Most mornings Susan Lerner, running late for her summer job at the New York Public Library, left her parents’ apartment in a great hurry, scooping up two tokens from a bowl of change in the kitchen and slamming shut the front door. Inevitably she woke her sister Laura, who had moved into the tiny maid’s room behind the kitchen and who sometimes managed to sleep through the clinking of coins and subway tokens but never through the crash of the door against its frame.
Too young for a proper job, too old for camp, Laura, fifteen, was spending her summer as she had spent much of the preceding year: reading long Russian novels and science fiction short stories. Alone on weekdays, she wandered through the narrow, muggy apartment, her hands sliding over the warty bumps of the walls; she eyed her mother’s bleak Japanese prints, watching the maidens and dancers skulk inside their black picture frames; she studied her father’s dusty bookshelves, as if she might find a book that she had somehow missed the hundred times she had looked before. And she waited for Susan.
Her father worked downtown near City Hall, her mother, who had finally gone back to her job, at a public school library on the Upper West Side. They left earlier – but more quietly – and returned later than Susan. Laura didn’t know if they were afraid to come home or reluctant to give up the office air conditioning.
Laura was neat, Susan was messy. Susan threw her clothes on their sister Wendy’s bed at night and rummaged there each morning for bras and underwear, so that the bed functioned as an open drawer. In the evenings she listened to Talking Heads, sketching still lifes of the bed and portraits of her sisters, and at eleven thirty, before going to sleep, she watched on a decrepit black-and-white television set Ted Koppel’s nightly update on the Iranian hostage crisis. She didn’t go out much; she had broken up with her boyfriend. Eighteen years old – the eldest of the three girls – Susan had just finished her freshman year at Vassar.
Until Susan left for college, Laura had shared the bedroom with Wendy, while Susan had slept in the maid’s room. Now Laura stole into the bedroom each morning to look at the new leaves in Susan’s portfolio. She never entered the room while Susan was there. “The music’s too loud,” she’d say, standing in the doorway. Or, “Why do you have to watch that every night?”
“Go away.”
“Clean up the bed.”
“Don’t be a creep. It’s not your room anymore.”
“You’re the creep.” Laura spoke brightly, even cheerfully, because that way the words cut deeper. Her sisters were always stronger, smarter, better than she, and so to compete she had learned to be tricky, to connive, just as she had learned to put English on her serves and returns when she played ping pong against them.
Laura stayed up late, listening to the apartment settle, the measured breathing of her parents in their bedroom, the maundering of a television set next door, the cars wheezing outside, the el whistling a few blocks away. Sometimes Susan, half-asleep, would get up from bed to use the bathroom. And Laura was waiting for her.
“Should we see Wendy tomorrow?” she asked Susan. “Let’s go see Wendy.”
In fact, the girls rarely visited Wendy together. Laura took the subway into Manhattan three afternoons a week. Susan usually visited during her lunch hour.
“She’d love to see us,” Laura said.
“You’re such a bitch.”
“You made me one,” Laura replied, in her soft, bright, bitter voice. After Susan went back to bed, Laura put her hot face against the now cool walls of the apartment and heard the building moan in its sleep. And Laura moaned too.

“I brought you chocolate,” Laura said, sliding the Milky Way bar across the table.
“I can’t taste it.” Wendy sat in her pajamas next to the table by the window, trying to wrap her hair around the index finger of her good hand. Her left hand was still very weak, but even the right lacked its former adeptness, and her hair, which had mostly grown back, kept slipping off the finger before she could coil the next loop. “What’s on tonight?”
“‘Barney Miller,’” Laura told her.
“That’s good.”
Laura didn’t know what else to say. The silence was menacing, pulling her back into danger, like a powerful undertow. “Can I braid your hair?”
“I guess.”
She went around behind Wendy and started to braid her hair. “I’m reading The Possessed, did you ever read that?”
“I can’t read.”
Wendy had helped teach Laura to read when Laura was five and Wendy was seven. “Susan was late again, I bet she gets fired. You have beautiful hair, it’s really grown back. Do you like these sneakers, I just bought them. Mrs. Lopez had her baby.” So this is how Mom does it, Laura thought without bitterness. You talk and talk, but you’re not really here. “Maybe we can go shopping together. Do you want to buy new pajamas?”
“What day is it?”
“Thursday.”
“Thursday,” Wendy said, with a momentary flicker of interest. “What’s on tonight?”
“‘Barney Miller.’”
“You told me already.” Wendy started to cry.
“It’s just going to take time.”
“You don’t,” Wendy said, “know what it’s like.”
Laura watched her sister weep. How strange, Laura thought. Someone else was inhabiting her body. Someone else was watching Wendy, minding her but not really knowing her or caring very deeply, like a substitute teacher calling the roll. “You’re improving, I know you are,” the substitute said, and Laura wanted to thank her, because she was doing a good job.
“I can’t remember…”
“You just have to be patient.”
“Stop it!” Wendy, suddenly furious, screamed at her. One of the nurses came running in.
The substitute left the room and went into the lounge down the hall. She checked her pockets for change and found enough for a cup of coffee from the vending machine. Laura had started to drink coffee in the last year, initially hating the taste but finding iced coffee with milk and sugar bearable. Now she could drink coffee black, and she relied on the caffeine because she was getting so little sleep. Her hands shook as she put money into the slot. Look at that, Laura thought, and now it was her father’s voice in her head. Would you get a load of that.
The room was smoky and her eyes smarted. She sat at one of the tables, sipping her coffee and reading in the dim light a Daily News someone had left behind. Ann Landers advised a young woman to talk to her parents, to confide in her minister, priest, or rabbi, to use birth control, and to consider professional counseling. Obviously, the woman had problems. Laura read all the comics, even the ones she didn’t like, and unscrambled the word jumbles before going back into the room Wendy shared with a stroke patient.
Wendy, quiet again, was lying on the bed, looking up at the ceiling. “What day is it?” she asked.
“Thursday.”
“I thought it was Monday.”

During her first Christmas vacation from Vassar, Susan had been invited to a New Year’s Eve party at a friend’s apartment in lower Manhattan, and she permitted Wendy, a junior in high school, to tag along. Laura stayed home and watched television with her father while her mother, Nancy, lay in bed, reading a mystery. Nancy struggled to stay awake until midnight but padded into the living room at the last minute to watch the ball descend in Times Square. She had worried about the two girls going off to Manhattan so late. The sisters had been amused by, even scornful of, their mother’s nervousness.
The party was held in a large loft, still under renovation, with a half-finished kitchen and a few thin walls separating the bedrooms and bathrooms. Wendy, who felt ill at ease clinging onto Susan, wandered from group to group, trying to fit in, until a boy, a college freshman, quite drunk and a head shorter than she, sat on one of the beds with her. Holding her hand, he told her about his love of African drumming and his dream of becoming a structural engineer. They all drank cheap champagne and cheaper sangria. The party went on very late. At three in the morning Susan’s boyfriend, Mark, asked Susan to come home with him; his parents were on vacation in St. Barts, and they would have the co-op in Riverdale to themselves. Mark had forgotten to bring enough money for a cab – Riverdale was a twenty or thirty minute drive from lower Manhattan at this hour – and Susan used the cab fare her father had given her and Wendy. She had promised to go home with her sister, but she told Wendy to share a cab with some of the girls from Queens. Wendy said goodbye to the freshman, and with four other girls walked to one of the avenues to hail a cab. When a cab pulled up, those four squeezed into the back of the taxi, but Wendy didn’t know them well and didn’t feel she could sit on their laps. She sat up front with the driver, on the other side of the plexiglass divider, and found that the seatbelt was broken and that the window wouldn’t shut. The cab headed north to 59th Street, making good time, while the genial Slavic driver asked them all their names and ages. Wendy, cold, zipped up her jacket and wrapped her arms around herself. As the taxi approached the Queensboro Bridge, there was a terrible accident.
Wendy’s head had slammed into the dashboard. The brain damage at the site of the blow was called a coup, the neurologist told them, drawing a sketch which Wendy studied with intense incomprehension. The tremendous pressure on the brain, he explained, had forced it against the opposite side of the skull, causing more damage, known as a countercoup. Next Wendy’s head had been thrown back against the plexiglass divider, causing additional shearing of nerve fibers. And then, apparently, Wendy’s head had smashed into the dashboard a second time. She lay in a coma for a week. They’d performed surgery to relieve the bleeding and swelling in the brain.
For the past six months she had lived in a long term residential care unit. Wendy had been a quick-witted girl, but she was slower now. She complained of an inability to concentrate. Reading was next to impossible. When she wasn’t apathetic, she was irritable and easily frustrated and had obvious deficits in her short term memory. She was also clinically depressed. Her left fingers and toes had been paralyzed for several days after she regained consciousness, and despite extensive rehabilitation work, she still had poor control over them. She claimed to have lost her senses of taste and smell. She suffered from frequent seizures. She wasn’t, in a word, herself. > Laura watched her mother, Nancy, brushing her thick silver hair in front of the long mirror over her dresser. When she was a small girl, Laura was embarrassed that her mother, alone among all the mothers of her friends, had gray hair. Now she loved her mother’s hair. She imagined herself with bangs of gray hair instead of brown and with lines etched across her smooth forehead. Standing next to her mother, looking into the mirror, Laura scrunched up her face to make the lines.
“You used to do that when you were little.” Nancy put her arm around Laura’s waist. “You know, you’ll always be my baby.”
Wendy’s your baby, Laura thought to herself.
“You’re losing weight,” Nancy remarked.
“It’s the summer. I don’t eat when it’s hot. I can’t, I can’t taste anything when it’s hot,” Laura decided. “That’s the problem.” She sat on her parents’ bed and bounced. It was the heat, she realized, the heat that kept her up at night. She would be fine as soon as the nights grew cooler.
“Careful, you’ll break the bed again.”
“It wasn’t me, it was Susan.” Years earlier, Laura had watched Susan bounce on the bed as if it were a trampoline, until the wooden bed frame collapsed. Somehow Susan had convinced their parents that Laura had been the guilty party.
“What did I do?” Susan, overhearing, entered their parents’ bedroom.
“You broke the bed,” Laura said.
“You broke the bed,” Susan said, and she laughed.
The laughter enraged Laura and then she was outside herself again and calm. “Let’s ask Wendy what happened.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Maybe she’ll remember,” Laura replied. “Maybe she won’t.”
“And that’s my fault.”
“It was an accident,” Nancy said automatically.
Susan left the room. Laura lay on her parents’ bed and counted the squares on the ceiling. She could hear the television set in the living room; her father was watching a ballgame. Her mother disappeared into the bathroom and Laura heard her brush her teeth. In Laura’s Russian novels no one brushed her teeth, no one went to the bathroom, no one menstruated. No one got into automobile accidents. In the science fiction she loved no one put on contact lenses each morning and dropped a lens behind the toilet and bent over to pick it up and banged her head on the sink when she stood up again. No one banged her head into the sink a second time, deliberately, just to feel how bad the pain could be.
Nancy came back to the bedroom, wearing a nightgown. Laura scooted over, making room on the bed for her. They lay next to each other, and her mother took her hand. “Laur, this has got to stop.”
“I can’t.” It was the truth.
“You know, when I have problems with my sister, I try to remember, she’s the only sister I’ve got.”
“I’ve got two.”
Her mother squeezed her hand and then let it go. “This is very hard for Susan.”
“It’s harder for Wendy.”

Laura noticed that Wendy had forgotten to put on panties. “Here,” she said, taking one from a small chest of drawers next to the bed.
Wendy laughed. “I forgot.”
“What do you want for your birthday?”
“Nothing.”
“You have to want something.”
“I want…” She was looking at and rubbing her left ring finger. Laura wondered if she wanted to get married someday and then Laura had trouble swallowing. “I don’t know,” Wendy said. “What do you want?”
“I want,” Laura spoke carefully, “you to be happy.”
“I’m happy.”
Wendy’s ring finger started trembling, then her fingers, then her left hand, then her left arm.
“My hand,” she said before she had a seizure.
Now she gets a nurse, Laura thought. Now she helps the nurse quiet Wendy. Now she helps Wendy lie down, shh, shh, she says, it’s okay. Now she says goodbye. Now she walks to the subway, now she rides the subway, now she reads her book.
“You’re a good sister,” her father, Stanley, told her. He was a chipper, sad, sometimes gruff, sometimes appallingly sentimental man with deep pouches below his weary blue-gray eyes. He loved to buy bargain books at the Strand, although he rarely had time to read them, since he was addicted to newspapers, magazines, college football and baseball games, and would eventually, when their building was finally wired for cable, become addicted to CNN and cable movies as well. Laura sat on the sofa with him, leaning against his shoulder.
“I’m a bad sister,” Laura said.
“No, no. You’re so patient with her. I love that about you.”
Laura eased herself down, so that she lay with her head on his lap. She knew this made her father uncomfortable, but he wouldn’t ask her to move. “It’s not fair.”
“I know,” Stanley said.
“Susan must feel guilty.”
“I know she does.”
“She told you?”
He timidly brushed hair away from her face. He hated when her bangs fell in front of her eyes. “She didn’t have to tell me.”
“So then you can’t know for sure.”
“Laura,” and now he was sharp with her, “what do you want her to do?”
She wanted Susan to die. Or Wendy to die.