My hand had stopped midair with my fork halfway to my mouth. I wasn’t sure what my next move should be: go on eating, or lock myself in the bathroom, claiming diarrhea. If there is one thing that will get you out of almost anything in life, it’s diarrhea. I mean, who wants to risk finding out you’re lying?
“Babe,” Eddie said, his eyes had gone dark, “get over here.”
Oops. It was too late to claim the diarrhea defense. It’s been my experience that it only works if you plan ahead for it. If, on the other hand, you try to just announce it spur of the moment, no one ever listens to you.
I set my fork down, obeyed. And maybe, I thought, it’d be good. Even when things were really bad, in its own way it was always also kind of good.
Eddie spread his arms wide over the back of the couch behind him and thrust upward with his hips, his cock clearly straining against the fly of his jeans.
“Take care of me, babe,” he said, his voice husky with wanting, but it was more of a command than a plea.
I knew it was safer to obey than to resist. And anyway, I didn’t really want to resist. Seeing Eddie like that had me feeling pretty horny too.
I undid the button of his jeans and then the zipper, tugging and tugging until I had them down around his ankles; Eddie never wore underwear, so whenever he wore the jeans that were slightly worn through in the back, you’d get a little glimpse of butt cheek peeking out at you. It was definitely a good rock-star look.
My hand was around the width of him, and I’d already started licking when the thought occurred to me: If I brought Eddie off like this, how would we ever make a baby tonight?
I dropped his cock like it was some utensil from the kitchen I was temporarily putting aside.
“What the fuck, Cin?” Eddie said, half rising. The jeans around his ankles made the move less threatening than it might have otherwise been. “Don’t stop now.”
“I’m not stopping,” I said, kicking off my boots and sliding out of my own jeans and panties. I didn’t even bother removing my top and bra, not wanting to waste time during which Eddie’s cock might lose its momentum. If Eddie wanted them off, he could take them off once I was securely astride him. Then I smiled, letting my hair fall against his face as I spread my thighs around him. “I’m not stopping at all. I’m just flipping over the tape.”
Eddie was like a rounded-off brick moving inside me. It would’ve been nice to have been just a tad bit wetter first but experience told me my body would get accustomed.
His words came out between thrusts like they were keeping their own beat. “I…just…can’t…believe…all…those…idiots…on…TV.”
“I know, baby, I know,” I said, riding him for all I was worth, praying he’d come soon so I could start making that baby.
At the bookstore that night, Diana and Lise had wondered why I wanted a baby right now. These days, they said, if given the choice most women waited till they were older than I was. Not wanting to be rude, I didn’t point out that they’d both waited so long, they were almost at the point of too old. But I did tell them the truth about myself: how I’d never had anything that was my own, how with a job I hated and a sister I worried about I was hoping to have just one tiny person in the world who I could love and take care of. If I waited till the time was right, I’d probably wait forever. And, anyway, I’d told them, I loved Eddie so much, I knew I’d never love another man like I loved him, so why not make a baby with him now?
“I…love…you,” he panted, thrusting harder now.
When Eddie spoke to me like that, when he looked at me with that wide smile of his that could have charmed the pants off any groupie, when he looked deep into me like it was only me he loved and only me he ever would love, I felt like the luckiest girl in the world. Eddie’s face looked so beautiful, framed as it was by my hair falling all around it like a curtain. “I love you t—”
“Fuck,” Eddie said when the phone rang.
“Let it ring,” I said. “If it’s important they’ll call back later.”
“Yeah, but what if it’s Joe? Joe was supposed to call me about that gig this weekend.” Eddie reached for the phone on the small table by the couch, even as he kept thrusting up into me. “Yo?” A pause. “No, she’s busy right now. Who is this?” Pause. “Sure, I’ll tell her.” He hung up, thrust some more.
I stopped riding. “Who was that?” I asked.
“Someone named Lise. Said it was some kind of emergency.” He shrugged, and then grabbed my ass tight with both his hands as though trying to jump-start me. “Come on.”
But I was off him like a light, running bare-assed to my satchel where I found the crumpled sheet of paper on which I’d written all the other women’s numbers; Diana’d had them from when all of us first called her. After that odd night at the bookstore, I’d never expected to talk to any of them again. They were older than I was; what did we have in common? But for some reason I’d taken all their numbers down and never thrown out the sheet of paper. I punched in Lise’s number, all the while Eddie was shouting in the background, “What the fuck?”
“Shh, shh,” I begged. “Please. Just give me one second.”
Lise answered on the first ring. “Cindy?” she said. Well, I thought, I guess everyone except us has caller ID these days.
“What’s wrong?” I said. “What’s the emergency?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, sounding a bit embarrassed. “I guess it’s not exactly an emergency. It’s just that Diana had that gastric bypass surgery, you know, the one that’s supposed to make people lose lots of weight immediately.”
“What?”
“I know, I know. But she wanted to do it. I guess that thing Sylvia said to her about just losing weight put the idea in her head. She realized she’d tried almost everything before, but never surgery. She thought it was going to be easier than having a tooth pulled. But I just came from visiting her in the hospital. I guess it was a lot harder than she thought. She’s in a really bad way. Anyway,” and here she coughed, like a stranger who has just gotten too personal with you and now thinks maybe they’ve gone too far, “I just thought you might want to know. It’s just that she doesn’t really know anyone else here but us. She’s all alone in the hospital, and if we don’t visit her—”
“Of course I want to know. Thank you…”
Then I heard a sound that wasn’t coming from the phone, wasn’t coming from Lise. I looked up in time to see Eddie shake the jeans off from his ankles, something like a growl coming out of him as he kicked the jeans away.
I only had enough time to say, “Thank you so much for calling” and “I’ll look in on her tomorrow,” before Eddie was on me.
Sylvia
After I’d walked out of the bookstore that night, I’d been so angry I hadn’t been able to see straight. The nerve of those women, thinking they had problems!
First there was that Diana, whose sister might sound like a bit of a jerk, but at least she was still alive. And hey, if she was a jerk, at least she was doing it from far, far away.
Then there was Lise, whose sister was also far away, but who sounded pretty nice to me, except for the whole competition thing. But wasn’t that Lise’s fault more than the sister’s, for allowing herself to get jealous of someone she obviously loved so much, for not being as brave as her sister in truly going after what she wanted out of life?
Finally, there was Cindy. True, her situation did strike even me as sad, having a druggie/depressed person for a sister. But here’s the thing: Her sister was still alive. So no matter how bad Cindy might think things were right then, there was still time to set it right. And that was the same thing with all of those women: their sisters were still alive, while mine was…mine was…
My sister, Minnie, was my twin, just five minutes younger than me. We used to joke that, because of our huge age discrepancy, I was sure to die first.
Whenever I looked at Minnie, it was like looking in the mirror.
We lived together all our lives:
growing up, then in college, finally in the little two-bedroom condo I still lived in. Neither of us ever got married. Neither of us ever had kids. When people would ask us how we could stand to be around each other so much, Minnie would always say, “We’re just like those Delaney Sisters. You know, the ones who wrote those books? Except we’re fifty years younger and we’re not black and neither of us is a dentist; we’re accountants instead. But other than that? It’s exactly the same.”
Minnie always did the talking for both of us. Me, believe it or not, I was the quiet one, the shy one, at least by comparison.
But then Minnie got breast cancer last year, and she started forcing me to come out of my shell. And oh had I come out! It was like all the nasty things I used to only think in my head suddenly came flying out of my mouth without thought. Or maybe it was that, with Minnie dying and then dead, I didn’t care what the world thought anymore. Life was short; I’d say whatever I wanted to.
“I won’t be around to stick up for you forever,” Minnie’d said one day when I was sitting next to her, holding her hand while they gave her the chemo. “You always said you wanted to run your own catering business, that as much fun as it was making Thanksgiving dinner for just me, what a thrill it would be to have total strangers paying for your cooking.”
So Minnie took out her life’s savings, helped me open Sylvia’s Supper, helped me hang up the hand-painted sign over the front door, and helped me set everything up just perfect.
And then she died.
• • •
I stood in the doorway of the back entrance to Sylvia’s Supper. It was near to closing time, but I figured I’d give it another fifteen minutes to see if any last-minute stragglers, maybe needing an immediate dinner, would stop in. I had one arm wrapped tightly around my waist in a vain attempt to keep warm, the other hand holding a cigarette as I stared up at the stars of the late February night sky.
I know, I know. I shouldn’t have been smoking. Funny thing was, right after Minnie died, I started up again. I’d been without a cigarette for twenty years, we both had, but no sooner did Minnie go in the ground from cancer than I realized the thing I was missing in my life most, besides her, was a smoke.
But I should have quit. If I hadn’t quit again before, I should have quit after what I’d found that morning. While doing a routine breast exam in the shower, I’d found something: a lump. It was my biggest fear in life—that the awful way Minnie went was the way I was going to go too, because we were twins—and it was coming true.
Of course I hadn’t made an appointment with the doctor. Why go, only to get told the obvious? And I knew I wouldn’t be strong enough to go through what Minnie had: the chemo, the cutting, all for nothing, all for just a few more months of pain. Of course I’d wanted her with me a little longer, even just another day. I’d wanted her with me forever. But not like that. Not in so much pain.
Minnie was so brave. And I knew that, whatever else I might have been in this life, I was no brave soldier. I’d just let things run their course on their own. If I were lucky, maybe I’d just die in my sleep.
“If that’s your attitude, then why did you ever come here anyway?” Diana had called after me, that night last month at the bookstore.
I knew I’d made it hard on the other three women, coming in there with my crossed-arms attitude as if to say, “Entertain me. Convert me. I dare you.” But so what?
“Because,” I could have told her when she called out to me, “I loved my sister more than anyone else in the world, and I miss loving someone that much. I want someone to be close to again. Even if we’re just meeting to talk about books or to ‘help each other become our best selves’ like you said in your ad in the newsletter, I need other human beings to be close to again.”
But I couldn’t say that. I couldn’t say that to those women who were strangers.
Crap. The phone was ringing. And I hadn’t even finished my cigarette yet.
I tossed the cigarette on the pavement, ground out the business end with my toe, made sure all the sparks were out, and then went back inside.
“Sylvia’s Supper,” I answered the phone.
“Um, Sylvia?” The voice was gnawingly familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. It had that stuttering quality to it, but without an actual stutter, as though the speaker wasn’t confident she had the right to interrupt.
“Yes, this is Sylvia,” I said patiently. “I make supper.”
Well, I thought it was funny.
“This is Cindy,” the voice said, gaining in strength, “Cindy Cox. We met at the bookstore a couple of weeks ago?”
And of course I knew who she was then, even if she hadn’t added the part about the bookstore.
“What—” I started to say, but she cut me off.
“I hope you’re satisfied.”
“Excuse me?”
“We all took your advice,” she said. “I’m trying to get pregnant, I’m pretty sure Lise is writing a book—”
“Lise is writing a book?”
“That’s not the worst part. Actually, come to think of it, that’s not bad at all.”
“So what’s the worst part?” I asked, not sure I really wanted to know.
“It’s Diana.” I heard an intake of breath. “She took your advice to just lose weight, and it’s all gone just horribly, horribly wrong. She had that gastric bypass surgery—”
“I never told her to do that!” I was more than willing to take responsibility for my own sins. But I was not willing to take responsibility for someone else’s idiocy.
“Does it really matter what your exact words were?” she said. “You said something to Diana, she heard what you said in a different way than you said it, and now this has happened.”
“This? What’s the this?”
“Never mind that now. Diana’s back home. Lise and I are meeting there tomorrow night, and I decided you’d better be there too. After all, you started this.”
“Whoa! Hey, just because you all made some choices to do some things, you can’t put the responsibility off on me.”
But she didn’t respond to my outrage. Instead, she was rattling off Diana’s address. And, not knowing why I was even obeying this annoying little twit, I was scrambling for a pen so I could get the address down before I forgot it.
“Just be there,” she said, hanging up.
I’ll say this for Cindy Cox: she sure knew how to get other people to do things.
Four Women
Recommended Reading:
Diana: In Her Shoes, Jennifer Weiner
Lise: Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg
Cindy: Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas, James Patterson
Sylvia: Talk Before Sleep, Elizabeth Berg
• • •
“What ever possessed you to do such a stupid thing?” Sylvia asked.
Diana was lying propped up by down pillows, on the gold-and-white couch in the large living room off the cathedral-ceiling foyer. She shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Lise had been the first to arrive, bearing a tray of finger foods: spinach in phyllo pastry, mini quiches, and a few blander options selected with Diana in mind. “I figured you probably couldn’t get up to do any cooking yourself,” she’d said, placing the tray down on the marble-top table in front of the couch.
Cindy, walking in next, a cab having dropped her off, looked around stunned, as though she’d just stepped into an old episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. “I bought a chocolate cream pie,” she’d said. “I got it at Stop & Shop.” She shrugged, looking embarrassed at her offering when compared to the grand surroundings she found herself in. The pie pan with its clear plastic dome still had the black-and-white label with its UPC on it. “Mom always says never to go anywhere empty-handed.”
Sylvia had come in last, late, carrying a large pot.
“Aren’t you the one who said,” Diana had laughed, “that people who are late should be tarred and feathered?”
“I don’t recall those as being my exact words,” Sylvia had grumbled. Then she’d surveyed the selection of food lined up on the table. “What’s all this?” she’d said.
On Cindy’s face was the look of someone who suspected she’d done something wrong, even if she wasn’t quite sure what that something was. “Lise and I were trying to do a good thing,” she’d said defensively. “We figured she couldn’t do any cooking.”
Diana had neglected to point out that she was wealthy enough to order in anything she liked or to hire the best caterers to cook something for her. The truth was, food was not Diana’s favorite topic at the moment, not when the mere ingestion of any of her old favorites—rich, fatty foods like spinach phyllo and chocolate cream pie—sent her running, as best she could in her postsurgical condition, for the bathroom.
“Diana can’t eat things like that!” Sylvia had snorted. “What are you two trying to do—kill her?”
“Hey,” Lise said defensively, indicating the blander options, “I did at least bring other healthy choices.”
Sylvia ignored her, lifting the lid off the pot she was holding and letting the aroma of Jewish penicillin fill the air. “It’s why I was late,” she muttered under her breath. “I figured you could use something easy on the stomach but with lots of vitamins in it, so I brewed up a pot at the last minute.”
Diana looked at the other woman. “I’m touched,” she said gently. “I can’t believe you took the time—”
“Well, don’t let it get to your head,” Sylvia cut her off. “It’s just soup.”
Lise had taken her tray and Cindy’s aluminum plate off the table and then located the kitchen, big enough to run a catering business from, where she deposited the offending items on the counter before rooting around in the unfamiliar cabinets and drawers until she found four Chinese soup bowls and matching soup spoons. If Diana couldn’t eat rich foods, none of them would.
The Sisters Club Page 6