Becoming the Butlers (10 page)

“So where have you been?” she asked.

“Nowhere, really.”

“But your doorman said…”

“We just went to visit my uncle,” I said quickly.

“But I thought you told me your uncle lived in Japan with a Geisha.”

“No, my other uncle.”

“You mean your mother’s brother?”

“That’s right.”

“What’s his name?” Nicole asked, narrowing her eyes with suspicion.

“George,” I answered too quickly. Then, wondering what Nicole had heard, I stammered, “I mean, Ricardo.”

“You seem pretty unsure about this uncle. Are you sure you saw him?”

“Why should I lie?” I said defensively.

“I have no idea,” Nicole said, leaning back to blow the smoke away from my face. At least she was considerate. “But you could have told me you were leaving. I kept calling and no one ever answered. I thought you two were abducted by space creatures.”

I bit into my donut as Mr. Bronoski brought over two cups of coffee. He spoke some more Polish to Nicole, and then pointed at me.

“What did he say?” I asked after he left.

“He asked me what happened to your hair. I was kind of wondering the same thing myself, but I was waiting for you to bring it up.”

“Well, I bleached it.”

“Obviously. But why?”

“Why not? Can’t a person change once in a while?”

“I’m not arguing with you, Harris. You look very different.”

“Really?” I asked hopefully. “Who do I look like?”

“I don’t know. But not Harris.”

“Listen, Nicole,” I began, my voice scratchy with nervousness. “I have a question…”

“Shoot away. I’m all ears.”

“Well…” Even though my coffee was burning hot, I made myself sip it for courage. “If you wanted to become another person, who would you be?”

“Do they have to be female?” she asked.

“I guess not.”

Nicole gulped half her cup of coffee down before she gave her answer.

“Johnny Cash. Not Johnny Cash as he is now, but Johnny Cash ten, fifteen years ago.”

“Isn’t he the guy who sang ‘A Boy Named Sue?’ Then went to jail?”

“That’s right. He can’t help it if he’s such a free spirit. I just love the way he looks—you know, like he can just get up and go wherever he wants. No questions asked. No hearts broken. He doesn’t even own a suitcase. Just the clothes on his back. Even his gravelly voice sounds like an open road.”

I decided my question had been way too broad. I couldn’t become Johnny Cash, or any other celebrity. It would have to be someone closer to home, someone I saw and heard everyday.

“How about at school?” I asked. “And the person better be female.”

“At Winfield?” Nicole mused. “They’re all such snobs. But the answer’s pretty obvious. Olivia Butler.”

“Olivia Butler,” I exclaimed. Her name rolled like cream against my tongue. “Of course.”

“Who wouldn’t want to be her? She’s got looks, dough, and brains. But so do a lot of other girls at Winfield. No, Olivia has something else. It’s almost historical.”

“What do you mean?” I demanded.

“It’s almost as if she’s in the wrong century,” Nicole said dreamily, waving her lit cigarette. Clouds of smoke enveloped our table and I felt as if we were in the middle of some movie flashback. “She belongs in a medieval castle, surrounded by an iron gate and moat. You’d have to travel far and endure many hardships before you could reach this castle, and then the only way to cross this moat would be by a rickety boat that might sink at any moment. And there would be Olivia, sitting by an open window, her long blonde hair flowing like a golden stream, playing a lute or a harpsichord or whatever they had in medieval times.”

Nicole sat up abruptly and ground her cigarette in the ashtray. “Listen to me,” she said in a different tone of voice. “I sound like a nut. She’s never said a word to me. Maybe once I asked her for the time, but of course she didn’t answer. Her brother, though gorgeous, isn’t much better. It must be very reassuring to be a Butler. Never a moment of doubt. Of course it helps to be beautiful. And they are all very beautiful.”

“Do you think it would be possible,” I said slowly, “to become one of them?”

Nicole gasped so loudly that the regulars, mostly old women still wearing bedroom slippers and truck drivers, glanced nervously at our table.

“What do you mean—become one of them?” Nicole asked. “You make it sound like some sort of Frankenstein experiment.”

“Nicole, I’m serious. I’ve been thinking about joining another family and now that you’ve mentioned it, they seem ideal.”

“Look, Harris,” Nicole said, leaning over, her blue eyes cold in the harsh fluorescent light. “I don’t want to dash your hopes, but come on, Olivia and Edwin probably don’t even know who you are. I bet if you stood right on top of their beautiful Butler toes they’d look right through you as if you were glass. But the Butlers would probably ignore the Pope, Greta Garbo, even Mick Jagger. They’re quite comfortable knowing only themselves.”

“I’ve spoken to Edwin before,” I said stubbornly.

“When?” Nicole asked, scrunching up her nose in disbelief.

“Last spring he stood next to me on the volleyball team and I always had to ask him to pass the ball.”

“Get serious, Harris. You don’t even know anything about their family. The mother could be an ogre, the father a sexual deviant.”

“I don’t think so,” I told her.

“You’re right,” she said, crossing her arms. “Let’s face it, the Butlers are perfect. Who wouldn’t want to be one of them? But you aren’t making things very easy for yourself. If you wanted to become Sally Kane, or Lucy Ludlow, or even Gina Fonseca…”

“I know what I’m up against.”

“Well good luck to you, Rachel. I’m sorry I laughed. But how are you going to do it?”

“I don’t know,” I told her.

“Neither do I. I mean, it’s not like going in for a nose job or face-lift. They live at 860 Fifth Avenue, in case you’re interested. At Sixty-eighth Street. I only know that because my father has a penthouse office next door. It’s a real snooty building. They probably wouldn’t let anyone in who didn’t claim a Mayflower ancestor. Look, I got to go. Another shrink session. I wonder what Dr. Golden would think of all this. Miss Harris doesn’t like being herself,” Nicole said, mimicking a German accent. “Being Rachel Harris isn’t so awful, is it?” she asked, briefly touching my shoulder. I looked away. “If I can help, I will,” she said softly. “You have my number. And hey, don’t disappear again.”

I watched Nicole leave and then left some change on the counter. The Butlers. Of course. I wasn’t intimidated by the fact that neither Butler had ever had much to do with me. Nicole was right: they would look through me as if I were glass. But I didn’t mind being an Invisible. The Butlers treated most people as Invisibles, and really didn’t have any friends but Hangers-on. And these Hangers-on,
who we Invisibles envied because of their proximity to the Butlers, were in turn scorned by the Godlike Ones. Even the teachers were intimidated, and when waiting in line at the water fountain, would always let a Butler go first.

I decided that if I was going to become a Butler I had better start acting like one. So instead of taking the cross-town bus I hailed a cab and left the driver a generous tip. I went to the East Side for school but rarely hung out in the neighborhood. My father always said even pigeon crap was neater on the East Side; all I knew was that the drunk I saw sleeping on a park bench on Fifth Avenue had spotless white socks and his head rested on a folded copy of The
Wall Street Journal.
A small and tidy porter with a little broom patrolled the sidewalk in front of the Butlers’ building. When he wasn’t hailing cabs he’d sweep the pavement furiously; a truly hopeless task, for whenever a bus rolled by, bits of paper, like grimy confetti, showered the cement. In the early morning sun the building’s crisp white awning looked as if made of lamé, but then, all of Fifth Avenue looked gilded to me. I looked up and down the gold windows, trying to figure out which belonged to the Butlers. I gathered up the nerve to ask the doorman what floor the Butler family occupied.

“Good morning,” I said nervously. The doorman, who was a formidable six-foot-five, brought his silver whistle to his lips and blew so loudly that a nearby cluster of pigeons took flight. Terrified, I ran down the block, waiting for the police cars to catch up to me. But the doorman was only helping an elderly man into a cab, and I realized the whistle was for the taxi, not for me.

I decided to go home before I got myself in real trouble. The cab ride had depleted all my money and I would have to walk home through Central Park. The park would be deserted that cold morning, but I wasn’t worried. My mother would have died if she knew how I sometimes walked through the park from school. I liked that half hour of privacy, and deliberately avoided the open paths favored by joggers and bicyclists. But I never met a mugger or a rapist, and didn’t mind the few amorous male couples who, when I passed by, discreetly buried themselves beneath the leaves.

My father made fun of dirty yellow New York snow, but the hills always looked as white as talc to me. A few hearty sleigh riders whizzed past on new-age silver disks. The fantastic palaces of Central Park West towered over the bare trees, their names like lost kingdoms:
Eldorado, San Remo, Beresford,
and
Majestic.
I walked by an umbrella frozen upright in a block of ice in Bethesda Fountain, and past the Bandshell, where a drunk was singing to himself on the stage. Then I turned left, and headed toward Wollman ice rink.

“Don’t you want to rent a pair of skates?” the man asked me at the ticket counter.

“No,” I said. “I just want to watch, if it’s all right with you.”

“Well there’s not much to watch today, with such nasty weather. Would you like a cup of hot cocoa?”

The drink, more minty than chocolate, warmed my face. Only one family glided by in the rink. I watched them from behind a foggy window, my face pressed against the heated glass. Obviously tourists, they had dressed all wrong for the weather. The father wore a hooded Georgia Tech sweatshirt and khaki pants, and his bare hands, clutching the icy railing, looked gnarled and red as lobster claws. The mother, a cheerful, round woman in powder blue corduroy overalls, hugged her arms together and wouldn’t stop sneezing. The daughter, about my age, wore a short skating skirt with striped tights that made her thin legs look like candy canes. Mother and daughter
practiced figure eights while dad, jumping up and down for warmth, took photographs with a camera so tiny it could have been a toy. “Beautiful! Fantastic!” he’d shout, and you could hear real pride in his voice.

The music changed to Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York,” and the family all clasped hands and skated at a dizzying speed around the rink. I held my breath, terrified they would trip and fall. The trio skidded to a somewhat clumsy stop, and embraced each other at the song’s rousing finale. My eyes felt wet; I wasn’t used to seeing happy families. I wondered if they would be willing to take me back with them to Georgia. I stepped back and saw my face in a nearby puddle. Again, I didn’t recognize myself, but this was much different. I was turning into a Butler; cheekbones rising from the thick planes of my pudgy face to sharp angles, lips slowly narrowing into an elegant sneer, my bushy eyebrows thinning to questioning arches. My hair no longer looked pink but was as golden and straight as Olivia’s. If someone stopped to talk to me, I was sure my voice would be changed to the slightly Europeanized and breathless tone of the Butler siblings. I whispered:
I will become a Butler,
and the words became a part of me and pulsed regularly like a heartbeat. My breath seemed to evaporate, and for a moment I thought I’d lose consciousness.

Nicole was right: I hadn’t made things very easy for myself. But I would be patient. My plan was to enter the Butlers’ lives slowly, stealthily, announcing myself with only a whisper. At first I wouldn’t be more than a shadow that occasionally tinted their days. I’d grow steadily brighter, and the Butlers would notice the new light, a gradual warmth. Like déjà vu, they would believe I was someone they had met before even if they couldn’t name the time or place. When they finally recognized me, they would feel the same admiration as when they looked at their reflections in a mirror. I wouldn’t even recognize myself. As a Butler I would forget all about my mother, George, and my bitter, self-pitying father, and for once be surrounded with so much love that I would never have to cry again.

The door was unlocked when I returned from Central Park, and I slowly made my way to the kitchen. My father sat, grading exams at the kitchen table that was usually sticky with jam or spilled juice. A neat circle of cigarette stubs surrounded a half-empty vodka bottle. The dim flickering kitchen light bulb made his face look hollow, his eyes sunken, the skin bleached as white as a bone. Almost like a skull, I thought, almost as if he’s dead already.

“Is that you, Rachel?” he asked.

“Yes. Who else could it be?”

“You’re right. Excuse me for asking such a stupid question. Who else could it be indeed?”

Our first words since Madrid and already we were at war. My father was in his ratty, old blue smoking jacket, and the forehead bandage looked even filthier.