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“How do I know you'll keep your word?" asked Coraline.
"I swear it," said the other mother. "I swear it on my own mother's grave."
"Does she have a grave?" asked Coraline.
"Oh yes," said the other mother. "I put her in there myself. And when I found her trying to crawl out, I put her back.”
― Neil Gaiman, "Coraline"
i. well this / is torturous
The other girls, defying the stereotype that Upper East Side mothers are distant creatures who prefer to keep clean hands via the hiring of many exotic nannies, have always expounded on maternal comfort. For a while Blair had kept in store the possibility that they might be lying, constructing elaborate fantasies of trips to Chanel and gelato on Fifth the same way other kneel at church pews and Blair prays to her toilet bowl, but the day a striking, sharp-featured woman with an almost-kindly smile melts out of a Bentley to pick Penelope up in eighth grade is the day Blair is forced to admit that maybe they aren't; maybe those negligently tossed comments about mothers braiding hair and providing dieting tips ―not that Eleanor doesn't do that, but Blair imagines there is more concern and less plain evaluation in her comrades' mothers' eyes― aren't, in fact, the results of a crafted deception.
It takes all of one week in Constance St Jude's for the issue to rear its head again, but this time Blair is prepared, has got all the weapons that will ensure that for the rest of his life her inferiors do not open their mouths out of turn. When Katie absent-mindedly flings around that "My mom can even order us those little canapé thingies for the tea-party, she's got the best caterer―" all Blair has to do is interrupt with an icy, honeyed, "Good to know we've all gotten past the stage of our 'moms' doing everything for us, isn't it, Katie?" and the girl's fighting tears, biting on an inexpertly glossed lip.
The thing is, despite what people seem to think, Blair does understand mercy; but she also knows when it is warranted and how to apply it. This particular comment might have been perfectly innocent, but there is no teenager in Blair's social circle ―and Blair is famous enough that the limits of that circle are only those of ignorance and sheer absence of social decorum, which is rare enough at Constance― who doesn't know that Eleanor Waldorf, for all she will give her daughter passes to all her shows and occasionally remembers to provide extravagant gifts, regularly forgets that she has, in fact, given birth to progeny a long fifteen years ago. They know what they've been doing: as much as disdain is the mark of power, information is its currency.
There have been long and empty summers in Blair Waldorf's childhood, but never let it be said that she isn't a girl who knows how to make strength out of her weaknesses: not only has she ingested every Audrey Hepburn film known to man, she's also taken advantage of the free time to gobble up as many classics as she can, studiously bent over the leather-bound volumes on her father's pristine chestnut wood desk. Of particular interest to her are those endless tales of cruelty and never-quite-barbaric schemes that are the Ancients, Ovid, Homer and the histories. At fifteen she sees in her mother an Aggripina, the powerful arrogance of a tyrant's mother; and her father is Ulysses, a perpetual runaway, always faintly dissatisfied with the life that's waiting at the end of the line. The point being: she knows what she's saying when she writes in her moleskin diaries, in what the teenage version of herself considers as 'classy glitter', as if there were such a thing, that her ambition in life is to stand in front of those girls ―of the entire world, even, but let's not burn too fast―, all the screaming lion's pit of them, and turn her thumb decisively down.
No more.
―
Let's phrase it like this: many people have tried to put Serena van der Woodsen in boxes, and approximately zero of them have succeeded. It's not as much that she resents the attempt ―she can't bring herself to mind it, to think about it―; but she changes too fast, too often, with too much dazzling, dizzying randomness for anyone to predict the pattern of her fallacies. A shooting star, that one uncle with the bright Hawaiian shirt she only saw once because he had dropped in on a family gathering called her, reverent and mocking at once, and Serena, all of ten with the firm wish of becoming a dancer when she grew up, fiercely in love with a girl in her class called Sara and refusing to be dissuaded, had only frowned. If anything, she'd thought then without any conceit, she had to be the sun: bright and overpowering, warm like white-sand beaches; unstoppable.
Wherever they go ―and there are a lot of places, a string of well-lit landscapes and identical hotels, complete with marble floors and frosty receptionists, at least until Serena sends herself in exile and Eric is hidden away into the recesses of the Ostroff Center― there is much oohing and aahing over the perfect van der Woodsen siblings, the blond-haired, well-mannered angels with their blinding smiles. Serena gets used to hearing vacationing socialites look over their Fendi sunglasses and simper, "But that daughter of yours, Lily, she's like a picture-perfect replica!" To which Lily always laughs, throwing back her head to show off her milk-smooth throat, and reclines into her husband's embrace. "She is," she says with a secret smile, as though proud of her accomplishment.
When Serena looks at herself in the mirror she can admit that she doesn't see it. She loves her mother, she does, loves her astuteness and her kind-heartedness, that perfect blend of motherly authority and being your child's best friend that all the parenting books recommend, but apart from the hair and maybe a certain likeness of bearing, their silhouettes just don't align. Serena is woman ―well, girl― enough to admit that she doesn't know whether or not she's bothered by that discrepancy, and the question that runs on its heel: is it Lily who fills the mirror-frame enough not to leave room for anyone else to look like her, or is it Serena?
But forget it -- Serena loves her mother and her mother loves her, would kill ―kill― for her if it came to that. Though it won't: their family picture is the most sought-after commodity during Upper East Side Christmas season, four white-smiling perfect specimens of the human race, not a care in the world.
―
So maybe this is why Blair and Serena fell together: those mothers whose shadow, light or heavy, weighs on their backs and wraps itself around their bones, leading them in endless cat-and-mouse games of self-esteem, search for independence and hunger; that, or Blair's bloodhound instinct upon recognizing that there is enough honey in Serena to coat the brokenness inside her. At sixteen she will be old enough to see it and stupid enough to poke at it under the cover of darkness; and single-minded enough not to acknowledge that honey, for all it is warm divine fare, also attracts all sorts of undesirable creatures ―damns nearly often as it heals.
Blair is haughty by need and solitary by choice, but Serena blasts through those defenses like they're suggestions, which it doesn't take long for Blair to discover is the way she treats most things. Whether she's right or wrong is a secondary concern: Serena operates following her own highly personal principles, is changing as quicksilver, will surprise, delight and betray you before you can even think to retaliate. She drops next to Blair on the bench where she's pretending to pore over a magazine, directs at her that blinding nine-year-old grin; says, "Watcha reading?" ―and there are the foundations laid for the most epic friendship to ever grace the halls of Constance St Jude's Academy.
After five months of friendship, Serena is the first to admit, with unthinking candor, that she doesn't like the careful coldness of the Waldorf penthouse, its cool purple velvet drapes and cream table-linen. In fact she finds it all dreary; and wouldn't Blair rather go to Serena's house, where there are pancakes and her little brother and Lily van der Woodsen who can give boy advice with the best of them? Blair refuses, and for the first time ―maybe a testament to Serena's occasional perceptiveness― there is a compromise: an afternoon on the town, New York sprawling belly-up for the two of them to explore, the long ungraceful streets, the stolen cigarette, the toes dipped in the Washington Square fountain, the running endlessly, breathlessly in the winding empty spaces left by the racing cars, cheating death despite not really understanding what it means yet. At the end of it when they're sitting on the doorstep of Serena's building, throats raw from laughing, Serena offers to teach Blair how to kiss ―"Here? In front of everyone?"― and before Blair can think of a suitable way to word her rejection there are dry, strawberry-tasting lips on her, a shy tongue licking at the seam, coaxing them open, and Serena is winding her tiny fingers into Blair's hair.
"There," she says where they're done, resting back, unmindful of the fact that Blair is shell-shocked, changed, a bit devastated at realizing what a friendship with Serena van der Woodsen will truly cost her. Unconcerned, Serena purrs in the sun.
―
Lily doesn't like her mother: it is barely a secret, and for someone as bright ―albeit unconventionally so, and sadly not in a way that really applies to academics, not that a judicious system of donations won't take care of that― as Serena it doesn't take more than a half-veiled comment at breakfast to understand as much. But she is Serena, and so she digs, tickles the sore spots ―that same impatient curiosity that will lead her to put her tongue in Nathaniel Archibald's mouth just to see what there is there so terrifying that even her best friend, the most fearless girl Serena has ever met, seems inordinately cautious when it comes to giving him more than a fleeting taste of her lipstick. Lily doesn't like it, but sits her down, annoyed and responsible; says, "Your grandmother and I have some issues. Leftover things from when I was young."
"What happened?" asks Serena, already bouncing on the mattress from sitting too long; she can never stay in one place, will always be fight or flight, nothing more, nothing less.
Her mother sighs. Serena knows there are pictures in boxes in the coatroom, piles and piles of faded polaroids where her mother looks disturbingly young, a Lily Rhodes with bright red lipstick and 70s hair, garlanded by boys. "Honey, it's a long story."
"How long?"
And there comes a look that Serena will remember, later, as a warning: a you wouldn't want to know that hides the vast ugliness that are the parcels of her own mother's past that she bothered to keep, still stinging with shame. The truth is, there are many facets to Lily van der Woodsen, and one doesn't stay on top for this long without some sacrifices: integrity, for one, and the odd misdeed, beribboned by voluntary legal blindness and too many brunches with government officials.
"The only thing you need to know," says Lily, and isn't that an ominous sentence, a sentence that will turn its back on Serena and slap her in the face, hard, "is that I love you, and I won't let what happened with your grandmother happen with us. We van der Woodsen, we learn from our mistakes."
If she had been Serena at eighteen she would have turned her head away, said, I wouldn't be so sure; but she is Serena at twelve and she just nods, dutiful, before embarking on the story of those letters they received from the French exchange students, and does Lily want to see hers? Lily does.
―
They had a cat, a long time ago: a purebred monstrosity of cruelty, jet-black with shiny fur like an omen, only vaguely siamese because Eleanor had recoiled at the idea of possessing one of those 'bald bastards', her shockingly inelegant words. A pomeranian required too much looking-after, and was hideous besides; a pony was out of the question; hamsters smelled like death incarnate. So it fell to it that a feline was the only acceptable option.
As it turns out, it didn't survive for long, though no one can tell why: Dorota took care of it devotedly, overfed it milk and gourmet leftovers until it became bloated and bad-tempered, only consenting to lay at the foot of Blair's bed and croak a slow prescient eye open when she came back from school as though to judge her. As if there aren't enough people doing that, Blair had thought at the time, bitter, and hadn't said, only to be mildly displeased when the cat was later found agonizing in the entrance hall, killed by the undefinable coldness of the Waldorf house.
On one memorable occasion at the beginning of its regrettable life it had brought back offerings, a laminated grey mouse Blair shuddered to think could have hidden somewhere in the house; which offering had promptly been disposed with, squirreled away in a trash chute quick enough that everybody had forgotten about the event before it could produce even mild discomfort. But today Blair can't help but wondering if it wasn't the same instinct ―something murderous and animal, the pathetic stomach-tightening propitiating― that drove her towards her boys. Her boys: Nate, mother-approved from head to toe, or so you'd think; an occasional junkie, sure, but everyone has a secret in the Upper East Side and at least Blair knew this one from the beginning; starched and proper and convenient most of all, as much for fantasies about summer houses in the Hamptons and blue-eyed blond children as for… ―and obsessed with Serena, of course, but then again the Bible says you've got to hate the sin and not the sinner and, well, as long as he doesn't act on it Blair has a few unresolved feelings about Serena herself; Nate, which concludes in Blair's first puddle of girlish, perfume-scented tears. Her mother doesn't say anything for the length of it, as uninterested as one can possibly be, only to be disappointed when that bright young idyll ends, directing a sour twist of lips at her only daughter as if to say, look what you've lost. And Blair is… well, sixteen. Best friend-less more often than not, whether Serena is testing the waters of girl-loving in that private school exile or swapping saliva with the homeless-looking new guy at school. But sixteen is thirty is ninety-five when you live in the Upper East Side: a silver spoon more often than not equals the unspoken obligation to know by heart every rule and regulation of socialite etiquette before you're even potty-trained.
So Nate, first; then, right at the cinch of adolescence, as she totters as fragile and brittle as one of pastries from Cafe Boulud she likes so much, Chuck Bass, of all people, because who better to piss off a mother? Chuck Bass, who you have to hide in the closet, under the bed, under the sheets; whose blood runs hot and whose touch burns, worse, ignites her; who understands things Nate had never understood, the necessity for meanness in a world that never pulls its punches, especially with people who see beyond the décor. Chuck Bass, who is blood-mouthed and adult and cruel, often without intention, childish with an empire on the back of his neck like a guillotine. So yes, she does a striptease for him in a backwater club that he ―what― owns? and he rolls down his window as she comes out of a church that's far enough out of the way that her lies only need be moderate instead of handwoven like precious tapestry; she does all that, and he breaks her heart, and her mother hasn't looked her way once. Well, Blair wants to ask, what do I need to do? (The adrenalin holds her up until the inevitable crash, and then it's just her in her bed with blood on her hands from Chuck's face and Chuck's side and Chuck's hold on her heart. Maybe this is the day Blair discovers her peculiar talent for self-destruction; maybe that day was a long time ago and she just hasn't wanted to see it for what it was.)
The rule goes like this, for daughters of mothers like Eleanor Waldorf: you strive for their approval until you break your neck looking up, and then you strive harder. Nate Archibald, granted, had his defaults well before his ancestry fell to tatters; so why not an actual prince? She will claim to be taken by surprise but here's a tidbit about Blair Waldorf, very little she does is uncalculated, and Louis Grimaldi does not belong to that elusive category. Dorota is more enthused by the engagement than Eleanor and doesn't hesitate to show it, faithfully seconding Blair as she rips through Manhattan in a frenzy of wedding arrangements, all the while carefully holding her prince at arms' length, maybe even ―though this will only become visible in hindsight, after the damage is done― a little too far. In a way it really is like a fairytale, only instead of the toad hiding a beautiful prince it is the contrary. Blair can't help but be a fatalist about it, after all the drama and running away with her princess dress gathering the dust and grime she thought she'd never have to set foot in again: Grimaldi ―as well as his future offspring, castle, and various monetary holdings― is a bust.
So really it's a godsend ―so to speak― that Blair has always been, though somewhat secretly, literarily inclined: the kind of godsend that sends her not quite hurtling ―drifting, if Blair ever stooped to use such unambitious a word― into Dan Humphrey's arms. Yes, you heard her: Dan Humphrey, he of the scruffy hobo-ish looks and the Brooklyn apartment, who no sooner set foot in Constance that he started adoring Serena. Notice a trend yet? It's not like Blair can help it, that thing with Serena, and she would even say that she constrains the passion to its platonic limits: but Serena is unavoidable, cometish, bright beyond belief; and even if she wanted to Blair could not be spared her attraction.
Either way, Dan it is, and Dan is enjoyable enough, in the sweet, half-cruel way of boys: he lacks poise but kisses her with genuine affection, though wonderingly, and his trying to tame Blair's sharp edges is a vain pursuit, which he seems to accept after a while. She doesn't quite love him ―but then, who does she love? In all her heritage maybe Eleanor didn't see fit to give her the ability to do such a tawdry thing as fall in love― but she luxuriates in him, in his research for solitude, his sour-candy sweetness, tart on the tongue. It is both ironic and fitting that, for all the drama their relationship inevitably creates, he really is the perfect boy for who Blair is at that particular juncture, just daring to try to peel off her cardboard-cut silhouette from her mother's drawing book; and as he is beneath her notice Eleanor does not acknowledge him, kisses Blair on the cheek when she comes back from her trips and eats breakfast with him, Blair and Cyrus, occasionally asking his name with as much interest as she can pretend to muster, which has never been much when it comes to Blair's affairs. Dan, bless his heart, doesn't get offended. Perhaps, Blair thinks, he knows that were she not her daughter, Eleanor might be liable to forget her name too.
—
ii. i need us undivided / i want this thing to stop
Mothers will hear anything; her mother will, at least. What she doesn't want to know she'll casually ignore, and what she considers important she'll give advice about, occasionally ―too often― smoothly manipulate her way into until she's in the position of pulling the strings. The day before her departure Lily almost never leaves her room, all the usual frenzy of her activity ―Serena doesn't know precisely what she does, has never asked, though she's always assumed she'd take after it and that the air of graceful agitation came with the socialite uniform― halted to a standstill. She guards Serena's bedroom door as though it were in her power to keep Serena from leaving, and Serena at fifteen sees in her only a cold, duplicitous woman who happens to be her mother. Later she'll recant, say, teenagers are mean ―and that's true, but deep inside herself she won't be sure she was completely wrong.
"Are you sure, darling?" asks Lily, probably for the thousandth time, and Serena has to ask herself what has gotten into her mother, usually so self-possessed, who would never stoop to asking the same question twice. She has that way of looking at you, as though to say, I'm not going to repeat myself. Not today, though.
But Serena is sure, Serena is certain and impregnable. One thing she has going for her, folded in her gilded repertoire of half-magic tricks (love spells, undine magic, tales of nymphs and faeries and women too beautiful to be allowed to live―"Helen of Troy," her best friend would say, nose upturned as she pretends not to know where she digs up all that dusty, encyclopedic knowledge), is that for all that she is solar and welcoming she is also closed to understanding; everything she decides is a decree, made law by her sweet Californian tones. People at school say she doesn't look like a New York girl, actually ―and she has that tan too, is that natural, and is she sure she doesn't spend her summers in Los Angeles or somewhere they dare not speak of, where the sun is less antiseptic and bears on darker skins? Serena waves it off. It matters little where she was born, after all: she has always belonged where she was going, and that's not going to change now.
"Mom," she says, with as much warmth as she can dig up underneath the annoyance, "I'm going."
But here is the cinch, where the fairytale truly skids off-track: it is that Serena, who is sun-kissed and as generous as you can be at fifteen with a trust fund whose amount does not bear looking at lest it singes your eyeballs, not only trusts her mother but will always hold her up as a hero, the figurehead to her hazardous ship of a life. She is the one whose advice will be remembered in damp, luxurious boarding school bedrooms, twisted around on itself to eat its own tail; and she is the glimmering image of the future, too, the glossy woman on the Christmas picture. Serena doesn't exist without family, and her father is a hazy fantasy, her grandmother a fairytale witch ―so what surprise is there in finding Lily van der Woodsen on the cover of that book, white teeth glinting like she doesn't intend to eat your heart and your castle, too, if you fall in her path?
(Oh, well.)
Lily must see this, the mellowing core of loyalty in her daughter, when she steps forward and wraps her into an embrace, says you can't keep a child and her mother apart for very long, not remembering how fast things can shatter. She loves her little boy, too, and he'll slit his wrists before she has to hide him away in a private clinic, fussily cleaning the blood with a monogrammed towel and crying, yelling out, already drawing contingency plans that would make anyone call her heartless could they read into her head ―is it really a surprise, then, that Serena won't be much better? But maybe Lily Rhodes ―sorry, van der Woodsen; that is what they call her now, not to forget― knew all along about the streak of wildness and chaos racing in her blood, that her children inherited —can you fail to notice something so insistent and irregular, after all? Can you really ignore it?
"I love you," she says, sleek and maternal.
Serena returns the sentiment, at least she does before barreling down the stairs and disappearing into a cab, her brother's neck slipping from her hold, his cheeks flushed and so sad to lose her. Children know that the things you lose never come back the same, but Lily has been trying to forget that for twenty years.
Mothers ―mothers aren't all Lily van der Woodsen. Boarding school is a cage but Serena sets fire to everything she touches and girls burn more quietly, not with less damage but with less smoke, and Gossip Girl's tendrils ―yes, she knows; give her some credit, she has a cell phone―are neither interested nor can reach her in Bumfuck, Switzerland. Her mother writes long, wrought-out letters Serena responds to when she remembers to. Either way they're irregular, bursts of sentiment in flowy ink, in Montblanc pen, though unfailingly written on the thick, creamy family stationery. It grounds Serena ―she keeps them in a shoebox under her bed, and over the covers she lets girls come as close to her as they dare, trace the outline of her lips in the dark, kiss her, not quite sure who or what they're touching, obeying the solar pulse of her body. Yes, Serena thinks; yes, yes, yes, and she takes unabashedly, sucking it all in like a sponge, like what she is: a girl who has never known either heartbreak, hangover or indigestion.
Anyone would think New York disconcerting after that, a year sheltered amidst an army of red-lipped pouty, cruel girls encircled by forests ―for all that Serena has an easy-going nature she has to admit that there is something to those places with their dark stone and European intricacies that calls to mind the shapeshifting and sentient roots of local lore―, but Serena is unfazed. Where she goes places ―things, people― become hers; when has it ever been otherwise? Blair welcomes her with a curled lip and the hurt look of a betrayed best friend, but Serena is ready to bow to her anger, to love her a little more to get her back. Her mother used to think them a strange pair, Blair so brittle and envious, a masqueraded orphan, and Serena everything of the golden child, slightly reckless but you couldn't tell then, and ―her mother. Her mother embraces her when she comes back and Serena drowns in the thick reminder of her perfume, asks after Erik, finds the heavy shroud of secrets firmly in place. Her room is a fifteen-year-old's and she is exhausted, for a second, on the cusp of collapse; but, but.
But she is Serena van der Woodsen still, exile or no: one night of sleep and she is as good as new, regenerated, and Constance sweeps her into its fold as if it recognized a true heiress just by her gait, the way she walks through those doors with her head held high, a web of rumors knitting its way around her like that coveted Chanel fall coat. Serena van der Woodsen, they say, her name like an omen, an incantation, Serena, she-- Serena van der Woodsen, who has not a care in the world, especially for what people say about her, what Gossip Girl spouts to whoever will hear; Serena van der Woodsen, who scans the crowd and finds the first —only— pair of glassy, clueless eyes, dog-eared book in his slack, curled grip, and feels settle inside her the lazy hot wave of wanting. Yes ―this is what she remembers.
He comes to her. They always come to her first; she only has to lie back and wait, like those lions in the children's books she used to read under the covers, flashlight making her face glow angel-red.
―
Blair is fond of order; this might be the reason why she has three fathers.
The first one is her favorite only by virtue of having been the longest to remain in line of sight, and because the few times her mother has mentioned him at all since that evening he is the version she's approved of (or at least that's what Blair made of it then, but to understand Eleanor Waldorf you have to play a game of exceptions, wade through double-negatives and antitheses ―Blair only infers approval of the past from her scathing criticism of the present). He is stiff and respectable at the dinner table, oozes charm with the businessmen he accompanies back to the in-house elevator her mother loves so much for the first two weeks after it's installed. It makes Blair feels like they're living in a hotel, but that's okay: her life seems penetrated with transience, from her volatile parents to her ethereal best friend to the emotions that she feels flutter in her chest like tiny bird's wings, then quiet down. Her first father sometimes comes to kiss her before bed, and Blair has to train herself out of clinging to his shoulders.
It is that father who loves pumpkin pie and his library ―pale Norwegian wood, Russian and French novels mostly; he doesn't share her love for the classics― and her, probably, although not enough not to set his napkin down one day and quite simply walk out, shedding his entire life like a snake its skin. Her mother shuts herself in her bedroom for two days and only walks out at the end of them to meet the lawyers, looking flawless as ever and with ribbons of words like 'abandonment' and 'unfaithful' streaming from her pinched lips, the swipe of her wrist towards her daughter disappointed as she realizes two days aren't enough for a fourteen-year-old to stop crying. So it is Dorota who says "My father died when I was ten" ―when did Eleanor's father die? Does she have a father at all?―, is infinitely gentle and nurturing where any other underpaid maid would have gotten the hell out of dodge, and provides a seemingly endless supply of superior quality tissues as Blair attempts to expunge all the water and salt from her body. Dramatically, she imagines its hollowed-out husk: will they donate it to a museum, label it 'Upper East Side Socialite Remains' and leave her there to be gawped at through a window, grief naked for the world to see? Thankfully before she can pursue that line of thought in comes Serena, whose eclipsing powers have no equal, and once again Blair sinks deep into her golden aura, wounds opening farther only to be sealed closed by her radiance.
There is ―yes, there is a glitch in the well-oiled machine that is Eleanor Waldorf, and only the privilege of being her flesh and blood allows Blair to glimpse at it, hanging with one spidery hand to the ramp and watching Eleanor ―her mother; the words still sound strange in her mouth after fourteen years, so seldom and ill used― sob helplessly as she signs reams of paper, a heavy, diamond-cut tumbler of whiskey in her grip. It is a private and austere sadness, that Blair has no place in, and no room for in the messy, overflowing chaos of her own despair: but all the same it buoys her, the deep thrill of looking in on something illicit and real, even though her throat closes up at the sight. The memory cracks in the kaleidoscope of time, superimposed with other similar instances of domestic voyeurism: but it allows enough for Blair to still catch her breath at the thought, remembering her feet freezing on the marble as she stood there, unable to look away.
Her second father is a recipient for blame, a traitor and a rule-breaker; he is made out of fragments of memory and was built out of need. Blair Waldorf doesn't play sports, wouldn't stoop to it, but that doesn't mean she doesn't need somewhere to aim her gun: and what better face for target practice than the man who walked out on her and left her to nurse her bouquet of jagged edges? Those stories are whispered like Halloween stories all throughout her inner circle of not-quite-friends: her father ran away with a man, what a disgusting pervert, wasn't even private about it, really, didn't bother to stop in his flight to pick up those silver cufflinks he loved so much on the dresser, can you believe it? Blair Waldorf does, and molds in steel the belief that change means not redemption but cowardice, is never less than a betrayal, a turnaround transformation used as pretext to leave things ―people; her― behind. There is her mother's heritage again: a host of distrusts, for strangers, deserters, fathers, coupled with a heady belief in heredity. So Blair thinks, Am I one of the broken people too? Blair thinks, What is wrong with me, that he would leave; thinks, What is wrong with me, what is wrong? Her moods are like a swingset; her mother's chosen therapist tells her that trauma is common in those situations, and Blair tastes the word on her tongue like bile.
And Eleanor's hand bears down on the nape of her neck, as if to tell her to quiet; winds around her forearm, steers her away, not into an embrace but throwing her, unmoored, into a bright sea of loneliness; kisses her forehead without thinking, her perfume an elixir, since fumes are all Blair ingests these days. Later she'll think, with the cold analytical detachedness that she has fashioned into an armor, how strange it is that her mother was at her most loving when furious ― but those paradoxical pairings of emotions are another family trait. Blair floats through the motions: in Serena van der Woodsen's cadmium and gold bedroom she exhausts her contradictory outbursts of rage, despair, disdain; and Serena closes her eyes and listens, bowled over the bed, or maybe doesn't listen, who's to say, maybe dreams of other things but manages to always open her eyes at the perfect pitch of compassion, which is enough for Blair ―really. So time passes; so Blair forgets, but doesn't forget. This domestic tragedy is what she'll build her intransigency upon: what will drive her to say that you always learn from failings, and to always fall hard, skin her knees and bloody her jaw and then get up, stronger and harder and crueler. No second chances, she'll say, thinking: my father didn't me give any, why should I?
As for the third father ―well, that one is a little more complicated to explain. He's composite, you see: a scrapbook mish-mash of all the men who have set foot in her home, her mother's temporary lovers, long suit-wearing silhouettes, a défilé of investment bankers and media moguls in Hugo Boss, Zegna, Michael Kors and, during her mother's most unfortunate days, the odd Dolce&Gabbana-wearing goon. When eventually the image settles he becomes a small, ridiculous man with a ruddy face and thick lips, who loves her too-tall mother and makes her smile in ways that Blair is terrified of. "Cyrus," he tells her, and then pulls her down into a hug, and Eleanor laughs; Blair can't help but wonder if this is one of those dreams she has sometimes where everything is the same but distorted, the way if she concentrates she can close one eye and see what the world would look like if Kandinsky took it for a spin. She never claimed to be perfectly sane, even though she does make a good impression of it.
So, "Blair," she responds, her ice-queen mask screwed onto her face with iron nails, and Cyrus giggles as though Eleanor hadn't forgotten to mention it.
―
Serena wants to travel. Serena wants to braid her hair and backpack through the Andes; Serena takes after her mother and carries in herself a longing for adventure, for danger, for Vegas and convertibles and Thelma and Louise-like rambles through the desert, throat hoarse with sand and unspoken declarations.
"Where do you want to go?" she asks, fingers idly tracing on Blair's Bensoni-clad back the letters of some boy's name. Too long to be Dan's, in any case. Blair should be relieved, what with her preoccupation with Serena not inadvertently muddying her name as she treads the waters of self-affirmation, but she's not.
"I don't know," says Blair, and that's a lie. Blair lies a lot to Serena, considering they're best friends ―or maybe because of it. "France, I suppose. Britain and Germany, and… Russia, maybe? Though I'd wait until their politics got less wretched. And Norway."
Serena screws up her mouth in a moue that doesn't quite manage to make her ugly. "Norway? What the hell would you do in Norway?"
Blair shrugs. What would she do in Norway? Sleep, for one: ten days of uninterrupted sleep in some innocuous chalet sunk deep in the snow, protected by the endless, immaculate vistas; then wrap her silhouette into a coat and fashion herself entirely other. It always seems to her one of those frozen states would be the place to do it: the cold make people sharp but slow to notice things, and they would only blink before she wasn't Blair Waldorf anymore, but―
"I want to go to Mexico," says Serena. She rolls onto her back, ecstatic, chest wide with laughter. "I want to meet everyone, and go to the festivals, and walk naked on the beach… besides, all the hot new designers are from there, right? And I want to go to Egypt. You have to come to Egypt with me, Blair. We'll be invincible."
For Serena the future is never uncertain: its permanency is as assured as the sun's, an endless stretch of possibilities in which she is swallowed up but always comes out victorious. Blair admires her; loves her, really, loves her much more than is wise ―her very best friend.
Serena sits up on her knees, the strap of her top sliding down her shoulder, and beams as she digs into her handbag. Her colored nails are like pinpricks of emotion in Blair's line of vision, fluttering up and down, piercing the universe. She comes up with a small, smelly pouch. "Nate gave me some," she says, "you want?"
And Blair ―Blair isn't a pot girl, never has been: if she were anything she would probably be a coke girl, would want to get even more wound up, sharper, no matter how dangerous she knows that is; but instead is a girl who doesn't eat, who doesn't sleep, who doesn't do anything but get thinner and tenser and more defined by lacks, and tries to empty her head of thoughts―, Blair says, "Why not?"
The blunt burns black-red between her fingers, inelegantly rolled-up; Serena laughs, loose and detached, contourless; and Blair feels nauseous.
"He makes me sick," she babbles, not sure who she's talking about ―Chuck, maybe, or her father? "A hotel ―and he didn't even leave the recipe for the pie, can you believe it? He used―he used to―a hotel―"
—and suddenly Serena's pressed into her, the overwhelming smell of Lily van der Woodsen's perfume, which Blair knows Serena puts on on days when she needs strength, and she's taken aback ―thinks, what did you need strength for? Not this, surely not this: holding her best friend as she cries starved, exhausted tears, and sobs how she thinks there's something missing inside her, the ability to care, to live without worry and razor-blade edges.
"Are you sad?" she asks, resurfacing from the embrace, threading a spidery hand in Serena's hair, "Serena, are you sad?"
Serena's eyes: since they were kids, big and aquamarine and inscrutable. "No," she says, "why would I be sad?"
Sometimes Blair gets on her knees in her bathroom and crawls into a prayer, lays down with her bare stomach to the spotless tile and begs for release; she keeps her eyes open beneath her mask until sleep snatches her because her visions are frightening and irregular, monsters with familiar faces rearing and reaching for her hand, asking her to run. Yes ―you could say she feels entitled to the question. "Don't you ever― doesn't it happen?"
Serena's face is like a flag in the wind as she whispers, "Of course it happens," and then, "Why do you think I want to travel?"
This was one of the first things her mother's therapist told Blair: running away won't solve anything. Blair was fourteen and devastated and bitchy and said, it worked well enough until now, and the therapist smiled as if to say, if only you could see yourself. That expression is burned on Blair's mind now, foremost in her fodder for eventual revenge.
Blair takes a puff and her fingers are burning. "Where do you wanna go?"
Serena lets her eyelids drift shut until her gaze is nothing but a feline sliver. "Far away," she says. "You'll go with me, right?"
"Stupid question," says Blair ―but then it's Serena's thumbs digging into her cheeks and her mouth, wet and open and yearning and, "Say you'll go with me."
Girls like us shouldn't want to get away, Blair thinks. "I'll go with you. I'll always go with you."
And she indulges in it, the thought, the sticky-note hope: that night, keeping Serena so close she thinks for a minute their bones might melt together and make some kind of abstract statue out of them; and later, after that, every time life ceases to be satisfactory, Serena bound to Brown and then in the wind, like they always knew she would be, and NYU —not Yale; wherever he is, her father must be burning with shame— unfolding around Blair like yet another hostile territory to conquer, because it is Eleanor's legacy that Blair's entire life will be a battlefield.
"Blair, darling," says her mother when she visits, and sometimes the piercing insight of impending adulthood redraws Eleanor as neglectful, not cruel; conjures images upon images of Eleanor behind her in the mirror, fastening her dresses, to stack against the pitiless inflection in her voice as she said to Blair that she just wasn't good enough — "I've already told you: we Waldorf women don't fit in everywhere. There's no use trying so hard."
It stings —what did Blair expect? She yearns to say, well, mother, you seem to do alright —but what does she know? Her mother is a silhouetted icon; she sits under candelabras and makes small talk with heads of state, occasionally misplaces her daughter, which is why Blair thinks it unfair that her mother knows her so well, can unfold her and reveal the dust within without so much as a twinge of effort.
"I don't think getting admitted into a society qualifies as 'trying hard', mother," she says instead, because breakdowns have never been and will never be fashionable. "But thank you for the advice."
Eleanor ignores the sarcasm. "You're welcome, dear. Now —where's your better half? I haven't seen her in months. I thought you were reconciled again, did I miss something?"
'Something' is a loose qualifier: what she missed is about thirteen years' worth of birthdays, for a start: piano recitals until Blair gave up piano and took up dancing, which she kept at until her social calendar wouldn't permit it, because she liked the pain; a slew of diseases so insidious Blair wishes she could sink back into her uneven, unpleasant dreams when they wake her up; Blair's first abortion, which she meticulously timed and organized so as to crush even the slightest chance that Gossip Girl could sniff it out; and the fact that Serena is at the other end of the country, gone and free and disappearing into the sunshine.
"She'll be back," says Eleanor with a definite note to her voice that speaks of past experiences; Blair is too exhausted to ask.
She's right, though, of course —Serena comes back once, at two in the morning, the light suddenly switched on in the doorway of Blair's room and her skin, hale and smooth and perfect, her smile as she says, "Guess who?"; she comes back twice, three times —and keeps coming back, in-between leaving, like Blair is her anchor. She doesn't take Blair to Egypt —finals are not something you can ditch at the drop of a hat, even when your name is Blair Waldorf—, but they go to the Hamptons and then to Paris again in the summer, indulging in a whirlwind turn through Europe, Italy and Switzerland and Norway, which Serena presents to her with an ample sweep of her hand, as if to say she built the country herself exclusively for Blair's enjoyment. Blair sends postcards back home just to have souvenirs, doesn't write anything on the back except, once, as she's feeling particularly maudlin confronted with the incandescent geyser of colors of an Icelandic sky, I miss you. When she gets home she will collect the envelopes where they haven't opened —for discretion's sake, Dorota stacks the unread letters in the first drawer of the hallway commode, tied in a pretty silk bow like they're in the 1860s— and pin the cards up in her room at NYU.
Being back to the Hamptons after the frenzy of travel is somewhat of a let-down, but Blair doesn't mind, stretches catlike on her lawn chair. Serena is wrapped in a towel at her feet and Blair thinks, If I closed one eye she could almost be Marilyn Monroe, which would be a strange thought to have if Blair's mind wasn't already an altar to Old Hollywood film stars.
"It's your birthday soon," says Serena, dipping a toe in the pool, the ocean-blue tiles glaring up at her.
Not really, Blair thinks, but she knows what Serena means. She means: they are growing up after all, after seeming, for a few years, liable to turn into wax statues of their high school selves, immortalized in the juvenile indignity of catfights and first times. Blair shudders at the thought. But they've grown up now, Serena's right, slowly peeling from their envelopes: if Blair stretches her arms far enough she can even hug the bulk of her loose ends, and how's that for success? How's that for making it through?
She leans down to be closer to Serena; sets on her chin in her palm, feet dangling. "How was Egypt?" she asks.
"Hot," Serena grins, showing off teeth. "You'd have hated it. But—" never has she been more enticing than now, and Blair cannot help but think of Baast, all those deities hovering between woman and beast, "the boys, Blair, they were amazing. So beautiful. And so many of them, you know? A real swarm."
"Did you even see the pyramids?" Blair can't bypass sightseeing without wracking herself with guilt —what will she say when she comes back? Does erring in a foreign country even qualify as traveling?—, so maybe it's envy, go figure.
"You mean those big pointy things?" Serena laughs, open-throated. "Of course I did. I thought of you."
"Not while you were with your 'boys', hopefully," smirks Blair, and —well, it's good to have Serena back, isn't it? Blair finds the business of teaching herself over and over to new prospective friends tiresome at best, and as hard as she tries friendship rarely springs out of pure force of will or even industriousness.
There's a ripple, and when Blair looks again Serena has disappeared. It takes a moment to find her, submerged, the long line of her body wavy in the water, hair floating up like strange seaweed. As she resurfaces she takes a deep, starving breath, slicking her hands down her hair and cheeks. The water sluices around her; she looks at Blair, and Blair forgets who she is.
"Always," Serena says.
There were a million nuances in that afternoon, Blair will think later, when solitude eats at her and she misses the best friend she ever had, when she tortures out of herself possibilities she didn't grasp at, chances she didn't take. There was the salted curve of Serena's smile and the realization that Blair's best friend is also made of brokenness, her clay thundered through with cracks; and there was the sun, and Serena at ten with a garden hose, and loving their absent mothers too much, too little, badly in any case; and loving each other, badly too but at least more manageably, and wanting to flee —and feeling like they didn't choose anything, not one of the things they've been and done since they were born three doors away from each other.
Serena lifts her wide rattan hat; her hair streams down on her shoulders like molten gold. If Blair didn't know her so well she might find it breathtaking —as it is it's something else that strikes her, the lean, hungry slant of Serena's cheek that she hadn't noticed before. Serena hides things well; Serena could have been a model if she'd managed not to want to be a thousand things at once. "I still wish we could have run away," she says without looking at Blair, idly —and Blair doesn't answer, because they both know that they can't.
—
iii. i wanna learn to love / but all my tears have been used up
It is hard to believe that mothers will ever die. Take Blair, for example: she didn't believe in it until this very morning, and even now she can't help but glance over her shoulder every few seconds, a foreboding creeping down her neck that her mother might swoop in at any moment, irritatedly flicking her satiny veil.
There is a disturbing wealth of similarities, Blair has found, between the organization of a funeral and of a wedding. There is need to accommodate for the needs of a crowd which does not stop for anything, who will eat, drink, riot; and though this reception will be as tastefully luxurious as each one of her mother's weddings was, and there won't be any neighbors bringing over saran-wrapped pot pies and other homely delicacies to stuff the stomachs of the grieving, it is still a hassle. Pleasing her remains hard even beyond the grave, Blair thinks; I should have suspected.
Looking back on it, Blair's whole life halts to a standstill on the heels of that death —and yet it's not as if Blair hadn't seen the whole inelegant length of it, her mother's pinched mouth when she had sat Blair down at the breakfast table one holiday they were all reunited and told her that of all the metaphors gnawing at her insides, one of them had come true. Of course she hadn't said it like that: she'd said 'cancer' and used all the proper medical terms, because who would Eleanor Waldorf be if she didn't wrap the only thing she couldn't control in an unbreachable hold of certainties? So it's not shock, exactly; more an unwillingness to believe in statistically improbable things. After all her mother has always made it through, has clawed her way up, pulled ten models out of thin air during that disaster at 2004 Paris Fashion Week —why shouldn't she defy death as well? Eleanor Waldorf wouldn't die at sixty-five, the New York Times believed, and Blair, bent over her fanned arsenal of dearth and devastation like every morning, doesn't see any reason to think them wrong. At least until—
This morning, this week even, it would have been surprising to get news from her, even though it was Blair's birthday: Eleanor is always somewhere, Thailand, Bora Bora, Rome, who knows; is, when it comes right down to it, a busy woman with no time for sentimentality. Maybe Blair should have been alarmed at the lack of properly grandiose presents, but her mother forgets things, always has. It was in the haze of mid-morning, halfway through her glass of orange juice, that Blair remembered: my mother is dead.
So now she is here: Serena came to fetch her with swollen puffed eyes and her beau du jour as accessories, even though Blair had said she could be trusted to get into a car on her own, and hugged her with her usual liquid unconcern; then they drove to the cemetery. The Waldorfs have a family vault —who doesn't? Dan Humphrey, perhaps; he will have to be squeezed in next to Serena's grave—: it is where they are now, the austere engraved stone proving that they retain their name even in death. For all the good it does them, Blair thinks. She knows there is already room in the soil for her, the heiress, a name on the book, perhaps even a lump of wood ready to be carved and polished into her final resting place; as though to say they are surprised that she has lived so long, and don't hold out hope of her surviving much longer. But she doesn't find it morbid today, more reassuring. They will be a place for her to go when she dies. It will all be neat and orderly, her body will not get lost in a formaldehyde-stinking morgue; she will be here, if not among people who loved her, at least among her own. It seems probable, when considering Blair's parental inspiration, that the dynasty will die with her: then she will really have been an heiress, and the best kind, a Lady Di, a Marilyn, one of those women she's never had the chance to be, too beautiful and too bright, life snuffed out of them too soon and leaving behind them no other legacy than grief. Yes; it is a pleasing thought.
It is hard to believe that mothers will ever die, but here she is, and her mother is dead. Blair looks around the wide silent church, filled with faces she only vaguely recognizes, and thinks of ancient mourners. Would her mother have liked that? No; she would have found them distasteful, the women with their long hair and ripped clothes, tearing at their breast with animal screams. And she would have seen the futility of it: Eleanor liked to fight a worthwhile adversary, but what challenge is there in knowing you're bound to lose? So maybe this is better, the waxen vanity of a made-up, bejeweled crowd; of tiny champagne flutes passed around; of Serena's wearing one of Eleanor's latest creations, a vibrant orange gown no one reproaches her for. It stares Blair in the face, as though to say: what do you know of homage? What do you know of making a mother proud?
But she knew, Blair remembers; she knew, and she defected, somewhat, as much as she could stomach, she chose not to try to fill an unnatural mold. There will never be a day when Blair forgets she is not who her mother wanted her to be, but at least she has made her peace with it —and isn't it hilarious, that she had to touch peace when her mother was on her deathbed? (She won't tell you about it, but those are things she remembers too: four furtive, shameful trips to the hospital to behold her mother more diminished that she had ever seen her, and sharing between them the awkwardness and mortification of Eleanor being so weak. Blair remembers the clinic, somewhere in Switzerland, clean and white and entirely foreign, a place where no one would recognize them. She remembers helping her mother pack her bags too —but there had been one moment, one single handful of seconds, where she had wanted to yell, to say, how can you talk about dying with dignity; do you not understand that it is still dying?
Well. Those things are behind them now.)
Blair is twenty-seven and not a girl anymore, not a girl for a long time; she's been above crying for her mother since she was nineteen, and she's not going to start again now. Let them judge her: she will stand straight-backed like a widow and listen to the eulogy, and she will climb on stage and deliver her Bible quotes, words on a page trying to weigh if her mother had a charitable enough soul to get into heaven. Well, Blair could answer that question for you.
"Tibi dabo claves regni caelorum," says the priest to close the ceremony: to you I will give the keys to the kingdom of heaven.
Careful, thinks Blair; you don't know what she might do with it. The refurbishing might not be to your taste.
—
Blair does her funerals in all black. She shops at Marchesa, at Vera Wang, austere asymmetrical gowns that do not let even the suspicion of weakness bleed through. It's a warning, Serena knows: it means, even when you think I am weak I'm not. She cries behind closed doors; for her mother she doesn't cry because she did that years ago, back when all that mattered was opening her mouth wide enough to catch her mother's scraps. Serena isn't blind, and she knows how Blair works: she has done her balances and found that her mother got all she deserved from her —the time, the love, the adoration— and has given her nothing in return except pithy advice and aborted late-night conversations that never managed to turn into anything else. Now Blair has her empire to shoulder: she sits at her mother's desk until far after the end of work day because she is afraid of her mother coming back to haunt her, and Serena's policy —not that she applies it— is not to interfere, but sometimes she's afraid that Blair will forget why she refused her mother's crushing legacy, why she decided to hand it over and try to walk away alive. What is it her mother says? Plants you don't love always die.
When Cece dies it's something else entirely; in fact it looks oddly like a vacation. Eleanor would have disliked her funeral and Serena thinks Blair might have done that on purpose, out of spite, and because she is so afraid of crumbling to pieces under an unbecoming sadness; Cyrus would have objected if he weren't a sobbing, blubbering mess, crying about how Elizabeth should have had twenty more years to live and he would have gladly died in her stead. But for Cece's funeral they all fly out to Martha's Vineyard and are welcomed by the soft white sun and greenery in droves, hanging feather-light over their heads. The coffin is made of pine, a thin casing of golden wood; Serena thinks that if Cece wanted she could just push it open and climb out. Hymns are sung in the church and it's all very tasteful but no one feels forced to wear all black except Blair, who is still grieving for someone else. In the darkness of Serena's bedroom she had said that for fifteen unbroken years she had never gone to a funeral. Serena had thought that her mother would have been shielding her from it, the harsh reality of life, but Eleanor would have considered it a welcome lesson; or maybe it was just that no one had died, simple as that.
Lily holds her when the coffin is lowered into the ground; Serena burrows her face in her mother's shoulder to hide that she isn't crying. Lily isn't, either: her shoulders are still, breath steady and alive in her ribcage, regulating the rhythm of Serena's heartbeat. They really are well-matched for each other, Serena can't help but think, watching her brother's red eyes leak tears on from over her mother's shoulders, and —would I like that, holding onto someone's hand white-knuckled, that wrenched-open expression, the relief of forgetting? Who knows. She might —but there are other things to love, and Serena has never been prone to regret.
"Honey," says Lily, two fingers in the crook of Serena's elbow, as though she was trying to take her pulse. "Are you—"
"I'm going back to Brazil after this," says Serena. Though really she isn't sure: Brazil, but who's to say she won't find another destination on the way, a grinning boy in a first class plane seat who will offer to share the hurdle to some new promised land? If there is one thing her mother understands that Blair doesn't, it must be this: that life is not made only of partings, that leaving throws the door open for return, that there is going ahead and not only away.
Lily doesn't blink, only sighs; then says, with a small, distracted smile, "Why don't you have a glass of champaign, Serena?"
Serena grabs one on a tray before she can even think about it. The thing is, Serena likes history and she understands it: the flow of things, the way they rise and ebb, the steady ascension and slow decline. She recognizes the patterns like no other —but her world is a world of secrets, claustrophobic and self-satisfied: with no one to answer her questions, is it really surprising that she would run away and try to find answers somewhere else?
Lily touches her cheek, fleeting. She doesn't quite look old, but Serena is her daughter and knows the lines around her eyes, the strings that can soften her mouth just like as they can turn it to steel. "My mother didn't love me," she says. "She wanted to, I think, in the end. She wished she had. But—" and there she turns away, just a little, enough for the sun to slice through her profile and turn Serena blind to her expression, "it's not always that easy, you know? This thing. Loving you. Loving your daughter. Do you remember Ellie's funeral?"
Eleanor would have killed Lily for calling her that, Serena thinks. She nods.
"Of course you're going to leave. And you're going to come back, just like I did, because it's what we do, you and me: we run around with people's hearts in our hands, not knowing what to do with them. Maybe you'll do better than me." She turns back to look at Serena, smiling, and Serena thinks, she has never looked as much like a figurehead as she does now; thinks, the only thing that's missing is a ship. "This weather is beautiful, isn't it?"
There are so many stories, Serena knows, that Lily has kept under lock and key, and will never be ready to reveal: troves of treasure and shame, newspaper clippings better forgotten, old rags bought before she knew what fashion meant. Still —is there another choice than to love your mother?
"The secret," says Lily, as though she had read her thoughts, "is loving each other remotely, far enough apart not to be able to hurt each other." Serena thinks of Cece's coffin deep into the ground, and when she looks into her mother's eyes she sees she's thinking about it too. "So, when's your flight? I'll have James drive you."
After that Lily drifts away and Serena lets her. She sees Blair hanging near the drinks, rigid and regal, her boys scattered in the crowd, ready to crawl back to her as soon as they catch a whiff of blood; and she sees everyone and everything, and does not move, keeps still under the sun, soaking it in. Perhaps this is what she does best, this placid immobility before flight, storing away memories in the form of snapshots, the pale flush rising up Blair's throat, her mother's sleeve, threaded with lace, her brother's kind eyes, the priest's pristine Bible that he tucks away underneath his cassock.
If she were someone else, the jumpy adolescent she got so much pleasure out of, Serena would probably wade back into the crowd and make her bets; as it is she walks away, towards the sea. Sometimes it's hard to believe she was born in a city when she remembers the ocean —because who else would she be but a water girl, a girl who toes off her shoes and disappears into the blue, dress stuck wetly to her thighs?
Serena sits in the white sand, knees tucked to her chest. The wind brushes against her skin; she breathes in deeply, in the absence of grief.
"Hello," says Dan, appearing at her side with two glasses of Moët-Chambon.
Serena looks up, and it takes two blinks for her to remember who he is, his name. She takes the glass.
"Hello." She doesn't know why he is here, who he knows that grants him the privilege of attending her grandmother's funeral, and she doesn't really care. She pats the sand next to her, to invite him to sit; he does.
"Erik and Gabe—" he offers up anyway, gesturing awkwardly with his hand. He laughs. "'Invited me here' would sound weird, right?"
Serena shrugs. "You know your way with words better than I do, I guess."
He sneaks a glance at her, surreptitiously checking if she's going to topple over, crumple onto herself and start to cry. Serena fights the urge to roll her eyes, say, do you know me? But he doesn't. None of them do; she's not sure she does. The sun is paling over Dan's shoulder, hemorrhaging color as the sky darkens.
"I've seen your books at Barnes&Nobles," she says then, just to stir him out of his investigation, and he smiles, sheepish, then says, "You go to Barnes&Nobles?"
Serena laughs at that. He was always simple, made her laugh. His sheets itched. "Okay," she says, "Google told me."
"Yeah." He's smiling too, just the corner of his mouth quirked. Wouldn't want to laugh at a funeral, not like her —but she is an exception, always has been. "You read any of them?"
Serena shakes her head no. "Are they interesting?"
What she means is: are they still about me? His first book was about Blair —he loved Blair then, maybe still does—, but it was about her: Serena is always the girl with its soft hidden capitals —the first girl, the girl in the middle, the girl in the sun. And besides, you can't talk about Blair without talking about Serena.
"I can't really answer that, can I? For what it's worth, if I didn't think they were interesting I probably wouldn't have written them."
Debatable, Serena thinks, and not worth much besides: the things people do for money and fame are well-documented. But she likes Dan, and unlike Blair she is generous, magnanimous, forgiving. Most of the time anyway.
"What have you been doing?" she asks without looking at him, her attempt at small talk.
He shrugs, strangely apologetic. "Does traveling count?"
"Blair would say no."
"What's your verdict?"
Of course traveling counts; what else is there? Does he really think she hasn't noticed all his books are about running away?
"Look," she says in lieu of answering, and he follows her finger, the broken-mirror splash of light on the small rippling waves. The sea is like an immense kaleidoscope and Serena feels overwhelmed, remembers watching the New York skyline with him and wanting to cry over the pale pink sunrise. "Look."
Dan opens his mouth to say something; she can feel it, the intake of breath, the rush of hope, his fragile heart hammering and she could lean over and take it in her hands and kiss it and crush it, easy as pie. But tomorrow she is leaving —heartbreaking can wait. She might not turn into her mother after all.
And— "Yeah," he says finally, the mercy of simple words for once, and lets himself fall back into the sand, arms moving weakly to make an angel. She laughs, falls besides him; thinks about running to get Blair and Lily, tell them that there are many directions in which to escape still, right and left and ahead, swimming to exertion in the endless stretch of blue.
"Listen," says Dan, and Serena wants to listen, she does, but her eyes are closing, and she's asleep.
There are many defining moments in the life of Serena van der Woodsen, scrapbook romantic-comedy moments documented by the papers, candids of Serena's glossed cupid-bow mouth open to say something journalists won't bother to report; the burning itinerary of an icon, always in flight. They will not remember moments like these, and she probably won't either, since peace has never been the watchword in her world after all. But there is something to be said for death and sleep and the blue of the sea melting into the blue of the sky, and for plane rides and goodbyes, for waking up in the sand with in her mouth the shreds of a dream about light; for Lily leaning against the doorjamb watching her leave, shoulders pale and slight in her champain silk wrap; for Blair, lips barely trembling but startlingly purple, kissing her cheek at the airport.
"I'll be back," she says, sure as ever, and Blair only smiles, a wry twist of lips that means maybe and we'll see about that —and then—
Serena van der Woodsen turns twenty-eight in Brasil with a gorgeous boyfriend and a house that looks over the sea. In the morning, after lazing around in bed with Blair on the phone —the girls at Victoria's are planning a party for her tonight, all the models and socialites from the coast, she knows—, she goes to the bathroom, waits while she washes her face. The little plus etches itself slowly on the plastic, taking its time.
She squints at the sun outside, then walks out onto the terrace, thighs still bare, as unselfconscious as ever; lays down in the hammock and looks up. The sky is aquamarine. Serena thinks, I could do with the world having being made only of sky and ocean, and nothing else in between.
Then she takes her phone out and calls her mother.
—
Mothers have all the properties of rock: they are sentient and weathering, standing tall and jagged on the top of cliffs; they are in turn sharp and impenetrable, absorbent of young girls' tears, consoling, quiet, patient; hard and yielding. If asked, Blair would compare her mother to a tough onyx gem, whose glossy surface when it breaks shatters in chalk-like shards; and Serena would give you an impression of amber: say, my mother is very nearly a mirror.
What about themselves? They wouldn't know what to say. Though, that's for sure, they would refuse to abide to being made of their mother's material —that, never. They would accept vulgar stone not to be made of onyx and gold; for all that they have loved them they are still their mothers' daughters, and they still bear their mothers' fury. They have seen stories turned into legends, children melting slowly into the mold, a trickling of empty envelopes, dreams concealed behind a sheen of lipstick, and there is a fight that they will not lose. Still, if you look for it, there is a picture: Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen walking into Tiffany's, arm in arm, armored with the strength of failing; walking across the aisles and refusing help, serene for a brief moment as they hold up into the light circles of gold and diamond which flash their million-dollar shine like a toothpaste-ad smile, glaring and convinced —and already behind the counter a girl is in a frenzy, whispers, is this what I think it is? Blair will glare at her from the corner of her eye, ever watchful, but Serena will not bother to notice; will keep brushing the rings with her finger, discarding one after the other, asking over and over like the joke they both know it isn't, "which one for eternal happiness?"
A picture: the outline of two girls —women— outside of a store, surrounded by anise pastel, carelessly tossing into their handbags tiny ribboned boxes; laughing with that odd shine to their eye that might mean, perhaps, that for all their mothers did not know about growing up they might have managed it after all.