My parents were the ones who started helping Betsy hide her bad hand. After my mother hemmed the bottom of Betsy’s coats, she would sew the extra material to one sleeve. Betsy always had sleeves that were too long for her. I thought all her coats looked like they were coming alive and taking over her body. My mother took forever with those sleeves. I hated watching her with Betsy. Because of her hand, Betsy possessed my parents in a way that I did not. Sometimes when I played with Betsy, I pulled my coat sleeves down over my hands; but the sight of me with gigantic hands always seemed to annoy my mother. “You don’t want to look like a waif,” she said, and she rolled my coat sleeves all the way to the elbow.
Helping Betsy with her bad hand was the only thing I could do right that summer. Betsy was only eleven, a year younger than me, but she had become pretty. The sun went into her skin, and she held it easily, her hair, knees, glowing. Everyone knew her walk at our junior high school, a slow, watery step, her hair lifting and slapping her shoulders. Betsy understood something that I didn’t, and as her older sister, it was my job to stop this.
That was the summer when my father moved from his bed to the couch every morning and when my mother tried to figure out what was wrong with him. It was 1973. Sometimes he was the one who waited in the gas lines, sometimes it was my mother. In the car he read books about success. They had words like Win and Conquer and Pinnacle in the titles. He and my mother ran a tutoring business for high school students, and students had maybe gotten smarter, somehow, and now nobody seemed to need much help.
The books made my father tired. After he read them, my father came home and lay down on the couch. He watched the news reports. Before he felt tired, I used to sit with him on that couch and watch Sherylline Rivers talk disasters: My father would say two things to me, either “Listen, Sally,” or “This is sick.” “Listen, Sally,” included anything in the Middle East and teenagers who were more successful than I was. “This is sick” included everything else. I wanted to sit on that couch until my father organized the world for me.
Now he didn’t want us in the den, so we sat where the carpet turned from rust to brown and watched him. It was Betsy’s idea to toss balls of paper with messages at our sleeping father. She wanted to see how far she could throw a ball of paper if it was placed on her bad hand. She said that if the messages hit him, maybe he would feel better. We scribbled notes we thought might work: The Greatest Father in the Universe! Smile! Hugs and Kisses! We Luv You! I crumpled up Smile! and put it carefully on her bad hand.
She reached her arm back and served Smile!, full force, into the den. The ball bonked our father on the forehead.
He opened his eyes. We waited for him to thank us.
I knew our father was different when he woke up after our message hit him. He didn’t instruct us about the world, something he would usually do. He threw back the blanket and sat up.
“Enough, girls,” he said. “Out.”
Hearing our father talk that way sent Betsy all the way across the yard. She put her towel as far from the den as she could. She said she was going to make a project of thoroughly reading all of her Seventeens.
I couldn’t decide where to sit. I didn’t know what we had done wrong. Sometimes I sat with her across the yard. Sometimes I sat on the edge of the den, like an anchor.
Our mother began to walk through the house. She walked hard through each room, as though into a wind. She was different, too. When she looked at us, she wasn’t in her face; she was somewhere with our father.
When my mother yelled at my father to get up or see a doctor, I ran to Betsy, who was involved in her Seventeens.
“What do we do!” I yelled at her.
She turned the page on a quiz on kissable lip gloss. “How should I know?” she asked.
I started to walk away until we heard our mother’s voice rise again, louder than I had ever heard it.
Betsy jumped up. She began to run, arms flapping. I ran, too. She turned on the sprinklers. “Doe,” she sang. “A deer. A female deer. Ray, a drop of golden sun. .”
“Me, a name I call myself. .” We ran. We ran over the water; we ran as though we had practiced. I followed her around the yard, over the magazines, cover girls all wavy under the water.
We ran as far from the house as we could. We sang so loud our voices blurred. The house shimmered through the water. It almost looked beautiful.
BEFORE MY FATHER GOT TIRED, HE TOOK US DRIVING. HE WANTED to take us somewhere we had never seen. Sometimes he reached over the seat to us, his arm waved in front of our faces, and Betsy and I would decide what to put in his hand. “Guess what this is,” we’d say, giving him anything — a shoe, a comic book.
I hated the game the moment Betsy put her bad hand into his. My father would rub her bad hand gently, as though he were trying to erase something, and then his fingers would close completely over her. “It’s. . a banana,” my father would say. “A croissant.” Betsy would fall into the seat, giggling. “Wrong,” she’d say. “It’s a boomerang tip.” Sometimes I would also put my hand into his. He would lightly lace his fingers into mine. “This is — um,” he would say, thinking. I waited for him to tell me something special I could be.
I had to be good at something. I was the older sister. That’s what I could do. My favorite older sister job with Betsy was when I was in charge of her bad hand. Before we played, she put her hand into my lap. I had so many ideas. We pushed it into Play-Doh to see the dents it made. We molded chocolate chip cookie dough around it to make a cookie that was full of air.
When Betsy was six, we were sitting in the yard, and I was holding her bad hand, wondering what would happen if we put on a sprinkler, when she took it away and put it in her lap.
“Why is it different on me?”
“What? What’s different?”
“Tell me.”
I repeated what our father had told me. You’re the same as me, you just can’t take piano lessons.
She began to bang her bad hand on the grass.
“Give me a thumb,” she said to me.
“What?” I asked.
“Come on,” she said. She put her bad hand into my lap.
I had no idea what to do.
I took her into our bedroom, and we looked through our closet. My Potato Head. Clue. Nothing seemed right. Our fifty-two-color marker set.
“Sit,” I said. I held her bad hand in mine, and I began to draw. Bumps of aqua, olive green, burgundy. I wanted to find the color combination that would make her fingers sprout.
When I was finished, Betsy had five colorful fingers drawn on her bad hand. We had a good day. I carried her around the yard; we sang. I lifted her up, she giggled, her bad hand raised like a beautiful flower.
When she woke up the next morning, the colors had run. Her hand looked like it had been beaten up. “What did you do!” I shrieked. I was afraid I had deformed Betsy in a new, horrible way; now she would also be purple. But as soon as we had cleaned her off, Betsy turned around and put it in my lap.