I can feel my ears getting hot. I know I should make more of an effort to understand the business side of my business. But every time I’ve asked Kelly to walk me through the figures and the projections, the accounting and the payroll, I end up cross-eyed, bored, and flushed with frustration. It’s hard work to understand, and it’s not that I’m afraid of hard work, it’s just that I’ve already done so much hard work, and I don’t think I should have to do this on top of it. I’m the one who came up with the totally original idea for SPOKE; I’m the one who won the entrepreneurial contest. I’m the one who landed a spot on the third most popular reality TV show in the highly prized nineteen-to forty-nine-year-old demographic on Tuesday nights. I’m the one who gets called a wide load but refuses to succumb to Whole30. I’m the one who gives hope to at-risk LGBTQ youth. I have done my part.
Sometimes, jokingly, when I can’t understand something on the books that Kelly needs me to understand, I will flop onto the nearest couch and bring the back of my hand to my forehead like a Victorian lady with low blood pressure, gasping, I’m the talent. But there is a kernel of truth in the performance. I am the talent! Not everyone can be the talent, just like not everyone can balance the books. Except, here is Kelly, her hair in a trendy blogger-girl braid, signed on for the fourth season of my show, able to do what I do and also what I can’t. She’s the talent too. So where and what does that leave me?
Outside smells like melted dog urine and gasoline. It’s the middle of May, but July hot. Kelly asks if we can talk before we get on the road. I’m dropping her and Layla off at the train station to head back into the city and taking Kelly’s car to Yvette’s house out east.
Now is when she’s going to tell me about meeting up with Jen and explain, I think, and ready my anger and resentment and yes, paranoia that I’m about to be eclipsed by Kelly once again.
Instead, Kelly stares at me for a long time, like I have something to say to her. “What?” I ask, finally.
“You seriously aren’t going to tell me?” Kelly shakes her head, her tongue pressed to the top of her lip in a mix of disgust and disappointment.
It can’t be the engagement. I asked Arch if she minded if I didn’t wear my ring for now. I wanted to break the news to Kelly in my own time, in my own way. I knew she would have a tough time with it. She thought shacking up with Arch after three months was moving too fast.
Besides. Whatever it is she thinks I’m not telling her, what she isn’t telling me is worse. She watched Jen express concern for my organs in her talking head last year, the patronizing worry in her brow layered over a shot of me taking a SPOKE class in a crop top. Waist circumference is directly tied to heart disease, she’d added, her Popsicle stick neck somehow able to balance a head swollen with that much prejudice and misinformation. You know what is directly tied to longevity? The number of friends you have, but you don’t see me going around insinuating that Jen will die early because she’s an insufferable twat no one wants to be around. Jen has found so many ways to call me fat without actually calling me fat she should win an award. To be clear, it doesn’t hurt me to be called fat; fat is not an insult to me. Fat is not who I am, who anybody is. But in Jen’s world, fat is an abomination of womanhood, and it hurts to know that someone is trying to hurt me by aligning me with the worst thing she thinks a woman can be in our culture, which is anything over a few pounds shy of nonexistence.
“You seriously aren’t going to tell me about meeting up with Jen?” I say to Kelly. “And you seriously did that? Behind my back? After everything she’s said about me?”
Kelly’s bitchy look falters. “How did you know about that?”
“Who knows you did that? Other than Jen, obviously?”
“Rachel,” she replies, naming one of the field producers.
My laugh is full of genuine pleasure. After the ROI debacle, it feels so good to be the one who knows what she is talking about again. “Let me give you a little piece of advice, Kel,” I say, lowering my voice as I glance into the back seat of the car, where Layla sits with the door open to get some air. I can hear snippets of the Instagram stories that aren’t interesting enough for her to watch to completion: half a word, a streak of a song, a few dog barks. “The field producers are like high-end strippers. They’re really good at getting you to spill your guts, and they’re really good at making you believe they give a shit. But it’s Rachel’s job to run to Lisa with anything you tell her, and then it’s Lisa’s job to get everyone else all riled up about it.”
Kelly nods, slowly, flippantly. When Kelly goes pious on me I am never more sure that I am capable of third-degree murder. I don’t want to just wipe that smug look off her face; I want to annihilate it. “See, I figured that’s how it works after Lisa texted me to ask how I felt about your engagement.”
Layla’s head pops out of the back seat. “You’re getting married?” she exclaims. Then she squeals, drumming her feet on the ground excitedly. “Can I be a bridesmaid? Please, please, please?”
So she does know. I guess I could have crafted a more strategic response to Lisa’s machine-gun spray of texts from earlier. But after Arch and I were done proposing to each other, I couldn’t help myself. How do you feel about your sister taking Jen Greenberg on a girl date? she had written, and so I had responded: It feels like not giving an F because I’m engaged!!!! But the truth is, that’s not what it felt like at all. It felt like someone had reached inside my body and turned my stomach upside down, shook all my organs onto the floor, and stomped on my spleen. By the expression on Kelly’s face, I know she knows it too.
Like most houses out east, the three—no, four now!—bedroom modern saltbox looks like a place of worship for a cult. It’s where Jen Greenberg was raised, so it would be the kind that spikes the no-artificial-sugars-added punch with arsenic. There is something about the Green Menace that is natural-born scary.
Last winter, Jen’s architectural overhaul included knocking down walls, adding a fourth bedroom and a saltwater infinity pool, and outfitting the kitchen in gray-veined Carrara marble, which should have been the second warning shot for Yvette, after Jen’s on-air claim that the reno was meant to make the house more comfortable for her mom. The thing about gray-veined Carrara marble is that it may look sexy, it may be all the rage on the home décor porn sites, but it’s not recommended for people who actually cook in their kitchens because it stains, scratches, and chips like a wet manicure. (Source: Stephanie Simmons. I heard the word “Carrara” and had a craving for ice cream.) You would think Jen Greenberg, kale smoothie millionairess, would opt for quartz countertops—not as dazzling, but much more durable. Only Jen Greenberg never intended to use that kitchen to make her not food into food. Instead, her intention was to fix it up, jack up the market value, and sell it to some HGTV hornball for a cool 3.1 mil.
Jen has the legal right to do with the house as she pleases. Ethically, she should be fined for all she’s fucking worth. She’s given Yvette no say in the decision to sell even though, for the last twenty-some years, Yvette has paid the property taxes and utilities, taken care of the landscaping and the leaks and the clogs. She’s replaced the roof, the kitchen appliances, and the crap furniture with gorgeous gray linen sofas and chairs. She taught Jen to swim in the ocean down the road, she’s brined fourteen tofurkeys in the Tic Tac–sized oven, and she’s shared gin and tonics on the back porch with Sir Paul McCartney. The house may be Jen’s, but the home was always Yvette’s. She’s absolutely heartsick to lose it.
I park Kelly’s car in front of the cheery red “For Sale” sign, by the flowering Japanese maple Yvette planted in honor of her late mother. The driveway is empty. The Greenbergs share an old blue Volvo station wagon, though Jen is “considering” the Tesla.
The sky is more white than gray, the sun illuminating the clouds from behind. It’s been raining on and off all morning, and I had to keep the windows up on the drive out here. Kelly’s car hasn’t had working AC since Obama was elected for his second term and the back of my T-shirt is color-blocked with sweat. My feet slide around in my sneakers as I approach the front door and knock. I wait. Nothing.