Two Sisters: A Novel

by Mary Hogan

  “Is Pia, um, home?” she asked, stupidly, sounding like a teenage girl.

  Really, Muriel wanted to hang up. Her impulse was to pop the smart card out of her cell and fling it down the nearest storm drain. She wanted to clamp her hands over her ears like a child and pretend she’d never heard Will say her name. In her mind she would continue to picture him at work, surrounded by computer screens. Pia would be at the spa in the village, the latest exfoliating concoction bubbling on her skin. Emma—lovely Emma—would be consumed by the boy who stared at her in ecology class. Should she stare back? Ignore him?

  “Aunt Muriel, why are boys so weird?”

  Had Muriel not heard the moan at the end of Will’s breath, she could still entertain the fantasy that Pia had gone Hollywood with a boob job. She could plot a way to leak it to Lidia in a petty manner that would make her sister look shallow.

  “I never thought she was the type to alter what God gave her,” she would say, tossing her hair. “Funny, she’s always seemed so confident.”

  Had Will not exhaled the truth, Muriel could look the other way.

  “She’s asleep,” he said, sighing once more.

  “Oh.” Muriel felt the weight of the phone in her hand.

  “It’s fairly bleak around here, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “We all are. What can you do?”

  “Is Emma okay?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I didn’t mean . . . I mean—”

  “Forgive me. This whole situation is fucked.”

  A bloated silence expanded between them like pizza dough. Muriel’s brain went blank. She tried to recall what Marvin sang to Whizzer in the soundtrack from Falsettos but all she could remember was Whizzer’s song “You Gotta Die Sometime.”

  “If you need anything . . .” Muriel’s voice trailed off.

  “I do. Keep Lidia occupied. She’s been sniffing around and Pia refuses to see her. I can’t keep her away forever.”

  Ah, yes. Muriel swallowed. She pressed her eyes closed. “Of course,” she said, wishing, of course, he’d asked for anything else. Let Emma move in. Spend weekends running errands around Connecticut. Donate half of her liver. “I’m on it, Will. You can count on me.”

  The moment she hung up, Muriel called her mother.

  “Why?”

  That’s what Lidia said when Muriel suggested they meet in the city for lunch.

  “It’ll be fun, Mama. Just us girls.” She winced. Even when Muriel was a girl she’d never been one of the girls.

  “What’s going on with your sister? She won’t see me.”

  “Nothing,” Muriel said quickly, overopening her eyes while she talked on her cell, hoping that an expression of innocence might lighten her voice. “Why do you ask?”

  “Aren’t you listening? I said she won’t see me.”

  “There’s a fabulous food court at the Plaza.” Again, she winced. Words like “fabulous” sounded absurd in her mouth, as if her tongue was playing dress-up.

  “Is she okay?”

  “Who?”

  “You know very well who!”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Aren’t you listening, Muriel?”

  The difference between lying for someone and lying to them was vast, Muriel suddenly noticed. Lidia Sullivant was as easily redirected as a hurricane headed for a trailer park. There was no nudging her off course. In desperation, Muriel heard herself promising to invite Pia to join them. “It’ll be fun! Just us girls!”

  The following week, when Lidia came bustling through the door of the downtown sushi restaurant Muriel had picked (based on a Times rave review), her first question was, “Where’s your sister?”

  “Sake?”

  “I called her this morning and Will said she was asleep.”

  “It’s made with highly polished rice.”

  “She’s not ill, is she?”

  “Waiter!”

  Muriel’s eyebrows felt sweaty. After her mother sat down and eyed her sharply, her mouth fell open and she began to blather. “Funny story, Mama. Pia was, um, riding Emma’s bike. You know, the new one they got her for Christmas? The one with all those, um, gears? And, well, she’d accidentally taken NyQuil during the day, the green liquidy one that zonks you out . . .”

  Breaking the first rule of successful lying, Muriel overexplained Pia’s absence. She knew better. Endless hours of crime stories on TV had taught her that the best liars stuck as closely to the truth as possible. Yes, I’ve been in that house. I was invited in for a glass of water. Naturally I might have touched all sorts of things. Still, she couldn’t help herself.

  “You know how steep their driveway is. Wasn’t it recently regraveled?”

  Groaning impatiently, Lidia reached into her purse for her cell. Before Muriel could stop her, she called Pia on speed dial. Muriel noticed that her sister was number one. Was she even on her mother’s contacts list?

  “Darling!”

  Astoundingly, Pia picked up. Muriel’s heart fell into her stomach. Where the hell was that waiter?

  “I’m here with your sister,” Lidia said. “Are you okay, kochanie?”

  “The bike didn’t crash, per se,” Muriel said loudly, leaning across the table. “It sort of skidded. You know, that thing that happens with a motorcycle on a sharp curve? Only not that bad, of course.”

  Covering the mouthpiece on her cell, Lidia said, “Shhh.”

  Mercifully, the waiter arrived.

  “Two sakes, please. Large.”

  Lidia listened and nodded as Pia said something or other. In a motherly way, she cooed sympathetically and muttered, “Aw.” With pursed lips, she shook her head. Tut, tut. When the waiter returned with a ceramic flask of steaming sake and poured two cups, Muriel singed her throat by downing hers like a vodka shot.

  “Heavens, Muriel,” Lidia said after she hung up. “You’re so dramatic.”

  “Dramatic?” she croaked, pouring herself another cupful.

  “Pia is fine. She didn’t say a word about any cycling accident. Will needed her at the last minute, is all. You know how demanding he can be.”

  It had never even occurred to Muriel to blame it on the man.

  “The eel roll is supposed to be fabulous, Mama. Shall we order two?”

  THE WEEK AFTER, Muriel met her mother at an Italian restaurant in Queens.

  “I read that the calamari here is to die for,” she said, smoothing the napkin flat on her lap.

  Lidia replied, “Black isn’t as slimming as everyone says it is.” Then she added, “That white napkin will leave lint all over your pants.”

  “Yes. Well. Hmmm.” Muriel scanned the menu from top to bottom. “I think I’ll have a salad.”

  “Caesar salad is as fattening as a Big Mac.”

  “Okay, then, uh, the Italian Cobb looks fab.”

  Lidia groaned, “Did you not see salami as one of the ingredients? Not to mention Parmesan cheese.”

  By dessert—which she didn’t dare order—Muriel decided it was best to avoid edibles with her mother. They were in New York! There were plenty of other things to do.

  “Hey! The Barney’s warehouse sale starts Monday, Mama. Want to meet me after work? The deals are delish!”

  Really, she had to stop talking like a Real Housewife.

  For her sister, Muriel plodded along with her mother to Barney’s (“Emma would look darling in this!”), the Museum of Modern Art (“De Kooning’s brushstrokes feel so, I don’t know, violent.”), Lidia’s nail salon in Queens (“Perhaps a natural shade to elongate my fingers?”). Each time Muriel saw Lidia, she was subjected to a full-body scan.

  “Coupon?”

  “Coupon?”

  “For that drugstore hair color?”

  “Why yes, actually. Buy one, get one half off.”

  “Foundation, too?”

  “No, that was full price.”

  “Same drugstore, though, I’m guessing. Thank goodness they don’t sel
l clothes. Or do they? I must say, Muriel, your T-shirts look very mass market.”

  On Saturdays, from time to time, Muriel took the M train to her parents’ home for a visit.

  “What’s new in showbiz?” Owen would ask, sitting in his favorite easy chair at one end of a highly polished coffee table. His wife, straight-backed, sat in the matching chair across the room.

  “Muriel is hardly in show business.”

  Ignoring her, Owen would say, “Aren’t you still in casting?”

  “Since when is reading lines on a page casting? Let’s not live in a fantasy world, Muriel. You’re more of a secretary, am I right?”

  “Do secretaries even exist anymore? I don’t even have a secretary. Besides, I believe the correct term is ‘executive assistant.’ ”

  “Since when is an engineer an executive?”

  “Our daughter lives in the greatest city in the world, Lidia. How many young people can say that?”

  “Sure, she’s young now, but with no man on the horizon her fertility is aging by the minute.”

  From her familiar perch on the outskirts of the household—as if Muriel had always lived in the suburbs of her family—she watched her parents spar like Foreman and Ali, eventually asking, “Any leftover golabki?”

  For her sister, Muriel lived with a stomach tied in all manner of knots.

  Chapter 24

  MORE THAN ANYTHING, keeping Pia’s secret weighed heavily on Muriel’s eyelids. On the way to work, she fell asleep against the bus window. Twice, she’d dropped off in the middle of Jeopardy! with an open carton of Ollie’s takeout toppled over on the frayed towel on her bed. Sitting through a Broadway show was nearly impossible. She’d missed a whole chunk of the second act of The Book of Mormon, waking up perplexed when Cunningham was in charge.

  Late August didn’t help matters any. During New York’s muggiest month, Muriel slogged through the suffocating air, her damp forehead spiked with Julius Caesar bangs. The moment she arrived at the office, she turned on the air conditioner full blast and leaned in close, pulling open the neckline of her mass-market T-shirt so the cool air could dry the sweat that had soaked through to the underwire in her bra.

  “Good morning, sunshine.”

  Joanie shuffled in midmorning. Unlike most large people, she didn’t sweat. She grunted and puffed and groaned when she lifted her heft off a chair. Yet in the years Muriel had known and worked for her, she’d never seen as much as a glisten on her boss’s forehead or upper lip. “I do all my sweating on the inside,” Joanie explained, whatever that meant.

  That particular summer day was a quiet one. A Friday sort of feeling was in the air though it was midweek. At last, Vaclav had been cast and that project was wrapped up. Joanie was now searching for an actress to star in a new independent feature. The film’s financing was secured (such as it was), the script was polished, locations were scouted, and a male lead was cast. The female lead, as usual, was more challenging. Producers were hunting for a beautiful, slender, young (of course, of course, of course) actress, able to convincingly portray a temporarily homeless single mother hiding an addiction to meth. One whose face and physique were attractive enough to desire, yet not surgically altered in any obvious way.

  “No Botox addicts,” the cocky postpubescent producer told Joanie, “though a boob job would be okay. Unless it’s a double D or something.”

  “Got it.”

  “Nothing pornish.”

  “Good to know.”

  “Think Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball.”

  “Terrific.” After Joanie hung up the phone, she said out loud, “Kill me now. Doesn’t he know Halle has the only natural breasts left in Hollywood?”

  With her cheeks still pink from the commute into work, Muriel was slumped in her desk chair thumbing through a stack of color head shots and pulling out promising résumés.

  “Another SEP,” Joanie announced, dispirited, from across the room. With a sympathetic shake of her head, Muriel swiveled her chair slightly away so Joanie couldn’t see how sleepy she was already becoming. A Halle Berry, they both knew, was hard to find at any price. A temp-size salary with an inexperienced leading actor and an unknown director? Well, no question it was an SEP: a “Sow’s Ear Project.” A one-in-a-million shot at turning nothing into something special. Casting was everything.

  Joanie was on the phone all morning. Always, there was a slim chance that a known actress would want to redirect her career with an indie. Particularly a beauty who could excite critics by forgoing flattering lights and makeup. A “Charlize” Joanie dubbed it after Charlize Theron’s bloated turn as a serial killer in Monster. Apparently, any movie with a stunning woman gone ugly—and the word “monster” in the title—will kindle the all-important buzz needed to propel a star into Oscar contention. With a “name” everything else was negotiable.

  “Crap,” Joanie said after hanging up the phone. She reached for a Hershey’s Kiss from the bowl on her desk and unfurled the silver wrapping. The word she hated most in the English language was “unavailable.”

  Muriel’s job that August morning was to ferret out an unknown talent, help her boss find a needle in Hollywood’s haystack of young women who were told by their high school drama teachers, “You know, you’re pretty enough to be an actress.” Someone with the charisma and talent to carry a small film to Sundance. Her eyelids began to droop right away. The bland faces in the head-shot stack blurred into a single beauty ad that had been retouched to boring porelessness. Muriel tried to focus on the same dimpled tip at the end of each surgically restructured nose, same envelope of a forehead, same chevron eyebrows locked in mock surprise over the same soupy Bambi eyes. But it all felt so meaningless. What did a nose have to do with anything? Really, what?

  “Well?”

  From her desk across the room, Joanie unsheathed another Hershey’s Kiss. A silver foothill of discarded wrappers rose up from the ashtray, their tiny flag tags sticking out in every direction.

  “Nobody promising yet,” Muriel said.

  “That’s not what I asked you.”

  Muriel lifted her lashes. “What did you ask me?”

  Popping the chocolate into her mouth Joanie rolled it around before saying, “I asked if you’d turned to stone. I’ve been talking to Mount Murielmore for the past fifteen minutes.”

  “Sorry. I’m a little off today.”

  “Today?”

  “Lately.”

  “A little? Do you also think Osama bin Laden is a little bit dead?”

  Muriel hiccupped a laugh, then refocused on the head-shot pile on her desk. Juicy, smacking sounds were audible from across the room as the chocolate settled into Joanie’s molars. Once the Kiss was gone, she followed it with a nicotine chaser, lighting her cigarette the way a man would, cupped in both hands to protect the flame from an imaginary wind. From its perch in the corner of her mouth, the cigarette tip glowed orange as Joanie drew in a lungful. “Out with it,” she said in a billow of smoke.

  Muriel looked up. Then she looked away.

  “I can’t read a script without glasses,” Joanie said, “but I’m not blind. Something has been eating at you for weeks. I’ve been giving you space, but time’s up.”

  Sucking on the inner flesh of her bottom lip, Muriel glanced down at the freckles on her hands. What was the difference between a hand freckle and a liver spot anyway? Would anyone make an effort to distinguish between the two? At twenty-three, would onlookers assume she had early liver spots or late freckles? Combined with the moles on her arms, she might as well cover herself in tenting.

  “Time’s up, Sullivant.”

  Muriel pinched the corners of the head-shot stack into perfect alignment. She refused to look her best friend in the eye. Each time she did she was startled by Joanie’s measuring stare. The way she cocked her head and sat as still as a cheetah lying in wait. It was impossible to hide from that woman. So far, Muriel had only been able to evade. She wanted to tell her what was going on. Honestly, sh
e did. Every cell in her body longed to open its membranes and release the secrets that had been putrefying like a body part buried in the backyard. With her best friend, she ached to dissect each moment in the dressing room with Pia, the way that single teardrop spread like a pond ripple on the gray satin fabric. (It dried without a stain; she checked.) Muriel’s muscles twitched with the desire to confess. She’d spent an entire day with her dying sister and only seen herself. And since that afternoon at the Plaza, she’d spoken to Pia only twice. Twice! Conversations that had been little more than lurching starts and stops. A teenager learning to drive a stick shift.

  “How are you doing?”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine? I mean, is ther—”

  “Well, tired, of course.”

  “Of course. I meant, what ca—”

  “What’s up with you?”

  “Me?”

  “Anything good on Broadway?”

  “Uh. Let’s see, um.”

  “How’s work?”

  “Work? Good, I guess.”

  “Good. Good.”

  “Pia, I jus—”

  “I know.”

  “It’s just that I wanted to tell yo—”

  “You don’t have to say anything.”

  “I feel so, I don’t know, awful. Is there anythi—”

  “I’m fine. Really. Fine.”

  When she wasn’t belching up half sentences or overlaughing at something innocuous Pia said or listening to the vast static of silence as her brain shorted out and she could think of not one single thing to say to a sister she’d known all her life, Muriel felt like a donkey braying into the wind. How could she tell Joanie how often she’d stared at the phone in her apartment and been unable to reach over with her mule hooves and dial? What kind of uncaring person did (didn’t do) that?

  “Still waiting,” Joanie said, her steady gaze piercing straight through the smoke. Muriel made a face.

  In the unbraiding of her emotions, strands of truth shamed her. Muriel was also pissed. Why had Pia not said something sooner? What kind of sister says nothing until it’s time to buy the dress she’ll wear for eternity? She’d seen her a couple of times before their lunch at the Plaza—once at the family house in Queens for Sunday supper, another time at a ballet performance of Emma’s. Both times Pia looked tired. But she said nothing! Had Pia been testing Muriel, waiting for her to grab her sister’s bony arms and insist, “I know something is wrong. I see it, I feel it in my gut. I’m not leaving until you tell me what’s going on.” Was Pia punishing her for failing at sisterhood yet again, the one time it mattered most?