The Favorite Sister

by Jessica Knoll

  The Rangers’ game goes mute as I descend the stairs to our living room. We have stairs in our prewar brownstone on the Upper East Side. This is not just architectural fact, it’s consolatory, something Brett pointed out to lift my spirits two years ago, when my third book came out and bombed. You have stairs in your apartment, Brett said. Fuck it. Not everything you do can be a win. I thrill every time I upset these stairs. Vince is always threatening to fix them—rather, use my money to pay someone to fix them—but I savor their squeaks and grunts, audible reminders of my earning power. It is one of the few times I allow myself to dissociate, to think about how I will never be at the mercy of Lynn from Creative and Marketing Staffing Pros again, creak, because I started writing the blog on my lunch break, and, creak, through the 3:00 P.M. slump too, and it became popular enough to net me a mid-six-figures book deal. I will never have to deposit seven dollars into my bank account, creak, just to be able to make the minimum withdrawal of twenty, creak. Because I have sold over three million copies of my first two books and am on track to surpass that with my memoir, which the Sunday Review embraced, breathlessly. (Finally.) Then there is the million Warner Bros. paid for my life rights, and the half I’m getting to adapt my memoir for film. Creak. Creak. The last two stairs sound absurdist, like a witch opening a door to a haunted house that you will tour, scream-laughing. Vince is watching me from his favorite navy club chair. Navy is the only color I’ve allowed on this floor.

  Vince looks confused when he sees me. “You’re not going?”

  It’s the sneakers. My mother wore heels in her bathrobe and that’s what I was taught. “I’m going,” I say, sinking into his lap. “Do I look like a slob?”

  “Oof!” He grimaces, squirming a bit. “Wait. Wait.” He shifts me around on top of him. “That’s better.” He breathes a sigh of relief.

  “Thanks,” I crack, digging my knuckle into his bicep, still far from solid though I’m paying Hugh Jackman’s trainer three times a week.

  “Hey-ayy!” He clutches his shoulder, his lips an astonished o. How could anyone want to hurt Vince?

  “You never answered me.”

  “What?”

  “Do I look like a slob?”

  Vince pushes his hair out of his eyes. Between him and Brett, sometimes I just want to superglue their hands to their sides. “But a sexy slob.”

  “Really?” I frown at my feet. “I just wanted to be comfortable.”

  “You look cool, babe,” Vince says to the TV screen, lifting his glass of wine from the marble-topped side table. I can smell the vintage.

  “Is that the 2005?” I ask, an edge creeping into my voice. I don’t know much about wine, but I know I had to put a hold on Vince’s credit card last year after a Christie’s online auction for Fine and Rare Vintages ended in obscenity.

  Vince quickly sets the glass back on the table and his hand gets lost in his hair again. “Nah. 2011 or something lame like that.” He squeezes my side, and in a suggestive voice says, “You could stay, though.” His hand moves lower. Squeezes there too. “And we could open that one.”

  I swat him away with a giggle. “I can’t. I need to see them.”

  Vince holds up his hands. He tried. “I’ll be waiting up.” He purses his stained lips.

  It’s a chaste kiss—it always is, these days—but when I lean in, I get a whiff of his old Rutgers tee and can’t help but feel pleased. BO is the scent of devotion in our marriage. Vince is not getting up to anything smelling like that. He means it when he says he will be waiting up. My husband is never more faithful than when he has to crane his neck to look up at me.

  Jen and Lauren are already seated by the time I arrive at L’Artusi, which is an unremarkable observation unless you are dining in New York City, where no restaurant will seat you until your entire party is present. A rule designed to keep your own illusions about yourself in check, I imagine. You’ve seen the original Hamilton—with Leslie Odom Jr.!—and you’re wearing the Gucci loafers that are on back-order until next fall? Please let us know when your entire party has arrived.

  Celebrity doesn’t help. I’ve seen Larry David pacing the corridor of Fred’s and Julianne Moore told it will be an hour-and-fifteen-minute wait at the original Meatball Shop, before the Upper East Side expansion robbed it of its kitsch mystique. So it’s genuinely remarkable that when I arrive Jen and Lauren are seated, and it’s genuinely a shame that it has nothing to do with the show, and everything to do with Jen Greenberg’s mother. Yvette Greenberg isn’t a celebrity, she’s a cause.

  I am self-conscious about the sneakers as I tail the hostess through the restaurant. I’m used to turning heads at this point, but before, I was half-defensive about it, feeling like people were gawking for the wrong reasons. No woman in New York would admit to reading my books before this year. Opening Didion or Wallace on the subway is as much a part of the dernier cri as the bedhead hair and the jeans that asexualize your butt. What are those about, anyway?

  Up the stairs we go, to a table in the corner, where Lauren Bunn and Jen Greenberg are sitting shoulder to shoulder, facing me as though schoolgirls on a school bus. I am breathless to discover that they’ve left me the outside seat. It’s customary for celebrities to sit with their backs to a restaurant, so that no one can snap a picture while they’re sipping wine with one eye closed and sell it to In Touch to be strung up with the headline Rehab for Reality Star! When the Diggers dine out together, it’s always a passive-aggressive tango for the outside chair, and it almost always ends up sagging beneath the weight of Brett’s big butt. To have it reserved for me will go down as a flash point in our history. That isn’t a chair; it’s a throne.

  Lauren rises when she sees me. “Rock star!” she cries, the way townsfolk would charge witch in seventeenth-century Salem. Witch! Witch! She flings her arms around my neck and I note the empty martini glass over her shoulder. Jen holds up two fingers. It’s her second. We need to move fast.

  She pulls away and holds me by the shoulders. “You are a rock star!” Her $250 micro-bladed eyebrows come together as she studies me up close. “You even look different.” She pats me down, her hands finishing on my rear end, which she pumps and jiggles, her platonic expression that of a doctor performing a routine checkup. “You feel different.”

  “All right, all right.” I laugh, removing her hands. Blond and oversexualized is Lauren’s beat. She’s like the poor man’s Samantha Jones—too drunk to enjoy all the sex she has. “And what’s different is these.” I kick up the septuagenarian sole of my sneaker.

  Lauren expands a hand over her breast and becomes momentarily Southern. “As I live and breathe.”

  Jen does not get up and fawn all over me, but she does provide me an excuse for my tardiness. “Traffic?” she asks, as I take my seat and spread a dinner linen over my lap.

  “FDR was a mess,” I tell her, even though it wasn’t. Late is just another outside chair. Late is a muscle, flexing.

  The waiter appears, one arm folded behind his back.

  “The Monfalletto Barolo,” Lauren says, before he can greet us.

  “Excellent choice,” he says, giving Lauren a little bow. She appraises his backside as he walks away.

  “He’s not even cute,” Jen complains. Her brown eyes don’t narrow, they just are narrow. Jen looks like the angry stepsister of a Disney princess, a TV critic once described her perfectly on Twitter.

  “I don’t like the cute ones.” Lauren closes her lips around the toothpick in her drink, removing an olive with her front teeth. “You don’t have to worry about me around your husband, Steph.”

  “Nice,” Jen quips.

  Lauren’s mouth pops open. “I said Vince is too good-looking for me. It’s a compliment!” She reassures me, the tiniest bit of fear in her eyes. “It’s a compliment.”

  I don’t smile but I do make a joke. “Where’s the option on SADIE for women who like uggos?” Lauren is the creator but no longer the CEO of a dating website that is, depending on whom you�
��re speaking to, a bold challenge to the status quo or a rich girl’s vanity project. If you are told the latter, you’re speaking to Brett.

  A clever phrase materializes. “Hots and nots,” I suggest, feeling funny when Lauren’s boisterous laugh stops the conversation at the table next to us. Funny was always Brett’s thing. Now, all it takes is the palest attempt at humor, a small miracle given the fact that I was at the end of the couch at the last reunion.

  The waiter returns, holding three gorgeous air-blown wineglasses. I do not stop him before he can place one in front of me, and Lauren notices, elated. “She’s drinking!” she exclaims to Jen, with the momentous pride of a lesser woman who has just called up her family members to share that the baby is walking, something every baby ever has done since the dawn of time. I don’t drink much or like children. I have my reasons for both.

  “Unlike you,” Jen says crisply to Lauren, “she has something to celebrate.”

  That was not said with love, but Lauren giggles anyway.

  The server appears again, splashing Lauren’s glass with a taste of the wine. He places the cork next to her fork for her consideration, a little blood-bottomed thumb.

  “Excellent,” Lauren concludes, tossing the whole thing back without really seeming to taste it.

  “That’s about all I can handle,” I tell the server with self-effacing cheer midway through his pour. He rights the bottle and wipes its neck with a white dinner napkin.

  “To season four,” Lauren says, raising a glass. “And to the Oscar-Nominated Female fucking Director.”

  “Keep your voice down, crazy woman,” I say, clinking Jen’s glass lightly and waiting for someone to wag their finger at me, only no one does. Rule number two of Goal Diggers of New York City, no one is ever nuts, batshit, insane, sensitive, or emotional. No one overreacts. “Crazy” and its derivatives are words that have been used to shame women into compliance for centuries. The outside chair and a Chinese ducket on the word “crazy.” Toto, I’m not at the end of the reunion couch anymore, which is where they stick you right before they fire you.

  I make eye contact with Jen first, then Lauren. “I just need to say something.”

  “Speech.” Lauren thumps a fist on the table. “Speech.”

  “No, seriously,” I say, not laughing, and the smile vanishes from Lauren’s face in a swift show of obedience. I rest my hands flat on the table, taking a moment to gather my thoughts. “I need to say that I’m indelibly touched by your support. Especially because I know the three of us have never been particularly close.” My expression is full of remorse. I let Brett turn me against you, and I see the error of my allegiance now—forgive me. “The last few months have been equal parts exhausting and exhilarating. I never thought I would open up about my past in this way, and I continue to be surprised not only by the people who have shown up for me, but by those who have not.”

  I pause, and that’s when I notice that Jen’s nails are painted. Jen’s nails are painted and she has traded her heavy-framed Moscot Mensch glasses for contacts and very possibly, Jen has gotten a boob job. The sexier styling seems an obvious message to the person who broke her heart last season: This is what you’re missing. We have no idea who he is, if he even is a he. Jen refused to get into details at the reunion, telling us only that there had been someone “special” in the picture but insisting that it had ended, amicably, with agonized tears in her small eyes. In the three years I’ve known her, Jen has been notoriously tight-lipped about her love life, which infuriates Brett, perennial oversharer. But I always thought it wasn’t so much Jen holding back as Jen not having much to tell. I have wondered, more than a few times, if Jen might have been a virgin before this “special” person came along. There is something about her that is inherently untouchable but prepared to be, in case anyone comes along who is up to the task. The gruffness is an obvious defense mechanism, allowing her to reject you first.

  Of course, the viewers would be surprised to hear me describe our resident earth goddess as gruff. Jen presents much differently on camera, speaking in spiritual platitudes and extolling the virtues of veganism and plant-based alchemy, a lifestyle that has turned into her livelihood. Packets of super-herbs and adaptogens sell for seventeen dollars in her downtown juice bars that are frequent props in the Instagram stories of Gwyneth Paltrow and Busy Philipps. Last year, she opened a vegan restaurant on the corner of Broome and Orchard that has so many beautiful people willing to wait an hour for her air-baked sweet potato fries that plans are in the works to open locations on the Upper West Side and in Venice, for a cookbook and a national delivery service. No matter, her mother wishes she were more like Brett.

  Lauren tsks. “I cannot believe Brett still hasn’t reached out to you.”

  Jen shoots me a look.

  “What?” Lauren asks, noticing. Jen gets very busy, straightening her silverware and ignoring the question. “What?” Lauren repeats.

  “I have not heard from Brett,” I say. “But I spoke to Lisa recently.” I exhale, like what I’m about to say won’t be easy for her to hear. “She told me they’re going in a different direction with the new Digger.”

  “Okay . . . and?” Lauren looks as if there is a weight attached to her jaw, pulling everything in her expression down, down.

  “They’re bringing in Brett’s sister and her niece to replace Hayley.”

  Lauren looks like she might short-circuit. “Brett’s sister and Brett’s niece?”

  I nod.

  “But . . .” Lauren brings her fingers to her temples with a soft moan, as though processing this new information is a painful endeavor. “How old is the niece?”

  “Twelve,” Jen says, stonily.

  Lauren looks like she’s about to cry. She sits there, her face growing hot, her breathing short and frantic, waiting desperately for one of us to say something that’s going to make her feel better. “I don’t understand,” she says, finally. “She’s going to be a cast member?”

  “She’s like a friend of the cast. It’s the sister who is the cast member.”

  “And she has a twelve-year-old?” Lauren crows. “How old is she?”

  “Our age,” I say.

  “Thirty-one,” Jen clarifies, ruthlessly. I haven’t been thirty-one for a few years now.

  “Is she married?” Lauren asks, eyes shut, like she can’t bear to look until she knows it’s safe.

  “No,” I say. “Not married.” Lauren opens her eyes with a sad, resigned sigh. The news is not great, but it is tolerable. Lauren would probably like to be married with a baby and two ugly nannies, but our master and commander doesn’t want kids; henceforth, none of us are allowed to want them either. A few years ago I started to notice that mothers and not-mothers are equally fixated on childless women in their thirties, and in particular childless, married women in their thirties. How fun for me. It is a little like living in a swing state and being registered as an Independent. Both parties campaign fastidiously to get me on their side. The mothers make me promises like, I’m not that maternal either, but you love them when they are your own. The not-mothers rage against therapists and doctors who try to pathologize your reluctance for children. Neither party thinks they have anything in common with the other, which makes it all the more hilarious how much they do. It’s human nature to want your decisions validated. You feel better about yourself and your life when others make the same choices as you do. Luckily for me, I have no problem validating this particular decision of Jesse’s. Pathologize my contempt for kids all you want, I’ll never have them.

  “But she doesn’t even live in the city,” I continue. “I heard they’re setting her up in Brett’s apartment and Brett’s going to move in with the new girlfriend.”

  “Like it’s a storyline?”

  “No, like . . . they’re going to make it look like the sister has always lived here. No one’s seen the apartment Brett is in right now so there won’t be any confusion.”

  “Who is she?” Lauren demands.
“Do you know her?”

  “I’ve only met her here and there. But she basically handles all the day-to-day at SPOKE so that Brett can do the hard work of cohosting the fourth hour of the Today show when Hoda goes on vacation.”

  There is a moment of bitter silence. None of us are over the fact that we weren’t asked to do it.

  “Fine,” Lauren concedes. “I get the sister. I guess. But why are they making the niece a part of the show?”

  “Well, now you’re asking the right question,” I tell her. A bread basket is delivered to the table and out of habit, everyone reaches for a piece. Rule number three of Goal Diggers, we eat carbs. We are emancipated from diets, and we exercise for health, not weight loss. Even if you starve yourself between takes like Lauren or suffer from orthorexia like Jen, you play your gourmandism for the cameras (or always, if you’re Brett and you found a way to commoditize your thunder thighs). Jesse thinks we have seen too many white, straight women hawking flat tummy tea on Instagram. Women who refuse to eat processed food are passé.

  “The niece is black,” I say.

  Lauren’s jaw goes slack. “Is the sister black?”

  My mouth full, I shake my head no.

  “Then what? The niece is adopted?”

  I shake my head again, unable to elucidate while chewing. I’m the only one who actually took a piece of bread in the end. Jen and Lauren remembered the cameras weren’t around and returned their empty hands to their laps to be sniffed later.

  “Stop making me dig, for Chrissakes!”

  I swallow my food and tell her what I know. The data I’ve gathered from the field producer whose Net-a-Porter habit I shamelessly indulge every Christmas: that come season four, I will no longer be the onliest POC on the show. I felt both completely helpless and like I had to do something after I found out. Something that would make me better, stronger, irreplaceable. But beyond the plans I’d already put into place, there was nothing I could think to do, and so I called Sally Hershberger and arranged a last-minute blowout, even though my hair is always perfect and I didn’t have anywhere to go. Some of us eat our feelings; others turn a hot air stream and a round brush on them. I sat in the leather swivel chair with the junior stylist, the only one available at the last minute, and searched Layla Courtney on Instagram.