Nothing Left To Want (16 page)

On our first day at Brown, Petal was wearing a black faux-Persian Lamb coat, matching black Duggs ... the doggie version of Uggs - and a hat. Petal hated the outfit but that is only because doggies can’t see their reflection in mirrors so she didn’t understand how fabulous she looked. There wasn’t a girl who could resist petting her and asking about the outfit, or a guy who didn’t at least use her as an excuse to come talk to me.

Really, we were having such a good time that I was shocked when Herbert called back and said that Petal had to be sent back to New York. He told me that the whole assist-dog argument had fallen apart when the Dean had asked what breed Petal was.

I didn’t get upset, I just told him to lease me an off-campus apartment. He cleared his throat and told me that all freshmen, no exceptions, no Kelleher name droppings excluded, had to live in the dorms freshman year.

I hung up on him, made a date with a cute guy named Ryan or Brian for later that night, and went back to my dorm room. I had decided to just ignore the stupid regulation.

As soon as Petal and I got back to our room, the bitchy dorm monitor walked in without knocking. She stared at my Petal like she was an unexploded land mine.

“
Out, out, no dogs in the dorms.”

I laughed at her. “Really, you need to calm down or get on some meds. Tell me who I can talk to about this, someone in authority, maybe … ” I looked her up and down, “ … someone who isn’t wearing scary man-made fabrics. You make me itch just looking at you.”

That didn’t go over well. She did call someone and the upshot was that Petal and I were escorted off campus like we were criminals. I drove a couple miles over to the Hotel Providence and checked in, and then called Daddy. It hurt my feelings that he acted like this was too stupid to bother him with,
this
being my college career. He told me he would send a car up for Petal. That bothered me even more. I told him not to bother and, for the first time ever, hung up on him.

Petal was my baby from the moment Aunt Georgia handed her to me. She became my best friend, my baby, and the first thing – well, person - to love me unconditionally. To me she has always been a person who belonged totally to me. I love her more than anything and she loves me that much right back. Petal doesn’t even weigh two pounds, and the bulk of her weight is her heart, and all her heart shows in her little bright eyes. Even now, when she is old and blind, her eyes light up when she hears me. She may not be able to see anything else but I know she still sees me. Petal sees me with her heart, and nobody in their right mind would willingly give up that kind of love. We have never been apart till now.

The next morning Herbert called me and told me he had spoken to some people on the University’s Endowment Board and that I could return to Brown as soon as I wished.

“
Thanks, Herbert. Does that mean Petal and I can return, or just me?”

“
Just you, Carey. I’m sorry but you must understand that Brown isn’t going to reverse hundreds of years of tradition for a poodle, for heaven’s sake.”

I didn’t like the way he had said
poodle
. it was the same way that other people might use the N word, or the L word, L being for lawyer, a breed that tended to be a lot less endearing than poodles. I told him thanks for nothing and simply snuck Petal back in, which is what I should have done in the first place.

* * *

I tried at Brown, I really did, but it just wasn’t working for me. I was lonely, I missed Milan and Christy, and I missed New York. I tried to fit in and make new friends but that isn’t something I am good at.

I was rushed for sororities, naturally, and I went to a few parties. I tried to blend and socialize and be wanted, and I should have made it, but it was so obvious that the girls had only invited me because of my last name and it was worse with the guys. They liked the way I looked, they liked my dimple and, if all a girl had to do to make a boy fall in love with her was to look good, I would have been fine.

No, that’s not right; a girl
can
make a guy fall in love with her because of the way she looks. Boys want to love beautiful girls. They are hard-wired for it and a girl can make a guy her slave without having to say much of anything. Milan is living proof of my theory. Even back then she collected marriage proposals on a weekly basis, and she did it by letting boys, and men too, just look at her and project their fantasies onto her. She’s so much smarter than people know.

If I hadn’t been so fucking insecure all the time, and so fucking desperate, I could have done that too. But I am - so fucking desperate, that is. The minute a guy, almost any decent guy with a minimum of hotness, would approach me, I would start running this film in my head. Before the poor guy could ask me if I wanted a beer, I had us in love, married and raising kids and poodles in Connecticut. With that kind of weird disconnect, it’s no wonder I messed up, talking a mile a minute, asking them probing personal questions, worse, telling them my personal thoughts, and all the while there is this cute young guy standing there who had innocently approached a pretty girl hoping for, at the most, a random drunken hook up.

By the time I had been at Brown two months, I would watch as a new frat boy would start to cross the room towards me only to have one of his friends pull him back and shake his head. They would whisper something and laugh. The girls all knew it too, knew that, despite my looks and my name, I was fast gaining a reputation as a loser, and, because of my looks and my name, they loved watching me standing there alone, trying so hard to pretend that was exactly how I wanted it to be.

I started drifting home to New York, at first on the weekends so I had an excuse not to show up at college mixers and be stared at uncomfortably or, worse, not to spend the weekend huddled in my dorm room clutching Petal and trying to convince myself that I was all right, that it was just other people, that Brown didn’t feel almost exactly to me like Menninger’s had.

After the second boy I brought back to my room didn’t call me again, the weekends in New York started stretching into four or five days at a time.

When I showed up on a Tuesday unannounced, I was waylaid in my room by my mother.

She walked in and sat on the edge of my bed, looking a little unkempt, a little frayed at the edges. My mother has always been a nervous, high strung woman. Most of the time she can pass it off as a kind of brittle social charm shared by all the other trophy wives. That day no charm was showing, just her nerves. I looked at her curiously. She wasn’t in the habit of stopping by for girl chats when I was home. I thought she was starting to look her age, and seeing it made me smile and she, misunderstanding me as always, attacked.

“
I have no idea what you find amusing, Carey. Is it your obvious failure at college that you are smiling about, or do you have some other news to share, maybe you’re pregnant?”

“
No mother, I’m not pregnant, though I wish I were, if for no other reason than to see how you’d react to being called Grandma.”

She shuddered. “Well, I suppose I should be grateful for small mercies, but what are you doing here? Have you been expelled? God knows I never thought you’d last in college.”

“
Why, because I’m not smart enough or is there some other glaring flaw you want to share with the class?”

She rubbed her forehead with her hand. She has beautiful hands, my mother, and I never told her that either.

She began speaking in a higher voice than I had heard from her before. “Oh, I don’t care if you fail college. God knows it hardly matters. I need to talk to you about something important.”

I didn’t respond to her because all I could hear were the words 'it hardly matters'. What hardly mattered, college or me? I didn’t ask because I had gotten my weekly fill of rejection already at school. I just shrugged and said. “What about?”

“
Your father is seeing someone again.”

“
Oh yeah? Well good for Daddy.”

She turned to face me and smiled. I felt a coldness coming from her that made me want to beg her to stop, to not say another word, to be … oh I don’t know ... how can you want something you’ve never had or ask for something you don’t believe exists?

She said. “Yes, well, good for Kells, and good for you too, Carey, because this situation is going to warrant some changes. It appears that your father has completely lost his moral compass this time. The girl in question is, I believe, twenty-three.”

“
Oh good. It’ll be like having another sister, but really, Mumsy, I fail to see what this has to do with me, unless you are asking me to double date with Daddy. I can try and ... ”

“
Oh stop it, Carey. You’re not amusing. No wonder you haven’t made a single friend at school. This concerns you because your father and I are separating. He is moving temporarily to that awful vulgar Trump Towers and, as I’m sure even you can understand, I really cannot possibly deal with you and your issues right now. So if you are not going to stay at Brown, I want you to find an apartment of your own immediately.”

If it had been another girl in another life, I could have cried or tried to phone my missing father, or asked her what in God’s name it was about me that was so wrong? Why was I this girl, this girl that even a mother couldn’t love?

There’s a bad cliché that goes something like that. I had always lived in my head, even when I was a little girl, and there I lived a different life. I had this little round mother who looked like Elizando and was crazy about me, but there is no second life for me, no secret alternative existence. I am not, for example, just lying here dreaming that I am dying or that I can see the shadow of a rat against the wall. It’s really happening, and the day my mother threw me out of the only home I had ever had two days before my eighteenth birthday, that really happened too.

I dealt with it. I didn’t give her the satisfaction of seeing how frightened I was. I asked her coldly if she could bear my presence there for a week. She assented politely and I contacted Herbert again.

Model of family retainer efficiency as he is, he managed within a few days to arrange the purchase of a small, but perfect, pre-war apartment at Madison and Fifth. My mother’s decorator speedily filled it with Sotheby’s antiques, since I was too numbed by this latest turn of events to show any interest in furniture, and by the end of the week Petal and I were in our pretty new digs. I informally dropped out of Brown and formally began my life alongside Milan and her new group of friends as a New York socialite, or 'celebutante', or 'heir head', as Page Six called us.

Call it whatever you will, it means being a girl, preferably a beautiful one, though if your family has enough money, the papers will all call you that anyway. A socialite is a girl who wears outrageous couturier clothing and who spends her days either recovering from a hangover or shopping. The shopping is for something fabulous to wear at each night's nightclub, so you can dance on the banquette and tables and smile for all your ahhmazing new friends that you met an hour before, and smile most dazzlingly for the photographers.

It means being a girl who hopes that the night never ends because mornings in that life can be pretty rough.

Chapter 17

Back at Brown, one of the few classes I ever managed to attend was an anthropology class. The professor was one of those young, cool types who wanted to bond with the students. Those guys never really get it. They feel as young as the students they are teaching because the ink is barely dry on their own dissertations, but what they don’t realize is that they are already almost thirty and that, while they were buried in the stacks, all these years passed. So when, finally, after a billion years of studying, they get their doctorates or their law degrees or whatever, they aren’t still the kid they were when they started out. Because they weren’t out in the 'real world', whatever that is, building up real world experiences and the stories that go along with them, they seem awkward and weirdly young to people their own age, but to people who are the age they see themselves as, they seem like weird adults trying too hard to be kids, so they can’t really fit in anywhere.

I know a little bit about that myself. For example, people might have watched me these last few years and wondered just what is a grown woman, one with a daughter of her own even, doing dancing on tables at clubs? Well, maybe that woman didn’t realize, while she was in her version of the stacks (which in my case was one long party that accidentally lasted twelve years), all that time had passed. She might, for example, look in the mirror one day and see places on her skin that Botox had missed and realize, oh my God, last night lasted a decade. Maybe a smarter woman would then sit down and figure out how to move forward into a grown up life, but no one has ever accused me of being smart.