by Adam Ross
And I had a keen sense, even at the age of thirteen, for the attributes I lacked, so I was drawn to Abe and Kyle for their respective gifts, as they were to me for mine. We became, I like to think, amalgamations: we hoped to steal some of one another’s best, each one the fulcrum to the other two, a threesome in balance, with no individual’s select powers giving him alpha-ascendancy over the rest.
But there was something else Kyle had that Abe and I didn’t, and that I confess I coveted, and for which I would have been willing, without hesitation, to forfeit our friendship at the drop of a hat.
He had a beautiful older sister.
Like her famous Born Free counterpart, Elsa Duckworth had a touch of the leonine in her appearance. She was regal in bearing and had a thick head of blond hair that she could poof up into a face-framing mane. At first glance, she and Kyle closely resembled each other, with the same WASPy contours, the strong jaw and ice-blue eyes; but upon closer inspection, and I inspected as closely as secret inspection allowed, she had a fuller face, almost pudgy in the cheeks, with very small, thin lips—an old woman’s lips—and large, round eyes that always seemed wide open. “She looks,” Abe liked to say, “like a stick’s just been stuck up her ass.” Because of her diminutive mouth, lost in that feline face no matter how much lipstick she applied, her eyes were the best place to gauge her reaction to anything or anyone, which in my case was the same dull, sleepy indifference you see on big cats lazing at the edge of the prey-filled, Serengeti Plain.
Kyle, on the other hand, could get a reaction out of his sister almost effortlessly, with an ability I envied bitterly and an approach I instinctively rejected, which was to piss her off. She was a senior at Spence that year and had a curfew of 1:00 a.m., so on the Saturday mornings after I slept over she’d wake up groggy and irritable to the sounds of us playing Atari in the TV room just off the Duckworths’ kitchen. Walking past us on a trip to the fridge in her blue flannel nightshirt, she locked into combat with Kyle almost instantly.
“Do you have to make so much goddamn noise?”
“Fuck you, Elsa,” Kyle said. “Go back to sleep.”
“I’m parched,” she said. “Is there any orange juice?”
“How the hell should I know?”
Watching Elsa open the refrigerator door, I saw her wide eyes widen further.
“You drank all the goddamn orange juice!” Elsa turned her back to us while she opened the top cupboard, her calves flexing as she got on tiptoe to check her hiding place. “And where are my graham crackers? Did you eat my graham crackers, you little shit?”
“Jacob ate some too.”
“Who?”
I raised my hand.
“I bought those for me.”
“You didn’t buy them. Mom did.”
“But I put them on the list.”
“But you didn’t pay with your own money.”
“Whatever. I had proprietary rights.”
“Don’t hit me with your SAT words, you fucking cheater.”
Yes, it was quite the scandal. There was a rumor that Elsa had hidden a pocket dictionary in her panties when she took the SATs and consulted it during a bathroom break—an accusation that could jeopardize her hopes of acceptance to Princeton in the fall. (She wanted nothing more than to attend Princeton, where her boyfriend, Toby, was a freshman.) I didn’t know any more details about the alleged cheating, nor, I think, did Kyle, but any mention of it put Elsa on her heels with fury, as it did now, and she stormed out of the kitchen without food or drink.
But I stole a peek at her, or anything having to do with her, every chance I got. The Duckworths’ East Side apartment was laid out like a giant L, with the kitchen and TV room at the bottom end, and the dining room, bedrooms, and living room perpendicular to the long hallway that comprised the column on top. Going to Kyle’s room, I often stopped to gaze in the open door of Elsa’s bedroom if she wasn’t around, at her queen-size bed (fit for a queen) with its radiant peach sheets, at her bulletin board ruffled with swimming and riding ribbons, and, most of all, at the collage of pictures she’d assembled on her far wall.
Collages were big back then, and the few girls I knew at that age combined photographs of models from fashion magazines, cutouts of odd catchphrases (Do it up!), product names, movie stars, lines from jingles (Ooo, la, la, Sassoon!), and logos (the Neptune trident of Club Med, for instance, or pictures of faraway camps they’d attended, like Antigua Adventure or Outward Bound). They glued these onto thin rectangles of cardboard, the items overlapping, the Elmer’s glue warping and buckling them into oddly curved shapes like a 3-D topographical map.
But Elsa’s collage was different. It was gigantic, filling the whole peg-boarded wall of her bedroom, as big as the mirror in my parents’ dining room but reflecting her desires instead of her image, the elements secured not with glue but with white thumbtacks. There were spaces between the photographs, between the Spence and Princeton pennants, between the snapshots of her other lovely girlfriends set tastefully apart, as if each party picture were itself a perfect memory to be cherished, the only party like it, these images and icons organized, so far as I could tell, into four discrete quadrants of parties, places, boys, and goals, each demarcated by the exposed gray pegboard beneath—the X/Y axis of Elsa’s identity. There were no models or movie stars on that wall, though there was one picture that I couldn’t help but dream about, shot down-beach, of Elsa in Barbados, sitting cross-legged on a jetty in a bikini, her head thrown back while the bay’s waves lapped the pilings below, her bleached-blond hair hanging down to touch the top of her inverted heart-shaped ass—her own Sports Illustrated swimsuit spread. There was a quote running the length of her wall, right below the crown molding, that she’d written out in red marker: GO CONFIDENTLY IN THE DIRECTION OF YOUR DREAMS! LIVE THE LIFE YOU’VE IMAGINED! And at the wall’s center, at the intersection of the axes, was a picture of her boyfriend that I can conjure even now: Toby has long, curly brown hair that he’s slicked back off his forehead, manelike as Elsa’s; he’s tan, his cheeks reddened by sun and reflected river light after a day of rowing crew; he’s wearing a denim shirt with the top four buttons undone to reveal a hairless chest; he’s standing in a circle of friends, laughing so hard that he’s bent from the waist as they spray him with champagne. Elsa is visible in the background, her small mouth open as wide as possible with laughter, her hands and elbows pressed together in a WASP-girl clap.
“What the hell are you doing?” Kyle said.
“Nothing,” I said, hurrying from Elsa’s doorway to his room.
Most of what I knew about Elsa was from these brief glimpses. East Side life at the Duckworths’ was like that: mysterious, private, and, most of all, roomy. Kyle had his own room, Elsa hers, as did their younger sister, Kirsti, who was barely pubescent and thus invisible to me. There were three bathrooms and a living room that, so far as I could tell by the pristine condition of the furniture, was never used. It was different from life at my West Side apartment, where I shared a bedroom with my brother that abutted my parents’ bedroom, which abutted the living/dining area that in turn abutted the narrow kitchen. I did my homework in a large walk-in closet off the front hall. In the morning my father would walk around wrapped in a towel and at night (or whenever I had friends over, it seemed) in nothing more than briefs, his Fruit of the Looms bulging with what looked like a huge stem of grapes. If the Duckworths’ apartment was in the shape of an L, ours was an O, and we all filled it like the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop. Not that I perceived myself as deprived, mind you. Nor did I associate Mr. Duckworth’s blue-suited, Wall Street, seven-to-seven workaday life with greater worldly success than my father’s I-don’t-know-on-Monday-where-I’ll-get-paid-on-Friday freelancer’s life. No, it was simply that in the Duckworths’ world, indifference to one another—even physical avoidance, if necessary—was a spatial possibility, a luxury that was both taken for granted and respected. People in this universe had lives that could remain separate—a
fact so remarkable to me that I decided it deserved my full attention. Consequently, I slept over at Kyle’s house every chance I got.
And perhaps because I hung around so often, the day eventually came when I stepped into Elsa’s line of sight.
It was taco night at the Duckworths’ house. Forget what you’ve heard about high-powered career people in New York never spending time with their kids. Without fail, every Friday evening Mr. Duckworth cooked homemade beef tacos, and every time I could finagle it, I was there to eat them. He would mold the tortillas into shape by sautéing them in oil and folding them in half, then he stuffed them himself with chili he’d made from scratch and baked them to crisp perfection. Next he chopped up all the fixings (onions, green chiles, lettuce, tomatoes), grated the cheese and put out the salsa, which he freshened with cilantro that he grew in a box on his windowsill. It was an involved process, so much so that Mr. Duckworth didn’t have time to change out of his work clothes in order to have things ready at a reasonable hour. He just draped his suit coat and tie on a chair, put on his favorite apron—Inside Trader, it read—and got to work.
I liked Mr. Duckworth. He sported a military haircut, looked like a tough-guy version of David Byrne, and always seemed to be squinting like Clint Eastwood, mostly when Kyle spoke. True, Elsa had inherited her small, pursed mouth from him, but on Mr. Duckworth it conferred a look of autocratic determination. Plus he reeked—a big word, back then—of authenticity. He’d played college lacrosse for Johns Hopkins. He was very strong and regularly challenged Kyle and me to arm wrestle him at the same time. “I’ll use just two fingers,” he’d say, then pound the backs of our hands into the kitchen table. Plus he knew stuff he quizzed Kyle about during dinner, manly-man trivia we’d need later on. “If you’re shaving,” he asked, “do you rinse your razor with hot or cold water?”
Kyle shrugged. “I don’t know. Hot?”
“Wrong! Cold won’t dull the blade!”
And he stuck up for me. The first night I slept over at Kyle’s house, I called my parents for permission. They wanted to know the address, which I had to ask Kyle for. “You fucking idiot,” he said. “You don’t know my address?”
“Hey, Kyle,” Mr. Duckworth said, “what’s Jacob’s address?”
“I don’t know.”
“You fucking idiot!” he shouted, and then genteelly gave me the number.
He was big into physical labor (you couldn’t get my dad near a shovel, let alone a tennis or soccer ball), and one Saturday morning early that fall he drove me and Kyle out to the three-acre lot he’d bought near Georgica Pond in East Hampton. All of us wore flannel shirts and jeans, and we spent the whole day chopping, piling, and burning weeds, briars, and brush. Toward the end of the afternoon, he took a small charcoal grill from the trunk of his Jaguar and cooked what seemed like the best burgers I’d ever eaten. On the drive back he did the only inauthentic thing I ever saw him do. We’d crossed the 59th Street Bridge and were headed up Third. Kyle, who could sleep anywhere, was passed out up front, while I sat in the middle of the white-leather backseat. Mr. Duckworth liked to drive very fast, and when a cab came to a sudden stop ahead of us, he checked his rearview mirror and my expression at the same time, then said, “Hold on!” as if it were life or death, and swerved around the obstacle without slowing his pace.
“Wow,” I said. “That was close.”
Mr. Duckworth nodded seriously. “Fucking idiot,” he said.
Of course, I knew a performance when one was delivered, and performers like to impress. That Mr. Duckworth cared made me like him even more.
“Thanks for taking us today, Mr. Duckworth.”
“Thank you. You worked very hard.”
“I like working hard,” I said.
Kyle, his head thrown side to side during our near miss, was snoring.
Mr. Duckworth looked at me in the mirror again. “Jacob, I want you to remember something. And I know you will if I tell you. It’s very important. It might not make sense now, but it will someday.”
I waited.
“Getting inside is everything,” he said. “When you’re outside, you might not think you’re good enough. Don’t believe it. Just get in there first. Then you’ll figure it out.”
He was staring at me in the mirror again, and I nodded seriously—he was right, it didn’t make sense—and I said what my father always did when he was given directions. “I’m with you.”
As for Mrs. Duckworth, well, she was another matter entirely. The kids got their blond hair from her Norwegian genes, and their blue eyes too. She always wore pearls and was what my father called “an attractive woman.” Like Mr. D, she worked on Wall Street and possessed the same Brooks Brothers seriousness. But I was convinced she didn’t like me. I’d heard her talking to her husband in the hall one evening, complaining that I used too many towels. She always seemed oddly out of it, which could be unnerving. She caught everything mid-sentence, then bobbled or dropped the ball. Kirsti loved to tell endless, meandering stories at dinner, chock-full of exhaustive detail and labyrinthine digressions, these narratives ending on a punch line only she found funny. An instance of Mrs. Duckworth’s attention proceeded as follows:
Kirsti: “And then Laurel and I went to the nurse’s office to get a Band-Aid and—”
Mrs. D (shifting her attention from the underside of her plate, which she has lifted in the air to examine): “Nurse? When? Were you sick?”
Mr. D: “Edna, listen to the story!”
Kyle: “Yeah, Ma, c’mon!”
Mr. D (to Kyle): “Don’t talk to your mother like that!”
Kirsti: “She broke the Bunsen burner and cut her finger.”
Mrs. D (taking Kirsti’s hands and examining them): “Which finger? Is it infected?”
Elsa (rolling her eyes): “Mork calling Orson.”
Kirsti: “It was Laurel’s.”
Mrs. D (waving both hands in the air): “I don’t understand why you two were cutting class.”
And when it came to watching sports, she was terrible. She couldn’t get the terms right, calling a field goal a touchdown, a home run a goal. True, she knew when to celebrate. The Duckworths’ TV room was just off the kitchen, and we’d all jump up together. But the whole family (not including me) would scream, “It’s called a safety, Mom.” To which she took a sip of her drink and, still smiling and giddy with cheering, said, “Shush.”
One Friday evening, Kyle and I were sitting on the couch watching the Yankees on Channel 11. Kirsti, the little overachiever, was doing her prealgebra homework at our feet. Mrs. Duckworth was making another round of margaritas. Elsa was talking on the phone to a friend, standing by the stove and indifferently following the game, the cord stretched so taut it had lost its curls. “Tell me,” I overheard her say. “I love a good schadenfreude.”
Then my father’s voice came out of the television.
Give, he intoned, to the United Negro College Fund. Because a mind is a terrible thing to waste.
“That’s my dad,” I said to Kyle. To anyone. To the air.
“That black guy?” Kirsti asked.
“No, the voice.”
“Bullshit,” Kyle said.
“Don’t use that language!” Mr. Duckworth said. “And let your friend talk!”
“It is,” I said. “That’s him.”
Elsa pressed the receiver against her chest. “That’s your dad’s voice?”
It was, I explained, it sure was. Watch TV with me sometime, anytime, and you’d hear my dad everywhere.
“Call you back,” Elsa said to her friend.
Dinner conversation that evening centered on me. Even though I’d spent enough nights at the Duckworths’ that I could get up from the table and raid the refrigerator like any of the children, Mr. and Mrs. D had no idea what my parents did for a living or, for that matter, even where they lived. In fact, the sum total of their knowledge of my family was written on a note taped above their secretary’s desk since the first night I’d slept
over: Rose, 787-3858.
Given that most of their friends were probably bankers and lawyers, it must have piqued the Duckworths’ curiosity as to how a person actually made a living doing commercial voice-overs, let alone paid their child’s tuition at the Trinity School, and Elsa in particular peppered me with questions. First I explained how a voice-over was recorded, with the actor sitting in a soundstage or studio, sometimes with a screen running the commercial behind him; I described the craft required to narrate a twenty-eight or sixty-second spot, allowing for the copy’s rhythm and speed; I elaborated on the difference between a regional and national commercial, between residual and nonunion pay, even what the letters in SAG and AFTRA stood for.
“This is boring,” Kyle said.
“Oh, really?” Mr. Duckworth said. “Can you explain to Jacob what I do?”
Kyle crossed his arms. “Not exactly.”
“Then shut your trap,” said Mr. Duckworth. “Sorry, Jacob. Please continue.”
In closing, I ran off as many of my father’s commercials as I could remember, all the brand names and brought-to-you-bys he’d tagged with his bass baritone. York Peppermint Patty, I said. Get the Sensation. From Peter Paul.
