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I never met my real father, who had abandoned Mom while she was still very much in love with him and very much pregnant with me. Eight months pregnant, to be precise. As in she no longer had the fashion-model figure that was evidently the only reason my father had loved her in the first place. She was twenty-one and he was twenty-two, and they lived paycheck to paycheck and didn’t own anything except towels. My father didn’t want me in the first place, so there was nothing in the way of a custody battle. Mom’s dreams were crushed and her heart was broken, but in terms of logistics, it was a relatively pain-free divorce.
Within the year, she got her girlish figure back, and along with it, a long line of men salivating outside her door. After a series of shallow relationships that lasted an average of six months and involved many expensive gifts that ended up at the pawn shop, she finally met the next man of her dreams. She was twenty-five, and I was four. Garret was older, sophisticated, and successful, and constantly told her what a beautiful treasure she was. Together they bought a four-bedroom house, complete with an in-ground pool and a set of matching BMWs in the driveway. Those first two years of marriage were the happiest of Mom’s life. That is, until she told Garret she was ready to have another baby, at which time he told her that might be awkward, what with his twenty-year-old girlfriend due to give birth any day.
If Mom walked away from her second marriage every bit as brokenhearted as from her first, she at least walked away a little bit wiser and with far less financial worry. Along with the guarantee of a very healthy monthly alimony check, she walked off with the BMW and half the proceeds of the house sale.
And off she was to another series of relationships with men whose favorite thing to do was show her off at parties as “my girlfriend, Sara, a former lingerie model.” She’d remind her boyfriends that she had a last name, and they’d remind her that they didn’t give a shit. She’d then remind them that if they insisted on treating her like a trophy, she was okay with that, but jewelry and credit cards needed to be involved.
Yes, she was growing cynical. If men were going to treat her like a trophy, she was going to treat them like a bank account. But it wasn’t all about the money. She was still only in her twenties, and many of her friends weren’t even on their first marriages yet. Which meant that there was still hope of finding true and lasting love, complete with a white picket fence and a house full of children.
And then along came Aaron. He was sweet and funny and kind and made an average middle-class income. But Mom didn’t care how much he did or didn’t earn. She didn’t marry him for his money, or lack thereof. She married him because he listened when she told him her stories. She married him because he introduced her to his friends as plain old Sara. But mostly, she married him because his favorite way to spend a Friday night was cuddling with her in front of the fireplace, and because her eight-year-old daughter called him “Daddy.” Mom was sure he was the one, and he was. She was sure their marriage wouldn’t end in divorce, and it didn’t.
It ended with a car accident. She was twenty-nine and came out with a few bruises. He was thirty-two and died a month later. They had been married for eight months.
In addition to being devastated on the emotional front, she was panicked on the financial front. She’d given up her hefty alimony check from Garret in exchange for a lifetime of love with Aaron. Now both Aaron and Garret were gone. Aaron hadn’t even had life insurance, and the medical bills from the accident ate up the bulk of her savings and pawn-shop earnings. She was left with less than five thousand dollars in joint savings and a house with barely enough equity to pay the realtor’s sales commission. In short, she walked away from the funeral broke, both emotionally and financially.
She needed money and she needed it fast. But her only real work experience was modeling, and she’d aged out of the industry. She was already dipping into my education fund to pay for rent and food. In lieu of returning to work, she decided to return to what was historically her most reliable source of income: men. In her mind, she’d already found and lost the love of her life. She’d never find another man who loved her like Aaron, so there was no point in trying. She put herself back on the wife market, content to offer herself up as marital eye-candy to a man content to be used for his money.
She found him. In spades. On her thirtieth birthday, less than a year after Aaron’s death, she married Stephen. Stephen was egotistical, boorish, and thirty years older, but Mom didn’t care. All that mattered was that he was a successful divorce lawyer who wanted a beautiful wife, and she was a beautiful woman who wanted a handsome income stream. Husband and wife played their parts beautifully. Mom clung to Stephen’s arm at black-tie events and conspicuously bickered with the other trophy wives over whose husband was the most brilliant and successful and magnificent in the sack. In return, Stephen lavished her with jewelry, provided her with more credit cards than her designer wallet could hold, and bankrolled her education-addicted daughter’s thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year private-school habit.
I was honestly pretty goddamned happy during the Stephen years. But Mom was not. She’d fallen out of love with husbands before, but Stephen was the first husband she hadn’t loved in the first place. By their two-year anniversary, she had learned that living under the same roof with someone you can’t stand and who can’t stand you back was emotionally exhausting. She would have stuck it out if Stephen was just old, shallow, and boring. But when he wasn’t playing the role of the world’s most generous husband and stepfather, he was a spectacular bastard. Every day started and ended with a barrage of verbal and emotional abuse, and in between, he cheated on Mom with anything that had two legs and could breathe. It was when she found out that he was spending upwards of ten thousand dollars a month on high-class call girls that she decided she’d finally had enough. The way her lawyer argued it, it was a stated trophy marriage from the beginning, and while Mom had faithfully and assiduously fulfilled her end of the contract, Stephen had reneged on his. It was a reasonable argument, but there was one big problem: Stephen was a lawyer, too, and a damned good one. While the final divorce decree provided Mom with twenty thousand a month in alimony, it also stipulated that the payments would end upon Stephen’s death. Stephen was already sixty years old, had a bad heart and about five thousand enemies. Mom could only rely on the alimony until Stephen had a heart attack or one of his former clients’ ex-husbands shot him, and it was a miracle neither had happened already. She needed a backup plan.
She was still young and beautiful, so if she wanted a new rich husband, all she had to do was bat an eyelash. The problem was, she’d had enough. On the surface, trophy marriage looked like easy money. But the hidden price was being shackled to a prick. The charade never ended, and constantly pretending she loved a man she couldn’t stand was unbearable. She decided she’d rather die than marry again.
The good news was, as Stephen’s worst habit had so vividly illustrated, a woman didn’t have to marry a man to make money off of him. There was a viable alternative that was every bit as lucrative as marriage, but offered a woman something a ring on her finger could not: freedom.
Mom’s fourth marriage was her last, and her new, shackle-free career was up and running. She was thirty-two years old.
It was the night of the little girl’s first formal dance. Only she wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was sixteen years old and a junior in high school. Her old Disney DVDs were rotting in a landfill. The family bookshelf was full of books with titles likeIt’s His FaultandSo You Married An Asshole. And the happily-ever-after Hallmark channel had been abandoned in favor of the all-men-are-bastards Lifetime Network.
The girl sat on a swivel stool in the bathroom dreaming of getting her first kiss from Dylan Gorsky as her mother French-braided her hair.
“Will you be home when I get back from the dance?” she asked.
The mother adjusted a strand of her daughter’s hair with a bobby pin. “I have an appointment tonight,” her mother replied. “I’ll try to be home by eleven, but no promises.”
The girl knew what “appointment” meant. It meant a client. “Why are you still taking appointments?” she said. “Didn’t you say that guy Mark proposed to you?”
“I said he proposed,” the mother answered. “I didn’t say I accepted.”
“Why not?” the girl said. “You said he makes a couple million a year. And that you really like him.”
“He does and I do,” the mother said. “He’s my most reliable source of revenue and my favorite client. Why would I spend three hundred and sixty-five days a year with him for free when I can spend one hour a month with him for sixty thou a year? Why would I want him for a husband when I can have him for a client?”
“Love?” the daughter said. “Lifelong companionship? Sex without a contract?”
The mother put her hands on her daughter’s shoulders and swiveled her around so that she could see herself in the bathroom mirror. “Look at your face,” the mother said, “and tell me what you see.”
“A zit,” said the daughter.
“Besides that,” said the mother. “I mean look at your face as a whole.”
The girl looked. She was pretty sure she had eyes and a nose and a mouth, but all she could see was the zit.
“I really wanted my first kiss to be pimple-free,” she said. “Do you think Dylan—”
“Focus,” the mother interrupted. “Look at yourself and focus. I’m going to say something now, and I need you to listen carefully, because I’m only going to say this once.” She brushed her daughter’s hair back. “You’re a beautiful girl. Before you know it, you’re going to be a beautiful woman. And when a man looks at a beautiful woman, he sees one thing and one thing only. A trophy. So if Dylan wants to kiss you tonight, do it. Go ahead and have your fun. If you two decide to start a relationship, have the time of your life. But if he tells you he loves you, watch out. Before you tell him—or any other man—that you love him back, ask him if he’d love you the same if you were flat-chested or twenty pounds overweight. Ask him if he’d still love you if you were a frizzy-haired, brown-eyed brunette instead of a long-haired, blue-eyed blonde. If he hesitates for even a second, you’ll have your answer. He doesn’t really love you. You’re just a trophy to him and he’ll throw you to the curb the minute he gets tired of looking at you.”
An hour later, the girl was on the dance floor, swaying in the arms of her strong and lovely young man. As the slow song came to an end, his lips met hers, and they kissed for the first time. He asked her to be his girlfriend, and she said yes. They were destined for true love. She was sure of it.
