Sisterland

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Vi grinned. “No comment.”

  “Are you trying to set me up with him?”

  “Supposedly, he has a Prince Albert. You know what that is?” When I shook my head, she said, “Of course you don’t. It means his dick is pierced.”

  “Who told you that?”

  She shrugged, and I said, “Maybe you should hook up with him.”

  “I’m having a drink tonight with Scary Black Man.”

  “Our neighbor?”

  “We’ve hung out a few times.”

  “When?”

  “You don’t know everything about me.” Then she added, “When you were at Mrs. Abbott’s.” Another guest, a guy, wolf-whistled so we’d quiet down and listen to Nancy again. It had been decided that we’d go outside for the ceremony, she said. In the small square of frozen grass between Nancy’s apartment building and the sidewalk, we all gathered in a circle, and she held the bowl, in the center of which stood a fat white lit candle.

  “Energies of this and other universes, we are grateful for everything you’ve provided to us,” she said. “As we continue on our journey, we ask that you receive our humble prayers and help clear our hearts of that which has been holding us back. Enlighten us on our path into the future.” She looked around the circle. “Let’s be quiet for this part so it’ll be easier for the energies to hear our prayers.”

  A woman named Jocelyn was standing to Nancy’s right, holding a smaller bowl, and she lifted the little folded pieces of paper out of it and passed them one by one to Nancy; one by one, Nancy held them to the flame and let them burn. I was standing across the circle, but I could tell, I could sense, when she got to mine. In spite of the fact that it was by then after eleven on New Year’s Eve, there was little noise outside except for the sound of cars on Grand Boulevard. It was very cold, and I felt my heart bulging a little, perhaps with hope.

  That night, somewhat to my own surprise, I did end up sleeping with Maxwell; he lived a block from Nancy, and I’m not sure I’d have gone home with him if I’d had to get into a car, but as it was, not much effort was required. And he did have a Prince Albert—he wore a curved silver barbell, which I encountered first with my fingers but truthfully couldn’t feel when we were having sex, perhaps because he had on a condom. Afterward, he slept spooning me the entire night, his arms crossed in front of my chest in a way that was both sweet and a little entrapping. Early in the morning, he got up to pee, then released a fart so thunderous that I started laughing; when he returned to bed, I faked still being asleep and he spooned me again. A few hours later, after I really had fallen back to sleep, then awakened, and he had, too, he suggested we get brunch and I declined in what I hoped was a friendly way; when he called our apartment a few times in the next week, having procured the number from Nancy, I didn’t call him back.

  Vi didn’t actually hook up with our neighbor on New Year’s Eve, but she did two nights later, and it went on for a few weeks before fizzling. The part I wish I could undo is that we kept calling him Scary Black Man. Not to his face, obviously, but whenever we discussed him. His real name was Jeff Parker, but all this time later, if Vi told me she’d run into Jeff Parker on the street, I don’t think I’d know who she was talking about. If she said Scary Black Man, I’d know immediately.

  In February, I started looking for jobs again and quit working for Mrs. Abbott when I was offered a position at an elder-care services agency; although no apparition of any sort had ever appeared to me at Mrs. Abbott’s, on my final night at her house, Mrs. Abbott greatly unsettled me by calling me by my mother’s name. “Rita, dear,” she said as I tucked her in, “be sure to take sixty dollars from my pocketbook.” Briefly, I was speechless, but then I concluded it was just a coincidence; for all I knew, another of the aides was named Rita. “I’m not supposed to do that,” I said. “But thank you.”

  In my new job, I helped clients figure out if they qualified for Medicaid or meal deliveries at home, and I served as a liaison between their families or doctors. Even then, when I did have health insurance, I didn’t see a shrink, but I bought a Jetta with forty thousand miles on it, which I suspect did more for my sense of well-being than years of therapy could have. In the fall, a woman in my office named Janet asked if I wanted to do a 5K run with her, a fund-raising race, and I said yes. We started running together in Forest Park before or after work, and at a brunch held by Janet after the race, I met a guy named David Frankel who was a manager at a big rental-car company headquartered in St. Louis. Almost immediately, we were dating seriously. If it never felt as if David and I were infatuated with each other (he frequently corrected my driving, and he told me that I talked too loudly when I was on the phone with Vi), he was someone to go to movies and restaurants with on the weekend, and Vi had not been entirely wrong when she’d said that I was more myself when I had a boyfriend. I might have disagreed with her about the reason why—I’d always felt that boyfriends were a distraction from the existential abyss Vi chose to hover closer to than I did—but the sentiment did have some basis. The night before I went out with David for the second time, while I was applying makeup, Vi burst into the bathroom and said, “You can’t marry him! You can have a roll in the hay, but you’re not supposed to marry him!”

  “I think you’re getting ahead of yourself,” I said.

  “No.” Vi’s face was serious. “You’re supposed to marry someone else.”

  Two years later, the day Vi and I turned twenty-seven, we had dinner at Hacienda with our father, Patrick, and David, and afterward our father went home to his apartment, and Vi and I drove to a bar in the Loop with the guys. While they played pool, I said to Vi, “I just want to tell you that David and I are getting engaged soon, and I hope you’ll be happy for us.”

  Vi looked unimpressed.

  “He’s up for adopting from China, which not all guys are,” I said. “And he can afford it, too, and it’s expensive.”

  “Why don’t you adopt on your own?” Vi said. “I’ll help you raise your wee little lotus flowers.”

  “Did you not hear what I just said? The adoption alone costs like twenty thousand dollars.” Vi and I had both been in debt for years.

  She said, “You know what you should do is, you should secretly get knocked up by him and then break up. That’d be free, and you’d still get to be a mom.”

  “That’s a terrible idea. I don’t want to be a single mother, and I don’t want biological children.”

  “The Chinese adoption thing is noble, but it’s not who you are.” After taking a sip of beer, Vi wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She said, “Your destiny is to breed.”

  “Luckily, it’s not up to you.”

  “How about this?” Vi said. “Just promise me you won’t get engaged before Christmas.”

  Christmas was four months away. “What difference does it make?” I said.

  Vi’s smile was ludicrously confident. “Because by then you’ll have met the guy you should marry.”

  On that New Year’s Eve of the new millennium, after all the pieces of paper were burned, Nancy said in a somber tone, “Thank you, energies, for letting us make this offering to you.” Then she looked around the circle and said, “Who needs another drink before midnight?”

  Inside, Vi and I ended up squeezed together on Nancy’s low couch. I said, “Should I ask what you wrote on your paper or will that make it not come true?”

  “What do you think I wrote?” I looked at her, and she added, “I’m sure it was the same thing you did.”

  I looked away then, toward the TV, which had at some point been turned on. It was so pleasant to be drunk in a warm, crowded apartment, to have eaten a delicious meal, to know that there was a guy hovering nearby who wanted to have sex with me (even a guy who was odd and, by his own admission, insatiable) that I was reluctant to let my mother into the night, or to let her in any more than I already had by invoking her on my own scrap of paper. Vi patted my knee, and I felt—this had to do with being drunk, though it
also wasn’t untrue—that no other person would ever understand me as my sister did.

  And then everyone was moving, we had arrived at the last ten seconds before midnight, and Vi stood, then stuck out her hand to pull me to my feet. “Ten, nine, eight,” people shouted, “seven, six, five, four”—and Vi, who was bellowing, nodded her chin once at me, meaning, You do it, too! and so I joined in—“three, two, one!” and everyone was cheering and blowing noisemakers, and from somewhere “Auld Lang Syne” was audible.

  “Happy 2000,” I said, and Vi stepped forward—to this day, it’s the only time in our lives she has done this—and kissed me on the mouth.

  Chapter 10

  These were the topics of some of the articles that ran in local and national publications in the weeks after Vi’s prediction:

  A bride whose wedding was scheduled for Saturday, October 17, at the Chase Park Plaza heard from several out-of-town guests who’d changed their minds about attending.

  For the Blues’ first home game of the season, which was supposed to be on October 16 against the Buffalo Sabres, there was a glut of tickets.

  Religious groups in the area were condemning the prediction, and a large evangelical church in Arnold had raised money to pay for a billboard along I-55 featuring a quote from Leviticus: do not turn to mediums or seek out spiritists, for you will be defiled by them. I am the LORD your god.

  Local frozen-custard shops were selling so-called quake shakes, and a sports bar was selling a quake burger, and two community college students were selling bumpers stickers that said I BRAKE FOR QUAKES.

  Across St. Louis, Targets and Walmarts kept selling out of bottled water and batteries.

  The city and county superintendents had agreed that school would not be canceled on October 16, though emergency drills were being staged so students would know what to do if an earthquake occurred.

  Professors at both the Saint Louis University Earthquake Center and Washington University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences—that is, Jeremy’s department—were adamant in stating that no one could predict earthquakes; that anyone who claimed otherwise was a fraud; and that it was irresponsible of the media to devote so much attention to such an outlandish story. In the Post-Dispatch, Leland Marcus, the chair of Jeremy’s department, was quoted as saying, “I would stake my career on it. There’s absolutely no such thing as earthquake season.”

  Hank had been right: By the afternoon following her appearance on the Today show, Vi, whose phone number was listed, had been called by dozens and dozens of reporters and producers throughout the United States and even by a columnist at a tabloid in Sydney, Australia, where it was already the next morning; by the next morning in St. Louis, she’d received requests for interviews from a producer of a radio show in Amsterdam and from reporters at Haaretz, in Israel, and the Sun, in England. After I’d dropped her off following our breakfast at the Four Seasons, she’d gone to sleep, and while she’d slept, her phone had rung and rung, her prediction spreading across the Internet. Also while she’d slept, reporters from the St. Louis Beacon and the Riverfront Times had slipped notes and business cards through the mail slot in her front door, a reporter from the Post-Dispatch had set up a camping chair on the sidewalk outside her house, simply waiting for her, and a dog had taken an enormous shit on her lawn, though she said she wasn’t sure if the shit was connected to the prediction, and when she asked the Post-Dispatch reporter, he said he hadn’t seen it happen. (Of course it was connected, I thought.) But until Vi woke, just after five that afternoon, she was unaware of the building frenzy; everyone else knew about it before she did. And when I reached her, around six, she sounded stunned as she said, “You won’t believe what’s happening.”

  “No,” I said. “I think I will.”

  “So I get off the phone with some dude at a newspaper in Longview, Washington, and I’m thinking, how weird is it that someone from the state of Washington even cares about an earthquake in St. Louis? And then I check my messages, and the state of Washington is the least of it. And while I’m listening to all these voice mails, I hear a knock on my door, and it’s a guy from the Post-Dispatch, and while I’m talking to him, a van shows up from Fox. I already can’t remember what I said to which person.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t talk to any more reporters.” I didn’t tell her there had been one at our house, too, also from the Post-Dispatch, a girl lurking by the driveway when we returned from the Wheelings’ whom I didn’t recognize as a reporter because she looked about sixteen. After she introduced herself, when I did understand, I pushed past her and brusquely said, “No comment.” I’d been surprised, though, when I peeked outside a few minutes later, that she was gone.

  “It’s not like I’m hawking salad choppers,” Vi was saying. “I’m trying to warn people so they can protect themselves.”

  “What if you come over here tonight?” I didn’t want her in my house; I didn’t want her to infect my children with the germs of public exposure, the antipathy of strangers. And it wasn’t entirely true that she wasn’t selling anything—as she’d mentioned to me before her Today interview, she’d be happy to generate new business. But nothing good could come of Vi hanging out by herself at home, accessible to anyone. I said, “Hank knows a publicist he thinks could help you, a woman he went to college with. How about if we get in touch with her before you talk to anyone else in the media?”

  “And I just don’t call back the Washington Post or the L.A. Times?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “For now.”

  “A publicist probably charges a million bucks.”

  “Hank said there might be ways for you to make money off this.” I couldn’t bring myself to specify what the ways were. I said, “If Jeremy drives over right now, will you just promise me you won’t talk to more reporters before he gets there? I’m not saying you shouldn’t at all, but we need to come up with a plan. I’ll call Hank and get the publicist’s number. She’s in L.A., so she might still be at work.”

  “Hold on,” Vi said. “My doorbell is ringing.”

  “Don’t answer it!”

  She laughed. “What are you so scared of?”

  Besides the potential for mass hysteria? The professional humiliation for Jeremy? The official destruction of our friendship with the Wheelings? “What’s to be gained by doing all these interviews?” I said. “Your prediction is out there. It’s all over the Internet, too, in case you don’t know. But you’ve said what you have to say, and aren’t you just repeating yourself now?”

  She was silent for a few seconds, long enough that it didn’t seem unreasonable to hope I’d persuaded her, but when she spoke, she sounded peevish. “Guardian told me to warn people.”

  I said nothing—wasn’t the deal we had that if she invoked Guardian around me very infrequently, I would be respectful when she did?—and she added, “I know you think I want attention. And maybe compared to you, I do. It’s not my goal to be invisible. But that isn’t what this is about.”

  “Just stay where you are,” I said. “Jeremy will be there in ten minutes.”

  While I’d been on the phone, Jeremy had begun giving dinner to Rosie and Owen, and as I returned the receiver to its cradle in the kitchen, I said, “How about if we switch and you go get Vi and bring her back here?”

  He looked less than thrilled.

  “Otherwise, she’ll keep talking to reporters,” I said. “They’re knocking on her door and calling nonstop.”

  “Are you thinking she’d spend the night here?”

  “Maybe.” Our eyes met.

  “I’ll go get her,” Jeremy said. “But it’s not your job to save her from herself. She’s her own person.”

  Not really, I thought. Not entirely.

  And he could tell this was what I was thinking, evidently, because he said, “I’m not talking about when you were embryos. I’m talking about now.” He passed me the spoon he was using to feed Owen sweet potatoes, and as he walked out of the kitchen, I called, “Tha
nk you.”

  I texted Hank then, to ask if he’d had a chance to contact the publicist, and he called and said, “I’m forwarding her email to you right now, and she said she’s happy to help however she can.”

  “Did she say how much she charges?”

  “You can read her email, but it would be about fifteen thousand to have her on retainer for the next few weeks.”

  “Fifteen thousand?” I knew I sounded like a rube, but it was hard to conceal my shock.

  “She’s good, Kate. I trust her completely. And I think that’s the going rate for people at her level.”

  I had two thoughts then, and the first was that one or both of the Wheelings had to have family money. Because they never seemed worried about it, but even when he’d been an art teacher, before Amelia was born, Hank couldn’t have made much more than I had at the elder-care agency. My second thought was that I wished Hank would come over to our house because I was pretty sure he’d be better than I would at persuading both Vi and Jeremy that Emma would be worth the expense. But even if things weren’t tense between Courtney and me, this would be an inappropriate favor to ask in light of her pregnancy. I needed to let Hank stay home.

  When Jeremy returned with Vi, it emerged that in addition to the various reporters I already knew she’d granted post-nap interviews to, she’d spoken to people at newspapers in Naples, Florida; Richmond, Virginia; and Wellington, New Zealand. She mentioned this with what I felt was increasingly disingenuous surprise that all these journalists were interested in her, and she did not acknowledge the request I’d made for her to stop; it was possible, however, that she’d talked to the reporters before our conversation. “Oh, and good news.” She grinned. “Patrick says he’ll be my publicist for free.” Given that Patrick was a manager at Crate & Barrel, this was not encouraging. “Can I have a beer?” Vi asked. As she headed toward the kitchen, she called over her shoulder, “Either of you want one?”

  In the living room, Rosie had just yanked a dump truck out of Owen’s hands. I whispered to Jeremy, “We’re about to call this publicist Hank gave me the name of, but she costs fifteen thousand dollars. Can we pay for it?”