The Sisters Club Read online

  “Is there really a show like that?” I asked.

  “Shh,” Sheila whispered. “I never should have said anything. Magda’s very sensitive about it. It’s on another network and that damn show is a huge hit.”

  • • •

  I was so stunned after they left, saying they’d be in touch, it was like I’d been hit by the train. I was so stunned, I forgot to lock the door behind them or put up the CLOSED sign. Instead, wanting to do something normal, I’d called Cindy up to see how she was. I didn’t want to make a nuisance of myself, but I’d been calling her every day since she told us her news about being pregnant. She’d been there for me during my breast cancer scare, and I wanted to be there for her now.

  “I still don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what I want to do yet.”

  It’s what she said every day, but each day I could hear the anxiety in her voice ratcheting up a little higher.

  “Well, it’s still early days, right?” I said. “What can you be? A month, a month and a half along? You still have time.”

  “I don’t know,” she said again. Then in a whisper, “Oh, shit. Eddie’s home early. I gotta go.”

  I was sitting at one of the tables, trying to make sense of things, when I heard the tap at the glass. Looking up, I saw a slightly familiar face with coffee skin and black hair: it was Dr. Gupta. How nice, I thought, he’s such a well-mannered person, he’s knocking first even though I don’t have the CLOSED sign up. Then it hit me. Shit! Dr. Gupta! What would he be doing here?

  I hurried to the door, opened it.

  “What is it?” I said. “What’s wrong? Did some test I didn’t even know about come back with bad results?”

  “What?” He was puzzled. Then he looked mortified as recognition hit. “Oh no,” he said. “I am so sorry. I suppose I should have phoned first. I was just in the neighborhood, and I thought I would stop by and see how you are doing.”

  That was odd. My surgeon made house calls?

  No, of course not. Surgeons didn’t do that. But what else could he possibly want? And then it struck me: this was a social call. When was the last time a man came to visit me who wasn’t the mailman or some delivery guy? I couldn’t remember. It had to have been back when Minnie and I were in college, lost back there somewhere in that long, dim hallway of dark memory. And how did I feel about this particular man being the first after such a long dry spell? The idea was scary and wonderful, all at once. But there was no time to think about that, because he was talking again.

  “But then,” he said, “when I saw you through the window, your face looked so sad and confused, I thought I should knock first so as not to intrude by just walking right in.”

  He was such a kind man, this man who’d cut into my breast and now had made a special visit to see how I was doing. And my shop was full of food. The least I could do was be gracious, for once in my life, and offer him something.

  “Would you like some dinner, Dr. Gupta?” I offered, holding the door for him.

  “Oh no,” he said. “You need not go to the trouble. But make it Sunil, please. My name, that is. Perhaps you would like to talk for a bit, Ms. Goldsmith?”

  It was weird. With the exception of Cindy and Lise and Diana—and of course Minnie when she was alive—it had been years, decades even, since anyone had asked me to talk to them.

  “Make it Sylvia,” I said.

  And then, at his urging, I started talking. I told him about the crazy TV people. I told him about Cindy’s problem without betraying her by naming her. It was so weird hearing myself tell it, mostly weird because, for the first time since Minnie died, I saw myself as a woman with a full, if peculiar, life. And not only that, I saw myself as a woman with real friends.

  Cindy

  Carly was lying in a ratty old lawn chair in the tiny front yard when I got there. She had on cutoff jean shorts and a pink baby tee, her eyes were closed as though she were asleep, and her face was tilted to catch the sun. Since it was Saturday afternoon, I’d figured it would be safe to come since both our parents would still be at work. I hated running into my parents there. All my father ever did was hassle me about my life, which was only slightly better than his other pastime: fighting with my mother.

  I really wanted to talk to Carly, but she looked so peaceful lying there it seemed a shame to disturb her. I was debating whether to just kiss her on the forehead and go when she lazily opened one eye, squinting up at me.

  “Don’t go, Cin,” she said. “I was just resting.” Then she shivered, even though the day was still warm for April, wrapping her arms around her bare midriff as she straddled the chair and rose. “C’mon, it’s freezing out here. Let’s go inside.”

  Inside at my parents’ house always depressed me. Nothing ever changed. There was the same furniture in the living room they’d bought when they’d moved in over twenty years ago: the same brown sectional sofa, the fake-wood coffee table with water stains on it, and even the fake plant in the corner with the heavy dust on the long leaves was the same. And the walls were barren. The few times Mom had tried to buy new furniture with money she’d saved from her own job, after paying the bills of course, Dad’d made her take the things back. “Why waste money,” he’d say, cracking the tab on his Budweiser, “when what we have still works so fine?” And when she’d tried to hang a framed poster she bought at the print shop at the mall? “Art’s for fancy people, Bev. It’s not for people like us.”

  Carly led the way through to the kitchen. She opened the fridge, took the bottle of milk out, and drank straight from it before offering it to me.

  I shook my head. The milk would probably be good for the baby inside me, if the expiration date wasn’t past due, but I couldn’t face swallowing anything right that minute. Then Carly followed the milk up by snagging a can of Diet Pepsi, and the idea of her drinking the one after the other caused my stomach to go into one of its increasingly regular threatening rumbles.

  She sat down at the Formica kitchen table, and I settled across from her.

  “You look great,” I said. “You haven’t looked this good since…”

  “You were going to say ‘before,’ right?” she said with a hard-edged smile that softened quickly. “It’s OK, Cin, you can say stuff like that to me. I’m doing better now.”

  “I can see that,” I said, glad. “How’s it going…here?” I said, indicating the house around us as if it were more person than place.

  She pulled a face. “Put it like this,” she said, “I can’t wait to get out. The ’rents are driving me nuts.”

  “You must be better,” I laughed.

  “Nah,” she said, as she made another face. “I couldn’t wait to get out even when I still felt lousy all the time.”

  “Where would you go?” I asked. Not that I blamed her. Only back in that house for ten minutes, and I couldn’t wait to get out again. Growing up, I’d never been able to understand how my mother stayed. I used to lay in bed at night, listening to them fight, my mother threatening to leave, my dad threatening to kill her if she did, my mom saying she didn’t care but then finally crying, saying she couldn’t leave us, meaning me and Carly, and saying she’d forgive him. I used to want to run down the stairs and scream at her, “Run! If you want to go, I’ll pack for you!” But I couldn’t do that. My dad would’ve killed me.

  “I don’t know,” Carly said now, studying the ingredients list on her soda can. “I guess I’d need to find a job first. Even still, I’d need someone to share a place with.”

  I thought about Carly’s friends, at least the ones I knew. They were the people who often got Carly into messes in the first place. If she stayed with one of them, she’d be back to drinking and drugs in no time; her moods would spiral down again, and she’d be back in what she laughingly referred to as “The Dark Place.”

  “You could stay with me,” I offered. “It’s not much, I know, but I’ve slept on the couch before. It’s really comfortable. Or you could get a sleeping bag for the floor.�
��

  “No, thanks, Cin. Thanks, really, but no. If I stayed with you, I’d have to stay with Eddie too, like last time. I don’t think I could take that.”

  I tried not to let my hurt show. Carly had been through a lot the last three months. Hell, she’d been through a lot her whole life. She couldn’t help it if sometimes maybe she didn’t have any tact. Tact being a word I’d learned about in one of the new classes I was taking on the computer to get my GED so I could take some college-level classes.

  “How’s old Eddie doing these days anyway?” Carly asked.

  “Actually,” I said, smiling and really meaning it, “he’s doing great. We got this new computer—”

  “You got a computer?”

  “Well, actually, this woman I know gave it to me, a laptop. She said she didn’t need it anymore and since I wanted to take some classes—”

  “Omigod, you’re taking classes?”

  “You think it’s dumb?”

  She thought for a second. “No, I think it’s great. I think it’s really cool. What are you studying?”

  “Right now I’m just catching up on all the classes I never finished in high school—math, science, you know the stuff. But after I get through with all that, OK, this you’re going to think is really dumb,” I said, suddenly feeling shy about it. “I want to be a social worker. I want to help women in trouble; you know, people like Mom.”

  “I don’t think that’s dumb at all, Cin.”

  “No?”

  “No, I think it’s the coolest thing I ever heard. But wait a second. What does Eddie think of all this? Does he approve of your going back to school?”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” I said, unable to conceal my smile. “Eddie thinks I got the computer so he can download like a gazillion songs. He thinks it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever done too!”

  “Omigod!” Carly was laughing so hard, she could barely gasp the word out as she reached to high-five me. “Wait a second, though,” she said. “What happens when he finds out?”

  I shrugged. “He won’t. Honestly, so long as he can download free music, he’s happy. He’s even trying to figure out how to set up one of those fan pages for the band.”

  “Too cool!” Cindy high-fived me again.

  I was so happy in that moment, to be living that moment of sheer joy with her, but in the next the nausea hit me, harder than it had all day, and I had to wrench my hand from hers so I could make a mad dash for the bathroom.

  The need to throw up was so immediate, I didn’t even have time to close and lock the bathroom door behind me. I just hurled myself to the floor in front of the toilet, my new temple.

  There were hurried footsteps down the hall, and then I felt Carly’s soft hands, pulling my hair back out of the way for me. When I was done, when there was nothing left inside me, I turned over, resting my back against the cool wall of the tub, eyes closed.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Carly asked, still stroking my hair.

  I didn’t have the strength to lie to her. “I’m pregnant,” I said. “Are you going to tell me that’s the coolest thing you’ve ever heard too?”

  She ignored my attempt at humor, or maybe it was irony; the class I was taking on the computer talked a lot about irony. “Does Eddie know?” she asked.

  I shook my head. Then I opened my eyes. “I went to the doctor, got a prescription for those prenatal vitamins, just in case I keep it, but I haven’t really decided yet.”

  “You’re thinking of having an abortion?” she asked. Then she smiled ruefully. “I’ve had two.”

  And I’d had one.

  When I was fifteen, I’d gotten pregnant. I’d actually wanted to have the baby, even though I realized I didn’t love the guy, and he definitely didn’t want me to have it. But things were so fucked up at home I figured that, even if my dad didn’t kill me outright, it would only make everything worse for everybody.

  “What do you want to do, Cin?” Carly asked.

  I thought about how if I’d really wanted to get rid of it, I could have done so already. The doctor at the free clinic I’d gone to had been friendly enough. It hadn’t seemed to matter to her one way or the other whether I accepted the prenatal vitamins or had an abortion, just so long as whatever I decided, it was what I really wanted to do.

  “Would you think I’m crazy if I said I want to keep the baby, but that I’m not sure I’m ready yet to tell Eddie about it?”

  The Party

  Recommended Reading:

  Lise: On Writing, Stephen King

  Diana: Shopaholic and Sister, Sophie Kinsella

  Sylvia: The Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris

  Cindy: Cold Sassy Tree, Olive Ann Burns

  • • •

  Lise was cutting vegetables for the salad, trying not to splatter juice from the tomatoes onto her white Capri pants and matching top, while Tony was transferring beer and wine from the fridge into a giant cooler to take outside, when the first knock came.

  “Your hair!” Lise squealed when she saw Diana. “Why didn’t you say anything?” Then she turned to the man standing next to Diana. He had on khakis and a pink Oxford shirt and looked as though he was somehow missing his tie. Lise held out her hand. “Dan! Hi! Don’t you just love her hair like this?”

  “It was a shock at first,” Dan said, his smile tight.

  In fact, it had been more than a shock. When Diana had arrived home from London, Dan had been just shy of livid.

  “How could you cut your hair without telling me first?” he’d said.

  “I thought you were my husband,” Diana had sniffed, “not my fashion consultant. If you don’t like it, just say so.”

  “It’s not that,” Dan had said, on unfamiliar ground with his own wife. “But imagine this: Imagine if I came home one day from Japan with a mustache and beard, or maybe with my head shaved. Wouldn’t you be just a little upset that I hadn’t told you what I was going to do first, that I hadn’t given you any warning?”

  “I suppose,” Diana had conceded.

  “It’s not really the hair that’s the problem,” Dan had said with a sigh. “In fact, it’s beautiful. I can really see your face now in a way I never could before. It’s that you keep changing things around—you schedule a major operation on your body, you hack off all your hair—without even thinking to discuss it with me first.”

  “I’m sorry,” Diana had said, “but what would you have had me do? Call you up from the salon in London on my mobile and ask you to set up the webcam so I could have you look at pictures in hair magazines with me to see which style you think might look best?”

  “Now that I’ve had time to get used to it,” Dan told Lise now, “I think it looks beautiful.” He held out a bottle to Lise. “Here. For your celebration.”

  “But I told everyone not to bring anything!” Lise protested.

  “You’ve earned it,” Dan said. “It’s not every day a person can say she’s finished a first draft on a first novel.”

  “Second novel, actually,” Lise smiled ruefully. “The first became kindling.”

  “This is great,” Tony said, reaching in with one hand to accept the champagne before Lise could turn it down again, and offering his other for a shake. “Tony, by the way. It’s a bit small inside here, and with just the one bathroom and eight of us there might be a bit of a line for the facilities today, but the yard should certainly hold us all.”

  Tony was right. Despite the smallness of Lise’s cottage, it sat on a full acre of land, and Tony and Lise had spent some time that Sunday morning arranging lawn chairs that were far enough away from the barbecue that people wouldn’t get smoke in their eyes, setting up croquet in case anyone wanted to play, placing citronella candles in strategic areas to keep the mosquitoes away as night fell.

  “Sounds like more of your guests are here,” Dan said at the crunch of gravel on the drive.

  Lise peered out the window over the sink. “Who’s that gorgeous man with Sylvia?” she asked Diana.


  “I dunno,” Diana said, coming to stand beside her. “And why is he wearing a suit on Sunday?”

  “I told her she could bring a guest,” Lise said. “I told everyone that.”

  “You probably never expected Sylvia of all people to show up with a date, though, did you?” Diana said.

  “But look at how pretty Sylvia looks,” Lise said. “I’ve never seen her in a dress before.”

  “I didn’t think she even owned a dress,” Diana said.

  The dress in question had a gauzy, mid-calf, wide jade skirt and an embroidered white peasant blouse that had been in fashion twenty years ago and suddenly was again. Sylvia had on a wide-brimmed straw hat over her short red hair, and she tottered up the drive in unaccustomed heeled sandals, a covered dish in her hand.

  “Oh, Sylvia!” Lise said, holding the door open for her. “I especially didn’t want you to make anything! It’s like you’re taking the cook’s version of a busman’s holiday.”

  “I have no idea what that means,” Sylvia said. “But I was trying out some new recipes anyway—you know, for the show pilot—so I just figured I’d bring some samples along. Oh,” she added, as though suddenly remembering she had someone with her, “and this is Sunil. Dr. Sunil Gupta.”

  “Please call me Sunny,” he said, his smile wide. “Sylvia does.”

  “Sunny?” Lise and Diana mouthed their shock across to one another.

  “Yoo-hoo!” Cindy’s voice called through the door. “Sorry we’re late, but I got us lost with the directions.”

  Like Lise, Cindy wore Capris, only hers were denim, and she had on a red tee, her long hair pulled back into a high ponytail that made her look even younger than usual. She held one open palm out to indicate the man at her side in a presenting gesture. He had on khakis so perfectly creased they looked as though someone had just snipped off the tags on the ride over, the white Oxford shirt looked just as crisp and new, and his Jesus hair was tied back in a neat ponytail.