Sisterland

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “We’ll get the costumes this afternoon,” I said.

  “Rosie wants a costume now!”

  Hank and I made eye contact in the mirror, and he said, “If you trust me to help her pick something, I don’t mind going to Target.”

  How I wish that I’d said no and just let Rosie whine. Instead, I said, “That would be awesome, if you’re up for it. Just nothing S-L-U-T-T-Y.” I unfastened my own seat belt and climbed out of the car, taking Hank’s place in extricating Rosie, and as I did, I said, “You get to go with Hank to look for your costume. Isn’t that nice of him? So please be his helper in the store and do what he tells you.”

  When Rosie was standing in the driveway in the rain, the little green hood of her raincoat pulled up, Hank extended his hand, and somberly, Rosie took it. I could tell that she was confused in ways she couldn’t express. I bent to kiss her forehead. “I love you, little pumpkin,” I said.

  Relax Massage was in a strip mall, and after I’d inserted Owen into the carrier and crossed the small parking lot, I almost collided with a man as I stepped from between two parked cars onto the sidewalk in front of the stores. He stopped, gesturing for me to go first; I did, smiling apologetically, and as I walked the remaining few feet to the door of Relax Massage, I could feel him walking in after me.

  The waiting room couldn’t have been more than fifty square feet, a dimly lit space with tan walls and an opaque sliding window that was open onto an interior hall. A bell waited on the window ledge. None of which was that suspicious, but there was a musky smell in the air that wasn’t at all like the minty scents of the spas I’d been to.

  As I was wondering whether I ought to ring the bell or let the guy behind me ring it, a door next to the window opened and a middle-aged woman with dyed red hair emerged. She said, “You are the daughter of Mr. Earl?” When I nodded, she said, “You come with me.” Looking at the man, she said, “You sit down, Mr. Nathan, and Alina, she is ready for you one minute.”

  She led me to a room about the size of the waiting room, also dimly lit, where a tape player emitted classical music and my father sat with his legs hanging off what looked like a doctor’s exam table except longer, and covered by a sheet rather than paper. He was—thank goodness—fully dressed, and drinking 7UP from a can; he wasn’t visibly injured. “Daisy, I didn’t mean to trouble you,” he said. Leaning against a wall, her arms folded in front of her, was a young woman I assumed to be Alina, an unsmiling figure with light brown hair that fell almost to her hips, wearing black leggings, a black tank top, and dark red lipstick. She had large breasts beneath the tank top, and I tried to suppress the question of whether she’d recently given my father a hand job.

  In a voice that was accent-free and neither friendly nor unfriendly, she said, “Don’t forget his raincoat.” She pulled it from a hook and passed it to me, even though my father had made no motion toward standing. When she spoke, I saw that behind the lipstick, she had a dead front tooth.

  “Dad, you’re well enough to walk to the car? Because I can call an ambulance.”

  “I’m fine.”

  As if my father were not present, the older woman said, “You take him to doctor. Could be problem of—” First she tapped her chest, over her heart; then she said, “Or here,” and tapped her head.

  “Dad, why don’t you lean on me to get up?” Even as I positioned myself beside him, Owen attached to me in the carrier, I thought my father would decline my assistance. When he didn’t, I thought one of the women would offer to help, which also didn’t occur. And so with one arm set around my shoulders, my father slid off the table into a standing position, and he continued to lean on me heavily as we made our slow progress out of the room. From the carrier, Owen turned his head to look at my father with curiosity. “Say, ‘Hi, Grandpa,’ ” I said as we retraced our route through the little hall and back into the waiting room, where I intentionally didn’t make eye contact with the next man waiting for Alina. Just before I reached for the handle of the door leading outside, the middle-aged woman said, “Your father, he not pay.”

  With my left hand, I pulled my wallet from the right pocket of my vest and shimmied out a credit card.

  “No,” the woman said. “Is cash only.”

  Right, I thought. Because you’re prostitutes. Aloud, I asked, “How much?”

  “I wouldn’t think of having you pay.” My father passed his entire wallet to the woman. I watched her take what I thought was eighty dollars before passing it back.

  “You go to doctor, Mr. Earl,” she said.

  In the parking lot, there was no discussion of my father driving his own car; after I’d helped him into the front seat of mine, I said, “Want me to fasten the seat belt?”

  “No,” he said.

  When all three of us were finally settled in, I said, “Did you eat breakfast this morning?”

  “I did. I had a boiled egg.”

  “Dad, I want to take you to the hospital. I’m sure you’re fine, but I just want to hear it from a doctor.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “I’d rather be safe than—”

  “Take me home, Daisy,” my father said. “I’m liable to pick up an infection at the hospital when all I’d like to do right now is rest. And you can bet they’d keep us waiting for hours.”

  I backed out of the parking space and pulled onto Olive, and when we were stopped at a red light, I said, “How about if you come to our house? I’ll take you home to pack a bag, and you can spend the night with us.” Which was pretty much what I’d suggested before, under different circumstances.

  “I’d like to go home, and I’d like you to be on your way,” my father said. “Don’t treat me like a child.”

  Again, I was silent, this time for several minutes, until at last I said, “I still want to call Dr. Gilmore and make an appointment.” When my father didn’t respond, I said, “I’ll call and see what he has open.”

  At his apartment, I escorted my father to the living room couch and, with Owen back in the carrier, rummaged around in the refrigerator, tossing a bag of deli turkey with a sell-by date from ten days earlier and setting a frozen chicken pot pie in the microwave.

  I shouldn’t have left Rosie with Hank, I thought. I should have brought her with me and we could have stayed with my father for the afternoon. Would it be too much to ask Hank to drive her out? I glanced at my watch and saw that there were fewer than forty minutes before he was due to pick up Amelia, which meant he couldn’t drive Rosie here. Besides, Rosie would never nap at my father’s.

  “We’ll come eat dinner with you,” I said. “A really early dinner. How does that sound?”

  But saying it, I felt afraid of the earthquake for the first time that day. The unexpectedness of the rain had pushed away the earthquake’s likelihood, but the unexpectedness of my father’s fainting had canceled out the unexpectedness of the rain.

  “Let’s see how the afternoon goes,” my father said.

  I set Owen on the floor in the living room and gave him the star rattle to play with while I used my cellphone to call my father’s internist’s office. I was standing between the kitchen and the living room, still on hold—Owen was saying, “Ba-ba-ba-ba,” and my father was saying nothing in return—when I saw that Hank was calling. Worried that the internist’s office would pick up while I was on the other line, I didn’t answer. After a minute, Hank called again, and this time, I answered immediately. “Is everything okay?” If the earthquake had occurred, it seemed impossible that I wouldn’t have felt it.

  “Rosie’s fine,” he said, but as he spoke, I could hear a crying child.

  “Is that her?”

  “She’s not hurt, nothing like that, but I need you to come meet us. We’re still at Target and we’ve been”—he paused, and when he spoke again his voice contained a fraught acidity I’d never heard—“detained. The security guard here is concerned about Rosie.”

  “I thought you said no one was hurt—”

&nbs
p; “No. Kate. Rosie’s fine. He’s concerned about—about me. Because Rosie isn’t my daughter.” Hank seemed to be selecting each word carefully, perhaps even speaking in code—obviously, he was being listened to—and all at once, I understood. Still in that weird, clipped way, he said, “He’s worried that you don’t know Rosie’s with me.”

  “This is insane,” I said. “Put me on the phone with the guard.”

  “Rosie’s mother is glad to talk to you,” I heard Hank say, leaning away from the receiver.

  A male voice said, “Sir, we’d like the child’s mother to come here in person.”

  “Should I call a lawyer?” I asked.

  “Not yet, but can you come now? Is your dad—”

  “Yeah, I’ll leave in a second. Jesus. I’m so sorry.”

  “We’re in the office, which is after you pass the pharmacy.” To the security guard, he said, “Should she come in the main entrance or a different one?” Then, to me, he said, “Come in the main entrance and go right.”

  Early on in my friendship with Hank, we’d taken the girls for a walk in their strollers on one of the semi-gated loops off Wydown, a neighborhood of enormous houses looming over enormous lawns—not the loop Mrs. Abbott, my former employer, had lived on but the one just east of it. I’d suggested walking back there because there was little traffic, which meant it was safe to be in the street instead of jamming our two strollers together on the sidewalk. At some point, a golden retriever approached us, and Amelia, who was about eighteen months, waved at the dog while Hank petted its head. The dog stayed with us as we continued around the bend, and I said to Hank, “See that thing on her collar? I wonder if she got out of her electric fence. I’m almost positive I’ve seen her before in the yard of that brick house back there.”

  Hank turned toward the dog. “You making a break for it?”

  “Does her collar have a name on it?”

  Hank bent over, peering into the dog’s neck. “No name or address,” he said.

  “I feel like we should take her back and ask if she’s theirs. I don’t want her to get hit by a car.” I glanced at Hank. “Do you mind?”

  He seemed hesitant, and it crossed my mind that he was deciding I was too annoying to be friends with. But then he said, “Sure, sure.”

  When we reversed directions, the dog did, too. At the bottom of a long driveway leading up a massive lawn to a house with four two-story Ionic columns in front, Hank stopped. “You’re planning to go knock?”

  I nodded.

  “You should go by yourself. Or you and Rosie.”

  “Do you think I’m being really weird?”

  On Hank’s face was an expression of what I initially thought was amusement. He said, “The people who live in these houses—if they see a black man coming up their driveway, they’ll call the police. Unless I’m here to do yard work, they don’t want me on their property.” Then he smiled a little and said, “Just a guess.”

  I was mortified. The whole walk had probably been a mistake, I realized; I must have seemed to Hank like an insensitive moron.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t—”

  “Don’t sweat it.” He still was looking up the sloped lawn. “You and Lassie go do reconnaissance, and I’ll wait here.”

  As it turned out, the person who opened the door was a woman who I felt sure was a housekeeper even though she wasn’t wearing a uniform, and who said, without much conviction, “Ginger, you’re a very bad puppy.” She didn’t seem like she’d have called the cops if she’d seen Hank approaching, though I understood his point.

  From that day on, we rarely spoke of race, but I tried to be careful. Once in the fall of 2008, when we were walking to Kaldi’s with the girls, we passed a house with lots of Halloween decorations—oversized inflatable ghosts and witches, cottony cobwebs spread over the bushes—as well as a mccain-palin yard sign, and Hank pointed to the sign and said, “All the effort they went to, and that’s the scariest thing of all.” The night Barack Obama won, we were watching TV at Hank and Courtney’s—Rosie was asleep in a portable crib in their bedroom, I was pregnant with Owen—and when the networks called the election around ten o’clock central time, Hank got choked up, but so did I; even Courtney seemed the tiniest bit misty.

  There were plenty of moments when I forgot, though. I was, after all, a white woman who’d grown up in St. Louis, now shepherding around my white children, seeming harried and harmless, reminding people of themselves. I forgot in a way that Hank, presumably, never could.

  Since the time I’d received a ticket while Rosie was in the backseat, I’d been careful not to speed, but heading east—I had to take Manchester Road because of the ongoing highway construction—I drove ten miles over the limit. Owen had begun to cry as soon as we’d turned out of the parking lot of my father’s building, and I had no idea where any of his pacifiers were. My father had seemed relieved by our departure; if he’d overheard my conversation with Hank, he didn’t ask about it.

  “I know,” I said as Owen wailed. “You’re ready to eat, aren’t you?” I turned on the radio, hoping it might distract him, and after a Christina Aguilera song ended, the DJ said, “No sign of an earthquake, but just got a report of an accident on Hanley south of Litzsinger Road.” Which wasn’t far from Target, though I was pretty sure if I came in on Brentwood Boulevard, I’d be okay.

  I’d learned from experience not to be too ambitious in the Target parking lot, but I had my pick of spaces; apparently, there was a way to keep people away from Target, and Vi had discovered it. I parked at an angle sufficiently awkward that I’d have reparked under different circumstances, turned off the engine, ran around to get Owen, and hurried with him toward the entrance.

  The first set of automatic doors parted as we approached, then the second set, and inside the store, we walked quickly by the holding area of large red carts, turned right, passed the intra-Target Starbucks and the pharmacy, and then I spotted red double doors I’d never noticed, with a keypad by their handles and a small red rectangle that said the word private. Through the narrow windows in the doors, I could see a hallway with a white linoleum floor and several rooms off it. I knocked loudly.

  A trim white man in a black uniform came to let me in; on his right arm was a badge that said Target Asset Protection, and on his left an American flag. I followed him to a small room, and as I entered, I could see Hank’s back, his close-shaved haircut from behind. He sat in a chair that faced a desk, and the guard took the seat on the desk’s far side. From a chair next to Hank’s, Rosie popped up on her knees and said, “Rosie wants Mama!”

  My sweet, pathetic daughter—she wasn’t actively crying, but tears were pooled below her eyes, and snot clung to the cut above her mouth. Still holding Owen, I scooped her up so that each of my children was balanced on one hip, which was a position that wasn’t sustainable for long. I looked at the security guard and said, “I don’t understand what’s going on here, but this man”—I nodded toward Hank—“is a very close friend and I asked him to look after my daughter.”

  The man appeared unruffled. “Ma’am, our foremost goal is safety.”

  “Hi, Kate,” Hank said glumly.

  “And you think you can decide better than me who my daughter is safe with?” I sounded shrill, I knew, but who did this security guard think he was? Already, my anxiety had shifted to anger.

  “Another customer heard her say, ‘This man is not my father,’ ” the security guard said. “You can see why we were concerned.”

  That man’s not Daddy. That’s what Rosie would have said, as she had about Marisa Mazarelli’s boyfriend at the acorn park and as she said every day about other men we passed. She wouldn’t have said, This man is not my father. And I already knew, too, what Hank said next. He said, “But she wasn’t talking about me anyway. She was saying it about an old man.”

  Perched on my left hip, Rosie reached up and twirled my hair. “Rosie wants to eat.”

  “We’re about to leave.” I turne
d my gaze back to the security guard. “Is there anything else you need?”

  The man pointed to Rosie. “She’s your daughter?”

  “Obviously!” As I snapped at him, I felt an awareness of how I could be outraged in a way Hank couldn’t. Did that mean that being outraged was my duty? Or that it was humiliating to Hank?

  Calmly, the security guard said, “Can I see some ID?”

  I glared. “What will that prove? You don’t even know my daughter’s last name.”

  “If I’m not mistaken, it’s Tucker.” The guard was matter-of-fact, not gloating.

  “Just show him your ID, Kate,” Hank said, and his voice was still tightly controlled, which seemed evidence that I was probably humiliating him.

  I hadn’t previously realized that I didn’t have my driver’s license on me; I’d been protesting on principle. But as I tried to think how I’d reach for my wallet with a child in each arm, it occurred to me that its saggy weight was absent from the pocket of my vest, which must have meant—I hoped—that the wallet had fallen out while I was driving. Aloud, I said, “My license is in my car.” I made my voice polite, which probably just sounded like sarcasm, as I said to the guard, “Would you like to walk out with us and I’ll show you?” There was no way I was letting Rosie or Owen out of my sight.

  The man curled his lower lip in and chewed on it. “What’s your home address?”

  I recited it, thinking, This is bullshit. This is bullshit, and we should sue.

  “Date of birth?” he asked.

  I gave that as well.

  “And the child’s date of birth?”

  Was this anything other than a face-saving exercise for him, the pretense that he’d release us because we’d provided the information he requested rather than because he’d screwed up by bringing Hank and Rosie back here in the first place? But I told him Rosie’s date of birth, and I was not surprised when he said, “All right then. I’m going to let you folks go. In the future, you need to watch that your children don’t make statements that raise concerns.”

  He led the four of us to the door that opened onto the store proper, and he stayed behind as we walked out. Immediately, the store’s humming normality enveloped us: the rows of cosmetics and soaps and lotions, the ignorance of the other customers. “Rosie, you can walk,” I said, and I slid her down my side. “But hold my hand.” None of us spoke again until we were outside, when Hank said, “I need to get Amelia.” There was a distance to his tone, as if we scarcely knew each other better than either of us knew the security guard.