Chapter 1 #2
“Okay, okay, everyone is sorry,” Lisette announced and stretched her arms over her head, hopping up and down a couple of times to get ready for her scene. It was a slightly sticky evening, the early August weather still thick with warmth in spite of the breeze from the open windows.
Mark glanced at me again. “That was a real kiss,” Mark muttered as he walked to the middle of Paul’s living room.
Those were the words that stuck with me, the ones that haunted me hours later. A real kiss according to who? A real kiss according to which one of us?
Then I reminded myself of the second rule of improv: don’t take anything that happens too seriously.
Let me back up a few weeks, because I haven’t always been an eager participant in the quirky world of improvisational theater.
A few weeks ago, I was a normal, sane person who wouldn’t have been caught dead at an improv show, let alone doing it myself in a rustic Canadian living room.
I was cynical and pessimistic and sure that I’d die alone, like any sensible single person in their late thirties in New York.
If you’re going to enjoy the urban life in Brooklyn, you can’t focus on all the lives you’re not having: the house in the suburbs, the winsome children, the family-friendly SUV driven by a V-neck-sweater-wearing husband.
Instead you have to focus on the parts of your life that make sense: the same-day Broadway tickets for half-price, the free mimosa refills at your brunch spot, the fact that you probably would have died alone even if you weren’t living in the big city.
So how did I end up end up on one of Canada’s island provinces, kissing a man who doesn’t want to date me?
It started with my sister Laura’s decision to move out of New York a couple of months ago.
Laura is three years older than me, and she and I have always been close, mostly because we survived the same childhood with its constant chaos and shifting father figures under the negligent eye of the world’s funniest drunk, our mother.
My mother is where I get my acidic sense of humor, but in every other way I try not to be like her: I pay my bills on time, I limit myself to two cocktails an evening, and I try not to pick up men in places like the cereal aisle of the grocery store or the line outside the theater for a kids’ movie.
My sister Laura has always been prettier than me, with faraway eyes and a cupid’s bow mouth.
She looks like a young Linda Ronstadt, according to our mother, or like a young Linda Cardellini, according to my high school boyfriend.
I have always had the role of her shorter, less enticing sidekick.
I am pale, with dark hair, and if my sister looks like a goddess, then I look like an easily frightened librarian…
or maybe one of those “relatable” ladies on television ads who pause my bike to talk about my endometriosis.
I never much minded, growing up. It felt like the natural order of things to have my older sister getting all the attention while I entertained people by imitating characters from Saturday Night Live.
Laura and I were a team when we were kids.
We spent our formative years playing grown-up to each other when our mother couldn’t quite manage it, asking each other whether homework needed doing or teeth needed brushing.
My sister is the one who helped me apply for scholarships to college when our mother was too disorganized to fill out the financial aid forms. My sister is the one who told me whether a boy in theater class liked me or whether he was definitely gay.
And when I graduated from college with a creative writing degree, my sister saw me through my first disastrous attempts to write comedy, and my less disastrous jobs in advertising and journalism.
In exchange, I remained her biggest fan throughout her wild party-girl years and her transition to AA meetings and a stable career as an accountant.
We were each other’s most important person, and it stayed that way even when she got married.
It was Laura who let me stay on her sofa when my long-time boyfriend Farid left me for his future wife.
And I helped her survive her rollercoaster marriage to the handsome rock musician Nick, who was out of town half the time and never did the dishes.
She took care of me when my depression got so bad that I lost my job at a fancy magazine and had to switch to financial writing.
And I helped watch her new baby Hannah whenever Nick was out of town for a gig, and then when she and Nick divorced a couple of years later after he moved to Los Angeles to pursue his dreams of musical stardom.
We were each other’s solid foundation in a shifting world.
And my niece Hannah was my surrogate daughter, whom I watched after school four days a week for the entirety of Covid.
Their lives were as important to me as my own.
I taught Hannah half of the letters in the alphabet, and I was the only one who watered Laura’s houseplants.
So it came as a surprise when Laura announced to me, right at the end of Hannah’s school year, that she was moving to Atlanta.
“The one in Georgia?”
“Nick got a steady job down there.”
“Nick?” I waited as her expression shifted from nervy to embarrassed, like a teenage girl caught cheating on a test. She hadn’t even told me her ex was back in the picture.
Laura took a breath. “He wants us to move there. He’s rented a place that’s big enough for Hannah to have her own room. He wants to work things out.”
“You mean, get back together.”
“He’s in a very different place now, Abby. He’s older. He’s gotten over his obsession with becoming famous.”
“And he has basically not seen his kid for two years.”
Her eyes were wide with shock, like I’d said something deeply unfair. “He was here at Christmas. But that’s why he wants us to move down there. He wants to try to be a family again.”
“Why can’t he move to New York?”
She rolled her eyes, like I was being utterly unreasonable.
“Because he got a job there. The music industry is really good there, and the cost of living is way lower, and he got a steady gig at the same club four nights a week.” I sighed.
This sounded like Nick all over: the awesome gig, the big plans, the insistence that my sister fall in line to support him.
“And if he loses that gig?”
“Well, I’d also be working as an accountant.”
“Your current job is letting you work remotely? I thought that was a strict rule for them.”
“I gave them two weeks’ notice.”
“Laura.” I knew I was taking the wrong tone. She hated being spoken to like she was the younger of us as surely as I hated being taken for granted, but I was angry enough that I couldn’t seem to help it.
“I can get another job, okay? They need accountants everywhere. That’s not going to be a problem.”
I sighed. This plan had clearly been in the works for a while, which was the part that bothered me most. “Why didn’t you tell me you were thinking about this?”
“I was worried you’d try to talk me out of it, and I had to figure out whether I even wanted it first. Can’t you just be happy for me? You know I never really got over him. And we have a kid together, so I’d like to give it a shot. Come on, Abby. Please.”
I saw in Laura’s eyes that she meant it. She was happy and hopeful, and she wanted me to be happy and hopeful, too. So I told her I hoped it worked out, and that I was happy for her.
And I was happy, I guess, the way you’re happy for a friend who announces they’ve sold all their possessions to embrace the ‘freegan’ lifestyle or that they’ve finally found true love with their surf instructor in Daytona Beach.
“You could move to Atlanta,” Laura added. “It’s a really cool town.”
Something inside me hardened at the words. Move to Atlanta? Move away from my friends and my apartment and my very slow-paced yoga classes?
Laura pressed on. “You work from home, right? You said they never ask you to go into the office anymore.”
This was technically true. My job in financial writing had gone through a weird transformation over the years.
After my long-time boyfriend left me, I went through a depression that doomed me at my full-time job as a journalist, so I took a freelance job I saw posted on craigslist. A business school graduate named Kedar was starting a small online magazine that was supposed to make financial writing fun and sassy.
(“Those Horrible Warehouses Popping Up in Cute Rural Towns May Be Your Next Investment Opportunity!”) He hired me despite my lack of business knowledge because I could deliver enough snarky articles to keep his readers amused, which he said was the ‘special sauce’ that was missing from other investment magazines.
Kedar would pitch me article ideas and I would write them up like they were monologue material for a late-night show.
It quickly turned into a steady gig—no healthcare or retirement plan, but I could live on what I made.
Then two years into the job, Kedar’s magazine was purchased by a hedge fund, and we were incorporated into their larger business as a fun and sassy internal newsletter, and since then, my job has fallen under the umbrella of a big firm.
We have office space on 47th Street, and I get regular paychecks and discounts on my gym membership.
It’s a reasonably cushy deal, except when the corporate execs look over our shoulders because we made the wrong investment recommendation or delivered a non-corporate dose of sarcasm about some environment-killing business.
But the best part of the job is that after Covid started, I was allowed to do my writing full-time from home, and I could spend a lot of time watching my niece Hannah in the process.
She’s seven years old now, and very funny, with a smoky voice like a tiny Natasha Lyonne.
Watching her after school Monday through Thursday was the best part of my week.
All the same, Laura’s assumption that I would simply follow them to Atlanta rankled.
So Nick had screwed up his marriage, and now I was supposed to pick up my entire life and move to hot, sprawling Atlanta in the middle of summer to support his attempt to win back my sister, keeping my fingers crossed that he didn’t blow it again?
This after listening to her cry about him for the last five years?
Was I supposed to keep babysitting Hannah? Was that the plan? I wondered if Laura was ready to quit her job partly because of my assumed availability to continue providing free childcare if Nick decided to take a gig out of town.
“I am not moving to Atlanta,” I snapped.
Laura looked startled, then annoyed. I wondered if some part of her, even after all these years, still assumed that her kid sister would follow her wherever she went. I was the gum-snapping sidekick on our sitcom, making smart remarks straight to camera, but I was not the lead.
“Okay, well…” Laura looked at the sky, as if asking for patience.
“I hate hot weather. I don’t even like New York in summer. And if you and Nick don’t work out…”
“Okay—”
“I mean it’s possible you’ll get there and after two days you’ll realize it’s a disaster.”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so, Abby. I invited you because I assumed you’d still want to see Hannah.”
Ouch. She was going for the jugular, knowing how much I loved that kid, and it made me even angrier. “Or you assumed I’d provide free babysitting when Nick starts to flake out again.”
Laura’s eyes flashed with anger. “That is completely unfair.”
Did I mention that we were having this whole conversation in Prospect Park, with children playing in the background?
I was watching Hannah running around in an impromptu game of tag, like kids do in New York, making instant friends with strangers—and I thought about how I was probably never going to have kids of my own, and I wasn’t sure whether to feel angry at Laura for using my love of Hannah against me or ashamed of myself for abandoning my favorite kid.
“Laur,” I said, “I love Hannah. But watching her has kept me from doing other things, so if you’re going to be leaving town, I may have other priorities.”
“What priorities?” Laura looked skeptical. I felt like we were teenagers again, and she was asking me to do her chores while she went out because what else would I have to do on a Friday night?
“Well,” I began, “I’ve always talked about moving overseas, and I never did it because you needed me.”
“What, so you’re going to move to France?”
“Maybe.” My anger was gaining momentum, like it had reached the top of the roller coaster and was about to drop.
“I could. I was helping you, okay, by watching Hannah, but now Nick can do that, right? So there are other things I’d like to do.
So yeah, maybe I will move to France.” This was a bit of a test: if Laura needed me for babysitting, she was going to have to admit it.
Instead, she said with fake casualness, “Sure. If that’s what you want.”
I could tell from Laura’s tone that she never thought I’d do it.
And that is how I ended up in Newfoundland, three weeks after Laura told me she was leaving, and a week after Laura packed her bags and moved a thousand miles south to try to build a life again with the world’s least reliable rock guitarist. Laura may have expected me to drop everything and follow her, but I was placing my bets on a different outcome: that Nick was going to prove as unreliable as ever, and Laura would be back in New York by September.
In the meantime, I was going to see the world, my chin held high and suitcases swinging at my side, like a slutty, urban version of Maria from The Sound of Music.
The improv? That came later.