Spelling It Like It Is (9 page)

Is There a Mall
in This Seaside Resort?

I
n the beginning of January 2012 we took a little trip to Pasadena for work. It was the up-fronts for
Tori & Dean
—the day when NBC affiliates presented their seasonal lineup to advertisers and press. The event was taking place at the iconic Langham hotel. Most people who were attending just drove in for the day, but since we lived so far away—in Malibu—they put us, the three kids, and Patsy up at the hotel for the night.

The night we arrived Dean and I were supposed to make an appearance at a red-carpet cocktail party. The next day was the press tour. Media outlets would have tables set up on the hotel’s lawn, and celebrities from all of the NBC/Universal shows would make the rounds, doing interviews. Then we’d head home. It would be a condensed but important trip.

All that day I sensed it coming, and, indeed, by the time we arrived at the hotel I had developed a full-blown migraine. I was expected at the cocktail party downstairs. They’d paid for our suite and everything. The hair and makeup people were there, at the ready. But I couldn’t function. This night was a big deal for us, our show, and our network. I was in tears, not knowing whether I should drag myself to the party and pretend to function or rest in hope of recovering so I could do press the next day. My publicist told me to rest—the next day was even more important—so I went straight to bed. I lay there with the lights out and an ice pack on my head. I did manage to eat some truffled Parmesan fries and to catch a few scenes from
Contagion
on pay-per-view.

The next morning, when I woke up, I couldn’t see straight. I was weeping with pain. We had to cancel the whole press day. Dean and I were in some ways the faces of the network. We were Oxygen’s most recognizable show, and one of their top shows. This was really, really bad.

I needed to go to the ER, but how? There was press everywhere. We would certainly be followed. Dean called down to the front desk to ask if there was a way we could leave without being seen. Security guards led us down through the kitchen and out a back way. We slipped into the hotel shuttle, and the driver dropped us off at the ER.

A nurse brought me to a room. Before taking my vitals, she handed me a cup.

“Before we can treat you, we have to make sure you’re not pregnant.”

This was not my first time at the races. For my worst migraines, one or two times a year, I end up in the hospital. I’d never been asked to pee for pain meds before.

I whispered to the nurse, “Oh no, my baby is only two months old. There’s not a shot in hell I’m pregnant. I’ve been a migraine sufferer my whole life. It’s fine to treat me.”

But the nurse wanted the pee, and I wanted the headache to subside, so I complied.

I FELT LIKE a character in
Days of Our Lives
, suffering from my fiftieth brain tumor, the one that would surely be my demise. I lay in the darkness of a hospital room, an ice pack on my forehead, murmuring, “Where’s the doctor? I just need the pain meds . . .”

An older man with white hair came into the room. My chart was hanging on a clipboard at the foot of the bed. He looked down at the clipboard.

“Mrs. McDermott? I just want to let you know . . .” he said.

“Yes?”

“That you’re . . . you’re pregnant.”

IT WAS LIKE an out-of-body experience. I remember thinking,
Wow, this is what it’s like to be really shocked by something.
Like a surprise party. Or like finding out you’ve been left 0.16 percent of your gazillionaire father’s estate. (Love him. Still bitter.)

I looked at Dean. He looked back at me. Oh. My. God.

“That’s not possible,” I told the doctor.

“The test shows that you’re pregnant,” he said.

“You don’t understand. I just gave birth!”

The doctor looked at me with mild impatience. I could see that he thought I was crazy, but I still needed him to understand that he was wrong.

“We could do a blood test,” he said. “The blood test will tell us definitively.”

“Yes, please,” I said. “You’ll see.” The blood test might not have a little window with words saying “not pregnant,” but I knew it would prove me right. I was sure it would be conclusive.

They took blood. The thirty minutes we waited for the results passed like an eternity. My head pounded like I was the cartoon Tom, and Jerry had just crashed my head between two enormous cymbals.

Finally the doctor returned. “Well, you’re definitely pregnant.”

“I’m so confused,” I said. “Tell me how this happened.”

He just looked at me.

“We only had sex once!” I said. Oh. We only had sex once. Or twice.

THEN, AS IF I wasn’t already reeling with this news, the doctor said, “Because you’re pregnant, we cannot treat you.”

No!

I thought back to when I’d been pregnant with Hattie. I’d had a migraine at the very beginning then too, before Dean even knew I was pregnant. The ER near our house had treated me that time. But this conservative doctor wouldn’t do it.

I texted my obstetrician, Dr. J. He wasn’t going to be happy with me. The pack of nursing-mom-appropriate birth-control pills he’d prescribed for me were lost somewhere in our house. Months later, Dean would discover them nestled in a toolbox in the garage. We’re still confused as to how they ended up there. I don’t use tools.

Dr. J was flummoxed at this news, but he got on the phone with the doctor and told him it was okay to administer pain medication. Afterward, we texted and Dr. J said, “Take your time. Digest this news. I want you to know that I totally support you whatever you want to do.”

I was horrified. Terminating the pregnancy was not an option for me. Did I want to be pregnant right now? No. Did I want another baby? Not so soon! But there was no way I was going to mess with fate.

The nurses left to get my medicine, and for the first time Dean and I were alone with our embryo and my pounding head. Dean said, “This is another blessing.”

They finally gave me the pain medication. I lay there for hours, waiting for the pain to fade, processing what was happening. I felt like I’d just come back from outer space and was being sent back up in a rocket the next day. Oh my God, I was embarking on this journey again. I was scared. Hattie was only two months old, and I was already one month pregnant. I was still nursing the baby. People were still congratulating me on the birth. I hadn’t even begun to think about losing the weight. But I was bouncing back pretty well. I felt great (other than this migraine). This baby was meant to be.

AFTER THE DISASTROUS up-fronts, back in Malibu, we weren’t exactly settling into life on the farm. I had pushed so hard to move to the house, and one weekend later I knew we’d made a huge mistake. Now we were expecting a fourth child. We already had Patsy and Hattie in one bedroom, and Liam and Stella, plus Jack every other weekend, in the other. Where would the new baby go? In the trailer? Under a tarp outside with all the still-packed boxes? But we had just moved. We couldn’t admit defeat . . . yet.

Aside from the space, we weren’t exactly fitting into the community. I couldn’t figure out the Malibu women. They wore Uggs and sweatpants with Cartier bracelets and diamond-faced Rolexes. They wore six-carat engagement rings alongside woven friendship bracelets with a made-with-their-kids look. They were super casual, their professionally sun-kissed hair thrown up in messy buns as if they didn’t care. Their cozy, washed-a-million-times, perfectly worn sweatshirts were from Free City and cost two hundred dollars. And they were universally tall, blond, and tan, with great bodies and so much plastic surgery that I couldn’t tell if one was thirty, forty, or fifty. They were basically the beachy version of Beverly Hills trophy wives. Here in the ’Bu, instead of shopping, getting Botox, and drinking cabernet in the afternoon, they walked on the beach every day, did yoga, and drank green drinks. Beverly Hills had its high-fashion moms who wore blazers and jeans, diamond necklaces, and heels or designer flats. A Malibu woman wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a blazer. But they were all the same to me. It was winter and my summer fling with Malibu was so over.

And it’s not like Malibu was knocking on my door, wanting to be best friends. Our first week in the house, we had filmed
Tori & Dean
for one day, shooting the final scenes of the season, and, although we didn’t know it at the time, of the show. When the show premiered, Oxygen came to our house and had live cuts of the family watching the premiere in Malibu. That night there was a truck parked in front of our house, with a satellite with a live feed.

Late that night I was in the kitchen, wearing a tank top and underwear, getting myself a glass of sparkling water with lemon. A man I’d never seen before opened our wooden gate and walked toward the kitchen’s sliding door. I’m a girl who, when house-hunting at age twenty-six, assumed the place I lived would have a guard’s room because I thought that everyone had guards on staff, in need of their own rooms. I screamed, “Dean! Dean! There’s a man coming to the door. I don’t know what he wants!”

Dean came out from the bedroom and went into the front yard to talk to the stranger. I listened from inside.

The stranger launched into an angry tirade. He said, “I’m your neighbor from across the street. So I don’t know who you people are, but my kid says you do some sort of TV show. You’re filming here. I don’t know what you’re doing. We’re not like that here in Point Dume. We don’t have people like that here.”

I flashed back to the neighbor we’d had way back when we’d lived on Beaver Avenue. He’d seen our cameras and said, “You might be making porns in there.”

Our Malibu neighbor went on with his disjointed tirade. “Everyone knows everyone. The lights from your truck were on. My kid couldn’t sleep. I’m having a Christmas party next week. Everyone comes to it. I’m sure you’d like to bring your wife to it. It’s the party of the year. But we’re not like that here in Point Dume.”

His tone was bullying. He was right in Dean’s face, pointing his finger right at him.

Dean said, “Get your finger out of my face.”

Then our new neighbor got pissed off. “Oh, you’re going to be like that? I see how you people are. You know what? On second thought, we don’t want your types at our party. You’re not invited to our party.”

The neighbor stalked away. Dean came back in. “Welcome to the neighborhood,” he said.

When my friend Madison heard that we weren’t adjusting to Malibu, he decided to help us out. Madison is one of the real estate agents on the Bravo show
Million Dollar Listing
. He is young and handsome and perpetually tan. We’d become friends through my production company, and he was the one who’d helped us get our summer rental next to Kelly Wearstler. He hadn’t found our current house for us—when he saw it he said he would have talked us out of it. We text all the time, and when I expressed doubts about Malibu, he said, “Don’t worry. I’m going to show you around. Malibu is a pocket of heaven.” According to Madison, we just had to get to know the right people. There were great families, but we had to know how to navigate. I became Madison’s pet project. He would help me come to love Malibu.

Madison really wanted me to meet all his favorite Malibu girls, and he said the best way was to take a certain dance class in the upscale Malibu Lumber Yard, a shopping complex adjacent to Malibu Country Mart that was a former lumberyard. I don’t go in much for group activities, much less any form of exercise, but I finally dragged my postpartum, pregnant self to this dance class.

It was a super-fast-paced class. Like Zumba, I think, although I’m not fully up to speed on workout-class trends. I was miserably out of shape. My pregnancy was still a secret (this again!), so I told the teacher that I was trying to lose the baby weight, but I was actually worried that all this jumping around was going to shake the embryo loose (which would turn out to be a much more real concern than I knew).

The teacher was good at what she did. And Madison had clearly suggested that she play friend-matchmaker for me. After class, when we were chatting, she said, “You know Alecia, right?” No, I didn’t know Alecia.

“You know . . . Pink? I should introduce you to her. You guys would really hit it off.” I didn’t know Pink. I don’t have many celebrity friends. I’m friends with Jenny from the west side. But the teacher clearly thought that my best options for new friends were other celebrities. She threw some other celebrity-mom names at me. She said, “Brooke. Minnie. They all come here. I get them back into shape.”

Of all the celebrity moms she knew, she was most enthusiastic about Pink for me. I tried to imagine the two of us bombing down Cross Creek Road together, pushing strollers. Hmm. Our husbands did both have tattoos. I couldn’t really see it, but I do love her song “Just Like a Pill.”

Madison so wanted me to love Malibu, but instead I missed Encino, of all places. I had thought the streets in Encino were ugly. I’d bitched about our Valley life. Now I longed for the frozen yogurt on every corner, the karate, dance, and princess classes for the kids. Where were Malibu’s family-friendly chain restaurants—the Buca di Beppo, the Chili’s? Where were the cheap Chinese nail salons? Stella and I liked to get Minx Nails, which are like fun stickers that decorate fingernails. At CVS the Sally Hansen knockoff ones are maybe ten dollars for a set. But at the one and only nail salon that finally opened in Malibu, some Zen décor and foot bowls later, the cute, silly mother-daughter Minx Nails excursion cost a total of three hundred dollars!

Malibu is a very small town. It has its own retro-chic vibe: farmers from the seventies living next to mansions with film producers and their trophy wives. The Malibu Country Mart and Lumber Yard had some of my favorite stores—Intermix, Alice + Olivia, Planet Blue. I thought I’d be happy walking around those boutiques. But who was I kidding? I couldn’t afford to shop there all the time anyway. And because there was only one area to shop, it was riddled with paparazzi. There was nothing for our family to do. We were pretty much isolated at home.