audio?
“You can’t know,” her mother said. “Deal with it. You are pushing forty.”
“Technically,” Estelle said, “I am one year away from pushing forty.”
“What-ev-er!” her mother replied. It was something you would expect to hear from a teenager, not a sixty-something woman living in Poughkeepsie who belongs to the Red Hat Society. Estelle suspected she got the phrase from her niece, LaDonna, who was living with her mother while her sister, Sonia, was in rehab. Sonia had been a crackhead and now everyone was very happy she was just a pillhead, addicted to Darvon and Valium and such. “It is so much easier to get off of those,” her mother said.
But Estelle knew the truth, that Sonia was taking their mother’s Oxycontins, prescribed for severe osteoporosis that had caused her back to curve up like a question mark. She would crush them up in the bathroomand snort the resulting powder. She was also taking their mother’s fentanyl patches and sucking on them, under her tongue like a lozenge. These were not good things, not at all, but she hid her sister’s secret practices the way you might hide a vibrator in a drawer, even liking that her sister had found a source of relief, and meanwhile let their mother pick on her, the good daughter. The one who held down a job, had recently acquired a mortgage, and had never given birth to a child because she felt it was unethical without the means to create a college fund immediately for said child. You couldn’t go reproducing in the world just because you had a job that provided the occasional free steak. She let her mother rip her to shreds, whenever possible. It was like a favor to Sonia. And she owed her one.
It had to do with something that had happened long, long ago, to her sister, and the role Estelle had played in it. The event was so distant and truly dark it almost seemed like a movie she had once seen, or a dream. But it was real and she knew it and it was like a stone in her heart, a hard cold spot there that never let her feel completely happy.
She recalled the geology classes she had taken in high school and how they had a hardness scratch test you could perform on rocks, to find out what sort of minerals the different rocks held inside them. The MOH Hardness Scale would tell you if rocks were made of more than one mineral. She recalled they had tested for(1) fluorite, (2) gypsum, (3) calcite, (4) quartz. You could find out things about rocks by determining what other material could scratch them and what they could scratch. She thought if you scratched that rocky place in her heart with a penny, a paper clip, or even a diamond chip, you would never see a scratch. It was that hard. It probably contained molybdinum or uranium or something. Or maybe even an element that had never been discovered. Her heart contained a glob of Kryptonite, the stuff that made Superman vulnerable, that had been imported by a meteor from a faraway world where things were harder than any substance known to man. Her sister’s heart, on the other hand, was more like a fossil. Something that had once been an organic thing, but had died out. A species gone extinct. Her heart was a dodo bird, or a small dinosaur, that had once run very fast. Estelle had played a part in it, the killing of that fast, special heart.
When she was nine and Sonia was seven, they had gone to a camp where each girl had to care for and tend her own horse. Estelle’s was Frost, a tall white gelding. But Sonia had gotten Kit, and Kit was pregnant. Halfway through camp Kit foaled and was out of commission, so when the camp girls went on their daily trail ride, up over the rise and into the hills for the entire morning, Sonia had to stay behind with Gramps, the father of one of the counselors. One afternoon Sonia had told Estelle that the old man would touch her in her underpants and smelled bad, “like sour cheese.”
“I wanna go home,” she told her sister, a tear dripping off the end of her
“You can’t know,” her mother said. “Deal with it. You are pushing forty.”
“Technically,” Estelle said, “I am one year away from pushing forty.”
“What-ev-er!” her mother replied. It was something you would expect to hear from a teenager, not a sixty-something woman living in Poughkeepsie who belongs to the Red Hat Society. Estelle suspected she got the phrase from her niece, LaDonna, who was living with her mother while her sister, Sonia, was in rehab. Sonia had been a crackhead and now everyone was very happy she was just a pillhead, addicted to Darvon and Valium and such. “It is so much easier to get off of those,” her mother said.
But Estelle knew the truth, that Sonia was taking their mother’s Oxycontins, prescribed for severe osteoporosis that had caused her back to curve up like a question mark. She would crush them up in the bathroomand snort the resulting powder. She was also taking their mother’s fentanyl patches and sucking on them, under her tongue like a lozenge. These were not good things, not at all, but she hid her sister’s secret practices the way you might hide a vibrator in a drawer, even liking that her sister had found a source of relief, and meanwhile let their mother pick on her, the good daughter. The one who held down a job, had recently acquired a mortgage, and had never given birth to a child because she felt it was unethical without the means to create a college fund immediately for said child. You couldn’t go reproducing in the world just because you had a job that provided the occasional free steak. She let her mother rip her to shreds, whenever possible. It was like a favor to Sonia. And she owed her one.
It had to do with something that had happened long, long ago, to her sister, and the role Estelle had played in it. The event was so distant and truly dark it almost seemed like a movie she had once seen, or a dream. But it was real and she knew it and it was like a stone in her heart, a hard cold spot there that never let her feel completely happy.
She recalled the geology classes she had taken in high school and how they had a hardness scratch test you could perform on rocks, to find out what sort of minerals the different rocks held inside them. The MOH Hardness Scale would tell you if rocks were made of more than one mineral. She recalled they had tested for(1) fluorite, (2) gypsum, (3) calcite, (4) quartz. You could find out things about rocks by determining what other material could scratch them and what they could scratch. She thought if you scratched that rocky place in her heart with a penny, a paper clip, or even a diamond chip, you would never see a scratch. It was that hard. It probably contained molybdinum or uranium or something. Or maybe even an element that had never been discovered. Her heart contained a glob of Kryptonite, the stuff that made Superman vulnerable, that had been imported by a meteor from a faraway world where things were harder than any substance known to man. Her sister’s heart, on the other hand, was more like a fossil. Something that had once been an organic thing, but had died out. A species gone extinct. Her heart was a dodo bird, or a small dinosaur, that had once run very fast. Estelle had played a part in it, the killing of that fast, special heart.
When she was nine and Sonia was seven, they had gone to a camp where each girl had to care for and tend her own horse. Estelle’s was Frost, a tall white gelding. But Sonia had gotten Kit, and Kit was pregnant. Halfway through camp Kit foaled and was out of commission, so when the camp girls went on their daily trail ride, up over the rise and into the hills for the entire morning, Sonia had to stay behind with Gramps, the father of one of the counselors. One afternoon Sonia had told Estelle that the old man would touch her in her underpants and smelled bad, “like sour cheese.”
“I wanna go home,” she told her sister, a tear dripping off the end of her
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