“No wah-wah-wah music,” Ma says.
“It’s good stuff,” my sister snaps. Overnight she’s become sophisticated, spouting off the names of foreign sports cars and haute couture designers. She goes to the kinds of parties to which I’m not invited. One time she’s dropped off after midnight, drunk, and I have to sneak her into the bathroom to wash the puke out of her hair. She keeps giggling and I tell her to shut up, she’ll wake Ma and Daddy. “Oh, Sally, you’re so boring,” she hisses at me in a stage whisper. “Fucking afraid of your own shadow.”
Marty wins the music fight, and “Sugar Magnolia” floats back to me in snatches. “Isn’t this pretty?” she asks.
“No meaning,” says Ma.
She makes us start at Alexander’s. Marty groans. “There’s not a single item of clothing in here I’d be caught dead in,” she pronounces. “Not even a sock.” She looks at me for support.
“Not even underwear,” I say.
“Stop it,” my mother says sharply. “Sally, I’m surprised at you.”
We spin circular racks of skirts and sweaters that are all heavy on burgundy, navy, and forest green, like the banners of Ivy League schools. My mother automatically picks out the same things for Marty and me to try on, as if we were twins. She holds up two kilts in our respective sizes, both in the same burgundy and blue tartan.
Marty barely gives them a glance. “Geeky, Ma.” My mother hands me the one in my size and I take it because it seems like something a boarding-school girl would wear.
After Alexander’s Marty wants to go to Casual Corner. A rock station blasts away in the background and the saleswomen stand around like poles, gossiping and jingling their silver bangles. My sister heads straight for the angora sweaters, and my mother, after a considering glance around, starts poking through a rack marked SALE. I pick out the first thing that catches my eye—overall shorts—but when I try them on Ma says: “They don’t bring out your best features.” She means they make my legs look fat. Marty ends up with a couple of tight sweaters and a miniskirt. Ma puts her foot down about a gold chiffon scarf. “Looks cheap.” Like the other stuff doesn’t.
When we get home Daddy is in the living room reading. My sister crackles her shopping bags at him. “Look what we got.”
Our father doesn’t look up. “You spend too much money.”
I don’t say anything. Daddy and I never talk unless it’s absolutely necessary and then only with my mother around.
The phone rings. It’s for Marty, it’s always for Marty.
“Hello?” she answers in that breathless voice she saves for boys, then she pulls the phone into the hall closet and closes the door as far as she can.
I go upstairs to try on my new clothes. I draw the blinds—David Katz probably isn’t home on a Saturday afternoon but you never know—and put on the kilt and the cream blouse with mother-of-pearl buttons I got to match it. The mirror over our dresser is so short I can only see down to the tops of my thighs, but I think it looks okay. I crack open the door to the hall and it seems like everyone’s still downstairs. It’s safe to go to my parents’ room to use the full-length mirror on their closet door.
Standing there, I fold up the kilt hem to see how I would look in a miniskirt and decide that Ma is right, I don’t have the figure for short. My hips have swollen so fast I can barely fit into my skirts from last year, but I’m still so flat I don’t need a bra, unlike my sister, who’s almost up to B already, even got her period before me. I unbutton the blouse halfway and scrutinize myself. Even when I press my breasts together I have nothing that can possibly be construed as cleavage.
I don’t hear the door open. I don’t know anyone is there until I hear his sound, a kind of gasped grunt. His face is in the mirror behind me, eyebrows drawn down into a V, mouth slack. The expression is disgust.
I pull the blouse shut and whip past my father, down the hall, back to my own room and into the closet where I sit hunched on the floor, hands crossed over my chest, willing my heart to stop pounding. Out the window I notice the Cuddy twins, Michael and Shauna, wheeling around the dead-end circle on their battered tricycles. They look ridiculous.
I hate my body. It’s too big, it was always too big. I want to be small like my mother and sister. At boarding school they won’t care that I’m built like a boy except for my fat hips and thighs. I’ll be an artist. How I look won’t matter. One more month. One more month and I’ll be out of here forever.
From downstairs I can hear my sister shrieking with laughter.
The week before I leave I decide to cut my hair. Darcy Katz does it for me in her pink room in front of the vanity mirror. “You sure?” she keeps asking over and over again until I want to scream. She cuts it in degrees, in case I change my mind, first to the middle of my back, and then, when I insist, all the way up to the nape. I wrap the snakelike hanks in tissue paper and hide them in the bottom drawer of my dresser.
At boarding school I make the best friend of my life: redheaded Frances Fischel, whose parents are divorced. Her father lives in the Virgin Islands with his new, much younger wife while her nutty mother languishes in a barn of an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Fran always has a supply of the best hash money can buy, thanks to the generous guilt allowance she gets from her father. After night study hall, the two of us go down by the river to get high sitting on the cold rocks among the willows. A few yellow house lights glimmer remotely across the water from us. When the hash is laced with acid the lights break free like fireflies, streaming up into the violet sky. The first time this happens it freaks me out, but then I get used to it, even try to draw it from memory.
The two of us develop elaborate philosophies. I’m going to be a painter and she’s going to be a poet. We make a pact to wear only silver jewelry for the rest of our lives. Silver represents dedication to art, while gold stands for worldly things.
The first time I go home is for Thanksgiving vacation. It feels like a dream. For one thing, we’ve moved from Coram Drive to the rambling Tudor house on the hill. On the way home from the train station Ma tells me: “So much trouble to move! You should be here to help. But now everything’s fine, we’re all settled in. Your daddy’s study is so beautiful, with wood panel.”
But when we pull up he’s not in his study, but down in our new living room, ensconced in his old oxblood chair with his Chinese newspapers.
“Hi,” I say.
He mutters something about my hair, which has grown out ragged to my chin.
I go upstairs and open the first bedroom door I come to, which turns out to be my sister’s. She’s lying on her bed talking on her new Princess phone. “Hey!” she says, annoyed.
“Sorry.” I close the door.
Later, when she comes into my room, she pulls aface.
“You have zits.”
“So.”
“You shouldn’t eat chocolate. I bet you stuff your face at that school.”
“Up.yours,” I say, an expression I picked up from Fran. It surprises Marty.
“Uh-huh. Well, you missed all the excitement. The move and everything. I got the best room.”
“Like I care.”
She smiles at me secretively and leaves.
My first night home, Ma makes my favorite dinner: spaghetti and lima beans. We’ve just started to eat when Daddy begins talking. Not to me exactly. It’s more like a quiz. Nothing’s changed.
“How you doing in your subjects at school?”
“Fine.”
“You get all As this semester?”
“We haven’t gotten our report cards yet.”
“How about tests? You get As on your tests?”
“Yes,” I lie.
Marty has picked up her plate and is leaning across to shovel her lima beans into mine, as she has done since we were children. I let her because even though she’s acting like a jerk, she’s still my sister.