Diamond Girl (11 page)

I stood at the doorway, balanced on my crutches. “Ellen, Mom, do you … did you remember what today was?”

She was silent but as I finally turned to go she spoke softly. “Yes, I did, Carey, but what does it matter?”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter … sorry I asked.”  Brightening my voice I said casually, “So I’ll just order the bracelets, then, right?” 

“If you want. You can do what you want, Carey.”

“Great,
Ellen, that is exactly what I’m going to do, just what I want. I’ll see you.”

She didn’t answer, and later, when I called Milan, she seemed
neither excited nor upset one way or the other about our travel plans. She did thank me for the earrings I had sent over from Martin Katz. I had asked our jeweler to pick out a pair for her and Christy when I had ordered my bracelets.

The next day the three of us lay together on her bed and argued in desultory voices about where to go, until we decided - or Milan decided - that we would ask my aunt if we could use her home in Aspen. We called it running away, but it’s not really running away, is it, if no one cares that you’re gone.

Chapter 12

The week the three of us went up to Aunt Georgia’s place in Aspen ended up being pretty defining in terms of our permanent roles in each other’s lives.

I’ll say this for Milan and Christy: while it feels to me like they deserted me and basically left me to rot, if anyone were to ask them they would see it quite differently. They would say - well,
will
say, because I can’t kid myself here, I am not going through the door, a door that is only ten feet from me but might as well be a million miles away ...

I am not going through it alive, and in death, I’ll achieve a level of fame that I have never had. I’ll be the new Anna Nicole Smith, which is just nasty but, yeah, everyone will know my name and everyone will have an opinion. I don’t have to be a brain surgeon to figure out the gossip. It’ll be a ton of Monday morning quarterbacking on the rich and dysfunctional. Daddy always hates it when people do that with his team; he is going to hate it more when they do it with his family, a lot more.

I should feel bad about it but I don’t. He left me. I would never have left him.

Milan and Christy left me too but, unlike Daddy, those girls, and especially Milan, will bask in the publicity. I bet dead I will be the best friend they ever had. I bet Milan will take off her bright pinks and blues and put on an outrageous black dress for a day or two and strike a grief pose. If she keeps her eyes hidden under shades, no one will notice
that they are dry.

It’s not that she didn’t love me
once, it’s just that she wrote me off a while ago. Good for her; you’d think she was a Kelleher the way she can cut her losses.

As for Daddy, I think he’ll grieve, never publicly, and maybe not too much since he has his new family. Also it looks like the Lions are going to make the play-offs this year. But maybe, when he’s alone, he’ll think about me, and remember me, remember that I used to know how to make him proud, make him laugh.

I don’t know when that stopped exactly. Obviously, if I knew anything, I wouldn’t be here.

I would like to see Milan right now, her more than anyone else. She has a way with words, that fabulous blond. She would look at me lying here and say something funny, like she did when the three of us were getting settled on our flight that day to Aspen.

We were just three girls, but even in First Class we took up a lot of air space. I had Petal in her totally adorable Vuitton doggy clutch, which she hated, so she was barking frantically. Milan had brought along two huge pillows and three carry-ons. Only Christy, quiet and beautiful, with her small bag which fit neatly into the overhead compartment, wasn’t giving anyone a headache.

Christy was always like that, like a girl in a fairytale, or maybe Alice in Wonderland. Things happened around her but not to her. She has always appeared contented to follow along in Milan’s turbulent wake, being admired but never judged. I can see now, too late, how smart her choices were.

Milan had, as usual, attracted the attention of everyone in the plane. The poor passengers that had to get by her kept tripping over her ten mile legs which were hanging in the aisle because she said she was only comfortable sitting sideways in her seat. I was suffocating underneath her pillows since she had propped them between us and was leaning back on me. Lucky Christy was across the aisle. At take-off Milan said loudly enough for everyone to hear, “I hate flying commercial and ahhbviously Petal does too. That’s why she won’t shut up.”

I giggled into the pillows, thinking that since she and Petal had only flown non-commercially once before, this was a pretty sudden onset dislike.

She twisted her head around and winked at me. “I know what you’re thinking, Care Bear, but if a girl doesn’t set high standards for herself, how will she ever become Queen of the Universe?” 

“Queen of the Universe, Mills?
Is that who you’re going to be when we grow up? What will Christy and I be, then?”

“My darling little handmaids.”
Seeing my expression she kissed my forehead. “No, not handmaids - my duchesses, my court, the heads of my entourage. Queens and stars always have entourages.” 

“Mills, what if we want to be stars too, what if we want to have entourages, not be them?”  

“Care Bear, you don’t have what it takes to live your life in the media glare. It would make you craaaazy, and Gawd, can you imagine Christy? I mean people like to look at her but what would she say if anyone asked her a question? Nope, it’s got to be me. You two can come along for the ride. You have to. I’d be lost without my sissy and my little Care Bear, and Petal too. She’ll love it. Listen to her bark. She is totally diva material.”

I thought about what she said. It was true that when the three of us went anywhere, it was she that everybody looked at, but I wasn’t sure if it was true that I couldn’t be a queen or a star too. After all, I was the Kelleher. She might have had a one of a kind face and body, but I was pretty too, pretty and a Kelleher. I decided to file my thoughts away for later.

Playing along with her, I took out my lipstick and held it up to her mouth like a microphone. “Tell me, Miss Marin, what are the disadvantages as you see them of commercial flight?” 

She tossed her head and lowered her eyes.  “Well, Barbara, and first let me say thank you sooo much for choosing me as one of the ten most fascinating people of this year - good call - the reason I hate commercial flight is because I just looove the Mile High Club, but, Barbara, commercial jet bathrooms are so tiny that it really takes the fun out of the whole experience, don’t you think so, Barbara? I mean, come on, all those world leaders you interview, especially President Clinton
…” Milan slowly licked her lips and laughed.,”… you must be a frequent flyer in the Mile High Club yourself.”

Christy and I both screamed with laughter. Later on, though, after Christy fell asleep, I wanted to ask Milan if she had ever been with a guy for real. I wanted to tell her about Jeff. She was my best friend but I didn’t know how she’d respond. She was so beautiful, glittering with her other-worldly confidence, that I just couldn’t do it.

Somehow I knew the whole losing your virginity in the mental ward scenario wasn’t the kind of thing Milan would find hot - pathetic, yes; hot no - so I never told her. I thought I’d wait, wait for the right guy to come along, someone really gorgeous and cool, a Milan-approved boy.  When he showed up, he and I would have what she called movie star sex and I would bask in her rarely given approval.

I still don’t know if back then she knew what that even meant, movie star sex. I don’t know when she gave it up. She’s funny that way. Everybody thinks that she talks openly about everything and it’s just the opposite really. As for me, I don’t think I know what movie star sex is, not even now. But back then, even though I was totally clueless, I did know it probably didn’t involve a lock down facility in Kansas, polyester sheets and some loser who said I was weird.

I stayed quiet and thought that maybe Milan was right.  Maybe I would make a better entourage duchess than a queen of the universe. 

We had to ride the shuttle from Denver to Aspen since Aunt Georgia didn’t keep permanent staff at her place in Colorado. She had sent a set of car keys over, along with the house keys and the alarm code. I had laughed at the car keys, holding them up to the girls, asking them what Aunt Georgia thought we would do with them.

Milan had snatched them out of my hand. “We’ll drive places is what we’ll do with them.”

I asked her. “How, Mills, since none of us has even taken driver’s
ed, let alone gotten our licenses?” 

“Oh don’t worry your pretty little head over it, Care Bear. I’ve seen a bazillion driving movies, I got this.”

Christy nodded sagely. “She really does, Carey. When we went to visit Grandpa in Boca last Christmas, Milan took the keys to his Rolls and drove all the way to Miami and back by herself. Our parents were so worried because they thought Grandpa would be furious, but he thought it was funny.”

I felt stupid then. I watched car chase movies too, and all I could boast of was driving a golf cart. That was how Milan controlled us, the ultimate Alpha girl, and the girl that nature had created to always be in the driver’s seat.

Even Milan got quiet, though, when she saw Aunt Georgia’s Aspen place. I had been there a few times on ski trips with Daddy, so I was used to it and, besides, this kind of thing was my birthright. I had been around it all my life.

The Marins, while having a famous name and living in a great hotel, well, it’s not the same, and I knew Milan was beginning to feel that difference. It made her both cruel to me,
which I hated, and it bonded her closer to me, which I loved.

Aunt Georgia’s 'little ski shack' is a twenty-five thousand square foot monster chalet. Designed by a famous architect who she had been married to for about a month, it’s a weird hybrid of mountain house casual and Versailles.

This broke down in practical terms to a lot of antique French furniture placed incongruously underneath antlers, and meant that while you could sprawl onto seriously comfortable leather and down couches, you might have to put your drinks on some rickety sixteenth century table. In addition, while the house was being built, Aunt Georgia had been in this creepy self-portrait phase, so she stares down at you from oversized canvasses in nearly every room.

No doubt the house is comfortable, though. All the terrazzo floors are heated and there are three master suites and eight other bedrooms to crash in. Also, the house has this one amazing feature and it was there that I led my temporarily speechless friends. At the back of the house, overlooking the ski runs, Aunt Georgia had created a magic room. She had installed an indoor Olympic size salt water swimming pool, all in black marble so that it seemed depthless. It has its own little marble island in the center, with a bar on it and hidden speakers. The room is tiled in hand-painted Italian mosaics and the one-way glass wall of windows looks out onto a mountain paradise. High overhead is a stained-glass roof, with heating panels to keep the snow from settling.

When Milan walked into the pool room she gave a little shriek, temporarily forgetting her goddess act and reverting to a delighted kid. She stripped down to her panties and dove in, yelling for us to do the same. We spent all afternoon in the pool, blasting Madonna on the sound system, ducking each other until exhausted, and floating quietly on our backs side-by-side, looking up at the stars through the glass.

It was one of the best days of my life.

Milan asked me years later if I had been looking at her and thinking of her in that way, and I can honestly say, no, I never looked at her with anything but admiration. There were no, like, girl-on-girl fantasies going on in my head. I don’t know if she believed me, I don’t know why she should. After all, logically speaking, if I became a lesbian, which means I like girls, why wouldn’t I have wanted the most beautiful girl of all?

It’s a good question. I never admitted to her that I wasn’t too sure about the whole lesbian thing, that I tried it because I was just so fucking lonely, or that back then, when she was beside me, I was never lonely. I didn’t tell her that because admitting to being lonely and needy isn’t edgy and out there, like being a lesbian, it’s just pathetic, and if she had really known me, known what a loser I was, she only would have left me sooner.

Chapter 13

I spent the next day by myself at Castle Aunt Georgia. The girls wanted to ski, which is pretty natural at a ski resort and, besides, they hadn’t had a chance to show off their new Chanel gear yet.

Milan had raided Aunt Georgia’s in-house designer ski boutique and had kissed me goodbye, wearing a pure white Bogner suit that clung to her five foot ten inch frame like skin. She had topped off her look with an oversized, white faux-mink hat. Her long blond hair was the only bright spot of color.

She looked exactly like what she planned to be, the queen of everything, or at least a queen of ice - too beautiful to be real, almost forbidding in her white perfection. Christy looked beautiful too, wearing her own adorable Juicy Couture snow suit and, if she hadn’t been standing next to Milan who was proudly modeling her look, she would have been a perfect cover shot for Seventeen. As it was, no one would look at her, no one would be able to see anyone beyond the dazzling Milan. For the first time that morning I was glad about my ankle, glad to have an excuse to stay behind. It’s easier not to compete and I have always been so small and uncertain, I would have been eclipsed standing near her.