I said nothing, so she went ahead to spread the rumor like creamy peanut butter through the school. I could see the story smeared over the faces of my classmates. Ironically, it enhanced the interest some boys had in me. Had I had breast enhancement, something done to make my buttocks more curvaceous, my waist so small? Almost overnight, my baby face had morphed into a stunning cover girl’s face, including a magazine model’s complexion. Ruta began to regret her mocking. She would glare angrily at me in the hallways and classroom but had nowhere near the fire in her eyes that burned in Ava’s right now.
“What is it, Ava? What else do you want from me?” I was sure she could stare down a charging tiger. “I turned it off!”
She smirked and then relaxed and brushed her silky black hair away from her face. It was shoulder length and never looked dull or dirty. My dark brown hair always felt coarse compared with hers, and I thought it was too curly. Maybe I felt that way because Daddy enjoyed stroking Ava’s hair and rarely stroked mine. Lately, when I complained about my hair to Mrs. Fennel, she threatened to take out the ironing board and iron every strand.
“If you keep moaning about it, I swear I will do it when you sleep,” she warned, “and if I burn some of it and you become bald, that will be on your head. Literally.”
And that was that.
Mrs. Fennel, who had been with my father for centuries, it seemed, always spoke with staccato efficiency. When someone said, “That woman doesn’t waste her breath,” he or she was surely referring to Mrs. Fennel. Often she went all day without saying more than a dozen words, but she could speak pages with a look, an expression. Even as a toddler, I always knew when my questions were foolish to her and not worth her answering. Ava said Mrs. Fennel was a surgeon. She could cut the waste out of any day. She never said or did anything without purpose or meaning. She had the best IWPB—important words per breath—of anyone.
“You should be grateful she has been your nanny,” Ava told me once after I complained about something Mrs. Fennel had said to me. “I’m grateful she has been mine.”
“I am!” I claimed, even though in my heart, I didn’t mean it. I dreamed instead of having a real mother.
“Spoiled,” Ava muttered, under her breath but loudly enough for me to hear. “She lets you get away with too much. She never let me get away with that much.”
I tried to be grateful, to appreciate all Mrs. Fennel did for me, but it was never easy. As an infant, I was forbidden to cry too much or too long, and I quickly realized that crying didn’t get me anything anyway. Mrs. Fennel was never physically rough with me. She never struck me or spanked me; she didn’t have to do that. Her stern looks, with those gold-tinted black eyes that were like laser beams cutting through me, were far more than enough to get me to swallow back a wail or a sob.
Tall and thin, with a hardness in her arms and body that had me believing she was made of iron until I saw her naked once, Mrs. Fennel radiated a firmness and confidence that gave me, Marla, Ava, and, I’m sure, Brianna, a sense of security. As long as she was there, nothing could harm us. Even germs feared her. No one ever got sick.
And yet she was so feminine at times, so concerned about our appearance, our looks, that I felt as if she had the power to sculpt us into beauties. She had bath oils (her own mixtures) that kept our skin smooth and soft, shampoos with one of her magical ingredients that, despite my unhappiness with my own hair, really did keep it soft and healthy compared with the hair of the other girls in my classes, and of course, she cooked and prepared the healthiest things for us to eat, which were mostly from her own herbal recipes. To this day, I don’t know what she gave me to eat as baby food, but whatever it was, it was homemade. There was always a gentle tug of war between her and Daddy, who tried to give us something sweet or decadent from time to time when we were younger.
“Don’t corrupt them. There’s time enough for that,” Mrs. Fennel might say, and that was that. Daddy would back off. Someday, I thought, I would know why Mrs. Fennel, who was supposedly our housekeeper and nanny, had such power over Daddy, who was supposedly her employer. Either jokingly or maybe because she knew more than I did, Ava once said, “She’s Daddy’s mother. He got his good looks from her.”
Despite her hard, sculptured features, Mrs. Fennel did look as if she might have been beautiful once. Her gray hair was still long and soft. She didn’t have any of those age spots elderly people develop, and her wrinkles weren’t deep or long. Sometimes they seemed to be gone anyway. It was as if she could have days of returning to her twenties or her teen years. It gave me pause to wonder about her past. Until now, at least, she especially didn’t like me or Marla asking her too many personal questions, and she wasn’t one to volunteer personal information. Maybe she really was Daddy’s mother and he had inherited his good looks from her. In our house, beauty seemed to be a fruit you could pluck when it was time to pluck it.
Ava was very attractive and very sexy. She could suck the eyes out of admiring men, young or old. I could hear them practically panting as we walked by, Ava seemingly floating, her head up, her eyes forward. She looked oblivious, as indifferent as some goddess might be, even though she was far from it. She always gave me the impression that she expected nothing less than admiration, even idolization. Walking with her was almost a sexual experience because of the way she flaunted herself. In their virtual-reality worlds, the men who saw her were already in the throes of heavy lovemaking.
Would I ever have Ava’s self-confidence? Her arrogance? I knew I was expected to have it. I couldn’t be my father’s daughter if I didn’t.
Ava stood there in her soft silk nightgown, her ample bosom firm, her neck curved smoothly into her shoulders. Even when she had just awakened, her complexion was vibrant. As long as I could remember, she had never had a skin blemish and certainly not a pimple. Even though she did use it, she really didn’t need to put on lipstick. Her lips were naturally a rich ruby. She never went to a doctor or a dentist; none of us did, for that matter. When I asked Mrs. Fennel why none of us ever needed any sort of medical attention, she simply said, “Good genes.”
Good genes? How could that be? From what I understood, I didn’t share those genes, and neither did Marla, but we didn’t go to a doctor or a dentist, either. Ava said it was because of the foods and drinks Mrs. Fennel prepared for us. She said Mrs. Fennel was better than any doctor or dentist. That was nice, of course. Who wanted to go to a doctor or a dentist? But it wasn’t enough of an explanation for me. Why had Mrs. Fennel told me it was genes? What did she know about our genes?
Like Marla’s, my origin was a mystery. All I really knew was that I had been plucked out of an orphanage, just as she was. Whenever I tried to find out anything specific about myself, I was always told not to think about it.
“Don’t dwell on what makes you different and apart from this family. If you do, you’ll be disowned,” Mrs. Fennel warned.
I certainly didn’t want that to happen, but my curiosity about myself seemed only natural, and my classmates often asked me personal questions. I ignored them or simply said I didn’t know, which most of the time was true, but it was always uncomfortable to say it.
“How could you not know that?” they would ask, astonished.
Meg Logan smirked and said, “You’re just a big mystery wrapped up in a secret. Enjoy yourself, but keep away from us. You’re like someone with Alzheimer’s.”
That was painful to hear and did make me feel foolish. Why couldn’t Mrs. Fennel or Daddy help me with some of these questions so I wouldn’t look like such a freak in school? Goodness knows, I didn’t want to feel different or in any way alienated from my father and my sisters. If anything, I wanted to be just like Ava. I was always trying to imitate her walk, the way she held her head, even her smile.
Was it wrong for me to be in such awe of my own older sister? Was it natural?
Right now, a quick movement in her eyes told me she saw how I perused her body the way some art student might gaze upon a statue
in a museum.
“What else do I want from you? I want you to stop behaving like some lovesick teenager.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re not?” She stared a moment and then shook her head and smiled. “Okay, what’s your problem today, little sister? The boy you have a thing for at school won’t look your way?”
“I don’t have any problems, and I don’t have any thing for any boys in my school,” I said, realizing too late how defensive I sounded.
She laughed skeptically, sat on the edge of my four-poster dark walnut bed, and then threw herself back on my oversize pillow. We rarely had what I would call a close sister-to-sister conversation, from what I understood those conversations were like when I saw them on television or heard girls in my class talk about their older sisters. Ava had stepped too quickly into the surrogate mother’s role Brianna had played, but maybe, now that I was older, she would be different, I thought. Her life was different. Why wouldn’t mine be as well?
At Daddy’s suggestion, Ava was attending classes at UCLA in Westwood, California, but she didn’t seem to have any real interest in them. She did it because it was something Daddy told her to do. It was the way we were all raised. When Daddy spoke, everything stopped. Even the earth paused in its spinning.
We had been living in Brentwood, on a side street just off Sunset Boulevard, for three years now. It was quite rural, with surrounding woods and acreage. The nearest house was far enough away for us to feel as if we had no neighbors. Daddy liked to move every few years. I had gone to school in three different states since first grade: upstate New York; Nashville, Tennessee; and now California. We always attended private schools that Daddy carefully chose, no matter how expensive they were.
Daddy was wealthy through inheritance but also because of what Mrs. Fennel said were brilliant investments through the years. Praising Daddy was at least one thing Mrs. Fennel would do frequently and fully. It was practically the only subject that interested her enough to talk about: Daddy’s wonderful qualities. She did sound like a proud mother. According to her, there was no one stronger, no one smarter, no one more successful than my daddy. A day rarely passed without her telling us how lucky we were to have him and how important it was for us to please him.
She didn’t have to do much persuading. Daddy really was the most charming, traveled, and educated man I had ever seen or heard. He was elegant and handsome in a very aristocratic way. People who met him for the first time believed he was from a European royal family. There was something Old World about him, in his demeanor, his manners, his way of speaking and eating. I often thought he could be a prince. I believed that someday, he might very well inherit a throne or be called back to occupy a castle in some exotic country. In my daydreams, I saw myself being treated like a little princess because of Daddy. The sapphire ring he wore on his right pinkie was set in gold and looked like the sort of ring a king might wear for his subjects to kiss, the way Catholics kiss the ring of a bishop. Ava wore a smaller, feminine version on her pinkie, and I recalled Brianna had one, too.
Daddy had friends everywhere, and all of them seemed highly educated and wealthy. I was to call some of them Uncle or Aunt when they visited, and they always brought gifts for all of us. Some were as young-looking as Daddy, but some looked more like Mrs. Fennel. What I observed and was proud to see was how deferential they were to Daddy, no matter how old they appeared. They did treat him as if he was royalty and they were his loyal subjects. Occasionally, one or more of these uncles and aunts were upset when they arrived and then were quickly ushered into a room away from any of us. Only Mrs. Fennel was permitted to be there. Regardless of how upset our guests might have been when they arrived, they left smiling and confident again.
It didn’t surprise me. No matter what time of the day it was or what he was doing at the time, Daddy never seemed flustered. It was as if there was nothing in this world that could surprise him. He had a calm, even demeanor that impressed anyone he met and put him or her at ease almost immediately. No one, except maybe Mrs. Fennel, knew his exact age, not even Ava or Brianna. He really did seem to possess the wisdom of a man centuries old, even though it was difficult to believe he was more than forty-five or fifty.
When was he born? Where was he born? Who were his parents? Those were questions I thought Mrs. Fennel would never answer. I asked Daddy how old he was, of course, but he only smiled and said, “Guess,” or “You tell me, and that will be my age.”
When I asked him where he was born, he said he’d been too young to remember. He always joked but never revealed anything.
Ava didn’t seem to care, and when I asked her what she thought, she looked at me as if it were a question that had never occurred to her. How could that be? I wondered. What made her so different from me? At times, she took on that expression Daddy had, that far-off look that made me feel as if he didn’t know I was there.
As far as I knew, Ava was the only one of us who was Daddy’s natural child. She claimed it was something she had learned only recently, and, contrary to how I would feel if I learned such a wonderful thing, she seemed angry when she learned that Daddy had fallen in love with someone and married her. It was as if love were a disease, Daddy had been infected, and she was the result. She made it sound as if she were a scar.
“What’s wrong with falling in love?” I asked her when she complained.
“Love is poison for us,” she replied, and would say no more about it, no matter how many times I asked.
If it had been responsible for my being Daddy’s natural daughter, I thought, I wouldn’t call it poison.
At times, Ava looked so much like Daddy that it was as if she were cloned. Rarely, if ever, did Daddy talk about Ava’s mother, and Ava hated to talk about her. She would get furious with me if I made the smallest reference to her. All I knew was what I had gleaned from Mrs. Fennel and the tidbits Daddy revealed. Her name was Sophia. I was told she had died in childbirth.
“Were there any pictures of your mother?” I asked her once.
“If there were, I don’t care to see them,” she told me.
“Aren’t you even a little curious about her?”
“No!” she said, practically shouting back at me. “Stop talking about her. For all I know or care, I was hatched, understand? Not born. You can consider me half an orphan.”
How could she be even half an orphan? She at least knew who her mother was and who her father was, although Daddy was as real in my mind and in my affections as any daddy could be. Why was she so bitter about her mother, treating her as someone who had tricked or corrupted Daddy? How had he met her, anyway? What made her so different from other women he had known? Why couldn’t anyone talk about it? Why did we all have to swim in so much mystery? Sometimes I thought I would surely drown in it. I was barely keeping my head above water with the little bits of information Mrs. Fennel threw in my direction from time to time as it was. I felt like some caged animal kept moments away from starvation.
Ava had one of those Mrs. Fennel impatient and annoyed expressions on her face right now.
“Come off it, Lorelei. Stop giving me that innocent look. You don’t lie here in your room and just listen to your music,” she continued, lying on my bed and looking up at the ceiling. “You lie here and fantasize about sex with one or another of the boys in your school, fantasize about wonderful kisses, their tongues on your tongue, their lips moving down your neck as they slowly undress you,” she said softly, with such an erotic feeling I felt myself tingle.
She turned on her side to look at me. Her breasts ballooned, and her eyes brightened impishly. How could any man resist her, resist those inviting lips? Would I ever have her power? It both excited and frightened me to think I would.
“I…”
“Please. Don’t bother denying it. I can practically hear your dreams through the wall, and I know the reason you’re so flushed sometimes. It comes washing down over you, doesn’t it? You feel like you might drown in your own sex,
like your heart might burst because it’s beating so hard and so fast, and all that simply from images, thoughts. You can’t even begin to imagine what the real thing will do.”
I nodded. No sense lying to her. It was that way exactly. Satisfied with my confession, she smiled again and lay back to look at the ceiling.
“Don’t forget, I was your age, too, and went through exactly what you’re experiencing. I will admit that I was doing it when I was younger than you, but it was the same, so stop trying to deny it.”
“I didn’t say I don’t imagine myself with any of the boys. I said I don’t have a crush on any of them. There’s no one I would die to be with, Ava. I swear!”
“Crush? Do you teenagers still use that term? I don’t care what you call it. You have it, this longing. Sometimes your body aches because of it.”
She grinned like a cat and then turned back to look up at the ceiling again. The way she stared at it made me wonder if she saw something on it. I glanced at it, too. Daddy was asleep right above us. Was that what she was thinking? Was she saying these things to me knowing he could hear her? Daddy could hear us in his sleep, even if we spoke as softly as we were now. He once told me he didn’t sleep. He drifted in the darkness, floated like an astronaut in outer space.
“Let me tell you something, little sister. Don’t be so eager to give it away,” she warned, clearly referring to my virginity.
“I’m not.”
“No sense denying you want to, Lorelei. Daddy senses it, too. He’s worried you might be at it like a rabbit and put us all in some danger.”
I gasped. What had I possibly done to give him that impression? “Did he really tell you that?”
“Of course. He tells me everything he thinks about you and discusses every change he notices, no matter how small it might seem to be.”
I expected that because she was older, Daddy would confide in her about things before he would confide in me, but not such an intimate thing about me. I always thought Daddy and I had a very special, honest relationship.