Sixteen
The car was a chrysalis. A secret transmogrification was proceeding invisibly in the driver’s seat. Greenwich and parents and childhood’s home fell back from her rear tires in a roil of dust. She merged into I-95, with the cars moving in coagulated clumps of July 4th’s ebbing last wave of traffic, and stretching like a thickened artery all the way to Manhattan. As she drove and the flow of cars mired to a standstill, the Toniness that the empty stretch of twisty road and the ignited tree-tops had summoned up, was, for the moment, killed. It died in frustrated sighs and in the futile twitching of a shift-hand with too little to do. And there was a sequence to the death, like there had always been, a slipping down from being Toni to being something else, then settling into a final thing. And although at this moment of her life there was a generous measure of satisfaction to be taken in what was left after all the Toniness had subsided, though now she was Dr. Marelli and life cooperated with her like a servant, there was no way to rise up to Toniness without passing through, on the descent, all the other people that she had at one time or another been forced to become. And these characters remained in an unalterable, insufferable state of etched permanence in the mind. They were frozen into the history of her life. There was no way to delight in being Toni, carefree and wild, without reanimating the memories of Toniness back when it was a sin.
When the Toniness had first appeared, it was much to Mommy’s perturbation, as the lines that were crossed — and indeed the only lines that were crossable at that age, were what partitioned the domain of little girls away from, for example: the spitting (because it was always effective in producing shocked expressions from Mommy and from her society friends), the hitting of boys (when they did, and they always did fumble for her point of weakness, though with Toni never finding it, and instead necessitating that the butt of a toy gun be brought swiftly round to meet their upper lip, making a delicious Bap! sound). And then there was of course the most unacceptable Give me! tone of voice, which was invoked masterfully from the very seat of logic and always with that arms-crossed, indignant ethical superiority. Though Daddy had seemed to often delight in these demonstrations of will and spirit, the pressure from Mommy prevailed, and there came an inescapable insistence from every direction that meant to squash away what was Toni, and leave in its place only what was Antoinette. And so that had been taken up, with all the Summer dresses and the coquetry and the batting of eyelids, and on occasion even the dreadful curtsy. But it had all been carried out as a manner of learning. For, though the world was permitted to see only Antoinette the Sweet, under the surface, Toni had not only survived but had made her home in a location from where she could continue to wield power, secretly.
When Toni had threatened to surge up through the surface the second time, it was Daddy’s turn to sweat. All those years of tacitly pushing his daughter in boyish directions came back on him to nastily sting. For the sports, and she seemed to have taken up a new one every year, had by senior year of high school transformed Antoinette into the subject of every teenage boy’s wet dream. Not that she had grown up bosomy or voluptuous in that vulgar, short-sightedly appealing way. Instead she had developed a more penetrating, more insidious allure. Hers was an attractiveness that seeped in with time, and droned inside you. She was tall, sufficiently tall to inspire in young men that feeling that verges on the threshold of physical intimidation, but not so tall as to push them over the line. She had that long-limbed litheness that began really in the nose, the way it was held up always making an obtuse angle with the line of the throat, then it took in the arms, which were like delicate rudders that flowed outward, shifting the center of gravity ounce by measured ounce. In movement, she arrested their attention, but it was with the smile that she possessed them. When she gave one, and they were rare, when the expression of bespectacled curiosity lost the wizening of the eyes (which were blue like a fakeness, too blue, painfully blue), and the forehead was relaxed, and the lips parted, it was a like a small dawn, a miracle. When she smiled at a particular young man, it meant a granted permission, a nod, an invitation to ruin. A window would come un-shuttered, and the Toniness would speak out and say: I know what you want, and I know you haven’t a clue how to get it. And of course no clue would be forthcoming, but that was the madness, the possession, the infection. Few were called, and fewer still were chosen, always by whim, and never, ever, more than once. When she did let herself unravel for some eager, sweaty-palmed suitor, it was a hard and furious gnashing, a nail-digging spasm in the clutch of enflamed reptile need. The sex could be furtive or quite brazen, a drawn out ordeal in her vacant house or a quick peeling down of lycra and panties in some empty classroom, but the Thing — and it was a Thing, like stoichiometry was a Thing — was done when she wanted it, and where she wanted it. As if to say: “Now or never.” Plain as that, and they complied. And afterwards, always the black cloak, the coldness, the silent emasculating glances, that chilled (for some permanently) the node of ardor at the base of the penis, when she let them understand that it was all no more mysterious or fanciful to her than poking at the innards of a splayed frog in biology class.
That was when she became Princess, Daddy’s Princess, not by feigning restraint or propriety, or by altering herself in the slightest, but simply by getting out of his sight. While off at college, they could imagine her anyway they liked. Though Toni would at last run wild for all of four years, indulging every increasingly solipsistic sexual curiosity, even getting married for a month to a fellow named Toufik, at home in Greenwich Mommy and Daddy knew nothing of it. They were contented when the letters came from Barnard, signed, as they always were: “…grades are good, see you soon. Love, Princess.”
Medical school was just one door among several available; and when pushed with a tentative, exploratory pressure, it seemed to open easily enough. Mommy and Daddy were pleased, and to them, the evolution (for this is how they saw it, and described it as such with great pride) from Antoinette, to Princess, to Dr. Marelli had been seamless and without incident. And the outbreaks of Toniness, if remembered at all, were ascribed to precocity and recorded as any other symptom of childhood’s normal travails.