Princess Daisy

by Judith Krantz

  “I thought you just told them what you wanted them to do and they did it,” Daisy said, incuriously. Her friend’s complaint was not an unfamiliar one.

  “Why should I have to give them a goddamned road-map? A man doesn’t have to show a woman where his cock is! It’s not fair!”

  “Just where do you think it should be moved to?” Daisy inquired reasonably. “The tip of your nose?”

  “I’m not giving up sex,” Kiki answered her quickly, “but there’s a real need for reform.”

  “Hmmm.” Daisy waited patiently for the real purpose of this conversation. Whenever Kiki talked about the clitoris she was leading up to something.

  “While we’re on the subject, Daisy, there’s one thing I really don’t understand about you,” Kiki continued.

  “Only one?”

  “Yup—how come you’re still a virgin? Everyone’s talking about you—did you realize that? They call you Peck-on-the-Cheek-Valensky.”

  “I know. It’s un-American … I’m an embarrassment to you, aren’t I?” Daisy laughed.

  “It’s getting that way. Do you realize that you’re going to be nineteen on your next birthday? In a few months? And still a virgin? Forget un-American—it’s unhealthy and unwholesome. Really, Daisy—I’m serious.”

  “I’m waiting for Mr. Right,” Daisy said annoyingly.

  “Bullshit You go square dancing with Mark Horowitz who’s having a mad thing with Janet except she hates square dancing; you go riding with Gene, the Gay Caballero; you go to the movies with absolutely anybody so long as it’s a mob; you let Tim Ross buy you pizza and he’s so in love with you that he’s happy just for the honor of paying for your pepperoni; you go into San Francisco for Chinese food with three girls, for God’s sake, and yet every one of the most attractive guys at school has been after you! And I’m not even counting the men you’ve met when you come home with me for vacations—the most eligible bachelors in Grosse Pointe have all been spurned by you, kid, including my poor brothers, those sweet assholes, and what about the men you meet when you go to Anabel’s for the summers? I’ve seen the letters they write which you don’t even bother to answer. What’s with you?” Kiki finished, her arms akimbo under her tattered poncho, her pointed ears pink with indignation.

  Daisy looked at her, suddenly serious. Kiki had been sounding this note for well over two years now and evidently it really bothered her enough to make an issue over it. And when Kiki made an issue she was capable of bringing Napoleon back from Elba.

  “Okay, you’re right. I don’t want to get involved with a man, not at all. I don’t want anyone to have any power over me. I don’t want anyone to think he is entitled to any part of me. I don’t want any man to get that close. I can’t stand it when they think they have a right to kiss me just because we’ve spent an evening together—who the hell asked them to—who gave them any permission, how dare they act as if I owed them anything?”

  “Hey, take it easy—calm down—we’re not talking about the same thing. You’re supposed to like getting close to a guy—or didn’t they ever tell you when you were growing up? Haven’t I gotten through to you, ever?”

  “But I do not like it—I don’t want to try it—and that’s the way it is. You should be able to accept that about me by now,” Daisy said with finality.

  “You’re right, I should. But I don’t.”

  “Well, keep trying,” Daisy advised her.

  Since Daisy had arrived at Santa Cruz she had been plagued by the romantic passions she inspired in various young men and, as far as she was concerned, their romantic passions gave her less sympathy for them than if they’d lost a shirt in the laundry. No one, no one was to be allowed to have the faintest hope of possession—she stamped out their feelings without the slightest remorse. She wasn’t responsible for them and if they wanted to be miserable because of her, let them. The minute anyone she went out with started to try to turn the neutral peck on the cheek into a larger embrace was the minute her relationship with him ended. There were always others to take his place.

  At almost nineteen, Daisy had consolidated her early beauty. Her spun silver-gilt hair, which she rarely cut except to have a quarter of an inch trimmed off the ends from time to time, reached almost to her waist. No matter how she tried to control it, to braid it or bunch it or tie it in neat clusters, it was impossible to do anything to keep her nape, her temples and her ears from being tickled by wisps, cowlicks and curls of shorter hair which escaped her firm hand and created a halo around her face. Her skin still held the warmth, that of a ripe peach, that she had inherited from Francesca and those generations of beautiful women of San Gimignano, and men found themselves impaled on her eyes. Eyes as large, with pupils of such a blackness as Daisy’s, were almost impossible to penetrate … yet the men of Santa Cruz never gave up trying. The touch of strangeness, which lent her beauty the necessary counterpoint, was her eyebrows, which were so straight and determined above the mystery of her eyes. As she grew older, her full, Slavic mouth, the one feature, aside from the color of her hair, that she had inherited most noticeably from Stash, became more firmly marked. At Santa Cruz she had grown taller until she reached her full height of five feet seven inches, but her body had not succumbed to institutional food. She was as slim and limber as ever: she rode every day in every kind of weather, and she had the firm, graceful arms, thighs, calves and shoulders of a horsewoman. Her breasts were fuller than they had been four years before but were still high and pointed.

  Both Daisy and Kiki wore the uniform they had settled on in their freshman year—jeans and handwoven tops, the jeans as battered as possible, the tops as ethnic. The two of them, known as Valensky and the Kav, were a legend on a campus where almost everyone was eccentric, because of the contrast in their personalities and their looks, to say nothing of Theseus who slept in their room and accompanied Daisy to all her classes. The only place from which he was barred was the eating commons, by demand of the other students.

  In spite of the intimate friendship between them, Daisy had never told Kiki about Dani, to whom she mailed, twice each week, a detailed drawing, sometimes showing a scene from her own life, sometimes a scene from Dani’s life, drawings which included those teachers and friends of Dani’s she had come to know so well. Sometimes Daisy asked herself if there might have been a time when she should have told Kiki about the existence of her twin sister, but, year after year, that moment had never presented itself. She still felt the power of the absolute prohibition which had been imposed by her father, that prohibition which she had been under since she was six, a prohibition she understood to be total, without knowing or questioning why it should exist. The longer it lasted, the more binding it became, and it was all the stronger for never having been discussed or explained—a terrifying taboo, that must be served because of consequences that were unthinkable, irrational, but entirely real.

  The only person left alive in the world who knew about Dani was Anabel, but Daisy never discussed Dani even with her. After Stash’s sudden death, Anabel had assured Daisy that Danielle had been provided for. Nevertheless, Daisy knew, in the deepest part of herself, that Dani was a secret she was under a compulsion to bear by herself. She had been born first—nothing had changed that fact, and her deepest loyalties and sense of responsibility still went to Dani. Often, when she was in the midst of some special enjoyment, she would imagine Dani, her double, her other self, more her child than her sister, playing in the garden or singing the simple songs she had been taught, and hot tears would fill her eyes at the realization of all her twin was missing, all the new knowledge and experience she would never have. Her only comfort was the realization that Dani was as happy as she could possibly be, that Queen Anne’s School was truly home to her and that the staff and other patients had become her family.

  Daisy had not, of course, been able to visit Dani from Santa Cruz, but during the long breaks at Christmas and Easter she always flew to England to see her, and every summer was spent with Anab
el at La Marée so that she could be within a few hours of Dani by plane. The staff at Queen Anne’s School took photographs of the two sisters together whenever Daisy visited, and these photos, which covered a period of thirteen years, were pinned up on a special cork board in Dani’s room. Often she pointed it out to her friends and teachers with great pride. “See Day? See Dani? Pretty?” she would ask, time after time, knowing that their answer would always be, “Yes, yes, pretty Dani, pretty Day!”

  During her years at college, Daisy had received letters from Ram, since all her school bills, all her travel bills and clothing bills were sent to him for payment, and her allowance checks had to come from him, too. Daisy could not tear up the letters and throw them away unread. Unfortunately money matters still gave Ram a hold on her and she could barely wait to graduate to get a job and become completely self-supporting.

  During 1967 and 1968, Ram’s letters had been totally impersonal, noting only that he had paid the various bills she had sent him out of her income from her stock. Then he had started dropping disquietingly intimate sentences into his communications. The first time this happened he had written, after disposing of business, “I hope that my actions of the past won’t be held against me for the rest of my life. I’ve never stopped condemning myself for what could only have been a case of temporary insanity.” The second quarterly letter was even more upsetting. “Daisy, I’ve never forgiven myself for what I did to you. I can’t stop thinking of how much I loved you and how much I still love you. If you would only write to say you forgive me—and that you are now able to understand that you literally drove me crazy, you would relieve me of a great burden.” This letter had struck a chord of terror into Daisy. It was as if Ram had reached out and tried to touch her. She looked around the room she shared with Kiki, trembling at the thought that her only safe refuge was here, and yet even here he was able to enter, if only in a letter.

  When she opened the first letter Ram sent her in 1969, she hoped that her lack of any answer to his last two letters would have caused him to return to simple business matters. But instead, he wrote, “I understand why you don’t feel ready to answer me yet, Daisy, but that doesn’t change the way I feel about you or the fact that I feel I must have, some day, a chance to gain your forgiveness in person. No matter what you think, I am still your brother and I always will be and nothing can change that—just as nothing can change my memories. Can you really forget the eucalyptus grove? Have you really no feelings toward someone who loves you so much?”

  The next time a letter came from Ram, and every time thereafter, Daisy dropped them, unopened, into the big trash basket in the coffee shop, unwilling to put them into the wastebasket near her desk. The arrival of one of them in her mail cubbyhole was like the sight of a curled-up snake. Her fear and loathing of Ram had grown stronger every year and his pleading words were vomitous, somehow menacing even in their humility.

  Long hours of introspection had permitted Daisy to understand that her premature sexual experience had been possible only because of an incompleted mourning process for her father that had catapulted her into a state in which she felt that she had lost a part of her own self, and so had fled to Ram to become whole again. She could never stop blaming him, never stop reassuring herself that it had not been her fault, but his. And yet, somehow, the guilt lingered, the guilt she knew she had no reason to feel, and she was angrily unwilling to venture into sexuality again. Daisy walled off and defended herself against sexual feelings—they caused pain, confusion, shame. She knew that she wasn’t being rational, but her emotions could not be reached by logic.

  Instead, she threw herself into a schedule of activities so full that her energy was consumed. Besides her regular classes and her daily trail ride, she became a member of the crew responsible for the stage sets of the many performances put on in the various Santa Cruz University theaters. She was so eager and ready a volunteer that more and more of the work fell on her shoulders until, by the fall of senior year, she was in full charge of all scenic design, and leader of a crew of scenery painters and builders called “Valensky’s Vassals” because of their devotion to their demanding chief. During her time at college Daisy created many stage sets which combined ingenuity with illusion in a highly professional manner. She also became familiar with all the varied crafts of stage décor: lighting, set dressing and costume design, as well as her own specialty of scenic design. She loved the stage of a theater as much as Kiki did; Kiki, who had become such an iridescent personality, as she acted in play after play, that to most people but Daisy, she seemed a splashy, spangled creature, so colorful that the details of her real self were overlooked in the glitter. But while Kiki appeared in front of an audience, Daisy’s feelings for the stage were based on the handling and working of actual materials and seeing what could be made of them. She took rich pleasure in seeing a freshly painted backdrop laid out on the grass of the sculpture garden of College 5, and later transforming it, with furniture and props, into a startling reality, as much as she loved creating a set for a dance group, using nothing but a curtain of long ropes of Christmas tree ornaments and spotlights. Daisy didn’t know what kind of job she would eventually get in the theater, but that was her ambition, and, until graduation, she planned to cram as much of stagecraft into her life as possible.

  Early in the fall of her senior year at college, Daisy was engrossed in sketching costumes for a futuristic version of The Tempest when an excited Kiki, shouting, “Hey, Daisy, where are you?” burst into their room at a run. “Oh, great—you’re here. Listen to this, I just got a letter from Zip Simon, head of advertising at old Dad’s company and he’s coming out next week and we’re invited!”

  “What does an executive of United Motors want with our humble, but admittedly lovely selves? And by the way, you’ve interrupted me. How do you think Prospero would dress on a spaceship?”

  “In a spacesuit—just leave that alone for a sec—I told you ages ago that Zip promised me that the next time they shot a TV commercial anywhere near here, he’d let us watch—and they’re going to do one in Monterey next week. It’s to introduce the new model of the Skyhawk. You know, the car that’s been such a secret.”

  “A television commercial! Oh, really, how gross! Stop kidding, Kiki,” Daisy said disdainfully.

  Students at Santa Cruz made it a fetish not to watch television except for an eccentric few who followed “As the World Turns” and insisted on being proud of their addiction. As far as commercials—all commercials—went, their contempt knew no bounds. Kiki, as an heiress to a vulgar Detroit fortune, was often hard-put to swallow her thoughts when she heard the lofty, utterly impractical ideas of her fellow students on American industry in general, and television advertising in particular.

  “Daisy Valensky!” she said indignantly. “Don’t you know that Marshall McLuhan said that historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful daily reflections any society ever made of its entire range of activities?”

  “You’re making that up!”

  “I am not! I memorized it because I’m just so sick and tired of the way everyone goes on around here—talk about ivory towers—wait till they try to get jobs, they’ll find out. Oh, come off it, Daisy, maybe you’d learn something from seeing them do the commercial.”

  “I suppose one can always learn something—like how not to do things.”

  “Oh, you’re so fucking condescending! You’ve been at Santa Cruz so long your brain’s decayed.”

  “Spoken like a true daughter of noble Detroit.”

  “Elitist swine!”

  “Capitalist pig!”

  “I got to say swine first, so I won,” Kiki said, delighted at her victory in their long-playing game of insults.

  A week later, on historic Cannery Row in Monterey, less than an hour’s drive from Santa Cruz, the two girls approached a roped-off section of the street where a small crowd of spectators had already collected. A gigantic
truck, with the word “Cinemobile” printed on its side, was parked close by. There was also a large Winnebago, and a truck carrying the new Skyhawk that was draped in heavy canvas. A vintage Skyhawk, in perfect condition, stood on the street.

  Kiki and Daisy edged cautiously through the crowd up to the ropes and inspected the scene of the commercial shoot.

  “Nothing’s going on,” Daisy observed.

  “Weird,” Kiki whispered, looking at the crowd of people inside the ropes who were frozen in widely separated groups. Two of the groups were made up of conservatively dressed men in dark suits and ties muttering together in low tones. She pointed to them with knowledgeability. “Our gang’s from the agency, the other’s from the client—my old dad’s guys.”

  “Those must be the crew,” Daisy said, indicating a tangle of men and women in jeans so shabby that they wouldn’t have looked out of place on campus, all of whom were drinking coffee from plastic cups and munching leisurely on doughnuts as if they were on vacation. Both girls looked with more interest at two people, isolated from everyone else who, at least, showed signs of animation. One was a tall red-haired man and the other a young, plump, severely tailored woman.

  “This doesn’t look right to me,” Kiki said snappishly. “I’ve seen them shoot commercials before and they’re not supposed to be just standing there.”

  “Look, you’re not in charge here,” Daisy reminded her.

  “Yeah, but Zip Simon is. Hey, Zip! Over here!” Kiki called boldly, with all the assurance of the client’s daughter, which is second only to the assurance of the client’s wife.

  A short, bald man broke away from one of the groups in business suits and came over to escort them through the ropes which were being guarded by policemen.

  “Kiki, how are you, kid?” He hugged her. “Who’s your friend?”

  “Daisy Valensky.”