Cashew and Pecan, Jen’s Frenchie and dachshund, swirl my ankles as I make my way into her McCondo, the thermostat set so low you would think the furniture was perishable. It continues to surprise me that hippie Jen, who was born and raised in a grungy loft in Soho, lives in one of these glass and steel luxury high-rises that geyser Bowery. With its white lacquer cabinetry, on-site housecleaning service, and hookups for smart technology, the place has all the charm of an airport hotel, making its fanciful décor all the odder. There are colorful kilims on the synthetic wood floors and a gallery of woven baskets on a wall without crown molding. If you’re going to live in a space that didn’t exist before the Obama administration, go to Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams and buy silver Greek key pillows and an acrylic coffee table and really embrace it. Instead, it’s like she’s taken a Renaissance painting from the Met and hung it in a gallery at the MoMA. She doesn’t even really seem to like her dogs. Brett once said she adopts them for Instagram likes, which was very funny, sadly. I hate how infrequently I laugh now that Brett is no longer around.
Lauren is barefoot in the kitchen, pouring a glass of wine, which turns out to be for me. A year ago, I would have had a sip, then slunk off to the bathroom to dump it in the sink so that none of the women could give me any grief. A year ago, I was on sixty milligrams of Cymbalta.
“Welcome back from your book tour!” she greets me. “We have so much to tell you. Oh!” she says, looking down at my shoes. “I’m wearing the same Chanel espadrilles! Well. I was. Somebody”—she sticks her tongue out at Jen and I notice instantly that it’s white—“told me to leave them at the door.”
“Oh,” I say, looking to Jen. “I can do that if you want.” It’s a weak offer. I really don’t feel like unlacing the ankle straps.
“When you can stop yourself at two glasses of wine and I don’t have to worry about you stepping on my dogs, you can leave your shoes on too,” Jen ripostes, setting me at ease instantly. Still maintaining a healthy sense of deference, even after seeing Brett at the all-cast prod meeting. Around these parts, alliances have the life span of mayflies.
“I’ve had one glass of wine!” Lauren protests, reaching into her bra and extracting a small plastic baggie, the kind that contains an extra button for a new coat. She peels the seal apart and slips a finger inside, which explains the white tongue. “Coke math.”
I take my wine and slide into a cantilevered chair with brown leather thatching before Lauren can ask me if I want any and, when I demur like I always do, pout and say I’m no fun. I was nervous to come here—it’s like Animal House behind the scenes, and the other women have always ragged on me for my half-finished wine spritzers. I’m uptight, a control freak. I need to let loose, learn to hang, whatever that means. What they don’t understand is that addiction runs in my blood, and that I pay a steep price for partying. They get hangovers; I get suicidal.
“Is this a celebration?” I ask, bringing my glass of wine to my lips cautiously. How much of it I’ll drink depends on the answer.
“I think so,” Lauren says, joining me in the sitting area, mere steps from the kitchen. On House Hunters, everyone is hot for open concept. In New York, there is no other choice.
Lauren tucks into the fold of the green velvet couch, one elbow propped on the back to keep her glass of wine level with her lips at all times. She’s wearing red striped track pants and a white cashmere wife beater, a diamond “L” in one ear the length of a crayon. She looks absurd, and yet she is routinely lauded for her bold sense of style while the Internet makes fun of my anchorwoman clothes. Why does Stephanie Simmons always dress like Kate Middleton visiting a children’s cancer hospital? the New York magazine recapper memorably asked. I have spoken to my stylist about edging up my look this season, and I suppose it’s a positive sign Lauren and I are wearing the same pair of shoes.
Jen sets a cheeseboard on the coffee table, though calling it a cheeseboard is an offense to Brie. “Mushroom and olive pâté,” Jen says, gesturing to a mealy brown lump surrounded by birdseed shards that I suppose are standing in for Carr’s. A few years ago, Jen kept a food diary for Vogue.com, chronicling a day in the life of her wackadoodle diet. It was all bee pollen shakes and plant dust lattes until 3:00 P.M., at which point she indulged in a handful of activated walnuts. The thing went mega-viral, and among the five hundred and seventy-nine comments the piece elicited is the first-ever sighting of Jen’s nickname, “the Green Menace.” Though it was Brett who made it stick.
“And we are celebrating, by the way,” Jen says, taking a seat without taking any food. “Because that little piggy will not be going to Morocco.” She smirks and twists the cap on her Brill juice. Jen names her juices and powders and potions for characteristics the customer is looking to enhance. A former Saluté assistant once told me—under promise of Prada—that she glimpsed a search on Urban Dictionary for the word “brill” on Jesse’s computer screen. Brill: British slang for brilliant, American equivalent of “cool.” In my opinion, Jesse has no business sporting a faux-hawk or those ghastly Stella McCartney creepers when she has to consult Urban Dictionary just to keep up with what the kids are talking about. You have no business treating the cast who made your show a hit like members of Menudo, putting us out to pasture at the ripe old age of thirty-four. That is decidedly un-brill.
Jen tips her head back and brings the juice to her lips. The sleeves of her dress gape open, like a wizard’s cape, a long oval through which one of her breasts is clearly visible. The bohemian of the Bowery has very definitely gotten a boob job. The thought comes before I can reason with it: I can’t wait to tell Brett about this. We used to drop nuggets of gossip about the other women at the other’s feet, like cats with rodent corpses. I feel a pang of sadness for what was, but it perishes almost immediately. “Tell me everything,” I nearly pant.
“Let’s start with the sister.” Lauren widens her eyes, blinks, and widens them once more.
“Have you met her before?” Jen wants to know.
“A few times,” I say, and decide to be generous. “But I don’t remember her being that bad.” One of the great things about where I currently sit is that I can be generous and still experience the cathartic release of disparaging my opponents, because everyone down below is willing to do it for me.
“Okay,” Lauren says, with a small, seated jump. “You know those Stuart Weitzman nudist shoes that everyone was wearing two years ago?”
“Except me,” Jen says with a self-congratulatory laugh. “I’m too much of a hippie to be able to walk in those things.”
Not too much of a hippie for implants.
“Well, the sister couldn’t walk in them either. It looked like the first time she was wearing heels. And I’m pretty sure they were the Steve Madden knockoffs,” Lauren says with a shudder. “In patent leather.”
“Don’t forget the off-the-shoulder top,” Jen says.
Lauren turns to me. “She’s first in line at Starbucks on pumpkin spice latte day, okay?”
I nod: Say no more. “And what, was the Big Chill wearing a seven-hundred-dollar tracksuit?” I ask. Not long after “the Green Menace” entered the Digger lexicon, a Jen supporter on Twitter (who we all agree was Jen in handle disguise) clapped back with a nickname of Miltonian perfection for Brett: “the Big Chill,” referring to both her avaricious figure and her seemingly endless capacity for chill. Brett loves to brag that she’s too lazy for fashion. That she has loftier things on her mind than fashion. That she is too broke for fashion. Such statements may have been true at one time. But I was twenty-three with a forehead free of injectibles once too, and you don’t see me going around and shoving that expired bio into people’s faces.
“Brett.” Jen says her name with a scoff. “Brett was forty minutes late—”
“Oh, come on,” Lauren chides. “Like twenty.”
“It was ten-oh-six when she walked in!” Jen guffaws.
“She’s such a hypocrite,” I say, remembering how Brett could never let it
go that I was late twice during season one, and only because the snotty makeup artist didn’t stock a foundation darker than Honey in his dopp kit and I had to redo my face myself. Everyone thinks I’m so high maintenance because I’ve hired my own glam squad, but I’d like to see how they’d respond to production teaming them with a car mechanic for hair and makeup. That’s how ill equipped their guy was to deal with a brown woman’s face.
“In all fairness, she did have some kind of issue with her booking system,” Lauren says. Pecan jumps onto the couch next to her and Lauren leans down to pet her, but before she can, Jen punts her off the couch with the heel of her hand.
“No jumping. On the. Minotti couch!” Jen booms. Suddenly there is a spray bottle in her hand, and she’s vaporizing the dog into the kitchen. Lauren raises her eyebrows at me in silent consternation while Jen fights to affix a baby gate between the wall and the island, imprisoning a yapping Pecan. Cashew has retreated beneath the coffee table and folded herself into a small, trembling nub, but she is guilty by association. Jen digs her out from underneath the table by her elbows and tosses her over the gate with Pecan. She lands on her back with a yelp. Almond barks in solidarity.
“Shut up, Almond!” Jen squirts him in the face, effectively silencing him, so she squirts him a few more times for good measure.
“The booking system crashing was such an obvious sham,” Jen says, resuming the conversation as though she didn’t just skip a beat to actively terrorize three defenseless rescues. “She only said that to make everyone think SPOKE is so in demand.”
Lauren and I are speechless a moment. I check over my shoulder to make sure Cashew is still breathing. Lauren clears her throat. “Well,” she says. “She was in her spandex still.”
“Why is she always in spandex?” Jen groans. “It’s probably why her sister is so skinny. How could you eat looking at all that dimply flesh?” She blanches.
“Whoa.” I laugh, though I’m thrilled to have Jen around to say it. I’m tired of having to pretend like Brett is some sort of war hero for having thighs that touch. Like she’s a better feminist than the rest of us just because she’s willing to expose the most unsightly parts of her body in a crop top. Though I suppose that’s my contest to lose. Don’t ever call me a feminist.
“Her sister is a smoke.” Lauren holds another white finger to her nostril and sniffs. “In that trashy, Barstool Sports kind of way.”
I’ve heard enough about Brett’s hot, trashy sister. “How did the conversation about Morocco go?”
Jen and Lauren exchange toothsome smiles.
“God, I wish you could have been there,” Jen says. “She was insufferable, bragging about her investors and how they were going to expense the entire trip.”
“Jen was like”—Lauren makes moon eyes and her voice turns buttery—“it sounds like Morocco will be a really powerful moment, Brett. I wish I could be there for it.” She cackles. “Brett’s face when she realized she was no longer the darling one. It really was priceless.”
“Did Lisa say anything to either of you afterward?” I ask.
Jen and Lauren look at each other, then at me to shake their heads no.
“Why?” Jen asks.
I swirl the wine in my glass, surprised to realize there is not much left to swirl. “When I met with Lisa and told her why I couldn’t make Morocco work, she straight-out asked me if we had made a pact not to film with Brett.”
“Did she not buy your reason or something?” Jen picks at a cuticle. Why do women affect fascination with their nails when they are trying to appear as though they are not bothered by something that bothers them?
The space between my vertebrae elongates, ever so slightly. “Why wouldn’t she buy my reason?”
“I mean . . .” Jen glances at Lauren, then back at me. “Are you really trying to get pregnant?”
I don’t like this suggestion that it’s not believable that Vince and I would want a baby. I know who my husband is, but I work hard to make sure no one else does. “I don’t know how I’ll feel in a few years.”
“So you’re not actually trying . . .” Jen trails off. This is an awkward conversation to have with someone who’s not really my friend.
“Soon,” I fib, which is what I’ve been promising Vince for the last year too.
The seam of Jen’s nail reddens, and she sticks her finger in her mouth, sucking. Interesting. I had always assumed that Jen, like Brett and me, felt no stirring for motherhood. It’s clear Lauren does, but that she has chosen the show over assembling the traditional family unit for now. At least Lauren has that goofy way about her. I could see her enjoying the mindless task of entertaining a cranially challenged being. But Jen is so aloof, so easily agitated, what part of having a child even appeals to her?
I can tell you what does not appeal to me. The very idea of motherhood feels like a hangman’s noose around my neck. Just another set of hands, tugging at my hemline, a tinier voice hawing, But what about me? A baby is an emotional burden and I am emotionally burdened enough. I spent my childhood in service of my mother’s anxiety, of pretending like it was unremarkable to be one of three black students in my graduating class. I’ve spent my marriage emotionally and financially supporting my husband’s lazy ambitions to become the next Ryan Gosling. I’ve spent my life overprepared, overdressed, mostly sober, and voluntarily undersexed, because one phone call from an overzealous member of the neighborhood watch and I’m being dragged away in handcuffs from a bimmer that couldn’t possibly be mine.
“Did Lisa talk to you about the SADIE party?” Lauren asks, pivoting the conversation for Jen’s sake. Such a good hire, that Lauren.
I nod. At the start of every season, we need an event that brings all the Diggers together. Lauren has rented out the penthouse at the Greenwich Hotel to celebrate the launch of SADIEq, a version of her dating app that translates the experience for the queer community. The theme is slumber-party sexy. Oh boy, do Diggers love a theme.
“I think it’s smart,” I say.
“It is smart.” Lauren grins wider. “I spent an arm and a leg on research that shows that in relationships between women, there isn’t always one clear aggressor in the initial courting stages. Women are much more egalitarian in their approach to dating, and so the thing that sets SADIEq apart from SADIE is that we get everyone to meet offline.”
I nod, pretending like that’s what I meant, that her new initiative is the thing that is smart. “That is really smart. It’s also smart that the first group event is your event. If it were my event or Jen’s event and Brett wasn’t invited, everyone would call us petty. But because it’s you, our Switzerland, it sends a very clear message that the issue is Brett, not us.”
Lauren rolls her diamond initial between her thumb and index finger, frowning. “Yeah, but I want to make it clear that the reason I didn’t invite her is because she’s the one who sent the video of me to Page Six. I don’t want to look like I’m doing Jen’s bidding. Or yours. I want everyone to know I have my own issues with her.” We all have our things that get us dragged on Twitter. Lauren’s is that she’s the show’s most malleable player. You can’t so easily manipulate the rest of us. It would be like trying to crack a brick wall with another brick wall. We’re strong, yet never stronger than each other.
“We have no doubt you will make it clear, Laur,” Jen says, with a knowing snort. My little pit bull, Lisa calls Lauren with genuine affection. And truly, she’s been trained to go for the throat. Don’t be fooled by the lovable floozy act—when Lauren is told to sink her teeth into something, she holds on until she can no longer detect a pulse.
“Did anything come up about compensation?” I ask, knowing that if it had, it would have been the first thing discussed. I’m just looking to gripe that Brett was in the position to ask for more money and she took it.
“She had a Chloe bag,” Lauren reports.
“I heard she negotiated low six figures,” Jen adds.
I clutch my wineglass tighter.
“Per episode?”
Jen snorts. “For the season. I would storm the streets if they were paying her that much per episode. It’s not that much money, once taxes are taken out.” She shrugs, trying not to appear bothered, but we are all bothered. I keep saying it’s not about the money, it’s about the principle, but I am starting to realize it is very much about the money. Five thousand dollars for 120 days of labor is not just criminal, it’s despicable when pay parity is one of your major talking points on the morning talk shows.
“Did you see Jesse on GMA last week?” I ask.
“The one where she was talking about the second shift and all the emotional labor women take on for free?” Jen’s eyes sail into the back of her head.
In perfect, unplanned harmony, all three of us repeat Jesse’s hollow motto at the same time, “Women need to get their money.”
We erupt into laughter, and I am surprised—surprised and pleased—to feel authentic warmth for these women. I could never disparage Jesse around Brett when we were friends, not when Jesse’s doublespeak applied to everyone but her.
The dogs start to bark, and a key turns in the lock. Yvette stumbles through the door, front-loaded with two bags of groceries.
She steps on her right heel with her left toe, sliding one foot out of her shoe. Yvette Greenberg has to take off her shoes to enter Jen’s apartment and I don’t. Put that on my tombstone.
“Mom!” Jen cries, rushing over to help. Lauren and I are right behind her.
“I’m not an invalid!” Yvette pivots her body, cradling the shopping bags and showing us her back. Her shirt is split between her shoulder blades with a slash of sweat. “I can handle it. Go back to your wine. It is lunchtime.”
The Favorite Sister Page 11