The Perils of Privilege

“Mother!” The expletive sounded like a curse word, bulleted out of her daughter’s mouth with just the right amount of venom and derision. “I told you we’re not ready for visitors, yet. You will have to wait just like everyone else.” She heard the slam of the telephone on the other end and couldn’t help the wince that grimaced her cranberry red lips. She blinked rapidly and slowly, then carefully placed her own phone back in its cradle.

Anyone who knew Margaret Channing wouldn’t guess she blinked rapidly to dispell tears, but that was what she did. Her faded blue eyes reddened with the effort but she was successful. No semblence of moisture fell from her eyes, and she moved slowly away, into her den where she poured her nightly brandy into a heavy crystal goblet. She took a seat on the dark brown leather, overstuffed, oversized chair to the left of dark oak bookshelves, and while she sipped, she gazed in a roundabout way at her surroundings. Once in a while the blinking would return and she would answer it with a hefty sip of the amber liquid. She slowly, tiredly closed her eyes, elegant brown head tipping back as she dozed, dreamed, and remembered all at once.

“Margaret, ladies don’t run like that,” her own mother admonished her in this very library. She skidded to a stop in front of her mother in the brown leather chair, her big yellow hair bow askew in shining long, brown hair. Mother’s hair was shaped into the chignon then. The child Margaret tipped her head and peered up at the mother.

“Why, Mama? Why must ladies not run? I like running!”

“Because,” the mother pursed her own red mouth in disapproval. “They just don’t. Margaret, it is very important for you to be a lady. We’re all counting on you.”

“Yes, Mama,” said the little girl although she had no idea what the mother meant, not until about five years later, anyway. Five years later when she had her Coming Out and discovered the family was as broke as the townies she’d been taught were not as good as she. The townies she’d been raised to think weren’t quite as privileged or special as she. The townies who walked past the rambling structure that was Margaret’s home and made faces and muttered behind their hands about how snooty the “upper classes” could be. If only they knew...

The silence of the house was broken by an urgent staccato knocking on the front door, startling her awake. Margaret rose up slowly, her fifty-two-year-old body feeling twice its age, and walked stiffly to the grand mahogany door. It opened ponderously to a well-suited young man standing on the ornate porch. He bowed a shimmering blond head with a gray hat in his hand, the kind Margaret hadn’t seen since she was just a girl, on the head of her father and his cronies.

“Good evening, ma’am,” intoned the youngish man, a stranger with a grin exposing dimples in his slightly wrinkled face, just enough of them to add some character, Margaret dimly acknowledged. “I’d like to take just a bit of your time if I may.”

It was on the tip of her tongue emit a negative, but suddenly she thought about the emptiness of the house, the cavernous feel of not only her home, but of her life, and for some reason she stepped back to admit him. Something she’d never done, Margaret Channing of the Chelsea, New York Channings was admit a stranger into the cold elegance of her own abode. She felt edgy tonight, probably because of Candra’s abrupt rejection, because of the daughter’s inability to understand the motivation of her mother’s entreaty to admit her into the new home she shared with her newest husband-number three, actually. Margaret stiffened at the memory and it caused her to smile tightly, the only way she could, at the gentleman entering the echoing marble hallway.

She continued to smile the only way she could while the gentleman droned on about his wares, working hard to sell what he considered to be the only option for better home vacuuming, an innovative technological advancement that would soon be renowned the world over, he assured her with mock seriousness, blonde eyebrows turned down over his earnest, bright blue eyes.

She bought it, the mechanism, signed her check with a flourish uncharacteristic of her, and as she closed the heavy door on his beaming face, she felt an odd sort of satisfaction that she had caused a level of enjoyment in another human being. It lasted long enough for her to make it back into the den with a faint upturn to her thin, crimson lips, but as she again sat in the dark leather chair of her childhood, her home, she took up the goblet with amber liquid, sipped until it was empty, then filled it again, a little more full this time,

Dusk oozed slowly into darkness outside the picture windows of Margaret’s spacious den; she wasn’t awake to hear the hissed utterance outside those windows, having dropped the goblet with a muted thump onto thick russet-colored carpeted flooring, her head tilted back and to the side, eyes closed with an occasional faint snore coming from her slightly open mouth.

“Fluffy, come back here, Fluffy!” It was obvious from his rolling eyes and pursed mouth that the man on the ground outside the picture windows felt silly as he crawled around in underbrush calling, “Fluffy, where did you go you damn dog!” He was hissing, half whispering and speaking through clenched teeth. He finally heaved a sigh as he scooped up a little white dog and stood with a grunt. He looked through the darkened windows in half fright when he was eye-level and was given the sight of Margaret’s limp form in an ostentatious leather chair.

“Must be nice,” he muttered as he plodded away with the wiggly, squiggly furry dog under his arm, “to have nothing more to do with your evening than drink yourself into a stupor.” He shook his head with half disapproval, half envy, and his hissing, scolding voice faded into the darkened distance while inside the cavernous mansion, Margaret Channing snored on softly, in solitude.