Two Sisters: A Novel (9 page)

Owen’s parents saw the entire situation differently.

“ ‘A lack of willingness on either side can void the marital contract and annul divine sanction,’ ” Owen’s father read from a pamphlet his parish priest had given him. “It says it right here, son, a
lack of willingness.
You can still get out of this thing.”

“How can I be unwilling to claim my own child?” Owen asked. “Give him or her a legitimate last name?”

That shut him up. A child, of course, complicated everything.

“I’m afraid it’s a done deal, Dad.”

What else could anyone say?

The reality was, Owen felt like a cartoon character hit by a two-by-four. Everything happened so fast, his cranium was still metronoming back and forth; his ears rang so loudly he could barely hear anything else. One moment he was marveling at the divine geometry of a woman who could swivel her hips on top of him in both a circle and a square, the next he was watching that same woman walk down the aisle toward him wearing an empire-waisted wedding gown at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow.

While Lidia happily lost the last vestiges of her elfin waist at her parents’ bakery, Owen drove four hours down Interstate 95 to find his soon-to-be family a suitable home in their new state. On the way, in the blessed quiet of the car, he had time to think. Lidia, he decided, was being foolish.
Manhattan
was out of the question. Raising a child in an apartment with no yard? No school down the block he or she could walk to? No street to play kickball in? It was absurd. If she had a fever in the middle of the night, what, they were going to wait for an
elevator
—perhaps stopping along the way for one of their drunken neighbors—then stand in the rain for a cab? It was virtually child abuse! Plus, Manhattan was so noisy. Who could hear themselves think with all those groaning buses and their screeching brakes? He had a better idea.

“
Queens?”
Lidia had said, aghast, when Owen called to tell her he’d found them a nice house across the river. “What are you talking about? When I told you I wanted to live on the east side, I meant the Upper East Side of
Manhattan
.”

“Four bedrooms, two and a half baths, a yard big enough for a swing set, eat-in kitchen.”

“Or maybe Sutton Place. I’m sure I was quite clear.”

“An entire house instead of an apartment, Lidia.”

“Were you not listening? I specifically ordered a doorman building.”

“Ordered?” Owen got quiet.

“You know what I’m saying. I’m not the Queens type.”

Inhaling slowly, Owen replied, “The town is called Middle Village. It’s a family neighborhood—a
village
—and only a subway ride to the city.”

“Queens isn’t me, Owen. It’s not
us
, I mean.”

“You haven’t even seen the house. It’s lovely. And light. And very much me. I mean,
us
. You’ll like it there, Lidia. We all will. I promise.”

“Isn’t Queens
Italian
?”

Owen’s grip tightened on the phone. “What on earth does that mean?”

“I’m just saying, at the very least, if push came to shove, we should live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. There are five Polish bakeries on the main avenue alone.”

“How do you know that?”

“Papa has connections.”

“We don’t need your father’s connections. I have a good job in the city. A straight shot on the subway from our house in Queens. I can
walk
to the train station.”

“Without my father’s connections, you would have such a nice job in midtown Manhattan?”

Owen stiffened his jaw. Lidia said, “I’m just saying.”

It was useless reminding his new wife that her old-school father had set up his job to protect her from their lip-flapping neighbors. That he’d loved his firm in Central Falls and hated to leave it, hated to leave Rhode Island, period. Even more useless was putting words to the thoughts he couldn’t push out of his mind:
I
told
you I’d run down the hill for protection. I offered money and a ride and absolute secrecy.
Lidia made life-changing choices without one whiff of concern for him. How dare she?! Most frustrating of all was her habit of pushing all culpability right out of her mind, as if it never had been the truth from the start.

Manhattan is fabulous!
he’d heard her say. Owen pressed his molars together. He had always despised people who used the word “fabulous” and now he was married to one.

“You see my point, don’t you?” Lidia asked, softly.

“Yes. I know exactly what you’re saying.”

“It’s settled then.” Relief flooded her voice. “You’ll do the right thing,
mój piezczoch
.”

Owen answered, “I already have. Our deposit on the row house in Queens is nonrefundable.”

After slamming down the phone, Lidia had refused her husband’s calls the whole time he was in New York setting up their new life. Which, Owen discovered, wasn’t so terribly awful after all.

P
IA
J
ULA
S
ULLIVANT
was born on a hazy summer afternoon in a Queens hospital not far from the row house in Middle Village where Owen and Lidia lived in polite cohabitation. In the delivery room Owen couldn’t help but notice that his blushing bride had morphed into Satan. Several times she growled at him like a rabid dog. Once, Lidia barked, “Get out of my face, you prick!”

“
Hee hee whoo whoo
. Breathe, darling.”

“Cram your own damn breath down your throat and die!”

Owen’s equilibrium was shot. His tidy life was a shambles. He could barely feel his limbs. Still, he persevered at his new wife’s bedside, even as her eyeballs bulged out of her head and he waited for her head to spin in full circles on her neck. She smelled like a hungover bum. Ungrateful, she frequently ordered him out of the room (even screamed for a priest!). Still, he persisted. It was the gentlemanly thing to do as much as it—physically—pained him. Lidia pierced the skin of his palm with her long fingernails more than once. In the grip of a contraction, she squeezed his hand so hard he feared for his metacarpals! Literally adding insult to injury, she turned her mottled face toward him and spewed profanity. Already stunned by the physical disgustingness of childbirth—Good lord, had she
shat
?—Owen was shocked by her bad manners. In spite of her pain. Sure, he understood lashing out when your insides felt as though they were being ripped out through your private parts. Still, he’d been nothing but kind and accommodating. Calling him a “dickwad” was uncalled for.

Though Owen desperately wanted to back away from the birthing bed, slip into the restroom and wriggle sideways out a window, he stayed. He never let go of Lidia’s claw nor suggested someone spray air freshener. The brutality of childbirth unnerved him. And the very randomness of nature—the way a single sperm can derail an entire life—upset him deeply. One wiggling haploid invades an egg. A diploid is formed. Cells divide. The zygote fuses onto the uterine wall, leeching nutrients from its host. Expanding like a rising cinnamon bun, a heart begins to flutter; limbs, spine, nervous system take shape; weblike veins spread tiny lines of red throughout the organism. The host body changes, rounds out, seeks a nest, demands security. Choice evaporates like a droplet of rain in a cracked lake bed. The child must be born into a stable union. God has His rules. The parents have their say. The legal system intervenes with a contract that, really, was only established so males could ensure paternity. As if a marriage license could keep a woman faithful. Preposterous! The whole machine completely ignores the very real disruption of a baby. With barely enough time to adjust to the absolute
presence
of marriage—the required conversations across every dinner table, the sound of breathing in your bed all night in spite of those lusciously curved lips, the almost instantaneous ceasing of sexuality, the crossed wires that continuously spark, the inability to come home from work and silently retreat to the basement to fiddle with the water-purification unit you were creating out of river rocks and riparian soil, the wrenching loss of silence itself—a needy mammal is wiggling like an upended cockroach, utterly helpless, dependent upon you for its very life? How could nature allow such carelessness?

Yet Owen never uttered a word about it. He was not that kind of man.

“Breathe, Lidia, breathe.
Hee, hee, whoo.”

“Cram it, you bastard!”

Owen Sullivant was many things. A bastard he was not.

Chapter 11

A
DMITTEDLY, THEY SHOULD
have taken a cab. But Muriel preferred the bus. Cabs so often smelled like the driver’s hair pomade. Plus, did they
ever
disinfect those vinyl backseats? Even so, waiting for the Riverside Drive bus on a Sunday was maddening. Three separate flashes of white were false alarms. One was a FedEx truck, another the Access-A-Ride minivan. The third was a FreshDirect delivery. Muriel knew from experience that the bus never came when you scanned the horizon for it. You had to look away and pretend you had all day to wait.

“So . . . ,” she said to Pia, turning her back on the flow of downtown traffic, “how’s Emma?”

Attempting to appear nonchalant, Muriel jutted one foot forward at a sporty angle, then immediately retracted it when she noticed that her big toe stuck out of her peep-toe pumps like an unpedicured bratwurst. In the banana-colored sunlight, wearing the white shirtdress for the first time, its buttons tugging open in tiny diamond shapes down her front, she felt like a hulking transvestite. Suddenly, she couldn’t figure out how to arrange her arms in a feminine way. Pia’s pouffy handbag swung carelessly in the crook of her arm. “Lovely as ever,” she said serenely.

“And Will?”

“Working around the clock.”

“Mom and Dad? Heard from them lately?”

“I met Mama for lunch last week. Dad is Dad.”

Muriel nodded.

“You’re well?”

Pia nodded. That about summed up what they had in common and Muriel didn’t need to turn around to know that the bus wasn’t even out of Harlem yet. With her older sister, there was always more unsaid than said. And asking about their brother, Logan, was a waste of time. An artist living in New Mexico, he’d divorced the family years ago.

Silence expanded between the two sisters like a darkening oil spill. A razor nick on Muriel’s bare shin stung from the hasty grooming. And though she hadn’t dared look, she was fairly certain her panty lines were not only visible through the white fabric, they were unevenly situated on her ass, as well. One higher than the other, both causing unsightly butt bulge.

“Things good at work?” Pia again fussed with Muriel’s frothy scarf.

Please, God,
Muriel silently prayed,
send the bus with the next green light.

“Full of spit, as usual.” Muriel burped up a laugh. Then she watched as Pia exhaled in the same judgmental way she exhaled when she glanced around Muriel’s recycled apartment.

Flying saliva, it was true, was a hazard of Muriel’s profession. Even though
profession
was stretching her job description to its outer limit. Muriel was a casting assistant. A job that sounded more glamorous than it was. In reality, she printed scripts from PDFs and alphabetized head shots and downloaded audition scenes onto Joanie’s computer. When actors came into the office to audition for a part, she retrieved them from the waiting room, did her best to calm their nerves (which never worked), and stood off camera to read the other roles. Flooded with stress-induced spit, many actors couldn’t help but emote their DNA all over Muriel’s face, particularly when Joanie was casting a drama with an
accent
, which she had been all week.

“Ever since I
vas
a boy in Prague,
ach
, I’ve been roaming the globe searching for some
ting
, some
vun
. You are my last
ch
ope.”

The projectile usually landed squarely on her cheek, though Muriel never flinched. To wipe spit off during an audition was unprofessional, upsetting to an actor. Her job was to relax everyone, Joanie included.

“I’m here, Vaclav. You can rest now.” Muriel calmly read her lines.

“
Ach
, at last, my
dahlink
.”

More than enduring salivary bullets, Muriel’s biggest struggle was not rolling her eyes. Lately, so many actors were
models
—pretty boys whose spray tans were too orange, teeth were too white, and hairlines began in the middle of their foreheads. Their character interpretations were cartoonish.
Ch
opeless, one might say. Patiently, Muriel read her lines and waited for the audition scene to end.

“Lovely,” Joanie would say, hoisting her heft up from behind the camera and holding out her fleshy hand. “Thank you for coming in.”

“I wasn’t fully feeling the Russian accent. I could work on it.”

“Good idea. And Prague is in the Czech Republic.”

Softly, Muriel would take the actor’s arm and lead him out, whispering, “You were great,” before returning to wipe his bad acting off her face. In her bottom desk drawer, she kept a Costco-size canister of antibacterial wipes.