Sisterland

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “I saw.”

  “I think he thought I was lying when I said I wanted my prediction to be wrong—that I was putting on a good front. But it’s true. Sometimes it’s good to be wrong.” She paused. “Do you think I should feel humiliated?”

  I didn’t answer right away, and then I said, “I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  “Ha,” she said, but she still didn’t seem offended. “Nice dodge.”

  “Dad fainted today,” I said. “That was the reason he couldn’t drive you. He—well, he was getting a massage, and he stood up afterward and passed out.”

  “Dad was getting a massage? Like a massage massage or a happy-ending massage?” Already, I felt the relief of sharing this information with the one person in the world who’d feel exactly the way I did about it: just as concerned and just as squeamish. “Is he okay?” she said.

  “I think he’s fine. He was super prickly when I went to get him. I wanted to take him to the hospital, and he insisted I take him home, although I did make a doctor’s appointment for him for Monday. But here’s the really bizarre part: Later, on the phone, he basically confessed that he has senses.”

  “Dad? Our dad?”

  “I know. He said he hadn’t known before today if there would be an earthquake, then he woke up this morning and saw the rain and knew there wouldn’t. And he said it very matter-of-factly, like he wasn’t dropping a bombshell. I kind of wonder if he’d taken pain medication and was loopy.”

  Vi’s expression was one of uncertain and excited interest, as if she were trying to remember the details of a very odd but pleasant dream. At last, she said, “Wow. I mean, holy crap, Dad, what else have you been hiding from us, you mild-mannered lighting salesman from Omaha, Nebraska? Besides your massages with hookers, that is.”

  “I always thought senses were hereditary,” I said. “I just didn’t think they were from his side. Anyway, don’t ask him about it. Or about the massage.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s none of our business.”

  “Was the masseuse Asian?”

  I shook my head. “Maybe Polish.”

  “It wasn’t a tranny, was it?” It was hard to guess whether Vi wanted the answer to be yes or no.

  “There was an older woman and a younger one, maybe a mother and daughter, and I think the daughter was the one who’d given him the massage. I mean, she looked over eighteen. And they were both real females. It was at a place in Olivette.”

  “But it obviously skeeved you out, so what aren’t you telling me?”

  “I’m just not sure if it was a sexual thing.” Though, really, who was I to pass judgment? “Let’s not talk about it anymore.”

  “Remember when you thought I should give Dad a gift certificate for a massage for his birthday and I said he’d hate it?” Vi laughed. “Well, I stand corrected.”

  And then on the television screen, there appeared footage of the truck smashed into the day care, an aerial shot followed by a close-up of brightly colored plastic balls and a flattened teddy bear and shattered glass, and I could understand why Jeremy had warned me against looking at the images.

  I said, “Do you know this is where Rosie went?”

  “Really?” Vi seemed more interested than I’d have expected, though I myself was preoccupied by trying to figure out why, in the last minutes before the clock ran out on Vi’s prediction, CNN was showing this accident. I didn’t yet understand that the accident at the day care would become a central part of the earthquake narrative—it would become the part that redeemed Vi, at least in the eyes of St. Louisans. The logic was similar to Jeremy’s when he’d told me about the accident: If not for Vi’s prediction, then the front room of the building would have been filled with children when the truck crashed into it; ergo, Vi had saved the children’s lives. And maybe the reason Vi wasn’t humiliated when there was no earthquake on October 16 was that at some level, she already knew—she had a sense—of this public redemption.

  Personally, I never bought into this version, and my view, it turns out, is shared by people outside St. Louis, which I know because I no longer live in St. Louis myself. It was only in the city of Vi’s prediction that the prediction justified itself. The proximity of the accident made people nervous, left them feeling grateful for what hadn’t happened, and their gratitude needed a recipient. That recipient became my sister. So she was wrong about the earthquake; she was right about something else, and her rightness allowed her to be forgiven.

  In that moment when Vi and I were still watching TV, when it still wasn’t quite midnight—we were standing just inside the front door because we’d never sat down—Vi said, “You haven’t asked how I got over here.”

  “I thought you snuck out the back of the bookstore.”

  “I did,” Vi said. “But after that.”

  “How’d you get over here?”

  Vi beamed. “I drove,” she said.

  Chapter 17

  Rosie’s music class met in the basement of a temple in Clayton, and what I first noticed—this embarrasses me now—was that the parent in one of the other parent-child duos was a black man. Then I noticed that he was a fit black man wearing a Wash U T-shirt. Then I noticed that he was Hank Wheeling, the husband of Jeremy’s colleague Courtney. Across the circle of children and moms—all the other parents were white mothers, and there were twelve adults total—I made eye contact with him, patted my chest, and mouthed, Kate Tucker. He nodded and smiled. We were waiting for the first class to start, and in my arms, Rosie squirmed in her flowered onesie. Amelia, who was then almost one and a half, though I knew neither her name nor her age, stood in front of Hank, clapping and yelling, “Bubbles! Bubbles! Bubbles!” She was exceptionally cute—so cute, in fact, that she could have been a model for the Swedish organic cotton baby clothes I had told Jeremy I’d stop ordering. Her skin was light brown and her eyes were dark brown and she had ludicrously long eyelashes and curly, wiry hair that was pulled into a fluffy ponytail on top of her head. I happened to know that her striped T-shirt and pink skirt were from the Swedish organic clothing company because I recognized the outfit from the most recent catalog.

  When the teacher arrived, toting little drums and bells, she had us introduce our children but not ourselves, after which we sang and danced for the next forty minutes. The class culminated with a conga line that snaked around the room as the adults shouted the lyrics to “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” A few weeks later, when I convinced Jeremy to come with me to a class so he could see how adorable Rosie looked while pounding a drum, I asked him afterward what he thought, and he said, “It was fine.” “You didn’t like it?” I said. “No, it was cute,” he said. “It was just kind of tedious.” Which made it clear, given that the class was a weekly high-water mark in entertainment for Rosie and me, that Jeremy could never have been a stay-at-home parent.

  During that first class, as we moved around the room, reconfiguring ourselves, Hank and I exchanged general pleasantries of the sort I was also exchanging with the mothers—as Rosie reached for a bell, he’d say, “Almost got it!” and I’d say, “So close and yet so far,” and we’d chuckle warmly. It seemed to me there was a slight charge in the classroom, the surprise of the other mothers at Hank’s presence. After all, at a parent-child music class in Clayton, a man was rare enough and a black man was basically astonishing. And then there was the fact of his defined biceps and flat abdomen—I’d seen it when he’d lifted Amelia onto his shoulders and his shirt had risen—while most of the mothers, even the skinny ones, were still lumpily post-pregnant.

  And then, while everyone sang “Goodbye to Rosie, we’ll see you next time,” I patted my daughter’s bottom and realized, touching wetness, that she’d had a blowout. The next thing I realized, after I’d quickly gathered up my diaper bag and carried her to the bathroom, was that I had no clean diapers with me.

  I looked down at Rosie lying on the changing table totally naked, smiling impishly, and I considered pul
ling the dirty diaper out of the trash and putting her back in it, but the thought of rewrapping her in that warm mustard-colored sludge was just too disgusting. So I sat her up, guiding her arms into a clean onesie, snapping it over her chest, while the onesie’s legs hung behind her bottom like the tails of a tuxedo. I lifted her and opened the door of the bathroom, and in the hall, walking by, were Hank and Amelia.

  “Sorry to bother you, Hank, but do you have a spare diaper?”

  “Sure,” Hank said. “Threes okay?”

  Rosie was still in size 2, but I said, “Perfect. I feel so dumb.”

  “It happens to all of us.”

  As he passed me the diaper, I thought of asking if he and Amelia wanted to go to the smoothie place where I was planning to get lunch, but it felt a little weird to issue this invitation to a man instead of another mom.

  Then he said, “Hey, you guys want to come with us to the Bread Company? Amelia is very into their mac and cheese right now.”

  “We’d love to,” I said.

  The diaper alone would have been enough to make me like Hank, but it was about ten minutes after we’d sat down with our food that I knew I could be true friends with him. First the name of Jeremy and Courtney’s department head, Leland Marcus, came up, and with no hesitation—and this was before either of our spouses had tenure—Hank said, “I don’t think he’s a bad guy, but the one I can’t stand is his wife.”

  “I know!” I said. “She’s so rude.”

  “I swear, at the potluck at the Vogts’ I saw her spit a bite of food on the floor. Intentionally, I mean. And we weren’t outside.”

  “Before Jeremy and I got married, she basically told me that no woman can be a good worker and a good mother.”

  Hank laughed. “Classic.”

  After we’d moved on to talking about what solids Rosie was eating and how old Amelia had been when she’d learned to walk, a John Mayer song began playing over the speaker system, and Hank gestured toward the ceiling and said, “Can I just say that I knew from the start this guy was all wrong for Jessica Simpson? It was so obvious he was going to leave her heartbroken.” My surprise must have registered on my face, because Hank said, “You disagree?”

  “I just can’t believe you know that Jessica Simpson and John Mayer dated.” I was pretty sure Jeremy didn’t know who either Jessica Simpson or John Mayer was.

  “Courtney leaves copies of Us Weekly lying around the house,” Hank said. “What can I say? Resistance is futile.”

  “Really, Courtney reads Us Weekly?”

  “Are you kidding? She subscribes.”

  “And do you open them up or just look at the covers?”

  In a good-natured voice, Hank said, “Kate, that’s a very personal question.”

  “Didn’t Courtney just win some major science prize?”

  Hank grinned. “I know, right?”

  I said, “So are you a full-time stay-at-home dad?”

  “Funny you should ask. That’s a topic of debate in the Wheeling household. I used to be a high school art teacher, and after Amelia was born, we decided, okay, I’ll hang out with her during the day, and I’ll work on my painting during her naps.” He rolled his eyes. “Which has mostly resulted in me not setting foot in my studio from one month to the next, but I do know all the words to Hop on Pop.”

  “ ‘Up pup’?” I said. “ ‘Pup is up’?”

  Hank smiled. “The truth is that Courtney comes home at four, so I could go to my studio then, which is just in our attic, but at that point in the day, all I want to do is drink a beer and chill out.”

  “I hear you.” Then I said, “Wait, Courtney comes home at four?”

  “Am I getting Jeremy in trouble?”

  “He comes home at five-fifteen, which isn’t terrible. But he’s pretty strict about not keeping different hours from nonacademics. He leaves the house every day at eight forty-five.”

  “Well, there you go. Courtney leaves at seven.”

  My motherly judgmentalness—different from but overlapping with other kinds of judgmentalness I’d harbored during my life—snapped on. Courtney had a five-minute commute but was away from Amelia for nine hours every weekday? Then I thought, Don’t be like Xiaojian Marcus. “Did you guys consider sending Amelia to day care?” I asked.

  “We checked some out, and Courtney was okay with them, but I was the one who resisted. So Courtney said, ‘Then why don’t you stay home with her?’ She was half-kidding, but the more we talked about it, the more it actually made sense.”

  “We sent Rosie to that place on Hanley for about a month,” I said. “Then she got an eye infection and ended up in the hospital, and I quit my job after that. Not that the infection was the day care’s fault, but I just didn’t know I’d worry about her so much.”

  Hank and I looked at each other, and he said, “You love them more than you ever imagined, right? And it’s terrifying.”

  And so our two families became friends, then good friends, and eventually best friends. The next week, following music class, Hank and Amelia and Rosie and I returned to the Bread Company, and as we were heading back to our cars after lunch—Amelia was going home to nap, and Rosie had already fallen asleep in her car seat—Hank said, “Hey, you guys should come for dinner this weekend.” Which we did, walking the half block from our house to theirs, and we sat in their backyard and they grilled; they made vegetarian shish kebabs, a bean salad, and a loaf of bread with black olives in it. For dessert, I’d baked brownies from a mix, which I hadn’t thought twice about beforehand but by the end of dinner had the impression the Wheelings wouldn’t have done. Bake brownies, sure. Just not from a mix.

  We left at seven-thirty, before either of the girls could have a meltdown, and as we were leaving, Courtney called out, “Come back tomorrow morning, and I’ll dig up some of Amelia’s old clothes for Rosie.” This was what I would come to most appreciate about our friendship with the Wheelings—that our interactions had a frequency and logistical casualness I hadn’t experienced since college with anyone besides Vi. Because of how close the Wheelings lived to us and because our families were similarly structured, we didn’t have to plan in advance the way I’d learned you did in adulthood; I could avoid those multiday email exchanges with the wife in the other couple over which restaurant or whose house, kids or no kids, what time, what could we bring? Then I’d look for a sitter, whom we’d pay twelve dollars an hour, or, if our friends were coming to our house, I’d spend two days cleaning and grocery shopping and cooking, all the while questioning whether getting together with these people was more enjoyable than Jeremy and me just ordering takeout and watching TV. When I expressed my doubts aloud, Jeremy would say, “Is this one of those situations where I’ll get in trouble for not disagreeing with you?”

  But with Courtney and Hank, one family could call the other at five-fifteen and say, “Do you guys want to come here for pizza?” Or sometimes, that fall, the three of them would walk over after we’d eaten our separate dinners and I’d put Rosie to bed and the rest of us would watch American Idol. Soon Hank and the girls and I were meeting up nearly every weekday. We’d walk across Skinker Boulevard to Forest Park and push the strollers around the zoo, or just unfold a blanket above Art Hill and let the girls play in the grass; this was where Rosie took a step for the first time. At Thanksgiving, the Wheelings came to our house along with Vi and my father.

  Meanwhile, Jeremy and Courtney started getting coffee in the afternoons, though apparently they only went to buy it together before returning to their separate offices. “You’re allowed to drink your coffee with her,” I said. “I won’t think you’re on a date.”

  “It’s not that,” he said. “It’s that neither of us has time.”

  Before getting to know her, I’d been intimidated by Courtney—the night I’d met her, at the Marcuses’ long-ago department holiday party, I’d heard her explain her research using about seven words I didn’t know in just two sentences—and my intimidation didn’t disappear.
But that first time we had dinner at their house, there was a moment when she and I had carried plates into the kitchen and we could see in the backyard that Jeremy and Hank were trying to get Rosie and Amelia to give each other five, and Courtney said, “Look at those daddies’ girls.” I felt then that she and I were sharing the double luckiness of not only having good husbands but knowing we had good husbands.

  A few minutes later, when we were back on the deck eating brownies—the Wheelings were polite enough to pretend they were delicious as opposed to merely adequate—Courtney said, “Do you run, Kate? I’m looking for a running partner.”

  “Not for a while.”

  “But that means you have run in the past. What was your pace?”

  “I don’t even remember. It wasn’t impressive.”

  “I go to Forest Park at five Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, so if you change your mind—”

  Jeremy laughed. “I don’t think Kate would get up at five if our house was on fire.”

  “Thanks,” I said. To Courtney, I said, “How far do you go?”

  “Around the park, which is what, six miles and change?” She wasn’t bragging; she said it so matter-of-factly that it was as if she didn’t realize it was worth bragging about. She added, “It can be a little sketchy down by Kingshighway, so that’s why I was thinking, safety in numbers.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, which was a lie that I wished were the truth. I was slightly surprised to hear Courtney refer to the sketchiness of the Central West End; the comment seemed racially fraught, or at least easily enough interpreted as such that I myself wouldn’t have made it in front of Hank.

  The next morning, when I went back to their house to collect Amelia’s hand-me-downs, Courtney had three canvas bags from science conferences waiting by the front door. She said, “I promise there are no tank tops that say Princess in sparkly letters. Don’t you hate that shit? As if the kid is even literate.”