Lots new over the weeekend

At age 16, Jareth Oswego, despite all the family’s grumblings against the institution, was still at Waeburn.
When they first enrolled Leona, Waeburn had seemed the only, obvious choice. Classes were capped at fifteen, students were not allowed to use coloring books (they inhibited creative thinking), and the dining-hall cuisine, engineered by one volunteer mother, was entirely organic. Modern in design when it was conceived in 1963, the school was a cluster of low-ceilinged, hooded concrete buildings connected over the dusty, red-earthed bowl of Tacoma Canyon by outdoor hallways. From the sky it was a spider—legs out and awry, splayed.
Some of the lawns between the halls had been landscaped with dry, imported Bermuda sod that scratched the legs of those who sat down Indian-style; Others had been left to the Eucalyptus trees whose dusty leaves clogged the gutters, changing the rhythm of the rain so that over some of the halls, water would fall in unobfuscated sheets. In LA it did not rain often, but like most things here, when it did, like most things, it did so in a showy, draining way. A single day of drizzle predicted five more to follow, and you sickened of the drudge of it. No weather was ever a relief from previous weather until—gah!—it was over with the suddenness of a snap.
Like the weather, moods shifted in showy patterns—driven with TV schedules. A bad episode of Boston Public would have the teaching staff irritable for seven days—until the next, when principal SkinnerTK would chastise the wrongdoer down in his office, to be scolded but not expelled (because in TV, unlike in real life, you did not want the trouble-makers to stop the plot from churning forward). They would mope over the happenings in the teachers’ lounge, feeling, until justice had been enacted onscreen, that it would never be enacted anywhere.
Jareth saw the same fawning behavior in his classmates; a single good episode of Dawson’s Creek would entirely affect the nature of the girls’ crushes. Where once his long-limbed, So-cal classmates would moon over the cluster of boys who actively discussed weight-lifting, gym runs, and the bleaching of hair in the manner of “Dawson,” it was when Katie Holmes’ character chose “Joey” instead that the girls’ attention shifted. Now, they pointed and nodded toward those pudge-faced, quiet puzzlers. Suddenly Matthew Velner, his hooded eyes sunk under sleeplessness, his pale skin—secluded from the glare of the sun by long nights spent programming computer games in his basement lab—was grumbling in Physics as to the correct etiquette one should use to dump a girl (long-limbed Tracy Tanner) for her best friend (long-limbed and blonde Diane Wheatus). The response—from a moronic, bleach-haired Dawson—was always an “I don’t know man, but—“ followed by a prescribed routine whose steps imitated something he had seen somewhere on TV. First take her to dinner, explain it after you’ve ordered, and have a nice drive afteward around a lake, some lake, with trees and people walking out around it.
The Oswegos watched as much TV as any of them. But the family’s attitude toward the set was as towards an intruder. Their mother, walking into the den, carried with her the catchphrase “What is this garbage?” no matter what was playing—a documentary on natural habitats, a film starring Meryl Streep as an Edwardian lady. And no matter their response, she’d cross to the other end of the room, her arms over her chest, to watch for a few minutes without speaking, before retreting with a blasé “Ughhhhhhh.” Jareth’s father would come into the den with a crossword puzzle, slump into the big armchair, and live in a world that came without TV, only speaking to shout out clues: “Four letters, Disagreeable neccessity.”
Leona would be the one to know: “Onus?” she’d ask, as if it was something she did not already know—granting her father that.
All media, aside from music, was background noise to their father.
It was as if Zed could not hear dialogue. A night at a play. The backdrop lit in fiery blue, the color of the zinnias of gas burners, and the characters moving before the scrim sparring with their hands in the air. At intermission they had stepped outside for some air. Leona, biting her nails, was thinking about how the play—which concerned a sister to be married off—could comment in its most biting lines on her own female imprisonment. Jareth was talking to his mother about if they should paint the trim in the guest-room that same blue color because, Maude had said, “It’s just so so lovely.”
Zed had interrupted to ask if they want anything, had walked to a neighboring vendor, bought a candy-bar, and had come back into the family’s conversation, chewing it.
“Well I thought she was terrible,” Leona was saying to her mother.
“Who was?” Zed asked.
There was one female actress on the stage—played by, if Jareth remembered correctly, Tava Shu.
“The one female actress on the stage,” Leona had said. “Who’s getting married off?”
“Oh right,” Zed had said, and walked off to eat his candy bar beneath a hooded lamp. Jareth saw someone approach him—a fan in a tweed sportcoat a size too large who stood with his hands in his pockets, leaning into his father. Their conversation was animated, crackling—Zed punched the guy on the shoulder. Maybe they had known eachother from way back. When Zed did not return to meet the family in their box later, when the lights had gone up, and then again, when the clapping had started and they had gone down the stairs into the lobby, Maude had said “For god’s sakes he’s always the one missing. My children are more dependable.” They had gone out onto the street with the rush of the crowd, with the plan to just drive home and hope he’d be there.
On the street, Leona had elbowed Jareth. They both saw it—a sports bar with a crusty sign, a vaguely gothic look to the stained-glass window and sour notes of rage eminating from within, the tinkerings of some bad rock band as insulated by egg-cartons stapled to the walls. Leona asked their mother to “Give her a second” and, leaving the family there on the street, had crossed to open the club door, disappear within, and re-emerge from their father from whose blithering lips protruded a cigar whose fancy green and gold label bespoke of a rare import.
In the car, snapping into his seatbelt, he had said, simply, “I didn’t much care for the play,” and mom had laughed.
“I will not recommend you for the board of the Tony’s,” she said, cackling.
“That thing won a Tony?” Dad asked, drumming his fingers on the glove compartment.
“Six,” Leona said from the backseat, seething a little.

Though watching television with his father who, oblivious to the set at all, didn’t change much, watching with his sisters was a completely different experience. Celia simply stopped on shows he would have been embarrassed to watchon his own—teenage dramas that played like morality tales (who to dump, how to dump, how to be dumped), MTV reality shows whose sparring housemates played for the cameras, and, holiest of holy, makeover house shows, wherin families switched houses for a weekend to redecorate eachothers’ parlors with loud paint and cheap, Swedish furniture.
But watching with Leona was xxxx. Never content with what was playing, she’d switch for a while and land on something inane—an infomercial wherein Tori Spelling was attempting to sell some sort of washable apron, a long-run episode of Friends, a Ricky Lake special on Eating disorders with double stages—one housing the anorexics, another the obese.
When it’s just the two of us, we can get really terrible. Amy goes to Harvard but took a semester off to deal with “emotional problems” (“Namely,” Amy flippantly tells the postman and others who ask, “the emotional problem of Harvard itself”). So she is too smart to be enjoyable company for daytime TV. She makes dissonant comments such as when, during a special on eating disorders, The Tyra Banks Show faces off five chairs of anorexic girls versus five chairs of obese girls, and Amy says, “What is she trying to achieve, some sort of Hegelian dialectic?” Or, during The Simpsons (my favorite, witness the tee described above), she makes the lucid observation: “Look at how Mr. Burns unconsciously authors every plot. Polluter providing death through nuclear smoke? Or angel granting life through low-wage paychecks.” It’s completely exhausting.
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At Waeburn, the seasons themselves followed studio schedules. In the spring and fall, the parking-lot at pickup time (3 – 3.15) would hum with talk of “Pilot season.” Cell numbers were exchanged. A pretty mother, leaning on the rolled-down window of a dad in an Escalade, was netting herself an audition. Those thin, gawky fathers who hauled leather briefcases would pull out from them piles of pages—a script!—to hand it into the waiting tote of another dad, who, bored during pickup, would page through the thing, smiling through his teeth.
Parental gossip, as usual, surrounded the fables they devised for their children: Oren is doing so well in English that his teacher recommended, god forbid!, he skip a level; The other day a stranger—a total stranger!—asked Celia if she would consider a modeling career. But, as though aware of the cliché nature of their own dialogue, talk would veer quickly away. Conversations ran to the fables of the worlds they were busily creating: I don’t know how they’re going to kill of Gwen’s character—she won’t stand for it; If Marissa marries him in the season Degan’s writing right now, ratings will spike and crawl down; or, I heard they built three submarines out in Mexico. A hatchet job.
Some seasons—especially during the summer and early Fall, when the snow had cleared from Toronto’s streets—parents would be out of the picture entirely. At the orphanage-sized homes of friends, parties would come without supervision, watched only by maids long ago bought into the childrens’ alliance. Children not of the Studio system, The Oswegos were triply cursed: Cursed with parents who were nearly always home, cursed with questions they would always have—What’s a dolly, Daddy?—and cursed with not knowing the importance, the absolute importance, of Denton Swire in the fourth grade whose mother was not a recognizable Gwen, let’s say, but ran Fox Dreamworks Pictures. That was why Greg Marcel was friends with the brash loser, that was why Mitzy had to spend so many weekends at his house, that was why, in Science Lab, though Swire had dropped the test-tube thus ruining the experiment, Paul Dine had provided him with his good results.
Still, even among those children of stars whose faces recalled a mash-up of their recognizable parents, in a school of 512, the Oswegos netted stares. Jareth, the middle child, had followed his eldest sister, Leona, and was trailed, one grade below, by the youngest, Celia, 14 going on 15. The reputation which plagued him was neither his eldest sister’s—she had gone on to Harvard, to the chagrin of all of her former teachers when faced with the two that could not live up—nor the reputation of Celia, whose looks had landed her on both the pages of C-list teen fashion mags and on the tongues of all but the shyest boys in Jareth’s grade (11th). No, the reputation to plague Jareth and all three Oswegos at high-school, in their twenties, and in their life, was the reputation of their father. It was not something that could be “played down” or “lived up to”—it was like being born in another country, or of another sex, or into another creed; as ingrained into their identity as the dots inscribed on dies.
At age twenty-three, Zed Oswego had, with the swift motion with which other fathers unzipped parkas, drawn a twelve-inch imitation-Medieval pewter sword down the pale stomach of a live sow, exposing innards to a sold-out stadium. Zed’s VH1 backstory—his rise into fame due to cokehead bassist and high-school pal Rick Moldin, the ensuing tours with their group The Gadabouts, and his gradual fadeout to domesticity in a mansion in the Malibu hills which he shared with his wife, a groupie he’d met when she was 18—was known to the school’s population who could trace, in the face of his dark-haired son, the father’s youthful moonface.
Jareth’s pale, soft face was round as a platter, cut into with the hard lines of a slim nose, thin lips, and the tired trails which drained from the tear ducts down into the corners of Jareth’s mouth, which hid a set of too-small, rounded teeth so perfectly aligned as to be the reason, Margerie Durnham told her friends at a sleepover in the tenth grade, why she loved him. Though Jareth would never know it to be love, he would sense Margerie’s strangeness. He took her quiet stares not as affection but as that other terrible hunger he had become more adept at recognizing—a starvation for fame, or for the proximity to it, which burned in the guts of even the best at pretending not to care.
Having a teenage rebel for a father bestowed the Oswegos with an innate reputation--they were not to be messed with. So how difficult it had been for the three of them to rebel.
It started with Leona, the eldest, who having graduated just two years prior, had been pointedly clever, industrially studious, and had made it a point not to be associated with a father who at age 20, had dropped out of a small community college on the Eastern shore of Massachusetts to follow a “dream” in the form of a choking, sputtering van driven on a cross-country tour. She was—and oh, what an ungodly word it was in the Oswego household—practical.
Leona was the type of messy-haired, uncaring girl who excelled at every academic. She was rude and she was brilliant. But it was in music class that she gleaned her first “F.” When handed a recorder she failed, purposefully, to elicit the correct sound. Her own notes, ricocheting down the concrete halls, strained like the peachy wail of a cat. A stab at chorus fared no better. She was a low mutterer, who hid in the third row behind Mario D’Ambreezio (the only boy, who if it were not for our contemporary age’s acquiescenes, would have been turned a castrati). When called out by the frustrated conductor who worried the Oswego girl did not truly know the lyrics, Leona was asked to solo her rendition. The correct lyrics to “Little Drummer Boy” were not “Watermelon watermelon Scooby dooby doo." The following quarter, she was not asked to return to chorus and so spent the period (8th) in total segregation. Forced to sign up for the only elective that still had open slots, "Winter Sports," she sat out on pick-up basketball games, coloring the thick wedge of her sneakers with the white-board erase pen she'd been given to keep the score.
To Jareth, Leona’s rebellion was a success; she had been the only Oswego to flee the scene.
Harvard had begun as a name only to be whispered. The symbol of all stratifications, all achievements, all placeholders Zed Oswego, in his throaty dinner lectures against “our country,” which to him, existed either in the Midwest, where the fat people they saw at Disneyland were from, or in the “hallowed halls of Harvard,” where bowtied scrooges “made up numbers.” The Gadabouts, despite their origins twenty minutes North of Cambridge, had played at Harvard Yard only once, playing a protest concert against Vietnam that had gone down in the books because of its headlining act, SOME FAMOUS PROTESTOR, who, Zed Oswego had never personally met, despite his stories to the contrary. Harvard, as an institution to be a part of and not to protest, was the ultimate rebellion.
The acceptance letter came in a thick brown envelope. In the recently remodeled kitchen of the Oswego home, on the marble island standing solitary in the sea of tile, Leona read the Congratulations that would island her forever from the family she felt weighted by. She only needed, she told her parents at dinner, a signature. Maude Oswego, though she would not admit it to her husband, was somewhat proud, and called up a “Celebration Dinner” (a pseudo-Thanksgiving, imported via a Deli on 3rd street) which her father endured, spearing peas with a single fork tine.
This fall, that was where Leona was— sitting around on lawns raked of reddish leaves that fell from the trees, or on wooden chairs pulled around circular tables, where she talked about philosophers, or on futons, alongside black and white and asian students, smoking hashish from gleaming hookahs and talking about how, even if they turned out to be Shakespeare, the earth would fall into the sun and it would all be meaningless. At least, that was how Jareth Oswego understood her life. She had been away now for a year and a half, having spent the intervening summer interning at a magazine in New York, whose name he had never heard of. Despite how close they had been in high school, she rarely wrote. This fall she would come home for her first Thanksgiving—four days which he looked forward to as a clean, crisp break from the soddy mess of fall spreading before him otherwise without interruption.
Labelled in Waeburn’s hallways as a stoner, Jareth hid beneath overlarge ponchos sold on the sidewalks in front of East LA’s unobscured headshops by sad-eyed Guatemalan immigrants. During lunch, he’d head over with Bresios and two or three others—sometimes Paul Dine would be there with Mitzy Hanks, if they weren’t making out in the dark of a music practice room, or there’d be Leg Rouland carrying the bummy prop of a skateboard (named by his Hollywood parents, “Legend,” a title he’d tried to shed) and they’d meet at the strip of Eucalyptus trees that edged the student parking lot, where they’d slump down, backs to the wall, to sit in the pile of dry leaves. Despite the pastoral setting, the place was called by everyone (including teachers) the “alley”—a reference to the places of deviation they had learned about in movies, where in small towns with rigid puritan standards, the grace of civil engineers had gifted teenagers the unlit backroads.
This smoking of Jareth’s was a pittance of a rebellion, spoil-sport really. His father, with a bowl of his own in the third drawer beneath his computer in the garage studio, couldn’t be said to care. The most his mother had ever said was, when finding in his sock drawer, his pipe (a cheesy cat-faced thing he’d paid too much for when he was 13 and didn’t know better), “You know this kills brain cells?” What a cliché, he had thought, as she had simply placed the embarrassment on the top of his dresser to stare at him with its gummy, muck-filled eyes.
Jareth didn’t turn to pot in the rebellious sense that maybe the Dawsons of TV turned to pot. It wasn’t only a rebellion but yes, an escape. In the sense that Leona paged through the Ivy League brochures hoarded in the folder labeled “Pre Calc” (an assurance that her parents would never open it), Jareth found life on the side-lines (the “alleys,” the headshops, the poolside chaises of spoiled-rich Legend) to be an escape.
Because really, anyone born into the name of Oswego needed this; this forgetting.
For Leona, escape came in dreams of stratospheric lecture halls where, raising a hand and standing to the teacher’s call, she’d answer with a rebuttal well-spoken enough to move the classroom to tears, a standing ovation, maybe, or just a glance from a scrubby man in a tweed jackets, its elbows worn, whose soft, surprised glance would seem to say—I never thought I’d find someone who understood. Jareth understood this in his sister and she understood, in him, the cat-eyed pipe and his bummer friends, that girl Mitzy with the raggled hair, whose measly crush on Jared was enough to launch the boy into hour long daydreams.
But to Leona and Jared, Celia was unexplainable; divinely strange as an immaculate conception. The thing—almost the entire problem, the entire distance between them—was that she was born extra-terrestrially, numbingly beautiful. Her elder siblings had inherited the face of a malcontent rocker from their father, but Celia’s mother, a former groupie, would say often that Celia came from her. Still, she had never looked like this—long limbed, tanned by the LA sun, with blonde hair from god-knows-where (the French grandmother no one had ever met, she posited) and the peaked, upturned nose of a Norwegian elf.
In the Oswego house, Celia was a gazelle trapped in a WalMart. Late night conversations between the parents, held over pillows, would concern how they could have produced such a creature. In the kitchen, dining-room, living-rooms and basement—even out by the chaises that lined the lima-bean shaped pool, where she sprawled over magazines whose inserts fluttered away in the heady breezes—Celia’s beauty was either adamantly ignored, unacknowledged, or mocked as distastefully conventional. To see her prancing about the house, Leona would chide, “Looking for your whitening powder?” Even their mother, exhausted by the more forgetful, irresponsible daughter sweeping under the couches for a missing sock or cellphone, “Sweetie, the mirror is over there.” Bursting with love, Zed would call her into his studio to deliver a drink or a snack with the mocking, disturbing tone of a horror-show Humbert Humbert: “My fawn?”
It was a farce carried out not in cruelty, but in sincerity, out of love, as a way to temper the girl. For the Oswegos understood that in West LA, where girls like Celia were instantly accepted, she had been given no reason to rebel, to forge a personality. She was born into a life without suffering. And so, the Oswegos understood without saying, they must manufacture it. At home, then, Celia’s beauty was a farce, because in the sun-drenched halls of Waeburn, it was everything.