“I’ll be really quiet,” Layla says from the back seat.
“Layls, honey, it’s not appropriate,” Kelly says, glazing her lips with a gloss so thick and pink it could be the coating on the strawberry doughnut no one wanted. Her nice clear skin doesn’t need the airbrush foundation she thinks it does and she’s put a meticulous, embarrassing wave in her hair. I don’t know much about fashion or designer doughnuts—neither does Kelly, but she’s trying and only occasionally hitting the mark—but I know that no woman in New York is spending hours trying to make her hair look messy anymore. At least her outfit looks good. She showed up at my apartment last week with ten abominably short dresses. I was tempted to let her meet Jesse looking like she was attending a divorce party at a lounge in Hoboken, but then I remembered how every August, Mom would take only Kelly shopping for new school clothes. Her rationale was that most little sisters wear their older sister’s clothes, and why should she have to pay for two wardrobes just because I couldn’t get ahold of myself? As though my skinny self was on the lam and I was expected to chase after her, a normative body bounty hunter, spinning a lasso above my head. Every August at the Gap cash register, Kelly would pretend to change her mind about a pair of jeans, or a flannel button-down, and run back into the dressing room to find the item of clothing she wanted to replace it with. What she would really do is grab something in my size so that I had at least one new item of clothing with which to start the school year. One time, I came downstairs in a gray waffle sweatshirt, a premier selection from the Gap’s 1997 fall sportswear collection, and just as Mom started to say something, Kelly cried, “I got a B-minus on my Spanish quiz!” It was the Courtney family equivalent of taking a bullet. That’s a fucking sister. And so, I asked my girlfriend if she would lend Kelly that Stevie Nicks–looking dress she bought on the top floor of Barneys that Zara is also selling for a tenth of the price. Arch and my sister wear the same size. Arch and my sister have gotten ahold of themselves.
“It’s not like you planned it like this,” I say. “The babysitter fell through.”
“For fuck’s sake, Brett!” Kelly turns away from the mirror, only her bottom lip pink. Sure, it’s okay for her to curse in front of Layla. “Be on my side for once. Be on my side for this.” Kelly is a nervous wreck for this meeting because she actually thinks she has a chance, though Jesse Barnes, creator and executive producer of the number two reality program in the highly prized eighteen-to forty-nine-year-old demographic on Tuesday nights, would never seriously consider casting her in Hayley’s vacant spot. But as soon as New York mag suggested photos of the pop-up yoga studio on site, Kelly started: What if we swung by Jesse’s after for lunch? Jesse spends almost every weekend of the year in her Montauk house, even during the off-season, and Kelly has now gotten it into her head that her way on to the show is through Jesse, even though I told her that Jesse is too senior to get involved at the casting level. Lisa, our showrunner, is the one Jesse trusts to make those decisions. But Kelly tried Lisa last year and both of us got a caning for it. DEAR FUCKING BRETT, Lisa wrote me after the coffee meeting I arranged between the two, THANKS FOR OMITTING THE FACT THAT YOUR SISTER HAS FUCKING UDDERS AND WASTING MY FUCKING TIME.
I didn’t tell Lisa that Kelly was a single mother to a preteen girl because she never would have taken the meeting otherwise, and I needed Kelly to hear for herself that she’s not right for a show about young women who have eschewed marriage (generally) and babies (specifically) in favor of building their empires. But Kelly doesn’t understand that unlike mommy gut, motherhood is a choice. And in the eyes of Jesse Barnes, it’s the wrong one.
For half the year, Jesse Barnes lives in a two-bedroom, one-bath 1960s beach bungalow that hugs the edge of a mythical clay cliff in Montauk. Of course she has the means to knock it down and build some glass-walled spaceship like most people would do. Most people aren’t Jesse Barnes. A woman living alone in a big ole house almost always invites the question of how she’s going to fill it. Partner, kids, multiple rescue dogs, each with its own Instagram account. But a five-million-dollar shack in the most expensive beach destination in the country answers that question with gorgeous restraint. A woman in a home only big enough for herself is the ultimate fuck you to patriarchal society. It says I am enough for me.
We’re greeted at the door by Hank, still in his orange wellies from his sail earlier that morning. Jesse met Hank years ago on a Montauk fishing dock and started buying swordfish and sea bass from him directly. From time to time, she pays him to fix up things around the house.
“Hi, girls,” Hank says. I let that slide because Hank is in his seventies. But Diggers have rules. The establishing tenet: We’re women. Not girls. I am a twenty-seven-year-old pioneer in the wellness space who reincorporated her company as a B-corp without needing to hire a lawyer. Would you refer to my male equivalent as a boy? Try saying it out loud. It sounds non-native. “She’s in the back.” He beckons us with three craggled fingers.
Through the double sliding glass doors I see that Jesse is reading The New Yorker—ha!—on a lounge chair by the tarp-covered pool, a Southwestern striped wool silk blanket draped over her legs. Kelly is doing her best not to stare, but Kelly is incapable of affecting disinterest in the face of something fantastically interesting. Jesse Barnes, whether you consider her the first feminist voice of reality TV (the New York Times) or a feminist fraud (The New Yorker), is nothing if not fantastically interesting.
“Hi!” Kelly says, much too ardently, before Hank can even introduce us. Jesse stiffens, but she smiles, graciously.
“Kelly!” Jesse says, standing to give her a hug. Kelly has met Jesse before, in headquarters and at the reunions, but it was only for the briefest of moments. Up close, without camera makeup and beauty lighting, she finally gets to see what I see: that the heartthrob of the butch community has pretty pink cheeks and a pink chin, hair just a little too dark for her complexion.
“Wow,” Jesse holds Kelly at an arm’s length, appraisingly, “look how gorgeous you are!” If Kelly were my size, no one would call her gorgeous. Her face is inoffensive and unremarkable.
“Can you believe she has a twelve-year-old?” I go in for a hug with Jesse, Kelly’s glare torching my back. I know she thinks I’m trying to sabotage her by bringing up the fact that she’s a mother. But it’s not that. It’s that I’m not going to pretend like my niece doesn’t exist so Kelly can break one thousand followers on Twitter, which is what we would have to do in order for Kelly to be cast in Hayley’s spot.