Sisterland (37 page)

“Perfect,” I said.

“Lettuce, tomato, or onions?”

“Yes,” I said. “All of them.”

When the waiter was gone, I groped under the table, where I’d set the diaper bag, and found Owen’s orange star rattle. I had just given it to him when I felt a hand on my back, and I turned and discovered that Jeremy was standing next to the booth and that Courtney Wheeling was standing beside him.

“Kate?” Jeremy seemed surprised but genuinely pleased to see me. He leaned in to kiss my forehead, then kissed Owen’s as well. “When we walked in, I thought, Wow, that baby looks like Owen,” he said. “And then I was like, And that woman is wearing Kate’s vest.” Jeremy and Courtney were dressed professionally: Jeremy in a jacket and tie and Courtney in a pantsuit. “Can we join you?” He gestured to the bench opposite Owen and me, and then, just before Jeremy slid in, he exchanged a look with Courtney in which I could have sworn he was apologizing to her.
Are you fucking kidding me?
I thought. Was the apology because I was Vi’s sister or because of the tension during our pizza dinner? Or was it because now, with me present, they wouldn’t be able to talk about, say, lunar radar altimetry and instead would have to discuss potty training?

“Don’t tell me Hank’s about to walk in with Rosie and Amelia,” Courtney said. Her tone was warm, as if this possibility would delight her, but I didn’t trust her. In fact, although this wasn’t fair of me, just a week after her abortion, I found her normalness, even cheerfulness, jarring.

I said, “Not that I know of. Rosie’s actually with a sitter.”

Jeremy nodded toward Owen. “Why isn’t he?”

A lie presented itself, and I seized it. “He was fussing when I was about to leave, but I knew he’d calm down in the car.”

“You decided not to get a manicure?” Jeremy seemed disappointed.

“I needed to run errands,” I said.

Jeremy made a mock-scolding face at Owen, waving his index finger. “This is supposed to be Mama’s downtime, O. This isn’t
your
time with her.” With the handle of the rattle jammed in his mouth, Owen beamed. “Pass him over here,” Jeremy said. Though I’d been considering saying that I was finished eating—if I’d thought I could get away with changing
my order to takeout and secretly waiting for it up at the bar, I would have—I went ahead and unbuckled Owen, pulled him from the car seat, and handed him across the table.

This was when the waiter materialized, carrying my rather large glass of beer. An expression of alarm flashed across Jeremy’s face, an expression he took care to eliminate before saying in a neutral tone, “What kind is that?”

I hadn’t yet taken a sip, but I nudged the glass toward him. “An Oktoberfest special. Want to try it?”

As Jeremy took a sip, Courtney said, “God, that looks good,” and he passed it on to her, an act that somehow contained the intimacy of their sharing a glass rather than her drinking from mine. After she’d swallowed, she said to the waiter, “I’ll take one, too.”

“Then make it three,” Jeremy said. “I can’t be outdrunk by two girls, can I?”

The waiter took their food order—a chicken sandwich for Jeremy and red beans and rice for Courtney, the virtuous vegetarian—and after he had left again, Courtney said good-naturedly to Jeremy, “Did you really just call Kate and me girls? I think that was the most sexist thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

Jeremy laughed, and I felt a strong desire for him not to apologize to Courtney. Not that he necessarily was going to, but before he could, I said, “So do you guys come here a lot?”

They both laughed before looking at each other—I then felt an antipathy for Courtney so intense that it was hard not to believe it hadn’t been there all along—and Jeremy said, “That sounded like the classic pick-up line. You come here often? I guess I’ve been a couple times with Schwartz and Marcus, but we’ve never been together, have we?” He glanced at Courtney, lowering his eyebrows as if trying to recall information, and I thought,
Stop looking at each other!

My plea worked, or at least Jeremy turned back toward me. He said, “So what errands were you running?”

I’d once read an article about a study showing that the stereotype of men not liking to date or marry smart women was false; men were fine dating
and marrying smart women, just as long as the men were smarter.
She can have her master’s
, the article had said,
as long as he has his PhD
. And maybe I was flattering myself that I was, by anyone’s definition, smart—after all, I’d never earned a master’s—but the article had made me uncomfortable. Because was this what I was in Jeremy’s eyes: his sweet, tedious wife, with whom he had conversations about what had been on sale at Target? And then I wondered, was part of the reason Jeremy was insisting on going to Denver so that he could spend time there with Courtney?

I had never been gripped by such insecurity. I said, “Well, we just came from the mall, but I’ll spare you the boring details. Owen was really into the fountain.”

“I hope not literally,” Jeremy said.

“Wait, you think it was irresponsible of me to let him go swimming?”

Jeremy laughed politely, and Courtney said, “Speaking of which, I think I’ve convinced Hank that we should go to Hawaii for Thanksgiving.” Looking at me, she said, “To a resort where Julia Roberts supposedly stayed with her family. Ooh la la.”

The salient piece of information here seemed to be that the Wheelings wouldn’t be celebrating Thanksgiving at our house, though they had for the last two years. And it wasn’t that I’d have hoped they would, if I’d thought about it, but there was a kind of double snub from Courtney in not acknowledging that we’d shared the holiday in the past.

“You get your own cottage with a kitchen, so you don’t have to eat every meal out,” she was saying. “And they give surf lessons right on the hotel beach. Fun, right?”

“I guess if you go for that kind of thing,” Jeremy said. “We prefer the glamour of November in Missouri, right, Kate?” At that moment, my exciting and embarrassing burger and fries arrived.

“Go ahead and start,” Jeremy said. “I’ll give O back to you when mine comes.”

The waiter brought their meals a few minutes later, but Jeremy kept holding Owen, even when I offered to put him in the car seat; Jeremy took me up on the offer only after I’d finished. Somehow, the food made things normal, or normal-ish, among us. Yes, I no longer liked Courtney, and
yes, she and Jeremy were sitting on the same side of the booth together, even though I was married to Jeremy and Courtney wasn’t, but our conversation stopped seeming quite as fraught and off-kilter. By unspoken agreement, none of us mentioned Vi or her prediction—not that I was in the mood to defend Vi anyway, given how she’d stormed out of our house the day before.

Eventually, Owen, bless his heart, really did begin to fuss, and I was able to leave without it seeming weird. I didn’t pay first, because Jeremy would cover my portion. “Tell Hank I say hi,” Courtney called as I carried Owen’s car seat out.

At home, I took Owen right up to his room, nursed him, and put him down, then returned to the living room to pay Kendra before she left. Rosie walked with us to the front door and grabbed at Kendra’s hand. “Kendra wants to stay,” she said.

“Kendra
does
want to stay,” Kendra said. “But I have to go to class, and I think it’s time for you to take a nap. Will you let me come back next week?”

By which point an earthquake would or wouldn’t have happened, I thought. By which point was it unrealistic to hope that regular life might have returned? As a child, when Christmas or my birthday—our birthday—was approaching, I’d note the expiration dates on cottage cheese containers or cartons of orange juice and feel excitement if the date fell after the one I was anticipating. I experienced a darker version of this urgency as I closed the door behind Kendra:
Let these days pass quickly. Please, please, just let them pass
.

After I’d wrestled
Rosie into letting me apply Neosporin, then put her down for her nap, our home phone rang, and when I saw that it was Jeremy, I simultaneously felt relief and a gamey, adolescent temptation not to pick up. But then what? I’d want to talk to him in an hour, and he’d be teaching.

“I know that was weird,” he said when I answered. “But it wasn’t weird for the reason you think it was.”

“What’s the reason I think?”

“Well, Courtney and I aren’t having an affair,” he said, and honestly, tears pooled in my eyes—idiotic tears, because Jeremy was so nice and I was so ridiculous—and he added, “Kate, if I ever cheat on you, I won’t be sneaking away to Blueberry Hill for my adulterous lunches.” In a more serious tone, he said, “When we ran into you, Courtney had just told me about her abortion. As in, about a second before I saw you. She even asked me if I knew, if Hank had told you, and I lied and said no, which felt really fucked up. And then we see you and Owen and—well, you know the rest. It was awkward all around, but it had nothing to do with you.”

I did feel assuaged; in fact, I felt humiliated by my lack of trust in Jeremy. “How did she seem about the whole thing?” I asked.

“We barely ended up talking about it. She brought it up a little after you left, just saying it’s been a rough few weeks, but she didn’t say much.”

“I’m starting to think Courtney’s more like a man than a woman,” I said. “The way she keeps her feelings to herself.”

Jeremy didn’t reply immediately, and I wondered if he was checking his email, but when he spoke again, I knew he wasn’t. He said, “I don’t like it that she doesn’t know Hank told you. If he eventually does tell her, she’ll realize I was lying today. But more than that, what’s he doing confiding in you and withholding information from his own wife?”

Was Jeremy subject to the same spasms of jealousy about my friendship with Hank that I was to his friendship with Courtney? This dynamic had always seemed so obvious and expected—so retro, even—that I think we’d all imagined it was beneath us. But now that it turned out it wasn’t, was it pathetic that I found Jeremy’s jealousy, if that’s what it was, reassuring and flattering?

“Maybe he’s scared of her,” I said.

“Of Courtney?” Jeremy’s tone implied that the suggestion was silly.

“I’m kind of scared of her,” I said, and he laughed.

“No, you’re not. How’s Rosie?”

“They’re both sleeping.”

There was a pause, and I knew Jeremy was about to turn back to his work. Beyond the general sense I had of him teaching, meeting with students
and colleagues, and dipping into his own research when he could, his days were mysterious to me, though in some ways my own days were mysterious to me, too; in the late afternoon or evening, I often struggled to recall how it was I’d spent the time. I said, “In case you’re wondering, I don’t usually drink beer for lunch.”

“I was a little surprised.” His voice was mild; he wouldn’t have asked if I hadn’t brought it up.

“It was an impulse order. I think the last time I had beer before five
P.M
. was tailgating in college.”

“Kate, the hard-partying sorority sister—it kills me I never got to meet her.”

“I wasn’t that hard-partying,” I said. “You didn’t miss much.” Then I said, “See you when you get home.”

“I love you, Greenie,” Jeremy said, and I said, “I love you, too.”

The knock on
the door came around eight forty-five, when Jeremy and I were finished with our ice cream but still watching TV. We looked at each other quizzically, and I said, “If it’s a reporter, maybe we should call the police.” I’d have preferred for Jeremy not even to check who it was, but we were right there in the living room, with the lights and television on.

He got up, opened the door just a little, and said, “Can I help you?” I could tell that he didn’t know who it was but also didn’t consider the person threatening.

“Sorry to bother you,” a female voice said. “I’m here to see Daisy. I didn’t know—I know you have kids, so I thought maybe after they went to bed was a better time—”

“Does my wife know you?” Jeremy asked. This—
my wife
—was his way of handling the Daisy-Kate confusion. He never called me Daisy.

I went to the door myself and said, “Hi, Marisa.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I just—I couldn’t find your phone number, and I didn’t know when you’d be around, and who knows what will happen Friday, so I thought it would be better if I came before. How’s your little girl?”

“She’s fine.” I was incapable of sounding as distant, as coolly neutral, as Jeremy, though of course Marisa was a stranger to him. She’d never held power over him, not in middle school or at any other time. And it was so clear that Marisa wanted to enter our house, that she wanted
something
, which gave her an air of neediness. “Would you like to come in?” I heard myself say. To Jeremy, I said, “This is Marisa Mazarelli. We went to school together.” To Marisa, I said, “My husband, Jeremy.”

She sat in the armchair, and Jeremy and I returned to sitting side by side on the couch. She was wearing another professional outfit: shiny brown pants, a sheer white blouse, and a brown jacket. She took the jacket off, folding it in her lap, and I saw that her blouse was sleeveless and her upper arms were very skinny. She gestured toward our frozen TV screen and said, “I won’t keep you. It’s just, yesterday, seeing you in the park, it was like fate. Because you know that guy I was with?”

I nodded.

“That’s Ryan. And it’s on-again, off-again, on-again, off-again—it’s been seven years. We’ve been this close to getting engaged—” She held her thumb and index finger a few centimeters apart. “I mean, he has the ring. He keeps it in his sock drawer, which is basically an invitation for me to find it. Hello, I’m not an idiot! And there was this time we’d more or less decided to get engaged, we were going on vacation to Miami, but we got in a big fight there, and the whole trip was a disaster. And that was two years ago.”

Was she waiting for me to speak, or was there more? Next to me, I could feel in Jeremy a vague amusement.

“We don’t live together,” Marisa added. “Our places are around the corner from each other, but a long time ago, I was like, I’m not taking it to the next level unless there’s a ring on my finger. Why would he pay for the cow and all that, but look where it’s gotten me.”