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saw Nanette in the mirror over and over. I saw others—people that I knew, and strangers. I saw random snippets of life, a girl sitting on the stairs eating a sandwich, a man walking through a doorway, a leaf floating to the ground in slow motion. Out of the mess of images, my private nickelodeon, I began to discern someone—a woman, comely in a severe way and medium fair, seen at different times, at different places, at different ages, in different moods and modes. Her name was Melissa, Melissa Archer or Melissa Peacock, but always Melissa.
John Peacock adored Melissa Archer. His first impression of her was of a pink girlish bow tied in her hair. She had a short figure, but not over slim, and a face that only looked young when you looked at it directly. But, out of the corner of your eye or in profile, you saw age and wisdom in that face. In the right clothes, with a little gray in her hair, she could be old, but she was not. She was young enough to wear a girlish bow.
Her father had died, and John attributed this strange impression of age to sorrow. John went to Paul Archer’s funeral because the whole town attended funerals. They gathered at Hillside and listened with reverence to the eternal words recited over the coffin.
At funerals, John was usually bored. Death did not interest him. It was not poetic or even sad. Death happened every day. Death happened to everyone.
You stood around at the funeral and looked at the people, the coffin, the headstones absorbing the day’s heat. The smell of cut grass permeated the air. In the autumn, if the air was hot, the sickly sweet sour smell of rotting leaves would join the smell of the grass, one high sustained note overpowering the more modest melody.
At Paul Archer’s funeral, John Peacock caught himself staring at that one girlish bow. It stood in contrast to the muted clothes that made each person look just like the next person.
The girl stood with her mother, a solid woman with deep lines on her face who did not scream or cry. The two women looked at each other, at the ground, and occasionally at the dark box. They were expressionless, but their lack of expression said volumes.
After the ceremony—happily brief—was over, John stood in the line to say a few words to the family. He usually just left, but he felt the need to take a closer look at the girl with the bow. He could see it, bobbing in and out of the crowd of heads in front of him, appearing and disappearing, as he moved slowly closer.
When the tall man in front of him finally moved off, John found himself face to face with the girl. For a moment, he was speechless.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hi,” said John. “I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry about your father.”
“Thank you,” she said and took his hand.
Days later, John sat with Melissa on her mother’s back porch in the cooling nighttime.
Melissa wore no perfume, and no scents overrode the smell of her body. John buried his face in her throat.
“You smell wonderful,” he said.
He drank in the smell, musky and dull, of her skin.
From the ages of one to seven, Melissa had a sister named Wisteria. The wisteria, her mother said, was a sign of happiness in love and family, and she had dreamed of wisteria before discovering her pregnancy.
Wisteria was a pale pink child with blonde hair. Melissa’s hair tried hard to be blonde but failed, producing a muddled off-brown color. Wisteria was a happy and laughing child that their father liked to bounce on his knee. Melissa was quiet and secluded, tending to disappear from her parents’ notice.
Melissa and Wisteria shared a bedroom. When they were alone together, Melissa would play a game where she would stick her arm down the side of the bed and tell Wisteria that she was stuck. She would beg her sister to pull her out.
Wisteria had learned that Melissa was always faking. Melissa was stronger, and by creating resistance, she could easily prevent Wisteria from pulling her away from the bed. Melissa would beg and plead for Wisteria to help her, insisting that she was really stuck. Wisteria would always break down and try to help Melissa, futilely pulling and tugging against her sister’s arm until, bored, Melissa would let go and send the younger child tumbling off the bed.
Then, Melissa would jump off the bed on top of the younger girl, pinning her arms and sitting on her chest. Wisteria would struggle helplessly against the force of her sister, unable to move or breathe, until finally, Melissa rolled off of her with a huff.
“It’s only a game!” she’d say. “Stop being a cry-baby.”
Wisteria was constantly reminded of her status as baby.
One day when they were five and four, Melissa and Wisteria were playing Ring-around-the-Rosie with three neighbor children. Melissa was on one side of Wisteria and a small boy with messy brown hair was on the other.
“Ring around the Rosie,” the children chanted.
Decades later, it would be commonly but erroneously claimed that this children’s rhyme dated from the 14th century and was a coded reference to the Black Plague. The actual beginnings of the song are lost in the clouds of history, but if we could clear those clouds away, we would find that an anonymous fourteen-year-old girl first created it in her head in 1862. At least, that’s what I saw in my mirror:
A ring and a rose, oh!
A basket and a posy, oh!
John, a Jack! James, a Jim!
Flowers for me, from him!
At the time, she had a very serious crush on a boy named Jim Waters, and a less serious one on Jack Dooley. Later, she would marry Jim Waters and have twelve children.
At some point this rhyme was adapted, with disguising variations, for use in the ring-games that they played at parties due to the religious bans on dancing. Children added the part about falling down to create an excuse to topple all over each other. Among dozens of versions and variations of the rhyme that were popular during the 1880s, one survived and grew stronger.
“Pockets full of posies,” the children sang.
During this particular singing of it, Melissa felt as black and ominous as a deadly plague. She had grabbed Wisteria’s arm the previous day and twisted it in her hands, leaving her arm red and swollen. The girl had screamed and cried, and their father had come.
It was unusual for a parent to come so quickly to these conflicts. Usually, Mother was in the kitchen and Father was out in the fields. Father had broken his belt, though, and had come in to his bedroom, next to the girls’, to find a new one.
He heard Wisteria’s scream and came into the room. Melissa did not have time for her usual ploy, which was to pinch or twist her own arm, so that each girl had the same red mark and none could be punished.
No tears or begging could convince Father this time. With his belt so handy, he took Melissa in hand and pulled her into his room.
This was her first “whooping.” Her parents had never had reason to beat her. It was entirely Wisteria’s fault, the crybaby.
“Ashes! Ashes!”
There was a searing heat in Melissa’s arm, the one that held her young sister’s, a searing heat filled with malice. Disturbing images flashed through the girl’s mind: dead bodies lying dead in the street, throwing off a stench of decay, covered in dirt and ash.
A child named William Hunting did invent a rhyme during the 1300s about the black plague. He and two playground cronies sang it daily, but their mothers scolded them about it. It did not survive the test of time. The rhyme was in Old English, but a rough translation reveals it to be straightforward: The dead are in the streets. The dead are in the town. The dead are everywhere, ’cept underneath the ground.
“All fall down!”
Melissa fell hard in the opposite direction from her small sister. Instead of letting go of Wisteria’s arm, she jerked and pulled, feeling a satisfying crack as the arm came toward her.
Wisteria screamed and began to cry. People came running to the pile of children. Melissa was forgotten, and all eyes centered on Wisteria. They picked up the younger child in their arms, lavishing comfort on her, spiriting her away from the scene.
Wisteria’s dislocated arm was quickly remedied, but with a good deal of crying and fussing.
During the summer when Melissa was seven and Wisteria was six, the sisters went swimming in a local pond. Wisteria carefully and shyly dipped her toes into the pool, wriggled them around, and screeched.
“It’s cold!”
Melissa dived into the water, contrarily.
“Come in!” said Melissa.
Wisteria continued a slow and painful process of edging into the water. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered, as she delicately slid her feet into the water’s edge.
Melissa swam to the far end of the pond and back.
“Such a baby!” she said.
The younger girl waded in up to her knees and bent down to touch the top of the water.
Melissa began to paddle around her in circles, crouched on the bottom of the pond. “Come on in,” she said. “Don’t be such a baby.”
Wisteria closed her eyes and crouched down, until the water was up to her neck. Then, she pushed off into the deeper water and began to dogpaddle around the pond.
“Why don’t you swim?” asked Melissa.
“I am swimming!”
“That’s not swimming.”
“It is too swimming.”
“You have to get wet to swim,” said Melissa and dived down under the water. She swam under her sister’s legs and tickled her feet as she went by. Emerging in the water on the other side of Wisteria, Melissa said: “What are you, a dog? Is that why you can only dog paddle?” The water dripped down her face, insinuating itself in her lips and in her eyes. The water was smooth, velvet. It made her feel mean.
“Stop it!” said Wisteria.
“What are you, afraid? Just afraid to get your face wet? No wonder you never wash!”
Melissa dived under the water again. She dived to the very bottom of the pond, and relaxing her lungs, she imagined that she could breathe underwater. She could stay down here, hovering just above the rocky bottom, examining the pebbles and weeds with delicate and loving care in a world that was all her own, a world that was of fishes and cold-blooded creatures.
When she looked up, Melissa saw her sister’s white legs dangling in the water, awkwardly splashing, disrupting the surface of the water, disrupting the smoothness of the world. Looking at those graceless legs and splashing arms, she suddenly needed to breathe. Melissa rose to the surface, took a breath, and dived down.
This time she hovered just beneath her sister’s body. She existed in a middle world between the disturbance at the surface of the water that was Wisteria and the rough wild world that was the bottom of the pond.
Wisteria annoyed her.
She reached up grabbed her sister’s ankles with a solid jerk, tugging on them under the water. She swam toward the bottom of the pond, pulling the disrupting factor down with her, down to the bottom, down to the rocks and plants, down to the foreign world where she belonged. Then, Wisteria’s smooth white legs slipped out of her grasp and floated toward the top of the water again.
When Melissa resurfaced, Wisteria was screaming.
“Stop it! Do you want to get another whooping?”
“What did you say?” asked Melissa. “What are you going to do, whoop me?”
“I’ll tell Dad!”
“Crybaby, tattle-tale, running to Papa because you’re too scared to swim!”
“I am not!” lied Wisteria.
“Then put your head in the water.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Yes you do!” said Melissa, and she grabbed her sister and pushed her head down into the water, dunking her, holding her under. Wisteria was struggling and squirming underneath the water, struggling and kicking pointlessly against nothing.
Melissa let her go.
Wisteria surfaced at the top of the water, gasping.
Melissa laughed.
Wisteria sputtered, her face red.
“You will get whooped!” she said. “You’ll get whooped until you can’t sit down for a week!”
Melissa laughed some more. “What are you going to tell them? That you got wet from swimming?”
Wisteria paddled to the shore, coughing pond water. “Oh, they’ll believe me. They’ll know what you are,” she said.
Melissa followed her. “They’ll believe that you’re a crybaby, always coming to cry to them about something. Melissa’s bothering me! Melissa’s looking at me funny! Melissa’s touching me!”
Wisteria pulled herself out of the water at the edge of the pond. Melissa crouched in the low water, still submerged up to her neck.
“They’ll believe me when I tell them how you tried to kill me.”
Melissa laughed at her. “I did not try to kill you!”
Wisteria stood shivering on the edge of the pond. She was shaking with anger, and fear, and cold, and righteousness, and everything else that might make a little girl shake. She looked small and white.
The little girl picked up a heavy stone from the ground. “You did!” she said. “You tried to kill me. You hit me in the head with a rock!”
Melissa was still laughing at her as Wisteria raised the stone over her own head. With all of her might, she smashed the rock against her own temple and fell back with a squelching sound into the muck at the edge of the pond.
Melissa leapt out of the water to where Wisteria was.
She stood over the girl, who was lying on her back, the wind knocked out of her.
“They’ll believe me now,” she said. “Aren’t I bleeding?”
She was bleeding, from a cut in her right temple. A droplet of red slithered down her forehead and onto her cheek. Wisteria pulled herself up on her hands. “They’ll believe me,” she said, “and you won’t be able to sit down for a week.”
Melissa’s face turned red and her cheeks burned.
“You will not tell them!” she said.
Now Wisteria laughed. “I will tell them. You’ll get what you deserve.”
Incredulous anger surged in Melissa. In her heart, she knew that she did not deserve to be punished. She did not deserve to have a horrible little sister.
“You will not,” she said.
Wisteria was looking at her, her chin in the air, mud in her hair, her eyes defiant, the small trickle of blood dripping even further down towards her chin.
With a lurch forward, Melissa grabbed her sister. The world was black to her. There was no thought in her. She was only acting, responding viscerally. Afterwards, she would remember it only as a kaleidoscope of color and the roaring white noise of water.
Melissa grabbed Wisteria and propelled her into the deep water. The elder sister used all her strength to hold the younger.
“You will not tell them those lies,” Melissa said, holding her sister’s hair, holding her sister’s head beneath the water.
The next few minutes were filled with nothing but rage. When Melissa remembered them, she remembered only flashes of color and movement in front of her eyes, not whole scenes or objects, just dissociated colors and shapes and motions.
When she finally let go of Wisteria, the girl did not move, but floated limply on the water.
I must tell you that the things in the mirror were not always things that actually happened. They were true—yes—but sometimes they were dreams, or imaginings, or fantasies, or memories—the versions of truth that fill up all of the empty places in our own minds.
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