“Do you understand me?” said Sarah.
Betty Jane immediately let go, but I felt the sting of her outrage as we transitioned.
“Holly?” said Sarah.
“Yes,” I whispered. Betty Jane had never backed down to anyone, and I didn’t know what scared me more: that she did it, or that Sarah’s threat made her do it.
“I am serious. No Betty Jane.”
Sarah still didn’t get that I couldn’t exactly banish someone who lived in my head, and for a moment, I considered telling her to forget it. But as funny as it sounds coming from someone living in NewYork City, I was lonesome and wanted physical interaction that didn’t include pretenses, wasn’t superficial, and/or didn’t have fur and four legs. I wanted my sister, my confidante, my friend, the one person who accepted me rips, tears, cracks,
leaks, the Committee, and all. It was a tough blow to discover Sarah accepted all but one part of me.That transformed the idea of a fun birthday into a day like any other day in my life, with me trying to muddle through while trying to manage Betty Jane. After all these years, I’d been successful on that front only when our desires matched.
I sighed. “Okay.”
“Also, Holly,” said Sarah, “it would be nice to meet your boyfriend.”
I had learned a long time ago that separation of church and state, as it were, was the best way to maintain secrets. My relationships always ended when the sex got boring and the guy wanted to know my middle name. Suffice it to say that my boyfriend, Peter, didn’t know about the Committee, that I had a sister, that New Year’s Eve was my birthday, and that I didn’t have a middle name.
I sighed again. “I’m sure he’d like to meet you too.”
My boyfriend, Peter, was an enigma. Half of him was a tall, sexy, urbane devotee of Tim Gunn and
Project Runway
, mimicking him down to the suit, tie, and slicked-back hair. The other half was a serious graduate student in religious studies. I met him at the diner where I worked as a waitress when he came in early one morning to try to stave off his post-all-night-partying hangover with greasy food. He never would have noticed me if not for an off-the-cuff reference to Kierkegaard I made.We’d been together for only two months and, as the antithesis of all his previous girl-friends, in height, weight, intelligence, looks, and so on, I found myself wondering, hourly, if we really were in a relationship. Luckily, we hadn’t yet reached the point where the stardust had worn off and/or I’d lost my ability to charm him with my witty repartee. I’d been there with previous boyfriends enough times to know no stardust meant you had to actually learn more about
each other or hop off the train. You can guess which choice I always made. But I wasn’t ready to let Peter go yet.
Meeting Sarah would definitely accelerate our journey to that fork in the road.
I called Peter immediately after Sarah and I hung up. His big New Year’s plan included Times Square, the most populated place in the country, me, and all of his friends. He’d mentioned it a few weeks earlier and my response had been the same one I had for most things I didn’t want to do—remain noncommittal and pray for a solution. When Sarah called and offered me one, I figured God was having a light day.
“So, my sister is going to be here on New Year’s Eve,” I said.
“Cool, she can come with us to Times Square,” said Peter.
“Well, the thing is”—I hesitated—“she’s arriving at six o’clock in the evening and leaving the following morning. She was kind of hoping we could do a quiet sister thing.”
I heard Peter breathing on the other end of the phone and asked the obvious question: “Are you mad?” He remained silent.
“Are you?” I asked again.
He still didn’t answer.
“I’ll see if I can work it out,” I said,“but if not, you’ll be with your friends.”
“Yeah, that’s why I have a girlfriend.”
“I’ll figure it out,” I said.
The day before New Year’s Eve, Peter still thought Sarah and I were spending the next evening with him and half the world in Times Square, and Sarah thought Peter had other plans.
I grew up with a woman who excelled at igniting roaring blazes with one word; and I’d had the pleasure of Betty Jane, who’d lived inside my head for the past twelve years and was equally good at setting fires. I probably had other options, but when desperate, you go with what you know.
I took a seemingly innocuous comment from Peter—“The jeans you wore the other day look better on you”—and doused it with verbal gasoline: “You think I’m fat.”
“Don’t be difficult—”
“Fat and difficult.” I raised my voice several octaves for effect. “What else?”
And with that, I ignited the roaring fight that got me out of introducing my sister and my boyfriend.
Most people would probably think I’m a horrible person for doing this; they’d probably also think one night in Times Square was not a big deal. Maybe I am a horrible person, but I live in a crowd. I didn’t need to extend it by standing in the middle of a much larger one. Not to mention that I’d be with people I didn’t know well enough to dislike; a boyfriend who didn’t have the first clue about me; my sister, who’d probably expose me in her attempt to protect me; and Betty Jane, who was liable to pull something really awful because she’d been excluded. If you were in my shoes, even if you said you wouldn’t, when the time came, you’d be willing to do anything to avoid that situation. Trust me on this.
When I opened my eyes on the morning of my birthday, Betty Jane raised her glass in a toast. I thought she’d forgiven me for her impending banishment. Then, as I buttoned my work uniform, she said, “I’ve told you many times that style doesn’t flatter your figure, or maybe Peter was right, and you’ve put on weight.”
“He never said that,” I said. She arched one eyebrow. “I said it.”
Betty Jane smiled. “Never mind.”
I stood five-foot-three if I held my head up straight. My waitress uniform with its tie at the waist drew attention to my long torso and short legs, making me appear squat and fat. Betty Jane had an eye for clothing that flattered. I didn’t. But Betty Jane
and I had been playing the game of retribution in the form of insults thinly veiled as truth for a long time. Only she played it much better than I did. She knew all my weaknesses and played on them like Beethoven on a fortepiano.The notes were soft or hard depending on her anger. Commenting on my weight meant her hands were crashing down on the keys.You couldn’t find an ounce of excess fat on my body if you put me under a microscope.
In other words, I was not forgiven.
She raised her glass again at that thought and I realized that there was more than orange juice in it. I’d never seen Betty Jane drunk before, but having witnessed the combination of my father and a bottle of booze on many occasions while growing up, I recognized a mean drunk when I saw one. But I’d chosen to comply with my sister’s wishes, and I left the responsibility of containing Betty Jane to Ruffles.
On my way home from the diner, I made my daily stop at the A & P grocery store. I believed that shopping weekly would force me into choices I might not like. How was I to know on Tuesday what I would want to eat on Saturday?
I stood in front of the cereal boxes debating with Ruffles and Sarge about whether Sarah would want Cheerios or toast for breakfast. Then Betty Jane slurred, “She banished me. Don’t get her anything.”
“I can’t believe you silenced her with a bottle of gin,” I said.
Inside my head, Ruffles held up her hands.
“Hey, I did the best I could under the circumstances.”
Betty Jane controlled the Committee, so they couldn’t banish her any more than I could.The only other option was to make her unavailable. Getting her drunk accomplished that and then some.
“Can you at least take the bottle away and hide it?” I asked.
I closed my eyes. Sarge reached for it. Betty Jane slapped him as she stumbled toward her bed, upending and draining the bottle on the way.
“Jesus, she’s smashed,” I said. I shook my head.“Quick, before she goes down, cereal or toast?”
Chatting in front of the Cheerios with myself went unnoticed in a big city. If I let down my guard like this back in Palo Alto, Nancy from my mother’s bridge club would spot me and tell Marjorie and Kate, and the next thing you knew all the families would be sitting poolside at some neighborhood barbecue whispering about me instead of their monthly Botox treatments.
Living in New York definitely had its abject moments, but when the woman standing next to me pulling a box of Rice Krispies off the shelf didn’t even glance sidelong as I discussed Betty Jane’s inebriation along with the pros and cons of cereal versus toast, those moments didn’t seem so bad.
We decided on cereal
and
toast, and I also bought the makings for a salad and pasta. On the way to the checkout, I grabbed a thirty-dollar bottle of wine and a coffee cake in a box. We’d need something to stick the candles on later. Then I decided I should start the new year with a new toothbrush, toothpaste, and floss and walked over to the dental hygiene section.
I picked up two packages and said,“Do you know the difference between unwaxed and waxed floss?”
“I read that dental tape is better,” said Ruffles.
“Is it?”
“Is what?” I turned and saw an A & P clerk standing next to me.
I shook my head and threw both packages into the cart.
By the time I arrived home, Betty Jane lay sprawled on her bed in a drunken stupor inside my head. Her incapacitation made the Committee unable to speak and participate. I knew the rest of the
Committee would give me a pass on this one, especially since the solution to the “how to keep Betty Jane out of Sarah’s face” problem came from Ruffles. Hopefully, nasty remarks and a hangover would be the extent of Betty Jane’s retribution.
The upside of Betty Jane’s drinking was that her hangover should keep her in bed for at least a day after Sarah’s departure, which would give me time to apologize to Peter, grovel if necessary, and then initiate a passionate reunion. Milton had warned me once about the consequences of using this method to restore harmony in a relationship. He said, “Do this and you become more enmeshed in the fantasy, when the reality is that the relationship wouldn’t exist if you ever thought about what made you stay.” This time, I ignored him.
I checked my watch, two o’clock. I had four hours to kill before Sarah arrived.
It was just past ten o’clock. Sarah and I sat under the covers in my bed. We’d had all our conversations like this while growing up—me against my pillow and Sarah with her back against the wall and legs hooked over mine.“Holly,” said Sarah,“Mom asked me to ask you when are you going to get a real job and support yourself like most people your age do? She thinks you wait tables to spite her.”
My working as a waitress bothered my mother almost as much as it did Betty Jane—especially when she compared me to Sarah, who went from high school, to college, to marriage, and to a career in accounting, hitting all the success milestones at just the right time. By age thirty, Sarah had embarked on motherhood, and four years and two perfectly timed children later she was now hitting all the right child-rearing achievements on schedule. From my mother’s perspective, by now I should have a successful career and a husband trying fervently to impregnate me.
I said to Sarah, “Ask Mom if she’d prefer to tell the bridge club that her NYU honor student can’t seem to find career success outside of the food industry because she has a little problem of five people inhabiting her head.” I smirked.
My sister sat silent. A few years ago she had decided it was best to remain neutral on the topic of my employment. She could not see the causal link between the fact that my jobs required me to interact with so many people and how often I changed employers. The missing piece I never shared was that I waited tables, and subsequently, it was Betty Jane’s behavior that always got me fired within six to eight months. When Sarah suggested I try to stay put, build stability in my life, I asked her to trust me that this was the best I could do.
“At least I have a boyfriend,” I said, hoping to direct the conversation to accomplishments my mother did care about.
“Well, yes,” said Sarah, “she was thrilled until I told her your boyfriend is a graduate student on scholarship. She figured out where the excess charges were coming from pretty quickly after that, Holly.”
“Is that why you wanted to meet him?” I asked.“Did she tell you to?”
“She didn’t have to. I see the credit card bill. And—”
“You’re always going to protect me,” I said. Sarah had told me this so many times over the years, I recognized the specific way her mouth shaped right before the words came out.
“I am always going to protect you.” Sarah squeezed my hand and my chest ached. Just once I wanted to be the one who protected her. It wasn’t fair that she seemed to walk through life as my bulletproof vest.
I sighed, then said, “I expected Mom to take comfort in the fact that my mind was not wasting. This seemed to be her chief complaint,” I said. “I addressed it and still she’s not satisfied.”
“We are now on the avenue called sarcastic,” said Sarah.“Maybe she is right. You do keep working as a waitress to spite her.”
A few years earlier my mother had asked Sarah how someone with an expensive education could have no ambition other than to serve breakfast. It was an appropriate question for most parents, and had my mother been like most parents, we would have had a credible, albeit misleading answer prepared. My mother so rarely asked questions about me or my life that her query had caught Sarah off guard. Her answer came across as vague and neutral, and my mother immediately interpreted my behavior as a slight against her. I’d never admit it to Sarah, but I did derive a certain pleasure from imagining my mother trying to explain my career to her friends.