Sisterland

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  After Vi and I were inside my car, I said, “I like her.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “What’s the problem? I thought that was a totally fun breakfast.”

  “What’s the problem besides that she’s female?” From the passenger seat, Vi smirked at me. Then she said, “Have you ever heard the joke about how a lesbian takes a U-Haul on a second date? Well, I think she’s ready for us to move in together.”

  “Literally?”

  Vi leaned forward and changed the radio station from pop to classic rock. “When you went to the bathroom, she mentioned getting together tonight. For like the sixth time in less than a week!”

  By my own calculation, it would be the fourth time. I said, “She’s into you.”

  “Do you think she’s pretty?” Vi’s voice was surprisingly vulnerable, and I thought how I had forgotten this part—how when you got together with someone new, you had to adjust to the ways in which they implicitly represented you. First you had to figure out what those ways were; then you had to determine whether you could put up with them.

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  “She looks kind of like Mrs. Kebach,” Vi said, and I began laughing. Mrs. Kebach had been our elementary school music teacher, a woman who led us in rounds of “Row, row, row your boat” and group sessions on the xylophones.

  “She does!” I said. “But Mrs. Kebach was pretty, too. I mean—” I paused. “I never imagined you’d end up going out with her, but she was pretty. So what did you tell Stephanie about tonight?”

  “I said I’d look at my schedule.”

  “Don’t game her, Vi.” I switched into the left lane, passing a van, and glanced over at my sister. “She seems like a straightforward person.”

  “You know what a wise woman once told me?” Vi said. “She told me the homosexual lifestyle is complicated, and all things being equal, I should date a man.”

  I said, “But all things are never equal.”

  I knew that Hank and Courtney were meeting with the genetics counselor that day, but I wasn’t sure what time; I waited until Rosie and Owen were up from their naps and texted Hank, keeping it vague in case he was in Courtney’s presence: U guys around? Hope things going well…. Thirty seconds later, Hank texted back, Come on over, in yard.

  Rosie helped me push Owen in the double stroller down the sidewalk and up the Wheelings’ driveway to the backyard, where Hank and Amelia were kicking a soccer ball back and forth; to my relief, I didn’t see Courtney. As we approached, I heard Hank saying, “Only the goalie uses hands.” He turned toward us, and though his appearance and demeanor were entirely normal, I knew.

  “Rosie, want to play soccer with Amelia?” I said.

  “Rosie wants chalk,” Rosie said.

  “Don’t feel obligated,” I said, but Hank was already opening the plastic bin where they stored their outdoor toys. (That even the Prius-driving, organic-cotton-wearing, non-meat-consuming Wheelings owned things made of plastic—it made me feel better.)

  “Draw a octopus, Daddy!” Amelia shouted as I set Owen on a blanket in the grass and placed toys around him. Hank was squatting in the driveway, the chalk scraping across the pavement, and the girls were hunched beside him. I walked over and watched as he finished the octopus—I often forgot about his artistic abilities—and then he began the outline of a cat. When he was finished with the whiskers, he passed his piece of chalk to Amelia and said, “Now you color the octopus, and Rosie, you color the cat.” He dusted off his palms and came to stand next to me. “Courtney definitely wants to terminate.”

  “Hank, I’m so sorry.”

  “Daddy, she’s messing it up!” Amelia cried as Rosie scribbled over the cat’s face.

  “Chill out, Amelia,” Hank said. “Let her do it her own way.” To me, he said, “I once went to a pro-choice march in college. You know, up on Beacon Hill in Boston, holding my sign, sporting my dreads. I definitely think it should be legal. But somehow the idea of it and then, like, my own wife—” He stopped talking, and I wondered again if he was about to cry.

  After a minute, in a relatively composed voice, he added, “She says she doesn’t want to try again, that the pregnancy was all a big mistake. We knew we only wanted one kid, we changed our mind, and ever since then, things have sucked—the infertility, the morning sickness when she finally did get pregnant, and now this. Her attitude is, put it behind us and enjoy life again.”

  “I’m sure that everything is overwhelming right now.”

  “Sure, but Courtney rarely changes her mind.”

  Owen had backed into a sitting position from his knees, and I said, “Good job, O. Good sitting up.” He flashed me a proud, gummy smile.

  “I usually admire her stubbornness,” Hank said. “Whether it’s not accepting excuses from an undergrad who tries to turn a paper in late or standing up to some crusty-old-man scientist who’s condescending to her. But being stubborn doesn’t work for this. You can’t just erase a pregnancy.”

  “Do you not want her to terminate?” I felt conscious of using the same language he did, not saying abortion.

  “I want us to consider our options.”

  “Maybe she’ll feel different in a few days.”

  Hank shook his head. “The procedure is scheduled for next Tuesday. She’d have had them do it today if they were willing.”

  My cellphone, which was in the pocket of my fleece vest, rang then, and I said, “Sorry. Let me just see if it’s Jeremy.”

  It was. “Are you at the Wheelings’?” he asked, and his voice contained a weird ridge of hardness that put me on alert.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I just tried you at home, and the voice mail is full. So I listened to it, and it’s all calls about Vi’s prediction. Have you checked your email today?”

  “Not yet. Are the phone messages from strangers or people we know? How would a stranger find me?” Especially when my name was completely different from Vi’s. And in this moment, I arrived at a belated understanding that this was what I’d been preparing for. For more than half my life, I’d been laying the groundwork for my own invisibility—for far longer, in fact, than Vi had been laying the groundwork for her exposure. But as a fluttery sensation passed through my stomach, I thought how unsurprising it would be if her preparation, her power, trumped mine.

  “St. Louis isn’t that big,” Jeremy said. “In the age of the Internet, the world isn’t that big.”

  “So who called?”

  “For starters, my mom, my dad, my brother, and your Mizzou friend Meredith. Also someone from the Riverfront Times, a reporter who says her editor went to high school with you.” The Riverfront Times was the free alternative weekly that cheekily covered bands and restaurants and local political scandals and featured advertisements for transsexual escorts; I had read it when I’d first moved back to St. Louis but not since I’d had children. “And there was a message from Janet,” Jeremy was saying, “and someone named Elise, who said she’s Travis’s mom—”

  Janet was my old friend and co-worker, and dimly, I had a recollection of a boy named Travis from Rosie’s music class, but how would his mother know I was Vi’s twin—how could she connect Violet Shramm to Kate Tucker?

  “She wanted to know if you’re planning to leave town. And one from the mom in that family you babysat for growing up. Melissa Barrett?”

  “Melissa Garrett,” I said.

  “And also there were some—I don’t want to upset you. I don’t see this as a big deal.”

  Again, my stomach fluttered. “What?” I said.

  “Some anonymous calls. Just two. One was a person saying, ‘Tell your sister she’s irresponsible,’ and the other was someone who yelled, ‘Fire!’ and hung up. I think as in—”

  “Yeah.” I swallowed. “I get it.”

  “The person who yelled fire just sounded like they were playing a prank. Is your refrigerator running, that kind of thing. And the other one sounded kind of schoolmarmy, like a self-rig
hteous little old lady. I deleted them, but now I wish I hadn’t, because describing them makes them sound weirder than just hearing them.” And yet there was that hardness in Jeremy’s voice; he didn’t like this, either.

  I said, “So what are we supposed to do?”

  “Have you checked on your dad today? I bet reporters are calling him, too. But tonight let’s get takeout and just relax. Maybe Thai?”

  That was all Jeremy had to offer? Thai food?

  “We can’t let this be about us, Kate,” he said. “It’s about Vi.”

  But that morning I had done her makeup for the Today show; from the end of sixth grade through to our high school graduation, we had cooked dinner together so as to pretend our mother hadn’t failed us; and thirty-four years earlier, we’d been one person. Of course it was about me.

  As I hung up, Hank was regarding me with unabashed curiosity. I said, “Apparently, our phone is ringing off the hook because of Vi being on the Today show this morning.”

  “Wait, that was today? And you waited until now to tell me?” He seemed not just interested but downright titillated; for the first time since we’d arrived in their backyard, there was about him no haze of grimness.

  “They interviewed her from here, not in New York. At her house. Matt Lauer did it.”

  “Let’s go watch it right now. You think just because my life is in shambles I wouldn’t want to see Vi shooting the breeze with Matt Lauer? You know what your sister needs?”

  “A muzzle?” I said.

  “A publicist.”

  “Vi doesn’t need a publicist.”

  “It’s not like only drug-addled starlets have them. It’s someone who knows how to handle the media, and if Vi’s been on Today, she’ll get more requests. Courtney and I went to college with a woman who does PR in L.A. Why don’t I shoot her an email?”

  The offer seemed very Harvard-like to me, that Hank not only understood what a publicist did but happened to know one. I said, “Won’t Courtney be annoyed if the woman helps Vi? And wouldn’t someone like that charge an arm and a leg?”

  “A good publicist ought to be able to make some money for Vi out of all this. I think some TV shows pay not for the interview exactly, but they pay a licensing fee for personal photos or whatever, which amounts to the same thing. Or Vi could get a book deal. Or her own TV show.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  Hank smiled. “Not what you were hoping for? Look, why don’t I email Emma, and if she can’t help, I’m sure she knows lots of other people. She could at least get us a ballpark estimate of how expensive it is.”

  “Thank you,” I said. He had not, I noticed, answered my question about Courtney.

  “Hey.” Hank made a sheepish expression. “Glad I’m good for something right now.”

  Chapter 9

  One Sunday evening during my junior year in college, my father answered the phone and there came a point when I was pretty sure we’d been talking for more than our allotted five minutes; I looked at my watch and saw that it had, astonishingly, been twelve. Then my father said, “Your mother’s gone to bed. The doctor has her on a new medicine for the fibromyalgia, and it’s making her tired.” He said this matter-of-factly, as if we’d discussed a diagnosis of fibromyalgia before—at the time, I had never heard of it, and I woefully misspelled it when I looked it up online—but out of some combination of surprise, politeness, and cowardice, I asked him nothing. A few days later, I emailed Vi and wrote, Have you heard Mom or Dad talk about her having fibromyalgia? Vi wrote back, What the fuck is that?

  Since starting Mizzou, I’d gone home infrequently. To be alone in the house on Gilbert Street with my parents, without Vi, was almost unbearable, and though she’d drop by, it was never for long. I’d suggest that we see a movie or meet up in the afternoon to have lunch, but she worked most nights at one restaurant or another and slept half the day. Was this, I wondered, what it had felt like for her when she’d stayed with me in the dorm and I’d barely had time for her in my schedule?

  I’d learned that taking Ben with me, seeing my parents’ house through his eyes, was worse than going home by myself. This mausoleum of unhappiness was where I’d grown up? I’d try to explain that it hadn’t been as bad when I was younger, that the plates in the kitchen and the television set in the living room and the hand towels in the bathroom hadn’t looked as old and outdated because they hadn’t been as old and outdated.

  Ben would sleep in the ludicrous guest room, the expectation that he would do so conveyed by the folded towels on the bed, though I never knew if it was my mother or father who’d set them there. Initially, I assumed that from visit to visit he was the last person to have used the bed, until I realized the guest room was where my father now slept; I discovered an empty bottle of his blood pressure medication under the nightstand. But even before I knew this, I’d have Ben sneak into my room instead of joining him in the bigger guest bed, and he would try to initiate sex, and I would start crying. Not because of the sex—that had gotten better for us after our first dismal hook-up—but because of everything else, the grip of family and the past.

  If I hadn’t previously thought of my mother as making much effort, after the fibromyalgia diagnosis she either stopped trying entirely or didn’t have the ability. Where once she’d run errands, she now remained in bed until five P.M. Prior to five, she was up only for doctors’ appointments, which my father left work to drive her to. If I arrived home in the middle of the day, the single indication that I was expected would be a key beneath the mat outside the front door. My father ate frozen dinners every night—I did the same during my visits—and my mother subsisted on orange juice, Triscuits, and spreadable cheddar cheese. She didn’t have the energy to attend my college graduation, and my father didn’t want to leave her by herself, so neither of them came. At the last minute, Vi and Patrick drove out, surprising me, and though I’d probably have told them not to if they’d offered in advance, I was glad to see them. Ben’s parents took all of us, plus Ben’s two sisters and grandfather, out for dinner at the fanciest restaurant in Columbia; Vi ordered lobster, and she and Patrick drank four cocktails each.

  Vi had vacated our parents’ house in a way I never had. She had cleared her belongings out of our childhood bedroom—even the Sisterland sign was gone—while my old clothes still hung in the closet, my Nipher and Kirkwood High yearbooks rested on the shelf, and a googly-eyed turtle sticker I’d arbitrarily stuck on my desk lamp in 1986 was still there eleven years later.

  In the summers during college, I stayed in Columbia and worked full-time at the adult day-care center; after graduation Ben and I rented a one-bedroom apartment in Lincoln Park. Our first year out of college, we hosted Thanksgiving in Chicago for our friends, who were mostly other Mizzou graduates, and I felt a particular kind of twenty-two-year-old’s pride in the fact that, unlike at Thanksgivings of my youth, we used fresh rather than frozen spinach for the casserole and real whipped cream instead of cans of Reddi-wip. (Also around this time, one ordinary weeknight after making dinner, I heard myself say to Ben, “I’m going to compost the rest of the bok choy”—there was a little yard with a compost bin behind our building—and pretty much everything I was smug about then was encapsulated in that single sentence. I thought—foolishly, obnoxiously—that I’d left my former self behind.) At Christmas, Ben and I went to see his family in Indianapolis, and these patterns held the following year, too: Thanksgiving in Chicago, Christmas in Indianapolis. “I don’t suppose you’d be able to come home just for a day or two,” my father said in early December, and I said I couldn’t. Ben and I had recently gone to look at engagement rings, and I definitely didn’t want his proposal to occur in St. Louis.

  Vi was working Christmas Eve but was supposed to go over to the house on Christmas Day, when my father would make steak for dinner. On Christmas Eve, my mother went to bed without eating, which wasn’t unusual; her door, the door to the room she no longer shared with my father, was closed by eight P.M. Because s
he regularly awakened so late in the day, twenty hours passed before my father knocked on the door shortly before Vi’s arrival to see if my mother needed help getting up. When she didn’t answer, he knocked again, then a third time. After he entered the room and found her unresponsive in bed, he called 911; the EMTs who came to the house declared her dead. Vi pulled up outside my parents’ house to find not just an ambulance but a fire truck and a squad car, all their lights flashing.

  For a full day, I didn’t know. I hadn’t been home for seven months, and that afternoon—this is only one of my regrets—I’d called to wish my parents a Merry Christmas when I knew my mother would still be asleep. This was after the big meal at Ben’s family’s house in Indianapolis; I’d been using the phone in the kitchen, and when I’d hung up I’d experienced a gut-wrenching sadness that I had mistaken for run-of-the-mill holiday sorrow. On the other side of the kitchen’s swinging door was Ben’s extended family: little kids hopped up on sweets playing with new toys while the adults watched football and lamented having overeaten.

  I sat by myself in the kitchen for perhaps ten minutes, scanning the photographs on the refrigerator door, waiting to be interrupted by someone and to have to rearrange my features so I wouldn’t seem like I was in an unfestive mood. Ben’s family was sporty and boisterous, his parents much younger-seeming than mine, and among the refrigerator photos was one of them looking at each other and smiling, his father in a tuxedo and his mother in a strapless red dress, at their thirtieth-anniversary party. There were also photos of one of Ben’s sisters grinning broadly, wrapped in a foil sheet, having just completed a marathon; of both sisters in hiking boots and shorts and fleece sweatshirts, standing on a mountain, the older one holding her fingers in a V behind the head of the younger one; of the whole family on a beach somewhere. Looking at this display, I knew suddenly that I couldn’t marry Ben, or anyone whose family was this normal and happy. Ben’s mother, whom I actually liked a lot, had once said to me that her goal in life was for each of her children to find someone who loved them as much as she and Ben’s dad did, and I had felt at the time like I was auditioning for a part I was very close to getting, but in this moment I realized I didn’t want it. The differences between our families would always be too painful.