by Dyan Sheldon
I hadn’t been planning to kill off Elk, too, but the words came tumbling out, beyond my control.
“Elk was a lawyer for Greenpeace,” I explained. “He was on his way to England for a conference.” I spent a few more seconds re-examining the patch of light again. “He never came back.”
“Oh, no…” Ella clutched my hand. “Oh, Lola…”
You had to give it to her, she was a terrific audience.
I went on, quietly, in a voice in which time has numbed but not erased the pain.
“His plane went down near Greenland.” I could hear the shattering of the plane as it smashed into the ocean. Red and orange flames that burned like the fires of hell exploded in my mind. Men, women and children screamed without hope. And then, suddenly, a dreadful silence fell over the cold, depthless water. “My mother had to fly out to identify what was left of the body.”
Ella’s face was whiter than Wonder Bread. “Oh, my God…”
I smiled a small but courageous, so-it-goes smile. “The twins were only a year old.”
Ella shook her head in shock and horror. “Your poor mom, what horrible things she’s gone through.” She wiped away another tear with the sleeve of her blouse. “I feel like I should apologize to her or something…”
Ella was more than capable of apologizing to my mother for having misunderstood her situation. This, however, was not an especially good idea. Elk really is a lawyer for Greenpeace, and he really didn’t come back from England – at least not to us – but it wasn’t a plane crash that kept him, it was a woman named Margot.
“It’s best not to mention the past to her at all,” I said quickly. “You know, too many agonizing memories.” I sighed as only one who has known real suffering can. “It’s ironic, isn’t it?” I said. “Your parents think my mother’s the destroyer of our social order, and she’s merely a victim of Fate.”
“I feel so awful.” Ella chewed nervously on her lower lip. “I really would like your mother to know that—”
“Whatever happened to the music?” I asked brightly. I picked up the CD Ella had abandoned and put it into the machine.
“Sidartha!” Ella managed a smile. “I forgot about them!”
“God…” I groaned. “That’s like forgetting how to breathe.”
I pedalled home beneath a silver crescent of moon, like a nick in the plush velvet of the sky. Ella and I are the only ones who ride our bikes to school. For all I know, we are the only ones who own bikes; most of the kids our age already have cars. But I don’t mind. A great actor needs to have good lungs so she can project her voice for the whole theatre to hear. Ella stopped taking rides from Carla Santini and her buddies when I convinced her that riding a bike is not only environmentally friendly, it’s good exercise as well.
I was still aware that Sidartha existed, but I have to admit that it wasn’t about the greatest band in the history of the world that I was thinking as I rode along. I was thinking about Karen Kapok, my mother.
I couldn’t get over the fact that of all the things the Gerards could have held against me – my clothes, my hair, my earrings and nose ring, and my attempts to turn Ella into a vegetarian, to name but a few – they’d chosen Karen Kapok! Ms Normal. It just shows you how ironic the world really is, doesn’t it?
But that, of course, was about to change. I was pretty sure that by the time I got home Mrs Gerard would already have heard all about my mother’s tragic marital history. That meant Mr Gerard would know by the end of his dinner – assuming, that was, he made it home for dinner for once. And that meant that by the time the Gerards settled down to watch TV together, their opinion of my mother would have radically altered.
I watched the sliver of moon as I turned up Maple Drive. It hung over the trees like a broken halo.
It was important to me that the Gerards liked me. I wanted them to encourage Ella to see me, not discourage her. Besides, if they didn’t like me, I’d never be able to convince them to let Ella go to a Sidartha concert.
I was whistling as I pulled into our driveway.
Because it was my turn to cook that night (my mother considers herself a potter, not the family chef), I didn’t get a chance to phone Ella before supper.
After supper I locked myself in the bathroom for an hour or so to rehearse my lines for the auditions the next day. This year Mrs Baggoli had chosen Pygmalion for the school’s annual production. I knew I was a shoe-in for Eliza – my cockney accent’s a lot better than Audrey Hepburn’s in My Fair Lady – but I wanted my reading to be perfect. The only competition I had for the lead was, naturally, Carla Santini, if only because no one else would even think of challenging her for a role she wanted. They might try out, but they’d make sure they weren’t too good. Carla Santini had starred in everything since she was in kindergarten and it was tacitly understood that she always got the lead and that everyone else got whatever they got. I’d been too late to try out for the play the year before, but this year I was ready for her. I felt I owed it to all the other mere mortals at Dellwood not to let Carla star this year. Just for a change.
It was almost ten by the time I finally got around to calling Ella. Her father had given her twenty-five bucks for getting a distinction in her history test, and her mother, who’d just started a new cooking course, had made her own ravioli for supper (Ella’s father is always giving her money for doing things my mother takes for granted, and Ella’s mother is always taking a course in something), but otherwise it was a quiet night.
“I hope you don’t mind,” said Ella after she’d stopped enthusing about the home-made ravioli, “but I told my folks about your mom.”
I pretended to mind – just a little.
“Well…” I said. “I wouldn’t want it to get back to my mother that I’d been talking about the tragedies in her life. She’s a very private person, you know.”
“My parents won’t tell anyone,” Ella quickly assured me. “They’re not gossips.”
This is probably true of Mr Gerard, who doesn’t have any time to gossip since he’s always working, but it isn’t true of Mrs Gerard. The women of Woodford are a communication system unto themselves. They might not know much about existential theatre or post-modern literature, but they know everything that goes on in Dellwood, no matter where it goes on. Gossip is what they do when they’re playing golf and shopping and sitting in the sauna together.
“Oh, I know they’re not,” I said equally quickly. “It’s just that it’s very personal stuff…”
“My parents were really moved by your mother’s story,” said Ella. “It made them think.”
I smiled at the telephone. “No one’s suffering is ever in vain,” I softly intoned.
After I hung up, I took a shower, touched up the purple nail polish I was wearing that week to match the lining of my cape, and went to my bedroom to get away from the grunting and shouting of the other members of my family while they played Monopoly in the living room.
When I look back on myself that day, going about my life as if I didn’t have a care in the world, it almost makes me weep. How innocent I was! How naïve! The poet was right: ignorance is truly bliss. There I was, laughing, talking, working, making spaghetti, eating, going over my script, doing my nails and cleaning my teeth, totally oblivious to the fact that a catastrophe of cosmic proportions was hurtling towards me.
It took me a while to get settled. That’s because my bedroom isn’t really a bedroom, it’s really a sun porch. At least it was until we moved in. My mother, trying to stop the twins from acting so much like twins, decided that each of them should have her own room. So I got the sun porch. (Ordinariness isn’t the only thing I have to fight against in my house; gross injustice is another.) Anyway, there isn’t any heat in my room, so I had to close all the curtains, plug in the minute and ancient electric heater, and find the chenille bathrobe I got at the Salvation Army so I wouldn’t freeze to death. Then I had to go back to the kitchen because I’d run out of candles. Then I had to get my diar
y out of its secret hiding place where I keep it to safeguard it against the prying eyes of my mother’s other children. My father, who is a worrier by nature, is convinced that I’m going to torch the house some day by burning candles, but I prefer candlelight to electric. It’s so much more atmospheric. Especially when I’m telling the events of the day to my diary. No matter how busy I am, or how exhausted from the slings and arrows of the last twenty-four hours, I write in my diary every single night. My life is extraordinary; I don’t want to forget any more of it than I can help.
By the time I was finally in bed with the radio on, my candles lighted, my diary on my lap, and my pen with the lilac ink in my hand, it was nearly ten forty-five. I started the entry for March 5th. I had a lot to tell, as always.
I’d had another fight with my mother about my hair at breakfast. My mother thinks that the only suitable hair colours are brown, black, blonde and auburn. She was refusing to let me dye mine blue. She never got over me cutting off all my hair in my Joan of Arc phase and she still hadn’t really come round to the ring in my nose, so she was being especially stubborn this time.
But there were up things, too. My new cape had attracted its share of admiring looks, and Mrs Baggoli herself had wished me good luck for the auditions the next day. I innocently took these events as good signs.
I’d only gotten as far as everything that had happened in maths, my last class of the morning, when the world came to its sudden and horrible end. It wasn’t water, and it wasn’t ice, and it wasn’t even fire. It wasn’t even a neutron bomb. It was an announcement.
Wait’ll I tell you what happened in the cafeteria today, I was writing.
And then the song that was playing ended, and George Blue, my most favourite DJ in the whole universe, began talking again. I started to listen when I heard the name Sidartha. I almost wish I hadn’t; that the moment had passed right by and left me ignorant but happy for a little longer. I sat there, rigid with horror, the pen dangling from my hand like a withered flower on a severed stalk. I glanced at myself in the mirror next to my bed. If I had to describe the look on my face I would say it was the expression of a young woman who has lost every reason for living.
“Oh, my God!” I screamed back at the radio. “It can’t be! It just can’t be! You might as well shoot me now and get it over with!”
“That’s right, guys,” said George Blue. “You heard it here first. Sidartha is no more. The boys are going to pursue solo careers.”
After I recovered from my initial shock, I raced back outside to call Ella and tell her the earth-stopping news. Ella was devastated. She hadn’t been listening to George Blue, she’d been washing her hair. Like Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
“Oh, my God,” wailed Ella. “We never even saw them in concert…”
The rest of her sentence hung silently in the miles between us: and now we never will…
“I don’t know how I can face another day,” I said softly, trying to hold back the volcano of tears welling inside me. “I just don’t know.”
My mother was passing on her way back to the living room with a cup of tea. She glanced over at me.
“If you don’t get off that phone soon you won’t have to face another day,” she informed me.
“Five minutes,” I begged. “Just five more minutes.”
Ella and I got as far as agreeing to dress in mourning for the rest of the week when my mother came out and did her talking-clock impersonation (“Do you know what time it is? It’s eleven forty-eight.”) and forced me to get off the phone. I went back to my room and put on the new Sidartha CD. I cried for a while. Then I rubbed off the purple polish and painted my nails jet black. I looked through my music magazines, re-reading every Sidartha article and interview. I cried some more. I tossed and turned for hours, listening to the wind rip through the trees like monsters clawing out the hearts of babies in their cribs. Sidartha is no more! I silently wailed into the darkness. Sidartha is no more!
I don’t know how I ever managed to sleep that night, but I must have dozed, no matter how fitfully, because I knew the instant I was awake: the pain began again.
A BRIEF ASIDE
I can’t go on with my story until I’ve explained a little more about Carla Santini. But in order to explain about Carla, I first have to explain about the social structure of Deadwood High. Life is like that, I find. Complicated.
I think of Deadwood High as an eco-system. It has its groups, and each of them feeds off the others. There are, of course, small grouplettes on the fringe – dopeheads, a couple of retro-hippies, a few biker types (but largely without bikes), metal heads, the total untouchables – but basically there are three main groups.
The first group is what I call the BTWs: Born to Wins. These are the kids who think of school as a social event. They’re popular, attractive, very busy and usually get a monthly allowance that would support a family of five for a year in Cuba. Their grades may not be the greatest, but they’re good enough. The boys are usually all-round athletes and the girls are usually on every committee. Parents and teachers wish these kids would buckle down a little more and treat maths and English as though they were as important as the Homecoming Dance, but otherwise they don’t mind them. They know they’re not going to be astrophysicists or anything like that, but they also know that they’re unlikely to wind up collecting bottles to get the deposit back so they can buy cheap wine.
The second group I call BTRs: Born to Run Everythings. They’re the brains and very goal-oriented. They either dress like the professionals they plan to be, or they’re super-cool with artistic and intellectual pretensions. They’re always seen reading the “right” book or listening to the “right” music. Parents and teachers love these kids.
The BTWs and the BTRs don’t interact at all with any of the fringe groups unless it’s to torment them, but they’re usually civil with each other.
The third group are the Independents. Unlike the kids on the fringe, who are either closet wannabes, or just resigned to the fact that they will never be accepted by any of the “in” groups in this lifetime, the Independents don’t care. Because they don’t care, they don’t get hassled or bullied and are more or less accepted by everyone, if only superficially. Achieving Independent status isn’t easy, so there aren’t many of them. Maybe eight or ten in the whole of Deadwood High.
I’m an Independent. It’s easier for me because I didn’t grow up with these kids. Ella should have been a BTR – she’s at the top of our class and she lives in the right neighbourhood – and she would have been if she were a little more like her parents, but Ella was not only very shy and repressed before we met, she was also uncompetitive and unpretentious and found the BTRs boring. Nobody really paid her that much attention before I moved to Deadwood. She wasn’t an Independent, she was just Ella. Now she’s an Independent by default, because I’m her best friend.
And then, standing alone like a princess on a tower of diamonds, there’s Carla Santini.
Carla Santini isn’t an Independent, she’s a BTW and a BTR. She could be anything else she wanted to be, but she wouldn’t want to be anything else, unless it were God.
Carla Santini is beautiful, rich, intelligent and revoltingly sophisticated for someone who was born and raised in the depths of New Jersey. She does what she wants; she dresses like a model. If Carla Santini wears something new on Monday, half the girls in the school will be wearing something like it by Friday. And then Carla will never wear hers again. Carla Santini is also one of those people who sees this enormous planet as a single-person dwelling. It baffles me how someone as materialistic, self-centred and shallow as Carla Santini can be the most popular teenager in Dellwood, but young as I am, I have already learned that there’s a lot in this life that doesn’t make sense.
After that first conversation in the homeroom Carla Santini didn’t come near me for a while. But she watched. I could see her sizing me up as she passed in the hall, tossing her hair and laughing with her friends as
though she didn’t know I existed. But I made sure that she did. Whether I was in a black phase or a phase of vibrant colours, I stood out: Morticia Addams one day; Carmen the next. And I made sure that I took part in all my classes; especially English. Carla Santini and her brood of admirers monopolized the middle rows in English, forcing everyone else either to the front (where they’d always be picked on), or to the back (where they fell asleep).
My second day at Dellwood, I dragged Ella to English early and sat dead centre. Ella didn’t want to; she liked to sit to the side at the back, but I pointed out that since there weren’t assigned seats we could sit where we wanted. We live in a democracy, don’t we? Ella can always be reasoned with. Unlike some of us she comes from a very reasonable family.
Even Ella admitted that it was worth it, just to see the expression on Carla Santini’s face when she strode through the door and saw us sitting in her seats. It only lasted a nanosecond, but it was a beauty: pure, primal rage. Scarlett O’Hara couldn’t have done it better. Then, without any hesitation, she screamed out, “I’m bored with sitting in the same place all the time, let’s sit at the back for a change,” and she sailed past us, her entourage shuffling after her.
At the end of my first week at Deadwood High, Carla Santini came up to me on the lunch line. She was smiling like a salesman on commission. She has an incredible number of teeth – at least twice as many as the rest of us – each of them perfect and white.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Carla Santini.”
As if I didn’t know that. It was like Cher coming up to you on the lunch line and saying. “Hi, I’m Cher.”
I smiled back. “I know.”
Carla’s smile became a little less bright but no less toothy. The salesman was about to tell me a price I didn’t want to hear. “I know you’re new here, Lola,” purred Carla Santini, “and you don’t understand how things work yet.” Her smile solidified. “I’ve been making allowances for that.”
