It was a day of surprises, beginning not on the red dirt of Paris but at the Whole Foods cash register, where for the first time in recent memory we managed to drop off an Amazon return without spending a small fortune on Jeni’s ice cream. The price made Crankenstein’s eye bulge, and she was already irritated that they were out of Napa cabbage and tempeh (what a lesbian), so our wallets emerged unscathed — which is good because we still need to visit Costco this month to stock up on some essentials and that’ll be painful enough.
During the course of our errands, I grabbed a bagel to enjoy during the first set of tomorrow morning’s Zverev-Alcaraz final. Having already bored everyone enough recently with tennis ramblings, I won’t say too much about Iga Świątek’s thumping of Jasmine Paolini, which was consistent with how she ripped through the previous four rounds. But it was great to see Chris Evert alongside Martina Navratilova at the trophy presentation, and the 6-2, 6-1 scoreline wasn’t as bad for Paolini as it looks; the way Świątek was playing today, she would’ve mauled Sabalenka just as easily.
This evening I was going to possibly finish the final installment of “Money Changes Everything,” but Tom’s problems again took center stage. In response to a couple of bizarre recent interactions with her, in which I couldn’t quite tell whether she believed a word of her own bullshit, I wrote her my second-ever advice email. It wasn’t general relationship advice — I’m no authority on that — but observations about the specific situation she’s found herself in and the ways in which she’s rewriting history in real-time to justify her actions. I did my best not to be an asshole but I know she’ll be stung by some of the criticisms and might be mad at me for a while.
It wasn’t how I wanted to spend part of the weekend, but it seemed like the right thing to do. Tom doesn’t want anyone in our family besides me and Youngest Sister to know what happened, which means by design that we’re the only two people in any position to hold up a mirror to her behavior. Youngest Sister is busy with 8,000 kids and feels like her opinions will be discounted anyway due to Tom’s paternalism. But Tom regards me as more of a surrogate parent and has solicited my take on her drama, so I felt an uneasy obligation to press her on some of her shakiest and most transparently self-serving assertions.
Being the Saffron Monsoon of the family wasn’t fun when I was a teenager and our parents were essentially AWOL, and I still don’t like it now. I can’t tell my sisters what’s right for them as adults, they have to figure it out themselves — and it’s not like I always make unimpeachable decisions myself. But in Tom’s case it’s very easy to see what’s wrong and how she got there. Later in the day, after sending that missive, new details emerged that made me wish I’d expressed a few negative sentiments more sharply.
Quandaries like this make me extra grateful to have Best Friend in my life, because he’s willing to tell me when I screwed up and point out when I’m being unfair to others and maybe a little too fair to myself. He’s probably called me an idiot a few thousand times in the 25 years we’ve known each other, and generously held his tongue an additional 20,000 times. More often than not, his judgment is sound. Everyone deserves a friend or relative who is willing to dress up like a WWE heel now and then and emotionally body slam them or clobber ‘em with a folding chair as needed. Hopefully Tom can take the hit, even if its impact registers on a delay.