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  Daddy and Miss Winnie talked in forced, cheerful tones.

  And then something shifted. Daddy’s voice rose and he was using bad language. “What the hell do you think you’re trying to prove?” he asked and she just smiled at him like his words did not bother her one bit.

  “That’s not very nice, Daddy,” I said. “Miss Winnie is our friend.”

  He turned on me with such rage I thought I might use the bathroom in my pants. He was screaming. “In your room!”

  Gray-Gray bolted off my lap and raced straight up the silk curtain.

  “Letting that goddamn cat into the goddamn living room! Answering the door by yourself! You are in big trouble, young lady. Big trouble! You go right to your room and stay there until I come up to deal with you.”

  He was so large, so furious, that though he was on the other side of the room it seemed as if there was no distance between us at all, that he was going to smash all his weight against me, that he was going to crush me beneath him.

  It was all I could do to get my legs to work. I only wanted to sink to the floor.

  “Now,” he roared, and I ran, not turning around to check on Gray-Gray. I ran out of the living room, into the front hall, and up the curved staircase with the iron railing. I ran up, up, up, and then down the upstairs hall, passing Mother, who must have been roused by Daddy’s screaming, who was walking unsteadily toward the stairs, her blond curls unkempt, her long white nightgown still on. She looked like a little girl.

  I shut myself into my room, wailing, and waited for either my mother to come and comfort me or my father to come and beat me (which surely he would have had the heart to do on that night). But no one came. No one came to my room at all. Only Gray-Gray showed up, mewing at the door. I let her in and put her on the bed with me and cried some more, only softly this time.

  Gray-Gray watched me anxiously and then licked my cheeks where the tears had been.

  At breakfast the next morning no one said a word about what had happened the day before. And after a few weeks went by with no one mentioning that day, I began to wonder if I had made it all up.

  A year or so later when Winnie arrived at our door again, this time to see Mother, I knew I had not.

  CHAPTER SIX

  No Lolita

  (Caroline, Fall 2000)

  Mom thinks Frederick is hot for me.

  “No twenty-four-year-old man shows such interest in an eighteen-year-old girl without romantic intentions,” she says. “You should know that before you go on your date.”

  “It’s not a date, Louise.”

  I am sitting at the kitchen table. She is standing at the counter, making brownies.

  “I’m not Louise to you,” she says, measuring out a teaspoon of salt and using the back of a knife to scrape off the excess. “If going to dinner and then a play at the Alliance Theatre is not a date, then the definition of dating has changed since I was single.”

  She smiles at her own joke and then walks to the pantry to retrieve the cocoa powder. She turns toward me after closing the pantry door.

  “Frankly, darling, I think it’s fabulous. Six years really isn’t that much of an age difference. Of course, it might become a problem if he’s looking to get married.”

  “Mom,” I say in my slowest, most drawn-out, pretend-I-am-talking-to-a-six-year-old voice. “You are insane. He is a director and I am an actor. Tonight we are going to see a performance of The Glass Menagerie, which the Coventry players are staging in three weeks. It makes total sense for us to go together, as professionals.”

  Mom raises her right eyebrow. “Professional whats?” she asks.

  “Oh my God, I can’t believe you just said that.”

  “Just see if he pays for your meal,” she says.

  I HEAR THE doorbell ring at 6:15, the exact time Frederick said he would arrive. I have to say that I find his promptness a little unappealing; it makes him seem really desperate. I have just stepped out of the shower and haven’t even towel-dried my hair. I hear Mom start exclaiming over him as soon as she opens the door. She actually says, “It’s lovely to see a young man in a shirt and tie.”

  Jesus. It’s like she wants to do him.

  I was planning on wearing jeans and a tank top but after hearing how dressed up he is I put on a blue cotton sundress that I bought in Little Five Points. It hangs loose on me and looks sort of hippy-dippy, but it shows off my tan, which is fast fading since summer vacation. Adding to the hippy affect, I go braless, more to see Mom’s reaction than anything else.

  Downstairs, Frederick, wearing jeans with his slightly frayed shirt and tie, sits at the kitchen table with Louise, eating from a big plate of brownies. My mother’s brownies are so good they almost make you forgive her for everything she’s ever done to you. She puts three different kinds of chocolate in them, chocolates that she special-orders from Williams-Sonoma.

  Frederick looks up at me, a brownie halfway to his mouth.

  “Your mother is a culinary genius,” he says.

  “Oh hush,” she says. I swear to God she bats her eyelashes.

  I grab a brownie and put it whole into my mouth.

  “Caroline,” says my mother. “These aren’t single-bite bits.”

  Frederick laughs while he stands up, pushing his chair back underneath the table. Brownnoser.

  “Thank you so much for these,” he says, touching my mother on the shoulder with his long delicate fingers. “I guess we better go if we want to eat before the play. Although seriously, I would be pretty happy if I could just eat brownies for dinner.”

  “You are too sweet,” says Mom. “To be completely honest, I don’t think this batch is up to par. Do they taste as good to you as they usually do, sweetheart?”

  “They’re perfect,” I say, annoyed. I have never once heard my mother claim that anything she has cooked meets her standards.

  She walks with us out the front door and stays there, beside the house, waving until we have backed out of the driveway. I wouldn’t be surprised if she slipped Frederick a condom while I wasn’t looking. Dad stayed in the den the whole time, watching sports on TV. In the movies fathers are forever doing idiotic things to try and stop their teenage daughters from having sex. My father isn’t like that. Much as he hates Clinton, he seems to have adopted the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy when it comes to my life.

  Which suits me just fine.

  FREDERICK TAKES ME to the Bridgetown Grill near the theater. I order jerk chicken with raspberry sauce. Over dinner Frederick makes me laugh so hard with his imitation of Coventry teachers that I snort a bite of jerk chicken up my nose. I start sneezing chunks of chicken into my napkin! It is totally disgusting, but Frederick laughs and calls me a “delight.” And then he puts his Visa on the table and tells me the meal is his treat.

  EVERY TIME I go to see a performance I tear up when the actors first come on stage. It has nothing to do with the material, it’s just—I know how they are feeling. Lit. Alive. Doing what they are supposed to be doing. Afterwards I usually feel a little depressed. I don’t like being a member of the audience. I want to be one of the players.

  I tell this to Frederick as we walk from the theater back to his beat-up Jeep. He says that during his first year at Yale he didn’t get a part in any of the plays he tried out for. But he went to see all of the performances, regardless. He had to. He was trying to be part of the theater scene. Still, he says, his stomach would knot up while watching the other actors. All he could think was That should be me.

  “Hold on to your jealousy,” he says. “Sometimes casting comes down to who seems to want it the most.”

  We stand by the side of his car. Even though it’s late September the night air is still warm. Cars buzz by us on Peachtree. Frederick unwraps a piece of Trident and pops it in his mouth. He holds the pack out to me. “Want some?”

  “I’m good,” I say.

  It’s late, almost midnight, my curfew. (Which is retarded. I mean, that I’m a senior and I still have a
curfew.)

  “I think you are beautiful and smart and talented,” Frederick says, all in one rushed breath. “And I know I should wait until you graduate—”

  He swallows his gum, leans in, and presses his chapped lips against mine. I don’t pull away but I don’t lose myself in the moment either. Maybe it’s that I can’t get over the fact that I’m kissing my teacher.

  I WAKE TO the smell of something baking, something sweet. Waffles. Dad used to make them every Sunday morning but he stopped completely when in junior high I refused to eat any because Mom had forgotten to buy syrup and was trying to convince me that strawberry jam would work just as well. I asked for a PowerBar instead and that was it. Dad had one of his “Jesus, I didn’t see that coming” anger attacks. Waffles ended up in the garbage; Dad stormed out of the kitchen. Tradition ended.

  Downstairs Charles, Mom, and Dad are all sitting at the kitchen table. Charles wears boxers and a T-shirt; Mom and Dad wear the matching fuzzy robes they bought at some ritzy hotel.

  “Good morning, darling,” says my mother.

  “Ready for a waffle?” asks Dad. He is unusually upbeat, making me wonder if before breakfast he and Mom did the nasty. Which in itself is nasty.

  “Sure,” I say. “Smells good.”

  Dad jumps up to pour batter in the iron.

  Mom, winking, asks, “And how was your night?”

  “God,” I say, “it’s like you’re just itching for me and Frederick to fuck or something.”

  For a second everyone stares at me, like they aren’t sure if I really said what I just said. (I wasn’t sure I said what I just said. It just came out.) Then my mother starts crying—crying, like she is some delicate flower who can’t be exposed to such language even though last spring she told me that she didn’t give a flying fuck what I did with my life.

  Dad turns from the waffle maker, his face red, shaking a plastic spatula at me like he is going to come after me with it. He wears a comb-over to try and make it look as if he’s not so bald, and every time—every time—he starts screaming at me he shakes his head around so much that the comb-over flops to the wrong side and he looks like he’s just got this random piece of long hair growing out of his corporate crew cut.

  “Jesus,” I say. “Sorry.”

  Mom looks right at me and says, “I would appreciate it if you just left the table.”

  “Fine,” I say, and I do.

  WHICH IS NOT to say that I don’t cry in my room or feel as if I can’t breathe or even hold a pair of orange-handled scissors up against the inside of my arm and make a small scratch. (I could never be a serious cutter. It hurts too much.) This is not to say that I don’t stand in front of my bathroom mirror with a fistful of hair in my hands, ready to cut it all off until I remember how horrible I looked in the third grade when I let my mom’s stylist give me a haircut “just like Mary Lou Retton’s.”

  Sure, I feel like shit after the Parker family attempt at breakfast but eventually the feeling becomes less intense and I hear dishes being rinsed and I know that each of the other three members of my family will soon be off doing whatever it is they do on a Sunday. So once I am pretty sure I’m not going to burst into tears or anything, I call Frederick’s house to see if he wants to hang out.

  His mom answers, which is kind of creepy when you think about it—that Frederick still lives at home—but she doesn’t try to talk to me or anything, thank God.

  As soon as I hear his voice I start crying again.

  “Caroline?” he asks.

  Why does he assume the crying girl on the other end of the phone is me? I’ve never cried in front of him before, except last year when I finally told him about Jim and the whole Honor Council thing.

  “What is it? What’s the matter?” he asks.

  I tell him that I have just had a massive and ugly fight with my parents.

  “Come over,” I say. “Come get me.”

  “Was your fight about me?” he asks. “Did you tell your mom about—about what happened last night? Between us?”

  Yeah, Frederick. Louise and I curled up in our jammies and discussed the fact that my teacher stuck his tongue in my mouth.

  “Look, it had nothing to do with you. It was about my—as my mother would call it—my potty mouth. Don’t worry. Louise still loves you.”

  He says to look for him in twenty minutes.

  FIVE MINUTES LATER, someone knocks on my bedroom door.

  Before I say anything, Dad walks in holding a bottle of water.

  “I brought this for you,” he says.

  I reach out to take the bottle, feeling my throat tighten the way it does before I cry. I do not want to cry in front of my father. I do not want to have a heart-to-heart with him.

  He sits on the edge of my bed. “Honey,” he says, “you’ve got to think before you say things.”

  Oh great. He’s here to lecture me about holding my tongue even after Mom makes all sorts of sexual innuendos about me and my teacher.

  “The thing is,” he says, trying to make deep and meaningful eye contact with me, “there is nothing less attractive than a woman with a foul mouth.”

  “What about a woman who smokes?” I ask, remembering that he once said that the least attractive thing a woman could do was smoke cigarettes.

  “Well, that too,” he says, not understanding that I am ridiculing him to his face. “Listen, babe. You are going to be out of here in less than a year. Can’t we make these last months peaceful? Don’t you think you can try and get along with your mother?”

  No. I really don’t. The thing is, Louise is totally unpredictable. It’s like she switches roles from day to day. Sometimes she wants to be all close and girlfriendish with me, and then other times she suits up as Tough Mom. And I’m sick of it. Sick of dealing with her. Sick of being the guinea pig while she figures out which parenting philosophy she’s going to embrace on any one particular day.

  “You know, I could be doing a lot worse than occasionally saying a bad word,” I say.

  I am doing worse things, but as I said, my father is clueless when it comes to my life.

  “Hey, I know you are a good kid,” he says.

  He smiles and I remember him saying those exact words when I was little, after Mom went apeshit because I got a grass stain on my white Easter sundress. All of a sudden I want to cry. Everything just seems impossible, including the fact that I love my father. I love him so much, yet I don’t think I can stand living with him and my mother for even the next night.

  Dad stands and stretches his arms behind his back. “There are some leftover waffles downstairs,” he says. “Why don’t you go eat?”

  I WAIT FOR Frederick on the front porch. Sandy used to smoke out here while Mom was running errands (translation: getting a manicure, getting her hair colored, or shopping at Neiman’s). Sometimes I’d smoke with her. Once Charles caught me and threatened to tell Mom unless I let him try a drag. I handed my lit cigarette over to him, and the minute he inhaled, Sandy said in that growl of hers, “Now if you tell your mama about Miss Caroline she’ll whip your butt for smoking.”

  She wouldn’t have, but Charles still kept his word.

  THE MINUTE I see Frederick’s Jeep making its way down Peachtree Circle, I run down the driveway to meet him at the curb, climbing into the front seat as soon as he stops the car.

  “Hi,” he says.

  The inside of his car smells like he just sprayed orange air freshener. I wonder if he farted on the way over and is now trying to cover it up.

  “Let’s go get drunk,” I say.

  He rolls his eyes. “Caroline, please,” he says.

  “Oh, would that be inappropriate?” I ask, widening my eyes in mock innocence.

  “Wow, I’m so glad you called me to come get you. You are in such a terrific mood. So upbeat and sunny.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “I just had a shitty morning. Let’s get Chick-fil-A.”

  “It’s Sunday,” he says.

  Damn it. I always
forget that Chick-fil-A is closed on Sundays. Fucking Christians.

  “What else can we eat? Fried chicken? Want to get a bucket at Fry Daddy’s?”

  “I don’t know how you stay so skinny,” he says.

  “Let’s go to your house to eat it,” I say. “We can have cocktails with our chicken. Unless your mom will be there.”

  He shakes his head. “I think she’s got some church thing, but it doesn’t matter either way. I’ve got private access to my room.”

  “Well, well, well,” I say. “Why didn’t you tell me you had access to a mom-free bachelor pad?”

  “Being a smartass will serve you well in New York,” he says.

  “Do you really think I’m going to get to go to New York?” I ask. “That I’ll do well at my audition?” I hate how high-pitched my voice becomes anytime I talk about my chances of getting into acting school.

  “You are going to kick ass,” he says. “And you’re going to have a great recommendation from your acting teacher.”

  He turns his attention from the road to smile at me.

  “I can’t believe I am actually going to get away from this fucking city.”

  “Atlanta’s not so bad,” he says. We are driving on Ponce toward Fry Daddy’s. As always there are a lot of homeless people—men mostly—on this street.

  “Why are they all here?” I ask. “It’s like a homeless convention.”

  “Atlanta likes to keep their homeless zoned.”

  “They’re zoned? That’s the most retarded thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  “Yeah, talk to me next year after one of them is living on your doorstep in New York.”

  Frederick pulls into the parking lot at Fry Daddy’s, where there are even more homeless people milling about. They are almost all black, and none of them are eating chicken.

  I get out of the car thinking about how half the kids at my school don’t even know there is a Fry Daddy’s, and if they did they probably wouldn’t ever go to it because they’d be scared of getting shot or something.