Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir (13 page)

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Authors: Melissa Francis

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #Entertainment & Performing Arts

BOOK: Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir
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She’d long ago traded in her youthful pink, green, and white bed linens for solid royal blue sheets and blankets that made the room more mature and less color coordinated. Various necklaces and bracelets spilled out across the top of her wooden dresser, interlaced with hoop earrings and chunky, gothic rings. She’d started wearing crosses, which I thought was odd, since she reviled Catholic school. She’d always had a problem with religion, but much more so now that it was a mandatory part of her day. I found organized religion comforting at almost twelve, but she wouldn’t give it a chance. Wearing a cross like Madonna was her way of mocking Christ and the flock of sheep who followed him.
Tiffany walked in behind me. “What are you doing?” she asked, grabbing from my hand the tape that I had picked up from her desk.
“I’m getting ready to go riding. Want to come?” I asked.
“No, I have plans.”
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I’m going to hang out with Chris and some friends, maybe Laura. We’ll probably go to Magic Mountain,” she said checking her makeup in the mirror over her dresser.
Tiffany and her best friend, Laura, were currently dating twins, Chris and John, cute bleached-blonde boys from the public school in our neighborhood. Conveniently enough, the brothers looked a little like Billy Idol. Or David Bowie. The two singers seemed to be the same, as far as I could tell.
Tiffany and Laura were in tenth grade now and though neither of them had a driver’s license yet, many of their friends did, which opened up a whole new world of freedom to them. Mom made anyone who came to give Tiffany a ride come in the house to say hello. She’d grill them on their plans and give everyone a once-over, but I wasn’t convinced of how effective that was. I knew from experience anything could happen once we got out the door and down the street.
Tiffany had on about six pounds of navy blue eyeliner and pearly pink lip gloss, both of which happened to be in high pop/rock fashion. She was channeling Madonna, circa
Like a Virgin
. She’d cut her hair to shoulder-length and had streaked it blonde to complete the transformation. She teased her bangs to the sky, and we both covered our wrists with rows and rows of intertwined black rubber bracelets we’d bought at the mall.
She had just had her ears double pierced, and now she put enormous hoops in every hole in preparation for a big night. Her look ventured closer and closer to the edge of full rebellion, but her face looked so pretty in the midst of it, Mom wrote it off as more fashion than a statement.
“Ouch,” Tiffany said after she put in the last hoop.
I thought she was talking about her ears, but when she stopped primping she wiped a few drops of blood from her forearm. I looked at the cut on her arm. It was a perfect lowercase
t
. She dried it with a tissue and left the room before I could ask why in the world she had cut herself.
 
 
Tiffany and Mom’s bickering had become an almost constant din that kept the atmosphere around the house tense. Tiffany’s attitude exacerbated Mom’s dark moods and each one’s negative energy fueled the other’s. Tiffany would make an unnecessary, snide remark to Mom, and the back-and-forth would escalate until Mom was confiscating her favorite jeans, taking away her phone, or just hitting her with the closest object, like a hanger or a belt.
Many times I would try to defuse the situation before it boiled over, interrupting the action and distracting Mom with a positive bit of information, like a high test score, or a bit a new information about the audition I’d just been on. But Tiffany wouldn’t always take the opportunity to retreat. There was only so much I could do when they were determined to battle. I could take refuge in a forgotten corner of the house, but when they were done, Mom would be so agitated, she’d turn her sights on me.
Just when I was sure one of them might kill the other, I went back to work and the clouds parted. I got cast in an ABC Movie of the Week that my agent described as “groundbreaking.”
When we went on the audition, Mom kept me in the car for a chat before we went inside to get the script. I thought she was gearing up for a pep talk, which by this point, I didn’t need.
“This is a kind of weird topic. You know how TV tries to be more and more outrageous to grab viewers and shock people? Well this is about incest. Do you know what that is?”
I shook my head. Mom looked very uncomfortable. She had the pained expression she got when anyone talked about sex, so I had some idea, but I hadn’t heard that particular word.
“It’s when a parent has sex with their child.” We both recoiled in disgust.
“Yuck.”
“Exactly,” she said. “But the truth is, it happens. And no one talks about it. So these producers want to talk about it, hoping that maybe it will inspire kids who are victims to speak up against their parents, and get help. The kids I guess feel helpless and powerless because they are being hurt by a parent, who after all, is supposed to be protecting and loving them. Do you understand?”
“So who . . .” I asked slowly.
“Not you,” she jumped in. “It doesn’t happen to your character. It happens to your older sister. The parents are already cast. The dad is Ted Danson, from
Cheers
. The mom is a really famous actress, very serious, not sure if you have heard of her, Glenn Close. What would you have seen that she’s been in? I’m not sure I would let you see anything she’s been in. She does a lot of adult dramas.”
I shook my head. I didn’t know her.
“They are really solid, well-known actors, so as your agent said, you know the producers will treat this tactfully with class, nothing salacious. They are really trying to help kids. And I’m sure the shock value won’t be bad for ratings. Once you say incest, you don’t have to go much further to shock people. There’s no nudity or anything; you don’t see anything happen.”
I was on board if Mom was, so I went in and read my lines. The key to bagging this job, once again, was crying on command. I still had that skill down cold.
I got the job, which was good, because the competition had taken it up a notch. Now that I was in sixth grade, the kids I auditioned with were on the ball. They were trained actors, serious athletes in what used to be just a pickup game of kickball. It used to be that I knew when I had won a job, and I’d come out and brag to Mom that I’d gotten it before my agent even called with the news.
Now the victories were a little fewer and little farther between, and my swagger had lost a bit of its bounce. This victory came at a time when we all needed a lift.
 
 
When it was time for the show to air, I felt slightly embarrassed about the topic. The newspapers and magazine shows did features about the show breaking new ground and talking about a taboo subject. They inevitably featured a real-life victim who before then had felt too ashamed to speak up. I wanted to be proud to help, but I didn’t feel like I’d done anything special, beyond showing up and doing my job like a good professional actor. I was always proud of that.
The show was called
Something About Amelia
, named for the victim in the story. Roxana Zal played Amelia and won a well-deserved Emmy. Mom said Ted Danson had deliberately played the creepy part of the dad to break out of his image as a sexy, lovable guy on
Cheers
. And by all accounts, he did just that. He was funny and goofy on the set, so I wasn’t sure how he was going to sell creepy, but the topic did the work for him. Glenn Close played our mother, which gave the movie some real dramatic heft.
A few days after the show aired, a girl at school came and told me her dad did it to her. I just stared. I didn’t know what to say. She didn’t explain. Just said, the same thing happened at her house, with her dad. I’m not sure I even responded. Luckily for me, she also told our teacher.
We graduated from elementary school shortly after that and I never knew what happened to her. I had always thought she was different, and Mom, for some reason, had never let me play at her house. She’d always had a weird feeling about the girl’s dad. He was an artist of some type, who did his own hair and his daughters in a ’70s Farrah Fawcett style. Mom called him a creep and said sort of cryptically, “Stay away from him.”
Still, when the girl told everyone, Mom said, “You can’t always believe what kids say. Who knows what really happened.”
I was shocked that she would cast doubt on the girl’s admission. She probably just wanted to end the conversation. After all, we’d done the whole movie so kids would feel confident enough to speak out. You can’t do that, and then dismiss what they have to say when they finally say it.
 
 
“Missy, wake up!”
I heard the voice but I couldn’t pull myself out of deep sleep.
A moment passed, and I slipped back into unconsciousness. I thought I was dreaming when I heard the voice again.
My father put his hand on my shoulder and shook me gently.
“Missy, wake up. Your sister has been in a car accident. She’s in the hospital. Mom and I are going to see her. Do you want to come? You don’t have to, I guess. You can stay here. We’ll lock all the doors. It’s almost morning anyway, and we’ve got to go right now.” Dad’s voice was calm, but urgent.
“I want to stay. I’m too tired.”
“That’s fine.” He was gone.
 
 
The next time I woke up, it was light out. I heard voices downstairs in the kitchen. I heard Mom, so I assumed I had dreamt the whole thing.
I walked into the kitchen and sat down at the table. I quickly understood that I hadn’t been dreaming. Mom’s face was tear-stained and tired. Aunt Marilyn was still crying.
“What happened?” I asked, now shocked to attention.
“Your sister was in a car accident last night. Dad came in and told you but you didn’t want to wake up.”
Immediately, I felt overwhelmed with guilt.
“I came home to get you. He’s still there with her.” Mom looked at the clock. “We have to go back to the hospital. Put on some clothes and let’s go. Hurry!”
“Is she okay?” I asked, now drowning in the news.
Her voice tightened. “We don’t really know. She’s conscious now so that’s a good sign, the doctors say. She and Chris were in the back of a pickup truck of all things, riding home from Magic Mountain. They’d all been drinking. The truck hit some gravel and flipped and they all flew out. There were three other kids in the back with them. Chris is hurt much worse than Tiffany. The doctors say he’ll need a metal plate in his skull and he almost lost his eye.”
At this, she broke down and started whimpering, which made Marilyn cry even harder. I sat at the table in shock. I was supposed to be heading upstairs to change, but I couldn’t make my legs work.
“When they left the house, she was in the cab of the truck. She promised me she wouldn’t get in the back. Frankly, I didn’t even consider the possibility. There were only three of them.” Mom choked back tears, then waved her arm at me irritably.
“Go change! Or go like that. I don’t care.”
I went up and changed into something that didn’t match and we raced to Holy Cross Hospital. It wasn’t the closest hospital to the site of the accident, but the first paramedic on the scene thought the impact had torn up the kids too much to just move them. He’d found most of them unconscious and a few moaning, and had radioed for a medevac helicopter to fly in and rush them to a special trauma center. The chopper landed in the desert nearby, and whisked them away.
Dad stood outside the intensive-care room where Tiffany lay, wrapped in bandages. Blood and guts made me woozy, so I could force myself only as far as the doorway. I could see from a few feet away that she had her eyes closed and that there was a huge bandage around her skull and forehead, padded with gauze and soaked with iodine and blood. Her face was swollen and purple. I couldn’t tell if it was really her.
She was sleeping, dressed in a white hospital gown. Her hands, also wrapped in bandages, lay motionless on top of the blanket.
Mom came up next to Dad and he put his arm around her as she melted into him, crying again. A doctor approached them as they swayed together in the hallway.
“I think she’s going to be okay,” the doctor told them. He was an older man with wavy graying hair and glasses. He was still wearing his scrubs, and a silly little blue hat that rode down on his forehead and tied behind his head. A matching mask dangled loosely from his neck.
His tone was matter-of-fact. “Most of the damage is cosmetic. She’s lost a lot of skin all over her body. We had a plastic surgeon stitch up her forehead and scalp, but the impact with the road and the gravel did a lot of damage, burning and tearing the skin. There’s part of her scalp where her hair will probably not grow back.”
“What about brain damage?” Dad asked in a voice that tried to stifle his emotions.
“We’ll have to see. She was awake at a few points, although not that lucid. It was hard to assess her mental state because her blood alcohol level was so high. In a way, that helped. Because the kids were so drunk, they bounced on impact. They might have been worse off sober. Then again she might not have been in the back of a speeding pickup with an intoxicated driver if she were sober,” the doctor said.

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