Sisterland

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Astonishingly, this pattern continued every weeknight for the next six years, until we left for college, by which point we’d long ago forgotten how odd it was that our mother spent each afternoon in bed and that Vi and I pretended—to ourselves, I think, as much as to our father—that she’d cooked dinner when she hadn’t. Vi and I rotated among three dishes: the broiled chicken breasts of the first night, creamed chicken breasts, and orange juice pork chops. These other two recipes were also ones that had been our mother’s staples and were located in her tin box. Our sides were always—and I truly mean always, 100 percent of the time—the iceberg salad with ranch dressing and either the rice or baked potatoes. On Friday nights, we ordered pizza; on Saturday nights, our father grilled steak; and on Sundays, our father took us without our mother—ironically enough, so that she could rest—to either Hacienda for Mexican food or King Doh for pot stickers and General Tso’s chicken. (Our mother didn’t care for what she referred to as un-American food.) At some point when Vi and I were at school, usually on Monday or Tuesday, our mother went to the grocery store, an act that, in retrospect, seems to me to deepen her complicity in the unspoken pact to deceive our father. In high school, after Vi joined the tech crew for school plays our freshman year, I’d cook dinner alone for weeks at a time while she was at rehearsal.

  Once, shortly after Jeremy and I moved in together, I decided to make him the orange juice pork chops. As they baked, I opened the oven door, and the hot, meaty, orangey smell assaulted me, the smell of my adolescence, of my parents’ house, of my mother’s depression that we never called depression. I wanted to turn off the heat and dump the chops in the trash, but to do so would have been melodramatic. Instead, I let them finish cooking and served them on beige plates. When Jeremy and I were seated at the high little table we used before we had children, I cut a small piece with my knife and fork, speared it, put it in my mouth, and began to cry. “Sweetheart?” he said. It took me a while to explain, and after I had, he picked up both our plates and set them in the sink, saying, “We’ll never eat pork chops again.”

  “It’s not all pork chops,” I said. “Just this recipe.”

  “Life’s too short.” He reached into the pocket of his pants and jingled his keys. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go get sushi.”

  Surprising as the invitation to Marisa Mazarelli’s slumber party was, I did understand its genesis, and that genesis was fraudulent. Two weeks earlier, in a performance conceived of, choreographed, and directed by Vi, she and I had lip-synched and danced to Billy Joel’s “You May Be Right” in the Nipher Middle School talent show. Because I had so little to do with the act’s creation, I feel that I can say without bragging that we brought down the house. The song started with the sound of glass breaking, then the ramping up of the electric guitar, then Billy, as Vi and I called him, singing in his bravado-filled way about crashing a party. Per Vi’s vision, she was dressed as a fifties greaser, in penny loafers and white socks, jeans rolled at the cuff, and a white T-shirt; her hair was slicked back, and she wore mirrored aviator sunglasses. I, meanwhile, was supposed to channel Marilyn-Monroe-over-the-grate, except that instead of relying on a subway, I was responsible for swishing my own skirt; I wore a white halter dress of our mother’s from the seventies, and fake-leather white high heels, also our mother’s, with socks stuffed in the toes, and I’d applied heavy makeup and used a curling iron to create ringlets. The real coup of our performance was that Vi had convinced our science teacher, Mr. Dummerston, to let us use his motorcycle as a prop; he himself was waiting in the wings with us before we went onstage so he could help wheel it out, and as soon as the lights went up and the students saw the motorcycle—he was the only teacher who drove one, and it was immediately recognizable because of its yellow frame—they began to scream. Then there was that thrilling sound of breaking glass and Vi strutting around the stage, fearlessly inhabiting her greaser persona: getting down on her knees and gesticulating forcefully with her arms, pleading with me to give her a chance; being wounded by my rejection, stalking away, then returning to plead some more. All I had to do was dance in place, shake my head dismissively, wag my index finger, and bat my eyelashes like I was conceited, which, of course, the more I could feel the enthusiasm of our audience, the more I really was. Every time the chorus came on, Vi and I would seek each other out and dance together, waving our arms, nodding our heads from side to side, linking hands and stepping forward then backward, in exactly the way we’d practiced night after night for the last two months.

  A feedback loop occurred wherein I was aware of the audience’s perception of us shifting from I never really noticed the Shramms before to They sure look like they’re having fun to Oh, I wish I were a twin! And it was true—we were having fun, being a twin was a great thing—and having an audience for the greatness only made it truer. To receive adulation just for being ourselves, albeit our costumed and choreographed selves, was both disorienting and miraculous.

  When the song was over, we got the only standing ovation of the night. The next person to go on was a seventh-grade boy performing a magic act, and a minute in, as he was fumbling with playing cards, a good-looking soccer player named Jason Trachsel yelled, “Bring back the twins!”

  After the talent show’s conclusion, there were cookies and juice and mayhem as the teachers chaperoning tried to get the students to fold chairs before all the kids dispersed to their own or one another’s houses. Vi and I were going home; our father would be waiting outside in his Buick to pick us up. I’d put on a sweatshirt over my mother’s halter dress but was still wearing my heavy makeup, which made me feel glamorous as Vi and I were mobbed by classmates and even teachers wanting to congratulate us. And the fraudulence first dawned on me as I accepted these congratulations: It wasn’t just that Vi and I got equal credit for a performance that had been in almost every way her idea. Rather, I received more credit for the sole reason that I had played the girl and she’d played the guy.

  Marisa Mazarelli, whom I hardly ever talked to, shoved aside two seventh-grade girls who’d approached to examine my curled hair and high heels. “That was awesome,” she said.

  I smiled. “Thanks.”

  She gestured toward Vi, who was standing a few feet away talking to Janie Spriggs, and said, “I never realized before tonight that you’re the pretty twin.”

  There were, I see now, insults for both Vi and me embedded in this comment, but I was so caught off guard that all I could say, in genuine confusion, was “But we’re identical.”

  Marisa shook her head. “Barely.” Twelve days later, she called to invite me to her birthday party.

  As I discovered, a hot tub was the least of the Mazarelli family’s treasures. A vast, lushly carpeted basement rec room also contained an enormous television set opposite a three-sided brown leather sectional sofa, ping-pong and pool tables, a player piano, a jukebox, a pinball machine, a gumball machine, and a dartboard whose bull’s-eye was the tomato icon of Mazarelli’s Pizza. Fourteen guests including me were in attendance, and the slumber party started with a pre-dinner staking out of sleeping bag locations (I hadn’t expected to land the prime real estate near Marisa herself and therefore wasn’t troubled that I didn’t) and proceeded with Mazarelli’s pizza for dinner, the boxes carried out with a kind of showy fake humility by Marisa’s father; a sundae bar set up along the Mazarellis’ dining room table; the ceremonial unwrapping of presents; a ten-P.M. dip in the hot tub, which entailed much shrieking and the revelation that Marisa wore a yellow string bikini; a post-hot-tub viewing of The Exorcist (I spent large chunks of it with my eyes closed, reconstructing in my mind the plot of the first Back to the Future); and finally the time at which some girls started falling asleep just as others caught their second wind. There was talk of prank-calling boys, but instead Marisa brought down from the living room the Ouija board she’d been given a few hours before by Abby Balmer.

  I was on my way to my sleeping bag after using the bathroom adjacent to Marisa
’s bedroom—of course Marisa had her own bathroom—when I paused by a handful of girls who’d clustered around the Ouija board. They sat on the floor next to the pool table, and soon I found myself sitting, too. Marisa was cross-legged on one side of the board and Abby was on the other, their fingertips not quite meeting on the planchette, which was made of plastic and shaped like an upside-down heart with a circular window near the top. I didn’t know what question they’d asked before my arrival, but I watched as the planchette slid over the letters O-N, followed by a chorus of squeals. Although I’d heard of Ouija boards, I’d never seen one. But I knew immediately that they were using it wrong—they were forcing the letters, picking them, instead of allowing the letters to be picked.

  “Ask it Jason Davis or Jason Trachsel,” said a girl named Beth Wheatley, and Marisa gave her a withering look.

  “Obviously, it’s Jason Trachsel,” she said. Who likes me? That must have been the question Marisa had asked the board. Jason Trachsel was the agreed-upon best-looking boy in our class—his mom was Korean and his dad was white, which meant he was the only Asian person in the eighth grade, and he was already expected to make the varsity soccer team the following year as a freshman at Kirkwood High School—while Jason Davis was a quiet boy with a center part. “Does he want to kiss me?” Marisa asked.

  At the top of the board, flanked by a menacing sun and a gloomy moon, and separated from each other by a skeleton head with wings and devil horns, were the words yes and no. As we waited, yes appeared beneath the planchette’s window in Gothic script.

  “Does he want to go all the way with me?” Marisa asked.

  Yes.

  She glanced around at us and said merrily, “Not that I would.”

  “Does he have wet dreams about Marisa?” cried out Debby Geegan. Neither of my parents had ever initiated a birds-and-bees conversation with Vi and me, and Debby was the person who in fourth grade had explained to us the meaning of the line “They keep their boyfriends warm at night” from the song “California Girls.”

  Yes, the board told us, and all the girls exclaimed with disgust and delight. But I wasn’t caught up in the excitement. I felt distracted by whatever it was—the energy—that had been summoned by the Ouija board; the girls had invited the energy in, and their invitation had been accepted.

  “When will he try to kiss me?” Marisa asked.

  V-E-D-R-Y, the board spelled out. As Marisa and Abby’s hands kept moving, Beth Wheatley said, “Does that mean Wednesday?”

  “Shh!” Marisa said.

  S-O-O-N.

  “Oh,” Beth said. “It just misspelled it.”

  “Beth.” Marisa had lifted her head to look at Beth directly. “Shut up.” Beside me, I felt Beth flinch.

  “Ask if anyone likes me,” said Debby.

  “Nobody cares if anyone likes you,” Marisa said. She smiled. “Who here tonight will be the first person to die?” As the other girls gasped, I did it without deciding—my hand shot out, stilling the planchette.

  “No,” I said. “Don’t.”

  “Because you think it’s you?” Marisa said.

  It wasn’t me. It was Brynn Zansmyer, who at that moment lay on the far side of the rec room in her sleeping bag. She wouldn’t die immediately, but it wouldn’t be in such a long time, either. The energy, the presence, told me this without using words.

  “Because it’s sad,” I said. Marisa and Abby wouldn’t have come up with Brynn’s name except by coincidence. That was the irony, that they believed they wanted to know the answers to their questions, but they weren’t listening.

  “Fine,” Marisa said. “Then how about this: Is it true that Violet Shramm gave Mike Dornheiss a blow job behind the cafeteria?”

  Right away, and not because of the presence, I knew. But a blow job? I thought. An actual blow job? And Mike Dornheiss? Mike was pale and red-haired and freckly and on the seventh-grade field trip to the Daniel Boone Home in Defiance, Missouri, on the bus ride out, he had been sitting across the aisle from Vi and me and had lifted his backpack from the floor by his feet, unzipped it, vomited inside, then zipped it up. And besides all that, why hadn’t Vi told me? I was myself completely sexually inexperienced, which had the effect of causing me to withhold judgment—a blow job wasn’t much more foreign or hypothetical than a kiss.

  “I’m going to bed,” I said.

  “Me, too.” Beth stood as I did, and Marisa said, “You guys are lame.”

  I had made a mistake in sitting down by the Ouija board, but my bigger mistake had been attending the slumber party in the first place. Marisa was, as Vi had warned me, a rich bitch, though mostly just a bitch. Standing in the rec room, at what had somehow become almost four in the morning, I wished I were at home and that I’d spent the evening lying on our living room floor with Vi, watching Rob Lowe bite into an apple. Gesturing toward the board, I said, “You should be careful with that.”

  “You’re scared of it, aren’t you?” Marisa said.

  “Ask if I should quit violin,” Debby said.

  Marisa looked at me. “You are scared. Your sister is a penis licker and you’re a scaredy-cat.”

  “Here’s a question,” I said. “Is Marisa’s dad having an affair?” As in the moment when I’d set my hand on the planchette, it didn’t feel like I’d decided to blurt this out before doing so.

  Very quickly, Marisa overturned the entire board. “Fuck you, Daisy,” she said. She seemed to be biting back tears, which I had never seen her do and which made me feel panicked rather than triumphant. Then she said, “Fuck all of you.” She stood, whirled around, and stomped up the basement stairs, leaving us hostessless.

  Beth, Abby, Debby, and I hardly spoke after Marisa’s departure; we retreated to our sleeping bags, but none of us had shut off the rec room lights, and I could feel their brightness when I closed my eyes. I lay there for more than an hour, listening to the breathing of the girls around me, wanting to undo this last section of time—why had I stopped on my way back from the bathroom?—and then I climbed out of my sleeping bag and went upstairs. Marisa’s room was at the front of the second floor. Her bedroom door was closed, and I opened it quietly. She was asleep in a double bed, lying on her back with her mouth open, and I saw how even Marisa Mazarelli was vulnerable. This was what I knew but sometimes forgot: the vulnerability everyone shared.

  I tapped her foot, and she startled.

  “I’m sorry for the question I asked,” I said. It didn’t occur to me that she might apologize in return, and she didn’t. I had ruined her birthday party, whereas she had merely been her usual self. I added, “I really liked the sundaes.”

  “I’m sleeping,” she said.

  “I don’t think you guys were using the board right anyway,” I said. “That means the questions don’t count.” Not that the final question, my question, had even been answered.

  “Get out, Daisy,” she said.

  “Vi and I have ESP,” I said into the dark room, and it would be impossible to overstate how desperate this disclosure was. Though our parents had never explicitly cautioned us against discussing our senses, they hadn’t needed to. But I was thirteen years old, it was getting light outside, I still hadn’t slept, and Marisa terrified me. The worst part was that my announcement worked. Right away, I could tell that Marisa became alert.

  “If you want to know stuff, about Jason or whatever, I could help you,” I said. “Usually I just know things because I dream them, but I could try using the Ouija board. We could use it together.”

  When Marisa finally spoke, she sounded neither mean nor excited but only curious. “Is the ESP because you’re twins?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “And that’s how you knew about my dad?”

  “We don’t have to talk about it.” I had felt his affair when Mr. Mazarelli came downstairs carrying the pizza boxes while Mrs. Mazarelli hovered nearby with a camera and they didn’t interact. The skin on Mr. Mazarelli’s face was ruddy, and he had a smug, unself-co
nscious grin, and he wore a gold pinkie ring. The affair was inside his grin.

  “Does Jason like me?” Marisa asked.

  I tried to feel the answer, to let it float toward me like seaweed in a calm incoming tide. But the information wasn’t as close as it had been when we were sitting around the Ouija board; the presence wasn’t in Marisa’s room. Nevertheless, I heard myself say, “I’m sure he likes you. Doesn’t every guy in our class?”

  It seemed I’d responded wisely. She shifted a little with pleasure. Then, in a darker tone, she said, “Are my parents getting a divorce?”

  Foamily, the tide slid in and out. “That’s hard to say.”

  She had started to doubt me, I could tell, and I wasn’t surprised when she asked, “What’s something about me that no one else knows?”

  This was too easy. “You cheated on the math quiz last week,” I said. “You copied the answers off Dave Stutz.”

  She laughed. Then she patted the mattress. “You can sleep up here if you want,” she said, and gratefully, I climbed over her, into the empty space.

  For a brief time, I became Marisa Mazarelli’s best friend. It was five weeks total, from the middle of April to the end of May. Before, I had walked home from school each day with Vi; now I would trot alongside Marisa as she rode a blue ten-speed with white handlebars to her house. Instead of eating melted cheese on Triscuits, we’d drink Diet Coke, which we carried to the rec room for our Ouija sessions. Usually but not always, the presence from before was there when we used the board, and it guided our hands. When the presence wasn’t there, I was just guessing, though sometimes Marisa was clearly pushing the planchette, and I never stopped her. At almost five each afternoon, I would depart from her house, which left me just enough time to make dinner with Vi before our father arrived home.

  Marisa’s family wasn’t around in the afternoons. Her father was working, her mother played tennis, and her older brother, Todd, was away at the University of Kansas. Based on what I could discern from photos and passing remarks, Todd appeared to be merely normal, even a glasses wearer, and not a member of the superspecies to which Marisa belonged.