When We Were Bright and Beautiful

by Jillian Medoff

Still, I’m hopeful. I have youth on my side. In a few years, by, say, twenty-eight, thirty, the whole enterprise will start to sag. For the moment, though, my face is unlined, my ass round and firm. I’m extremely tall, almost six feet, and lanky, with long legs, slim waist, and large breasts. I have a wild mass of auburn curls and freckles that trail into my cleavage. I’m not a conventional beauty. But because of my height and thick, glossy hair, I’m striking. Besides, money hides a multitude of sins, and I have unlimited resources.

Money is a noose that yokes children and parents together in ways you can’t anticipate. It binds you for life and then some.

I’ll be flooded with love from my knees to my neck;

I’d say “overprotective,” but how much protection is too much? That’s like trying to quantify love.

“Yes. You should have. It’s harder for Nate—I understand this. But I depend on you to keep Lawrence in check. Or, at the very least, to keep me apprised of his behavior.”

This is so loaded. I could write an essay on this.

You can’t choose who you love, but you can choose how you behave.

Felicia is a female version of DeFiore, except the same qualities that I find oddly charming in him—large, pushy, bombastic—I find unforgivable in her.

That’s misogyny gyal

One great lie of modern life is that parenthood is vital and transformative.

The half-life of a daughter’s grief is equal to the length of time she spent with her mother multiplied by the rest of her life.

Men with no sense of humor are exhausting; this guy is soul-killing.

Haggerty’s eyes may be empty, but I’m the one with no soul.

Which is the funny thing about families, no matter how much cake you have, someone will always feel starved.

Women who don’t see the world through the lens of men’s needs are naïve or willfully blind.

Ouf

not just to fight this case, but to fight Eleanor.

Geez

“She can’t walk around like that. It’s inappropriate. We have sons.”

:(

A girl has more confidence at sixteen than she’ll ever have in her life. She also has more self-loathing. It’s why we’re so moody, why our reactions are outsized. Cyclonic drama is how we achieve balance. The world is chaotic and irrational. At sixteen, we lack a way to control it. So we lean into the chaos. We become the chaos. We express what we feel in real time because we believe, mistakenly, that unburdening ourselves will stop the tumult, or at least help us make sense of it.

I love this

For my parents’ generation, porn is dirty. The men who watch it, sketchy. Nor would it occur to them that women watch voluntarily.

Neither of us care about his age. Lots of times, I’m more mature.

“Billy’s our son. We’re desperate.”

What I didn’t say? He sure as shit has it in him, Detective.

“No one is more dangerous than a teenage girl,”

Lawrence doesn’t realize I’ve left, that I’m split, that I am twenty-three and sixteen, adult and child, woman and girl.

For a partnership to endure, he once told me, one person has to be the peacemaker. Someone has to take it on the chin.

Still smiling. Always smiling.

Opposing ideas can be simultaneously true; one reinforces the other even as they’re both canceled out.

If he were a different man entirely.

Yale is gorgeous. The buildings are gorgeous. Being here, I’m gorgeous too.

“She’s impossible” he says to me at every turn. “But she’s my wife.” It’s how he apologizes.

By positioning Felicia next to Billy, the jury will see him interact positively with a less attractive woman. Beside my naturally elegant brother, Felicia looks ungainly and matronly.

“Older males will see their younger selves in Billy. They’re tired of defending their behavior. When they were his age, it wasn’t a crime for boys to touch girls, et cetera. Women are less predictable. Some will love Billy and be put off by Diana. Others will identify with Diana and want to crucify Billy. Females are fickle creatures.”

My brothers exchange glances that say I am beyond stupid.

This moment reminded me of this quote: “Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.”

Watching porn is not a fetish. It is not deviant behavior. Porn did not influence Billy’s feelings toward women. Many men watch porn. Many women do too.

LOL

Nate’s decided to be nice to me again.

“Advantage is a pendulum. It swings both ways.”

You can’t sit in a courtroom with a boy, any boy, even your own brother, and not question his innocence. Too many women in the world have come forward. They have too many stories. What shocks me, and keeps shocking me, is that their stories are about men we know—loving men, caring men; men trusted by wives, revered by daughters. Men like Lawrence. Wives like Eleanor. Daughters like me. So, yes, I do have to wonder about Billy because I know, better than most, that anyone is capable of anything. Tap deeply enough, and you’ll find we’re all monsters below the surface.

There are thresholds you cross when you love someone. You make allowances. You forgive the unforgivable. You sacrifice yourself for his pleasure. Especially after all he has given you.

“Why can’t I ask a question, Nate? Why do you always shut me down?”

Mothers forgive their children in ways they never forgive themselves.”

We don’t get a happy ending. But it may be a promising start. I recognize that to let Eleanor off the hook is to forsake myself. But to not forgive her means forsaking myself in other ways; it means accepting a life polluted by bitterness and blame.

No one is all good or all bad. You can love your father because he clothed and fed you, but you can hate him because he’s a man and tragically flawed.

“They weren’t just dying,” she explained. “They were also leaving me behind.”