Broken Wings (19 page)

He stood mere stiffly in the middle of the night and lectured me just the way our father would. I couldn’t remember anyone speaking to me as an adult would speak to a child. We were all always adults in my house. Whether I liked it or not, I was never classified as an infant or an adolescent, or even a young adult.

“In my house we all take responsibility for our actions,” my father preached. “You are told or shown what is right and what is wrong and you are in charge of your own behavior accordingly. No one can look after you better than you can yourself, and you shouldn’t expect it or depend upon it.”

Carson was the one who came up with the idea to keep a profit-and-loss statement in relation to me. Everything I broke, accidentally or not, every bit of damage that could be calculated, was placed on the loss side. Someday, I would do something to earn a living and then he would then calculate the assets and work out the profit and loss. Daddy thought he was so clever and even suggested he submit his idea to some business magazines.

I told Carson it made me feel good to know I provided some amusement to them. He either didn’t understand or deliberately misunderstood my sarcasm. I suppose I always felt like an outsider, and they had always treated me as one. It shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to my mother that I was nothing like her.

Especially now, during what she saw as my debutante years, she puzzled over why I was such a mystery to her. Why didn’t I want the same things she always wanted? Why did I insist on wearing torn jeans instead of the expensive designer jeans she bought for me? Why did I put a ring in my nose and on my belly button occasionally? Why did I listen to that terrible music, and especially, why did I still want to hang out with friends who were, in her words, “beneath us”?

There was never any doubt in my mind that if I, as I was, were not her daughter, I would be beneath her as well. She never really looks at me, never sees me for who I am, I thought. Maybe she is afraid of what she helped create. Maybe my father has the same fear. I just remind them of their biggest mistake.

My father wasn’t even there for my birth. He was away on a business trip. My mother accused him of deliberately scheduling it for that time. Finally, she got him to admit that he felt my being born was chiefly her responsibility.

“How come?” she asked.

“The woman,” he said, “is the one primarily responsible for preventing pregnancy, not the man.”

The way he described it, the man was an innocent bystander.

And so Mother was to be in charge of my upbringing. When I had all that trouble in public school, I overheard them arguing about it.

“I know what we agreed,” she told him, “but I’m too old for this sort of thing, Henderson. She’s rushing me into old age. The stress shows. You don’t have the full brunt of it. You’re off doing your projects.”

He was quick to remind her that those “projects” paid for the big home, the expensive cars, expensive vacations, miles of clothes in her walk-in closet, on and on.

That was when she convinced him to spend the money to send me to this wonderful private school.

“We’ve got to get her away from this crowd of juvenile delinquents,” she argued.

“It seems to me,” he replied, “their parents probably want to get them away from her. Maybe we could ask them to contribute to the tuition. They’d gladly do it to get her away,” he muttered.

Nevertheless, he relented and wrote the check to get me into the private school. Now, I was being sent home from that one, as well.

“Go directly up to your room and remain there until your father returns,” my mother ordered when we had arrived. “And I don’t want to hear that music blasting. Just sit and contemplate what you’ve done and what you’ve become,” she advised.

I marched up the stairway. I was still feeling tired and bored and actually looked forward to getting back into bed. I fell asleep pretty quickly and awoke only when pangs of hunger made me dream about food.

Mother was gone again, so there were only myself and the two maids at home. It took one just to look after mother’s things, clean her suite, and do her errands. I could hear the vacuum cleaners roaring away, sucking up every particle of dust. I sauntered into the kitchen and made myself a cheese and tomato sandwich. I didn’t realize how hungry I was, which was probably a result of the alcohol I had drunk. I ate two sandwiches and a chocolate-covered frozen vanilla yogurt bar.

Usually, young girls envy their mothers for one reason or another. Most of my girlfriends at public school felt they weren’t as pretty as their mothers. It was different at the private school. There, the snob birds I cared to talk to all had no problem with their egos. I don’t have the same sort of bloated self-image, but I couldn’t say I ever wanted to be just like my mother.

There are things about her I like, but we do seem so different that I can understand someone wanting to double-check my birth certificate to have proof she gave birth to me.

For me the envy was reversed when it came to our figures. Mother could never understand how I could eat whatever I wanted, as much as I wanted, and not become a blimp. She was always on one diet or another, and she had a personal trainer. A new ounce of weight, a wrinkle, something sagging, whatever, put her into a panic. When I was very little and I walked with her, I noticed how she would often pause to look at her reflection in a store window. She would never pass a mirror. I first thought she was checking to see if anyone was following us. I’d turn to look back. It didn’t take me long to realize I was right. Mother was being chased by age.

Now I often caught her looking at me. If envy could be translated into tears, she would be crying her eyes out. The only satisfaction she had was in telling me that if I didn’t take better care of myself, I would regret it someday.

“One day you’ll wake up and see fat where there wasn’t any or that firm behind of yours will suddenly turn into marshmallow, Teal. You’ve got to do preventive things. You don’t exercise like you should. You eat everything I tell you not to eat. I should know,” she concluded. “I had your figure and I discovered how hard it was to maintain.”

Sometimes, being spiteful, I would deliberately add another scoop of ice cream to my dessert or gorge myself on a bag of Kit Kat bars right in front of her. I knew she was dying to eat one.

“Who bought that?” she would cry. “I distinctly left orders not to buy that.”

“I did,” I said. “I love them.”

She would practically flee from me, or from the desserts.

Go on. Run away. I’ll never get like you, I vowed.

After my late lunch, I took my portable CD player and went for a walk. We had a telephone in the pool cabana, so I stopped there and called one of my so-called “beneath us” friends from public school, Shirley Number. I expected she would be home by now, and she was. I told her what I had done and what had happened to me. She thought it was funny, of course, and then went on to talk about some of the things she and the other girls I knew were doing. I really missed being with them.

“Do you see Del Grant?” I asked her. He was a senior I’d had a crush on since ninth grade.

“No,” she said. “Don’t you remember? Oh, I guess I didn’t tell you,” she added.

“What?”

“He dropped out of school when his father left them. You know what his mother is like, her drugs and all.”

“Dropped out?”

“Yes, he works full-time at Diablo’s Pizza in the mall. He says he has to help support his seven-year-old brother and five-year-old sister.”

“Oh. Bummer,” I said.

“He doesn’t seem unhappy, but you know Del. You couldn’t tell if he was unhappy anyway.”

“Is he going with anyone?” I asked, and held my breath.

“Not that I know of. Selma Wisner has a mad crush on him and practically stalks him, but he doesn’t seem terribly interested in her.”

“I’ll meet you at the mall this weekend,” I said. “Saturday, okay?”

“Really? I thought you weren’t allowed to hang out with us anymore.”

“I’m not.”

She laughed.

“Okay, we’ll meet for lunch. Are they going to let you out on the weekend?” she asked.

“No, but that hasn’t stopped me before,” I said dryly.

She laughed again.

“I miss you,” she squealed. “Everybody’s so… everybody,” she said. It brought a smile to my face.

“See you soon,” I said, and hung up.

I walked some more, thinking mostly about Del Grant now. I suppose what I liked about him the most was that he was a loner. Probably because of his home situation, he avoided making friends with many people. He never had time to be in an extracurricular activity at school, and was absent so often, he barely got by. He kept to himself and wasn’t very talkative in school, and whenever I saw him anywhere in the city, he smiled or nodded, but always looked like he was afraid to do much more.

Yet I never thought of him as shy. To me he looked like he knew more and was older than the other boys his age. I had the feeling he thought that the things that were important to them were childish or meaningless. He was clean and neat even though he was poor and didn’t have much of a wardrobe, sometimes wearing the same thing for days. But he looked like he took care of what he had. Neal Sertner told me Del’s mother cut his hair, when she wasn’t drugged out on something or other. When he had it cut, he looked stylish. His mother worked on and off in a beauty parlor, but she had gone through so many, been fired from so many jobs, that people said she didn’t only burn her bridges, she burned the roads to the bridges.

I liked Del’s dark eyes, the way he tilted his head just slightly when he looked at someone, especially when he looked at me. I saw a strength in him I admired. He wasn’t big by any means. He was just about five feet ten and about normal weight for his age. He didn’t have big muscles or shoulders, but he looked tight, firm, hardened not by exercise but by life itself, and for me that added a note of maturity I respected.

His nose was perfect, and his lips weren’t too thick or too thin. His jaw line was a bit sharp, perhaps, but he had a male model’s cheekbones. He walked through the school not so much with confidence as with indifference. His eyes were always fixed straight ahead, and when he sat in the cafeteria or when I saw him sitting in a classroom, he stared down and looked up only when he had to, but he never appeared to be afraid of anything.

The other boys in the school simply kept clear of him. When he walked through a crowd, it was like Moses parting the sea. The other students would step back. They looked like they were afraid of touching him. They glanced at him and then quickly returned to their own conversations as if he wasn’t really there. I loved the fact that Del didn’t seem to care at all. Their indifference reinforced his.

We’re alike, I thought. Someday he’ll see that; he’ll look at me a little longer, let me talk to him a little more, and he’ll understand and he’ll smile and he’ll want to know me. That was my schoolgirl fantasy before I was abruptly ripped out of public school and sent to Snob Birdland. My biggest fear was that he would think I wanted to be there; he would think I was just some conceited little rich girl.

“Teal!” I heard Mother scream. “What are you doing outside? Didn’t I tell you to stay in your room? Your father is on the way home from work. Get yourself in that house and up those stairs,” she ordered.

She had just pulled up in her Mercedes, stepped out, and saw me sauntering along the edge of our gardens. I saw she had a bag with the name of one of her favorite boutiques printed on the outside.

“I needed some air,” I said.

“You’re going to need more than some air,” she fired back. “Get in that house.”

I did what she said and went up to my room, where I flopped on my bed and, with my earphones still on, folded my arms and pouted, staring at the door. Soon my father would be opening it, and I had to prepare myself for that scene.

Daddy could be the most dramatic man. I think it came from his business negotiations. He was good at posturing, and no one I knew could fix his eyes on you and burn a hole through you as well as my father. It was probably that and his quick mind that had made him so successful in the business world. Carson had inherited his math abilities. It was like I was completely passed over when it came time to distributing his genetics, as far as mental capacity went. Maybe that was why he and I never got along. If I didn’t resemble him in other ways, I would bet he would have accused my mother of infidelity. Even now he often had a look on his face that suggested he thought I was created with a mixture of sperm, his and some lover’s my mother must have taken. What else could explain me?

The door opened slowly, and he was standing there staring in at me.

My father never hit me, never so much as raised his hand. I know there are many people who would say I am the way I am because of that. Ironically, Carson says he did spank him and once slapped him so hard, he made his head spin.

I didn’t take off the earphones for a long moment. I knew that was only adding fuel to the fire, but I was trying to postpone the inevitable. Finally, I did.

“Drunk? At school?”

I didn’t answer.

“I don’t even want to hear an excuse. You’re so clever with your excuses, Teal. You really should think seriously of becoming a defense attorney. But that would mean taking school seriously and trying to become something, do something with your life other than ruin and destroy and bring static and havoc into everyone else’s life.

“I don’t want you leaving this house until I say so, understand?”

“Don’t leave the house? I don’t have to go to school?” I asked.

“You know what I mean, Teal. Of course, you have to go to school, although I don’t imagine you will last there much longer. When they kick you out, you will be in a far worse situation, believe me, so if there is any advice you should heed, it’s this: don’t get into any more trouble. I mean it, Teal. I have reached the end of my patience.”

I started to put the earphones back on.

“Just a minute, young lady. Before you withdraw into your own world as usual…” he said, and marched across my room to my phone. He unplugged it. “No more private line, and you will not be permitted to make any phone calls on the family lines or my line, understand?”