Let me go back a couple of years, though, before I get into it, so you can see the whole picture.
Remember how I was talking about the first kiss with the future minister and that after that I started dating a lot of boys and I didn't care that my parents went away and left me alone?
Well, I kind of went a little crazy. It was like the future minister released a wildcat of insatiable urges.
My perm grew out, I started eating sensibly, and I started going for weekly cortisone shots at the dermo. Suddenly, I was not so bad looking anymore and the guys took notice.
I admit it. By the age of eighteen I had dated almost every guy on the Main Line. I'm not saying I slept with all of them, but I will admit that I slept with way too many. It wasn't like I was just sleeping with guys randomly, but I really thought they wanted to date me. Yes, I was incredibly young and dumb. Looking back, I truly wish I'd had the knowledge and the confidence at the time to know that my body was a sacred object and should only have been shared with someone who truly understood and appreciated what I was handing over. I didn't get that until years later. And, thankfully, I think it was going through all that I did that taught me that lesson. I swung from extreme to extreme, and eventually I realized I had to settle down in the middle. That's something that needs to be worked on, on earth. When you have that mandatory health class in the seventh grade and you see that movie about puberty, sure, they should tell you what's happening to your body, but along with that they should tell you what a gift your body really is, and since it is a gift, you should treat it as such. It's not that I blame Mrs. Bickle, my seventh-grade health teacher, or my parents or any other elder, but I think it's something that's terribly overlooked. I always thought that if I ever had a daughter, that would be the first thing I'd instill in her.
Still, that time in my life was a blast. Pen and I and the other girls got fake IDs so we were able to get into all the hot Philly clubs. We had a bunch of older friends who took us under their wing, and finally going out didn't mean going to some suburban keg party, it meant fancy dinners and champagne. Since we needed to look good when we went to these places, this is when I really started getting into fashion, and as my dad said, he “had the credit card bills to prove it.” Mom liked how I looked though. “I can't believe what a pretty young woman you've turned into,” she'd say. “Grandmom would be so proud.”
Even the guys at school wanted to date me. The twins, Seth and Tom Rosso, started being nice to me when they heard I was the nightlife queen of Philly. Dana Stanbury and Kerry Collins and Olivia Wilson counted on me for advice on how to get guys when before it had always been the other way around. I was fast becoming the most popular girl in school for my decadent ways.
I do want to say one positive thing, if I may. I might have been partying too much, but I never did drugs. No, I swear, I didn't. I tried pot once and it got me so paranoid that I had to hide in a stall in the bathroom at the Black Banana club for three hours until the high calmed down. That was enough to scare me off of drugs forever. I will admit that I did drink a bit though. Vodka was my thing, and that thing about having sex with a lot of different guys? Yeah, I did that a lot, too; so, yeah, I didn't do drugs, but I did everything else that an underage girl should not be doing, and if I knew then what I know now, this entire best day would not be here. Thing was, I just didn't know it at the time. I have to be honest and include it on the “best day” list, even if I know better now.
School suffered because of my partying. By the twelfth grade, I'd gone from getting pretty good grades to barely getting by. I got a 440 for my combined SAT scores because the night before I went out with friends until five in the morning. I arrived at the test thirty minutes late, wearing my pajamas and a hangover. When all the kids got their SAT scores back, I got a note to come see the guidance counselor. When I got to her office, not only was she there, but so were my parents. As you know, for my father to miss a minute of work, this was huge and really, really bad.
“Alexandra,” Mrs. Anderson said in her always-calm, wispy voice, “the reason we called you here is because we're a little concerned about your SAT scores.”
“A little?!” Dad said, raising his voice.
“What'd I get, 900, 1,000?” I asked seriously. Nothing fazed me at this age. So dumb.
“You got a goddamned 440 combined!” my father shouted at me. “You get two hundred points for spelling your name correctly, and I hope you at least did that right!”
“Bill, please,” my mom said, trying to calm him down. Mom took Mrs. Anderson's words to heart when she told them that a decline in grades like mine could have an underlying cause like depression.
“Alex,” Mom said, “we just can't understand how this could have happened. What happened to all the studying time you had with that SAT tutor we got you?”
Poor Mom. I was actually skipping out on that SAT tutor and running downtown to party with my friends. He was a student at Villanova they'd hired, and when I went to meet him at the Ludington Library, all I did was hand him my parents' check and leave. The guy must have made a fortune from my parents. I hope he at least did something good with the money.
I was really shocked at the 440 though. I honestly thought I'd done better than that.
“Is there anything going on that we should know about? Have things been hard for you lately?” Mrs. Anderson asked, taking my hand.
“She's got it easier than anyone I know,” my dad shouted. “She's got a brand-new BMW to drive around and she buys clothes and more clothes. Don't think I don't notice those credit card bills, Alexandra! What this girl needs is a good swift kick in the ass for all the good we've given her!”
Surprisingly, nothing changed after that. I think my parents might have grounded me, or at least they said they were grounding me, but since they weren't around to check that I was actually grounded, I went out anyway. I even thought it was funny whenever one of my friends mentioned my SAT score. It was the classic anecdote at school. My nickname became 440, and I got a kick out of that, too.
In the end, the SAT thing didn't amount to any real problem. Remember, my daddy was rich and even though I couldn't have cared less if I went to college or not, he did. He was going to make sure that I not only went to college, I was going to my parents' college, the University of Pennsylvania, and there was going to be the Bill and Maxine Dorenfield gymnasium to make sure it happened.
I gotta say, though, I loved college. I was out of high school and away from the Main Line and in town with my own single dorm room (Mom was afraid I wouldn't get enough sleep if I had roommates). Eventually, I had my own apartment in town (yes, in a Dorenfield-owned building, but Dad was never there, and, frankly, I wasn't either).
After high school, Dana Stanbury went to the University of Colorado and Kerry Collins went to Pepperdine in California; Olivia Wilson went to Northwestern in Chicago. Pen, however, went to NYU, and if there was anything to beat the club scene in Philly, it was the club scene in New York. I'd even asked my parents if I could transfer to NYU, but they were dead against it.
“With all the money I shelled out to get you into Penn?” Dad yelled. “You are going to Penn and you are going to like it!”
So, by day (if I could get up) I was a student majoring in psychology at Penn. By night I was a club kid in New York City, arriving back in Philly just in time for a 9:00 a.m. class, still in the clothes I was wearing the night before (actually, it wasn't even the night before, it was two hours before). Needless to say, I was the best-dressed girl in Psych 101.
Thing was, it was the first time in my life that I was ever free. I was making all kinds of new friends in the New York club scene. Ray Milland had a lost weekend? I had a lost four years and, yes, it was decadent and bad, but it was the greatest.
Then one fall Saturday morning in Manhattan, Pen and I were twenty-two and we'd both graduated from college that prior spring. We were just going back to her studio apartment on Bleecker and Broadway after a night of clubbing. It was about 7:00 a.m. Neither of us felt like taking a cab. The morning was just perfect, no clouds, a nice breeze, not too many people on the street. It was one of those moments when you suddenly take a deep breath and reflect on your life and realize that right now things are really good. I was in the greatest city in the world with my best friend, and we'd spent a night dancing and flirting nonstop. No parents were around to tell us what to do. We had all the money we needed thanks to our parents' credit cards. Neither of us had a job at that point, though Pen had been contemplating law school. (She eventually went, but not for another year.) That didn't matter though. That morning, walking through the streets of lower Manhattan with my best friend, life was really good.
And then the rain started.
No, I mean real rain, out of nowhere; quarter-size raindrops came falling out of the sky and we had no shelter. We started running and running along Houston Street as the rain pelted us. I was laughing so hard that I couldn't keep up with Pen, who was half a block in front of me by then. When she stopped and looked back, I must have been such a sight because she laughed so hard she fell to the sidewalk.
This is probably one of those moments that no one else would think was funny unless they were there. I'll put it this way though. Think about your own best friend. Think about a time in your life together when you made each other laugh so hard but no one else got the joke when you told it later. That's the kind of moment I'm talking about. This is the moment when all the great moments you've shared together rush back into your head. I saw Pen on her first day at the Friends School, all fat and tall and gawky looking, and remembered the rescued feeling I had when she opened that trash bag and got me out of it. I could see us at ten, playing in my bedroom with my dolls from around the world, and then at twelve when we'd sit on my bed and look through my mother's
Vogue
magazines and pretend that we were the women in those pictures. We were fourteen when we stole cigarettes from her mother's purse and went behind her house to smoke them (well, cough them is more like it). I hear her voice, all groggy and sick, when she told me she got food poisoning from the steak sandwich at school, which would eventually lead to my first kiss. I see us holding hands with our fantastic twenty-year-old figures, making our way through a New York City club as men tried to hit on us. I hear us gabbing and laughing and hours and hours of conversations that lead up to this moment. My best friend in the world is lying on a downtown New York sidewalk at seven in the morning while rain pelts us, and we can't stop laughing as I try to pick her back up.
Do you get where I'm coming from? I thought you would.
So we finally got back to her apartment, soaking wet. Pen had this crummy studio just off Broadway that cost $1,000 a month. If it wasn't the roaches that were bothering her, it was her furnace. So much heat would radiate from that thing, sometimes she'd lose five pounds just by sweating through a half hour of television. She tried legal action to get the furnace fixed (and eventually won a nice settlement), but on that particular morning it was worse than it ever was. Because of the intense rain, by the time we got back to her apartment it wasn't even a dry heat. The apartment had gone from being merely a sauna to a full-blown steam room. There was so much moisture in the air that it was even fogging up the windows, and we were feeling even more soaked from just sitting in her apartment. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the dampness of the place was making it difficult to see each other. It was the Amazon rain forest relocated to Bleecker and Broadway. So I made a wise request.
“We can't stay here,” I said. “We're checking into a hotel.”
I don't remember which of us suggested the Plaza. It was probably me. I was always a huge
Eloise
fan, but that part is cloudy.
Anyway, so we checked into the Plaza, still in our soaked clothes from the night before. I used my father's credit card. “The magical card,” Pen called it since all I ever did was charge things and I never saw or knew the balance on the bill. Why my parents let me get away with it, I don't know. I guess in some ways I was still the miracle child to them. There were no smaller rooms available, all they had was a suite, and Pen and I both remarked that we really needed the space anyway. I don't remember how much the room was at the time, could have been $1,000 or more, but remember, I had that magical credit card so price was not an issue.
The suite had two rooms and a view of Central Park. We both were starving, so we ordered half the menu from room service and sat in our Plaza terrycloth robes as we watched television. We eventually fell asleep around noon.
It was dark by the time we got up. Since we had graduated from college, both of us led nocturnal lives.
“Hey, we have no clothes,” Pen struggled to say as we awoke.
We were meeting some guys we'd met the night before, at I Tre Merli for dinner at ten, and it only seemed logical that we find some new clothes.
So we took the magical credit card and went to Bergdorf's. I can't even remember what the heck we bought that pushed the bill so high. I know I got a velvet three-quarter coat and Pen got a Shetland coat (it was getting cold out). I know we had to buy some underwear and bras, and Pen saw a pair of jeans that looked amazing on her and I loved this tight black lycra dress with fringes of velvet coming off the bottom. We might have had a drink or two at the Oak Room bar beforehand (or three or four), and we both might have been a little drunk. Since we didn't have any hair products or even a brush, the concierge at the Plaza made us an appointment at John Dellaria and we got our hair and makeup done. I would find out later that our purchases ran over $20,000, but that wasn't until much later.