Lee Nichols - Hand-Me-Down

David’s admiring gaze broke from Charlotte. “I’ll get a plate from the buffet.”

“Emily,” Charlotte and I said.

“Right,” David said. “There’s chips in the kitchen. Back in a second.”

“Get me a slice of cheese,” Charlotte said.

David headed off and I eyed Charlotte’s enormous stomach, realizing I hadn’t capitalized on her condition as much as I should have. She’d grown positively huge. “Sit by me,” I said, and patted the couch. If I were lucky, the InStyle photographer would get a shot of this. The caption: A grotesquely pregnant Charlotte Olsen, and her svelte, much younger sister, Anne.

Charlotte sat beside me and the cushions seesawed me into the air. “You two sick of each other yet?” she asked. Meaning me and Dad, living together.

Dad and I looked at each other. Why get sick? We got along great. Plus, I didn’t have to pay rent, so I could spend my little all on necessities like clothes, mochas, and alcohol.

“Because the guest house is empty,” Charlotte said. “With the baby coming, I thought it’d be nice to have Anne close.”

Sure. I’d already had a lifetime of Charlotte’s secondhand goods, the last thing I wanted was to take care of her second generation. Then reason lifted its shaggy head. The guest house was a cozy cottage with one bedroom, a kitchen with a Wolf stove and Sub-Zero fridge, and a living room out of Metropolitan Home.

“How much for rent?” Dad asked, a shade too eagerly.

“Well, if she’d baby-sit every now and then…”

“No.” Dad shook his head. “Anne needs to pay rent. It’ll be good for her.”

“Dad.”

“How about three hundred?” Charlotte said. “Including utilities.”

Three hundred I could swing.

“Not enough,” Dad said.

“But if she takes the baby a couple times a week.”

“Wait one infantile second,” I said. “I never said I’d help with the baby.”

“Of course not,” Charlotte said. “Only if you had time.” She and Dad looked a little nervous. There’s a bit of Emily in me.

“What do you think?” I asked Dad.

“I’d miss you…” he said, gloomily.

And I realized I couldn’t leave him. It wasn’t like he still had Mom to take care of him. Maybe it’s a youngest daughter thing, but I felt I had a responsibility. And he did like having me around, even if he grumbled about it occasionally.

“…but I’ll help you move next week,” he finished.

When Emily arrived, the photographers positioned her in front of a huge poster for a film called Spanking Schoolgirls. She’d been posed to hide the naughty bits, and hadn’t budged since. I guess she had a little of the model in her after all. Her publisher, Jamie Lombard—early thirties, an ink-stained cowboy, with rugged good looks and a receding hairline—stood proudly beside her. He was a local publisher, and few of his books had ever sold more than five hundred copies. The unexpected success of Emily’s book had left him slightly shell-shocked.

Emily, on the other hand, looked utterly comfortable chatting with a reporter about the dichotomizing of sub-textual prurience or something. As far as I could understand, her point was this: women like to fuck. Not exactly an earth-shattering insight, but apparently if you dress it up in postmodern theory, you get famous for your dangerous mind.

It did make me eye Emily speculatively. She’d been secretly dating someone all summer, and my bet was that he was someone in the “film” trade who she was too embarrassed to introduce to her family. A porn star like Johnny Deep, maybe, or Roger More.

I looked for Charlotte, to expand upon this theory—why had none of us met this mystery man?—and my Aunt Regina drifted into range. She eyed me and said, “I’m glad you’re finally out of mourning.”

This was her joke. Her only joke. My mom—her sister—had died when I was ten, and though I sometimes missed her, I hadn’t been in mourning for twelve years. But Aunt Regina had an arrested image of me from what she called my “Goth Phase” in high school. Every time she saw me since, she was amazed anew that I wasn’t wearing black lipstick.

I gave a courtesy laugh, and starting heaping food on my plate.

“Now you’ve stopped coloring your hair black,” she said, “you look much more like Charlotte.”

“We’re often taken for twins,” I lied.

“Surely not identical,” she said. “Now if only you were a success, like your sisters. How proud your mother would be.”

Before I could kill Aunt Regina and stuff her body in the crawlspace, Billy and Ian arrived—at the same time, like they’d shared a ride. This worried me for some reason, so I raced over to introduce them and be sure the introduction was necessary.

“Ian, this is Billy,” I said, taking Billy’s hand in a loverlike fashion. “Billy, Ian.”

They said hello.

“So this is your boyfriend,” Ian said.

“Yep,” I said—giving Billy’s hand a warning squeeze.

“What?” Billy said. “Me?”

I laughed and dragged him to a corner where I hissingly instructed him that, for the duration of the evening, he was my boyfriend. He claimed he wasn’t. I told him he was. He became stubborn. So I offered an introduction to Charlotte, and he said he’d be my boyfriend for a whole week if he could shake her hand. A month if he could lick it.

We threaded through the crowd as I internally debated the merits of allowing the lick, but Billy dug in his heels when he spotted Charlotte.

“That really is Charlotte Olsen!” he said.

“Yeah.”

“No way. She’s totally—”

“Pregnant,” I explained.

“—hot. She’s totally hot.”

“She’s a water buffalo.”

“She’s a fox.”

“But she’s five hundred pounds!” I pointed out.

“I need a cold shower just looking at her,” he said. “Oh, man.”

“Her feet are bloated.” I thought he should know. “She’s a bloated hippo with clown feet.”

“She’s even hotter than her calendar.”

“And bigger than her car.”

“You know,” he told me, man to man, “I jerked off to that calendar three times a day for like two months.”

Fifteen minutes later, I slipped onto the patio. There was a couple sitting on the Adirondacks overlooking the pool, and chatting in low tones. I was going to sneak past, but it was only Ian and Emily.

“Why aren’t you inside with your adoring fans?” I asked.

“I needed some air,” Emily said. “The photographers…”

Ian shot a longing glance back at the house. “A little peace and quiet.”

It was disgusting. Even in herd-of-buffalo form, Charlotte was breaking his heart. “She’s enormous,” I mumbled. “She’s a one-woman stampede.”

“What?” Ian gestured toward the party. “Is that what that crash was?”

“Oh. Um. That was me. I broke up with Billy.”

Ian opened his mouth like he was going to say something, then closed it again.

“A long way from par,” Emily said. “He didn’t even make it to the first hole.”

“Emily!” I said.

She blushed bright red. “I meant golf hole—like in golf.”

“You’ve been watching too much porn,” Ian told her.

“Porn is film,” I observed.

“Why’d you break up?” Ian asked me.

“We’d grown apart.” I turned to Emily. “So where’s your invisible boyfriend?”

“We broke up, too.”

“Really? When? Why?” The relationship may have been clandestine, but she’d seemed happy.

“It was only sex,” Emily said.

“Well, what did you expect from a porn star? Intellectual fulfillment? I don’t know what—”

“A porn star?” she said.

Ian laughed. “Hung like a moose, I bet.”