I didn’t have the sort of looks you found just everywhere. Gordon kidded sometimes that I could be part Indian with my dark coloring, high cheekbones and almond eyes. “Bedroom eyes,” he called them, meaning they were sexy. My father referred to them as “alien” because they were the same shape as the eyes he gave to the maidens from other worlds in his novels. When I looked at my parents—both of them so fair—and at Neal and Meg with their light blue eyes and freckled noses, I wondered sometimes how I had managed to be born into such a family.
Well, duh. You weren’t! However, we don’t learn this from Dad and Mom. (Who, P.S., are a “night person” and a “day person” whose schedules only briefly coincide.) Instead, we learn this from a sepulchral presence around town whom people keep mistaking for Laurie. As the days pass, “Laurie” appears at a party the actual Laurie has begged off of, enraging Gordon; in the house, confusing Laurie’s parents; at the Post Office, where she accepts a birthday invite that she fails to pass on, enraging the birthday girl; and in various lonely poses around the dunes surrounding Cliff House.
Laurie is beside herself at how this could be happening, but, luckily, Helen Tuttle, child of the Southwest, holder of knowledge of the Navajo, and former girlfriend of Luis, a Navajo, is there to point out an explanation other than Laurie’s going crazy:
“You weren’t using astral projection, were you?” Helen asked.
“Using what?” I said in bewilderment.
“You know—sending your mind out from your body? Luis’s father used to be able to do it.”
This seems like a good time for somebody to take a book out of the library related to the issue at hand! Okay, but getting ahead of myself. Laurie finally gets the answer to her question, when she is visited, in a profound dream, by Lia, who claims to be her twin sister and leans across and gives her a spooky astral-projection kiss. At this point, in possession of a towering mountain of supernatural proof, Laurie confronts her parents, whose reaction is, to put it mildly, not open. “The trend today is toward total openness about adoption,” her father says. “Still, that idea has been upsetting to your mother…. Laurie, it’s not that big a deal. You’re the same person you always were. You’re our beloved daughter…. Now that you know your background, there’s nothing left for you to wonder about. Can’t we just file this away and get on with our normal lives?”
Sadly, this kind of secrecy was once the norm, young Juno fans! Also key for the plot is her mother’s explanation of why, confronted with a set of beautiful, mixed-blood Navajo twins to adopt, they did not just snag both:
“Then, why—” The question rose to my lips without my even realizing that I was going to ask it. “Why did you take me instead of her?”
“We couldn’t raise both of you,” Dad said. “We were going out on a limb to take even one dependent at that point in our lives.”
“That’s not what I asked,” I said. “What I want to know is, why did you choose me over my sister?”
There was a moment’s silence as my parents exchanged glances.
Then Dad said slowly, “Your mother—your mother, well, she thought—”
“I didn’t want her,” Mother said. Her normally gentle voice was strangely sharp. “I just didn’t want her. I wanted you.”
“But if we were just alike—”
“You weren’t alike,” Mother said. “You looked just alike—both of you so beautiful with big, solemn eyes and all that thick, dark hair. The people at the agency wanted us to take you both, and despite what Dad says, I really think we might have done it. It seemed wrong to separate twin sisters. I picked you up and cuddled you, and I knew I never wanted to let you go. It was as though you were meant to be ours. Then I handed you to Dad to hold and picked up the other baby, and—and—”
“And what?” I prodded.
“I wanted to put her down.”
BECAUSE LIA IS EVIL! Arg! And, of course, the machinations of Lia’s evil, as they unfold in the novel, are great fun. Not only does she put Helen Tuttle in the hospital (the ability of specters to put people in hospitals in the novels of Lois Duncan must only be exceeded by the ability of the shark in the Jaws franchise to increasingly have the ability to handily kill people on dry land), she lures Jeff and Laurie to a near-death experience, and, having alienated Laurie completely from her peers and those who love her, manages to invade her body and steal her entire life.
BUT NOT SO FAST, LIA!
Because Lia doesn’t weaken the bonds Laurie holds to the world—her takeover of Laurie Stratton from all the elements strengthens them. When Lia easily ruins the friendships she gained through Gordon, it only makes her realize how glad she can be for Helen’s loyalty. Her interruption of the placid family structure of the Strattons forces Laurie’s parents to realize how damaging their inability to face Laurie’s adoption was, which in turn allows Laurie to realize she is, in the end, a Stratton who loves and is loved by her family. And, most important, when Lia splits Laurie and Gordon apart, she actually brings Jeff and Laurie together—not coincidentally because Jeff, unlike Gordon, is willing to face the question of Lia and Laurie’s adoption. He’s also willing to talk about the weirder question of what Megan calls Laurie’s “ghosty”:
“Look, Jeff, there’s no sense in our discussing this. You don’t believe in astral projection, and I don’t blame you. I couldn’t accept it myself until just recently.” A question occurred to me. “What were you doing here the night you thought you saw me? There’s no reason for anyone to come out this way unless he’s coming to Cliff House.”
“I walk here sometimes because you live here,” Jeff said.
Shades of Pretty in Pink! But, even though the ostensible point of the novel is that looks don’t matter because those who love us, like Laurie’s savior and little sister Megan, can look past them to the true self beneath, of course, looks do matter. Not only are they a constant subject, as the novel commences, within Laurie’s family before Laurie knows about Lia, but also, Laurie and Jeff’s changing looks have reversed the course of their entire lives. Duncan’s point about our appearance versus our true self is much more subtle. In the scene where Laurie, loosed from her own body, regards the sleeping Lia, we can see that clearly:
She was a duplicate of myself…. Yet there were differences.
This girl’s ears were pierced, and mine were not. Mother and I had gone through a few rounds on that issue, and she had won. “There are enough natural holes in a person’s anatomy,” she had said firmly….
…There was a tiny scar on the chin that might have been nothing more than the result of scratching an insect bite, but it was a scar that I did not have.
There was a mole on the neck at a spot where I had no mole.
I continued my inspection…. She had perfect fingernails, the kind that had always filled me with envy. My own had a scraggly look, not exactly “bitten to the quick,” but “slightly gnawed.”
Small things. Unimportant. Almost unnoticeable, yet they spelled the difference between Lia Abbott and Laurie Stratton.
So it is not that looks don’t matter. Not only do they matter to others—they matter because they reflect choices we have made, what has been done by us and to us. Our looks may start with what life had dealt us, but they are also about the lives we lead.
BOOK REPORT
Hangin’ Out with Cici
By Francine Pascal 1977
Time Outs
Getting to be thirteen turned out to be an absolute and complete bummer. I mean it. What a letdown. You wouldn’t believe the years I wasted dreaming about how sensational everything was going to be once I was a teenager.
Spending time socializing with one’s mother must rank up there with transcribing Haydn and laying brick as the activities your average 13-year-old is least likely to want to partake in. But Francine Pascal, best known for the Sweet Valley High series—you may have heard of it—manages in her most charming stand-alone novel to create the one situation wherein which bouncing around town
with dear old Mom could reasonably compete with a hot date with Bruce Patman: going back in time to hang out with a mother who’s, um, very different from the strict, easily enraged lady she knows all too well.
There’s something strangely appealing about the idea of actually visiting the world your mother grew up in—especially when the idea that she had a life before you at all seems faintly humorous. The idea of witnessing the particulars of my mother’s own upbringing—the sunny 1950s in Langston, Oklahoma, then as an adolescent in Queens, getting up early to take the bus and train to Bronx Science, then college years at CUNY, going on dates with my dad—seems to rank psychologically somewhere alongside visiting a fascinating, dimly lit display in a museum and watching a blurry documentary on PBS (sorry, Mom), two things I love to do but that might be taking the idea of earlier eras a little far.
But as the snapshots of my own life start to reveal an ancient palette very different from the brilliant millions-of-colors digitization of any camera-phone, Facebook-uploaded pic of me today—which is to say, as my old 1970s and 1980s haircuts start to make me look a little PBS documentary, myself—the idea of being able to breathe in the air of an earlier time, to say nothing of the air that shaped someone you thought you knew very well indeed, starts to seem all that much closer. Frankly, looking at the covers of all these books feels pretty much like going back in time to visit my own mother. Cue spooky time-travel spinny shot.
Victoria is a private-school student in New York, rebelling as hard as she can against her school’s “vomity blue blazer” and boxy pleated skirt and anything else that attempts to box her in. A humble ringleader, she modestly declines to take credit for the numerous disruptions swirling around her, even when authorities strenuously insist she take credit. Unfortunately, after a disruption involving a theater balcony, a cigarette, and a spitball directed at a teacher’s head, the new principal himself requires Victoria to present herself at his office, with parental guardian at her side, to receive her just due.
For some time, Victoria and her mother have been locked in the kind of go-rounds that would bedevil a prizefighter. A typical one goes something like this:
Now she comes stumping toward my room, saying, “You just listen to me!” She’s angry and just pushes the door open without even knocking. “You’re behaving like a four-year-old.”
And we start our usual argument. “That’s the way you treat me,” I say, and she tells me that’s because I act like one and I should realize I was wrong and accept my punishment, and it goes on that way with me saying one thing and her saying another but never really answering me…. I swear I’ll never treat my daughter the way they treat me. I’ll really be able to understand her because I’ll remember how awful it was for me.
But her latest infraction changes the stakes entirely. As it happens, the principal is suggesting not only that Victoria needs to be brought into line, but that she might draw the line somewhere else entirely. And as Victoria departs for one last weekend of freedom at her cousin’s birthday party—a weekend during which she is busted for, as her aunt says, “smoking a pot,” only adding fuel to the ganja—she realizes her mother isn’t only mad: She’s about to give up on her.
But somewhere during the train ride home from Philadelphia, something strange happens. The lights go off, Victoria bumps her head, and when she wakes up, the little old lady next to her has been replaced by a young, pregnant lady, all the passengers seem to have recently picked up a child or two, and the kindly, elderly conductor is now a kindly young conductor.
You may see what’s coming, but Victoria doesn’t yet—quite. Walking through a slightly unfamiliar-looking Penn Station, trying to find her mother by the information booth that is strangely half the size it used to be, she decides first that they must be filming a movie, and then that New York tourism has taken an odd direction:
You can tell they’re really squares. All the women are wearing skirts and the men are dressed in baggy suits and most of them are wearing old fashioned felt hats. Not even the kids are wearing jeans. In fact, nobody is but me. It’s unreal. This has got to be some kind of convention group from Missouri or someplace. Something real snappy like librarians, funeral directors, and Eagle Scouts.
She’s relieved when she sees Cici, a girl her age whom she waves over, mistaking her for a friend. Cici is unperturbed, and then, after hearing her story, waits with Victoria, then finally invites her to come hang out with her in Queens until Victoria can reach her mother, whom she keeps trying to no avail. Getting on the E train, Victoria tells us, “…I can tell right off I’m really going to like Cici. You know how it is, sometimes you just meet someone and bang, you hit it off. Better than that, you’re old friends instantly.”
Cici and I chatter away for the rest of the trip. We seem to have a million things in common. Especially problems. She tells me about how she’s always getting into trouble for the littlest, most unimportant things. Just like me. Plus she hates the way she looks, too. I tell her she’s crazy because she’s really cute-looking, but she says her eyes are too small and close together and she thinks her knuckles are too big.
Victoria and Cici spend the afternoon together, doing wholesome activities like shoplifting and thwarting perverts in the movie theater. But throughout, Victoria is finding it harder and harder to make excuses for why her number, apparently, doesn’t exist in the New York area anymore, everyone is dressed like an extra from a black-and-white movie, and in Queens, apparently everything is sold for an eighth of its usual Manhattan price.
Because the answer is…it’s May 19, 1944! No biggie. Staring incredulously at the day’s paper, Victoria is filled with despair at realizing she’s truly and irrevocably screwed: “This is definitely the forties and I have no home and no family and I’m going to be stuck here forever.”
But wait…there’s more! When Cici finally manages to drag the distraught Victoria home, she’s shocked to hear a very familiar voice—and then absolutely gobsmacked to see the person that goes with it:
Sure, she’s younger and slimmer and all that. But there’s no question. I know for absolutely certain that she’s my grandma. And this has to mean—no! I won’t let the thought come any closer! It can’t be!
YES!
Felicia! Cici! My own mother! Holy cow, I am dumb. Fantastic! I told you she looked familiar. I mean, she didn’t really, but there were things about her that reminded me of someone. Not so much the features, but more like the expressions, the way she talked—I don’t know what, something, maybe the look in her eyes. I just knew I knew her all along, only I thought she was a friend of somebody’s or some girl I met someplace. That’s what threw me. I thought she was a kid like me.
But she’s not. She’s a woman. Felicia, Cici, whatever she wants to call herself, there’s one thing for sure, this crazy nutty kid who isn’t afraid to zonk a pervert in the shin, turn Woolworth’s upside down, sneak cigarettes in a garage, and probably do a million other kooky things and maybe even some awful things like buying a science test, isn’t my friend at all.
She’s my mother!
Hangin’ Out with Cici is a wonderful way to learn all about the 1940s (where else would I have ever heard the phrase “Kilroy Was Here”?) but it’s also a great book for learning about what makes someone realize it’s time to grow up. In Cici’s case, it’s finally being caught for a crime even she’s ashamed of. But in Victoria’s case, it’s that, by realizing her mother is a person just like she is, she considers that she might want to start persecuting her for every conceivable crime. As she watches the young Cici scramble off a roof on her way to an illfated mission, she thinks:
Watching her now reminds me how once, about two years ago, we were on a picnic with two other families in some park on Staten Island, and I don’t know why, but everybody (the adults anyway) was kidding around and daring each other to do all sorts of crazy things like swinging from monkey bars and climbing trees. I remember that my mother climbed higher than anyone else, so high that I b
egan to get a little worried. Everyone else thought it was hysterical, but it seemed kind of peculiar, even a little embarrassing to me. Now that I consider it, I guess it was kind of unfair of me to be embarrassed. After all, just because you’ve got children doesn’t mean you’re nothing but a mother. I’m hopeless when it comes to my mother. Everything about her is either embarrassing, irritating, or just plain confusing. I don’t know why I can’t just say she’s a super climber and let it go at that.
By seeing her mother in her own place—that is, a lovely, charming girl on the verge of becoming a juvenile delinquent—Victoria is suddenly able to put herself in her grownup mother’s place, too. Suddenly, she realizes that it’s not her mother who’s been giving her a hard time. It’s she who’s been giving her mother a hard time. As the book ends, Victoria is returned back to the clog-wearing 1970s with rock-hard evidence that her mother, however shrewish she seems now, once, really and truly did know how she felt. But Hangin’ Out with Cici isn’t only really about getting to know your mother. It’s also about realizing your mother, that shrew, made a choice to grow up, for a good reason—and you might want to think about it, too.
EXTRA CREDIT
Jane-Emily
By Patricia Clapp 1969
Global Terror
Any devotee of Rebecca or The Turn of the Screw (and one would hope you are already a devotee of both) will already be well prepared for Jane-Emily, the gothic tale of the pretty, poised Louisa and her niece Jane, and the petulant ghost, Emily, the former mistress of the house who died at the age of 12. When Louisa and Jane arrive for the summer, they find someone already in residence and unlikely to welcome them with open arms—Jane, the spoiled young lady of the house who died—in a petulant state of outrage, one imagines—two decades ago, and has no intention of letting any other girls become mistresses of the house. Angry ghosts, malevolent doubles, attempts to thwart love, rambling estates, change-of-scene summers—what’s not to like?
Shelf Discovery Page 21