Sisterland (30 page)

I said, “What Courtney does has nothing to do with us.”

“Have you given more thought to going out there with me? I’m sure the tickets are insanely expensive now, but at least we don’t have to pay for Owen’s. And hey, we’re big spenders.”

The remark was clearly a reference to Emma Hall, and I didn’t acknowledge it. I said, “Meaning we’d just ditch Vi and my dad? Besides that Owen and Rosie are hell to travel with.”

“For the sake of discussion,” Jeremy said, “if I skipped the conference, what do you picture me doing here? I’ve already canceled my classes.”

This was when I felt the first flare of true anger. “Really?” I said. “Because if you’re not teaching, there’s no other reason for you to be here?”

“You want the moral support. I understand that. But I question the point of staying in town for something that won’t happen.”

I snorted—an unintentionally Vi-like snort. “It must be nice to be so certain.”

“I want to float an idea,” Jeremy said. “I’m not saying it’s right. But I want you to consider it. What if neither you nor Vi is psychic?”

I glared at him. “What if you’re not really American? Maybe you’re French—has that ever occurred to you? Or maybe you’re not even a human being. What if you’re a giraffe? I’m not saying you are, but I just want you to consider the idea.”

“Come here.” He patted the couch next to him, and I didn’t move. “Or don’t,” he said. “Suit yourself. For one thing, I’m not that tall.” I didn’t laugh, and he said, “That’s how I know I’m not a giraffe.”

“I got it,” I said.

“We have these articles of faith about ourselves, but sometimes they’re wrong. And for you, the senses—it doesn’t bring you pleasure anyway, so why not just let it go?”

I sometimes forgot this, that not leaving Owen with the babysitter wasn’t the only secret I kept from Jeremy; there was the much larger secret of how two years earlier I’d discarded my own ESP. Which made Jeremy at least partly right. And his rightness, his unearned knowledge of me—it was infuriating. Looking at his boyishly handsome face, his intelligent countenance, his easygoing confidence that I was a solid wife and a good mother and that he knew more than I did about every subject in the world, including the subject of psychicness and the subject of myself, I felt indignant.

“It’s not just Vi who has a proven track record,” I said, and at some level I was conscious of the peculiar relief of my concern about Rosie having been replaced with anger. “Have you forgotten that I was involved with finding Brady Ogden’s kidnapper, too? And at her
Today
show taping, I could hear the questions Matt Lauer was asking even though no one else in the room could besides Vi. I don’t want to be like this. I just am. And
for you to be so sure you’re right and everyone else is wrong, especially when her prediction affects the safety of our children—it’s arrogant, and it’s really fucking insulting.”

He still wasn’t mad; Jeremy was never mad. He said, “I was just thinking about Brady Ogden. Remember how you wanted to call off our wedding so you could devote yourself to worrying about him full-time? That seemed like a good idea to you.”

“Why is it bad to have compassion for other people? Besides, Vi and I were totally right.”

“All I’m saying is you let your worry get the best of you. You were doing it at our wedding, you were doing it a few minutes ago when Rosie made a noise, and you’re doing it now. I know the last few weeks have been hard, but the solution isn’t to put your life on hold.”

“There’s never going to be a situation like this in our lives again!” I said. “This is huge, and it’s directly connected to us. And let’s say Vi is right, there’s a big earthquake, and we lose power on our street, people all over the city lose it. Or what if, I don’t know, a shelf falls on me and I break my leg and have to go to the hospital and can’t take care of Owen and Rosie? I would need you. Or what if Vi is wrong and you’re right, and nothing at all happens? This Friday is the same as any other day. In that case, Vi is humiliated and who knows what she’ll decide to do, or who will be hounding her from the media? And then
she’ll
need me. And if she needs me, I also need you. I can’t take care of Owen and Rosie and her all at the same—”

He held up his hand, palm toward me. “You’re imagining worst-case scenarios. Those things could happen, sure. But I just don’t think they’re likely.” He was quiet, and then he said, “If you’re psychic, why don’t you answer the question yourself and we can plan accordingly. Is there going to be an earthquake?”

How strange it was to be put on the spot by my own husband. And clearly this was the moment to tell Jeremy that I had destroyed my senses. But was it possible that all I had to do to get him to skip his conference was to agree with Vi, even if I wasn’t sure? The truth was that in recent weeks I had sometimes felt the dread of certainty and sometimes felt the
opposite—the shame of Vi being laughably wrong. But being unsure wouldn’t keep Jeremy in St. Louis, and I heard myself say, “Yes. Yes, I do think there’ll be an earthquake on October sixteenth. I think Vi’s right.”

The expression that crossed Jeremy’s face then—it was as if I’d said something sweet but ridiculous, like that I’d seen a unicorn.

“And you think there’s no chance,” I said.

“Not no chance. There’s always a chance. But it’s infinitesimal.”

I said, “So all along, for the last seven years, you’ve thought having senses is bullshit?”

“There are these probability experiments,” Jeremy said. “In a room full of people, statisticians figured out how many had the same birthday. The number was always much higher than non-mathematicians would guess. But the telling part was that the people who thought the coincidence was the most meaningful were the ones who actually shared birthdays. They thought it meant something because it was personal to them.”

“In other words, all the times I’ve dreamed of something that’s come true, it’s just been a coincidence?”

“It’s called confirmation bias—attributing greater meaning to so-called evidence that supports your existing belief while ignoring information that contradicts it.”

I wanted to be calm as I spoke next, as calm as Jeremy. “Why do you get to decide what’s true about me and what isn’t? And why have you acted all this time like you were open-minded when you weren’t? Remember when you told me about that exploding church?” A few weeks after I’d disclosed to Jeremy that I was psychic, he’d referred in passing to the 1950 church choir practice in Beatrice, Nebraska, which was supposed to be a famous example of group ESP, and I’d had no idea what he was talking about. Apparently, it was when a gas leak caused a Baptist church to explode during what should have been a weekly choir practice, but nobody was injured because—the chances of this were something like one in a million—not a single one of the choir members had shown up on time. I didn’t know about this incident because I didn’t know about psychicness from the outside, as a topic I’d researched, but I had found it strangely touching to
learn that Jeremy had checked out a book on paranormal phenomena from the Wash U library. I said, “Was all of that just to humor me? You pretended to take it seriously while you were laughing behind my back?”

“I was never laughing behind your back.” After a pause, he said, “In grad school, there was this woman in my program who had blue hair. I don’t know what her real hair color was, and she didn’t have a particularly unusual personality. When I first met her, I assumed she was a punk, whatever that means, but she was a regular person. She just had blue hair. And that’s how I’ve seen your senses. They’re your blue hair, but they’re not that big a deal.”

Perhaps there had been a time when the analogy he was drawing would have seemed sweet. But having called his bluff, having forced my loving, thoughtful husband to admit that he’d always believed I was full of shit—harmlessly full of shit, but full of shit nonetheless—it was apparent that the accord in our marriage was overly reliant on a fundamental lack of specificity or resolution. We didn’t fight because we usually stopped short of acknowledging any reason to.

There was a wail then, a high wail, from one of the monitors, but this time I recognized it immediately as Owen, wanting to nurse. I turned to go back upstairs—
Saturday Night Live
still unwatched, Rosie’s sweatshirt still unclean, the question of Jeremy’s trip still undecided. Or perhaps just not decided to my satisfaction. Because in a conciliatory tone, when I was halfway up the steps, Jeremy said, “A shelf won’t fall on you. I’ll secure them all with brackets before I leave.”

On the mornings
Amelia Wheeling was in preschool, I took Rosie and Owen either to story hour at the Richmond Heights library or for a long walk to a park on Wydown, but not to our usual parks on DeMun or at Oak Knoll. So Rosie wouldn’t be bored without Amelia, I told myself, though maybe it was so I wouldn’t be bored without Hank.

On Monday, October 12, which was sunny and cool, we skipped the library because I couldn’t face hearing the other mothers discuss Vi’s prediction. We had just arrived at Wydown Park—Rosie and I called it the
acorn park because it had a huge stone acorn statue set in a little garden above a low brick wall—when my cellphone rang. I saw that it was Vi.

“I’m at your house.” She sounded cheerful. “But where are you?”

“Why are you at our house? Wait—did you drive?”

“I took a taxi. I have a question for you.”

“That you have to ask in person?”

“It’s nothing bad,” she said. “Don’t start freaking out.”

“We’re at a park, the one on Wydown across from the deli.”

“That’s kind of far.” I said nothing, and she added, “But I’ll be there as fast as my little feet can carry me.”

After I hung up, I sprang Rosie from the stroller, and she took off toward the acorn statue. There were only four other people in the park on this morning, two of whom were an old man and a boy, a little younger than Rosie, who I assumed was his grandson; we’d seen them here before, and Rosie and the boy usually sniffed each other out without exactly playing together, while the grandfather and I nodded in greeting (I was pretty sure he didn’t speak English). Also, at a table near the fence between the park and the street, a man and a woman dressed in business clothes drank from paper coffee cups; she was skinny, wearing a pin-striped silk suit and stylish, uncomfortable-looking black heels.

I pulled Owen from his stroller seat and inserted him into the baby carrier I’d put on before leaving the house (it had long ago stopped seeming strange to me to walk around wearing an empty baby carrier). When he was secure, I squatted to get a ball from the undercarriage of the stroller and followed Rosie across the grass. As I got close, she looked over her shoulder, smiled mischievously, and took off running again, this time toward the man and woman at the table. Owen and I stayed close behind. Rosie slowed down a few feet from the couple and said loudly, “That man’s not Daddy.”

The man and woman both laughed, but an unhappy energy hovered around them, as if Rosie had interrupted a serious conversation. And then, with a start, I realized that the woman was Marisa Mazarelli. I hadn’t seen her for nearly seventeen years, since our high school graduation, and she looked simultaneously the same and much older. Patrick had run into
her a few years earlier and had described her to Vi and me as “hagged out,” and while this was definitely an overstatement and she was still pretty, she did appear diminished. She was brown-eyed and brown-haired and pert-nosed, but there was nothing exceptional about her beauty, about her presence. Was that only because middle school and high school, the era of her power, was long past? Or was it that her power had always hinged on an audience and here in this park, on this sunny October morning, she no longer had one? Surely she knew about Vi’s prediction, and probably found it risible. But even if she chose at this moment to make a ruthless comment about my sister and me, who’d witness it except the grandfather and grandson and Marisa’s boyfriend, or whoever he was? Then I thought he had to be her boyfriend, because once you were married, you didn’t hang out in parks on weekday mornings without kids.

Warmly, the boyfriend said to Rosie, “How old are you?”

I was reluctant to speak; I suspected my voice would give me away, if Marisa didn’t already know who I was. But after a few seconds of silence, it felt weird for me not to prompt Rosie. “Do you know how old you are, sweetheart?” I said. “How many years old?” I avoided Marisa’s gaze and looked instead at the back of my daughter’s head, her wavy dark brown hair.

“Seven!” Rosie shouted.

“You’re two and a half,” I said. “You’re not seven.”

“You’re seven!” Rosie yelled, and she started running away from them. I turned, too, saying in a tone of light regret, as if I’d hoped to stay and visit, “Onward.”

I could feel Marisa’s eyes on my back. She definitely knew who I was, and she probably knew that I knew who she was, but we’d silently decided not to acknowledge each other. And as I chased Rosie, I was fairly sure that I’d come out ahead in our exchange, or nonexchange. Because here I was with my two cute children, and I’d noticed that the ring finger of Marisa’s left hand was bare. This was the nastiest, most elemental math, made no less ugly for its undeniability:
I ended up with a husband and you didn’t
. Or at least she hadn’t so far, or if she had, she’d gotten divorced.

Rosie made her way to the little boy and his grandfather, who were standing near a bench on which the boy had set a bunch of plastic action
figures. The grandfather and I smiled at each other. By the time Vi arrived, Rosie was busy repeatedly burying a plastic soldier under mulch, then yanking him up and flinging mulch everywhere.

“That was at least two miles,” Vi said from a few yards away. Her cheeks were flushed, her forehead sweaty. She waved at the grandfather. “Hi there,” she said. “Violet. Kate’s sister.”

With a thick accent, he said, “A pleasure to meet you.” So he did speak English. In any case, it felt as if Vi had violated park etiquette by introducing herself. Then she said to me, “See that woman over there? I swear it’s Marisa Mazarelli.”