Sisterland Read online

  “Oh, I’m not arguing that there aren’t some small-minded yokels in the Lou,” Hank said, and I realized with self-consciousness that a black man married to a white woman probably didn’t need to be reminded by me of how conservative a place St. Louis could be. “But—” Hank paused and mouthed, Fuck ’em. “Seriously,” he said aloud.

  “What about Courtney, though?” I said. “She must have been appalled by Vi just now.”

  “She hasn’t seen it yet.” Hank checked his watch. “She teaches until one-fifteen. But I’m sure she’ll be okay being the yin to Vi’s yang.”

  You mean the rational to Vi’s crazy, I thought, but even in my head it sounded too mean to say. Besides, I didn’t believe Vi was crazy. I believed she sometimes seemed crazy, and that on a regular basis she exercised bad judgment, but I didn’t believe she was crazy; I never had. “Should we get going?” I said.

  Amelia attended preschool in the morning three days a week, at a place where I was planning to put in an application for Rosie for the following fall, so on those days, we met up post-lunch and pre-nap. Our default plan was to walk first to Kaldi’s, where Hank and I would get coffee and the girls would split a scone, and then to backtrack to the park—officially known as DeMun Park, though Hank had been greatly amused when Vi told us that everyone who’d ever worked in the row of restaurants along DeMun Avenue referred to it as MILF Park.

  As we left the Wheelings’ house, it occurred to me that I should call my father, to check if he’d watched the news, but after his comment that morning about Vi coming into her own, I couldn’t bring myself to do it; in case he hadn’t seen her, I wanted to give him a few more hours of not knowing.

  Outside, Amelia and Rosie skipped in front of us, and Hank walked beside me as I pushed Owen in the stroller. Amelia slapped her palm against a lamppost, and when Rosie mimicked the gesture exactly, I thought, as I often did, that Amelia and Hank were like mentors to Rosie and me: Amelia was always beckoning Rosie toward the next developmental stage, while Hank was the person who’d most influenced me as a parent. It was from Hank that I’d learned to give Rosie her own spoon when I’d fed her jar food, so that she wasn’t constantly grabbing the one I was using. Hank had told me to put Triple Paste on her when her diaper rash got bad (“Way more than you think you need, like you’re spreading cream cheese on a bagel,” he’d said), and to buy a Britax car seat after she outgrew her infant seat, and to go to the Buder library for the best story hour. The way Hank was with Amelia—affectionate and relaxed, unconcerned with getting mud or food on his clothes—was the way I aspired to be with Rosie, and the way Hank answered the questions Amelia asked, which was succinctly but accurately (and definitely not cutely, not in a winking manner for the benefit of another adult), was the way I tried to answer Rosie’s when she began asking them.

  As we turned onto DeMun Avenue, I said, “Courtney looked good on TV. How’s she feeling?”

  “Not too bad. She wants to get the results of her CVS, just for peace of mind, but she hasn’t been nauseous for a while.”

  Courtney was eleven weeks pregnant, expecting in April. When we’d gotten to know the Wheelings, they’d been in agreement that they were having only one child, and in fact, Rosie had been the beneficiary of Amelia’s pricey hand-me-downs, which Courtney had told me with such certainty they’d never want back that I hadn’t worried when Rosie ripped or stained them. And then, the summer after she got tenure, Courtney decided she wanted another child. Not only wasn’t it difficult for her to persuade Hank, it was so easy that I suspected he’d have preferred two kids all along. Courtney was then thirty-seven, and when they hadn’t conceived within six months, she began taking Clomid; after another six months, she decided to have IVF but hadn’t yet started the first cycle when she discovered she was pregnant.

  I’d had Owen during the time Courtney and Hank had been trying for a second baby, and I had never spoken to Courtney about their fertility troubles; Courtney herself still hadn’t told me she was pregnant, and everything I knew had made its way to me via Hank. Courtney also hadn’t broached the subject with Jeremy, though they were closer than Courtney and I were. Once it had seemed slightly strange to me that our friendships with the Wheelings broke down not along gender lines but along professional ones—like me, Hank was the stay-at-home parent—but these days I rarely thought about it.

  “So this morning Amelia wakes up at five-fifteen,” Hank said. “Not like wakes up crying in the night, but wakes up wakes up, in a great mood, wanting to eat breakfast. And she’d slept through the earthquake, but Courtney and I had been up then, too, so I was so tired I felt hungover. It was like all the downside of a hangover without any of the fun. I started thinking about getting up in the night with a newborn, and I seriously don’t know if I have it in me again.”

  I laughed. “I think that train has left the station.”

  “It’s been a while for us,” Hank said. “And we aren’t spring chickens anymore.”

  “Oh, please.” Hank and Courtney were only four years older than I was, and they were in great shape. Every Wednesday afternoon and Saturday morning, they saw a trainer together, and they had met because they’d both played varsity squash as Harvard undergrads, a fact I was glad I hadn’t known until my friendship with Hank was established—not the squash part, though it was a sport with which I was totally unfamiliar, but the Harvard part, which made Hank not quite the same breed of stay-at-home parent I was.

  “Call me when you turn thirty-five,” Hank said. “I swear something changes.”

  “All right, geezer.”

  “I will say this: Your son is an excellent advertisement for babykind.” Hank stepped around the stroller, so he was facing Owen, and started walking backward. “We want to order one just as easygoing as you, O,” he said.

  “Not to confirm your fears, but you know he’s not sleeping through the night yet, right?” I said. “He still nurses every three or four hours.”

  “For real?” Hank looked incredulous. “You’ve got to let him cry it out.” Hank was still walking backward in front of the stroller, and he said to Owen, “You don’t want your mom to get a good night’s sleep, huh? Kate, you should see the shit-eating grin your son has on his face right now.”

  I laughed, though beneath the levity of the moment, I felt a sudden uneasiness that wasn’t related to our conversation. It was the realization I hadn’t allowed myself to have earlier, choosing instead to be distracted by how disheveled Vi had looked on the local news: My sister had received a warning that something bad was going to happen. I wasn’t yet entirely convinced that there would be another earthquake, though I wasn’t convinced there wouldn’t. Either way, she’d sensed something.

  I said to Hank, “Do you and Courtney keep emergency supplies?”

  “Not a one. Do you guys?”

  I shook my head.

  “You planning to go buy a generator now?”

  A generator, no, but maybe a crank radio, and definitely water and canned food. Aloud, as if the possibility amused me, I said, “I might.”

  “I have a confession,” Hank said, and I felt a kind of tingle, a nervous anticipation. I was both surprised and unsurprised when he said, “I know how you feel about Vi’s whole gig, but there’s a part of me that believes in that stuff. ESP, psychic predictions—the world’s a pretty weird and cool place, so why is it impossible?”

  Again trying to sound lighthearted, I said, “Don’t let Courtney hear you say that.”

  “Ehh—” He shrugged. “She cuts me slack for being artsy.” Before Amelia’s birth, Hank had worked as an art teacher at a private high school, and he made oil paintings, or at least he intended to even if he didn’t have much time these days. The attic of their house, where I’d never been, was his studio. He added, “My only point is that it’s hubris to claim there aren’t unexplained phenomena out there.”

  Hank and I had been friends for just over two years, which wasn’t that long, but we’d seen each other alm
ost every day during this time, and there were ways in which he knew more about my daily life than Jeremy did. Yet every time Hank and I had headed in a direction that could have opened onto the topic of psychicness, of my psychicness—conversations about our families or our childhoods or about secrets, even conversations once or twice about the paranormal—I’d always let the opportunity to tell him pass. I’d imagined that I’d immediately wish I could take the admission back. The last person I’d revealed the truth to was Jeremy, because I’d thought I owed it to him. But if I wasn’t marrying Hank, was it unreasonable that I wanted to seem to him like a regular person? Growing up, from adolescence on, I had assumed that I couldn’t live in St. Louis as an adult because my past would always follow and define me. I’d been pleasantly surprised to discover that I might be wrong. To have settled in my hometown with a husband from elsewhere, to have friends from elsewhere—this was a version of life I hadn’t been able to envision as a teenager. Why would I disrupt this fragile balance just for the sake of self-disclosure? Hank and I knew each other well; we didn’t need to know each other completely.

  And yet my withholding of information, which had previously felt only like discretion, abruptly seemed to be verging on dishonesty. We’d arrived at Kaldi’s, and I pulled the brake on the stroller. Amelia, who was standing with Rosie by the café’s front door, called, “Daddy, can we have a raspberry scone?”

  “Hang on, sweetheart,” Hank said.

  “I’m sure Vi will be glad to have you in her corner,” I said.

  “But does she have you?” Though Hank’s tone was casual, he was looking at me so intently that I wondered what he suspected. Surely this was the moment to say, Of course she does, because we’re exactly the same. Or we had been, until I’d deliberately destroyed my abilities.

  Instead, like a coward, I said, “Of course she does. She’s my sister.”

  Chapter 3

  Vi and I were born in August 1975, less than a month before our parents’ first wedding anniversary. At thirty-seven weeks, we were considered full-term, which was and still is unusual for twins, but the truly notable fact of our arrival was that our mother didn’t know until the day of her delivery that there were two of us. Twenty-three years old and slim, she had gained seventy pounds during her pregnancy; by her second trimester, her hands and feet were so swollen every morning that the doctor told her to remove her wedding ring or risk needing to have it cut off.

  Apart from her dramatic weight gain, our mother had experienced what she understood to be a normal pregnancy. It was at a routine appointment on a hot morning in mid-August that our mother’s obstetrician ordered an X ray because he was considering revising her due date based on her size. (Sonograms existed then, but they were still uncommon.) During the X ray, the technician saw right away that there were two babies, announced the news to our mother, then pleaded with her to act surprised when the obstetrician told her. But she didn’t have to act—she was stunned. How would she take care of twins? She had moved to St. Louis a year and a half earlier from the tiny town of Risco, Missouri, and she knew no one who could help her. She’d grown apart from the girl she’d lived with before marrying our father, she was estranged from her family in Risco, and she no longer had co-workers.

  The doctor, who didn’t want our mother carrying twins beyond thirty-seven weeks, told her to call our father and have him pack a bag and meet them at the hospital. Once there, the doctor broke our mother’s water—she said he used a hook that resembled a crochet needle, a detail that as children, Vi found fascinating and I was disturbed by. After several hours, the doctor decided that our mother’s labor had progressed enough, and he had an anesthetist administer an epidural. As soon as it took effect, our mother realized only half her body was numb. She needed another dose, she told the nurse, but the nurse explained that the anesthesia just hadn’t kicked in yet and our mother should wait. An hour passed, and our mother, with increasing desperation, told the nurse she still was numb on only one side of her body. After the doctor examined her, he said she was too close to delivering to receive additional medication. This meant that while the left side of her body remained desensitized and immobile, the right side was wild with pain; one arm and leg writhed as the other lay inert. She was trapped, and she also was alone; our father sat in the waiting room.

  When Vi emerged, our mother felt as if she’d been turned inside out. A nurse whisked the baby away, and as the contractions continued, another nurse told our mother to keep pushing, which our mother thought she already was doing. I emerged eight minutes later and was similarly whisked away. Our mother had neither held nor even really seen us; she was hyperventilating, and though she soon stopped, she felt flattened, overwhelmed by what she had just been through. She lay motionless in the hospital bed and swore that she would never have another baby.

  As for Vi and me, after our Apgar scores confirmed that we were healthy, we were weighed (Vi was six pounds, nine ounces, and I was five pounds, eleven ounces), then cleaned, wrapped in blankets, deposited in bassinets, and taken to the nursery, where we were introduced to our father. Vi was asleep, he said, and I was awake, and he went about memorizing our faces. Vi had been named, but I hadn’t. For the next five days, though the nurses and our father repeatedly inquired about our mother’s preferences, she declined to answer. Having expected only one baby, she had planned on Violet for a girl and Victor for a boy. What about Violet and Victoria, our father suggested, but our mother shook her head. She had spoken very little since our birth; she did not breast-feed us. Violet and Margaret? (Margaret was the name of our father’s mother.) Our mother shook her head again. Violet and Daisy? our father asked, and our mother shrugged. He took this as assent, and we became Violet Kimberly and Daisy Kathleen. Our mother later claimed that Kimberly and Kath-leen had been maternity ward nurses, but our father denied it, saying the nurses had merely helped him select our middle names.

  As little girls, Vi and I loved hearing about our arrival in spite of the fact that we didn’t have a mother who concluded this narrative with lavish expressions of affection. In retrospect, I’m not sure why we were so enthralled by this story, aside from the fact that we possessed the guileless self-absorption of most children. But it took having babies myself for me to understand just how lacking, how depressing even, the story of our births was, with its absence of any hint of joy on our mother’s part. She had looked forward to having one child, was my interpretation of events when I became an adult, but having two did not double her excitement; rather, it extinguished it. Our mother was neither a happy mother nor a happy person. It’s impossible for me to know if she was unhappy before she had us, but I suspect she previously must have been able to enjoy herself at least a little or I doubt that my father would have married her. And not only married her but been so smitten that, as a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor, he’d proposed to her within three months of their meeting and left behind a life in Nebraska to move to St. Louis for this beautiful woman seventeen years his junior.

  It also took having babies of my own for me to truly imagine what that experience in the hospital must have been like for my mother, how difficult: At twenty-three, she was almost a decade younger than I was when I delivered my first child; her husband wasn’t in the delivery room to support her; and the combination of the ineffective epidural and the still surprising fact of there being two babies to push out must have been, in the clinical sense, traumatizing. And things did not improve much, particularly with regard to her isolation, when the hospital discharged the three of us.

  That morning, our mother had changed, for the first time since our arrival five days earlier, from a hospital gown to a dress, and she was shocked when she looked in the mirror. Between giving birth and shedding the water weight that had made her swollen, she had lost at least thirty pounds; her legs were so skinny that she reminded herself of Minnie Mouse. And this, in a way, was the happy ending of our birth story, a happiness Vi and I surely intuited, and celebrated, even if it had l
ittle to do with either of us—that in spite of everything she’d been through, on the day she left the hospital, our mother once again looked pretty.

  We lived in Kirkwood, Missouri, a suburb twelve miles southwest of the St. Louis Arch. The blue shingled house on Gilbert Street that my parents had bought when they married was the one they stayed in until after I’d graduated from college, and for all that time my mother complained about it. She said that the house was drafty in the winter, that the street smelled of exhaust from trains on the nearby tracks, and that the neighbors were nosy and low-class. The real problem, however, wasn’t the house; it was a simple and terrible fact that none of us ever discussed because we didn’t need to, which was that our mother didn’t like our father. In her crossed arms, the exhalations of her nostrils, the pinch of her lips, she showed us every day that she didn’t enjoy his company, didn’t find him interesting, and didn’t respect him. Part of it seemed to be that she held him accountable for the disappointments life had dealt her, though it was always easier to see that she was disappointed than to understand exactly why. (Not that my father was alone in having let her down. Almost everyone my mother encountered fell into one of two categories: low-class or snobby. Only very occasionally would she bestow her most prized compliment, reserved for a rich person who had pleasantly surprised her: He didn’t put on airs, she’d say. He acted the same as you and me.)