The Whitneys

The Whitney Family consisted of two adults and three children, the adults being Bill Whitney and Moira Whitney and the children being the twins Sophie Whitney and Harry Whitney, and finally little Wendy Whitney. The Whitney Family was similar to any other. It, too, had its highs and lows, and the lows never seemed too insurmountable. At this time, the household is at an ecstatic high.

         Sophie Whitney is skipping gaily from the mailbox after school back to the front door. The whole family is watching anxiously from the living room through large casement windows and luxurious red drapes, imported from France, thank you. Sophie’s floral patterned Spring dress frolics through the mild air, mimicking the mood of its wearer. Her earrings do, too. She is a giant bounce. A model’s smile is painted upon her face. Her dark eyes shine brightly. She has been accepted to Harvard. The opened letter is in her hand.

         Bill grabs Moira’s shoulder lovingly with his arm, and they share a warm smile. “Oh, our daughter. Ivy League bound,” their eyes say. Little Wendy Whitney is (somewhat) artificially excited, too young to really understand the implications the acceptance holds. Harry smiles all too genuinely, pride on the outside, contempt on the inside. He knows that letter will soon be tossed onto the mahogany dining table, imported from Germany, thank you, along with the letters from Yale and Princeton. A decision will have to be made. Once it is made, the household will experience the same sentiment it is now.

           Harry is proud of his sister. He is. But he’s just not caught up in all the pomp and circumstance that the rest of his family is. Holidays are the worst. Rich aunts and uncles, privileged cousins (though not unlike the Whitney’s), and grandparents with the personalities of hotshot stockbrokers, quick to attach themselves to any attractive, rising stock they happen to witness, be it an actual stock or a grandchild. Not-holidays aren’t much better. His parents are always there, quick to praise her next accomplishment, and there’s little Wendy who always gets artificially excited for her sister, but who is too damn cute to really get mad at.

         He steals a glance to his left, where the rest of his family still stands waiting for Sophie to return. It is one of those Kodak moments, or a scene you might find in a Burberry family catalog, if such things existed. The handsome, spectacled father wearing a cashmere sweater vest, the beaming mother, still beautiful in her forties wearing a starched and ironed white blouse, and the adorable little daughter, knee high stockings and pigtails. “Oh, our Ivy League bound daughter (sister).”

         “I do not exist to my parents at this moment,” thinks Harry. No one, not even him, notices that he has slouched his shoulders. He wishes Sophie would skip a little faster so he can get back to his own life, still the life of an eighteen year-old like Sophie’s. His nineteen year-old life, however, will not include the strenuous academia of Princeton, or even Brown. Notre Dame, most likely. Yes, the household experienced a surge of energy for that letter, too, but Harry is not Sophie. Harry is the hype for the World Series. Sophie the Super Bowl.

         Sophie is at the front door. She throws them both open all too dramatically, being careful not to crease the letter unnecessarily. She is an atomic particle being fired into the nucleus that is that family, the house. She leaps into her father’s arms and is surrounded by Moira and little Wendy. The reaction is complete and immense. Shouts of laughter and shrieks of joy erupt from the epicenter. Harry observes this and then moves in. Dealing with the aftermath of the emotions is more his thing.

         “Daddy! I got in!” exclaims Sophie.

         “I knew you would. You worked so hard!”

         “Oh, baby, I’m so proud of you,” gently coos Moira. She tightly hugs her daughter and looks on the verge of tears.

         “Sophie, Sophie!” Little Wendy. She hugs her sister.

         The hugs gone all around, Harry makes his subdued entrance, “Congratulations, Sophie.” Sophie jumps to Harry’s feet and hugs him excitedly, tightly. Harry is now free, but he stays to be polite. He has work to get to. Thinking of it this way makes him feel much older than he really is.

         The family heads back towards the dining room, all smiles and joy. On the table lay two standard size letters. Room for one more lies between them. Princeton, Harvard, Yale, alphabetical. The letter is placed. The trifecta is complete, and the family begins to part ways. Bill has important business to tend to; Moira has the house. Harry has his work. So does little Wendy. Sophie has a decision.

         Bill goes to his desk, mahogany, German. Moira goes to dust and then cook. The children go to their rooms, all upstairs. Harry usually locks himself away in his room until his work is done. Little Wendy stays at the dining table in case she needs any help. Sophie goes to her room, where she happily leaps onto her four poster bed, Italian, prepared to soon tell her friends the news and start on her decision. One should not be too hasty when choosing between Ivy Leagues.

         Before Harry opens his book he glances at his acceptance letter to Notre Dame and sighs.

         “Harry!” Wendy yells from downstairs.

         Harry jumps from his chair to go help his sister. Usually Sophie will help, just a sister-to-sister thing, but lately it’s been Harry being called into the game. It never takes too long, though, and he doesn’t mind.

         “Hey, Wendy. What’s up?”

         “I can’t subtract…”

         “Ah, let me see here,” Harry picks up the worksheet Wendy has. It’s not very difficult, but she is only ten. “Ten minus two is…”

         “I can do that! It’s when they both had two numbers.”

         “OK. Twenty three minus fifteen… Yes, carry the ten to the ones place…”

         The subtraction lesson goes well. Little Wendy should do fine on the next quiz or test; she’s a quick learner. However, she’s the family’s artist, quite talented for a ten year-old. She paints, plays piano, and is very imaginative.

         “That little sister of yours,” his mother told him one day, “is quite the entertainer. Today she wants to be English. She always has new things she wants to be. You would call her ambitious, but she’s too sweet.”

         Sure enough, into the room bursted Wendy, spouting off little phrases in an accent. “Mother, I’d like a spot of tea. Yes, a spot’ll do me just right.” “Oh, Harry, where did you get those atrocious pants? The hem’s coming undone!”

         “Where does she get this from?” asked Harry, a laugh dancing throughout his voice.

         “I just don’t know, Harry! Probably from her mother!” His mother had joined the charade now. “Wendy, would you like one or two spoons of sugar in your tea?”

         Wendy had also wanted to become a firefighter, the President of Canada, a cowboy, and Indiana Jones, but most recently she had fancied becoming the Pope. Harry and Sophie had arrived home from school and became curious as to what Wendy was slowly walking about the house wearing her bed sheets and shabbily taped paper hat.

         “Wendy, what are you doing?” asked Sophie.

         “I want to be the Pope! He has giant parades and he rides around in a glass box. People are so excited to see him. I want that to be me. Look.” Wendy started waving to an imaginary crowd, smiling genuinely. Then she slowly outstretched her arms, pivoting her head to insure she saw all those who had come to see her. It must have looked like she was offering salvation to Harry and Sophie. Had the Whitney’s been more devout Catholics she would have known she probably wouldn’t want to become the Pope, but the Whitney’s were more Catholic on paper than in practice. Harry applied to Notre Dame because his father went there.

         Harry recalls that event as he walks back up to his room. “That would be perfect,” he thinks. He imagines the future conversation he will have with anyone who asks about his family.

         “Oh, two sisters? What do they do?”

         “Well, one is a partner at the most prestigious law firm in New York City—.”

         “Very impressive.”

         “And the other is the first female Pope.”

         “You have to be shitting me. That’s your sister? Wow. What do you do?”

         Nothing that impressive. Harry has as much trouble answering that question imagining himself years in the future as he does now. “How does any eighteen year-old know what they want to do, anyways?” he asked once, watching TV with his friend Paul.

         “It’s just a feeling you get, I guess. Like when you meet who you’ll marry.”

         “You sounded like a twelve year-old girl when you said that. Wendy could have told me better.”

         “I’m sorry. I just don’t know. I know I’ve always wanted to go into pharmaceutical sales. I never thought about it after that.”

         “You knew you always wanted to go into that? How old? Did the doctor give you medicine for a cold at age eight and that was when you knew?”

         “I guess so. Something like that.”

         “Sad life.”

         “I’ll be banking.”

         “True.”

         To bank. The verb that drives any teenager into their prospective field (they’re almost certainly lying if they say otherwise). Harry feels that there are two guaranteed sources of bank. Being a doctor, and being a lawyer. Sophie will probably go to law school, Harvard Law, thank you. He does not want to be overshadowed as a lawyer, too. And what a lawyer does anyways, he is not sure of. On TV it is a showy job where you make eloquent statements in front of a packed courtroom. Harry once saw a man in a suit walk out of a law office. He looked like a lawyer. But he also looked like he hadn’t slept for two weeks. He looked pissed.

         To be a doctor is quite the little commitment, and Harry knows he doesn’t have the passion to become one. It is not just his lack of commitment to the schooling it requires. He knows he couldn’t handle the job. He couldn’t look at sick people all day. He would love to help them, but he just couldn’t do it. He couldn’t have people die, not under his watch. It would happen. He would feel guilty everyday he came home to his own family after seeing one or several broken up earlier in the day. Harry crossed doctor of the mental to-do list long ago.

         It is always difficult for Harry to open his books when he can’t determine what he working towards. He sits at his desk, toying with his clicker pen. He thinks about his father downstairs. He did well. He does well.

         “You live in a six bedroom house with five people living in it. It’s the most beautiful one I’ve seen in the state. Your mom is beautiful. Sophie will become my wife. You’re not a dullard, either. Ya’ll have a summer lake house almost as big as this one. You have a Mercedes. What does your dad do?” asked Paul one day, incredulously pondering the success of the Whitney’s.

         “First, I don’t think Sophie will ever marry anyone, especially you. Second, come closer.” Paul moved in a little closer. “You’ve seen The Godfather?”

         “Of course. Why?”

         “My father,” Harry whispered, “knows people. This house, all dirty money.”

         “What?”

         “No, I’m kidding. It’s just business.”

         “You’re an ass. What business?”

         “We don’t even really know. It could be drugs for all I know. But I really doubt that. He’s a good guy.”

         “Hm, well. I suppose I can just marry into it.”

         “No.”

         Of course Harry knows what his father does. He just usually doesn’t tell anyone. He works in the tobacco industry. He is on the verge of becoming a major league player in the game, actually. He banks, but the Whitney’s don’t smoke. Bill smokes in his office sometimes, but that’s all. He used to smoke a lot until his doctor told him he would probably die before he could even retire. Harry wishes his father would do something else, but what one’s parents do is seldom up for debate.

         Harry taps his pen on the desk a few times, listlessly waiting for motivation. It is a nice pen. Everything is nice. The nicety pains Harry sometimes. He thinks of Paul’s family, modest, probably a stronger family unit that his own. Harry is truly thankful for what his family has, but sometimes he just wishes that he had not known it all at all. The house is taken for granted; he was brought into after birth. The same for the summer house. The car was different. He awoke on his shared sixteenth birthday with Sophie to find the dining room decorated. A sign “Happy Birthday Harry and Sophie!” hung above the window. Outside the window were two Mercedes, black and silver.

         “Silver! Silver!” screamed Sophie. She looked prepared to leap through the glass to get to her new car, but decided against it at the last moment.

         Harry was excited, too, of course. A Mercedes as a first car! But Harry’s reluctance to ever draw much attention to himself was attacked by this car, assaulted to the point that his reluctance held no weight in the real world. No high-schooler can brush off the attention a car like that draws. Sophie could make the best of it, Harry knew. It made sense for her to have that car. The beautiful blond with beautiful friends, obviously going somewhere in life. Why not have the rewards early? But for Harry the car did not match his personality. People could see his discomfort with the car. They interpreted it as dissatisfaction with a luxury item, a cardinal sin among—everyone. Brat.

         Harry is not a brat. He did not ask for the car; it was given to him. To express dissatisfaction to his parents about it would have been disrespectful. He graciously gave thanks for and accepted the gift. So be it if he must feel guilty for “owning” it. Paul had a car, some 1999 model that smelled like gasoline and always gave that the impression that it might explode in a fiery gasoline explosion at any time. Harry always gave him opportunities to drive the Mercedes, his way of shoveling some guilt off his back. Interestingly he also knew how people felt about him having the car. He could do nothing about it. To tell someone he didn’t fit with the car because it was a source of guilt, ridiculous!

         A thought runs through Harry’s mind: A misunderstood rebellious teen who is angered by grand parental gifts, who is ashamed of what he has. “That wouldn’t be polite,” he concludes.

         “Harry!”

         Harry fumbles his pen onto the floor in surprise. Sophie has popped her head into his room, a streak of dirty blond hair obscuring her visible eye, leaving nothing but her nose visible.

         “What? God, maybe knock next time.”

         “Sorry. Remember there’s a party tomorrow night. Are you going?”

         “Oh, yeah. I think so. Do you want to drive over together if I do?” He forgets that the answer to this question is already in his head.

         “I’m driving over with some of my friends. But I’ll see you there, OK? We don’t have many more before we’re all gone.”

         “You’re right. I’ll see how much work I get done.”

         “OK. Good night!” exclaims Sophie’s nose.

         Harry watches her close his door. He feels bad for before, acting stoic in the face of the acceptance letter pageantry. He knows he should have been more excited. He actually felt contempt!

         “Feeling contempt for other’s accomplishments, especially one’s sister’s, is childish,” he writes on blank paper. He crumples the paper into a ball and shoots it at his trash bin. It hits the lip and caroms away under a chair. Harry used to want to be a basketball player, too. He finally opens his book to work.

        Sophie awakens first in the house. After all, sacrificing an hour of sleep every morning to study extra proved to be beneficial recently. Now it’s just a habit. Ivy League. Conflicting waves of excitement and fear batter the shore of her mind. She is immensely proud of herself. Is it a deadly sin to be proud of oneself for being admitted to three Ivy League schools? “To hell with that,” she mutters softly. All would be well but for the nagging feeling that she cannot name somewhere in her mind. It is not a good one. She knows fear, it is not that. It is not apprehension. The startling thing about it is its clarity; she just doesn’t have a name for it.

         The feeling has been with her since middle school, the beginning of her illustrious compulsory schooling career. First place in science fairs, debate team wins, athletic victories. Her early teen years gave her early tastes of the wunderkind designation. In seventh grade she was already marked for greatness. She was simply the brightest student around. It did not hurt that at thirteen she also stood a head taller than the tallest boy and, rather dangerously, drew the eyes of many of the school’s males, teachers included.

         Her beauty was responsible for many things, most tragically the end of her innocence as a child. A sharp student is always admired, but a beautiful, sharp student may as well be crowned and placed on a throne, never again allowed to live the life of your normal genius. Like Harry, Sophie never asked for many things either, but her life was thrust upon her at a younger age. Harry got a Mercedes at sixteen; Sophie sprouted breasts, grew legs, and could do double integrals before she could obtain a learner’s permit. She continued to never ask for many things. Her life simply made it difficult to ask for things since they were given to her so quickly.

         She quickly developed a subconscious entitlement or affinity for perfection that neither she nor nobody else ever really noticed. In the rare cases that she did not ascertain perfection, it was taken for granted by her and others that it was not far off. This affected her less in academia (an A is generally as good as any other A) than in her social life, where she went through friends and potential boyfriends quickly without really knowing what it was she was looking for. An outsider would believe her to be friend-rich, but lurking under the surface of the teenage popularity bubble that she floated upon was the fact that she had few, if any, true friends. But, of course, they were not far off.

         Several years of floating among different friends led her to settle among those like her most, a balance of beauty and brains, though generally tilted more towards the beauty side. She was driven to this arrival by sheer familiarity, people believed; finding comfort in being around others who drew the same sorts of attention she did. Male friends were nonexistent. She found most boys her age to be predictable, and she could sense how they looked at her as a prize to be won.

         At school on the day she was accepted to Harvard, a murmur rippled through the school: “Sophie Whitney, despite her beauty and brains and popularity, is the biggest outsider of us all. Her friends are not her friends. They wish to be hers, but she will not allow them to be. She acts nice, but she certainly must not be. No one is so perfect. She is asexual. She has never had a boyfriend. She has not even reached first base. She is our queen who is nothing like us. Why has she been queen for so long?” The murmur only lasted twenty minutes, perhaps, before it disappeared. The blasphemous instigators of it were hunted like dogs, killed, and thrown out in the garbage. It was ensured that Sophie never even heard the murmur.

         Harry did. It made him, too, feel that there was an large elephant in the high school. The unanimous authority’s authority of the school had been questioned. He tried to cast the murmur out of is mind after it had died like everyone else, but he could not. It bothered him too much that it was his sister. He felt terrible; he decided that he must tell her. To not would be impolite. He must also make sure to tell her politely, he knew.

         “Sophie, how are you?” Harry had quietly entered her room. Sophie sat cross-legged on her four poster bed, surrounded by papers and opened books.

         “I’m fine, Harry. Come in. Have you decided about the party? I’m busy, but I’m listening,” she said, continuing to read and scribble notes.

         “I’m still thinking about it. But I wanted to talk about something. I just—heard something at school today. About you.”

         Scribbles.

         “I don’t know. People said things. They called your character into question. I don’t know why.” Harry realized that this whole speech was more for himself than her. He was being a dutiful brother. He had to let her in on his information. What good could it bring to her?

         “What did they say?” asked Sophie, not raising her head from her notes.

         “They just don’t understand you. They don’t see how you can be everything that you are. They put things on you because of what they’ve made you!” Harry realized he was becoming angry.

         “What do you mean, made me?”

         “You’re just popular and all. They’ve made you some kind of super being.”

         “I don’t want to be that. You know that.”

         “I know. I know. I just wanted to tell you. I wouldn’t feel right keeping it from you.” Harry regretted ever having told her. He knew a word for this: Selfish. He was trying to soothe his own feelings for his sister by inadvertently hurting her own.

         “Thank you. I can’t change who I am. I see how I could be misunderstood. I don’t let it bother me. Don’t let them bother you, either.”

         Harry stood puzzled for a second over her stoicism. He felt more affected by the situation than she, the subject of ill-spirited high school commentary. He realized that he was intimidated by her demeanor. He could see the effects she could have on non-family.

         “I won’t.” He turned to go.

         “Good night, Harry. I love you.”

         “I love you, too.”

         Harry closed the door behind him, still not understanding how she had received the news. She seemed to not care. She didn’t care. On his walk to his room he found that he was both envious and fearful for his sister. Envious because of everything she had, her looks and intelligence, her lack of concern for how others viewed her. Fearful because of this lack of concern, aloofness almost, which might keep her from finding true friendship, true love. He wished her not to be so simple-minded, finding it ironic that someone of such intelligence could be so ignorant of certain things.

         He remembered late one night he sat at the dining table with his mother when neither could sleep. They talked about nothing in particular until they started talking about Sophie.

         “You and your sister are both very blessed. But Sophie, I hope she is not too blessed. She’ll always be able to do great things, but she lives in a bubble. Dad and I haven’t really helped it, but what could we really do? Most of it’s from how other people see her. She’s too pretty for that brain of hers. She takes things for granted. She’s the best daughter I could have asked for. I just hope when she’s off on her own she’ll become more tuned in to real things. She’s been brought up not having to worry where anything will come from but her next test grade. You have to work for things in life.”

         “She’ll be fine, Mom.” Harry, the undying optimist.

         “I’m sure. I hope so.”

         Harry remembered that being unsettling in that it was the only time he had ever heard any negative thing said about Sophie at home. But after speaking to Sophie he saw what his mother meant. Sophie had been transported through her teen years by people’s intensely favorable views of her attributes. She had never encountered setbacks or criticism. Even when things were said about her by her entire school she was not fazed by it. To her, negativity does not exist. Life cannot be lived that way, not because of personal inability, but because of necessity. The world is real. The world is negative.

         Harry sat at his desk that night and on a blank piece of paper he wrote, “Some things are better left unsaid. And mother knows best.” He crumpled it into a ball, and, knowing better, walked to his trash bin and dropped it in.

         In her quiet room, after Harry had finished speaking to her and left and already written another day’s lesson, Sophie did something neither Harry nor her mother would have expected: She cried. She cried for twenty minutes, her head smothered with pillows to prevent alerting anyone with a sound. She cried about the murmur, which she had heard. A thing like that remains a secret to no one. She cried about the feeling. The feeling without a name.

         “I don’t want to go to Harvard, or Princeton, or Yale.”

         She cried for losing track of things in her life. For letting success in her early teens sweep her up in a fury of perfectionism and self-pride that gave her no choice but to continue her overachieving ways. Many times she wanted to throttle back, to become just a normal beautiful girl, but she could not stand to disappoint herself or, most of all, her family. But she cried most of all, ashamedly, out of self-pity. For being given the natural gifts that made all who witnessed her come running with enthusiasm to see where she would end up, or to try to have sex with her, or to try to become her friend to siphon off of her attention.

         These were the things she cried about, a gifted girl thrust into a spotlight she did not ask for. The worst feeling, which did have a name, was that at the pit of her stomach she knew she was weak. Nothing but her own personal weakness had allowed a life to be made for her that she did not request. At any time she could have said, “No! This isn’t for me! I can do things for myself. Others need these things more than I do!” But she did not say those things. She hesitantly accepted them to the point that beginning to refuse them would have been impossible.

         No, she did have no true friends outside of family. The closest she had to one was stripped from her indirectly by Harry, but she did not blame him for that. She felt weak for her accepted circle of friends, pretty girls whom she strategically chose in order to try to push off as much of her attention as possible onto them. They were a coping mechanism.

         Sophie stopped crying suddenly, fully drained of emotion, her head clear surprisingly clear of everything. It was not the first time she had cried over such things. She wondered if she was just being too emotional. She knew she had many things many people would only dream of having. Yet she still felt like there was something unfair in it all. She sighed heavily and wiped her face dry. She turned back to her books and notes. She decided she hated being beautiful.