Two Sisters: A Novel (23 page)

On Saturdays, from time to time, Muriel took the M train to her parents’ home for a visit.

“What’s new in showbiz?” Owen would ask, sitting in his favorite easy chair at one end of a highly polished coffee table. His wife, straight-backed, sat in the matching chair across the room.

“Muriel is
hardly
in show business.”

Ignoring her, Owen would say, “Aren’t you still in casting?”

“Since when is reading lines on a page
casting
? Let’s not live in a fantasy world, Muriel. You’re more of a secretary, am I right?”

“Do secretaries even exist anymore?
I
don’t even have a secretary. Besides, I believe the correct term is ‘executive assistant.’ ”

“Since when is an engineer an
executive
?”

“Our daughter lives in the greatest city in the world, Lidia. How many young people can say that?”

“Sure, she’s young now, but with no man on the horizon her fertility is aging by the minute.”

From her familiar perch on the outskirts of the household—as if Muriel had always lived in the suburbs of her family—she watched her parents spar like Foreman and Ali, eventually asking, “Any leftover
golabki
?”

For her sister, Muriel lived with a stomach tied in all manner of knots.

Chapter 24

M
ORE THAN ANYTHING
, keeping Pia’s secret weighed heavily on Muriel’s eyelids. On the way to work, she fell asleep against the bus window. Twice, she’d dropped off in the middle of
Jeopardy!
with an open carton of Ollie’s takeout toppled over on the frayed towel on her bed. Sitting through a Broadway show was nearly impossible. She’d missed a whole chunk of the second act of
The Book of Mormon
, waking up perplexed when Cunningham was in charge.

Late August didn’t help matters any. During New York’s muggiest month, Muriel slogged through the suffocating air, her damp forehead spiked with Julius Caesar bangs. The moment she arrived at the office, she turned on the air conditioner full blast and leaned in close, pulling open the neckline of her mass-market T-shirt so the cool air could dry the sweat that had soaked through to the underwire in her bra.

“Good morning, sunshine.”

Joanie shuffled in midmorning. Unlike most large people, she didn’t sweat. She grunted and puffed and groaned when she lifted her heft off a chair. Yet in the years Muriel had known and worked for her, she’d never seen as much as a glisten on her boss’s forehead or upper lip. “I do all my sweating on the inside,” Joanie explained, whatever that meant.

That particular summer day was a quiet one. A Friday sort of feeling was in the air though it was midweek. At last, Vaclav had been cast and that project was wrapped up. Joanie was now searching for an actress to star in a new independent feature. The film’s financing was secured (such as it was), the script was polished, locations were scouted, and a male lead was cast. The female lead, as usual, was more challenging. Producers were hunting for a beautiful, slender, young (of course, of course, of course) actress, able to convincingly portray a temporarily homeless single mother hiding an addiction to meth. One whose face and physique were attractive enough to desire, yet not surgically altered in any obvious way.

“No Botox addicts,” the cocky postpubescent producer told Joanie, “though a boob job would be okay. Unless it’s a double D or something.”

“Got it.”

“Nothing pornish.”

“Good to know.”

“Think Halle Berry in
Monster’s Ball
.”

“Terrific.” After Joanie hung up the phone, she said out loud, “Kill me now. Doesn’t he know Halle has the only natural breasts left in Hollywood?”

With her cheeks still pink from the commute into work, Muriel was slumped in her desk chair thumbing through a stack of color head shots and pulling out promising résumés.

“Another SEP,” Joanie announced, dispirited, from across the room. With a sympathetic shake of her head, Muriel swiveled her chair slightly away so Joanie couldn’t see how sleepy she was already becoming. A Halle Berry, they both knew, was hard to find at any price. A temp-size salary with an inexperienced leading actor and an unknown director? Well, no question it was an SEP: a “Sow’s Ear Project.” A one-in-a-million shot at turning nothing into something special. Casting was everything.

Joanie was on the phone all morning. Always, there was a slim chance that a known actress would want to redirect her career with an indie. Particularly a beauty who could excite critics by forgoing flattering lights and makeup. A “Charlize” Joanie dubbed it after Charlize Theron’s bloated turn as a serial killer in
Monster
. Apparently, any movie with a stunning woman gone ugly—and the word “monster” in the title—will kindle the all-important buzz needed to propel a star into Oscar contention. With a “name” everything else was negotiable.

“Crap,” Joanie said after hanging up the phone. She reached for a Hershey’s Kiss from the bowl on her desk and unfurled the silver wrapping. The word she hated most in the English language was “unavailable.”

Muriel’s job that August morning was to ferret out an unknown talent, help her boss find a needle in Hollywood’s haystack of young women who were told by their high school drama teachers, “You know, you’re pretty enough to be an actress.” Someone with the charisma and talent to carry a small film to Sundance. Her eyelids began to droop right away. The bland faces in the head-shot stack blurred into a single beauty ad that had been retouched to boring porelessness. Muriel tried to focus on the same dimpled tip at the end of each surgically restructured nose, same envelope of a forehead, same chevron eyebrows locked in mock surprise over the same soupy Bambi eyes. But it all felt so meaningless. What did a nose have to do with anything? Really,
what?

“Well?”

From her desk across the room, Joanie unsheathed another Hershey’s Kiss. A silver foothill of discarded wrappers rose up from the ashtray, their tiny flag tags sticking out in every direction.

“Nobody promising yet,” Muriel said.

“That’s not what I asked you.”

Muriel lifted her lashes. “What did you ask me?”

Popping the chocolate into her mouth Joanie rolled it around before saying, “I asked if you’d turned to stone. I’ve been talking to Mount Murielmore for the past fifteen minutes.”

“Sorry. I’m a little off today.”

“Today?”

“Lately.”

“A little? Do you also think Osama bin Laden is a little bit dead?”

Muriel hiccupped a laugh, then refocused on the head-shot pile on her desk. Juicy, smacking sounds were audible from across the room as the chocolate settled into Joanie’s molars. Once the Kiss was gone, she followed it with a nicotine chaser, lighting her cigarette the way a man would, cupped in both hands to protect the flame from an imaginary wind. From its perch in the corner of her mouth, the cigarette tip glowed orange as Joanie drew in a lungful. “Out with it,” she said in a billow of smoke.

Muriel looked up. Then she looked away.

“I can’t read a script without glasses,” Joanie said, “but I’m not blind. Something has been eating at you for weeks. I’ve been giving you space, but time’s up.”

Sucking on the inner flesh of her bottom lip, Muriel glanced down at the freckles on her hands. What was the difference between a hand freckle and a liver spot anyway? Would anyone make an effort to distinguish between the two? At twenty-three, would onlookers assume she had early liver spots or late freckles? Combined with the moles on her arms, she might as well cover herself in tenting.

“Time’s
up
, Sullivant.”

Muriel pinched the corners of the head-shot stack into perfect alignment. She refused to look her best friend in the eye. Each time she did she was startled by Joanie’s measuring stare. The way she cocked her head and sat as still as a cheetah lying in wait. It was impossible to hide from that woman. So far, Muriel had only been able to evade. She
wanted
to tell her what was going on. Honestly, she did. Every cell in her body longed to open its membranes and release the secrets that had been putrefying like a body part buried in the backyard. With her best friend, she ached to dissect each moment in the dressing room with Pia, the way that single teardrop spread like a pond ripple on the gray satin fabric. (It dried without a stain; she checked.) Muriel’s muscles twitched with the desire to
confess
. She’d spent an entire day with her dying sister and only seen herself. And since that afternoon at the Plaza, she’d spoken to Pia only twice. Twice! Conversations that had been little more than lurching starts and stops. A teenager learning to drive a stick shift.

“How are you doing?”

“Fine.”

“Fine? I mean, is ther—”

“Well, tired, of course.”

“Of course. I meant, what ca—”

“What’s up with you?”

“Me?”

“Anything good on Broadway?”

“Uh. Let’s see, um.”

“How’s work?”

“Work? Good, I guess.”

“Good. Good.”

“Pia, I jus—”

“I know.”

“It’s just that I wanted to tell yo—”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“I feel so, I don’t know,
awful
. Is there anythi—”

“I’m fine. Really. Fine.”

When she wasn’t belching up half sentences or overlaughing at something innocuous Pia said or listening to the vast static of silence as her brain shorted out and she could think of not one single thing to say to a sister she’d known all her life, Muriel felt like a donkey braying into the wind. How could she tell Joanie how often she’d stared at the phone in her apartment and been unable to reach over with her mule hooves and dial? What kind of uncaring person did (didn’t do) that?

“Still waiting,” Joanie said, her steady gaze piercing straight through the smoke. Muriel made a face.

In the unbraiding of her emotions, strands of truth shamed her. Muriel was also
pissed.
Why had Pia not said something sooner? What kind of sister says nothing until it’s time to buy the dress she’ll wear for eternity? She’d seen her a couple of times before their lunch at the Plaza—once at the family house in Queens for Sunday supper, another time at a ballet performance of Emma’s. Both times Pia looked tired. But she said nothing! Had Pia been
testing
Muriel, waiting for her to grab her sister’s bony arms and insist, “I
know
something is wrong. I see it, I feel it in my gut. I’m not leaving until you tell me what’s going on.” Was Pia punishing her for failing at sisterhood yet again, the one time it mattered most?

Worse, Muriel suspected that she’d been so insignificant in her sister’s life, so very nonexistent, the mere thought of telling her about her diagnosis never entered her head. Not until she needed someone to be the guardian of her final look and keep their mother at bay.

“Waiting, still.” Joanie’s stare bore a hole in Muriel’s temple.

“I have to pee.”

Standing, Muriel circled around her desk and loped into the restroom, aware that Joanie’s wildcat eyes were watching her every footfall. A paper flag from a Kiss wrapper in Joanie’s ashtray flared from an ember in her flicked cigarette. Taking another deep drag, Joanie seemed only to crouch lower in the brush.

In the quiet of the closet-size bathroom, Muriel held her wrists under the cold water stream. She rolled her neck in a circle, hoping to lure blood up to her brain. Letting her eyelids fall shut, she inhaled the bleachy smell of the automatic toilet cleaner, the lavender aroma of the hand soap. Her mind drifted back to one sunny afternoon with her sister, years before, when Lidia had deliberately left them home alone. When Pia’s cruelty was sport.

Forgive me.

It wasn’t your fault. Siblings are mean sometimes.

I
T WAS A
Saturday. Muriel’s favorite day before her mother’s infidelity abruptly scalpeled matinees out of her life. After she saw Lidia’s Broadway kiss with Father Camilo, they never went into Manhattan together again. They never spoke of it, never checked the weekend newspaper for the latest show to come to town. Matinee Saturdays simply
stopped
. Curtain down.

Before long, it felt as though the theater had been a fantasy. The sequins, the feathers, the swelling violins, the high-kicking legs. All of it had been a dream and Muriel was now awake. Guilt was now her weekend companion. Why had she told her mother she saw them? Oh
why
didn’t she make sure Lidia believed her when she agreed never ever to tell?

Saturdays, for Muriel, were now ordinary days when she hung around the house without much to do. Her one friend from school spent weekends with her father upstate. Logan was preparing to leave for art school in the fall. He didn’t mind when his little sister followed him into the basement or out in the yard to watch him work on a bent metal sculpture or a collage made of colored glass. But with his hair spilling over his face, Logan’s focus was so intense it was like staring at a sculpture itself.

“At art college,” Muriel asked him, “do they ever make you take actual tests? Like with a pen?”