Sometimes, jokingly, when I can’t understand something on the books that Kelly needs me to understand, I will flop onto the nearest couch and bring the back of my hand to my forehead like a Victorian lady with low blood pressure, gasping, I’m the talent. But there is a kernel of truth in the performance. I am the talent! Not everyone can be the talent, just like not everyone can balance the books. Except, here is Kelly, her hair in a trendy blogger-girl braid, signed on for the fourth season of my show, able to do what I do and also what I can’t. She’s the talent too. So where and what does that leave me?
Outside smells like melted dog urine and gasoline. It’s the middle of May, but July hot. Kelly asks if we can talk before we get on the road. I’m dropping her and Layla off at the train station to head back into the city and taking Kelly’s car to Yvette’s house out east.
Now is when she’s going to tell me about meeting up with Jen and explain, I think, and ready my anger and resentment and yes, paranoia that I’m about to be eclipsed by Kelly once again.
Instead, Kelly stares at me for a long time, like I have something to say to her. “What?” I ask, finally.
“You seriously aren’t going to tell me?” Kelly shakes her head, her tongue pressed to the top of her lip in a mix of disgust and disappointment.
It can’t be the engagement. I asked Arch if she minded if I didn’t wear my ring for now. I wanted to break the news to Kelly in my own time, in my own way. I knew she would have a tough time with it. She thought shacking up with Arch after three months was moving too fast.
Besides. Whatever it is she thinks I’m not telling her, what she isn’t telling me is worse. She watched Jen express concern for my organs in her talking head last year, the patronizing worry in her brow layered over a shot of me taking a SPOKE class in a crop top. Waist circumference is directly tied to heart disease, she’d added, her Popsicle stick neck somehow able to balance a head swollen with that much prejudice and misinformation. You know what is directly tied to longevity? The number of friends you have, but you don’t see me going around insinuating that Jen will die early because she’s an insufferable twat no one wants to be around. Jen has found so many ways to call me fat without actually calling me fat she should win an award. To be clear, it doesn’t hurt me to be called fat; fat is not an insult to me. Fat is not who I am, who anybody is. But in Jen’s world, fat is an abomination of womanhood, and it hurts to know that someone is trying to hurt me by aligning me with the worst thing she thinks a woman can be in our culture, which is anything over a few pounds shy of nonexistence.
“You seriously aren’t going to tell me about meeting up with Jen?” I say to Kelly. “And you seriously did that? Behind my back? After everything she’s said about me?”
Kelly’s bitchy look falters. “How did you know about that?”
“Who knows you did that? Other than Jen, obviously?”
“Rachel,” she replies, naming one of the field producers.
My laugh is full of genuine pleasure. After the ROI debacle, it feels so good to be the one who knows what she is talking about again. “Let me give you a little piece of advice, Kel,” I say, lowering my voice as I glance into the back seat of the car, where Layla sits with the door open to get some air. I can hear snippets of the Instagram stories that aren’t interesting enough for her to watch to completion: half a word, a streak of a song, a few dog barks. “The field producers are like high-end strippers. They’re really good at getting you to spill your guts, and they’re really good at making you believe they give a shit. But it’s Rachel’s job to run to Lisa with anything you tell her, and then it’s Lisa’s job to get everyone else all riled up about it.”
Kelly nods, slowly, flippantly. When Kelly goes pious on me I am never more sure that I am capable of third-degree murder. I don’t want to just wipe that smug look off her face; I want to annihilate it. “See, I figured that’s how it works after Lisa texted me to ask how I felt about your engagement.”
Layla’s head pops out of the back seat. “You’re getting married?” she exclaims. Then she squeals, drumming her feet on the ground excitedly. “Can I be a bridesmaid? Please, please, please?”
So she does know. I guess I could have crafted a more strategic response to Lisa’s machine-gun spray of texts from earlier. But after Arch and I were done proposing to each other, I couldn’t help myself. How do you feel about your sister taking Jen Greenberg on a girl date? she had written, and so I had responded: It feels like not giving an F because I’m engaged!!!! But the truth is, that’s not what it felt like at all. It felt like someone had reached inside my body and turned my stomach upside down, shook all my organs onto the floor, and stomped on my spleen. By the expression on Kelly’s face, I know she knows it too.
Like most houses out east, the three—no, four now!—bedroom modern saltbox looks like a place of worship for a cult. It’s where Jen Greenberg was raised, so it would be the kind that spikes the no-artificial-sugars-added punch with arsenic. There is something about the Green Menace that is natural-born scary.
Last winter, Jen’s architectural overhaul included knocking down walls, adding a fourth bedroom and a saltwater infinity pool, and outfitting the kitchen in gray-veined Carrara marble, which should have been the second warning shot for Yvette, after Jen’s on-air claim that the reno was meant to make the house more comfortable for her mom. The thing about gray-veined Carrara marble is that it may look sexy, it may be all the rage on the home décor porn sites, but it’s not recommended for people who actually cook in their kitchens because it stains, scratches, and chips like a wet manicure. (Source: Stephanie Simmons. I heard the word “Carrara” and had a craving for ice cream.) You would think Jen Greenberg, kale smoothie millionairess, would opt for quartz countertops—not as dazzling, but much more durable. Only Jen Greenberg never intended to use that kitchen to make her not food into food. Instead, her intention was to fix it up, jack up the market value, and sell it to some HGTV hornball for a cool 3.1 mil.
Jen has the legal right to do with the house as she pleases. Ethically, she should be fined for all she’s fucking worth. She’s given Yvette no say in the decision to sell even though, for the last twenty-some years, Yvette has paid the property taxes and utilities, taken care of the landscaping and the leaks and the clogs. She’s replaced the roof, the kitchen appliances, and the crap furniture with gorgeous gray linen sofas and chairs. She taught Jen to swim in the ocean down the road, she’s brined fourteen tofurkeys in the Tic Tac–sized oven, and she’s shared gin and tonics on the back porch with Sir Paul McCartney. The house may be Jen’s, but the home was always Yvette’s. She’s absolutely heartsick to lose it.
I park Kelly’s car in front of the cheery red “For Sale” sign, by the flowering Japanese maple Yvette planted in honor of her late mother. The driveway is empty. The Greenbergs share an old blue Volvo station wagon, though Jen is “considering” the Tesla.
The sky is more white than gray, the sun illuminating the clouds from behind. It’s been raining on and off all morning, and I had to keep the windows up on the drive out here. Kelly’s car hasn’t had working AC since Obama was elected for his second term and the back of my T-shirt is color-blocked with sweat. My feet slide around in my sneakers as I approach the front door and knock. I wait. Nothing.
I check my phone. 12:47. Yvette said to arrive at 12:30 on the nose, which was anal and unlike her, but I figured it was because she wanted me to get there before Jen. She’s been out here two days already, trying to enjoy the peace and quiet before the weekend’s open house. I wait until my phone says 12:48 to knock again. Still nothing.
I cup my hands around my eyes and press my nose to the panel of windows shouldering the front door. Jesus. The house is now a Tibetan fur fever dream: shag white carpet, shag white side chairs, shag white throw pillows on the blessedly un-shaggy white linen couch. All this distinctively fuzzy décor paired with cold white stone floors. Limestone is what Jen went with, I recall Yvette telling me. It’s slipp
ery when wet—which makes perfect sense for a beach house with a pool. I’m afraid someone’s going to crack their head open, Yvette confided in me.
My sigh fogs the window, and I wipe it clean with my shoulder, searching in my bag for my phone.
“Hello,” Yvette says, on the third ring. Her hello is always the same, a velvety hell-low-ah, managing to be both unrecognizing and deeply intimate at the same time.
“Hiya,” I say. “It’s Brett.”
There is a pause. “Honey,” she says, “everything okay?”
“Ah, yeah.” I laugh. “Where are you?”
There is another pause. “What do you mean?”
“I mean.” I slap away a mosquito on my thigh. I wonder if Stephanie will be avoiding the Hamptons this summer on account of Zika. Seems unlikely. “You told me to come at twelve-thirty.” I wait for her to remember but she doesn’t. “So . . . I’m here.”
“Where?”
“Yvette!” I cry, exasperated. “The house in Amagansett!”
Yvette mumbles something to herself I can’t make out. “I thought we said Sunday,” she says. I can picture her squinting at the Imagined Desks of Historical Women calendar I gave her last Christmas, Mary Shelley with a glass of white wine next to her pen. “Is it Sunday?”
I suffer a spike of fear as I realize this isn’t Yvette being flaky, this is Yvette being in her late sixties and having trouble with her memory. “No, it’s Friday,” I say, gently. “We said Friday.”
“Honey, I am getting so old!” Yvette chuckles. “I come out tomorrow. Jen was coming this afternoon to show the house to a listing agent. I must have gotten my days screwed up.”
I squeeze my eyes shut and exhale hard. I’m stranded in the Hamptons with only the Green Menace to take me in.
“I feel horrible,” Yvette says, though she doesn’t sound horrible. She sounds like she’s in the middle of plucking her eyebrows or some other banal but satisfying activity, like I’ve interrupted her pleasantly productive afternoon. “Jen should be there soon. Why don’t you just wait for her?”
A smattering of raindrops cool my scalp. “It’s about to pour.”
“I don’t mean outside. The key is under the rock in the second planter around back. Let yourself in. Make some lunch. Jen had scheduled a FreshDirect delivery for twelve-thirty.” In an offhand manner that seems anything but offhand, she asks, “Is it there?”
FreshDirect. I wouldn’t take Jen to be so provincial. I scan the front patio, spotting faster with raindrops by the second, but I don’t see a delivery. “Nothing. No. It’s really starting to come down again.”
“Hmmm.” Yvette sounds concerned. “They might have dropped it off by the back door. Would you check?”
“Yvette, I’m sorry, but I’m not staying. I don’t feel comfortable being here without you.”
“Would you at least bring the food inside so it doesn’t spoil?”
I drop my arm by my side, shutting my eyes and taking a deep, calming breath. I return the phone to my ear and force a smile so that it sounds in my voice. “Sure.”
I unlatch the gate and walk parallel to the house. I can see the new pool, its tarp littered with leaves and dead bugs and one lone Solo cup.
“The delivery’s back here,” I tell her, as I round the corner and spot the cardboard FreshDirect boxes, soggy from the rain, piled two deep next to the double patio doors that have replaced the sliding door with the screen that used to always jump the track. The rain has almost washed away the ink on the note taped to the top box: two attempts to contact, left unattended per directions.
“Oh, good!” Yvette says. “Well, help yourself to anything you want—”
“I’ll just grab something at Mary’s Marvelous on my way out—”
“It’s fifteen dollars for a salad there!”
“Good thing I don’t eat salad then.” I locate the key and fit it into the lock. “I’m going now. I need both hands for this.”
“You are a lifesaver!” Yvette says. “Thank you. I am so sorry about today. But you won’t regret this.”
“Thanks, Yvette,” I say, hanging up and puzzling briefly over her last statement. What won’t I regret, exactly?
I hear a car chewing up the pebbled drive and I brace myself, thinking it’s Jen, but it continues down the road. Every crevice of my body is wet with sweat and the rest of me is catching up in the rain. I decide that’s the only scare I need—I cannot be here when Jen arrives. We might both die of discomfort.
I squat and hoist a box into the crooks of my elbows. I’ve not taken one step when the waterlogged bottom gives out, like one of those commercials showing what happens to bargain paper towels when tested with too much blue detergent. Jen’s groceries spray everywhere: on my shoes and bare legs and the fresh whitewashed oak porch. Mother. Fucker.
I step onto the lawn, wiping my feet on the wet grass like a dog, leaving behind what looks like yellow spittle. Egg, I realize, gross. It takes me a moment to connect the dots, because unlike Jen, I am not a masochist in a voluntary state of sustained primal hunger to meet the patriarchal-mandated beauty ideal. I eat eggs for breakfast and put cream in my coffee and cheese on my sandwiches and oh my God, bacon. That is a package of uncured bacon, seeping its pink bacony juice onto the new porch. It’s like a puzzle overturned on the table: Only when everything is laid out in front of you can you really start putting all the pieces together. Jen’s healthy, long hair. Her four-pound weight gain.
I hear another car approach, and I wait, unmoving, as its old engine fusses nearer. There is one short burst of hard rain, like someone has taken a cloud and wrung it out over my head, but I do not seek cover. The car door slams shut and Jen calls out, nervously, hopelessly, “Yvette?” My heart is banging like a gavel; hers must be too. She knows that’s my car in the driveway.
I listen to the gate open, to Jen’s careful footsteps on the slippery deck. I have to look away when she sees me. I can’t bear to see her so vulnerable and exposed. I have earned each and every unkind feeling I have toward Jen after the way she’s spoken about me to America. I get to feel vindicated by the discovery that the nation’s most sanctimonious vegan has been skulking around ordering bacon off the Internet like contraband. It’s turkey bacon. But still. She has no right to make that tragic face and make me feel bad, nearly empathetic, for her.
I make an intense project out of cleaning my shoes in the grass and speak casually. “I think it was from the rain. The boxes just fell apart when I picked them up.” I’m quick to add, “Yvette told me to bring them inside.”
I only look up when I hear Jen fit her key into the lock. She disappears inside, the door latching shut slowly but firmly behind her. For a moment, I think that’s it. Jen is just going to stay inside until I leave, maybe even for the rest of her life, so that she never has to deal with the fallout from this. It’s not the worst strategy.
But after a few moments, Jen reappears with a beach towel slung over her shoulder and some green plastic trash bags. She offers me the beach towel and shakes open a garbage bag. She picks up each grocery item and examines it for damage, setting it aside or throwing it out, depending. I don’t know what else to do other than help.
“It doesn’t look it but I think it’s still good,” I say, holding up a jacked-up wheel of Brie.
Jen holds out her hand, regally, as though I am a huntsman who has brought home the heart of a warring queen. I place the lump of cheese in her palm with a deep curtsy, playing along. I’m uncomfortable, and trying to act like none of this is that big of a deal, which I realize is very much in keeping with my nickname. Jen chucks the ball of Brie into the trash bag, hard, without bothering to examine it. Okay then.
“I had amenorrhea,” she says, tightly.
“I don’t know what—”
“I hadn’t had my period in four years.” Jen speaks over me without raising her voice. “My hormones were all out of whack. You can’t have your hormones out of whack when you’re trying to freeze you
r eggs, so that you can have a baby, which I would like to do, someday. My doctor suggested I try to go pescatarian to see if it would help. It’s just temporary, while everything stabilizes.”
I scan the groceries left on the deck. Not a piece of salmon in sight, but dairy and fatty cuts of animal hind legs for days. I can’t help but feel a teeny bit vindicated—See? Your way is not the healthy way. “Good for you, Jen,” I say. “You aren’t a strong woman for denying your hunger. You are a strong woman for standing up to society’s expectations of how we are supposed to—”
“Yvette sent you out here?” Jen demands, before I can say look.
I lift one shoulder in a vague non-answer, not wanting to betray Yvette, who clearly wanted me to discover Jen’s illicit affair with breakfast meats and put her on blast. Jen tightens the strings of the trash bag with a scowl. “She’s angrier than I thought that I’m selling. Or maybe she just actually hates me.” She hurls a carton of hazelnut coffee creamer into a trash bag and it splatters back at her in retaliation.
“Your mom doesn’t hate you, Jen. She hates that you are suffering and depriving yourself for an unjust cause. She hates that you see yourself as a body first and a person second. She just wants you to be—”
“I’ll get Lauren to invite you to her party. That won’t be hard. Getting Steph to film with you will be the real bitch.” Jen’s eyes are bright, unblinking. She looks away with a difficult swallow. “I’ll do my best.” She’s going to cry, I realize. In fact, I think I mumble Thanks so that she doesn’t cry. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do less than wrap my arms around an emotional Jen Greenberg. I’d come away with thorns, I’m sure.
The Favorite Sister Page 14
