Banshee. Rachel Dewoskin
“It’s unsavory.”
“I don’t know,” she argued, “I think it’s forgivable. Can any of us really say we’d have been first in line to announce our Jewishness when it might have gotten us killed? Wanting to survive isn’t really selfish or unsavory, is it?”
“Depends on how far you’re willing to go, and at whose expense,” I said, like a bitter old man. It seemed funny to me that even though Leah’s idea was slightly more cynical and less idealistic than mine, her reason for believing it was forgiving and kind. Whereas my impulses were now jaded and rusty.
“I have to stretch,” Leah said, twitching on the blanket. She stood then and bent at the waist, and I had a moment of horrific expectation that she might do an entire yoga routine. She reached her arms up to the sky. “Join me,” she said, grinning. I wanted to do yoga with Leah in the park about as much as I’d wanted to eat the disastrous cheese sandwich, but I didn’t want to be cranky or immobile, so I stood and reached my arms up. I did everything she said, is the truth. Maybe she was the perp and I, the innocent victim.
“Sun salutation,” she said.
The only sports I liked were swimming and climbing the sheer faces of cliffs. There was something about the private, single-minded focus of those two activities that allowed me to engage without embarrassment, self-criticism, or pure loathing of the way they made my body feel. I hate teams. I hate sports that involve rules or balls or getting chased or hit or even interrupted in my own pursuits.
Alexi was always athletic, talented, even when she was a baby, kicking her chubby legs furiously. She never had to try hard, but maybe needing to make a bigger effort might have benefited her, given her some necessary experience.
Once, after a volleyball game in which Alexi leapt up to the net and slammed a ball down onto the other team’s side, whooping like a superhero, a high school boyfriend of hers said, “You know what you’re good at? At being good at things.”
Alexi reported this to me at the time, unsure why it made her unhappy. “He meant it as a compliment,” she said, “but I don’t like it.”
“Of course not,” I told her. “Because you work hard and he can’t see it.”
She surveyed me skeptically. “Yeah,” she said, “maybe.” I looked away, caught. Had Alexi ever had to work hard at anything? And if not, was it because she had enough talent to compensate? Maybe Leah was the daughter I’d never had, the pleaser. Oh my god—reroute your thinking, Sam! Stop imagining them in the same sentence, please.
Leah was embarrassingly planking on the blanket, her body an absolute two-by-four. I did what I always do when asked to plank, which was to collapse and lie on my stomach. I looked at the grass, the billions of blades, the leaves on top of it, and tried to see individual shapes and colors. A bug struggled through a tangle of damp leaves, finally triumphing and finding itself on top. Now what, bug? Sunbathing? What’s your goal?
“That’s not a plank, Professor Baxter,” Leah said. She rolled onto her back and shaded her eyes from the sun.
“I’m observing nature,” I told her, my face scalded by shame at my own fancy name and title, dripping as both were with desire and irony.
But now she sounded genuinely curious. “For a poem?”
Ugh. How dark did I want to go? Did I want to say what I was really thinking, that soon I’d be packed among the dirt, bugs storming my body, flesh blowing off my bones?
“Yes, maybe,” I said. “For a poem.” Then she touched the small of my back.
Once, when I was in seventh grade, I made a bug collection, and one of the beetles didn’t die properly even though I asphyxiated it with nail polish remover before pinning it to the foam board with all its dead colleagues. When I woke in the morning, the hearty beetle was turning slow circles on its pin, its stomach leaking, its eyes black with either life or impending death—I couldn’t tell. I put a nail polish remover pad over it so it would be drenched and certain to die, and then I cried all the way to school and all day at school, including during my presentation of the bug collection.
“I remember when I first read ‘Button,’” Leah said, her hand still on my back, possessively, I thought. At the mention of my work, nausea rolled me over and trapped me on my back. At least this meant I shed her hand. I imagined kicking my many insect legs while I closed my eyes and hoped Leah would say nothing else about that poem, which had gotten more attention than any of my other work (and which I could hardly stand to remember). Kill me! That pompous motherhood poem—why had I written it?
And why had everyone liked it more than any of the other awful or good poems I wrote? “Button” was a poem about my mother infusing me with everything she was, and my only realizing it once I had a baby and had, in the way we all do, become my own mother. While buttoning Alexi’s coat. I outlasted Leah by not saying anything, not even grunting in acknowledgment that she had mentioned the poem.
“It made me think someday I’ll be like my mother,” she said, shrugging and using the hand that had been traveling down my body only a minute ago to shade her eyes. “And that being like her, I mean, will be okay.”
“Oh, wow. Thanks,” I said.
I hadn’t yet told my mother. I was worried she’d die of seeing me in danger, of having to recalibrate her entire notion of me, the way she’d understood me her whole life, depending on my invincibility for the narrative of her two children to work.
“Sam?”
“Uh huh?”
“Do you have sisters or brothers?”
I so didn’t want to be having this conversation. Why was it impossible to avoid intimacy with someone with whom you’ve had sex? Already here we were, on a picnic, paddling down a river of talk that would likely lead from our siblings to our exes.
How could I redirect this deep talk into a series of meaningless one-night stands with her in a row? Probably not going on a romantic picnic to the park with her would have been a good start. Oh well. “I have a half-brother, from my mother’s first marriage.”
“Oh,” she said, gazing up at me. Was she batting her lashes? “Did you grow up together?”
“Only somewhat.” I looked away.
“Are you close?”
I took a long time responding, hoping that would signal my lack of interest in having this conversation. I was looking at the faint view of Leah’s underpants under her tights, visible between her legs, up her skirt. I put a hand on her leg again, imagined sliding it straight up her warm thighs in public, then thought better of it—but only by a slim margin. Were my half-brother and I close? Hank, from our mother’s first, brief marriage, frail and wounded his whole life, alternately in love with and furious at our mother, both poles informed by his desperate need of her. He married a woman ten years older than him, a curly-haired, outgoing beauty so much like our mother that it almost seemed like an intentional joke. I loved her. I was thirteen when Hank married Sarah, and she was like a second mom, made significantly better by the fact that she wasn’t actually my mom. And by the fact that she was the kindest, smartest, most beautiful woman I had ever known.
“Hello?” Leah asked. I was staring at the curve of her on the blanket, resting my hand on her hip.
“We’re only sort of close,” I said. I didn’t ask about her family, just gently squeezed her.
“Well, I’m a twin,” she said.
I was as surprised that this hadn’t come up in the workshop as I was distressed to know it. I felt I should know nothing about Leah except the way she felt against me, the taste and feel of her—nothing about her family. If I had learned she was a twin in the workshop—when we were discussing Keisha’s poem about her sister, for example—that would have felt less obscene. But I had my hand on her ass, my fingers pressing, worrying her clothes away, wishing they’d dissolve