Sisterland

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “That’s what she gets for being a snoop,” Jeremy said. I had walked from the door back to the couch, where he was still sitting, and he pulled me onto his lap. “You know what her punishment is for tormenting you way back when?” he said.

  I looked at him.

  He said, “Her punishment is being her.”

  But then things unraveled between Jeremy and me; they unraveled the next morning. Rosie refused to eat the oatmeal Jeremy had fixed, and she was still at the table when I came downstairs. When I entered the kitchen, she said, “Rosie gets up with Mama.”

  “She’s had about two bites,” Jeremy said. Owen was on the kitchen floor banging a spatula against the linoleum squares.

  I took a seat beside Rosie and, after much wheedling, got her to eat half the bowl; I was the one holding the spoon, which I was fairly sure I shouldn’t still have been doing for an almost-three-year-old. Then I wolfed down a banana, washed my hands, and when I reached for the Neosporin, which I’d been keeping on top of the refrigerator, Rosie screamed, “No medicine! No Rosie medicine!”

  “It helps keep your boo-boo clean. Mama will just put on a little.”

  “No medicine!”

  She was twisting away, pushing at me when I tried to get closer, and I said to Jeremy, “Can you hold her arms?” This was how we’d done it the night before.

  He did, and I gripped her chin with one hand and dabbed on the antibiotic while she continued to flail her head. When I finished, she was sobbing. I lifted her from her booster seat, and she clung to me as I carried her into the living room. Jeremy followed us with Owen, and after he’d set Owen on the floor by the shelf, Jeremy said, “Okay if I go pack?”

  “Hold on.” I hadn’t planned to say it; I just did. “I don’t want you to go to Denver.”

  Jeremy’s expression was sympathetic. “I know you don’t.”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, please don’t go. Fine if you never believed I’m psychic, but”—here my words turned into sobs—“but I need you to stay. I need you here.”

  “What’s Mama saying?” Rosie said, and I sniffed and blinked, trying to straighten out my crumpled face.

  “We’re talking about Daddy’s job,” I said.

  Jeremy perched on the arm of the chair and said, “Let’s break this down. What are your specific concerns? Because I think we can work around them.”

  “My concern is that we have two young children, and I’m worried about their safety.”

  “No, I know you are. And let’s face it, it’s challenging enough to take care of them on a good day with both of us here. But what if we get your dad to come in for a couple hours each morning, Kendra comes in a couple hours at night—or you could have your dad sleep here, give him our bed, and you sleep downstairs, if you just want another adult in the house.”

  “Jeremy, I want you here! You’re my husband.” I was probably terrifying Rosie, and possibly Owen, too. I said, “My dad would be a burden as much as a help, and you know it. He’ll give Owen pennies to play with.”

  Jeremy looked genuinely pained. “This whole situation sucks,” he said. “Don’t think that I don’t realize how hard it’s been for you.” At some point in graduate school or as a new professor, had Jeremy been required to take a seminar on negotiating? Because that’s what it felt like, like he was very diplomatically preparing me not to get what I wanted from him. And sure enough, he added, “But I can’t skip this conference just because we have young kids.”

  “I don’t see why not,” I said. “I did quit my job to take care of them.”

  His expression became incrementally less sympathetic. “Voluntarily,” he said.

  “Because I thought it was in the best interest of our family.”

  “Well, I guarantee that putting my job at risk isn’t in our family’s best interest.”

  “Give me a break, Jeremy. Even if you didn’t have tenure, skipping one conference would not be putting your job at risk. And everyone knows conferences are mostly schmoozing in the hotel bar.”

  Jeremy’s jaw had tightened. “Which can have a direct effect on things like what journals you get published in. It’s all interconnected.”

  At this moment, I became aware of the smell of shit—actual shit, not conversational bullshit—and I said to Rosie, whom I was still holding, “Is that you?” I pulled back the waistbands of her pants and diaper, and it was her. I said to Jeremy, “I know you think I don’t understand the intricacies of academia, but either you’ll fly to Denver today or you won’t. What I’m telling you is that I really, really, really don’t want you to.”

  “Will the locks be changed when I come back?” He smiled a little.

  “I’m glad you find this funny.” And yet I was starkly aware that I had nothing with which to threaten him. How and when had I arrived at this point of powerlessness in my marriage? Short of invoking divorce, which even in my current mood I recognized as insane, what leverage did I have? There was my anger, yes, but Jeremy was making it clear that he could tolerate that just fine.

  Rosie and I were halfway up the stairs when he said, in a voice that contained no humor at all, “You know what, Kate? A part of me doesn’t want to go, either. And you know what else? If I cancel at the last minute, and if there’s any hint that I did it because of your sister’s prediction, then I might as well leave Wash U. I’ll lose all credibility in the scientific community.”

  I stopped on a step, shifting Rosie against my hip. “Is that what this is about? Your professional pride?” Wasn’t part of Jeremy being Jeremy that petty gossip didn’t bother him? It bothered me, but not him.

  He said, “Remember when you asked if people know that Vi is my sister-in-law? Well, they do. And I’ve tried to protect you from this, but, yeah, it is awkward. Because as much as the media treats this as a complex issue with two viewpoints—maybe it’s possible to predict earthquakes, maybe it’s not—there’s nobody, nobody, who’s a scientist who thinks anything other than that Vi’s premonition is a total sham. If I don’t go to Denver, everyone I know will be talking about me. I need to show that I’m still myself, nothing has changed, and the coincidence of me being related to Vi is just that—a coincidence.”

  So I did, in the end, embarrass Jeremy; instead of him lifting me toward a happier, more financially secure, less freakish existence, I’d pulled him down with me. This was heartbreaking; it elicited my sympathy in a way no other argument he’d made for traveling to Denver had. But I still didn’t want him to go.

  “So how about this?” he said. “I’ll have my phone on me all the time, and when I see that it’s you, I’ll stop whatever I’m doing to answer, even if I’m in the middle of delivering my own paper.”

  “Jeremy, it doesn’t matter if you take your phone with you,” I said. “What will you be able to do from a thousand miles away?”

  He didn’t go to campus that day but left for the airport when the children went down for their afternoon naps; as if to rub salt in my wounds, he gave a ride to Courtney, who was on the same flight out he was, though she was returning to St. Louis a day earlier than Jeremy. I’d been sorting laundry on the dining room table when he came to say goodbye after setting his wheeled suitcase by the front door. (A suitcase filled with only the belongings of an adult; because I’d never, since their births, traveled without our children, such a prospect was unthinkable. No diapers or tubes of Desitin, no tiny shirts with butterflies or trucks on them, no copies of Goodnight Moon.)

  Jeremy stood next to me, and I couldn’t look at him.

  “I’m sorry that everything is so screwed up right now,” he said.

  I folded a pair of Rosie’s polka-dotted pants and said nothing.

  “Sweetheart,” Jeremy said.

  I finally looked up.

  “It’ll all be fine,” he said. “Call whenever you want, I’ll be home Sunday, and we’ll put this behind us. Think of what we have to look forward to, like Owen dressed as a carrot.” This was what Rosie had decreed Owen should be
for Halloween, though we didn’t yet have costumes for either of them.

  Jeremy hugged me, and I put my arms around him in return, but loosely. Maybe this wasn’t really the reason why, but it seemed like if I held him tight, it would just make it harder to let him go.

  Chapter 15

  My sister came to the hospital a few hours after Rosie was born, and the first thing Vi said was “She doesn’t look very Chinese.” Then she grinned. “No, she’s adorable. She’s perfect. Did you poop on the table?”

  Jeremy had gone downstairs to the cafeteria, and I was sitting up in bed in a gown, holding Rosie, who was wearing a diaper, a little cap, and a duck-covered blanket that kept slipping off her. At seven pounds even, she was unimaginably tiny—her nose was tiny and her ears were tiny and her arms and legs were tiny and her fingers were tiny and her fingernails were shockingly tiny; her butt had been tiny when I’d watched Jeremy change her diaper as she lay in the plastic bassinette. She had intermittent swirls of hair that was dark like Jeremy’s, and dark blue eyes with creases under them, as if emerging into the world had exhausted her, and there was some sort of womb crust on her forehead that the nurses hadn’t cleaned completely. And also—Vi was right—she was perfect.

  “I pooped, but it’s true what everyone says. I was too out of my mind to care.”

  “I totally knew you were having a baby last night. I was playing pool with Patrick and all of a sudden, I was like, yep, it’s started. I almost called, but I didn’t want to interrupt a contraction.”

  “Well, my water broke at midnight,” I said. “And we came to the hospital around three A.M., and she was born right before eleven.”

  “Wow, you had an easy delivery. Jack’s wife was in labor for thirty-three hours.” Jack was the manager at the Italian restaurant where Vi no longer worked. “Can I hold her?”

  “Will you wash your hands?” I said. “Or use that dispenser on the wall?”

  Vi squirted out some antibacterial gel, rubbed her hands together—for a not entirely satisfying length of time—and extended her arms. “Come to Auntie Vi,” she said.

  “Be careful of her neck,” I said as I eased Rosie toward her.

  “You think I’ve never held a baby before?” Vi scrunched up her nose. “Wait. Have I ever held a baby?” She stood there with Rosie’s head against the inside of her elbow and swayed. “I have the touch,” Vi said. “She just closed her eyes. So did you get an epidural?”

  I shook my head.

  Vi held up her free hand. “High five, girlfriend. I was sure you’d cave and ask for drugs.”

  “You know those golf shoes with spikes on them? I felt like someone was wearing those and jumping on top of my vagina.”

  She laughed. “At least you only had one baby, huh?”

  Her “easy delivery” remark had rubbed me the wrong way, and then the high five had mollified me slightly, and then her remark about expecting me to cave had rubbed me the wrong way again, and then the opportunity to say how painful the delivery had been had mollified me again. The allusion to our own birth was neutral—on the one hand, Vi was minimizing what I’d just been through, but on the other hand, I, too, had been thinking about our mother. Her experience giving birth to us had been a major factor in my wish not to have an epidural.

  I said, “Is it weird we’re giving the baby a flower name? She was going to be Sophie, but I was holding her right after she was born, and I had a change of heart.” Jeremy had been surprised but amenable; he’d actually suggested the name Rosie months earlier and I’d nixed it because it was a flower name.

  Vi looked down at Rosie. “It fits her. And Rosie isn’t as—whatever it is you thought Daisy was. As hippie chick–ish.”

  “You don’t think we should name her Rita, do you?”

  “Because all it would take to undo everything that was messed up about Mom would be to name your child after her? No. You shouldn’t.” Vi was still looking at Rosie as she said, “How weird is it that you have a kid? I always knew you would, but—”

  “I know. It’s surreal.”

  “She didn’t even used to exist and someday she’ll have a favorite color. She’ll eat pancakes. Did Jeremy cut the cord?”

  “He decided to leave it to the professionals.”

  “But he’s a doctor.” Vi said this in the mocking way she sometimes invoked Jeremy’s PhD, though he never identified himself as Dr. Tucker; he had his students call him Professor Tucker. She’d say, Jeremy, feel my pulse. Take my temperature. Oh, wait.

  “I have to show you something,” I said. “Give me Rosie, and go in the bathroom and look in that plastic bag by the sink.”

  After my daughter (my daughter!) was back in my arms, I heard Vi whoop with delight from the bathroom. She reentered my room holding up with both hands a pair of the white mesh underwear a nurse had given me a pack of after the delivery; they were so enormous that they resembled shorts. “These are awesome,” Vi said.

  “I knew you’d appreciate them.”

  “Are you wearing some right now?”

  “And a maxi pad that’s about a foot long.”

  “Can I keep this pair?” Vi was dangling the underwear off the tip of her index finger and twirling them. “Patrick will fucking freak when he sees these.”

  There was a knock on the door, and the nurse who’d started at three o’clock walked into the room. “Baby last nursed at two-thirty, right?” she said to me. “So let’s give it another go. You need any ibuprofen?”

  “Not right now.” They had me breast-feeding every hour, even though my milk hadn’t yet come in and even though no matter what position I maneuvered myself or Rosie into, it didn’t seem like the right one.

  “Will you wait in the hall?” I said to Vi.

  “Wow,” Vi said. “Still a prude, even after childbirth.” She gathered up her purse and the cape she now wore instead of a coat, a fashion choice that had coincided with the ascent of her new career. “I’m going to go find Jeremy so we can smoke cigars. Oh, I almost forgot Rosie’s present.” From the purse, Vi withdrew a small cardboard box. Rosie was nestled against my chest, and I said, “You open it.”

  After Vi had pulled off the tape, she lifted out a layer of white tissue paper and then a small pale blue pear-shaped bottle with a clear crystal stopper. Holding it up, she said proudly, “It’s an antique perfume holder.”

  Of course it was an antique perfume holder; I had to bite my lip to keep from smiling. Two months before, my friend Janet had thrown me a baby shower, for which Jeremy’s mother and sister-in-law had flown to St. Louis and at which I’d had bestowed on me onesies and bibs and stuffed animals, a baby carrier and a mobile and a special trash can just for diapers. Vi had forgotten to show up. It had crossed my mind that she either consciously or subconsciously wasn’t pleased that I was pregnant, but I was fairly sure the shower had just slipped her mind; it was on a Saturday at eleven in the morning, when she wasn’t necessarily awake. Afterward, she’d been determined to make it up to me. A few nights later, Jeremy worked late and she brought over pickles and ice cream, neither of which I was craving, as well as a DVD about natural childbirth that a friend had loaned her. After the first birth, Vi said, “I’m sorry, but that’s the grossest thing I’ve ever seen. Can we watch Project Runway?”

  In the hospital room, the perfume holder caught the dim January light coming in the window.

  “It’s really pretty,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “But wait for the best part.” She turned the bottle around, and I saw that across its widest surface was painted a white-and-pink rose. To the nurse, Vi said, “And I didn’t even know what my sister was naming her baby.”

  “How about that?” said the nurse. “You’re psychic.”

  There was, of course, that blur of early days and nights after we’d brought Rosie home, a tiredness deeper than any I’d ever known, the endless cycle of nursing her and burping her and changing her, of all three of us slipping into a desperate kind of sleep before resumi
ng the cycle. But slowly, a kind of schedule asserted itself; the exhausted confusion cleared. Rosie ate every three hours. Each morning, an hour after nursing her, I sat at the dining room table and pumped milk that I’d then transfer into freezer bags in preparation for when I’d return to my job at the elder-care agency and Rosie would enter day care. I hated the pump, the whirring nipple-yanking tugs that made me not simply feel like a cow but gave me new sympathy for cows themselves, and I forbade Jeremy to enter the room while I used it.

  Rosie began to look back at us when we looked at her, began to smile, began to sleep for longer stretches; she developed a particular affinity for a little stuffed cat and would suck joyfully on its left ear. At twelve weeks, we moved her from a bassinet in our room to her own room, which made me uneasy, but Jeremy reminded me that all the books said moving her would only get harder as she grew older. “For me or for her?” I said, and he said, “Aren’t you guys still kind of the same?” Which he meant as a joke, but it was how I felt—that once Vi and I had been a single person split apart, and now my daughter and I were. With her in the stroller, Rosie and I took long walks north on DeMun and west on Wydown, up and down the fancy streets with the old, big houses and tall trees, and though I purposely didn’t go onto the street where Mrs. Abbott had lived, passing the entrance to it always filled me with gratitude that I was no longer in my twenties and miserable. (In the summer of 2001, I had awakened one morning and known Mrs. Abbott was dead; I waited a week, then found her obituary online. She had been born in Bristol, Connecticut, I learned, and her maiden name had been Spaeth.)

  When Rosie and I drove to Schnucks, in the parking lot I carefully lifted her from her car seat and inserted her into the baby carrier, her chest facing mine because she was still so little. Inside, she’d turn her head to see the apples or cereal boxes. When the other customers or the checkout woman would remark on her cuteness, I’d smile modestly, as if I didn’t secretly consider their compliments insufficient. If she fell asleep on the ride home, I would sit in our driveway with the car in Park and the engine on and the air conditioner running, the ozone layer be damned—this was in April or May—and as I waited for her to awaken, I’d do absolutely nothing because I didn’t yet have a cellphone with Internet access, didn’t want to disturb her by talking on the phone, and usually wouldn’t have remembered to bring along a book in her diaper bag. I’d look in the rearview mirror at the street behind me, the green leaves on a ginkgo tree and the cars passing, and I’d feel not bored or impatient but rather, as I observed her (her car seat faced backward, with her own mirror reflecting her closed eyes and tilted head into my mirror), as if, in watching her sleep, I was making a deposit in the bank account of her well-being. This was how I felt when she nursed, too, when I also wasn’t bored despite the fact that, unlike other mothers I knew, I never read or watched television while doing it. But perhaps it was not the magic of motherhood that I was experiencing in these moments; perhaps I just had a greater capacity for inertia than I’d ever realized.