“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.
I’d tried to connect with her on the phone but the distance was too great. There was always something going on in the background on both of our ends, or awkward silences. When I’d been home the previous summer, she’d only come home once, and she’d brought her boyfriend and her best friend, Molly, so there hadn’t been an opportunity to even try to revive the connection that had been so precious and just as fragile as I’d feared.
Debbie had a sister she was close to, and their bond always made me envious. I didn’t know why Tiffany and I couldn’t be best friends like that, since we’d also been together since birth and shared the same tumultuous history.
When we were little Tiffany had been the one I relied on to dig us out of trouble. I remembered our earliest days of riding horses together. When I was about six years old, Mom would let us spend half of the day on Saturday riding ponies at a local Western stable in the Valley. It was long before we started riding more seriously out of Fairfield. She’d drop us off with some cash for food and then pay to rent each of us the pony of our choice for three hours.
I always chose Windy, an old gray and white mare with a long white mane that had yellowed over time. Her coat was shaggy, but she was gentle and predictable and I wasn’t terribly brave. Tiffany loved Trixie, a beautiful bay with a glossy black mane and tail who had been named for her ornery and defiant personality. Trixie was always available to rent on Saturdays because no one wanted to pay for the challenge she presented.
Mom’s rule was that we weren’t allowed to ride the horses off the property onto any of the neighboring trails. So we did her one better. We’d ride the ponies down the sidewalk of the busiest str
eet to 7-Eleven to buy candy. Mom wouldn’t allow us to have candy in the house, so our only chance to stock up was via pony when we were left alone. We both knew we’d be skinned alive if our routine was discovered, but the lure of unmonitored sugar was too great.
One Saturday when we were inside 7-Eleven emptying the shelves, the ponies rubbed off their bridles and escaped. We returned to the parking lot where we’d tied them to a chain link fence and found only their bridles hanging limply to the ground.
My stomach dropped and I instantly began to sob. Arms full of the candy that had caused so much trouble, I turned to Tiffany and wailed.
“They’re going to send us to jail for losing Windy and Trixie!” I cried.
Tiffany rolled her eyes. “No, they aren’t. You’re six. I’m ten. We can’t go to jail,” she shot back, her voice tight with fear.
“Then Mom will kill us!” I cried.
“Just shut up! Let me think! What should we do?” she asked herself, since I wasn’t helping.
Tiffany took the candy out of my hands and threw the bags in the trash, ditching the evidence of our disobedience. Then she grabbed my hand and dragged me as we ran back to the barn. Along the way we looked for signs of the horses and found nothing.
When we got back to the front gate of the stable, Linda, the owner, was standing by with a wry smile on her face.
“Lose something?” she asked. Her round stomach and breasts tested the limits of her navy blue T-shirt, which barely covered the top of her jeans. Her face was tanned and well worn by the sun, and her dusty brown hair fell to her shoulders in long straight ropes that made me think of the lead lines we used to tie up the horses.
I couldn’t talk for all the tears that were streaming down my face. Tiffany bit her lip as Linda gestured to the two errant ponies, now feeding greedily on the grass near the front of the barn.
The horses, smart as they were, had broken free and just trotted home for food, leaving the two us to get home on foot. I’d fallen apart, but Tiffany had held it together, the way I thought she always would.
“I’m not sure what my sister’s doing,” I said to Debbie as we arrived at class. “She’s starting law school in the fall at the University of San Diego. I think she’s just packing up her home in Berkeley and getting set up in San Diego.”
“So you’ll see her when you go home?” Debbie asked.
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
But I wasn’t sure at all.
When summer arrived, Mom let me write a check from her account for part of the rent for my apartment in Washington, D.C., but she’d taken a pound of flesh in exchange for her generosity. I’d listened endlessly to what I should be doing differently, how much I was costing her, what shows other kids I knew growing up in Hollywood were currently working on.
“Shannen’s got another series! Boy, she just keeps on working,” she zinged.
“Yep,” I said flatly, digging my fingernails into my arm.
Before I left Harvard for the summer internship, I’d lined up not one, but two jobs for the fall. I’d be working as a paid intern for the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on PBS. The show’s economic correspondent worked from a studio in Cambridge, so I could ride my bike to his office four days a week and do anything his team needed, which eventually included going out and doing interviews on my own with a crew.
I also got hired to work on a tech support team at Harvard Business School. The job was a little like being a flight attendant, going up to the graduate students’ rooms and helping them get familiar with the Internet, which was just making its debut. I also showed them how to use new applications to open their case studies online. The office where I stood ready by the phone had a free soda machine, and I could do my homework while I waited for calls for help. Eventually, I managed the whole tech team for twenty-five bucks an hour.
For the next two years, I never worked less than forty hours a week so I wouldn’t get caught short again. The Today show internship turned out to be everything I’d hoped, a glimpse into a rarefied world I might be able to join after graduation if I worked hard enough and stockpiled cash to cover being paid very little, if at all, to start. I hoarded every nickel possible and scraped together fifteen thousand dollars by the time I graduated, so that I could afford to take an entry-level job as a producer cutting tape and running a teleprompter for a local television station in Maine right out of school. I’d driven all over New England to get the job, but the position only paid minimum wage, something my scrounging and saving had afforded me the luxury of keeping to myself. Still, even at $6.10 per hour, I was on my way.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
We walked off the plane at LAX and into the terminal. It was almost ten at night and the airport was empty except for an Indian woman, nearly asleep, standing behind the register in Hudson News.
Wray walked next to me a stride faster, slowing occasionally so I could catch up. He was so tall, he easily outpaced me, but I was dragging my feet, dreading what lay ahead.
Wray and I had been dating for about eight months. He’d been my next-door neighbor at Harvard in Eliot House, the huge, Oxford-style dorm shaped like an imposing stone hexagon. He and a handful of messy, clever guys like him lived on the other side of the fire door in my dorm room, stacking pizza boxes in the hall and generally entertaining my roommates and me at any hour. I’d hit on him a fair bit during my sophomore year, but he didn’t seem to notice. I even went to watch him play on the varsity volleyball team because I liked the way he looked in his shorts. He had sandy brown hair and big blue eyes, but more than that an irrepressible charisma that got him elected president of everything on campus.
I didn’t see him after he left Harvard until a year after I graduated, when my best friend, Nicole, invited me down to New York from Manchester, New Hampshire, where I was struggling with my first on-air news reporting job. Turns out news was nothing like acting, though I think I’d been hired on the premise that experience in one would help with the other.
Nicole was working as a first-year analyst for an investment bank, pulling all-nighters at her desk analyzing every detail of a potential corporate buyout, only to then stay out until dawn the next night to soak up the New York nightlife. She was the most glamorous brain I’d ever met.
“Come on down for the weekend,” Nicole said, explaining that her boyfriend had a bunch of cute friends. “We’ll go out, you’ll have fun. You’ve got nothing better to do in Manch-Vegas.”
I’d only been working in New Hampshire for a month, and I didn’t know anyone who lived in the state, so I had nothing to do on the weekend except shop at the state’s only Gap. I threw a weekend bag in my car and drove four hours down the interstate to crash on Nicole’s couch for the weekend.
I joined the party already in progress at a place called the Bubble Lounge down in Tribeca. I talked the oversized bouncer into letting me jump the line by explaining that my group was already inside.
When I got through the door, I was immediately deafened by the pounding music. I scanned the crowd and saw Nicole near the bar waving her right hand at me, her other hand combing through her long blonde hair. She was the picture of hip New York fashion, in knee-high black boots and a shiny blue top that simultaneously set off her eyes and hugged every curve of her perfect body. Not surprisingly, a team of guys swarmed around her. It took me less than thirty seconds to realize the team was, in fact, my old next-door neighbors from Harvard.
I talked to Nicole for a few minutes, and tried to tell her these were not new, cute guys, but rather my hapless, essentially unchanged college neighbors. She laughed it off and handed me a shot of tequila.
After a few minutes, Wray worked his way over and introduced himself. He didn’t even recognize me. I thought about getting in my car and driving back to my apartment three states away, but I was too tired, and I’d just had a shot of tequila. So I let him buy me a drink and talk endlessly while I barely responded.
I had to remind him that he’d already met me, and in fact,
lived next to me for almost a year. I knew I looked different with the newscaster makeover the new station had given me, complete with the classic anchor bob, but I didn’t think I looked that different.
“I can’t believe you don’t recognize me. I’m twenty-two, not forty. It’s not like it’s been a decade since we were in school together,” I said, annoyed.
“Well, I’ve been out for more than three years. Wait! You had a whole bunch of roommates . . . Debbie and Sue and Alex. I remember Greg hitting on Alex. God, he never got anywhere with that. And you were dating some guy the whole entire time. Some guy from Kirkland House right? What was his name?” he said.
I didn’t help him. “So what do you do now?” I asked, changing the subject.
“I work for a private equity fund. We buy companies and do things to make them run better and then sell them,” he said, his deep blue eyes looking pleased with this statement.
“Do things like . . . laying people off?” I said.
I’d been indoctrinated into the value of economic efficiency, so I wasn’t judging him, but I thought it couldn’t hurt to give him a hard time.
“You buy companies and then chop them up into little pieces and sell them bit by bit?” I continued.
“I wish! Those are the easy deals. The low-hanging fruit. Most of those deals have been done already and there aren’t many dinosaurs like that lying around waiting to be worked out,” he said grinning. It was going to take more than that to get his goat.
“This feels like Pretty Woman,” I said.
“Why, are you not really a reporter?” he smiled.
“No. I mean, yes, I am. I’m saying that you sound like Richard Gere trying to dismantle that shipping company or whatever.”
“Yeah. Though it’s not clear what that guy did. I guess he was sort of in private equity or just some guy with family money buying stuff to amuse himself. I don’t have family money. I have to get up early in the morning and go to work every day,” he said, taking a step closer. “So you’re a news reporter in New Hampshire. Like in print? Or on TV?”
Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter Page 20