Sisterland

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “I think you’re being way too hard on yourself.”

  Hank half-smiled. “I’m sure you do.” He took a sip of beer. “When Courtney was interviewing at Wash U, a friend of ours who’d done his postdoc at Mizzou told us Missouri is the northernmost southern state.”

  “And the southernmost northern state,” I said. “And the easternmost western state, and the westernmost eastern state.”

  “But it was the southern part that got my attention—I was picturing good old boys waving Confederate flags.”

  I said nothing; I did sometimes see Confederate flags, mostly in the form of bumper stickers.

  Hank said, “What happened after Wash U offered Courtney the job was almost the opposite. People were overly excited to find out I’m black. I’d been teaching at a prep school in Boston, but when Courtney put out feelers about whether Wash U could help me find a job here, the two schools I was interested in said they didn’t need an art teacher. They’d meet with me for an informational interview, but they weren’t hiring. So Courtney and I make a trip out anyway, I go to the schools, and from the minute I introduce myself, they’re falling all over themselves, and what do you know? It turns out they do need another art teacher. Both schools! It was like they’d never met a black man who knew how to hold a paintbrush.”

  “But you took one of the jobs, didn’t you?”

  “I did, and my co-workers were nice, for the most part. There wasn’t an admissions tour in my three years there that didn’t stop in my classroom, but they were nice.”

  “For what this is worth,” I said, “that Target security guard doesn’t represent everyone in St. Louis.”

  “Granted. But no matter how many liberal professors we know, there are certain realities. And then I think about Amelia, and were we selfish to have her? Like, ‘Yeah, the world is a fucked-up, racist place, but let’s make our little half-black, half-white baby anyway because we’re in love and she’ll be so cute!’ ”

  “I think every parent wonders some version of that,” I said. “I definitely wonder what I’ve saddled Owen and Rosie with.”

  “Maybe Courtney was right,” Hank said. “Maybe being biracial and retarded would have been too much for one kid.”

  “That wasn’t her reasoning, was it?”

  Hank shrugged.

  “You know how earlier you asked if I’d ever had premonitions?” I said. “Well, I lied. Vi and I started out exactly the same, when we were little, but as we got older, I decided being psychic was creepy and embarrassing. Before I met Jeremy, I was sure I wouldn’t have biological children because I was afraid they’d be psychic, too. I wanted to be a mother, but I was planning to adopt.”

  “Holy shit,” Hank said.

  “I’m barely psychic anymore,” I said. “Although today, when it was raining in the morning, I knew Vi was wrong about the earthquake. I just knew.”

  “And have your kids shown signs of ESP? I guess Owen wouldn’t yet, but has Rosie?”

  I shook my head. “And now I can’t imagine my life without them. But sometimes I feel like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

  “I can’t believe you’ve been holding out on me all this time.” Hank gave me a mischievous look.

  “I’m telling you that I’m fourth-rate now. At best. Please don’t put your hand behind your back and ask how many fingers you’re holding up.”

  “Oh, I’m planning to exploit you for far bigger gain. Investments I should make on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and that kind of thing.” Then he said, “I know you feel really burned by Vi right now, but she completely looks up to you. You realize that, don’t you?”

  “Vi thinks I’m a shallow, boring housewife.” I laughed. “And she’s right.”

  “We all need someone in our lives to keep us honest.” Then he said, “That’s not really how you see yourself, is it? Because you have everything going for you: your happy marriage and your cute kids, and you’re all nice and pretty—” There was a weird way his voice caught on nice and again on pretty, like he was preemptively making fun of his own sincerity. Even so, these were by far the most generous things anyone had said to me in a long time. Jeremy and I were too tired to give each other compliments.

  Simultaneously, I felt the impulse to point out the reasons Hank was wrong—and really, he of all people knew how messy our lives were, how narrow and repetitive our days—and the impulse to bask in this version of myself, to pretend that everything he said was true.

  “You forgot organized,” I said. “How well-organized I am and what a tidy housekeeper and that’s why there are never any mice in our kitchen.”

  We looked at each other, and he said, “If I kissed you right now, it would probably be a really bad idea, huh?”

  This was the final opportunity to avoid the evening’s outcome. Deflecting his overture would be awkward, but surmountably so. We wouldn’t have transgressed in any explicit way.

  And so I did the opposite of deflecting: I lunged forward, I pressed my mouth against his, and we were kissing in a way Jeremy and I hardly kissed anymore—it was like Hank and I were trying to consume each other. Again I wondered, had we been waiting all along to do this? The idea that because he was a straight man and I was a straight woman, there would therefore be sexual tension between us seemed so clichéd that it had never been difficult for me to dismiss.

  And then I wasn’t wondering anything; his hands were all over me and my hands were all over him, and there was that good smell Hank had, like cloves and soap, a smell that I’d always been faintly aware of and now felt drugged by. Jeremy did not, of course, exist in this moment (if he existed, how could I have done what I was doing?), yet even so I was conscious of Hank as Not Jeremy: Hank’s torso was bigger, his shoulders were broader, his biceps harder. I had not held a man other than Jeremy for seven years; to me, sex meant sex with Jeremy. But here was a reminder that the narrowness of my life, the repetition of my habits, were choices I made.

  We’d shifted so his back was against the arm of the couch, his legs out in front of him, and I was on his lap, and without much difficulty Hank managed to get his hand past the waistband of my jeans, into my underwear, and to touch me in a way that made me twist and moan above him, a way that made it seem extremely urgent that I unfasten his pants and pull them off, past his knees, that I then pull off his briefs—so Hank wore briefs; they were gray Calvin Klein—and I held his erection (again, in a fleeting not-thinking way, I did note that, consistent with the racial stereotype, his penis was larger than Jeremy’s, though not dramatically so) and with my thumb I rubbed the exposed underside of the tip, this rubbing motion being something my husband who didn’t exist liked, and something Hank apparently did, too, and then I guided Hank into me; I was slick and he glided right in.

  He stayed inside me as he moved into an upright sitting position with his back to the couch cushions, as if he were watching television. And in fact the television was still on, but instead of following The Tonight Show, we were naked from the waist down, grinding against each other, both of us breathing quickly, and he was pushing up my shirt, pulling down the cups of my bra without bothering to unfasten them, and rubbing his face between my breasts, sucking my nipples, which was something I hadn’t let Jeremy do since I’d given birth to Rosie, because it was too confusing to have my nipples in the mouth of more than one person. But with Hank—and I was wearing one of my usual threadbare nursing bras, and it was possible that I’d start leaking milk—I didn’t care. Hank’s tongue on my nipples was the least confusing part of what was happening, but I didn’t care about any of it. I just needed him to keep jamming up into me, I needed to feel his warm skin under my hands, his solid body, which offered a comfort I had been unable to find elsewhere for the last several weeks. And then the good feeling tipped over and spread, I was shuddering with it, and when I moaned, he bounced me against him faster, gripping my hips, and a minute passed, and another minute, another minute after that, and he was still going. First, enough time
elapsed for the woozy glow inside me to dissipate. Then I began to wonder how long it would be until he finished—was this intentional on his part, or was there a problem. Or neither; was he just not efficient but didn’t see a need to be? And then I was officially waiting for him to be done, and then, perhaps seven minutes after I’d come, I heard from the other room a clacking sound, a single snap, and I knew immediately that the mouse had been caught. This was the moment when Jeremy reentered my consciousness, and I understood that I had betrayed him in an irreversible way.

  Because if a mousetrap had snapped while Jeremy and I were going at it, we’d have started laughing. Or at least we’d have acknowledged it, whereas with Hank, as well as I knew him in other contexts, he was sexually a stranger to me. Had he even heard the mousetrap? If he hadn’t, I wasn’t about to bring it to his attention and thereby risk prolonging the conclusion of this act. (Later, there would be opportunity to wonder why I hadn’t done exactly this. Or not prolonged the conclusion but prevented it. But in the moment, the idea of not allowing Hank as much time as he needed would have struck me as bad manners, like clearing the plates at a dinner party while your guests were in the middle of their meal.)

  After an endless stretch in which I had traveled across continents of disbelief and regret, over forests and fields and rivers, and he was still thrusting away under me, finally, finally, he sighed deeply—his eyes were closed—and stopped moving. He tilted his head back against the cushions, and his hands remained at my hips, though it seemed to be because he hadn’t gotten around to moving them rather than because he was actively placing them there. My head was above his, and I felt an uncertainty about what to do next that was as complete as the comfort I’d derived from him such a short time before. What words would either of us now say? In what way was I to extricate my body from his? And surely I was the one who had to start the extrication, wasn’t I, since I was on top? The moment when he’d open his eyes would be terrifying, I thought; if there were a way to permanently avoid it, I would.

  And then he did open them. He opened his eyes and raised his head and smiled wryly, and it was the same smile he’d exchanged with me the week before at the Oak Knoll playground when Amelia had thrown not one but two apples into a muddy puddle, as if he were saying, What can you do? He patted my side in a friendly way that also, clearly, meant Get up.

  I swung my left leg over his lap and turned until I was also sitting on the couch—I was bare-assed on the couch where Rosie and I read about the adventures of Frog and Toad—and I leaned forward to retrieve my underwear and jeans from the floor. In my peripheral vision, I could see that he, too, was pulling his clothes back on, and I heard him zip his pants.

  He tapped me on the arm, and I turned my head.

  “Hi,” he said. Again, his expression—it wasn’t one of intense amusement, but it wasn’t unamused, either. It wasn’t horrified. He said, “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said.

  I felt another way I hadn’t for years, which was that I didn’t want to be the girl who was lame after sex. Who took it, for whatever reason, too seriously. This seems odd in retrospect, given that I might have just wrecked my marriage and that surely wrecking one’s marriage was grounds for seriousness.

  Hank stood. “I’m gonna pee,” he said.

  This time, I just nodded.

  I could hear him in our downstairs bathroom, and I had no idea what to do with myself. Go to the upstairs bathroom and wipe away the semen leaking into my underwear? Throw away the dead mouse in the kitchen? Check on my children?

  The toilet flushed, the faucet ran, and he came back into the living room and said, “So I should get Amelia home to sleep in her own bed.”

  Yes, this was exactly what needed to happen—they needed to leave. Which did not preclude me from feeling a sting of rejection at the hastiness of his departure. How was it possible to know already that this had been a mistake and still to be as sensitive to his every inflection as if we were dating?

  As I stood, I said, “Let me get the leftover Chinese for you.”

  “Nah, you keep it. Rosie was going to town on the broccoli, huh?” We were both quiet for a second, and he said, “I’ll say goodbye to you now, because who knows what state Amelia will be in when I bring her down.” He stepped forward and set his palms against both sides of my jaw and kissed me on the lips, quickly but fully. In a strange way, this moment brought me back to him. My jangled, seething brain was busy thinking, I would never leave Jeremy for Hank; I could never even have an affair with Hank, because he takes so long to come. But when he kissed me, it was so much the gesture of a husband that I could, however briefly and misguidedly, imagine being his wife. Also, this time, the taste of his mouth was familiar.

  While he was getting Amelia, I gathered their jackets and Amelia’s pink backpack. He carried her down the stairs, and as far as I could tell, she was still asleep. As I let them out the door, he whispered—he said it not the way a single guy does to a single woman but the regular way he’d said it to me hundreds of times before, for playdate-scheduling purposes—“I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”

  The first thing I did when they were gone was go into the bathroom myself, but sitting on the toilet, I was so churned up I couldn’t pee. What—what—had I done? What had I been thinking? How could such a ruinous act be so easy? Its nonoccurrence up to this point hadn’t required restraint, so it seemed as if, conversely, there ought to have been more effort involved in its occurrence. And what now? Should I tell Jeremy? If so, while he was still in Denver? No, not while he was away. Definitely not. But whatever had happened between Hank and me was finished, I thought. It had to be. And then, having resolved something, I was able to pee. When I wiped, Hank’s semen coated the toilet paper.

  After I’d washed my hands, I dried them on an orange hand towel, which was one of two Halloween-themed towels Rosie and I had picked out the year before at Target; the orange one was embroidered with a little spider, and the other was purple with an orange pumpkin on it. As I dried my hands, I experienced the first bout of nostalgia—there would be many—for the person I had been before this evening, the person who’d bought these silly towels, who hadn’t cheated on her husband. The person who had felt guilty when she hid The Berenstain Bears Go to Camp because she was sick of reading it to Rosie or when she forgot to put sunscreen on Rosie and Owen before leaving for the playground. In the past, those had been the kinds of sins I committed against my family.

  In the kitchen, while averting my eyes as much as possible, I slid the poor dead mouse in the trap into a plastic bag; I walked out the back door, deposited the bag in the garbage bin, and washed my hands again at the kitchen sink. Then I filled a glass with tap water and gulped it down. It was somehow reassuring that I’d already cleaned up from dinner; it was one less way that my life was squalid.

  Back in the living room, I changed the channel from NBC to CNN. It was eleven twenty-three. Was there any point in watching the final half hour of a nonevent? I’d shower before bed, I decided, then return downstairs to hear them officially say on TV that nothing had happened.

  I carried both monitors up to the bathroom and had just pulled back the shower curtain when the doorbell rang. I looked at my own face in the mirror, as if for guidance, and the bell rang again. Who would it be at almost midnight? Had Jeremy decided to come home after all? And Jesus, what if he’d arrived an hour earlier? But no, Jeremy would have a key. My father? It seemed doubtful. Marisa Mazarelli, attempting once more to pry her romantic future out of me? But she was traveling, too. The likeliest possibilities had to be Hank or some reporter who wanted to interview me in the moment of my sister’s prediction not coming to pass. Either way, to ignore the doorbell would keep me from getting in the shower out of worry that whoever had rung was still lurking.

  I had failed to consider one person, and when I peered through the window at the top of the door, even though the glass was beveled and the porch light was off, I recognized her
immediately. I opened the door and said, “Hi, Vi.”

  She held up both hands, as if in surrender. “Just me—no paparazzi. Although I swear I understand now how Jennifer Aniston feels.” I let her in, and as she shrugged off her cape and tossed it toward the living room couch, she said, “Is Jeremy asleep?”

  “He’s out of town.”

  “He left you here to hold down the homestead while he fled for higher ground?”

  “He’s at a conference in Denver that was planned way before all this.”

  “That makes more sense. I mean, I couldn’t imagine he ever believed me.” She sounded nonchalant, not bitter, as she added, “Which means that now he gets to say I told you so. I just wish Courtney Wheeling the self-righteous prune didn’t get to say it, too.”

  Courtney. So focused on my betrayal of Jeremy had I been that I hadn’t yet considered her. And though she wasn’t my favorite person, she was—she had been—a friend. Really, what had I done? What was my justification? That the past few weeks had been stressful or that Jeremy had let me down by going to Denver? These were not adequate, as justifications went. I pointed to the TV and said, “Aren’t you supposed to be at the vigil?”

  “The whole vibe was bugging me, so I said I had to go to the bathroom and snuck out the back. I could tell that when midnight came, they were going to offer me condolences like someone had died while secretly gloating.” She added, “I thought I’d feel humiliated, I know I’m supposed to feel humiliated, but I really and truly feel relieved. I had a nightmare this week of, like, this falling-down church with dead bodies in front of it, and it was so gruesome. And maybe it was just some slum in Nigeria or somewhere like that. Maybe it was the country I was supposed to go to for the Peace Corps, and not even an earthquake but normal life. Matt Lauer interviewed me again this morning—”