The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (17 page)

Billy was on the phone when I got back. From the number of “dudes” out of his mouth, I figured he was talking to one of his friends. Of course Billy was a dude kind of guy. Finally, he clicked off. “That was my agent. I freaking love her.”

Or the kind of guy who called women “dudes.”

“So what’s up?” he asked.

“I wanted to talk to you about . . . my mom.”

“Is she okay?” he asked, with concern.

I felt myself stiffen. Why was he acting as if he cared so much? He had met her only once. “She’s fine,” I said. “I mean, maybe she’s not
totally
fine,” I admitted. “But she’s not not fine—you know, to the point where she’s drinking again or anything like that,” I babbled. “But . . . she’s thinking of getting a job at a rehab.”

“To do research for a role?” he asked.

“No. For, like, a new
career.
”

He cringed. “But what about acting?”

“That’s the thing—she wants to give it up,” I said. “And the reason I wanted to talk to you is that I heard they haven’t cast the role for the woman in your new movie. And I think she’d be perfect for it.”

His eyebrows went up.

I took another deep breath to help me go on, wishing I hadn’t thrown out the Play-Doh without first taking a sniff. “And even though I’ve never ever done this before—I
swear
—I was wondering if maybe you could talk to your agent or the producers or whoever, and see if she could come in to audition,” I blurted. “I’m not saying to give her the part or anything, but just . . . give her a chance?” This was as excruciating as the cramps on the first day of my period every month. “Her agent tried to get her in, but no one thinks she’s . . . important enough anymore,” I said quietly, staring at the floor. “And she could really use a break.”

“I know she could,” he said just as quietly.

Oh, God. This suddenly felt like the worst idea ever. “Like I said, I’ve never done this before.” I fidgeted nervously. “In fact, I think it’s totally gross when people do things like this, but—”

“I’ll have my agent call the producer tonight. We’ll set something up for Monday.”

I looked up.

“Really? You’d do that?”

He shrugged. “Sure. Your mom’s a great actress. And she’s been through a tough time. Consider it done.”

As I felt my eyes fill with tears, I looked back down at the floor. I was
not
going to cry in front of Billy Barrett.

Once, when I was in the bathroom and picked up one of Mom’s little daily meditation books (there were about ten of them strewn around the apartment, which prompted me to tell Mom that the next one she bought should be called
Meditations for Women Who Can’t Stop Buying Daily Meditation Books
), I read something about how doing something nice for someone isn’t all that spiritual. It’s doing something nice and then not telling them that’s the spiritual part.

Not that I had any plans to tell Mom about what I had done. Although she was doing a better-than-average job at trying to act all upbeat about her life (“You know what, Bug? I actually
like
having all this free time, without the phone ringing. It’s very therapeutic after so many years of having every second scheduled”), I knew that she was struggling. And if I hadn’t known, the fact that her most recent purchase at Be Here Now was a book called
When Things Fall Apart
by some Buddhist lady named Pema Chodron—in which she had highlighted almost every paragraph and scribbled
Yes! Exactly!!!!
in the margins—was a good clue.

But then the abundance candle happened.

On Tuesday I walked out of school to find her waiting for me.

“Mom, you’re . . . dressed,” I said in surprise when I got to the car. I tried not to cringe at the latest bumper sticker: LET GO AND LET GOD. For the last few weeks, she had been alternating between three pairs of yoga pants and several T-shirts. But that day she was wearing her tightest jeans (even tighter nowadays, due to the fact that a lot of her free time was spent eating Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches, which, despite their name, do not make you skinny), a lilac boho peasant shirt, and a pair of vintage brown cowboy boots. She looked like the old Janie Jackson—the famous one who used to end up in
People
’s Most Beautiful People issue.

She flashed a smile that would’ve lit the entire electric grid of L.A. “That’s because we’re celebrating!”

“You got it?!” I yelped.

“Got what?” she asked, confused.

Whoops. “What?”

“What?”

I had seen the “What?” thing in a movie once. It worked on Mom every time.

I quickly opened the car door and jumped in, sliding down a bit in order to hide from Olivia and Sarah as they walked out. Not that it would have mattered if they had seen me. Nowadays whenever we crossed paths, they just pretended not to see me. Mom saw them, though.

She turned to me. “I’m really sorry, Annabelle.”

I felt my face get warm. “Just drive, okay?” Every time Mom tried to get me to talk about how my friends had dumped me, I refused. What was the point? Talking about it wasn’t going to make me feel better. If anything, it was going to make me feel worse.

“I don’t understand why you don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “It’s very important to process emotions. Otherwise, they get stuck in your body. By the way, did you know that studies are now showing that cellulite might be caused by emotions that are trapped—”

“Mom, just go,” I ordered as Olivia and Sarah got closer.

“Okay, okay,” she said as she pulled out.

“So what are we celebrating?” I asked in order to change the subject.

“Well . . . we’re celebrating the fact that I’m going in to read for the Billy Barrett movie tomorrow!” she shrieked.

I gave what I hoped was a very believable shriek in return. “Mom, that’s
awesome
! What happened?”

“The abundance candle is what happened!” she replied. “Remember when we were at Be Here Now, and I wanted to buy that candle?” she asked. “The one that came with the angel card? And you told me not to get it because you thought thirty-two ninety-five was a rip-off, even though Oprah had listed it as one of her favorite things?”

“Yeah. Because it
is
a total rip-off.”

“Yeah, well, I had Enid buy me one when she was there the next day.” Enid was this older woman who went to the same Tuesday AA meeting in Beverly Hills, the one Mom called the Shoes and Handbags meeting because it was filled with rich women. According to Mom, Enid had gotten drunk only once in her life but found the meetings so uplifting that she had been going for five years, even though she wasn’t sure she was an alcoholic. “And I’ve lit it every night during my meditation,” she went on, “and obviously it worked.” She looked at me. “See what can happen if you just practice positive thinking, Miss Nancy Negative?”

I couldn’t believe she thought a
candle
had done all this. “Mom, you didn’t get the audition because of a candle.”

She turned to me. “What do you mean?”

“I mean . . .” What was I doing? It was so nice to see her happy again. Did I want to ruin it? At a meeting the other day the topic had been “Would you rather be right or would you rather be happy?” Frankly, I would’ve liked to have been both, but I was trying not to worry about being right all the time when it came to Mom and focus on just being happy. “It probably wasn’t
just
because of the candle. It was probably because they realized that you’re a great actress.”

“Well, I’m sure that’s part of it,” she agreed. “But I think most of it was because of the candle.”

I’m sorry, but sometimes it was hard not to want to be right. Did she realize how insane she sounded?

“Well, the candle and my vision board,” she added.

Apparently, she did not. A vision board was a bulletin board on which you pinned up stuff that you wanted in your life. Kind of like an old-school Pinterest thing.

“So where are we going?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

“To Fred Segal,” she said as we drove down Pico Boulevard.

Fred Segal was one of the most expensive stores in L.A. “For what?”

“For something for me to wear to the audition!” she exclaimed. “Even though, you know, it’s probably not an audition. More just a meet-and-greet before officially offering me the role.”

“Mom, we don’t have any
money
for you to be buying new clothes,” I said. “We barely have enough to pay the rent.”

“Annabelle, I appreciate your concern,” she said in her high-pitched I’m-the-mother-here tone. “But I’m the mother here, and I’ll decide how the money gets spent.”

“But we don’t have any for you to spend!” I shot back.

She shook her head. “What do you think it’s going to say to the universe if I stop trusting it and show up dressed in some rag?”

“The universe doesn’t care!” I cried. “Because the universe did not get you this audition! I did!”

The minute the words were out of my mouth, I tried to breathe them back in.

She slammed on the brakes. Which, thankfully, happened to coincide with our hitting a red light. “What are you talking about?”

So much for being spiritual. “The reason you got the audition is because I went to see Billy Barrett and asked him if he could talk to the producers and have you come in,” I confessed.

The light turned green, but Mom didn’t move. “Why did you do that?” she asked quietly.

A horn blared behind us. “I don’t know,” I said nervously. “Because I didn’t want you to quit acting. And it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“I can’t believe this,” she muttered, shaking her head as she began to drive. “Talk about humiliating.”

“Yeah, well, how about a thank-you?” I shot back unspiritually.

“For what?” she snapped. “For butting into my business and not respecting my boundaries?”

Ever since rehab Mom had been big on the B-word and managed to work it into a conversation at least three times a day. “Since when have we ever had
boundaries
, Mom?”

“That’s it—we’re not going to Fred Segal,” she said, slamming on the brakes and doing a U-turn smack in the middle of Pico Boulevard. Which, given her lack of driving ability, was impressive. I would have complimented her if we hadn’t been in a fight.

“Good! BECAUSE WE CAN’T AFFORD IT!” I yelled.

“STOP SAYING THAT!” she yelled back.

The rest of the ride was spent in silence. At least until I couldn’t bear the silence because it made the
Why are you such a bitch? Why did you have to do that? What’s WRONG with you?
monologue in my head even louder and meaner, so I turned on the radio to KROQ. Until Mom reached over and clicked on her
Meditations for Calming Down in Traffic
CD, on which, over the sound of waves, a woman’s gentle voice said, “There’s no reason to get upset. You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be at this moment. And you’ll get to exactly where you’re going at the divinely appointed time.” Until I turned it off because the monologue in my head was slightly less annoying than the anti–road rage lady.

I tried to open my mouth to say “I’m sorry,” but it was as if it had been wired shut. Was I sorry? What I was was confused. In the past, if I had done something like this, maybe Mom would’ve gotten mad for, like, a minute or so, but then she would’ve been happy that I had helped and she would’ve gone into her what-did-I-do-right-in-a-past-life-to-deserve-the-best-kid-in-the-universe speech.

Because if I wasn’t helping; if I wasn’t being useful; if I wasn’t saving the day, who
was
I? That’s what I did. That was my role. I was never going to be as pretty or talented or famous as my mother. I was never going to light up a room like she did. So I had to do something.

“Do you want me to run lines with you?” was what I said in lieu of an apology.

No response.

“So now you’re not talking to me?”

Nothing.

My stomach started to clench. She
knew
I hated when she wouldn’t talk to me. Some kids got smacked by their mothers. I got the silent treatment, which, in my opinion, was just as bad.

“Fine. Don’t talk to me. I don’t care,” I said, hating myself for caring as much as I did.

When we got back to the apartment, we stomped off to our respective bedrooms and closed the doors forcefully. (Because they were so cheaply made, you couldn’t slam them or else they would literally fall off their hinges, and then you had to wait for Samir, the landlord/very-unhandy handyman, to come fix it, which, because he hated the fact that back in Iran he had been a doctor but now spent his time unstopping stopped-up toilets, made the whole thing very uncomfortable.)

As I tried to do my homework, I listened for the sound of Mom’s door opening. When it came and I heard her banging around in the kitchen, I opened mine and walked out.

“It’s dinnertime,” she said icily. She opened the freezer, pulled out a Lean Cuisine, and threw it down on the counter. “But because you’re so intent on running the show, I’m done cooking for you. You’re on your own,” she said as she pulled a can of chickpeas out of the cupboard and clamped the can opener on the lid.

It was a good thing I had learned how to “cook,” i.e., push the buttons on the microwave, back when I was five. “Fine,” I replied.

We stomped around in silence for a bit. “I was just trying to help,” I finally said.

She looked up from the can, which, as usual, she couldn’t get open because it didn’t have buttons. “Annabelle, ‘helping’ is zipping up someone’s dress,” she said. ‘Helping’ is cutting the price tag off her sweater.” She went back to butchering the can. ‘Helping’ is
not
tracking down a major star and begging him to allow your mother to audition for his movie after everyone’s decided she’s a washed-up has-been!”

“Yeah, well,
I
don’t think you’re a washed-up has-been!” I said as I broke down and grabbed the can from her before she hurt herself. “I think you’re someone who’s had really crappy luck lately and deserves another chance!”

She shook her head. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t think I should go in to audition.”