The Corner of Bitter and Sweet Page 5

  “I know what you mean,” I agreed. Actually, I didn’t, but I was hoping that if I agreed with her she’d go back to her People so I could start surfing the top gossip sites to see what they were saying about Mom’s arrest. After she didn’t say anything for what seemed like a safe amount of time, I went back to my iPhone.

  “Like a hospital, right?”

  I looked up again. “Huh?”

  “All the Marshalls. They smell like hospitals,” she replied. “Or old age homes. But not T.J. Maxx. They smell like . . . one of those scented candles.”

  I couldn’t believe I was having a conversation about the smell of different discount-clothing stores at five o’clock in the morning while the guy I wished was my father bailed my mother out of jail. Although that would definitely win me some sort of Most Original Facebook Status Update award.

  As she put her People into her purse and settled back in her chair, I knew I was in trouble. “So who you here to get?” she asked. “Boyfriend?”

  As I shook my head, the sleeping guy let out another snore and some more drool.

  “That’s who I’m here to get,” she said. “Actually, he’s my fiancé. We haven’t gotten around to getting the ring yet, but we’re going to. They’re just so expensive, right?”

  I nodded. As much as I was dying to know why the fiancé had been arrested, I didn’t dare ask, afraid it would be a very long answer.

  She pointed at Ben at the window, who, after signing a bunch of forms, was now on the phone. “That your dad?”

  I shook my head.

  “Oh. So he’s your boyfriend.”

  Okay, I was definitely not in Kansas anymore. Ben was twenty years older than I was. In L.A. you saw that a lot but not with, like, teenagers. “Uh, no. I’m here for my—”

  Before I could finish, the door opened, and Mom came click-clacking out. Her steps were a little more wobbly than usual, but she still walked better in heels drunk than most people did sober. Her hair was a bit mussed up, her blue eyes were a little bloodshot, and her eyeliner was smeared, but other than that she looked fine.

  “Omigod—that lady looks just like that actress!” my new friend gasped. “The one who used to be really famous! From that TV show . . . the Friends rip-off . . . what’s it called?”

  “Plus Zero,” the African American woman offered.

  The cornrowed T.J. Maxx fan nodded. “Right. Right.”

  When Mom saw me, she slowed, and her flawless posture—the posture she had perfected by doing the old-school-walking-with-a-book-on-her-head—disappeared. Her shoulders slumped, her face bloomed with sadness and regret and guilt and all the other stuff that I sometimes saw on it when she hadn’t closed her bedroom door entirely at night and I peeked through the crack. Or when she was standing at the sliding glass door that led to the backyard, staring out at the pool as she smoked a cigarette and blew the smoke outside, because in her mind, if she did that, she wasn’t really smoking.

  It sounded warped, but it actually made me happy to see my mother like that. Not because I wanted her to be miserable, but because it was honest and true and not an act. The times I loved Mom best were when she wasn’t overly happy or overly beautiful. I loved her when she was human, because it made me feel as if it was okay for me to be human, too.

  But then, in a split second, she put her (former) superstar face back on, threw her shoulders back, and continued click-clacking toward me. When she reached me she pulled me into a hug.

  “Omigod, it is her!” I heard the woman gasp.

  “Yup. You’re right. I recognize the walk,” the now-awake Hispanic hottie agreed.

  “Oh, Bug. I guess I kind of screwed up, huh?” she said into my ear.

  Kind of? “I don’t know, Mom. You think?” I said, unable to keep the anger out of my voice.

  I felt her stiffen. “You don’t have to be so hostile,” she said, hurt.

  Before I could reply, I heard the familiar click of an iPhone camera.

  With the money she could get selling that to one of the tabloids, my new friend would be able to buy everything in T.J. Maxx.

  As the two of us let go of each other, Mom ran a hand through her hair. “You don’t have a mirror by any chance, do you?” she asked me.

  “Are you serious?”

  “I’m a huge fan,” the cornrowed woman gushed to Mom.

  Mom smiled big. “Oh, that’s so sweet! Thank you so much!”

  “Do you think I could get a picture with you?” she asked. “’Cause no one’s gonna believe me when I tell them I met you.”

  “I don’t see why not,” Mom said.

  Ben and I looked at each other. Maybe on a normal day the fact that Mom was posing for pictures with fans in the middle of a police station at 5:00 a.m. after having been arrested would have seemed completely insane, but because this wasn’t a normal day, it just seemed par for the course.

  The woman handed the phone to Ben. “Would you mind?”

  As Mom posed, I plopped down on the chair and did a Google search of her name to see what came up.

  I cringed when I saw the first result. “Oh, no.”

  Ben looked over. “What is it?”

  “Simon,” I sighed. Simon was Simon Sweet, a blogger whose real name was Edwin Machado. Despite the fact that he was only twenty-eight, Simon had almost as much filler in his cheeks as Mom did. Who would’ve thought that not answering some dorky fan’s e-mail with his request for an autograph all those years ago would have resulted in his remade self gleefully dragging Mom through the mud of cyberspace after her life imploded? Apparently, Simon was not great at letting things go because whenever he could write something snarky about Mom or print unflattering photos, he did.

  Mom took her arm away from the woman’s shoulder and reached for my iPhone. “Give me that.” She held the screen up close to her face. “What . . . ? She squinted. “I can’t see this without my glasses,” she said as she handed it back to me. “Can you read it to me, Bug?”

  I looked at it and cringed. “How about if I read it to you in the car?”

  “No, I want to hear it now.”

  “Mom, I don’t think this is—”

  “Annabelle. Read it.”

  I sighed. “Okay. ‘SIMON SEZZ. . . . What former sitcom queen who hasn’t been able to get arrested finally did . . . driving the wrong way on the PCH at two a.m.? According to the police report, Ms. Washed Up and Has Been drank a little too much vino. . . . like, say, three times the legal limit. And from the mug shots that are about to be released, it appears that someone’s been skimping on the highlights.’”

  Mom was so mad some lines popped up on her forehead, which, given the amount of Botox that had built up over the years, was close to a miracle. “First of all? It was not two a.m.—it was three. And I was drinking vodka, not wine. And I was only two-point-nine-eight times over the legal limit.”

  “I don’t know what that Simon person is smoking, talking trash about your hair,” the cornrowed woman said. “’Cause I think it looks great.”

  “Thank you,” Mom said.

  She had been trying to get it done for about a month, but ever since Miki, her hairdresser, had gotten his own show on Bravo, he was now more famous than she was and had trouble fitting her in even though she had been his first celebrity client.

  Ben walked over to the door and peered outside. “Janie, we need to go. There’s a ton of paps out there.”

  She turned to the woman. “You wouldn’t happen to have a mirror, would you?”

  I grabbed Mom’s arm. “Mom, come on.”

  “Okay, okay.” She looked me over and pulled out a lipstick from her bag. “Bug, you look pale. Just put a bit of this on, will you?”

  “You’re insane,” I said, shaking my head as I pulled her toward the entrance.

  “You ready?” Ben asked me before he open
ed the door.

  “Do we have a choice?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then, sure. Why not?” I replied.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I spent my sixteenth birthday in rehab.

  Well, visiting Mom in rehab. She hadn’t wanted to go (“Rehab is for people who have a serious drinking or drug problem,” she kept saying. “Not someone like me who has a drink once in a while to unwind.”) Ben, her agent Carrie, and her publicist Jared thought it was a good idea. (“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Jared said during the Team Janie meeting at our house the morning after the arrest, “but I’m thinking we might be able to get you a book deal for a memoir out of this. Or at least a column in Oprah’s magazine.”)

  So two days, countless snarky blog posts underneath Mom’s mug shot, and a very unflattering photo of me taken by the T.J. Maxx lady making the rounds on the Internet later, Ben arranged for Esme, our housekeeper, to stay with me during Mom’s time away, and he drove her down to Oasis, a “full-care facility for the recovery of mind, body, and spirit” (read: fancy way to say rehab). He took her when I was at school. More specifically, while I sat in class trying to focus on the trig quiz in front of me. Fully aware that no one else in class was focusing because they were sneaking looks at me to see if I’d end up losing it like Lara Newberry (the Daughter Of a stand-up-comedian-turned-movie-star) had the day after her mother had been shipped off there. (“All I can tell you is when you go for Family Weekend,” she told me in the bathroom, “make sure you go hungry, because the food in the dining hall there is awesome. Totally organic. And because alcoholics crave sugar when they’re detoxing, the dessert and snack selection is super-great.”)

  I may have looked as if I was keeping it together on the outside, but inside was a different story. That following Wednesday, before joining my friends in the cafeteria, I stopped in the bathroom. Luckily, I was close to the nice one—the one that they had just redone over spring break so that it no longer smelled all vomit-y. (Private school for girls = beaucoup de bulimia.) Once in, I went to the handicapped stall and managed to plop down on the toilet and grab on to the metal rail before my heart started to pound so hard it felt as if it was going to come through my throat.

  “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 unpopular, no one would be mistaking us as characters on Girls anytime soon.