little ants down there; a faint tug of guilt that circumstance had placed them there, waiting for someone to step on them like bugs. But I also knew what our father was trying to tell us. We belonged up here, Benny and I; we were safe with him in the heights.
Oh, Daddy. I trusted him so much. His bulk was the bulwark that defended us all against life’s vicissitudes. No matter how much Benny or I lost control—no matter what self-destructive whims I might obey (Dropping out of Princeton! Financing indie movies! Modeling!)—he was the person who reeled us back inside the gates of his protectorate before it was too late. And he always did; until suddenly, at the most critical moment, he couldn’t.
They say DNA is destiny. And probably this is true for those with gifts coded in their genes: say, a rare beauty or intelligence, the ability to run a four-minute mile or dunk a basketball, or perhaps just an innate cunning or insatiable drive. But for the rest of the world, those born without some obvious greatness, it’s not your DNA that will get you ahead; it’s the life you were born into. The opportunities you were (or weren’t) handed on a silver platter. It’s your circumstances.
I am a Liebling. I inherited the very best circumstances of all.
And yet, circumstances can change. The natural trajectory of your life can be utterly disrupted by one unexpected encounter, setting you so wildly off course that you’re not quite sure if you’ll ever find your way back to the path you were on.
For me, it’s been twelve years, and I’m still trying to find my way back.
* * *
—
Growing up, I knew what was expected of me. Private school and debate club and tennis team, boyfriends whose last names graced buildings in downtown San Francisco, grades that were good enough (but—let’s be frank—boosted just a tad by Daddy’s generous donations to my schools). It’s true that I struggled occasionally with what my parents called “impulse control”—like the time I borrowed Maman’s Maserati, got drunk, and crashed it, or the time I threw my tennis racket at an unfair judge at the junior nationals. Still, for the most part, I knew how to play my role and hit those benchmarks. Nothing I did couldn’t be fixed with a dimple, a smile, and a check.
My brother was the one who was irreparable. By the time I was in high school, it had grown clear that Benny was—as Maman delicately put it—“troubled.” When he was eleven, my mother found a notebook hidden under his bed with elaborately drawn pictures of men being disemboweled by dragons and their faces melting off, so she sent him off to a psychiatrist. He flunked all his classes, scribbled on his locker, was bullied by his schoolmates. At twelve, they put him on ADHD medication, then antidepressants. At fifteen, he got kicked out of school for giving his meds to his classmates.
I was in my senior year of high school then, a month away from graduation, already sleeping in a Princeton T-shirt. (Legacy, bien s?r.) The night that Benny got expelled for passing out his Ritalin at school, I could hear my parents shrieking at each other in the music room downstairs—a room they sometimes picked for their fights because it was supposedly soundproofed, without realizing that their voices actually carried through the mansion’s heating ducts. Lately, they’d been shrieking a lot.
“Maybe if you were ever here he wouldn’t feel the need to do stupid, reckless things in order to get your attention….”
“Maybe if you weren’t such a mess yourself you would have noticed that something was wrong with him before it got to this point.”
“Don’t you dare make this about me!”
“Of course it’s about you. He’s just like you, Judith. How do you expect him to get his shit together when you refuse to do it yourself?”
“Oh that’s rich, coming from you….You don’t even want me to start on your shit! Your addictions are going to destroy us all. Women and cards and who knows what else you’re hiding from me.”