Princess Daisy (29 page)

12

H
andwoven!
” Kiki proclaimed excitedly.

“What?” Daisy looked up from the catalogue of courses offered at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Kiki had been ruminating for a good half-hour as she cast a disgusted eye on her still-unpacked suitcases sitting in one corner of their dormitory room.

“But that’s it! That’s the key! Handmade, homespun, second-hand, third-hand, stolen or bartered for—but above and before all else,
handwoven
. I mean, we don’t want to stand out like a couple of nerds, do we?”

“I thought I’d gotten away from uniforms once I was freed from Lady Alden’s—don’t tell me I’ve got to get back into another one here? And anyway, why is how we dress so important?” Daisy inquired. “I thought this place was casual.”

“Daisy, you just don’t understand yet,” Kiki sighed patiently. “Once you know how to dress for a place or an event—once that’s figured out, the rest takes care of itself. You spent too much time at the same school so you never had to worry, but if you’d been to as many schools as I had, you’d realize that you can only survive and be yourself if you
blend
into the surroundings. Now neither of us is exactly inconspicuous and we both want to spend the next four years sort of incognito—no princess for you, no Miss Grosse Pointe Automotive Heiress shit for me—so we’ve got to get into handwoven right away, even if it itches.”

“Done. Now how about deciding what courses you’re
going to take? That won’t take care of itself,” Daisy said, waving the catalogue at her meaningfully.

“There’s a course in surfing that sounds intensely interesting. Also kayak handling, bike maintenance and jazz dancing. But the only one I’m absolutely definite about is trampoline.”

“Kiki—you’re impossible. There’s no credit given for any of those.”

“Bugger.”

“I’m taking pottery, drawing, print making and painting—all necessary for an art major,” said Daisy smugly. “And, since we have to satisfy something called the Social Sciences requirement, let’s both take Dreaming S. Oh, hell, it says here that we have to take Western Civilization too—a must for Freshmen.”

“I’ll sign up for anything to stay here. I think we’ve landed in Camelot,” Kiki said, looking out of the window blissfully.

“Look, take trail riding with me. We’ve got to get some phys. ed.—oh, blast, no credit for that.”

“Give me that catalogue,” Kiki demanded. “Ah ha! Workshop in Theater Production satisfies the Humanities requirement—how about that? We get to be in a play—I think I’ll major in Drama.”

“Good. Our education’s settled,” Daisy said in satisfaction. “Now let’s go shopping. Or should we just buy our own loom?”

Daisy had given an entirely adequate performance on the College Board Examinations—Lady Alden’s ruler had not been plied without a purpose—and Santa Cruz had been glad to welcome the fifteen-and-a-half-year-old student from London.

Kiki and Daisy were roommates at Cowell, the first of the largely self-contained residential colleges to open in Santa Cruz which was, itself, the most beautiful baby of a great university system. It had been founded in 1965, just two years before Daisy and Kiki entered this experimental school built on two thousand dreamingly lovely acres overlooking Monterey Bay, seventy-five miles south of San Francisco.

A visitor, driving toward the university from the Victorian seaside city of Santa Cruz, grows dizzy with the rich, lazy, untouched sweep of open fields and deep forests
of a former working ranch, still guarded by old fences,
dotted
with limestone kilns and graced by a few ancient farm buildings. The university is made up of separate residential colleges, modeled after Oxford or Cambridge in their conception of community but designed by some of the greatest modern architects in the United States. The colleges are so cleverly hidden in the trees that they can almost be overlooked entirely, although the students, who could be dress extras in a lumberjack movie, contrive to stay visible as they lope from class to class, bearded genial boys and gilded, if messy, girls.

Daisy and Kiki romped through Santa Cruz, taking courses that always sounded easier than they turned out to be, and working much harder than they had planned to, but, in the course of it, becoming increasingly drawn into the worlds of art and the theater which opened up to them.

Daisy discovered that her talent for drawing, which she had reserved for the sketches she made for Dani and her moments of solitude, was a substantial talent, a far greater gift than she had realized, a serious potential. She immersed herself in drawing and painting, watercolor, pastel and oil, never tempted by the abstract-expressionist mode, but rather sticking to what she did best: realistic and sensitive portraits, studies of nature, and, of course, drawings of horses. Kiki found an outlet for her randy, inquisitive and honest self in the theater where nothing she could do or say aroused any surprise from her peers. They were all “into self-expression” which suited Kiki very well. This was finally the “fun” she had always searched for everywhere, and at Santa Cruz she could get academic credit for it.

Kiki was a spendthrift with her small delicate body. She had many love affairs, caring nothing for her Grosse Pointe indoctrination into the nature of virtue, her good name or public opinion. She cared for no opinion of her actions but her own, and her strict code was satisfied by personal generosity and absolute sincerity. She had a talent for falling for the wrong men, but she reveled in her errors, getting out before she hurt anyone but herself. She observed, in sinful amusement, the efforts of others to try to make her feel guilty. Fun came first—why couldn’t people just admit it—take their fun, take their lumps and go on to the next adventure? Why did you have to
learn
from your mistakes? You’d only find a different one to make the next time anyway.

Daisy and Kiki roomed together during all their years at Santa Cruz, often talking far into the night and sharing their experiences, yet Kiki, whose many antennae seemed to sprout like a network from her whimsical head, knew that there were large areas in her friend that she didn’t understand. Daisy was, even in their senior year, still something of an enigma and Kiki had little patience for enigmas.

“Daisy,” she suggested one day in 1971, the winter of their senior year, “think about the clitoris.”

“Before lunch?”

“Why, I ask you
why
, is it where it is? All tucked away, practically invisible, impossible to find without directions that I, for one, am fed up with having to provide.”

“I thought you just told them what you wanted them to do and they did it,” Daisy said, incuriously. Her friend’s complaint was not an unfamiliar one.

“Why should I have to give them a goddamned road-map? A man doesn’t have to show a woman where his cock is! It’s not fair!”

“Just where do you think it should be moved to?” Daisy inquired reasonably. “The tip of your nose?”

“I’m not giving up sex,” Kiki answered her quickly, “but there’s a real need for reform.”

“Hmmm.” Daisy waited patiently for the real purpose of this conversation. Whenever Kiki talked about the clitoris she was leading up to something.

“While we’re on the subject, Daisy, there’s one thing I really don’t understand about you,” Kiki continued.

“Only one?”

“Yup—how come you’re still a virgin? Everyone’s talking about you—did you realize that? They call you Peck-on-the-Cheek-Valensky.”

“I know. It’s un-American … I’m an embarrassment to you, aren’t I?” Daisy laughed.

“It’s getting that way. Do you realize that you’re going to be nineteen on your next birthday? In a few months? And still a virgin? Forget un-American—it’s unhealthy and unwholesome. Really, Daisy—I’m serious.”

“I’m waiting for Mr. Right,” Daisy said annoyingly.

“Bullshit You go square dancing with Mark Horowitz
who’s having a mad thing with Janet except she hates square dancing; you go riding with Gene, the Gay Caballero; you go to the movies with absolutely anybody so long as it’s a mob; you let Tim Ross buy you pizza and he’s so in love with you that he’s happy just for the honor of paying for your pepperoni; you go into San Francisco for Chinese food with three
girls
, for God’s sake, and yet every
one
of the most attractive guys at school has been after you! And I’m not even counting the men you’ve met when you come home with me for vacations—the most eligible bachelors in Grosse Pointe have all been spurned by you, kid, including my poor brothers, those sweet assholes, and what about the men you meet when you go to Anabel’s for the summers? I’ve seen the letters they write which you don’t even bother to answer. What’s with you?” Kiki finished, her arms akimbo under her tattered poncho, her pointed ears pink with indignation.

Daisy looked at her, suddenly serious. Kiki had been sounding this note for well over two years now and evidently it really bothered her enough to make an issue over it. And when Kiki made an issue she was capable of bringing Napoleon back from Elba.

“Okay, you’re right. I don’t want to get involved with a man, not at all. I don’t want anyone to have any power over me. I don’t want anyone to think he is entitled to any part of me. I don’t want any man to get that close. I can’t stand it when they think they have a right to kiss me just because we’ve spent an evening together—who the hell asked them to—who gave them any permission, how
dare
they act as if I owed them anything?”

“Hey, take it easy—calm down—we’re not talking about the same thing. You’re supposed to
like
getting close to a guy—or didn’t they ever tell you when you were growing up? Haven’t I gotten through to you, ever?”

“But I
do not
like it—I don’t want to try it—and that’s the way it is. You should be able to accept that about me by now,” Daisy said with finality.

“You’re right, I should. But I don’t.”

“Well, keep trying,” Daisy advised her.

Since Daisy had arrived at Santa Cruz she had been plagued by the romantic passions she inspired in various young men and, as far as she was concerned, their romantic passions gave her less sympathy for them than if they’d lost a shirt in the laundry. No one,
no one
was to be
allowed to have the faintest hope of possession—she stamped out their feelings without the slightest remorse. She wasn’t responsible for them and if they wanted to be miserable because of her, let them. The minute anyone she went out with started to try to turn the neutral peck on the cheek into a larger embrace was the minute her relationship with him ended. There were always others to take his place.

At almost nineteen, Daisy had consolidated her early beauty. Her spun silver-gilt hair, which she rarely cut except to have a quarter of an inch trimmed off the ends from time to time, reached almost to her waist. No matter how she tried to control it, to braid it or bunch it or tie it in neat clusters, it was impossible to do anything to keep her nape, her temples and her ears from being tickled by wisps, cowlicks and curls of shorter hair which escaped her firm hand and created a halo around her face. Her skin still held the warmth, that of a ripe peach, that she had inherited from Francesca and those generations of beautiful women of San Gimignano, and men found themselves impaled on her eyes. Eyes as large, with pupils of such a blackness as Daisy’s, were almost impossible to penetrate … yet the men of Santa Cruz never gave up trying. The touch of strangeness, which lent her beauty the necessary counterpoint, was her eyebrows, which were so straight and determined above the mystery of her eyes. As she grew older, her full, Slavic mouth, the one feature, aside from the color of her hair, that she had inherited most noticeably from Stash, became more firmly marked. At Santa Cruz she had grown taller until she reached her full height of five feet seven inches, but her body had not succumbed to institutional food. She was as slim and limber as ever: she rode every day in every kind of weather, and she had the firm, graceful arms, thighs, calves and shoulders of a horsewoman. Her breasts were fuller than they had been four years before but were still high and pointed.

Both Daisy and Kiki wore the uniform they had settled on in their freshman year—jeans and handwoven tops, the jeans as battered as possible, the tops as ethnic. The two of them, known as Valensky and the Kav, were a legend on a campus where almost everyone was eccentric, because of the contrast in their personalities and their looks, to say nothing of Theseus who slept in their room and accompanied
Daisy to all her classes. The only place from which he was barred was the eating commons, by demand of the other students.

In spite of the intimate friendship between them, Daisy had never told Kiki about Dani, to whom she mailed, twice each week, a detailed drawing, sometimes showing a scene from her own life, sometimes a scene from Dani’s life, drawings which included those teachers and friends of Dani’s she had come to know so well. Sometimes Daisy asked herself if there might have been a time when she should have told Kiki about the existence of her twin sister, but, year after year, that moment had never presented itself. She still felt the power of the absolute prohibition which had been imposed by her father, that prohibition which she had been under since she was six, a prohibition she understood to be total, without knowing or questioning why it should exist. The longer it lasted, the more binding it became, and it was all the stronger for never having been discussed or explained—a terrifying taboo, that
must
be served because of consequences that were unthinkable, irrational, but entirely real.

The only person left alive in the world who knew about Dani was Anabel, but Daisy never discussed Dani even with her. After Stash’s sudden death, Anabel had assured Daisy that Danielle had been provided for. Nevertheless, Daisy knew, in the deepest part of herself, that Dani was a secret she was under a compulsion to bear by herself.
She had been born first
—nothing had changed that fact, and her deepest loyalties and sense of responsibility still went to Dani. Often, when she was in the midst of some special enjoyment, she would imagine Dani, her double, her other self, more her child than her sister, playing in the garden or singing the simple songs she had been taught, and hot tears would fill her eyes at the realization of all her twin was missing, all the new knowledge and experience she would never have. Her only comfort was the realization that Dani was as happy as she could possibly be, that Queen Anne’s School was truly home to her and that the staff and other patients had become her family.