The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (14 page)

“Again,” said Alice, Ben’s date. When he had called the night before to ask if it was okay if he brought Alice to the party—this D-girl he had been out with a few times—I felt a twinge in my stomach. It was one thing to take someone to dinner, or to foreign movies with subtitles at the Nuart, but bringing someone to an awards party meant something. Even if it wasn’t the Oscars and was being held in what looked like the set of
Hoarders
, with the smell of
khoresht-e fesenjan
—lamb stew—coming in through the windows. Secretly, I had hoped that Ben bringing a date would freak Mom out and finally make her realize that he wasn’t going to sit around forever waiting for her—but all she had said was, “Absolutely! The more the merrier! And would you be a total love and pick up some coconut cupcakes at Joan’s on Third?”

I was all set to not like Alice. D-girls—“development girls,” aka women who spent their days tracking scripts that might go on to sell for a million of dollars—had a reputation for being super-annoying. Like grown-up sorority girls. But Alice was different. Maybe it was because she had a fab English accent. Or the fact that she was wearing a long tweed skirt with Doc Martens boots and a black lace shirt with cap sleeves, through which I could see a yin and yang tattoo on the back of her right shoulder. Or how, as she handed me the box of cupcakes, she said, “You’re lucky I didn’t inhale all of these during the drive over, because while I’ve been able to swear off ciggies, I will never be able to turn down a cupcake.”

Or maybe because when the commercial for Billy’s movie played, she paused in her conversation with Carrie, glanced at the screen, rolled her eyes, and said, “You can’t swing a cat in this town without seeing that bloke’s abs on a TV screen or billboard.” Then patted Ben’s abs and said, “Good thing I’m not into that kind of stuff.”

“Whose abs?” Mom called from the kitchen.

Because Mom spent so much time worrying about
her
abs (we had owned every infomercial-advertised ab buster/shaper/zapper on the market before we sold them at our garage—or, as Mom insisted on calling it, “estate”—sale the weekend before we moved), it made sense that Mom would perk up at the word.

“Billy Barrett’s,” Ben yelled back. The pre-show resumed, and there were Billy and Skye walking the red carpet. If the MTV Movie Awards were prom, Billy and Skye would definitely be crowned king and queen. With her jet-black bob, ruby-red lips, kohl-lined eyes, and six-inch stilettos, she’d probably also win Most Likely to Have Slept with the Entire Football
and
Debate Team.

Mom
click-clacked
into the room just as there was a close-up of Billy giving one of the interviewers a bro hug. “See, Annabelle? I told you.”

“Told her what?” Ben asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

I watched as Alice took his hand. He didn’t let go. In fact, I could see him squeeze hers, which made me both happy and sad in the same moment. Ben deserved to be happy. I just wished he could have been happy with us.

Carrie looked up from her BlackBerry and brushed her Brazilian blown-out brown hair back from her eyes. When she signed Mom ten years ago—still an assistant, without an office—her hair had been super-curly, and she had worn these shapeless dresses she got at Loehmann’s. Now, at only thirty-three, she was the head of the motion-picture talent department at one of the biggest agencies in town and had a standing appointment every Monday at the hottest hair salon in Beverly Hills. Although she was looking at us, her fingers continued typing away. “I just read the script for his next movie this morning,” she said. “It’s amazing.”

“That
Hope Is the Thing with Feathers
thing?” Alice asked. “You’re right. Unless he royally screws up, he might get an Oscar nomination out of it.”

“What’s it about?” Mom asked.

“It’s about this townie in a small town in upstate New York—think Matt Damon in
Good Will Hunting
,” Carrie replied. “He ends up falling in love with a female professor in her early forties who specializes in Emily Dickinson—think sexy librarian type—who’s fifteen years older than him and a recovering alcoholic. Kind of a reverse
My Fair Lady
, in that she’s the one who educates him.” With a quick glance at her BlackBerry, her fingers began to fly again. “Except then she’s diagnosed with cancer. But before she dies, he smuggles her out of the hospital and takes her to Emily Dickinson’s house, where they sit outside and he swears his undying love to her before she dies in his arms. Think
Terms of Endearment
, but with sex instead of the mother/daughter relationship.”

“Terms of Endearment?!”
Mom turned to me. “Bug, did you hear that?”

She turned to the group. “Annabelle wasn’t exactly . . . planned,” she explained. “And I had scheduled a procedure at Planned Parenthood, but the night before I was supposed to go
Terms of Endearment
was on cable, and I took that as a sign that I was supposed to cancel the appointment. I didn’t realize it, but even back then I had a connection with a power greater than myself.”

Alice glanced at Ben, who gave her a what-can-I-tell-you shrug. “Well.
That
was a good thing,” she said brightly.

“Your mom’s awesome,” Walter whispered to me as he grabbed a handful of the chocolate-covered espresso beans Carrie had brought, which were probably a regift.

“Yeah. In a completely inappropriate way,” I whispered back.

“Who’s playing the woman?” Mom asked.

“They haven’t cast her yet,” Carrie replied. “Sandy was supposed to do it, but she dropped out.” The bigger the star, the less need there is to mention a last name. Which is why in Hollywood, everyone knew “Sandy” was Sandra Bullock.

Maybe there
was
something to this coincidence stuff. I wasn’t into fate—I left that stuff to Mom—but between the Billy thing, and the fact that the lead character was the same age as Mom and a recovering alcoholic, the whole thing just kind of smacked of it.

I felt goose bumps pop up on my arms. “This could be the one,” I blurted out.

Carrie turned to me. “The one what?”

“The one that’ll get Mom back in the game.”

Agents don’t like it when you fill a client’s head with visions of fame and fortune. Especially when you do it in front of them, which means they have to do damage control in the moment.

“I know it
sounds
great,” said Carrie, “but Janie, I’m not sure it’s for you.”

“What are you talking about?! It couldn’t be
more
for me!” Mom countered.

“She’s not wrong,” agreed Ben. Which was surprising. Ever since things fell apart, Ben had been dropping hints that maybe Mom might want to look into another line of work. Like maybe get her certification to be a yoga teacher. (“You do it all the time anyway,” he’d said, “so why not get paid for it?”)

“I could definitely see you in the role,” Alice added. “I’d probably be thrown in D-girl jail for this, but I see you even more than Sandy.”

I smiled. Yeah, kind of hard to hate her.

“I agree,” Walter said. “It’s hard for girls to do action movies, but she was great in
Speed
. But then she had to start doing stupid romantic comedies. Sandra Bullock should do more action.”

While totally off point, Walter seemed to be in the supportive zip code, which I appreciated.

Mom turned to Carrie. “I don’t understand why you’re so against this.”

“It’s not that I’m against it”—Carrie said, not looking Mom in the eye—”’it’s just that they’re very close to making an offer to someone.”

“Who?”

“I think I heard it was . . . Carey Mulligan.”

“Carey Mulligan is, like,
twenty-five
,” I said.

“She’s younger, but she plays older,” Carrie said. “Plus, you know, she’s
Carey
. And she’s English. That English thing alone makes her able to do anything.”

“Well, I bet if I could just meet on it—” Mom said.

“Janie,” Carrie interrupted, “here’s the thing. . . .” At that moment Carrie didn’t look like one of
Hollywood Reporter
’s 50 Most Powerful Women, as she had been named a few weeks earlier. She looked like someone who felt awful about the fact that what she was about to say was going to hurt someone who had remained her loyal client for many years, even when bigger, more established agents had tried to steal her away. Or—worse yet—she looked like someone who knew she was about to hurt a friend. “There’s no way it’s going to happen,” she said quietly.

As I watched Mom’s face begin to fall, I felt my heart crack.

“Janie, believe me, no one knows more than me how perfect this would be for you,” Carrie pleaded. “In fact, I put in a call to the casting director twenty minutes into reading the script, to try and get you in to read, but she was very clear about it: they want a name.”

“But she is a name,” I said. “Everyone knows who she is.” Maybe nowadays they knew it because the tabloids printed really unflattering photos of her all sweaty after yoga, with captions like “Has Janie Jackson Gone off the Wagon Because of the Stress of Losing All Her Money???!!!” But still—in Hollywood, publicity was publicity.

Mom stood up and smoothed her dress. “Annabelle, it’s okay. I get it.”

“Janie, I’m so sorry,” Carrie said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Mom said, squeezing Carrie’s hand. “I appreciate your trying.”

None of us looked at one another as we listened to Mom make her way toward her room, this time with a sad-sack-sounding shuffle rather than her optimistic
click-clacking
. Instead, we all stared at the floor.

But in my mind I was totally giving God the finger.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I didn’t completely believe that my giving God the finger had anything to do with Mom falling into a ginormous depression about the fact that, from here on out, our groceries would be bought with money made from dog-food and feminine-product voice-overs. (“Listen, I may not be able to get her in to read for the Billy Barrett movie, but I do have some really good news,” Carrie said after Mom left the room. “I think I may have gotten her a gig as the new voice of Tampax!”) But it probably didn’t help.

“Hey, God?” I whispered as I took out my key to open the door that Tuesday after school. The day had started out bad (woke up to a photo on one of the gossip blogs of me walking out of Om My Gawd with what looks like three chins and the caption “Janie Jackson’s Daughter Turns to Food to Deal with the Stress of Her Mother Going Bankrupt!!!”). And it got worse when I happened to find out while hiding out in the bathroom during a panic attack that, other than Kristin Farelli, who spent most of her time alone writing poetry about the moon and menstrual blood, I was the only one in my class not invited to Sharona Kline’s Sweet Sixteen. Which hurt even worse, seeing that back when we were thirteen and no one liked Sharona because she smelled like a combination of mothballs and Lysol, I made sure to invite her to all my parties. (I had to take two huffs of Play-Doh after that.) “I have a proposition for you,” I went on. “If I open this door and Mom’s out of bed and showered and dressed in something other than those flannel cat pajamas, I will go back to another one of those Alateen meetings.”

The night before, as I lay in bed listening to the muffled sound of her crying, I had come to the conclusion that, if I were just a better person—a person who tried to be good and didn’t think mean thoughts about other people, like, say, the way that, as I watched Olivia chewing on the one piece of Twizzlers that she allowed herself once a week, I kind of hoped she’d choke on it—things might go back to normal.

“Mom?” I called out.

Nothing. Not even the sound of women screeching in Spanish coming from the TV from one of Mom’s telenovelas. As I walked toward her room, my stomach did cartwheels. Was it drama queen-esque of me to worry that one of these times I might find my mother checked out permanently in the bathtub à la Whitney Houston? Not only had Mom not been to one AA meeting since the party, but she had stopped answering her phone, which, post-rehab, was constantly ringing with calls from Willow and a host of permanently chipper sober people.

Through the crack of her door, I saw her lying in bed, staring at the wall. Greasy brown roots sprouted from her head.

“Hi! I’m home!” I said as bubbly as possible as I flung open the door. It came out sounding pretty flat, though.

Her reaction was to pull the blankets up over her head to block out the light that was coming in.

“So, did you have a good day?” I asked hopefully.

Nothing.

I sniffed. “Well, I can smell that a shower wasn’t part of it.” I fished her arm out from under the covers and cringed at her chipped red nails as I tried to yank her up.
Thou shalt never walk around with chipped nail polish
was Commandment Number 8 in Mom’s world. “Look, Mom, I’m sorry you’re a little bummed out here, but bathing is not optional.”

It was like trying to pull a five-foot-four log. “Mom. Please,” I pleaded. All the fizz was gone from my voice. I sounded like an opened can of Diet Coke that had been left out in the sun all day. “Please get up.”

“I think there’s some Lean Cuisines in the freezer,” she said through the blanket. Her voice sounded tinny, as if coming through a radio station with bad reception. “Or just order in. But no pizza. You need to stay away from dairy, Annabelle. It’s really doing a number on your skin.”

I sighed. It was probably a good sign that, while she didn’t care about how she looked, she was still concerned about how I looked.

“Mom. Come on.”

She yanked the covers up higher.

“Mom.”

She flipped back over and peeled the covers down so that her face was showing. The dark circles under her eyes made her look about ten years older. “Annabelle,
please.
Just leave me alone.”

“I just—” I was going to say something nice. Something along the lines of “I just hate seeing you so sad. And I miss you. And I want my mother back.” But before I could get any of that out of my mouth, I saw it.