The Corner of Bitter and Sweet Read online

  “I’m not talking about the dresses!” I cried. “I’m talking about the fact that I canceled my plans to stay home to cheer you up and then you go ahead and totally bail without—”

  She stood up straight. “I do not need ‘cheering up,’” she said defensively. “Because people who need cheering up are people who are depressed, and I am not depressed.”

  “Yeah? Then who was that crying in your room until three o’clock in the morning every night this week?” I demanded.

  She stood up even straighter and smoothed her imaginary skirt, like some maid in one of those boring English movies that always won a bunch of Academy Awards. (“Just once I’d like to be offered one of those,” Mom was always saying. “I can look plain. I mean, I don’t prefer it, but it’s not like I wouldn’t do it for my art.”) “Okay, Annabelle, that’s enough,” she said, all serious. “We’ll have this conversation later, once you’ve calmed down.” She began to walk out but then turned. “And don’t worry about helping me pick out something to wear—I’ll figure it out myself.”

  If she had delivered that line in a TV show or movie, it would’ve gotten a laugh. But the thing was, she was serious.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon fighting. Or rather, I spent the rest of the afternoon huffing Play-Doh and trying to ignore her while she manufactured all these bogus questions to try to get me to start talking to her because she was too stubborn to apologize. At six, she click-clacked into the living room as I was going through one of my favorite photography blogs. It belonged to some guy in Iceland where he posted photos of really depressing stark settings that he then planted this mechanical smiling dog in. “Well, I’m off,” she said.

  Not ready to forgive her yet, I ignored her.

  “Do I look okay?”

  I sighed and looked up. I was never good at the silent treatment. Giving or getting it. In her peach-colored DVF and vintage Frye boots, you couldn’t tell that she had spent the last three days in bed watching bad TV while drinking vodka and eating peanut butter-filled pretzels. “You look fine,” I said grudgingly.

  “Fine or good?”

  “Good,” I replied.

  She smiled. “Thanks, Bug.”

  “But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Are you wearing Spanx?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, offended.

  “Oh.” I went back to Tumblr.

  “Do I need them?”

  I shrugged. “No.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see her glare at me before she stomped off.

  Not nice, true. But I couldn’t help it. It was bad enough how selfish Mom could be sometimes, but to be so clueless about how selfish she was being and expect me to just forgive her like that—that was the part that drove me nuts.

  A minute later she returned. “Better?”

  I looked over and nodded.

  She applied some of the Fiercely Fresh lipstick that had been named especially for her (a deep red called Jeweled Janie) to her already perfect lips before coming over and sitting down next to me. She smelled good. Agent Provocateur perfume. Warm and spicy and jasmine-y. Mom-ish.

  “Annabelle, I’m sorry,” she said softly, pulling me toward her. “I realize that was selfish of me to do that. I wasn’t thinking.”

  So she wasn’t that clueless. I tried not to, but I leaned into the smell and closed my eyes. That smell was Mom at her best. When she was happy and together and made me feel like she had everything under control. The way you should feel when you’re with a mom. At least I guessed so. I wasn’t sure because it didn’t happen that often.

  “It’s okay,” I sighed into her head.

  She let go of me. “You’re sure I look okay?”

  “Yes,” I said. Actually, some of her eyeliner had smeared, but I was still mad so I wasn’t going to point that out.

  She flashed her trademark Janie Jackson smile. “Great. I’m off then. The restaurant’s all the way in Malibu, so don’t wait up for me. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Two-drink limit!” I called after her.

  “Annabelle, don’t worry about me, okay?” she said in her best I’m-the-parent voice. “I’m the adult here. Not you.”

  In what universe?

  The lack of typos in her replies to my texts throughout the night was a good sign. Her spelling, which wasn’t great to begin with, got worse the more she drank. Around midnight, when she wrote that I would be happy to know that she had had only one glass of wine and was now drinking Pellegrino, I decided it was okay to go to sleep.

  A few hours later I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  “Annabelle,” a man’s voice said.

  I smiled. Even three-quarters asleep, I’d know that voice anywhere.

  “Annabelle, you have to wake up,” Ben said.

  I kept my eyes closed. Maybe Mom had had one of those movie moments where she had realized she was in love with him and she had gone to his house to tell him, and now they were waking me up because we were going to fly to Hawaii and they’d get married on the beach, like in some cheesy TV movie.

  “Annabelle, you have to get up and get dressed, okay? We have to go get your mother out of jail.”

  Hearing “get your mother out of jail” will wake you right up. I shot up in bed. “What are you talking about?”

  “DUI,” he said as he rummaged through my pile of clothes to be put away on the antique bench at the foot of the bed, those that I never actually got around to putting away. He grabbed a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and tossed them over to me.

  DUI stood for Driving Under the Influence. As in alcohol. So much for that two-drink maximum. Or the water that she swore she had switched to.

  “She was driving on the wrong side of the PCH.”

  At that I slid back down under the covers. This was not happening. The PCH was the Pacific Coast Highway, which ran along the ocean and was sometimes hard to drive on during the day. I screwed my eyes shut again and tried to go back to the Mom/Ben/me/Hawaii scenario while I waited for a “Just kidding!” from Ben. None came. I peeked out from under the covers. “Please tell me there were no paps around?” It was as much a prayer as a question. Paps were short for paparazzi, which was short for scum of the earth.

  “There were,” he sighed. “Annabelle, you need to get up. We need to go get her.”

  I pulled the covers over my head.

  After a few sniffs from a can of blue Play-Doh that I then shoved into my purse, I threw on my clothes and pulled a brush through my hair. (It wasn’t that I was vain, but things were bad enough without pictures of me looking as if I had just stuck my finger in an electrical socket making their way across the Internet.) During the drive over, I made a mental list of my favorite places in the world (the top of Fryman Canyon, the Marais in Paris, Palm Springs on a summer night). Ben, being Ben, tried to make me feel better by asking how my week had been; how I had done on my trig test; what new music I had heard on KCRW that he should be listening to so the assistants in his office wouldn’t think he was totally uncool. Leave it to him to try to act as if we were on our way to get ice cream rather than to bail my mother out of jail.

  Ben came into our life when I was eight. Mom met him because he was the entertainment attorney for the guy who lived in the apartment next door, this screenwriter named Scout Rosenstein (“It says Scott on my birth certificate, but that’s just so . . . common, you know?” he liked to tell me when he babysat me while Mom was out on auditions). Back then she didn’t have an agent or manager, so when she finally booked a voice-over gig for a deli-meat commercial, she needed someone to make the deal for her. Ben—who was not just a big-time attorney with big-time actor, writer, and director clients but also a vegetarian—wasn’t in the business of doing rinky-dink deals like that, but Scout convinced him to do it as a favor.

  As
Ben likes to tell it, he took Mom on as a client not because of her, but because of me. From the minute we met, in his office—Scout, who was away in Thailand rewriting a big action movie because the star decided on the first day of shooting that he couldn’t find his character’s motivation, couldn’t babysit me—we had this instant connection.

  As for him and Mom, not so much. In that first meeting, she launched into this whole thing about how she had just taken a workshop about abundance and manifestation. And the fact that she had drawn him into her life like this to jump-start her career was proof that the crystals she had bought with the money that should have gone toward the electric bill had obviously worked. I had grown up with this particular brand of insanity, so I was used to it. Ben is not a New Age-y kind of guy, so he just thought she was batshit crazy. And then, when he politely tried to tell her that while he was sure that her psychic was right when she had said that one day Mom would win an Academy Award, and while he was happy to do this one deal for her as a favor to Scout, he really wasn’t taking on new clients, she completely ignored him and went right on talking.

  My mother may have been crazy, but she was also charming, and you kind of couldn’t help getting swept up in her excitement. Which Ben did. Maybe it was because unlike all the unformed guys in Mom’s life—the pot-dealer-who-really-wanted-to-direct, the waiter-who-really-wanted-to-write, the personal-trainer-who-really-wanted-to-be-a-stunt-double-for-Johnny-Depp—Ben was solid. He didn’t just have a job, he had a career. And a house, which meant he didn’t have to crash at our place like the pot dealer did. And a car that was clean and didn’t smell like cigarette smoke or break down on Sunset Boulevard, like the waiter’s did. And instead of borrowing money from Mom like the personal trainer did (not that she had any to lend at the time, but she did anyway), Ben lent us some but never in a creepy way that made it seem as if he was doing it just so she’d go out with him.

  In fact, unlike most straight guys, he never hit on her. At the beginning, it was because he had just broken up with this screenwriter he had lived with for three years and “needed to grow my balls back after she had busted them into a million pieces.” (Overheard one night as the two of them hung out in the living room when I was supposed to be asleep. Instead, I was standing at my door with one ear to a glass listening to their conversation.) Then, after a while, when he had become family—to the point where Mom let him see her without her makeup on—the idea of them together seemed kind of creepy. Ben was the one who checked my math homework and listened to me practice my oral reports on such boring subjects as how the Grand Canyon came to be. (Mom said that as much as she loved me, listening to all those facts and figures gave her anxiety and was going to force her to take a Xanax.)

  And Ben was the one I called the first time Mom passed out so hard I couldn’t wake her up and I was terrified she was dead.

  Nothing happened between them. Perhaps because, with an undergraduate degree in Russian literature from Princeton and a law degree from Yale, he was really smart and therefore knew that his shelf life in Mom’s orbit would be longer if he used his brain when dealing with her instead of his penis. Until one night when I was thirteen. I had slept over at Maya’s that night, but the next night when Mom, Ben, and I went to King Fu for our weekly Sunday night Chinese dinner, the whole thing was Awkward-with-a-capital-A. So awkward that, right after the waiter put down our egg rolls and moo shu pork, I turned to them and asked, “Okay, what’s going on?” Mom, with her oversharing problem, blurted out the whole story. About how, the night before, after the season’s wrap party, Ben had been trying to make her feel better about her latest breakup, from this German director named Thaddeus (“I do not make movies—I make films!” he was always correcting me). And how one thing had led to another and before she knew it, they were kissing and then . . . At that point I put my hands over my ears so I wouldn’t have to listen—that’s how grossed out I was. Luckily, Ben reined her in, and she skipped to what she called the long and the short of it.

  “The long and the short of it, Annabelle,” she had announced as Ben stared at his eggroll as if it held all the secrets of the universe while I stared at my sneakers as if they were in there instead, “is that, after a very long and honest conversation, Ben and I have decided that what happened between us last night, while it was beautiful and loving”—that was really how my mother talked sometimes, like a Hallmark card—“is better off . . . fading into a memory instead of blossoming into a full-blown flower.” (A really cheesy Hallmark card.)

  At that I had cringed. Not so much because I was still thinking about the fact that she and Ben had done it but because I was realizing how corny she could sound when she came up with her own dialogue. I hoped for her sake that she wasn’t going to be one of those actresses who decided what she really wanted to do was write.

  She turned to Ben and smiled. “Right, Ben?”

  He paused before smiling back. “Right,” he replied. He didn’t look at me. But he didn’t need to. Because in the moment between the pause and his “Right,” I saw it all in his eyes. How much he loved her and how hurt he was by the fact that she didn’t love him back that way.

  Something changed after that night at King Fu. To anyone else, it probably wouldn’t have looked any different, but to someone whose report cards over the years were covered with comments like Annabelle is very perceptive of other people’s feelings—perhaps to a fault, as she tends to take them on sometimes, I picked up on it right away. Ben was still part of our lives—at my violin recitals, with the video camera because Mom was hopeless with anything that had more than one button; at birthday dinners; holidays; awards shows. When it was just the two of us—like during our Sunday outings—he was still the same Ben, giving me his full attention. But whenever Mom was around, I could see how at some point it was like a part of him got up and left the room. Maybe because it made it hurt a little less. After a while, it just became this unspoken thing that we lived with—the idea that Ben loved Mom, but Mom didn’t love Ben “like that,” and as long as no one (i.e., me) brought it up, we could keep pretending it wasn’t there.

  We got to the Santa Monica Police Department to find a swarm of paps waiting outside. You could always tell them from regular people: they were the ones chain-smoking and knocking back Red Bulls with pissed-off expressions on their faces as if they still hadn’t gotten over the fact that they had been chosen last for volleyball in gym class in fifth grade, and that’s why they had devoted their lives to making other people’s lives hell. When they got a look at Ben’s shiny BMW 750, they came to attention like soldiers. Well, if soldiers were doughy and in serious need of some sun and vegetables.

  “Annabelle,” he said, putting his hand on my arm as I started to open the door.

  I turned. “Yeah?” My voice sounded garbled and far away, as if it were coming via an underwater speaker in a very deep pool.

  “It’s going to be okay. I promise.”

  Although Ben was pretty much the only person I knew who consistently made good on his promises, it was hard to believe him on this one. “Sure,” I replied rather unsurely.

  Something about the way he squeezed my arm made my eyes fill with tears, which I quickly put a stop to by biting the inside of my lip. I knew if I let myself start crying, there was a chance I might not stop. As I opened the car door I was gunned down by the click-click-click of their cameras. Growing up with a famous mom meant that I had perfected my blank stare when it came to this stuff years ago. It was just the right amount of I’m-just-going-to-ignore-you without being too bitchy and verging into you-guys-are-the-scum-of-the-earth territory. (Which they were. One time one tried to get into the examining room when Mom was having her gynecological checkup.)

  “Annabelle! Over here!”

  “Annabelle, how does it feel to have to come bail your mom out of jail in the middle of the night?”

  “Annabelle, do you think this is because her ca
reer has totally tanked since she left the show, or was she always a lush?”

  Okay, that was just wrong. As much as I tried to follow my Thou shalt not look paps in the eye mantra, I turned to see which one had asked that last question. Just in time to see Ben pull up all five feet eleven of himself as if he was going to take a swing at the guy.

  Despite the fact that he drove a fancy car and lived in a million-dollar, famous-architect-designed house, Ben was a hippie at heart. He was Buddhist Lite and not into violence, but when people said mean things about Mom, something kicked in and he got all macho. “Just ignore them,” I murmured, pushing our way through the crowd. He settled down, and we walked through the doors of the police station.

  Each flash of the paps’ cameras was a reminder that the truth about my mother—the one that I had tried so hard to hide—was about to become public.

  I was about to go back to the bathroom for another round of Play-Doh huffing a while later when a thirtyish woman with blonde cornrows wearing a leopard-print halter top smiled at me. She would have been pretty if it weren’t for the pockmarks on her face. And if she got her chipped tooth fixed. And if she lost the black liquid eyeliner. But she did have a nice nose.

  “Cute top,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I replied. “I, uh, like yours, too.” It wasn’t really my style, but it felt like the right thing to say during a chat in the waiting room of a police station while talking to a woman who may or may not have been a hooker.

  She smiled big, showing a few more chipped teeth. “Yeah? I got it at Marshalls. In Chatsworth. I only got it, like, a few weeks ago, so there might be some left.”

  Chatsworth was deep in the San Fernando Valley. It was also the capital of the porn industry, a fact I had heard on the news the other night. “Great. I’ll try and swing by there and pick one up,” I replied, probably a little too enthusiastically.

  She leaned in closer to me. As she did, I saw that she had a tattoo of a pentagram on the back of her right shoulder. Maybe she wasn’t a hooker but a witch. “Personally, I like T.J. Maxx a lot better, but what are you gonna do, right? I mean, every single Marshalls—they all have this . . . smell.”