Sisterland (14 page)

In spite of the recent sense of her I’d had, I was stunned. “What are you doing here?” I said. When I went to embrace her, I could smell her Vi-ishness—she had long ago stopped wearing cheap perfume in favor of patchouli oil, under which she always smelled in a good way like toast and over which, in this moment, she smelled like body odor.

“I was in the neighborhood,” she said. “Also, Reed sucks.”

“Wait, did you just leave? You’re not on a break?”

“I am on a break. A self-imposed one.” She entered the room, set her duffel on the floor, and sat on my bed. Then she said, “You’re Heather, right? I’m Vi, Daisy’s original roommate.”

Heather looked between us, seeming confused, and I said, “This is my sister.”
Daisy
wasn’t how anyone at college knew me, and I felt a flare of annoyance. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see Vi, but there were preparations I’d have made if I’d known she was coming.

“Do you have any food?” Vi asked.

Though Heather and I were co-renting a mini-refrigerator, it contained only yogurt, which belonged to her, and vodka, which belonged to me and which Lauren and I mixed with raspberry Crystal Light and drank before parties; I’d considered asking Heather if the vodka bothered her, but I was afraid of the answer. Looking down at my watch, I saw that it was just after eleven. “We could go get pizza,” I said.

Vi set her palms against my mattress and pushed herself off. “Sounds
magnifique
.” She walked over to a closet, the one that wasn’t mine, and opened it.

“Here,” I said. From my own closet, I pulled out a fleece jacket and passed it to her. It was impossible not to notice that Vi’s weight, which had stabilized in high school, had climbed again since we’d started college, and her face and body contained a new puffiness. Vi and I weren’t beautiful—we had our father’s long, narrow nose—but we could certainly be pretty, because we also had our mother’s large blue eyes and light hair. And yet, with her dumpy ponytail and clothes, it almost seemed as if Vi were trying to look unattractive. It would have been mean to see her as a cautionary example, a warning of what would happen if I stopped climbing the StairMaster every day, but after our time apart, both our similarities and differences appeared more starkly to me than they ever had before. Her hand reaching for the doorknob as we left the room, cuffed by the red fleece of my jacket—it could have been my hand, there was a way in which it
was
my hand.

Outside, as we turned onto College Avenue, I said, “What’s going on?”

“I came here on the Greyhound, which did you know that’s called riding the dog? A guy who got on in Salt Lake City asked if he could put his head on my shoulder to sleep, and a guy who got on in Denver asked if I’d pierce his ear.”

“You said no, right?”

“He even had a cup of ice. But yes—I said no.”

“You should have sat next to a woman.”

“For some of the time, I did. I’ve been on the bus since Sunday night.”

Which meant forty-eight hours before. I said, “I still don’t understand—”

“My roommate, Lisa, is totally anorexic. She goes running twice a day, for like six miles each time, and she talks about food constantly and hoards candy—Starbursts and Jolly Ranchers—but she doesn’t
eat
it. And the other roommate, Wendy, she’s supposedly some kind of engineering genius, but she has no sense of humor and uses this disgusting deodorant that she sprays on for so long every morning, I can taste it in my mouth.
There’s a lot of weirdos at Reed, but not cool weirdos. That’s what I thought it would be.”

“But you’re planning to go back, right? Did you tell your professors you’d be missing class?”

“The professors aren’t friendly, either. It’s just not my kind of place.”

“Vi, you’ve barely been there a month.”

“I want to take a gap year and travel, like everyone does in England.”

Vi also had a work-study job—hers was in food service—but I knew without asking that she had no more money saved than I did, nor were our parents the kind to fund such activities.

As we passed Rosemary Lane, she said, “So you’re happy as a clam here, huh? Mizzou is a dream come true?”

Carefully, I said, “I like it overall.” I decided then to come clean on the other piece of information I’d concealed in my emails, besides my name change. I said, “I joined a sorority. I’m a Theta.”

To my surprise, she said, “I thought I wanted to go somewhere without a Greek system, but now I can see the point of it, just for meeting people.”

Was it possible Vi hadn’t made any friends at Reed? Perhaps her emails had been as selectively revealing as mine.
I went to an anti-apartheid rally
, she’d mentioned recently, which I’d interpreted as Vi having fun.

“So who’s your boyfriend now that you and Tom are done?” she asked.

I thought of Ben Murphy, with whom I’d made out after our ping-pong match, but I said, “Nobody.”

“Wait a second.” Vi actually stopped walking. “You don’t have a boyfriend?”

“It’s not that weird.”

“I feel like there should be dogs falling from the sky and statues crying blood. Are you still talking to Tom?”

“Not for a while.” We had reached University Avenue, and as we turned, I said, “How long are you planning to stay? No offense.”

Vi laughed. “No offense, but I’ve never liked you. No offense, but your personality sucks.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I’m psyched to explore Columbia,” she said. “I probably should have come here to begin with.”

Really?
I thought. It was good to see Vi, but in the close quarters of college life, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to contain her, or prevent her familiarity with my old self from spilling into my new life. But because it was the way I wished I felt, I said, “
Mi
dorm room
es su
dorm room.”

We ordered a
twelve-inch pizza with sausage and green peppers, and while we waited for it, Vi said, “I knew as soon as I got out there that I’d made a mistake. I should never have gone to Reed without visiting. The whole vibe was just off. But I was like, okay, I’ll get through the semester, maybe even the first year, and then I’ll transfer. And at first I tried to be a good little student. Really. I was all diligent. But in classes, everyone just loved hearing themselves talk. The place is overrun with pretentious windbags. And the bathrooms in my dorm were coed, did I tell you that? I was like, wait, I’m really expected to take a shit with some dude’s hairy legs right next to me? I started walking over to this administrative building to poop.”

“I bet you’ll get used to it,” I said.

She shook her head. “That’s not the point. This is the part I have to tell you. I’m in the library a few nights ago, sitting in this carrel, and all of a sudden, there’s this crazy yellow light, this energy, and I’m inside it, and a voice is saying to me, ‘You’re not meant to suffer.’ Over and over: ‘You’re not meant to suffer, you’re not meant to suffer, you’re not meant to suffer.”

No, Vi
, I thought.
No, no, no
. More than four years had passed since I’d felt the presence summoned by Marisa Mazarelli’s Ouija board. I said, “Had you done acid?”

Vi looked annoyed. “This had nothing to do with drugs. It was a really beautiful experience. It was peaceful. I was inside the light, it was like being in a swimming pool except with light instead of water, and the voice says, ‘I am your guardian. You’re not meant to suffer.’ And I’m like, okay, well, what
am
I meant to do? And the voice says, ‘You’re on a journey of
discovery.’ Then the light goes away, and I’m still sitting in the chair in the library, but I hadn’t imagined it. It was definitely real.”

Across the booth, we looked at each other, and Vi’s expression was eager. I said, “Okay.” What I wouldn’t have given to be someone who could dismiss her story as utter nonsense.

“I got on the bus the next day,” she said.

“That seems like a really literal interpretation of a journey.”

Seeming hurt, Vi said, “I don’t know why you can’t be supportive. It wasn’t scary at all, if that’s what you’re thinking. It was profound.”

“Reed is a great school,” I said. “You were so excited to go there. Have you joined any groups?”

“I’m telling you I had a transcendent experience and you’re saying I should try out for debate? I thought you would understand.”

Of course I understood; even at her most impossible, Vi had never said or done anything I could not imagine saying or doing myself, if I had less self-control and respect for convention. But her tone was rubbing me the wrong way, and I said, “Sorry to disappoint you.”

That night, she
started out on the carpet, but by two o’clock, which was half an hour after we’d turned out the light, she’d climbed into bed beside me; she said the floor was hard. By two-thirty, I’d insisted that she flip so her head was by my feet, though once she’d done so, it became clear that this setup was no better than being side by side. Around three-ten, she began scratching behind her knee, her nails scraping over the skin just a few inches from my face.

I pressed my hand to her leg and whispered, so as not to awaken Heather, “Quit it.”

“I think I might have picked up something on the bus,” Vi whispered back.

“Great.” Before climbing into bed, she’d taken a shower, padding to and from the communal girls’ bathroom in my white terry-cloth robe and flip-flops, though I wasn’t sure if that meant Vi was clean or that my robe was now dirty.

“Not like an STD,” Vi said. “Like a rash.”

“Then you’ll only make it worse by scratching.”

Vi sighed loudly—was Heather really sleeping through all of this?—and I turned onto my side, away from my sister. I knew the exact second she fell asleep; I could hear the change in her breathing. Almost right away, our conversation at the pizza place asserted itself in my brain. Would the yellow light overtake me, too, in this moment or later? I didn’t want it to. I wanted nothing to do with it. Vi had said the experience wasn’t scary, but what if it
was
the same energy that had been there when Marisa and I had used the Ouija board? It wasn’t that I necessarily believed in Satan, but I believed in the existence of darkness, which was perhaps the same thing. And back then, I also hadn’t immediately recognized that presence as bad.

The next afternoon,
when I returned from my economics lecture, Heather was away from the room and Vi was lying on my bed reading the
Missourian
, Mizzou’s student newspaper. “Someone named Ben Murphy called for someone named Kate.” Vi looked amused. “Isn’t Kate kind of bland?”

“It
is
my middle name.” This was what I’d planned to say if someone from high school asked about the change, though so far I hadn’t ended up in a class with anybody from Kirkwood. That Vi was the first person for whom I needed to break out the excuse was deeply irritating.

“First of all, your middle name is Kathleen,” Vi said. “But I just don’t see you as a Kate. What about Maya? That’s pretty.”

“Then you be Maya.”

“You don’t have to get all grouchy.” She set down the newspaper. “What do Mom and Dad think?”

“I haven’t told them.” In fact, it surprised me that she assumed I had. Though St. Louis was only two hours from Columbia, and many of my classmates who were from the area went home on weekends, it seemed understood that I wouldn’t return to our house until Thanksgiving. “Call after five on Sundays because the rates are cheaper,” my mother had said on the drive to Mizzou, and when I did call collect each Sunday, I spoke to
her for five minutes, at which point, as precisely as if she’d set an egg timer, she passed off the phone to my father. After I’d spoken to him for five minutes, I’d hear her in the background, saying, “Earl, that’s enough. She’ll call again next week.” During our conversations, my mother never asked questions. Instead, she told what might generously be called stories, many of which I already knew—that our neighbors the Pockneys had had to cut down the dogwood tree in their front yard because of a fungus, which would prompt her to recall the time their Jack Russell terrier, Eisenhower, had run away for three days, which would prompt her to say, as she often had in the past, that she didn’t think it was right to give a dog the name of a president. When I spoke to my father, he did ask about my life at Mizzou, but in a general way, as if I were the daughter of a friend. How were my classes? Was I enjoying the bustle of campus life? From week to week, he had no follow-up questions about the outcome of a particular paper I’d written or the craft project I’d planned at the adult day-care center; instead, in every conversation, we started anew with generalities. After my mother had given him notice, he’d always conclude by saying, in a rueful tone, “It’s awfully quiet here without you girls,” and I’d try to resist the downward pull of everything contained within the remark, the gravity of sadness in our house. Lightly, I’d say, “Well, it’s good to talk to you, Dad.” Often, when I placed the phone’s receiver back in its cradle, I’d have to blink away tears.

But what I had said to Vi was true: While I’d been actively hiding my name change from her, it hadn’t occurred to me to mention it to our parents. They were so confined to one particular part of my life that it didn’t seem like it mattered if they knew. Maybe this was callous to think, but it just wasn’t of much consequence what they called me.

Vi stretched her arms above her head. “So,
Kate
—is Ben Murphy the guy who’s not your boyfriend?”

“Did he leave a message?”

She shook her head. “Just his number. Let’s go get Chinese food. I’m starving.”

“I’m meeting my friend Ann for dinner at six so we can do problem sets.”

“Then eat two dinners. It’s not even five yet.”

The truth was that I wasn’t so sure I wanted Vi to accompany me to the cafeteria again anyway. That morning, when I’d taken her to breakfast, we’d sat with my friend Lauren and a couple other Theta girls I didn’t know well, and after I got up to find an orange, I returned to discover everyone at the table with stricken expressions, listening to Vi deliver a speech about how women’s armpit hair contained powerful sex pheromones. It could have been worse, though; she could have been talking about the yellow light. I said, “I’ll go with you to get Chinese food, and then I really do have to meet Ann.”