Just Wrong and Sorry

When Cristine walked into their mother’s kitchen, Camille’s stomach lurched like a lilypad abruptly abandoned by a colony of frightened frogs. The sounds of the Bastille Day party came in with her from the garden, where Maman’s friends talked ever louder as their wine glasses drained either down their throats or onto the flagstones as their barefoot grandsons raced by, bumping their elbows. 

Camille knew Cristine was coming to mend fences. Still, without knowing if she should now expect a tepid truce, a bitter reckoning of past sins, or the reunion of her dreams, she opted to keep her hands busy with the crudités and onion dip rather than mingle in the garden attempting to smile with old friends and neighbors. Her mother had said only that she’d passed on to Cristine what Leo had remembered of repeating the eavesdropped news of her pregnancy at Sunday school and that she had convinced her to come to Bastille Day. 

They faced each other awkwardly across the island, Camille wiping the wet of the cut vegetables from her trembling hands on a teatowel. Cristine’s steps slowed and she slung an off-white canvas bag from her shoulder and pulled out a bottle of red wine. The sisters had spoken only in public in the nine years Cristine had missed this party. It was hard to know where to begin. Well, “I’m sorry. I was so wrong,” was where to begin, but it was so hard to say. Instead, without a word, she went to the cabinet and took out two glasses.

“Don’t tell mom,” Cristine quipped as she twisted off the cap and poured them each a glass. The irrepressible merry elf-light in her eyes danced, and only Camille would understand the gravity of the sin of wine without a cork.

“I never tell your secrets,” Camille replied, holding her sister’s gaze as her eyes welled, praying she would know.

“I know.” Her gaze fell. Camille raised her glass to graze Cristine’s, and she understood that that dropped gaze was all the sorry her big sister would ever require of her. She stepped forward and buried her face in Camille’s shoulder, marking the silky teal tanktop darker with her tears. Todd would never let her just be wrong and sorry and move on without a fraught conversation he claimed was a way to clear the air and she felt as an exercise in cataloging her flaws, highlighting by contrast how very right he was. Cristine’s shoulders heaved a little as Camille’s hands reached around her, first hesitantly and then powerfully. 

Nine years lost to the mere bad luck of a child eagerly repeating what he thought was good news about a coming cousin. Cristine had told no one else, could only conclude that Camille had betrayed her. Only when Leo joined the adults’ table and learned not only that the marriage was over, but that it should never have begun did he recall his role in provoking the proposal.

“Thank you,” Cristine said, wiping her face with that same teatowel and laughing as she regarded it. Because she always did that. Not snot on the teatowel, but some vaguely wrong choice like it: the car parked in the middle of the driveway instead of to either side, the red t-shirt thrown in at the last minute with the whites, the mayonnaise knife plunged half-scraped into the mustard. And because laughter was her identity. And because Camille only laughed and never shamed her for it. 

They sipped and smiled sheepishly. Camille was just thinking that it was not that Cristine was inconsiderate, when, as if to prove her thought Cristine announced “Oh!” and proffered the other lump from her canvas bag. As she unwound a winter scarf from the object, Camille smiled again: not inconsiderate, but inattentive. For what emerged was a sculpture from her recent showing, something, Camille knew from her website, that might sell for a thousand dollars, but was, to Cristine, just something she made when the inspiration hit her--something she could not have resisted making once it did-- and which she could wrap loosely in a scarf and shove in a shoulder bag with wine.

The figure was a kneeling woman, a highly glossed pale green nightdress slipped from one shoulder and hair hanging in disarray. One arm rose in triumph over her head, a silver anchor pendant gripped in the hand, the broken chain trailing below. A gash in the figure’s nape bled where she had torn the necklace free. Camille recognized Cristine’s own necklace, an engagement gift Todd had meant to represent himself as her safe harbor.

The model was the same she’d seen in a three-piece series that began with the woman reclining on glossy sheets of a luxurious bed, rose petals on the pillow. The second showed the woman huddled on the floor in misery, struggling with the same sheets beside the bed, only the corner of it depicted. The third featured her with the sheets torn to ribbons and tied from a banister, the figure climbing over. In each the face is only suggested, lost in a disarray of brown hair, while the fabrics lay in the rippling folds of living action, so perfect you expected to touch satin if you reached for it. 

Camille had known at once what it meant, even before her mother had announced that Cristine was leaving Todd. There would be no more sculpted babies sleeping at their adoring mother’s breast or toddlers almost airborne above father’s up-stretched arms, the contact necessary to support the sculpture just barely visible. Cristine, having honed her skill on the scenes that Todd could talk to his friends and family about, had finally given up. He was not going to see her as more than a competent maker of plates and vases, a hobbyist. In the escaping woman, Camille had seen a glimmer of hope that they could repair the rift that had opened between them when he’d dropped to one knee at a church Fourth of July picnic, sealing Cristine's fate as the wife a man who politely, adoringly piled sea walls around her imagination. 

The door swung open again, and Marjorie, a neighbor, came in, still yelling instructions to her son over her shoulder. “Well, hey!” she announced as she saw the sisters together staring at a porcelain sculpture. “I didn’t know you were here!” She addressed Cristine specifically. “I didn’t see Todd and Marie?” 

Cristine smiled but became a little clipped. “No, they went to Kansas City on vacation.”

“Oh?” Marjorie looked confused.

“We’re separating,” she stated with little emotion.

“Oh no!” she exclaimed, taking Camille in her look. She had obviously not noticed that she had not seen the sisters together in years, was unaware of her intrusion on their first shared glass in nearly a decade. “What happened?” Sympathy flowed from her voice before her face snapped into a performatively defensive expression, readied by her own experience to leap to the woman’s side.

Cristine sighed deeply. Was “he leads me by the hand to see how I’ve folded his clothes wrong again” or “he wants to watch documentaries and I want to watch stand-up comedy” something that could be said to have happened? Could it be said to a woman who had needed a restraining order, who’d gone to court to demand enough money to keep her children alive? She shrugged one shoulder, sending her tanktop strap off the other like the sculpted woman’s. She imagined Todd’s hand there, righting the fallen strap, embarrassed by the sensuousness. “There just wasn’t any love anymore,” she said, which was not true. There was enough love left that she spent three waking hours of every night placing neatly labeled stones in her mind’s scale: Kindness in the stay side perfectly balanced against inflexibility in the leave tray. Marie’s sadness versus Marie’s learning to live inauthentically. She’d fall asleep at last with them still level and have to do it again the next night. Part of her wished he would hit her so she could wield that rock to break the scale.

What she wanted to say was that when Todd was ready to take her out to some work function charity ball thing she didn’t know the purpose of, she was always still in her overalls with clay in her hair and an idea possessing her hands and all she wanted in the world was to be married to someone who could go to the function and say out loud with smiling pride “my wife is always covered in clay when it’s time to go” as an excuse for her either not being there or still sporting a smudge of chalky white on the back of her neck, depending on the demands of the idea and not the colleagues. 

But instead he tapped impatiently while she rushed to clean herself and dress, the idea left burning in the lump of clay, and her burned with shame for her inconsideration, even after her work gained notice and he asked her to donate a piece to the auction or bring a vase as a housewarming gift. She wanted to tell her about the humiliation of having one of Todd’s cheerful colleagues turn to her and say “Todd said you’re a homemaker.” Not because she would be ashamed to be one, but because Todd was ashamed to say that she worked all day everyday chasing a dream of being an artist and she hadn’t caught it yet. Because for Todd she would only be an artist by making money from art and not by making art. But she had smiled and agreed that she was and tried to be interested in whatever work talk they made.

 None of that was weighty enough to say to Marjorie. He was right. It was inconsiderate, and yet, she thought, still so very easy to love her through. Like Camille would, she realized, as soon as Marjorie left and she had the incomparable relief of saying it to her. 

They took the bottle upstairs and locked themselves into the bathroom, sat on the inexplicably carpeted floor (and had a good laugh at their mother’s style choices) while Camille drank the rest. Cristine declined not only more wine, but also the offer to stay over. She had come to see Camille, to give her a peace offering, and to not have to say that she was wrong. Then she would drive to the new apartment.

“Oh but it must be empty! Stay.” Camille pulled her sister’s arm into her own lap.

“I want empty,” Christine protested, her eyes glinting with the potential in a blank studio. Camille read the glint and knew it was not politeness.

“But you must see Leo. He feels terrible.”

“He was a kid.” Cristine waved her hand to dismiss it all. It was impossible to regret. If he hadn’t spilled her secret, she would not have Marie, and she could never regret Marie, even knowing she would not have chosen motherhood. 

Sometimes she imagined that future conversation with Marie, could see her distraught after Todd wielded that she would have aborted her as a weapon against Cristine. She imagined talking her through the logic steps of separating not wanting motherhood from not wanting her. “How many kids do you want?” she would ask her. “Two” Marie would say, tucking her straight brown bob behind her ear. “And what about the third that you won’t have? Does it make sense to consider how he feels about not being?” She would get it intellectually, but there would be a lot of kisses and peanutbutter cookies to help her know it emotionally. “You can only love a baby who is. You can’t invent an idea of one to love.” And the part she wouldn’t say unless Marie was already 18 and off to college when this all happened: “you will understand when you are on your own financially and not in love with the man you should be in love with.”

But that was all speculation. Todd didn’t know she had only married him because Leo had made her pregnancy public and irrevocable. Todd didn’t want to hurt her and would never hurt Marie. It was only Cristine herself who dreamed he would do it, only she who could see the scars of all the hurts he had no idea he’d inflicted. 

“I’ll see Leo tomorrow,” she promised.

A smile tugged Camille’s cheek at the word “tomorrow,” and she nodded. Cristine kissed her forehead as she stood, leaving her on the floor. “You’ve got red wine teeth.”

“Got it. Thanks.” Camille smiled her gory grin. “I love you.”

Cristine opened the door, tossed the keys back in her near-empty canvas sack, and gazed on the stark white walls of her living room and through the cutout into the whiteness of the kitchen. She’d left the light on when she’d come earlier today to drop off groceries and pull the delivered foam mattress in from the hall. Of course she had. She pressed her back against the white door and let her knees sink beneath her, sliding down to the floor. Her hair fell into her face like her sculpted woman’s and she pulled her hand up to her eyes. 

In her mind a stone dropped into the tray, knocking it decisively out of balance. The weight of the stay side lifted off her own shoulders as the leave side sank under the last stone’s bulk. 

Realizing the one glass of wine was all she’d had at the party, Cristine stood and went to the kitchen, flipping her sandals off as she walked, and took a slice of bread and two small jars from the cabinet. She pulled out a drawer for a knife and made herself a peanut butter and jelly foldover, pausing for a moment over the grip on the new jelly jar. She looked into the peanut butter, at the sweet red streak within and apologized to no one.

 She would sculpt the scale tomorrow, with the top stone marked “home.”