“Adorable,” I tell her. “You look my age.” Lauren barks, Ha! Jen texts someone.
I generally like Lauren. She’s Lauren Fun! What’s not to like? We’ve always treated each other like friends of a mutual friend who get along exceptionally well whenever occasion brings us together, who have each other’s numbers but only so we can text logistics. What time is (enter mutual friend’s name) birthday dinner tonight again? I think it’s ridiculous that she’s been sentenced to indentured servitude just because Jen brought her on the show—they know each other from summers in Ohm-nah-gansett. Jerk me. But the truth is I’m not interested in taking on Lauren as a real friend. I get all itchy around people who aren’t honest with themselves, and Lauren crashes into that category headfirst double fisting tequila on the rocks and shouting Let’s do it again! You could argue Steph suffers from the same affliction, but Steph is honest with herself. It’s everyone else she’s lying to, which is not necessarily a criticism. I just think she could be more strategic about which lies she tells.
Jen turns her infamous squint on our showrunner. “Lisa, I have to be on the east side at one for another meeting.”
Jen has this expression about her, Ugh, people, do I really have to talk to them? There is something about her that is fundamentally unfuckable. I guess she’s pretty—we’re on TV, the network’s not evolved enough to cast uggos yet—but it’s an anemic kind of pretty. She’s a whey-faced canvas upon which she’s applied the “vegan boho” palette. Lots of tea-stained lace schmattas are involved. Maybe that’s where this unsexiness comes from, the fact that she has no idea who she is or what she stands for. Everything is an imitation, flower child cosplay, with the end goal being money and success, rather than fulfillment and pleasure.
Even this bougier Jen before me feels like a well-thought-out move on the chessboard. Word is that Jen has glossed up her appearance to reignite her relationship with the person who put her heart through the Vitamix just before the last reunion. The third button of her linen shirt is undone. Saucy minx. But there is no way to know for sure, primarily because Jen refuses to talk about her personal life. This sends me into orbit. We are on a reality TV show! We signed up to share all aspects of our lives, even the humiliating heartbreak. I had to endure Sarah dumping me twice—once in real life and once again when it aired, but Jen has managed to wiggle off the hook. She wants the promotion and adoration of being on TV without having to make any of the sacrifices.
“Now that we are all here,” Lisa tucks her chin and stares me down from the other end of the table, “let’s get started.”
Kelly picks up her production packet, her spine rod straight.
Now that we’re all here? I glance at the door. “Steph lost in one of her two hundred rooms?”
The field producers laugh.
“Steph’s not coming,” Jen seems very pleased to tell me. Since when does Jen refer to Stephanie as Steph?
“She’s not coming?” I survey the room, looking for anyone who is as gobsmacked as I am. We have never had a Digger skip the all-cast prod meeting before.
“She’s in Chicago with Marc,” Lauren volunteers, watching closely for my reaction, knowing I am well within my rights to bug out that Stephanie is in Chicago with our director of photography, alone. They don’t film you early and alone unless they think your storyline is pertinent to the season. No one wanted to film me, early and alone, presiding over the yoga auditions.
I refuse to show that I care, but damnit, I care. “Why wouldn’t we do it when she’s back then?” I ask Lisa.
“Because,” Lisa says, “you’re all busy bitches and four out of five of you ain’t bad.” She picks up the production packet and flips the page. “Headline events . . .”
Everyone turns their attention to the packet before them. I try to focus too, but all I see are numbers and words instead of dates and locations. I detect movement and glance up in time to see Lauren lean into Jen’s side and whisper something, holding a knuckle to her lips to contain a giggle. Jen manages to crack a smile without short-circuiting.
It’s hard to believe that the very first episode of Goal Diggers kicked off with Jen and me shopping for recycled dresses at Reformation, hours before the party for the grand opening of her second Green Theory location. We were something resembling friends back then, butting heads once we realized that our definitions of health inherently threatened the other’s business model, with hers being “skinny” and mine being “eat the doughnut.” Truly, that is the crux of our issues—that and Jen’s unmitigated disgust with my body—though Jen likes to make it out as though I “stole her mother.” It’s not my fault Yvette is disappointed in Jen for choosing a path in life that makes women smaller.
“We had talked about doing a ride to raise money for Lacey Rzeszowski’s campaign,” Kelly is suddenly saying, and I come to with her looking at me, encouragingly. We’ve been discussing ways for our businesses to acknowledge the results of the election.
I clear my throat. “Lacey . . . ?”
“Rzeszowski,” Kelly prods. “We talked about this, remember? She’s one of two hundred women who are running for political office for the first time this year? Making a bid for a seat in the New Jersey Assembly?”
I am drawing a blank. The Green Menace seizes the opportunity.
“One thing I’m in the process of doing is designing a limited line of juices called Clintonics,” Jen says, her eyes ever narrow.
Lisa taps her pen against her forehead for a few moments, trying to work out what Jen has just said. “Oh my God,” she says when it clicks. “Clintonics. Fucking hysterical.” Yeah, so hysterical she doesn’t even laugh.
Lauren nods. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Her energy is manic, depending on what she’s on that day. “And they’re supposed to be good for your voice, right, J?”
“They’re concentrated with what we call ‘the warming spices’ in Ayurvedic culture,” Jen says in a tone that tells me to prepare for terminal boredom. “Cinnamon, cardamom, and clove are traditionally used together to provide a diverse supply of antioxidants that help boost immunity, but tulsi is the new super spice that the homeopathic community has discovered supports lung and throat health. To help our voices as women carry.”
There are mumbles around the room about how smart this is, how timely. I’m just thinking that of course that guy broke up with her. Jen’s farts must smell like death.
“We could sell them at the front of SPOKE,” Kelly suggests, tentatively, because she knows we have a strict policy about pushing food or drink on our customer. I feel strongly that SPOKE shouldn’t influence women’s dietary choices. They get enough of that everywhere else they go.
“You need a permit to sell outside of the restaurant and it’s a pain in the ass to get,” Jen says. “Plus, your girl doesn’t really do the juice thing.”
“I love them.” Kelly shrugs, and I put my finger on it. Kelly’s lost weight. It’s only a few pounds, and I didn’t notice in those duster cardigans she usually wears, but in that tight getup from Forever 21, her chest looks like a grill pan.
Jen raises her eyebrows, amused by this, and I can’t say I blame her. If Jen’s sister were here, sucking up to me, I’d be pretty fucking amused myself.
“Think on it,” Lisa says, licking her finger and turning the page. “Let’s talk Morocco.”
Now it’s my turn to sit up straighter. Let’s! “I had a conversation with one of my investors last night. About funding the trip. Whatever we need. Travel, lodging, transportation. We’re totally covered.”
“Is big daddy single?” Lauren bats her eyelashes.
“Back off,” Lisa says. “It’s Greenberg who’s in dire need of rebound D.”
Jen turns a livid red.
“Wow, Laur.” I fold my arms across my chest, glowering at her. “That’s really sexist that you would just assume my investor is a man.” An awkward hush falls over the room, and I let everyone stew in it a good long while. “Just kidding.” I stretch my arms over my
head with a leisurely yawn. “He’s totally an old white dude from Texas.”
Everyone but Jen laughs.
“Can we focus, please?” Lisa squeaks. Lisa is pushing fifty but has the voice of an eleven-year-old choirboy and this manages to make her all the more terrifying. There is something deeply disturbing about being told that you’re about to become so irrelevant even your own grandchildren won’t remember your name by a woman who sounds like Pinocchio, which is something Lisa said to Hayley when we went to Anguilla to shoot her new control-top swimsuit line. You haven’t lived until Lisa has eviscerated you in an exotic location.
Lisa slaps the page of her production packet. “Morocco,” she says, impatiently. “We are thinking last week of June. We start filming June first so that’s enough time for everyone to get their feet wet, work through their shit”—she points her pen at me—“and come together for a big, bleeding-heart getaway. My rough understanding is that we start the trip in Marrakesh, and then head out to one of these villages in the mountains.”
Kelly raises her hand, as though she is in school. Lisa calls on her, playing along. “Yes, Miss Courtney?”
“Layla has become pen pals with a girl in the village of Aguergour. She’s one of our top sellers on the shop. I thought it would be a nice moment for the two of them to meet in person.”
There is silence all around, mine sharpest. This is the first I’ve heard of Layla’s pen pal. Kelly learns fast. She always has.
Jen, of all people, is the one to say, “That sounds like a really powerful moment.” But then she keeps talking. “The thing is, I don’t think I can go in good faith. The CDC recommends a hepatitis A vaccination for Morocco, the makers of which are on PETA’s list of companies that test on animals. They use baby bunny rabbits.” Her chin quivers.
Lisa holds her hand up to silence me, though I haven’t spoken. “Is that right?”
Jen dips her finger into a tub of lip balm free of parabens, sulfates, and phthalates and dots it on. That was a quick recovery—from almost crying over the baby bunny rabbits to an act of personal grooming. “But just because I can’t make it doesn’t mean it’s not a great idea.” She smiles at me, like she had to grease her lips just to get them to do that.
Now Lauren raises her hand. “I hate to pile on,” she says. “But we’re in app development for the new version of SADIE that’s tailored for the LGBTQ community. My CEO is worried about me going to a country that prosecutes gays and lesbians for their sexuality.”
Lisa works her pen between her thumb and index finger, index and middle, holding Lauren accountable in a thousand-yard stare. “Weren’t you in Dubai over the holidays?”
Lauren dips her finger into Jen’s tub of lip balm. “For one night.” She rubs her lips together. “You can’t fly direct to the Maldives.”
I snort. “And where do the Maldives stand on gay and lesbian rights?”
Lauren gapes, opening and closing her shiny mouth a few times before a few sober brain cells bump into each other. “I read that your investor had his daughter’s wedding at Trump Bedminster!” she cries, completely out of context. A field producer covers her mouth with the production packet in horror and I’m tempted to do the same. What she just said is true, but Lauren has never come for me before. A two-fingered chill walks my spine. What is happening here?
“People! People!” Lisa chirps in a way that makes Kelly bow her head and plug a finger in her ear. “Enough. Everyone is to mark June twenty-third to July second on their calendars. We will find a location that works for the group.”
“Lisa,” I sputter, “I have to go to Morocco this summer.”
Lisa curls her lip, disgusted by my desperation. “We’ll figure it out, Brett.” She waits for Jen and Lauren to turn their attention back to the production packet. What the fuck? she mouths, jerking her head in their direction. I exaggerate my shrug to show I’m just as baffled as she is. Lisa rolls her eyes and mouths Fuck my life, both because she is almost fifty and doesn’t realize that no one is saying that anymore and because what’s my problem is Jesse’s problem is Lisa’s problem. That’s always the way it’s been. So why does this time feel different?
CHAPTER 4
* * *
Stephanie
“When I was sixteen, I entered an essay-writing contest at a major women’s magazine and won. In the contest’s half-century history, I was the youngest woman ever to take home the honor. You have a voice beyond your years, the editor in chief told me in a handwritten note, and because of that we are willing to bend the rules for you. I had lied about my age on the application form. Contestants had to be eighteen to enter. To this day I keep that note in my top desk drawer, reading it whenever my confidence wavers. It’s a reminder that I once believed in myself so much that I, Stephanie Simmons, broke a rule.
“There were prizes. Publication, of course. Five thousand dollars, though that was incidental. I would have left all of it on the table for the trip into the city to meet with a literary agent. Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein before she turned twenty. S. E. Hinton published The Outsiders when she was just sixteen. I had the first two chapters of my novel already drafted and an outline of the rest, and I planned on not just meeting with Ellen Leibowitz of the Ellen Leibowitz Agency to find out how the publishing world worked, but on pitching her and leaving with representation.
“ ‘We’ll make a day out of it!’ my mother exclaimed after reading the letter from the editor in chief. Breakfast at the Plaza. Shopping at Bloomingdale’s. She would get a manicure while I was no doubt signing with the Ellen Leibowitz Literary Agency on Lexington Avenue (‘Lexington Avenue is a very upscale street,’ my mother said with authority when she looked up the address on the Internet.) We’d end the day with a celebratory drink at The Ritz Carlton in Battery Park, watching an orange sun glaze the Hudson. I would order an iced tea and my mother a glass of champagne, and when the bartender wasn’t looking, we’d swap. ‘Oh, Stephanie,’ my mother said, pinning the letter to the refrigerator with a magnet from Baltusrol Golf Club (I was a single-digit handicap by the time I entered high school). ‘Aren’t you so proud of yourself?’ Her blue eyes brimmed with tears, the effect infuriating and depleting all at once. Let me have this, I remember thinking, incapable of parsing what I wanted more: to break something or to sleep.
“I understand my anger and my exhaustion now. As a child, my mother was constantly asking me to perform for her, to reassure her that I was doing well, that I was thriving, that I was happy. That she was a good mother and that she had made the right choice in adopting me, defying all those who counseled against it. She was single, they told her. She was fifty. She was white. Did she have any idea how much work it took to raise a child in a two-parent family? Sure, she could afford help, but wasn’t it a little bit cruel, wasn’t it a little bit selfish, to bring up a black girl in a town as homogeneous as Summit, New Jersey, just because she missed her window to have a baby of her own? My mother was married briefly in her thirties, the ink barely dry on her divorce papers before her own mother was diagnosed with an aggressive and intractable form of breast cancer. She put her life on hold—thirteen years of it—to take care of her mother, and her death left a void for a new dependent. She was volunteering at a women’s shelter when a counselor mentioned a friend’s troubled teenage daughter had gotten pregnant, and that the family was looking to put the baby up for adoption. ‘I didn’t care if you were black, white, green, or polka-dotted’, my mother told me the only time I asked her why I didn’t look like her. ‘I wanted you.’ It was the closest we ever got to acknowledging my race.
“ ‘You’ll need an outfit for the interview,’ my mother said, even though I didn’t. When I went back to clean out the house after her death five years ago, I donated so many unworn pieces to that same women’s shelter that a volunteer asked me if I had a clothing store that had gone out of business. But my mother insisted that I take my winnings and go to the Short Hills Mall two weeks before the meeting. �
�So there’s time to get to the tailor if we need to.’ My mother loved the tailor. At five-foot-one and ninety-seven pounds, she needed his step stool more than I ever did. I had twenty-five pounds and half a head on her by the time I could drive. People didn’t know what to make of the two of us. This frail, glamorous white woman approaching her seventies and the young black girl dressed in her likeness. Was I her elderly aide? Her expensively turned-out housecleaner? I grew up stared at. Sometimes I wonder if it’s the reason I feel comfortable buying tampons with a camera crew in tow.”
The joke elicits a few laughs from the audience gathered to hear me read from my memoir at the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago. No, I realize, my eyes settling on a woman in the third row. Not a laugh. A yawn.
“I asked my best friends to accompany me to Nordstrom,” I continue, speaking over the voice inside my head that insists I am boring everyone. Get to the good part already. “As always, Ashley, Jenna, and Caitlin went best of three on a game of rock, paper, scissors to decide who got to drive my car to the mall that day. I hated my blue bimmer. I felt screamingly self-conscious behind the wheel, ever since the night a middle-aged white man saw me searching for my keys in the parking lot of Kings and called out, ‘Hey! You! What are you doing to that car?’ He probably had a daughter my age, but to him, I wasn’t anybody’s daughter, a promising young woman with the fifth-highest GPA in her class, a nationally ranked field hockey player, or a talent on the page. I was an anonymous, suspicious, and potentially threatening you. The word still makes me shrivel in shame. I tried to imagine any of my friends being addressed as such and could not. I saw the way grown-ups looked at them—with fondness, with amusement. Oh, let them eat candy for breakfast now. Let them break curfew. Real life will come for them soon enough. Some people got mulligans in life, but I learned early on I was not to be one of them.
The Favorite Sister Page 8
