The Never Never Sisters

by L. Alison Heller

  Four (4) missed calls. The Argentinians, Dave had explained that morning when I’d finally asked who had been calling so incessantly. A blowup on one of their filings—extremely poor timing, yes, but it was what it was. There had been a jolt of something on his face—annoyance or fear—that made me wonder if it was his screwup, difficult as that was to imagine.

  I would tell him about this exact moment a few months later—my nonchalance as I cupped his work phone in my right hand, slowly typing in his password with one thumb, my left hand still on the fridge. If someone had forced me to articulate what exactly I thought I was doing, I would have said, I’m helping. It seemed obvious—to find out who called and report it to Dave when I returned his work phone, which he was probably missing like an amputated limb. I think this was when the questions started to bubble, although they were deceptively tiny, offering no hint of how angry and loud they would become as they roiled up to the surface.

  I assumed his password was 4165—our birthdays combined and transposed—our universal code for the ATM, our luggage tags, our online grocery delivery account. I used it as my password for everything, even though I had recently read that you weren’t supposed to do that.

  Maybe Dave had read the same article, because 4165 didn’t work. I tried other combinations: our anniversary; Dave’s birthday; Burp, the name of Dave’s childhood dog (which said everything I ever needed to know about his family); Hana, the lush Hawaiian coastline where we went on our honeymoon and Dave’s favorite place on earth; his initials; his mom’s maiden name; my name; my birthday. Access Denied. Access Denied. Access Denied.

  My phone rang from within my bag, and I knew without checking that it was my mom. “Hold on a second.” I pressed MUTE and pinned the phone under my armpit, her tinny stream of conversation still audible as I turned the doorknob to Dave’s office. “Here.” I stood in the doorway and reached out my right arm, his work phone still in my palm. He jumped from his chair to retrieve it. “You got more calls, and what on earth is your new password?”

  “What?”

  I grabbed my phone from under my arm. “Paige?” my mom was saying. “Paige. Paige? Hello? Paige? Paige?” I pressed CANCEL MUTE and closed my eyes against the headache that had started earlier in the day. “I’m here. Hold on. Just talking to”—Dave shook his head, eyes wide, hands crossed over each other, and I remembered he wasn’t supposed to be at home—“myself.”

  I shut the door on gesticulating Dave and walked into my bathroom to grab some Advil from the medicine cabinet.

  “Talking to yourself? Well,” said my mom, “should I be worried? What about?”

  “Cell phone passwords.”

  “Really? I thought you were a better conversationalist than that.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “Are you lonely, doll?”

  “No.” I shook out two pills into the palm of my hand and gulped them down without water, gagging only a little.

  “Sometimes people talk to themselves when they’re lonely. You’re going to get mad at me, but you know what would help—”

  “I can guess—a baby?”

  “A baby would give your life purpose. It’s the most fulfilling thing.”

  “Isn’t having a baby to cure loneliness the worst reason?”

  “If you’re sixteen, maybe.”

  I walked out of the bathroom with the goal of lying down on my bed, only to stub my toe on the two boxes I’d moved from the closet two days before. My mom’s pressure to procreate wasn’t the garden-variety Jewish-mother type; although I could appreciate her motive—replacement, “do-over”—it was no less annoying.

  I had no plans to tell her that I’d started to peek into strollers as I passed them on the sidewalk to see the babies inside, stretched out asleep or grasping fruitlessly at air. Or that Dave and I had both started to warm to the idea of having one.

  “Please stop.” I rubbed my toe, then switched to speaker phone so I could browse e-mail messages. I usually ticked off quite a few mindless tasks while my mother and I chatted.

  “Would you believe I didn’t even call to nag you about this?”

  “Yeah?” My e-mail checked, I opened the lid of the box containing my childhood mementos. The first thing I saw was my old pink journal. On the cover, I’d written Paige Reinhardt in carefully practiced bubble handwriting. The second box was Dave’s, and it had his hallmark lack of organization: an avalanche of loose photos chronicling everything from the bowl-cut years up to law school.

  What was the rule about throwing away stuff? If you hadn’t used it in a year . . . I stacked the boxes together and with my foot push-kicked them across the floor to my closet. “So, you’re not calling to nag me about grandchildren. And I returned your scarf last week. What else could it be? I’m on the edge of my seat here.”

  She chuckled and then shut off her laugh like a faucet. “She’s coming. On Saturday.”

  “Sloane?” It was odd to speak her name aloud; my voice seemed to belong to someone else at that moment. “As in the day after tomorrow?”

  “Yes. Your dad just spoke to her.”

  I clicked her off speaker and pressed the phone to my ear. “How was she?”

  “Fine, apparently. But you know, this is Dad.”

  “Hardly the world’s most astute social detective.”

  “To say the least. She’s taking a red-eye from California, so I thought maybe we could have breakfast here the morning she gets in.”

  “What about Nantucket?”

  “Obviously we won’t go now.”

  “How long is she here for?”

  My mom paused. “He wasn’t sure, so we’re planning on staying in the city for the time being. I’ll put together something little for Dad’s birthday.”

  “Did he get any other information?”

  “No.”

  “He’s useless for these types of things.”

  “I know. But apparently she was asking about you.”

  “That’s . . . new.” I was being charitable. In truth, it was a little creepy.

  She sighed. “All of this is new, hon. Can you do Saturday?”

  “I have clients in the morning.”

  “On Saturday?”

  I shrugged into the phone. “I can make it. I just have to leave in time for their session.”

  “Fine. I was thinking we’d just keep it the four of us.”

  “It’s five with Sloane.”

  “I meant the four of us—you, me, Dad and Sloane.”

  “No Dave?”

  “It might be a lot to spring on him. I mean, who knows how she’ll be? Tired from the flight, probably . . .”

  Tired—the ultimate euphemism. “He won’t care. He has work anyway.”

  “Good.”

  “Is this—you’re happy, right?”

  “Of course. She’s coming home. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.” Her voice did a little brassy vibrato on the last few words, like Ethel Merman. “I’ll leave you to your conversation with yourself, my dear. The lull of empty chatter.”

  She’d said the phrase so carelessly, the way you hum a catchy melody, like it meant nothing.

  Sloane was somewhere across the country, folding and packing T-shirts, probably smiling to herself about all the havoc she could wreak. And the rest of us would be defenseless, so used to exchanging empty chatter that we wouldn’t know how to call out to one another in warning.

  chapter eight

  THE FIRST TIME I ever saw Dave’s “pissed-off” face was about six months after we started dating. He looked so dramatically sulky—pouty lips, stern eyes, eyebrows slanted down—that I thought he was pretending to be annoyed about my plans to meet an ex-boyfriend for drinks. (I had since admitted to Dave that I was wrong about that fight; we were still i
n the early stage and had the roles been flip-flopped, I would have been insecure too.)

  Still, that face. I probably found it cute at the time, but I was long over that now. I smiled back to mitigate the flash of resentment I felt.

  It was late afternoon on Friday, July 4; Duane Covington and all other corporate Midtown offices had shut down hours before, but Dave, stubbornly, perversely, remained in the office/guest room, turned three-quarters away from me, his arms folded over his chest and his lower lip stuck out.

  “So basically,” I said, “you’ll shower and leave the house for my parents but not for me.”

  He sighed, deeply and slowly, an inhalation that seemed to take roughly five seconds to travel up through his nose, expand visibly through his chest and be expelled, in a rush of dramatic frustration, through his mouth.

  “That’s okay.” I leaned against the doorframe of his office and tried not to be bothered by the vaguely moldy smell that had bloomed over the past four days. His current diet was Coke, Eskimo bars, Cap’n Crunch and Pink Floyd on a loop—nothing capable of decaying. Was the smell possibly from him? “I understand. Not gonna pretend it’s not annoying, but I get it.”

  “So you’d prefer that I fake it with you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then schlepping to see some lame fireworks along with five million strangers is about the least compelling thing I can think of to do right now.”

  “I understand why we can’t leave the city for the holiday weekend, even though everyone else has—”

  “You could’ve gone.”

  “Right. Like I’d desert you now.”

  “Come on, Paige. It’s not about me. You have to stay for Sloane anyway.”

  “You’ve been in this room for four days. You need to leave. Just for an hour or two.” I desperately needed an evening out as well. “Welcome to tough love, Dave. How many times have you left the apartment since Tuesday?”

  He shrugged.

  “You’ve left once.”

  “I’ve left twice.”

  “What was the second?”

  “Mail room.”

  “As in the one in the lobby of this building?” Eyebrows raised, I walked over to his desk, where a newspaper was carefully folded up next to his keyboard.

  I pressed my finger hard against the headline about the financial scandal, and Dave recoiled, like his nerves had annexed the paper. “Did you just wince?” I poked the article and kept my finger on it, feeling like a locker room bully. Dave regarded me warily.

  “Are you getting your work done?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has anyone complained that you’ve missed deadlines?”

  “No.”

  “Has Herb said anything new to make you worried this won’t blow over?”

  “No.”

  “I am doing my best here not to push you.” No response. “But it’s time. You. Need. To. Go. Out.”

  Dave tilted his head to the side for a moment before giving me the briefest nod. Displaying a shred of self-awareness that I had feared extinct, he got up out of his chair and walked past me. Two minutes later I heard the shower running.

  My victory was short-lived. Dave emerged from our bedroom freshly shaved and cleanly dressed in a button-down shirt and Bermuda shorts, staring down at his work phone and grumbling about missing a call while in the shower.

  I ignored him and grabbed our picnic basket with two hands. I had ordered it in February—right after we put down our deposit on the Quogue house—fueled by fantasies of sipping wine on the beach, our grapes and cheese protected from the sand by a little red checkered blanket. The thing was ridiculously heavy, intended for riding in the backseat of a convertible along roads bordered in sea grass. We were taking the subway; Dave had made clear that if he was going to be so stupid and weak as to agree to leave the house, he refused to be so stupid and weak as to take a car through the July Fourth traffic.

  I knew if I asked Dave to carry it, he’d find one more thing to complain about and the night would be totally shot, so I lumbered along as best I could, gripping the ridiculously small handles, the wicker slicing my knuckles, while I tried unsuccessfully to make light conversation.

  When we emerged from the Forty-second Street subway station, it was so bright and sunny, I could smell my own heating flesh. As we walked, sweat pooled under the back pockets of my cutoffs and trickled down my legs. I didn’t comment on the damp stains at Dave’s armpits because he’d found enough to complain about: the crowdedness of the train, the heat and my plan that we should go all the way to Pier 84. “You know we could’ve seen them just as well on TV,” he said, “without having to travel through Hades.”

  I ignored him, but when we finally got to Twelfth Avenue, I dropped the godforsaken picnic basket, opening and closing and shaking out my stiff fist, and looked around: people in flag shirts, people clogging the intersections, people taking pictures, people in tank tops and bare chests, squinting into the heat.

  “Holy crap,” I said. “I feel like an extra in Gandhi.”

  “This”—he surveyed the crowd—“is my personal hell.”

  “Where should we sit?” I tried to find an empty patch, but all I could see were little red, white and blue bodies dotting the ground. I charged ahead, finally finding a two-foot patch of space in the middle of a cluster of several families.

  With Dave standing above me, I plunked down the basket and spread out the checkered cloth, placing on top of it the quinoa and three-bean salads and roast beef sandwiches. When I took out the small bottle of champagne and the strawberry juice, I placed it upright and in the center of the blanket. This was supposed to make him smile, but he hadn’t even noticed.

  Before I met Dave, I’d never taken a sip of alcohol. I felt comfortable enough with him to ask what I’d always pretended to not care about knowing: What did it taste like? (Surprisingly thirst quenching, he said.) What did it feel like to be drunk? (Fun, he said, or painful; it all depended.) His answers only inspired more questions, and I finally proposed outright that he help me learn for myself.

  He bought one bottle of champagne, two pints of strawberries, borrowed a blender from somewhere and made a passable puree. He didn’t have much experience with champagne cocktails, but he thought, correctly, that I might enjoy the taste. It’s funny now to remember what I pictured before that first sip—some sort of Hieronymus Bosch scene of mass projectile-vomiting mayhem.

  I sipped, though, buoyed by his emotional support. Dave had sworn he’d cut me off if I turned out to have an insatiable appetite, but I didn’t. We had two strawberry Bellinis each: perfectly enjoyable and perfectly easy to put down. I was free, and Dave had broken the spell.

  “Looks good,” said our neighbor to the right, who was chewing on a cart hot dog. He and his entire family were, I guessed, from the Midwest—all polite, milk-fed smiles crowned by four identical green foam visors shaped in points like the Statue of Liberty’s crown.

  “Nothing like a New York street dog,” I said, keeping my tone sunny and friendly.

  Dave met my eye for a long beat in a way that highlighted my phoniness—did I really believe there was nothing like a New York street dog? Had he ever even seen me eat one? “Hmm,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get one.”

  “If you’re hungry,” I said, unable to keep the steel out of my voice, “why don’t you eat some of the picnic I prepared just for you?”

  He picked up the container of three-bean salad, eyed it suspiciously and plopped it down. “Doesn’t really appeal.”

  I felt the Midwest family looking at us, curious.

  I leaned in close to Dave. “What the fu—” Five feet away the kids sat on their blanket, cross-legged, eyes wide, like Dave and I were performing in Shakespeare in the Park. “What the hell is your problem?”

  The Mid
west mom, inches from me, drew up her shoulders.

  “You know my problem,” said Dave. “You’ve had a front-row seat. And yet here we are.”

  The Midwest guy cleared his throat.

  “Not really. I don’t know shit. Sorry.” I directed that to the family. “You’ve totally clammed up. It makes me wonder, Dave. It really makes me wonder.” I realized then so simply: it had.

  He picked up the champagne and put it down. “What world do you live in that you’d think I’m in the mood for champagne and fireworks? Thank you so much for your feeble attempts at support. I know it’s a stretch for you, and I suppose it’s the most I’m going to get.”

  “What are you talking about? I’ve done everything you’ve wanted. I’ve left you alone; I haven’t told anyone about your mysterious work stuff. I’ve stayed in town with you this whole summer—”

  “A huge sacrifice. That I never asked you to make.”

  “That’s not fair. Even before your whole”—I pressed my index finger to my lips—“thing, I’ve just been alone, hanging in the winds for months. It’s not easy to be totally dependent on your schedule.”

  “Then don’t be. Find something to do. Are you even listening to yourself? How alone you’ve felt. What you want to do. Notice a trend?” He was practically spitting out the words. “I know it’s an impossible lesson for you to wrap your head around, but not everything is about you.”

  I stood up. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “My whole life, Paige, has been ignoring what I want to make you happy.”

  Arms shaking, I grabbed the wicker picnic basket. I was aware that we had an audience by this point—there was a silence all around us that hadn’t been there before. I thrust the entire basket at the Midwest family. “Enjoy,” I said, and pushed away through the throngs of sweaty, increasingly drunken people streaming in the opposite direction. I was almost at the subway when I felt a hand on my shoulder.