Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter

by Melissa Francis

  “On TV. I work for the ABC station in Manchester. It’s local news. I was a producer right out of school for the local NBC in Maine. In fact, I was the only person in my class who thought it was a good idea to move to Maine after graduation,” I said, and he laughed.

  “What made you go into news? Didn’t you act growing up? My roommate, Greg, is an actor here in New York.” He gestured to his friend, whom I had recognized right when I came in.

  “I was in acting my whole life growing up. And I went off to Harvard to kind of see if I could live without it. Turns out I could,” I said.

  I wasn’t sure why I was telling him so much. Maybe it was the drink, maybe I was just tired. He was a good audience, though, so I had a hard time stopping.

  “I interned at the Fox station in L.A. after my freshman year and news was immediately addicting. It was such a rush to see everyone race to airtime. And there’s no safety net. It’s totally unlike entertainment. There’s barely a script, there’s no rehearsal, no support. You’re responsible for coming up with everything you say. Live or die, it’s all on you. It’s exhilarating. I love it. But it’s stressful too.”

  He’d moved even closer while I was talking so he could touch my wrist resting on the bar. His finger sent a chill up my arm, raising an army of goose bumps. I had tried to be annoyed by him, but he was melting my resistance.

  He charmed and entertained and cajoled me for hours, totally ignoring his friends and everyone else. He was happy and unconcerned in a way I had never been.

  “Your eyes are yellow,” he said, now completely in my personal space.

  “Yes, I know.” I looked down, uncomfortable with the way he looked through them.

  “They are really pretty. I’m not sure I noticed that when you lived next door,” he said with a smile.

  “No, you were too busy hanging out with your friends at the Fox Club,” I teased.

  “Well, we were seniors by the time you came along. I was the president of the club. I had a duty to hang out there,” he said.

  “You know I came by to hit on you, at the Fox, and in your room,” I admitted. “I even went to watch you play volleyball.”

  “I’m pretty sure you came by to hit on Greg.”

  “No,” I said. “That was my cover. I talked to him, but I was after you.”

  “Well, I think I would have noticed if you were hitting on me. You may have been too subtle. Or I was just an idiot. My fault, I’m sure. It’s not like there was an abundance of pretty girls at Harvard,” he said.

  “Is that why you were always busing in girls from Wellesley?” I teased.

  A few drinks later, the arm he’d had on the bar was now wrapped around my waist. He leaned in and kissed me, right in the middle of the crowd. The room full of people blurred into the background. I had no idea where any of our friends had gone, and I hadn’t thought to look for them for a while.

  The rest of the weekend, I tried to put my finger on his energy, dissect it and understand it. Instead I got wrapped up in its freedom and carried away.

  For months, I looked for signs that his charisma was a façade, a magic trick, but couldn’t find any. Now that our casual dating had turned serious, I’d brought him home to L.A. to see if he could survive a weekend with my family. The odds were less than even. But I had landed a job near New York and we were planning on moving in together, so the collision of Wray and my family became inevitable.

  “My family is crazy,” I warned him for the tenth time as we got into the rental car and started to exit the airport. He laughed, which made me think he didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.

  He was going to spend forty-eight hours among the crazies in their natural habitat. He’d see how they resembled electrons rapidly orbiting around each other, invisibly bound to some center while also fighting to get away. It was enough to make me vomit.

  Just to complicate the family dynamic further, Tiffany had moved back home with Mom and Dad. She had made her way through Berkeley, and had even scraped through the University of San Diego Law School. But she’d barely cleared the second hurdle. She didn’t have the focus or the stamina for law school, ending up at the bottom of her class with no sign of a job on the horizon. Now she was at home studying for the bar. I hoped that with a vocation, she’d have something solid to keep her centered and supported. But she was off to a rough start now that she was back home, not working, essentially not doing anything except going on the occasional job interview and taking a bar review course. She hung around the house and bickered with Mom much of the time. None of the friends she’d made in school lived in the area. Her life at the moment sounded lonely and directionless to me.

  Wray adjusted the rearview mirror and cleared his throat, amused by my discomfort. He put his hand on my leg, as if to tell me I was worrying for nothing.

  “You’ve met my family. Now they are totally crazy,” he said, removing his hand to chew on his cuticle.

  “No,” I said. “Everyone says their family is crazy. Mine actually is. It’s a clinical thing. We could be studied on an academic level. It’s not like annoying or quirky. It’s real crazy-crazy.”

  He turned quickly to look directly at me in the passenger seat as we sped down the highway, his blondish brown hair rumpled from the six-hour plane ride. He smiled in a way that made me smile involuntarily.

  “Stop worrying. It’s going to be fun.”

  I loved his misguided optimism.

  It took about an hour to navigate the 405 Freeway, merge to the 101, and make our way all the way out to Westlake Boulevard, where Mom and Dad now lived.

  The Northridge earthquake of the mid-’90s cracked the foundation of the house I grew up in, and forced the city to declare the structure uninhabitable. Mom and Dad were at home and asleep when the earthquake struck. Though books and pictures and everything else that wasn’t nailed in place had fallen and shattered as the ground rolled and rumbled, there was plenty of time for them to get outside without getting hurt.

  When the shaking stopped, Allstate forked over a sizable settlement and in turn, Mom got one of the things she’d always wanted, a brand-new house in a gated and guarded community, Lake Sherwood, out in Westlake Village.

  When I left for college, I’d assumed they’d stay in our house forever, that the place would remain a museum to my childhood. Even as the walls showed the dings and scratches of time, it seemed like nothing would actually pry my parents loose from that house, no matter how much Mom mused about renovating or moving. They’d have to come up with a plan and execute it as a team, which meant coming together and taking action. That was unthinkable, with so many chiefs and not a single indian. My family was incapable of working together as a productive group.

  Ultimately, I wasn’t far off. It took a natural disaster to dislodge them, and nothing less.

  We got off at Westlake Village Blvd. and drove through the town center out to the rolling grasslands and farmlands of Hidden Valley. At the edges of two pastures sat a brick guard gate. Through the dark night, I could make out an escaped cow that stood on the mowed lawn to the right of the guardhouse, eating a late-night snack.

  “Hello, folks, who are you here to see?” the potbellied guard asked, leaning toward the car from inside the guardhouse. He didn’t bother to get to his feet.

  “Is that cow here to greet us?” I asked.

  “No,” he laughed. “She’s an escapee from the down the street. I called the guy she belongs to. He’s coming down with a trailer to get her. It’s not the first time she’s come down here. She prefers this tender stuff, I guess,” he said, gesturing to the neatly trimmed lawn. This new neighborhood was nothing if not idyllic, I thought.

  “We’re going to the Francis residence,” Wray said, and with that the guard pushed a button and the imposing wrought iron gates swung open.

  We drove our small rental sedan through the towering gates and followed Stafford Road past a slew of enormous homes illuminated by streetlights, then wound around a g
olf course down the oak-lined street.

  “It’s right there, on the right. Pull in there,” I said, pointing to a more modest home across the street from the course.

  Wray pulled into the driveway, and my heart started to pound. I really adored him, and I felt fairly certain the people inside the house were going to ruin this for me.

  We got out and headed for the door, leaving our luggage in the trunk. I walked a step behind Wray on the brick path, my boot heels echoing in the silence of the evening air.

  When we arrived at the front door, I pushed it open and led Wray inside. A soft, rose-colored light bathed the inside of the house, bouncing off the shiny pine floors like candlelight. Mom had cornered the market on antique pine armoires that stretched up to the ceiling. She had filled almost every room with at least one if not two pieces. Overstuffed armchairs dwarfed adjoining antique pine side tables, draped with Pierre Deux fabrics, every available surface covered with porcelain knickknacks, minute Tiffany Limoges boxes, and picture frames.

  We walked past the dining room, where the table was set for dinner, cluttered with country French linens and colorful dishes and silverware, the ceiling painted like a night sky. Candles shaped like food filled in the spots between dishes in the center of the oval table. The house was decorated within an inch of its life.

  “Wray, good to see you,” Mom said in a formal tone, sweeping in from the kitchen. Her voice was stilted and unnatural. I could tell she was nervous about having him there.

  My eyes drifted across the tabletops covered with tchotchkes, marveling at all that had appeared since the last time I’d visited. Every surface held a dozen items, each intricate and unquestionably beautiful, but presented in such abundance that it was difficult to appreciate any particular one. I couldn’t imagine the time and energy Mom had spent accumulating these trinkets and assembling the scene before us.

  Dad came out from the living room, where he had been sitting in a hunter green wingback chair, watching C-SPAN. The House was voting on another piece of pork barrel legislation, and he was watching the tally, as if something tangible were at stake outside this room.

  Wray dwarfed my parents, in size and presence. I considered the possibility of just going back to New York in the morning if we survived the night.

  “Where’s Tiff?” I asked.

  “Upstairs. She’ll be down in a second. I told her you were on your way,” Mom said, looking Wray over.

  I wondered which Tiffany would emerge from upstairs. I hoped for the steady, eye-rolling big sister who had returned refreshed and clearheaded from a semester backpacking around in Europe. But it had been three or four years since I’d seen that version. I’d grown to expect the nervous person I’d seen last Christmas, who hit the wine a little too hard. She’d be fine one minute, then a switch would flip somewhere in her brain, and she seemed to want to crawl out of her skin. Most of the time I blamed her edginess on Mom, but now it seemed like more and more things made her uncomfortable. It was hard to pinpoint and understand since I only saw her occasionally.

  Last Christmas had been the first time my family had met Wray. I was reporting for a local station in Rhode Island, and as the newest hire, I had to work the whole holiday on the air. Mom, Dad, Tiffany, and Marilyn had flown out to offer their support. But then when the time for Christmas dinner rolled around, Mom got angry about something someone had said, though no one knew what it was because she locked herself in her hotel room, and refused to come to the holiday meal at my apartment. Wray had flown back from his family’s home in Florida to meet my family, and that’s what he came up against.

  “Wait, your mom flew all the way here, and now she’s boycotting the dinner?” he asked, laughing in disbelief. “And you don’t even know why?”

  Tiffany, Dad, and I shrugged in unison. We had no idea, but we did know we were enjoying the meal, and Marilyn was stuck with Mom. She was only really punishing herself and Marilyn, it seemed.

  I noticed Tiffany drank more than her share of wine during dinner though, and the rest of the trip, especially when Mom was actually around, she was anxious and on edge, quiet and constantly tugging her hair. It wasn’t good. She was spending too much time cooped up with Mom. She needed to start her own life.

  “Come into the kitchen. Can I make you something to eat?” Mom said now, as if that was a normal thing for her to do. “I’ve got steaks I could broil.”

  She gestured to the Viking range that I was sure she had no idea how to operate. Dad and I exchanged knowing looks.

  “I can grill them,” Dad said, walking to the Sub-Zero and opening it, rescuing her.

  Tiffany walked down the stairs and into the room, crossing to me first and giving me an awkward hug. Her face looked tired. She had no makeup on, and her skin looked red and bumpy, her eyes strained. The stress of living in the house with Mom and having nowhere to go during the day was getting to her.

  “How was your flight, Miss?” she asked. Her voice sounded like a little girl’s, high and soft.

  “Long,” Wray offered, jumping into the conversation. “And there was no movie.”

  Dad cooked steaks on the grill outside the kitchen door, and Wray kept the conversation going through the preparation and all the way to the end of dinner. He could chat with himself if need be. It was a great skill. Tiffany piped in occasionally, shifting uncomfortably in her chair, pulling on strands of her hair.

  At one point when we’d eaten most of the food, the conversation turned to politics. Fueled by a few drinks now, Tiffany moved in to defend Bill Clinton.

  “He’s doing a good job. He’ll probably have a budget surplus next year in spite of your terror over his spending. His only problem is he can’t keep his dick in his pants,” she said.

  Mom blanched at the off-color comment and Dad grimaced, but Tiffany looked delightfully guilty, like a child acting out for attention. Unsure of her target and not liking the unpredictability of the situation, I stood up from the table and started clearing the plates. Wray shot me a look like I was the one being rude. I just wanted the dinner to end so we could go to bed and get the day over with.

  Wray followed my lead eventually and insisted on doing the dishes, taking the plates that each of us handed to him and scraping the last bits of food into the garbage disposal before rinsing them off and loading them into the dishwasher.

  He chatted happily with Mom while he worked. She’d found an audience who hadn’t heard all her stories about the house, decorating, and my acting career. She embellished details and drew out the dramatic moments, and he laughed at the punch lines and frowned at the appropriate pauses. Mom was in heaven.

  Tiffany and Dad retired to the living room to watch Law & Order, and Wray and I yawned and stretched before heading upstairs. We were still on New York time, which gave us an excuse to exit early.

  We peeled off into the room that was designated as mine, although I’d never technically lived in this new house. The room had plush off-white carpet and a marble bathroom all its own, with a deep tub and an elegant polished vanity. The furniture in this room was far more sparse, and looked like a collection of leftovers or things that hadn’t worked elsewhere in the house.

  I kept thinking it would have been nice to grow up in this room. There was less pressure and more beauty. It was hard to believe an earthquake had instigated such an upgrade. Our lives were apparently worth so much more once a disaster had destroyed the foundation.

  A queen bed stood against the wall. I didn’t love the idea of sleeping in the same bed with my boyfriend in my parents’ house, even though we’d just moved in together in New York. But the idea of sending him to another room seemed weird too. The sleeping arrangements just added to the awkwardness of the whole visit. Wray read my mind and put his arms around me.

  “Seriously, you need to relax. Your parents are great. I have no idea why you are so worked up, but you’re freaking out for nothing. Breathe,” he said.

  The next day I wandered down in my sweats alo
ne while Wray was still snoring. Mom had gotten up early to make banana bread from a mix and brew coffee. I loved the happy-homemaker façade. I’d practically starved to death foraging for food in our house while growing up and now she was putting on a show for Wray as if she were Martha Stewart. She even quoted Martha for good measure.

  “You never want to cool bread too quickly, Martha says,” she remarked to no one in particular. I looked over at Tiffany, who rolled her eyes dramatically. Dad chuckled.

  “What? What’s funny? What are you all laughing at?” Mom asked.

  I heard the shower running upstairs. A short while later, Wray emerged totally ready for the day, pressed and shaven. We all stared at him, having barely ingested coffee.

  “How did everyone sleep?” he chirped. No one responded.

  Mom sliced him some banana bread and he made a show of breathing in the aroma.

  We sat around for at least an hour, watching television and discussing different plans for the day. Most of the action was going to center on a football game on television and another opportunity to grill. Dad planned to go for a long walk, which was his exercise ritual, though I knew Wray would not consider anything less than an hour–long run a decent workout. He had more energy than my entire family put together.

  Wray and I volunteered to go to the grocery store to get food to graze on during the game and meat for the grill. Mom scribbled down items she wanted on a list. Tiffany mentioned some exotic vegetables that would make a good side dish. She’d taken up cooking now that she was living at home, mostly to escape into the vacuum that was the normally empty kitchen.

  “Okay, so we’ll do the shopping,” Wray announced. “Let me go upstairs and grab the keys to the rental car. I’ll be right back.”

  I followed him upstairs to get my purse and change into clothes suitable for a run to a grocery store. When we returned downstairs, the place had cleared out. We walked out the front door without locking it and got in the car.