Shred Sisters

shred sisters

Also by Betsy Lerner

The Bridge Ladies

Food and Loathing

The Forest for the Trees

shred sisters

A Novel

betsy lerner

Grove Press

New York

Copyright © 2024 by Betsy Lerner

Jacket design and collage by Amanda Hudson, Faceout Studio, using artwork from Getty and Stocksy

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Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: October 2024

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN 978-0-8021-6370-7

eISBN 978-0-8021-6371-4

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

Here are the ways I could start this story:

Olivia was breathtaking.

For a long time, I was convinced that she was responsible for everything that went wrong.

No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister.

PART I

Do Not Feed the Fish

1

I was afraid to wake up my dad. He was stretched out on the couch in his den, late afternoon, his brown loafers kicked off on the shag carpet, resting on each other like rabbits.

This better be good, Amy.

He never used my full name. It was Aim or A, or Acorn, Bun, or Bunny.

By the time he reached Ollie, she was soaked in blood.

Ollie had dared me to jump on the couch with her. Using the thick cushions as a trampoline, she made a swishing sound as she jumped, touching the ceiling and dunking an imaginary basketball. Only when she took a jump shot from the side, not realizing the power in her legs, she crashed into the picture window behind the couch. For a second there was silence, then the window splintered into a web of shards that rained down on my sister. She shook her head, and pieces of glass flung like water from a summer sprinkler. She froze in place, afraid to take a step or move. Tiny spots of blood blossomed from beneath her shirt and pants.

My father told me to call 911 for an ambulance, then soothed Ollie with his deep voice. It’s going to be okay, honey. Stay still.

Ollie hadn’t moved a millimeter, knowing that doing so would push the shards of glass deeper into her skin. Now in partial shock, she couldn’t speak. Later she joked that she looked like a giant tampon, but just then her wit was on hold. Our mother was away on a bridge cruise through the fjords with her friends. The pamphlet for the trip was on the kitchen counter with all her contact numbers, should we need to reach her. In the long minutes before the ambulance arrived, I suggested we call her. My father vetoed the idea.

Let her have her fun.

The EMS crew arrived, stopping short when they saw her.

Whoa, the woman EMT said.

Shit, the guy said, then, Pardon my French.

The woman slid her hands under Ollie’s armpits while the man cut her shirt off from the back. As usual, Ollie wasn’t wearing a bra, and my father left the room. While the woman held Ollie up, the man plucked glass from her back. She was silent as they lifted her onto the stretcher. The woman covered Ollie’s front with a white sheet. Faintly, then vividly, red slashes soaked through like hash marks. I heard her moan, and they gave her a shot. I started to climb into the ambulance, but the man waved me away and pulled the door closed. Dad started up the car and said I should wait at home, hold down the fort.

I took out the broom and dustpan, the upright kind I used for a game I called Movies. I’d scatter garbage on the floor and sweep it up while complaining with my imaginary ushers about the customers and the sticky floor. The current situation presented more of a challenge. The couch and carpet were covered in shards, shavings, and glass dust. I upgraded to the vacuum. My mother was proud of her new Electrolux cannister; like a dachshund on wheels, the vacuum followed her around as she made her way through the house. It did a good job on the glass dust, but the hose started to buck with the bigger pieces. A puff of black smoke belched from the grid at the back of the vacuum, followed by the smell of burnt plastic.

I called the hospital but couldn’t get through. It was getting dark, and I started to panic. Here I was again, on the sideline of another crisis Ollie created, staged, and starred in. My sister was possibly bleeding to death, while my mother dealt another hand of bridge against a backdrop of majestic fjords. The brochure showed a lavish buffet, a room filled with animated card players, a sunset, and a moonrise. I wanted to call her, but I knew my father was right. Except it wasn’t about letting her have her fun; he knew she would make matters worse.

Dad returned from the hospital later that evening. There was blood on his sleeve. He hugged me hard and said Ollie was going to be fine; the cuts bled a lot, but they were largely superficial. I started to cry, and he hugged me again and told me not to worry. I wanted to lash out: why hadn’t he called? How could he have left me? But I didn’t want him to think that I was more worried about myself than about Ollie. He said he needed sustenance, which meant a trip to Chuck’s Steakhouse, a martini straight up with olives and a porterhouse, rare.

I loved to police the people in line at Chuck’s salad bar, observing how well they adhered to the honor system. When it was my turn, I’d make a show of using the correct tongs to take my fair share from each container, while Ollie would plunge the same tongs into every container, heaping coleslaw on her plate, then olives, and a stockpile of croutons on top. It wasn’t a crime, but it stood for everything I couldn’t stand about her.

The waiter took our order, and my father debriefed me. He said Ollie would stay in the hospital overnight; they had given her some strong stuff for the pain. A plastic surgeon had been called in to assess the damage. Her back was the worst, he said, but the scarring would be minimal. Not a single shard of glass had touched her face.

You’re a very pretty girl, the surgeon said. You’re lucky.

When Ollie came home the next day, she let me apply ­Neosporin on the deeper cuts on her back. I carefully traced each one with a worm of ointment.

Can’t you speed it up?

I was too slow and methodical for Ollie. Even woozy on pain medication, she couldn’t stand waiting for anything.

By the time my mother returned five days later, my father had had the window reglazed and the carpet and couch professionally cleaned. Dad said it looked as good as new. I thought Mom would detect the damage right away, but she was full of bluster and in a generous mood, having won the tournament. She showed off her first-place trophy and handed out presents from the ship’s gift shop. A baseball cap that said Fjords for my father and a T-shirt for me that said "I ª FJORDS." The bag appeared to be empty, but then she fished out a polar bear carved from white quartz, small enough to fit in your hand, and gave it to Ollie for her collection of souvenir bears.

The tradition had started before I was born. From the moment Ollie saw them, she fell in love with the bears at the Bronx zoo. She was delighted by the creatures swimming, nosing a big red ball into the air, basking in the sun. She refused to leave the exhibit and my parents could not cajole, bribe, or budge her. The story goes that they stayed watching the bears until the zoo closed. At three, Ollie already knew how to exert her power, and my parents, beguiled by their little girl, acquiesced. Strong-willed, headstrong, and stubborn didn’t attach themselves to Olivia until later.

Eventually, my mother put the pieces together from the evidence: the banged-up vacuum, the bloody gauze in Ollie’s wastebasket, the bill from the hospital mixed in with the day’s mail. My father downplayed the whole thing, said it was nothing. Years later, after Ollie stopped coming home, he said he blamed himself, he shouldn’t have tried to hide the accident from our mother. Even then, long before Ollie was in real trouble, she was often out of control, playing too hard, not knowing when to quit. The surgeon had said that Ollie was more than lucky; if a single shard had lodged too deeply in her neck, she could have died.

After the meal, Dad ordered dessert, a piece of Chuck’s famous mud cake, with two forks. The waiter set the cake down and winked, Enjoy, you two lovebirds. My father lifted a bite to his mouth, but then his body started to shudder. I looked away, afraid of what might happen next; I had never seen my father cry. After a few moments, he shook it off, wiped his face with his handkerchief and apologized for breaking down. It had been a long day.

Is Ollie going to be punished? I asked.

A mix of disbelief and disgust crossed his face, Is that what’s on your mind? Suddenly I was to blame; the girl who sailed through glass remained unscathed—Houdini had escaped without a scratch. My father sank his fork into the cake.

Olivia and I fought as if the world existed to fuel our rivalry. We fought over possession of the big chair in front of the television and the remote control. We fought over the window seat on an airplane and the aisle at the movies. There was no taking turns when it came to sitting in the front seat of the car; as long as I was alive, the younger sister would be relegated to the back seat. Even our mother didn’t contest it. We fought over the dog we didn’t have, what breed it might be, what to name it, which of us it loved most. If Ollie thought that I had a larger portion of food, she’d swap our plates. We fought physically—hair pulling, punching, kicking. Far worse was the name-calling, the insults she leveled at me that still sting today. She called me loser, zero, first living abortion. She said I was a brownnoser, a teacher’s pet, and a kiss-ass. I was boring, cloying, a below-average human. She knew I was an A+ student, but she wasn’t talking about grades. In Ollie’s view I had no charisma, no flair.

My first tormentor, she was ingenious in keeping her tactics beneath my parents’ radar. When we fought, they always said the same thing: they didn’t care who started it, we should sort it out ourselves. What was there to sort out after Ollie had eaten my dessert, left my beloved markers open to dry, and beheaded my dolls? Every year on my birthday, Ollie would push me aside and blow out the candles. My parents would chide her as they laughed—Ollie!!! My father would relight the candles, but I would refuse to blow them out or make a wish as the little wax columns melted into the cake. They would tell me to stop being silly, and I was branded the bad sport while Ollie pushed me aside and stole my wish.

During one of my many scavenging missions through my parents’ room, I found an accordion file behind my mother’s desk. The A slot, labeled with my full name, Amy Claire Shred, was written in my mother’s gorgeous handwriting, full of graceful loops. Inside was an archive of information. My Social Security card, with numbers separated by dashes, like Morse code. My birth certificate, with the time I was born, 6 a.m., and my birth weight, 5 pounds, 8 ounces. The doctors had informed my parents that one ounce less and I’d be in an incubator. My father compared me to a hamburger under the warming lights at McDonald’s, and somehow that image morphed into the nickname Bun, and then Bunny. Even fully grown, I would remain in the fifth percentile for height and weight, reaching only five feet and weighing under one hundred pounds. Whenever I complained about my size, my mother said good things come in small packages. I was smart enough to know that good things come in tall, willowy packages like Ollie’s.

I found my elementary school report cards and fanned them out to admire the solid column of Exceeds Expectations on the academic side of the ledger. It was in the personal-development section that I faltered—namely, in social skills. The injustice of it inflamed me. I was desperate to be included, but I was the skinny, clumsy, bespectacled soldier who gets picked off first by enemy fire in every war movie. I was already being shunted away from tables in the cafeteria and had relegated myself to the perimeter of the playground. My teachers reported that I was introverted and socially challenged.

I peeked into the O slot and found all of Ollie’s report cards bound in a rubber band. I opened one after another showing that her grades were abysmal. She failed Health! I ran to my mother, filled with a younger sibling’s indignation; here was proof positive that Ollie was given special treatment. My mother admonished me for snooping; Ollie’s grades were not my concern, she said. How could my mother, the Patron Saint of High Expectations, allow Ollie to get away with poor grades?

In high school, it became evident that Ollie couldn’t concentrate. Her brain was a pinball machine. She never finished a book or completed a project. She couldn’t be bothered with maps or directions. She winged her tests and navigated the world on instinct. When I cried that it wasn’t fair, this double standard for our grades, my mother said, with a blend of finality and cruelty, Who said life would be fair?

In the spring of sixth grade, a boy in our class was diagnosed with leukemia. He played clarinet, and I remember how small he seemed in the marching-band uniform, his hat like a toy soldier’s tilted down on his forehead. In a matter of months, his body grew gaunt, his skin turned greenish gray, and then he disappeared. Our class planted a tree in his memory. At the dedication ceremony, the janitor played guitar and sang in a falsetto voice Where Have All the Flowers Gone. He wore his janitor pants but had put on a white, collared shirt and a navy blue vest. None of us had any idea that he played guitar or sang, and it was kind of embarrassing.

That night, I went to Ollie’s room and knocked.

Enter.

A few days before, while she was at track practice, I had rummaged around in her dresser and found a packet of pills.

Are you sick? I asked.

What are you talking about? Her tone was harsh, impatient.

I found your pills, I confessed.

What pills?

In your bureau.

What were you doing in my room? She pinched my neck hard.

I didn’t have a quick answer. I couldn’t lie the way Ollie did. If anything, I had the opposite problem, telling too much truth, speaking far beyond the required response to any question. This, too, Ollie found irritating. Sometimes my mother would concur. Sweetheart, she’d say, can you wrap it up? or Amy, please, get to the point. Then I’d try to make myself not talk, or I’d respond in clipped one-word answers, until I could no longer keep it up.

I had no reason to be in Ollie’s room, let alone go through her dresser. I knew I risked banishment, punishment. Still, I snooped, spied, and studied her. The smallest details about her life intrigued me: the silver ring on her middle toe, her black nail polish, the way she could talk and floss at the same time. In high school, Ollie was always ahead of the pack trend-wise, fashion-wise, music-wise. She knew about Italian directors and French cigarettes. She wrote in a composition notebook that she called a journal. She wore a bucket hat in the summer and a beret in the winter. She played David Bowie’s song Heroes over and over as if it were her personal anthem.

Don’t touch my shit, Olivia snapped, still squeezing my neck. Understand?

Are you dying? I asked, wriggling away, thinking about my dead classmate.

What are you talking about?

The pills, I said.

Oh my god. Olivia fell backward. You’re such an idiot.

My mother pinned the beginning of Ollie’s problems on an ordinary car ride home from the orthodontist. For years to come, she would refer to it as the day Ollie turned. She was fifteen and I was eleven. It was a year or so after she crashed through the window, and, if you ask me, Ollie had already turned. She flouted the most basic Shred Family rules: not clearing her plate, not making her bed, not taking out the garbage. She no longer watched our favorite lineup of TV shows, instead listening to music alone in her basement room. She and I had previously regarded the downstairs as a terror-filled underworld with spiders, mice, and a disgusting sulfur smell. I couldn’t fathom her choosing the partially finished basement with a musty mattress hauled down from the attic. Ollie had made a lair, a psychedelic dungeon, painting the walls black and installing a black light that made the specks of white glow.

It’s my house, and black is not a color you paint walls, our mother railed when she saw what Ollie had done.

It’s my room and I can paint it any color I want, Ollie roared back.

Now she was cranky, her teeth and gums sore from the doctor’s prodding and tightening. Her braces would come off at her next visit, but even so she made a display of her suffering. She was one of the few teenagers on the planet whose beauty was not diminished by braces. I would be getting mine soon and was sure to be called Brace Face, Train Tracks, and Metal Mouth. More stoic than Ollie, I had already planned to stop eating at school after Roger Coffin, a boy in our class, had been made the target at Four Square for the world-class offense of being caught with egg salad in his braces. Ricky Testa, class bully, took aim with the intensity of a pro bowler as he scooped the ball underhand, and whipped it at Roger, hitting him in the chest and knocking him back onto the cement. Laughter erupted from the boys in the square and the crescent of girls standing nearby. Long seconds passed, and Roger remained motionless. In what was probably my last act of bravery, I walked over to check if he was okay. His wind back, he sat up and bounced to his feet. Seeing me hovering, he said, loud enough for all