Sistering

by Jennifer Quist

  Suzanne stands perfectly postured in her stiff, shiny cocktail dress. It’s a more boring show than the neighbours are used to, but it’s a pretty one. Everyone knows Suzanne’s got the best legs of any of us. Still, she’s leaning forward, trying to see her hemline, nervous Ashley might pin it across the widest point of her calves and make her look dumpy.

  I just had a baby. I’d hate to know how Suzanne thinks this dress makes me look.

  Ashley plucks pins out of her mouth, one by one, as Suzanne slowly turns in a circle. “Go put it on, Heather,” Ashley says.

  I shush her again.

  “I will.” Heather’s dress is still zipped into its garment bag, right where it’s been since I tossed it across her lap.

  “Come on,” I cheer. “You can’t look any more seasick in your dress than I do in mine.” I’m frowning at myself in the mirror hanging over our spectacular, custom-built fireplace. We paid Durk a fortune to build it into our living room a few years ago, when their masonry business was new and about to go broke already.

  This sheet of fancy framed glass was expensive enough, and it may have been a solid design choice, but having to look at it all the time does not make me happy. I should have hung that oil painting of a schooner over the mantel, like Mum suggested. I get stuck here at the mirror sometimes, looking at my face in the horrible natural light coming through the window. There are two bloodless scars between my eyes—marks of all the scowling I’ve done. I hate getting shots, but it might be time for some Botox. Maybe I’ll ask Suzanne to come with me. There are always resources set aside in their household budget to be spent on looking fabulous. And someone needs to get her in private and have a talk with her anyways. Something about Suzanne is off. She looks kind of awful lately—awful for Suzanne, I mean. Nobody would notice but us.

  Here’s the scene in my living room. Meaghan is late. Heather, rightly paranoid about the neighbourhood’s armchair voyeurs, is changing into her dress in the bathroom. Suzanne and Ashley have reversed roles, and now Suzanne is on the rug pinning Ashley’s hemline, kneeling on the metal points sticking out of her own dress like it’s mortifying medieval penance. I am standing in front of the mirror, smoothing my forehead with my fingertips.

  Bathroom, table, mirror, rug—that’s how we’re positioned when Meaghan bursts through my front door. Heather hears the noise and trots out of the bathroom, groping for the zipper lost between her shoulder blades. Meaghan skids to a stop on my new hickory flooring and scans the room as if she’s counting us, making sure we’re all present.

  Cue the drama.

  “Stop,” she says. “If we leave the tags on and stop the alterations right now, we might still be able to return the dresses.”

  “You’re going to cancel another wedding? As if, Meaghan.”

  “What? Not again.”

  “Honey, what happened?”

  Heather is talking louder than anyone. “Nothing. Nothing ever happens. I’m sure if we keep calm we can work it out this time.”

  Meaghan takes three steps backward, retreating between the balustrades of the curved stairwell behind her, as if we’ve chased her there. “What is the matter with me? What did you guys do to me?”

  What did we do to Meaghan? No one says a word in our defence. Ashley takes Meaghan by the hand, carefully tugging her down the stairs. “It’s okay, sweetie. Come sit on the couch and tell us what he did.”

  Meaghan won’t hold Ashley’s hand. “Ian? He didn’t do anything. It’s not Ian’s fault I want out of it. Ian is fine.”

  I cluck my tongue. “Then it’s the fault of your new boyfriend—the guy you brought with you to the parking lot the day you showed me and Martin the pictures?”

  Suzanne has seen him too. “The guy with the beard?”

  Ashley has missed this development. She’s squinting. “New boyfriend?”

  “Huh? No,” Meaghan says. “No, this is not about a man—any man.”

  “Then cancelling the wedding is all about you?” I say, because on Mom’s 1980s soap operas, that was the line that usually went along with a dumb declaration like the one Meaghan’s made.

  She raises both of her hands and shakes them at us, the angriest jazz-hands ever. “No. It’s not me either. It’s you. It’s all of you.”

  Heather is bossing. “Meaghan, sit down.”

  “Look at you,” Meaghan says, stepping through the four of us, moving to stand against the fireplace. “Look at all of you in your matching dresses and your matching everything. Don’t any of you realize why I’ve wanted to get married so badly, ever since I was a tiny little girl? It has nothing to do with men. I wanted to get married so I could be one of you. On my own, you keep me outside. You keep me out. I need to find a man so you’ll let me in.”

  Heather reaches behind her own back, finds the pull of her zipper, and lets her dress split apart and fall to the ground, crumpling like a shed green skin at her feet. She’s standing in my living room, in front of us and the neighbours, in her slip—yes, in a slip. Leave it to Heather to be fully dressed even after stripping off her clothes.

  “Oh, so you don’t want us in the matching dresses you ordered anymore?” she says, stepping out of the ring of green fabric, advancing. “Fine. What’s the problem, Meaghan? Is it your birth order? Don’t like being last? Well, try being the one flying off the front of the birth order. Try being the one left to hold the door closed.”

  The last bit doesn’t make sense. Ashley tries to laugh it off. “What?”

  Heather won’t laugh back at her. She waves her bare arm to where Suzanne and Ashley and I stand, our dresses still zipped around our torsos. “There’s the inner three. They’re the core sisters, the real sisters. In every way, I am just as off-centre as you, Meaghan.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “You don’t remember,” Heather continues. It turns out it’s fairly easy for someone wearing nothing but her underwear to keep the floor in a heated discussion. “You don’t remember my university holidays, when instead of hanging out with me, the three of them would take off together with whatever bunch of boys they were into at the time. They’d leave you and me at home. They wouldn’t bother to make excuses for it. They’d just go.”

  It’s ridiculous. “Whatever, Heather. Meaghan was way too young to go out with us,” I say.

  “Hear that?” Heather asks Meaghan. “You were too young. And me—I was just too much.”

  I’ve had enough. I keep my clothes on but I say, “Heather, don’t act like you wanted to hang out with a bunch of high school kids.”

  She shakes her head. “It’s just one example. I spent years on the outside as the only married one, the one with kids—”

  “You didn’t have to. Those were your choices,” I say.

  Meaghan huffs. “Hey, why is this about Heather?”

  “Yeah. What about me?” Ashley says, not laughing anymore. “You guys all went to college after high school. You’re all married to professionals. Sure, you dabble in working, when you feel like it. But you’re all living pretty much as kept women while I work my ass off lifting bricks all day.”

  I snort. “Yes, I agree with Ashley. There is a class distinction in the family—only it’s not her problem. It’s mine.”

  Heather sneers. “You and old-money Martin are unhappy with your class, Tina? Aw, I think I might burst into tears.”

  “Cry your eyes out, Heather. But there is a class distinction here, and it works to keep me isolated. I mean, look at the way you guys won’t come to any of the corporate charity events I work so hard to plan.”

  Ashley throws her head back, laughing again, but uncharacteristically ugly and obnoxious. “You mean, your parties at the Hotel Macdonald? I can just see me and Durk there. Which pair of shoes should Durk wear to your high society charity events, Tina? His steel-toed boots or his fair-trade handwoven flip-flops?”

  T
his might be the very worst kind of sisters’ meeting—the kind where everyone is telling the truth. I hate them when we’re like this. I hate me when we’re like this. I hate the sound of my own voice saying, “Who said anything about high society? They’re my parties and you guys totally boycott them, like it shouldn’t matter to me—like it doesn’t kill me to be left alone in that fussy hotel trying to please all those horrible, horrible people pretending to be Martin’s friends.”

  Meaghan is going back to the beginning. “I’m not talking about being left at home. And it’s not the differences in our schooling or work or class or anything like that. None of you will have thought of this.” Everyone waits while Meaghan takes a breath. “I knew being married wasn’t going to be enough. I wanted to be married the same way all of you are married. I want to be married, but without a mother-in-law.”

  Suzanne groans.

  “Except for Suzanne,” Meaghan hurries to say. “We all know Suzanne is the exception that proves the rule.”

  Suzanne is quiet now, but she looks sick and trapped, cradling her stomach. Something about her reaction is ominous enough to make me feel it in my own gut. Either she’s working up some disgusting, excruciating digestive condition, or something else has gone wrong.

  Now is not the time to ask if Suzanne is okay. Her problems fade into the queue. “Wait. Meaghan, wait,” I say. “The day you and Ashley showed Martin the kissy pictures—I’m sorry, I don’t think I ever explained the rest of it. Martin’s mother isn’t—”

  It’s not the right time for me to mention this either. Meaghan interrupts. “So making sure I didn’t have a mother-in-law meant I couldn’t stay with Ian, a mama’s boy. And then I met Riker—”

  “Oh, Riker,” Heather bawls. “Riker the sci-fi, orphan shop-keeper—that’s your new boyfriend?”

  Meaghan is sniffling now. “No. But he told me the first day I met him that his mother was dead. And I fell for it. And then I let myself get involved with him—emotionally, I mean. I didn’t cheat on Ian, not really.”

  Ashley is handing her a tissue, pushing Meaghan’s hair away from her eyes. “Aw, honey.”

  “Only, you were right, Heather,” Meaghan says. “Riker’s mom isn’t dead. Of course she’s not. He made that up because I said his real life story must be lame and clichéd—which it is. And then I saw her, his mom, someone’s future mother-in-law. I heard her voice. She’s alive.”

  Though she’s right about Riker’s mother, Heather’s only movement toward gloating is a faint shake of her head. I’ll say one thing for her, she takes no pleasure in calling us out. She never does.

  There’s no need for Meaghan to cry. Ashley and I both know it. We’re talking at the same time, cooing like a pair of pigeons. We drape ourselves around Meaghan. Behind us, Heather is stepping back into the closest clothes at hand, her green dress. Suzanne doesn’t move to help her with the zipper.

  “Sweetheart,” Ashley says. “You don’t know this but I do have a mother-in-law. Durk’s bio-mom showed up a few weeks ago. It’s a long, painful story, so we haven’t been talking about it. She’s a total mess. She got herself arrested after crashing her car on the Henday, and now she’s doing a court-ordered stay in a residential addictions recovery programme.”

  I get it. “Rehab?”

  “I guess,” Ashley says. “Durk has been visiting her at the facility. We’ve agreed to let her come to dinner on his birthday, after she gets out.”

  It’s the first I’ve heard of Ashley’s mother-in-law. Heather seems to know all about it. The traffic cops at the car accident must have told Ewan the details. There’s no way Ashley went through that ordeal without mentioning her family connection to Ewan.

  I like stories like the one about Durk and his mom—stories where people give each other chances they don’t deserve. I’ve seen the scars on his hands. In a world that’s fair, Ashley’s mother-in-law shouldn’t get to see Durk ever again. But when it comes to family, what does what we deserve have to do with anything?

  “And,” I’m saying when Ashley’s done, “it turns out I have a mother-in-law too.”

  Meaghan already knows the real connection between Martin and the socialite who died in the Bentley. But she’s made the same mistake I made, assuming Martin’s real mom must be just as dead as his wicked stepmother. When I tell her Martin’s mom is alive, Meaghan trips backward. “So suddenly, both of you have mothers-in-law. And Suzanne still has May, of course.”

  Suzanne drops to sitting on my couch, bending over her churning stomach.

  “So what about you?” Meaghan asks Heather. “How are you going to resurrect your mother-in-law? I was at the funeral after Ewan’s mom died. I saw her urn. I saw Ewan crying and saluting in his fancy police uniform.”

  Heather flicks her Smurfette hair, saunters to the fireplace, pauses. When she stops at the centre of the hearth, she wrenches the big topaz ring from her right hand.

  “I have no mother-in-law? Well, what about that?” Heather clinks the topaz onto the mantel.

  “Did your mother-in-law give you that?” Ashley ventures. “I thought she died broke.”

  Heather tosses her head again. “Oh, she contributed to it alright.”

  Heather’s gaudy ring—it’s been a puzzle to me. It’s not Ewan’s taste and it’s too big and ostentatious for everything Heather does, yet it’s on her finger all the time. I’ve been wanting to take a good look at it for ages. I lift the ring from the mantel, holding it in the all-seeing afternoon sunlight of my big dirty window. Martin is good for some things. He’s taught me about gems, making sure I understand the value of the gifts of affection and apology ordered for me in his name by his secretaries. Heather’s ring is unlike any of those. It’s perfect, symmetrical, glassy clear.

  “This is a synthetic stone,” I say.

  “Yep.”

  “Where are we going with this?” Ashley asks, though this is Heather’s story and she should know all Heather’s stories end up in a graveyard.

  Heather resumes. “None of you has ever run a funeral before. Right? So odds are none of you has ever seen those glitzy brochures from companies that transform cremated human remains into gemstones.” Heather says it like it should explain everything.

  Maybe it does. I tilt the ring, flashing its stone in the sunlight. “This rock is your mother-in-law?”

  “Yes.”

  Meaghan cringes. “Gross.”

  Ashley pounces. “Let me see it!”

  Heather rolls her eyes. “It’s just a tiny bit of her. We buried the rest. I charmed Ewan into waiting in the car with the kids while I went into the funeral home to sign the release form for the cremains—the cremated remains, the ashes, whatever laypeople are calling them these days.”

  “Cremains.” I repeat the word. It sounds like a cute cheesy trade-name Martin would invent.

  “Anyways,” Heather says, “on my way out of the funeral home, I sneaked into the ladies’ room, pried the urn open with a nail file, and skimmed off the tablespoon I knew they’d need to make the ring.”

  “You went right inside the urn?” As the girl who sat in the Bentley of death, I need to know.

  Heather shrugs. “I had to. And then I mailed the tablespoon of cremains to some company in Arizona. A few months later Carol’s memorial diamond was couriered to our front door while Ewan was at work.”

  Suzanne speaks. Her voice is weak, like I expect it to be after seeing her looking so sick to her stomach. It’s also ragged, like her throat is sore. “You never told Ewan about it? You kept it from him?”

  Heather frowns. “It doesn’t concern him. In the end, it does not concern him. I always wanted Carol and me to have a relationship of our own, without him—not always a triangle, just a straight line.”

  Suzanne coughs, cupping her hands over her face.

  Heather looks hard at the top of Suzanne’s bowed head,
speaking over the coughing. “Oh, don’t act like I’m a bad person,” Heather scolds. “It’s not like I didn’t stand back and let Ewan have his own grief. He had access to all of Carol’s death rites he could stand. I wanted a little more. I wanted this. Maybe someday I’ll slip over to the cemetery and bury the ring under the sod with her. But not yet.”

  Ashley and I have finished inspecting the ring. Meaghan is holding it at arm’s length, pinched between two fingertips like a snotty tissue.

  “Stop it. She’s perfectly sanitary,” Heather assures us. “Everyone’s much cleaner after cremation than we ever were before it. And remember the gem’s not a topaz. It’s a diamond—you know, hard, sparkly carbon. They say everyone’s memorial diamond comes out a slightly different colour, usually somewhere in the yellow-orange family. If people don’t like it they can pay extra to have it treated so it comes out blue or green or something that looks a little less like urine crystals.”

  It’s classic Heather—telling us how clean and sensible something is long enough for it to get filthy again.

  “So how did you explain where the ring came from to Ewan?” I ask. I didn’t think Heather and Ewan kept secrets. Maybe Ewan doesn’t.

  She grins at me. “I told him it’s a present from you, Tina. You gave it to me on my thirtieth birthday. Okay?”

  I nod. “Sure.”

  “Look, I didn’t mean to freak anyone out,” Heather says as she puts her mother-in-law back onto her finger. “I just wanted to explain that, yes, I’ve kept my mother-in-law in my life for my own reasons and in my own way.”

  Meaghan doesn’t know what to say anymore. So she laughs, no happiness in it.

  It’s sad and prompts Ashley to start gathering Meaghan’s hair like she’s about to braid it, talking sweetly over her shoulder. “It’s okay, honey. See, it’s easy to be one of us. And it’s a big relief for us to hear this was about something silly like mothers-in-law. Heather had us worried it was serious. She had us thinking you felt left out of our sisterhood because you’re scarred from your abortion.”