The Sisters Club

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  “Did they find out what was wrong with her?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “A parasite. Anyway, she’s out now. She says she’s not as strong as she used to be, but she refused to come home. Sara’s determined to finish out her time there, but thankfully she should be back in a few weeks.”

  “Still,” he said, “what an ordeal for her to go through. For you, as well. It must have been very frustrating having someone you love in a hospital so far away.”

  I conceded that it was.

  “I can see,” he added, “how something like that could distract one from one’s job.”

  “I never said it distracted me,” I pointed out, “merely that I was worried about her.”

  “Is there something else going on with you, then? How are things with Tony?”

  I sat up straight in my seat. “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, come on,” he laughed. “Everyone knows about you and Tony. Why, it’s as obvious as Sally Markham’s eternal crush on Phillip Exeter.”

  “Tony and I are fine, thanks,” I said settling back. “There are no problems there.”

  “Then what else could be taking your mind from your work?” he said.

  I could have told him that in addition to worrying about my sister, daily, I also worried about how Diana was coping with the fallout from losing a lot of weight quickly, that I was concerned about Cindy’s pregnancy, and that I wondered if Sylvia saw how much she was starting to care for her former surgeon and where it was all going to lead for her. But I didn’t think he’d care about them, nor did I imagine he would understand my concern for women who would seem to him to be relative strangers in my life, so instead I said, “Who said my mind isn’t on my work?”

  He set down his china cup and saucer, and then rose and walked over to his desk. Then he put on his reading half-glasses and picked up a folder I hadn’t noticed before.

  “I’ve got your student evaluations of you as a teacher here,” he said.

  That’s right. In the e-mail he’d sent me back in April—that e-mail I’d unwisely ignored—he’d said something about one of my students leveling a complaint at me. At the time, I suppose I’d unconsciously assumed the complainant must be John Quayle, that bane of my teacherly existence, and that John Quayle was such an obvious pompous ass—although there were certainly enough professors in the department who were like that too, not to mention the dean himself—that no one would ever take his complaints too seriously. Each year there was at least one English major who caused problems for one of the professors in the department. That professor had never been me, but I guessed that after years without a single nuisance complaint, it was finally my turn.

  “It’s John Quayle, isn’t it?” I said now.

  The dean flipped through the folder. “It is John Quayle,” he said. “It’s also Danitra Jackson and Tiffany Amber and Brad Moffett. It’s all of them, really.”

  “What?”

  “It’s true,” he said. “Every student in your writing class complained about you. The gist is that you were wonderful in the beginning of the semester but, as time wore on, you grew increasingly distant. One even says that you graded her on something she never wrote. Here: ‘My story was about a woman of color trying to balance romance and career in the big city, but Professor Barrett wrote on my paper that the extended metaphor involving cows was pretentious and didn’t quite work for her. I didn’t have any cows in my story!’”

  Oh no. I’d mixed my evaluations of Danitra’s work up with John’s. God only knows what I’d written on his paper.

  “One or two complaints, I can understand,” the dean said. “Every teacher gets those, although you never have. But all of them?” He removed his glasses. “So I ask you one last time: What is going on with you?”

  “Well, I suppose I was spending a lot of time on the novel—”

  “What novel?”

  So I told him about the novel I’d written, how first I’d written one, tossed it out, then wrote another.

  “But that’s wonderful news!” he said, and suddenly I could see departmental dollar signs dancing in his head. Finally, I was going to deliver on the promise he’d seen in me when he first hired me.

  “How can it be wonderful,” I said, “when all my students say I’m doing such a lousy job?”

  “Oh. That.” He made a dismissive gesture at the folder. “So you had one semester’s worth of less-than-stellar evaluations. I’m sure you’ll make it up in the fall. Do you think all famous novelists who are also university professors are always able to perfectly compartmentalize their creative lives from their teaching lives?”

  Famous novelist? I thought he was laying it on a bit thick, seeing success where there were no guarantees, making him sound naive. After all, I didn’t even really have an agent yet. But then I saw it through his eyes: When he first hired me, straight out of Iowa, he’d thought I’d be the Next Big Thing. Was it really surprising, then, now that I’d actually shown signs of working on a novel after all these years, that in his own mind he’d see a fairy-tale ending even though there was little basis for it?

  As to his question about whether other novel-writing professors can compartmentalize their lives, I honestly had no idea. But I did have another idea, and it came to me in one of those Joycean epiphanies I was always telling my students about. For the first time I saw clearly that I couldn’t wear two hats at once. Maybe Joyce Carol Oates could go on spinning out book after book while teaching at Princeton, but it turned out I was more of an all-or-nothing woman than I’d ever imagined. I couldn’t go on doing both novel writing and teaching. One of the two was always bound to suffer. And I knew now which one it was I couldn’t afford to let suffer.

  And I saw something else. The reason I’d never responded to his e-mail about there being a complaint; my thinking about everything other than teaching; my inattention even in the classroom—all of it was because my heart was no longer in my work, not this work. My heart was somewhere else.

  I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Dean, I know this will come as a shock to you, but I won’t be coming back here in the fall.”

  “What?”

  It took a lot of explaining and soothing on my part. And I could see the dean fighting to hold on to his dream of having a successful novelist in residence; which, when you think about it, is very funny, since there was no guarantee I’d ever sell the book, nor that it would be successful. But at last I made him see that I could never really take a chance on the one while still trying to do justice to the other.

  And then I was out in the sunshine, ecstatically happy until the thought struck me: for the first time in over a dozen years, I was out of a job.

  Diana

  I set off down the driveway, water bottle in hand, taking my time because it was that hard to breathe. It wasn’t the walking that bothered me—I was used to that by now—but the humidity! If anyone had told me it got this humid this early in the season in Connecticut, I’d have stayed in London.

  “Dress cool today,” Dan had warned before leaving for work that morning. “It’s supposed to hit ninety today.”

  “Ninety? But it’s not even June yet!” What a hot spring it had been. “What sort of an insane country is this?”

  “One that’s affected by global warming, just like everywhere else.”

  “Then it wasn’t always this bad?”

  “Nope. When I was growing up, winter was winter, spring was spring. But now? It could be ninety today, sixty-five tomorrow.”

  As I walked through the neighborhood, shocked at how hot and humid it was even so late in the afternoon, I wished it could be tomorrow so that I’d have a chance at that sixty-five. I also wished it were an hour from now, so I could go back home and check my e-mail again. Usually I walked for thirty minutes, forty-five tops, but today I’d committed to a full hour just to get myself out of the house.

  When I first started walking, as soon as I could get around following the surgery, I’d attracted funny looks from peopl
e in passing cars. Not that the streets in our sleepy neighborhood were so very busy, but any people who passed through all gave me funny looks. Could I blame them? I must have looked ridiculous, this incredibly obese woman walking for a few minutes a day, as though that could matter. It was not so different really than ordering a diet cola to go with your all-you-can-eat buffet. But as the days piled up, and I kept walking farther and farther, the pounds melted off. Now the people who passed, at least the ones I recognized as being regulars in the neighborhood, usually gave me a silent thumbs-up when they saw me with my water bottle. It made me feel proud and walk a little faster, as though I had my own private fan club cheering me on.

  The scale that morning said I was now down sixty-five pounds. Sixty-five would have made a great weather forecast, but it made an even better weight-loss number. At the rate I was going, if I could only keep it up, sometime next month I’d break two hundred pounds for the first time since I was a young teenager.

  Numbers, numbers, numbers!

  Some days, I got sick of it. But what else was there? How many minutes walked, how many calories or fat grams in a bit of food, the numbers on the scale, how many pounds lost, the decreasing sizes on the clothes I tried on each week at the store—my whole life was reduced to bloody numbers.

  I had to admit it: I was bored here, lonely too. Oh, sure, I had Lise and Cindy and Sylvia, but they all had jobs during the day, and they had busy lives and relationships. But what did I have? I had numbers and e-mail.

  I’d confessed as much to Artemis on the phone that day, not about the e-mail but about the boredom.

  “Why don’t you get a job?” she’d suggested.

  Of course, before Dan and moving to America, I’d had a job. I’d been a videographer. I shot all the high-fashion runway shows, a truly masochistic job for a fat woman to have. What I’d really wanted was to be a documentary filmmaker, shooting people who did peculiar, almost obsolete jobs. But when the BBC kept refusing all my attempts, and the only places that would even accept my short films were small festivals where the highest hope was that twenty people in a smoky room might actually view my short all the way through, I sought more lucrative work with my camera equipment. Then I saw the ad for shooting runway shows. Apparently the design houses, even though they’re physically at the shows, like to go over the tapes later, seeing what works and what doesn’t once they’re removed from the adrenaline rush that are the shows themselves.

  At first it was exciting going to places like Milan and Paris, shooting film in posh rooms, being up close with famous people who most other people get no closer to than snaps in the fashion magazines or on the screens of their TVs. But the reality of it as time wore on, listening to women who weren’t much bigger than an X-ray debate about whether they can afford to eat another celery stick before slipping into their Lagerfeld or Balenciaga was shockingly boring.

  And, as I say, it was masochistic. But the money was excellent. As the years passed, I became in high demand as an editor, meaning the design houses preferred I send someone else to shoot, leaving me in the booth to cut and splice, which was fine by me. And the money improved yet again. When I first went over to editing, Artemis questioned it.

  “Doesn’t the person with the camera make more?” she’d asked.

  “No,” I’d responded, delighted for once to know something she didn’t. “The editor makes much more. Firstly, the day rate is higher. Also, a cameraman might spend one day shooting something that takes the editor two weeks to cut.”

  But I didn’t want to go back to that now. I didn’t need to go back to that now.

  “Dan makes so much money,” I’d told Artemis, “we don’t really need for me to have a job.”

  “It’s not a matter of need in that sense. It’s a matter that you need to do something more than sit around that house all day. Don’t you ever miss having a job where you were in high demand and earned your own nice living?”

  I thought about it and realized it was true. Despite the fairy-tale quality of my meeting Dan, followed by our whirlwind romance and marriage, it had been hard leaving behind something I’d worked so long and so hard at, a world where I was valued.

  “Yes, but I wouldn’t know how to start up a similar career over here, and I don’t know what other kind of job I could get. I can’t imagine it would look very good to Dan’s colleagues. ‘My wife is an investment counselor,’ one of them would say. ‘Mine is a veterinarian,’ another would say. ‘What does yours do?’ ‘Oh, she just got a job at the mall,’ Dan would reply. Can you picture that?”

  Artemis had admitted she could indeed picture that, conceding it would be just awful, then she’d rung off, but not before promising to put her mind to the idea of how to keep me from going stir crazy here.

  Of course I did already have something to keep me from going stir crazy, at least part of the time, I thought as I trudged up the drive, having seen that the hour was up and I could now go inside. And that something was what also kept me from seeking out a job that would take me away from home all day. I had my e-mails, from Dirk. But of course I hadn’t told Artemis that.

  Inside, I set my empty water bottle down on the kitchen counter before doing my version of racing up the stairs. In the bedroom, I quickly looked at the computer screen, which I’d left on, but there were no new e-mails, unless of course you counted spam, which I didn’t. I glanced at the clock. It would be eleven in the evening in England now. Where was he?

  The first e-mail had been waiting for me when I’d arrived home from my transatlantic trip just a few short weeks ago.

  From: dirk.peters@dirkliterary.uk

  To: dananddiana@comcast.net

  It was such a pleasure meeting you. How does your husband like your new hair?

  And then it had continued from there. The first day or two, there had been just the one e-mail—Dirk writing a one-liner to ask how I was doing, me replying—but then those e-mails began to multiply, like two rabbits left unattended. By the time the first week was out, Dirk was writing me enough times a day for Dan to comment on it.

  “You must have made quite an impression on Artemis’s friend,” he’d said. “But isn’t he a literary agent? And isn’t Lise the one who wrote a book? Don’t tell me he wants you to write a book too.”

  So then I took to deleting the string of e-mails between us before Dan came home from work at night, but one day I just got busy with something and forget to do it. Dan saw them again and commented again.

  That was when I opened a new e-mail account. And I didn’t tell Dan.

  Dan and I used to share one account. It had just been simpler that way. There was nothing either of us didn’t want the other to see. But now? It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the things Dirk wrote to me, and yet Dan had already noted the frequency, twice. Why ruffle him? Dan had so much on his mind all the time, what with work and everything.

  The e-mails themselves were innocent enough: Dirk asking me how the weight loss was going, encouraging me, asking about what it was like growing up as Artemis’s sister. He even had me e-mail him pictures of myself as I grew progressively smaller. Dirk had also asked to see Lise’s new book, a request I’d forwarded on to her, only this time he was taking his time commenting on it. She’d told me she was sure he must hate it.

  Where was he?

  Then a new e-mail popped into my inbox and there he was.

  From: dirk.peters@dirkliterary.uk

  To: dianat@yahoo.com

  Diana, luv, sorry I’m late. You would not believe how dull some of these literary dinners can be. Bloody fucking Booker. Why don’t they just give the next twelve to McEwan and have done with it? Now, then, where were we? And what have you been up to while I was gone?

  I pictured him ripping off the confining tie of his tux with one hand as he typed with the other. It made an attractive picture. Then I set my hands to the keys, and replied.

  Memorial Day

  Recommended Reading:

  Sylvia: La
Cucina: A Novel of Rapture, Lily Prior

  Cindy: I’m with the Band, Pamela Des Barres

  Lise: The Book of Joe, Jonathan Tropper

  Diana: Royal Sisters: Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, Anne Edwards

  • • •

  Sailboats kept out of the way of speedboats trailing water skiers, a floating raft bobbed in the distance, and sunlight stippled the dark blue waves of Candlewood Lake. The small beach was already crowded with people taking early advantage of the long holiday weekend, and at the water’s edge, a sullen boy in long navy trunks and a resiliently sunny girl in a glittery red, white, and blue one-piece suit were fighting over a Styrofoam noodle; it appeared the girl would win. Farther up the beach, four women sat on two large striped towels that had been placed together, a cooler and picnic basket between them. It was the Saturday morning of Memorial Day weekend, and Sylvia, Cindy, Lise, and Diana had managed to escape the real world for the time being, carving out a few hours together.

  “Shouldn’t you be working today?” Cindy asked Sylvia. Cindy’s face was tilted up to catch the sun, her question lazily asked with no urgency or judgment.

  “Advantage of being your own boss,” Sylvia said. “I just put the sign on the door. It’s an important day, Memorial Day, a day to remember those you’ve lost even if they weren’t soldiers. People can just cook their own meals today if they want to eat.”

  “Just don’t try that attitude every day,” Lise advised, rubbing suntan lotion into her arm. “You might find yourself out of a job.”

  “Nah,” Sylvia said. “I’ve got the TV show now. Or at least I will, once it’s on.”

  “How’s that going?” Diana asked. The other three were all in bathing suits—Cindy in a yellow polka dot bikini, Lise in a red tankini, and Sylvia in a navy suit that looked ten years old—but Diana had yet to take off the floral caftan she had covering hers.