I raise my eyebrows, and a valve in my heart thinks about opening. Because Brett is the one who is off script now. The plan had always been for me to apologize to her. Brett was to have come out of this scuffle smelling like roses.
“I miss you,” Brett says, thickly. She might mean it. “It’s killed me not to be able to congratulate you on all your success, which is so so well-deserved. And it’s killed me not to be able to share with you what’s going on with my life. Can we just—I don’t know. Meet for a drink? Coffee? Catch up. I miss you,” she repeats. “Every single day.”
I am silent. Brett prompts me with a slow roll of her finger. It’s my turn. “I miss you too,” I force myself to say.
Brett hops up on the counter, so that we are thigh-to-thigh, shoulder-to-shoulder, conjoined twins. She covers my hand in her own, and I feel the cold metal on two fingers, instead of one. “Oh yeah,” she says, holding up her hand with a wry smile. “I got engaged.”
The band is plain, gold, and a little too thick. The signet I bought for her has so much more style.
“I’m happy for you, Brett,” I say, with feeling, but everything in my body language is rigid. This does not deter Brett from draping an arm around my shoulders, from the assault of her warm touch. Does she actually believe me? If she does, she is so far down this rabbit hole of our perceived reality I almost feel sorry for her. Almost.
“We can make this right, can’t we?” Brett pleads. “Come on. You know I always support you. Real queens fix each other’s crowns.”
My disdain takes my breath away. Real queens fix each other’s crowns? This is the equivocating claptrap that passes for feminism these days. An Instagram idiom that places the burdon on the less effective party. Men get to go about their lives, paying women less and black women even less than that, unencumbered by cutesy demands to fix a problem they created. Telling women to help other women in a society that places us in a systemic competition with one another is a fool’s errand. Two percent of the world’s CEOs are women, and yet we are expected to treat each other like sisters and not rabid hyenas thrown a carcass picked to the gristle by lions. Malnourish me, undervalue me, humiliate and harass me when I try to get my money anyway, but don’t you ever tell me to go about it nicely.
I say none of this because I am not here to be a truthsayer. I am here to capitulate. Brett isn’t the only one acting out of a sense of self-preservation. I lean into this changeling’s embrace, even though the stink of the French perfume I bought her tangled with the body odor in the pajama top I also bought her makes me queasy. “Yeah,” I say. “I think we can make this right.”
But touch my crown and you will lose a fucking finger. Put that on a coffee mug and hawk it.
CHAPTER 10
* * *
Brett
It was last year. Steph’s thirty-fourth birthday. I had moved back in with her for the second time, after breaking up with my very needy ex-girlfriend. Sarah and I had lived in a newly constructed high-rise on North End and Murray that cost us forty-five hundred a month. The apartment had one hundred and fifty more square feet than my first place on York and Sixty-seventh, with a dishwasher and a view of a better high-rise across the street and nary a rodent nor a kitchen drawer wide enough to accommodate a utensils divider, and in New York City, that is the height of luxury living. No rats and no room. It was the nicest place I had ever paid to live in, almost nice enough for me to pretend like the relationship was working, but in the end, I couldn’t take one more drunken accusation that I wasn’t all in. The process of breaking a lease on a New York City apartment is more soul crushing than lunch hour at the DMV, so Sarah and I worked out a deal where if I moved out, I only had to pay a quarter of the rent until our lease was up in the fall, just a few months away. Sarah wasn’t totally wrong about me not being all in, and I felt I owed it to her to let her stay in an apartment neither of us could have afforded on our own, at least for a few more months. Meanwhile, like a Pew Research statistic come to life, I was forced for financial reasons to move back in with my surrogate parents at twenty-six years old.
Steph had declared that for her thirty-fourth birthday, all she wanted was a quiet night in and Vince’s killer coq au vin, which was very unlike Steph. But later, over dessert, she admitted the truth, which was that she didn’t want proof of a birthday celebration on anyone’s social media or in the press. She was afraid to remind Jesse that she was another year older.
“You are . . . ridiculous,” I said, catching myself in time. I wanted to call her insane.
“You’re too young to understand,” Steph said, hysterically, toppling her untouched slice of Milk Bar Birthday Cake onto its side with her fork. She told me once that her medication makes anything sweet taste like cardboard.
“Try me,” I said, thinking about reaching for her plate, but I didn’t want to look like a pig, having already cleaned my own. Why can’t you just be normal came my mother’s voice. I’m not saying to not eat dessert, I’m saying don’t eat your dessert plus everyone else’s. I’d sneak down here later tonight and eat it straight from the box, I decided. If I polished it off, which was likely, I’d just tell them I noticed roaches in the kitchen and I threw the cake out before it could attract more. The plan had soothed me at the time.
“So,” Steph said, resting her fork, tongs down, on her plate, “there’s this German word, torschlusspanik. It literally translates to ‘gate-shut-panic.’ Are you familiar with this?”
I pushed a pair of imaginary Coke bottle glasses farther up the bridge of my nose. “Intimately.”
On the other side of the table, Vince dropped his head with a soundless laugh.
“Forget it.” Stephanie’s shoulders tightened, and she clutched her water glass to her chest defensively. There was wine, but only Vince and I were drinking it. Alcoholism runs in my family, she has said to me enough times that I’ve started to suspect there is more to it than that. Like maybe Stephanie is someone who lubricates life’s edges by staying in control at all times.
“Aw, babe. Come on.” Vince reached for the hand that was pinned beneath his wife’s armpit and settled on holding her wrist when she wouldn’t give it to him. Stephanie never could laugh at herself. People say that I’m quick to make others the butt of my jokes, but I am the first one to recognize when I’m being too Brett-y. Stephanie doesn’t have that ability, and I never realized before I moved in how delicately Vince had to tread around her. He seemed to not mind it, but later I learned he was exhausted.
“Please,” I begged. “Tell us. I didn’t graduate from college. How else am I supposed to learn about . . . tushy . . . spank?” I glanced from Stephanie to Vince with big bimbo eyes, my palm flipped up by my shoulder—is that right? Vince tried not to laugh again, but even Stephanie couldn’t hold a straight face.
“I hate you.” She laughed, despite herself.
“But in direct proportion to how much you love me, right?” I stole one forkful of her dessert and immediately regretted it. It only made me want to pick up the piece of cake in both hands and bite into it like a sandwich.
Stephanie drummed her fingers on her forearm, taking her time being convinced to share. “Torschlusspanik,” she said finally, resting her water glass on a white marble coaster, “is the sensation—the fear—that time is running out.” She jabbed at her heart with a finger. “I have that. With this birthday. Thirty-three was my last something birthday. The last year your success is special. It’s the last age anyone can call you a wunderkind, if we’re sticking to the German theme.”