Daughter of Darkness

  “I guess there’s no one else out there like us,” I said. I couldn’t help it. It came out like a complaint.

  “I didn’t say that,” Ava replied. I looked up quickly. “There’s no one else like us around here. We have our territory; others have theirs.”

  “We can’t ever be friends with them?”

  “No. It could be very dangerous for all of us.”

  “Do they ever get too close to us or we to them?” I asked. I felt I could get some answers from her now, now that we were going out together. I sensed I had reached a new plateau, one that would be filled with new trust and new answers.

  “Sometimes.” She turned. “And that’s not something we want to happen.”

  “That’s something Daddy senses occasionally, right? He can tell when they get too close.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Is that why we move so much?”

  “Sometimes, yes. Never mind all that,” she said, back to her characteristic annoyance. “You’re getting us sidetracked with all these questions. Concentrate only on what I’m telling you. I’m telling you that if you think about what I just said, two sisters are more formidable for a guy. It’s one thing to separate friends but quite another to separate sisters.”

  “Choosing one over the other would cause sibling rivalry,” I said.

  “Yes, that would play into it, too. Now you’re thinking. The one left behind might be so upset about it that she would say something at home, something that would get her sister in trouble.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Some of it Brianna taught me the way I’m teaching you. Some things I read. Most of it will come naturally to you, just being out there among them.”

  Among them, I thought. That really did make us sound as if we had come from another planet.

  She started to go through some of my earrings and necklaces.

  “Daddy didn’t want me wearing any jewelry with this dress,” I said.

  “When did he tell you that?”

  “When I put it on for dinner. He thought it would take away from my natural beauty.”

  “That was then. This is for now. There’s understated and overstated. Daddy doesn’t keep up with the youth scene out there. That’s why he needs us. This would be all right,” she said, plucking a pair of teardrop diamond earrings out of my jewelry box, “and this matching necklace. You need some color, some glitter,” she added, before I could voice any protest.

  “But Daddy knows style,” I blurted, still not taking the jewelry from her.

  “Is Daddy taking you out for this field trip, or am I? Well? Make up your mind. He put me in charge of this for a reason. He has faith in me. I think I know what I’m doing. I don’t fail out there, do I? Well?”

  I took the jewelry from her, but I couldn’t help feeling I was disobeying Daddy. Even something as small as this seemed like a great defiance, a possibility of disappointing him. But then I thought that if Ava wasn’t afraid of getting him angry, I shouldn’t be so timid about it. I couldn’t imagine her taking any such risk.

  “Okay, finish up,” she told me, and went to do her own makeup and get dressed.

  When she was finished and came for me, we stood before my full-length mirror and looked at ourselves standing together. She was wearing a light pink silky one-piece dress that was tapered at her waist and a little shorter-hemmed than my dress. Her collar didn’t go as low as mine, but she had put on one of her uplift bras. She looked as if she could fall out of her dress at any time.

  We had different looks entirely. Ava, despite what she had wanted me to wear, was not wearing any jewelry. Her hair was straight, down around her shoulders. I thought I looked like a young lady dressed for a formal dance, and she looked as if she worked in a strip club.

  “You’re not even wearing earrings,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about what I’m wearing and not wearing,” she said. “I know what I’m doing, what has to be done tonight. Let’s go.”

  I followed her out. I half expected to see Mrs. Fennel standing at the door waiting to inspect us, inspect me, but she was nowhere in sight. Daddy had left earlier in the day to meet some business associate and wasn’t home yet. I was happy about that. No matter what Ava had said, I still felt he would be disappointed in my appearance. Marla heard us, however, and came hurrying out of the den, where she was watching television.

  “Oh, you both look so beautiful,” she said, dripping with envy.

  “Relax. As Daddy told you, your day will come, Marla,” Ava said. “Don’t be in such a rush to grow up. It’s not all fun and games. There’s more responsibility.”

  Marla grimaced and then muttered to me, “I don’t care what she says. You’re lucky, Lorelei.”

  She retreated with her shoulders sagging, her head lowered.

  “She’s lonely,” I said. “I usually spend this time with her.”

  “You want to stay home?” Ava snapped. “Go ahead. Sit with your little sister, and watch some cartoon.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to stay home, Ava. I just felt sorry for her. Didn’t you ever feel sorry for me? Even a little?”

  “No,” she said. She held her gaze on me a moment, as if she were searching for some sign, some proof, that I was indeed too different.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “Let’s go. She’ll be all right. You’re right.”

  She opened the door, and we went out. I looked back once, but Marla was probably already curled in close to a fetal position on the sofa. I was confident that, like my situation when I was her age, one or more of her classmates had invited her to go somewhere to do something, whether it was to a movie or just to hang out at someone’s house, and she had had to say no. You could refuse these invitations just so many times before they stopped coming altogether. It didn’t much matter how you refused them, either. Your excuses could sound quite plausible, but the result was always the same. You weren’t going to be there. You weren’t going to embrace someone’s attempt at a closer friendship.

  I used to think, I know we’re different, but can’t we just pretend we’re not once in a while? Can’t I do the things other girls my age do? Finally, one day when I was about Marla’s age, I asked Mrs. Fennel just that, and she said, “No,” but with such an accompanying angry, biting look that I dared not even think it again.

  Ava said we didn’t need school friends. We had each other, and we had Daddy.

  It was true that Daddy did his best to occupy us. He took us to shows and on trips and even permitted us to attend his parties sometimes. If he ever invited a woman to dinner, we were all there at the table as well. Whoever she was, she was always impressed with our manners and our polite and informed conversation. More than one of his dates said something like, “You’re raising them by yourself better than most couples raise their own children.”

  “You simply nurture what’s already in them,” Daddy would tell them. “You give it room to grow, to breathe. You have patience. It’s like this wonderful wine,” he would say, looking at the decanted wine. “If you don’t rush it, it will be smooth, the flavors full.”

  Of course, I didn’t realize it when I was very young, but now I knew that whenever he spoke to one of his women like that, in his silky soft voice, she was practically having an orgasm. I remember looking around the table and seeing the sly, almost smirking smile on Brianna’s face. She would look down the whole time Daddy spoke. Ava was mesmerized and was just as curious as I was about the women Daddy had brought to our table and later would bring to his bedroom. We could see his power unfold right before our eyes, and that made us idolize him even more.

  “We’re taking the convertible?” I asked Ava as she headed for the Mercedes. Daddy had three cars: two sedans, one of which I used for school, and this convertible.

  “Of course. We want to look the part. We’re on the prowl,” Ava said.

  “Like wolves.”

  “Better than wolves,” she replied, and finally laughed at somethi
ng I said.

  Now that we were on our way, I was feeling as if I had fallen into a blender. A variety of emotions were swirling around inside me. I was frightened, nervous, excited, and even a bit numb. I waited for her to continue talking and explain why she didn’t go to these places normally. When she didn’t follow up, I asked her why not.

  “This sort of a place is a college hangout. College boys are usually too immature for me and too gregarious.”

  “Gregarious? What do you mean?”

  “They hang out in clumps to give each other moral support. The worst are fraternity guys with their rah-rah, boom-bah. Those pins and sweaters and hats drive me nuts. And these sorts of young men gossip more than women do. Take my word for it. When they return from a date, they have to give a blow-by-blow account, and they usually exaggerate to make their buddies jealous. They are, in a word, too dangerous for us. So, as I told you, Lorelei, nothing will happen tonight, not in the sense we mean, understand? This is really and truly just a field trip, an experimental little journey.”

  I nodded, but she didn’t see it. We rode on.

  “That’s not to say there isn’t a great deal to learn from these college boys. You want to know what to say, how to say it, and when to say it. You want to know when you return a gaze or a glance or when you fish with your eyes and hook with a smile. This isn’t like some harmless flirtation in class, either. These young men aren’t at this place to find little high school romances. They’re not there to find a girl they can go steady with and write home about. Most of them, anyway,” she added. “There are always the dreamers.”

  “Dreamers?”

  “Why shouldn’t there be some of them looking for their miraculous soul mates? You’ve got to be able to recognize them and, for the most part, stay away from them. The men we want are those who want no lasting relationships. They won’t care if they don’t learn all about you in one or sometimes two nights. They want to go to bed with you, have a laugh, and go back out there with no promises left on the table. Some men,” she said, smiling, “give women they’re with promises the way people leave tips for the maid in a hotel. So,” she continued, “what you want to telegraph to them, sometimes like breaking news on television, is the fact that you, too, are not looking for anything lasting. You want a good time. And boy, does that work fast.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “They drop all caution, Lorelei. They’ll go practically anywhere you tell them you want to go and do whatever you want to do. Like puppies you feed little tasty tidbits after they go outside to pee.”

  Something struck me about the way she was talking about men, something I hadn’t thought about, even though this wasn’t the first time I had heard her speak about them in this mean, disrespectful manner.

  “You don’t like men, do you, Ava?”

  I could see my question gave her great pause. She even slowed down a bit, her face darkening, tightening. For a moment, I thought she was teetering between turning to me to shout something nasty and suddenly breaking out in tears herself.

  “It’s not a question of our liking them or not liking them the way you mean. We don’t have that sort of freedom.”

  “Freedom?”

  “Lorelei, tonight, if you learn anything important,” she said, “you will begin to learn that being so attractive to men is our particular curse, while at the same time being our particular blessing.”

  “I don’t understand. How could it be both?”

  “We can get who we want when we want him.”

  “And that’s bad? How is that bad?”

  “You will understand,” she said with Daddy’s confidence. “I promise. You will.”

  We drove on in silence for a while after that. My mixed emotions of excitement and nervousness had suddenly settled into a pool of dread. This was certainly not the first time I had had this feeling, but right now, it seemed stronger than it ever had been.

  When Daddy had decided we were moving after I had begun my first years at school in New York, I had dreaded starting a new school. I was in fifth grade by then. Having friends was something everyone wanted and pursued. Friends invited friends to their homes and to birthday parties. One or two friends were important companions, to help each other get through any difficult challenges. They shared homework, stories about funny and sometimes sad things that had happened at their homes. They trusted each other with their emotional baggage, invested in each other in small but significant ways.

  No matter what school I attended or where we were living at the time, it didn’t take long for my classmates to learn that I had been adopted and had only a father. Few had older sisters who bore so much responsibility for them as mine did. Many differences, such as differences in race and religion, even family wealth and importance, usually don’t matter as much to younger children. They concentrate more on the similarities, but my being an orphan and the way I was made to stay aloof from the rest of them caused them eventually to ignore or avoid me.

  So when I began again in a new school, I knew I would hate the strangeness of it. I would hate having to get familiar again with all the small but necessary things every new student has to learn. But most of all, I knew what would soon happen. I knew how the other students would treat and see me, and that filled me with dread. I hated that feeling. I often wanted to cry when I was alone at home, thinking about the world I was missing, but nothing was more frightening to me than Daddy believing even for an instant that I was unhappy having him as my father and living in his home with my sisters, that I was in the smallest way unhappy about our lives. If I cried or in any way showed my disappointment and dissatisfaction, he would see it and be terribly hurt, I thought.

  Besides, and this was most important, I could see that my older sisters were not upset about the way we lived, so I thought that would soon be true for me as well. I would get over these feelings. I must be patient. Brianna, before she left home, had seemed very happy to me. Ava never complained and really seemed to enjoy being who she was and what she was. How could it be any different for me? The ecstasy that came with being a daughter of darkness was just ahead, waiting for me to claim it.

  Obedience.

  Loyalty.

  And sacrifice.

  Worship the three, and, as Daddy promised, all would be well.

  Ava turned sharply onto a city street. Just ahead of us on the right was a neon marquee that read “Dante’s Inferno.” There was a small crowd of young men trying to get in and obviously failing. We could hear their protests and pleadings.

  “This is it?” I asked. “Dante’s Inferno?”

  She laughed. “Yes. They toy with the idea of being in hell. Little do they know how easily we can take them to it.”

  Her comment made me wince, but I guessed that was what we did.

  “Now, listen to me, Lorelei. When we get inside and the men start to approach us, let me do all the talking first. In fact, you want to get used to letting them do most of the talking. Volunteer no information. Act as if you’re a secret agent, undercover or something. Wrap your mystery around you like armor. Most men will be nervous, too, no matter how they act or try to impress you with their savoir faire. You’ll learn quickly that it’s the quieter ones, the confident ones, who are more impressive and in some ways more dangerous for us.”

  “Dangerous? Why?”

  “It’s like any competition. They’ll be more qualified to play the game. The danger for us is they might sense danger and pull back. You can spend just about all evening with such a man and come home empty-handed, and you don’t ever want to come home empty-handed. That’s a disappointment Daddy can’t tolerate. I have never returned empty-handed, and neither did Brianna, but both of us wondered, and you will wonder, what would happen if we did.”

  “What would happen?”

  She just looked at me, and in that look, every possible nightmare seemed to show its ugly head. What if Ava’s subtle accusations about me were right? What if I was too different? What if I could
n’t do what she and Brianna could do? What if I failed the first time I was on my own? Would Daddy send me away? Should I fear something even worse?

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said, as if she could read my thoughts. “You’ll be a success. Daddy and Mrs. Fennel don’t choose girls who won’t be.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Mrs. Fennel told me, and you know Mrs. Fennel. She doesn’t make excuses for us or for herself. There’s no ‘Oh, you’ll do better next time,’ or ‘Don’t worry, you’ll understand next time.’ None of us is ever coddled, Lorelei, and we’re stronger for it. You’re stronger than you realize you are right now.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Now, remember, let them talk more. Use your eyes, your shoulders, and your whole body to speak to them. It’s enough.”

  “What do we tell them about ourselves?”

  “Nothing, Lorelei. We’re not looking for a relationship. There’s no reason for us to tell them anything.”

  “Not even our names?”

  “Oh, you can tell them your name.”

  “I can?”

  “Let’s see. Tonight your name is Diane. No last name.”

  “Diane?”

  “Right. And I’m Elsa. I haven’t used that one recently. Elsa. Okay, Diane, here we go,” she said, pulling up to the entrance.

  The valet stepped forward eagerly to take our car. Ava seized my left arm when I opened the door before the valet had a chance to get to it.

  “You’re being too anxious. Don’t step out awkwardly like some high school teenager, Lorelei. Slowly, slowly, always move as if there are a hundred pairs of eyes on you. Sex and grace go together well. The men will see immediately that you have some class, experience. Think about your posture. Concentrate on your figure. Always be aware of yourself. Do nothing by accident, no matter how small and insignificant you might think it is.”

  “Okay,” I said, but let her get out first so I could mimic how she moved, turned, paused, and started toward the entrance to the club.