And it was over. No more Chicky. No more Joe and Ellie. No more book—the one I knew I could actually write.
“I’m fine,” I said to Alexandra on the phone. “I’m moving on.” But the apartment was so damn quiet.
OVER THE NEXT few days it got worse. I’d gotten used to Chicky’s taped voice talking to me throughout the day. Now I felt like I was getting divorced again—only without the husband-cheating-on-me part. And I had to find a job. All over again. I looked at my bed and thought about how much I wanted to get into it and pull the covers over my head.
“Why shouldn’t I?” I said to Annie “Nothing ever works, no matter how much I try.”
You’ve never really had it hard, have you, Doll Face? Chicky had asked.
“It isn’t fair.”
You’ve never really had it hard, said Chicky’s voice inside my head.
“I don’t deserve this.”
Please! said a new voice inside my head that I recognized as my own. You never really had it that hard!
I washed my face, opened my laptop, and typed out my résumé. And here’s the thing I want to say right now about life lessons: Sometimes they come to you from the damnedest places.
I pitched for jobs on the Internet for three days. I didn’t give up and I didn’t feel sorry for myself—well, not a lot. On the fourth evening, just after I’d packed it in and was turning on the TV for a CSI rerun, I heard someone turning the key in my door. Only two people besides me have ever had the key to the apartment, Alexandra and Jake, and Jake handed his over when I bought him out. Annie wasn’t barking her warnings against intruders; instead she was jumping against the door in a display of canine welcome. So it wasn’t a surprise when Alexandra waltzed in. The fact that Sheryl was with her … well, that was a shock. Alexandra was holding a sheaf of papers. So was Sheryl.
CHAPTER 23
Alexandra bent down to pet Annie, who had rolled over on her back in adoration. Annie has never forgotten who rescued her, I don’t care what people say about dogs having no memory. Besides, Alexandra had named Annie for her mother, and these things create a bond.
“This is very well written.” Alexandra held up the pages.
“I finished it in the airport before I got on the plane,” Sheryl added.
“I called Sheryl and asked her to come out East so we could talk to you together.”
“Like an intervention. This is my second. The first was one we all did for Gracie Mamaront, when we found out she was drinking grape-tinis at seven in the morning.”
“We think you should keep on with this.” Alexandra waved the pages at me.
“This book is better than Love, Max. Your heart’s in it more,” said Sheryl.
“Do you want to write it, Francesca?”
“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “The woman who hired me can’t pay me. I have dog food to buy.”
“But if you could, would you want to write it?”
They were both looking at me, faces a little worried, maybe, but encouraging too. They loved me and each of them, in her own way, had always been there for me. Even though most of the time I hadn’t been very grateful for it.
Ellie didn’t have a mother, and her father beat her. That was a weird thing to be thinking about at that moment, but unfortunately that’s how my head works.
“Yes,” I said, to my mother and Sheryl. “I would like to finish writing the book. But I’d have to do it on spec, and I’d have to support myself while I did it.”
“Lenny and I don’t have a lot of money,” my mother said. “But there is a second bedroom in our apartment. If you need a place to live …”
My mother’s second bedroom was the size of a large closet. Her favorite form of entertaining was still a Bad Spaghetti Night that lasted until 3 A.M. Also, Lenny had two sons who sometimes came to visit him, and whenever Pete and his family were in the country they stayed with Alexandra and Lenny. I could see Annie and me crammed into the closet while I tried to follow my creative muse.
“Or,” said Sheryl, “I can give you whatever you need. I have a check right here …”
And what would I do when the money ran out? Would I take more from Sheryl? And then, if I didn’t find a publisher for my masterpiece, keep on taking more? For how long? I looked at my mother and my stepmother and realized that neither of them had ever been very practical. They hadn’t had to be—because of the man who had left Sheryl a wealthy widow and had seen to it that Alexandra was a comfortable divorcée. The man who had married against his family’s wishes in a big romantic gesture but then made sure he earned a hell of a good living.
Just to prove that sometimes mothers do read their daughters’ minds, Alexandra chose that moment to say to Sheryl, “You know who Joe in Francesca’s story reminds me of?”
“Nathaniel,” Sheryl said. “I saw the likeness immediately. No wonder she wants to write the book.”
“Joe wasn’t anything like Dad,” I said.
“Of course he was,” my mother said, “in the ways that matter.”
“You could always count on Nathaniel,” Sheryl said.
“Actually, I couldn’t,” my mother said thoughtfully. “But then, he couldn’t count on me.”
Sheryl turned to me. “You could, Francesca. That’s why you like this story so much.”
Alexandra handed me her copy of the pages I’d sent to her. “You’re a good writer—and this is good work. You really should read what you’ve written. It would be a shame for you to give up just because you’re facing a few challenges.”
And before I could point out that “a few challenges” didn’t exactly cover the situation, Alexandra and Sheryl headed for the door.
“Where are you—”
“Your mother and I are going to give you some time to think this over,” Sheryl said.
“We’re going out to pick up dinner,” my mother said. “There’s a place in this neighborhood that has the best Kung Pao chicken.”
“Do they use canola oil or peanut?” Sheryl was asking as my front door closed behind them.
I read over the pages I’d written. And I thought it over—as directed—because I do take orders well. I thought about the whole writing thing, and how I’d gotten into it, and how it had been the only thing I’d ever loved doing. And I thought about my dad, and how he was really the one who first got me started writing. Remembering that, and the way Daddy stood by me throughout my teenage and college years, still makes me want to smile. And cry.
PETE AND I had continued our yearly visitations to California until he was a sophomore in high school. That was when he won an award for doing something esoteric with numbers, and suddenly he was in demand for a whole laundry list of Budding Genius programs. They were so impressive that even Alexandra had to agree it was time to let him skip his annual two-month sulk next to Dad’s pool so he could follow his geek bliss. Pete spent the next three summers in garden spots like Irvine, California, Washington, D.C., and, for some reason that escapes me, Reykjavik.
Since, unlike Pete’s, my vacations weren’t devoted to mind-bendingly difficult academic work, I probably could have continued spending two months in Pasadena. But somehow by the time summer rolled around each year I had lined up a job. I think I’ve already mentioned that I usually worked for my mother’s friends, most of whom were operating day-care centers in poverty-stricken churches, helping illegal immigrants stay in the country, or trying to force landlords to provide the services mandated by law for their tenants. All these organizations worked on a shoestring, so my salary—if I earned anything at all—was always tiny. I tried to tell myself that I did this work because I had a burning need to make a difference. But my dad knew different.
He and Sheryl were driving me back to LAX after I’d taken a fast trip to California to see them. I was rushing back to New York to continue assisting with a literacy program at a halfway house for recently paroled female convicts. To a woman, our clients began each reading lesson by first intoning, “I thank God I�
��m straight and sober one more day.”
“But you could stay here and have some fun,” Sheryl protested.
A part of me wanted to. The halfway house was old, and when the drains backed up it got a little ripe. And, to be honest, a couple of the inmates scared me. But I couldn’t quit my job. And I couldn’t explain why.
“It’s okay, honey.” Dad came to my rescue. “We understand. Your brother’s in Iceland, and you don’t want to be the sibling with free time on your hands.”
And, pathetic as it was, that was my motivation. Several times in the past few years, people had introduced me as Pete Sewell’s older sister, and it had seemed to me that the phrase who doesn’t do much was implied. And while I might have my girly moments, I had not been raised to be the family airhead. I was Woman, and my mother expected to hear me roar.
Dad had picked up on my thoughts. “Lotta pressure, honey. Don’t let it get to you.”
But it did. Alexandra never understood why I felt I was in a footrace with Pete. Or with anyone, for that matter. “The only person you have to compete with is yourself,” she told me one time. “It’s not about Pete.” There was no point in trying to explain to her that it was about him, not only because he was a freaking genius but also because he had developed into the spitting image of our beautiful daddy, while I had a long nose—actually it was Alexandra’s nose—and those sturdy hips and thighs.
But I plunged onward in my adolescence, trying without any success to figure out the mixed signals I was getting from the two female role models in my life. I was too girly to be my incredible mother, and I was too intellectual—and chubby—to approach being Sheryl.
Each of them tried in her own way to help me.
“Just be yourself!” Alexandra advised.
“Francesca, stop thinking so much!” said Sheryl.
I couldn’t do either.
I did fall in love a lot. As I think I mentioned earlier, the boys were what was euphemistically labeled troubled. Because I wasn’t totally self-destructive, just hormone-crazed, I knew the junior sociopaths who caught my fancy were unacceptable. But that didn’t mean my heart wasn’t constantly being broken.
Dad was the only one who really knew how unhappy I was, and he knew there was no way I could talk about it. Instead, he had a friend from his Westchester days deliver a jazzy Corvette convertible to our apartment building for me. And I’m sorry to be a materialist, but it helped. I spent many a dateless weekend riding around the outlying suburbs of Manhattan in my car with the top down and the sound system blasting. I became one hell of a driver, and to this day I can change a tire on any vehicle that doesn’t qualify as heavy equipment.
Meanwhile, Pete was sailing through his teenage years unscathed. He was in one of the few schools in the United States where being smart and career-oriented was not the kiss of death socially. Unlike me, Pete had friends and dates—lots of them. In his junior year, he settled on a girl who played the cello with the New York Philharmonic and had a grade point average almost as high as his. The boy I was in love with at the time was going to be facing charges for possession unless his father could pull some strings.
Of course, Pete had already made early admission to Harvard. I’d finished high school too and was headed to a liberal arts college that had a history of progressive thought in the Hudson River valley; with my arithmetic phobia the Ivies weren’t going to happen for me. But I had also settled on a career. I was going to be a lawyer.
“Wonderful!” Alexandra enthused. “We’ll start a family dynasty.”
“Are you sure, honey?” Dad asked. “The law is awfully … demanding.”
But having made my pick I was determined to stick to it. I polished off my required courses in my first two years at college and began on my career path.
I made it through Criminal Justice and Juvenile Criminology—barely. But the New York State Penal Code? Don’t ask. The good news was, I was studying so hard that I didn’t have time to fall in love anymore. The bad news was, I gained eighteen pounds. And then there was the night when I was talking to Dad on the phone and I started to cry and couldn’t stop for two weeks.
Sheryl wanted to send me to the Golden Door. Alexandra wanted to send me to a shrink. Dad sent me a red Porsche. Actually, he bought it from his Westchester buddy and then he flew east and drove it up to my campus to give it to me personally. Alexandra joined him, Pete came down from Harvard, and we all went out to the lousy Chinese restaurant near my campus. Dad held my hand while I wept into my moo shu pork. “There’s no disgrace in changing your mind, honey,” he soothed.
“You’re smart and strong, Francesca,” my mother said staunchly. “You’ll get a grip on this.”
But I knew I wouldn’t. Dad said, “If being a lawyer is wrong for you, drop it, honey.”
Alexandra intervened. “I wouldn’t say you should give up because you’re finding the work difficult, that’s never a good reason—”
“It is, if you’re miserable,” Dad broke in. “Were there any subjects you liked in school, honey?”
I quit sobbing. “There was one class …” I started to say, but I stopped. Because the class I’d enjoyed was going to sound totally fluffy to my overachieving brother and mother.
“What was it?” Dad urged. The three of them stared expectantly at me.
“A creative writing workshop,” I said, as Pete and my mother tried not to roll their eyes. “I had to submit a short story to get in,” I hurried on. No need to tell them that I’d whipped up a tale about a divorce as told from the viewpoint of the family dog. “It was really quite competitive. I never thought I’d make it.” In fact, everyone who had tried out for that workshop had been accepted. Of the seven who were not me, five were the kind of girls you know had problems at home, and two were guys trolling for dates. “The work wasn’t easy,” I said. That was actually true. But compared to beating my brains out over the penal code, it had been a walk in the park. “The instructor said I had a real flair.”
Alexandra and Pete picked up on that right away. “Instructor?” Pete repeated.
“He wasn’t a full professor?” my mother demanded.
“Didn’t you listen, damn it?” Dad said. “She liked doing it! And the teacher said she was good at it.”
“I suppose, if you wanted to major in English, you could switch over,” my mother said dubiously. She had always been opposed to what she called “amorphous liberal arts degrees for girls that don’t prepare them to do anything in the real world.”
“She could teach,” said my brother.
“Do you think you’d enjoy that?” Dad asked me.
But I was damned if I was going to get an airhead English degree. Or become a teacher. Not when my brother had just signed on as architect for a prestigious not-for-profit group. And there was a rumor that he might be presenting a paper at the UN.
“We just want you to be fulfilled in your work,” said my mother.
“To hell with that,” said Dad. “I just want you to stop crying!” And, amazingly, his usually stiff WASP upper lip twitched, and his eyes welled up.
“It’s okay, Daddy,” I reassured him. “I’m going to ace the rest of this year. And I’m going to ace the LSATs.”
I pulled myself together enough to graduate, but as for the acing part? I got the damn diploma, okay? As for the LSATs, you know that sad story.
I soon discovered that my degree in political science was about as much use as one in English would have been in the job market, so I went back to work for one of Alexandra’s friends. I continued living in her apartment on the Upper West Side. I continued falling in love with idiots. I did that until my father died.
Dad died quickly. People told me it was a blessing, because he’d had a massive stroke and if he’d lived he probably couldn’t have walked again. He would have spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair, and everyone agreed he would have hated that. So it was better this way. For his sake. Personally, I thought it would have been better if he had
n’t had the goddamn stroke. He was only in his fifties, he exercised regularly, didn’t smoke or drink more than a couple of glasses of wine with his dinner, and he was as slim as he’d been the day he met my mother. He was in great shape. Except for one tiny son-of-a-bitching piece of plaque that no one even knew was there, which broke loose, clogged an artery, and killed him.
But my father was gone—unexpectedly and too young. Alexandra hunted down Pete—he was in a desert somewhere in Africa—and he and I flew to Los Angeles for the funeral, which I’ve already described and which I did my best to tune out. When I came home, there was a box waiting for me at the apartment. Dad had sent it the week before he died. Inside was a pile of brochures from every college and university in the New York City area that had a writing class. My father had picked out one he thought would be good for me and put it on top of the heap. The class was called Write Your Bestseller! He’d inked in a big star next to the name. Bet you’d like this one, he’d scrawled in the margin. No tests, no pressure. (I learned later that he’d called and found out.)
I put the box in the back of my closet. I wasn’t ready to try the writing thing yet—and his note had done me in. I didn’t take the box out again until Sheryl started dating. Then I found out that the class my dad had picked for me was still in existence. I signed up for it, and I wrote Love, Max. I’ve already told the rest of that story. But what I’ve never told anyone is: I saved the brochure he sent me.
I walked into the bedroom, opened the bureau drawer where I keep my sweaters, and pulled that little pamphlet out from under the bottom of the pile.
There was something else Dad had written in the margin. I’m so proud of you I could bust.
By the time Alexandra and Sheryl came back with dinner, I knew I was going to finish Chicky’s book. And I realized I was more my father’s daughter than I had ever known. Because if I was going to do something that impractical, I wanted to be sure I could take care of myself first. And I knew exactly how I was going to make that happen.
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