My mother flew east with me so she could take me to boarding school. Paul was going to drive us up in his VW bus.
“Isn’t it sweet, on his way to Harvard, to give us a lift?” she said. “Otherwise we’d have had to rent a car.”
Paul showed up at Eighty-first Street early. “Nervous?” he said to me.
“I’m excited.” I was wearing a navy blue skirt, a white button-down shirt and a lavender-colored wool vest, all new. I felt very crisp, very orderly.
Paul carried out my bags and trunk and arranged them in the back of his van. My mother wanted to drive, and Paul hopped into the passenger seat. My father had given me a hi-fi, and its new boxes sat next to me on the backseat.
New York disappeared as we headed up unfamiliar highways. I only knew how to get out of the city by airplane. You took a taxi over the “Tri-bra” Bridge (her accent) and arrived at the airport. At the rest stop, my mother fished her little brown vial from her bag and reached down her blouse for the tiny spoon on a chain, scooping up hits of coke.
My mother said, “I’m dying to meet your roommate.”
I said, “I wonder what kind of music she likes.” I had spent a lot of time conjuring this certain friend. My mother told Paul her own boarding school stories.
In the New England town we turned onto the main route through the campus. I tried to spot anything I remembered from the tour. The campus looked much, much bigger. Cars drove slowly, left-or right-hand signals blinking. My mother had Paul read the directions.
“Now where’s the admissions building?” she said. “Oh, there. Next left, then?”
As Paul unloaded the bags, my mother and I went up the steps of the dorm and found the dorm head’s apartment, her door ajar.
“Come in! I’m Miss Peters.” She wore khakis and a pink sweater, her hair in a short ponytail.
“I’m Daphne. And this is Susanna Sonnenberg.”
Miss Peters checked her clipboard. “It looks like you have a single.”
On the stairs my mother said to me, “You have no idea how lucky you are to get a single. My roommates were always complete cows.”
“But you said you were dying to meet my roommate.”
“I only said that to cheer you up.”
The little room smelled of carpet cleaner, and my mother opened the window. We could hear shouts from some sort of game. A mattress on a metal frame, an industrial desk pushed into the corner, matching dresser.
“This isn’t so bad,” she said.
“Hi, are you Susanna?” A girl pointed down the hall. “Your brother’s looking for you.”
“She seemed nice,” my mother said. She called out the door to Paul. He brought in my trunk. She lifted the lid, started to pull out towels and sheets. “Here, give me that pillow. And let’s get something on the walls.” Paul came back in with the stereo boxes. I watched my mother fix things up. She was showing off for Paul. I was curious about the voices in the hallways, the singing and shrieking.
My mother picked a leaflet off the desk. “Convocation at noon. Followed by a ‘Welcome Third Formers Luncheon.’ Parents are invited, too.”
“Hi, I’m Beatrice. Are you from England?”
“Yes. I am,” my mother said, extending her hand. “Although my daughter’s from New York.” She got more British. A blond girl with a cast on her foot came in, using a crutch.
“Hi! I’m Kelly. I’m the proctor.”
“Oh, wonderful.” My mother stepped close to her and took up the hand that was on the crutch. “Listen, love, will you keep your eye on Sue? Look out for her? Promise me?” The girl nodded, big smile. “And where’s the loo?”
The girl shrugged.
“Oh, right, sorry. The bathroom.” She trotted down the hall. I knew she needed a toot.
“Wow, your mom’s gorgeous.”
“Thanks.”
“That’s your mom? How old is she?”
“Thirty-three.”
“Did Miss Peters say your brother could come in? Boys aren’t allowed in the dorm.”
“He’s not my brother. He’s my mother’s boyfriend.”
“No way!”
“How old was she when she had you?”
I was going to say seventeen, which my mother sometimes told people, sometimes told me, but these girls might add fourteen and seventeen, then see the math was wrong. I said, “Nineteen.”
My mother held Paul’s hand as they walked me to the arts center. We followed a winding path through stands of trees. Sunlight, then shadow, then sunlight. I worried I wouldn’t remember how to find my dorm. People thronged in front of the theater.
“We’ll wander about,” my mother said. “And meet you back at your room before the lunch.”
The ceremony was long, the dark auditorium packed. The headmaster listed the rules against drinking and smoking, about coed visiting and being on time for classes. He talked about the honor code. It was a big deal. “The foundation of a healthy community,” he said. The hallmark of something-or-other. Teachers sat in folding chairs behind his dais. “Was that your mother?” someone whispered at me. I nodded. At the end, a brass march blared over speakers as we filed out according to our year.
The door to my room was open, and I started to walk in. Another mother was folding sweaters.
I checked the number on the door. “Sorry.”
“You’re probably in the next section over,” she said. I had come in through the wrong entrance, and the common rooms, stairwells and hallways were identical.
I opened my door to see Paul and my mother seated on the bed, which was still bare, except for the pillowcase.
“Listen, love,” she said, getting up. “We’re not staying. Paul has to get to Boston.” She said to him, “Will you wait for me outside?”
“Good luck, Susy.” Paul cuffed me gently on his way out.
“You should write him a thank-you note,” my mother said. She leaned close. “We broke in the mattress for you.”
“Oh, gross, Mummy! I was gone an hour.” I shot a look at the bed. They’d done it without even putting down a mattress pad. I would die if someone had heard them. “Thanks a lot.”
“What can I say? He’s nineteen.” She laughed. “Don’t take it so seriously. How was the lecture? Very important?”
“Not really. Nothing but rules and stuff about earning grades that’ll get you into Harvard.”
“Well, you knew the academics were going to be rigorous.”
“I’m fourteen. Do I have to think about college?”
“You could have gone to that hippie school in Vermont,” she said.
“Everyone’s so preppy, so…stiff,” I said. I felt panicky and needed her to see it. “These are not my people. I hate it here. This was a mistake.”
“Don’t be a drama queen. You don’t ‘hate’ it here. Anyway, what are you going to do, go to Taos High? Are those your ‘people’? You’ll make friends. Kelly said she’d take you over to the dining hall for dinner.”
“God, I don’t even know her.”
“Well, she’s super, and she thinks you’re super.” She stroked my arms and started to cry. “My baby, baby, baby.” She pulled me against her. I could feel how hard her heart was pounding, or maybe that was both our hearts. “Big girl,” she said. “You’re out in the grown-up world now.” She gripped me, we kissed, and she left, wishing Kelly a great year as she headed out. I felt how exhausted I was.
Later, in a nightgown, I opened my door, carrying my toothbrush and toothpaste. Miss Peters stopped me.
“Lights out.”
I said, “But I have to brush my teeth.”
“You should have done it earlier. Sorry.”
“But it’ll take less than a minute.”
She stood in front of me. “You’ll get used to the rules,” she said. “Back in your room now.” I threw my toothbrush down on my desk before banging shut my door.
I’d been gone about a month. It was like a year, learning so much: Every building had a name, and a lot of them had one name but were called another. Older kids referred to things like Mug Night that I had to decipher, and my mailbox had a combination, and the bus to New York left campus on some Fridays, but not all, and the weekend hours were slightly different in the two dining halls. I was supposed to try out for sports, wanted to audition for a play, and someone handed me a flyer about the literary magazine. My stomach attacks came weekly, and weekly I’d get special permissions signed by Miss Peters and walk in the dark to the infirmary, where I would explain to a nurse that I already knew Valium worked, please, please. I missed home, my mother’s rumpled bed, Penelope’s James Taylor music, which I didn’t even like. I missed being me.
My mother phoned frequently. When I heard the thrum of the ringer, I waited until someone called my name. One night I sat in the booth with the glass door closed. People looked in as they raced by for the stairwell. I sat in the sturdy chair, feet up on the built-in shelf for phone books. My mother went over the Taos gossip I craved. There’d been a party by the river and someone had dared someone else to jump from the bridge. Lincoln’s brother was getting married. Penelope refused to learn to drive.
“She’s only twelve,” I said.
“She’s so difficult,” said my mother. “She really misses you.”
“Me, too.”
“Do you remember Justin?”
“Sure.” He had been my last crush, a cute seventeen-year-old on the periphery of my regular crowd. All summer my mother kept saying he was crazy about me. “Well, I’ve got something to tell you, Sue. He moved in.”
“What?” Why would he do that, I was thinking, when I’d already gone away?
“He moved in because, uh, well, you’re going to hear this from someone—because we’re a couple now.”
I set my feet on the floor.
Now that she’d told me, she got excited. “I had no idea he was a virgin. He seemed so experienced.”
“What?”
“Wouldn’t you agree that our house is better than his crazy family’s house?”
I agreed, dazed and furious. “He was a virgin?”
“It wasn’t my idea, Sue! He and Penny are really getting along. I hope you approve, darling.”
We hung up, and I walked down the hall to Katy’s room. She was studying, leaning against a bolster her mother had sent in a care package. I was a little drunk on Katy, my new friend. She wore Love’s Baby Soft. I knew her favorite color, her best grade, which teacher she had a crush on.
I dropped onto her bed. “My mother just told me she’s dating my boyfriend.”
“What do you mean?”
I’d started a lot of my stories to her with “My mother…” “She said that he just moved into our house, and she took his virginity.” Saying it out loud gave me an odd feeling in my body, like putting on another girl’s jeans. Everything fit, but not in the right places. She probably wouldn’t believe me.
“Your boyfriend?”
“Yeah. We went out last summer.” I hadn’t actually dated Justin, but the story felt more credible that way, conveyed what this felt like. “We never even broke up before I left.”
“Your mother’s too much,” Katy said.
I wanted something more from her, but I wasn’t sure what and had to settle for that.
I got a crush on a senior named Larry, and you could see him anywhere on campus, he was that tall. He had a deep voice and a rash of acne scars. In October he was in The Importance of Being Earnest, and I made Katy go backstage with me so I could tell him he was good. The next night I timed my tray return in the dining hall with his. “Hi,” I said. “Remember how much I liked your performance?” I asked him to walk me to my dorm. I could make him say yes because I knew you could get boys to do anything. He showed me a shortcut, crossing through some woods, and I asked him about acting, but he wanted to talk about an upcoming football game.
When we got to my quad I started up the steps, turned around and found him eye to eye with me, mouth to mouth. “Okay, enough about football,” I said. He cupped his giant hands around my face and leaned forward and kissed me. This wasn’t getting a kiss; this was kissing. I pressed into him, but he wouldn’t open his mouth. Anyway, I wanted him to leave so I could race upstairs and tell Katy. The next night I refilled my milk glass when he did, and he walked me back to my dorm, and we reenacted the scene, because that was the only way to get the kiss to happen again. Walk, steps, hands, mouth. This time his tongue went into my mouth and moved around, dry and pushy.
But the word kiss floated up, danced over his head and held my attention as he held my face. French kiss! Girls trooped up the concrete steps around us, lugging at the glass entry door. He made a joke I didn’t get. I just wanted the kissing, more, more. He stayed another couple of minutes, and then I ran in to find Katy.
I sat in class with “kiss!” in my belly, such a jolt and a jump, such a good, at-last feeling. I answered questions but couldn’t hear my own voice. That kiss was loud. Walking between classes, I thought the white chapel was whiter, and the lines of the arts center starker, and every single dot and speck of other students on the campus didn’t know what I knew. I’d call my mother after study hall.
When she answered I was so excited. (We didn’t mention Justin ever. Easier.)
“Guess what? I had a French kiss!” My tummy jumped again, the words unlikely in my voice.
“That’s great, love.” Her television was on. She asked Penelope to turn it down, and I could picture the way her hand rose to catch Penny’s attention. “Next time you’re in the city I want you to call my gynecologist and get fitted for a diaphragm.”
“Come on, Mummy. It was just two kisses.”
“There will be more, and one day, you’ll want to make love,” she said. “Remember what your father did to me?” She told me she trusted that doctor. “You know he delivered Penelope at New York Hospital. You probably need a small diaphragm. Did you know I wear the smallest size there is? Who kissed you?”
“This senior.”
“A senior. Good kisser? Teenaged boys can be such bad kissers.”
“Yeah, he was kind of bad, I guess,” I said.
“Well, cheer up,” she said. “You won’t have to kiss him forever. You’ll find the good ones.”
I went into Katy’s room.
“My mother thinks I should get a diaphragm.”
“Why?” Katy still hadn’t been kissed. She looked like I’d said a bad word, which annoyed me.
“To be ready.”
“She wants you to be ready to have sex? Your family. We can’t even have sex here, you know. It’s against the rules. Imagine if Peters busted you?”
I said, “I bet she’s still a virgin,” and we cracked up. “Larry’s so big, he’d crush me if we made love.” It didn’t sound appealing.
“I can’t believe you can talk about that stuff with your mom.”
“Yeah, we tell each other everything.”
“You know, though,” said Katy. “You seem a little boy crazy. It’s always all about boys with you.”
“Oh, loosen up,” I said, getting up from her bed. She never even tried with boys, and all you had to do was try. I went back to my room. I felt mad at her, and embarrassed. And really, really hungry for more kissing. I lay down, replaying the hands, mouth, tongue.
Larry broke up with me the next day in the student center. He said he didn’t want a girlfriend. Wow. My first boyfriend, my first real boyfriend. I could kiss anyone.
I liked a boy in algebra named Hammond. I’d go over to Willetts House, the freshman boys’ dorm, and hang out in the common room. He was kind of mysterious, always able to produce cigarettes or Bacardi. One morning after math Ham headed back to my quad with me. We were walking along, a fine mood, nothing serious, when he jerked me off the path. I stumbled, and he grabbed my arm and pulled me several paces into the grove of dense trees. “Hey,” I said. “This isn’t the way.”
“Hold on a minute,” he said. He pushed hard and sort of pulled me and pushed me until I was on my back on the ground.
“Come on,” I said. I think I was laughing, whatever goofy joke, dumb act this was. “Ham, come on, let’s go.”
“No, wait.” Ham dropped to his knees and threw one leg over me. Then he pinned down my wrists and shifted his legs until his knees pinned my shoulders. I still thought he was kidding, a stupid joke, a joke. I watched his hand, enormously close to my face, as he unzipped his jeans one-handed and pulled out his penis. Not a joke. He pressed it against my mouth. I felt a hot animal surge of NO, strange pulses zooming into my shoulders, and I bucked my chest and threw him off. I ran a few yards toward the path. Then I stopped, turned around and looked at him, and I said, “Coming?” because again, back in sunlight, standing upright, this was just a prank. He hadn’t meant it. He brushed leaves off his jean jacket and walked me the rest of the way to the quad. We didn’t talk. I was amazed by the way silence swallowed the episode and threatened the memory.
That night I started to tell a sympathetic teacher what had happened, but I couldn’t make it come out the way I wanted, couldn’t keep it awful. Already unraveling, the experience was bursting into fragments, rather than staying whole, and I didn’t trust myself to get it right.
“I told the school about what you did,” I said the next time I saw Ham.
“So?” he said. He walked away in a drove of boys. There were a million ways to feel lonely at this school.
I waited a few days to tell my mother. I knew her reaction would take over the situation, make everything giant. Mornings and evenings passed, the classroom, study-hall and dining-hall demands insistent, and the details grew murkier. By the time I told her, I couldn’t remember the things I wanted to, and it sounded made-up to me.
She dove in. She wanted me to press charges against Ham, against the school, but I knew how my voice sounded in this world—attention-getting, overdone.
“Good God,” she said. “Why did I ever allow you to go so far away from me?”
I went home to Taos for the summer. One day, driving through town with my mother, we stopped for a pedestrian and it turned out to be Justin crossing the street. We watched him. She put the car back into gear and said, “You know, I think I might take up with that boy again.”
I wouldn’t go for the bait. “Randall? Michael?” I sneered. She was sleeping with both.
“Don’t be melodramatic, Susy. It doesn’t suit you.”
Sunday, August 31, 1980
Randall physically assaulted my mother, beating her over the head, hitting her in the face, and punching her in the stomach where she is now hemorrhaging. He then drove to———, stormed into Michael’s office, threw him to the ground and kicked his face in…I’m glad I’m not there—so glad! I don’t want to deal with that shit!…Mummy…and Michael are intending to charge Randall with assault and battery. All of them are fuckers!
I was visiting my father on the Cape, without Penelope, when I heard this account over the phone. Things seemed to happen when I wasn’t there, exciting and awful, and I couldn’t know if they were true, how much was true. I could picture my mother’s injured face, the look of movie makeup.
Worried for my sister, for both of them, I told my father.
“Gracious,” he said. “Is she in hospital?”
I didn’t know.
The next morning my father said that if he thought he could win, he’d sue my mother for custody of Penelope.
“Or perhaps a social worker to visit the house.”
My stomach flipped over. My mother and Penny. All of us. I couldn’t imagine Penny gone; I should make a case for our life in Taos. It felt like my father wanted to break up my family, and my loyalties careened.
I called Taos several times over the next couple of days, but my mother wouldn’t calm herself and answer my specific questions as I tried to pin down the event. “What happened?” I kept saying. “What happened?” And she changed the subject. But it was settled. It was the way we were going to talk about Randall from then on.
Anyway, my father never sent a social worker.
I returned to school for the fourth form year. On occasional weekends I slept at my father’s new apartment in New York, where he’d had all the doorjambs removed to make way for his wheelchair. I’d take Amtrak to Penn Station. Once, I started flirting with a man on the way down, and I agreed to meet him later in Washington Square. He said he was twenty-four and didn’t mind that I was fifteen. “How do you feel about Italian food?” I lied to my father that I was meeting old classmates at the Regency. I got off the subway at West Fourth Street and walked to the edge of the park. The stranger pulled up in his car, and I didn’t wonder if I should get in but opened the door and let him drive us. We had a bland meal, and he turned out to be a bland kisser, too, and I said I’d call him but knew I wouldn’t.
My father introduced me to his new girlfriend, Isabel, who had already moved in. She had almond-shaped eyes and short dark hair in a blunt cut. In a couple of months, he married her, and I brought Katy down to the city for the small party, a ceremony performed in the living room by a judge between dinner and dessert.
Katy took me home on a long weekend to her old stone house in Pennsylvania, a state I’d never visited. I wasn’t even sure where it was.
We took our stuff up to her bedroom, and she showed me around. The bathrooms with pink soaps, the shining piano and sheet music, the brightly lit kitchen island. We slumped in her family room, her cat warming my legs as we watched a Marx Brothers movie. Her mother came in from the kitchen and brought us brownies. Settled in the velvet sectional, I held a heavy brownie in one hand, its chocolate separating in chunks, my arm warmed by my best friend’s arm. Then Katy’s mother came back in and told me I had a call. She held out the receiver in the doorway between kitchen and family room. I got up and followed the cord back to the kitchen and then out into the hallway. This was about my mother, and I felt fright and weary intolerance. I remember the tone of voice but not the caller, the hurry and descriptions and my almost instant anger, a collapse in me.
My mother, who had been visiting New York, was in the hospital, and it was an emergency, very bad, very serious. I didn’t want to listen. I wanted to stay with my friend. We had plans to go shopping by ourselves in Philadelphia. The caller said, “Your sister’s in shock. You have to come.” I didn’t want to. “Daphne almost died.”
“My mother’s in the hospital,” I told Katy and her mother when I hung up.
“Good Lord,” her mother said, putting her hand to her mouth. “Is she all right?” Katy hugged me.
My mother and Penelope had been staying in our old apartment between tenants, getting it into shape. They’d been going to clubs, taking our old tables at the restaurants on Third. That afternoon Penelope had walked into the bedroom when the shades shouldn’t have been drawn. Our mother was inert at the edge of her bed, suspended in the middle of some act she didn’t seem to be completing. Penny rolled her over and saw that her leg was unlike a leg. It was riddled with pussed welts, and Penny ran to a neighbor, who called the ambulance.
“I guess my mother had been shooting cocaine into her thighs.”
“How do you do that?” Katy said. “Isn’t it a powder?”
“She mixed it with tap water. I guess she’d been doing it for a couple of weeks. She used the same needle, so she’s got a really bad infection.” This was so stupid. Katy’s mother, her hand still over her mouth, was staring at me. “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s just a dumb move. She’s been in hospital a lot. She’ll be fine.”
I had to leave. I had to. Katy’s mother went to get the train schedule, and Katy brought my bag down from her room. They drove me to the station.
“Are you sure you’re going to be okay?” Katy’s mother said. Yes, I said again and again. “Well, are you sure? Will there be anyone to stay with you?” That question hadn’t occurred to me. “If you need to come back, just call, and I’ll pick you up at the train.” No. No, I wanted to get away, away from their stupid house and driveway and stupid homemade brownies. I wasn’t a child.
I arrived back in the city and took the subway up to the hospital. Lenox Hill was three blocks from our apartment, personal, like our florist, our chemist, our liquor store. That’s where she got her first flat of Demerol and the individually wrapped syringes. I walked down the wide corridor, scanning for the room number.
My mother smiled when she saw me. I tried to avoid breathing in the smell that filled the room. Penelope was crying, sitting in a chair next to the bed. She grabbed my wrist and said, “Susy, Susy.” I put my arm around her.
“What did you do?” I said to my mother. I wanted to make her say it.
“Silly me,” my mother said. She held up the sheet so I could see, and it was shocking. Her flesh was turned brown and green and gray and purple, puncture marks scattered up and down her leg. “It’s septicemia,” she said, a stagy thrill in its medical weight. “How’s school?”
“You used tap water?”
A nurse came in. “We’re going to get her right, girls,” she said. “If your sister hadn’t found her when she did. Another few hours, she would have been gone.” She put her hand on Penelope’s shoulder. “You saved her life.”
“Jeannie’s from Trinidad,” my mother said, smiling at the nurse. “Her brother plays soccer.”
I stayed with Penelope in the apartment, ordering hamburger platters from the Skyline. We slept in our mother’s bed with the television on. The pillows smelled like tea rose and her unwashed nighties. When the infection was under control, she was going to come home. I took the train back to school in the middle of a weekday. The porter in the café car sold me a beer, although he knew he wasn’t supposed to.
My favorite teacher was Mr. Cutler. I didn’t care about the others anymore, or my grades. I was transferring to a smaller school in Colorado, a three-hour drive from Taos. My mother and I had decided that was the right thing because everything here was too Waspy, overcontrolled, not like us, and we needed to be closer together. She was sorry she’d fucked up. “I promise you, darling,” she said.
Mr. Cutler was square-jawed and blue-eyed. He lived in Willetts House in one of the suites assigned to teachers. He coached boys’ lacrosse, striding the campus with paternal dignity. “He’s like an oak tree,” I wrote in my diary. “A rooted part of the school’s identity.” He let me into an English elective listed for seniors. We read Bradbury and Donleavy, and then we wrote “life experience” stories. I titled one “To Her Doctor’s Health.” It was about a girl who has to give her mother injections of Demerol.
She pulled the cap off the needle keeping her eyes away from the gleaming thread of metal. Down the needle jammed through the rubber seal of the medicine bottle, and up it came again full of its own clear, cold blood. She looked down on her mother’s thigh, blue and green and purple from countless injections.
Mr. Cutler told my adviser I was the best writer he’d had in ten years, which I told my mother. I sent her the story, and she loved it. “Aren’t you lucky I make such good material?” she said. I sent my father the story, and he sent it back with a note: “I don’t know why you thought I should read this. It doesn’t seem to me much good or particularly original.”
When Mr. Cutler’s picture was in the student paper, I cut it out, taping it to my mirror. Everyone knew of my infatuation, and Katy would get me to blush when Mr. Cutler came into the dining hall. It was better than boys; nothing could happen. I certainly didn’t want something to happen. It was enough to know that he liked my writing, that I could catch his attention with content. Maybe I could get him to think about the unbuttoned top button of my cardigan, but I wasn’t interested in anything gross.
In the first week of June the school mood was bursting with every relaxed rule, and I went to find Mr. Cutler. I slipped away from a grounds cleanup and crossed the lawns, which were bubbling with mowers. The air smelled of gasoline and rainy earth, and I felt excited. Inside the peculiar quiet of Willetts House I followed a carpet runner to his suite. His door was open.
“I was wondering if you’d like to go to the IHOP with me?” I said.
“When?” he said.
“Now. Want to?”
Mr. Cutler stood right up, left his magazine on the couch and took his loden coat off a hook.
“Why not? Let’s go,” he said, backing me into the narrow hallway as he locked up, and then we went out to the faculty lot. Actually, I hadn’t expected his acquiescence. I’d just wanted to remind him I was leaving, that he was going to miss me. I wanted to come out and say I’d miss him. Away from the bulletin boards and lacrosse gear, he was a man. He probably wanted to get me out of his private quarters, whatever it took, but I wouldn’t have known that.
In the diner I ate pancakes, and he had coffee.
“I have to ask,” he said. “That story you wrote? About the little girl and the injections? How do you know so much about that?”
I told him about my mother’s back. I told him about our house in Barbados and my father’s MS, my stomach pain and Valium. I told him about Daphne’s recent time in the hospital. “My mother, yeah, she does drugs, but she’s not always like that. She’s very beautiful. She went out with Clint Eastwood.”
Mr. Cutler’s face had gradually changed from pleasant interest to gloom. He looked aged. “You’re only fifteen,” he said. “And you have so many stories to tell. I’m almost fifty, and I have none.” I had no idea what he meant. It seemed like a strange thing for an adult to say, and I thought he wanted me to feel sorry for him. I felt tricked, like he had asked about me, but now we were going to talk about him.