The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (19 page)

“You love her.”

He sighed. “Yes,” he said quietly. “I love her.”

Ben was not one of those super-sensitive guys—like Per, the Swedish sculptor whom Mom had dated during her Scandinavian phase—but I could have sworn his voice cracked a little as he said it.

I felt something crumble inside of me. Like when something dries out to the point where it just turns into dust, even though a second earlier it had looked solid. Luckily, our car pulled up then so we didn’t have to talk about it anymore. Which was good, because, really, what was there to say?
Wow, I’m so happy for you guys—even though this totally screws up my master plan of you and my mother getting together now that she’s finally getting it together. Great—so I guess I should stop pretending that you’re my father, huh? Hey—if you guys get married, do you think maybe you can fix up a room for me to crash at when Mom is driving me nuts?

As much as I hated Mom’s bumper-sticker collection, I was grateful for them at that moment; they gave me something to focus on as I willed the tears not to fall. I cleared my throat. “Well, that’s good. You should love her. She’s cool. Thanks for dinner,” I said quickly as I turned to bolt to the car.

Ben grabbed my arm. “Annabelle.”

Don’tcryyoucannotcrywhateveryoudodon’tcry
, I said to myself as I turned to face him. “Yeah?”

“It doesn’t change anything,” he said. “You know that, right?” He sounded like he was pleading.

Actually, it changed everything. I shook my head and got in the car.

One of the great things about a parent getting sober was that after years of their being so stuck in their own head, thinking about themselves, they were finally able to notice when something was bothering you.

“Annabelle, we need to talk about something,” Mom said solemnly, breaking the silence as we drove up Olympic Boulevard toward home.

I pinched my thigh in order to stop the tears from coming. “Can we talk about it later?” I pleaded, pinching harder.

“No, we can’t,” she said firmly.” Bug, I know that we’ve talked about this before—”

“Actually, Mom, we
never
talked about it,” I snapped. “That’s part of the problem. Because maybe if we had, then things would be different right now—”

“What are you talking about?” she asked, confused.

“I’m talking about— Wait, what are
you
talking about?”

“The trainer issue.”

“What?”

She took another deep breath. “I know you’re worried about the money stuff,” she said, “and when I told you a few weeks ago that I was considering starting back up with Brian”—Brian was Mom’s very expensive personal trainer—“you gave me a look like I had just suggested I sell one of my kidneys, but I just don’t think I can trust myself to do what needs to be done to get myself into top shape before shooting begins without having to be accountable to someone.”

Amendment: Some parents, when they got sober, got out of their heads and noticed when something was bothering you. Mine? Not so much.

“Don’t look at me like that, Annabelle,” she went on. “I know you think this is all vanity, but it’s not. Being fit is part of my job,” she said defensively.

I shook my head. “Amazing,” I laughed. This time when I pinched my thigh, it wasn’t to stop the tears—it was to prevent myself from screaming at her.

The next day I stood in front of the fountain at the Grove—the giant one pulsing in time with a Celine Dion song that made me want to jump in and refuse to get out unless they turned it off. What did people wish for when they weren’t busy wasting their wishes on other people? Did you start small? (“I hope they have some black-and-white cookies left at Diamond Bakery across the street on Fairfax.”) Or did you just go all out? “I’d like a boyfriend who looks like Ryan Gosling but has the personality of Jesse Eisenberg because Ryan Gosling is too cool and would intimidate me.”)

Behind me I heard the unmistakable noise of way too many pieces of popcorn being shoved into a mouth at one time. “What are you doing?” asked Walter. We had become such good friends that even, when his mouth was full, I understood him. Plus, he asked that question all the time.

“I’m . . . not doing anything.”

“You were going to say something,” he said suspiciously.

“No, I wasn’t.”

“Yes, you were. I heard the pause in between the ‘I’m’ and the ‘not.’”

I rolled my eyes. Walter may have wanted to do special effects for movies when he grew up, but he would’ve made a great detective.

“What were you going to say?”

“Nothing. Forget it.” Although I was constantly being surprised at how much I had in common with the kids in Alateen (marking vodka bottles with Sharpies in order to check the level was something I had been particularly embarrassed about until, when I finally admitted it during a meeting, there was a bunch of knowing laughter), there was some stuff that felt so stupid I’d be afraid that if anyone ever knew, they’d think I was nuts.

“I
hate
when you do that ‘Nothing, forget it’ thing,” he said.

He did hate it. Just like I hated it when people did it to me. “Okay, fine,” I said, “so you know when you throw a penny into a fountain?”

He shook his head. “I never do that. In fact, I try to avoid pennies whenever possible. I bet if you Googled it, there’s stuff about how touching all that copper gives you cancer or something—”

“I meant, in
general
,” I said. “The
idea
of throwing a penny into a fountain.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Well, for, like, the last five years, every time I’ve thrown one in—”

He wrinkled his nose. “I hope you wash your hands after you do that.”

“Walter.”

“Okay, okay. Sorry. Go on. So every time you’ve thrown one in—”

“I’ve . . . wished that my mom would stop drinking.”

He shrugged. “That makes sense.”

“And . . . that she’d realize she’s supposed to be with Ben, and then they’d get married and everything would be fine.” I waited for him to start laughing, but he didn’t. He just sniffled because of his ever-present postnasal drip. “But now I realize how stupid it sounds.” Not to mention it didn’t work.

He shrugged. “Don’t beat yourself up. Magical thinking is just part of the deal.”

“What do you mean?”

“Wishing on pennies. Needing to sit in the same chair at meetings. We all have it,” he said. “Well, at least, you know, kids who grow up like we do. I don’t know if the normies do it.” “Normies” were what alcoholics called non-alcoholics. Or, in our case, what we called kids who grew up in homes where you weren’t constantly worrying about whether your dad was going to burn down the house if he passed out with a lit cigarette in his hand. Or where you taught yourself to use the stove when you were six so you could make breakfast for your three-year-old sister because your mother’s hangover was so bad she couldn’t get out of bed. “When I was eight, I did this thing for a few weeks where I would only eat orange foods because one weekend when I drank a half gallon of orange juice, my dad stayed sober the entire time,” Walter admitted. “So I thought if I just stuck to orange stuff, it might keep working.”

“So what’d you eat?”

He shrugged. “Cheetos, oranges, butternut squash, carrots. Lorna Doones—”

“Lorna Doones aren’t orange.”

He shrugged. “No, but they’re
beige
. Which is in the orange
family
.”

I laughed.

“It didn’t work, by the way,” he said. “A week into it my dad got another DUI. And my fingers were stained orange from the Cheetos.” He sniffled and made a noise that sounded as if he was about to hack up a hairball. “Listen, you can wish on pennies or not step on cracks—I know this kid named Kevin? He used to do that, the no-cracks thing, and talk about annoying. It took
forever
to get down the street with him—anyway, you can do all that, but it doesn’t make a difference. What’s going to happen is going to happen.”

I nodded. I knew he was right. But instead of feeling bummed out that I had even less control over life, I felt warm and fuzzy inside. The kind of warm and fuzzy that came when you took the risk to tell someone something that you were sure they would laugh at, and instead he understood. As I looked at Walter—an occasionally annoying, no-concept-of-boundaries-when-it-came-to-other-people’s-food, loud-talking, postnasal dripper—I realized I was going to miss him when I was in New York. Because his parents were on the verge of splitting up. (“I mean it this time, Walter,” his mother had been telling him for the last few weeks, the way she had for the last four years. “I really do.”) They had decided, in a last-ditch effort to try to work things out, to rent a house in Nantucket, because once upon a time, when they were young and didn’t have any kids, they had gone there on vacation and had had a really good time. (According to Walter, they had made similar trips to Florence, Italy, and Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, to try to do the same thing.) Which meant that Walter and his younger sister, Allison, were going to Florida, to visit their grandparents. Thank God for Skype, although he (and Mom) were already on me about how I was going to have to find some Alateen meetings in New York. (“There may be cows there, Annabelle,” Mom had said the night before, “but there are meetings as well.”)

Walter and I may have been friends for only a few weeks, but in a lot of ways I felt closer to him than I did to my old ones. The same ones who, as we turned around to leave, I saw coming out of Anthropologie and right toward us.

“Omigod! Annabelle!” Olivia cried as they drew closer, juggling three bags. Anthropologie used to be my favorite store as well, but now I was all about bragging to anyone who would listen about my new pink-and-white Diane von Furstenberg–rip-off Mossimo dress that was marked down twice at Target. “That is so weird. Sarah and I were
just
talking about you!” She turned to Sarah. “Right? Weren’t we?”

Sarah nodded. “Yup, we were. Totally.”

They had their backs turned to Walter, as if he wasn’t even there. “This is my—” I started to say.

“We wanted to catch you at lunch, but we couldn’t find you,” Olivia cut me off.

I hadn’t been in the cafeteria because Maya had been out sick, which meant I had no one to sit with. Instead, I sneaked off to my favorite handicapped stall to eat my tuna sandwich and have a panic attack in peace.

“So how are you? What’s new?” Sarah asked, stepping in front of Walter.

When I had first started going to meetings, Walter had shared about how he often felt invisible, especially around his parents because they were such big personalities. As Sarah did that—just turned her back on him like that—I knew that he was probably feeling awful. Just like I had around them for the last few months.

I grabbed his arm and pulled him over next to me. “This is my friend Walter,” I announced.

“Hi,” he mumbled.

Olivia and Sarah looked at each other. “Your friend?” Olivia asked, her mouth twitching as if trying not to laugh.

“Yeah.
My friend
,” I replied. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Walter stand up straighter.

“Um, okay . . .” she said, as if the idea was totally insane. “Anyway, what are you doing Friday night? My dad got us tickets to Mumford and Sons, and I think I can get another one.”

“I have plans.” I didn’t, and I loved Mumford & Sons, but I would rather have listened to them with really shitty earbuds than gone with those two.

“What about Saturday? There’s a Crossroads party,” Sarah said.

“Omigod, it would be so fun if we all went together!” Olivia said. “We’ll get Maya to come, too. It’ll be just like old times.”

Did they know how transparent they were?

“I can’t believe you’re going to get to hang out with Billy Barrett!” Sarah said. “That is totes rad.” Whenever Sarah tried to use slang, she sounded like a foreigner for whom English wasn’t her first language.

Olivia shot her a look. “But that’s not why we want to hang out with you,” she said, trying for the save. “It’s because . . . we miss you.
Obvi
.” She sounded a little more normal when she tried, but not much.

“Oh, wow. That’s really sweet of you guys,” I said. “I wish I could say the same, but actually . . . I
can’t
.” I watched as the smug smiles on their faces started to deflate, like Sarah’s bra when she took out the padding. “And I wish I could say it has been nice running into you, but, you know, I can’t say that either.” At that, they were flat, like Sarah’s chest. “So I think we’re gonna go. Come on, Walter.”

I would have killed to see the looks on their faces as we walked away, but it felt even better not to turn around.

CHAPTER TEN

MAIN DIFFERENCES BETWEEN LOST ANGELES AND UPSTATE NEW YORK

• The stars you see are in the sky, not the supermarket.
  
• Subaru Outbacks and Foresters are the equiv-alents of Mercedes and BMWs.
  
• The ads on the radio stations sell Jesus, not Botox.
  
• When you’re forced to stop to let a fox cross the road, it’s the four-legged kind.
  
• Starbucks is considered on par with fracking, in terms of screwing up the environment.
  
• There is no need to set the alarm on your iPhone when you have a cow as your next-door neighbor.
  

That last one I learned the first morning we were there, three hours before I had planned to get up.

“That cannot be a cow,” I murmured as I got out of bed in the 1922 farmhouse in a town called Clermont—population 1,726—that the producers had arranged for us to stay in during the movie. Because it was still dark, I managed to add another bruise to my collection as I whacked my knee on an antique sewing machine on my way to the window.

It was. Still mooing. And not only was there a cow—there was a goat as well, nuzzling up to the cow. Which, had I been awake, I would have found very cute.

Mom came running in, wearing a black silk nightgown. “What’s going on?” she yelled. “What’s that noise? Is someone out there? Is it a pap?”

I stumbled back into bed and covered my head with a pillow. “It’s not a pap. It’s a
cow
.”