Michelle had first discovered her power while working with her Hebrew tutor, a young man who had bought her clothes. Shoplifted them, actually, although she didn’t know that at the time. She could imagine Rachel saying, “Do the math, stupe. He was helping you with Hebrew for ten bucks an hour. Do you think he could afford those things he gave you?” But it never occurred to Michelle to worry about how he afforded the items until he was arrested, a month after her bat mitzvah. He was picked up at the Woodies in Columbia with a pair of Guess jeans. Michelle’s first thought was: Wait-he steals for other girls, too? She had assumed she was special and was irritated to learn that he had made similar arrangements with other female students.
He had been a little pervy. It was funny, how the ones who touched you the least were often pervier than the ones who really did stuff. But weak, so weak. Once, when he tried to get her to model one of the outfits, she had looked at him and said: “It’s not really my style. But thank you.” Bambi had been out of the house that day. Who wouldn’t trust her twelve-year-old daughter with her Hebrew tutor? He had tried to kiss her once, only once. Michelle had drawn a hand across her mouth and said: “No, thank you.” The next week, he brought her three dresses, better ones.
Towel wrapped to ensure modesty, she walked back the length of the pool, still aware of the boys’ glances. She did not use the bathroom in the cabana/changing room at poolside, nor did she use the powder room off the kitchen. Michelle, who knew the Gelmans’ home as well as her own, climbed the stairs to the master bedroom, where the enormous en suite marble bath had lighted mirrors, heated towel racks, a bidet, even a heated floor, not that it was turned on in June.
The bathroom opened into a dressing room the size of Michelle’s oh-so-stingy bedroom. Even as Linda and Rachel decamped, Bambi would not allow Michelle to move into their rooms. Michelle suspected this was because she would then want to redecorate, make the new room hers. Why shouldn’t she? Her room was childish. Sophisticated for a thirteen-year-old-she had been allowed to use her bat mitzvah money to redo it. But now the color palette, peach and pale green, bored her. So fussy, so Laura Ashley, which it happened to be.
Her top back on, she sat on the long, upholstered stool in the center of Lorraine’s closet and considered its perfection. The problem, as Michelle saw it, was that money came too late. You had to be old, in your forties, before you had the money to have the best clothes, furnishings, jewels. Even if Lorraine had been as beautiful as Bambi, these things would still be wasted on her. Michelle wished she had known her mother in her twenties, when the money flowed and no expense was spared. The photos of this time, in black and white, looked fake to her, props from a film. And by the time Michelle was born in 1973, the clothing was horribly tacky. Thank God Bambi had made them dress like the preppies they weren’t.
She barely remembered her father and worried sometimes that the memories she did have weren’t even hers, just stories planted by her mother and sisters. But there was a smell, a couple of them. Cigar stores, anything leathery. And a certain aftershave that she sometimes picked up in department stores. No one could have made her remember smells that weren’t hers to remember.
If her father had served his sentence, he would be free by now. Would it really have been that hard? She once overheard Linda telling Rachel that he might have been out in ten years, according to Henry. Ten years. He would be here and this would be their house and she would be allowed to borrow her mother’s clothes and jewels. Because, yes, Bambi was the same size as Michelle. When Michelle was younger, the boys who came to the house had gotten crushes on her.
Maybe that was part of the reason that Michelle now preferred men, men she never allowed to come to her house.
But even if her father had returned, would they have been rich again? Michelle could never work out that part of the fantasy, and Michelle was very pragmatic about her fantasies. What would he do? Could he earn as much in a legal enterprise as he had in his old business? These were not questions she could put to Bambi, or even her sisters. So much of what she knew about her father had been learned from eavesdropping. Michelle was less resentful than the others thought about being cut off from the family’s days of ease and money. But she hated not being privy to the secrets that her sisters shared. The stories about the mistress. Did they really think that Michelle, incurious as she was at thirteen, hadn’t seen the article in the Star when Julie Saxony disappeared almost ten years to the day after her father did? It had been only a matter of time before someone at school had told her that everyone believed that her father had finally sent for Julie Saxony-and all the money he had put away, money that was supposed to go to Bambi.
Much to her surprise, Michelle started to cry. And everything around her was so beautiful, silken and pristine, that she wasn’t sure where to dry her tears, which were clotted with mascara. She padded back to the bathroom, picked up the towel she had left on the floor.
“What are you doing here?”
It was Sydney, the birthday girl, the girl to whom all this belonged, not that she would ever fit into skinny Lorraine’s dresses, no matter how her mother tried to starve her. Sydney was wearing a two-piece, which Michelle found absolutely shocking. She would live in a caftan if she had a body like Sydney’s.
“Your father told me to go put my top back on. I was lying on my stomach, just trying to avoid tan lines. But, you know.”
“His ideas about femininity basically align with Sir Walter Scott. He’s a prude, my dad.” A shrug.
Michelle envied Sydney those casual words even more than she envied her these beautiful things. To be able to say that one’s father was this or that.
To be able to say: “My dad.” My dad, my dad, my dad.
“Anyway, we’re about to have cake. Don’t you want cake?”
Sydney’s tone implied that everyone must want cake all the time. Michelle wished she did, that the pleasures of chocolate and frosting could still be meaningful to her. Then again, what did she find pleasurable? She enjoyed things mainly in the planning. If she had gone to Philadelphia today, the thrill would have been in the subterfuge and the escape. And then the night, the hours of denying someone else pleasure. That was what made her happiest, or at least close to something that others might recognize as happiness.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not hungry.”
“I guess that’s why you have the body you have,” said Sydney. Cheerful, not begrudging. “Mom tries to make me live on lettuce and carrots, hoping I’ll look like you-or at least like her. But it’s just never going to happen.”
Michelle couldn’t help being impressed by Sydney’s matter-of-fact acceptance of herself. “How do you manage that?”
“Manage what?”
This was tricky to word. “Not minding. I mean, you know, being cool with how things are.”
Sydney smiled. Half smiled, really, using only the left corner of her mouth. “I’ve got my stuff. Believe me, I’ve got stuff that bugs me. Stuff that’s bigger than my weight.”
“Like what?” Michelle really could not imagine what could bother someone if she had money and didn’t care about her appearance.
“I was asked to leave camp last summer.”
“That’s it? You got kicked out of sleep-away camp?”
Sydney studied her, as if judging Michelle’s worthiness as a confidante. “Yes, that’s it. But it bugs me. I loved that camp. I loved-well, I wish I could go back. I would have been a junior counselor this year. But I can’t go back. They made that clear.”
Some boring kid spat, Michelle decided. She wouldn’t press further. She tried to ignore the fact that Sydney clearly wasn’t allowing her to press further.