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If Only There Was A Word Called Adulting - Chapter 3 Pt 1
March 07, 2022 03:52AM |
Fall 1993, Buffalo, New York
It took coming to a tiny corner of upstate New York, six hours away from the Big Apple, and living in a world of only girls to finally set me free. This isn’t the first time I went far away from home, for Father and Grandma had brought us on vacations to Europe and Asia since we were very little – but it is the first time I can make choices without someone from home watching over me.
Before this, my everyday life was a circle of being shuttled from home to school and sometimes to Charles’ house; and then weekends and holidays were planned by Father or Grandma or our au pair. Where we shopped, what movies we watched, the places we’d go to for holidays – all of these were choreographed to a fault, and I simply went along with whatever had been decided by my minders. It did not even occur to me to feel trapped, for I had known nothing else. Being two years older than me, Liz had always been my yardstick for all that a girl ought to be, for she had been virtually crafted in Father’s image and he doted on her alone. After Mary was born, our nanny could no longer handle all three of us; since then, there were a string of au pairs minding only Liz in the beginning, and then taking me on as well when I started school, for Mary was such a handful when she was a toddler that it took all of one nanny and then some to look after her. Our au pairs were like a rotating cast of surrogate big sisters, flipping through magazines with us to pick out clothing styles so Grandma would know how to shop for us, taking us to all the new movies that were “in” at the moment, and going through the Billboard Hot 100 with us every week on the radio. Grandma was the one who stocked my bookshelf, because I was the only one who would sit quietly and listen as she read increasingly longer bedtime stories to us, going through three bedrooms every night chasing our staggered bedtimes. Whereas my sisters would interrupt her and keep asking for stuff, using story time only as a tactic to delay going to sleep, I actually enjoyed her stories and asked to read along with her. So, she knew I was the only one who would treasure Mom’s old collection of children’s literature, and it all got shifted into my room. But it also meant that for the first twelve or thirteen years of my life, I didn’t even get to decide which books I got to read – I thought I was picking out my own books from my shelf, which seemed like an endless collection at the time, but actually, I had no idea that any books existed beyond what my shelf told me about.
Coming out to camp, and then to boarding school, my world has suddenly turned around. For the first time, I have choices. Even though my schedule is heavily structured, there are elective activities where it’s entirely up to me to pick whatever I want, instead of asking Father or Grandma to give me permission to do things. For the first time, I have variety. I’m not limited to the things our au pairs or Liz or Grandma would do, so I have the chance, and in fact there’s plenty of grown-ups who encourage me to do things I’ve never done before. Sailing, riding, pottery, community service, computer science, physics, hiking, and skiing – so many things I never thought about before leaving home are now available to me, and I’ve discovered that the world is much bigger and broader than the little slice my au pairs, Grandma and my childhood books showed to me. For the first time, I have responsibilities. I have to pitch in with cleaning up my cabin at camp and my dorm at school, keep track of my own things, and stay on top of my schedule without someone to remind me about tests, tryouts, sporting meets, and appointments. For the first time, I have little pockets of time to explore my world unsupervised. During weekends at SEM, we can go into town and do our own thing for a few hours, so I can go into stores and pick out clothing that Grandma would never have bought for me. And for the first time, there’s people who trust me enough to count on me for getting real stuff done. Near the end of my seven weeks at Raquette Lake Camp, my age group went on a 90-mile, 4-day canoe trip, where all of us had roles to play in keeping everyone together, staying safe, making steady progress along the lake, and taking care of all the group supplies. When he sent me off to camp and boarding school, Father only thought he was opening up opportunities for me to make friends with other girls from rich families all over the East Coast. Little did he know that in the process, he’s handed me the keys to explore the outside world on my own terms too.
And then, you’d be surprised at how liberating a world without boys can be. Back when I went to a school with both boys and girls, there were those spaces people just expected the boys to own – team sports, video games, science, and math, to name a few. And if you were a girl, you dreamed of doing all the things the cool girls did – wearing the right clothes, having pretty handwriting and artwork, getting your stories published in the school magazine, getting into dance shows, and being invited to parties on the weekends. But when everybody is a girl and our school has everything out there for us to do, there’s no more talk about what’s “boy stuff” or “girl stuff” anymore, it’s just all about experiencing the world out there. It also means everyone has a voice, and that means much more to me now that I’m old enough to have a proper answer when people ask me what I think about things. In the Lower School and Middle School back home, our teachers taught us like the children that we were. Always, the teacher had the correct answer, and our job was to remember stuff and get it right. There was no such thing as debate, and no room for us to express our own opinions. In any case, even if we’d had the freedom for discussions back in the Middle School, the boys made so much noise I bet they’d have hogged everybody’s air time. So now that we all are girls here at SEM, we are all here on equal footing and everybody gets to say what they think. That’s something I never had before, not only at school but also at home, where Father and Grandma always knew best.
Having a free run of the library on my own – both our enormous school library at SEM and the public library downtown – opens up entire worlds for me too. When I was living at home, the books Grandma put on my shelf were always about girlhood: I had children’s classics like Little Women, The Secret Garden, What Katy Did, Anne of Green Gables, Pollyanna, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and A Little Princess; the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder; the Ramona and Anastasia series by Beverly Cleary and Lois Lowry respectively; St. Clare’s and Mallory Towers stories by Enid Blyton; the Chalet School series by Elinor Brent-Dyer, and Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself by Judy Blume. After I outgrew kiddie books and started looking for something more grown-up to read, she replaced those with Austen and Bronte and Gone with the Wind and Beverly Cleary’s teen books: Fifteen, Jean and Johnny, The Luckiest Girl and Sister of the Bride. She also stocked my bookshelf with tons of Judy Blume, which is how I learned about what to expect when girls grow up, because Grandma would have considered it vulgar to have The Talk with me directly. In the libraries of the world at large, though, there are many stories which are not about girlhood or romance or marriage – in freshman year here at SEM, I’ve lapped up Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, Moby-Dick, Lord of the Flies, and Catcher in the Rye already. Through these books I learned of a world that is not seen through rose-tinted glasses; where people don’t need to be good-looking, rich or white to have a voice and be heroes; that everybody has a mean streak in them, and that it is much easier to choose evil than good. And surprisingly, instead of making me sad, this knowledge has made me feel powerful. Because from then on, I’ve been able to look back at how we weren’t quite the perfect family at home and I might not be quite the perfect girl with the perfect life, but now I know that the world is messy and difficult and being a good person doesn’t necessarily mean all the good things will happen to you. Yet somehow, I’ll still get through it anyway just like so many other people have.
The summer after freshman year, Charles and I had our Level 1 driving licenses, and we were learning to drive together in the Chevy Impala that Charles’ parents had bought for him to learn with. Mrs. Musgrove was just like I’d always remembered her when I was home for freshman year winter break, but to everyone’s surprise, sometime during spring semester she learned that she was expecting another child, a younger sibling for Charles at last, and by the time it was June, she’d gotten so huge she couldn’t move around much. So, our chauffeur, Mr. Hill, was the one who taught both Charles and me to drive; he’d bring me up to the Musgroves’ house at St. Clair Shores whenever Father and Grandma didn’t need to use our car, and the three of us would get into the Impala and then hit the road. I’d picked up a map of metro Detroit from the bookstore, and it was really fun telling Mr. Hill which parts of town we wanted him to take us to. By the end of the summer, we’d explored every street of metro Detroit that was safe for us to go, and I felt great about being able to find my own way around town.
Charles had been an only child for so long that his mom having another kid had left him at a bit of a loose end all around, so now it was my turn to have him over at our house to hang out. There really wasn’t much to do around the house to entertain a boy – we still weren’t allowed into the kitchen; nobody had ever bought us Nintendo or Sega consoles because we’re all girls, so Charles had to get the CD-ROMs of his favourite games and install them on our computer; and even if he’d been into reading, none of the books on my old shelf would have been interesting to him. So, we did the best we could: we went into the basement entertainment room, where Father had upgraded his hi-fi, replacing the old unit with a huge new MacIntosh surround sound system and home cinema during the year while I was away. There’s now a brand new built-in cabinet from floor to ceiling filled to the brim with his CD collection, because apparently, he’s been on a shopping spree to buy the CD version of every single gramophone record that Grandma had kept from the times when Mom was alive, adding those to his already extensive CD collection. Thankfully, Grandma stopped him from throwing away the stack of Mom’s old records and brought them back to her house together with her old gramophone player to put away as keepsakes. That meant we had a decent time playing Father’s CDs, and dancing to the music together sometimes just for fun. We also went through Father’s entire stack of laser discs, watching everything from Madame Butterfly to Kindergarten Cop just because we were so bored. Although Charles is more into the light-hearted rom-com and action movies, I made him sit through The Silence of the Lambs, Dead Poets Society and Scent of a Woman – all the good movies that were too dark for our au pairs to take us to back when they were playing in theatres. Still, we were running out of stuff to do by August, and that’s why I am so happy now for fall term to start again, so I can come back to SEM and my world can grow bigger again.
This year, I’ll be rooming with Elise Barnett; our teachers make it a point to get to know everyone really well, so now that they’ve spent a whole year with us, they have a pretty good idea who’s going to get along with whom. We’re the “STEM girls” of our class – in the beginning, pretty much everybody thought they’d suck at math and science because it was boy stuff, but when we were actually forced to spend time on it even though we were girls, it turned out I was better at it than at writing and art. Elise was one of those girls who had never cared about what was for girls or for boys ever since she was a little kid, so she was good at all the boy stuff, like math and science and sports and hiking, all the way from the beginning. When we started out, she had to help me with my math homework, though after a couple months I caught up with her. And because we both like hiking and reading too, we ended up hanging out together whenever Liz didn’t pull me along to join her and her friends. We shopped at local thrift stores in Buffalo during weekends, went on all the outdoor activities arranged by SEM, and because Elise is full of joy and humour, so everyone thinks she’s cool, I also ended up in the cool crowd in my class by association. So now that we’ll be roommates, we won’t be short of people wanting to hang out with us in our dorm house.
And not long after term begins, Charles mails me something and everybody’s excited to see me getting mail from a boy. It’s a picture of Mrs. Musgrove seated on the generous couch in their living room, smiling from ear to ear, holding two baby girls swaddled in pink and purple blankets, one in each arm. There’s a banner in the background saying, “Welcome home, Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove”, and Charles and his dad are squished on the couch on each side of her. “I have two baby sisters now,” are the only words he wrote to me, scrawled on the back of the photo.
“Hmm,” says Elise. “That doesn’t really look like much of a love letter to me. But it’s really cute how he wrote you just to show you his new baby sisters.”
“Oh, Charles isn’t really my boyfriend,” I reply. “Just someone who’s been a really good friend since we were three, who also happens to be a boy. He’s always been almost like the brother I never had, though I don’t know if that’ll still be the same now that he’s got real sisters of his own.”
Summer 1994, Grosse Pointe, Michigan
If you ask Liz, turning sixteen would be all about being “sweet sixteen”, the prime age for getting attention from boys; but if you ask me, the two biggest things about being sixteen are the ones that that bring my freedom to an entirely new level: my Level 2 driving licence and being able to work. All my life before this, I’ve had to ask and wait for people to take me to places; but now, that’s all changed when Father has an Audi 80 sedan, which he bought two years ago when Liz turned sixteen, that can be all mine during the day because Liz only uses it at night. I just need to make a deal with Mr. Hill to make sure he takes Liz to the mall whenever she wants to go there, and I’m all on my own to roam free this summer.
Mrs. Musgrove’s been working mornings at the front desk at the main Musgrove garage for as long as Mr. Musgrove can remember; she’d drop off Charles at school, then take customer calls and check people in for their repairs from 9 am to 3 pm, and then she’d go off to pick Charles up, take him home and get dinner ready. Mr. Musgrove tells me she took six months off when Henrietta and Louisa were born, and then she’s put them into day care and started again. But since school is out for the summer, he hopes that Charles can help out and he can hire me, now that I’m sixteen, and if we can man the front desk between us during the summer, then they can take the twins out of day care for these few months and Mrs. Musgrove can have some quality time bonding with them at home.
Pretty soon, I’m the one who ends up doing most of the phone duty, because people like my voice and I’ve learned the art of getting people to calm down when they’re frustrated. No biggie, because that’s what we’ve had to do with Liz and Mary all my life. Charles does stuff like printing and filing papers, but he gets bored easily and often he wanders off to look at the cars and watch what the mechanics are doing. After work, I drive Charles home and drop in on Mrs. Musgrove and the babies for a bit. It’s me who gives Charles’ baby sisters their nicknames; at ten months old, they’re at the age when they zip around the house at warp speed on hands and knees and have figured out how to pull themselves up to stand hanging onto walls and furniture. Naturally, they’re getting into everything in the house and have to be pulled out from everywhere, but when I clap my hands and call out, “Het-ty! Lu-lu!” in a sing-song voice, they’ll always come. And so those names stick, till everyone forgets they had names that were too big for them in the first place. Of course, Father and Grandma think I’m just hanging around at the Musgroves’ house with Charles all day; they’ll never stand for it if they knew I was working for money, especially at the age of sixteen. But “Charles” usually is a magic word with them; I know Father’s been a business friend of Mr. Musgrove’s for the longest time, and they’ve always loved how well I get on with Charles. So, if I want to do anything, I just need to drag Charles’ name into it, and Father and Grandma will readily approve.
Mostly the Musgroves’ body shop gets fender benders, but one morning, they bring in a silver grey classic Mercedes that’s been smashed in full frontal impact; thankfully, the owner isn’t injured and he comes in with his car, practically blubbering because it’s been totalled. It’s one of those old ones where the doors pop up from the top of the roof, and ironically, they still work fine even with the front of the car all mangled and twisted. There isn’t anyone else in line, so I can leave my work station behind the counter and check the car out at closer range. The shininess of the chrome details, the slim and delicate steering wheel, the perfect complement to a lady’s hand in a cream-colored glove, in those halcyon days when ladies had hats and gloves and gentlemen had suits and bowlers, at least that’s how they were in Grandma’s old movies.
“They don’t make ‘em like that any more, what a pity,” says Mr. Musgrove. “Y’know, cars are so much safer these days, but then, that’s why they make ‘em all the same. Gullwing doors, that’s what they call these things” – he taps one of the doors that are hanging ajar, and I realize how descriptive that name is, for they’re bent just so, a silver seagull spreading its wings – “they can’t have ‘em, ‘cause in a crash, if your door hinges are on the roof, it could bring your whole roof down. Ah well. I dunno if we can save this one, but we’ll give it our best shot.”
Thankfully it isn’t a busy day, so I can come out between customers with a piece of letter-size blank white paper I filched from the photocopier and a borrowed pencil, and draw. I haven’t done this in years, not since I failed art in fifth grade, but for some reason I want to re-create this car as it might’ve looked during its glory days, with a silhouette of a genteel lady with her hair coiffed just so, her hand gently resting on the wheel. My sketch is just black and white in pencil, and I add on layer after layer of feathered lines and shadows all day, forgetting all about lunch break and ignoring Charles.
When the owner comes in just before we close the reception at 3 pm, Mr. Musgrove solemnly tells him the bad news. Nobody’s really surprised, because this car is so old we couldn’t possibly get parts to build an entire new engine and reconstruct the bonnet and front fascia from scratch, but his shoulders slump in dejection anyway.
“Excuse me, sir.” I feel a little shy about approaching him directly, but still gather up the courage to timidly tap his shoulder lightly and hand him my picture. “I drew your car, so you could have something to remember it with. And I know maybe I’m not all that good, but I did my very best, and I hope I did it justice.”
“Not that good? Young lady, you sure undersell yourself,” says the owner, a fifty-something man in a shirt and tie, in a booming voice. “Such details! Such realism! It’s a wonder nobody’s picked you up to be an artist, or a designer. Thank you – I will treasure this, all the rest of my life.”
“If I’m so good, then why was I almost failing art all the time in Lower School?” I ask Mrs. Musgrove when Charles and I get back from work. “I don’t think that guy was funning me, he sure didn’t sound like it, but I just can’t figure out how what he said could possibly be true.”
“Honey, why don’t you bring some of your old drawings out for us to look at tomorrow?” Mrs. Musgrove, the quintessential mom with the Mom-Mobile, which has now been upsized to a seven-seater minivan after the additions of Hetty and Lulu, always has all the mom answers I never get at home. “I kept all of Charles’ old artwork, you know. Let’s take a look at them and compare, and then I can tell you what I think.”
When we go through my old childhood art the next day, we find that even all the way back in second or third grade, I was already drawing in perspective. There were cars, lots of them, identifiable as BMWs or Mercedes-Benzes or Chevys or Pontiacs by their front grilles and logos. Because there were lots of cars, there were also plenty of roads, drawn with dotted divider lines and coloured in grey. Mostly the roads were flanked by buildings – houses, shop-fronts – and there were people walking down the sidewalks, usually families with lots of kids. Back then, all my people were facing sideways, because I only knew how to draw people in profile, and I was picky about making my people look real. The grades were marked in red on the reverse side of the paintings – most of them were C’s, with the occasional C+, and no A’s or B’s. Eventually in fifth grade, the C’s became D’s, but thankfully, they stopped making us do crayon pictures when we went up to Middle School, so that was the worst it ever got.
Mrs. Musgrove spreads all of Charles’ second- to fifth- grade artwork beside mine. I remember he did OK, generally getting B’s, and he’d always managed to get multicoloured smudges of crayon smeared all over his face and hands when he drew. Where I made lines in thin pencil, his were all drawn over with thick black crayon; everything was two-dimensional, but his colours were all graduated in multi-tone ombre patterns. Grass was two shades of green, alternating in slanted waves; cars were bright primary red or blue or yellow, not the muted shades of burgundy or navy or black or white or silver you see on actual cars on the roads. His people looked like stick figures, but they always had big round eyes and wide red smiles. The sky, filling up half the paper with multiple shades of blue, always had fluffy white clouds, and the grass always was strewn with red, pink, yellow and orange flowers. My paintings had lots of lines but not many colours, while his had all the colours but the lines and shapes were all very simple.
“Do you see the difference now?” Mrs. Musgrove kneels beside me as we contemplate the rows of artwork we’ve laid out on the kitchen floor, her arm draped across my shoulders. “Anne, hon, you painted like a grown-up, and Charles, bless his heart, he still painted like a kid back then. And the teachers expect a kid of eight or nine or ten to fill the page with colours, but you were so focused on capturing all the detail you saw on the streets that you never drew the sun or the sky. But just because you weren’t painting the kind of pictures your teachers expected, that doesn’t make you a bad artist at all. I dare say you probably were at least as good, if not a better artist than Charles back then, and you still are.”
After the incident with the gullwing Mercedes, Charles and I start shifting roles. Somehow, I end up being the one going around carrying tools to all the mechanics, while Charles takes over the front desk on top of doing the paperwork. One day, Mr. Musgrove stops next to me when he’s making his rounds and acknowledges me with a nod of approval.
“Anne, I’d thought all the gasoline has gone away from your family’s blood, until now,” he says. “I’m glad you’ve kept it going in the new generation.”
“Gasoline? In the Elliot blood?” I know vaguely that Father and Mr. Musgrove are friends, but I’ve never really thought much about how Father makes his money. “When was that? And how can that be, when I’ve never seen Father do anything with cars except sit in the back seat of them?”
“So, you don’t know how your family got rich, then? Well, the first generation of the Elliots was right there when they made the Model T Ford, making mechanical parts for cars. Here – come slide down with me right under here – see, all the parts that link all the way from the steering column to the wheels, like this. They’ve been selling original parts to the auto manufacturers, and then spare parts for repair and maintenance to garages like us – and that’s why your dad and I, we’re best buds for a reason. Our survival depends on each other.”
For the rest of the summer, Mr. Musgrove teaches me all kinds of things about cars – what all that stuff under the hood does; how the steering and braking mechanisms are all connected in the underbody of the car; and telling me about how computers and electronics are starting to take over automobiles. We talk about cars and safety, and how cars are getting chunkier and wider because side airbags have become standard and car body structures are now being built with special zones, so they’ll keep their shape where it’s needed to keep people safe, while absorbing the impact in a crash. And that’s when I realize that all of the work that goes into designing and making cars and their parts is extremely useful and helpful, because it saves people’s lives, so it makes the world better.
“What should I do to continue all this? All the work that Father’s company’s been doing?” I ask Mr. Musgrove.
“Well, you can start by doing engineering when you go to college. To work on autos, you’ll probably want to do mechanical engineering. And then you’ll come back out to your old man’s company, and they’ll teach you from there. And of course, I’d be happy to show you anything about cars – just pop over anytime you want.”
Winter 1994, New York City
Well one of the things that isn’t fun about being part of the Elliot family, is how Father and Grandma think it’s so important to show us off to everybody. Most people think “coming out” into society is one of those old things from Pride and Prejudice that went the way of the dodo in the twentieth century, but to Father, the International Debutante Ball in the Waldorf Astoria is The Big Thing each of us girls absolutely must do the winter of the first even year after we turn sixteen. Oh of course, Liz loved it; although Mary and I weren’t allowed inside the ballroom, Father filmed her spectacular Texas Dip curtsey on his Sony Camcorder, and I’ve been watching over and over how she dipped to the ground with her hands stretching out up and backwards like the wings of a swan, her white gloved hand clutching Cousin William’s in a feather-light touch as he bowed gracefully to one side to let her go all the way down. It’s such a lovely sight, if I didn’t have to think about how I’ll need to pull off such a move too; me, the klutz who’s been failing all the ballet auditions at school from ages eight through fourteen.
For years, we’ve been preparing for this – the ballroom dancing lessons Father made me do on weekends since I was five; the endless fittings for my lacy, strapless white dress which Father flew me back to Detroit for throughout this year; and of course, the task of picking my escort. Liz has had a crush on our third cousin, William Elliot, since forever, and he kindly obliged when Father asked him to escort her because he’ll do anything to make Father happy; but I’m scared of him when he’s so much older, and I’m sure he’ll laugh at me if I do anything dorky like tripping over my skirts or messing up my curtsey. Liz dragged me to mixers all through sophomore year to meet prep-school boys and find “The One”, but none of them wanted anything to do with mousy old me when they could have glamorous blond her. I never got past date number one with any of them, because Liz was always their date number two; in fact, sometimes they’d come up to me asking so sweetly and shyly for a dance that it’d melt my heart to oblige, only for them to drag me over to Liz and beg me for an introduction to her after just one number. It was so blatant that I was second fiddle to Liz all the time, no surprise though that was, that I couldn’t bring myself to get Liz to ask any of them for me.
“Oh, come on,” Liz had said. “Just tell me who you want, and I’ll make sure they do it for my sake – can’t you see, I’ve got all of them wound around my little finger? After all, it’s just a date, not a mate. All they have to do is keep you company and make you look good for one night, and then who cares what happens next?”
“Thanks Liz, but no thanks,” I’d replied. “That’s the point, they all think you’re the bee’s knees, and I’m just the geeky little sister they humour until they’ve got you. Nope – there’s got to be another way, and I’ll figure something out myself.”
And I do figure it out in the end – Charles has been my best friend all these years, and I can count on him to keep me from tripping, not to laugh at me if I mess up at anything, and to always have something to talk about all evening long. We’ve been doing dance class together since we were little kids and dancing for fun in Father’s rec room, and even though he’s still chubby-cute rather than handsome, that at least means we kind of match. Neither of us is going to be the next fashion model, but we’re comfortable with each other and he’ll always be on my side. So, I ask him to be my escort and he gallantly obliges, with Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove bringing the twins along with us for the trip to New York.
Still, I feel absolutely nervous about following in Liz’s footsteps; she was the last Michigan debutante, and I already feel jittery enough about everyone staring at me without having to think about what they thought of her the previous round.
“Now ladies and gentlemen, our debutante from Michigan!”
My heart gives a stir at the sound of the band playing My Michigan; it’s a melodious, gentle love song to our state, unlike the peppiness of I Love New York or the folksy sound of The Eyes of Texas. Liz might’ve wanted something flashier, but c’mon, this is our state song, and it’s an ode to our appreciation for our land and its natural beauty. As Charles walks me up the aisle arm in arm with a flag bearer carrying our state flag behind us, I realize it would have been so wrong to let Liz pair me up with a random prep-school boy instead of coming with him, because it would have made false this moment of the two of us being true Michiganders born and bred, representing our state. I try not to think about how much I’m indebted to Charles for being game enough to do this for me, or what all the girls from my old class before I went to SEM, all of whom are still his classmates, would say to him if they had any inkling of this. We mount the steps to the stage, me taking care to hitch my skirts up just a little so I won’t step on them, and then it’s time.
“And now from Michigan, we have Miss Anne Virginia Elliot, daughter of Mr. Walter Elliot and the late Mrs. Elizabeth Stevenson Elliot, Grosse Pointe, Michigan!” the emcee announces.
As the crowd breaks out into a polite cheer, I do a dainty little dip, sinking six inches or so into my cupcake-shaped skirts and crinolines, and then it’s over. At least, I don’t have to ever walk backwards; thank goodness I’m not living in the days when they presented ladies at court before the Queen, and they had to practically kneel down before her before retreating in reverse, because you couldn’t let the Queen see the back of you. By Anne Elliot standards, it doesn’t take much to make my debutante night a sort-of-success; my strapless corset bodice doesn’t fall off, I manage to make little steps so I don’t mess up the hem of my floor-length skirts or trip over, and my escorts are friendly and chivalrous to me all night, and I am content.
Every girl making her debut tonight has two escorts: a civilian escort, which means Charles for me, and a military escort who’s a cadet from one of the top military schools, namely West Point, the US Naval Academy, or the Citadel. I’m only sixteen and have no idea what to talk about to a college boy, so I’m really lucky that Richard Fitzwilliam, my military escort, is just like a nice and friendly big brother. He’s exactly the right height to not make me look short, and like Charles, he looks nice and down to earth, a real, approachable person, instead of being untouchably handsome. I ask him about why he chose to go to West Point, and he’s remarkably frank about his reply.
“Well, you’re a middle child too, so you probably have some idea about what it’s like to be the second son of the family. To get anybody to notice you at home, you’ve got to be a little bit of a rebel. And Uncle Sam forks out the dough for West Point, so I’m not costing my old man a single penny. Money talks, especially when I’m not the one who gets the family business and a baked-in path to riches from babyhood.”
Much as I wish I could be friends with Richard, I know I’m not going to see him again and that he won’t remember me after this night; he’s twenty-one, after all, a man of the world, and I’m just like any other high school junior when I’m not all made up and decked out in this crazy way.
After the night of the Cinderella Ball, Charles and I morph back into the high schoolers that we are – I trade that enormous white dress, bigger than some wedding dresses, for my red hooded duffel coat and blush-pink pom-pom beanie; and Charles ditches the tux for his varsity bomber jacket and plaid baseball cap with ear flaps. The day after the ball, we walk to FAO Schwarz together and go halvsies on getting the nine original Beanie Babies for Mary, as well as matching Simba plushies for the twins, and then the Super Car Lego Technic set for us to build when we get home. Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove take us out to Central Park while Liz, Father and Grandma go clothes shopping, and we ride the horse-drawn carriage, dandling a twin on each of our laps. That evening, Father and Grandma take us to see Cats on Broadway because I asked if we could; and I lose myself in the beauty of Memory, mouthing the words and wishing I could sing like Sarah Brightman. Finally, we wrap up our trip with New Year’s Eve, where we spend the day touring the city till we end up at Times Square where we watch the ball drop.
“Ten… nine… eight… seven… six… five… four… three… two… one… HAPPY NEW YEAR 1995!!!”
We’re jumping around, shouting out the countdown, Charles and me; and at this moment, I feel much more alive, much more in my element than at my debutante presentation where I was a bundle of nerves. “Out” in society or not, what difference does it make, when at the end of the day, all I want is just to be a high school kid, having fun and living my life to the fullest?
Spring 1995, Buffalo, NY
After my big society “debut”, it’s back to reality – which for me, means going back to SEM and figuring out what my senior year capstone project will be. The whole idea of having us do this is so we learn who we are and what special superpower we’ll bring to make this world a better place. Oh and of course, because it’ll help us figure out what we want to do in college, too.
Ever since I was in sixth grade, there’s been one big question buzzing at the back of my mind: what keeps planes up in the air, and how can you stop plane crashes from happening? See, after that memorable ride we had in the TriStar when we went to Disneyland, the plane that wasn’t a DC-10, it wasn’t that long before I came across the word “DC-10” again, and not in a good way. That same fall, I was flipping through Grandma’s Good Housekeeping magazines like I often did to pick out clothes, and suddenly, an article caught my eye. It had a picture of a burned-out shell of part of an airplane lying in an open field, and another of a group of people, some of them injured, with little kids among them, sitting or lying on the grass waiting for help. As I read the article, I pictured myself and my family and all those families with kids on the plane, smashing down hard on the grass; for the way the survivors talked about the crash was so real, I could almost feel it myself. The plane that crashed was a DC-10, and the plane we were in was supposed to be a DC-10, too. How did we make it down safely when those people didn’t? Was there any way they could possibly have saved more passengers, or stopped the crash from happening? Why was there a plane called a DC-10, anyway, when all the planes I knew came from either Airbus or Boeing?
You don’t learn much more about anything when reading the same things over and over again, and so before long, I’d given up on being able to find out anything potentially useful about planes. Obviously, my bookshelf was useless for anything except girly story books, and the only books in our house with any kind of general knowledge in them were the Encyclopaedia Britannica volumes that Father kept on the top shelf of his study, mainly because they looked magnificent. I tried asking for permission once to take a look at what it had to say about airplanes, but after Father said, “Well, all right, as long as you don’t break anything”, I’d gotten scared climbing up the stepladder our maid brought into the study so I could reach the volumes. They were so heavy, I pulled at one of them with my fingers and freaked out that if I dropped it, everything else would come crashing down. And so, there wasn’t much I could do to find out anything about planes, all the way until now when we can finally search for stuff on the Internet. But hey, now we have a computer lab and a big library here, so maybe this is the right time for me to make it into my project and figure out something new, learning what I want to know about this question that’s been bugging me for years.
It feels like my life at SEM is just beginning – now that Liz has gone away to college, I don’t have to go with her to mixers anymore, and with the Debutante Ball being over and done with, all my weekends are completely my own, and I finally have all the freedom to do only the things I like to do. This year, I finally shot up some so I don’t look so stubby anymore; I’m now five foot four, and because I gained weight first and shot up later, I look a little leggier now and can run a little faster than I used to. Elise and I tried out for cross-country at the beginning of this year, and we’ve been going to meets together, running against other girls from Deerfield and Hotchkiss and all the other big prep schools. I love it when I’m out there running on the grass and the trails; even though there’s so many girls around, I somehow feel like it’s just me and nature together, and everything else fades into the distance as I get into the flow. Ever since the summer I spent at Raquette Lake two and a half years ago, I’ve always felt that being out on a trail, at one with the great outdoors, is the closest to heaven I could possibly get; and it’s a pity Father sent me only when I was starting to age out of camp, so I never had a chance to go back again. Now I’ve barely started to really come out into my own at SEM, yet pretty soon all our teachers will be talking to us about college and all. But one thing’s for sure – I’m starting to figure out who I am, and slowly, I’m getting more and more power and freedom to try new things and forge my own direction in life. Even though I don’t feel like I’ve had enough of SEM just yet, maybe there’s one good thing to look forward to about college – it’ll get me back to camp again, ‘cause then I’ll be old enough to get a summer job as a counsellor. Ever since I got out of home, every year it’s been getting better and better, unlocking more and more new things I can do.
Fall 1995, Buffalo, NY
The funny thing is, I love it that here at SEM we don’t have any boys, but yet I know college without boys is not what I want at all, not when I’m going to major in engineering. Father always wanted us to follow in Mom’s footsteps and go to Barnard; it’s been a tradition for a long line of Elliot women, both those who were born and those who married into the family, to attend women-only liberal arts colleges and come out with an Arts degree that would show their elegance and femininity, allowing them to marry well. But there’s no engineering major at Barnard or Wellesley, only natural sciences; and at Smith, there’s an interdisciplinary engineering science major, but I doubt I’ll be able to focus on getting deep into cars or planes if I go there. So even though I decide to apply to all three of them, just because it’s what Father and Grandma expect, I know I also want to try other colleges that have full engineering departments too. There shouldn’t be any barriers to girls becoming engineers, but the reality is that most engineers are still men. So, if I really want to learn engineering and do it well, I’ve got no choice but to learn it with boys. And we girls aren’t the little kids we used to be in middle school anymore, so I hope the boys have grown up too and gotten past making all the noise like they did back then.
“Well, based on your capstone project, it looks like you might end up going for aeronautical engineering,” says Mrs. Jane Churchill, our college counsellor. “At least, you’ll want to go someplace that offers you that option. And so, let’s see, there’s MIT, Stanford, Purdue, or Georgia Tech. And Ann Arbor for sure – you’ll definitely want to apply to at least one school in state, so you have a safety net where you’ve got a strong likelihood of getting in.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I reply. “I’m not sure what I’ll pick yet – aeronautical, or mechanical. It’s like, I guess I have a duty to carry on my father’s business and so maybe I should be getting into cars, you know? But I’m also learning a lot in my capstone on planes, and I could see myself spending my whole life doing this too. So maybe I should just try all the schools that have both, and then wait till junior year to figure things out.”
“That’s a pretty good idea,” Mrs. Churchill agrees. “It’s a joy to work with girls like you – you know your mind and have a clear sense of purpose. And because those two majors have many areas in common, it’s entirely possible for you to choose later, because they’ll share many prerequisites in freshman and sophomore year. So now, you have one more thing to think about. Is there any one school you want to go to more than the others? MIT and Stanford, especially, are highly competitive. Even with perfect grades and healthy extracurriculars, getting into either of those is a bit of a lottery even for the best of students. If you’ve got your heart set on either of those, you might want to think about applying early decision to get your best shot at getting in.”
“Early decision? What’s that?” For the umpteenth time, I’m so thankful I’m here at SEM, because with Father and Grandma having a one-track mind about Barnard and Wellesley and Smith, there wouldn’t be anyone to give me advice about engineering school if I’d gone into Upper School back at home.
“It’s when you apply to your top choice college in November, so they tell you in December if you’ve gotten in. There’s a catch 22 though – you’ve got to be really sure you want to go there, because if they say you got in, then you’ll have to go there and can’t back out. Think about it – and I’m always here for you to talk to me about your choices if you want.”
There isn’t that much time for me to narrow things down, because it’s September already and I need to send everything in by November. I start by eliminating Caltech, because aerospace there is a minor when it’s a major at Stanford. Actually, I don’t really care about going to a big-name college as long as it’s good at the majors I’ve picked, but I know it’ll be easier to convince Father if it’s a school that’s famous and easy for him to brag about. That probably means MIT or Stanford, because Georgia Tech and Purdue are great schools, but I doubt Father knows anything about them. Mrs. Churchill goes through the U.S. News and World Report college rankings with me, and we find that MIT’s top of the list for its aeronautical department, plus it’s closer to Detroit than Stanford, and so I’m all set.
The essay is a blank canvas for me to write my dreams: I talk about how I grew up in a family who’s forgotten that our livelihood comes from cars, so now it will be up to me to learn the skills to make sure our business can carry on for another generation. And yet, I write, I also yearn for the times when we travelled on holidays as a family in my childhood, when we could just be together without the pomp and circumstance that surrounded us at home with our maids, nannies, and chauffeur. And planes are a big part of how we travel, not just for my family but allowing many families around the world to get away and get closer to each other. I speak of how I don’t know exactly what I’ll do just yet – I want to do something useful after I finish college, but I can’t quite figure out if that will mean joining Father’s company to make safer parts for cars or working in the airplane industry to make travel safer for all the families who want to go on vacation. Whichever way it is, I know I’ll be grateful for all the opportunities they give me in college, and I wrap up the essay with the promise that I’ll use all the knowledge I’ll get to make this world a better place.
It took coming to a tiny corner of upstate New York, six hours away from the Big Apple, and living in a world of only girls to finally set me free. This isn’t the first time I went far away from home, for Father and Grandma had brought us on vacations to Europe and Asia since we were very little – but it is the first time I can make choices without someone from home watching over me.
Before this, my everyday life was a circle of being shuttled from home to school and sometimes to Charles’ house; and then weekends and holidays were planned by Father or Grandma or our au pair. Where we shopped, what movies we watched, the places we’d go to for holidays – all of these were choreographed to a fault, and I simply went along with whatever had been decided by my minders. It did not even occur to me to feel trapped, for I had known nothing else. Being two years older than me, Liz had always been my yardstick for all that a girl ought to be, for she had been virtually crafted in Father’s image and he doted on her alone. After Mary was born, our nanny could no longer handle all three of us; since then, there were a string of au pairs minding only Liz in the beginning, and then taking me on as well when I started school, for Mary was such a handful when she was a toddler that it took all of one nanny and then some to look after her. Our au pairs were like a rotating cast of surrogate big sisters, flipping through magazines with us to pick out clothing styles so Grandma would know how to shop for us, taking us to all the new movies that were “in” at the moment, and going through the Billboard Hot 100 with us every week on the radio. Grandma was the one who stocked my bookshelf, because I was the only one who would sit quietly and listen as she read increasingly longer bedtime stories to us, going through three bedrooms every night chasing our staggered bedtimes. Whereas my sisters would interrupt her and keep asking for stuff, using story time only as a tactic to delay going to sleep, I actually enjoyed her stories and asked to read along with her. So, she knew I was the only one who would treasure Mom’s old collection of children’s literature, and it all got shifted into my room. But it also meant that for the first twelve or thirteen years of my life, I didn’t even get to decide which books I got to read – I thought I was picking out my own books from my shelf, which seemed like an endless collection at the time, but actually, I had no idea that any books existed beyond what my shelf told me about.
Coming out to camp, and then to boarding school, my world has suddenly turned around. For the first time, I have choices. Even though my schedule is heavily structured, there are elective activities where it’s entirely up to me to pick whatever I want, instead of asking Father or Grandma to give me permission to do things. For the first time, I have variety. I’m not limited to the things our au pairs or Liz or Grandma would do, so I have the chance, and in fact there’s plenty of grown-ups who encourage me to do things I’ve never done before. Sailing, riding, pottery, community service, computer science, physics, hiking, and skiing – so many things I never thought about before leaving home are now available to me, and I’ve discovered that the world is much bigger and broader than the little slice my au pairs, Grandma and my childhood books showed to me. For the first time, I have responsibilities. I have to pitch in with cleaning up my cabin at camp and my dorm at school, keep track of my own things, and stay on top of my schedule without someone to remind me about tests, tryouts, sporting meets, and appointments. For the first time, I have little pockets of time to explore my world unsupervised. During weekends at SEM, we can go into town and do our own thing for a few hours, so I can go into stores and pick out clothing that Grandma would never have bought for me. And for the first time, there’s people who trust me enough to count on me for getting real stuff done. Near the end of my seven weeks at Raquette Lake Camp, my age group went on a 90-mile, 4-day canoe trip, where all of us had roles to play in keeping everyone together, staying safe, making steady progress along the lake, and taking care of all the group supplies. When he sent me off to camp and boarding school, Father only thought he was opening up opportunities for me to make friends with other girls from rich families all over the East Coast. Little did he know that in the process, he’s handed me the keys to explore the outside world on my own terms too.
And then, you’d be surprised at how liberating a world without boys can be. Back when I went to a school with both boys and girls, there were those spaces people just expected the boys to own – team sports, video games, science, and math, to name a few. And if you were a girl, you dreamed of doing all the things the cool girls did – wearing the right clothes, having pretty handwriting and artwork, getting your stories published in the school magazine, getting into dance shows, and being invited to parties on the weekends. But when everybody is a girl and our school has everything out there for us to do, there’s no more talk about what’s “boy stuff” or “girl stuff” anymore, it’s just all about experiencing the world out there. It also means everyone has a voice, and that means much more to me now that I’m old enough to have a proper answer when people ask me what I think about things. In the Lower School and Middle School back home, our teachers taught us like the children that we were. Always, the teacher had the correct answer, and our job was to remember stuff and get it right. There was no such thing as debate, and no room for us to express our own opinions. In any case, even if we’d had the freedom for discussions back in the Middle School, the boys made so much noise I bet they’d have hogged everybody’s air time. So now that we all are girls here at SEM, we are all here on equal footing and everybody gets to say what they think. That’s something I never had before, not only at school but also at home, where Father and Grandma always knew best.
Having a free run of the library on my own – both our enormous school library at SEM and the public library downtown – opens up entire worlds for me too. When I was living at home, the books Grandma put on my shelf were always about girlhood: I had children’s classics like Little Women, The Secret Garden, What Katy Did, Anne of Green Gables, Pollyanna, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and A Little Princess; the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder; the Ramona and Anastasia series by Beverly Cleary and Lois Lowry respectively; St. Clare’s and Mallory Towers stories by Enid Blyton; the Chalet School series by Elinor Brent-Dyer, and Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself by Judy Blume. After I outgrew kiddie books and started looking for something more grown-up to read, she replaced those with Austen and Bronte and Gone with the Wind and Beverly Cleary’s teen books: Fifteen, Jean and Johnny, The Luckiest Girl and Sister of the Bride. She also stocked my bookshelf with tons of Judy Blume, which is how I learned about what to expect when girls grow up, because Grandma would have considered it vulgar to have The Talk with me directly. In the libraries of the world at large, though, there are many stories which are not about girlhood or romance or marriage – in freshman year here at SEM, I’ve lapped up Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, Moby-Dick, Lord of the Flies, and Catcher in the Rye already. Through these books I learned of a world that is not seen through rose-tinted glasses; where people don’t need to be good-looking, rich or white to have a voice and be heroes; that everybody has a mean streak in them, and that it is much easier to choose evil than good. And surprisingly, instead of making me sad, this knowledge has made me feel powerful. Because from then on, I’ve been able to look back at how we weren’t quite the perfect family at home and I might not be quite the perfect girl with the perfect life, but now I know that the world is messy and difficult and being a good person doesn’t necessarily mean all the good things will happen to you. Yet somehow, I’ll still get through it anyway just like so many other people have.
The summer after freshman year, Charles and I had our Level 1 driving licenses, and we were learning to drive together in the Chevy Impala that Charles’ parents had bought for him to learn with. Mrs. Musgrove was just like I’d always remembered her when I was home for freshman year winter break, but to everyone’s surprise, sometime during spring semester she learned that she was expecting another child, a younger sibling for Charles at last, and by the time it was June, she’d gotten so huge she couldn’t move around much. So, our chauffeur, Mr. Hill, was the one who taught both Charles and me to drive; he’d bring me up to the Musgroves’ house at St. Clair Shores whenever Father and Grandma didn’t need to use our car, and the three of us would get into the Impala and then hit the road. I’d picked up a map of metro Detroit from the bookstore, and it was really fun telling Mr. Hill which parts of town we wanted him to take us to. By the end of the summer, we’d explored every street of metro Detroit that was safe for us to go, and I felt great about being able to find my own way around town.
Charles had been an only child for so long that his mom having another kid had left him at a bit of a loose end all around, so now it was my turn to have him over at our house to hang out. There really wasn’t much to do around the house to entertain a boy – we still weren’t allowed into the kitchen; nobody had ever bought us Nintendo or Sega consoles because we’re all girls, so Charles had to get the CD-ROMs of his favourite games and install them on our computer; and even if he’d been into reading, none of the books on my old shelf would have been interesting to him. So, we did the best we could: we went into the basement entertainment room, where Father had upgraded his hi-fi, replacing the old unit with a huge new MacIntosh surround sound system and home cinema during the year while I was away. There’s now a brand new built-in cabinet from floor to ceiling filled to the brim with his CD collection, because apparently, he’s been on a shopping spree to buy the CD version of every single gramophone record that Grandma had kept from the times when Mom was alive, adding those to his already extensive CD collection. Thankfully, Grandma stopped him from throwing away the stack of Mom’s old records and brought them back to her house together with her old gramophone player to put away as keepsakes. That meant we had a decent time playing Father’s CDs, and dancing to the music together sometimes just for fun. We also went through Father’s entire stack of laser discs, watching everything from Madame Butterfly to Kindergarten Cop just because we were so bored. Although Charles is more into the light-hearted rom-com and action movies, I made him sit through The Silence of the Lambs, Dead Poets Society and Scent of a Woman – all the good movies that were too dark for our au pairs to take us to back when they were playing in theatres. Still, we were running out of stuff to do by August, and that’s why I am so happy now for fall term to start again, so I can come back to SEM and my world can grow bigger again.
This year, I’ll be rooming with Elise Barnett; our teachers make it a point to get to know everyone really well, so now that they’ve spent a whole year with us, they have a pretty good idea who’s going to get along with whom. We’re the “STEM girls” of our class – in the beginning, pretty much everybody thought they’d suck at math and science because it was boy stuff, but when we were actually forced to spend time on it even though we were girls, it turned out I was better at it than at writing and art. Elise was one of those girls who had never cared about what was for girls or for boys ever since she was a little kid, so she was good at all the boy stuff, like math and science and sports and hiking, all the way from the beginning. When we started out, she had to help me with my math homework, though after a couple months I caught up with her. And because we both like hiking and reading too, we ended up hanging out together whenever Liz didn’t pull me along to join her and her friends. We shopped at local thrift stores in Buffalo during weekends, went on all the outdoor activities arranged by SEM, and because Elise is full of joy and humour, so everyone thinks she’s cool, I also ended up in the cool crowd in my class by association. So now that we’ll be roommates, we won’t be short of people wanting to hang out with us in our dorm house.
And not long after term begins, Charles mails me something and everybody’s excited to see me getting mail from a boy. It’s a picture of Mrs. Musgrove seated on the generous couch in their living room, smiling from ear to ear, holding two baby girls swaddled in pink and purple blankets, one in each arm. There’s a banner in the background saying, “Welcome home, Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove”, and Charles and his dad are squished on the couch on each side of her. “I have two baby sisters now,” are the only words he wrote to me, scrawled on the back of the photo.
“Hmm,” says Elise. “That doesn’t really look like much of a love letter to me. But it’s really cute how he wrote you just to show you his new baby sisters.”
“Oh, Charles isn’t really my boyfriend,” I reply. “Just someone who’s been a really good friend since we were three, who also happens to be a boy. He’s always been almost like the brother I never had, though I don’t know if that’ll still be the same now that he’s got real sisters of his own.”
Summer 1994, Grosse Pointe, Michigan
If you ask Liz, turning sixteen would be all about being “sweet sixteen”, the prime age for getting attention from boys; but if you ask me, the two biggest things about being sixteen are the ones that that bring my freedom to an entirely new level: my Level 2 driving licence and being able to work. All my life before this, I’ve had to ask and wait for people to take me to places; but now, that’s all changed when Father has an Audi 80 sedan, which he bought two years ago when Liz turned sixteen, that can be all mine during the day because Liz only uses it at night. I just need to make a deal with Mr. Hill to make sure he takes Liz to the mall whenever she wants to go there, and I’m all on my own to roam free this summer.
Mrs. Musgrove’s been working mornings at the front desk at the main Musgrove garage for as long as Mr. Musgrove can remember; she’d drop off Charles at school, then take customer calls and check people in for their repairs from 9 am to 3 pm, and then she’d go off to pick Charles up, take him home and get dinner ready. Mr. Musgrove tells me she took six months off when Henrietta and Louisa were born, and then she’s put them into day care and started again. But since school is out for the summer, he hopes that Charles can help out and he can hire me, now that I’m sixteen, and if we can man the front desk between us during the summer, then they can take the twins out of day care for these few months and Mrs. Musgrove can have some quality time bonding with them at home.
Pretty soon, I’m the one who ends up doing most of the phone duty, because people like my voice and I’ve learned the art of getting people to calm down when they’re frustrated. No biggie, because that’s what we’ve had to do with Liz and Mary all my life. Charles does stuff like printing and filing papers, but he gets bored easily and often he wanders off to look at the cars and watch what the mechanics are doing. After work, I drive Charles home and drop in on Mrs. Musgrove and the babies for a bit. It’s me who gives Charles’ baby sisters their nicknames; at ten months old, they’re at the age when they zip around the house at warp speed on hands and knees and have figured out how to pull themselves up to stand hanging onto walls and furniture. Naturally, they’re getting into everything in the house and have to be pulled out from everywhere, but when I clap my hands and call out, “Het-ty! Lu-lu!” in a sing-song voice, they’ll always come. And so those names stick, till everyone forgets they had names that were too big for them in the first place. Of course, Father and Grandma think I’m just hanging around at the Musgroves’ house with Charles all day; they’ll never stand for it if they knew I was working for money, especially at the age of sixteen. But “Charles” usually is a magic word with them; I know Father’s been a business friend of Mr. Musgrove’s for the longest time, and they’ve always loved how well I get on with Charles. So, if I want to do anything, I just need to drag Charles’ name into it, and Father and Grandma will readily approve.
Mostly the Musgroves’ body shop gets fender benders, but one morning, they bring in a silver grey classic Mercedes that’s been smashed in full frontal impact; thankfully, the owner isn’t injured and he comes in with his car, practically blubbering because it’s been totalled. It’s one of those old ones where the doors pop up from the top of the roof, and ironically, they still work fine even with the front of the car all mangled and twisted. There isn’t anyone else in line, so I can leave my work station behind the counter and check the car out at closer range. The shininess of the chrome details, the slim and delicate steering wheel, the perfect complement to a lady’s hand in a cream-colored glove, in those halcyon days when ladies had hats and gloves and gentlemen had suits and bowlers, at least that’s how they were in Grandma’s old movies.
“They don’t make ‘em like that any more, what a pity,” says Mr. Musgrove. “Y’know, cars are so much safer these days, but then, that’s why they make ‘em all the same. Gullwing doors, that’s what they call these things” – he taps one of the doors that are hanging ajar, and I realize how descriptive that name is, for they’re bent just so, a silver seagull spreading its wings – “they can’t have ‘em, ‘cause in a crash, if your door hinges are on the roof, it could bring your whole roof down. Ah well. I dunno if we can save this one, but we’ll give it our best shot.”
Thankfully it isn’t a busy day, so I can come out between customers with a piece of letter-size blank white paper I filched from the photocopier and a borrowed pencil, and draw. I haven’t done this in years, not since I failed art in fifth grade, but for some reason I want to re-create this car as it might’ve looked during its glory days, with a silhouette of a genteel lady with her hair coiffed just so, her hand gently resting on the wheel. My sketch is just black and white in pencil, and I add on layer after layer of feathered lines and shadows all day, forgetting all about lunch break and ignoring Charles.
When the owner comes in just before we close the reception at 3 pm, Mr. Musgrove solemnly tells him the bad news. Nobody’s really surprised, because this car is so old we couldn’t possibly get parts to build an entire new engine and reconstruct the bonnet and front fascia from scratch, but his shoulders slump in dejection anyway.
“Excuse me, sir.” I feel a little shy about approaching him directly, but still gather up the courage to timidly tap his shoulder lightly and hand him my picture. “I drew your car, so you could have something to remember it with. And I know maybe I’m not all that good, but I did my very best, and I hope I did it justice.”
“Not that good? Young lady, you sure undersell yourself,” says the owner, a fifty-something man in a shirt and tie, in a booming voice. “Such details! Such realism! It’s a wonder nobody’s picked you up to be an artist, or a designer. Thank you – I will treasure this, all the rest of my life.”
“If I’m so good, then why was I almost failing art all the time in Lower School?” I ask Mrs. Musgrove when Charles and I get back from work. “I don’t think that guy was funning me, he sure didn’t sound like it, but I just can’t figure out how what he said could possibly be true.”
“Honey, why don’t you bring some of your old drawings out for us to look at tomorrow?” Mrs. Musgrove, the quintessential mom with the Mom-Mobile, which has now been upsized to a seven-seater minivan after the additions of Hetty and Lulu, always has all the mom answers I never get at home. “I kept all of Charles’ old artwork, you know. Let’s take a look at them and compare, and then I can tell you what I think.”
When we go through my old childhood art the next day, we find that even all the way back in second or third grade, I was already drawing in perspective. There were cars, lots of them, identifiable as BMWs or Mercedes-Benzes or Chevys or Pontiacs by their front grilles and logos. Because there were lots of cars, there were also plenty of roads, drawn with dotted divider lines and coloured in grey. Mostly the roads were flanked by buildings – houses, shop-fronts – and there were people walking down the sidewalks, usually families with lots of kids. Back then, all my people were facing sideways, because I only knew how to draw people in profile, and I was picky about making my people look real. The grades were marked in red on the reverse side of the paintings – most of them were C’s, with the occasional C+, and no A’s or B’s. Eventually in fifth grade, the C’s became D’s, but thankfully, they stopped making us do crayon pictures when we went up to Middle School, so that was the worst it ever got.
Mrs. Musgrove spreads all of Charles’ second- to fifth- grade artwork beside mine. I remember he did OK, generally getting B’s, and he’d always managed to get multicoloured smudges of crayon smeared all over his face and hands when he drew. Where I made lines in thin pencil, his were all drawn over with thick black crayon; everything was two-dimensional, but his colours were all graduated in multi-tone ombre patterns. Grass was two shades of green, alternating in slanted waves; cars were bright primary red or blue or yellow, not the muted shades of burgundy or navy or black or white or silver you see on actual cars on the roads. His people looked like stick figures, but they always had big round eyes and wide red smiles. The sky, filling up half the paper with multiple shades of blue, always had fluffy white clouds, and the grass always was strewn with red, pink, yellow and orange flowers. My paintings had lots of lines but not many colours, while his had all the colours but the lines and shapes were all very simple.
“Do you see the difference now?” Mrs. Musgrove kneels beside me as we contemplate the rows of artwork we’ve laid out on the kitchen floor, her arm draped across my shoulders. “Anne, hon, you painted like a grown-up, and Charles, bless his heart, he still painted like a kid back then. And the teachers expect a kid of eight or nine or ten to fill the page with colours, but you were so focused on capturing all the detail you saw on the streets that you never drew the sun or the sky. But just because you weren’t painting the kind of pictures your teachers expected, that doesn’t make you a bad artist at all. I dare say you probably were at least as good, if not a better artist than Charles back then, and you still are.”
After the incident with the gullwing Mercedes, Charles and I start shifting roles. Somehow, I end up being the one going around carrying tools to all the mechanics, while Charles takes over the front desk on top of doing the paperwork. One day, Mr. Musgrove stops next to me when he’s making his rounds and acknowledges me with a nod of approval.
“Anne, I’d thought all the gasoline has gone away from your family’s blood, until now,” he says. “I’m glad you’ve kept it going in the new generation.”
“Gasoline? In the Elliot blood?” I know vaguely that Father and Mr. Musgrove are friends, but I’ve never really thought much about how Father makes his money. “When was that? And how can that be, when I’ve never seen Father do anything with cars except sit in the back seat of them?”
“So, you don’t know how your family got rich, then? Well, the first generation of the Elliots was right there when they made the Model T Ford, making mechanical parts for cars. Here – come slide down with me right under here – see, all the parts that link all the way from the steering column to the wheels, like this. They’ve been selling original parts to the auto manufacturers, and then spare parts for repair and maintenance to garages like us – and that’s why your dad and I, we’re best buds for a reason. Our survival depends on each other.”
For the rest of the summer, Mr. Musgrove teaches me all kinds of things about cars – what all that stuff under the hood does; how the steering and braking mechanisms are all connected in the underbody of the car; and telling me about how computers and electronics are starting to take over automobiles. We talk about cars and safety, and how cars are getting chunkier and wider because side airbags have become standard and car body structures are now being built with special zones, so they’ll keep their shape where it’s needed to keep people safe, while absorbing the impact in a crash. And that’s when I realize that all of the work that goes into designing and making cars and their parts is extremely useful and helpful, because it saves people’s lives, so it makes the world better.
“What should I do to continue all this? All the work that Father’s company’s been doing?” I ask Mr. Musgrove.
“Well, you can start by doing engineering when you go to college. To work on autos, you’ll probably want to do mechanical engineering. And then you’ll come back out to your old man’s company, and they’ll teach you from there. And of course, I’d be happy to show you anything about cars – just pop over anytime you want.”
Winter 1994, New York City
Well one of the things that isn’t fun about being part of the Elliot family, is how Father and Grandma think it’s so important to show us off to everybody. Most people think “coming out” into society is one of those old things from Pride and Prejudice that went the way of the dodo in the twentieth century, but to Father, the International Debutante Ball in the Waldorf Astoria is The Big Thing each of us girls absolutely must do the winter of the first even year after we turn sixteen. Oh of course, Liz loved it; although Mary and I weren’t allowed inside the ballroom, Father filmed her spectacular Texas Dip curtsey on his Sony Camcorder, and I’ve been watching over and over how she dipped to the ground with her hands stretching out up and backwards like the wings of a swan, her white gloved hand clutching Cousin William’s in a feather-light touch as he bowed gracefully to one side to let her go all the way down. It’s such a lovely sight, if I didn’t have to think about how I’ll need to pull off such a move too; me, the klutz who’s been failing all the ballet auditions at school from ages eight through fourteen.
For years, we’ve been preparing for this – the ballroom dancing lessons Father made me do on weekends since I was five; the endless fittings for my lacy, strapless white dress which Father flew me back to Detroit for throughout this year; and of course, the task of picking my escort. Liz has had a crush on our third cousin, William Elliot, since forever, and he kindly obliged when Father asked him to escort her because he’ll do anything to make Father happy; but I’m scared of him when he’s so much older, and I’m sure he’ll laugh at me if I do anything dorky like tripping over my skirts or messing up my curtsey. Liz dragged me to mixers all through sophomore year to meet prep-school boys and find “The One”, but none of them wanted anything to do with mousy old me when they could have glamorous blond her. I never got past date number one with any of them, because Liz was always their date number two; in fact, sometimes they’d come up to me asking so sweetly and shyly for a dance that it’d melt my heart to oblige, only for them to drag me over to Liz and beg me for an introduction to her after just one number. It was so blatant that I was second fiddle to Liz all the time, no surprise though that was, that I couldn’t bring myself to get Liz to ask any of them for me.
“Oh, come on,” Liz had said. “Just tell me who you want, and I’ll make sure they do it for my sake – can’t you see, I’ve got all of them wound around my little finger? After all, it’s just a date, not a mate. All they have to do is keep you company and make you look good for one night, and then who cares what happens next?”
“Thanks Liz, but no thanks,” I’d replied. “That’s the point, they all think you’re the bee’s knees, and I’m just the geeky little sister they humour until they’ve got you. Nope – there’s got to be another way, and I’ll figure something out myself.”
And I do figure it out in the end – Charles has been my best friend all these years, and I can count on him to keep me from tripping, not to laugh at me if I mess up at anything, and to always have something to talk about all evening long. We’ve been doing dance class together since we were little kids and dancing for fun in Father’s rec room, and even though he’s still chubby-cute rather than handsome, that at least means we kind of match. Neither of us is going to be the next fashion model, but we’re comfortable with each other and he’ll always be on my side. So, I ask him to be my escort and he gallantly obliges, with Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove bringing the twins along with us for the trip to New York.
Still, I feel absolutely nervous about following in Liz’s footsteps; she was the last Michigan debutante, and I already feel jittery enough about everyone staring at me without having to think about what they thought of her the previous round.
“Now ladies and gentlemen, our debutante from Michigan!”
My heart gives a stir at the sound of the band playing My Michigan; it’s a melodious, gentle love song to our state, unlike the peppiness of I Love New York or the folksy sound of The Eyes of Texas. Liz might’ve wanted something flashier, but c’mon, this is our state song, and it’s an ode to our appreciation for our land and its natural beauty. As Charles walks me up the aisle arm in arm with a flag bearer carrying our state flag behind us, I realize it would have been so wrong to let Liz pair me up with a random prep-school boy instead of coming with him, because it would have made false this moment of the two of us being true Michiganders born and bred, representing our state. I try not to think about how much I’m indebted to Charles for being game enough to do this for me, or what all the girls from my old class before I went to SEM, all of whom are still his classmates, would say to him if they had any inkling of this. We mount the steps to the stage, me taking care to hitch my skirts up just a little so I won’t step on them, and then it’s time.
“And now from Michigan, we have Miss Anne Virginia Elliot, daughter of Mr. Walter Elliot and the late Mrs. Elizabeth Stevenson Elliot, Grosse Pointe, Michigan!” the emcee announces.
As the crowd breaks out into a polite cheer, I do a dainty little dip, sinking six inches or so into my cupcake-shaped skirts and crinolines, and then it’s over. At least, I don’t have to ever walk backwards; thank goodness I’m not living in the days when they presented ladies at court before the Queen, and they had to practically kneel down before her before retreating in reverse, because you couldn’t let the Queen see the back of you. By Anne Elliot standards, it doesn’t take much to make my debutante night a sort-of-success; my strapless corset bodice doesn’t fall off, I manage to make little steps so I don’t mess up the hem of my floor-length skirts or trip over, and my escorts are friendly and chivalrous to me all night, and I am content.
Every girl making her debut tonight has two escorts: a civilian escort, which means Charles for me, and a military escort who’s a cadet from one of the top military schools, namely West Point, the US Naval Academy, or the Citadel. I’m only sixteen and have no idea what to talk about to a college boy, so I’m really lucky that Richard Fitzwilliam, my military escort, is just like a nice and friendly big brother. He’s exactly the right height to not make me look short, and like Charles, he looks nice and down to earth, a real, approachable person, instead of being untouchably handsome. I ask him about why he chose to go to West Point, and he’s remarkably frank about his reply.
“Well, you’re a middle child too, so you probably have some idea about what it’s like to be the second son of the family. To get anybody to notice you at home, you’ve got to be a little bit of a rebel. And Uncle Sam forks out the dough for West Point, so I’m not costing my old man a single penny. Money talks, especially when I’m not the one who gets the family business and a baked-in path to riches from babyhood.”
Much as I wish I could be friends with Richard, I know I’m not going to see him again and that he won’t remember me after this night; he’s twenty-one, after all, a man of the world, and I’m just like any other high school junior when I’m not all made up and decked out in this crazy way.
After the night of the Cinderella Ball, Charles and I morph back into the high schoolers that we are – I trade that enormous white dress, bigger than some wedding dresses, for my red hooded duffel coat and blush-pink pom-pom beanie; and Charles ditches the tux for his varsity bomber jacket and plaid baseball cap with ear flaps. The day after the ball, we walk to FAO Schwarz together and go halvsies on getting the nine original Beanie Babies for Mary, as well as matching Simba plushies for the twins, and then the Super Car Lego Technic set for us to build when we get home. Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove take us out to Central Park while Liz, Father and Grandma go clothes shopping, and we ride the horse-drawn carriage, dandling a twin on each of our laps. That evening, Father and Grandma take us to see Cats on Broadway because I asked if we could; and I lose myself in the beauty of Memory, mouthing the words and wishing I could sing like Sarah Brightman. Finally, we wrap up our trip with New Year’s Eve, where we spend the day touring the city till we end up at Times Square where we watch the ball drop.
“Ten… nine… eight… seven… six… five… four… three… two… one… HAPPY NEW YEAR 1995!!!”
We’re jumping around, shouting out the countdown, Charles and me; and at this moment, I feel much more alive, much more in my element than at my debutante presentation where I was a bundle of nerves. “Out” in society or not, what difference does it make, when at the end of the day, all I want is just to be a high school kid, having fun and living my life to the fullest?
Spring 1995, Buffalo, NY
After my big society “debut”, it’s back to reality – which for me, means going back to SEM and figuring out what my senior year capstone project will be. The whole idea of having us do this is so we learn who we are and what special superpower we’ll bring to make this world a better place. Oh and of course, because it’ll help us figure out what we want to do in college, too.
Ever since I was in sixth grade, there’s been one big question buzzing at the back of my mind: what keeps planes up in the air, and how can you stop plane crashes from happening? See, after that memorable ride we had in the TriStar when we went to Disneyland, the plane that wasn’t a DC-10, it wasn’t that long before I came across the word “DC-10” again, and not in a good way. That same fall, I was flipping through Grandma’s Good Housekeeping magazines like I often did to pick out clothes, and suddenly, an article caught my eye. It had a picture of a burned-out shell of part of an airplane lying in an open field, and another of a group of people, some of them injured, with little kids among them, sitting or lying on the grass waiting for help. As I read the article, I pictured myself and my family and all those families with kids on the plane, smashing down hard on the grass; for the way the survivors talked about the crash was so real, I could almost feel it myself. The plane that crashed was a DC-10, and the plane we were in was supposed to be a DC-10, too. How did we make it down safely when those people didn’t? Was there any way they could possibly have saved more passengers, or stopped the crash from happening? Why was there a plane called a DC-10, anyway, when all the planes I knew came from either Airbus or Boeing?
You don’t learn much more about anything when reading the same things over and over again, and so before long, I’d given up on being able to find out anything potentially useful about planes. Obviously, my bookshelf was useless for anything except girly story books, and the only books in our house with any kind of general knowledge in them were the Encyclopaedia Britannica volumes that Father kept on the top shelf of his study, mainly because they looked magnificent. I tried asking for permission once to take a look at what it had to say about airplanes, but after Father said, “Well, all right, as long as you don’t break anything”, I’d gotten scared climbing up the stepladder our maid brought into the study so I could reach the volumes. They were so heavy, I pulled at one of them with my fingers and freaked out that if I dropped it, everything else would come crashing down. And so, there wasn’t much I could do to find out anything about planes, all the way until now when we can finally search for stuff on the Internet. But hey, now we have a computer lab and a big library here, so maybe this is the right time for me to make it into my project and figure out something new, learning what I want to know about this question that’s been bugging me for years.
It feels like my life at SEM is just beginning – now that Liz has gone away to college, I don’t have to go with her to mixers anymore, and with the Debutante Ball being over and done with, all my weekends are completely my own, and I finally have all the freedom to do only the things I like to do. This year, I finally shot up some so I don’t look so stubby anymore; I’m now five foot four, and because I gained weight first and shot up later, I look a little leggier now and can run a little faster than I used to. Elise and I tried out for cross-country at the beginning of this year, and we’ve been going to meets together, running against other girls from Deerfield and Hotchkiss and all the other big prep schools. I love it when I’m out there running on the grass and the trails; even though there’s so many girls around, I somehow feel like it’s just me and nature together, and everything else fades into the distance as I get into the flow. Ever since the summer I spent at Raquette Lake two and a half years ago, I’ve always felt that being out on a trail, at one with the great outdoors, is the closest to heaven I could possibly get; and it’s a pity Father sent me only when I was starting to age out of camp, so I never had a chance to go back again. Now I’ve barely started to really come out into my own at SEM, yet pretty soon all our teachers will be talking to us about college and all. But one thing’s for sure – I’m starting to figure out who I am, and slowly, I’m getting more and more power and freedom to try new things and forge my own direction in life. Even though I don’t feel like I’ve had enough of SEM just yet, maybe there’s one good thing to look forward to about college – it’ll get me back to camp again, ‘cause then I’ll be old enough to get a summer job as a counsellor. Ever since I got out of home, every year it’s been getting better and better, unlocking more and more new things I can do.
Fall 1995, Buffalo, NY
The funny thing is, I love it that here at SEM we don’t have any boys, but yet I know college without boys is not what I want at all, not when I’m going to major in engineering. Father always wanted us to follow in Mom’s footsteps and go to Barnard; it’s been a tradition for a long line of Elliot women, both those who were born and those who married into the family, to attend women-only liberal arts colleges and come out with an Arts degree that would show their elegance and femininity, allowing them to marry well. But there’s no engineering major at Barnard or Wellesley, only natural sciences; and at Smith, there’s an interdisciplinary engineering science major, but I doubt I’ll be able to focus on getting deep into cars or planes if I go there. So even though I decide to apply to all three of them, just because it’s what Father and Grandma expect, I know I also want to try other colleges that have full engineering departments too. There shouldn’t be any barriers to girls becoming engineers, but the reality is that most engineers are still men. So, if I really want to learn engineering and do it well, I’ve got no choice but to learn it with boys. And we girls aren’t the little kids we used to be in middle school anymore, so I hope the boys have grown up too and gotten past making all the noise like they did back then.
“Well, based on your capstone project, it looks like you might end up going for aeronautical engineering,” says Mrs. Jane Churchill, our college counsellor. “At least, you’ll want to go someplace that offers you that option. And so, let’s see, there’s MIT, Stanford, Purdue, or Georgia Tech. And Ann Arbor for sure – you’ll definitely want to apply to at least one school in state, so you have a safety net where you’ve got a strong likelihood of getting in.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I reply. “I’m not sure what I’ll pick yet – aeronautical, or mechanical. It’s like, I guess I have a duty to carry on my father’s business and so maybe I should be getting into cars, you know? But I’m also learning a lot in my capstone on planes, and I could see myself spending my whole life doing this too. So maybe I should just try all the schools that have both, and then wait till junior year to figure things out.”
“That’s a pretty good idea,” Mrs. Churchill agrees. “It’s a joy to work with girls like you – you know your mind and have a clear sense of purpose. And because those two majors have many areas in common, it’s entirely possible for you to choose later, because they’ll share many prerequisites in freshman and sophomore year. So now, you have one more thing to think about. Is there any one school you want to go to more than the others? MIT and Stanford, especially, are highly competitive. Even with perfect grades and healthy extracurriculars, getting into either of those is a bit of a lottery even for the best of students. If you’ve got your heart set on either of those, you might want to think about applying early decision to get your best shot at getting in.”
“Early decision? What’s that?” For the umpteenth time, I’m so thankful I’m here at SEM, because with Father and Grandma having a one-track mind about Barnard and Wellesley and Smith, there wouldn’t be anyone to give me advice about engineering school if I’d gone into Upper School back at home.
“It’s when you apply to your top choice college in November, so they tell you in December if you’ve gotten in. There’s a catch 22 though – you’ve got to be really sure you want to go there, because if they say you got in, then you’ll have to go there and can’t back out. Think about it – and I’m always here for you to talk to me about your choices if you want.”
There isn’t that much time for me to narrow things down, because it’s September already and I need to send everything in by November. I start by eliminating Caltech, because aerospace there is a minor when it’s a major at Stanford. Actually, I don’t really care about going to a big-name college as long as it’s good at the majors I’ve picked, but I know it’ll be easier to convince Father if it’s a school that’s famous and easy for him to brag about. That probably means MIT or Stanford, because Georgia Tech and Purdue are great schools, but I doubt Father knows anything about them. Mrs. Churchill goes through the U.S. News and World Report college rankings with me, and we find that MIT’s top of the list for its aeronautical department, plus it’s closer to Detroit than Stanford, and so I’m all set.
The essay is a blank canvas for me to write my dreams: I talk about how I grew up in a family who’s forgotten that our livelihood comes from cars, so now it will be up to me to learn the skills to make sure our business can carry on for another generation. And yet, I write, I also yearn for the times when we travelled on holidays as a family in my childhood, when we could just be together without the pomp and circumstance that surrounded us at home with our maids, nannies, and chauffeur. And planes are a big part of how we travel, not just for my family but allowing many families around the world to get away and get closer to each other. I speak of how I don’t know exactly what I’ll do just yet – I want to do something useful after I finish college, but I can’t quite figure out if that will mean joining Father’s company to make safer parts for cars or working in the airplane industry to make travel safer for all the families who want to go on vacation. Whichever way it is, I know I’ll be grateful for all the opportunities they give me in college, and I wrap up the essay with the promise that I’ll use all the knowledge I’ll get to make this world a better place.
| Subject | Author | Posted |
|---|---|---|
| Kalee | March 07, 2022 03:52AM |
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