Allison Bradley                                                                                                                               

TANGO

Everything had gone according to plan, except that her husband’s body was far too heavy for her to lift into the dumpster she’d chosen. It was the usual predicament for my sister Lola—her sense of ambition always outshone her ability to execute.  

Lola had been running into similar dilemmas, albeit on a smaller scale, since we we’d been kids. One summer, she got tired of her leg cast (fell off the roof trying to actually play a fiddle) and attempted to melt it off with a hose. Another time she ran afoul of some earnest park rangers when she tried to send smoke signals to a cute boy a few campgrounds down from us, ended up torching our parents’ tent. I convinced them she’d saved us from a pack of rabid skunks.

But this time was different. This time the law that came calling had handcuffs and weapons and Miranda rights. This was going to be a tough one for me to untangle. 

Usually, it went like this: Lola concocts grand plan, I tell her bad idea, Lola ignores me because I’m younger and more boring, Lola almost pulls it off but then blows it somehow, and I step in to fix it all up. 

It’s like a hypnotizing sibling tango—a repeating pattern of relationship dynamics punctuated by impromptu twists and turns. I can’t say I hate it. Being the lead, maintaining the poise, is probably the origin story of my self-esteem and, occasionally, it needs some reinforcement. 

“Remember when you renamed our family meetings the Business Operations Committee?” Lola once prompted me. “Talk about Mom and Dad’s idea backfiring on them.” 

“Well, I thought reframing might give those meetings more structure,” I said. 

“Yeah, but you were in, like, the fourth grade.”

She had a point. Our parents’ constant fretting about our second-hand clothes and bad grammar spilled over to me. They were always on us about trying to blend in, and sometimes I took it even further than they did. Not Lola, though. She’d roll her eyes at every correction, every nudge toward conformity. I started trying to control her very early in life.

But this thing with her husband Patrick. When she called me from jail, I couldn’t imagine what could have gone so wrong there. Especially since Patrick was kind of a dud, an unprovoking guy who really was no match for her. 

She’d been standing over his body in the parking lot behind their condo complex. Patrick was zipped up in a camouflage sleeping bag, head and all, and she’d been calmly contemplating her next move like an old man staring at a chess board in the park. The police had been tipped off by an unhoused gentleman whom Lola had managed to piss off. He’d seen her struggling to heave the sleeping bag up to the dumpster and offered to help for 20 bucks.  

According to the man, Lola looked him up and down, paused for a couple seconds, and then said, “I’m not comfortable giving you cash but I will gladly buy you some groceries.” 

“Oh, real nice coming someone who’s trying to get rid of a body,” he answered. He was so annoyed that he flagged down the first cop car he saw and pointed them straight at her. Lola never even saw them coming, she was so busy staggering around, maneuvering the sleeping bag first from the center, then from each end, trying to remember to lift with her legs.

“I wasn’t trying to murder him,” she told the police as Patrick started to squirm around in the sleeping bag. “He just needed to be taught a lesson.” 

“Lady,” one of the cops said with a dip of his chin and raise of his eyebrows. 

“Honestly,” she said. “I figured if he woke up in a sleeping bag, in a dumpster, he might think twice next time about cheating at Monopoly. I mean, you can appreciate this, right? He steals from the bank,” she said. 

Now, I’m not defending what she did to Patrick, but I have to agree that stealing from the bank in Monopoly is pretty shitty. In that game the money is everything and stealing puts everyone else at a really unfortunate disadvantage. 

I can imagine the cop being nearly convinced to let her go. Lola believes in herself, and it’s infectious. She has this way pulling her full eyebrows inward when she’s explaining something. It makes her look serious, but then she flashes a full, mischievous smile. She’s also tall, with long auburn hair and green eyes, so she has that going for her. We actually looked a lot alike. Except I got the family pimples.

#

There's a personality thread that runs through us, too—a quickness to prickle at any number of injustices. It’s a bond we discovered when our parents enrolled us as the non-fanciest kids at a fancy private school. We never would have gone there if we weren’t given scholarships, which made our parents proud. But then they were even more paranoid about how we’d be seen by the rest of the world, which made me not want to go.

Lola, however, was over the moon. She was eleven and I was eight.

“Claire, we’re now officially poster children, ‘Working class kids who are good at math’,” she proclaimed with her hand arching left to right, as if to show me the headline over two forlorn but studious-looking versions of ourselves. “You know what that means, right? It means we make them look generous and clever, and then we pretty much get to do whatever we want.” 

Once we got to the new school, I was terrified of not pleasing every adult in the entire place. Lola and I were constantly at odds about it. 

“Loosen up,” she once said. “It’s our job to teach these other kids how to have some fun.” 

“Not everyone thinks it’s funny to use morning announcement time to suggest their P.E. teacher consider wearing shirts long enough to cover his beer belly,” I told her. 

“Um, now, there’s where you’re wrong,” she said. “You are the only person who didn’t laugh at that.” 

I started pretending not to know her at school. She acted like she didn’t notice, but I know she did, and I know it hurt her, because she let me do it.

My eyebrows still pull inward a little when I remember how carefully I pushed her off to the side in my desperation to fit in.

And then there was this one Monday—I remember because Mondays were my days to erase the marker boards during morning recess. My normally hyperactive conscience went on sabbatical when I spotted a package of Twizzlers in the half-open drawer of my teacher’s big wood desk. Our parents had some sort of emotional allergy to red dye number 3, plus there wasn’t usually extra money for candy, so the little kid part of my brain saw how easy it would be to grab those Twizzlers, eat every last one in 20 seconds flat, and toss the empty package into the little wicker waste basket that sat next to the desk..

Tossing the evidence into the trash can was a rookie move, though. “You’ve got no game,” Lola would later say. “It's really sad.” 

So, I was caught. Nabbed by the teacher before we even got to post-recess roll call and sent to the principal’s office.

The school office was part lounge and part institutional workspace, two equal forces in step toward the same goal: a space for leather sofas and flower vases to give the place some personality, and on the other side of a high counter, a row of staff cubicles and small machines for solving problems and keeping the place running.

Lola had been given “a position” in the office for part of each morning, helping out the office staff who, wink wink, then had a way of keeping an eye on her. On that day, I glimpsed her in my periphery filing some papers in a metal cabinet, took one look at her shoes—one sneaker and one flip flop—and found myself longing for her unique spirit to rescue me. 

I was a blubbering mess before they even got me to Principal Banks. Trembling from the fear of losing my free tuition, an easy mark. So he decided to beat me down a bit more: How could he have expected anything more? Was I also the one who’d taken all the ketchup packets from the cafeteria? Stole Mr. Freeman’s thermos last week? Likely so.

“Hang on there, boss man,” Lola interrupted, barging in through the open door from the secretary’s cubicle. “Let’s not drag in every other petty crime at this stiff little dorkfest you call a school. We’re not thieves. Besides, that thermos hadn’t been washed since 1978. It’s way beneath either of us.” 

“You will leave this room at once,” Banks said. “Your sister. Took. Twizzlers.” He was exasperated, like Superman having been exposed to Kryptonite.  

Lola paused uncharacteristically for a couple of beats. Stuttered a couple of failed beginnings, along the lines of “OK...yeah...but.” It was looking like this might be tougher than I thought.

 Finally, she folded her arms across her chest, tilted her head to one side, and held forth.

“A nine-year-old kid saw a shiny package of red candy and in a small slip of what has been excellent character at this school, she ate it. Right. Call the frickin FBI. We’ve got a real case on our hands. If I were you, I'd kick her out of school.”

She paused to let that set in.

“Oh, but hang on,” she continued. “People might think you’re one those lame adults who picks on little kids. One of your top scholarship kids, too. You sure you want to keep badgering her, Skippy?” 

Holy shit, I thought. Thank god for Lola’s authority issues.  

I got off the hook with a one-day suspension for stealing. Lola was suspended for a week for being disrespectful. 

The injustice of her punishment and Lola’s protectiveness of me that day tipped the scales of our relationship back into balance. Interestingly, I also became a Marxist. For all of fifth grade, I carried around, in the outside pocket of my backpack so everyone could see, a copy of The Communist Manifesto. My indignation over the Twizzler scandal had sparked a minor but meaningful sense of outrage at the bourgeoisie. 

“The who-sie?” Lola would ask every time I trotted out my new words.

“The privileged,” I clarified.

She sighed. “You gotta stop talking like that. Someday you’re going to want a social life.”  

#

I was thinking about my Communism-curious days as I sped toward the county jail to spring Lola. So, Monopoly, yes. And cheating, yes. This was just the type of tune that Lola and I could dance to. I hadn’t figured out what to say to the keepers of the county jail yet, but my brain was working as I drove across town, through intersections and past strip malls, thwarted by traffic roundabouts and irritated by every other car on our small town’s new four-lane roads. Lola and I strategized over the phone—tried to, anyway— while I drove.                                  

“No, no, no,” she said. “You don’t have to come here. Go to the hospital and get Patrick, will you? And maybe while you’re there, um, you know, smooth things over a little?” 

Rescuing Lola—that I could handle. Facing Patrick? That made me twitch down to the undersides of my toenails. He was her husband, not mine. But I found myself thinking, what if I did have a husband some day? Would I dispatch of him as easily for, say, not taking out the trash?

So I dodged the question. “I’m in a little traffic but I should be there in 10.”   

A recorded operator’s voice broke through: You have two minutes remaining on your call from the Monte Vista County Jail.  

“Hang on, hot shot,” Lola shouted at the recording. “So, anyway, I need you to work some of your magic with Patrick. It’s not like he’s pressing charges.” 

Her voice was very faint. “Lola, are you OK? Are you there?” I asked, concerned. 

“I am here!” She was yelling, but I could barely hear her through my phone.   

“Wait a sec!” I yelled back. “My Bluetooth disconnected.”  

“Just go get Patrick, will you?” she shouted.  

I fiddled around with icons and touchscreens and finally got her reconnected.  

“Anyway, Patrick’s fine. I mean, of course he’s fine,” she said. “I would never do anything to hurt him. Little Xanax nap is all. Just talk him down from the ledge.”

“Is he on a ledge? Have you heard from him?” I was stopped at another red light, a few intersections from the jail, still trying to figure out how we even got to this point. Starting to wonder if it was about time I trusted myself and stopped leaning on Lola.

“You’re my only phone call, so no. But come on, where else would he be besides a ledge?” she asked.

You have one minute remaining on your call from the Monte Vista County Jail. 

“What would I even say? ‘You shouldn’t have cheated at Monopoly’?” I thought she would find this absurd. She took it further.

“Give him the old ‘capitalism is rigged enough already’ speech. Remember? From when we got popped selling fake VIP seats to high school football games?”  

I wanted to believe in her. This was turning out to be one of our more cinematic moments, and as usual, I was unable to resist the urge to find out what might happen next.

“So anyway, let me know when the coast is clear with Patrick and I’ll get myself home,” Lola said.

I was silent. 

“Are you there?” she yelled in the phone. “Is this another Bluetooth problem?”

“Just get yourself home and we’ll meet you there.”

#

Like I said, my self-worth always benefited from those clean-up moments with Lola, so I stuck to the usual moves and pulled into the nearest gas station to make a U-turn. Then headed away from the jail, toward the hospital.

The Emergency Room was about what I would have expected for a Saturday afternoon – half-full with miscellaneous feverish types, someone holding an ice pack on an ankle propped up on the row of connected metal chairs, two older people chatting over vending machine Cheez-Its. Patrick sat off in a corner, staring out the window and looking weirdly well groomed. He may even have just combed his hair because I never would have guessed that he’d recently been stuffed into a sleeping bag.

“Hey,” I said on approach, as if it wasn’t at all strange that we were greeting each other in the ER, that his wife was nowhere to be seen, and that what just happened to him wasn’t completely bizarre.

“No Lola?” he asked, a bit of blankness in his eyes.

“She’s, um, wrapping up her, um, situation.”

From the seat next to him, he grabbed his phone and a brown bag full of snacks. Apparently, Patrick wasn’t the only thing Lola had packed into the sleeping bag. He started walking toward the door, silent. I could tell he was either very angry, very sad, or both.

In the back of my mind, the music was fainter than ever.

We got to the car, started the drive to their condo, and ­Patrick began to talk. I think he expected me to hold up my end of the conversation, but I could barely manage.

“It’s too much, you know? She went too far this time.”

“I know.”

“She got lucky because no one was hurt. Unless you count our relationship. But if she keeps this up...” He seemed to lose his train of thought.

“I know.”

“And you. You've gotta stop covering for...” He was like a radio signal distorting on a mountain road. I tried to focus on driving.

The two miles across surface streets to their condo felt longer than a cross-country trip on a Greyhound bus. When we finally parked the car—I took great pains to pull into the side of the property away from the dumpsters—my plan was to walk in with Patrick, get eyes on Lola to be sure she didn’t end up with some jailhouse tattoo, and dismiss myself from their relationship issues.

I opened the front door. Lola was just standing there in the living room looking empty and confused. Not a smirk or a bounce or a hint of confidence to be found. Like a holograph who lost her way. The game board, the little silver cannon and top hat pieces, and all the multi-colored bills had been tossed around the room. Patrick was waiting.

“You shouldn’t have cheated at Monopoly,” was all we could think of to say.

 #

(END)

Allison Bradley lives and writes in Sacramento, CA.