Fiction from The Literary Review

The Haight

TERESE SVOBODA

It isn't as if we are close, only her sweater is. It still has her shape from so much of her in it before I took it. I left first and I knew what cold could await me. That she might leave too was not my problem, she had a place with my mother. She painted my mother's nails, she stood behind her couch and pressed her fingers into her forehead. I made up so little of that life, I figured they wouldn't miss me, I figured her sweater as a souvenir of what I wouldn't miss.
      Her underwear too. A baseball cap. I took enough of her things so I didn't look her up when I barefooted it through her town a year later, or so the town Mom said a boy with airbrush tatoos and teeth you could count would take her. I had had enough of those boys myself, let alone the sweater I had worn and worn without looking her up and saying I'm sorry. It's the least you could do, said my mother, but I did less.
      After another year passed and hunger wasn't as new as all the other new things, I happened again to visit her town and Mom said Check, just check up on her, I haven't heard Boo from her for six months, but I didn't. I said I work now, I conference all day and at night I sleep hard. Which wasn't all true, I was stuffing computer specs into the trash instead of smiling cow-eyes at brochure-laden retailers wearing actual patent leather, then getting wasted at nights at concerts and at last, laid, by nobody business.
      I was tired.
      The next time I flew there I was up to my neck in green screens, a look-see so new most of them were cardboard. Mom didn't care to hear about my trials over ordering these screens for all of my twenty-four clients. She said when she herself had flown there, the address was all wrong, it could not be right, and she found out nothing.
      She must have moved, I said. She knows where you live, I said.
      You're the only one to find her, you look like her, she said.
      I would recognize myself if I saw me? I said.
      She went quiet.
      I don't have that sweater with me, I laughed my best. I need the sweater as a lure.
      That Mom should still be bothering, after all my sister's silence and not mine, hurt me. Who says one sister and another makes two together?
      When you consider I was searching for a livelihood and someone to keep it lively all those years after, I was busy. Mom kept busy knitting more stinking sweaters--not for me--and for Mom, time was just a stitch dropped, or another color yarn. Then music we heard before came back like we were always tuned in but turned down, but my sister didn't. No letters with postmarks stained from rain or backed-up sinks left any kind of trail, no phone calls rang, reversed, there were no phone calls at all, the silence continued like a skip at the end of an old 78, a silence even I had to notice.
      Did anyone know where the tatoo king had come from, exactly where he might leave for? I asked. He ordered pizza to go and my sister went with it, said my mother. She ordered the pizza like it would bring her back, got old with that pizza and didn't eat it, made phone calls and aggravation and sweaters and then died without a word from my sister.
      I cut my hair short the way she wouldn't, I kept away from pools and mirrors of all kinds so I didn't think Who else? when I looked. But now crowds crowd with glimpses of my sister until I decide I must go, I must find her, I must ask her what she thinks she is doing.
      The Haight is the place where someone like her with a pizza eater of tatoos and few teeth would end up at, that's what my mother always said about that town that all the buses led up to. Look at the map of then, and the cost of those buses, the kind of girl she surely turned into as soon as she left us.
      So I go right to that spot and I put up and look at what pictures there are. The man at Emergency pleads innocent, nada, no computers back then except for salary, and the police ask about tracks, did she have them? They didn't lead to us is all that I answer.
      The sweater I stole still fits me.
      I'm looking for myself I tell people. We have the same features. People smile and shake their heads. A lot of you came here, they say, the street was full of you, in and on it, people slept on people, humped here under the dark lights someone was always making here, the bulbs out all over. You couldn't walk the street like you do now, from one end to the corner.
      What I find out, after all these years, is that anyone could be her--one of those with her head down, with no other reason than not to be seen, or with her head too far up, a big bird flying away with her brain.
      A dog that is hers or could be can't find the hydrant he is so old. I take a place over the street and I watch that dog every day walk past my window. If she still comes to sprawl, one jeaned-leg crossed over the other the way girls her age did then, then this is where to watch. Otherwise, it's just a block not too far from a park.
      I sit at the window in her sweater and she has my life now, bangs, a girl/boy/girl, wearing an apron no woman still young should wear, with Mexican shoes in green leather, and a husband who worked so hard he died early and left money. Or maybe she's not me--she could be the woman next door who moved out before I could ask about her tatoo and the pizza, or she could sell cars at a lot down the street during the hours I sleep.
      Police and the places that follow her kind of problem still send me papers. See the papers? My mother had so many that the heat of their fire took the hair off my arms. They send me more papers whenever I ask about her so I'm sure there's someone with the same name doing something.
      But not her.
      Haight means hate, my sister getting even. It's just a sweater, I say. I didn't have it that long before she left.
      To find me?
      To be me.
      Surprise! They say memory is all you are after you die.
      She's done me one better.