Walpurgisnacht

         My sister is perfect. She’s a successful actress, gorgeous and wealthy, and semi-secretly Wicca. Technically her sect isn’t Wicca, but they have some strange Scandinavian name I can’t pronounce, so I say Wicca.

           Before Walpurgisnacht, I hadn’t seen my sister for nearly two years, and then only on holidays. Her absence had more to do with our parents, a perfectly WASPy couple that everyone was surprised but not surprised to learn was divorcing. Our father was moving in with a younger woman, our mother to Thailand to find herself. I was nearly done with my senior year and left alone in a home that would go up for sale as soon as I went to college. They told me at breakfast Friday morning with their bags already by the door.

           “You’re eighteen. You can stay by yourself for a few weeks. We’ll be here for graduation.”

           Naturally, I skipped school and as seeing my sister seemed the most reasonable thing to do, I drove for Los Angeles, calling when I was half an hour away. She’d known the divorce was coming, but she hadn’t known they’d left.

Of course I could stay. She was on set and told me where a key was. I should make myself at home. Oh, and her friend might pop over to pick something up before she arrived.

           My sister was too cool for Hollywood and had a home outside of town in an area where other too-cool stars lived in mansions not so different from Hollywood ones but different enough.

           The first thing I did when I arrived was mix a drink. I hesitate to say cocktail as it was vodka mixed with liquors I’d never seen. I was eighteen and in a movie star’s house. What else was I to do?

           Slipping into my swimsuit, I sprawled out by the pool and drank half my cocktail and stared at the clouds, thinking about nothing. I should have been angry or sad, but I was calm. The divorce wasn’t a surprise. They never made a big deal of things, so neither did I.

           Half an hour into my cocktail, my sister’s friend showed up. I was a bit tipsy, so I thought I was imagining meeting a rock star dressed like a gay cowboy, but his continued appearance over the next few days when I wasn’t tipsy would later confirm his rock star status.

           He offered me a joint. “You must be Tess’s sister.”

           I took it between my fingers, lifting it to my nose. I’d never even smelled marijuana before.

           Chuckling, he took the joint back and demonstrated like a gay, weedy Marlborough man. He was in the middle of explaining when Tess appeared, strolling onto the patio in her swimsuit with a martini.

           In my mother’s opinion, she was, like me, too thin and too tan, though in my opinion it was our mother who was those things. She had been on the cover of Vogue twice, once about fifteen years ago and the other about two months ago. To be on the cover of Vogue at twenty-four and thirty-nine was no small feat, especially when she had hardly changed between the two.

           Unlike most stars, she was prettier in person when her smile was real.

           “Are you giving my baby sister drugs?”

           Baby was an understatement. Tess was twenty-one when I was born and had starred in two soap operas and a film. I was the empty nest fix and the replacement.

           There’d been a brother three years younger than her who’d died in a car accident a year and a half before I was born. He’d been high and driven off a bridge. They’d starred in one of the soap operas together.

           “She’s an adult,” the gay cowboy shrugged.

           Tess plucked the joint from his fingers as she sat beside me, wrapping an arm over my shoulder. “Never give my baby sister drugs.” Her tone was playful, but underneath her smile and through the gaze peeking out edge of her sunglasses was sharpness.

           She brought the joint to her lips, but before she smoked, she turned to give me a kiss and ruffle my hair. She pulled me close like she had when I was little.

           She and her friend exchanged a few glances, and after she’d inhaled some of the smoke, explained that she was having a party in the back of the property that night but that it was far away enough that it shouldn’t bother me. I asked if I could come, but she said it wasn’t a party for kids.

           “I’m not a kid!” I insisted, lifting my head from her shoulder.

           She kissed my forehead, reminding me that only a kid would say that. “It’s a party for a special group. It’d be strange to have an outsider there. You and I can have some girls’ fun tomorrow.”

           Later I learned she drugged me at dinner so I would sleep through the noise, and between that afternoon and waking up to the sight of the gay cowboy standing naked in my doorway, his body covered in glow in the dark paint, gesturing for me to follow, I don’t remember anything.

           Deep in the backyard there were woods, and deep in the woods there was a clearing lit by a crackling bonfire with a core that shifted from green to blue to green and orange and again to blue and then to green as the colors stretched out into wisps of strangely shaped smoke around which painted naked fires danced to the beat of a worn-out drum and the melody of the wind.

Three women approached to undress me. I tried to form words, but the smoke filled my lungs and created coughs instead. The women grinned, admiring my young, skinny body as they whispered with each other. Nervously I smiled at the sings of praise, submitting to their painting. To tell colors or patterns it was too dark, but there was a rhythm to the way they touched me, as though their hands had planned the patterns with the beats.

           The painting was pleasant in a way I could never have pictured, and as their fingers drew circles and lines and shapes over my skin, my eyes closed and my mouth opened, swallowing the heavy smoke.

           Its smell was sweet, but not like sugar. Light yet rich, strong yet subtle.

           “I told you stay inside! Why are you here?”

           I opened my eyes. My sister stood between the painters and the fire, the flames illuminating the edges of her pale skin so I could see the outlines of her naked body and a wreath that was braided into her hair.

           When I tried to answer, a strange laugh-cough escaped.

           The wreath seemed to spin as she stepped forward, grabbing one of the women by the arm. “Why are you admitting her? She shouldn’t be here.”

            “She was brought,” she smiled, nodding to the gay cowboy rock star. My eyes drifted to him, followed him as he danced with the various figures. Many had faces I knew. Singers, actors, a politician. Some were unknown, and some I knew I had seen but could not have said where, all blending together into movement.

           The painters finished, the withdrawal of their touch leaving a longing over my skin as they left for the fire.

           My sister approached, her movements a regal and refined contrast of clarity with the chaos of the dance. I shuddered at the touch as she took my hand. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for you to see this, and I never wanted you to be a part of this.” Yet the way she said sorry, though traced with hints of sorrow, was wistful. “If you are here, you are meant to be,” she declared, taking my other hand and leaning forward to press her lips to my forehead, filling the longing that had been itching at my skin.

           She pulled away. She smiled. And she led me to the dance of Spring.

           I awoke in my bed without any hangover or weariness as might have been expected, feeling more alive than I’d ever felt and practically leaping into the day.

           The paint was gone. My hair was damp. I must have showered. My clothes were folded neatly on the dresser. When I went downstairs coffee was waiting.

           Any traces of a pagan ritual were gone, both from the house and from my sister, who sat at the table with a plate of fruit and her coffee and book. Her hair was washed and brushed and dried. A floral dress had replaced the paint, a soft perfume the scents of smoke, plastic glasses the fire in her eyes.

           “Do you want anything?” she offered without looking up.

           “I don’t eat much for breakfast,” I answered as I poured myself a cup of coffee and slid into the seat across from her.

           “Mom doesn’t make strawberry pancakes every day?”

           “She’s Paleo.”

           “Oh,” she laughed, removing her glasses and shutting her book and placing them neatly to the side at perfect right angles to the table. Everything about her was perfect again, but not in the rugged, natural perfection of the previous night. This perfection was calculated.

           She interlaced her fingers, tapped her thumbs together. A few beats passed during which I sipped my coffee and she breathed.

           She was such a collected contrast with the wild May Queen that I wondered if I had imagined it all and that, if I hadn’t, she would ever dare speak of it.

           But after a few deep breaths she began her speech. “The last night of April is referred to as Walpurgisnacht. It celebrates the Spring and coming of Summer.” She went on with her textbook explanation, gradually coming to her history. “They found me when I was about your age, also on Walpurgisnacht…”

           She continued with an apology, but she finished with an invitation. Once I’d been initiated, I could choose to follow her path, awakening a spirituality suppressed by years of Sunday school. Or I could pretend last night never happened. Both were acceptable so long as the events of last night remained among those who had been there.

           “Why did you choose to stay?” I asked, suspecting someone had pressured her. To my surprise she admitted she’d stumbled across the group purely by accident shortly after our brother died. She’d been distressed, and they showed her peace.

The innermost workings of her heart were confessed so coolly, as easily as lines from a script, and the more she spoke, the more I admired her skill, realing that my impression of her life, of my life, had been a lie. She had succeeded in making the whole world, especially me, and even more especially herself, that she was perfect when she was as far from perfect as people came, which somehow made her all the more perfect.

           As she finished, presenting me with my ultimatum, I struggled to rectify the contrasting perfections of my sister: the perfect actress, the perfect pagan. One an unnatural life of lies, one so effortlessly natural. Only through her they could be combined. I could never be an actress, so I would become the May Queen.