Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter

by Melissa Francis

  “What are you going to do when you go back to school?” I said, changing the subject. “Are you going to apply to grad school?”

  It was her fifth year at Berkeley, which was entirely normal in the University of California school system. Almost no one graduated in four years anymore. They either couldn’t get the classes they needed because of overcrowding or they were just avoiding adulthood.

  “I’m going to apply to law school and take the LSAT. I thought about doing psychology, but it’s such a long road. Besides, I’d really like to be a lawyer,” she said.

  “I think you love Law & Order,” I teased.

  “Well that’s true.”

  The thought of her going back to Berkeley unsettled me. I didn’t want her to return to her old friends and her old self. This transformation seemed tenuous, and I wanted to hold on to her.

  “Are you excited about Harvard? It’s so far away,” she asked with wide eyes.

  “I know, isn’t that fantastic? A whole plane ride away. No one can drive to see me. No pop-ins,” I said.

  I was thinking of Mom, but I suddenly realized that included her, and the distance bothered me unexpectedly.

  “You can visit me,” I offered. “Mom would buy you a ticket.”

  “Not without wanting to come,” she said ruefully.

  We hung out most the days and nights when I wasn’t working for the next few weeks; Tiffany delayed going back up to Berkeley, but it couldn’t last. She had to go back to school to register and get settled in after such a long time away traveling around Europe. The summer was fleeting.

  One night, I took off by myself to see Patrick. He was two hours away in San Diego visiting his parents, and I drove down to meet them and go out to dinner. I still hadn’t come clean to him about how old I was, and now I was getting in deeper by meeting his parents.

  When we made the plan, I knew it was unrealistic to think I would drive all the way back to the Valley that night. But if I went with the premise that I would spend the night at his house, the idea would have provoked a huge fight with Mom.

  Sure enough, when midnight rolled around, Patrick and I were entangled and exhausted in the room he’d grown up in and the last thing I could do was tear myself away from him and leave. He was going to vanish soon enough anyway.

  I phoned Mom with some lame excuse about how I was too tired to drive safely, and instead of yelling, she just slammed down the phone. There was nothing she could do from a distance, and we both knew I would be dead when I finally turned up at home. I may have been eighteen, but not coming home was tantamount to an insurrection.

  At six AM, Patrick rolled over in his bed and woke me.

  “You’d better go. Both of our moms are going to kill us,” he said without opening his eyes. He was even sexier in the morning, which I wouldn’t have bet was possible. I rested my head on his bare, tanned chest and then tilted my head up and kissed him. He kissed me back before gently pushing me off him and onto the floor with a smile.

  “I’m serious. You have to go.”

  “You’re twenty-four,” I said, very well aware of the difference between our ages. “I know why I’m in trouble, but why is your mom going to kill you?”

  “Because this is her house, and not my apartment. My little sister still lives here. We’re Catholic. I really can’t have a girl stay over. You’ve got to go.”

  I drove the entire way far above the speed limit, as if making good time would fix anything.

  When I walked into the house, I was surprised to find it empty except for Tiffany. She sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading the Los Angeles Times.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked.

  “Dad’s at work. Mom went out. She said she couldn’t stand to look at you when you got home,” she said without looking up.

  “Yeah, I’m in big trouble this time,” I said weakly. She didn’t respond.

  “Wait, you’re not going to give me a hard time!” I said, suddenly shocked.

  “You stayed out all night? You couldn’t have seen him and just come home?” she said.

  “Oh my God! What’s the big deal! I was just tired! It’s a long drive. I lived at Stanford the whole summer by myself last year! I’m leaving for college in a month! I can sleep anywhere I want then!” I shouted.

  “Exactly. You can sleep anywhere you want then. For the rest of your life. You didn’t have to rub it in their faces now. We all knew you weren’t coming home when you left and you lied and said you were. Come on. You want people to treat you like an adult, then act like one.”

  I stared mouth agape at this stranger at the kitchen table. Then I had to laugh.

  “Are you seriously lecturing me about being responsible and respectful?” I said.

  She looked up at me. “You just shouldn’t have done it, and you know it.”

  I turned on my heel and left the room. I went upstairs and combed my hair into a ponytail and put on my Islands uniform.

  When I got back in my car to drive to work, all I could think was, please don’t let this level-headed girl posing as my sister disappear. I don’t mind being the bad apple. Please let it be her turn to shine, to feel good, to be happy in her own skin.

  A week later when she drove off, I repeated my prayer silently to myself. Let this be her time. But God wasn’t listening.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “Absolutely not. Let me get this straight. You want to spend the summer living with your boyfriend a million miles away in Washington, D.C., doing some unpaid job instead of going on auditions, and I’m footing the bill for the whole thing? Ha! You’ve got a lot of nerve!”

  And with that, the phone went dead. Mom had always been the queen of slamming down the phone. She loved to end a conversation that way. The sound of the handset crashing into the cradle a split second before a dial tone replaced her screaming voice. It was the perfect exclamation mark to whatever dramatic speech she’d just finished.

  Years ago, the proliferation of the cordless phone had robbed her of one of her dearest forms of expression. Now when she wanted to let someone know that their response didn’t matter, she could only tell them by punching a button and then slamming the phone down on the nearest counter, the second act devoid of its most important witness.

  I looked out the window of my dorm room and sighed. Eliot House was a hulking limestone dorm on the bank of the Charles River. My third-floor room overlooked JFK Boulevard, where packs of athletes in practice uniforms carrying lacrosse sticks or rowing bags streamed from Harvard Yard over the Charles River to the practice fields just beyond the stone bridge. I watched them and was willing to bet that their parents would applaud their industry and gumption.

  My mom’s response wasn’t unexpected. Still, I’d hoped. The unpaid job she’d spat at was a prestigious internship with NBC News in D.C. that I’d landed after months of letters and phone calls and begging. I’d be working on the Today show and I’d get to go to the White House and sit with the press corps in the West Wing. But to Mom, the job was in the wrong industry and the wrong zip code.

  The year before, I’d waltzed into the career counseling office at Harvard with no clue about what I wanted to do with my summer break. Every smart, aggressive freshman was sniffing around for a jump on something or other. Half of them were gearing up to be consultants, which didn’t make sense to me. We knew next to nothing about nothing, so how could we possibly tell a company how to do its business better? Still there seemed to be three tracks at Harvard: Wall Street consulting or investment banking, law school, or medical school. Those options seemed too dreary for someone like me who had already had a career with a lot more sparkle.

  Then I’d found a lone scrap of paper with a description of a job that had never occurred to me: KTTV—News Intern. KTTV was the local Fox News affiliate in downtown Los Angeles. “Reports to the Assignment Manager, generating story ideas and assisting the assignment desk.” I didn’t know how to come up with a news story or what an assignment desk
was, but the job sounded a whole lot better than making copies in a law office.

  I called, wrote, and interviewed and eventually the golden yet unpaid position was mine. I came home every day exhausted with a migraine from the frantic yelling and racing to the top of each newscast. I was hooked. News was everything entertainment television wasn’t: unscripted, unrehearsed, no safety net. Get in front of the camera and use the brain God gave you or risk being utterly exposed in your underpants.

  That’s not to say my actual duties as an intern were far above making copies in a law office. But I’d seen my future and then made a map to get there. That involved more internships with more connections who would vouch for me and get me through the next door, until I could make a tape, pedal the reel around tiny markets, and finally get on the air.

  Now, my mom’s reaction to the Today show internship was a roadblock. I sulked for a while before giving up and heading downstairs to meet my boyfriend, Zach, in the dining hall for the very end of lunch before the dining hall closed to prep for dinner.

  Zach was tall and preppy with dark hair and high cheekbones that always made me wonder if his Arizona roots had reached out and intertwined with those of some Native Americans. He’d beaten me to the dining hall, made his way through the line, and was already seated at one end of a long table in the oversized wood-paneled room.

  “Sorry I’m late. Talking to my mom. What’s for lunch?” I said, looking at his tray.

  “Chickwich. The one meal they can’t screw up. You better hurry if you want one. I saw bricks of lasagna waiting in the wings for dinner so this may be the last good meal of the day,” he said, rubbing his palms together over his plate.

  I walked to the food line in the great hall and grabbed a red, battered tray off the stack. A thousand meals had traveled on the tray, scratching the surface into its own unique pattern. The line inched forward twisting and turning into the heart of the kitchen, where a pillowy Slavic woman greeted us each day from behind the sneeze guard.

  “Hi, honey. What do you want for lunch?” she asked, sounding almost like an aunt or a grandmother so warm and sincere I almost believed I could tell her I wanted a rack of lamb and she’d turn around and produce one.

  “I’ll take a chickwich, thanks,” I said.

  “Just about the last one,” she said smiling.

  She picked up a breaded chicken patty from a bed of lettuce using flat metal tongs and dropped it onto a bun she’d pulled from a bag that said “institutional use only,” which made me think I was eating prison food.

  I returned to Zach’s table and sat down across from him. He’d already eaten one chickwich and was focused on the second. Unlike most rumpled college boys, Zach was neat as a pin. His shirt was pressed, cuffs folded back so they wouldn’t catch the honey mustard.

  He covered his mouth with his hand so he could talk and eat at the same time without being rude.

  “So what did your mom say?”

  “‘No,’ basically. I told her how great the internship is, that I know a bunch of people here who tried to get jobs like it, and struck out entirely. I explained that I’ve been working and begging and calling and writing and planning for months. All that didn’t matter,” I said, looking down at my tray and shaking my head.

  “Well, she wants you to come home,” he said matter-of-factly. He was cute, but not particularly helpful.

  “No shit, Sherlock. But I don’t want to go home.” I frowned. “I want to go see another city. I’ve lived in L.A. and Boston. I want to try out D.C.”

  “So just come with me. You’re twenty years old!” he said easily.

  Zach only had his mom. She was relentlessly and untiringly proud of every single thing he did. They’d been alone since his parents had split up when he was little, so he’d developed a solid sense of self-reliance that I admired. He always worked, and he always had a plan. I was a planner myself, but next to Zach, I felt like a slouch.

  “I can’t just go without her signing off on it,” I grumbled.

  “Why not?” he pressed.

  “I don’t have enough money.”

  Mom had me and she knew it.

  Zach shook his head and grimaced as if he were saying, “I told you so.” He worked as many hours as he could muster at Harvard Law School in Alan Dershowitz’s office. Dershowitz was a famous appeals lawyer who made his name as much in the media as the courtroom. Zach was smart enough to score a job that paid, had cachet, and got him closer to getting into Harvard Law.

  He was pretty pleased with himself.

  “If you had a job this semester . . . ,” he nagged.

  “I know. I know! Advanced micro and calculus were sort of kicking my ass. I barely made it through my classes.”

  It was true. I’d decided to major in economics and found my calculus skills weren’t quite up to the task. I was struggling to get through the more technical parts of my major and since all my professors graded on a curve, I had to climb over half my rabid classmates just to get a B. It was much harder slogging than I was used to.

  “I can pay for stuff,” Zach offered, softening his rebuke.

  “Well, maybe there’s still time for me to work it out,” I said.

  I spent the afternoon in my dorm room calling around campus looking for work. My choices for employment were bleak so deep into the semester. I could clean dorm rooms or do food prep in a hairnet in the dining halls. Both were humbling and barely compensated. All the better-paying, more dignified jobs had been snapped up months earlier.

  My roommate, Debbie, walked in and plunked herself down on my bed. Her blonde bowl cut framed her face with a blunt edge except where the strands mixed with the humidity in the air and feathered around her ears. She brushed her bangs back, and her bare forehead made her wide blue eyes appear even larger above her freckled cheeks.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Looking for a way to make money,” I replied.

  She crossed her jeans-clad legs and tugged at the bottom of her pale T-shirt. Debbie’s low-maintenance style clashed with my penchant for make-up and trendy clothes and made us seem like an odd couple. But we’d been fast friends from the day she walked into my freshman dorm. I’d never cried or complained about a problem she couldn’t walk her way through, and vice versa.

  “What do you need cash for?” she asked.

  “I want to take that internship in D.C. for the summer and go with Zach. He’s working for the public defender’s office. But it’s not paid and my parents want me to come home so they aren’t going to give me money to do it.”

  “Can you use the Little House money or whatever?” she asked, going to the obvious solution.

  “Not really. It’s complicated,” I lied. “The only thing I can find on short notice is working in the dining hall, or dorm crew.”

  She flinched at the last suggestion. Harvard sent financial aid students around the dorms with buckets and toilet bowl brushes cleaning other students’ filth. The task was revolting and demeaning. You might knock on someone’s door to clean their toilet and then sit next to them an hour later in art history. I always thought there had to be an easier way to earn money. Now I wondered if they were just poor planners like myself.

  “Kitchen has to be better than dorm crew. Anything would be,” she said with a shudder. “How bad could it be?”

  The next day I descended into the bowels of Eliot House to find out. It turned out the kitchen that churned out three meals a day for us also served our next-door neighbors at Kirkland House. The steaming, belching food factory buried deep underground connected both houses by tunnels that reached out like two long arms to the dining halls above.

  Sounds of metal utensils clashing and thick local accents mixed with the stifling damp air and swirled around me as I walked through the tunnel toward the manager’s office. This zone was off-limits to students, making the trek through the tunnel feel like a journey to the other side.

  “You the new kid?” asked a stout man from
behind a desk, looking up from piles of paperwork as I walked through the door. I wondered how he could read anything given the smudges on his wire-rimmed glasses.

  He spun his chair around and opened a big drawer behind him. After rummaging through piles of checked fabric, he eventually produced a well-worn pair of pants. He threw them on the desk and then rose to his feet before opening another drawer higher up on the cabinet. From there he pulled a white short-sleeved shirt that was frayed around the collar.

  “Everyone wears a uniform. You can have these but you have to bring them back. You can wear what you have on to train today, but wear the uniform tomorrow.”

  He stood up and squeezed past me with a grunt, motioning for me to follow him. The three hairs that still remained on top of his head fluttered as we moved down the hall, and I wished that someone, somewhere would open a window.

  Eventually we arrived at the kitchen. I don’t know what I expected. Certainly not Wolfgang Puck given what the finished product tasted like. But my suspicion about the prisonlike quality of our meals seemed to be immediately confirmed.

  Half a dozen women and one lone guy stood at prep stations around the room, quietly chopping, mixing, and sorting. In the center of the room, an island of burners held pots big enough to boil naughty children one by one. Blue flames licked the bottom of the pots as white foam bubbled to the surface. On the far side, a wall of ovens radiated heat and cooked the room. A sharp scent of antiseptic cleaning fluid overpowered anything that might smell like food.

  I looked at the people working quietly and recognized one woman’s decidedly Irish, pale face from behind the counter upstairs. I’d seen her schlep heavy metal trays through the door at the back of the dining hall countless times and only casually wondered where they came from. Now I knew.