Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You (13 page)

12.

THE CURSE

Senior year means doing everything for the final time.

Except Tink's final year with us was our junior year. When no one was prepared for an ending.

 

We would wonder—did Tink know?
When
did Tink know?

Later it would seem to us that she'd been saying good-bye almost since we'd known her. Out of nowhere she'd come into our lives and, just as mysteriously, now she was leaving.

Our art instructor at school mounted an exhibit of Tink's Night Sky photographs in the school gallery, which was up for the month of March; our local Quaker Heights newspaper published a full-page feature on Tink's work, which included a terse interview with the young student artist.

 

Interviewer:
What are you trying to say in these photographs?

Katrina Traumer:
I'm not trying to say anything. Photographs don't say.

Interviewer:
Let me rephrase my question, then. The “Night Sky” sequence seems to suggest that human beings are related somehow to the constellations—to the universe—maybe to God?—but are unaware of that fact. Is this a fair interpretation?

K.T.:
A photograph is like a poem—there should be different interpretations.

Interviewer:
What is your greatest hope as a photographer?

K.T.:
To take some good pictures.

Interviewer:
What is your great challenge as a photographer?

K.T.:
To take some good pictures.

Interviewer:
Do you intend to continue studying photography after graduation?

K.T.:
After graduation? That's too far away to plan.

Interviewer:
You'd had a quite successful career as a child actor on the TV series
Gramercy Park
. Do you ever anticipate returning to acting?

K.T.:
No.

Interviewer:
What was it like to have a career at a time in life when most children are just—children?

K.T.:
I thought this interview was about my photographs.

Interviewer:
Yes, of course. But our readers would also be interested in your experiences as Penelope in
Gramercy Park
.

K.T.:
But I'm not. I haven't been interested in Penelope since I was nine years old.

 

(The interview might have been longer, but the newspaper feature ended abruptly at this point.)

 

It must have been a sign we hadn't known how to interpret: In April of that year, Tink cut off most of her hair!

Tink's ripply, frizzy, burnt-red hair, which was snarled at the nape of her neck and wasn't always what you'd call super clean—suddenly, one day, was gone.

“Oh, Tink! My God! What have you
done
?”

We'd been invited to Tink's house. An invitation to Tink's house was rare.

(Tink came to our houses often. She'd come to study with us, and stay for dinner—though we'd have to coax her, and our mothers would have to coax her, before she gave in. For often it seemed that Tink's mother was “away,” and maybe there was just a housekeeper at Tink's house, or maybe there was no one at all. Tink would not have told us.)

We all came together in Merissa's mom's station wagon to the house at 88 Blue Spruce Way, in which Tink and Veronica Traumer had lived for less than two years. It was a sprawling, showy, “custom-designed contemporary” on a hilly lot above an artificial lake bordered by blue spruce trees as if in a scenic calendar in which no one actually lived.

At the house, Tink opened the door for us. Instead of her signature black leggings, she was wearing jeans and a red
GUERRILLA GIRL
T-shirt. She was barefoot, and most of her hair was gone.

“Hey, guys! Love ya.” Tink had to laugh at the looks on our faces.

We were stunned, staring at Tink's head, which looked so small, and vulnerable, like a small child's head.

Tink had not only cut off her hair with scissors—“without exactly looking to see what I was doing,” as Tink explained—but when her mother saw the disaster, she'd taken Tink to a hairstylist in Quaker Heights to “minimize” the damage.

You could say that Tink's hair was both a disaster and, in a weird-punk way, chic. It was shaved at the nape of her neck, a half-inch long except at the crown of her head, where it was an inch long, and fuller. Our girlfriend looked like a punk rocker or maybe a street urchin in a comic strip—hair sticking up in short tufts.

We hugged Tink. We tried to laugh with her. We didn't want to accuse her but—what a surprise this was! It felt like some sort of rebuke.

“Come in! Quick! Big Moms will be downstairs soon enough, and all over my ‘girlfriends.'”

Tink led us inside her house. The large white-walled rooms were sparsely furnished, and the tall windows had no curtains or blinds; on the floors were scatter rugs, each colorful, beautiful, probably very expensive, but inadequate to fill the large floor space. After nearly two years, it seemed that Veronica Traumer hadn't quite moved into her new house.

Why had Tink cut her hair, and why without warning?

“Maybe I had brain surgery over the weekend. Or ECT.”

“ECT—what's that?”

“Electroconvulsive therapy. Electric shock.”

We laughed because Tink laughed, but we didn't know what to think. The loose-fitting T-shirt disguised Tink's thinness, but you could see her bony hips and pelvis in the tight-fitting jeans, and she appeared to be shivering—in fact, the house was overheated.

“ECT has a bad rep, but it actually
works
. Shocks you out of your narcissistic stupor. Sure, your IQ drops an octave, but—what the hell. You become tractable and, like,
lovable
.”

Seeing how perplexed we were, and the horrified look on Nadia's face, Tink said airily, “No. I just got sick of my old hair, and cut it off. Who else is gonna do it, if not me? Also to piss off Big Moms, she's got this obsession with being
feminine
.” Tink laughed. “
Femininity
is a weapon, Big Moms says. You bet, it can be lethal in the right hands.”

Tink brought us into the kitchen to get Cokes and smoothies from a large Sub-Zero refrigerator. A dark-skinned woman, whom Tink introduced as Valeria, was preparing dinner—the spicy smells were overwhelming.

Tink had invited us each singly—confidentially.
Don't tell anyone else, please, this is a small private party at my house for just special people.

We'd conferred with one another, of course. It wasn't difficult to determine whom Tink had probably invited.

“See, Big Moms is taking us on a trip next week. We're flying to ‘L.A.,' as it's called. And I wanted to make just the perfect impression—just as
feminine
as possible.”

We were in an adjacent family room with a large fireplace, a fifty-inch flat-screen TV, floor-to-ceiling plate-glass sliding doors. Even this room, which was more comfortable than the rest of the rooms we'd seen, with Mexican tiles on the floor, bright-colored sofas and chairs and pillows, looked as impersonal as a designer room; you could see that Tink had no favorite place to sit, but wandered around as you would in a hotel lobby, before dropping onto the floor beside a sofa.

Valeria came into the room to bring us appetizers. She laughed when Tink said she was the best cook ever and Big Moms was conspiring to kidnap her, to take her with them.

“Are you really going away, Tink? Where?”

“No. I mean—yes. Maybe.”

Tink laughed. She was sprawled on the floor with her thin legs outspread. Her bare feet were like an urchin's. Without her frizzy burnt-red hair to hide behind, Tink looked awkward and exposed. Her face was pale; even her freckles appeared to have faded.

“I mean—there's a preliminary trip. And depending on the outcome of this preliminary trip, there may be a permanent trip—a ‘removal.' Depends.”

“But—when would this be? We have, like, six weeks before school ends. . . .”

“Who knows?
I'm
not in charge.”

We wondered if Veronica Traumer was moving to Los Angeles to make a film. Or work in TV on the West Coast.
Gramercy Park
had finally ceased its long run after a dozen years, and its cast, which had grown older with the seasons, would all be looking for new work.

Tink was a tease: No matter what she told us, seemed to confide in us, if we asked her a direct question she'd deflect it with a joke, or make a sarcastic reply.

We were reminded of Mr. Trocchi's remark.
Tink is no ordinary student. Her destiny is elsewhere.

How badly we wanted to believe this.

At last, after about a half hour, as Valeria was about to serve dinner—(we were all going to help her bring dishes to the table)—Tink's mother came downstairs, hurrying to meet us.

“Ohhh—girls! How lovely.”

We had glimpsed Tink's mother before, and we'd seen photos of the actress Veronica Traumer online, but we'd never seen the woman close up until now.

She was so—
bosomy
. And her face seemed large, like a moon. And her skin seemed to give off a light, as if an actual spotlight shone on her.

If you looked closer, you could see that Veronica was expertly and heavily made up. Her face had none of the delicate bone structure of Tink's face, but you could see an uncanny resemblance around the eyes and the bridge of the nose; otherwise, Veronica's face was fleshy, as if there were no bones beneath. We guessed she'd had “work” on her face—injections, or implants—for her cheeks were full and the skin around her mouth just slightly puffy; her face was amazingly unlined for a woman of her age, which we knew to be over forty.

Veronica's eyes were a dull mud-green, not vivid and striking like Tink's, but glamorously made up with eye shadow and eyeliner. And she wore gold lamé capri pants and a taupe jersey top that showed the impress of her large breasts, and shoes with clattery heels. All this for a weekday evening at home with no guests more important than her daughter's high school classmates.

Her perfume wafted to us and enveloped us like a mildly toxic cloud.

Quickly Veronica's eyes darted about us, from face to face: Did she know us? (She should have known Merissa Carmichael, at least, and maybe Hannah Heller, but she didn't seem to recognize them.) Should we introduce ourselves? Tink had turned sulky and silent and wasn't at all helpful, sprawled on the floor beside the sofa.

“Trina? Where are the rest of your guests?” Veronica smiled uncertainly.

“These are them, Moms.”

“But—I thought you were inviting all your new friends from school.” Veronica looked perplexed, disappointed. You could see that life with her adolescent daughter was fraught with surprises difficult to interpret. “All your friends from Quaker Heights Day School.” Veronica enunciated the formal name of our school as if eager to demonstrate that she knew it.

“I said I was inviting the people I like.”

“No boys?”

“You didn't want boys, did you?”

“Well—I'd thought . . .”

“If there are boys, there is sex. You don't want ‘sex'—so why d'you want ‘boys'? Make sense, Moms.”

Tink spoke so impatiently to her mother, we were embarrassed.

Veronica was smiling, or trying to smile. Her hair had been bleached a striking platinum blond, like Merissa's, but it was as synthetic-looking as a mannequin's hair. Her fleshy lips were outlined in deep purple.

“It's just that I'd thought—somehow—you are sixteen years old, after all, aren't you?—and you've mentioned boys, I think. . . .”

“A party with boys would be Friday or Saturday night, not Wednesday. Or maybe you don't know which day of the week this is, since you aren't working right now.”

Tink was behaving so rudely, we exchanged glances with one another. Not one of us would have spoken like this to our mothers in the presence of guests; yet Veronica only winced, and smiled in a way to suggest that this was a strategy of hers—smile,
smile
. For after all, Veronica Traumer was a quasi-public figure, accustomed to TV lights and interviews. Accustomed to
performance
.

We saw that she was holding a glass of wine in her fingers, which were glittering with rings. And her fingernails were long and oval and brightly polished.

Since Tink made no move to introduce us, we introduced ourselves to Veronica Traumer: “Chloe”—“Shelby”—“Merissa”—“Nadia”—“Martine”—“Hannah”—“Anita.”

We could see that Veronica's gaze moved lightly from each of us to the next and that, though listening, she wasn't going to remember a single name.