I switched the phone from my left ear to my right ear. I switched it back. Something about hotel rooms always made me feel like I was being detained, like a prisoner, before I would be released into another darker, more savage room. A room where I might have to defend myself.

On the other end of the line, my sister’s voice – her neurosis so familiar, the same shape and texture as my own – inquired as to why people worried so relentlessly about being liked anyway? What was the big deal? It was, she said, only when people liked you too much that problems arose. Problems of possession. Problems of which coffee shops to attend after relationships fell apart. We were two fairly average women – lacking unique selling points, with figures that the magazines, in their general meanness, might accuse of being pear-shaped, hair that suggested frazzled, working minds – but even we had experienced the phenomenon of being liked.

Also she explained, for a brief time, after she lost the small talk, she didn’t know what a fork was. Recently, she’d taken all the forks out of the kitchen drawer in the house she shared with her husband and closely examined them. She rested a fork on her growing belly. She managed to identify it as an eating tool. When her husband passed her a fork during the breakfast he insisted they shared every morning to strengthen their marital bond, she asked, ‘What would you name this instrument?’

‘Fork,’ he answered.

In this way, my sister felt the matter was settled but she was worried a similar incident might occur with the knife, the lifelong boyfriend to the fork. Fondling the forks was just one of my sister’s late night activities. The others, she said, weren’t worth getting into. She was nearly seven months gone, a pregnancy at forty that the doctors described as ‘geriatric.’ We described it as miraculous. I listened, I listened, I half-listened. I was on a book tour and was, despite myself, despite the kind of person I encouraged myself to be by reading recommended deep literature, distracted by whatever hotel room I was sitting in – its flat design, creeping brownness and unfriendly furniture. Whenever my sister asked about the tour, or my work, which she found confusing and opaque and sort of disagreeable, like I’d started an argument I refused to finish, I simply said, ‘I love it. I really love it. I believe in it.’ Then we were silent for a long time.

‘What’s a person who talks constantly about what they like called?’ my sister asked.

‘A zealot.’

‘Am I a zealot now that I can’t do small talk?’

‘I’m not sure. You could be.’

‘Am I too chubby to be a zealot?’

‘You’re not chubby – you’re pregnant. And, anyway, I think zealots can be chubby.’