Sisterland (15 page)

I ate strawberry
frozen yogurt for my second dinner, and as Ann and I were leaving the cafeteria, we passed a group of guys, one of whom said, “Kate?” When I looked over, Ben Murphy said, “Hey, I don’t know if you got my message.”

“Yeah, sorry …” I trailed off. In the not particularly flattering light of the cafeteria’s entry hall, I noticed that Ben’s wide nose turned up at the end, displaying his nostrils in a piglike way. He wore khaki pants and a tucked-in royal blue polo shirt, and he was okay-looking, but the fact that we’d made out at the frat party was clearly revealed in this moment to have been a result of drunkenness rather than any particular attraction between us.

He said, “We’re having a barbecue tomorrow at the DU house, and you should come if you can.” There was the smallest strain in his delivery, the effort he was making to sound casual.

“Oh. Well, I have a biology test, but I’ll try to make it.”

“Yo, Murph, quit flirting,” said one of the guys he’d entered the cafeteria with—they were lingering a few feet away—and Ben looked embarrassed.

“Come over anytime after five,” he said.

Heather was in
the room but Vi wasn’t when I returned from the adult day-care center the following afternoon. I changed into shorts and a T-shirt and walked to the gym to use the StairMaster. When I got back to Schurz Hall, Vi was sitting on the floor outside my room, which meant that Heather must have departed in my absence, locking the door behind her.

Vi had a book open on her lap, and as I approached, she held it up, cover out—it was
Their Eyes Were Watching God
, by Zora Neale Hurston—and said, “Have you read this?”

I shook my head.

“I just went to an amazing African-American Lit class taught by this guy who’s a major Hurston expert. Don’t shorts that short give you a wedgie?”

I squinted at her. “You went to a class?”

“When in Rome …”

“Vi, you’re not a student here.”

“They weren’t checking IDs at the door.”

“That’s not the point.”

“What’s it to you if I sit in on a class?”

I hadn’t yet unlocked the door, nor had she stood. I folded my arms in front of my chest. “You need to go back to Reed,” I said.

“Funny you should say that.” As if this were her ace in the hole, a triumph for her to lord over me, she said, “Because actually I’m not enrolled. I stopped going to classes weeks ago, and the dean said I had to withdraw for the semester.”

I stared at her. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing now that I’m gone from there.”

“Do you think you can just stay here forever? Because you can’t. It’s rude to Heather.”

“Oh, really?” Vi smirked. “To Heather?”

“If you’re not going back to Reed, then you need to go home.”

Vi did stand then, the book tucked under her arm. “See, I can’t do that, either,” she said, and again I could have sworn her tone contained a bragging
note. “Because if I’m in St. Louis, I’ll just keep fucking Mr. Caldwell.” We looked at each other—I suppose I should have felt compassion, but I wanted to slap the smugness off her face—and she added, “Don’t even pretend you didn’t know, because you knew.”

Had I known? People had said Vi was Mr. Caldwell’s favorite; junior year, she sat at the desk closest to his, and once my boyfriend, Tom, had jokingly told her that she’d sit on Mr. Caldwell’s lap if she could. But there was an enormous difference between teasing Vi that she and Mr. Caldwell were in love and her having real, actual sex with him. He was at least thirty-five, I was pretty sure, and he was handsome for a teacher, but the idea of him as someone you
touched
entirely changed the criteria for judgment. His womanly hips and butt, the paunch of his belly, his blond beard and flushed cheeks—recalling them actively repelled me.

Finally, I said, “Where? If you were hooking up with him, where’d you go?”

“It was mostly in his office during my free periods. I’d meet him about ‘a paper’ ”—Vi made air quotes—“and he’d shut the door. And I’d be able to hear people in the hallway outside talking about the football game or whatever.”

“Weren’t you scared of getting caught?”

“What, by a teacher?” She scoffed. “I think he got off on the danger. Oh, he did once take me to a restaurant in Illinois, when his wife was out of town, but that actually stressed him out way more than banging me on school property.”

“Did you lose your virginity to him?”

“God, no.” Vi laughed. “Patrick and I did it in ninth grade, and it’s how he figured out for sure he’s into dudes. Caldwell’s not a pedophile, by the way. Pedophiles like children who haven’t gone through puberty. Anyway, we were in touch when I was at Reed, but his wife just had a baby, and I’m thinking we should end it. It’s a little gross now that he’s a dad.”

“But it wasn’t gross when he was your teacher?”

Vi shrugged.

Her nonchalance—it was infuriating. “It’s like you’re trying as hard as
you can to make a mess of your life,” I said. “And you know what? I bet eventually, you’ll succeed.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Why can’t you just be a normal person? Why do you have to have sex with teachers and talk to spirits and drop out of college?”

“Why do you have to be so narrow-minded and judgmental?”

“Judgmental?” My voice was raised in a way I’d regret later, not because I cared about offending Vi but because other people on the hall might have heard. Almost in a shout, I said, “Judgmental is what you call letting you stay here after you show up with no warning? You’re wearing my clothes, you’re using my toothpaste, you’re sleeping in my
bed
, for Christ’s sake. So if that’s judgmental, then I’d hate to see how you’d be treated by someone who doesn’t feel as sorry for you as I do.”

As I stalked away, it wasn’t that I forgot I was holding the room key—taking off with the room key accounted for the only satisfaction I felt. What I had forgotten was that I was wearing a sweaty T-shirt and shorts and that, as with my abrupt departure from my own high school graduation, I had no particular place to go. I’d find Lauren, I decided, but when I knocked on the door of her room, two floors below mine, her roommate said, “I think she’s at a barbecue.”

Ben’s fraternity barbecue—I’d forgotten that, too. If I’d still been interested in Ben, I wouldn’t then have decided to go; I wouldn’t have wanted to appear before him unshowered. But my wish to tell Lauren what a terrible person my sister was exceeded my concern over Ben’s opinion, and I walked down Rollins Street to the DU house. I had just turned onto Maryland Avenue when Ben himself appeared with another guy. Seeing me, Ben smiled so broadly that it was like I really had shown up for his benefit. “We forgot the ketchup and mustard,” he said. “Want to go on a Hy-Vee run?”

“Sure,” I said. (Sometimes when I look back, it feels as if what he said wasn’t
Want to go on a Hy-Vee run?
but, rather,
Want to be my girlfriend for the next six years?
and with just as little thought, I still said sure.)

He drove a black BMW, which made me understand that he probably
came from a rich family. The other guy, Nate, let me sit in front. Even on the ride, I could feel Ben’s solicitousness, how his attention had shifted from his frat brother to me, a girl he barely knew.

By the time we got back to the DU house, my outrage at Vi had subsided; besides, it wasn’t as if I’d have told Lauren or anyone else the whole story. Lauren was the one who approached me, saying, “Why are you wearing workout clothes?” She had on a striped knee-length skirt and a cardigan sweater.

“My sister is driving me crazy,” I said. “I look terrible, right?”

“You look cute,” Lauren said. “Sporty.”

Ben had gotten me a plastic cup of beer and, when I finished the first, another; I ate a hot dog and some potato chips, and I joined a badminton game occurring on the lawn. U2 was playing on speakers set in windows on the second floor, and it was a nice autumn evening that grew cool as darkness fell. “Are you cold?” Ben asked. “I could get you a jacket.”

Had Heather let Vi into the room, or was she out roaming the campus? I wasn’t still furious, but I also wasn’t ready to see her again. This barbecue, this was what I had come to Mizzou for. Not to be weighed down by Vi’s weirdness, her bad choices and creepy spirituality. “Maybe I will borrow a jacket,” I said.

What Ben had meant, of course, was from his own dorm room, which wasn’t in the DU house and was in fact as far from it as my dorm, but I walked with him there, solidly buzzed, and when we got to his room—it was on the first floor of Hatch, a double he shared with a roommate who conveniently was elsewhere—he turned on the overhead light and we’d been inside no more than thirty seconds before he kissed me. Then he nudged me toward his bed, and he was on top of me, nibbling my left ear in a way that seemed ridiculous. He pushed up my T-shirt and stuck his hand under my sports bra, the base of which was still slightly damp from my time on the StairMaster hours before, but Ben seemed either not to notice or not to care. I kept tuning in and out of the moment—it was hard to decide if it was more alarming that Vi had slept with Mr. Caldwell or been forced to withdraw from Reed—and I was half-aware of when Ben eased my shirt over my head. (Presumably Vi had done with Mr. Caldwell
the very things I was in the midst of doing with Ben.) I was the one who removed my bra, because it wasn’t the kind that hooked in back, and then my shorts and underwear were off, too, but Ben was still dressed. At some point, he’d unfastened the dark brown leather belt he was wearing, then unbuttoned and unzipped his khaki pants, pulling them and his boxers down below his butt, but he didn’t remove them, and the two sides of the unbuckled belt, the buckle and the leather tip, kept slapping my thighs as he thrust against me. No penetration had occurred when, without warning, he came. He froze immediately, and I said, “Oh—okay.” I didn’t want to offer reassurance if that would only embarrass him. But the fact that the hook-up had apparently concluded, that he didn’t understand there was a way to make it up to me—it made me suspect he’d never had a girlfriend. Finally, I said, “Do you have some Kleenex?”

What he handed me was a full-sized maroon bath towel, and I mopped up between my legs. He was standing by the bed, and he said in an almost mean tone, as if I were the one who’d done something I shouldn’t have, “Are you going to tell Lauren?”

“No.” I slid on my underwear and shorts and reached for my sports bra.

Again, accusingly, he said, “I’ve had sex before.”

“Okay,” I said, and I pulled on my shirt. Remarkably, or not, I’d never removed my socks and running shoes. It seemed agreed upon that I would leave, and I stood and stepped toward the door.

In a voice that was only incrementally less hostile, he said, “We should hang out again.”

Back in Schurz
Hall, Heather was sitting at her desk eating yogurt, and there was no sign of Vi. “Have you seen my sister?” I asked.

Heather shook her head. “Not since this afternoon.”

“I hope it’s okay that she’s still here,” I said.

“Oh, she’s not bothering me.” Heather took a bite of yogurt. “She can stay as long as she wants.” After a pause, she said, “I apologize if this is weird to ask, but are you guys identical twins?”

Growing up, Vi and I had gotten the question endlessly, sometimes on
a daily basis, but this was the first time it had come from someone who seemed to think the answer would be no rather than yes.

“Yeah, we are,” I said.

“Really?” I could tell she was surprised. “I was wondering, but I didn’t—” She smiled. “I’m so jealous of you.”

Around eight in
the morning, I became aware of someone lightly shaking my arms, saying my name. The room was still more dark than light because the shades were drawn, and I had two groggy realizations at the same time. The first was that the person waking me was Vi—the name she was saying was Daisy—and the second was that she had never returned to the room the night before and I’d had my best night’s sleep since Monday.

I propped myself up on my elbows, and Vi whispered, “I need to talk to you in the hall.”

I climbed from bed and followed her out. Facing me, Vi looked wild and agitated: messy-haired and baggy-eyed and jittery, smelling like cigarettes.

“I got in trouble,” she said.

A window in the hall overlooked an oak tree, and even though the window wasn’t open, I could feel what a pleasant fall morning it was; something about the sunny weather, the turning leaves, made me less alarmed by Vi’s summoning than I should have been. It took her perhaps five minutes to explain what had happened: The night before, she’d had dinner in town and wandered around for a while before making her way back to Schurz Hall. Then she’d parked herself on a couch in the empty common room on the third floor and watched television for seven hours. Some students had come in and out during this time, but she hadn’t spoken to them. Just before six in the morning, while Vi was watching the old movie
The Philadelphia Story
, a group of three girls had shown up in spandex shorts and tank tops, one of them toting a
Buns of Steel
tape. (Rising at the crack of dawn to exercise—I couldn’t imagine.) The girl carrying the tape had told Vi that they worked out together at this time, in this place, every
morning, and that it was their turn to use the TV and VCR. The movie was almost finished, Vi said. There were only a few minutes left, and then they could have the common room. But they’d reserved it starting at five-thirty, the girl said, and she retrieved a clipboard hanging from a hook outside the room to show Vi where she’d written her name in the time slot. Fine, Vi replied, but she just wanted to watch the end of the movie; surely the girls’ buns could wait? No, the group’s leader said. The room was theirs.