A Girl's Best Friend (3 page)
“Have you been watching
Oprah
again?” Lilly asks.
“I’m remaking my life.” I shrug. “Those are books I’ve collected over the years.”
But never actually read
, I add silently. Confession: I usually go to a boutique until the feelings of “Daddy angst” dissipate, as his Visa payment expands. Mission accomplished.
Poppy shrugs. “You got a Bible in here?”
“Oh! I’ll be right back!” I run and grab the Bible that Lilly covered for my wedding that never happened. She made it out of the shantung silk I bought for the gown, and it’s one of my very favorite things. First, because she made it, and next because I think of Marcus when I see it.
Thinking of my almost-first marriage helps take some of the sting
out of my recent sort-of-second marriage. Marcus and I may not have been getting married for love, but we did love each other in a very special way. His death from liver disease really put me into a place of mass confusion.
“So we’re ready?” Poppy asks when I run back out.
“We are.”
The scent of my father’s expensive cologne lingers in the room like an invisible cloud of his very being. I can almost make out his shape. “Did my father leave?” They nod and I feel relief that I can just disappear under the radar.
Mrs. Henry is nowhere to be seen, and that’s just as well too. We have never actually liked each other, but from what my father tells me, she was good to my mother. I vaguely remember that, but Mrs. Henry’s rudeness to our surviving family has far outweighed anything good I remember. I was too young, and my father was too desperate at the time. All I know is the woman hovers like a ghost and is just as creepy.
“Let’s go,” Lilly says, and she wears her anxiety by shaking her hands nervously. Lilly has a difficult time sitting still. I’m still not sure why she comes with us to the spa; she practically has to force herself to sit through a treatment—like she’s getting tortured. She has the personality of a hamster on a running wheel, as if slowing down will leave her hovering between up and down, so she can’t stop.
“Okay, one more thing before we go,” I add as we head towards the elevator. I take a deep breath and say out loud what I’ve been thinking since they hauled Andy off to the pokey. “I’ve decided that part of the reason I fell for Andy again was that I’d created a false image in my mind.”
“Sure,” Poppy says.
“You’re just figuring this out?” Lilly adds.
“So, in order to prevent that in the future, I’ve decided I need to learn what it’s like to live in the real world. So I was thinking maybe we should take Lilly’s car.”
Now granted, calling Lilly’s car
a car
is a stretch. It’s definitely what you might call authentic living, in that it was purchased from a neighbor when she crashed it, and proudly it displays all the reminders of that day. Once upon a time, it came into this world as a Saab. Now she calls it the Slob, and it’s my Cinderella carriage into my new life.
“You’re kidding, right?” Lilly asks. “I’m not sure my car will actually make it to the spa, Morgan. It’s a five-hour drive. Isn’t there some other way to start? Like maybe getting drugstore lipstick versus Bloomie’s or something?”
“Come on, it will be fun!” I enthuse, anxious to get on with Life in the Real World. “I need to have a dose of authenticity. To experience what the rest of you have struggled for. Otherwise, I don’t know if I can give this all up, and I have to give it all up or I’ll never be able to tell the Andys from the Princes.”
“So you want to slum it, is that right?” Lilly asks.
“
Slum
is a harsh word. I want to know what it feels like to drive in a normal car where you’re not garnering attention for your ride.”
“Oh, we’ll garner attention, all right.” Lilly shrugs. “But sure, whatever.”
We take the elevator down to the parking garage where Lilly’s car has been hidden by the doorman to keep its “realness” away from my fellow penthouse dwellers. The bellman brings the car around, and I get another glimpse of the Slob. Oh dear, I don’t remember it being quite that bad. I start to nibble on my lower lip, knowing full well my snootiness is going to get me nowhere in the real world. I sing that song in my head about stepping out of my comfort zone, into the realm of the unknown, and the doorman opens the Slob door.
“So let’s go!” I pile into the back and see the earthy leather seats, ripped by its former owner’s dog. I also smell cleaning supplies. Lilly has a little issue with Lysol—an addiction, you might say. The air is stifling, hanging heavy with the deep, antiseptic aroma I’ve grown to associate with her (and the hospital during my mother’s illness).
“Feeling real yet?” Lilly laughs.
“It’s fine,” I lie, holding my breath while I pump the button to open the window.
“Oh, that window doesn’t work. The wreck, you know,” Lilly informs me. I gasp for air since I’ve been holding my breath too long.
“It is not fine,” Poppy says as she slides in. “When are you going to get married, Lilly, and have Max buy you a decent car? This thing was a piece a decade ago.”
“I can’t believe you said that, Poppy! Since when do I need a man to take care of me?”
We both look around the car, but neither one of us says what we’re thinking to Lilly. She’s a sadist, but at least she has good taste in men.
“Sorry, you’re absolutely right.” Poppy slinks down in her seat. “It just seems like an obvious decision. You two adore each other. You drive a complete piece of trash and live in a dump. He’s wealthy, gorgeous, lives in the Marina, puts up with your nana, and is dying to get married. You do the math.”
“Getting married would only add more stress. This business is going to be my success. No one is going to say I married into it.”
I understand Lilly’s feelings. She loves Max Schwartz, heir to a San Francisco hotel dynasty, and she won’t have anyone belittling their love by saying she wants his money. But it does make me wonder. Then I see the faintest sign of a tear in her eye. Lilly is not the tear-shedding type. “It will work out.”
As someone who has been slowly seduced by and is now officially owned by my father’s money, I can’t say I fault her. But I don’t know that I’d take such drastic steps to prove it. Driving in the Slob for one day is a big enough step for me.
“Morgan was born into prosperity, Lilly. No one minds that she drives a BMW. It’s expected of her.”
Yeah, so my father buys me a new BMW nearly every year. Not so much for me, but so his reputation for being the finest father in all of San Francisco isn’t harmed. I look up to tell them this, but they’re talking amongst themselves, not interested in my input, so I go back to looking out the window, staring at Bob the bellman, who’s patiently waiting for us to haul this thing out of here.
“Since when have I ever done what was expected of me?” Lilly points out. “And besides, now Morgan wants out of her prosperity, and we’re in the Slob. So it can’t be all that great.”
They both turn around and look at me.
“Can we go now?” I ask. “You two bicker like an old couple. We’re supposed to be relaxing this weekend, getting me away from all the turmoil, remember? Poppy, you know better. Spray some essential oils or something. Chill.” I cross my arms and sit back against the open wound of the seat.
Lilly starts up the car, and I bet they heard it on the top floor. This thing sounds like a turbo-diesel jet!
We drive out onto the busy street, where reporters are waiting by leaning against their cars, ankles crossed, cigarettes poised. But they take one look at the car, decipher that one of the maids is leaving the building, and go back to smoking. We are home free!
Until Lilly sticks her head out the window and blows a raspberry at them. With a rush of double-takes, they all chuck their cigarette butts and dash to their cars. But they’re parked the wrong way on the street, and Lilly and Poppy laugh all the way down the hill.
“Very funny,” I say. Poppy and Lilly are still laughing, until the Slob starts to sputter and coast unnaturally roughly down the hill. Lilly rolls to the edge of the street and double parks.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m pulling over, Morgan. The car stopped working. This is what us real folk call ‘car trouble.’ Adam Ant wrote a song about it in the eighties. You might want to download it on your iPod.” Then she giggles.
“Oh wait, real people can’t afford those.”
“Start it up again!” I demand. When I hear myself, it sounds amazingly like Veruca Salt.
Daddy, I want it now!
“Listen, at least the Slob didn’t do this to us on 101 in the middle of nowhere,” Poppy says brightly.
“No kidding,” Lilly agrees. Then she turns around, after pulling on the emergency brake, and faces me. “Need I remind you whose brilliant idea this was? Two blocks, that’s how far we got. You drive a 645i convertible, Morgan. And in the real world, that’s better than a piece of junk. First word of advice: real people are practical. They take the good car.”
We clamber out of the car and gather around it like a casket at a funeral. People are honking as though we actually have any control over the situation. I get out my cell phone and press a button.
“What are you doing?” Lilly asks, snapping my phone shut.
“I’m calling the bellman and getting a tow truck. I’ll have my car brought around and we’ll be on our way. Our first treatment is early tomorrow. We need to get on the road.”
“Oh no, you don’t,” Lilly says. “You want to see how the real world works? The real world waits here for a tow truck driver while every San Franciscan yells obscenities for being in middle of the road. That’s what the rest of us do, Morgan. You have to learn to enjoy it. Sometimes I like to wave when people yell at me. Welcome to reality, baby. I don’t want to take anything away from your experience.”
Reality bites.
At this point, the photographers catch up with us and start clicking away and screaming in my face:
“Miss Malliard, did you marry Andy Mattingly?”
“Did you know he was married?”
“Will you be getting an annulment?”
“Does Andy wear boxers or briefs?”
“Okay, that’s disgusting!” I point and yell at the journalist, but Poppy comes up in my face and whispers a reminder. “Morgan, don’t say a thing.”
I know better. My father has told me this my entire life:
“Be above reproach.”
“Don’t sink to their level.”
“They’re nothing but parasites.”
But right now, the rules hardly matter. As they huddle together in their mass of flailing limbs, flashing bulbs, and taunting questions, the memory of my mother’s funeral invades my head. They all look just as they did then, still hoping to capture a small piece of my mother. And I imagine that’s exactly what I am to them. I start to wilt.
“That’s enough. Normal people don’t endure this. Call your bellman, Morgan.”
Poppy pulls me into the foyer of another elite apartment complex on the street. Their bellman helps me to a sofa and offers me a glass of cool water. I accept it gratefully and cross my legs, admiring my new shoes. Real people definitely can’t afford these shoes.
The bellman is kind and grandfatherly, and I wonder what my life would have been like if my father had been like him.
“Do you have a daughter?” I ask him.
“Three,” he says back. Then he taps my shoulder. “And I know you didn’t do anything those papers said you did. I can see it in your eyes. I always know when a woman’s lying.” He taps his temple. “That’s what comes with living with four of them.”
He smiles genuinely, and I feel my whole body relax. Just one person believing in you has that effect.
He goes off to the door to shoo away the leeches and make sure they don’t enter the building.
“Lilly, you were right. I think my foray into the real world should probably be a smaller step than the Slob. As you always say, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day.’”
“Good call,” Lilly agrees.
“So, shall we go?”
I figure the real world has got to be better than this.
“You know,” I muse to my friends. “Christopher Columbus had a tough time finding the new world, too. It was fraught with setbacks. Why should my journey be any different?” I lift up a fist. “Let’s burn the ships!”
Poppy rolls her eyes, “That was Cortez who burned the ships, not Columbus. Your history knowledge rivals Lilly’s geography skills.”
“Whatever.” Like I’m taking a GMAT here. I know one thing: the real world can wait until I’m exfoliated.
I
’ve been called a dumb blonde in my day, and I think that’s unfair. First, because I’m not really blonde. And second, because I made it through college without the help of tutors, overly friendly professors, or my father’s money.
Now, I’ll grant you that falling for a fake Christian rock star wasn’t the high point on my learning curve. Definitely not the move of the sharpest crayon in the box. But, in my defense, Andy Mattingly did write poetry that rivaled Yeats. Sure, it might have actually been Yeats, but at the time, I thought I was his beautiful muse who inspired him to greatness. I made myself believe that loving him enough would propel him to musical prominence.
We’ll get to my narcissistic fantasies later, but for once in my life, I felt loved for who I was, not who I was born and shaped to be by my father.
Wishful thinking is my Achilles heel.
I’m through with this kind of fairy-tale life. Always waiting for the glamorous rescue where the hero rides in on his white horse (or white Beamer—I’m not picky) and takes me to his castle (conveniently located near Nashville’s Music Row). Yeah, I put way too much thought into it, I know. But after two failed attempts at engagement, I’m beginning to see the error of my ways.
With God’s help, it’s my turn to be the knight. I’m going to get myself a real job, find myself a church where my tithe isn’t public knowledge, and I’m going to prove to everyone who called me an adulteress that I am an innocent woman. Perhaps this is all over-reaching, but I have to start somewhere.
Right after this pedicure.
The automatic chair’s thumper rises roughly up and down my spine, rolling me to a state somewhere between relaxation and downright annoyance in one fell swoop.