Back After This

Chapter Six The Sister

Chapter Six

The Sister

My sister, Molly, was two years older than I was and four inches taller. When she invited me to her pretty Silver Spring house for dinner, it was always in the same form: a day of the week, the meal her husband was going to make, and a question mark.

Tuesday, lasagna?

Saturday, chicken mole?

Wednesday, that spicy pork thing with rice?

This time it had been Friday, spaghetti? , and I had said yes. That was before I knew that I would be trying to prepare to have my romantic innards exposed to a wide audience, and my plan was to work up to telling her about it. Of course, once she opened the door, I lasted about three minutes before I started spilling the whole thing to her and Pete.

The three of us were in their small kitchen. He was looking after a boiling pot of pasta, Molly was pouring me a glass of wine from the bottle I’d brought, and I just said, “They want me to make a show about dating.”

“But you’re not dating,” Molly said, handing me the glass. “Wait, are you dating?”

“Well, the idea is that I would be,” I said. “I have to go on twenty blind dates.”

Molly literally squeaked. “That sounds like a nightmare, why would you have to do that?”

“I’m supposed to learn from it. Someone would…coach me.”

Pete turned around from the stove to slice a loaf of Italian bread on the counter. “Like a sex coach?” he asked. He was tall enough that he often looked like he might bump his head on the range hood, but he navigated their kitchen with a lot of style. I envied him, as someone who did not cook. And I envied her, as someone who did not have a guy who cooked living in my apartment.

“No!” I said. “Not like a sex coach. I think she’s more like a life coach. Tries to help you be your best self or something.”

“Oh,” said Pete. “So it’s like a makeover.”

“I hope not. I don’t want to have to get veneers for a podcast.” They quizzed me about the things I’d expect them to: whether I really wanted to do it, whether I was sure I really wanted to do it, and whether I thought Toby would stick to our agreement. Molly was not a big fan of my boss. “I think he will,” I said. “I guess we’ll find out.”

I offered to help finish setting the table, and she brushed me off, as always. Just then, my phone buzzed. It was Will: Update! His name isn’t Buddy, it’s Gideon. She just calls him Buddy. And he’s not her dog. She volunteers at a rescue and was walking him. But he’s back to her safe and sound.

I texted him back: Glad to hear he’s okay . And then I typed and deleted three or four different sentences before I settled on a pair of emojis. A dog’s paw and a thumb pointed up. I put the phone away.

“What’s up?” Molly asked.

“It’s just this guy I met the other day. I helped him catch this huge dog that had gotten loose.” I told her the story, from the haircut to the peanut butter to the fact that we traded numbers.

Her eyes widened. “You gave him your number! That’s a development.”

“I mean, not really, it doesn’t count, he wasn’t really asking for my number.”

“If he asked you for your number,” Pete said, pulling out a noodle and peering at it, “then he was really asking for your number.”

“He just wanted to tell me that things turned out okay with the dog,” I said.

“Hah!” Pete barked without turning around to look at me. “Maybe you do need a coach.”

“Either way,” I said, “it doesn’t matter, right? I’m doing this other thing. I just wanted to know the dog is okay. And he is. This guy took him back to his rescue, and now the dog can freely use his head to knock over walls.”

We ate around their kitchen table, and the conversation turned, inevitably, to the fact that, as had been the case almost continuously since they bought their house five years earlier, large sections of floor were torn up and several interior walls were down to the studs. The people they bought from had owned the house for fifty years, and it hadn’t been updated in ages, which was the only way they could afford it. I had helped paint three of the rooms so far, but it wasn’t clear to me whether it would one day be finished, or whether this was just how they liked it, living inside a constant list of projects to be accomplished.

“It’s coming along,” Molly said. “We’re about eight weeks behind on the upstairs hall bathroom, and the contractor just told us that he bought the wrong size bathtub for our en suite, so we’re going to be waiting a little while for those things. Your brother-in-law is trying to talk me into a double oven for the kitchen.”

“I want the double oven,” Pete said, gesturing with his salad fork. “Business in one, party in the other. Chicken on top, cheesecake on the bottom.”

“I don’t think we need it,” Molly said, “but as you can see, I’m having a lot of trouble talking him out of it.”

“Hey, you got the big tub,” he said. “A big tub for a double oven, that’s a fair trade.” He raised his eyebrows at Molly. “And you’re the one who’s going to get to eat the cheesecake, baby. You can eat it right in your big tub.”

She smiled. “Right answer.”

When we were finished eating, Pete went off to watch the Nats on TV in the basement and Molly and I parked on opposite ends of the living room couch. “Have you talked to Mom?” she asked.

“Not for a couple of weeks. What now?”

“She’s meditating in Sedona.”

“Of course,” I said. Our parents were hardly ever around in person, as a result of near-constant spiritual quests and personal growth experiences they’d engaged in for most of our lives. I considered it a minor miracle that they’d never wound up in anything that qualified as a full-on cult (yet), but they never met a guide they didn’t want to pay for a weeklong or monthlong retreat to explore their inner selves. It was where most of their money went, which remained a source of low-level stress for us, given that we secretly suspected that at some point when they couldn’t travel and had spent themselves broke, they’d expect to move in with Molly. They hadn’t even seen this house, in part because Molly and Pete didn’t want them to know how much space there was. I suspected the endless construction was covertly intended to discourage them in their golden years.

Starting when we were about twelve and fourteen, they would go off and leave us on our own, because neither of us ever had the slightest interest in any of these adventures. They did seminars, weekends, mountaineering, orienteering, whitewater rafting, marriage-improvement retreats (six times!)—and they trusted us to take care of ourselves.

Molly and I would stay home watching movies and trying to get homework done. It never occurred to us to have parties, because we just would have had to clean up after them ourselves. We would divide up the chores on a chart on the refrigerator, and our sole act of rebellion was that beginning when Molly was seventeen and I was fifteen, we would each have one shot of whiskey on the last night before they got back. They weren’t really drinkers; they didn’t realize the level on their massive jug of Jim Beam was dropping bit by bit. We added water when we thought they might get suspicious.

Now that they were retired, Mom and Dad traveled separately most of the time. She was still deeply into wellness culture, while he liked to pick up new hobbies and go somewhere to pursue them fervently until he reached the limits of his abilities. He’d been to two tennis camps, a ski camp, a surfing camp, a rock and roll camp, and an adult space camp. We caught up with them between trips, or whenever they decided to call. I loved them, they just weren’t around. The role that a lot of people’s parents played in their lives, Molly played in mine.

“Well, hopefully, meditating in Sedona will give her everything she didn’t get from meditating in Vermont this summer.”

“New Hampshire.”

“Whatever. Anyway, tell me about your trip.” Molly and Pete had just gotten back from a getaway in Ocean City, so I made her tell me about every day they were gone, every walk and every meal. I asked her about the weather, I grilled her about what they saw on the boardwalk, and I nailed down every detail of their hotel room from the windows to the rug to the cat who lived in the lobby. I wanted to tour her happiness and run my fingers over the corners and the edges.

I found contentment in general very reassuring. As the news got more and more depressing, and I got older, and the work I so loved was swamped by stories about murder and shows where L.A. comedians invited friends over to talk for three hours about nothing, the idea of simple good days had started to seem implausible to me. I’d started to think about real happiness as not just precious but owned, kept, borrowed, shared, stolen, divided, and sacrificed. When I was around it, I wanted to eat it, almost, like a cupcake. Happy kids, happy dogs, happy crowds, they were irresistible.

When she had told me everything she could remember, she said, “Okay, now I want you to tell me something. You’re sure you want to do this dating thing?”

I smiled. “I am.”

“Because of the job? The boss?”

“Sure,” I said. “But for me, too. I really am tired of being alone.”

It was hard to say exactly why there hadn’t been anybody since Justin, since the night he explained in a very matter-of-fact way, while I was doing the dishes, that he didn’t think he loved me anymore. Out of all the details of that agonizing memory, my brain had held fastest to the fact that he said this to me with his phone in his hand, as if it were normal, as if it were just an opening salvo for a conversational serve-and-volley and not the relationship equivalent of “you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” And so although he didn’t say the words “I want to break up,” I moved out that night. He kept the apartment; I kept walking. I walked until I got to the Metro, and I took the Metro to Pete and Molly’s, carrying my tote, my laptop, my recording kit, and a suitcase.

“It’s just so much to tell people,” she said. “Everybody listening to your business, don’t you think it’s going to feel creepy?”

“Maybe. But I mean, I ask other people to do it all the time,” I said. “I ask them to talk about horrible things that have happened to them, embarrassing things, really private things. I would be a total hypocrite if I refused to do it myself. Maybe this will make me better at it.”

“They’re not going to, like, record you, are they?” she said in a scandalized half-whisper.

“Of course they’re going to record me.”

“No, no,” she said. “Like, record you.” I still just looked at her. “ Record you doing things on dates.” She shimmied her shoulders up and down and bit down on her lower lip.

“Are you asking me if there’s going to be a podcast of me having sex?”

“I’m just trying to understand!”

“No,” I said. “Nobody wants to hear that. I mean, that’s not true, obviously some people want to hear that, but they’re not going to hear it from me.”

“Good. I love you,” she said, “but I don’t want to hear your noises.”

I turned and put my face in the couch cushion. “ I don’t want to hear my noises. I don’t acknowledge that I even have any noises. There are no noises.”

“Okay. I just wanted to make sure.”

I turned back toward her. “I want to get it in gear, Mol. My goal is to learn from this woman, who is happily married, how to meet people. Ideally, I’m going to master it, tackle it, and be so successful at it that I never, ever, have to do it again.”

“Amazingly positive attitude,” she said. She had the most beautiful gold-hazel eyes; I had envied them endlessly when we were kids. When she’d turn them on me back then, it could flood me with admiration and frustration that mine weren’t the same. Now that look always just made me feel pierced by her constancy, by how long I’d been counting on her, even when I was half-prepared to buckle under the weight of her expectations. “If you think this is the way to go,” she said, “then I hope it works.”

“I do too,” I said. “I’m meeting Eliza at her house in Bethesda. Sunday morning pastries.”

“Fancy. And you’re already working on the weekend, so that’s a…sign of something.”

“She also has an apartment in Manhattan.”

“From this ? God, maybe I should have been an influencer,” Molly said. “I’m sure I have some kind of wisdom to pass along. Do you think people would watch TikToks of me eating peanut butter off a spoon at midnight after drizzling it with chocolate syrup? It’s the best idea I’ve ever had.”

“Self-care comes in many forms,” I said. “I could probably get you sponsored by a funeral home for cats.”