The Sisters Montclair by Cathy Holton

was suffused by a delicate shame.
    She might not have married Bill. Her life could have taken a different track altogether. In her youth she had conjured this incessantly, this shadowy other-life that could have been hers, imagining a life free of duty and restraint, but with its own achievements and pitfalls. Yet who’s to say this other life would have been any different? Who’s to say that, regardless of the path she took, she wouldn’t wind up learning the same thing about herself? That caution and duty were what she would always choose to build her life on, what she would always come back to.
    And now the girl was talking, she could hear the tinkling lilt of her voice, and turning her head, Alice caught the tail end of what she’d said. It was faint and muffled, like talking underwater, and Alice could barely make it out. Already the memory of the man she’d loved was fading, was gone. The girl was smiling, her lip ring glinting beneath the overhead lights and her black hair falling around her familiar face. There was a bitter taste in Alice’s mouth. She felt a growing sense of alarm. The girl had awakened something in her; Alice could feel it low and rumbling.
    She felt a shift, a sudden dislodging, and a surge of memories like a rockslide, came tumbling down around her, crushing her with their weight.
    Charlie Gaskins had a stutter and so Alice’s mother would not let her throw rocks at him. Alice would be standing at the edge of her yard down near the river and Charlie would come out and start lobbing stones over the fence and mewling like a cat. If she retaliated, he would go inside and call to his mother, and she would go next door and complain to Mother.
    “Shame on you,” Mrs. Gaskins would hiss at Alice as she walked by. “Shame on you, a big girl like you, picking on an afflicted child.”
    Alice wanted to shout, “Shame on your afflicted child for throwing stones at me,” but she would clamp her mouth shut and keep quiet.
    And later when she went to Marymount Academy for Girls with Charlie’s twin sister, Adele, it was the same thing. Mrs. Gaskins could not bear for the other girls to be mean to Adele, even though Adele spoke perfectly well and had no need of parental protection. The result of all of this was that Adele and Charlie grew up as mean as snakes. No one wanted to play with them.
    It was Adele who first came up with the Sugar and Spice Parties. None of the other girls wanted to go to Adele’s parties and so Mrs. Gaskins would get on the phone and call around to their mothers, and at the appointed time, the cars would pull up in front of the Gaskins house and out would step girls with big bows in their hair, walking dejectedly toward the Gaskins front door.
    If Mrs. Gaskins was present, Adele would be catty to the other girls, and would have temper tantrums if she lost at games. But when Mrs. Gaskins left the room, Alice would walk up and stick her fist in Adele’s face and say, “We don’t like you. We’re only here because our mothers made us comes.” Alice was the only one who could make Adele cry.
    When Alice was a senior in high school and had long out-grown Sugar and Spice Parties, Adele was still having her mother call around to make sure her invited guests showed up. At one particular party in October of 1932, Alice brought her sister, Laura. It was a Cat Rat Party; the senior girls were Cats and had been assigned to care for a freshman sister, known as a Rat. Alice had insisted that she be assigned to Laura because she knew she was the only one who could handle her. Laura wasn’t like other girls.
    And because she knew this, and because the other girls knew it too, Alice was apprehensive this particular evening, feeling herself to be outgunned and outmaneuvered. She stood at the edge of the grand room with its mullioned windows overlooking the river, searching for Laura who had slipped away not long after they arrived. A crowd of senior girls and their Rats were dancing to