Tales From My Closet (6 page)

But I loved my internship. I hardly ever saw her, but when I did, Libby always said something nice to me or complimented my fashion sense. Everyone else was nice to me, too, saying that I had a good work ethic and a great sense of style. Then Emma Beth came.

Emma Beth, who was already halfway through college, was the
real
summer intern. The first time we met, she looked me up and down, half smiled, and said: “Interesting choice.”

“What?”

“Your outfit.”

I was wearing, you have to love it, my brother’s extralong blue-and-white-striped cotton pajama top, cinched in with a fat black shiny belt that I’d gotten at Target, so the total effect was of updated shirtwaist dress.

“So
you’re
the one who got here because you’re related to Libby,” she continued.

“Well, not exactly,” I started to explain, but she cut me off.

“You’re in high school?”

“Yes, but —”

“See you around.”

Emma Beth had a doll’s light-blue eyes and white, petal-shaped face, with hair cut in a forties-style pageboy, and even though she really wasn’t that pretty, she had a certain flair, a certain ultradetached attitude that made you notice her. Her look was strictly office-pro: pencil skirts that hugged her bottom half, and a variety of crisp white shirts, with wedges or high heels and ropes of pearls: classy, well-tailored, feminine, and, obviously, expensive. No castoffs or thrift shops or make-it-yourself for her, and sure, I wouldn’t have minded having a wardrobe filled with several variations of houndstooth skirts and white blouses, but since I couldn’t even afford the knockoff look that you can get at Old Navy, what chance did I have? And she didn’t look like a junior lawyer in her clothes, either, not with the occasional rhinestone poodle jewelry that she wore to add whimsy. Which is how Libby put it, anyway, when she stormed into the design room and announced that, thanks to Emma Beth, she wanted to launch an entire new line, featuring poodles. “Such whimsy!” she said in front of the whole staff, myself and Emma Beth included.

Speaking of poodles, by the time I got home, I was feeling like dog doo. For one thing, I was covered with sweat — the city had gotten hot and steamy, the way it does in July, with that New York garbage smell wafting up from the gutters and the acidic burnt-coal smell of the subway grinding up from the vents. With Becka in Paris, and Polly busy with swimming (she’s superathletic), and everyone else at summer camp or whatever, I had no one I could really talk to. Dad was in a terrible mood as usual, barely grunting at me when I came home. Plus, I had a babysitting job that night.

Mrs. McCloskey was flat-out nuts, a super–control freak of the freakishly freaky variety. She was waiting for me by the door with a list of instructions, including exactly how much TV the older kid, Tommy, could have (one hour, and it had to be something on PBS), and exactly what he and his brother, the dreadful Matt McCloskey, could have for dessert: a single gingersnap cookie with half a pear. As for dinner itself, she’d already made it: brown rice and peas with melted cheese on top, with a salad.

Matt put his on the counter, grabbed a box of Cheerios and a jar of applesauce, and ate three bowlfuls. Tommy ate his dinner but then proceeded to convince his brother to go downstairs to the playroom to have a burping contest, which he won, but only because Matt got sick and ran to the bathroom, where he threw up all his applesauce and Cheerios, mainly, but not all, into the toilet.

But I just couldn’t do it. . . . I couldn’t clean up his vomit without getting sick myself, so I closed the door and told the boys not to go in there and to only use the upstairs bathroom. Both boys had lost interest in the burping contest, so we settled in for a nice long night of
Frizzy’s Lunch Lab
and
Noah Comprende
, which I alone could
comprende
. (I’m in Spanish III.) I finally couldn’t stand it anymore and switched to reruns of
Friends
and then
One Tree Hill
while the boys whined that they were bored and threatened to tell on me. At which point I searched through the freezer where I found, ta-da, a pint of cherry vanilla. I gave each of the boys two giant scoops and took a single scoop for myself, and the three of us sat back down on the sofa in the playroom and ate it. Then both boys went crazy from the sugar and chased each other around the house, both pretending that they were Harry Potter, until at last they collapsed and I told them to brush their teeth and put their pajamas on for bed.

“No!” Matt said. “I want
your
pajamas!”

“Me, too!” his brother piped up.

“These aren’t pajamas,” I said. “And anyway, they’re mine.”

“They look like pajamas to me,” Matt said.

“Well, they’re not.”

I didn’t get home until almost midnight, where I found Dad fully dressed and snoring on the couch, and all I made, for six hours of those brats, was fifty-four dollars.

Over the weekend my parents got into another huge, whopping argument, mainly about his drinking, until finally Dad stomped out. And the thing is? When Ben and I were little, Dad wasn’t like that — I mean, maybe he drank, but he didn’t, like, get drunk. Even now, no one — outside our own family, that is — even knew he drank. Or at least that’s what Mom said. She said: “Your father’s drinking is a family matter, and it’s private. No one needs to know. He just needs to exert a little more willpower.”

But the fighting escalated so much that over the weekend I took two more babysitting jobs, because even though I really don’t like babysitting, at least I didn’t have to be home. Ben went out, too, but unlike me, he didn’t have to work, and instead contented himself with hanging around with John, watching TV. “Yar, yar, have fun in butt-wiping world,” he said as he sauntered out of the house Friday night. But it wasn’t so bad. It was just one little girl, and I made twenty dollars for fewer than two hours. But Saturday night it was whine city, a whole family of little bookworms, meaning that I read about a thousand kids’ books until at last the parents got home and paid me a whopping huge fifty bucks. When I got home, there was an email from Becka in response to the one I’d sent her about how my family was driving me crazy and Emma Beth was a bitch. Here’s what she said: “Hang in there,
chère
!” That was it. Finally, I drifted over to my closet to get into my nightgown, but when I opened the door, there was Ben, waiting for me. “Surprise!” he said, jumping out of the closet and laughing so hard that he went purple.

By Monday I was better rested, and what’s more, I’d pulled off the most fabulous of my fabulous loungewear looks yet: a hot-pink Victoria’s Secret nightgown of Mom’s that she never wore because it was probably three sizes too small for her. Only I wore it like a tunic, over dark-gray leggings, with black ballerina slippers. And did I look fabulous? Yes, I did. Because as much as I wasn’t exactly crazy about being taller than most of the boys, the upside was that I could wear practically anything.

And the second I walked into work, I knew I’d hit it again — everyone was smiling at me, and a couple of the more senior marketing people even gave me a thumbs-up. Even the snooty girl at the Starbucks who usually didn’t bother to so much as say hello to me told me that she thought I looked cute. Then it happened: No sooner had I returned to work, then right in front of everyone, including Emma Beth, I kind of tripped, and half fell, half toppled, over my right ankle, spilling half a tray of coffee.

“Tripped over your PJs?” Emma Beth said as I turned the color of a ripe raspberry.

“Don’t worry about it,” one of the assistant designers said as I limped out of the room. “Everyone here thinks your look is just great.” Other people said other nice things. But all I could think of was what a big, stupid loser I was — thinking that I could prove myself at Libby Fine when, just like Mom and Dad had said, I wasn’t much of anything at all other than a fifteen-year-old who liked clothes. I wasn’t even smart, not like my parents were, or like Ben.

I felt worse and worse as the day went on, until, as I was leaving, Emma Bitch turned to me and said, “At least interns can’t get fired.” Instantly, it was like a bomb was about to go off inside me, shattering my skin to bits.

I couldn’t stand it. The bomb was going to go off! My skin was already crawling, and I was hot and then cold, but mainly, I was exploding, exploding inside and turning into little bits of hideous garbage.

That’s when it happened: In a store window, I noticed a fantastic pair of eggplant-purple boots, and just knew that, somehow, I had to have them. Next thing I knew, they were on my feet, and I was whipping out my cash card, flooded with relief.

I
t’s a bit
of a long story, but here-a-goes: I’m a swimmer, and built kind of big, especially in the butt and legs. What am I saying? My butt isn’t “kind of big.” It’s huge, a country all of its own, and I hate it. Because I’m a swimmer, it’s out there for all to see all the time, except not really, because mainly when I’m in my Speedo I’m also in the water, with my bottom half hidden. And the rest of the time, I wear pants or shorts with big blouses that cover up my back end. So there are a lot of styles I can’t wear, even though I’d love to. Such as white jeans. Not in a million years would I expose my rear end to such humiliation as to be viewed by the countless minions at school in all its enormous enormity.

“But, honey,” my mother says, “first of all, you have a beautiful figure. And second of all, your rear end is your engine. You’ve got a beautiful swimmer’s body, strong and muscular. Most girls would kill to look like you.”

But that was just my mother being nice, because first off, she’s a very nice mommy, and second off, my dad split on us when I was too little to even remember him, so it’s just me and Mom, with Hank, our smelly mutt. I talk to my so-called father maybe twice a year and hardly ever see him at all, and he never even remembers my birthday, so it’s like I may as well not have a dad at all. But even though he’s a jerk, my mother feels guilty about my not having a father, and is constantly making all these little sacrifices so I can have things that we can’t afford. Which is where the white jeans come in: I made the mistake of mentioning that I loved white jeans, and the next thing I know, Mommy was like: “I’ll get you some for your birthday!” And I was like: “Mommy, do you know how much jeans cost?” And she was like: “There are thousands of jeans at the Gap.” And I was like: “You don’t get it, Mommy. Because the only jeans that might look even halfway decent on me aren’t at the Gap.” And she was like: “But jeans are jeans.” Then I had to explain that, sure, back in the day, maybe, jeans were jeans. But now? The only jeans that actually look good on me are designer jeans, which we can’t afford, which is why most of my pants are from discount stores, and no matter what, I have to cover up my backside with a big blouse or T-shirt, and since I spend half my life in the pool, it doesn’t really matter anyway.

“Then we’ll get you a nice pair,” she said.

“Earth to Mommy? Just look at me. In white jeans, people would think I was the great white whale.”

Mommy is skinny, with skinny legs and arms and reddish-brownish hair that she wears as short as a boy’s, and my father, Burton, is skinny and very tall. Hello? God? Because with these two as parents, where did I come from? My father must have wondered the same thing, too, because, as I said, he left us to move to Los Angeles when I was about a year old, and he doesn’t even come to see his own father, my poppy, who lives in an old-age home in Queens and can barely remember who Burton
is
. (Join the crowd, Poppy!) Poppy is the sweetest thing you can even imagine, flirting with his caretakers and giving me candy when he thinks no one’s looking. Sometimes he gets confused and calls me “Patty,” which is the name of one of his caretakers, but usually he calls me “Precious Pumpkin,” or “Angel,” or “Sweetest.” Mommy and I visit him almost every week, and every time I see him, I want to ask him how Burton turned out to be such a loser. He doesn’t even help with child support. Mommy supports us by giving piano lessons.

“No, really,” she said, straightening up against the wall the way she does when her back hurts. Her beautiful walnut-colored Steinway, in our dining room, is the one thing she kept when Burton skedaddled out of our lives. “I’m going to get you some fabulous white jeans. You need new clothes anyway. At the rate you’re growing, you’ll be as tall as Burton.”

“Oh, goody. I can just be one giant freak of gigantism,” I said. “They can put me in the circus.”

“Are you kidding?” Mommy said. “What I’d do for some of your height. And anyway, I’ve decided. For your birthday, I’m going to buy you some white jeans, and there’s nothing you can say to change my mind.”

“How about we have to eat?”

“Don’t be dramatic. We’re not rich, but I make enough.”

But she doesn’t, not really. Which was another reason I’m so into swimming. I’m good at it — good enough that I could maybe get a scholarship for college. My coaches have always encouraged me, and our new coach — Coach Fruit, which isn’t his real name but we call him that because he’s always telling us to eat bananas and apples — keeps telling me that I’m a natural and if I work hard, I could probably get scholarship money, even at USC, where he himself lettered AND, EVEN MORE AMAZING, almost made the Olympic team. He has red hair and freckles but is tall and built like a swimmer with wide shoulders and kind of long arms: like a giant Dennis the Menace. I totally love him. We all do. But it isn’t, like,
love
love, obviously. For one thing, he’s at least thirty, maybe older. Also, he has a girlfriend, Bella, and she’s so gorgeous it’s not even funny and you can tell by the way he looks at her that he’s, like, totally in love with her.

“You really think I could swim for USC?” I said.

“You’ve got what it takes to swim just about anywhere.”

“Yeah, right,” I said, thinking about how much college costs and how broke Mommy and I were.

“Why are you so skeptical?”

I thought about it for a minute, until finally I just blurted it out. “It’s just Mommy and me. And we’re not exactly what you’d call rich.”

“One more reason why I’m going to have to work you hard,” Coach Fruit said, which made me blush inside my body. Because for one thing, I probably shouldn’t have told him that. It was private business. But also because of the way he was looking at me, straight through my eyeballs, like he could see my brain.

I was thinking about that, about how I’d spilled our financial situation to Coach Fruit, when Mommy, arching her neck, said: “It’s not your job to worry about our finances. And anyway, I just picked up two new students. A brother and a sister. They’re going to start coming once a week for a full hour, which really adds up.”

“Oh, wow. Now we’ll be able to buy a yacht.”

“Oh, come on, Polly! Indulge your mother.”

“But, Mommy,” I finally said, “can we afford it?”

That’s when she teared up. “Oh, honey! If I can’t take my precious daughter shopping for her birthday, what kind of mother am I?”

So that’s how I ended up in Mommy’s ancient junky Ford Fiesta, driving to the Riverside Mall on one of those humid, warm, rainy days in late July that make you want to stay in bed for the rest of your life watching TV.

“I just wish you could see how really beautiful you are, just the way you are,” Mommy said as she maneuvered the groaning car through traffic on Route 46. “It’s this awful media that equates being thin with being attractive, when it’s just not true.” I’ve heard this lecture before. “I mean,” Mommy continued as I gazed out the gauzy window at the blur of auto supply warehouses and giant discount stores and pizza parlors floating by, their colors blurring together in the wet sheen on the glass, “when you look at history, even as recently as the nineteen sixties, bigger women were considered the more beautiful. Marilyn Monroe. Elizabeth Taylor. Neither of those women was really thin. And then, when you go back to any time before the twentieth century — I mean, if you don’t believe me, go to the Met some time to look at the Rubens and the Titians. The more flesh, the better.”

“Fine, only guess what, Mommy? I don’t live in, like, the Middle Ages.”

“How was practice this morning?” she said, changing subjects.

“Okay,” I said, hedging. I’d broken my own record in the five hundred freestyle.

“How’s the new coach working out?”

“He thinks we should be ready to win State tomorrow. If we even get into State this year, which is, like, who knows.”

“He pushes you?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

I don’t know why I didn’t tell her that Coach Fruit was amazing, or that he thought I could one day be seriously competitive. But for some reason, I felt like I had to hold back, leave a little of my life in reserve, just for me.

“I used to love to go shopping with your grandmother,” Mommy suddenly said in this dreamy voice she gets when she talks about her own mother, who died when Mommy was still in college. “I’ll never forget the first time she took me to Marshall Field’s. I thought I was in heaven. I still remember what she bought me that day, too: a blue zip-up sweater with a hood, and these fabulous, sort of Art Deco plastic bangles. Only they didn’t look like plastic. They looked like ivory.”

“I know, Mommy. You’ve told me before.”

“I have?” she said, pulling into the mall’s parking lot with an expression on her face like she’d never seen so many cars before.

“Okay, then. Where to start? Macy’s? Lord and Taylor?”

I guess I should be grateful that my mother likes to take me shopping and wants me to look pretty, and I am, but sometimes it’s like she’s
too
attentive, too into what I look like and how I’m doing. Which, I know, is so much better than, for example, my friend Robin’s mom. I mean, poor Robin. The last time I saw her, she was practically in tears, and even though Robin’s smart and pretty and really a nice girl, too, she thinks she’s stupid, which is just not true, plus she thinks everything’s her fault, which is also not true. Even though I don’t see her much anymore, I feel bad for her. I mean, her mother is just a bitch. Versus my own mother, who can actually be
too
nice.

So naturally, every time I came out of the dressing room, Mommy said something like, “You look great in those!” Even though I didn’t.

“I look like a hippo!” I said. Or: “I’m just too big to wear white jeans. I look like a lump of mashed potatoes.”

It was right around middle school, when I started sprouting a figure, that Robin, who until then had been my best friend, started hanging out more with Becka, who was also part of our group of friends, just not my
closest
closest. They never really dropped me, as in: We’re in, you’re out. Even now, all three of us are friendly, saying hello in the halls and even, sometimes, having lunch or meeting for coffee or ice cream. But in middle school, it became obvious that they were both slated for cooldom, and I was so not. For one thing, both of them were beautiful — and thin. Plus, they both had a lot more money than I had. They had Frye boots and wore their jeans tight and skinny, drooping off their hips, clinging to their legs, tucked into their boots or into high-top sneakers. They even had boyfriends. I’d see them laughing together, drinking cherry soda, whispering. Whereas I just got big — big all over — and tall.

I started swimming at the Y.

It’s hard to explain, but once I found my speed, I wasn’t me, Polly, at all. I wasn’t even a girl. I forgot that my mother had to teach piano lessons to spoiled brats in order to pay the rent, that my father had left us when I was a baby, that Poppy was stuck in an old-age home in Queens where the only people who ever visited him were me and Mommy, and that my butt was ginormous. I was fast. I was very fast. Faster, even, than most of the boys. It was like I could fly.