Some Girls: My Life in a Harem (18 page)

After that night, I told my mother I was leaving home. My mother—sender of award-worthy care packages to summer camp, cheerful carpooler, PTA president, tireless volunteer, meticulous writer of thank-you notes, thrower of flawless dinner parties, dedicated caretaker of any sick family and friends—thought it was a good idea. She suggested that I get my GED and apply for college a year early.

I got into NYU and my mother took me to Loehmann’s to buy me some new clothes for college. Whenever we went shopping, my mother was generous to a fault. She often suffered the consequences later, when the bill came back and my father ranted about her carelessness, her uselessness. She couldn’t even clean the house, he said. All she was good for was shopping. These reckonings happened every time a bill came back, but still she shopped.

“You have to understand men,” she told me. “You let them say what they need to say and then you do what you want anyway.”

My mother wanted to go to Loehmann’s and I wanted to go to the only punk clothing store in all of North Jersey, so we compromised. I was terrified by what I had dubbed the “Hadassah thighs” on the old Jewish ladies in the Loehmann’s communal dressing rooms and she was appalled by the swastikas tattooed on either side of the punk store clerk’s Mohawk, but we were gentle with each other that day.

“She shouldn’t have a haircut like that with such a fat face,” was all that my mother said about the clerk.

We had lunch together and I can’t remember what we talked about. There was a sweetness to the ritual, the final shopping trip before I left home for good. It was as if I was any girl leaving home to go to college. And in some ways it was true. Both realities existed simultaneously. I was a half-broken anorexic teen hiding behind my purple hair and running for my life and I was a precocious girl with theatrical aspirations, an early admission to a good school and a numbered list of dreams and plans that took up ten pages of my diary.

And both mothers existed simultaneously: My mother whose eyes went cloudy, who stared into space and stood with her hands limp at her sides while her husband berated her kids; my mother who sewed labels onto every last sheet before I left for college. I could hear both mothers on the other end of the phone line that day.

 

“Ask her if she’s still going to come to the Caymans with us this year,” my dad said in the background.

“Honey, are you going to make it home in time to come to the Caymans with us? We’d really like it if you’d come,” my mother translated.

“No, Mom, I don’t think so.”

“What did she say?” my dad asked my mother.

“No. She said no. She can’t come this year.”

“What? I’m stuck with just her brother? Tell her she’s ruining my whole vacation.”

My mother didn’t translate this last comment. Instead she said, “Are you really all right?”

“I’m great. This is a great job. I can’t pass it up.”

By the time I hung up, I was relieved that they knew the sort-of truth and I was also relieved that I didn’t have to see them for a while. No one was waiting for the phone, so I called Sean. I called Sean and wept. I missed him. I was homesick. I turned around and watched myself in the mirror as my face turned dough-pale and splotchy. I secretly liked watching myself cry. It was like watching someone else’s face. It proved to me I was feeling something. Sometimes I spent so much time acting the part that I forgot how I was really feeling, forgot if I ever even had any real feelings.

“Then come home, Jill. Just come home,” he said, sounding tired. Tired of me. Later he told me he wasn’t tired of me, he was sad for me, for what I was becoming, for his inability to change my course.

“I can’t.”

“I can’t help you.”

I called Penny and she told me the show was proceeding without me, but assured me there would always be a place for me. We’d write in something new when I got back. Except I didn’t know when I was coming back. I regretted not assuaging my mother’s worry, not returning to Sean, not being there while Penny was writing our show, but I was compelled to stay in a way I couldn’t explain to any of them. I couldn’t just walk away. I couldn’t leave and let Serena win. I didn’t want to be the quitter.

 

At the parties I sparkled with laughter, but back at the house I was grim and homesick. Serena was relentless. She sent back the food before I got downstairs in the morning. She organized mimosa parties out by the pool and forgot to invite me. She blasted movies in the den, next to my room, when I tried to nap. She told the other girls that I smelled, that I was a hooker with herpes, that I was a drunk, that I was a fat, bulimic slob. Everything she said was overheard by the powers that lurk, that surveil, so that after the herpes comment I was taken on a surprise trip to the doctor.

I knew about Serena’s treachery from Taylor, who kept me in the loop because she hated Serena, too, and because I was maybe her only friend in Brunei or New York or anywhere, even though she still tried to charge me commission on the money I made. Taylor and I lay in bed together and looked up at the lights in the stepped ceiling. It was kind of like a sunken living room in reverse.

Taylor whispered in my ear with the music on loud so no one could overhear us. She tried to get me to take revenge on Serena.

“You have to retaliate.”

“Nobody listens to me; they listen to her.”

“Robin listens to you. Why do you think she’s doing this?”

I was beginning to believe that I somehow inspired an ancient tribal instinct to cast out the one who was different.

“It’s not because you’re different, sweet pea,” said Taylor. “Stop being so married to that whole self-concept. It’s because you’re better. It’s because he prefers you. But that bitch may change his mind unless you get in there and defend what’s yours.”

But I couldn’t remember ever having taken revenge on anyone. Instead, I would sink deeper into myself; I would run away. I clung to my dreams of stardom and knew that therein lay my revenge. Taylor had something much more immediate in mind, and under her tutelage, I was beginning to consider it. I was beginning to think I owed it to myself.

After all, isn’t that what you do when you suddenly find yourself a member of a royal court? You plot. You scheme. You jockey for position. You take revenge. Isn’t that the person you want to be? Or do you want to be the girl with the steadfast, good heart, the girl who gets stepped on, the girl you inevitably wish had less screen time because everyone else is so much more interesting?

“You have to stand up for yourself. You could tell him something about her that would get her sent home,” suggested Taylor, twirling a lock of my hair absentmindedly around her finger.

“He’s too smart. He would know what I was doing.”

“Not necessarily. Not if you’re smart, too. Smarter. You can be, you know. He has a weakness. He’s blinded by his ego.”

Taylor’s visit to Brunei ended quickly, much to my disappointment, putting a stop to our schemes. She was sent home after three weeks and wasn’t asked back. Taylor and Robin didn’t gel. Taylor may have been brilliant in her way, but she was too calculating, didn’t have enough soft spots. She was just like him and he recognized it immediately. He preferred girls he could charm, girls he could hurt. Taylor was a good actress, but she had her limitations. She couldn’t do vulnerable. But she had stayed long enough to plant a hard, cold seed in me.

 

The seed that Taylor planted, Fiona watered. After Taylor left, I would escape to Fiona’s house in the afternoons to smoke and eat her chocolates. Fiona was the only girl on the property who got her own house. She slept in the master and used the other two bedrooms—the entire rooms—as closets. She had the beds removed and she rolled in wardrobe racks instead. Her suits and gowns and tennis attire and loungewear and even her pajamas were arranged first by genre and then by color. She didn’t do it herself; she delegated with a grandiose sense of entitlement.

Fiona had twice as many servants in her guesthouse as we did in ours and they were always running around doing one task or another. Fiona spoke to them almost exclusively in Thai and they actually seemed to like her. I was always apologetic with the servants. I had so much to learn.

Fiona had been a popular television actress in the Philippines. She told me that Robin had fallen in love with her while watching her show and had sought her out and invited her for a visit. Initially she was intrigued, then she was repulsed, then he won her over. On her first night in Brunei, she had walked into the party and then walked straight back out. Robin had answered her consternation with diamonds. She pulled the necklace out of a drawer crammed with jewelry boxes and tried it on for me. It was in the shape of a diamond cougar that clasped to its own tail. It curled around her neck like something captured, declawed. She had been in Brunei six months already.

We drank tea in Fiona’s living room as she reclined on the couch and chain-smoked. There was no smoking allowed anywhere; Robin loathed it. Fiona did it anyway.

I had a good, snotty cry and complained to her. The other girls were so cruel. Taylor had gone home. I missed New York. I missed Sean. I had mounting anxiety, had too many hangovers, woke every morning with a dark cloud over my head I couldn’t shake.

“I can’t take those mean bitches. I can’t take this anymore.”

“Stop being stupid. Are you here to make friends?” she asked. “That’s a mistake. I’m not your friend. Robin is not your friend. Those morons are certainly not your friends. The money is your only friend.”

I wanted to be like Fiona. I had considered myself all grown up when I was about fifteen, but I was changing my mind.

“Besides, you’ll get back at them. I have my own ideas about retribution,” she said. “Most of them include shopping.”

One morning soon after, I received the by-then familiar knock on my door, but when I got downstairs to the car, Fiona was sitting in it.

“We’re going shopping,” she said. “Robin likes to see us in traditional gowns. Don’t worry; we’ll get real clothes later. Think of this as an appetizer.”

A driver chauffeured us around to traditional Malay shops, where heavily made-up women in patterned silks fussed over us, costuming us in brightly colored sarong Kebayas and sarong Baju Kurongs, complete with matching bejeweled shoes, hair pieces, and jewelry. We must have bought ten each. The driver shelled out note after note and toted all of our bags to the car.

That night, Robin had portraits of Fiona and me taken by the fountain in the entrance hallway of the palace. I stood there all wrapped up in a traditional gown of beaded pink silk, with a glittering pink fake flower adorning my hair. Most of the photos were of each of us individually, but in some of the poses Fiona and I sat next to each other and held hands like it was a wedding portrait.

Fiona was becoming more than a friend; she was an older sister of sorts, in a pervy way. I had always wanted a sister. That night I felt that my position in the hierarchy of the harem made me a participant in something ancient. Part of it was treacherous and terrible, but part of it wasn’t so bad, this world of women with one enigma of a man who held sway over us all.

Our next shopping trip was something else entirely.

Fiona and I sat in the back of yet another car, this time heading back to the Bandar Seri Begawan airport, where we hopped on a private plane to Singapore. The interior of the plane was all white leather and gilded hardware and walls that looked like white marble veined with gold. Chic flight attendants served us drinks and lunch, fanned out magazines for us to choose from.

“Thank you, Siti. Thank you, Jing,” she said to the smiling flight attendants as we exited the plane. Fiona learned and remembered everyone’s name.

Fiona walked through the airport like she had somewhere to go, but never like she was in a rush. She always wore heels and it gave her hips a slight swing—nothing too slutty, but enough to affect a gravitational pull on the attention of the men she passed. I mirrored her gait all the way to our waiting car and then out again when we reached the Hilton, where we were staying in the Prince’s private suite. The suite occupied an entire floor, had its own full staff, and was more like a villa than a suite. The interior was classic Robin, with a big indoor fountain and lots of solid-gold doorknobs.