Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir (31 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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He chatted happily with Mom while he worked. She’d found an audience who hadn’t heard all her stories about the house, decorating, and my acting career. She embellished details and drew out the dramatic moments, and he laughed at the punch lines and frowned at the appropriate pauses. Mom was in heaven.
Tiffany and Dad retired to the living room to watch
Law & Order
, and Wray and I yawned and stretched before heading upstairs. We were still on New York time, which gave us an excuse to exit early.
We peeled off into the room that was designated as mine, although I’d never technically lived in this new house. The room had plush off-white carpet and a marble bathroom all its own, with a deep tub and an elegant polished vanity. The furniture in this room was far more sparse, and looked like a collection of leftovers or things that hadn’t worked elsewhere in the house.
I kept thinking it would have been nice to grow up in this room. There was less pressure and more beauty. It was hard to believe an earthquake had instigated such an upgrade. Our lives were apparently worth so much more once a disaster had destroyed the foundation.
A queen bed stood against the wall. I didn’t love the idea of sleeping in the same bed with my boyfriend in my parents’ house, even though we’d just moved in together in New York. But the idea of sending him to another room seemed weird too. The sleeping arrangements just added to the awkwardness of the whole visit. Wray read my mind and put his arms around me.
“Seriously, you need to relax. Your parents are great. I have no idea why you are so worked up, but you’re freaking out for nothing. Breathe,” he said.
The next day I wandered down in my sweats alone while Wray was still snoring. Mom had gotten up early to make banana bread from a mix and brew coffee. I loved the happy-homemaker façade. I’d practically starved to death foraging for food in our house while growing up and now she was putting on a show for Wray as if she were Martha Stewart. She even quoted Martha for good measure.
“You never want to cool bread too quickly, Martha says,” she remarked to no one in particular. I looked over at Tiffany, who rolled her eyes dramatically. Dad chuckled.
“What? What’s funny? What are you all laughing at?” Mom asked.
I heard the shower running upstairs. A short while later, Wray emerged totally ready for the day, pressed and shaven. We all stared at him, having barely ingested coffee.
“How did everyone sleep?” he chirped. No one responded.
Mom sliced him some banana bread and he made a show of breathing in the aroma.
We sat around for at least an hour, watching television and discussing different plans for the day. Most of the action was going to center on a football game on television and another opportunity to grill. Dad planned to go for a long walk, which was his exercise ritual, though I knew Wray would not consider anything less than an hour–long run a decent workout. He had more energy than my entire family put together.
Wray and I volunteered to go to the grocery store to get food to graze on during the game and meat for the grill. Mom scribbled down items she wanted on a list. Tiffany mentioned some exotic vegetables that would make a good side dish. She’d taken up cooking now that she was living at home, mostly to escape into the vacuum that was the normally empty kitchen.
“Okay, so we’ll do the shopping,” Wray announced. “Let me go upstairs and grab the keys to the rental car. I’ll be right back.”
I followed him upstairs to get my purse and change into clothes suitable for a run to a grocery store. When we returned downstairs, the place had cleared out. We walked out the front door without locking it and got in the car.
“Your family is great. Your sister is a little off,” Wray ventured. “But I’d be like that too if I had to move back in with my parents.”
“Yeah. I don’t know,” I said.
“She’s studying for the bar?” he asked.
“In theory. I don’t know how much studying she’s doing. She said she was going to take the Kaplan course. But I thought that’s why you go to law school, basically to study for the bar,” I said.
“Right,” Wray said, following the winding lane around the golf course. We went through the gatehouse and out onto the main road.
“Turn right here. There’s a Bristol Farms back next to the exit from the freeway,” I said. “I was hoping that Tiffany would get a normal office job and her own apartment, and just start her life, sort of. Mom always says Tiffany wants to keep hiding in school. That’s why she went to law school. So she wouldn’t have to face life. She took almost six years to graduate from Berkeley, well, just over five, I guess. And then spent three more years in law school. She took a break in the middle. She’s been milking it for a long time. She’s never had anything like a nine-to-five, five-day-a-week job. I think it would do her a lot of good. Even if she was just like a paralegal or something. Turn here,” I said, pointing to the light at the intersection.
“How old is she now?” he asked.
“Twenty-seven,” I said.
“Well, normally you apply for jobs as you’re graduating, right? So did she do that? How did she not sort of lock something down before she left San Diego,” Wray asked, turning on Westlake Boulevard with the highway now in sight.
“I don’t know. I think her grades were pretty terrible. When I went down there for graduation, she seemed like she was sort of holding on by a thread. In college she’d made a pack of friends, but I didn’t meet anyone really at law school that she seemed to hang out with except her boyfriend, who was a jerk, a real angry loud type. Her apartment was a disaster and when we went out to dinner, she spoke sort of frantically and didn’t always make sense. The whole vibe was not good. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, but it was not normal.”
And it seemed to me that she was drinking a lot but I didn’t say this to Wray. I noticed that Mom would snap at her and nag when she drank now, but her complaints didn’t get any traction with Tiffany or Dad, since Tiffany wasn’t driving and she wasn’t so drunk she was knocking over the furniture or anything. Plus she and Dad were drinking from the same bottle, so clearly he didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. Since I had been away from the group and now stepped back in, it was easier for me to see her casual drinking was escalating.
We pulled into the parking lot of Bristol Farms, and right into a spot in the front row next to the bay of shopping carts.
When I got out of the passenger side, I saw them. Tiffany and Dad getting out of one car, Mom closing the door of another, one row away.
“Didn’t we all agree that you and I would do the shopping?” Wray asked, befuddled, pointing to my dad and sister.
“Yep. And look,” I said, “there’s Mom, too. In a third car.”
“Wow,” Wray said.
“No one trusts anyone else in this family to do anything, even shop for lunch.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
 
“W
eshould just elope,” I said to Wray, still admiring the ring he’d given me. He’d taken me to the top of the Empire State Building and surprised me with a beautiful square diamond. I said yes immediately. Now the sun bounced off my new ring like a disco ball.
I was on a cell phone, sitting in a news van with my news crew, waiting for the search-and-rescue team to find a downed Cessna. We’d been on high alert deep in the Connecticut woods for four hours, and it had gotten old.
“If I had a dime for every private plane crash I’ve covered in New England, we could pay for this wedding ourselves. Why do people fly in these two-seaters? They fall out of the sky like rocks. And I’ll be damned if they don’t find the thing the moment we decide to go for dinner,” I said into the phone. The photographer up front grunted in agreement at every sentence.
“Come on. It’s gonna be great! It’s a huge party with all our friends,” Wray said.
“You have no idea what you are in for,” I said, knowing he was comfortably seated at his desk at his office near the Flatiron Building in Manhattan, while I was crouched in a van in the woods, rummaging through my purse for a granola bar.
“Sure our moms have gotten a little nutty with the details but it’s going to be beautiful,” Wray assured me.
My call waiting beeped in. It was Mom.
“Okay, it’s my mom again. With yet another detail I’m sure. She’s spending so much money. I don’t know how they can afford this. I’m sure my dad has no idea how much she’s spending.”
“Doesn’t he ask her?” Wray said.
“No, I’m sure not. Communication isn’t their forte,” I replied.
“Well, why don’t you tell her we don’t need so many elaborate details and frills?” Wray said, always trying to solve the problem.
“Yes. I have said that and it’s like talking to a wall. She tells me that I didn’t have any trouble spending a fortune on my dress.”
“I’ll pay for that. If I can also pick out what’s under it,” Wray said.
I ignored him. “I have less understanding of their finances than ever.”
Beep.
“Shit. I have to take her call or she won’t leave me alone. Bye.”
“How many times a day does she call you?” he said, as I cut him off.
“Hi, Mom,” I said into the phone.
“
There
you are,” she said, completely annoyed.
“Yes, Mom. I’m working. I’m in the woods . . .”
“Well, don’t get a tick bite. That would ruin the wedding. Especially if it was on someplace that showed,” she said.
“What’s going on?” I pressed, not wanting to make the call last any longer than necessary.
“We have to decide if the chairs should be wrapped in pale pink chiffon fabric or apricot. The fabric makes a gorgeous bow on the back. Not too big,” she said.
Beep.
More call waiting. This time it was Dana from the assignment desk. She was the assignment manager for the station, but also a close friend who was in the wedding, and she’d suffered through the details as much as I had. Besides Wray, she was the main person keeping me sane through this process, the only one who understood I was juggling this job and Mom the Wedding Planner. I thought about conferencing her into the fabric vote since I didn’t care.
“Do we need to wrap the chairs?” I asked. “How much is that?”
“It’s a fortune, but it’s necessary,” Mom said.
Beep.
“Necessary? Mom, I’m working. I have to answer that,” I said, realizing that Dana could be calling about something other than my pending nuptials.
“Pink or apricot?”
“Hold on,” I said, clicking over to Dana. “What’s up? My mom is driving me bananas.”
“They found the plane! Where are you? I just heard it on the scanner! Are you sitting in the truck? Get out of the truck, grab Brian, and run!” Dana yelled.
I hung up on both calls and threw the van door open. Brian’s boots beat me to the dusty path in front of us and I chased him in the direction of the barking dogs. He had his camera up on his shoulder, rolling tape as he ran. I pulled the stick microphone out of my pocket and flipped it upside down to switch it on from the base.
We caught up to the search party and other TV crews in time to see them pry open the plane door. Brian widened his stance to steady himself as he shot the state trooper climbing onto the plane’s wing. The trooper dipped his shaved head inside the cabin as two searchers held the door back.
“Let’s get him out!” he shouted with his head still inside. Two rescue workers climbed inside the cabin and struggled to free the pilot, who was apparently still breathing.
My phone rang again. It was Mom.
“I cannot talk,” I shouted into the receiver. “I don’t care what color the chairs are. Pick one. Or we can stand. I have to go. They’re prying this pilot from the plane.”
And with that I snapped the clamshell shut and turned it off.
 
 
Two weeks later Wray and I boarded a much larger plane to L.A, loaded down with everything we’d need for the wedding and the honeymoon. I’d spent the previous day, Monday, standing on a train platform in New Haven, where a mother and her four sons had been struck and killed trying to cross the tracks in the middle of the night. The tragedy had led every local newscast. Like most reporters, I’d become immune to death and destruction. I was used to seeing mangled cars containing bloody bodies right up close. Plus you start to notice how often a bad decision had set off a deadly chain of events. But this was too much. When we arrived, the children’s shoes were still lying on the tracks. The scene rocked even the most seasoned reporters among us. It was not an auspicious start to the week that would end with my wedding.

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