Sisterland

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  I had figured out on my own, by watching him during an assembly, that Jason Trachsel was not actively interested in Marisa. But he was persuadable, and Marisa and I spent many hours consulting the Ouija board about his preferences. Perfume, yes. Smoothly shaved legs, yes. Tank tops and big boobs, which meant Marisa had more going for her in the former category than the latter; she looked good in her string bikini, but she wasn’t spilling out of it. Another of Jason’s likes was when girls had sweat above their upper lips, which surprised us. He thought girls’ periods were disgusting and that girls who played video games were cool, and this was how Marisa eventually lured him and Brad Wennerle over one afternoon. We kept the Ouija board hidden, and the four of us played Super Mario Bros., and after an hour Marisa and Jason went up to her bedroom. She had shaved her legs that morning and was wearing perfume and a tank top. Brad and I switched from Super Mario Bros. to pool. I felt mildly hopeful and mostly fearful that he would try to kiss me, but he seemed more interested in poking the stucco ceiling with his pool cue and causing tiny particles of paint to rain down on us. The longer this activity went on, the less I experienced of either hope or fear. Putting a stop to the ceiling poking felt like my responsibility, as if I were babysitting, but I wasn’t sure what to say to Brad. He went home before Marisa and Jason reappeared, and then it got to be five o’clock, six after five, ten after five, and I climbed the two staircases to the second floor and stood outside the closed door of Marisa’s bedroom. I was considering knocking when I heard Jason say, “What if I only use one finger?” I turned and fled.

  This was three weeks into my best-friendship with Marisa, and she had, as was to be expected, less time for me once she and Jason became a couple. On the days Jason didn’t show up, we still used the Ouija board; on the days he and Brad or someone else came over, we didn’t speak of it. The second time a boy named Alex Cooke accompanied Jason to Marisa’s, he kissed me during a commercial for a local car dealership, while we sat together on the sectional sofa. Then we continued watching Divorce Court, then he kissed me again during the next commercial. Alex was decently cute, and I couldn’t wait to tell Marisa about this development—I was thinking about telling her even while I was kissing Alex—but once again, it got to be five and she and Jason were still in her room and I had to leave.

  That night at nine forty-five, after Vi and I were in bed with the light out, the phone rang, and I leapt for it. Unlike some of our classmates, Vi and I didn’t have our own line.

  “Does Jason love me yet?” I heard Marisa ask.

  In the dark, Vi was watching me from her bed. “I’m not supposed to be on the phone right now,” I said, which wasn’t true. Our parents weren’t strict; strictness would have required more energy than our mother could or would exert, and our father deferred to her. To Marisa, I said, “But let’s ask the board tomorrow.”

  She was pushing the planchette toward yes, and I let her. But Jason hadn’t come over that day, and Marisa was clearly in a bad mood. There had been only one Diet Coke left in the refrigerator, and she’d said, sighing, “You can have it,” and I’d said, “Oh, that’s okay,” and she’d said, “Good,” popped the tab off, and taken a long swallow. She could have offered to split it, I thought. (I drank Diet Coke—way too much of it—for the next eighteen years. I quit only when I got pregnant with Rosie, which is to say that perhaps all that aspartame was Marisa Mazarelli’s true legacy in my life.)

  As we sat with the Ouija board between us, Marisa asked, “Does Jason think Abby is hot?”

  Yes, appeared beneath the planchette, but again, Marisa was pushing it.

  “I knew it,” she said. We both were quiet. Really, she’d already asked so many questions about Jason that there was little left to discover. Meanwhile, I rarely posed questions and I never posed ones about myself. This was only partly because I recognized that my role was to assist Marisa; it was also because I didn’t feel the urgent curiosity she did, except on her behalf. If anything, the future seemed overly knowable to me, pressing up against the present.

  Then Marisa found inspiration. “If he wasn’t going out with me, who would he go out with?”

  The planchette dipped downward and stopped on good bye.

  Marisa lifted the planchette, held it in front of her face, and said, “What’s wrong with you today?”

  “Do you love Jason?” I asked.

  She opened her mouth and released a huge, prolonged belch—a belch worthy of a smelly old man and therefore all the more delightful for its emergence from the mouth of a pretty fourteen-year-old girl. She said, “That’s what I think of love,” and we both laughed. “Let’s put on fake tanner,” she said.

  I still ate lunch with Vi, Janie Spriggs, and a few other girls we’d known since elementary school, and at our table the next day, Vi was talking about how cockroaches can survive decapitation—she claimed they died not from their heads being severed but from starving—and I thought of asking her to stop, but I was barely listening anyway. I was trying to figure out how to intercept Marisa in order to deliver the information that had waited for me as I’d awoken that morning.

  When Marisa stood from her table and dumped the remains of her lunch in the trash bin, I stood, too, hurrying. By the time I caught up with her, she was outside, walking with Debby Geegan and two other girls.

  “Marisa, I need to talk to you,” I said. “It’s important.”

  She turned to the other girls. “Wait here.”

  We walked toward the chain-link fence. “Jason is cheating on you.” I was so overwrought that I was on the verge of either smiling inappropriately or bursting into tears; presumably, Marisa’s reaction would help guide my own.

  Her eyes narrowed. Her voice was firm as she said, “No, he’s not.”

  I’d imagined that she might be upset or angry or perhaps even grateful to me. But I hadn’t anticipated that she’d simply deny what I was telling her. “Maybe you should ask him,” I said.

  “Maybe you should shut the fuck up,” she said, and she walked away.

  For the first time in more than four weeks, I didn’t go home with Marisa. At my own house, I was surprised to discover that Vi wasn’t there. Walking up Gilbert Street, I’d almost been able to taste the melted cheese on Triscuits, but when I found the kitchen empty, I lost interest. I poured ginger ale from a two-liter bottle into a glass, but the soda was flat and in any case a poor substitute for the dark magic of Diet Coke. I could hear my mother’s television, and I went into the living room and turned the TV set there to the same channel—the end of Santa Barbara. I hadn’t been watching for more than a few minutes when I was seized by the blazing obviousness of the situation. It did not require any extrasensory powers; in fact, it seemed that only willful blindness had prevented me from knowing until then.

  For twenty minutes, I peered out the living room window that faced the street, waiting for Vi, and when she walked into view, I hurried outside to meet her. “You have to stop,” I said.

  She grinned.

  “Vi, I’m serious.”

  “Why? It’s a free country.” This was a favorite expression of hers then. I looked at her and she did, I realized in that moment, fulfill all the criteria: She wore tank tops and perfume (the brand she liked was Primo!, which was supposed to smell like Giorgio but you could buy it at Walgreens for $7.50), and she shaved her legs and she had big boobs and her upper lip got sweaty. But the legs in question were pale white, not nearly as shapely as Marisa’s, and clad in pea green cargo shorts from the army-navy surplus store in Webster Groves; below the shorts she wore black Doc Martens without socks. And the big boobs were because, as if to justify our mother’s criticism, Vi was getting big overall. By that point, she weighed perhaps eighteen pounds more than I did, weight that seemed concentrated primarily in bras that were two cup sizes bigger than mine, and in her belly, the soft flesh of which was discernible beneath her shirt.

  I said, “If Marisa finds out, she’ll kill me. Or you.”

  “O
ooh!” Vi clapped her palms against both her cheeks and made her eyes big. “I’m terrified!”

  “You don’t know Marisa.”

  Vi looked at me. “What is it she has over you?”

  “And you don’t even like Jason,” I said. “Do you?”

  Vi shrugged. “He’s not my type, but he’s cute.”

  Vi had a type? We were only thirteen! Who had my sister become, and when? Lowering my voice, I said, “Did you give a blow job to Mike Dornheiss?”

  Vi laughed. “Did Marisa tell you that? Because it would explain things. Listen, Daisy. Jason came to me.”

  “So yes or no about Mike?”

  “No.” She looked indignant, and then she smiled. “I gave him a hand job.”

  For the second time that day, the first having been when I’d told Marisa that Jason was cheating on her, I felt as if I might cry. I said, “You’re going to get a reputation,” which was surely something I’d heard one person say to another in a movie.

  “Who cares?” Vi said. “Unlike you, I’m not trying to join Marisa’s little club.” All this time, we’d been standing on the sidewalk, and she turned toward the walkway that led to our front door. “Did you start dinner?”

  I shook my head and followed her inside.

  We made creamed chicken, and just after she’d set the pan in the oven, Vi turned to me. “Don’t flip out,” she said. “You promise?” Then she whispered, “I did give a blow job to Jason.” Her expression was half bashful and half proud. “We sixty-nined.”

  “Oh, Vi,” I said.

  Certainly Marisa might have believed I’d made up my abilities, that all along I’d been in cahoots with my sister. This was what I’d have preferred for Marisa to believe, but I already knew, even then, that my own preferences had little bearing on the outcome of events.

  I avoided her for the rest of that week, but apparently Jason did, too. On Monday afternoon, she marched to his house, entered via the unlocked front door, walked up to the second floor, found his room—she had never been to the Trachsels’ before—and discovered him straddling my sister in his bed, leaning in to lick her ample boobs. “We had our shorts on,” Vi told me later, as if this fact restored all dignity to the encounter.

  On Tuesday, as Marisa and I and a few dozen other girls were changing before PE, she yelled, “Hey, Daisy!” When I looked over my shoulder, I saw that she already had on her PE clothes and was standing by the sinks, about fifteen feet away. All the conversations that had been occurring ceased at once, and I could feel, before she said anything else, that it was going to be bad. And Vi wasn’t in school that day; she was faking sick, and I was alone. I forced myself to turn in Marisa’s direction.

  “How’s your ESP today?” she called out.

  My heart slammed against my rib cage. The presence from the Ouija sessions—it was here, too, in the locker room. It was egging Marisa on, even if she wasn’t aware of it. And then I understood, as I never had before, that it was a malevolent presence. Did we think we could simply ask it question after question and give nothing back? No. It wanted something from us in return.

  “Did you guys know that Daisy is psychic?” Marisa’s tone as she looked around the locker room was filled with a brutal cheer. “And Violet, too,” she continued. “Although I wonder if Violet’s so busy being a slut that she doesn’t have time to predict the future.”

  There was a shift in the air, a dawning comprehension on the part of the other girls. This was a takedown. Which was probably what they’d suspected, but the way Marisa had started had been confusing to them.

  “They talk to the devil,” Marisa said. Except for a dripping faucet, the locker room was silent. “That’s who tells them things.”

  Later, it felt like I should have offered an explanation, stating facts to our audience: We’ve been using a Ouija board Marisa got for her birthday, but now she’s mad because she found out she and Vi both have been hooking up with Jason Trachsel. But I said nothing, and Marisa added, “Daisy and Violet are devil-worshipping witches, and if you don’t watch out, they’ll put a spell on you.”

  From out in the gym, I heard the sound of Ms. McKee’s whistle summoning us. In the locker room, the girls remained quiet. What was it that the presence wanted? And then I thought that maybe Marisa was right; maybe it was the devil. If I never asked it anything else, would it leave me alone? “We’re not witches,” I finally said, and my voice was small.

  Marisa walked toward me, and I braced myself, as if for a punch. Instead, she leaned in close to my face, brought her hands up, clenched them, and popped them open as she shouted, “Abracadabra! Ooga booga!” Laughter erupted as she kept walking.

  I turned back to my locker, and I remained facing its metal door for more than a minute. The other girls began murmuring, then they began talking at a normal volume, and then they, too, walked into the gym. When I turned around again, only a handful were left, conversing as if I weren’t there.

  That weekend, my mother dropped Vi and me off to spend the afternoon at the West County mall. In the food court, Vi went to buy a cheeseburger from McDonald’s while I got in line at Sbarro. I felt a tap on my shoulder, and a girl I had never seen, a girl who didn’t go to our school, said, “Are you one of the witches?” Her voice was mostly bright, almost friendly, but with a filigree of cruelty probably attributable to the fact that she was accompanied by three other girls. Variations on this interaction played out for Vi and me for the rest of eighth grade and all through high school.

  On the last day of middle school, the eighth graders went to Six Flags, and that evening there was a pool party at Mandy Jurenka’s house that I didn’t go to; all that summer, I hid at home. One day in July, a letter arrived for me in the mail, my name in all caps on the envelope, as if to disguise the handwriting—as if I wouldn’t know immediately who it was from. Inside was an unlined piece of paper with ten words on it: You are a FREAK and you are going to HELL!

  When Vi returned before dinner from watching a movie at Janie Spriggs’s house, I was lying on my bed looking at the paper. I immediately set it to one side, and she grabbed for it, held it up, and snorted. “I should put a spell on her,” she said. Whatever had been going on between Vi and Jason was long finished, and when we’d run into Beth Wheatley one Sunday at King Doh—she was with her family, and Vi and I were with our father—she’d mentioned that Jason was going out with Marisa again. I later heard that Jason told people that when Vi had lain on top of him, he’d felt like he was being smashed, but this may have been a rumor circulated by Marisa because it didn’t sound to me like what a boy would say.

  I doubted our parents had any inkling of what had transpired that spring—they were even more socially isolated than Vi and I were—but one evening shortly after I received the freak letter, on another night when Vi was at Janie’s, my father knocked on the open door of our bedroom. He said, “I thought I’d get an ice-cream cone. Would you like to come?”

  My mother was watching TV in the living room as we left the house. Neither my father nor I said a word during the eight-minute walk downtown, and we spoke little as we waited in line at Velvet Freeze, then placed our orders; he asked for chocolate and I asked for peppermint with rainbow sprinkles. When we had our cones, we went back outside, and after we’d found an empty bench, my father said, in a mild way, “I didn’t much care for junior high. I hadn’t had my growth spurt yet, and kids that age can be cruel.”

  I kept licking my ice cream and said nothing, and my father didn’t speak again, either. He finished his cone first, then I finished mine, then he said, “Shall we?” and we walked back home, also in silence.

  In my first month of ninth grade, at Kirkwood High, a senior boy named Dan Edwards approached me in the hall and said, “You’re Daisy, right?”

  I tensed, waiting for the inevitable.

  He said, “Some of us are going bowling on Friday, and you should come.”

  I blinked.

  “I can pick you up at your house,” h
e added.

  He was medium height and skinny, with a narrow head and moderately bad skin. He was on the fringes of the popular crowd in the senior class, which was how I knew his name—he was thought by guys to be very funny, though his was a Monty Python and Blues Brothers brand of humor that I never exactly got. Dan did, however, turn out to possess a private kindness not commonly associated with allegedly funny high school boys.

  Standing by the lockers that afternoon, I said, “I live on Gilbert Street near the train tracks,” and I experienced an unexpected surge of optimism, as if I were a trapeze artist letting go of one swing and lunging hopefully toward the next. Might it be possible for me to transform myself from an unacceptable high school type—a freak—into an acceptable type: a freshman girl dating a senior boy? And surely this was no colder a calculation than the one made by Dan. Not being all that attractive, his best bet for landing a girlfriend was the well-established method of using his senior status to pursue somebody younger.

  In late December of my freshman year, after Dan and I had been going out for three months, we lost our virginity to each other in his single bed, under tan-and-white-striped sheets, while his parents were driving his grandmother back to Rolla after Christmas. If the sex didn’t hurt as much as I’d feared, I also wouldn’t characterize it as pleasurable, possibly because we were using not one but two condoms. But Dan’s gratitude and nervousness made me feel very tender toward him. The next day, he gave me a thin gold necklace with a pendant of peridot—my birthstone, though I’d never known it—and a card that read, Dear Daisy, I care about you a lot. Love, Dan. The sweetness of these words was almost—almost—a counterbalance to You are a FREAK and you are going to HELL! Also, the fact that Dan couldn’t bring himself to write I love you, even though clearly he wanted to, was a relief because I didn’t think I loved him back.