Ali in Wonderland: And Other Tall Tales (7 page)

Chapter Eight

Happy and Preppy and Bursting with Love

L
osing my virginity was about as romantic as a flu shot. The problem with having a sheltered and protected upbringing is, you’re not prepared for anything alien and outlandish, like the penis. We never discussed sex at home. Everything I learned about sex was from deodorant commercials and slasher films. The lesson—if you were slutty you’d be the first bludgeoned.

In the summer of my sixteenth year, I was given the choice of going to sleepaway camp or getting a job. I felt I was too old for collecting patches based on my fire-starting skills and yet too young for any substantial employment like D.C. mayor or editor of the
Washington Post
. My mother offered me a job filing in her office, but I make it a point not to mix business with non-pleasure. I was sitting on the sofa of our Mark Hampton–designed blue-and-white chintz guest room, scraping out the middle of a gooey wheel of Brie, when I had a revelation. I thought to myself, “What are my summer goals?” Well, that was easy; I wanted money and fame. But what else? What was I passionate about? And then it hit me—chocolate. I love chocolate. It was that flicker of genius that led me to become the neighborhood Cake Boss.

I recruited my friend Christina to partner with me. Christina was basically sunbathing on the roof of her house all day, and this adventure saved her from atrophy, and probably skin cancer. The startup was easy. We would walk to the corner grocery where my mother had an account and charge eggs, flour, sugar, bittersweet chocolate bars, some sandwiches for lunch, a pint of coffee ice cream, and some Milk Duds. The fantastic thing about my business was that there was zero overhead, which put us ahead of the game before we sold our first cake. After quick pit stops at the Gap and 7-Eleven (for Big Gulps), we would make our way back to my house and begin our respective chores. I would mix and sift and bake while Christina made prank phone calls to boys she liked. And thus, much like the profitable and innovative Ben & Jerry’s, a successful partnership was formed.

My mother has always been helpful in discreetly giving success a little pat on the rear. She began calling friends to advertise the fact that culinary masterpieces were being created in her own kitchen, and wouldn’t they want to (have to) buy one? Within two weeks, I was knee-high in melted chocolate. There were so many calls coming in for cakes, Christina had to reduce her prank calls to no more than nine an hour. Luckily, there were soap operas. Just when we were teetering into confectionery doldrums, someone on
All My Children
would be raped and, like a shot of B12, it would give us enough energy to finish the orders for the day. We were even beginning to receive long-distance orders, the problem being that these cakes required shipping. My mother received lemon Bundt cakes in round reindeer tins every Christmas from a billionaire friend, but these were obsolete in the middle of June. I ended up buying cardboard moving boxes, dropping a cake in, duct-taping it shut, and marching it over to the post office. The socialites from Sacramento or Chicago were too polite to complain about a smashed box full of crumbs.

O
ne sweltering August day Christina and I were invited to a make-out pool party, which resulted in Christina spending the whole workday spray-tanning her feet and holding a tray of tin foil under her face in the backyard. Meanwhile inside I was Durga, the Hindu goddess with eight arms, shoving pans in the oven and double-boiling chocolate chunks. We had one last delivery in the neighborhood, which I made solo while Christina headed to her house to mousse her hair and pick out a revealing blouse. All our deliveries were made on foot, so if the cake was not bound for somewhere within a ten-block radius, we had to beg one of our parents to drive us. The night of the party, the delivery was so close, I decided to just drop the cake off en route. After all, I wasn’t that excited about the party; it would be the same old people, I can’t drink tequila upside down, and I was exhausted. My hair was spackled with flour, and my blue-and-white-checked apron was Jackson Pollocked in chocolate.

And then he sauntered in. Chad was what every prep-school girl coveted. He was naturally blond and blue-eyed, with a body perfected by the St. Paul’s crew team, Mick Jagger lips circa 1961, a sun-kissed face, and cheekbones you could slice a mango with. He wore frayed khakis and a faded vintage Harvard T-shirt. He was a genetic masterpiece. It was like the moment in
King Kong
when the villagers see the ape for the first time and all fall to the ground. “Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Kong! The eighth wonder of the world!”

I have never been the girl in a wet T-shirt contest or the type who rides the bull in a bikini—quite the opposite. I approach my prey skillfully and discreetly, like a python sidling up to a mouse. The unshowered, unkempt look was not winning me any points in the swimsuit competition, however, so I relied on talent, which for the past few weeks had been reduced to measuring brown sugar and vanilla extract. Chad demonstrated little interest in me, which only made the pursuit that more challenging. I was about to throw in the dish towel when out of nowhere, Chad asked the room if anyone wanted to drive to Delaware Beach to catch the sunrise. The trip was three hours—each way. I threw my hand up. “What the hell, yeah! Let’s do it!” Christina looked at me like I had just volunteered for the Navy SEALs. A couple of nondescript boarding-school friends and the disproportionately limbed kid who threw the party offered to ride with him. Chad had his own car, a Twizzler-red Honda. Swoon. Clearly, there was no room for me. I had to act fast. “It’s cool, I’ll drive. I have my own car.”

My mother’s VW Rabbit was parked in front of our townhouse. There was just one microscopic wrinkle. I didn’t have a driver’s license, a detail that failed to deter me. I was given ten minutes to run home, rip off the apron, spray in my Psssssst instant shampoo, and get “my car.”

I returned in madras shorts, a white button-down Talbot’s Oxford, and espadrilles. I rambled up the driveway in the VW like I was driving Miss Daisy. My father had taken me to abandoned parking lots to practice driving, so I was adept at steering and turning. I didn’t know any road rules, but could locate the horn and tape player, which I felt was good enough.

Chad and his friends sped down Route 95 blaring the Grateful Dead, their bare feet sticking out of the back windows. Desperate to keep up, I clenched the steering wheel with drenched palms, eyeing the right-hand emergency lane at all times. And under my breath I sang, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

We pulled up to the boardwalk parking lot just before sunrise. Chad was impressed that I had driven independently to the beach, sans gaggle of giggly, lip-gloss-applying girlfriends. Yeah, I was a lawbreaking, badass gangsta who rode alone!

The rest of the morning played out like a saccharine Oxygen channel movie. We walked on the sand, dipping our toes in the surf. We enchanted each other with our greatest hits—grade point average (okay, I lied), passion for table tennis, best fried clams in Maine, the usual banter. And then we kissed. I felt lipless as he pressed his glazed doughnut of a mouth on mine. First love uncoiled its dewy petals.

It was about two o’clock in the afternoon the next day when I pulled into the same parking space in front of our house. It had never entered my mind there would be consequences for my renegade behavior. I was a first-timer, no rap sheet. On the front door was the picture of a kennel and bone with a chain leading to a photo of me taped to it. I was in the doghouse?

Christina had broken under the inquisition. My mother thought I was spending the night at her house, and when she called just to check in Christina started babbling, unprompted. “Hey Nazis, she’s in the attic.”

“You are grounded for the rest of the summer,” my mother yelled, pointing her finger at me, in case I missed the object of her wrath.

“Okay.” I sighed passively.

Unwittingly, I was squirting lighter fluid on the fire. “Not only are you grounded for the summer, but you will do all the dishes for every meal!” she yelled again.

“Got it,” I whispered unresponsively.

“You are grounded for the summer, have to do the dishes and . . . no friends can come over. Ever!”

I cleared my mousy throat. “I understand.”

My mother was shaking with constipated rage. “I have to go to New York this weekend, and you are coming with me!”

“No.”

“Oh, yes, you are! I am not leaving you here alone. You are coming with me to New York!”

“No. I’m not going.”

“You listen to me young lady, you are going with me to New York, do you understand?”

“Mom, you can’t force me on the plane!”

She paced the living room and while checking the soil of an orchid announced, “Okay! New punishment! You’re not grounded or have to do the dishes, but you have to come to New York with me this weekend!”

I fell to the ground as if touched by a televangelist before fleeing to my room, where I fake-sobbed loudly. How had I become such a genius? When you turn fugitive, is your criminal mind naturally sharpened? I should have been grounded for years! She should have taken away all my inalienable rights! But instead, my punishment was to accompany her to New York?

It was one of the best weekends I ever had. My mother and I shopped at Bergdorf’s, dined at Swifty’s, a WASP watering hole, and saw the musical
A Chorus Line
. And by Monday morning I was humming “Tits and Ass” on my way to meet Chad for pancakes.

T
he rest of the summer consisted of Beach Boy concerts, BBQs, and paddleboating on the Potomac. I know, sappy, but when you’re in love you don’t care, you’ll change rattraps.

We parted in September, both of us flying north to our respected institutions of higher education. Chad’s was a coed stone fortress perched on a snowy hill in New Hampshire, mine a Cape Cod shingled manor that housed a variety of girls behind bars. We wrote pages and pages of love letters, had the occasional pay phone conversation, and once in a while met in Boston. We would sleep on the foldout sofa in his brother’s Harvard graduate housing complex in Cambridge. He would lie there and read Hemingway aloud while I strained not to fart.

It wasn’t until Thanksgiving, when we were both back in D.C., that I decided the moment was ripe for his plucking.

His parents lived on a ramshackle farm in northern Virginia. Ramshackle not in the quaint Edith Wharton sense of the word but in the mice-infested, creepy
Shining
sense. Vines were growing through the walls; the roof leaked like a running faucet. Chad’s mother never left the house, wore the same housecoat every day, and spoke to the animals like a Dr. Dolittle on mushrooms; there wasn’t a cuckoo’s nest she hadn’t flown over. I liked her; she was loopy and nonsensical and was constantly asking me why I was wasting my time with her boy. One day Chad and I walked into the kitchen to find her frying hot dog buns. As we touched upon topics such as why one of the horses had jumped the fence into oncoming traffic, she would scrape the buns out of the pan, wrap them in tin foil, and place them in the freezer.

It was a frosty November night when we drove to the nearest 7-Eleven. Collectively, we knew very little about copulation. We browsed the candy section like it was a gallery in Chelsea; Chad bought some Starburst and casually asked for condoms. I almost ran through the plate-glass window. The word, the idea, the act—it was all enough to send me over the edge. “What size?” the corpulent woman with beady eyes asked. Come on! You don’t ask a nervous seventeen-year-old boy that! He’s not asking for socks! And frankly, I didn’t want to hear the answer. “Plain or lubricated?” Now I was going to vomit. Maybe it would be easier to just make the condoms ourselves at home. I could sew!

Back at the farm we retreated to his room and read the back of the condom packet, poring over each step of the directions and every line of the warnings like a pair of
Scientific American
interns. I think we even memorized the ingredients, expiration date, and plant number: polyurethane, nonoxynol-9, June 1981, and DAO.

I’ll spare you the details because, believe me, it won’t read like a
Penthouse
letter. More like a Guantanamo confessional. It hurt. So much so that I’m surprised I ever got back on that horse again, if you know what I mean.

The next night Chad took me to dinner to celebrate our rite of passage. And to reassure ourselves that it was all okay because one day we would marry. We went to a French bistro that was known less for their escargots than for the fact that they delivered the food on roller skates. The restaurant is now defunct; too many lawsuits. We were dressed in clothes reserved for chapel and college interviews. I had just bitten into my endive salad when my vision began to blur and yellow stars began to swirl around the table like a
Starlight Express
acid trip.

The next thing I remember was waking up in a hospital bed at Georgetown University Hospital. There was a gynecologist present, so naturally I assumed I had given birth. Chad was pale and shaky. He thought I had given birth, too. The doctor explained to us that pregnancy encompassed nine months, not two days, and that I had torn a tissue in my vagina, which had caused bleeding. Perhaps we should have bought Magnums after all?