Necessary People

by Anna Pitoniak

  Until, that is, she got to KCN.

  This is life? I could see the dismay on Stella’s face, during her early months of work. This is life? This uncontainable and roiling thing, chock-full of complicated ideas and obscure terms? Conflict, avarice, war, incompetence: when you paid enough attention, life had a way of showing its ugly chaos. For the first time, Stella didn’t understand what she was supposed to do.

  And now what did Stella want? She wanted the thing she had once possessed, which had been wrenched away from her. That sweet, velvety sense of belonging.

  The rich girl and the poor girl, the pretty girl and the plain girl. If we were characters in a story, Stella was the one you always wanted to be. The girl who is quick to laugh, good at making friends, charming to strangers, comfortable in her own skin; the girl whose beauty is equated with virtue. Her heart open and capacious, not curdled by desperate ambition.

  Real trust, Jamie said, can’t be transactional. And what is ambition if not a constant transaction? Hard work—days, weeks, months—in exchange for more money, more power, more influence. I wanted to succeed, and that was my problem: people could see that desire. They could smell it. How can you trust someone who reeks of ambition?

  Stella’s newly polished performance at KCN worked. The bosses noticed. It all happened within the span of a few weeks. She was promoted to assistant. She was invited to more meetings. People trusted her. Why? They knew she was rich, that she didn’t need this job. So she was doing it out of pure love for the work. Wasn’t that admirable?

  I’d had more than a year’s head start on Stella. But by that summer, she was closing the gap between us, and her shadow was looming over me again.

  Stella was a distractible driver, checking her phone and texting as we lurched through Friday afternoon traffic on I-95. It was a long drive to the house in Maine, where we were spending the week with her family. When we arrived after midnight, the house was mostly dark, but the porch light was on. The front door opened and a woman stepped out.

  “Nana?” Stella squinted. “Oh, Nana, you didn’t have to stay up for us.”

  “Don’t be silly, my dear,” her grandmother said. She was a petite woman, dressed in slacks and a cardigan and a string of pearls, her silver hair neatly bobbed. I shivered, still in the cotton dress I’d worn to work that day. It was August, but it felt more like fall.

  “Nice to see you again, Violet.” Mrs. Bradley smelled like lily of the valley as she brushed a dry cheek against mine. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Thank you.”

  Inside, the house was as I remembered it: grand but relaxed, with dark wood floors and white walls. There were family photos everywhere, Oliver and Stella in Kodachrome, ancestors in faded sepia. The property was set far down the driveway, at the tip of a peninsula, surrounded by water on three sides, the neighbors invisible. The house sat atop a prow of land, the lawn sloping down toward the rocky beach. As we passed through the wide living room into the kitchen, the windows were open to the night air and the roar of the ocean.

  It was inherently elegant in a way that made Anne and Thomas’s home in Rye look overdone. Anne, I had gathered, didn’t particularly enjoy spending time with her mother-in-law. Stella’s parents had their own beach house in Watch Hill, but the Bradley grandparents insisted that each branch of the family spend at least a week at the Maine compound, adhering to strict rituals of tennis matches and cocktail hours and dinner parties. The elder Mrs. Bradley was a far better Wasp than Anne would ever be, and this made Anne insecure.

  “Did my parents already go to bed?” Stella asked.

  “They were tired,” Mrs. Bradley said, placing a loaf of bread on the kitchen counter. “Did you eat? You look thin, Stella. Your mother doesn’t feed you enough.”

  “My mother doesn’t feed me at all.” Stella laughed. “That’s Violet’s job now.”

  “Oh?” Mrs. Bradley said, pulling a serrated bread knife from the knife block.

  “Violet’s a great cook,” Stella said. “Among her many talents.”

  “She is?” Mrs. Bradley said, with a faint smile that suggested of course she is, just look at her. “Well, Violet. You must cook for us sometime.”

  After Mrs. Bradley had fixed us chicken salad sandwiches (awfully dry, without mayonnaise or mustard) and said good night, Stella opened the refrigerator. “Aha,” she said, holding up two bottles of beer. “Let’s go eat outside.”

  As we left behind the radius of light that spilled from the living room windows onto the lawn, the night was dark and clear. The grass, when we sat down on it, was parched and spiky. Mrs. Bradley had said it was one of the driest summers on record.

  “God,” Stella said, leaning back on her elbows and kicking off her sandals. “Aren’t you so fucking happy to be away from that office?”

  “I suppose,” I said.

  Stella laughed. “I suppose,” she said, in a singsongy voice.

  “What?”

  “You’re so serious. Loosen up, Vi, we’re on vacation.”

  Stella pulled a joint from her pocket. As she sparked the lighter and raised a questioning eyebrow at me, I shook my head.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  “Miss Goody Two-Shoes,” she said. “Here, take it.”

  “No, really.” I pushed her hand away. “It’ll just put me to sleep.”

  She shrugged and took a long inhale. “Your loss, loser.”

  My phone buzzed against my leg: an e-mail from a senior producer, about a segment I’d been working on. I was typing a response when Stella reached over and grabbed the phone, tossing it on the grass between us.

  “Hey!” I said. “That was work.”

  “No phones at meals. Nana’s house, Nana’s rules.”

  “Does your dad know about this rule? I bet you ten dollars we come down for breakfast tomorrow and he’s already glued to it.”

  “Rude, Violet.”

  “I bet you a hundred dollars.”

  “Look,” she said, pulling out her own phone and dropping it next to mine. “Even though you’re being very snarky—here. A show of good faith.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Fine,” she said. After a second, she started giggling.

  “How high are you?” I said.

  “I got it from some skeeze at the gas station,” Stella said. “It’s probably laced.”

  We lay on our backs for what felt like a long time. In Maine there was no light pollution, and the sky was bright with stars, so regular and dense that it looked like a dark colander studded with thousands of holes. There was silence, except for the roar of the ocean and the occasional rasp of Stella’s lighter.

  My phone vibrated again. I couldn’t resist, and sat up to see what it was. The screen was alight with a text message from Jamie. I was reaching for it when Stella grabbed it first. That’s when I realized it wasn’t my phone—it was hers.

  She curled over the phone, her body angled away from me.

  “Jamie’s texting you?” I said.

  “He’s funny,” she said. The light from the screen illuminated her smile.

  “What is it?”

  But she was standing up, sliding her feet back into her sandals. She bit her lip, then pushed a button and held the phone up to her ear. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she called back over her shoulder. “Take the guest room at the end of the hall.”

  “What about you?” I said.

  She was already halfway back to the house. “Hey!” she said, her voice clear and sweet. Then she was laughing. “Yeah, I know. I know.”

  Her voice faded into the distance. A knot formed in my stomach. Jamie and Stella were texting each other? They were calling each other? After midnight on a Friday? I had always assumed that Jamie disliked Stella, that their friendship only existed because they had me in common. But lately I’d been working harder than ever, determined to stay at least a step ahead of Stella in the KCN hierarchy. I’d been spending less time with both of th
em.

  I started to gather the dishes. Stella had left behind her beer bottle, her plate with her half-eaten sandwich. Her joint, too. It was smoldering where she’d dropped it, the grass around it starting to smoke. The orange glow of the ember was like a firefly trapped in the darkness, a dangerous remnant of Stella’s routine carelessness.

  For a second, I thought about leaving it there. Maybe the flame would catch, ripping across the bone-dry lawn toward the Bradley compound. A horrible, magnificent inferno. A lesson to her. If I kept cleaning up her mistakes, Stella would never learn.

  The days in Maine felt expansive. I’d wake without an alarm, the guest bedroom flooded with sunlight. Stella aside, the Bradley clan were chipper morning people, eating breakfast on the porch and chatting while they read the Wall Street Journal. Breakfast, like every meal, was a civilized affair. A glass bowl of fruit salad, a silver pot of coffee, scones and muffins baked that morning by Louisa, their efficient housekeeper.

  Stella would wander downstairs in late morning. We’d go for a swim off the end of the dock, or we’d play tennis on the Bradley’s court, or we’d take the boat to the next town over. Occasionally we ran into someone Stella knew, locals Stella had befriended in previous summers. “Tenth grade,” she said, waving as she reversed the engine and we pulled away from the gas station dock. The manager of the marina waved back, beaming at her. “I blew him in the back of his car.”

  “Really?” I said. He was scruffy and potbellied, and definitively not her type.

  She put on her sunglasses. “He sold me coke. It was a fun summer.”

  In the afternoons, we’d return to the house for a late lunch and then fall asleep reading on the shady porch, the thrillers and spy novels that lined the Bradleys’ bookshelves. As the day faded, we’d go for another swim. Mrs. Bradley had us gather for cocktails at 6:30 p.m. precisely. We had to be showered and dressed. The housekeeper would have dinner waiting for us afterward.

  The first time Stella had invited me to her house, Thanksgiving of freshman year, I was convinced I’d never fit in. Pop culture had taught me how easily the poor girl embarrasses herself in the company of the wealthy. But this, it turned out, was a myth propagated by the wealthy themselves. Rich people love their shibboleths. They love to act like their language is impossible to learn. The truth was that anyone with halfway decent powers of observation could pick it up in five minutes.

  This was how I purchased my way into Stella’s family: with good manners. To keep a toehold in this world required careful behavior. The worst thing I could do was to flout the rules. Old money hates, hates the nouveau riche because the nouveau riche haven’t bothered learning the rules. They’re having too much fun getting drunk and riding Jet Skis. They’ve got their money, which is more important than social acceptance. Anyway, if you give it a few generations, their money will look like anyone else’s.

  It wasn’t so bad, really. The Bradleys were boring and uptight, attached to ritual and manner, but at least they were predictable. Not like my own parents, with their constant eruptions of anger. Here, as long as you followed the rules, you were okay. As long as the conversation was polite, it didn’t matter what was being said. Of course, this led to a lot of boring conversation, a lot of dull iterations of the name game. You know how old houses always look good? Whether mansion or tenement or saltbox, if it was built more than a century ago, it has a certain air of elegance. But when you think about the small rooms, the outdated layouts, the bad electrical wiring, you realize you’d never actually want to live there.

  That was like the world of the rich. From far away, it looks enchanting. Up close, you realize the elegance is just a product of stasis. It’s easy to be tricked into thinking something is beautiful.

  Toward the end of that week, Stella and Oliver and I took the boat out after lunch. It was a perfect day: the sky bright blue, the air hot, the sea glassy and calm. Hundreds of yards offshore, Stella cut the engine. We bobbed in silence for a while. I closed my eyes. This sense of peace, this calm solitude amid pristine wilderness—I’d admit, the wealthy did this well.

  I heard Stella laugh. “What?” I said, opening my eyes.

  “This freak,” she said, pointing at Oliver, who had just taken off his T-shirt. “Jesus, Oliver, do you ever go outside?”

  “You are pretty pale,” I said. His bright white skin made him look like some nineteenth-century German aristocrat down from his schloss. Possibly tubercular, probably just delicate.

  “You’re supposed to be the nice one, Violet,” Oliver said. He placed his sunglasses atop his carefully folded T-shirt. “Anyone else coming in?”

  “I just ate,” Stella said. She lay on the bow of the boat in her bikini, her stomach taut and hip bones protruding, her slender legs crossed like drinking straws.

  Oliver climbed onto the edge of the boat. “Violet?”

  “Sure,” I said. When I jumped in, the water was so cold that it made my breath catch.

  Oliver lay on his back, moving his hands just enough to stay afloat. “My grandmother taught me to swim. In the summers, when I was little,” he said.

  “Don’t bore our guest,” Stella called from the boat.

  “Don’t eavesdrop,” Oliver called back. He flipped over and faced me. We were both treading water, eggbeater-style. “She taught me and Stella. She drilled us when we got older. She’d ride next to us in the boat and time us on a stopwatch.”

  “I can picture it,” I said.

  “Nana doesn’t fuck around.” Oliver smiled. He took a precise satisfaction in swearing. Then his smile disappeared. “Actually, it’s a sad story.”

  “What happened?”

  “When she was a little girl, her older brother drowned. He took the boat out, the weather turned, and he capsized. He wasn’t very far offshore when it happened. If he’d been a stronger swimmer, he might have made it back. His body washed up the next day. She was five years old, I think. It’s one of her first memories.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “Sad, isn’t it? That’s been her obsession ever since.”

  Oliver flipped onto his back. I joined him, spreading my limbs like a starfish. With my ears filled with water and my eyes looking only at the sky, I felt hyperaware of how far out we were, how deep the water was beneath me. Hundreds of cubic meters of water separated me from the ocean floor, but if I went motionless, the water meant nothing. Dead weight, sinking right to the bottom.

  When we climbed back aboard, Stella was lying on her stomach, paging through a gossip magazine. “Why are you reading that trash?” Oliver asked as he toweled off.

  “I don’t know if you’ve heard, Oliver, but I’m a journalist. I need to keep up.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Violet, I thought you’d be a better influence on her.”

  “Get fucked, Ollie,” Stella said lightly, using the nickname he hated.

  “Don’t worry,” Oliver said to me. “This is just her thing. Whenever she fought with our mother, she’d go out in this boat and sulk for hours. Bobbing around and stewing.”

  “I can hear you,” Stella said.

  “It’s Pavlovian. This boat brings out the bratty teenager.”

  “Or maybe it’s because you won’t stop giving her a hard time,” I said.

  Oliver looked surprised. I shrugged. “It’s vacation. You’re being kind of harsh.”

  Stella clambered over the windshield onto the deck of the boat. She smacked her brother on the arm. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s for being a paternalistic asshole.”

  “Ow,” Oliver said whiningly.

  “You should listen to Violet,” Stella said. “She’s smart. If she says there’s something wrong with you, there’s something wrong with you.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” Oliver muttered, pulling his T-shirt back on.

  Later, as the sun was sinking and the air was growing cooler, Stella drove us back in. She’d had her boating license since she was little, and she handled the boat deftly, much b
etter than she did the car. She steered with one hand, her blond hair streaming in the wind. Oliver and I were sitting on the bench seat in the back.

  “I’m sorry about earlier,” he said. “I didn’t mean to start a fight.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “No, it was rude. You shouldn’t have to sit through our bickering. But I guess we both revert to childhood when we’re together. I guess it’s inevitable.”

  “I’m an only child.” I shrugged. “What do I know?”

  “I worry that you have this distorted view of me. Stella probably says otherwise, but I’m actually a nice guy.”

  Oliver looked genuinely distressed, and I felt bad. He was oddly old-fashioned, but he also had an endearing sincerity—the opposite of Stella’s cool sophistication.

  “I know that!” I said, touching his hand. “Of course I know that.”

  The waves had picked up, and occasionally Stella hit them at the wrong angle, bouncing the boat violently. She whooped with delight.

  “Slow down!” Oliver shouted at her. “This is way too fast.”

  “Can’t hear you!” Stella shouted back.

  Oliver edged forward to where Stella held the wheel. He said something inaudible, and she rolled her eyes, but the boat slowed down slightly. As Oliver made his way back to the bench seat, Stella shouted, “Sorry my brother’s such a pussy, Violet.”

  “She’s insane,” he said. “I have to remind her that not all of us have a death wish.”

  “She’s too confident for her own good.” I thought of the smoldering joint the other night. “Maybe you should let it happen. One bad accident and she’ll be scared straight.”

  “And get another lecture from Anne and Thomas about how I failed to take care of my little sister?” He laughed bitterly. “No, thank you. They still think it’s my fault that she disappeared at Christmas two years ago.”