Great
Authors: Sara Benincasa
FOR BRIAN GLENNON
of the Hunterdon Central Regional High School
English Department
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His lessons inspired this book.
Also, he made high school way better.
CONTENTS
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M
y dad, who did all the heavy lifting when it came to child rearing and was far better suited to the job than my mother, gave me some good wisdom after my first summer away in East Hampton. I was twelve, and my mother had her personal aesthetician and stylist, Jonathan, put some blond highlights in my mousy brown hair when he came to the house for her weekly appointment. When I flew back home to Chicago before school started, I brought my blond highlights with me. Dad stared at me like I was an alien when he opened the triple-locked apartment door to let me in. When I was unpacking in my tiny pink bedroom (this was before I painted it brown and covered it in vintage posters of Jeff Buckley and the Afghan Whigs and Liz Phair), he came into the room and gave me a little speech.
“That place at the beach with all your mother's fancy friendsâit's another world. I'm not saying it's a bad one. It's just different. But whether you're in this world or that one, you still have to live with yourself. Remember that you can't be one person in one place and a totally different person in another place. Right is right and wrong is wrong, no matter where you are.”
I wonder what he would've said if he'd met Jacinta Trimalchio.
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What I remember the most about Jacinta is her eyesâthose enormous green orbs flashing joy and pain and longing from that impossibly delicate face. They were always so full of hopeâirrational, astonishing, sometimes even irritating hope. Hope that it would all work out, somehow, even when it was plain to see her dream messily slipping away like wet sand through a child's fingers. But to understand her, and what she hoped for, and what she got, and how she almost,
almost
managed to hang on to it, you've got to understand where it all happened.
East Hampton, that storied playground of the extremely rich, and those who work for them, is a town of traditionsâwhether those traditions are new or old, once something is declared “traditional,” no variation can be tolerated. My mother
loves
traditions. And she's made a mint convincing women that she's the arbiter of all things domestic. My mother, the Queen of All Cupcakes, spends most of her waking hours figuring out how to conquer television, radio, publishing, and the Internet with her sugary signature confections. She convinced millions of America's mothers that they needed to make their own organic sprinkles from scratch, or risk a lifetime of scorn from better, more evolved female specimens. She started out as a cocktail waitress in Chicago, worked her way up to the kitchen, started her own catering business, acquired some celebrity clients, and
bang!
âshe was off to a life of glitz and glamour and fondant in New York City, leaving my father and me behind in the Second City.
My dad didn't take it so hard because, as he told me the day Mom left, “She's not the person I married, anyway. I don't even know who she is now.” Since he's a good guy, he added, “She does love you, you know. And you love her, too.” But she never stops buzzing around long enough for me to get a good look at who she really is, so I can't decide if I love her or just feel like I ought to. She imprisons me in East Hampton each summer, because the court says she can and because I don't have any real reason to refuse, except that I really, really don't like her.
Anyway, traditions.
In East Hampton, houses should
always
be clad in cedar shinglesâpossibly the most boring building material available to modern man. Cars should have dark tinted windows to cloak the celebrities or (more likely) wannabes who sit inside. Bathing suits should be completely coveredâpreferably, by coutureâon village streets. Children should be seen and not heard. And you never ever talk about money.
When I came back from the Hamptons after the summer I met Jacinta Trimalchio, Chicago felt like the biggest relief in the world. Watching the grid of lights unfurl before me as the plane drew down lower to O'Hare, I felt my whole body relax. My shoulders dropped. And then I started to cryâreal, gulping sobs, the kind my mother would never have approved of, the kind I don't think Jacinta Trimalchio ever let herself shed, even when she should have, especially when she should have. Even though we were pretty close to landing, a flight attendant came by and gave me a bunch of tissues.
“Here you go,” she said, leaning down to my aisle seat. “It's going to be all right. It's almost over.” She patted me on the shoulder and walked back to the galley. She was right. But she was wrong, too. I don't know if it's ever really going to be over. Not for me, anyway.
That my summer had been overrun by fakes and liars was no surprise. That's how fancy people stay fancyânot usually through outright lies, but through selective omission, partial revelation, and what they might, on the SATs maybe, call “delicate subterfuge.” The Hamptons is full of fancy people who spend their days pretending, and their nights dreaming, that their pretense is real. But the biggest, fakest liar of them all, Jacinta Trimalchio, was also the best person among them.
She stands alone among everyone in my life as the only person who truly believed in the power of love to overcome everythingâ
everything.
That she was wrong in the end doesn't diminish in any way my respect for her. You could call her a lot of thingsâdelusional, obsessed, a fraudâbut you couldn't say Jacinta was without passion. She did everything bigger than everybody else, including falling in loveâor whatever it was she fell into with Delilah Fairweather. Maybe it was an obsession. Or maybe it was just an innocent hope, pure and true, that she could regain the life that had been stolen from her.
You might argue that she did herself in, that she deserved everything that came her way, ultimately, but I'd be willing to fight you on that pointâphysically, if necessary. I should've fought harder for Jacinta when I had the chance. But I didn't, and that's why I came home from Chicago like a raw-nosed girl crawls sickly and gratefully to her bed at 7:00 a.m. after a night-long coke and booze bender, wiping snot off her face and bile off a pair of lips she can't feel. And if you think I'm too young to know what that looks like, you've probably never been seventeen years old and spent a summer in the Estate Section in the Hamptons.
T
hat summer began differently from all other summers in East Hampton. Usually I take a coach flight from Chicago sometime in mid-June (Dad pays for it, because he doesn't want me to get a big head from flying around on Mom's first-class dime), and Mom sends a giant black SUV with tinted windows to pick me up at JFK Airport. (Because, you know, a five-foot-tall girl with two suitcases really requires a ginormous sports utility vehicle and a uniformed, obsequious driver to get out to the East End of Long Island.) Then he drives me the two hours out to the fancy house my mom bought when I was eleven, less than a year after she divorced my dad and moved to New York to open her own cupcake bakery and begin shooting her TV show,
Bake Like Anne Rye!
(You have to add the exclamation point at the end. It's part of the trademarked name. They can seriously, like, sue you or something if you don't.)
I got to the usual spot at JFK, and there was a driver holding up a big embarrassing placard with
NAOMI RYE
written on it. For as much as my mother loves being the center of attention, I hate it with a huge passion. Even my dad, who is about the least show-offy guy you'll ever meet, is better in front of a crowd than I amâhe teaches gym and coaches basketball at my high school, so he's always in front of lots of people. He's really good at it, too, and yet his yearly salary is equivalent to about two weeks' pay for my mom. I'm not even kiddingâI did the numbers. I'm not supposed to know what they make, but Mom always has lawyers or assistants around talking facts and figures, and last year they published all the Chicago public high school basketball coaches' salaries in the
Tribune
. My dad's was near the bottom, although his win-loss record was almost the best in town. A bunch of parents got together and said he should get a raise, but the board wouldn't give him one. Some people probably think he gets a lot of money from my mom, but the truth is, he refuses to take any of it. The child support goes instead into a trust, which I can't touch until I'm thirty-five, or sooner if I get married, or unless the trustee agrees I can use it to pay for college. I think my dad hates that even moreâwhenever I cop an attitude, he says, “I'm not raising some trust-fund brat!” which kind of hurts, but I always forgive him. He only says it when he's really, really mad. He knows I'm going to use the money for college, anyway.
I said hello to the driver and followed him out to the car that was, as usual, some kind of armored tank. He lifted my bags as if they were peanuts, popped them into the back of the car, and held the door open for me, and soon we were off and rolling. Only this time, instead of heading out toward Long Island, he started driving toward Manhattan.
“Um,” I said. “Um.” I'm not good at public speaking, even when the “public” consists of only one stranger. My mom could do it with two hands tied behind her back, blindfolded, and probably gagged, to boot, but not me.
“Um,” I tried again. “Isn'tâI meanâwe usually go the other way. To East Hampton. When we drive there. I don't mean you and me, because this is the first time I've met you. I just mean, you know, me and whoever is driving me. Which is usually someone I've never met before.” I shut up then, because I'd come down with what my friend Skags calls “a case of the Nervous Naomi Babbles.” Skags and I have been best friends since we were in kindergarten. She's this boyish lesbian (she says she rocks the “boi” look, but that spelling annoys me), and she looks like a ten-year-old kid. She's hilarious. My dad used to be kind of afraid that I was going to turn out gay, too, I thinkâhe never said it, but I could tell. But he chilled out once he found me sobbing in my bedroom over yet another boy who didn't want me. He softened toward Skags even more when she yelled at him from the bleachers to run some specific offensive play I don't know the name of. I'm a coach's kid, but I can't tell you a damn thing about how the game is played. Maybe it was actually something about dribbling? I don't know.
The driver said, “Oh, miss, we're not going to the Hamptons. We're going to the Downtown Manhattan heliport.”
“Why are we going there?” I asked, alarmed. Before he could answer, my cell phone rang. I checked the incoming number.
“Mom?” I nearly shouted into the phone. “Why am I going to the Downtown Manhattan heliport?”
“Hi, darling!” she trilled in the fake-happy voice she only uses when people she wants to impress are listening. Her vowels soften, her pronunciation becomes more clipped, and she sounds like she's trying to fake a posh English accent. If you could hear Skags do an impression of it, you'd die laughing. It is seriously dead-on.
“Isn't it a wonderful surprise, dear?” Mom continued, letting out a peal of fake laughter. “And I had absolutely nothing to do with it! You know Senator and Mrs. FairweatherâI'm sitting with Merilee right now at Baxley'sâhave their own helicopter. Well, Delilah happens to be taking it from town to East Hampton today, and Merilee was kind enough to suggest that you take the trip with her! Isn't that generous of her, darling?”
Okay, a few things: My mother had absolutely everything to do with me being offered a chance to catch a ride with a Republican senator's ridiculously beautiful (but, I'll admit, shockingly nice) fledgling model daughter. She'd been hammering away at Merilee Fairweather for years, trying to lock down something she could actually call a friendship, and it seemed she'd finally done it. The helicopter offer alone wasn't evidence that Mrs. Fairweather had succumbed to my mother's relentless hounding, but the “sitting with Merilee right now at Baxley's” was.
Baxley's Restaurant and Ocean Golf Club is this aggressively charming restaurant in a weather-beaten clapboard Victorian home right on its own private little stretch of beach in East Hampton, with a members-only golf course and palatial club next door. It's kind of an East Hampton institution, and the fact that my mother had wrangled herself a seat at the Fairweathers' reserved table was for her, I knew, a dream come true.
“Hey, Mom,” I said halfheartedly, because I felt like I should acknowledge her victory, “it's really nice that you're having lunch with Mrs. Fairweather.”
“I know,” she whispered. “She just got up to use the bathroom. I am justâdelighted is not even the word, Naomi. Between this and getting ready for the IPO . . .” You'd think a self-made millionaire Food Network host/cookbook author/cupcake bakery owner about to launch her own branded line of kitchen supplies and food productsânot to mention a magazineâwouldn't need the approval of some anorexic socialite, but you don't know my mom. Being accepted by Merilee Fairweather was way more important to her than Bake Like Anne Rye!, Inc.'s initial public offering of stock, an upcoming event that she'd been trumpeting all over the cable news networks in recent days.
Skags, who loves sports and financial news like she's some old 1 percent-y rich dude instead of a middle-class teen with a lesbian faux-hawk, tried to explain to me what an IPO is when my mom texted me about it, but I didn't care enough to listen too closely. The gist is that an initial public offering means you think your company is so badass that you're willing to sell little tiny pieces of it off to the general public, and if the stock price goes up, everybody gets rich and happy.
“And,” Mom added, “the senator is apparently considering buying some stock when we go public at the end of the summer!” She tried to maintain a whisper, but her voice kind of squeaked with joy at the end.
“So I guess I can't get out of this helicopter thing, can I?” I said, not in a mean way. I just sort of resigned myself to it at that point.
“Darling,” Mom said, sounding surprised. “Why would you want to?” I heard a rustling in the background, and my mother saying to Merilee Fairweather, “Naomi is
so
excited! This will be her first trip in a helicopter. And you know she adores Delilah.” That wasn't strictly trueâI
adored
Skags. I don't know what the word was for how I regarded Delilahâadmiration? Awe? We were definitely from different tribes that spoke different languages and had different customs, and I couldn't imagine us ever being close in the way that Skags and I were. What would we ever talk about? She could tell me about Fashion Week, and I could, like, explain how I'd gotten an A+ in Honors US History II after collaborating with Skags on a comic book version of the first chapter of Howard Zinn's
A People's History of the United States
(Skags did the pencils, I inked and colored, and we both worked on lettering).
In the background, I heard Mrs. Fairweather say, “Oh, well, Delilah thinks Naomi is just lovely.” Even though I knew she was pulling that one out of her ass, I actually blushed a tiny bit. Different tribe or not, Delilah Fairweather was exactly the sort of person you want to think you're “just lovely”ânot that I'd ever admit that to any of my friends back home, where we called the popular, beautiful girls the Beasts. Skags swore that one of the Beasts, Jenny Carpenter, was completely in love with her, but I was pretty sure that was a delusion.
“Mom,” I said, “helicopters kind of freak me out a little.” I did not add, “And so do you, and I wish I were back home drinking mint chocolate milk shakes with Skags and making fun of the Beasts and those giant summertime sunglasses that make them look like overgrown flies.” I don't think she would've understood a single word I said.
She unleashed another laugh. “Oh, darling. The Fairweathers fly the same helicopter as the president! A Sikorskyâwhat's it called again, Merilee?” She rattled off model numbers and some facts and figures, which I ignored. Clearly, I was going to lose my copter V-card whether I wanted to or not. “Naomi, I really have to hang upâMerilee reminded me of the strict no-phones policy in the club, and people are starting to notice. I'll see you soon.”
I got off the phone and stared out the window for the rest of the ride to the heliport. I was just clambering out of the huge SUV while the driver got my suitcases when I heard an unmistakable sweet voice (the kind of high-pitched but whispery girly tone Skags calls Marilyn Voice) call, “Naooooomi Ry-yyyyyyye!”
I looked up, and there was Delilah Fairweather, slowly walking off the tarmac to where I stood. She seemed to float above the ground like Glinda the Good Witch when she makes her appearance in Oz. I guess that would make me Dorothy, but I usually feel more like a Munchkin when I'm standing near Delilah Fairweather. For one thing, Delilah's around five foot ten in flats. She's also gorgeous, with perfect tanned skin and abnormally huge blue eyes. She has one of those cutesy Cupid's-bow mouths, and when she smiles, her teeth gleam bright enough to blind passersby. For real, she should hand out those Beast-approved giant sunglasses as a precautionary measure before she grins. And of course she's got long blond hair. Of
course.
And somehowâand I'm not saying they're fakeâshe ended up with a pair of D cups on that super-slim body. She is a walking, talking, living, sexy Barbie doll, if Barbie enjoyed skiing in Aspen, shopping in Paris, and smoking copious amounts of marijuana.
“Naooooomi Rye,” Delilah said again in her breathy little-girl way, stretching out the syllables as if it were a novel experience for her tongue. She delicately stepped over to me on those impossibly long legs and bent down to give me the world's best-smelling hug, which immediately sent tingles up and down my spine as if Delilah were actually electric. Delilah always smelled like some combination of movie popcorn and cotton candy and caramel and other foods she has never allowed past her full, bee-stung lips. I'd known her since we were kids, and I'd never seen her eat more than a teensy portion of anything. Still, I found it impossible to hate herâshe treated me kindly, for one thing, and for another, she had this way of training her eyes on you and making you feel like you were the only important person in her entire life. She always seemed to have one foot in this world and one foot in some other, rarified realm where magical elves twirl inside sparkling soap bubbles that float on the surface of an enchanted sea.
She lifted a handful of my hair and breathed into my ear, “Your hair looks
stunning
this summer.” Her eyes met mine, and she shook her head in wonder. The compliment briefly made me feel as if I had won the lottery.
I have to give Delilah credit for never being mean to me, through all the years my mother tried to force me on herâand, what's more, for making a real effort to be welcoming and kind, in her own flighty way. When the adults had clambakes at Baxley's and the kids ran down to the ocean to play, Delilah complimented me on my bathing suit or made sure I had a pail in which to collect shells. When we got older (like, seventh grade) and my mother finagled invitations to various house parties, Delilah invited me to hang out with the other kids at the far edge of the property. I always followed her and her friends at a safe, respectful distance down to the pond or past the pool house or whatever, and she oversaw the passing of the joint or flask. On the frequent occasion that the kids tried to skip over me, she scolded them sweetly and made sure I got my chance. If I took a drag, it was always quickâI don't like pot, and anyway, I don't know how to inhale. I do better with booze, because it's hard to mess up an action as simple as swallowing liquid. Pot smoking, thoughâthere's some kind of weird art I haven't figured out. Probably I never will.
Delilah introduced me to her companions as if I were her real friend and not just the daughter of her mother's ex-caterer. But she was much in demand and couldn't sit around and babysit me the entire night, of course. Consequently, it was up to me to fend for myself at these outings, which inevitably ended the same way. I'm not much of a conversationalist, which makes a handful of people back home (the Beasts included) think I'm a snob. I'd much prefer that reputation to the one most people ascribe to me: “Naomi Rye? Oh, she's such a good listener.”
That
was what always ended up happening at these Hamptons parties: everyone else would get wasted while I'd stay sober, and before you knew it, one girl or another would corner me and start pouring out a sob story about how her boyfriend was off in the bushes, having sex with another girl, or how her parents didn't really love each other and everyone knew, or how her brother had tried to commit suicide but failed because the chauffeur had found him in the garage before he could finish hanging himself, or any one of the usual awful things that happen to very rich people. I didn't want to know this stuff, because proud people who confide in you in their weakest moments inevitably end up resenting you, but I managed to collect an arsenal of wealthy teenagers' tales. When those kids become governors and CEOs, which they will, I could make a fortune selling their darkest secrets off to gossip columnists. Of course, I would never actually do that (even though Skags says I should).