Blood and Oranges by James Goldsborough (latest books to read txt) 📗

o’clock, and Terry spent so much time with Howard flying back and forth to the new Hughes missile plant in Tucson that he often didn’t come home at all. Lizzie had found a UCLA co-ed for Robby when Joe was in jail, but Playa del Rey was not Brentwood, and no co-eds were available.

“Can’t go on like this,” Terry said one evening when they were having drinks on the patio and watching the sun sink into the Pacific. Soon the nightly marine layer would be forming, when the coolness of the water mixes with the warmth of air off the land. “She hates school, hates the club, hates the people who stay with her, has no friends and as far as I can see has no fun in life at all.”

“Didi’s her own person,” said Maggie. “Nothing wrong with that.”

“But she’s so different.”

“From . . .?”

“From everything—from other children. From you, from me.”

“So she’s different. Weren’t you different? I know I was.”

Maggie had tried everything with her, but Didi was a drudge. At the club, she refused swimming lessons. Throw her in the pool to sink or swim which was how she’d learned herself, but Didi would probably have let herself drown. When they went to the stables, Didi would not get on the pony, would not get on the horse with her mother, would not touch the reins, hated the dirt and dust and shit as much as Nelly did. Sometimes you force your children to do something, thinking it’s for their own good and knowing one day they’ll thank you for it, but Didi knew her own good better than anyone.

Maggie had had the discussion with Terry before, and defended her daughter every time. But the truth was she’d reached the end of her tether, driven to tears sometimes by anger and frustration with Didi’s obstinacy, her refusal to do anything her parents might have liked, that might have given them even a hint of the joys of parenthood. Maggie began to wonder if it wasn’t calculated: selfishness used as a means of punishment. But why? She had no idea how to deal with something like that.

“I wasn’t that different,” Terry said. “Can’t figure it. She has everything.”

“Doesn’t like it here.”

“Doesn’t like the beach.”

The thought hit them simultaneously as they sat sipping rum in the ocean breezes. Sailboats from Santa Monica Pier tacked a few miles off Venice.

“Nelly adores her. Remember last Christmas in Bel Air? We couldn’t separate them.”

“Maybe that’s it,” he said.

It was too obvious. She called her mother that night.

They brought her over in Terry’s station wagon. Three suitcases of clothes and belongings were left in the hall while Didi walked around deciding which bedroom she wanted. Thinking she would want her mother’s old room, Nelly had installed bright yellow curtains and a new pale blue bedspread set, but Didi didn’t want her mother’s room and hated yellow; she wanted Aunt Lizzie’s room, farther down the hall from the master bedroom. Nelly looked to Maggie, who smiled as if to say get used to it. Terry carried the bags to the bedroom, and four of them sat down to lunch. Iris, who’d been with Nelly since Lupe left after Eddie was killed, poured the chablis and brought in a fresh tomato salad from the garden followed by chicken croquettes in béarnaise and squash from the garden. Didi was delighted to have a real lunch served by a real maid. She liked maids.

“Tomorrow Ralph will drive us down to Westlake,” Nelly told her granddaughter. “Miss Pierce, the vice principal, will show us around so you can get a feel for the school. Some of the girls are already there, I understand, for summer activities.”

Didi was eight, tall for her age, happy that her legs nearly reached the floor at Granny’s dining room table. She was a pretty girl, solid, not delicate, with her mother’s dark Latin hair and not a touch of her father’s Welsh red. Nelly thought she took more after Lizzie than Maggie for she tended to observe rather than talk. She was polite to a fault, and from what Nelly had heard from friends, would fit in perfectly at Westlake, where they had classes on etiquette. She was stuffy, no question, but Nelly liked that. No more Maggies, please! She was aware of everything around her, her reticence growing not from shyness or lack of observation but from withholding judgment. Above all things, Didi hated making mistakes. She was a cautious creature, circumspect to a fault, mortified by failure. The saying is that the girl is the mother of the woman, but in Didi’s case, for reasons no one ever understood, the saying would not hold.

“What kind of summer activities, Granny?’

Nelly sipped her wine. She’d seen her granddaughter carefully pose her fork before she asked the question.

“Well, I’m sure I don’t know. We’ll find out tomorrow.”

“Summer sports, probably,” said Maggie. “Girls’ sports, like field hockey.”

Terry smiled at his wife. “Somehow I can’t see you in knickers playing field hockey with the other girls.”

“I never did,” said Maggie. “I played with the boys.”

“You know I don’t like sports, Mother,” said Didi.

Terry took a sip of wine and smiled at his daughter. He would never admit he wouldn’t miss her, but it was the truth. He couldn’t warm to her, and it wasn’t for not trying. With a son he would have known how to break through the shell or with a cuddly girl or even with a tomboy like Maggie. A little thing like Didi who shunned physical contact and liked sitting by herself was a mystery to him. He had an image of Alice McKee, his friend Tom McKee’s little girl, jumping into her daddy’s arms by the club pool, a little monkey in a wet bathing suit, wrapping her skinny arms and legs around Daddy and screaming with joy as they jumped in the water locked together. Terry would have loved it. Didi would have died of shame.

She fit right