After I'm Gone Read online

  “If it kills you,” Bambi had added.

  “It just might.”

  Michelle glanced over her shoulder at the kids in the pool. A few years ago, she might have amused herself by making all the boys focus on her, but it was too easy, not enough of a challenge. The Philadelphia man, as she thought of him, was another story. The Philadelphia Story. That’s the kind of joke that Rachel would have made, if Michelle had confided in her, but she wasn’t like everyone else, telling Rachel her secrets. The Philadelphia Story was twenty-four, in his second year at Wharton, and Michelle was cock-teasing him within an inch of his life. She loved that men tried to use that term as an insult. She was proud of her technique, as formal and balletic as a matador’s. So far, she had slept with him only literally, stripping down to a T-shirt and her underwear, then ordering him out of the bed when she awoke in the middle of the night to find him trying to undress her.

  Her mother had thought Michelle was on a school trip to New York City that time. There was a Park trip to New York in May. Bambi had given Michelle the money to attend and she had signed up, then gone sorrowfully to the head of school seventy-two hours before departure and explained that there were the “usual issues” at home and she needed a full refund. The head had counted the money out of petty cash and asked Michelle how her senior project was coming along. (Park students did not attend classes in their final semester, but worked on projects that they presented at year’s end.) “As well as can be expected,” she said, using her brave voice, the voice of The Girl Who Had Seen Too Much, the girl who had been asked to be an adult before her time. The Philadelphia Story, whom she had met in a bar Preakness weekend, was waiting for her outside the school. He drove her straight to a beautiful inn on the Eastern Shore, one that had been in some movie a few years back, and she had tortured him all weekend. She was a virgin, she told him. True. She wasn’t ready yet. Also true, although Michelle’s not-readiness had nothing to do with fear. Oh, she helped him out, she wasn’t heartless. Well, maybe a little heartless, when she crawled into that beautiful bed with him in her panties and T-shirt and told him he could take care of himself while he watched her touch herself. “But use a towel,” she added.

  They had hit Saks in D.C. before he took her back home. She then hid her purchases at her friend Devorah’s, who briefed her on the New York trip so Michelle could provide Bambi with plausible details. The only possible pitfall was that someone would mention to Bambi what a shame it was that Michelle had been forced to cancel, but Michelle was pretty sure that the head would remind everyone to be sensitive about the Poor Brewers. Everyone was so goddamn careful around Michelle. People at school, her mother, her sisters. Just because she used it to her advantage didn’t mean it didn’t bother her.

  Jesus, this chaise was like some kinky bondage chair. She couldn’t find a comfortable position on it and she sure as shit couldn’t flip over. Lorraine might not know what it was like to try and lie facedown when one had breasts, but Sydney certainly did. Lorraine probably didn’t spend much time by the pool, being the kind of woman who never tanned. A shame. The pool was gorgeous. Michelle loved everything about the Gelmans’ house, couldn’t understand her mother’s private disdain for it. When she was younger, she had assumed her mother was pretending to dislike it because she was embarrassed by their own house, but, no, Bambi really seemed to think their old wreck of a place was preferable to this shiny house where everything was so very up to the minute. If this was tacky, then Michelle could only hope to live in such tackiness.

  She felt a shadow fall across her back, assumed it was a cloud passing over the sun. When the shadow didn’t move, she said: “I’m fine, I don’t need anything.”

  “You need,” a man’s voice growled, “to put your top on.”

  Oh, Bert, sent to do Mother’s dirty work. Again.

  “You have your top off,” she said. Bert was very proud of his physique, and Michelle had to admit it was quite good. Slender yet muscled, the right amount of hair. And, like her, he tanned beautifully, quite the opposite of Lorraine with her big hats and moles everywhere.

  “You’re embarrassing your mother.”

  And upstaging your daughter, she thought. Michelle actually liked Sydney, who was extremely good-natured about being the overweight redhead in a family of dark-haired, good-looking people. Her twin brothers, Adam and Alec, born less than two years after Sydney was adopted, had the kind of eyes and lips that people said were wasted on boys. They were certainly wasted on those two. Nasty jocks, very competitive. They would have been asked to leave Park School if Lorraine wasn’t such a big deal there.

  “Okay, I’ll just sit up and put my top on,” she bluffed.

  “You will cover yourself with a towel and go into the house to make sure you’re decent.”

  She started to argue, but something in Bert’s tone would not be denied. She did as instructed, thinking about the alternate reality of Philadelphia, the place she should be right now. They might have gone to an art museum for real. Then Le Bec Fin—not that Michelle could eat that much and still wear bikinis, but she liked the idea of expensive restaurants and wine and champagne. She still wasn’t ready to have sex with him, though. She might never be. She wanted to be in love the first time and she hadn’t been, not even close. She barely liked most of the boys and men she knew. She assumed the Philadelphia Story would get mad with her eventually, really mad. That was part of the thrill, testing how far she could push men. No, she did not want to be raped, and she felt she had excellent instincts for picking men who would not go that far. Look at Philadelphia Story, making his stealth move in the middle of the night, then skulking off to sleep in a chair when she called him out. No, she was very clear that she wasn’t caught up in some moral dilemma, as Rachel would probably have it, in which she wanted a man to take her virginity because she was too guilt-ridden to give it away freely.

  It was just so exciting, knowing that she had something men wanted, that anyone wanted. Not only did her boyfriends not take advantage of her, they allowed her to boss them around, demand favors. She supposed she would still be able to do that after she lost her virginity, but she wasn’t in a rush to find out. Her mother, as far as Michelle knew, hadn’t had sex for fifteen years and men were crazy for her. Look at Bert, doing whatever she wanted, without Bambi even having to ask. Yet her sisters had fallen crazy in love and where had that gotten them? Linda was always yelling at Henry, and Marc had divorced Rachel before their second anniversary, leaving her without a penny. Rachel had signed a postnup, the sap. You’d never catch Michelle making that kind of mistake.

  Michelle had first discovered her power while working with her Hebrew tutor, a young man who had bought her clothes. Shoplifted them, actually, although she didn’t know that at the time. She could imagine Rachel saying, “Do the math, stupe. He was helping you with Hebrew for ten bucks an hour. Do you think he could afford those things he gave you?” But it never occurred to Michelle to worry about how he afforded the items until he was arrested, a month after her bat mitzvah. He was picked up at the Woodies in Columbia with a pair of Guess jeans. Michelle’s first thought was: Wait—he steals for other girls, too? She had assumed she was special and was irritated to learn that he had made similar arrangements with other female students.

  He had been a little pervy. It was funny, how the ones who touched you the least were often pervier than the ones who really did stuff. But weak, so weak. Once, when he tried to get her to model one of the outfits, she had looked at him and said: “It’s not really my style. But thank you.” Bambi had been out of the house that day. Who wouldn’t trust her twelve-year-old daughter with her Hebrew tutor? He had tried to kiss her once, only once. Michelle had drawn a hand across her mouth and said: “No, thank you.” The next week, he brought her three dresses, better ones.

  Towel wrapped to ensure modesty, she walked back the length of the pool, still aware of the boys’ glances. She did not u
se the bathroom in the cabana/changing room at poolside, nor did she use the powder room off the kitchen. Michelle, who knew the Gelmans’ home as well as her own, climbed the stairs to the master bedroom, where the enormous en suite marble bath had lighted mirrors, heated towel racks, a bidet, even a heated floor, not that it was turned on in June.

  The bathroom opened into a dressing room the size of Michelle’s oh-so-stingy bedroom. Even as Linda and Rachel decamped, Bambi would not allow Michelle to move into their rooms. Michelle suspected this was because she would then want to redecorate, make the new room hers. Why shouldn’t she? Her room was childish. Sophisticated for a thirteen-year-old—she had been allowed to use her bat mitzvah money to redo it. But now the color palette, peach and pale green, bored her. So fussy, so Laura Ashley, which it happened to be.

  Her top back on, she sat on the long, upholstered stool in the center of Lorraine’s closet and considered its perfection. The problem, as Michelle saw it, was that money came too late. You had to be old, in your forties, before you had the money to have the best clothes, furnishings, jewels. Even if Lorraine had been as beautiful as Bambi, these things would still be wasted on her. Michelle wished she had known her mother in her twenties, when the money flowed and no expense was spared. The photos of this time, in black and white, looked fake to her, props from a film. And by the time Michelle was born in 1973, the clothing was horribly tacky. Thank God Bambi had made them dress like the preppies they weren’t.

  She barely remembered her father and worried sometimes that the memories she did have weren’t even hers, just stories planted by her mother and sisters. But there was a smell, a couple of them. Cigar stores, anything leathery. And a certain aftershave that she sometimes picked up in department stores. No one could have made her remember smells that weren’t hers to remember.

  If her father had served his sentence, he would be free by now. Would it really have been that hard? She once overheard Linda telling Rachel that he might have been out in ten years, according to Henry. Ten years. He would be here and this would be their house and she would be allowed to borrow her mother’s clothes and jewels. Because, yes, Bambi was the same size as Michelle. When Michelle was younger, the boys who came to the house had gotten crushes on her.

  Maybe that was part of the reason that Michelle now preferred men, men she never allowed to come to her house.

  But even if her father had returned, would they have been rich again? Michelle could never work out that part of the fantasy, and Michelle was very pragmatic about her fantasies. What would he do? Could he earn as much in a legal enterprise as he had in his old business? These were not questions she could put to Bambi, or even her sisters. So much of what she knew about her father had been learned from eavesdropping. Michelle was less resentful than the others thought about being cut off from the family’s days of ease and money. But she hated not being privy to the secrets that her sisters shared. The stories about the mistress. Did they really think that Michelle, incurious as she was at thirteen, hadn’t seen the article in the Star when Julie Saxony disappeared almost ten years to the day after her father did? It had been only a matter of time before someone at school had told her that everyone believed that her father had finally sent for Julie Saxony—and all the money he had put away, money that was supposed to go to Bambi.

  Much to her surprise, Michelle started to cry. And everything around her was so beautiful, silken and pristine, that she wasn’t sure where to dry her tears, which were clotted with mascara. She padded back to the bathroom, picked up the towel she had left on the floor.

  “What are you doing here?”

  It was Sydney, the birthday girl, the girl to whom all this belonged, not that she would ever fit into skinny Lorraine’s dresses, no matter how her mother tried to starve her. Sydney was wearing a two-piece, which Michelle found absolutely shocking. She would live in a caftan if she had a body like Sydney’s.

  “Your father told me to go put my top back on. I was lying on my stomach, just trying to avoid tan lines. But, you know.”

  “His ideas about femininity basically align with Sir Walter Scott. He’s a prude, my dad.” A shrug.

  Michelle envied Sydney those casual words even more than she envied her these beautiful things. To be able to say that one’s father was this or that.

  To be able to say: “My dad.” My dad, my dad, my dad.

  “Anyway, we’re about to have cake. Don’t you want cake?”

  Sydney’s tone implied that everyone must want cake all the time. Michelle wished she did, that the pleasures of chocolate and frosting could still be meaningful to her. Then again, what did she find pleasurable? She enjoyed things mainly in the planning. If she had gone to Philadelphia today, the thrill would have been in the subterfuge and the escape. And then the night, the hours of denying someone else pleasure. That was what made her happiest, or at least close to something that others might recognize as happiness.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not hungry.”

  “I guess that’s why you have the body you have,” said Sydney. Cheerful, not begrudging. “Mom tries to make me live on lettuce and carrots, hoping I’ll look like you—or at least like her. But it’s just never going to happen.”

  Michelle couldn’t help being impressed by Sydney’s matter-of-fact acceptance of herself. “How do you manage that?”

  “Manage what?”

  This was tricky to word. “Not minding. I mean, you know, being cool with how things are.”

  Sydney smiled. Half smiled, really, using only the left corner of her mouth. “I’ve got my stuff. Believe me, I’ve got stuff that bugs me. Stuff that’s bigger than my weight.”

  “Like what?” Michelle really could not imagine what could bother someone if she had money and didn’t care about her appearance.

  “I was asked to leave camp last summer.”

  “That’s it? You got kicked out of sleep-away camp?”

  Sydney studied her, as if judging Michelle’s worthiness as a confidante. “Yes, that’s it. But it bugs me. I loved that camp. I loved—well, I wish I could go back. I would have been a junior counselor this year. But I can’t go back. They made that clear.”

  Some boring kid spat, Michelle decided. She wouldn’t press further. She tried to ignore the fact that Sydney clearly wasn’t allowing her to press further.

  “Look, even if you don’t want cake, won’t you please come back to the party? I know you don’t want to be here, with my friends, but I’m so happy you came.”

  “You are?”

  “I am. I don’t have any real cousins. You and Linda and Rachel are the closest thing I have. And my brothers are such assholes.”

  “Sydney!” Michelle didn’t disagree. She was just shocked that Sydney was so candid.

  “Everyone knows. Except Mom, which I guess is how it’s supposed to be. Look, I don’t mind that I was adopted, I really don’t, and that my brothers were born eighteen months later and everyone’s like, ‘Oh, that’s what happens when people adopt, they relax and have their own children.’ My parents have never made me feel second-rate. We’re all three spoiled, but the twins are extra spoiled. Did you notice they’re not here today? They’re out with Uncle Tubby playing miniature golf because I knew they would ruin everything. I asked Dad to get rid of them. They’re psychopaths.”

  “Do you ever think about your natural parents?”

  “Mom and Dad are my natural parents,” Sydney said. Then, after a pause: “I do wonder about my biological parents, though. I mean, I’m curious. How could I not be? And my folks won’t tell me much about my adoption. They say it was done through the Associated.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “Yes, but there should be a story, right? And the only thing I know is that it happened really fast, that they got a call and they picked me up and they didn’t have anything ready. Twenty-four hours after I was b
orn. I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense.”

  Michelle thought it made as much sense as anything did. She also realized she better start thinking about birth control. Eventually. The women in her family were fertile. Linda had four kids and was talking about getting her tubes tied. Michelle had been not quite an accident, a by-product of too much revelry, her father trying one more time for a boy, although her mother insisted he had preferred being the only man in a household of women. “He liked women,” she said, oh so dryly.

  “Anyway,” Sydney said, “I want cake. And it’s my birthday. For one day I get to call the shots around here. Then it will be Heckle and Jeckle’s world all over again. Sometimes, I feel like Ferris Bueller’s sister. You know, there’s probably a reason she was such a freaking bitch.”

  “Well, if you’re Jennifer Grey, you get to end up dancing with Patrick Swayze, so it’s not all bad.”

  Sydney’s face was a study. “Yeah, no one puts Baby in the corner, right? Only I spend a lot of time in corners. Well, maybe not so many corners, but watching stupid TV, like Blossom. Everyone else in this family is so jocky. Even Mom plays golf.” She shuddered.

  “So why did you want a pool party for your Sweet Sixteen?”

  “I didn’t. I didn’t even want a party. I wanted to go to a nice restaurant, just Mom and Dad and me. They didn’t think that was special enough.”

  “I’m sorry,” Michelle said. She wasn’t. It angered her that Sydney had parents who worried about what was special enough for her. Her family was always trying to knock down Michelle’s ideas about what she deserved, said she was grandiose.

  “That’s okay. In two years, I’ll go away to college. My mom thinks I should go to one of the Seven Sisters, but I want to live in New York. Columbia, Barnard, NYU—whatever it takes, I’ll get into at least one of them, I think.”