Sistering

by Jennifer Quist

  I shrug. “Nowhere special. But for taking a slam on your deceased mother so gracefully, you’ve earned a coffee, on me. Let me buy it for you. I won’t make you talk to me anymore if you don’t want to. If it’s more civilized, we can just sit and text each other.”

  He laughs with his voice this time, but he’s still hesitating.

  I jab my left hand into his face, though I’m still not wearing my diamond. “I’m engaged. Remember? I’m safe. You won’t end up having to date me or anything. And even if I hadn’t been a jerk about your mother, I’d still owe you something for letting me loiter in your store all week.”

  He reaches under the counter to shut off all the television screens from one central switch. The geek-boys grumble but don’t make much of a complaint when their games power down. No matter what they say online, most geeks have a dark, secret love for unilateral authority.

  I get the video game store clerk to jaywalk across the avenue to a boutique coffee shop, the kind staffed by girls Tina calls my clones. She’s silly. The coffee-girls don’t look exactly like me. But they might look more like my twins than any of my real sisters ever will.

  Unlike me, my coffee-clones can draw animal shapes with creamer on the tops of lattes. Tonight, my coffee animal looks like a llama. The video game store clerk, who says his name is Riker, has a brontosaurus floating in his cup.

  I’m pretending to be Heather again, all deathly business, when I ask, “So how did you handle your mom’s remains? Burial or cremation?”

  He ducks like he’s about to hide inside his cup.

  I sit back in my tiny squeaking bistro chair. “Sorry, Riker. That was too much, wasn’t it?”

  He wipes his beard dry. “No, it’s only natural you’re curious.”

  I shake my ponytail. “Okay, forget the burial. Tell me how she died.”

  Riker coughs into the crook of his elbow. “Heart attack.”

  “Right.” I’m nodding. “Where was she when she—you know?”

  “Where was my mom when she died?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Uh, in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. But she never made it.”

  I let out my breath, relieved. I am the girl who can’t stop hating what happened to Heather the morning her mother-in-law died. I am the girl who can’t stand the grim grey cast that’s dimmed my sister’s life ever since that moment, whether it now comes with a pay cheque or not. An ambulance—that’s a proper, professional place to die.

  “So how old was she?”

  Riker swallows. “She was old for someone with her kind of heart condition.”

  I wrinkle my nose. “My mom is old. She was almost forty when I was born.”

  He makes an eager leap at the change in subject. “Wow. Why’d she wait so long to have kids? I thought people didn’t do that back then.”

  I dip my fingertip into the latte-llama’s long, creamy back. “She didn’t wait. My oldest sister was born when Mum was in her twenties—perfectly normal reproductive schedule. But then it took them a while to reach me in the birth order. I am a failed boy, the last in a long line of failed boys, the youngest of five sisters.”

  Riker jolts in his seat. “Hey, just like the Dionne quintuplets.”

  “Huh?”

  “The Dionne sisters, from Quintland. You know—those five baby girls the government took away from their parents and made into a museum exhibit way back in the Depression era.”

  I start to nod again. This time it’s like I’m Ashley and I’m cool and sweet enough to humour arcane dork-lore. “Yeah, okay. That’s sure some obscure Canadian history trivia you got there.”

  Riker’s face blanches for just an instant. He runs his hands through his beard as the colour returns beneath it. “Oh, come on. The Dionne quints! There was a documentary about them on the CBC a few years ago. They must have aired it five or six times by now. You know.”

  I shrug. “We have cable.”

  He whips his phone from the tabletop. “Look, I’ll show you. Here.” He’s beckoning me closer, where I can see the screen. “One summer, more tourists came to see the quints than Niagara Falls. Look at the picture. That’s not their dad in the back. It’s some politician and those five babies in the front are quintuplet sisters. No fertility drugs, no in vitro technology, just a natural wonder.”

  I lean away from him. “A wonder, like my family.”

  “Exactly.”

  I smirk. “Exactly. Except we aren’t multiple-borns. We came one at a time over the space of twelve years. And we are not now, nor have we ever been, part of a government sponsored freak show.”

  “Freak show? What? No, the quints were a national treasure, a sign of hope and growth during an economic cataclysm, an inspiration.”

  I’m laughing. “Making them even less like my sisters and me.”

  Riker sets his phone back on the table. “Still, five girls in a row—that’s got to be unlikely.”

  I’ve heard it before. “Not really. In theory, every time a baby is conceived there’s a fifty-fifty chance it will be born a girl. You wanna read up on the gambler’s fallacy.”

  “Sure, it may be so in theory. But—”

  “But here I am, a girl.” I stand up. “And here I go.”

  I need to get home. The company Ian works for is installing new printers tomorrow, and he has to get there early. He’ll go to bed moping if he doesn’t see me again tonight. His job is running around an office tower calming down furious executives who mess up their computers. Most tech-support staff aren’t happy in their jobs. There’s nothing anyone can do about that. But Ian has more to be disappointed with than most, weighed down by a languishing degree in Romantic English poetry. That’s his first education, the one he got before the computer training that actually pays his bills and funds his natty pastel wardrobe.

  “Anyone ever tell you you’re not like other English majors?” I ask Riker as he stands to leave the café with me, “As far as I can tell, all Ian uses his degree for now is keeping people like me in our place.”

  Here in Edmonton, at this point in the spring, it’s cold as winter once the sun starts to set. Out in the street, I’m clutching my thin hoodie around myself, twisting my face into that betrayed snarl people get when they’ve underestimated the weather.

  And then she sees me. Suzanne can’t help but spot me through the windshield of her minivan as she drives past me in the street. I’m standing here in the turquoise yoga pants she doesn’t believe I should ever wear out in public. That’s Suzanne—and Troy too—preoccupied with the loveliness of everyone. It’s innocent enough—some kind of scar tissue she’s grown over the fact that everyone’s always said Ashley is the pretty one. What kind of an idiot would say a thing like that? All kinds, apparently.

  I must have some faint scarring, too. The thought of Ashley’s supreme prettiness and Suzanne’s supreme fussiness makes me bow my head and frown at my turquoise legs. Ashley is the only one of us who wears yoga pants to do yoga, out on her back lawn in the sunshine with yogi-thin Durk, his shirt off, neither of them wavering a millimetre as their kids teeter in and out of poses all around them.

  I’ve heard Ashley say, “I’m sorry, but until people actually work out, all they’ve got are faux-ga pants.”

  The funny thing is, once Suzanne is paired with Troy, her pretty trophy husband, she gets prettier herself. As a couple, they add up to something more beautiful than the sum of their parts. They’re like an old YouTube video of Donny and Marie Osmond—a Flowers-in-the-Attic version of Donny and Marie where they double up their matching DNA and spawn a bunch of gorgeous, eerily similar kids.

  Suzanne must be leaving Troy’s clinic after dry-mopping the laminate floors and refilling the paper dispensers afterhours. She’s heading to the suburbs as I’m beginning to make my way back to Ian.

  “Hey, Honey-girl,” she calls, her m
inivan rolling alongside the curb, stopping in a tow-away zone. Through the open window, Riker and I can hear Joy Division playing on her car stereo, though, if you ask me, it’s still too early in the day for it. “Hop in,” she tells me.

  At the sight and sound of our Suzanne, Riker takes a step that’s more like a stagger backwards. I must be panicking slightly too, pitching my half-full paper coffee cup into a waste bin.

  Over her car stereo’s relentless bass-line, I’m not sure Suzanne hears me telling Riker, “This is quint number two.”

  She waves at him anyway, and the light in Riker’s face changes, brightens. He’s backing away, nodding so deeply he’s nearly bowing, as if he’s been blessed. He turns to leave and I join Suzanne in her van.

  “What’s with the gloomy tunes?” I ask her.

  She steers into traffic as I slam her van’s door. “Gloomy?”

  “Gloomy. Listen to him, singing like that.”

  “What? He’s okay. He’s just thoughtful.”

  I turn toward her. “Hey, maybe something deep and troubled from your subconscious made you pick this sad music today. What is it, Suze? What’s your darkest latent fear right at this minute?”

  Suzanne gasps—loud and dramatic, like she’s a voice in a radio play. “It’s my mother-in-law. Today this song is about May. She’s heading back to Central America, and I always get so worried and sad when she goes.”

  How boring is that—boring and unlikely. Even with the gasp, Suzanne has failed to convince me. She mentioned May not because she’s sad about the big trip, but because she loves talking about her mother-in-law—a lot. It’s like she’s obsessed with her and she wants all of us to keep thinking about May too. Strangely enough, it works. At any time, my sisters and I can converse fluently about May’s business, even though we’ve seen her in real life less than half a dozen times—once at the wedding and once for each time Suzanne had a baby.

  And I can’t tell if it’s messed up for Suzanne to be this way or not. Maybe every woman who has a mother-in-law is obsessed with her. For all I know, the obsession could go both ways. I mean, May might go around slipping Suzanne’s name into conversations until everyone May knows feels like Suzanne is their own daughter-in-law.

  Maybe someday I’ll have to do it too. I’ll learn to obsess over Ian’s mom.

  “So who’s the beard?” Suzanne asks right when I’ve gone back to thinking about Ian.

  I turn off her music and groan into my seatbelt. “Some guy from the video game store over there. I just said something totally offensive to him and I was trying to smooth it over with some coffee.”

  Suzanne is laughing before she’s heard the rest of my explanation. It’s not her exaggerated actress laugh. It’s a real one that lilts, sweet and a little delighted, like she thinks I’m still made of apple sauce and warm milk and my mistakes are all tiny and adorable. “Oh no, Sweetie. What did you say to him?”

  I groan one more time. “I was channelling Heather or something and I made some lame mama’s boy joke only to find out his mother is actually dead.”

  “Well, that’s an honest mistake. At his age, he’s got to be used to people assuming his mom is still around.” It’s a comically short car-ride down the avenue, and Suzanne is already parking underneath the awning of the big yellow high-rise where I live with Ian. “So is the video game store guy feeling okay now?”

  “Hope so.” My fingers are on the lever of the door handle, but I’m not letting myself out onto the sidewalk. I want to know something—something about Suzanne and her mother-in-law. It might be important. Of course, I can’t just demand, “Hey, Suzanne, what’s with your obsession with Troy’s mom? Is that normal? Is that mandatory?”

  No way. If you ask me, anyone who says she can talk to her sisters about anything must have a stinking, oozing, pus-crusted scab of a relationship with them. Talking about everything is stupid. It’s rude. What some people like to spin as the virtue of honesty is really the vice of carelessness—thoughtlessness. What they’re really saying is, “I can’t be bothered to be discerning about what I force you to lug around in your head and heart.”

  People in decent relationships know to keep their mouths shut sometimes—not that it works to hide much. The kindness, the mercy, is in the lack of telling, not the lack of knowing. Being close means soaking up and leaking out far more information than anyone would purposely know or make known. It’s like my sisters and I are all sponges sopping in a single bucket. We’ve each got our own edges and pores, but we’re squeezing out and sucking in the same mucky water.

  Look at me, sitting next to Suzanne, thinking in metaphors—thinking like she does because it might be the best way to try to understand.

  Instead of blurting whatever I want to ask about her mother-in-law, I turn to Suzanne in the front seat of her minivan and say, “Isn’t it weird? Whoever that beard guy marries, she won’t have a mother-in-law. She’ll be like Heather and Tina and Ashley.”

  Suzanne clucks. “What a shame, huh?”

  “Sure, but still. That guy’s future wife—no mother-in-law.”

  “I guess.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” I’m opening the door.

  Suzanne leans forward, YouTube Marie Osmond’s thick, dark hair draping over the steering wheel. She’s calling to me as I step onto the sidewalk. “Hey,” she says, “don’t forget to introduce Ian to your new orphan-friend.”

  Once more, I let her door bang shut.

  Tina

  [3]

  It was the screaming that woke me up. This time, it wasn’t the baby screaming. He is capable of waking me up, but by baby number six, newborn crying is just funny, kind of pathetic, a nice try.

  No, this time the screams in the night were mine.

  I gave up reading pregnancy manuals when I realized I had the experience to write one of my own. Know what I’d include in my personal pregnancy manual? Something I’ve never read anywhere else. I’d write a section about the nightmares—those secret postpartum bad dreams. I can’t remember exactly what I was dreaming when I woke up tonight. All I know is near the end of it I dreamed I sat up in bed screaming. And then I really was sitting up in bed screaming. Postpartum nightmares: no one writes anything to prepare us for those.

  My dear Martin is out of town on business tonight. Yes, somehow he tore himself away from the bed where I bleed and sweat and come and go all night. He says if the new baby refuses to sleep unless he’s in full sunlight, I should hire a night-nanny. Night-nanny—is that even a thing?

  No, I’ll stay up with the cute little cry-hole myself. I’ll sit here with the lights off, fantasizing about propping a bottle in his mouth, desperate enough to lie down and take my chances with the nightmares. I’ll keep sending menacing texts to Martin’s five-star-hotel room in downtown Toronto, chronicling all of this in real time. And he’ll keep responding with ridiculous non-solutions that all amount to writing another cheque.

  The baby’s not so bad—for a baby. I’ve had worse. So did my mother, the lady who must be the biggest bottle-propper there ever was. Frankly, I think my sisters are way too hard on Mum. None of them is raising a big family, not like me or Mum. I know better than any of us what she was up against—what she is up against. I may have one more baby than Mum but she didn’t have a nanny for a single minute of the time she was caring for us, day or night—not even a lazy, dirty nanny like mine.

  And that’s not the only disadvantage Mum had. I don’t know how she managed it, but she lived through her entire childrearing mess without sisters.

  Yes, I’m still in the postpartum sappy phase. Symptoms include this crazy tenderness I’ve got for my sisters right now. Don’t dismiss my feelings as hormonal chemical reactions. I’m still a person, not a physiology demonstration. And listen to how that kind of dismissal sounds. It’s like saying a bullet isn’t valid if it’s propelled by a nuclear reaction instead of the us
ual flash of gunpowder. It’s still a real bullet. It’ll still tear right through anyone. In the end, it doesn’t matter what sent it flying. My feelings are just like that.

  I sit here in the dark, shaking off nightmares, remembering my old life when I lived with my sisters, getting choked up over stuff I haven’t thought about since the last time I was late night baby-meat. Who knows—if I didn’t have my sisters, I might be mad at Mum. Whatever else she’s done, Mum kept on giving me sisters.

  It’s not like Mum doesn’t have a sister of her own. She does. But it’s not the same for them as it is for us. We’ve never seen much of Mum’s sister, our Aunt Beryl. She lives in British Columbia, on the other side of the Rocky Mountains, in the same weird old house where she and Mum were kids together. It’s a house penned in by trees, too far from the coast for a glimpse of the ocean, but near enough that people who know the ocean well can say they’re able to smell it from the yard. The house was our grandmother’s before she died. Even though she’s gone, the building still feels like an old person. Underneath the basement stairs the floor is dirt. There’s a tiny milk door cut into the back wall. And the attic isn’t just a hatch on the ceiling that no one ever opens but a real room with stairs and stuff stowed and forgotten in it like a room in a book, where the real story begins.

  Once, when Dad’s old job sent him to a convention in Bermuda for a whole week, Mum brought us to stay at Aunt Beryl’s house so she wouldn’t have to lock us in the car and roll it down the ravine into the river. During the days, Aunt Beryl kept us busy and outdoors. We pulled dandelions out of the lawn, shelled fresh peas, foraged for blackberries. When it was hot and muggy, we’d lie under cedar trees that wouldn’t survive the winters back home, watching Heather and Suzanne learning to crochet doll dresses that would’ve been pretty slutty on real girls.

  Ashley and I were so young we weren’t considered human enough for crochet. And Meaghan, she was waiting, off in that place where the rest of us will go to wait for her someday when she’s still alive here after our time has run out—assuming, as we always have, that’s how all of this works.