Bittersweet Dreams Read online

  My father was there minutes after the paramedics had arrived. He stood off to the side, holding me, as we both watched them work desperately. I knew she was gone, but my father clung to hope. He was surely thinking, This can’t be happening, while I was thinking of how it had happened, what had gone wrong in her body. When the paramedics shook their heads, my father pressed me tighter to him. I put my arms around him, and we walked out behind the stretcher to watch them put my mother in the ambulance.

  My father always claimed that I was holding him up. The strength in my arms was what kept him standing, and the look in my eyes kept him breathing.

  All through the funeral, my father never stopped telling people how I’d had the foresight to call 911 before calling him and how I had performed CPR. He assured them that I knew exactly what to do. He was probably still in shock himself and kept himself from breaking down by bragging about me. I found it interesting how people wanted me to describe what had happened in as much detail as I could. It was as if that made them feel better or they thought it would help me get through it. I knew almost all of them were surprised at the cool explanation of the physical details from someone my age, but I would have had to confess something. Ever since I was a little girl, ever since Fish Face, I enjoyed shocking people and seeing the expressions of amazement on their faces.

  At least I had a sense of humor about something, right?

  Anyway, later on, when my teachers informed Daddy and Julie that I had to be separated from the others more often because I was disruptive, challenging things they said or asking questions that were beyond the subject at hand (at first, they thought I had ADD and was unable to concentrate; later they realized I was merely bored), Julie was embarrassed. She surprised me. She wanted my father to persuade them not to do such a thing. They had the discussion right at the dinner table in front of me, as if I weren’t there.

  For a moment, a small, slight moment, I thought she really cared about how this would affect me. Was she capable of being concerned for me? Then she continued to talk, and that thought died a swift death.

  “Separate her? It sounds like they’re afraid she’ll contaminate the other students. I have many friends with children in this school, Roger. There’ll be talk. It doesn’t make us look too good, and it makes me wonder about her relationship with Allison, whether I should be worried or what?”

  My father didn’t see it that way, but Julie pointed out that Allison was going to grade school at the same school and would eventually have the same teachers I was having.

  “You know how teachers are when they have the younger sisters or brothers of students who gave them trouble. They think it’s a family trait or something.”

  “She’s not really giving them trouble, not in the sense you mean, Julie,” he said patiently.

  “It’s the same result. Your name gets soiled.”

  “Soiled?” I said, looking up. “You mean made dirty or disgraced?”

  “What?”

  “Okay, Mayfair,” my father said quickly.

  “But this is a stupid discussion, Daddy. Allison and I don’t share any genetics. Why would my teachers transfer their feelings about me to her?”

  “You can still have an influence on her,” Julie said quickly.

  “The teachers won’t make that connection so quickly. Allison doesn’t have the same last name. My father hasn’t legally adopted her.”

  “He will someday,” Julie said confidently. “Her father will not oppose it, believe me.”

  I looked at him. Give her our name? It simply hadn’t occurred to me. As long as she had her father’s name, she was still a stranger, sort of a guest, but that would certainly change if she had my last name, too. And what a mean thing to do to her father, I thought.

  “Yes,” Julie went on. “You think of everything, but you didn’t think of that. You shouldn’t have been so annoying in class. Teachers don’t forget.”

  “It’s not the reason they gave for moving me out of the classroom,” I said. “They know I’m beyond what the class could achieve already. It wasn’t fair to me, and it wasn’t fair to them.”

  She simply smirked. The principal might have done better if he had told her I had bad body odor. Despite what my father said, she took it hard. She made him feel guilty, too. She kept harping on what their friends would say. She had married into this family. Her favorite expression about me at home whenever she and my father discussed my school situation and the special way I was being treated by my teachers and the school administration was, “She won’t grow up normal.”

  I couldn’t help but correct her. “You mean, I won’t grow up to be normal, Julie. Or you could say I won’t grow up normally. Adverbs and nouns,” I added, “have different destinies in sentences.”

  “What? What did she say? And when are you going to make her call me Mother? I’m so embarrassed when she calls me Julie in front of other women, and it’s a very bad influence on Allison. She’s starting to call me Julie, too. I had to slap her this morning.”

  Allison was nearly eleven at that time, and I was almost fourteen. I wasn’t just reading Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, which was Greek to my classmates, but I also read science books like Lives of a Cell or The Evolution of Amphibians and graduate-level sociological and psychological essays and discussions. I was fascinated by everything in my textbooks and never at a loss for a new question, even if it was about something my teachers would not be presenting for months, maybe years. I was that far ahead in my reading and my thinking.

  Despite what I had told Julie, I knew in my heart that the real truth was that my teachers shoved me out of the classroom to escape from me, not to make things better for me or the rest of the class. They weren’t programmed to work as hard as they would have to work if I remained in the room. Calling what I was doing independent study was just a fancy way of saying, “Get her out of my hair.”

  They were all probably happy that I had been taken completely out of their school, I thought now as we drove on to Spindrift. There was no longer a possibility of having me as a student, of being challenged and made to look inadequate in front of the other students. Some of them were probably saying they had suspected that someday I might do something as outrageous as what I had done. They might even cite some notorious people who were highly intelligent but had done bad things, just so they could justify their antagonism for someone they had to admit was mentally advanced, someone they should normally cherish and nurture.

  “She’ll probably end up working for some clandestine organization like an even more secret branch of the CIA,” one of them would say, and most of the them would nod.

  As we drew closer to Piñon Pine Grove, Julie primped her hair and checked her makeup. She never could understand why I didn’t care more about my appearance. She actually encouraged me to wear lipstick and paint my toenails and fingernails when I was eleven. Many of the girls in my class were doing just that.

  One of the happiest but soon to be frustrating days she spent with me was instructing me in how to put on makeup at her vanity table. I was there because I didn’t want to disappoint my father. Allison stood off to the side, watching jealously. I would have gladly given her my seat and let her take my place. My mind kept drifting back to the calculus problem I was attacking in the twelfth-grade math book I was using, so I was inattentive. I was sloppy about putting on fingernail polish.

  “Whenever you have no interest in something, you rush it and mess it up,” Julie complained, moaning as if I were ruining one of her precious works of art or something. “Maybe some of your grade-school teachers were right. You have ADD.”

  “No. They were wrong. They’ve admitted that. They’re not the best judges of the problem, despite being teachers.”

  “How could you say that? They were your teachers.”

  “You need to be a doctor to diagnose it properly, and many teachers use it as a convenient excuse for why students don’t pay attention to their boring presentations of material. Do
n’t you recall having teachers like that? My father does.”

  She stared at me a moment, at a loss for any way to argue, which was something she desperately needed to do. “I don’t care. That’s not the point I’m making,” she said. When she became frustrated, she always wagged her head, which made her upper torso wag, too. Sometimes she did it so hard I thought she might fall off her chair.

  I sighed deeply. “Okay, Julie. What is the point you’re making?” I asked.

  “Don’t you want to look pretty? You have a very pretty face, your mother’s eyes, and if you brushed your hair properly, it wouldn’t look like a rat’s nest.”

  “Have you ever seen one?” I asked her.

  “One what?”

  “Rat’s nest.”

  “Oh, Mayfair. It’s just an expression.”

  “Yes, but do you know why people use it? You should know what you’re saying when you say something, Julie.”

  She shook her head and muttered to herself, “Why am I even trying?”

  “We compare messy things to a rat’s nest because rats build their nests from an assortment of items, including anything that attracts their interest. Their young defecate in them before they’re old enough to leave the nests and sleep in their own mess.”

  “Oh, my God, that’s disgusting.”

  “Maybe then you don’t mean to compare my hair to a rat’s nest,” I said.

  She lowered her chin to her chest and stared down sadly at her makeup, all her wonderful new powders and creams, the special scissors, and the variety of brushes, all that beautification magic. She looked like she was about to burst into tears. I must say, from the time my father married her until that moment, I had always found her as curious as I would a new insect. She rarely read a book. She collected fashion and celebrity gossip magazines like a squirrel storing acorns and spent half her day getting ready to go to lunch with other women like herself and the rest of the day talking about what they had talked about at lunch.

  Was she a product of evolution going in a different direction?

  “I remember when my mother first permitted me to wear makeup and instructed me in how to do it,” she said softly, sucking back her tears. “I was very excited, and when I went downstairs to show my father, he looked like he was going to cry. ‘My little girl is becoming a young woman,’ he said. I was sad and happy at the same time.”

  She turned to me, narrowing her eyes as if she were the one looking at a specimen under a microscope, and not vice versa.

  “Doesn’t any of this excite you or interest you at all? You must have some reaction to it, right?”

  “It’s curious,” I admitted.

  She looked at Allison to see if she understood anything I was saying, but Allison stood there with that habitual smirk of hers. Unfortunately, she had her mother’s ugly habit of dropping the corners of her mouth.

  “Curious? What do you mean, curious?” Julie asked.

  “We make fun of primitive people for coloring their faces, but here we turn it into a high domestic art form.”

  “What? You’re saying putting on makeup makes us primitive?”

  “Consider the whole picture, Julie. Television commercials imply that if you use their products, you’ll be as beautiful as the models. They airbrush them and touch up their faces in magazine advertisements and photographs. It’s dishonest and makes every girl, every woman, frustrated and unhappy with herself. Look at Allison. She’s dying to get to this vanity table, and she’s only in the fifth grade. You should take that television set out of her room. It’s a carnival.”

  “No!” Allison cried.

  “Don’t change the subject, Mayfair. Don’t you want to use makeup, wear lipstick, and have your hair look nicer?”

  “Not particularly,” I said. “At least, not now. I’m not in any mating season.”

  “Mating season?” She looked like she would cry again.

  “I want to use makeup,” Allison said. “I want to look nicer now. Let me.”

  Julie shook her body as if she were throwing off water like a drenched dog. “This is giving me a headache,” she said. “I wanted to do something nice for you, and you’re giving me a headache. Curious, primitive . . . I’ve never heard any young girl talk like you do.”

  “It’s interesting, that’s all I’m saying, Julie. You know, it wasn’t that long ago that girls were forbidden to wear lipstick until they were at least eighteen,” I told her. “Think about the changes in social mores that have occurred not only over the past century but over the past decade. There are girls in high school now with tattoos on their necks, breasts, and rear ends, and their parents didn’t stop them. Girls wear rings in their noses, their navels, and their lips. They punch holes in their cheeks. Now, there is a tribe in Central Africa—”

  “Stop!” she cried, and popped out of her seat with her hands over her ears. Both Allison and I were a little shocked at her burst of frustration. She relaxed and regained her composure, because Allison was looking at her wide-eyed. I might have been smiling. “I need to see about dinner,” Julie said. “Either finish putting on your nail polish or wash off what you’ve done.” She scrunched up her shoulders and left her bedroom.

  I looked at myself in the mirror. I did have my mother’s green eyes, slightly almond-shaped. I had naturally long eyelashes but still didn’t understand why Julie coveted them so. My nose was slightly longer than I would have liked, but it was straight, and I had full grapefruit-pink lips that I knew Julie also coveted. Whenever she complimented me on my rich, smooth complexion, she sounded like she was complaining. I knew she thought my beauty was wasted. She wasn’t alone. I had heard that sort of comment bitterly made by other girls in school from time to time. I wasn’t unappreciative of my good looks. I just wasn’t as absorbed with them as she and the other girls were. Maybe that was a fault. I was thinking more about it lately.

  My menarche came later than for most girls, but once it had, my body began a determined march to maturity, led by full, perky breasts. I read everything I could get my hands on in articles or books that discussed the subject of female development, and then I analyzed my own reactions to my budding sexual desires. I even thought about keeping a journal about my own development, but I decided there was really nothing unusual enough about me to warrant the effort.

  That was the way I was.

  I analyzed everything I did or started to do and determined how much time and energy I should spend on it.

  Like this makeup thing.

  It was easier to wash off the three nails I had painted, give my hair four or five quick brushes so it wouldn’t fall over my eyes, and then get back to my calculus.

  “You’re being ungrateful to my mother,” Allison said. The word ungrateful was in practically every other sentence her mother tossed in my direction.

  “Do you know the meaning of gratitude, or are you just parroting your mother?”

  “Don’t call me a parrot!” she screamed, and walked out when I began to laugh.

  However, there was no question that Julie saw all that as another example of my deliberate failure rather than appreciating what she was trying to do for me. She complained to my father at dinner.

  “After all,” she said, “I’m making the best effort I can, Roger. I offer to take her to get new clothes, new shoes, anything, but she shows no interest. She has to meet me at least halfway.”

  He nodded and told me I should be more appreciative. He tried to sound stern, but I knew he hadn’t reprimanded me enough to please her. She sulked her way to bedtime.

  I suppose what I eventually did to Allison and her English teacher, Mr. Taylor, in a way pleased her, despite how she reacted. It finally turned my father against me and justified her constant complaining about me.

  Right now, it was the only reason for any regret, the only reason for my telling my father I was sorry.

  But let me explain how I happened now to be in my father’s car, with my bags in the trunk and my stepmother, at the pro
spect of getting me out of the house and out of her hair, practically panting like a dog about to be untied and let free to run.

  5

  I have this tendency to compare Julie to animals often. I remember thinking she must have charged like an elephant in heat at my bedroom door one Sunday afternoon a few months ago. First, I heard her footsteps pounding on the hallway floor. Most of the time, she wore sharp-heeled shoes that clicked over the Spanish tiles, but this particular day, they sounded more like the rat-a-tat of a machine gun. She was moving that quickly and determinedly. Then I heard the rattling of the doorknob, and when I didn’t respond instantly, I actually saw the hinges strain. Adrenaline must have been pouring out of her ears.

  I had looked up reluctantly from The History of Western Civilization to pay attention. I was nearly finished with the book and hated the interruption, especially if it was Julie doing the interrupting. Most of the time, it was about something so minor or insignificant that I could barely listen.

  “Why is this door locked?” she screamed. I envisioned her putting her lips to the hinges to be sure her voice carried through. “Mayfair! I know you hear me. Don’t pretend you’re asleep!” She slapped the door with the palm of her hand so hard I was sure it turned bloodred.

  “Coming!” I shouted back, but I took my time. I took so long, in fact, that she rattled the handle again, this time so hard I thought surely she would break it, which only made me take longer. I stood there and let her shout my name one more time and slap the door again before I unlocked it.

  When I opened it, she was standing there breathing hard, her shoulders rising and falling with every deep, quick breath, her face looking like she had been in direct sunlight too long. She was so upset she’d permitted strands of her dark brown pampered hair to pop up like broken guitar strings and her mascara to run. Her lips trembled as the rage washed over her face in small tremors. I was waiting for her to explode and shatter herself all over the walls and the floor.