“What did you expect to find, me hacked to death in the freezer? Look at me.” I held my arms out. “I’m fine. You might as well have saved yourself the time and stayed to listen to the band. Eddie’s really good.”
“No, he’s not, Cindy. Eddie’s not good in any way, shape, or form.”
“Look, I’ve had about enough of you. You—”
“Why are you with that guy?”
“What?” The words stopped me cold. I’d heard those words somewhere before.
“I just don’t get it,” Porter said. “You’ve got everything going for you.”
“No, I don’t! How can you say that?”
“How can you not? You’re sharp, you’re funny, you’re sweet, you play a mean game of stick, you’re even great to look at—always have been. You’ve got everything going for you, even if you’re the only one who can’t see it. But Eddie? Eddie’s just one mean son of a bitch. Anyone can see that. If he was a dog, someone would have to shoot him in the yard.”
“Why are you with that guy?” Sylvia had asked me that the day we’d all gone to Candlewood Lake for our pre-Memorial Day picnic. At the time, I hadn’t answered her. Well, I couldn’t answer her. And I couldn’t answer her because the question was all wrong. The question everyone should have been asking was, “Why is Eddie with you?”
Didn’t any of them get it? Eddie was the smart one, not to mention drop-dead gorgeous. Eddie was the talented one, the one with ambition. I was lucky to have him, because who was I next to someone like that? I wasn’t pretty like Diana, or smart like Lise, or talented like Sylvia with her cooking. I was just a dumb blonde who couldn’t do any better than a job at Midnight Scandals. And if I ever lost Eddie, who would I be then? I’d be no one. I’d be alone. There wasn’t another guy in the world who’d ever put up with me.
“Eddie is not a dog,” I said. “You come by my home, uninvited. Sure, we used to be friends, once upon a time, and you fixed my computer problem for me and I thank you for that. But now you’re insulting the guy I live with, the guy I love, and I’m asking you to leave.”
“I just think you should think about what you’re doing with your life. I think you should—”
“Get out,” I said, grabbing him by the collar and pulling him toward the stairs. “Get out. Get out! Get out!”
“Fine, I’m going,” he said, wrenching his collar from my grasp. “But do me a favor first.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out some expensive-looking leather wallet from which he removed a business card, and then handed it to me. The card has his name, Porter Davis, and a number. “Look, if you ever need anything, anything at all—”
“Just go,” I said. Then I closed the door.
• • •
I stood with my back to the door, fingering the card in my hand. I was madder than I’d been in forever.
How could they all be so wrong about Eddie? Oh, Lise and Diana hadn’t said anything that day at Candlewood Lake, and their men had been nice enough the day of Lise’s party. But maybe they were all thinking what Sylvia said. And then there was this Porter, straight-as-an-arrow Porter, showing up out of the blue, echoing Sylvia, butting his nose into my business.
I needed to show them all. I needed to show every one of them once and for all that they were wrong about Eddie, that he was the perfect guy for me.
But how?
Then it came to me: a party. Everyone else in the club had entertained the other members in their homes. Well, except for Sylvia, who’d had us all to her shop, which was practically the same thing. But none of them had ever been invited to a gathering at my apartment, which could maybe be why they doubted how good Eddie and I were together. They needed to come to our home and see us here together. I’d invite them all tomorrow, for the end of the month.
And I’d show them. I’d show them all.
Sylvia
“Cindy was here last night.”
Lise and I were in my condo, sitting on the lavender sectional in the living room, drinking coffee with a shot of Kahlua in each cup, and snacking on éclairs I’d brought home from the shop. They’d be too old to serve to customers in the morning, but they were still fine now.
I didn’t usually have visitors—OK, I never had visitors except for last night and today—but I hadn’t felt like spending one more night by myself, rattling around in my fourteen hundred square feet: two bedrooms and bath up; half bath, living room, smaller dining room and ridiculously tiny kitchen down; and finished basement with the ping pong table on which Minnie and I used to hold marathon tournaments for two. I’d been to the graveyard after work that evening and sat on the grass by Minnie’s stone, which was next to my parents—one day I’d lay next to them all—unable to take my eyes off the lonely etching: MINNIE GOLDSMITH, SISTER, 1965–2014.
As soon as I got home from the cemetery, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Even the idea of fixing dinner wasn’t attractive. So I ran through my short list of people to call: there was no way I was calling Sunny; Diana seemed to be increasingly self-involved, not that I wasn’t happy with her weight loss, but it was all she talked about those days; and Cindy had just been there the night before, besides which she already had enough on her plate. That left Lise. I certainly wasn’t going to call any of the TV people.
“What was Cindy here for?” Lise asked.
“She wanted me to teach her some simple recipes for this party she’s having. I offered to do the cooking, but she said no, said she wanted to do it all herself, only she wasn’t sure what foods went with what foods, and she said if I didn’t help her, and I quote, ‘I’ll probably freak at the last minute and call Domino’s.’” I couldn’t hide my shudder. “Perish the thought.”
“God, she’s sweet. So, what did she finally decide to serve?”
“Who knows?” I shrugged. “I showed her maybe a half dozen different recipes, and she said she’d decide later, that she wanted to surprise me. But she kept confusing the paprika with the turmeric, so it should be interesting.”
Lise laughed.
“Don’t laugh,” I told her. “You do realize this party is going to be a disaster, don’t you?”
“Why would you say that?”
“Because it’s true. Can’t you see that? There’s Cindy, letting herself get all excited, like this is going to be some kind of great party, like maybe it’ll be exactly like the party you threw or something.”
“And it’s not?”
I snorted. “What’s it that young people always say these days? Oh, right. Hel-lo! There’s that little problem known as Eddie?”
“I still don’t get it,” Lise said. “I thought Eddie was mostly fine that one time we met him. I don’t get why you had to be so hard on Cindy about him that day at Candlewood Lake.”
“Do you think it’s normal the way Cindy said Eddie reacted to her shooting pool with another guy?”
“Who asked her out.”
“But she said no and Eddie knew it.”
“No, maybe it’s not exactly normal.” For once, her tone turned judgmental. “But how would you like it if people criticized your choice in men?”
“What choice in men? I already told all you people, I’m cooling it with Sunny.”
“You want to talk about something I don’t get? That’s something I don’t get. Sunny’s smart, he’s respectful toward you, he’s funny, he’s handsome, he dresses nicely, he’s a doctor—”
“Who the hell are you?” I tried to laugh. “My Jewish mother?”
“No, I’m just your friend, and as your friend I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with you.”
“What’s wrong with me? Nothing.”
“Oh, no? Then way are you scared of intimacy?”
“Scared of…? What a crock-of-shit, new age, dumbass thing to say. I’m not scared of intimacy! I’m just fifty years old. I’m too old for all that dating nonsense. I’m too old to be dating, to have,” I did that half-quote thing in the air with my fingers, “relationships.”
> “You’re fifty years old, Sylvia! You’re not dead.”
“Oh, yeah? Who says?” Which, I’ll grant, was a pretty dumbass thing to say on my part, but she had me riled.
Her expression softened. “You are scared of something,” she said. “What are you scared of?”
What could I tell her—the truth? That I hadn’t had sex in thirty years?
• • •
Back in college, when Minnie and I were both twenty, there’d been a fraternity party that Minnie went to without me. I was sick—strep, plus I never really liked to go to parties anyway—and even though Minnie said she didn’t want to leave me, I insisted she go alone. I told her I’d just sleep the entire time she was gone, which I did, meaning I was sleeping while my sister was busy getting gang-raped. I woke to her crying on the twin bed across the room.
She’d been invited to the party by a friend of hers, or at least it was someone she thought was her friend. When she got there, it was mostly guys and just a few girls. She figured she was safe because it was her friend’s frat house, right? And, being outgoing, Minnie had always been kind of a mascot of the place. But apparently some guy there was mad at her. I don’t know. It was tough to get the story straight, she was crying that hard. But there was something about this one guy really liking her but then getting mad at her because one night she’d brought some other guy to a party. So, anyway, on this night, her friend got her really drunk—she swore it must have been spiked, that she didn’t really drink that much—and then he said someone wanted to talk to her, and it turned out to be this guy who was really mad and the room was dark, and she tried to get away but then she heard noises and realized there were more people in the room and then she really tried to get away but she was just so dizzy and the room kept spinning and there were just too many of them and…and…and…
I tried to convince her to go to the cops but she said no way, she said no one would ever believe her, and even if they did, they would only blame her. And I saw it immediately: she was right. This was 1985, not that it would be that much easier on her now. But back then, people would definitely just say she’d gone to the party by herself, she’d been drunk, she went to the room by herself, she never screamed, she was asking for it. The semester before, a girl on our floor had been “trained”—that’s the word guys used for what the rest of us called “gang-raped”—by some members of the hockey team. She hadn’t kept quiet about it, made a real stink, even though she didn’t press charges. Then one night, she was waiting in line in the cafeteria, talking to her roommate who was one of her loudest defenders. Some guys from the hockey team were a few places ahead of them in line, and I guess the girlfriend must have said something about them they didn’t like, because one of the guys turned around and, pointing straight at her, said, “Watch it or you’re next.” Her face went dead white and anyone could see what she was thinking: they’d gotten away with it before, they’d get away with it again. Sure, there’d be some kind of slap-on-the-wrist disciplinary action taken. But in the end, they’d walk, more powerful than ever. It had started already. If you took a poll in the dorm, most would have said it was the girl’s fault and that they felt sorry for the guys that the stupid bitch was giving them so much grief.
And it would have been the same for Minnie.
She made me promise I wouldn’t go to the police on her behalf; she made me promise I’d never tell a soul what happened to her that night; she made me promise neither of us would ever go to any frat parties ever again.
And it was easy to promise her those things—I’d do anything, say anything, just to stop her crying—but it didn’t end there. It started out so gradual at first, I barely noticed it. It started out with her not going out on a date when she was asked the next weekend, which seemed entirely understandable at the time, and grew from there until she slowly shut out men completely, except for relatives and service workers she couldn’t avoid, like the mailman. Minnie had been so hurt, she never wanted to be hurt like that again.
And me? I went along for the ride.
Before Minnie’s rape, I’d had the healthy sex life of any college student—we both did. They were experiences I’d enjoyed plenty at the time. And I even thought I was in love, once, but now I thought maybe that wasn’t true at all; it was that very young, “I just want to be in love and you could be almost anyone,” kind of thing, very different from the perplexing combination of giddiness and deeply mature longing I now secretly felt for Sunny.
Did Minnie make me go along for the ride? No. It’s not like she made me or anything; it just turned out that way. Thirty years of living together like two Jewish nuns.
• • •
How was I supposed to get back on the horse again after thirty years?
I couldn’t tell Lise all that. Not that she’d have laughed at me, I don’t think. But she lived such a modern life, with her boyfriend and never getting married and everything, la-di-da, she’d never understand the decisions I’d made.
“Never mind that,” I answered her now, figuring the best way to get people to stop talking about you is to ask them about themselves. “How are things going with the revisions? You said that Dirk’s been e-mailing?”
“Dirk,” she said, laughing and proving my point about people being easy to throw off the scent. “He keeps sending me all these ideas for revisions, some of which are contradictory, and keeps talking about the need to make the work ‘more commercially viable.’ But he also says that if I just listen to him, he’s sure he can sell the book and get a lot of money for it.”
“And that’ll make you happy?”
“Well, sure. I mean, what would be greater than walking into a bookstore and seeing your name on the spine of a book?”
“I don’t know,” I said, popping the last bit of pastry in my mouth, “maybe fresher éclairs?”
But Lise didn’t care about éclairs just then, fresh or not.
“Dirk is just, I don’t know, like this Svengali character. And I guess maybe that should bother me, but it’s just all so much fun. He tells me to make changes in certain areas of the book and—poof!—it’s like it’s a whole different book.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
She shrugged, not bothered.
“What does Tony make of all this?” I asked.
She made a face. “Don’t ask. Ever since I quit the university, Tony hasn’t exactly been a pillar of support.” She shook it off, returning to her new favorite subject. “I was really disappointed. I thought Dirk was going to be coming to New York. He comes a few times a year to have lunches with editors and clients. But now Diana says he told her he’s not going to New York this season, that instead he’s waiting for the end of July when he’s going to come for some big romance writers’ conference in Atlanta.”
I tried to stifle a yawn, hoping she wouldn’t think me rude, but she caught it anyway. I wasn’t bored, just suddenly tired, tired after remembering.
“I should go,” she said, starting to rise.
“No, stay,” I said quickly. I didn’t really feel like talking anymore, but I also didn’t want to go back to being alone just yet. I picked up the remote control. “Maybe we could just watch some TV?”
“OK.” She settled back. “Sure.”
I flipped it to the Food Network.
“How’s the show coming?” she asked.
“I don’t want to talk about those crazy people,” I said. “You’ll see the show along with everyone else in the country in July.” Then, looking at the screen I said, “‘Bam!’ What the hell is it with that guy? ‘Bam!’ Who says that?”
The Second Party
Recommended Reading:
Diana: The Foursome, Troon McAllister
Lise: Misery, Stephen King
Cindy: Baby Proof, Emily Giffin
Sylvia: Chocolat, Joanne Harris
• • •
Eddie woke late in the afternoon, hungover, to the smell of turkey in the apartment. It had been a late night the
night before, playing a gig, and he could have been working that night as well if only Cindy hadn’t insisted he stay home.
“What do you need me here for?” he’d asked her yesterday. “They’re your friends.”
“How would it look if you weren’t here? Wouldn’t it have been odd if, the day of Lise’s party, everyone had shown up as couples and she was there all alone? C’mon, it’ll be fun. It’ll be something different to do.”
“Fine. Then at least let me invite some of the guys over too.”
“No,” Cindy had said, putting her foot down in a rare act. “If your band comes over, it’ll just turn into another jam session. Before the night is out, everyone’d be snorting coke and using all the spoons for instruments.” On one occasion back when Cindy was still drinking, sometime the year before, she’d awoken from a night of partying with Eddie’s band to find spoons all over her living room. It had taken her a while to figure out where they had come from, but then she’d had a flash of everyone using her spoons to play percussion along to Bruce Springsteen and Eddie’s drummer trying to hang a spoon off his nose and failing. “I want to have a normal night, like other people have, with four couples getting together for good food and intelligent conversation.”
Eddie had sneered at that last part, but in another rare act for the Cindy/Eddie household, he’d let her have her way.
Now Eddie struggled upward, sitting on the edge of the bed for a few minutes holding his head before rising and heading off to the shower. As he passed through the single room that constituted the living room and smaller dining room, he didn’t look up, didn’t take notice of the white Christmas lights with which Cindy had lined the ceilings, didn’t take notice of Cindy herself sitting at the round table in the dining area doing something on the computer.
When he emerged twenty minutes later, chest damp, a tattered green towel wrapped around his hips, Cindy hurriedly turned off the computer.
The Sisters Club Page 18
