by Robin Palmer
He gave me a look.
“You’re an artist,” I said. “It’s an artistic idea.”
“Okay, okay,” he laughed, folding himself into the tub.
His legs were so long it looked as if he was going to explode up and out of it. As I clicked away I moved closer and closer until soon I was standing over him. After I was done I put the camera down but didn’t move. As we looked at each other, I felt like I was at the top of a roller coaster before that first drop. So this was what people meant when they talked about a Moment with a capital M.
“You do realize that as soon as you let me out of here, I’m taking some of you,” he finally said.
Moment broken. I brought the camera back up to my face. “No way.”
“How come? It’s only fair.”
I shook my head. “I like to be behind the camera, not in front of it.”
“Okay, Jackson, you’re off the hook for today, but I promise you at some point I will be the one holding the camera and you will be in front of it.”
“At some point” implied a future. With him in it.
I smiled.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
After the hike—which included a visit to a fire tower, which Matt admitted he had never been to the top of, despite numerous attempts to climb it, because he had a slight (“Maybe not slight—more like crippling”) fear of heights—we stopped for lunch at this place, Luna 61, in Tivoli, near Bard. After a quick glance at the vegetarian menu (pad thai noodles, stir-fry, sweet potato and goat cheese enchilada), I decided it was my new favorite restaurant in the area. And then, after one bite of the owner Debra’s homemade banana cream pie, I amended my decision: it was my favorite restaurant anywhere.
I kept waiting for our conversation to hit a lull. To get to that moment when an awkward silence fell over the table like a cheap itchy blanket that we found ourselves unable to untangle ourselves from, where no matter how many topics we tried, we couldn’t throw it off and get back to easy flow. That’s how it had always been for me with guys I knew in the past. I would play this slow game of verbal strip poker—take off an earring with this story, a ring with that memory—but soon enough the messy truth of my life started peeking through and the guy somehow intuitively knew it was time to start backing away and to find someone who was . . . less complicated.
But that didn’t happen with Matt. The conversation kept flowing through lunch and over the ride home. It was so easy that as we turned onto my road, I was even thinking that maybe I’d be the one who suggested we get together again. Sure, I’d be blackballed by all those magazine advice columnists who were always saying you needed to let the guy do everything or else you’d scare him away (if he was going to be scared away that easily, did you really want him?), but who cared. Especially because off in the distance, whatever happened between us already had an expiration date of forty-seven days and fifteen hours. Not that I had counted.
“So,” he said as he put the car in park and turned off the ignition.
“So,” I repeated. Would it be weird to invite Matt in? Did it just scream, I’m asking you in because I’m hoping you might kiss me even though I still don’t know for sure that you’re not with someone? Yeah, asking him in could be weird. “Do you want to see our cow?” I blurted. The minute it left my mouth I cringed. As if that wasn’t weird?
He looked confused. “You have a cow?”
“Well, no, it’s not ours,” I corrected. “It’s the neighbor’s, but it likes to hang out at our fence. She’s nice. We named her Mabel. My mom thinks that’s a cow-sounding name. She even answers to it. Kind of.” Who was the babbler now?
“Sure, I’ll come see your cow.” He cringed. “Although that sounds kind of creepy when you say it out loud.”
We were just about to turn the corner into the backyard when we heard Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On” come pouring out of the windows of Billy’s pickup truck as he pulled into the driveway. My mom was sitting next to him.
So that’s why I hadn’t gotten any texts from her.
“Omigod, they’re so good!” Mom said as she tumbled out of the truck with a bunch of bags full of produce. “Who is that again? Lynyrd Skynyrd?”
Billy cringed. “I can’t believe you just mixed up Skynyrd and Zeppelin. I’m going to have to pretend I didn’t hear that.”
Mom laughed. And not one of her fake tinkly laughs she used when she was flirting with a guy. This one was simple and genuine. Which alarmed me even more than the alternative.
“Dude, I’m going to have to make you a classic-rock playlist,” he went on. “To educate you. Maybe even track down some concert at, like, the Pomona Fairgrounds, with some band from the seventies to take you to when we’re back in L.A.”
Okay, (a) the guy called my mother dude. And (b)—as if (a) wasn’t bad enough and a (b) was even necessary—Billy was talking about hanging out with my mom when the movie was over and we were back in L.A. He wasn’t supposed to say things like that. That was not “Location Doesn’t Count”–ish.
“Hi, Bug. Hi, Matt,” Mom said when she saw us. She held up a bag. “We decided to barbecue and went over to Adams in Kingston. Bug, you wouldn’t believe what a great market it is. And you know you’re not in a big city when there’s barely any frozen food in the place! Matt, would you like to stay?”
Really? She was doing this in front of everyone without asking me first? It wasn’t like she had had a lot of experience trying to be the cool mom in front of a boy her daughter liked, but still—we had never missed an episode of Gilmore Girls back when it was on. From that alone, she knew the right and wrong things to do. She knew she had to check with me first.
“Oh. I . . . uh . . .” He looked over at me, but I just kept staring at the ground. On the one hand, I didn’t want him to go (see: lamely asking if he wanted to see my cow). But like people were always talking about in Alateen, it was one thing for a parent to stop drinking. It was a whole other to change habits and patterns that had been etched deeply because of the parent’s drinking. Like, say, being afraid to have friends over when you had no idea whether your mom was going to be drunk, or get drunk, and what she was going to do or say in front of your friends. Yes, my mother was sober, and, yes, with every day that went by she was showing me that she was, indeed, changing, but it was hard to trust that it was going to last. I had gotten pretty good at moving through life with my breath held, afraid that if I dared to exhale my life would all come crashing down. You can’t give that up after a week, or a month.
“I can’t,” Matt finished. “In fact, I need to get going.” He turned to me and flashed me a generic smile, the kind you wear when being introduced to a friend’s somewhat-senile grandparent. “Fun hanging out with you today.”
“Yeah, totally,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as bummed as I felt.
I waited for him to say something about getting together again, but instead he patted me on the arm (could that be any more of a kiss of death?). “See you around.”
See you around? There was a bigger kiss of death—and it was that.
“Sure,” I replied.
As he walked to his car, I made a beeline into the kitchen so I could head off the disappointment that was starting to churn inside me by stuffing my face. Luckily, I knew there was one last slice of the banana bread I had made. (Now that Mom was back in full Weight Watchers/ Jenny Craig/Eat for Your Blood Type mode, I was well aware that every time I wondered how something I baked disappeared so fast, I had only myself to blame.)
“Hey, Annabelle,” Billy said as he sat at the kitchen table. “Your mom told me you made this banana bread?” he asked as he held up the last sliver of it.
And now this was happening? “Yeah,” I sighed.
I watched longingly as he popped the last piece in his mouth. “It’s awesome,” he said as I went to the freezer to get out some of the frozen Momofuku Compost
Cookies that I had made the day before (when your cable is out, other than read, there’s not much to do when you’re stuck at home in the country but bake). But they weren’t in there. “Where are the Compost Cookies?” I asked as Mom sailed into the room in a silky rose-colored boho caftan thing (any fewer than three wardrobe changes a day signaled depression). It was more Morocco than country, but the color made her blue eyes even bluer, not to mention made her boobs look perkier, which might have explained why she chose it.
“The cookies with the potato chips and pretzels and toffee pieces?” Billy asked. “Those were killer.” He patted his zero-percent-body-fat eight-pack. “Although I had no business eating all those when we’re four days away from camera.”
I looked at Mom.
“I put them out with the tea last night,” she explained. “I wanted to show him what a great baker you are.”
“Dude, you totally are,” he said. “Hey, you know what you could do? Find a cookbook by whoever is considered, like, the most popular baker in history and then start a blog and make all the recipes and then turn the whole thing into a movie, like they did with that Meryl Streep one.”
“Julie and Julia,” Mom said. “We loved that, Bug—remember? We watched it that time I had that awful stomach flu?” She meant the stomach flu that was really low-grade alcohol poisoning. “It was so cute.”
“Maybe it could even be something for my production company,” Billy went on. “I know everyone’s going to expect me to do these action things, or raunchy Hangover comedy things, but I want to mix it up a bit, you know? Appeal to that female demo as well.”
“I think that’s very smart,” Mom agreed. “It just makes me so mad how Hollywood tries to pigeonhole us. In fact, I was thinking of writing something for the Huffington Post about it—”
As they continued talking, I looked at the two of them, sitting at the table together with a vase of wildflowers and a pitcher of lemonade between them, like something out of a magazine ad. I had to admit they did look good together. But I wanted it to be just on-screen, not off.
Billy ate all my homemade baked goods, thus forcing me to go down to the basement and wade through spiderwebs, rusted garden tools, and a pile of what were probably mouse droppings to get to the box with the Ken doll so that I could try to deal with my anxiety that way. (It didn’t work. My highly developed olfactory senses revealed that Mattel must use a different kind of plastic for their male dolls, which lacked the same sort of soothing effects.) And when he got excited about something—like the fact that he, too, enjoyed the occasional episode of Too Cute on Animal Planet—he called females dude when demonstrating said excitement. (“Dude! I love that show! That one with the Jack Russell puppies? Seriously too cute.”) And he took a long time to tell a story because he was a stickler for getting the facts right. (“Once, when I was in sixth grade . . . no, wait . . . it may have been fifth. . . . yup, it was fifth because I remember Whitney Barbano sat in front of me ‘cause of the alphabetical thing, and I had such a crush on her because she had this jet-black braid . . .”) But even with all that, I had to give him props for putting aside his strong feelings about vegetarianism to grill Mom and me the most amazing burgers I had ever had in my life.
“My mom would kill me if she found out I was sharing the Barrett family secret with you guys, but whatever, she’s not here to find out,” he said when Mom asked what it was that made them so good. “Two words: grape jelly. Well, in this case, five: sugar-free grape fruit preserves—because that’s all I could find in your fridge.”
“They’re pretty awesome,” I agreed.
“Yeah? You think so?”
It was kind of sweet the way he sounded like the answer really mattered to him. Then again, he was also an actor. Maybe he was just trying to impress Mom. I nodded. “Almost as good as Father’s Office.” That was my favorite burger place in L.A.
“Omigod. Dude. I love that place! Well, I did until I stopped eating meat.” He jumped up. “You want me to make you another one? I can make you another one.”
“Oh, that’s—”
“Seriously. It’s no big deal,” he said, already throwing one on the grill.
I shrugged. “Okay, thanks.” I looked over at Mom, who mouthed Is he not so sweet? and shrugged. He was sweet. They were all sweet in the beginning. Especially at the beginning of filming, before they caught on to how nuts she was.
After he brought it to me—well-done, but not well- well-done, which was usually how people did it when you said well-done—Mom poured us all some more lemonade. “So, Annabelle. Tell us about your day with Matt.”
“It was fun,” I said, taking a bite of my burger. Until the part when you showed up and he got all weird and bolted, obviously never to be heard from again.
She turned to Billy. “For the most part Annabelle is very articulate and communicative—all her old report cards say something to that effect. But when it comes to talking about boys, I get one-word answers.”
“Mom.” And she wondered why.
“Annabelle, you want another piece of corn?” Billy asked. “It’s good, right? There’s something about grilling it in the foil that—”
“So when are you seeing him again?” Mom broke in. She sighed. “I remember my first boyfriend. . . .”
A triple: interrupting, embarrassing me, and making it about her. “Mom. I just met him. He’s not my boyfriend.”
She turned to Billy. “Annabelle hates when I try to talk to her about boys.”
“Well, yeah, I can understand why,” he laughed.
Mom’s smile—the one that seemed permanently etched on her face whenever he was around—flickered. “Excuse me?”
He shrugged. “It’s obvious that you’re embarrassing her. Look at the way her ears are turning pink.”
My ears got even warmer. I wasn’t sure what was worse: being talked about like I wasn’t there, or having Billy Barrett notice my utter and complete mortification.
Mom laughed. “I’m not embarrassing her.”
Billy’s eyebrows shot up.
“We’re just talking,” she said lightly. “Annabelle and I talk about everything. We’re very close.”
“Yeah, but maybe this is something you want to talk about later,” he suggested gently. “Like when I’m not here.”
If there was anything that made Mom go into diva mode, it was when someone tried to give her parenting tips. Billy didn’t sound drama king–ish, like he was stirring it up looking for a fight, but even Ben didn’t dare call her on the way she dealt with me. His response was always to change the subject as quickly as possible and divert her attention to something else, like how when a kid fell, you tried to distract him before he could compute that he had fallen and had a meltdown.
I watched Mom watching Billy, who wasn’t watching either of us but was instead putting mustard on his veggie burger, as if everything was cool and they were just having a conversation instead of standing on the brink of a huge drama. As he brought the burger up to his mouth, Mom did her guppy imitation (mouth open, mouth shut; repeat) before closing her mouth. She stood up. “I’m getting a sweater. Does anyone need anything from inside?”
We shook our heads before I went back to focusing on the grilled red pepper on my plate. I was confused. On the one hand, I was grateful to Billy for cutting Mom off at the pass—he was right, she had been completely embarrassing me. But at the same time I was also annoyed. Billy barely knew Mom. And he certainly didn’t know our relationship. Sure, maybe what she and I had was a bit—okay, more like a lot—dysfunctional, but it was our dysfunction.
“Sorry for butting in like that,” he said as he polished off his burger.
“It’s okay,” I said. I took a breath. Maybe it was okay. In Alateen kids were always talking about how when you first started doing something differently, it sometimes felt wrong, because you were so used to things be
ing done the screwed-up way. I waited for him to say something more about it—why he had said it; how he felt about having said it; what it meant that he had said it—but he didn’t. Instead, the Rolling Stones’ song “Wild Horses” started playing, and he went off on a story about being at some fancy resort in the Caribbean where Keith Richards had a house and this Victoria’s Secret model was being introduced to him and asking what it was like to have been in the same band as John Lennon.
Was it a guy thing, this not analyzing and talking something to death? Or was it just what semi-healthy people did?
Mom came back out with her sweater and an apple pie from Migliorelli’s farm stand. I studied her face, but there were no visible emotional bumps or bruises from his comment. She was back to looking happy and relaxed and all the other things she never used to be unless she had had at least four drinks in her. After dessert, we carried the dishes into the kitchen, and Billy started to wash them.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said.
“It’s cool. You would’ve thought that with two older sisters I would’ve gotten through life without ever having washed a dish, but it was the opposite,” he said. “They made me do all of them.”
Billy Barrett doing dishes. If I were a different kind of person, I so would’ve grabbed my camera and snapped a picture and sent it to Us Weekly for their “Stars—They’re Just Like US!” feature. Instead, I grabbed a dish towel so I could dry.
“Hey, do you have plans tomorrow?” he asked as he handed me a plate.
Although I hated myself for it, I had snuck a look at my phone more than a few times during dinner to see if Matt had texted. He hadn’t. “Nope.”
“Well, I was supposed to go in for wardrobe stuff, but it got rescheduled,” he said as he scrubbed a bowl, making sure it was actually clean. The few times Mom had done the dishes, you could be assured that when you’d go to get a glass, there’d still be a lipstick stain on it, or flecks of dried food on a fork. “So I was thinking of heading down to the city and hitting some galleries. I thought that if you didn’t have any plans, you might want to come with me,” he said. “There’s some shows in Chelsea that are a little Francesca Woodman–like that you might enjoy.”
