Sisterland

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Part of the reason Vi and I had chosen to live in the neighborhood we did was its proximity to the job I’d gotten. I could walk there in fifteen minutes, and because I didn’t need a car to drive to work, Vi said I could use hers for errands if I chipped in on insurance and gas. That I hated the home health aide job pretty much from the moment I took it should, perhaps, have made me question the wisdom of letting it determine where I lived.

  The woman was named Mrs. Abbott, and she was a ninety-six-year-old widow who was mostly lucid, though also mostly asleep during the hours I was there. Every Tuesday, Saturday, and Sunday, I arrived at her house at seven P.M. and left at seven A.M., when my replacement showed up. Mrs. Abbott’s son, who was himself in his seventies and lived out in Ladue, had hired attendants to be with her twenty-four hours a day, and there were five other versions of me, though I never met all of them and some didn’t last more than a few weeks.

  At seven-thirty P.M., I gave Mrs. Abbott a bath, rubbed Vaseline on her skin, helped her into an adult diaper and a nightgown, and got her settled in bed. (I didn’t realize at the time what good training this would be for motherhood.) I’d line up three Ritz crackers and a plastic cup of milk with a straw so she could take her medications, then I’d check off the meds I’d administered on a clipboard kept on the mantel above the bedroom’s fireplace. Then I’d turn out the light but remain in the room until I left in the morning, which was sometimes before Mrs. Abbott woke. Occasionally, she needed to be changed during the night or would just wake up disoriented, but mostly she slept, snoring gently.

  In spite of there being plenty of space in her bedroom for a twin bed or cot for the aides, there wasn’t one; I sat in a large armchair upholstered with a blue-and-white pattern of fox-hunting aristocrats. Yet because no one at the agency had told me I couldn’t sleep, I assumed it was understood that I would. Though there was a small television set I was allowed to watch propped on a nearby bureau, I never did—first, because Mrs. Abbott listened to the radio when she slept, and I didn’t like the competing sounds; and second, because I feared that if I did have the TV on, she’d die and I’d fail to notice. I was warned never to use Mrs. Abbott’s phone to make long-distance calls, never to help her with anything financial—managing her checkbook, for instance—and never to allow my family members into her house. On my own, I don’t think it would have occurred to me to do any of these things.

  It wasn’t because of Mrs. Abbott that I hated the job; if I’d worked for her during the day, I might even have liked it. I hated it because the first week I was there, an idea lodged itself in my head, an idea that was somewhat ludicrous during daylight hours, even to me, but less so at night, when Mrs. Abbott and I were alone in her vast, dark house. The idea, which occurred to me during my second night on the job, was that the Ouija presence from all those years earlier with Marisa was going to find me. It was going to find me in Mrs. Abbott’s bedroom, perhaps appearing before me physically, and then—well, I didn’t have a clear idea of what it would do, but surely it would mock me for thinking that by telling Vi not to communicate with Guardian in our duplex, I could prevent my own contact with the spirit world.

  Every night after Mrs. Abbott was asleep, I’d pull out a book or magazine and wait to feel tired enough to fall asleep myself. I’d have drunk as little as possible in the hours prior to my arrival at Mrs. Abbott’s because I didn’t like using the master bathroom—it had a raised toilet seat with arms—but I also didn’t want to leave her room to use the one down the hall. When I did manage to fall asleep, I’d often startle awake.

  I’d been stunned to learn that Mrs. Abbott had no security alarm. She lived on one of those semiprivate streets St. Louis is full of, a loop without sidewalks, and though there was a wrought-iron gate at the loop’s entrance, it was open day and night and served the purpose of merely seeming unwelcoming rather than preventing access. A few years later, I told Jeremy that Mrs. Abbott’s house had been at least ten thousand square feet and he was skeptical, so we went online—by then, such information was easy to find—and it turned out it was twelve thousand.

  On the first floor were large, shadowy rooms and an enormous front hall with nothing in it but the stairs and a two-story mullioned window. The kitchen, which I found particularly creepy, had a black-and-red checkerboard floor and, except for the dishwasher, appliances that were decades old.

  I worked for Mrs. Abbott for fourteen months, a period that in retrospect is vague, though I also feel, because my unhappiness and anxiety made time pass slowly, that I spent more like ten years as her employee. Though I could have stayed with the same agency but asked to be transferred so I was working with a different client or with multiple clients, and working during the day—it’s clear now that I should have done exactly this—I didn’t because then I’d have needed to buy a car.

  It’s also clear, of course, that the presence I feared was less the Ouija one than my mother’s. The medical examiner’s report that had come in the mail to Gilbert Street shortly before I moved out had stated that her death was a result of combined drug intoxication; she’d been taking nine medications, including (this mystified me) sleeping pills. On the evening I found the envelope open on the kitchen counter, I read the enclosure, replaced it, and discussed none of its contents with my father.

  I myself was perpetually sleep-deprived, and on the nights I didn’t work at Mrs. Abbott’s house, if Vi wasn’t around, I’d drink a smoothie for dinner and go to bed as early as seven P.M. Due to our schedules, Vi and I saw each other erratically. She spent four nights a week, including either a Fri-day or Saturday, as a hostess at an Italian restaurant on the Hill. Her shifts ran from four to midnight, meaning we were rarely both home for dinner, and unlike me, she was good at sleeping during the day. On Sundays, we had lunch with our father, and afterward, Vi drove off alone, and my father and I went to the Schnucks on Manchester Road.

  Because Vi had lived in St. Louis since dropping out of Reed—it was strange to realize that she’d only ever been away for six weeks—she had an extended group of friends who weren’t people we’d known growing up. There were the ones she meditated with at the bookstore, an activity I never asked about. There was also a group with whom she played bar trivia on Mondays, an event I did attend once, only to discover that I could answer almost no questions and that the few I could answer could also be answered by several other people on our team; I left reeking of cigarette smoke, much of it directed at me by my sister.

  Vi’s friends Patrick and Nancy regularly came over to get stoned and make catty comments about the contestants on reality television shows; Nancy was a frizzy-haired yoga devotee who’d been at our mother’s funeral and who was the owner of the purple dildo with lifelike veins. Sometimes I’d join them in the living room, but I couldn’t summon the energy to contribute to their commentary.

  One afternoon in November, by which point Vi and I had been living together for eight months, she entered the apartment just after five P.M. to find me sitting in the living room with the TV on and the lights off; I was watching an old Star Trek, wearing my bathrobe from college with a sweater that had belonged to Ben’s father over it, drinking red wine from a coffee mug and eating Doritos from a family-sized bag. I’d been under the impression that Vi would be working that night, but apparently, when she’d shown up at the restaurant, the other woman who hostessed was there already, and the manager sent Vi home.

  “Wow,” she said as she threw her keys into the basket where we kept mail. She walked into the living room, flipping the switch that turned on the ceiling light, and I blinked. I could have feigned confusion and said, Wow what?, but there didn’t seem to be a point. Vi said, “You know you’re depressed, right?”

  “I didn’t realize Doritos were against the law.”

  “Don’t be defensive. I’m not criticizing you. But you should see a shrink.”

  I didn’t have health insurance—for that matter, neither did Vi—but I just said, “That’s not going to happen
.”

  She settled into the papasan chair and yawned, not covering her mouth. “I’ve always wanted to be in therapy. Like the old-school kind where you lie on a couch not looking at the person.”

  I took another chip from the bag.

  “So this is your plan?” She set one foot on the coffee table and crossed the other over it. “Star Trek and jammies on by five o’clock every night?”

  “Excuse me if I haven’t taken St. Louis by storm.”

  “I think it’s because you don’t have a boyfriend right now.” Vi’s tone was musing. “It’s like you aren’t yourself without one.”

  I said, “Have you ever considered having a thought but not expressing it?”

  “I come in peace, Daze.” This was what Vi called me long after almost everybody else except our parents called me Kate—Daze, short for Daisy. Patrick was the one other person who called me Daze, and I let him because he’d cried when he’d told me my mother had died. Vi said, “You’re in a bad place, and I want to help.”

  I stood and dropped the Doritos bag on the table. Before I stalked off to my bedroom, I said, “If I wanted your help, I’d ask for it.”

  One morning, as I was returning home from a night at Mrs. Abbott’s, I had just crossed Clayton Road when I became aware of a person behind me. I turned and made quick, unfriendly eye contact with a black man wearing navy blue scrubs under an open winter coat. He was less than ten feet back—the sun had just risen, and we were the only ones outside—and when I made a left onto Brookline Terrace, I thought he’d go straight. But he went left, too. As we passed Edward Terrace and then Ralph Terrace, I waited for him to turn, but he still was behind me. Those weren’t scrubs he was wearing, I suddenly realized. I myself had on scrubs, so I had foolishly assumed he did, too, but it occurred to me then that he was an escaped convict wearing a prison uniform and that he was planning to rob, rape, or kill me. (If it is tempting, after the fact, to try to defend or excuse my thinking in this moment, it also would be dishonest. And it wasn’t even that no black people lived in the neighborhood, but not many did.)

  The duplex Vi and I rented was on the next street, Moorlands Drive, and my mind raced: Instead of turning right, in the direction of our apartment, would it be smarter to turn left and go back to Clayton Road, where I could wave down a passing car? Or should I start running toward the duplex with the idea of unlocking the door and hurling myself inside as quickly as possible or, if I couldn’t manage that before the man grabbed me, just start screaming for Vi?

  But when we reached Moorlands, I didn’t turn left, and I didn’t start running. I went right, still walking, and so did the man, and then I crossed the street, and so did the man, and there were only two houses remaining before our duplex, one house remaining, and then I turned onto the walkway, and when I was no more than ten feet from our front door, I couldn’t stop myself from glancing back, and he’d turned onto the walkway, too. This was when two things happened very quickly: I knew, with a sickening kind of terror, that I was really and truly about to be assaulted; and as I stood there frozen, he passed me, went left toward the door of the duplex that wasn’t ours, pulled a key from his pocket, opened the door, and walked inside. Which meant, it appeared, that he was the new tenant who’d just moved into the rental unit below Vi’s and mine. And while this didn’t exclude his being a murderer or rapist, it indicated that being a murderer or rapist wasn’t the reason he’d followed me from Clayton Road.

  I waited until I was inside our apartment and had locked the door before I started crying, and though the tears were the result of my humiliating, offensive fear, they soon came to feel, as all tears I cried then did, like a lament for what a mess I’d made of my life by breaking up with Ben and leaving Chicago. Still bawling, I went and woke up Vi, and after I’d described to her what had just happened, she laughed, which actually did make me feel better; also, she didn’t say that if I’d lived in Little Rock during desegregation, I was the kind of person who’d have spit at the black students as they tried to enter the high school.

  The next week, while I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror blow-drying my hair, Vi pushed open the door and sat on the edge of the tub. She’d hostessed the night before, and she usually went out with her co-workers after the restaurant closed. Even this late, around noon, her face retained the pale, doughy look of having just awakened, and I could smell smoke coming off her.

  “I decided what we should do,” she said. “We should take belly dancing.”

  I had turned off the blow-dryer when she entered the bathroom, but I turned it back on.

  “There’s this place in the Loop that has classes.” She was yelling cheerfully over the roar of air. “We’ll get out of the apartment, and I heard it burns a lot of calories. Which is counterintuitive, isn’t it, because what if your belly goes away?” I bent my head forward and turned it to the side, still blow-drying, and she said, “Just promise you’ll think about it.”

  She walked away, but when I’d finished and was putting the blow-dryer in the drawer under the sink, she returned and stood in the threshold of the door. “By the way,” she said, and she was smirking, “I met your scary black man. He’s a resident in radiology at Barnes.”

  We never took belly-dancing lessons, but that New Year’s Eve, Vi convinced me to go with her to a dinner party Nancy was hosting to welcome the new millennium, or to welcome it prematurely, depending on your viewpoint—Vi and Patrick bickered over this, and I found the debate too boring to form an opinion. I was more interested in whether the Y2K problem would make utilities fail and planes crash, but when I was reading an article about it one evening, Vi said, “That Y2K stuff is bullshit. My meditation group was talking about it, and we’ve all gotten messages that the transition will be peaceful.”

  On Christmas Eve, the day before the anniversary of my mother’s death, I had worked at Mrs. Abbott’s, and for Christmas, my father had come over to our apartment. I’d bought a precooked ham from Schnucks that I served with mashed potatoes, green beans, and crescent rolls—Vi had said she’d help me make the sides, then hadn’t—and for dessert we ate pumpkin pie, also from Schnucks. My father gave us Starbucks gift cards for twenty-five dollars each, and the modesty of the present—it was what you’d give your mailman, I thought—made me feel embarrassed for him, even though there was nothing else I’d hoped for. Then, thank God, Christmas was finished.

  Nancy lived in Tower Grove, and on New Year’s Eve, there were about fifteen of us at two tables set up in her dining room and living room. She turned out to be a great cook, and it was the best meal I’d had since moving back to St. Louis: figs wrapped in bacon, and olives with blue cheese, rosemary garlic lamb, warm spinach salad, popovers, and a chocolate torte. Nancy had set out place cards, and Vi and I were at different tables; I was next to a guy named Maxwell who looked to be in his late thirties. He was pudgy, with a dark, full mustache and beard, and he wore a burgundy guayabera shirt embroidered with white birds, which I heard myself compliment him on when I took my seat, less because I actually liked the shirt than because I’d noticed it. Also, I’d already had three glasses of wine. After we finished the main course, by which time I’d had a fourth glass, he reached out, pressed his fingertips to my cheeks, and said, “You have an amazingly symmetrical face.” I was drunk enough that this didn’t entirely put me off. I said, “You should see my sister.” He laughed and said, “I have.”

  This was when Nancy tapped a fork against her wineglass and said, “Attention, everyone. It’s time for the Burning Bowl Ceremony.” On small pieces of paper that were being passed around, Nancy explained, we would all write something negative in our life that we wanted to leave behind in the old millennium. Then we’d put the pieces of paper in a large tan ceramic bowl, which she held up, and we’d light them on fire. The spirit of the universe would receive our requests, release us from the forces that had been holding us back, and allow us to have new beginnings. As Nancy spoke, I tried to catch Vi’s eye, but
my sister wouldn’t look at me.

  I waited for a slip of paper to make its way to me; then, because there were fewer pens than guests, I waited for Maxwell to finish using his. I saw him write SEXUALLY INSATIABLE in all caps, and I couldn’t help wondering if this was for my benefit.

  And yet, after he’d given me the pen, I felt what I’d felt almost seven years before, making wishes under the Arch with Vi on our high school graduation night: that to be sincere in this moment was a bit silly, but to be insincere was to waste an opportunity. For a full minute, I wrote nothing. When Nancy came by, collecting everyone’s scraps, I scribbled, in tiny letters, Mom guilt. Then I folded the paper in half and handed it off.

  A discussion started about whether to burn the paper inside, where it might set off the smoke alarm, or outside, where it was ten degrees. I went to stand with Vi, Patrick, and Patrick’s lawyer boyfriend and murmured to Vi, “I thought Nancy was one of your restaurant friends, not one of your meditation friends.”

  “She’s both.” Vi was reading my face, trying to gauge my mood, and she said, “They’re not going to howl at the moon. After this, Nancy wants people to play Charades.”

  “I wrote something,” I said.

  “Good. You get a gold star.”

  “Is Nancy trying to set me up with that guy Maxwell?”