Sisterland

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  While sending this email, I saw dozens of notifications of Facebook messages from people I hadn’t been in touch with in years, and I realized that I couldn’t go back on Facebook itself until after October 16, or perhaps I could never go on again. I closed my email and found the website of a large national sporting goods chain, from which I ordered a crank radio, a first-aid kit, three LED waterproof flashlights (we currently owned one flashlight that wasn’t waterproof), and a propane stove. If Jeremy asked, I wasn’t going to lie about what I’d bought. Still, I couldn’t help hoping that the packages would arrive while he was at work.

  In those first days following Vi’s appearance on the Today show, I would read the comments that appeared online after articles about the prediction. This woman is an idiot and anyone who trusts her is an idiot, too. Or: She should quit trying to scare people, take a good look in the mirror, and go on a diet!! And of course: If she can predict the future, why doesn’t she win the lottery and buy a nicer house? Hers looks like a shithole from what I saw on TV. There was always, always that lottery one.

  Vi was reading the comments, too; she’d call me when Rosie and I were building a tower out of blocks or I was changing Owen’s diaper, and I’d answer because what if it was urgent? In the past, I’d sometimes not pick up if I was in the middle of something, but this was one of the ways of quantifying her celebrity, that now I didn’t dare. “Okay, listen to this,” she’d say, and begin reading: “ ‘Like other end-of-the-world prophets, Ms. Shramm obviously has not only delusions of grandeur but outright delusions.’ But I never said the end of the world is coming! When did I say that?”

  “Ignore it,” I’d say. “Quit reading.” It was in advising Vi not to read the comments that I was able to convince myself, which is to say that I persuaded one of us.

  “I never realized how mean people are,” she said another time, after an article in an online magazine—not even the comments but the article itself—compared her to an agent of Satan.

  “Really?” I said. “You didn’t?”

  During one of our calls with Emma—again, Vi was at my house, Jeremy was watching the children upstairs, Emma was on speakerphone—Vi said, “How do we get websites to take down the stuff people are writing about me? Because it’s not true, and they don’t even have to put their real names.”

  “Oh, you mustn’t read that rubbish,” Emma said, as if she were surprised to learn Vi had been; it seemed this was another of our novice mistakes. “It’s absolutely awful what people write, isn’t it? But trust me—the sort of person posting comments, it’s a forty-year-old man who lives in his parents’ basement and works at some shit job and he’s furious, just furious at the world, and you mustn’t let him get under your skin, but instead you should feel pity for him.”

  During this same conversation, Emma reiterated her earlier instructions to Vi not to grant additional interviews to the reporters loitering outside her house, which was now normal; there’d be one or two on the sidewalk almost all the time during the day, and some would wait into the evening. And they were no longer just from local publications. One had come from a Japanese newspaper, a trim man in khaki pants and a white short-sleeved button-down shirt. So incredible was this fact to me that I yearned to ask him: Had he really boarded a sixteen-hour flight just to talk to Vi? Of course, I didn’t say a word to him, and after picking Vi up that day around noon, with Rosie and Owen in the backseat, I decided that I wouldn’t return to her house again with them in the car. Ideally, I wouldn’t return to her house, period, until this was all over.

  Reporters were occasionally outside our house, too—I always checked to make sure the street was empty before going somewhere with Owen and Rosie in the stroller or putting them in the car, though once a guy had tricked me by waiting across the street—and for several days, a reporter from the Post-Dispatch had rung the bell in the late morning and again at six o’clock. It wasn’t the girl from before but a middle-aged man who left notes and business cards—his name was Phil Krech, and he was the one Vi had spoken to the afternoon following her Today appearance—but when I told Emma about Phil Krech, he stopped coming by; I think he stopped because Emma had Vi agree to another interview with him. That Vi was a twin had been mentioned in an article in the Post-Dispatch and repeated elsewhere, and photos of Vi and me from our Kirkwood High senior yearbook had run in the Riverfront Times and also, rather shockingly, in People magazine. In both these articles, I’d been referred to as Daisy Tucker—I’d never legally changed my first name—and Jeremy’s name and job had also been disclosed. And we’d gotten plenty of phone calls from journalists; I no longer checked messages, and we agreed that Jeremy would delete them without my listening to them. I wondered if, as October 16 drew closer, Vi’s house would turn into one of those circuses of cameras and lights and satellites, as when the media staked out the home of a woman who’d had sex with a famous politician, or the campus of a school where a shooting had just occurred.

  On the phone, Emma was telling Vi, “You say, ‘I’m so sorry, but all requests have to go through my publicist.’ You make me the villain.” Hearing Emma say this, I again felt an immense gratitude, until she said, “Meanwhile, my negotiations with Today continue, and I should have more information in the next day or so.” She pronounced the t’s in negotiations like soft c’s.

  “Wait, is Vi going back on the Today show?” I asked.

  “Did I not tell you?” Vi said.

  Was Vi talking to Emma without me? Apparently so. “Why would they want you again?” I asked Vi.

  “They feel that they own the story,” Emma said. “They have a relationship with Vi now, having introduced her to the country. Obviously, if they want her a second time, it would be only appropriate for them to pay licensing fees for family photos and such.”

  “Family photos?” I repeated.

  “Chillax,” Vi said. “Nothing is definite.”

  I said, “Emma, I really appreciate everything you’re doing and I know this isn’t about me, but I don’t want to be in any photos on Today.”

  “Duly noted,” Emma said. “On a different topic, how would the two of you feel about an interloper from Los Angeles popping in for a visit?”

  “We’d feel fabulous,” Vi said.

  Emma flew out for twenty-four hours. She stayed at the Ritz-Carlton in Clayton, at our expense, though she spent most of the time on a tour of what she referred to as “Vi’s St. Louis,” as in “What I really yearn to do is see Vi’s St. Louis.” In a town car also subsidized by us (and truly, I had never heard of anyone in St. Louis hiring a town car), Vi and Emma and Patrick, who’d invited himself along, drove by Nipher Middle School and Kirkwood High School and the house on Gilbert Street; they had lunch on the Hill, at the restaurant where Vi had worked the longest.

  “You should come on the tour,” Vi had said the day before Emma’s arrival. “Hire your babysitter.”

  She meant Kendra, a Wash U undergrad who helped me one morning a week. “I doubt she can do it on such late notice,” I said.

  Vi said, “Well, Emma definitely wants to meet you.”

  After an absurdly long discussion, we agreed that Emma and Vi would come to our house for a pizza dinner to which we’d also invite the Wheelings, since they were the reason we knew Emma. Having Courtney in my home wasn’t my first choice at this point, but trying to avoid doing so would only draw more attention to the awkwardness between us; besides, I didn’t want to give Vi the satisfaction of knowing that Courtney and I weren’t getting along. “And you’re welcome to bring Stephanie,” I said.

  “She can drive over in her U-Haul,” Vi replied.

  Stephanie didn’t end up coming for dinner, though Patrick did. And Emma turned out to be stunning, with pale skin, a dark bob, and four-inch heels. Upon meeting, she kissed me on both cheeks and remarked on how darling Rosie and Owen were. She’d brought to our house a bottle of red wine and an enormous bouquet of Stargazer lilies—I couldn’t help wondering if we had paid for
these as well—and there was a sort of amusement accompanying her good manners that made me suspect she found it a great lark to eat dinner at six P.M. in the suburbs. It wasn’t that I didn’t like her, but rather that I wasn’t sure I trusted this version of her—in-person, high-heeled, gorgeous Emma—quite as much as I trusted her voice on the phone. Also, she flirted with Hank.

  Hank and Amelia came without Courtney—“She’s laid up with a sinus infection,” he announced as they walked in—and as I went to the kitchen to get drinks for people, I heard Emma saying, “Hank, how is it that I’ve become an old crone and you’re just as young and handsome as the day we graduated?”

  Jeremy returned then from picking up the pizza and salad, and I passed him glasses of wine to distribute. I was still in the kitchen, dumping the salad into a wooden bowl, when Hank came to get a beer, and I said in a low voice, “Courtney’s not mad that you’re here, is she?”

  From the drawer next to the oven, he pulled out our dinosaur-shaped bottle opener. “Honestly,” he said, “she just wants to lie low before tomorrow.”

  “Oh.” He meant before her abortion, and I felt clumsy. “How is she?”

  Hank shrugged, and at that moment Rosie clattered into the kitchen wearing pink pants, no shirt, and my clogs on the wrong feet.

  “You ever feel like something’s missing, Rosie?” Hank said.

  “Pumpkin, I think you’ll be more comfortable with your shirt back on,” I said.

  The Wheelings left first, a little after eight—I’d already put Owen and Rosie to bed—and when Owen woke to nurse at ten, Emma, Patrick, and Vi were still there; and then, to my surprise, when I returned downstairs, they had just opened a new bottle of wine, though at least they appeared to be making quick work of it. Given that the town car had disappeared after dropping them off hours earlier, it was unclear to me how they’d be departing from our house. Jeremy shot me a look that I understood to mean Make them leave.

  I turned to Emma. “Are you worn out, or are Vi and Patrick going to show you the St. Louis nightlife?”

  “There are some decent bars a few blocks from here,” Jeremy said. “Within walking distance, in fact.”

  “No, no, no.” Vi shook her head. “Those are boring yuppie bars. I’m thinking Arsenal Street.”

  “Want me to call you a cab?” I asked.

  “Or downtown,” Vi said. “Because we never ended up seeing the Arch today.”

  “Which almost means I haven’t really been to St. Louis, doesn’t it?” Emma said. “Not officially.”

  I was so tired that I had to raise my eyebrows so my eyes would stay open. I tried to make my voice festive as I said, “You should definitely go downtown, in that case.”

  “You won’t be joining us, Daze?” Patrick curled his lower lip toward his chin.

  “I wish.”

  When they finally, finally were gone—Emma kissed me again on both cheeks before they took off—I walked into the kitchen, where Jeremy was washing dishes. I patted his butt. “Sorry.”

  “I was about to get my sleeping bag and unroll it on the living room floor.”

  “They just don’t have children.” I passed him a plate from the table and said, “Besides that, what did you think of Emma?”

  “She was fine.” Had I expected that he’d say she seemed worth all our money? Jeremy wouldn’t have thought this of anyone. He added, “Patrick seemed wasted.”

  “He told me the salad dressing was divine. I said I couldn’t take credit.”

  Jeremy forced a smile. The truth was that there was a certain fizzy excitement they’d taken with them, the luster of California, and in their absence, there were only our dirty dishes, our tiredness, and the fear I felt for all of us.

  The next morning, at the office of her ob/gyn, Courtney terminated her pregnancy. Amelia was at school, but I didn’t—I couldn’t—offer to take her for the afternoon (they hired a sitter), or to drop off food for them, because Courtney still didn’t know that Jeremy and I knew. I waited to get a text from Hank afterward, but I didn’t, not that day or the next.

  “I hope there weren’t complications,” I said to Jeremy, and he said, “I’m sure they’re just resting.”

  Hank called on Thursday morning. “So she’s back at work.”

  “That’s a good sign, right? It sounds like a good sign.”

  “I should have tried harder to talk her out of going through with it. I didn’t try very hard.”

  “You can’t beat yourself up.” Rosie and Owen and I were in our living room; Rosie was balancing the baloney on Owen’s head like a cap, and he looked over at me in a tearful way, as if surprised and disappointed that I wasn’t intervening. “Don’t do that, Rosie,” I said. “Leave him alone.”

  “Don’t do that, Rosie,” Rosie repeated, then tossed the baloney toward the ceiling and said, “The baloney wants to fly.”

  “You’re a great husband and a great father,” I said to Hank. “I hope you know that.” And I thought then, though I hadn’t clearly thought it before this moment, that if I learned I was pregnant with a baby who had Down’s, I wouldn’t have an abortion; I wouldn’t have made the choice Courtney had.

  “So I took Amelia to Oak Knoll yesterday, just to get her out of the house,” Hank was saying. “And she’s on that bird toy, you know the thing that rocks? And a girl who’s maybe five comes up to us, she points to Amelia, and she says to me, ‘Where’s her sister?’ ”

  “Oh, God.”

  “I almost lost it. I did lose it, truthfully, but not till we got home.”

  As I watched Rosie and Owen—Rosie was sending the baloney airborne again, and Owen was trying to rip an ad for antacids out of an issue of Time magazine that was three months old—my heart clenched. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  I heard Hank swallow. “I always thought it was a girl,” he said.

  Chapter 11

  It was in October 2002, on an evening shortly before Halloween, that Jeremy and I almost collided in the pasta aisle of Schnucks. He was holding a grocery basket, and I was pushing a cart, which came within an inch or two of him as I rounded the corner before I abruptly pulled it back. “I’m so sorry!” I said, and he said, “No, no, it’s my fault,” and then he looked at me and exclaimed, “You’re the smoothie girl!”

  I said, “I am?”

  Jeremy felt very silly for having blurted this out, he told me later, and at the time I knew he was embarrassed, but I thought he was cute. He was shorter than any guy I’d dated, and he had close-cut dark hair and small glasses with metal frames, and though he seemed solemn, his cheeks were flushed in a way that was endearingly boyish. I knew then, before he’d asked me out, before he’d even said his name, that we would get married. Next to the boxes of spaghetti and rigatoni, I had just met my husband.

  He said, “I think I’ve seen you at that place—” He gestured toward the western side of Schnucks, beyond which was a row of smaller stores and restaurants, including a wrap and smoothie take-out place, and I said, “Oh, I go there all the time,” and he said, “I’ve always thought it’s weird that they’re so organic and natural, but they’re next door to a tanning salon,” and I said, “I always think the same thing!” There was a silence, and I added, “And they sell those diodes to protect you from your cellphone, but you have to wonder about the ultraviolet rays beaming onto their food from the other side of the wall.” Then I said, “I don’t even know what a diode is.”

  He smiled. “They must be powerful.”

  Another silence arose; surely this was the turning point of the interaction, when we’d either extend our conversation in a way that would be explicitly unnecessary or we’d head off in opposite directions. But I wasn’t anxious. If we didn’t extend our conversation, we’d have another one later. We needed to, in order to get married. Also, I was at this time still going out with David.

  Then Jeremy said, “I’m guessing you live in the neighborhood?”

  I nodded. “On the other side of Big Bend.”


  “I’m off DeMun.”

  “Are you a grad student at Wash U?” I asked.

  The flush of his cheeks deepened. “A professor in Earth and Planetary Sciences.”

  “You don’t look old enough to be a professor,” I said—I said it teasingly—and he said, “Believe me, that’s why I always wear a tie on the days I teach.” In the ensuing lull, he added, “Well, maybe I’ll see you when we’re next getting smoothies,” and I said, “Yeah, definitely,” and he said, “We could even meet there on purpose,” and I said, “That’d be fun,” and he said, “Or we could, you know, go somewhere and have a real drink,” and I said, “Why don’t I give you my email?” The guilt I felt as I wrote it on a scrap of paper from my grocery list was overridden by my sense of optimism, the chemical shift I experienced in Jeremy’s presence. I said, “I’m Kate, by the way.”

  “Jeremy.” There was a moment in which we both tried to discern if the other person wanted to shake hands, and then it didn’t happen—it would have seemed too formal or dorky, I thought, to shake the hand of the man I was going to marry—and instead I lifted my right arm and waved. “See you soon,” I said.

  He emailed the next day and asked if I’d like to get dinner at a restaurant in South City the following week. And though I’d planned to break up with David well in advance of my date with Jeremy, I didn’t do it until an hour before Jeremy was to pick me up. We were at David’s apartment, and after I said I felt like we had grown apart, he said, “I guess you don’t care that everyone we know assumes we’re getting married.”