Sisterland (3 page)

I said to my father, “I have a question for you about tomorrow. It’s just as easy for Jeremy to grill salmon or steak, and since it’s your birthday, you should decide.”

“Oh, heavens, I’m not picky.” He was quiet before adding, “Vi seems well these days, doesn’t she? She’s come into her own.”

My father tended to speak in code, which had to do, I believed, with his midwestern decorum, a discretion so extreme that it precluded direct
mention of a wide range of topics. Perhaps the worst thing Jeremy had ever said to me, when we’d been together about six months, was that my father was cold. Jeremy had made this remark after we’d invited my father to hear the symphony and he’d declined without giving any reason, and the way Jeremy had said it had been as if this view was a shared understanding we had instead of a scathing observation on his part. “Well, I’ve never heard him say ‘I love you,’ ” Jeremy had added. “I’ve never heard him give you a compliment.” When I began to cry, I think Jeremy was shocked. But to me, my father had always been the kind, warm parent. He was reticent, yes, but he wasn’t cold.

In this moment, however, I truly had no idea what my father was talking about when he said Vi was doing well: Her job, which I had long assumed was as much a source of discomfort for him as it was for me? The fact that she had a date?

I said, “I guess she does seem good.” That she and I had had a fight wasn’t worth burdening my father with. “All right,” I added. “So Jeremy will get you tomorrow at five o’clock.”

Back in the living room, I said, “My dad is driving Vi to her date, but I don’t even think Vi’s told him it’s a woman.” The night before, I had recounted to Jeremy my disagreement with Vi at Hacienda, including the part where she’d declared that children were a problem people created then congratulated themselves for solving, at which point Jeremy had laughed and said, “She’s right.”

I said, “I assumed the woman was picking her up, but they’re meeting this afternoon at a Starbucks in Creve Coeur.”

“How romantic,” Jeremy said.

“I know, right?” Even though I wasn’t exactly rooting for a thriving lesbian romance for my sister, she’d be better off meeting the IT consultant at night for a drink. How could you possibly fall in love off Interstate 270, on a Thursday afternoon? As I dropped to my knees and began picking up blocks that were strewn across the rug, I said, “So I think for his birthday dinner, my dad wants steak.”

A few minutes
after twelve, Rosie pounded on the Wheelings’ door while I unfastened the various harnesses keeping Owen strapped into his half of the double stroller. From the porch, I could hear the television in their living room, which was never on in the middle of the day. Hank had an odd expression—both perplexed and amused—as he held open the door. “So do you know or do you not know that your sister was just on Channel 5?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Do you ever feel like there are only six people in St. Louis?” Hank said. “And we’re either married or related to half of them?”

“If
you
think that, try having grown up here. Why was Vi on TV?” Although Hank didn’t seem perturbed, my pulse had quickened.
Please let it just be a man-on-the-street interview
, I thought.
Something about the Cardinals or the Highway 40 construction
. I followed Rosie inside with Owen in my arms.

“Hey, Rosie the Riveter,” Hank said, and Amelia, who was Hank and Courtney’s three-year-old daughter and who was standing on the couch, called out, “My mom is on TV!”

I turned back to Hank. “What’s going on?”

“Courtney and Vi were in the same news segment about the earthquake.”

“Why would Vi be—” I started to ask, and Hank said, “I think it’s better if you just watch. I DVR’d it for Courtney.”

“Is it good or bad?”

On the wall in one corner of their living room was a large flat-screen TV, and Hank held the remote control toward it. “It’s not that it’s bad,” he said. “But you’ll think it is.”

I tried not to grip Owen too tightly as I faced the screen. The segment began with a young brunette reporter describing the earthquake that had occurred during the night and providing an overview of the region’s geology. “San Francisco gets more attention,” she said, “but heartland dwellers know that one of the strongest continental earthquakes ever recorded in the U.S. had its epicenter in the Missouri Bootheel, just a few hours south of St. Louis.” Courtney then appeared on-screen, Courtney as in Hank’s
wife and Jeremy’s colleague, sitting behind the desk in her office. “In fact, it was a series of between three and five seismic events, the first of which was in December 1811 and the last in February 1812,” she said, and she sounded calm and authoritative.
COURTNEY WHEELING, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR OF GEOPHYSICS
, it said in black letters at the bottom of the screen. “At this point, we don’t know if the second and third events on December 16, 1811, were quakes or aftershocks. As for the question of whether we’re living in an active seismic zone right now—”

Before Courtney could finish, the reporter said, “According to one area woman, the answer is very much so.” Hank laughed, presumably because it seemed obvious that Courtney had been about to say the opposite, and then Vi filled the screen. Seeing her, I flinched. The big, loose purple tunic she wore had seemed unnoteworthy at Hacienda but now appeared garish, and even if she hadn’t been in the same clothes, I’d have guessed she hadn’t slept the night before: There were shadows under her eyes, her face was puffy, and she didn’t have on makeup. I had never been on television myself, but I knew you at least needed foundation.

“Another earthquake is coming soon. A powerful, powerful earthquake.” In voice-over, as footage showed Vi giving a tour of her living room—the iron candelabra set on the windowsill and the Tibetan prayer flags strung across one wall and the little fountain in the corner, with water bubbling over a pile of stones—the reporter said, “Violet Shramm, a self-described psychic medium living in Rock Hill, claims that the tremors St. Louis residents felt earlier today were a prelude to a much bigger earthquake. No, she doesn’t have proof, but in 2004 she helped Florissant police find nine-year-old kidnapping victim Brady Ogden, she publicly predicted Michael Jackson’s death in June—and she says she had a hunch about the quake that happened early this morning.”

“I did a reading for a group last night,” Vi told the camera, “and the last thing I said to them was, ‘Be careful, because Mother Earth is very restless right now.’ ”

I glanced at Hank. “I thought you said it wasn’t that bad.”

“Well, I wish they weren’t pitted against each other. I’m sure Courtney had no idea.”

“She looks deranged,” I said, and added, as if it were necessary, “Not Courtney.”

“Shramm knows she’ll have her skeptics,” the reporter was saying, “but she believes that staying quiet could do more harm than good.”

“If I can save just one life,” Vi said, “that’s what’s important.”

The shot shifted to an image of a map with a pulsing red circle over the border between Missouri and Arkansas on one side and Kentucky and Tennessee on the other. “No doubt about it, we’re in a hot zone,” the reporter said. “But according to Washington University’s Wheeling, the Big One could come tomorrow—or never.”

“It’s no likelier to happen next week than fifty years from now,” Courtney explained, and she looked, I noticed this time around, impeccably tasteful in a gray blouse, a black suit jacket, small silver earrings, and well-applied foundation; her short blond hair was neatly brushed. “Does it hurt to keep emergency supplies in the basement? Not at all. But in terms of daily threats for St. Louisans, I’d say something like obesity far outranks earthquakes.”

“Oh, God,” I said, and Hank said, “Yeah, she could have chosen a different example.”

“Every year, GPS instruments record hundreds of instances of seismic activity on and around the New Madrid fault line, yet we feel virtually none of it because it’s not that strong,” Courtney was saying on-screen, and she sounded serene and wise and not sleep-deprived. “The reality is that if you’re using seismometers, you’ll see earthquakes occurring.” She smiled. “The earth is always busy.”

The brunette reporter reappeared in front of Vi’s house, though blessedly without Vi herself anywhere in view. “For St. Louisans rattled first by recent events and now by future predictions, let’s hope not
too
busy,” the reporter said. “Back to you, Denise.”

Hank paused the screen, and I turned to him and said, “That was awful.”

“So Vi’s eccentric,” Hank said. “It’s not illegal.”

“Kate, Owen spit out his binky.” Amelia was pulling on my hand. “He spit it on the floor.” She held the pacifier up toward me, and I rubbed it
against my shirt and stuck it back in Owen’s mouth. I glanced at Rosie, who was setting a blanket over a row of Amelia’s stuffed animals, and I wondered if she realized her aunt had just been on television.

“Vi must have called the station herself, right?” I said. “I mean, how else would they have found her? It’s not like she’s an expert on earthquakes.” No, the earthquake expert—that was Courtney. The feeling that gripped me in this moment was similar to what I imagined the relatives of an alcoholic must experience when they learn that their parent or child or sibling has gone on another bender: that mix of anger and disappointment and lack of surprise, a blend so exquisite, so familiar, it’s almost like satisfaction. Of course. Of course Vi had had a premonition about something big, and of course, instead of taking the time to think it through, she’d called a television station, and of course she’d let herself be interviewed while wearing no makeup. Why did she always get in her own way? I was embarrassed, yes, but my embarrassment was mostly for her, not me. After all, we no longer had the same last name, no longer looked identical. People I was close to knew I had a twin sister, but acquaintances—my former co-workers, or our neighbors other than the Wheelings—wouldn’t connect me to this strange woman in her purple shirt, with her weird prediction. I said, “I’ll never understand why she likes drawing attention to herself.” After a beat, I added, “And the reason you think Vi is delightfully eccentric is that you’re not from here.” Hank, Courtney, and my husband had all grown up on the East Coast: Courtney outside Philadelphia, Hank in Boston, and Jeremy in northern Virginia.

“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.