on the street in New York a few years later, and she let it drop that Benny had been diagnosed as schizophrenic—that he’d been sent home from Princeton after he attacked a girl on his floor and then ran naked and raving through his dorm—I was surprised when the pang that I felt was not of vindictive rage but of pity. Poor Benny, I thought, as Hilary prattled on about how he was living at some fancy institution near Mendocino, how someone from school had visited him and he was basically a vegetable now, drugged out of his mind.
And then, tearing up—Poor us.
So maybe I did still love him after all.
As for the rest of the Lieblings—for them, I had nothing but hate.
8.
VANESSA, VANESSA, VANESSA. Does she feel it, as I walk across the cobbled drive toward her—something electric in the air, a premonitory tingle? Her intuition warning her that something about me—my poised, rehearsed, yoga-instructor walk; the toothy grin slapped across my face—isn’t quite right? Does she find herself fighting a strange urge to board the windows, take in the lawn furniture, lock the doors tight, and hide in the basement?
I doubt it. I am a category 5 hurricane coming her way, and she has no clue.
9.
STONEHAVEN. I NEVER IMAGINED I’d someday live in this monstrous heap. Growing up, it was the albatross that hung around the Liebling family neck: an estate so firmly attached to our name that it was impossible to imagine ever letting it go. It felt like Stonehaven had stood there on the West Shore forever, an anachronistic stone monolith that rejected any attempts to dress it up as something new. The house had been passed to the firstborn son of five generations of Lieblings, which meant that someday it would belong to my little brother Benny—not to me.
Toxic patriarchy! you might be thinking. Fight against the injustice! But honestly, I wanted nothing to do with the place.
I have hated Stonehaven since I was six years old and first came up here for Christmas. My grandparents, Katherine and William III, had mandated that the extended Liebling family spend the holiday at Stonehaven, so we all slowly rolled in one snowy December afternoon, the wheels of our town cars leaving muddy tracks along the drive. Grandma Katherine (never Kat, or Kitty, but Katherine, always with the emphasis on that first ah) had brought in a decorator for the family gathering and, honestly, she had quite de trop taste. When you walked in the front door of the house you were assaulted with the holiday. Swags and garlands hanging off every cornice, poinsettias brandishing their poison petals from the centerpieces. A tree that brushed the ceiling, drooping with silver ornaments and gold tinsel. Full-sized Victorian Santas that lurked in dark corners, their faces frozen mid-chortle, and scared the stuffing out of me.
The whole house smelled of fresh-cut pine boughs, a medicinal smell that made me think of murdered trees.
My grandmother was a great collector of European decorative arts, the more gilded and elaborate the better; though my grandfather preferred chinoiserie. (Previous ancestors had dabbled in eighteenth-century American, Jacobean, French Revival, Victoriana.) So Stonehaven was full of delicate furnishings balanced on spider legs, and precious objects rendered in bone-thin porcelain. The house was a giant slap in the face to the very concept of childhood.
My grandmother sat all of the cousins down on the day we got there. “There will be no running inside Stonehaven,” she warned us all sternly. Benny and I were perched side by side on a silk-covered sofa in the drawing room, sipping chocolate from child-sized teacups. Grandmother Katherine’s silver hair had been shellacked and teased until it was as stiff and shiny as the ornaments on the tree; she wore a pink Chanel suit that dated back at least two decades. My mother (Maman, she liked us to call her, though Benny refused) paced silently behind her, tugging on her diamond studs, chafing at being sidelined here. “There will be no throwing of balls, or wrestling, or playing of wild games. Do you understand me? In my house, little children who do not follow the rules get spankings.” My grandmother peered over her bifocals at the children. We all squirmed under her gaze, and nodded.