Who didn’t suggest that I view my sentence as a sabbatical, a much-needed rest from briefs and deadlines and clients? Would they like to try six months off without travel or passport, without weekends away, or nights out, with the only fresh air available from the roof that was the scene of their crime?
If I heard a note of disapproval in anyone’s helpful hint, I’d nip it in the bud. Bad behavior or just bad luck? Yes, I may have been having sex al fresco with someone—heaven forfend—I wasn’t married to, but it’s not a crime per se until observed by someone with a 9-1-1 trigger-happy finger.
“Doesn’t your building have a gym?” was a favorite palliative. It did, but only someone with the whole city at his or her disposal would consider an in-house gym to be a substitute for real life.
I made a list of might-do activities I could perform solo, indoors: read books; watch the TV series that everyone had discussed with passion in the firm’s break room; learn to play an instrument; keep a journal; meditate; do jigsaw and crossword puzzles; relearn to knit; hook a rug; needlepoint a pillow; paint; write letters; write a novel; write poems; cook; bake; feed a sourdough starter. The culinary activities were inspired by my state-of-the-art kitchen, no credit to me, but to the previous owner’s expensive choices.
Those generous-for-Manhattan hundred square feet of kitchen were what gave my sister ideas on how to keep me busy—the word sister not telling the whole story, because we are identical twins, Jane Morgan, JD, and Jackleen Morgan, MD, a dermatologist with a flourishing solo practice on the Upper East Side.
A factor in her efforts to support me was her belief that she was partially responsible for my home confinement. Having attended my hearing for moral support, dressed in a red suit and a feathered black fascinator, sitting directly and identically behind me, glaring at the judge . . . might he have noticed, she asked.
I knew her. I heard her self-blame not as guilt over her courtroom behavior, but as her lifelong belief that she is the center of attention, that the male judge couldn’t help but notice her, intuit her judicial animus, and punish the nearest defendant for it.
* * *
My parents and I don’t know why Jackleen sees herself as the more important, grander twin. Is it nomenclature? Me, Jane; she, Jackleen, “Jacqueline” on her birth certificate, shortened and made cuter in high school? True, she’s a doctor, but I’m a lawyer! We earned the same ribbons in high school sports and went to the same college. As to her airs of superiority and her bossiness, when challenged she doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
But my bad luck has brought out the best in Jackleen. Without mentioning money, without asking me directly how I was paying my bills, she was finding ways to underwrite my unemployed existence. It wasn’t the unvarnished writing of checks, but support both subtle and unsubtle, literal and figurative. She is ambitious on my behalf, and with her practice thriving, she is generous; so generous that I’ve stopped mentioning things I want or need, her retention so good that the book or earrings or slow cooker I’ve admired show up within days. I don’t love being a charity case, but having turned myself into an unemployed outlaw, I’m in no position to reject her noblesse oblige. And the friends with all the suggestions about how to fill my hours, who might visit or send a note, a book, a bottle of wine? Where are they now?
* * *
Since the first week of my confinement, Jackleen and I talked daily, and have a standing Sunday-night dinner, always her treat, a bounty of extras delivered so I’ll have leftovers. The day she suggested we forgo our usual takeout, I sensed she was up to something and asked why.
She missed my cooking! Why order in when we could have one of my brilliant meals? More transparent compliments followed: What I produced was creative and delicious. And my gorgeous kitchen! Was I using it to its full capacity? She wished her kitchen had that double oven, these six burners, that trash compactor.
I said, “But you never cook. You keep boxes of shoes in your oven. What’s really up?”
She said, “I have an idea. I’ll tell you over dinner tomorrow! Order anything and everything you want,” she said, her Fresh Direct password texted as we spoke.
I was susceptible. I had no income. I paid my maintenance and utilities from savings; didn’t want to touch my 401(k) or take handouts from my parents.
Sunday night arrived with the many indulgences I’d ordered, starting with live Maine lobsters. She complimented every morsel—the salad with its radishes and heirloom tomatoes; the corn, the melted butter; the reduced-fat Cape Cod potato chips. She praised not just my culinary expertise and presentation, but also the courage it took to plunge the lobsters into boiling water. Maybe she, too, was a New Englander, but clearly I’d been the one who’d gotten the cooking gene!
She was a doctor. Did I have to point out that we had identical DNA? “What’s up—really?” I asked.
She put down her lobster tail, fork embedded for the extrication. I knew, didn’t I, that she’d been to a derm conference in LA the previous week? On the second day, she’d heard a Beverly Hills dermatologist rave about his genius hire of a nutritionist for his boutique practice. “Word will get around,” he told the breakout session. Dr. So-and-So’s practice comes with food advocacy! The patient leaves, maybe glowing after a chemical peel, with a list of healthy oils and omega-3 fatty acids, guaranteed to increase her collagen production. Her friends think, Wow, she looks great. Do any of their friends’ doctors offer this service? No! They switch to you!
“Are you going to follow his advice?” I asked innocently, pretending it wasn’t a pitch to me.
She said no, not hiring a nutritionist. Maybe . . . a food adviser and recipe curator?
“Me?”
“You’d be great!”
Zero appeal notwithstanding, I asked, “Are you talking about putting recipes on your website?”
“Or a booklet. Or maybe just a handout, something like ‘Eat your way to more beautiful skin.’ You’ll test the recipes, and of course they’ll do double duty as your lunches and dinners.”
That part was good, the financing of my meals.
Jackleen continued, “We’ll call it Skinutrition. One word. I coined it myself.”
“Just recipes, right?”
“We’ll see . . . but definitely with a narrative. You’ll tell our story—the one that says cooking has been in our DNA for generations.”
She knew me so well. She knew how to get my attention. “Great-Aunt Margaret?” I asked.
“Great-Aunt Margaret,” she confirmed.
* * *
Great-Great-Aunt Margaret, actually. Her time in the sun was, by today’s standards, quiet and sweet. Jackleen and I, our mother, and our maternal grandmother had been raised on a short, disarming chapter titled “Father Hires a Cook,” in the once-ubiquitous and best-selling 1935 memoir Life with Father by Clarence Day, no relation, yet a hand-me-down family favorite.
My mother and I, especially, loved the whole idea of our Margaret, the Days’ longtime cook, portrayed in every adaptation—radio, Broadway, movie, TV! Her manner was humble, her devotion legendary, her stews unequaled.
I didn’t answer Jackleen right away; didn’t tell her that she’d gotten my attention with the mention of our distant relative who’d been played by an unglamorous British silent film star in the movie version. I’d said only “I have to think it over.”
I didn’t ask the most obvious questions—Why go to this trouble?—because I knew she would say, It’ll be a great patient perk, rather than the truth: Her younger-by-nine-minutes sister needed something to keep her busier than her police procedurals on BritBox.
I kept ordering with her blessing from Fresh Direct and Whole Foods, using her passwords, forwarding the emailed receipts, as if my food bills were accruing to some legitimate business account benefiting Jacqueline Morgan, MD, FAAD, FAACS.
* * *
I’ve left out the biggest credit of all to Jackleen, the highest test of loyalty, which is also the most painful and public thing that my public indecency produced: the black-and-white photo of me in carnal action, in the New York Post, under the headline “Lewd & Law-scivious!” True, you couldn’t see my face, and there was a black bar over my naked rear end, but I was identified by name and occupation. Potentially embarrassing to her why? Because we were identical twins with alliterative names—which J was this one, on top of a supine man, acting out public indecency? Which one was the lawyer and which one was the doctor? Different haircuts notwithstanding, at thirty-nine—unfortunately not my body of ten years ago—and blurry, we remain pretty much identical. I looked up the Post’s circulation: 230,634. Did I know one of them? It didn’t matter. I had a listed landline, and for two weeks after the picture ran, men called, asking for Attorney Jane Morgan. All claimed impressive physical attributes I’d surely enjoy, had pressing legal problems such as separations and divorces, and all wanted to make evening appointments.
The photograph caused some tension at home with Jackleen’s overly protective boyfriend, who bought all the offending copies at their corner newsstand so no one else could. His disapproval and her defense of me started a rent in the fabric of their otherwise harmonious cohabitation. Jane, she argued, had done nothing that any hot-blooded thirtysomething in New York wouldn’t have done! A gross miscarriage of justice meets yellow journalism! He’d better not say one word that suggested otherwise! And if she was putting food on my table, tough luck! It wasn’t his money or his business.
Not that we needed more bonding or a common enemy, but she and I had been awarded one for life: my nemesis, the woman who called 9-1-1 in the first place. Jackleen and I never missed an opportunity to rail, “Did she who lives in a penthouse need the few bucks she’d probably been paid by the Post to further grind her deeply offended heel into my neck while zealously recording what she couldn’t bear to witness? Hypocrite! What is wrong with people?”