The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (7 page)

“It’s not a heart attack,” Madame Jennings, the school nurse, had said two days earlier, on Monday afternoon when I got Mademoiselle Burton to let me out of history class to go see her.

“How do you know?” I asked doubtfully. Ever since a school nurse had told me my foot was fine the day I fell off the balance beam in third grade and then it had turned out to be broken, I tended to question their expertise.

“Because it’s a panic attack.”

I shook my head. “No, it’s not. I don’t get panic attacks.”

She shrugged. “Well, now you do,” she said curtly, as she opened up a carton of tongue dispensers and put them in a jar. “Welcome to the club.”

I wondered if being a school nurse was like being a gym teacher. Kind of a those-who-can’t-get-a-job-in-a-real-hospital-because-they’re-missing-a-sensitivity-chip-end-up-in-a-school-arranging-wooden-Popsicle-stick-looking-thingies situation.

“You really think it’s a panic attack?” I asked as I put my hand on my chest. It was as if behind my back my heart had gone to 7-Eleven and chugged a six-pack of Red Bulls.

“Yes,” she grunted, not even looking up.

She was worse than a lunch lady. I guessed the fact that she sounded so bored should have made me feel less anxious, because obviously in her mind I wasn’t going to die, but it was actually making me feel more so. “So what am I supposed to do about it?”

“Breathing helps.”

“But that’s part of the problem. I can’t breathe.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. I suggest having your mother make an appointment with your primary-care physician.”

I would have, had my mother not been busy doing something called “equine therapy,” where you got in touch with your inner child while brushing a horse. Something I learned in an e-mail she sent from the BlackBerry that belonged to one of the chefs who was a big
Plus Zero
fan and had lent it to her even though it was technically against the rules for the rehabbers to have contact with the outside world.

Even though a Google search later showed that I had six of the eight most common symptoms of panic attacks, I continued to insist that wasn’t what was going on with me. Mostly because there had to be at least one person in the family who was keeping it together. Esme, who was like a second mother to me, wasn’t handling things very well. Ever since Mom had left, she spent most of her time crying and praying for Mom’s soul while I patted her on the shoulder and handed her tissues.

Even the Play-Doh wasn’t helping. The only time I seemed to be completely free of the anxiety was when I was standing in a very hot shower, which had left me with perpetually pruned fingers.

Sitting in the girls bathroom, I took a lot of deep breaths and was finally able to calm myself down enough to sit through lunch. I joined my friends at the table with a very L.A.-approved brown rice, veggies, and tofu bowl. “Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

Olivia reached out and put a Cotton Candy–polished hand on my shoulder as I sat next to her. “How are you doing?” she asked quietly, as if she worked at a funeral home.

“Yeah. How are you doing?” Sarah echoed. Sarah was big on echoing whatever Olivia said. The thing was, she lacked Olivia’s smoothness, so when she said it, it was a little too loud, to the point where a group of Sylvia Plath–loving depressives at the next table glanced over, excited to see who else was having a hard time.

I shrugged. “Turns out a parent in rehab does not get you excused from trig pop quizzes.”

“Mrs. Tashlick’s such a bi-atch, I bet she would’ve made you take it even if it had been an attempted OD situation,” Maya said, shoveling fries into her mouth.

As warped as that was, I had to laugh. A lot of people found the fact that Maya was missing a filter between her brain and mouth a little off-putting, but that was one of the things I loved most about her. Along with the fact that she had recently chopped off her long blonde hair into a short bob and died it jet black, “just because.”

Olivia flinched as Maya shoved three fries at once into her mouth. Up until last summer Olivia had considered fries a major food group herself, and had had the butt to prove it. Four weeks at fat camp and one eating disorder later, she existed on steamed veggies with a dollop of sriracha sauce for almost every meal, and the butt was a thing of the past. As was her previously frizzy brown hair—now it was blonde and keratin straight.

“Has Billy Barrett tweeted about it?” she asked.

The vein on the side of my forehead that had been pulsing on and off ever since picking Mom up at the police station started up again with a vengeance. “Why would he do that?” I had made the mistake of telling them about meeting him in Whole Foods, and now they wouldn’t drop it.

She shrugged as she dipped a piece of broccoli in the sriracha and began to nibble at it. “Because they’re now friends because of Whole Foods.”

“Yeah. The Whole Foods thing,” Sarah agreed as a glop of her tuna fish sandwich ended up on her shirt on its way to her mouth. With her frizzy red hair and freckles, she looked like the L.A. version of Pippi Longstocking. “Celebrities always tweet about other celebrities when they die and stuff like that. Not that, you know, your mom is
dead
,” she began to backpedal. “What I mean is that they tweet when some crazy drama that’s all over TMZ happens.”

“Nice, Sarah,” Maya hissed as she grabbed one of her sweet-potato chips.

“What?” Sarah hissed back, moving her chips closer to her.

“Way to take her mind off it.”

“No, he hasn’t tweeted about it,” I replied. “Because they’re not friends. They talked for two seconds.”

“And he gave her his number and e-mail,” Olivia added.

“And he gave her his number and e-mail,” I agreed. “Which she won’t be using because in light of everything that’s going on, hooking up with some actor—who, by the way, has a girlfriend—is the last thing on her mind.” At least I prayed it was. Not to mention I had managed to snag the receipt from her bag after we had gotten home from the market that day and tuck it away in my sock drawer.

As I managed to change the subject to the guy from Harvard-Westlake whom Olivia had met at the Crossroads party over the weekend, I flashed on a photo that I kept on one of my nightstands of the four of us. It had been taken two years ago, at the Oscar party Mom threw every year at the house. Her parties were almost as famous as the post-Oscar
Vanity Fair
party. In the photo, we’re all crowded together, me in the middle, holding us all together, which was essentially how it had been since the four of us became friends back in seventh grade. When there were fights, I was the one who played Oprah and got everyone to make up. I was the one who decided what we’d do for our birthdays. I was the one who made a yearly scrapbook and gave them out to everyone on the last day of school.

Because it was just Mom and me—no siblings or even cousins—these guys weren’t just my friends. They were my sisters.

Having a famous mom definitely raises your stock in terms of popularity, and sure, I had been invited to hang out with the super-popular girls—shopping, sleepovers . . . you name it. One spring break, Yancy Shapiro had even invited me to go to Hawaii with her and her family. But I just wasn’t popular-girl material. I wanted to hang out with Maya and Olivia and Sarah. Like me, they were a little off. Maya had the whole IDI (inappropriate disclosure of information) thing going on. Olivia liked to eat her feelings, after dipping them in hot sauce. And Sarah was a hypochondriac who had a symptom-navigator app so she could try to diagnose all the diseases she was sure she had. While we weren’t
un
popular, no one would be mistaking us as characters on
Girls
anytime soon.

“So are you still up for Arcade Fire next weekend?” Olivia asked. Because her father was the head of the television department at one of the big talent agencies, he was always able to get us tickets to concerts. Or, rather, his assistant did.

“It’s, uh, Family Weekend at the . . . thing,” I replied. I still couldn’t bring myself to say
rehab
. In fact, the night before, as I lay in bed unable to sleep, I had made a list of synonyms for it—such as
wellness center, health spa, place people go after they fuck up royally
.

“Can Jade have her ticket then?” Maya asked. “She loves them.”

Olivia and Sarah exchanged a quick look. Jade was Maya’s new girlfriend. With their matching black bobs, they sometimes looked like twins, which was a little weird.

“Actually,” Olivia said, “so does Parker. I think we should ask her.” Parker was Parker Wren, sister of an actress who, in addition to supposedly going out with Ryan Gosling a few times, had just snagged a role in Wes Anderson’s new film, a combination that gave Parker official Sister Of status. Olivia put her hand on my arm again. “We’ll miss you.”

“Yeah. Totally,” Sarah agreed. “Some other time.”

“Yeah. Of course. Another time,” I said. Although it made me feel like the world’s worst daughter, I hated my mother at that moment.

The only place where my mother had good timing was in front of the camera. Other than that, it sucked (see: getting knocked up by almost total stranger), so it made sense that the two weeks following her arrest were super-slow on the gossip front. Not one celebrity (a) announced he or she was gay; (b) got caught cheating via cellphone pictures; or (c) got into a public brawl with the ex of a current boyfriend or girlfriend. Which meant that for the first time since she announced she was leaving
Plus Zero
, Mom—and, by default, I—were in the news again.

There were pictures of me on the blogs walking into school with captions like “Devastated by Her Mother’s Breakdown, a Distraught Annabelle Jackson Attempts to Trudge Through the Day!!!” (Actually, on that particular day, I was not distraught. I was exhausted because I had stayed up until two o’clock in the morning watching
The Way We Were
and crying, not just because it always made me cry but because it was Mom’s and my favorite movie to watch together.) And me outside Whole Foods chugging down a smoothie with the caption “It May Look Healthy, But What’s Really in That Smoothie? Is Annabelle Jackson Going Down the Same Road of Destruction as Her Mother???”

That one bugged me, mostly because it was never going to happen. Maybe it was because Mom was a poster child for how annoying drunk people could be, or because vomiting wasn’t on my list of fun ways to spend my time, but the one and only time I had gotten wasted had been enough for me. Every time I came close to throwing up, I found myself overcome with the fear that I wouldn’t be able to get to the toilet in time, which would then render me immobile, and so I ended up hurling wherever I happened to be. Which, in that case, happened to be on a very expensive sofa at this girl Sparrow’s house. I already felt out of control enough. I didn’t need alcohol to feel even more out of control and then have a headache to boot.

Although as I pulled into my driveway on my bike post–Whole Foods smoothie pap attack, I kind of wished I could just walk into the house and pull out the bottle of whiskey I knew was stashed in the head of the giant Ganesha statue on the patio and drink until I passed out. (Although Ganesha was the Indian god who was the remover of obstacles, obviously, he—like the fountain—wasn’t operating on all cylinders.) To be able to shut off my head for a few hours. Or at least turn the volume down on the running commentary about how Mom’s arrest was just the beginning, things were going to get worse, and somehow (even though I wasn’t quite sure how) this was all my fault. Like if I had been a better daughter, watched her more, and told Ben how bad things really had gotten with the drinking and pills, then I could have stopped it. If a drink (or five) would’ve done that, then I totally would’ve poured myself one. But I knew that the half hour (or five minutes) of peace I would’ve gotten would’ve then been followed by even worse fear and worry and regret. Plus, because I would be drunk, it would take that much longer to get back to a state of mind where I could then do something about it. Or at least
think
I could do something about it.

Esme was at her book club, and even though the sun was just starting to go down, she had put every light in the house on because she thought it made it a happier place. But when I walked in, there was nothing happy about it. If anything, the space and quiet I found myself standing in the middle of brought all the anxiety that I had been pushing down since Mom left bursting to the surface.

If I had been Olivia—or at least the old Olivia—I would’ve gone to the kitchen and started stuffing my face with any carb that wasn’t nailed down. Instead, I went straight to my bedroom. Out of habit I locked my door, even though I was the only one there. I went to my closet and took out the pillowcase on the left-hand corner of the floor. As I brought it to my bed and turned it over, four cans of Play-Doh, two Barbies, a Skipper, and a Ken (maybe it was the lack of hair, but none of the Ken heads gave off that rubbery smell that I loved so much) came tumbling out. Followed by some assorted random Colorforms, their smell long gone, that I couldn’t bring myself to throw out because they reminded me of the West Hollywood apartment and a time when Mom was happy and hopeful and had a glass of wine only on very special occasions.

Picking up the red can, I popped the top off and brought it to my nose, closing my eyes as I inhaled deeply. I counted to five as I held it in my lungs, waiting for the familiar feeling of safety to wash over me, like when I wrapped myself in the blanket that Esme had crocheted for me, but nothing happened. It didn’t happen when I tried the yellow can, or even the blue one. Or with any of the Barbie heads. Instead, my heart beat faster as yet another anxiety attack kicked in.

Nothing was working.

Feeling even more anxious and uncomfortable than before, I went over to my desk and took my Nikon out of its case and walked into Mom’s bedroom. Back when we still lived in West Hollywood, she’d go through decorating magazines and tear out photos of bedrooms she loved, talking about how one day her bedroom would be in a magazine. And it had been. A bunch of times. Even though she’d been in rehab for a week her smell was still there—the musky smell of her Agent Provocateur perfume mixed with the tart citrus and sweet gardenia of the different body lotions that were scattered around the room. (“Let me tell you something, Annabelle,” she liked to say. “Sure, dental hygiene is important, but soft supple skin? Just as important, if not more so. I mean, if need be, you can
buy
new teeth, you know?”) I half expected her to come strolling out of her walk-in closet, wearing only her underwear. Even though it drove me nuts when she did that. (“Sweetie, the human body is a beautiful work of art,” she’d always say when I tried to convince her to put clothes on. “Especially before things start sagging.”) I would have done anything for her to do that right then.