The show is founded on the radical notion that women are people first, and once women have kids, they cede everything to the black hole of motherhood. I want to make it clear that this is Jesse’s worldview, but I don’t think she’s wrong either. We have choices as women, and there is no right one to make—especially because no matter what you decide, the world will tell you you’re doing it wrong. But when you make the choice to become a mother, it becomes the choice that defines you, fair or not. Case in point: the New York Times obit for Yvonne Brill, eighty-eight-year-old rocket scientist. She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said. This is what the editors chose to lead with, about a woman whose inventions made satellites possible.
And motherhood is a limitation that women themselves have internalized. Go on, right now, and look up the Instagram and Twitter profiles of all the men you know. How many of them list father or husband to @theirwife’sname in their bios? Not many, I’d guess, because men are raised to view themselves as multifaceted beings, with complexities and contradictions and prismatic identities. And when they only have a certain number of characters in which to describe themselves, when they reduce themselves to just one or two things, it is more likely their profession, and maybe their allegiance to a certain sports team, than their family.
So there are mothers and unmothers, and while neither choice is the easy one to make, motherhood is at least the comfortable one. The one society has come to expect from us. Same goes for marriage, same goes for changing your last name to match your husband’s, for him being the financial provider, moving for his job and learning to make a mean beef stroganoff. There is a rash of reality TV shows that either depict this conventional way of life (Real Housewives) or the aspiration to this way of life (The Bachelor). Mothers and wives and domestic goddesses and aspiring mothers, wives, and domestic goddesses get to see their likeness represented when they turn on the TV at all hours of the day.
But there was nothing for the unmothers, and the unwives, and the women who can’t even scramble an egg. And there are a lot of us, more than ever before. A few years ago, when she was just thirty-nine and a network executive at Saluté, Jesse Barnes read Yvonne Brill’s obit, and then she read the Pew statistics that showed that for the first time ever, women were outpacing men in college placement and in managerial positions. More women than ever before were out-earning their husbands, starting their own businesses, and choosing to delay marriage and children, or to withhold from both customs altogether. Where are the reality TV avatars for these women? Jesse wondered, and when she couldn’t find them, she created them.
And because she was committed to assembling an ethnically, sexually, and physically diverse cast, I found a place where I fit, after not fitting in for the entirety of my life. Goal Diggers is the little corner of the reality TV landscape where women like me belong, and it’s unfair—and typical—that a woman like Kelly, with her big boobs and her tiny waist, her socially sanctioned and exercised uterus, would stomp in and try to claim a piece of this scant land for herself.
“Unbelievable,” Kelly declares. Jesse has led us to the edge of the property, where the Atlantic recycles itself brutally against the base of the cliff. These are not the turquoise waters of Carnival Cruise Line commercials or the gentle brown waves I learned to bodysurf at the Jersey Shore. This is the tank that housed Moby Dick. These are steel-colored waves that will make a missing person out of you. Of all the slippery bitches I know—and I know a few—the ocean takes it by a landslide.
“This house was originally built two hundred feet from the bluff,” Jesse says, sending an apologetic wink my way. I’ve heard this story many times over.
I raise a hand in permission. “No. Tell her.”
Jesse explains how the land has eroded—one hundred and seventy-five feet in the forty-one years since the house was constructed. She’s had to apply for an emergency approval from the East Hampton Planning Department to have the house relocated closer to the road.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to tear it down and build a new one?” Kelly asks, and I squeeze my eyes shut, mortified.
“This house was built on the site of a former World War II bunker and constructed from the structure’s original cement.” Jesse gives Kelly a tolerant smile and starts back toward the picnic table without having to explain further.
Hank has left silk wool and alpaca blankets folded in our seats, blue striped for me, gray for Kelly. We drape them over our shoulders and nod our heads when Hank offers us red wine. Jesse is watching Kelly, and when my sister realizes it, she frames her chin with her hands and gives a big, fifth-grade-picture-day smile. Sometimes Kelly is funny.
Jesse laughs. “I guess I’m just trying to find the resemblance.”
“We sneeze in threes,” I say, tartly. Maybe if my hair were its natural color and my thighs didn’t touch, Jesse would see the resemblance. Stephanie pays a bitchy therapist a lot of money to exorcise her demons and she once tried to play armchair with me, proposing that in high school, I gained weight and covered my arms in tattoos as a defense mechanism against comparisons to Kelly. Kelly was the pretty one, the smart one, the one who was going places. Sabotaging my looks, failing in school, disappointing my mother for sport, it was all less of an emotional risk than trying to measure up to Kelly’s legacy and failing.
And by the way, Stephanie added, the average woman in America wears a size eighteen. So you’re not fat. If everyone could stop assuming that I care about being skinny that would be so great. You’re showing young girls that you don’t have to be thin to be beautiful, many a freshly body positive women’s mag editor has started off an interview with me, causing my pelvic floor to seize up in a fit of fury. No, I correct them, I’m showing young girls that you don’t have to be beautiful to matter. The thinking that women of all shapes and sizes can be beautiful is still hugely problematic, because it is predicated on the idea that the most important thing a woman has to offer the world is her appearance. Men are raised to worry about their legacies, not their upper arm and thigh fat, stretch marks, crows-feet, saggy elbows, ugly armpits, thin eyelashes, and normal-smelling genitals. This is how society keeps us out of the C-suite—it booby-traps the way to the top with self-loathing, then reroutes us on a never-ending path of self-improvement.
“Did you find a space?” Jesse asks us.
“We found a space,” I say.
“Oh!” Jesse turns to me. “Where?”
“You know where Puff ’n’ Putt is?” Kelly interjects, annoyingly.
“The mini golf place?” Jesse asks.
Kelly nods. “We are right across the street. That hardware store shut down. It’s such a great location.”
“And we hardly have to do anything to it,” I rub my fingers together, signifying money, “which is good because I’m going to be eating a lot of ramen during this expansion.” Kelly pierces my thigh with a fake fingernail under the table. I wrap a fist around her finger and twist, doing my best, one-handed, to inflict an injury with a very racist name that wasn’t yet considered offensive when we were kids in the nineties. It was in the nineties that Kelly and I should have outgrown the roughhousing, only it intensified with age, and now it’s like we’re adult thumb-suckers or something else worthy of a spot on TLC’s My Strange Addiction. The longest break we’ve ever taken from our weekly wrestling matches was ten years ago, when Layla was two, and only because we realized we were scaring the shit out of her. She would come running in when she heard the rumbling start, sobbing and shrieking, “No hurt! No hurt!”
We never talked about stopping. We just did, for a while. Then one day, while Layla was napping, Kelly opened the refrigerator to find that I drank the last can of her Diet Coke. She dragged me off the couch by my ponytail and we went at it silently until it was time for Kelly to wake up Layla. And that’s been our routine ever since—quiet, private violence. We know it’s perverse. We know we should stop. But it’s an outlet for words that would hurt more to say.
Kelly bumps the table trying to wrestle her finger free from my death grip, and Jesse trains an eye on both of us, curiously. We sit up straight and give her our best You imagined it smile.