Sisters ch.3 – Buffy's Schooldays

One year after Debra Nielsen had met and fallen for Jacob Carter, her sister Joyce had met Hank Summers. He had fallen wildly in love with her, and while she (to tell the truth – but she never did) had not really fallen for him in the same way, he was still charming, personable, promising, and above all funny as all get out. She scarcely ever met him without being made helpless with laughter, laughing till she cried. She really thought that he should have been a stand-up comedian... but when she said so one morning in the college cafeteria, suddenly all the spirit went out of the atmosphere. It was not just that Hank fell silent; something radiated from him that was grimmer than anger.

For a few seconds, Joyce had no idea what was going on. She even had a brief suspicion that this strange silence was the build-up to another gag; but that was swiftly followed by a horrified realization that she had said something that offended – worse than offended – her friend. She tried a shamefaced apology...

"Let's not talk about it, Joy."

"But I just mean that you make me laugh! You are the funniest person I've ever met, and that has to be good, hasn't it?"

"Really, Joy, let's not. OK? It's not a good idea. I don't want to be a comedian."

It was only later that she realized that that had been a very unhappy suggestion. Hank's father had in fact been a professional comedian, and had hit the skids when his son was barely in his teens. He had resorted to drink, and two years later, after violent scenes and the intervention of the police, he had been forced out of his house. A year and a half after that, he had been found in an alley, dead from alcohol poisoning, and with the marks of a recent beating. For now, though, Joyce only knew that live performance, especially comedy, were a sore spot.

And yet Hank Summers had been brought up in show business, he understood it, and he knew people. As soon as he graduated, he took a job in the show business giant Talbot Entertainment, and he was soon being promoted. He was at the interface between the creative people and the administration and finance, and he proved good at it, sensitive to the needs and moods of artists, able to smooth trouble over, to propose sensible compromises, and to just keep things ticking over. A few people began to say that he was the necessary man.

If only things had worked out as well at home.

Yes, from the outside it looked fine. A large house in the good part of Hollywood; a beautiful, desirable and warm-hearted wife, who looked as good in a bikini as she did in evening dress, good company for anyone who called, and who had started to grow a personal interest into art and antiques into a successful business. Who would not want to be married with such a woman? And Hank and Joyce never allowed the rest of the world to doubt that. But a snake had not only entered that garden, but was growing fat and poisonous in it. Joyce, a woman born to be a mother if ever there was one, was not managing to have a child. Two pregnancies ended in painful and unpleasant miscarriages. The pain started cutting the link between them, and Hank started feeling more at ease at work than at home, where, when nobody was around, Joyce would fall into unhappy silences and stare into the void with large, dark eyes.

When they were offered the opportunity to adopt baby Elizabeth – or Buffy – husband and wife inwardly jumped at it. Joyce, especially, felt her heart going out to the little bundle of hope and humanity as if she had been her own.

...

There were many children in Hank and Joyce's neighbourhood and in their social group, and almost all of them went to the same school. There never was any question of Buffy going anywhere else.

The world in which Buffy's parents moved was sociable, but not friendly. Behind the grins and the handshakes and the invitations to lunch or dinner there was a merciless attitude, an unspoken and indeed unacknowledged certainty that the devil would indeed take the hindmost; which affected Buffy long before she understood anything about it. Sometimes Hank and Joyce dressed themselves and Buffy in expensive clothes and go visit people she didn't know, and then she would get a lot of recommendations about how to behave. Then they would go into someone else's house and she was packed off with some children she didn't know, under the supervision of people with dark skins and funny accents; in time she understood that they were domestic servants from places with long names like Guatemala or Nicaragua. She had met several Latino children at school, but had not had much by way of friends, and Latino adults were a bit of a novelty. She liked chatting with them, and more often than not she spent more time talking to the adult in charge than playing with her supposed new friends. On one occasion she had a real punch-up with another child; the Nicaraguan lady in charge parted them with some difficulty, and then spent some time setting their clothes right and cleaning their faces, so the parents should not notice something bad had happened. The poor woman was afraid she might get sacked if her employers found that she had let the children get out of hand. Somehow Buffy and her sparring partner both understood it – perhaps because, as children, the idea of hiding things from adults was clear to them; but the next time they visited that family, the Nicaraguan was gone, and another woman was in her place. Buffy tried to get an answer and was shooed out of the room for her pains.

So the next time she was taken along for an adults' dinner, she was prepared for the worst, or at least as prepared as a ten-year-old can be. And she kept telling herself that she would not fight with any other child, however much of a snot they were.

Children at Buffy's school learned certain things quite fast. They were all connected with show business and related areas, and the sense of money and social prestige tended to seep into classes early. Girls all knew about dress and make-up. It could even make for drama. There was a committed English teacher who, a few weeks into her first term at Showbiz Elementary, was taken aside by three older colleagues and informed in no uncertain terms that her frumpy and ill-coordinated dress was courting classroom disaster. She took it badly, but it was not rare to hear a cluster of tiny ten-year-olds mock knowledgeably this or that adult fashion disaster. The woman eventually left.

By the time she was ten, Buffy knew all about popularity and what it took to achieve it. The worldliness that had surprised and upset Sam had been there for a while. She understood that her parents were not as prominent as those of some other children, and that her love for ice skating was in danger of making her look like some sort of nerd and jock combo. She took up cheerleading as a more socially approved activity, and proved pretty good at it. She made sure that she went everywhere with her cheerleader friends... or what she understood as friends.

Nobody realized it, but Buffy was growing more insecure. That was why she needed her "friends" and their approval. She would come to school from a home where her parents rarely spoke with each other any more. Hank had used to sit with her and go over her homework, correcting mistakes and explaining things; now he rarely ever did it, and her homework suffered. And Joyce went about her business with a sense of grim endurance, as though her prosperous and successful life were no better than something to be suffered, to put up with day after day, with as little complaint as possible. Even Sammy's visits were no longer the joyful times they had been, even though the sisters were always glad to see each other. And it turned out that Sammy's promised stellar career was not materializing – and she did not like to talk about it. It was to school, now, and to hanging out with the cheerleader gang, that Buffy looked forward to for warmth and fun and light.