Yes, my mom lacks even the remotest sense of irony, but she's certain that in a perfect world, any miserable little boy or girl should be able to grow up and become nothing less than… her. Best left unsaid was the fact that she and my dad were already brandishing glossy, gate-folded brochures for all-boys boarding schools in Nova Scotia. Military schools in Iceland. It was clear: Goran wasn't a success, and some impending dawn I'd find him packed up and gone, replaced by a four-year-old Bhutanese leper.
If I wanted to practice my feminine wiles on Goran, my time was running out.
As my mother would say, "You've got to strike while the flatiron is hot." Meaning: I needed to get pretty and make my move soon. Ideally, tomorrow night. Ideally, while my folks were onstage, doling out the Oscars.
The final straw that broke the camel's back was, this week, when Goran sold five of my mom's Emmys over the Internet for ten dollars apiece. Before that, apparently, he'd collected a bunch of her Palme d'Or awards from our house in Cannes and sold them all for five bucks a pop. After a decade of my parents insisting that movie-industry awards meant nothing, and amounted to little more than a crass gold-plated embarrassment, my mom and dad went ape shit.
The way my mom saw it, Goran's every transgression, his every misanthropic misbehavior was simply a result of his not receiving adequate love and cuddling.
"You must promise me, Maddy," my mom said, "that you'll show your poor brother an extra-special amount of patience and affection."
His deprived infancy is how come, when my parents rented out a Six Flags amusement park for his birthday, and trotted out a purebred Shetland pony as his gift, Goran assumed the animal was lunch. For Halloween, they'd dressed him up as Jean-Paul Sartre, with me as Simone de Beauvoir, trick-or-treating up and down the hallways of the Ritz in Paris with copies of La Nausee and The Second Sex, and Goran didn't get the joke. More recently, Goran had hacked into my mother's bathroom security camera and sold Web subscriptions.
Of course, my dad wanted to introduce the concept of discipline and consequences into Goran s life, but a boy who's no doubt been tortured with electroshocks and waterboarding and intravenous injections of liquid drain cleaner, he's not going to be easily cowed by the threat of a spanking and a one-hour time-out.
By now my pink blouse had arrived from Barcelona. I planned to wear it with a skort and my cardigan sweater embroidered with the crest which represented my boarding school in Switzerland. That, and basic low-heeled Bass Weejun penny loafers. Soon enough Goran and I would settle ourselves in front of the television in our hotel suite. Alone, just him and me, we'd watch my parents arrive at the red carpet in the Prius arranged by the publicist. Frigid, reclusive Goran would be mine alone as we watched my mom and dad preen for the paparazzi. Once they were safely away, I planned to phone room service and request dinner pour deux, lobster and oysters and onion rings. For dessert, I'd procured five ounces of my parents' genetically enhanced Mexican sinsemilla. No, it's not especially logicaclass="underline" My parents constantly railed in opposition to irradiated, genetically spliced and engineered corn, but where marijuana was concerned plant scientists could never monkey with it too much. No matter how hybrid a Frankenstein skunkweed, they would pack the sticky resinous mess into a pipe and torch it.
In case you have yet to notice, my parents do nothing in moderation. On one hand, they mourn the fact that Goran spent his babyhood alone and untouched. While on the other hand they never cease touching me, hugging and kissing me, especially when the paparazzi are around. My mother limits my wardrobe to pink and yellow. My shoes are either cute Capezio ballet flats or Mary Janes. The only makeup I own is forty different shades of pink lipstick. You see, neither of my parents wants me to appear any older than seven or eight. Officially, I've been in the second grade for years.
When my baby teeth began to fall out, they went so far as to suggest I wear a set of the painful primary-teeth dentures that Twentieth Century Fox forced into little Shirley Temple's adolescent mouth. In times like these, being kneaded, probed, and polished by a team of beauty experts, I wished I had also been raised, untouched, in an Iron Curtain orphanage.
This year, the Academy Awards fell smack-dab on my thirteenth birthday. With stylists swarming around her, dressing and undressing her like a giant doll, makeup artists experimenting to decide which eye shadow worked best with what designer gown, hairdressers curling and straightening her hair, my mother suggests I get a small tattoo to mark the occasion. A little Hello Kitty or Holly Hobbie, she says, or a piercing in my navel.
My dad has a penchant for buying me stuffed animals. And, yes, I know the word penchant, although I'm still not certain what constitutes French-kissing.
God only knew what a cute Holly Hobbie or Hello Kitty tramp stamp would stretch and fade to become over the next sixty years. In the same way my parents imagined all the little boys and girls of the third world wanted to become them… my folks thought my childhood should be the childhood they'd wanted to have, resplendent with meaningless sex, recreational drugs, and rock music. Tattoos and body jewelry. All their peers feel pretty much the same, and it leads to children whom the public believes to be nine years old becoming pregnant. Thus the paradox of teaching nursery rhymes along with contraception skills. Birthday presents such as Hello Kitty diaphragms and Holly Hobbie spermicidal foam and Peter Rabbit crotchless panties.
Please don't imagine it's fun being me. My mom tells the stylist, "Maddy's not ready for bangs." She tells the wardrobe person, "Maddy's a little sensitive about her big bottom."
Don't imagine I even get to speak. On top of that, my mom complains that I never talk. My father would tell you that life is a game, and you need to roll up your sleeves and build something: Write a book. Dance a dance. To both my parents, the world is a battle for attention, a war to be heard. Perhaps that's what I admire about Goran: his distinct lack of hustle. Goran's the only person I know who's not negotiating a six-picture deal with Paramount. He's not staging a show of his paintings at the Musee d'Orsay. Nor is he having his teeth chemically bleached. Goran simply is. He's not secretly lobbying for the stupid Academy of stupid Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to give him a shiny statue while a zillion people stand and applaud. He's not campaigning to build his market share. Wherever Goran is at this moment — sitting or standing, laughing or crying — he's doing it with the clarity of an infant who knows that no one will ever come to his rescue.
While technicians blast her upper lip with lasers, my mom says, "Isn't this fun, Maddy? Just us two, together…" Whenever fewer than fourteen people are clutching at us, my mother considers that to be private mother-daughter "alone time."
No, whether he's alone or observed by millions, whether he's loved or loathed, Goran would be the same person. Maybe that's what I love most about him — that he's so much NOT like my parents. Or like anyone I know.
Goran absolutely, positively does NOT need love.
A manicurist with a Gypsy accent, something leftover from some country where brokers analyze the stock market by reading pigeon entrails, this woman buffs my nails, holding my hand cradled in her own. After a moment, she turns my hand palm up and looks at the new, red skin where I'd left my frozen skin stuck to the door handle in Switzerland. She doesn't say anything, this bug-eyed Gypsy manicurist, but she's clearly marveling at how my wrinkles have been erased. How both my lifeline and love line have not merely stopped — but vanished. Still cupping my red hand in her own coarse, rough fingers, the manicurist looks from my palm to my face, and with the fingers of her other hand, she touches her forehead, her chest, her shoulders, making a fast sign of the cross.