Diamond Girl

Chapter 14



The air in here is so bad but it shouldn’t be. It's cold in here. I can’t feel much in the way of sensation from my neck down but the skin on my face is still sensitive. I can register the clammy air on my lips and how cold my tears feel trickling down the sides of my face into my ears. I haven’t been able to feel my feet at all for what seems like days. Truth to tell, I have never had much sensation in my feet.

For me that was one of the rare positives of being a Type One diabetic. New York girls have to live out their lives in punishing shoes, sky high heels even with a pair of old jeans. At our chic-est, we will stride through the meat packing district to a new club wearing our newest Manolo boots, fourteen thousand dollars a pair, always too narrow and the heel is a nosebleed making five inches.

In truth, when New York women set foot outside, they are en pointe. People always ooh and ahh over ballerinas in their little toe shoes standing en pointe for two seconds. Well, the true foot hero is the New York woman striding bravely down Fifth Avenue on stiletto thin heels, her feet practically at a vertical angle and always in shoes at least one size too small. We are the modern day practitioners of the ancient art of Chinese foot binding.

In places like Greenwich, a young debutante and her trophy mother can risk a pair of Chanel ballet flats. Go for it, they are very ladylike, but I wouldn’t recommend making a habit out of it. Sky high heels don’t just lengthen a woman’s legs and make her calves look sweet, they shorten the impact of the size of girl’s feet. A foot bent at an angle nature never intended is a foot that doesn’t look like a freaking gunboat, as it would in flats.

A couple generations ago people from families like mine used to marry their cousins to keep the money in the family. They even married their first cousins, which honestly is so weird, but then I guess there started being enough money to broaden our horizons, so the family scions were able to stop marrying their cousins and producing kids who looked like poor Eleanor Roosevelt.

Men being men, once their fortunes started being much more massive than the poor old cousin-marrying family founders ever dreamed of, they realized that not only could money buy great houses and yachts, but it could also buy ahhmazing looking women. Hence, the advent of the New York trophy wife. The name is self-explanatory.

Trophy wives started being a hot ticket item in the seventies, about the time millionaires became billionaires and decided to have not just water yachts, like our predecessors, but sky yachts too. There are several different kinds of high-end private jets, but the two best kinds are the Boeing Business jet like Daddy has - that’s the stretch limo of jets - and then there is the smaller, faster, sexy Bombadier.

Trophy wives usually only come in two makes, just like the jets. There is the luxury stretch supermodel trophy wife who averages out at between five foot ten and six two, weighing in at one fifteen to one thirty. Most of that weight is concentrated in the hair and chest region; think Giselle Brady if you need a visual. The smaller, sexy trophy wife is almost always of the Asian variety; think Wendy Murdoch.

With the advent of the new high-end model wife came dress designers to encase their ahhmazing bodies and enable them to be displayed for maximum hotness, and shoe designers to add the finishing touches.

The shoe designers faced a challenge. The Boeing Business jet model of trophy wife is a very big seller, but she has one imperfection. In order to support the mile long body without tipping over, she is usually cursed with enormous feet. These feet are not a pretty sight when stretched out full length, thus the advent of the monster heel and its subsequent contortion.

Though I was the child of an enormously tall Bigfoot version of the trophy wife, I was tiny, a throwback Kelleher to the old, smaller, inbred cousin days. Fortunately, both my paternal grandmother and my mother were gorgeous trophy wives, so my small stature was the only thing left over, genetically speaking, to show that I didn’t descend from Amazons.

I was a rare little creature, that’s what Daddy said, and I think he was right. I have the tiny feet and stature of the doll-like Asian women, combined with the features of the stretch supermodels. Because I have naturally tiny feet, I could have gotten away with flats if I had wanted, but, of course, I was in Milan’s posse and that meant five inches, no matter what.

It was okay, the nosebleed heels. I had almost no sensitivity in my feet and that’s why photographers for Page Six and the like loved me. Unlike the looks of snotty distaste my peers gave them, I was always smiling. When people look at the haughty expressions on the faces of New York socialites, they probably think what a bunch of elitist bitches, but it’s not that really, it’s because their feet hurt.

Like most everything else, though, Milan was an exception to the rule. Of course she wore the best and highest heels that Blahnik and Choo and Weitzman could create, but if she was in pain, and I know she was because she would show off her welts and blisters and deformed toes to Christy - and I like war wounds - she never let it show to anyone else.

Her smile was always radiant, her look as relaxed and as inviting as if she were lying in bed for the photographs. Milan had dropped out of Dwight just prior to our senior year and begun to spend her time developing her world-famous brand. In those days, that meant she was at a different ‘had to be seen there’ club every night and, while she was there, she danced on the banquettes to the loudly-voiced approval of onlookers and the flash of paparazzi cameras. Those cameras always burned me. Sudden flashes made me squeeze my eyes shut in protest and in all my candid photos I would be an icky white color, overexposed and squinting, but those same flashes and klieg lights warmed Milan’s skin to rosy perfection.

Christy and I didn’t drop out of school. It wasn’t an option in my case. Kellehers always finished high school, and usually four years of college as well. After that, since no Kelleher was allowed to work in the company, the Kelleher men could choose from a variety of professions - golf, painting and stamp and/or rare book and map collecting.

Since only our side of the family had the money to buy a major sports team, doing so naturally made Daddy both famous and revered, not only in our family but by other filthy rich scions. Owning your own football or basketball franchise was very manly and, in addition, it actually gave the men lucky enough to have one something to do and, even better, something to talk about.

I mean, I love my cousins, but how far can you stretch out a story about the rare black-on-magenta stamp you just purchased at auction? Actually, that might be a bad example because, at least as far as my second cousin Herbie Kelleher is concerned, you could stretch out the story about two weeks, or until the listeners start entering into murder/suicide pacts with themselves, like in that old hilarious movie, Airplane.

Poor Daddy. Here he had the most amazing toy of all, his football team, but because of the people he associated with, he would have been better off owning the map Christopher Columbus penned. Daddy only hung out with the friends of his childhood. He was uncomfortable with the wild boys of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The problem was that his childhood friends didn’t have the kind of money those guys had, or that Daddy had, and they didn’t own NFL or NBA teams, nor did they follow sports, except for golf.

So at the usual deadly Hamptons gatherings to save an endangered sand dune, or a desert pup fish, it was usually Daddy with his great football stories who ended up being the odd guy out. He must have felt self-conscious about it too because, on my sixteenth birthday, he unveiled his plans for the Carolyn Kelleher Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.

A foundation is a much more old money New York thing than a football team and, after that, Daddy and my suddenly involved mother hosted a number of deadly boring in-town and Hamptons fund raisers of their own. I liked the foundation because it meant, in addition to flying with Daddy to football games, he would take me with him to foundation board meetings as well.

The downside of the foundation was that it intrigued my mother too. She jumped at the chance to use some of the three hundred million dollar original endowment to showcase herself as the long-suffering, but still really well dressed, mother of a sick child. That led to the semi-annual luncheon and fashion show, 'Designers for Diabetes' which was the cringe-making name she picked. And because the foundation was in my name, she began to feel the need to spend quality time with me.

There was never a single photograph taken of me in those years where she isn’t standing nearby looking lovingly at me. She wanted to be taken seriously as an authority on her family tragedy, so she spent hours - well a half hour - carefully researching/googling juvenile diabetes. This was so she could make a moving speech at the end of the fashion show, pleading with the attendees to reach 'deep into your hearts' - translation, deep into your husbands' checkbooks - 'and help to eradicate this terrible illness'.

The downside of her enthusiasm for me was spending time with her; the upside was that the foundation really did raise a lot of money and, who knows, maybe it will help out some sick little kid one day. I joke about it, but this disease is a killer and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, not even my mother.

The other kind of cool thing about the foundation was that I got to model the closing outfit in the fashion shows. Of course, my two best friends in the world, Milan and Christy, were models too, but they were always modeling in some runway show for charity and, in Milan’s case, not just for charity but for the hot designers in ‘fashion week’ as well. Not me, though. My name stood tall, but I didn’t, so the 'Designers for Diabetes' luncheon was my only chance twice a year to stride out on that runway in some ahhmazing Marc Jacobs or Vera Wang (two of our big supporters), couturier creation and feel the warmth of admiring eyes staring up at me.

Thinking about this stuff reminds me of how panicked I was that last year at Dwight. I had to decide where I went from there. Daddy, whose opinion meant the most, said he wanted me to continue onto Brown as Kellehers usually did. My mother said vaguely that I might as well, since she didn’t know what else I could do.

Hearing her say that reminded me of how few the options were for a girl from a family like mine. Women in my world do not collect stamps, and unless we are given early control of our money, as Aunt Georgia was - Aunt Georgia who had recently built an orphanage in Laos - unless that happened we couldn’t start our own charities and hold fundraisers. There was marriage, always an awesome option and one I would have loved, but I couldn’t marry myself and nobody else was asking. We could spend a few years after high school dabbling in art, which bored me, or trying out for the Olympic equestrienne slots. That last one is very popular with my kind, and I did love horses, but I hadn’t ridden seriously in years, so that was out. Desperate, I turned to Milan and Christy for advice.

Milan was pragmatic as always. “Well, Care Bear, you can join me on the club scene, but I wouldn’t if I were you.”

“Why not?”

She shook her head. Her beautiful eyes looked tired. “Oh, get real. I’m there becoming famous. I’m going to be so famous that people will pay me a million dollars just to walk into their stupid bars or their hotels. I’m going to model, and act, and be like a cult for little girls in small town nowhere, and I’m going to make so much money doing it that I’ll be the Marin everyone thinks of when they hear the name - me, not the hotels. I’m going to do all this so that I can be like you already are, the girl who has everything.” She rolled her eyes. “Why do you need to climb down by being in the tabloids? You’re already there, the place everybody wants to be, the girl everybody wants to be.” Christy nodded, backing up Milan’s opinion.

I looked at her curiously. ”What about you, Chrissy. Are you going into the club scene, two fabulous Marin sisters for the price of one?”

She shook her head. “No, Milan doesn’t want that and neither do I. She’s already prepaid my first year at the Fashion Institute. We’re going to get our own apartment and live together, but she’s the star and I wouldn’t want it anyway.”

Milan kissed her little sister on the temple. “That’s right, baby sister is going to do whatever she wants, become a famous designer or marry the best boy in the country, or have both if she wants it. I’ll take the fame and the hits for the two of us.”

Christy, recognizing my look, said. “Care Bear, you can live with us, you know you can. You can come to school with me if you want. We’ll learn how to design handbags together, we’ll rule.”

I hugged them both, thanked Christy, and excused myself, saying I had to study for finals.

They knew it was a lie but let me go without questions. On the short walk home to 800 Fifth Avenue from the Plaza, I made up my mind to go to Brown. It would please Daddy and, after all, there was no place I could think of I really wanted to be.