Diamond Girl

Chapter 3



I didn’t know that my parents had a bad marriage until the year I turned eight. When I was really little, my life was pretty regimented. I think now that might be one of the reasons I haven’t done so well at anything I set myself up for. Born rich usually means born protected, born surrounded, and I’m guessing might be where the phrase ‘born fool’ comes from too.

My nanny, Elizando, would wake me up at seven every morning in my pink Mackenzie Child’s bedroom. My bed had been custom-made for me in their studios. It was a replica of Kelleher’s Rest on the outside and the walls inside my bed-playhouse were hung with watered pink silk from the Fortuny factories in France.

Elizando would quietly open the curtains of my floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the polar bears in the zoo and tap lightly on the outside of my bed house.

“Miss Carey, the sun is up and it’s time for you to be too.”

If I didn’t answer her right away, she would slide open the door to my little sanctuary and smile at me with her tired brown face.

Usually, since I never did wake up easily, she would end up carrying me into my adjoining pink bathroom where she would prop me up on the toilet and put me into the warm bubble bath she had drawn for me before waking me. After my bath, she would wrap me in my own big monogrammed towels and carry me back into my bedroom to dress me in my small Chapin uniform. If I was lagging too badly, she would feed me toast upstairs, but if the morning went well without me having a tantrum or trying to fight her about putting on my clothes, I would be taken downstairs to eat in the special round yellow dining room designed for breakfast only.

I did hate to wake up, but most mornings I tried my best to cooperate with Elizando so that I could have that half hour downstairs alone with Daddy. He would look up from the paper and wink at me, and pretend to ignore me until Elizando had seated me in my chair and withdrawn upstairs. Then he would look at me over his paper.

“Good morning, Carey K. I must say you look lovely today.”

I would pretend to be serious. “Good morning, Daddy. Thank you. You look lovely today too.”

He would grin and ring for my morning chocolate and his third coffee, and we would eat in compatible silence. He wasn’t much for conversation in the morning and neither was I - it’s just another thing we have in common - but I loved being near him in the sunny yellow room that overlooked the Central Park morning joggers below.

Right before Elizando would come back for me to escort me downstairs, he would lay down his paper and put his chin on his hands and stare at me as though he was surprised I was still there. I would imitate his gesture, and that made us grin at each other, our mutual pleasure reflected in identical blue eyes and left side dimples.

He always asked me, “So, Carey K, any plans today?”

“I thought I might go to school, Daddy, unless you want me to stay home.”

Ninety-nine percent of the time he would pretend to think it over, and sigh and say that he thought I might as well go to school, and he might as well go to work. But if we were having breakfast during football season, he might surprise me and ask if I wouldn’t rather go see the team play instead. Those were the best times ever, just me and Daddy and Elizando, of course. George, our chauffeur, would grin if he saw us coming out the doors of 800 Fifth, me wearing my Carolina Lions baseball cap, because he knew that instead of driving me to Chapin, he would be driving us to the mayor’s heliport, if the game was local, or to Teeterboro in New Jersey to catch the plane to wherever in the country our team was that day. Elizando had to come because Daddy was an owner and the games were work for him. He would check up on me all day, though, and usually bring people back to the box with him.

They would act excited to meet me. “Is this her, the famous Carolyn Kelleher that the team is named after?”

I had been taught excellent manners by Elizando and Chapin, and would always stand up when adults came, saying Hello, sir or ma’am, yes, it’s really me. They would glance at Daddy and laugh, and he would laugh too and hoist me up into his arms and shove my cap up. I honestly didn’t know until years later that it was the other way around, that I had been named after the team, not vice versa.

Most of the time, though, instead of flying around the country with Daddy, I would only be taken down in the elevator by Elizando and handed off to George for my morning ride to school. Every Friday afternoon George picked me up and I would climb into the back of the limousine where my sister and her weekend nanny, Stacey, would smile at me and we would make the drive out to Tamerlane for the weekend.

Stacey was the nanny for both Kelly and me on the weekends. Since Elizando was married and had her own little boy, my parents let her have the weekends off and she would go home to her family. My sister’s weekday nanny, Consuela, did not have a family but she used the weekends to work in her brother’s grocery store in Brooklyn. I only knew that because I had overheard my mother talking to one of her girlfriends on the phone.

My mother and her friends did not have very interesting conversations. As far as I could tell, they were mostly about two things: where to eat lunch and how terrible and demanding the help was. It was pretty boring but I tried to eavesdrop on her every chance I got anyway since, sometimes, I learned things that helped me understand the people I lived with. That is how I found out about Consuela having a weekend job, by listening to my mother whine to her friend Sherry about how ridiculous it was that the servants needed outside income since they “are already completely overpaid, and are probably all stealing from me besides.” Hearing her talk that way about the people who took care of us and lived with us made my stomach hurt.

If it was true, then they were bad people and it also meant that they didn’t really like me or my sister at all; they were just faking it because it was their job and they were paid a lot of money to pretend to like us. I worried too that maybe Consuela, and even Elizando, might start stealing my things. I started yelling at Elizando after that whenever she would pick up my toys. I told her I knew she wanted to steal them and give them to her sons, or maybe sell them.

Elizando ignored me when I said things like that but her sad eyes would look even sadder, and she would mutter in Spanish and shake her head. I wanted her to teach me Spanish, which I thought sounded so pretty and seemed like a secret language, but Elizando knew for sure that would get her fired. My mother said Spanish was the language of maids and her daughters would be fluent in French. To accomplish this, I had classes at the Lycée Français after school twice a week. I also had dance classes, modern once a week, and ballet and art appreciation. By the time I was seven I could tell the difference between a Chagall and a Monet, and why that is important to know before you lose your first tooth, I’m still not sure.

So weekdays were always exactly the same except for football days. I was always in bed by seven and I never saw Daddy except at breakfast and at bedtime if he was home to kiss me goodnight, and I never saw my mother at all.

I might hear her if I stood outside doors after school and I could smell her because she wore too much perfume and was always trying to develop her 'signature scent', but I never saw her unless it was by accident, or in the summer. Since nobody at school ever talked about doing things with their parents, and Elizando never mentioned my mother, I didn’t know that we were different, I didn’t know that parents sometimes ate together with their children, or that mothers were the ones who woke up their kids and got them dressed. If I had known, I wouldn’t have wanted it anyway. Elizando took care of me during the week and Stacey took care of me on the weekends, and that is the way it was.

It was Stacey, who was not a regular servant at all, who first made me realize that my parents didn’t like each other and that my mother was cold, even by the standards of the tribe I was born into, where child neglect has been raised to an art form. It was Stacey who first noticed I was sick, and I suppose she saved my life, for a while anyway, and I guess I should be grateful to her for that.

Except for our chef and our butler, Louis, Stacey was the only white person who worked for us. Even up at Tamerlane all our help was Hispanic. So that made Stacey different right away and, on top of being white, she was young and super-pretty too. Stacey had even gone to my school, Chapin. I knew it was on a scholarship because she had told me so herself. The thing that was funny was that she laughed when she said it, which somehow I knew was different than how my mother would have said it.

It seemed like everything made Stacey laugh. She was studying to be a psychologist at NYU, and a professor of hers who knew someone who knew my mother had helped her get the job. Stacey said she wasn’t a real nanny; that she was an au pair. My sister Kelly was so little that she couldn’t pronounce au pair at first and pronounced it 'aper'. Stacey found that as hilarious as she found most of our antics and, for a month or so, would crack up Kelly and me, and George too, during the drives out to Connecticut by making ape voices and faces.

That didn’t last, though. Someone must have reported it to my mother, who must have talked to Stacey, because there were no more ape games. Poor Kelly was immediately enrolled in four-day-a-week after pre-school speech therapy and made to wear a mouth guard at night for a year. She was three then.

Anyway, it was Stacey who noticed that something was wrong with me.

Like every other little kid in the world, I loved candy and sodas and anything but what was on my plate. Being raised by nannies, though, and living most of my life four stories above the kitchen and attending the nutrition-based Chapin - which actually means we promise to keep your children thin if you pay us forty thousand a year plus endowments for them to attend - didn’t give me much of a chance to indulge my sweet tooth.

Weekends and holidays at Tamerlane were different. The cook there, Rosy, thought it was cute when Kelly and I would run into the kitchen and steal cake batter, or munch down on the cookies she made for us. Since Stacey liked to go into Greenwich on weekends and window shop and flirt with cute guys, she let us buy Cokes and candy bars so that we wouldn’t whine about being bored.

The first signs of the illness that would dominate my life showed much more clearly at Tamerlane than they did in New York because of these normal kid indulgences. In the city I was always thirsty too, but no one - well Elizando or my teachers anyway - remarked on it. It was Stacey who noticed that I was crazy thirsty sometimes, no matter how much I drank, or that I seemed to have to pee about thirty times a day. My riding instructor, Bill, would tell her that he was worried about me. He said I complained sometimes that I couldn’t feel the reins. Well who else was he going to tell?

Then, one afternoon in Greenwich after Stacey had taken Kelly and me for ice cream, I got really sick and so dizzy that Stacey had to carry me back to the car. I might have never been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes if left to my mother, because I know Stacey called her that day. I overheard her side of the conversation, and when she said, “Well, yes, Mrs. Kelleher, she seems fine now”, I could tell she was upset. She must have been because she took it upon herself to break my mother’s cardinal rule with staff: never bother Mr. Kelleher about anything. Stacey somehow wormed out of George my father’s private cell number and called him herself. I don’t know what they said to each other, but by Monday of that week, I wasn’t at school, I was at our family pediatrician’s, screaming in Elizando’s restraining arms as they tortured me with long painful needles that drew out so much blood I was sure they were trying to kill me.