The Corner of Bitter and Sweet

by Robin Palmer

She didn’t look convinced. Maybe because I didn’t sound all that convincing.

  “Mom . . . you love acting,” I said quietly. “It’s your life.”

  She shook her head. “No. You’re my life, Annabelle,” she replied. “Or rather, taking care of you and making sure your tuition is paid and putting food on the table is my life.” She walked over and hugged me. It wasn’t the bone-crushing-push-the-air-out-of-you kind of hug that I was used to from her. “Do you know how grateful I am to have you?” she asked into my hair. “You really are the best, Annabelle. And for these last months that I have you before you go off to college, I want them to be as normal as possible.”

  “But we’ve never been normal,” I said into her hair. “Why should we start now?”

  She laughed. Her laugh sounded different nowadays. Deeper. Older. More real. “Okay, maybe not normal. But at least with some . . . stability. Listen, I had a career that most people only dream of. . . .”

  I hated that she was speaking in past tense.

  She let me go and smiled at me. “But now it’s time to move on.”

  I searched her eyes for tears, but there weren’t any. It was as if she had just said, “And now let’s go have Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches.”

  Maybe she was ready to move on from being an actress—but I wasn’t ready to let her. My mother was never happier—or more herself—than when she was acting. And as much as I was trying to separate from her, watching her do that made me happy as well.

  I couldn’t let her quit. Especially not now.

  Even if I had no idea what to do to stop her.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “I know this was my idea,” I said to Walter as we sat in my living room a few days later staring at the receipt with Billy Barrett’s number, “but now I’m thinking it might be a very, very bad one.” I pulled the bowl of microwave kettle corn away from him. “And stop hogging.”

  “I’m not,” he replied, pulling it back. “Plus, my doctor told me I need more nutrients.”

  “Then maybe you should try eating something that’s actually nutritious,” I countered. I wasn’t sure how Walter had become the person with whom I spent most of my free time, therefore making him resemble something along the lines of a best friend, but he had.

  “Look, you said it yourself,” he said—stopping to try and catch some kettle corn in his mouth, but missing so the pieces joined the other missed pieces in between the couch cushions—“there was obviously a reason you didn’t throw away that piece of paper.”

  “Yeah. Maybe because I couldn’t be bothered to walk over to the garbage can at that moment in time?”

  “Or maybe because your Higher Power knew that you were going to need it down the line.”

  I cringed. While the meetings were definitely helping, I still got weirded out when Walter or my mom started talking about a Higher Power aka God, as if He/She/It were living next door. That being said, it was a little bit weird that this was coming into play now.

  Walter picked up the receipt and handed it to me. “Just do it.”

  I sighed. I had rehearsed my speech numerous times, but every time I tried to dial the number, I got cold feet. Hi, Billy? This is Annabelle Jackson—Janie Jackson’s daughter? You know, the ex–TV star who ended up driving the wrong way down the PCH a few hours after she met you in Whole Foods? Well, I’m not sure if you heard or not, but while she was in rehab she found out that she was totally broke and now she’s paying our rent with tampon commercials. It was usually at that point that I would have to stop rehearsing in order to take a huff of Play-Doh.

  “Okay, well, I guess I’m going to have to help you,” Walter said, picking up my iPhone and punching in the numbers.

  “What are you doing?! Stop!” I yelled, trying to grab it away from him. When I heard the sound of ringing, I started to freak. And when I heard Billy’s voice saying “Hello? Hello?” after Walter thrust the phone into my hand, I really started to freak. I didn’t have to talk to him. I could just hang up. It’s not like he would recognize the number.

  “Hello?” I heard Billy demand as I stared at the phone. I could hear people in the background, as if he was in a café or something.

  I pulled the phone closer to me, my finger poised over the End button. And then . . . “Is this Billy?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Who’s this?”

  “This is Annabelle Jackson . . . Janie Jackson’s daughter? We met you in Whole Foods a while back. . . . You probably don’t remember, but—”

  “Sure, I remember,” he said.

  At that, I stumbled. I had spent so much time practicing the part where I reminded him who I was that I blanked on what came next.

  “Who is it, Billy?” a woman’s voice demanded.

  I heard him cover the phone. “I’ve got it, Skye,” he said, slightly muffled.

  I quickly pushed the Speaker button so Walter could hear.

  “Is it another one of your friends?” Skye asked. “’Cause we talked about this with the therapist. Either you get rid of those friends, or we’re over. For good.”

  “Yeah, and we also talked about the fact that you need to stop being so freaking paranoid that I’m scamming on every girl I say hello to, or it’s over,” he snapped.

  Walter and I looked at each other. “This is good,” he whispered.

  “I think I should just hang up. This doesn’t seem like the best time to—”

  “So what’s up, Annabelle?” he asked.

  I quickly took it off Speaker. “I, uh, had a favor to ask you, but if this isn’t a good time to talk, I could just—”

  “You know the Apple Pan?”

  Who didn’t know the Apple Pan? It was an L.A. institution. “Of course.”

  “Well, I’m totally jonesing for their banana cream pie—”

  “You always do that!” Skye cried in the background. “You know I can’t have that because of the gluten and dairy thing, so you pull this passive-aggressive move and go there in order to avoid me because of your fear of intimacy!”

  She was loud enough that Walter could hear her even without the phone being on Speaker. Jeez. If she were my girlfriend, I’d want to get away from her, too.

  “Meet me at four?” he asked.

  “Meet you. In person. At four,” I repeated nervously as I looked at Walter, who nodded. “Okay.”

  I tried to convince Walter that if he were really a good friend, he’d come with me, but he was having none of it.

  “Listen, I think the guy is awesome—I mean, I’ve already seen Rad and Righteous five times and actually paid full price for the tickets rather than only going at matinee times—but it would be weird if I went with you,” he said as I dropped him off at home.

  “But the whole thing is weird!” I cried. “Why not just have it be weirder?”

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “You can do this, Annabelle. I know you can,” he said as he got out of the car. Before he shut the door, he turned. “And if you would bring me a piece of banana cream pie afterward, that would be awesome.”

  I also loved the banana cream pie at the Apple Pan, but not when my stomach was so jumpy I was positive that if I swallowed a bite, I’d immediately upchuck it.

  “Are you going to eat that?” Billy asked after he finished off his slice.

  I shook my head. I was so nervous I didn’t trust myself to talk.

  “Then can I have it?” he asked, pulling his L.A. Lakers hat down a little lower as a couple across the room stared at us.

  I barely had the “shh” part of “Sure” out of my mouth when he slid my plate over his way and started to eat the slice of pie. “I love this stuff. Makes me think of home.”

  I knew from articles that Billy was from Iowa. Or Nebraska. Or some other place where they had a lot of corn.

  “So what’s up? What’d you want to
talk to me about?”

  “Well, um—”

  His iPhone dinged with a text. As he looked at it, he sighed. “Are there, like, sanity tests or something online that you can print out? “‘Cause I’m definitely making the next woman I go out with take one first.”

  Well, that was good. That meant there’d be no way he’d want to date my mother. “I don’t know, but that sounds like a good idea,” I replied. “So what I wanted—”

  As his phone beeped again, I saw him will himself not to look at it and to stay focused on me.

  “I wanted to ask you—”

  Finally, he gave in, picked up his phone, and sighed. “Oh, man. Rondo’s out tonight because of his knee! That blows.”

  I nodded as if I knew who this Rondo person was. “Totally.”

  His eyes lit up. “You like basketball?”

  “Huh?” I asked, confused.

  “The way you said ‘totally’ when I mentioned Rajon Rondo’s knee made it seem like you followed basketball.”

  “Oh. Well, I do follow it . . . a little . . . but not, you know, all the time,” I said.

  “Oh, man, I love it,” he said. “I keep telling my agent to find me a script where I play a player. I played in high school, you know. I mean, I wasn’t the best on the team, but I have a pretty awesome dunk.”

  “That’s cool,” I said.

  “I’m thinking something where there’s a role for Jack,” he went on.

  “Is Jack another player?” I asked.

  He laughed. “No, I mean Nicholson,” he replied. “Don’t you think that would be awesome? If Jack played, like, my grandfather? Or maybe some old coach who comes out of retirement to coach my team and at first he’s all up in my grill about stuff but later you find out that’s only because he thinks I have all this potential?”

  “Sounds great,” I said.

  “Yeah, I think so, too,” he agreed. “So what is it you wanted to talk to me about?”

  I was always amazed at how people with ADHD could move from subject to subject without missing a beat. I took a deep breath. The only thing I hated more than asking people for help was . . . actually, there wasn’t anything I hated more than that.

  “I . . . actually, will you excuse me for a sec?” I asked as I grabbed my bag and stood up.

  Once inside the bathroom, I took out a can of red Play-Doh. (My blue can was tapped out because of how often I had opened it over the last few weeks.) As I started to take a sniff, I got a look at myself in the mirror. “Okay, you need to stop this,” I said to my reflection as I chucked the can. “Not only is it pathetic, but if you get cancer, Mom’s not going to be able to afford the treatment.”

  Billy was on the phone when I got back. From the number of “dudes” out of his mouth, I figured he was talking to one of his friends. Of course Billy was a dude kind of guy. Finally, he clicked off. “That was my agent. I freaking love her.”

  Or the kind of guy who called women “dudes.”

  “So what’s up?” he asked.

  “I wanted to talk to you about . . . my mom.”

  “Is she okay?” he asked, with concern.

  I felt myself stiffen. Why was he acting as if he cared so much? He had met her only once. “She’s fine,” I said. “I mean, maybe she’s not totally fine,” I admitted. “But she’s not not fine—you know, to the point where she’s drinking again or anything like that,” I babbled. “But . . . she’s thinking of getting a job at a rehab.”

  “To do research for a role?” he asked.

  “No. For, like, a new career.”

  He cringed. “But what about acting?”

  “That’s the thing—she wants to give it up,” I said. “And the reason I wanted to talk to you is that I heard they haven’t cast the role for the woman in your new movie. And I think she’d be perfect for it.”

  His eyebrows went up.

  I took another deep breath to help me go on, wishing I hadn’t thrown out the Play-Doh without first taking a sniff. “And even though I’ve never ever done this before—I swear—I was wondering if maybe you could talk to your agent or the producers or whoever, and see if she could come in to audition,” I blurted. “I’m not saying to give her the part or anything, but just . . . give her a chance?” This was as excruciating as the cramps on the first day of my period every month. “Her agent tried to get her in, but no one thinks she’s . . . important enough anymore,” I said quietly, staring at the floor. “And she could really use a break.”

  “I know she could,” he said just as quietly.

  Oh, God. This suddenly felt like the worst idea ever. “Like I said, I’ve never done this before.” I fidgeted nervously. “In fact, I think it’s totally gross when people do things like this, but—”

  “I’ll have my agent call the producer tonight. We’ll set something up for Monday.”

  I looked up.

  “Really? You’d do that?”

  He shrugged. “Sure. Your mom’s a great actress. And she’s been through a tough time. Consider it done.”

  As I felt my eyes fill with tears, I looked back down at the floor. I was not going to cry in front of Billy Barrett.

  Once, when I was in the bathroom and picked up one of Mom’s little daily meditation books (there were about ten of them strewn around the apartment, which prompted me to tell Mom that the next one she bought should be called Meditations for Women Who Can’t Stop Buying Daily Meditation Books), I read something about how doing something nice for someone isn’t all that spiritual. It’s doing something nice and then not telling them that’s the spiritual part.

  Not that I had any plans to tell Mom about what I had done. Although she was doing a better-than-average job at trying to act all upbeat about her life (“You know what, Bug? I actually like having all this free time, without the phone ringing. It’s very therapeutic after so many years of having every second scheduled”), I knew that she was struggling. And if I hadn’t known, the fact that her most recent purchase at Be Here Now was a book called When Things Fall Apart by some Buddhist lady named Pema Chodron—in which she had highlighted almost every paragraph and scribbled Yes! Exactly!!!! in the margins—was a good clue.

  But then the abundance candle happened.

  On Tuesday I walked out of school to find her waiting for me.

  “Mom, you’re . . . dressed,” I said in surprise when I got to the car. I tried not to cringe at the latest bumper sticker: LET GO AND LET GOD. For the last few weeks, she had been alternating between three pairs of yoga pants and several T-shirts. But that day she was wearing her tightest jeans (even tighter nowadays, due to the fact that a lot of her free time was spent eating Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches, which, despite their name, do not make you skinny), a lilac boho peasant shirt, and a pair of vintage brown cowboy boots. She looked like the old Janie Jackson—the famous one who used to end up in People’s Most Beautiful People issue.

  She flashed a smile that would’ve lit the entire electric grid of L.A. “That’s because we’re celebrating!”

  “You got it?!” I yelped.

  “Got what?” she asked, confused.

  Whoops. “What?”

  “What?”

  I had seen the “What?” thing in a movie once. It worked on Mom every time.

  I quickly opened the car door and jumped in, sliding down a bit in order to hide from Olivia and Sarah as they walked out. Not that it would have mattered if they had seen me. Nowadays whenever we crossed paths, they just pretended not to see me. Mom saw them, though.

  She turned to me. “I’m really sorry, Annabelle.”

  I felt my face get warm. “Just drive, okay?” Every time Mom tried to get me to talk about how my friends had dumped me, I refused. What was the point? Talking about it wasn’t going to make me feel better. If anything, it was going to make me feel worse.

>   “I don’t understand why you don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “It’s very important to process emotions. Otherwise, they get stuck in your body. By the way, did you know that studies are now showing that cellulite might be caused by emotions that are trapped—”

  “Mom, just go,” I ordered as Olivia and Sarah got closer.

  “Okay, okay,” she said as she pulled out.

  “So what are we celebrating?” I asked in order to change the subject.

  “Well . . . we’re celebrating the fact that I’m going in to read for the Billy Barrett movie tomorrow!” she shrieked.

  I gave what I hoped was a very believable shriek in return. “Mom, that’s awesome! What happened?”

  “The abundance candle is what happened!” she replied. “Remember when we were at Be Here Now, and I wanted to buy that candle?” she asked. “The one that came with the angel card? And you told me not to get it because you thought thirty-two ninety-five was a rip-off, even though Oprah had listed it as one of her favorite things?”

  “Yeah. Because it is a total rip-off.”

  “Yeah, well, I had Enid buy me one when she was there the next day.” Enid was this older woman who went to the same Tuesday AA meeting in Beverly Hills, the one Mom called the Shoes and Handbags meeting because it was filled with rich women. According to Mom, Enid had gotten drunk only once in her life but found the meetings so uplifting that she had been going for five years, even though she wasn’t sure she was an alcoholic. “And I’ve lit it every night during my meditation,” she went on, “and obviously it worked.” She looked at me. “See what can happen if you just practice positive thinking, Miss Nancy Negative?”

  I couldn’t believe she thought a candle had done all this. “Mom, you didn’t get the audition because of a candle.”

  She turned to me. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean . . .” What was I doing? It was so nice to see her happy again. Did I want to ruin it? At a meeting the other day the topic had been “Would you rather be right or would you rather be happy?” Frankly, I would’ve liked to have been both, but I was trying not to worry about being right all the time when it came to Mom and focus on just being happy. “It probably wasn’t just because of the candle. It was probably because they realized that you’re a great actress.”