1 rental house with only three bedrooms
Mix together liberally
Result? One recipe for disaster.
Remove the literary agent from the mix, and you’ve still got a disaster.
My advice? Don’t try this at home. The recipe sucks.
My point? Nothing was turning out the way I’d planned. I’d had such high hopes for this trip, thinking that if we could just get Cindy out of Connecticut, if we could just come around her as a united group, we could find a way to make her see the light, make her see that it was best for her and her baby that she break from Eddie for good. But none of that was happening because two of our intervening triad—Lise and Diana—were too involved in playing out their own petty drama. And for what? Some fast-talking geek in a gold suit?
This is to say that even after Dirk left, streaking out of the sandy drive in his black Jaguar, things were just as tense, even more so, than when he’d been there. All my life, up until that past year, I’d avoided groups of women. Of course I’d avoided men too, because of Minnie, but I’d particularly avoided groups of women. There was a good reason for that. Put two women together for any length of time and they start fighting like a married couple. Put more than two women together for any length of time and they start fighting like a family.
A chill had grown up between Diana and Lise. Obviously, it had something to do with the Dirkster. I can’t say it made a whole lot of sense to me. What woman in her right mind would want Mr. Smarm? And yet I was sure jealousy lay at the heart of the silent feud. But didn’t Lise have Tony? Wasn’t Diana married to Dan? Sure, they’d both alluded to problems with their men. Lise had told us Tony wasn’t exactly supportive of her new career, while Diana had grown increasingly critical of Dan: he was never home; when he was home, he didn’t have sex with her; blah blah blah, the things she’d told us all the way back on Memorial Day weekend, not to mention the night we left Connecticut when she said Dan wouldn’t miss her. I’m not saying they shouldn’t have felt the way they did, but from where I was sitting, those women didn’t exactly represent bargains for their men. I know I’d encouraged Lise to just write her book, but I never told her to impulsively quit her job, and I could see where Tony might be put off by her doing so. It’s one thing to say you’re going after your dream and another thing to burn down all your bridges before you were even sure just what that dream was.
Lise herself was having doubts.
“All these changes Dirk keeps asking me to make,” Lise said to me one overcast afternoon while Cindy was in the game room trying to teach Diana to shoot pool. “In the beginning, when I was first writing this book, I liked the feeling that I was writing my story for an audience of one: Dirk. But now? There are days when it doesn’t even feel like it’s my book anymore.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “I always thought people just wrote books and, if the writing was good enough, someone published it.”
“You’d think, wouldn’t you?” Lise said with a wry grin. “But Dirk always says that there are two kinds of agents: the kind that just take your work and turn it back out into the world again without so much as a comma changed, like a publishing revolving door; and then there are the other kind, the craftsmen who act as early editors, making sure the work is as near to perfect as possible before they’ll submit it.”
“So, Dirk’s this second kind?” I said. “He has to put his fingerprints all over everything first?”
“Dirk…”
But then Diana came through, on her way to the kitchen to get another can of diet soda, and Lise shut up about Dirk.
It had gotten to the point where Lise and Diana would no longer talk to each other unless they absolutely had to. This meant that they’d barely say “Pass the salt, please” to each other at the dinner table. If I were a nicer person, I suppose I would have offered to switch rooms with one of them. But both of them were acting so loony, there was no way I was going to do that. And I suppose that, with Dirk gone, one of them could have moved into the bedroom he’d been using. But I’m guessing, for one of them to move out, it would have felt to both like admitting a defeat of their friendship. Me, I’d have just admitted defeat right away and jumped to clearer waters…not to mention the bigger bed.
I would have liked that bigger bed. And I also would have liked to be relieved of some of the cooking duties.
When we first got there, and for the first couple of weeks, I enjoyed it. It was fun shopping in stores where they had some different ingredients than I was used to working with at home, fun trying out new dishes. But after a while, I started feeling like not only was I the den mother to this dysfunctional family, I was also the chief cook and bottle washer too.
“Cook, cook, cook! That’s all I seem to do around here,” I said one night. “You’d think I was a caterer or something.”
“Well, you are a caterer,” Lise pointed out. But she took my point, and she and Cindy offered to cook dinner.
“I’m so glad we have some time, just the two of us, to talk,” Diana said in a low voice as we sat on the deck, the other two doing God knows what with my kitchen inside.
I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to encourage her or not. She probably just wanted to complain about Dan again or tell me all about the latest pound she’d lost; or, worse, talk about Dirk. Still, it didn’t seem right to be rude.
“Oh yeah?” I said. “What’d you want to talk about?”
“I was wondering,” she said, “have you ever considered putting the story of you and your sister down on paper? You could write about how the two of you lived, and then how she died. I’m sure it would make a fascinating tale.”
“You mean, like, for other people to read?”
“Of course. What else would be the point?”
“God, no,” I said. “I’d feel as though I was exploiting her.”
Diana’s face fell.
“I don’t mean it’s wrong for other people to do that sort of thing,” I hurried to say. “People can do what they want. I’m just saying it’d be wrong for me.”
“Oh. I see.” Then she said, “What about a recipe book? The ratings for the taped episodes of The Rude Chef seem to be holding strong. You could maybe do one of those tie-in things, put together a collection of all your favorites, maybe jot the odd rude comment or two down with each one. I’m sure your fans would love it.”
“A collection of my favorites?” Now, there was an idea with more appeal.
Still, I thought, Books, books, books! First, everyone wants me to cook, cook, cook, and now everyone wants to talk to me about books, books, books.
• • •
The only one who appeared untouched by the cold war that was now Diana and Lise, and the only one who wasn’t coming to me to talk about books—maybe because she spent half the days with her nose buried in one romance novel or another—was Cindy. She just moved on, growing marginally bigger each week, seeming to be blithely unaware that we were all there because of her. She was so calm, in fact, I hated to burst the bubble around her by talking to her about what we’d come there to talk to her about. And so, the days piled up with nothing said.
But I did sneak calls to Carly every now and then whenever Cindy was otherwise occupied.
“How’s it going?” I asked, on one such occasion.
“Good. I like working in the bra shop. At least it beats sitting around the house all day, and I get paid once a week.” Pause. “Oh, and Eddie was here last night.”
My grip on the phone tightened. “Eddie? What happened? What’d he want?”
“He wanted what he wants every time he comes by: for me to tell him where Cindy is, for Cindy to come back.”
“You didn’t tell him, did you?”
“Not a chance. The only problem was, this time he was really drunk. And, um, he hit on me toward the end. But I think it was because he was so drunk. Cindy and I look so much alike, he probably started thinking I was her.”
“Oh shit! Are you OK?” I knew I neve
r should have left Carly alone to deal with Eddie. If I’d been smart, I would have gone all FBI and moved her to a safe house first before we left.
“Of course!” She laughed. “You don’t think that after everything I’ve lived through I’d have any trouble dealing with a tiny problem like Eddie, do you? I’m fine. I’m handling it. Everything’ll be fine.”
• • •
Lise’s problems with Tony, Diana’s problems with Dan, and Cindy’s problems with Eddie—even if he wasn’t immediately in the picture anymore, and no matter what Carly said, he was still a big problem. The only one of our happy foursome not having problems with her man was me, and maybe that was because I didn’t think of Sunny as my man. He was, as he himself had pointed out, my “great good friend.”
But that great good friend did call every night we were down in Georgia, checking up on me, checking up on everyone else.
When I told him how awkward our living arrangements had become, he even offered to come down. Maybe, he told me, his presence would defuse some of the tension everyone except Cindy was feeling.
“You can’t do that,” I objected. “You have patients who rely on you. You have appointments.”
“Say the word,” he said, “and I will be on the next flight. I can always get someone to cover me. Just say the word, Sylvia.”
“The word is, no, thanks, Sunny. OK, so maybe that’s two words.”
“Very well, then. But please feel free to reserve the right to change your mind at any time.”
“Thanks. It’s just this is something the four of us have to work out here on our own. It’s not like I don’t appreciate your offer, though. I do. In fact, I appreciate everything you do, calling me every day to check in and stuff.”
“I am glad,” he said. “It is nice to feel appreciated, and I am happy if it helps you. But, listen, Sylvia. When you get back home, we are going to need to talk. Much as I have enjoyed it, I do not want to go on being just great good friends anymore. It is not enough for me. It is time we take things up to the next level or consider saying good-bye.”
OK, so maybe the other three weren’t the only ones with man problems.
Cindy
People must think I’m stupid, I thought.
And why wouldn’t they? After all, I’d always thought of myself that way, so why wouldn’t everyone else?
I felt the damp sand squish between my toes as I walked closer to the surf. There was limited sun in the gray and white skies as I slowly lowered myself a few feet in front of the water. I ran the thick wet sand between my fingers, enjoying the ooze of it and, before I knew it, I was pushing the sand together, molding little piles of it into individual shapes.
A castle, I thought. Why not build my own castle?
It was easy at first, scooping out a great big circle for the moat. But when I tried to make more intricate details—rooms for my castle, a drawbridge to keep bad people out—castle building proved harder than I’d thought.
I was tempted to ask a child a little ways down if I could borrow her pail and shovel, but then realized how silly I’d look: a grown woman, asking to play with a kid’s toys. So I pressed onward, going down to the sea to gather small amounts of water, which I brought back in my cupped hands, hoping to turn the sand within the moat into the consistency of something I could build with.
It took a lot of trips.
But, eventually, things started to stick.
While the sun continued its disappearing act, and a hot wind with an unusual under layer of chill came in, I built my rooms, my protective drawbridge finally in place.
Who would live in my castle? Me, of course. And, if it was going to be my castle, I might as well declare myself to be the queen. Then, across from the queen’s bedroom, I constructed a room for my baby, a nursery for the princess. If I was fantasizing, I might as well make the baby a girl. I knew when people asked pregnant women if they wanted a boy or a girl, the right answer was supposed to be, “I don’t care, just so long as it’s healthy.” And that was the main thing I cared about, but I was still sure I’d have a girl. With all the women who’d been around me lately—really, only women, except for Dirk before he left—it was like being at the center of a coven, all that female energy, and I could no more picture having a boy come out of me than I could a pig.
So now there were two people living in my castle: my baby and me.
I never let on to any of the others, but I was scared to have the baby. Sure, I’d wanted a baby, wanted to be pregnant. But now that I was, I was scared of everything. I was scared of my body changing, scared of actually delivering the baby, scared of everything that would follow once the baby was out in the world. Mostly, I was scared of being alone.
I’d always been thin, as paranoid of being fat as any other American girl I knew. It was distressing to think of my body getting bigger and bigger, even though I knew that wasn’t what I was supposed to be thinking about now. I was supposed to be thinking about the health of the baby.
And I was, nearly all the time. At night I’d lie in bed, hand on my tummy, thinking the words only in my head because to say them aloud, even in a whisper, might wake Sylvia in the next bed: Hey, you, I’d mentally whisper to my baby, are you OK in there? Am I doing everything right? Are you getting enough food? Enough sleep? Are you resting up for your big day?
And how was the baby going to get out of my body? Oh, I knew how. I’d read some books, looked at articles on the Internet. I knew women had been having babies as long as there’d been women on the planet, some of them under much less ideal circumstances than the hospital birth I planned on for my baby, like the woman who gave birth up in a tree during a flood. Really, compared to that, what did I have to worry about? But I did worry. I worried about everything: the pain, how I’d deal with it.
More than that, though, more than anything else, I worried about what would come afterward: How would I take care of the baby once it was here? Would I do a good job?
Grabbing another handful of sand, I started making the queen’s bedroom bigger, big enough for two.
Who else would move into my castle? Who would move into the queen’s bedroom?
I pictured Eddie living with me there, the two of us married, Eddie somehow—even though he was over thirty—getting onto American Idol and winning it all.
“Hi, honey. I’m home,” I heard Eddie say in my head.
“How was the tour?” I said back.
“It was great. We played a million places and rocked them all. But you know what? I missed you every second. I couldn’t wait to get back home to you.”
It was a nice dream. But was it possible? I knew the American Idol part’d never happen. But could Eddie and I still have a happily ever after?
People must think I’m stupid, I thought again. And by “people” here I meant Sylvia, Lise, and Diana. But, really, even if I was stupid about a lot of things, I wasn’t nearly as stupid as they thought. Did they really think I didn’t know they were up to something? Did they really think I thought this whole trip was just about the four of us spending some “quality time” together? Did they think I didn’t notice how, every time I even hinted I might call Eddie, someone else would race to the phone first or say there wasn’t enough time because they had some activity planned for all of us that simply could not wait?
Nobody could be that stupid. Not even me.
And yet I remained calm. I was the eye at the center of their storm.
I went back to my castle building, wondering if there was anyone else who could share the queen’s room besides Eddie. I’d never thrown away Porter’s business card. Even though I’d never called him, throwing away that card would have felt like throwing away the only smidgen of my past that had nothing to do with my fucked-up family and my fucked-up life with Eddie. Porter was that tiny ray from the past that still had the shine of girlish hope around it. What would it be like to have him share the queen’s bedroom with me?
“Hi, honey. I’m home,” Porter would sa
y. “I made a killing today on Wall Street but every second I thought of you.”
Stupid, I told myself. You really are stupid. Every fantasy I had, it was like something out of an old fifties sitcom. The next thing you know, I’d be offering to make my men martinis, helping them on with their quilted smoking jackets, and angling to get money out of them so I could buy myself a pretty hat.
I started making the queen’s bedroom smaller again, taking some of the sand away.
“What are you doing?”
I turned to see Diana, crouching down next to my castle in the sand.
“What does it look like?” I said, going back to my work. “I’ve never made a sandcastle before. I figured I might as well make one just once before we have to go on back home.”
We’d been there nearly a whole month. Surely, it’d be time to go home soon.
“It looks wonderful,” she said brightly. “I particularly like that moat. But have you noticed the tide’s coming in?”
I used my hand to shield my eyes against a sun that was no longer there and looked out at the wide sea, the big waves rising and crashing far out, bigger than I’d seen them since we’d been there; the smaller waves at the shore edged closer to my fortress. “It’s OK,” I said, trying to make a tower room stand up at the top of the castle. “I wasn’t expecting it to last forever.”
“I wanted to talk to you while the others aren’t around,” Diana said like we were the best of friends.
“What about?”
“I was wondering: You love to read romances so much.” And here she leaned in closer. “Have you ever considered writing a book?”
I laughed, the first real laugh I’d felt come out of my body in a long time.
“God, no!” I said. “I’m not smart enough to make up a whole imagined story like that. That kind of thing’s for other people.”
“I wasn’t talking about a made-up story,” she said. “I was thinking you could write something about your current situation: you know, being pregnant, having a child by yourself, and perhaps something about what you’ve been through with Eddie.”
The Sisters Club Page 24
