Diamond Girl (13 page)

She stood abruptly and tossed her hair. “I’m hungry. I don’t want to call for pizzas, it takes too long. Come on, let’s drive down and eat.” The two blond boys rose obediently. The one who had first commented on my wrists asked Christy, “You’re coming too, right?”

She flashed Milan a look and once again I was amazed, and a little jealous, at the silent perfect communication they shared. She shook her head. “No, I’m going to stay here. I’m all sweaty and icky from skiing. You guys bring back a mushroom for Carey and me.” 

The boy sat again. “I’ll stay and hang with you. Mushroom sounds good.”

Christy glanced at Milan, then at me. Her eyes widened a little and she said petulantly, “I don’t want you to stay here. I said I was going to take a shower. Gawd, did you think I was inviting you to watch.”

The boy flushed and pulled on his jacket.

The dark alpha boy stood too. Speaking to Milan but still eyeing me, he said, “Sure we’ll take you to Pazzo’s, no sweat. I’d still like to know the deal with your little friend's mass bling there, though.”

Milan turned on him. “It’s not bling, you no-class loser. Those are real, she’s real. Carey’s our diamond girl.” She sneered,
“You wouldn’t know the real thing if you saw it.”

He wasn’t fazed. He turned to Milan and eyed her up and down. She smiled at his appraisal, her anger gone as quickly as it had come. He asked her. “So, if she’s a diamond girl, you must be made of some gemstone so rare I haven’t even heard of it yet.” 

Her eyes clouded. “No, no gemstone at all. I’m made of that fake jewelry, the kind that looks like it's gold, but it turns your finger black.” 

The other boys laughed. Christy and I didn’t. The dark boy shook his head. “No, that’s not right. Whatever you’re made of it, it could stop a fucking clock just by looking at you. Don’t you know that you’re the hottest girl in any room?”

Milan leaned in closer to him, giving him a half-smile. “Okay, if you say so, that’s what I am. Carey’s the diamond girl, Christy’s the best girl, and I’m the hottest girl in every room. Sounds like a good logo design. Come on, I’m hungry.”

The boys followed her long strides out of the room and, as soon as we heard the distant closing of the front doors, Christy was beside me.      “You’re sick, aren’t you?
Poor Carey. You should have called us. I had my cell on all day.”

I looked at her beautiful face and I couldn’t talk. She leaned over and encircled me in her sweet girl scent. “It’s okay, I know, I understand. Milan does too. We love you Carey. You think you’re some kind of freak because you’re sick and it’s not true. Come on, let me help you upstairs. Tell me what you need.”

My swollen throat and dry mouth wouldn’t work. I stared at her helplessly. She nodded, helping me up. “Here, lean on me. We’ll take the elevator.” Without asking me, she reached down and yanked my insulin unit from the front of my jeans and stared at the numbers and the flashing light. I had muted the sound when they had come in. “Gawd, Carey, this is empty. Come on, let me help you.”

I did let her help me. I let her guide me upstairs and sit me on the toilet, and even pull down my jeans and panties, because I couldn’t make my hands work. While I sat there, she pulled out two syringes from the small refrigerator in the room I had chosen and she depressed them expertly, filling my insulin unit, then she helped me undress and get into the round tub.

She joined me and gently washed my hair as well as her own.  After our bath, she guided me, still naked, to the carefully turned-down bed and into the cool clean sheets. Apparently Sulky Sue was efficient as well as mean.

I grabbed her hand. “Christy, thank you. You saved me.”

She shook her head. “No, I just helped you, you’re our friend, Carey, our closest bestest friend. Milan and I will always take care of you, just like you take care of us. We love you.” She leaned over and kissed my forehead, turning off the bedside lamp. I heard her soft laugh in the darkness. “Wow, wouldn’t those guys love to walk in on this, two hot naked blonds? I better go blow-dry my hair and get dressed. Milan and the boys will be back any minute. You sleep, little Carey girl, sleep and have sweet dreams. Tomorrow, Milan and I won’t ski, we’ll stay home with you all day, okay?” 

I murmured okay, wanting to beg her to stay with me till I slept and knowing
, if I did, that she would say yes but resent me for it. And it was so important to me that she and Milan always see me as more fun than trouble. If I let them know me, really know me in all my disgusting need and insecurity and physical weakness, I knew they would draw away, perfect faces pulled tight with disgust and pity.

Kelleher toys or not, I would lose them.

I didn’t fall asleep for a long time. That night I laid there alone in the dark and listened to the far-off sounds of music and laughter, and the girls screaming in pretend terror at whatever the boys were doing to them in the pool.

I didn’t feel sorry for myself or want to join them. I knew the boys would think I was weird and awkward, and it would ruin the night. I knew that if I were in the pool, I would have had to take off my bracelets and then they would have seen the ugly scars underneath all my diamonds.

Chapter 14

The air in here is so bad but it shouldn’t be. It's cold in here. I can’t feel much in the way of sensation from my neck down but the skin on my face is still sensitive. I can register the clammy air on my lips and how cold my tears feel trickling down the sides of my face into my ears. I haven’t been able to feel my feet at all for what seems like days. Truth to tell, I have never had much sensation in my feet.

For me that was one of the rare positives of being a Type One diabetic. New York girls have to live out their lives in punishing shoes, sky high heels even with a pair of old jeans. At our chic-est, we will stride through the meat packing district to a new club wearing our newest Manolo boots, fourteen thousand dollars a pair, always too narrow and the heel is a nosebleed making five inches.

In truth, when New York women set foot outside, they are
en pointe
. People always ooh and ahh over ballerinas in their little toe shoes standing
en pointe
for two seconds. Well, the true foot hero is the New York woman striding bravely down Fifth Avenue on stiletto thin heels, her feet practically at a vertical angle and always in shoes at least one size too small. We are the modern day practitioners of the ancient art of Chinese foot binding.

In places like Greenwich, a young debutante and her trophy mother can risk a pair of Chanel ballet flats. Go for it, they are very ladylike, but I wouldn’t recommend making a habit out of it. Sky high heels don’t just lengthen a woman’s legs and make her calves look
sweet, they shorten the impact of the size of girl’s feet. A foot bent at an angle nature never intended is a foot that doesn’t look like a freaking gunboat, as it would in flats.

A couple generations ago people from families like mine used to marry their cousins to keep the money in the family. They even married their first cousins,
which honestly is so weird, but then I guess there started being enough money to broaden our horizons, so the family scions were able to stop marrying their cousins and producing kids who looked like poor Eleanor Roosevelt.    

Men being men, once their fortunes started being much more massive than the poor old cousin-marrying family founders ever dreamed of, they realized that not only could money buy great houses and yachts, but it could also buy ahhmazing looking women.
Hence, the advent of the New York trophy wife. The name is self-explanatory.

Trophy wives started being a hot ticket item in the seventies, about the time millionaires became billionaires and decided to have not just water yachts, like our predecessors, but sky yachts too. There are several different kinds of high-end private jets, but the two best kinds are the Boeing Business jet like Daddy has - that’s the stretch limo of jets - and then there is the smaller, faster, sexy Bombadier.

Trophy wives usually only come in two makes, just like the jets. There is the luxury stretch supermodel trophy wife who averages out at between five foot ten and six two, weighing in at one fifteen to one thirty.  Most of that weight is concentrated in the hair and chest region; think Giselle Brady if you need a visual. The smaller, sexy trophy wife is almost always of the Asian variety; think Wendy Murdoch. 

With the advent of the new high-end model wife came dress
designers to encase their ahhmazing bodies and enable them to be displayed for maximum hotness, and shoe designers to add the finishing touches.

The shoe designers faced a challenge. The Boeing Business jet model of trophy wife is a very big seller, but she has one imperfection. In order to support the mile long body without tipping over, she is usually cursed with enormous feet. These feet are not a pretty sight when stretched out full length, thus the advent of the monster heel and its subsequent contortion.

Though I was the child of an enormously tall Bigfoot version of the trophy wife, I was tiny, a throwback Kelleher to the old, smaller, inbred cousin days. Fortunately, both my paternal grandmother and my mother were gorgeous trophy wives, so my small stature was the only thing left over, genetically speaking, to show that I didn’t descend from Amazons.

I was a rare little creature, that’s what Daddy said, and I think he was right. I have the tiny feet and stature of the doll-like Asian women, combined with the features of the stretch supermodels. Because I have naturally tiny feet, I could have gotten away with flats if I had wanted, but, of course, I was in Milan’s posse and that meant five inches, no matter what.

It was okay, the nosebleed heels. I had almost no sensitivity in my feet and that’s why photographers for Page Six and the like loved me. Unlike the looks of snotty distaste my peers gave them, I was always smiling. When people look at the haughty expressions on the faces of New York socialites, they probably think
what a bunch of elitist bitches
, but it’s not that really, it’s because their feet hurt.

Like most everything else, though, Milan was an exception to the rule. Of course she wore the best and highest heels that Blahnik and Choo and Weitzman could create, but if she was in pain, and I know she was because she would show off her welts and blisters and deformed toes to Christy - and I like war wounds - she never let it show to anyone else.

Her smile was always radiant, her look as relaxed and as inviting as if she were lying in bed for the photographs. Milan had dropped out of Dwight just prior to our senior year and begun to spend her time developing her world-famous brand. In those days, that meant she was at a different ‘had to be seen there’ club every night and, while she was there, she danced on the banquettes to the loudly-voiced approval of onlookers and the flash of paparazzi cameras. Those cameras always burned me. Sudden flashes made me squeeze my eyes shut in protest and in all my candid photos I would be an icky white color, overexposed and squinting, but those same flashes and klieg lights warmed Milan’s skin to rosy perfection.

Christy and I didn’t drop out of school. It wasn’t an option in my case. Kellehers always finished high school, and usually four years of college as well. After that, since no Kelleher was allowed to work in the company, the Kelleher men could choose from a variety of professions - golf, painting and stamp and/or rare book and map collecting.

Since only our side of the family had the money to buy a major sports team, doing so naturally made Daddy both famous and revered, not only in our family but by other filthy rich scions. Owning your own football or basketball franchise was very manly and, in addition, it actually gave the men lucky enough to have one something to do and, even better, something to talk about.

I mean, I love my cousins, but how far can you stretch out a story about the rare black-on-magenta stamp you just purchased at auction? Actually, that might be a bad example because, at least as far as my second cousin Herbie Kelleher is concerned, you could stretch out the story about two weeks, or until the listeners start entering into murder/suicide pacts with themselves, like in that old hilarious movie,
Airplane
. 

Poor Daddy.
Here he had the most amazing toy of all, his football team, but because of the people he associated with, he would have been better off owning the map Christopher Columbus penned. Daddy only hung out with the friends of his childhood. He was uncomfortable with the wild boys of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The problem was that his childhood friends didn’t have the kind of money those guys had, or that Daddy had, and they didn’t own NFL or NBA teams, nor did they follow sports, except for golf.

So at the usual deadly Hamptons gatherings to save an endangered sand dune, or a desert pup fish, it was usually Daddy with his great football stories who ended up being the odd guy out. He must have felt self-conscious about it too because, on my sixteenth birthday, he unveiled his plans for the Carolyn Kelleher Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.

A foundation is a much more old money New York thing than a football team and, after that, Daddy and my suddenly involved mother hosted a number of deadly boring in-town and Hamptons fund raisers of their own. I liked the foundation because it meant, in addition to flying with Daddy to football games, he would take me with him to foundation board meetings as well.