The Chocolate Money
6. The Hangover-Brunch Cruise Party
Copyright © 2012 by Ashley Prentice Norton
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Norton, Ashley Prentice.
The chocolate money / Ashley Prentice Norton.
p. cm.
“A Mariner original.”
ISBN 978-0-547-84004-8
1. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 2. Children of the rich—Fiction. 3. Bildungsromans. gsafd 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3614.O7823C47 2012
813'.6—dc23 2012014223
eISBN 978-0-547-84058-1
v1.0912
“Dance: Ten; Looks: Three,” from
A Chorus Line
. Music by Marvin Hamlisch, Lyric by Edward Kleban. Copyright © 1975 (Renewed) EDWARD KLEBAN and
SONY/ATV
MUSIC PUBLISHING LLC. All Rights for EDWARD KLEBAN Controlled by WREN MUSIC CO. All Rights for
SONY/ATV
MUSIC PUBLISHING LLC Administered by
SONY/ATV
MUSIC PUBLISHING LLC, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.
Copyright © 1975 Sony/ATV Harmony LLC (ASCAP), Wren Music Co. Inc. All Rights by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 8 Music Sq. W., Nashville, TN 37203. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission.
Part ITo my parents, Jon and Abra, who always told me to just keep writing
1. Haircut
August 1978
T
HE DAY I CUT
my hair and
completely fuck up the Christmas Card,
I am merely bored, not
a defiant brat
like Babs tells all her friends.
It is late August. I am ten. Babs is in the kitchen talking to Andie, who comes Saturday afternoons for Bloody Marys and eggs Benedict. Babs doesn’t drink alcohol. She always nurses a Baccarat champagne flute of freshly squeezed juice (grapefruit, plum, raspberry) cut with a heavy pour of Perrier. Fruit has way too many calories. I’m not even sure she likes the taste, but it looks pretty.
“So, Andie,” Babs says, “we are doing the Card tomorrow. I can’t decide if I should go summer or for more of a holiday feel. No matchy-matchy reindeer sweaters, of course, but maybe a tad less controversial than last year’s. I know the nudity was tastefully done, but I don’t want that bitch Nona Cardill writing nasty things about me in her column. That biddy probably never takes off her underwear. And all the calls from school. No sense of humor at all; no points for creativity.”
All the kids in my grade at Chicago Day were really mean when our Christmas Card arrived last year. Yes, we were naked, but I was sitting on Babs’s lap and covered her privates. That didn’t make things any better. They said I was totally weird to have my picture taken without my clothes on. The best I could come up with was that it wasn’t my idea.
“It was very avant-garde, Babs. I still have it up on my fridge,” Andie says.
I think this is kind of creepy. Babs just laughs.
I’m sitting on the floor by the kitchen table, almost out of view, reading
Tiger Beat,
which has my idol Brooke Shields on the cover. Babs got me a subscription to it for my tenth birthday and it’s one of the best presents she ever gave me. I watch them smoke and ash into their Villeroy & Boch plates—Babs’s “weekend” china. It doesn’t matter that we eat off these plates; Babs can turn anything into an ashtray. She and Andie lean into the white marble island as if they need help remaining upright. Babs wears white short-shorts and a white Playboy bunny tank top, a silver bunny head outlined on it in rhinestones.
Andie wears a brown wrap dress that is so wrinkled it looks like she dug it out from under her bed. She has Birkenstocks on her feet. When she came in, I could see the hair on her toes.
Babs is beautiful, and I wish I looked like her. She has blond hair, which she wears up in a messy French twist, and blue eyes. You might think Babs was Grace Kelly’s twin if GK said words like
cock
and
pussy
and hit little kids. Babs always said she would much rather look like Brigitte Bardot, sexy, fluid, and open-ended like an unmade bed, but she doesn’t have the curves to pull it off. She is very tall, five foot ten, and cut like a boy: slender hips, no butt, no boobs.
Babs’s legs are right in front me, and like she says, they are so
fucking fabulous.
Her calves are shea-butter rich and smell of South African lemons, thanks to her Veritas lotion. She almost never wears pants or pantyhose. She uses their bareness to take advantage of the elements: they goose-bump in the cold, glisten in the sun, go slick in the rain. Since I am her daughter, I think she might let me touch them some time. I hope I will even grow into my own pair one day. But her body is off-limits to me. It is almost as if she were afraid my small hands would leave fingerprints and ruin them forever.
Andie isn’t even remotely attractive, and this is exactly why Babs is friends with her. She has curly hair with gray in it, and big horse teeth. She always agrees with Babs, no matter what.
“That’s the difference between our Card and other people’s. As you know. Don’t just snap something and send it to your friends. Spend some time on it. Surprise people when they open the envelope. I was thinking about a
Turning Point
theme, both of us with buns and matching leotards. But with a holiday twist. I’m afraid most people won’t get it. It’s just too bad we don’t know Misha. Those fabulous tights.”
I don’t get it. Buns and leotards? Who is Misha? Since when does Babs like ballet?
“Anyone who doesn’t get that movie doesn’t deserve your Card, Babs.”
Today, Andie is surprisingly authoritative, making up standards for Babs’s friends. I think she hopes this Card will narrow the pool of people Babs likes and give Andie more of a shot. As it stands, Andie is just a daytime friend. She’s never invited for dinner when other people come. But Andie thinks if she just keeps showing up, Babs will bump her up on the roster, make space for her at the table. This will never happen. Babs makes up her mind about people and doesn’t allow for upgrades. Like me, Andie is taking the standby approach, but it just doesn’t work. There are always better people available to take the good seats.
Babs spots me listening in on their discussion and says, “Bettina, stop hovering. Go find your own fun.” Hovering is
fucking annoying,
so I stand up and leave.
Babs says things like this all the time and I am used to it. But still, I don’t want to find something else to do. I’m an only child but completely lack the mythical powers of only-child imagination. Unlike Eloise, I cannot make a day out of fixing a doll’s broken head or spend hours feeding raisins to a turtle.
I do have a nanny, but not the doting or fancy kind. Stacey is twenty and isn’t from England, but Lyons, Wisconsin. Before coming to work for Babs, she lived in a small ranch house with her family. The average tenure of my nannies is about nine months, and Stacey has been with us for two years now. A real achievement.
Stacey’s favorite parts of the job are smoking Virginia Slims menthols (Babs would never hire a nanny who didn’t smoke) and speeding down Lake Shore Drive in the Pacer Babs has given her to use. She reads
Cosmo
and highlights all the passages on how to drive a man to ecstasy. She really has no interest in me.
I don’t completely blame her. I am a little girl who offers no easy conversation and doesn’t do tricks. I don’t like stickers, don’t play with Barbies, and think cartoons are stupid. What matters to me is someday being friends with Brooke Shields. Babs met her once at Studio 54 and had Brooke autograph a cocktail napkin for me. I was so happy I put it in a Dax frame along with a cut-out picture of her. This is the best thing I have.
Unlike Brooke, I am not gorgeous, or even a tiny bit pretty. I am four-three with flat brown hair that won’t hold curls. Once, Babs tried to give it volume by attacking it with a curling iron, but the only thing she accomplished was burning my scalp. Babs promises that when I turn eleven, she will get me professional streaks for my birthday.
The one thing I seem to have going for me is that I’m thin, and Babs loves buying clothes for me. She spends lots of money on them: suede or leather pants she picks up in Paris, silk-screened T-shirts with Warhol prints on them, gray crinkled-silk pinafores with black velvet ballet flats. But none of this really matters. I’m a match that just won’t strike.
When I leave Babs and Andie, I decide to hit the playroom in the aparthouse. Babs calls our apartment this because it’s as big as a real house. Two stories, four fireplaces, six bedrooms, and eight potties. The problem is that there is really nothing I like to play with in the playroom. It’s just a large space with wall-to-wall sand-colored carpeting and big toys; Babs’s version of an indoor playground. There is a red wooden jungle gym with a metal slide, a sandbox filled with sand from some beach in France, and a life-size glossy black horse with a mane and tail that are made of real horsehair. Boring.
Besides the toys, there’s a wooden glossy green bench that looks like it has been stolen from an actual park. The bench legitimately belongs to Babs, but it’s disturbing in another way. It sports a gold plaque that says
MONTGOMERY AND EUDORA BALLENTYNE. HIT THE DECK MAY 26, 1967. MAY THEY RIP.
Montgomery and Eudora Ballentyne were Babs’s parents. They died in a boat accident the year before I was born. There’s a glass ashtray built into an armrest of the bench. In the accident, her father was decapitated on impact. Her mother, still alive, was pulled into the motor of the boat. It was still running, and it sliced her body into bloody pieces.
Above the bench are Lucas’s paintings. Lucas is Babs’s first cousin. He lives in New York City, like Brooke Shields. Lucas has some kind of free pass in Babs’s life. I can tell by the way Babs talks to him on the phone that she likes him in a way that has nothing to do with sex. She talks to him like she might a brother, and she once even apologized to him about something. Maybe since Lucas has the chocolate money too, he and Babs belong to the same tribe. Lucas is married to someone named Poppy and they have a son named JoJo, but I have never met any of them. Babs says Lucas hates to fly.
Lucas’s paintings are abstract, mostly gray and black lines on big white boards. Even though I don’t understand them, I really like them. He sends a fresh batch every two months, and Babs mails back the old ones, which he displays at a gallery and hopefully sells.