“I don’t care,” I said. “Sign it.”
“You’ll thank me someday.”
“I can’t wait,” I said.
She rose and walked slowly to the door.
“They’re goin‘ to take you directly from here, Robin. We won’t have a chance to say good-bye.”
“We said good-bye a long time ago, Mother darling,” I told her. I said it firmly, but my eyes were clouded with tears.
She nodded.
“I’m sorry, honey. I’m sorry I hurt you. No matter what you think, I’ll never stop lovin‘ you. I hope you come back.”
“To what?”
“To me,” she said, and opened the door. She hesitated, and then she closed it.
It wasn’t a loud noise, but to me it was like a gunshot.
A few minutes later, a policewoman came in.
“You’d better go to the bathroom,” she said. “You’ve got a long trip ahead of you.”
I did what she suggested. When I came out, she was waiting for me.
She took me down a hallway to a door where a police vehicle was parked. A patrolman opened the rear door and I got in. It occurred to me that I had nothing but the clothes on my back. I was going to say something about it, but no one seemed interested in anything I had to say, so I kept my mouth shut.
I looked back when the car pulled away. I don’t know why. Something made me do that.
I saw Mother darling standing on the walkway, clutching the boots I had taken.
She held them as close to her as I had held them to me.
It was all we shared at the moment.
But it was enough to free the tears locked in my heart.
PART TWO
TEAL
1
Suspended
As soon as our English teacher, Mr. Croft, took off his sports jacket and draped it over his desk chair in front of the classroom, I knew I was going to laugh. The laughter rose in my chest in waves, rolling freely upward. Mr. Croft turned to write the first grammar exercise sentence on the board, and I saw his shirt partially out of his pants. It really wasn’t anything all that unusual. He was not a very neat dresser. However, everything had struck me as humorous this morning, from the security guard at the front entrance looking at me with grouchy, suspicious eyes, to the snob birds in the bathroom who nearly exploded with shock when I plucked my silver flask out of my purse and took a sip.
“What’s that?” Evette Heckman asked.
“Orange juice and vodka,” I replied, smiled, and drank some more. When I offered it to them, they fled as if I was offering them a drink of poison.
In class my laugh came out with a sound that resembled someone spitting up a drink first, and then I went into the giggles. Mr. Croft turned with confusion on his face and raked the room with his eyes, finally settling on me. His grimace of bewilderment changed to a smirk of annoyance, and that made me laugh even harder.
I knew the vodka I had taken from my parents’ bar to mix with the orange juice had most to do with my inability to contain myself. This wasn’t the first time, and something told me it wasn’t going to be the last, no matter what happened this particular morning.
“What do you find so funny, Miss Sommers?” Mr. Croft asked. “Surely not restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, although the results of your quiz yesterday might suggest you’re not taking this very seriously.”
Everyone’s eyes were on me. Some of the snob birds looked angrier than Mr. Croft, probably to win favor or maybe because they really did think I was interrupting their precious private-school educations. The idea was, if you paid more for it, you would take it more seriously. At least, that was the theory my parents believed or, should I say, hoped was true, especially for me. I had all but failed tenth grade the year before in public school. I had been suspended three times there and put in detention so often, there was a joke that I would get a degree in it. After I was caught vandalizing the girls’ room, which cost my father nearly a thousand dollars, my parents thought a strategic retreat to a private school would be the solution. I would be less apt to be influenced by bad seeds. The truth was, I was the one doing the influencing.
Mr. Croft brought his hands to his wide waist and glared at me. His nostrils were as big as a cow’s when they flared. He turned his lips inward, outlining his mouth in two thin white lines of rage, and clenched his teeth.
“Well?” he demanded, speaking through the wall of cigarette-stained enamel.
I laughed harder. I couldn’t help it, even though my stomach was hurting and I was gasping for breath.
He sighed.
“I think it’s best you get up and go to the principal’s office, Miss Sommers,” he said in a tighter voice.
I continued to laugh.
“Teal Sommers!” he screamed, stepping toward me. “Get up and get out this minute.”
He pointed at the door so vigorously and sharply, the button on his cuff undid and his sleeve sagged like a torn curtain. Someone gasped, but that just widened my idiotic grin. He saw what happened and lowered his arm, pointing more gracefully with the other arm and hand toward the door.
“Go. I will intercom the office to let Mr. Bloomberg know you are coming,” he assured me.
I caught my breath and let my head fall back a moment. I was looking up at the ceiling, watching the lines of the tiles wiggling. Mr. Croft walked all the way down the aisle to my desk. By this time his rage was building like milk boiling in a pot. Any moment he might seize my arm and pull me out of my seat, I thought.
“What is wrong with you, young lady?”
“Smell her breath,” one of the snob birds cried out. I wasn’t positive, but I thought it was most likely Ainsley Winslow. Always full of herself, she’d hated me from the moment I told her that her nose job was poorly done, was too pointed, and made her resemble a chicken.
Mr. Croft looked in her direction and then down at me with more intense scrutiny.
“Is that true, Teal? Have you drunk something you shouldn’t?”
“No, sir,” I said, and then I covered my mouth with both of my hands quickly because my stomach was starting to send up more than laughter. It took two hard swallows to keep it down, my eyes bulging with the effort.
“Go!” he commanded with a sense of panic as well as anger in his voice.
I rose much too quickly and awkwardly and fell against him. He jumped back as if I was on fire. As fast as I could, I scooped up my books and charged toward the door. Behind me I heard the rest of the classroom laughing. I fumbled with the knob and went out, closing the door behind me. The churning in my stomach stopped for a moment, but the corridor seemed to turn on its side and then right itself. I hiccuped so loudly, the sound bounced off the walls, echoing all the way to the end of the corridor. With one hand against the wall to steady myself, I started down the shiny tiled floor.
The librarian, Ms. Beachim, came out of the faculty room and paused to look at me. She lowered her glasses over the bridge of her bony nose and peered.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I feel like I’m inside out.”
“Pardon?”
“Like a sock when you take it off,” I told her. Then I laughed, and she stood there gaping at me with her hands pressed against the base of her throat.
I straightened my shoulders and tried to walk a straight line, but I guess I had drunk more orange juice and vodka than I normally did, especially in the morning. The world would not stop swaying. I was getting more and more seasick.
Finally, I reached the principal’s office. When I stepped in, I paused, or at least I thought I had. Even though my feet were planted, somehow it was as if I was still moving.
Mrs. Tagler looked up from her desk. As soon as the principal’s secretary set eyes on me, her eyebrows lifted and her lips went into a crooked smile. She had a hairdo and a face that reminded me of a praying mantis, especially with those long, thin arms she kept bent at the elbows and those hands with finge
rs curling inward.
“Now what?” she asked.
“I thought he was going to call and lodge a complaint,” I said.
“Who?”
“Mr. Croft’s shirt is out of his pants,” I said.
“What?”
“He’s a mess.”
I giggled, and she let her jaw drop enough for me to see the gold crown in the back of her mouth.
“You were sent to see Mr. Bloomberg?”
“No, I was asked to pay him a friendly visit,” I replied. “To see how things were going and if there is anything I can do to help improve the school,” I added, and, before I could stop it, hiccuped.
She nodded knowingly.
“Sit down,” she ordered as she rose like a gusher to her full six feet of height. Her husband, I was told, was only five feet five and had to be careful he didn’t get poked in the eye by one of her breasts. She always wore those stiff pointy bras that looked like they had been borrowed from Madonna’s costume closet.
Mrs. Tagler went into the principal’s office, closing the door behind her. Only seconds afterward, the door was thrust open and Mr. Bloomberg stood there glaring out at me. Something in my face told him the whole story. His bushy rust eyebrows curved downward when I hiccuped again.
“I don’t want to talk to you in the state you’re in,” he said. “Go directly to the nurse’s office. I’m calling your mother.” He turned to Mrs. Tagler. “See that she goes to Lila’s office,” he said, and she nodded.
“Come along, Teal,” she said, her voice softer now.
I stood, remembered my books, and reached down, knocking them every which way.
“Oh, forget them,” Mrs. Tagler said. The phone was ringing. Mr. Croft had finally gotten himself together enough to call, I thought. She picked up the receiver and listened.
“Yes, he knows,” she said. “Thank you.”
She considered me, wavering before her. She seemed to go in and out of focus, and that made me smile. Then came another hiccup, and another.
“Go on, Teal,” she ordered. “I have more important things to do than baby-sit a sixteen-year-old girl who should know better.”
I left the office and, with her walking beside me, went to the nurse’s office, which fortunately was only two doors down.
Mrs. Miller looked up from her desk. She was completing one report or another. That’s all she ever seemed to do in this place, I thought, complete reports or coddle one of the snob birds who was having a bad monthly, as she referred to it.
“What is it?” she asked, staring up at me, her eyes glittering with suspicion.
“Our Miss Sommers has had something alcoholic to drink, apparently. She needs to sleep it off until her mother arrives. She was sent to the office but Mr. Bloomberg doesn’t want to see her in this condition.”
Mrs. Miller was up and around her desk. She took a long look at me and then directed me to one of the small rooms in which she had a cot-size bed.
“How are you feeling now?”
My hiccuping had finally stopped, but that didn’t help all that much.
“Nauseated,” I said.
“Lie down. If you have the urge to regurgitate, use this,” she said, putting a basin next to the bed. There wasn’t any sympathy in her voice, just firmness. “Why do you do this?”
Instead of answering her, I closed my eyes. The question seemed to reverberate in my brain: Why do you do this? Why do you do any of these things, Teal? Who do you think you’re hurting? Where is your appreciation for all the wonderful things you have and all the wonderful things we’re doing for you? Blah blah, I thought. It was like a broken CD or like being locked into an echo chamber.
I felt my stomach settle down, and moments later, I was asleep.
“What have you done?” I heard someone shout through the walls of my pleasant cocoon. I groaned, opened my eyes reluctantly, and looked up at my mother.
I never fully appreciate how tall she is, I thought, or how bony her shoulders are, even through her stylish designer suit. My father accused her of being anorexic, but somewhere, at one of her spas, no doubt, someone told her if she stayed thin, she would never look old. To me, just the contrary was happening. She was in her late forties, but looked ten years older. Her skin seemed so taut over those high cheekbones she prized, and the effect of that was to emphasize her jawbone. In dim lighting, with just a glow on her face, she looked like a skeleton. I told her that once, and she nearly took off my head with a sharp slap. Despite the miles and miles of skin creams she had available on her vanity table, her hands were never soft to me. I couldn’t remember them ever being soft, and of course, she had perfect nails always. She once missed an important gynecological exam because it conflicted with her manicure.
“Well?” she demanded. She swung her purse toward me in an aborted move to club me into attention. It hovered over my face a moment, and then she brought it back toward her.
I scrubbed my cheeks with my palms and, unfortunately, burped.
She stepped back as if I was truly going to explode.
“You’re disgusting,” she said, pulling the corners of her mouth down.
I sat up.
“Is it morning already?” I teased.
My mother’s eyes were truly her best feature. They were normally big, luscious-looking hazel-green, with naturally long eyelashes. She could widen them to almost twice their size when she wanted to show her rage or surprise. For a moment she looked all eyes to me, like some sort of extraterrestrial creature.
“You’re not funny, Teal. Do you know how much your father is spending to have you attend school here?” she asked.
I always thought it was odd how she referred to any expenditures the family had as purely my father’s. She was obviously not one of those wives who believe half of everything their husbands own belongs to them. Sometimes, she gave me the feeling that she was as much a tenant in the home as my older brother, Carson, had been, and I still was.
“I forgot, Mother,” I said.
“Fifty thousand dollars,” she said, tapping her foot after each word for emphasis. To me she looked like she was keeping beat to music. “If we add that to all the money he’s spent on psychotherapy, tutors, fixing the things you’ve broken, paying off people who have lodged complaints against you, and everything else I can’t think of, he’s spent as much as some third world countries spend over a year!”
“Maybe he should ask the UN for help, then,” I said.
“Get up,” she snapped. “You’ve embarrassed me again and again. Don’t you have any concern for this family and its reputation? Oh, what have I done to deserve this?” she asked the ceiling.
“Forgot your birth control pills sixteen years ago?” I offered.
She turned a shade darker than blood red and looked out toward Mrs. Miller’s desk. In front of other people, my mother was always stylish, elegant, and able to manage her rage. She rarely, if ever, had a strand of hair out of place, and when I was little, I used to believe that creases were terrified of forming in her clothing. She would have them ironed to oblivion.
“I suppose this is really all my fault,” she said, not really sounding like she was taking the blame, “for having you so late in life.”
I did actually agree with that diagnosis. My parents made me on a hot summer night after they had both had too much to drink. My father let that little detail out once when they were arguing over something stupid like how much of his money my mother spent on fresh flowers, especially in the winter. I happened to overhear it.
“Maybe I was just dying to be born, and there was nothing you could do about it,” I offered dryly.
She pulled herself up, primping like a proud peacock. Then, as cool as a brain surgeon, she stepped out of the little comfort room and spoke to Mrs. Miller.
“Do you think she is in any sort of condition for a meeting with the principal?” she asked, hoping to hear no, of course.
Mrs. Miller rose and came to the room.
; She grabbed my shoulders and turned me to her as I stood, and then she shook her head.
“What gets into you kids these days?” she asked.
“Aliens?” I responded. “Through our belly buttons, I think,” I added.
Mrs. Miller nearly smiled.
“She’s fine, Mrs. Sommers. She’ll probably have a good headache all day. Give her some Advil at home.”
“I think it would be better if she suffered all day and appreciated the damage she is doing to herself,” my sweet, loving mother replied.
Mrs. Miller looked like she agreed.
“Come along, Teal,” Mother said, and I started out.
“Your books,” Mrs. Miller reminded me. “Mrs. Tagler brought them in after you arrived.”
“Oh. Sorry,” I said. I really meant sorry she had brought them in, but Mrs. Miller smiled and handed them to me.
I continued after Mother, who tapped the corridor floor tiles with the sharp heels of her shoes like some drum roll as she reluctantly led me back to the principal’s office to be executed in red ink. I remained a good yard or so behind her, imagining an invisible rope tied to my neck, which was used to tug me through life itself.
“How is she doing?” Mrs. Tagler asked my mother when we entered.
“Rather badly, I would say, wouldn’t you?” Mother replied, her lips slicing a thin red line in her face. I always thought that for an expert on cosmetics, Mother wore her lipstick too thick.
Mrs. Tagler rose without speaking and went into the principal’s office. Mother turned to me, shaking her head.
“I was on my way to have lunch with Carson,” she said. My brother, who was nearly fifteen years older than me, was already running the business affairs division of my father’s real estate development company. He had his own townhouse and was practically engaged to the daughter of a wealthy banker.
Carson was everything they would want me to be, I thought. He is Mr. Briefcase, a suit and a tie with a perfectly designed manikin within, Mr. Perfect who uses a Waterpik after every meal. I called him my father’s second shadow, especially when it came to business.