Sunrise Mystique

“But, Mom, you promised!” Becky cried. “You said you’d be here with me, THIS TIME.” “I’m telling you this is really important. We’ll get together and burn some serious plastic when I get back. Why don’t you go shopping with some of your school friends or go out to dinner on me? Gotta go, Rebecca. Have loads to do before the limo picks me up. The corporate jet leaves soon.” Not waiting for her daughter’s reply, "Ta, Ta,” she said and then the phone went dead. Rebecca Allison Wells sat on her Victorian style canopy-bed, in a mauve silk nightgown, deep in thought. Her spacious bedroom was connected to a sitting room having a huge picture window in the exclusive North Chicago high-rise. The window framed a breath-taking panoramic view of the Lake Michigan shoreline and the metropolitan Chicago skyline to the south. Her suite of rooms was professionally decorated, looking like a feature article in a lady’s interior design magazine, elegant, but lacking warmth. The calendar on her Queen Ann desk announced December 26, 1992. Her eighteenth birthday had come and gone two days ago, as silently as the dead of night. The weather was frigid and gloomy, “Another miserable Chicago winter,” Becky groaned. She looked at the large mirror on her collector’s edition vanity. The young woman staring back at her was a contradiction. She knew her size. She was five feet zero, weighing a hundred pounds, waist-length dark brown hair, and vibrant blue eyes. She was a cheerleader at her exclusively private all girl high school that gave her athletically feminine muscles covering her 36-22-32 petite frame. “Why are you crying?” the girl in the mirror asked sympathetically. Becky looked back angrily, “As if you didn’t know,” she spat. Becky had talked to herself, since she was a little girl. As an only child, she spent most of her time away from school alone and she didn’t get along with the other girls in class. To ‘them’ she was a haughty little biach who had everything. Her evil witch mother performed amazing tricks with the wave of her powerful wand. Becky called her imaginary friend Cathy, after the little girl who lived next door to her grandparents, who kindly let Becky play with Cathy as a child. Becky’s mother didn’t let her play with common people. Common people were mere mortals. And so started her argument with Cathy, her reasonable self. Cathy was different than Becky. Becky wanted to love, to be free and to experience life in all its color. Cathy was so - levelheaded, the practical girl her mother adored. Cathy fired the opening volley, “Just look at your closet Becky. You have all the designer fashions a teenage girl could dream of. Why the tears?” Tears streamed down Becky’s cheeks. It was going to be a good cry this time she felt as she screamed back, “Yes! Yes mother buys me everything a credit card can buy, but I can’t buy my mother’s love! That’s all I want Cathy, is love. Is that such a sin? I want a gentle hug, a soft brush of my hair, a tender kiss, and a family to enjoy on holidays. Is that too much to ask for? Is it?” Becky and Cathy glared at each other angrily in the mirror. Becky wasn’t going to back down today. Her mother had crossed the line. She’d purposely stayed away from my birthday two days ago and conveniently had a series of business meetings in Geneva over my Christmas through New Years holidays. “And I got to spend my two special days of the year alone, AGAIN,” Becky wailed, “It was you and I for Christmas dinner. Yes of course there was the maid and the female cook, but they don’t count. Oh, what a rousing crowd we had!” Cathy was hurt over the last comment, but she struggled for a comeback. She looked around the aristocratic apartment. It was hollow, having the feeling one gets at a mortuary, elegant but eerie. Becky sensed she’d hurt her friend, the imaginary little girl she hadn’t seen, in reality, for over fourteen years, though they were closer than sisters. “I’m sorry Cathy that I hurt your feelings. You're my best friend, but I want more Cath. I want to love, to feel warm air blow through my hair, to feel the sun on my skin, the excitement of a beautiful party, not the contrived social scene mother has planned for me, to attend all the right schools, to know the right people … Is it wrong to want to be held by a handsome gentle-bred young hunk as we waltz in the moonlight?” Becky held out her open empty arms imagining. “I know mother gives me every material gift imaginable, but that’s not what I want.” she blinked after a moment. “What I want most from mother isn’t here. Somewhere in mother’s rise to unimaginable power as head of her international bank and an attorney in corporate law, she’s forgotten how to love.” Becky smoothed her satin sheets. She confessed to Cathy, “Over the last year I’ve tried to talk to mother about the things that are bothering me. Things I want. I had to call her secretary to make appointments. I felt like I’m scheduling appointments with a psychologist, not my mother, but I did it. I tried to explain to her that love was very important to me. Mother doesn’t understand love. You can see that with her and Dad! Dad was a once successful real estate magnet from an influential New England family. Then mother destroyed his self-esteem. She cut him off from her love. Soon he found love with his male friend, and then mother divorced him. In one of our nasty arguments, mother let it slip that I was A MISTAKE. That I caused her to miss her first big chance of success in life.” Becky took a slow breath; “Things haven’t changed, because mother doesn’t want it different. She’s happy the way things are, but I’m not! Mother and I speak two different languages. I’m young, full of life, a romantic. She’s middle-aged, a yuppie, and so fake.” Becky sighed, “I’ve made up my mind Cathy, I’m leaving.