Sistering

by Jennifer Quist

  Heather is waiting with me, tapping one finger against her own forehead, like a cranky metronome. She arrives on time for everything and exercises her right to get mad when anyone else is late.

  Satisfying Heather is not why Suzanne arrived early today. I wasn’t surprised to see her coming through the doors of our showroom while I was still busy signing off on today’s shipment. Suzanne’s Mary Poppins mother-in-law is arriving at her house this afternoon. She might be there already, for all I know. I’m decent enough to nod and hum along when Suzanne raves about how great it is to have her visiting. But if you ask me, one uptight perfectionist in a home is already too many. I have no idea how May and Suzanne function when there’re two of them under the same roof, even if it is for just a few days.

  Heather stops tapping when Meaghan finally arrives, closing my office door without looking up from her phone.

  “Okay, this is all very dramatic, Ashley,” Heather begins, scratching at the crown of her head. The part in her hair is dusted with heavy, white powder. It’d be kind of gross if I didn’t know she’s been sanding drywall over her head all morning. She left a project unfinished in order to be here. Maybe I shouldn’t blame her for being impatient with all of this.

  I can never make sense of the lifestyles of part-timers. It must be one of Heather’s days off from the funeral home. The girl abhors relaxing. When she’s home, she’s renovating—ripping up carpet, refinishing cabinets, crawling around in the rafters stringing electrical wire like the son Dad never had, or something dumb like that.

  Meaghan is still minding nothing but the screen in her palm. “Let’s get going. I’ve got to be at work in half an hour,” she says.

  While Heather is shooting preservatives into people who are dead, and Suzanne is dripping IV fluids into people who aren’t quite dead, and Tina is gestating babies who aren’t quite alive, Meaghan is sticking labels onto prescription bottles in the back of a drugstore. She’s a pharmacist’s assistant though she’s smart enough to be a pharmacist. Don’t worry. I’m not about to go off on the tragedy of unfulfilled potential. I never went to university either, and I’m pretty sure I’m doing just fine without it. Meaghan’s job is nothing worse than boring, and not everyone finds boredom unpleasant. It’s exactly what some people want.

  “Well, I’m sorry to bother everyone,” I begin, not sorry, “but I don’t know what to do about something—something big, something about Tina and Martin.”

  “Okay,” Suzanne says, rushing through the pause I tried to create.

  I know this is weird, meeting to talk about Tina’s husband. It’s weird for me too. Most of the time, none of us thinks about Martin when he’s not standing right in front of us.

  “Okay,” I repeat. “You guys remember the restaurant where we had Tina’s baby shower lunch, right?’

  Everyone’s nodding.

  “Well, we’ve got a contract there doing some brick work on this new wood-fired oven they have in the kitchen. So Durk’s been down at the restaurant every day this week. And on Thursday,” I pause again to look at each of their faces. Meaghan has gone back to watching her phone. “Meaghan.”

  “Sorry.”

  “On Thursday, Martin came to the restaurant for lunch with a pretty woman, just the two of them. They were eating at that really private table—the one set up inside the big old elevator car, away from everything else.”

  Heather rolls her eyes. “Well, it’s not the best judgment. But it’s still classic Martin behaviour.”

  “So did Durk go over and say ‘hi’ to them?” Suzanne asks.

  She sounds so innocent and reasonable all the time. It can really bug me.

  “No. He says he was going to but then he got creeped out after he saw Martin kiss this lady—right on the mouth.”

  This time the pause is theirs, not mine. None of my sisters wants to ask the next inevitable question. There isn’t a way to ask it without being offensive and risking escalating this into one of those sister meetings where everyone ends up crying. No one wants to ask me, “Is Durk sure that’s what he saw?”

  The fact is, my Durk has a history of—I don’t know—having ideas come into his head when he’s smoking up, taking them way too seriously, and coming down on the delusional end of reality. I know the girls still remember the Thanksgiving when Durk announced to their husbands that he’d dated every one of the sisters in our family before settling on me as the best one.

  “The best one for me, bros. That’s all I mean. They’re all fine ladies.”

  It would have been a big problem if it was true, especially since Heather was already mother to two of Ewan’s babies and Meaghan was still in junior high school when I first met Durk and brought him home. Everyone knows to act like he never said it.

  Fine: so they tend to reserve judgment when it comes to Durk’s stories. Uncorroborated eyewitness statements, Ewan and his police would call them. I know it and there’s a little bit of me that hates my sisters for it. Then there’s another bit of me that might hate Durk for it. And the worst part of all is the one that hates myself for it.

  It’s up to careful Suzanne to find the smoothest path out of this. And she would have if Heather hadn’t started talking first.

  “Someone saw Martin kissing a strange woman,” Heather restates. “I hate to say it, Ash, but, ‘So what?’ We’ve all been kissed by Martin. Give him a glass of wine and we can hardly walk past him without him trying to kiss us. It’s a high society thing. Kissing is their normal, accepted greeting ritual. Right?”

  Meaghan agrees, bobbing her head, talking in some loud onomatopoeia. “Mwah, mwah. And sometimes, mmmwah!”

  It’s rough but it works. I can be crestfallen without being furious. “Okay, maybe,” I say, “but who is this lady? She’s not one of Martin’s sisters-in-law.”

  “She could be anybody,” Meaghan says. “Martin is well-known in the city. He gets around. I’ve seen it too. He knows and he paws everyone downtown: waitresses, janitors, lawyers, fellow CEOs, everyone.”

  This is also true. No one else is particularly spooked by Tina’s husband’s smoochy lunch in the elevator car with the unknown pretty woman. In a way, I get it. They would be concerned if it was anyone else’s husband, but this is Martin. His money-driven moral code is kind of experimental, based mostly on trial and error and whether Tina throws a fit. He’s like a corporation wrapped up in a human body and an Armani suit. And while I’m pretty sure he knows people generally don’t like full-on adultery, the murky grey areas of what makes a terrible husband must be confusing for him. A secluded lunch for two, complete with casual kissing, might not mean to Martin what it would mean to other men.

  Still, I can’t leave this alone. If I go back to Durk and tell him the girls don’t really care what he saw in the restaurant’s elevator car, it will stand between them—between my husband and my sisters. And I can’t have that.

  Heather couldn’t sigh any louder. “What is it you want us to do, Ashley? Spy on Martin ourselves? Play stake-out? Follow him around snapping pictures?”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  Meaghan is shaking her head, reaching for her phone again. “Creepy.”

  “Yeah, it’s too much,” Suzanne agrees. “What else could we do?”

  I’m standing up. “Nothing. We’ll do nothing. We’ll just sit here and let Martin fool around until he gives Tina some disease.”

  “Ah, for crying out loud,” Heather interrupts. “If we stalk Martin we could wind up charged with criminal harassment.”

  “What? Following people is a crime?”

  Heather rakes her fingers through her own hair and a tiny squall of white dust snows from her scalp onto the floor of my office. “It can be a crime. Ewan told me about it the time that freaky old lady whose son was charged with manslaughter followed us all around the grocery store.”

  The meeting’s crisis is drying up a
nd shrinking away from me. I fall into my seat. The wheeled chair creaks and rolls backward, into the wall. Something about the sound of it makes me want to cry. I can still see Durk through the window. He’s finished with the forklift and he’s using his hands to stack loose bricks into a perfect cube. He could toss them into a box and be done with it but he doesn’t. He needs to see the bricks aligned, squared, set in order not as a reflection of an inner peace he has but as a wish for an inner peace I’m not sure he can ever have. I don’t know. But any hope of finding real peace for Durk is impossible without me—without all of us.

  I don’t need to explain it to my sisters.

  “Ash, honey,” Suzanne says to me, “Troy’s clinic is downtown, close to Martin’s building. I’m in that neighbourhood just about every day. I can keep an eye on Martin without harassing him, okay? We all can. Tell Durk we’ll be paying closer attention from now on. Go ahead and tell him we’re worried about Tina too.”

  Her offer is patronizing—painful, but typical. At this end of the birth order, I’m used to slinking away with consolations. I can accept them as the tokens of love my sisters mean them to be.

  Meaghan

  [6]

  “Marie-Reine.”

  That’s Riker, talking to me, standing behind me. I’ve come to his store again to blast and roll my way through video games identical to the ones Ian and I have at home.

  “Marie-Reine.” He says it again. I guess this is how he begins conversations: with an announcement—short, without context, left suspended for someone to pick it up.

  “What? Queen Mary?” I say. Like just about everyone in Canada, I know enough cereal box French to make clunky, literal translations all by myself.

  “No, just Marie-Reine. That’s the name of the fifth-born of the Dionne quintuplets. She’d be your quint avatar.”

  “Ya don’t say.”

  I haven’t bothered to wear my gym costume tonight. I’m here in my usual geek-bunny wear—irony from head to toe. Ian says this T-shirt is too small, but I’m wearing it anyway. It has the words “Frickin’ Repent” written across the chest and is completely awesome. There’s a pair of skinny jeans flexed over my curves, and I’ve got army green canvas ballet flats on my otherwise bare feet.

  Believe me, I tried not to come here tonight. I even delayed it with a round of phone calls to my sisters. The only one available to talk was Suzanne. And frankly, Suzanne and I don’t speak well on the phone. The call was desperate and we both knew it.

  “So have you ever read The Importance of Being Earnest?” I asked Suzanne.

  “Wha? No, I guess not.”

  “I just finished it. I liked it.”

  She hummed an answer.

  “Yeah,” I went on, “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone named Ernest in real life.”

  “At your age? Probably not,” she agreed. It’s the kind of dead-end reply Mum would make when trying to end a call.

  Now, at the store, Riker is the person struggling to chat with me. Somehow, he knows to talk about the sister already on my mind. He’s asking after Suzanne. “The sister I saw you driving away from the coffee shop with the other night—the second-born—she’d be called Annette back in Quintland.”

  I nod. “Cool. We call her Suzanne.”

  “Suzanne. Yeah.” He waits for three beats and goes back to the beginning. “They say Marie-Reine was special among her sisters because the whorl in her hair spun clockwise when everyone else’s went counter-clockwise.”

  I smirk at the screen. “So you’ve got the Dionne quints’ Wikipedia page memorized?”

  “Uh—sure, among other things.”

  “I’m touched.” But I still won’t turn around.

  Riker starts all over with a new non-sequitur. “Cremated.”

  My thumb slams against the pause button. “Cremated?”

  “Yeah. We had my mother cremated, after she died. You—you said you wanted to know.”

  “Cremated? Wow. My sister Heather cremated her mother-in-law. I mean, she paid a funeral home to cremate her mother-in-law,” I clarify. “That was before Heather could actually do it herself. Now that she works in a funeral home, she’ll cremate anyone’s mother or father or kids or lonely neighbours.”

  Riker raises his eyebrows. “Seriously? Which sister is Heather?”

  “She’s the oldest.”

  He rubs his beard, as if this is important. “Heather, firstborn—in Quintland she’d be called Yvonne.”

  I snort. “Yvonne Dionne?”

  He almost laughs. “Yeah, yeah it rhymes. It’s a showbiz name, remember? She’s the firstborn quintuplet, the headliner.”

  “Hey, can we go for coffee yet?”

  He looks at the wall clock, the one shaped like a red, pixelated mushroom. “Now? It’s still fifteen minutes until nine.”

  “Come on, Riker.”

  He ducks his head. “How can I refuse Marie-Reine? No one ever says no to Queen Mary.”

  I scoff because everyone—everyone—says no to me.

  As I turn to tell him this, I see something through the plate glass window that makes me throw the game controller into Riker’s chest. He doesn’t catch projectiles easily and fumbles the controller between his hands before he gets hold of it.

  “Is he coming in?” I hiss. I’m an idiot, raising my arm to hide my face.

  “Is who coming in?” Riker is gaping around the empty store as if he’s never been here before.

  “Ian. My Ian.”

  Riker looks through the window, into the street. “You mean the guy in the purple shirt, on the sidewalk?”

  “Yes.”

  Outside the store, Ian is extending his arm, reaching for the handle of the door.

  “Yep. He’s coming in.”

  I swear at my shoes as bells ring over the front door. Ian steps inside, scanning the shelves of games. He isn’t looking at Riker and hasn’t seen me, hunched and cringing, standing behind him.

  Riker calls out a greeting. “Hey, there. You looking for something in particular?”

  Ian laughs at himself. “Yeah, actually. I’m looking for a gift, for my girlfriend.”

  “Your girlfriend likes video games?”

  Ian finally makes eye contact with Riker, smirking. “Yeah. How cool is that?”

  I am totally stupid. “Hey, honey,” I say, stepping into Ian’s view.

  “Meaghan, what’re you doing here?”

  “Same as you. Getting a game.”

  Ian takes my hand. “Okay, here’s what I’m thinking,” he says. “Instead of you having to go out in the dark and the cold to the gym every night until the wedding, we could get one of those games that—you know—kind of tricks us into standing up and getting a good workout right at home.”

  He sounds like an infomercial. All I say is, “Yeah, great.” I look at Riker like I don’t know him. “You got anything like that?”

  “Something dance-y?” Ian adds.

  Riker is playing the obsequious salesman. It’s masochism, and it’s sadism too. He’ll have manners so good, so self-effacing, so smarmy we will both be made miserable.

  He claps his hands once. “Of course. Right over here, sir.” He leads us to the rear wall of the store, the area farthest from the cash register. It’s the sports section, the place least in need of surveillance because it’s stocked with the kind of inventory video game consumers will be least tempted to steal.

  Ian is talking to me as we follow Riker between the shelves. “I was pretty sure you were getting sick of me copying eighteenth century love poems onto the fly-leafs of books of old poetry and passing them off as gifts. You’re always saying the Romantics need to get over themselves, so—”

  I make a faint protest, blushing.

  “Sorry, Babe,” Ian goes on. “It’s just that I was raised to think girls were suppose
d to like that kind of sweet stuff, and it’s a hard habit to break. But, well, who can blame you for rejecting my dumb, old-fashioned ideas about gendered artistic preferences, right?”

  Riker claps again. “And here we are. These dance games are quite popular and so much fun you won’t know you’re exercising,” he says, quoting from the script of Ian’s infomercial. He picks out a game that uses some form of the word “hot” five times on its packaging.

  Ian takes it. “Awesome.”

  When the transaction is over, and Riker has slid the game into a plastic bag with one final humiliating flourish, Ian dismisses him, the way any customer would, and turns to me. “You still shopping, Babe?”

  I’m nodding. “Yeah, actually. I haven’t found anything for my nephew’s birthday yet.”

  “Really? Which nephew?” Ian asks.

  The question grates. I probably roll my eyes as I snap, “One of Tina’s kids. I’m not exactly sure which one, okay. I’ll figure it out when we get to the party next weekend. They all love video games, so it doesn’t matter.”

  “Wow, already? I can’t believe it’s time for another one of those kids to have a birthday.”

  “Well, it is.” I’m scowling. “Ian, I’ll be home in a little while. Just go. I’ll meet you there.”

  Ian goes. He always goes—no questioning, no sulking, just going.

  The door closes behind him. Riker is standing at the counter, mute, nearly motionless, like scenery. He moves, bouncing the palm of his hand against the countertop. “Meaghan, you had me thinking your boyfriend was some kind of hyper-critical control-freak jerk.”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  He steps from behind the cash register, jostling past me, moving toward the door. “He lets you play all the video games you want. He uses poetry to kiss up to you, not to put you down. And he obediently trots off home as soon as you tell him to leave.”