Ali in Wonderland: And Other Tall Tales (8 page)

A
few weeks later I was skipping out the door to meet Chad for . . . ahem, let’s just say miniature golf. I had almost closed the front door when my mother called me in to her office for a second. Whenever my mother called me in to her office, it was never for a second. We sat on the couch, and she studied me like an opposing prosecutor. “Are you okay?” she asked with concern.

“Um, yes.”

“Anything you want to talk to me about?” She leaned in. I assumed she’d found the Chinese bowl I broke earlier that summer and stashed under my sister’s bed. But before I launched into an elaborate lie pinning it on Sissy, my mother pulled out a pink print from her bag. “I got this bill from the emergency room.” Damn health care system. I didn’t know if or how I was covered, and so we had given the emergency room Chad’s mother’s credit card, along with my address.

We both sat in silence. And then my mother smoothed her skirt. “And you’re okay? The doctors said it’s all fine?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, that’s good.”

And then my mother said something to me that I have never forgotten and which made me feel so protected and connected to her. It was slightly over my head at the time, but I’ve carried it with me to this day. She looked directly in my eyes, “If you or your sisters ever find yourselves in trouble, you come to me! I don’t need some jackass emptying out his piggy bank and taking you to some half-cocked, rundown clinic.”

I never had to take her up on this. Although, I remember when my college boyfriend (holding chopsticks and a spatula) came flying into the room screaming, “Ill tell you if it’s a cyst!”

Chapter Nine

Tennis, Anyone?

I
was not a competitive child. I never experienced insomnia when I half-assed a paper on John Adams or the origins of poison ivy. I didn’t play team sports, and rose only to a mediocre level in skiing and tennis. These were the two sports our family trips were built around and, I was told, would benefit me socially when I was older. I never competed for boys, choosing instead to live by the motto, “If you love something, set it free, if it comes back to you, it’s yours; if not, well, then he’s an asshole.” I did, however, compete for some attention. I was the youngest of the first marriage and middle of the extended family, so it was my psychological prerogative to scratch the door until I was noticed. My stepfather loved a party trick that involved picking me up by my jawbone until my little feet dangled off the floor. In the olden days they called it a hanging. But if that was what it took to get a little applause, I would always put my neck out. The payback was forcing him and my mother to sit through two hours of me lip-synching the entire
Free to Be . . . You and Me
album.

During the summers on the Cape my mother was an avid tennis player. The hair-sprayed Nancy Reagan coif and sparkling kaftans were ditched in D.C., exchanged for faded jeans, white JCPenney T-shirts, and tennis whites. Some days she would garden or go to the local farmer’s market in her tennis whites and never actually make it to a court. Fashionistas would say it’s the outfit that transitions into anything.

Most women wear their tennis skirts just above the knee, with some sort of sewn-in panty underneath. My daughters call them skorts. Or they were bloomers. My mother’s skirt was significantly shorter, and she wore nothing underneath but her nylon underwear. She didn’t care about the fashion, comfort, or perception; it was a white skirt, and that was what was required of a tennis ensemble. It was the same “Oh, who’s really paying attention” attitude that would compel her to strip down to her Maidenform white bra and translucent underwear and dive into the ocean. While my siblings and I screamed in horror from the sand, she would shout back, “Oh, c’mon, it looks like a white bikini.” Well, not when she emerged from the surf. If you were standing more than two feet away and couldn’t detect the minuscule clips on the bra, she was stark raving naked. In the middle of a July afternoon. On a public beach. In Cape Cod.

And as Cape Cod was the mandatory destination for family time, I had to leave Chad’s embrace and inflated lips for the month of August. When you’re a teenager and you’re separated from your soul mate du jour, a month is an eternity of Crosby, Stills and Nash songs and answering every phone call on the first ring. Chad’s parents were in South Africa for the summer and left him with the house, the car, and a Visa card. The world was his oyster. And I, his pearl, was smoking cigarettes behind the local Tastee Freez. My days were unstructured: sleep, eat, beach, eat, sleep, eat (although the order could change, depending on the weather).

W
e were having one of our traditional lobster races one night. We would write numbers in nail polish on each of the lobsters’ shells and then race them on the back porch. I know, PETA, I know, how could we torture them and boil them alive? Boredom. It was a stretch to call it a race; it was more of a death march. We once had a bracket of rambunctious lobsters that scurried around with so much vigor, we ended up losing one. My little sister had to share, and while everyone focused on the injustice of Fiona not getting both claws, I imagined how someday there would be thousands of spawned lobsters living under our house. And slowly moving the whole structure closer and closer to and then into the ocean.

As we watched our lifeless crustaceans try to muster up the energy to slither an inch, I asked my mother, “Mom, there’s really nothing for me to do here . . . can I go back to D.C. to see my friends?”

“You mean Chad?” She raised that eyebrow.

“Yes, but also get ready for school . . .”

She gave me that look. “School doesn’t start for a month.”

I adjusted my lobster’s broken antenna. “Why do I have to stay here? Why? What do I have to do to go home?”

“We are here for the month, that’s it, end of discussion.”

I pretended to concentrate on the amazing race. “What if I beat you in tennis?” The idea was ludicrous. I was a C+ player for my age group, always hitting balls into the other court and hurting players.

“Okay,” said my mother, both eyebrows raised to their devil’s peak.

I was startled. “You mean if I beat you in a set of tennis, you’ll let me go back to D.C.?”

She graced me with a condescending smile. “Yes, if you beat me in tennis.”

W
e walked down to the Eel River Beach Club the next morning and took one of the courts by the parking lot. We could hear the seagulls cawing as they rifled through the open Dumpster, one occasionally flying off with the tip of a hot dog roll in its beak. I wanted to dive right into the competition just like those flying rats, but my mother insisted we warm up. She was so polished, with her follow-through moves and slamming serves, her long tan legs dancing across the court. I was convinced my racquet was badly strung, as the majority of the balls I hit flew over the court fence, nearly hitting the gulls and causing a ruckus.

My mother collected three balls in her left hand. “You ready to start?”

I nodded.

To this day, I have never been as focused as I was that afternoon in Plymouth, Mass. I willed myself to be a better player than I was. I was nailing her lobs, smashing her net shots, and slicing my returns. I was Chris Evert without bangs. My mother grew serious; it was no longer fun and volleys, but a competition with the reality of something to lose. I played off her mistakes, which only seemed to multiply them.

It was match point; I was ahead by one game. The sun was beating down on us, a fat kid covered in blue popsicle juice was watching through the chain-link fence, and we could hear the loudspeaker by the pool: “Adult swim, everyone out of the pool except for seniors, it’s adult swim. Hey Anthony—are you swimming without trunks?” It was my mother’s serve. She bounced the ball about eight times before she flung it up into the air. It was wide. Again, she bounced the next ball about nine times. She tossed it, smacked it, and we both eyeballed it as it narrowly missed the baseline.

I won. I had beaten my mother in tennis. I broke into hysterical laughter. “I won! I won!” And then I paused, preparing myself for the disappointment of my mother explaining to me that she had never been serious about the bet and how it was fun just to play.

As she started gathering up our tennis balls, though, she smiled. “I’ll call the airline.”

Game over!

Chapter Ten

London Calling

I
n our family the concept of a purposeless summer was anathema. As a college girl I couldn’t bear another session of tennis camp (most of the campers were nine) and didn’t feel like being a mother’s helper to some spoiled towhead on Fishers Island who spoke with a lisp and peed in golf bags. My mother suggested an internship. An internship, in her eyes, was a mind-enhancing experience, which would serve me well in future job applications. To me, an internship just meant I was working for no pay. The question was what and where. I was leaning toward concession stand operator in charge of Junior Mints or nail technician, but I knew I didn’t want to live at home in the sweltering humidity of Washington, dining on endive salad and sorbet with my mother and stepfather every night. Plus, I didn’t have a beauty school license. And, not being the outdoorsy type, anything in the Outward Bound arena like mountain-climbing leadership programs was out of the question. I wasn’t going to skin and eat possum meat (without French dressing). When my mother threatened me again with a job answering phones at her office, we compromised on an internship at Christie’s, the art and auction house, in London. I was feeling very adventurous and Anglophilic. And I always have a hankering for clotted cream.

As I was counting down the hours until I could spread my wings, my mother pulled out her shears and clipped them. She insisted I stay with family friends. Poof went my fantasy of a swinging, Austin Powers–type flat, replaced by a room that boasted buttercup yellow curtains and a single bed on the top floor of a town house on St. James’s Place. The mother and father were bankers, and the son was head of the debating society at Oxford. Not the types to roll joints and jump around in popsicle blue leisure suits all night, no way baby! Not that I wanted that; I just liked the idea of the option. The house was filled with oil paintings of stern-looking ancestors and yelping Jack Russell terriers. I expected Jane Austen to come flying in the parlor door at any minute with a basket of wildflowers, a stack of parchment love letters, and some serious boy trouble.

As much as I was infatuated with a British accent and fancied anyone who had one, I did have a boyfriend in the States at the time. Tim was from an unpronouncable town in the middle of Long Island. Hopapogue or Pagapougue. Anyway, Tim was a filmmaker. And a drinker. Well, he was Irish. Tim never passed on a pint of Guinness, and was jealous of my proximity to it. When I went to London for the summer, he acted like I was joining the Peace Corps (to him anywhere outside Long Island was on a different time zone and was festering in malaria), even though he had already taken a job at an Alaskan fish cannery. We communicated exclusively through letters, which, by the time I had received one, reported obsolete, weeks-old news. I would write to him about my strolls through the Tate Museum, the bucolic English countryside, and the exceptional interiors of the British Parliament. Tim would regale me with the fetid stench of fish guts, a dysentery outbreak, and how he contracted crabs from an old sleeping bag. I would sit on the benches of Hyde Park watching young lads in white linen play cricket and writing Tim pages and pages of poetry. He would mail me his toenail clippings. Love is blind.

The first day of my internship I was escorted up magnificent limestone stairs to the prints and watercolors department at Christie’s. There I met my boss, Percy Talbot. He was a persnickety man in a finely tailored suit and tortoiseshell glasses who wore his black hair slicked to the side, and a fresh gardenia pinned to his lapel. He didn’t make eye contact with me or shake my hand. Instead, he led me to a tiny room filled with print files and briefly taught me how to catalog paintings. I had envisioned myself with a wooden gavel, bellowing, “I hear two million, who will bid three!” and drinking champagne at Francis Bacon retrospectives. It didn’t occur to me that a nonpaying job, that required effusive pleading on my mother’s part, would result in a summer boxed in a back room with a magnifying glass and a Sharpie, scrutinizing watercolors.

I would walk home from my airless nook every afternoon making up stories about how I was part of the royal family, but pretending to be a commoner to see what mainstream life was like. Or I was Hungarian and had escaped just after the war, leaving behind the man I loved—but who, I knew, I would one day bump into on the streets of London. Once or twice I was a sexy British spy prepared at any moment to rip off my Sears raincoat and reveal a leather bra and a loaded gun. Am I the only one that does this?

I had dinner with our family friends every night, complete with silver flatware and floral china that corresponded with each course. I would whisper under my breath, “Water glass to the right, bread plate to the left.” It was so English and so civilized I sometimes found myself using words like “jolly good,” “blimey,” and “keep your pecker up” (be happy).

T
he second day of work, Mr. Talbot scolded me for wearing trousers. I was wearing Ralph Lauren herringbone tweed pants with a white silk blouse; we weren’t talking Daisy Duke jean cutoffs and a neon tube top. But pants were forbidden for women by the Christie’s dress code. I spent the day in my capsule of boredom feeling like a rebellious Marlene Dietrich before heading out for another jaunt through the park. As I marched past Buckingham Palace, I decided the next day I would wear pasties and crotchless panties; after all, that was what Gloria Steinem would do, right? By dinner (sole meunière and buttered new potatoes) I had calmed down. I decided to forgo a political stand in favor of keeping my professional life intact. But he was a cheeky bastard.

The third day, I was reprimanded again, this time for wearing my hair down. Again, I didn’t bunny-hop into one of London’s most prestigious establishments looking like Lady Gaga; my hair was simply brushed out and pushed back behind my ears. Christie’s women, I was informed, had to wear their hair up in a bun or some kind of Danish. I was never given a reason; I mean, why not a hairnet? I used paper clips to keep my hair in the best croissant I could muster without a brush or mirror, which set the metal detector off coming back from lunch. Let them think I was stealing office supplies. Bugger off.

After work one afternoon, I decided to explore Harrods, the luxury department store I’d been hearing about at work—an enormous five-acre structure that housed everything from truffles and teeth whitener to an elliptical treadmill, a leather mahjong board, and thousands of diamond trinkets. There was even a real miniature black Mercedes for children. Well, Arab children. I loved watching the Saudi princesses come into the store in a cluster of burkas,
hijab
s, and
khumar
. Clearly, while bowing backward out the door, they had told their husbands they were going to the open market to buy turnips. What they did instead was take the white Bentley straight to Harrods, their daytime playground. They would all bundle into the elevator, and “ding”—Ladies’ Lingerie. And there the gang stripped down to their Versace bras and panties, drank champagne and smoked Benson & Hedges Lights, and gossiped about Michael Caine and Joan Collins. After hours of doubling for extras out of a Robert Palmer video, they would spray themselves with Lysol and chew a few breath mints, get back into their black habits, and scuttle home. This was the original housewives’ reality show.

On my fourth day of work, Mr. Talbot, who clearly needed a kitten in his life, screamed at me yet again—this time for my choice of earrings. I was wearing hoops, and only diamond and pearl studs were acceptable. Why? I thought. As far as I could tell, there weren’t many girl gang wars under way at Christie’s. I had spent an hour comparing two watercolors of haystacks when from down the hall I heard a holler. “Alexandra!” I froze. First of all, Christie’s was a silent institution; second, how many Alexandras could there be? And third, who the hell was screaming out my name?

I gingerly walked into Mr. Talbot’s office like a geisha at her debut. “Did you call me?” I said, practically bowing.

“Yes. I would like a lapsang souchong tea with lemon.”

I didn’t know how to interpret this. “That sounds good, sir.” I think I even bowed again.

“No, I want you to get me a tea with lemon.”

I spent the next two hours trying to find tea and master the pronunciation of
lapsang souchong
. At last I placed the tea on Mr. Talbot’s desk. “He’s gone to lunch,” I heard from the adjoining room. A ginger-haired woman was holding up slides of Cézanne fruit bowls to the window.

“I’m sorry?” I said, adding a hint of British accent like Madonna.

“Mr. Talbot has gone for his lunch. It’s twelve noon.” She acted like it was common knowledge that Mr. Talbot took his lunch at twelve noon. Why, that’s the reason Big Ben tolls. I was steamed the whole walk home. Sod it. I started planning my own Boston tea party.

O
n the fifth day, I spent the morning on sixteenth-century pastoral scenes. Green trees, two sheep; green trees, four sheep, and a cow; six sheep, two cows, and five geese. And so on. Suddenly I heard it again: “Alexandra!” I threw down my artist eraser. I marched down the hallway with purpose, but no ideas. When I entered Mr. Talbot’s office, he didn’t look up. “Tea.”

“Please?” I answered jokingly.

He looked up at me like I had just thrown a dart at Mona Lisa’s face. “You’re excused.”

I could feel my cheeks burning. I tapped my pencil on a Gainsborough drawing so forcefully that I almost tore right through a picnic scene. I gathered the papers and piled them neatly, placed the pencils meticulously in the desk drawer, and slipped out the back stairs.

As I skipped through the park, I felt that one of my many fantasies could in fact be coming true. I was in a different country; I could be anyone. Kitty Kat would be my new name. The next day I took off to Italy with ten gay men, which proved a lot more educational than any internship. I went from viewing John Singer Sargent watercolors to statues of nude Roman men. And going from being alone in a windowless room at an auction house to watching my impeccably groomed traveling companions frolic in the waters of Lido Beach in Venice is eye-opening in its own way.