Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter

by Melissa Francis

  Once again, she was right, and my confidence sank yet another notch.

  The scene was between me and Kate Reid, an older actress who played the character from the nursing home gang that had been paired with Freddy and me during the story arcs. She was an acclaimed British actress with two Golden Globe nominations and very little affinity for or patience with children. I got the impression she thought we all sucked at acting and our lack of talent might be contagious.

  We walked through the rehearsal. I was sitting at a table doing homework; she came in and sat by me, and gently explained that the couple who had visited wanted to adopt Freddy but not me.

  Now we were going to do one for real.

  “Rolling. Speed? Speed. Marker! Action!”

  Kate started on her speech.

  “Sarah, I know this is hard to hear. It doesn’t make you any less special. They just want a boy. They want Alan. And only Alan,” she explained.

  The script called for me to wait until the end of her speech and then tell her that was fine. They could take Alan, who was Freddy’s character, and I would make the supreme sisterly sacrifice.

  But I couldn’t meet her eyes. She told me that they didn’t want me, didn’t like me. I had just heard this speech from Mom in the car the night before. Kate tried to take my hand and my back stiffened. A reluctant messenger, sticking me with pins, delivering the news she was sent to convey, barely comforting me. I was embarrassed by all that I lacked, ashamed that someone had been sent to tell me about it, and then sorry for her discomfort at being forced to do it.

  Kate wasn’t halfway through her speech, and without ever looking at her, I just started to cry silently. I tried to stop, but I couldn’t. I cried for my character, and for myself. We were both barely teenagers, and this was just a little too much weight for us. Girls our age were supposed to be learning how to put on lipgloss in a middle school bathroom somewhere. Instead, we were being judged as deficient, and cast aside.

  Kate got to the end of her lines, and it was time for me to respond. I couldn’t find my voice. I said something like, “I understand. I’m glad for him. He should go and be happy.” But the words barely came out. I paused and gathered my breath to try to give the last line more volume while wiping away the tears. I was trying to be brave for both of us, but I could barely get the air to speak.

  “I’ll be okay. Really. I want him to be happy.” The script didn’t even call for me to cry, but I just couldn’t help it. I was involved in the scene and the larger drama swirling around it. I couldn’t tell which was which.

  Kate leaned in and hugged me and started crying herself. And the director just let the scene go. When he finally said cut, the whole crew started clapping.

  As so many of us suspected, when the final show aired, the network pulled the plug. Once again, I was out of work and back at school. When I went riding, my friends’ moms liked to ask if we’d heard if the show was being picked up. The families at the stable all lived in and around the television industry and were pretty savvy about the business. They knew the show was a dud and they wanted to rub it in because Mom had been fairly unbearable when I was cast.

  “Did you hear about the show yet? Did they order more episodes?” Shannon’s mom, Megan, asked. She was an oddly shaped woman who always wore light-colored sweatpants that accentuated her enormous hips and butt. Her hair was dark at the roots but orange and red at the tips and she had problem skin. In the solitude of our car, my dad would say Megan looked like a pear with acne, and Tiffany and I would bust up laughing.

  “Hi, Meg,” my mom drawled reluctantly. She knew Megan had read the news somewhere and had shown up only to turn the knife.

  “Did they order more? I hope, I hope!”

  I thought Megan needed Sherry, the acting coach. I slipped into my horse’s stall before Mom answered. I knew she’d come up with something, and I didn’t want my face to reveal that we felt bad about the cancellation of the show.

  “Nope. Oh well. The show stank. Can only do so much with bad writing. Just frees Missy up to do something better,” she tried.

  Needless to say, Mom was in a bad mood.

  No matter how she spun it, the show’s being canceled was a defeat.

  Tiffany and I were back to our normal routines, which included a fair amount of head-butting. After all, we were two teenage girls living under the same roof. Most of the discord emerged from the borrowing or outright stealing of clothes.

  Tiffany had adopted a pink and white striped Guess blouse as part of her weekend uniform. She wore it a million different ways, open with a camisole underneath, closed and belted over tight jeans. She’d tease and spike her bangs, put on a knotted hairband ripped right from Madonna’s Material Girl album, and look like a million bucks.

  It wasn’t long before I started slipping into her room and pillaging the pink and white shirt, and other key items, from her closet. I’d sneak in while she was in the shower, snag something, and hide the item in the part of my closet where the sliding doors overlapped, so you couldn’t find it unless you already knew it was there.

  She’d retaliate by coming into my room, trying on something fresh from the cleaners, and then dumping the shirt or dress in a heap in the middle of the floor, leaving it rumpled, even though it hadn’t yet seen the light of day.

  I would enter my room, find the heap of fresh clothes, and scream her name at the top of my lungs.

  One Friday night Tiffany was getting ready to go out, but she couldn’t find the pink and white shirt. She charged into my room, wearing only a bra and her jeans, and flung the mirrored doors of my closet open with all her might, frantically searching piece by piece through the closet.

  Confident my hiding spot would remain undetected, I calmly lay across my bed, watching Don Johnson prance around in a linen blazer on that night’s episode of Miami Vice.

  Then she found it.

  “Ha!” she barked as she gripped the hanger in her fist, her face candy-apple red from the search and agitation.

  “That’s mine actually,” I lied coolly, not budging from my position on the bed.

  “You’re a liar!” she yelled. And with that she turned and slammed my closet door so hard, it bounced back off the frame with equal force.

  “What are you doing!” I yelled, finally jumping to my feet.

  “You’re right!” She stopped, breathing heavily, and narrowed her eyes. “Why would I close that? I bet there’s more of my stuff in here!” She turned back to the closet and started rooting through the hangers again.

  “This is mine. And this,” she said, plucking out my favorite items, one by one.

  I grabbed the shoulder of a dress and we began wrestling over it.

  “Stop it! I’m so sick of both of you!” Mom barked behind us.

  We both jumped. Neither of us had seen her come in.

  She picked up the pink shirt that had started the fight and left the room. Instinctively sensing disaster, we both trailed her down the hall and into her room, where she ducked into her bathroom and then reemerged with a huge pair of scissors that she held up like a sword.

  We gasped.

  “You’ll never fight over this shirt again!” she said, slicing through the shirt with her shears as we watched in horror. I waited for the fabric of our most beloved shirt to bleed. Then Mom threw down the scissors and just started tearing our treasure to shreds.

  “I hate you!” Tiffany screamed.

  Mom threw down what remained of the shirt and charged her, grabbing her by the shoulders, shaking her. Then she turned toward the door, dragging Tiffany’s body violently alongside her as if she were a rag doll.

  They disappeared through the door and after a frightened beat, I followed them into the hallway where I saw my mom drag Tiffany down the flight of stairs while Tiffany scratched and clawed to get away.

  Resistance was hopeless. Mom was stronger than any wrestler when she was fueled by rage.

  When they reached the bottom of the stairs, still e
ntangled, Mom grabbed Tiffany’s arm with one hand and reached for the front door with the other hand. Tiffany was still naked from the waist up, except for a bra, and I could see the red marks on her arms and shoulders where Mom’s fingers had been gripping her.

  Mom opened the door and flung Tiffany out into the night, slamming the door with so much force, the picture windows that lined the front of the house shook. She bolted the top lock and came stomping back up the stairs, where I was watching the scene, gape-mouthed.

  “You can’t leave her out there. She has no shirt on,” I reasoned when Mom reached the top.

  “You want to go with her?” she shouted, eyes wide with anger, teeth clenched.

  “I’m letting her back in!” I said, sliding past her.

  But as I moved past her, she grabbed me by the shoulders and threw me down the stairs, headfirst.

  I tumbled forward, the carpet on the stairs burning the skin on my face. I stuck my arm out to brace for the fall, but my legs caught on the banister first, my shins slamming painfully into the wood. But, at least, this slowed my fall.

  I slipped the rest of the way to the bottom, just as Dad finally emerged from the den downstairs. I was amazed it took this long for him to come out.

  “What’s going on?” he yelled.

  He turned his head to the window and saw Tiffany shivering outside, half naked. He turned back to Mom and glared at her.

  She was indignant. “You want to deal with them! Fine! Get involved! For once! You deal with them, for once!” she screamed, thundering into her bedroom and slamming the door.

  I was still on the ground, assessing my limbs for damage, when Dad went to the front door and unlocked it.

  “Get back in here,” he said to Tiffany, who was now bewildered and tearful.

  “I don’t know what you two did, and I don’t fucking care. I’m sure it was something. Get upstairs to your rooms! Both of you! Jesus Christ!” he cursed, returning to the den as the mayhem in the house ended, leaving only silent rancor and the hum of the television in the den.

  A few months after NBC canceled Morningstar I got a postcard in the mail from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, saying that the show’s producers had submitted my performance in the final episode for Emmy consideration. I didn’t get a nomination, but I saved the postcard in my room, taping it to the mirror.

  At least they reran the show, and more checks arrived in the mail. I rode with Mom to the bank, where she left me in the car and went inside to deposit them. She came back with the printed receipt and I decided to quietly pick up my financial investigation. After all, she’d told me that I was making five grand an episode. That meant she was weakening. Now was the time to strike and get more information.

  “So how much is in that account now?” I inquired.

  She stopped adjusting her seat belt and let her hands drop to her lap. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because I work hard. I’m excited. I want to know. There’s got to be more than I need for college. Come on. Tell me. I’m fourteen. I can take it.”

  “But I don’t want you telling everyone. The reason I’ve never told you is because this is what everyone wants to know. They always ask you, ‘How much money have you made?’ like a bunch of low-class people. It’s so rude and none of their business. And I didn’t tell you so you could honestly say, ‘I don’t know.’ Will you be able to keep your mouth shut?”

  “Yep.”

  She waited for what seemed like a year. I didn’t budge. Finally, she handed me the slip.

  It was over a quarter million, a lot of money, but not what I expected. I’d done a lot of math since she’d told me I was making five thousand an episode for Morningstar. I knew you got paid a large percentage of the original fee every time a show re-ran. It was called a residual. And I knew my quote hadn’t been much lower on Little House. Even if it was half of what I’d been paid per episode for Morningstar, the show had run about fifty million times. Plus I had heard Mom tell my dad that each cycle of a national commercial brought in about ten grand. Those could pay out for years. I’d done dozens. More than fifty. Maybe seventy-five. We’d lost count. I’d been in two movies, which had shot for months at a time. The number I’d come up with was much bigger.

  “Is that it?” I finally said.

  Her face fell.

  “Is that the only account?”

  Mom’s shocked expression flushed with anger and her face darkened. Then just as quickly, she looked defeated.

  “ ‘Is that it?’ Is that really all you have to say?” She sucked in a mouthful of air and made a noise like a wounded animal.

  “I’ve devoted my entire life, selflessly, to taking you to interview after interview, callbacks, and so many times you’ve come up empty. I’ve sat on set after set for hours, bored. To tears! Taught you a million lines. Driven hours in traffic, packed clothes, sacrificed all my time! The things I could have been doing for myself all that time! I could have gone back to college, improved myself like so many moms. Selfish moms. But instead what have I done? I’ve made you a star. I’ve made you rich. And that’s the thanks I get?”

  She started to cry, not even stopping to breathe as she unloaded her frustration on me.

  “What an ungrateful, selfish brat you turned out to be! I might expect this from your sister. But not you. Never in a million years did I think you would look at all I’ve done for you and say that!” A man walking by looked in the car, but it didn’t slow Mom down. She just rolled up the window and kept going.

  “My mom never lifted a finger for me. It was all about my brother, her beloved Sonny! Or Marilyn, the pretty one. My father wouldn’t send me to college. Just a waste of money, he said, when you’ll go get married and get pregnant. The day I graduated from high school, no thanks to them, by the way, he told me to go out and get a job and start paying him back for raising me.” She sniffled angrily.

  “If I’d had half the support from my parents that you get from me, who knows what I’d be today! But I didn’t get an ounce of anything from them, and I’ve poured my life into you and this is the thanks I get!” She pulled the slip out of my hand and crumpled it into a ball.

  “My friends have always told me that I shouldn’t do so much for you when I get nothing in return. You get all the fame and fortune and I’m just the hated stage mom. What do I get? Nothing. But I always did it, I was happy to do it because I love you and we’re a team. I never thought you were the type of kid who would turn on me and bite the hand that’s feeding you, that’s made everything possible. My friends warned me, but I didn’t believe them.”

  We sat in silence for a while, then she finally put the car in gear and headed home. When we got home, she got out of the car and slammed the door so hard the window should have shattered. Then she went into the house and up into her room and slammed that door so hard I expected the big picture windows at the front of our house to crash in next.

  I tiptoed up to my room and lay down on my bed and stared at the ceiling.

  I had the distinct feeling my mom was lying.

  About what, I had no idea. I felt guilty for being an ingrate, but I couldn’t think of what friends she would have had that conversation with. She didn’t have any friends she confided in. None. Just her sister, Marilyn. But that’s not who she’d quoted. Why would she lie about that if she wasn’t compensating for another stretch of the truth.

  Then again, what did I really know about how much money had come in? I could be wrong. I’d been kept in the dark so long, I had so little information. I couldn’t tell.

  I looked at the framed picture of Grandpa, her father, that I kept next to my bed. A tiny three-by-five, black-and-white of him in a Yankees uniform. I’d put it in a gold frame and set it next to my bed after he’d died two years earlier.

  He’d played on the Yankees’ farm team, or at least had tried out for it, depending on who was telling the story. He was up at bat, smiling but looking serious at the same time. Tall, handsome, and
slender, it was the 1930s version of the man I adored.

  He was always my favorite grandparent, ready to play catch in our cul-de-sac at any moment, even in his dress shoes, which he always wore. Endlessly patient, he never turned me down for a game of Monopoly. So many times, I’d run down the hallway to build up a head of steam, then fly through the air and crash down onto his stomach as he snored unsuspectingly on our guest room bed. He’d nearly have a heart attack from the shock, but he never got angry. He’d chuckle and fall back to sleep, or rouse himself and play whatever game I wanted.

  When he walked in the front door of our house, Tiffany and I would attack him and turn out his pockets, looting him for gum, candy, or spare change. We’d even go visit the little candy store he owned in downtown L.A. and pillage the shelves there, taking a year’s supply of chocolate and candy. And he’d just laugh as Mom tried to rein us in.

  This was the man who had demanded payment when Mom graduated from high school? This was the miser who had terrorized their household? I’d heard the story a million times, but it still didn’t ring true.

  Mom had said a lot that didn’t add up and tried to cover it all with outrage. I knew something wasn’t right, but I wasn’t going to solve the mystery that day.

  CHAPTER TEN

  When Tiffany walked in the door from school, there was a thick envelope sitting in the middle of the kitchen table. Mom was standing next to the table with her hands on her hips, shifting from foot to foot. She had somehow stopped herself from opening the envelope since the mailman dropped it off hours earlier. I had to give her credit. Normally Mom didn’t hesitate to open our mail. She said we were minors living in her home, so she had every right to monitor our communications.

  But this was special. Tiffany had been waiting to hear back from colleges and we all knew what a thick envelope meant, versus a skinny one. This one seemed to hold a whole registration packet and had been sent by one of the most prestigious schools in the state, the University of California, Berkeley.