He met one of my girlfriends once. Thanksgiving, two years ago, in San Diego, where he moved after Mom died. He’s remarried now, to a vegetarian named Susan. Susan and my father treated my ex like a best gal pal from college who didn’t have anywhere to go for the holiday because her parents were going through an ugly divorce. They stuck all of us—Layla, Kelly, Sarah, and me—in the second bedroom, mother and daughter in the bed, lezzies on the air mattress. There is a third bedroom in the San Diego house, but it’s Dad’s “office” and he had emails to send “very early in the morning.”
It’s not hard for me to imagine Mom’s reaction. She was dead when I came out of the closet at twenty-two, but had she been alive, I doubt she would have so much as frowned, abiding as she did by the parenting rule that the best way to discipline your children when they “act out” is to ignore them. Between my maroon hair and my green hair and my purple hair, my tattoos and piercings, and a brief Wiccan stint after renting and keeping Blockbuster’s copy of The Craft, I got ignored a lot growing up. But you better believe she would have been marching in the pussy parade as my star started to rise, as she saw that my gayness was intrinsic to my celebrity. And she would have adored Arch. A lawyer for the A-C-L-U? She could have been a purple Communist with a sexual attraction to mangoes, and Mom would have set out the fancy Clinique lotion every time I brought her home.
Mom didn’t go to college and while she occasionally flitted around in various retail capacities whenever we needed a little extra cash or she needed something to do, she never had a career. She came of age in a time when it was just as socially acceptable for a woman to get married at twenty-one and have her first child by twenty-three as it was to go to college and earn a paycheck. I don’t think she had the confidence to continue her education, the path that was really in her blood. And so she was always a little bit defensive about being a young mother, getting it into her head that if she could raise a Mensa candidate it would somehow elevate her status in the eyes of second-wave feminists.
She chased accolades for Kelly before she could even walk, submitting her photo to Gerber baby contests and entering her into child beauty pageants. By the time I was born, four years later, she had so much time and money and hope vested in Kelly that it came down to another decision: Split the effort and risk turning out two mildly accomplished daughters, or go full throttle on the one who was already showing so much promise. Kelly was an honorable mention in the 1986 Gerber contest, so go full throttle on her she did.
My phone trembles in my hand as the R pulls into the Twenty-eighth Street station and catches a few bars of service. I look down. Kelly. Asking me how far away I am. The production meeting started eighteen minutes ago, but our booking system went down twenty minutes into the Rise and Resist class and I was on the phone with tech support for an hour and a half. I didn’t even get a chance to shower and I’m still in my smelly spandex. Ten minutes, I tell her. Is there food there?
It’s harder for me to imagine how Mom would have reacted to Kelly’s about-face. And Layla. What kind of grandmother would she have been to Layla? My gut tells me not the kind who baked cookies and read bedtime stories, at least during those early years. Now that Layla’s older and has expressed an interest in SPOKE, she would have warmed. But I don’t know if she would ever forgive Kelly for making her feel like she bet on the wrong horse.
Kelly was a sophomore at Dartmouth, studying abroad in Morocco, when Mom had her second stroke. I was fifteen, downstairs in the finished basement pretending to be researching a class project, actually in a sex chat room. Kelly was the one who turned me on to them. She once forgot to sign out of her account and when I opened up the browser, I discovered her screen name, PrttynPink85, and that her ambitions did not end outside of the classroom! I was floored, mostly because despite the fact that there were never any rules in place in our household, Kelly didn’t date. It was assumed Kelly was more interested in microbial genetics or whatever the fuck they studied in AP chemistry than she was boys. My sister went to prom with her best friend, Mags, and came home early with a greasy-assed McDonald’s bag. Looking back, I can see that Kelly was just taking her cues. Our mother made it very clear that high school was for getting into a top college, not for football games and fun. And so my sister went off to her Ivy a sexually frustrated virgin with a banging bod and an encyclopedia of knowledge thanks to her digital dalliances. None of us should have been surprised when she went on a fuck-crawl of Marrakesh two years later.
My mother’s second stroke was minor, same as the first. She insisted Kelly stay abroad. Two days later she got up to use the bathroom and a pulmonary embolism took her down as she was washing her hands. She would have been relieved that it happened after she had gotten her pants back on—Mom was obediently ashamed of her ass. In a way I’m grateful that she was, because my inclination was always to do and be the opposite of whatever she expected of me. Body confidence is hard. Teenage rebellion comes with reserves.
My father and I called Kelly with the terrible news, and then we called her again . . . and again . . . and again. She had become increasingly difficult to get ahold of in the weeks leading up to Mom’s death, even though my parents set her up with the priciest international plan AT&T had to offer. We left messages, telling her we needed to speak to her urgently. She must have heard the news in our voices, because she never called back. She never called back.
We got ahold of her professor, who told us that Kelly hadn’t been to class in two days. For most students, this was unremarkable, but for Kelly—BRING IN THE NATIONAL GUARD. Through her roommate, we were able to track her whereabouts to the flat of the DJ at the American watering hole, who went by the name Fad. Only Fad. My father and I had to put the funeral on hold and fly to Marrakesh to drag my goodie-two-shoes sister out of the arms of a thirty-two-year-old man who wore tiny yellow sunglasses and double puka shell necklaces. Fad wasn’t actually Moroccan, he’d emigrated from Nigeria as a kid, and that’s about as much as Kelly knows about his background. I have determined that in another life, a life where he didn’t dress like an aging MTV veejay on spring break, Fad-no-last-name-Fad must have invented the polio vaccine and maybe also cold-pressed coffee. Because how else do you end up with a Layla?
I should thank Fad not just for my niece but for dickmatizing my sister the way he did. Because if he hadn’t, I never would have had a reason to travel to Morocco, and the idea for SPOKE never would have been born. And so it seems a bit of a moot point, what my mother would think of our lives now. Because nothing would have turned out this way if she hadn’t died and Kelly hadn’t fallen out of first place.
The train shudders into the Twenty-third Street station. I check my phone. I’m already late—what’s five more to dash over to Third Ave and grab a bagel? The chance that there is any sort of substantial spread at the prod meeting is low. We’re a month out from filming—those bitches are in conservation mode.
Only half the seats in the conference room are occupied, and yet the team has made a complete ring around the table by skipping chairs. Kelly has two empties to her right and three to her left. She’s fighting to look like she doesn’t care that no one wants to sit next to the weird new girl, but I can smell how much it actually bothers her. Seriously, when my sister is stressed, she emits the odor of sauerkraut.