Two Sisters: A Novel

by Mary Hogan

  “Things good at work?” Pia again fussed with Muriel’s frothy scarf.

  Please, God, Muriel silently prayed, send the bus with the next green light.

  “Full of spit, as usual.” Muriel burped up a laugh. Then she watched as Pia exhaled in the same judgmental way she exhaled when she glanced around Muriel’s recycled apartment.

  Flying saliva, it was true, was a hazard of Muriel’s profession. Even though profession was stretching her job description to its outer limit. Muriel was a casting assistant. A job that sounded more glamorous than it was. In reality, she printed scripts from PDFs and alphabetized head shots and downloaded audition scenes onto Joanie’s computer. When actors came into the office to audition for a part, she retrieved them from the waiting room, did her best to calm their nerves (which never worked), and stood off camera to read the other roles. Flooded with stress-induced spit, many actors couldn’t help but emote their DNA all over Muriel’s face, particularly when Joanie was casting a drama with an accent, which she had been all week.

  “Ever since I vas a boy in Prague, ach, I’ve been roaming the globe searching for someting, somevun. You are my last chope.”

  The projectile usually landed squarely on her cheek, though Muriel never flinched. To wipe spit off during an audition was unprofessional, upsetting to an actor. Her job was to relax everyone, Joanie included.

  “I’m here, Vaclav. You can rest now.” Muriel calmly read her lines.

  “Ach, at last, my dahlink.”

  More than enduring salivary bullets, Muriel’s biggest struggle was not rolling her eyes. Lately, so many actors were models—pretty boys whose spray tans were too orange, teeth were too white, and hairlines began in the middle of their foreheads. Their character interpretations were cartoonish. Chopeless, one might say. Patiently, Muriel read her lines and waited for the audition scene to end.

  “Lovely,” Joanie would say, hoisting her heft up from behind the camera and holding out her fleshy hand. “Thank you for coming in.”

  “I wasn’t fully feeling the Russian accent. I could work on it.”

  “Good idea. And Prague is in the Czech Republic.”

  Softly, Muriel would take the actor’s arm and lead him out, whispering, “You were great,” before returning to wipe his bad acting off her face. In her bottom desk drawer, she kept a Costco-size canister of antibacterial wipes.

  “Getting spit on is an insult, not a life,” Lidia once told her youngest daughter, forgetting it was she who first ignited Muriel’s interest in theater. How very like Lidia to overlook her role in shaping her daughter’s life. Lidia had introduced Muriel to red velvet curtains that swept open with a muted swoosh, swelling music that pressed against her sternum, satin dresses that rippled across a stage like cake icing, love songs so heartbreakingly rendered tears would stream down her face. Lidia had opened the door to a theatrical world of passion and perfection, inviting her youngest daughter to step through before so cruelly snapping it shut.

  “Feel that?”

  At the bus stop, Pia faced the Hudson River. A half smile on her lips, she appeared to be mesmerized by the cursive peaks of gray-blue water in the wake of the Circle Line ferry. Muriel pointed her face toward the river and tried to feel.

  “The breeze is splendid,” said Pia.

  “Ah.”

  “Sailboats fill me with such longing. It’s as if everyone on the water knows the answer and we don’t even know the question.”

  Muriel stared at the lone dinghy on the river and blinked.

  Turning back toward her sister, Pia said, “Every good and perfect gift is from the father of the heavenly lights.”

  “Even sunburn?”

  Pia didn’t laugh. As she often did when she was with her, Muriel wondered how it was possible they were sisters at all. Though, God knows, she had tried to be a Sullivant woman worthy of her sister’s and her mother’s respect. Which primarily meant, of course, married.

  COLLEGE BEGAN MURIEL’S years of actively looking for a mate. In class, in the library, in the dorm, in the quad. Guys were everywhere, just nowhere near interested in her. And when she was able to secure a date, she was usually too distracted by her critical inner voice to hear the particulars of a regular conversation. Like the night she invited a guy named Paul from her sociology class to watch a movie with her in the dorm’s media room. The film starred Julianne Moore. Paul remarked, “Freckles are cute,” but at that exact moment, Muriel had been looking down at her bare forearms wondering, What’s the cutoff point between a freckle and a mole? Was there some sort of medical measurement? It would be centimeters, of course, or millimeters. Something a regular person couldn’t decipher. Maybe a freckle was flat and a mole was raised? As she stroked her arms in the mottled splatter of TV light, she noted that they felt like a pilled sweater. Her heart sank. Of course her freckles were moles. She’d been foolish to think otherwise. If not, would they contain so many errant hairs? A mole was probably a follicle incubator, like dung-fertilized earth for a sprouting seed.

  “Don’t you think?” Paul had asked.

  “Yes. Moles are a hideous blight. Sorry. I’ll wear long sleeves.”

  He shot her a look that struck Muriel as belittling. If Paul thought she was going to wear turtlenecks, too, well he’d better think again.

  Somehow, Muriel had never learned the basics of chitchat. Her vision of relationships was defined on the Broadway stage when she was a young girl accompanied by her mother. Grown, whenever she was with a boy she liked, she felt compelled to burst out in a show tune. Most guys found that insurmountably odd.

  After college, when the pool of possibles evaporated considerably, Muriel reworked her strategy. She trolled opening-night theater parties and closing-night theater parties and holiday parties and every invitation she could wrangle from Joanie in search of a suitable mate. She listed herself online and only shaved ten pounds off her real weight so as not to shock a potential suitor when he met her in the ample flesh. After work, she nibbled on happy hour buffets and drank vodkas with club soda and lime because she’d read in a woman’s magazine that they were “low in calories and high in class.” Still, most of the single straight men she met seemed like frat brothers, as if a date might begin in a rented limo and end with a food fight through the open moon roof. They drank beer from tipped-up bottles and blatantly evaluated her cleavage with furrowed brows.

  “For Pete’s sake,” Pia had said, “of course you’re going to meet drunken idiots in a bar.”

  She had a point. So Muriel sat on benches in Riverside Park reading National Geographic. She took an investment class at the 92nd Street Y and a guided medicinal herb tour in Chinatown. She even gave church a go. Sunday mornings were no longer slated for reading every word of the Times. Muriel paid homage to the heavenly father by singing hymns and smiling beatifically at St. Patrick’s Cathedral instead of eating Zabar’s crumb cake in bed on her frayed towel. She thumbed through the Bible for divine direction and swallowed the obvious hypocrisy when it rose like bile in her throat. Judge not lest ye be judged? Who on God’s green earth was more judgmental than a Christian? Live and let live? What about gay marriage? Or atheism?

  Muriel even bought two Grace Kellyish sweater sets—one butter yellow, the other Easter pink—and spent an ungodly amount of money and time in a midtown salon stripping the brown out of her hair and looking like Big Bird until they recolored it chilled chardonnay blond. Dark roots instantly spread like Ebola. Mirrors startled her. Her face looked as round as Charlie Brown’s without its brunette boundary. She couldn’t wait to save enough money to color it back.

  This foray into holy towheadedness had not been entirely fruitless. The previous year, she’d met a man named Kent at a singles event in an overlit Unitarian church basement near her apartment. He’d made her laugh by introducing himself as “Bond. Kent Bond.” A line he’d probably used a thousand times.

  “Sullivant. Muriel Sullivant,” she’d replied, tucking a strand of chilled chardonn
ay behind her ear, hoping her dark root line didn’t look too skid markish.

  “Muriel?”

  “Clearly, my parents were on drugs.”

  “Mine never grew up. My middle name is Clark.”

  Muriel overlaughed and Kent ate it up. He had a pleasant enough face and a squishy body that felt comforting to hug. He liked the same things Muriel did: Netflix, flavored popcorn, free theater tickets, and Ollie’s takeout. He asked her out. She said yes. Over dinner, they shared stories about a twentysomething’s life in Manhattan.

  “I have three roommates!” said Kent.

  “I can cook, wash my dishes, and grab a gallon of ice cream out of my freezer without moving one inch,” Muriel volleyed back.

  Kent and Muriel dated, hit it off, then created two butt-shaped divots in her bed in front of the TV. Their sex life was silent and painless, rarely lasting longer than a commercial break.

  “You good?” Kent would ask, breathless and flat on his back after six pumps and a grunt.

  “Sure. Good. Great.”

  Great? Muriel berated herself for lying. Wasn’t forthrightness the hallmark of a mature relationship? Hadn’t Dr. Phil once said that very thing? Or perhaps she’d read it in the same magazine that advised low-cal, classy vodka. If she was truly forthright, “good” was in another universe when it came to Kent’s sexual skills. Even “adequate” was skirting earth’s outer atmosphere. But Muriel was emerging from a prolonged sexual drought and wasn’t up on the current protocol. If your boyfriend was bad in bed, was it bad form to tell him? And how, exactly, did one go about that?

  “You good?”

  “Define ‘good.’

  “You know, satisfied. Spent.”

  “Spent? Um, no.”

  “Sheesh. I had a great time.”

  “Yes, I see that.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Define ‘didn’t.’ ”

  Clearly, there were pitfalls galore. If a boyfriend wasn’t particularly curious about—or interested in—his girlfriend’s nether regions how did said girlfriend negotiate a better deal? “I’ll climb on top if you’ll meander downtown?” Muriel had always been awful in business.

  After a few months, Muriel decided that sex with Kent was like pizza. Even the worst slice was better than starvation. Bond, Kent Bond, was a good nuzzler and loved to fry bacon on a whim in the middle of the night.

  High flying, adored. So famous, so easily.

  Nothing can thrill you. No one fulfill you.

  Together, they sang lyrics from Evita. Muriel would probably still be with him had their relationship not taken a uniquely New York City turn.

  “So, Muriel, by law, your lease passes on to a spouse?”

  “Feel like ordering in tonight?”

  “And ‘spouse’ is defined as marriage alone?”

  “I’m thinking Thai.”

  “Can it be a civil union? Or, say, common-law?”

  “Mee grob eaten off my bare belly. Grrr.”

  “If you think about it, possession is nine-tenths of the law. Why do we have to do anything as boringly legal as marriage? Can’t we change the locks? I have a little money saved up for court costs if it comes to that.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Kent got down on one knee. “I want to take our relationship to the next level.”

  “Are you asking—?”

  “Yes. Will you add me to your lease?”

  Shortly after Muriel changed the locks on Kent, she fell back into herself the way an animal-shaped rubber band returns to its original contour. She restored her brown hair and funereal wardrobe and explained to God that St. Patrick’s Cathedral was all the way across town. The Times crossword puzzle alone took up an entire Sunday. What, He wanted her to get Alzheimer’s?

  At the bus stop with her angelic sister, Muriel tugged at the scarf knot around her neck and felt anger rising in her chest. A scarf? And a white dress? Had Pia not noticed her uncovered clavicle all these years, the turtleneck gifts that went unworn even in New York’s iciest winters? How could she insist Muriel wear a pink and orange scarf over transparent white cotton? Had the woman never noticed her crow-colored wardrobe? Had her sister never even seen her at all?

  Cursing the MTA for its obvious indifference to paying passengers, Muriel decided that as soon as they were comfortably seated on the bus, she would act like the woman she was instead of the little girl she felt like around Pia and make her move. Untying the scarf with purpose, she would say, “This is really more you than me.” Period. She would give it back. Then she would take a deep breath and confidently address the elephant between them.

  “Why exactly are you here?” she would ask. “What exactly do you want from me?”

  Yes, that’s exactly what she’d do.

  Chapter 12

  NOT THE SLIGHTEST bit apologetic for being late, the bus driver grinned and said, “Hello, ladies.” Muriel dipped her MetroCard twice, paying for her Connecticut sister, but refused to return the driver’s smile even as Pia chirped about the glorious day and let her fingers lightly touch his arm.

  “Here.” Once they were seated Muriel handed Pia an antibacterial wipe. “How many germy New Yorkers touched that driver’s very same arm?”

  Pia responded with a condescending pat on Muriel’s bare knee. A touch that Muriel promptly sterilized as well. “I have another wipe in my purse if you need it,” she said. Pia simply smiled that faraway smile she used to signal the end of a conversation.

  Sitting side by side, gently bumping shoulders at every red light, the sisters watched the Upper West Side pass in a slide show of urban/suburban splendor. Riverside Drive—one of the prettiest streets in the city—was a well-kept homage to the beauty of old New York. The air smelled as soft as meringue. Sunshine reflected pink off the brownstone windows. Hexagonal pavers on the park side created a Parisian-style promenade with teak-and-wrought-iron benches placed beneath mature London plane trees whose trunks looked like elephant legs. Beyond the green strip of park, the Hudson River flickered in the afternoon sunlight like a new box of tinsel. If not for the ugly huddle of Trump monstrosities south of Seventy-second Street, the western edge of the upper island would be a postcard.

  Muriel pressed her lips together in a determined way and reached up to loosen the damn scarf. “Really, Pia,” she said, inhaling, “this is much more yo—what’s wrong?”

  Pia’s eyes were wet with tears. For a moment, she couldn’t speak. Muriel stared at the quiver of her throat as she swallowed, her hands like seal fins, ill-defined flaps of skin jutting out from her wrists. Should she hug her sister? Comfort her in some way?

  “I’m glad we didn’t take a cab,” Pia said, swiping her lower lashes with the ring finger of her right hand. “I’d forgotten how pretty your neighborhood is.” Reaching an arm around Muriel’s shoulders, she pulled her close and held her tightly. A startled Muriel let her body crumple over as Pia kissed the top of her head. She stared down at the strained buttons of her white dress. The scarf stayed put.

  “Are you okay?” she finally asked.

  “Fine.”

  “Sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Of course she believed her. Pia was always sure.

  ST. JOHN’S CEMETERY—the multiacre sprawl of headstones and weeping statuary along Metropolitan Avenue, where mobster John Gotti is buried—was the liveliest part of Middle Village, Queens. According to Lidia Sullivant, that is. She never tired of reminding her husband and the rest of her family how much she’d rather be on the other side of the East River.

  “Where the living live,” she often said.

  One winter Saturday in their Middle Village row house, young Muriel heard her mother’s precise footfalls down the hardwood stairs. It was her favorite day. No school. No church. Her homework was already done. But the clipped sound of Lidia’s spiked heels coming toward the kitchen quickened her pulse. Even though it was lunchtime, she considered tossing her peanut butter sandwich in the tras
h.

  “How soon can you get dressed up?”

  “Me?”

  Owen was sudsing a paintbrush at the sink. His back tensed at the sound of his wife’s voice. Through the kitchen window Muriel spotted her teenage brother, Logan, fussing with wires and sparks on the back porch. She thought, Pia must be out somewhere with her friends.

  “Yes you, silly. Would you like to see a real Broadway show?”

  As if waiting for the punch line, Muriel stared up at her mother and blinked. She took a big swig of milk and felt the painful descent of a wedged wad of peanut butter and bread. Wearing a steel-gray wool pantsuit and matching shoes with pointy toes and heels, Lidia stood with a fur-lined Burberry trench draped over her arm. “Well?” she said, impatiently. “Want to go or not?”

  “Do I!”

  Grabbing the remains of her sandwich, Muriel scrabbled up the stairs. Silently, Lidia took the newspaper off the kitchen table and waited for her daughter in the front room.

  It was a cold December day. Mother and daughter hurried to the subway stop a few blocks away, red cheeked and chilly. Lidia carried her fancy shoes in a fancy tote. They took the M train to Wyckoff Avenue, then transferred to the L line, which rumbled aboveground through Queens before descending into the tunnel below the East River. Owen had been mistaken. It wasn’t a straight shot from Middle Village to midtown Manhattan. There were transfers and gum-splotted station platforms. The air belowground reeked of scummy water and human decay. Had driving through Times Square not been so atrocious and parking not so absurdly expensive, Lidia wouldn’t have dreamed of setting foot on a subway train. Why, one time the linoleum floor on the train was so filthy she was loath to step on it! More often than not a homeless man, smelling of death itself, lay slumped in a corner. Plus there were all those welfare queens with their litter of children. Clearly they spent their government handouts on fried food and drugs. Why else would they look so bloated and so frequently forget to use birth control?

  Of course, if Lidia was with Owen, she would insist he drive her into the city, drop her off at the curb in front of wherever they were going, and park nearby no matter what the cost. It was only right, after all. He did force her to live in Queens. With Muriel, however, the trains were good enough. The last thing she needed was to worry about tipping every open palm in a Manhattan parking lot and finding the garage again when there were so many identical garages hidden in the bowels of every high-rise.