Becoming the Butlers Read online

  “Olivia,” I whispered, then “Olivia,” somewhat louder.

  “Shhhh…,” she whispered, “I’m next.” She stepped forward, raised her head, and turned around. The priest then deposited a wafer in my upturned palm. I looked at it and then looked at him. The priest seemed slightly befuddled, as if I were the odd guest no one knew at a housewarming party.

  “Sorry,” I whispered, and quickly turned and followed Olivia down the aisle. This time she waited for me.

  “Olivia,” I said bravely, “I’m sorry I called you before and said I was Monica Sands.”

  That did it. Olivia stopped, and turned around. Her eyes were the iciest blue I’d ever seen.

  “So you’re the one. I called Monica back, and she told me she never phoned.” A flicker of recognition crossed her face. “Aren’t you Mr. Harris’s daughter?”

  “No,” I mumbled.

  “Yes, you are.” Her eyes narrowed as if she couldn’t quite see me. Then, with a start, Olivia exclaimed, “What’s that in your hand?”

  “It looks like a cracker to me.”

  “That’s the Host,” she said in a low, shocked voice. “You’re supposed to swallow it!” She began to smile, and then covered her mouth with her hand. “You just can’t hold it like that,” she admonished. “Have you got a tissue? A purse? We’ve got to hide it.”

  We. Olivia had said we.

  “I have a pocket,” I told her. “In my skirt.”

  “That’s fine. Just don’t make it too conspicuous.” She glanced behind her, and smiled again. “What if ol’ Father Finley knew?”

  “I think he does,” I said.

  “That’s even better. All right, ease your hand down. There. That’s good.” She sighed in relief. “This still doesn’t make sense. Why are you here? And why did you say you were Monica?”

  Someone called out Olivia’s name. Edwin, standing behind the last pew, glared at his watch, implying they were late.

  “My mother…,” she cried with a start. “I forgot…” Then the other Olivia Butler began to settle in, her features hardening like clay. “I think it’s despicable that you lied like that,” she hissed. For a moment she looked ugly. “Monica will be furious. You’re a real weirdo. Don’t you ever call me again.”

  I stood rooted in the middle of the aisle, not even bothering to move as parishioners jostled me on their way back. I remained in place even when the priest lowered the lights and disappeared behind the altar. Rain slashed against the stained glass windows and water, like runny oil paint, ran down the red, green, and blue panes. My hand searched for the wafer in my pocket, which had now crumbled into a powder as fine as dust.

  NINE

  Although we were sitting next to each other in Bio, Nicole scribbled me a note and passed it surreptitiously behind my back:

  Dear Rachel,

  Please meet me in the back of the cafeteria so we can talk. This is getting ridiculous. You’re acting more friendly to the formaldehyde frog than to me.

  Shalom

  Nicole stood up after class and I nodded and followed her. I desperately needed a friend. That morning, in the school lobby, I had another miserable encounter with Olivia Butler. Like me, Olivia was late for homeroom, but not late enough to run up the stairs. She paced by the elevator, furiously jabbing the button and knocking on the door. I suspected her fury wasn’t so much directed toward Manny, the school elevator man, as her sopping wet clothes and shoes. Olivia had not worn a raincoat or even carried an umbrella, and as she paced I could hear the water swishing in her loafers. Her wet hair, tucked behind her ears, looked as transparent and shiny as plastic. A bedraggled Olivia was much less intimidating than yesterday’s self-righteous church Olivia. I took two steps forward, determined to explain everything, when Olivia turned around and saw me. Now when I think about it, I’m sure there were three or four other latecomers, also waiting for the slow elevator. But the other students faded away, and I felt like Olivia and I were in some old Western movie, two gunslingers facing each other in a dusty, empty square, a faint drum roll in the background. Olivia looked up at me, and then, with a visible shiver, bolted up the staircase, her dripping skirt leaving a small puddle on each step.

  Olivia Butler always took the elevator. The last time I remembered seeing her on the staircase was for a fire drill. It wasn’t that she was lazy: Butlers simply preferred limos to taxis, elevators to stairs. Yet I had repelled her so much that she preferred climbing five flights to homeroom than risk speaking a word to me. I had always believed that any emotion, even hate and disgust, was better than apathy. As her hurrying footsteps rang in my ears, I suddenly craved a little indifference.

  “I’m sorry, Harris,” Nicole told me at lunch. “And you know I never apologize. I thought about this Butler business all weekend, and it started to make sense. Other people want to be doctors, lawyers, get into Princeton, be on the cover of Vogue. You want to become a Butler. Kind of the same thing.”

  “Thanks,” I told her. “I need the encouragement. I haven’t had much luck lately.” I told Nicole about our disastrous meeting in church, and she listened carefully, tapping her right temple with her index finger as if to keep my story intact inside her head.

  “You can’t rush at her, like you’re on some battlefield,” Nicole declared after I was finished. “You’ve got to be slower. More patient. And you have to start looking like a Butler.”

  “But I thought I was looking like a Butler,” I protested. “My hair…”

  “That’s a perfect example,” Nicole cried, thumping her fist on the table. “It’s awful. The first thing we have to do is take you to Olivia’s hairdresser. The Cutting Edge.”

  “But I can’t afford it!”

  “So you eat condiments from McDonald’s for a week. Then we’ll have to change your clothes. Get rid of the polyester. The Butlers don’t wear anything but natural fibers. Have you got any cashmere sweaters?”

  “Cashmere?” I gasped. “Why they’re a fortune!”

  “Ask your mom. I’m sure she has one stowed in her closet from high school.”

  “But my mom…” I stopped suddenly. Nicole didn’t know about my mother.

  “My mom was a hippie,” I said, making myself laugh. “She never wore cashmere.”

  “Hmmmm… But I guess you couldn’t have asked her anyway. I mean she might not like the idea of you turning into a Butler. It’s a little like divorce.” Nicole examined her nails, which today were painted silver and gold. She wore a heavily embroidered white cotton sweater, a full red skirt and, with her hair braided in two buns, looked like some kind of punk peasant.

  “You know,” Nicole began, still studying her nails, “I really hope you succeed. It would be magic: almost like a fairy tale that came true. My therapist says I identify with you.”

  “With me?”

  “See,” she said in a strained voice, her eyes deliberately lowered, “when I went to boarding school in London, I really wanted this older girl to like me. This was all before I saw Dr. Golden and I was incredibly insecure, a lot like you, Harris. This girl was some Ambassador’s daughter, and would only talk to you if your name contained at least three hyphens. One day when she was out playing cricket I went into her room and took her Cartier watch from her desk. There was a great hullabaloo about the theft, and Cecily, that was her name, was heartbroken because some college guy she met in Monte Carlo had given it to her as a sweet sixteen present. Anyway, I pretended to discover her watch in a garbage bag dumped behind some bushes in the garden. Cecily was ecstatic to have her watch back, I was hero for the day, and we were best friends for the rest of the year.”

  “And no one ever knew you did it in the first place?”

  “Nope. I planned it perfectly. Even made up some story about a man in a dirty leather coat creeping about in the ivy.”

  The bell rang, and Nicole pushed away her plate of untouched tuna salad. “Dr. Golden is going to say I’m getting anorexic again. But I’m just not hungry. Please don’t go
around repeating that story I told you. I’m in enough trouble here without anyone knowing about past criminal activities. I’ll meet you in the lobby at three.”

  “Thanks, Nicole,” I told her. She grinned at me and grabbed her pile of books.

  “Hey,” she cried, stoppingmid stride. “So, what happened to your father?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, wincing slightly.

  “He’s always whistling and smiling in class.”

  “He does the same thing at home and it’s driving me crazy.”

  I sat back in my seat, watching Nicole join the throngs rushing out of the cafeteria doors. I wasn’t ready to go to English yet, and knew nearsighted Mr. Sheehan wouldn’t even miss me. My father had been so cheerful yesterday that I thought any moment he would break into a tap dance. After I arrived dejected from my meeting with Olivia, James informed me we were all going to the Bronx Zoo: an expedition, he hoped, which would bond the Vasquez family to our own. Although most of the exhibits were closed, my father waxed eloquent about the noble beauty of the one poor lion who looked frozen to death. Our motley group did resemble a family; the only other visitors were an angry-looking man who hissed at the snakes and a teenager in a leather jacket who threw stones at the owls. My father wandered up and down the icy grounds, determined to find a certain white polar bear which he said looked like Luisa’s favorite stuffed animal. His enthusiasm didn’t even wane when a guard said the polar bear died last July.

  “Well,” James chirped, determined to be cheerful, “maybe we can visit the grave.”

  “Did you say grave?” The guard snickered and rolled his eyes. “This was a polar bear, Mister, not your Aunt Ruth.”

  For a moment I thought my father was going to lose his temper. His arms stiffened, and he bit his lip sharply, as if to stop the stem of angry words. “How about a Mars Bar?” he asked George Jr., and we marched into the souvenir store, where my father bought all the Vasquezes chocolate bars. He was taking great pains to make them feel like they belonged to our family. If only he had tried half as hard with me.

  After school Nicole and I walked to The Cutting Edge. The salon was all chrome and leather, the air misty with a constant cloud of hairspray. Nicole asked for Olivia Butler’s hairdresser.

  “Olivia Butler,” Nicole explained impatiently. “Don’t you know who she is?”

  “One moment please…” The receptionist flipped through several pages of her appointment book and after five minutes informed us that a Monsieur Thomas was Olivia’s man. Monsieur Thomas turned out to be a burly, bearded jock in a sweatshirt and baseball cap who told me to call him Tom.

  “Who did this hatchet job?” he asked, picking up a piece of my hair as if it were a dead animal’s tail.

  “She wants her hair done just like Olivia Butler,” Nicole told him in her most commanding voice. Tom peered at Nicole down the bridge of his nose and asked her not to stand so close to my chair. “I wouldn’t want to accidentally slice off your nose with my scissors,” he added with a sarcastic giggle.

  “Aren’t you Olivia’s hairdresser?” Nicole demanded.

  “Of course. Is Olivia on TV now?”

  “No,” Nicole answered. “Why?”

  “I didn’t know she was so famous. How about a Madonna do? All the teenagers want that now.”

  “She wants to look like Olivia Butler, not some disco slut!”

  Tom, menacingly brandishing his scissors, turned to Nicole. “Do me a favor, sweetheart,” he said in a soft and lethal voice. “I’m cutting your friend’s hair, not yours, so why don’t you sit beneath one of those broken hairdryers and flip through Seventeen. I’m told there’s a great interview with Michael J. Fox.” Nicole walked away in a huff. Tom turned to me and said, “Okay. Olivia Butler it is. Just remember, I’m not a plastic surgeon.”

  At the end he twirled me around in the chair and mentioned that if I really wanted to do things strictly by the book, according to Olivia Butler, I would tip him more than fifteen percent. My hair looked exactly as before but two inches shorter. I was fifty dollars poorer. Becoming a Butler had turned out to be a very expensive proposition.

  “Well, it’s better,” Nicole told me at the reception desk. “Why didn’t he bleach it again?”

  “He said I had the wrong coloring for a blonde and I should let it grow back to its natural color.”

  “Hmmm…maybe Olivia’s really a brunette too.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You’re right. Girls like her are always blondes, even if they don’t have blonde hair. Do you know what I mean? They are born golden. Why don’t we go back to your place so I can bug your dad about the math final.”

  My apartment! The Vasquezes would be there, and I couldn’t exactly hide them beneath my bed. If Nicole saw them, she would wonder about my mother, and I couldn’t make up any more stories. My mother had started everything with her first lie about George.

  “Not today, Nicole,” I said, trying to be apologetic.

  “I can come over after dinner,” she said brightly. “We’re going to some ethnic restaurant in your neighborhood, something like Easter Island cuisine. I can just pop up about nine.”

  “No, Nicole!” I didn’t mean to raise my voice. The receptionist’s phone rang and rang in front of an empty desk. Nicole grabbed her coat, her mother’s old muskrat, and threw it over her shoulders. This coat was way too big and made her look like a kid in a bear costume.

  “Okay, Harris!” she shouted, her mouth trembling. “Fine! You never have to see or hear from me again!”

  “Nicole…”

  “You know something? It’s really a lousy haircut. You don’t look like a Butler at all. But you sure as hell act like one.”

  She stormed out of the door, nearly knocking over a perfectly coiffed woman in a mink. I tried to follow her but Nicole jumped into a cab and said something to the driver that made him race down the block. I stopped at a phone booth in order to leave an apology on her father’s answering machine. A recorded tape informed me that the line was dead, a fitting metaphor for our friendship.

  I walked home in the drizzle, my Olivia Butler cut now closer in spirit to the soggy original as seen that morning. Pilar opened the door before I even put the key in the lock.

  “Rachel!” she cried out urgently, pulling me in. “I’ve been waiting for you all afternoon. Your father’s acting very strange.”

  “So what else is new?” I asked, hanging my damp coat in the closet. I stumbled over something on the floor and nearly crashed into the wall. “What the…,” I swore, stooping down to pick up one of Luisa’s dolls from the floor.

  “Sorry,” Pilar murmured. “Luisa’s so messy.”

  Luisa’s Cabbage Patch dolls depressed me because they were obviously fakes: cheap Made-in-Taiwan imitations. Anyone could see how shoddy these dolls were by just looking at the dull plastic eyes, the cheesecloth outfits, the limp string hair which resembled Pilar’s own.

  Pilar took my arm again and dragged me over to my father’s door. “Listen,” she commanded. I had little choice in the matter. Either James had installed new speakers, or placed his tape deck right next to the door. The booming window-rattling rock was nothing like his usual Joan Baez.

  “So?” I yelled over an electric guitar coda that sounded like gunfire.

  “Your father hates this kind of music. Just yesterday he said heavy metal makes his nose bleed.”

  “Maybe he’s changed his mind.” I headed toward the bathroom in the hope she wouldn’t follow.

  “But Rachel…” Pilar caught up to me and for the second time held my arm.

  “What is it now?” I whined, wriggling away from her grasp. I knew I was being rotten to Pilar, but I couldn’t afford to be kind. My resolution was a wall of precariously loose bricks; if Pilar took away just one, the whole barricade could come tumbling down.

  “Don’t be mad,” she implored, quickly gnawing at a nail and then hiding her hand behind her back, “but I heard everythi
ng Mrs. Rosen said to you last night.”

  “How?” I asked. “You weren’t there.”

  “Mrs. Rosen’s voice is very loud. And I put my ear up against the door.”

  “Well, it wasn’t very interesting. My dad wants to be your dad. Big surprise.”

  “Mrs. Rosen was wrong,” Pilar said quietly. “It was more than a year.”

  “What? Let’s go into the bedroom.” After Pilar had followed me in I closed the door. “So you knew!” I exclaimed.

  “I caught them once,” Pilar began in a small and tight voice. “It’s all because of my eighth-grade Geology class.”

  “Geology? What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I left my experiment at home in my room, and the nuns let me go home at lunch so I could pick it up. The front door was unlocked, but I didn’t think twice since my dad was exterminating that week and he had to keep going back to the basement to get more roach spray.”

  “So what happened?” I asked impatiently.

  “I couldn’t find my rock anywhere. Then I remembered I left it on my dad’s night table. I opened their bedroom door, and there was your mom, asleep, in my dad’s pajamas. These pajamas”—Pilar coughed into her fist, and lowered her eyes—“looked like a New York Mets uniform, you know, with stripes and a number and even Strawberry on the back. I bought them at Macy’s for my father’s Christmas present. He thought they were silly and told my mother she should try to shrink them so George Jr. could use them.”

  “Nice,” I said.

  “He upset me, but I was used to it. Although I wanted to hate your mother, I couldn’t. She looked so beautiful. Her long hair was all spread out on the pillow and she was even smiling. My dad was in the shower. I tiptoed in, so as not to wake her, grabbed my rock, and ran. But I must have dropped my glove on the floor, ‘cause at dinner my father gave it back to me without a word. He knew I knew, and I think that’s when he started planning to leave. That stupid rock,” Pilar burst out, hitting her knee hard with her fist. “I didn’t really need it—I could have waited. If I had only waited, they’d still be here.”