With the old lady still yammering through my headset, I kick off my Bass Weejuns and slip my feet into the strappy high heels.
And yes, I'm well aware of all the valid reasons why I should politely but firmly refuse these shoes...But instead, I LOVE THEM. And they fit.
XV.
How come I click so well with Goran is that he's never been allowed to be a child, and I'm strictly forbidden to grow any older. The day before my mom was supposed to appear at the Oscars, she took me to a day spa on Wilshire for a little industrial-strength pampering, mother-daughter style. While she and I got our hair highlighted, belted in identical fluffy white terry-cloth bathrobes, our faces caked with masks of Sonoran mud, my mom explained how Goran grew up as a refugee in one of those Iron Curtain orphanages where the babies all lie ignored and untouched in cavernous wards until they're old enough to vote for the current regime. Or to be conscripted.
There in the day spa, even as Laotian masseuses knelt to buff the dead skin from our feet, my mom told me that infants require a minimum amount of physical touch in order to develop any sense of empathy and connection with other human beings. Without such handling, a baby Would grow up to be a sociopath, lacking any conscience or ability to love. More as a political gesture—not merely for publicity's sake—we're having all of our acrylic finger- and toenail overlays replaced. One of my mom's deepest political convictions is that, if people want so desperately to come to the United States, wading across the Rio Grande at great risk to their life and limb simply for the opportunity to pick our lettuce and iron our hair, well, we should allow them. Entire nations would enjoy nothing more than the opportunity to scrub our kitchen floors, she says, and to prevent them from doing so would be a violation of their most basic human rights.
My mom is adamant on the subject. At the moment, 'We're surrounded by various political and economic refugees as they crowd forward to scrape and wax and pluck at °Ur imperfections.
After all the herbal high colonics I've endured, not to Mention the electrolysis, the tortures of Hell hold little terror. It never fails to impress me how so many of the huddled masses and wretched refuse can flee the political oppression and torture of a foreign government, then arrive in America ready and eager to inflict largely the same tortures on the ruling classes here.
As my mom sees it, her dry, flaky skin is some immigrant's vocational opportunity. Plus, hurting her offers immigrants a nifty cathartic therapy for venting their rage. Her chapped lips and split ends constitute someone's rungs up the socioeconomic ladder to escape poverty. Sliding into her middle age complete with cellulite and scaly elbows, my mother has become an economic engine, generating millions of dollars which will be wired to feed families and purchase cholera medicine in Ecuador. Should she ever decide to 'let herself go,' no doubt tens of thousands would perish.
And no, I haven't overlooked the steadfast way in which my parents blame Goran's failure to adore them on everyone except themselves. To them, if Goran doesn't love them, that clearly indicates that Goran is damaged and incapable of loving anyone.
In the spa, the stylists and artists hover around us, those minions as dense as the worst Harpies of Hell, circling and offering the information—always credited to a way-inside source—that while Dakota makes a lovely girl, she was in fact born with superfluous male genitalia. My mom's personal assistant: Cherry or Nadine or Ulrike or whoever, she brays that Cameron is so dense that she bought the morning-after abortion pill and, instead of swallowing, stuck one up inside her woo-woo.
According to my mom, national boundaries must be adequately porous, and incomes must be redistributed to allow all people, regardless of race and religion and circumstances of birth, to be able to purchase her films. Her noble egalitarian philosophy holds that all human beings should be allowed to buy tickets to her movies AND to vacuum her pores. She insists neither Africa nor the Indian subcontinent will ever achieve technological and cultural parity with the Western world until their density of DVD players makes them a major consumer of her body of filmic work. And by that, she means her REAL work, marketed in its actual studio-designed packaging, not merely some crappy pirated, black-market unit which pays royalties to nobody except drug lords and child sex slaves.
Lecturing the assembled publicists and stylists, my mom says that if any aboriginal peoples or primitive tribe still does not celebrate her acting, that's only because those subjugated native cultures find themselves oppressed by an evil, fundamentalist form of religion. Their budding appreciation of her films is obviously being quashed by some devilish imam or patriarchal ayatollah or witch doctor.
Rallying the pedicurists and aestheticians around the white terry-cloth hem of her robe, my mother speechifies that they're not just grooming an actor in order to pimp a motion picture. In actuality, the team of us, my mom and her stylists and masseuses and manicurists, we're engaged in raising awareness around bold, cinematic narratives which model the possibility of truly equal standards of blah, blah, blah...Instead of spending their lives as pregnant, dirt-eating, genitally mutilated victims of some crushing theocracy... now, third-world ladies can aspire to become cosmo-swilling, Jimmy Choo-wearing sexual predators. By our deft use of acrylic fingernails and bleached-blond hair extensions—here she flutters her outflung arms in an all-inclusive gesture—we're empowering the downtrodden, exploited peoples of the world.
Yes, my mom lacks even the remotest sense of irony, but she's certain that in a perfect world, any miserable little boy or girl should be able to grow up and become nothing less than... her. Best left unsaid was the fact that she and my dad were already brandishing glossy, gate-folded brochures for all-boys boarding schools in Nova Scotia. Military schools in Iceland. It was clear: Goran wasn't a success, and some impending dawn I'd find him packed up and gone, replaced by a four-year-old Bhutanese leper.
If I wanted to practice my feminine wiles on Goran, my time was running out.
As my mother would say, 'You've got to strike while the flatiron is hot.' Meaning: I needed to get pretty and make my move soon. Ideally, tomorrow night. Ideally, while my folks were onstage, doling out the Oscars.
The final straw that broke the camel's back was, this week, when Goran sold five of my mom's Emmys over the Internet for ten dollars apiece. Before that, apparently, he'd collected a bunch of her Palme d'Or awards from our house in Cannes and sold them all for five bucks a pop. After a decade of my parents insisting that movie-industry awards meant nothing, and amounted to little more than a crass gold-plated embarrassment, my mom and dad went ape shit.
The way my mom saw it, Goran's every transgression, his every misanthropic misbehavior was simply a result of his not receiving adequate love and cuddling.
'You must promise me, Maddy,' my mom said, 'that you'll show your poor brother an extra-special amount of patience and affection.'
His deprived infancy is how come, when my parents rented out a Six Flags amusement park for his birthday, and trotted out a purebred Shetland pony as his gift, Goran assumed the animal was lunch. For Halloween, they'd dressed him up as Jean-Paul Sartre, with me as Simone de Beauvoir, trick-or-treating up and down the hallways of the Ritz in Paris with copies of
Of course, my dad wanted to introduce the concept of discipline and consequences into Goran s life, but a boy who's no doubt been tortured with electroshocks and waterboarding and intravenous injections of liquid drain cleaner, he's not going to be easily cowed by the threat of a spanking and a one-hour time-out.
By now my pink blouse had arrived from Barcelona. I planned to wear it with a skort and my cardigan sweater
