Sisters
by Diana Altman
“I Need to Leave Now” by Jaina Cipriano
Gretchen was an intensely serious person working on her Ph.D. in Medieval German at Harvard. Her clothes were mostly brown and nothing about her invited your gaze. She sat for hours hunched over texts. She showed me a German word that stretched from one margin right across the page. One word. We were both in our twenties then, both recently married, both living in apartments in Cambridge.
Her husband was a small flamboyant man who flung scarves around his neck and wore his various berets at a jaunty angle. It was quite a shock to hear him meow to her. Boyd turned to Gretchen and said, “Yeow.” His cat accent was Siamese. She turned to him and replied, “Meeeow.” Then he batted her with his paw and said in a teasing way, “Meow.” She batted him back. This was a conversation you couldn’t enter.
I met Gretchen because she was having trouble getting her driver’s license issued in her maiden name. I was having trouble registering to vote in my maiden name. We were both told that our surnames had changed automatically upon marriage. The year was 1971. If we wanted to continue using our maiden name, we had to go to court to change our names. “I have to go to court to change my name back to my own name?” I challenged the voting commissioner to disenfranchise me. I said I’d take the city to court. The city’s lawyer ruled in my favor, said that there was no law requiring a woman to use her husband’s surname. If I did not have to go to court to change my name back to my name, then no woman did. It was just a matter of letting them all know so I wrote an article for the Boston Phoenix and made up an organization called NameChange. Women having trouble with this issue should phone. Because it wasn’t just me telling them to refuse to go to court, it was an “organization” telling them on the phone, they thought they were talking to an authority when it was really just me.
Which is how I met Gretchen. She was getting the runaround from the Department of Motor Vehicles so she called NameChange for advice. Once you get involved in a cause, you meet all the other people involved in that cause. Dozens of married women in Massachusetts, in towns all across the state, were being told that they could not continue to use their maiden names and some of those women were lawyers. One of them gathered us all together in her living room where we worked on the wording of the opinion we expected the Attorney General to issue. His opinion would say, “A married woman’s surname is whatever she says it is so long as she has no intention of defrauding anyone.”
Thus Gretchen and I joined what was later called The Women’s Movement. We held signs and marched down Boylston Street. Now men march with women but back then men were entirely not welcome. We did not want to subject ourselves to what we learned to call “the male gaze.” So when I joined up with Gretchen at one of the marches, I was surprised that she was there with her husband Boyd. That’s how I met him. He was cheerful, seemed unaware of the looks of suspicion that darted at him from the women marching near him. We didn’t want men mingling in our fight. We were roaring without them. That was pretty much the point.
It was on the train back to Cambridge that I first heard Boyd meow to Gretchen. His cat accent was Siamese, heavy on the yow. When I got home, in an effort to understand Boyd, I meowed to my husband. He replied, “Woof.”
We had a new baby. Gretchen told me her sister had an expensive baby carriage that she no longer used now that her child was four. That’s how I got that Rolls Royce creation with huge wheels and cushy springs. When strangers peered inside and saw my baby and said how beautiful, my eyes filled with tears because that was so extremely true.
Gretchen’s sister Raven delivered the carriage to my house. One day she just showed up. She was dreamy, seemed to float above the ground, had long braids, dangling earrings, Birkenstocks, and bangles from wrist to elbow. She was twenty-four, said her son was in nursery school.
She too lived in Cambridge and had pushed the baby carriage from her house to mine. Inside the carriage was a fuzzy miniature poodle that gave me many kisses then ran around the yard. The dog seemed attached to Raven by an invisible magnet because the whole time we sat on my porch, it didn’t run away or even leave the yard. When she suggested, in a soft voice, that it stop running around and come lay down on the porch next to her chair, it did. Immediately. Then, much to my amazement, Raven took out a baggy of marijuana. Marijuana was illegal back then. You could go to prison but there she was out in the open on the front porch of the two-family house Harry and I were renting, sifting seeds out, saving the seeds in a little film canaster, and licking the edge of a piece of rolling paper. She took a hit and said in a choked voice, “Isn’t it so cute how Boyd meows?”
“You think?”
“Gretchen doesn’t appreciate him. You know he was child prodigy chess player.” She took another hit. “This stuff is great.” She offered it to me but I waved her away.
“I smoked the whole time I was nursing and my son is a genius.” We sat staring out at the street, the two-family houses on the other side, the UPS truck that went by. “You want to hear what my son said yesterday? He was sitting at the table not saying a word. Then he says, ‘The most difficult shape to draw is the isosceles triangle.’”
“How old is he?”
“Four!”
“I guess he’s an artist.”
“No shit. Tell me something I don’t already know.” We sat watching a noisy bee nose its way into the wisteria.
“Thanks for the baby carriage. It’s really elegant.”
“Yeah. My ex comes from money.”
“So you got a good settlement?”
“I guess so. I’m not into material things.”
“So what do you do with the money?”
“Nothing. I can’t touch it. It’s in a trust. Those were the conditions. I don’t project a responsible aura.”
“You brought that baby carriage here.”
She squinted at me and drew her head back. “You don’t have to be soft with me. I’m a Libra. I worship the goddess of Truth.”
“Still. You don’t like people underestimating you.”
“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t know the first thing about managing that money. I’d blow it all.” She dropped the roach into a little plastic bag and dropped that bag into her purse, a large satchel made of wool textile. “Boyd knows about money. He’s a math genius.”
“Then you’re lucky he’s your brother-in-law.”
“You’re telling me. I don’t know what I’d do without him.”
“Is Gretchen jealous?”
Startled, she sat up straight. “Why did you say that?”
“I don’t know. Just wondering.”
“Did she say something?”
“No.”
“You’re a very astute individual.”
From inside the house came the sound of my baby waking up so I went into the house and up the stairs and was surprised when I scooped up the baby, after we exchanged our usual wake-up smiles and coos, to discover Raven had followed me. “I have to nurse her, Raven. Thanks so much for the carriage.”
“I don’t mind. Just do your thing.”
The phone rang. I carried the baby to the living room, sat down on the sofa, lifted my now wet shirt and my baby fastened on to me and began to suck, a relief because my breasts were so swollen. I picked up the phone. “NameChange.” On the phone was another woman who had been told at the Registry of Motor Vehicles that she had to go to probate court if she wanted to keep her maiden name. I watched Raven walk around looking at the titles of books on the bookshelf, Victorian novels, poetry anthologies, all the works of Shakespeare, the books of an English major. Then she spotted Harry’s guitar case, opened it, took out the guitar and started strumming. I said into the phone, “No, you do NOT have to go to court.”
Raven was hunched over the guitar plucking notes but not in a way that was musical. Then she hit the guitar with her flat palm to make a drum beat and kept doing that. Her noise making did not seem oblivious but aggressive.
My baby was kneading my breast and making soft, contented moans. I loved watching her little pink face and her teeny little hand and her cute little feet. “Yes, you will have to be brave to defy them,” I said into the phone. “But nothing will change until we stop going to court to change our names back to our own name. If you can just put off renewing your license we’re about to get an Attorney General’s opinion and that opinion will have the force of law.”
I put down the phone and lifted my baby from one breast to the other. This was not something I wanted to do in front of Raven because I didn’t want her to see the top half of me naked. Feeding your baby is a melty time, a squishy time, a time when you aren’t even on this earth. At least it was for us back in the days before breast pumps were ubiquitous, when we could stay home with our infants and not be labeled a Stay At Home Mom. As if mothers stay at home.
“Gretchen wants to keep her maiden name,” Raven said looking up but still hunched over the guitar. “I don’t see what’s the big fuss. What difference does it make? It’s not as if your maiden name is yours. It’s your father’s name so who cares which man’s name you stick on yourself?”
“Raven, I have some work to do today so I’m wondering if…?”
“Families should all have the same surname. Why should the wife have a different last name from her child? The school people will treat the child with smothering kindness because they’ll think it’s from a broken home.”
“Raven…I…” The phone rang. I picked it up. “NameChange. Yes, this is the right place. Your driver’s license?”
Raven checked the pocket watch that was hanging from a chain pinned to the side of her skirt. She mouthed, “Where’s the bathroom?” She went where I pointed. “No, you can insist that your maiden name be on your diploma,” I said into the phone. That conversation went on for a while because the woman had used her husband’s surname for two years and now she wanted to go back to her maiden name and I wasn’t sure how she would go about doing that. So for a few minutes I didn’t think about Raven and when I put the phone down and remembered her and went to get a fresh diaper from the baby’s room, I was surprised to see she’d gone without a word.
Through the window I could see her at the end of the block, her dog trotting along after her, as children released from school came in clumps down the sidewalk. One of them, the slender one with the blond ponytail, would soon ring my doorbell. I knew this because she didn’t live on my street but was just there in order to visit me. I had been her seventh grade English teacher. She liked telling me her boy troubles and playing with my baby.
So it wasn’t until several hours later that I discovered that my jewelry box was open and the pearls I got from my grandmother were gone. It couldn’t be my mistake because I never left the lid open not only because of my own tidiness but also because Harry was an architect and lids open, toilet seats up, cabinet doors ajar, ruined his sense of symmetry. The student who had visited me that afternoon never left my sight so it couldn’t have been her. At dinner, eating our adsuki beans and brown rice, Harry and I discussed the best way to handle this robbery. I phoned Gretchen.
“This is a difficult conversation, Gretchen. I think your sister stole my pearls.”
“You want her phone number?”
“I guess so. Has she ever done this before?”
“Raven? Yes. She does it all the time.”
“She steals?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way. She just takes stuff.”
“Gretchen. It’s against the law to take stuff.”
“She doesn’t mind.”
“What do you mean she doesn’t mind?”
“She always gets away with it.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s pretty. She gets away with everything.”
“Does she return the things?”
“I don’t know.”
“Has she ever gone to jail?”
“I don’t think so. She doesn’t always tell me everything.” Then she put her palm over the receiver and I heard a muffled, “Meow. Yow.”
“Gretchen. You sister stole my Grandmother’s pearls.”
“I know. You just said.”
“I don’t know how to handle this, Gretchen. I mean if I accuse her she’ll just say she didn’t do it.”
“That’s definitely a possibility.”
I hung up after Gretchen gave me Raven’s phone number. I was going to call her right then but my baby cried and by the time I got the baby settled, it was too late at night. The next day I phoned her. “Raven,” I said, “please return my pearls. They were from my Nana.”
“Who’s this?” I repeated my name. “Do I know you?”
“Raven I don’t want to call the police. Do you want to get into that kind of mess?”
“Oh. The girl who has my carriage.”
“Yes. The woman who has your carriage. And thank you for that.”
“Wait. Did you think it was free?”
“You mean it wasn’t?”
“Why would I give away such an expensive carriage? I’d have to be some kind of dope. Do you think I’m a dope?”
“You never told me you were selling it to me.”
“Tell you? Wouldn’t that be obvious?” Then I heard her put her palm over the receiver and say, “Meow.” Though she was muffling the receiver with her fingers, I could hear a male voice say, “Yowww.” Was that Boyd? Was he with his wife’s sister? Click. She hung up.
The police showed up at my door, a big man you’d hire as your body guard, and a small, gray-haired man. I explained the situation. They went into every room, picked up my jewelry box, looked behind my bureau, made notes. They said that I had no proof. I didn’t have any photo of the pearls or any documents saying Nana left the necklace to me. They said I could press charges but they didn’t think I’d win.
If I hadn’t loved my grandmother so much and if those pearls hadn’t had so much history, it would have just been a financial loss. But those pearls were a marriage gift to my grandmother from my grandfather. He said he knew he’d marry her when he heard the sound of her voice.
I enjoyed investigating Nana’s jewelry box while she brushed my hair when I was a child. I sat on her bed surrounded by her dolls. She was an old lady but still loved her dolls and I knew all their names. Nana smelled very nice and her body was soft to lean against.
Harry and I were still young enough to know nothing about insurance and even if some insurance company had sent me hundreds of dollars for my loss it wouldn’t have compensated me. I was fighting nameless bureaucrats every day, including those who would not let me give my daughter a hyphenated surname on her birth certificate, but how to fight a thief I had no idea.
Dressed in her most adorable onesie, little pink bunnies, I carried my baby downstairs, put her in the carriage and headed out to Raven’s house. She lived in an apartment on the top floor of a Victorian house. I rang the bell and she buzzed me in even though there was no way she could know who was there because there was no intercom. I trudged up three flights of steep wooden stairs hugging my baby tight and at the landing on the third floor Raven was standing in front of her open door. “Oh,” she said, “it’s you.” I just stood there holding my baby. Then a man’s voice said, “Who is it, Raven?”
“I thought it was UPS,” she replied. Then to me, “What do you want?”
“My pearls. I want my pearls back.”
“What pearls? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Then, much to my amazement, Boyd came to the door barefoot and wearing only boxer shorts. Abashed, we stood gawking at each other. Raven went back into the apartment. She returned with my pearls and stuffed them into my hand. She said without words that I should keep my mouth shut, the return of the pearls was payment for that.
Many months later, Gretchen and I met at the State House. We were there to testify for a new bill that would make it law that a married woman could use her maiden name. “Do you love your husband?” one of the state representatives asked. All I could reply was, “What’s that got to do with it?” Which was not a good answer because he was genuinely trying to understand. Gretchen testified that she already had a reputation as a German scholar and if she stopped using the name on her published papers, it would damage the forward thrust of her career. We went out for tea afterwards.
I wasn’t sure I was going to hold up my end of the bargain with Raven. Gretchen was my friend and maybe I had an obligation to rescue her from Boyd. “Raven returned my pearls.”
“Not her taste.”
“Did she mention it to you?”
“We don’t really talk.”
“Ever?”
“I mean about anything important.”
“Still, it must be nice to have a sister living so close.”
“I’m thinking of leaving Boyd.” She kept her eyes down then raised them to mine. “Did you notice he meows?”
Diana Altman is the author of Hollywood East: Louis B. Mayer and the origins of the studio system, a book of film history soon to be made into a documentary film. Her award-winning novel In Theda Bara’s Tent was described as “sophisticated storytelling” by Library Journal and as “enthralling” by Publishers Weekly. Her recent novel, We Never Told was selected by NBC News as one of 20 great summer reads. It received a 5-star review on Booklist and won first place/gold in the 2020 Feathered Quill Book Award contest. Altman’s work has appeared in North American Review, Trampset, Notre Dame Review, StoryQuarterly, Cumberland River Review, Natural Bridge, Forbes, The Sea Letter, Moment, New York Times, Yankee, Boston Herald, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City where she is an Authors Guild Ambassador. She was a former President of the Women's National Book Association, Boston. She graduated from Connecticut College and Harvard University. www.dianaaltman.com
Jaina Cipriano is an experiential designer, filmmaker and photographer exploring the emotional toll of religious and romantic entrapment. Her worlds communicate with our neglected inner child and are informed by explosive colors, elements of elevated play and the push/pull of light and dark. Jaina writes and directs award winning short films that wrestle with the complicated path of healing. Her second short film, ‘Trauma Bond’ is a dreamy, coming of age thriller that explores healing deep wounds with quick fixes, it took home the grand prize at the Lonely Seal International Film Festival. Jaina’s photographic works forgoes digital manipulation, everything is created for the camera. She takes an immersive approach to working with models, approaching a shoot like a documentary photographer as her subject is let loose in a strange designed space. Working with Jaina is often described as cathartic and playful. Her photographic work has been shown internationally. Jaina is the executive director of the Arlington International Film Festival and the founder of Finding Bright Studios - an experiential design company in Lowell, MA. She has collaborated with GRRL HAUS, Boston Art Review, and was a Boston Fellow for the Mass Art Creative Business Incubator and a finalist in EforAll Merrimack Valley.