Sisterland Read online

  I had prepared myself for the tedium of life with a baby, warned about it by co-workers and friends and countless movies and sitcoms, but I’d experienced much in my adult life that was more tedious: office meetings and office paperwork and wedding toasts and the wait at the mechanic’s while my oil was changed. Rosie was not tedious to me; rather, she was my own tiny and charming companion. It wasn’t that I endlessly tried to amuse or edify her. I just brought her along when I did things, in and out of the house, and her skin was very soft and her expressions were sweet and she was a real person, a miniature person who clearly adored me, and I adored her in return.

  And then she was sixteen weeks old, and it was time for me to return to work at the elder-care agency and for Rosie to go to the day care Jeremy and I had picked out when I was still pregnant. Rosie would be entering the Zucchini Room of a medium-sized place on Hanley Road, and I accompanied her for a half day on the Friday before she started. This time, I noticed things I hadn’t when Jeremy and I had visited months before: how runny the other babies’ noses were and how chewed-on the toys looked, plus could two teachers really look after eight babies when it took all my energy and attention to look after one? But the kids seemed mostly happy, and the adults were warm. Jeremy would take Rosie on Monday, we decided, so that I wouldn’t bawl.

  After going to sleep on Sunday night, I awoke around three from a dream in which Rosie was in a prison cell; she was crying, reaching for me, from behind bars. I got out of bed and hurried to her room, where I found her asleep on her back, breathing evenly. My heartbeat slowed as I watched her in the dark. Eventually, I went back to bed.

  In the morning, when I tried to describe the dream to Jeremy, he smiled. I was changing Rosie’s diaper while Jeremy stood nearby. “Are you a baby bandit, Rosie?” he said. He touched my shoulder. “It’s natural that you’re feeling nervous.”

  But in some ways, it was easier being back at work than I’d expected: The schedule and the rooms were familiar; talking to other adults, having conversations, consumed my attention. There was a routine I could slip into, that could carry me along, and there was the shocking weightlessness of being responsible only for myself. Except when I closed the door of my office and taped paper over the rectangular window to pump, my body belonged to me. But when Rosie came into my mind, I’d feel a lurching worry. What if one of the teachers dropped her?

  Meeting with a diabetic eighty-six-year-old and his sixty-five-year-old daughter, I kept looking at the clock above my bulletin board, waiting for the minutes to pass until I could walk out to the parking lot, get into my car, and drive to pick up Rosie.

  As the weeks passed, my uneasiness waxed and waned. “She had a good day,” Miss Helen would often say when I picked Rosie up. Rosie’s clothes smelled like the teachers, which wasn’t to say the teachers smelled bad—just that there was no denying Rosie had been elsewhere.

  I started putting her in leather booties with a smiling teddy bear over the toes. She didn’t need shoes, in that she was many months away from walking. But her socks always fell off, and then she was barefoot, and how could I endure my tiny daughter being out in the world without me, barefoot? Every morning, I’d pull the shoes over her feet before securing her in the car seat so Jeremy could carry her away.

  On Jeremy’s side, Rosie wasn’t the first grandchild, and while Jeremy’s parents and stepparents were pleased for us, they weren’t that brand of grandparent who can’t get enough of the new baby or who while visiting does laundry and cleans the kitchen; even if they hadn’t lived several states away, I don’t think they’d have been that kind of grandparent. They were happy to come see us, to hold Rosie and eat a few meals, and then to fly out again.

  Carol and Ned, Jeremy’s mother and stepfather, visited the week after Rosie’s birth, and when Rosie was five months old, Carol had a meeting in Chicago and decided to add an overnight trip to St. Louis. My mother-in-law was a petite woman with salt-and-pepper hair; when dressed formally, as for her job as an attorney, she wore black and beige and maroon, classically tailored slacks and jackets and turtleneck sweaters that, I’d realized over time, were quite expensive. When dressed informally, she wore jeans and suede driving shoes. Every morning, she swam two miles at a gym, and once a year, she and Jeremy’s stepfather, who was also a lawyer, took a ten-day vacation to somewhere sporty and international: Australia, say, or Kenya. I liked Carol, and I knew I could do much worse in the mother-in-law department. At the same time, we weren’t close. She had a brisk, sometimes preoccupied energy—she was always checking her smartphone years before everyone was always checking their smartphone—and she was fond of games I wasn’t good at, like Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit. Also, she had asked me four separate times if I ever regretted not getting my master’s in social work.

  Carol arrived on a Friday afternoon about a month after Rosie had started day care. Jeremy met her at the airport, I picked up Rosie an hour early, and we converged at home, sitting in the living room, Jeremy and his mother drinking red wine while I drank a beer and we all made faces at Rosie. Rosie had had a cold earlier in the week and was still fussier than usual but sat happily on Carol’s lap, turning the pages of a board book.

  Around seven, I took Rosie up for bed. It was while changing her diaper that I noticed that her left eye seemed watery. “Are you okay, little pumpkin?” I said. “Are you sad?”

  She looked at me somberly, but she wasn’t crying. I zipped the pajamas up the front. In the glider, Rosie nursed for perhaps a minute before pulling off, and then she did begin to cry.

  “What’s wrong?” I said. “Should we try again later?” I held her against me, rocking, and she calmed down, but twice in a row, when I set her in her crib, she howled. Only on the third try, after I’d held her for over ten minutes following her descent into sleep, was I able to successfully deposit her in the crib and creep away.

  Jeremy and Carol had gone to pick up a pizza, and I’d been upstairs so long that they were back and already eating in the kitchen when I returned to the first floor. “Everything okay?” Jeremy asked.

  “Forgive our bad manners in starting without you,” Carol said, “but I have exciting plans tonight that I can’t be late for.”

  “Plans here?” Jeremy said. “In St. Louis?”

  Carol beamed as if about to divulge a juicy piece of gossip. “I’m going to a séance.”

  I understood immediately, but I could tell Jeremy didn’t.

  “Violet invited me, and she said her house isn’t far from yours,” Carol said. “So, Jer, if I can borrow your car—”

  I tried to sound undistressed as I asked, “When did you and Vi schedule this?”

  “You never even told me what your sister does, Kate!” Carol wagged her finger at me in a mock scolding. “And truly, my entire life, I’ve wanted to see a psychic. When I walk by one of those places with the neon hand in the window, I’m always dying to go in.”

  Jeremy said, “You’re going to one of Vi’s sessions?” Sessions was what Vi herself called them; she would never have said séance.

  “I told her I absolutely want to pay the full amount, no family discounts.” Carol looked at me. “So she doesn’t undercharge me, what’s her usual fee?”

  “I think thirty,” I said.

  “She doesn’t make you pay?” Carol winked, and in the wink, I understood that she saw Vi’s psychicness as unconnected to me—that she didn’t assume I shared Vi’s abilities, or her pretense of them. Whether Carol believed that Vi was genuinely psychic was a separate matter from whether Carol was titillated by the idea of it; for many people, I knew, the titillation lay in the unlikeliness.

  Carol said, “When I was here after Rosie was born, I said, ‘Violet, how’s the restaurant?’ Well, she told me she’s been doing this for the last two years, and my jaw about dropped to the floor. I said, ‘Next time I’m in St. Louis, you must let me come.’ She offered to do a private séance, but I think the group sounds like much more fun.”

 
After a silence, Jeremy said, “I hadn’t pegged you as a fan of the supernatural, Mom.”

  Carol laughed lightly, catching my eye. She said, “Our children never give us credit for being interesting, do they?”

  After Carol had gone to use the bathroom, Jeremy whispered, “Sorry.” In a non-whisper that was still quiet, he added, “I think she just sees it as a lark.”

  “I’m going with her.”

  He squinted at me. “Why?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “They’ll be fine. They’re both grown-ups.”

  “Think how easily Vi could say, ‘Yeah, Kate’s psychic, too. Oh, she hasn’t told you?’ It’ll change the way your mother sees me forever.”

  “But not necessarily for the worse. Little did I know that my mom was so fascinated by this stuff.”

  “She thinks she’s fascinated, until it weirds her out.”

  “So call Vi and ask her not to mention you.”

  “Then she definitely will. She’ll pretend it was a mistake, but I’m sure she’s getting off on having been in contact with your mom without us knowing.” I heard Carol open the bathroom door, and then she was entering the kitchen, saying, “Now, don’t wait up for me because I have no idea how late I’ll be.”

  “Carol, if you don’t mind, I’d love to go with you,” I said.

  Without hesitating, Carol said, “Fabulous. Do you think it’s all right if I’m wearing jeans?”

  “I’m sure it’s fine.”

  I went upstairs to check on Rosie, and inside her darkened room, listening to her baby snores, I thought maybe I should skip Vi’s. The session was called for eight, and it was already a quarter to; I could feel Carol’s antsiness emanating from the first floor. There was no way Vi would start on time, but Carol, who was herself unfailingly punctual, didn’t know this. I really didn’t want to go, I thought. I wanted to stay at home, to be in the same place as my daughter. But after a few more seconds of standing over Rosie’s crib, I tiptoed out.

  In the car, Carol was talkative, asking how many people would be at Vi’s and who they were, and I tried to answer her questions in a way that didn’t reveal that I had never attended one of the sessions. As I parked on the street, I could see, past Vi’s small yard and through the lit-up front window, the living room of the house she’d bought with the down payment from our father. Beyond the candelabra on her windowsill, a dozen people stood in clusters of two or three, and hanging on the wall behind them were Vi’s Tibetan prayer flags.

  As Carol and I entered, the volume of voices was high, and I felt a jolting reminder of how the rest of the world carried on in the evenings while Jeremy and I were cocooned away with Rosie. (Apparently, people still left their houses.) The folding chairs were set up in a circle in the living room, with Vi’s lounger at the top of the circle, beneath the prayer flags.

  Vi was uncorking a bottle of wine when she caught sight of me. She made a theatrical expression of astonishment, opening her mouth wide and holding her fingers in front of it. Approaching us, still holding the wine bottle with the opener embedded in the cork—I’d wondered if she’d be outfitted in flowing robes, but she wore denim shorts and a Mizzou T-shirt—she said, “I feel like I’m being visited by the queen of England.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t have missed this for the world,” Carol said, and neither Vi nor I corrected her misunderstanding.

  There was no one else there that I knew, which was weirdly impressive: Total strangers paid my sister to attend her sessions. Vi had gone to get plastic cups from the kitchen, and Carol was helping, when someone tapped me on the arm, and when I turned, a woman my age or a little younger stood a few inches from me, beaming. She was very pretty, with long red hair that she wore in two braids, and she seemed kind and warm and open in a way that put me on edge. “You’re Violet’s twin, aren’t you?” she said. “I’ve heard amazing things about you.”

  I summoned a smile. “Thanks.”

  “You two must have an incredible connection. I’ve always wished I had a twin.” She leaned in, though we already were standing close together. “I even wonder if I did have a twin who, you know—” She waved one hand in a circle, by which I understood that she meant died in the womb. This wasn’t the first time someone had made a comment like this to me. As I took a step back, she said, “Or maybe it was in a previous life.” A man was passing us, and the woman reached out and pulled him toward her—he was one of only two men present, and he looked about sixty, with a silver beard and small gold-rimmed glasses—and said, “Bob, this is Violet’s twin sister.”

  Bob brought his hands together in a yoga pose, bowing his head. “A privilege.”

  I held up one of my own hands and waved.

  Vi and Carol reappeared in the living room, distributing wine, and after one more trip to the kitchen and back, Vi called out, “Does everyone who wants a drink have one?” She scanned the living room. “Then let’s get cracking.”

  We all took seats, and she said, “Some of us here are old friends, but for those who are new, let’s everyone go around and say our names. And I want to mention two special guests tonight—my twin sister, Kate, and her mother-in-law, Carol.”

  There was applause, and I smiled sheepishly. Vi’s clients—they weren’t my kind of people, but it was undeniable that they were nice. When we introduced ourselves, Carol said she was a séance virgin, and I cringed, wondering if in anticipating that Vi would embarrass me in front of Carol, I’d had it backward.

  Following introductions, Vi delivered a kind of prayer, invoking our sacred energy and our open hearts and our gratitude for the gifts around us. Then she began a monologue—perhaps it was a sermon—about how she’d been out for a walk in Tilles Park the other night and had seen a toddler and a puppy playing hide-and-seek, approaching and retreating from each other, and it had reminded her that even in our hectic, twenty-four/ seven world, we need to take the time to be playful, and while I was wondering whether Vi had really taken this walk and whether the toddler and puppy actually existed, I realized that everyone else was nodding their heads. Even though what she was saying seemed neither interesting nor original, she spoke with an authority I hadn’t previously observed in her. She expected the group to buy what she said, and they did. I probably would have, too, if she weren’t my sister.

  “Is someone here tonight having conflict with a co-worker?” she asked then, and a woman in a purple tank top raised her hand.

  Vi said, “I’m picking up on that, Penny. Tell me a little more.”

  “My supervisor never gives me credit,” Penny said. “I busted my ass to get this project done, and at a department meeting yesterday, she kept saying, ‘We did this, we did that.’ ‘We’ nothing!”

  “That’s hard, isn’t it?” Vi said. “She’s not being honest.”

  “It’s just really frustrating,” Penny said.

  “You know what?” Vi said. “She’s not being honest with you and your colleagues, but the part that’ll come back to bite her is she’s not being honest with herself. And when you get to the point where you can’t face your own reflection in the mirror”—Vi chortled but not unsympathetically; it was a we’ve-all-been-there chortle—“well, that’s a place none of us want to be. Penny, this woman is struggling. She’s having a rough ride, and I want you to meet her with compassion. I want you to dialogue with her, but I want you to remember that she wouldn’t be acting this way if she wasn’t in a dark place.” Vi looked around the circle. “Someone’s worried about health. Don’t be shy. You’re safe here.”

  Silver-bearded Bob said, “As most of you know, I lost a hundred pounds two years ago. My wife and I started out dieting together, but she had trouble sticking with it. She’s still very heavy, and I want to support her, but it’s hard when I’m trying to eat celery and carrots and go for runs and she’s ripping open another bag of chips in front of the TV.”

  Bob’s quandary seemed to me only loosely health-related, but Vi didn’t hesitate. “Bob, first, I want to acknowledge your incre
dible courage and tenacity.” My sister brought a hand to her forehead in a military salute. “From someone who knows how hard dieting is, really, hats off. You’re an inspiration to all of us. Now, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to be totally and completely on your wife’s team. Not like, ‘Honey, quit pigging out on chips,’ but like, ‘I am there for you. One hundred percent, I am there for you, and together we’re going to beat this.’ Start small. You’re running, yeah, but how about going for a walk around the block with her? Let me ask you this: Who makes dinner?”

  “Usually, she does.”

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh. How did I know that?” There was group laughter. “Bob, I want you to take over the cooking a couple nights a week. Make salad, grill some fish. No discussion of calories, just a healthy, delicious meal prepared with love. Can you do that?”