Sisterland (2 page)

“Fine,” I said. “Forget I said anything.”

“Don’t be a pussy.”

I glared at her. “Don’t call me names.”

“Well, it seems awfully convenient that you get to speak your mind and then close down the discussion.”

“I need to go home for their naps,” I said, and there was a split second in which Vi and I looked at each other and almost laughed. Instead, sourly, she said, “Of course you do.”

In the car, she was silent, and after a couple minutes, Rosie said from the backseat, “Mama wants to sing the Bingo song.”

“I’ll sing it later,” I said.

“Mama wants to sing the Bingo song now,” Rosie said, and when I didn’t respond, she added in a cheerful tone, “When you take off your diaper, it makes Mama very sad.”

Vi snorted unpleasantly. “Why don’t you just toilet train her?”

“We’re going to soon.”

Vi said nothing, and loathing for her flared up in me, which was probably just what she wanted. It was one thing for my sister to fail to appreciate the energy I put into our lunches, the sheer choreography of getting a six-month-old and a two-year-old out of the house, into the car, into a restaurant, and back home with no major meltdowns (never in my children’s presence could
I
have ordered a meal as intricately, messily hands-on as a fajita), but it was another thing entirely for Vi to mock me. And yet, in one final attempt at diplomacy, as I stopped the car on the street outside the small single-story gray house where Vi lived, I said, “For Dad’s birthday, I was thinking—”

“Let’s talk about it later.”

“Fine.” If she thought I was going to plead for forgiveness, she was mistaken, and it wasn’t just because we really did need to get home for Rosie and Owen’s naps. She climbed from the car, and before she shut the door, I said, “By the way?”

A nasty satisfaction rose in me as she turned. She was prepared for me to say,
I didn’t mean to be such a jerk in the restaurant
. Instead, I said, “Parabens are preservatives.”

Fourteen hours later, at three in the morning, our squabble was what I was stewing over; specifically, I was thinking that the reason I’d made my points so clumsily was that what I really believed was even more offensive than that being straight was easier than being gay. I believed Vi was dating women because she was at her heaviest ever—she’d quit smoking in the spring, and now she had to be sixty pounds overweight—and most lesbians seemed to be more forgiving about appearances than most straight men. I didn’t think I’d object to Vi being gay if I believed she actually was, but something about this development felt false, akin to the way she’d wished, since our adolescence, that she’d been born Jewish, or the way she kept a dream catcher above her kitchen sink. Lying there in the dark next to Jeremy, I wondered what would happen if I were to suggest that she and I do Weight Watchers together; I myself was still carrying ten extra pounds from being pregnant with Owen. Then I thought about how most nights Jeremy and I split a pint of ice cream in front of the TV, how it was pretty much the best part of the day—the whole ritual of relaxation after both children were asleep and before Owen woke up for his ten
P.M
. nursing—and how it seemed unlikely that half a pint of fudge ripple was part of any diet plan. This was when the bed in which Jeremy and I slept began to shake.

I assumed at first that Jeremy was causing the mattress to move by turning over, except that he wasn’t turning. The rocking continued for perhaps ten seconds, at which point Jeremy abruptly sat up and said, “It’s an earthquake.” But already the rocking seemed to be subsiding.

I sat up, too. “Are you sure?”

“You get Owen and I’ll get Rosie.” Jeremy had turned on the light on his
nightstand and was walking out of the room, and as I hurried from bed, adrenaline coursed through me; my heart was beating faster and I felt simultaneously unsteady and purposeful. In his crib, illuminated by a starfish-shaped night-light, Owen was lying on his back as I’d left him an hour earlier, his arms raised palms up on either side of his head, his cheeks big and smooth, his nose tiny. I hesitated just a second before lifting him, and I grabbed one of the eight pacifiers scattered in the crib. As I’d guessed he would, he blinked awake, seeming confused, but made only one mournful cry as I stuck in the pacifier. In the small central hallway that connected the house’s three bedrooms, we almost collided with Jeremy and Rosie, Rosie’s legs wrapped around Jeremy’s torso, her arms dangling limply over his shoulders, her face half-obscured by tangled hair. Her eyes were open, I saw, but barely.

“Do we go to the basement?” I said to Jeremy. The shaking had definitely stopped.

“That’s tornadoes.”

“What is it for earthquakes?” In retrospect, it’s hard to believe I needed to ask, hard to believe I had reached the age of thirty-four and given birth to two children without bothering to learn such basic information.

Jeremy said, “In theory, you get under a table, but staying in bed is okay, too.”

“Really?” We looked at each other, my husband sweet and serious in his gray T-shirt and blue-striped boxer shorts, our daughter draped across him.

“You want me to check?” He meant by looking online from his phone, which he kept beside the bed at night.

“We shouldn’t call Courtney, should we?” I said. “They must have felt it if we did.” Courtney Wheeling was Jeremy’s colleague at Washington University—his area of study was aquatic chemistry, hers was seismology and plate tectonics—and she and her husband, Hank, lived down the street and were our best friends.

“It doesn’t seem necessary,” Jeremy said. “I’ll look at FEMA’s website, but I think the best thing is for all of us to go back to bed.”

I nodded my chin toward Rosie. “Keeping them with us or in their own rooms?”

Rosie’s head popped up. “Rosie sleeps with Mama!” A rule of thumb with Rosie was that whether I did or didn’t think she was following the conversation, I was always wrong.

“Keeping them,” Jeremy said. “In case of aftershocks.”

In our room, I climbed into bed holding Owen, shifting him so he was nestled in my right arm while Jeremy helped Rosie settle on my other side. I wasn’t sure whether to be alarmed or pleasantly surprised that Jeremy was all right with having the kids sleep with us. In general, he was the one who resisted bringing them into our bed; he’d read the same books in Rosie’s infancy that I had, half of which argued that sharing a bed with your kids was the most nurturing thing you could do and the other half of which warned that doing so would result in your smothering them either figuratively or literally. But I liked when they were close by—whether or not it really was safer, at some primitive level it felt like it had to be—and the thought of them sleeping alone in their cribs sometimes pinched at my heart. Besides, I could never resist their miniature limbs and soft skin.

Rosie curled toward me then, tapping my arm, and I turned—awkwardly, because of how I was holding Owen—to look at her. She said, “Rosie wants a banana.”

“In the morning, sweetheart.”

Jeremy had gone to the window that faced the street, and he parted the curtains. “Everyone’s lights are on,” he said.

“A monkey eats a banana peel,” Rosie declared. “But not people.”

“That’s true,” I said. “It would make us sick.”

Jeremy was typing on his phone. After a minute, he said, “There’s nothing about it online yet.” He looked up. “How’s he doing?”

“He’s more asleep than awake, but will you get an extra binky just in case?” Surely this was evidence of the insularity of our lives: that unless otherwise specified, whenever Jeremy or I said
he
, we meant our son, and whenever we said
she
, we meant our daughter. On a regular basis, we sent each other texts consisting in their entirety of one letter and one punctuation
mark:
R?
for
How’s Rosie doing?
and
O?
for
How’s Owen?
And surely it was this insularity that so irritated Vi, whereas to me, the fact that my life was suburban and conventional was a victory.

Jeremy returned from Owen’s room with a second pacifier, handed it to me, and lay down before turning off the light on his nightstand. Then—I whispered, because whispering seemed more appropriate in the dark—I said, “So if there are aftershocks, we just stay put?”

“And keep away from windows. That’s pretty much all I could find on the FEMA site.”

“Thanks for checking.” Over Owen’s head, I reached out to rub Jeremy’s shoulder.

I felt them falling asleep one by one then, my son, my daughter, and my husband. Awake alone, I experienced a gratitude for my life and our family, the four of us together, accounted for and okay. In contrast to the agitation I’d been gripped by before the earthquake, I was filled with calmness, a sense that we’d passed safely through a minor scare—like when you speed up too fast in slow highway traffic and almost hit the car in front of you but then you don’t. The argument with Vi, inflated prior to the quake, shrank to its true size; it was insignificant. My sister and I had spent three decades bickering and making up.

But now that several years have passed, it pains me to remember this night because I was wrong. Although we were safe in that moment, we hadn’t passed through anything. Nothing was concluding, nothing was finished; everything was just beginning. And though my powers weren’t what they once had been, though I no longer considered myself truly psychic, I still should have been able to anticipate what would happen next.

Our routine in the morning was that we’d awaken
around six-fifteen either to Owen’s squeaks on the monitor on my nightstand or to Rosie chatting with herself on the monitor on Jeremy’s nightstand. I’d go nurse Owen while Jeremy showered, then he’d take both children downstairs to eat while I showered. When I joined them, they’d have moved into the living room, which was also our playroom, and I’d be only halfway down the steps before Rosie began making excited announcements about my appearance—“Mama has a blue shirt!”—or describing her own activities. As I reached the bottom step, she’d fling herself into my arms, as if we were reuniting after many years apart. (How flattering motherhood was, when they weren’t smearing food on my clothes or sneezing into my mouth.)

On this morning, Rosie squatted by the bookshelf and shouted, “Rosie’s driving a school bus!”

Jeremy, who was holding his phone and Owen, said, “The earthquake had a magnitude of 4.9, and the epicenter was in Terre Haute, Indiana.”

“Have you talked to Courtney yet?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I’ll wait until I see her at school. I’m guessing she’s already fielding calls from the media.”

As soon as I sat on the couch, Owen began kicking his legs and reaching for me. I lifted my arms, and as Jeremy passed him over, he said, “By the way, your dad just called. He wants to know if you can take him grocery shopping tomorrow instead of today.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Well, he said he felt the earthquake, but he didn’t seem worked up about it.”

“Since when does my dad call at seven
A.M.
?”

“Go call him now if you’re worried.”

I held Owen back toward Jeremy. He began to cry, and as I walked to the kitchen, I heard Jeremy say, “Really, Owen? Am I really that bad?”

From our cordless phone, I called my father’s apartment. After he answered, I said, “So you felt the earthquake, too?”

“Just enough to know what it was,” my father said. “I’m afraid I have to postpone our trip to the store this afternoon. Will tomorrow work for you?”

“Tomorrow’s your birthday dinner, Dad.” My father still drove—he wasn’t supposed to at night but was fine during the day—but even so, since my mother’s death ten years before, I’d taken him grocery shopping once a week. We’d get deli meat and sliced cheese for his lunches and plan out his dinners, for which he’d buy himself only the cheapest cuts of beef and pork.

“I hope you’re not planning anything fancy,” my father said.

“I promise it’ll be very low-key. What do you have to do this afternoon?”

“I’ll be giving a lift to your sister. I’m sure you know she has a date.” Though my father didn’t sound like he was complaining, irritation gathered in me. About a year before, around the time my father’s doctor had told him he could no longer drive at night, Vi had stopped driving period. She said she’d had enough of all the jackasses jabbering on their cellphones while going eighty miles an hour; also, not driving was greener. But Vi rarely recycled an aluminum can of Diet Coke, even when a bin was two feet away, and it was obvious that the real explanation was that she’d developed a phobia. I’d meant to get online and do some research, but many months had passed without my doing so. I did get online on a daily basis, usually in the afternoon when Rosie and Owen were both asleep, but once in front of the computer, I’d forget everything I’d meant to do and end up either on Facebook or reading about pregnant celebrities. Meanwhile, Vi showed no inclination to start driving again, and socializing with her and
my father, especially during the evening, continued to require elaborate planning.

“Dad, she can take a taxi to her date,” I said. “She’s not destitute.” Vi was always thousands of dollars in credit card debt, as I had once been, too, but surely she could scrape together cab fare.

“I don’t mind,” my father said. “She doesn’t think they’ll be more than an hour.”

“They’re meeting in the afternoon, not at night?”

“At three o’clock, at a Starbucks in Creve Coeur. Not too far off 270, I believe. Vi said I’m welcome to come in and sit at another table, but I’ll just bring the paper and make myself comfortable in the car.”

“That doesn’t sound like much fun for you.” My father had also said nothing to suggest that Vi had revealed the gender of her date to him. It was so like my sister to have our almost-seventy-four-year-old father drive her, even to be okay with him following her inside, yet not to bother explaining to him either online dating or her nascent lesbianism. (The first I’d ever heard of Vi being involved with a woman was two summers before, when she’d met someone named Cindy at a spirituality conference in Illinois. Cindy was our age but wore a long gray-and-green batik skirt with a matching flowing shirt and the kind of sandals you’d go river rafting in, and thirty seconds after meeting me, she said in a faux-sympathetic tone, “You give off a very, very tired energy, and you need to make more time for yourself.” When of course I was tired—I had a six-month-old baby! Vi hadn’t introduced Cindy to our father, and a few weeks later, Vi had told me she and Cindy were no longer on speaking terms. Since then, Vi hadn’t, to my knowledge, dated anyone.)