The Favorite Sister

by Jessica Knoll

  “Would you like a glass, Miss Greenberg?” Lauren offers.

  “I’m going from here to exercise, otherwise I would say yes.”

  Jen’s face darkens. The only organized exercise Yvette partakes in is SPOKE.

  “I thought you were coming tomorrow,” Jen hisses, shadowing her mother as she steps over the baby gate in the kitchen.

  “No,” Yvette says, setting the bags on the island; Pecan and Cashew spring up around her knees. “I’m going out east tomorrow.”

  “But the cleaners came today.”

  Yvette groans, remembering something. “The open house.”

  “Yes. The open house. On Saturday. I told you five times, Yvette,” Jen snaps, with a scathing intensity that sends Lauren and me searching for our phones, averting our eyes out of respect for Yvette. Because how humiliating, for your daughter to speak to you like that in front of her friends who grew up idolizing you. How humiliating, that this über-feminist icon has found herself in a place where she has no other recourse but to take it. Yvette is broke, running Jen’s errands for pocket change now that commencement speeches at Sarah Lawrence don’t pay like they used to.

  Once Yvette had the Amagansett house as a cushion. But legally, Jen owns it. Jen’s father, whom Yvette never saw reason to marry, left it in Jen’s name when he died twenty years ago. Jen spent the entire winter overseeing an expensive and exhausting remodel. Last month, to Yvette’s absolute devastation, Jen put the house on the market for 3.1 mil. I’m sure Brett has a less forgiving narrative for why Jen chose to sell her childhood home, but I have a sense that Jen will make sure her mother sees some of the money from the sale.

  Yvette takes a long, hard look at her daughter. Pecan yaps, and she drops to her knees. “Hi, sweet girls. Yes,” she coos, as they lap at her face. “Hello. Hello.”

  “You’re giving them positive reinforcement,” Jen complains, glowering over her.

  “For being adorable?” Yvette laughs.

  “They were jumping on the furniture.”

  Yvette stands with a sigh, brushing dog hair from her slacks. “Slacks” is the exact right word to use to describe Yvette’s clothing. She dresses like Mary Tyler Moore at a march in the seventies, right down to the red, round glasses, lest we forget who she is and what she was up against back then. She has done a lot of good, I will give her that, but I find Yvette’s belief system laughably shortsighted. Specifically this idea that we will succeed as women once we start to celebrate our differences, instead of pretending they aren’t there. How convenient for her to say, this attractive Jewish woman born and raised on the Upper West Side and schooled at Barnard. What differences did she ever have to celebrate?

  Not to mention, I think it’s cruel that Yvette has taken to Brett so garishly, going so far as to offer to adopt her in season two. Yvette and Jen have always had a strained relationship. When I was Brett’s friend I heard it from Yvette’s side, which is that her desperate attempts to connect with her daughter seem to only push her further away. Now that I’ve gotten to know Jen, I see it differently. Yvette is woefully disappointed in how Jen has chosen to make a living, “preying” on women’s body insecurities under the cover of blended-kale wellness. But here Jen is, a homeowner in Manhattan, a successful flipper in the Hamptons, a bicoastal business owner, all by her thirtieth birthday. There is much for Yvette to be proud of, but Yvette doesn’t want to be proud. She wants Jen in her likeness. How dare she tell women to celebrate our differences when she can’t even accept her own daughter for who she is.

  “I’ll come out Sunday.” Yvette’s voice is barbed. “So I’m not in your way.” She reaches for the grocery bags with an impish smile. “Would you like me to unpack these for you as well, dear?”

  Jen slaps a hand around her mother’s wrist, stopping her. “How much do I owe you?”

  “One thirty. It would have been ninety if you’d let me go to Gristedes but . . .” Yvette lets that hang, stepping over the dog gate and joining us in the sitting area. “Did I interrupt the powwow?” she asks, reaching for a vegan cracker. She takes a small, tentative bite and cries Oh! as the whole thing crumbles in her hand.

  “We were just talking about this year’s trip, Miss Greenberg,” Lauren says, politely, hoping that this time she will be invited to call her Yvette, dear, please.

  “I’m sorry to hear Morocco isn’t going to work out,” Yvette says, and Lauren dims, ever so slightly.

  “It’s not like Brett can’t go just because we can’t go,” Jen says, reappearing to shove a fist of cash into her mother’s pocket. “She wouldn’t even have to go alone,” she adds, her voice pitching with the risibility of it all. “She’s got her sister and her niece to ride her coattails.”

  Yvette shakes her head, clearly disapproving of Jen’s tone. “I think you should give Brett a chance. She’s got a lot to celebrate this season and I know it hurts her not to be able to share that with her friends.”

  “No more than any of us!” Jen spits.

  “Well . . .” Yvette presses her lips together, pained. “Maybe. I don’t know.” She fans her hand in front of her face, still sweating. “It’s not my place to say.”

  We all look at each other, thrumming with curiosity. What is not Yvette’s place to say? But we can’t bring ourselves to ask. Asking implies that we care. Instinctively, I check my nails.

  Yvette rests an elbow on the back of the couch. “Did you girls meet Brett’s sister yet?”

  “Kelly was at the prod meeting,” Lauren says. She notices with a delighted little start that my wineglass is empty. Before she can get up to grab the wine bottle in the kitchen, Jen is behind me, topping me off.

  “Do you think she will make a nice addition to the group?” Yvette asks.

  “She’s a mom,” Lauren says, in lieu of no.

  “I’m a mom,” Yvette says. “So don’t let Jesse tell you it’s unfeminist to have children. You’re all about that age where you need to start thinking about what you want to do.”

  There is a chorus of soft lies about our ages: thirty, twenty-nine, thirty-two and a half.

  Yvette sighs, pinching the fabric beneath her arms and shaking it, trying to air it dry. “In any case. I hope you will be welcoming to this new woman. I know you think it’s more interesting when you give each other a hard time, but I promise you are all interesting enough on your own.”

  Jen throws her head back and squeezes her eyes shut in blinding exasperation, and I can’t say I blame her. Yvette likes to act like she left the show on principle, when what really happened is that she threatened to walk if they didn’t give her more money, and Jesse called her bluff. I don’t know why Yvette pretends like this didn’t happen. Here she is, the ne plus ultra figure of gender equality, and she would rather the world knows she values her integrity over her wallet. Integrity is just the rock you hit your head on when you lose your fingerhold on power. The last thing the world needs is one more woman with principles. What we need is women with money. Women with money have flexibility, and nothing is more dangerous than a woman who can bend any way she wants.

  Jen groans. “We welcomed her, Yvette.”

  Yvette turns to face Jen. “So you wrote her back?”

  The question gives me whiplash. “Wrote who back?”

  Yvette replies, over Jen’s protestations that she not, “Brett’s sister reached out to Jen and asked her to tea. She told her that she admires the way she’s scaled her product”—Yvette throws a look to her daughter—“did I say that right, dear?”

  Jen rolls her eyes, but she nods.

  “You’re not going, are you?” I set my wine on the table. I had been enjoying the taste up until now.

  “Why wouldn’t she go?” Yvette asks me, in the gentle, infuriating tone of a therapist prodding you to reexamine a preconceived notion that is patently false.

  I squeeze my shoulder blades tighter together. The hypocrisy of this woman. “Because,” I say, very slowly, as though Yvette is an invalid who may have
trouble following, “Jen and Brett don’t get along, and it would probably be very hurtful to Brett if Jen went out of her way to befriend her sister.”

  Yvette’s posture improves as well. Appallingly, she says, “I very much doubt it. With the contributions Brett strives to make in this world, she doesn’t have the bandwidth for such petty grievances.”

  Lauren pops a cracker in her mouth, watching the two of us anime-eyed.

  “I told her I couldn’t go,” Jen says, slamming a cabinet door shut in the kitchen, startling us out of our standoff.

  Yvette gives me a smile that says she hopes I’m happy (oh, I am), before rolling back the sleeve of her linen button-down. Jen has inherited her mother’s love of linen. “Ah!” she exclaims. “I’ve got to get going if I want to make the twelve-thirty class.” She heads to the door and plops down on the cane-backed settee while she stuffs her feet into her shoes.

  “Be nice, girls.” She stands, pressing her palms together, like it will require divine intervention for such a miracle to happen. “The whole world is watching.”

  Yvette really took the air out of our sails, and so we disband not long after she leaves. It’s three quarters of a mile to the Canal Street station, the city a humid, gloomy fishbowl, but I decide to walk it anyway rather than get an UberBLACK, my usual move. My mood is not usual. I have the feeling of being both drowsy and frenetic, of yearning for and dreading the next season, all compounded by the email that arrived in my inbox while I was at Jen’s. I read and reread the message from the private investigator on my walk. I don’t realize that I’m covered in a film of sweat until I descend the stairs to the subway, swipe my MetroCard, and walk past three silent Christian missionaries who do nothing to try to convert me.

  John Gowan from Spy Eye Inq. has responded to my latest panicked missive, assuring me that my mother’s funeral was at St. Matthews, as I reported it in the book, and not at St. Mark’s, as the friend of my grandmother’s claimed at my event in Chicago. I look up from my phone sharply—the tunnel is coughing hot air in my face. I step over the yellow line and strain to see if that’s the downwind from the express or the local. You always feel it coming before you see it.

  The ground burbles beneath my feet, and a cast of headlights sends tourists scattering back, unlike the inured city roaches that hold their ground. I stay where I am too, like I always do when I rarely ride the subway, feeling one millionth of the train’s impact as it cannons into the station. It’s a blow at first, your hair sucked straight off your head, your dress, if you’re wearing one, flying up to reveal your underwear, but once you get past the initial confrontation you find it’s more of a pull, an invitation. Something you could almost imagine accepting.

  Huh. For the first time in a long time, I might be a little bit drunk.

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  Brett

  How do you feel about your sister taking Jen Greenberg on a girl date?

  Lisa’s text stops me bone-cold. I read it again with a flu-like shiver. Taking implies that this girl date with Jen has already occurred. I was with Kelly yesterday, and I’m due to meet her at our warehouse on Long Island for our quarterly advisory board meeting in one hour. Was she planning on telling me?

  “Please,” Arch says, disappearing behind the door of the refrigerator, “no phones this morning. We promised.” She reappears with a container of milk. Real milk. Milk that will grow a third arm out of your forehead, with hormones and fat and BPA leached from the plastic jug Arch got at the corner deli for $2.99, along with a loaf of Pepperidge Farm bread and some precut cantaloupe. Cantaloupe! She might as well eat jelly beans for breakfast. You don’t understand; women like Arch are an endangered species in a city where a packet of powder and nut milk passes as a big breakfast on a Grub Street food diary. It’s one reason I keep holding on.

  My phone buzzes with another text from Lisa. Jen invited her to Lauren’s sexy slumber party party

  Then another. See if Kelly can swing an invite for you lollololol

  I’m actually being serious BRETT

  Need to get you in the same room with the others

  No one wants to watch you peddling a stationary bike by yourself all fucking season long. BORING.

  NOT EVEN JESSE

  I raise a thumb to respond, but Arch plucks my phone out of my hand.

  “Plates,” she orders lovingly, when I start to protest, “to the left of the stove.”

  It’s been nine days since Kelly and Layla moved into my old apartment downtown and I moved into Arch’s one-bedroom on the Upper West Side, and, as Arch reminded me last night, nine days since we’ve had sex. The place is a mess. My shit is everywhere. I’m stressed about Morocco. (Don’t think I’m giving up that easily.) Every night, we are on StreetEasy, searching for two-bedrooms in an elevator building by Arch’s office on the west side, between $6,500K and $7,500K a month. I’ve raised $23.4 million in capital, and I still can’t afford to buy in this town.

  I set the plates on the counter and Arch drops a piece of toast on each, sucking a finger that’s gotten scalded. We look at breakfast and then at each other with wrinkled noses. The toast is the color of Jen Greenberg’s heart. Black, in case that wasn’t clear.

  “I have an hour before I have to reunite an incarcerated father with his newborn baby for the first time,” Arch says.

  “I have fifty-five minutes before I test-drive an electronic bike that will help twelve-year-old girls outrun rapists.” This is our favorite game. Who will do more for the state of humanity today?

  Arch slams a jar of Smucker’s on the countertop with stoic resolve. “Charbroiled carbs it is then. Breakfast of champions.”

  We carry our plates over to the couch and settle in. Arch unfolds her disproportionately long legs—her thighs are normal, but her shin bones belong in the Museum of Natural History—and props her feet in my lap. Arch has skinny, knobby toes, like crab legs without any meat, and her nails are the same shade of red as the SPOKE logo. This was done to woo me, but it managed the opposite effect. You’re too much for me, I thought, guiltily, when she came home with the tissue still between her toes.

  “Did you know Kelly and Jen Greenberg hung out?” I ask Arch.

  Arch flicks a crumb off her top lip with the inside of a knuckle, unaware that she has left dark grit in the corners of her mouth. “Are you asking me or telling me?”

  “Asking.” Arch and Kelly are friends, which should make me happy. That the person you love meshes well with your family is all most people hope for in life. Instead, it makes me nervous, paranoid even. What did you talk about? I ask, my tone light, my heart racing, whenever Arch comes home from an outing with Kelly. Maybe I’m afraid of these two pairing off against me, the way Layla and I sometimes do to Kelly. Maybe I’m afraid that if Arch spends enough time with Kelly, she’ll realize how little of an intellectual connection we actually have. Maybe. Maybe.

  “I would have told you if I knew that,” Arch says, to my relief. Now I get to just complain.

  “How fucked-up is that?” I ask.

  Arch mounts her long hair on top of her head, a ponytail holder in her teeth. I notice our age difference when she puts her hair up. Nine years. It’s nothing sometimes, and then it’s everything. “She’s trying to get to know her new colleague at work,” she says, the black elastic in her mouth bobbing. “She knows you don’t like Jen, and she probably felt funny telling you about it.” Arch lifts a shoulder, failing to see the criminal activity. “Give her a break, Brett. She feels like an outlier. She just wants to fit in.”

  “Well, she went and got herself invited to Lauren’s party. She’s fitting in fine.” The group events are where it all goes down—the drama, the tears, the reconciliations. You are dead in the water if you don’t attend the group events. Lisa is a monster but Lisa is right. No one wants to watch me pedal a stationary bike by myself all season long. NOT EVEN JESSE. A dizzying premonition suddenly kicks me in the head: My sister is in the opening credits for
next season, but not me. I’m raising the next generation of Goal Diggers would probably be her tagline. I set my burned toast on the coffee table after just one bite.

  Arch pokes my thigh with her bony toe. “Hey. You’re going out to Yvette’s to make peace with Jen today. Maybe she’ll invite you once you smooth things over.”

  After we test-drive the bikes for the advisory board members, I’m headed out to Yvette’s. There, butthole vehemently clenched, I will extend an olive branch to the Green Menace. Olives are vegan, right?

  Arch checks the time on the cable display box. “You want to shower first?”

  “You can,” I say, removing her feet from my lap and going in search of my phone in the kitchen. It quickly becomes apparent that Arch has hidden it. I drill my fists into my hips and Arch laughs.

  “I promise to tell you where it is after you shower.”

  In the bathroom, I turn on the water and plunk down on the toilet while it does the slow work of warming, unsure of what to do with my hands without a screen to manhandle. I flush and step under the spray, even though it’s the temperature of forgotten tea. I wouldn’t put it past Arch to try to surprise me in here, and I am so not in the mood.

  I lather my hair with conditioner—the secret to my great hair is that I hardly ever wash it—and reach for my razor. Something small and shiny pings the tile floor, and I go very still, feeling each of the showerhead’s individual strikes. With my big toe, I nudge the thing Arch sent me in here to find, as though afraid it may produce fangs and bite. Compared to my Standing Sisters ring, Arch’s choice is thicker, sturdier, something my father would have worn. I realize Arch doesn’t know what I want at all—this dyke would have welcomed a diamond. The sadness feels like a paper cut. Quick, non–life threatening, brutal.

  I spin the faucet left without shaving. If I shave Arch will know I found the ring without . . . what? Shrieking? Crying? Instagramming? Maybe she thought she was going to come in here, pull her tank top over her head, and finally get some use out of this spa shower the size of a smart car . . . I shut off the water and practically staple my towel to my body.