Names My Sisters Call Me Read online

  “The thing about Courtney is that she doesn’t wear any particular jewelry all the time,” Lucas said. “She has lots of rings she wears sometimes, but she likes her hands the way they are.”

  I had never paid much attention to my jewelry preferences, I realized then. But I made my living with my hands. I depended on them and enjoyed them. I wouldn’t have known how to go out and choose something that would sit on them ever after. I was kind of amazed that Lucas had given the entire process so much thought.

  Norah reached across my mother and picked up my left hand. She held it to the light, turning the whole hand this way and that as if examining it for flaws. It didn’t seem to occur to her that it was still connected to my body.

  “You’ll really have to concentrate on your manicure,” she told me in a low voice, as if she didn’t wish to embarrass me in front of everyone else. “Your hands are going to be the focus of a lot of attention, and the last thing you need are scraggly, dirty nails.”

  I tugged my hand out of her grasp. My hands might not be confused for a hand model’s, but I thought scraggly and dirty were taking it a step too far.

  “Nobody cares about my nails, Norah,” I told her, feeling defensive.

  “You wouldn’t believe the things people care about,” she retorted. Because she, as ever, knew best. “I’m going to get the camera.”

  Norah was about control and had always been this way. When she was a kid, her control issues generally involved the sanctity of her bedroom and her refusal to lend out her toys and dolls. These days she thought a bit bigger.

  She insisted that she was not in any way OCD, a laughable assertion, but one she felt comfortable making because, she would tell me, there was a right way and a wrong way to do things. She chose to do things the right way. End of discussion.

  The right way meant that we had Family Dinner every weekend at her house, and she always used linen napkins. The right way meant that she and Phil refused to allow a television to pollute their home, preferring to read the newspapers from a selection of Eastern Seaboard cities, peruse the most esoteric literary fiction, and engage in stimulating intellectual debates concerning international politics and ethical dilemmas over fine wine. When Lucas and I expressed our preference for the Sci Fi Channel, anything on Adult Swim, and classic DVD marathons, they both pretended not to hear us. When it was pointed out to them that Eliot, their two-year-old son, might one day face ridicule in school for being completely out of the pop culture loop, Norah actually sneered.

  She’d practically raised me, she would say. And last she’d checked, I was doing fine.

  Someone had to step in and take charge after Daddy died, she would say with a sniff, and I was the only one who could.

  Because she was the only one capable, was the subtext. Mom had been lost in a haze of grief. Our middle sister, Raine, had been acting out since she was a toddler. By the time I was ten, Raine had distinguished her sixteen-year-old self in our prudish Pennsylvania Main Line town by being wilder than all the other bad seeds put together, Mom had parlayed her grief into a continuing life choice rather than a debilitating incident, and Norah already had her first PhD. In bossiness. At eighteen.

  “So,” Norah said then, studying me across the roast chicken she was serving up onto her best china plates. “You’re finally engaged!”

  That finally was because Norah felt grown-ups shouldn’t (a) date for longer than six months without Knowing Where the Relationship Was Headed, (b) live together under any circumstances before marriage because They Still Don’t Buy the Milk No Matter How Feminist It Might Be to Give It Away for Free, and You Know How Liberal I Am, Courtney, and (c) continue to date after a year without being engaged, because You Either Know or You Don’t. She and Phil got engaged on their first anniversary, married on their second anniversary, and that, as she’d told me many times, was the secret to their happiness. No “waffling,” as she put it. The fact that Lucas and I had been together for three years without so much as a shared bank account confused and annoyed her.

  I thought that the fact Lucas chose to attend these weekly dinners with me was proof of love far above and beyond the gorgeous ring he’d just put on my finger. The ring was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen, but Family Dinners were tests of strength and will. Norah maintained a constantly updated spreadsheet of checks and balances, slights and alliances, and was always waiting to pounce. I assumed this spreadsheet existed only in her mind, but sometimes I suspected the existence of a hard copy, too.

  “I’m so happy for you,” Mom was saying. “I remember what it was like to be young and in love.” She beamed at me. “And what fun we’ll have, with a wedding to plan!”

  “Remember, Courtney,” Norah chimed in, frowning at Mom. “Your wedding is about you. Not about some fantasy wedding Mom wished she had with Dad.”

  Twenty-eight years had passed since my father’s death, and yet I winced a little bit at Norah’s tone. Lucas reached over to grab hold of me, his hand warm and reassuring on my leg.

  My mother didn’t respond, a well honed battle tactic, though I could swear I saw her lips tighten.

  “You’ll have a summer wedding, of course,” Norah said, wresting back control of the conversation as she served me a plate of drumsticks and stewed carrots, both of which I hated. But I didn’t say anything. About the food, anyway.

  “We haven’t made any plans, Norah,” I told her. “We got engaged fifteen minutes ago.” Lucas squeezed my leg a little bit, and I felt a rush of giddiness. Engaged. We were engaged. To be married.

  “It’s never too early to start making plans,” Norah said, frowning slightly.

  When she got engaged, if I remembered correctly, she’d allowed seven point three minutes for weeping and excitement, and had then proceeded to book her venue, photographer, and caterer before the end of the day. Because Nora was nothing if not prepared.

  “Eliot can be your flower boy,” Norah continued, handing out plates to Mom and Phil. “Or your ring-bearer. It’s up to you, of course.”

  I felt the strangest urge to apologize for the possibility that I might want control over my own wedding. But then, hers had turned out to be a disaster, despite the kind of planning that would have done Napoleon proud.

  “Everyone will tell you that the process is scary, or stressful,” Mom told me. “But I think you can decide how it will be. There’s such a thing as too much planning, you know.” It was a gentle dig, but Norah stiffened.

  “Not everyone is satisfied with stopping by the courthouse on their way home from work,” Norah sniped right back at our mother.

  “Everyone is not you, Norah,” Mom said in the even tone she used when she wanted to prevent an escalation.

  “Mom, please,” Norah said crossly. “Courtney doesn’t want to elope!”

  “I don’t know what I want to do,” I offered up into the tension. “I guess Lucas and I are going to have to think about it.”

  “But I’m betting you’re not going to elope,” Norah retorted—more to her plate than anything, and, obviously, to make sure she got the last word. We all knew better than to engage.

  “While you’re thinking about it, the first thing to plan is the engagement party,” Mom said, using a getting-down-to-business tone. “Lucas, you’ll have to invite your parents to come down.” She made it sound as if the party was already planned, and happening the following week.

  “I can’t have any parties until the season’s over,” I told her, after sharing a dazed look with Lucas. The season in question was not winter, which was likely endless, but the more finite Philadelphia Second Symphony Orchestra concert season, which finished in late May.

  “Then we’ll do it this summer,” Mom replied. “How about July?”

  I couldn’t answer her for a moment. An hour ago I’d been skating on Germantown Avenue with my boyfriend. Now I was discussing my engagement party and feelings on elopement. I wasn’t sure I could keep up with the life shift.

  “Wow,” I said,
feeling panicky. “I mean, this is really nice of you, but I’m not sure we . . . ”

  “I would be thrilled to throw it for you,” Mom said, inclining her head at me as if that settled the matter.

  “Um, great,” I said. “Thanks.” But something occurred to me. “Is the engagement party where we all sit around and play those weird games with the ribbons? Because I don’t think I can handle that. With a straight face.”

  “That’s the shower,” Norah told me. “Like mine, which I didn’t realize was so difficult for you.”

  Terrific. Another black mark next to my name in her mental slights column.

  “An engagement party celebrates the engagement,” Mom told me. “It can be a cocktail party, a lunch, whatever you like.”

  “We don’t have to talk about it now,” Lucas said smoothly, with another squeeze to reassure me. Possibly he’d glimpsed the look on my face and feared, as I did, that I might succumb to dizziness in some eighteenth-century swoon. The thought was appealing.

  “The sooner you get your plans set, the more you can enjoy the engagement year,” Norah said, contradicting him. She was sliding into full-on lecturer mode. Sometimes I forgot she was only thirty-six, a mere eight years older than me, because she could sound as old as the hills.

  “We’re in no rush,” Lucas told her, still smiling when she handed him a plate piled high with potatoes. Lucas hated potatoes.

  “You’ll be surprised how quickly the time goes,” Norah assured us. “You have to get out in front of it, or the next thing you know, it’s two weeks before your wedding and you have nothing.”

  “I’m sure Courtney will do just fine,” Mom said then. Norah looked dubious.

  “When has Courtney ever done something of this magnitude?” she asked. With unnecessary derision, I felt. “You don’t have to listen to me, of course,” she continued. “But I am the person at this table who was married the most recently.”

  “If by recently you mean six years ago,” I pointed out.

  “I know how long I’ve been married, Courtney.”

  “We all know how long you’ve been married, too,” I retorted. “We were all there. I’m pretty sure we can all remember it as the last time anyone spoke to Raine.”

  Norah gaped at me.

  “Are you saying you think we should have continued to speak to her?” she demanded.

  “That’s not what I—”

  “Because I was sick and tired of rewarding her behavior, especially on the one day in my entire life that was supposed to be about me and not her!”

  One of Norah’s hands had crept over her heart, as if I had broken it with my careless words. Or stuck one of the serving knives into her.

  Next to me, I could feel Lucas’s interest flare. Having never met my colorful, estranged sister, he was intrigued by all the drama that was kicked up any time her name was mentioned. As was I, to be honest. Raine was nothing if not fascinating.

  “I don’t think we should go down this road,” Phil piped up from his end of the table. Phil never said much, so we all stared at him and took in the uncharacteristic outburst. He was thoughtful and quiet, a professor of physics at Temple and some fifteen years Norah’s senior. He was as likely to be considering the effects of gravity as he was to be thinking about whatever was going on in front of him, but even he had a strong opinion about Raine. Everybody did.

  “Apparently,” Norah snapped at him as if he needed a recap, “Courtney feels we were too hasty. The fact that Lorraine”—Norah deliberately used her full, hated name—“ruined our wedding reception is no big deal.”

  “That’s not what I said,” I told her more firmly. “I was just pointing out that we all remember your wedding vividly, because of Raine. And no one’s saying what happened was no big deal. None of us have spoken to her since, have we?” I used my most placating voice, the one I’d learned growing up in this family but had honed to perfection in orchestra pits, dealing with overwrought conductors and prima donna first-chair cello players. Norah seemed to deflate. She cut a piece of chicken, and then toyed with it on her plate.

  “I’ve spoken to her,” Mom said.

  Her voice was calm, but her words crashed down in the center of the table and rippled outward, almost as if she’d thrown a plate.

  “What?” I stared at her. I heard Norah’s fork clatter against the china plate, and knew she was staring as well.

  “I speak to her once a week, usually,” Mom continued, seeming completely oblivious to the tension all around her. She forked up some stewed carrots and chewed them with every appearance of calm.

  “Mom, you have to be kidding me,” Norah snapped. “How could you? All this time, I assumed none of us even knew where she was!”

  And she, of course, had taken a certain satisfaction in that.

  “She’s my daughter, Norah, just as you are,” Mom said, sounding completely unruffled. She didn’t quite smile. “Of course I know where she is.”

  We left Norah’s house shortly after that—because really, what could follow my mother’s pronouncement? Certainly not dessert.

  “That wasn’t really how I saw this all happening,” Lucas confessed as we made our way down the dark street, easing carefully around the patches of ice. His words turned into puffs of smoke against the night air. “I thought there might be a toast or two.”

  “When Norah could make it all about her and her pain?” I scoffed in pretend astonishment. “Silly man.”

  “Next time we get engaged,” Lucas said, reaching over for my left hand and fiddling with the ring through my mitten, “I’m rethinking the whole ‘let’s celebrate our actual life’ part.”

  “I liked that part.”

  “Sure, but I could have done it after Family Dinner. We could have celebrated ourselves and then called everybody, like everyone else in the world. But no, I had to be different.”

  “I liked it,” I told him, kissing him. “It was perfect. You’re perfect.”

  “That’s true,” Lucas agreed, smiling at me and pulling me close. “I am. For you.”

  Later that night, Lucas was asleep in the big queen bed that took up most of the bedroom in our cozy two-bedroom apartment, and I got up to feed our obnoxious matching pair of tabby cats, Felix and Felicia.

  Yes, despite Norah’s warnings, Lucas and I had moved in together after dating for about a year and a half. And it had been another whole year and a half before he’d proposed. No wonder she’d been concerned. At this point in her relationship she’d already been married to Phil. For a year.

  I shoved Norah and her pronouncements out of my mind as the cats rushed at me and twined themselves around my ankles. They were a brother and sister we’d happened upon at a curbside rescue right after we moved in together, and had been conned into taking when they were tiny four-month-old kittens. They were always up to something, and were often completely psychotic for no apparent reason. Which was to say, they were perfect little cats.

  I laid out some wet food for them—after listening to them yowl and carry on as if the last time they’d been fed was months ago, instead of that morning—and then headed back toward the bedroom. Before I got there, though, my eye was caught by my cello and stand in the bay window of the living room. I flexed my left hand a little bit, and felt the familiar wash of guilt and panic. I should have spent the day practicing instead of celebrating. I knew my performance suffered if I didn’t put in at least a few hours every single day, and I couldn’t afford to let my performance suffer. Lucas, who worked at home, running his Internet security business, claimed he loved listening to me practice while he put out fires and slapped down hackers. Which was good, since I did so several hours a day. I would have to buckle down the next morning, which meant I should get to sleep.

  But my mind was too riled up to rest.

  I was engaged! After all those years of wondering if it would ever happen, it had. It had been a confusing night. In the movies or on TV, engagement scenes were followed by musical montages and cham
pagne toasts. Not tense family dinners and hours of telephone calls. Lucas had ended up calling every family member he had, and half of our friends. I’d been responsible for the other half. Once the ball started rolling, we’d had to keep going so no one would feel left out or slighted. It turned out that telling the same story over and over again was kind of exhausting.

  But it also put the glaze and polish on the way we would tell the story. That was the strangest part. By the final couple of phone calls, we had it down to a few glossy sentences. I wondered if those sentences would be what survived the evening—like a photograph. A snapshot version of what had actually happened.

  Maybe that meant I’d forget about the less pleasant parts, like Norah trying to micromanage my wedding within minutes of the proposal.

  “She’s overbearing,” Lucas had agreed when we’d been peeling off our winter coats near our hall closet, “but she’s only trying to help. I think this is her way of showing interest.”

  “She drives me insane,” I’d retorted. “She’s this almost impossible mixture of incredibly confrontational and completely oversensitive!”

  “And that,” he’d agreed.

  After which, we’d had better things to do than psychoanalyze Norah.

  I told myself to stop doing it now, in the dark, where it could easily be mistaken for brooding. Anyway, there were more pressing things to brood about.

  The truth was, I was completely thrown by the fact Mom was in touch with Raine.

  My sister Raine was almost as much of a myth to me as the father I’d never known. Even before she’d disappeared six years ago, she’d been larger-than-life. She’d been the fun one. That sounded like such a small thing, but it had been almost incomprehensibly huge when I was a kid. Our whole family life was arranged around one central, sad fact: my father’s absence. We were all sad. Except for Raine.

  While Norah stressed and fussed and bossed, Raine snuck out on the roof to smoke joints or danced by herself in her room with her eyes closed. Norah was the one who lectured me about my class schedule. Raine was the one who explained to me that boys who were really mean to you probably liked you, and it was okay to be mean right back. And then she’d showed me how.