Sisterland

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  That afternoon, I took a shower in the bathroom adjacent to Rosie’s room, and when I emerged in clean clothes, with wet hair, Jeremy was holding Rosie and talking to Vi, who sat on my foldout chair. “Hey there, hot stuff,” Vi said. “Sorry about everything.”

  “She’s doing much better now.”

  “That’s what Jeremy said. You should have called. I knew something was going on.”

  “How’d you figure out we were here?” I asked.

  “I called him.” Vi gestured at Jeremy.

  “If you two want to walk around the block and get some air, Rosie and I will be fine,” Jeremy said.

  “That’s okay.” I extended my arms, and he passed Rosie to me.

  “That’s some eye,” Vi said. “Will she have any scarring?”

  This thought hadn’t occurred to me. “I don’t know why she would,” Jeremy said.

  “It’s not contagious, is it?”

  “Not unless you have an open cut that you rub against her eye,” I said.

  “Maybe I won’t hold her anyway, just to be safe.” Vi gestured to the box of granola bars. “Can I have one?” As Jeremy nodded, Vi said to him, “Was your mom wowed by me?”

  “It sounds like she had a great time,” Jeremy said.

  “You should come some night.” Vi glanced at me. “It wasn’t nearly as woo-woo as you imagined, right, Daze?”

  I didn’t, of course, hold Vi responsible for Rosie’s infection, but I definitely wished I hadn’t attended the session. I said, “That stuff’s not Jeremy’s cup of tea.”

  “Wow.” Vi laughed. “Don’t censor yourself.” She pointed at Rosie. “Does Dad know?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to call him.”

  “We never went to the ER when we were kids, did we?”

  What was she implying? “Not that I remember,” I said.

  Vi said, “Every time I look at her, you know what I think of? I think of In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

  If Rosie hadn’t shown signs of improvement, I wouldn’t have had the courage to fight with my sister; I wouldn’t have wanted to release bad will into the world when I needed the world’s beneficence. So perhaps it was a reflection of my confidence in Rosie’s restored health that I said, “Vi, if you’re under the impression that you’re making things better by being here, you know what? You’re not.”

  We stayed in the hospital one more night, and the strange part was that when they finally discharged us, I felt the return of anxious heart; it had gone away when Dr. Mittra patted my shoulder, but it came back. Having a child in the hospital was, in most ways, awful, and yet I believed in the competence of the nurses and doctors more than I believed in my own; it was like turbulence on an airplane, how it could be both terrifying and out of your hands.

  This was the time when, each night at home, I began putting the diaper bag by the front door, making sure that my wallet with my health insurance card was in it, when I’d charge my cellphone in the outlet closest to the diaper bag, and when I switched from sleeping in pajamas with silly patterns of monkeys or gnomes to sleeping in black yoga pants and plain T-shirts. I also kept wearing a nursing bra at night long after I’d stopped leaking milk, and in this way, I always knew that if I had to leave for the ER in the middle of the night, I could do so quickly.

  Rosie didn’t return to day care. We’d already paid the month’s tuition, but I kept her home, and I quit my job effective immediately; I went back only to clean out my office. I’d thought my supervisor would be disappointed in me—she was a forty-eight-year-old divorced mother of three named Sue—but when I told her I was leaving the agency, she said without rancor, “It’s hard, isn’t it? I envy you that you have the option of staying home.”

  Which I did, but barely. The day Rosie was discharged from the hospital, when I told Jeremy I wanted to quit my job, he said, “I ran the numbers and we’ll be okay on just my salary, but we need to be more careful. For instance, no more ordering Rosie fifty-dollar Norwegian organic pajamas.”

  “They’re thirty dollars,” I said. “And Swedish.”

  “Her clothes fit her for a month,” he said. “Just buy her stuff at Target.”

  In the weeks and months after Rosie was in the hospital, I worried all the time: When she sneezed, I worried that she was getting a cold that would turn into cellulitis again, or perhaps pneumonia. I worried when I heard reports about resurgences in whooping cough, and when she started eating solids, I worried about her choking, and when I cut her pinkie while trimming her fingernails, I worried that she’d develop a staph infection. One afternoon while Jeremy was teaching, when she threw up five times in an hour for no obvious reason, I was so frantic that I had to make myself breathe in the way recommended by the teacher in the birthing class we’d taken.

  It wasn’t that I no longer took pleasure in Rosie’s company; it was just that the joy of, say, watching her lie on her back and kick at the parrot hanging above her play mat was accompanied by a thrumming undercurrent of dread so constant and all-encompassing that it seemed hard to believe I’d lived without it for as long as I had. I had thought that I’d become a parent when Rosie was born, but now it seemed my true initiation had occurred during her return to the hospital.

  When panic seized me—as when she threw up or I held a thermometer under her armpit and watched the digital numbers jump—I’d tell myself, Be calm. It’s completely normal for children to get sick. But all during that first summer of Rosie’s life, my heart would clench and clench.

  I knew my anxiety was hard for Jeremy, too, less for what I said than the jittery waves I emanated, my reluctance to participate in activities without Rosie—to go to a movie, for instance. Even after I agreed to hire Kendra to babysit one morning a week, instead of leaving the house, I lurked, under the pretense of doing laundry and straightening up.

  It was the double aspect of my anxiety, I think, that made it bad: First I worried that terrible things would befall Rosie, then I worried that I was right to worry because I was psychic. Like all new mothers, I’d been told repeatedly, by doctors and nurses and friends and strangers and advice books, to trust my instincts. But my instincts had betrayed me; they’d gone haywire.

  The week before Rosie was eight months old, on a warm afternoon in late September while she was napping, I wrote Having senses on a piece of paper I’d torn from a notebook we kept by the phone. I folded the paper and dropped it into our clear salad bowl, along with a box of kitchen matches; I tucked Rosie’s monitor under my arm and carried the bowl into the backyard.

  I was too embarrassed to speak aloud before I struck a match against the strip on the box, but inside my head, I thought, Please. Please, please let this work. Then I lit the paper on fire. I felt ridiculous standing there in the sun as the paper burned; surely this brief rite would not be enough to eliminate a lifetime of premonitions. And in many ways, of course, it wasn’t: I still sometimes dreamed of the future, and I still had hunches about people (the new dental hygienist at the practice Jeremy and I went to—she was being beaten up by her boyfriend, and I knew it the minute she called me back to the exam room). But burning that piece of paper did give me something, something that it’s possible no one else had ever aspired to, which was grounds for doubting my own intuition. It gave me, inside the confines of my brain, plausible deniability. When a frightening thought about Rosie lodged itself in my head, I could say, Maybe. But maybe not. Perhaps I was still psychic, and perhaps I wasn’t.

  And soon there was evidence that both my senses and my anxiety were waning. A week after I burned the paper, I was driving on Delmar between Hanley and 170, Rosie in the back, when a cop pulled up behind me and turned on his lights and siren; once I realized what was under way, I was thrilled, which surely was a reaction the cop hadn’t previously encountered. He was my age, a white guy who, when he saw Rosie, seemed almost apologetic. Nevertheless, because I’d been going forty-two miles an hour in a thirty-five-mile zone, he proceeded to issue me a
speeding ticket.

  That same week, when Kendra came, I left the house; I went to the Galleria and bought a new pair of jeans and a macadamia nut cookie. I also signed up to take a music class with Rosie, though surely such a class, with a dozen other babies and toddlers in it, would mean the exchange of many germs.

  For a while after Rosie’s eye infection, I thought I’d never have another child, because who would take care of the second one if the first was hospitalized? But over time, I became less preoccupied with this scenario; I almost forgot it. And really, this was the ultimate sign that my anxiety, in its severest form, had passed: that eight months after I burned my senses, I was pregnant with Owen.

  Chapter 16

  On the afternoon of October 15, after Jeremy had left for the airport, his absence didn’t, at first, feel abnormal; after all, he was always gone on weekdays. I’d calculated that the time between when he departed for Denver and when Vi’s earthquake prediction expired, assuming it expired at midnight, was thirty-three and a half hours.

  Rosie and Owen both woke not long after Jeremy left, and following their snacks, I texted Hank: Park?

  Coffee first, he texted back.

  I still felt self-conscious about Rosie’s banged-up lip, but after three days, it looked much better. And getting our coffee from Kaldi’s, hanging out in the park—it was a regular afternoon. Perhaps Jeremy had been right.

  Around five, as I was pushing Owen in a bucket swing and the girls were chasing each other, I said to Hank, “Do you guys want to come over for dinner? We could order Chinese.”

  “I told a mom at Amelia’s school we’d go to the thing in Forest Park tonight.”

  “The earthquake thing?” I’d received an email about this event through a playgroup Rosie and I hadn’t attended in a year, and without fully reading it, I’d managed to absorb that the Science Center was sponsoring an evening for kids called “EducationQuake!” If Vi Shramm weren’t my sister, it was conceivable that we’d have gone.

  “I might as well tell you now,” Hank said. “We also got invited to an earthquake party tomorrow night.”

  “What’s an earthquake party?”

  “I’m guessing it’s an excuse for parents of young children to drink cocktails. You’ve heard of hurricane parties?”

  “Are you staying overnight at their house?”

  “God, no.” He paused then. “Let me put it this way: Maybe some people are. We’re not.” I gave Owen a push with the heel of my hand, and Hank said, “Are you and Vi still in your Today show fight?”

  “It looks that way.”

  “I wonder if she’s going on TV by herself.” I shrugged, and he looked amused. “Don’t try to tell me you’re not planning to watch.”

  “Honestly, I’ve seen enough of Vi on television.”

  Hank grinned. “Touché.” For the last several days, he had seemed to be in a good mood; he hadn’t mentioned the abortion, so neither had I. We’d talked about my having run into Courtney and Jeremy at Blueberry Hill—Courtney had told him about it—and he’d treated it as a pleasant coincidence, an impression I hadn’t corrected. He’d said, “So you finally got busted for not leaving Owen with the sitter, huh?” and I’d said, “No, I pretended it was a one-time thing.”

  Rosie wandered over to the swing set. “Rosie wants toast.”

  “If we can’t lure you with Chinese food, we should probably start heading back so I can get her dinner ready,” I said to Hank.

  “You want to meet up with us later at Forest Park?”

  “I don’t think I have it in me.” I felt a clinginess then, a wish not to separate from Hank, as if nothing bad could happen to any of us in his presence. But this was childish, and I needed to be a grown-up.

  “Hang in there.” Hank flicked my cheek with his thumb and middle finger. “Okay?” There was something both odd and pleasing in the flicking gesture, though it wasn’t until I was at home, waiting for the water to boil for the macaroni and cheese Rosie and I would eat, that I was able to pinpoint what the oddness was: It had been flirtatious. And Hank and I didn’t, I was pretty sure, flirt.

  After I drained the noodles, I heard my phone ding inside my vest pocket, and when I pulled it out, thinking it would be Jeremy, I saw that the text was from Hank: Found out what yr famous sister is doing tmrw, he’d written, and he’d pasted a link I couldn’t resist clicking on. It was an article from the Post-Dispatch, with the headline EARTHQUAKE PSYCHIC TO ATTEND PRIVATE VIGIL. The vigil would be at the Mind & Spirit Bookstore, I discovered as I continued reading, and it was closed to the public. So she’d be on the Today show in the morning, and then she’d embrace privacy and discretion? She was ridiculous.

  By seven-thirty, I’d applied Rosie’s Neosporin, put Owen to bed while Rosie danced and shouted around us in her nightly frenzy, and then put Rosie herself down, and the night ahead felt almost unsettlingly free. All my earthquake preparations—removing the wall hangings and storing the china; organizing the emergency supplies in the basement; even consolidating our important family documents, like birth certificates and Social Security cards, into a Ziploc bag—were complete. I wondered if I ought to organize the junk drawer in the kitchen, which barely closed, or if this was the moment to catch up on the last two and a half years’ worth of emails, at least the non-earthquake-related emails, or if perhaps I should finish reading the novel I’d started over the summer. What usually happened when an unanticipated chunk of time presented itself was that I spent ten minutes pondering the possibilities available to me, at which point either Owen or Rosie woke up or else I realized that something demanded my immediate attention—poop-stained pants, milk pooling on the kitchen floor. And it was almost a relief to remember what it was I needed to attend to; otherwise the choices were bewildering.

  Sure enough, as I descended the stairs, I realized that I ought to call my father. Jeremy’s suggestion to the contrary, my father wouldn’t help me with Owen and Rosie, but for his own sake, I wanted to offer him the option of staying at our house the following night. Because what else would he do with himself on this strange day, a day that could be momentous or ordinary? Did he believe that Vi’s prediction would come to pass? It was such a basic question, yet it was unthinkable that I’d ask him. And even if I could have, he wouldn’t have answered.

  When I reached him and told him he was welcome to come over anytime the next day, from the morning on—“We’re up around six,” I said—he said, “Maybe I could stop by in the afternoon.”

  Something in his tone told me that he meant he’d be willing to do us a favor, not that he thought we’d be doing him one.

  “Just if you want company,” I said. “If you’d rather stay put in your own house, I don’t blame you.”

  “Well, Vi’s event doesn’t start until five, if I’m not mistaken.”

  My father was attending Vi’s bookstore vigil? “Did she ask you to drive her?” I said.

  “I don’t mind. I’ll sit out back and listen to the radio in the car.”

  “Dad, she can get a ride with a friend who’s going anyway. I’m sure it’ll run really late.”

  “I truly don’t mind.”

  You might not, I thought, but how about the other people sharing the road with you when you can’t see at night?

  “Let’s touch base in the morning,” my father said.

  I had, while talking to my father, been dimly aware of a rattling in the kitchen; I’d even walked in there from the living room, carrying the phone, but the kitchen was silent until I walked back out, at which point the rattling resumed. It wasn’t an earthquake—it was much too small, and it kept starting and stopping.

  I returned to the kitchen, and this time the rattling continued. I took a step toward the oven, which seemed to be its source, and it stopped, but when I waited a minute, it started again. I reached for my cellphone and texted Jeremy: I think we have a mouse.

  As he had promised, no more than thirty seconds passed before our home phone rang.


  “Where’d you see it?” he said. In the background, I could hear the buzz of many voices—the hotel bar, presumably, where he was busy placing articles in journals.

  “I didn’t see it yet, I only heard it under the stove. Isn’t that where we had one last year?”

  “Sorry this had to happen tonight. We have some traps in the basement, on that shelf where you keep the Christmas decorations.”

  “Lovely,” I said.

  “The traps are in a plastic bag.”

  “Do I have to put cheese in it? Is that something people do in real life?”

  Jeremy laughed. “Has my princess never set a mousetrap? No, you don’t need to put any food in. Just be careful with the spring, and you might want to put out more than one, but make sure you move them before Rosie’s up in the morning. If you do catch a mouse, what I always do is just roll it up in newspaper and take the whole thing out to the trash bin.”

  “It won’t still be alive, will it?”

  “No, but don’t feel too guilty. Mice spread diseases. How’d things go tonight?”

  To reveal that they hadn’t gone badly would be to concede in a way I wasn’t yet ready for. I said, “About how you’d imagine.”

  “The baloney’s holding up in my absence?”

  “You’ll have to ask Rosie.”

  “All right, then.” He wasn’t going to let himself be pulled toward rancor. “Call back if you have trouble with the trap, and call either way before you go to bed.”

  Setting a mousetrap, it turned out, wasn’t harder than applying antibiotic ointment to a squirming two-year-old. In fact, it was easier. I set three, washed my hands, and was opening the refrigerator door to reward myself with a beer when my cellphone rang.