“The pound?” Mom sounded alarmed.
When Dad pulled up, KC jumped out of the passenger seat, his tail already wagging. He jogged over to us as we ran through the front door toward him. Mom stopped in the doorway.
“What happened? Why was he at the pound? Did he get lost?” she asked.
“Let’s go inside,” Dad said, looking over the fence into the neighbor’s yard below.
KC followed us inside the house, which Mom never, ever allowed. This was a special circumstance since we’d nearly lost him. He didn’t know what to do first, but rather than pee on the furniture, he wisely chose to head for the kitchen.
“Come here big guy,” Dad said, pouring dog food in a dish on the kitchen floor. KC looked no worse for wear, just shocked to be in the house. He wagged enthusiastically at the attention and wolfed down the food.
“The neighbors in front called the pound about the cats,” Dad explained.
We had a stray cat population gathering on the side of our house. I’d started feeding a few strays, and apparently they’d told every cat in the neighborhood, and the population exploded. They fought and made noise. Mom didn’t allow pets inside the house for more than a visit, so I couldn’t really separate the few cats that were ours and bring them inside to feed them. I kept putting food outside because I didn’t know what else to do, and the problem ballooned.
Our neighbors left a note complaining about the infestation. Then they came by to talk to Mom. She basically told them to get lost, but the truth was, we had no idea what to do now that the problem was out of control. The cats had congregated on our property and they weren’t leaving.
The neighbors threatened to call the animal pound, and frankly, we welcomed the help.
“The animal catcher decided the best way to get our attention was to take the dog,” Dad explained. “He’s groomed and fat and wearing a collar with his name on it. Clearly we’d miss him. They wanted to get our attention, but I guess they didn’t want to actually help with the cat problem. Or they couldn’t catch the cats, since most of them are wild.” Dad smoked a cigarette while he told the story.
My mouth opened in shock. They’d stolen the dog to punish us. It was my fault for enabling the cat population to flourish.
Mom’s face burned red with anger. “How dare they.”
“Who? The pound? It was actually pretty smart,” Dad said, taking another drag. “I asked them what they wanted us to do. I told them they weren’t ours. They just showed up looking for food.”
“And what did those assholes say?” Mom didn’t swear very often and when she did, she sort of tripped on the words as if she had a hard time forming them.
“They said the neighbors said they were ours. And it doesn’t matter what we say anyway because when the pound came by, all the cats were here looking for food.” He picked up a gallon jug of wine from where he kept it under the kitchen counter and poured a glass.
“Apparently, it’s not legal to have more than three cats or something,” he continued. “We need to have them fixed. I said they aren’t ours, and we can’t catch them anyway! I’ll pay to fix them, or whatever. That’s not the problem. We can’t catch them to do it. They didn’t give a shit. They don’t know what to do and they’re the fucking animal control. That’s their whole job! I told them to take them, and they basically ignored me. Fucking bureaucrats. They don’t have a clue.”
I hugged KC, feeling very lucky to get him back and frightened that I had put him in jeopardy.
“The Parkers. It’s their fault. How dare they call the pound. They’ll pay,” Mom warned ominously. She grabbed her purse and her keys and walked out the front door without saying another word.
We watched her headlights pull out silently, all wondering the same thing.
“What’s she going to do?” Tiffany finally asked.
“I don’t know,” Dad confessed.
“I saw her take a hammer and hit someone’s car in the parking lot outside the mall last week,” I said.
“What?” Their heads swiveled toward me and Dad looked shocked. Finally. He never seemed surprised when I told him about the scrapes Mom got into.
“Some guy beat her to a spot, and when she pulled up and yelled at him, he just cursed at her and went inside the mall. So she got a hammer out of the trunk and smashed it into his door, making a huge dent,” I said. I let the shock sink in.
“I was so scared someone was going to come and arrest us,” I added, reliving the incident.
“She had a hammer in the trunk?” Dad asked, as if that were the most shocking part.
“Yeah, she said she put it there for that reason. Because of the last fight she got into in a parking lot.”
Dad shook his head and then started laughing at the absurdity of the story. Then Tiffany and I started laughing too. Who ever heard of a suburban mom carrying around a hammer to punish her competitors in the parking lot? You had to laugh.
A few hours later, I heard Mom pull back into the garage and come inside the house. She went directly upstairs into her room. Dad huddled in front of the television downstairs in the den, where he spent almost every night, watching television until way after we all fell asleep.
I got out of bed and stole into Tiffany’s room, which was right next to mine. “What happened?” I whispered. Her light was off but I knew she was still awake.
“I have no idea. I don’t care. Go to bed.”
I couldn’t stand it. I went down the hall into Mom’s room. I crept in and sat on the edge of the bed. She saw me, but didn’t look directly at me or say anything. I knew something bad had happened, because she just stared at the TV and didn’t meet my eyes.
When she didn’t say anything for a while, I stood up preparing to leave.
Then I saw the collar in front of the TV, reflecting the light. I took a step closer to get a better look at it. I felt my mom studying my face while I tried to work out what had happened.
“It’s Coco’s. The Parkers’ dog. I took her in my car, and I drove her out to the pound in Simi Valley. And I turned her in. A lost dog. Like KC.”
I calculated what that meant in the silence that followed. She had the collar, so the pound had no idea whose dog it was.
“But they don’t know who to call to rescue Coco,” I said, looking at the collar.
“That’s right.” There was an edge to her voice I rarely heard, but I knew enough to get away as fast as I could when I heard it.
Without the collar, the pound had no idea who the dog belonged to, no name, no one to call. And Simi Valley was miles away, much farther than a dog could go on foot. The Parkers would never think to look all the way out there. They’d assume Coco got lost on her own, and they’d drive through the neighborhood or go to the dog pounds nearby.
They’d never find her, and the pound would eventually kill her with the other strays that weren’t lucky enough to find a home.
Coco was a sweet dog, but old and kind of matted. She loved a nice pat on the head or one of KC’s dog treats. She was friendly but reserved now that she had aged. She was not the kind of dog that would ever get adopted by a family looking to rescue a pet. She would never speak up and save her own life.
Mom had effectively murdered our neighbors’ dog as revenge.
I got in bed and cried into my pillow. I wanted to tell the neighbors, leave them a note, so they could save Coco’s life. But I was so scared of what Mom would do to me. The Parkers would confront her or report her, and she’d know who had told on her. Who knew what she’d do to me then?
Coco was going to die. And, one way or another, the situation was completely my fault. I’d created the problem by feeding the cats, and now I was too frightened for myself to stop the consequences. I wanted to help Coco—how could I live with myself if I didn’t? But if I saved that poor helpless dog, and Mom found out I’d betrayed her, as she inevitably would, who would save me?
No one. I couldn’t risk it. Poor Coco.
CHAPTER EIGHT
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.
Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter Page 9