Salon | Unzipped: Twisted sisters

It was the strangest thing about Mademoiselle, Tiffany thought as she pushed her dark hair behind her ears -- how did they always know what was going on in her life? Tiffany was 21, and every article spoke to her. The magazine was like a good girlfriend that you could call up and chat with for three hours. There was "Good News About the Pill" (she'd just gone on it herself) and "Will You Cheat on Him?" (three months ago, she had done exactly that to her boyfriend, Robert) and then a long article about the most popular sexually transmitted diseases on college campuses.

But the real reason she liked Mademoiselle was because -- like all the other women's magazines -- every article had something to do with sex. And as many problems as she knew she had (bad communication with Mother, difficulty in maintaining intimate relationships with men, always wanting to please everybody around her), sex was not one of them. It was the one area that felt completely trouble-free.

It wasn't just her, she'd tried to explain to her older sister Lisa on the car ride out to the airport. All girls her age were like that. None of them seemed to take sex as seriously as, say, Lisa and her neurotic 30-something friends. Lisa had been telling her not to fall into bed with the first guy she met on this vacation to Atlanta -- "They really won't respect you, Tiffany" -- and Tiffany inwardly groaned. The truth was, she didn't really care one way or another if a guy respected her in the morning.

Why did women over the age of 25 obsess so much about sex? She was still mulling this over as she went through the security gates. "No problem, it's fine," she said to the Filipina woman who accidentally shoved her as she ran the metal detector over her body. "I'm sorry," she said to the woman waiting to walk through behind her. Lisa was definitely right about some things: Tiffany apologized too much. She made a mental note to stop apologizing for everything.

Now here she was on the plane, apologizing to the man in front of her when she accidentally dug her knees into his back. Lisa's stern voice floated through her head again. I don't know why I should listen to her, Tiffany thought. At 32, Lisa had had a series of failed relationships and was trying hard at this point not to get cynical. The middle sister, Karen, who was 27, said Lisa's biological clock was ticking so loudly it was scaring all the men away. Karen herself was another screwed up story: She wanted a boyfriend too, which never seemed to happen, despite the plethora of male friends she had in her circle. Karen said at her age the terms "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" had somehow floated away, dropped out of the realm of possibilities. In Karen's group, they all just slept together when they got horny or drunk -- or both, as was usually the case.

It was weird, Tiffany thought. As they got older, they seemed not to grow together as sisters were supposed to (at least according to Mademoiselle), but rather further and further apart. In fact, whenever Tiffany met a girl who wasn't her exact age, she found they had nothing to talk about.

But now there was a girl sitting next to her, looking a little older than Lisa, reading the New York Times. It was a long flight to Atlanta; talking to someone might make the time go faster. This girl was pretty in a sort of unfussy way -- long hair, little makeup, wearing mostly black. She must have sensed Tiffany looking at her because she turned and smiled. Pointing to the front page, she said, "Doesn't Kenneth Starr look like the kind of guy who lives with his mother?"

Tiffany nodded, feeling oddly fraudulent; she wasn't much interested in the political scandal and only knew as much as she'd picked up from David Letterman. Still, she wanted the girl to like her (another failing of hers, Lisa had pointed out, wanting everyone to like her) and started to tell her how people had commented that Tiffany bore some resemblance to Monica.

N E X T+P A G E +| Bad wine and bad sex