Bittersweet Dreams (6 page)

She should have been able to see that easily. Didn't it take one to know one, and who better to see a phony than a phony? That was why my father couldn't see through her. He was too trusting and honest, despite the work he had to do. He was desperate for happiness since my mother's death. I didn't like it, but I had to forgive him. I had to make myself understand and accept.

My stepmother sat with her shoulders hunched up, which made the skin at the back of her neck crinkle like cellophane. She would lower her chin and cramp up tightly when she was nervous. I could imagine all the organs inside her crowding together like frightened mice. And when she was very, very nervous, she would hold her breath until her face turned red. Right now, it was as if she felt that if she made a sound or moved a muscle, it would all go bad, and my father would take my side, turn the car around, and blame it all on her. All the way home, she would think,
So close. There I was, so close to getting rid of her, and I screwed up.

I knew the silence in the car was driving her bonkers, however. My father wasn't his talkative self. Julie didn't want the radio on, because the chatter made her even more nervous, and I certainly had nothing to say to her. I hadn't said anything to either of them after we had left Los Angeles. I was sure she thought I was just being spiteful, my old spoiled self. I wasn't, but I couldn't help my silence. Maybe I was sadder than I would admit, and I wasn't sulking as much as I was crying inside. But that was something I would never reveal to her.

Everyone talked to himself or herself. Perhaps I did it more than most people, because I had running conversations going as if my brain was on Facebook or something. It was probably another reason so many other students kept their distance at my old school. To them, I always looked as if I were on another planet, in another dimension, listening to some other voices. It bugged some of my teachers, because they thought I wasn't paying attention to their important comments, but when they questioned me to catch me so they could bawl me out, I always had the answer.

Was I very sad about leaving my home? I knew that any other girl would have looked back at the house and gotten all choked up inside. It wasn't only because of what the house was, an eight-thousand-square-foot, two-story Spanish-style hacienda in Bel Air, complete with a beautiful oval pool, a cabana with a built-in barbecue grill, and a clay tennis court. I'd heard my father say the house and the grounds were estimated to be worth upward of twelve million dollars. He bought it when he was promoted to CEO of Pacifica Advertising, which had contracts with major pharmaceutical companies and some entertainment firms. He was now a major stockholder in the company, a fact I was sure was not lost on Julie.

I had mixed feelings about leaving, because I grew up in this house. My best memories of my mother took place in this house, and now I was being deported from it.
Deported
was the right word. How often I had felt like a foreigner now in my own home. But when I looked back and thought about it more, it was like cutting the umbilical cord again. I wasn't just separating from my father and my mother's memory. I was losing them. They were drifting off like smoke in the wind, falling behind as we drove on. I was never so afraid of being alone.

Nevertheless, I refused to let myself get emotional. I had talents and skills few people had, number one of which was harvesting the most value from any experience. What I had in that house I was taking with me. I was able to internalize all of it. I treasured all the memories, no matter how small or insignificant someone else might think they were. Not Julie, not the school administrators who had come down on me, no one could take any of it from me.

“How much longer?” Julie asked, as if she were being waterboarded.

“Not far now,” Daddy said. He turned and flashed one of his rah-rah, sis-boom-bah, high-octane, successful-advertising-executive smiles at her.

“You sure you know where you're going, Roger?”

“He has it on the GPS,” I muttered. “If he makes a wrong turn or something, it will let him know.”

She ignored me, but my father said, “Mayfair's right. We can't get lost.”

“I don't trust those things,” Julie said, and I laughed a little too loudly for her. She didn't trust the GPS because she couldn't grasp how to use it. The one in her car was never turned on. She had trouble with a television remote. It was a wonder she could work her blow-dryer, and if it did get too hot and shut off, she'd scream, “Roger, the electricity in the house is off!”

“Try to figure it out yourself, Julie,” I would tell her. “How can the electricity be off if the lights are on?”

Just like back then, she glared at me angrily now in the car and then turned quickly away. I didn't have to wonder what she was thinking. She had made that perfectly clear many times. Almost from the day she and my father had married, she'd always accused me of ridiculing her in one way or another. Why should it be any different even after what I had done? I was irretrievable, unrepentant, and impossible to change or improve. You didn't just give up on someone like me, she might say. You shook her completely out of your memory. I was sure she was chafing at the bit just thinking of the free rein she would have in our house now, never worrying about any comment I might make about something she had done or wanted to do.

The midafternoon Southern California freeway traffic suddenly began to swell. Somewhere along the highway artery, there was a blood clot, I thought. We slowed to a crawl. It didn't bother me. Whenever we were on the freeways and traffic slowed to a crawl or came to a standstill, I would continue reading or researching something on the internet. My father had bought me my first laptop when I was just a little more than three, and later he made sure I was always hooked into a satellite or had a PDA so I could get onto the internet. Whenever we had company and someone asked a question no one could answer, he would turn to me and say, “Mayfair, why don't you look that up for us?”

Like a father watching his son in a Little League game, he'd sit back with pride and watch me, at three or four years old, get the right website and come up with the answer, usually in less than a minute.

I was on the internet now, researching the community where Spindrift was located. It was in the Coachella Valley, just outside the small city of Piñon Pine Grove, named for the piñon pine trees that populated its borders. There were some small factories providing building materials and one that made store racks, plus some industrial farms. Not exactly an exciting new community, I thought, but I didn't exactly enjoy Los Angeles, either. I rarely visited the museums or the parks.

Researching the community and the school, I was quite content with the delay, but I knew the traffic jam put butterflies and worms in Julie's stomach. If anyone wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible, it was she. I imagined the only reason she'd come along was to make sure my father didn't change his mind. Of course, she acted as if she was concerned and cared about me, at least for his sake. She was concerned, all right, concerned that I would somehow be rejected at the door and end up back at home with Allison, who had been left behind with the maid. After what I had done, the faster and the farther we were separated, the better it would be in Julie's eyes.

“How do people do this every day?” Julie asked, nodding at the traffic.

“Is that a hypothetical question?”

“What?” she said, turning around to me again. She had to struggle to make it look like a painful effort. She was that tightly wrapped.

“
Hypothetical
means you really don't expect a specific answer. You ask it to begin a conversation, a larger discussion. Do you want an answer?”

She stared a moment. “You have an answer?”

“People do this every day because they have little choice, Julie. Their jobs are far away from their homes. They want their kids to go to better schools. They want to live in safer neighborhoods. The commute and all this traffic on weekends to get to malls or stores,” I said, waving at the cars in front of us, “are the trade-off. It's probably far worse on weekday mornings and late afternoons.”

She dropped the corners of her mouth and pressed her lower lip under her upper one. “Well, I couldn't do it,” she said.

“You don't have to do it. You don't even have to shop for food.”

“Mayfair,” Daddy said, with that little upturn in his voice to indicate that I should go into retreat.

I knew that the whole episode at school, including what had recently occurred between me and the girls I called the “bitches from
Macbeth
,” had exhausted him. He looked like he had aged years. He was afraid of any conversation between Julie and me continuing for more than a few seconds. He was quite aware of how easily I could belittle her in any argument. I was always good at winning arguments, whether it be with her or with my teachers.

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.”