“I’m not going to make out with you,” Lisette said as she stood up.
“We’ll just see where the scene goes,” Mark replied.
“No, that is actually a bad idea,” Paul said. “I’m sorry about that, guys. That was setting a bad precedent. I’m sorry, Abby.” Thatis my real name, though I noticed he still couldn’t quite meet my eyes as he said it.
“I’m sorry, too,” I repeated.
“Okay, okay, everyone is sorry,” Lisette announced and stretched her arms over her head, hopping up and down a couple of times to get ready for her scene. It was a slightly sticky evening, the early August weather still thick with warmth in spite of the breeze from the open windows.
Mark glanced at me again. “That was a real kiss,” Mark muttered as he walked to the middle of Paul’s living room.
Those were the words that stuck with me, the ones that haunted me hours later. A real kiss according to who? A real kiss according to which one of us?
Then I reminded myself of the second rule of improv: don’t take anything that happens too seriously.
Letme back up a few weeks, because I haven’t always been an eager participant in the quirky world of improvisational theater. A few weeks ago, I was a normal, sane person who wouldn’t have been caught dead at an improv show, let alone doing it myself in a rustic Canadian living room. I was cynical and pessimistic and sure that I’d die alone, like any sensible single person in their late thirties in New York. If you’re going to enjoy the urban life in Brooklyn, you can’t focus on all the lives you’re not having: the house in the suburbs, the winsome children, the family-friendly SUV driven by a V-neck-sweater-wearing husband. Instead you have to focus on the parts of your life that make sense: the same-day Broadway tickets for half-price, the free mimosa refills at your brunch spot, the fact that you probably would have died alone even if you weren’t living in the big city.
So how did I end up end up on one of Canada’s island provinces, kissing a man who doesn’t want to date me?
It started with my sister Laura’s decision to move out of New York a couple of months ago. Laura is three years older thanme, and she and I have always been close, mostly because we survived the same childhood with its constant chaos and shifting father figures under the negligent eye of the world’s funniest drunk, our mother. My mother is where I get my acidic sense of humor, but in every other way I try not to be like her: I pay my bills on time, I limit myself to two cocktails an evening, and I try not to pick up men in places like the cereal aisle of the grocery store or the line outside the theater for a kids’ movie.
My sister Laura has always been prettier than me, with faraway eyes and a cupid’s bow mouth. She looks like a young Linda Ronstadt, according to our mother, or like a young Linda Cardellini, according to my high school boyfriend. I have always had the role of her shorter, less enticing sidekick. I am pale, with dark hair, and if my sister looks like a goddess, then I look like an easily frightened librarian…or maybe one of those “relatable” ladies on television ads who pause my bike to talk about my endometriosis. I never much minded, growing up. It felt like the natural order of things to have my older sister getting all the attention while I entertained people by imitating characters from Saturday Night Live. Laura and I were a team when we were kids. We spent our formative years playing grown-up to each other when our mother couldn’t quite manage it, asking each other whether homework needed doing or teeth needed brushing. My sister is the one who helped me apply for scholarships to college when our mother was too disorganized to fill out the financial aid forms. My sister is the one who told me whether a boy in theater class liked me or whether he was definitely gay. And when I graduated from college with a creative writing degree, my sister saw me through my first disastrous attempts to write comedy, and my less disastrous jobs in advertising and journalism. In exchange, I remained her biggest fan throughout her wild party-girl years and her transition to AA meetings and a stable career as an accountant. We were eachother’s most important person, and it stayed that way even when she got married.
It was Laura who let me stay on her sofa when my long-time boyfriend Farid left me for his future wife. And I helped her survive her rollercoaster marriage to the handsome rock musician Nick, who was out of town half the time and never did the dishes. She took care of me when my depression got so bad that I lost my job at a fancy magazine and had to switch to financial writing. And I helped watch her new baby Hannah whenever Nick was out of town for a gig, and then when she and Nick divorced a couple of years later after he moved to Los Angeles to pursue his dreams of musical stardom.
We were each other’s solid foundation in a shifting world. And my niece Hannah was my surrogate daughter, whom I watched after school four days a week for the entirety of Covid. Their lives were as important to me as my own. I taught Hannah half of the letters in the alphabet, and I was the only one who watered Laura’s houseplants.
So it came as a surprise when Laura announced to me, right at the end of Hannah’s school year, that she was moving to Atlanta.
“The one in Georgia?”
“Nick got a steady job down there.”
“Nick?” I waited as her expression shifted from nervy to embarrassed, like a teenage girl caught cheating on a test. She hadn’t even told me her ex was back in the picture.
Laura took a breath. “He wants us to move there. He’s rented a place that’s big enough for Hannah to have her own room. He wants to work things out.”
“You mean, get back together.”
“He’s in a very different place now, Abby. He’s older. He’s gotten over his obsession with becoming famous.”
“And he has basically not seen his kid for two years.”
Her eyes were wide with shock, like I’d said something deeply unfair. “He was here at Christmas. But that’s why he wants us to move down there. He wants to try to be a family again.”
“Why can’t he move to New York?”
She rolled her eyes, like I was being utterly unreasonable. “Because he got a job there. The music industry is really good there, and the cost of living is way lower, and he got a steady gig at the same club four nights a week.” I sighed. This sounded like Nick all over: the awesome gig, the big plans, the insistence that my sister fall in line to support him.
“And if he loses that gig?”
“Well, I’d also be working as an accountant.”
“Your current job is letting you work remotely? I thought that was a strict rule for them.”
“I gave them two weeks’ notice.”
“Laura.” I knew I was taking the wrong tone. She hated being spoken to like she was the younger of us as surely as I hated being taken for granted, but I was angry enough that I couldn’t seem to help it.
