I'll Be You(16)

I kept thinking about what Alice had said—the word culty clutching at my brain like a sock with static cling. Culty? What did that mean? I’d heard people say that AA was “culty.” So was Esalen, where my mother annually went on a solo trip to meditate and soak naked in hot tubs. You could use the word to describe anyone from red-hat-wearing MAGA types to rabid Kanye West fans to the people you’d find in a hot yoga class. The world fetishizes intense devotion and charismatic celebrity; it’s almost impossible to live in the twenty-first century and entirely avoid doing anything cultlike, I told myself.

Culty: It could mean anything. It could mean nothing at all.

Other than the dirty kitchen, nothing else about Elli’s house looked remotely out of the ordinary. The catchall dish by the back door was still full of seashells and spare keys; the notes on the fridge were just shopping lists and grocery receipts; the mail on the counter was still shelter magazines and solicitations from liberal nonprofits. Over a year had passed since I’d been here last, but it might as well have been a day. On a cursory glance, I didn’t even see any evidence that Chuck had moved out, except maybe the lack of Gatorade in the fridge. Though that just showed how little his presence had registered on the house in the first place: This had always been my sister’s domain.

A neat stack of invoices sat on the kitchen table, each with my sister’s business logo stamped on the top: Eleanor Hart Floral Design. In her mid-twenties, Elli had reinvented herself as an event florist who specialized in weddings and baby showers, giant sprays of flowers in elegantly pale colors. “It’s really the perfect job for me,” she’d once told me. “I work with beautiful things all day and I get to be a part of people’s happiest days.” Eleanor Hart Floral Design was a one-woman show, its focus far more heavily on arrangements than profitability. I riffled through the invoices. Most were stamped past due, but she hadn’t bothered to mail them.

Once the kitchen was clean, I headed upstairs to Charlotte’s room. Last time I was here—just a little more than a year ago—it had been a guest bedroom, done in cerulean and yellow; it was the room where I’d slept off my last rehab recovery. Now it was a pink and white temple of female toddlerdom, all frills and lace. It was Elli’s dream childhood bedroom, I realized, the one she’d painstakingly designed for our dollhouse back when we were nine, now re-created in full size. One wall was covered with shelves of collectible dolls that Charlotte was still too young to play with; the other contained a crib that was tented in a lace canopy. A shag carpet in pale pink was littered with pristine stuffed animals.

Charlotte, delighted to see her toys, toddled over to a play kitchen and began to cook herself a wooden meal, burbling to herself under her breath. I dug through her closet, sweeping aside the hangers where embroidered dresses with French labels hung in pristine array, until I found a pile of swimsuits. The location of my sister’s beach towels eluded me, so I took a stack of fluffy towels from the bathroom and shoved them in a tote bag that I found in a hallway closet.

At the far end of the hallway, the door to my sister’s bedroom stood half ajar. The room itself was dark, the blackout curtains drawn tight. I couldn’t resist. I pushed the door open and peered in, my toes sinking into the pale blue wall-to-wall carpeting. I could smell my sister in the air, a lingering must of sleep sweat and vanilla-scented deodorant. Despite the gloom I could see that her bed had been left unmade, a satin robe abandoned on the floor. Stepping inside the room felt unbearably intimate: If Elli wouldn’t have wanted me to let myself into her house, she definitely wouldn’t want me in her bedroom. I wavered on the threshold.

But there was something sitting on the table next to my sister’s side of the bed: a black binder, thick with documents, bristling with sticky notes. Was it divorce papers? Financial statements? Had my sister decided to go back to school? Curiosity got the better of me. I stepped into the room and picked up the binder. Despite the dim light I could see that the cover was embossed with a single word in gold: GenFem.

I took the binder out into the light of the hallway and flipped through it. It was full of worksheets, like a college student’s study binder. The printouts had titles like “Conquering Fear Structures” and “Emotional Control Systems” and “Powershifting P-A Relationships” and “Excising Toxicity.” The typeface was small, paragraph after paragraph of dense text, followed by pages of empty lines for notes. Some of the printouts had diagrams, rivers of arrows flowing from one stick figure to the next. I could make no sense of any of it at a glance, but clearly my sister knew what it all meant. Each page had been carefully inked up in my sister’s neat cursive, salient phrases highlighted, edges carefully marked with stickies.

So this was what Alice had been talking about. GenFem was some kind of self-help group. A little culty, yes; then again, so were most self-help groups. I glanced at some of the phrases that my sister had highlighted: If it’s not painful it means that you’re taking the easy route. Growth hurts. Ignore the pain. And: You can have a redo, all it takes is reinvention. And: You can’t wait for someone else to give you the things you desire most. You must take them for yourself.

This last line gave me pause. Something about it felt off, utterly unlike the Elli I knew. She didn’t “take” the things that she desired; that was the kind of selfishness I’d embraced, but that had always been anathema to her. Then again, maybe that was exactly why Elli felt that she needed this kind of a lesson plan. She’d never been strong on agency. Still, something about these sentiments struck me as stringent, clinical, cold. Was my sister really trying to reinvent herself? Why would she even want to do that? She was so perfect already.