The Crasher Read online

  “Practicing for my audition in Ginger and Fred, Dad… I’m the tallest in the class, so I’m trying out for Fred.” She gave him a coquettish look. “I wanted your opinion about the look before I asked permission to borrow it for the big night…”

  As Graham growled something about putting the cart before the horse and the Douglases made polite titters, Ginny got up and tap-danced around the room, the taps on her shoes and the tap of the cane on the wooden floor reverberating through Virginia’s head. When she reached the door she bowed low to the ground. “Good night, ladies and gentlemen.”

  Jim Douglas made a halfhearted attempt to applaud, but when nobody else joined in, he stopped. There was an awkward silence as they heard Ginny run upstairs. “I’ll get the coffee,” said Virginia, and “Where’s that coffee?” said Graham, simultaneously.

  “Ginger and Fred?” Virginia didn’t need to look at Lucy Douglas to know she thought her daughter belonged in a straitjacket.

  “Ginny’s in a modern dance class at Dallas High,” Virginia snapped over her shoulder.

  “Oh, does she want to be in show biz now? I thought she wanted to be a dress designer?”

  Graham’s face was still red. “Certainly not.” He struggled to regain his composure. “She’s top of her class in math. When she graduates, she’s going to business school, to get a degree in business administration.” He straightened his shoulders. “She’ll eventually join me.”

  “Over my dead body,” Virginia murmured. She was so upset, reaching up for the precious coffee cups she only used when they had company, she dropped one, the handle breaking off as it hit the countertop.

  Upstairs, at the small sink in her bedroom, a lifesaver in the rented house with only one bathroom, Ginny slowly, painstakingly, began to remove the kohl with Johnson and Johnson’s Baby Oil. Before she was halfway finished, her tears were helping the job along.

  What a fool she’d made of herself… and in front of prissy, gossipy Lucy Douglas, of all people. How could she have let her mother down like that, giving away the family secret that her father had always conned his way through life?

  Ginny stared at the black streaks on her face. Not half an hour ago she’d felt so excited, applying the newly acquired kohl, managing to stuff her unruly hair into a skintight, olympic-style bathing cap that gripped her skull so tightly, it made her cheekbones look more prominent, tying her pièce de résistance on top, the black turban she’d made out of the control tops of her mother’s old panty hose.

  She’d set out to make everyone laugh with her Fred Astaire act, to help her mother, who wasn’t that keen on playing gin—or for that matter having the Douglases over. As usual, because of her father, it had turned into a nightmare.

  Why did he constantly humiliate her with his well-worn stories? Why was he always illustrating his own cleverness with stories about escapades her mother believed showed up her worst trait, an overpowering determination to get her own way, no matter what, rather than flashes of brilliant initiative learned at her father’s knee?

  She was spent, worn out, the way she always felt after any confrontation with her father. There were more and more of them these days as the subject of Her Future loomed nearer.

  She knew when it was coming. Usually at breakfast. Often on a Monday, her father’s favorite day for making pronouncements, the day the fathers of most kids she knew were in a rush to get to work, dashing to their cars or the subway, or a seven-thirty or eight o’clock bus to get to an office, a plant, a business.

  Her father was different, and how she’d grown up hating that fact.

  It was her mother who went to work. Her father worked from home—wherever home happened to be—and most Mondays he acted the way she supposed most wage earners did, sighing about the onset of another week of toil ahead, sitting at the breakfast table as if he was the chairman of the board.

  What bullshit as Toby, her best friend at Dallas High, would say. Monday was no different from any other day of the week for her father. He would go into whatever room of the house he’d designated as his “office” and dictate his daily output of words of wisdom into his “Memory Minder.” Later he would take hours, starting and stopping the machine, to listen, before finally typing out, almost word for word, what he had already dictated.

  It was a terrible waste of time, but Ginny had long ago given up hope of trying to persuade him to type his thoughts directly onto the typewriter.

  “Think of the correspondence course as a classroom,” he would pontificate. She could repeat it word for word. “When the material arrives through the mail, it is essential the pupil can ‘hear’ as well as read what the teacher is teaching. So I must first hear what I am going to teach—the tone is almost as important as the information.”

  Quentin Peet, the nationally acclaimed columnist, her father’s idol, would then be brought into it. “I am sure Peet must dictate his pieces,” her father would say. “Every word resonates like no other writer’s in the world. I am sure that’s his secret.”

  Well, bully for Mr. P. As far as Ginny was concerned dictation was for secretaries, but there had never been enough money around in their lives for that kind of luxury.

  California, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas. During her short life they’d lived in four different states and seven different cities. Toby thought it sounded terribly glamorous and she’d let her think it, but it wasn’t, no sirree. It wasn’t glamorous at all. It was hell on earth.

  Just before moving to this dreary house near the Marsalis Park Zoo, they’d been living in Denver, and that was where the horrible, lurking suspicion that had been building inside her turned into reality.

  Her mother, trying to hide the fact, had been crying over the electricity bill, and like a thunderbolt, as if God himself had spoken, Ginny had suddenly known, absolutely known for certain that the Walker School of Advanced Learning was a failure, if not a sham, that despite growing up hearing over and over again that it was their passport to prosperity, it never had been, nor would it ever be.

  Heavy rain began to beat against the window. At least that would drown out the smell of the monkey house for a few hours. Ginny threw off the tuxedo jacket, undressed and jumped into bed to finish her math homework. At ten o’clock at night, still only in October, she was shivering, dreading another Dallas winter, with only a gas fire in her room.

  “It rarely rains and is never cold in Texas,” her father had said two years before as he outlined the reasons for their move to the area of his “new opportunity.”

  As she turned out the light Ginny’s resentment and anger returned. Just like the Walker School of Advanced Learning, that had been a lot of bullshit, too.

  When the Douglases left, Virginia could just imagine what they were saying as they drove home. “Is that what he teaches in his How to Succeed in Business or whatever he calls his courses, to lie and steal and crash? No wonder his daughter’s such a kook. He probably cheated at gin, too. He probably always cheats, then calls it chutzpah or initiative.”

  The car seat story was all too true. Virginia hadn’t been amused or impressed when it had come out. On the contrary, she’d wanted to punish Ginny, to make her realize that taking someone else’s property was stealing, that to go anywhere where she wasn’t wanted was undignified. To her fury, before she could do anything, Graham had not only told Ginny he was proud of her, he’d rewarded her with a wonderful present, her first sewing machine, using some of the money they’d put away for medical emergencies.

  Ancient history though it was, Virginia thought about it as she washed up the supper plates, and it made her boil all over again. As if the sewing machine hadn’t been enough. As usual, she’d been the one paying for the lease on the car and so, of course, for the car seat, too.

  It was all uphill and tonight it was all too much. How could she ever give Ginny a normal life, growing up with a peripatetic father who had itchy feet as soon as responses to his local ads ran dry, whose “School of Advanced Learning” would have
led them into an advanced stage of poverty without her paychecks?

  On the wall was the set of kitchen knives Graham’s sister Lil had sent them last Christmas. How horrified Lil would be if she knew what she, Virginia, wanted to do with them right now.

  After “Dear Friend,” Graham Walker’s opening letter to new subscribers began with the homily, “We don’t wake up on the wrong side of the bed. We wake up on the wrong side of the brain.” Ever since she could remember Ginny had always tried to sleep flat on her back.

  Now it was one of the few left of her father’s many dictates she thought might contain an element of truth. Certainly on this day of days, when she’d woken up on her stomach, with her head buried in the pillow and the wrong side of her brain definitely in control, not cooperating in any way with what she had to do.

  Two weeks had passed since the stormy morning-after-the-Douglases-night-before. She’d apologized profusely to her father, more to please her mother than anything else, knowing she could twist him around her little finger, providing he never suspected how she really felt about his “life’s work.”

  It wasn’t her father she worried about. It was her overworked, overburdened, wonderful mother, who didn’t deserve a brat like her for a daughter, or a control freak like her father for a husband. Toby knew how much she needed her mother, particularly now, when her support would be so essential when the Big Showdown finally came: business school versus liberal arts at the community college or, her most longed-for dream, allowing her to become an intern, apprentice, gofer, or whatever the lowliest job was called in the world of fashion design.

  How crazy her mother would think she was if she knew that was what today was all about.

  For the third time, Ginny squeezed hard with finger and thumb the small tube of adhesive in her left hand, as in her right, she held, trembling between tweezers, a set of Supreme Sable Lashes. Again nothing came out of the tube.

  As she had been expecting with every tick of her bedroom clock, her mother called from the bottom of the stairs, “Are you nearly ready, Ginny?”

  Her brain suddenly gave her a break. Of course, the stupid tube needed to be pierced. The explicit instructions, propped up against the mirror, that she could probably recite because she’d read them so often, had omitted that obvious piece of advice, because it hadn’t been written for morons like herself.

  As she was about to use the thin end of the tweezers to go to work, her mother called again. “Ginny!” She got the message. Her mother was about to take off without her.

  “I’m coming… I’m coming.”

  It was too bad. There was no time left to add the Supreme Sables. She should have given them a trial run, but she’d been too concerned that once on, they wouldn’t come off, and she couldn’t see herself getting away with them at Dallas High, where patience for her “originality” was definitely wearing thin.

  As the car horn blared outside, Ginny looked again in the mirror. It only showed her down to the waist, but she thought she’d accomplished what she’d set out to do.

  With the Fred Astaire turban again covering her hair, this time worn with an electric blue velvet sheath she’d made, Scarlett O’Hara style, from curtains she’d found in a yard sale, large round herringbone earrings made from overcoat buttons, and a lightly penciled brown mouth, she did look different, perhaps even “head turning,” which was cousin Alex’s greatest compliment.

  The Supreme Sables, at the considerable investment of five dollars and seventy-five cents, would have added the perfect finishing touch, but the sarà, sarà. She had learned—literally at her mother’s knee—when to stop crying over spilt anything and when to get on with life.

  Because Alex had told her more than once that you don’t have to be a Boy Scout to know how important it is to Be Prepared, she popped the lashes and adhesive into her small black sewing kit, which today would double as her purse.

  One more look in the mirror.

  Would the most famous designer ever produced in the United States—well, at least in Texas—notice how the turban emphasized the shape of her head? If so, it would be worth the headache it was already creating. Would Paul Robespier, once Paul Roberts, back in Dallas with his first American collection after ten successful years in Europe, realize how original her cut-on-the-bias sheath was? If he didn’t, the day still held plenty of promise. Thank goodness it was a school holiday. There had never been a day to match this one.

  She felt the same nervous excitement she’d had before diving from the top board in the school diving competition. She’d won then. Diving into something totally different today, she told herself, she’d win again. Her hands were shaking as they’d been up there on the board. Surely, a good omen?

  The car horn blared once more and she raced down the stairs of the boring little beige house, light-years away from the world to which she was headed. It was a world, Ginny knew, where women thought nothing of spilling their breakfast orange juice on ermine bathrobes that cost seventy-five hundred dollars a throw, where every stitch her mother made to fit colossally wealthy (often colossally overweight) Texas matrons into colossally expensive creations cost more than her father usually earned in a day.

  Ginny opened the car door and nonchalantly tossed a coat on the back seat, her mother’s coat.

  Guilt brought her excitement down a peg. They’d often shared the coat, the warmest one in the house, but her mother didn’t know she’d made an adjustment or two to make it look more fashionable—well, on her. With lapels removed, the coat now opened wide in front to show off the vivid blue of her dress. She had also shortened it an inch or two to show off what she considered were her best features, long, shapely legs.

  As the car backed out slowly, although it was too early for any mail to have arrived, both mother and daughter looked at the mailbox. Neither realized she was doing it. It was an involuntary action, because there was a special significance about the Walker mailbox. Regularly empty or regularly full meant all the difference between staying put or moving on to “another more profitable location,” as Graham Walker put it.

  It was the reason the size of the mailbox was the first thing Ginny looked at when they arrived at a new address. Too large and Ginny feared it would never look full enough to satisfy her father, so she took her time unpacking all her bits and pieces, in case they’d soon be on the road again. However, she always found a place to set up her precious sewing machine.

  How her mother put up with all the packing and unpacking over the years she would never understand, but then there was so much about her parents she didn’t understand and probably never would.

  In a flood of affection Ginny attempted to give her mother a kiss as she backed the car onto the road. “Oh, I’m so thrilled, so thrilled… thank you, oh thank you, there’s no other mother in the world like you.”

  It was true. For weeks Ginny had been thinking of a way to smuggle herself into Paul Robespier’s much publicized Fashion Show of the Year at Neiman Marcus. Just when she’d decided to hitchhike to the store at dawn to try to get in through the staff entrance with the cleaning crew, her mother had suddenly told her she could come with her, “providing you keep yourself quiet.”

  Virginia turned to smile at her only child. Her loving expression changed immediately.

  “Ginny, why on earth are you wearing that again? You look like… like something from another planet—like one of those ETs or whatever they’re called. Oh, Ginny, really, I just can’t believe you.”

  “I thought you liked it,” Ginny said defensively. “I got the idea from a late night movie… something Adrian made for Joan Crawford in…”

  “Adrian! Joan Crawford! I really can’t believe what I’m hearing. All month long you talk about your longing to see Robespier’s collection, nagging me insane to sneak you in somehow and then, when you finally drive me into the ground to get your way, you appear in… well, I don’t know what to call it, except as you’ve just described it yourself… in something out of the ark. Ad
rian… Joan Crawford—they’ve both been dead for years!”

  Ginny concentrated on swallowing to stop angry tears from ruining her makeup.

  Virginia sighed heavily. There was no way she could disappoint Ginny now. “All right, stop feeling sorry for yourself. All I’m going to say is, looking like this, it’s even more vital you keep your promise to stay in the background. It’s going to be a madhouse anyway. There’s a waiting list a mile long hoping for cancellations.”

  On the expressway she continued. “Ginny, I don’t understand why you want to make yourself look like a freak. You’ve got such lovely hair. Why on earth d’you want to hide it?” Her voice was soft, low, the way it was sometimes when she sat on her bed at night to tell her wonderful stories about life in the world of fashion. “You can sew beautifully… if I can get some Vogue patterns…”

  “I hate sewing! I hate patterns! Mother…” Ginny couldn’t help it, her voice broke as she tried to explain. “Don’t you understand, I want to be original, to look different. It’s the only way I’m ever going to get anywhere in fashion. Alex says…”

  “Alex! What does he know about fashion? He’s as off-the-wall as you are. Originality is one thing, but… but… looking like a weirdo…” Virginia sighed again. It was no use. It was never any use, particularly if her too-smart-for-his-own-good nephew, Alex, had given Ginny his seal of approval.

  Since childhood Ginny’s idol had been her ten-years-older cousin, and her mother well knew that no amount of parental disapproval, disdain, or detraction had ever been able to topple Alex off the pedestal Ginny had created for him.

  Neither of them spoke again until they reached the exit for Neiman Marcus. Then, “Remember Ginny, you’ve got to stay out of sight.” Virginia paused, then added sharply, “None of your tricky business.”

  “I swear, I swear, no one will know I’m there, but if there is a chance… the slightest, tiniest chance, could you introduce me to Monsieur Robespier, pleeese?”