My Perfect Life

by Dyan Sheldon

  For Kathy, Patty and Mary

  My Perfect Life

  The first time Lola came to my house, she threw herself onto my bed with an unstifled cry. “My God, Ella, is there anything you don’t have?” She wasn’t just asking a question; she was declaiming.

  I said, “Lola?”

  She didn’t hear me.

  Her arms waved and her jewellery rattled. “Your own phone … your own television … your own video … no siblings to gnaw away at your privacy…”

  “Lola?”

  She propped herself on her elbows and gave the radiator a look usually reserved for religious statues. “And temperature control!”

  Lola’s bedroom was really a sun porch and wasn’t equipped with heat.

  “Lola?” I said again.

  She looked at me, but she still wasn’t listening. “You don’t know how lucky you are, Ella Gerard. If you changed places with me for just one day – just one day of the slave labour, bourgeois insensitivity and soul-sucking harassment that is my miserable lot – you’d realize how incredibly lucky you are.”

  I knew I was lucky – people have been telling me how lucky I am for as long as I can remember – but I didn’t really want to hear it again. Not then. I’d heard my mother’s car pull into the drive. Any minute now she might come upstairs to look for me. I figured I could get my mother over the hurdles of Lola’s second-hand clothes and nose ring, but if she saw what Lola was doing to the bed she might go into cardiac arrest. Not only was Lola rumpling the covers, but her shoes were actually touching them, too. My mother wasn’t that keen on shoes on the carpet, never mind the bed.

  “Lola!” I didn’t mean to shout. Shouting could bring my mother running. The only time my parents raised their voices was when there was a lot of noise or they were far away and they wanted to be heard.

  Lola caught her breath. “What?”

  “Could you please get off the bed?”

  Lola laughed. “What?”

  “Could you please get off the bed?” I glanced over my shoulder, half expecting to see my mother in the doorway, smiling with disapproval.

  Instead of getting up, Lola leaned back on the pillows. “What for?”

  I had to stop myself from going over and yanking her off. “Because my mother doesn’t like anyone sitting on the beds.” I’d gone from shouting to whispering. Just in case my mother was lurking outside.

  Lola, however, doesn’t have what you’d call an obedient nature. She’s not the person rules are made for; she’s the person who breaks them. Repeatedly.

  “Why not?”

  “She just doesn’t.” Lola was staring at me in a way that made me uncomfortable. “She has a thing about beds.”

  Now Lola was really curious. “What kind of thing?”

  The whole truth was that my mother had a thing about more than beds. If we got into that we could be at it for hours.

  “She’s just a very neat and tidy person,” I explained. I hoped Lola couldn’t tell that my palms were sweating. “She doesn’t like the beds messed up.”

  Lola laughed. “I’m not messing it up. I’m just sitting on it.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re messing it up.” I wasn’t shouting, but I was a little shrill. “And your shoes are on the covers.”

  One Lola Cep eyebrow rose. Inquisitively. “What is she? Obsessive-compulsive?”

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Of course not. She’s just neat and tidy. Now will you please get off?”

  “I just don’t see what the big deal is,” said Lola. She was being deliberately stubborn. I could tell because her voice sounded totally reasonable. “We can straighten it out later. She’ll never know.”

  “She will know. My mother has a very special way of making—”

  “Your mother makes your bed?” Lola looked as if disbelief might strangle her.

  I thought she meant instead of the housekeeper. “Mrs Wallace can’t meet my mother’s standards, either. She doesn’t make the edges straight enough. My mother likes straight edges.”

  It was an unnecessary explanation. Lola was still harping on about the fact that I had room service.

  “You don’t even have to make your own bed?” Lola flopped back against the pillows, her arms stretched towards the ceiling. “Oh, ye Gods! Did I get born into the wrong family or what? I don’t believe it. You don’t even have to make your own bed.”

  My mother’s voice rose up the stairs. “Ella? Is someone with you?”

  She meant was Carla Santini with me.

  I opened the door and stuck my head into the hall. “Hi, Mom,” I called. “I brought Lola home. Remember I told you about Lola? The new girl?”

  “Lola?” I’d lived with Marilyn Gerard for sixteen years; I could hear the disappointment in her voice. “Well, come on down and I’ll fix you a snack.”

  Lola sat up. “This is a joke, right? Your mother doesn’t really fix your snacks…”

  I shut the door.

  “She doesn’t have a job like your mom,” I reminded her. “Taking care of me and my dad and the house is what she does.”

  Lola rolled her eyes. “Good Lord!” she cried. “Is this Dellwood, New Jersey, or Stepford?”

  After that Lola was always asking me questions about my parents – though not nearly as many as they asked about her. Did they fight? Did they pick on me? Did they nag? Did they … did they … did they…? They didn’t. Everything my parents did was right.

  “Your life can’t be this perfect,” Lola kept saying. “The odds are against it.”

  No matter what the odds, though, up until I met Lola, I did have a perfect life.

  My parents were perfect parents. We lived in Woodford, a perfect and exclusive community, in a perfect town, in a perfect world. I had perfect friends, went to a perfect school and did perfect things. I was about nine before I realized that not everyone had their own swimming pool and jacuzzi – it came as quite a shock.

  By the time Lola Cep landed at Dellwood High, I was pretty much bored out of my mind. I couldn’t see that anything would ever change. I’d finish high school with an excellent academic record, and then I’d go to some perfect college, and then I’d have some perfect career, and eventually I’d marry someone like my father and live in a place just like the one I’d grown up in, and be just like my mother. There were days when it didn’t really seem worth the effort to get up in the morning.

  But then Lola moved (extremely unwillingly) to Dellwood (the wilderness) from New York City (the very heart and soul of the civilized world), and things started to change. For the first time in my life, I could imagine living another way; being someone else. I didn’t know what that other way of living was yet; but at least I knew it existed.

  None of us at Dellwood High had ever seen anyone like Lola Cep before. Well, maybe in movies, but not in real life. Lola saw herself as a creative force that would shine like a lighthouse in the dark and dull suburban night (her words, not mine), but that’s not how everyone else saw her. Everyone else just saw her as bizarre. Or possibly crazy. She didn’t dress like the rest of us, or talk like the rest of us, or act like the rest of us – and her family wasn’t like ours, either. Her mother had three children and no husband, which caused quite a few eyebrows and noses to rise. Lola’s mother didn’t have lunch with the other mothers, or do volunteer work like the other mothers, or play golf like the other mothers, either. Lola’s mother was a potter who wore old clothes, drove an old car, and stuck chopsticks in her hair. Lola called her Karen.

  At Dellwood High, we were used to kids being bizarre in a quiet, nerdy way, but there was nothing quiet or nerdy about Lola. Lola was bizarre like Salvador Dali was bizarre. You know, outrageous, loud, and larger than everybody else’s l
ife. To tell you the truth, I think that everyone except Carla Santini was a little afraid of Lola. Carla just loathed her on sight. I figure it was something genetic.

  I decided to make friends with Lola for three reasons:

  1. Since Carla Santini dumped me in junior high, I didn’t really have a friend.

  2. On her very first day at school, Lola stood up to Carla Santini, which in Dellwood is the equivalent of David knocking out Goliath with a pebble. Carla is beautiful, intelligent, wealthy and the most popular girl in the school (especially with herself). To balance out these positive qualities, Carla is also domineering, manipulative, calculating, opportunistic and secure in the knowledge that she was God’s special project – and that for her He got an A. In the sixteen years I’d known Carla Santini, no one so much as thought of standing up to her.

  3. I felt sorry for Lola. She was like E.T., surrounded by aliens and longing to go home. Only Lola didn’t end up in Elliott’s backyard; she ended up in Carla Santini’s backyard. She might as well have crash-landed in hell.

  I don’t want you to get the wrong idea… I’m not saying that Lola ruined my perfect life; she does have a remarkable amount in common with a nuclear bomb, but she didn’t do that. Lola was a catalyst; she caused change.

  Change didn’t ruin my perfect life, either. It didn’t even make it possible for it to be ruined, that was already happening anyway. But change affected the way I reacted when everything started crumbling around me.

  And for that I absolutely, definitely, and positively blame Lola Cep.

  Lola and I have a

  conversation about

  the school elections

  Lola and I were in the library that afternoon. We’d found the books we wanted, and were waiting for Mrs Hawley, the librarian, to check them out.

  Mrs Hawley handed me my stack. “I hear your friend Carla Santini’s running for President of the student body, Ella. Are you going to be helping her with her campaign?”

  It was a long time since Carla Santini and I had been friends, but I couldn’t expect Mrs Hawley to know that. Mrs Hawley pretty much stayed in the library, safe from the seething social jungle of Dellwood High.

  I put my books in my bag. “No. No, I’m not.”

  Lola didn’t say anything. This time. Mrs Hawley once threw her out for launching into an impassioned rendition of Hamlet’s soliloquy in the reading room, so she tended to control herself in the library.

  But as soon as we got outside, Lola had plenty to say.

  She flung one arm across her forehead. I’m not always sure which actress in which film Lola is modelling herself on, but this time I had a hunch it was Bette Davis. She’s a big Bette Davis fan.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” wailed Lola. “Why am I always the last to know?”

  I was writing down the date my library books were due back in my diary so I wouldn’t forget and wasn’t totally listening. “Tell you what?”

  “The school election, of course. Why didn’t you tell me it was imminent? Were you saving it for a surprise?”

  I blinked, confused. “I guess I thought you knew.”

  “You thought I knew?” Lola had replaced the velvet cape she wore in the winter with a turquoise shawl for the spring. It flapped up and down with her arms like wings. “I haven’t spent my whole life in Deadwood, like you, Ella. I’m not steeped in every miniscule tradition. How could I possibly know a thing like that?”

  “Because it happens at the same time every year.” I stuck my diary back in my bag. “And you were here last spring.”

  She frowned. “It happened last year?”

  “That’s right. Same time, same place.”

  “But I’d only just arrived,” said Lola. She swung one end of her shawl over her shoulder. “As you well know, at that time I was very deeply traumatized by being dragged out of my spiritual home and into the wasteland of suburbia. You couldn’t possibly expect me to remember something as tediously mundane as a student election.”

  We headed towards the bike rack. There were only two bikes locked to it: Lola’s and mine. Everyone else either had a car or a chauffeur.

  “If it’s so tediously mundane, then why do you care?”

  Lola gasped. Presumably in horror. “Why do I care? You’re asking me why I care?”

  I stopped walking. Lola often makes me feel as if I’ve come into the movie after it’s started.

  “I’ve missed something, haven’t I?” I asked.

  Most people just sigh – you know, quickly and quietly – but Lola heaves her sighs all over the place like she’s Superman and they’re boulders. It has something to do with her thespian soul.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Ella. I should think that it’s obvious – especially to you,” and she stalked off, her bangles clattering and her shawl flapping.

  And suddenly it was obvious. It was so obvious that I was surprised I hadn’t been expecting it. I guess I just assumed that because Lola considered politics beneath the creative soul it was one theatre where she would be willing to let Carla Santini take centre stage. How naïve can you be?

  I practically had to run to catch up with her.

  “You can’t be serious,” I gasped. “You’re not actually suggesting that you’re planning to run against Carla for President, are you?”

  Lola was already unlocking her bike. She eyed me over one shoulder, aloof and cool. “And why not?”

  There was one really obvious answer to this question: because Carla Santini would decimate her. All Carla had to do was remind everyone that Lola was not only an outsider, but an outsider who was on record as being a major liar as well, and the student body would close ranks. It’s something they’re good at. Plus, Carla would have the time of her life doing it.

  But there was an equally obvious reason why I wasn’t going to mention this to Lola just then. I knew Lola well. Telling her that she couldn’t run against Carla because Carla would grind her into powder would be like waving a hunk of bloody antelope at a hungry lion; she wouldn’t be able to resist.

  “Why not?” I pretended to consider this question thoroughly. “Well, let’s see… For one thing, you’re totally uninterested in politics and school government—”

  “Not if Carla Santini’s planning to run, I’m not,” Lola informed me. “That changes things.”

  “I don’t see that it changes anything…” I had to be careful what I said. You can’t simply tell Lola not to do something, because she’ll have done it before you’ve finished your sentence. You have to let her convince herself. “You’re an actor, not a politician. You don’t want to waste your talent on something you’re not interested in.” I gave her a glance. “Something so crass.”

  Lola stood up. “Well, no, of course, I don’t. Acting is my passion and my very life. But the two aren’t totally incompatible—”

  I cut in before she started listing all the successful actors who had gone on to be successful politicians.

  “But it would depress you. I mean, what if you have so much to do as President that you can’t even be in the play next year?”

  I figured I had her with that one. Lola would rather be imprisoned in Mexico than not be in the school play.

  Lola waved this objection away as if it were a gnat. “Oh, that’s not a problem. While I’m busy with rehearsals, you can take over my duties.”

  My jaw dropped. “Me? How did I get into this?”

  “Well, you’ll run as my Vice President of course! And, as Vice President, it’ll be your job to step in when I’m busy. You know, like when the President of the United States gets killed or impeached or something like that. That’s what the Vice President’s for.”

  For someone who’d only just learned about the election she’d certainly thought it all through pretty quickly.

  “But, Lola—”

  “There are no buts.” Lola struck a defiant pose. It was either Joan of Arc or Scarlett O’Hara. “I can’t let Carla get the Presidency. She’ll only use it to ext
end her tyrannical hold over the minds and hearts and souls of our fellow students. Carla doesn’t understand about democracy. The election’s just a formality to her. She thinks she should rule by divine right. We owe it to the students of Dellwood High to give them a real government.” She threw back her head and raised an arm in the air. The effect was a little less impressive than she intended, since she still had her bike lock in her hand. “One that is based on freedom and creativity, not oppression and conformity.”

  I backed my bike out of the rack. “I don’t think there’s much risk of Carla setting up a dictatorship. The Student President’s just a figurehead – you know, like the Queen of England. She doesn’t really do anything either.”

  “But she could,” argued Lola. “Prince Charles is always getting into trouble for doing stuff. The monarchy, like anything else, is what you make it.”

  I said, “But—”

  Lola rattled her bike lock. “I’m not thinking of myself, I’m thinking of everyone else. “The people need me!” cried Lola. “That’s all that matters when the last curtain falls.”

  Personally, I doubted that the people were ready for Lola. At least not the people of Dellwood High.

  “You think it might help you play Lear, don’t you?” I asked. One of Lola’s ten major life ambitions is to play Lear, preferably at the Globe in London.

  “Not just Lear. There’s the Richards to think of, too.”

  I was more concerned with the incredible potential for pain and stress Lola running for Student President would mean.

  Lola raised her bike lock towards the sky. “‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’” she shouted.

  And not just for me. Lola was going to need a lot more than a horse once Carla Santini was through with her.

  “‘Mine honour is my life; both grow in one: Take honour from me, and my life is done’!”

  Exactly, I thought; that’s exactly what Carla will do. And all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men, would never put Lola back together again.

  It was then that I finally remembered something that was guaranteed to stop all argument about the election once and for all. I almost laughed out loud.