Wicked Jealous: A Love Story (7 page)

During the holiday break, I added in another Zumba class on Tuesdays to escape Hillary. And when I finally caved in to the Zumba ladies’ pressure in January, and added a Saturday morning Zumba class into the mix on top of my Tuesday and Thursday ones (there was no way I was staying in the house while Hillary hosted a six-week How to Become a Modern-Day Goddess workshop in our living room), it
really
started to drop off. Soon I was trading my size 16 Old Navy cargos for 12s. If Nicola had her way, I would have traded them in for something all together different—like some of the vintage dresses at Brad’s—but a girl could handle only so much change at once.

The thing about showing up at Zumba three times a week was that it wasn’t very long before I ran out of semi-viable excuses as to why I couldn’t join the ZB (Zumba Brigade) for coffee afterward. There were only so many made-up doctor and dentist visits a sixteen-year-old girl could go on before a bunch of mothers got worried and wanted to get involved by giving referrals for second opinions and stuff.

Which is how, one Thursday afternoon in March after Jorge had me
demonstrate one of the more complicated steps during class (recently, Cookie had confided in me that Jorge’s name was actually George, that he had graduated from Yale with a degree in theater, and that he had about as much Latino blood in him as I did, which was zero), I found myself sitting around a table with five middle-aged women at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on San Vicente in Brentwood sipping an iced coffee and feeling like a suspect from a
CSI
episode.

“So where do you live, honey?” Cheryl asked as she sipped her half-caf-no-whip-two-Splenda mochachino and peered over her glasses.

“Off of Montana,” I replied.

“North or south?” Marcia demanded.

“North.”

“Ahh . . . very nice,” said the group in perfect harmony. Because Brentwood was one of the nicer parts of L.A., there wasn’t really a wrong-side-of-the-tracks situation, but north of Montana was considered the very nice part of town instead of just the nice part of town.

“And what does your father do?” asked Gwen, an African American woman who had gone as far as to change into a different matching yoga outfit post-Zumba.

“He’s a TV writer. He created that show
Ruh-Roh
?”

The collective gasp was so loud you would’ve thought I had said, “He came up with the cure for cancer?”

Cookie gasped. “Oh my God—I
love
that show! It’s an acute case of excelitis!”

The women looked at one another, confused. “Huh?” Cheryl said.

“You know, like extremely excellent,” Cookie explained.

“Actually, the ‘excel’ in excelitis has to do with looking at Microsoft Excel spreadsheets online for too long,” I replied.

“It does?”

I nodded.

She took out her notebook. “Duly noted.”

“But the show
is
marvelous,” Gwen said as the rest of the group nodded in agreement. Apparently, I was one of the few people on the planet who didn’t get why a talking dog was so funny.

“And your mother? Does she work?” Beth asked.

Oh no. The dreaded Mom moment. You’d think with sixteen and a half years worth of them, they would have gotten easier, but not so much.

“Actually, my mom’s . . . not around,” I admitted.

“Rehab?” Cheryl asked.

“Up and moved to an ashram in Oregon?” Gwen suggested.

“Left your dad for another woman?” Marcia guessed.

Wow. Maybe my situation wasn’t as bad as I thought. “No. She died.”

Cheryl patted my hand. “Oh, honey. I’m sorry. Cancer?” she asked with a cringe.

I shook my head. “No. She, uh, died while she was giving birth to me.”

The gasp at that was so loud that the old man and his much younger girlfriend at the next table looked over.

“Oh, how
awful
!” Beth cried.

“You poor thing!” Gwen exclaimed.

I sipped at the last of my almost-empty iced coffee in order to avoid their eyes. I know I should have appreciated the fact that people felt bad for me, but I would rather have skipped the whole subject all together. When I had been seeing Dr. Gellert, he had tried to tell me that all my eating was an attempt to numb out from the unexpressed grief I had over my mom’s death and keep it from coming to the surface. And then he offered me a crystal bowl of M&M’s when I started to cry.

“But your dad, he remarried, right?” asked Beth. “I mean, with his success, I’m sure women are lined up around the block.”

I shook my head. “He’s had girlfriends over the years, but no one that serious until now. Hillary—this woman he’s been dating—moved in a few months ago. It was only supposed to be while they redid her floors, but—”

Gwen held up her hand. “You don’t even have to continue. We all know exactly where this is going.”

“You do?”

“The floors are finished, and she’s still there,” Cookie said.

“Right.”

Marcia sighed. “That’s
exactly
the MO my ex-husband’s third wife used,” she said. “She was an executive at Paramount until she finally roped him into giving her a ring, and now she’s pregnant with their second child and is planning on having a water birth and wants me to be the midwife.” She looked at the group. “Just so you know, I said no.”

The women nodded and clucked in approval.

My stomach got all wonky. I had a feeling that if anyone knew the way evil gold-digging D-girls like Hillary worked, it was this group.

Cheryl reached over and pulled me to her, surprising me with her strength. For someone so tiny, she was like a well-dressed barnacle. “Oh you poor, poor girl!” she
tsk
ed. “And you don’t even have a mother to commiserate with! I don’t even want to
think
about what it would be like for my son without me here.”

I smiled. Her son was lucky. Out of all the women, I liked Cheryl the best. Although I got the sense that because she was so overprotective, he was probably the nerdy type—like a Russian Club member who tried to scrape together a goatee with very limited facial hair. Or a tie-dyed, faux dreadlocked
MAKE PEACE, NOT NUCLEAR ARMS
T-shirt-wearing type.

“Oh look—here he is!”

I managed to wrestle my head out of the death grip Cheryl had me in, and I saw that I was way off. Because her son was Jason Frank. Who, at that moment, was giving me a very strange look. Probably because his mom was holding me against her boobs while I sat around drinking coffee with a bunch of middle-aged Zumba-ers.

“Jason, honey, this is—”

“We know each other,” we mumbled in unison.

“She goes to Castle Heights,” Jason said.

“Really?! What a coincidence!” Cheryl said. “Honey, did you know that Simone doesn’t have a mother? She died
giving birth to her.
Isn’t that just
awful
?”

Okay, really? Suddenly, I was wondering whether I needed to rethink my positive opinion about Cheryl.

“I have a question, though,” she said. She turned to me. “Honey, what did you do when it came to things like menstruation? Did your dad explain it to you, or did you—”

Okay—
really
really?! This seemingly sweet little woman was making it so that I was now going to have to transfer schools?!

The good news was that with all the sweat that came pouring out of my forehead at that moment, I probably lost another three pounds. The bad news was that Jason looked like he was going to hurl right then and there.
“Mom,”
he said. “Stop.”

“Okay, okay,” she said. “I was just curious.” She stood up. “Ladies, I’ll see you next class. I have to take Jason to the doctor. He’s got a bit of a rash that starts—”

“Mom!”
he barked.

It was good to know that Cheryl was an equal- opportunity embarrasser. As much as it had sucked to grow up without a mom, I did have to say I didn’t miss that kind of thing.

“I’m willing to pretend the last five minutes never happened if you are,” I mumbled as Cheryl said her good-byes.

“Deal,” he mumbled back.

Almost being embarrassed to death by the ZB was bad enough, but dinner with my family? Even worse.

Per Dad’s shrink Dr. Melman, he wanted us to start having family dinners together on a regular basis. It was bad enough having to pass Hillary in the upstairs hall at home (I tried to time it so that didn’t happen often), so having to spend a Sunday night at Twin Dragon—especially when there was a special on IFC about
Best Moments in French Cinema—
was not high on my list of Things I Look Forward to Doing Now, Or at Any Time in my Life. I was, however, super excited to see Max, who was driving down from CalArts for the dinner.

“Whoa!” he exclaimed when he walked up to the table as Dad e-mailed with his iPhone on his lap and Hillary stared into her snake compact, reapplying some of the latest red lipstick she had bought in her quest to get her lips the same color as mine. While I had inherited our mother’s jet-black hair, Max looked more like our dad, with brown hair that in the summer turned a little red, and big brown puppy-dog eyes. (“Doesn’t it all just scream, ‘Adopt me before they euthanize me?’” Nicola liked to say.) “Simone, you’ve lost even more weight since I saw you last month!”

Hillary snapped her compact shut. “I keep telling her that she needs to make sure she doesn’t get
too
thin,” she warned. “Too thin is really not becoming. Believe me, I’ve been there. I know. Plus, the research about the Millennials—”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” I cut her off.

“Remind me again how you’re doing this,” she asked. “Fat Flush? South Beach? Weight Watchers? The Flat Belly Diet—”

“Zumba.”

Hillary squinted before remembering that squinting gives you crow’s feet and makes you look old. “I’m not familiar with that,” she said. “Is it more protein or fruits and vegetables?”

“It’s not a diet. It’s like a dance-exercise thing. To Latin music. You probably don’t know it because I don’t think it’s big with the Millennials,” I replied. “It’s mostly middle-aged housewives who do it. But it really works. Oh, and I stopped eating Butterscotch Krimpets after you went into my closet without asking and completely cleaned it out and replaced it with subpar chocolate.” I glanced toward my dad, but there was nothing other than more one-handed e-mailing.

“Well, that’s great,” Hillary said, “but as your soon-to-be stepmother, I worry about you.” She shoved a plate of egg rolls toward me. “Which is why I think you should have an egg roll.” She plucked the one that my dad had in his non-e-mailing hand out of it and put it on my plate. “Or two.”

I glanced over at Max and gave him a quick see-that?! look. He may have been one of those annoying give-someone-the-benefit-of-the-doubt-and-look-on-the-bright-side types, but even he had gotten with the program and realized that no matter how good Hillary may have looked in a bikini, she was
nuts
and had our father under some sort of weird spell and couldn’t be trusted. Especially after I called to tell him that I had overheard her telling the interior decorator that it was okay for her to move everything out of his bedroom so that they could start to talk about possible nursery designs.

Luckily, I was saved by Sol, our waiter. Although everyone who worked there was Asian, they all had old Jewish men names like Sol and Murray and Hymie.

“I’ll have the shrimp and vegetables,” Hillary said after my dad and brother had ordered. “With a few changes. No vegetables, and only three shrimp.”

It was hard to tell for certain, but I was pretty sure he mumbled something about how high maintenance rich white women were. He turned to me. “And you?”

“She’ll have the Kung Pao chicken, the lo mein, some sweet and sour pork, and an extra side of rice. Brown, not white.” She smiled at me. “Brown is
much
healthier than white.”

It was like she
wanted
me to stay fat. I turned to Sol. “I’ll have the chicken and broccoli. No changes.”

He nodded approvingly.

After he walked away, my dad went outside to make a phone call. When he came back, they dumped the Italy news on us. Disinviting me from a family vacation. Sending me off to live with my brother and six random guys for the summer.

“I’d like some time to think about it, if that’s okay,” I said. I turned to my father. “That
is
okay, right?”

“Of course it is, honey,” he replied. I rolled my eyes as I watched him glance toward Hillary to make sure that it was, indeed, okay. I couldn’t believe it.
My
father—a guy who had been in charge of rooms full of
Harvard Lampoon
–trained writers and stand-up comedians, two of the most difficult personalities known to man—melted into a puddle whenever he was around her. It really was like she had him under some kind of spell.

“But try and think fast because those extra-deluxe villas go very quickly,” Hillary said.

I could only hope that my dad’s reverse lobotomy would happen quicker.