The Better Sister Page 2

  At home, I automatically found myself rewarding him for supporting me, pouring a shot of sambuca from the bar cart in the living room.

  He downed the drink in one gulp and grabbed my hands as I was wrapping them around his waist. “Were you happy with the interview?” He entwined his fingers in mine before placing my hands at the base of his neck and looking into my eyes. Then he was kissing that spot beneath my right ear, his go-to move when he had other plans for us. “I swear, that interviewer looked at you like you were Gandhi.”

  Adam and I hadn’t been intimate in weeks. We’d both been so busy. All I wanted was to crawl into bed with a novel. “Did you really just say Gandhi to try to get me hot?”

  He stopped. “What’s wrong?” he asked. Note to self: the least sexy phrase in the English language is “What’s wrong?”

  Back when I was still writing articles aimed at the sexed-up-wife crowd, I actually said that the key to saving your marriage was to fool around at least two times a week. “It’s a lot easier to put up with each other’s shit when you’re putting your parts together.” The advice wasn’t exactly progressive, but at core, there was some truth in it. I closed my eyes and tried to match his earlier mood.

  “Nothing’s wrong. Sorry, I was just joking.” When he started to kiss me again, I whispered “Please, don’t stop.” Did you know that in survey after survey conducted by women’s magazines, those three words were the ones that men most wanted to hear in bed? Please. Don’t. Stop.

  I felt my breath quicken as his mouth paused at my clavicle and began moving toward the belly that I could have described as “a six-pack” just a few years earlier. I stepped out of my slingbacks, and, just like that, I was eager to finish what he had started.

  As they say, fake it until you make it.

  When we were finished—both of us—I tucked myself into the crook of Adam’s arm, the way we always used to sleep for the entire night before we bought the king bed. “That was amazing. Again, thank you so much for doing that stupid interview.”

  “Why would you call it stupid?”

  “You know. Just cheesy. I’m not used to being the center of attention that way.”

  He looked at me for a full five seconds, studying my face. “But it’s what you’ve always dreamed of, isn’t it? And now you have it.”

  The words themselves were unobjectionable, even congratulatory. But for some reason, they stung. I tried to tell myself I was being paranoid, feeling guilty about dragging him into that interview, where it was all me-me-me.

  When he rotated 180 degrees and turned his back to me, my fears were momentarily confirmed. Then he reached for my top arm and draped it around him, pulling me into a spoon position. He kissed my hands and let out a satisfied sigh. Our cat, Panda, suddenly appeared from nowhere—the only way he knows how to make an appearance.

  “Greedy Guy?” Adam’s eyes were closed, but he had felt the nineteen-pound fur ball pounce on the mattress. When we first got married, we let six-year-old Ethan name our new kitten. He opted for Greedy Panda for reasons we still didn’t understand, and ten years later, the name had taken on various iterations.

  “Hmm-hmm.” I smiled as Panda snuggled into the small of my back. I felt happy and relaxed.

  When I heard the front door of the apartment open, I wasn’t sure if I’d fallen asleep or if I’d only been resting my eyes. I glanced at the clock. It wasn’t even ten. Ethan had made curfew with a full hour to spare.

  “I should make sure he ate,” I said.

  “He’s sixteen years old. He’s probably had three dinners by now. You deserve to sleep. You have a big day tomorrow.”

  We both knew I’d be tossing and turning all night. I always felt confident with the written word, but I would need to stand up before hundreds of people at the awards ceremony to deliver my speech. I’d been preparing for the last week.

  “I still can’t believe all of this is happening,” I whispered.

  He pulled me closer, placing his top hand on my bare hip. It felt good.

  “Hey, about that, I didn’t have a chance to tell you earlier. Something came up with work, and I may be late tomorrow night.”

  I was glad he couldn’t see my face. The news, delivered so casually, felt like a slap. I kept my voice level, not wanting to give him the expected reaction.

  “Well, what is it? Maybe I can talk to Bill.” The head partner at Adam’s firm was Eve’s lawyer and also a close friend.

  “No, it’s a client. It’s Gentry.”

  I knew he was under pressure at the firm to bring in business, and that his biggest client, the Gentry Group, was an important part of the picture. “So . . . how late do you think you’ll be?”

  “Maybe not at all, but they’re flying in from London, and I’m supposed to meet them at some conference room near JFK. I’m pretty much at their whim.”

  “But you’ll definitely be there?”

  “I just don’t know, babe. I’ll try, though. You know how proud I am of you, right?”

  He kissed my hand, reached for the nightstand, and turned off the light. I listened to his slow, relaxed breaths as I rehearsed my speech in the dark.

  2

  All my life, I have been a creature of habit. In college, when other students scoured the catalog for afternoon classes to accommodate their idiosyncratic sleep schedules, I was the one who set the alarm for seven so I could hit the gym and the commons before a 9:00 a.m. lecture. I handled bills on the sixth of the month, did laundry on Saturdays, and grocery shopped on Sundays. Even now, I almost always ordered the same two things for lunch—Greek salad with salmon and roast beef on rye—from the deli beneath my office, and rarely ate out unless it was at one of my five regular restaurants, where I sit at my regular tables and order my regular meals. No chaos, no drama. Boring? To some people, sure. But I was convinced that routines and rituals were the key to both my happiness and my productivity, which—let’s face it—were interrelated.

  No surprise, then, that I followed a routine when it came to my work, too. Rare was the day when I wasn’t at my desk by eight thirty.

  But the day I would be honored by Press for the People was, in fact, a rare day. That night would be a celebration of a free press and the First Amendment more generally. Thrown at the Natural History Museum and less fashion-centric than the Vogue party at the Met, it was informally known as the Geek Gala. I knew that if I went into the Eve offices, staff would be popping in all day with congratulations—some out of sincerity, plenty out of sycophancy. Plus I’d have to leave early in any event to get ready, so I decided to work from home.

  Now here’s the thing about people who swear by routines. When they decide to break from the usual, they go big. The Greek salad is replaced by a large pepperoni pizza. The skipped day at the gym becomes a month of couch-potatoing. And working a half day from home meant that I was still lying in bed in my PJs at one o’clock, my legs pinned beneath the comforter by a nineteen-pound purring machine named Panda.

  But my laptop was on lap duty, and I was getting more work done than if I’d suited up for the office. I had edited one article about the implications of recent health-care policy changes on birth-control access, and had moved on to a feature we were running on a female candidate who had recently become the youngest person ever elected to Congress. She had rocked the political establishment by dethroning a senior member of the Republican Party’s leadership during the primaries. Her opponent was so certain of his continued tenure that he had refused to debate her and, in fact, never spoke her name until she knocked him out of the race with a double-digit lead at the polls. Perhaps most shockingly, she won a heavily Republican district with a platform that patched together centrist economic policies, inclusive social views, and a full-throated attack on the influence of corporate money on the electoral process. In the aftermath of her shocking win, pundits were calling for both parties to revise their allegiance to tribal partisan dogma. Even a skeptic like me found myself hopeful as I read the feature.
Maybe the next generation would find a way to unite a divided country.

  My warm fuzzies were quickly drenched when I clicked on the Dropbox link from the photographer we’d hired for the photo shoot. Where was the candidate who had worn her hair in a ponytail at the base of her neck? What had become of the jeans and brightly colored sweaters she’d donned for knocking doors? This, after all, was a woman who had gone viral by retweeting and mocking every single sexist insult she had received after showing up at a town fair meet-and-greet without makeup. And now she filled my screen in over-the-top glamour shots. More than a hundred of them, all the same. Oscar-ready hair, smoky eyes, and glossy lips. I didn’t even want to ask where the clothes had come from. I recognized one of the jackets from this year’s Prada collection.

  I could already picture the calls for a boycott of Eve. Canceled subscriptions. Tweets bemoaning the demise of one of the last feminist magazines still in print. Someone funnier than I was would start a meme satirizing the front cover of the magazine.

  Each shot was more nauseating than the last. I stifled a scream when I got to the photo of her dressed like a sexy librarian in thick glasses. What the hell was the photographer thinking, and why had a congresswoman agreed to participate?

  I clicked out of the photo editor and drafted an email message to Maggie Hart, the writer who had been assigned to the profile. Hey Maggie. I’m reviewing the photos of Sienna Hartley. Did you attend the shoot? The looks are problematic, no? Please see if the photog has other shots we can use. Thx.-CAT

  Chloe Anna Taylor. The staff at the magazine was so familiar with the initials that concluded my nonstop emails that they referred to me as “Cat” when I wasn’t around.

  I knew I should walk away from the computer while I waited for a reply, but I couldn’t help myself. After forty years of nursing primarily good habits, I had managed to develop an extremely bad habit as of late. As I did almost every day—multiple times a day, usually—I clicked over to Safari and looked at my mentions on Twitter. Just one little @ typed before my user name, and total strangers could get my attention.

  In theory, I’d started using the site to interact directly with Eve readers. In today’s climate, a print monthly can’t survive on paper content alone. Our digital marketing department now made up 30 percent of the staff, and every single Eve employee was expected to build and maintain an online presence consistent with the magazine’s branding efforts.

  I clicked on the heart image for all the supportive posts, indicating that I had read and liked them. Thank you @EveEIC. U helped me find courage to call out my boss last night. Scared the shit out of him! #Themtoo #Metoo

  @EveEIC. Felt like one of the thems, but now I’m a me too. Went to HR last week. Harassing coworker fired today! Time’s up! Followed by three applause-hand emoticons.

  I retweeted the post with my own comment: We’re changing the world with our stories! Keep it up. Power in numbers. #Themtoo #Eve

  But for every five atta-girls came one of the trolls.

  @EveEIC Your just mad cuz your old vag is 2 dried up for any man to want it.

  Can you imagine being married to @EveEIC? What a man-hating cunt.

  My favorites were the ones who tried to pretend as if they knew something about me personally. @EveEIC You act like you don’t need a man, but I bet you let that cuck of a husband treat you like a dog at home.

  But mostly they liked to tell me I’d be less of a feminist if I were hotter. @EveEIC You could stand to lose a few. Quit your job and go running.

  That one got a reply from another user: She’s a little thick, but, man, I’d hate-fuck the shit out of that.

  Then another, and another, and another. I’d seen it before. Once the nasty comments hit a tipping point, the thread transformed into a contest of sorts: Who could be the very worst human in 140 characters?

  I want @EveEIC to have a daughter so I can rape both of them.

  Ding, ding, ding. I had found the winner. I hit retweet and typed This kind of comment is how we know we’re winning the war. #Runningscared #snowflake

  I knew that my 320,000-odd followers would go to town on the guy (at least, I assumed it was a guy) until he deleted his account, but I went ahead and reported his tweet as abuse anyway.

  Adam had warned me to ignore the threatening comments that came with being a woman on the internet. I had the option, for example, of ignoring all my mentions or filtering out people I didn’t know personally. But that would defeat the purpose of engaging directly with Eve’s readers.

  Besides, I wasn’t going to let a handful of cowards hiding behind the anonymity of a website silence me. As my Twitter bio said, “Nobody puts baby in a corner.”

  Having scratched the itch, I found that I couldn’t stop. I closed Twitter and opened Poppit, an anything-goes message board that allowed users to post anonymously without even a registration process. A quick search of my name filled my screen with hateful rants. When they weren’t calling me a dried-up, bitter old hag, they were labeling me a skank and a whore who had slept her way to her position—even though I had gotten married at the age of thirty-one, when I was already a features editor at City Woman and months away from becoming editor in chief of a downtown cultural paper. Plus, my husband was a lawyer who had nothing whatsoever to do with the publishing industry. If anything, I had been the one to help his career. But of course none of these strangers who hated me for trying to make the world a little more fair to women knew anything about that.

  I was about to close my browser when I saw a new post appear at the top of the thread, under the user name KurtLoMein. She’s a hypocrite. Full of tough talk about the world needing to change the way it treats women, but she’s a coward in her own life. Cares more about her picture-perfect image than actual reality.

  My fingers lingered over the keyboard, knowing I shouldn’t respond, and not knowing what to write if I did. The ping of an incoming email pulled me out of the social-media sinkhole. It was Maggie, getting back to me about the photo shoot.

  Hi Chloe. You don’t like the pictures? Oh no! It was Sienna’s idea to blow up the traditional, ridiculous glamour shoot. She was totally psyched about it, but I can ask her for some images from the campaign if you really hate it. Let me know? Maggie

  A second message quickly followed.

  I just called your office so we could chat directly, but Tom says you’re out today. I feel terrible now. I should have asked the photog for some other looks as well, but got infected by Sienna’s enthusiasm for irony. How can I make this better? Maggie

  P.S. Congrats again on the P for the P Award! Hope the gala is amazing!

  I clicked back to the photographs and saw them in a completely different light. I felt like one of those people who gets outraged about an email, only to be told that it should have been written in a nonexistent sarcasm font. I was that nerd who didn’t get the joke. I was barely into my forties, and I felt . . . old.

  No worries, I typed. Just wanted to make sure Sienna was 100% okay with the look. CAT

  I reread my original email, making sure I hadn’t said anything inconsistent with this one. As I hit send, I found myself thinking about that final, scathing Poppit message. Did I really care more about my image than reality?

  A few minutes later, our landline rang. It was Les, the afternoon doorman, letting me know that Valerie was here. She was the woman I had hired to do my hair and makeup for the gala. Two hours and $500 from now, I’d look like an older version of the woman in the ironic photo shoot my magazine would be running next month. I tried not to wonder what Maggie Hart would say about that.

  “What do you think?” Valerie asked. I’d been perched on the foot of the bed so long that my legs hurt when I stood.

  Looking in the mirror, I barely recognized myself. My normally straight shoulder-length dark brown hair had been shaped into a perfect wave of spiral curls tumbling from a deep side part. My skin looked natural, but dewy and flawless. She had used light blush and a nude gloss, and given m
e dark, smoky eyes. My heart-shaped face had previously unknown contours.

  “You’re a miracle worker, Valerie.” We had first met when one of our usual makeup artists was hit with a stomach flu and sent a friend to replace her. When I set eyes on Valerie’s hot-pink Mohawk and array of facial piercings, I wasn’t sure she was the right person for the job. But she was proof that some people simply choose to march to their own beat, even if they can keep perfect time with the rest of the band.

  “Do you want to get dressed before I do one final blast of hairspray?”

  “My gown feels like a sausage casing. I want to wait until the very last minute.”

  “All right. Just be careful. The makeup will rub off. And your lips are so perfect right now. Try not to mess with them, but if you need a touch-up, I’m leaving you both the liner and the gloss. And use this brush for the gloss, not the applicator that comes with the tube.”

  “Message received, Michelangelo. I won’t destroy the artwork.”

  “You sure you don’t need help with a zipper or anything? I can wait if you want.”

  I declined the offer, saying that Adam would be back in time if I needed a hand, even though I hadn’t heard anything from him since the previous night. He’d left early in the morning, before I woke up.

  Valerie was shellacking my carefully positioned waves with spray when I heard the creak of the apartment door. We’d had a Post-it note on the refrigerator to remind one of us either to call the handyman or pick up some WD-40 for at least three weeks. I longed for the days when a to-do sticker never lingered for more than forty-eight hours in our home. We had both gotten so busy.

  “See?” I said, feeling my own smile. “That’s probably him now.”

  We followed the sounds into the kitchen. Instead of Adam, Ethan stood in front of the open refrigerator, his eyes searching for something that obviously wasn’t there.

  “Oh. Hey, Valerie.” His voice had probably dropped an octave since he’d seen Valerie last winter during the holiday party season. He immediately straightened up, pushing the refrigerator door shut behind him.