The Corner of Bitter and Sweet

by Robin Palmer

  I pulled the pillow tighter around my ears. Did she have to sound so awake?

  “What’s that thing next to it?”

  “A goat,” I said, turning over and placing the other pillow on the back of my head. “And I don’t think they’re ours. I think they belong to the neighbors.” At least I hoped they did. Otherwise, we might be in charge of feeding them, and I highly doubted they liked Lean Cuisines.

  “You do know that cows are considered sacred in India, don’t you? They bring very good luck,” she said. “I learned that in yoga class.”

  Realizing that going back to sleep wasn’t an option, I sat up. “Great. But we’re not in India,” I said over the cow’s bellowing. Although with how different upstate New York was from L.A., we may as well have been in a foreign country.

  “Well, I’m sure they’re good luck everywhere,” she said, climbing into bed with me. “How’d you sleep? Isn’t the quiet magnificent?”

  “Actually, I found it kind of loud,” I said. It was weird not to go to sleep with the sounds of car alarms or Persian music. Instead, it was chirping crickets and buzzing cicadas, and, in the case of my right ear, one lone mosquito that I couldn’t get no matter how many times I slapped at it.

  “Yeah, me, too,” she agreed. “Still, it’s the country!” she said, squeezing me to her before she jumped out of bed. “Come on—let’s go get breakfast.”

  I squinted at the clock. “Mom, it’s six o’clock. Nothing’s going to be open.”

  “Of course it is! People get up really early here,” she said, grabbing my arm. “To work the land!”

  I guessed I could cross farming off my Potential Careers list because I was so not a morning person.

  They got up early if they worked at Stewart’s, a combination gas station/mini-mart. Which, once we drove around for a while, I discovered was the only thing open that early other than the Mobil XtraMart across the street.

  “Ooh, these look good!” Mom said, pointing at something that looked as if it had wanted to be a scone about two weeks earlier but gave up somewhere around the biscuit stage. She smiled at the woman behind the counter, who was sporting a slight beard. “These aren’t gluten-free by any chance, are they?”

  I cringed. “Mom.”

  “Glu what?” the woman asked, confused.

  “Nothing,” I said, jumping in. “Do you have iced coffee?”

  “Yep,” she replied, staring at Mom.

  “Great. We’ll have two of those,” I said. “Thanks.”

  As she walked over and started pouring something out of a milk carton with “iced coffee mix” printed on the side of it, Mom cringed. “I don’t even want to think about all the chemicals that are in there,” she whispered. “When we get back in the car, you’ll Goggle that New York Times article about the best places to eat in the area.”

  “Google,” I corrected.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Half and half?” the woman asked.

  “Half and half? Do people still drink that stuff?” Mom asked.

  “Mom.”

  “What? Do you know what that stuff does to your arteries?” She gave the woman a Janie Jackson smile. “Actually, do you have soy?”

  “Soy sauce for your coffee?” the woman asked.

  If this was how the next six weeks were going to go, we were in serious trouble. “How about nonfat milk?” I jumped in.

  She pointed to the dairy section, which held gallon-size milk cartons. “You could buy one of those, I guess,” she said, “and put some in.”

  “We’ll just have some regular milk, if you have it,” I said, before Mom could say yes.

  “Bug, you know I can’t digest lactose.”

  “It’s one time,” I said. “You’ll live.”

  “Did I see you on TV the other day?” the woman asked as she handed us our drinks, which were now so light they looked like milk with a splash of coffee.

  Oh, no. It was starting.

  Mom smiled some more. “You may have,” Mom said. “A few years ago I was on a sitcom called—”

  “No, it was one of them judge shows,” the woman said. “Not Judge Judy. That other one.”

  I started to laugh but, once Mom gave me a dirty look, quickly turned it into a cough.

  “No, sorry,” Mom replied. “I’ve never been on one of those.”

  “Oh,” the woman said, disappointed.

  I took a sip, totally prepared for it to be disgusting. “Oh, my God—this is awesome!” I said, amazed.

  “That’s because it’s probably all sugar,” Mom whispered. She turned to the woman and flashed another smile. “Well, thank you! So nice meeting you!”

  “Mm-hmm,” the woman replied, eyeing my mom suspiciously.

  “I thought people in the country were supposed to be nice,” Mom said as we got back into the green Subaru Outback that the producers had arranged for us to have while we were here. “That was more of a Manhattan attitude.”

  “Maybe they’re not used to seeing people fully made up and accessorized at seven o’clock in the morning,” I replied, sipping at my iced coffee. I wasn’t even done with it, and I already wanted another one.

  As we drove down Route 9G toward Hudson, which, according to my Googling, was considered the “Brooklyn of the Hudson Valley,” I had to admit that with the wide-open smog-free blue sky and glowing purple Catskill Mountains, it was pretty gorgeous. Other than the one dead deer, two dead skunks, and multiple squirrels we passed on the way. (“Honey, it’s the country. You get used to it after a while,” Mom said, as if she had any experience with it. “Plus, it’s a good reminder of the ongoing cycle of life and death.”)

  “How adorable!” Mom chirped when we got to Warren Street, Hudson’s main street. “It’s like something out of a movie!”

  It did look like a movie set. For something set in the early 1900s. With the small, square row houses and Victorian townhomes, I almost expected Annie to come marching down the street singing “Tomorrow.” As we walked, I saw that every other storefront was a gallery or antique store. “There’s a Pilates place and a yoga studio,” I said, relieved. Not like I’d be going to either, but it was comforting to know that we weren’t completely lost in time.

  Next door was a little café called The Cascades. They didn’t have soy, either, but they did have nonfat milk, which made Mom happy. Not to mention these ginormous coconut-blueberry muffins that made me happy and made her eyebrows go up when I ordered one. Plus, the waitress, Wenonah (“WE-nonah, with a hard e—not Wynonna with an i-sounding y, like that country singer,” she informed us when she introduced herself) recognized Mom right away. As she plopped herself down at our table and started to gush about how much she had related to this TV movie Mom had done early in her career, in which she had played a woman on the run from her abusive husband because literally almost the exact same thing had happened to her, back in ‘95, when she was married to her first husband, whom she couldn’t really talk about because of, you know, legal things, I excused myself to go to the bathroom. When I came out and saw that Wenonah was still yakking away, I walked to the front to grab one of the free magazines I had seen when we walked in.

  “You’ve never been here, huh?” a voice asked as I thumbed through a glossy magazine called Chronogram that, along with music listings and art openings, also had a large selection of eco-builders and hypnotherapists.

  I turned around to see a guy a little taller than me with blue eyes and brown hair that looked as if it hadn’t seen a brush for a while. He was wearing paint-stained khaki shorts and a T-shirt that read HUDSON: THE UN-HAMPTONS (AND LET’S KEEP IT THAT WAY). Unlike the guys I knew from L.A., who were lean from years of soccer and lacrosse, this guy had a cuddly look to him. Almost like if you were to squeeze him in the right place, he’d let out one of those squeaks like a stuffed animal.


  “How’d you know that?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Because anyone who’s been here knows that once Wenonah corners you, you’re in trouble,” he replied. He smiled. “I’m Matt.”

  The gap between his two front teeth made me smile back. “Annabelle.”

  “So you a weekender?”

  “A what?”

  “Do you live in the city and just come up here on weekends?”

  “Oh. No, I actually live in L.A,” I replied. “I’m just here for the summer. With my mom. She’s . . . working up here.” I wanted to see how long I could hold off on the perhaps-you’ve-seen-my-mother’s-mug-shot-on-TMZ? thing.

  “At Bard?”

  Bard was a college near Tivoli, which was about ten minutes from the farmhouse. Mom had made sure to tell me the producers had mentioned there was a nice gym there, in case something about the country air turned me into someone who liked to work out. “No. She’s, uh, shooting a movie.”

  I waited for him to start with the third degree the way people usually did—especially people outside of L.A.—but all he did was nod after he waved to the woman behind the counter. “Cool,” he said as she slid a cup of coffee across the counter toward him.

  So this is what it felt like to be normal. At least until the cook came out and barked at Wenonah to leave the customers alone and get back to work, which meant Mom was free to walk over to see what I was up to.

  “Oh, my God—what a life that woman has had!” Mom announced as she joined us. “This is why it’s important to get out of the fishbowl of Hollywood, Bug—not just to be in nature, but to meet people who are such . . . survivors!” She held up a scrap of paper. “I got her e-mail address. I think if I have some time, I’ll interview her. You know, for research, in case I ever do another battered-woman thing again.” She turned to Matt and flashed him a smile. “Hello, I’m Janie Jackson.”

  I searched his face for recognition, but there didn’t seem to be any. “Matt Wallace. Nice to meet you. So are you making a documentary?”

  “A what?” she asked, confused.

  “Annabelle said you were making a movie,” he replied. “There’s a lot of documentary filmmakers up here, and because you just said you wanted to interview Wenonah, I thought maybe—”

  Mom laughed. “Ohhhh. You meant a documentary documentary.” She shook her head. “No, no—I’m making a movie movie. With Billy Barrett?”

  He nodded. “Ah. Yeah, I heard some of the girls in Swallow talking about him the other day. I’ve never seen his stuff, but he sounds like a pretty big deal.”

  Mom looked at him like he was an alien. “You haven’t seen a Billy Barrett movie? Do you even . . . go to the movies?” Mom asked.

  “Mom.”

  “Oh yeah. All the time,” he said. “Over at Upstate. In Rhinebeck. They also have one in Woodstock.”

  I had seen that in the Chronogram magazine. They had all the independent stuff.

  “They had this great documentary last week about fracking,” he went on. “If it’s still there, I highly recommend it.”

  Mom turned to me. “Do I even want to know what fracking is?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” I replied.

  “Do you have a TV?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “No. I watch stuff on Hulu and Netflix, though.”

  She relaxed. “Good. That explains it.”

  I shook my head. I wondered if there was a clinical term for people who had an overwhelming need for people to recognize them. Other than “actress.”

  “Well, I should get going,” Matt said. He flashed another gap-toothed smile. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

  “Yeah,” I said, hoping I sounded like what the magazines referred to as “inviting but not desperate.”

  “Nice meeting you, Mrs. Jackson.”

  I tried to cover my laugh with another cough.

  “Oh, honey, it’s never been Mrs.,” Mom laughed. “Janie’s fine.”

  After he was gone, Mom turned to me and raised her eyebrow.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said, her lips twitching as she tried not to smile.

  My face felt all hot. “Then why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I’m not looking at you any way.”

  On TV, parents tried to discourage their kids from dating, nervous to see them grow up. Not my mother. Although she never came right out and said I was a freak because I wasn’t sneaking off to Planned Parenthood to try to get the morning-after pill, I knew the fact that I wasn’t boy-crazy was somewhat of a disappointment to her. After yet another fight about the whole thing, we had decided the subject was off limits which, for some reason, made me feel like even more of a loser.

  The truth was, not only was I still a virgin, but I had made out with a boy only once. In Sarah’s garage with her cousin Sam, who was visiting from San Francisco. He was cute in a post-weight-loss Jonah Hill way, but it didn’t end well. When we first started making out, it wasn’t horrible—his lips were soft, and he didn’t jam his tongue down my throat like I had heard from Maya sometimes happened. (Before she decided she liked girls, Maya had made out with a lot of guys.) But then he started jamming his tongue in my ear. Hard. To the point where I told him if he didn’t stop I was afraid he’d damage my eardrum. I didn’t say it to be mean—it was more that I just didn’t want to go deaf—but he took it that way. (The fact that he called me a bitch under his breath as he stomped off, knocking over a rake in the process, sort of tipped me off.)

  Sure, I wanted a boyfriend, but watching over Mom had always been a full-time job, so there never seemed to be time. Plus, if the way you acted in a relationship was hereditary, I was screwed. The minute Mom got into one, she became all obsessive and clingy and started reading every horoscope online to try to figure out what was going to happen in the future; then she’d make an appointment with her psychic to try to figure out how not to screw it up. Being in love didn’t look like fun to me. It looked as if it would bring on even more panic attacks.

  “He’s probably got a girlfriend, Mom,” I said as I turned around and started to walk out of the café.

  Which would be both a relief and a bummer at the same time.

  The next day, after dropping Mom off at an AA meeting at a church in Hudson, I went over to the Spotty Dog, a bookstore/pub on Warren Street.

  Other than the guy working behind the bar, there was no one else there. I checked out the photography section. For a small bookstore, they had a surprisingly large collection, including the Francesca Woodman one Ben had bought me. Even though I already knew the photographs by heart, I took it off the shelf so I could browse through it. As I walked toward the back, I passed the self-help section and paused. Usually, I avoided that stuff at all costs, but after glancing to make sure the guy behind the counter was still busy with his issue of the Believer, I ran my fingers along the books until I came to the Relationship section and grabbed a book called Thirty Days to Calling in the One. It wasn’t like that Matt guy was the One—I’d probably never even see him again—but it couldn’t hurt to learn more about what to do if, indeed, I wanted to call in the One. Or Someone. Or Anyone.

  I had just finished reading about ways to feng shui your living space to invite in love and had moved on to the chapter about how to unblock your energy field when a shadow came over me.

  “Whatcha reading?” a voice asked.

  Oh, God. I knew that voice. If I hadn’t recognized it from the Rad and Righteous ads, I would have known it from the voice mails that Mom had saved on her iPhone, which I had listened to the other day while she was in the shower. (When I told Walter about that, he suggested I pray to my Higher Power to have my nosiness removed.) I quickly moved the book behind me and jammed my back against the shelf to keep it in place while reaching for the Francesca Woodman.

  “Billy, hey.
Just, uh, this,” I said, holding it up.

  “Dude, I love Francesca Woodman!” he exclaimed, grabbing it from me.

  “You know who Francesca Woodman is?” I asked, surprised. She wasn’t one of the big names, like Cindy Sherman or Diane Arbus or Gregory Crewdson. She was more like the angsty Sylvia Plath of photography.

  “Yeah. My art consultant bid on one recently at an auction for me, but we didn’t get it.” He started to flip through the pages. “I’ll show you my favorite.”

  Now that I thought about it, it made sense. Most of her work consisted of nude self-portraits she had made when she was in college. I couldn’t believe I was going to have to stand here and look at nude photos with Billy Barrett. Although that would have gotten a lot of traction as a Facebook status update or a tweet.

  He stopped flipping and held the book out. “This one.”

  I looked at it. “Really?” I asked, surprised. It was a photo of her in a clawfoot bathtub. Her face wasn’t visible, but her long dirty-blonde hair hung over the back of the tub.

  “Yeah,” he said, studying it intently.

  “That one’s my favorite, too,” I replied.

  He smiled. “Right on. She reminds me of Ophelia in this one, for some reason.”

  “Ophelia from Hamlet?” I asked dumbly.

  “Well, yeah. I mean, what other Ophelias are there?”

  I don’t know why it surprised me that he would reference Shakespeare. The guy was an actor, and Hamlet was one of the most famous plays in the world. But Billy was better known for explosions than running around a stage in tights.

  “Especially in light of, you know, what happened to her at the end,” he went on.

  “You know about how she died?” I asked, even more surprised.

  At that, he turned to me. “What do you think? That the only thing I read is Maxim or something?”

  I guess the slight pause as I racked my brain trying to think of a response was answer enough. “Yeah, well, you wouldn’t be the only one,” he sighed.

  Way to make a girl feel guilty. But what was I doing feeling bad for Billy Barrett? He did not need my sympathy.