The Geometry of Sisters Read online

  Maura thought of the word estranged. Is that what she and Carrie were? And if so, had Carrie learned the possibility of estrangement, of family members not talking to each other, from Maura and Katharine? Did broken families follow through the generations?

  The night before school started, she watched twilight fade and the stars come out. The sight made her eyes sting. Carrie had always loved the night sky; she'd known every constellation. On her eleventh birthday Andy had surprised her by painting her bedroom ceiling with the stars visible the night she was born. He'd researched the almanac, found glow-in-the-dark paint, done the work while Carrie was at school.

  Carrie had been bowled over. She'd gotten out H. A. Rey's The Stars, compared the constellations in her favorite book with those her father had painted over her bed. They'd both been delighted, but then, they so often were.

  Maura stared out at the lavender horizon, at a light blinking in the distance. The beam flashed once, twice, then a long beat, and then it flashed again. She pictured the lighthouse on Lake Michigan. Almost an apparition, a ghost lighthouse, it had appeared out of nowhere three summers ago.

  Nights around the campfire, the family had listened to the loons and watched the beam flash across the water. Travis said no matter where they were on the lake, or hiking in the woods, they could use the tower to guide them to their cabin.

  Carrie had been mesmerized by the lighthouse, had taken many photos of it. Maura had loved it too, felt both comforted and unsettled by it, stared at it for hours, getting lost in her memories and imagination.

  She'd been here in Newport the summer before Carrie was born. Andy had stayed home in Columbus, painting their apartment, getting it ready. They'd met their first year at Oberlin College, dated ever since. Andy claimed he'd known the first day that he was going to marry her. Maura had known right away, as well.

  What was not to love about Andy Shaw? He was the classic, all-American, true-blue good guy. As a kid he'd shoveled the sidewalks of all his elderly neighbors—without being asked, and never taking pay. Andy's mother had told Maura, and Maura had loved that story.

  Maura had started Oberlin with a broken heart. Her high school boyfriend had told her they should break up and see other people. She'd met Andy that first week, at orientation. He'd noticed her sadness, right under her skin, and immediately set out to cheer her up. He had a car, and he took her apple-picking out in the countryside. They drank cider, sitting under pines by the reservoir, and she found herself telling him everything, just like a best friend.

  They went to the movies, he took her on hikes. She went to his soccer games. Winter came, and he took her snowshoeing. Through it all, they talked and talked. She even told him about her father.

  Andy was kind, conscientious, completely honest. He was five-ten, trim and athletic, loved sports. He was too sensitive to be a true jock, and she loved that about him. People relied on him. If someone needed a ride, Andy drove them. When an assistant coach's child was hit by a car, Andy organized a fundraiser. He was always helping, always pitching in. He was warm, wonderful, true, and dear.

  Maura remembered being glad they were far away from Katharine. As much as she loved her sister, she'd been afraid of how she would see Andy.

  Katharine was an artist. The two sisters had grown up in Connecticut, in a small Cape Cod-style house with a nice yard, across the street from a golf course. Their family had driven first a Ford and then a Volvo station wagon. They looked normal from the outside, but behind their closed doors, there was sadness and worry.

  Their father sold public address systems. Amps, tuners, speakers, microphones. He went to all the colleges, theaters, auditoriums, and companies in the area, trying to sell equipment. He wore beautiful suits and expensive ties. His shoes were always shined. He had a slow, crooked smile that made you feel so happy when you said something to bring it out. He met with purchasing agents. He played golf with his clients. He'd have drinks and dinner with administrative assistants, because they could influence their bosses' choices. Frequently he didn't come home.

  Their mother held her pain inside. She sipped tea and made pen-and-ink drawings. Sometimes she'd write haiku to go with them, holding herself together with tea, India ink, and Japanese poetry. The person who showed her anguish most was Katharine. Maura would watch her sister every afternoon. She'd seem to grow paler by the minute, until their father walked through the door. Then Katharine would become alive, happy and animated.

  On nights when he didn't come home, Katharine would stay in their room after dinner. She wouldn't come out to watch TV, or to do homework, or have snacks. Maura would go looking for her, try to cheer her up. Katharine would usually be sitting on her bed, sketching.

  Sometimes, the worst times, she'd be on her knees at the bedroom window, watching down the street for their father's headlights. Maybe she was praying; Maura never asked. Often she had tears in her eyes, and when Maura would start to talk, Katharine would just shake her head hard. And Maura would go away.

  Maura had watched both her mother and sister retreat into art. She'd seen her neighbors' lives—people with children, good jobs, summer vacations, a round of golf after work—as being sweet and real. She'd imagined becoming a teacher, having holidays and summers off, falling in love with someone she'd want to have kids with. She didn't want to marry a missing man and turn out like her mother, who hid in line drawings and poems of seventeen syllables and tried not to think of her husband with another woman.

  People always said that artists were edgy, but they didn't know Katharine. She was razor-edgy She fled the suburbs of Connecticut at the very first opportunity, off to art school: the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.

  She was different; not just the way she dressed, a uniform of black T-shirt and pants, a tuxedo jacket for fancy occasions, high-top red Converse sneakers, eyeglasses with heavy tortoiseshell frames, but also in her art. She worked with metal—sheet metal taken from junkyards, iron girders, beams, columns, and cables; a journey-level ironworker, she learned to cut, weld, and rivet them into large sculptures.

  The shapes used to be abstract, but after a while she'd started to create animals, extinct animals—for reasons no one but Katharine knew: the quagga, blue pike, Steller's sea cow, saber-toothed tiger, dodo bird, and Caribbean monk seal.

  Katharine's material was hard and sharp, and as time went on, she seemed to take on those qualities herself. No one but Maura, and maybe their mother, had ever seen her cry. She'd shed so many tears for her father, it seemed as if she never wanted to do that for anything else. Certainly not for any other man.

  Art school and ironworking opened brand-new worlds for her. She met other people like herself, independent contractors and artists who didn't do anything automatically, who questioned their parents' ways, who broke free of anything traditional, who went looking for their own answers, who thought rules were for people who needed to be told what to do. Artists followed their own compulsions and didn't always know why they did what they did.

  Katharine didn't understand their Connecticut neighbors. Maybe she never had—perhaps her upbringing, the sorrow of always hoping for more from her father, had demonstrated too vividly the traps of expectations and conventional married, suburban life. It wasn't simply that she judged the neighbors: she didn't even get them. She saw the sweetness of their lives as being a snare, the steadiness of their existences to be stultifying.

  “Can you imagine coming home to a guy mowing the lawn in madras shorts?” Katharine had asked one early summer night when she was home from RISD, watching Mr. Sisson push his mower back and forth. The two sisters sat on the front steps, drinking lemonade as pollen danced in the golden twilight.

  “Kind of,” Maura said, embarrassed.

  “Not me,” Katharine said. “Check out the pink polo shirt.”

  “He's so nice,” Maura said, staring at Mr. Sisson. And she thought, At least he comes home. She babysat for the family, and she'd seen how he treated Mrs. Sisson: put his
arm around her, danced with her in the kitchen, brought her tea by the fire on cold nights. They never fought. There were no long silences and arguments about money, about where he'd been, not like between Maura and Katharine's parents.

  “Nice,” Katharine said. “Maybe it's an act.”

  “It's real. I know.”

  “That's just in front of you. Maybe they're different when they're home alone. Besides, how boring.”

  “You don't want a nice man?”

  “Look at his hair.”

  “What's wrong with it?”

  “He thinks about it. He goes to a barber, probably has it scheduled into his calendar, gets it cut just so, and combs it neatly. You want that?”

  “It doesn't bother me.”

  Katharine laughed. “Maybe you just haven't met someone who doesn't care about everything being so tidy.”

  Maura had stared across the street at the big white colonial house on the edge of the golf course. Spreading trees, beautiful old maples and oaks, shaded the lawn and a pool lined with gray-blue stone; a picket fence separated the yard from the golf course. Mrs. Sisson had a rock garden. In the spring, scillas bloomed, filling the yard with tiny bright blue flowers. She glanced at her sister, trying to understand.

  “I don't want nice and neat,” Katharine said. “I don't want a guy with hair cut in a perfect line just above his collar. I don't want a conventional life in madras shorts. Who knows what hides behind that pink polo shirt? He might be just like Dad, out for himself.”

  “Just because they live across the street doesn't mean they're the same….”

  “I don't care; I don't want it. There's more. You know the expression ‘reach for the stars’?”

  “Yes.”

  “It's just a saying. No one really does it. At least no one around here. We're in the suburbs, Maura. To the Sissons, ‘reach for the stars’ is something they'd write on a graduation card. To them, nature is the green, green grass of the golf course fairway. Give me wild, soaring, indefinite, and unpredictable. That's what's real… that's the only way to really get to know someone. When they dare to show you that—that's when you really become close.”

  “Sounds scary,” Maura said.

  “I'd only trust someone who showed me his craziness,” Katharine said.

  Katharine never said she didn't like Andy when they finally did meet, but Maura knew: he reminded her of Mr. Sisson. After college Andy had gotten a job coaching in his native Columbus. After four years in Ohio, Maura needed a summer by the sea. She and Andy had made plans to be together, but the truth was, Maura was panicking.

  She had doubts about settling down with Andy—or maybe settling down at all.

  Her sister was here in Newport. Before Katharine had bought the saltwater farm about seven miles north in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, she had had an apartment on Spring Street and a welding studio on a back alley near Brown & Howard Wharf, and they planned a sisters' reunion, their last before Maura's “real life” started.

  Katharine had talked about the alley. She'd made it sound dark, dangerous, filled with wild energy and creative, exciting people. She'd mentioned a guy, a kindred spirit. Someone who didn't play by the rules, never wore a suit, taught Katharine how to weld. His parents had money, but he wouldn't take it—he worked as an iron-smith in the same seedy back alley as Katharine.

  “He works with elements,” Katharine had said on the phone, the winter before Maura graduated. “Metal and fire.”

  “Just like you,” Maura had noted, hearing a new tone in her sister's voice.

  “He's a madman. Sometimes we stay up all night, drinking and talking. Sometimes we don't even need to drink—he tells me his ideas, and I tell him mine, no holding back. We go out to Breton Point and watch the sun rise. That's where he told me that when he was little he kept a list of extinct animals, just like me….”

  “He did?” Maura had asked.

  “Yes,” Katharine had said. “And he gave me his list, so I can add them to mine.”

  “Why extinct animals?”

  “You're not crazy enough to understand,” Katharine had said. “But J.D. is.”

  “You're in love with him!”

  Katharine had laughed. “It's not like that.”

  Maura, waiting, had wished it was. Katharine had always seemed so focused on her art, on inspiration and where it took her. She'd had a couple of boyfriends—rebel types their father had hated, boys with long hair and guitars. But they'd never been enough, not even close, for Katharine. But who was? Maura had wanted Katharine to find someone she loved as much as Maura did Andy.

  “Why isn't it?” Maura had asked. “It sounds romantic.”

  “It's not that at all,” Katharine had said. “The way we feel about each other is too big.”

  “I don't mean hearts and flowers,” Maura had said, embarrassed. “I mean, you showed him your craziness, right? Didn't you always say that was the test? And don't yell at me for this, but he sounds like your soul mate.”

  To her shock, Katharine hadn't howled. She'd just listened, letting that clichéd phrase hang between them. “That comes close,” she'd said quietly.

  “Does he have long hair?” Maura had asked teasingly knowing that was Katharine's type.

  “Not really. When it gets in his eyes, I cut it for him.”

  “Then why not more?” Maura had asked, stunned at the image of her sister cutting some brooding ironsmith's shaggy hair.

  “Because that's all there is, Maura. Don't make more of it, okay?”

  “Okay” Maura had said. She'd taken her sister at her word.

  Now Maura took her last sip of tea, got ready to stand, when she saw a man sitting in the shadows, on the school's wide marble steps. He was watching her, and the sight shocked her. At first glance she thought it was Angus, the security guard. But no—this man was younger, thinner. She could see the angles of his body, the lines of his cheekbones.

  He saw her look over, raised his hand to wave. But Maura just bowed her head and pretended not to see. She hurried home, wondering how long he'd been watching her stare across the water.

  The next morning, the first day of school, Maura lost her keys. Eight a.m., with classes scheduled to start at eight-thirty she stood outside her classroom, balancing an armload of blue notebooks, rummaging through her book bag. Her first day as a teacher, and she was blowing it before the bell rang.

  “Can I help you with that?” a man asked. She barely looked up, starting to panic as she realized her keys were really lost, getting a fleeting impression of khaki pants and blue shirt, polished brown wing-tip shoes. Raising her gaze to his face, she realized it was the man she'd seen on the steps last night.

  “That was you!” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “You looked lost in thought, and I didn't want to disturb you. But right now, it looks as if you could use some help.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I can't find my keys.”

  “Hang on,” he said. “Do you mind?”

  He took the book bag from her before she could even think to protest. Reached in, came up with a key ring.

  “These?” he asked.

  “Yikes,” she said. “Yeah.”

  He fit the right key in the lock, heard the sharp click, and opened the door. She preceded him in, feeling embarrassed. Dumping the notebooks on her desk, she turned to him. He had very dark hair and eyes, a friendly wide smile with a slightly crooked front tooth, and that angular body, sharp cheekbones.

  “I'm Stephen Campbell,” he said. “I teach math.”

  “Maura Shaw,” she said, shaking his hand. She knew that hers must feel like ice, but he didn't react. “I teach English.” She paused, then added, “This is my first day.”

  “At Newport Academy, I know,” he said. “Welcome.”

  “No, I mean as a teacher,” she said. “My first day ever. I've practice-taught, in labs with supervisors, but I've never stood before my own class.”

  “You'll do great,” he said.

&
nbsp; “How can you tell?” she asked.

  “Because you're nervous. If you didn't care, you'd just be coasting. Here you are, ready to illuminate your students' minds, fill them with poetry and drama and new ideas …”

  “For a math teacher, you're very eloquent,” she said.

  “Ha, that's a typical English teacher's way of looking at mathematics. I don't teach computation—I teach philosophy,” he said.

  “Hello, Stephen, and hello, Maura!”

  Wheeling, Maura saw a big, rumpled man, dressed in tweed, with bushy eyebrows and a neatly trimmed beard, burst into the room. She'd met him once before, when he'd been in Ohio and she'd interviewed.

  “Maura,” Stephen said, “you know our headmaster, Ted Shannon.”

  “Good to see you again,” she said, feeling grateful to Stephen for getting her out of the jam with her keys, hoping that he would be Beck's math teacher; she had the feeling they'd speak the same language. “Thank you for this opportunity …”

  Ted laughed, shaking his head. “Glad to have you with us, Maura—yell if you need anything.”

  “Thank you,” she said. Feeling good, she caught Stephen giving her an odd look.

  “He recruited you,” he said.

  “Well, if you can call it that—he sent out a general mailing, I think.”

  “I'm sure it was more personal than that,” Stephen said, gazing down at her, making the top of her head prickle. Just then the bell rang, long and resonant and echoing down the stately stone hallway, and Maura's heart clutched. She glanced at the clock on the wall: eight-thirty sharp.

  “Good luck, Maura,” Stephen said, heading out the door, leaving her to pass out the blue notebooks, one on each desk, and wonder about what kind of math teacher taught philosophy, and what he'd been doing alone on the school steps last night.

  Beck had stood outside the school in the early morning light, sun bouncing off the ocean, practically blinding her, reminding her that water was lapping at the rocks, just waiting to get her. She'd stood with Travis at first, but then some girl with long seal-brown hair, straight as corn silk, very gorgeous, Ally's worst nightmare, had walked over, said she wanted to introduce him to some other juniors. The girl had shined her baby blues at Beck, saying, “I saw you the day the moving van came! Love your braids!”