Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  William Liebling IV. He looked just like the photos I’d seen—a big, bald man in an expensive suit—except that in person he seemed so much larger than life, even bigger than Benny. He must have been in his sixties, but he wasn’t at all frail; instead, he had that air of gravitas and power that comes with inherited money. And unlike the pictures that I’d seen, the opera photos where he looked so benignly at ease, his face was beet red and his eyes were burning coals inside puffy folds of skin.

  He ignored Benny, who was scrambling out of the bed with his hands covering his groin, and addressed me instead. “Who are you?” he barked.

  I felt damp and exposed. My heart was still on fire in my chest, my flesh still suffused and sensitive; I couldn’t reconcile everything racing through me. “Nina,” I stammered. “Nina Ross.” My eyes darted to Benny, who was tripping over his giant feet as he grabbed at the boxer shorts he’d abandoned on the floor. He inched toward the doorway, his eyes fixed on the jeans lying on the floor of the hallway.

  Mr. Liebling turned and barked at Benny. “Stop right there.” He turned back to me and examined me for a long time. “Nina Ross.” He rolled the name in his mouth, clearly committing it to memory, and I wondered if he was the kind of dad who would call my mother to complain. Probably. Or maybe Benny’s mom would do the honors. I imagined my mom telling them both to go fuck themselves.

  Benny had succeeded in getting his underwear on and he stood hunched there near the doorway, his thin arms covering his naked chest. “Dad…” he began.

  His father whirled around and lifted a finger in the air. “Benjamin. Not. A. Word.” He turned back to me and tugged on the bottom of his suit jacket to straighten it. This seemed to calm him. “Nina Ross. You will leave now,” he said coolly. “And you will not come back here. You will leave Benjamin alone from now on. Do you understand?”

  I could smell something in the air, pungent and sharp: It was the anxiety pouring off Benny as he watched me with a helpless expression on his face. He looked shrunken and young suddenly, like a little boy, even though he had at least a half foot on his father. I felt a surge of emotion, a desire to protect him from everything that might break him. I thought of the Nina in Benny’s drawing, the superhero with the dripping sword. My heart wasn’t racing anymore; I felt calm as I tucked the sheet tighter around my torso. “No,” I heard myself saying. “You can’t tell me what to do. We love each other.”

  The muscles in Mr. Liebling’s face twitched, as if jolted by an electric shock. He stepped close to me and leaned in, voice dropping to a hoarse bark. “Young lady, you don’t understand. My son cannot handle this.”

  I looked over at Benny, hunched in the corner, and for a stinging second I wondered if his father was right. “I know him better than you do.”

  He laughed then, a mirthless, condescending sound. “I am his father. And you”—he measured me with his eyes—“you are nobody. You are disposable.” He pointed to the door. “You’ll leave now, or I’ll call the police and have you removed.”

  He turned to Benny, and ran a hand over his bald pate, as if testing the shape of his skull. “And you. You will be in my study in five minutes, fully dressed. Yes?”

  “Yes,” Benny said, his voice almost a whisper. “Sir.”

  His father examined him for a long minute, his eyes running over his son’s long loose limbs and concave chest; and then a little sound came out of him, like a sigh, and I could see something deflate inside him. “Benjamin,” he began, reaching out a hand to his son. Benny flinched. His father stopped, mid-gesture, and rather than leaving the hand hanging there in midair, he instead ran his hand over his pate again. Then he turned and walked out the bedroom door.

  We waited until we heard the cottage door slam and then we grabbed for our clothes, scrambling to get dressed as quickly as we’d gotten ourselves undressed. Benny wouldn’t meet my eyes as he yanked his sweatshirt back over his head and tied on his sneakers. “I’m sorry, Nina,” he kept saying over and over. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.” I put my arms around his waist but he just hung there limply, as if his spine had snapped inside him; he turned away from me when I tried to kiss him. And I knew then that, even though I’d stood up to his dad, Benny certainly wasn’t going to. No matter how much he pretended to hate his family, if he had to choose between them and me, it wasn’t going to be a contest. I was not a superhero, slaying dragons for him; I was nobody. It felt like a mirror that I’d been gazing into had shattered, and now all that was left was tiny fragments I had no idea how to reassemble.

  He didn’t hold my hand as we trudged back along the path to Stonehaven. He didn’t hug me when I turned right to go around the house and he turned left to go up the steps to the kitchen porch. He just closed his eyes tightly, as if trying to see something hidden inside his head, and then he said those words once more, barely audibly—“I’m sorry, Nina”—and just like that we were done.

  * * *

  —

  So then: finals and June commencement, which at North Lake Academy meant that the entire student body spent the last day of school down at the lake, kayaking and waterskiing and barbecuing tofu dogs on the dock of someone’s private beach. I’d only glimpsed Benny a few times in the intervening weeks—a gaunt figure I’d spy sloping through the halls in the distance, as my throat seized up with Pavlovian longing—and I lay in bed at night imagining how we might finally get to talk at the party. How he’d see me sitting on the beach and come over and cry and apologize; and I’d of course forgive him and we’d embrace and then we’d be back together forever. The end.

  But Benny didn’t come to the beach party at all, and so instead I spent the day lying in the sand next to Hilary and her friends, listening to them talk about their summer lifeguarding jobs, and trying not to cry.

  At one point, Hilary rolled over so that she was facing me, and propped her head up on one hand. “So hey. Where’s your boyfriend today? Off on his family’s yacht or something?”

  “Boyfriend?” I repeated dumbly.

  She gave me a knowing look. “Give it up, girl. Everyone knows. You’re not that sly.” She smiled. “I knew you two would hit it off. From the start.”

  I lay back on my beach towel and squeezed my eyes shut so hard that I saw red fireworks behind them. “He’s not my boyfriend,” I said. “We broke up.”

  “Oh. Shit. That sucks.” She flopped over onto her stomach and loosened her bikini strings. “Hang out with us this summer. I’ll find you someone better. That’s the good thing about being a lifeguard, it’s easy to meet guys.”

  Any thoughts I might have had about this dubious plan—becoming a beach bum, making Hilary my new BFF and hooking up with the sunburned summer kids—vanished when I got home that afternoon. The minute I turned the corner to our house, I could see it: my mother’s hatchback, packed to the gills with boxes and Hefty bags. I walked up the driveway and stood there, staring through the windows at the jammed back seat. I could see my patched-up moon boots, pressed up against the glass. And I couldn’t stop myself anymore: I began to cry, big hideous sobs of despair at how everything could go from wonderful to awful in just a few weeks.

  Eventually my mother came outside and approached me, her arms extended for a hug. “I’m sorry, baby. I really am.”

  I sidestepped her, swiping at my nose with the back of my arm. “You promised. We’d stay until I graduated.”

  She looked like she might cry, too. “I know I said that. But it’s not turning out how I hoped.” Her hands worked at the bottom of her shirt, rolling it and unrolling it. “It’s not about you, baby. You kept up your end of the bargain. It’s just…” She hesitated.

  The expression on her face stopped me. “This is about Benny, right?”

  Tears were pooling at the corners of her eyes, but she didn’t deny it. “Nina…”

  “They called you, didn�
��t they? His parents, the Lieblings? They called you to tell you that he and I were involved? They told you to keep me away from him because I’m not good enough for their son.”

  I looked at her and she wouldn’t look back at me, just kept rolling and unrolling the hem of her shirt as her ruined mascara ran in rivulets down her face. And as I stood there watching her, my entire life packed into a pitifully small number of boxes, I knew. They’d driven us out of town. To the Lieblings, we were just trash, a minor nuisance in the way of their world domination, and therefore we had to go. And because they were rich, they had gotten their way.

  I wondered about the strings that they had pulled, in order to get us to leave. Because how else could they have forced my mom to give up a job, a home, her daughter’s glorious Future? They’d strong-armed, they’d threatened. That was the Liebling way, Benny had already told me as much: My dad’s a bully: If he doesn’t get what he wants at first, he’ll just threaten you until he does. A call of complaint to North Lake Academy, my scholarship yanked. A well-placed word at my mother’s job, threatening her livelihood. How easy it must have felt for them to take away the little that we had. After all, we were insignificant to them.

  I felt my mother’s arm creep around me. “Don’t cry, sweetheart. You don’t need him. You have me, and that’s all you need. You and I, we are the only people we can trust,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “Besides, you are better than anyone I have ever met. You are better than their horrible son.”

  “Then why are we letting them get away with it? We don’t have to let them do this to us,” I insisted, growing frantic. “We shouldn’t let them have what they want. We should stay.”

  My mom shook her head. “I’m so sorry, baby. But it’s too late.”

  “What about the Ivy League?” I managed. “What about Stanford summer school?”

  “We don’t need a fancy private high school for that.” She straightened, squeezed my arm, turned to the car as if something had been decided without me. “You’ll do well wherever we go, if you just apply yourself. That was my mistake. We never needed to come here in the first place.”

  * * *

  —

  And so we moved back to Las Vegas, and I started my junior year at yet another enormous, concrete institution. And maybe my mom was right that I didn’t need a private high school to excel, but our year at Tahoe had also broken something critical inside me: the ability to believe in my own potential. I knew now who I really was: a nobody, disposable, destined for nothing.

  After Tahoe, my mother lost her footing, too. The first few months that we were back in Vegas, she was giddy, going on shopping sprees for our new apartment and speculating that our ship was about to come in. But by that winter, she’d gone grim and silent, once again disappearing to the casinos at night; and this time, I knew that she didn’t have a waitressing job. Eventually, she was arrested for credit card fraud and identity theft. She went to jail, and I went into foster care until she got out six months later. When she was freed, we moved to Phoenix, then Albuquerque, and finally Los Angeles.

  Despite all the disruption, I managed to rise far enough above the underserved herds at my subpar schools to gain admittance to a middling liberal arts college on the East Coast; but not high enough for the Ivy League, not high enough to qualify for scholarships. Still, I was determined to get as far away from my mother’s life as possible, even if it meant turning down the local junior college and taking on student debt. I went off to get a BA in art history, still so blindly in thrall to Stonehaven that I didn’t think much about career viability. Inevitably, I emerged four years later in a worse state: even more broke, underqualified and lost. The bright shiny Future—the one in the Princeton sweatshirt, the one on the cover of the Stanford summer school catalog—was not for me after all.

  The Lieblings stole all that from me, and I never forgave them for it.

  * * *

  —

  For a long time I hoped that I was wrong about Benny; I hoped that he wasn’t like his family after all, and just needed to be reminded who he really was. For a while, after we first arrived back in Las Vegas, I wrote letters to him; rambling thoughts about loneliness, stories about my depressing new school, little observations underlined by a silent plea to let me know that I still mattered. After a few months of this, I got a postcard in the mail: a photo of the boathouse at the Chambers Landing pier, and on the back a single sentence, in a childish scrawl: PLEASE STOP.

  So was my mother right? Was my entire relationship with Benny a transaction, a failed power grab between two fundamentally unequal people? Was I just covetous of Benny’s life and hoping to take a piece of what he had? And was he just trying to assert his dominion over another human being, trying to live up to the example his ancestors had set? Maybe what we experienced never was love; maybe it was always just about sex and loneliness and control.

  In a different sort of story, I would have saved that portrait that Benny drew of me, the one where I looked like a manga character; and I would have tenderly pulled it out for inspiration in moments of self-doubt, as proof that I was somebody after all. But the reality is that I burned that picture in the fireplace of our Tahoe cabin before we drove out of town that last day. I sat there with a poker and watched the edges of the portrait blacken and curl; watched the fire lick at those confident eyes and the sword-wielding hand, until all that was left was ash.

  In a different story—one with a kinder, gentler protagonist—I also would have looked Benny up some years later and we would have commiserated and grown close, maybe rekindled a friendship that transcended what had once driven us apart. But again, that’s not this story. And while it’s true that I followed the Lieblings’ doings from a distance—I knew when Judith Liebling drowned in a boating accident, not long after I got that horrible postcard; I knew when Vanessa Liebling became an Instagram celebrity; I knew when William Liebling IV died—I never bothered to reach out to Benny. Why should I, when he’d never reached out to me to explain why he’d so easily abandoned me? I was angry at him for so long that it became an essential part of my being, an ache that sat at the pit of my stomach, the tender genesis of all my rage at the world.

  And yet. When I ran into Hilary on the street in New York a few years later, and she let it drop that Benny had been diagnosed as schizophrenic—that he’d been sent home from Princeton after he attacked a girl on his floor and then ran naked and raving through his dorm—I was surprised when the pang that I felt was not of vindictive rage but of pity. Poor Benny, I thought, as Hilary prattled on about how he was living at some fancy institution near Mendocino, how someone from school had visited him and he was basically a vegetable now, drugged out of his mind.

  And then, tearing up—Poor us.

  So maybe I did still love him after all.

  As for the rest of the Lieblings—for them, I had nothing but hate.

  8.

  VANESSA, VANESSA, VANESSA. Does she feel it, as I walk across the cobbled drive toward her—something electric in the air, a premonitory tingle? Her intuition warning her that something about me—my poised, rehearsed, yoga-instructor walk; the toothy grin slapped across my face—isn’t quite right? Does she find herself fighting a strange urge to board the windows, take in the lawn furniture, lock the doors tight, and hide in the basement?

  I doubt it. I am a category 5 hurricane coming her way, and she has no clue.

  9.

  STONEHAVEN. I NEVER IMAGINED I’d someday live in this monstrous heap. Growing up, it was the albatross that hung around the Liebling family neck: an estate so firmly attached to our name that it was impossible to imagine ever letting it go. It felt like Stonehaven had stood there on the West Shore forever, an anachronistic stone monolith that rejected any attempts to dress it up as something new. The house had been passed to the firstborn son of five generations of Lieblings, which meant that someday it would belong to
my little brother Benny—not to me.

  Toxic patriarchy! you might be thinking. Fight against the injustice! But honestly, I wanted nothing to do with the place.

  I have hated Stonehaven since I was six years old and first came up here for Christmas. My grandparents, Katherine and William III, had mandated that the extended Liebling family spend the holiday at Stonehaven, so we all slowly rolled in one snowy December afternoon, the wheels of our town cars leaving muddy tracks along the drive. Grandma Katherine (never Kat, or Kitty, but Katherine, always with the emphasis on that first ah) had brought in a decorator for the family gathering and, honestly, she had quite de trop taste. When you walked in the front door of the house you were assaulted with the holiday. Swags and garlands hanging off every cornice, poinsettias brandishing their poison petals from the centerpieces. A tree that brushed the ceiling, drooping with silver ornaments and gold tinsel. Full-sized Victorian Santas that lurked in dark corners, their faces frozen mid-chortle, and scared the stuffing out of me.

  The whole house smelled of fresh-cut pine boughs, a medicinal smell that made me think of murdered trees.

  My grandmother was a great collector of European decorative arts, the more gilded and elaborate the better; though my grandfather preferred chinoiserie. (Previous ancestors had dabbled in eighteenth-century American, Jacobean, French Revival, Victoriana.) So Stonehaven was full of delicate furnishings balanced on spider legs, and precious objects rendered in bone-thin porcelain. The house was a giant slap in the face to the very concept of childhood.