Sisterland (16 page)

I had a hunch and said, “Had you been smoking?”

“Just cigarettes,” Vi said, and I thought that this violation must have particularly galled the early-morning exercisers.

The girl stood in front of the television screen, blocking Vi’s view, and said again that it was their turn to use the common room, fair and square, and because the movie ended then and the credits started and the girl had made her miss the last part, Vi said, “Are you happy now, you selfish cunt?” At that point she either tossed the remote control to the girl (Vi’s version) or threw it at her head (the girl’s version); in any case, the corner of the remote hit the girl in the jaw.

“And she started bleeding, but like, the tiniest, tiniest bit,” Vi said. “From inside her mouth. She spit, and seriously, it was the amount of blood when you’re flossing.”

As I listened, the leaves outside the window seemed considerably less cheerful, the day less promising. Really, what had Vi been thinking?

The girl freaked out, Vi said, claiming Vi had attacked her, and Vi insisted that it had been an accident, and the next thing she knew, two officers from campus security had appeared—one of the other girls had slipped away and called them—and Vi had been handcuffed.

“Are you kidding?” I said.

“Well, the handcuffs were plastic,” she said. “Kind of like garbage ties.”

One officer had escorted her on foot to the university police station, which was on Virginia Avenue, and though she hadn’t seen them while walking over, once there, Vi spotted the three
Buns of Steel
girls across the room. She was interviewed—not in an interrogation room, just sitting in a chair while the officer behind the desk took notes, and he’d already removed
the cuffs during the walk from the dorm. He consulted with other officers, including the one who’d interviewed the girls, and after about forty-five minutes, by which point the girls had left, Vi’s officer told her she was free to go but he was turning the matter over to the Office of Student Conduct, and she should expect to receive a letter from them shortly.

“Wait,” I said. “You never told him you don’t go here?”

“I know I fucked up,” Vi said. “I know, okay? And I’m sorry, but I didn’t know what else to do.” Then she said, “They don’t think I’m me. They think I’m you.”

Campus mail was,
apparently, quite efficient, and I received the letter from the Office of Student Conduct in my mailbox in the entry of Schurz Hall by noon that very day. It listed which of the Collected Rules and Regulations of the University of Missouri System might have been violated by Daisy Kathleen Shramm—“Physical abuse,” which was further defined as “conduct which threatens or endangers the health or safety of any person”—as well as the date and time of the incident of concern; the letter also provided instructions on scheduling my meeting with a Student Conduct officer and warned that if I failed to do so, a hold would be placed on my student account. I called the number and made an appointment for the following morning at eleven. Then I called campus information to get the number for Ben Murphy because I had no idea where the slip of paper was on which Vi had written it several days before. Vi was in the shower, after having slept for most of the morning.

When I identified myself, Ben sounded surprised as he said, “Oh, hi.”

“I’m wondering if you can drive my sister and me to St. Louis,” I said. “She’ll stay there, and I’ll come back with you. I’ll pay for gas.”

“When?”

“Now,” I said. “It’s sort of an emergency.”

“A medical emergency?”

“No, she just needs to go home, but if she gets on a bus, I’m afraid she’ll go somewhere else.”

“I didn’t know you have a sister who goes here.”

“I don’t. She’s been visiting. Can you take us?”

“I have class at two-fifteen, but I don’t know—I guess I could skip it.”

“Come here at two-fifteen,” I said. “I’m in Schurz, so you can pull up right in front.”

It wasn’t that I’d changed my mind about dating him; it wasn’t that I trusted him; it wasn’t even that I felt he owed me after our botched hook-up. It was that he was the only person I knew at Mizzou who had a car.

I told Vi
after she returned from the shower, wearing my bathrobe, carrying my plastic bucket of shampoo and conditioner. Her hair was a wet rope that she’d twisted over her left shoulder—she’d squeezed it out after turning off the water, I knew the exact gesture—and it was then, observing her hair, that it first occurred to me to cut my own.

She looked at me with a wounded expression. “You’re kicking me out?”

“If you stay here,
I’ll
probably get kicked out. There are rules against people who aren’t students living in the dorm, and now I can’t take any chances.” I hadn’t gotten angry when she’d told me what she’d done in the common room; if she had proven that my wariness of her was warranted, she had simultaneously given me the reason I needed to send her away.

“Just let me have a few more days,” she said.

“What difference will that make?”

“I’m thinking I’ll start taking classes in January. And don’t worry, I won’t stay with you until then. I walked by a house on Bouchelle Avenue with a sign saying they have a room for rent.”

“Do you have any money?”

“I’m planning to get a job.” She was quiet. “You could spot me.”

“Vi, I barely have money. Anyway, why do you want to live somewhere that you don’t know anyone?”

In a quiet, defeated voice, she said, “I know you.”

Oh, Vi
, I think now.
Oh, Vi, forgive me
. I have no idea which house on Bouchelle she meant, but in my mind it’s a co-op where they’d all smoke pot together while making tofu and kale for dinner; I never entered such a place, but Columbia was crawling with them. And in this alternate version
of events, in the help wanted section of the
Missourian
, we find Vi a waitress position, and she remains in my dorm room until she’s made enough for first and last month’s rent, if the co-op hippies would even have required that much. She does indeed start taking classes at Mizzou in January, my second semester. She and I meet for coffee a couple times a week. She doesn’t crowd or embarrass me; I don’t exile her. We both have our own lives, and they overlap, but not excessively. After she catches up with a few summer classes, we graduate together in 1997. She enters the Peace Corps, or she enters law school, or she goes to work for a nonprofit, or she becomes a physical therapist or a vet.

Or maybe she never earns her degree in this version of events, either, but at least I don’t force her out. I let her stay a little longer, until she leaves on her own. What I did—making her go—was justified more than it was necessary; it was defensible more than it was right.

In the version of events that did occur, the real version, I didn’t want the
Buns of Steel
girls to connect us, didn’t want to risk them seeing us together, and so as Vi stood there in my bathrobe, her hair dripping, I said, “I really think it’s better if you leave.”

In Ben’s car,
I sat in the front seat and Vi sat in back, and Ben, looking at Vi in the rearview mirror, said, “I talked to you on the phone, didn’t I? You guys sound alike,” and Vi said, “I assure you the similarity ends there.” And then she continued, embarking on a kind of monologue: “But really, I only have myself to blame. No one knows
Kate
here better than I do, and that’s why I should have realized she’s not the person you turn to when you need a helping hand. If you behave yourself, if you’re dressed up in your pretty clothes and acting all happy, then sure, Daisy will give you the time of day, but at the first sign of trouble, she’s out of there. She doesn’t like conflict, she doesn’t like
weirdness
. And watch out, because according to her, I’m just getting weirder. I had this amazing spiritual experience, probably the most amazing experience of my life, and Daisy’s like, ‘Yep, ignore it, pretend it didn’t happen.’ ”

In equal measures, I wanted to silence Vi and I felt hypnotized by the
drone of her voice, the inappropriateness of her disclosures—the way that if I could have scripted her dialogue in this moment, everything she was saying was the opposite of what I’d have chosen. It was hard to gauge how much sense she was making to Ben, especially given that she’d switched back to calling me Daisy, but it seemed safe to assume that neither of us was coming off well.

“You know what, Daisy?” Vi said, but even then, when she was ostensibly addressing me, her words still had a distant, performative quality—they were more for Ben than for me, and more for some invisible, sympathetic audience than for either one of us. “Just because that stuff in eighth grade with Marisa sucked for you, that doesn’t mean all spiritual communication is bad. You can choose to cut yourself off, and hey, it’s a free country, that’s your choice. But that’s not how I want to be. I want to open myself up, I want to experience other dimensions, I don’t want to be bound by the rules of this world. Does that make me a freak? So be it. Now, what’s your name again? Ben? Ben, don’t worry that Daisy is like me. She’s not
weird
. Yes, she has the senses. I cannot tell a lie. But she’s going to hide them or die trying, so you’re good to go with your vanilla romance. And you seem like a typical preppy guy, which I’m not saying to insult you, I’d assume most typical preppy guys are glad to be called typical and preppy. To each his or her own. What I’m trying to say is that I wish you and my sister a long and happy life together.”

The car was quiet—it was hard to believe Vi had truly stopped talking—and Ben said, “Who’s Marisa?”

“Nobody.” I turned around again, making eye contact with Vi, and said, “Just stop, okay? He’s doing us a favor by driving us.”

“He’s doing
you
a favor.” But surprisingly, she didn’t say anything else, and after a few minutes, Ben turned on the stereo; a Spin Doctors CD played, the one with “Two Princes” and “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong.” Even now, if I’m in a store and either of those songs comes on, I’ll walk out.

An hour and a half passed, and dread collected in my stomach as I gave Ben directions for getting off 270. When we arrived at our strange familiar house on Gilbert Street, sitting there the same as always in our absence,
Ben said, “I’ll go hang out in that McDonald’s we just passed if you tell me how long you need.”

“No, I’m only going in for a second,” I said. “Wait for me here.”

“Are you sure?” He looked perplexed, but I nodded and climbed from the car.

It was four-thirty
P.M.
, and we had to ring the doorbell repeatedly because neither Vi nor I had a house key. After a minute, I could tell our mother was peering through the peephole, and then she opened the door and said in an alarmed voice, “Why are you two here?” She was wearing a robe over her brown nylon nightgown, and white slippers.

I said, “Vi wants to come home. Reed didn’t work out.”

Our mother scowled. “That was a waste of money. Does your father know?”

“Not yet.” I leaned in to kiss my mother’s cheek; she and Vi didn’t touch. I was carrying Vi’s duffel bag, and I said to my sister, “I’ll put this upstairs, okay?”

Getting out of the car, Vi had seemed a little stunned, and she didn’t reply to me. Then she said to our mother, in a normal voice, “What’s the difference between a screw and a staple?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” our mother said.

“I don’t know,” Vi said. “I’ve never been stapled.”

As I climbed the steps, I heard my mother say to her, “You’re just as snotty as you always were.”

The door to our old bedroom was closed, and the Sisterland sign that Vi had taped to it eight years before was still there; it had been there all along, but when I’d lived at home, I’d stopped seeing it. Surely, there was a kind of irony to it—the room had either a population of one or zero now, but definitely not of two—but there was nothing to be gained from pondering this incongruity. I pushed open the door, set down Vi’s duffel, then walked out and used the bathroom before returning to the first floor. Vi and my mother had moved into the kitchen, Vi sitting at the table eating potato chips and drinking orange juice and my mother standing and watching her suspiciously. “I have to go because the guy who gave us a ride is waiting,” I said. “Tell Dad I’m sorry I missed him.”

“You’re leaving?” My mother’s expression was confused.

“This guy I know gave us a ride, but he has to get back.”

Vi wouldn’t look at me; she got up, carried her glass of juice and bag of potato chips into the living room, and turned on the television. I leaned into my mother, and she was so insubstantial that it was like embracing a phantom. “I’ll be home at Thanksgiving,” I said. “Which is only a month away.”

I stepped back, and my mother looked me up and down and said—really, her voice sounded more concerned than cruel—“You should be careful, Daisy. You’re starting to put on weight, too.”

Back in the
car, I said to Ben, “If you want to go to McDonald’s, let’s get on the highway first because the one here is really slow.”

As Ben started the engine, I felt an absurd fear that Vi would run out of the house, pull open my car door, yank me to the ground, and force me to stay while Ben drove away. Neither he nor I spoke as he navigated through downtown Kirkwood. Only when we were back on 40, headed west, did he say in a sincere tone, “Does she have, like, a diagnosis?”

“A what?”

“Like if she’s mentally ill, or—”

Icily, I said, “She just has a lot going on right now.”

At the McDonald’s where we did stop for an early dinner, we didn’t talk much, but I didn’t like Ben enough to find the silences awkward. If I felt grateful toward him, it was a resentful kind of gratitude; he seemed to be such a blandly ordinary person that I doubted he had a framework for understanding someone like Vi. Ben and I also spoke little once we were back in the car. But the next day, when he emailed and asked if I’d like to go to a movie on Saturday night, saying no would have been a rudeness more brazen than I had the courage for. We saw
The Fugitive
at the Hollywood Stadium, and afterward we had actual sex, in his dorm bed, with a condom. He didn’t tell me until two months later that it had been his first time, but he didn’t need to. It was just for a few weeks that I still saw his nose as piglike, and after that it only struck me when we were with his
family, because his father and two older sisters had similar noses. Ben and I remained a couple all through college, and after graduation, we moved together to Chicago.