Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen - Dyan Sheldon [7]
Ella rolled her eyes. “Oh, please… Will you stop with the Carla Santini obsession for a few minutes?” She pursed her lips, looking at me as though she were wondering how honest she could really risk being. “The thing is…” she went on, slowly and carefully choosing her words.
“The thing is that I’m not your mother’s idea of a suitable companion for you.” Mrs Gerard wants Ella to hang out with other well-off, middle-class kids who will all go to the same good colleges and eventually have the same narcotic if perfect lives as their parents. She doesn’t want her only offspring running around with someone who has the soul and passion of a gipsy and lives in an old house without a microwave.
“Actually,” said Ella, her eyes on the thick white carpet, “it’s more your mother than you that my mother doesn’t think is suitable.”
I gazed at her incredulously.
“My mother?” Thinking my mother isn’t suitable is like thinking Santa Claus is a highwayman. My mother is eminently suitable – in an ordinary way. “Not suitable for what?”
Ella squirmed uncomfortably. “It’s not big things…” she mumbled, still studying the two-inch pile. “I mean, remember when they met at Parents’ Night?”
I nodded my head very slowly. My mother hadn’t really said anything about it, just that she’d met the Gerards.
“Yeah…”
Ella squirmed some more. “Well, apparently your mother was wearing filthy old overalls and she had chopsticks in her hair.”
“My mother often has chopsticks in her hair,” I answered a little shortly. Because she can never find a hair clip. “And if she was in her work clothes it was because she didn’t have time to change.”
“You don’t have to get defensive with me,” said Ella. “I’m just telling you what my mother said.”
“But it’s ridiculous. What difference does it make what she had in her hair?”
“I know it doesn’t matter,” said Ella. “But my parents pay attention to stuff like that. They’re old-fashioned.”
“Old-fashioned? Ella, they’d have to be time travellers from the Victorian era to get upset about a pair of chopsticks.”
Ella stopped studying the carpet and turned her attention to the CD player. “Forget it,” she said. “It isn’t important.”
“What do you mean it isn’t important?” I threw myself in front of her. “This is the woman who gave me life we’re talking about. Whose milk fed my fragile body, whose blood flows through my veins. Of course it’s important. What else does your mother have against Karen?”
Ella smiled wryly. “Well, that’s one thing.”
“What is?”
“That she lets you call her Karen. My mother doesn’t like that. She thinks it’s disrespectful.”
“What else?” I pushed. “There has to be more than that.”
Ella sighed. She was no match for me in this kind of thing, and she knew it.
“Well, if you must know, Lola, neither of my parents is too happy about the fact that your mother has three children and no husband.”
To her credit, Ella was looking pretty embarrassed.
I was simply stupefied. “What?”
Ella shrugged helplessly.
“I do know this is practically the twenty-first century and everything, but my folks really are old-fashioned. At least about stuff like that they are. They think single mothers are a threat to society.”
Well, you can see their point, can’t you? I mean, what hope is there for our culture when a mother lets her sixteen-year-old daughter call her by her first name, wears chopsticks to hold up her hair, and lives without a husband? The barbarians are practically battering down the gates.
I was really interested now. I’d never seen my mother as a social outcast before. It was an idea I could warm to.
“You’ve got to be joking,” I said, even though I knew