After Tahoe, my mother lost her footing, too. The first few months that we were back in Vegas, she was giddy, going on shopping sprees for our new apartment and speculating that our ship was about to come in. But by that winter, she’d gone grim and silent, once again disappearing to the casinos at night; and this time, I knew that she didn’t have a waitressing job. Eventually, she was arrested for credit card fraud and identity theft. She went to jail, and I went into foster care until she got out six months later. When she was freed, we moved to Phoenix, then Albuquerque, and finally Los Angeles.
Despite all the disruption, I managed to rise far enough above the underserved herds at my subpar schools to gain admittance to a middling liberal arts college on the East Coast; but not high enough for the Ivy League, not high enough to qualify for scholarships. Still, I was determined to get as far away from my mother’s life as possible, even if it meant turning down the local junior college and taking on student debt. I went off to get a BA in art history, still so blindly in thrall to Stonehaven that I didn’t think much about career viability. Inevitably, I emerged four years later in a worse state: even more broke, underqualified and lost. The bright shiny Future—the one in the Princeton sweatshirt, the one on the cover of the Stanford summer school catalog—was not for me after all.
The Lieblings stole all that from me, and I never forgave them for it.
* * *
—
For a long time I hoped that I was wrong about Benny; I hoped that he wasn’t like his family after all, and just needed to be reminded who he really was. For a while, after we first arrived back in Las Vegas, I wrote letters to him; rambling thoughts about loneliness, stories about my depressing new school, little observations underlined by a silent plea to let me know that I still mattered. After a few months of this, I got a postcard in the mail: a photo of the boathouse at the Chambers Landing pier, and on the back a single sentence, in a childish scrawl: PLEASE STOP.
So was my mother right? Was my entire relationship with Benny a transaction, a failed power grab between two fundamentally unequal people? Was I just covetous of Benny’s life and hoping to take a piece of what he had? And was he just trying to assert his dominion over another human being, trying to live up to the example his ancestors had set? Maybe what we experienced never was love; maybe it was always just about sex and loneliness and control.
In a different sort of story, I would have saved that portrait that Benny drew of me, the one where I looked like a manga character; and I would have tenderly pulled it out for inspiration in moments of self-doubt, as proof that I was somebody after all. But the reality is that I burned that picture in the fireplace of our Tahoe cabin before we drove out of town that last day. I sat there with a poker and watched the edges of the portrait blacken and curl; watched the fire lick at those confident eyes and the sword-wielding hand, until all that was left was ash.
In a different story—one with a kinder, gentler protagonist—I also would have looked Benny up some years later and we would have commiserated and grown close, maybe rekindled a friendship that transcended what had once driven us apart. But again, that’s not this story. And while it’s true that I followed the Lieblings’ doings from a distance—I knew when Judith Liebling drowned in a boating accident, not long after I got that horrible postcard; I knew when Vanessa Liebling became an Instagram celebrity; I knew when William Liebling IV died—I never bothered to reach out to Benny. Why should I, when he’d never reached out to me to explain why he’d so easily abandoned me? I was angry at him for so long that it became an essential part of my being, an ache that sat at the pit of my stomach, the tender genesis of all my rage at the world.
And yet. When I ran into Hilary