Her mother said, with a brave little smile, “It’s definite, Merissa. Your father and I are getting—divorced.”
Merissa swallowed hard.
She said, “I guess I know, Mom.”
Thinking how good it was, the way in which her mother phrased this news: Your father and I are getting—divorced. And not instead: Your father wants a divorce.
Merissa didn’t shrink away when her mother hugged her and began to cry. And Merissa cried with her.
“I’ll help you, Mom. It will be all right.”
II
TINK TINK TINK TINK TINK TINK TINK TINK: A SCRAPBOOK
1.
HOW TINK CAME INTO OUR LIVES: SEPTEMBER 2010
Rumor was, somebody “famous” was transferring from a revered old prep school in Manhattan into the junior class at Quaker Heights Day School.
Rumor was, this somebody was (A) a model, (B) a movie actress, (C) a New York City stage actress, (D) a TV actress.
Rumor was, she was the daughter of a famous actress-mother and a “really rich” father (who owned a sports team?) and they’d just moved into one of the new showy custom-designed houses in the exclusive gated community of Quaker River Heights.
It was the third week of the fall term. The most outrageous rumor—well, it had to be a fact—was that the new transfer had been granted special permission by our headmaster, Mr. Nichols, to miss the start of term, for “professional” reasons: She’d been in Paris on a shoot.
“Look!” Martine Hesse happened to be standing at a window in Mrs. Conway’s classroom, just before the start of third-period English class; there, second-floor windows overlooked the front driveway.
“A limousine!”
It was a shiny black Lincoln. You couldn’t have seen through the tinted windows even if you’d been down on the sidewalk past which the limousine was gliding.
And where the town car parked, you couldn’t see from the second-floor windows who got out and entered the school building.
Later it would be claimed by Martine and several others in Mrs. Conway’s class that they’d actually seen Tink Traumer climb out of the back of the limousine and enter through the front entrance, on her way to the headmaster’s office.
In no version of the original story was it claimed that Tink’s mother or any adult had accompanied her. Invariably, Tink had been alone.
But later it would be claimed by numerous others that they’d seen Tink arrive via limousine for her first day at Quaker Heights Day School and they’d seen the “uniformed chauffeur” get out of the vehicle to open Tink’s door for her.
As Tink would say, with a snort of derision: “Bullshit! Nobody opens any bloody car door for me.”
There came the short, fiery-haired girl into Mr. Doerr’s third-period geometry class. Her face was pale and plain, as if it had been scrubbed, and even her freckles looked bleached; but her singed-looking hair sprang out from her head with a look of quivering indignation.
The girl had been escorted to Mr. Doerr’s classroom by one of Headmaster Nichols’s assistants, who gave the math teacher an admission card from which, in a bemused voice, Mr. Doerr read:
“‘Katrina Traumer.’ Hel-lo.”
Mr. Doerr was being pleasantly welcoming to the new girl—but you knew, if you knew Mr. Doerr, that he was also just slightly exasperated at being interrupted at his favorite class-time activity, which was scrawling figures and equations on the board. This Mr. Doerr did each class period in a kind of fevered trance, after which he’d step back, gripping chalk in his fingers, and call out exuberantly to the class: “Who can help me out on this one?” You could see how pleased he was at what he’d been scribbling, as if it were a secret code only a few very special students could decipher.
But the knock at the door, and the arrival of the new transfer with the springy rust-red hair, had interrupted Mr. Doerr’s ritual.
“Katrina Traumer—welcome! Though you are twelve days late for school, I’m sure there is a more than adequate explanation for your tardiness. And so, Katrina, if you would please take a seat in the—”
“Tink.”
“Excuse me? What did you say?”
“The name is Tink.”
Mr. Doerr regarded the new girl with an expression of startled puzzlement. He was at least twelve inches taller than she, and one hundred pounds heavier. Yet as she stared at him with uncanny glassy-green eyes, Mr. Doerr lost some of his composure.
“Did you say ‘Tink’?”
“It’s the name people call me,” Tink said, “if they want me to grant them my attention.” Yet the red-haired girl spoke so disdainfully, you wouldn’t expect that even being called by this strange name would guarantee her attention.
We had time now to stare at her clothes. Like no other clothes any girl at Quaker Heights was likely to wear to class.
We were into Levi’s straight-leg jeans and tight little Gap tops, mostly worn beneath looser-fitting shirts or sweaters. We were seriously into a “chic-preppy” look that suited us, we thought.
Here was the new red-haired transfer student from Manhattan who was wearing a dancer’s leggings—black tights—beneath a pullover of some strange crinkly fabric that looked more like soft filaments of metal than cloth.
And on her feet—child feet, size four—little red leather sneakers with black laces.
“‘Tink’! What kind of a name is ‘Tink’?”
Mr. Doerr had just two modes of speech: Teacher Mode, which was as brisk and staccato as a nutcracker might talk if it could talk, and his Ironic Mode, which was droll and dry and intended to be funny. During class Mr. Doerr spent most of his time in Teacher Mode, but now and then shifted to Ironic Mode; he maintained a deadpan expression but shifted his eyebrows to signal, Okay, kids, now you can laugh. So we’d laugh to humor him, for you don’t want to hurt the feelings of any adult who grades you or will write letters for your college applications. But with Tink in our class, already you could see that he’d have to be careful or the wiry little red-haired stranger with the green eyes glancing out over the class—gliding over our rapt faces, without lingering, like a ray of light—would make a fool of him.
Tink never smiled, either. She would confide in us, later, that the secret of humor was not smiling, so your listeners didn’t know whether you knew you were funny—they had to guess, and guessing kept them alert.
“Tink is the logical diminutive of Tinkle, Mr. Door.” The red-haired girl’s voice was unexpectedly scratchy, like fingernails on slate.
“Excuse me—the name is Doerr.”
“That’s what I said, sir: Dour.”
“No! Not Dour—Doerr.”
“Doooer.”
“Do-err. The accent is just slightly on the first syllable.”
“Tinkle. The accent is just slightly on the first syllable.”
“But Tinkle isn’t your name, is it?” Mr. Doerr was becoming red-faced now, and not smiling; just as the red-haired girl with the glittery green eyes was not smiling but looking at him with an affronted air. “Your name is—”
“Correct. The name on the card is ‘Katrina.’ You can see that no one would wish to be called ‘Katrina’ who wasn’t fifty years old, with fifty-inch hips.”
Some of us in the class laughed, this was so funny. But others sat staring at the new girl and at befuddled Mr. Doerr, for whom we were now feeling embarrassment.
“I don’t see that ‘Tinkle’ is an improvement over ‘Katrina,’ frankly,” Mr. Doerr said, with a sudden glare. “Why ‘Tinkle’?”
“Because when I was a little girl, I would go tinkle in the potty, just like you, Mr. Dorr.”
Laugh! Everyone in our class erupted into laughter, and it was five or maybe ten minutes before poor, blushing Mr. Doerr could quiet us down, assign the new girl a seat in the fourth row, and continue with the shambles of his class.
Tinkle in the potty, just like you.
Immediately, these words were taken up at Quaker Heights Day School, from the ten
th grade, which was an unusually close-knit class of fewer than one hundred students, through the eleventh and twelfth grades; even the most popular and self-absorbed seniors who had no idea who “Tink” Traumer was tossed the phrase about as if they understood the joke. Tinkle in the potty! Just like you.
2.
“BRATTY BITCH”
Almost immediate and near unanimous was the judgment on Tink Traumer: bratty bitch.
She was too small, scrappy, and young-looking to be an actual bitch—a bitch meant some measure of sexual-female maturity. But she was way too mature to be a brat, which meant just a young kid.
“She’s mean! She’s nasty! I tried to be nice to her—asked her how she liked Quaker Heights so far—and she didn’t even look at me, just sort of snarled, ‘There are no Quakers here, and no Heights—what’s there to like?’”
“Maybe she was being funny?”
“Funny! She was nasty. She didn’t even ask my name, or—anything.”
Even worse, in Mrs. Conway’s homeroom, when Mrs. Conway asked Tink where she’d transferred from, Tink said, “UWS.”
“‘UWS’? I’m not sure what that means.”
“Upper West Side.”
“Oh! Manhattan, I guess?”
By this time Tink had opened her laptop and was typing into it, as if her exchange with Mrs. Conway had concluded.
(Hannah Heller, whose desk was close by Tink’s in homeroom, tried to see what Tink had logged in to—her laptop screen seemed to be showing a sequence of photographs of the nighttime sky.)
It was so: The “new girl” wasn’t friendly, at least not in any normal way. If you tried to talk to her—to ask her questions—her pale, freckled little face seemed to freeze, and her green-glassy eyes quivered like a combustible liquid; but if you just smiled at her, or glanced at her without any expectations, Tink might surprise you by saying, “Howdy.”
Howdy. So hokey, it was cool.
We were shocked by how disdainful Tink was when Mr. Trocchi tried to ask her about her professional career.
(Mr. Trocchi remembered having seen her TV series, Gramercy Park, years ago. Tink had been in the cast from the age of six to eleven, playing the daughter of an alcoholic divorcée while her mother, Veronica Traumer, played another, unrelated character. According to Mr. Trocchi, Veronica Traumer was a “competent” TV actress, but Tink had been “just terrific—you’d never think the little girl was acting at all, she was just being herself.” All this Mr. Trocchi told us, and much more. He was thrilled to have a professional actress to work with in student productions.)
What a surprise then, and a disappointment, when Mr. Trocchi tried to question her in class.
“Tell us what it was like, Katrina—I mean, Trink—being a celebrity at the age of six.”
Tink, seated tensely in her desk, which seemed too big for her small-boned body, stared at Mr. Trocchi coolly. “Excuse me: My name is bloody Tink—not bloody Trink.”
Bloody! No one had ever heard this colorful adjective before, in such a context. Mr. Trocchi considered how to react and then—laughed.
“‘Bloody’ is a British expression, should any of you be interested in colloquialisms,” Mr. Trocchi said, in his mock-teacherly way, to the class, “though I think it is considered just a bit too colloquial for polite British society. You’ve traveled to Britain, Tink? Or—you’ve lived there?”
“Some.”
This ambiguous answer, reluctantly muttered, Mr. Trocchi seemed to accept as a positive reply.
Again he asked her how it had felt to be a celebrity at the age of six, and Tink stiffened and with a pained little grimace said that she’d never been a celebrity—“That’s ridiculous.”
Mr. Trocchi plucked at his mustache, protesting, “But in professional circles, you certainly were! You had a career, Tink, and you made money, while other little girls your age were in grade school and playing with dolls.” Mr. Trocchi smirked at the very thought of little girls in grade school playing with dolls—he’d forgotten that the rest of his female students must have been in this category. “You and your mother, Veronica Traumer—both! What was it like?”
“My character did the acting. Not me.”
“Mmm! How interesting! ‘My character did the acting—not me.’ I think you must mean a kind of Method acting, Tink? Could you explain to the class, Tink, what Method acting involves?”
Mr. Trocchi had no difficulty calling Tink by a diminutive. If anything, he seemed to relish the intimacy, as if he’d known Tink Traumer for a long time. When he’d been told of Tink’s witty exchange with his colleague Doerr, he’d laughed as if he’d never heard anything so funny. He was no prissy old conformist like Doerr.
Tink murmured, “Some other time, maybe. Method acting is complicated.”
“Why yes, it is! There’s a philosophy of acting—and of the theater—behind it. Stanislavsky . . . Chekhov . . .” Mr. Trocchi was excited, as we’d rarely seen him.
“Well. I hope you will want to audition for our fall play—Our Town. You would make an unusual, I think very effective Emily—one of the great roles for a girl in the American theater.”
Tink shook her head vehemently. No!
“What do you mean—no? You don’t want to audition for Thornton Wilder’s Emily?”
You could see—if you were sitting near Tink, as Chloe Zimmer was—that her fingernails were badly bitten. The black leggings she wore virtually every day to school looked as if they hadn’t been laundered in some time, and her springy, singed-red hair looked as if it hadn’t been combed or brushed, let alone shampooed, in days.
You could also see—if you stared hard enough—that when Tink’s long, loose sleeve fell back from her left wrist, there was a tight, flesh-colored adhesive bandage around the wrist.
Mr. Trocchi persisted, “You mean—it’s something of a professional insult, to ask you to audition? Of course—I understand. I wasn’t thinking. Let me offer you the role, then—without an audition. Or we could read through the play together, after school one day this week, and see if the role appeals to you.”
“I don’t think so, Mr. Trochee.”
“Trocchi—not ‘Trochee.’”
“Trock-y.”
“Trocchi.”
“Troc-cee.”
(Did Tink mean to be funny? She was so deadpan—so serious! And Mr. Trocchi was so serious.)
“But the point is—will you play Emily in Our Town? I’m sure the local media will want to cover the production, and I can contact the New Jersey section of the New York Times. Think of the publicity for our school, and for the drama program! Merissa, you’re the new president of the Drama Club. What do you think?”
Merissa frowned. Though she had played several minor roles in school productions, she hadn’t yet been cast by Mr. Trocchi in anything like a leading role; it had crossed her mind that maybe Emily in Our Town might be her “breakthrough” role. So she was reluctant to support Mr. Trocchi in this casting suggestion.
Also, she had been watching squirmy red-haired Tink Traumer and had definitely registered the girl’s stiffened expression even as Mr. Trocchi chattered enthusiastically.
“What do I think? I think that you should have auditions, Mr. Trocchi—as always.”
Merissa tried to exchange a glance, a smile, with Tink Traumer, but Tink ignored her.
Ignored Merissa Carmichael! Beautiful, poised Merissa Carmichael with pale-blond hair, flawless skin, and ceramic-doll features.
Mr. Trocchi objected, “In professional theater, and certainly in the movies, auditions are not required for accomplished actors. We’ve always had auditions here, of course—all our actors are amateurs.”
Merissa said, “But our productions are amateur productions, Mr. Trocchi! It isn’t fair to not have auditions—open auditions, for everyone.”
“But here we have Tink Traumer—a professional—in our midst!”
“If Tink is interested in playing the role of Emily, she can audition—like the rest of u
s.”
Mr. Trocchi frowned, plucking at his mustache. For the fear was, of course, that Tink would not audition for the role—or any role. And he would lose the opportunity to showcase her.
“I understand your point, Merissa. And—the rest of you—I see that you agree with Merissa?—but—if we want a truly first-rate production of this great American classic, Our Town, we will have to cast the very best ‘Emily’ at our disposal. . . .”
Tink objected, “Mr. Tucchi—Trucci—I’ve tried to tell you that I’m not a bloody actor now, I’ve been retired since the age of twelve. I’ve become an amateur.”
It was only a moment—just a blink of an eye—but you could see, in that moment, a look on Tink Traumer’s face that was frightened.
Then, immediately, Tink’s face froze again. Shut up as tight as a clenched little fist.
One thing was certain: Tink wasn’t a model.
“A model has to be tall—Tink is practically a midget. And a model has to be beautiful—she has to have high cheekbones. Tink has a face like a little pug dog, or a monkey. She’s homely.”
Chloe Zimmer objected. (Chloe, the sweetest of girls, never failed to defend a girl who was being criticized behind her back, even if, as in this case, the girl wasn’t her friend.)
“Tink Traumer is not homely. Her face is just—just—her own unique face.”
“Unique! Everybody’s face is unique—so what?”
It was easier to think of Tink Traumer as a bratty bitch.
3.
“THAT CHAIR IS TINK’S”
This happened just yesterday.
Six months, two weeks, and three days since Tink left us.
We were at our table in the dining hall at school. Merissa—Hannah—Chloe—Nadia.
But also, though they weren’t in the (secret) innermost circle of Tink, Inc.: Anita Chang—Martine Hesse—Shelby Freedman.
Lunchtime in the high-ceilinged dining hall, which was reputedly modeled, on a smaller scale, after a revered old dining hall in Oxford.
Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You Page 9
