Sisterland

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Jeremy looked faintly amused, as if I were joking.

  “I know it’s a lot,” I said, “but things are getting out of control.”

  His expression changed—he was registering my desperation, which was not the same as agreeing to my request—and then Vi was back in the living room. “Let’s call the publicist,” I said. “Her name’s Emma, and Hank said she’s really great. And”—my face was burning even before I said it; surely this was the worst act of manipulation I’d committed in my marriage—“she’s kind of expensive, you were right about that, but Jeremy and I want to pay for her because it just seems worth it.” Feeling Jeremy’s angry surprise (it did not billow from him, as with smoke, but rather was laserlike in its precise focus on me), I added, “After you’re flooded with new clients, you can pay us back.” She would never pay us back, I knew, and I would never try to get her to, but perhaps the suggestion would assuage Jeremy.

  I didn’t dare make eye contact with him as I retrieved the phone from the kitchen and pressed the number from Hank’s email. “Emma Hall PR,” said a female voice, and I said, “It’s Kate Tucker, Hank Wheeling’s friend. I think he told you my sister and I—?”

  “Emma’s out of the office, but let me check if I can find her,” the voice said—of course she wasn’t Emma Hall; of course a publicist in L.A. had an assistant—and after a silence, she said, “Putting you through to Emma Hall.”

  Emma Hall was driving, possibly with her windows down, and she was also British, which Hank hadn’t mentioned, and the combination of the rushing air, the fact that I’d put her on speakerphone, and her accent made her hard to understand; I needed to hear an entire sentence before I could decipher it. Also, one of the first things she said was “Isn’t Hank the best? And Courtney, too, I love them both. I’ve always fancied the idea of a trip out to Kansas City to see them.” But I liked everything else about her: She was friendly and confident and not condescending, she had already watched the clip of Vi on Today, she complimented the shirt Vi had worn, meaning she complimented my shirt, and when I said, “We just want to make sure we know what it is a publicist does,” Emma laughed and said, “Right, what a great question.”

  All media queries would go through her, she said; if journalists contacted Vi directly, Vi would forward their number or their email to Emma, and Emma would be the one to respond. She said she’d decline most requests, which alone made me want to hire her. “Once you’ve done the Today show, there’s no reason to talk to the Bumblefuck Gazette,” she said, and as I confirmed to myself that yes, in her elegant voice, she had indeed just said Bumblefuck, she was already moving on. “And we can think about what your goals are, Violet, what image you want to project, so you’re not simply being reactive.”

  “I want to get the word out so people can take precautions.”

  “Absolutely, absolutely,” Emma said, and I had the distinct impression that she’d encountered people like Vi before—sincerely altruistic, but not completely so.

  “And I don’t want to seem like a nut job,” Vi added. “I want people to know I don’t stand to gain from this.”

  Emma asked if Vi had a website, and when Vi said no, Emma said, “Then that’s the first order of business. I’ll have my assistant get cracking on this the minute we hang up, on securing the URL and setting up something rudimentary for now. What I’d like you to do, tonight even, is write a personal statement. Something brief, one paragraph or so, about who you are and how your prediction came to you. Just very plain language. Nothing fancy.”

  “Would you come to St. Louis or handle things from there?” I asked, and Emma said, “Well, that depends.” Then she said laughingly, “And I said Kansas City before, didn’t I, when you don’t live in Kansas City at all? And you were too polite to correct me. Shame on me!”

  There was never a moment when we officially agreed to work together; by the time I told her that I’d be handling payment and that I was taking her off speakerphone so she and I could square it away, it seemed we’d all already decided. Vi was still right next to me, and because I didn’t want her to hear me say the number, I said to Emma, “The fee you mentioned in your email to Hank—”

  “Fifteen thousand for thirty days.” Emma did not seem at all embarrassed. “Plus travel expenses and accommodations in the event of my visiting St. Louis.”

  I felt a swirl of nausea in my stomach. “And we’d pay that up front or in installments?”

  “Half now and the second half after two weeks.”

  “So for the first part, I’d wire it to you, or write a check—?”

  “As you prefer,” she said. “I trust you, of course, Kate. Any friend of Hank and Courtney’s …”

  I was aware that at some point, Jeremy had collected Rosie and Owen and taken them upstairs, though until I hung up the phone, I didn’t entirely attend to this fact.

  “I thought you were just trying to censor me, but she sounds awesome,” Vi said. “You really won’t tell me how much she costs?”

  “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” Was Jeremy merely annoyed or outright furious? Either way, it wouldn’t improve matters if Vi knew that I hadn’t gotten his blessing.

  “More or less than a thousand?”

  “We’re finished talking about this,” I said.

  “More, huh?” Vi raised her eyebrows. “Thanks, Daze. What does Courtney Wheeling think of their friend helping me spread my witchy message?”

  As if I hadn’t wondered the same thing, I said, “She’s preoccupied with other stuff right now.”

  Vi looked at me intently. “She didn’t miscarry, did she?”

  If Courtney planned to terminate, it probably was better for my sister to believe Courtney had miscarried. But it also felt wrong to say she had while she was still pregnant. “Don’t ask me that,” I said.

  “Yikes,” Vi said. “You think it was because she wasn’t eating enough?”

  “Courtney eats. She’s just thin.”

  “You know, I still haven’t watched myself on Today,” Vi said. “Have you?”

  Didn’t I need to go upstairs and nurse Owen before he went to sleep? And I always put him down for bed, too. But maybe I’d let Jeremy handle tonight, I thought. Owen had polished off an unprecedented two jars of sweet potatoes at dinner, and anyway, it wasn’t like he wouldn’t wake up to eat again in three hours. “I’ve watched it, but I’ll watch again,” I said. To my surprise, it had calmed me to watch online with Hank; the knowledge of Vi having been on Today was the opposite of calming, but seeing the segment itself, I’d been reminded of how well she’d come off.

  Vi and I sat next to each other on the couch, Jeremy’s laptop resting half on my left thigh and half on Vi’s right one. “My hair looks awesome,” Vi said. “Good job. But holy shit, do I really have three chins?”

  “You don’t have three chins.”

  After the segment finished, she said, “That wasn’t bad.”

  “Didn’t you believe me?” Then I said, “You haven’t changed your mind about October sixteenth?”

  Vi was looking into the distance, in the direction of our dining room but not at the dining room itself, and simultaneously I didn’t want her to visualize a natural disaster from inside my house and I felt her separateness from me, her mysteriousness, in a way that was almost impressive. She did have an ability, one I’d never been impressed by back when I’d shared it; but now mine was mostly gone and hers was sharper than ever.

  “No,” she said. “I haven’t changed my mind.”

  I’d said she was welcome to stay over—although this prospect had seemed unappealing a few hours earlier, it had proven pleasant to spend the evening with Vi—but her cellphone had rung a few times, and around nine, her friend Nancy, hostess of the millennium New Year’s Eve party, had picked her up to go meet people for drinks. Though Vi and Nancy remained close, Vi had grown apart from some of her other meditation friends; she’d told me they were jealous that after the Brady Ogden case, she’d been able to
make a living as a psychic while they still had to hold down day jobs.

  Nancy didn’t come inside, and I waved to her from our porch as Vi headed out. “If there are any reporters, or just any weirdos, waiting at your house, come back over here,” I said. “When Nancy drops you off, don’t let her leave until you’re inside.”

  “You’re being paranoid.” Vi grinned. “It’s kind of flattering.”

  As she reached Nancy’s car, I called, “Don’t forget about writing the statement for your website.”

  “Aye, aye,” she replied.

  I locked the front door, organized the diaper bag, went around turning off the lights on the first floor, and set the security alarm; normally Jeremy closed up the house while I was nursing Owen. Had Jeremy eaten dinner? I hadn’t, except for some stale pretzels I’d brought out to the living room after we’d watched Vi’s interview.

  It was definitely unusual that he hadn’t returned downstairs, though it was also clear why. And I’d never before dreaded walking up to bed, but on this night I did; the door to our bedroom was closed. I went into the bathroom, and when I was finished, I paused in front of our bedroom—I wondered if I should knock, but that would be downright bizarre—and when I pushed the door open, I saw that the light on Jeremy’s nightstand was on, and he was sitting up in bed, wearing his glasses and an old Wesleyan T-shirt, the sheet and comforter pulled to the middle of his chest. He held his phone in front of him with one hand, the glow from the screen reflected in the lenses of his glasses, and I heard what sounded like a bus driving and then a man saying, “That’s for sure,” from which I inferred that Jeremy was watching a TV show or movie, and for some reason the smallness of the screen and him up here alone, in his college T-shirt, made me sad.

  “Hi,” I said, and in a tone that was tight but not gratuitously mean—he wasn’t trying to show that he was pissed, he just was pissed—he said “Hi” back.

  I took a step forward. “Are you mad because I said we’d pay for the publicist or because I said it without you agreeing to it?”

  “Both.” There was no humor in his voice, despite a joke’s easy proximity, and it was only then that he paused whatever he was watching and really looked at me. He said, “I’m curious how much you think we have in the savings account.”

  I swallowed. “Twenty thousand?”

  “Well, I got paid today, and that put us just over eleven.”

  “Eleven thousand?”

  “Yes,” Jeremy said. “Eleven thousand.”

  Would Emma accept payment by credit card? “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry we didn’t have a conversation about it, but I really want Vi to work with this woman, and I was afraid that if she knew how much it costs, she’d say no. She wouldn’t even listen. And instead she really liked her, and she said—Vi, I mean—she said she wouldn’t talk to more reporters without having them go through Emma. That’s exactly, exactly what I was hoping.”

  “You need to realize that you can’t control Vi’s behavior. I’m serious, Kate. She’s a grown woman, a willful grown woman. And even if you’ve temporarily got a leash on her, this idea that you can keep her in line is going to end badly in the long run.”

  I folded my arms. “Okay.”

  “I’m not saying this to be a jerk. I’m saying it because I’m worried that you’re setting yourself up for something really ugly.”

  “I get your larger point,” I said. “And I’m sure you’re right. But to have a professional handling the media—I don’t see how that can be bad. Vi is in over her head. You’re the one who listened to those messages on our voice mail. Well, multiply that by a hundred and that’s what she’s going through. Every time she turns around, another reporter wants to talk to her, and she can’t say no. She loves the spotlight, and she believes she’s helping people.”

  “So let her talk to the reporters. They’ll go away eventually.”

  This was such a radical notion, so contrary to the frantic way I was expending my energy, that there was in it something enticing, something liberating. What if I simply stepped back and did nothing at all? But I couldn’t. I said, “Let’s just give Emma a chance.”

  “And our savings.”

  Would our disagreement have had a different tenor if I were still generating an income? But then he said, “If you were going to impulsively spend fifteen grand that we don’t have, I wish it had been on a really awesome flat-screen TV.”

  So he was going to forgive me; I was lucky.

  I gestured toward his phone. “What are you watching?”

  “A comedy that’s completely not funny, which is a feat.”

  I took another step forward. “You feel like doing something else?”

  For the first time since I’d entered the room, he smiled, or at least he half-smiled. “It depends what you have in mind.”

  I climbed onto the bed, over him, so that my knees were on either side of his waist. “I have a few ideas,” I said. I took his phone out of his hand and set it on the nightstand, and when I leaned in and kissed his mouth, he kissed me back right away. Jeremy and I were like everyone else with young children—we went weeks without having sex. We were always too tired, or a baby was crying. We joked about not having it, while listening to our children on the monitors. “We could schedule it,” I’d once said, and he’d said, “I never wanted to become those people,” and I said, “But you can see why it happens, right?”

  As he pulled his shirt over his head, then raised my arms to pull off mine—I kept my bra on during sex, so I wouldn’t leak milk—I thought that maybe this was what we ought to do every night: forgo ice cream and TV downstairs and just come up to bed. I could’ve done without the fight, though as we kept kissing, as he rubbed his hands over me, I thought that what people said about make-up sex was true.

  I was still on top, and he had been inside me maybe four minutes when I felt that surge, my body shuddering against his. I was usually first, though he didn’t take much longer; we were compatible in this way. (And maybe, given our efficiency, there was no reason we didn’t do it far more often.) As he was coming, Jeremy said in a kind of heaving whisper, “I love you so much, Katie,” and I kissed his neck. I don’t know if he realized that the only time he called me Katie was when we were having sex.

  We’d fallen asleep with the light on, and were both still naked except for my bra, when Owen started crying. I scrambled out of bed and gathered my clothes from the floor on Jeremy’s side, hastily pulling them on as I walked.

  Owen’s room was dark except for the starfish night-light. As soon as he saw me, he stopped crying, and I scooped him up and sat us both in the glider, him sideways on my lap.

  Earlier, with Vi, as we’d talked to Emma and watched the Today interview, a scheming sort of air had developed between us, a mood like the one twenty years earlier on all those afternoons when we’d practiced our dance routine for “You May Be Right.” Other people receded until it was only us and our project. Or so it had felt, but as I nursed Owen, it no longer felt this way at all. Vi’s prediction wasn’t fun; it was scary. And the people I’d allowed to recede were my children, who were so small, who needed me so completely. Owen weighed sixteen pounds; he could do nothing for himself, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even reliably sit up; he slept in pale blue pajamas and a sleep sack with a brown teddy bear on the front. There was nothing that mattered besides protecting him and Rosie. Maybe we should leave town, I thought. Or, at the least, I needed to convince Jeremy not to go to Denver.

  Owen was mostly asleep as I changed his diaper and brought him back to the glider to burp him. He breathed deeply, curled into me with his left cheek pressed over my heart, and for a long time I kept on patting his back, holding him in my arms.

  Vi had writer’s block, she explained when we spoke around ten o’clock the next morning, which was why she hadn’t yet finished the statement for her new website. I was pretty sure that writer’s block was code for being hungover, but scolding her wouldn’t help. “Emma want
s this as soon as possible,” I said. “I’ll hammer something out and call you back.”

  I’d just put Owen down for his first nap, and I set Rosie up in front of an episode of Dora the Explorer and opened Jeremy’s laptop on the dining room table. I probably had about ten minutes before Rosie started wandering around, and so in seven, I finished a paragraph, which was all Emma had requested.

  Hello, my name is Violet Shramm, I wrote. Thank you for visiting my website. Since childhood, I have experienced premonitions, also known as extrasensory perceptions. I was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. I enjoy cooking, watching reality TV (my guilty pleasure), and spending time with my family. As you may have heard, I recently had a premonition that an earthquake will happen in the St. Louis area. It was not my intent to scare people. Instead, I wanted to help them make preparations to stay safe. We could link here to FEMA’s recommendations, I thought. I concluded with a variation on what Vi had said to the Brookstone cashier when she’d bought the slippers for our father: I sincerely hope that my prediction turns out to be wrong. I am not a scientist, and I’m capable of making mistakes like anyone else, but it is only in good faith that I share my views and ideas.

  When I called to read Vi what I’d written, she wanted me to insert references to her having helped the police find Brady Ogden, as well as to her having publicly predicted Michael Jackson’s death, both of which had been mentioned on Channel 5. (The latter had occurred during a session with clients at her house, which I wasn’t sure counted as public—in June, two days before Michael Jackson died, she’d told clients she was worried about his health.) After I’d reluctantly taken her suggestions, she also wanted me to cut the last line; I convinced her to keep it, and she convinced me, even though it made me cringe, to add To anyone reading this, I wish you a day full of positive energy. Emma subsequently excised the first two sentences; the rest of the paragraph appeared on Vi’s website, which was up later that afternoon. Next to the statement was a picture of Vi I’d taken the previous Thanksgiving; she was wearing a red cape, but it looked like a normal sweater if you didn’t know, and she was smiling prettily. In the original photo, Rosie had been sitting next to Vi, so I’d emailed the photo to Jeremy, had him cut Rosie out—I didn’t want Rosie on Vi’s website but didn’t have the technological skills, modest though I knew they were, to remove her myself—and then emailed the photo to Emma.