Sisterland

  “I just think we both might be happier with other people.”

  Sarcastically, he said, “Isn’t that what people say when they’ve met someone else?”

  I hesitated then said, “I’m saying it because it’s true.”

  He squinted at me. “So you are or aren’t planning to go with me to my nephew’s bar mitzvah?”

  “Why don’t I email you?”

  As I drove home, took a shower, and waited for Jeremy, I felt growing awareness that I’d handled this sequence very badly. When I opened the door and saw Jeremy standing outside the duplex, his dark hair and metal glasses, the distance between not really knowing him and marrying him seemed unbridgeable; it seemed to require an effort I suddenly doubted I had in me. I suspect now that I wouldn’t have had these doubts if I hadn’t already felt sure Jeremy would become my husband.

  As I learned in the car, he’d been born in 1970—five years before I had—and had grown up in Arlington, Virginia. He had an older brother who was married and had children. He’d attended Wesleyan University in Connecticut for his undergraduate degree and Cornell for his master’s and PhD. He’d been at Wash U for just two months, having never visited St. Louis before his job interview on campus; prior to this position, he’d done a postdoc at Berkeley. But these were mere facts. There remained the accretion of our respective pasts, the tiny and numerous experiences that didn’t exactly matter individually but in the aggregate defined us.

  At the restaurant, there were many silences, presumably because I was trying less than I had at Schnucks and making him work more, and then because he could tell that I was trying less and was wondering why. My plan was that after we finished eating, I would tell him I had enjoyed getting to know him but that it wasn’t the right time for me to be dating. Then I thought, was it necessary to say anything at all? If it was, maybe it ought to be just before he dropped me off for the night, or maybe not even in person. An email could suffice and would be far less awkward.

  He was so nice, though. I pictured his calm disappointment on opening this email, his confusion, and I thought that I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. On the drive back, as he pulled onto the ramp for 40, he said tentatively, “There’s a bar around the corner from my apartment if you’d be interested in getting a drink.” I could tell he thought I was going to say no. He didn’t know why, but he knew the date had gone badly. I imagined he’d decided ahead of time to suggest the bar after dinner and he’d still suggested it even though the evening hadn’t been much fun.

  I said, “Okay.”

  He glanced across the front seat. “Okay?”

  With more enthusiasm, I said, “Sure.”

  After he parallel parked on Southwood Avenue, we emerged from the car, and when we met up on the sidewalk, he briefly set his hand on my back; there seemed to be something generous in the gesture, a willingness to forgive my bad behavior.

  We had split a bottle of wine over dinner, and at the bar—it was a nice bar, one I’d been to a few times—he ordered whiskey on the rocks and I ordered a vodka tonic. As we talked about nothing in particular, I felt a relaxed warmth spreading through my body; this warmth increased as we downed two more cocktails each. At some point he made a fleeting reference to his parents’ divorce, and I was drunk enough that I didn’t conceal my surprise.

  “Your parents are divorced?”

  He blinked, as if surprised that I was surprised, then nodded. He had mentioned both his parents before but not in ways that I’d guessed this fact.

  “How old were you?” I asked.

  “Seven,” he said. “In second grade. My brother was nine.”

  “Which I would think is the worst possible time because you’d be old enough to understand that things have changed but too young to really get why.”

  Again, he regarded me seriously. “That’s about accurate.”

  “Were you traumatized?” My tone didn’t sound quite right, I could tell; it sounded eager.

  “My parents made an effort to be civil to each other,” he said. “But, yeah, it was hard.”

  So he hadn’t, like all my previous boyfriends, led an improbably painless existence; perhaps we could get married after all. Had I really had the foolish intent, just hours before, to tell him I didn’t want to see him anymore? He had such intelligent eyes, and he had hands that were quietly beautiful, straight fingers with clean, short nails, and I could imagine them on me. At close to midnight, he said, “You want to get out of here?” and I nodded, and we stumbled up the block to his apartment, which turned out to be exactly the apartment I would have wanted him to have: a tidy, comfortable one-bedroom with furniture that was grown-up—a tan living room couch, a teak bed frame that I saw as I walked past the open bedroom door—but not macho or glitzy. Plus, as I peed at length, the sound was concealed by a fan in the bathroom. What more could I hope for on a first hook-up?

  He’d put on music—Van Morrison—while I was in the bathroom, and pretty much immediately we were making out on his tan couch, and then we moved with little discussion to the bedroom, and we never even got under the covers; within ten minutes, we were both completely naked, and he was pulling out a condom from a drawer in a table beside the bed, and though I had had enough boyfriends that I’d learned how to be a girlfriend who conveyed what felt good, I had never before encountered a guy who, the very first time, just seemed to know. He was alert to every way I moved, every sound I made—and it wasn’t that I was particularly noisy—and he adjusted the way he touched me accordingly, doing more or less of whatever it was he’d already been doing. I was very drunk, of course, and delirious with lust, but I had a fleeting moment in which I thought, with total clarity, I cannot believe I found this guy. Then I felt, in the happiest possible way, like I was exploding.

  Afterward, he shifted off me, holding me from the side, and we were quiet, and finally he said, “Do you want a blanket or some water?” There was something plainly courteous or decent about him that I found far preferable, in such a moment, to excessive emotion.

  I said, “We could get under the covers.”

  So we did; we’d never turned on any lights in his bedroom, but a wide yellow bar came in from the hall. Again, he slipped his arm behind my neck and clasped my shoulder, curling into me.

  I said, “About earlier tonight, I’m sorry if I—”

  “It’s okay.”

  “But you don’t know what I was about to say.” I wondered if he thought that I was going to apologize for my intrusiveness about his parents’ divorce; in fact, I had been planning to apologize for being withdrawn at dinner.

  He said, “Whatever it is, it’s okay. There’s nothing you need to be sorry for.”

  Surely this wasn’t true. But it was so generous, so unsentimentally kind, that it silenced me.

  After that night, I didn’t question whether we ought to be a couple, whether getting to know him was worth the effort (and it really wasn’t an effort anyway). Sometimes, of course, I questioned why he wanted to be my boyfriend or my husband. But even that night at his apartment, and certainly as time passed, the feeling that being with Jeremy gave me was like the one I’d had listening to my mother’s old Christmas records during childhood. Especially with the lyrics that went “Oh the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful …,” I’d wish I could climb inside the song, that I could be festive and protected among sleighs and snow. With Jeremy, it was as if I had actually succeeded in breaching the song; to my own astonishment, I had gotten what I wanted.

  On the first anniversary of our first date, I said to him—I was conveying this information humorously, to illustrate my own earlier stupidity—“I was planning to tell you that night that I couldn’t go out with you again.”

  He was serious as he said, “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “Of course,” he said, and he didn’t seem to find the memory at all amusing.

  Already, long before then, I’d told him about having premonitions; I’d told
him after we’d been together just six or eight weeks, which seems shocking in retrospect, especially since I’d never told Ben or David at all, but once Jeremy and I were on stable ground as a couple, there wasn’t much that changed between us. We’d gone to a Wilco concert in Kansas City—as much for the novelty of traveling somewhere together, staying a night in a hotel, as for the concert itself—and it was halfway through the four-hour return drive that I said, “There’s something I want to tell you.”

  Jeremy glanced across the front seat of his car and said, “As long as it’s not that you’re married.”

  “I’m not married. Or pregnant.”

  “Good.” Then he said, “I mean, if you were pregnant—” and he reached for my hand. What he meant, clearly, was we’d figure it out; it’d be fine.

  I said, “I’m kind of psychic.”

  We looked at each other, and he was smiling, but when he saw my expression, he tried to bite back the smile. “I’m sorry, but that’s not what I thought you were about to say. Keep going.”

  “I know how it sounds. And especially with you being a scientist. But I just—I feel like I should tell you.” Was this what it was like to disclose to a romantic partner that you had an STD? Though presumably you had to do that even sooner.

  “So did you know we’d meet before we did?” Jeremy asked.

  I thought of the glimpse I’d gotten of him the night Vi and I had graduated from high school, but if I tried to describe it, it would sound like a bigger deal than it had been. I said, “I’ve never been that good with stuff in my own life.” I looked at the license plate of a truck in front of us—Tennessee—just before Jeremy pulled into the left lane to pass it. I said, “It’s like with an instrument. If I’d learned to play the violin early on, and if I’d also had some innate ability, maybe eventually I’d have gotten really good. But if I never took lessons, or I took lessons for a few years and then quit, the ability would barely be part of my life.” I was quiet before adding, “My sister has kept up with it. She sees it as a positive thing.”

  “But you don’t?” Jeremy’s tone had become serious, matching mine. When I’d told Vi that I’d met a guy named Jeremy Tucker, she’d chortled and said, “That sounds like the name of a boy explorer.” But I was pretty sure she liked him, because when we’d all gone out for Mexican food, he’d ordered a strawberry margarita after we both did—I think she’d found this endearingly unmasculine—and following dinner, he’d accepted her invitation to join her for bar trivia. And then at the bar, he’d known so many answers that Vi’s team came in first, unseating the usual winners, whom Vi and her friends loathed. Patrick leaned over and whispered, “Where did he learn all this random shit about European history?” The next evening, when I returned to our apartment after work, Vi grinned and said, “He even looks like a boy explorer. He’s perfect for you to marry.”

  In the car returning from Kansas City, I said to Jeremy, “It’s a long story, but in middle school, I started using a Ouija board a lot with another girl. The girl turned against me and exposed me and Vi for having this creepy ability, but the girl was right—it was creepy.”

  “So your premonitions now are like what? Who’ll win the Super Bowl? Where you left your wallet?”

  I hesitated. “Neither, exactly. With a wallet, that would be remembering more than sensing. With the Super Bowl, if I was at a party, it’s possible that I’d have a feeling about which team would win. But the senses are usually darker than a football game. Back in middle school, I had a premonition about a girl in my class dying. It didn’t happen until years later, but it did happen—she fell while she was hiking. Or I can tell when I meet a woman if she has an eating disorder, or other things that are messed up about a person. In college, I signed up for a sociology class, and the first day, I got a gross feeling from the professor. I dropped the class, but later that semester he was arrested for having a huge collection of child pornography.”

  “But you didn’t have a hunch about him being into child porn specifically, did you? So maybe he just seemed generally off. Or with the eating disorder stuff, you’d never know if you were wrong, would you?”

  I was quiet. I had thought in advance that I wouldn’t try to convince Jeremy.

  “It’s not that I think you’re making this up,” he added.

  When our eyes met, I said, “I’m not.”

  “Just bear with me,” Jeremy said. “No one’s ever told me something like this.”

  “I’ve never gotten a speeding ticket,” I said. “That might be a less depressing example. And I’ve definitely sped. But at certain times, I’ll just know I should slow down, and right after I do, I’ll pass a cop car.”

  “So why am I the one driving right now?”

  “Or another time in college, I was on the steering committee for a big Greek Week party, and at the last minute, I had a really strong feeling I shouldn’t go. It was very weird for me to skip it, but I pretended to have the flu. I was worried something bad would happen to everyone at the party, like the roof collapsing, but what did happen was that the police came and arrested a bunch of people for drinking.” If I had been among them, I might have been expelled, given the infraction already on my record at Mizzou, but I thought I’d hold off on sharing that saga for another time; there was no need to inundate Jeremy.

  “So basically being psychic allows you to get away with a life of crime.” He glanced at me. “You know I’m teasing, right?” Then he said, “I have a premonition about us.”

  Immediately, I knew where this was headed, and it wasn’t because I was psychic. But I tried to form a good-natured expression.

  “I think we’re a great couple,” he said. “And we’ll make each other really happy.”

  If he was underestimating what I was trying to convey, he was also being sweet. It was time to let the conversation end.

  After a silence, he said, “That’s not the kind of premonition you mean, is it?”

  It was true that he had disappointed me, possibly for the first time. But the fact that he knew it had the strange effect of negating the disappointment. I said, “I realize this is really weird.”

  “Well, I probably wouldn’t use the word psychic, but I’m sure we all subconsciously pick up on cues about situations.”

  “Right,” I said. “But that’s not what I’m talking about. I have dreams about things, and a lot of the time I don’t understand what they mean, but then the things I dreamed about happen. It’s like I saw a scene from a movie, and only later do I watch the movie from start to finish.”

  “I’m still confused about how ongoing this is for you.”

  “It’s as much in the past as I can put it,” I said.

  “Because of middle school?”

  “Having senses just isn’t necessary,” I said. “It’s not even practical.” I was looking out the window at the farmland on our right. “It’s okay if you don’t believe that people can be psychic.”

  “Whether I believe it is immaterial,” Jeremy said. “What you’re telling me is part of who you are, and I believe you.” The distinction he was making in this moment—it didn’t seem like it would come to matter as much as it did. “Anyway,” he continued, “as personal confessions go, you have to admit this is of a different order than ‘I’m not a natural blonde.’ ”

  “I am a natural blonde.”

  “Phew.” Jeremy grinned. “Because that might really have been a shock to my system.” Then he said, “So the stuff that happened in middle school—when you said it’s a long story, did you mean one you do or don’t want to tell? Because no pressure, but we are on a long drive.”

  For several seconds, I considered the question. From the vantage point of Jeremy’s passenger seat, beside this man who had grown up in a different state from me, who was five years older and a science professor and absurdly kind, middle school finally seemed like a long time ago. I said, “I could tell you.”

  It was around the time of the trip to Kansas City that we started t
alking about marriage—fleeting references at first. Once, as I flipped channels on his TV while he made dinner, he came into the living room when I was stopped on a program about animals on the islands of Fiji. “Look how pretty that is,” I said, and he said, “Should we go there on our honeymoon?”

  On an evening during which we’d eaten next to a large family at a pizza restaurant and were in the car driving back to Jeremy’s, I asked, “Can you picture adopting kids from another country?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Can you picture adopting them from China?”

  Again, as easily as if I’d asked if he could turn up the radio, he said, “Sure.”

  In a rush, I said, “In high school, I used to babysit for these people who lived on my street, and they had really cute daughters from China, and ever since then, I’ve wanted to do that. And that way, they wouldn’t be psychic, because I think it comes from my mom’s family.”

  “Wow.” But Jeremy said it calmly. “I do want biological kids, but I don’t see why we couldn’t do both. You’re sure having senses is hereditary?” It was weirdly endearing to hear the phrase “having senses” come out of Jeremy’s mouth—it had been such an intrafamily reference that it was as if he’d prepared Wonder bread toast with cinnamon sugar for me while we watched Rob Lowe in Class.

  I said, “I’ve always thought so. Do you feel like in order to be happy in life, you have to have biological children?”

  “I don’t know,” Jeremy said.

  The subject came up again from time to time—if we were out somewhere and saw white parents with a little Asian girl, I’d nudge him and murmur, “Look.” One Sunday morning after we’d slept in and then had sex, he said, “Here’s the thing. I just think you and I would have really great kids. They’d be part Kate-ish and part Jeremy-ish and part just themselves, and it’d be fun to watch them grow up.”

  This was not so different from the argument Ben had once made, minus the part about squinty eyes. I said, “But what if they have senses?”

  “What if they’re nearsighted? What if they can’t carry a tune?”