The Personal Assistant to the Twin Wrestling Superstars
The personal assistant to the twin wrestling superstars is sitting in the folded-open backseat of a black SUV, listening to Jessie worry. Jessie holds a compress to her bruised face, directs her comments to Steph. They’re riding to the airport, about to fly from San Diego to Pittsburgh for a wrestling pay-per-view where Jessie’s ex-fiancé is fighting, and the twin wrestling superstars are making their first in-ring appearance in a year. They’ve been training for weeks. Steph apologizes again for hurting Jessie, says she’s out of practice after the baby.
The twin wrestling superstars hold up their phones, taking video of their ride, of their tense conversation—footage that will be spliced in with the professional footage also being shot right now. All for their reality show. The personal assistant is an anti-flower. The cameras are the sun, and she bends away from them. No one has told her to do this, but she likes to support the myth that the twin wrestling superstars make their lives happen all on their own.
The personal assistant is always struck by how close the twin wrestling superstars are, even when they’re upset with one another. They joke about their bodies, their high school boyfriends, their intelligence. They call each other bitch and hug the next minute. Jessie needs Steph, and Steph pretends not to need Jessie, but they are the flowers, the twining vines that prop each other up.
The personal assistant has a sister nine years older than her. They haven’t spoken in months. This is more from neglect than intention. She hopes. She hopes her sister hasn’t just written her off. She hopes, instead, that her sister is just especially busy with her baby. But even before the baby, the personal assistant would call and text with no response. The personal assistant wants to stop thinking in circles.
“I’m definitely taking out my extensions after the pay-per-view,” Steph tells Jessie, an olive branch of conversation.
“I can tear them out during our match,” Jessie shoots back. She’s taking a selfie. Her eyes are daggers, and the filter is blood red.
“I said I was sorry, Jess.”
The personal assistant saw Steph botch their dual finisher, Double Trouble, in the spare gym they trained in. She had seen it executed flawlessly dozens of times before: Jessie would hoist their opponent onto her shoulders, and Steph would drop kick the opponent in the face. During their last training session, however, Steph’s aim was off, and her kick—instead of hitting the air over Jessie’s shoulder—landed on Jessie’s right cheekbone. Steph’s husband was there with ice packs, and the personal assistant promptly left for painkillers and Tiger Balm.
“This is just, like, the last thing I need right now, you know?” Jessie tells her twin. “I’m just…I’m in a fragile emotional state.” She exhales theatrically. “And a fragile physical one. Thanks a lot. It’s gonna take a crazy amount of foundation to cover this up.”
“Geez, Jess, you’re not the only one. I just had a baby, for goodness’ sakes. Do you know where my hormones are? All over the place! Do you see how saggy my arms are? And I’m supposed to go wrestle in front of thousands of people? For the first time in a year?”
The personal assistant senses that if this footage is used, there will be a cutaway here to Steph in a gown, on a couch, in front of a fireplace, wine glass in hand, and she’ll talk about the joys and drawbacks of motherhood. The personal assistant appreciates Steph’s honesty about being a mom. How, sure, her body made another life, but now she has stretch marks, and she’s okay with it, but other people aren’t. The personal assistant remembers her own mother, how sometimes she’d hear her crying in the shower or how she’d draw the blinds during summer afternoons to lay in her bed, the radio only a murmur. The personal assistant made sure to stay quiet on those days, at those times. The personal assistant’s sister was already at college. She didn’t know who to talk to.
“Did you schedule our next meeting at the vineyard?”
The personal assistant had, and she tells the twin wrestling superstars that the meeting is two weeks after the pay-per-view, giving them time to catch up on their personal lives since training has taken center stage. The twins can’t be wrestling superstars forever. They need to set up their next act. She assures them everything is on track with the rosé release later that day. Jessie says she’s glad something is going right.
When Jessie and her fiancé split, the personal assistant was made to swear not to tell anyone—not to tweet about it or make an Instagram story. She hasn’t. She wouldn’t. This job is steady, the twin wrestling superstars are nice people, and they pay well. She gets a bonus every Christmas and enough time off to enjoy it. If she doesn’t visit her family in Pittsburgh, she visits historical sites. She watches the re-enactors, people who remind her of the twin wrestling superstars and their colleagues. They’re all people in costumes playing made-up or mostly made-up characters. Steph’s husband once offered to teach her how to take a bump in the ring. She declined, saying she had to answer some email. Which was true.
But sometimes she imagines who she might be if she were a wrestling superstar. Her entrance would start with the click-vibrating of texting, then notification pings and phones ringing. It would get louder and scramble and coalesce into a moment of the briefest silence before some charging music hit. The announcer would lean into shouting, “From parts unknown, it’s...The Personal Assistant!” In the ring, The Personal Assistant would be a heel. Outside the ring, the personal assistant isn’t a heel. She isn’t sure what she is. In wrestling, that might make her a tweener, someone who acts kind of like a heel but for whom fans cheer. Or it would make her enhancement talent, the no-name, no-gimmick guy who comes in to put other guys over—make them look good.
The personal assistant pulls out her phone. She’d texted her sister last week with a photo of a sandwich she ate and asked what her sister was doing. She mentioned she’d be in Pittsburgh, albeit briefly and for work, and she knew Mom and Dad were out of town on a trip, but if the sister had time, maybe they could grab coffee? Or a sandwich?
When they were little, the personal assistant and her sister were happiest when they ate tomato and mayo sandwiches with the tomatoes their father grew in his garden. They’d harvest the tomatoes together and watch as their father cut thick slices of the fruit, the innards spilling out and staining the wooden cutting board. He sprinkled each slice with a little salt and pepper. The tomatoes were lumpy, multi-colored. Their father called them heirloom tomatoes. They’d only heard that word connected with things like brooches in the books they read, so they thought it meant the tomatoes were very fancy and very expensive. Their father spread a thin layer of mayonnaise on toasted slices of white bread—the best kind of bread for these sandwiches, he said—and then plopped on one or two giant slices of tomato. He’d hand off the sandwiches and tell them to run outside and eat them in the garden. They could smell the other tomatoes growing while they ate, increasing the joy of the simple meal.
The personal assistant wants to ask the twin wrestling superstars if they’ve ever eaten tomato sandwiches in a garden, but they don’t have that kind of relationship.
The personal assistant’s sister still hasn’t replied. The personal assistant only has so much spare time around the pay-per-view, so she has ruled out driving to her sister’s house and surprising her. Her text referenced the sandwiches-in-the-garden tradition—a mention she’d hoped would inspire warm feelings and motivate a reply. But maybe this wasn’t as big a memory to her sister. Or maybe the personal assistant is misremembering. Maybe eating a tomato sandwich in a garden is just a thing she read in a book or saw in a movie and has now blended into her own childhood memories. But she swears it happened. She could use a reply, some kind of confirmation, an acknowledgment that they’ve shared something.
The twin wrestling superstars have talked about trips to get ice cream with their grandfather, learning to wrap each other’s hair in thread, how they’d swap places to see if their mom noticed. (She did.) Jessie is the godmother of Steph’s baby. Jessie had promised to name Steph as godmother if Jessie could convince her ex-fiancé to have a baby. That was their sticking point. The ex-fiancé doesn’t want children. Jessie does. She wants a baby of her own to love. Steph’s daughter is her joy. The personal assistant has watched Jessie with her niece. In those moments, Jessie seems actually unguarded, ignores her text messages and the cameras, doesn’t appear to give a thought to the way she looks. The personal assistant knows Jessie’s desire for a baby wasn’t a line—as some people claimed—to tie down her ex-fiancé, to distract him from wrestling and his burgeoning acting career. The personal assistant saw the movie where he voiced a timid bull. His performance was fine.
At the airport, the twin wrestling superstars jostle over who goes first in line, Jessie claiming her injury gives her right of way. Steph rolls her eyes but lets her go first.
The personal assistant pulls out her boarding pass and ID and removes the little jewelry she has on. Jessie is still wearing the ring the fiancé gave her—for appearances, she says, because they haven’t broken the news to anyone outside their families. Neither are ready to make their parting public. The personal assistant suspects that Jessie and the ex-fiancé don’t want to talk about it because to talk about it will make it real, and they can’t make it real. They do love each other, the personal assistant is pretty sure. But their world is wrestling, and that world trades in the ability to blend your supposed real life with the character you play in the ring. And their in-ring characters are in love and engaged. When she started her job with the twin wrestling superstars, the personal assistant didn’t understand the meta-theatrical nature of this world. The twin wrestling superstars had assured her she’d get it. They picked it up fast, they said. Their names aren’t even Steph and Jessie.
In her mind’s eye, the personal assistant sees the flight information in her email, the many meetings and appointments she’s scheduled for the twin wrestling superstars, the contacts in her phone that are only there for the benefit of Jessie and Steph. She greets the TSA agent, places her shoes and bag into one bin and her laptop in another. She raises her hands above her head in the scanner. She’s done this hundreds of times now, but every pose in the full-body scanner makes her feel exposed, on display. Maybe this is how the twin wrestling superstars felt when they first started wrestling.
Steph has been worried about the comeback match, worried about her stretch marks, worried about leaking milk on live TV. Jessie has joked about it, and Steph glares. The personal assistant saw Steph add extra nursing pads to her purse that morning before they left. The personal assistant remembers when her sister had a kid three years before, how she flew out a month after the birth to meet her niece, a little wrinkled thing with wispy hair and those tiny fingernails. This came out of my sister, the personal assistant thought. The personal assistant felt awe at the tiny body in her arms, surprised by how heavy the little girl was. She spent the weekend under the spell of the baby, holding her, placing the pacifier in her mouth, watching comedy specials on TV while the baby dozed. Her sister showered and slept, and the sister’s husband made stock and soups to freeze for later. Whenever the personal assistant sees pictures of her niece online now, she smells chicken broth and herbs.
The personal assistant’s sister, in a rare moment, confided to the personal assistant that her body was all different, totally changed. Her hips were in new places, her feet had grown a size and a half, and if she sneezed or laughed, a little pee or blood trickled out of her. The personal assistant had seen the heavy-duty pads in the bathroom. Her sister worried about breastfeeding, getting her daughter to latch. The personal assistant assured her she was doing great, that millions of moms out there had or hadn’t breastfed, and formula existed. But, really, what did she know about any of this? She’d looked around her sister’s apartment, now filled with toys and small socks and a drying rack of bottles. The personal assistant’s apartment was empty, clean. Functional. She traveled so much with the twin wrestling superstars. Her life was bound up in theirs: needed but not needed. A part, but never in the whole.
After slipping her shoes back on, the personal assistant finds the twin wrestling superstars just ahead of her. They’re elbowing one another in a faux fight to get to their gate first, freshly pressed juices dosed with protein powder in their hands. Jessie and Steph can’t stay mad at each other. Or maybe they carry their resentments and fears differently. They’ve relied on each other for so long, even a kick to the face and a baby before their big comeback can’t faze them. The personal assistant peels off to queue for coffee and a pastry. She wishes for a bagel with a thick smear of cream cheese, but San Diego isn’t known for that.
When she catches up with the twin wrestling superstars at the gate, Steph is scrolling through her phone and Jessie is using her phone as a mirror, adjusting her hair and tenderly tapping her bruise. “All I’m saying is do Double Trouble the right way in the ring, bitch, or else.” She’s smiling when she says it, and Steph barks out a laugh.
“Or what?” Steph asks. “You’ll drop me like you dropped your fiancé?”
The personal assistant doesn’t move. Jessie gives a big theatrical gasp. “Steph, don’t be so mean!” She bursts out laughing. “Anyway, I couldn’t get rid of you. Like, I look in the mirror, and there you are.”
Steph video-calls her husband, who holds up their baby, a round-cheeked daughter with wide blue eyes.
“Kitty!” Steph coos.
“Ki-ki!” Jessie croons, any animosity totally forgotten in the face of her niece. “Our rosé comes out in half an hour! Yes, it does!”
The personal assistant pulls out her own phone, scrolls through Instagram, thinks about texting her sister again. How much is too much? the personal assistant wonders. She tallies up the number of unreturned texts and calls, the phone dates when she’s been stood up, many well before the baby came along.
The personal assistant and the twin wrestling superstars board the plane. The personal assistant opens her laptop to check the sales numbers. They’ve oversold, which becomes clear when Jessie and Steph’s voices get louder as they make a last-minute call before takeoff. A discount code for a similar wine by the same winemaker will go to every disappointed customer.
The personal assistant is happy for them, and she texts them a silly message though they’re only a few rows apart. They always think it’s hilarious when she does this. They’ll send back their own photo, their doubled faces in similar grins or pouts or grimaces, depending on the tenor of the message. Her phone pings, and she picks it up, expecting to see just that, but it’s a message from her sister. Sorry I missed this! Looks like a great sandwich. I’m sorry I don’t have time to meet up this weekend. Have fun!
It’s hard for the personal assistant not to feel her stomach hollow out. She can hear Jessie and Steph congratulating each other. The personal assistant and her sister never created anything together.
The plane turns and begins racing down the tarmac. The personal assistant breathes deep. The personal assistant remembers when she was very little, maybe five or six, and her sister was babysitting while their parents were on a date. She lifts the not-yet-personal-assistant up in her arms on a big pillow, pretends she’s flying on a magic carpet. They both whoop and make whooshing sounds until the not-yet-personal-assistant loses her balance and topples to the tile floor, bruising her head. Her sister scoops her up, grabs a bag of frozen peas, and holds it to the bump forming above her eye.
The plane ascends, and the ground falls away.
Her sister rocks her back and forth, wiping away tears. Just a bump. You’re going to be okay. I know it hurts, but it won’t always. It’s okay, kiddo. It’s okay.
Theresa J. Beckhusen’s (@tbeckhusen) creative work has appeared in Necessary Fiction, Sundog Lit, and others, and her editorial work in Forbes.com, Paste, The Kitchn, American Theatre, and others.