The trick, Bambi decided, was to care about things while making others care more.
Barry ran his hand up and down her bare arm, ostensibly admiring the flower he had selected. “Now that I think about it, it’s the color of your eyes.”
“The whites? Yes, I suppose so.” Said with a gentle humor, hoping he would drop the subject and avert the faux pas he was about to make.
But, of course, he wouldn’t. “The purplish cast of the flower, I mean. Brings out the violet in your eyes. Like Elizabeth Taylor’s.”
It was not the first time the comparison had been made. It probably would not be the last. Bambi had found it thrilling when she was younger. Then frustrating, because who could win against Elizabeth Taylor? Now, she considered it merely boring. Up until five months ago, she used to contradict the boys who sought to flatter her this way. “My eyes,” she would say with flirtatious sternness, as if the fact in dispute were of great importance, “are cerulean.” This wasn’t true at all-cobalt, perhaps, or even ultramarine. But men seldom contradicted Bambi. She was beginning to find this boring, too. She had been dating since she was fourteen. The year she turned fifteen, the book Marjorie Morningstar had been published and that was another comparison through which she had suffered. “Oh, it’s about you,” said her mother’s friends. (Her mother, perhaps deducing that this would make her Mama Morningstar, an overweight peasant with a sly wit, was silent on the matter. Ida Gottschalk was thin and quite chic.) Bambi always replied: “No, it’s not. I don’t want to be an actress and I can’t wait to get married and move to the suburbs and have a huge family.”
Everyone laughed, but she was telling the truth. The truth was handy that way sometimes, the best cover for what one really wanted. The problem was, that truth was now too true to work: It had been a wonderful gambit when she was seventeen, then eighteen, then heading off to Bryn Mawr. Now she was nineteen, and while the official story was that she was taking a semester off because of a mysterious malady that might have been an inflamed appendix or walking pneumonia or mononucleosis or possibly all three, that story was going to be exposed eventually. So here she was, on a date that was just barely acceptable.
Come to think of it, the same thing happened to Marjorie in the book. She went to a dance with a too-young boy and found only humiliation.
Still, Bambi couldn’t afford to coast. She snapped to, turned the full force of her not-really-cerulean eyes on her date. “I’m having a marvelous time, Barry.” She used to have marvelous times and maybe she would again. Maybe it was only a matter of trying.
Then again, they had said the same thing about college. All she had to do was try.
“Some very smart girls simply aren’t ready for college emotionally,” the dean had told her parents. The school was apologetic, almost embarrassed, because they had not anticipated a student such as Bambi, who went to every class, took notes, earned passing grades on her midterms-then disappeared finals week, forging an overnight permission slip and never returning. By the time it was apparent what was going on, Bambi had been at the Ritz in Philadelphia for three days, having persuaded the people at the front desk to open an account that would be paid, she said, by her father when he arrived.
And he did, and it was, because what could Sy Gottschalk do under the circumstances with his only, beloved, spoiled-to-death daughter. He gathered her and her luggage-all of it, three pieces and a steamer trunk, a high school graduation gift-and drove her home while she sat in a petulant silence, as if he were in the wrong. She never did tell her parents, or anyone, why she had fled Bryn Mawr-and done so in such a way that she risked expulsion. She was still trying to figure that out herself. Being accepted at the school had been thrilling, another crown in a high school life that had included many such honors. She had basked all spring in her classmates’ slightly stunned admiration, for Bambi had been clever about hiding her good grades and ambition. Bryn Mawr was like being homecoming queen or a Sigma Sweetheart. All she really wanted to do was brandish her acceptance letter, then put it in a frame, another triumph achieved.
The problem was that college demanded you do more than just show up and wave.
And then what? She didn’t know. She didn’t want to work, although her mother had begun to make ominous noises about learning basic bookkeeping, in order to help with the family business. She was too short to model except at department-store teas, which didn’t pay. There was only one thing to do, only one thing she really wanted to do. She wanted to marry and have children, as soon as possible. She should have let the Bryn Mawr acceptance be enough, gone to the University of Maryland. She would have been engaged by the Christmas break, either to a desirable senior or maybe a junior. Then she could have withdrawn from school and started planning her wedding and her life beyond it. A life with a house full of children, a house that would be the opposite of the one in which she had grown up.
Instead, she had risked her momentum, her aura of perfection. No one really believed that she had withdrawn from the semester because she had walking pneumonia. Or an inflamed appendix or mononucleosis. She had blown all the hard-won capital of her youth in one single bet. It reminded her of her parents’ struggles after they expanded and opened a chain of grocery stores, assuming it was the logical move after their success in wholesale produce. They had overextended themselves and been forced to scale back. They had taken a second mortgage on the house, which her parents found immensely shameful. Ultimately, they had surrendered their dreams of genteel shops and shored up the wholesale side, servicing the very ghetto stores they had been trying to escape. But they had survived and even prospered. So Bambi knew one could recover from missteps. She just didn’t particularly want to expend the energy. Recouping one’s losses took time and patience, not her strong suits. She had been on a very long winning streak-nineteen years, her entire life. She could not bear to be on a losing streak for even nineteen minutes.
Barry brought her punch, inevitably doctored. The too-sweet punch and the cheap alcohol did not bring out the best in each other. It was like eating a flaming wad of cotton candy.
“Delicious,” she said.
He smiled, besotted. He probably thought she was fast, being older and all. Well, he was in for a surprise. If she wanted to go that route, she would have engineered a chance meeting with her high school boyfriend, Roger. He was two years older than she was and had developed a very appealing confidence since transferring to the University of Baltimore. He also was dating her friend Irene, one of the girls who had gathered at Bambi’s bedside to hear the horrific story of how she almost died from misdiagnosed pneumonia/inflamed appendix/mononucleosis. It would have been tempting to see if she could get him back, but then she would have him back. And she didn’t want to return to her sixteen-year-old self, which is what she would be with Roger. Even then, Roger had been too fast for her, pushing her hard to do things she was not ready to do. He was probably faster now. She had asked Irene point-blank if they were doing it and Irene had-“simpered,” that was the word. Simpered. So they were. That was dangerous. Not because Bambi was prudish, but because it limited one’s options. You really shouldn’t have sex unless you were sure this was the right man because you should marry the first man with whom you had sex. Before marriage was okay, but only if he was the one. It wasn’t morality, it was simply smart. Your first would be your last. Bambi didn’t ponder the why of this, and she certainly didn’t want her husband to be a virgin. Nor did she expend much time thinking about how her future husband might have gained his sexual experience. Presumably with other girls, not nice girls, why should she care? Bambi was a prize, and part of the prize was her virginity, much in the same way new cars were prized for their unblemished whitewalls and perfect upholstery. Yet their value dropped the moment they were driven off the lot.