Leona and Celia: The Prettier Sister

+ I think of my story when I'm swimming in the pool. There's a rhythm to the lines. But when I get out of the water, it seems that every two sentences need a thousand more between them. The "head-draft" had Celia's physical description popping up in sentence three so I think need to find a way to more quickly structure her in. Anyway, for Wednesday, I've given myself a 15-page assignment on Celia in High School which will be chapter 1. I thought the other night of, if this were a movie, what's the obvious first scene. The answer: I think it's Celia's show-and-tell presentation about the loss of her father's wealth, which leads Robbie, whose father is the president of ABC, to talk about it at the dinner table, which leads ABC to send G. Blandings (the location scout) out to the property alongside Leslie Bennett, to scout (Which will be seen by Alan and his mother, Margaret, who live across the street). This, I hope, is the start of that: The Oswegos in High School, before Celia's presentation. It also sets Leona up as our lensing narrator


Leona was incapable of being like her sister, Celia. A dose of Modernist fiction, ingested too early, along with the elbow-jabs endured on daily trips down hallways infested with Hollywood offspring had taught her to disdain all knowledge gleaned from surface. She hated shallow beauty, romantic comedies, the giggles trilling from the music rooms where the High School’s couples sloppily kissed. She was too tall, too broad shouldered, and posessed too plain a face—this she knew—and at heart simply feared the shame that comes of cold rejection. She had long ago succeeded in convincing herself that her refusal to engage in the flirtatious rituals of her peers—a capella, group luncheons, afternoons out at the megaplex bordering the school parking lot—was due to the higher knowledge that she could only love and be loved where there was a meeting of minds.

In short, she believed she could only convince someone to love her back through cleverness.

Such opportunities were rare. The boy at the videostore who shared a fetish for pre-code Paramount releases—she had gone to coffee with him. At a summer program for prospective art-school applicants, she had kissed a fellow malcontent whose mixtape ended on a long, slow song that burned wordlessly forever. And then there was Toby, a dark-haired fan of philosophers long dead (he was really a “fan” in the full sense of that word) who was too short for her at 5’6", but who proved, in his devotion, that somewhere, sometime she would be loved for her biting wit, for the very strangeness she cultivated.

Celia, on the other hand, skipped-over the same world with the extra-terrestrial grace of a gazelle in a Wal-Mart. Her long, tawny legs drew stares in the grocery store, as she lazily pushed the cart down the lean aisles walled with cans. She had the air, at fifteen, of needing nothing, of eating nothing, of loving nothing--not really, that is. Leona was a talkative complainer, a hater of the world's unfair systems, an arguer and a spoilsport. Celia was all silence, speaking to the boys who stared across classrooms in what they interpreted as a coded language of gestures: her long, sweeping blonde hair could be pulled back behind an ear with the use of only a single finger; her desk could be tapped with pale, hard nails, in patterns of morse code; her legs could cross and uncross with the rhythm of waves lapping the hull of a retreating ship. Celia smelled good--her soaps were fruit-flavored, purchased at specialty shops, and in the messy bathroom off of her messy bedroom, cluttered every surface.

Leona was adamantly unkempt; on a weekend trip to Las Vegas, her mother, with whom she had shared a bedroom and who had carelessly forgotten to bring along a comb, was shocked to find that her daughter had not only brought none, but that the girl protested to not even own “one of those things.” (Celia, of course, had several.) Even in high school, Leona wore purposelessly sexless garb: navy knee-high socks, loafers worn down from years of sloughing through streets, dresses culled from the four-for-a-dollar piles at the Estate sales of washed up actresses who, after being elbowed out of manses in the hills, had wound up in the chock-block suburbs of the valley, their possessions spilled out onto dry, Bermuda grass they could no longer pay anyone to water. Chunky, vomit-colored bracelets of bakelite, bauble earrings the size and hue of mushrooms, the dark high-collared dresses of widows in mourning—these finds Leona shelled out her father’s money to buy, running her fingers over their cigarette-stained, fork-flecked surfaces, sitting beside her on the passenger seat as she sped North up the 405 in the soft-edged, smog-hazed grey-blue of an LA dusk.

Later, Leona would perhaps realize a disease of vanity in the loving of only that which society had discarded, but at the time she could not see what she did as anything but natural. She loved the beautiful, unloved—this was what she told Richard, the short, dark, philosopher who’d sit out with her and smoke in the public park at night. She liked to think of the past lives of her finds, of all the sad, Grey Garden women who’d worn the things before her. There was a type of immortality in it. She loved, she’d say, not that which made her beautiful, but that which was, innately.

Her mother would agree: the clothes did not make the girl beautiful. They bulged at the hips, they gave the girl broad shoulders, thick ankles. They were evidence that Leona “did not make an effort,” she’d say, to their father in bed, wondering if she should be concerned. “It’s the same as I was at that age, Maudy,” Zed Oswego would reply (to many of his wife’s queries), flipping to the next page in whatever he was reading, letting her talk on. “Leona’s not Cee,” he’d say.
“That,” Maude would say, chuckling, “Is for sure.”
Maude and Zed Oswego often wondered aloud how they had produced a daughter like Celia—blooming with a natural beauty that must, they exclaimed aloud, have come from somewhere. The same musings were not left for Leona. In short, Leona was not the pretty one, and they knew that her life would not be less happy, but it would be harder, and that was something that mattered. If no where else, it mattered in High School.

The Waeburn public school netted its fair share of celebrity offspring. Classes were capped at fifteen, students were not allowed to use coloring books (they inhibited creative thinking), and the dining-hall cuisine, baked by one volunteer mother, was entirely organic. In a school of 500, even among the children of stars, whose faces against all light reminded their watcher of a mash-up of their two strange parents, the Oswegos still netted stares. Leona, the eldest, having graduated just two years prior, had made a name for herself aside from her strange garb, by giving frequent, rousing, angry speeches as the leader of a poorly-attended philosophy club that met weekly. Her previous teachers, when confronted with another Oswego--Jareth, one year younger--would always wonder why he wasn't as outspoken as that sister of his, whose quick, clever essays had gotten the girl into Harvard where she claimed to be pursuing the most useless and backwards of disciplines--Greek.

Jareth Oswego was a dark horse himself, but not like his sister Leona. In over-large, unmarked tee-shirts, the boy was a sitter-out. He preferred the corners of classrooms, and spoke up only when called on to deliver a cutting, sardonic reply. He was adept in Playwrighting, Mr. Gardner told the other teachers over subs one day in the teacher's lounge. The boy, he protested, had style. As Leona had carved a way for herself to stand outside of the light thrown off by her father, Jareth's soft ways were designed to slip under the radar. He did not seem, given Leona, to be an Oswego. Teachers called students like these "Space Cadets." They were always losing their backpacks, calculators, watches and receipts. They showed up late to gym classes without even modestly crafted excuses. On test days, they forgot pencils, and yet when tested showed to have somewhere, at some time, actually done the homework. Their passage through the grades seemed at each juncture like a miracle, and other students admired their spirited lack of trying. Jareth Oswego was clearly a stoner, though no adult had ever willed to catch the boy. xxxx

And he was nothing like Celia.

If Leona despised High Schools' happinesses, and Jareth seemed to float through the world unaware of any of its systems at all, Celia was simply a practical girl. High School, she understood, even at age 15 in the 10th grade, was a landscape of symbols and surfaces. A girl could get ahead and have the most fun by simply being pretty, and so it was to this task that she devoted all of her energies.