Sisterland

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Dan and I kept going out after he left for Grinnell, until the spring of my sophomore year, when I was wooed by a classmate named Tom Mueller. Tom was better-looking than Dan, and a proud Republican; once after he used the term “welfare queen,” he and Vi got in a fight that culminated in her throwing a Lucite salt shaker from our kitchen table at his head.

  Although I had, unbeknownst to myself, become a serial monogamist—for almost a decade, until after my mother died, I wasn’t without a boyfriend for more than a couple weeks at a time—I hadn’t totally succeeded, back in high school, in going from Witch to Girlfriend. In our junior year, Vi, Marisa, and I all ended up in the same English class. The teacher was Mr. Caldwell, who was in his mid-thirties and had blond hair, a blond beard, and flushed cheeks that became even pinker when he spoke about the genius of Melville and Faulkner. He had a PhD from Yale, which made it a feather in the cap of Kirkwood High that he was there; after earning his doctorate, he’d moved to St. Louis because his wife was a native who wanted to come home. Everyone loved Mr. Caldwell, and many girls had crushes on him, though I found his unusually rounded hips and buttocks womanly. But I did think he was a great teacher, and the force of his personality, his enthusiasm for American and British literature, made his the one class I was in with Marisa during high school that was tolerable; Mr. Caldwell made Marisa irrelevant.

  And then, in January of our junior year, Mr. Caldwell came down with the flu and a substitute teacher showed up. She took attendance by calling out our last names, and when she got to Shramm, I raised my hand and said, “Here.”

  She looked again at the list. “There are two Shramms. You’re which one?”

  “No,” Marisa said immediately. “She’s Witch Two.”

  The class broke into laughter; Vi gave Marisa the finger; I sat in my chair facing forward, not turning my head. There was then, for weeks, a resurgence of our identity as the witches, and once when I got excused from chemistry to use the bathroom, I passed a popular freshman boy named Kevin Chansky in the otherwise empty hallway. He smirked and said, “Hey, Two,” and I whirled around. Perhaps this was the last straw because Kevin was younger than I was or because he was sure enough of himself to taunt me with no one watching. In any case, I grabbed the back of his sweater, pulling him toward me, and said, “Don’t ever talk to me again, you piece of shit.” He looked terrified, which was gratifying, but I was shaking as I continued down the hall. I wasn’t so sure I’d done the right thing—in Kevin’s retelling, I might seem weirder than I was already thought to be—but when I described the incident to Vi, she gave me a high five.

  I wondered sometimes what my boyfriends made of the rumors surrounding Vi and me. To Dan, I think they seemed like freshman silliness. He once said, “You’re not really psychic, are you?” and I said, “No,” and he said, “Too bad, because I was hoping you could tell me if I’ll get into Northwestern.” (In fact, I did know—he wouldn’t.) I always felt that my reputation preceded me, that every time I talked to someone I hadn’t talked to before, every time I drew any attention to myself, which I did only when I couldn’t avoid it—I would participate in class if it was required but under no circumstances would I have made an announcement at assembly—I was proving one thing: Look how normal I am. Look how not creepy.

  I earned B’s in high school, was accepted in the spring of my senior year by four colleges, including the University of Missouri—Mizzou—and introduced myself as Kate when I arrived on campus in the fall of 1993. Daisy had always seemed like someone else, someone fanciful and lighthearted. But, as with my decision to date Dan Edwards, my reasoning also reflected calculation. Other people from my high school attended Mizzou, and though I could, with a student body of over thirty thousand, mostly avoid them, I didn’t want to take chances. If someone I knew from St. Louis told someone else at the university, “Did you know Daisy Shramm is a witch?” I wanted the other person to say not “She is?” but “Who?” For no particular reason, I majored in political science. I also joined a sorority and spent forty minutes a day climbing to nowhere on a StairMaster in the gym.

  Vi had gone out to Reed College, in Portland, Oregon; she and my father had flown west the same day my mother and I made the two-hour drive from our house in Kirkwood to Columbia, Missouri. But Vi did not last long at Reed, and I’ve wondered if her departure from the school was the first in the series of events that propelled her not toward a degree, not toward the kind of steady career she was certainly smart enough for, but instead onto the fringes of society. Or maybe she was already headed that way all along.

  Marisa Mazarelli stayed in town for college, going to Saint Louis University, which was a Jesuit school downtown. I didn’t attend high school reunions or informal get-togethers held by our classmates, so I didn’t see her for more than fifteen years following our graduation. I heard that her father had moved out a few months after we finished high school; for years, he’d been having an affair with a waitress at one of his restaurants. After college, Janie Spriggs told me that Marisa was engaged, and then that the wedding had been called off, but I didn’t know if the decision had been made by her or her fiancé, or even who her fiancé was.

  Brynn Zansmyer, the girl whose name had come to me that night at the slumber party when Marisa asked the Ouija board which of us would be the first to die, was killed in a hiking accident in California in August 1998, when she was twenty-four; she tripped on a narrow path on a cliff and fell a hundred and twenty feet into a ravine. I didn’t go to Brynn’s funeral, but she was the first person I knew to die young, and I felt—I shouldn’t have, but I did—shocked by her death. So consumed had I been by the other events of that slumber party and their aftermath that I had never again considered the information I’d received about Brynn until nine years later. I wondered then: Should I have warned her? Would she have thought me insane, or would the rumors of my demonic powers have made my claims plausible? Even if she’d believed me, though, what would I have said? Vi and I hadn’t been raised in any church, and my understanding of concepts such as fate and destiny was decidedly murky, influenced by Back to the Future as much as anything else. But what was clear, what had always been clear, was that I was not powerful. Thus I could feel guilty, and deeply sad for Brynn, without the conviction that I could have changed the outcome of her life.

  Brynn had had large brown eyes and very long hair that in elementary school she’d worn with bangs and a middle part. On either side of her part she wore what we called friendship barrettes—little metal clips into which we wove two colors of skinny ribbon. We all made these, but Brynn’s collection was the most extensive. She also had a pet rabbit, Marshmallow, whom we had the opportunity to hold at her eighth-birthday party, in second grade. In middle school, she turned suddenly pretty, which I suppose was why Marisa had tapped her to be in her coterie. About a month after my showdown with Marisa, following a PE class in which Ms. McKee had had us do push-ups on the pavement outside—this was one of the last days of eighth grade—we were changing clothes in the locker room, and Brynn said with concern, “Daisy, your leg is bleeding.” I looked down to see a two-inch cut below my left knee. “I have a Band-Aid,” Brynn said. But instead of passing it to me, she ripped the wrapper herself, pulled off the tabs, and knelt to apply the Band-Aid to my skin; the gesture was both sweet and weirdly intimate. As she stood, she said, “When you get home, you should have your mom put Neosporin on it.” This was something I thought of after Brynn died. We were, after all, in eighth grade and certainly old enough to apply our own antibiotic, but apparently she lived in a house where her mother still did such things. Later I was glad for this—for all the indications that poor pretty Brynn, with her barrettes and her rabbit and the little pink zippered vinyl case in which she’d kept Band-Aids, had during her short life been well-loved.

  Chapter 6

  For the second night in a row, I had trouble falling back to sleep after Owen’s two A.M. nursing; I was determined not to think about Vi’s earthquake predic
tion, which was soon indistinguishable from thinking about it. The real question was whether I’d be cheating, breaking the pact I’d made with myself when Rosie was a baby, if I tried to figure out if Vi was right. Was I even capable of figuring it out at this point? And if I did, if I invited senses to come back in this way, then what? Hadn’t I learned that I couldn’t just glean one useful tidbit, then slam the door on everything else?

  So no. No, I would not attempt to find out whether there would be an earthquake. But what was permissible—because wouldn’t any other mother do the same?—was to think through a strategy for if an earthquake happened. I imagined being in the yard with Owen and Rosie, the blue sky and sharp sun and the dry, curled leaves blowing off the trees. And then, from nowhere, would come the shaking, the power of the land asserting itself. I would press my children to the ground and cover them with my body. Inside our house, dishes would slip from cabinets and lamps would tip over; I didn’t want this, of course, but to sweep up broken glass would be manageable. Or maybe it would be worse: Trees would fall and roads would buckle. Or in the most terrible version, if the earthquake was as strong as the New Madrid ones centuries earlier, houses would crumble, cars fly skyward. If Rosie and Owen and I were in the house, on the first floor, we’d climb under the dining room table, and on the second floor, we’d—I wasn’t sure. Get in the tub, or the closet Jeremy and I shared? Lie down in our bed again? I needed to look up online what was safest.

  Or, I wondered, should we just leave St. Louis altogether? But for how long and where would we go and what would happen to Vi and my father? Jeremy would never agree to canceling his classes. If staying meant certain death, then of course I wanted to leave, but if staying merely meant being temporarily inconvenienced, then I wanted to stay. Unlike a hurricane, an earthquake, even a bad one, wouldn’t last long.

  And after it was over, we’d pick ourselves up. Maybe we’d be completely unscathed, or maybe there’d be several days of inconvenience and atypical neighborly chumminess while the electricity was out and tree trunks blocked the street, or maybe it would be the beginning of real, sustained chaos, society as we knew it breaking down. But wasn’t this ludicrous to consider? An earthquake in St. Louis, even a devastating one, would be significant for only a tiny portion of the American population; it wasn’t going to render the dollar worthless or lead to pillaging.

  I just had to keep Owen and Rosie safe during the shaking, I thought; if I could do that, we’d all be fine. With this resolved, I fell asleep.

  “I had a revelation this morning in the parking lot of Schnucks,” I told Hank as we stood together at the edge of the Oak Knoll playground later that day. Amelia and Rosie were running back and forth across the bridge that connected the towers on the larger of the two play structures, and Owen perched in a baby carrier on my chest. He was facing out and I could feel him watching the girls as raptly as if they were finalists in a tennis tournament. “I want a minivan,” I said.

  Hank snorted, but not meanly.

  “Will you go with me to a dealership to do reconnaissance?” I said. “Not right away, but maybe after all the earthquake stuff? I feel like I need to have the facts in order to make my case to Jeremy.”

  “Jeremy’s too cool for a minivan?”

  “What would you do if Courtney said she wanted one?”

  Hank grinned. “As if I haven’t been emasculated enough with our his-and-hers Priuses.”

  I said, “When we were at the grocery store, I’d just put Owen and Rosie into their car seats and Rosie was screaming her head off because I hadn’t let her get a cookie—I mean, it wasn’t even nine A.M.—and I was cramming the groceries into the trunk, but they didn’t all fit because the double stroller was back there.” Another reason they hadn’t all fit in my sedan was that I’d bought six gallons of water, along with batteries and extra diapers, which I planned to store in the basement; in addition, I’d withdrawn three hundred dollars from the ATM, not that it was clear to me what I’d do, in an emergency, with the money. I said, “I had to put bags in the front seat next to me, and then that sensor thing on the dashboard thought a person was sitting there who wasn’t wearing a seat belt and kept dinging. And as I pull out of the parking lot, I pass this woman loading up her minivan all placidly, and there’s room for everything, and she has two children in car seats, too, but they’re both very calm.”

  “You know a minivan doesn’t guarantee that Rosie won’t scream for cookies, right?”

  “Also, we could all go places in one car,” I said. “Like if you and I wanted to take the girls to Grant’s Farm, we wouldn’t need to drive separately.” Before Owen’s birth, Hank and I would drive together, but neither Hank’s car nor mine could fit three car seats. I said, “Is the dealership you guys used last time the one out in Hazelwood?”

  “Yeah, but what if they’re so persuasive that I come away with a minivan, too?” Hank said. “Then what? You’ll have a lot to explain to Courtney. Here’s what I really want to know, though. When the seat-belt sensor was going off, did you buckle up your bag of bread and milk?”

  “If we’d been driving more than half a mile, I would have, because it was so annoying. But no.” Amelia had moved to the center of the bridge, its lowest point, and she began jumping in a way that made the bridge shake; Rosie clung to the metal railing and shrieked with joy. I said, “I let the bread and milk live dangerously.”

  As soon as Owen and Rosie were down for their naps on Friday afternoon, I began making my father’s birthday cake, and I’d just set the pan inside the oven when the phone rang. Seeing that it was Vi, I said, “Did you figure out when the earthquake will be?”

  “Daze, you’ll be the first to know if I do. But Jesus, you need to relax.”

  “You’re the one who went on TV warning people about a life-threatening natural disaster.”

  “Well, I don’t think your time is up. Do you?”

  “I hope not.”

  “I was calling to ask if you got Dad a present yet, and can I go in on it?”

  “You can, but it won’t seem like it’s from you. We got him a Wash U sweatshirt and a picture of Rosie and Owen in a frame that says WE LOVE GRANDPA.”

  “You always have to make me look bad.”

  “Give him an IOU for a fun activity, like you’ll take him out for brunch.”

  “That’s what you give your dad when you’re twelve.”

  “Then do what you want.” But do not, I thought, ask me to pick you up right now and drive you to the mall.

  “Jeremy’s coming to get me at five-fifteen, right?” Vi said. “You think we could swing by the Galleria and I’ll run into Brookstone for literally three minutes?”

  Which is the same amount of time it would have taken you to order something online two weeks ago, I thought. Aloud, I said, “That won’t work because Jeremy’s picking up Dad, too. I’m sure Dad doesn’t care if you give him a present. He probably won’t even notice.”

  “So says the good daughter with multiple gifts.”

  “You can put your name on our card,” I said.

  “Yeah, and maybe I can Photoshop my face into the picture of Owen and Rosie.”

  “So did Dad have fun on your date?”

  “Very funny. He didn’t come inside. The woman was okay but kind of intense.”

  “So are you.”

  “Yeah, but I hadn’t even finished my coffee when she’s like, ‘I’d like to see you again. How about dinner on Saturday?’ I said I needed to check my calendar, but don’t you think that’s weird not to wait until the end of the date? Or she could have sent an email after.”

  “It’s flattering,” I said. “She must like you.”

  “Well, I am irresistible.” Vi sighed. “You really don’t think an IOU for Dad is lame?”

  “You could make it for something he’d never do on his own, like getting massages together at a spa.”

  “Dad would hate a massage,” Vi said, which was probably true.

  I’d set Owen
and Rosie’s monitors side by side on the kitchen table, and just then, from Owen’s, there was an unhappy yell.

  “Wow,” Vi said. “I guess the pleasure of your teats has been requested.”

  The phone rang again as I was changing Owen’s diaper, and I answered it without looking at the caller ID panel; I assumed it was Vi.

  Instead, Hank said in a tight voice, “So Courtney just got a call from her doctor about the CVS, and it looks like the baby has Down’s.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “I’m so sorry.” Was I’m so sorry even an appropriate response? “Is there anything we can do?”

  “Courtney’s coming home from work now, and she’s pretty upset.”

  “They think the baby has Down’s or they know?”

  “Well, we meet with a genetics counselor next week, but if there’s an extra chromosome 21, that’s Down’s. I guess the question then is how severe.”

  I thought of Janie Spriggs’s brother—You’re twins because there’s two of you—and I wanted to say something to Hank about how sweet Pete had been, but again, I wasn’t sure of the protocol of this moment; maybe mentioning that I’d known a nice retarded person was akin to announcing that some of my best friends were black. “How about if we drop off dinner tonight?” I said.

  “Nah, I’m sure you’ve got your hands full with your dad’s thing.” Hank sounded miserable as he said, “Tell him happy birthday from the Wheelings.”

  When I’d hung up, I called Jeremy.

  “Wow,” he said. “Poor Hank and Courtney.”

  “You don’t want to come home early, do you?”

  He hesitated. I was asking because Hank’s call had made my heart clench—it was a particular kind of nervousness I thought of as anxious heart—and because Jeremy’s presence in the house calmed me, even if he was upstairs reading or grading and I was downstairs with the children, and these were facts that both of us understood without discussion. When Rosie had been five months old, she’d gotten very sick—she’d been in the hospital for three days—and sometimes, even though more than two years had passed, the panic I’d felt then abruptly came back to me, the nauseous fear that something terrible was happening or about to happen; if anything, now that we had Owen, when the panic surged, it was worse because there were two of them and (Pete Spriggs’s proclamations notwithstanding) only one of me. What Jeremy and I also didn’t need to discuss right then was his belief that he ought not to accommodate my every flare-up of anxiety, a belief I mostly agreed with, though more in theory than at specific times such as this one. Nevertheless, knowing he’d be home in a few hours and that in fact nothing about Rosie or Owen’s well-being had changed since Hank’s phone call, or for that matter since Vi’s earthquake prediction, I made myself say, “It’s fine if you can’t.”