The Never Never Sisters

by L. Alison Heller

  He got up from the chair and stretched back his arms. “Okay.”

  chapter fifteen

  EVERY WORKDAY MORNING at roughly eight fifteen, Dave shoved his keys in his leather messenger bag, slung that bag over his shoulder and set out for the twenty-block walk to work. I’d accompanied him a few times, so I knew that throughout the walk he was largely distracted by thoughts of the day’s deadlines and calls. His ultimate destination was the General Motors Building on Fifty-ninth Street, a skyscraper set off from Fifth Avenue by a plaza that sat squarely in the middle of a major Manhattan artery: diagonal from Central Park and directly across the street from the New York Plaza Hotel.

  That morning, as always, he strode across the plaza, ignoring the fountains, the small crowd gathered around the morning news program being filmed there and the tourists waiting for the toy store to open. He walked quicker than some of the joggers streaming into the park, passing through the security turnstiles and not pausing until he turned right into one of the elevator banks designated for Duane Covington, LLP.

  He had worked at the firm for twelve years and inevitably bumped into someone he genuinely liked. That morning he saw Stan Blakesey and, as always, Dave brightened, and they gossiped about fallen comrades until Stan got off on seventeen.

  When the elevator doors opened on twenty, Dave walked down the sunlit hall to his office—a four-hundred-square-foot perfect rectangle in the northwest corner of the building with park views. Dave was proud of his office, especially after Herb had confided that his assignment had been a matter of some delicacy. It needed to be large enough to acknowledge Dave’s substantial rainmaking contributions to the corporate practice, but not so large as to piss off his more senior colleagues. All in due time, Herb had said.

  As soon as Dave plopped down in the chair to log onto his computer, Herb himself knocked on his door. Getting visited by Herb was strange enough—usually Herb did the summoning—but the tentative politeness of his knock made Dave half rise out of his seat. When Herb shut the door behind him, Dave knew something big was happening.

  Herb asked Dave how his summer had been going. The two often spoke several times a week, so Herb knew damn well how Dave’s summer had been going. “Fine,” said Dave, trying to be casual.

  “Good,” Herb said. “Do you mind coming up to my office?”

  The two of them clipped up the internal stairwell, Herb setting a fast pace and Dave keeping step and wondering if all this secrecy meant a spot had finally opened up on the compensation committee. It was one of the most prestigious at the firm, and Dave had been gunning for Richard Abbott’s spot, since Abbott was rumored to be decamping to another firm.

  Hedda Brynn, the human resources representative, was already sitting in Herb’s office when they got there, her legs crossed tightly and a folder on her lap. Dave greeted her and asked, with concern, if this was about her son. The kid was a tennis player, nationally ranked in some teen tournament. Dave had spent some time talking to him at the last family retreat and felt a connection. Perhaps he was in trouble and had asked for Dave, even if, as Dave pondered this, he doubted whether a seventeen-year-old would really need a good corporate lawyer.

  No one said anything and Dave was about to ask more questions, but Herb, now safe behind his desk, leaned forward, hanging his head sadly. “Dave, buddy,” he said, “you’re the subject of an ongoing investigation, and you need to stay out of the office until it’s cleared up.”

  A joke, Dave thought. He looked at both of them, half smiling, but when their faces stayed serious, he got that it wasn’t a joke. His brain frantically sorted through his cases and his associates. “Is it the Pinkus Farms matter?” he said. “The work Noah’s doing on Arkat? Is it—”

  “Dave.” Herb patted the desk gently. “That’s all we can say. But I know in my heart”—Herb palmed his chest—“that you’re as squeaky clean as they come. So let us go through formalities here, and you’ll be back as soon as we can clear up everything.”

  They agreed that Dave should maintain productivity on his matters. Ideally, Herb explained, he’d work at home. Ideally, they could keep his inconvenience to a minimum. The firm would supply whatever equipment he needed. Then Herb accompanied him—first, back to his office, where Dave packed up a Bankers Box, and second, down to the lobby, where a town car was sitting on Fifth Avenue, waiting to take him home. Dave wondered whether he had passed the car, sitting empty, waiting for him, twenty minutes before, on his way into the office. As soon as he buckled his seat belt, he started to cry.

  When he finished talking, Dave sat silent for a few minutes on the couch. Then, rather abruptly, he got up.

  “Are you going back to work?”

  I was surprised at how relieved I was when he shook his head and held out his hand. I followed him to bed and we tucked into our sides at the same time; then he reached out his hand for mine across the middle of the bed. Within seconds, I felt his hand go slack and heard his breathing slow with the unbothered sleep of the innocent.

  Dave’s report had been convincing and detailed, but my eyelids sprang open every time I tried to close them. I felt like he was lying.

  But why wouldn’t he tell me truth about this?

  It was hard to breathe in that position, so I released my hand from the weight of Dave’s and sat up. I snuck to my closet. One of the blue notebooks had a pen—a twenty-year-old Bic, its blue top streaked white with tooth marks—stuck in the spiral. I selected that one and flipped past my mother’s scribble, stopping at the longest entry I could find.

  chapter sixteen

  Frankie was grumbling right up to when he dropped us off at the car dealer. I slammed the door on him rather than say for the fifteenth time that morning that Sloane earned it, so let’s just be happy about that fact. Let’s not waste our time bitching about a thing. It’s only a thing. We can provide it; it makes her happy: everyone wins.

  He kept at it, though. Since when does seven months of playing by the rules get someone a car? A car? You think I ever got a brand-new car when I was a teenager? Seven months of sobriety means she gets a later curfew, a new sweater. (I think his real problem was with the color: mint green. Cars, Frankie thinks, are silver or black. Maybe—if it’s a Ferrari or a little sports number—cherry red.) “What did Pressman say about the car?” he asked. “He can’t think this is a good idea.”

  Slam dunk for me. “Ask him yourself,” I said. “Come to a fucking session and ask him yourself.”

  Frankie shut right up—he has made clear his position on journaling. We get it, Frankie. We all get it. Men don’t show their feelings.

  I haven’t actually told Pressman about the car. I’m not scared of his disapproval, but I think he’s getting fixated on what he calls my “Guilty Feelings.” He’s very disapproving of these Guilty Feelings. “Vanessa,” he said last week, “I don’t want your Guilty Feelings to run the show.”

  I was touched (it’s the closest the guy has gotten to expressing a direct opinion); too touched to tell him that as a mom, I have nothing but my Guilty Feelings. They are my touchstone. If you don’t feel guilty, especially when you know it’s your goddamn fault, that all your kids’ problems can be traced to your bloodline, you’re not doing your job.

  I don’t think Pressman has kids. I don’t see any evidence of them in the driveway—no basketball hoop, no swing set. The only hint of his life outside the room with the couch is the bad cooking smells through the vent. I was talking with G. in the waiting room about the car thing, and we both started to sniff at the air—there was a starchy, overcooked, heavy odor overpowering the room like those waves of smell in a cartoon.

  “Potatoes?” G. said.

  “Sauerkraut,” I said.

  “Boiled beef? No.” G. sniffed. “Broccoli, first steamed, then boiled for twenty minutes, then microwaved.”

  “What’s his deal?” I asked
.

  G. pointed toward Pressman’s closed door. “Based on the smells, I think he lives alone with his housekeeper-cook, a refugee from the Marriott prison institutional cooking services who dresses in one of those black-and-white maids’ uniforms and walks around with an ostrich feather duster.”

  We laughed way out of proportion to how funny it was, but sometimes a joke just hits right. I needed at that moment for Pressman to be reduced to a goofy caricature. I don’t know why, I just did.

  We had one minute left. One minute before the start of the hour, when Pressman would open the door for G.’s session. I didn’t want him to see me still there, so I started to leave.

  “About the car,” G. said, “I think you should go with your gut. You’re her mom, and if you know she’s in a good place, that should be conclusive.”

  I do know she’s in a good place, a much different place from where she was last year. For one, the company she keeps. G. told me that a parent who was halfway paying attention would have been able to take the temperature from G.’s group of surrounding friends at any given moment, to tell whether G. was using or not.

  Jeremy is a relief. Not just because I know the dad’s a pediatrician, but just look at him. The button-downs and baseball caps. He shakes my hand, calls me Mrs. Reinhardt. He looks me in the eye. He’s on the swim team. He talks about movies and early-morning practices and algebra tests. No room for monkey business with all those late-afternoon practices. What’s that phrase I heard Sloane say? “His body is a temple.”

  Last year, one of the things I kept coming back to was how much easier it would be if Sloane were a boy. Not that boys can’t get abused that way, but something about my skinny little daughter out on the streets at midnight met me at the place of my greatest fears. I felt as if all the caution I’d used in my own life—calling cabs when I couldn’t afford them, wearing flats so I could walk fast late at night when leaving work—had been prematurely spent.

  It’s not like I wanted to give her a car last year, to be used by those greasy hoods she hung out with. Who knows what would’ve happened in it? Now it’s a different story entirely. And even if I do have Guilty Feelings, that’s not why she’s getting one; she gets the car because it’s Sloane’s birthright as a regular suburban daughter who turned sixteen and whose parents can, with a little extra budgeting, afford it.

  chapter seventeen

  I WAS STILL sleeping, my face pressed against the notebook spiral, when my phone rang. “Mom?”

  “Hon, talk me through something.” She was using her rushed party-planner voice, so I assumed she was calling to brag about something like the thread count of the napkins for my dad’s party later that night.

  I checked my watch. Theoretically, clients were due in my office in three hours. But because it was the Jacobys, I wasn’t holding my breath. “Sure.”

  “Do you think Sloane will be okay tonight, with all the people?”

  I exhaled. This! This, I realized, was one of the reasons why I hadn’t stopped reading the journals, as maddening as they were. They rambled. They were out of order. They required constant flipping through pages and indecipherable initials. But still. They were a missing piece to everything else that we couldn’t discuss: my grandfather, Sloane’s adolescence, why she—steel-nerved, tough, frank, bossy Vanessa—dissolved around Sloane. “I do. I think she’ll be fine.”

  “Did you ask her to bring Giovanni? Because I don’t want to bring it up without her telling me about him and—”

  “Mom. I haven’t talked to her either.”

  “It’s a lot of people for her alone. She’s meeting Dave. She’s seeing the Rabinowitzes again. I could tell Cherie not to come.”

  “Isn’t it more celebratory for Dad if they’re there?”

  “Come on. He doesn’t care. And what if she needs to smoke?”

  “You did not just say that. You’re going to cancel Dad’s party so your daughter has enough time to smoke?”

  “I guess not.”

  “It’s not that many people. It’s”—I calculated the guest list in my head: Mom, Dad, me, Dave, Cherie and Darren Rabinowitz, and, of course, Binnie and her husband, Michael, who happened to be Dave’s law school friend and was incapable of discussing anything that wasn’t about work or baseball statistics, and Sloane—“eight people. She can handle it.”

  “Would you look after her?”

  “Of course. Every forty-five minutes, I’ll take her for a smoke break.”

  Dave wandered past me into the bathroom and did a double take when I said that. “Sloane,” I mouthed, and he nodded, pointing to the shower to indicate his destination.

  “Thank you, my dear,” my mom was saying. “That relaxes me plenty.”

  “You’re joking, right? I was joking.”

  “Bye, sweetie. Oh, and I did something funny.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a surprise. You’ll see tonight.”

  I stood there after she hung up until I heard Dave turn the water on, and then I darted for an empty trash bag. Since his suspension, things had gotten a little gross in the orbit of his personal space—no time, he claimed, no time—and I’d been sneaking into his office whenever he showered, just to pick up the empty bottles and wrappers, to clear the crusty cereal bowls and spoons. It made the smell in there a little fresher, even if I always felt like I was doing community service—shuffling around the room, white bag in one hand.

  I patted the papers on his desk, listening for the telltale crinkle of a Pop-Tarts wrapper buried by books and documents. There, faceup on his desk, was his work phone, the automatic lock function disabled because of a book corner pressing down on its keyboard. Hey, the message he’d been typing read. Good point about the collateral. But I happppppppppppppppppppppp. I released the P key and picked it up, and there the thing was, in my hands, unlocked and innocent. No need for a password.

  The water flow turned quiet. Dave, three rooms away, was done with his shower, reaching for his towel, pressing it against first his face and then his shoulders. I toggled to the call log and back to the e-mail screen. There was no time to really read anything, but it was immediately apparent: Dave had been in touch with more people than Brian the Moronic. And wasn’t that the whole point of having a liaison? To not contact these others: Maya, Nell, Matt, Jack? The door creaked and I dropped the thing back on the desk, walking clear out of the apartment and down the hall barefoot to the trash room. Technically, it was a waste of both a garbage bag and a trip—there was only one Eskimo bar wrapper and a paper—but I went anyway, slamming the door hard when I left.

  Why wouldn’t he tell me the truth?

  Scott Jacoby’s eyes were bleary and red, possibly from crying or possibly from smoking pot. (I’ve learned the hard way that disengaged and sad can read very much the same in my office.) Now that he wasn’t in his work clothes, he kind of looked like a pot smoker—shaggy blond curls pushed back with small oval sunglasses on the top of his head. Plaid shirt. Droopy khaki shorts with paint splotches. We hadn’t gotten beyond pleasant greetings before Scott started twisting and turning in his chair as though what he really wanted—to the point of obsessive distraction—was to crack his lower back.

  Helene, on the other hand, was dressed for a tuna-salad luncheon at the Junior League: green pastel collared shirt and pencil skirt. Kitten-heeled shoes. I got a little knot in my stomach at that. It sounds superficial, but sometimes people who dress like they want different things in life actually do.

  “Okay to start?” I asked.

  “What you said, last time, about what do I want?” Scott’s voice was soft, and I nodded to encourage him. Sometimes, by the end of my sessions, I felt like a bobblehead doll. “That’s irrelevant.”

  “How so?” I said.

  “It’s about compromise and sublimation.” The red eyes were from crying, then.<
br />
  I nodded gently. “Like, what?”

  He shrugged. “I’m basically being asked to ignore and forget.”

  “Can you give me more details?” He shrugged again. “I ask what you want because I believe that, as a foundation, you both have to want the marriage to work, even if you don’t see how it can. Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then,” I continued, “once you remind yourself that you want it to work, if you learn how to reflect—truly understand where each other is coming from—it won’t feel like compromise.”

  I admitted to them, because I’d seen skeptical expressions such as theirs before, that I knew reflection sounded cheesy, but it was effective. If you can concentrate on listening to another person—without your own viewpoint getting in the way, without judging or discarding or thinking of a response—for the simple purpose of taking in someone else’s reality, you start to understand her.

  “How do we do it?” said Scott.

  “You’d listen to Helene, try to repeat the essence of what she said in your own words and repeat it back to her. Then vice versa.”

  “I’m ready,” Helene said in that get-down-to-business voice. “Let’s start.”

  Scott started pulling at an imaginary string on his pants leg.

  “Scott?”

  He stopped fidgeting. “Yeah. Reflection. I get it.”

  “He’s fine,” Helene said. “Right, baby?”

  “I’m fine.” Scott cleared his throat. “But don’t you want our backstory first? So you can decide who’s right?”

  “That’s not what I do, Scott.”

  “I know.” He removed his sunglasses from the top of his head, shook out his curls and put the glasses back on.