by Norma Klein
Joshua rushed naked back into my room and got dressed in about one second. He tried saying, “It wasn’t Rusty’s fault, Mr. Engelberg. See, I had this term paper to do so we—”
“I said out and I mean out,” Daddy said, pointing. “Go!”
“Daddy,” I said after Joshua had gone. “We just fell asleep, that’s all. Joshua had a really bad virus two weeks ago and he just lay down and—”
“As a first step,” Daddy said, “I’m calling his parents tomorrow morning. Don’t they know where their children are at night? Don’t they care?”
“Daddy, please don’t call his parents,” I begged. “It’ll never happen again. Really.”
“Tat,” Daddy said, looking at me gravely, “I’ve always trusted you. As you know I believe in trust between parents and children. I’m just saddened, more than anything else, not so much shocked as saddened, at the way you’ve taken advantage of that trust.”
I looked up at him mournfully. “I’m sorry, Daddy. Really.”
Usually if I look up at Daddy that way and kind of lean against him, he softens, but this time he just said stiffly, “We’ll talk about this in the morning. I don’t think you realize how serious—”
I lay in bed worrying about Daddy calling Joshua’s parents. Would he do such a sick, awful thing? Daddy can be nice. He’s really not a mean person, despite what I might have made him sound like here. I mean, he really wants what’s best for us. It’s just that things have changed so much since he was my age and he can’t understand that. He says he tries to, but he just can’t. Mom’s always saying that Daddy’s views about women are straight out of the 50s when women were supposed to be virgins and men were allowed to screw around and do whatever they wanted. “If those were the good old days, you can have them,” she says. Actually, Joshua’s father is not that different, though I don’t especially think he and Daddy would get along. Joshua’s parents live in this really fancy duplex on Park Avenue. That’s because Joshua’s father, whose name is Patrick Lasker, is a lawyer who makes a lot of money on divorce cases. That’s how he met Joshua’s mother, in fact. She was trying to get a divorce from the person she was married to, John someone, who drank, and she went to Joshua’s father and I guess they liked each other so much, Joshua’s father decided to get divorced too. So they got married and had Joshua and his two brothers.
Joshua hates his father; he calls him Patricia behind his back. He says that he has girl friends and is seedy and gross in all sorts of ways. He’s sort of tall with thick, long grayish hair and glasses and he always wears turtlenecks with this funny pendant around his neck. Joshua thinks he looks like a fag. Joshua’s mother is this little sort of nervous-looking woman who works in charities and is worried because Joshua’s oldest brother took a year off from college and is traveling around Europe, playing the guitar. She’s afraid he’ll never come back.
I know Mom and Daddy would hate Joshua’s parents. Daddy has this thing about people who live on the East Side. He says they’re all decadent and phony and he doesn’t respect people who make a lot of money unless they do it by mistake, doing something worthwhile. Also, I know Mom would hate Joshua’s parents’ apartment. It’s really elegant with lots of antiques and peach-colored carpets. It looks just like the apartments Mom sometimes points to in House & Garden and says, “God, don’t you just want to vomit! How can people live like that?” I guess Mom thinks our apartment is nice and it is in a way. Mom doesn’t “believe” in carpets so we just have bare wood floors and Indian rugs and lots of books. It’s kind of messy. When I was sick in third grade after I had my tonsils out, my teacher came to visit me and she looked around as though she didn’t know what to say. Finally she said, “My, this certainly looks very lived in.”
All day at school I worried about Daddy calling Joshua’s parents. What if they decide we can’t see each other anymore? What if they set some horribly strict curfew like nine o’clock? What if Daddy says he thinks we’re too young for sex?
I decided I better do what Daddy said and come straight home from school. So I didn’t even go out for pizza with Shellie like I usually do. Deel has her math tutoring on Monday so she doesn’t get home till six. Her tutor is this friendly old man who has around six cats and a huge tank of tropical fish. Deel likes animals a lot so they spend most of the time talking about animals. Maybe that’s why she’s still failing Math.
When I got home, the house was quiet. At first I thought no one was there. But when I went into the kitchen for a snack, there was Mom, sitting on a stool, reading a cookbook. “Oh, hi, sweets,” she said, giving me a kiss. She was wearing her snakeskin jumpsuit. It’s not really snakeskin, it’s just velour patterned to look like that. Daddy doesn’t like it, but he says he’s learned to live with it. I love it. When I get tall enough, Mom says I can borrow it.
“Did he call Joshua’s parents?” I said anxiously, taking down the Oreo cookies.
“Not yet.”
“Is he going to?”
Mom sighed. “I’m afraid so.”
“Oh Mom! I’m going to be so humiliated . . . couldn’t you stop him?”
“Well, the second you were out the door, he was reaching for the phone, sputtering about statutory rape and that type of thing. I tried pointing out that it might be better if he called when he was a trifle calmer. And I also said that it was clear as day that whatever you were doing with Joshua, you were doing because you wanted to, so rape is scarcely a fitting—”
“Then what’d he say?”
“He said he’d wait and call Joshua’s father at the office.”
“Mom, Joshua is really a nice person.”
“Darling, I know! I think he’s a perfect sweetie . . . but that’s really totally irrelevant.”
“It is?”
“Basically . . . see, the thing is, what’s bothering Lionel is that it’s you, his little darling, having sex, and that totally freaks him out.”
“Didn’t he think I ever would?”
“Oh, he knew you would eventually, but he probably hoped you’d be like him and wait till college.”
“‘When I was your age, my grandparents were still tucking me into bed’? That’s a line from Manhattan that Woody Allen says to Mariel Hemingway; she’s seventeen.”
“Precisely.”
“Would he feel just as bad if it were Deel?”
“Not quite, I don’t think . . . Oh, it’s lots of things, hon. It’s complicated. There’s one crucial fact that I think—An awful thing is about to happen to Lionel.”
I felt scared. “What?”
“He’ll be fifty in two weeks—five oh.”
“So?”
“Well, to you fifty is fifty, nothing special. But to Lionel it’s a whole big deal. It’s half a century. It’s, well, definitely middle age. It means time is running out.”
“But what does that have to do with me and Joshua?”
“Well, here he sees you blooming, going forth into the world . . . and here his options are more and more limited. When you’re young, you have a feeling you can conquer the world, anything can happen, and then it dribbles away bit by bit. It’s been five years since he won the Emmy and nothing much has really worked out since then, so he’s kind of in a general funk about everything . . . He’s gotten plump, poor thing.”
“Yeah,” I said, seeing what she meant.
“And then it’s his whole relationship with you, Tat. He adores you. You’re his little pet, his darling. Remember how the two of you used to go to photography shows on Saturdays or to screenings together? And to you it was such a big deal, such a wonderful surprise and treat. And now you wouldn’t be seen dead with him.”
I felt awful. “That’s not true! That I wouldn’t be seen dead with him!”
“Well, you know what I mean. Whenever he suggests something, you’ve made other plans. Before he was big, wonderful Daddy who knew everything and you looked up at him with those big, beautiful eyes and it made him feel terrific, and now . . . well, you’re
looking at Joshua that way.”
“You mean he’s jealous?”
“Sort of . . . Look, hon, the whole thing is as normal as blueberry pie, but when it strikes home, when it’s your daughter, that’s when it hurts.”
“Poor Daddy.” I sat down on a stool next to Mom and began eating some cookies.
“I know.” Mom sighed. “Poor Lionel.”
“Do you think there’s something I could do to make him feel better . . . I mean, other than not seeing Joshua?”
Mom nodded. “You know, I was thinking, you remember how you and Deel used to give little parties for us when we had our birthdays? Well, I’m giving Lionel a surprise party when he turns fifty, but I thought if the two of you did it with me, baked something nice, maybe made him some special present . . . Remember how you used to make those collage calendars? Just kind of make a fuss over him.”
“Sure, I could do that.”
“I mean, let’s face it,” Mom said. “Part of it there’s nothing you can do anything about. He just has to come to terms with it himself. But I think if you kind of snuggled up to him, just a touch, maybe—”
“Okay,” I said. That sounded easy.
Just then the phone rang. Mom answered it. “Oh, hi! Yeah, sure . . . what time is it again? Five thirty? Okay, well, what should I do? Should I pick you up or what? Great, see you then.”
When Mom hung up the phone, she closed the cookbook. “Hon, listen, I have to run, I’m going to have a drink with Simon. I’ll be back around six thirty, okay? See you!”
She ran off to get her coat.
Simon used to be Mom’s director. It’s really a sad story. For four years Mom had this terrific job on a TV soap called The Way We Are Now. It was one of those gummy things that are on from 2:00 to 3:00 every afternoon, but Mom’s part was really terrific. She was a kind of villain or villainess. That’s the kind of part Mom likes; she likes roles you can sink your teeth into. She says she always hated ingenue roles, even when she was young enough to play them, and now that she’s thirty-nine, she says she doesn’t feel like trying to look ten years younger than she is. Actually, Mom looks younger than she is anyway, but I know what she means.
On TWWAN Mom played this woman named Myra who’d had a really terrible childhood. Her uncle, her stepmother’s brother, seduced her when she was eleven, but she was too scared to tell anyone, and that gave her all kinds of complexes about men. Then, when she finally told her mother about it, when she was eighteen, her mother threw her out of the house and she got into the car and drove off. Only it was a rainy night and her car crashed and she was horribly disfigured and had to have facial surgery. The trouble was that the doctor who did surgery on her, Dr. Morrison, fell in love with her and that led to all kinds of complications because he was married and his wife got really mad. So Myra (Mom) left town and moved to Chicago where she met a really nice man named Fred, but he was leafing through some old letters one day and found out about her uncle and that very day he left her. She felt heartbroken and decided to go back to her hometown and be a nurse there. By a strange coincidence Dr. Morrison was in that same hospital as a patient (he had to have something done with his kidneys) and they fell in love again and his wife got mad again.
Anyway, the awful thing is they wrote Mom out of the show six months ago. They’d put these new writers on the show and they wanted to build up some other part, so they had Mom in a car crash where she died. Dr. Morrison has been a real mess ever since then; he seems to have lost the will to live and no one knows what to do with him. Even his wife says she wishes Myra were around to cheer him up. But it’s too late. Once you’ve killed a character off, that’s that. But the main thing is, poor Mom! Because she was doing a terrific job. You should see all the fan mail she used to get. Four men even proposed to her! One of them said she looked just like his childhood sweetheart and another said he lay in bed every night dreaming about her. Another one said he’d read her sign was Taurus in some TV magazine and that meant she was perfect for him because he was Aquarius. So that proves she was doing a great job, and she was earning all this money. Of course she can still do commercials, but it’s not the same thing.
Anyhow, that’s how Mom met Simon. He’s only thirty-three, which Mom says is young for a director, but she said he’s really good. Maybe he can help her get another job on another soap, but Mom says they’re terribly hard to get just because they’re so insanely lucrative. Mom loves earning money. She’s totally different from Daddy in that respect. She says if she earns money, she can do splurgy things from time to time like buy those wine-red leather boots that she got for me last month. She told Daddy they cost $60, which he thought was decadent and horrible, but really they cost $150! She told me not to tell him. She said he’d die if he knew. Partly, it’s that Daddy is a socialist, sort of, meaning he worries about how many poor people there are in the world and feels guilty that he isn’t poor. Mom was sort of poor herself when she was little, and she says she doesn’t feel guilty about it at all. Also, she says she likes getting nice things for me and Deel since she couldn’t have them when she was little—nice sheepskin coats and cute sweaters and stuff. I’m glad she’s like that because I like clothes too. Deel is a little more like Daddy. She mostly just wears jeans and her desert boots and a turtleneck.
Chapter Two
Deel got home around six. “Shit,” she said.
“What?”
“I hate math! I hate it. I hate it so much I wish I knew the person who invented it and I’d go out and kill him.” Deel’s glasses were fogged over. She has dark frizzy hair and a big nose, like Daddy, and when she’s mad, she gets this really fierce expression that used to scare me when I was little.
“Gee.” It’s funny. I really kind of like math. I mean, I wouldn’t want to be a mathematician or anything like that, but I like math. “Isn’t he helping any?”
“Dodson? Not really . . . we never do any math. He just tells me stories.”
“But what’ll you do? What if you fail again?”
Deel shrugged. “Where’s Mom?”
“Out having a drink with Simon.”
“So, did Daddy shoot anyone yet?”
I sighed. “Mom said he was going to call Joshua’s father from the office.” I started biting my nails, something I made myself stop doing six months ago.
“God, Rust, you are dumb! How come you let him stay so late?”
“We fell asleep.”
“So, what happened? What were you doing in the bathroom?”
“Just kind of fooling around.”
Deel looked at me suspiciously. “At three in the morning?”
“I remembered I hadn’t washed my hair so . . .”
Deel sniffed; she has a cold. “What happened with Daddy, though?”
“He began hammering on the door.”
“While you were washing your hair?”
I felt sheepish. “No, we’d finished with my hair.”
“What do you mean we?”
“Well, Joshua said he’d help me.”
Deel’s eyes widened. “Oh, wow! You mean you were—”
“Yeah.”
She whistled. “And Daddy—You were, like, doing it, when—”
“Yeah.”
“Oh boy, you have got problems.”
“It was dumb,” I agreed.
I feel kind of funny talking about sex with Deel, just for this reason: she’s never fucked with anyone, even though she’s a year and a half older than me. It isn’t on moral grounds or anything. It’s just no one has asked her. She says if no one does by February, when she’s sixteen, she’s just going to go out and find someone, in cold blood, sort of, and do it to get it over with. I guess she feels a little humiliated that I did it first. Deel has this theory, though, that younger sisters usually do things first in terms of marriage and sex. She says older sisters tend to do better academically and become doctors and lawyers. The trouble is, I do pretty well in school and it’s Deel who’s failing Math. It se
ems like all our lives people have said to Deel, “Well, are you still reading a mile a minute?” and to me, “Look at that hair! Look at those eyes! Aren’t you as cute as a button?”
By the way, the reason we have such weird names is Daddy. He used to teach at the Yale Drama School—that’s were he met Mom, who was in his class—and he wanted to name us after literary heroines. Deel’s real name is Cordelia after someone in a play by Shakespeare called King Lear. It’s worse for her because she hates “Cordy” and doesn’t much like “Deel,” but she doesn’t want people to go around calling her “Cordelia” either. She says at school her teachers always call her “Deelyer” which she hates most of all. I’m named after this person in a Russian opera, Eugene Onegin. It’s about this girl who falls in love with somebody who doesn’t love her back, but then she gets married to somebody else and he changes his mind, only then it’s too late. My friends call me Rusty because of my hair so that’s not such a problem. Mom calls me Tat or Tati, but Daddy likes to call me Tatiana if he’s feeling affectionate. He likes graceful, romantic names for women.
“Listen, Deel?” I followed her into her room.
“What?” Deel was sneezing and changing into another sweatshirt.
“Mom was saying—well, you know Daddy’ll be fifty next month? And she’s giving him a surprise party and she thought we might, like, do something special for it, like bake something?”
“Sure,” Deel said.
“Do you want to do the Dobos Torte?”
“Yeah, that’s yummy.”
Deel and I make regular things like brownies and pound cake, but our specialty is Dobos Torte. It’s this wonderful chocolate cake with around eight layers. It takes a long, long time to make, but it always tastes wonderful.
“Mom says Daddy’s feeling sad and we should try to cheer him up.”
“It’s like in Passages,” Deel said. She’s reading that just for pleasure. Deel does a lot of reading, not for school, just because she feels like it. Passages is this book that tells about all the problems adults have. It sounds like a kind of depressing book. “He’s a classic case.”
