A Catered Affair Read Online Free PDF Page A

explained that she’d been recording all the late-night stand-up comedy shows and was watching them over and over again, studying the technique and timing of people like Roseanne and Ellen DeGeneres. It seemed that Scarlett had a new ambition—to be a stand-up comic.
    When she wasn’t watching videos of women comics, she was trying to write her own material.
    As she got more confident, she would try out her act on Mum and me. “OK, guys, I have a new bit. Tell me honestly. Does this work? . . . I’ve been painting my room, so I got out my stepladder. I don’t get along with my real ladder.”
    At sixteen, Scarlett wanted to leave school and get a McJob to support her comedy writing and performing. With echoes of Nana Ida and Grandpa Joe, Mum insisted that Scarlett stay on until she was eighteen and take her final exams.
    She did pretty well with minimum effort and could have gone on to university, but Scarlett was having none of it. She got a job as a runner with a Soho film company and started trying to impress the bookers on the comedy circuit.
    Meanwhile, I was in my second year at Leeds, studying law. I chose the subject because it fascinated me and because, more than anything, I wanted to be a lawyer. I also knew that Dad would have approved.
    Although she’d loved Dad to bits, Scarlett understood that I felt his loss more than she did. We talked about how, growing up, I had “belonged” to Dad and she had “belonged” to Mum. As kids there had been no jealousy between us. It was just how our family was.
    After Dad died, that changed—at least as far as I was concerned. Although I never said anything to Mum or to Scarlett, and Mum went out of her way to be loving and affectionate, I felt very alone without Dad. I began to resent the relationship Scarlett had with Mum. I knew, and I think they both knew deep down, that they would always have a special connection.
    The hurt I was feeling had an effect on my relationship with Scarlett, and I cooled towards her, particularly after I went to university and she was left at home. Then one night, not long before her eighteenth birthday, Scarlett came into my room (I was home for spring break). She asked if she could try out a couple of comedy bits on me. “I’ve been experimenting with some new material,” she said. I asked her what kind and she said, “Lesbian.”
    “Lesbian? Isn’t that a bit risky? I mean, what do you know about being a lesbian?”
    “Quite a bit, actually.”
    I didn’t say anything for a couple of seconds. It was dawning on me that she was serious. “Hang on. Are you actually telling me you’re gay?”
    She nodded. “You’re the first person I’ve come out to.”
    After all the mean, shitty thoughts I’d been having about my sister, she’d chosen to confide in me. I felt privileged and very loved, but at the same time it was like I was a kid being given a Christmas present that I knew I didn’t deserve because I’d been bad all year.
    We stayed up talking until five in the morning. Scarlett told me that she’d known she was gay since she was eight. I was astonished that a person could know before they hit puberty, but she was adamant. She described standing in the school playground and it suddenly hitting her that she wanted to spend her life with a girl. “I knew nothing about sex,” she said, “but I was in no doubt that I wanted to live with a girl. I also had this sense of it being wrong and that people would disapprove.”
    She had kept her secret for all these years. I couldn’t begin to imagine the confusion my little sister must have felt. I hugged her and we both started to cry.
    “But why haven’t you come out to Mum?” I said at one point. “You know she’ll be cool with it.”
    “Yeah, too cool. I wouldn’t put it past her to put an announcement in the Jewish Chronicle : ‘To Shelley Roth—a beautiful lesbian, Scarlett Poppy, just out. Proud mum and daughter doing well.’ ”
    I said that I took the