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Authors: Alison Pace

Through Thick and Thin (3 page)

BOOK: Through Thick and Thin
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“Yes, thank God for her,” Meredith says even though she’s never seen this blonde, and skinny, and apparently rather unsettling woman at the end of the DVD. She wants to say,
Are you okay?
Because something like that, that’s an okay thing to say, right? That’s not making a
thing
, that’s not making the drama that Stephanie insists not be made. Stephanie does not like
things,
does not subscribe to what she thinks is the drama people can make out of stuff, out of anything. Even if a lot of other six-month-old babies are already quite settled in to a sleep schedule, a nighttime sleep schedule. Stephanie says she has heard of these babies who sleep from seven to seven, and for the life of her, she just can’t imagine that it could be true.
“Aubrey thinks it’s like baby pot,” Stephanie continues. “Baby crack. I try not to let her have too much TV, especially with the way this zones her out, but I just get so tired, and especially since you’re here and I don’t get to see you, I think it’s fine.”
“It’s educational,” Meredith assures, and then for a while, for a full five minutes or so, they watch the soothing colors and shapes and sardonic sock puppets on the big screen; Meredith wonders if maybe she should get a
Baby Einstein
video for herself, or whatever the adult equivalent is. Though actually the adult equivalent is probably, as Aubrey says, pot, or crack. Probably not the best idea. Probably.
“Speaking of Aubrey, where is he?” Meredith asks.
Stephanie stares at the screen for a second more. “Oh, I think he’s in his workroom,” she answers vaguely as she glances briefly in the direction of the door across the room.
It could be the inherent 1970s implication of a finished basement—like the one they never had growing up in their house in Washington, the District, not the state, because the house was too old, the basement wasn’t the type that could be finished. It could be that. Whatever it is, something always makes Stephanie time-travel back a few decades and call Aubrey’s corner of the basement a workroom, as if there’s a toolbox in there, and a saw, some drills, a wooden sawhorse perhaps, as if it’s the site of various and sundry manly man crafts. But it’s not that at all. It’s just a different part, a sectioned-off area of the basement. Aubrey has a desk set up there, and his seventeen-inch MacBook Pro that Meredith has on occasion felt lust for, having the fondness she does for shiny new things. Aubrey also has about five million CDs down there, and his golf clubs, and both his and Stephanie’s skis and snowboards that were never used this winter, for the first winter ever. He has all these
Sports Illustrated
magazines, hundreds of them, and for some reason, a mini-fridge.
“I should get him,” Stephanie says after a moment, and the way her voice turned before, becoming higher when she talked about the woman who pops up at the end of the
Baby Einstein
videos, her voice gets that way again, as if an anxious glaze has just been painted onto it. “He should say hi. I didn’t even think. So rude, I’m sorry.”
“Oh, no, it’s fine, Steph,” Meredith tells her, “don’t be sorry.”
“I guess he thinks if it’s just, you know,
you
, and not an actual guest, he doesn’t have to come up and say hi,” Stephanie explains. “But he should. I’ll get him.” The only movement she makes is flipping her hands up and making quotes in the air around the word
guest
. Normally, Meredith would want to address the subject of air quotes with Stephanie. Meredith has long thought of the use of air quotes as a matter of concern. But right now, it doesn’t seem important.
“No, don’t, it’s fine,” she says, with some manufactured urgency. She extends a flexed palm, as if to quite physically stop her sister’s mad dash to the basement door. She wants Stephanie to think it really does seem like she’s about to go down there and get him. She has no idea why, but she thinks that it’s necessary. “It’s fine,” she says again, “I’m here all day. It’s fine, it’s nice to see just you for a little bit.” And it is, even if there might be something about it that’s lonely.
“I just don’t want you to think he’s rude,” Stephanie adds, still concerned.
“I don’t think he’s rude,” Meredith assures.
“No, I know, and it’s nice to see just you, too.” Stephanie brightens as she angles herself on the couch until she is completely facing Meredith, the door to the basement/workroom now out of her line of vision. The sounds from the
Baby Mozart
hit a crescendo and then settle down again.
“So,” Stephanie says, reaching out, touching Meredith’s knee, “Tuesday? Big day.” Tuesday is Valentine’s Day.
Big day,
Meredith thinks, and smiles; possibly it is closer to smirking than smiling.
“Josh is still coming up?” Stephanie double-checks.
“Yep, still is,” Meredith replies, noticing how they both felt it necessary to use the word
still
.
“Where are you going?” Stephanie asks, now beaming a little bit. The beaming, just so you know, isn’t because she’s a fan of Josh, Meredith’s vanished and now reappeared ex-boyfriend, but because she is a fan of Meredith having a date for Valentine’s Day again. She is a fan of Meredith giving romance a chance again, even if it is with Josh. She is a fan of Meredith finding her happy ending, even if with Josh, the ending was not so happy at all.
“Bouley,” Meredith says with more restraint than Bouley would normally be said with. Yes, she’s been there four, even five times before, as she’s been to so many wonderful restaurants four, even five times before. But the restraint in this instance is less because she’s jaded and more because she thinks restraint is important to have with Josh. Restraint, really, is the only way to play it. Especially with Josh.
“Oh, I do love Bouley,” Stephanie says dreamily. She sighs and looks a little wistfully off at nothing in particular, some point above Ivy’s head, past the flat screen. “I miss coming with you.” And something in Meredith surges, and she wonders if it’s just that she misses her sister so much, even if they are sitting less than two feet away from each other, even if there’s really no way to explain what it feels like when things, husbands and babies and suburbs, happen to everyone around you but not you, when everyone changes, when everything changes, and you just stay the same.
“I miss you coming with me, too,” she says, “You’re my favorite dining companion, hands down.”
“I miss the wigs, too.” Stephanie says, still wistful, perhaps even more wistful. Stephanie always liked the secret agent aspect of Meredith’s job, the disguises and the aliases and all the different credit cards, almost as much as the food. Stephanie used to come over beforehand and disguise herself, too. And Meredith would always happily accommodate; she understood, she’s always liked the disguises very much, too.
“You can always come, whenever you want.”
“Right,” she glances at Ivy, “tell me when you get switched to the New Jersey beat.” Stephanie does have a sitter for Ivy, or maybe the correct word would be nanny since it’s the same person who comes every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons and is available on Saturday nights, too; something that Stephanie had, at one point, been quite pleased about, so representative it seemed to her of freedom. But Meredith isn’t sure when a person stops being a sitter and starts being a nanny, or if she is in fact technically either since Stephanie has yet to let her stay alone with Ivy. At some point, freedom stopped being at the top of the list of things Stephanie got pleased about.
“Steph,” she suggests, treading lightly, “you should really come in one night. I have to go back to 66 in the next few weeks, twice probably. You know, it’s Jean-George Vongerichten’s Chinese-themed outpost in Tribeca?” Meredith asks, and Stephanie shakes her head, as in
No, Meredith, I didn’t know,
because really, how could she, out here in Ridgewood, not living, breathing, and sleeping (poorly) the New York City restaurant scene? Or maybe she shakes her head, no, as in
No, I’m not coming with you
. Meredith continues on quickly, “You’d
love
it there, he does this soy-cured salmon with Asian pears and a crème fraîche that is just exceptional. He uses cilantro in it, in the crème fraîche. You should come,” Meredith says invitingly, and when Stephanie looks a bit more wistful, a bit more like she’d really quite like a nice night out at a restaurant, Meredith adds on, “You can wear the red wig if you’d like.”
“The long red one?” Stephanie asks longingly, just a hint of elasticity in her voice. Meredith considers it for a moment, braces herself, and then ever so cautiously adds the thing she’s been thinking should have been added onto almost every sentence for the past few months.
“Steph,” she begins, in a tone she hopes strikes only the right level of impassioned, “at some point you need to be okay with letting Ivy stay with her sitter, or even just with Aubrey for the night.” (Was it impassioned? Impassioned enough?) Stephanie stiffens. Meredith isn’t sure when exactly Stephanie stiffened, when the 66-long-red-wig glimmer went out of her eye; if she lost her at
sitter
, or at
Aubrey
. Surely it was at
sitter.
She reapproaches, “Steph, lots of people, lots of really excellent mothers, almost as dedicated as you, use sitters. Nannies.”
Stephanie tucks a new highlight behind her ear, and repeats the motion on the other side. She considers the lava lamp shapes on the screen for a moment and then she glances at the door to the basement before turning again to Meredith, her forehead slightly clouded. “It’s not just that. I can’t go to a big dinner, I’m starting a new diet on Monday,” she explains. “I haven’t lost hardly any of the baby weight.”
Meredith doesn’t say anything for a second, she hates the word
diet
, always has, and wonders how the topic changed so quickly away from 66. Stephanie is looking at her expectantly. “You look great,” she tells her, and she thinks so, she does.
“No, I don’t. I’ve lost none of the baby weight.”
“Steph, that’s an exaggeration.”
“But it’s not a big one. I’m a cow.”
“You are absolutely not,” Meredith protests. Sure, Stephanie’s been thinner before. Sure, she could be thinner than she is now. But who hasn’t, who couldn’t? Meredith looks quickly at Stephanie’s middle, first at her stomach, then at her thighs, and then, even more quickly, down at her own. She reminds herself that thighs, just by their very nature, look a lot bigger when sitting down on a couch, stomachs do, too. She tries not to compare. Comparing herself to Stephanie has never worked out well for her. Stephanie had always been the nicer sister, the sportier sister. She’d always been the prettier sister even though they looked so much alike; people had never noticed that because Stephanie had always been the thinner sister. She tries not to judge herself or her sister. And then she does anyway. She’s still heavier than Stephanie is, and she remembers (how could she forget?) that Stephanie, for all intents and purposes really, should probably be the heavier one. Stephanie has a new baby. Meredith just has
The NY
, and ten thousand restaurants in New York City, so many of them needing to be reviewed. But she shouldn’t compare. She tells herself it’s not a contest. She tells herself that a lot.
Meredith sits up a bit straighter, tucks a thumb into the waistband of her jeans, and pulls them up a bit, up and over her stomach, which she will only call her stomach. She will not say
roll
or
pooch
, because it might actually be more than that, and also, attributing the words
roll
and
pooch
to one’s body parts can’t be considered productive. She will say, however, that low-waisted jeans (a fashion trend she can now see she was wrong to have tried to embrace) are not friends. She has seriously begun to contemplate the very real possibility that low-waisted jeans are in fact the devil’s playthings.
“What diet?” Meredith asks. Just to be polite.
“The Zone,” Stephanie tells her. “Caryn lost twenty-five pounds on it.” Caryn, Meredith thinks, could very well be one of those annoying women in Manhattan, the miniature ones whose numbers are legion and vast, who actually look good in Seven, Citizens of Humanity, Hudson, Rock & Republic, True Religion and all the other myriad brands of low-waisted jeans that are
everywhere.
Meredith knows all their names (the names of the low-waisted jeans, not of the miniature women). She would bet right now that Caryn, even when she was pregnant, has never actually seen the other side of size six. Meredith does at times see how it’s wrong to hate people on sight. Now is not one of those times.
“Caryn actually did the thing where they deliver it every day to you, three meals and a snack. But I’m just going to do it with the book. I have the book,” Stephanie says authoritatively, and Meredith worries for a moment that she’s going to jump up and get the book and brandish it at her. But that doesn’t happen. Stephanie only adds hopefully, almost as wistfully as when she remembered Meredith’s wigs, “People say it’s complicated, but I can’t see how it can be that complicated. I mean, it’s just a diet.”
Just a diet
. Meredith doesn’t think there’s any such thing. But Stephanie doesn’t know that, how could she? She doesn’t have the advantage of accumulated years of knowledge that Meredith has. Stephanie hasn’t spent her entire life feeling fat.
“See, how it works is . . .” Stephanie begins to explain something, something about the ratios of fats and proteins and carbohydrates, but Meredith isn’t really listening. She’s thinking that she’s heard it all before and she doesn’t want to hear the intricacies of this particular diet, doesn’t want to know why it’s easy to follow, why this one will work. She’s thinking that even with everything they used to have in common, before there was Aubrey and Ivy and Ridgewood, before everything changed but Meredith didn’t, now the one thing they have in common is this. Weight. Weight that needs to be lost.
She turns her attention back to Stephanie. She tries to focus, because she thinks she might see a little bit of a glimmer in her sister’s eyes again, and she thinks that right about now, Stephanie could use a bit of a glimmer.
BOOK: Through Thick and Thin
4.47Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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