Free Miss Wyoming by Douglas Coupland

strayed outside the clan's unspoken bounds. She was grudgingly tolerated at annual family events, and she often arrived alone, because young John was a sick child. John was home more than he was at school, frequently in the hospital with infected ears or sinuses or other microbial lapses, which Doris handled with a genial calmness.
    «Come along, John, I need to ferry you off to your quack for a checkup.»
    «Let me finish my breakfast first.»
    «What is that orangey glop you're drinking there?» She picked up the bottle of drink powder John had begged her to buy the previous week and read the label. « “Tang” —
brilliant.
I'll try some with Bombay gin tonight.»
    «It's for astronauts.»
    «Really? Then I must have a sip
immediately
because this afternoon I'll be off to see Raitt at the St. Moritz, and it'll take an extraterrestrial amount of energy to go and pry him away from the charms of Sixth Avenue long enough to discuss raising my allowance just slightly.» She sipped it. «Bravo! Now off we go.»
    John was an imaginative child, but his curiosity was often limited by illness to the confines of the apartment. When Doris was out, John would sneak into her room and go through her treasure box. It contained the shell of a baby turtle she'd eaten for breakfast with Piers in Kyoto in 1961 («I felt it wriggling down by my voice box, the little dickens»); before-and-after cosmetic surgery photos of saddlebag removal («Saddlebags are the Lodge family curse, Johnsy. Oh, to be a
boy
!»); the handwritten menu from her wedding dinner catered by an Andalusian chef recommended to her by Gala Dalí — unborn lamb in a mint coulis («Lambryos, darling, and don't go knocking it until you've tried it, and don't go giving me that Mutual-of-Omaha's-Wild-Kingdom face»). There was one of John's baby shoes (gilded, not bronzed), some seashells and a stack of girlhood horse-jumping ribbons. There was also a photo of Doris water-skiing with Christina Ford, one of Piers on his prized Chesapeake mare, Honeymoon, as well as a faded black-and-white shot, reverently framed and somehow out of synch with the other photos. It was seemingly taken near a stable — Piers was talking with somebody in the background — and showed Doris standing with Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, with Marie-Hélène lighting Doris's cigarette, a wicked grin on Doris's face.
    John didn't think it abnormal that his mother spent her days neither learning skills to make her employable nor making thrusts at wisdom. Rather, Doris preferred spending her time pursuing rich men, which she had been raised to do, with the uncritical instinct of terns who migrate from continent to continent each year. John found this fascinating.
    «Mom, why do you always go everywhere in a plane?»
    «What do you mean, darling?»
    «Like today. You went up the Hudson Valley and you could easily have taken a car, but you flew.»
    Doris preferred flying — even to nearby locales like the Hudson Valley or the Hamptons. «Darling, if there's one thing a man will
never
admit to a woman, it's that he is unwilling to pay for a plane ticket or charter a craft for the day. A man would sooner eat ketchup soup for a month than to not hire a helicopter to hop to Connecticut with a
lady.
Easiest just to order the plane and then tell him to pay once you're at the other end.» This was not a cynical statement from Doris. She had been taught this on her mother's knee.
    Relatives were somewhat kinder to John than they were to Doris, as families often prefer to skip generations when it comes to conferring affections, and John was a handsome, affable, if quiet, young boy. Spending so much time in bed, he soaked in abnormally large amounts of daytime TV programming — far more than the occasional episode of
Love of Life
or
The Young and the Restless
watched by the typical American teenager. John absorbed everything. TV loaned him a vocabulary and a tinge of sophistication lacking in others his own age.