Spelling It Like It Is (24 page)

“It’s been seven months!”
I wrote back. I wanted to have control of my body again.

“Try hiking,”
Scout said.

I told him that the doctor had approved my activities and that the trainer knew what he was doing, but Scout was having none of it.

Three days later I was back at the hospital. Nothing had bothered me while I was working out, but over time the pain in my abdomen became severe. Scout was right. Should’ve hiked.

Looking at my CT scan, the surgeon said he didn’t think I had a hernia. He couldn’t tell, but he thought the problem was scar tissue pinching a nerve. Then he examined me. As soon as he saw the bulge of flesh over my scar, he told me I needed surgery to fix the bulge. He said, “I want to do this with a plastic surgeon.”

I said, “What? Why a plastic surgeon?”

He said, “In layman’s terms, it’s a tummy tuck.”

I said, “I don’t need that!”

He said, “Trust me, you’re going to want it.”

Was he saying I needed it for medical reasons or that I had to have it? I couldn’t tell.

I said, “I don’t care what I look like.”

It was true. I just wanted the pain to go away. I was happy with how I looked. And I didn’t want plastic surgery—I didn’t want to spend more time away from my children for vanity. And in the back of my head I didn’t want to have people thinking I’d resorted to surgery to get my body back.

The surgeon said that he had to fix the scar tissue. If I didn’t have surgery on the bulge at the same time, it would only get worse.

As I walked out of his office, a nurse said, “You need to know that he’s a very conservative doctor. He doesn’t usually recommend surgery.” Still, I resolved to get a few more opinions.

Meanwhile, the fine-tuning I’d wanted from working out hadn’t happened, and the bikini shoot was only a week away. I’m not interested in a tummy tuck, but I’m not completely un-vain.

I turned to slimming wraps. This fell wholly into the category of unscientific weight loss. I went to a place in my neighborhood called Suddenly Slimmer. They claimed that by wrapping my body in mineral bandages I would lose inches and my skin would tighten right up. It seemed unlikely, but at least it was noninvasive.

I used the name “Victoria McDermott” when I booked the appointment, but the woman at the desk said, “Wait a minute! I know who you are. At first I didn’t know, but now I totally know who you are.” She led me to a room where I was to sit for an hour, naked except for the Ace bandages that wrapped my body.

I went for two treatments, and the second time I brought Stella. There was a mini-trampoline in the room, and she bounced happily as I lay there getting what I told her was something to help my skin. We’d only been there twenty minutes or so when the same wrap lady popped into the room. “Hi, Tori! There’s a woman here for a treatment. She’s really excited that you’re here too! She loves your show. She’s never had the treatment before and she’s nervous. Can she come in to meet you? You can tell her about it.”

I guess she saw people naked except for mineral wraps all day long and didn’t think it would be weird for me to meet someone while lying mummified on a vibrating recliner. I’m such a wimp. “Sure,” I said. Fuck me.

The woman came in: “Oh my God, Tori! It’s so nice to meet you.”

I tried to wave a zombie hand but could barely move. “This is awkward, but hi, how are you?”

She laughed, and then seemed to get how embarrassed I was and made a quick exit.

I took a picture of Stella jumping on the trampoline and my mummified feet and sent it to my publicist with a note saying, “Gotta do what you gotta do. With my luck Stella will tell someone from
Us Weekly
about this tomorrow.”

For the
Us Weekly
photo shoot the next day, my publicist had given me clear instructions as to what I should say about my weight loss. Women didn’t want to know that I had lost weight through dieting, not exercising. I didn’t want to be the asshole who didn’t work for it. So I said that I swam. It was sort of a bad choice. I can’t do much more than doggy-paddle.

Stella, who had witnessed the mineral wraps, almost blew my cover. She was in the kitchen with the makeup and hair person from
Us
before I came in. When I entered, the woman said, “Oh my God, Stella told me all about the trampoline.”

“Oh, yes, I took her to a trampoline place,” I said, covering.

“You got your skin tightened there!” Stella chimed in.

“It was a great facial later that day,” I said. If I wasn’t careful Stella would land her own feature: “Tori’s Toddler Exposes Her Secrets.”

Even after the shoot, I wanted to stay diligent about my diet. I stayed away from sugar and didn’t take a single lick of the kids’ ice-cream cones. But one night Dean and I were in bed. My Ambien was just kicking in when we heard a loud thump. We went outside and found that two of our chickens were missing. Just gone, presumed dead. One of the ones that died was a favorite of mine that we’d named Elizabeth Taylor. Their coop door was busted open. We hadn’t heard any squawking, but we’d been told that there were raccoons on our property. I was devastated. Thank God Coco was safe in her dog bed in our room. She doesn’t know that she’s a chicken.

When we came back into the kitchen—maybe the Ambien was to blame—for the first time in my life I did stress eating. Sitting on the counter were brownies left over from the craft services at the
Us Weekly
shoot. After the shoot, as a pat on the back, I’d taken a single bite, but then Patsy said, “I see you’re off your diet.” I felt guilty and spit it out immediately. The night Elizabeth Taylor died, I ate the entire container of brownies.

Dean had never seen me eat like that. He said, “What are you doing?”

I said, “I’m stress eating!”

He stared at me, still not understanding.

“The chickens are dead!” I yelled, shoving the last brownie into my mouth. As Dean gently led me back to the bedroom, I realized I finally understood what the whole emotional-eating thing was all about. Our chickens were gone, but wow, those brownies were good.

Somewhere That’s Green

O
n Valentine’s Day I was in the kitchen baking treats with Liam, Stella, and Laura. I had four projects going: Rice Krispies Treats, cakes, cake pops, and cookies. Finn and Patsy were in their room. Hattie was already asleep for the night. The kitchen in our Westlake house was all windows on one side. They let in tons of sun during the day, but as the sun set, the glare made it hard to see anything but your own reflection. I pulled a batch of cookies out of the oven, and then I saw Laura’s face go white. Had my cookies burned?

I said, “What is it? The cookies?”

“No, nothing. I don’t know,” she said. Then, after a moment, she said, “I saw someone in the backyard walking past the window.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “That always happens to me. You’re seeing your own reflection in the window.”

“No,” she said insistently. “Someone walked by. They were light.”

“They were light?” I didn’t know what she meant.

“We’re all wearing dark tops. It was a man. He was wearing a long-sleeved khaki jacket.” She was stumbling over her words, but this was starting to make some sense: I was wearing black and she was wearing navy blue.

I said, “Really? What do we do?”

She said, “I think we should call the front gate.” That was a good idea. This was, after all, a gated community. Surely if we had a trespasser the front gate would handle it.

Laura called the front gate. She told them what she’d seen. The guard said, “Sorry, we can’t help you. You’ll have to call the police.”

Laura said, “But we’re three women alone with four babies. Can you come up here while we wait for the police?”

The guard said, “Sorry, but we aren’t armed, and we can’t go on private property.” He gave her the number of the sheriff’s department.

Then it started to hit me. What if this was for real? What if there was an intruder on the property and we were in danger at this very minute? None of the doors were locked. The sliding glass doors in the kitchen and our bedroom had doggie doors that interfered with the lock. Some of the doors didn’t even have locks. Dean had a gun but I didn’t know where it was.

“Okay, guys,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere safe until the police are here.” Laura grabbed the kitchen timer (after all, I had two red velvet heart cakes in the oven). We went out in the hallway, where we had a good view of the whole house, but I couldn’t figure out a safe place to go from there. The four of us stayed in the hall for fifteen minutes, waiting for the police. We knew because we had the timer. My cakes would be done in five minutes. I called the sheriff’s department again. This time the guy who answered the phone was snippy.

“I just talked to you. They’re on their way.”

I said, “We’re alone with young children, baking and scared. Please don’t talk to me like that.”

He agreed to stay on the phone with me until help arrived. All of a sudden the timer went off.

The cakes! Laura and I locked eyes, panicked. “They’re going to burn!” I said. I was scared to go back into the kitchen, but I couldn’t send my bubbly blond babysitter. You know how these things go. The cute babysitter always dies first. I had to go get my red velvet cakes. But what if the guy was in the kitchen? Could I grab them and grab a knife at the same time? I made a decision. I had to go in. For the love of baking.

The guy was still on the phone. He said, “The cops are on your property.”

I said, “They’re not! Nobody’s here. But I smell red velvet burning!”

He said, “I don’t know why they haven’t rung the doorbell.”

I knew why. They were dead in our backyard.

Then the guy on the phone said, “Okay, the cops are in your backyard.”

Laura and I led the kids to the back door. I saw flashlights bobbing around. I opened the door and two cops came in.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” I said, putting on my oven mitts as I ran to take out my cakes. In addition to the two red velvet heart cakes, I had two regular cakes that I was going to use for push pops ready to go in the oven. The cop came in to tell me they hadn’t found anyone on the property and to ask me a few questions.

“Tell me about the security here,” the cop said.

I said, “Hold on, I’m going to put my other two cakes in the oven.” I had my priorities straight. The cakes for the push-pop cakes went in the oven. Then I told the cop that none of the sliding doors worked, and the front door was unlocked.

“Do you know how unsafe this is?”

I said, “It’s a guard-gated community.”

He said, “Please. They get in here all the time.” We called the owners of the house, who said they didn’t have anyone scheduled to do any work. The cops hadn’t seen any footprints, but that didn’t mean anything. They filed a report, and then one of them said to me, “I would call the security situation here unlivable. I don’t know how you sleep a wink at night.”

Dean was out of town on business, due to arrive back that evening. But I wasn’t about to keep my family in this high-risk situation. We couldn’t stay in the would-be crime scene. I gave the cops some of my fondant-coated conversation-heart Rice Krispies Treats (they came out perfectly). As they enjoyed them, I packed up all the kids and the dogs and Coco so we could check in to the local Hyatt. The cops seemed a little surprised that we were leaving.

“You just told me the place was unlivable,” I said.

“Next time we can be here faster,” the cop said. “I wouldn’t go to a hotel.”

But there was no stopping me now. I had room service on my mind.

When Dean’s plane landed, my string of increasingly panicked texts came through. He read through to the bottom, which told him to meet us at the Hyatt. When he arrived, he was less than convinced about the imminent danger we’d been in.

“But the cop said the security situation was ‘unlivable’!” I said.

“Come on,” Dean said. “He was being a little extreme.” He told me that the front door had a working dead bolt and that he could easily fix the sliding doors. I wasn’t reassured.

That night, a thought that had been floating around my brain came to rest. It was happening again. We had to move. It wasn’t the intruder. All he did was provoke a temporary anxiety. But we’d been renting this overpriced house for almost a year and it was time to assess our situation. The children weren’t happy at the nearby school, and the best school we’d found for them was forty-five minutes away. We’d driven that far from Malibu to their preschool, and we knew it was hard on them. Above all, we had to downsize our lives. Our money manager insisted on it.

On the other hand, were we really going to move again? This was the ninth place Dean and I had lived in seven years together, and our homes were all over the place. We weren’t narrowing down where we belonged and how we wanted to live. What was I looking for in all these new houses? I had a notion of a home that would complete me, complete our family, and I kept thinking I’d found it, but I was never happy. I wanted a stable life. I want something permanent. I needed that. My family needed that. But what if I never found it? I didn’t want to chase an impossible dream.

What was home? I always flashed to the movie
Little Shop of Horrors
. Audrey is a trampy girl who dreams about a life different from hers. She sings “Somewhere That’s Green” about wanting to cook like Betty Crocker and look like Donna Reed. Her fantasy is a little more modest than mine, but the feeling is the same. And really, there is something about the simplicity she describes that I long for.

I grew up in great luxury, wanting a simple, cozy life. Now I’m torn between the two. I have a vision of waking up in the morning, wrapping myself in a big cable-knit cardigan, putting on my wellies, and flinging open the front door. The kids run in with freshly laid eggs. Dean is on a tractor. I bring him a cup of coffee, baby on one hip. I hand it to him and go back inside. But in the fantasy of this “simple” life, we’re running a farm . . . but we’re still producers. My wellies are designer. The cardigan is a thick cashmere sweater-coat. And Dean’s got a pimped-out tractor. The house I go inside is our super-cute “pseudo” farmhouse. It has been updated with all the latest amenities. No rough floors; only Viking appliances.