Sisterland (38 page)

This time, she was obviously expecting me to speak. I said, “That sounds hard.”

“I’m just wondering,
is
he going to propose? Ever? Or is he stringing me along?”

I felt foolish that it had taken me until this moment to understand
where she was headed. “Oh, I don’t do that anymore,” I said. “I can’t. I haven’t been able to for—a while.” The quality of Jeremy’s attention was shifting; he was watching me with an interest he’d been unable to muster for Marisa, and he must have assumed I was lying.

“I’m not saying, like, how many children will we have or will they be boys or girls.” Marisa laughed in a bitter way. “Just, do I stick it out with him or do I give up? Because after seven years—I was twenty-eight when we started going out, and I’ll be thirty-five in April. And for a woman, thirty-five’s a major cutoff.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to help you,” I said. “I really can’t. Vi is the one who still does this, but I don’t.” Would it be karmic justice for Marisa to have to pay Vi for her insights, or was it unfair to inflict Marisa on Vi even when I was mad at my sister? It was possible, I thought, that Vi would find it more gratifying than I did to encounter this pleading, needy version of Marisa. I added, “But if you get in touch with her, you should wait until after this Friday.”

“Are you kidding?” Marisa said. “We’re getting the hell out of town tomorrow. Aren’t you?”

She was actually the first person I knew who was leaving St. Louis because of Vi’s prediction, and although it felt like her plans ought to have been proof of something to Jeremy, he wouldn’t see it that way. “No,” I said. “I don’t think we are.”

“But what if you and your kids get trapped under rubble? Aren’t you scared?”

“We’re taking precautions,” I said.

“Why don’t you ask Ryan about getting married?” Jeremy said then. “Ask him what you’re asking us.” Even if he was only trying to change the subject, there was something decidedly surreal about my kind, sensible, good-looking husband giving romantic advice to my adolescent nemesis. Jeremy added, “Be clear about what you want, and if Ryan doesn’t want the same thing, dump him. Plenty of people get married after the age of thirty-five.” He patted my thigh. “I was thirty-four, and look how lucky I got.”

Marisa squinted at Jeremy. Was she noticing that my husband was
good-looking, or was she too mired in her own self-absorption? She said, “I bet you’re not from St. Louis.”

“Northern Virginia,” Jeremy said.

“Yeah, see, if you’re from somewhere else, that’s why you think thirty-five isn’t old. But for here, it is. Trust me.” She turned back to me. “I don’t understand how you can just not be psychic anymore. Isn’t that like losing your sense of smell?”

I shook my head. “Yeah, I’m not sure why.” If she thought I was going to explain, let alone apologize, she was mistaken.

She glanced around the living room, and I could feel her energy adjusting itself. She hadn’t gotten what she wanted, and we weren’t being solicitous enough that she’d feel welcome just to settle in and chat, or at least I hoped she wouldn’t. “You took stuff off your walls, huh?” she said. “I’m really surprised that you’re not leaving town.” And it was only then, after it became apparent that it wouldn’t happen, that I realized I’d been expecting an apology from her. I would have accepted it graciously, unfussily; I wouldn’t have made her grovel.
I’m sorry I was such an awful person when we were growing up
, she’d have said, and I’d have said,
Don’t worry. It was a long time ago
.

“We’ll be fine,” Jeremy said.

Marisa was standing, pulling on her jacket over her skinny arms, lifting her hair around the jacket’s collar. She looked at me. “You should move back to Kirkwood. It’s such a good place to raise kids.” Then she withdrew a phone from her black leather purse and said, “Tell me your number and I’ll text you mine, so if anything pops into your head, you can reach me.”

She was loathsome; she was just as unrepentant, just as much of a user, as she’d always been. And of course I gave her my number—the number for my cellphone, which somehow seemed like it would limit her ability to infiltrate my family’s life more than giving her our home number would. I never wanted her to come back. If she did, I would think of a way to prevent her from walking inside.

After I closed the door behind her, Jeremy said, “Wow.”

“Wow that she’s leaving town or wow about the boyfriend?”

“The smartest thing poor Ryan can do is run really far and really fast in the other direction.”

So Jeremy preferred not to discuss the fact that Marisa was heeding Vi’s warning; he would have if I’d forced the subject, but I wasn’t going to. I wasn’t leaving it alone because it didn’t bother me, however. I was leaving it alone because hearing about what a rotten couple Marisa and Ryan were, I wanted us to be better. At the least, I wanted us not to be experiencing discord currently. And so I said, “In her defense, two years of the ring in the sock drawer has to be a mindfuck.”

“That’s what she gets for being a snoop,” Jeremy said. I had walked from the door back to the couch, where he was still sitting, and he pulled me onto his lap. “You know what her punishment is for tormenting you way back when?” he said.

I looked at him.

He said, “Her punishment is being her.”

But then things
unraveled between Jeremy and me; they unraveled the next morning. Rosie refused to eat the oatmeal Jeremy had fixed, and she was still at the table when I came downstairs. When I entered the kitchen, she said, “Rosie gets up with Mama.”

“She’s had about two bites,” Jeremy said. Owen was on the kitchen floor banging a spatula against the linoleum squares.

I took a seat beside Rosie and, after much wheedling, got her to eat half the bowl; I was the one holding the spoon, which I was fairly sure I shouldn’t still have been doing for an almost-three-year-old. Then I wolfed down a banana, washed my hands, and when I reached for the Neosporin, which I’d been keeping on top of the refrigerator, Rosie screamed, “No medicine! No Rosie medicine!”

“It helps keep your boo-boo clean. Mama will just put on a little.”

“No medicine!”

She was twisting away, pushing at me when I tried to get closer, and I said to Jeremy, “Can you hold her arms?” This was how we’d done it the night before.

He did, and I gripped her chin with one hand and dabbed on the antibiotic while she continued to flail her head. When I finished, she was sobbing. I lifted her from her booster seat, and she clung to me as I carried her into the living room. Jeremy followed us with Owen, and after he’d set Owen on the floor by the shelf, Jeremy said, “Okay if I go pack?”

“Hold on.” I hadn’t planned to say it; I just did. “I don’t want you to go to Denver.”

Jeremy’s expression was sympathetic. “I know you don’t.”

“No,” I said. “I mean, please don’t go. Fine if you never believed I’m psychic, but”—here my words turned into sobs—“but I need you to stay. I need you here.”

“What’s Mama saying?” Rosie said, and I sniffed and blinked, trying to straighten out my crumpled face.

“We’re talking about Daddy’s job,” I said.

Jeremy perched on the arm of the chair and said, “Let’s break this down. What are your specific concerns? Because I think we can work around them.”

“My concern is that we have two young children, and I’m worried about their safety.”

“No, I know you are. And let’s face it, it’s challenging enough to take care of them on a good day with both of us here. But what if we get your dad to come in for a couple hours each morning, Kendra comes in a couple hours at night—or you could have your dad sleep here, give him our bed, and you sleep downstairs, if you just want another adult in the house.”

“Jeremy, I want
you
here! You’re my husband.” I was probably terrifying Rosie, and possibly Owen, too. I said, “My dad would be a burden as much as a help, and you know it. He’ll give Owen pennies to play with.”

Jeremy looked genuinely pained. “This whole situation sucks,” he said. “Don’t think that I don’t realize how hard it’s been for you.” At some point in graduate school or as a new professor, had Jeremy been required to take a seminar on negotiating? Because that’s what it felt like, like he was very diplomatically preparing me not to get what I wanted from him. And sure enough, he added, “But I can’t skip this conference just because we have young kids.”

“I don’t see why not,” I said. “I did quit my job to take care of them.”

His expression became incrementally less sympathetic. “Voluntarily,” he said.

“Because I thought it was in the best interest of our family.”

“Well, I guarantee that putting my job at risk isn’t in our family’s best interest.”

“Give me a break, Jeremy. Even if you didn’t have tenure, skipping one conference would
not
be putting your job at risk. And everyone knows conferences are mostly schmoozing in the hotel bar.”

Jeremy’s jaw had tightened. “Which can have a direct effect on things like what journals you get published in. It’s all interconnected.”

At this moment, I became aware of the smell of shit—actual shit, not conversational bullshit—and I said to Rosie, whom I was still holding, “Is that you?” I pulled back the waistbands of her pants and diaper, and it was her. I said to Jeremy, “I know you think I don’t understand the intricacies of academia, but either you’ll fly to Denver today or you won’t. What I’m telling you is that I really, really, really don’t want you to.”

“Will the locks be changed when I come back?” He smiled a little.

“I’m glad you find this funny.” And yet I was starkly aware that I had nothing with which to threaten him. How and when had I arrived at this point of powerlessness in my marriage? Short of invoking divorce, which even in my current mood I recognized as insane, what leverage did I have? There was my anger, yes, but Jeremy was making it clear that he could tolerate that just fine.

Rosie and I were halfway up the stairs when he said, in a voice that contained no humor at all, “You know what, Kate? A part of me doesn’t want to go, either. And you know what else? If I cancel at the last minute, and if there’s any hint that I did it because of your sister’s prediction, then I might as well leave Wash U. I’ll lose all credibility in the scientific community.”

I stopped on a step, shifting Rosie against my hip. “Is that what this is about? Your professional pride?” Wasn’t part of Jeremy being Jeremy that petty gossip didn’t bother him? It bothered me, but not him.

He said, “Remember when you asked if people know that Vi is my sister-in-law? Well, they do. And I’ve tried to protect you from this, but,
yeah, it
is
awkward. Because as much as the media treats this as a complex issue with two viewpoints—maybe it’s possible to predict earthquakes, maybe it’s not—there’s nobody,
nobody
, who’s a scientist who thinks anything other than that Vi’s premonition is a total sham. If I don’t go to Denver, everyone I know will be talking about me. I need to show that I’m still myself, nothing has changed, and the coincidence of me being related to Vi is just that—a coincidence.”

So I did, in the end, embarrass Jeremy; instead of him lifting me toward a happier, more financially secure, less freakish existence, I’d pulled him down with me. This was heartbreaking; it elicited my sympathy in a way no other argument he’d made for traveling to Denver had. But I still didn’t want him to go.

“So how about this?” he said. “I’ll have my phone on me all the time, and when I see that it’s you, I’ll stop whatever I’m doing to answer, even if I’m in the middle of delivering my own paper.”

“Jeremy, it doesn’t matter if you take your phone with you,” I said. “What will you be able to do from a thousand miles away?”

He didn’t go
to campus that day but left for the airport when the children went down for their afternoon naps; as if to rub salt in my wounds, he gave a ride to Courtney, who was on the same flight out he was, though she was returning to St. Louis a day earlier than Jeremy. I’d been sorting laundry on the dining room table when he came to say goodbye after setting his wheeled suitcase by the front door. (A suitcase filled with only the belongings of an adult; because I’d never, since their births, traveled without our children, such a prospect was unthinkable. No diapers or tubes of Desitin, no tiny shirts with butterflies or trucks on them, no copies of
Goodnight Moon
.)

Jeremy stood next to me, and I couldn’t look at him.

“I’m sorry that everything is so screwed up right now,” he said.

I folded a pair of Rosie’s polka-dotted pants and said nothing.

“Sweetheart,” Jeremy said.

I finally looked up.

“It’ll all be fine,” he said. “Call whenever you want, I’ll be home Sunday, and we’ll put this behind us. Think of what we have to look forward to, like Owen dressed as a carrot.” This was what Rosie had decreed Owen should be for Halloween, though we didn’t yet have costumes for either of them.

Jeremy hugged me, and I put my arms around him in return, but loosely. Maybe this wasn’t really the reason why, but it seemed like if I held him tight, it would just make it harder to let him go.

My sister came to the hospital a few hours after Rosie
was born, and the first thing Vi said was “She doesn’t look very Chinese.” Then she grinned. “No, she’s adorable. She’s perfect. Did you poop on the table?”

Jeremy had gone downstairs to the cafeteria, and I was sitting up in bed in a gown, holding Rosie, who was wearing a diaper, a little cap, and a duck-covered blanket that kept slipping off her. At seven pounds even, she was unimaginably tiny—her nose was tiny and her ears were tiny and her arms and legs were tiny and her fingers were tiny and her fingernails were shockingly tiny; her butt had been tiny when I’d watched Jeremy change her diaper as she lay in the plastic bassinette. She had intermittent swirls of hair that was dark like Jeremy’s, and dark blue eyes with creases under them, as if emerging into the world had exhausted her, and there was some sort of womb crust on her forehead that the nurses hadn’t cleaned completely. And also—Vi was right—she was perfect.