Footprints in the Snow

Stephanie Hope Accongio

I.

I hang up the portable phone, and slam shut the mirrored door to the

cabinet, three times, like a madwoman.

My boyfriend John hears the noise, and opens the door. "Fighting with

Jolie again?" he asks me.

I start to cry.

"Maxine, she does this all the time. Don't let her make you cry," John

says reasonably.

My sister Jolie, the bossiest person ever born, doesn't cry. I cry all

the time. Especially when I am angry--like now. When Jolie gets angry, her

mouth narrows into a grim line, and her eyes narrow into little ice sheets.

Even though we fight over the phone most of the time now, I know that on the

other end of that phone line, her eyes are all thin and icy. Oddly enough, one

of my earliest childhood memories is the one and only time I have ever seen

Jolie cry. It happened a few weeks after my mother's funeral. Jolie must have

also cried when my mother died, but I can't remember that.

What I do remember, is playing in the den by the basement stairs. There

were toys all over the floor because no one had cleaned up since the funeral.

Jolie and I were pretending to be ballerinas when I tripped on our Sit-and-Spin

and fell down two or three of the stairs. My arm was broken, although we didn't

know that then, and I started to scream. Jolie rushed to my side, hugged me

tight, and kissed my forehead like my mother used to do, until my dad came out

of the kitchen. Right away, dad started to holler at Jolie that she was old

enough to know better than to let me play by the stairs. He always hollers when

he is scared. He kicked the Sit-and-Spin across the room and kept hollering

about what a mess the house was. Jolie cried all the way to the hospital, in

the waiting room, and the whole way home even though I was the one with my arm

in a cast.

When we got home, I remember that Jolie picked up all the toys in the den,

and when my dad saw this he took her into his arms and said, "You're my big

girl." She fell asleep there in his lap. She was seven, and I was five, and I

never saw her cry again.

She didn't even cry when she broke her arm. Jolie and I were riding our

bikes and she fell down. I hopped off my bike and went over to her. Her eyes

were all watery, and she was sucking her bottom lip in and out. I put my arms

around her and tried to kiss her forehead. "Stop It!" Jolie yelled and pushed

me away. She straightened her spine, dusted herself off, and walked home.

II.

I just shake my head at John since I am too angry to speak and brush past

him into the bedroom. He follows me. "Max, she's just mean-spirited. Don't

pay any attention to her," he says.

Jolie is not mean. I want to tell him this, but I am afraid that I will

scream it at him, and then John and I will have a fight about how I can't

control my temper. Jolie wasn't the type of sister who goes running off to tell

on you all the time. Some time before Junior High I decided that I wanted a

pet. I kept bothering my dad about it, but he was unmovable. He said he had

enough responsibilities. I soon developed an obsession with animals. I started

going into the woods by our house to see the deer that Jolie said were there.

My dad was always afraid that some crazed killer would grab me, so I wasn't

supposed to go into the woods alone. I usually went to the woods alone on

Sundays when my dad thought I was riding my bike. I never did see any deer, but

one day I heard this little squeaking sound. It turned out to be a bleeding

baby brown rabbit with teeth marks in its side.

I smuggled the rabbit into my room that day, resolving to nurse it back to

health. Only I didn't know where to begin. I went to Jolie. When Jolie saw

the rabbit, her eyes and lips narrowed and she said in her usual bossy way, "In

the house! You take him out right now."

"I'm going to keep him Jolie. You help me make him better," I told her.

Her frown deepened. "If dad finds out!" she said.

"I don't care. He can scream the whole house down," I told her. Jolie

was always afraid of dad and his hollering.

Jolie looked down at the rabbit who was on a towel in my laundry basket

and folded her arms in front of her. "Maxi, you can't keep him. You'll be in

such trouble." But I could see she was weakening. I pulled her hand down and

put it on the soft brown fur. She petted him a while, then she went and got

some bandages. Jolie watched after the rabbit long after I had gone to sleep

that night.

The next day when we came home from school, I had a very bad feeling.

When I peeked into the laundry basket, my rabbit was lying still with its mouth

and eyes wide open. I started to scream for Jolie. She put her arms around me

and kissed my forehead, but she was trembling. Then she picked up the rabbit in

her hands and turned him away from me a minute. I clawed at her to see the

rabbit.

"He's not dead Max. He's sleeping," Jolie said, showing me my rabbit's

now closed eyes.

"No. He's not moving!" I shrieked. Then the rabbit moved slightly in her

hands.

"See. He is," Jolie said.

"You moved your fingers!"

"I did not. But he needs to go outside Maxi. If he doesn't get back to

the woods he will die. I have to take him right now. You stay here so dad

won't know," she said with urgency.

In my panic I nearly shoved her out the door. "Run!" I yelled after her.

Years later Jolie told me, when I asked, how she buried my rabbit in the

backyard so I could be near him.

III.

"Jolie isn't mean," I say to John.

"Then why are you always fighting?" he asks me.

When I was about thirteen and Jolie was fifteen, she told my dad that he

could let the cleaning lady go. Jolie did the cooking and most of the cleaning

around the house anyway. Jolie hated that cleaning lady from the day she first

came, although I never knew why. When the lady still worked for us, Jolie would

re-do the vacuuming sometimes. Jolie woke me up for school in the morning, made

my lunch, and even my father seemed to depend on her to remind him of his

appointments and the bills. I remember saying, "My sister says so and so," a

lot to my friends. Jolie was also a model student. Teachers who had her were

always disappointed when I was in their class. Jolie tried to teach me to keep

my notebooks organized with different color pens and highlighters (she had an

elaborate system), but I never seemed to have the right pen with me in class.

Although we wrote in just the same way (when I was in kindergarten Jolie tied me

to a chair in the basement and wouldn't let me go until I had learned whatever

she had learned that day in class), my notebooks were never as neat.

Jolie and I began to fight when I entered high school. I wasn't as smart,

I had a nastier temper, and I had no artistic talent. I took up soccer, dressed

all in black, listened to loud music, snuck out of the house to be with my

friends, talked on the phone late into the night, and failed almost all my

classes. I always did well in math though. When I would come down the stairs

in the morning dressed in black with a miniature dagger hanging from my ear,

Jolie's mouth would narrow into a thin line. She thought I was weird and tried

to tell me how to dress. I resisted. One day at breakfast she told me I

dressed like a freak. I called her a "tight-ass." She spun around and slapped

me so hard she knocked me off my chair. One day I came home late from school to

find that Jolie had cleaned my room and flushed the cigarettes she found under

my mattress down the toilet. I rushed into the kitchen where she was doing

dishes and hurled a plate and a glass at her. She ducked, and they smashed into

the sliding-glass door leaving a huge crack in it. I was grounded for two weeks

for the glass door. I was always getting grounded. Jolie was never grounded.

The biggest trouble I ever got into was for the night I lost my virginity.

I was a sophomore in high school and made the mistake of not coming home at all

that night. I guess I thought Jolie would let me sneak in the sliding-glass

door while she was making breakfast. Maybe I didn't care if I got caught. I am

not sure which, but dad caught me coming in that morning, and he screamed at me

like a crazed escapee from the mental hospital. I wouldn't tell him anything,

and he ended up storming out the front door looking for my latest boyfriend.

Unfortunately for him, that was the wrong guy. "Max, what happened?" Jolie

asked me when he was gone.

"You have to promise not to yell or say one thing, Jolie."

"Tell me, Maxi."

"Not one word. Promise," I said. She promised.

When I told her, she opened her eyes really wide, but she didn't say a

thing. She listened intently for every detail.

Later that night, when we were in the bathroom Jolie said, "If I could

lose five pounds, I might look like you."

I looked at us in the mirror and laughed. Jolie had been trying to lose

five pounds since she was thirteen. I doubted that she would ever look like me.

I had long straight strawberry hair, my mother's blue eyes, and high cheekbones.

Jolie's soft face was framed in not brown but not blond curls that could only be

styled in a way that Jolie called "sensible." Her eyes were a deep brownish red

like cherry wood. Jolie's most striking features were her beautiful dimpled

smile and perfect teeth. When she did smile, she looked impish, but she didn't

smile much, since she thought she looked ridiculous. Anyway, dad wouldn't let

me go anywhere without Jolie for a few months after that.

For the rest of our high school years, I would pass Jolie, who was wearing

jeans and one of her pale blue or pale pink sweaters, in the hall, and we would

pretend not to see each other.

When Jolie graduated from high school, I thought she should go to an

exotic art school in some far away place. Her paintings had won prizes in

contests, and I admired them although I never told her. From a reasonable

distance her paintings were realistic renditions of boring things and boring

colors. Sometimes, there were people too. When you looked close though, her

paintings were all a hurricanes of vibrant hues swirling and crashing against

each other. There would be tornados of fuchsia and legions of orange that you

wouldn't even know were there. But Jolie went to nursing school and lived at

home. We continued to fight over the cigarettes, the boys, the alcohol, and the

report cards.

IV.

"Well, why do you two always fight?" John asks again cornering me by our

bed.

"We don't always fight," I tell him.

The summer after I graduated from high school my dad had a stroke. At the

time I had a job busing tables in a hot new club in the city that Jolie wouldn't

have liked. I also started wearing a purple shade of lipstick Jolie should have

hated. She was too busy nursing dad to care what I was wearing or doing any

more, though. I was always better at figures than she was, so I took care of

the money arrangements for the hospital with our family lawyer. Jolie took the

bills and receipts I had and rearranged them, but she didn't get angry about my

disorganization except when I misplaced a tax form. Jolie was falling behind in

nursing school, so I sat up with dad at night after I got back from work. I

tried to quiet him, because before he learned to talk again he used to call for

me at night. I think my name was the only word he could say, and that he was

using it to mean a variety of things, but I didn't want Jolie to hear that he

never called her.

When dad started getting better, Jolie and I went out to the movies

together. That's where she met Sam. One night the next summer Jolie and I were

double dating. The four of us piled into Sam's car and drove up to Niagara

Falls. Jolie was scared the whole time that Dad would get angry (he never

liked for us to be very far away from him), but Sam and I convinced her that he

would never find out. When we got there, it was dark, and Jolie and Sam

disappeared for an hour looking at the Falls. I was making out with my date in

the back seat, so I didn't miss her. On the way home we stopped in a diner to

get some food. Jolie and I went to the ladies room.

"Sam's great," I told her.

She turned to me and smiled broadly, her cheeks dimpling into a

mischievous grin. "He is isn't he?" she asked me. Then she asked me if she

could borrow some of my lipstick. "He's. . . he's like this purple," she told

me.

I was eighteen and Jolie was twenty when the doctor said my dad was fully

recovered. Dad went back to work, Jolie finished up nursing school, and we all

ate together again. It was spring when Jolie came into my room late one night.

We had been planning a surprise birthday party for my dad together, so I thought

that is why she came in. When I turned on the light though, I saw that she was

pale and shaking.

"You're the only person I can tell, Maxi," she said bracing her back

against my door.

I sat bolt upright and felt my throat tighten like it does when I am going

to cry. "Dad's sick again isn't he?" I asked her ready to cry hysterically in

her arms.

Jolie shook her head no and folded her arms in front of her. "I haven't

got my period in two months," she said sucking her bottom lip in and out.

The room was very quiet, and Jolie came to the side of my bed and sat

down. I felt the room spinning and spinning. And then a loud laugh wrestled

its way from my throat. "You could be pregnant," I said unable to suppress the

giggles that came from some foreign part of me.

"I know I am. I can just tell," Jolie said in a tiny voice, shrinking

into a tiny ball. I became furious. I hated Jolie for sitting in a little

wounded ball on my bed, and I hated her for the water that was hovering at the

rims of her bloodshot eyes ready to spill over and become tears. It was Jolie

who might be pregnant, but I felt Maxine drift farther away into the darkness of

the night with every suck of Jolie's lower lip. I wanted to hit her, make her

stop. I'd never been so scared in my whole life.

"THERE'S NO USE GETTING UPSET ABOUT IT!!!!" I screamed at her. My dad

yelled at us from down the hall to be quiet but I kept hollering. "HOW COULD

YOU BE SO STUPID?" It was all I could do to keep from trying to knock those

wide open watery eyes into narrow slits. But my hollering had the desired

effect.

Jolie straightened her spine. She stared at me a few moments as if I had

really hit her. Then she tuned and walked out of my room. I tried to sleep,

but some sort of knot had formed in my stomach. Finally I went into Jolie's

room. She was sitting at her desk talking on the phone. When I came in, she

hung up. She sat properly in her chair and crossed her legs.

We sat in silence for a long time while Jolie sharpened all her pencils

and arranged them in the canister on top of her desk. Jolie finally clasped her

hands together and said, "I am getting married." Her eyes were clear, her lips

were set in their regular determined shape, and I knew that now I could get to

sleep.

V.

"Just forget about it John. You wouldn't understand," I tell him, dancing

on the fine line between misdirecting my anger and making a point.

"Maybe that's it, Max. She doesn't understand you," he says wrapping his

arms around me and pulling me onto the bed.

When Jolie married Sam and moved away, my dad and I lived together in our

house. The house was always a mess, and he never helped out with dinner, and

one night, I ran off and moved in with John. Jolie doesn't like John very much.

She thinks his hair is too long and that he takes me for granted. Jolie wants

me to move back with Dad and take some courses in math. That's what we fought

about. She told me I needed to be able to support myself. I told her to mind

her own business. She told me I was living my life for John. I told her she

didn't have any life to live for anybody. She doesn't even paint any more. As

soon as she knew she was pregnant, she threw all her paints in the trash. She

hung up on me. Tomorrow she'll call back and make me apologize.

"Do you understand me, John?" I ask him.

"Yes. You are a wild crazy lunatic," he tells me.

I remember being in elementary school in the winter when the snow would

pile up past my knees. Jolie would walk in front of me and break through the

snow, and I would step easily into the holes her boots made. If I wanted, I

could even run behind her, in her footprints with ease. She would clear a path

for me like that the whole way to school.

"I'm able to be," I tell him.