Serpentine Vol. 5, No. 1, "The Wingbeats of Insects & Birds"

Serpentine, Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 2001

The Wingbeats of Insects and Birds

by Emily Rapp-Seitz

My sister is saving the world, one leg at a time. I sit cross-legged on the waterbed as she unpacks her human-sized backpack stuffed with clothes rolled small and tight as boulders. I run my hands over the gift she has brought me from Africa. It is a winding tower of smooth-faced ebony people twisting around each other. This hand melts into that foot until even the wood looks like it will crawl all over itself. "It’s from Kenya," she says. "It’s a statue of humanity." I wiggle my finger through an ebony leg to poke the chest of another coiled person. "Ouch," I say, grimacing. She shakes her head at me, smiling.

"You’re tall," she says, picking up one mini-bundle after another. Shaking them out life-size, the shirts and shorts are lost in thick specks of foreign-looking dust. A strange, sweet fleshy smell settles on my skin like warm sunlight.

"You smell," I say and she laughs so hard her tiny breasts swing from side to side inside her thin cotton shirt; for a moment the circles dark as bruises under her eyes seem to lighten. I wonder what I would do without a sports bra in Namibia where Claire lives. I watch the fabric of her jeans bends at funny angles and wonder how my friends would react to the iron hinges of Claire’s prosthetic leg; they creak as she bends to the left and right, moving around the room.

Claire reaches into her bag as if she’s opening a cadaver, digging deeper and deeper until she finds the right organ to extract. Inside are folders and files that look like they rode on the outside of the plane from Africa; they are covered with dirt, oil stains and other signs of contact with some sort of goo. Stacked up, her "paperwork" makes three even piles that come almost to my chin. I watch them sink and rise on the bed, towering over her clothes. With a serious look on her face, my sister moves the folders around like checkers, organizing. I look at her suitcase, full of dark, probably very smelly clothes. Examining the mass of wrinkled shorts and T-shirts, I wonder if my sister has forgotten that we live in Wyoming where summer lasts about two weeks, and spring chokes to the surface for a month if we’re lucky.

After she unpacks, Claire sleeps for two days. The windows are cranked open and a sunny, yellow wind whips through the room. Under the blankets, her body makes a scrawny looking tent rising with her breath and deflating again as she exhales. Piles of paper surround the bed, marked with different colored sticky notes, which also cover the walls. I shut the window softly so she doesn’t wake up with small reminders to "call Olivier" and "fax to Human Rights Watch" and "Final Draft – to Geneva!" stuck to her forehead. From what I can gather, jet lag is confusing enough. Even with tip-toe monkey-stepping, it is impossible to avoid most of the paper explosion on the floor. Claire would call this her "systemless system." Before she went overseas for the first time six years ago, when I asked to borrow a tape or a sweater she’d say something like, "It’s under the pair of jeans on the left side of my bed, next to my French book." She must be in the right line of business, I think to myself. If anyone can find a landmine, it’s certainly Claire. I stand in the open doorway watching her for a few seconds before I hear Anna’s noisy, impatient honk.

I grab an apple in the kitchen on the way out the door, adding "75" to the mental calorie log in my head. My dad is at the kitchen table, still wearing his plastic lab goggles. Bent over his latest nature enterprise, he is sprinkling birdseed over a pinecone covered with peanut butter. "Dad," I say, tapping my fingers above my eyes.

"Oh! Thanks honey. Have a good day at school!" When he pulls the goggles off there are red rims around his eyes that look like rust.

"Catch lots of birds," I say.

Anna has a "hardship license" but it has nothing to do with having a hard life. It just means her parents live far out on a ranch and she can drive two years earlier than the rest of us. The idea of the law is to help kids who had to drive and work on their parents’ ranch. Trying to picture Anna in a tractor or doing any work at all nearly makes me giggle out loud.

Anna has recently adopted a new habit of smoking – designed, she said, to keep her weight down. I always feel heavy around Anna, and even more so now that I know she’s dieting. I can’t imagine her legs getting any smaller than the sticks they are now. I practice doing butt squeezes in the seat; the kind the magazines say you can do anywhere without being noticed - like your own private workout. Anna inhales dramatically and tries to talk to me as she exhales, raising her voice over the rattle of the car’s motor. She calls it the "French exhale," but she looks more like a blue-eyed dragon puffing out a sad excuse for fire. "Repeat please," I request after she poofs a string of mumble at me.

"How long is your sister home?"

"I don’t know, about a month I guess." I shift my weight and pretend to dig for my geometry assignment in my bag. "She’s getting ready for a new field assignment." I don’t tell Anna that Claire is taking medication to prepare herself for a specific malaria strain in northern Namibia, where her work is taking her for the next few months. I concentrate on the willpower I will need to get through the day without eating anything.

I don’t tell Anna that Claire also wrote to me about trying to get a new prosthetic leg built with a doctor in Denver. She found out about him on the internet while she was shopping around for Shriner’s warehouses that might donate used artificial limbs to the landmine victims she works and lives with. Claire’s laptop looks so old and defeated to me I’m surprised it works at all, but she says it’s better than what a lot of people have. It’s hard to argue with that logic.

"Hmph." Anna takes a drag and asks me slowly, watching my face, "Is it weird, seeing her?"

"Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I haven’t seen her for four years." I shrug. I wish suddenly that nobody knew Claire was home; then I wouldn’t have to figure out how to talk about her. Worse, I am afraid I really wished that she hadn’t come home at all. I say finally, "She’s really skinny." I roll down the window and toss my apple core into the street. I only ate half so I note "minus 45" in my head. I imagine a great big minus sign kicking away the excess calories; the image makes me smile, but it terrifies me too.

"God, it’s so sad." Anna tosses her cigarette out the window and combs through her hair, fluffing and arranging the dark brown curls. Anna, I’ve realized lately, is perfect. She has almond-shaped blue eyes, no signs of a blemish anywhere, and she is definitely the thinnest girl in the sophomore class. I’m afraid to be too jealous of her because she might stop being my friend; then again, she might be my friend for exactly this reason, I can never tell.

Anna rolls up the window, bites her lip and drums her fingers on the wheel. "Do you think she would show me her leg sometime? I mean, I’ve never really seen it. Is it like the ones the athletes wear on that show Ripley’s Believe It or Not?"

I’m not sure why Anna’s question makes my stomach feel cold and queasy, since Claire herself often refers to her new body as "bionic." But Claire is not a freak like the people on that show, I think to myself. She’s my sister and I’ve never even seen her with her leg off. The athletes on that show are always throwing off their prosthetics and hopping around like the daddylongleg spiders we used to torment in the summer by pulling their legs off and making them squirm.

"I’m sure you wouldn’t be that impressed, Anna," I say. But I know she would be impressed, and I’m not sure why that bothers me so much. It seems strange to admire someone who’s had such bad luck. I remember my parents’ strained faces and my sister standing awkwardly in her new body in the hospital. Claire’s face was not sad or sweating or even shocked, but blank and empty. What I remember most is that I was invisible during those months: either someone was trying to protect me or maybe nobody noticed me at all, I never decided for sure. I shut me eyes and feel a shiver, like stepping outside quickly in the fall when the sun has tricked you into thinking it’s warmer than it really is.

"It’s all just so… creepy," Anna whispers softly. She lifts her bangs off her forehead and makes a one-handed turn into the high school parking lot. I feel my cheeks flush with anger or shame or somewhere between the two. I hate the way Anna talks like she’s always performing.

"I don’t think she needs your pity, Anna." I speak much louder than I want to.

Anna looks at me as if I’ve just growled at her. "Whoa, sorry Mary-Kate. If you don’t want to talk about it, just say so." She lurches the Cutlass into a parking spot and the motor begins to wind down. She stubs out her cigarette and turns to me, and I can tell she really is sorry, but I leap out of the car before she can say anything. I race up the parking lot so fast that I’m out of breath by the time I reach my locker outside homeroom. I feel slow drops of sweat gather and roll in a slow-motion flood down my back. I lean my head against the cool metal and try not to think about my sister’s skeletal frame rattling with breath. I try to erase the image of her surrounded by a sea of papers and clothes with her prosthesis placed carefully against the wall - the contoured bumps of the rubber toes peaking out from under the clean white sheet draped over it.

During biology class, I’m distracted by flying notes from Anna’s desk in the back row, asking me first if I want to be her lab partner, then if I’m interested in jogging later and finally if I think Brady Murphy looks cuter than usual today. I imagine her face crumpling as I mold each one into a ball and toss it to the floor. I feel too strange to be forgiving.

When I come home my sister’s bedroom mess has migrated to the dining room table, where she is talking on the phone in long, rounded vowels that I recognize as French. Her voice moves like stretched bubble gum and then suddenly snaps to a brisk staccato. She is slapping her hand on the table and holding up a document in front of her, then pulling her ear away from the phone to look at it more carefully. Claire is infamous for her "phone manner" as my dad calls it. When she was in high school, I used to hear her coo-ing at all hours of the night, probably to one of the scared-sounding boys that asked for her. I used to hide behind her door and watch her as she talked; she would stand in front of the mirror and perform for herself. She would make outrageous faces while giggling sweetly. She would give the phone the bird and say "uh-huh" in a syrupy voice. "Persuasive" was my Dad’s favorite word for Claire, but it seemed to me then that she was just faking – that nothing was real to her but her own self-created world. During the rare phone calls from Namibia, I imagined her smiling and giggling at her dirty reflection in a phone booth in the wide, hot desert, not really listening to us at all.

Now Claire is tapping her foot and scribbling something on a notepad. I can hear the tinny echo of the voice on the other line. Finally the scribbling stops. She fires away again in a siren voice, smoothes the paper with her hand, heaves out a great big irritated "Oui!" and hangs up the phone. Sighing, she shuffles the paper into a bigger mess. Satisfied, she turns to face me. I have to inhale to keep from gasping. Greasy strands of hair are smeared across her forehead and she is visibly sweating.

"What’s the matter with you, Claire? Are you sick?"

"Oh," she swipes her hand in the air at an invisible bug. "I started my new Larium treatment today." She tells me that taking medicine to prevent malaria produces a kind of "mock" malaria. I must look unconvinced because she continues. "It’s just preparation, Mary-Kate. The mosquitos in some parts of Namibia are resistant to the drugs I normally take." Her voice drops off as she scribbles on a document and clears a space for a new pile. "Anyway," she says, looking up at me and smiling, "don’t be too concerned if I act a bit strangely or feel sick sometimes. No biggie." She sorts through a few piles and picks up a pink piece of paper. "Mom made a grocery list. I guess she’s got a big order to fill this week and no time to go. Feel like coming with me?"

My mother operates a one woman store of wooden dolls with soft hair and overalls, tall rabbits with painted signs that say "Happy Easter" around their necks, and Santas with soft white beards and eye-glasses made of twisted wire that sit joyfully on suburban front porches during the holidays. Wreaths, party favors, birthday gifts, tablecloths – Mom can make anything with a country or holiday theme. She started her craft business just after Claire’s accident, which was just about the time she decided that working so hard for tenure in the geology department wasn’t worth the trouble.

Mom’s workspace used to take up most of the garage during the day, with saws and sewing machines running constantly. At night, she stored all of her tools and wood and supplies in neatly stacked tupperware bins in the corner. What had been a break from teaching to take care of my sister became early retirement. Three months later my dad stopped parking the car in the garage until he could build a new room off the house just for her work. Her room is now a regular business with a fax machine, computer, a row of tables and sewing machines lined up against the far wall, and a wooden sign advertising "Larsen’s Creations" over the front door I find her there now behind a sewing machine, pulling a piece of red and white gingham fabric under the humming needle. The light shines on the top of her hair where silver lines overlap the white blonde strands like the weave of a basket. Concentrating intensely, her face is wrinkled like tinfoil in sharp, even creases. She looks up, smiles, and clicks off the sewing machine. "Hi there," she says, rubbing her eyes. "How was school?"

"Fine." She starts to thread the fabric by hand but keeps talking, her eyes down. I have always thought my mother had a fascinating face – the perfect combination of shadows and light. Her eyes are nearly black but her eyelashes are blonde and transparent, fluttering over her eyes like short-lived butterflies. Her nose is long and sharp, pointing down to a soft chin and a neck that looks more fleshy than it used to. I used to love to run back to the house when she called me for dinner just before it was dark. I would inhale the wood stove and feel the cold skin on my cheeks. In her face was the reflection of the dream-like light of dusk. I remember how dinner used to be just a time of magic and warmth that simply arrived at the end of the day, instead of a dreaded hour when the calorie counter ticking in my head like a waiting bomb pounded even louder.

"Are you going to help your sister at the store?" Mom brings the thread up through the fabric and looks at me.

"Sure. What are you working on?"

She doesn’t answer me but starts tying a small knot in the string. "You know, Mary-Kate, sometimes that medication might have her acting…funny. Mostly flu-like symptoms, but the doctor said there might be hallucinations and nightmares. So don’t be alarmed. That’s why Dad and I brought her home. I don’t think she gets adequate care over there," she shakes her head, snapping the thread with her teeth. "I’m just telling you not to worry." She smiles softly and flips on the machine.

"Don’t worry, Mom."

"Go on then," she says without looking up, "go help your sister." When I look behind me on my way out, the sewing machine is still whirring mightily, but my mom’s hands are still and clasped together. Her head remains perfectly still; no silver light dances across it.

The Super King Price "plaza" is a grocery store/pharmacy/bank/florist all in one building. All it needs is a hospital and we could use the rest of Laramie as a museum about ghost towns. The grocery section is teeming with fast moving carts, children eating donuts from the bakery to appease them while Mommy shops, and announcements of specials on canned corn or Bran Flakes every few minutes. Claire is humming. She is wearing an old hooded sweatshirt and ripped jean shorts that look as if they’re about to fall off. She looks around slowly, her mouth slightly open. "Wow," she says, stiffening in the fluorescent glow of lights. "C’mon, let’s move."

As we move to the cereal aisle, I notice a woman apparently suffering from grocery-induced paralysis, staring at my sister’s awkward gait as she walks towards the Corn Flakes. She navigates her cart close to Claire and investigates her leg from the side, then backs up and makes a slow half-circle around the back of my sister as Claire looks slowly up and down the rows of cereal boxes. Her eyes move from the hydraulic hinge to the straight metal calf and the rubber toes that Claire has painted bright red. Pretty soon she’ll whip out her measuring tape so that she can make a prosthesis of her own. My face is burning. "Can I help you with something?" I look her dead straight in the face, my back facing Claire. Her face flushes a deep rose color. "Oh, Oh no," she stammers, "uh, excuse me," and with that she and her cart are wheeling away. I stare at her as hard as I can until she turns into the pasta aisle.

"Sometimes at home," Claire explains as we pack up our groceries, "the only thing to buy at the store is rice." She shakes her head and slams the bananas to the bottom of the bag. Beads of sweat are standing out on her forehead and some are rolling into her eyes. I don’t know what to do so I just watch Claire and pack the groceries, my heart beating rapidly.

As Claire and I step into the elevator to the parking garage, a man with a peppered mustache pats her on the back and says loudly, "Well, there, what happened to you?" She looks at him with her mouth set in a straight line, a head of lettuce hanging precariously from the top of the grocery bag.

"What happened to your manners?" I snap back at him and the elevator door slides shut across his churning face as we step into the garage and walk slowly to the car. On the way home, Claire holds the paper bags of groceries in her lap. When I take them from her, there are dark stains where her hands have been.

While we’re unpacking the groceries, Claire gets a call from Pastor Jim, who asks her if she’d be willing to meet with a new family from Tanzania. They are visiting professors at the university. Apparently my father has told them about his oldest daughter’s adventures on the African continent. Claire hangs up the phone and spins to face my father, who is busy frying hamburgers while my mother chops onions.

"Did you tell him to call me?" she snarls. Her hands are shaking as she sits down.

"Yes, well, yes, dear, I thought that you might like to have some people from.."

"From where Dad? From barbarian Africa? Do you know that I haven’t seen Pastor Jim once since high school graduation? Don’t you think I might need a break?" Her voice sounds authoritarian, like a sergeant. In all my life I have never heard my sister speak this way to anyone. I look down at my hands and feel panic spread hot inside my chest. My mother runs over to check Claire’s temperature with her hand, but Claire shakes it off, her face growing redder. My father is holding a plate of burgers in mid-air. He looks crumpled and small. I hear my stomach make a terrific growl. My father glances at me, puts the food on the table, wipes his hands on his apron, and takes a few steps back.

"I’m sorry, Claire. I didn’t think…"

"Don’t apologize, Robert," my mother says, sitting down roughly in a chair, straightening the silverware. "It’s just the medication. She has a temperature and she’s acting strange." She looks at me now; I see the reflection of my own panic in her dark eyes. She goes on, speaking directly to me. "Doctor Beisley said we should expect this. There’s nothing to worry about."

My sister’s face is a strange mix of bright red and lime green. I want to melt into the wall. Claire says in a quiet, steady voice, "I’m right here, Mom. Don’t act like I’m invisible." She stands up slowly, mumbling something before she slinks off to her bedroom. My mother slams down the salad bowl and picks at her food before standing up and going outside. My dad and I eat in silence. I pick the fat out of my burger and only eat one side of the bun. When I offer to do the dishes he reaches over and squeezes my hand. He walks to the foot of the stairs and listens to the wind blowing through Claire’s room before going downstairs. Outside the sewing machine whirs like a circling helicopter. I few moments later I hear the theme song for the evening news and then the beginning of the weather report as I walk upstairs without saying goodnight. Claire is in the bathroom so long that I have to go downstairs to brush my teeth.

That night I am about to fall asleep when I see Claire’s shadow in my doorway. I sit up, startled. "Mary-Kate," she whispers. I realize that both the hall and the bathroom lights are on. "Are you awake?"

"No," I answer loudly, flopping back down to let my heart make its way back up from my feet. I hear my stomach growl loudly and Claire giggles.

"Good, it’s great that you’re awake," she says, walking awkwardly to the other side of the bed. She slides her leg off and it makes a thump as it hits the floor. "Woops," she says, crawling into bed and pulling the quilt tight underneath her chin. I can see her teeth chatter as I get up to turn off the lights and crawl back in bed.

"It’s dark," she says, "It’s so dark in Namibia that you can’t separate yourself from it. The only way to know that you still have a hand is to rest it on your face," she brings her hand up to her face and looks at me through her first and second finger. I realize that my sister is 27 years old and still afraid of the dark.

"I think there’s more light in your room, Mary-Kate." A stain of vomit has dried like a paper snowflake on her left cheek. Her eyelids are gray, like dust. Sweat balances on the tips of her eyelashes like drops of water on the leaves of aspen trees, glassy and floating. Stopping suddenly, she turns her back to me and soon begins to snore. I stay awake for a long time, my legs tucked underneath me, flat and even. Finally I lift my head over the slight bump that is Claire. Her prosthesis is bright like the surprise of flesh in moonlight, dividing the gray light. The nylon stocking pulled halfway up looks like a Barbie doll leg shedding its skin. Claire’s hand is flopped over the side of the bed. I feel a lump in my throat - a dense ball of sadness and pride I cannot dislodge.

Last week in science class I learned that both space and matter are sometimes invisible because much of what is solid doesn’t register on scientific instruments. I move closer to Claire and shorten the space between us. Wind is twisting through the trees in the yard, screeching around us, and whining in the fireplace downstairs. I imagine a giant woman has scooped up our house; she is ringing it like a towel as she searches the empty streets for her children; her screams penetrate the wood and glass designed to insulate our safety. The darkness is broken by patches of yellow light thrown like pillows from a few windows on the street.

I leave Claire snoring in my room and weigh myself on the bathroom scale in my parents’ bathroom. I walk to work, disgusted that I have gained two and a half pounds. I decide I’d better forgive Anna, return her calls from the last few days and see if we can go for a jog.

I have a job some Saturdays as the snack tray girl at different faculty and student events in the biology department at the university. Technically, I’m not 18 but in a state where people operate dangerous ranch machinery at age ten, a girl who just misses the mark of legal university employment is easily accommodated. I get paid $6/hour for my toil, straight from the cash box in the department office. I find my dad in his office dusting the taxidermic birds on his shelf, singing along to Neil Young on his Walkman. My dad knows every bird in the world, even a few that no one believes exist. He has them marked according to country of origin on the world map in his office. He has added some blue stickpins to the "endangered birds" map set within the larger one. On the table is a half-finished sketch of a warbler. I smile and pick up my apron on the way out of the office.

This week it is a scientists’ exhibit intended to make "college bound" students excited about using microscopes and delving into the great secrets of the universe. Dad reminded me this morning to stop tottering around with my tray of cheese and crackers early and have a look at the different exhibits. I watch the scientists explain their projects, thinking about all of the things in the universe that nobody understands.

I learn that there is an observatory in Arizona where scientists measure the dimensions and map the surface of stars. It seems two different stars can often look like one in the sky, while a single star can sometimes look divided. I move on quickly to the next exhibit where a scientist plays a cassette tape of cricket noises. Although my dad hoped I might be the next great Larsen birder, I would much rather investigate creatures under rocks than those flying over trees. The crickets’ rhythm is strange and hypnotic; like a private song beautiful only to those who understand. Wide-eyed onlookers look momentarily convinced they are actually in the jungle. Like trees bending in the wind, they lean into the scientist’s voice:

"Rhythms are ubiquitous in nature and occur everywhere in diverse phenomena; from the daily opening and closing of flower petals, to your own heartbeat and the wing beats of insects and birds."

The pictures of microscopic bugs are magnified, suspended on the edges of leaves and quivering in the jungle air. The crickets’ legs are perfectly thin and folded in symmetrical parts. I wonder if a cricket’s heart is much bigger than a raindrop inside his green, hairless chest.

When I come home there is a note from Mom and Dad: "Took Claire to Doctor. Back 3 PM-ish" pinned to a stuffed owl with one eye. Around 5 PM-ish my father walks in with a long face and no Claire. "Don’t worry, he says, "She’ll be fine. They just want to make sure she’s responding to the medication." A few hours into Moby Dick, my mother comes home and helps Claire up to her room. I hear the rumble of hushed voices and then the sound of water in the kitchen. I step into the hallway and lean silently over the banister. Mom is standing over the kitchen sink, smoking a cigarette slowly like she’s in one of the black and white movies they show in the middle of the night. She blows smoke slowly and silently out the open window. My father stands beside her, his hands moving through her pale, glittering hair. The moonlight reflects off the ring of thinning hair that circles his scalp, lighting it up like a halo.

That night I dream that my sister is falling off the face of Africa. She skips over the border of Senegal and twirls across the desert through Sudan. In Ethiopia, she realizes she is being chased by giant red bees from Rwanda with wings the size of Europe and furry Angolan spiders with yellow teeth dripping blood. Screaming, she sprints across Kenya and through Tanzania, all the way through Zimbabwe and Botswana to Namibia where she finally covers her face, slides over the A of Namibia, bumps across the border and then down into the tip of South Africa, finally swinging off the edge of Capetown into a sea of uneven stars. The bugs hover above, wings buzzing and monstrous jaws agape. At first she is swimming fast and strong and then finally she is covered with waves.

I wake up swatting the air, ready for battle with big-toothed insects. I open my mouth, expecting to feel a web knitting my teeth together, but there is only dryness and the first cracks of morning light waiting at the windowsill.

When we come home from church, Claire has color in her cheeks and is padding around in the kitchen, working her way through a pile of toast. "Delayed appetite," she laughs. She offers me some but I shake my head and go for a glass of water. Claire looks at me for a few long moments and goes downstairs.

I’m about to write a sonnet for English class when I hear her coughing. I walk down the steps to see what’s wrong. She is sipping green tea, leafing through some folders, and coughing into a shredded Kleenex. Her hair is braided, and she’s wearing an old wool sweater of my dad’s and orange sweatpants that say "Go Wyo" in black letters. She has a red plaid scarf wrapped around her head that looks like something chewed on the edge of it.

I pick up a stack of photographs and start searching for stray postcards to add to my collection of cards and photos. I began collecting when Claire went overseas six years ago. The first one she sent me was from Amsterdam, and she had everybody in the airport bar sign it. My favorite is from Frankfurt, because she smeared cheese on one side and wrote "Scratch and Sniff." I inhaled as deeply as I could and it was possible to detect just a hint of the fresh, yeasty scent of what Claire described as "the world’s stinkiest cheese." I keep my postcard collection in a red shoebox under my bed.

In Claire’s stack I find a photo of two tanned girls sitting on the back of a motorbike. Behind them are several enormous buildings: one is a red temple with two gold lions guarding the front and the other is a huge white Neiman Marcus. In the background a woman is selling sarongs and knock-off Armani T- shirts; she has at least fifteen watches on her outstretched arm. Both women seem watchful, and they are all looking at the ground. "Where was this taken?" I ask. "Why is everyone looking down?" Claire leans over, "Oh," she says, "I took it. That’s Bangkok. I think I was wearing shorts."

The rest of the photos are mostly landscape shots broken up by huge groups of sweaty people holding shovels or books. I hold up the ones I find most interesting and she looks up from what she’s writing or reading to say "Cambodia. Mine field." or "Ditch-digging. Ethiopia." and "Prosthetic warehouse. Bosnia." One photo is of a beautiful black woman with cropped hair and wire-rimmed glasses wearing a sunflower yellow dress that flows out around her. Behind her is a small wooden house that looks like one of the cabins from Bible camp. Her smile is wide and bright and queen-like. My sister blinks hard and she puts down her paper with a sigh. "That’s Musimbi," she says, taking the picture from me, "she died of malaria last year." Her voice is as hollow as those days in Wyoming when the wind replaces the sound of your own breath. I feel a tiny spring of terror released in my stomach. She hands it to me and looks quickly away. "Take it," she says, "that’s a picture of my house."

I weigh myself, smile at the disappeared pounds, and go to my room, feeling desperately hungry and terribly victorious all at once. I add Musimbi’s picture to my postcard and photo collection and sift through it slowly, waiting for the hot rollers twisted against my head to cool down so I can test out one of my potential prom-dos. I have to lift the pictures right up to my face as if they are slides because the rollers weigh my head down so much I have to keep my neck perfectly straight. I think if I hold this position long enough I can lose my second chin. I am determined to look as thin as possible in my prom photos. I search slowly through the bag of postcards and letters my sister has sent to me over the past four years, trying to ignore the burning sensation around both my ears.

MARY-KATE!!! This postcard does not do justice to the beauty of the sand dunes in Namibia. And did you know this country was famous for its diamonds…Everyone is real nice – my housemate is from Kenya, her name is Musimbi… Dear MK, Hello from Cambodia…Mary-Kate, Do you know how many people in the world do not have enough to eat?…Sis, This is a picture of the Peace Corps Volunteers who helped us with the project in Nairobi……Then an envelope with a long letter and "Fragile" written on the outside. Hey Mary-Kate, guess what, I’m getting married! Pascal and I got engaged near Mont Blanc – they threw a party for us which was really too much but it’s probably the first time I’ve been dressed up and out for dinner in a year! So it really was a nice change. He works for the Swiss arm of the International Peace Bureau I work for in Namibia. P and I met in Geneva at training, which feels like ages ago. It’s fast, I know, but you’re going to love him! Wrote Mom and Dad about it, too. I think we’ll get married in May… The rest of the letter is about their latest project with landmines. I feel like someone has put my stomach in the freezer. Enclosed is a picture of a tall young man with long blonde hair and a smile that nearly splits his face. My sister is facing him, holding both of his arms. Her head is tilted to the side. Her skin is white as moonlight and her eyes seem to swallow up the camera. She is wearing a simple black dress with a pair of black heels that would look ridiculous if a few inches were added. But her legs are long and muscular, and she practically dances on those shoes. They are not just happy, they are totally oblivious. I stare into Pascal’s face for a long time until I can almost feel him smiling at me. I pull out my rollers as hard as I can to keep from screaming.

Anna calls later and tells me that we are now a group of five girls going to prom without dates and frankly, she thinks it’s better that way. She promises to call me when she gets back from a weekend in Colorado, where she hopes to get her prom dress. "But we’re not even skiing," she says, "what a drag."

The next night the Tanzanian family arrives for dinner. My dad has been whipping up smoke in the kitchen for a few hours and my mom actually dusts the furniture with something besides the palm of her hand. I try to ask if Dad needs help but he’s apparently on some kind of culinary mission. Claire and I fold napkins in the dining room and I tell her what kind of prom dress I’m looking for. She is wearing an African dress. It’s blue and kind of tie-dyed, only much more beautiful than the T-shirts we made for the Homecoming Parade this fall. Light and dark concentric circles of various shades of blue wind around her like vines. Her black hair is pulled back into a tight, low bun at the nape of her neck, making her cheekbones look as if they might break through the skin of her face. I always wanted my sister’s easily beautiful features. Claire has the kind of face where everything serves a purpose: her tiny pointed nose is perfectly placed between her huge eyes, and her dark hair makes her skin look that much lighter, as if it glows. Being her sister makes my mushy, unorganized features and less than remarkable hair beautiful only by association.

Mr. and Mrs. Kanyoro eat salmon, green beans and some very stiff potatoes with us by candlelight. Dad burned the cheesecake so there’s a bowl of Hershey’s Kisses in the middle of the table. Mr. Kanyoro’s hands are smooth and soft when I hold his during the prayer, and he laughs loud and high when he tells stories. My dad is rapt with his new kindred spirit. He is asking Mr. Kanyoro about African birds and lets out a whoop when his theory about a rare African owl is affirmed. My mom looks soft tonight, with her hair curled under at the ends. The light blue sweater softens her dark eyes and in the candlelight they look wet and sparkling like deep black puddles. I try to concentrate on only eating half of my dinner and I cover my plate with green beans.

Mrs. Kanyoro is wearing a bright yellow and blue cloth tied neatly around her body. Her presence is solid and her words are soft and precise. She covers my hand with hers when I pass the potatoes and says, "Thanks so much for having us." Her speaking voice has the rhythm of soft laughter – a low, steady rumble like a distant lullaby. Claire sits back in her chair and pats my mom’s hand. My dad learns the Swahili word "jambo" for hello and Mrs. Kanyoro tells me I have "the prettiest yellow hair" she’s ever seen. My dad casts me a furrowed look when I cover the mashed potatoes he put on my plate with my napkin.

After dinner my father pours brandy for himself, Mr. Kanyoro and Claire, and they sit in the living room while Mom, Mrs. Kanyoro and I clear the table and do the dishes. I twist a Hershey’s kiss slowly in my mouth with my tongue, savoring my one sweet treat of the week. My sister is leaning in and gesturing wildly with her hands. My father sits back in the armchair, one leg crossed over the other. Mr. Kanyoro rocks back and forth in the rocker, nodding and grinning at my sister. "They must be talking politics," I tell my mother. My sister knows details about places in the world that I can hardly find on a map.

"You have a very brave girl, there," Mrs. Kanyoro says to my mother, who is busy wiping dishes. Mom’s hands stop mid-wipe and she sets down a dish. "Yes." Her voice shakes. I think to myself that maybe if I can lose 10 pounds before prom by denying myself the comforts of food, then I will be brave, too. I listen to the urgency in my sister’s voice; I hear the passion and the sweetness. I have eaten nothing, but I still feel as if I might burst.

My dad’s cheeks are rosy as he shuts the door behind our guests. He gives me a high five and pats both Claire and I on the back for a few moments. "What were you talking about?" I ask, placing the Kanyoros’ gift of a white stone box on the stereo in the living room.

"The land dispute in Botswana," she says. I nod as if I understand. The Kanyoros gave her a bright colored cloth that Claire shows me how to wrap around my head. She says I look radiant. It looks like purple and white stripes are growing out of my forehead.

The next day Claire reads with me at the table and comes down to do the stretch section of my aerobics videotape. When we look through pictures of prom dresses, I tell her to be sure and choose the ones that will make me look thin and I’m happy when she says, "Then I’d have to choose all of them." She pauses for a few moments, as if she’s looking at me without using her eyes.

"Mary-Kate, are you on a diet?"

No, I’m not, I think to myself. I just don’t eat. "No."

"Well, good," she says "you shouldn’t be." I avoid her eyes by picking up my magazine and flipping through it.

Claire bakes cookies that afternoon; she brings me two and watches me eat both. They are sweet and greasy and full of fat. I do 120 jumping jacks in my room that night before going to bed.

That weekend, Claire starts sleeping with her windows closed. She comes home one morning from a walk around the block, smelling like wind. The same day we decide to avoid the rodeos and old-fashioned Western frolic of Jubilee Days and go to the mountains instead. Dad paints on his jeans and is out the door by 8 am to catch the last hurrah through the buffet line at the annual morning "Pancake Feed" where Mom has been tossing batter with her bridge club friends since 5:30 in the morning. I ask him not to torment any 4-H cows in the name of science. Last year I found an unusually large rodeo rat in the fridge for one of his experiments about how viruses enter cells. Apparently he chased it under a bleacher and caught in an empty nachos container. Thankfully I noticed it before Mom did. I didn’t ask how it died. "No lab rats at home," I tell him. "It’s weird."

Claire drives like she’s auditioning for stuntwoman in an action movie, rolling through stop signs and lurching in front of Wyoming’s infamous 100 year old drivers. I can’t tell if cutting off old ladies on their way to the church bazaar is a bad habit she picked up overseas or if it means she’s really feeling better.

"What kind of a car do you drive in Namibia?" I ask, trying to sound neutral.

"A really bad one," she quips. At the stoplight, a man in his Hush Puppies meanders across Mitchell Street to get his pancakes.

The two bars in town are hopping with cowboys. A hand written sign in front of DJ’s Saloon reads: "Where cowpokes meet cowgirls – $1/pitcher Happy Hour." On our way to the interstate, two men wearing tight Wranglers and flannel shirts almost slide over our fender running across the street, a long "Budweiser" banner flapping between them. "Hey there pretty little lady!" The one bringing up the rear tips his hat at Claire. I blush because I can see every contour in his butt. "You should stay and run for Rodeo Queen," I suggest to Claire.

"Yeehaw!" she yells after them.

"You sure are purty, ma’am," I say to her. She giggles and punches me softly on the arm.

Twenty miles outside of Laramie is Vedauwoo National Park where a bronze statue of President Lincoln’s head grimly supervises the most dangerous overpass in the state. Finally passing through his gaze on a stormy night at over 7,000 feet on a winter night is to feel true relief.

"Funny," says Claire, wrinkling her nose, "this road reminds me of the road from Windhoek to Okahandjah. In Namibia," she adds, in case I’ve forgotten where she lives. "Except this one’s paved, of course. Weird. Even the sky looks the same." Clouds are stacked like rounded ladders, stretching sideways into heaven. We watch the prairie unfurl into an endless stretch of blue and then curl back up again as the short gray mountains close around us.

Our car crunches over the gravel and stops just short of the picnic tables. "I’m not hungry. Are you hungry?" Claire asks suddenly. Before I have a chance to answer she says, "How about we work for our lunch? Let’s go hiking."

"Uh, do you think that’s a good idea?" I answer, nervous. "I mean, should you be climbing mountains on your new medicine?"

"Do I think I should be taking advice from my little sister when I feel fine?" She fires back. She blinks twice and then in a softer voice she says, "I’m not going to collapse, Claire. It’s just like having a touch of the flu. Anyway, it’s not that steep, it’s a beautiful day and I’m used to being on the move."

I walk behind her, trying to figure out how many calories I can burn in the next half hour. I watch Claire place her right foot carefully in front, bracing herself and then heaving the left foot up to reach the other, sometimes putting her hands in the dirt to support herself in between. Stomp, bend, heave, bend, stomp, heave. I watch her T-shirt darken with sweat, revealing the muscles in her back and shoulders. I hear the creak of the hydraulic hinge as she navigates up and over the rocks. As we move closer to the slice of blue sky getting wider and wider, I can barely keep up with her.

At the top of the hill, we sit on the rocks and stretch our faces toward the noonday sun. Claire feeds some of her picnic to a squirrel and places her hand flat on the rock so ants can crawl over her fingers. Dirt is caked under her fingers where she gripped the ground on the way up. There doesn’t seem to be any area of her skin that is not sweating. I’m uprooting rocks in the dirt, looking for interesting bugs to dissect. "I should have brought some jars," I say, thinking these would be perfect for the project we’ll be doing at school next week.

Claire, amused, says, "You should see the bugs in my house. Once on the way back from the bathroom, a spider this big" she shows me her closed fist, "dropped right down in front of my face and just bounced," she moves her fist up and down. I laugh and feel spiders in my underwear. Claire goes on to tell me about a bee she heard buzzing in the next room that was the size of her eye, and about the community center in Okahandjah where a regular army of ants is liquidated occasionally by the all-purpose gecko, affectionately known as the "lizard-vac."

I want to ask her more about Namibia, about the small town where she works, about her travels, and about what it’s like to work with landmine victims; but how would I answer her if she asked me what it has been like here, for these four years, without her?

Claire sighs and leans back on her hands. I look out to the brown wood fences of ranches in the distance. Words rustle between us like foxes sprinting through grass. I remember when Dad taught us that Vedawoo means "earth-born spirit." I imagine rivers bleeding through trees. I imagine the wind in Africa like sighs running deep and old.

People coming up to our picnic spot applaud and nod in admiration as my sister and I descend slowly on the trail. "See, Mary-Kate," she says between quick breaths, "all you have to do to be a hero is have a tragedy." She laughs but I just keep looking down at the stones on the path to keep from falling.

After a few days of phone calls and faxes, Claire is invited to talk about her work with landmines at the university. On the day of her big presentation, my sister emerges from her room transformed. I almost gasp and spill soda on the Prom edition of Seventeen. She is wearing a black pantsuit that I recognize as the one she bought special for her UN internship interview six years ago. It was so tight in the back then that she was afraid it might split when she sat down. Now it looks as if a few more of her might fit into one of the pant legs. Her hair tucked behind her ears gleams so black it is almost blue, and her lips are touched with a hint of red. I notice with glee that she has cleaned the dirt from underneath her fingers.

"I hope you don’t mind, I borrowed your lipstick," she says.

"It’s fine," I stammer and then add, hopefully, "Any time."

At the presentation of Claire’s work, my dad is volcanic with pride while my mother nods to various people she knows, looking timid. "Yes," Dad tells people milling about before the lights dim, "her work is exhausting. Important."

Claire’s eyes are blue bullets into the audience, which consists mostly of Amnesty International members, a few overweight political looking men, and a smattering of faculty and students who watch CNN. "No one escapes the mines," says her journalistic voice, "And no one will escape these slides." As the slides begin to flash across the screen my father looks as if someone has set an anvil on his shoulder blades. His lips are pursed together, his legs crossed tight. My mother is gripping his knee with both hands. There are pictures of babies with red pulp for legs and hollow-cheeked mothers hopping around using one stick. "Anti-personnel landmines are the most destructive force against civilians in post-conflict countries," Claire’s voice rings through the auditorium. "They act as a literal, lethal block against the best peace and justice efforts. They are easy and cheap to plant and costly and difficult to remove." A slide shows men with plastic shields, crouched down and sweating in front of staked out portions of the ground. "Every month over 2,000 people are killed or maimed by landmines. Of the 250,000 landmine amputees worldwide, few have access to physical or emotional therapy." A mother with one eye and no legs cradles a small baby on her lap, while flies buzz around her eyepatch.

A slight, smiling man wearing a turban flashes on the screen. "This is Marcus," says my sister, "he coordinates the donation and delivery of prosthetic limbs from Europe and North America." About twenty "used legs" are piled behind them. "Landmines are one of the largest human rights violations in the world today," Claire continues, "but human rights organizations are eliminating them slowly with support from the Ottawa Agreement to help ban the sale, manufacture, and stockpiling of anti-personnel landmines. The United States has refused to support this agreement. Out of our central office in Namibia, the International Peace Bureau has established concrete ways in which you can help us work to end this humanitarian crisis."

Claire stays after, milling about and answering questions, handing out examples of letters to send to student groups and people in suits about the urgency of banning anti-personnel landmines. Her presence is slender and relentless. I pick up some pamphlets about Claire’s organization, but I don’t open them. I walk outside into the courtyard and inhale the air of cafeteria food wafting from the basement of one of the dormitories. My father appears next to me, blowing out a small stream of air.

"Well kiddo," he says, which is code for: Don’t worry. "I guess it’s sometimes easier to hear about something than to actually look at it."

"Dad?"

"Yes, dear."

"Claire didn’t suffer like that when she lost her leg, did she? I mean, like those people?"

"No," he says, "she had the best medical care." "The very best," he says, softly.

I inhale. "Who was driving the car when they crashed, Claire or Pascal?"

"I don’t know, Mary-Kate," he says, "I never asked."

I persist. "How can she work with people who look like that? Why would she want people to think that she was a landmine victim too?" I sit down quickly on the stone bench, thinking about Pascal’s blonde ponytail and his wide as the sky smile. "How can she stand it?" I am desperate to know but at the same time, afraid to hear the answer.

My dad starts to kick at an interesting piece of dirt. "Your sister has always been hard-headed and independent. She does things her own way. We have to respect that." He puts a hand on my shoulder and jingles the change in his pocket. "She’s a survivor.," he says and then adds softly, "and I’m so glad." We stay that way for a moment, watching wispy clouds move fast across the wide sky toward the West. A small bird flutters overhead as we stand up to leave.

"Bird name?" I ask, indulging him.

"Blue finch," he nods, squinting.

Later that night I hear the soft sobs of my mother in the kitchen. I walk slowly downstairs and sit next to her at the table. A handkerchief covers her eyes. "Your sister is going back early. She’s already sick of me, I guess." She lets out a stifled laugh and shakes her head. "I don’t understand that girl."

"She lives there, Mom."

My mother looks up at me with pained, red-rimmed eyes. "I know," she says slowly. "You’re right, Mary-Kate. It’s where she lives. It’s her home." I think I’ve made her feel even worse. We sit in silence for awhile until my mother gets up from the table, dumping her full mug of tea into the sink. "Anyway, she wants to take you shopping before she goes."

The next day my sister takes me shopping for a prom dress. "If I’m missing your prom, the least I can do is help you shop for the dress," she tells me. Although yesterday’s near-glamour by no means cancels out the fashion mistakes of the past few weeks, I am nonetheless encouraged. My sister turns out to be quite an opinionated shopper: "Too slutty," "Fighting a fire or going to prom?" "Mary-Kate, you are not Mariah Carey." Finally we agree on a long black silk dress with a fitted waist and spaghetti straps, referred to as a "classic" by my suddenly fashion-forward sister. Somehow she appears to know what she’s talking about; never mind that she is wearing her pink aerobics sweatsuit from ten years ago.

"It’s over Dad’s limit and I would still have to get shoes," I say, spinning in the mirror, silk sliding wickedly over my thighs. Just the way Claire smiles at me makes me feel pretty, even thin.

"What size shoe do you wear?"

"Six. Why?"

Claire looks at me for a long time. "I’ll get the shoes," she says. "Get changed."

Claire knocks on my door a few hours later and comes in holding a white box that says "Orcade" in gold lettering on the top. "I think these will be perfect with your dress," she says, opening the lid. I look at her, filled, but before I say anything she says, "Pascal bought these for me in Geneva. We were window-shopping, which is all you can really do on an intern’s salary, but I loved these because they were glamorous…and I was so tired of hearing about poverty and death and disease," she let out a small snort and looked up at me with a shaking smile. I can’t believe that my sister ever tires of hearing about tragedy, but the relief in her voice when she says that makes me feel tight and hollow inside inside. I suddenly want to beg her to please stay with us, but I say nothing.

"Sometimes I’m more like Mom than I’d like to admit," she says, and I try to smile. She looks down again, brushing invisible dust from her lap. "Anyway, he bought them for me that night." She exhales through her nose and looks again at me. "But he gave them to me later. They were way too expensive. Stupid really – what the hell was I going to do with high heels in Namibia? And I loved them." She is looking over me and then suddenly she seems to see me again. Her eyes are glittering blue and full of some kind of terrible looking love. "And he would’ve loved you, Mary-Kate." I feel the intensity of my sister’s feelings for me like a blast of heat. I understand all at once what love for the people in her life has cost her; what her own life has cost her. I feel the force of this love and I want to grab on to something in order to withstand it. I want to pull her away from all the memories by her wrist, her arms, her leg – anything that will take her away from the dark shadows in her eyes.

She slides her hand slowly over the gold lettering, shuts the lid and hands the box to me. "They’ve only been worn once," she says, like she’s trying to sell them to me. She leaves quietly and I say "thank you" as the door clicks shut.

The shoes are soft and black, and the straps are snug but weightless. The leather smells expensive. I twirl in the mirror, nearly falling over – I’m not used to being so tall and the heels sink into the carpet. I decide that on prom night I’m going to look pretty good after all. I remember Pascal’s smile in the photograph.

I walk carefully down the stairs and stand for a moment behind the glass doors opening out to the deck, teetering slightly. I have pinned my hair up and put in earrings to give Claire the full effect of next Saturday’s glamour extravaganza. I watch her blow smooth spirals of smoke into the air. The lights of truck stops and fast food chains glimmer in the distance. The lopsided star my dad made of Christmas lights is still balanced on the back fence six months later. The shoes make a dull clicking noise against the wood deck. Claire turns and whistles. The air smells like cloves. "You look amazing."

"Thanks."

"You’re going to have a lot more fun at your prom than I did."

"I hope so," I reply. Claire listened to Whitney Houston and would only eat microwave popcorn for a week after she was dumped at prom. She laughs softly, remembering. I sit down next to her and pull the long black skirt over my ankles.

"Aren’t you cold?" I ask, shivering.

"I want to bring back some good clean Wyomin’ air with me," she says, imitating Dad and nodding to her open backpack, airing out on the porch swing.

"How do you carry that thing on your back?" I ask, my throat tight, imagining my rail thin sister with that huge, menacing bag wrapped around her when she could probably fit inside of it.

She clamps her cigarette in her teeth, hoists herself up with both hands and drags the bag off the porch swing, snapping it in the air like a towel. She walks behind me and slips the thick, canvas bag over my shoulders, reaching around to secure the belt with a tug that nearly sends me toppling to the left. I forget that my sister has been digging ditches in Africa for four years and is a lot stronger than she looks.

"Feeling just fine I see."

"You bet."

While she’s tugging and pulling she says, "You know I’ll write to you right?" I nod. This is ridiculous, I think as my vision blurs, I am not crying all over my new prom dress. "Listen, I’m sorry I won’t be here." She pauses, reaching steady hands in front of me to fasten the chest strap. "Monika went back to Germany for two weeks for meetings, and I haven’t met all of the new volunteers. . . And Musimbi’s replacement is set to arrive in two weeks and I want to make sure everything is set before the program starts next month. So it’s all that."

"You miss it there," I say.

"Voila," she says, turning me around, "a perfect fit. You can do jumping jacks in that now if you want. It’s waterproof, too." She grins.

The backpack feels oddly weightless but heavy like a sigh. It’s like something clinging around your waist that you don’t necessarily want to shake loose.

"You," she says, pointing at me with her burned out cigarette and securing the shoulder strap with a final tug, "look terrific." Her warm hand lingers on my shoulder.

Emily Rapp-Seitz grew up in Wyoming and Nebraska. A graduate of Saint Olaf College and Harvard Divinity School, in Fall 2001 she will be a Michener Fellow in Fiction and Poetry at the James Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.

Please post a message on our community bulletin board, or send email to editor@serpentinia.com to let us know what you think about this story, and we'll pass your message along to the author.

Home || Current Issue || Prior Issues || Writing Contest || Staff || Links || Rings