Authors: Anna Quindlen
“That’s so condescending. What, suffering is always real and success is always a fake?”
“No, women who sell bootleg Nikes to try to feed their kids are real and a woman who talks about Tupperware on TV is fake.”
“How do you know they’re feeding their kids? Maybe they have a crack habit.”
“Okay, now you’re just looking for a fight. Hand me that big yellow bowl.”
All the Tupperware was stacked neatly. My sister is the messiest person on earth, except in her mind, which is as orderly as the inside of a nuclear reactor control room. Meghan’s life is so full that she has had to jettison the peripherals. Kenya, you can shout at her, and she can tell you who runs the country, who is trying to oust him, what the most profitable industry is, and how much foreign aid the United States shells out. “Isn’t it weird,” Leo once said, “that my mom knows all this stuff you didn’t even know you needed to know?”
But she can never find her BlackBerry, and I now write her cell phone numbers in my book in pencil because she loses the phones so often. Her schedule is kept and enforced by a brace of young assistants. Her jewelry is mainly kept in a dressing room chest, to be coordinated to her clothes by trained professionals, adept in the art of deciding which neckline cries out for hoops, which for pearl buttons or gold studs.
“Voilà,” I said. “Like this.” I popped on a lid, lifted a corner, and let out a
pfft
of air, then closed it all the way. Lift,
pfft
, lift,
pfft
. “How did you ever avoid learning to burp Tupperware?” I asked. “Aunt Maureen had as many pieces of Tupperware as she had photo albums. I think she taught me to burp Tupperware when I was a toddler.”
“We still lived at home when you were a toddler.” By
home
Meghan means the big gray house with the white shutters, the house where we lived until our parents died. We moved to the smaller Cape with Aunt Maureen and Uncle Jack when we were six and ten. Meghan lifted the lid off a large bowl, then put it back and let the air out. “It would have looked like I was a moron if I’d messed this up,” she said, but she practiced three or four times more. The last time she burped the Tupperware and looked straight ahead, her head tilted slightly to one side. My sister is the host of
Rise and Shine,
America’s number one morning show. She is the most famous woman on television, which means that she is probably the most famous woman in America. The camera doesn’t want to see the top of Meghan’s head, although the colorist makes sure her roots are never darker than the rest. It wants to see her face.
She thumped the top of the Tupperware and tried to lob it back up into the cabinet. I took it from her and put it on the shelf. It’s funny that I’m so much taller than Meghan, that she wears a size 6 shoe on her stubby-toed feet while I have vast gunboat 10s that look designed to bestride entire continents. Meghan is far larger in all the ways that matter. That’s why from now on I will bring wine to parties instead of flowers.
“Red,” she’d said flatly. “For some reason white is totally over.” And like the rest of the country, when she talked, I listened.
“Don’t wear black tonight,” she said as I left her apartment. “It really washes you out.”
“Thanks for doing this, by the way,” I said. “It’s really important. They’ll raise a lot of money. Some of which they’ve promised will actually get to us. We’re figuring on a new furnace because of you, and maybe another aide for the kids.”
“It’s just strange that it’s a Saturday night. No one gives a charity dinner on a Saturday night.”
I shook my head. “Do you know why it’s on a Saturday night? Because they were told that because of your schedule you could only do it on a Saturday night.”
“Hmm. I probably should have known that, shouldn’t I?”
“I’m wearing black,” I said as the elevator doors closed.
E
VERYONE WAS WEARING
black, except for a few adventurous souls who had decided to hell with convention and were wearing black and white, and the older women, who still dwelled in the land of lavender and teal. The reception area outside the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf was choked with guests for the annual dinner of a group called Manhattan Mothers Guild. Manhattan Mothers is made up of socialites who raise money for poor women and children by hosting lunches, dinners, even breakfasts. The event programs are rather unvarying. There is a video that is usually long on shots of cute black kids with enormous dark eyes. There is a testimonial, from either a former foster kid who has gone on to Harvard Law School or a woman who was beaten bloody by her boyfriend and now counsels others in the same spot. And there is an honoree, chosen because of fame, fortune, and the ability to fill a couple of $100,000 tables. There is fierce competition for honorees; the CEOs of various corporations every week turn down three or four invitations to be cited for their commitment to a better life for all New Yorkers (or for all New York children, or schools, or landmarks, or parks).
In the world of fund-raising events, honoring Meghan Fitzmaurice, who has anchored
Rise and Shine
for the past ten years, is the ultimate double threat, publicity and philanthropy both. Coverage in the newspapers, perhaps the local affiliate of the network, a brace of tables, a crowd drawn by the opportunity to hear and see her. She does not disappoint. Unlike some other honorees, Meghan always shows up sober. She always looks good. She always speaks well. She is always cordial to those who approach her table, even the young television reporters who say they have been watching her since they were in elementary school, which makes her feel a hundred years old.
We were raised with good manners, first by the housekeeper, then by our aunt. We let them down only when we are alone.
I rarely go to events like this. Meghan doesn’t ask me. She doesn’t even ask Evan, her husband, unless the event is particularly high profile or she suspects that there will be lots of other investment bankers and that he can therefore turn it into a business opportunity. Once, years ago, Evan, Alex Menninger, and Tom Bradley got pleasantly drunk at a dinner party and created what they called the Denis Thatcher Society, an organization of men married to powerful public women. Any time the Denis Thatcher Society is mentioned, all the men roar with laughter and all the women get very still, their faces flat.
Occasionally Meghan brings Leo to one of these events as her date. In this way her son has met the president of Ireland, two presidents of the United States, a couple of Supreme Court justices, and that guitar player who organizes all the big relief rock concerts and is now a lord. “Today it’s boring,” Meghan said once when Leo groused in the car on the way to the hotel. “Tomorrow it’s history. Think of the stories you’ll have to tell your kids.”
“I’m not having kids,” Leo always says.
“You’ll change your mind,” Meghan always says.
I arrived too early and circulated busily with a glass of wine in my hand, looking as though I was looking for someone when I was merely trying not to look like someone who knew no one. The wife of one of Evan’s partners was doing the same, and she seemed overjoyed to see me although we’d met in a perfunctory way only once before. She talked for ten minutes about their newborn twins, a conversation that seemed to take place underwater in slow motion. Baby nurse, teak crib, glub, glub. She drifted off and was replaced by Meghan’s associate producer, the one she had been threatening to fire during our Saturday morning Central Park runs for at least three months. I could tell he hadn’t gotten my name because twice he referred to my sister as “the queen of all media.”
“You,” came a throaty voice from behind me, and I turned to Ann Jensen, who was the chair of the event. “You. You. You.”
“Yes,” I said.
“You are my hero. Or heroine. Do you mind which? Because whichever it is, you are it. All day I have been saying, Bridget Fitzmaurice is my hero. Or heroine.”
“It was nothing. Really. I was happy to do it.”
“Nothing? Four hundred and thirty additional guests is nothing? Last year we made a million dollars at this dinner. This year it will be one point six million. That…is…not…nothing.”
Manhattan Mothers had given the women’s shelter program where I work a good-size grant the year before. In exchange I had delivered Meghan for this year’s dinner. I was a hero. Or a heroine.
“And let me tell you something about your sister,” Ann Jensen said, leaning in more closely so that I could look directly into her eyes, which had the preternatural stare of someone who has had lower and upper lifts. People always feel the need to tell me something about my sister, as though we don’t know each other well. “Oh, I could tell you a few things, honey,” I was tempted to reply, but instead I looked rapt. I tried not to look down. Ann Jensen had on a strapless gown, and she had the kind of cleavage about which Irving likes to say, “You could park a bicycle in there.”
She held on to my hands insistently. “No demands,” Ann continued. “Do you know how rare that is? No demands. We had someone several years ago—I can’t even tell you. A certain size car, a helicopter from the country house. And then they wouldn’t even come for dinner. In at nine-oh-five for the award, out by nine-thirty. Your sister is not only coming for the meal, she is coming for cocktails.”
“And staying for dessert and dancing,” I said.
“What did I say? No demands.” It’s an odd thing about irony in New York; either you find yourself in situations where it is the only language spoken or those in which it falls on utterly deaf ears. Ann probably spoke French for shopping in Paris and pidgin Spanish to give instructions to the housekeeper. She did not speak ironic. “My hero,” she said as she was led away by a woman with a clipboard and I began my aimless circulating again.
My sister came in at seven. Usually I can tell because the cameras start to go off with a sound like a swarm of insects. It was easier this time because she was wearing a white dress. Meghan never wears underwear under her evening wear. I suppose Evan and I are the only ones who know that. Or maybe everyone knows it. The dress she was wearing that night followed the lines of her body perfectly. It looked like a very simple white halter dress until you realized that it was covered with tiny round shiny things. “Those things,” she’d said that morning at breakfast. “You know. They’re not sequins. Damn. You know.”
“I have no clue.” I still had no clue, but they looked wonderful. The dress looked like water, which seemed apt. Meghan has the body of a swimmer, long strong muscles, broad shoulders, slim hips. Every day after the show she takes off the makeup, calls me, has a cup of coffee, goes to the gym, and swims for thirty minutes. She says it’s the only time she can really be alone.
“She’s much better looking in person,” someone behind me said.
“She has to have had work done,” said another.
She hasn’t.
Evan was next to her, his hand at the small of her back. Evan and Meghan met when they were children, he eight, she six. We lived in the nicest section of Montrose then, and so did he. They were at a birthday party together. Legend has it that he said she had spots on her face. “I have freckles,” she said with the dignity she had even as a kid. “They look like spots,” he replied. She pushed him in the pool. I have heard the story so many times that I can see it all in my mind’s eye. Evan is wearing a polo shirt that’s buttoned too high on his thin stalk of a neck. Meghan’s knees are knobs, her legs skinny, her hem drooping because our mother was so careless with our clothes, insisting they be so expensive that they needed dry cleaning or ironing, then ignoring whether they were cleaned or ironed. He is speaking out of self-protection because she is so sure of herself; she responds out of outrage at being made to look foolish. Of course I have no way of recalling any of this; I was two years old at the time and was probably at home in a playpen watching the housekeeper wash dishes, which apparently was one of the ways I whiled away my toddler days. I’ve been told too many times to count that Meghan called Evan “Stupid Head” as he flailed in the deep end, and that he was led away, dripping and dazzled.
I’m sure Evan had never encountered anyone like Meghan before. Evan’s parents are the quietest people on earth. When she’s feeling froggy, his mother will say, “Oh, you,” to her husband, and he’ll squeeze her forearm. That’s the equivalent of all hell breaking loose in the Grater household. I sat with Evan’s mother at their wedding lunch, and I remember how her eyes filled and shone as she watched the two of them move around the dance floor. Evan had taken ballroom dancing lessons as a surprise for Meghan, and he was guiding her firmly through the turns and twirls. “He’s beside himself,” his mother had said.
It’s a variation of that dance when Evan steers Meghan through crowds like the one at the Waldorf dinner. She never really has to move at all, never has to thread her way like I do through the waiters’ trays and the glasses held high and the eyes wandering away to someone more interesting or important. Like a spot in the cosmos, she becomes that area around which all matter begins to circle. The chair of the event. The vice chair. The woman whose son was in Leo’s class at the Biltmore School before Leo went away to boarding school (the kid who beat Leo bloody in fifth grade). The woman who is married to one of Evan’s partners (and who once tried to seduce Evan in a powder room during a party). The president of the network.
Somehow my boss, Alison Baker, the executive director of Women On Women, has wound up at Meghan’s side. She leans in to whisper in my sister’s ear, and the gracious, slightly frozen smile that Meghan has been wearing and that fits as perfectly as the dress widens into something authentic and wicked, and over the camera click-click I hear the guttural and very loud sound that is Meghan’s real laugh. Once a men’s magazine said it was the sexiest thing about her.
The Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf looks like the throne room of some small second-rate monarchy, Liechtenstein, maybe, or Monaco. The hotel knows its market, and the lighting is soft and pink and designed to shave ten years off your age. It takes forever to make your way through the tables, which are arranged even more tightly than the guests arranged themselves during the cocktail hour. Ann Jensen was right; the evening’s take would be enormous. I looked inside my little calligraphed seating card, but I knew my table number. I was at table 1. Meghan is always at table 1.