Diamond Girl (14 page)

The downside of the foundation was that it intrigued my mother too. She jumped at the chance to use some of the three hundred million dollar original endowment to showcase
herself as the long-suffering, but still really well dressed, mother of a sick child. That led to the semi-annual luncheon and fashion show, 'Designers for Diabetes' which was the cringe-making name she picked. And because the foundation was in my name, she began to feel the need to spend quality time with me.

There was never a single photograph taken of me in those years where she isn’t standing nearby looking lovingly at me. She wanted to be taken seriously as an authority on her family tragedy, so she spent hours - well a half hour - carefully researching/googling juvenile diabetes. This was so she could make a moving speech at the end of the fashion show, pleading with the attendees to reach 'deep into your hearts' - translation, deep into your husbands' checkbooks - 'and help to eradicate this terrible illness'. 

The downside of her enthusiasm for me was spending time with her; the upside was that the foundation really did raise a lot of money and, who knows, maybe it will help out some sick little kid one day. I joke about it, but this disease is a killer and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, not even my mother.

The other kind of cool thing about the foundation was that I got to
model the closing outfit in the fashion shows. Of course, my two best friends in the world, Milan and Christy, were models too, but they were always modeling in some runway show for charity and, in Milan’s case, not just for charity but for the hot designers in ‘fashion week’ as well. Not me, though. My name stood tall, but I didn’t, so the 'Designers for Diabetes' luncheon was my only chance twice a year to stride out on that runway in some ahhmazing Marc Jacobs or Vera Wang (two of our big supporters), couturier creation and feel the warmth of admiring eyes staring up at me.

Thinking about this stuff reminds me of how panicked I was that last year at Dwight. I had to decide where I went from there. Daddy, whose opinion meant the most, said he wanted me to continue onto Brown as Kellehers usually did. My mother said vaguely that I might as well, since she didn’t know what else I could do.

Hearing her say that reminded me of how few the options were for a girl from a family like mine. Women in my world do not collect stamps, and unless we are given early control of our money, as Aunt Georgia was - Aunt Georgia who had recently built an orphanage in Laos - unless that happened we couldn’t start our own charities and hold fundraisers. There was marriage, always an awesome option and one I would have loved, but I couldn’t marry myself and nobody else was asking. We could spend a few years after high school dabbling in art, which bored me, or trying out for the Olympic equestrienne slots. That last one is very popular with my kind, and I did love horses, but I hadn’t ridden seriously in years, so that was out.  Desperate, I turned to Milan and Christy for advice.

Milan was pragmatic as always. “Well, Care Bear, you can join me on the club scene, but I wouldn’t if I were you.”

“Why not?”

She shook her head. Her beautiful eyes looked tired. “Oh, get real. I’m there becoming famous. I’m going to be so famous that people will pay me a million dollars just to walk into their stupid bars or their hotels. I’m going to model, and act, and be like a cult for little girls in small town nowhere, and I’m going to make so much money doing it that I’ll be the Marin everyone thinks of when they hear the name - me, not the hotels. I’m going to do all this so that I can be like you already are, the girl who has everything.” She rolled her eyes. “Why do you need to climb down by being in the tabloids? You’re already there, the place everybody wants to be, the girl everybody wants to be.” Christy nodded, backing up Milan’s opinion.

I looked at her curiously. ”What about you, Chrissy. Are you going into the club scene, two fabulous Marin sisters for the price of one?” 

She shook her head. “No, Milan doesn’t want that and neither do I. She’s already prepaid my first year at the Fashion Institute. We’re going to get our own apartment and live together, but she’s the star and I wouldn’t want it anyway.”

Milan kissed her little sister on the temple. “That’s right, baby sister is going to do whatever she wants, become a famous designer or marry the best boy in the country, or have both if she wants it. I’ll take the fame and the hits for the two of us.”

Christy, recognizing my look, said. “Care Bear, you can live with us, you know you can. You can come to school with me if you want. We’ll
learn how to design handbags together, we’ll rule.”

I hugged them both, thanked Christy, and excused myself, saying I had to study for finals.

They knew it was a lie but let me go without questions. On the short walk home to 800 Fifth Avenue from the Plaza, I made up my mind to go to Brown. It would please Daddy and, after all, there was no place I could think of I really wanted to be.

Chapter 15

Announcing to Daddy that I had decided for sure to go to Brown cheered him up so much that, after I told him, I felt horrible an hour later when I was lying in my bathtub and I realized that I had no clue if I would be able to get into Brown.

I was graduating in three months, all the applications from my classmates had gone out at the end of the previous year and, with the Ivies, you were supposed to have pretty much been in training for them since you were like six years old. My grades weren’t awful but they weren’t Ivy material either. And the other stuff, like extracurricular activities and volunteerism, were not even on the table. I was beginning to worry. What would he think when I was inevitably rejected? He would be disappointed in me, which I would hate, and he would be embarrassed by my failure, which he would hate.

My head started to hurt imagining the look on his face. I dumped in more Peruvian Pink Salt to the water. Peruvian Pink is honestly not only the greatest bath salt on the planet but, because it’s from somewhere in South America and the crystals in it are like two thousand years old, it not only promotes peace and mental acuity, and smells so good, but whenever I soaked in it I got all my best ideas.

I have always been very in-tune with anything aroma therapy based. It worked like a charm that day too. While I was floating in my pink water, it came to me that I could offer a one-of-a-kind admissions essay to Brown that played to my particular strengths. In other words, how by shopping at politically correct companies I was helping to save the world, one animal cruelty-free product at a time.

I know some people thought the documentary I eventually produced for Brown was very
Legally Blonde
. My essay consisted of my videographer following me around the city for a day while I spoke about the good works that companies like Starbucks, and Origins, and a funky little designer called Myne Bianca who made great looking faux-fur jackets, did for our country. It was a serious piece and was nothing like that stupid video Elle Woods, aka Reese Witherspoon, made to get into Harvard Law.

First of all, I wasn’t floating around in a pool wearing a sequined bikini. I was out power shopping at the kind of companies that not only employ a lot of Americans but also sell great stuff to other Americans who have a well-developed sense of social consciousness.

When my videographer, Jackie, and my producer, Leon, had finished editing the film which we titled 'Shop with Reason', I was so impressed that I wondered if maybe we shouldn’t enter it at the Sundance Film Festival. Instead I held a private screening of it for Daddy.

He needed cheering up as he had never really recovered from having to return home and live with my mother again. I knew he had done it for me and that always worried me. Daddy wasn’t used to being told what to do or to being miserable and living with her. A thirty thousand square foot apartment pretty much guaranteed the latter, even if he ignored her attempting the former.

I don’t think he had been in love with Arianna but I know he had enjoyed her company more than he did my mother’s and, by coming home for me, he had sacrificed something important. Happiness is rare, so rare that it’s the one thing even people in my family can’t buy.

My father is a guy who holds his cards close to his chest and he is not naturally affectionate, but with me, who he did love and, even better in some ways, who he understood, he did try. When I say he understood, what I mean is that Daddy knew that while I looked like a Kelleher, and tried my best to act like one, I was somewhat defective, emotionally speaking.

I wanted to be liked. Oh fuck it, I wanted to be loved. It was never enough for me to have people befriend me and do what I asked because of my name. I wanted them to care about me, this inner me, whoever that was, to want to be with me even if I didn’t buy them things. Worst of all, I was needy for tactile affection and that is something that just never happened for me. Elizando used to hug me, and sometimes, though never enough, Milan and Christy would hug and kiss me. Later on, of course, there was sex, but what I really wanted, really craved, was the kind of physical closeness to the people I loved that I saw on sitcoms, like on
George Lopez
where the parents were constantly touching their kids.

It was never going to happen in my family, in my world, but Daddy, who was the most reserved person in a world peopled by iron reserve, did try. He was verbally affectionate to me. He told me he loved me. He showed that he enjoyed my company. He went above and beyond the stilted way he had been raised, and had lived, to try and fill up some of the empty, hungry places inside me.

I would have died for him. I wish he knew that.

What had worried me a lot in the two years since he had come
home and left his Italian bombshell, was that he would blame me for being stuck at 800 Fifth Avenue, home of his not-so-trophy wife. That he didn’t, or that if he did he didn’t show it, just shows how much he used to love me.

My mother was not only a self-obsessed shrew who was held together only by plastic and Botox and - at least in my opinion - by too small couturier outfits, she was also deadly boring, yet she seemed surprised that her ability to gossip endlessly about the same people they saw for dinner 364 nights a year - Christmas Day being for family - made him yawn and walk away.

I spent time trying to make things more fun for Daddy, the day I showed him my sure-fire Brown admission tape being no exception. The only other person alive whose company, besides mine, I knew Daddy enjoyed was Aunt Georgia’s. Those two were like Milan and Christy: tightly-bound sibling survivors of a childhood they never spoke of. He lit up around her, so it was to Aunt Georgia’s crazy over-the-top home theatre at Trump Towers that I took him for my screening.

I hadn’t invited Milan or Christy, so it was just the three of us in her comfortably pale yellow theatre that seats 100. Aunt Georgia is definitely an old-style New York heiress, très private and never speaks voluntarily to the press, but she loves movies and hosts an outrageous annual Academy Awards party once a year, which is, I’m pretty sure, the only time she uses her theatre.

She was as always happy to see Daddy, and me too I think, and had her butler serve us her own idea of movie junk food: Cristal Brut champagne and popcorn, with sides of pâté or peanut M & Ms. After a short fight, Daddy okayed me having one glass of champagne as he figured it was the lesser of two evils, M & Ms being strictly on the list of ten million things Yype One diabetics can’t have.

Aunt Georgia and Daddy watched my
Shop with Reason
film with occasional muffled laughs and applauded wildly at the end. I stood up, flushed and happy, and took a bow.

I looked eagerly at them. “You really liked it?  Honestly?”

They both nodded enthusiastically and Daddy said, “We loved it, sweetheart.” He turned to Aunt Georgia. “Didn’t you think that was an awfully good film, George? I mean, she’s not even eighteen yet.”

Aunt Georgia smiled at both of us. “I thought it was brilliant, Kells. I think our little Carey should study screenwriting when she gets up to Brown in the fall, or I don’t know, Kells, do you think with her being so creative, she maybe shouldn’t go out west, to … oh, I always forget the names of those California schools.” 

Daddy laughed comfortably. “Of course you forget them, George. We don’t attend them and, no, she doesn’t need to go to the middle of nowhere. Brown has a fine drama department. Good Lord, don’t you remember when the young Kennedy boy got so caught up in it that he nearly became an actor?”

“Oh God, Kells, you’re right. I’d forgotten all about that and I’m sure you’re right, Car
ey will be fine at Brown, and …” she looked at me piercingly, “… don’t forget, darling, beautiful and talented as you are, we stay on the other side of the camera.”

Until Aunt Georgia said that I had never even thought about trying to become an actress. I wanted to ask her the obvious question as to
why I couldn’t be one since, naturally, the minute she said I couldn’t, I suddenly realized that being an actress was after all my lifelong dream. At seventeen, lifelong and ten minutes are pretty much the same thing.

I didn’t want to ruin our fun day though by arguing. I could wait to tell them about my new plans after I landed my first film role. I just smiled modestly. “Thanks, Aunt Georgia.
You too, Daddy. I’m just glad you like my stupid little movie. I only hope it’s good enough for Brown. Otherwise, Daddy, I might end up at one of those colleges you are talking about in the middle of nowhere and have to major in … well, uhm, teaching or dog walking, or something.”