Sisterland

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “I’d like her to have some stability like you have with Jeremy,” my father said. “Just something to fall back on over the long term, after I’m not around, and I wonder if you wouldn’t be disappointed if instead of helping out with your wedding, I made a down payment on a house for your sister. I’m awfully sorry I can’t do both. As your mother knew all too well, I’ve never been a financial whiz kid.”

  I blinked and said, “That’s fine.” My voice was uneven, but not so hideously that it required his acknowledgment.

  “I know it isn’t fair to you—”

  “Dad.” I held up my hand. “It’s fine. We don’t need to talk about it.” But he wasn’t finished. “I’m sure they must pay the professors handsomely at Wash U,” he said. “If you weren’t marrying someone responsible, I wouldn’t—”

  “It’s completely fine,” I said. “Really.”

  “There is something I want you to have.” He was the one pushing the grocery cart, and he looked at me then, my tall, thin, old, sad father, wearing a short-sleeved poly-blend plaid shirt and gray slacks. “It’s in the car.”

  We finished shopping and loaded the plastic bags into my trunk. I wasn’t planning to remind him of whatever it was he intended to give me—I feared another twenty-five-dollar Starbucks gift card—but when we were seated, he passed me a small royal blue velvet pouch cinched at the neck. I knew immediately what was in it; to open it would be like opening the past. But he was waiting, and I had no choice. I was then holding my mother’s charm bracelet, the charms dangling like false promises: the little gold baseball bat and the malachite shamrock, the windmill, the poodle with eyes of tiny turquoise, the miniature beer stein. “How does the saying go?” my father said. “Something old, something new … I thought this could be your something old.”

  There had been certain things I’d wanted badly in my childhood, and instead of getting them, I’d grown up; I did not want them any longer. But I said, “Thank you, Dad.”

  “Would you like me to put it on you?”

  I forced a smile. “I think it’ll be more special if I save it.”

  Jeremy was usually out until after eleven on poker nights, and back in our apartment, I turned on the TV. I would have called Vi to tell her about the bracelet, but I thought she was working, which was why I was surprised when my cellphone rang shortly before nine and her name came up. “I just got back from meeting with a police detective,” she said. “I think they believe us.”

  “You’re not at the restaurant tonight?”

  “I called in sick. The detective was a woman, but her name is Tyler.”

  “When did you hear from them?”

  “Just this afternoon. Come over and I’ll tell you about it.”

  “I’m in my pajamas already.”

  “So?”

  After a second, I said, “Okay. I’ll come over.”

  When the detective—Tyler McGillivary—had called Vi that afternoon, she’d wanted to see Vi as soon as possible; twenty minutes later, she was in Vi’s living room. Detective McGillivary had asked her questions for close to an hour: about Vi’s life and her job, about her previous premonitions, about the specific senses Vi was having with regard to Brady Ogden. Detective McGillivary wanted to know how closely Vi had followed the case, which wasn’t all that closely, or if she’d ever had contact with the Ogden family. “Did you know Brady has two brothers?” Vi said, and I said, “Did you not know that?”

  Detective McGillivary used Vi’s bathroom—Vi wondered if she was snooping—and when she emerged, she asked if Vi had time to come in to the station. Detective McGillivary gave her a ride (it wasn’t a police car she drove, and it didn’t even look like an unmarked police car; it seemed like it was her personal car, partly because Vi saw the stub to a movie ticket on the dashboard), and at the station, Detective McGillivary took her to a private room. The detective went to get them coffee and returned accompanied by two other people, both men, who obviously were also on the police force, though Vi forgot their names and titles immediately upon being introduced. With these men present, Detective McGillivary asked many of the same questions she’d asked at Vi’s apartment, especially the ones about the guy Vi thought was the kidnapper and the ones about being psychic. “You didn’t say anything about me, did you?” I said.

  “It came up that I have a twin.”

  “Did they ask if I have senses, too?” They had; I knew they had.

  “I said you don’t like talking about it. Which, I know, Daze, I promised you and everything, but what would you have done? And I swear I didn’t say you were the one who came up with the name Derek. They really weren’t that interested in you.”

  They all were respectful toward her, Vi continued, much more than she’d expected. The way they talked to her, it was as if she’d been a witness to a crime and they appreciated her help. Even when she described how Guardian had first spoken to her at Reed—here she looked at me meaningfully—they didn’t seem to be rolling their eyes.

  Detective McGillivary suggested they go for a drive, and one of the men went, too; Detective McGillivary drove, the guy sat in front, and Vi sat in back. This time, on the backseat, Vi saw a pair of swimming goggles.

  They took her past the Ogden family’s house and around their neighborhood, past the elementary school Brady Ogden had attended, and then they drove to the apartment complex where I hadn’t turned my car off, and they sat there for a long time, maybe forty-five minutes, and talked about different things. They were relaxed with her, Vi said; it was like they were just hanging out, but as they were leaving, Vi abruptly felt short of breath and heard Guardian say, “He needs your help.”

  “Did the detective say she’d be in touch?” I asked.

  “Yeah, or that I should call her if more stuff comes to me.”

  “Will they tell you if they find him?”

  Vi gave me a peculiar look. “They won’t have to,” she said. “It’ll be national news.”

  Again, as when I’d called and left the message on the tip line, I thought something would or should happen immediately; Brady Ogden should be found, and the man who had abducted him should be arrested. But the weekend passed, the last weekend before my wedding, and Vi had neither called nor been called by Detective McGillivary. I had had no further senses about Brady Ogden, though I’d had plenty of thoughts about him during the hours I couldn’t sleep at night—a nine-year-old boy inside an apartment in one of those big awful buildings, with a predatory, blond-haired man.

  Jeremy and I were to leave for Mendocino on Wednesday. On Monday, I called Vi and said, “Will you ask the detective if there’s any news?”

  “You ask her. Just say you’re me again.”

  “Our deal was that you’d talk to the police.”

  “But I have nothing to say to her.” Didn’t Vi always have something to say? She added, “You just want this to be resolved before your wedding.” But she didn’t sound mean or judgmental as she said, “Daze, there’s nothing you can do right now for Brady Ogden.”

  That night, Jeremy had just dumped spaghetti into a pot of boiling water when I said, “I want us to still get married, but I think we should cancel our wedding. I’m sorry.”

  He looked at me with an unfriendly expression. “Didn’t we already have this conversation?”

  “Vi’s been having senses about Brady Ogden, and I drove around with her last week and she thinks she knows which building his kidnapper lives in, which means it could be where Brady Ogden is, too, if he’s still alive, and I had a dream that the kidnapper’s name is Derek, and then Vi met with the police.”

  “And that changes our wedding plans how?” If I’d thought Jeremy’s jaw would drop in astonishment, it would have meant I didn’t know my fiancé. I hadn’t thought this, but it still surprised me just how unruffled he was.

  And his question was, in a way, a good one. But in another way, its answer seemed self-evident. I said, “You don’t think it’s gross for us to have a fancy party celebratin
g ourselves when a little nine-year-old boy is still missing?”

  I could see Jeremy’s irritation around his mouth. We virtually never fought, which Vi had once told me meant we weren’t honest with each other, so my familiarity with his displeasure was as its observer rather than its inciter. Every few months, someone would royally piss him off—a drunk guy at a Cards game who threw a cup that hit Jeremy in the head or a mechanic at a garage who he felt had overcharged me—and in a clipped way Jeremy would make two or three comments about what a bottom-dwelling waste of humanity the person was, and then his ill humor would pass.

  But this was different; this time, Jeremy’s displeasure was directed at me. He said, “Brady Ogden has been missing for, what, two months?”

  “Almost four.”

  “Okay. Almost four. He’s been missing for almost four months, and during that time, we’ve been debating steak versus chicken, and stuffed mushrooms versus spanakopita, and what color flowers…. So help me out here in understanding—”

  “I said that I’m sorry. I know how annoying this must be.”

  “Annoying?” Again, those almost pursed, almost amused lips, and the strangeness of his not being my ally. “Kate, the world is a big place, and there are always good and bad things happening at the same time. Should we cancel our wedding because of the Iraq War? Or violence in Kosovo?”

  “My sister’s not directly involved in that.” Then I said, “Remember when J.F.K. Jr.’s plane went down? He was on his way to his cousin’s wedding, and the cousin called it off, but she and the guy still got married later. They just knew that weekend wasn’t the right time.” The plane accident had preoccupied me the summer it happened not only because of how young and good-looking Kennedy had been but also because the other passengers on his little plane had been his wife and the wife’s older sister, who was a twin. For months—even still sometimes—I’d wonder, what was the other twin, the living twin, supposed to do after the accident? She’d had two sisters and lost them both at the same time.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Jeremy said, “but you’re not a Kennedy. And Brady Ogden isn’t your cousin. Would you know him if you saw him on the street?”

  “I definitely would.”

  “Maybe I’m a jerk, but I wouldn’t.” Jeremy folded his arms. “Here’s the thing. If we don’t get married in Mendocino, I don’t want to get married.”

  Without a doubt, this was the most shocking thing Jeremy had ever said to me. I hadn’t imagined that he’d be pleased about my decision, but I had thought he’d let me persuade him. He’d be disappointed but he’d understand, and perhaps even be touched by my sensitivity.

  I said, “So you’re willing to call off the wedding?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Are you afraid that people will be mad about having to cancel their plane tickets? Even if they’re not refundable, they can put the amount toward a different ticket.”

  Jeremy was shaking his head. “That’s not what this is about. It’s about a precedent for our life together that I don’t want to set.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “This idea you have that you’ll be punished for enjoying yourself—it’s a huge bummer, Kate. You’re allowed to experience ordinary pleasures, even if you didn’t get to when you were younger. You’re even allowed to have children.”

  “Having children and not getting married in California have nothing to do with each other.” But I felt two opposing emotions: flattery that Jeremy had observed me so closely and betrayal that he had observed me so closely.

  “I’m just afraid that if we get married”—he paused, possibly having jarred himself, as he’d jarred me, with that if—“that when anything bad happens, you’ll let yourself be consumed by it. You’ll shelve the rest of your life.”

  Was this what he believed I’d done in the past? During the witches episode in eighth grade or after my mother’s death? I said, “If you think that, I’m not sure why you’d want to marry me in the first place.”

  “Besides that I love you?” We watched each other over the kitchen’s high wooden table, and he said, “The wedding is all planned. There’s hardly anything left for us to do but get on the plane.”

  “What if my feeling that we shouldn’t get married out there isn’t just about Brady Ogden? What if we get in a car accident driving up the coast?”

  Prior to this, Jeremy’s anger had been dimming; it flared up again as I spoke. He was almost clenching his teeth as he said, “Do you think that will happen?”

  “It could.”

  He took a step backward. “I can’t let you drag us both to crazyville, Kate. Okay? I just can’t.”

  In a small voice, I said, “I don’t think our car will crash. I just—sometimes it’s like my mind is this echo chamber.”

  He stepped toward me again, around the table, and set his hand on my shoulder. “We’re going to have a really nice, fun, relaxed wedding. That’s not something you need to feel guilty about.”

  We took a cab to the airport because we’d be gone long enough that it was cheaper than paying to park. Sitting together in the backseat, passing the Dr Pepper syrup plant and the billboards for radio stations and car dealerships, Jeremy and I didn’t speak; an observer could have been forgiven for imagining we were on our way to a funeral rather than a wedding, and certainly it wouldn’t have seemed that the wedding we were on the way to was our own. In the airport, after we’d made it through security, we bought lunch at separate places and ate together at our gate, still barely talking. As the plane lifted off, I closed my eyes, and Jeremy took my hand.

  I felt a strange weightlessness, a kind of absolution. I had tried to cancel the wedding; Jeremy had countered by saying he wouldn’t marry me; not marrying Jeremy would, clearly, be an enormous mistake. This sequence felt neat in the way of a syllogism—it seemed to mean there was no alternative and I was not responsible for whatever had befallen Brady Ogden, whatever was befalling him still.

  And so if I could put one foot in front of the other, if I could merely not deviate from the path I was on, that would be enough. Though if I managed to fake a little bridal joy, that wouldn’t hurt. With my eyes still closed, I wondered if I ought to let Jeremy off the hook, if it was unfair to go through with marrying him. But surely I had given him an out, and he hadn’t taken it.

  Now, when I look back on that plane flight, besides remembering the pall over what should have been a festive time, what I’m most struck by is how unencumbered we were—physically unencumbered, I mean. We were two adults sitting in our seats, dozing, reading, sipping soda. Did we have any idea how soon there would be little bodies squirming against our chests, grabbing our hands, bleating and whining, wanting to eat or be entertained? I’d thought back then that I needed to be vigilant, but what was my vigilance for? It was only practice.

  Or maybe I am being disingenuous—if I borrowed problems then, maybe I am borrowing them still. Maybe I have always been, as Vi would subsequently accuse me, someone who creates obstacles for myself then looks around in surprise, wondering where they came from.

  It was better in California: the change of scenery and the fact that the scenery was so pretty, the deep blue sky and green hills, the glittering water and crashing waves. We arrived in Mendocino around dinnertime and walked to town from the inn, ate at a restaurant that seated us on a patio with little white lights woven into the trellis beside our table, and split a bottle of wine. We spoke more, but still solemnly—mostly about the logistics of the next few days. Jeremy ordered an after-dinner cognac, and we were both already buzzed as we returned to the room, where we found champagne in an ice bucket and two flutes awaiting us, compliments of the inn’s staff. Without consulting me, Jeremy opened the champagne—the cork hit the ceiling, the liquid foamed out in a way he did nothing to stop, instead letting it spill onto the carpet—and poured us both a glass. He passed one to me and said, “To us,” and we clinked.

  “This is good,” I said, and he said
, “It’s amazing what they throw in when you spend a mere twenty thousand.”

  We got halfway through the bottle, sitting up side by side on the thick white comforter of the king-sized bed with our backs against the pillows, and then he took my glass out of my hand, set it on the floor, and rolled onto me. His mouth was over mine, and he was pulling at my clothes, and when I was naked, his teeth were on my nipples, his fingers inside me, and after a few minutes, he withdrew his fingers and slid into me, rocking his hips against mine; I gripped his arms above the elbows. We finished at the same time, and instead of pulling out, he just lay there, still inside me, and I could feel the trickle of liquid between us. After a minute, I said, “I’m glad you’re making me marry you.”

  Our families arrived the following day—Jeremy’s two sets of parents, his brother and brother’s wife and their two children, plus Vi and my father and Patrick. “I seriously almost puked on the drive in,” Vi said as we stood outside the main entrance of the inn in the cooling late afternoon. “You didn’t tell me the roads were so twisty.”

  “Have you heard from the detective?”

  She shook her head.

  Jeremy had made a reservation at a Chinese restaurant, which seated us at a big round table with a lazy Susan in the middle, and it was seeing people interact from such separate parts of my life, of the life Jeremy and I now had together, that made me understand for the first time that a wedding was more than a party where you got married—that I had indeed been too literal in gauging whether it was worth the expense. Jeremy’s sister-in-law, Meg, was laughing uproariously with Patrick, and Vi and Jeremy’s mother were talking intently about something, and my father was very earnestly drawing a picture of a tractor for Eddie, Jeremy’s three-year-old nephew.

  This feeling of enlargement, of random and merry reconstitutions of our friends and family, continued as people kept arriving the next day: Meg and my friend Janet in the pool together with their children, Jeremy’s friend Cockroach tossing a Frisbee with Patrick and Jeremy’s grad school adviser on the lawn in front of the inn. All the guests, which was still only twenty people because a handful wouldn’t arrive until Saturday, were invited to the rehearsal dinner on a terrace behind the inn. Jeremy’s divorced mother and father gave a joint toast about how wonderful Jeremy was and how thrilled they were that he was marrying me, and after they sat down, my father rose, and embarrassment clutched me; was it some breach of protocol for him to speak when he wasn’t paying for any of the wedding? But no one besides Jeremy and me knew, I reminded myself. “I’ve never been terrific at expressing my feelings,” my father said. “But Daisy and her sister used to like to sing and dance, and this is a song I want to sing in their honor.” It was “The Way You Look Tonight,” and he sang without musical accompaniment, and for several seconds I was horrified. Plus, he’d just called me Daisy. But his voice, which had been a little thin to start, thickened—my father had always had a good voice—and at some point the song transformed from unbearable to charming. For the rest of the weekend and long after, my father’s toast was often mentioned by our guests as the wedding’s highlight.