Page 32 of The Favorite Sister

“I’ll just grab something at Mary’s Marvelous on my way out—”

“It’s fifteen dollars for a salad there!”

“Good thing I don’t eat salad then.” I locate the key and fit it into the lock. “I’m going now. I need both hands for this.”

“You are a lifesaver!” Yvette says. “Thankyou. I amsosorry about today. But you won’t regret this.”

“Thanks, Yvette,” I say, hanging up and puzzling briefly over her last statement. What won’t I regret, exactly?

I hear a car chewing up the pebbled drive and I brace myself, thinking it’s Jen, but it continues down the road. Every crevice of my body is wet with sweat and the rest of me is catching up in the rain. I decide that’s the only scare I need—I cannot be here when Jen arrives. We might both die of discomfort.

I squat and hoist a box into the crooks of my elbows. I’ve not taken one step when the waterlogged bottom gives out, like one of those commercials showing what happens to bargain paper towels when tested with too much blue detergent. Jen’s groceries spray everywhere: on my shoes and bare legs and the fresh whitewashed oak porch. Mother. Fucker.

I step onto the lawn, wiping my feet on the wet grass like a dog, leaving behind what looks like yellow spittle.Egg, I realize,gross.It takes me a moment to connect the dots, because unlike Jen, I am not a masochist in a voluntary state of sustained primal hunger to meet the patriarchal-mandated beauty ideal. I eat eggs for breakfast and put cream in my coffee and cheese on my sandwiches and oh my God, bacon. That is a package of uncured bacon, seeping its pink bacony juice onto the new porch. It’s like a puzzle overturned on the table: Only when everything is laid out in front of you can you really start putting all the pieces together. Jen’s healthy, long hair. Her four-pound weight gain.

I hear another car approach, and I wait, unmoving, as its old engine fusses nearer. There is one short burst of hard rain, likesomeone has taken a cloud and wrung it out over my head, but I do not seek cover. The car door slams shut and Jen calls out, nervously, hopelessly, “Yvette?” My heart is banging like a gavel; hers must be too. She knows that’s my car in the driveway.

I listen to the gate open, to Jen’s careful footsteps on the slippery deck. I have to look away when she sees me. I can’t bear to see her so vulnerable and exposed. I haveearnedeach and every unkind feeling I have toward Jen after the way she’s spoken about me to America. I get to feel vindicated by the discovery that the nation’s most sanctimonious vegan has been skulking around ordering bacon off the Internet like contraband. It’s turkey bacon. But still. She has no right to make that tragic face and make me feel bad, nearly empathetic, for her.

I make an intense project out of cleaning my shoes in the grass and speak casually. “I think it was from the rain. The boxes just fell apart when I picked them up.” I’m quick to add, “Yvette told me to bring them inside.”

I only look up when I hear Jen fit her key into the lock. She disappears inside, the door latching shut slowly but firmly behind her. For a moment, I think that’s it. Jen is just going to stay inside until I leave, maybe even for the rest of her life, so that she never has to deal with the fallout from this. It’s not the worst strategy.

But after a few moments, Jen reappears with a beach towel slung over her shoulder and some green plastic trash bags. She offers me the beach towel and shakes open a garbage bag. She picks up each grocery item and examines it for damage, setting it aside or throwing it out, depending. I don’t know what else to do other than help.

“It doesn’t look it but I think it’s still good,” I say, holding up a jacked-up wheel of Brie.

Jen holds out her hand, regally, as though I am a huntsman who has brought home the heart of a warring queen. I place the lump of cheese in her palm with a deep curtsy, playing along. I’m uncomfortable, and trying to act like none of this is that big of a deal, which I realize is very much in keeping with my nickname. Jen chucks theball of Brie into the trash bag,hard, without bothering to examine it. Okay then.

“I had amenorrhea,” she says, tightly.

“I don’t know what—”

“I hadn’t had my period in four years.” Jen speaks over me without raising her voice. “My hormones were all out of whack. You can’t have your hormones out of whack when you’re trying to freeze your eggs, so that you can have a baby, which I would like to do, someday. My doctor suggested I try to go pescatarian to see if it would help. It’s justtemporary, while everything stabilizes.”

I scan the groceries left on the deck. Not a piece of salmon in sight, but dairy and fatty cuts of animal hind legs for days. I can’t help but feel a teeny bit vindicated—See? Your way is not the healthy way.“Good for you, Jen,” I say. “You aren’t a strong woman for denying your hunger. You are a strong woman for standing up to society’s expectations of how we are supposed to—”

“Yvette sent you out here?” Jen demands, before I can saylook.

I lift one shoulder in a vague non-answer, not wanting to betray Yvette, who clearly wanted me to discover Jen’s illicit affair with breakfast meats and put her on blast. Jen tightens the strings of the trash bag with a scowl. “She’s angrier than I thought that I’m selling. Or maybe she just actually hates me.” She hurls a carton of hazelnut coffee creamer into a trash bag and it splatters back at her in retaliation.

“Your mom doesn’t hate you, Jen. She hates that you are suffering and depriving yourself for an unjust cause. She hates that you see yourself as a body first and a person second. She just wants you to be—”

“I’ll get Lauren to invite you to her party. That won’t be hard. Getting Steph to film with you will be the real bitch.” Jen’s eyes are bright, unblinking. She looks away with a difficult swallow. “I’ll do my best.”She’s going to cry, I realize. In fact, I think I mumbleThanksso that she doesn’t cry. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do less than wrap my arms around an emotional Jen Greenberg. I’d come away with thorns, I’m sure.

I know, on paper, that this looks like a bribe, and that bribes are measures only dishonest and despicable people resort to, but it isn’tlikethat. (I also knowIt isn’t like thatis something only dishonest and despicable people say.) But it’sreallynot like that! My investors are expecting a three-episode arc in Morocco with gratuitous placement of the e-bikes. I have gladly participated in all the other group trips for all the other women, who are older, more accomplished, and more established than I am. I arrived at the airport on time for Greenberg’s trip, with a smile on my fucking face, the morning after she told meWillpower is a muscle that can be strengthenedwhen I asked for more bread at dinner. I have shown up for these women. I haveohh’d andahh’d over their expensive, rat-free apartments. I have read their four-hundred-page books and drank their chunky juices and downloaded their dating apps when I am in a relationship to help boost membership. I have supported them getting richer, more famous, and more important. Now, I get a little taste of that kind of success myself and they can’t stand it. They have banded together to keep the little guy in her place.

So this bribe, which wasn’t even my idea, reallyreallyisn’t like that. If anything, it’s a course correction. It’s what is right. Still, I offer to toss the bag of spoiled food in the Dumpster at the end of Jen’s street on my way out. A small act of penance. Because if I’m being reallyreallyhonest with myself, it might be a little bit like that. I might be a little bit despicable. But I’m not ready to be that honest yet.