The Sisters Club

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  “Really?”

  “No.” I cuffed him on the shoulder. “I made that part up.”

  “But what about child support?” Sunny ran his fingers through his hair. “Every time you turn on the news, you see moms complaining about deadbeat dads. I would think you would want to enforce the rights of Cindy to have Eddie support a child who is half his.”

  “You know,” I said, “it’s funny, but I don’t. It’d be one thing if Cindy wound up pregnant because of condom breakage or some such thing, but she planned to get pregnant, without Eddie’s consent. So, no, I don’t think Eddie owes the child one red cent.”

  “How will Cindy support the baby, then, on just one income and probably a low one at that? Most families these days need at least two.”

  “I’ll take care of her and support her, the baby too, for as long as it takes.”

  Sunny let out a low whistle. “When you play God, you do not fool around, do you?”

  “Yeah, well…”

  “And who is going to support you, Atlas, while you are holding up the rest of the world?”

  “I don’t know. Carly?” I laughed at the idea, a quiet sound in the night. “I don’t know.”

  We were silent for a time, watching the neighborhood. The younger kids should have been in bed already, on a school night no less, but the weather was too nice for parents to mind or object that they wanted to skateboard or toss the football around a little longer.

  “It is very peaceful here,” Sunny said. “When I first met you, I could not understand why you would want to live in a condo when you and your sister could have undoubtedly afforded a house. But I can see it now. You get to enjoy watching a lot of other people grow and change and just live, but at night, or whenever you want to, you can just close the door.”

  “Plus, I don’t have to cut my own grass,” I added.

  A stray football came our way and Sunny retrieved it from the small patch of grass next to my stoop and tossed it back to a child’s waiting arms.

  “But,” Sunny said, as though we’d been in the middle of debating whatever point it was he was about to make, “how can you be so certain that, even if Eddie can be made to believe the baby is not his, he will not bother Cindy anymore?”

  “His ego,” I said with certainty. “Some men, if they loved the woman enough, it wouldn’t matter whose child she was bearing. They’d still do anything to be with her. But a guy like Eddie with that fragile ego that he masks by strutting around like he’s got the biggest ego in the world? No way.”

  On the outside, I spoke each word with nail-in-the-wall certainty. But inside? I was praying like crazy I was right.

  “And what if you are wrong?” Sunny asked simply, as though reading my mind.

  “Hey, we’re all only human,” I said. “Every single one of us makes mistakes.”

  Cindy

  I got a job volunteering at a help hotline.

  Not long after we returned from Georgia, I realized I just couldn’t take sitting around Sylvia’s condo every day while everyone else went about their jobs and their lives. Carly was doing great working for Marlene at Midnight Scandals. Carly’d just shown up for work the day after we left Connecticut, telling my boss I had to leave town on an emergency, and she turned out to be so good at selling underwear, even better than me, Marlene hadn’t minded the switch at all. And, even if Carly hadn’t worked out so good, now that I was really showing, I couldn’t imagine Marlene would want me back working with her super skinny staff. Sylvia said that there were laws protecting pregnant women from discrimination, that no employer could turn me down just because I was obviously expecting a baby. And yet I couldn’t believe that there were a lot of employers out there just dying to hire a pregnant lady whose chief job experience involved working at the mall. But volunteer work? People would take even me if I was free.

  Listening to other people’s problems, one after another for hours at a time, seemed like good training for the field I hoped to go into one day: social work. It was also what you might call illuminating. I’d always thought my problems were pretty big, but listening to what some other people were going through—serious depression, husbands and kids suddenly dying—made me realize that mine were not the worst problems in the world. Listening to other people also made me realize that some people don’t know how good they have it. At least once a day I’d get a call from some hysterical person who was going through a problem that was the emotional equivalent to a broken fingernail. But then I’d have to stop myself from letting my exasperation show in my voice. I’d have to tell myself that the worst a person has experienced is the worst they know and that telling someone who just sprained their ankle that they shouldn’t whine about it because there’s a guy next door in a wheelchair who’ll never walk again isn’t very useful.

  So I just kept doing my job and hoping on good days I was making things better, at least for someone in the world. I hoped on bad days that I wasn’t making anyone want to go out and kill themselves.

  • • •

  Eddie and I had spoken on the phone nearly every day since we’d been back. I’d told him all about the trip—with the exception of that conversation during the storm—while he’d told me what was going on with the band. Every time we talked, he said he missed me and asked when he’d see me again. Finally, a day came when I felt I couldn’t put it off any longer. I asked Sylvia if I could borrow her van for a few hours, and then I told Eddie to meet me at the Dunkin’ Donuts on South Street, figuring neutral territory was best; plus, I was really craving a chocolate frosted donut with sprinkles.

  When I’d still lived with Eddie, I’d been able to hide my pregnancy because I’d still been in my first trimester, but now I made sure to wear something that would reveal it the instant I walked in. As I arrived, though, I saw he wasn’t there yet, and when I sat down on the swivel stool, the counter came over my belly.

  All the way over, I hadn’t known what to expect. I hadn’t even known exactly what I was going to say. So I’d turned up the radio, distracting myself with the musical heartache of others.

  When Eddie finally walked in, I was done eating my first donut—during which time I’d looked around me and wondered whoever thought pink and brown and orange would make a great color combination but then recognizing it had worked out pretty well for them—and halfway through the second.

  “God,” he said, settling down in a rush onto the stool next to mine, “of all times to get pulled over for a taillight being out. The whole time the cop was writing me out the ticket, I kept worrying you wouldn’t be here when I got here.”

  “Hi, Eddie,” I said.

  “God, I’m such a jerk,” he said. “I’ve been dying to see you forever, and then I come in here and the first thing I do is start jabbering about some traffic ticket.” He grinned. “Hi, Cindy. That’s how I should have started, right? Hi, Cindy. How are you?”

  A part of me felt like just delaying the next moment forever. But it was just time now. It was well past time.

  I swiveled in my stool, stood up, and rested my palm on my belly.

  “This is how I am, Eddie,” I said.

  “Holy shit!” People always talk about receiving shocking news and how it nearly made them fall off their chair. You never really think that kind of thing happens in life, like someone slipping on a banana peel, but it must because that’s what happened to Eddie. “Holy shit, Cindy!” Then the shock, more like horror, on his face disappeared and he actually grinned again, like he was the happiest man in the world. “My God, it all makes sense now! The reason you’ve been acting so fucked up these last few months—it’s because of this.” He couldn’t keep his eyes off my belly. “But why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I—”

  “Oh, man, Cindy, if only I’d known, I could have helped you. You were probably too scared to tell me because you thought I’d be mad, but I could have helped you.”

  “Really? You’d have done that?”
<
br />   “Of course. I could have found a doctor for you to get rid of it. But don’t worry. It’s not too late. I’m sure we can still find someone who will be willing to—”

  Now it was my turn to be horrified. “I don’t want to find that kind of doctor, Eddie! I want to keep this baby!”

  “Listen,” Eddie said, and I could see him struggling to remain calm as he took my hand, as we played out our little domestic drama in Dunkin’ Donuts. “If you want to have a baby, sure, we can have one. Eventually. But now is just like the worse timing in the world. Things with the band have been really going good lately. We have more gigs than we can handle. I’m thinking if we can just go on the way we are for the next six months—”

  “I’m really happy that things are going so well for you,” I said. Then: “And it’s OK you don’t want this baby, because it’s not yours anyway.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not your baby. It’s someone else’s.”

  “I don’t believe you. You never would have slept with someone behind my back. No way.”

  “Of course I would have,” I said, making it up as I went along. In my mind, I pictured someone like Porter, only I didn’t say it was him, because God knows Eddie would have hunted him down and shot him like a dog if I had. Then, with the picture of Porter in my mind, I spun a story of hooking up with some guy one night when Eddie was out playing with the band. “He was great,” I finished up. “I never saw him again but it was definitely worth it.”

  “You slut!” Eddie said. Then his hand was up so fast to hit me, the only thing in the room moving faster than it was my own as my hand shot out, stopping his at the wrist. God knows if Eddie’d wanted to, he could have easily broken my grip, done whatever he wanted to me. I think he was so stunned though, at the very idea of me resisting him, of fighting back, he didn’t move a muscle.

  I spoke each word distinctly, so there’d be no mistaking them. “You. Can’t. Hit. Me. Any. More.” Then, so there’d be no room for error at all, I added, “And don’t call me anymore either. I don’t love you, Eddie. It’s time you moved on.”

  I let go of his wrist, calmly picked up my bag, and walked out, not looking back even once.

  • • •

  I got in the van and drove, not right back to Sylvia’s. I just drove.

  Walking out of there like that was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Telling Eddie I didn’t love him anymore was pretty damn hard too.

  People looking at what I did from the outside might say that what I did was wrong, lying to Eddie like that, and I hadn’t even known for sure I was going to do it until the words came out of my mouth. Up until then, I’d still believed things could go either way. But life doesn’t come in one size fits all, the same decisions working for everybody. Sylvia was right about what I needed to do, but for the wrong reasons. If I told Eddie the truth, eventually I’d lose myself in him again, even deeper than before. I had just enough strength to stand up to him that one time.

  In the months since I’d moved out of our apartment, I’d felt myself changing; not huge changes, just a little bit at a time, but enough. If I went back to Eddie, it might be good in the beginning, but then it’d only get worse again. Because the problem had never been who Eddie was; the problem was who I was when I was with Eddie.

  And I just couldn’t bring a baby into that.

  Still, I loved him, not in the same way I used to, but in brief glittering flashes, like when I’d remember his smile or the way he said certain things.

  A few years back, when Prince Charles got married for the second time, the TV kept replaying clips from his first courtship and marriage. They particularly liked showing the one where, when Charles and Diana got engaged, some reporter asked him if he was in love and he said something like, “Of course. Whatever ‘love’ is.” You could tell people laughed at that, like he was the stupidest person in the world. But I could kind of understand where he was coming from.

  Love, like faith, wasn’t something you could touch. It kept changing all the time, depending on the people and circumstances. You couldn’t put it in a box. You couldn’t describe it. It just was what it was. It was what I felt, more than anything in the world, for the baby inside me.

  I drove on, terrified of the future, determined to put the past behind me.

  Lise

  September.

  For as long as I could remember, September had been a time of new beginnings for me. From my early preschool days through my early twenties it had meant buying new school supplies and new clothes with the hope of the reinvention of myself that the fresh school year always brought. And in the dozen plus years since I’d ended my formal schooling, none of that had changed. I’d simply exchanged one side of the desk for the other, graduating from being a student of the educational system to becoming the educational system, each fall bringing fresh faces in the classroom, fresh even though they were predictable: the ones who arrived certain they knew everything already about writing and there was, therefore, nothing left for you to teach them, and the ones that arrived filled with the hope that you would somehow miraculously show them the way.

  But that September was different, the first in memory.

  All summer long, my giving up my professorship had been both real and unreal. On the real side was my sense of relief, freedom, and the idea that I would finally no longer be what I’d been for so long, would no longer have to do the same old things. I’d imagined that when September came my sense of liberation would be complete. But it had been unreal too, as though, until September came and went without me stepping foot inside a classroom, none of it would be final.

  Now we were three weeks into September, and it was nothing like advance imagination had predicted.

  It was final, felt final, but not in any way you could call good. My cottage was close enough to the campus that I could still see the rest of the world coming and going, and me no longer a part of it.

  Like an amputee mourning an artificial limb, I missed my classroom, missed my students, the serious and the silly.

  September was no longer a time of new beginnings for me. It was a time of endings.

  Now that I was no longer student or teacher, who was I?

  • • •

  I’d returned from Georgia to an empty house and grass that had grown a foot tall in my absence. Not to mention dust all over everything. Never much of a nester, I needed to keep physically busy in order to prevent my mind from ranging too widely—about Tony’s absence, which he’d foretold, us having not even spoken while I was away; about everything to do with the writing and publishing of books; and even about my friends, the troubled and the not so much—and quickly got to work setting my small world in order. The worst was the lawn, which felt like it should have required a machete rather than the push mower I normally used. That lawn became a metaphor for my life: all the distractions that needed to get hacked away before you could get down to the essence of the thing.

  Once I beat the lawn back into submission, it still didn’t feel like enough. Whereas before I had mown it the usual once a week—or, more typically, Tony had—I now felt a need to go at it at least twice a week in order to ensure that the horror I’d come home to didn’t make a return.

  That’s where I was, mowing the lawn for the second time that week, when the phone calls started coming. The cell phone I’d clipped onto the back of my cutoff jeans shorts vibrated against my hip.

  “I know it’s late,” Dirk’s voiced chirped. Then he amended, “Well, it’s late for me here, but I don’t suppose it’s late for you at all. Anyway, I just got home from a night out and saw in Publishers Weekly online edition that two of your former students—John Quayle and some Danitra person whose last name I don’t recall—have both sold first novels.”

  “What?” I said dumbly. “Both of them?” I typically tried to be happy for my students’ successes, but this was a bit much. Were they working on those books when they were my students?

  “But don’t
you see? This is wonderful news! The headline begins ‘Two Connecticut University Students…’ and right away I recognized your college. We’ll be able to use this to promote the hell out of you once we’re ready to send your book out. Just think how attractive this will make you to editors. If you teach the kind of students that go on to make big book deals, how much better, they’ll think, might your own writing be?”

  John and Danitra?

  Big book deals?

  “Dirk, I have to go. I’m sorry, but I was in the middle of something important when you rang. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  I clicked off before he had time to say anything else, unable as yet to digest what I was feeling. Nor did I get a chance to before the cell phone buzzed again.

  “Have you seen Publishers Weekly yet?”

  It was Aunt Tess.

  Ever since she’d offered to finance me, even though I hadn’t taken her up on it, she’d had a vested interest in my career. She’d even subscribed to the print edition of Publishers Weekly—not an inconsiderable cost—saying that she wanted to be the first to read about my deal when my book finally sold.

  “No, I haven’t,” I said, “but I did hear something about what you’re about to tell me. To tell you the truth, I was trying to get the grass cut and I think I should—”

  “Never mind that right now. Don’t you want to hear about what your students have gone and done?”

  Not really, I thought, but I couldn’t say that.

  “Apparently,” she said, “this Danitra girl has written a literary novel that they say is like nothing anyone has ever seen.”

  Danitra had written a literary novel?

  “The title,” Aunt Tess went on, “is Something About Bees.”

  In spite of myself, I had to laugh at that. When I was still teaching, I’d told my students that as important as talent was to a writer these days, perhaps more important still was perseverance. The people who got published were the ones who kept putting one writing foot in front of the other, no matter what happened. And, I told them, as important as having talent and perseverance was, you couldn’t beat a perfect title. What, after all, I would say, would have become of The Great Gatsby if Fitzgerald had been allowed his first impulse, which was to name the book Trimalchio in West Egg? I’d further told my students that there were even some books that were destined to be bestsellers by sheer virtue of certain words used in the titles that seemed to have a magical hold over readers: “diaries” was one, “light” was another, “secrets” was always a winner, and, for some inexplicable reason, “bees” were big.