Fiction: Faith

Of course, it’s the dead girl who gets the attention.  In this case, my sister.

THE LIVING ROOM

On the fireplace mantle is a blown up photograph of Sharon, actually the cover of Boulder Magazine, which did a feature story on her masterminding the recycling program at our high school.  Her black curls fall all over the place, a Jewish afro, Dr. Dad calls it — he has one too — and she’s smiling like she’s high.  Seven freckles arc across her nose.  She hated them, but I used to wish I had them.  I got my (our) mother’s straight hair and dark complexion.  Sharon wished she had my genes, and naturally I wanted hers.  We had a very old and dumb joke of handing each other actual pairs of jeans whenever one of us said that line.  Our rooms adjoined each other, separated by French doors, which I loved and she hated.  I liked to burst in on her when she had a boy over — the doors don’t lock — just to see if I could catch her doing something.  I did.  But if our parents were away, she’d block the doors with a dresser and turn up her stereo so I couldn’t hear any activity.  Her favorite song was “Darkness, Darkness” by Jesse Collin Young and the Youngbloods, one of the doctors’ sixties albums.

Tonight, Wednesday, the doctors eat Moo Shu Vegetarian at Shanghai Sam’s, then attend their weekly Parents of Murdered Children meeting in Denver.  They always ask me to come, but I can’t.  I do miss Sharon.  We were close.  I’m 17, the age she was at her funeral.  She’s 19, or would have turned 19 this year.  (I have this tense problem when I talk about her.)

Her killer’s in prison.  We got “justice,” but not the death penalty, which the doctors wanted.  I’m personally against it: eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth was the motto around here during the trial, which ended six months ago.  “If we all believed that, we’d be blind and toothless,” I thought, which isn’t an original slogan with me, but I kept my snappy comeback to myself.  I distinctly remember the doctors, who are both ex-hippies, being virulently anti-death penalty, but that was before.

BEFORE

Sharon Stein, salutatorian at Boulder High, editor of the school newspaper, gets into every college she applies to, parents and ‘lil sister kvelling all spring as she suffers the exquisite pain of choosing which Ivy League she will deign to grace with her presence.  We are all in awe of Sharon: her wit, her intelligence, her talents.  I know her better than the doctors, though, and I know what they don’t: she tries every drug ever to fly up a nose.  She sleeps with nearly every person on the masthead, including girls.  And she’s famous for inscribing tiny, masterful “cheat sheets” on her thigh, handily accessible beneath her short skirts, which also serve to titillate her test-taking neighbors.

I watched her write crib notes for her AP English exam in purple ink above her left knee.  She aced it, though being second in her class was a blow to her ego she never got over.  And then, at Harvard — guess what? — everyone was as smart as she was, and cheating more difficult, but “you’d be surprised at how common it is,” she wrote me, “even at Harvard.”

NOW

Naturally it’s hard being in her shadow.  Sally Stein, baby sister.  I have all the same teachers, but I’m a B+ kind of student.  I don’t cheat.  I disappoint everyone by not being at the top of my class, not being Miss Energetic Everything.  These days everyone pities me, sibling of the murdered child, though I don’t think Sharon would have appreciated being called a child, as she prided herself on her maturity.  I try not to pity me, but the doctors’ obsession with my sister doesn’t help.  When she was alive, she would get jealous of me, she said, because I had “youngest child privileges” — her invention.  She said she’d made my life easier by going through all the initial crap with our parents about boys, drugs, curfew, etc., so that, by the time I caught up with her, they were more mellow.  But that was part of her whole myth about herself, because they didn’t know half of what was going on.  She only brought home the “nice” boys, the ones she didn’t fuck.  And she always obeyed curfew, only she’d go out again after the doctors went to bed.  And she lied when she said she’d only tried pot, and that other drugs didn’t interest her.  In fact, she sold cocaine for three months in her junior year, when she was hanging around with that University boy from Brazil.  The doctors knew absolute zip about her; still they know nothing.

FACTS

The divorce rate for couples where a child dies is twice that of the general population.  (And that’s 50%, right?)

This statistic is one of the gems in the literature from Parents of Etc., Etc., which my parents joined after the trial.  There is no Siblings of Etc., Etc., but siblings are allowed at their meetings.  I went once, but all I could hear was this endless sanctification of the dead person.  I know it’s inevitable, and it probably won’t last forever, but it’s too hard for me to listen to.  I mean, I knew her.

I must sound like the hardest bitch on wheels.  I’ve changed, I know I have.  My sister and I used to smoke cigarettes and play ping pong when she baby-sat me.  She also let me pop the blackheads on her back, the most disgusting and most fun thing we did together more recently.  Those are some of my best memories.  We also took apart our parents’ desk with meticulous care, searching for secrets.  We found some old love letters addressed to Dr. Dad — before he was Dr. Dad — from a girl named Sesame, circa 1969, and a chunk of our mother’s diary from her college years at Barnard, when she was estranged from her parents.  She never told us about that, and now that I know, but she doesn’t know that I know, I can’t confess how we read her most private writing.

SHARON’S ROOM

Over the bed hangs a ratty poster of Jesse Collin Young, whom I find rather hideous, with his fu manchu mustache and fake-looking sky-blue eyes.  On her night table is a framed photo of me and her, both in overalls — we must have been 5 and 7 — with ice cream smeared across our faces.  That picture used to embarrass me, but now I find it sweet she kept it near her.  (She didn’t take it to Harvard, however.)  On the red trimline phone she put a label saying, “This is a princess phone, for use only by the princess, i.e., moi.”  Mexican blankets on the bed, Mexican rugs on the floor, and those garish folk paintings, framed in glass hanging over the window so that the light came through them at sunset.  (It still does.)  Naturally, her room has the better view; you can see the Flatirons from here, while mine looks east over the backyard.  Dr. Mom used to plant all kinds of wildflowers out there, but not anymore.  White walls, and an indigo ceiling, with actual constellations drawn — accurately, of course — in glow-in-the-dark paint.  She and Dr. Dad did that when she was 12 and into those Greek mythology stories of how the constellations were named.  Her favorite was the Pleides, the seven daughters of Atlas, and she’d named her freckles after them: Maia, Electra, Taygeta, Merope, Celaeno, Sterope, Alcyone.

Detectives went through all her stuff after she was murdered.  The guy who killed her was from here, another Boulder High student, who had gone to B.U. — to be near her, I guess.  His defense lawyers called it a “crime of passion,” a term which makes the doctors go ballistic.  That’s why he didn’t get the death penalty, the judge said: insufficient proof of premeditation.

So now the doctors are working on a stalking law.  When they’re not at their offices, not at Parents of Etc. Etc. meetings, they’re lobbying Congress.  I guess it’s very noble of them to think of other Sharons, the Sharons of the future, but their whole goal is that the state will kill the killer if the victim is murdered by a stalker.  I don’t see how that fixes anything.

When I was really little, I remember the doctors talking about how they’d seen an execution in Saudi Arabia, where they’d stopped on the way to their Peace Corps posts in Africa.  They said it was the worst thing they’d ever seen in their lives — they saw heads roll and everything — and it made them glad to be Americans, where justice is not based on Islamic law.  Personally, I can’t see the difference between chopping someone’s head off and killing them with a hypodermic.

JEWISH PRINCESSES

We always took a lot of shit from our friends about being the daughters of two doctors, plus our names, Sharon and Sally Stein, which couldn’t possibly be any more Jewish.  When Sharon read Steinbeck in seventh grade, she went through a period of making everyone call her Rose of Sharon, only you had to say it “RosaShairn,” like Henry Fonda does in the movie.  My real name is Sarah, but it never stuck, except with my grandma.  It sounds too much to me like Sharon, so I don’t think I’ll ever use it, especially now.

The doctors used to be atheists, very secular Jews, very Left.  But now, every Saturday morning, Dr. Dad drives down to the orthodox shul in Denver, near my grandma’s.  He himself points out the irony of driving on the sabbath.  Dr. Mom doesn’t go, and he’s asked me, but you wouldn’t find me dead in an orthodox synagogue, pardon the expression.  I ran away from Hebrew school and refused to get bat mitzvahed, since it seemed to me totally hypocritical of the doctors to foist that religious crap on us when they didn’t believe any of it.  Sharon went along, though — for the money, I’m sure.

One of the weird things about her last six weeks is that she started going to Hillel meetings and attending services at a Cambridge synagogue and talking about god.  I don’t know where that came from, except that her roommate, who was (is?) supposedly a beauty — the Knockout from Newton, Sharon called her — was big-time into her Judaism, and I think Sharon was just copying her, which would be typical.

THE KITCHEN

What we don’t have on the shelves anymore: Fluffernutter, peanut butter, egg’n’onion matzoh, blackberry jam.  The Four Food Groups, Sharon called them.  She used to make herself puke.  That’s how she stayed skinny.  I tried but couldn’t pull it off.  You’d think Dr. Mom, the pediatrician, would’ve figured it out, but no.  Princess Sharon outshined all her detractors and blinded all her admirers.  Except me.  I wouldn’t say I saw right through her, because that would imply transparency, and she wasn’t that.  But I saw her, at least.

MY ROOM

No dumb musician posters here.  It’s bare.  Each wall is a different color: ochre, teal, mauve and black.  The doctors are the kinds of parents who think you have to give your kids lots of freedom, or else they’ll rebel, which is what they did with their parents, or so they say.  Look at them now, however: Dr. Dad going to shul every weekend just like his father, and Dr. Mom marrying a doctor, just like her mother wanted.  Anyway, Dr. Mom even went with me to the paint store, and when the salesman asked if I was sure I wanted black, and looked to her for confirmation, she said, “If that’s what she wants, that’s what she gets.”

The only thing they ever flat out prohibited was tattoos, because of the Holocaust.  Grandma has the numbers; seven of her siblings were killed at Belson.  I can’t stand even writing a phone number on my hand, but Sharon wanted one, of course, because all her friends had them.  (They still do.)  That was the only knock-down-drag-out fight the doctors ever had with Sharon.  The night before she left for Harvard.  She wanted me to side with her, but I stayed out of it.  Her plan was to tattoo the Pleides on her left shoulder.  No one had anything like that; in this case, I’ll grant her originality.  She said she’d get stars of David instead of 5-pointed stars, but that just made the doctors angrier.  Finally, she announced she’d do it in Cambridge, and they’d just have to deal.  I think she must have forgotten all about it, though, since she never mentioned tattoos in her letters or calls — I’m sure the Knockout from Newton doesn’t have any — and none was listed under “identifying marks” on her body.  Dr. Mom has this bizarre idea that if they’d backed down on the tattoo issue, Sharon would still be alive.  Or maybe they’d feel less guilty about the fact that their (our) last night together was spent arguing.

THE LOCKED BOX IN MY CLOSET

Here I keep my own diaries, and the letters Sharon wrote me from Harvard.  I didn’t show these to the detectives because they’re too personal.  For instance, she had a pregnancy scare there, from a last-gasp fling in Boulder, but then her period came.  And I think she was in love with the Knockout from Newton — infatuated, anyway.

It’s so bizarre, Sal.  She’s one of those Jews with blond hair and bright blue eyes.  But she’s RELIGIOUS.  She keeps the Sabbath!!!  (For Christ’s sake, I keep thinking, in 1994!!!)  And she’s also a virgin, another anachronism.  (If you don’t know that word, look it up, as Dad would say.)  But she has this calmness about her that I swear I’ve never seen anyone younger than Grandma possess.  Could this be because of her “faith”?  I have to use quotation marks, because whenever I think of that word I picture Mom and Dad’s “Blind Faith” album, with that gorgeous half-naked girl on the cover.  Actually, my roommate looks a lot like her.

I didn’t want the doctors to read this.  As much as I wish they could know the “real” Sharon — as much as anyone is real, I suppose — I’m also scared of bursting their proverbial bubble.  I don’t think they could handle the truth.  And what for?  It wouldn’t fix anything.  So many secrets.  I can’t talk to my friend Marilyn about it either, because she has her own fake Sharon she idolizes, only her gaga admiration is based on all the “bad” things Sharon did.

After the murder, Dr. Mom sent me to a shrink.  Coincidentally, I was into wearing all black at that time, but I quit then.  I was always the punker, Sharon the hippie, and both of us behind the times.  Maybe that’s why she got so much over on the doctors, because she appealed to their sense of nostalgia.  She was going to change the world, too, via her journalism, just like the doctors once thought they’d do with medicine.  They spent three years in Togo teaching the indigenous people about sewage and disease.  Now Dr. Mom’s clients are all yuppie babies, and Dr. Dad makes lots o’ bucks operating on all the stressed out men having coronaries at their silicon chip jobs.  Wow — the world’s really changed, huh.  I suppose you would call Sharon an idealist.  Dr. Dad called me a nihilist when I was 13, then made me look it up.  It’s pretty accurate — before and now.

THE SHRINK VISIT

Shrink:  Tell me what’s on your mind.

Me: Nothing.

Shrink:  I imagine it’s very hard for you right now, after your sister’s brutal murder.  Do you worry you might be next?

Me:  Why would I think that?

And so on.  He called me a survivor, which really pissed me off.  We didn’t have any chemistry, obviously, though the doctors went to this guy for a year.  Maybe that’s what’s kept them together.  Who knows?  If it isn’t too horrible to say so, they seem like they love each other more now.  Like my sister’s death made them closer, ironed out the gunk in their marriage.  They’d hate to hear me say such a thing, but it’s true.  For instance, Dr. Dad has cut back all overtime, except emergencies, and Dr. Mom is majorly into the communal meal experience.  Now it’s a rule we have to have dinner “as a family” four nights a week.  Which is ironic, because it was always Sharon who was off somewhere calling (or not calling) to say she couldn’t make dinner.  Me, I don’t do clubs or teams or any of that high school crap.  Mostly I hang out with Marilyn or by myself, go to movies, drink coffee on Pearl Street and write in my diary.  I think the doctors think I’m pretty boring.

COLLEGE APPLICATIONS

Unlike my sister, I do not have every choice of where to spend my years of higher education, as it is called.  I sure as hell would never go to an Ivy League school with all those fakers.  I suggested a community college for starters, but the doctors vetoed that in seconds.  I’m thinking of the U. of Washington at Seattle, mostly because I want to get away from Colorado’s boring sunshine, and I hear they have good coffee there.  I have no idea what I want to study, and I can’t see paying a private college major bucks for me to futz around for a few years, or indefinitely, as is likely.  Maybe I’ll do something really useful, like philosophy.  I’ll get a Ph.D in pessimism, and then they can call me Doctor Nihilist.  The doctors think I should try art school — because of my bedroom walls, I’m sure — but I’m no artist.  Sharon could have been, if she had wanted to direct her attention that way.  She drew great marginalia — caricatures of teachers and sketches of her surroundings — all over her notebooks and letters.  She drew me the Knockout from Newton, who resembles the Botticelli Venus rising from the sea — in Sharon’s warped vision anyway.  The Knockout from Newton didn’t even come to the funeral, because it would have meant flying on the sabbath.  Great friend, huh.

THE MURDERER […]

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“Faith” originally appeared in Toyon Magazine from Humboldt State University