Two Sisters: A Novel (2 page)

Alone within her own four walls Muriel felt peaceful. By herself she could ignore how life had sort of
fallen
on her, the way raindrops splatted the bare heads of careless pedestrians. They should have planned better, tucked a collapsible umbrella in their handbags at the very least. Had they paid attention to the darkening sky, or believed the dire weather reports, they would have worn impervious gear and left the suede shoes at home. They wouldn’t plod through life with strands of dripping hair.

“Well?” The impatience in Pia’s voice was as sharp as a hangnail. This time, Muriel’s sigh was audible.

Eight years older, Pia was not the kind of woman who needed days of notice before her life could be viewed. She lived in an endless house in Connecticut with her thicket-haired husband, Will, and their reedy tween daughter, Emma. Root Beer, Emma’s Labradoodle, had custom dog beds built into cabinetry throughout their home. Days, Pia bopped about their white-washed village wearing Ferragamo flats and ironed cotton shirts tucked into True Religion jeans. Nights, she made family salads with organic micro greens and herbs from her garden. She took “me” time to pray and do yoga. Recently, she’d announced that Jesus Christ was her personal savior. The Bible, she said, taught her everything she needed to know.

Good God
, thought Muriel, asking, “A lion never ate a lamb on Noah’s Ark? How could you possibly believe that?” Then she rolled her eyes to heaven.

“
Faith
,” Pia replied, without further bothersome thought. With Pia, life was uncomplicated and pristine. An easy smile was pasted on her lips. Shop owners knew her by her first name: “Put the cashmere in the Pia pile, will you, DeeDee?” In every imaginable way Pia was a custom-tailored sort while Muriel was hopelessly off the rack.

With the phone cradled between her shoulder and ear, Muriel said the only thing she could think of on the spur of the moment.

“Um.”

Walking over to the window, she hooked her index finger around the sheer curtain and looked out. Four stories below, spring was still holding its breath. The sky was baby blanket blue. Her beautiful brownstoned block was lined with trees, their branches resembling stalks of Brussels sprouts: tightly packed buds all poised to pop. One more week and the whole city would stretch awake after its long gray nap, squinting like a newborn in morning sunlight. Soon New Yorkers would stash their folded winter personalities somewhere out of sight, the same way they stored cable-knit pullovers, ski socks, and flannel sheets.

Pia groaned into the phone. She’d always been impatient with her sister’s inability to think fast on her feet. At that moment, the only other thought Muriel could muster was how much she wished Verizon would accidentally drop the call to give her a few extra seconds to plot a way out of her sister’s visit. Once, she’d tried to fake a dropped call, but Pia only shamed her by calling right back, saying, “That was beneath even
you
.”

“Muriel.” A sharp blast of air pierced Muriel’s eardrum.

“Yes?”

“Well?”

Muriel loved the way spring looked through the window of her walk-up. Unlike most people, she didn’t need to be outside to enjoy it. Sun gave you skin cancer, air conditioners fell from high-rise windows, cabs jumped curbs, strangers coughed directly in your face, dog owners left poop on the sidewalk, schizophrenics heard atmospheric messages from the CIA, planes flew into buildings, and manhole covers exploded straight up. Bad things happened outside. Muriel preferred sateen sheets—when she was lucky enough to unearth them in a clearance pile—a remote with fresh batteries, and sunshine filtered through gauzy curtains.

Two Chihuahuas were off leash down on the sidewalk. What if they darted into the street?

“
Muriel?”

Of course Muriel would be home. When she wasn’t at work or at the theater for work or in line at Tasti D-Lite, she was always home. And when she wasn’t, she wanted to be. Attempting an air of breeziness, she said, “I’ll be in and out.” Pia, they both knew, didn’t even slightly believe her. Muriel reached up to smooth the spaghetti tangle of her hair.

“We need to talk,” Pia said with a period.

There it was. Muriel’s chin hit her chest. Her head dangled off the end of her neck. They’d “talked” many times before. Rather, Muriel had listened with eyelids hanging like velvet drapes. Dispatched by their mother, Lidia, Pia had nattered on about slimming down, toning up, getting a better job, moving into an elevator building, living a holier existence, highlighting her hair. (“Men really do prefer blondes, Muriel. It’s a proven fact.”) The female Sullivants couldn’t comprehend a person functioning in a kitchen the size of a powder room or disfunctioning in a life that was perpetually blinking, on hold, as if at any moment a purpose might pick up. The Sullivant men—Muriel’s father, Owen, and brother, Logan—seemed to do what most men did around her: they regarded her as if she were a window.

“Why don’t we talk right now?” Muriel said to her sister over the phone. “You know, like we already are.”

Pia got quiet before she said, “I need to see your face.”

Her face? It had been months since her last facial. And three times as long since her last haircut. Dear God.

“How’s noon?” asked Pia. Muriel replied, “Hmm.” Noon was a tough hour to reject. Not early enough to say that she was in the middle of reading the book review, not late enough to claim it would affect her fake evening plans. Plus noon meant lunch and preparing a meal for her perfect sister with her perfectly highlighted hair and perfectly toned body and perfectly arched eyebrows would totally ruin Muriel’s perfect Sunday.

“Noon, noon,” she said, as if flipping through an appointment book. “Let’s see here.”

“Noon it is,” Pia said, not waiting for a final okay.

“Well, all righty then.” Muriel tried to sound chipper.

“I’m taking the train in.”

“Can’t wait.” Lying, as well as lying around on Sundays, was a Muriel Sullivant specialty. God forgive her. Honesty required explanations and justifications; both wore on her like a vinyl shoe, always rubbing the same spot raw. It was much less stressful telling everyone what they wanted to hear.

“Love you,” Pia said in the same breezy tone she used with the Korean woman who did her nails.

“You, too,” Muriel replied automatically. Then she pressed the off button on her phone and for a full five minutes didn’t move at all. Her shoulders melted into two parentheses. Her bare feet felt the imprint of the perfectly good remnant of sisal someone had willy-nilly thrown away. Unmade and billowy, her bed called to her, the remote looking like a Hershey bar against the white sheets. A grunt formed deep in her stomach and made its way up her windpipe. Finally, she lifted her chin and put the lid back on the popcorn tin. She pulled the cheese-oil towel off the duvet, shook the cheddar dust into the tub, folded the towel, and put it away. After making her bed in a manner that would impress a hotel’s management and shoving her strewn-about laundry in a suitcase at the back of her closet, Muriel buttoned herself into outside clothes and descended four flights of stairs to the sidewalk below where she cursed herself for forgetting her sunglasses. Head down, scanning for dog poop and fallen gingko berries—which were aromatically
exactly
the same—she marched to the end of the block to buy limes, club soda, and something lunch worthy, bracing herself for the storm that was about to blow into her cozy nonlife out of the clear blue.

Chapter 2

T
HEY MET IN
a movie line.

“Warren Beatty could convert me to communism.”

That’s the first thing Owen Sullivant heard Lidia Czerwinski say. Though she didn’t say it to him. Or maybe she did. It was hard to know with Lidia. She was a woman of ulterior motives.

“Or any other
ism
.” She giggled like a girl.

Flushed and fluttery, Lidia huddled with her two married girlfriends outside Pawtucket’s only cinema, their Rhode Island winter edging into town. She stamped her feet and rubbed her palms together, anxious to get inside so she could sit in the dark warmth and swoon over the Clavius moon crater in Warren Beatty’s chin. It didn’t matter that he was old enough to be her father. All three women agreed. For two hours, they would surrender to his rakish hair and tumescent lower lip and forget that their own husbands drank beer from a can and let their toenails grow until they poked through their socks. Or, that they had no husband at all.

“
He
likes blood and guts.” Owen’s date, Madalyn, inserted herself into the conversation with a flick of her thumb at Owen’s sweater-vested chest. United by some secret chromosomal code, the women acknowledged her with a knowing nod and pinched lips. Owen wanted to accidentally kick Madalyn’s shin.

“True?” Lidia asked, her neck lolling backward to drink in Owen’s full height.
No Warren Beatty this one
, she thought, running her fingers lightly down her throat. Nonetheless, he had a full head of hair—dull brown though it was—and pleasant enough features. A woman could do worse. With a quick flick of her eyes, she glanced at his left ring finger. The reflex of a single woman over twenty-five. Madalyn spotted it instantly and reached for Owen’s hand.

“Guess so,” he said, positioning his unwieldy body in what he hoped was a casual pose. His feet hurt in his hard Sunday shoes. His arms seemed overly long and he was cold without the new Members Only jacket he’d bought but left at home. That damn weatherman had said fifty-five degrees. It was forty-eight at
best
. Madalyn’s hand felt like a claw hammer. Her pouffy hairdo looked ridiculous. Touching it later would feel like reaching behind a steamer trunk in the farthest corner of a spooky attic. His pillowcase would smell like hairspray all week. What he wouldn’t give to be in Providence, alone, at
Death Wish II
.

“Hah.” Madalyn rolled her eyes. “Last week he dragged me to an old Hitchcock.”

Owen Sullivant stared, blank faced. Why did Madalyn have to say
anything
? They’d been standing quietly, companionably, minding their own business. She dove into a stranger’s conversation like a humpback on a herring. And the way she spat out,
Hitchcock
. What the hell did that mean? The man was a genius. She had clung to his arm when the birds flew out of the fireplace, buried her head in his chest as Tippi Hedren ran for her life in that sexy narrow skirt. Afterward, she’d relived every scary moment over tequila sunrises and salted peanuts in the town’s best cocktail lounge. What more did the woman want?

In baby steps, the line shuffled forward. Annoyed, Owen leaned out to see what was going on. Was someone paying in
pennies
? Pretending to cough, he retrieved his hand.

The plain fact was this: Owen Sullivant’s desires were simple. He wanted
order.
Each morning at precisely seven o’clock he awoke without prodding from an alarm clock. He fixed himself one perfect cup of black coffee and a medium-size bowl of steel-cut oatmeal. Reusing a paper sack until it dissolved, he packed a turkey breast sandwich on wheat bread—light on the mayo—and a navel orange for lunch. In the fall, when eastern apples were at their peak, he swapped out the orange for a McIntosh, preferring the tart crispness of a Mac to the mealy sweetness of a Red Delicious. On Sundays he drove into Providence because the church there had a real organ. On weekdays, in his morning shower, Owen ran through the particulars of the day ahead comforted by the fact that one day rarely looked different from the rest. The only reason he’d bought a trendy new jacket when his brown suede blazer was still perfectly wearable was because Madalyn had accused him of resembling his father.

“We
are
closely related genetically,” he’d replied, sarcasm surging past his teeth even as he tried to use his tongue as a sandbag.

“A man in his thirties shouldn’t look like a man in his fifties.”

“Thank you, Madalyn, for telling me how I should look.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, as obtuse as ever.

The awful truth was, Owen had intended to break it off with Madalyn weeks ago but was still searching for the right words. It pained him to crush a woman’s expectations. And he was certain Madalyn would respond overdramatically. Why, a few months ago, she’d been
apoplectic
when Edith Head passed away.

“Edith who?” Owen had asked, handing her several fresh tissues.

“My God! Audrey Hepburn, Bette Davis, Grace Kelly, Gloria Swanson, Ginger Rogers—she designed costumes for all the greats!”

“Was she an aunt? A relative of some sort?”

“Don’t you
think
I would have mentioned by
now
if I was
related
to the great Edith
Head
?” Her eyes practically bulged out of her own head.

Owen had quietly sighed. Breaking up with Madalyn was fraught with peril at every turn. The great Edith Head, he found out when he looked her up, lived into her eighties. Had Madalyn thought she was immortal?

So every Saturday night as they made tepid love in the wake of a lackluster date, Owen examined his exit strategies. His mind flashed platitudes like a flip-book.
Everything happens for a reason. Time heals all wounds. If we were meant to be . . .
blah, blah, blah. None of it sounded even slightly manly, especially not while he was on top of her. And Owen’s current ploy of indifference wasn’t working at all. He had hoped Madalyn would notice what a cad he’d become, storm out on her own, and be done with the whole messy business. But, honestly, the woman was as thick as the goo she sprayed on her cobwebbed hair.