The Kitty Committee

by Kathryn Berla

  The Kitty Committee wasn’t totally about mischief, and it wasn’t always about Carly. Carly and Jane had ambitions which demanded extracurricular activities that bit sharply into their free time. Carly also had private tutoring for the upcoming SATs, and Jane attended an SAT prep class every Saturday. This meant Maggie and I had a lot of alone time, which we often spent together. I knew I wanted to go to college. I just didn’t know what I had to do to get there beyond keeping my grades up and taking the few SAT practice tests in a booklet Carly had given me, along with an admonishment to use it. My parents never had “the talk” with me—the college talk, that is. They assumed I’d figure it out the same way Luke did. They assumed when a child left home, they should be prepared to survive on their own. And the way to get there wasn’t by having parents coddle them, hold their hand, and map out every step along the way. Ironically, Carly also professed to believe that self-reliance was the key to advancement but, as an only child of two working parents, she had plenty of resources at her disposal.

  I never doubted that my parents’ faith in my ability to get things done on my own without their guidance came from a place of love and respect. They trusted me to instinctively know the right thing to do. They gave me the basics as a child and assumed the rest would take care of itself. But their trust was deeply misplaced and, because it was so matter-of-factly given, I didn’t hold it in high esteem.

  Halloween weekend. While other kids put on costumes and partied hard, the Kitty Committee celebrated Carly’s sixteenth birthday at a very upscale restaurant in a trendy but tiny Napa Valley town an hour away from Indian Springs. Her parents drove—two cars—and the party included an adult couple, friends of Carly’s parents.

  I’d never spent much time with Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan. The few times I’d been to Carly’s home, they were either not there or busy doing something in another part of the house. Their style was to leave us alone, unlike Jane’s parents who made a point of popping into the room to chat for a few minutes whenever we were around. Even Maggie’s mom, on the rare occasions she was home, plopped down on the sofa with us and tried to hang out like one of the girls until Maggie shooed her away. I liked her and would have let her stay if she was my mom. No topic was off-limits around her, and Maggie could and did swear without fear of punishment.

  Sleepovers were almost always at Maggie’s but occasionally at Jane’s. When we were at Jane’s house, Leann inevitably tossed her sleeping bag wherever we made camp for the night—sometimes we fell asleep in the den, watching movies and eating popcorn; sometimes it was Jane’s bedroom; when the weather was still nice, we made up beds on the back porch, falling asleep to the yip of coyotes and the low moans of great-horned owls. Wildlife was one of the perks of living where Jane did, out in the country. Leann kept a horse, and she taught me how to feed it carrots by tucking in my thumb. I loved the smooth, rubbery feel of its surprisingly soft nose and the way it pushed air from its lungs through giant nostrils, which made me think of the blowhole of a whale. I liked Leann a lot and, in many ways, felt most comfortable when she and I were alone, never feeling pressure to be anyone other than who I was. But Leann wasn’t part of the Kitty Committee, and she had her own set of friends from her own school.

  My house, by mutual consent, was avoided by the Kitty Committee. Nobody ever said as much, but it was never suggested as a meeting spot, and nobody showed up at my house except to pick me up or drop me off. My house didn’t have a fun, loose vibe like Maggie’s.

  So the car ride was the first time I actually got to see Carly interact with her parents, or at least her father, who drove us four girls, Carly sitting up front.

  “My baby girl’s growing up,” he said proudly, as though he was somehow responsible for that fact. He reached over and patted her on the knee, but she pushed his hand away and turned to look out at the darkness beyond her window.

  The car smelled richly of leather. It hummed quietly along the two-lane road that twisted through tall trees looming ominously like black giants on either side. I didn’t see a single car on the road besides the taillights of Mrs. Sullivan’s car, occasionally flashing red at the sharp twists and turns in the road.

  “I think you gals are going to like this place,” he said. “It’s a Michelin three-star restaurant.” He made eye contact with us via the rearview mirror, but I had no idea what that meant and didn’t want to expose my ignorance, so I simply nodded in approval.

  “That’s the highest ranking a restaurant can get.” Carly craned her neck toward the back seat. “So enjoy because you might never get this chance again.”

  Jane rolled her eyes at no one in particular, but I caught it and hoped Mr. Sullivan wasn’t watching in his rearview mirror.

  “It’s so exciting that you can drive now, Carly,” Maggie said.

  “What do you girls plan to do with your lives?” Mr. Sullivan asked abruptly. He was not an unattractive man for his age. He had sandy-blond hair like Carly’s, but thinning on top. He had clever eyes capped by bold eyebrows, and his face was strong and square-cut. In his suit, he looked like an important person. My father owned one suit that he wore to funerals, and he’d had it for as long as I could remember, possibly my entire life. It wasn’t sleek and tailored like Mr. Sullivan’s, who I knew owned an accounting firm where his wife was also a partner.

  “I have no idea,” Maggie said.

  Jane looked at me as if giving me a chance to answer first, but when I didn’t, she said, “I like theater, drama, writing . . . I’d love to have a career in one of those fields.”

  “How about you, Grace?”

  I instinctively knew he wasn’t so much interested in what we had to say as he was in bringing the conversation back around to Carly while trying to be polite.

  “I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. “My mom’s a nurse, so maybe that.”

  “That’s a noble field,” he said. And then, proving my instincts correct, “Carly here is going to make a boatload of money.” He chuckled. “At least that’s what she’s been telling us since she was four years old. Haven’t you, Carly?”

  “Yup, I’ve heard her say that a lot too,” Maggie said.

  I wished I could see Carly’s face, but I could only see the glossy hair falling across her ear, catching the bluish gleam of the car’s instrument panel.

  “I always tell her, ‘Carly, I hope you’ll remember your poor old dad.’” He reached out as if to pat her knee again but withdrew his hand when it was halfway there.

  “I’m sure you and Mom will do just fine on your own,” Carly said dryly.

  “Do you know that ever since she was a little girl, she helped me pick stocks for our private portfolio? I’d say, ‘What do you think the old man should buy next?’ and she usually steered me right. Didn’t you, Sweetheart?”

  Was she smiling or frowning? I’d have given anything to know.

  “Yeah, Carly’s always been really good in math,” Maggie said when it was clear Carly wasn’t going to answer.

  The black giants slid behind us, bathed eerily at every bend in the road by the brake lights of Mrs. Sullivan’s car.

  “Here we are,” Mr. Sullivan said at last, slowing to signal his intent to turn into a driveway I never would have seen had it not been for the gap in the trees and Mrs. Sullivan’s sudden disappearance at exactly that spot.

  It was a dark place where I could barely see the plate in front of me. I had no idea what to order so I just said, “the same,” and pointed to Carly when the waiter came around to me. The adults sat at one end of the table, across from each other for easy conversation. The Kitty Committee sat on the other end—two facing two. It was a stiff and formal atmosphere, and I spent most of the night worrying about which fork to use, where to put my napkin, which water glass and bread plate was mine, and whether I had dressed appropriately. It wasn’t at all the treat that Carly had promised. I wondered if I was the only one feel
ing that way. Were Jane and Maggie enjoying themselves? They seemed to be. Not wishing to interrupt the conversation, thereby calling attention to myself, I reached across Maggie for the bread basket. Carly paused mid-sentence, glanced at me, and barely smiled.

  “Maggie, could you please hand Grace the bread so she doesn’t knock over your drink?” She spoke to Maggie, but her eyes were fixed on me, and her tone was impatient. I wanted to die, but everyone laughed good-naturedly.

  We didn’t seem like a group of young teens celebrating a sweet sixteen. I wondered what Carly’s parents would think if they could see the way my family ate, often with trays on our laps, sometimes with me sitting on the floor of my dad’s bedroom so we could be together. My mom, exhausted from trying to hold everything together. My dad silently nodding to acknowledge our remarks, one eye on the TV, his smiles more like grimaces of pain. I wondered what they’d think of our humble meals in Guatemala—beans, rice, chicken. Luke and I licking our fingers in lieu of napkins, stuffing the greasy leftovers into our well-worn pockets to be shared with Tramp as soon as we dared.

  “So, who’s next?” Mr. Sullivan dialed up his volume to reach our side of the table. “In the birthday department?”

  It occurred to me that Carly’s mother hardly spoke to us girls, focusing most of her attention that night on the adult friends. I had to remind myself that there were two parents, not one parent and three adult friends.

  “Jane and I are in March,” Maggie said. “I’m exactly one day older than Jane.” They exchanged amused glances and giggled at that delicious coincidence while a frown line appeared between Carly’s perfectly formed eyebrows.

  “And you, Grace?”

  “She’s not until May first,” Carly answered for me.

  “Oh really, May Day?” Carly’s mother showed interest in us for the first time. “That’s a lovely day to be born, with some religious significance, you know, apart from what most people think about that date.”

  I nodded my head because I did know.

  “That’s a long time to wait for your driver’s license, Grace. Good thing you have Carly to shuttle you around in the meantime,” Mr. Sullivan said.

  I didn’t bother telling them it would be another eighteen months before I was eligible for a driver’s license and neither did Carly or the other girls. Perhaps they weren’t really paying attention, or maybe they’d grown tired of the adult intrusion into Carly’s celebration. I didn’t bother telling them that my family owned one car, and it was fully commandeered by my mother, to be used for our family’s survival. Carly already had a nice BMW, albeit five years old, which was earmarked only for her.

  I didn’t know then that by the time I was old enough to drive, I’d be on the way to losing my family and inventing an entirely new identity for myself—independent adult.

  “Carly tells us you’ve had quite the life,” Mrs. Sullivan said, as though just becoming aware of my presence and her daughter’s party. She turned to the woman seated opposite. “Grace has grown up overseas in all kinds of different exotic countries,” she explained.

  “Oh really?” The woman arched a sleek black eyebrow in my direction. “How interesting. Were you a military brat?”

  “My parents were missionaries,” I said and then added, “and my mom’s a nurse.” A nurse was usually an easier thing for outsiders to accept. I knew that living overseas to help people through medicine always brought murmurs of approval and even admiration from others. Being a missionary only brought quizzical and fearful looks, as though the next move I would make would be to proselytize.

  “Oh, that’s fascinating,” she said, but she didn’t seem fascinated at all.

  “I’m sure Grace has some very interesting stories she could share with us sometime,” Carly’s mom said, making it clear this wasn’t the time or place to share my interesting stories. I was frankly relieved. “Jane, I love the way you’re wearing your hair up tonight, dear. They say the loveliest part of a woman is her neck, and you’re so blessed with a long, graceful neck.”

  The furrow appeared between Carly’s eyebrows again. I thought Carly was beautiful, and I never noticed things like graceful necks. But at that moment, I did notice that Carly’s neck was not long. Perhaps it was a little shorter than usual, even compared to Maggie’s. Maybe even compared to mine. It was the first shortcoming I noticed in Carly, and it came via her mother’s tongue.

  “Carly, Sweetheart, ready to add up the check for us?” Mr. Sullivan interrupted. “It’s a game we’ve had since she was little,” he explained to the table, his eyes darting from person to person. “She adds up the check, and if she finds any mistakes, she gets to keep the difference if it’s in our favor. Of course, if it’s not in our favor, no reason to get the poor waiter unnecessarily in trouble, is there?” He laughed loudly at that.

  Carly picked up the check and scanned it before shaking her head and handing it back to her father.

  “She doesn’t do it for the money anymore,” Mr. Sullivan went on. “Just our little game, isn’t it, Sweetheart?” His arm moved in such a way I could almost swear he was reaching for her knee under the table.

  Mrs. Sullivan smiled icily.

  Chapter Twelve

  I can’t pinpoint the moment when I realized Maggie was taking rule number three too much to heart. We often smuggled a beer or siphoned off hard liquor from a parent’s stash, but we normally did that as a group. We did it during times when the Kitty Committee had a sleepover or crashed a classmate’s party (where we never left each other’s sides). When we went to the water park or even the movies. Never enough to reveal our state of intoxication to others, but just enough to instill the sense of bon ami, high spirits, and a secret that we alone shared. Just enough to make everything seem a little bit funny. A little reckless. A little daring.

  But during the times Maggie and I were alone together, more and more often I suspected she’d had something from her mother’s liquor cabinet before I arrived. Maggie’s mom was divorced and not often home. She worked, and when she didn’t work, she dated unapologetically. That was a concept so alien to me that I couldn’t help but pity Maggie. On the other hand, it gave us a place to hang out that was almost always unsupervised. A place where we could speak openly about anything and act out in ways we couldn’t have gotten away with at my house. Or Jane’s. Or even Carly’s, whose parents also worked, but whose home, it was understood, we should never disrespect.

  I think it was the day Maggie showed up at school with the unfocused gaze and slow manner of speaking that had become so familiar to me. Like someone just waking from a nap, her eyes remained at half-mast, and her tongue coiled lazily around each word. Looking back, it should have been easy for me to hear that silent cry for help, but I didn’t. Drinking wasn’t a shameful thing, a crutch, a tool to numb painful feelings. It was an act of rebellion against parents and school and social norms. It was fun. And Maggie was still wonderfully lovable and entertaining at the same time.

  First period was American History, a class Maggie and I shared. That morning, Maggie was a little worse off than usual and, in fact, seemed to be barely functioning. When Mrs. Gossage announced we’d be watching a Civil War movie so she could finish grading tests, I was relieved—Maggie could use that hour to get herself straight. Mrs. Gossage was an eccentric with long, graying hair; horn-rimmed glasses with lenses so smudged by fingerprints it was hard to see beyond them; the same pair of Birkenstock sandals, regardless of the outfit she wore; and a very large and colorless mole on her lip that was almost impossible to ignore when she was speaking. Her apparent favorite colors were black or dark brown which magnified, by contrast, the flaky field of dandruff that adorned her meaty shoulders.

  Despite her odd appearance, she was one of the more popular teachers in school, not because she had the gift of bringing history to life for her students; in fact, it was quite the opposite—her lectures were dry and tedious. But he
r students loved her because she listened to us as though whatever came out of our mouths was quite possibly the most interesting thing she’d heard that day. She peered at us through those badly smudged glasses as though we were precious examples of the best of humanity. She valued us and our opinions—both the profound and the ridiculous—so we valued her in return.

  It was a good movie, so it didn’t take me long to get drawn into the story. I became so engrossed that it was almost thirty minutes before I glanced over at Maggie, who sat in the desk one row up and to the right of mine. By then, her head was on the table, cradled in her arm, and I concluded she was asleep. I winced, hoping she wouldn’t snore like I’d seen her do in the past. I nearly pretended to drop something so I could lean forward and jiggle her awake but thought better of it. The volume of the movie was loud enough to cover up a bit of soft snoring, and Mrs. Gossage had stepped out of the room. But the rest of the movie was ruined for me as I became obsessed with watching out for Maggie. After a while, I lost track of the storyline.

  Seated in front of me was a girl named Kerry. Directly across the aisle from Kerry was Maggie. Kerry was a friendly girl whom Maggie and I often chatted with before class, but that day the sight of Maggie sprawled across her desk, mouth agape, proved to be irresistible. Kerry glanced back and forth from the screen to Maggie several times before turning around to look at me, stifling a giggle with her open palm. I looked over her head at the screen, pretending not to notice, pretending I was completely absorbed in the movie. But when she reached across the aisle and poked Maggie’s shoulder with the blunt end of a pencil, I cringed. Maggie retracted her arm, mumbled incoherently, and turned her head to face the other direction. From where I sat, I could see the glisten of spittle on Maggie’s chin and the lower part of her cheek.