The Age of Infidelity

The Age of Infidelity

I spent my childhood chasing a vision of my dead sister. In the summer of 1960, the year Holly drowned in the river, she was sweet sixteen. Her boyfriends tied up the party line night and day, and no wonder. She wore crinolines, two or three at least beneath her swirling skirt. She pulled her dark hair back in a poof and curled her bangs so they grazed her eyebrows just so. Did she go dancing in saddle shoes? We had only the one school picture of her on the mantel, all the others packed away. I got my ideas about what she wore from reruns of Dobie Gillis, Holly’s favorite show. And maybe I had to strain to remember how she looked—she was nine years older—but the funny thing was, I could hear her just fine. I could hear her cajoling my mother, clear as if they were standing over me.

Can I go out on the river?

May I go out on the river.

All right. May I go out on the river.

No, you may not. I do not trust a teenage boy with a boat.

You are the meanest woman who ever walked the earth.

Holly’s voice was soft and fluty, bored, and if she used it to drive my mother crazy, my mother got her revenge by bellowing no to whatever Holly asked. My mother was the clearest deepest alto at Division Street Methodist. She had a voice like a bassoon.

She kept up the choir after Holly died, she kept up most everything and seemed to be doing as well as anybody could expect of a mother who’d lost half her children, till one day I came home from school to find her crouching in the hallway. It was three years since Holly died. My mother wouldn’t get up off her haunches till I closed all the drapes—she’d seen a gunman on the roof across the way. He’d been watching her for hours, waiting to pick her off. She got the idea from Lee Harvey Oswald, so I guess you could say we were both taking our visions off the tv set.

That first time my mother was up in the state hospital close on to a year, and I wasn’t allowed to go visit, so naturally I pictured her in a damp dungeon with chains around her ankles. My father came back from seeing her with his face gone as gray-green as modeling clay. I figured out I should probably be cooking for him and found my mother’s Lowcountry Receipts. When she was home we didn’t eat anything out of the river, but I got to be pretty good with deviled crab and boiled shrimp, which my father ate like he was scared the ocean might run out. We set down two big plates of shrimp on newspaper, a bowl of melted butter between us, and that was all we needed in the world. Then we made ourselves comfy with the television, which my mother hated. We took to watching the news during supper, and after the news something to make us laugh.

When she was finally discharged, her voice muffled so you could hardly understand her, we stopped buying seafood at the docks, and we thought we’d have to turn the tv off, too. But she sat right down with us and watched with a puzzled look on her face, as if everybody onscreen was speaking Hungarian. That I should like That Was the Week That Was was beyond human comprehension, or her comprehension anyway. After a few months had passed, she said:

I don’t believe I can live this way.

She waited till my father left to hide her pills and to show me just which shelf they would be sitting on in case of emergency. She said that with the help of Jesus she was going to practice mind control and after a week, sure enough, she smiled at the television. After two weeks she laughed till the tears streamed down...