The Corner of Bitter and Sweet Read online

  “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.

  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 p
eople 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.”