Sisterland Read online

  “Maybe your earthquake was never an earthquake,” I said.

  Three weeks later, on the afternoon of January 12, 2010, as the children and I were driving home from the shoe store after buying Rosie a pair of purple sequined sneakers, I received a text from Jeremy: So sad about Haiti. I turned on the car radio and learned that a magnitude 7 earthquake had struck just west of Port-au-Prince, killing and injuring countless people, blocking the roads with rubble, and cutting off electricity and phone service.

  As I was turning into our driveway, my cellphone rang, and when I answered, Vi was sobbing. “It’s awful,” she said. “It’s awful.”

  In the backseat, Rosie reached out, plucked Owen’s pacifier from his mouth—her arms were getting long—and stuck it in her own. To Vi, I said, “Do you want to come over?”

  “Maybe.” Vi sniffed. “Isn’t Haiti already really fucked up without this?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Jeremy and I didn’t watch any news until the children were in bed, and even then, I couldn’t take much at a time. I’d get up to put laundry in the dryer or to carry a water glass from the living room mantel to the kitchen sink, and I was sorting the mail that had accumulated recently when Vi called.

  “I’m going down there to volunteer,” she said.

  I had already heard someone on CNN say that you’d be better off just sending money, but there were so many steps between Vi expressing her plan and boarding a plane to Port-au-Prince that it didn’t seem like I needed to dissuade her.

  “Come over,” I said. “Seriously.”

  “Stephanie will be here soon.”

  “She’s welcome, too.”

  “I’m not talking to reporters, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Are reporters calling you?”

  “Well, I heard from Emma about ten seconds after the quake. The ground might still have been shaking. But I’m done with the media.”

  “Really?” I tried to conceal my relief.

  “When I was doing all those interviews, it seemed fun, but the thought of talking to some newspaper columnist now—I mean, they all ask you the same questions over and over, the questions are dumb to begin with, and then they either take what you say out of context or just straight-up misquote you.”

  May you always feel exactly as you do now, I thought. Aloud, I said, “I can see that.”

  After I hung up, there was footage on-screen of a collapsed hospital, and a weeping woman outside it was being interviewed, a translator speaking over her in French-accented English. I gestured toward the TV. “I guess this explains why Vi was so insistent about her prediction, if that’s what she was picking up on.”

  Jeremy gave me a dubious look. “You’re really convinced her ghost guide mixed up Haiti and St. Louis? The poorest country in the Northern Hemisphere and a declining midwestern city?”

  “I don’t think Vi would lie. She doesn’t have much to gain at this point.”

  Jeremy was silent, and then he said, “I hope those godforsaken people down there get a fraction of the attention your sister did.”

  I hadn’t yet embarked on my plan, with regard to my father, to train Vi as my replacement—the first step would be to have Vi come along to the grocery store—but it turned out that I never needed to. Two days after the earthquake in Haiti, my father was having lunch at home when an aneurysm in his brain ruptured, causing him to double over with a searing headache. Though he was able to call an ambulance, he wasn’t conscious when the medics arrived, and they had to break down his locked front door. Early that evening, when Jeremy went to my father’s apartment so that neither Vi nor I had to, he found the door hanging from the hinges, a splattering of vomit on the dining room rug, and the uneaten remains of a turkey sandwich at the table. My father had died five hours earlier, in the ambulance en route to the hospital.

  It’s hard to say what would have been a preferable way for him to go, but the lunch alone, the vomit, the fact that he called his own ambulance, then died in pain and among strangers—if I had been choosing for him, certainly I’d have chosen something else. We used the same funeral home he’d used for our mother, and though I initially didn’t want a graveside service—I feared no one would come—Jeremy and Vi persuaded me. Fourteen people showed up, including Jeremy’s mother; we hired Kendra to watch Rosie and Owen. Vi had said she’d write a poem about our father, but as Jeremy and I turned in through the gates of the cemetery, she called my cellphone and said, “I started something, but it seemed really cheesy, so I’m reading the poem Jackie O’s boyfriend read at her funeral.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “You’ll like it,” Vi said. “It’s classy.”

  More irritably than I meant to, I said, “I already told you it’s fine.”

  The service lasted ten minutes, during which I thought about how my father had been lonely before meeting my mother, then lonely in a different way after marrying her. But wasn’t I filled with sorrow less for the quiet futility of my father’s life than out of fear that my own children would judge me as harshly as I judged my parents? Was I enough different from my mother and father? I tried to be, but hadn’t I just messed up in other ways?

  We hadn’t arranged to have a reception afterward, which felt inhospitable but not inhospitable enough to spontaneously invite everyone back to our house. Instead, we made small talk by the casket, then drove home with Jeremy’s mother, followed by Vi and Stephanie. Jeremy’s mother had come to the cemetery in a taxi from the airport and was flying out the next morning.

  No one at the grave site had said anything about Vi’s prediction. Or at least no one had said anything to me.

  The following weekend, Vi and I cleared out our father’s apartment. He wasn’t someone who’d held on to much, which was part of why it was a surprise to find, in the drawer in his bedside table, a letter from a neurosurgeon I’d never heard of dated August 24, 2009, confirming that he had been diagnosed with a cerebral aneurysm and that against the doctor’s advice and in spite of the risks of rupture, including but not limited to subarachnoid hemorrhage or intracranial hematoma, he did not at this time wish to seek further treatment.

  I took the letter into the kitchen, where Vi was emptying cabinets. She pointed to a large flat cardboard box on the table. “That’s a really nice skillet, and he never even opened it.”

  “Jeremy and I gave it to him.”

  “Does that mean you have dibs on it?”

  “Keep it. Look at this.” I passed the letter to her and waited while she read it. “Why wouldn’t he have wanted treatment?”

  “He was seventy-four, Daze. Maybe he didn’t want to use his remaining time being poked and prodded by doctors.”

  “But to not even try—you don’t think he was, like, depressed—”

  In a skeptical voice, Vi said, “Do you think he was depressed?”

  “Not that I noticed, but—”

  She shook her head. “Dad was fine. He had all those sexy massages to live for.”

  “You never said anything about that, did you?”

  Vi rolled her eyes. “No, I didn’t say anything.” She set the letter on top of the skillet box. “Although now I wish I hadn’t let you talk me out of asking him about having senses. You know how he hardly asked us questions about our lives? Do you think it’s because he didn’t need to? Like, he just knew?”

  I thought, for the first time in years, of that evening the summer after Vi and I had been in eighth grade, when my father had taken me to get ice cream and told me how he hadn’t enjoyed junior high. “You know what?” I said. “I think he did. Did he know we were the ones cooking dinner all that time? He must have.”

  “Did he know I’d grow up to be a big fat dyke?”

  “Believe it or not, I think he knew that, too. Did he know Mom would die so young? Or what an unhappy marriage they’d have?”

  “They had good times together, Daze. You don’t believe it, but they did. Did I ever tell you that a couple
months before she died, I went to Steak ’n Shake one day for lunch and saw them? I walk in, and there the two of them are. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they were definitely talking.”

  “Mom was up that early? And eating?” I tried to picture them, my father in a short-sleeved plaid polyester shirt, my excessively skinny, once-pretty mother.

  “I decided not to say hi. They looked like they were having a nice lunch, and why disturb them? So I left.”

  “Do you think it’s not true that Mom didn’t like Dad?”

  Vi puffed out her cheeks, considering the question, then exhaled. “I think Mom didn’t like Mom.” Then she said, “But she didn’t kill herself. Despite what that douchey boyfriend of yours claimed. Wow, I can’t even remember his name.”

  “Ben,” I said, and at the same time, Vi said, “Don’t tell me. He doesn’t deserve the space in my brain.” Vi reached for the letter from our father’s doctor and, as I watched, folded it into a paper airplane. When she launched it, it hit the refrigerator before bouncing to the floor. She said, “The fact that he wasn’t jumping for joy all the time doesn’t mean he was miserable. It’s not one or the other. Mom had problems, yeah, but I really don’t think Dad was depressed. He was just a grown-up.”

  Although Vi didn’t end up traveling to Haiti, there was a child, a ten-year-old girl named Ginette who was written about in an Associated Press article that ran in the Post-Dispatch, whom Vi became preoccupied with. After losing her mother in the earthquake, Ginette was living in a donated tent with five other children, the youngest of whom was eleven months and the oldest of whom was fifteen. They were sleeping on carpet scraps and foraging for food, and they had intestinal parasites. A pastor checked on them erratically; the baby lay in filth, covered in flies, and when he fussed, Ginette sang him lullabies.

  For a few days, Vi wanted to adopt Ginette; then she wanted to make a donation to the pastor so that he could buy the children uncontaminated food. One afternoon while Rosie and Owen were napping, Vi and I looked online together, trying to figure out how to find the pastor, or at least the reporter who’d written about Ginette and the pastor, but when Jeremy got home, he said what I already knew, what Vi probably knew, too—that it was better to give money to an aid organization. This was what he and I did.

  Vi kept tracking Ginette, she told me—she meant through either visualization or communicating with Guardian, not through the newspaper, because no other articles about Ginette ran—and she thought that a distant family member had come to collect her, then sold her as a servant. After that, Vi couldn’t locate Ginette anymore. She said, “What do I do now?”

  It was an unusually warm February day, and we were in our yard; I was blowing bubbles, which Rosie was chasing, and Owen, who had begun walking the week before, took halting steps across the grass. I dipped the plastic wand back into the jar of soap. “I don’t know,” I said.

  Six weeks after the earthquake in Haiti, there was an even stronger one—magnitude 8.8—in Chile, and though it caused serious damage, there were far fewer fatalities and much less destruction because the quake’s epicenter was in a small town. Later in the year, major earthquakes occurred in Indonesia, China, and Turkey. In March 2011, a magnitude 9 earthquake killed more than fifteen thousand people in Japan. Did this mean that in fact there had been a kind of earthquake season that started in September 2009? A geophysicist—Courtney Wheeling—would say no. On average, an earthquake of magnitude 6 or greater happens somewhere in the world every three days. Mostly, they happen underwater, and we hardly take notice. It is only when the earthquakes come to us, upending the streets and houses and trees we think of as ours, that they command our attention. But the earth, as Courtney once told a local TV reporter, is always busy.

  Jeremy had been offered and accepted the Cornell job at the end of January. During his spring break, we flew out with the children to look at houses, and I met with the obstetrician whose name Jeremy’s adviser’s wife had passed along. My due date was July 3, and we’d move in May, as soon as Jeremy finished teaching. What we didn’t say, what we didn’t need to, was that it seemed wiser for me to have the baby outside St. Louis.

  Jeremy’s accepting the job—our shared understanding of the move as my punishment—was another thing that eased the lingering tension between us. Though we didn’t acknowledge such distasteful facts, the earthquake in Haiti had also made things better between us, as had my father’s death. These global and personal tragedies made us glad not to be alone, glad to still be moving forward together as a family. Even so, I sometimes thought of what Jeremy had said to me the night we first slept together—There’s nothing you need to be sorry for—and of how it was no longer true. It would never be true again.

  We saw Vi and Stephanie frequently that spring. In their presence, it could almost seem as if I hadn’t fucked up as colossally as I had. The irony was that the two of them—I assumed Vi had told Stephanie—were the only people other than Jeremy and me who knew that the baby I was carrying was Hank’s. But maybe we nevertheless found them comforting because Stephanie hadn’t been part of our lives before Vi’s prediction and was therefore a change for us, but not a bad change; enjoying her company didn’t represent pretense or loss.

  Stephanie moved in with Vi in March, and when Vi told me she was about to, she said, “Don’t even make the joke.”

  In April, at Owen’s first-birthday celebration, for which we invited over only Vi and Stephanie, Vi declined both cake and ice cream, and I was incredulous. “If you must know,” Vi said, “I’m doing Weight Watchers. And no offense, but that cake doesn’t look good enough to be worth the points.”

  “You know, I was thinking you were thinner,” I said.

  “Really?” Vi looked unabashedly thrilled. “I’ve lost six pounds.”

  The next weekend, when they came over on Sunday so Stephanie and Jeremy could watch the Cards play the Cubs, I said, “Do you guys want to stay for dinner? It’s vegetable stir-fry, so it’s healthy.”

  “Thanks, but Vi has promised to make me her famous herb-encrusted salmon tonight,” Stephanie said.

  “Herb-encrusted salmon?” Jeremy turned to my sister and said, “She has you by the balls, Vi.”

  There was a silence, and I wondered if Jeremy’s remark, which he’d meant as a teasing compliment to Stephanie, had come across as equating lesbians and men. And then, with complete aplomb, Stephanie said, “Jeremy, my hands aren’t that big.”

  This wasn’t the only time I thought it, but it was the first time: that it was all right for me to leave St. Louis, because now there was someone there who loved Vi as much as I did. Before they went home that day, I said to her, “I think you’ll be okay after we’re in New York.”

  “No shit I will.” Vi looked amused. “Please don’t tell me you’re getting sentimental about moving. Don’t you remember what you wished under the Arch? It’s finally coming true.”

  “Well, not quite like I pictured.”

  “Of course not.” Vi shrugged. “Not for me, either. No Peace Corps and no”—she held up her fingers—“ ‘husband.’ ” Then she patted my hand. “But don’t worry, Daze. It’s not like you can escape me. Whatever happens, wherever you go, you’ll always still be living in Sisterland.”

  One Saturday morning when Jeremy had taken the children to the zoo and I was running errands alone, I stopped at the Schnucks on Manchester, which I hadn’t been to since my father’s death. The store was crowded, and I didn’t realize until I was loading my food onto the conveyor belt that the cashier was an older woman with heavy makeup who’d helped us many times before.

  She gestured toward my belly. “Honey, you’ve been busy!”

  I smiled sheepishly. There was an embarrassment I now felt when Owen and Rosie were with me, which was most of the time, as if people were thinking, Why doesn’t that woman stop having children? Perhaps they assumed I was a member of a religious sect determined to build its population.

  “Your dad’s not w
ith you today?” the woman said.

  I shook my head.

  The woman smiled. “What a nice man he is.”

  On a Monday in mid-April, in the middle of story hour at the Richmond Heights library, I received a text from Hank: Heard you’re expecting again. Congrats! I was by then in the beginning of my third trimester, and I was huge. I was standing behind the group of children at the librarian’s feet, following Owen as he toddled among the shelves.

  Just as jarring as this unexpected contact with Hank was the realization, as evidenced by the time stamp on the screen of my phone, that six months had passed since his previous text. He’d sent that one the morning after we’d had sex: C coming home at noon. We should talk. And to think that there had been a time I’d felt impatient on the mornings Amelia attended preschool; those few hours had seemed too long to wait before reconnecting with Hank. All this time later, Hank as a notion, an idea, made me feel a reflexive queasiness, as I might if thinking of Marisa Mazarelli, but when I actually recalled the hours we’d spent together at parks and in each other’s yards, it was hard not to miss him.

  In the library, I was preoccupied enough, caught off guard enough, not to be gripped by nostalgia. I texted back, Thanks. He could ask, but I wouldn’t initiate the topic.

  His next text didn’t arrive for several minutes: Just want to confirm there’s nothing we should discuss.

  Thank God for texting, I thought. Because how capacious that single line in its invitation to lie without officially lying.

  Nope, I wrote, nothing to discuss.

  Wow three kids, he wrote back.

  I know! I wrote. Hope you guys are well. Which was as bland, as innocuous, as what I might have told a former co-worker or a person I’d known distantly in college. Five weeks later, on the day we left St. Louis, I still hadn’t seen Hank again.

  For the most part, the movers packed us. I insisted on transporting only our most fragile items: the antique perfume holder Vi had brought to the hospital when Rosie was born, a platter Jeremy’s brother and sister-in-law had given us that was painted with our names and the date and place of our wedding. The week before departing from St. Louis, after Jeremy did due diligence with Consumer Reports, we traded in both our cars and bought a minivan, a purchase Jeremy had mentioned first. We’d use it to drive to Ithaca, where it would become mine, and Jeremy would buy a sedan with snow tires.