The aunts didn’t worry in the least about Gillian’s reputation. They never once thought to give her a curfew or a good talking to. When Sally got her license she used the station wagon to pick up groceries and haul trash to the dump, but as soon as Gillian could drive she took the car every Saturday night and she didn’t come home until dawn. The aunts heard Gillian sneak in the front door; they found beer bottles hidden in the glove compartment of the Ford. Girls would be girls, was the way the aunts figured it, which was especially true for an Owens. The only advice the aunts offered was that a baby was easier to prevent than to raise, and even Gillian, as foolhardy as she was, could see the truth in that.
It was Sally the aunts brooded about. Sally, who cooked nutritious dinners every night and washed up afterward, who did the marketing on Tuesdays and hung the laundry out on Thursdays, so the sheets and the towels would smell fresh and sweet. The aunts tried to encourage her not to be so good. Goodness, in their opinion, was not a virtue but merely spinelessness and fear disguised as humility. The aunts believed there were more important things to worry about than dust bunnies under the beds or fallen leaves piling up on the porch. Owens women ignored convention; they were headstrong and willful, and meant to be that way. Those cousins who married had always insisted on keeping their own name, and their daughters were Owenses as well. Gillian and Sally’s mother, Regina, had been especially difficult to control. The aunts blinked back tears whenever they thought about how Regina would walk along the porch railing in her stocking feet on evenings when she drank a little too much whiskey, her arms out for balance. She may have been foolish, but Regina knew how to have fun, an ability the Owens women were proud of. Gillian had inherited her mother’s wild streak, but Sally wouldn’t have known a good time if it sat up and bit her.
“Go out,” the aunts urged on Saturday nights, when Sally was curled up on the couch with a library book. “Have fun,” they suggested, in their small, scratchy voices that could scare the snails out of their garden but couldn’t get Sally off the couch.
The aunts tried to help Sally become more social. They began to collect young gentlemen the way other old ladies collected stray cats. They placed ads in college newspapers and telephoned fraternity houses. Every Sunday they held garden parties with cold beef sandwiches and bottles of dark beer, but Sally just sat on a metal chair, her legs crossed, her mind elsewhere. The aunts bought her tubes of rose-colored lipstick and bath salts from Spain. They mail-ordered party dresses and lace slips and soft suede boots, but Sally gave it all to Gillian, who could put these gifts to use, and she went on reading books on Saturday nights, just as she did the laundry on Thursdays.
This is not to say that Sally didn’t try her best to fall in love. She was thoughtful and deep, with amazing powers of concentration, and for a while she accepted offers to go to the movies and dances and take walks around the pond down at the park. Boys who dated Sally in high school were astounded by how long she could concentrate on a single kiss, and they couldn’t help but wonder just what else she might be capable of. Twenty years later, many of them were still thinking of her when they shouldn’t, but she had never cared for a single one and could never even remember their names. She wouldn’t go out with the same boy twice, because in her opinion that wouldn’t be fair, and she believed in things like fairness back then, even in matters as strange and unusual as love.
Watching Gillian go through half the town made Sally wonder if perhaps she had only granite in the place where her heart should have been. But by the time the sisters were out of high school, it became clear that although Gillian could fall in love, she couldn’t stay there for more than two weeks. Sally began to think they were equally cursed, and given their background and their upbringing, it really was no surprise that the sisters should have such bad luck. The aunts, after all, still kept photographs on their bureaus of the young men they had once loved, brothers who’d had too much pride to take shelter during a stormy picnic. The boys had been struck down by lightning on the town green, which was where they were now buried, beneath a smooth, round stone where mourning doves gathered at dawn and at dusk. Each August, lightning was drawn there again, and lovers dared each other to run across the green whenever black storm clouds appeared. Gillian’s boyfriends were the only ones lovesick enough to take the risk of being struck, and two of them had found themselves in the hospital after their runs across the green, their hair forever standing on end, their eyes open wide from that time onward, even while they slept.
When Gillian was eighteen she stayed in love for three months, long enough to decide to run off to Maryland and get married. She had to elope since the aunts had refused to give their blessing. In their estimation Gillian was young and stupid and would get herself pregnant in record time—all the prerequisites for a miserable and ordinary life. As it turned out, the aunts were right only about her stupidity and youth. Gillian didn’t have time to get pregnant—two weeks after the wedding, she left her husband for the mechanic who fixed their Toyota. It was the first of many marital disasters, but on the night she eloped anything seemed possible, even happiness. Sally helped to tie a line of white sheets together so that Gillian could escape. Sally considered her little sister greedy and selfish; Gillian thought of Sally as a prig and a prude, but they were still sisters, and now that they were about to be separated, they stood in front of the open window and hugged each other and cried, then vowed they would be apart for only a short while.
“I wish you were coming with us.” Gillian’s voice had been whispery, the way it was during thunderstorms.
“You don’t have to do this,” Sally had said. “If you’re not sure.”
“I’ve had it with the aunts. I want a real life. I want to go where nobody has ever heard of the Owenses.” Gillian was wearing a short white dress that she had to keep pulling down against her thighs. Instead of sobbing, she rummaged through her purse until she found a crumpled pack of cigarettes. Both sisters blinked when she lit the match. They stood in the dark and watched the orange glow of the cigarette each time Gillian inhaled, and Sally didn’t even bother to point out that hot ashes were falling onto the floor she had swept earlier that day.
“Promise me you won’t stay here,” Gillian said. “You’ll get all crumpled up like a piece of paper. You’ll ruin your life.”
Down in the yard, the boy Gillian was about to run off with was nervous. Gillian had been known to back out when it came time to commit; in fact, she was famous for it. This year alone, three college boys had each been convinced that he was the one Gillian meant to marry, and each had brought her a diamond ring. For a while Gillian wore three rings on a gold chain, but in the end she gave them all back, breaking hearts in Princeton, Providence, and Cambridge all in the very same week. The other students in her graduating class took bets on who her date would be for the senior prom, since she’d been accepting and breaking invitations from various suitors for months.
The boy in the yard, who would soon be Gillian’s first husband, began to toss stones up on the roof, and the echo sounded exactly like a hailstorm. The sisters threw their arms around each other; they felt as though fate was picking them up, rattling them around, then releasing them into completely alternate futures. It would be years before they’d see each other again. They’d be grown-up women by then, too old to whisper secrets or climb up to the roof in the middle of the night.