Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

by Jillian Lauren

  That was that. I sat back and rearranged my brain. I would be staying. For how long? I didn’t have any more clothes, had already worn everything three times at least. I had things to do at home. I had . . . what? I ran through my list. My friends would still be there. New York wasn’t going anywhere. Sean was beyond sick of me. My family and I had been through worse; we’d get through this, too.

  As for my career, my protests collapsed right there. I had an internship with some very cool people, which did not mean that I was cool myself. I had a résumé that included Penny’s work in progress, three student plays, two student films, and quite possibly the worst performance in the worst vampire movie ever made. Objectively, I had nothing, really. Nothing but big plans. Those could wait. I felt both ends of the spectrum of emotion at once: I felt elated and I felt sick. I was winning and I was sinking.

  chapter 15

  The days wore past the two- and then the three-week mark and a new set of shiny and clueless American girls now sat around the table. Taylor sat next to me. Of course she had found her way to Brunei. She had bullied and cajoled and otherwise hypnotized Ari into sending her a ticket. Taylor would not be denied. I was wary of her at first, but her ire had worn thin in the face of all the other competition and we were fast friends again.

  The American and European girls now spilled over from house five to house six. Most of the Asian girls, with the exception of Leanne and Fiona, stayed at another location, which was more like a dorm. Taylor and I shared a room in guesthouse six. Leanne had the room across the hall and Serena had the master. Ari took over the master in guesthouse five. The minor characters, the bit parts, the day players (don’t get too attached; they change fast) were a blond Amazon volleyball player named Kimmee, an L.A. rock groupie named Brittany, who wore a promise ring that was supposedly from Vince Neil, and an anti-Semite named Suzy, who treated me to my first experience of hearing the word Jew used as a verb, as in, “I Jewed him down on the price of these earrings.”

  The Prince was allowed four wives and he had only three. So the subtext for all the vindictive vying between the girls in Brunei was that the prize might be a crown. The game was this: Transcend all assumptions, transcend all invisible hierarchies, inspire the love that conquers all and you can turn from stepdaughter of the world—Thai teenage hooker, aging Playmate, flailing actress, retail slave, delusional rock slut—to princess. From duck to swan with a nod of his head.

  Some girls came and went, just interchangeable faces in the joke snapshots we took around the house when we were drunk and too amped up to get to sleep (snapshots that would embarrass me later when one of the girls sold hers to E! True Hollywood Story). Some girls stayed for long periods of time and hung out under the radar as pretty couch decorations. Some girls got off the bench and really got in the game with everything they had. All the girls changed during their time in Brunei. All the girls were transformed in some way by the pressure, the paranoia, the insidious insecurity that creeps in when you size yourself up against a roomful of other girls every night.

  Who would you be? Would you shine or would you buckle? Would you stay and slug it out or would you run?

  One of the favorite topics of discussion between the girls was what we told parents, boyfriends, and husbands. When a porn star first appears in a movie, hair pinned up and eyeglasses on, before she crawls onto the office desk, you always wonder, How did she tell her parents?

  Serena said that she told her parents she was dating her employer. She told the guy she lived with (the red-head who had dropped her at the airport, who had moved with her to L.A. from Kansas, not her boyfriend, she insisted) that she was a nanny. Taylor didn’t have parents as far as I could tell. She never talked about them and she never made a call. When we had first met she had told me a bogus story about a peach plantation, so I never asked again. I thought I’d spare her the lie.

  I had put it off for too long and it was time to tell my parents something if I didn’t want to cause an international incident. They were growing audibly suspicious of my rushed calls from the set of the eternal Singapore movie shoot. I sat in my kitty-print pj’s by the phone table in the marble entranceway, picked up the receiver, and dialed their number.

  The conversation was awkward, with the painful pause of the international phone lines serving as a reminder of the distance between us. I told them that while shooting that mythical movie in Singapore I had met a man, that I was working as his assistant, that he was the Prince of Brunei.

  “Where?” asked my father.

  “Brunei.”

  “What the fuck is Brunei?”

  I could have made up something less revealing, something without such an easily breakable code as “assistant.” But you have to couch your lies in truth or they tighten around you like a Chinese finger trap.

  It was harder than I thought. My parents sounded confused. They sounded worried and powerless, my father stuttering with anger and handing over the phone, my mother trying to figure out what the hell was going on while still staying on everyone’s good side—ever the diplomat, whatever the cost. I pictured her with her fingers wrapped around the back of one of the kitchen chairs, her knuckles white; pictured a pot of tomato sauce bubbling on the electric burner behind her.

  “When are you coming home?”

  “I’m not sure. Two weeks. Three. Maybe longer.”

  I felt the noose of guilt tighten. I could taste the acid at the back of my throat. It made me physically sick, all the lying. Sorry I’m not a different daughter, I wanted to say. Sorry you weren’t different parents. Sorry for hurting you. Sorry for this whole mess. Sorry and I’m doing it anyway. After everything between us, I still felt the constant compulsion to say I was sorry.

  When I had made my decision to leave home for good, I had been sixteen. I know it was a Saturday because I’d been babysitting. I pressed the code on the garage door and entered through the downstairs. My mother stood over the ironing board wearing jeans and a BeDazzled sweatshirt. She was backlit by the bare bulb in the laundry room, her mouth set and her shoulders squared. The house smelled like steamed cotton. I was thinking about my reading for school, about Holden Caulfield hiding his imaginary bullet wound, about April being the cruelest month—big, important things. I walked right past her.

  “You could at least say hello.”

  “Hello.” I kept walking. I didn’t have time for my mother, but my father and I had endless time for each other. Every day called for a new maneuver in our permanent state of war. But my mother got passed over. I think she smarted from my dismissal.

  “Look at me.” She demanded some attention. “What have you been doing?”

  “Drunk-driving.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  My father was halfway down the stairs; I could gauge his heavy footfalls above us. My mother left her ironing and stood confrontationally in my path. I tried to walk around her, but she grabbed my wrist.

  “Don’t you walk away from me. Look at me. Are you on drugs?”

  This was her favorite question. She was on all kinds of committees: drug education in the schools, date-rape awareness, silent auction for the school fair. The drug-education committee had made her paranoid. The truth was that I wasn’t on drugs all that often and I definitely wasn’t on drugs that night, if you didn’t count the fact that I had sucked the nitrous out of the Cohens’ whipped cream.

  “Get off me.” I pulled my arm away.

  By this time my father was on the landing of the staircase. When I yanked my wrist out of my mother’s hand it looked to him like I was about to hit her.

  My father could move at incredible speeds. He was a short, Humpty Dumpty-shaped guy, but he defied physics with the momentum of his anger. His eyes were bulging and bloodshot. The veins along the side of his neck grew unnaturally large and the visible capillaries along his nose and cheeks darkened with effort as they struggled to accommodate the rush of blood to his face. He was so
fast that I hardly saw him coming.

  “Don’t you ever raise a hand to your mother.”

  His hand clutched my throat and he swept me backward until I hit the wall.

  “Shameful. Fucking disgusting. Ungrateful little bitch.”

  With every punctuation mark my father pulled me forward by my throat and then slammed my head back again. When he let go, I crumpled to the floor and pulled my knees to my chest. I called it my civil-disobedience trick. I closed my eyes and made myself into the tiniest ball. I showed no soft bits.

  “Look at me when I talk to you.”

  He paced in front of me, clenching and unclenching his fists. The hitting was easy compared to the words. The hitting happened only infrequently but the words happened every day. I knew he was wrong, knew he was inexcusable. But still, the words were the worst part. He stammered as they tumbled out of him. He spoke in tongues, literally foaming at the mouth.

  “You’re a pig you dress like a fucking slob and you make yourself ugly you look like an ugly dyke and you think you’ll meet nice people that way you won’t you think you’ll meet a nice boy that way you won’t we are ashamed of you you’re nothing but a fucking disappointment a waste a fucking waste of a person what happened what happened to you what did I do to deserve this this this piece-of-shit life these fucking kids you’re a joke this is a fucking joke on me.”

  I knew my father’s rages and I knew how to stop them. I knew it would get worse for a minute, but it would be over soon. I instigated him.

  “Is that the best you can do?”

  “What did you say to me in my house?”

  He grabbed my hair and pulled me away from the wall.

  “Are you on drugs?”

  I flicked the off switch. I went limp in all my limbs and dead in the eyes. He straddled my chest and hit me in the face repeatedly, alternating his open palm with his nastier backhand. Every time his hand made contact, he asked me again, “Are you on drugs?”

  My ears rang and the ringing was a thread. I took the edge of the thread and pulled myself, light as air, to the top of the room and out into the deep green suburban night with the cut-grass smell and the crickets, the lights on behind curtains, the TVs flickering in their living rooms. I sailed past West Orange and Newark and along the Parkway and over the Hudson and never once looked down until I saw New York, the Emerald City, its spires shining in the moonlight. I knew something about New York. I knew I wouldn’t be ugly when I got there.

  My mother stood with her arms at her sides by the foot of the stairway across the room. She looked like someone in a movie who had been frozen in time while the other characters kept moving. The spell lifted just long enough for her to call out.

  “Enough. Please. Enough.”

  I wasn’t sure if she was talking to my father or me or God.

  My father stood up and backed off, looking confused and lost. I imagined I knew what he was thinking right then: that his life was so very far from anything he had hoped for, had tried for, had dreamed of when he dreamed of a family. That he was so very far from the man he’d thought he was. I felt sorry for him.

  “My children are a curse from God,” he said, as he turned and walked out the door to the garage.

  When my father snapped like this, hours later—or in the worst cases the next day—an entirely different person would sheepishly knock on my door and ask if I wanted to come downstairs and listen to music in front of the fire, or if I wanted to go for ice cream at Baskin-Robbins and rent a movie.

  “I have a bad temper,” he likes to say about himself. “But it’s over fast.” As if a quick beating is preferable to a big, long talk.

  After that night, I told my mother I was leaving home. My mother—sender of award-worthy care packages to summer camp, cheerful carpooler, PTA president, tireless volunteer, meticulous writer of thank-you notes, thrower of flawless dinner parties, dedicated caretaker of any sick family and friends—thought it was a good idea. She suggested that I get my GED and apply for college a year early.

  I got into NYU and my mother took me to Loehmann’s to buy me some new clothes for college. Whenever we went shopping, my mother was generous to a fault. She often suffered the consequences later, when the bill came back and my father ranted about her carelessness, her uselessness. She couldn’t even clean the house, he said. All she was good for was shopping. These reckonings happened every time a bill came back, but still she shopped.

  “You have to understand men,” she told me. “You let them say what they need to say and then you do what you want anyway.”

  My mother wanted to go to Loehmann’s and I wanted to go to the only punk clothing store in all of North Jersey, so we compromised. I was terrified by what I had dubbed the “Hadassah thighs” on the old Jewish ladies in the Loehmann’s communal dressing rooms and she was appalled by the swastikas tattooed on either side of the punk store clerk’s Mohawk, but we were gentle with each other that day.

  “She shouldn’t have a haircut like that with such a fat face,” was all that my mother said about the clerk.

  We had lunch together and I can’t remember what we talked about. There was a sweetness to the ritual, the final shopping trip before I left home for good. It was as if I was any girl leaving home to go to college. And in some ways it was true. Both realities existed simultaneously. I was a half-broken anorexic teen hiding behind my purple hair and running for my life and I was a precocious girl with theatrical aspirations, an early admission to a good school and a numbered list of dreams and plans that took up ten pages of my diary.

  And both mothers existed simultaneously: My mother whose eyes went cloudy, who stared into space and stood with her hands limp at her sides while her husband berated her kids; my mother who sewed labels onto every last sheet before I left for college. I could hear both mothers on the other end of the phone line that day.

  “Ask her if she’s still going to come to the Caymans with us this year,” my dad said in the background.

  “Honey, are you going to make it home in time to come to the Caymans with us? We’d really like it if you’d come,” my mother translated.

  “No, Mom, I don’t think so.”

  “What did she say?” my dad asked my mother.

  “No. She said no. She can’t come this year.”

  “What? I’m stuck with just her brother? Tell her she’s ruining my whole vacation.”

  My mother didn’t translate this last comment. Instead she said, “Are you really all right?”

  “I’m great. This is a great job. I can’t pass it up.”

  By the time I hung up, I was relieved that they knew the sort-of truth and I was also relieved that I didn’t have to see them for a while. No one was waiting for the phone, so I called Sean. I called Sean and wept. I missed him. I was homesick. I turned around and watched myself in the mirror as my face turned dough-pale and splotchy. I secretly liked watching myself cry. It was like watching someone else’s face. It proved to me I was feeling something. Sometimes I spent so much time acting the part that I forgot how I was really feeling, forgot if I ever even had any real feelings.

  “Then come home, Jill. Just come home,” he said, sounding tired. Tired of me. Later he told me he wasn’t tired of me, he was sad for me, for what I was becoming, for his inability to change my course.

  “I can’t.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  I called Penny and she told me the show was proceeding without me, but assured me there would always be a place for me. We’d write in something new when I got back. Except I didn’t know when I was coming back. I regretted not assuaging my mother’s worry, not returning to Sean, not being there while Penny was writing our show, but I was compelled to stay in a way I couldn’t explain to any of them. I couldn’t just walk away. I couldn’t leave and let Serena win. I didn’t want to be the quitter.

  At the parties I sparkled with laughter, but back at the house I was grim and homesick. Serena was relentless. She sent back the food befor
e I got downstairs in the morning. She organized mimosa parties out by the pool and forgot to invite me. She blasted movies in the den, next to my room, when I tried to nap. She told the other girls that I smelled, that I was a hooker with herpes, that I was a drunk, that I was a fat, bulimic slob. Everything she said was overheard by the powers that lurk, that surveil, so that after the herpes comment I was taken on a surprise trip to the doctor.

  I knew about Serena’s treachery from Taylor, who kept me in the loop because she hated Serena, too, and because I was maybe her only friend in Brunei or New York or anywhere, even though she still tried to charge me commission on the money I made. Taylor and I lay in bed together and looked up at the lights in the stepped ceiling. It was kind of like a sunken living room in reverse.

  Taylor whispered in my ear with the music on loud so no one could overhear us. She tried to get me to take revenge on Serena.

  “You have to retaliate.”

  “Nobody listens to me; they listen to her.”

  “Robin listens to you. Why do you think she’s doing this?”

  I was beginning to believe that I somehow inspired an ancient tribal instinct to cast out the one who was different.

  “It’s not because you’re different, sweet pea,” said Taylor. “Stop being so married to that whole self-concept. It’s because you’re better. It’s because he prefers you. But that bitch may change his mind unless you get in there and defend what’s yours.”

  But I couldn’t remember ever having taken revenge on anyone. Instead, I would sink deeper into myself; I would run away. I clung to my dreams of stardom and knew that therein lay my revenge. Taylor had something much more immediate in mind, and under her tutelage, I was beginning to consider it. I was beginning to think I owed it to myself.

  After all, isn’t that what you do when you suddenly find yourself a member of a royal court? You plot. You scheme. You jockey for position. You take revenge. Isn’t that the person you want to be? Or do you want to be the girl with the steadfast, good heart, the girl who gets stepped on, the girl you inevitably wish had less screen time because everyone else is so much more interesting?