The Spinster Sisters

by Ballis, Stacey

  “So Brant tells me you’re an expert on relationships,” Mallory says.

  “Well, I’d hardly say that,” I say. “The work my sister and I do has less to do with relationships to other people and more to do with the relationship you have with yourself. It’s about how to embrace your life no matter what your relationship status. And if you are in a relationship, how to not lose yourself. Our primary philosophy is that you can’t be a good partner to somebody else unless you’ve clearly defined who you are and what you want in the future.”

  “Wow,” Mallory says. “I’m just lucky you didn’t have all that relationship expertise when you were married to Brant, or maybe I’d still be alone!”

  Sweet Cap’n Crunch. What the hell is this bitch aiming at?

  “Well,” I say, “I couldn’t ask for a better ex-husband. I’m probably one of the only people who can honestly say that getting married was one of the best things that ever happened to me, and getting divorced was one of the best things that ever happened to me.”

  Brant smiles. “See? That’s why you’re my favorite ex-wife.”

  “What’s that I smell?” asks Mallory. “Vietnamese food?”

  “No.” says Paige. “We had Thai.”

  “Oh,” says Mallory. “I was just wondering because I’m very knowledgeable about Vietnamese culture. I lived in Vietnam for over a year. I speak the language. Do you speak any languages?”

  “French,” I say.

  I can’t look Paige in the eye. I know she’s got a look about her that says, Who the hell is this woman?

  “Actually, there’s a lot of French influence in Vietnam,” Mallory begins. And then proceeds to regale us for a full twenty minutes about her life in Vietnam, her study of the culture, her desire to return with Brant and show him her village. She talks a blue streak. And she has one primary topic: herself. We hear the entire story of how she and Brant met. We hear how she was a clarinet player of such caliber that she was recruited by the army to play in one of their orchestras, and that was how she paid for college. We heard about her privileged Jewish upbringing in Savannah, Georgia, and her subsequent estrangement from her family. She flops around on my couch, posing and posturing and letting one bit of information about herself lead into the next in a manner that practically sucks all the oxygen from the room. Brant sits on the chair, this strange look of pride and nervousness on his face.

  What the hell is he thinking? I look at the clock over the television. It’s ten thirty. They’ve been here for a half hour. Mallory has not asked either Paige or me anything about ourselves. Nor has Brant participated in the conversation. It’s been a monologue on the wonders of Mallory and her exciting and dramatic life. All I want is to find out if the mother penguins make it back to the daddy penguins in time to feed the baby penguins so that they don’t die. Mallory pauses to take a breath, and I jump on the break to say, “That’s very interesting. You know, I feel bad; I invited Paige over to watch this movie, and we still have a half hour left. You guys are welcome to stay and watch with us, but I think we’ll get back to it.”

  “Oh no, we couldn’t,” says Mallory. “We have shul in the morning.”

  “Shul?” I ask Brant.

  “Shul,” he says.

  “Orthodox shul? With the curtain down the middle and all the Hebrew?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “What’s that mean?” asks Paige.

  “Apparently, it means my ex-husband has converted to Judaism,” I say.

  Actually, Brant is technically Jewish. His mother was the granddaughter of a rabbi. But she gave it up when she married his Episcopalian father, and he was raised essentially without religion. He always referred to his family as humanist agnostic. He absorbed the Spingold traditions while we were married, celebrating the holidays with our usual focus on food and not so much on God. But still, it was more observant than he had been growing up. Looks like Mallory is having an even greater spiritual influence.

  “Well then, don’t let us keep you,” I say, rising to walk Brant and Mallory to the door.

  “It was very nice to meet you,” she says, slipping back into her clogs.

  “Likewise,” I say. “I’m sure I’ll see you again.”

  “Thanks, Jodi,” says Brant. “I’ll call you this week.”

  “Okay, talk to you later,” I say.

  I close the door and hear them heading down the stairs. Brant always walked like a herd of elephants, so I can hear his footsteps all the way down to the bottom. I go to the front window and see them exit the building and head out to Brant’s beat-up car. I go back to the living room and sit down.

  “What. The fuck. Was that?” says Paige.

  “I have no idea.” I sigh.

  “Did you know they were coming?”

  “Of course not. Don’t you think I would’ve mentioned it?”

  “So he just showed up here unannounced with his new girlfriend. At ten P.M. on a Friday night.” Paige looks gobsmacked.

  “It certainly looks that way.”

  “You realize she did everything except piss on your furniture,” Paige says.

  “Yes, I noticed that.”

  “And what the hell was that big long speech about her life and her fabulous years as the queen of Vietnam, and how smart she is and how everything has been difficult for her, but she’s risen above it?” Paige is building a head of steam.

  “I couldn’t begin to tell you.”

  “And what was with needing to have a tour? And taking her shoes off and flopping all over your couch?” Paige takes a breath. “Jodi. I swear to God, if you would’ve come in to work on Monday and explained what just happened, word for word, without any embellishment, I would’ve thought you had lost your mind. I would’ve thought you were exaggerating to make the story funnier. I would’ve thought that you are perhaps feeling a little strange that your ex-husband has this new girlfriend in light of how hard he fought the divorce and vowed that you had ruined him for other women. In a million years I never would have believed you, had I not just seen it for myself.”

  “Yeah, I know. Kind of amazing, isn’t it?”

  “What the hell was he thinking, bringing her here?”

  “You know Brant. He’s a great guy deep down, but he’s totally socially inept. I’m sure that he thinks it makes him look very cool and progressive to have such a comfortable, friendly relationship with his ex-wife. I think he was showing off for her. Announcing that we have the kind of relationship where he can just drop by because he saw the light on. That I would be welcoming and warm and want to meet her and be friendly and she could see us banter back and forth, and isn’t it all one big happy family? But he and I are going to have to have a little talk about the point at which it is appropriate for me to meet the woman in his life. I mean, Jesus Christ. They’re not even sleeping together yet! I don’t need to be part of his weird seduction plan. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that he wait until a relationship is really serious before he drags me into it.”

  “And they’re going to temple together?” Paige says.

  “What can I do? He is who he is. If he thinks rediscovering his Judaism with her will be a good thing, who am I to argue?”

  “You’re being too good!” Paige gets up onto the couch and props herself on her knees in a pinup-girl pose with her chest thrust out. “Have you met me? I’m Mallory, and these are my breasts and I’m sort of a lawyer and I used to be in the army and I lived in Vietnam and I invented the Internet and I’m so wonderful and fabulous and I’m making your ex-husband become a rabbi since I wrote the Torah, and I’ve decided that he’ll be my new husband and I hate that you have a nicer apartment than he does, and so I’m going to try to make you as uncomfortable as possible in your own living room.”

  We start to laugh. Paige rolls over onto her back, unbuttons two buttons on her shirt, throws her legs up into the air, and starts doing little ballet maneuvers with her feet. “And do you drink pop, because I invented pop. I’m
the first one that ever thought you should put a flavor and sugar into sparkling water, and that makes me a genius and did I mention that I have lovely breasts and like for you to look at them? I notice that you have furniture in your house, and I think that’s fascinating, as I build all my own furniture from scratch.” Paige allows the front half of her body to slide off the couch so that she sprawls gracefully onto the floor. She strikes another provocative pose. “I think it’s so cool that you’re watching a movie. I starred in a movie, and I wrote it myself and I directed it and I produced it and I designed all of the sets, and I sewed all the costumes myself and it was going to be called Me Me Me: A Retrospective and shown at Cannes and Sundance, which was an idea I gave to Robert Redford a long time ago, but my funding fell through because nothing good ever really happens to me, I have to make it happen myself, and I come from a terrible family, my father beat me as a child with my mother’s shoe, and she popped pills, and every bit of success that anyone in the world has ever had is somehow related directly to me and my perseverance, and even though I cannot pass the bar, I’m still the super-duper genius girl of the universe.” Paige collapses, spent and out of breath.

  By this time, the two of us are laughing so hard we’re practically peeing in our pants. On the one hand, I feel a little bad making fun of Mallory, who was clearly so uncomfortable with the idea of my having a continuing relationship with Brant that she needed to stake out her territory. On the other hand, her behavior had been so appalling that I am hard-pressed not to feel justified in having a little amusement at their expense.

  I open another bottle of wine, and Paige and I watch the last twenty-five minutes of the penguin movie. When it’s over, she asks me what I think.

  “Well, first of all,” I say, “these are not Jewish birds.”

  Paige starts to laugh. “Why not?”

  “Really? With the walking seventy miles over the ice, and no food and the wind chill a hundred and eighty below zero and the egg on the feet and it could fall and it could freeze and then there’s a two-day window where the mother has to get back if she hasn’t been eaten by a leopard seal. The poor father, four months in the cold, no food, and one little piece of phlegm to sustain the kid, if it actually hatches. I mean, honestly.”

  “But it’s so heartwarming. And it’s so sweet, their relationship with each other,” says Paige. “And it’s amazing, their ability to survive.”

  “Look, I’m trying not to be a cynic about this. And I’m trying to get past one of my least favorite things, which is the strange desire for filmmakers to anthropomorphize animals. I mean, ten minutes on the mating ritual as if it’s some nightclub, and everybody’s finding the perfect dance partner. I could even get past that. And Lord knows I would listen to Morgan Freeman read out of a phone book for two hours most happily. But I’m going to be honest here. I think these may be the second-dumbest creatures on the face of the earth.”

  “So which are the first?” Paige asks.

  “That’s easy,” I say, “the goddamn filmmakers!”

  She snorts wine through her nose.

  She laughs, and I start laughing, too. I know that I’m taking out some of my frustration with Brant on the poor penguin movie.

  We chitchat for a little while until Paige starts to yawn. “Sorry, Boss Lady,” she says, “I’m fading.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I should probably go home.”

  I walk her to the door and then go back inside to clean up the wineglasses. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there is a creature dumber than the penguins and the filmmakers. If there is, my ex-husband is definitely in the running.

  We Are Family

  Nothing is more important than family. Whether it is the family you

  were born into or the family you create around you with your good

  friends, that support system is essential to a good life. But two of the

  most difficult things to manage can be your family’s involvement in

  your relationship and the relationship you have to your lover’s family.

  There are all sorts of pitfalls to be aware of, and family can often be a

  significant factor in relationships going awry. If one partner’s family

  doesn’t approve, it can bring enough tension into the relationship as to

  be detrimental to good communication. And respecting the feelings,

  traditions, and needs of both families is the only way to keep your partnership

  strong.

  —From a speech delivered by Jodi Spingold at the Scottsdale JCC Jewish Book Club Girls’ Night Out event, November 2006

  We have reserved the private dining suite at One Sixty Blue for dinner, to celebrate Jill and Hunter’s engagement and meet his family. Aunt Ruth and Aunt Shirley and I got here a little early to ensure that everything is set up to our exacting standards. This meant that within ten minutes of our arrival, Aunt Ruth was delivering a lengthy set of directions to the waitstaff, and Aunt Shirley had weaseled her way into the kitchen to meet the chef. I’m taking a quiet moment in the sitting room attached to the dining area to gather my thoughts.

  Jill hasn’t said too much about Hunter’s family. She’s only met them twice before, and even then just for short weekends. All she has said is that they are pretty conservative, sort of B-list Philadelphia Main Line types, not gazillionaires, but definitely wealthy, and that they have always been very polite to her, if not necessarily what one would call warm. And the brother, some sort of Wall Street wunderkind, apparently spends most of his time disappearing to talk on the phone. Jill confessed earlier today to a small bit of apprehension about tonight, worried that Hunter’s family will find the aunts a little too strange to like, and that the whole Jewish thing will rear its ugly head. Not to mention the fact that they have been known to give money to some of the very groups that are currently making our professional life hell. Hunter swears that they don’t have a problem with the Jewish thing, especially since it isn’t like he is planning on converting, but Jill thinks he is a little bit myopic about his family in general. He also thinks that when they attend the galas hosted by their cronies to fund-raise for candidates who are pro-life that it isn’t making a statement about their own feelings about the abortion issue; they are just supporting their friends. God bless Hunter. I hope he is as clueless about our many faults and foibles.

  “Well, I think the meal is going to be lovely,” Aunt Shirley says as she glides into the room to join me. “The chef was delightful, and the kitchen is immaculate and humming.”

  “They’ve never disappointed us before,” I say, just as Aunt Ruth appears. She folds her long legs into one of the chairs.

  “Well, are we ready to meet the in-laws?” Ruth asks.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” says Shirley, shaking her head. “Why should I be so nervous?”

  “It’s just natural,” I say, reaching over to pat her arm. “I’m nervous, too. These people are becoming family, and our family has always consisted of just us. Suddenly we have to take a whole other group of people into account.”

  “And they’re WASPs,” says Ruth bluntly.

  “Ruthie, that’s terrible!” Shirley flashes her eyes at her sister. “You must behave yourself. Tonight is very important to all of us.”

  “I didn’t mean it in a derogatory way, simply a statement of fact. They are WASPs. We are not. There won’t be a common footing. It’s likely to be awkward in the beginning, and since we know that, it makes us nervous.”

  “Our common footing is Jill and Hunter,” I jump in. “These people created Hunter, and we love him, right? So there is no reason to expect that we won’t love his family.”

  “Of course, dear,” Ruth says.

  “You’re so right,” Shirley offers. “I’m sure they’ll be lovely.”

  “For WASPs,” adds Ruth.

  “Well then, smile, because here they come,” I say as the glass doors open and Jill leads her soon-to-be new family into the room.

&nb
sp; “This is my sister, Jodi, and my aunts, Ruth and Shirley.” Jill points to us each in turn. “Everyone, this is Hunter’s father, Cleveland.” Jill gestures to a tall, ruddy-faced man with oddly greenish blond hair and broad shoulders.

  “Everyone calls me Cleve,” he says, stepping forward to shake hands.

  “And this is my mother, Grace.” Hunter escorts his mother by the elbow. She has a helmet of perfectly frosted hair, a slim figure, and the placid lack of expression that seems to come with BOTOX or Xanax or both. She offers her hand to me first, which is ice cold. I instinctively grasp it in both of my hands, if nothing else to warm it up.

  “It’s lovely to meet you, Mrs. Charles,” I say.

  “Please, do call me Grace,” she says in a breathy, nasal voice that makes me wonder if the perfectly upturned button nose is original or a reproduction.

  “And this is Hunter’s brother, Stallworth. But everyone calls him Worth.” Jill points to a slightly taller version of Hunter, but instead of Hunter’s golden hazel eyes, Worth’s are the piercing ice-blue of those dogsled dogs. I step forward with my hand extended, but he raises one finger at me and reaches inside his jacket pocket for his phone, which he flips open with one hand as he sidles back out the door.