Swimming lessons.

I had intended last night to get back to Rachel, and what happened on Saturday — it is Thursday, after all — but everything got hijacked by the fantastic news that Alex’s old friend, Jamie, is getting married! Wisely, Jamie went outside of our old friend group because, I mean, look at all the waste we’ve had keeping it within ourselves: I married Julian; Alex used to regularly “date” (I use that word loosely) Amanda, Julian’s ex; then Alex married Minty, my old roommate, only to have her leave him when —

Oh wait. I’m never going to get to Rachel this way, and at this point, I really should.

About 5pm, there was still no sign of my sister at the store. Ben was getting antsy — I think I’m guilty of building up my sister as this fabulous monster, like she was cobbled together by a chic Doctor Frankenstein from a pile of pashminas, Birkin bags, matcha and petty insults — and couldn’t stop rearranging the display of Watergate-related books and ephemera he’d constructed earlier in the week. (“Should ‘All the President’s Men’ really be the focal point? It’s so obvious.”) Ben’s the one who got me this job in the first place, and is technically my manager, but the structure is pretty flat here: there’s our boss (not naming him, because I got doxxed last time I had a blog and there were people threatening to show up just to look at me and/or Julian), and then there’s the rest of us, by which I mean Ben, Molly (the other staff member) and me. Ben had done a little bookdealing back in Mississippi, and already knew the basics of buying, so when word of a manager position at this store made its way to him, he jumped at the chance to leave the “Redhat Jungle,” as he calls it.

I’m here because, well, because I’m Ben’s friend. I can live with it. I’m not particularly talented at retail, but then again, I was striking out trying to find a job back in marketing. I’d been out of the industry for too long (I quit working full-time for good in 2014 when I was focused on trying for a baby — Julian said the long hours were almost certainly to blame for my inability to conceive, at least in part) and now *I* was the old person pathetically looking for work in a young person’s game. I’d missed my chance to move up the ladder, and I was still stuck at the bottom at 33 (and now 34) years of age. I had only one telephone interview out of the 70 applications I sent out, and it was clear within minutes of starting the call that the company had meant to call some other candidate (“you sure your name isn’t Kelsey?”).

Ben took pity on me and gave me some work to do. Our boss is something of an indiscriminate buyer, and we had an excess of “airport fiction” piling up in a stockroom — Clive Kessler, John Grisham, “potboilers,” Ben called them dismissively. “Figure out a way to get rid of them all and turn us a buck and you can come be our ‘efficiency expert.'” I was stumped at first — how do you get rid of 800 paperbacks? I then remembered something from when we were clearing the Pasadena house: if you post something on Craigslist as “free to the first taker,” people are picky and uninterested. Why is it free? What’s wrong with it? But if you ask for a very modest sum, people think they’re getting a deal they can’t pass up. So I put up an ad: “Over 800 books, mixed fiction, many nearly new. Top authors: E.L. James, Picoult, etc. $25/lot.”

The books were gone within the day, and I was now in charge of winnowing out dead or dying stock. But mostly, I’m there to keep things tidy and to chill with Ben. It’s not a bad job, and since I don’t need to worry too much about money, the fact that I’m paid minimum wage for 30 hours a week doesn’t bother me. And part of my job is to keep Ben entertained — I mean, not officially, but it’s kind of turned out that way — by telling him stories about my life. “Rich people are a special kind of crazy,” he tells me over and over again. “You wouldn’t think all that money would make people bored enough to create drama out of nothing but, wow, y’all are nuts.”

I remind him I’m not rich — my mom’s a doctor and my dad’s a lawyer, but Rachel and I went to public school, and I went skiing out at Big Bear, not Gstaad like Julian. Mom drove a Volvo station wagon and dad had an old Mercedes Biodiesel. And Alex’s family is essentially broke, with his mother and sister dependent on Alex’s salary to keep the wind out of the drafty old barn of a house they insist on rattling about in when they could have moved to a more modern home years ago.

So far, Ben has only met Alex from what he calls “The Melissa Cranford Show.” He missed both Jen and Jenn when they breezed through in March, and Caitlin was never so wrapped up in all the cray at the time to figure in the “cast,” as he calls it. “I feel like meeting Rachel will feel like meeting Lauren Conrad, or Lala from Vanderpump Rules at this point,” he told me Saturday afternoon. “I’m bristling with anticipation at meeting one of the stars.”

I was simultaneously dreading Rachel showing up and being herself, not showing up at all and disappointing Ben, or showing up and not being herself (and disappointing Ben). The day was slow-going — after the rush for the free books, all we managed to sell was a used copy of Gravity’s Rainbow (“Good luck!” Ben wished the purchaser). Alex called after his afternoon practice and told me he was going to hang out with a couple of the guys from his squad tonight so I could have that “sister time” Rachel clearly needed. And every time the little bell on the front door to the store tinkled, I looked up anxiously, searching for Rachel.

5:30. I’ll say this for my sister: she knows how to make an entrance. BAM! The door flung open and Rachel sashayed in, preceded by a cloud of Tom Ford Plum Japonais. Her hair was (how???) blown out in the sort of easy, beachy waves I watch YouTube tutorials about and cannot replicate, and she appeared to be wearing almost no makeup except some tightlining on her upper lid only and a bright coral lip. Black cigarette pants topped with yet another of my cashmere sweaters (this one from Pringle, dark navy, V-neck, a gift from Julian from years ago), black crocodile flats. No jewelry except one Hermès bangle, orange and gold. The look was effortless, as always. I didn’t realize I was grinding my teeth until a seed from the multigrain toast I ate for breakfast dislodged from a lower left molar.

Ben grabbed my right forearm to steady himself. “Jesus,” he whispered. “Now I get it.”

“Hey bitch, I’m here,” she yelled from the far side of the floor. “Cute shop.” She started poking through the ephemera I had so carefully reorganized only a few hours before, removing a cheap black and white print of one of the plates from “A Rake’s Progress” torn from a book (for some reason, people love these) and inspecting it closely. She then stuck it in the subsection for postcards (clearly marked as such) and marched up to me.

“Baby girl,” she cooed, and took me in her arms. I stiffened — I have never been Rachel’s “baby girl.” Bitch, loser, whore, slut, sure. Baby girl? No. This was either an act for Ben’s benefit or whatever secret she had to tell me tonight was really bad. I pulled away from her and she inspected me closely, scrunching up her forehead as much as the Botox permitted, her mouth a coral moue. “You look thinner. Well done.”

I glanced at Ben who looked even more uncertain about being in his skin than usual, shifting his gaze from the floor to Rachel repeatedly. “Rachel, this is Ben, my manager. And my friend,” I told her, grabbing Ben’s arm and pulling him forward.

“Oh yes! The Southern refugee. How brave of you to live there so long.” She flashed him her 12,000 kilowatt smile and patted his hand between hers.

This was ridiculous. I started: “It was just outside of Memphis, Rachel. It’s not like he fled from some –“

Ben interrupted — “No, it’s a shithole. I had air conditioning and cable TV, but it’s a shithole.” He looked startled as soon as it came out of his mouth, as if she’d somehow pried a truth out of him that he usually shared after a couple of shots of vodka merely by being in her presence.

Rachel yelped in delight. “Mel, I love him. You are an absolute angel baby, Ben.” She wrapped her arms around him, stood on her tiptoes to touch her lips to his cheek, and at that moment, I lost Ben to Rachel. Ben beamed with satisfaction, like teacher told him he was the best speller in the second grade. Great.

She let go and clasped her hands in front of her. “So, let’s split. Ben, I’m stealing Melissa from you, just a little early. I tried to get us in to Chez Panisse but no dice. This hick town! Ridiculous. I need to touch up, Mel, gimme the key to the staff bathroom.” Ben pressed his own key into her hand and said reverently, “Downstairs, past the occult section.”

My sister swept by us, a pleasant fug of perfume trailing her. “Jesus,” Ben said again.

“So? Was I right?” I asked him, wiping the lipstick off his face.

“It’s like… a personal visit from Regina George and Elle Woods and I am here for it.”

*****

Rachel rebuffed my plan to walk home or ride the bus (“ew”) and instead we rode back in a town car she had her assistant scare up. Apparently in my absence she’d managed to convince Steve not only to make her a chai latte, but also to program her a key code of her own to the back garden gate, as it was she who let me in. (Luckily, he drew the line at the code to my studio, small mercies.) As she closed the gate behind me she said, “You know, Mel, you really do look better than when I saw you last month. Really. I’m sorry I said you look like ass.” She kind of smothered the last bit behind her hand but I heard it.

I opened up the studio for us both. The bed was now up, the heat was down, the towels drying on a rack, and most of her clothes were tucked back in suitcases. Even Steve’s cup was washed. The tidiness of the place made me feel morose rather than grateful — so wholly unlike the cloud of chaotic busy-ness that attends my sister, so still and sterile.

Rachel lay down on the blue velvet loveseat, and draped her arm across her eyes. “Christ, Mel, why couldn’t you just have stayed in Burbank? It’s just so fucking inconvenient to come here. And I am so tired of Mom asking me if I think you’re really okay or just bluffing. I mean, you were always so good at hiding shit and convincing them everything was just fine when things clearly weren’t. Like I would know. You’re just as much of a fucking enigma to me.”

This was a surprise to me, that Rachel couldn’t read me. It sounds stupid, but when she was nine and I was seven, she convinced me that she could read my thoughts, so I’d better not think anything bad about her or she’d know. I mean, obviously I outgrew that delusion, but I have always felt that Rachel could divine my mysteries, read my bones.

“Rachel.” I placed an old wool blanket — one of Alex’s, smelly and terrible and full of moth-holes, removed from his family home and thus very dear to him — over her legs and leaned back against the loveseat. “Why are you here?”

She inhaled deeply. “Do you think this Tom Ford is a bit much? Matt likes it, but I’m not totally convinced.” She nudged my head with her big toe. “Oh Little Em. I’ve fucked up and I don’t know what to do. I’m such a fucking mess and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

I turned around to face her. Her arm still obscured her face, but what I could see of it was mottled with emotion. “Rachel,” I said quietly. “I’m here. You just tell me, tell me however much you want to say.”

She didn’t say anything for a while, so I leaned back again and listened to her breathe, the slightest hitch in the pattern giving lie to the reality that my lovely mess of a sister was an actual human, that she didn’t always fail upwards. “Melissa, I think I’m in love with Matt,” she finally said, with little of the emotion I was observing in her body. “I think I’m in love with Matt and I don’t want to fuck it up this time. I don’t want to push him away, or sleep with some rando just to rid myself of feeling things.”

Wow. Just wow. Her problem — her problem! — was that she was in love. Not that she’d wrecked her marriage, like I had, or was the sole source of emotional support for a man who was keeping three mostly ungrateful women afloat, like I was, or had to depend on handouts from a spiteful ex, like I did. No, beautiful Rachel was in beautiful love with her beautiful boyfriend (okay, Matt’s not that beautiful) and she wasn’t sure she couldn’t stop herself from sleeping around.

But all I said was, “I see.”

“How do I not fuck it up? I don’t know I’ve got it in me, this domestic thing you’re so good at, that Mom’s so good at. You’re both women and I’m just this teenage bitch who got old. And I worry that Matt’s going to get sick of me in ten years and then where will I be? I’ll have wasted the last of my good years on what? Some man and what he wanted? Some good it did you. Shit, Mel, I didn’t mean that.” She slid down off the loveseat and sat down next to me on the hardwood floor, pulling the blanket around us both.

“It’s okay.” (It wasn’t okay.)

“I just thought maybe… maybe you could tell me it’s okay to love Matt. You’re so much better at this loving thing than I am. It’s like… you see the wave cresting and instead of running away from it in terror, worrying you’ll drown, you run towards it, knowing you’ll float. But I don’t know if I’ll float. Maybe I’ll drown.”

I kissed her cheek, so full up with jealousy and yet weak, weak from years of loving my sister and wanting so badly for just a bit of her sheen to rub off on me. I’d forgive her nearly everything. Julian used to rip me for this — “You let her break you down and for what? She uses you for whatever she wants — money, a roof over her head, Christ, she takes your clothing out of your drawers as if it were her own. And all without a simple by-your-leave. She’s a disaster and when I’m here in this house, she is not to come in it.”

So of course she came over when he wasn’t there, which was much of the time anyway.

I look at her face, see my face reflected in her face. We are sisters, two of the same. “Rachel, how do you know you won’t swim?”