Читать книгу Domestic Arrangements - Norma Klein - Страница 10

Chapter One

Daddy was livid at breakfast.

I knew he would be. What I was hoping was that he’d sleep late, which he usually does. Mornings are usually kind of hectic around our house; everyone gets up at a different time. Delia and I go to different schools—I’ve been at Hunter since I was five, but poor Deel has shifted around lots of times. First she was at Columbia Grammar, but she didn’t like it and didn’t have that many friends so Mom put her in Bank Street, which was okay except it ended in 8th grade. Now she’s at Riverdale, which she likes except she’s failing Math and getting C’s, which gets Daddy hysterical because he always had his heart set on Deel going to Harvard, like he did.

Mornings in our house usually go like this. I get up at 5:45. That sounds dumb and even crazy to a lot of people since I don’t have to be in school till 9:00, but I like having time to myself in the morning. What I do is get up, have breakfast—a toasted bagel with butter and honey and a glass of milk—and then go back to bed. By then I’m dressed, but I just kind of lie there, thinking about things. If I don’t have that, if I oversleep and have to rush off to school, I miss it. Meanwhile Deel is still in bed. She always tells me to wake her up at 7:00, but when I do, when I go into her room and poke her, she starts mumbling and grumbling and pulls the covers over her head. Deel is strange that way. She often actually sleeps with the covers pulled completely over her head. Then, at 7:30, she suddenly bounds out of bed and starts screaming at me for not waking her up early enough! Her school is way uptown—it takes her 45 minutes to get there—and mine is just across the park. The only bad thing for me is when the bus is so crowded I can’t even get on and have to walk through the park. That’s only happened a couple of times, though.

Mom’s schedule varies. Usually she sleeps late and I don’t even see her in the morning. That’s because she has an erratic schedule, depending on whether she has to go for a shooting or an audition or something. What she does for a living is act in television commercials. Deel thinks it’s gross that Mom appears in all these really sexist commercials like the one where she’s inside a huge roll of toilet paper with just her head and arms and legs poking out and a man comes along and squeezes her and says, “Hey, you’re softer than the one I have at home.” But Mom says she made enough off that one commercial alone to pay for one year of Deel’s school and that once Deel is out in the real world she’ll stop being such a snot nose and learn to compromise a little. Deel says she never will. Mom is quite sexy for a mother. She’s really tall, five-ten—about two inches taller than Daddy, even more with heels—and she has bright red-blond hair. I guess I shouldn’t reveal this, but that’s not her real hair color. Her real hair color is brown, but when she was doing a Broadway musical in her twenties she had to play a role called Carrot Top, so she dyed it and everyone said how sexy it looked and she’s done it ever since. Her main problem is that she has to dye her eyebrows too or she’ll look weird. Mom’s main assets as an actress are her legs, which are really long, and her smile. She has a kind of big mouth and her teeth are parted a little in the middle (just like mine) but directors like that. They think it looks engaging and natural so she’s never had it corrected.

Daddy is usually just about getting up at 8:15, which is when I leave. He comes into the kitchen in his jogging suit—it’s a leisure suit, really, which Mom’s brother got him; he doesn’t actually jog—and gets out his juice and Product 19. Poor Daddy has gotten a little bit plump—he’s always on a diet. I know what he weighs—169—and what he wants to weigh is 155 like he used to. His problem is noshing. He’s usually good until after dinner when he sometimes reads or watches TV and sneaks into the kitchen for little snacks. Daddy has an office he goes to—he’s a filmmaker and does things like figure out projects and try to raise the money, and then, if he does, he directs them. They’re usually documentaries about serious things. You might have seen the one he did about this man who was dying of cancer: Death Rites. That was on TV five years ago and it won an Emmy. Daddy’s quite a serious person in general. He takes everything very hard, which is probably why he got so hysterical last night when he found Joshua and me fucking in the bathroom at four in the morning.

“We have to talk about this,” he started saying as I was going to get my knapsack.

“Daddy, I’ll be late for school,” I said. I started getting into my coat.

Mom had gotten up, which is unusual for her. Maybe Daddy had told her about what happened. She was wearing one of her sexy nightgowns, the tiger-skin one with the plunging neckline, and her hair was all rumpled the way it usually is in the morning. “Darling, please,” she said, taking Daddy’s arm. “There’s plenty of time to talk about it this evening. Why make her late for school?”

Daddy whirled around. “You’re treating this like some trivial, irrelevant incident,” he yelled. “This is our daughter!”

“It is?” Mom said wryly. “Gee, you could’ve fooled me.”

Daddy hates it when Mom horses around about things he thinks are serious. “Okay,” he said, sighing heavily. “Nothing matters. Our children don’t matter, the state of the world doesn’t matter . . . it’s all just one big, delightful joke.”

“Sweetie,” Mom drawled in her soothing voice (she comes from Kentucky and doesn’t have a southern accent at all, except, as she says, “when it’s helpful”), “I’m just saying why wreck everyone’s day by making a huge scene at eight in the morning? Tat’ll explain everything to us tonight, won’t you, hon?”

I smiled at Mom. Mom’s my ally, she’s always on my side. I can count on her. “Sure,” I said, swallowing. Actually, I’m not sure I have a very good explanation, but maybe I can think of one during the day.

“You come right home after school,” Daddy yelled at me as I went out the door. “No fooling around. Straight home!”

Fooling around? What did he mean? Basically, they’ve been after Deel this year not to “fool around” after school, meaning go to some friend’s house and smoke pot. Some of our friends’ parents don’t mind if they smoke pot at home. Some of our friends’ parents don’t mind what they do. Like Gina’s parents. Her mother says that as long as they’re going to do it, why not do it at home? That sounds so sensible. When I’m a parent, that’s what I’m going to tell my children.

Joshua’s not in my school. He goes to Stuyvesant. Actually, he used to go to Riverdale and was friendly with some kids Deel hung around with. That’s how we first met. He came over with some of Deel’s friends one afternoon, and we kind of hit it off. The boys in my class are just not that great. I mean, they’re okay, but nothing to write home about. I guess 14-year-old boys just aren’t that, well, polished or suave. Suave’s sort of the wrong word—Joshua’s not suave, exactly. But he’s just more—you can talk to him about things. He’s more laid back. You don’t have to worry that he’s going to just lunge at you all the time. Like with sex. He says he wants me to enjoy it too. I like it when boys are considerate that way. Joshua’s such a nice person, which is why the whole thing with Daddy is so ironical. I mean, it wasn’t even Joshua’s fault he stayed so late last night. It was mine. I was the one who suggested it. That’s why I really hope I haven’t gotten him into trouble. I just pray Daddy doesn’t call up his parents or do something unspeakably gross like that.

This is what happened. I might as well tell you so you’ll know the facts because Daddy’s version will make it sound all lurid and hideous and it wasn’t at all.

The deal I have with Mom and Daddy is this: on weekdays I have a curfew of 10:00 and on vacations and weekends 1:00. Actually, it’s Daddy more than Mom who sets the rules. He’s more of a rule person, if you know what I mean. Mom always says you have to make up your own rules, which gets Daddy mad; I guess he thinks she’s setting a bad example for us by saying things like that. Last night was a Sunday so usually Mom and Daddy would have been home, but this particular Sunday Mom’s college roommate, Angela Weitzman, had invited them to dinner. Daddy hates Angela Weitzman, partly because she lives way out in Connecticut someplace, which is an hour’s drive both ways, and also because her husband is a gynecologist who breeds horses. Daddy says he’s a Philistine and a bore, and he wishes Mom would meet Angela for lunch and not force him to go out there. Mom says it’s only once a year and Angela would be hurt if she had the feeling Daddy didn’t like her. “She loves you, Lionel,” Mom’ll say to Daddy. “She wishes Herman was like you, she’s always saying that.” “Well, she should have married me then,” Daddy will say. “Why didn’t she?” “Because I got to you first, sweetie, that’s why,” Mom’ll say. Mom can usually get around Daddy and get him into a good mood, even if he wasn’t in one to begin with.

I knew that if they were going to the Weitzmans’ they’d never be back till way after midnight, so I guess I wasn’t that worried about when Joshua would leave. He stayed for dinner and we had linguine with this really good pesto sauce that Mom bought last week at Pasta and Cheese. It’s all green and garlicky, but I figured if we both had it, it wouldn’t matter so much if I reeked of garlic. Then we studied a bit and then we fucked and then we fell asleep. We both just fell sound asleep. Mom and Daddy got home around two. I was still sleeping at that point, but Joshua had gotten up and gone to the bathroom. When he heard Mom and Daddy come home, he figured he’d better stay in there till they were safely asleep. So he waited around half an hour till everything was quiet.

At that point I woke up. I saw that Joshua wasn’t in bed with me and didn’t know what had happened. I went to the bathroom and there he was, poor thing, sitting in the bathtub all wrapped up in a big orange bath towel, reading Lord of the Flies (he has to do a book report on it for school). I got in the bathtub with him and we began to kind of horse around. I suddenly realized I hadn’t even washed my hair, which I usually do Sunday night. Joshua said he’d help me wash it, so we took a shower together. Then we got out and began drying each other off and, well, one thing kind of led to another. We didn’t want to go back to my room because we were a little scared about Mom and Daddy so we did it in the bathtub, which wasn’t that bad. We spread out a lot of towels and turned the portable heater on. It was really quite cozy and comfortable.

Right while we were, like, in the middle of doing it, suddenly the door rattled. “Who is it?” I called out.

“It’s me,” Daddy said. “What are you doing in there, Tati?”

“I’m just washing my hair, Daddy.”

“Do you know what time it is? It’s almost three in the morning! Don’t you have school tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” I said breathlessly. It was a little hard to talk with Joshua lying right on top of me. “I’ll be out soon, I’m almost done.”

Then Joshua got out of me. We figured the mood had been spoiled, sort of, and there’d be other times. I wrapped myself up in a towel and slowly unlocked the bathroom door. Joshua was still in the bathtub, huddled up in the towels, but the shower curtain was all around him like a tent. Daddy was standing in the hallway in his pajamas, looking angry.

“It was crucial that you wash your hair at three in the morning?” Daddy said.

“It just felt kind of itchy,” I said. “You know. It was bothering me. I couldn’t sleep.” I smiled at him, hoping to change the subject. “Did you have a good time at your party?” I said cheerfully.

Just then Joshua sneezed. He’d had a cold about two weeks ago, but was over it mostly. But I guess lying there with all those damp towels must have started it up again. Daddy looked at me sternly. “What was that?”

I shrugged my shoulders like I had no idea and hadn’t even heard anything.

Daddy went into the bathroom and pulled aside the shower curtain. There was poor Joshua, his hair all wet, cringing in the back of the bathtub. “All right,” Daddy said. “This is it. I don’t want to hear one word of explanation. I want you out of here in precisely ten minutes or I’m calling your parents right this minute.”

Joshua rushed naked back into my room and got dressed in about one second. He tried saying, “It wasn’t Rusty’s fault, Mr. Engelberg. See, I had this term paper to do so we—”

“I said out and I mean out,” Daddy said, pointing. “Go!”

“Daddy,” I said after Joshua had gone. “We just fell asleep, that’s all. Joshua had a really bad virus two weeks ago and he just lay down and—”

“As a first step,” Daddy said, “I’m calling his parents tomorrow morning. Don’t they know where their children are at night? Don’t they care?”

“Daddy, please don’t call his parents,” I begged. “It’ll never happen again. Really.”

“Tat,” Daddy said, looking at me gravely, “I’ve always trusted you. As you know I believe in trust between parents and children. I’m just saddened, more than anything else, not so much shocked as saddened, at the way you’ve taken advantage of that trust.”

I looked up at him mournfully. “I’m sorry, Daddy. Really.”

Usually if I look up at Daddy that way and kind of lean against him, he softens, but this time he just said stiffly, “We’ll talk about this in the morning. I don’t think you realize how serious—”

I lay in bed worrying about Daddy calling Joshua’s parents. Would he do such a sick, awful thing? Daddy can be nice. He’s really not a mean person, despite what I might have made him sound like here. I mean, he really wants what’s best for us. It’s just that things have changed so much since he was my age and he can’t understand that. He says he tries to, but he just can’t. Mom’s always saying that Daddy’s views about women are straight out of the 50s when women were supposed to be virgins and men were allowed to screw around and do whatever they wanted. “If those were the good old days, you can have them,” she says. Actually, Joshua’s father is not that different, though I don’t especially think he and Daddy would get along. Joshua’s parents live in this really fancy duplex on Park Avenue. That’s because Joshua’s father, whose name is Patrick Lasker, is a lawyer who makes a lot of money on divorce cases. That’s how he met Joshua’s mother, in fact. She was trying to get a divorce from the person she was married to, John someone, who drank, and she went to Joshua’s father and I guess they liked each other so much, Joshua’s father decided to get divorced too. So they got married and had Joshua and his two brothers.

Joshua hates his father; he calls him Patricia behind his back. He says that he has girl friends and is seedy and gross in all sorts of ways. He’s sort of tall with thick, long grayish hair and glasses and he always wears turtlenecks with this funny pendant around his neck. Joshua thinks he looks like a fag. Joshua’s mother is this little sort of nervous-looking woman who works in charities and is worried because Joshua’s oldest brother took a year off from college and is traveling around Europe, playing the guitar. She’s afraid he’ll never come back.

I know Mom and Daddy would hate Joshua’s parents. Daddy has this thing about people who live on the East Side. He says they’re all decadent and phony and he doesn’t respect people who make a lot of money unless they do it by mistake, doing something worthwhile. Also, I know Mom would hate Joshua’s parents’ apartment. It’s really elegant with lots of antiques and peach-colored carpets. It looks just like the apartments Mom sometimes points to in House & Garden and says, “God, don’t you just want to vomit! How can people live like that?” I guess Mom thinks our apartment is nice and it is in a way. Mom doesn’t “believe” in carpets so we just have bare wood floors and Indian rugs and lots of books. It’s kind of messy. When I was sick in third grade after I had my tonsils out, my teacher came to visit me and she looked around as though she didn’t know what to say. Finally she said, “My, this certainly looks very lived in.”

All day at school I worried about Daddy calling Joshua’s parents. What if they decide we can’t see each other anymore? What if they set some horribly strict curfew like nine o’clock? What if Daddy says he thinks we’re too young for sex?

I decided I better do what Daddy said and come straight home from school. So I didn’t even go out for pizza with Shellie like I usually do. Deel has her math tutoring on Monday so she doesn’t get home till six. Her tutor is this friendly old man who has around six cats and a huge tank of tropical fish. Deel likes animals a lot so they spend most of the time talking about animals. Maybe that’s why she’s still failing Math.

When I got home, the house was quiet. At first I thought no one was there. But when I went into the kitchen for a snack, there was Mom, sitting on a stool, reading a cookbook. “Oh, hi, sweets,” she said, giving me a kiss. She was wearing her snakeskin jumpsuit. It’s not really snakeskin, it’s just velour patterned to look like that. Daddy doesn’t like it, but he says he’s learned to live with it. I love it. When I get tall enough, Mom says I can borrow it.

“Did he call Joshua’s parents?” I said anxiously, taking down the Oreo cookies.

“Not yet.”

“Is he going to?”

Mom sighed. “I’m afraid so.”

“Oh Mom! I’m going to be so humiliated . . . couldn’t you stop him?”

“Well, the second you were out the door, he was reaching for the phone, sputtering about statutory rape and that type of thing. I tried pointing out that it might be better if he called when he was a trifle calmer. And I also said that it was clear as day that whatever you were doing with Joshua, you were doing because you wanted to, so rape is scarcely a fitting—”

“Then what’d he say?”

“He said he’d wait and call Joshua’s father at the office.”

“Mom, Joshua is really a nice person.”

“Darling, I know! I think he’s a perfect sweetie . . . but that’s really totally irrelevant.”

“It is?”

“Basically . . . see, the thing is, what’s bothering Lionel is that it’s you, his little darling, having sex, and that totally freaks him out.”

“Didn’t he think I ever would?”

“Oh, he knew you would eventually, but he probably hoped you’d be like him and wait till college.”

“‘When I was your age, my grandparents were still tucking me into bed’? That’s a line from Manhattan that Woody Allen says to Mariel Hemingway; she’s seventeen.”

“Precisely.”

“Would he feel just as bad if it were Deel?”

“Not quite, I don’t think . . . Oh, it’s lots of things, hon. It’s complicated. There’s one crucial fact that I think—An awful thing is about to happen to Lionel.”

I felt scared. “What?”

“He’ll be fifty in two weeks—five oh.”

“So?”

“Well, to you fifty is fifty, nothing special. But to Lionel it’s a whole big deal. It’s half a century. It’s, well, definitely middle age. It means time is running out.”

“But what does that have to do with me and Joshua?”

“Well, here he sees you blooming, going forth into the world . . . and here his options are more and more limited. When you’re young, you have a feeling you can conquer the world, anything can happen, and then it dribbles away bit by bit. It’s been five years since he won the Emmy and nothing much has really worked out since then, so he’s kind of in a general funk about everything . . . He’s gotten plump, poor thing.”

“Yeah,” I said, seeing what she meant.

“And then it’s his whole relationship with you, Tat. He adores you. You’re his little pet, his darling. Remember how the two of you used to go to photography shows on Saturdays or to screenings together? And to you it was such a big deal, such a wonderful surprise and treat. And now you wouldn’t be seen dead with him.”

I felt awful. “That’s not true! That I wouldn’t be seen dead with him!”

“Well, you know what I mean. Whenever he suggests something, you’ve made other plans. Before he was big, wonderful Daddy who knew everything and you looked up at him with those big, beautiful eyes and it made him feel terrific, and now . . . well, you’re looking at Joshua that way.”

“You mean he’s jealous?”

“Sort of . . . Look, hon, the whole thing is as normal as blueberry pie, but when it strikes home, when it’s your daughter, that’s when it hurts.”

“Poor Daddy.” I sat down on a stool next to Mom and began eating some cookies.

“I know.” Mom sighed. “Poor Lionel.”

“Do you think there’s something I could do to make him feel better . . . I mean, other than not seeing Joshua?”

Mom nodded. “You know, I was thinking, you remember how you and Deel used to give little parties for us when we had our birthdays? Well, I’m giving Lionel a surprise party when he turns fifty, but I thought if the two of you did it with me, baked something nice, maybe made him some special present . . . Remember how you used to make those collage calendars? Just kind of make a fuss over him.”

“Sure, I could do that.”

“I mean, let’s face it,” Mom said. “Part of it there’s nothing you can do anything about. He just has to come to terms with it himself. But I think if you kind of snuggled up to him, just a touch, maybe—”

“Okay,” I said. That sounded easy.

Just then the phone rang. Mom answered it. “Oh, hi! Yeah, sure . . . what time is it again? Five thirty? Okay, well, what should I do? Should I pick you up or what? Great, see you then.”

When Mom hung up the phone, she closed the cookbook. “Hon, listen, I have to run, I’m going to have a drink with Simon. I’ll be back around six thirty, okay? See you!”

She ran off to get her coat.

Simon used to be Mom’s director. It’s really a sad story. For four years Mom had this terrific job on a TV soap called The Way We Are Now. It was one of those gummy things that are on from 2:00 to 3:00 every afternoon, but Mom’s part was really terrific. She was a kind of villain or villainess. That’s the kind of part Mom likes; she likes roles you can sink your teeth into. She says she always hated ingenue roles, even when she was young enough to play them, and now that she’s thirty-nine, she says she doesn’t feel like trying to look ten years younger than she is. Actually, Mom looks younger than she is anyway, but I know what she means.

On TWWAN Mom played this woman named Myra who’d had a really terrible childhood. Her uncle, her stepmother’s brother, seduced her when she was eleven, but she was too scared to tell anyone, and that gave her all kinds of complexes about men. Then, when she finally told her mother about it, when she was eighteen, her mother threw her out of the house and she got into the car and drove off. Only it was a rainy night and her car crashed and she was horribly disfigured and had to have facial surgery. The trouble was that the doctor who did surgery on her, Dr. Morrison, fell in love with her and that led to all kinds of complications because he was married and his wife got really mad. So Myra (Mom) left town and moved to Chicago where she met a really nice man named Fred, but he was leafing through some old letters one day and found out about her uncle and that very day he left her. She felt heartbroken and decided to go back to her hometown and be a nurse there. By a strange coincidence Dr. Morrison was in that same hospital as a patient (he had to have something done with his kidneys) and they fell in love again and his wife got mad again.

Anyway, the awful thing is they wrote Mom out of the show six months ago. They’d put these new writers on the show and they wanted to build up some other part, so they had Mom in a car crash where she died. Dr. Morrison has been a real mess ever since then; he seems to have lost the will to live and no one knows what to do with him. Even his wife says she wishes Myra were around to cheer him up. But it’s too late. Once you’ve killed a character off, that’s that. But the main thing is, poor Mom! Because she was doing a terrific job. You should see all the fan mail she used to get. Four men even proposed to her! One of them said she looked just like his childhood sweetheart and another said he lay in bed every night dreaming about her. Another one said he’d read her sign was Taurus in some TV magazine and that meant she was perfect for him because he was Aquarius. So that proves she was doing a great job, and she was earning all this money. Of course she can still do commercials, but it’s not the same thing.

Anyhow, that’s how Mom met Simon. He’s only thirty-three, which Mom says is young for a director, but she said he’s really good. Maybe he can help her get another job on another soap, but Mom says they’re terribly hard to get just because they’re so insanely lucrative. Mom loves earning money. She’s totally different from Daddy in that respect. She says if she earns money, she can do splurgy things from time to time like buy those wine-red leather boots that she got for me last month. She told Daddy they cost $60, which he thought was decadent and horrible, but really they cost $150! She told me not to tell him. She said he’d die if he knew. Partly, it’s that Daddy is a socialist, sort of, meaning he worries about how many poor people there are in the world and feels guilty that he isn’t poor. Mom was sort of poor herself when she was little, and she says she doesn’t feel guilty about it at all. Also, she says she likes getting nice things for me and Deel since she couldn’t have them when she was little—nice sheepskin coats and cute sweaters and stuff. I’m glad she’s like that because I like clothes too. Deel is a little more like Daddy. She mostly just wears jeans and her desert boots and a turtleneck.