The Favorite Sister

by Jessica Knoll

  In addition to being SPOKE’s bookkeeper and also a .000000001 percent investor (she generously threw in 2K of the money Mom left us in her will), it was Kelly’s idea to expand into yoga. The pop-up studio is a trial run. If it does well for us, I promised Kelly that FLOW would be her domain. But for that to happen, Kelly needs to hire some instructors. Before Maureen there was Amal, who blew something called a Handstand Scorpion and spoke too high, like a little girl. How could anyone relax into something called King Pigeon with that voice? Before that was Justin, who was otherwise perfect if not for his declaration that he would require a 20 percent raise to leave his post at Pure Yoga. Next! Kirsten’s capital offense was her uninspiring sequencing.

  I paw through the stack of resumés. “Kirsten. I want to give her a call back. She was good. I liked her.”

  Kelly squares the pile of resumés I just cluttered. “Not Maureen?”

  I tug my sweatshirt on. The sleeves are still wet from Erin’s hands. “Bitch should have preordered my book.”

  “Jesus,” Kelly gasps, horrified. “Please tell me that’s off the record, Erica.”

  Erica. Not Erin. Panic pole-axes me. Have I been calling an important reporter by the wrong name all morning? I retrace our conversation and take a metaphorical exhale, realizing I’m in the clear. Names are my thing. I’m slipping. I’ve allowed this Stephanie pettiness to distract me. Thank God for Kelly, who handles the details so that I can focus on the big picture. I remind myself this is why I need her around. Because lately, I’ve been thinking that maybe I don’t.

  Kelly reaches for the passenger-side sun visor and flips it open, hauling her twenty-pound makeup kit into her lap. She brought the whole thing with her, like some kind of traveling theater dancer.

  “I’ll be really quiet,” Layla says from the back seat.

  “Layls, honey, it’s not appropriate,” Kelly says, glazing her lips with a gloss so thick and pink it could be the coating on the strawberry doughnut no one wanted. Her nice clear skin doesn’t need the airbrush foundation she thinks it does and she’s put a meticulous, embarrassing wave in her hair. I don’t know much about fashion or designer doughnuts—neither does Kelly, but she’s trying and only occasionally hitting the mark—but I know that no woman in New York is spending hours trying to make her hair look messy anymore. At least her outfit looks good. She showed up at my apartment last week with ten abominably short dresses. I was tempted to let her meet Jesse looking like she was attending a divorce party at a lounge in Hoboken, but then I remembered how every August, Mom would take only Kelly shopping for new school clothes. Her rationale was that most little sisters wear their older sister’s clothes, and why should she have to pay for two wardrobes just because I couldn’t get ahold of myself? As though my skinny self was on the lam and I was expected to chase after her, a normative body bounty hunter, spinning a lasso above my head. Every August at the Gap cash register, Kelly would pretend to change her mind about a pair of jeans, or a flannel button-down, and run back into the dressing room to find the item of clothing she wanted to replace it with. What she would really do is grab something in my size so that I had at least one new item of clothing with which to start the school year. One time, I came downstairs in a gray waffle sweatshirt, a premier selection from the Gap’s 1997 fall sportswear collection, and just as Mom started to say something, Kelly cried, “I got a B-minus on my Spanish quiz!” It was the Courtney family equivalent of taking a bullet. That’s a fucking sister. And so, I asked my girlfriend if she would lend Kelly that Stevie Nicks–looking dress she bought on the top floor of Barneys that Zara is also selling for a tenth of the price. Arch and my sister wear the same size. Arch and my sister have gotten ahold of themselves.

  “It’s not like you planned it like this,” I say. “The babysitter fell through.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Brett!” Kelly turns away from the mirror, only her bottom lip pink. Sure, it’s okay for her to curse in front of Layla. “Be on my side for once. Be on my side for this.” Kelly is a nervous wreck for this meeting because she actually thinks she has a chance, though Jesse Barnes, creator and executive producer of the number two reality program in the highly prized eighteen- to forty-nine-year-old demographic on Tuesday nights, would never seriously consider casting her in Hayley’s vacant spot. But as soon as New York mag suggested photos of the pop-up yoga studio on site, Kelly started: What if we swung by Jesse’s after for lunch? Jesse spends almost every weekend of the year in her Montauk house, even during the off-season, and Kelly has now gotten it into her head that her way on to the show is through Jesse, even though I told her that Jesse is too senior to get involved at the casting level. Lisa, our showrunner, is the one Jesse trusts to make those decisions. But Kelly tried Lisa last year and both of us got a caning for it. DEAR FUCKING BRETT, Lisa wrote me after the coffee meeting I arranged between the two, THANKS FOR OMITTING THE FACT THAT YOUR SISTER HAS FUCKING UDDERS AND WASTING MY FUCKING TIME.

  I didn’t tell Lisa that Kelly was a single mother to a preteen girl because she never would have taken the meeting otherwise, and I needed Kelly to hear for herself that she’s not right for a show about young women who have eschewed marriage (generally) and babies (specifically) in favor of building their empires. But Kelly doesn’t understand that unlike mommy gut, motherhood is a choice. And in the eyes of Jesse Barnes, it’s the wrong one.

  For half the year, Jesse Barnes lives in a two-bedroom, one-bath 1960s beach bungalow that hugs the edge of a mythical clay cliff in Montauk. Of course she has the means to knock it down and build some glass-walled spaceship like most people would do. Most people aren’t Jesse Barnes. A woman living alone in a big ole house almost always invites the question of how she’s going to fill it. Partner, kids, multiple rescue dogs, each with its own Instagram account. But a five-million-dollar shack in the most expensive beach destination in the country answers that question with gorgeous restraint. A woman in a home only big enough for herself is the ultimate fuck you to patriarchal society. It says I am enough for me.

  We’re greeted at the door by Hank, still in his orange wellies from his sail earlier that morning. Jesse met Hank years ago on a Montauk fishing dock and started buying swordfish and sea bass from him directly. From time to time, she pays him to fix up things around the house.

  “Hi, girls,” Hank says. I let that slide because Hank is in his seventies. But Diggers have rules. The establishing tenet: We’re women. Not girls. I am a twenty-seven-year-old pioneer in the wellness space who reincorporated her company as a B-corp without needing to hire a lawyer. Would you refer to my male equivalent as a boy? Try saying it out loud. It sounds non-native. “She’s in the back.” He beckons us with three craggled fingers.

  Through the double sliding glass doors I see that Jesse is reading The New Yorker—ha!—on a lounge chair by the tarp-covered pool, a Southwestern striped wool silk blanket draped over her legs. Kelly is doing her best not to stare, but Kelly is incapable of affecting disinterest in the face of something fantastically interesting. Jesse Barnes, whether you consider her the first feminist voice of reality TV (the New York Times) or a feminist fraud (The New Yorker), is nothing if not fantastically interesting.

  “Hi!” Kelly says, much too ardently, before Hank can even introduce us. Jesse stiffens, but she smiles, graciously.

  “Kelly!” Jesse says, standing to give her a hug. Kelly has met Jesse before, in headquarters and at the reunions, but it was only for the briefest of moments. Up close, without camera makeup and beauty lighting, she finally gets to see what I see: that the heartthrob of the butch community has pretty pink cheeks and a pink chin, hair just a little too dark for her complexion.

  “Wow,” Jesse holds Kelly at an arm’s length, appraisingly, “look how gorgeous you are!” If Kelly were my size, no one would call her gorgeous. Her face is inoffensive and unremarkable.

  “Can you believe she has a twelve-year-old?” I go in for a hug with Jesse, Kelly’s glare torching my back. I know she thi
nks I’m trying to sabotage her by bringing up the fact that she’s a mother. But it’s not that. It’s that I’m not going to pretend like my niece doesn’t exist so Kelly can break one thousand followers on Twitter, which is what we would have to do in order for Kelly to be cast in Hayley’s spot.

  The show is founded on the radical notion that women are people first, and once women have kids, they cede everything to the black hole of motherhood. I want to make it clear that this is Jesse’s worldview, but I don’t think she’s wrong either. We have choices as women, and there is no right one to make—especially because no matter what you decide, the world will tell you you’re doing it wrong. But when you make the choice to become a mother, it becomes the choice that defines you, fair or not. Case in point: the New York Times obit for Yvonne Brill, eighty-eight-year-old rocket scientist. She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said. This is what the editors chose to lead with, about a woman whose inventions made satellites possible.

  And motherhood is a limitation that women themselves have internalized. Go on, right now, and look up the Instagram and Twitter profiles of all the men you know. How many of them list father or husband to @theirwife’sname in their bios? Not many, I’d guess, because men are raised to view themselves as multifaceted beings, with complexities and contradictions and prismatic identities. And when they only have a certain number of characters in which to describe themselves, when they reduce themselves to just one or two things, it is more likely their profession, and maybe their allegiance to a certain sports team, than their family.

  So there are mothers and unmothers, and while neither choice is the easy one to make, motherhood is at least the comfortable one. The one society has come to expect from us. Same goes for marriage, same goes for changing your last name to match your husband’s, for him being the financial provider, moving for his job and learning to make a mean beef stroganoff. There is a rash of reality TV shows that either depict this conventional way of life (Real Housewives) or the aspiration to this way of life (The Bachelor). Mothers and wives and domestic goddesses and aspiring mothers, wives, and domestic goddesses get to see their likeness represented when they turn on the TV at all hours of the day.

  But there was nothing for the unmothers, and the unwives, and the women who can’t even scramble an egg. And there are a lot of us, more than ever before. A few years ago, when she was just thirty-nine and a network executive at Saluté, Jesse Barnes read Yvonne Brill’s obit, and then she read the Pew statistics that showed that for the first time ever, women were outpacing men in college placement and in managerial positions. More women than ever before were out-earning their husbands, starting their own businesses, and choosing to delay marriage and children, or to withhold from both customs altogether. Where are the reality TV avatars for these women? Jesse wondered, and when she couldn’t find them, she created them.

  And because she was committed to assembling an ethnically, sexually, and physically diverse cast, I found a place where I fit, after not fitting in for the entirety of my life. Goal Diggers is the little corner of the reality TV landscape where women like me belong, and it’s unfair—and typical—that a woman like Kelly, with her big boobs and her tiny waist, her socially sanctioned and exercised uterus, would stomp in and try to claim a piece of this scant land for herself.

  “Unbelievable,” Kelly declares. Jesse has led us to the edge of the property, where the Atlantic recycles itself brutally against the base of the cliff. These are not the turquoise waters of Carnival Cruise Line commercials or the gentle brown waves I learned to bodysurf at the Jersey Shore. This is the tank that housed Moby Dick. These are steel-colored waves that will make a missing person out of you. Of all the slippery bitches I know—and I know a few—the ocean takes it by a landslide.

  “This house was originally built two hundred feet from the bluff,” Jesse says, sending an apologetic wink my way. I’ve heard this story many times over.

  I raise a hand in permission. “No. Tell her.”

  Jesse explains how the land has eroded—one hundred and seventy-five feet in the forty-one years since the house was constructed. She’s had to apply for an emergency approval from the East Hampton Planning Department to have the house relocated closer to the road.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to tear it down and build a new one?” Kelly asks, and I squeeze my eyes shut, mortified.

  “This house was built on the site of a former World War II bunker and constructed from the structure’s original cement.” Jesse gives Kelly a tolerant smile and starts back toward the picnic table without having to explain further.

  Hank has left silk wool and alpaca blankets folded in our seats, blue striped for me, gray for Kelly. We drape them over our shoulders and nod our heads when Hank offers us red wine. Jesse is watching Kelly, and when my sister realizes it, she frames her chin with her hands and gives a big, fifth-grade-picture-day smile. Sometimes Kelly is funny.

  Jesse laughs. “I guess I’m just trying to find the resemblance.”

  “We sneeze in threes,” I say, tartly. Maybe if my hair were its natural color and my thighs didn’t touch, Jesse would see the resemblance. Stephanie pays a bitchy therapist a lot of money to exorcise her demons and she once tried to play armchair with me, proposing that in high school, I gained weight and covered my arms in tattoos as a defense mechanism against comparisons to Kelly. Kelly was the pretty one, the smart one, the one who was going places. Sabotaging my looks, failing in school, disappointing my mother for sport, it was all less of an emotional risk than trying to measure up to Kelly’s legacy and failing.

  And by the way, Stephanie added, the average woman in America wears a size eighteen. So you’re not fat. If everyone could stop assuming that I care about being skinny that would be so great. You’re showing young girls that you don’t have to be thin to be beautiful, many a freshly body positive women’s mag editor has started off an interview with me, causing my pelvic floor to seize up in a fit of fury. No, I correct them, I’m showing young girls that you don’t have to be beautiful to matter. The thinking that women of all shapes and sizes can be beautiful is still hugely problematic, because it is predicated on the idea that the most important thing a woman has to offer the world is her appearance. Men are raised to worry about their legacies, not their upper arm and thigh fat, stretch marks, crows-feet, saggy elbows, ugly armpits, thin eyelashes, and normal-smelling genitals. This is how society keeps us out of the C-suite—it booby-traps the way to the top with self-loathing, then reroutes us on a never-ending path of self-improvement.

  “Did you find a space?” Jesse asks us.

  “We found a space,” I say.

  “Oh!” Jesse turns to me. “Where?”

  “You know where Puff ’n’ Putt is?” Kelly interjects, annoyingly.

  “The mini golf place?” Jesse asks.

  Kelly nods. “We are right across the street. That hardware store shut down. It’s such a great location.”

  “And we hardly have to do anything to it,” I rub my fingers together, signifying money, “which is good because I’m going to be eating a lot of ramen during this expansion.” Kelly pierces my thigh with a fake fingernail under the table. I wrap a fist around her finger and twist, doing my best, one-handed, to inflict an injury with a very racist name that wasn’t yet considered offensive when we were kids in the nineties. It was in the nineties that Kelly and I should have outgrown the roughhousing, only it intensified with age, and now it’s like we’re adult thumb-suckers or something else worthy of a spot on TLC’s My Strange Addiction. The longest break we’ve ever taken from our weekly wrestling matches was ten years ago, when Layla was two, and only because we realized we were scaring the shit out of her. She would come running in when she heard the rumbling start, sobbing and shrieking, “No hurt! No hurt!”

  We never talked about stopping. We just did, for a while. Then
one day, while Layla was napping, Kelly opened the refrigerator to find that I drank the last can of her Diet Coke. She dragged me off the couch by my ponytail and we went at it silently until it was time for Kelly to wake up Layla. And that’s been our routine ever since—quiet, private violence. We know it’s perverse. We know we should stop. But it’s an outlet for words that would hurt more to say.

  Kelly bumps the table trying to wrestle her finger free from my death grip, and Jesse trains an eye on both of us, curiously. We sit up straight and give her our best You imagined it smile.

  “We’re doing okay for ourselves,” Kelly says, rubbing her fingers together coyly. “Most Series A capital efforts raise between two and fourteen million dollars. We did almost triple that.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Jesse says. “SPOKE is such a great concept.”

  “Yeah, but that has less to do with it than you’d think,” Kelly says. “The key to breaking that fourteen-million-dollar glass ceiling is a unicorn valuation of the company, and, because it’s a private company, making sure that the valuation is disseminated publicly to create a bidder’s urgency in the private equity firm world.”

  Jesse blinks like she’s been spun around on the dance floor one too many times. “Jesus,” she says to me, “she’s like John Nash with a great rack.”

  I feel a ridiculous spear of jealousy. Jesse has been known to make somewhat lecherous comments to young, pretty women, but I prefer to be the target of them, thank you very much. “Kelly has whatever the opposite of mom brain is,” I say, pettily. Kelly makes Shut up! eyes at me for bringing up Layla again. I make them right back at her.