Sisterland

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  My parents were at this point just a few feet from Tom and me, my father taking pictures of Vi and Patrick as they pressed their heads side by side and held the tassels from their caps above their mouths like mustaches; my mother was observing them and frowning. And in this moment I felt a welling combination of shame and fury on my family’s behalf, a fear that my parents, while innocent of Mrs. Mueller’s suspicions, were still too odd and socially inept to convince anyone otherwise.

  I was close to crying, but I tried to conceal it as I said to Tom, “Your mom’s a snob.” Really, I was about a second from tears. “And you’re a wimp.”

  “Daisy—” He seemed less offended than concerned, and before my face collapsed, I turned and ran in the other direction. But I had no plan, I realized when I found myself on the outskirts of the throng of graduates and their families; my plan had been for Tom to chase and soothe me, but he wasn’t cooperating. I was at least five miles from home, wearing heels and a dress under my ridiculous red gown, but I couldn’t come up with a better idea, so I began walking. Mason Road ran along the east side of the park, and I knew it intersected with Manchester, which would eventually lead me back toward Kirkwood.

  I’d been walking for twenty minutes, it was completely dark out, and I’d developed blisters on both heels when I heard frantic honking that I briefly felt sure was coming from Tom’s Jeep before I saw Vi driving our father’s Buick and gesturing wildly. She pulled over, and I ran across Manchester Road. “What the fuck are you doing?” she called out her open window.

  “I got in a fight with Tom.” I had thought Patrick would be with her, but she was alone. I said, “Did Mom and Dad wonder where I went?”

  “We assumed you’d left with Tom, but then I ran into him, and he asked me where you were.”

  “I hate his mom.” When I saw that Vi was looking over her shoulder, preparing to make a U-turn, I said, “Can you take me home?”

  She glanced at me. “What did Tom do?” Just about everyone—even Vi and Patrick—planned to attend the after-graduation party. It was the kind where you couldn’t go back in if you left early, but almost no one left early, either.

  “I’m not in a party mood,” I said. “My feet hurt.”

  Vi laughed, but she kept driving east. We rode in silence, except for the radio, but first Vi didn’t make a left on North Geyer, then she didn’t make one on Kirkwood Road, either.

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  “I’m seeing where the wind takes us.”

  “Seriously,” I said.

  “If you’re not going to the party, I’m not, either.”

  “You don’t have to skip it.”

  “Well, I’m so crushed,” she said. “I’ll probably regret it for the rest of my life.”

  We were quiet again, and at Hampton Avenue, she got on the highway.

  “Don’t take us to East St. Louis,” I said.

  Vi grinned. “Relax.”

  By the time we were downtown—which wasn’t reputed to be quite as dangerous as East St. Louis but also wasn’t known as a hangout for suburban white girls, especially at night—my agitation about Tom and his mother had been replaced with wariness of whatever it was Vi and I were doing. Vi parallel-parked on Fourth Street and reached in the backseat for her bunched-up graduation gown and mortarboard cap. She climbed from the car, donned them both, then ducked her head back in to look at where I still sat in the passenger seat. “Come on,” she said. “And put your hat on.”

  I’d almost thrown it in the trash on my way out of Queeny Park, but instead I’d carried it with me, and even though I wasn’t sure why I was doing so, I obeyed Vi. We walked north on Fourth, then cut right on Market, and all at once, the Arch was before us, huge and luminous and impossibly curved. We crossed the street and entered the grounds of what was officially known as the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. “Aren’t there park hours?” I said.

  Vi scoffed, holding up her gown. “These are our immunity. Because it’s our special, special night.”

  There were no people nearby, though I could see in one direction two men standing beside an overloaded grocery cart and in the other direction a figure of indeterminate gender squatting by the curb. We followed the inclined sidewalk, then turned onto the grass, and then we could no longer see the Arch because we were standing under it; beyond the grass, down the steps and across the street, lay the dark mass of the Mississippi River. Vi looked up and said, “Okay. This is the place.” Soon she was lying flat on her back. Her mortarboard cap fell off, and she tugged it back on; when it fell off a second time, she adjusted it so her head rested on it like it was a pillow.

  Under her gown, Vi was wearing a navy blue rayon dress printed with large brown flowers; it was knee-length, and as the gown parted and the dress rode up, I saw that beneath it, like a girdle, she was wearing spandex bike shorts. It had been years since I’d seen her either wear a dress or ride a bike.

  She patted the grass and said, “Make yourself at home.” As I lay down next to her, she withdrew a pack of Camel cigarettes and a plastic lighter from a side pocket in her dress; she tapped out two cigarettes, held them in her mouth as she lit them, and passed one to me. “It’s a little-known fact,” she said, “that if you make a pilgrimage to the Arch on the night of your high school graduation, and if you lie down under its highest point, then any wish you make will come true.”

  “What about picking up homeless-man germs?” I said. “Is that part of the tradition?”

  “You know what they say. Until you’ve had gonorrhea, you haven’t really lived.” In fact, as we lay there and smoked—I smoked only at parties and had gotten through high school never purchasing a pack—there was something pleasant about being stretched out on the grass in the warm night. Above us, the underbelly of the Arch glowed, and past the Arch was the infinite sky; it did not seem so hard to believe, in this moment, that a wish you made here could come true.

  “That’s cool about your poetry prize,” I said. “You didn’t know, right?”

  “You mean didn’t know didn’t know or didn’t have a sense?”

  “Either.”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure Mr. Caldwell decided single-handedly, so it doesn’t exactly count.”

  I turned to look at her; I could have asked what she meant, but I didn’t.

  After a minute, Vi said, “You think Mom will start cooking dinner again when we’re at college?”

  “I’ve wondered that.”

  Vi inhaled on her cigarette. “I have a present for you.”

  “Really?” It hadn’t occurred to me to buy one for her.

  “Don’t worry. I didn’t pay for it. It’s a story Patrick told me, and I’ve been saving it to tell you because it’s awesome. You know his cousin Mary in Kansas City?”

  I nodded.

  “She works at a coffeehouse that sells biscotti. The pieces aren’t wrapped, they’re just in a jar with a lid next to the cash register. And every night when the employees close up, they play a game called Naughty Biscotti. They each take a piece, put it in their butt crack, and see how far they can walk before it falls out. Whoever walks the farthest wins. Then they put the pieces back in the jar.”

  “That is not true,” I said.

  “Mary swears.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “Maybe she swears, but it’s still not true.”

  “But will you ever eat unwrapped biscotti again?” Vi laughed. “See? You believe it. Okay, want to hear my first wish?”

  “That the cafeteria at Reed sells butt-crack-flavored biscotti?”

  “Oh, I already know they do. That’s why I decided to go there. My second wish is that Mrs. Mueller’s face-lift starts melting. And my third wish is that after college, I get into the Peace Corps and I fall in love with a dashing African tribesman and become his wife.”

  “Why don’t you just fall in love with another Peace Corps volunteer?”

  After consideration, Vi said, “Okay. And then I’ll go to law school
at Berkeley. But who will you marry? Don’t say Tom.”

  In fact, despite Tom’s mother, he and I were planning to stay together after I’d left for Mizzou and he was at DePauw in Indiana. And yet I swear that in this moment—a breeze rose, and I could hear it passing through the ash trees—I saw Jeremy; truly, I saw him. Not up close but at a distance, in profile, as if across a parking lot. This wasn’t how I’d see him when we would actually meet, but I think it’s how I recognized him. And though I could, on the night of graduation, feel his kindness, the image of him made me nervous. I was seventeen, and he was a strange, grown-up man.

  I said to Vi, “Compared to most of the guys in our class, Tom has a lot going for him.”

  “Well, sure—in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Okay, how about this? At Mizzou, you’ll meet a nice country boy named Fred who’ll sweep you off your feet and take you back to his family farm. You’ll have eight children. Every night you’ll cook meat loaf, put the kids to bed, and you and Fred will make passionate yet gentle love.”

  “What, while he chews on a piece of hay?” Then—I had never said this aloud, I hadn’t even realized I’d decided it—I said, “I don’t want to have children. I want to adopt so they don’t have senses.”

  “Really?” Vi looked genuinely interested. “That’s the only reason I would want kids. But why do you even think senses are hereditary? I’ve never met anyone more clueless than Mom and Dad, so they sure as shit don’t have them.”

  “But we know nothing about Mom’s family. Obviously, something weird happened between her and them.” Vi was quiet—I could feel her skepticism—and I said, “I’ll be like the Garretts.” These were neighbors I babysat for, a white father who worked at Monsanto and a white mother who ran a catering company and their two Chinese daughters, Lucy and Anna, who were four and five.

  Vi wrinkled her nose. “Those girls are annoying.” She never babysat; in the summers, she worked at a frozen yogurt place that would be closed by the mid-nineties.

  I said, “The reason Mrs. Mueller doesn’t like me is because of senses. And all the stuff with Marisa Mazarelli—I’d never want to put my children through that.”

  “Marisa’s an ignoramus,” Vi said. “And you still haven’t wished for anything.”

  “Have you?”

  “The Peace Corps and law school. Oh, and my cool husband. I think he’ll be named Theo. That’s a cool name, right?”

  What I wanted sounded so pathetically unambitious that I almost didn’t say it, but then I did. I said, “I wish to live anywhere besides St. Louis.”

  Back in the car, we were headed west on 40 until Vi got off on Grand. “Where are you going now?” I asked.

  “There are still four hours before the breakfast,” she said. “We can’t go home.”

  And so instead, we drove. We drove up and down the streets around the water tower, past the old mansions built in a neighborhood where rich people no longer wanted to live, and we drove by the brick houses on Magnolia, past the Botanical Garden, south on Kingshighway, then north on Kingshighway, then west on Lindell, along the stately homes that had been built facing Forest Park for diplomats visiting the 1904 World’s Fair—Tom had once told me that Chuck Berry lived in one of these houses, which I didn’t learn until adulthood wasn’t true—and then we drove by Wash U, where I didn’t know my one-day husband would work, up toward the Loop, down Delmar and past the Tivoli Theatre—we considered getting something to eat in the Loop, but then we’d driven by without stopping—and then we were on 170, up near the airport, out in St. Charles and O’Fallon and Chesterfield, places that we never went, that would explode with housing subdivisions and schools and strip malls in the years to come. And then we were somehow all the way back on Kingshighway and this time, a little south of Barnes-Jewish Hospital, something blew across the dark pavement in front of our headlights, and Vi and I looked at each other with incredulity and delight. It was close to one A.M. by then, and we hadn’t spoken for easily twenty minutes.

  “Was that a Burger King crown?” I said, and Vi said, “It’s a miracle! A Burger King crown on Kingshighway? We should go back and get it!”

  “We don’t need to get it,” I said. “We both saw it.”

  Our windows were open, and the radio had been playing continuously—not one but two Billy Joel songs had come on during our drive—and the air was dense with the humidity of a midwestern summer, weather that even then made me homesick, though it was hard to say for what. Maybe my homesickness was a form of prescience because when I look back, it’s the circumstances of this very car ride that I recognize as irretrievable: the experience of driving nowhere in particular with my sister, both of us seventeen years old, the open windows causing our hair to blow wildly; that feeling of being unencumbered; that confidence that our futures would unfold the way we wanted them to and our real lives were just beginning.

  “Now all our wishes will definitely come true,” Vi said. “You can’t beat a crown for a good omen.”

  Four months later, on an overcast Tuesday morning six weeks into my freshman year at Mizzou, I awoke with a strong feeling that I needed to call Vi. It had been the dream I’d been having before my alarm clock went off, I realized, a dream of sitting in a lecture hall with my view of the stage blocked by a girl who had a pixie haircut. Then the girl turned around, and I saw that she was Vi. The expression on her face was unsmiling, as if she didn’t know who I was.

  Though it still sometimes surprised me not to find Vi next to me at a meal, or to return to my dorm room and realize that it wasn’t Vi but a girl named Heather from Davenport, Iowa, reading in the other bed, the truth was that Vi and I hadn’t been in close contact; we’d spoken on the phone infrequently since starting college. The two-hour time difference between Columbia, Missouri, and Portland, Oregon, made it always seem like not quite the right moment to talk, plus the busyness of college could consume me for days at a time: the cycle of classes and assignments and my work-study job (it was at an adult day-care center, but to my surprise, I kind of liked it), plus exercise and parties and post-party debriefings with girls I already felt closer to than the friends I’d had in high school.

  All of this meant that Vi and I communicated primarily by email, which was new to both of us, and which we used to write four- or five-paragraph, correctly capitalized and punctuated missives every other day. Sitting in my dorm’s computer lab, I’d start out Dear Vi, and I’d sign off Love, Daisy. I’d feel like I was starring in a wholesome movie about a well-adjusted coed as I wrote, I just went with a bunch of people on my hall to a lecture by a man who’s climbed the highest mountain on every continent.

  As it happened, I didn’t get around to calling Vi that day. After returning from the adult day-care center, I met up with Lauren, a girl from Tampa who had during rush become my new best friend, and we went to the gym, climbed for forty minutes on adjacent StairMasters while listening to music on headphones, then stood outside the gym entrance for the same amount of time, drinking bottled water and discussing whether I should go for a freshman named Ben Murphy with whom I’d played ping-pong at a Delta Upsilon party the previous Saturday. (The second week of school, during one of our increasingly empty, stuttering phone conversations, I had worked up the nerve to say to Tom Mueller, “I’ve been thinking maybe we should see other people,” and in a tone of great relief, he’d said, “I’ve been thinking that, too.” We hadn’t spoken since.)

  Lauren and I lived on different floors of the same dorm, Schurz Hall, and after we parted ways, I showered, read two chapters from Book IV of The Wealth of Nations, then met up again with Lauren and our friend Meredith to walk to dinner. In the cafeteria, some guys we knew invited us back to their room to watch Animal House, and it was after ten by the time I returned to my own room to make flash cards for an upcoming biology test.

  My roommate and I got along but hadn’t become friends. During the first week of school, our peer adviser had bought a birthday cake for a guy on the ha
ll, and that night when I’d said to Heather, “Are you going to Rick’s room?” she’d said, “I’m a Witness, and we don’t celebrate birthdays.”

  A witness to what? I’d thought before realizing she meant Jehovah’s. I knew little about the religion, but after that, worried that she, too, would strongly disapprove if she ever caught wind of my senses, I kept a polite distance. It wasn’t hard because she left every weekend. She either had family nearby or—I was never clear on which—was staying with people from her church whom she considered family.

  On that night in October, I was at my desk copying phrases from my biology textbook onto index cards, and Heather was sitting on her bed, her legs tented and a notebook open across her thighs, when there was a knock on our door. Before either of us had a chance to stand or even to call “Come in,” the door swung open and my sister appeared in the threshold. Vi wore a long-sleeved gray T-shirt, jeans, and Birkenstocks without socks, and over one shoulder she carried a green duffel bag. Unlike in my dream, her hair wasn’t short; she’d parted it in the center and pulled it back into a low ponytail at the base of her neck, with the strands that weren’t long enough to fit in the rubber band tucked behind her ears. She grinned and said, “Look what the cat dragged in.”

  In spite of the recent sense of her I’d had, I was stunned. “What are you doing here?” I said. When I went to embrace her, I could smell her Vi-ishness—she had long ago stopped wearing cheap perfume in favor of patchouli oil, under which she always smelled in a good way like toast and over which, in this moment, she smelled like body odor.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” she said. “Also, Reed sucks.”

  “Wait, did you just leave? You’re not on a break?”

  “I am on a break. A self-imposed one.” She entered the room, set her duffel on the floor, and sat on my bed. Then she said, “You’re Heather, right? I’m Vi, Daisy’s original roommate.”

  Heather looked between us, seeming confused, and I said, “This is my sister.” Daisy wasn’t how anyone at college knew me, and I felt a flare of annoyance. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see Vi, but there were preparations I’d have made if I’d known she was coming.