Chapter One - Lola
Saturday
It is seven in the morning when I wake up, exhausted and famished. It is true what they say about grief making you hungry. I tiptoe down the stairs, my feet cold on the stainless steel. While making breakfast and coffee, I find the day’s mail on the kitchen counter, carefully sorted into stacks: condolence cards and letters, bills, personal mail and tabloids. On top of one stack is a copy of People magazine. A photo of my mother is on the front page under the headline Mayumi May bids farewell to husband. At the bottom is a subheading, highlighted in yellow: Exclusive pictures inside.
For a moment I pause and question whether it is my mom who makes everything about herself, or whether it is the media. The answer comes to me immediately: it is my mom. She’s always insisted that I call her ‘mother’. It’s funny how the death of my father and his funeral have turned into a media spectacle, just like everything else in my life, with the spotlight on my mother. The tabloid hasn’t even bothered mentioning the name of my father, as if it doesn’t really matter who my mother was married to. I turn to the exclusive photos inside and read the details about my mother’s elegant Giovanni mourning dress that had been custom designed for the event. I don’t feel any revulsion or disgust. Growing up in this family I have gotten used to it. Everything in my life was artificial, including my father, Richard Windsor: he was distantly related to the royal family through his mother, and for obvious reasons he’d taken up her last name.
After breakfast, I join my mother in the living room. She is sitting on the Ron Arid stainless steel sofa — the most expensive sofa in the world, although I don’t know how anyone can stand to sit on it — with her ankles and knees together, legs slanted to the side and her hands resting in her lap. Her face is impassive, but even without any expression her Japanese heritage lends it an impressive look. She looks stunning, as if she were posing for a photoshoot. I can’t tell whether she is grieving or not, because it’s not the first time I’ve seen this look on her face. This is her usual look, her equilibrium state. But given that my father got cremated yesterday, I decide to be sympathetic.
“It’s going to be okay, mother,” I say. “I’ll be here for as long as you need me.” I get up to join her on her metal sofa when she finally speaks, looking straight at me.
“Don’t get up, I’m fine. I told you the day before, there’s no need for you to stay. I mean it, and I would like to be alone,” she says in her heavily Japanese-accented English. She gets up, her Jimmy Choos clacking on the black marble floor, picks up a cigar from a box on the mantel, lights it and returns to her place. She takes a casual puff, then says, “Lola, I’d like you to leave when you’re done grieving.”
She makes it sound like she is doing me a favor by letting me stay. In a moment of grief, I’d mistaken my mother for a person — my mistake. I find it funny how she pronounces my name. She always says it like ‘Law-lah.’ Other than that, her English is perfect, a combination of a beautiful accent and elite haughtiness. Her chocolate-brown eyes are filled with the disdain that she really feels for everyone. She truly believes she is superior, and she never tries to hide her dislike for me.
Her dislike for me is a result of things beyond our control. We come from a long line of witches, and since the witchy genes (or whatever it is that allows us to do magic) skip one generation, I ended up a witch and she didn’t. That is something she holds against me, even though the non-witchy generation gets the ability to predict the future. It was partly how she’d become so successful, but she would never admit it. Being an actor, a former top model, a philanthropist, one of New York’s elite and a trophy wife to my business tycoon father had thrust us all into the limelight. She publicly maintained that she wanted to keep her personal life personal and her only child out of the spotlight, but in truth, she just didn’t want any attention focused on me. Her personal life is, and has always been, very public otherwise.
While I got the witchy gene, I didn’t get her size-zero genes. We look more like sisters than mother and daughter, and she is the beautiful one. Growing up in her shadow had been difficult, and she made it harder by always excluding me from things. Even when we had parties at our place, she made sure that I stayed in my room. It was awful having the people I had massive crushes on, singers and divas who topped the charts, actors and actresses who played superheroes, across the hall from me when the closest I could get to them was looking at the pictures that made it to the tabloids the next day.
My parents didn’t really raise me or play any part in my life growing up, aside from paying for the live-in nanny and my college. My mother made a point of donating her designer dresses and shoes, reminding me constantly, “You should lose weight if you want these. It would be a disgrace to the designer if you wore them the way you are.”
So, naturally, I turned out exactly how you’d expect me to, growing up in a fancy place among rich people who were always in a war to outdo each other. Unlike other kids of the same circle, I had zero confidence or belief in myself, and only began to have the semblance of a life once I moved out and got a job at a hospital.
“Fine,” I say. “There isn’t much for me to grieve, so I’ll leave and let you grieve alone.”
“O-negai shimasu, Lola, there’s no need to be so dramatic,” she says. I expect her to follow that by asking me to stay, to not leave so soon, or something like that, but she doesn’t. “I prefer my solitude. Unlike you, I have a very busy life. I prefer some quiet whenever I can get it.”
“Mother, had you ever been to visit father at the hospital, you’d see how busy hospitals are.” I run upstairs to gather my things.
“Arigatō,” she says, then calls after me. “Take the back entrance, there’s a camera crew gathered at the front one.”
I leave through the front door instead, passing my mother on the stairs as she dramatically broadcasts her grief to the cameras and microphones that are shoved into her face. None of the paparazzi bother about me, having no clue that I am the daughter. I don’t look the part.
When I get back to my apartment I immediately turn on the TV and switch to E! News in the hope of catching my mother’s press conference. I want to hear her speech to see if she’d mentioned me or anything about me. The only thing I catch is the sound of cameras clicking as her handsome agent places his arm behind her and guides her back into the brownstone house. She stops for a moment and looks at the camera, and it feels like she is glaring at me through the screen, although it is hard to see her eyes because she has black, diamond-studded Versace shades on. I go on my computer and find a clip of her speech on YouTube, complete with my supposedly dramatic exit. It doesn’t look as dramatic on the screen. She doesn’t mention me, doesn’t say anything about her ‘family’, just talks about herself, how she is coping, what she plans to do, etc.
It pains me to see that she literally doesn’t give a fuck about me, her only child, and that is the final straw for me. I decide to cut all ties with her, not that she’d notice. It is ludicrous, really, being the only daughter of two billionaires and having to work my ass off to get by. My parents had stopped supporting me financially as soon as I had turned 18 — or, at least, my mother had. My father had literally played no role in my life. All the money and businesses my father had left were in my mother’s name.
I want some sort of closure, but I know I won't get any, so there is no point in trying. For the first time in years, I ache to return to work on a Sunday. The hospital is completely different to my home, but I feel much more at home there. The walls are painted in subtle colors, and people only talk when they need something from you. They might not always be kind, but I have no expectations of them, and so I am never really disappointed by them. Back at home I had always expected affection or love, but the closest my parents had got to that was handing me my pocket money.
At times like this, I miss my grandmother. She’s the polar opposite of my mother, and she always made me feel better. I suddenly remember something that she often said to me, “Tonbi ga taka wo umu.” It was a Japanese quote that translated to ‘A kite breeding a hawk’. I remember asking her what that meant, and how she’d put her hand on my cheek and say, “It means that you are a splendid child born from common parents.” But I haven’t heard from my grandmother in years. We never really knew where she was at any particular time; she would just appear and disappear as she pleased.