Keep Me Posted (3 page)

In mid-June, Gretchen Steele and I tagged along with Sid and her boyfriend, Kenny Fisher, to a Grateful Dead show at Buckeye Lake in Columbus. Gretchen and I were not Dead fans—we listened to 311 and Sublime and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But it sounded like a fun way to spend a summer weekend, and I’d do anything to hang out with Sid.

To people in Sid’s old crowd, you just have to say Buckeye Lake ’94, and they know that it was pouring rain and that the band did a whole set of rain songs and an unending jam that made me wish I had split that tab of LSD with Sid, so I didn’t have to stand there swaying like a moron for twenty minutes while everyone around me went into some kind of reverential trance. At some point during the nine-hour preshow party in the fields around the stage, Sid and Kenny disappeared into his tent and accidentally made a baby.

Kenny sold marijuana and nitrous oxide balloons out of the back of his van. This makes him sound like a real loser, but forget everything you may have heard about drug dealers or single guys with conversion vans. Kenny was kind and funny and smart—at least that’s how he seemed to my seventeen-year-old self. He was huge—six foot four and muscular except for his soft beer belly. He wore loose-fitting tank tops and board shorts, and had an animal skull tattooed on his tanned biceps. With his wraparound reflective sunglasses, fanny pack (essentially a drug dealer’s briefcase), and New Balance running shoes, he affected a sort of trend-resistant, devil-may-care attitude. Again, he sounds awful on paper, but in the alternate universe of the jam-band circuit, he was definitely the “cool guy.” Something about his scratchy deep voice, bright blue eyes, sunburned face, dazzling smile, and infectious laugh drew people to him. Sid and Kenny were kind of this power couple in
that whole world. Gorgeous and uninhibited, their non-dreadlocked hair and pleasant smell set them apart from many of their peers.

Have I mentioned yet that Sid is a beauty? I know that’s what everyone wants to know: what we look like. We look a lot alike—thin, average height, honey-colored hair, olive skin, dark eyes, big bright smiles—except she is strikingly beautiful in the way of movie stars and wealthy socialites and I am just barely above average in the way of plain girls everywhere. Our mom is part Native American and our dad is half Greek, so we looked vaguely exotic among the blondes and redheads of our childhood. And while our features are mostly the same, Sid’s were put together just right. It’s like she was carefully molded by an artist and I was the knockoff, hastily put together in a sweatshop to look like her. At certain angles and in some pictures, we look nearly identical. But on second glance, you notice that my eyebrows hover where hers lift, my nose hooks where hers dips, my skin blotches where hers glows, and my teeth suffice where hers dazzle.

On the upside, I am extremely photogenic. But every time someone tells me this, what I hear is, “You look much better in photos.” Or, “It’s disappointing that you don’t look more like your sister.” It’s probably for the best I’d never tried online dating. If I’m being honest, it’s part of the reason I was such a big Facebooker. As long as I never actually run into any of my ex-boyfriends, they are going to think they really missed out.

Being the less attractive sister, and I suppose a tad superficial, I spent a lot of time in my formative years thinking about physical beauty—what constitutes it, what it makes possible, how it influences one’s personality. I’ve determined that the hair-skin-teeth trifecta is the most important of all. If you have that covered, you can have a big nose or a weak chin or small eyes (but not all of
those, obviously!) and still be considered beautiful. This is the kind of deep stuff I thought about endlessly between the ages of about fifteen and nineteen.

At any rate, despite Sid’s considerable charms, a baby turned out to be Kenny’s deal breaker, and shortly after she declared she was going to have it, Kenny was gone. I probably don’t need to tell you that Sid had never been rejected on any level prior to this point, so this was new territory for her. She went from golden child with the world as her oyster to heartbroken virtually overnight.

Seeing Sid in this new light came as a blow to everyone. I was as surprised as anyone when she decided to go through with the pregnancy. I guess those annual baby funerals that our favorite teacher in elementary school held on the anniversary of
Roe v. Wade
had an effect on her. Looking back, I cannot believe that my liberal-voting parents let us sit through that macabre production. Or that they let me wear that “tiny footprints” pin that I bought from Mrs. H for twelve dollars. Or that I had an eighth-grade teacher who sold dead-baby-themed jewelry to her students.

After the initial shock wore off, Mom and Dad did their best to act supportive and positive, but it was hard not to detect their disappointment that Sid’s promising future appeared to be caving in. To be honest, I was devastated at first.
What about my plans for us?
I selfishly wondered. She was supposed to take me under her wing, to help me make friends, to be my roommate when I moved off campus, to backpack across Europe with me after college. I wanted to scream at my parents: “This is what you get for sending us to twelve years of Catholic school. Some of that stuff stuck!”

I went off to college while Sid was in her first trimester, barfing and crying all day. Her pregnancy continued in much the same way; she was basically a puffy and weepy mess for nine months. I
came home a few weekends to spend time with her, and nobody in our open-minded family quite knew how to talk about it—or how to interact with a Sid who wasn’t the shining sun around which we all orbited.

Eventually, I came to find comfort in Sid’s lot. I’d read too many novels in which the only truly good character, the one who is beloved and respected by everyone, dies. Based on this, at some point during our preteen years, I’d developed an irrational fear that my sister would perish in a car accident or at the hands of a serial killer or of a rare disease or natural disaster. As it was, conversations about her could be downright eulogistic:
Kind to everyone
.
A beautiful person—inside and out
.
And so humble!
I harbored this secret fear for years, and in church, after Communion, I would actually kneel down and pray to God to keep my sister alive.

But her pregnancy was a major setback, and one that made her less mythical in my eyes. I stopped worrying so much about her then.

As soon as River was born, Mom and Dad and Joe and Margie promptly turned to mush, found their words, and couldn’t stop talking about it, which was now a
him
. Sid, too, took one look at her new son and knew in her hippie heart that becoming River’s mom at this moment in her life was her destiny. She went at mothering him with her trademark gusto. He had a charmed baby – and toddlerhood with an incredible support system, even if Kenny was never heard from again. Sid went back to school—premed—at the state school a half mile from our parents’ house, where she and River lived until she became a certified nurse-midwife five years later.

New York

Jan 2

Dear Sid,

Happy New Year! I hope you guys had a smooth flight back and the jet lag isn’t too bad. It was great to spend Christmas with you. I’ve been fantasizing about coming to visit you in Singapore. Alas, I don’t think it’s in the budget for us anytime soon. But maybe if I start saving now, we can do Christmas there next year. Hey, you were right about this letter-writing thing. It is going to be fun. I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to see something from you in my mailbox. What a treat!

I want to kick off these letters in the spirit of openness. I want us to really know each other again—like when we were teenagers. I’ve been racking my brain for a fitting way to begin, and the only thing I can think of is a truly embarrassing confession. It’s really stupid, but I want to make a gesture of honesty to nudge us a little closer to the time in our lives when there were no secrets. Right about the time River was born, I got arrested for shoplifting in Athens. It had become a habit of mine. I started with books. Incensed that my Psychology 101 book cost $125, I slipped it into my bag and walked out. I couldn’t believe how easy it was, and found it perversely thrilling. I moved on to the odd shirt or candle, becoming bolder and bolder with each success. A few times, I reached behind counters for sunglasses or jewelry. After about six months, I was caught. As I was leaving the bookstore, a security guard stopped me and asked to check my bag. Well, there were two textbooks, a planner, some pens, and a T-shirt
in there. Oh my God, it was so humiliating. There were like a dozen people there who saw what was going on. It hurts me—physically hurts me—to think of it now. I called home from the police station, and Dad drove down and bailed me out. I went to court and had to pay thousands of dollars (borrowed from Mom and Dad) and do community service for a year and join this support group. I still have no idea what I was thinking. I may have been depressed . . . This is going to sound like I’m blaming you, but please know that I’m not: When you got pregnant, it was like you suddenly dropped out of my life. I was so sad. I think the whole klepto thing was some sort of coping technique or distraction or simply a sign that I was going a bit crazy without you. What I should have done was made an effort to maintain our relationship then, instead of escaping into my ridiculous little crime spree, but good choices have never been my forte.

Okay, there. I did it. I’m mortified (even Leo doesn’t know about this!) but I wanted to reveal something real and honest and hard to get things rolling. I promise to lighten up from here on out, and try to bring you rainbows and sunshine more often than not.

Love,

Cassie

The next day when I went to mail it, I got to the mailbox and something stopped me. When I send an even vaguely important e-mail, I’ll go back and read it two or three times to make sure I didn’t say anything stupid. Yet here I was about to send this
massively personal letter, and I’d never be able to see it again. What if it got lost in the mail?

Instead of dropping it in the box, I put it back in my bag. I considered typing it out and saving it, but that seemed silly. Plus, that would tempt me to then send it by e-mail, and the thought sullied the delicious vision I had of the piles of handwritten letters accumulating over the year. I thought about taking a picture of it, but a bunch of photos of partial letters on my phone didn’t appeal. So I walked with the boys to the OfficeMax on Sixth Avenue and bought a scanner. The project, from making the purchase to getting the thing set up, took most of the day and all of my patience. But in the end I had a system to assure every letter Sid and I exchanged would be saved for posterity.

That night after bath time—letter scanned, saved, and re-enveloped—I let Quinn come downstairs with me while Joey played with Leo. There was a mailbox right on the corner outside of the Henrietta Hudson, our neighborhood lesbian bar. Its proprietor, Kim, was our downstairs neighbor. We had an unspoken agreement that I wouldn’t complain about the noise from her bar or the patrons we sometimes found canoodling in the building’s foyer, and she wouldn’t complain about the running and stomping and screaming coming from our apartment at what must seem to a bar owner ungodly hours of the morning. I’d heard horror stories about angry downstairs neighbors from my apartment-dwelling friends with kids—heavy carpet; no running or jumping indoors; eviction threats from co-op boards—so Kim was basically the perfect neighbor for us.

“Would you like to drop the letter in?” I asked.

He held out his hand. “Yes.”

I hesitated for a second.
Maybe I shouldn’t send it. Maybe I should run upstairs and write a regular letter containing no shocking confessions. Maybe I should rewrite it. If it were an e-mail, I would have surely rewritten it several times.

“Mama? Come on,” Quinn said.

I brushed the dark hair away from his big brown eyes and kissed him on the forehead before handing him the letter. He pulled the box open and stood on his tiptoes to peek inside. To give him a better view, I hoisted him onto my knee.

“Huh?” he said, clearly disappointed that the envelope was just sitting there on a tray—I think he imagined peering down into a pile of letters and packages. I explained how the box works and he slowly pushed the handle shut, pressing the bridge of his nose to the lid so he could watch the letter as long as possible. As soon as he closed the lid, he quickly opened it again and gasped at the empty tray.

He looked at me, wide-eyed.

“I know, right! That letter is going to go on a truck to the post office and then on an airplane to the post office in Singapore, and then to Aunt Sid’s house.”

Singapore

January 2

Cass—

I’m sitting here in what has to be Singapore’s oldest and saddest shopping mall FOR YOU. You have convinced me to get over my moral opposition to hiring a helper and to let you live vicariously through me. What was it you said at Christmas? That me not taking advantage of this perk of expat living
was a slap in the face to people like you, who would kill for that chance? Well, far be it from me to slap you in the face—literally or figuratively. Plus, I wouldn’t mind another adult in the house to talk to. (Adrian’s in Bangkok again.)

So I’m at this mothball-smelling storefront office looking through a pile of résumés—each with a grainy black-and-white photo, which is weird because the women whose résumés I have are all just milling around in the hallway. It’s like a Pantene casting call in here. The hair on these women! It’s jet-black and thick and so shiny. Oh, here comes my first interview. To be continued. . . .

Okay, I just met the one I want to hire, and now I’m waiting while Mrs. Lee finishes up the paperwork. I couldn’t get anyone to say anything other than “Yes, ma’am,” or “No, ma’am,” in response to every single question, which means each interview lasted only five minutes. So I gave up on getting an actual answer from anyone and went with my gut. Her name is Rose and she had me at “Good morning, ma’am,” because of her dazzling smile. They have all seemed so nervous and afraid, but Rose’s nervousness came across in smiles and giggles, and since she’s going to be living with us, I figure the more smiles, the better.