Sisterland (32 page)

“Like when you pay for my eight-dollar fajitas with the income you earn from your exhausting job?” she interrupted. “Is that what you’re talking about?” And really, Vi and I argued often, but what I felt at this moment was an anger whose purity and heat were unlike any I’d previously experienced.

“Fajitas are the least of it, you sociopath! You want to know how much Emma’s charging? You really want to know? Fifteen thousand dollars. Now get out of my house!”

“With pleasure.” Vi was standing, shoving her feet into her clogs, picking up her bag, and it was gratifying to see that she herself was shaking with rage. Maybe if she’d been a little more efficient, I wouldn’t have had the chance to say what I said next.

But she still hadn’t reached the front door when I said, “You know nothing about being an adult—nothing about marriage or having kids or holding a real job. So the way that you constantly pass judgment on me is absurd. That’s why I bite my tongue when you do it, because it’s laughable that you have the nerve. It’s like having my manners corrected by a caveman.”

“Maybe if you keep telling yourself how perfect your life is, eventually you’ll believe it.”

“I never said—”

But she was talking over me. “You just can’t imagine that not everyone wants to spend their days changing diapers. Some of us think the world has more to offer. Can you believe it? And it’s hilarious that you see yourself as such a great mother because from my perspective, you’re turning your children into clingy little wimps. You cut Rosie’s blueberries in half, for Christ’s sake! Yeah, Mom was fucked up, but at least she gave us room to breathe.” With her hand on the front door, Vi glared at me. “So I guess you haven’t been the only one biting your tongue.”

Less than two weeks before I was to marry Jeremy, Vi
called me at work and said, “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

She was going to announce that she wasn’t coming to the wedding, I thought immediately, or that she was coming but was no longer willing to be the maid of honor, or that she was willing to be the maid of honor but didn’t want to wear the dress we’d picked out together. I had prepared myself for all these possibilities and decided that I wouldn’t fight her—that I couldn’t let her spoil the celebration. Then she said, “It’s not about your wedding.”

“So what is it?”

“Can we meet up tonight? Without Jeremy?”

“His department head is taking us out for dinner, but you can come over before. I should be home by five-thirty. Is it something serious?”

“Yes,” Vi said, “but it doesn’t have to do with us.”

Jeremy and I
had decided on a destination wedding in Mendocino, California, a plan that had once seemed perfect. The ceremony would occur at the same bed-and-breakfast where he’d proposed a year earlier; he’d had a conference in San Francisco, I’d flown to join him afterward, and we’d driven up the coast to stay at an inn. Holding the wedding in Mendocino would, we thought, make it fun even though it would be small, with the inconvenient location a justification for not inviting our distant relatives or any co-workers except my friend Janet.

The deeper we got into the planning, however, the more obvious it became that even a small wedding in Mendocino would be prohibitively expensive. In fact, I had the impression that it was our very attempts at being understated that would cost so much. Shortly before Jeremy and I had moved in together, we had been mutually discomfited to learn opposite pieces of information about each other: He’d been surprised to find out that I had debt, and I’d been surprised that he didn’t. At that point, I owed nine thousand dollars in student loans and four thousand in credit card bills, neither of which seemed to me disgraceful—I had a decent credit rating, especially compared to Vi—but I could tell that Jeremy didn’t like these facts about me. He didn’t say so, but he might even have considered my debt low-class, to borrow a term from my mother. Meanwhile, it hadn’t occurred to me that he
wouldn’t
still be paying off student loans; I didn’t understand until meeting Jeremy that most people with doctoral degrees received funding during their years of graduate work. And his parents had paid for the entirety of his undergraduate education, which at a private university had cost far more than mine.

The week I was to stop being Vi’s roommate, Jeremy said that he’d been thinking about it and suggested the following: that as a gift, he wanted to pay off my student loans; that after I moved in with him, I didn’t need to pay rent at first but should instead put what would have been rent money toward paying off my credit card bills; that when I had, we’d both pay rent proportional to our salaries (he earned twice what I did); and that we’d take turns covering daily living expenses such as dinners out. Growing up, I’d regularly had the feeling that my mother hadn’t taught Vi and me the things a mother was supposed to teach you—to put toilet paper on the seat in public bathrooms or to straighten my leg when shaving my knee—and there were lessons I’d had to glean from observation or just from the hunch that I’d done something wrong. The evening when Jeremy laid out his financial proposition was the first time it occurred to me that perhaps my father had failed to impart certain lessons, too. I was also, of course, dumbstruck by Jeremy’s generosity.

And yet, as the wedding expenses added up—deposits for the inn where the rehearsal dinner, ceremony, and reception would take place; the
invitations; the photographer and the cake and the flowers—Jeremy was the one who was prepared to splurge, and I was the one who balked. “You only get married once,” he’d say with a smile. “Hopefully.” (As it happened, even though Jeremy’s parents were long divorced, they were that civilized brand of divorced people who, with their respective second spouses, would all good-naturedly socialize; his father and stepmother had attended the engagement party that Jeremy’s mother and stepfather had held for us the previous winter in Virginia.)

Eventually, I convinced Jeremy that we needed neither a band nor a DJ—Patrick said he’d download songs for us on his iPod—and I bought two used dresses online for a hundred and fifty dollars each, kept the one that fit better and resold the other. My friend Janet would do my hair and makeup, we’d have no wedding attendants except Jeremy’s brother and my sister, and we’d cap the guest list at twenty-six people, including us. The two areas where Jeremy was inflexible were that he wouldn’t consider a cash bar—it wasn’t that I was hell-bent on it, but this was another instance in which he might have considered me low-class for even floating the idea—and he also for some reason really wanted to give out match-books with our names and the date on them, though these turned out to be relatively cheap, as wedding favors went. Even so, when all was said and done, the weekend would cost over twenty thousand dollars, which meant, after his parents told us they’d cover the rehearsal dinner, we’d still deplete Jeremy’s savings. (He’d have to sell off stocks, though to me the notable fact was that he owned stocks—really, unlike me, Jeremy was a bona fide grown-up before we met.) I had wondered if my father might pay for at least some of the wedding, but no offer had been forthcoming. My father had retired the previous summer, and I had little idea of the state of his finances, though his rental apartment was a modest one.

If I was being honest, the cost wasn’t the only reason for my ambivalence about my own wedding. The closer the date drew, and the more I found myself fielding friendly questions about it from co-workers and acquaintances, the more self-conscious I grew about the fact that it would be in northern California. It seemed the choice of a woman who fancied herself
free-spirited—who wore a toe ring, say, and who baked bread from scratch and whose name was Daisy.

On a hot Sunday morning in August about a month before the wedding was supposed to happen, Jeremy and I went for a walk in Forest Park. “I want to marry you,” I said. “But I wish we were just doing it at the courthouse.”

“That’s so dreary.” A second later, when Jeremy apparently remembered that my parents had done exactly that, he added, “Sorry. Listen—I don’t care what we’re wearing. I don’t care if we have a first dance or place cards or any of that shit. But weddings are one of the only times in life that people come together for happy reasons, and I want that—I want to be in a nice setting, surrounded by people who love us. Anyway, if we cancel, we won’t get the deposit money back.”

“And you think
I’m
unromantic. Did you find out if Cockroach is bringing his new girlfriend?” Cockroach, whose real name was Nick Chandler, was Jeremy’s Wesleyan roommate.

“I’ll email him today.”

“Try to be a little discouraging. Subtly discouraging.”

“ ‘I know you’re into her, but are you hundreds of dollars’ worth of our money into her?’ That kind of thing?” We were passing the boathouse, and Jeremy took my hand. He said, “Have a little faith, okay? Not everything can be quantified.”

When I’d moved
into Jeremy’s apartment, Vi had found a stranger named Sheila to take my room in the duplex on Moorlands Drive. Within two months, Jeremy and I were engaged while Vi and Sheila had had a series of explosive arguments, broken the lease, and gone their separate ways. Vi, who’d recently been promoted from hostess to assistant manager at Trattoria Marcella, found a place in Rock Hill, where she lived alone for the first time. When she enthusiastically recommended it, I said, “It’s not that I don’t believe you, but it’s kind of too late for me.”

As I let Vi in the evening of her unsettling phone call, she immediately
spotted an unlit pale green candle on the table just inside the front door, lifted it, and sniffed. “Cedar?”

“Pine.”

“Where’s it from?”

“Some store at the Galleria. Want it?” Offering Vi my possessions was a slightly weird impulse I’d developed during my relationship with Jeremy. It was hard to say if it arose from my proximity to Jeremy’s money, or from vague guilt over the fact that Vi was still, eternally, single, or perhaps from something less insidious, something as simple as affection.

“Really? Thanks.” She tossed the candle into the oversized straw bag she was carrying and walked into the living room, where she took a seat on the couch, set down her bag, kicked off her Birkenstocks, and put her bare feet on the coffee table. She was wearing a thin-strapped sundress that exposed her back, shoulders, and ample cleavage; her chest and cheeks were flushed, and her hairline was sweaty. “It’s hotter than fucking bananas out there,” she said.

I’d gone to the refrigerator to get us both Diet Cokes, and from the kitchen I asked, “Are you working tonight?”

“No, thank God.”

Back in the living room, I said, “What’s going on?”

“You know Brady Ogden?”

“The kidnapped boy?”

“I had a sense about him.”

“Oh God, Vi.”

“I think it’s a postal worker who did it. That’s what they’re called, right? Postal workers?”

“Like a mailman?”

“Maybe. Or just someone who works at a branch office. A male.”

“And Brady’s—” I almost couldn’t bring myself to say it. “Is he alive?” Brady Ogden was a nine-year-old who’d lived fifteen miles away, in Florissant. On a warm May night three months earlier, when he’d heard the music of the ice cream truck, he’d asked his parents if he could go buy a Bomb Pop and had never returned home. After police questioning, the ice
cream truck’s driver—a recent high school dropout—had been cleared of suspicion. He’d been stoned, apparently, but he hadn’t kidnapped anyone. The disappearance of Brady Ogden had repeatedly appeared on the front page of the
Post-Dispatch
, as well as being a frequent topic of discussion on all the local news programs; more briefly, it had made national news.

Vi’s expression was one I knew well, as if she were trying hard to remember something, though remembering wasn’t what she was doing. “He is alive,” she said. “I’m pretty sure. But I think the guy might be—you know—”

“Torturing him?” I could barely stand to have this conversation.

“Well, molesting. If there’s a difference between that and torture—I don’t know, I guess there is. But what I wanted to ask you is, I think I’d recognize where the guy lives if I saw it, so what if we drive around together?”

Because this was years before Vi stopped driving, the request seemed particularly odd. I said, “You think we should just get in the car and go up and down every street in Florissant?”

“I don’t think he’s still in Florissant. He’s in one of those suburbs that people barely lived in when we were growing up. Maybe Chesterfield?”

“Maybe?”

Vi seemed preoccupied, and also uneasy. After a pause, she said, “Yeah. Maybe.”

“You should go to the police.”

“You think?” She looked at me with surprise.

“Let’s say you and I are driving around Chesterfield. In a best-case scenario, we pass some house and you’re really having a sense, and then what? I’m sure as hell not getting out to knock on the door.”

“It’s not a house,” she said, and her voice was more confident. “It’s an apartment building.” Then she said, “I didn’t think you would tell me to contact the police because what if I’m wrong and I seem like a big nut job?”

“But if this kid is being—” We looked at each other, and I said, “If I was having a sense, I’d go to the police.”

On her face was an expression of great skepticism.

“I’m sure they have a system for dealing with this,” I said. “There’s a tip line just for Brady Ogden, right? And I bet a lot of the tips are wrong, and they’re not fazed by that. And who knows—if you go to them and say, ‘I’m having this hunch he’s been kidnapped by a mailman who lives in an apartment building in Chesterfield,’ maybe they have a list of suspects and one of them fits that description and they can go back and investigate that person more.”

Vi bit at a hangnail on her thumb. “With your wedding, I thought you’d tell me to forget it.”

“Because heaven forbid that a kidnapped boy take attention from me? Thank you.” I took a sip of Diet Coke and steeled myself. “Have you been getting messages from Guardian?”