Civilization
CAROLINE
Most of all, I couldn’t stand the idea of missing out on an entire summer’s worth of fun and gossip, even if it was just sitting around Jenna Franklin’s mom’s house when she was at work, talking about boys and painting our toes.
All summer, every summer, I missed everything.
And don’t get me started on the year my mom kidnapped us and made me move down there for a whole semester.
It was like prison. Well, prison with a good view, I mean.
Looking back, I realize that most of the reason I didn’t want to leave Manhattan was that I didn’t want people to talk about me when I was gone. I couldn’t deal with feeling left out of the circle that I had worked so hard to insert myself into.
Because, I’ll admit it, I’ve always cared a hell of a lot about what other people think.
I used to believe it was human nature, but now I’ve realized it’s more akin to the nature of a New York City social climber.
I call myself that affectionately, now that I’m back in New York, back in my apartment, back in my old life, yet somehow a completely different person.
I’ve never felt that it was a bad thing to want to better your station in life.
Which is why after my father was killed and my mother moved us to Podunk City, USA, I felt that, geographically and socially, I had moved in the wrong direction in a big way.
I used to thank God every night that I only had to live in that hick hellhole for six months. Only six months before I could escape back to NYU, aka civilization. I got that my mom was scared and all of that after 9/11. But honestly. The city rebuilt. Why couldn’t she?
I felt guilty leaving my two sisters to rot there.
Emerson especially. She was only a baby, for heaven’s sake.
Well, I guess ten isn’t a baby. But it’s young enough that you don’t know what you don’t know.
And what she didn’t know was that our selfish mother had taken her out of the city of action and opportunity and dropped her into the cultural desert.
So I made it my life’s mission to encourage her passion for art and acting.
And I guess somewhere in there, I forgot to work on my middle sister, Sloane.
Bless her heart, as those degenerates say with their slow accents, she stayed in the damn place.
Went to college in Georgia with all those peaches and practically no teeth.
Married a guy in the military, which, I mean, yeah, is admirable and all that.
But we’re Murphys. We were destined for greatness.
Greatness was what I thought I was getting when I met James.
His hair was great. His plane was great.
His Fifty-seventh Street apartment was great.
Even his mother was great. For fourteen whole blissful years, we were great, too.
Just great. Until he decided to come home and tell me, six months pregnant, no less, that he was no longer in love with me.
He was no longer in love with me, you see, because he was now in love with a twenty-year-old supermodel who subsisted on squeezy applesauce and whipped cream vodka.
This is what you should expect when nothing in your life is ever good enough.
You should expect that your husband will eventually trade you in for something better.
Truth be told, sometimes I’m surprised I hadn’t traded him in, as hard as I was scraping to reach the top.
But, well, it’s harder to climb when you’re pregnant in heels.
And so, when I decided to take a short sabbatical with my sweet, beautiful, fated-for-a-Nobel-Peace-Prize daughter, Vivi, I figured I’d already fallen about as far as I could.
Might as well fall all the way down to “my momma’s house,” as they would say in Peachtree, a town with too many mullets and too few chromosomes.
Had I known that we’d be Murphy, party of eight, I might have rethought my decision.
But there are no people in the world to make you realize what a spoiled, selfish bitch you’ve become and put you right back in your place quite like sisters.
All I can say is that for the state I was in, thank God I have two.