TToWB: Achin' To Be

Chapter 4 of The Tenderness of Wild Beasts, a novel. Everything is bad in the memories from a seventh birthday party.

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The Tenderness of Wild Beasts

Chapter 4 - Achin’ To Be

My first real memory of Judith is very bright, even if, actually, Mum stole the show that day. Ironically, it was the celebration of another event in Jud’s life. It was her seventh birthday. Her mother had thrown away a huge party in the Lair’s impressive property. I was the kid living in the peeling house next to the 101, I never had a birthday party. Oliver insisted that I had to go. He was trying to befriend the Lairs so bad it was ridiculous. Oliver and Virginia Lair, Jud’s mother, knew each other for a long time but only one of them remembered it. Of course, it was Mum’s husband.

In the eighties, Virginia was a sort of wine prodigy who had made a name for herself over the Napa Valley and Southern California, putting her clever tastes in alcohol, her marketing skills as well as her cold charm at the service of many rich hedonists. The press was invited when she eloped with Chance Crawford, a handsome rising actor of Hollywood. When I started hanging with their daughter, the Lairs were just reigning over less than a thousand acres of vines in Monterey County and bottles of the previously hyped wine factory of Lucero would no longer approach the tables of the Post Ranch Inn. Apparently, chance had deserted them as Chance had deserted himself.

Oliver was working at their plant, that is all I know. I never drink; maybe it is because of the smell he was bringing back home, associated with the stench of his bootlicking and colourlessness, which have sparked my disinterest in boozing.

He once asked, “Why do you despise me so much, Mary Jane?”

I took it as a rhetorical question, as he never really seemed that interested in the answer. I was not either.

The luxurious house of the Lairs never smelled of wine. The bottles were in a fancy bar hidden inside a wall, evoked but never taken out in front of us. The only smells I remember there were the wet sourness of their crotch-sniffing labrador, and the chemical sweetness of turpentine, from Chance’s painting studio. Nobody had seen Chance Lair in a movie for a long time, not even as a guest in a TV show or in a Christmas special. But he was nice with me, he liked me. I was very patiently looking at his canvases, while he was talking about his art, mostly Big Sur’s landscapes. He said I had an artist’s eye. Meanwhile, Jud was sulking in her room. Chance did not like his daughter. He wished that, hanging out with me, she would act a little more like me. He wished that I would be his daughter. I was looking for a father, but Chance was slimming before my very eyes; a child is able to smell a life that dies. Sometimes I thought that I was the last remaining human who could see Chance Lair. When other people were coming to the house, he was nowhere to be seen. Virginia never gave him his scenario. Incidentally, I have no image of him at his daughter’s seventh birthday party.

There was a crowd of children of all ages, all dressed up in fancy costumes. I was a Native American, wearing an old red fringed t-shirt with an eagle head printed on it, a worn-out headband belonging to Mum with a crow feather slipped on its side as well as bad warpaint. The costume itself was screaming pathetic, but Oliver also thought it would be fantastic if I handcrafted the gift all by myself. Mum secretly tried to limit the damage, but the result was an awful papier-mâché piggy bank covered with cheesy pink paint. It perfectly matched the disappointment on Judith’s face as well as the charmingly crafted smile of despise I got from her mother. Thanks to Oliver, I had discovered my talent in the art of social humiliation.

I had left Mum hanging with other adults next to the buffet to venture in the vast lawn where kids were supposed to play together. Obviously, Jud’s tall, pretty, and older cousins were all there, all looking the same, with their arrogant, high-pitched voices. They kept discussing the kind of boys they would marry one day.

They all agreed on blonds with blue eyes, their cheeks not even a little bit blushing, with the cold seriousness of Wall Street’s traders comparing listed stock.

“I am more into brown haired guys,” stated Jud.

It was a well-known fact that she was an adopted child. I had always compared her to an Aztec princess or to an Ancient Egypt priestess, because of her lined eyes, but she was more probably coming from North Africa.

Once, we were sitting next to each other and I was suddenly hit by the contrast between my pale skin and her golden clay tan. As I drew her attention to it, she neutrally stated, “Yes, I was meant to survive to another desert. I’m not supposed to be there, you know.” This blew my mind. Not only because of her young cynicism, but because her words had touched a nerve. I am not supposed to be here. I could somehow relate to this feeling. Around the same time, I started questioning my own origins. I had no tangible reason to doubt the righteousness of my place in the peeling house but I had already secretly stopped calling Oliver “Dad”.

The blond Californian cousins exchanged a knowing look. They then all turned their cruel eyes in my direction, the only little girl of the group who had not yet laid claim to a husband it wouldn’t be legal for her to have before at least a decade. I had ab-so-lu-te-ly no clue on the subject. As a matter of fact, I had not yet considered frolicking with the other sex and the question appeared quite incongruous to me.

The boys in the courtyard kept talking about Sharon Stone crossing and uncrossing her legs in Basic Instinct and I kept giggling about Meryl Streep twisting and untwisting her neck in Death Becomes Her.

But I felt that I had to answer, to distract them from Jud’s brave preference.

So, I cried out, “I want to marry a redhead with green eyes!”

I was hoping that, if I really had to take that decision at such an early age, at least I could make things more improbable by picking a quite rare genetic combination. I got the result I was aiming at; the older girls rolled their eyes and turned away from us. But if I remember this party so vividly, it is because my satisfaction did not last very long.

Out of the blue, Mum grabbed me and, to my greater shame, started to scream in front of everybody. She was literally shaking, in a very scary way, and her voice was distorted by something I first thought was anger. With years, I have finally recognized despair and fear, but at only six –I was not seven yet– all I could come up with was that I had done something ominous, dangerous.

She kept screaming, “Nonsense, nonsense! A redhead with green eyes! Your husband!”

It was not even articulated. She was almost drooling with furor and I was, of course, mortified. I decided that day that love would not be my favorite subject, and especially not one I could discuss with my mother at all. Ever. But I could not understand why, only feeling some unfairness about that experience, along with the boiling sensation of public humiliation. Twice in the same day, it certainly deserved a place of honor in my memory.

Years later, I wondered what everyone could have thought about her shitshow that day. Siobhan McCord had always been the discreet and chilled bookstore owner, hiding behind her books. I was in awe in front of her almost transparent violet eyes. She was very stoic, her ageless porcelain features stressed by her strict, black bob cut and her gigantic dark green shawls. She was a living statue, not the funky ones you find on busy streets, but the haunted Neo-Gothic funeral monuments hidden in the dense vegetation of a European cemetery. With her quirky sense of humor, she always dressed as a vampire on Halloween, to match her book of the day, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and no kid would trick-and-treat near the bookstore. Well, actually, no adult would venture in either. What the hell had happened to my tower of strength, my marble-made mother and her sweet irony?

I did not understand the tense atmosphere inside of the car either, when Oliver drove us home, nor the way Mum acted as if it never happened afterward. My costume sucked, my gift sucked, so in my child’s mind, it made perfect sense that my future love life would suck too. After all, my Mum’s marriage with Oliver was a joke.

I was missing crucial information then, that the former greatest love –and biggest mistake– of my mother’s life was a redhead with green eyes.

And that it was you.

(To be continued.)

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The Tenderness of Wild Beasts

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