Confessions of the Other Sister Read online

  “We’ll go in the barn,” he suggested, gesturing toward what was rumored to be one of the oldest barns left standing in Tompkins County. The unpainted wood was so old, it was almost black. Normally she wouldn’t go in the place for fear it would collapse on top of her but tonight she’d take the privacy at just about any cost, even if it only meant her body was hidden by wood slats.

  Funny how the threat of getting sick changes all your values.

  The door creaked loud when he opened it; they stepped in. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the light coming through the rotting slats. It was just a barn. Empty now, but not that far from inhabitable. Stall doors, open and seemingly waiting for occupants. Remnants of straw within.

  He opened another door to what must have been the tack room. A single old bridle hung on the wall, the bit dull with age, next to a shredded nylon halter. There was a bag of feed on the floor, split open with corn spilling out, as if it had been dropped from some height and then just left there. She took a long, bracing breath. The room smelled like deep cold earth, leather, and a hint of molasses.

  “Better?” he asked.

  “Yes, actually.” The world was warped, for sure, but she no longer thought she was on the verge of vomiting.

  “Good.” He pulled her into his arms, wrapping his warmth and strength around her.

  And, damn it, it felt so good. More than that—it felt lifesaving. She all but went slack and it didn’t even matter; he held her up. She wanted to sleep.

  Or was she asleep?

  “You look so fucking hot tonight,” he said, then kissed her, hard and wet, on the mouth.

  “Don’t!” She tried to draw away but was firmly in his arms. “We can’t!”

  “Shhh.” He moved a hand up and down her back.

  She relaxed against his touch. It felt good. If she could just stand here and enjoy this for a little while . . .

  He kissed her again. “You don’t know how long I’ve wanted to do that.”

  She floated in it for a moment, actually enjoying the security of his embrace, the smell of the smoke on his skin and hair, even the cinnamon and beer on his breath. It was almost a romantic Christmas movie.

  Almost.

  “No,” she forced herself to say. “Really.”

  “You don’t mean that. I can tell. You feel the same way I do. You always have.”

  “No. It’s not okay. Don’t.”

  “It’s okay. I promise you we won’t get caught. Just go with it. You know you want to.” And he kissed her again.

  Chapter Two

  Frances

  You know the party is getting stale when the topic turns to people claiming they’ve seen the ghost of Frank Sinatra in the bathroom.

  It was impossible, of course. He’s been gone, what, twenty-some years now? Thirty? I don’t know. I couldn’t ask him because I didn’t see him, but it was the night of the Emmy Awards, at the after-party of one of TV’s great divas, Jill Cameron, and the champagne was flowing. I heard at least five guests say they saw him in there, though the details varied greatly.

  “I was washing my hands and when I turned off the water and looked in the mirror, he was right behind me. Right behind me, I tell you, clear as day. It was, if you’ll forgive me, chilling and”—with a delighted shiver—“thrilling.”

  “He was sort of floating, just a faint whisper of gossamer, but he was singing ‘Strangers in the Night’ right to me! I think he was flirting.”

  “I was takin’ a whiz, so obviously I told him to leave, and the sonofabitch tried to punch me, but his fist went right through me.” There’s always one in the crowd, isn’t there? The jerk who thought he sounded like a badass by claiming to have stood up to a ghost. “I mean it,” he insisted through the laughter of the others. “I’ll go back in right now, come with me!”

  All of this was after my employer, Jill herself, had proclaimed that Sinatra and Ava Gardner had rented the place together when they were having a secret affair, before they were married. The story of their rental was one I had seen her devise while I was making the avocado egg rolls that afternoon.

  I’m her private chef, you see.

  She was watching a biography of Frank wherein a love shack was referred to, and while I admit the description—a gorgeous midcentury modern with a pool shaped like a piano—sounded like Jill’s house, I knew from my own passive viewing that that house was in Palm Springs. But Jill was so excited at the idea of him having been in her house once that I didn’t want to correct her.

  And obviously there was no correcting people who wanted to believe they’d seen a really cool ghost.

  The same documentary said he hated the song “Strangers in the Night,” so the likelihood of him choosing that to serenade Missy Gaylord, known to daytime-soap fans as Phoebe Millstone, grande dame of a group of make-believe hospital staffers in upstate New York (where I happen to have grown up), with that particular number really felt unlikely. I’d come away from the documentary, and the egg rolls, with the impression that he was a man who didn’t suffer fools gladly, and Missy Gaylord was most definitely a fool.

  I am, somewhat embarrassingly, named after Frank Sinatra. He was Francis and I’m Frances, but it’s still for him. My sister is Crosby, after Bing, which is a much cooler first name and only one of many things about her that stick in my craw.

  Our contemporaries are way too young to be really familiar with either namesake, though there are always some who know them. But our parents are old-movie-and-music buffs who practically live in the past. Actually, our dad wrote the song “Happily Never After” in the early 1980s (sorry if it’s stuck in your head now) and he’s been living pretty well off that stupid song ever since, though he was always a bigger fan of the standards.

  I’m not being disrespectful, by the way. He says it’s a dippy song himself. He had a whole album and that was the only track he thought was definitely a B side, written as a pun, but it ended up being a monster hit. It was even resurrected in a cartoon feature in the early 2000s. I’m embarrassed to tell you how much he’s made from it, but trust me, it would give you a new respect for one-hit wonders. I just wish, for his sake, he’d been able to follow it up with another so it didn’t feel like a fluke.

  My mother, Sandy Solomon, is a cookbook author, famous for her first effort, Veg Out, a vegetarian cookbook of reimagined comfort foods published back when a pun on vegging out was funny and not groan-worthy. She is further beloved for her ongoing series (Veg In, Don’t Be Chicken, et cetera), which I think is now at eight books. Good recipes, by the way. I use them all the time. I can butcher an entire side of beef with quick precision, eliminating all questionable parts, and I can make an osso buco that would bring tears of joy to your eyes, but nine times out of ten, I’d rather have wild mushroom risotto or even macaroni and cheese. And yes, I use a bit of Velveeta in that. I do what works, not what’s strictly “fancy.”

  Cooking professionally doesn’t always give me a choice, however. And I love cooking, I really do, but it’s not my most golden aspiration. What I want—my dream vocation—is to act. I wish it weren’t. But it is.

  That’s why I left the East Coast and came to Los Angeles in the first place.

  I started following this dream in fifth grade, dressed as a Twister game box in a (retrospectively) terrifying school play called The Enchanted Toy Shop. Needless to say, I dropped it for a bit in order to be a child, then, after some coercing from my eighth-grade English teacher, who thought I performed well in our class readings of elementary Shakespeare, I landed the lead in the terrible (but cheap, royalty-wise, so the school could afford it) Frankenstein, Honey! Which was a musical about the love between a monster cobbled together from clay and his female inventor (me). Again, looking back, just weird, particularly in its efforts to make the original story less gruesome. I mean . . . a clay monster? This was not the route to child-stardom.

  In high school I was the only freshman and then sophomore getting leads with the upperclassmen. By graduation, theater fully defined me in reputation. There was no question when I went to college that I’d keep doing it. And I did.

  In college, I was Roxie Hart in Chicago, A in Three Tall Women, Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I was in tons of embarrassing films made by film students. Everyone else—like my sister—spent their college careers playing beer pong and sneaking into bars with fake IDs. I spent Friday nights at the school’s film festival or rehearsing or practicing in my dorm.

  It seemed like I was off to a great start. But it turns out that no one cares what plays you did in school. You don’t ride into a real audition on a list of high-school accomplishments; all you do is be very, very good. Oh, and have connections. Have multiple talents. I could sing and dance a little, well enough to get that role of Roxie, but I wasn’t fit for big Broadway musicals.

  So I came to Los Angeles, forgoing any potentially disappointing attempt at the lights of Broadway. I started lining up auditions. Basically, I was told that my theater roots showed. I needed to start learning to act for the camera instead of the back row.

  The time between auditions got filled up quickly with restaurant jobs as I tried to make enough to pay the rent. I’d worked at a place in town as a teenager, learned I was good at cooking, fast as a line cook. Runs in the blood, I guess. I wasn’t working at great places, but I was making high hourly, which meant I could depend on a steady income. Plus, I really didn’t have to talk to anyone. Not like the bouncy, buzzy servers and bartenders who were also trying to “make it.” I didn’t have it in me to be constantly on.

  Then I never had time to practice. I got stuck staying up late and sleeping until the beginning of my shifts. Taking doubles. I was too tired, too worn out to focus on the
new challenge of acting small, acting with nuance, reeling myself in.

  Suddenly I was lost. I wasn’t doing theater at all, I wasn’t really able to focus on learning how to change my talent, and I was just scraping by with money. My livelihood was taking over my dream career.

  Still, I got a few walk-on parts, but nothing very promising. I gave Will Arnett a cup of coffee in a short-lived sitcom. I was a dead body on NCIS. But the forgettable roles weren’t worth the time I put in going for auditions in LA; there was more money in restaurant work.

  The seeming last gasp of my career came when I decided to audition for a holiday production of Brigadoon at a large dinner theater. I got an ensemble role. Everyone there was clearly close; it was a clique. I could even identify the me in the group, the shy one who quietly wanted it more than anyone. I ended up quitting. I didn’t have the time to sing in the background for a musical I didn’t even like.

  And that was the last time for a while that I made an effort at acting. It felt hopeless. Great actors, great singers, great beauties—they’re a dime a dozen in LA, and the clichés are all true: so many of them are working as servers to pay the bills. You’ve got to have something extra. My confidence withered to almost nothing a couple of years back.

  I started working for a woman I’d met through the restaurant industry. She was opening a boutique grocery store with prepared food made daily. With her reputation, it was bound to become a quick staple. And it did. It flew to the top of lists, got great Yelp ratings. I was making great, steady money, and for the first time since moving to LA, I was doing something that mattered and I wasn’t holding my breath before opening bills and e-mails from my credit card company. I wasn’t drowning in late fees and overdraft fees and spending hours on the phone with customer service begging for them to be waived.

  I had good hours. I had a nice boss. I worked in a pleasant environment. I was too young to compromise that hard, but . . . I needed the break. I needed to rest. I needed to breathe.

  Meanwhile, through all of my lonely struggle, I was constantly at odds with my ever-happy, never-trying sister.

  We had never exactly been two peas in a pod, and as we got older, it got worse. She was always off socializing, making friends, falling in love, wallowing when it didn’t work out. She traveled with big groups. She drank cheap beer on small boats and champagne on big ones. And despite never once pushing herself to the limit to succeed, she was always tripping over good luck and opportunity.

  She gets everything she wants, no matter what it takes. Want to try singing? How about doing a little backup on a huge Andrew Bird song because you happened to meet him around a campfire in Joshua Tree and sang a harmony on “Sister Goldenhair” that he liked? Acting? How about during one of your two nights of work at a high-end restaurant, you bring the wrong entrée to a big-time casting director, but you’re so charming about it that he says you’re perfect for a bit part in the new Judd Apatow movie. (She was a party guest in a leopard-fur coat and smeared lipstick, and the scene is often lauded as one of the funniest in the movie.)

  Even the small stuff. She once got hit on by a famous, objectively hot musician (at a bar in Florida) and turned him down because she knew he was a player. He texted her for a month after, and there’s a theory she’s the inspiration behind one of his songs.

  Oh, then, for whatever reason, she wanted to try her hand at being a writer because she read Gone Girl and thought it was “sooo good.” She hit the New York Times bestseller list with her debut novel. It was a mystery, admittedly a damn good puzzle of a book, but it should have been—she’d been making up the story since we were kids playing Clue. Always imaginative, back then she’d come up with the idea that everyone had done it—Murder on the Orient Express but different—and even the grown-ups had told her it was clever and she should do something with it, so when she got older, she did just that. And it worked, to the tune of a number-one bestseller.

  Last I heard, she was leisurely working on her second book, apparently living happily on the royalties of the first, while I’m slaving over a hot stove to make a living so I can get back to the fruitless effort of pursuing my dreams in my off-hours. Last she heard from me, I was getting a great new job that she still couldn’t be impressed by because it wasn’t acting.

  Anyway. Enough about Crosby. (That would probably be the sad name of my sad memoir—even the title wouldn’t be about me.) (I promise I see the humor in that.)

  The thing is, my life is actually going pretty well. Really. It’s a sweet gig cooking for Jill and mixing with the weird and diverse crowd she hangs with. A-listers, D-listers, the whole alphabet of listers. I’ve met people who were a big deal in this or that decade, character actors who have been in a hundred movies with tons of Somebodys. I have even met—and fed—a few Somebodys.

  Plus it pays well enough to keep me in a nice place in the Miracle Mile with air-conditioning. I can afford to have good local produce in my home. I can stave off headaches with good wine. I have even started to curate a decent wardrobe with a few high-end pieces to mix in with the cheaper stuff.

  And most important, most secret, I’ve saved a lot. I’ve saved enough that if I needed to, I could take a few months off. It’s not so hard if you have a good salary and you’re able to nibble on food at work. But while saving enough money for a rainy day seems like a good idea when you’re doing it and like an achievement when you get there, you don’t want to use it or you’ll be right back where you started. I don’t want to use up my savings and go back to zero. Yet it’s hard to serve two masters—practicality and passion.

  The truth is, I’m trying to get back into the acting thing. Once I was able to stop panic-working to stay alive, I found myself with time again. I started filming myself. Acting in front of the mirror, like I did in high school. I look up great auditions. I pore over the best monologues. I master them. I practice and practice. It’s started to come more naturally again. I’m starting to think I could really do it again.

  I haven’t told anyone but Jill about that, though.

  Meanwhile, I am happy, really. I go to work every day in a beautiful place with a nice boss and I’m making enough to support myself as well as put away some savings. How many people can say that?

  Jill lives in a moderate-for-the-area house in old Bel Air with a pretty large property surrounding it. The house was built in the 1920s, but beyond that I’ve never really been able to find any specific history on it. Perhaps because even then it had been modest compared to its surroundings. It’s a stone’s throw from homes that once belonged to Myrna Loy, Rudolph Valentino, Lucy and Desi, and Jayne Mansfield, and it’s even next door to a place where Cary Grant had lived briefly.

  I love the romantic golden-era history of the place and the feel of driving into that always-sunny neighborhood. I grew up in upstate New York, so palm trees remain a novelty that I appreciate every time. Particularly the very tall, thin kind of palm with a splat of leaves on the top, giving that unmistakable Hollywood look.

  They are the Harlow blondes of the tree world.

  The kitchen there is also something to behold. Bright and sunny all day long, with sleek concrete countertops someone smart had talked her into when she’d replaced the old tile surface. The ceilings are so high that a searing steak never sets off the smoke detector, and each of the two counter islands is wide enough to seat twelve people comfortably. Having a workspace that makes cooking easy and having a client as appreciative as Jill makes it completely fulfilling. I think I could genuinely be happy doing this for the rest of my life. Or, if not happy, at least content.

  Because, no.

  I’m not happy.

  Not really.

  I still want to act. Whether it’s old dreams or something in the Hollywood air itself, I don’t know, but that itch isn’t scratched. I’m back in the game and playing hard, getting as many auditions as I can now, basically throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if any of it will stick.

  It is the most important thing to me.

  * * *

  “MY GOD, HOW many cases of champagne did we go through?”

  It was the end of the night, and Jill had just removed her Louboutins, throwing them haphazardly into a black and red pile on the hardwood. She put her stockinged feet up on the glass coffee table.