Our father specialized in malls and entertainment centers, and it had made him—us—very wealthy, millionaires a few times over. At the end of the fiscal year, Carson liked to break it down to how many dollars were made per minute. I suppose in my case it was how many dollars were wasted every minute.
We lived in a full-blown estate house with nearly twelve acres, an Olympic-size swimming pool, and a clay tennis court, which only Carson used occasionally. The property was walled in and gated.
“I’m sorry I spoiled your day,” I told my mother.
When Mr. Croft asked for examples of understatement once, I raised my hand and said, “My mother favors my brother over me.” Worships would have been more like it.
“My day?” She laughed. “It’s more than one day you’ve spoiled, Teal,” she added.
I looked up at her sharply and felt tears trying to introduce themselves to my eyes. Only my own ever-present boil of rage kept that from happening.
The principal’s door opened before I could say anything, and we were ushered in. Mr. Bloomberg did not get up when we entered, and I could see that bothered my mother. He was trying to make a point, however. The point was, this was definitely not a social occasion.
“Please have a seat,” he said, nodding at the chairs Mrs. Tagler must have just placed directly in front of his marble-topped, immaculate-looking desk. Everything was so neatly organized, I felt like wiping my hands through the piles of papers and files before sitting and knocking them all about. Of course, I didn’t.
“I am sure you realize, Mrs. Sommers, that this is Teal’s fourth appearance before me generated by her misbehavior in three months.”
“Yes, of course. I’m very, very upset about it, Mr. Bloomberg.”
“We pride ourselves on how well run our classrooms are and how professional our staff is. To waste all that over this sort of thing is more than just a breach of our school rules; it’s a veritable sin.”
“Oh, I agree,” Mother said. He could have said, “Let’s hang her at dawn,” and she would have nodded. As long as it didn’t conflict with her hair appointment, of course.
“Alcoholic beverages, drugs of any kind, weapons of any sort, all those are grounds for expulsion after only one incident, Mrs. Sommers, much less three or four. I have,” he continued, reaching for a document on his desk, “asked Mrs. Tagler to retrieve your contract with us. Both you and Teal signed the document when she entered the school, you will recall. I have underlined the stipulation that if and when Teal should be asked to leave the school as a result of repeated misbehavior, you forfeit your tuition.”
He handed it to Mother, who pretended to read it with interest and then handed it back to him, nodding.
He then sighed deeply and looked at me.
“Is there any possibility you will change your behavior, Teal?” he asked.
Mother turned and glared through me.
I shrugged. He knitted his thick, dark brows together and leaned forward.
“That’s not quite the response I was looking for,” he said.
My mouth felt so dry. That was all I could think about, and I was on the verge of asking for a drink of water. He turned to Mother.
“If she is sent to this office again for any reason, no matter how small the violation, we will have to ask her to leave the school. For now, she is suspended for three days. I hope you and your husband will impress upon her how serious this has become, Mrs. Sommers. We’re not a public school. We don’t have the time or the inclination to reform disrespectful young people. Anyone who attends this school should know the value of the education he or she will receive.”
I wanted to put my fingers in my ears, but I didn’t dare. Most of the time, actually, I wanted to put my fingers in my ears. I guess drinking booze was just another way to do it, especially at this school for penguins and canaries, I thought.
“I understand,” Mother said. She glared at me. “We’ll have a good talk.”
He nodded, firming his lips and looking at me skeptically. Our eyes met, and he knew the clock was ticking on my expulsion. He could also see how little importance I was placing on it.
“Very well,” Mr. Bloomberg said in a tone that clearly indicated the meeting had ended.
Mother rose, and I followed her out. Mrs. Tagler looked up at us as we passed through the outer office. She and my mother exchanged looks of sympathy as if I was more like a disease than a child.
“Your father is going to go ballistic over this, Teal,” she said as we left the building and headed toward Mother’s big Mercedes.
I knew what was coming. Mother had a set lecture. I really believed she had written it all down and memorized it. It always began with how much my father had done for me. The lecture started as soon as we were in the car and she was driving out of the school parking lot. She should have recorded it and put it on a CD she could just play, I thought.
“Look at what you have, Teal. A beautiful home. Your own suite, your own telephone and a computer, clothes that rival any princess’s wardrobe, clothes you don’t wear, I might add. Any toy you wanted as you grew up, you got. You have servants waiting on you, a car and driver to take you wherever you want to go, and if you behaved, you would have your own car. Why, why are you like this? What do you want?” she asked, a little more hysteria in her voice than usual.
I looked out the window.
What did I want?
Should I tell her? Could I ever tell her? How do you tell your own mother that what you want the most is simply to be loved?
2
Grounded
At wasn’t a surprise to me that I often imagined myself locked in some echo chamber. My big house was filled with words that bounced around me, repetitions of threats, lectures, and ever-changing rules. In other homes, I suspected the walls lovingly absorbed the words spoken between mothers and daughters, fathers and daughters, brothers and sisters, but not in mine. The warmth in our home came from central heating, not from smiles and kisses, hugs and loving caresses.
A few years ago, I sat and thumbed through the pile of family albums we had in the den. I was more fascinated with my brother when he was younger and his relationship to my mother and father than I was with anyone else. One of my therapists once accused me of being a little paranoid about it. He was referring to the way I described my mother smiling at Carson or holding Carson’s hand, or the way my father held him when he was a little boy, and the way they held me or looked at me when I was his age.
First, there were three times more pictures of Carson than there were of me. Mother’s explanation for that was my father became more successful during my early years and was far busier than he had been when Carson was growing up. Therefore, there wasn’t as much time to recreate. As he became more important in the business world, they moved up the social ladder, and Mother had the added burden of presenting him and herself to the substantial world, as she liked to call it. She became a social bird who primped her feathers and held court at dinners and balls, making sure her face was pasted on the society pages and in the slick community magazines. If I even approached what some might consider a complaint about how little we did together, I was told the sacrifices were all very important and good for the family, which of course included me, so I shouldn’t feel I was neglected.
I had three nannies in my first ten years, two of whom, according to my father, demanded battle fatigue insurance. I suppose the worst thing I did before I was nine was knock over the perfumed candle in Mother’s bedroom after she and my father had left for a dinner with the mayor. It was my misfortune or my intention, depending on who tells the story, that the candle remained burning. Its tiny flame managed to lick the sheer nightgown my mother had on a hanger by her closet door. That triggered a bigger fire, which spread into the walk-in closet.
We had a sprinkler system in the house. Naturally, we would, Daddy being a developer and up on everything that was possible and necessary. The flames set off the sprinkler, which then soaked Mothe
r’s wardrobe, ruining, she claimed, one hundred fifty thousand dollars’ worth of clothing. My father actually fired the nanny I had at the time. I knew that if he could have, he would have fired me.
“You’re finished here as my daughter,” he would have said. “Get out. Go to some orphanage!”
I actually dreamed such a scene and woke up crying. Carson, who was twenty-five at the time and still living at home, was the only one to come to my bedroom to see what was going on. I told him I had a nightmare.
“My advice to you,” he said, “is to stuff it back into the pillow. That’s what Mother used to tell me to do when I had a bad dream, and it works.”
It was something she had told him when he was only four or five, I was sure; but at least she had come to his room when he had cried. My tears made her nervous because she was older and more apt to get nervous, and making her nervous was forbidden because “nervousness leads to wrinkled brows and palpitating hearts.”
“I didn’t mean to start the fire,” I said. Vaguely, I wondered if I did. It was during the period I was seeing a therapist and was told that sometimes we don’t realize ourselves what we secretly want to do. Now I know he meant subconsciously, but I was too young to understand that, so he called it my secret self. He had me so convinced I had a secret self that I often paused quickly in front of a mirror to see if another me would be visible, perhaps caught unaware.
My brother Carson grunted after I protested my innocence. He has my mother’s nose and mouth, my mother’s eyes, but my father’s bulky upper body and my father’s dark brown hair. From the rear, especially from a distance or when there isn’t much light, it’s hard to distinguish who it is, Daddy or Carson.
“You know what Daddy says about apologies,” he reminded me. “They are always too little too late and might as well not be uttered. Usually they serve only to remind the injured party he or she has been injured.”
He stood mere stiffly in the middle of the night and lectured me just the way our father would. I couldn’t remember anyone speaking to me as an adult would speak to a child. We were all always adults in my house. Whether I liked it or not, I was never classified as an infant or an adolescent, or even a young adult.
“In my house we all take responsibility for our actions,” my father preached. “You are told or shown what is right and what is wrong and you are in charge of your own behavior accordingly. No one can look after you better than you can yourself, and you shouldn’t expect it or depend upon it.”
Carson was the one who came up with the idea to keep a profit-and-loss statement in relation to me. Everything I broke, accidentally or not, every bit of damage that could be calculated, was placed on the loss side. Someday, I would do something to earn a living and then he would then calculate the assets and work out the profit and loss. Daddy thought he was so clever and even suggested he submit his idea to some business magazines.
I told Carson it made me feel good to know I provided some amusement to them. He either didn’t understand or deliberately misunderstood my sarcasm. I suppose I always felt like an outsider, and they had always treated me as one. It shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to my mother that I was nothing like her.
Especially now, during what she saw as my debutante years, she puzzled over why I was such a mystery to her. Why didn’t I want the same things she always wanted? Why did I insist on wearing torn jeans instead of the expensive designer jeans she bought for me? Why did I put a ring in my nose and on my belly button occasionally? Why did I listen to that terrible music, and especially, why did I still want to hang out with friends who were, in her words, “beneath us”?
There was never any doubt in my mind that if I, as I was, were not her daughter, I would be beneath her as well. She never really looks at me, never sees me for who I am, I thought. Maybe she is afraid of what she helped create. Maybe my father has the same fear. I just remind them of their biggest mistake.
My father wasn’t even there for my birth. He was away on a business trip. My mother accused him of deliberately scheduling it for that time. Finally, she got him to admit that he felt my being born was chiefly her responsibility.
“How come?” she asked.
“The woman,” he said, “is the one primarily responsible for preventing pregnancy, not the man.”
The way he described it, the man was an innocent bystander.
And so Mother was to be in charge of my upbringing. When I had all that trouble in public school, I overheard them arguing about it.
“I know what we agreed,” she told him, “but I’m too old for this sort of thing, Henderson. She’s rushing me into old age. The stress shows. You don’t have the full brunt of it. You’re off doing your projects.”
He was quick to remind her that those “projects” paid for the big home, the expensive cars, expensive vacations, miles of clothes in her walk-in closet, on and on.
That was when she convinced him to spend the money to send me to this wonderful private school.
“We’ve got to get her away from this crowd of juvenile delinquents,” she argued.
“It seems to me,” he replied, “their parents probably want to get them away from her. Maybe we could ask them to contribute to the tuition. They’d gladly do it to get her away,” he muttered.
Nevertheless, he relented and wrote the check to get me into the private school. Now, I was being sent home from that one, as well.
“Go directly up to your room and remain there until your father returns,” my mother ordered when we had arrived. “And I don’t want to hear that music blasting. Just sit and contemplate what you’ve done and what you’ve become,” she advised.
I marched up the stairway. I was still feeling tired and bored and actually looked forward to getting back into bed. I fell asleep pretty quickly and awoke only when pangs of hunger made me dream about food.
Mother was gone again, so there were only myself and the two maids at home. It took one just to look after mother’s things, clean her suite, and do her errands. I could hear the vacuum cleaners roaring away, sucking up every particle of dust. I sauntered into the kitchen and made myself a cheese and tomato sandwich. I didn’t realize how hungry I was, which was probably a result of the alcohol I had drunk. I ate two sandwiches and a chocolate-covered frozen vanilla yogurt bar.
Usually, young girls envy their mothers for one reason or another. Most of my girlfriends at public school felt they weren’t as pretty as their mothers. It was different at the private school. There, the snob birds I cared to talk to all had no problem with their egos. I don’t have the same sort of bloated self-image, but I couldn’t say I ever wanted to be just like my mother.
There are things about her I like, but we do seem so different that I can understand someone wanting to double-check my birth certificate to have proof she gave birth to me.
For me the envy was reversed when it came to our figures. Mother could never understand how I could eat whatever I wanted, as much as I wanted, and not become a blimp. She was always on one diet or another, and she had a personal trainer. A new ounce of weight, a wrinkle, something sagging, whatever, put her into a panic. When I was very little and I walked with her, I noticed how she would often pause to look at her reflection in a store window. She would never pass a mirror. I first thought she was checking to see if anyone was following us. I’d turn to look back. It didn’t take me long to realize I was right. Mother was being chased by age.
Now I often caught her looking at me. If envy could be translated into tears, she would be crying her eyes out. The only satisfaction she had was in telling me that if I didn’t take better care of myself, I would regret it someday.
“One day you’ll wake up and see fat where there wasn’t any or that firm behind of yours will suddenly turn into marshmallow, Teal. You’ve got to do preventive things. You don’t exercise like you should. You eat everything I tell you not to eat. I should know,” she concluded. “I had your figure and I discovered how hard it was to maintain.??
?
Sometimes, being spiteful, I would deliberately add another scoop of ice cream to my dessert or gorge myself on a bag of Kit Kat bars right in front of her. I knew she was dying to eat one.
“Who bought that?” she would cry. “I distinctly left orders not to buy that.”
“I did,” I said. “I love them.”
She would practically flee from me, or from the desserts.
Go on. Run away. I’ll never get like you, I vowed.
After my late lunch, I took my portable CD player and went for a walk. We had a telephone in the pool cabana, so I stopped there and called one of my so-called “beneath us” friends from public school, Shirley Number. I expected she would be home by now, and she was. I told her what I had done and what had happened to me. She thought it was funny, of course, and then went on to talk about some of the things she and the other girls I knew were doing. I really missed being with them.
“Do you see Del Grant?” I asked her. He was a senior I’d had a crush on since ninth grade.
“No,” she said. “Don’t you remember? Oh, I guess I didn’t tell you,” she added.
“What?”
“He dropped out of school when his father left them. You know what his mother is like, her drugs and all.”
“Dropped out?”
“Yes, he works full-time at Diablo’s Pizza in the mall. He says he has to help support his seven-year-old brother and five-year-old sister.”
“Oh. Bummer,” I said.
“He doesn’t seem unhappy, but you know Del. You couldn’t tell if he was unhappy anyway.”
“Is he going with anyone?” I asked, and held my breath.
“Not that I know of. Selma Wisner has a mad crush on him and practically stalks him, but he doesn’t seem terribly interested in her.”
“I’ll meet you at the mall this weekend,” I said. “Saturday, okay?”
“Really? I thought you weren’t allowed to hang out with us anymore.”