Sisterland (24 page)

Nancy lived in Tower Grove, and on New Year’s Eve, there were about fifteen of us at two tables set up in her dining room and living room. She turned out to be a great cook, and it was the best meal I’d had since moving back to St. Louis: figs wrapped in bacon, and olives with blue cheese, rosemary garlic lamb, warm spinach salad, popovers, and a chocolate torte. Nancy had set out place cards, and Vi and I were at different tables; I was
next to a guy named Maxwell who looked to be in his late thirties. He was pudgy, with a dark, full mustache and beard, and he wore a burgundy guayabera shirt embroidered with white birds, which I heard myself compliment him on when I took my seat, less because I actually liked the shirt than because I’d noticed it. Also, I’d already had three glasses of wine. After we finished the main course, by which time I’d had a fourth glass, he reached out, pressed his fingertips to my cheeks, and said, “You have an amazingly symmetrical face.” I was drunk enough that this didn’t entirely put me off. I said, “You should see my sister.” He laughed and said, “I have.”

This was when Nancy tapped a fork against her wineglass and said, “Attention, everyone. It’s time for the Burning Bowl Ceremony.” On small pieces of paper that were being passed around, Nancy explained, we would all write something negative in our life that we wanted to leave behind in the old millennium. Then we’d put the pieces of paper in a large tan ceramic bowl, which she held up, and we’d light them on fire. The spirit of the universe would receive our requests, release us from the forces that had been holding us back, and allow us to have new beginnings. As Nancy spoke, I tried to catch Vi’s eye, but my sister wouldn’t look at me.

I waited for a slip of paper to make its way to me; then, because there were fewer pens than guests, I waited for Maxwell to finish using his. I saw him write
SEXUALLY INSATIABLE
in all caps, and I couldn’t help wondering if this was for my benefit.

And yet, after he’d given me the pen, I felt what I’d felt almost seven years before, making wishes under the Arch with Vi on our high school graduation night: that to be sincere in this moment was a bit silly, but to be insincere was to waste an opportunity. For a full minute, I wrote nothing. When Nancy came by, collecting everyone’s scraps, I scribbled, in tiny letters,
Mom guilt
. Then I folded the paper in half and handed it off.

A discussion started about whether to burn the paper inside, where it might set off the smoke alarm, or outside, where it was ten degrees. I went to stand with Vi, Patrick, and Patrick’s lawyer boyfriend and murmured to Vi, “I thought Nancy was one of your restaurant friends, not one of your meditation friends.”

“She’s both.” Vi was reading my face, trying to gauge my mood, and she said, “They’re not going to howl at the moon. After this, Nancy wants people to play Charades.”

“I wrote something,” I said.

“Good. You get a gold star.”

“Is Nancy trying to set me up with that guy Maxwell?”

Vi grinned. “No comment.”

“Are
you
trying to set me up with him?”

“Supposedly, he has a Prince Albert. You know what that is?” When I shook my head, she said, “Of course you don’t. It means his dick is pierced.”

“Who told you that?”

She shrugged, and I said, “Maybe you should hook up with him.”

“I’m having a drink tonight with Scary Black Man.”

“Our neighbor?”

“We’ve hung out a few times.”

“When?”

“You don’t know everything about me.” Then she added, “When you were at Mrs. Abbott’s.” Another guest, a guy, wolf-whistled so we’d quiet down and listen to Nancy again. It had been decided that we’d go outside for the ceremony, she said. In the small square of frozen grass between Nancy’s apartment building and the sidewalk, we all gathered in a circle, and she held the bowl, in the center of which stood a fat white lit candle.

“Energies of this and other universes, we are grateful for everything you’ve provided to us,” she said. “As we continue on our journey, we ask that you receive our humble prayers and help clear our hearts of that which has been holding us back. Enlighten us on our path into the future.” She looked around the circle. “Let’s be quiet for this part so it’ll be easier for the energies to hear our prayers.”

A woman named Jocelyn was standing to Nancy’s right, holding a smaller bowl, and she lifted the little folded pieces of paper out of it and passed them one by one to Nancy; one by one, Nancy held them to the flame and let them burn. I was standing across the circle, but I could tell, I could sense, when she got to mine. In spite of the fact that it was by then after eleven on New Year’s Eve, there was little noise outside except for the
sound of cars on Grand Boulevard. It was very cold, and I felt my heart bulging a little, perhaps with hope.

That night, somewhat to my own surprise, I did end up sleeping with Maxwell; he lived a block from Nancy, and I’m not sure I’d have gone home with him if I’d had to get into a car, but as it was, not much effort was required. And he did have a Prince Albert—he wore a curved silver barbell, which I encountered first with my fingers but truthfully couldn’t feel when we were having sex, perhaps because he had on a condom. Afterward, he slept spooning me the entire night, his arms crossed in front of my chest in a way that was both sweet and a little entrapping. Early in the morning, he got up to pee, then released a fart so thunderous that I started laughing; when he returned to bed, I faked still being asleep and he spooned me again. A few hours later, after I really had fallen back to sleep, then awakened, and he had, too, he suggested we get brunch and I declined in what I hoped was a friendly way; when he called our apartment a few times in the next week, having procured the number from Nancy, I didn’t call him back.

Vi didn’t actually hook up with our neighbor on New Year’s Eve, but she did two nights later, and it went on for a few weeks before fizzling. The part I wish I could undo is that we kept calling him Scary Black Man. Not to his face, obviously, but whenever we discussed him. His real name was Jeff Parker, but all this time later, if Vi told me she’d run into Jeff Parker on the street, I don’t think I’d know who she was talking about. If she said Scary Black Man, I’d know immediately.

In February, I started looking for jobs again and quit working for Mrs. Abbott when I was offered a position at an elder-care services agency; although no apparition of any sort had ever appeared to me at Mrs. Abbott’s, on my final night at her house, Mrs. Abbott greatly unsettled me by calling me by my mother’s name. “Rita, dear,” she said as I tucked her in, “be sure to take sixty dollars from my pocketbook.” Briefly, I was speechless, but then I concluded it was just a coincidence; for all I knew, another of the aides was named Rita. “I’m not supposed to do that,” I said. “But thank you.”

In my new job, I helped clients figure out if they qualified for Medicaid
or meal deliveries at home, and I served as a liaison between their families or doctors. Even then, when I did have health insurance, I didn’t see a shrink, but I bought a Jetta with forty thousand miles on it, which I suspect did more for my sense of well-being than years of therapy could have. In the fall, a woman in my office named Janet asked if I wanted to do a 5K run with her, a fund-raising race, and I said yes. We started running together in Forest Park before or after work, and at a brunch held by Janet after the race, I met a guy named David Frankel who was a manager at a big rental-car company headquartered in St. Louis. Almost immediately, we were dating seriously. If it never felt as if David and I were infatuated with each other (he frequently corrected my driving, and he told me that I talked too loudly when I was on the phone with Vi), he was someone to go to movies and restaurants with on the weekend, and Vi had not been entirely wrong when she’d said that I was more myself when I had a boyfriend. I might have disagreed with her about the reason why—I’d always felt that boyfriends were a distraction from the existential abyss Vi chose to hover closer to than I did—but the sentiment did have some basis. The night before I went out with David for the second time, while I was applying makeup, Vi burst into the bathroom and said, “You can’t marry him! You can have a roll in the hay, but you’re not supposed to marry him!”

“I think you’re getting ahead of yourself,” I said.

“No.” Vi’s face was serious. “You’re supposed to marry someone else.”

Two years later, the day Vi and I turned twenty-seven, we had dinner at Hacienda with our father, Patrick, and David, and afterward our father went home to his apartment, and Vi and I drove to a bar in the Loop with the guys. While they played pool, I said to Vi, “I just want to tell you that David and I are getting engaged soon, and I hope you’ll be happy for us.”

Vi looked unimpressed.

“He’s up for adopting from China, which not all guys are,” I said. “And he can afford it, too, and it’s expensive.”

“Why don’t you adopt on your own?” Vi said. “I’ll help you raise your wee little lotus flowers.”

“Did you not hear what I just said? The adoption alone costs like twenty thousand dollars.” Vi and I had both been in debt for years.

She said, “You know what you should do is, you should secretly get knocked up by him and then break up. That’d be free, and you’d still get to be a mom.”

“That’s a terrible idea. I don’t want to be a single mother, and I don’t want biological children.”

“The Chinese adoption thing is noble, but it’s not who you are.” After taking a sip of beer, Vi wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She said, “Your destiny is to breed.”

“Luckily, it’s not up to you.”

“How about this?” Vi said. “Just promise me you won’t get engaged before Christmas.”

Christmas was four months away. “What difference does it make?” I said.

Vi’s smile was ludicrously confident. “Because by then you’ll have met the guy you should marry.”

On that New
Year’s Eve of the new millennium, after all the pieces of paper were burned, Nancy said in a somber tone, “Thank you, energies, for letting us make this offering to you.” Then she looked around the circle and said, “Who needs another drink before midnight?”

Inside, Vi and I ended up squeezed together on Nancy’s low couch. I said, “Should I ask what you wrote on your paper or will that make it not come true?”

“What do you think I wrote?” I looked at her, and she added, “I’m sure it was the same thing you did.”

I looked away then, toward the TV, which had at some point been turned on. It was so pleasant to be drunk in a warm, crowded apartment, to have eaten a delicious meal, to know that there was a guy hovering nearby who wanted to have sex with me (even a guy who was odd and, by his own admission, insatiable) that I was reluctant to let my mother into the night, or to let her in any more than I already had by invoking her on my own scrap of paper. Vi patted my knee, and I felt—this had to do with
being drunk, though it also wasn’t untrue—that no other person would ever understand me as my sister did.

And then everyone was moving, we had arrived at the last ten seconds before midnight, and Vi stood, then stuck out her hand to pull me to my feet. “Ten, nine, eight,” people shouted, “seven, six, five, four”—and Vi, who was bellowing, nodded her chin once at me, meaning,
You do it, too!
and so I joined in—“three, two, one!” and everyone was cheering and blowing noisemakers, and from somewhere “Auld Lang Syne” was audible.

“Happy 2000,” I said, and Vi stepped forward—to this day, it’s the only time in our lives she has done this—and kissed me on the mouth.

These were the topics of some of the articles that ran
in local and national publications in the weeks after Vi’s prediction:

A bride whose wedding was scheduled for Saturday, October 17, at the Chase Park Plaza heard from several out-of-town guests who’d changed their minds about attending.

For the Blues’ first home game of the season, which was supposed to be on October 16 against the Buffalo Sabres, there was a glut of tickets.

Religious groups in the area were condemning the prediction, and a large evangelical church in Arnold had raised money to pay for a billboard along I-55 featuring a quote from Leviticus:
DO NOT TURN TO
mediums or seek out spiritists, for you will be defiled by them. I am the LORD
YOUR GOD
.

Local frozen-custard shops were selling so-called quake shakes, and a sports bar was selling a quake burger, and two community college students were selling bumpers stickers that said
I BRAKE FOR QUAKES
.

Across St. Louis, Targets and Walmarts kept selling out of bottled water and batteries.

The city and county superintendents had agreed that school would not be canceled on October 16, though emergency drills were being staged so students would know what to do if an earthquake occurred.

Professors at both the Saint Louis University Earthquake Center and Washington University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences—that is, Jeremy’s department—were adamant in stating that no one could predict earthquakes; that anyone who claimed otherwise was a fraud; and
that it was irresponsible of the media to devote so much attention to such an outlandish story. In the
Post-Dispatch
, Leland Marcus, the chair of Jeremy’s department, was quoted as saying, “I would stake my career on it. There’s absolutely no such thing as earthquake season.”

Hank had been
right: By the afternoon following her appearance on the
Today
show, Vi, whose phone number was listed, had been called by dozens and dozens of reporters and producers throughout the United States and even by a columnist at a tabloid in Sydney, Australia, where it was already the next morning; by the next morning in St. Louis, she’d received requests for interviews from a producer of a radio show in Amsterdam and from reporters at
Haaretz
, in Israel, and the
Sun
, in England. After I’d dropped her off following our breakfast at the Four Seasons, she’d gone to sleep, and while she’d slept, her phone had rung and rung, her prediction spreading across the Internet. Also while she’d slept, reporters from the
St. Louis Beacon
and the
Riverfront Times
had slipped notes and business cards through the mail slot in her front door, a reporter from the
Post-Dispatch
had set up a camping chair on the sidewalk outside her house, simply waiting for her, and a dog had taken an enormous shit on her lawn, though she said she wasn’t sure if the shit was connected to the prediction, and when she asked the
Post-Dispatch
reporter, he said he hadn’t seen it happen. (Of course it was connected, I thought.) But until Vi woke, just after five that afternoon, she was unaware of the building frenzy; everyone else knew about it before she did. And when I reached her, around six, she sounded stunned as she said, “You won’t believe what’s happening.”