Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [88]
Victoria sniffed out a yes, and Ramona closed the door and let the sisters have the dark bedroom air back to themselves.
Bliss was in a turmoil all that next day. Felt like she’d been spun around on the end of a lasso when her stomach was full. Shern wouldn’t talk to her. Since their fight last night and all day into this evening. Not a “Good morning, Sister,” or “Don’t cross on the red.” Not even a “Watch your mouth” when Bliss said “oh, fuck” just so she could get a reaction from Shern. Shern hadn’t reacted. And now Bliss sat at the dining-room table and tried to get down a swallow of peas and rice and remembered how Shern sounded crying last night. While Bliss had tried to sleep on the green velvet couch because Shern wouldn’t make room for her in the bed, Bliss had listened to Shern’s cries pierce even through the pillow and the heavy bedroom air to stab against Bliss’s ears like knife points. It was a sharper cry than even their first nights here, when they all three were yelping like newborn puppies that needed to nurse. But last night Shern’s sounds were absent the “I want Mommie” kind of sob that had become typical for them and was familiar and almost comforting because it was born out of their longing for their parents and their home and was shared completely by the three. Shern’s crying the night before had been incomprehensible to Bliss. As if Shern had swallowed a part of hell that Bliss couldn’t taste. It was such a dark, solitary kind of cry that the memory of it now was coating the peas and rice that Bliss held in her mouth like a gravy that’s too thick. She felt like she needed to throw up.
She put her napkin to her mouth and spit the half-chewed food into her napkin and then looked around the table. It was just Mae and Victoria and Bliss there now. Ramona had eaten quickly and was up from the table, saying something about getting to the Laundromat before a storm hit. Addison wasn’t even there, and Shern had come in from school, said she didn’t feel well, and gone straight to bed. Bliss looked at the tablecloth to try to still her stomach. The tablecloth was white lace with a pink plastic lining; she thought that at least the lining would save the table underneath from the contents of her stomach should she vomit right now. She kept her eyes on the tablecloth and asked Mae if she could be excused.
“Sure, darling,” Mae said, between slurping sounds as she gulped at hot tea and lemon. “Neither you nor that number one daughter had much of an appetite tonight. I hope you girls aren’t filling your stomachs with too much candy during the day.”
“No, ma’am,” Bliss answered as she avoided Victoria’s eyes that she knew were saying, “Please don’t leave me down here with just Mae.”
She rushed from the table as she heard Mae say to Victoria, “It’s just you and me, buttercup, with Ramona headed to the Laundromat and those sisters of yours holed up in that bedroom. Why don’t we play a game of pit-a-pat, doll baby?”
And then Bliss was upstairs and in the bedroom where Shern lay facing the radiator and the wall, still lying wide so that no one else could fit on that bed.
“Shern, are you awake?” she asked, quietly, tenuously, the spinning in her stomach slowing down now that she was away from that table and the peas and rice.
Shern didn’t move, not even a twitch to acknowledge Bliss’s presence in the room.
“Shern, please talk to me, I said I was sorry. As it is, you won the fight last night; if anybody should be mad, it should be me. But I’m not angry with you, Shern. Please.” Bliss played with her fingers and dragged the “please” out like a child begging for a piece of a candy. She leaned over Shern’s back to try to look in her face, knowing that Shern wouldn’t be able to resist the pleading splashed all over Bliss’s face.
Shern shrugged Bliss away from her shoulder as if she were trying to shake off a bad itch.
Bliss persisted. She squeezed her body