Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir (28 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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“So what did your mom say?”
“‘No,’ basically. I told her how great the internship is, that I know a bunch of people here who tried to get jobs like it, and struck out entirely. I explained that I’ve been working and begging and calling and writing and planning for months. All that didn’t matter,” I said, looking down at my tray and shaking my head.
“Well, she wants you to come home,” he said matter-of-factly. He was cute, but not particularly helpful.
“No shit, Sherlock. But I don’t want to go home.” I frowned. “I want to go see another city. I’ve lived in L.A. and Boston. I want to try out D.C.”
“So just come with me. You’re twenty years old!” he said easily.
Zach only had his mom. She was relentlessly and untiringly proud of every single thing he did. They’d been alone since his parents had split up when he was little, so he’d developed a solid sense of self-reliance that I admired. He always worked, and he always had a plan. I was a planner myself, but next to Zach, I felt like a slouch.
“I can’t just go without her signing off on it,” I grumbled.
“Why not?” he pressed.
“I don’t have enough money.”
Mom had me and she knew it.
Zach shook his head and grimaced as if he were saying, “I told you so.” He worked as many hours as he could muster at Harvard Law School in Alan Dershowitz’s office. Dershowitz was a famous appeals lawyer who made his name as much in the media as the courtroom. Zach was smart enough to score a job that paid, had cachet, and got him closer to getting into Harvard Law.
He was pretty pleased with himself.
“If you had a job this semester . . . ,” he nagged.
“I know. I know! Advanced micro and calculus were sort of kicking my ass. I barely made it through my classes.”
It was true. I’d decided to major in economics and found my calculus skills weren’t quite up to the task. I was struggling to get through the more technical parts of my major and since all my professors graded on a curve, I had to climb over half my rabid classmates just to get a B. It was much harder slogging than I was used to.
“I can pay for stuff,” Zach offered, softening his rebuke.
“Well, maybe there’s still time for me to work it out,” I said.
 
 
I spent the afternoon in my dorm room calling around campus looking for work. My choices for employment were bleak so deep into the semester. I could clean dorm rooms or do food prep in a hairnet in the dining halls. Both were humbling and barely compensated. All the better-paying, more dignified jobs had been snapped up months earlier.
My roommate, Debbie, walked in and plunked herself down on my bed. Her blonde bowl cut framed her face with a blunt edge except where the strands mixed with the humidity in the air and feathered around her ears. She brushed her bangs back, and her bare forehead made her wide blue eyes appear even larger above her freckled cheeks.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Looking for a way to make money,” I replied.
She crossed her jeans-clad legs and tugged at the bottom of her pale T-shirt. Debbie’s low-maintenance style clashed with my penchant for make-up and trendy clothes and made us seem like an odd couple. But we’d been fast friends from the day she walked into my freshman dorm. I’d never cried or complained about a problem she couldn’t walk her way through, and vice versa.
“What do you need cash for?” she asked.
“I want to take that internship in D.C. for the summer and go with Zach. He’s working for the public defender’s office. But it’s not paid and my parents want me to come home so they aren’t going to give me money to do it.”
“Can you use the
Little House
money or whatever?” she asked, going to the obvious solution.
“Not really. It’s complicated,” I lied. “The only thing I can find on short notice is working in the dining hall, or dorm crew.”
She flinched at the last suggestion. Harvard sent financial aid students around the dorms with buckets and toilet bowl brushes cleaning other students’ filth. The task was revolting and demeaning. You might knock on someone’s door to clean their toilet and then sit next to them an hour later in art history. I always thought there had to be an easier way to earn money. Now I wondered if they were just poor planners like myself.
“Kitchen has to be better than dorm crew. Anything would be,” she said with a shudder. “How bad could it be?”
 
 
The next day I descended into the bowels of Eliot House to find out. It turned out the kitchen that churned out three meals a day for us also served our next-door neighbors at Kirkland House. The steaming, belching food factory buried deep underground connected both houses by tunnels that reached out like two long arms to the dining halls above.
Sounds of metal utensils clashing and thick local accents mixed with the stifling damp air and swirled around me as I walked through the tunnel toward the manager’s office. This zone was off-limits to students, making the trek through the tunnel feel like a journey to the other side.
“You the new kid?” asked a stout man from behind a desk, looking up from piles of paperwork as I walked through the door. I wondered how he could read anything given the smudges on his wire-rimmed glasses.
He spun his chair around and opened a big drawer behind him. After rummaging through piles of checked fabric, he eventually produced a well-worn pair of pants. He threw them on the desk and then rose to his feet before opening another drawer higher up on the cabinet. From there he pulled a white short-sleeved shirt that was frayed around the collar.
“Everyone wears a uniform. You can have these but you have to bring them back. You can wear what you have on to train today, but wear the uniform tomorrow.”
He stood up and squeezed past me with a grunt, motioning for me to follow him. The three hairs that still remained on top of his head fluttered as we moved down the hall, and I wished that someone, somewhere would open a window.
Eventually we arrived at the kitchen. I don’t know what I expected. Certainly not Wolfgang Puck given what the finished product tasted like. But my suspicion about the prisonlike quality of our meals seemed to be immediately confirmed.
Half a dozen women and one lone guy stood at prep stations around the room, quietly chopping, mixing, and sorting. In the center of the room, an island of burners held pots big enough to boil naughty children one by one. Blue flames licked the bottom of the pots as white foam bubbled to the surface. On the far side, a wall of ovens radiated heat and cooked the room. A sharp scent of antiseptic cleaning fluid overpowered anything that might smell like food.
I looked at the people working quietly and recognized one woman’s decidedly Irish, pale face from behind the counter upstairs. I’d seen her schlep heavy metal trays through the door at the back of the dining hall countless times and only casually wondered where they came from. Now I knew.
“Bess, I’ve got a pair of hands here to help you,” the manager barked and with that he marched back toward his office.
A squat woman with gray hair pulled back into a tight bun waved me over. The creases around her eyes turned up as she smiled.
“Want to staht with choppin’?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said.
Bess set me up at a chopping board with a sharp, gleaming cleaver. Then she built a giant, tumbling mountain of washed whole vegetables to one side of my board before disappearing into a closet near the door where we’d entered. She reemerged with a freshly washed but still stained apron and handed it to me. I slipped the strap over my head and tied the long waist straps around my middle and got started.
Over the next few hours, I diligently deconstructed the hill of potatoes and carrots, chopping and slicing until my wrist hurt. At first the task was satisfying, dicing the hard vegetables into symmetrical shapes, but the pleasure of creating organized little orange and beige piles soon wore into tedium.
Eventually I’d worked through everything Bess had given me, and she let me go.
“Come back tomorrow if you want. Hank has plenty of shifts. If you want,” she said.
“I’ll be back,” I said, wiping the perspiration from my forehead.
“You guys usually don’t last too many shifts. Get a nice job in the library.” She smiled, showing me her yellowed teeth.
I nodded and took off my apron, retreating to where I’d left my folded uniform for the following day’s shift. As I trudged back through the tunnel, I calculated what I’d earned for my exhaustion. At this rate, I’d have to work a dozen shifts just to pay one month’s rent, not to mention any other expenses. It was hopeless.
Later that night I sat with Debbie in the dining hall in the middle of a long table, staring at the carrots and potatoes that filled out the evening’s stew. I wondered if I’d chopped the carrots on my plate. I had a whole new appreciation for the food we had denigrated at every meal.
Some of our neighbors from down the hall sat with us at the table.
“You know, she chopped those vegetables,” Debbie said, pointing at me with her knife. She’d been impressed with my gumption, but I was less thrilled to volunteer to my classmates that I was so hard up for money.
“You what?” Caitlin said. She tossed her dark, shiny hair behind her shoulder, eyes wide with disbelief.
“She spent the afternoon working in the kitchen. Apparently we have no idea what goes into these meals,” Debbie said.
“I don’t want to know,” Caitlin said with obvious disdain. She looked directly at me. “Why on earth would you do that?”
I’d tried to blend in since I got to Harvard, sharing almost nothing about my family. Mom had been loud and braggy the two or three times she, Dad, and Marilyn had come to visit. But so many of the kids at Harvard had real money, old money; they were at ease with the cash that seemed to flow endlessly from their pockets. I knew any airs Mom put on were mortifyingly transparent.
Since the vast majority of students lived on campus for their entire undergrad stay, sleeping in dorm-issued beds, your clothes and bed linens were the only indications of where you’d come from. That and what you shared about yourself. I felt like my story was so tangled and complicated that the less I offered, the better. Of course everyone knew I’d grown up on television, and
Little House
was still in reruns on a local Boston station every single day. But beyond that, I just kept my mouth shut.
“Oh, my mom doesn’t want me living in D.C. this summer so she’s going to try to starve me home,” I said casually.
“My mom would never let me work in the kitchen, serving other students. It’s demeaning,” Caitlin sniffed.
I could see the hair on the back of Debbie’s neck stand up. “What’s demeaning about working? Do you think you’re better than the people that work in the dining hall to make the food you’re eating right now?”
“Well, yes. I think our parents sent us here so we wouldn’t have to chop vegetables and wash dishes. And my mom wants me to focus on studying and getting A’s. I’m not sure working in the dining hall is the best use of my time at this school. There are a million things we could be learning . . . libraries, museums, clubs, classes. We only have so much time here. I don’t think it makes sense to spend it cutting up food,” she argued.
Her dark eyes shone against her pale skin. Enough of her red lipstick remained to give her the appearance of Snow White. I wondered if there was a poison apple handy.
“Well, I got a summer job that’s going to help me get the job I want after graduation. Whatever I have to do to get to D.C. this summer is worth it, I guess,” I said evenly.
I didn’t want to encourage the debate. There was so much more to the story I had no intention of explaining. No one at Harvard needed to know how crazy and controlling my mom was, or how she’d relentlessly drained and mismanaged our finances without anyone stopping her or even challenging her.
So instead of inviting more questions, I just stood up from the table and carried my tray to the conveyor belt where we dumped them when we were done with a meal. I’d always pictured the napkin-littered trays falling into a black hole once they got beyond the end of the rubber runway. Now I knew there was a lone worker at the other end where the belt snaked behind the wall, pulling them off one by one and wiping them down.
After a week of cramming in shifts inside the underground labyrinth of kitchens, I had cleared next to nothing. But when I told Mom what I was doing, her combined shock and horror led her to rethink her hard-line position.
“You don’t have to be so dramatic. Obviously I will help you,” she said with exasperation.
It certainly hadn’t been obvious to me.
 
 
“What’s your sister doing this summer?” Debbie asked as we walked across campus to class a week later. Spring had taken hold on campus, and cherry blossoms exploded in pale pink and then fell to the ground in front of us, staining our path like wet tissue paper.
I hadn’t thought about Tiffany’s plans. The summer we’d spent together almost two years ago when she’d returned from Europe was the last time we’d felt close to each other, much as I had feared at the time. She’d melted back into the Berkeley scene and disappeared from my life, as if that wonderful summer had been a figment of my imagination.

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