The Go-Between

by Veronica Chambers

  “I’m going to the mall to meet a friend. Is that okay?”

  My mother nodded. “Yes. At least one of us should get back to the business of normal life.”

  “Have Samir drive you,” my father said. “And turn around immediately if you start getting followed by the paparazzi.”

  As the gates to our home opened, reporters and photographers stormed the car.

  “It’s not her,” Samir said, rolling down the window to give them a peek. Assured that their scoop was not driving away, the press returned to their posts.

  I had forgotten how frantic it could get, how hunted my mother could feel. I’d spent most of my life thinking she was a narcissist, a good mom but a self-involved diva all the same. I thought about what a huge production my mother’s workplace was. Even without the scandal, it must make a person feel happy yet anxious to arrive at work and see giant billboards of herself everywhere she looks. It took so many people to make a telenovela. There were writers, producers, and network executives; set designers, decorators, and construction crews; craft services, trailer managers, location scouts, camera operators, and sound and light techs; not to mention hair, makeup, and wardrobe. Everyone had an assistant, and some of the assistants had assistants, called second assistants. My mom was at the center of it all. Some of the people liked and admired her, but lots of them didn’t like her at all, especially other actors who saw her as the one to beat. Sometimes when I visited her on set, she would look over at a crowd of stand-ins and cast members and whisper to me, “Can you feel it? All the hatred coming off that couch?”

  Because she was the star, Mami had to be nice to everybody. God forbid she was tired or in a bad mood or had a legitimate beef with someone. She was always acting, even when the cameras weren’t rolling, from the moment she arrived until the moment she stepped into her car and drove away. If she didn’t, she’d get labeled as “difficult,” other people would use her behavior as an excuse for not doing their jobs well, and in the worst-case scenario, this would happen—bad, bad press.

  By the time we arrived at Patrizia’s house and her security had let us into the compound, I was so mad, I could barely speak. I told Samir that I wouldn’t be long.

  I walked slowly to the front door, taking deep breaths and trying to stop my heart from racing. I clenched and unclenched my fists, trying to stop my hands from shaking. I reached for the doorbell, but before I could even press it, Patrizia opened the front door.

  “Hey, come on in, tell me all about it. Escándalo!” she said, grinning.

  “I’m not coming in,” I said. “I’m here to ask you a simple question. Did you sell that picture of my mother’s prescription bottle to the tabloids?”

  Patrizia, like my father, was a terrible poker player. I could see it in her face. She actually looked proud of herself. Still she insisted, “No. Why would I do that? You’re my best friend.”

  I tried to stay very still. I stood up straight and tried not to slouch like the wreck I felt inside. “Few words, Camilla,” I told myself silently. “Use few words.”

  “I don’t believe you, Patrizia, and I don’t want to be friends with you anymore.”

  Then I turned around and started walking away. I didn’t expect her to start crying, but that’s what she did. “Don’t do this, Cammi,” she sobbed. “I’m so sorry. I’ll make it up to you. There’s so much going on. I think my parents are getting a divorce. You know how I am. I was just acting out.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just kept walking.

  “You’re not going to say anything?” Patrizia screamed. “I thought we were friends. But I guess you’re just a crazy bitch like your mother.”

  I stopped and turned to look at her, desperate to say something that would end things, to say the right thing that would crush her to pieces. But there was no point in trying to have the last word. It was over, and I needed to go home and come clean to my parents.

  In the car, I got a text from Patrizia. The message read:

  I bet you’ll think twice before stealing a man from me again. Amadeo was mine.

  I couldn’t believe it. She had destroyed my mother’s reputation, invaded her privacy, and broken my trust over Amadeo. I knew it wasn’t really about him. What she liked was being the alpha in our friendship. She was prettier, richer, more legit, with her businessman father and her country club mom. But when I met Amadeo, when I started needing her less, she didn’t like it. As many times as I’d watched Mean Girls, I’d never thought it would play out that way in my life.

  When I got home, I handed the phone to Albita. “Could you block this number, please?”

  She looked down at the number and hissed, “I knew it was her.”

  My parents were sitting in the kitchen. I told them what Patrizia had done and how I had confronted her. “I’m so sorry,” I said. Now I was the one in tears.

  My father, ever the wise Yoda, said, “We can’t control what other people do. You can only control your reaction to them.”

  For the most part, throughout her career, my mother has gotten along with her costars. There was just one, rather notorious, exception—a high-maintenance tantrum thrower from the Dominican Republic called Ivan Sancocho. The studio had him under contract early in my mother’s career, so they begged her to do just one novela, Entre Amantes, with him and then she could go back to working with her favorite costars.

  From the beginning of the production, my mother and Ivan were at each other’s throats. According to Sergio, my mother insisted that his breath smelled. She refused to kiss him unless he brushed his teeth, in front of her, before every love scene. A production assistant brought Ivan a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bucket, and a bottle of water for him to do the deed while my mother watched. “It was humiliating,” Sergio told me. “So Ivan began planning his revenge.”

  Ivan bribed the script supervisor so that my mother didn’t get the right draft of the script. She showed up on set after a long weekend, having memorized the wrong lines. If you know my mother, you know that the anxiety of having memorized the wrong lines would drive her crazy. Then he arranged for the studio valets who washed my mother’s car every week to call her, distraught, claiming that the car had been stolen. Then, as the final straw, he had the seamstress on the show take in all of my mother’s costumes so it would appear that she was gaining weight. Furious, my mother went and complained to the head of the studio. My mother was the telenovela golden girl. Fans loved her, the media was smitten with her, and, most important, advertisers adored her. So the studio agreed—after Entre Amantes, Ivan Sancocho would be Ivan San Adios.

  The fans had a different idea, however. They made Entre Amantes the highest-rated telenovela of the decade. Ivan Sancocho was Ivan Going Nowhere. Adding to the drama, it turned out that Ivan hadn’t arranged to have my mother’s costumes altered. By the time Entre Amantes wrapped, she was three months pregnant with Sergio. By the time the series aired, my mother was eight months pregnant and showing big-time. After Sergio was born, rumors began to fly that Ivan was actually Sergio’s father, and my mother had her first breakdown—a mix of postpartum depression and Ay, yo no puedo. I just can’t take it.

  When I got back from confronting Patrizia, there was a giant bouquet of flowers on the kitchen island. It was crazy big, like one of those standing arrangements you see at a fancy restaurant or at a funeral. “What’s this?” I asked.

  My mother said, “You want a laugh? Look at the card.”

  I got up and opened it. It was from Ivan Sancocho. He had written:

  My darling Carolina,

  I have read with sadness about your recent tragedies. I know you miss me and that your career has been on a slow nosedive since our legendary pairing. I can only pray that one day, before this life is over, your heart will mend and you find the peace and happiness that you deserve.

  Yours and always yours,

  Ivan

  “Are you kidding me?” I said. “What a dick!”

  My mother smiled and tip
ped an imaginary hat at me. “My thoughts exactly.”

  Then we laughed, all of us, for the first time since the tabloid clouds had opened and hailed down upon our home. I knew that it wasn’t going to be easy, and it was actually my fault, but it was going to be okay.

  “Look at this,” my mother said, slamming a script down onto the kitchen table. Then, before my father could reach for it, she scooped it back up.

  “I won’t do it,” she insisted, pacing around the kitchen. “I won’t pimp the details of my real life and my real struggles for ratings. Those cowardly executives sent me the script on a Saturday because they did not want me to barge into their offices and tell them off. They think I’ll cool down by Monday. Well, they’re wrong about that.” Then she let off a string of curses that was so vitriolic that both my father and I jumped as if the words might hit one of us on their way out the door.

  She slammed the script down again. “Reinaldo, you read it. Tell me what you think.”

  Then my mother turned to me and said, “I can’t eat breakfast. Come with me for a swim?” I said yes.

  I went upstairs to my bedroom and changed into a simple one-piece. When I got to the pool, my mother was already in the water. She was wearing a two-piece, and even though she had twenty-plus years on me, she had the kind of abs that would make the girls at my school jealous. “Pilates,” is what she always said whenever anyone complimented her figure. But I knew the truth: it took a lot more than Pilates to keep my mom looking like a real-life Wonder Woman. She ran on the treadmill every morning for at least forty-five minutes to an hour. If her call time was seven a.m., she was up at five to bang out an hour of cardio in our home gym. Diana, the chef, kept a careful count of every calorie that went into my mother’s mouth. If she went out to lunch, for example, she not only ordered sensibly, but she also took a snap with her iPhone of what she ate so that Diana could plan dinner accordingly. Yes, four days a week, she did Pilates with Simone, the French ballerina, who came to the house to put my mother through her paces on the Reformer. But she also lifted weights with Raul, her driver, at least two days a week—light weights, a lot of reps, so that she didn’t bulk up. And at least twice a week, either during her lunch break or after work, she went to a spin class. On Saturdays, she ran five to seven miles on the treadmill. And on Sundays, she rested, and by “rest,” I mean she went to a spa where she lay under infrared lights for an hour to sweat out all the toxins. This was followed by a sixty-minute lymphatic massage. Each session allegedly burned two thousand calories and offered a “thirty-six-hour metabolic boost.”

  Watching my mother in the pool, the thought occurred to me that I had no idea how to be a woman, a regular woman. The girls at my school always said I was lucky to have such an amazing woman for my mother, and I was. I loved her. I admired her. But I never labored under the delusion that I could ever be like her. My mother was a goddess. I was a mere mortal.

  We swam together in the pool in relative silence. I was lost in my thoughts, and my mother, I knew, was swept away by all the ways that her carefully constructed life was being challenged. When I was very little and I swam in the pool with my mother, I used to pretend that I was a girl from the mainland and that my mother was a mermaid. I pretended that if I followed her, closely and quietly, she would lead me to Atlantis, that lost kingdom under the sea. I thought of that again, as my mother led in laps. I stayed in my own lane, careful not to splash her, intent on not turning until she had made each turn.

  After about an hour, my father came out and sat on a chair by the edge of the pool.

  “I’ve read it,” he said.

  My mother hoisted herself up onto the ledge so she was sitting with her legs dangling in the pool. I did the same.

  “So, what do you think?” she asked.

  “I don’t think you should do it,” he answered.

  She hugged him then, even though she was soaking wet and he was dressed for golf.

  The script the studio had sent my mother was about a high-flying corporate executive, the lone woman in a man’s world. She’s struggling to keep up, and her boss tells her that she either raises her numbers in the next quarter or she can find another job. Desperate and exhausted, she’s sure that she’s sunk. Then one day, she accidentally takes her son’s ADHD medicine, mistaking it for ibuprofen. On the medicine, she has more energy than she’s had in months, she’s laser-focused, and she seals a big deal. Thus begins a cycle of pill popping and prescription medicine abuse that ends in shame, destruction, and eventually redemption.

  “I’m on antidepressants,” my mother said quietly. “I do not have an addiction. My biggest fear about this script is that women who need help—who know a little of my story and watch a lot of telenovelas—won’t get the help they need because it seems like I went down a bad road. Asking for help was the best thing I ever did. I don’t want to pretend that it’s not.”

  We sat in silence for a while. The sun was hot and it felt good to have my legs in the pool. I knew then that I was wrong when I looked at the externals and thought because I was not va-va-voom like my mother, she was not teaching me something about life.

  “Take some time off. Let’s call it a sabbatical,” my father said decisively. “You’ve been doing these novelas back-to-back for twenty years. You deserve a vacation. A paid vacation.”

  We took short holidays—a week here and there, two weeks at Christmastime. But my father was right. My mother was always, always working.

  She looked around nervously. “Reinaldo, maybe that’s going too far. You know how fickle this industry can be. It’s so hard to stay on top. There’s always someone looking to take your place.”

  My father—sweet, wise, and warm—said firmly, “It’s only the top if it’s the top you’ve chosen. If you let the business dictate your value and your worth, then you’ll always lose, no matter how many billboards they put your picture on. Tell your agent that you are politely declining this script and you want to spend some time with your family. Tell her to make it clear to the studio that you’ve earned a six-month paid sabbatical, or you will use the exit clause in your contract. Let them film their basura script, and then in six months, when it’s in the can, you’ll be back.”

  Mami took a breath and smiled. I could tell she liked the plan. “Even if they say yes—which they won’t, but it doesn’t hurt to ask—I mean, what would I do with all that time?”

  “Maybe we can travel,” my father said. “Spend some time in Europe, be a little closer to Sergio.”

  My father had said the magic word—“Sergio.”

  “I love that idea,” my mother said.

  “Hey,” I said. “What about me?”

  My father took a moment to consider the possibilities. “It’s November,” he said. “If we take you out of school for the next semester, we could try to get you into a school abroad or maybe get you a tutor. Would you mind?”

  I thought about Patrizia. We didn’t go to the same school. But in a short time, she’d become my most valued friend, until she wasn’t. The other girls at my school were nice—Yvette, Luchina, Denise—girls to hang out with at lunchtime and after school, but no one I’d miss if my family went away for a few months. And how cool it would be to spend a semester in Europe and be closer to Sergio. I was in.

  The plan began to take shape, and we began to slowly arrange all the pieces. My mother turned down the script, Sin Límites. The studio—maybe out of guilt, maybe out of loyalty—agreed to the sabbatical. My mother feared that allowing the sabbatical meant they were grooming someone new, but my father explained that such fears came with the territory. “You are spreading your wings, my love,” he said. “It’s only natural to wonder if they will hold you up.”

  Samantha, my mother’s agent, found us a fabulous apartment in Madrid. Sergio would only be a two-hour flight away instead of the current ten-hour haul. When Sergio told my mother that he was clearing his schedule and he’d come to see us every weekend, my mother wept. Happy tears. Not Pri
ncess Diana tears.

  It was now two weeks before Christmas, and we were all set to go to Europe right after New Year’s when Samantha came by the house to talk to my mother. She said, “You know how they say that when you make plans, God laughs?”

  It turned out that while my mother had been in LA having her head shrunk, she’d squeezed in a few “getting to know you” meetings with producers. One of the producers had been so taken with my mother that, unbeknownst to her, he’d kept her in mind for a new series he was developing. It would be for a major network, in English, and he wanted my mother to be one of the stars. If it was successful, it would be one of the biggest breaks in my mother’s already considerable career. If it failed, Samantha reasoned, then we would return to Mexico and my mother would go back to work at TexCoco. LA had never been part of the plan. But this last-minute plot twist, so very telenovela, was too juicy to resist. My mother said yes. We all said yes. How could we not?

  Suddenly we were heading to LA, and life would change for all of us.

  We’d visited the United States before. Ever since I was little, my mother had been traveling to Miami to do press for her shows. A press junket is when a studio is promoting a project. They fly a bunch of reporters to a hotel and ensconce my mother in a giant suite, and she gives interviews from eight a.m. to eight p.m. When we were younger, Sergio and I would travel with her and we loved it. Fancy hotels. Room service. Hanging out by the pool. And the big bonus: everybody in Miami spoke Spanish, or at least so it seemed. My father would urge us to practice our English, insisting that the younger you are when you learn, the less of an accent you have. So we became fluent in Spanglish—switching back and forth between English and Spanish.

  But my mother hated the press junkets. “They always ask the same questions,” she’d complain. “What are your favorite designers? What do you do in your free time? What’s your biggest dream? What’s your greatest fear?” She would roll her eyes and say, “How many different ways can I say it? Chanel and Gucci, depends on the occasion. I have no free time because when my show isn’t shooting, I’m holed up in a hotel room with the likes of you. My biggest dream is for you to go away. My biggest fear is that you’ll never leave and I’ll be stuck in this hotel room answering inane questions until I die, preternaturally young, from boredom.”