Sisterland

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “But what’s the umbrella in this scenario? Saying no to Cornell? Canceling my plans for AEPS?” Jeremy was still calm, as if the idea that we were having a disagreement hadn’t occurred to him.

  “What if you go to the conference but postpone Cornell?” I forced a smile. “And then neither of us gets our way and we can both feel resentful.”

  He smiled, too. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re a world-class negotiator?”

  “Lukovich isn’t trying to recruit you, is he?” I said. It was well-established between us that I didn’t want to leave St. Louis as long as my father was alive.

  “They do have a job opening this year, but Lukovich knows where we stand on moving. This would just be a colloquium, not a job talk.”

  “Will they pay you?”

  “Let me put it this way: Yes, but it probably won’t be enough to cover a trip to Target.”

  After a minute, I said, “If Vi’s right, then I guess her prediction’s not embarrassing, but I’d rather be embarrassed and safe.”

  “I know you would,” Jeremy said.

  As we were cleaning up after dinner, there was a knock on the back door—this wasn’t the one we, or anyone else, usually used—and when I looked over, Courtney Wheeling was making a blowfish face against the windowpane. I opened the door, and she said, “I saw the light on back here. Late-night dining, huh?”

  “Come on in,” I said, though I wasn’t entirely sure why she was at our house. We hung out with the Wheelings all the time, but we generally called or texted each other first. In spite of the fact that Courtney was wearing shorts, running shoes, a T-shirt, and an unzipped hooded sweatshirt, the force of her personality—her intelligence and confidence and will—emanated from her. Although Courtney was pretty, her prettiness was never the main thing I noticed about her. Her hair was blond, like mine, but very short—she’d once told me she got it cut every three weeks—and even in her haircut her confidence was obvious; the same was true of her glasses, which had aggressively nerdy thick black frames. I liked Courtney, and I was impressed by her, but I didn’t always find myself able to relax in her presence.

  “I’m sure you’re feeling weird about the Channel 5 thing today, but you shouldn’t,” she said. “That’s what I came over to say. It’s not your fault if you have a wackadoodle sister.”

  Was I supposed to thank her? I glanced at Jeremy, who was wringing out the sponge, and his expression was impassive. I said, “What a weird coincidence, huh?”

  “That poor newscaster wouldn’t know seismic energy if it bit her in the ass,” Courtney said. “Which tends to be the norm with the media. Did Jeremy tell you he got invited to give a talk at Cornell?”

  “I did indeed,” Jeremy said.

  Courtney took a seat at our kitchen table. “Cool, right?” she said to me. Then, to Jeremy: “Did you read Leland’s email yet?”

  “I skimmed it,” Jeremy said. We made eye contact, and he said, “Nothing interesting. Department politics.”

  “So Amelia is agitating to eat meat,” Courtney said. “Which I knew would happen eventually, but I didn’t think it’d be this soon.” Both Courtney and Hank were vegetarians.

  “I was wondering about that,” I said. “At the park today, she was pretending to cook ham.”

  Courtney wrinkled her nose. “Gross.” As if I were a pig farmer, she added, “No offense.”

  “None taken,” I said.

  She said, “There’s just something extra-revolting about ham. It’s so fleshy. But we’ve always said if Amelia wanted to try meat, we’d let her, so I’m thinking we should all go out for dinner and you carnivores can show her how it’s done.”

  Jeremy looked amused. “I’m guessing if she’s got molars, she’s good to go.”

  “Okay, then you can provide moral support to her parents.”

  “You mean molar support?” Jeremy said, and Courtney and I rolled our eyes at each other.

  Courtney said, “Kate, did you hear that Justin Timberlake and Rihanna are hooking up?”

  “I saw that online, but I’m not sure I believe it.”

  “I want it to be true. They’d make beautiful babies.” Early in our friendship, I had wondered if I should feel patronized by Courtney’s tendency to bring up celebrity gossip with me, but I had soon realized that her interest in the topic was unabashedly sincere; in fact, her knowledge far eclipsed mine, though I still wasn’t sure when she had time to study up. Courtney stood then. “I’m thinking Saturday for meat night. You guys free then?”

  Jeremy and I looked at each other, and I said, “I’m pretty sure.”

  “You can tell Hank tomorrow,” Courtney said to me. “And we’re cool on the whole TV news showdown? No hard feelings?” When I nodded, she said, “Tell your sister nice prayer flags.”

  When Courtney had left, I let a minute pass, which probably was long enough for her to be halfway home, before saying, “I kind of feel like she was trying to trick me into being on her side.”

  Jeremy shook his head. “Courtney’s just being Courtney.”

  We both were quiet, and I said, “I can understand her being bummed out about Amelia wanting to try meat.”

  “Why? Meat’s delicious.” Jeremy was grinning.

  “But doesn’t it make it seem like all our children are growing up so quickly?”

  “Am I allowed to remind you of that when Owen wakes up at two in the morning?” Then he said, “What if you go do your thing in the living room and I bring out some ice cream for us? Will that make you feel better?”

  What Jeremy meant by doing my thing was that every night after the children were asleep, I took a few minutes to set the diaper bag by the front door, checking that inside it were not only diapers and extra clothes but my wallet with my health insurance card; I also charged my cellphone in the closest outlet.

  “I’m leaning toward a chocolate-pistachio blend tonight,” Jeremy said, and I thought, as I did at least once a day, how lucky I was that he was my husband; it hadn’t been a foregone conclusion that I’d marry someone kind, because I hadn’t understood how much it mattered.

  I said, “You really think I’m a person of simple wants, don’t you?”

  Jeremy grinned again. “Isn’t that why you settled for me?”

  Chapter 5

  In April 1989, the spring Vi and I were in eighth grade, I got invited to a slumber party at Marisa Mazarelli’s house and Vi didn’t. While I wish I could say that I considered declining out of sisterly loyalty, the truth is that when Marisa called our house, I raced to ask my mother, and when she granted permission, I accepted with an excitement that I tried to conceal more from Marisa than from Vi. I was surprised and flattered to have made it onto Marisa’s guest list—Marisa of the long, dark, curly hair, Marisa of the large, newly constructed house with a hot tub, Marisa of the scary power over most of the girls at Nipher Middle School. Marisa was the daughter of the owner of an eponymous pizza chain in eastern Missouri and western Illinois. She had started wearing lip gloss in fifth grade. And at a dance the previous fall, she had, during the last song of the night—Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”—brazenly made out on the dance floor with a boy named Chip Simmons. I’d already heard about the Mazarellis’ hot tub, even though I’d never been to Marisa’s house, and when she told me over the phone to bring a bathing suit to the party, I felt the thrill of confirmation.

  It wasn’t until a few hours after Marisa’s call, when Vi and I were getting ready for bed, that the first wave of uneasiness struck me. We had just emerged from the bathroom and were headed toward the bedroom we shared. (The third bedroom in our house was kept as a guest room, its double bed pristinely covered by a white spread with cream-colored satin borders, unslept in and unsullied by actual guests from one year to the next.) Our room, which was usually a mess, had a sign on the door that Vi had posted when we were in fourth grade and neither of us had taken down since:

  SISTERLAND

  POPULATION 2

  DO
NOT ENTER WITHOUT PERMISSION!

  “I could ask Marisa to invite you, too,” I said.

  “I saw her cheating on the math quiz yesterday,” Vi said. “She was copying off Dave Stutz, and he didn’t even know it.”

  I said nothing, and Vi added, “Marisa is a rich bitch.”

  Coming on top of the cheating comment, this was too much. “It’s not my fault if you’re jealous,” I said.

  If asked during elementary and middle school, I would never have claimed that Vi was my best friend. I might not even have said I liked her that much. For one thing, I was unsentimental as a child, and for another, I had no frame of comparison. Did I like living in Missouri? Did I enjoy having ears?

  In any twenty-four-hour period, it would not have been uncommon for us to be apart only during a few classes at school. Otherwise, we were almost always in the same room, side by side on chairs in the school cafeteria or at our kitchen table, watching television in the living room with our heads on the cushion we’d moved from the couch to the floor, taking turns hanging upside down from the mulberry tree in our yard, the backs of our knees hooked on the lowest branch and our shirts flying over our faces. We participated in no organized sports or other extracurricular activities—our mother’s general suspicion of the world extended to doubts about the value, financial or otherwise, of music or dance lessons—and we were often unsupervised.

  We made up many of the games we played. One that irritated our mother involved, in its entirety, lying with our heads on opposite arms of the living room couch, the soles of our feet meeting up in the middle, and pumping our legs back and forth as if riding a bicycle while singing, over and over and over, “There’s a place in France / Where the naked ladies dance / And the men don’t care / ’Cause they wear their underwear.”

  Around fifth grade, Vi and I invented Commercial, which we played only outdoors, in the backyard, and which entailed assigning each other imaginary products that we then pretended to advertise; for the most part, these products were related to sex or farting. (Vi once made me come up with a commercial for what she called a vagina wig, and it was one of the great shocks of my life, years later, to learn in a college history course of the existence of merkins; I almost stood up in the middle of the professor’s lecture and walked out to call my sister.) Vi and I also played Person, which was the name we gave to a game much like Twenty Questions, except without the questions: One of us would think of either a celebrity or someone we knew—our music teacher, Mrs. Kebach, for instance—and the other of us would get three guesses to figure out who it was, though we usually got it on the first or second try. Our mother disliked this game even more than she disliked our singing, “There’s a place in France.” The first time she ever heard us playing, when Vi and I were in the backseat while she drove us home from the dentist’s office, she turned around and said, “Stop it! Stop it right now! That’s a bad game!” We still did play, but not in front of her.

  None of us attended church, and my mother, despite her own upbringing, didn’t seem to be religious, but she was superstitious; if we spilled salt, she made us throw some over our left shoulders, and if the sun came out while it was raining, she’d say it meant the devil was getting married. My mother’s one great happiness was her Christmas records, the ones she’d brought up on the bus from Risco: Perry Como singing “O Holy Night,” Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra. We listened to them from mid-November to mid-January.

  On the weekends, our father would drive Vi and me to P.S. Video on Jefferson Avenue, where we each got to select one movie to rent. We could spend easily half an hour considering our options, picking up and returning various empty cardboard cases to the shelves—the actual cassettes were stored behind the cash register—and there are movies from this time period that I never saw but still feel a kinship for just from holding their cases in my hands: Good Morning, Vietnam and Mannequin and Rumble Fish. Often, the movies we picked were ones we’d already seen: The Secret of My Success, which featured a young and handsome Michael J. Fox, or Class, which featured a young Rob Lowe, who was so far beyond handsome, so perfect in every possible way, that it hurt to watch him. In a scene in which he bit into an apple, the juice clung to his lips in a way Vi and I found devastatingly sexy; we’d rewind the video several times per viewing just to torment ourselves.

  During the week, after school, Vi and I watched vast quantities of television. By middle school, our two favorite shows were Divorce Court and the soap opera Santa Barbara, both of which we viewed while eating either Cool Ranch Doritos, Wonder bread toast topped with butter and cinnamon sugar, or tiny pieces of American cheese melted in the microwave onto Triscuits. We shared a radio–cassette player on which we listened to Y98, and there were certain songs we’d become obsessed with—“Take My Breath Away” and “Walk Like an Egyptian”—and try to tape, though we rarely succeeded in pressing the Record button until several seconds into the songs. Soon after getting our ears pierced in sixth grade, we began pleading to get our right ears double-pierced, which our parents let us do as a twelfth-birthday present just before the start of seventh grade, and around this time, Vi also wanted an asymmetrical haircut—it would be chin-length on the left side of her face but cropped above her ear on the right—which our mother said she was allowed to do only if she lost ten pounds. Toward this end, Vi intermittently did sit-ups in front of the television, which I’d join her for because it felt more festive that way, though what’s notable to me about the bargain in retrospect, when I look at old photos, is that Vi wasn’t heavy then. She weighed ten pounds more than I did, but I was skinny.

  It was also in seventh grade that one night at dinner, Vi said, “Want to hear a clean joke? Bob took a bath with bubbles. Want to hear a dirty joke?” Without waiting for anyone to respond, she said, “Bubbles was the lady next door.” There was a long silence, and then my mother leaned forward and slapped Vi’s face.

  “That didn’t hurt,” Vi said, and my mother said, “Go to your room, you spoiled brat.”

  I got up with Vi, and neither of our parents objected.

  In late October, Vi gave herself an asymmetrical haircut, and the first thing I thought when I saw her was that our mother would forbid her to attend the Halloween dance and I’d have to go alone, but Vi wasn’t punished. Instead, my mother just pursed her lips before saying, almost with pleasure, “No boy will want to dance with you like that.”

  Vi and I had only one real friend, a girl named Janie Spriggs, who lived a block away and regularly joined us to play Commercial; in turn, Vi and I would go to Janie’s house to ride her mother’s stationary bike and try on her mother’s fur coat, sometimes doing both simultaneously. Janie had an older brother named Pete who had Down’s syndrome—Vi and I referred to him as retarded, as did our parents—and every time he saw us, by way of greeting, Pete would say in a singsong, “You’re twins because there’s two of you.” Interestingly, though, Pete could always tell us apart, long before the asymmetrical haircut and the weight difference, back when many of our teachers and the other students couldn’t.

  Vi and I were included in classmates’ parties only when everyone was invited, but I didn’t feel the sting of rejection; after all, I wasn’t staying home alone. I think our classmates considered us a benign oddity. Twins weren’t nearly as common then as now—this was prior to widespread fertility treatments—yet we’d been going to school with many of the same people since kindergarten, which meant that we were both familiar and strange. Until Marisa, we also were viewed, I’m pretty sure, as a package deal; if another girl were to have one of us over, she’d have to have both of us, and we weren’t beloved enough to be worth two guest slots.

  But it wasn’t as if we invited anyone to our house besides Janie. Our birthday usually fell during the week in August when we drove to visit our father’s relatives in Omaha, so we had cake there and never held a celebration back at home. When Vi and I were younger, I suppose it was our mother who didn’t initiate social activiti
es on our behalf, and when we were older, we didn’t initiate them because we had realized, without ever speaking of it, that we were colluding to conceal a certain fact about our family. This was not the fact of our “having senses,” as Vi and I called it from a young age. Rather, it was that, from the time we arrived home after school until a few minutes before our father arrived home after work almost three hours later, our mother remained in bed with the door closed, the shades drawn, and the lights off. Vi and I referred to what our mother did in our parents’ darkened bedroom as napping, though we understood that she wasn’t asleep—often the TV was on, sometimes set to the same program Vi and I were watching in the living room—and in rare instances, we’d knock on the door to ask her a question.

  The first time we came home from school to find our mother in bed, Vi and I were eleven, and this turn of events made us decidedly nervous; we inquired as to whether she was sick and when she ignored the question, we heated a can of chicken noodle soup and carried the steaming bowl into her room on a tray. Our father returned every evening from work at five forty-five, and that evening, when it got to be five o’clock and our mother showed no sign of emerging, we took matters into our own hands. Using a recipe from one of the index cards our mother kept in a white tin box on top of the refrigerator—she herself had copied the recipe by hand from the Post-Dispatch in 1977 and made it frequently—we prepared broiled chicken breasts, as well as buttered rice and an iceberg salad with Kraft ranch dressing. Optimistically, we set the kitchen table with four places but were surprised when, at five-thirty, our mother appeared before us, fully dressed, seeming like an only slightly more preoccupied version of her usual self. “Oh,” she said when she saw that dinner was almost ready. “Well, I hope the chicken’s done all the way through.” When our father arrived home, we ate as if it were a normal night. At the end of the meal, he wiped his mouth with a napkin and said, “That was good, Rita.” This was what he said at the end of every dinner, and none of us corrected him.