He and Mommy laughed as they exchanged looks of pleasure, and for a small moment, only a small, slight moment, I wondered with whom Winston was being the conspirator, me or her?
As soon as I sat behind the steering wheel of my beautiful new car it suddenly didn't matter who it was.
14
Welcome to Palm Beach
.
For me attending a private school was different
from attending a public school in so many ways, but when I stripped away the polish and the shine, the expensive equipment, and the smaller classes, there were similarities that went to the heart of school life anywhere, public or private. Just as in any of the schools I had attended. there was the in crowd and those longing to become part of it. Almost all of the senior high students at EJW had known one another for years and socialized with one another. They were a very tight bunch, but what struck me as really different about the girls I met at the Edith Johnson Wood School was how like their mothers they were. To call them clones was not an exaggeration. Their conversations were centered around designer clothing they had bought or were going to buy, cosmetic surgery on their noses, and collagen injections in their lips. There was even a junior girl who had already had a breast enhancement. And then there was the endless talk about the world-class resorts they had been to during the summer months, some of them comparing itineraries to show they had been in more places. They reminded me of those motorhomes with stickers from every place visited splattered all over their rear ends.
I was sure the old adage "An apple doesn't fall far from its tree" was true for the boys and their fathers as well. They spent most of their free time comparing their luxury automobiles. Their expensive clothes, and their very expensive toys, like jet skis, speed boats, motorcycles, and sound systems. One boy I met even talked about the single-engine plane his father had bought for him. It was truly a game of "I can top that," and it was very important to get it all out in the conversation as quickly as possible that first week back, especially in front of me. Both the boys and the girls did it. I think, to let me know just how low I was on the totem pole, even though I was living at Joya del Mar.
I was surprised by how much they all knew about me even before I set foot in the building. From the icy welcome most of them gave me I could tell immediately that they had been told Mommy and I had married into money, and we didn't come from any of the so-called core Palm Beach families, Often I felt they believed I carried contamination just because I wasn't brought up in their privileged world. Crossing that Flagler Bridge was slumming to some of them.
"You sound like you're the one who's being a snob. Grace." Mommy told me when I described my first day and the girls and boys to whom I had been introduced,
Marjorie Meriweather, a girl in my class, had been assigned to serve as my
so-called big sister and show me around. She made me feel as if I was a pimple on her face. "This is Grace Montgomery," she mumbled quickly to anyone who cared to listen. "New student," she added, making it sound more like a warning than an introduction.
"Why don't you give them a chance, get to know them before you condemn them?" Mommy continued.
"Give them a chance? Get to know them? How do you do that when the girl you meet blinks a phony smile and then turns her back on you before you can finish a sentence?"
"I'm sure you're exaggerating. It's just your own insecurity speaking, Grace. Once they get to know you, they'll all want to be your friends. As soon as you find two or three girls or even boys you like, invite them to Joya del Mar for lunch and swimming. Once you do that you'll see how quickly you'll make friends with so many of the others."
"I don't want those kinds of friends. Mommy. I don't want to have to bribe anyone to be my friend."
"It's not a bribe. It's what's expected. You'll see once you get accustomed to living here. It will all work itself out," she assured me.
Get accustomed to living here? I'll never get accustomed to living here, I thought. but I gave up arguing about it. She simply didn't understand, or maybe she didn't want to understand. The one thing that helped me go forward was that I liked my teachers, every single one, and I could see after the first week that they liked me too, or appreciated me. As far as I could tell, none of the other students in my English class, for example, had read all of the summer's required reading. In fact, many hadn't read a single title. Most of the time I was the only one raising my hand when Mr. Stieglitz asked a question about one of the books. He had a very dry, witty sense of humor. too.
"Are you sure you're in the right school?" he kept asking me that first week, "This is the Edith Johnson Wood School. The students here don't read or write. They just sigh, moan, and complain."
Of course I laughed, but the others glared at me with pinched faces full of indignation and annoyance. Similar things happened in my other classes. So many students didn't do their homework or did it poorly. It was as if the sole purpose of school to many of them was social, a place to gather and gossip, plan parties, and court romances.
"School, college, any sort of professional training or education isn't as important to these students as it might be elsewhere," a boy named Basil Furness told me one afternoon in the cafeteria, if I could call it a cafeteria. It looked more like a fancy buffet restaurant with a selection of food every day that rivaled the best dining places in the Palm Beaches. There were more people working there than at any school I had attended, too, despite the school's small size. The students didn't have to pick up after themselves. Two older women bused the tables. In fact, that was how I met Basil. I had started to clear off my tray when he stopped me.
"You want to put these poor women out of work?" he asked, half facetiously.
"Excuse me?" I said. Everyone else wasn't exactly breaking his or her neck to start a conversation with me. For a moment I thought he was speaking to someone else.
"If you start a trend here you could put people whose job it is to look after us out of work. Leave the tray," he ordered. He actually looked angry.
He was a very thin, light-brown-haired boy with a bad complexion he was trying to hide under an unfortunate and pathetic attempt at a beard. His facial hair was almost transparent, and the combination did more to draw attention to his skin problems than if he didn't have the beard at all.
His eyes were a bit too beady, his nose too lean and long, and he had a lower lip that was so much thicker than the upper it looked swollen. It wasn't simply his unattractive physical qualities that separated him from the others. however. I quickly learned he was far too sarcastic and belligerent for them,
"Oh." I said, and took my hands off my tray quickly. Just at that moment one of the girls in my math class. Enid Emery, stopped to ask me if I had done the homework.
"Of course." I said.
"Oh, good. Could I borrow it to copy it quickly? I didn't have a chance to do it last night."
"No," I said.