by Sachi Parker
This particular evening, Brad sneaked up to the cottage to be with me. The door was on the ground floor, so there was no need for ropes or climbing out of windows. I just let Brad in, and we immediately went at it like teenagers in heat—which is exactly what we were. We were so mad with passion that I forgot to close the curtains.
We were doing some heavy making out, and pretty soon I realized that this was going to be a historic encounter: we were going all the way. We moved from kissing to groping to grinding with amazing speed. As if by magic, my clothes were off, and so were his, and we were wrestling on the couch, and it was happening, we were going for it, we were right at the brink…!
Then the door flew open—forgot to lock it!—and there was Mrs. Green, staring at us, mouth open in shock. We were caught, caught dead. There was no hope of coming up with an adequate excuse, not with the two of us stark naked, our limbs intricately intertwined.
I hastily covered myself with a couch pillow, while Brad grabbed his clothes and hid behind them. Mrs. Green took in the lurid scene for a moment, her eyes fixing me with wounded outrage, and then she turned and stalked off into the night.
I threw Brad out of the cottage and then, guilt-stricken, rushed up to the main house. I burst in on the Greens and apologized profusely to them. I felt terrible, I had betrayed their trust. How could I have been so selfish and ungrateful? I tearfully admitted my guilt—“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”—and begged for their forgiveness.
I didn’t get it. Mr. Green just said he was “very disappointed,” and left the room. Mrs. Green wouldn’t even look at me; she stared at the wall and said nothing.
Brad and I broke up after that. Much as I desired him, close as he had come to adding a seminal chapter to my sexual history, he had been an accomplice in the most humiliating episode of my life, and I just couldn’t be with him anymore.
• • •
AT exam time, we had to take both the British and the American tests to determine our college worthiness. The SATs were not culturally neutral; they were definitely slanted toward American mores and idioms. If you hadn’t been raised in the United States, you just wouldn’t do as well—and I didn’t.
I did, however, score very high on my French and English A-levels, which were extremely hard and served as the best barometer of whether you belonged in college.
This encouraged me to look forward to college with a newfound purpose. I was going to really apply myself from now on. I was going to be a model student. I hadn’t picked out a college yet, but wherever I went, I was going to shine.
So it was with pride and relief that I received my diploma from Battisborough. Mr. Green gave me a stiff, cursory handshake, and Mrs. Green averted her eyes as I passed. I didn’t care: I was out, I was moving on. The graduation ceremony was small, but it was beautiful and inspiring.
Neither of my parents came.
Chapter 6
“You’re on Your Own Now”
In June of 1974, Mom was performing her act in Las Vegas. That was her reason for missing my graduation.
I completely understood. In those days, before the second coming of Atlantic City and the glut of casinos all over the country, Las Vegas was a world of glitz unto itself. When you played Vegas, you were at the peak, the center of the entertainment universe. And you couldn’t just walk away from that, even to attend your daughter’s graduation.
So, since Mom couldn’t come to me, I went to her. I was a high school graduate now, practically a grown-up. It was time for us to establish a real, mature mother-daughter relationship before I went off to college.
I’d been to Las Vegas as a young girl, when Mom was hanging out with Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. Back in 1960, Dad was producing a show called Holiday in Japan, a musical revue extravaganza starring the biggest Japanese singers and dancers of the time; it more or less introduced postwar Japanese culture to the West. Holiday in Japan played a month at the New Frontier Hotel and Casino, which, with the Flamingo and the Desert Inn, was one of the few Vegas-type hotels on the Strip at that time. The Strip itself was in fact just a strip, a wide dirt roadway. Las Vegas was a different proposition back then. There was a lot less neon and a lot more sand.
I don’t remember the Japan show at all, but I remember the wind, and the cold. It would be dry heat during the day but freezing cold at night. For some reason, while I was visiting Dad during Holiday in Japan, we didn’t stay in a hotel. We lived in makeshift tents in the desert, and slept on cots. We had to walk across the sand dunes to get to the hotel where the revue was being performed. Our feet would sink in the shifting sands, while the wind buffeted us from all directions, and we had to use outhouses to relieve ourselves. When I would wake up in the middle of the night having to pee, I dreaded going out into that cold, and the blowing wind. Whenever I did screw up my fortitude and make a run for the outhouse, I was constantly dodging the huge tumbleweeds that rolled past. They scared me, and for good reason—they were as big as I was.
Vegas had a lonely, mysterious feeling then. There was an overpowering sense of nothingness. Yet for some reason, I found it enchanting. I particularly loved the mornings, when the red sun would paint the sheer cliffs of Sunrise Mountain.
So I was completely unprepared for the jolt of energy that hit me now, in the Las Vegas of 1974, virtually the minute I stepped out onto the tarmac. The lights, the people, the cars, the sense of money and power and pleasure—the very air thrummed with electricity. It made me sad. It wasn’t quiet, like before. I couldn’t hear the wind anymore.
As I sat at a front table in the theater where Mom was performing, I found myself surrounded by celebrities, politicians, high-rollers, and the like, all in tuxedoes and gowns and gaudy leisure suits. They were all there; they had all dragged themselves away from the casino tables and the roulette wheels just to see my mom in action.
And she was worth it. A complete entertainer, she did all her songs from Sweet Charity—“I’m a Brass Band,” “If They Could See Me Now”—and some funny specialty numbers, and those brilliant Bob Fosse dances with the top hat and black tights, and “It’s Not Where You Start, It’s Where You Finish,” a new signature song for her from the musical Seesaw, which was based on Two for the Seesaw. (Show business is a curiously circular kind of world.)
It was a great act. Mom owned that stage, and she knew it. And every now and then she would look down from her kingdom and give me a wink, with a big, glorious smile on her face. She was enjoying herself immensely, and she wanted me to share in the fun.
And I did. I was so proud to see her up there that it literally made me shake. The waiters would ask me if I wanted another Shirley Temple, but I couldn’t even speak. If I could have, I would have said, “Forget about the drinks. Look at my mom!” She was so special, and she made me feel special, knowing that I was a part of her, that her spirit and her talent lived within me, somewhere. Just the thought that we were connected took my breath away.
After the show, I waited in the dressing room while Mom greeted her fans. There was always a line of people outside the door, armed with papers, posters, anything for her to autograph. They would wait patiently, sometimes over an hour, just to pay homage to her. Every now and then the professionals, the important people, would be ushered through the crowd to see her. Sinatra, Dean Martin, Jack Lemmon, Danny Kaye—they would blithely cut the line and step into the dressing room for a casual chat that might last fifteen minutes, an hour, or more.
While everyone else waited. This upset me, because I felt for all those ordinary people out there who just wanted to show their appreciation. I knew what it was like to be kept waiting. I wanted to say, “Mom, shut up. There are people out there who want to see you!”
At the same time I was empathizing with the outsiders, I was also enjoying the thrill of being on the inside, with the special people. If they were special, that meant that I was special, too. More than that—I was cool.
When Mom did finally make time for the public, she w
ould be a most charming host. She’d chat, she’d laugh, she would happily pose for photos. Then the moment would come—you could see it in her eyes—when she was done. Her face would go blank, she’d turn off the thousand-watt smile, she’d give you the cold stare, and you knew you’d been dismissed—and woe betide those who didn’t pick up on the signals, because then she’d happily spell it out for them:
“Excuse me, but I have a life, do you? Have a nice day. Go win some money.”
That night, having vanquished her fans, Mom closed the door, sighed wearily, and then turned to me with exaggerated deliberation. I could tell from her manner that there was a dramatic moment coming. She stepped forward and took my hands in hers.
“Sachi, sweetheart, I’m so proud of you. I really am.” She waited a moment to let this sink in. I understood in a limited sense that the important point here was not that I had graduated from school, but that she was proud. Her emotional response was center stage right now.
Mom turned to her dressing table and picked up a thin jewelry box with a red ribbon stretched around the corners. She waited a beat, and then handed the box to me. “Here.”
I took the box and opened it.
Inside was a diamond necklace.
I was stunned. It was spectacular. It must have cost a fortune.
“Oh my God! Mom—it’s amazing!” I held it up, and saw the dressing room mirror lights glittering in the prisms of the stones.
“Those diamonds are from Belgium,” Mom said. “Belgian diamonds are the best in the world. I had them shipped here specially on a private jet.”
“Really? Just for me?”
“Just for you.” She wrapped her arms around me and gave me a big hug. “Congratulations, baby!” We rocked back and forth, and I luxuriated in the moment.
Then she stepped back and added a casual fillip: “You’re on your own now.”
It took me a moment to process this, and I realized that there was a hidden weight to these unexceptional words.
“On my own? What do you mean?”
Mom sat at her dressing table and began removing her makeup. “Well, I mean, you’ve graduated, there’s your gift—good luck. Do you have any plans?”
“Plans? Well, I was hoping to go to college…”
Mom looked over her shoulder with a get-real expression. “College? What for?” She laughed pleasantly. “How can you afford college anyway?”
“Well, I thought maybe…” I made a hopeful gesture toward her.
She rejected my fanciful notion in short order. “Ha! Don’t look at me. You have to make your own way in the world, sweetheart. That’s what I did, and look where I got.” She made a sweeping gesture to include the trappings of her room, the photos with fellow celebrities, the good-luck telegrams, and, beyond that, the golden world of Las Vegas itself. “That’s the key to happiness. When you do it all on your own it means so much more. You’ll see.”
I was trying to see, but I have to admit, it wasn’t easy taking the long view. I just couldn’t make sense of it. I wasn’t going to college? Why had I just spent six years in expensive prep schools if I wasn’t prepping for anything? What was that all about?
For the record, I asked Dad to pay for college, and he said no, too—which was odd, because all through my teenage years, Dad had contended that I would be the perfect candidate to work at the United Nations in Geneva. “You have so many languages under your belt, you have a broad way of thinking, you’re not judgmental, you don’t have any religion to screw you up, you understand and embrace differences in people, you empathize with others. You would be ideal.” I thought so, too. Still, how was I going to get to the UN without a college education? I was no genius, but I knew that I couldn’t make it from A to D without a few stepping stones in between. Take them away, and where was I?
I watched impotently as Mom wiped the cold cream from her face and started applying another round of makeup for the real world. My first instinct was to flee in tears, but then I thought better of it and decided to appeal to her maternal advice-giving side. “But, Mom, what am I gonna do instead?”
“Oh, don’t worry,” she said cheerfully. “Something always comes up.” Mom stared critically at her visage in the mirror, adjusting her mascara. “And you know, sweetheart, if you ever get short of money, if you’re ever really desperate, you can always sell the necklace.”
I never sold it, no matter how desperate my situation was (and it got pretty grim at times). I always kept the necklace in a compartment in my purse and carried it around with me wherever I went. I was terrified of losing it. It was only when I was married and settled in a house of my own that I felt confident enough to leave it in a jewelry box—and there it is, still.
• • •
MOM did give me one other unexpected gift that summer. It was after her show closed and we went back to Malibu. The Malibu house was actually a huge apartment building that Mom had built for herself. It was a two-story structure right on the sand, and she rented out some of the apartments downstairs. She lived upstairs, in an ever-expanding suite of rooms.
There were always guests in the other rooms, and some of them stayed so long they were getting their mail there. One such omnipresent couple were Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, renowned sex therapists and art curators. They had written all kinds of books—The Sexually Responsive Woman, Pornography and the Law—and they’d organized a museum show, the First International Exhibition of Erotic Art. They were generally considered standard-bearers for the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
They had latched on to my mom in a big way. Mom embraced them as liberating figures, not just sexually but philosophically. Looking back, I think they gave her permission to be free with her life, permission she never got from her own very restrictive Baptist parents. Phyllis and Eberhard were anything but restrictive. Extremely full of themselves and their “anything goes” credo, they were eager to spread the gospel of the Kama Sutra. That’s all they talked about: sex, sex, sex, in every conceivable facet and per-mutation.
They gave me the creeps. I think I was also jealous of the attention they got from my mom. It made me angry that they were sponging off her and using her as a meal ticket (I was even angrier some years later when I discovered that she bought them a farm in Costa Rica). I just wished there was some way I could protect her from these kinds of people.
I avoided them as much as I could. Luckily it happened that my old boyfriend Brad from Battisborough (who was now back as my new boyfriend) lived in San Francisco, just a few hours away, and he was visiting for the weekend. So I could spend all my time with him.
It was inevitable that at some point my path would intersect with that of our live-in guests. One afternoon, we found ourselves all colliding in the living room: Mom, the Kronhausens, Brad, and me. The grown-ups were looking very sophisticated and knowing. I sensed at once we had stumbled into a potentially volatile situation, so I tried to hustle Brad out of there as quickly as possible, but it was too late.
“Sachi, is this your boyfriend?” Phyllis asked.
“Yes, this is Brad.” I made all the necessary introductions.
“You’ve been going together a long time?” asked Eberhard, fixing me with an owlish eye.
“About a year, maybe. Off and on. Here and there.”
“Have you had sex yet?”
I felt my face flush. I didn’t look at Brad—I didn’t want to embarrass him any further. “Sex?” I responded, laughing lightly. “No! Of course not.” I chuckled some more, just to underscore the point. This seemed like the only rational response: to treat the question like a joke. Obviously they were parodying their reputation as sexual gurus, right?
As I looked at Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, and Mom, they all stared back at me with earnest curiosity.
“No? You’ve never had sex?” Phyllis asked. “Ever?”
“No,” I admitted sheepishly.
“Don’t you think it’s time you did?” her husband asked.
Now
I did look at Brad, because I instinctively felt the need for an ally. He had an incredulous what-the-hell-did-I-get-myself-into expression on his face. I don’t think he’d had a lot of experience with bizarre eccentrics.
“You’re how old—seventeen?” Phyllis asked.
“She’ll be eighteen in September,” Mom offered.
“Well,” Phyllis said, with a perplexed shrug, “you’re practically an adult. What are you waiting for?”
“You’re at the bright dawn of your sexuality,” Eberhard pointed out. “This is the moment to explore and experience.”
I nodded politely. “Okay, well, we’ll think about it.” I took Brad’s hand in mine, to show that we were pledged to making a serious effort.
“I think you should do it right now,” Eberhard stated.
Brad and I instantly let go of each other’s hands. “Now?”
“You know,” Phyllis said, directing her comments to my mom now, “it would be a fabulous opportunity for Sachi, to have her first introduction to sex with all of us here as a support group. We could talk about it afterward—discuss what happened and why—and validate her feelings.”
Eberhard agreed. “Guide her through the trauma, and celebrate the joy.”
Phyllis was getting excited. “She could really benefit from our expertise.”
Mom was leaning forward, lips pursed thoughtfully. I tried to read her face. Which way was she going to break? Surely she wouldn’t agree with this nutty idea. Surely.
Now Mom nodded warmly. “I think it’s a wonderful idea.” So much for surely. “I wish someone had been there for me,” she added.
I started inching toward the exit.
“And on a professional level,” Phyllis said, “it will be instructive for us to observe this crucial rite of passage as it happens. It’s a win-win.”