The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (8 page)

I walked into her bathroom. All sorts of makeup tubes and bottles and compacts littered the countertops, untouched since she had left. She had enough to open up her own makeup counter. Or at least work at one. Which, once she got out of rehab, might be the only job she’d be able to get.

I aimed the camera.
Snap
. I loved the sound of the shutter opening and closing. There was something so purposeful about it. Something that said, I’m not sure why, but this image—this moment—it matters. It’s something I want you to know about me and my life and what I think and what I feel and what I can’t really tell you in words. Because if I try, it’ll just end up sounding stupid and make me feel weird, like my insides are hanging out because I took the risk to let you in, so I’m going to do it in pictures, but then I don’t want to discuss it after. Because if I do, we’ll somehow start talking about my mother because somehow the conversation
always
ends up getting around to her; and it’s too painful, and right now I’m too angry and too sad and too scared. So if I just don’t talk about it, maybe I can keep pretending that it’s not really happening, or that it’s not really so bad, or that if I wish hard enough, the whole thing will just go away and we can go back to things being normal, whatever that means.

I opened the medicine cabinet. A row of amber-colored prescription bottles stood at attention like soldiers. Unlike the rest of the room, these were in perfect order, their labels facing out. Xanax. Ativan. Klonopin. Ambien. Prozac.

Snap.

Even before I had Googled each one to see what they were for, and the various side effects, and the things you were supposed to avoid when taking them (like, say, alcohol), I had known what they did. What they did was take my mother away from me. The way they made her eyes all glassy and her speech slow was bad enough. But when she took them, it was like I could see part of her—the part that was fun, and funny, and loved life, and had this amazing energy that swept you up whether you wanted it to or not, and got you out of bad moods, and made you laugh when maybe fifteen minutes before you wanted to cry—it was as if I could literally see it waft up and out of her, like smoke trailing out of a chimney. And what was left was just a beautiful five-foot-four, Pilates-ized, yoga-ized shell.

I opened the door to her closet and walked over to her Diane von Furstenberg dresses, wedging myself between them and breathing in her smell. Out of the corner of my eye I saw an old Payless shoebox, up on top of the shelf, its sides dented. I couldn’t believe after all this time she still had it. I carefully took it down and went over to her bed, crawling under the covers and putting two pillows behind me, like we did when we watched TV together. To anyone else looking inside the box, it would’ve just looked like a random bunch of junk. Different-colored crystals and stones, fortunes from fortune cookies, inspirational quotes scribbled on paper about having faith and never giving up, one of those little clip-on koala bears missing its right eye, an empty bottle of a Young Living Essential Oil called Into the Future.

For good or for bad, this junk was what my mother was about—magic and wishes and hope. And—after years of struggling and going without so I could have and choosing to look at our life as an adventure instead of what it had been for so many years, which was chaotic and a little scary—it had paid off. Big time. Mom had gotten what she wanted—she had become famous, and the world knew who she was, and they loved her like her family never had. While Mom suffered from verbal diarrhea most of the time, her childhood was one subject she stayed quiet about. She had grown up in a small town near Pittsburgh that, from the few photos she had in an album she kept stashed on the other side of the closet, looked run-down and depressing. Her father was a mechanic, and her mother had been a secretary for an accountant. It would have been one thing if there had been a lot of love to make up for the fact that there wasn’t any money, but from the stony look on Mom’s face whenever I brought them up, there hadn’t been.

At the bottom of the box was a piece of yellowed notebook paper.

I, Annabelle Meryl Jackson, hearby proclame that I have the best mother in the entirre world and that I love her more than anything—all the way up to God, past God, past God—and always will.

(Even though she won’t let me get that cute beegle we saw in the window of Pet Luv because she says that pet stores are evil because they get their dogs from puppy mills.)

Signed,

Annabelle Meryl Jackson,

Age 7, Los Angeles, CA 90046

I smiled as I remembered the look on her face when I gave it to her. That was what started the “all the way up to God, past God, past God” thing. I smoothed the paper and leaned it up against the box on the bed and reached for the framed picture on her nightstand—the same one from the Emmys that I had in my bedroom—and put it next to the box. Then I grabbed my camera.

Snap.

It was a good thing I just got the viewfinder wet with my tears and not the lens.

That Saturday, before we drove down to Laguna for Family Weekend, Ben insisted that we go to John O’Groats—a little restaurant on Pico Boulevard that, over the years, had become what we both considered our place. Unlike so much of L.A., it was down to earth, with oatmeal that was just the right consistency and even better biscuits. I so associated it with Ben that once, when Mom was dating this architect named Theo (he was Swedish, with blond hair and pale skin, and he never smiled) and she suggested the three of us go there for breakfast one Saturday, I lied and said that it was closed for remodeling.

Ben also insisted on singing the entire “Happy Birthday” song off-key when Sioban, our favorite waitress with a thick Irish brogue that took me years to understand, brought over a biscuit with a candle in the middle of it. Although I acted embarrassed, the truth was, the reason I kept my face turned down with my hands covering my eyes wasn’t because Ben was such a bad singer (though he was) but because I was afraid that if I looked at him, the tears that I could feel lodged in my throat—the ones that had signed a lease at the police station and were so settled there they were almost done decorating—would decide to go on a field trip and come out through my eyes.

“Happy Sweet Sixteen,” he said once I had blown out the candle. Like so many birthdays before, my wish was that my mother would finally get her shit together and marry Ben. “How’s it feel to be the bravest, most beautiful sixteen-year-old on the planet?”

Ben was always going on about how pretty I was. And even though I always told him he was nuts, every time he said it, my heart was forced to expand to make room for the extra love that I felt for him because of it. Maybe it was because he knew that it kind of sucked being the semi-pretty Daughter Of one of
People
’s Most Beautiful People, but if he complimented Mom on how she looked, he always complimented me just as much, if not a little bit more. I didn’t actually believe him, but I sure was grateful.

I shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”

“I love you so much, Annabelle. You know that, right?” I nodded. I did. It was one of the few things in life I was sure of. “I love you, too.”

He smiled and reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope. “Here’s the third part of your gift.” The first part had been a new portrait lens that I had been stalking at Samy’s Camera on Fairfax, and the second part was a book of Francesca Woodman’s photographs. She had been this amazing artist who took these dreamy black-and-white self-portraits before jumping off a building when she was twenty-two. (“What a fascinating story,” Mom had said when I told her about it. “Maybe I should develop a movie about her. With the right lighting I could probably pull it off, don’t you think?”)

The smile on my face flickered as I opened the envelope. It was an application for the CalArts photography program summer fellowship for high school students. I had mentioned it in passing to him about a month earlier, and because he was Ben, he remembered. I would have loved to go. “That was really sweet of you to remember, but with everything going on . . .” I shook my head. “I can’t.”

His own smile faded as well. “Look, obviously this is not a great time. For any of us. But I’m not going to let you put your life on hold because of her, Annabelle. You’ve done that enough.”

“I have not,” I said defensively.

His left eyebrow raised the tiniest bit, the way it did when Mom tried to tell him she had only had two drinks and was therefore fine to drive.

“Even if I did apply, I wouldn’t get it,” I went on.

“How are you going to know that if you don’t apply?”

I hated how logical he could be. It had to be the attorney in him.

He reached for my hand. “Annabelle, give yourself this opportunity. You’re an amazing photographer. Let the world see that. You need to stop hiding.”

“I am not hiding.” He may have not been my father, but sometimes I sure got mad at him like he was.

“Will you at least think about it?”

“Fine,” I lied.

“This is it?” I asked later as we drove up a rolling green hill toward Oasis. In front of us stood a ginormous mansion complete with a gazebo surrounded by blooming flowers, and behind it the sparkling Pacific Ocean. I took out my camera and snapped away.

“Uh-huh,” he replied. “It’s like something out of
The Great Gatsby
,” he said as he nodded to a smiling gardener, whom I half expected to break into song.

I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting a rehab to look like. Glassy-eyed people zoning out in front of a TV tuned to bowling? Some sort of waterboarding setup? Oasis, however, was more like one of those resorts you saw in
Condé Nast Traveler
magazine—the ones that cost more a night than most people made in a week, where your every need other than someone wiping your butt was taken care of for you before you even realized it was a need. (The first Christmas Mom was on the show, we went to one of those places, in Mexico, and I was so uncomfortable with people coming up behind me and saying “Is there anything I can get you?” that I ended up spending the last two days in the hotel room watching television.)

“They’re all so
happy
,” I whispered to Ben as we stood in the lobby watching well-dressed people lounging on the overstuffed sofas, laughing. They turned to us and smiled. “Shouldn’t there be, I don’t know, . . . crying or something?” I murmured as I smiled back.

“Maybe that only happens at the cheaper rehabs,” Ben whispered back.

“Bug!”

I looked up to see Mom sailing down the stairs. Wearing jeans and a light blue T-shirt, her hair hanging loosely around her makeup-free face, she really did look thirty-seven, like it said on her bio on IMDb, instead of forty-two, her actual age. Although she’d probably yell at me, I quickly reached for my camera and started snapping away. She looked too beautiful and too much herself not to.

In our last therapy session, Dr. Warner told me that when this moment came—seeing Mom for the first time—it was totally okay if I didn’t want to let her hug me. I didn’t even have to talk to her if I didn’t want to. According to Dr. Warner, anger was a perfectly acceptable response to the situation and it was important to let that out rather than let it get stuck inside me and come out in all sorts of weird ways, like screaming at customer-service people in India with very American names.

“Mom!” I yelped as I ran up to her and threw myself at her, almost tackling her to the ground. Sure, I was pissed. But that could wait. As she hugged me and I breathed in her scent, I realized that for the first time in I didn’t know how long it was free of that gross metallic twinge that the pills gave her.

She clutched at me so hard I could barely breathe. “Oh, Bug, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said, scrunching my eyes tight to try to hold back the tears.

“No, it’s not okay,” she said tearfully. She pulled me to her closer. “I know I’m supposed to wait until we have our official session with Rain—she’s the counselor who’s going to be running group today . . . oh, honey, you’re not going to
believe
her story. . . . Her mother was a crackhead, and then when she was sixteen she started . . . actually, you know what? It’s her story to tell, not mine, so forget I said that,” she rambled. “Anyway, what I wanted to say is that I know I owe you a giant amends for everything I put you through, and I don’t expect you to forgive me right away—really, I don’t—but I just hope that—” As a very tall African American man with long dreadlocks walked by, Mom waved. “Tony! Tony! This is Annabelle, my daughter!”

I wasn’t sure what was worse—a hungover mom who moved at the pace of a snail or a sober mom who had so much energy it was as if she had drunk a pot of coffee in one gulp.

Tony came over. “Nice to meet you, Annabelle. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

At that, Mom pulled me into another giant hug. “Do you see how much I love you, Bug? I talk about you all the time.”

“She does,” Tony agreed. “Like . . . all the time.”

“There’s Alexis!” Mom said as a skinny scowling girl around my age, her platinum-blonde hair streaked with magenta and wearing a nose ring, walked down the stairs. “I really want you to meet her. She’s just lovely. Or will be when she finally lets me give her some makeup tips. Wonderful personality.”

Alexis looked like she wanted to hurt someone.

“She could really use a friend,” Mom went on. “Which is why I told her that once we get out of here, she should come out to the house for a weekend!” She pointed to an older woman wearing a silk caftan puffing away on a cigarette outside as she paced around a tree. “I also invited Marianne to come up for a few days . . . I know she looks fabulous—that’s Halston, by the way—but the truth is her drinking and drugging have basically left her
destitute
,” she went on. “Although I told her that there’s absolutely no smoking in the house. Bug, I know I’ve only been here for two weeks, but I swear to you, I am
done
polluting my body—Ben! Oh, honey, it’s so great to see you!” she cried as he walked up. She smothered him in a hug as well. “I know I fought you on it at first, but, honestly, I think coming to rehab is going to prove to be the single most important decision I’ve ever made in my life. Well, after having Annabelle, obviously.” She turned to Tony. “You know, I was
thisclose
to having an abortion. But the night before I was supposed to go to Planned Parenthood,
Terms of Endearment
came on—did you see that? Shirley MacLaine is just
magnificent
in it—and—”