Almost Royalty: A Romantic Comedy...of Sorts

by Courtney Hamilton

  Age 12.

  I am five foot four and weigh 89 pounds. My breasts appear and I try to pretend that nothing has changed by slouching.

  One night after I’m in bed, I hear Julia talking on the phone. She’s on the phone for a long time. I keep hearing her say, “I won’t pressure you, I promise.” The next day, Big Mike appears. Julia is happy.

  He is older. He wears frayed jeans and T-shirts with holes in them. He sees me and says, “Jesus, look at you.” He gives me a big hug, and moves his body around while hugging me, holding on way too long. He sticks his hands up my shirt and pretends to tickle me.

  He does this a lot.

  I don’t like it.

  I start to push him when he wants to “just give me a hug.”

  Julia catches me pushing him away.

  She drags me into her bedroom. “If you push him away, he might go and leave us. If he leaves, I’m going to be sad again. You don’t want that, do you? Good. Then don’t push him away, damn it. He’s just showing you that he likes you.”

  Julia and Big Mike decide to take a trip. Alone. For one week.

  Age 15.

  It’s January. I’ve gone back East to look at colleges because I am graduating early from high school. My mom convinces me to visit her sister and brother-in-law, Ruth and Ben Stern, in Marblehead, a town outside of Boston. She gives me their phone number. I’ve never met my Aunt Ruth and Uncle Ben.

  I have never met any member of my mother’s family.

  I call them. They’re surprised to hear from me, but they invite me over. I take a bus from Boston to Marblehead.

  “Oh my goodness, you look so much like Wendy,” says my Aunt Ruth when she sees me. “But blonde.”

  Wendy, my mom’s little sister.

  “Your mom and Wendy didn’t always get along,” said Aunt Ruth.

  “Why?” I ask.

  Aunt Fran looks at me. “How old are you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Well, Wendy was the baby of the family, closest to your mom in age. But she always stole your mom’s boyfriends.”

  Aunt Ruth serves leftovers for dinner. After dinner, she asks me if I would like to see a picture of my grandfather.

  She shows me a picture of an old man with a long beard, wearing a small cap over his head. I have seen this kind of cap before.

  “Aunt Ruth,” I ask, “why is my grandfather wearing a Yarmulke?”

  “You don’t know?”

  I think for a moment. “Oh. My mom… you’re not… the Fighting Irish Cohans of Boston?

  “Cohen, not Cohan.”

  “What happened?”

  “Your mom wanted to marry a Goy—your dad. She didn’t want any problems.”

  Aunt Fran hands me the phone.

  “Call your mother.”

  I call home. Julia picks up.

  “Golda,” I say, “when were you going to tell me?”

  But now it’s Megan’s baby shower, which happens after the baby is born because Megan has an emergency C-section and the baby is born early. It’s a boy. Aunt Katy has tried to put a good spin on things by inviting every member of the family.

  Aunt Katy is the only member of my father’s family who tries to include Julia in all family events. When I was a child, we were never invited to any Hamilton celebrations.

  Three years ago, I was invited to Aunt Katy’s annual Christmas party for the first time. There were a lot of whispers, sighs, and long looks from the Hamilton clan. While exchanging presents, I learned that my father was previously married.

  I now have an uneasy feeling that Julia may have been a dee-vorce engineer for my father, and not just Big Mike.

  “Your mother has always been so stylish,” says my Uncle Jack.

  Julia is wearing my cherry red cocktail dress with the cleavage that goes to her navel. About three weeks after our incident, I went looking for it. I couldn’t find it, and tried to remember whether I had taken it to be cleaned. But when I went to deliver my rent check, the manager of my apartment house couldn’t look me in the eye and seemed very sheepish.

  “Rick,” I said, “what’s going on?”

  She had told him that she had left her glasses in my apartment. He let her in. “I saw her stuff something into her bag,” he said.

  It’s not too pretty; especially because she picks up the baby and holds him against her chest and he thinks it’s time to nurse. So the baby tries to latch on to one of her breasts.

  “Isn’t that sweet,” said Julia, as she hands the baby back to Megan as quickly as humanly possible without dropping him.

  I sit down and eat some cake. Julia plops down at my table.

  “You’re looking well,” Julia says, “but your hair doesn’t have enough blond in it.”

  “It’s my natural color,” I say.

  “Maybe you should change that,” said Julia.

  “So Julia,” I said sipping punch, “now that you’ve been kinda a member of the Hamilton clan for over 30 years, do they know that you’re Jewish yet?”

  “Lower your voice, damn it,” said Julia, “these people are highly anti-Semitic.”

  “Really… what are they, Bay Area Liberals?” I said.

  “Very funny,” said Julia. “Katy’s husband—Charlie, your Uncle Jack, and Grandpa Hamilton—they’re members of the Los Angeles Country Club. I’m pretty sure that they still don’t let Jews into the Los Angeles Country Club.”

  “But do they—Aunt Katy, Uncle Charlie, Aunt Betsy, Uncle Jack, Grandma and Grandpa—know that you’re Jewish, or are you still pushing that line of crap about your maiden name, Cohen—the fighting Irish Co-hans of Boston?”

  “You don’t know how hard it was to be accepted by this damn family,” said Julia.

  “It doesn’t look like you’re trying too hard to fit in,” I said.

  “It’s been more than 30 years. They have to accept me.”

  “So why not tell them.”

  “Does it make any difference to anyone at this point?”

  To have the long looks, the knowing silences, the frequent whispers, the turned away faces, the strange questions, the quick glances, the pauses in conversations, the big sighs and the mysterious innuendos explained.

  “It would make a difference to me,” I said.

  And then Julia looked at me. Really looked at me.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  “And the dress. Am I getting it back?”

  Julia just looked at me. And smiled.

  4

  Therapy

  “Just hold my hand. Tighter. There… doesn’t that feel good?” said Roberta.

  Roberta was holding my right hand and lightly massaging it. We were having a therapy session. Her face was two inches from mine and she was staring into my eyes.

  I looked away so that I couldn’t see the scars in her eyelids from her last eye-lift.

  Were those new Sally Mann photographs on the walls?

  Her hand was flabby, without texture or a discernible trace of a bone in it, greasy from fifteen years of moisturizing with Vaseline Intensive Care.

  It felt like I was holding a banana slug.

  “Tell me again why we’re doing this?” I asked.

  I wanted her to let go so that I could take a sip of my Washington Green Apple Tea, which had oozed to the consistency of a 7–Eleven Slurpee.

  “You should know by now,” said Roberta.

  “Well,” I said. “I guess I’ve forgotten.”

  “You know… well… explaining things… it’s not the way I work,” said Roberta for the millionth time.

  I turned my head away so Roberta wouldn’t see me roll my eyes.

  I sighed. “Well, maybe today you should because I don’t know what I’m doing here,” I said.

  Roberta gave me a look. I was pretty sure that I had just broken some unwritten rule of therapy such as the Implied Therapist-Patient agreement.

  Somewhere during my fifteen years with Roberta, therapy had become a bad habi
t like Gap Khakis, Starbucks Coffee, and friends who always made you feel depressed. At some point I actually forgot why I was doing therapy.

  I think I first entered therapy because I wanted to speak with a sober adult, someone who wasn’t trying to rationalize a parenting style that equaled criminal negligence. What I got was Volvo-driving, pot-smoking, vegetarian women, the kind that lived in Santa Monica, Venice, Topanga, or Haight-Ashbury, went to Berkeley instead of Barnard and became Unitarian after being raised Jewish or Episcopalian. They could always be found supporting Save the Whales, Habitat for Humanity and Ralph Nader.

  But more to the point, they were a stark contrast with my mother, Julia, something I craved.

  In the fall my senior year of high school—actually September—I finished all of my applications for college. I sent out 17 applications, to every conservatory, school of fine arts, or university that I thought had promising violin teachers. I was hoping for at least one early admission.

  In December, I got a call from one of the fine art schools. They had a shortage of violinists and “Did I want to come to college early?” They offered me a fairly substantial scholarship.

  The school had been started with a radical faculty who thought that they would change the world with their artistic vision—30 years later all they wanted to do was make as much money as possible.

  I started the arts school in the winter semester, three months before my seventeenth birthday. Due to all of the acceleration and extra credits from music summer schools, I was graduating early.

  As I received my dorm room assignment, a hunk of metal which looked like a fatal car crash in red, yellow, and blue was wheeled to me on a dolly.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “This is your furniture,” said the dorm registrar.

  The dorm registrar gave me a screwdriver, which was to be used to construct the hunk of metal into a bed, a desk, and a chair. I was also given two bright yellow trash baskets that looked like yellow traffic cones.

  I wheeled the dolly with the red, yellow, and blue metal hunk and two yellow trash baskets down a long dark hallway and found my room. The metal was surprisingly heavy.

  My room was made out of cinder blocks. It looked like an outdoor carport. The floor was covered with green indoor-outdoor carpeting that was mostly stained. There was one light switch for the panel of fluorescent lights that covered the ceiling. The lights hummed when turned on. The bathroom was shared and connected to another dorm room, the occupant of which was an albino lesbian dancer named Kimmy who was studying modern dance. My room overlooked the swimming pool.

  No one—other than me—ever bothered to wear a bathing suit to that pool.

  “The trash baskets are cute,” said Julia, as she gazed out at the numerous naked 18-year-old bodies lounging around the pool.

  “I guess,” I said. “Do you think you could help me make some furniture out of this metal?”

  “You know,” Julia said, “I’m kinda hot. Mind if I go for a swim?”

  “I’m not sure I have a bathing suit that’ll fit you,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said.

  Not six minutes later, I watched as my naked mother did the breast stroke in the shallow end of the pool while simultaneously managing to engage two of the naked 18-year-old boys in conversation.

  My roommate was a 25-year-old graduate student from New York. Her name was Bettina. She was in the art school and had recently created a group show in downtown L.A. at the Woman’s Village with the Lesbian Women’s Art Collective—a collective she had founded.

  Bettina was the Queen of the Lesbian Collective. It was her subjective impulses that created the Collective’s operating rules.

  Admission to the Lesbian Collective was by application only, a review process for which Bettina had final approval. Only those who were militant lesbian-feminists—no guys (the oppressors), no flowery/‌romantic art (delusional), no make-up or girly clothing (slave garb) were admitted. If you were seen talking to a man for any reason other than necessary functions, wearing a tiny amount of make-up, or behaving in an “oppressed”—traditional female—manner, you were booted from the Collective without warning. For members of the Lesbian Collective, taking classes from male instructors was strictly forbidden.

  Of course, Bettina objected to my being her roommate. She called me “a Breeder” because I wasn’t a lesbian. But the registrar’s office told her that she couldn’t select her roommate by sexual orientation, and she either roomed with me or hit the street.

  Bettina’s show at the Lesbian Women’s Art Collective was called “I Do… Not” and was performance art about destroying wedding images—literally. It featured Bettina and her Collective Lesbians doing things like demolishing engagement rings with sledge hammers, ripping a bridal gown with shears, and smashing a wedding cake with their bare hands while chanting, “I Do… Not.” Too bad about the cake—it was chocolate. I went to the show and waited to see if part of it was participatory, like everyone would get a piece of the cake. It wasn’t.

  But one night Bettina walked in the dorm with her girlfriend, Wanda, wearing the ripped wedding gown and said, “Have a piece of cake.”

  “Isn’t she beautiful?” said Wanda, a welder in the art school. Eventually they all took turns playing the bride with the ripped wedding gown. Whoever played the bride got to take what was left of the cake home that night. Wanda and Bettina left me with the cake while they went for their honeymoon at Wanda’s apartment in Van Nuys.

  Except for Bettina and Wanda, no one spoke to me outside of class during the first month I was at the school, no one except for this nut on the Theater School Faculty—the dean—who chased me around the school screaming, “Hi Fake!” “Hey Fakie” or “Hello Ms. Fakie.”

  I couldn’t find anything at the school because the administration had decided that signs ruined the visual “flow” of the building. The school itself was built on four straight levels with two central elevators connecting each floor, such that the building could be turned into a shopping center, insane asylum, or a rest home if the school failed.

  At first I never saw anyone in the school. At most, I would walk down a hallway and see one person who would scurry down the hallway like a roach that had been exposed to light and would never acknowledge me.

  A door would open, I’d wait for a person to appear, and the door would slam shut without anyone materializing. I would walk down empty concrete hallways seeing no one, hearing only the sound of my feet hitting the concrete or the hum of the fluorescent lights. And it was freezing. Although the temperature outside could often go above 105 degrees, the building seemed to have a thermostat that had been permanently stuck at 56.

  After four weeks, I finally stumbled into the room where the mailboxes were located. Well, to be honest, it took me three weeks to realize that I had a mailbox, and one week to find it.

  The mailboxes were situated in a large windowless room framed by three blank white walls and a solid black floor. The floor had been shined to such a gloss that it reflected the bank of fluorescent lights on the ceiling. No one was in the room when I found it. I found my mailbox, opened it, and sat on the floor to read the four weeks of mail that had accumulated for me.

  After about eight minutes of reading I realized that someone was standing over me. I waited for the person to leave. After about two minutes I realized that the person was still in the room.

  I looked up and saw a slightly overweight guy with short dark hair wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket, jeans that were ripped at the knee, and sunglasses with mirror lenses. An art school geek, trying to look tough.

  Damn. Where were those cute gay guys from the theater school?

  From the ground, I judged him to be around five foot five. He was leaning against the mailboxes, full of art school pretension. I knew he was going for a look like Erik Estrada in CHIPS, one of those retro ’70s shows that sporadically appear on Nickelodeon. What he got was more like Barbra Streisand
in Yentl.

  He appeared to be staring at me.

  I looked at him for ten seconds. He didn’t say anything. I continued reading my mail. About five minutes later, I realized that he hadn’t moved. I looked up.

  “May I help you?” I said.

  “Are you Courtney?” he said. I seriously wondered if I should answer this.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “Hmm. You’re the new girl that everyone wants to screw,” he said.

  He walked out of the room.

  Six years later, right after I managed to keep a straight face as his fiancée told me that she wanted “Memories” from the Broadway musical Cats and The Pachelbel Canon played at their wedding, Ronald Goldstein paid me $100 not to tell her how he first introduced himself to me.

  “Look,” he said, “this girl has big tits and likes me. And her dad is loaded. So I don’t have to worry about selling my paintings, which even I think are crap, and I don’t have to worry about finding booty.”

  “But, Ronald,” I said, “you made such an impression.”

  Right after my mail room introduction to Ronald, I walked back to my dorm room and decided to cook every Velveeta recipe that I had ever eaten. Unfortunately, the cooking equipment I had, a hot plate and toaster oven, was rather limited. However, my repertoire, which included Velveeta junior pizza, Velveeta broccoli-Cheese Nips-casserole, Velveeta enchiladas, Velveeta soup, Velveeta condensed-milk mushroom soup chicken, and Velveeta melt on salmon, was fairly extensive.

  Bettina, after deciding that the Velveeta cook-off was not part of some feminist art performance piece about the capitalistic oppression of middle-class moms, was confused. She sat next as me as I thought about my next Velveeta concoction.

  “I’m not sure whether I should be repulsed or worried,” she said.

  “Why? Want some Velveeta?” I said as I cut off a four-by-two-inch cube.

  “Do you want to talk to someone?”

  “I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”

  Somewhere in the middle of making Velveeta cheese bread, the dean of the music school knocked on my dorm door.

  “Courtney,” he said. “Are you in there?”