The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (2 page)

Once back in my chair, balancing on my left butt cheek, I closed my eyes to try to bring up the vision of myself walking into Target. I tried to conjure up the soft
whoosh
of the automatic doors, but I couldn’t—maybe because of the stream of angry Spanish that was coming from over near the vending machine along with the sound of someone pounding on it. So I switched gears and instead tried to go back in time a few hours and hear the soft trickle of the fountain that lived outside my bedroom window and often served as a sort of aural sleeping pill on the nights I was really worried instead of just kind of worried about my mother. The really expensive antique fountain from China that Mom’s decorator had insisted she buy because it was good feng shui and would protect us from bad things.

The one that, given the fact my mother had been booked for drunk driving as she sped the wrong way down the Pacific Coast Highway, was obviously defective.

CHAPTER ONE

There was nothing about the forty-eight hours leading up to my balancing on a germy ripped vinyl chair that made me think that life as I knew it was about to be over.

That Friday had been a typical one.

TYPICAL FRIDAY IN MY LIFE PRE–ARMAGEDDON

• Wake up.
  
• Make sure Mom is still alive and hasn’t choked on her own vomit or accidentally overdosed on Ambien or Klonopin, two of the many prescription-drug bottles she keeps on her nightstand.
  
• Throw on silky Indian-y shirt that I sneak from her closet while she’s passed out because it’s Friday, which means I don’t have to wear the itchy navy-blue L’École school uniform that makes me look like a flight attendant.
  
• Text Mom to get out of bed as I listen to my best friend Maya go off on our other best friends Olivia and Sarah during the drive to school in her powder-blue BMW convertible. She was pretty sure they were total homophobes, as evidenced by the fact that ever since Maya announced she was a lesbian, the two of them wouldn’t get undressed in front of her in gym class.
  
• Call Mom during lunch to see if she is out of bed or if this is one of her depressed days.
  
• Realize from her groggy voice that it’s one of her depressed days.
  
• Make her promise to be out of bed and showered and dressed by the time I get home and to please call her psychiatrist to see if he can up her meds to deal with the depression.
  
• Hold the phone away from my ear as she yells at me that she’s
  not
  depressed—she’s just tired—and there’s a difference. (Mom gets very upset when anyone brings up the D-word. You would’ve thought they were accusing her of drinking too much. Which, you know, she does.)
  
• Rinse and repeat.
  

Ever since Mom had left the show in order to be a big movie star, only to not have that happen because she ended up doing romantic comedies so stupid that even Jennifer Aniston and Katherine Heigl turned them down, she had gotten more and more “tired.” Tired to the point that sometimes her hair went unwashed for so long it left grease marks on the couch pillows. Tired to the point that I would hear her crying into her pillow through her closed bedroom door. Tired to the point that I had stopped making a hash mark on the Ketel One vodka bottle in the freezer to compare it to the one I had made the night before with a Sharpie because she was going through them so fast. (Semi-useless bit of trivia: because of the condensation from the freezer, Sharpies are the only thing that work.)

That Friday, I held my breath when I walked into the house after school, not knowing what I’d find. But when I heard the TV on in the den, I relaxed a little. She was out of bed—that was progress.

“Bug? Is that you?” Mom called out. Bug was Mom’s nickname for me because of the way I apparently flailed my arms and legs in my crib when I was a baby.

I flinched. It probably wouldn’t have been noticeable to most people, but I could hear a slight slur in her voice. Dogs and their extra-sensitive hearing had nothing on me and my ability to tell from just one word when someone was wasted.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Come say hi,” she said.

I cringed. Mom was sprawled on the white slipcovered couch in a black silk nightgown and a ratty pink chenille robe, a toe sporting chipped red polish peeking through the L.L. Bean slippers she had had since I was little. As if that wasn’t bad enough—and it was—she was eating gherkin pickles straight from the jar. The sight was not exactly in line with the elegant-yet-inviting-beach-house-chic decor that
Architectural Digest
had written about in the cover article about our house a few years earlier.

When I got to my room, I was going straight to my closet for the Play-Doh. The blue kind because for some reason it gave off the strongest, most calming odor.

With a pickle between her fingers like a cigarette, my mother opened her arms. “Come give me a hug,” she demanded.

I sighed. And the Barbie’s head. Definitely needed some of that. Trying to say no would get me nowhere. Even when she was drunk—
especially
when she was drunk—Mom had a way of getting what she wanted.

I walked over and leaned down so I could be swallowed up by her, sucking in my breath and holding it so I didn’t have to smell the alcohol or BO. I looked at the ninety-two-inch plasma TV. “Are those . . .
kittens
?”

Mom nodded as she pushed me away and began to crunch on a pickle. “Uh-huh. It’s this show called
Too Cute
,” she said with her mouth full as she fished another pickle out of the jar. “Kittens are so . . .
life-affirming
. I wonder if there’ve been studies that show that they raise your serotonin level.” She turned to me. “What do you think, Bug? Do you think we should get a kitten?” Her eyes got all misty. “You know, when you were a baby, before I started calling you Bug, I used to call you ‘puppy.’”

That didn’t even make sense. But when Mom was drinking, lots of things didn’t. I wasn’t sure there was enough Play-Doh in the world to fix this.

“You promised you were going to be dressed when I got home,” I said.

“I
am
dressed. This nightgown, Bug? It’s La Perla.” She sniffed. “Forgive me for wanting to relax a little after spending eight years working my ass off.” She hiccuped. “Excuse me.”

I shook my head. “And you wonder why I never want to have people over anymore,” I muttered under my breath as I stomped back to my room. Back when Mom was on the show, my house was ground zero for hanging out, but over the last few months I found myself constantly coming up with excuses as to why I couldn’t have friends over:
The painters are there. The kitchen is being retiled. It’s raining. It’s sunny. It’s Tuesday
.

“I’m your mother, Annabelle,” she called after me. “I will not let you speak to me like that!”

She was in luck. I wasn’t interested in speaking to her, period.

I was in the middle of a new list titled Ways to Support Myself If I Ever Emancipate Myself and Move Out (I knew you needed a master’s degree to be a psychologist and I hadn’t graduated high school yet, but I put it down as an option anyway) when there was half a knock on my door before it opened. A closed door meant nothing to Mom. Even if you were in the bathroom on the toilet.

“I know you’re mad at me, but I needed to share something with you.” She sniffled. It was a good thing she hadn’t gone to the trouble of putting makeup on today, because if she had, it would have been all cried off.

“I never said I was mad at you,” I corrected. I mean, I
was
, but I hadn’t come out and said it. Mostly because I didn’t want her to be able to use it as ammo to pour herself another drink.

“Carrie called.” Carrie was Mom’s agent. “Katherine Heigl changed her mind and decided she wants to do that movie I was going to get the offer for.”

Ouch. Losing a role to Katherine Heigl was ten times worse than losing it to Jennifer Aniston. Especially when it was a very unfunny, dumb comedy about an uptight businesswoman who’s downsized and forced to take a job at a day-care center where she falls in love with a wacky Jim Carrey–like music teacher. “I’m sorry, Mom.”

She nodded, her eyes all teary. “Me, too.” She reached into the pocket of her robe and took out a crumpled tissue. “Well, I’ll let you get back to whatever you’re doing.”

I turned over my iPhone to hide the list. I felt guilty just thinking about leaving her. As if she’d ever let me get away with it. Mom was so clingy that one of her old assistants had once bought her an embroidered pillow that said
If you ever leave me, I’m going with you
. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?” I asked.

She tried to smile. “Of course I am. I’m always okay.”

I got off the bed and walked over and gave her a hug. In the last year I had grown three inches, so now, at five feet six, I was two inches taller than she was. For some reason, looking down on her rather than up made me anxious, as if I had just jumped out of an airplane and couldn’t open the parachute. “Things are going to turn around.”

She nodded into my chest.

“They are.”

“You promise?” she asked my left boob.

“Yes, I promise.”

“When?”

I sighed. “I don’t know, Mom. Maybe you should call Gemini and ask her.” Gemini was the psychic to whom Mom had been going for eight years, ever since Gemini told her she was going to get a role in a series with a number in the title that was going to make her super-famous. (The sitcom—a total
Friends
rip-off—was called
Plus Zero
.)

“You think?”

“Actually, no—don’t call her.” Now that she was a Psychic to the Stars rather than a recovering crackhead working at the Psychic Eye Bookshop, she charged three hundred bucks an hour. “Just trust me.”

“Okay.”

As I started to let go, she clutched harder. “Bug?”

“What?”

“Do you love me?”

I stopped myself from sighing. “Of course I do.”

“How much?”

Really? We had to do this now? “All the way up to God,” I replied impatiently.

“That’s it?”

“Past God, past God,” I sighed. That was our thing, something I had come up with when I was seven that she had held me to ever since. The thing that we had said to each other back when she used to tuck me in and, when I got older, when she’d call me from the set to say good night. The thing she’d force me to say when we were in a fight and she was feeling needy. You have never known embarrassment until you’re standing in line at the ArcLight movie theater hissing into your phone, “Fine. I’ll say it. I love you all the way up to God, past God, past God. Now will you please stop calling me?”

She smiled and kissed me on the forehead. “That’s how much I love you, too. Thanks for cheering me up,” she said as she shuffled off.

After she was gone, I reached over to my nightstand and picked up a photo in a silver frame. It was a picture of the two of us on our back patio, on a sunny August afternoon six years ago, the first time she was nominated for Best Actress in a Comedy Series for her sitcom
Plus Zero
. I was six at the time and she was thirty-two, even though all the magazine articles said she was twenty-eight. With her sky-blue one-shouldered vintage Halston gown, and her honey-colored hair cascading down her back in perfect ringlets, she looks like a Greek goddess. This was the version of my mother that I wanted back—the one who was bursting with life. The one surrounded by light.

The one who showered.

I, on the other hand, look like a Hostess Sno Ball. I’m squeezed into a strapless pink taffeta dress that—although, thankfully, you can’t see it in the photo—gave me back fat; my brunette curls are stubbornly pinned back into a French twist, which had already fallen out by the time we got out of the limo, resulting in bobby pins dripping from my hair and into my food throughout the evening.

In the photo, Mom stands behind me, her pale white hands with their perfectly polished red nails planted firmly on my olive-colored arms. We’re both smiling—hers made up of straight white teeth; mine a mouth full of metal braces.

To anyone looking at the photo, it looks perfect. The big house. The sparkling pool. The fancy clothes. The cloudless sky. But because this is Hollywood—where the main export is make-believe—the picture doesn’t tell the whole story.

The morning of the Emmys—after a few slaps on the face and the espresso I managed to get down her throat—we were in business. I’d already stumbled out of bed somewhere around 3:00 a.m. to check that she was still breathing (holding mirrors up to a passed-out person’s mouth is useful only in the daytime; middle-of-the-night checks require leaning down and putting your ear right up to her mouth). By the time Ozzie and Alix—her hair and makeup team—arrived to get her ready, Mom was about 80 percent sober. And by the time the camera crew from
InStyle
arrived to document the whole thing for the “Countdown to the Emmys” article, you would’ve had no idea that things were anything less than perfect at Casa del Jackson.

Just like no one can see how, in that photo, Mom’s not just touching my arms. She’s clutching them. So hard that there would be red marks on my skin when she let go, because that’s how it always was.

But instead of reaching up and removing them, or wriggling away, I had reached up and grabbed on to one of her hands.

And was holding on just as tight.

After a few hours, I went back into her room and found her lying in bed on her side, staring at the wall. It was a good thing my dream in life wasn’t to be a cheerleader because obviously I sucked at it.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

She rolled over onto her other side. This was how we communicated a lot of the time lately. I asked questions, and she rolled over and ignored me.

“Well, I’m going to make us dinner,” I said as I turned around and went to the kitchen.

At our house “making dinner” meant nuking Lean Cuisines. I had grown up on them. When Mom became rich, you would’ve thought we would have stopped, but I think they put some sort of drug in them that made you addicted, because they were still the thing we grabbed for on the nights when Esme, our housekeeper, hadn’t cooked for us. “It’s ready!” I called out as I brought a Fettuccine Alfredo and a Ginger Chicken to the dining room table.