by Diana Renn
“What do you want from me, Zan?” Mom asked as Orhan moved away.
“Just stop treating me like a criminal.”
“Happy to. When you stop acting like one. Even before the shoplifting, you were sneaking out and partying with your friends. You want my trust? Earn it back.”
“Well, lucky for you, I lost all my friends. You must be thrilled.”
“I’m not thrilled. And if you lost them so easily, maybe they weren’t really your friends.”
“You never liked anyone I hung out with,” I complained.
“Okay, now you’re just picking a fight. And you’re pissing me off,” she said, struggling to keep her voice lowered. “And could you maybe think about someone else besides yourself for two seconds? We’re here for Aunt Jackie. To provide moral support. We can’t do that if we’re at each other’s throats. Do I make myself clear?”
“Oh, sure. You want us to just fake it, right? Act like everything’s perfect and we have a perfect little life. Even though there’s no one here to interview us.”
Now Selim approached. He reached between us for our suitcases—gingerly, as if he were sticking his hand into a bee’s nest—and took them by the handles. He offered to take Mom and me below deck and show us our room.
Selim led us down the stairs to a hallway with gleaming wooden walls, and Aunt Jackie followed. He opened the door to a room that was just across from Aunt Jackie’s. But the room was so small that she had to wait outside while Mom and I moved our luggage in.
“I thought I was getting my own room,” I said, surveying the tiny space in dismay.
Mom glared at me. “Hey. These cabins are not cheap. Do you know how lucky we are to be on this cruise? Aunt Jackie had a free ticket, since Berk was supposed to lecture, but for us to come, I had to buy two.”
I backed away, as much as I could in a room that was only six feet wide. “Okay, okay. I just thought, you know, when we all traveled before, like to Mexico and stuff, I always had my own room, so . . .”
“Well, these are not those times. This is now. This is different. Everything is different!” Mom yelled.
Selim, who had been standing at the foot of our bed with a frozen smile, backed into the narrow bathroom and pretended to fix a hinge on the door.
Mom rubbed her temples. “It’s been a long day for both of us. Can we call a truce?”
I didn’t answer. Forget the vow of silence; I was all out of words. Nothing I could say would please my mom. I opened my suitcase and took out a fresh, lighter-weight shirt to change into as soon as Selim left our cabin. It was cooling off a little up on deck, but down here, it was sticky hot.
“Always lock your suitcase,” Mom warned as I half-zipped it again. “You never know who’s inclined to steal something,” she added with a long look.
That remark could only be aimed at me. Her criticism, my God. It never ended. I zipped my bag all the way closed and flipped the lock with a dramatic gesture, just to get her off my back.
“An Academy Award–worthy performance,” said Mom, watching me.
“Thank you,” I said, bowing. Then I sank gratefully onto the crisp, white sheets of my berth and gazed out a porthole window, while Selim explained the bathroom fixtures to Mom. Suddenly my eyelids felt so heavy. I couldn’t process what Selim was saying in his broken English about how to transform the sink in our closet-sized bathroom into a makeshift shower, or where the life jackets were, or what time breakfast was served, or the name of our first port of call.
“Zan?” said Mom, after Selim had left our cabin. “Don’t you want to come up and have something more to eat? Get to know our traveling companions?” Her voice sounded far away, as if she were underwater.
“Not hungry,” I murmured, closing my eyes as the boat gently rocked. The meze and pita bread had filled me up.
The door clicked behind her as she left to join Aunt Jackie in the hall. “Sorry. She’s being her difficult self,” I heard Mom murmur.
My mom’s and aunt’s voices trailed off. I was already slipping away, into sleep, letting the boat lull me into the sense that everything would somehow be okay. I still wasn’t forgiving Mom for dragging me into a summer of exile. And it was totally unfair that I was being punished for my dad’s stupid decisions. But as far as places for exile went, Turkey wasn’t the worst. Spending the whole summer here wouldn’t kill me. Right?
3
Most people have pretty simple stories about how they ended up in a foreign country. They wanted to go on vacation. They bought an airplane ticket. They went. End of story.
Mine’s a little more complicated.
Once upon a time, my dad, the Massachusetts attorney general, decided to run for governor. His approval ratings were sky-high because of how he’d handled a corruption case.
Or maybe they were high because he had great hair. The media always liked to comment on how he had just the right touch of dignified gray at the temples, never a single hair out of place. What they didn’t know was that Dad’s personal hairdresser came to our house every week to touch it up. He spent more on his hair than Mom did.
Things were good from the end of my freshman year, when he announced his plans to run, and all summer long, and even into the start of my sophomore year. Mom quit her job and put all her event-planning energy on fund-raisers for Dad’s campaign. Celebrities with ties to Massachusetts turned out to show their support. My friends and I got to meet all the local royalty. Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner. Steven Tyler. Chris Cooper. Tom Brady and Gisele. A steady parade of Red Sox and Bruins.
My own approval ratings at Cabot High School skyrocketed, too. I had tickets to all the hot Boston events. I suspected, deep down, that people were more interested in me because of the perks of being friends with the potential governor’s daughter than because of any desire to get to know the real me. There were times I had no idea who my real friends were anymore. And sometimes being photographed was exhausting, or having to dress and act a certain way, or darting into bathrooms to make sure my makeup was okay. To make sure I was okay. I felt that if I stopped and let down my guard, I’d explode into a million pieces.
But I liked the challenge of juggling social plans, deciding whom to invite to things and whose invitations I should accept. I liked seeing my picture in magazines and newspapers and on social media, knowing I’d pulled it off. People had fallen for my costume, my makeup, my entire act. On some level I knew that playing only a version of myself was deceitful, but it was fun, too, almost like a game, and I was good at it.
Then one day my dad’s gubernatorial opponent launched a bomb: a video of my dad kissing a woman in the Boston Public Gardens. They were under a willow tree, surrounded by bags of takeout from Fresh City Wrap. Oh, did I mention this woman was not my mom?
The video made me sick to my stomach. I couldn’t even watch the whole thing. And it got replayed all over the news, with headlines like “Attorney General Glazer Gets Fresh.” Then, of course, there were all the joke headlines: “Close Shave for Glazer” and “Glazer’s Sharp-Tongued Mistress.” Because as it turned out, the woman was Victoria Windham, divorced heiress of the Boston-based Windham Shaving Company, which manufactured razors.
At the campaign manager’s urging, my family met with a crisis management expert. Mom kept sputtering about how embarrassing it was: her life was now made-for-TV material. “It’s bad enough you had to run around behind my back, but with Victoria Windham, of all people?” she shouted at Dad at that first meeting, before the crisis expert even had a chance to begin.
Victoria Windham was old Boston money, a philanthropist whose main job seemed to be doling out money to museums, foundations, and charities. She lived in a four-story townhouse on Beacon Hill, with her two greyhounds and a cat with no tail, and high-ceilinged rooms stuffed with art and antiques. I knew this because she’d hosted one of the key fund-raising parties for Dad’s campai
gn—a party that Mom had organized.
Mom figured Victoria’s generous campaign donations had to be the reason Dad was drawn to her. What other reason could there be? She was like the opposite of Mom, more dramatic-looking than pretty, and too skinny, with skeletal cheekbones and intense green eyes buried in deep sockets. She wore her long auburn hair halfway down her back like she probably had since high school. Usually she dressed all in black and smelled of strange perfume, which she told Mom and me she was learning to mix herself; she’d actually traveled to Thailand to take a perfume class. Rich people—I mean, mega-rich people—could be weird that way, pursuing eccentric interests and yakking about them to anyone who’d listen. I’d met enough to know.
At that meeting with the crisis management expert, Mom couldn’t stop ranting about Victoria. “At least it wasn’t an intern. I should be grateful, right?” Mom laughed bitterly.
Dad looked down and twirled one of those fancy pens he collects, an astronaut pen that they say can write upside down and even in outer space, which is probably where he wished he was at that very moment.
I shrank into the leather couch and pulled at my running-shirt sleeves, which had somehow crept up my wrists to reveal the constellations of white spots on my hands. I couldn’t shake the thought that I could have prevented this mess. I’d seen clues for weeks. Texts coming in to my dad’s phone, with messages like, Can you get away for an hour? Or Desperately missing you. I’d heard him end calls when Mom or I came into the room. That, of course, was when he was actually home, which was next to never. Long hours at work, longer hours on the campaign trail.
Then there was the big clue, in Victoria’s bedroom. Where, yes, okay, fine, I had been snooping while my mom was helping set up that big fund-raising party in February. Why was I snooping? I don’t really know. I just did that sometimes. My shrink said it was from growing up in a political household, around people who were always trying to stay a step ahead of someone else. You were raised in an atmosphere of mistrust.
So during the party setup at Victoria’s house, after using one of her bathrooms, instead of heading back to the living room, I turned and walked down a corridor to her bedroom. I looked at all her bottles of odd-smelling Thai perfume, and eventually found myself standing before her closet. I opened the French doors. And nearly fell over. One whole section was filled with button-down men’s shirts. Pinstripes and pastels. My dad’s initials monogrammed on the cuffs. MDG, for Marcus David Glazer. I stared at the shirts, then bolted from the room.
I arranged my face so my panic wouldn’t betray me. I watched Dad and Victoria from afar and told myself lies to explain everything. The shirts? Extras, in case he spilled. Victoria’s pat on my dad’s arm? She was just being supportive. His smile at her from across the room? Meant to signal, “Great turnout tonight!” I had a whole alternate script by the end of the evening that I honestly tried to believe.
Maybe I could have talked to my dad, and convinced him to ditch Victoria, before it hit the news. I could have warned my mom. Then the whole thing could have been handled privately. But I didn’t say anything. I was too scared they’d blame me, somehow, for snooping. Or maybe I was scared that once I voiced my suspicion, it would become all too real.
The crisis management expert gently took over and got my mom off her Victoria Windham rant. A plan was formulated: My dad would sever all ties with Victoria and return her campaign donations. He would issue a public apology at a press conference. Mom and I would come along. We were given a script: We are working as a family to get past this bump in the road. We are pulling together. We are all on board.
“Voters will be moved by your resilience as a family,” the expert explained. “Americans tend to be quite forgiving of sex scandals,” she added, looking at Mom. Mom was staring ahead with a sharp glint in her eyes I’d never seen before.
Sex scandal. Because of course that’s what it was. The video was just the tip of the iceberg. Dad and Victoria had been together since January, and now it was late May. Still, those words shocked me. I couldn’t even look at him. All during my sophomore year, as his campaign for governor ramped up, he’d lectured me about how our family was in the spotlight, how I couldn’t get in trouble, how everything we did would get magnified in the media and reflect back on him. How I should hang out with “quality people.”
Then he had gone and done this.
Soon after the meeting, I found myself with Mom at Neiman Marcus shopping for conservative matchy-matchy dresses. The morning of the press conference, we both got our hair blown out, our makeup professionally done. It was almost like a party. Except I couldn’t fight the feeling of dread inside me. The voters of Massachusetts would be watching us. As would my friends—or now, my ex-friends. Because as soon as the scandal broke, people stopped texting and calling, and the party invitations dried up. All those people who wanted stuff from me when the campaign was in full swing went out of their way now to avoid me. I was radioactive. All because of Dad. I tried to shrug it off, but it hurt to be dropped so fast, and to realize how shallow all my school friends were.
After our blowouts, I drank a couple of beers I’d stashed in my closet from one of my mom’s parties. I grabbed my sports bag and told Mom I was taking the bus to the climbing gym. Burlington Boulders was my sanctuary, the one place where I felt as if I wasn’t in the spotlight. On the wall, nobody cared who I was.
“Are you insane? Zan, you are so not climbing two hours before the press conference,” Mom said, blocking the door. “You’ll sweat and mess up your makeup.”
“Ah, the makeup. We wouldn’t want my real face emerging on TV, right?” I shot back.
“That’s not what I meant. Come back here. You are not leaving this house!”
I pushed past her and walked out the door.
And kept walking. I took a bus to Burlington, but I didn’t go to the rock gym for some reason. I went to the mall, and headed straight to the Athleta store, as if propelled by invisible forces. Everything felt underwater and unreal.
But what was real was this: though I’d left my parents to face the cameras at the press conference without me, I got caught on camera in the end—a security camera—stuffing three hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise into my bag. A pair of leggings, a sports bra, and two of those long-sleeved tops I like, with the thumb hooks so the sleeves never ride up your arms. Which is about all you can get for three hundred bucks at Athleta. I was spluttering something about their criminal prices when mall security arrived.
I sobered up fast while I waited for Mom to show up. The security officers said she had sixty minutes to collect me before they called the police. Things only got worse when I saw that it wasn’t Mom picking me up after the press conference; it was Dad.
I couldn’t look at him. The last time I’d gotten caught, taking nail polish at a CVS, he’d said he couldn’t keep springing me like this. That he was worried I’d “graduate” from lipsticks to pricier items. That’s what the visits to the shrink’s office were meant to combat.
We just sat in the car while he talked at me, his eyes blazing, not even driving for a long time. “Dammit.” Dad slapped the steering wheel with his palm. “I had a chance of salvaging this campaign.”
I shot him a skeptical look.
“My own daughter bolting from a press conference, and then breaking the law?” he continued. “You had to put the final nail in my coffin, didn’t you? If this leaks out to the press, it could be the end of the road for the campaign.”
“Are you kidding me?” I shot back. “Do you remember why we were having the stupid press conference in the first place? And by the way, your timing could use work, too.”
“Look. I’m sorry you had to hear about Victoria and me the way you did,” he said, taking his voice down a notch as he started up the car and pulled out of the parking lot. “But adult lives are complicated. We were both lost for a while, Victoria and I, and we fou
nd—”
I put up a hand. “Spare me the details.”
“I just meant to say, things haven’t been so easy for your mom and me for a while now. And every story has two sides. But your job, right now, is to stay the course. Go to school, join the temple youth group again, get your work done. Eye on the prize, Zan. You can’t just be a reactor and live your life in meltdown mode. And you can’t be acting out like this. Three hundred dollars of merchandise! That’s serious. This just isn’t you.”
“Thanks for the motivational speech.”
“Hey, I just saved you. Again. Do you have any idea how much worse this could have been? How lucky you are they aren’t pressing charges? This is a major-league screw-up!”
“Learned from the best,” I said. And as my dad stopped at a red light, I opened the door and got out of the car. On Route 3 North, cars swerved to avoid me.
“Zan! Zan! Get back in the car! Right now!”
I made it three long blocks, at a fast run, before I lost him and managed to call my mom to come get me at a McDonald’s.
After that, the real fun began. My incident did hit the news, thanks to a video shot by a shopper, showing mall security dumping out the contents of my bag and hauling me away. The video got posted on YouTube and showed up right under my dad’s in search results; “Glazer Kid Gets Rap Sheet” trended on Twitter, even though I avoided a formal arrest. Then that ended up being even more media fodder, with headlines like: “Preferential Treatment for Attorney General’s Daughter?”
So much for presenting a unified front to the American family. Mom and Dad couldn’t seem to agree on how to handle the fallout from the Athleta incident, so instead they just fell apart. Dad moved into a one-bedroom condo in Cambridge, in a building that seemed filled with separated and divorced men. He slipped further behind in the polls, and struggled to pick up the pieces of his campaign, granting interviews and giving speeches.