Sisterland

  The car was quiet—it was hard to believe Vi had truly stopped talking—and Ben said, “Who’s Marisa?”

  “Nobody.” I turned around again, making eye contact with Vi, and said, “Just stop, okay? He’s doing us a favor by driving us.”

  “He’s doing you a favor.” But surprisingly, she didn’t say anything else, and after a few minutes, Ben turned on the stereo; a Spin Doctors CD played, the one with “Two Princes” and “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong.” Even now, if I’m in a store and either of those songs comes on, I’ll walk out.

  An hour and a half passed, and dread collected in my stomach as I gave Ben directions for getting off 270. When we arrived at our strange familiar house on Gilbert Street, sitting there the same as always in our absence, Ben said, “I’ll go hang out in that McDonald’s we just passed if you tell me how long you need.”

  “No, I’m only going in for a second,” I said. “Wait for me here.”

  “Are you sure?” He looked perplexed, but I nodded and climbed from the car.

  It was four-thirty P.M., and we had to ring the doorbell repeatedly because neither Vi nor I had a house key. After a minute, I could tell our mother was peering through the peephole, and then she opened the door and said in an alarmed voice, “Why are you two here?” She was wearing a robe over her brown nylon nightgown, and white slippers.

  I said, “Vi wants to come home. Reed didn’t work out.”

  Our mother scowled. “That was a waste of money. Does your father know?”

  “Not yet.” I leaned in to kiss my mother’s cheek; she and Vi didn’t touch. I was carrying Vi’s duffel bag, and I said to my sister, “I’ll put this upstairs, okay?”

  Getting out of the car, Vi had seemed a little stunned, and she didn’t reply to me. Then she said to our mother, in a normal voice, “What’s the difference between a screw and a staple?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” our mother said.

  “I don’t know,” Vi said. “I’ve never been stapled.”

  As I climbed the steps, I heard my mother say to her, “You’re just as snotty as you always were.”

  The door to our old bedroom was closed, and the Sisterland sign that Vi had taped to it eight years before was still there; it had been there all along, but when I’d lived at home, I’d stopped seeing it. Surely, there was a kind of irony to it—the room had either a population of one or zero now, but definitely not of two—but there was nothing to be gained from pondering this incongruity. I pushed open the door, set down Vi’s duffel, then walked out and used the bathroom before returning to the first floor. Vi and my mother had moved into the kitchen, Vi sitting at the table eating potato chips and drinking orange juice and my mother standing and watching her suspiciously. “I have to go because the guy who gave us a ride is waiting,” I said. “Tell Dad I’m sorry I missed him.”

  “You’re leaving?” My mother’s expression was confused.

  “This guy I know gave us a ride, but he has to get back.”

  Vi wouldn’t look at me; she got up, carried her glass of juice and bag of potato chips into the living room, and turned on the television. I leaned into my mother, and she was so insubstantial that it was like embracing a phantom. “I’ll be home at Thanksgiving,” I said. “Which is only a month away.”

  I stepped back, and my mother looked me up and down and said—really, her voice sounded more concerned than cruel—“You should be careful, Daisy. You’re starting to put on weight, too.”

  Back in the car, I said to Ben, “If you want to go to McDonald’s, let’s get on the highway first because the one here is really slow.”

  As Ben started the engine, I felt an absurd fear that Vi would run out of the house, pull open my car door, yank me to the ground, and force me to stay while Ben drove away. Neither he nor I spoke as he navigated through downtown Kirkwood. Only when we were back on 40, headed west, did he say in a sincere tone, “Does she have, like, a diagnosis?”

  “A what?”

  “Like if she’s mentally ill, or—”

  Icily, I said, “She just has a lot going on right now.”

  At the McDonald’s where we did stop for an early dinner, we didn’t talk much, but I didn’t like Ben enough to find the silences awkward. If I felt grateful toward him, it was a resentful kind of gratitude; he seemed to be such a blandly ordinary person that I doubted he had a framework for understanding someone like Vi. Ben and I also spoke little once we were back in the car. But the next day, when he emailed and asked if I’d like to go to a movie on Saturday night, saying no would have been a rudeness more brazen than I had the courage for. We saw The Fugitive at the Hollywood Stadium, and afterward we had actual sex, in his dorm bed, with a condom. He didn’t tell me until two months later that it had been his first time, but he didn’t need to. It was just for a few weeks that I still saw his nose as piglike, and after that it only struck me when we were with his family, because his father and two older sisters had similar noses. Ben and I remained a couple all through college, and after graduation, we moved together to Chicago.

  Vi no longer had an email account, or not one she had access to, but certainly I could have called her during the day, when our mother was in bed and our father was at work. I didn’t. I heard, that Sunday, during the five minutes I spent talking to my father, that she’d been hired at a Lion’s Choice, a roast beef sandwich restaurant with franchises all over St. Louis; the next week, my father said she’d moved into an apartment in Dogtown with Patrick, who was taking classes at Forest Park Community College. My father never seemed offended that I’d been home without staying long enough to see him, though he wouldn’t have told me if he was. I assume that my parents asked Vi nothing about her return, that the questions they didn’t pose were infinite.

  On the night before Thanksgiving, after taking the bus from Columbia to St. Louis and eating dinner at home, I borrowed my father’s Buick and drove to Vi and Patrick’s apartment. It was nine P.M., and they were having spaghetti with marinara sauce and watching TV with the volume turned way up while a haze of pot smoke hung in the air. Vi seemed heavier than ever and wholly upbeat. When she went to the bathroom, I said to Patrick, “Are she and Mr. Caldwell—”

  “Unh-unh-uh.” Patrick wagged an index finger back and forth while shaking his head. “In this abode, we do not speak that name.” Which wasn’t a real answer, and one I gladly accepted. I learned later—three years later, after Mr. Caldwell had been fired from Kirkwood High when four girls, none of whom were Vi, came forward to report their own sexual relationships with him—that he and Vi had continued to have sporadic contact that fall.

  The following spring, Vi asked a patron at Lion’s Choice how her french fries were, and the woman said, “Them is disgusting.” This single grammatical desecration prompted Vi to enroll at Webster University, which was just a few minutes from the house where we’d grown up. Though Vi eventually took classes from nearly every academic institution in St. Louis, she never earned a bachelor’s degree. In the almost two decades since I arranged for Ben to whisk us away from the campus of Mizzou, I’ve had ample time to consider my culpability in this fact.

  The Student Conduct officer I met with in the fall of my freshman year was a warm, heavyset Latino man of about thirty. I’m not sure if it was because I expressed contrition (it never occurred to me that telling the truth might have solved more problems than it would have created) that I received a warning and one year of probation but no more severe sanctions. Under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, my parents weren’t notified; they would have been contacted only for an infraction involving drugs or alcohol. The conduct violation would remain on my record for five years, which was part of why I waited until a year and a half after graduation to apply to social work school. I wanted to be able to answer no to the question of whether I’d ever been subject to disciplinary action. I revealed to no one, not even Lauren or Ben, what Vi had done.

  Right after my meeting in
the Office of Student Conduct and before I was due at the adult day-care center, I hurried to a hair salon in town and asked the stylist to take off eight inches. This pixie was the most drastic haircut I’d ever had, and wrong for my face, but I didn’t regret it because it was meant to prevent the Buns of Steel girls from recognizing me; it made me feel I’d taken every precaution. It wasn’t until the stylist was finished and had removed the nylon smock that the dream I’d had the morning before Vi had arrived at Mizzou came back to me, that moment when she’d turned around in the lecture hall. But it had never been Vi I’d seen in the dream, I realized as I faced the mirror. Instead, I’d seen myself.

  Chapter 8

  It hadn’t occurred to me that our dinner with the Wheelings—Amelia’s first “meat night”—would still happen, in light of the news Hank and Courtney had received the day before about Courtney’s pregnancy, but on Saturday afternoon, Hank texted me: 5:30 for pizza yeah? I texted back: Sure if that works for u guys.

  The place our families liked had windows through which kids could watch a kitchen crew rolling the dough and topping it. Even though it was early, there were people waiting when we arrived, mostly other families, and I was glad to see that the Wheelings had already secured a table. As we approached, Courtney waved, and she and Hank looked like themselves, only more subdued.

  In a voice of forced cheer, Courtney said, “Rosie, Amelia and I have been waiting for you to go watch the pizza makers.”

  “You want me to take her?” Jeremy said to me, and I said, “Sure.”

  Hank said to Courtney, “You think pepperoni for Amelia or ham?”

  Courtney rolled her eyes at me. “Our bloodthirsty daughter.” To Hank, she said, “You decide.”

  When she and Amelia and Jeremy and Rosie were gone, I said to Hank, “How are you doing?” at the same time he said, his voice low, “Courtney still doesn’t know I told you she’s pregnant, so don’t say anything about the whole—”

  “No, of course not,” I said quickly.

  “You didn’t tell Jeremy, did you?” I’d been unbuckling Owen from the car seat, not exactly making eye contact with Hank, and when I looked across the table, Hank had a particular kind of uneasy expression on his face, an expression that I was pretty sure was a request for me to lie to him.

  Which I did. “No, no,” I said as I lifted Owen out. I wasn’t even sure if Hank was asking if I’d told Jeremy about the pregnancy or the CVS results, but since I’d told Jeremy both, the distinction was moot.

  “She’s just private about stuff like this,” Hank said, and I thought that he had to know I’d told Jeremy. In that case, Hank was really asking if I’d make sure Jeremy didn’t mention anything to Courtney. Without much conviction, Hank added, “I should have kept my big mouth shut.”

  “You didn’t know.” I dug around in the diaper bag at my feet for a toy for Owen and came up with a translucent rattle that had little orange stars inside. The truth was that Owen’s presence seemed almost in bad taste, as if I were gloating over my healthy baby.

  Hank said, “Remember that stuff I was saying about not wanting to get up early with a newborn? I feel like such an asshole now.” He seemed to be on the cusp of tears, and if he was crying when our spouses and daughters returned to the table, surely it would, among other things, reveal to Courtney that I knew exactly what was going on. The only previous time I’d seen Hank cry had been the night Barack Obama was elected.

  “Hank, don’t beat yourself up,” I said. “You can’t. No matter what, you guys will figure things out.”

  Hank was silent, blinking a few times. “In Courtney’s mind, she already has.”

  “You mean—”

  He sniffed once—the moment of almost tears seemed to have passed—and when he spoke again, he sounded more sarcastic than weepy. “I mean, the winner of the Macelwane Medal can’t have a retarded kid.”

  A college-aged waiter appeared then, and I said, “Sorry, but we need another minute.” Yet by the time Jeremy and Courtney had returned with the girls, Hank and I still had neither ordered nor even discussed what we were ordering, a fact that clearly annoyed Courtney. She turned to Jeremy. “You guys like pepperoni, right?”

  “We do.”

  “Okay then, a thirteen-inch pepperoni for your family that Amelia can sample, and the mushroom one for us. Which one is our waiter?” She was scanning the restaurant.

  “If Amelia’s eating their pizza, they should get a seventeen-inch,” Hank said, which I’d also been thinking, but Courtney scowled and said, “Amelia will have one piece.” She stood, menu in hand, and strode toward the bar to place our order, even though this wasn’t a restaurant where you placed your order at the bar. When she returned, she was carrying four pints of beer, and not for the first time, I understood why Courtney Wheeling was a tenured professor and I wasn’t. I hadn’t seen Courtney drink for a while, and I felt Hank take note of it, too, as she distributed the glasses. She sat down and lifted hers. “To efficiency,” she said.

  Briefly, for about thirty seconds, I thought that harmony had been restored to the table; Courtney’s bad mood, which I couldn’t exactly fault her for, even if I’d also witnessed this same mood under ordinary circumstances, seemed to have subsided. Then she looked at me—I was sitting directly across the table from her—and said, “Kate, has your sister spent much time in Central Asia?”

  “Central Asia?” I wasn’t certain I’d heard her correctly.

  “I was wondering because of the prayer flags.”

  “Oh,” I said. “No. No, she hasn’t been there.” I had a strong suspicion of what the answer would be as I asked, “Have you?”

  “I have.” Courtney took a sip of beer.

  “For your research?” I knew Courtney had spent time collecting data in Chile and Indonesia.

  She shook her head. “Just for fun. Hiking in Nepal after college. So I was thinking today, how does someone become a psychic? Do you get certified? Is there a test you have to pass?”

  I looked at her, and for a few seconds we held each other’s gaze—I’m sorry your baby has Down’s, I thought, and I’m sorry Channel 5 interviewed Vi, but neither of those things is my fault—and I said, “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “What’d Vi major in in college?”

  Did she already know? But I didn’t see how she could. “Vi started at Reed, but she left before she finished,” I said.

  “She doesn’t have a college degree?”

  Hank said, “Courtney, if you’re trying to prove Vi’s not a scientist, I don’t think anyone at this table will dispute that.”

  Courtney turned to face him, smiling an enormous smile that I could tell, even from the side, was false. “What?” she said. “Kate would tell me if my questions bothered her.” She turned back to me. “Are my questions bothering you?”

  I shook my head, and under the table, on my leg Owen wasn’t balanced on, Jeremy patted my knee.

  Courtney said, “You don’t actually believe your sister’s prediction, do you?”

  It wasn’t realistic to expect Hank to say, as he had during our walk to Kaldi’s, that he didn’t see why being psychic was impossible. Still, I felt myself waiting hopefully. When he said nothing, I said, “It’s kind of complicated.”

  In a genial voice, Jeremy said, “Show me one family that isn’t. Hey, Amelia, I hear you’ll be trying meat for the first time tonight.”

  Courtney gave Jeremy an unimpressed look. “Are we really not allowed to have an adult conversation? If we’re just hiding behind our children and making boring small talk, I could grab any random mom off the playground for that.”

  Still genially, Jeremy said, “We can talk about whatever you want to talk about, but for you to hold Kate accountable for her sister’s actions is silly, as you pointed out the other night.”

  Courtney glanced first at Hank then back at Jeremy before saying, “Both of you are acting like Kate is a delicate flower who can’t stand up for herself. Are you a delicate flower, K
ate? Am I making you”—she switched to a tone of faux sympathy—“uncomfortable?”

  I was pretty sure I was flushed as I said, “Actually, there is something you should know about Vi. She’s been invited to be on the Today show next week.” I already knew Jeremy would ask later what had made me tell Courtney. Because she’d find out anyway, I’d say, though if Jeremy had been the one to divulge the information, I’d have wondered why he had. I added, “So I guess they don’t have a problem with her not having a college degree.”

  Courtney’s expression was contemptuous. “People go on Today because they’ve had hiccups for two weeks, or because a shark bit their leg off. It’s not like it means you’ve achieved anything.”

  “Courtney, come on,” Hank said. “Vi’s her sister.”

  “Vi’s a public-health threat,” Courtney said, and the conversation might have escalated from there, but our waiter appeared with the pizza, and as we dealt with the logistics of the food, it seemed that Jeremy, Hank, and I mutually decided to pretend we hadn’t heard Courtney’s last remark.

  “I don’t want this,” Amelia said then. She was pointing to the pepperoni on the pizza slice Hank had just set on her plate.

  “That’s the pepperoni,” Courtney said.

  “I don’t want it. It’s brown.”

  “Pepperoni is brown,” Courtney said.

  “I don’t like brown pepperoni.”