Bittersweet Dreams Page 5

  My father had said that ever since I could talk, I had questions and, soon after, good answers, even before I began to read. When he was first dating Julie, he told her quite a bit about me. He wanted to prepare her. In fact, she’d said that some nights, I was the sole topic.

  “He’s so proud of you,” she had told me the first time we met at our house. They were on their way to a charity event, and he had brought her to the house first, explicitly to meet me. He’d asked me to put on something nice and brush my hair.

  Anyway, from her tone of voice, I had understood that she wasn’t terribly happy about my being so much the center of my father’s life. I didn’t mind that I was the big topic of discussion when he was courting her, but he had built me up so high in her eyes that she was quite nervous about meeting me the first time. I enjoyed her being so tense. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.

  “How pretty you look,” she began. “Did your daddy pick out that dress for you?”

  “No. I pick out my own clothes,” I said.

  “Really?” She smiled. I could see it was quite forced. She really didn’t like the dress I had chosen. She glanced at my father, who shrugged. “Well, maybe you’ll let me help you choose a dress next time you need one,” she said.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Mayfair!” my father said.

  I gave him one of my innocent looks, and he shook his head in frustration. I really was innocent back then. I was looking for some reasonable response. Was she a clothing expert? What was her justification for the offer? Why would she care so much about how I looked? These all seemed to be logical questions, and my comment hadn’t been meant to show disrespect or hurt her feelings. It was meant simply to get an answer that made sense.

  However, I could see in her eyes that I had hurt her feelings. I didn’t care, and I could admit that I was actually a little pleased. Of course, I would soon realize that my reaction had been natural. Any child, even one who was unafraid of showing her feelings about something, as I was, would naturally make it evident that she resented another woman replacing her mother, not that she ever could. It was merely a pathetic attempt at it.

  “Your father’s told me so much about you,” Julie continued. “I feel as if I’ve known you for years.”

  “Does anyone really get to know anyone, even after years?” I asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “People change so much,” I said, eyeing my father. “You never know when they’ll do something completely out of character, or the character you thought they were.”

  His eyes were full of warnings. He knew how sharp and biting I could be, even at that age.

  “Oh, well, I suppose. I mean, I don’t really mean I know you yet, but I hope in time we’ll get to know each other and be more comfortable with each other,” Julie said, fumbling for the right words.

  “I know a little about you. I know you have a ten-year-old daughter and you were in a bad divorce,” I said.

  She looked at my father as if he had betrayed a confidence they held dearly between them. “Yes,” she admitted, “it was unpleasant.”

  “Well, there you are,” I said. “My point.”

  “Pardon? Your point?”

  “You obviously never really knew your husband if you ended up in a divorce. Either you or he changed so much you had to get a divorce.”

  She stared for a moment as if she were looking at someone who spoke a foreign language and then looked to my father for a rescue. It was clear she had never had someone as young as me say such things to her. He shook his head at me, smiled slightly, and then declared that they had to get going.

  “I look forward to seeing you again, Mayfair,” Julie said before she left, holding out her hand.

  “Why?” I asked.

  She held her breath, puffing out her cheeks and then pulling her hand back, saying, “To get to know you better, of course. I also would like you to meet Allison.”

  “Okay,” I said, with about as much enthusiasm as someone going to the dentist.

  She turned to leave, and my father leaned toward me to whisper, “We’ll talk later.”

  Afterward, when we did talk, he made it clear to me that he really liked Julie and thought she would be good for both of us.

  “I’d really appreciate it if you would make an effort to get along with her. Any relationship requires some compromise, Mayfair. Besides,” he said, “we always wanted you to have a younger brother or sister.”

  “Don’t you know which it is? Allison sounds like a girl.”

  “Mayfair, stop it,” he said. Whenever he gave me his warning to behave, he lifted his eyebrows and pressed his lips together so hard that the blood would leave them.

  When he started to spend nights at her house, I knew the marriage was inevitable. I tried to accept it, running through reasons and motivations, but I knew I never would.

  The night he’d come into my room to tell me he had proposed to her, I was in the middle of researching the various theories about Hamlet and why he took so long to avenge the murder of his father. It was almost as if something powerful had arranged for me to be reading Hamlet coincidentally at that time. I had just read the lines, “A second time I kill my husband dead, When second husband kisses me in bed.”

  I didn’t look up from the paper I was writing.

  “Did you hear me, Mayfair?”

  “Yes, Daddy. You’re standing only a few feet away.”

  “Well, can you at least acknowledge it, please?”

  I turned around and looked at him. “Are you sure you want to marry her? Marriage is a very serious commitment.”

  He nearly laughed. “I think I know what I’m doing, Mayfair, yes. Don’t tell me you didn’t think this day would come.”

  I nodded. “Are you drawing up a prenuptial?”

  He shook his head. “What?”

  “It’s just sensible nowadays, Daddy, especially with your net worth and the fact that you’re going to marry someone who has been through a divorce. She might have trouble with long-term relationships.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it,” he said. “Why am I talking about this?” He shook his head as if he could restart our conversation. “Can you please make an effort to get along?”

  “I can,” I said. He was asking only for an effort.

  “Thanks.” He turned to start out and then stopped. “This doesn’t mean I don’t miss and love your mother, Mayfair.”

  “That’s not something you should tell me, Daddy. It’s something you should tell Julie.”

  I didn’t think I would ever forget the hard, cold look on his face. “She knows,” he said before leaving.

  For a moment, it was as if he had taken all the air out of the room with him.

  But I didn’t cry.

  I returned to Hamlet.

  We’re all in a play, I thought. We all seemed to have roles assigned to us even before we were born. I knew I did. Whether I liked it or not, I was on a stage. The curtain was open, and the lights were on.

  Who knew how the play would look when the final curtain was drawn?

  4

  I had met Allison a few times before my father married her mother, of course. I thought she was a mousy, frightened little girl, but that was just a first impression. In the back of my mind, I stored the thought that she was Julie’s daughter. She had to have inherited some of her conniving, a little of her phoniness. The innocent, meek look could very well be a deception. Besides, my father was now going to absorb a great deal of her mother’s attention and love. She was probably as unhappy about it as I was, and maybe she would do more to sabotage the relationship than I would. I hoped so.

  Julie must have prepared her for meeting me. She was polite but very cautious.

  “My mother told me you were very smart,” she had said, sounding like it was a criminal offense. “I get mostly Bs.”

  “Bs sting,” I said. “Go for As.”

  “What?”

  Figure i
t out yourself, I wanted to say, but I just laughed.

  She looked at me suspiciously. “None of my friends get all As, and the girls I know who get all As don’t have many friends,” she said.

  This is going to be really something, I told myself. I’ll be living with a Barbie doll for a stepmother and a ditzy tween who thinks she might catch intelligence from me and lose her friends. Later, because of who and what she was, it would be easy to use her as a way to get back at both the man who abused me and my stepmother, with whom I eventually shared a mutual dislike.

  Fortunately, my father and Julie decided not to have a big wedding, so I didn’t have to go through all that business with dresses, flowers, pictures, guest lists, invitations, and menus. They were married by a judge and took a week in London as a honeymoon. Allison stayed with an aunt. I was fine by myself with our maid looking after the house and keeping an eye on me, although I could tell that I intimidated her as much as I did anyone else. She spent most of her time avoiding me. She wasn’t afraid of me. I was just too different from the teenage girls she knew, her two nieces and their friends. She was always promising to have them come around to meet me. Maybe my father had put her up to it, but she never did, and although I think I would have liked it, I didn’t encourage her.

  My father called from London during their honeymoon only once. Whenever he was away on business trips that took a week or more, he always called me two or three times, at least. Anyone would tell me that a man on his honeymoon shouldn’t be calling home much. Maybe he knew my mind was already cemented when it came to my opinion of Julie back then. I imagined she would make a face or a comment if he mentioned he was thinking of calling me.

  I could just hear her. “Why? She’s no child, Roger, and she’s more intelligent than the two of us together. Don’t baby her. She might even be insulted.”

  Insulted? It wasn’t a thought he would have had, but perhaps she put it into his head and that was why I didn’t hear from him again until he returned.

  I would never have been insulted by his showing me concern. I never was when he went on other trips. I knew he had confidence and faith in me taking good care of myself and the house. He wasn’t calling because of that. He was calling because he loved me. I was good at reading people right from the first time I met them. Daddy used to say half-jokingly that I would be an incredible detective. For a few weeks, he was on a real streak when it came to that, talking about forensic law enforcement, CSI stuff, and even international law enforcement. Like all parents, he probably needed the comfort of knowing there was an endgame here, some target or goal for me to achieve, a goal he could understand, that anyone could. Otherwise, what was the point of all this intelligence?

  To me, Julie was a simple read. She was one of those insecure people who needed to be constantly reassured of her importance and was threatened by anyone sharing her stage. From what I already knew about her before she had even moved in to live with us, I thought she would even be jealous of the attention my father paid to her daughter.

  After spending more time with Allison, I came to the conclusion that she was merely shy and battle-fatigued from what must have been a nasty home life and living in the shadow of a self-centered mother. Julie was surely the kind of mother who flaunted her good looks and made her daughter feel she would never be as beautiful. Maybe that was part of what had destroyed her first marriage. I listened between the lines whenever I heard her describing it, and I felt confident that her ex-husband had grown tired of being married to someone who was more in love with herself than with him. I wondered when my father would grow tired of that, too.

  From the details I learned from Allison when I was able to get her to talk about it, the fights between Julie and her ex-husband had bordered on physical. I easily imagined Allison behind a closed door with her hands over her ears and her teeth clenched, half expecting the ceiling to come falling onto her head. I had read sociological and psychological studies on domestic turmoil to do a paper for my history teacher, so I knew that when parents went at each other like that, their children feel they’re also being pulled apart. If the children are very young at the time, they actually can develop medical problems, such as trouble with digestion, and learning disabilities.

  While reading about all of this domestic turmoil and its effect on children, I felt like screaming. Could parents be so blind that they couldn’t see what they were doing to those they supposedly loved? The truth seemed to be that people hurt those they claimed to love more than they hurt those they didn’t. I listened and overheard stories other students told about their home lives. To me, it was very clear what was happening and what the results would be. When I mentioned some of this to my father once, he brightened and said, “Maybe you should be a psychiatrist, Mayfair, a child psychiatrist. You’d be great.”

  I’d be great at anything I did, I thought. That wasn’t the point. What was obvious was that my father needed me to be aiming at something tangible, something he could cite. He couldn’t explain that his daughter was going to be a student for most of her life, maybe a philosopher. Everyone else’s daughter was going to be a teacher, a lawyer, something in the fashion industry, perhaps a doctor. Something.

  All of this, my life at home, my father’s expectations, my teachers, and the pressures other students subtly put on me, made me want to scream. Often, I was in the school library when this urge came over me. Imagine what that would have done, what it would have added to the image I had at school. The librarian, Mr. Monk, already thought I was something created in a laboratory. The speed with which I went through books seemed to frighten him. He was a tall, thin man with glassy gray-blue eyes and very thin light brown hair. Whether I imagined it or not, he seemed to step back whenever I approached the desk, as if he expected I might throw a book I was returning at him because I found it poorly written or something.

  After having done the paper on domestic crisis, I was sure I could diagnose Allison’s problems. She seemed to be a classic example of what could result, which was why I wasn’t sympathetic as much as I was curious about her. It was as if a good case study had been delivered to my doorstep. My father wasn’t too far off with his latest suggestion for my career. Anything to do with psychology was intriguing, so I was happy to have the opportunity to study something firsthand.

  In the beginning, I approached her the way a good therapist might. I wanted to know how much her parents’ nasty divorce had destroyed her emotionally. I formed my questions carefully. I wanted to see if she had any talents, abilities that her mother had stifled. What would her feelings be about my father and her relationship with him? Would she see him as an interloper, someone who didn’t have any business being in their lives, or would she see him as a wonderful change, a hope?

  My father mistook my interest and my talks with Allison for a desire to make her feel like my sister. Maybe that was really a part of it. Maybe he was right that I had always wanted a younger brother or sister, but as he and I already knew, forming relationships, any relationships, didn’t come easily for me. I had little faith that they ever would. So, in the beginning, at least, Allison was simply another specimen under my microscopic gaze. I admit I had a tendency to treat most of the girls I met the same way, and consequently, building friendships was very difficult, if not impossible. I had always been like this, but it was even worse after my mother’s death. It wasn’t entirely my fault.

  When I entered junior high school, my teachers often separated me from my classmates every chance they had, putting me in small rooms or in the library to read and work on my own, so even then, I never had much of a chance to have a best friend or, for that matter, any real friends. Maybe the real reason I had so much trouble making friends, trusting people, or committing to a relationship was the pain I had suffered when I lost my mother. I was afraid of losing someone else, wasting my affections. Because I was so intelligent, most people misread my reactions to my mother’s untimely death.

  My mother had died instantly one m
orning in our kitchen. The autopsy later showed that she had suffered a cerebral aneurism. I was nine and sitting at the kitchen table at the time. I didn’t freeze and start to cry when she collapsed. I called 911, and as calmly as I could, I told the operator that my mother had fallen over her bowl of cereal and was unconscious with her eyes wide open.

  “I got her down on the floor and gave her CPR,” I said, “but I can’t revive her. I think she has had a stroke.”

  I knew exactly what a stroke was. One of the first books I asked my father to buy for me was a medical book. I loved diagnosing illnesses. My father was always amused at how I interpreted symptoms whenever he or my mother had an ache or pain, but I was not yet set on being a doctor and already, even at only nine years old, wondered if I would be good with patients. I could see them complaining about me for not having a good bedside manner. “She treats me like I’m a specimen and not a person,” they would say.

  See? I could admit to my problems. Right from the days when I could first read and write, I knew that if you weren’t honest about yourself, you would never improve or grow.

  After I had called 911, I kept myself from crying, because I knew I had to get the correct information out quickly. Then I called my father and basically told him the same thing, but this time, I did begin to cry. Until the paramedics and my father arrived, I sat on the floor beside her, holding my mother’s hand, struggling to think of something else I might do to help her. I could almost hear her telling me to stop pretending, because she was already dead and gone.

  “You know better, Mayfair. Concentrate now on helping your father get through this,” she would certainly say. “He’ll be leaning on you, even at your young age. And he’ll be worrying so much about you now. Comfort him. Be warm and loving, Mayfair. I’m depending on you.”