The town is called Shadydale, and I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of it, for it consists of little more than the main street with its dismal shops that sell antique things, and its diner inhabited by suspicious folks hunching over their bitter coffee possessively, and the lone movie theater where hollow-eyed teenagers make their weekly pilgrimage on Friday nights to stave off an existential boredom, the faded marquee calling them forth. I like it, though. Everyone moves at a country pace, like tortoises. We go over a wooden bridge to get there, and it is autumn so the maple trees are shrugging off their painted foliage.
What keeps the place going, I think, is the lifeblood of gossip that pumps through its veins, rumors of intrigue to titillate an otherwise banal and slowly eroding existence. I have always liked to come into town and listen to the people talk, even if they never talk to me, or even if they are talking about me while looking at me from the white corners of their eyes. I will always be recognized as one of those Wakefields who live in the haunted house out in the swampland, and I must carry that haunting with me wherever I go.
“Do you always do the groceries?” asks Elizabeth. “What did she do before you moved back home?”
“She had a grocery boy.”
“Lord.” Her eyes turn heavenward. “If she got hooked up to the internet, she could just order all of her groceries to be delivered and continue marinating in that house like a chicken.”
I grab a cart, and we stroll at a more leisurely pace than I usually take on my grocery trips. The store is bright and blooming. Rainbows of fruit occupy large crates before us. Elizabeth grabs items at whim as we pass: kiwi, a bottle of mustard, Swiss cheese, bacon.
“You wouldn’t believe the pregnancy cravings,” she says while inspecting a box of cereal. “I used to hate mustard. Now I can’t get enough. I just want to put it on everything. Popcorn, crackers, bananas. Just everything. It’s like having the perpetual munchies.”
“So just like college, then?”
Elizabeth gained the notorious freshman fifteen—or maybe twenty—after an affair with a pot dealer her first year away at school, when I was still at home. She dieted and exercised intensely for months before the extra weight started to vanish, and this was only after they broke up for the fifth and final time. I actually liked her more with the extra weight, though. She had less to be self-righteous about, and she was pleasanter, and warm, and when she came home for holidays, she would share her chips with me. When she started eating drab salads, there was no more sharing, only an unhappy shoveling of leaves into her mouth, a glower across the kitchen table.
She picks up another box of cereal and says to the list of ingredients, “No. Now there’s a boy inside of me.”
“So just like college, then.”
The cereal ends up in the cart, and her hands find her hips. “Jealous because you didn’t get any?”
“You know I never wanted what you were having.”
She stops walking, so I am forced to halt the cart and wait for her to tell me what’s the matter. She looks suddenly upset, as if the fragile balance of carelessness and that faint fixed impression of a smile are straining under some ugliness breaking through, the first effervescent bubbles pushing at the surface tension of a pot heated almost to boiling. After a moment, the tension settles, but the laugh that escapes sounds high and false. “You know what’s odd? When you’re pregnant, everyone wants to touch your belly.”
“Do you want me to touch your belly?” We start moving forward again. “Is it for good luck?”
“Some people are interested in the miracle of childbirth.”
We talk the way sisters talk, I think. Even as we needle each other, there is a kind of enjoyment in it, perhaps in the knowledge that we are playing out a larger conversation that all sisters must have. Little lighthearted barbs intended to prick but not sting, to rile up one another; the common lexicon of women bound by blood. Yes, the way sisters talk to each other—for sisters, above anyone on earth, must become fluent in this passive-aggressive language.
But I won’t admit that here in the middle of the fluorescent grocery store, amid shelves of milk and butter, my sister is riling me up the way only she knows how to.
I grip the cart and sigh. “I’m glad you’re happy. But can’t you just enjoy your happiness without needing me to feel it, too?”
“Happy?” she breathes, and I cannot tell if she is truly wounded or if she is merely behaving so to call out my too-overt aggression; there is a fine balancing act that must be maintained to keep the order of politeness and cruelty intact. “Happy? You think I’m happy? My husband and I separated and I’m almost eight months pregnant. How can I be happy?”
“I’m sorry,” I say, even though I’m not sure if I really am, and I wonder, if I’m not sorry, whether that makes me a terrible person.
I have become more conscious now of the people around us doing their own shopping, and I get the feeling they are all looking at me from the corners of their eyes. They are looking at me because I have brought attention to myself in being rude to my sister, and then retreating into that docile and pathetic apology. They have identified us as Wakefields and now are thinking their nasty thoughts. This is why I move swiftly and smoothly through the store when I come alone, like a leopard; as much as I like to listen to the people chirp, I want also to be invisible. Being seen makes me uncomfortable. I look around at all the flat-eyed shoppers as we go, and I think to myself, this town is an angry, dismal blight of a place, and I can’t pretend to like it anymore.
The truth is that I know Elizabeth will be fine whether I coddle her with niceness or not. It seems a formality to be nice for niceness’ sake. The social convention doesn’t draw actual love or care out of us; it only filters out the ugliness, as if to say that because we cannot see it, it must not be there.
And I know Elizabeth will be a good mother without having to sycophantically remind her of that. She knows how to do the right things. She took care of me, after all, when I was too young to realize our mother had failed to. Now she reads baby books and goes to prenatal classes and gushes all the usual pregnancy clichés as if they have become fresh in her mouth. When the baby comes, she will take one look at him and no matter how blood-bathed and wrinkled he is, she will call him perfect, precious, beautiful. She will take a thousand identical pictures of him and post every last one online. She will never abandon him like she abandoned me. She knows she will immediately love this creature that percolated in her womb for nine months because he belongs to her.
Such instant bonding with another creature is something I can’t quite imagine. A mother is supposed to feel that way about her child, but what if she doesn’t? What if she looks at her child and does not recognize it? What if the screaming infant bursts forth into the world and instead of seeing love, she sees only a bleating incoherent alien? A parasitic creature that makes her wonder how it lived inside her so long, her gorge rising at the very thought? This is not mine, she thinks. This is not mine.
I hurry the cart forward on its squeaking wheels so as not to think about it. Damn my sister for making me think these kinds of thoughts.
On the drive home she says wistfully, “Things will be so different from how I imagined, without him. I don’t know what we’re going to do. I just wanted everything to be right. Is that so much to ask?” She composes herself in the mirror.