The Frog Prince

Chapter Nine

C hapter N ine

M om leaves, and I go back to my desk, and immediately the office is a beehive of activity.

Tessa appears at my desk, soon followed by Josh and then delicate little Sara.

“Your mom?” Tessa asks, leaning against my cubicle wall, downing a little silver can of Red Bull, but it’s not a question; it’s a statement, and I can’t help thinking that Tessa’s the last person who should be drinking Red Bull. She’s by far the most creative director with her wardrobe. Today she’s wearing a short red vinyl skirt, red tights, a black leather vest, and black combat boots.

“Yes.”

“She wasn’t here long,” Tessa adds, taking another hit from her can. “You should have taken her on a tour around the office, introduced her to everyone.”

Mom would have loved that. She would have been thrilled by a guided tour, getting the official “Here’s my desk, here’s the break room, here’s where we make coffee, and that’s where I make my photocopies” description.

My throat suddenly feels lumpy, and I swallow hard as a big red neon sign, like those applause cues in TV studios, blinks BAD DAUGHTER over my head.

Everybody’s waiting for me to say something now. “I was worried about Olivia returning,” I say, feeling lame, and it is lame. “I’m behind on work and didn’t think she’d appreciate my mom hanging around.”

Tessa crunches her now empty can. “Olivia doesn’t own the office.”

Josh nods.

Sara just continues to monitor everything like a little whatever-she-is. I have not figured Sara out yet. She might be a lot of fun (if she ever talked), or she might be a drone (which I think everyone thinks I am), or she might be someone dangerous, which I doubt, but you never know.

“I know, I—” and I break off, feeling even more like a lame-ass because my mom never comes to the city, we never do “girl things” together, and yet I’ve been really lonely, and good company would be nice.

And maybe that’s why I’m nervous about Mom being here. She’s good, and she’s company, but I wouldn’t exactly call her good company. I just get so uptight around her, my insides knotting, and somehow I go from zero to sixty in no time flat. “I wasn’t sure about protocol.”

“If my mom were here, I wouldn’t give a flying fuck about protocol or what anyone might think,” Tessa answered, tossing the smashed Red Bull can into my trash bin. Two points.

“Is your mom in New York?” Sara asks Tessa.

Sara doesn’t usually speak directly to Tessa. It’s kind of an unwritten team rule. Each team has its own members, and members fraternize with one another, not with the enemy team. But somehow, now that Tessa and I have broken the ice, Josh seems just as comfortable talking to Tessa as he does with Olivia.

“No,” Tessa answers flatly, and Josh, in his brown cords and nondescript beige shirt, is listening intently.

“Is she in New Jersey, then?” Sara persists, and Tessa gives Sara a drop-dead look.

“No.” Tessa tugs on her red tights, pulling them higher on her skinny thighs. “My mom’s dead. She died when I was four.” And then she walks away, combat boots clomping violently as though she’s a hotheaded Irish looking for a fight.

For a moment no one speaks. Sara just looks at me and then Josh before slinking away.

Josh remains. “That explains a lot,” he says after a moment, staring after Tessa.

“Does it?” And in Josh’s face I see something new, something different, something… protective.

He doesn’t like Tessa, does he?

“She’s like a character from a Hemingway novel,” he says, and I try to follow this figurative leap, because it has to be figurative. Hemingway didn’t really write about women, did he?

I look down the corridor toward Tessa’s office. “I wonder what she’d do if I invited her to join Mom and me for dinner.”

“Where are you going to dinner?”

I’m jerked back to the stark reality of a weekend alone with my mother. “The Tonga Room.”

Josh nods. “I love that place. I’m really into the old tiki thing. I used to collect hula dancer dolls.”

Okay, he has to be gay. That’s not a heterosexual man talking right now.

“You’re welcome to come,” I say, fingers crossed that he’ll say yes, but I don’t want to come on too strong, for fear of scaring him away. I have to have at least one friend attend dinner with me tonight, or Mom will think I haven’t made any friends yet (which is true), and she’ll worry about me more (which would mean more visits and phone calls). “My mom is hoping to meet some of my…”

My voice trails away, and Josh looks at me, then deadpans. “I’ll be your token friend.”

“You will?”

“Mmmm. After hearing that pitiful story about you falling as a kid in your new high heels—beige Naturalizers, your mom said—I think you need one.”

And I smile, a funny, crooked smile because gay or straight, Josh has been nicer to me than anyone else I’ve met since I’ve moved to the city. “Thanks.” My smile grows. “I’ll go talk to Tessa.”

“You better do it fast. Olivia will be back soon.”

I can see Tessa through her open door. She’s sitting cross-legged in her chair, staring intently at her computer screen.

“What do you want?” Tessa asks brusquely without glancing up from the computer.

She’s uncomfortable. I realize she hadn’t meant to say anything about her mom and is angry that she did.

Asking her to join me and my mom and Josh for dinner is nothing short of stupid and insensitive. I shouldn’t do it.

“ Well? ” Tessa sighs with exaggerated patience, giving the edge of her desk a push, rolling her chair backward.

Don’t be stupid, don’t he stupid, don’t be stupid—

“Would you like to join my mom and me for dinner?” I ask brightly, eyebrows lifted as if to convey Fun! Excitement! Good Times for All!

“Jesus, Mary, and—”

“My mom thinks I have friends,” I say fast, cutting her short, mortified that I’m giving her the true version of events, but unable to lie. “She’s going to a lot of effort to make dinner reservations for tonight, and…” I exhale, take a brittle breath. “I already feel like a schmuck for sending her away without the office tour. And now if I show up at her meet-Holly’s-friends party without any friends, she’ll think I’m mad at her, or embarrassed.”

“Which you are.”

Damn, Tessa’s tough. “Not mad.” I hesitate delicately. “Well, maybe mad. And maybe embarrassed.”

“She’s your mom .”

“It’s not that simple.”

“What’s to be embarrassed about?”

“It’s not one thing; it’s little things, lots of little things.”

“Name one.”

I stay silent. I don’t want to do this. In high school it was cool to put your parents down, but I don’t like criticizing my mom. At least not out loud.

“Come on.” Tessa pushes for a reason.

Fine. If she wants a reason, she can have one. She can have ten. “My mom doesn’t remember anything I tell her. Like what I do. Today she said she didn’t know I was in PR, or that I’d handled events, and yet I invited her to a half-dozen different things when I worked in Fresno.”

“What else?”

“She’s always compared me to Ashlee, my younger sister, who starred on her volleyball team, never missed a prom, was crowned homecoming queen as well as Miss Congeniality in the local Miss America pageant.”

“Wow.” Tessa’s impressed. “Quite a girl.”

“Yes, she is. And that’s how my mom wants me to be, but I’m not extroverted like that. I’m not a social butterfly. I don’t even want to be a social butterfly.”

“Then don’t be. Be yourself,” Tessa answers, unfolding her legs, dropping her feet on the floor so the heels of her boots thump, boom-boom . “God, I could use a smoke.” She opens up her desk drawer, slams it shut, and then opens it again, fishes out some orange Tic Tacs, and then throws the Tic Tacs back into her drawer. “What time’s dinner?”

“Six.”

Tessa’s dark red eyebrows arch. “Early.”

“She’s eager.”

Tessa laughs, a surprisingly deep belly laugh. She may have an Irish temper, but she’s got the Irish humor as well. “So where are we going?”

I gulp air. I can’t believe she’s going to go. “The Tonga Room.”

And Tessa just laughs some more. “See you there.”

I leave Tessa’s office, and her laugh follows me down the corridor, all the way to my cubicle, where Olivia is sitting in my chair, filing her nails.

“Hey,” I say, my face twitching from happy smile to horrified, petrified smile.

“ Hhhheeeeey. ” Olivia mocks my greeting before blowing dust from the tip of one perfect nail. “So how are things, girl? Having a good day?”

I’m suddenly glad Mom’s gone. I would not want Mom here for this. I’m going to get my butt kicked, and I’m going to feel pretty bad pretty quick.

“Okay,” I say, trying to keep my smile. Olivia’s also smiling, but her eyes are hard and she’s pissed. I’ve seen her pissed before—not nice—but never at me until now.

Chilly smile. “How are my Oracle numbers coming along?”

“Pretty good.”

“Can I see what you’ve got so far?”

I’m panicking, scrambling, thinking I’ve done it now, backed myself into a corner with a big fat lie. “I did have until five, didn’t I?”

Her expression hardens. She studies me for an uncomfortably long time. “What were you talking to Tessa about?”

So that’s what has set Olivia off. Not the fact that I don’t have the Oracle info together. Not the media phone numbers on the inside of my file folder. Not my disappearance at eleven when I went to meet Brian Fadden. It strikes me that there’s a lot I could get in trouble for—and it all has to do with me helping out on the Leather please wave from a sitting position , I pray silently, and miraculously, my mother does.

“We’re having a great time,” she says as we reach the table, and I look at Tessa for confirmation. Tessa smiles, shrugs, and I think that’s about as warm and fuzzy as I’ve ever seen Tessa.

Mom has stories to tell tonight. She’d tried to drive here earlier and got lost and somehow ended up on some bridge but it wasn’t the Golden Gate; it was the other one, the big gray one that was severely damaged in the last big earthquake, and the traffic was impossible, traffic like you don’t believe, but she did finally get back across the bridge after paying the toll, and now here we are.

Yes we are.

I need a drink bad.

Drinks arrive, and I’m very happy with my ultra-smooth pi?a colada. I know pi?a coladas are the wimpiest of all blender drinks (perhaps only a chi-chi is lower in terms of verve), but it’s tasty and smooth and it goes down easy, and soon I’m a little mellower.

We order pupu platters and expensive entrées you’d find in many Chinese restaurants for a quarter the price, but we’re paying for the atmosphere and the band that’s setting up on their little island/raft bandstand. But wait, there’s mist and a storm, and then the rain passes and the sun comes out again, and the tropical drinks keep rolling, and we keep eating.

The band doesn’t start playing until eight, and we’ve pretty much wrapped up eating by then, but once the music starts, my mom looks so positively blissful that I resist the urge to rush her home and into bed.

Why shouldn’t she enjoy herself? She certainly can’t do this in Visalia. And as the waiter brings a third (fourth?) round of drinks, I look at Tessa and Josh, who’ve got their heads together, deep in conversation, and I think, we might have a couple here—but then I overhear bits of their soulful conversation.

“There’s nothing wrong with the Yankees loading their team. If George can pay the salaries, he should bring in the best. Other cities are just jealous.”

But Josh isn’t buying into Tessa’s argument. “Yes, because other cities don’t have the population base or the tax revenue New York does.”

“Tax revenue, pooh! If other teams could afford our players, they’d have them—”

“But other teams can’t—”

“That’s not the Yankees’ fault, and they shouldn’t be penalized.”

“But there should be some equality.”

“You don’t mean equality; you mean parity…”

Their voices are getting louder, which is why I can hear every word. And the louder the voices, the closer they come to blows.

Suddenly Josh is standing and grabbing his coat. “It’s late; I better go,” he says grimly, reaching into his wallet for cash, but my mom refuses to take his money.

“My treat,” she says, hands clasped, although she’s anxious about the new tension at the table, and her eyes dart from Tessa to Josh.

“Thank you for dinner, Mrs. Bishop. I had a wonderful time.” Josh leans forward, gives my mother a kiss on the cheek and, with a nod to me and hardly anything at all to Tessa, leaves.

Tessa sticks around another five minutes, but the mood has changed, the fruity tropical cocktails seem dense and sickeningly sweet now, and even the band is playing the crowd favorite, “When a Man Loves a Woman,” which makes me want to gag. It’s definitely time to go home.

Tessa tries to give Mom money as well, which Mom again adamantly refuses, firmly conveying that this is her night, her party for my special friends (I cringe at that part), and Tessa goes.

Mom settles the bill. She won’t let me contribute, either, and tonight was expensive, each cocktail around ten dollars, but Mom’s in her element. She loves being able to provide, loves feeling useful and needed. But even though she’s paid, we don’t immediately leave.

Instead we sit there, listening to the band and the rain and what I’m sure are exotic birds, but that could be the fizz of rum in my veins or in my brain.

“Ah,” Mom sighs, a pleasant, perhaps slightly tipsy look on her face, “this was fun.”

“It was. And thank you for being so nice to my friends.”

She gestures with a don’t-even-mention-it shake of her hand. “I hope you’re happy.” She tips her head back, regards me for several seconds. “Or happier. Although I really don’t know what will make you happy.”

Something in her tone hits me funny, and I sit up in the red booth. “What do you mean?”

“I just don’t think anything will ever make you happy, Holly.”

It’s funny, but when I get mad at work, I feel as though I can explode, fast. Sharp and hard. But when my mom upsets me, it’s so different. With Mom it’s an intense heat, a slow, hot burn that comes from deep inside me.

“You had everything,” she continues. “The most wonderful man—handsome and charming, kind and generous—”

“He didn’t want me, Mom.”

“Why not? What did you do?”

I look away, hurt, so hurt. What did I do? “I didn’t do anything wrong. I was just myself, Mom.”

“But it doesn’t make sense. He loved you! He married you. It was a beautiful wedding, and you two made such a lovely home together.”

“It was a lovely home, but we weren’t happy.” I stand up, reach for my coat, my purse. “We should go. It’s getting late and I have to work in the morning.”

Leaving the Fairmont, I realize that neither of us should be driving after so many drinks, so I tell Mom we’ll leave the cars and we’ll get them in the morning, and we hail a cab to my apartment after Mom retrieves her suitcase from her car.

Mom and I sit stiffly side by side in the back of the cab until Mom finally breaks the silence. “I don’t know why you’re mad at me.”

“I’m not mad,” I say wearily. “I’m hurt.”

She makes a soft, hurt sound of protest. “Why are you hurt? I was just trying to reach out to you, Holly.”

I tense, close my eyes, hands in fists in my lap. I know her too well. I know every sound she makes—the way she swallows, breathes, eats, exhales.

I know maybe too much about her. And there are times I think I could annihilate her with my knowledge. Destroy her with my hands, or with the cruelty of my tongue.

It’s terrifying to feel that kind of emotion, that kind of power, particularly toward your own mother.

I don’t know if it’s the same for other mothers and daughters, but my mom and I hurt, each other sometimes just by being alive. And yet it’d kill me if she were dead.

“You make it sound like I was so lucky to get a guy like Jean-Marc.”

“You have to admit, he was really special.”

“Yes, but maybe he was lucky to have me. Maybe he should have been more grateful for me.”

Mom lapses into silence, and I push a hand through my hair, feeling increasingly blue. This always happens when Mom and I get together. We can’t seem to speak the same language, and I don’t know why. Mom doesn’t have this problem with Jamie (he doesn’t talk) or Ashlee (she smiles at everything). Just me. I don’t want her hurt, and I don’t want to hurt her.

And I don’t want her to hurt me.

But this is also why I don’t call her, or ask her advice, or even try to confide in her. It’s impossible to take my problems to her. She doesn’t understand me, or what I need.

The cab pulls up in front of my apartment, and I pay the cabdriver, and Mom and I enter my apartment.

I show my mom around and offer her my bed, but she refuses, saying she’d be perfectly happy on the living room couch. I’ve got the start of a killer headache, and I’m in no mood to argue with her now. “I’m not putting you on the couch, Mom—”

“I prefer the couch. I sleep better there than in a big bed.”

“That’s silly.”

“I sleep on the couch all the time at home.”

“You do?”

She steps out of her shoes and lines them up perfectly straight between the couch and end table. “Yes. I do.”

Somehow she’s managed to sound righteous and defiant all at the same time, and I watch her adjusting the pillows on the couch.

“Why do you sleep better on the sofa?” I ask, picturing the old sofa with the faded pink and burgundy cabbage roses in the living room at home. I think the upholstery was once vaguely Laura Ashley-like, but that was the ’80s, and cabbage roses were everywhere for a while.

“It’s more comfortable.”

“But the sofa is small. It’s not even full-size!”

Mom shrugs and turns. “I don’t mind.” She’s unzipping her small suitcase and takes out her nightgown. “I’ll just watch a little TV and be asleep in no time.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. Just give me a blanket and I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll make the couch up properly.”

“No. A blanket’s all I need. I can use one of the pillows from the couch.”

I have a rather terrifying picture of how Mom lives at home. Dinners alone in front of the television, and then later she pulls the afghan from the back of the couch and covers herself, watching TV until she falls asleep.

It is such a lonely life, I think, and I wonder yet again why she stopped dating when, in the early years after Bastard Ted left, she went out a lot. Those were the years she did anything and everything to meet other singles. She even took up square dancing, heading out twice a week in the ugliest yellow-and-aqua-checked dresses with enormous starchy skirts beneath.

I look at her now, really look at her, and see the face that I’ve known forever, and it’s older; it’s changed. The skin is less taut; the circles beneath the eyes are permanent, shallow hollows of lavender; the corners of her eyes droop more. So do her lips. Her brown hair, once my exact shade, is faded and heavily laced with gray, and I think, this is what I’m going to look like in thirty years. This is me at fifty-five.

It scares me. I don’t want to look faded or rumpled; I don’t want to be so tired that I fail to color my hair, or so poor that I can’t buy clothes without a heavy polyester thread count.

This all sounds so petty, but I’m afraid of aging. Afraid of dying. Afraid of my own mortality. No one in fairy, tales really gets old; they just go to sleep—think of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White—but this is real life, and I’m twenty-five, a good third of the way through my life, and I don’t know if it’s going to get any better or easier. I don’t know if I’ll ever have more happiness than Mom did, and I don’t think Mom had a lot.

And my mom should have. She was a good girl, too.

Tears suddenly sting my eyes, and I turn away, close the shutters at the big bay window so the whole world doesn’t watch Mom watching TV on the couch.

And I’d hate Bastard Ted more if I thought he was truly happy in his little Orange County townhome. It’s all very nice that Ted’s so spiritual and in touch with his true essence, but what about his kids? What about us? Dads aren’t supposed to freak out on their families. Dads are supposed to be dads to their kids. Dads are supposed to be… good.

“You know where the bathroom is,” I say, double-checking the dead bolt on the front door, “and the kitchen. Help yourself, and if you need anything, ask.”