The following morning, Father joked about what had happened at the recital.
I returned to sobbing.
“I wasn’t trying to insult your friend,” I told him (sob, sob), “that’s just how I look when I’m interested!”
“Well, my daughter, you’re just going to have to find a new look.”
In the following weeks I tried various expressions. To get the faces down, I would imagine myself in a various interesting situations. There was “walking past a man leading his cat on a leash” interest and “my dad just found another West African dung sculpture” interest, “Penelope Brewster was wearing a thong today” interest and “my uncle is a right-wing Republican” interest. When I thought I had one of the faces right, I would photograph myself and show the photo to my mom.
I had a great time with this, and by the end of the week, I had a number of interested faces. All of them, I must admit, were convincing.
I decided that I would try them out on Joseph. He could be counted on for an honest opinion.
Later that day, Joseph was rambling on about his grandfather, who lived with Joseph and, more significantly, shared a bathroom with him.
According to Joseph, his grandfather had been constipated for three decades (a condition he blamed on his late wife’s brisket), but had recently come up with a mixture of tea leaves, black pepper, and Maalox, which, he claimed, had cured him.
As Joseph talked, I knew that I was wearing the right face, for Joseph, interpreting my look as one of interest (with a dash of revulsion), dove into ever greater details of what he had learned of his grandfather’s digestive tract. The work I had done over the last months was paying off.
CINDERELLA
I CAN’T DENY that before I ran for president of my eighth-grade class, it had occurred to me that if I was elected, I’d be in a position to arrange events that would give me an excuse to meet the boys at school.
So the first thing that I decided to do in my new position was to organize a dance, a Halloween dance. I picked Halloween because it continued to be my favorite holiday. I wanted to do something fun and scary—like the inspired foolery that I’d grown up with at the hotel.
The dance also provided me with the opportunity to approach boys I liked and ask them to help out with refreshments, music, decorations, and tickets. By the time the big night rolled around, the boys and I would be friends and they would ask me to dance. At least that was the plan. Even if this failed, everyone would be in disguise (I as Cinderella), and the boys might just confuse me for one of the attractive girls.
I’d given out the assignments days in advance. Arriving at school in the late afternoon, I waited in the cafeteria for the boys to arrive and make good on their promises.
An hour before the dance, when no one had appeared, I placed some calls. Of those few boys I was able to reach by phone, all showed a frightening nonchalance about their tasks. I attempted to be nonchalant about their nonchalance. It didn’t work.
Thirty minutes before the dance, nothing was ready. With little time, I managed to pull together some decorations and set up some tables. One of the boys had dropped off a bowl of bean dip which, he assured me, was what “Grandma made for Mom’s senior prom.” From the look of the dip, it wasn’t clear whether this was a cryogenically preserved bowl of what Granny had made decades earlier or something fresher. I put the dip on the table and sat down.
Exhausted, I still needed to change into my costume when Meredith Penny, the parent in charge of the dance (of course), arrived.
She began to shout commands.
“The floor in the main hall—sweep it! And the windows, clean them! And the curtain on the stage, fix it . . . ”
I interrupted.
“But I need time to get into my costume.”
“Then work faster.”
I worked faster than I’d ever worked in my life, and with five minutes to spare, I rushed toward the lockers. But hefty Meredith blocked my path. She pointed to the table with the dip and drink. No one was there to serve them.
I made my way to the table, still sweating from my tasks. After an hour or two, with everyone but me enjoying themselves, I noticed a commotion at the center of the dance floor. In all the running around to prepare, I’d neglected to make certain that someone was supervising the Licker, who, disguised as Captain Crunch, was able to advance on people who otherwise would have stayed far away.
I had no time to make sure that the Licker stayed out of trouble, so there was only one thing to do. I asked him if he would do me the favor of retrieving an item from the janitor’s closet down the hall from the cafeteria. Once the Licker was inside, I closed the door.
That taken care of, I returned to a list of assignments which Meredith had taped to my chair. I raced over to the snack table.
Pressing my overheated noggin against the side of the frosty dip, I watched as others (including the boys who had neglected the jobs I’d given them) arrived. I felt like Cinderella if Cinderella’s fairy godmother had never shown up.
Before leaving the dance, Meredith had made certain that the list was so long that I would have little chance to dance and that I would be in that awful cafeteria, taking down decorations and throwing away garbage, until well after everyone else had left. And I was already exhausted.
If I needed a reason to feel sorry for myself, this was it. My only comfort was that with Meredith’s departure, things couldn’t get worse.
Then they did.
Through the rear doors of the cafeteria came a group of parents, all dressed in costume. Meredith, who had never actually left, led the way. Accompanying her, against its will, was Meredith’s reawakened pleather costume, which had, decades before, shocked the citizens of Pagosa Springs.
“Who’s That Girl,” Meredith’s favorite, was on the speakers.
“When you see her, say a prayer and kiss your heart good-bye. She’s trouble, in a word . . . ”
As Meredith drew closer to me and the dip, I was able to make out the details of her outfit: black pleather tights, pointy pleather bra, teased hair, and a long metal chain around her neck.
Given her girth, upward-thrusting bra, black makeup, and chain swinging back and forth across her torso, the dancing Meredith resembled a battleship that had been struck by enemy fire and was listing badly.
As kids fled, I knew that my Halloween dance was over and would soon be known as the biggest catastrophe in the history of our middle school. But that was its fate: it had been organized by the school idiot.
At that instant the music stopped.
“Meredith, get off the floor!”
The voice came loudly from the opposite side of the auditorium.
“This is our dance.”
Meredith’s eyes searched violently for her antagonist.
Hunter Whiting, the best-looking boy in the school, stepped forward.
“You heard it, Meredith. GET OFF THE FLOOR.”
To everyone’s amazement, Meredith Penny, without a word, left the floor, left the auditorium, and left our future. Never had so much material girl disappeared so quickly.
But Hunter was not through.
“Now I want to say something that should have been said a long time ago. There is someone who has been working very, very hard so that we can enjoy ourselves. And it is about time that we thanked that person, someone who is not only hardworking and modest but also the prettiest girl I know.”
He turned to the table where I was sitting.
Me?
Hunter grinned.
I stood up. I felt the top of my head, my black curls still tucked neatly behind a tiara.
No one was laughing.
I walked from behind the table. A waltz came on.
Others began to sway. And when I was within reach of Hunter, he held out his hand. I took it, placing my other hand on his s
houlder. He reached his arm around my waist and pulled me close. So close I could smell his Axe body spray. (One of the girls at school had given all the cute boys a can of Axe, so our school permanently smelled of perfume and sweat.)
“Hunter,” I sighed.
He brushed a strand of hair that had fallen from my tiara.
And then we danced, Hunter holding me in his caring though muscular arms as the music carried us around the room.
“It’s as if there’s no one else in the room,” he whispered.
“I know . . .” I replied, my eyes closed, my face pressed against his shoulder.
“And you have dip in your hair.”
What?
“I said there’s dip below your face, and if you don’t get up your head’s going in.”
I opened my eyes. The dip was looming under me, the Licker just above. As I fell asleep my head had lolled closer and closer to the ominous bowl, hovering just above.
“I’m sorry but someone locked me in the closet, and I just got out.” He shrugged. “Worse things have happened. I came here, and everyone was gone. Except you, taking a nap.”
I was too shocked not to ask.
“Hunter?”
“He’s gone with the others.”
“Did we dance?” I asked.
The Licker paused. He liked me too much to tell me the truth.
“Here, let me help you clean up,” he offered.
With that he began gathering trash off the tables and floor. He did not look back at me, allowing me time to adjust to what had never happened.
When we finished cleaning the gymnasium, he approached me. In his hand was a small plastic bag. It was the one I’d brought to the dance. Still inside were my golden gown, matching slippers, and tiara.
It was late at night, and no one was on the street. We walked each other to the corner and said good night.
THE BANANA PEELS OF OPTIMISM
LUNCH AT TABLE 17 was a time usually devoted to bemoaning various embarrassing social situations. One day I found myself the focus of everyone at my table’s gaze.
“Where do you want to go?”
This came from Maria and was a question echoed by every kid in my school. And we would not stop asking it for the next few months, each time more nervously. Maria, luckily, got to opt out of the entire process because her family was moving back to Italy.
Typical of my parents, they had done nothing to figure out where I should go to high school, so I took the elevator down to the lobby of the Chelsea, hoping that someone there had gone to high school in New York and would know what was going on.
It was late in the afternoon and I caught the Crafties in the window of sobriety between lunch and predinner cocktails at El Quijote. I emptied my sack of complaints.
Waving his cane to silence the others, Mr. Crafty began.
“As I look back on my life, the people I met at Hotchkiss and then the Naval Academy helped me to achieve my greatest accomplishments. Am I proud to admit that? No, but the advantage cannot be denied.”
“Excuse me,” interrupted Uber-Crafty, “you never went to Hotchkiss, and it was the Capitan, not you, who went to the Naval Academy.”
“Well, what about ‘my greatest accomplishments’?” asked Mr. Crafty, surprised at the revision to his biography.
“Locked securely in the future.”
“Funny man, but let me remind you”—Mr. Crafty now had the end of his cane stuck in Uber-Crafty’s chest—“‘the distinction between the past, present, and future is only a persistent illusion.’ ”
“Who said that, Mr. Crafty?” I questioned.
“I can assure you that he doesn’t remember,” Uber-Crafty responded. “The point that he is trying to make is that if you want to get into a good college you will need to attend a private high school.”
This was the first I’d heard of such a thing. Noting my surprise, Uber-Crafty continued.
“Over half the kids from private schools in this city go to good colleges, even if they’re screw-ups. That’s not true of public schools.”
I was beginning to feel a fever coming on.
“Loaded parents know that the best way to get their little idiot into a respectable college is to find a private school where the kid automatically goes from elementary and middle school into high school.”
“What about poor kids?”
“No damn shot. No matter how much you work cleaning the shitters for Mr. and Mrs. Loaded, you aren’t going to make the scratch to send your kid to a private school.”
This roused the Capitan, who was relaxing in a chair on the opposite side of the lobby.
“ ‘Muchacha!’ to quote our recently departed friend.”
“Right you are, El Capitan. It’s all about muchacha.”
Crafties Number One and Two were now waving their arms and clapping in mock tribute to Uber-Crafty.
“If you idiots would shut up, you might learn something,” shouted Uber-Crafty.
There was no chance of that, but Uber-Crafty continued anyway.
“So rich parents take a good look at themselves, their relatives, and Little Maxie and make a quick decision that the little crapper will never have the genetic stuff to beat out Jane Chu for that spot at a top public high school, so they pick up the phone and call in some solids to get Maxie into a private kindergarten. This is the last time, by the way, that these assholes will be honest about what’s going on with their kid.”
“Hallelujah! Praise Uber-Crafty!” The chorus of sarcasm had started up again.
“Shut the fuck up!”
And with that the lecture was over.
—
The next day I sought out the school guidance counselor and told her that it was important that I get into a private high school. The conversation didn’t last long: I had missed the deadlines for private schools, and as for the selective public schools, I was too late for most of those as well.
I was back where I had started.
That evening I returned to the lobby.
This time, Uber-Crafty was alone.
When I told him that I’d missed the deadline for private schools and that I was again at a loss for what to do, he laughed.
“Do me a solid,” he said.
I nodded.
“Tell me what you’ve enjoyed most in the last year.”
“Singing along to ‘Anything Goes’?” I replied cautiously.
He grimaced.
“Anything else?”
“Watching movies,” I admitted.
“Well,” he responded, “here’s my advice: find a goddamn public school where you can sing and watch old movies, and stop bothering me.”
As I stood at the elevator, waiting to go back up to my room, Uber-Crafty approached me. He looked me in the eyes.
“One more thing.”
“Yes?”
“Don’t sweat it, kid.”
—
Two days later, glancing through the several-hundred-page Directory of New York City Public High Schools, I came upon a place where I could sing and act.
That evening I told my father of my selection: Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts.
“Congratulations, my good girl,” Father announced. “You’ve made a fine choice, and I have every reason to believe that you will find the curriculum exactly what you are looking for. And as to the student body . . . ”
“Father,” I interrupted, “have you actually heard of the school?”
“Not by name.”
Lord.
Luckily, my fellow students knew a lot about the school, which is why they laughed when I told them of my decision. According to them, LaGuardia or “LAG” was where you went if you were genuinely talented—if you had played Annie on Broadway or done master cl
asses with a famous musician.
It was the Fame school.
If that wasn’t enough to intimidate me, there was an additional bit of bad news: according to the kids at my table, LaGuardia required an audition.
I soon confirmed this: the acting studio at LaGuardia asked for two monologues, one comedic, one serious, and both had to be contemporary and appropriate for a thirteen-year-old. In other words, no Shakespeare.
As to the singing studio, the school required one a cappella song and a series of vocal and rhythmic tests, basically impossible for someone, like me, who couldn’t read music. I decided to go for the acting studio.
Terrified, I reported this to my parents. They could not believe that I was the least bit bothered. They would help me find the monologues, they promised, I would pop up on stage, perform them, and the judges would declare that they’d heard nothing like it in all their years.
Here was the slippery stuff that my parents constantly tossed in my path—the banana peels of optimism, which invariably caused me to fly up in the air and come down on my head. I’d long ago excused them this attitude of theirs: they’d both grown up in the Midwest, where, it would seem, seldom was heard a discouraging word and where whenever the two of them actually decided to do something, which was not often, the universe agreeably parted and let them complete their task.
For me, by contrast, the world was the sort of place where just as you were getting to love someone (like Artie or my grandparents or Cream Puff), you were forced to watch them suffer and die; a place where one could spend years alone and not understand why; not an easy place, an often painful place.
—
The whole problem of what to perform for my audition was made easier when I discovered a list of suggested monologues on the LaGuardia website. When I presented the list to my parents, my mother suggested I do the Auntie Mame monologue that I’d been performing at cocktail parties since I was five.
“It’s a sure win!” she said.
But my father disagreed. He couldn’t believe that I would even consider doing a monologue from the school’s list. Why, he asked, bore the judges with something they’d heard a thousand times?
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