Sisterland

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “Do you have any food?” Vi asked.

  Though Heather and I were co-renting a mini-refrigerator, it contained only yogurt, which belonged to her, and vodka, which belonged to me and which Lauren and I mixed with raspberry Crystal Light and drank before parties; I’d considered asking Heather if the vodka bothered her, but I was afraid of the answer. Looking down at my watch, I saw that it was just after eleven. “We could go get pizza,” I said.

  Vi set her palms against my mattress and pushed herself off. “Sounds magnifique.” She walked over to a closet, the one that wasn’t mine, and opened it.

  “Here,” I said. From my own closet, I pulled out a fleece jacket and passed it to her. It was impossible not to notice that Vi’s weight, which had stabilized in high school, had climbed again since we’d started college, and her face and body contained a new puffiness. Vi and I weren’t beautiful—we had our father’s long, narrow nose—but we could certainly be pretty, because we also had our mother’s large blue eyes and light hair. And yet, with her dumpy ponytail and clothes, it almost seemed as if Vi were trying to look unattractive. It would have been mean to see her as a cautionary example, a warning of what would happen if I stopped climbing the StairMaster every day, but after our time apart, both our similarities and differences appeared more starkly to me than they ever had before. Her hand reaching for the doorknob as we left the room, cuffed by the red fleece of my jacket—it could have been my hand, there was a way in which it was my hand.

  Outside, as we turned onto College Avenue, I said, “What’s going on?”

  “I came here on the Greyhound, which did you know that’s called riding the dog? A guy who got on in Salt Lake City asked if he could put his head on my shoulder to sleep, and a guy who got on in Denver asked if I’d pierce his ear.”

  “You said no, right?”

  “He even had a cup of ice. But yes—I said no.”

  “You should have sat next to a woman.”

  “For some of the time, I did. I’ve been on the bus since Sunday night.”

  Which meant forty-eight hours before. I said, “I still don’t understand—”

  “My roommate, Lisa, is totally anorexic. She goes running twice a day, for like six miles each time, and she talks about food constantly and hoards candy—Starbursts and Jolly Ranchers—but she doesn’t eat it. And the other roommate, Wendy, she’s supposedly some kind of engineering genius, but she has no sense of humor and uses this disgusting deodorant that she sprays on for so long every morning, I can taste it in my mouth. There’s a lot of weirdos at Reed, but not cool weirdos. That’s what I thought it would be.”

  “But you’re planning to go back, right? Did you tell your professors you’d be missing class?”

  “The professors aren’t friendly, either. It’s just not my kind of place.”

  “Vi, you’ve barely been there a month.”

  “I want to take a gap year and travel, like everyone does in England.”

  Vi also had a work-study job—hers was in food service—but I knew without asking that she had no more money saved than I did, nor were our parents the kind to fund such activities.

  As we passed Rosemary Lane, she said, “So you’re happy as a clam here, huh? Mizzou is a dream come true?”

  Carefully, I said, “I like it overall.” I decided then to come clean on the other piece of information I’d concealed in my emails, besides my name change. I said, “I joined a sorority. I’m a Theta.”

  To my surprise, she said, “I thought I wanted to go somewhere without a Greek system, but now I can see the point of it, just for meeting people.”

  Was it possible Vi hadn’t made any friends at Reed? Perhaps her emails had been as selectively revealing as mine. I went to an anti-apartheid rally, she’d mentioned recently, which I’d interpreted as Vi having fun.

  “So who’s your boyfriend now that you and Tom are done?” she asked. I thought of Ben Murphy, with whom I’d made out after our ping-pong match, but I said, “Nobody.”

  “Wait a second.” Vi actually stopped walking. “You don’t have a boyfriend?”

  “It’s not that weird.”

  “I feel like there should be dogs falling from the sky and statues crying blood. Are you still talking to Tom?”

  “Not for a while.” We had reached University Avenue, and as we turned, I said, “How long are you planning to stay? No offense.”

  Vi laughed. “No offense, but I’ve never liked you. No offense, but your personality sucks.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I’m psyched to explore Columbia,” she said. “I probably should have come here to begin with.”

  Really? I thought. It was good to see Vi, but in the close quarters of college life, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to contain her, or prevent her familiarity with my old self from spilling into my new life. But because it was the way I wished I felt, I said, “Mi dorm room es su dorm room.”

  We ordered a twelve-inch pizza with sausage and green peppers, and while we waited for it, Vi said, “I knew as soon as I got out there that I’d made a mistake. I should never have gone to Reed without visiting. The whole vibe was just off. But I was like, okay, I’ll get through the semester, maybe even the first year, and then I’ll transfer. And at first I tried to be a good little student. Really. I was all diligent. But in classes, everyone just loved hearing themselves talk. The place is overrun with pretentious windbags. And the bathrooms in my dorm were coed, did I tell you that? I was like, wait, I’m really expected to take a shit with some dude’s hairy legs right next to me? I started walking over to this administrative building to poop.”

  “I bet you’ll get used to it,” I said.

  She shook her head. “That’s not the point. This is the part I have to tell you. I’m in the library a few nights ago, sitting in this carrel, and all of a sudden, there’s this crazy yellow light, this energy, and I’m inside it, and a voice is saying to me, ‘You’re not meant to suffer.’ Over and over: ‘You’re not meant to suffer, you’re not meant to suffer, you’re not meant to suffer.’ ”

  No, Vi, I thought. No, no, no. More than four years had passed since I’d felt the presence summoned by Marisa Mazarelli’s Ouija board. I said, “Had you done acid?”

  Vi looked annoyed. “This had nothing to do with drugs. It was a really beautiful experience. It was peaceful. I was inside the light, it was like being in a swimming pool except with light instead of water, and the voice says, ‘I am your guardian. You’re not meant to suffer.’ And I’m like, okay, well, what am I meant to do? And the voice says, ‘You’re on a journey of discovery.’ Then the light goes away, and I’m still sitting in the chair in the library, but I hadn’t imagined it. It was definitely real.”

  Across the booth, we looked at each other, and Vi’s expression was eager. I said, “Okay.” What I wouldn’t have given to be someone who could dismiss her story as utter nonsense.

  “I got on the bus the next day,” she said.

  “That seems like a really literal interpretation of a journey.”

  Seeming hurt, Vi said, “I don’t know why you can’t be supportive. It wasn’t scary at all, if that’s what you’re thinking. It was profound.”

  “Reed is a great school,” I said. “You were so excited to go there. Have you joined any groups?”

  “I’m telling you I had a transcendent experience and you’re saying I should try out for debate? I thought you would understand.”

  Of course I understood; even at her most impossible, Vi had never said or done anything I could not imagine saying or doing myself, if I had less self-control and respect for convention. But her tone was rubbing me the wrong way, and I said, “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  That night, she started out on the carpet, but by two o’clock, which was half an hour after we’d turned out the light, she’d climbed into bed beside me; she said the floor was hard. By two-thirty, I’d insisted that she flip so her head was by my feet, though once she’d done so, it
became clear that this setup was no better than being side by side. Around three-ten, she began scratching behind her knee, her nails scraping over the skin just a few inches from my face.

  I pressed my hand to her leg and whispered, so as not to awaken Heather, “Quit it.”

  “I think I might have picked up something on the bus,” Vi whispered back.

  “Great.” Before climbing into bed, she’d taken a shower, padding to and from the communal girls’ bathroom in my white terry-cloth robe and flip-flops, though I wasn’t sure if that meant Vi was clean or that my robe was now dirty.

  “Not like an STD,” Vi said. “Like a rash.”

  “Then you’ll only make it worse by scratching.”

  Vi sighed loudly—was Heather really sleeping through all of this?—and I turned onto my side, away from my sister. I knew the exact second she fell asleep; I could hear the change in her breathing. Almost right away, our conversation at the pizza place asserted itself in my brain. Would the yellow light overtake me, too, in this moment or later? I didn’t want it to. I wanted nothing to do with it. Vi had said the experience wasn’t scary, but what if it was the same energy that had been there when Marisa and I had used the Ouija board? It wasn’t that I necessarily believed in Satan, but I believed in the existence of darkness, which was perhaps the same thing. And back then, I also hadn’t immediately recognized that presence as bad.

  The next afternoon, when I returned from my economics lecture, Heather was away from the room and Vi was lying on my bed reading the Missourian, Mizzou’s student newspaper. “Someone named Ben Murphy called for someone named Kate.” Vi looked amused. “Isn’t Kate kind of bland?”

  “It is my middle name.” This was what I’d planned to say if someone from high school asked about the change, though so far I hadn’t ended up in a class with anybody from Kirkwood. That Vi was the first person for whom I needed to break out the excuse was deeply irritating.

  “First of all, your middle name is Kathleen,” Vi said. “But I just don’t see you as a Kate. What about Maya? That’s pretty.”

  “Then you be Maya.”

  “You don’t have to get all grouchy.” She set down the newspaper. “What do Mom and Dad think?”

  “I haven’t told them.” In fact, it surprised me that she assumed I had. Though St. Louis was only two hours from Columbia, and many of my classmates who were from the area went home on weekends, it seemed understood that I wouldn’t return to our house until Thanksgiving. “Call after five on Sundays because the rates are cheaper,” my mother had said on the drive to Mizzou, and when I did call collect each Sunday, I spoke to her for five minutes, at which point, as precisely as if she’d set an egg timer, she passed off the phone to my father. After I’d spoken to him for five minutes, I’d hear her in the background, saying, “Earl, that’s enough. She’ll call again next week.” During our conversations, my mother never asked questions. Instead, she told what might generously be called stories, many of which I already knew—that our neighbors the Pockneys had had to cut down the dogwood tree in their front yard because of a fungus, which would prompt her to recall the time their Jack Russell terrier, Eisenhower, had run away for three days, which would prompt her to say, as she often had in the past, that she didn’t think it was right to give a dog the name of a president. When I spoke to my father, he did ask about my life at Mizzou, but in a general way, as if I were the daughter of a friend. How were my classes? Was I enjoying the bustle of campus life? From week to week, he had no follow-up questions about the outcome of a particular paper I’d written or the craft project I’d planned at the adult day-care center; instead, in every conversation, we started anew with generalities. After my mother had given him notice, he’d always conclude by saying, in a rueful tone, “It’s awfully quiet here without you girls,” and I’d try to resist the downward pull of everything contained within the remark, the gravity of sadness in our house. Lightly, I’d say, “Well, it’s good to talk to you, Dad.” Often, when I placed the phone’s receiver back in its cradle, I’d have to blink away tears.

  But what I had said to Vi was true: While I’d been actively hiding my name change from her, it hadn’t occurred to me to mention it to our parents. They were so confined to one particular part of my life that it didn’t seem like it mattered if they knew. Maybe this was callous to think, but it just wasn’t of much consequence what they called me.

  Vi stretched her arms above her head. “So, Kate—is Ben Murphy the guy who’s not your boyfriend?”

  “Did he leave a message?”

  She shook her head. “Just his number. Let’s go get Chinese food. I’m starving.”

  “I’m meeting my friend Ann for dinner at six so we can do problem sets.”

  “Then eat two dinners. It’s not even five yet.”

  The truth was that I wasn’t so sure I wanted Vi to accompany me to the cafeteria again anyway. That morning, when I’d taken her to breakfast, we’d sat with my friend Lauren and a couple other Theta girls I didn’t know well, and after I got up to find an orange, I returned to discover everyone at the table with stricken expressions, listening to Vi deliver a speech about how women’s armpit hair contained powerful sex pheromones. It could have been worse, though; she could have been talking about the yellow light. I said, “I’ll go with you to get Chinese food, and then I really do have to meet Ann.”

  I ate strawberry frozen yogurt for my second dinner, and as Ann and I were leaving the cafeteria, we passed a group of guys, one of whom said, “Kate?” When I looked over, Ben Murphy said, “Hey, I don’t know if you got my message.”

  “Yeah, sorry …” I trailed off. In the not particularly flattering light of the cafeteria’s entry hall, I noticed that Ben’s wide nose turned up at the end, displaying his nostrils in a piglike way. He wore khaki pants and a tucked-in royal blue polo shirt, and he was okay-looking, but the fact that we’d made out at the frat party was clearly revealed in this moment to have been a result of drunkenness rather than any particular attraction between us.

  He said, “We’re having a barbecue tomorrow at the DU house, and you should come if you can.” There was the smallest strain in his delivery, the effort he was making to sound casual.

  “Oh. Well, I have a biology test, but I’ll try to make it.”

  “Yo, Murph, quit flirting,” said one of the guys he’d entered the cafeteria with—they were lingering a few feet away—and Ben looked embarrassed.

  “Come over anytime after five,” he said.

  Heather was in the room but Vi wasn’t when I returned from the adult day-care center the following afternoon. I changed into shorts and a T-shirt and walked to the gym to use the StairMaster. When I got back to Schurz Hall, Vi was sitting on the floor outside my room, which meant that Heather must have departed in my absence, locking the door behind her.

  Vi had a book open on her lap, and as I approached, she held it up, cover out—it was Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston—and said, “Have you read this?”

  I shook my head.

  “I just went to an amazing African-American Lit class taught by this guy who’s a major Hurston expert. Don’t shorts that short give you a wedgie?”

  I squinted at her. “You went to a class?”

  “When in Rome …”

  “Vi, you’re not a student here.”

  “They weren’t checking IDs at the door.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “What’s it to you if I sit in on a class?”

  I hadn’t yet unlocked the door, nor had she stood. I folded my arms in front of my chest. “You need to go back to Reed,” I said.

  “Funny you should say that.” As if this were her ace in the hole, a triumph for her to lord over me, she said, “Because actually I’m not enrolled. I stopped going to classes weeks ago, and the dean said I had to withdraw for the semester.”

  I stared at her. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing now that I’m gone from there
.”

  “Do you think you can just stay here forever? Because you can’t. It’s rude to Heather.”

  “Oh, really?” Vi smirked. “To Heather?”

  “If you’re not going back to Reed, then you need to go home.”

  Vi did stand then, the book tucked under her arm. “See, I can’t do that, either,” she said, and again I could have sworn her tone contained a bragging note. “Because if I’m in St. Louis, I’ll just keep fucking Mr. Caldwell.” We looked at each other—I suppose I should have felt compassion, but I wanted to slap the smugness off her face—and she added, “Don’t even pretend you didn’t know, because you knew.”

  Had I known? People had said Vi was Mr. Caldwell’s favorite; junior year, she sat at the desk closest to his, and once my boyfriend, Tom, had jokingly told her that she’d sit on Mr. Caldwell’s lap if she could. But there was an enormous difference between teasing Vi that she and Mr. Caldwell were in love and her having real, actual sex with him. He was at least thirty-five, I was pretty sure, and he was handsome for a teacher, but the idea of him as someone you touched entirely changed the criteria for judgment. His womanly hips and butt, the paunch of his belly, his blond beard and flushed cheeks—recalling them actively repelled me.

  Finally, I said, “Where? If you were hooking up with him, where’d you go?”

  “It was mostly in his office during my free periods. I’d meet him about ‘a paper’ ”—Vi made air quotes —“and he’d shut the door. And I’d be able to hear people in the hallway outside talking about the football game or whatever.”

  “Weren’t you scared of getting caught?”

  “What, by a teacher?” She scoffed. “I think he got off on the danger. Oh, he did once take me to a restaurant in Illinois, when his wife was out of town, but that actually stressed him out way more than banging me on school property.”

  “Did you lose your virginity to him?”