The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (3 page)

She padded out. I was happy to see that she had brushed her hair, at least one side of it. Happy until I saw her detour to the kitchen so she could fix herself a vodka and tonic. When I was little, I had loved the sound of the ice cubes jangling in the glass. Now I thought of them as screaming. Glass in hand, she plopped herself down at the dining room table, sinking heavily into the chair as if she had just finished a triathlon.

I forced myself to look at her. “You want the fettuccine or the chicken?” I asked as I balanced them on my palms.

She pointed to the fettuccine. (“All this cheese and pasta for only nine points! Where else are you going to find that, Bug, huh?” she was always marveling.)

I had wanted the fettuccine. “I don’t think I’m going to go to that party tomorrow night,” I said, putting the dinner in front of her. I walked around to sit down. The ten-foot table, made of wood from a 250-year-old barn from somewhere in Vermont, totally dwarfed us. As did most of the stuff in the Spanish-style hacienda that, thanks to the Hot Property section of the
Los Angeles Times
, everyone knew had cost $2.75 million. The house was beautiful, but sometimes I still missed the two-bedroom West Hollywood apartment we had lived in until the middle of the first season of the show. It was small, and we had had to space our showers out because the hot water always gave out, and the smell of stuffed cabbage that had wafted up from Mrs. Spivakowsky’s apartment downstairs always made me want to vomit, but it had been home. Even after seven years in this house, a lot of the time I still felt like Alice after she drank from the bottled marked DRINK ME.

Mom looked up, the unbrushed side of her hair sticking to her face. Normally sunkissed and blonde, angry dark roots were now sprouting from the top. “But you’ve been looking forward to it all week,” she said.

That was true. I had been. I didn’t know the kid throwing it—some girl from hippy-dippy Crossroads School named Zazu—but my friend Olivia had promised there were going to be lots of hot guys there. “Get a boyfriend” had been on my How to Avoid My Mother list the other night, and a party with cute boys would be a good place to start on that. Even though I sucked when it came to flirting with boys and therefore hadn’t had a boyfriend before.

I shrugged. “It’s okay. There’ll be another one.” In my mind’s eye I saw my shrink Dr. Warner’s eyebrow go up as she gave me a look that was not exactly disapproving, because shrinks were supposed to remain neutral, but was definitely disapproving-ish. According to her, missing out on social events just so I could sit at home to watch Mom drink and be depressed wasn’t helping the situation. In fact, what I was doing was called “enabling,” which, from what I had gathered, was a fancy word for “co-signing people’s bullshit.” The thing was, when I did leave Mom while she was depressed, I just ended up spending my whole night calling to check how bad she was slurring, which wasn’t exactly social.

She picked at her pasta. “Really? You’d do that?” she asked. I could tell she was trying not to sound too excited. But it still came through.

“I just said I would, Mom,” I snapped. Immediately, I felt bad. I hadn’t inherited her acting ability. I mean, I had been the one who had offered.

She hauled herself up from the table, walked over, and pulled me up into a huge hug, despite the fact that I was midbite with a forkful of chicken and rice in my hand. “Oh, Bug, what would I do without you?” she asked into my neck as I watched a clump of rice disappear into her hair. Because it was already so dirty, I didn’t bother to get it out. Instead, I shifted so that my breathing was only halfway constricted. It was if I could literally feel the need rolling off her in waves and settling on my body. Like I had been slimed or something.

I moved my face so that her breath, metallic from the pills she took (Ambien for sleeping, Zoloft for depression, Klonopin for anxiety), wasn’t filling my nostrils. I hated that smell. Almost as much as I hated the smell of vodka, even though she swore that vodka didn’t smell. “Well, lucky for us, you won’t have to find that out,” I sighed.

She let go of me and clapped her hands. “I know—we’ll do Movie and A Manicure!” she said, all excited. “Just like the old days.” Back before
Plus Zero
(read: when we were poor) we’d spend Saturday nights giving each other manicures in her bed while watching cheesy 1980s comedies like
Mannequin
. (I didn’t know which was more painful—the way Mom always pushed too hard with the cuticle stick or Kim Cattrall’s performance.)

“Okay. Sure. Sounds great,” I said. Recently, Mom had been on this whole “old days” kick. Maybe because the here and now kind of sucked.

“You’re
sure
you’re okay staying home with me?” she asked. “Because I don’t want you to do it just because you feel like you
have
to and then resent me for it. Because that’s at least two more therapy sessions right there. If you do it, I want it to be because you
want
to.”

“Mom, it’s fine,” I said firmly.

The fog that had been hovering around her face for the last week lifted, replaced by the bubbliness that had made her such a big TV star, causing one blogger to once write “Janie Jackson—the most carbonated star on network television!”

“This is going to be so fun.” She pushed her Lean Cuisine away and stood up. “I’m going to go check the nail polish supply to make sure it hasn’t thickened.”

The next morning Mom decided that instead of just Movie and A Manicure, we would spend the entire day together.

“And do what?” I asked as I watched carefully to make sure she didn’t pour anything but milk into her coffee.

“Go to Be Here Now?”

Be Here Now was a big New Age/self-help bookstore in Venice that Mom loved. The problem was that when she got the books home, she usually passed out before she got more than a few pages in, so they didn’t really help.

“You know the incense in there always makes me sneeze,” I replied.

“Okay, okay. How about . . . ooh . . . I know! We’ll
bake
.”

“Bake.”

“Yeah. We’ll make cookies! Those ones you made with the pretzels and the butterscotch chips. The—whatsitcalled—recycling cookies.”

“You mean the Momofuku Milk Bar Compost Cookies?” I corrected.

“Yes. Those.”

Those
were
pretty awesome. I had seen the recipe on the Pinterest board of some girl named Jen who lived in New Jersey. Basically you took anything you wanted—pretzels, potato chips, Reese’s—and put it all in there. They were like a legal version of crack cocaine.

“Baking’s a good mother/daughter thing to do, don’t you think?”

I shrugged. I would have preferred hanging out in my room making a list of the ways I’d rather spend my Saturday other than hanging out with my depressed mother, but if baking was going to help kick Mom out of her funk, I was up for it.

She stood up. “We’ll go to Whole Foods and get the stuff. Give me two minutes to get dressed.”

A half hour later, I was still waiting for her. I plopped down on the couch and picked up a copy of
People
with the actor Billy Barrett’s smile beaming out at me. “He’s
Rad and Righteous
, But Will the King of Hollywood Ever Find True Love?” the headline read. You couldn’t say that Billy Barrett was the flavor of the month. He was more the flavor of the last two years.

According to the article, Billy was a “combination of the Ryans (Reynolds and Gosling) and the Brads (Pitt and Cooper).” He did both comedy and action, and his new movie
Rad and Righteous
(an action comedy) had been number one at the box office for the last three weeks in a row. He wasn’t my type—for the most part I liked guys who were a bit nerdier in both looks and personality—but I could see the appeal. Every girl I knew thought he was super-hot. Including Maya (“Just because I’m into girls doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the gorgeousness that is Billy Barrett.”). If you took a poll at my school and asked which Hollywood actor most girls would like to lose their virginity to, he’d win by a landslide

“Mom, we’re going to the supermarket—not a premiere!” I yelled.

“Yes, but it’s Whole Foods, Bug,” she yelled back. “You never know who you’re going to run into there.”

She was right. You never knew.

Half an hour later, right there in the produce aisle, we saw Billy Barrett himself, staring at a pair of big boobs on a very thin, very flirty brunette who was helping him pick out artichokes.

“Eww. Gross,” I said out loud. Mom was busy being fawned over by an old couple who were telling her how no one in their retirement community missed a rerun of
Plus Zero
.

Suddenly, Mom stopped talking. “Is that . . . oh, my God . . . it is. It’s Billy Barrett.” She fluffed her hair. “I have to go say hello.”

I held her back. “Mom, you don’t even know him!”

“I know. But we’re both actors.” The only thing worse than one celebrity in a non-movie/TV-set public place was two of them. It was like there was this weird law-of-physics thing that kicked in: whenever two famous people were in the same room, they had to say hello to each other. She grabbed my hand. “Come with me.”

Before I could stop her, she had dragged me over with her. “Excuse me, Billy?” Mom said as the brunette stuck out her boobs a little more and did a hair flip. While her flip wasn’t as smooth as Mom’s, it was pretty good.

Please let him recognize her
, I thought as he turned around. Billy Barrett didn’t look like the type of guy who watched a mainstream 9:00 p.m. sitcom. He looked like the type of guy who was just getting up from an early- evening nap after a wild night of partying and preparing to go do it all again.

As he focused on her, a big smile appeared on his face. It wasn’t just his mouth that smiled—it was his eyes as well. In fact, if it was possible for a person’s nose and chin to smile, they were, too. He was cute. Like I-don’t-know-if-I’d-give-it-up-for-him-but-I’d-definitely-start-thinking-about-what-kind-of-birth-control-I’d-use-in-addition-to-condoms-if-I-did kind of cute.

“
Wow
. I can’t believe I’m standing in front of
Janie Jackson
,” he marveled. “That’s just . . .
wow.
” He turned to the brunette. “Isn’t it?” The action-hero deep voice that he used in interviews and on red carpets wasn’t there. He sounded . . . normal. Like some sort of Midwestern-churchgoing-star-quarterback guy. Which made sense, because according to the article I’d read, that’s exactly who he was.

The brunette looked less impressed than Billy. “I guess,” she said as she stuck her chest out even farther.

Mom did her patented smile-as-she-ran-a-hand-through-her-hair move. (It was such a trademark of hers that it was actually cited in one of those
How to Get a Guy and Keep Him
books as a flirting technique.) “You’re so sweet to say that,” she laughed.

I was confused. What, exactly, had he said?

“You know, I used to watch your show all the time my senior year.” Billy winked. “When I was supposed to be studying.”

Ouch. He may have been hot, but obviously he had not downloaded any sort of
How to Talk to Older Women Without Making Them Feel Old
e-book.

Mom’s smile flickered. “Well, thank you,” she said. “I appreciate that. I think.”

“Although now that I’m standing in front of you, it’s obvious that you were like,
twelve
, when you shot that,” he laughed.

His save made Mom turn the smile back up to full wattage.

“But seriously. You’re, like, an
idol
of mine,” he said. “Your comic timing in that show was
genius
.”

I cringed. Putting emphasis on words like that—that was definitely a kind of flirting, wasn’t it?

“You know, I did a guest role on
Two and a Half Men
,” he said, “so I know how tough sitcoms can be.”

That was, like, the nicest compliment Mom had gotten in the last few months, other than when the homeless guy we passed on Ocean Avenue a few nights earlier had told her she had killer knockers. “You’re so sweet to say that,” she said again.

The way his eyes kept drifting down toward those knockers, I wasn’t sure
sweet
was the word for Billy Barrett at that moment. According to the blogs, he was a bit of a commitmentphobe. He had an on-again, off-again thing with a screenwriter named Skye, who was known as much for her habit of dressing like a 1940s movie star as she was for her ironic indie comedies. Skye did not have a last name. Well, she did—Bernstein—but after being nominated for her second Academy Award, she decided to chuck it, and Hollywood decided to let her. She broke up with Billy every other week because of the photos that popped up with him
thisclose
to other girls, and then overshared about the whole thing on her blog and Twitter.

“And the fact that you just walked away from a hit series to pursue your art?” he asked Mom. Huh. Billy Barrett was a reader—at least of feature articles in
People
and
US Weekly
. “Talk about inspiring.”

Pursuing her art.
It hadn’t exactly panned out that way, seeing as how barely any offers for roles in any films had come in, let alone for ones in arty, indie films.

“Do you realize the guts it takes to do something like that?” He shook his head. “Wow.
Wow
.”

Okay, we were definitely in flirting territory. Why couldn’t we have run into him in Target instead of Whole Foods? At least if we were in Target, I could have excused myself and gone and bought some Play-Doh and ducked into the bathroom for a quick huff.

He grabbed her arm. “Do you know who Joseph Campbell is?” he asked, as if the fate of the universe hung on her answer to the question.

Mom gasped. “Omigod—I
love
Joseph Campbell!”

There was a book by this Campbell guy in Mom’s bathroom, which was where she did a lot of her self-help reading.

“Oh, me, too,” Billy said. “The makeup woman on my last movie gave me one of his books to read before I went to Costa Rica last year—we weren’t involved or anything, just friends,” he added quickly and a little guiltily. “I have to say, the dude just nailed it, you know? Totally blew me away.”