Wednesday's Child
he secret to placing a ship in a bottle is to attach a thread to its masts before working it into the small opening, then, letting the thread dangle from the bottle's entrance, you must tug it gently, manipulating the sails into their hoped for formation. When the line is cut, some may tangle and remain in the bottle, so to be successful you must use a strong thread, but one almost imperceptible to the human eye.
My father used to call them 'patience bottles'. He would hole himself up in his study and labour over them for hours that turned into days, weeks and even months. Cursing his woody fingers and wiping away the steady drip, drip, drip of sweat which ran from his faltering hairline to fill the tributaries of creases on his forehead and stream, like a waterfall, down his aquiline nose. He was never young. My father was a big man, who stood between me and the sun, leaning like a hollow tree. Creaking with age and filling with emptiness.
I am in the caravan again. I don't know what I will do with it now. I can only think of it as belonging to her, and her belonging to it. I'm not sure one is designed to exist without the other.
"Don't worry. Nothing can harm it." my father once boasted to my mother when a sudden gust buffeted its sides.
I knew though, even then, its strength was only on the surface. Like a metallic bead of water, stretched around its own fragility. A teardrop. Inside, my father's bottles chinked against each other on the padded shelves and sang the secrets of my family. Tunelessly and quietly. Worried someone might hear. I first met my sister in the caravan.
She was born on a Wednesday, when I was eleven and she was twenty-three. My mother told me things about her I did not understand and when they brought her home, that first time, my sister greeted me with licorice breath and thick glasses that bumped against my own nose.
"She has to get close to see you." my mother told me. "The doctor said she only sees shapes and colours in a kind of blurry way. Think of it as interwoven, sort of like a tapestry."
My mother spoke in muted wooliness.
My sister bobbed around near the doorway of the caravan, with the fingertips of her rubbery arms always stretching toward the opening, like a bird, longing, but afraid to leave the nest. Her name had been painted, in forever dripping cursive, on one of the caravan's faded silver sides.
We went away that summer I had a sister. My mother, father and I in the station wagon and my sister, towed behind, in the caravan.
"She's not used to cars," my mother said "but she knows the caravan. We bought it when she was born," her lips tightened around the words, not wanting to let them out, "She can't talk to us anyway. Not properly."
I knelt backwards on the bench seat and peeled my sweaty forearms from the vinyl to wave and point at things through the back window. My sister stared back, contorting her mouth into a smile as she shook her head from side to side.
The bitumen appeared translucent in the late afternoon heat haze, disappearing ahead of us, before just as suddenly reappearing and veering us off in a new direction. I had the feeling we were going the wrong way.
From her place behind us my sister performed wildly in her small rectangular window frame, like a movie I was not old enough to see. I grew tired of waving, and even of watching. The sunset bled behind us.
My father parked the caravan in a relinquished coastal town and we lived there for six weeks, amidst the salt air and mosquitoes, the sun toughening our skins, bleaching our hair and our minds.
The day my lime green sheets on my cot bed in the annex turned red, that summer I turned twelve, my mother said I'd become a woman and handed me a paper bag with secret things.
"I wrote a list of things I knew I should bring." she told me.
My mother never left anything to chance.
She composed her autobiography in lists, of all the things she had done, or wanted to do. I found them after she died, stacked in sagging shoe boxes on the shelves of the caravan. Sorted in two year bundles and wrapped with coloured string secured in knots, not bows. Designed to be remembered, but not looked back upon.
In the caravan I look at what are left of the bottles, even dare to move some of them from their mattresses of dust on the shelves and onto the fold-down kitchen table where my family used to eat. I want to recall the story behind each one but my memory doesn't allow me to, and for that, perhaps I am thankful. My sister used to love the bottles.
My sister could not speak her name. It was full of "B's" and "R's", impossible for her to pronounce. My mother talked about changing it to Judith or Jenny, but only talked, so instead we used "she", "her" or "you-know-who" in conversation. My parents talked in whispered shouts behind their bedroom concertina door in the caravan at night and I loaned my name to my sister, pinned "Lucy" on her chest, and pretended I was her so I couldn't hear.
My father drank twelve long necks of beer in one day and stayed up for nearly two days without sleep, a fluorescent light swinging low over the empty amber glass, surrounded by craft glue and string.
"See," he called to us, "I've put ships in all these bottles. None of them are perfect, but it doesn't matter because you can't see inside anyway."
He disappeared behind the flimsy divider and I heard the blanketed thud of his body hit the bed.
"Timber." my mother said quietly. It was the only time I'd heard her make a joke. She stacked my father's bottles into the shelves over our heads and sat with us at the kitchen table. My sister's finger swirled elaborate snail trails on the grey laminex with some spilt cordial and my mother sobbed for only herself to hear when I beat her at "Snakes and Ladders".
"You always were the lucky one." she said.
My sister's existence that summer ceased most communications within my family. It was as if my parents did not speak to each other for fear of reminding themselves they could. I did not speak for fear of reminding them my sister couldn't.
Our skins brushed against each other damply as we moved about inside the caravan but our thoughts never had the opportunity. My father muzzled them before they became syllables so we could only look at each other blankly before he lowered his head again over the glass, forcing his splintered hands into fluidity. Sometimes I saw them tremble when he thought I wasn't looking.
Leaning over the gas stove in the caravan, my mother always hummed while she worked, so it seemed she had to be constantly aware of her own presence, the fact that she lived and breathed. As if she was continually prodding herself to see if she was there. Pinching herself to ensure she wasn't dreaming.
My sister remained quietly intricate, transparently maintained in a hardened but fragile shell. In the balmy last days of the season the air was heavy with the scent of rain and her and I were always the first from the beach to the caravan. I turned the AM radio up louder than it had ever been before until the drone cut through me like a blunt saw. I wrapped my sister's hands around it and we bounced around together on the hard yellow sand. She moved with a strangely awkward gracefulness, skipping and weaving, bringing her feet up and down alternately and sometimes together in deliberate rhythm.
A flinty man cut through my enjoyment, grabbed my sister by the shoulders with his grey skinned hands and shook her until the transistor sprung open on the earth, all its wires and inner workings strewn about.
"Are you deaf?" he shouted as my sister stomped around him.
"Yes," I replied for her and he tripped over his words and knelt on the ground before us to gather up the broken pieces.
My sister danced like a pony.
I don't know what to do with the caravan. My children wander through it, as it sways in the backyard breezes, They open cupboards and sniff at my past and leave again. It holds nothing for them.
My son asks about his grandfather and I tell him stories made meaningless by time and distance as he runs his hand over the dusty glass and marvels at how something so complex could be kept in a bottle.
When we left the beach that summer my sister wailed and flung herself against the ground until my father had to sling her over his shoulder and force her through the caravan door. He cursed his height and bumped his head and pushed the fragile door shut behind her, before slumping onto the front seat of the car and resting his sun-reddened right arm on the window frame.
He puffed and groaned, more tired than I had ever seen him, and when the first shatter of glass reverberated from the caravan with my sister's name, he adjusted the rear vision mirror and lurched the station wagon into first gear.
His eyes didn't blink anymore after the third smash and when I twisted on the seat to look back at my sister my mother told me to sit down.
"Perhaps she doesn't want to be in the caravan anymore," I offered my parents. They didn't answer me. I think they forgot I wasn't her.
We drove to a place I'd never seen before and my father backed the caravan onto a yellow square of grass where its wheels rested easily in four dusty depressions. A steely woman who wore a white shapeless dress and her hair in a single rusty plait came out of a building with small windows that had never opened. My mother unlocked the caravan and my sister somersaulted out, her clothes flecked with red, one hand reaching out and one finger still vined around the door latch.
The lady spoke my sister's name and enveloped her in a waft of antiseptic and vomit that my sister seemed to welcome. My mother shuffled around in a reluctant gesture as my father pried my sister's finger from the caravan door.
My parents never said goodbye to her that day. I don't know if it was because they knew they were going to see her again or because they knew they weren't. We never talked about that summer again.
My mother would go out sometimes, with a shoebox on her lap on the city bus and when she came home she would bake and clean and hum, louder and louder until my father walked away, back to his study. But he never built the ships again.
In the caravan I look again at mother's careful longhand that wrote on the bottom of her list of things to do on Tuesday, 15th of October, the day before she died: "Have the caravan sent to Lucy."
My mother never left anything to chance.
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