The Sisters Club Read online

  I at least had the good grace to be embarrassed.

  “No worries,” Tony said, inching up beside me and nudging my chin up with his knuckle before deep-throating me with a kiss. “Just for being a particularly bad girl,” he said with a smile, “I’ll let you make it up to me.”

  • • •

  The phone rang.

  Tony and I were in the kitchen gulping our way through toast and coffee. I had never been a late person by nature, but sometimes Tony’s nurturing had a tendency to make me so.

  Before I picked up the phone, I looked at the caller ID, but it wasn’t any number I recognized.

  “Lise?” I knew that British accent. There were plenty of professors at the university who affected faux-British accents, as if teaching English to the point of tenure somehow conferred a new nationality on people who originally came from Nebraska or California or even Connecticut, but there was only one person in my fairly small world that spoke that way with authenticity. Immediately, she had my full attention.

  “Diana?” We’d spoken a few times on the phone since that somewhat misguided night at the bookstore two weeks before.

  What an odd night that had been. Diana had been so overly eager, almost desperate for things to work out. Cindy had been very eager too, for that matter, but she had been a different kind of eager, perhaps because of her youth. And then there’d been Sylvia, the hostile one; the one who made everyone else wonder just what the hell she was doing there.

  I’d been giving Sylvia a lot of thought since that meeting. Well, I would, wouldn’t I? Given that she was in a real sense responsible for me finally getting serious about writing a book. And what I’d been thinking was that her hard shell was just a cover-up, like a turtle. There had to have been a lot of pain in her life, not just recent pain but nearly life-long pain, to create a shell that thick. I wondered what those pains were.

  And then, whenever I thought about the “book” aspect of the club, I had to laugh. Diana’s ad in the newsletter had said she was specifically looking for women who loved books “to talk about same”…as well as other stuff. The funny part was, I’d tried to join many clubs over the years where the ostensible purpose was to discuss books, only not much book discussing ever got done. Instead, the other women in those clubs mostly talked about their relationships, or their kids if they had any, after a mere cursory discussion of the book in question, sometimes lasting no more than five minutes. It was frustrating, really, when I’d put several hours into reading some book—often lousy—I wouldn’t normally be interested in, only to not really discuss it. But I could see where those other women were coming from: they wanted to make a human connection with other women and books were as good an excuse as any to get out of the house. The only problem was, those women I’d been in groups with before I hadn’t been able to connect with them. But I did want to make a connection. Then I saw Diana’s ad, and, in a way, it seemed the perfect compromise: women getting together who loved books but without a specific agenda as to what had to be read. I could almost see Diana saying, in her overeager but pleasant way, “So what if we didn’t really talk about any books specifically? At least we all know we like books!”

  In the few times we’d spoken since, it had just been superficial stuff and as yet we’d made no plans to get together again. I liked Diana well enough; I’d just been too busy with work. As for the other two, that night at the bookstore had been awkward, and, despite my instant liking of sweet Cindy and my curiosity about tart Sylvia, a part of me had begun to think I never would hear from them again.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked Diana now.

  “I hate to impose,” she said, sounding as though she really meant it, “but I’m going in for a bit of surgery later on this morning.”

  “A bit of surgery?” How casual she made it sound. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s really wrong, per se. I’ve just decided to take Sylvia’s advice.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, I’m going to have this gastric bypass surgery you read about all the time and—”

  “Diana, have you thought this out?”

  “Of course I have. I’m not a child. Anyway, it was stupid of me to call. I’ll just have to find someone else. Bye.”

  She was obviously hanging up.

  “Diana!” I screamed loud enough so she’d hear me even if she’d nearly put the phone down.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Just tell me what you need.”

  “Well, it says here on the pre-admittance form that I need to put someone’s name down for them to contact in case of an emergency. You know, if something should go wrong.”

  My head instantly filled with images of all sorts of things that might go horribly wrong.

  “What about your husband?” I said, voicing the obvious.

  “Oh, Dan’s in Japan this week, next week too.” She gave a laugh that was more tin than tinkle. “And I don’t really know anyone else here. I mean, I suppose I could ask Cindy. But she does seem to have so many of her own problems, what with her sister and everything. Perhaps Sylvia…”

  Putting Sylvia down would be disastrous. If there was any kind of emergency, Sylvia would only make Diana feel worse by telling her it was all somehow her own fault.

  “What about your own family?” I asked.

  “Well, of course my sister, Artemis, and my parents are my next of kin, but they can’t very well pop over here to handle an emergency should one arise, can they? Not that there will be any—emergencies, that is.”

  I grasped at other options, any other option. “And there’s really no one else?”

  She laughed, a rueful sound. “Unless you include the mailman, I’m afraid the answer is no. I really don’t know anyone else here.”

  It was sad to think I was the closest person to her. “Of course you can put me down,” I said impulsively.

  “You won’t regret it,” she said, as though she’d just sold me something. “I’m sure nothing will go wrong. This is all just a formality; you know, one of the hoops they make you jump through.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. But please have the hospital call if they need me for anything at all.” I gave her my cell number so the hospital could reach me even in class, even in the bathroom, praying all the while nothing would go wrong. “And please call me yourself, just as soon as you’re able, and let me know how it goes. If you give me the name of the hospital, I’ll come by after work.”

  “What was that all about?” Tony asked a moment later, as soon as I’d hung up. He rose and knocked back one more swig of coffee before shrugging into his coat.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, feeling a bit stunned. Then I looked up at him. “But I think I just became someone’s next of kin.”

  Cindy

  I’d barely had time to set the grocery bags down on the counter when I felt arms snake around me from behind, squeezing me tight. The pressure of the hands against my belly felt funny somehow, and I looked down to see one was holding a stuffed bear. The hand moved upward till I was face-to-face with the bear, and I saw that it was white plush and holding a red satin heart with white stitching on it that said I love you.

  Then it was as though the bear was talking. I heard, in a voice that I guess was meant to sound like a bear, but a nice bear, “I’m sorry, Cindy. I’m sorry I was in a bad mood last night. You know I love you, right? You know I love you more than anything in the world and that I’d die without you, don’t you? You forgive me—”

  “Of course,” I said, turning around in Eddie’s arms, looking into those eyes I loved so much, and seeing love looking right back at me. “Of course. It was nothing.”

  Eddie kissed my neck till my knees went weak then he perched the bear on my shoulder. I looked to my side, caught the bear’s eye. “Damn, that thing’s cute.”

  • • •

  “Is dinner ready yet, babe?” Eddie opened the cabinet under the sink, tossed an empty beer bottle in the trash, and
left the cabinet open. Then he reached for the chipped chrome handle of the fridge, the constant hum it always made getting louder as he opened the door, and pulled out another beer then walked out of the room without waiting for an answer. Then came the clicking sound of the remote, followed by music and raucous laughter. It was probably MTV or VH1.

  I stood in the small kitchen adding more onions and peppers to the oil sizzling in the pan. I’d forgotten to pick up any meat on the way home from work and figured I’d make up for the lack of meat with extra vegetables. If I was lucky, by the time dinner was served, Eddie would have drunk enough beer that maybe he’d mistake the eight ounces of mushrooms I was planning to add at the last minute for the missing meat. But who could blame him if he was upset? I should have remembered the meat. And even if he noticed, the mutual oral sex we’d had in the kitchen after he gave me the bear had been hot enough he probably wouldn’t mind.

  The kitchen was a yellowed-tile and cheap-cabinet disaster, not that I had much love for cooking. It was the smallest room outside of the bathroom in our rental, which also had a living room and bedroom. The apartment was on the second floor, above the florist we paid rent to, and you could hear the sounds from the street at all hours of the day and night, even with the windows shut in winter. The windows themselves were old—Victorian, I think it’s called—and double-hung with two long rectangular panes over a single water-shimmery sheet of glass. When the train came through, you could hear them shuddering in their frames.

  “Dinner!” I announced, carrying two plates into the other room, the smell of the soy sauce and red wine I’d added to the mix tickling my nose. I moved to place everything down on the round table, which was at the far end of the living room from the TV and covered with a cream-colored crocheted cloth I’d bought at Sears.

  “Smells good,” Eddie called over. “But why so fancy?”

  “I just thought—”

  “Come on,” he said, smiling an invitation, flashing a brilliant smile as he took his feet off the low coffee table and moved newspapers and magazines out of the way. “Show’s about to start.”

  I didn’t bother asking what show he meant as I set down both plates on the coffee table before settling on the floor across from him, half my ass on the lumpy area rug, the other half on the hardwood. Whatever it was, it would no doubt have something to do with people beating each other up to become the last person standing and that last person standing would no doubt win something grand, like a ton of cash or a recording contract or something like that.

  Eddie’s eyes were on the screen and my eyes were on Eddie as he raised the first forkful to his mouth. I waited to eat myself, all the time wondering: Would he like the dinner? Would he notice anything was missing? Would it go on being a good night or would it turn into a bad night?

  I saw his Adam’s apple move as he swallowed.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I think that guy is totally fucked,” he said. “Look at him! How does someone with so little talent get on TV anyway?”

  “I meant the food,” I said.

  “Oh,” he answered, leaning across the table briefly to kiss me on the tip of the nose, flashing another smile. Then, without even looking down at his plate, he forked up some more. “It’s great, Cin. You’re an awesome cook.”

  I let out the breath I hadn’t even known I’d been holding and lifted my own fork.

  Maybe if Eddie managed to stay in an OK mood for the rest of the night, we’d have sex later. Even if he didn’t, we’d probably still have sex later. It just might not be so much fun. Taking Sylvia’s advice from the one night I’d met her, I’d thrown my birth control pill for the day down the toilet that morning. It was strange taking the advice of a woman I’d only met once, and a nasty woman at that, but she’d spoken like the Voice of God. And, really, she had a point: If there was something I wanted, more than anything else in the world, why just sit here wanting? Why not just go for it?

  As I ate, I watched Eddie watching the TV.

  Eddie had long wavy brown hair—chestnut, I think you’d call it—that my mother always referred to as Jesus hair. He had green eyes flecked with brown that had a certain animal quality to them. His body was thin, and he didn’t gain weight no matter how much food he ate—which may have been because of the coke he snorted on weekends—and he usually dressed in torn jeans and T-shirts with band names or political slogans on them. Eddie always said it was a cool look for a rock star to have. A rock star. That’s what Eddie wanted to be, even though thirty had come and gone for him recently. Eddie still thought it would happen someday. Most days, I believed that too.

  Some days, and nights, it felt like I could just go on looking at Eddie forever.

  The night I’d met the other women at the bookstore, we’d spent some time after Sylvia left talking a little bit more about ourselves. Diana talked about her husband. Lise talked about that guy she was seeing secretly from work. When it came my turn, I told them about Eddie. Right before coming out that night, Eddie and I had gotten into a big fight.

  “What do you mean you’re going out?” he’d demanded. “What do you need to go sit with some strange women in a bookstore for when I’m right here?”

  I couldn’t really blame him for being upset. Except for nights he was with his band, practicing or playing gigs, we were always together. And if the shoe was reversed? If he just wanted to go hang out with some guys I didn’t know? I’d have felt the same way he did: abandoned, like maybe the great thing we had together—this thing where each of us was the other’s whole world, or most important world, where we got lost in each other so much of the time to the exclusion of all else—just wasn’t enough for him anymore.

  But for once I didn’t listen. This was something I wanted to do, for me. With Carly sick again, I wanted to make a connection with other women who could fill that particular emptiness. So I’d ducked under his arm and out the door, promising I’d only be gone an hour or two, promising I’d give him the blowjob of his life when I returned.

  As it turned out, I was gone three hours and Eddie was very angry. As it turned out, it took more than one stinking little blowjob to make him forget my three-hour defection.

  But as I’d sat in the bookstore café with those nice women, Diana and Lise, I just couldn’t bring myself to tell them dark stuff, like how mad Eddie’d been about my leaving, so I told them good things instead.

  “When I first met Eddie eight years ago,” I’d said, warming to my subject, “I was a sophomore in high school and he was just out of technical college. He was so cool, so mature compared to the other guys I knew! He wanted to go on the road with his band right away, but his mom insisted he at least work at a real job for a bit first. She thought he should know what it is to work for a regular paycheck. But the economy was bad and any job he went for, there were always like a million other applicants too. Then he saw an ad in the paper for a used-car salesman job. If you ever meet Eddie you’ll know Eddie could sell anything to anybody! But when he went to fill out the application, there were like sixty other people already there. Eddie said it wasn’t just like a regular application, where you fill out references and stuff like that, but that there was also a long test that went with it. There were questions like, ‘Are you willing to do accounting work’?”

  “Ah,” Diana had interrupted. “They were doing a psychological profile on your Eddie.”

  “That kind of question is meant to filter out people who aren’t really interested in the particular job,” Lise had added. “If you say ‘yes,’ they think: If you want to do accounting work, then why are you applying for a job selling cars?”

  “Exactly,” I’d said. “And of course, as Eddie told me later, he was too smart to fall for that trick. He put down ‘no,’ he did not want to do accounting work. But then came another odd question, ‘Do you like blind people?’”

  “Ha!” Diana’d laughed. “A blind question about blind people. That’s very clever.”

  �
��Huh?” I’d said. “A blind question?” I mean, it was obvious to me that it was a blind question, because it was about blind people obviously, but I didn’t get what she was getting at.

  “A blind question,” Lise had kindly explained, “is one that profilers put in as a control. They expect one hundred percent of people to answer the question the same way. In this instance, they’d expect everyone to answer, ‘Yes, I like blind people.’”

  I still hadn’t been sure what she was talking about, but I certainly understood the last sentence.

  “But that’s exactly it!” I’d said. “That’s where Eddie’s so brilliant! Eddie wrote, ‘No, I don’t like blind people.’”

  “Huh?” Now it was Lise’s turn to be surprised. “Who doesn’t like blind people?”

  “That’s exactly what the interviewer wanted to know,” I’d said, getting excited in the telling, “when he called Eddie in for a follow-up interview. ‘Mr. Haven,’ Eddie told me the interviewer said, ‘your application looks quite good. We really like the fact that rebuilding cars is something you do as a hobby, it shows you have a real attachment to the product. But one thing has been puzzling us. Out of sixty applicants, you were the only one who put down, ‘No, I don’t like blind people.’ Could you tell us why that is, Mr. Haven?’ Now it was Eddie’s turn to look at the interviewer like he was the one causing the puzzle. Eddie told me he spread his arms wide, looked the interviewer straight in the eyes, and said, ‘Because they can’t drive cars!’ Eddie was hired on the spot. Course, he didn’t stay at that job very long, but I still love that story.”

  The other two women had loved the story too. Maybe they were seeing right along with me the possibilities that were Eddie. And I’d only been telling the truth: I still loved that story.

  Crash! The TV never knew what hit it as the remote slammed into its center, courtesy of Eddie’s hand. “Goddamn fucking idiots,” Eddie said now. “I don’t even know why I watch that stupid program.”