Part 1 (2/2)

A scream interrupted me. I spit out Tea's words and tossed her book aside before racing out to the balcony again. Ash was out of the water but standing by the pool, now with a different duo: the woman from earlier today and a new man. I wanted to stare, to see what the h.e.l.l they were up to that elicited the shriek I'd just heard. But I was afraid Ash would catch me at it, and I didn't want to give her the satisfaction of knowing she'd gotten my attention again. And knowing her, Ash would just call me a pervert and tell Father I was spying on her, just to get me in trouble.

She was always doing things like that when we were younger. I remember one time when we were kids and Ash was in trouble for something-I don't remember what, since usually it seemed like she could do no wrong. But I do remember Ash had been sent to her room alone. Even back then Ash couldn't stand to be alone. She cracked open her door and stood there whispering my name until I came to see what the fuss was.

Then Ash looked me right in the eyes and slammed her hand in the door. On purpose. She broke two of her fingers and had to go to the hospital. But her plaintive wails brought Father running and her lies convinced him I'd been responsible. Ash was released from solitary and I took her place in the doghouse, so it was a win-win situation all around for her.

I didn't want to give her that kind of satisfaction now, so instead I grabbed the pair of odd binocular-like sungla.s.ses that were an expensive good-bye gift from Mark, who somehow thought bird watching might bring me solace in his post-graduation absence. I'd never watched a bird in my life, and I didn't intend to start, but I had realized that the spectacles appeared to others as simply a pair of peculiar looking sungla.s.ses. No one would notice me people watching from my room, though with these telescoping super-strength lenses I could practically see every pore, every hair on each person's body.

I could stoically relax on my balcony, sit in my reclining redwood patio lounge holding my novel, and peer over the pages at Ash and what I was beginning to suspect was a constant parade of lovers. I felt simultaneously intrigued and repelled by the sight of so many of them fawning over my sister like she was an adorable but doomed SPCA puppy begging for a home. What did Ash offer that turned normally independent people into simpering fools? If I paid close attention, would I catch a glimpse of her secret ingredient? Was it something intrinsic to her soul or could I apply it like a glossy lipstick? Could it magically transform me externally, the way Tea's words did in my mind?

Ash had always enchanted other people. When we were young girls being trotted out at Father's c.o.c.ktail parties for show and tell, the partygoers would always gather around sweet, pig-tailed Ash. At one of Father's office holiday parties, when Ash was maybe eight or nine, she got on stage while the band was on a break and announced that she had a special treat for the audience. She was dressed in a little red velvet pantsuit with white fur trim that my mother must have helped her pick out. I was still too terrified to speak to people unless forced, and so I stood there, slack jawed, as enamored of my sister as the rest of the audience. She was everything I wanted to be, back then and still now. Beautiful, smart, charming, and truly unafraid of anything. At the party, I kept hiding below the buffet table, stuffing my face and wondering how soon I could get out of there while Ash was charming the pants off of Father's colleagues.

Soon all eyes were on Ash as a band member handed her a microphone and she started belting out a perfect rendition of ”Santa Baby.” We'd been singing Christmas carols in front of the mirror in our underwear for weeks, karaoke style, so we both knew every single word. But watching Ash up there, I realized that she brought something to the song I never could. We weren't even teenagers yet, but there was something faintly womanly about Ash, like a twenty-year-old trapped in a nine-year-old's body. All eyes were on her as she winked and smiled and sang in a Betty Boop tone. When she finished, the crowd applauded and gushed and Father beamed with pride.

For years afterward, I would think of that party, of how Ash could walk into any situation and charm people. She would sometimes take me under her wing, telling me how to make an entrance like she did, but just as often she'd mock me or push me aside when others were around. Always, we seemed to be competing for Father's affection, and always, Ash won.

Even in our family, I seemed to be on the outside of Ash's world, looking on as everyone fluttered around her, flitting about and marveling.

So that summer I pretended to be a birdwatcher looking for that endangered species. I pretended I was an anthropologist observing a foreign culture, longing to learn the sacred rituals of a society I could never truly enter.

Chapter Two.

Hours of spying slipped into days, and I soon decided I was getting far more from observing Ash than I would ever garner from my novels and their make-believe worlds. I started bringing a notepad out to the balcony with me, jotting down random things I noticed, hoping somehow a pattern would emerge and I could unravel the secrets of this alien world. If nothing else, I told myself, this would enliven my own writing, help me infuse an element of realness that my English professors had always complained was lacking from my characters, which they criticized as being more caricatures than living, breathing, believable individuals.

Watching Ash was like viewing my own private reality dating program. Each new day brought another surprising revelation. Father, an archconservative Republican, must have been having a fit, knowing what she was doing out there, and yet he never said anything to that effect, he never went out and shut her party down. Maybe he was able to pretend it wasn't happening. Maybe going down there would have confronted him with the vulgar truth, that his little girl wasn't a little girl any longer, that she was very much an adult, a s.e.xually aggressive woman who was hanging around the pool with all manner of riffraff, drinking and smoking pot, lighting up casually, and pa.s.sing spliffs as if they were simply sharing cigarettes.

There were colorful drinks strewn about, drinks that could pa.s.s for punch, but I could tell from the way the girls giggled and t.i.ttered that there was booze in them for certain. Each new day, Ash seemed to ratchet up the poolside debauchery, as though challenging Father to step in, pus.h.i.+ng his limits to see when he would break. Even I was surprised by his restraint. He seemed to be combating her by fighting a cold war, trying to freeze her out by utterly ignoring Ash's increasing decadence. It couldn't continue indefinitely. Eventually Ash would push him too far and Father would explode, raging as white hot as any atomic bomb. I couldn't help but wonder how many people would end up getting hurt, casualties in their little war. Would it be worth it in the end? What did she hope to prove?

I couldn't see everything that was happening down there by the pool, but over the next few weeks I saw enough. c.o.c.ktails drunk, joints smoked, drugs pa.s.sed, and pills popped, right there, directly under Father's nose. The only solace was that Father's increasing absences prevented him from witnessing every immoral spectacle. Somehow my homecoming and Ash's hedonistic explosion had coincided with Father's sudden disappearance. He was no longer home for dinner every night. In fact, some nights he didn't come home at all.

The stepmonster explained Father was staying overnight in town because of his work, and maybe that was true or maybe it was an excuse. What did I know? Father wasn't talking to me. His phone calls were relayed secondhand through an untrustworthy conductor. Tabitha could have reason to lie. Maybe Father was cheating on her. Maybe now that Tabitha was closing in on thirty she had lost her appeal and he was trading her in for a younger model. Maybe he wasn't that different from Ash after all. Maybe he was staying out late drinking or shacking up with another, younger version of Tabitha.

Our place in Lake Oswego was less than an hour outside Portland, but Father kept an apartment in the city, a condo in the Pearl District for nights he had to work late. I'd never been there, but he used to stay there a lot before Mother died. That all changed when he married Tabitha. Maybe it was because she was just nineteen and he didn't want to leave her alone, or didn't dare. Maybe he thought someone else-a neighbor, the pool boy, the UPS guy-would catch her eye if he wasn't there to keep her company. Whatever the cause, in the years since Mother's death, Father had come home nearly every single night. I guess that's what happens when middle-aged men marry teenagers, they have to watch their women a lot harder to make sure no Fabio-wannabe tennis instructor steals them away. It was also probably why Father hired our gardener, whose name I'd finally learned was Gualterio, even though Father insisted we call him Bob. He was about sixty years old, in the U.S. without papers, and probably poor as dirt, which I guess made Father feel comfortable Tabitha wouldn't run away with him.

Poor Bob, though, because he had to put up with Father's racist condescension and Ash's Caligula-style partying while he was just trying to keep the lawn mowed and shrubbery trimmed. Only that summer, I noticed that the gra.s.s seemed a little longer than usual and the topiary wasn't maintaining its customary definition. And every time I peeked out at Ash's wild poolside parties, I could see Bob lingering in the shadows, watching. I wondered what he was getting out of it, staring at all those young, supple bodies, watching the depraved debauchery playing out in the summer heat. I hoped he had someone to go home and share his hard-on with and he didn't just have to resort to beating off alone in the tool shed.

I stole another peek at the boys by the pool and noticed something surprising. The guys who'd been hanging around Ash all week weren't guys at all. They were women. Very masculine gals, to be sure, but girls, nonetheless. Having grown up in the Northwest, where even the straight women were utilitarian and capable of tossing eighty-pound bales of hay one-handed, it said a lot if someone's masculinity so overshadowed all visual cues to the contrary that I couldn't tell they were female-bodied.

But there they were, young women sporting swim trunks and T-s.h.i.+rts and the occasional ball cap. Of course, there were more feminine girls too, girls like Ash and a retro Bettie Page girl wearing a one piece, and a girl with gla.s.ses who wore surf shorts and stayed out of the water, lounging poolside with a fruity c.o.c.ktail. Another girl wore a different color thong bikini every day, and a short girl with piercings in her lip, nose, belly b.u.t.ton, and G.o.d knows where else, seemed to like having the details of her many tattoos slowly outlined by Ash's stray fingers.

Just like the men who preceded them, these women seemed to fawn over Ash, vying with each other to be the one to touch her, even casually. I watched the way their fingers brushed Ash's when they handed her a drink, the way they hoisted her on their shoulders for a game of chicken, or took their time rubbing sunscreen lotion on her legs, chest, belly.

It was odd to watch them compete for her attention. Ash seemed to choose a winner after a while, allowing only one girl to bring her drinks, pour sun-warmed pool water over her bronzed body, or light her cigarettes. But her fancy never lasted long. A few hours and the games began again, the compet.i.tion for Ash's favor. Some brought her gifts. Others did dangerous dives, risking head injury in shallow water, or picked fights with each other. It was like watching Wild Kingdom during rutting season when the young bucks crashed their antlers together in a display of virility and an effort to court single does. Were humans driven by the same base instincts? Were the tens of thousands of years of evolution, the accomplishments of brilliant minds like Socrates and Shakespeare and Madame Curie thrown out the window when it came to s.e.xual impulses and dating rituals?

A few of Ash's suitors seemed to rise above and differentiate themselves from the ma.s.ses. One girl brought along a guitar and serenaded Ash with songs. I couldn't make out the words from my balcony, and I've never mastered lip reading, but it was pretty clear the singer was professing her undying love. Ash looked bemused. She received each of her subjects' pathetic adorations like her Royal Highness, sitting on her throne, deigning to bestow the slightest smirk to those that pleased her with their antics.

The first time I witnessed it, the sheer shock of Ash f.u.c.king another girl in broad daylight threw me off my chair. My disgust was tangible. It made my skin crawl. Why was my sister so vulgar, so cra.s.s? For G.o.d sake! How come Ash never learned decorum like the rest of us?

That wasn't really fair. I knew she had been taught the rules of polite society. I'd seen Mother in action. So what drove Ash to violate all the tenets of good manners? It was revolting. But I couldn't turn away. It was like I had to watch. I had to pay silent witness to each surrender, see each woman throw her head back or bite her lip or cry out for more. I'd never made a lover respond with such enthusiasm. I'd never even experienced that kind of pa.s.sion myself, let alone had that kind of s.e.xual power, to bring a lover to their knees, to have them scream my name or beg for me not to stop.

I almost wished I could see more through my Peeping Tom gla.s.ses. I wanted to know what it was that Ash was actually doing, how her tongue flicked across that woman's c.l.i.t, or how her fingers moved inside this other woman, to elicit such joyful responses. I wanted to be closer, to hear the words the women screamed in their moment of ecstasy. I imagined them as vivid verses, poetry that rivaled the love poems whispered by Sappho.

Watching Ash seemed to evoke the kind of stirring in my loins my college lovers never did. When I realized this, for a moment I was overcome with disgust at myself. What kind of pervert was I? That was my sister, for G.o.d sake! I suddenly saw Ash standing before me naked, and the image sapped the s.e.xual arousal I'd been feeling. I threw down the sungla.s.ses and vowed never, ever to watch again. I retreated to my room and my books. I decided to go cold turkey.

On my second day of detox, I started to feel like there was a physical struggle going on. I had to fight this force that drew me to the sliding gla.s.s door that led out to the balcony. I put all my muscles into it, sweating and straining, but my feet were being pulled out from under me. The balcony was a black hole and I was caught in the gravitational pull. I refused to give in. I vowed to ride this all the way through the pain of withdrawal even if it got as bad as Trainspotting. I had to conquer my addiction.

I realized I wasn't some kind of incestuous freak. When I watched Ash seduce those women I wasn't putting myself in their shoes. I didn't want to do Ash, I wanted to be Ash. When I watched, it was like I was the one down there by the pool, taking those women. I was no longer shy, bookish Megan. I was pleasing those women myself, wielding s.e.xual prowess at seven feet deep. Freed of my moral dilemma, I gave myself permission to retrieve my binoculars and return to my post.

I realize, from an explicitly psychoa.n.a.lytic viewpoint, that my voyeurism was a little like scopophilia, and there was something I lost by being a watcher instead of an actor. So it's not surprising that I eventually was drawn into the fray myself.

But back then I convinced myself that watching my sister wasn't that bad of a vice. After all, I wasn't drinking and driving, or doing drugs, or involving anyone else in my perversion. That made me feel morally superior to Ash and, at that point in my life, I'd do an awful lot to feel superior to Ash in any way. So I told myself I wasn't doing anything wrong. In fact, I convinced myself I was taking control of my s.e.xuality. I was just imagining my way to erotic power, teaching myself s.e.xual fluency, burrowing out of a prison of frigidity.

Sometimes I looked down at the naked bodies by the pool and discovered it wasn't just Ash making love with another woman. There was a whole group of them. Sometimes they were entwined into a ball of indistinguishable limbs, or they would take turns going one-on-one, with Ash kissing and stroking them, lying on the gra.s.s, or leading them back into the pool, clutching the sides of the deep end so that the pa.s.sion wouldn't pull them under. I watched Ash's hands wander below the surface and the girls she was with, nay, the women, throw their heads back and open their mouths with silent moans or audible wails, or the same pleading sound that escaped my own lips and caught me off guard.

I don't know if Ash knew I was spying on her. She certainly never said so, not that we had a lot of conversations. Every once in a while I thought she was looking right at me, or I imagined she was winking at me, mid coitus, but most of the time I was pretty sure she was too caught up in the moment to be thinking about her twenty-two-year-old kid sister.

And I tried hard to remain un.o.btrusive, even more so after Cynthia began spending all of her time by our pool. Cynthia Newkirk was Ash's best friend, a lithe blonde with long hair and beautiful b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I'd first met her several summers earlier. Now I was discovering that Cynthia had a penchant for being topless nearly as often as Ash. Occasionally, Tabitha asked me to take mail from our main house out to the pool house for Ash, and I overheard her and Cynthia talking conquests, comparing s.e.xual notes about their respective prowess.

It was pretty clear that Ash was the winner in any carnal compet.i.tion, but I suspect Cynthia was trying to please her by offering as much t.i.tillation as possible, while secretly hoping to have Ash hanging on her every word just once, the way Cynthia and everyone else did whenever Ash opened her naturally perfect mouth. I had been forced to wear braces for three years, whereas Ash's forever-white teeth were straight from the moment they broke through her gums.

When Ash wasn't looking at Cynthia, I saw the way Cynthia's demeanor changed, the way she mooned over Ash like everyone else, absorbing every inch of Ash's body. Her longing glances lingered and her eyes flashed with jealousy whenever Ash paid attention to anyone else but her.

Cynthia's desire was so conspicuous I can still feel the weight of it after all this time. It lurks there like an unfulfilled ghost doomed to wander the grounds until its hunger is satiated. It still lingers in the air around the pool house like a poisonous gas that, heavier than the air around it, clings to the ground years after it was released. When you step through the gaseous cloud, a sickly sweet aroma settles in the back of your gullet and makes you gag. You choke and claw at your throat as the gas robs you of oxygen and knocks you to your knees.

Poolside, each and every day seemed like Cancun's spring break, but back inside the main house, things couldn't have been more different. I could see almost the entire estate from my balcony on the second floor of the east wing. The pool to the left, the gardens to the right, and straight back between two carefully manicured hedges was Ash's pool house. I could even see inside the pool house as it was only s.h.i.+elded by two large, unenc.u.mbered French windowed doors.

As the summer pa.s.sed by, I spent most of it in my bedroom, only emerging for a few hours in the morning and evening when I was required to join Father and the stepmonster in the dining room. Relations between Tabitha and me were as chilly as ever. At least she'd never tried to take Mother's place. But there had been a time, years ago, when Tabitha had tried to develop a relations.h.i.+p with me. She had grown up an only child and had these Pollyanna fantasies about what it'd be like to have sisters. I think that's why she wanted to be our friend.

Tabitha and Ash seemed to bond right away. Maybe I was a little jealous. Or maybe it was that way siblings have to differentiate themselves from each other, like if Ash was going to be best friends with Tabitha, then I sure as h.e.l.l wasn't. I'm not sure what it was, but I hadn't wanted a relations.h.i.+p with Tabitha back then, and my utter rejection of her overtures created a sort of permafrost between us and prevented any potential affection from taking root.

With Ash banished to the pool house and Father staying at the office longer and longer hours, it seemed as though all the warmth had drained from the house. Stepping in from outside was like walking into an industrial grade freezer.

The house was ridiculously large for four people and their servants, and without Ash, it seemed cavernous and empty. I was always tempted to holler yodels down the long halls and time how long it took for the echoes to return, but it would have required a calendar instead of a stopwatch. I think there's some kind of mathematical equation for determining the expanse of an estate with echo technology, like the way you calculate the distance of lightning from the time between a strike and the sound of thunder.

I'll never understand why Father moved us out there in the first place. Maybe it was his way of grieving or a desire to protect us girls after Mother died, that had him relocate us to this huge estate in Lake Oswego, a Portland suburb with neither the color nor the potential dangers of the city. Even when all of us were home, most of the rooms in the palatial house remained empty, save for unused furniture shrouded in those protective sheets that make a place particularly haunted and frightening when you're a tween.

I remember Ash not being much help in that department. She thought it was hilarious to torment me, and she'd often disappear for hours at a time and then claim she'd been abducted by the ghosts of former residents who were all killed in a bloodbath murder-suicide perpetrated by an insane patriarch.

Even now, the rooms we used sporadically or merely pa.s.sed through, like the sitting room, parlor, and formal dining room, remained untouched for weeks or months at a time-except by the maid staff, who were expected to clean every room at least once a week. My room was the size of a small apartment, and I had my own television set and refrigerator. For lunch all I had to do was call down and ask the cook to whip me up a sandwich. Mandated ”family dinners”-how can it be a family dinner when Ash wasn't joining us?-at Casa Caulfield were quiet affairs.

Father seemed filled with rage when he was home, angrier than I'd ever seen him. Yet he never went out to the pool house and shut Ash down. I don't think he even attempted to talk with her once after kicking her out of the house. Ash could be annoying, but I don't understand why he didn't put his foot down, stop her debauchery, and bring her back inside. It was like he was waiting for her to change completely before he'd even acknowledge she still existed. They were both stubborn as mules and neither was willing to give an inch until the other gave a mile. I didn't realize it then, but she was begging for structure, not rebelling against it. I'll never understand why he didn't provide it.

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