Many of those solemn declarations that she made were about being perfect for our parents.
“We have to be better in every way than other children would normally be for their parents, Semantha. We’re a famous family here. We have a real history, a rich heritage. Few families do. There is no official royalty in America as there is in countries like England, but there is in the minds of Americans. What that means,” she quickly added, because she could see I didn’t understand her—she claimed my face was so easy to read that it could have a library card—“is that people still look way up to certain other people, people with a history like ours, and think of them as something special. We truly are something special, so you can’t be ordinary. It’s absolutely forbidden for any of us Heavenstones to be ordinary,” she emphasized, which was Cassie’s Second Commandment.
“We have to say double the clever things other children would say. We have to make our parents laugh twice as much as other parents laugh. We have to give our parents twice as much love, too, especially our daddy, who has been handed down all this grand heritage.”
“I give them all my love,” I said.
“It’s not enough. You’re not enough, I’m not enough, as we are. We must … rise to the occasion. We must be like angels, so much like angels that Mother will swear she sees wings on us both. Daddy already sees them on me, as you know, and that’s not by accident.” She paused and turned to me as if she had just remembered she was speaking to me and not to herself. I would swear that the way she held her shoulders when she said that actually made me think I did see wings on her, too. “Are you listening?”
I nodded emphatically, but the more Cass
ie talked about being more than perfect for our parents, the more worried about failure I became. How can I be twice as much as I was? I wondered. I didn’t doubt that maybe Cassie could. She was so intelligent and clever and read far beyond what girls her age would or could read. She was far more mature than her classmates, too. However, I knew that her teachers weren’t all fond of that. Some complained that she was racing through her childhood too quickly. She should play more, enjoy more, they said.
“Cassie is Cassie,” Daddy would reply, as if that explained everything.
Sometimes, however, I thought Mother was really becoming more and more unhappy about Cassie, rather than taking double pleasure in her. Ironically, Cassie had a personality that resembled our mother’s more than mine did, and I was sure Mother saw things in her and about her that she didn’t necessarily like in or about herself.
For one thing, Cassie was too quick to see and point out weaknesses and flaws in other people, and once she rendered a judgement about someone, she couldn’t be moved from it, even, as Daddy might say, with a bulldozer. I sensed he actually liked that about her. “Too many women are flighty,” he said. “Their minds are tied too tightly to their erratic emotions and go from high notes to low notes like some out-of-tune piano.”
But Cassie was so particular, especially about her classmates, that she had no real friends, just casual acquaintances she tolerated. She wasn’t just a snob. She was “a snob’s snob.”
Although Daddy didn’t come right out and say it, I was sure he thought Mother was a snob, too. Mother didn’t belong to any clubs or organizations, and whenever Daddy asked her why not, she always answered with a complaint about the other women. “They gossip too much,” or, “They are obsessed with the wrong priorities.” They were too materialistic or simple. She also said many of them were “vague.”
What did she mean by that? I asked Cassie. Cassie would never refuse to answer a question. She liked being asked, and she liked my listening to her. She would widen her eyes and put her face so close to mine, I could see the tiny specks of green in her eyes. I was jealous of those specks. They were Mother’s specks.
“When Mother looks at these vague women, she doesn’t see anyone. They are so vapid and empty she looks right through them. They simply don’t exist.”
I shook my head. It made no sense. How could they not exist? They were standing right there in front of Mother, weren’t they? I pointed that out and said, “They eat and talk and walk.”
“So do insects,” Cassie said. “That’s what they are, merely insects.”
Like Mother, she had a way of pursing her lips after she was critical of someone or something. It was as if they both decided that they would say no more on the subject, not that they didn’t have more to say. They just didn’t want to waste another breath, and as Daddy would say, “When those two get that way, you can’t pry an additional word out of them with a crowbar.”
Both Cassie and Mother were very efficient. From the moment she rose in the morning to the moment she went to sleep, Mother had something to do. She hated wasting time, which was another reason she had so few friends. She told us that most of the women she knew loved wasting time, spending hours and hours at lunch, sipping coffee, pecking at their food like birds, and then shopping even if they had nothing for which to shop.
“Leisure,” Mother would say, “has not given these women opportunities to do something significant with their lives. On the contrary, it has taken those opportunities away. They are no longer important to their families, especially their children. They have nannies when the children are young and, of course, maids and cooks to clean and prepare the meals. They make sure their children are fully occupied with piano lessons or dancing lessons, and if they need help with schoolwork, they hire tutors. They don’t realize it, but they’ve replaced themselves.
“But perhaps they’re too selfish to care,” she concluded after thinking about her own words for a moment. “Their homes are simply … private hotels.”
Consequently, despite the size of our home, we had no maids or cooks, and neither Cassie nor I had a tutor. Even if Daddy complained mildly about my average grades, he couldn’t deny that I had the best tutor possible already with us: Cassie, who in my mind knew as much as, if not more than, my teachers did. Before Mother would agree to either piano or dancing lessons, we had to demonstrate to her that we wanted them very much ourselves first. Cassie didn’t want them, but I did. All of my friends were having lessons.
“I don’t know why you practice the piano and go to dance class, Semantha,” Cassie told me. “You’ll never be a pianist, and you’ll never dance in a professional show. It’s a waste of precious time.”
I didn’t reply. I tried not to contradict Cassie, but even my silence was defiant to her. She’d go, “Well? Well? Well?” until I had to say, “I guess you’re right.”
I did eventually stop taking my lessons. Neither Daddy nor Mother tried to get me to change my mind, especially when Cassie pointed out to them that I might better spend my time trying to improve my grades. The extra time didn’t make much difference, however.
Somehow, even though she had no piano or dance lessons, Cassie was always very busy. She loved organizing, whether it was her own clothing, groceries in the kitchen pantry, or Daddy’s magazines and newspapers. She inspected our house every day, looking for something out of place or some reason to rearrange things. For this, Daddy or Mother always paid her great compliments. They were both very proud of her.
Cassie was, of course, an excellent student. She just didn’t do anything else at school, because nothing else was really worth the time or more important than helping Mother look after the house and Daddy. As far as I could tell, that meant boyfriends and school dances weren’t important to her, either, whereas I couldn’t wait for them. It puzzled me that she could be so disinterested in these things. Although we were sisters, we were so unalike.
Someone merely had to look from her room to mine to see the vast differences between us. My clothes were often not hung up or put away neatly. I had papers, magazines, and dolls scattered like the end-of-fall leaves everywhere. Often, I’d forget and leave the remains of something I had eaten on the plate for a day or two, and I never made my bed as well as Cassie made hers. Mine always looked slept in, while hers looked unused. Our bathrooms were the same way. Mine had towels unfolded, often on the floor, the soap streaking the sink, shampoo bottles open and leaking in the shower, or washcloths crumpled on the vanity table. My mirror usually had spots on it because I stood too close to it when I brushed my teeth vigorously.
Across the hall in her suite, Cassie’s bathroom looked as if it had just been built and had yet to be used. Everything sparkled, and Mother never looked in on it without declaring how spic-and-span it was, loudly enough for me to hear, even through a closed door.
Once, when I was much older and thinking back on all of this, I decided that I was the way I had been simply because I didn’t want to be at all like Cassie. I deliberately did things that were opposite to what she did. It was important to me that everyone saw and knew that I was her sister, yes, but we were as unalike as any two unrelated strangers, and I wanted people to see that.
To her credit, Cassie didn’t try to make me into a carbon copy of her. I think she was happy that there were so many differences between us. She didn’t want to share a compliment or any praise, especially from Daddy, but, more important, she didn’t want anyone to believe that what she had accomplished and what she could do was so easy that even someone like me could accomplish it or do it. I sensed how little she respected me for who I was.