The Sisters Club

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

And now I’d sent away all my close friends—Sylvia, Lise, Diana—and their men, the people who could have saved me.

  In the kitchen, Eddie closed the space between us. Usually, if I was crying, Eddie would feel bad about whatever he was doing, at least after a while, and back off. It was only when I tried to stand up for myself that he really tried to take me down. But, hard as I was crying right then, he just kept coming at me.

  He grabbed hold of my ponytail, yanking so hard my head snapped back.

  “What did you think, you stupid little idiot? Did you really think you were going to have some kind of fancy evening with those fancy highbrow people?”

  “It could have been nice, Eddie. It could be again.” I squirmed to get out of his hold, but every time I squirmed, that hold just got tighter. “They’re really nice. They’re my friends.”

  “Those people aren’t your friends! Don’t you get it, Cin? They laugh at people like us.” His face was an inch from mine. “They laugh at you. The only reason they want you around is so they can feel better about themselves. You’re such a loser, that next to you they feel smart and successful and rich. That’s why they keep you around.”

  “That’s not true! They’re my friends!”

  “They’re not your fucking friends!” He yanked harder. “And I’ll tell you something else. You’re not seeing them anymore.”

  “What? No! You can’t tell me who I can and can’t see!”

  “Oh, no?”

  Still holding onto my hair with one hand, he reached for the glass bowl on the counter with the other. Then he grabbed a handful of the cherries that I’d so carefully washed earlier in the day.

  “No,” I said. “What are you going to do?”

  He hiked up the back of my skirt, the one I’d bought at J Crew, and put his hand under the waistband of my panties, shoving the cherries down against my skin. Then he kept his hand there, squishing the cherries against my openings until I was wet.

  “See that, Cin? You and me are alike. We’re trash. We’re not like those people.”

  Then he lifted the front of my skirt, ripped off my panties, and finger-fucked me against the counter before dropping his own jeans and fucking me for real, the red juice from the cherries, pieces of skin from the fruit pressing between us.

  God help me, I enjoyed it.

  He held my legs wrapped around his waist as he thrust into me, talking in my ear.

  “You love me, Cin, right? You love only me?”

  “Yes, Eddie,” I said into his shoulder, holding on, “only you.”

  • • •

  I awoke the next morning to a hangover of self-hatred and the phone ringing and a note on Eddie’s pillow where his head should have been. Picking up the note, I hurried to the other room to get the phone.

  It was Carly.

  “Hey! How’d the big party go last night?”

  “It was great,” I said. “Everyone had a nice time.”

  “That’s wonderful! And here I was worried it wouldn’t go well for some reason. Hey, I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Sure. Go ahead.”

  “Listen, the ’rents are starting to drive me up the wall again. Mom keeps getting on my case, Dad keeps getting on Mom, and I was just wondering: Do you think I could come stay with you again, just for a few days?”

  I looked at the note in my hand.

  Hey, Babe:

  Sorry I had to go while you were still sleeping. You looked so beautiful lying there. Last night was great, huh? Ron called, said he wanted to jam all day today, so that’s where I’ll be, but I should be back in time for supper. Make something good, OK? Oh, and clean this place up. It looks like a dump!

  “Hey, Carly, can I call you back in a little bit? I don’t feel so good right now.”

  Twenty minutes later, I was getting out of the shower, having experienced my first bout of morning sickness of the day before stepping in, when the phone rang again. It was probably Eddie, calling to tell me he loved me or with specific instructions about dinner.

  “Hello?”

  “Is that asshole there?” It was Sylvia.

  “No,” I said, “and he’s not an asshole. As a matter of fact, after everyone left last night, we made love.”

  “That’s just the pregnancy hormones talking.”

  “What? And what do you know about pregnancy?”

  “Ever since you told me you were pregnant, I’ve been reading up on it. Pregnancy makes women horny. It says so right in the book. It wasn’t Eddie that was making you feel so good last night after we left. It was the pregnancy. When will he be back?”

  “I don’t know. I—”

  “Pack your things. Pack everything you want to keep in this world. I’m coming to get you.”

  Diana

  “What is wrong with Sylvia? Is she nuts?” I said.

  I was on the phone with Lise, who had called to tell me about Sylvia taking in Cindy. Not only had she taken in Cindy, but apparently, she’d also taken in Cindy’s troubled sister Carly.

  The night of Cindy’s party, Dan and I had discussed things in the car on the way home.

  “I never guessed Eddie could be like that,” Dan had said. “He seemed so nice the first time we met him.”

  “He did, but I suppose sometimes people can be deceiving. You know, the person you see in public is different than the person you see in private. Then, too, he was drinking much more tonight.”

  “What do you think would make Cindy stay with someone like that?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” I’d said. “Perhaps she has self-esteem issues?”

  The next morning, Cindy had still been on my mind, although there were a few other things encroaching on my thoughts again.

  The good news? The scale said I weighed one hundred and ninety pounds. It was hard to believe at times, but if I just kept on doing what I was doing—putting one step in front of the other in my daily walks and downing one carrot after another, however much I hated carrots—in another month and a half I’d weigh one hundred pounds less than I had when I’d first started. For some people—tiny Sylvia came to mind—that would constitute their whole person.

  More good news? There was another e-mail from Dirk. Well, there were e-mails from Dirk every day, but this particular e-mail was different. I’d mentioned to him about how bored I was starting to feel in Danbury; or, if not bored, then restless. I’d said I was thinking about looking for a job, but had no idea what around here might suit me. That was when I came up with my idea, or at least the germ of one. Perhaps I could do some work for you, I’d written. Now, there’s an intriguing idea, he’d written back. But then he’d trailed off with one of those ellipsis things, and I had yet to pin him down on what exactly I could do for him. Still, I thought, wouldn’t it be something if I, Diana Taylor, were somehow to align myself with a first-rate literary agency? If Dirk was known as the Jaguar, then perhaps one day I could be known as the Panther.

  Of course, when I’d intimated as much to Artemis in a telephone conversation the next day, she’d laughed.

  “The Panther? I don’t know about that, Diana. Maybe you’d be ‘The Ocelot’? Or possibly ‘The Lemur’?”

  “Never mind about that now,” I’d hurried on, not wanting to let her hear how her words had hurt me. “There’s something else I was hoping to get your feedback on.”

  Then I’d told her about Cindy and Eddie; how, except for Sylvia, we’d all mostly thought he was terrific at first with just a few minor reservations; how wrong we’d all been.

  “Maybe it’s the old break-up-to-make-up thing,” Artemis had suggested. “Know what I mean?”

  “No, I’m afraid I haven’t a clue.” Artemis had always had so much more experience with men than I had. I felt inadequate compared to her whenever the subject came up.

  “Maybe the sex is wonderful. Maybe the periods of tension make it more so.”

  “But that’s daft! Cindy’s beautiful. She’s sweet and she’s kind. Why not pick a man who’s he
r equal and have sex with him? Who would put up with a man treating her dreadfully just to get laid?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “I have a theory.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Well, I don’t know how to say this, but Cindy’s…different than Sylvia and Lise and myself. And Eddie’s…different than the other men.”

  “How so?”

  “For one thing, neither of them has been to university. And then, too, they live in a one-bedroom flat instead of a house or at least their own condo. Eddie sings in a band, Cindy works at the mall—”

  “Diana, I’m shocked at you!”

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “That’s just such a classist thing to say. It’s the sort of thing Mother would say! You’re not honestly telling me that this Cindy friend of yours is in an abusive relationship just because she and her Eddie didn’t read Homer at Cambridge or because he sings in a band instead of being a CEO like Dan, are you?”

  “Well, when you put it like that…But I didn’t mean—”

  “Nobody ever does, do they? The fact of the matter is, women who live with CEOs are just as likely to get bashed around by their husbands as your friend is. The only difference is, you never read about it in the papers, and they get bigger presents as part of the makeup phase.”

  “So you’re saying Cindy stays with Eddie because the making up is so good?”

  “Of course. And I’m also saying I think it’s very small-minded of you to assume that your friend Cindy’s current situation has anything to do with her socioeconomic stature. It could just as easily be you as her. Only it’s not.”

  That was something to think about.

  “And here’s something else,” Artemis had gone on. “People looking at marriages from the outside—”

  “But Cindy and Eddie aren’t married.”

  “Whatever. People looking at other people’s relationships from the outside only see a part of the picture. Speaking of pictures…”

  “Were we? Speaking of pictures?”

  “Of course we were, Diana. Don’t you ever pay attention to me when I speak?”

  Then Artemis told me about some man she’d been seeing, said there was a picture she was going to e-mail to me of the two of them together at a party, and to see what I thought.

  As soon as she’d rung off, I did as she asked. Not because I so desperately wanted to see a picture of gorgeous Artemis with her latest gorgeous boyfriend. I didn’t. But because I knew she’d only grill me about it the next time we talked. And if I made a slipup while describing him, a slipup revealing that I’d never looked? Say, if I commented how lovely his hair looked when in reality he was as bald as Vin Diesel on most days, Artemis would eat me alive.

  As it turned out, Artemis’s new boyfriend looked exactly like Vin Diesel, which I found out when I looked at the e-mail she’d sent me to the account I shared with Dan. It had been a long time since I’d checked that account, since the e-mails I received from Dirk came to the new account I’d created, but I saw now that there were several e-mails that had “Layla” as part of the e-mail address, and I knew exactly who those must be from. The temptation to read them was huge, I must say, but then I reminded myself how annoying it had been when Dan had mentioned Dirk’s repeat e-mails to me in a suspicious-sounding way. And I did have Dirk. Thinking of him made me promptly switch to the other account to see if there was anything new from him.

  From: dirk.peters@dirkliterary.uk

  To: dianat@yahoo.com

  D,

  I’ve never known another woman like you…

  • • •

  And now here was Lise on the phone, and she wasn’t at all agreeing with my assessment of Sylvia, that she was nuts for taking Cindy in, not like I would have expected Lise to have done.

  Lise and I always agreed on nearly everything, so it came as something of a shock.

  Then Lise said something strikingly similar to what Artemis had previously said about people looking at other people’s relationships from the outside only ever seeing part of the picture. She went on to say, “They only see what the couple allows them to see, or maybe they only see what they want to see. But it’s always more complicated than that. It’s easy to judge. It’s a lot less easy to understand.”

  “Fine,” I said, growing tired of people casting me as someone who could only see things in blacks and whites. I could see grays too. “Whatever the true nature of the relationship between Cindy and Eddie, it is nuts, Sylvia interjecting herself in that way. She could get hurt. That Eddie is a maniac! It’s only a matter of time before he figures out who Cindy is staying with, and then what might he do?”

  “But how would he find out?” she wanted to know. “Chances are Cindy never even told him any of our last names. True, he was here that one time, and he did come by last night wanting to know if she was with me—”

  “He was there? In your house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you say something earlier, for God’s sakes?”

  “Perhaps because as soon I answered the phone, you went off on your tear about Sylvia being nuts and I had to respond to that first.” She sounded amused. “Besides, it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. And Tony was here.”

  “Well, what did you tell him?”

  “I lied. I told him I had no idea where Cindy had gone to, said I hadn’t talked to her at all. At least that part was true: I haven’t talked to her, only Sylvia. He grumbled and yelled a bit afterward, but he did finally leave. Tony saw to that.”

  “But don’t you see what I mean? Eddie’s determined. Somehow he’ll find her. And Danbury is so small.”

  “There are eighty thousand people here,” she laughed. “That’s hardly small.”

  “Well, that still doesn’t make it London. And haven’t you ever noticed how you keep running into the same people over and over again? The odds are Eddie will find Cindy. It’s just a matter of time. And then what will happen?”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Then: “Why did you get us all together in the first place? When you put that ad in the bookstore newsletter.”

  “Come again?”

  But she didn’t answer that one. Instead she said, “I know, from what you’ve said, that your sister Artemis can be toxic. But I’m curious: What are you like when you talk to her?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you ask her questions about what’s going on with her? Or do you just talk about yourself, only to wind up disappointed when the response you get from her isn’t totally up to your expectations?”

  “I suppose the latter, but I’m still not sure I understand quite what it is you’re getting at here.”

  “I suppose what I’m getting at,” Lise said with a sigh, “is that relationships—and by ‘relationships’ here I don’t mean just romantic relationships but all kinds of relationships—are as much about what you bring to the table as what the other person does. I think Sylvia sees that, maybe better than any of us. If you’re always thinking about ‘What’s in this for me?’ or ‘How do I benefit?’ or ‘Can I get hurt by this somehow?’ then life will always fall short for you.”

  Sylvia

  If anyone thought I was nuts, they were probably right.

  Not that long ago, I’d been feeling lonely rattling around my condo by myself. OK, I’d felt lonely ever since Minnie died. And now I was living my mother’s old line of “Be careful what you ask for.” What was I doing with not one but two young women sleeping in Minnie’s old room? Someone, I thought, should lock me away.

  Except I wasn’t the one who should be locked away. That Eddie should be locked away, he was that crazy and mean. And Cindy should be locked away for putting up with him. Oh, and while we’re locking people away, might as well throw Carly into the bargain too, just because.

  The day after Cindy’s party, when I’d gone to get her, riding in like the cavalry in the Sylvia’s Supper van, I’d expected some resist
ance. Cindy had obviously been in denial about Eddie for a long time. Maybe she’d tell me she’d changed her mind about coming with me. After all, I’d only known Cindy for a matter of months. She’d been with Eddie for years. This couldn’t have been the first time things got really bad. Maybe there was a history of things getting bad enough for her to begin the process of leaving, and then Eddie doing something at the last minute to win her back.

  But when I got there, she was practically waiting at the door with one pathetic old suitcase packed.

  “That’s all you’re taking?” I’d asked, surprised.

  “I want the computer too. But I was scared to lift it myself because of, you know, the baby.”

  It was just a laptop. It didn’t weigh much. But, I figured, with everything else that was going on with her, she probably wasn’t thinking straight.

  Four months pregnant and she was just beginning to show, but there was definitely a little bump there you couldn’t miss. And yet, somehow, Eddie had missed that bump. Maybe Cindy wasn’t the only one in denial?

  So I’d disconnected the laptop and loaded it into the van along with her suitcase. We were driving away, heading toward the condo, and that’s when she lays her bombshell on me. Only, her being Cindy, she’d done it in a tentative sort of way.

  “Um, do you think maybe we could swing by my parents’ house and pick something up first?”

  “Sure. What do you need? More clothes?”

  “Um, not exactly.”

  “Not exactly” turned out to be her whacked-out sister Carly who, considering what Cindy had gotten herself into with Eddie, maybe wasn’t the most whacked-out Cox sister after all.

  “What am I running here,” I said, as Carly threw a duffel into the back of the van, climbing in after it, “Sylvia’s Wayward Home for Girls?”

  Carly had laughed, a clear tinkling sound, before addressing her sister like I wasn’t there. “You’re right. She’s really funny.”

  “See?” Cindy had said, smiling for the first time that day. “Told you.”