“You know white is mourning color in China. And besides, it reminds me of Darcy.” Ma is silent for a minute and then she says: “I’m worried about your sister. You know we send her to the best private school in New Haven.” Marty has finally conceded to this, because it’s where Schuyler goes.
Into my brain jump possibilities: flunking out, drugs, pregnant.
“She got arrested,” Ma says. “At Macy’s, with her friends. She was shoplifting.”
I think of another time she got caught shoplifting, with me. I say: “That’s not so bad.”
“Not so bad? I had to go down and pick her up. So shameful! She and those girls, all their parents so rich, can buy anything they want.”
“What did she take?”
“Some kind of jumper, not even nice-looking. She tried to wear it under her clothes.”
“Did they press charges?”
“Not this time. I think she won’t do it again.”
“What did Daddy say?”
Ma presses her lips together. “Of course he’s very upset. But she doesn’t listen to him. Maybe you talk to her.”
When I go up to her room, Marty is sprawled out on her blue-and-white-checked comforter, leafing through Vogue.
“That’s sad about Darcy, isn’t it?” I sit down next to her, noticing she has on way too much eye makeup.
“The guy was shitfaced.” She yawns and turns over onto her back, stretching like a cat. “Christ, am I hung over.”
“You knew him?”
“Not personally. He was a townie.”
“You’re a townie.”
“Fuck you.”
“Ma told me about your crime,” I say.
“It was stupid.”
“Why’d you do it?”
“For Christ’s sake, Sa. I’ve already had all the lectures.”
“Ma thinks you’re sorry.”
She laughs, flipping her hair out of her eyes. I’m losing patience.
“Are you going to keep on acting this way?”
“What way?”
“Like a self-centered bitch.”
“Oh God, I don’t believe you. Who’s the one going to the fancy-schmancy boarding school?” She sits up. “You know, I read your journal last summer. I know all about your jaunts by the river, how you get your liquor and your pot.”
“What?”
“You know what Ma and Daddy would do if I told them?”
“I can’t believe you read my journal.”
“I can’t tell you how sick I am of hearing how perfect you are.”
“At least I don’t UPSET them.”
“Because you’re a hypocrite.”
“You could have gone away.”
“And leave Ma? No way.”
“Ma can take care of herself.”
“How do you know? You’re not around.” Marty flops back onto a mound of pillows, her arms folded behind her head. “But you know what? I wouldn’t be you for all the money in the world. You’re so goddamn passive. You can’t stand up for yourself. You have no personality.”
I lean over and punch her, hard, in the soft part of her biceps. She’s caught off guard and tries to hit me back, but misses and goes toppling off the bed. The way she falls is overdramatic, just a little too graceful.
“Get out of my room,” she growls, facedown on the rag rug. I can’t tell whether she’s crying or not.
“No one’s making you stay in this dump.”
“GET OUT OF MY ROOM.” She jumps up and then her hands are in front of my face and I feel the biting pain of her fingernails in the flesh of my neck. I reach and slap her fingers away, slap until my own hand bones sting. I’m still bigger, after all. She lunges forward and with all her weight shoves me toward the door. “GET OUT.”
“You’re such a baby,” I shout back. “Just wait until you’re out in the real world without Ma to protect you. You’ll be a big failure.”
She slams the door in my face.
I begin spending more and more of my breaks with Fran at her mother’s apartment in New York City. During the day we go shopping or to museums and at night we get stoned and send out for Chinese food and watch old movies on TV. Sometimes we go out with the boys Fran grew up with, who like her are smart-alecky and good-looking. The two of us dress up in our best thrift-shop outfits—Fran in a lime miniskirt and an orange chiffon blouse, me in a pink strapless gown threaded with silver beads. I have to stuff the top with Kleenex to make it stay up. Fran scrutinizes the effect. “You have a beautiful neck,” she says, “but maybe next time you should wear evening gloves.” She never directly refers to the scars on my arms.
My boy is always excruciatingly polite. Fran says not to worry, these guys aren’t sophisticated enough to handle someone as exotic as me. What reassures me most is that she doesn’t seem to take them very seriously herself. Once a couple of them come to visit us at school and we go skinny-dipping in the river. Fran’s pale round breasts, illuminated by the moonlight, fascinate all of us. “You’re thinner than you look,” my boy remarks to me, and I know it’s not a compliment.
Summers, when I have to go back to Woodside Avenue, I hide out in my bedroom, avoiding my parents as much as possible. I do volunteer things: arts-and-crafts counselor at a day camp, teaching life skills at a shelter workshop for the mentally handicapped. Maybe my sister is right, I’m a complete wimp, and helping people worse off makes me feel better. Weekends when the weather is good I’m out in the back yard drawing or painting. It’s the one thing I do that takes me away from this world. I buy a field guide to learn the trees: silver maple, sugar maple, pin oak, blue spruce, and my favorite, the two black walnuts that form a kind of gateway to Ma’s garden. A matched pair, the tree man says to Daddy, the wood worth twenty thousand dollars at least. One summer one of the trees is struck by lightning and has to be carted off in huge splinters, worthless. I notice Daddy doesn’t brag about the one that is left, as he had with the pair. It seems that symmetry is terribly important to most people.
Marty has a string of summer jobs—the longest as hostess at a fancy steakhouse downtown, but she quits after a fight with the owner. “He wanted me to be goddamn Suzie Wong,” she says.
“Useless, both of you,” Daddy says at the dinner table. “Walking pieces of meat.” He points out that the younger sister of one of his summer school students is a page in the U.S. Senate. Not to mention Xiao Lu, who is going to physics camp in the Adirondacks.
I have trouble sleeping, those summer nights at home. I read till I’m too restless to lie in bed anymore and then I go out to the backyard and smoke, and sometimes I even dream about this boy or that. It’s not sex I’m thinking about. I want them to want me. That would be enough.
Back at boarding school I keep working on my portfolio, and on April 15, senior year, I get in line for the dorm phone to tell my parents I didn’t get into Yale. Ma is the one who answers.
“That’s a shame,” she says. “I don’t know what you’re going to do now.”
“Half our class applied, you know, and they took only seven people.”
“Your father will be very disappointed.”
“I’m going to the Rhode Island School of Design, Ma. It’s a very good art school. Maybe the best in the country. They gave me a scholarship and everything.”
“I just talk to Xiao Lu’s mother. He got into Harvard and M.I.T.”
For graduation I give Fran a hammered silver bangle and she gives me a pair of silver earrings shaped like teardrops.