The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (18 page)

“What?!”

She shrugged. “If I were supposed to, it would have happened organically, without interference from anybody. Plus, I told you, I want to work at a rehab.”

“You’d rather stand outside a bathroom listening to people
pee
so you can make sure they give clean drug tests rather than star in a movie?”

She cringed. “Would I really have to do that?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I saw it on
Celebrity Rehab
once.” And then it hit me. She was scared. I put my hands on her shoulders. “Mom, you can do this,” I said. “It’s just an audition.”

“But what if I don’t get it?” she asked quietly. “Then what, Bug? “‘Cause I have to tell you—I’m running out of ideas here.”

“Well, if you don’t get it . . . I guess the universe has other plans for you,” I replied.

That was pretty freaking spiritual, if you asked me.

THINGS I PROMISE TO DO IF MOM GETS THE MOVIE

• Throw out all Play-Doh and Barbie heads.
  
• Stop stalking Olivia and Sarah’s Facebook and Twitter accounts and spending time making up stories about how much fun they’re having even though I know for a fact that Olivia always exaggerates on her posts in order to make things sound better than they are.
  
• Become one of those people who spends her weekends working with guide dogs for the blind or volunteering at nursing homes.
  
• Make an attempt to make more friends rather than spending all my time with Walter, because even though I’ve gotten used to the fact that he’s a very loud cruncher, I miss having girlfriends to talk about girl stuff with, other than the morning ride to school with Maya.
  
• Stop making lists, because they don’t really seem to help.
  

That night, I ran lines with Mom and found myself surprised at how good she was. I wasn’t sure why—she had won a bunch of Emmys over the years. But something had changed. As we went through the scenes, it was as if she stood still and played a game of strip acting, slowly taking off one layer after another—humor, anger, defensiveness—until the lines blurred and I forgot that I was watching my mother and instead felt like I was seeing the X-rayed insides of this English professor who was so scared of getting hurt that she’d rather spend her time with the writings of a dead poet than with other human beings.

A few days after her audition, I got home from school to find her waiting for me at the dining room table reading her
Meditations for Women Who Think Too Much
book.

“Oh, good, you’re home,” she said, standing up. “Come on—we’re going out.”

“Where are we going?” I asked as I tripped over a meditation cushion and banged my elbow on an armoire.

“It’s a surprise,” she said, grabbing her purse.

“Where are we going?” I asked again as we drove east on Pico Boulevard.

“I told you. It’s a surprise.”

When we pulled into the King Fu parking lot, I turned to her, confused. Back before she was famous, King Fu had been the place where we had gone on every special occasion—birthdays, last days of school, Christmases with the rest of the Jews, even though we weren’t Jewish. “What are we doing here?”

“We’re having dinner!”

I looked at the clock. “It’s four thirty.”

“We’re having an early dinner!”

Other than two old couples who spoke very loudly because they couldn’t hear each other, we were the only people in there.

After we ordered (as usual, with the kung pao chicken and moo shu pork and vegetable dumplings and sweet and sour pork, we ordered way too much food. And, just the way it had been back when we used to come here, I was already worrying that the bill was going to be expensive), she smiled at me. “Bug, do you remember the last time we were here?”

I thought about it. “I think it was . . . to celebrate your getting
Plus Zero
.”

A smile spread across her face.

“Oh, my God. YOU GOT IT?!” I screamed.

She nodded.

“YOU GOT THE PART???!!!”

She nodded again.

“IN THE MOVIE?!”

More nodding.

Although I was probably too old (and too heavy), I leaped out of my seat and jumped into her arms before she screamed, “Bug, honey, my back!” and I jumped down and instead lifted
her
up.

“YOU’RE GOING TO BE IN THE MOVIE?! REALLY?” I screamed as I plopped her back down once I realized that all her depression eating was making
my
back hurt as well.

“I AM!” she screamed back.

After we did a little happy dance (in addition to being almost deaf, the other diners seemed to be almost blind as well, as none of them were paying us much attention), she stopped and grabbed my shoulders. “Honey, this is all because of you. If you hadn’t believed in me—” At that her lip started quivering. Usually when that happened I got super-uncomfortable, knowing she’d be starting with the crying any second, but this time I didn’t care. Probably because I had already beat her to it.

“No, Mom—you did it,” I replied, wiping my eyes. “I helped a little, but you went in there and nailed it.
You
. Not me. And not a candle.”

“I still think the candle helped,” she said.

“Okay, fine,” I laughed. The whole thing was so surreal, I was waiting for a camera crew to jump out and tell me I was being punk’d. “So when does it shoot?”

“July. In upstate New York,” she replied. “Bug, you’re going to love it up there. Apparently, this little town called Hudson, where we’ll be staying? Supposed to be so cute. It’s two hours north of Manhattan, right across the river from Woodstock.”

If this had been a few months ago, I would have fought her on going because I wouldn’t have wanted to leave my friends. But seeing as I no longer had any friends, except for Walter and Maya, it sounded like it could be fun.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized that her doing the movie meant that she’d be seeing Billy Barrett on a daily basis and pretending to be in love with him.

And for my mother, there was a very fine line between reality and make-believe.

CHAPTER NINE

A few nights later Ben took us out to dinner to Ivy at The Shore to celebrate. Ever since he had started seeing Alice, we had seen less and less of him. That night, when Mom came into my room to ask me how she looked, instead of just giving a routine “Great,” without even looking, I actually took the time to check her out, and I was glad to see that she did look great. I knew it was silly because Mom’s beauty only canceled out the fact that she was nuts for a limited amount of time, and then guys usually caught on to the truth and bolted, so the fact that Ben had been in our lives for so long meant that he was either (a) incredibly stupid (which he was not) or (b) would have loved her even if she wasn’t a Most Beautiful Person. What was even sillier was the fact that I was still hoping they would hook up.

I spent a lot of the dinner trying to get everyone to play the “Remember When” game. (Remember when we went to Martha’s Vineyard that summer and ate steamers and lobster rolls? Yeah, no, not the time Mom threw up over the side of the boat because she’d had too much sangria—the night before that. Remember when we took a road trip up to Northern California and stayed in that really pretty hotel, and Ben and I drove over to San Francisco because Mom had to stay in bed the next day after the tour of the vineyard?) But even with that, things felt weird. More polite. Like instead of its being our one thousandth dinner together, it was our first.

In French there are two ways to say
you
: the formal
vous
, which you use for strangers and bosses and old people, and the informal
tu
, which is for family and close friends. That night, the
tu
-ness that had always been there between Ben and Mom felt like a thing of the past, and Ben’s “Sure! Of course!” when I asked if he would come to New York to visit us during the movie came off as very
un
sure.

As for Mom, she didn’t seem to notice the fact that things were weird.

She was too busy texting.

“Who are you texting?” I asked after Ben had excused himself to go to the bathroom. “Willow?” For good or for bad, now whenever Mom got stressed out, instead of reaching for a drink or a pill, she texted her sponsor. (Good for the rest of the world, bad for Willow.)

“No,” she replied, pecking the keyboard with one finger. (“Do you think they offer a class at the Learning Annex where adults can learn to text with both hands like you kids?” she had asked me the other day.)

“Then who? Eldin?” Eldin was an older African American guy from Mom’s Monday night meeting who had become one of Mom’s buddies.

I heard the
ding
of the response from the mysterious texter, followed by Mom’s laugh. A real laugh. From her shrinking-by-the-day-because-she-had-sworn-off-carbs-because-the-camera-adds-ten-pounds belly. “Billy,” she replied.

“Billy
Barrett
?” I demanded.

She squinted at the phone. “Tell me again what LMFAO means. I always forget.”

Even with the text abbreviation cheat sheet I had made for her, Mom still struggled with that stuff.

“Since when have you been texting Billy Barrett?” I demanded.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. A few days?”

“About what? The movie?”

“The movie, life, love . . . ,” she said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. “What does it mean, Bug?”

“What does it mean that you’re texting some guy you don’t even know about
love
? A guy who, by the way, has a
girlfriend.
”

“No. The LNFAO.”

“It’s L
M
FAO,” I corrected.

“Whatever. So what does it mean?”

“Did you hear me about the girlfriend part, Mom?”

She sighed. “I did hear you, Annabelle. And we’re not talking about love in terms of
us
. We’re talking about love in terms of, you know, the
concept
of it. Seeing that that’s what the movie is about.”

I shook my head. I had no one to blame for this but myself.

“So are you going to tell me what it means, or am I going to have to Goggle it?”

“It’s
Google,
” I corrected.

“Same thing. The Google will also tell me how to give someone a ringtone, right?”

“There’s no ‘the.’”

“What?”

“It’s just Google. Not
the
Google. Or
a
Google. Just Google.” Was it dumb to get hung up on articles like
the
and
a
? Yes. But I needed to have control over
something
.

“Fine. Google. So will it?”

“You want to give Billy Barrett his own
ringtone
?!” I cried. “Mom, you don’t just give
anyone
a ringtone. It’s a big deal to do that!”

“I’m thinking something by Katy Perry,” she said. “Does it cost extra when the song is really popular?”

My forty-two-year-old mother wanted to use a Katy Perry ringtone for a guy who was sixteen years younger than she was and with whom she was having text conversations about love. I could only hope I made it to the bathroom in time before I threw up.

Before we could get into it more, Ben returned to the table and we continued pretending that everything was just like it had been pre–rehab/bankruptcy/Alice. To her credit, Mom put her iPhone away in her bag, but I could still hear the stupid text noise come through a bunch of times. (Really? Billy Barrett didn’t have anything better to do with his time than triple-texting without a response?)

Outside, as we waited for the valets to bring our cars, Ben and I watched as Mom signed autographs and posed for pictures with some girls a little older than me.

He smiled. “It’s nice to see her back in her element.”

“Yeah. And with fans who aren’t retired and living on Social Security,” I replied. The fact that she was doing a movie with Billy had gotten her a lot of cred with younger people.

I cringed as I heard one of the girls asking Mom if Billy was as hot in person as on-screen and then turned to see Ben looking at me. “What?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Nothing. Come here,” he said, pulling me toward him into a hug.

I wasn’t big on hugs. Probably because with my mother, instead of making you feel safe, they had you fearing for your life as the breath was squeezed out of you. But I did love Ben’s hugs. They were my version of the pills that used to litter Mom’s bathroom. As soon as he wrapped his arms around me, I felt my body relax, which was great for two seconds, until my eyes began to fill with tears.

“What is it, Annabelle?” Ben asked. Even without seeing my face, he could tell something was wrong. Which, for some reason, made the tears come faster.

“Nothing,” I replied, trying to keep my voice level.

“You’re lying. Your voice went up at the end.”

That made me even want to cry more.

He pulled me away from him and looked me in the eyes. “Tell.”

“It’s . . . things are all
vous
-y with you and Mom,” I blurted.

“Huh?”

I wiped my eyes. “You don’t love her anymore, do you?” I asked softly.

He pushed my hair out of my eyes. “What are you talking about? Of course I love her. I love both of you. You know that.”

“No, I mean . . . you’re not . . .
in
love with her anymore.”

He looked away. “Annabelle, I was never . . .” he started to say. But then he stopped and looked back at me. “No. No, I’m not,” he said gently.

This time when my eyes filled up, I didn’t try to stop them. I would have been lying if I didn’t admit that this whole time, part of why I wanted Mom to get it together was so that she’d finally have the Movie Moment—when she’d finally realize Ben was her guy and she’d get in her car and, while some Death Cab for Cutie or Phoenix song played, drive as fast as she could to his office without getting a ticket (no one got tickets during Movie Moments)—and profess her undying love to him in front of everyone.

“Are you in love with Alice?” I asked.

“I . . . care for her a great deal,” he replied, staring at the sidewalk as if one of those visions of the Virgin Mary had just appeared, like in those articles in the
National Enquirer
. (At one point, back when Mom was still really famous, there was something in there about how the Virgin Mary had appeared in our house because Mom was a descendant of her.)