Being Audrey Hepburn (20 page)

“Well then, what
are
you going to do?” She wouldn’t look at me, but we could see each other’s reflection in the window.

I shrugged. I didn’t know.

“Are you going to throw away a lifetime of responsibility, of actually being someone, to become one of
them
when you’re not really one of them anyway?” Jess asked. “You know, when they finish partying, they go home—to trust funds and Park Avenue apartments and vacations in Saint Bart’s and indulgent rich parents who let them do anything, even when they completely fuck up.”

“It’s different for you—you know who you are. I never have,” I said. “I want to be somebody, too. I just don’t know how.”

“Wow. I was afraid you’d get lost in this game and believe that it was real,” Jess said.

“It
is
real to me,” I said.

She shook her head slowly, astonished.

“I know,” I said sadly. “It’s not really like the Lisbeth everyone thinks they know around here.”

“I’ve got to get some sleep,” Jess said abruptly and began putting away her sewing tools. Then she stopped and sat next to me on the bed.

“Well, I have something I haven’t told you, too,” she began. “I found a tiny studio in Chinatown I can afford and I quit the Hole.” I was stunned.

“No way!”

“It literally just happened.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It wasn’t even a plan, not right away anyway. But I checked out this ad on a whim, and when I saw this place, I knew I had to do it. I’m moving in next week.”

“Why does it have to be so sudden?”

“It just happened that way, believe me. I was going to ask you to help me move.”

“Sure,” I said too quickly. I wanted to sound positive, but I didn’t feel that way. I always seemed to be a step behind. Whenever I would get close to what I wanted, something would change, and my goals would seem impossibly far away once again. Jess looked at me like she was worried I might tear up. I was worried, too.

“I’ve done a bunch more of the dresses, just so you know,” she said. “I had a few ideas I wanted to try out. Here, look.” She walked to her closet and opened the accordion doors. Inside was a rainbow array of four more dresses already finished, modified, some radically, from Nan’s treasure trove. I flipped between the dresses.

“Jess, they’re so wonderful.” My Designer X was truly amazing. Looking at the dresses, you realized that she was just beginning to tap her talent.

“Yeah, this design ‘exercise’ has been good. I didn’t have the courage to develop my own line, at least not this fast. But I’ve gotten a lot of confidence working with these dresses, and I’m thinking about it now. I could do way more,” she said. “And you gave that to me, Lisbeth. You’ve been an inspiration.”

“Yeah, sure … really?”

“Yeah. Come on, we can talk in the morning. Let’s get some sleep.” She threw me one of her Sonic Youth T-shirts.

I headed into the bathroom to take down my hair and scrub my face. Jess kept a toothbrush for me in the medicine cabinet; I grabbed it and hunted around for the minty toothpaste I liked. The cinnamon kind that Jess’s family favored just burned my lips.

I stopped and examined my face in the mirror. I didn’t look like Audrey Hepburn at all, just plain, ordinary Lisbeth Anne Wachowicz.

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” Jess said from the other room. “Your mom called my mom last night trying to track you down, and my mom promised to send you back right after breakfast.”

I closed my eyes and tried to breathe.

“You have to go home sometime,” Jess said.

28

Delaying the inevitable, I hung out at Jess’s house as long as I reasonably could.

Ever since Jess told me that my mom had phoned her mom, my brain imagined every dire scenario, trying hopelessly to anticipate what I was walking into. It’s one of the freaky things about being the kid of someone who throws plates and bottles around the house—you can’t help imagining the worst—because it happens and you’ve seen it.

Leaving the green strapless Valentino from last night in Jess’s closet with the other dresses, I borrowed a tank top and clean underwear and grabbed my jeans from the day before.

Turning down the street toward my house, I figured: shower, eat something, try to stay calm, and prepare to talk to Mom when she comes home. It was two in the afternoon, and I assumed no one would be there until three thirty—only I was wrong. Mom’s car was in the driveway.

That was unusual. She never took time off from the hospital, and they never gave her any. I took a deep breath and opened the screen door.

“Well, look who’s here. Howdy, stranger,” she said from the kitchen, lighting a cigarette. There were a few bags of groceries on the kitchen table. I dropped my backpack and started helping her put them away.

“Is something wrong with your phone?” she asked, taking a drag of her cigarette.

“No, Mom, I’ve just been busy, you know, with Jess and at the diner.” I took the four packages of frozen corn, opened up the freezer, and found myself staring at the stacks of half-eaten ice cream containers and the hundred-year-old frozen hot dogs. “How come you’re home so early?” I asked.

“At the court-ordered therapist’s office for Ryan,” she said and handed me the milk to put away. I noticed that she was rubbing her arm.

“You know the whole family was supposed to be there. The school-board attorney made it a condition of your brother’s release. I didn’t expect your sister,” she said, taking another drag on her cig. “But I expected you.”

“I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t know,” I said, wondering why those words hurt so much and why I felt so bad that I had let her down.

“Well, how
would
you know if you don’t answer your fucking phone? I even texted you,” she said. I felt her pushing toward a buildup. “I called everywhere; Nan didn’t know where you were.” I wondered if Nan was worried. Crap.

She grabbed her usual coffee mug by the sink. The bottle of Gordon’s would be next. Then Ryan walked in. He stood in the kitchen doorway. I hadn’t seen Ryan for a while. He seemed taller and his hair was longer, especially in the back. Mom must have cut his mullet for the therapist meeting. The run of freckles across his nose had faded, but he had the same crooked grin.

“Hey, sis, did you hear?”

“Hear what, Ry?”

“I’m clinically depressed. Pretty cool, huh?” He had a smug expression on his face. Instead of being repentant for all the trouble he caused, he seemed to be thriving on the attention.

“Well you seem pretty happy about being depressed.”

“Funny, sis, I get it.” Mom sat down at the table, and, oddly, I smelled coffee. She hadn’t walked over to the liquor drawer. She had poured herself coffee.

“Make me some Eggos, Mom,” Ryan demanded. How did he think he’d get away with that? But Mom was silent. Normally she’d have snapped at him by now. He seemed to have some edge on her, maybe the therapist told her to be nice to him.

“Do it yourself, Ry, I need to talk to your sister,” Mom said quietly.

“But I always burn them,” he said with a tiny wicked smirk.

“I’ll make them,” I volunteered and opened up the freezer. I figured it couldn’t hurt to drag this out as long as possible to avoid whatever it was that Mom wanted to talk to me about. Putting the waffles in the toaster oven, I noticed Mom’s hand shaking slightly as she held her cigarette. Something was going on with her, but I couldn’t tell what.

“So, who said you were depressed, Ry?” I asked.

“The head doctor. He said I need more stability at home,” Ryan said, smugly pleased now that he was the focus and everyone had to worry about him. I guessed that Mom had gotten reamed at the therapist’s office.

The timer rang on the toaster oven, and then I buttered the waffles and handed them over to Ryan. He sat down across from Mom at the table.

“Ryan, I told you I need to talk to your sister,” she said. Ryan seemed unfazed, like he wasn’t afraid of provoking her.

“But I want to hear,” he said. He was totally pushing it. Mom looked up from her coffee at Ryan. I thought she was going to leap across the table and choke him.

“Get the fuck out of here,” she said quietly and went back to her coffee.

Ryan hustled up, so I guessed there was a limit to how far Mom would accommodate him. He grabbed his waffles and nodded with that shit-eating grin of his as he left.

“You missed the school orientation,” she said. “Hand me my lighter, will you?”

“Really?” I passed the Bic and she lit another cigarette.

“They sent this letter.” She fished a piece of folded paper out of the pile of papers on the kitchen table and slid it over to me.

“Mom, it’s addressed to me—it’s my mail,” I said.

“It isn’t if you don’t pick it up.”

I took my time reading the letter. It wasn’t anything new, really. I had been to one of the orientations before. It wasn’t like I didn’t know what dorm I was going to live in or where the classes were. The school was only five miles away. But the fact that she was opening my mail meant that she had some kind of clue. That couldn’t be good.

“I don’t have to go to that orientation,” I said matter-of-factly. “It’s optional. I went to the first one instead when we signed up.”

“Is there something going on you want to tell me?” she asked, exhaling the smoke as she spoke. She rubbed her arm again as if it were sore and straightened her sleeve. Mom was on the hunt. That was her way when she suspected something.

“Don’t go off the rails on me, Lisbeth,” she said, looking me in the eye. “You’re the only dependable one left.”

“I know, Mom,” I said, not having the slightest clue how I’d ever be able to talk to her about what was really going on.

“I’m going to need you around more,” she said, sternly.

God, I hope not,
I couldn’t help thinking.

She knew something was up, but she hadn’t put her finger on it—yet.

29

I arrived at Montclair Manor without calling, and when minutes passed and Nan hadn’t opened the door, I started to panic. What if she had fallen or had a heart attack?

Peering through the side windows, I couldn’t find a sign of her anywhere. She wasn’t in the back either. I knocked on every door and window. As I decided to head for Nurse Betty’s office, Nan’s door opened and there she was, dressed in a fluffy lavender bathrobe, her cheeks rosy, her silver hair pulled into a chic knot.

“Nan, you’re okay!” I said.

“Of course, dear, I was just taking a bubble bath.” She stretched her arms out to hug me. “Like liquid Prozac, isn’t it?”

We entered, and I wondered how on earth I had stayed away from Nan’s apartment for so long.

“It’s so lovely to see you,” she said from her bedroom as she changed into her clothes.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt your bath.”

“Oh, not a problem. I’m quite shriveled up and wrinkled as it is,” she said with a laugh. “Although the sea salts were soothing.”

I heard the distinctive snap of her Chanel compact, the one she still had from the sixties that she continuously refilled herself. Don’t ask why, but to me that little click had the definitive sound of luxury. It always summoned the smiling, elegant image of Nan.

She entered the room all bright and shiny, with a light blush highlighting her cheeks, an absolute minimum of makeup, totally put together in seconds. I marveled at how she did that.

“And to what do I owe this wonderful impromptu visit?”

“Missing your cheesecake?” I said sheepishly.

“Well, unfortunately there’s no cheesecake in the house,” she said with a sad look. “But today’s special is chocolate heaven cake. I hope that will do?” Her eyes twinkled.

“That sounds even better,” I replied. “And I could help with the whipped cream.”

“Splendid idea,” she said.

We both slipped into her miniscule kitchen that was hardly big enough for one. As I whisked the cream in a metal mixing bowl, I inhaled her perfume and immediately felt at ease.

“You know, Nan, there was an oil painting in your storage area of a little girl. Is that you?” I asked.

“I doubt it, dear, that was probably my mother.”

“Really? But she looks so much like you,” I said.

“Everyone said that, and I always thought it was funny because I knew my mother as a very stuffy old woman. She wasn’t really involved with us children and although she was a suffragist, she kept it very hush-hush. She was a snooty upper-crust society lady, given to secret cigarettes.”

“Well, you’re not stuffy.”

“I certainly hope not!” she said as she dolloped endless spoonfuls of whipped cream onto her homemade chocolate cake. “Come, let’s eat! I have something to show you!”

We squeezed through the kitchen and sat in the living room. There on the table was a new scrapbook I had never seen before.

“I’ve been working on a little project,” she said. She handed me the cake knife. “Would you please do the honors?” Sitting next to me, she opened the scrapbook to the first page. There I was, in the Audrey Givenchy on Page Six.

“What is this?” I asked as I put down the cake knife and began turning the pages. Page after page contained clippings and photographs, some from the Web, some from newspapers and magazines, including
US Weekly.

“You knew about these?” I gasped. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I assumed you’d tell me all about it at some point,” she said, smoothing a strand of hair behind my ear. “It seemed like such a grand adventure. I didn’t want to spoil your fun. But I couldn’t help collecting every bit of it.” She was beaming with pride.

It startled me that I was actually the girl in these pictures. My charade was a complete fiction, but laying them out like that, collectively, seemed so real. I was impressed at how perfectly she had prepared each photo. Museum-quality work, Jess would have said.

“I even bought a printer and started using the computer.” She pointed proudly to her ancient desktop, where there was a nice new printer and mouse pad.

“Oh Nan…” As I hugged her, I closed my eyes and felt tears welling up.

“At first, I didn’t know what to think. I recognized the dresses, though I was completely shocked at what you’d done to them,” she said.