Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir (27 page)

Read Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir Online

Authors: Melissa Francis

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

BOOK: Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir
9.41Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
She wore a pale pink cotton tank dress that showed off her tan, paired with a bangle earrings and studded belt to add an edge. With lots of black kohl eyeliner and a pale frosted lip, she looked sizzling. Gary’s eyes didn’t leave her as he mopped up a spilled drink and shoved a tip in his pocket.
I showed her to a table near my hostess stand, surprised by how excited I was to see her. I wanted to be around her more than anyone else. I hadn’t felt that way since we were little kids.
“I highly recommend the Hawaiian salad. My friend Tory says it has the fewest calories if you get it without cheese. Or you could get it with cheese, and then it tastes really good.”
“No cheese. I don’t want to gain any weight before I get back up to Cal. Also, why the hell did you torture me on the treadmill this morning if we’re just going to eat cheese?” She sighed.
“Excellent decision. I will let them know. You eat, I will clean up my station. We can close up and go in like fifteen minutes.” I smiled.
 
 
A short time later, we were sitting at a bar a few blocks away known for loud music and careless bouncers.
“It never ceases to amaze me when we get into a bar with the same ID!” I laughed. I’d been using her ID since she turned twenty-one. It was guaranteed to work, except when we were together.
“How do they not notice it’s the same name, the same birthday, and nearly the same picture?” Tiffany said.
“I don’t know. The picture looks different. You have short hair on yours. Long hair on mine. That’s something,” I said, sipping a rum and Coke.
“Which one of us is driving home? I don’t mind,” she offered, pushing her drink away.
“Actually, I don’t care either,” I said quickly. I loved that she didn’t feel compelled to get hammered. I’d seen her drink compulsively so many times, pouring drinks down her throat as quickly as they came. She had a casual relationship with this cocktail that I didn’t want to upset.
“What are you going to do when you go back to school?” I said, changing the subject. “Are you going to apply to grad school?”
It was her fifth year at Berkeley, which was entirely normal in the University of California school system. Almost no one graduated in four years anymore. They either couldn’t get the classes they needed because of overcrowding or they were just avoiding adulthood.
“I’m going to apply to law school and take the LSAT. I thought about doing psychology, but it’s such a long road. Besides, I’d really like to be a lawyer,” she said.
“I think you love
Law & Order
,” I teased.
“Well that’s true.”
The thought of her going back to Berkeley unsettled me. I didn’t want her to return to her old friends and her old self. This transformation seemed tenuous, and I wanted to hold on to her.
“Are you excited about Harvard? It’s so far away,” she asked with wide eyes.
“I know, isn’t that fantastic? A whole plane ride away. No one can drive to see me. No pop-ins,” I said.
I was thinking of Mom, but I suddenly realized that included her, and the distance bothered me unexpectedly.
“You can visit me,” I offered. “Mom would buy you a ticket.”
“Not without wanting to come,” she said ruefully.
 
 
We hung out most the days and nights when I wasn’t working for the next few weeks; Tiffany delayed going back up to Berkeley, but it couldn’t last. She had to go back to school to register and get settled in after such a long time away traveling around Europe. The summer was fleeting.
 
 
One night, I took off by myself to see Patrick. He was two hours away in San Diego visiting his parents, and I drove down to meet them and go out to dinner. I still hadn’t come clean to him about how old I was, and now I was getting in deeper by meeting his parents.
When we made the plan, I knew it was unrealistic to think I would drive all the way back to the Valley that night. But if I went with the premise that I would spend the night at his house, the idea would have provoked a huge fight with Mom.
Sure enough, when midnight rolled around, Patrick and I were entangled and exhausted in the room he’d grown up in and the last thing I could do was tear myself away from him and leave. He was going to vanish soon enough anyway.
I phoned Mom with some lame excuse about how I was too tired to drive safely, and instead of yelling, she just slammed down the phone. There was nothing she could do from a distance, and we both knew I would be dead when I finally turned up at home. I may have been eighteen, but not coming home was tantamount to an insurrection.
At six AM, Patrick rolled over in his bed and woke me.
“You’d better go. Both of our moms are going to kill us,” he said without opening his eyes. He was even sexier in the morning, which I wouldn’t have bet was possible. I rested my head on his bare, tanned chest and then tilted my head up and kissed him. He kissed me back before gently pushing me off him and onto the floor with a smile.
“I’m serious. You have to go.”
“You’re twenty-four,” I said, very well aware of the difference between our ages. “I know why I’m in trouble, but why is your mom going to kill
you
?”
“Because this is her house, and not my apartment. My little sister still lives here. We’re Catholic. I really can’t have a girl stay over. You’ve got to go.”
 
 
I drove the entire way far above the speed limit, as if making good time would fix anything.
When I walked into the house, I was surprised to find it empty except for Tiffany. She sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading the
Los Angeles Times
.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“Dad’s at work. Mom went out. She said she couldn’t stand to look at you when you got home,” she said without looking up.
“Yeah, I’m in big trouble this time,” I said weakly. She didn’t respond.
“Wait, you’re not going to give me a hard time!” I said, suddenly shocked.
“You stayed out all night? You couldn’t have seen him and just come home?” she said.
“Oh my God! What’s the big deal! I was just tired! It’s a long drive. I lived at Stanford the whole summer by myself last year! I’m leaving for college in a month! I can sleep anywhere I want then!” I shouted.
“Exactly. You can sleep anywhere you want
then
. For the rest of your life. You didn’t have to rub it in their faces now. We all knew you weren’t coming home when you left and you lied and said you were. Come on. You want people to treat you like an adult, then act like one.”
I stared mouth agape at this stranger at the kitchen table. Then I had to laugh.
“Are you seriously lecturing me about being responsible and respectful?” I said.
She looked up at me. “You just shouldn’t have done it, and you know it.”
I turned on my heel and left the room. I went upstairs and combed my hair into a ponytail and put on my Islands uniform.
When I got back in my car to drive to work, all I could think was, please don’t let this level-headed girl posing as my sister disappear. I don’t mind being the bad apple. Please let it be her turn to shine, to feel good, to be happy in her own skin.
A week later when she drove off, I repeated my prayer silently to myself. Let this be her time. But God wasn’t listening.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
 
“A
bsolutely
not
. Let me get this straight. You want to spend the summer living with your boyfriend a million miles away in Washington, D.C., doing some unpaid job instead of going on auditions, and I’m footing the bill for the whole thing? Ha! You’ve got a lot of nerve!”
And with that, the phone went dead. Mom had always been the queen of slamming down the phone. She loved to end a conversation that way. The sound of the handset crashing into the cradle a split second before a dial tone replaced her screaming voice. It was the perfect exclamation mark to whatever dramatic speech she’d just finished.
Years ago, the proliferation of the cordless phone had robbed her of one of her dearest forms of expression. Now when she wanted to let someone know that their response didn’t matter, she could only tell them by punching a button and then slamming the phone down on the nearest counter, the second act devoid of its most important witness.
I looked out the window of my dorm room and sighed. Eliot House was a hulking limestone dorm on the bank of the Charles River. My third-floor room overlooked JFK Boulevard, where packs of athletes in practice uniforms carrying lacrosse sticks or rowing bags streamed from Harvard Yard over the Charles River to the practice fields just beyond the stone bridge. I watched them and was willing to bet that their parents would applaud their industry and gumption.
My mom’s response wasn’t unexpected. Still, I’d hoped. The unpaid job she’d spat at was a prestigious internship with NBC News in D.C. that I’d landed after months of letters and phone calls and begging. I’d be working on the
Today
show and I’d get to go to the White House and sit with the press corps in the West Wing. But to Mom, the job was in the wrong industry and the wrong zip code.
The year before, I’d waltzed into the career counseling office at Harvard with no clue about what I wanted to do with my summer break. Every smart, aggressive freshman was sniffing around for a jump on something or other. Half of them were gearing up to be consultants, which didn’t make sense to me. We knew next to nothing about nothing, so how could we possibly tell a company how to do its business better? Still there seemed to be three tracks at Harvard: Wall Street consulting or investment banking, law school, or medical school. Those options seemed too dreary for someone like me who had already had a career with a lot more sparkle.
Then I’d found a lone scrap of paper with a description of a job that had never occurred to me: KTTV—News Intern. KTTV was the local Fox News affiliate in downtown Los Angeles. “Reports to the Assignment Manager, generating story ideas and assisting the assignment desk.” I didn’t know how to come up with a news story or what an assignment desk was, but the job sounded a whole lot better than making copies in a law office.
I called, wrote, and interviewed and eventually the golden yet unpaid position was mine. I came home every day exhausted with a migraine from the frantic yelling and racing to the top of each newscast. I was hooked. News was everything entertainment television wasn’t: unscripted, unrehearsed, no safety net. Get in front of the camera and use the brain God gave you or risk being utterly exposed in your underpants.
That’s not to say my actual duties as an intern were far above making copies in a law office. But I’d seen my future and then made a map to get there. That involved more internships with more connections who would vouch for me and get me through the next door, until I could make a tape, pedal the reel around tiny markets, and finally get on the air.
Now, my mom’s reaction to the
Today
show internship was a roadblock. I sulked for a while before giving up and heading downstairs to meet my boyfriend, Zach, in the dining hall for the very end of lunch before the dining hall closed to prep for dinner.
Zach was tall and preppy with dark hair and high cheekbones that always made me wonder if his Arizona roots had reached out and intertwined with those of some Native Americans. He’d beaten me to the dining hall, made his way through the line, and was already seated at one end of a long table in the oversized wood-paneled room.
“Sorry I’m late. Talking to my mom. What’s for lunch?” I said, looking at his tray.
“Chickwich. The one meal they can’t screw up. You better hurry if you want one. I saw bricks of lasagna waiting in the wings for dinner so this may be the last good meal of the day,” he said, rubbing his palms together over his plate.
I walked to the food line in the great hall and grabbed a red, battered tray off the stack. A thousand meals had traveled on the tray, scratching the surface into its own unique pattern. The line inched forward twisting and turning into the heart of the kitchen, where a pillowy Slavic woman greeted us each day from behind the sneeze guard.
“Hi, honey. What do you want for lunch?” she asked, sounding almost like an aunt or a grandmother so warm and sincere I almost believed I could tell her I wanted a rack of lamb and she’d turn around and produce one.
“I’ll take a chickwich, thanks,” I said.
“Just about the last one,” she said smiling.
She picked up a breaded chicken patty from a bed of lettuce using flat metal tongs and dropped it onto a bun she’d pulled from a bag that said “institutional use only,” which made me think I was eating prison food.
I returned to Zach’s table and sat down across from him. He’d already eaten one chickwich and was focused on the second. Unlike most rumpled college boys, Zach was neat as a pin. His shirt was pressed, cuffs folded back so they wouldn’t catch the honey mustard.
He covered his mouth with his hand so he could talk and eat at the same time without being rude.

Other books

Sprout Mask Replica by Robert Rankin
Revolt by Shahraz, Qaisra
The Sheikh's Green Card Bride by Holly Rayner, Lara Hunter
Tyrant by Christian Cameron
The Devil's Cocktail by Alexander Wilson
Dangerous Weakness by Warfield, Caroline
Man Seeks Woman 2, Man Seeks Wife by Stephanie Franklin
Renegade Player by Dixie Browning