Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  I sat down on the rug next to him and tugged my skirt over my knees.

  “I don’t get it, Benny. You had to know that was against school rules. What did you have to gain from it?”

  Benny shrugged. “Kids are nicer to me if I give them drugs.”

  “You know, there are other ways to make people like you, stupid. Like, maybe make an effort sometimes? Join the chess club. Spend your lunchtime actually talking to people instead of sitting in a corner drawing creepy pictures in your notebook.”

  “Well, it’s a non-issue now.”

  “Oh, please. Dad will offer to build the school a new auditorium or something and everything will be forgiven.”

  “No.” It alarmed me, how limp and motionless he was on the rug, how affectless his voice was. “Dad wants us to move to Tahoe. They’re going to send me to school up there. Some progressive academy that’s going to turn me into Paul Bunyan or something.”

  “Tahoe? How ghastly.” I thought of that huge, cold house on the West Shore of the lake, cut off from everything I considered civilization, and I wondered what leverage my father had over my mother to convince her to move there. Since my father had inherited the house the previous year, we’d been up only once, to go skiing over spring break. Maman spent most of our stay wandering around the rooms, gingerly touching the spindly old furniture with a pinched expression on her face. I knew exactly what she was thinking.

  Benny’s arms and legs swept slowly up and down the nap of the rug, like he was making a snow angel. “Not really. I hate it here anyway. Can’t be any worse up there. Probably better. The kids at our school are so full of themselves.”

  I watched my brother scratching at the crop of pimples that had recently erupted, red and angry, on his chin. They matched the color of his hair, which made them even more obvious. My oblivious brother didn’t realize how much harder he was making life for himself; he seemed determined to shrug off all the advantages that came with being us. Back then I still believed that Benny’s issues were mostly of his own design, like he could just choose to stop sitting in his room drawing cartoons and acting weird, and then everything would be OK. I didn’t understand yet.

  “You don’t give anyone a chance,” I said. “And stop scratching your pimples or you’ll get scars.”

  He gave me the middle finger. “Anyway you’re going to be off at college, so stop acting like you give a shit where we live.”

  I ran my own hand across the nap of his rug. It was thick blue pile that the decorator had put in to disguise the ink stains from Benny’s abandoned Sharpies. “Maman’s going to go crazy up there.”

  He sat up suddenly and looked at me fiercely. “Mom’s already crazy. Didn’t you know that?”

  “She’s not crazy, she’s just moody,” I said quickly. And yet, there was a whisper at the back of my mind, an awareness that her moods went beyond your average midlife ennui. Benny and I never really discussed our mother’s swings but I saw him watching her sometimes, as if her face were a weather vane and he was using it to predict the coming storms. I did the same thing, awaiting the moment when the switch inside her would flip from on to off. One day she’d be picking me up at school in the town car, her eyes lit with excitement, calling through the window. I made appointments for facials or Let’s go to Neiman’s or, if she was feeling really heated, I’m dying for some decent French, we’re going to take the plane to New York for dinner. And then, the next day, her rooms would go silent. I’d arrive home from tennis practice or a study session to an ominous stillness in the house, and would find her lying in bed, with the drapes drawn shut. “I have a migraine,” she’d whisper, but I knew that the medications she took weren’t for headaches at all.

  “Maybe Tahoe won’t be so bad,” Benny said hopefully. “Maybe it’ll be good for Mom. Like…a spa retreat or something. She loves those.”

  I imagined Benny and Maman rattling aimlessly around Stonehaven, trapped inside those stone walls, and it sounded like the exact opposite of a spa retreat. “No, you’re right,” I lied. “It’ll probably be good for her.” Sometimes you have to pretend that a bad idea is a good idea because you have no control over the outcome, and all you can do is hope that adding your false optimism to the pile might tip the scale in the right direction after all.

  “She loves to ski,” Benny offered.

  “So do you. And you’re better at it than I am.”

  Even though Benny had turned into this strange creature, oozy and crusty and fuzzy, his room smelling like spunk despite the housekeeper’s best efforts, I couldn’t look at him without thinking baby brother. Without thinking of the way he used to climb into my bed as a toddler and make me read him picture books, his soft little body pressing warm and needy against mine. Our parents loved us both but they loved me a tiny bit more because I was easier to love, and some part of me felt guilty about that; like, it was my job to make up for what he was missing.

  So I adored him unconditionally, my little brother. I still do. Sometimes, I think it’s the best thing about me. Certainly, it’s the only thing that doesn’t feel hard.

  That day, I reached out and placed a hand on the back of Benny’s neck, wondering if he still gave off superhuman heat, the way he had as a child. But he twitched at the sensation, and my hand slid off.

  “Not anymore,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  And so I went off to Princeton, pretending that my family’s move to Lake Tahoe wasn’t the end of the world.

  Of course, it was. Wealth is a Band-Aid, not an inoculation; and if the disease runs deep enough, it will cure nothing at all.

  I threw myself into life at Princeton—social clubs, academics, parties. I fit right in, at least when it came to the social milieu (the classwork was a different story). I spoke to my mother weekly, and my brother occasionally, and nothing they said seemed alarming. Mostly, they sounded bored. I flew in for Christmas at Stonehaven—the formidable annual gathering of cousins and great-uncles and family friends with Fortune 500 surnames—and found everyone in a festive mood. We skied. We ate. We opened gifts. Everything felt normal enough; even Stonehaven seemed more welcoming than it did in my childhood memories, jammed with relatives, the kitchen ejecting a steady stream of baked goods and hot drinks. I flew back out again, reassured.

  Then it was March. I had just gotten home from a dorm party late one night when my phone rang. I almost didn’t recognize my brother’s voice: It had dropped an octave since we last spoke, and it sounded like a man’s, as if he had become a completely different person in the space of a few months.

  “Doofus, it’s one in the morning,” I said. “Time zones, remember?”

  “You’re awake, aren’t you?”

  I lay back on my bed and examined the tiny chips in my manicure. “What if I wasn’t? What’s worth waking me up for?” But inside, I already knew.

  Benny hesitated, dropped his voice to a whisper. “Mom’s doing that thing where she doesn’t want to get out of bed anymore. Like, as far as I can tell she hasn’t left the house in a week,” he said. “Should I do something?”

  What was there to do? Her moods changed, they had always changed, but they had never broken her entirely; she always came back. “Talk to Dad?” I offered.

  “He’s never here. Only on the weekends, if he makes it up here at all.”

  I cringed. “Look, I’ll deal with it.”

  “Really? Awesome. You’re the best.” I could almost feel his relief flooding the line.

  But it was midterms and I was desperately behind in my classes so I didn’t have the bandwidth to properly address the drama back home; the thought of my mother’s storm cycles, endlessly repeating themselves, exhausted me. So “dealing with it” meant giving my mom a call, a half-hearted test probe: I’m going to ask if you are doing OK and please give me the answer I want to hear.

 
And she did. “Oh, honestly, I’m fine.” She snipped off her syllables with neat, patrician bites; I heard my own voice mirrored in hers, the lack of California in our accents. (No valley drawl in my family; no surfer slang for us!) “It’s just a little tiring, all this snow. I’d forgotten how much hassle it is.”

  “What are you doing with yourself? Are you bored?”

  “Bored?” There was a slight intake of breath on the other end of the line, a hiss of annoyance. “Not at all. I’m working on ideas for redecorating this place. Your grandmother had such awful taste, so baroque and kitsch. I’m thinking of flying out an appraiser and putting some of it up for auction. Selecting some pieces that are more appropriate to the period of the estate.”

  It should have been reassuring, but I could hear it in my mother’s voice, the stutter of exhaustion, the effort it was taking her to sound lively and alert. A miasma hung around her, of thick inertia. And by the time I came home for spring break a month later, she’d slipped into the next phase in the cycle: the hyperactive one. I felt it in the air the minute I stepped inside Stonehaven: the cool crackle of tension, the brittle edge to my mother’s movements as she passed from one room to the next. My first night in town, the four of us sat around the formal dining table for dinner and my mother chattered away at high speed about her redecorating plans while my father tuned her out completely, like she was a static channel on the TV. Before dessert was even served, he’d pulled his phone out of his pocket, frowned at a message, and excused himself from the table. In a minute, the headlights from his Jaguar illuminated Maman’s face through the window, as he headed down the drive. Her eyes were dilated and unseeing.

  My brother and I gave each other meaningful looks across the table. Here we go again.

  The next morning, Benny and I escaped Stonehaven with the excuse that we were going to get coffee in town. As we stood in line at a café, I kept sneaking glances at my brother. He held himself with a strange new confidence, his shoulders straighter, as if for once he wasn’t trying to disappear. It appeared that he had finally learned to wash his face, and his acne was clearing. He looked good, and yet there was something distracted and aimless about him that I couldn’t quite put a finger on.

  I was jet-lagged and distracted myself, which is probably why I didn’t pay much attention to the girl that Benny was talking to at the café. She had materialized in line in front of us, an unremarkable teenager in ill-fitting clothes that failed to disguise her heaviness, and thick black makeup that masked whatever natural prettiness lurked underneath. Her hair was pink, a home dye job; I had to look away to avoid staring at the mess she’d made of herself. Her mother, hovering nearby, was her physical opposite: blond, overtly sexy, and trying too hard. Benny’s poor friend needs a makeover and some self-esteem, and clearly her mom isn’t the one to give it to her, I thought idly, and then my phone began to vibrate with messages from friends back East. So it wasn’t until they’d already left that I glanced at my brother and noticed the expression on his face.

  He took a sip of his coffee, then dropped the cup back on the saucer. “What?” He stared back at me.

  “That girl— What was her name? You like her.”

  He flushed. “Who said that?”

  I pointed at the top of his shirt, where red splotches marched upward from his chest to start their onslaught of his face. “You’re blushing.”

  He put a hand on his neck, as if this might conceal the pink. “It’s not like that with us.”

  The café’s windows were fogged with steam. I peered out to see if I could catch a better look at the mystery girl, but she and her mother had already disappeared around the corner. “So how is it, then?”

  “I dunno.” He smiled to himself, and slid down in his chair so that his legs stuck out into the aisle, blocking the path of everyone walking by. “She’s smart and she doesn’t take shit from anyone. And she makes me laugh. She’s not like other people. She doesn’t care who our family is.”

  I laughed. “That’s what you think. Everyone has an opinion about our family. Some people are just better at hiding it.”

  He scowled at me. “And you like that, don’t you, Vanessa? You like people paying attention to you because you’re rich and pretty and your family is supposedly important, don’t you? Honestly, though, don’t you ever want people to look at you and just see a person, instead of a Liebling?”

  I knew the correct answer was Yes, of course. But the truth was that I didn’t. I liked hiding behind the name Liebling. Because honestly, what would people see if they did look past it? A girl of no particular ability, no particular brilliance, no particular beauty; someone fun to have at the party but not someone meaningful. A person skating on top of the successes of the people who had come before her. I knew that about myself: I knew I didn’t have something powerful inside me, something compelling me toward greatness. I had only good enough.

  (Oh, you’re surprised by this little streak of self-awareness? Just because I’m rich and pretty and Internet-famous doesn’t mean that I haven’t spent my time loathing myself. More on this later.)

  What I did have: a name that meant that this didn’t matter, in the grand scheme of things. I could earn a 3.4 GPA and still get into Princeton, because of my family. So yes, I liked being a Liebling. (Wouldn’t you?) The only person in the world whose impression of me wasn’t ever going to be the least bit impacted by my last name was the person sitting next to me, the person who shared that name. Benny.

  “Whatever, doofus. If you think she’s so great, maybe you should ask her out.” I put down my cappuccino and leaned in. “Seriously. If you like her, make a move. She wouldn’t be hanging out with you all the time if she didn’t like you, too.”

  “But Mom says—”

  “To hell with them. What do they have to do with it? Please. Just…kiss her if you like her. I guarantee she’ll be into it.” What I didn’t say: Of course she’ll be into it, she’ll be kissing a millionaire! Even if she pretends that’s not an aphrodisiac, I promise you it’s got an appeal that she is not immune to.

  He squirmed a little. “It’s not that easy.”

  “It is that easy. Look—have a drink first, sometimes that helps. Liquid courage.”

  “No, I mean, it’s not so easy because I’m grounded. As of two days ago. Mom and Dad said I’m not allowed to see her anymore.”

  “Wait, why?”

  He spun the empty cup in the saucer and it splattered dregs of coffee across the chipped café table. “They found my pot stash and blamed it on her. They think she’s a bad influence.”

  “And? Is she?” I reconsidered the girl’s black clothes, heavy makeup, the pink hair. It was true she didn’t exactly give off that wholesome-Tahoe-mountain-girl vibe.

  “They don’t know her at all.” When he looked at me his eyes were strangely luminous, his pupils huge, like he might be able to see things that I couldn’t. I remembered his frailty then—that he could be easily broken, just like our mother. My brother was teetering on a knife’s edge; all it would take was a push in the wrong direction and he could end up tumbling off.

  But I thought I knew the right direction! Oh, I was so proud of myself. A girlfriend, an amour fou! That would normalize him in a way that my parents’ overprotectiveness would not. Look at me, I thought. Giving my brother real advice, something that might actually help him function in the real world and get out of his messed-up head. I thought I could help him in a way that our well-intended but clueless parents could not. I thought I knew how the world worked for kids like us.

  I was so very wrong.

  * * *

  —

  Benny ended up taking my advice and kissed his little friend. He kissed her and then, apparently, he fucked her. Good for Benny, right? Except that our father caught him in the act and my parents both completely lost their minds. And my brother was shipped off to a summer ca
mp in Italy, from which he sent me morose postcards: Who knew Italy could feel like prison? And: I swear I’m never talking to Mom and Dad again. And then, as the summer progressed, longer letters that were more disturbing. Do you ever hear voices talking to you when you’re lying in the dark and trying to fall asleep? Because I’m wondering if I’m going crazy or if it’s just some kind of coping mechanism because I am so fucking lonely here. And then, toward the end of summer, a letter on thin blue paper that was written entirely in Italian. I do not speak Italian. I wasn’t even sure it was Benny who had written it because the handwriting was so cramped and strange, except that it was his signature at the bottom.

  I was pretty sure he didn’t speak Italian, either.

  I was back in San Francisco at the time, for my first summer break. I had assumed that Maman would also be there with me, but she vanished not long after I arrived, off to a spa in Malibu where they hiked five hours a day and ate only liquefied vegetables and did colonics instead of facials. She was supposed to stay for two weeks but she ended up staying for six. When she came back home, just two days before I was heading back to Princeton, she was as thin as death, her eyes popping from her tanned skull. “I feel absolutely amazing, like all the filth from living was just sucked out of me, like I’ve been purified,” she gushed, but I could see how jittery her hands were as she pressed carrots into her fancy new juicer.

  I found Daddy in the library, poring over earnings statements. “I think Mom needs medication.”

  He gazed at me for a long minute. “She takes Xanax.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think that’s helping, Dad. I don’t think the spa retreats are healthy for her, either. She needs real professionals.”