Kate Christensen - The Great Man

“I’m not sure how mature it made me,” said Abigail, dumping the canned Italian tuna on the salad platter.

“And the love you feel for your children is so deep, really so soulful and gut-wrenching, how could you choose to miss out on that? And having children aside! Marriage itself is…well, a ‘people-growing machine,’ as one of the self-help books calls it. You can’t be in a good, strong marriage and be immature or selfish. The two are totally incompatible.”

Abigail turned to her and said, “To be honest, I wonder about my own choices sometimes, which I suppose were in many ways like yours. I gave myself to my husband and son instead of finding my own place independently of anyone else. There’s so much I never learned about myself. Not to mention the world. I would guess that Ruby knows things you don’t, just as you know things she doesn’t.”

Samantha looked surprised, as if she’d anticipated an ally and found an adversary instead. “Maybe,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong — as kids, we were inseparable. We thought it was the best luck, having a twin sister for a best friend. But something changed between us after I married Ivan. I think Ruby got jealous. She thinks Ivan is overly possessive and controlling of me and I’m an overly involved mother, both of which are completely ridiculous notions. That’s marriage! That’s motherhood! I belong to other people now, and Ruby can’t come first with me anymore. If that hurts her feelings, well, too bad. This is just the way things go when you grow up.”

Abigail set the table with plates, silverware, napkins. The little boy, Buster, or Peter, whatever his name was, had nestled against his mother on the bench and fallen asleep, his lips parted. Asleep, he looked angelic. Abigail, with unconscious yearning, remembered the recent warm heft of him in her lap, the whiff of yeasty crackers on his breath, his hot, clammy hand alighting briefly on her clavicle.

“I have thought, through the years, in my more charitable moments, about how hard it must have been for your mother,” Abigail said. “I know Oscar never supported you. I am sorry for that. He and I never discussed you girls directly, so I never took steps to ensure you were properly cared for financially by him. That was my own pettiness. Of course it was because I resented you, but that was childish of me.”

“How amazing of you to say that,” said Samantha.

“And I know you hardly ever saw your father,” Abigail went on.

“Right,” said Samantha. “And when we did, he and my mother demanded each other’s full attention.”

“Yes,” said Abigail. She drizzled the vinaigrette over the salad and looked at it for a moment. She had forgotten all about the cantaloupe soup. Impressing this girl no longer mattered to her, and anyway, Samantha clearly wouldn’t have cared if she had served a pile of shredded Kleenex; food was obviously not among her passions.

“About Ruby,” Samantha said. “You know, I didn’t mean to imply that her poetry is bad or anything. It’s actually pretty good. She even publishes it in literary magazines….”

Clearly, Samantha was itching to say more about Ruby, but Abigail knew from having sisters herself that this itch could never be scratched. The love and rivalry were too intertwined to ever satisfactorily express either. She imagined that Samantha was feeling guilty for her earlier remarks and now wanted to acknowledge the positive side of the sisterly equation, and she smiled inwardly at how well she knew this dynamic, how it never went away no matter how old you got. She was still exactly the same way with both of her sisters, even though one of them was dead now.

Abigail set the salad on the table. Marcus brought Ethan in then, freshly bathed and dressed in clean clothing, his wet hair combed, his face clean-shaven. Samantha stared at the sight of her half brother, tall and beautiful and impassive and pale, being led into the kitchen by an enormous, gentle black man.

“Here he is,” said Marcus. “Ready for his lunch.” He sat Ethan down next to Samantha and said to Abigail, as if no one else were in the kitchen, “See you the day after tomorrow, Mrs. Feldman.” He vanished without another word.

“This is Ethan,” said Abigail to Samantha. She set a plate of sliced cantaloupe on the table.

“Hello, Ethan,” said Samantha.

Ethan didn’t look at her, but his expression looked quizzical to Abigail.

“Ethan,” she said, sitting across from them, “this is your half sister, Samantha, and these are her children, Peter and Josephine.”

Ethan twiddled his left ear with his right hand.

“I think he knows you’re here,” said Abigail, spooning Niçoise salad onto her plate. “Is Buster hungry?”

“He’ll wake up when he’s ready,” said Samantha, smiling down at her son. “He’s very self-directed. He has a genius IQ, like Ivan, by the way.”

“Ah,” said Abigail. “So we both have special sons.”

Samantha plucked one wizened black olive from the tray. She put it into her mouth and chewed it as if it were medicine, then said, as if Abigail hadn’t spoken, “We don’t know officially, of course, since it’s too early to test him, but it’s obvious.” She kissed the top of her placid daughter’s head. “Jo will probably take after me. Mediocre in all things.”

“You never know,” Abigail said, fighting an urge to slap her. “Josephine might turn out to be the smartest of you all.”

Samantha dropped her olive pit into her empty beer bottle and said, “Thank you for inviting us over. What a delicious lunch.”

“But,” said Abigail with a mock Jewish-mother inflection, “you’re not eating anything.”

“I’ll eat when Buster wakes up,” said Samantha. She looked over at Ethan. “Ethan,” she said. She spoke a little too loudly for him, Abigail thought. “I’m glad to meet you finally. I always knew I had a brother, all my life, and I was always so curious about you. You look a lot like our father and my twin sister, Ruby. She’s your half sister, too.”

Abigail reached across the table and held a forkful of fish and potato to Ethan’s mouth with a napkin underneath to catch any spillage. He took the food, chewed briefly, and swallowed, his right hand still touching his left ear.

“When I was a little girl,” said Samantha, “I used to dream about you. You were very strong. In one dream, you picked up a Volkswagen Beetle and carried it down the street. And in another dream, you moved all my mother’s furniture around her house. She came home and saw you and said, ‘Ethan! What are you doing?’ and you smiled at her and walked out of the house; then she looked at what you had done and said to Ruby and me, ‘It actually looks better this way.’”

Abigail looked in consternation at Samantha. It had never once occurred to her that Teddy’s daughters had, as children, known about their father’s other child, but of course Oscar would have told the girls about Ethan, and of course they must have been strongly curious about him; she herself would have been insatiably curious about an unknown brother. “What an amazing dream,” she said.

“Ethan was my secret hero when I was little,” said Samantha, more softly now, to Abigail. “I know it sounds ridiculous. I used to daydream about him coming to rescue me when I got teased by another kid or was worried about a test. I pretended Ethan would come and beat up the other kid or take my test for me.”

Abigail shook her head. “My gosh,” she said. “Do you hear that, Ethan? Your little sister thought you would protect her.”

Ethan made a low thrumming noise in the back of his throat.

“He understands,” Abigail said with certainty.

“Really?” said Samantha.