The Best of Enemies (6 page)

Figures that the number one slot on my personal enemy list is Kitty “Flipping” Carricoe, a
girl
to the nth degree.

Had I not hated her so much, I might not have been so eager to take my first overseas assignment.
I should give her due credit for being so damned contemptible.
If I hadn’t left the States, I’d have never embedded, thus I’d never have been nominated for a Pulitzer for international reporting or have written and sold my memoir
Girl O’War
.
(Wasn’t keen on the title, but my editor insisted.
After forty weeks on the
New York Times
bestseller list, I admit he was right.)

I’m about to reply to Bobby when someone leans over his shoulder.
The first thing I see is tanned cleavage, encased in a snug T-shirt featuring a beribboned, cartoon cat face.
She plops down in Bobby’s lap, obscuring most of his face with her ample Hello, Kitty-covered rack.

“Ohmigod, is that your sister?!
Hi!
Hi, hi, hi!
I’m Melody, Bobby’s girlfriend!”
she says.
“I totes can’t wait to meet in person!
He’s told me a scrillion things about you!”

Bobby narrows his eyes.
“Nope, not me, never said anything like that.
In fact, Jack, I don’t like you.
I don’t like you because you’re dangerous.”

I reply, “That’s right, Iceman.
I am dangerous.”

Then he chomps at me Val Kilmer–style and we both crack up again.

The best thing about my relationship with my brothers is the shorthand we’ve established over the decades.
We don’t need a lot of words to connect with our shared history.
One snap of my brother’s teeth brings forth the recollection of a hundred games of street hockey, long treks through the Skokie Lagoons, and sitting side by side on the old couch in the dusty family room, surrounded by a never-ending stream of fat Labrador retrievers, watching our favorite movie for the umpteenth time.

And, if I delve deeper, which I’m not often wont to do, the wordless memory of how we were there for one another in the years after we lost our mother.
Without her, we were unmoored, rattling around in our Saint Louis home like loose marbles in a box until my dad brought us together with what we considered the greatest movie ever made.

Once we finally accepted she was gone forever, Dad took the job in Illinois, which was for the best.
We couldn’t move past our loss in the old place.
My mother was everywhere—in the bright pink flowers still lining the front walk, in the way her spicy perfume lingered in her closet long after it was emptied, in how every knickknack had been arranged just so.
Moving to Evanston was how we excised her ghost.

“I don’t get it,” Melody says, interrupting my reverie.

“We’re quoting lines from
Top Gun
,” I explain, attempting to remain patient for Bobby’s sake.
She seems puzzled, so I elaborate.
“The movie?
Came out in 1986?”

She giggles.
“Well, no wonder I’m confused!
I wasn’t born until 1993!”

Bobby’s expression turns plaintive and even though we’re seven thousand miles away, a single glance tells me he’s pleading for me to take it easy on this one.
He must have a soft spot for her, too.

“Wow,” I reply, forcing a smile.
“Then . . .
you’re still just a
girl
!”

North Shore, Illinois

Last Wednesday

“Hi, sweetie!
Come in, come in!
Oh, my goodness, look at you!
Très
chic!
Is that a St.
John top I spot?”

As I open the door for Ashley, the warmth of the June day wafts in behind her.
The air outside smells like freshly mown grass and the neighborhood’s alive with the buzz of dozens of leaf blowers.
As of the first sign of spring each year, there’s never a moment from dawn until dusk that the air doesn’t reverberate with the sounds of all the lawns in North Shore being professionally clipped.
Some days it’s noisier up here than it ever was when I lived in the city.
Thank heavens for triple-paned windows!

I lean in to peck Ashley on both cheeks, my lips never actually grazing her skin.
How can Dr.
K say that watching the
Real Housewives
is worthless?
Those gals taught me air kisses are
so
much more cultured than a hug or handshake.

Ashley’s practically unrecognizable from when we met last fall.
Her now lowlighted golden-brown hair, lightly flecked with her apparently natural buttery streaks, is pinned up in a side-swept bun, an almost exact replica of Cate Blanchett’s style at the premiere of
The
Monuments Men
.
Gone are the tacky ankle booties, replaced with a simple (but divine) pair of heeled Chanel spectator oxfords.
I imagine the numbers on Barry’s AMEX have worn clean off at this point.

“Natch!”
Ashley squeals and gives me a little spin.
“The whole dealie’s from their new resort collection!”

I could not be more proud of successfully remaking Ashley in my own image.
My sister Kelly was right when she told me it’s easier to build people up than tear them down.

Well, that’s more of the
spirit
of what she said.
Kelly’s exact quote was “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Since Ashley was predisposed to disliking everyone I dislike, particularly after her snafu with Brooke Birchbaum at the fall swim meet, I felt like she should be on my team.

Ergo, makeover.

Ashley seems like an entirely different person from the one I met tottering around on Bambi legs in hooker shoes, delivering highly inappropriate snacks last September.
Now she’s tasteful, tailored, and can hide six kinds of veggies in her turkey meatballs.
You’re welcome, Goldman family!

And yet . . .
at some point over the spring, she managed to somehow
surpass
my image.
I mean, St.
John?
Really?
Who can afford St.
John in this economy?
When did she stop buying Ann Taylor Loft?
I find this turn of events distressing.
If Ashley were to put her ideas for a trophy-wife-turned-snack-mom lifestyle Web site into action, I might not be able to handle the competition.

So there’s no misunderstanding, we don’t
need
a Kitty Carricoe, Version 2.0.

Version 1.0 is doing quite nicely, thank you.

Ashley and I cross through the cathedral-ceilinged, transom-windowed, blue slate-floored foyer, past the round maple pedestal table holding an etched crystal pitcher, which brims with my trademark fresh-cut Stargazer lilies and pink and green Pistachio hydrangeas.

“Your arrangement is
to die
!”
Ashley exclaims.

“Six hundred and twenty-one Facebook users would agree,” I reply.
Kelly always says it’s not bragging if it’s true.

I really did hope to surpass one thousand “Likes,” though, and not having reached that number made me anxious.
Should I have taken the photo on a sunnier day?
Or used a different filter?
More “Walden” and less “Amaro”?
Do I need to obscure the stems by wrapping a banana leaf around them?
Or are my trademark blooms beginning to lose their appeal?
Shall I shake things up a bit?
Go more kitschy and approachable and display my blossoms in a painted Ball jar instead?
Do I mix in some tulips next time?

Or is it just that I’m slipping in popularity?

Please, God, tell me I’m not slipping.
That’s the last thing I need.

Ashley asks, “Where do you find the little flowers that kind of look like a brain-fist?”

“Here and there,” I reply, failing to mention the special order I place through North Shore Petal Pushers every week.
Oh, no.
I
made Pistachio hydrangeas happen in North Shore.
Not her.
Those are
mine
.

The clacking of Ashley’s heels echoes throughout the house.
We pause for a moment to admire the wall of my black-and-white family pictures, artfully arranged in eclectic frames to form two letter Ks, the first backward and the second forward.
(Sort of like Kim Kardashian’s logo, except not hideously tacky.)

The K thing has . . .
gotten out of hand.
We gave Kord my maiden name, as that was always the plan.
Then Dr.
K was so tickled by all our first names beginning with that letter, he insisted we follow suit with the rest of the Littles, hence altering my preferred spellings of “Cassandra” and “Connor.”
To me, the alphabetical matching smacked of the Duggars’ naming protocol, but Dr.
K insisted.
For Mother’s Day last year, he gave me a monogrammed piece of jewelry to represent all of their names.

The pendant on the necklace reads
KKK.

Betsy almost burst a blood vessel laughing when I showed her, while her African American driver, Charles, seemed decidedly less amused.
I told them both it was the gesture that counted.
The lovely, sweet, accidentally racist, completely tone-deaf gesture that now lives at the bottom of my jewelry box.

“You make beautiful babies!”
Ashley says and I can’t help but feel proud.
She points to the photograph I took of Kassie in the North Shore Forest last fall, face radiant with joy as the leaves she’s tossing waft down to cling to her fair hair.
“My fave.”

Although the day in the shot wasn’t quite as festive as it appears—while I was trying to capture the perfect photo, Dr.
K grew impatient and began to tap away on his iPhone, completely turning his back on the whole scene.
I was aggravated he wasn’t more supportive, especially since he used this exact picture in an ad for his practice in the
North Shore Shopper
.

Still, no matter what else’s happening around me, this photomontage cheers me up.
I’m so fulfilled by the family we’ve created.
Once in a great while when I’m frying in the blinding sun at yet another soccer game, or feeling my bum AND brain going numb as I sit on stiff metal bleachers in the natatorium, two laps into the endless fifteen-hundred-meter breaststroke competition, I wonder what my life might be like if I hadn’t taken this path.

And then I’m overwhelmed by the guilt over my momentary wistfulness.

But right here in this double-K-shaped display, where all my accomplishments are laid bare in funky metallic frames, I always return to my happy place.

Ashley and I pass the sparsely furnished living room (I prefer to call it “minimalist”) and then the dining room, which is so minimal that . . .
well, it’s actually empty, save for a dreamy handwoven rug in lush shades of crimson and ocher that Betsy found in Indonesia.
(Betsy gives THE BEST housewarming gifts.
Fact.)

“Your dining table hasn’t arrived yet?”
Ashley asks.
“Ohmigod, how long has it been?”

“Can you believe it?”
I fume, hand balled into a fist on my hip in an approximation of outrage.
“Who knew it took so long to ship the old-growth beech from Bavaria?”

Truth?

I have no clue how long it takes to ship old-growth beech from Bavaria, having not actually ordered any.

I may not have been
entirely
forthright with Ashley about the status of our nonexistent dining room furniture as we developed a small cash-flow sitch last fall.

See, our financial problems are twofold—first, we bought our place at the top of the market.
I was on board with this particular location because no one who’s anyone lives west of Green Valley Road in North Shore, at least according to my sister, Kelly.
Sure, I grew up in the more rural part of town informally called West North Shore, which was fine as that area was zoned for horses.

Dr.
K and I forked over twice what we might have paid a few miles away so our kids could attend the tony Lakeside Elementary instead of Calvin Coolidge, my completely unremarkable grammar school alma mater.
Kelly told me that Calvin Coolidge wasn’t even offering Mandarin classes at the time!
Still, the quaint little Cape Cod we bought was adorable, nestled in the midst of so many old-growth oak trees.

Before we even moved in, we made the business decision to tear down the Cape Cod in order to take advantage of the size of our lot, because that’s what everyone does in North Shore.
(Hoo-boy, you should have heard what Nana Baba, my ridiculously utilitarian mother-in-law, thought about that!) Now our sparkling new, triple-paned, custom-built, mock Tudor home is deliciously spacious, and the large, oak tree–filled yard has been reduced to a landing strip of grass in the front and the back.

Kelly insisted that only negligent monsters allow children to play outdoors alone, so I’m confident we’re better off with the expanded interior space, even if part of it’s presently bereft of furniture.
But since the housing crash, we’ve lost a ton of equity and we’ve maxed out our homeowners’ line of credit, just like many North Shore families, so we’re a bit stuck.
(Not Betsy and Trip, but they don’t count.)

Others are floundering, too.
I’m sure of it.
I saw my next-door neighbor Cecily dropping off items to sell at the North Shore Doubletake consignment store last week.
Naturally, I ducked out before
she
could see
me
.
Wouldn’t want to embarrass her!

The second reason for our cash crunch has been the one-two punch of fluoridated water and sonic toothbrushes.
The cavity-filling business is a shadow of what it once was in the candy-coated, sprinkle-topped heyday of the second half of the last century.
Back before my father sold Dr.
K his North Shore dental practice and retired to South Carolina, he had a staff of four dentists, twelve full-time hygienists, a lake house
and
a ski cabin, and two brand-new Cadillacs delivered to our driveway every fall.
Dr.
Daddy says cans of full-sugar soda alone paid for my tuition and convertible Cabriolet.

To compensate for the changes in the industry, Dr.
K sank a ton of money into building up the cosmetic portion of his biz last fall.
Dr.
Daddy’s old shag carpet and Brady Bunch–style paneled walls are finally gone.
The office is so high-tech now!
The exam room looks like NASA with all the plasma screens.
Unfortunately, air abrasion drills, digital panoramic X-rays, and jaw-tracking technology don’t exactly come cheap.

Honestly, the only reason I’m still able to dress Kassie in Hanna Andersson and Billieblush is because of the posts those companies sponsor on my blog.

Ashley interrupts my thoughts.
“Hey, is Dr.
K around?”