Being Hartley (6 page)

"Right, that's all five in." Uncle Erik stands up straight again, shutting the oven door.
"It's a pity your dad isn't here, Thea. I could really go for his potato and rosemary number tonight. Next time, hey? Anyway, while we wait, I have a little something else for you. A little surprise pre-dinner entertainment, you might call it."

Everyone freezes.

"A surprise?" Mom speaks first. Being older, she's probably the most wary of all of us, having encountered more of Uncle Erik's "surprises" in her time. "What kind of surprise?"

"Dad," Allie says.
"No more videos from the Segway Polo Club. It is
too
lame."

Uncle Erik leans against the kitchen counter and smirks at us all, loving every minute of our squirming.
"Okay, I'll put you out of your misery. It
is
a video I have to show you, but not of the Segway Polo Cub. No, this is a video you might actually be interested in. Come on, then." He starts off down the hall, and glancing unsurely at each other as we go, we begin to follow him. "To the screening room!"

-
7
-

We each settle back into one of the large leather recliners and wait patiently for whatever it is Uncle Erik's going to show us.

"Before we start, a small snack to whet your appetite!" He emerges from the bar with a tray. A tray with tiny little tubs of popcorn on it.

"Cute!
Thanks, Uncle Erik!" I say as I take one from the tray.

"It
is
videos of the Segway Polo Club," Allie says from the seat beside me, as she takes a tub as well.

"Oh, shush," Uncle Erik says.
Having passed around the popcorn, he perches on the side of Mom's chair, in the row behind Rory, Allie, and me. "Now, you know I've been spring cleaning lately…" he starts.

"I put the Segway out with the trash, but he found it!" Allie interjects.

"Finished?" Uncle Erik asks, staring his youngest daughter down. When there's no reply, he keeps talking. "Right, then. Well, in my travels, I happened to find this. And I thought you might enjoy it. So, here we go!" He presses a button on the remote in his hand.

"Aaaggghhh!" Allie, Rory and I scream at the same time as soon as the footage jumps onto the screen.
"Aaaggghhh!" We look at each other, eyes wide. And then we start laughing and turn back to focus in on the screen. Because there, in widescreen detail in front of us, is…us. Rory must be about eight, which makes me about six and Allie about five. We're on a trampoline, in the back yard of Uncle Erik's old house in Beverly Hills. The sun is beating down, and someone has a hose on us.

The three of us watch, entranced, as we sing some silly song and do some silly dance that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

"You were always doing that," Mom says, laughing along with us. "Making up crazy songs and then performing them for whoever would be your audience."

"Dad, check out your
hair
," Rory says, cracking up. "You've, like…got some!"

"Thanks for pointing that out, darling daughter." I look up to see Uncle Erik run his hand over his buzz cut that makes his bald patch look way less obvious.

"Well, I think your new ’do is cool, Uncle Erik."

"Yes, age gracefully, as they say," my mom chimes in.

I twist in my chair to give her an "Oh, really?" stare, and she gives me one right back.

"No surgery here," she reminds me.

"Hmmm…" I say, raising an eyebrow, because Mom might not have had actual surgery, but she's had everything but.

"Aaaggghhh!" Rory, her attention still on the screen before us, yelps
, and Allie and I whip back around to see my mom strutting around in a teeny tiny yellow bikini.

"Goodness," my mom says.
"I miss that body. I wonder what happened to it? Gravity, I think they call it."

Allie snorts.
"Because you look so bad now, Aunt Cass!"

"I don't think I look bad now, but I know I don't look like that!" Mom laughs.
"So, how old were you here, Rory? About eight?"

Rory nods.
"Yeah, I think so. Which means I was already working on
Saturday Kids
full-time."

Mom's head whips back to the screen.
"Really? Already? Well, I guess you're right. But you seem like such a baby."

We all sit back in our seats and take in the movie for a few minutes more in silence, until Allie leans forward to examine my image more closely.
"Check you out, Thea. I mean, Rory's a good few years older than you there, but you are totally keeping up with her, aren't you?"

Uncle Erik agrees.
"You really are. We should have signed you up for
SMD
as well, hey?"

And my mom?
Well, no surprise, but my mom doesn't say anything at all to that one.

* * *

It's like old times. Almost like there's nothing wrong. We all eat way too much pizza, and drink way too much chinotto, and talk way too much with our mouths way too full. We also all decide that Rory, with her four cheese pizza with roasted pine nuts, is the pizza champion of the evening, and she does a victory lap around the table, whooping as she goes.

"It was the pine nuts that did it.
They gave the pizza that little extra something." Allie reviews her sister's pizza, conceding victory. "A certain…zing, if you will."

"Thank you." Rory curtseys to one side of the table, then the other.
"Thank you."

We all applaud.
And it's only because I catch this look between Mom and Erik that I'm not supposed to see that I remember things aren't completely normal.

"As the winner, I'll now be off to create The Sundae."
Rory says the words "The Sundae" gravely, loudly, and loaded with meaning, as we always do. I mean, it is dessert, after all, the most important part of any meal. And it's a great honor to be entrusted with such an important task.

While Rory creates, the rest of us clear the dishes and stack the dishwasher.
As we come in and out of the kitchen, she protects the tall sundae glasses from our gaze. "No peeking!" she tells us.

We're almost done clearing when she calls out to us.
"In front of the TV?" Rory asks.

"Yes!" we yell back, as one.
Nothing beats The Sundae in front of The TV.

As Rory carries the tray with its five loaded-down sundaes on it out into the den, the rest of us clamber for our favorite spots and cushions on the huge sectional lounge. We all wait, practically drooling, as Rory passes around the glasses.

"Please, oh masterful creator, explain The Sundae to us this evening," Uncle Erik says when we all have our glasses.

Rory takes a seat beside me on the lounge.
"Okay, so you know Cass brought us heaps of packets of Tim Tams," Rory starts and everyone nods. Tim Tams are this Aussie chocolate biscuit that is practically worth moving across the world for. They come in all different kinds, like double coat, dark chocolate, chewy caramel, black forest, and white chocolate, etc. But as with most things, the original kind—malt biscuit, chocolate cream filling, another malt biscuit and covered in milk chocolate—is the best. Wherever we go in the world, we take a whole lot of packets of Tim Tams with us.

"So, tonight, courtesy of Cass, The Sundae consists of chocolate ice cream, chocolate sauce, a crushed Tim Tam, more chocolate ice cream, a little more chocolate sauce, a dusting of crushed Tim Tam
, and a garnish of roasted hazelnuts."

"Ooohhhh…" we all say.
"Ahhhhh."

"Catch, Rory," Uncle Erik says, throwing the remote her way, and Rory catches it with her right hand, sundae in her left.
It's only then, watching her, that I realize, the whole time we've been here, that Rory has stopped calling my mom "Aunt."

She flicks the TV on
, and the very first thing we see makes us all jump.

"Uncle Roman!" Allie's the first to call it.

I recognize my mom's brother, of course, even though I've only met him a couple of times in my life and even then for only a few minutes at a time. The movie that's playing is one that he made a few years ago—a drama about an attorney defending a client on death row. He was nominated for an Oscar for it, but didn't win. But this year, he did win an Oscar for something else, which is, I guess, why they're playing this movie again now.

We sit in silence, scarfing up our sundaes and watching the scene play out before us.
It's a powerful one. He's a pretty good actor, Uncle Roman. Mom always says probably the best in the family, despite their differences.

When the commercial break kicks in, Mom looks over at Uncle Erik.
"Have you seen him since he won the Oscar?"

"No," Uncle Erik tells her.
"He's been busy, of course. Interview after interview, I think. And now he's shooting something in Vienna."

"Amazing that he finally won an Oscar." Mom shakes her head.
"Considering…"

"He's 'not much of an actor,'" the pair of them chime in together, making quotation marks in the air with their fingers, and then crack up.

The rest of us eyeball them, having no idea what they're referring to.

"Okay, I'll bite," I say after they manage to control themselves.

Across the other side of the couch, Mom re-positions herself, crossing her legs underneath her. She waves one hand as if it's nothing. "Oh, it's this silly thing our mom used to say when we were growing up. I shouldn't have mentioned it in front of you kids."

I keep very, very quiet on hearing this, because I know from experience that Mom could change her mind at any second and not deliver any more information at all, but Allie frowns and charges in.
"Wait. She used to say that Uncle Roman wasn't much of an actor? But he's amazing! And he just won an Oscar!"

"Pity about Roman," Uncle Erik speaks up in an old lady voice now.
"Can't dance. And not much of an actor."

Both of them crack up again.
My mom actually laughs so hard she seems to be having trouble breathing.

And me? I can't believe what I'm hearing.
Something about Mom's family! About show business, even! I look from one of them to the other. "Did she really used to say that? To his face?"

My mom stops laughing immediately and stares me dead in the eye.
"Oh, honey. She sure did. And that's when she was being
nice
."

* * *

After rolling around for at least twenty minutes, I sit up in bed at 1:17 a.m., hungry and thirsty and very, very awake. My body clock is scarily confused lately, having traveled from Paris, to Tasmania, to LA in the past week. I check my cell—there's a message on it from my dad saying I'm not getting the pink Bentley for Christmas, but if he's feeling generous he may spring for a large pink marshmallow with wheels.

I try reading for a while, but this doesn't work
, and eventually I give in and make my way out to the kitchen to see if I can dig up some leftover pizza. I'm about to round the corner from the hallway into the kitchen when I hear voices and slow down. Then I stop dead when I hear what the voices are talking about—Allie.

And I'm not normally a big one for eavesdropping, especially because my mom is so careful that it rarely delivers any useful information, but like I told Rory earlier today
—when it comes to Allie, I want to make sure I'm being told the whole truth and not babied. I hold my breath, the fingers of my left hand gripping the wall beside me as my mom's voice cuts through the stillness of the house again.

"So her cardiologist's pleased with how everything's going?" she says.

"He's thrilled. It's better than any of us hoped."

Relief floods through me.
So what Mom's been telling me about Allie
is
true. I go to start forwards again when Uncle Erik speaks and I pause once more.

"Thanks for coming, Cass.
Tonight—it's the happiest I've seen Rory in ages. Maybe things aren't as bad as I thought. I was really losing it there for a while."

I think about this for a second.
When Mom and I had arrived this afternoon, Rory had been pretty down in the dumps and not herself. And Uncle Erik had definitely been on her back. But as the afternoon went on and we spent time at Allie's dance class, then time at home, she seemed...well, something close to normal, at least. Maybe she managed to forget about work for a while? I know I kept forgetting that, in the morning, we'd all be off to the studio, then piling on two buses with the
SMD
team and driving to Las Vegas.

My heart starts pounding in my chest now, reminded of this fact.

"Come on, Erik," my mom says, and I can tell without needing to look that she's shaking her head at him in exactly the same way she does at me when I need to "wise up," as she calls it. "Why do you think that is?"

There's silence for a moment or two before my mom, the usual giver of wisdom, continues.

"We're here, we've spent the evening together, Rory's had some down time and some semblance of a normal family life."

"Rory has a normal family life," Uncle Erik argues. "She has me, she has Allie
—"

But Mom cuts him off. "And a full-time, eleven- to twelve-hour-a-day job that she's had since she was eight and a pink Bentley with her name plastered all over it. If she wants out, let her get out.
Now. Before she does something truly out there."

"Like what? Run away for real?
Like you did?"

"Yes." Mom's voice raises a notch or two now.
"Like I
had
to. Because I was never going to get the support I needed at home. What was I supposed to do? I was having all those problems on-set with that leading man with the wandering hands. And the studio told me to suck it up. My own mother told me to suck it up. I didn't know what else to do!"

"I know that, Cass.
And the position they all put you in, at seventeen no less, was unforgivable. But Rory has that support. Which is why she doesn't need to run. And that's what I'm trying to show her. Along with how to be responsible and fulfill her commitments. It's about being an adult." Uncle Erik pauses briefly. "Anyway, if you want to play the 'family life' card, you can hardly say Thea's life is normal."