The phrase “there’s no place like home” doesn’t always evoke cozy nostalgia. Considered another way, it marks an absence, or perhaps an exile. Maybe Dorothy has nowhere to go, or she lives in an Oz of mean streets.
Such is the situation in Curtis Smith’s (step)sisters (Trompe l’Oeil Press, 223 pages). Set in Philadelphia during a strike of sanitation workers and an infestation of rats, the story is narrated by Kiley, a young woman struggling to make ends meet with the help of her half-sister, Nora. They want to build a life of their own but to do so, they need resources beyond what they can earn in a low-wage economy. So they sometimes operate on the wrong side of the law, taking side gigs as couriers of illicit substances to Atlantic City. This is supposed to be a temporary expedient, to save up some seed money to start a legitimate business and begin afresh. From the outset, though, Kiley’s motives are more personal than practical:
“I’m here for my sister […] because the worst things happen to her when I’m not around […] I tell her I’ve bought into her grand scheme—her goal of stepping away […] but I’m really here because I love her more than reason and sound judgement and all the scoldings of my better angels.”
Kiley and Nora have each other’s back. Of the two, Kiley is the more reflective, while Nora is more extroverted and prone to outbursts. It’s their complicity and absolute trust, more than an accidental blood relation, that makes them sisters. They form an effective team.
Narrated in sixty brief chapters which sometimes rely on quick cuts, cinema-style, the plot is punctuated with dramatic bursts. Smith toggles adroitly between Kiley’s interiority and the external menace of everyday life. During one early scene, when Kiley and Nora are stopped by a highway trooper, I had to put down the book and walk around the room for a moment because it was making me too nervous.
For their primary employment, the sisters have jobs as cleaners. They report regularly to the office space of a financial firm to vacuum the carpets and empty the trash after the day shift has gone home. With their tasks comes a certain intimacy:
“I weave past the desks I’ve come to know. The computer screens ringed with Post-it reminders. The ones where the staplers and tape dispensers are always positioned just-so. The framed photographs, weddings, vacations, children beneath Christmas trees. This still space and the vacuum’s hum, and in the windows, my reflection.”
This is Kiley’s space, too, though she lacks the salary or status of the employees who work here by day. She observes matter-of-factly that the “daily current of millions” that run through these offices and the “deals made with oligarchs” are part of “a network as dirty as our runs to Atlantic City.”
A twist of circumstances brings Kiley to a new job at the Academy of Natural Sciences. At first blush the work is menial, as she lacks training and education and spends her hours unpacking boxes. But the Academy quickly because Kiley’s space, too, and a source of further reflection. Standing in front of a diorama that display mountain sheep balancing on precarious ledges, she muses:
“I don’t long for money. I don’t long for a man to rescue me. I don’t long for anything—and I can’t tell if this makes me feel peaceful or empty, and if I’m not filled with something, am I any more alive than this hallway’s animals?”
Here and elsewhere a spiritual awareness informs the story, even as the sisters fight their way forward in a relentlessly material world. The rat infestation in their neighborhood is a grisly problem for its own sake, but as in Albert Camus’ The Plague, where rats also figure prominently, the animals oblige a reassessment of human society, and reveal the fragility of its founding myths. A demagogue named Miller is keen to exploit the infestation with an aggrieved political discourse of “Us and Them.” His followers revel in busting up encampments of the homeless and junkies, in the name of “right and wrong.” Anger is an ideological currency, and for Kiley and Nora, its expression by men is especially threatening. Kiley thinks back on an old boyfriend:
“Perhaps I should’ve stayed with Hank […] but whenever I soften on him, I cycle back to the final-straw night I decided to leave. An eavesdropping on him and his friends. Their conversation uglier with every beer. The tribalism that ran deeper than their allegiance to the Phillies and Eagles. The anger of talk radio. A flag-waver’s love-it-or-leave it rhetoric. The meanness to be found in neighborhoods haunted by guys like Hank and his crew. Guys who feel cheated. The belief they were born at the wrong time […]
Smith puts his finger on the predicaments of a generation for whom the optimism and complacency of their boomer predecessors are foreign concepts and frankly untenable. For Kiley, “ordinariness feels like a miracle” and her longed-for luxury is hope.
We all live in our bubbles, we are told, and there is truth to that notion, but in (step)sisters, Smith depicts something more subtle, akin to a Venn diagram. Kiley simultaneously inhabits multiple bubbles, or more precisely, circles, which sometimes overlap. The grim striving of mean streets and the intellectual activity at the Academy and the financial forces of the office high-rise are all constitutive of her consciousness.
This is a powerful novel that refuses easy answers while at the same time resisting a deterministic naturalism or an exhausted nihilism. (step)sisters is the work of a thoughtful and generous imagination.
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Charles Holdefer’s next novel, Move the Mountain, will be published in April 2027.
