Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

my nose. (“I thought you forbid us to wear make-up on penalty of death.” “Absolutely verboten; most unbecoming. Hold still and don’t bat your eyelids. You’re so lucky to have the sort of face that won’t ever need much touching up; this is an exception; don’t get any ideas. In photographs, details can get washed out.”) Afterward, when the fashion editor offered me the strapless dress as a gift, Mother, to my further astonishment, let me keep it.

Then, one afternoon a few weeks later, she mysteriously called me into the living room after school. “I have a surprise for you,” she said, and handed me the June 1st copy of Life. I was on the cover. “Margaret Sullavan’s 15-year-old Brooke,” read the caption. I felt as if the breath had been knocked out of me.

“But, Mother,” I gasped, inanely scrutinizing the life-size photograph of my profile under the red-and-white Life banner, “did you know? Did you give them permission?”

She smiled, very pleased. “I felt I owed it to you” was her answer, and she would not elaborate.

As this occurred just before school let out and the annual summer country club dances began, I was able to derive a maximum of attention from my cover. Fellow tenth-graders were reverential; snotty juniors and seniors nodded to me in the corridors between classes. A new delegation of boys from Brunswick, older and more sophisticated, with drivers’ licenses and their own cars and a practiced way of dancing close, of kissing good night, of introducing themselves to Mother and Kenneth while everyone waited for my grand entrance down the front stairs, began materializing. “Sniffing around,” Elizabeth grunted. Bill surreptitiously took a roll of nude pictures of me skinny-dipping and sold them to Brunswick students for black-market prices. He had quite a profitable business going until Mother confiscated the negatives. And Bridget, although she never said a word, was envious; I could tell by her silence.

Bridget, at fourteen, was becoming as impossible in her own way as I had been in mine. (Mother and I liked to think I had, by now, passed through the most acute fevers of adolescence.) Bridget’s way was quite different. Her rebellions took the form of strange fasts and silences. She hid her uneaten food in the playroom cupboards. Once when I searched there for paints, I came upon a lump of desiccated liver wrapped in paper napkins. By mentally retracing our dinner menus as far back as I was able, I reckoned the age of that petrified scrap at two months.

Bridget’s silences drove Mother crazy. Mother did not like to be ignored. And Bridget did not like to be criticized. She might withdraw to her room and not be seen again for many hours. Nor did she like what she considered to be Mother’s insincere, larger-than-life charm. What, in fact, Mother thought of as Southern graciousness, Bridget saw as strained, fake, hypocritical.

For instance, Mother might hurl down the telephone and exclaim, “Good gooby, what a bore Helen Dodge is. She’s on her way over here right this minute with a smoked turkey—I’m trapped! There goes my beautiful selfish morning, my nude sunbathing, and my fingernails, my toenails, my clean hair, my checks!”

And then, when Helen Dodge rang the doorbell ten minutes later, Mother would embrace her as if they were long-lost sisters and beg her to stay for lunch. At lunch, increasingly offended by Mother’s effusive high spirits, Bridget would say less and less, barely answering poor Helen Dodge’s well-meant questions about school.

Mother would cringe with shame, which she contrived to conceal with sparkling bravado: “Speak up, darling! You’re mumbling and you know how deaf I am.”

Slowly, as if a shade were being drawn over a window, Bridget’s face would withdraw from the conversation as well. Move by move, she would match Mother’s act with her own. It was unsettling to witness. The more animated Mother became, the more expressionless Bridget. Her unmistakable aim was to become invisible and vanish.

“How could you do this to me?” Mother would fume afterward. “You know perfectly well that any and every guest in my house is to be treated with respect whatever the circumstances—in the middle of an earthquake, for God’s sake! You’ve been brought up to have good manners, you’ve been set a good example by both your father and me—in this respect, at least, we concur—Where do you think you’re going? Don’t roll your eyes up to heaven and leave the room when I’m talking to you!”

Bridget remained but, without saying a word, made it clear she was no longer present.

It was decided that I should go to boarding school for my junior and senior years. A Swiss boarding school had long been one of Mother’s dreams: “You’re so lucky that I can afford it; oh, I would give anything to have the opportunity to ski beautifully, to speak perfect French!” But, because I was swept up in the Greenwich social whirl and couldn’t bear to leave it, I scotched that dream in favor of something closer to home. Bridget, on the other hand, suddenly professed a desire to get as far away as possible. To everyone’s surprise, she announced that she would actually prefer to go to Switzerland. Then Bill, having considered his life alone without his two sisters, decided he, too, wanted to go away to school. So, in the fall of 1953, the three of us left home.

I was sixteen, Bridget fourteen, Bill twelve. It never occurred to me it was the last time we would live together as a family.

For all my resistance to the idea of leaving my beloved friends, my feature-story contests, my pink-and-white room, my role as troublemaker and provocateur, my convoluted flirtations, I’d begun to look forward to the novelty of freedom. Mother—after a winter of hauling me up and down the Eastern seaboard to investigate all the blue-chip girls’ schools, and of glossing over my bothersome candor when interviewed by their eager headmistresses (“No, Miss St. John, actually I don’t want