Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen - Dyan Sheldon [10]
It was almost ten by the time I finally got around to calling Ella. Her father had given her twenty-five bucks for getting a distinction in her history test, and her mother, who’d just started a new cooking course, had made her own ravioli for supper (Ella’s father is always giving her money for doing things my mother takes for granted, and Ella’s mother is always taking a course in something), but otherwise it was a quiet night.
“I hope you don’t mind,” said Ella after she’d stopped enthusing about the home-made ravioli, “but I told my folks about your mom.”
I pretended to mind – just a little.
“Well…” I said. “I wouldn’t want it to get back to my mother that I’d been talking about the tragedies in her life. She’s a very private person, you know.”
“My parents won’t tell anyone,” Ella quickly assured me. “They’re not gossips.”
This is probably true of Mr Gerard, who doesn’t have any time to gossip since he’s always working, but it isn’t true of Mrs Gerard. The women of Woodford are a communication system unto themselves. They might not know much about existential theatre or post-modern literature, but they know everything that goes on in Dellwood, no matter where it goes on. Gossip is what they do when they’re playing golf and shopping and sitting in the sauna together.
“Oh, I know they’re not,” I said equally quickly. “It’s just that it’s very personal stuff…”
“My parents were really moved by your mother’s story,” said Ella. “It made them think.”
I smiled at the telephone. “No one’s suffering is ever in vain,” I softly intoned.
After I hung up, I took a shower, touched up the purple nail polish I was wearing that week to match the lining of my cape, and went to my bedroom to get away from the grunting and shouting of the other members of my family while they played Monopoly in the living room.
When I look back on myself that day, going about my life as if I didn’t have a care in the world, it almost makes me weep. How innocent I was! How naïve! The poet was right: ignorance is truly bliss. There I was, laughing, talking, working, making spaghetti, eating, going over my script, doing my nails and cleaning my teeth, totally oblivious to the fact that a catastrophe of cosmic proportions was hurtling towards me.
It took me a while to get settled. That’s because my bedroom isn’t really a bedroom, it’s really a sun porch. At least it was until we moved in. My mother, trying to stop the twins from acting so much like twins, decided that each of them should have her own room. So I got the sun porch. (Ordinariness isn’t the only thing I have to fight against in my house; gross injustice is another.) Anyway, there isn’t any heat in my room, so I had to close all the curtains, plug in the minute and ancient electric heater, and find the chenille bathrobe I got at the Salvation Army so I wouldn’t freeze to death. Then I had to go back to the kitchen because I’d run out of candles. Then I had to get my diary out of its secret hiding place where I keep it to safeguard it against the prying eyes of my mother’s other children. My father, who is a worrier by nature, is convinced that I’m going to torch the house some day by burning candles, but I prefer candlelight to electric. It’s so much more atmospheric. Especially when I’m telling the events of the day to my diary. No matter how busy I am, or how exhausted from the slings and arrows of the last twenty-four hours, I write in my diary every single night. My life is extraordinary; I don’t want to forget any more of it than I can help.
By the time I was finally in bed with the radio on, my candles lighted, my diary on my lap, and my pen with the lilac ink in my hand, it was nearly ten forty-five. I started the entry for March 5th. I had a lot to tell,