Mornings in our house usually go like this. I get up at 5:45. That sounds dumb and even crazy to a lot of people since I don’t have to be in school till 9:00, but I like having time to myself in the morning. What I do is get up, have breakfast—a toasted bagel with butter and honey and a glass of milk—and then go back to bed. By then I’m dressed, but I just kind of lie there, thinking about things. If I don’t have that, if I oversleep and have to rush off to school, I miss it. Meanwhile Deel is still in bed. She always tells me to wake her up at 7:00, but when I do, when I go into her room and poke her, she starts mumbling and grumbling and pulls the covers over her head. Deel is strange that way. She often actually sleeps with the covers pulled completely over her head. Then, at 7:30, she suddenly bounds out of bed and starts screaming at me for not waking her up early enough! Her school is way uptown—it takes her 45 minutes to get there—and mine is just across the park. The only bad thing for me is when the bus is so crowded I can’t even get on and have to walk through the park. That’s only happened a couple of times, though.
Mom’s schedule varies. Usually she sleeps late and I don’t even see her in the morning. That’s because she has an erratic schedule, depending on whether she has to go for a shooting or an audition or something. What she does for a living is act in television commercials. Deel thinks it’s gross that Mom appears in all these really sexist commercials like the one where she’s inside a huge roll of toilet paper with just her head and arms and legs poking out and a man comes along and squeezes her and says, “Hey, you’re softer than the one I have at home.” But Mom says she made enough off that one commercial alone to pay for one year of Deel’s school and that once Deel is out in the real world she’ll stop being such a snot nose and learn to compromise a little. Deel says she never will. Mom is quite sexy for a mother. She’s really tall, five-ten—about two inches taller than Daddy, even more with heels—and she has bright red-blond hair. I guess I shouldn’t reveal this, but that’s not her real hair color. Her real hair color is brown, but when she was doing a Broadway musical in her twenties she had to play a role called Carrot Top, so she dyed it and everyone said how sexy it looked and she’s done it ever since. Her main problem is that she has to dye her eyebrows too or she’ll look weird. Mom’s main assets as an actress are her legs, which are really long, and her smile. She has a kind of big mouth and her teeth are parted a little in the middle (just like mine) but directors like that. They think it looks engaging and natural so she’s never had it corrected.
Daddy is usually just about getting up at 8:15, which is when I leave. He comes into the kitchen in his jogging suit—it’s a leisure suit, really, which Mom’s brother got him; he doesn’t actually jog—and gets out his juice and Product 19. Poor Daddy has gotten a little bit plump—he’s always on a diet. I know what he weighs—169—and what he wants to weigh is 155 like he used to. His problem is noshing. He’s usually good until after dinner when he sometimes reads or watches TV and sneaks into the kitchen for little snacks. Daddy has an office he goes to—he’s a filmmaker and does things like figure out projects and try to raise the money, and then, if he does, he directs them. They’re usually documentaries about serious things. You might have seen the one he did about this man who was dying of cancer: Death Rites. That was on TV five years ago and it won an Emmy. Daddy’s quite a serious person in general. He takes everything very hard, which is probably why he got so hysterical last night when he found Joshua and me fucking in the bathroom at four in the morning.
“We have to talk about this,” he started saying as I was going to get my knapsack.
“Daddy, I’ll be late for school,” I said. I started getting into my coat.
Mom had gotten up, which is unusual for her. Maybe Daddy had told her about what happened. She was wearing one of her sexy nightgowns, the tiger-skin one with the plunging neckline, and her hair was all rumpled the way it usually is in the morning. “Darling, please,” she said, taking Daddy’s arm. “There’s plenty of time to talk about it this evening. Why make her late for school?”
Daddy whirled around. “You’re treating this like some trivial, irrelevant incident,” he yelled. “This is our daughter!”
“It is?” Mom said wryly. “Gee, you could’ve fooled me.”
Daddy hates it when Mom horses around about things he thinks are serious. “Okay,” he said, sighing heavily. “Nothing matters. Our children don’t matter, the state of the world doesn’t matter . . . it’s all just one big, delightful joke.”
“Sweetie,” Mom drawled in her soothing voice (she comes from Kentucky and doesn’t have a southern accent at all, except, as she says, “when it’s helpful”), “I’m just saying why wreck everyone’s day by making a huge scene at eight in the morning? Tat’ll explain everything to us tonight, won’t you, hon?”
I smiled at Mom. Mom’s my ally, she’s always on my side. I can count on her. “Sure,” I said, swallowing. Actually, I’m not sure I have a very good explanation, but maybe I can think of one during the day.
“You come right home after school,” Daddy yelled at me as I went out the door. “No fooling around. Straight home!”
Fooling around? What did he mean? Basically, they’ve been after Deel this year not to “fool around” after school, meaning go to some friend’s house and smoke pot. Some of our friends’ parents don’t mind if they smoke pot at home. Some of our friends’ parents don’t mind what they do. Like Gina’s parents. Her mother says that as long as they’re going to do it, why not do it at home? That sounds so sensible. When I’m a parent, that’s what I’m going to tell my children.
Joshua’s not in my school. He goes to Stuyvesant. Actually, he used to go to Riverdale and was friendly with some kids Deel hung around with. That’s how we first met. He came over with some of Deel’s friends one afternoon, and we kind of hit it off. The boys in my class are just not that great. I mean, they’re okay, but nothing to write home about. I guess 14-year-old boys just aren’t that, well, polished or suave. Suave’s sort of the wrong word—Joshua’s not suave, exactly. But he’s just more—you can talk to him about things. He’s more laid back. You don’t have to worry that he’s going to just lunge at you all the time. Like with sex. He says he wants me to enjoy it too. I like it when boys are considerate that way. Joshua’s such a nice person, which is why the whole thing with Daddy is so ironical. I mean, it wasn’t even Joshua’s fault he stayed so late last night. It was mine. I was the one who suggested it. That’s why I really hope I haven’t gotten him into trouble. I just pray Daddy doesn’t call up his parents or do something unspeakably gross like that.
This is what happened. I might as well tell you so you’ll know the facts because Daddy’s version will make it sound all lurid and hideous and it wasn’t at all.
The deal I have with Mom and Daddy is this: on weekdays I have a curfew of 10:00 and on vacations and weekends 1:00. Actually, it’s Daddy more than Mom who sets the rules. He’s more of a rule person, if you know what I mean. Mom always says you have to make up your own rules, which gets Daddy mad; I guess he thinks she’s setting a bad example for us by saying things like that. Last night was a Sunday so usually Mom and Daddy would have been home, but this particular Sunday Mom’s college roommate, Angela Weitzman, had invited them to dinner. Daddy hates Angela Weitzman, partly because she lives way out in Connecticut someplace, which is an hour’s drive both ways, and also because her husband is a gynecologist who breeds horses. Daddy says he’s a Philistine and a bore, and he wishes Mom would meet Angela for lunch and not force him to go out there. Mom says it’s only once a year and Angela would