5. The Double Life
THE DOUBLE LIFE
Rhonda's has different sides to her.
There's the work Rhonda—sharp, operational, the one she uses when she's solving problems and doesn't have time for softness.
There's the band Rhonda—tired underneath the competence, the sound of someone holding four people together through sheer will and caffeine.
And then there's the voice I only hear late at night, when she's alone and it's dark and the world isn't watching.
Karen arranges the side dishes with the fussiness of someone for whom table presentation registers as a moral virtue.
The dining room smells of rosemary and the lavender candle she burns at every meal, and I'm sitting in my designated seat—between the good china cabinet and the window—texting Rhonda under the table.
My phone lights up on my lap. She answered my earlier message about work.
I’m at the studio. Sandy showed up on time today, such a miracle.
"Lena, phone away at the table, please." Karen says.
I pocket the phone and pick up my fork and stab into the roast potatoes.
"How's the job?" My father passes the roast beef. He does this every Sunday. The same question.
"Same as always. Just numbers and spreadsheets."
"You should be grateful. Firms don't hire just anyone."
I want to roll my eyes but I don’t. I look at the other side of the table, where Jani was supposed to be sitting.
Jani is not here.
There are four seats at this table—my father, Karen, me.
Jani did but now its empty. She had a nickname—my father called her Jay-ni, with the emphasis on the first syllable, which she hated with a passion I only understood later.
She had a girlfriend named Molly. No record of it remains in this house.
She was seventeen when Karen found the text messages. I don't know what the messages said. I was never asked. But my father kicked her out the next day.
"Have you been seeing anyone?" Karen asks, cutting through the rosemary-scented silence.
"Not at the moment."
"There must be nice young men at your firm."
"There are nice people everywhere."
"You know what I mean."
I do know what she means. My phone buzzes in my pocket. I keep my hands on the table and my face neutral.
My phone buzzes again. Are you surviving dinner?
I cut another piece of roast and wait a moment before excusing myself.
"Just freshening up," I tell Karen and she nods.
I read the messages in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the bath with the tile cold through my jeans. Rhonda has sent more messages.
You don't have to respond right now.
But I'm thinking about you in that dinner and hoping it's not terrible.
I type back, knowing Karen will give me a couple more minutes before she starts wondering.
It's the same as always. Everyone's performing.
That sounds exhausting.
I don’t recommend it.
Is it weird that I wish I were there to make you laugh?
I take a deep breath before typing back.
I would love that.
I can see you laughing. You have this laugh that comes out before you expect it to. I want to create that.
You already do.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Good. I'm going to make you laugh next time I see you.
When are you going to see me?
I am figuring it out.
I wash my hands and gaze at my reflection. The woman looking back is competent and tidy. Karen will accept this. A straight stepdaughter working in a big accounting firm.
I go back to the table and finish the roast and say thank you for dinner. My phone sits warm in my pocket .
Gerald catches me at my desk, the way he’s started to, one hand resting on the top of my monitor like it’s a fence post he’s decided to lean on.
“Hey I was thinking, would you like to join me for lunch?” he says. “There’s a new place by the station. Apparently they deep fry their sandwiches.”
“Oh sorry, can’t,” I say, already gathering my things. “I’ve got lunch with Ravita.”
“I could join,” he says, easy and hopeful. “I don’t mind being a third.”
“It’s kind of a girls’ thing,” I say. “We mostly talk rubbish and complain about people. You’d hate it.”
“Course.” He smiles, completely undeterred, a man who has clearly never once been the last person picked for anything. “Rain check.”
“Sure,” I say, because that’s what you say, and I take the stairs down to the café feeling almost virtuous about it—turning down a lunch to keep a lunch—right up until I sit down across from Ravita and remember how I missed the last few hangouts.
Ravita is eating her salad across from me.
“You didn’t come Sunday,” she says, not looking up.
“Sunday?”
“Collage day. The Sirens collage. Me and Marnie laid out eight months of tour photos and the good polaroids and the ticket stubs, we had the special washi tape, and you said you were busy.” She spears a cherry tomato like it owes her money. “You’ve been busy for a while now.”
I was busy. I was hanging with Rhonda. I don’t say that.
“I know. I’m sorry. Work’s been—”
“Work.” She finally looks up. “You’ve been hard to get hold of, Lena. You don’t come to collage. You half-answer the group chat. You smile at your phone and then flip it face down like I can’t see you do it.”
“I’m not—”
“And Gerald keeps coming by my desk to ask where you are.” She lets that land. “The audit contractor. He asks about you constantly. Brought you an oat latte on Tuesday and you weren’t even in.”
“Gerald’s just friendly.”
“Gerald is into you, and you haven’t noticed, because you’re somewhere else. All the time. Even when you’re sitting right here.” She says.
“I’m not disappearing.”
“Then come Sunday. We’re redoing the collage. Bring back the washi tape you stole.”
I can’t say yes, because Sunday is family lunch—the immovable object, the one appointment I can’t move or explain away. “I can’t do Sunday. I’ve got family. Lunch with my parents.”
Something crosses her face, and she nods, slow. “Right. Family.” She goes back to her salad. “Of course.”
“—and then the new monitor guy panics and routes Rebecca’s vocal to the front row at full volume, so now she’s convinced he’s cursed,” Jani says. “Riley won’t stop laughing about it. Nine days on the road and I’ve eaten gas station food for six of them. How is a person meant to live like this.”
“You love it,” I say.
“I do and it’s killing me. Both true.” A pause, the phone shifting against her shoulder. “Okay. Enough about me and the cursed monitor guy. Tell me about you.”
“I’m the same.”
“You are not the same. Are you seeing someone? I can hear you typing while we talk. Who is he?”
Who is he. I glance at my phone, where a woman who is very much not a he has just sent a photo of a cursed gas-station sandwich captioned: ‘This is worse than a pretzel’.
“Nobody. Work friend.”
“Lena.”
“Jani.”
“Hmm…you’re hiding something, aren’t you?”
“I’m eating dinner and talking to my sister. Nothing is more important than that.”
“Of course it isn’t.” She laughs, and lets it go, and we move on to her tour dates and whether the heating in the van works and whether my boss is still a nightmare.
We’re not together, Rhonda and me. That’s the thing I keep having to remind myself. We’re friends who text from morning to night. We’re friends who blamed a kiss on a pitcher of beer. Friends.
We are only friends.
I was having a great dream about my Instagram reaching 1 million followers, when my phone goes off.
Groggily, I pick up the phone on my pillow. Rhonda. I sit up and clear my throat.
“Hey, you okay?”
"I had the worst show ever," she says, and her voice is rough, worn down.
"Oh no, what happened?"
"The sound was off. Sandy was distracted. Jo left early—again. I played the wrong bass line in the bridge of 'Nightwork' and nobody noticed, and that's almost worse than if they'd all stared at me. If they'd called it out, at least someone would've been paying attention."
I pull the pillow behind my head. The streetlight is making patterns on my ceiling, orange and geometric.
"Tell me about the wrong bass line."
"It was the verse line. The one that sits under Jo's melody in the second verse.
During the bridge I switched to autopilot—you know how that happens, where your hands just know what to do and your brain checks out?
I played the verse line instead of the bridge line, and I played it for thirty seconds, and nobody looked at me.
Jo was singing. Sandy was playing her part.
Jeremy was keeping time. And I thought: I could play the wrong part for the entire set and none of these people would know or care. "
"I'd care."
"You weren't there."
"I'm here now."
She's quiet. I can hear her breathing, and the sound fills my small apartment.
"I wish you were," she says. "I wish you were in that room. I wish you could've been watching."
"Really?"
"Yeah you would've paid attention. Someone would've seen me fucking up and cared that I was fucking up."
"I care about you all the time."
She breathes. "Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"That's—" she stops. "Thanks Lena."
We talk about food. She ate a kebab from a cart outside the venue and it was excellent, charred vegetables and sauce that was somehow both too salty and not salty enough.
I ate leftover pasta and burnt the garlic again.
We talk about childhood. Hers in foster care, twelve different houses before eighteen.
Mine in a house with a father who chose his wife's comfort over his stepdaughter's safety.
“I think I hold onto grudges,” Rhonda says at some point, maybe an hour in. “In my head. A ledger of everything I do for this band that nobody asked me to do—the calls, the studios, the six-a.m. emails. I know it’s toxic. But it’s the only record that the work happened at all.”
“I think that’s okay, you’re just protecting yourself.”
“That’s a generous read.”
I turn onto my side, phone warm against my ear. “I do a version of it too, you know. The keeping-a-record thing. Caring about something where nobody can see me do it.”
“The fan account,” I say. “RileyStickLovers. Fourteen thousand people who love the thing I love, and not one of them knows my name. I pour everything into it and stay completely invisible. It’s the safest way I’ve found to care about something out loud.”
“That’s not sad. It’s kind of amazing, actually.”
“It’s just a fan account.”
“Maybe,” she says, and lets it go, and I lie in the dark with my phone warm against my ear feeling, for no reason I can name, completely understood.
"When are we going to stop doing this?" I ask. "This phone-call thing. This distance thing."
"Soon," she says. "I'm working on it. I'm rearranging tour dates. I'm—I'm trying to figure out how to be in the same city as you in a way that doesn't immediately complicate everything."
"What if I wanted it to be complicated?"
"Then I'd already be on a train to you."
I put in for three days off on a Wednesday, which I have never once done in four years, and my manager is so startled he approves it before I’ve finished the sentence.
“I’m visiting family,” I tell Ravita in the lunchroom, which is true. “My sister. She moved around a lot for work. I don’t see her enough.”
“You have a sister?” Ravita blinks. “You have never once mentioned a sister.”
“She’s really private,” I say, which is the most honest thing I’ve told Ravita in months. “We’re close. But it’s complicated. She’s my half sister, and estranged with my parents.”
“Everything with you is complicated lately.” But she softens. “Go. See your sister. Send me a photo so I know she’s real.”
The truth is a set of nesting dolls. My sister Jani lives north in the same town as Rhonda. I’m going to sleep on Jani’s couch and tell her nothing, and somewhere in those few days I’m going to see Rhonda.
Me: I’m visiting in two weeks! I’ll be staying at Janis. Maybe we can hang out?
Rhonda: You’re actually coming?!
Me: Put me on the list for the show.
Rhonda: Already done. Cant wait. Xx
I stare at the two little x’s at the end of her message like they’re a code I have to crack.
Rhonda Mars, who manages crises for a living, signed off with kisses.
I put the phone face down on my chest and lie in the dark and let myself want it, out loud, in my own head, without deleting a word of it.