Waiting in a humid train station
in a city in a summer, I felt like Lily Bart. A weekend with well-to-do friends didn't change that. I am the Lily Bart working girl, going up to famous sights on the Sound, seeking invitations to country houses, escaping the heat of the city for the cool of the chic country. And the rich house is always freezing even when some temper is boiling over. It was a lovely weekend but Wharton would have had a field day. My friend picked me up from the train station in a Mercedes, her Mercedes. (But since it's illegal to drive a Mercedes at liberal hippie schools, she's taking her father's Volkswagen convertible. Much better.) Enveloped in the smell of leather we arrived at her crisp white house and went around the back to say hello to her crisped tan parents sitting sipping ice water by the pool. Two skinny hands waved hello. When they asked about my summer I resisted any Torres temptations towards shock-value by detailing life at the Greenhouse, a pleasure dome for the masses.
For dinner, she took me to a delicious sushi restaurant where in the parking lots Mercedes kissed or had mixed marriages with BMWs. Two blond zeroes proved that being tall and anorexic was a marketable skill outside of modeling as they greeted and asked for our reservations. I had some, but as sat at the sushi bar staring at raw fish flopping and flipbooking from past to present stories with my old friend, I forgot what a trendy place with what trendy people we were surrounded. It's not her fault she was thrown in a world where daughters' sociological compassion must wear Anthropologie, Gucci, and dress down in Versace and Mercedes daily; she is a sweetheart. And the wonder is how she came from a perfectly nice workaholic who plays tennis on the weekends and an obsessively organized, eating disordered compulsive cleaner who anxiously watches what her daughter, overflowing humanity, gracefully exuding mess of being eighteen and feeling and thinking things, eats. And I think she is proud.
Sunday sailing on a Sound, saw between ships how this'd be a nice way to see the sky. Outside the rarefied air of the airconditioned house, there are a lot of nice beaches and waves that belong to you if you're from not just any port in a storm. Controlled the sail and the steering and I laughed as caught the wind and plunged the craft into waves. We plunged into talk about religiously conflicted regions around the globe and thought about how it was a nice place to come in the season, how it might be easy to steer a course from here, set out to see the rest of the world and see it better off in off-season, if you have a soul. And she has a soul. So did Lily Bart; it undid and almost saved her.
For dinner, she took me to a delicious sushi restaurant where in the parking lots Mercedes kissed or had mixed marriages with BMWs. Two blond zeroes proved that being tall and anorexic was a marketable skill outside of modeling as they greeted and asked for our reservations. I had some, but as sat at the sushi bar staring at raw fish flopping and flipbooking from past to present stories with my old friend, I forgot what a trendy place with what trendy people we were surrounded. It's not her fault she was thrown in a world where daughters' sociological compassion must wear Anthropologie, Gucci, and dress down in Versace and Mercedes daily; she is a sweetheart. And the wonder is how she came from a perfectly nice workaholic who plays tennis on the weekends and an obsessively organized, eating disordered compulsive cleaner who anxiously watches what her daughter, overflowing humanity, gracefully exuding mess of being eighteen and feeling and thinking things, eats. And I think she is proud.
Sunday sailing on a Sound, saw between ships how this'd be a nice way to see the sky. Outside the rarefied air of the airconditioned house, there are a lot of nice beaches and waves that belong to you if you're from not just any port in a storm. Controlled the sail and the steering and I laughed as caught the wind and plunged the craft into waves. We plunged into talk about religiously conflicted regions around the globe and thought about how it was a nice place to come in the season, how it might be easy to steer a course from here, set out to see the rest of the world and see it better off in off-season, if you have a soul. And she has a soul. So did Lily Bart; it undid and almost saved her.
