The Favorite Sister

by Jessica Knoll

  I have been saying I am too old for Talkhouse since before I was too old for Talkhouse. The crowd tonight is twenty-one years old or fifty, no one in between but the two of us. It’s the first time I’ve ever been where there is room to rest my elbow on the bar in the main room, with a clear view of the empty dance floor and the stage, where a few roadies are busy assembling a drum set. The rain has kept it quiet so far. My new wedges are squeegeeing water with every step and I don’t dare release my ponytail for fear of the shape my hair will take on its own, but the cameras aren’t here, two fingers of tequila are playing the tendons in my throat, and downwind, a pack of fraternity brothers in pastel shorts are debating how old to tell us they are.

  “Girls?” The bartender places two plastic cups in front of us, half-full with something clear. Vodka shots. Shit. They might not even be twenty-one. “From the gentlemen down the way.” The bartender indicates with a thumb. That two adult women with multimillion-dollar empires between them are referred to as girls and this group of rosy-cheeked pussy grabbers as gentlemen—even facetiously—is the problem with the world in two words.

  The boldest one calls over the Pool Party 2017 playlist, “You were looking too serious over there!”

  Brett turns to me, mouth agape, and I match her outraged expression—time to have some fucking fun.

  Brett shouts back, “You basically just told us to smile. It’s been illegal to tell women to smile since 2013.”

  He takes the rebuke as an invitation to approach, which, of course it was. Closer, I see that his baseball hat is from a sailing regatta he attended in Newport two summers ago when he was ten. “Yeah, ’cause no one ever tells men to smile. It’s only women who are expected to be pleasing and accommodating at all times.”

  Brett makes a raspberry sound with her lips. “Ex-fucking-cuse me?”

  The kid tucks his hands in his back pockets, broadening his hairless chest, ever so pleased with himself. “We watched that short Stop Telling Women to Smile in my women’s studies class.” He dips his head and looks up at us with a debilitating smile. “We watched your show too.”

  Brett flips her hair to the other side of her shoulder. It’s drying in gorgeous, wild waves. I’m still thinner.

  “So?” I rest a hip against the bar and fold my arms across my chest, scooping my breasts so that my top pulls up, exposing a sliver of lean midriff. “Which one of us is your favorite?”

  “Oh, man.” He laughs, twisting his hat around backward, smearing his thick blond hair across his forehead. If we were all in college at the same time, he wouldn’t bother with either of us. “Lauren, probably.”

  “Shocking!” Brett rolls her eyes.

  “You asked me who my favorite is. Not who’s hottest.” He looks right at me, and goddamnit if his shit-eating grin doesn’t impale me from my inner thighs to my sternum.

  Brett says, “Because it’s 2017 and women care fuck all if a bunch of whiskey dick frat boys think they’re hot.” She twists a hair around her finger, her brown eyes huge and nonthreatening. Oh, she cares. We all care. Women sexually attracted to socks are not impervious to the male gaze. The difference today is, we have to say that we are. Feminism doesn’t emancipate us, it’s just one more impossible standard to meet.

  Brett leans in closer, her voice greased with charm. “But for shits and giggles, if you . . .” She flutters her eyelashes up at him and waits.

  “Tim,” Tim supplies after an unsexy moment of confusion.

  “Tim,” Brett speaks his name with comic seduction, soft on the “T,” long and yummy on the “m.” “If you were to pick the hottest, Tim. Who would it be?”

  He gestures at us with a startled expression on his face, like he can’t believe we even had to ask. “Either one of you. And I swear I’m not just saying that because you’re both here. The other girls”—he shows them the exit with a sideways scoop of his hand—“I know a million girls who look like that. You two are different.”

  Different is good, Instagram tells you. Conformity is boring. Be you because everyone else is taken. Easy to repost in earnest when you haven’t labored under the duress of different all your life.

  “A tie?” Brett pouts.

  “Yeah, Tim,” I cosign, “girls like us? We don’t do ties. Someone has to lose.”

  Tim points his chin at the ceiling with a groan, as though we have tasked him with settling something as complex as the national budget.

  “It’s honestly a tie,” he says. “But if I’m hedging my bets . . .” He looks from me to Brett from Brett to me, oscillating between two sets of pleading oh, please, pick me! eyes. “I’d go with you.” He shrugs one shoulder half-heartedly in my direction.

  Brett covers her heart with her hand and crumples a little.

  “You don’t like guys,” Tim reminds her.

  “You’re into the cougar thing.” She sips her drink. “I get it.”

  The word “cougar” hits me like a fist wearing brass knuckles. My heart is pounding in my brain, clobbering my intellectual capacities, making only high school mean girl ripostes accessible. “Or he’s into the thin thing,” I say.

  “See,” Brett directs her plastic cup of vodka at me, jovially, “thin” failing to deliver the body slam I hoped it would, “the thing is, Steph—I could be thin if I wanted. You can’t be in your twenties. No matter how disciplined you try to be.”

  Brett raises her vodka shot and knocks it back, her face twisting gruesomely like a Salvador Dalí portrait. Tim watches us, a little nervously, unable to tell anymore if we’re joking. We’re deadly serious, but we can’t let him know that. He came over here to make us smile.

  “In that case,” I say, raising my shot, “to women being in their sexual prime in their thirties.” I knock back the warm vodka, gagging. Tim wasn’t wrong. We were looking a little too serious over here. And I’m not ready to get serious. Not yet.

  The nineties cover band comes on at midnight and we have no problem securing spots in the front row. The children who frequent this place are just wrapping up cocktail hour at their squalid summer shares. The rain stops at some point, and when a bead of sweat trickles down my spine I turn and realize it’s the next day, that the entire room has filled to its usual capacity, which is whatever one body shy of suffocation is. Brett and I are holding hands, dancing and screaming the lyrics to No Doubt and Goo Goo Dolls songs, making lewd Tim sandwiches to R. Kelly covers while the floor swipes at our feet with warm toffee gloves. A constellation of cell phones hangs in the air, capturing our every move.

  The lead singer is not much younger than me, her hair in high pigtail buns, and I do the math to figure out if she is closer to Gwen Stefani now than Gwen Stefani then. Then. Though, just barely. If she can be here, I can be here, I decide. As she sings the final verse of “Spiderwebs,” a girl in the crowd tugs on Brett’s arm. I can’t hear what Brett says when she turns to her, but her eyes light up in recognition and she throws her arms around her neck. Someone she knows. Someone to distract her. I gesture for Tim to crouch down so that I can shout in his ear, “Drink!”

  I take his hand, pulling him through the crowd, but I don’t stop at the bar in the main room, or the bar in the back room, or the bar outside. We keep going, into the loud, spongy night, past the bouncer standing beneath the white wood arbor, punching entrance stamps onto the backs of hands, and around the side of the bar and into the strip of grass between the outdoor patio and the next building, which I’ve never bothered to identify. There, I close Tim’s arms around my lower back and slip a finger under his chin, guiding his mouth toward mine. The first kiss is long, soft, and without tongue, leaving me bow-kneed and swollen.

  “Aren’t you married?” he asks, the noble question a gurgle from deep within his throat.

  “We can stop if you’re uncomfortable,” I offer sweetly, releasing the buckle of the needlepoint belt his mom bought for him. Tim groans. It’s not a no.

  We reenter amid protests from the peons who have been waiting in line
for the last forty minutes. At the outdoor bar, we find Brett stuffing a lime down the neck of a Corona.

  “I have been looking for you everywhere!” she cries. She jumps up and gets behind us, herding us like a flock, ordering, “Inside, inside. I have a surprise for you.”

  We get stuck in a jam at the door, and Brett takes the opportunity to dust the wet leaves and grass and crud off our new friend’s back in a dramatic, sweeping motion. “Steph,” she chides, slyly, “way to not be a dead fish, girlfriend.” I’m both incensed by the implication that I don’t have interesting enough sex with my husband to keep him faithful and pleased that Brett has noticed that I am desirable enough to have pulled a guy like . . . shit. I’ve forgotten his name.

  “If only Arch could be as lucky.” I tousle her hair, the way I’ve seen Kelly do to annoy her. Brett slaps my hand away, hard enough to be heard over the music.

  The three of us—the world’s most beat ménage à trois—push our way inside. At the bar, what’s his face runs into his friends again. Tim! they cry, and I silently thank them. Tim waves at me to go on with Brett, who continues to drag me onto the dance floor, holding one of my hands in both of hers for extra leverage. I glance back at him before the crowd swallows me whole—two newborns with tits have joined their group, are squealing, Oh my God, Tim! and reaching up to hug him because they are just so little and so pretty and so very, very young. It’s like the weight of the universe has suddenly settled on my eyelids. I could fall asleep standing up in this drunken, dancing crowd.

  Brett has forged a path to the stage, and she’s waving her arm at the lead singer, who points right back at her, as though she knows her. “So,” the singer says into the microphone in her loud, clear veejay voice, “you know I don’t usually take requests.” The crowd hollers, incoherently. “But there are special circumstances tonight, because we have two Goal Diggers in the houseeee!” This announcement is greeted with cheers that could be cheers for anything, and booing that is very specifically for us. Brett jams both middle fingers into the air.

  “And one of these bitches,” the singer continues, “has been screaming at this bitch to play ‘Bitch’ for the last hour. So what do you say we three bitches sing a song about bitches together?”

  More vague cheering. More intentional booing.

  A stagehand ambles toward us, sticking his hand into the crowd and hoisting the two of us over the large speakers. The stage lights are bright lie detectors, and I realize with a start that despite her twee pigtails, the lead singer might actually be older than me.

  She cups her hand over the mic and speaks to us. “Please tell me you know the fucking words.”

  “I dominated this song at middle school dances,” Brett says. “Steph, what was that? College for you?”

  The lead singer gives me a look—oh no she didn’t—and makes a grand gesture out of pressing the mic into my hands. “She can sing backup,” she tells me with a wink. The act of camaraderie frames the moment as two old broads taking back the night from the young buck. I am struck brutally and repeatedly with a blunt-forced thought: I never should have come here.

  The song starts, that bouncy pop beat laced with a few warning strokes of the guitar, gearing up for the title profanity that Brett screams into the mic with adolescent glee. Brett wasn’t in middle school when this song came out. I was. I remember my mother hanging up the phone with shaking hands, turning to me and asking if I had used street language at Ashley’s beach house after they were kind enough to host me for an entire week. That was the word ginger, golf-shoe-wearing Mrs. Lutkin had used. Street. I had washed the dishes after dinner and hung the towels to dry on the outdoor line and made the bed every morning, but what Mrs. Lutkin remembered most of my stay was the night she came home early from dinner and found Ashley and me in our pajamas, dancing around the family room to street music.

  Brett is having a hell of a time, whipping her long, wet hair in circles and hogging the mic only to screw up the order of the lyrics. I’m a bitch, I’m a mother, I’m a child, I’m a lover. By the second verse, Brett decides to personalize the song and shout, I’m NOT a mother, which no one thinks is funny but doesn’t seem to embarrass her.

  We’re at the part in the music video that involved a heavy lift from central casting. Black women, wacky women, butch women, old women, pretty women, all dancing together in the same room, proving that the bonds of sisterhood are stronger than cultural and generational walls, than the beauty standards that try to tier us. Whoo-oh-ohhh whoo-oh-ohhh. Brett turns to me, and in a moment of passion, reaches behind my neck and slips her hand under my ponytail. I think she might kiss me—put on a display of faux lesbianism to ruin the very last of our feministic cred—until I realize she’s sliding off my hair tie. Before I can stop her, she tosses it into the crowd with a mirthful laugh. “Let your hair down for once in your life!” she screams at me, forgetting—or not forgetting—that there is a microphone in her hand.

  It’s as though she pantsed me. I scan the crowd for Tim, hoping he isn’t watching this. I hope for something different when I locate him, surrounded by his friends, laughing and shaking his head. Why is he shaking his head? Is he denying that he hooked up with me? He says something in a defensive posture to a member of his group. Whatever it is only incites more teasing. He is. He’s denying it.

  The band plays the main chord, again and again, softer and softer, until we can hear the crowd cheering again. Brett passes the mic to me to take a deep bow, which is just another opportunity to flip her hair over her back like Ariel the Fucking Mermaid.

  “How about a round of applause for these two?” the lead singer says into the backup singer’s mic. “That was terrible,” she says over the jeers and cheers. “Terrible! Stick to spinning and making up stories, you two.”

  A low ohhhh travels the crowd and the lead singer brings her hand to her mouth, mortified. I don’t believe she was being malicious, but it doesn’t matter, because that’s how it was interpreted, and I have to say something. I have to defend myself. One of the bouncers is helping Brett scale the speakers, but I still have the mic in my hand when her feet touch the ground.

  “I am good at making up stories,” I say into the microphone, before I can think about it too hard. “But this one”—I point to Brett—“she’s the master at it.”

  Brett looks up at me from the crowd, laughing a little, because I’ve kowtowed to her all evening and she has no reason to believe I’m about to turn on her. “You heard we had a falling-out, right?”

  Brett’s mouth drops open a little.

  I continue with a rictus grin. “You’ll see it all play out on TV. But when you do, you should know it’s fake. The whole thing was fake. We made it up for the ratings.”

  “Get off the stage!” somebody yells.

  Brett is now trying to scramble back over the speakers like an obese mountain goat.

  “Oh, and no little girls are raped in the mountains of Morocco. Brett lied about that too. And oh yeah, they’re going to try to make it look like Vince fucks Brett’s sister this season. But that’s not who he—”

  Brett tackles me before I can finish. It is a real, honest-to-God football player tackle, a hug around my ankles that cripples me at the knees. I fall back on one hand, raise one filthy heel into the air for balance. It could be a dance move: Do the cover-up, and kick it like this.

  “Girl fight!” the singer cackles into the mic, like the fucking traitors we all turn out to be as soon as the opportunity presents itself. I hurry to my feet, furiously embarrassed, clenching my fists at my sides to keep from whaling Brett across the face, which is what I’m dying to do, though not here, not yet. I trundle over the speakers, refusing anyone’s help on the way down. It’s farther than I expected and I feel my shins in my pelvis when I hit the floor, stumble ungracefully, and stride out, as dignified as too many vodka shots will allow.

  We get stuck with a van again, Brett in the left middle two seats and me in the back row. The driver had waite
d after we’d gotten in, sure more of our friends were coming since we’d sat so far apart. “It’s just us,” Brett finally had to say. She doesn’t speak again until the cab has made a U-turn in the middle of Main and we have passed the old Presbyterian church on our right, and then she swivels in her seat to face me. She’s paled considerably in the last few minutes. “Everyone is probably too drunk to remember what you said anyway.”

  Somebody is scared. I hold her eye, a half smile on my face, my head grooving in gentle, unconcerned rhythm with the road. “I wrote it on the bathroom wall in permanent marker just in case,” I say. I didn’t, but I’m having too much fun, watching Brett quake in her sneaks.

  Brett turns away from me. “I never should have agreed to this,” she mutters to herself. Then louder, for the people in the back, “I didn’t need to agree to it. I’m not the one who’s past my prime.”

  I stare at her Cousin Itt hair for a hot minute.

  “Your sister is gorgeous,” I tell her, finally.

  Brett snorts. “She’s single. Go for it.”

  I find my lip gloss, dab some on. I must look a fright. “But I never worried about Vince around her. Not for a second. You know why?”

  Brett’s head bobs back and forth with the motion of the van. She doesn’t answer me. I grasp the back of her headrest with both hands and stick my chin over her shoulder. “Because she’s too smart for him. We all know Kelly’s the brains behind the operation. Vince likes his side pieces dumb. Dumb and not ugly, exactly—I mean, look at me—but, you know, like the castoffs. The lemons.”

  Brett takes out her phone and at first I think this is some sort of sister strategy that I never learned, being an only child and all—ignore her and she will get bored and give up. But then I see she’s texting Jesse. Steph just got on stage at Talkhouse and told everyone that the show is fake and scripted. She’s badmouthing all of us and I just wanted you to know before we film at your place tomorr—

  I rip Brett’s phone out of her hand, drop it on the floor, and smash the screen with a single stomp from my new wedges. This next part, this does happen so fast. Brett throws herself at me, all claws and wet lashings from her hair. She slashes my face, drawing three lines of blood along my jawline.