Saving Elijah

you.”
    “All right, even if we don’t get married. We can live together in a beautiful house and do anything we want. No husbands to tell us what to do.” Except in my house, it was just the opposite.
    “You mean like when we’re thirty?”
    “Yep. Even forty.”
    She raised an eyebrow. “Well, of course we’ll always be there for each other. But not when we’re thirty or forty.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because you’re not going to make it to eleven.” She grinned. “’Cause your mom’s going to kill you tonight.”

    *    *    *

    Bea Stern told my mother, of course, and got fired. After all, she’d violated Charlotte’s Petal policy: style, fit, quality, and honesty.
    And that night I got an all-out dose of Charlotte’s Wrath. I was hiding in my room at about six o’clock when I heard the front door slam, then the creak of the steps, then banging on my door. “Dinah! Open the door. This instant!”
    I considered jumping out the window, then decided against it and opened the door.
    Her eyes were wide, her jaw clenched. “How dare you insult my customer?”
    “I didn’t insult her, I just—“
    She slapped me so hard I staggered back and fell to the floor next to the jumble of Barbie dolls.
    “Don’t lie, Dinah!” She towered over me, wearing the gargoyle face and her Chanel suit, alligator handbag looped over one arm, keys still in hand. “I hate it when you lie!”
    I was crying hard, and holding my hand to the stinging place on my face where she’d slapped me. I heard Nelda banging the pots around downstairs. She knew.
    “I want you to apologize. Right now!”
    I lifted my face and forced myself to look up at her. Tears were streaming down my cheeks and I clamped my mouth shut. I hated her.
    “Apologize. Right now.”
    I didn’t know what good apologizing to her was going to do, but I knew I didn’t want another dose of her convincing.
    “I’m sorry.”
    Charlotte sat down on my pink bedspread. “Why would you say such a thing to one of my customers, Dinah?” Suddenly she was a calm, rational person who wanted to discuss something with a daughter she had no memory of slapping less than a minute ago.
    I shrugged. I wasn’t even sure why I’d said what I’d said.
    “It’s that Bronstein girl,” Charlotte said. “She’s a bad influence. You are never to be so disrespectful again. And you will never set foot in any of my stores again.”
    I said nothing. That was hardly a punishment. What followed was.
    “And you are not to see Julie Bronstein again, either.”
    “Mom, you can’t—“
    “I can do anything I want. Look at this mess. I buy you everything and you never show the least appreciation for any of this.” She swept her arms out in a gesture that took in the room, the book-strewn bed, the cardboard guillotine, the leftover scraps of cardboard and scissors, and the pile of Barbies and half-naked Kens.
    “You have ABSOLUTELY NO CONCEPT of what my life is like!”
    I curled myself into a corner next to my bed. My mother stood up then and said, “You know, Dinah, you’re hardly in a position to make fun of someone for being fat!”
    She whirled around and stormed off. Of course that wasn’t the end of it. She carried on for weeks about her ungrateful daughter who didn’t appreciate how difficult it was to be a mother and a successful businesswoman at the same time. Did she think I cared? She was the only mother I knew who worked. She threatened not to send me to camp, in addition to never letting me see Julie again, but in the end, her threats about separating us were mostly bluster.
    For the whole first half of my life, in fact, no matter what I was doing, or where I was going, Julie was always there. She was there when I was eleven, and my brother locked me in a closet after we spied on him making out with Liza Tubbman, saw him rubbing her boobs, which were quite impressive, as I remember. Charlotte took Dan’s side, as always, believed his story about studying for a test together: “Three hours in that closet!” I argued, in a confrontation that had my brother red-faced, my father’s mild protest instantly silenced by my mother, and Liza Tubbman, her shirt hurriedly buttoned wrong, slinking out the door.
    As I argued back, my mother’s objection, “I’m sure it wasn’t three hours, Dinah. The way you exaggerate is just tacky!” eventually turned into a full-fledged attack of the gargoyle face, a vicious comparison of the importance of my