Sisterland (21 page)

As I hung up, Hank was regarding me with unabashed curiosity. I said, “Apparently, our phone is ringing off the hook because of Vi being on the
Today
show this morning.”

“Wait, that was today? And you waited until now to tell me?” He seemed not just interested but downright titillated; for the first time since we’d arrived in their backyard, there was about him no haze of grimness.

“They interviewed her from here, not in New York. At her house. Matt Lauer did it.”

“Let’s go watch it right now. You think just because my life is in shambles
I wouldn’t want to see Vi shooting the breeze with Matt Lauer? You know what your sister needs?”

“A muzzle?” I said.

“A publicist.”

“Vi doesn’t need a publicist.”

“It’s not like only drug-addled starlets have them. It’s someone who knows how to handle the media, and if Vi’s been on
Today
, she’ll get more requests. Courtney and I went to college with a woman who does PR in L.A. Why don’t I shoot her an email?”

The offer seemed very Harvard-like to me, that Hank not only understood what a publicist did but happened to know one. I said, “Won’t Courtney be annoyed if the woman helps Vi? And wouldn’t someone like that charge an arm and a leg?”

“A good publicist ought to be able to make some money for Vi out of all this. I think some TV shows pay not for the interview exactly, but they pay a licensing fee for personal photos or whatever, which amounts to the same thing. Or Vi could get a book deal. Or her own TV show.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

Hank smiled. “Not what you were hoping for? Look, why don’t I email Emma, and if she can’t help, I’m sure she knows lots of other people. She could at least get us a ballpark estimate of how expensive it is.”

“Thank you,” I said. He had not, I noticed, answered my question about Courtney.

“Hey.” Hank made a sheepish expression. “Glad I’m good for something right now.”

One Sunday evening during my junior year in college,
my father answered the phone and there came a point when I was pretty sure we’d been talking for more than our allotted five minutes; I looked at my watch and saw that it had, astonishingly, been twelve. Then my father said, “Your mother’s gone to bed. The doctor has her on a new medicine for the fibromyalgia, and it’s making her tired.” He said this matter-of-factly, as if we’d discussed a diagnosis of fibromyalgia before—at the time, I had never heard of it, and I woefully misspelled it when I looked it up online—but out of some combination of surprise, politeness, and cowardice, I asked him nothing. A few days later, I emailed Vi and wrote,
Have you heard Mom or Dad talk about her having fibromyalgia?
Vi wrote back,
What the fuck is that?

Since starting Mizzou, I’d gone home infrequently. To be alone in the house on Gilbert Street with my parents, without Vi, was almost unbearable, and though she’d drop by, it was never for long. I’d suggest that we see a movie or meet up in the afternoon to have lunch, but she worked most nights at one restaurant or another and slept half the day. Was this, I wondered, what it had felt like for her when she’d stayed with me in the dorm and I’d barely had time for her in my schedule?

I’d learned that taking Ben with me, seeing my parents’ house through his eyes, was worse than going home by myself. This mausoleum of unhappiness was where I’d grown up? I’d try to explain that it hadn’t been as bad when I was younger, that the plates in the kitchen and the television
set in the living room and the hand towels in the bathroom hadn’t looked as old and outdated because they hadn’t
been
as old and outdated.

Ben would sleep in the ludicrous guest room, the expectation that he would do so conveyed by the folded towels on the bed, though I never knew if it was my mother or father who’d set them there. Initially, I assumed that from visit to visit he was the last person to have used the bed, until I realized the guest room was where my father now slept; I discovered an empty bottle of his blood pressure medication under the nightstand. But even before I knew this, I’d have Ben sneak into my room instead of joining him in the bigger guest bed, and he would try to initiate sex, and I would start crying. Not because of the sex—that had gotten better for us after our first dismal hook-up—but because of everything else, the grip of family and the past.

If I hadn’t previously thought of my mother as making much effort, after the fibromyalgia diagnosis she either stopped trying entirely or didn’t have the ability. Where once she’d run errands, she now remained in bed until five
P.M
. Prior to five, she was up only for doctors’ appointments, which my father left work to drive her to. If I arrived home in the middle of the day, the single indication that I was expected would be a key beneath the mat outside the front door. My father ate frozen dinners every night—I did the same during my visits—and my mother subsisted on orange juice, Triscuits, and spreadable cheddar cheese. She didn’t have the energy to attend my college graduation, and my father didn’t want to leave her by herself, so neither of them came. At the last minute, Vi and Patrick drove out, surprising me, and though I’d probably have told them not to if they’d offered in advance, I was glad to see them. Ben’s parents took all of us, plus Ben’s two sisters and grandfather, out for dinner at the fanciest restaurant in Columbia; Vi ordered lobster, and she and Patrick drank four cocktails each.

Vi had vacated our parents’ house in a way I never had. She had cleared her belongings out of our childhood bedroom—even the Sisterland sign was gone—while my old clothes still hung in the closet, my Nipher and Kirkwood High yearbooks rested on the shelf, and a googly-eyed turtle
sticker I’d arbitrarily stuck on my desk lamp in 1986 was still there eleven years later.

In the summers during college, I stayed in Columbia and worked full-time at the adult day-care center; after graduation Ben and I rented a one-bedroom apartment in Lincoln Park. Our first year out of college, we hosted Thanksgiving in Chicago for our friends, who were mostly other Mizzou graduates, and I felt a particular kind of twenty-two-year-old’s pride in the fact that, unlike at Thanksgivings of my youth, we used fresh rather than frozen spinach for the casserole and real whipped cream instead of cans of Reddi-wip. (Also around this time, one ordinary weeknight after making dinner, I heard myself say to Ben, “I’m going to compost the rest of the bok choy”—there was a little yard with a compost bin behind our building—and pretty much everything I was smug about then was encapsulated in that single sentence. I thought—foolishly, obnoxiously—that I’d left my former self behind.) At Christmas, Ben and I went to see his family in Indianapolis, and these patterns held the following year, too: Thanksgiving in Chicago, Christmas in Indianapolis. “I don’t suppose you’d be able to come home just for a day or two,” my father said in early December, and I said I couldn’t. Ben and I had recently gone to look at engagement rings, and I definitely didn’t want his proposal to occur in St. Louis.

Vi was working Christmas Eve but was supposed to go over to the house on Christmas Day, when my father would make steak for dinner. On Christmas Eve, my mother went to bed without eating, which wasn’t unusual; her door, the door to the room she no longer shared with my father, was closed by eight
P.M
. Because she regularly awakened so late in the day, twenty hours passed before my father knocked on the door shortly before Vi’s arrival to see if my mother needed help getting up. When she didn’t answer, he knocked again, then a third time. After he entered the room and found her unresponsive in bed, he called 911; the EMTs who came to the house declared her dead. Vi pulled up outside my parents’ house to find not just an ambulance but a fire truck and a squad car, all their lights flashing.

For a full day, I didn’t know. I hadn’t been home for seven months, and that afternoon—this is only one of my regrets—I’d called to wish my parents a Merry Christmas when I knew my mother would still be asleep. This was after the big meal at Ben’s family’s house in Indianapolis; I’d been using the phone in the kitchen, and when I’d hung up I’d experienced a gut-wrenching sadness that I had mistaken for run-of-the-mill holiday sorrow. On the other side of the kitchen’s swinging door was Ben’s extended family: little kids hopped up on sweets playing with new toys while the adults watched football and lamented having overeaten.

I sat by myself in the kitchen for perhaps ten minutes, scanning the photographs on the refrigerator door, waiting to be interrupted by someone and to have to rearrange my features so I wouldn’t seem like I was in an unfestive mood. Ben’s family was sporty and boisterous, his parents much younger-seeming than mine, and among the refrigerator photos was one of them looking at each other and smiling, his father in a tuxedo and his mother in a strapless red dress, at their thirtieth-anniversary party. There were also photos of one of Ben’s sisters grinning broadly, wrapped in a foil sheet, having just completed a marathon; of both sisters in hiking boots and shorts and fleece sweatshirts, standing on a mountain, the older one holding her fingers in a V behind the head of the younger one; of the whole family on a beach somewhere. Looking at this display, I knew suddenly that I couldn’t marry Ben, or anyone whose family was this normal and happy. Ben’s mother, whom I actually liked a lot, had once said to me that her goal in life was for each of her children to find someone who loved them as much as she and Ben’s dad did, and I had felt at the time like I was auditioning for a part I was very close to getting, but in this moment I realized I didn’t want it. The differences between our families would always be too painful.

And so when at last I returned to the living room, I murmured to Ben that I had a headache and was going to bed early. The dismay on his face confirmed to me that he had planned to propose that night. Maybe we’d have taken a walk down the cold, dark street of brick houses, or it would have been by the fireplace, after the cousins had left and his sisters
and parents had gone to sleep. I felt a churning in my stomach as I brushed my teeth and climbed into the double bed that Ben’s parents didn’t care if we shared. (In contrast to the mother of my high school boyfriend Tom Mueller, Ben’s mother adored me—she would send fruit-scented soaps and packets of fancy powdered hot chocolate to our apartment in Chicago and sign the cards “Mom Sylvia.” I think she had never quite gotten over the fact that my parents hadn’t attended my college graduation.)

I would still have to stave off a proposal for the two days before Ben and I returned to Chicago, I thought, and then I’d have to stave off whatever new plan he came up with after proposing at his parents’ house hadn’t worked, and it all made me feel tired. It wasn’t that I wanted to break up with him, just that I wanted to halt further progress—I wanted to enter a holding pattern. These were the thoughts I went to sleep thinking the night after my mother died. Then I dreamed not of her but of Vi yelling my name from across a grassy field; in the dream, I pretended I couldn’t hear her.

I didn’t have a cellphone then, and because Ben’s last name was Murphy and neither Vi nor my father knew the first name of Ben’s father, it was useless for them to call information in Indianapolis; they had no way of reaching me. Vi sent an email—
Call me ASAP
—which I got while sitting in front of a computer at the desk in Ben’s father’s home office on the evening of December 26. Immediately, my pulse began to race. Normally, I’d have gone to find Ben’s mother and asked if I could make a long-distance call, but instead I simply lifted the receiver of the office phone and dialed Vi’s apartment. Patrick answered on the fifth ring, and when he realized it was me, he said, “I’m so sorry, Daze.”

“What happened?” I said.

“Oh, shit, I thought Vi reached you,” he said. “Your mom died.” I almost thought he was kidding, but then he began to sob.

I swallowed and said, “But how?”

“The EMT told your dad he thought it was a reaction to her medications. It was in her sleep.”

I had known my mother took several prescription medicines, I’d seen
the forest of bottles on her nightstand, but I couldn’t have said exactly what they were for.

“Vi’s at your parents’ house now,” Patrick said.

Ben drove me to St. Louis that night; it took us four hours, and there was the threat of a snowstorm, but the flakes didn’t start to fall until we’d arrived. My father greeted us at the door and said, “I’m glad you’ve come home,” and his voice cracked. Behind him, I caught sight of Vi in an old University of Nebraska sweatshirt with the hood up, her eyes puffy and rimmed with red.

My mother’s was
the first funeral I’d ever attended. There was a service at the funeral home, a large white house on Manchester Road that I’d passed many times without taking note of it, then the burial at Oak Hill Cemetery. My Mizzou friend Lauren had wanted to come, but she was a paralegal in her hometown of Tampa and had to work over the holidays. My father’s brother and his wife flew in from Omaha, and Patrick and his mother were there, along with a handful of Vi’s restaurant co-workers, some of my father’s colleagues, a few of our neighbors, and all four members of the Spriggs family. I didn’t realize I’d been waiting for Pete Spriggs, who’d become a rotund man in his late twenties, to announce to Vi and me, “You’re twins because there’s two of you” until the burial was finished, everyone had dispersed, and he hadn’t said it.

During the service, I’d had trouble remembering what my mother had looked like. I could remember certain photos of her but not her moving around, talking to me. What came to mind instead was something Vi had once said when we’d studied the civil rights movement in high school, which was that if our mother had lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, during desegregation, she was the kind of person who’d have spit at the black students as they tried to get inside the high school. I attempted to chase the comment from my brain.

Patrick, his mother, and our aunt and uncle came back to our house for lunch, which was a tray of cold cuts Ben had picked up that morning from
Schnucks. From the moment Patrick had told me my mother had died, I’d felt both clingy and jumpy around Ben—glad that he hadn’t given me the opportunity to turn down his proposal, that I hadn’t made things officially bad between us and he was willing to drive with me to St. Louis and stand next to me at the funeral, but aware that I still couldn’t marry him, even though my mother had died. I just couldn’t.