by Ella Berman
“This is really sad, Mom. You know too much about them. You shouldn’t even know where Calabasas is.”
“Turn left here,” my mom says, ignoring me.
I take a left, promising myself that I can turn left again in three blocks. Thank god for the grid system. I slow down to let an old woman with a walker cross the road. My mom makes an impatient noise and I try not to smile.
“Grace, you have a house in Venice and you made 3.2 million dollars on your last movie. You can’t actually be telling me that you’re happy here.”
“How do you know that?”
“Google,” she says.
“Great, well there’s taxes and commission on that, you know,” I say, rubbing my eyes. “And you moved from London to a house the color of Pepto Bismol in Anaheim, but you’re telling me that you’re happy here.”
“We’re older than you. Happiness is no longer relevant,” she shoots back, and I wish she hadn’t because the phrase settles somewhere deep inside me. I open the window, and for once it’s cold enough in Southern California that I can see my own breath.
“Okay, little miss sunshine. Let’s try this. Tell me one time you’ve been happy since you’ve been back. And I’m talking genuinely happy. If you can do that, and I believe you, then I’ll leave you alone.”
I pull up at a traffic light and turn to look at her. My mom’s hair is still red, but it’s finer now and dusted with silver at the roots. Her beauty has become slightly distorted with age, as if her features are now too big for her face.
“I was happy last week when we went to Costco and they had the giant version of that hot sauce we both love.”
My mother looks at me like I’m insane, and I shrug.
“Can you pull in here?” my mom asks, pointing to the parking lot of a health-food store I’ve never been in, and after a moment I oblige.
“I’ll be two minutes,” she says, and I watch as she walks into the store. While she’s inside, I stare at the window display, where the same photo is repeated at least twelve times in various sizes. The photo shows a man holding an iron dumbbell, his neck swollen with engorged veins and his body angled into a deep squat. They probably could have chosen a different position.
My mom opens the car door and slides back into the passenger seat.
“They don’t have my pills here either,” she says.
“Okay,” I reply, unsure of what else to say. My parents do not like change. It’s like they decided that the move from England would be their final adjustment in life so they just buckled in instead, waiting to grow old and die. It’s easy to forget that neither of them has even turned fifty yet.
I reach out and touch her arm. She pulls away instinctively, and I realize I can’t remember the last time we touched each other on purpose. Before I moved to LA, I guess.
“So are we going home?” I ask.
She nods, and tunes the radio to a country music station.
“You know those pills are basically speed,” I say after a moment. “They’re not good for you.”
“Are you sure you’re qualified to give me a lecture on drugs, Grace?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you just skip a couple more meals and then we’ll talk,” I say reflexively, and she pulls away from me as if I’ve bitten her.
I keep my eyes fixed on the road ahead, and I spend the rest of the journey home thinking of all the things I could have said instead of that.
CHAPTER FOUR
When the anniversary of my return to Anaheim comes and goes without further comment from my mother, I wonder if she’s forgotten our conversation about my future. It’s almost entirely out of character for her to drop something so easily, but she has spent the last few days in a state of neurosis preparing for my sister’s impending return, dusting the ten-year-old studio family portraits that line the green walls of our hallway with military precision. She’s already cleaned Esme’s room twice, even though my sister isn’t due home for another week.
For my part, I’ve spent the last few days proving how content I am by smiling like a maniac whenever I’m in her presence, even though it turns out that being happy all the time is exhausting. I have no idea how the Mormons keep it up. I stay out of my parents’ way as much as possible, even skipping the morning coffee ritual despite knowing it means I have to walk four blocks to the nearest Starbucks for my Americano.
I am woken up one morning by a particularly loud front door slam, and the thud of something being dumped in the hall outside my bedroom. As I stretch in bed, I can hear hushed voices drifting under the gap in the door and perhaps even the sound of someone crying. It’s early, and I could probably fall back to sleep, but I’m mildly interested in what’s happening, as it’s not following the blueprint of my parents’ usual morning routine.
I slip out of bed in my gray tracksuit and an old Winnie the Pooh T-shirt, stumbling over a large purple suitcase that has been dumped in the hallway outside my bedroom door. My parents are in the living room, sitting around the table we only use on the rare occasions we have company. A bunch of yellow tulips are arranged in a vase, and the pink sparkly mug nobody is allowed to touch when Esme is away is laid out in front of an empty chair.
“When did you start drinking coffee?” I ask as my sister walks into the room from the kitchen. Her black hair is pulled back into a ponytail at the nape of her neck, and her skin has gotten worse since I saw her last, sort of tender and raw where she’s been picking at her spots. We hug briefly but, as always, we don’t quite fit together right, and her shoulder digs into my throat. I pull up a chair opposite her, and nobody talks for a moment.
“What are we talking about?” I ask.
My dad picks at a rough bit of skin on the back of his hand, but my mom is already frowning at me. Something is definitely off. I’ve always known how to read a room, even if I don’t always adhere to the rules.
“I’ve been suspended until the end of the year,” Esme says after a moment in which it becomes clear my parents aren’t going to tell me. She’s attempting to sound bored, and my mom flinches. I can’t imagine how much she’ll hate that I’m here to witness the decline of yet another of their progeny.
“What for?” I ask. The suspension is interesting to me for a few reasons, not least because, to my limited knowledge of Esme as a teenager, it is entirely unprecedented. Always a thoughtful kid, my sister has grown up into a solemn teenager, cocooned both by my parents’ adoration of her and her advanced placement status in everything she does at her elite boarding school. Even her pale skin seems too vulnerable for the unflinching Southern Californian sun when she’s back, as if she’s somehow remained untouched by anything harsh up to this point.
My sister takes after my dad, aesthetically speaking, which would be a euphemism unless you’d actually met my dad. Growing up, before I realized how it worked, how sometimes the thing that you were always told was a blessing can actually be a poison, I would feel guilty when people complimented me on my hair or my perfect white teeth, and Esme for her grade in math or her piano playing. I thought that it meant I was better somehow, and that my parents were only overcompensating for her plainness by loving her more, when in reality Esme was probably just kinder than me, less slippery, less attention seeking. If I thought about it too much, I could feel jealous of her, but I think she could say the same about me.
Esme stretches her arms above her head and then shrugs, a movement that reminds me so much of myself that I pause.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Esme says, her accent more pronounced than ever. I try to find the sister I once knew in this American sixteen-year-old, but it feels like a lost cause. I remember how, when she was younger, Esme used to break anything she loved. She’d take apart her favorite American Girl doll or the Transformers car she got for her sixth birthday just so she’d know how to put it back together again if the worst were to happen. The floor of our house in En
gland was always strewn with abandoned limbs and random rubber wheels as a result, but she never once faulted her own logic.
My mom exhales helplessly next to me, and I feel sorry for her even though she’s probably already working out how it’s my fault. I do the math and figure that we wouldn’t have left England if it weren’t for me, so the connection shouldn’t be too much of a reach for her. It never is.
“What was it, bad grades?” I ask, trying to lighten the mood. Even when she was a kid, it was clear that Esme was smarter than the rest of us put together.
Esme shakes her head.
“Did you finally set fire to that vile uniform?” Esme frowns at me, and I realize too late that she’s still wearing the green pleated skirt underneath her wooly sweater. I remember now that my sister has this way of looking at you as if she can see through you to your blood.
“Alcohol?” I ask. “Not drugs?”
“I’m not you,” Esme mutters, just loud enough for everyone to hear.
“Well, I highly doubt that it’s sex,” I say, stung that she mentioned my sobriety in front of our parents, even though I already understand that I deserved it.
“Grace!” my mother says, before preempting Esme’s tears by taking her hand. I push my chair back and walk into the kitchen, debating whether or not I need to apologize already. I don’t know when it became so difficult for me to have a civil conversation with another human being. I pour myself the end of the jug of coffee, the part with the sludgy grains that get caught in your teeth, and figure I’ll probably just head back to bed instead.
* * *
• • •
I’m flicking through some old photographs when my mom knocks on the door. After less than a second she’s standing in my room, and it’s the first time she’s been in here since I moved back.
She hovers above the bed, and I move my legs so that she can sit on the end. She does so, folding her hands on her lap and leaning against the sparkly purple wall. This already feels too intimate for us, and I squirm under the sheets, wishing I wasn’t tucked back up in bed like an invalid.
“Who are these people?” she says, squinting at one of the photographs on the duvet.
“Her name was Anna.” I point at a pretty dark-haired girl standing next to me, flashing a peace sign at the camera.
“Oh yes, you did ballet with her. I remember her mother. Their TV was practically bigger than their house,” she says as she drops the photo back on the pile. This used to mean that they were low-rent, tacky, but I think she’s forgetting the sixty-two-inch screen she has hanging above the electric fireplace downstairs. She shifts her position on the bed, and I can see how thin she is underneath her cotton shirt.
“Esme’s had a rough year, you know,” she says.
“She’s barely been here,” I say. “How would I know?”
“You’re one to talk,” my mom says, and I realize too late that I walked right into her trap. Because I’m the one who made them move across the world and then left them behind, and the only way they knew how to punish me was to make their world smaller and smaller until there was no room for me in it anyway.
“I get it, I’ll apologize to her,” I say after a pause, just in case I can change the course of this conversation for the first time in my life.
My mom shrugs, as if I’m missing the point.
“I meant what I said the other day. You can’t hide here forever.”
“Mom, do we have to do this? I’m not a kid anymore.”
“Says the girl in the Disney pajamas, making her sister cry,” my mom says. “You never had to want for anything, that’s why you’re like this.”
Say what you like about my mother, but she’s never missed an opportunity to get a good dig in.
“I spent the majority of my teenage years alone on a film set, so don’t tell me what I’ve wanted for,” I say, trying to be calm but hearing something in my tone that I can’t control. Fighting with her is like muscle memory. The smallest thing used to set us off and we would spar back and forth, neither of us really caring what the other one said until suddenly we did. We say a lot of stuff that means nothing, but it’s like a coin-pusher game in an arcade, each insult edging us a little closer to the edge until all hell breaks loose.
“If you have something to say, then just say it,” my mom says, narrowing her eyes at me, but I look away, ignoring the adrenaline that is now coursing through my body. She shakes her head. “You had everything.”
“And I would still swap places with you in a heartbeat,” I say, and then we both realize what I’ve said, how small her life is because she had to accommodate mine, and how much more she would have given up for even one-tenth of what I have.
“You’ve always been selfish, Grace. It’s nice to see you haven’t changed,” she says.
“You know, I don’t expect you to give me any special treatment, but I thought you could at least pretend to like me,” I say quietly. “I already said I would apologize.”
We sit there for a few moments before she stands up. I think she’s going to leave but she starts to speak again with her hand on the door, her gaze unflinching.
“Do you want to know the truth, Grace?”
I shrug, because she’s going to enlighten me either way.
“I don’t think you’re a good person for your sister to be around right now.”
And there it is. Can you hear it? That’s the sound of coins clattering into the gutter. I stand up, suddenly needing to be anywhere on earth but here.
“Gosh, I have no idea how that could have happened,” I say as I drop the Polaroid I’m holding onto the bed. The photo was taken at Disneyland when I was twelve, just before our lives were transformed. My dad and I are grinning on either side of a life-size Pluto. My sister is holding my dad’s hand, shyly peeking around him to squint into the camera. My mom is on the other side of me, her arm around my shoulders and a pair of sequined Mickey Mouse ears on her head. I wonder now whether her dislike for me crept up on her so slowly that she couldn’t see it happen or whether it happened all at once, like an earthquake.
“You know, you never asked me why I came back,” I say, and then I push past her, walking out of my bedroom, out the front door of the pink house, down the porch steps, until once again I am under the endless blue sky, racing past miles and miles of stucco bungalows flanked by 4x4s on one side and rippling American flags on the other.
CHAPTER FIVE
When I was thirteen, a casting director came to my school in London to find an unknown actress for a trilogy about a trio of teen assassins at an international spy school. We all put our names down to audition for the part, and the other girls giggled and rehearsed all morning, arguing over who deserved to be in the film the most. I ignored them, and the casting director’s appraising eye, instead staring down at a well-worn copy of The Catcher in the Rye that I carried around because I thought it made me seem complicated. I had long, glossy cinnamon-colored hair, one blue eye and one green, and dimples, all of which meant I was already popular so I could afford to be pretentious. Dimples are the kind of thing that matter in a state school in London, and everywhere else, it turns out.
For the first thirteen years of my life, our basement apartment in Islington was filled with my parents’ friends, the only obvious grounds for an invitation being that my mom found the person interesting in some small way. The adults drank a lot and had loud, unruly debates about everything from Princess Diana to Marxism, and although my dad was engaging enough in a hardworking, salt-of-the-earth kind of way, even then I understood that mom was the reason people kept coming back. She could be searingly funny, due to a combination of her razor-sharp perceptions and occasional callousness, and she was also beautiful, with thick auburn hair and eyes the color of a swimming pool under a thin layer of ice.
As I got older, people would say I was her doppelgänger, and I knew th
ey said it because I sort of looked like her, but mostly because I worked hard at it, copying the way she laughed, the arch tone of her voice, so that people would know not only that we were the same, but also that we were better than everyone else. When my sister was born, I was surprised to find that even though it didn’t seem like she should be a threat to me, pale and solemn as she was, it didn’t stop my mother from loving her more. It turned out they’d been trying for another baby for a while, and Esme was the grand prize.
When the lunchtime audition came around, I stood on the stage in our main hall next to the other girls, embarrassed by my sameness and disguising it as boredom. The other girls were bouncing on their toes, excitement distorting their voices when they said their lines as they tried not to laugh at their friends who were pulling faces and waving at them manically from the seats.
When it was my turn, I completely blanked. Of course I hadn’t rehearsed anything, had just expected to deliver it all seamlessly and walk off, maybe stick my middle finger up to make the other girls laugh. I stood onstage, trying not to piss myself because I knew that even I would never live that down, and I realized that I had never wanted anything as much as I wanted this, and the futility of realizing it at exactly the moment I was ensuring it would never happen made me burst into tears. Everyone around me froze, because I was too old to be crying that way, so shamelessly. When I finally managed to get the line out, it was through heavy, juddering sobs and barely intelligible. That same night, the producers called my parents to ask if I could be flown out to LA to screen-test. The way my parents looked at me changed from that moment on, and, for the first time since my sister was born, I figured out how to hold on to their attention.
Looking back, I feel ashamed of how much I wanted it all.
CHAPTER SIX
When Disney offered me a lifetime pass for shooting a movie with them, I didn’t imagine I’d use it even once, let alone once a week for the entire year I’ve been back in Anaheim. Every week, however, I leave my parents’ house in the morning and walk to the resort hotel we stayed in when we first visited California, before we ever imagined we’d be moving here. Even though I know it’s weird, sometimes just being somewhere so entirely engineered to make you believe in something makes me feel better. It would be embarrassingly reductive to say it reminds me of a simpler time, so let’s just say I go there for the buffet and the Mickey Mouse waffles.
