Over the noise of her own sobs, Swanny heard the sound of the heavy key ring jangling to the floor, her mother’s curses, the key clanking in the lock. Then Pippi was in her room. Her shoulders were high; her dark eyes smoldered. She strode across the seal pup rug. In a sudden fit of terror, Swanny clutched the blankets to herself. Pippi wrenched them from her hands and cast them aside. Both looked at the purplish-red stain spreading from the seat of Swanny’s silk bloomers to the Egyptian percale.
“Oh, thank God,” Pippi sighed. Her face relaxed. She reached into the pocket of her housecoat, took out a jade earring, and clipped it absently to one lobe.
“I’m dying,” Swanny repeated with less conviction.
“Not yet, darling.” Pippi smiled wryly. “Give it a few years.”
That night during cocktail hour, Pippi served her a martini. For thirteen years it had been a Shirley Temple; now it was a martini. Swanny imitated Pippi and ate the olive first.
“I hope Corona showed you how to use the LunaTamps.”
“There were instructions on the box.”
“I’m not paying her to hand you a box.” Pippi flipped the switch on the wall; a fire roared to life in the fireplace. She peeled the ermine stole from around her neck and draped it over the back of a chair. “Now, tell me, dear. Isn’t it glorious to be a woman? Don’t slouch.”
Swanny slurped gin from the lip of her glass. “I just wish you’d warned me.”
“I suppose you’ll be moody now, and wanting chocolate. Oh, the things you forget. But it’s just like a bicycle. It comes back.” Pippi tossed back the rest of her drink and shook herself another. Swanny observed, with some mild surprise, that her mother was already drunk. “Swanny, have I ever told you the difference between a first and second wife?”
“No.”
“The difference between a first wife and a second wife is that the first wife has fake jewelry and real orgasms. The second wife has real jewelry and fakes the orgasms!” Pippi let out a little shriek; her laughter rang against the vaulted ceiling. “You’ll be a first wife, of course. Nothing tawdry. But don’t worry. We’ll get you the real jewelry too.”
It was that night, for the first time, that Pippi explained what investing in Swanny’s future meant.
* * *
Pippi Dahlberg homeschooled her daughter Swan Lenore from the ages of thirteen to eighteen in a battery of courses that she herself designed. Some of the courses lasted a matter of weeks; others were ongoing over the entire five years. Regardless of their duration, the rigor and mental discipline demanded for each was considerably intimidating. Swanny was awakened each day, Monday through Friday, by Corona in the gray, pale hours of dawn and summoned to the “schoolroom,” a chilly glass annex at the back of the house that had once been called the solarium. Her mother was always there waiting, alert and bony and bejeweled, with a vial of espresso and an emery board. On wicker chairs, separated by a wicker tea table, the women faced each other in all kinds of weather. Wind howled in the cracks of the skylight panes; sodden leaves on the lawn gave way to muffling snow, and then to the moist buzzing stupor of spring. A chalkboard on wheels tilted near one wall, its green slate never completely erased. Ghosts of names and dates mingled with the vivid silhouettes of fresh verbs and adverbs. At the wicker table, Pippi branded each completed worksheet and test with a red rubber stamp bearing the family seal. The mimeographed papers left ink on Swanny’s hands.
The courses Pippi taught included Penmanship, Self-Defense, Table Manners, Nutrition, Reproductive Health, Portfolio Management, Elocution, Ballroom Dancing, Evening Wear, Gemstones of the World, Wills and Trusts, Home Surveillance, Decorating, Voice, The Hostess’s Role, Prenuptial Agreements, and Divorce. The lessons of the last two were woven into the fabric of all the others, and could be encapsulated in a single pithy phrase: Not without my signature you don’t.
“Say it for me,” Pippi instructed, scrutinizing Swanny over the leopard-print frames of her half-moon glasses.
“Not without my signature you don’t.”
“Oh, darling, no. Say it sweetly.”
In the beginning, Swanny was petulant and daydreamy, with runs in her stockings from the sharp rattan of the chair. She had a tendency to write test answers on her wrist, though Pippi caught her every time. She ate indiscriminately from the zenith of the food pyramid down to its basement, often while her mother lectured at the board, and she refused to acknowledge a difference between turquoise and lapis lazuli. Still, despite herself, she learned.
For Swanny, the sensation of learning was not unlike the sensation of getting yet another new tooth. It began as a subliminal irritation, the semiconscious knowledge of something in her head both unwanted and unnecessary, and soon began driving her to distraction. Her mother employed what she called the Socratic method, which consisted of coldly interrogating her daughter hour upon tedious hour with a series of enigmatic, hair-splitting, formally indistinguishable, nigh well unanswerable questions that tested her rote memorization and mind-reading abilities simultaneously. More than once, Swanny found her tongue dumb as a thumb in her mouth, or heard herself stuttering (as her mother said, “unattractively”) in rage. More than once, she retreated from lessons to join Corona in the kitchen, where she pitched in by thunking the cleaver into the fresh-skinned rabbit shanks.
And yet, far from extinguishing an interest in her studies, this anger kindled it. Swanny hated the diagrams of properly and improperly arranged silverware; she did not care about the eclectic array of newel posts in the Steelworth mansion. But she wanted more than anything to humiliate her mother. At night, in bed, she would kick her legs beneath the monogrammed linens, muttering scalding retorts to Pippi’s terse queries and disappointed sighs. Enveloped in the coral porcelain of the bubble bath, she stewed over her improper suppression of unaccented vowels. Depressing the keys of her klangflugel with errorless precision, she strove to sound whatever diabolical chord it would take to lift her mother’s eyes from the daily crossword. She and Corona took turns spitting in the espresso machine, and slapped discreet low-fives when Pippi broke a heel. But Swanny wasn’t satisfied. Sometimes she wondered if she ever would be.
One evening, after a daunting Language of Flowers exam followed by a wintry, interminable dinner conversation, Swanny slipped out of the house. It was a cloudy night in summer, with heat lightning flickering in the purple clouds like the neon lights of a celestial city. She squinted up into them, and wished, not for the first time, that her mother would send her away to boarding school somewhere cosmopolitan, because here she was so lonely she could scream. She knew all the risks of dormitory life, and she honestly didn’t care. She’d keep mousetraps in her jewelry box to ward off thieves. She’d wash her hair in lamp oil to keep the nits away. She finished her amontillado and threw the glass down the outside cellar stairs.