Page 16 of Just So You Know, I Don't Work Friday

“Why?” I asked her, confused.

“Because you’re trying to become a housekeeper,” she said. “Housekeepers aren’t young. They’re matronly. Think of Mrs. Doubtfire.”

“Mrs. Doubtfire was a nanny, right?” I paused. “Was she a nanny and a housekeeper?”

“I don’t remember. I haven’t seen that movie since I was young. But Robin Williams transformed into an older lady. There was a reason.”

“Are you saying that I should transform into an older lady?” I wrinkled my nose. “I don’t know if I want the job that badly.”

Polly shook her head. “No. I understand what Chelsea’s saying, but you don’t want to lie.” She bit her lower lip. “Or any more than you’ve already lied.”

“What do you mean? What lies? I don’t look like I trained at the Culinary Institute in Paris?” I said, and they both burst out laughing. “What’s so funny?”

“Girl, you can barely boil an egg,” Chelsea said, shaking her head. “And remember that time you were going to make grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup for everyone? And you burned all the sandwiches, and all the toast was black and like charcoal and—”

“Stop exaggerating. It wasn’t that bad.”

“It actually was,” Polly said, nodding. “I remember that. I was so disappointed because you burned every single piece of bread there was, so I couldn’t even make some.”

“Well, Mom and Dad liked it.”

“I don’t think Mom and Dad liked it. I think that they were practicing their ‘let’s make our children feel like they can do anything in the world’ personality type whatchamacallit,” she said.

“What? You’re not making sense.”

“Sorry.” Polly looked up from her phone. “I just got a message.”

“A message from who?”

“I don’t know. A wrong number.”

“Weird. Why don’t you just delete it?”

“I guess I should,” she said. “Anyway, what was I saying?”

“You were saying that Mom and Dad lied to me about my cooking skills.”

“Yeah, but they lied to all of us about a lot of stuff,” she said, laughing.

“Oh, yeah? Like what?”

“Well, they lied to Polly when they told her that she was going to be the number one tennis player in the world,” Chelsea piped in.

“I know,” Polly said. “Can you believe it? There was a year or two in my life that I actually thought I would be competing against Serena Williams.” She rolled her eyes. “Shit, I couldn’t even compete against Serena Williams’s grandma.” I started laughing. That was true. Polly had sucked at tennis.

“And remember when Mom and Dad said they could see me performing on Broadway,” Chelsea said, “dancing and singing?” I nodded and giggled. Chelsea had no rhythm, and she was tone-deaf. The fact that my mom and dad had told her that she would be very likely to land the role of Annie if she auditioned was beyond me.

My parents were so new age that they didn’t like to tell us when we couldn’t do something. And I was grateful for that in some ways, but in other ways, it made us dreamers. I was an artist. Polly was studying history and English with hopes of being a writer but also hoped to be a kayak instructor, which I had no idea how that was going to work. And then Chelsea was still living in La-La Land. She had hopes of being an acrobat. I wasn’t sure if that was real or not, seeing as she’d never even done gymnastics, but that was what she’d said at our last family dinner. I wasn’t sure if it was because Mom and Dad were trying to help us figure out what our next steps in life would be. I thought they’d gotten to the point where they realized that they made some missteps.

None of us had a real career. Even though technically I was the only one that had graduated college so far, and I was in grad school now, Chelsea and Polly were still in college. But Polly was getting her degree in English, and Chelsea was getting her degree in… I didn’t even know what Chelsea was getting her degree in. She seemed to change it every semester.

“Earth to Harriet,” Chelsea said. “What do you think about this outfit?”

I stared at the plain white shirt and the long, dark gray skirt in her hand. “I guess so. That’s kind of blah.”

“You want to look blah. You blend in with the house. Remember?”

“True,” I said.

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