Family Secrets (42 page)

“I want to go to college now,” Paris said firmly.

“Why don’t you think about it for a while,” her mother said.

“I know I want to go to college now. I am old enough.”

“They’ll be eighteen,” he mother said, “and you’ve never even been out with a boy.”

“There are plenty of boys to meet at college and none here,” Paris said.

“I’m sure she can handle the work,” the principal said. “The only question is whether she feels she can handle the rest of it. Perhaps you’d like to consider a New York school.”

“Where is Radcliffe?” Paris asked.

“Cambridge, Massachusetts,” her father said.

“I want to go to Radcliffe,” Paris said firmly.

If I don’t go to Radcliffe, she thought, I’ll never be a writer, and if I can’t be a writer I’ll kill myself.

They let her go up to Radcliffe for an interview. The dean of admissions said she certainly looked a lot older than fifteen. Paris’ parents were impressed with the school. They hoped she would be accepted. Even though they wanted her to stay out for a year they wanted her to be the one who was able to say no or yes, not the school. It would not do to be rejected anywhere in life, if possible.

During the next few months Paris’ mother several times brought up the subject of staying out and Paris rejected it. Eventually Paris realized she had won; her mother was waiting as eagerly as she was for the letter of acceptance to arrive in the mail. She was the only girl in her class to have applied to only one school. Everyone else had applied to at least four. It was a gamble, her friends told her, and she was crazy, and good luck. Paris really wasn’t afraid that she wouldn’t get in. After all, if a school knew they were the only school you had applied to, wouldn’t they be flattered?

The letter of acceptance finally came. Everyone was pleased and relieved, but not as relieved as Paris was. For the first time she realized the terrible gamble she had taken. If she hadn’t been accepted then she would have had to stay home after all.

When her parents told her grandfather the good news he was so pleased that he sent Paris a check for the entire first year’s tuition. He didn’t like to be bothered remembering birthdays, and he didn’t believe in Christmas, so this was the first present he’d given her since she was a baby. Paris knew he was proud of her.
He
wouldn’t have wanted her to stay home and rot! He was a progressive old man and he respected her. You didn’t have to have long conversations with someone to know how he felt about you.

It was a new era in fashion: the New Look. Paris owned only one dress, two skirts, and three blouses, because she wore school uniforms every day except weekends. Wasn’t she lucky that all the styles changed just this year when she had to buy everything new for college? She would buy long circle skirts with waist cinchers and lots of cashmere sweaters and a plaid wool suit with a straight skirt and a matching hat with a feather in it to wear to football games. Her mother said they could shop up in Connecticut while they were at Windflower. She had already bought Paris three new silk blouses and carefully put in dress shields. Paris hated dress shields. She could hardly wait to get up to college and rip them out. Her mother was going to put dress shields in all her new cashmere sweaters too. Paris bought a pair of small scissors.

Cambridge would be cold so she and her mother had bought flannel pajamas with tight cuffs, and woolen bed socks. Paris already had a fur coat, mouton. She’d had it since her sophomore year in high school. She knew she would love college even though everything about college was still a mystery. In the movies college kids belonged to fraternities and sororities and acted like jerks, but at Radcliffe they didn’t have that. It was more sophisticated. Embarked on another step toward her master plan for life, Paris was beginning to feel sophisticated herself. She had just turned sixteen. No one dared give her a sweet sixteen party. She was a college girl (almost).

When the family moved up to Windflower that June, right after her graduation from high school, Paris suggested that they buy tickets to the local summer theater. It was the first time anyone had suggested that the family do anything outside their own grounds. Lavinia and Jonah, Melissa and Lazarus, Paris and Everett would go every week to see the plays. Since Paris couldn’t drive yet, her parents dropped her off at the playhouse on their way to do the grocery shopping, gave her money for tickets to that week’s performance so they could see if they liked the idea, and arranged to pick her up when they’d gotten the shopping done.

Paris really hadn’t meant to ask for a job. When she walked into the lobby all she meant to do was buy tickets and see how much it cost for the season. But the first thing she saw was an unflattering photograph of that week’s star, standing in a frame in the lobby, and the next thing she saw was the door to the auditorium was open, the stage curtains were open, and kids her age were doing things with scenery. She suddenly felt an excitement she had never known before. She had been in plays at high school, but this was real, this was professional theater. It even smelled different, like a real theater, not like a school full of kids. Everybody looked very informal and she wasn’t in the least frightened, only fascinated. She asked who was in charge, and someone directed her to a fat young man in shirtsleeves.

“That photo in the lobby is awful,” Paris told him. “In New York we have caricatures of the stars that we put in the lobby each week.”

“Who’s we?”

She blithely ignored him and went on. “I’m a professional artist, and I would be glad to make the caricature for you every week if you would let me work here. It would help your business a lot. You wouldn’t have to pay me. Just let me help paint scenery and so on.”

“Pay you?” the fat young man said, amused. “The apprentices here pay us for the privilege.”

“Why?”

“They get acting classes and a chance to act in plays when we need someone to fill in.”

“Oh, I’d love that,” Paris said.

“Well, if you’re really an artist, bring in a picture and then I’ll see.”

“I’ll draw one right now of that actor in the photo. Do you have any paper?”

One thing she could do was make a fast sketch that really resembled the person. She had done caricatures of her whole graduating class for their senior yearbook. She made a sketch and showed the man, and he was impressed.

“Okay,” he said pleasantly. “You can start work here tomorrow. I’ll give you the advance publicity photos to work from, or if you want I’ll let you meet the stars and you can sketch from life if they let you.”

“And can I be an apprentice too?”

“You’ll have to do a lot of dirty work. Paint scenery, run errands, take notes, but you’ll learn a lot too.”

“And I won’t have to pay?”

“No.”

“Wonderful!”

“What’s your name?” he asked.

For a moment Paris tried to think of a glamorous stage name but she couldn’t manage to make any name but her own pass her lips. Her throat just dried up with the fear of being a hypocrite. “Paris Mendes,” she said. He would probably think it was a terrible name.

“Made that up, huh?”

“No, it’s mine.”

“Okay, Paris. I’m Andy.”

She went to the box office and bought tickets, and then she waited in front of the theater until her parents and Aunt Melissa came to get her.

“Here are your tickets and I have a job.”

“A what?”

“I’m going to work at the playhouse drawing caricatures of the stars that they’ll put in the lobby every week.”

“You always were good at drawing,” her mother said.

“And they’ll let me be an apprentice. I’ll learn all about the theater and even get to be in a play.”

“Oh!” Melissa said. All sorts of expressions crossed her face: pleasure, longing, disapproval.

“That’s fine,” her mother said, “as long as you don’t have to go there all the time.”

“But I have to go there every day.”

“Who’s going to take you?” Melissa said.

“There’s always somebody going to town. There are cars.”

“We’re not taking you every day,” her mother said.

“Then I’ll take a taxi.”

“With what for money?”

“Please can’t somebody take me? Everett has nothing to do. You could take turns. I’d drive if I could, you know that.”

“Well, I could take her,” her father said.

“You’d have to take her home too.”

“Maybe I could get a ride home,” Paris said.

“You are not going in cars with strangers,” her mother said. “That’s out.”

“Your good-natured old father, recruited again,” her father said. He seemed rather pleased. Paris thought he would probably like to be an apprentice too if he could. Who wouldn’t? It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. A real job! It suddenly hit her what she had done. If she’d thought of how important it was she never would have had the courage to ask for the job, but something had just come over her, and it had all happened so easily. If she’d planned on it she never would have done it, never.

They teased her at Windflower about being stage struck, and they grumbled about who would drive her to work, but she managed to get there most days without too much begging. Every night she prayed that they would let her go the next morning, that someone would finally volunteer. Everett was the worst. He had to extract his price from her first; she had to let him kiss her and rub his hands over her breasts and try to get at her crotch. He was certainly disgusting. Paris dressed in jeans deliberately now, and shapeless shirts, to keep Everett away. When he tried to get his hand between her legs he was foiled because of the jeans. She would never wear a dress in his presence, even though her mother’s nagging was becoming incessant. If her mother or his mother happened to come into the room while Everett was mauling her he would immediately change the sex play to horseplay, twisting her arm, and Paris would scream, the mother would scream, Everett would let her go, and then there was that awful moment when Everett had to decide whether or not he had been cheated of his price. If he hadn’t been cheated, he would drive her to the playhouse. If he had been cheated, then he wouldn’t drive her anywhere, and letting him kiss and maul her had all been wasted.

She and Everett were so different, and it was a shame
he
was the one who had a car and a driver’s license. He was twenty-two years old, and after finally getting to be a junior at college he had dropped out. He’d been kicked out of college twice for getting bad marks and failing his tests, and both times Grandpa had gone to the dean or the trustees or someone and donated a big amount of money to the college and then they had taken Everett back on probation. Now Everett just lounged around Windflower, lazy and selfish. No job was good enough for him, he said. He wouldn’t go into the family business, not that it would be any great loss not to have a jerk like him, and he wouldn’t work for anyone else either. What Everett wanted was for his mother to set him up with a radio repair shop in Miami. He called it “the radio business.” Aunt Melissa probably would—she never refused him anything, and at least he’d be working. He didn’t even go out on dates with girls. Paris had begun to realize that Everett really didn’t know any girls, in spite of all the wild stories he used to tell her when she was younger and gullible. A twenty-two-year-old boy had no business jumping on his little cousin who was practically his little sister. He was too old for that. But the trouble was, she was just getting old enough for that, and he was more interested in her than ever. She had decided she would never marry him. He didn’t attract her. She would have to marry nobody. It didn’t matter now, her days were full with the playhouse and her struggles to get there.

If she went to the playhouse in the morning her mother made her come home for lunch, and then no one wanted to drive her back for the afternoon. She could hardly blame them; it was hot in the afternoon. But she wasn’t allowed to bring her lunch in a paper bag, because as her mother and aunt said, they were paying the help good money to serve their lunch and Paris could eat it with the family like a human being. The alternative, which she usually chose, was to go without lunch and cadge as much free candy and orange drink as she could from the candy concession in the theater. The apprentices ran the concession anyway, and a box of chocolate-covered almonds, while they were on the forbidden list for Paris’ skin, made a satisfactory lunch. She told her mother they gave lunch to the apprentices. That wasn’t a lie; candy was lunch.

She loved the playhouse. She had met several stars and had made caricatures of them. All the stars liked the drawings except one, who said it wasn’t flattering enough. The others were very sweet to her. She was allowed to watch rehearsals and take notes for the producer, and although they hadn’t yet had any promised acting lessons Paris felt that being around the plays in production served as acting lessons. She thought maybe it was all a fake, they took the kids’ money and then never gave them acting lessons at all, and she was glad she didn’t have to pay. Whatever she got was a bonus. She was the only one who didn’t want to be a professional actor and who was going on to college in the fall. They were all friendly and nice to her.

One evening Paris and her family were just sitting down to dinner when a girl phoned her from the playhouse.

“Can you dance?”

“No,” Paris said.

“That’s all right, we’ll teach you. It’s just social dancing, you know, ballroom.”

“Oh, I can do that.”

“Do you have a long dress?”

“No,” Paris said.

“That’s all right, we’ll borrow one to fit you. One of the girls is sick and we need an extra girl for one scene tonight. Can you be here in an hour?”

“Me? You want me?”

“Yeah. Can you do it”

“Sure I can!” Paris said, and raced to tell the family.

They all had to come to see her make her professional debut. She felt like a star. So what if it was only one scene, it was a scene the star was in, and he actually touched her in it, bumped into her in fact, so that made her a real part of the scene. There was the audience, laughing and having a good time. Paris wasn’t the least bit nervous. The boy she was dancing with was a nervous wreck, but she thought he was probably very stupid. This was just summer theater after all, and half those people in the audience were their neighbors even though they didn’t know each other, so how could it be scary? It was wonderful!