Helen of Pasadena Read Online Free PDF Page B

inside but on a picture-perfect street. The Oak Knoll neighborhood of Pasadena was filled with traditional landscaping and long, curving driveways leading to architecturally significant homes of the 1920s and ’30s. To say it was a dream neighborhood for someone like me was an understatement. It’s not like a movie set, it was a movie set. Father of the Bride , Mr. and Mrs. Smith , Brothers & Sisters —all shot on this street. As a kid, I hadn’t known anyone who lived like this, and now, somehow, it was me. When I started to cry, Merritt and Nancy pretended not to notice.
    “It’s our forever house,” I said, repeating a phrase I’d heard Cissy Montague use at Mommy and Me aerobics. Cissy and her husband, Bart, childhood sweethearts and one-time Cloverfield classmates, had just purchased an enormous house in the same neighborhood on fashionable Jordan Road. A house on Jordan was the big time, another realm of real estate, within reach to only a select few. And that select few included Cissy McMurphy Montague and her prematurely balding but decent husband.
    Thankfully, Cissy had full-time help, so she could spend many hours a week chasing down highboys and hand-printed toile wall-paper with her decorator, Pierce DeVine, while the nanny Maria watched McMurphy Montague, first-born son. The renovations had been rumored to be in the millions, which was a lot of money in the mid-’90s, and included moving the pool. Move a pool? I didn’t even know that was possible, but Cissy wanted that pool to get more sun, so she moved it.
    “She’s only 30. How can they afford a place like that?” I’d asked Candy at the time. Hey, Merritt and I had some money, but not move-a-pool money.
    “Oh, aren’t you cute, little wood nymph from Oregon! Cissy’s family founded Standard Oil. She’s loaded, and she wants to move the pool. So she’s moving it.”
    I would later learn that when I asked about the origin of someone’s wealth in town, the response always seemed to be “they were a founding family of Standard Oil.” If only my family had known that crude oil was more profitable than patchouli oil. At the time, this bit of intel about Standard Oil seemed like incredible good fortune for someone like Cissy, who was not exactly a rocket scientist.
    “Bart and I decided that this is our forever house,” Cissy announced to all of us in aerobics one day, using little McMurphy for a bicep curl. My heart had opened up to Cissy. So she moved a pool, and she had a full-time nanny and a cleaning woman. That’s okay. She wanted to make a home for her family. I could forgive her the endless supply of Cole Haan loafers. Such confidence in the future, such security in her husband’s love. In that moment, I wanted to be Cissy more than anything.
    Now my forever house would go on the market and be sold at a huge loss, financially and emotionally. So would the iceberg rose hedge, the portico with the Brown Jordan furniture where I loved to read, Aiden’s giant tree swing and my white-tiled Pierce DeVine kitchen with the Viking stove, the Miele dishwasher and the hand-blown Italian light fixtures. Goodbye to the red dining room that Tina insisted was the “must paint” color of 1999 and the ridiculous upscale urinal Merritt put in the poolhouse loo. Maybe this was why my parents eschewed traditional housing situations. It was hard to get emotionally attached to a seasonal rental.
    I mourned my real estate more than my late husband. I’d truly become a Californian.
    How was I going to tell Aiden? What was I going to tell Aiden? Well, son, you’re a teenager now, and I know you thought your dad driving into a panda was as bad as it could get, but I have worse news. Your father lost all his money and most of yours, he took up with a woman who got a boob job for her 21st birthday, and you may not be able to go to college. So get over the grieving, cause we’ve gotta pack!
    Cynicism in a time of anger can be like prayer.
    Where was my