I Like You Just the Way I Am (24 page)

Candice was the type of girl who started breathing hard the minute she even attempted to do something nefarious. Any sort of elaborate lie might give her too much time to accidentally break down and confess. She needed a one- or two-word answer she could spit out while avoiding eye contact, and then change the subject.

“Let’s think, what could you have done today that might have caused this?”

“Um, maybe something at the gym?”

“A needle attacked you at the gym? No way. It’s too small to be a gym accident.” I racked my brain thinking of plausible scenarios, but all I came up with was “misguided insulin shot,” “misguided heroin needle,” or “misguided extra in a remake of
Death Becomes Her
.” Sadly, Candice wasn’t a diabetic, a heroin junkie, or an actress/waitress. She was a woman nearing forty with crow’s-feet I wouldn’t have even mentioned if Sorenson hadn’t opened his cosmetically enhanced duck lips.

“Jenny! Stop! It looks like a Botox bruise! That’s all it’s ever gonna look like.” Candice sat down on her toilet, resigned. She didn’t have any fight left in her.

“Not if we make it bigger,” I said without thinking.

Life shot back into Candice’s eyes. She stood up and grabbed my shoulders hard. “Will you punch me?” A small tear of desperation fell down her now-flawless cheek.

I thought about the Candice I’d known in my twenties—the strong, seemingly unaffected beauty who could barely be bothered to apply ChapStick. I thought about myself—the recovered anorexic who’d looked into having her anus bleached after catching a weird glimpse of it in a magnifying mirror in tenth grade. Maybe I’d projected too much of my own shit onto Candice. Maybe I should have asked more questions. Unfortunately, it was too late for questions. What was done was done.

“Please.” She was begging now, closing her eyes slightly and bracing for impact.

Instantly I was transported back to the previous Christmas, where after an afternoon of sailing and snorkeling, my stepmom, Kristen, came to me with a weave so tangled, there was no choice but to shave it out. Though I didn’t want to be the one to turn her into Helen Slater from
The
Legend of Billie Jean,
I was the only one she trusted to do it. Candice needed me just like Kristen had. She entrusted me with her vanity, her reputation, and her pride. I couldn’t let her down.

Trying to be the best friend I could be and before she could get out the words “nevermind this is a terrible idea,” I cocked back my fist and slugged Candice in the face.

Still numb, she darted to the mirror and examined her rapidly swelling eye. Now not only did she look like she was recently Botoxed, but she also looked like she was mugged and possibly raped by a small doctor with no upper body strength.

“This better bruise!” she said like an MMA fighter hoping for a few vanity wounds.

Horrified by my behavior and shocked by how the day had already unraveled, the only thing I could say was, “The first rule of Botox club is, we don’t talk about Botox club.”

Candice erupted into laughter, then shrieked in pain and ambled to the kitchen for ice. After physically assaulting my good friend, I needed to go home and call my therapist.

“Wait, I probably shouldn’t use the ice if I want it to stay blue.” Candice held a bag of frozen peas in her hand as I hugged her to leave.

“Use the peas,” I urged her.

Later that evening, Jason got a phone call from his good friend Nick, Candice’s husband. I was too nervous to eavesdrop, so I threw the dogs in the shower and busied myself with washing them. After a few minutes, there was a knock at the bathroom door. When Jason walked in, his face was grave.

“I just got off the phone with Nick.”

Knowing that the best defense was a good offense, I pretended to be annoyed before he could. “Babe, I can’t hear you with the water and I have wet dogs in here! Can this wait?”

Jason walked over to the shower and opened the glass door cautiously. “Sorry, honey. I guess Candice’s trainer dropped the bench press bar on her face today at the gym. They’re canceling dinner this weekend because she has a black eye.” He looked at me sweetly, hoping I wasn’t disappointed.

“Wow! That’s crazy.” I exhaled, relieved.

“Why don’t you look upset?”

“No, I am! Baby, that’s just my face,” I reassured him. “I knew I didn’t need any more Botox,” I said to the dogs under my breath, mentally flipping Sorenson the bird.

Once Jason was fast asleep, I texted Candice to congratulate her on pulling off what I’m sure was the most elaborate hoax of her life and also apologize if I in any way railroaded her into doing something she didn’t want to do. I made sure to say all the things I’d failed to tell her before—that she looked amazing for her age, that her effortlessness made her the envy of all her friends, and that she would always be a natural beauty.

I sat there for several minutes, moved by my own words, when my phone lit up with her response.

“What do you think I’d look like with my tits done?”

13.

You Were Molested

Having a sister is
like having a best friend who hates you. She shares your parents, shares your clothes, shares your secrets (with her entire circle of friends), and secretly wishes you were twins so that she could have absorbed you in the womb.

My sister and I were born sixteen months apart, and from the earliest time I can remember, we have struggled to differentiate ourselves. This often proved difficult when my mom was busy giving us the exact same middle name or having my sister’s tooth pulled so we could be in braces together. Of course, all of it had less to do with my mom’s wanting us to be connected and more to do with what was convenient for her. But as a result, Amanda and I have always harbored a small, misguided resentment toward each other that is obviously my mom’s fault.

In grade school, I carved out a space for myself as the “overachieving people-pleaser,” leaving Amanda no choice but to become the “hot-tempered rebel without a cause.” I won the science fair with my herbal Prozac for dogs, while she got suspended for trying to burn down the science room.

As adults, our roles reversed. Amanda joined the workforce and became the responsible, tightly wound sister who sends thank-you cards. And I married an actor.

I guess I shouldn’t have expected the best practical joke I’ve ever played on someone
ever
to be well received by a girl who is offended by use of the word “panties.” But as an older sister, I still felt it my duty to push the envelope.

Shortly after Amanda and Larry started dating, they moved in together. I wasn’t seeing a lot of either of them, because I still wasn’t comfortable watching them touch. Up until five months ago, Larry had been Jason’s newly single friend—up for anything and a complete joy to be around. Now, he was the puppy-lover to my neurotic sister, who wouldn’t shut up about whether or not her hips looked wide in her college graduation video from eight years ago.

One night, after a two-hour phone call about her hips, I hung up and packed a bowl. My sister-in-law, Veronica, was in town for the summer, and she and Jason were already three bong hits ahead of me. I walked into the guest bedroom to find the place littered with Twix bars as they swung around on my stripper pole.

“Jenny is the most uncoordinated stripper I’ve ever seen!” Jason said as he hung from the pole in an upside-down arabesque.

My husband has always been more of my wife, so the fact that he was a better stripper than me was annoying but not a huge surprise.

Just as my high started to take effect, I wobbled toward the stereo and adjusted the volume on the
Twilight
soundtrack.

“Do you find it at all weird that your husband strips?” Veronica asked, tossing a dollar at Jason to reward him for his performance.

“She just hates that I’m better than her!” Jason arrogantly slid down the pole and cat-crawled over to the bong. “Sorry, honey, but you are a horrible mess of a stripper, and I could obviously win
Dancing with the Stars
.… Should we order a pizza?”

I was stoned but still felt Jason’s cockiness needed a little curbing. I knew he was better, but to let him know he was better would go against all my principles as a woman. I decided the quickest fix would be to bring out his yearbook and remind him that he was on the tennis team and totally married out of his league. Veronica ordered eight pizzas for the three of us while I left to track it down.

After thirty minutes of standing in the garage, trying to remember why I left the house in only a workout bra and boxer shorts, I homed in on a bin of old albums. Opening it, I realized they were mine. Earlier that year, my mom had given my sister and me all our childhood photos as gifts. (Code for: she had no use for them in her new condo.)

Distracted by my own cuteness, I forgot about Jason’s yearbook entirely and carried the ten-pound bin back into the house to go through it. The alarming thing about those albums wasn’t seeing my parents married and happy (though that was weird too)—but the obvious absence of my sister. There were no shots of her anywhere. I felt like Marty McFly in
Back to the Future,
though I was entirely too high to make it to the Enchantment Under the Sea dance in time to effect any real change. Still, from the look of these pictures, Amanda hadn’t ever existed within our family.

I called my mom to make sure I hadn’t accidentally smoked mushrooms.

“Mom, remember Amanda? You know, my sister? Why are there no pictures of her in this photo bin?”

“Jenny?” she asked, confused, as if she had had a litter of children and was trying to remember which one I was. “Oh, the baby photos! I separated them. Your sister has all the pics of her and you have all the pics of you.”

“So there were no pics of us
together
?”

“I think I threw those out.”

Before I could respond, the pizza guy was at the door. I told my mom I’d call her back, which I had no intention of doing, and paid for the pies.

Jason and Veronica floated into the room like Shaggy and Scooby-Doo and immediately started bingeing. Hell-bent on finding evidence of the childhood I was vaguely sure I’d experienced, I continued searching through the photos.

Eventually, I stumbled upon a small four-by-six of Amanda sitting in a rocking chair with our Great-Grandpa Norm. He seemed serene, while Amanda looked scared to death. I guess it made sense: Grandpa Norm was a molester.

Well, to be fair, I’m not certain Grandpa Norm ever really molested anybody. But his brother Mervin did.

As children, we always heard the stories of weird Great-Uncle Mervin from Alabama who went to jail for inappropriate behavior with his children and grandchildren. Details were never expounded upon, because this was the WASPy side of my family—the side that didn’t like to suffer through things like “facts” or “reality.” Suffice it to say, he was a scary fucking Molester Man.

For as long as I knew him, my Grandpa Norm had no teeth and whenever he kissed you, your mouth would inevitably collapse into his. I never saw him wear anything but overalls, and his welder’s hands were swollen from years of hard labor (and probably molesting). He never tried anything on me, but he had this vibe that made you feel like he might be undressing you with his creepy grandpa eyes. His daughter, my Grandma Gayle, was the kind of perennial child who at fifty-five still referred to her breasts as her “privates.” She spent most of her adult life hibernating in her house, collecting
Reader’s Digests,
and getting drunk on Listerine. Norm’s late wife, my Great-Grandma Jean, carried a revolver in her kitchen apron and slept between Amanda and me every time we spent the night at their house. For this reason, I was certain of two things:

1. Grandpa Norm was a molester (because why else would she insist on sleeping in our bed?), and

2. Amanda and I could
never
have been molested by Grandpa Norm (because we never had any alone time).

Over the years, especially after Grandpa Norm passed, Amanda and I would try to bait my mom into admitting that Grandpa Norm stole her virginity. This was a recurring joke of ours. We were insistent: Her string of weird relationships and her inability to love—they must have been a reaction to a repressed sexual violation by the man she considered her second father. Her response was one of disgust, followed by a lengthy diatribe about how Grandpa Norm was one of the greatest men she’d ever known. We never bought it.

When I walked into the kitchen to share my story, Jason and Veronica were busy discovering the benefits of using a slice of pizza as a plate for another slice of pizza.

I donned my best narrator voice, like Burl Ives in the claymation version of
Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer
(whom, incidentally, I’ve also always suspected of being a molester), and told the tale of Grandpa Norm. I explained that my sister and I had been talking about him—with each other, with our mom—for years. I finished my story by pointing out the photo of Amanda on a rocking chair with Grandpa Norm. It was an innocuous snapshot, but it could be the photographic “evidence” I’d long been waiting for.…

“I feel like I could have been molested,” Veronica said plainly.

“By who?” Jason asked.

“I don’t know. Doesn’t everyone feel like they might have been molested? Like maybe if I got hypnotized, I’d remember sucking Dad’s dick or something.” She hopped up on the counter and grabbed another piece of pizza.

“I was never molested, and sometimes it kind of offends me that nobody even tried.” I stared at a photo of myself with a hideous bowl cut that I was sure helped dissuade would-be attackers.

“The molestation really helps me understand why your sister is such a cunt,” Jason said thoughtfully.

“Jason! She wasn’t
really
molested. That was just our running joke. And now I have the perfect photo to support it.” I thought for a moment, until inspiration struck.

“Should I send this picture to Amanda with an anonymous note telling her she was molested?”