Not Suitable For Family Viewing (22 page)

“That’s how I met Grandpa. I’d looked after my mother when she was dying so I knew what to do with Dora. I read to her, I bathed her, I cleaned the house, even cooked a bit. I didn’t tell Harry I was pregnant, but after a while it became obvious. I was worried he was going to throw me out, but he didn’t. One day, he just said, ‘You can stay here as long as you need to.’ He never asked who the father was or what I was going to do when the baby came along. He just made sure I didn’t work too hard and got to bed early.

“Dora died a few months later. I stayed on, cooking and cleaning for Harry. You were born. I named you Robin because I wanted
you to be able to fly away if you ever needed to. And I named you Opal because…I guess back then I still believed Mrs. Hiltz was good and I was bad.”

She shakes her head. “Anyway, you came along and Grandpa fell in love with you. I wasn’t going anywhere then. We were a family.”

Her face goes blotchy but she just sucks it up and keeps going. “That thing you read on enoughaboutmimi.com is right. That’s more or less how I got my first job. Harry was doing some electrical work at the studio the day the
Book Talk
host up and quit two hours before the show. Harry lied and said I was twenty-five, told them I could do it, told them I had experience. They didn’t go for it at first. Then he said, ‘Give her a chance and I won’t charge you for the work I did.’ The station was a shoestring operation. They almost
had
to give me a try.

“Harry came home all excited. I told him there was no way I could do it. I was too shy. He wouldn’t listen. He said I just had to ask a professor a couple of questions about Jane Austen. The professor would do all the work. I still said no. Then he said, ‘You owe it to me.’ He didn’t mean it, of course. He only said that to make me do it. He bought me a dress, fixed my hair and basically pushed me onto the set. The only thing that saved me was that I’d read all Austen’s books a million times. I practically knew them by heart. I asked my first question. The professor answered. I was so fascinated I almost forgot I was on TV. I’d found my calling. I became the regular host.”

Her voice has changed. I can see her body loosening up. The words are just pouring out of her.

“One day, I met your dad—Steve, I mean—at the studio. It was just as his song was starting to get airplay. Around the same time,
Harry saw an ad for a newsreader on a local station—a paying station—and he prodded me into applying for it. I got the job. Steve’s song flew up the charts. He adored you in that
whatever goes
way of his. I thought we were in love. We got married.”

She rolls her eyes at that. It obviously wasn’t much of a love affair. No surprise there, I guess.

“It was all happening so fast. This time, though, I wasn’t going to let things fall apart. I should have given more time to you but…but, I don’t know. All I can say is, I really believed I was doing this for you. You were going to have a mother you could be proud of, a family you could be proud of, a good name…everything. That’s why I hired Anita. She was warm and loving in a way that I couldn’t be.”

She turns and looks at me. Her eyebrows are squished together. “I’m sorry I couldn’t give that kind of affection to you myself. But I couldn’t give you something I never had. I hope you know I love you just the same.”

I’m embarrassed. “Yeah,” I say. “I do.”

She nods—she’s embarrassed too—then goes back to her story. “I never imagined that my career would take off the way it did but I understand how it happened. On TV, I didn’t have to be myself. I could pretend to be whoever I wanted to be. It was the only place I felt completely comfortable. As you know, intimacy isn’t my strong point.”

She raises her hands up in a shrug. It’s a Mimi move, sort of clowny. Something she’d do right before a station break or on a promo for her next show. I see what she’s trying to tell me, though. There’s nothing she can do about the way she is. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

She says, “I got a local talk show. I tarted up my wardrobe and changed my hair. I wasn’t worried about anybody recognizing me then. I mean, the only people who knew I was a Bister were in Port Minton. They’d never see the show. Most of them wouldn’t have recognized me even if they did. I’d been on the Island until I was sixteen. Even when I moved into town no one ever actually made eye contact with me—except, of course, Rosie and the Hiltzes, and they weren’t around. So I didn’t really
need
to change my appearance. I just wanted to update my look.

“Then the show went national. That made me a little nervous. Things were going so well—I didn’t want to lose everything I’d worked so hard for. I had my first plastic surgery.”

She turns and shows me her profile. “I had a bit taken off the end of my nose. Not much. Nobody thought anything of it. Everyone does it there. Each time we took on new stations, I’d get a little more afraid of being recognized. I’d plump up my lips, get new cheekbones, square off my chin.”

She pulls her feet out of the sand. “I even got my toes fixed. Did you know I had webbed feet? They’re actually not all that uncommon. But for me they were like the mark of Cain. Proof I was a Bister. When you were born, I was terrified your feet were going to be webbed too. It never crossed my mind that it would be your thumbnails that would give you away. That’s a Mrs. Hiltz trademark—something to be proud of!” Her face says
yeah, right.
She shakes her head.

“You know, I always meant to—I guess—confess. Grandpa wanted me to. My analyst wanted me to.
I
wanted to. But I could never bring myself to do it. I’d lived with the lies for so long. And, let’s face it, they worked for me. I was rich. I was famous. And—dare
I say it—I was respected. That’s what I wanted most of all—the respect. I was terrified of what would happen if I admitted I’d been lying all along. Would my fans reject me? Would
you
reject me?”

I start to say something but she puts her hand up to stop me.

“I don’t know if you can understand this or not, but the fear of confessing was always so much worse for me than the anxiety of living as a fraud. I guess that’s why I told my audience anything else they wanted to know. I figured if I was really, really frank about my plastic surgery and my bad eating habits and my acne outbreaks, they’d never suspect I was lying about the rest of my life.

“And to tell you the truth”—something about that phrase makes us both laugh—“before the Internet came along, lying wasn’t that hard. Eighteen years ago, getting fake ID was a piece of cake. I’ve been a Bister, a Ingram, a Reiner and a Schwartz—and until now, I managed to do it all under the radar. As for my other lies, I kept them simple—the fire, the adoption”—she takes a big breath—“how you came to be…”

She looks at me with a pained smile. I take it as an apology. I know she’s sorry she didn’t tell me the truth. I shake my head as if I’m okay with that. Her face loosens up. She pats my leg.

It’s a couple of seconds before she continues. “I was lucky, I guess. Lord knows, Steve’s got his share of faults but a lack of decency isn’t one of them. I told him I got pregnant on a one-night stand with some guy I never saw again. He just shrugged—waved it off—and accepted you as his own.

“The photo was a bit more of a problem. I’d held on to it as a keep-sake. I never planned to pass it off as being a picture of me. But the cable TV station needed a childhood photo for a Christmas fund raiser one year. All I had was that picture of Rosie. A little while
later, someone asked me for a photo to use in a profile for the local TV guide. I used the same one. It seemed harmless enough.

“Then my career started charging ahead. The picture got used a few more times—I could hardly say no when someone asked—but now it was making me nervous. I was a public figure. Who knows who might stumble upon that picture? I got someone to touch it up for me—just enough so it believably looked like the same girl but not so much that anyone would immediately recognize it as Rosie. I relaxed. It became my official childhood photo. I should have thrown the original out—and the ring too—but they meant too much to me. Believe it or not, I’ve never been as happy as those two years I spent at Mrs. Hiltz’s.”

She sighs. She goes, “Well, there you have it!” She sounds like she’s ready to cut to a commercial or introduce tomorrow’s show, but then her face softens and she says, “Is there anything else you want to ask me?”

“Yes,” I say. It seems so petty and self-centred but…hey, I’m seventeen. I’m allowed to be petty and self-centred sometimes.

“Why did you take me off the show? Because I got fat?”

Mom goes, “No!…No!” but I don’t believe her. She says it in that fake
why would you ever think such a thing?
way.

I just look at her.

She turns away. “Okay. Not really.”

At least she’s being honest.

“Not the way you mean, anyway. You were definitely getting a little more than plump and you know what they say, the camera adds fifteen pounds. So, yes, that’s why I took you off the air.”

I try to smile, like,
oh well, who cares,
but I can feel tears burning behind my eyes.

Mimi rubs my knee and says, “Let me explain.
I
didn’t care that you’d gained weight. Lots of girls do at puberty. It was natural. I knew you were going to be tall like your dad. So that wasn’t it.

“I took you off because it bothered me that the whole world was going to be judging you by the ridiculous size 2 standards of prime-time TV. They’d ridicule you. They’d splash unflattering pictures of you in the tabloids. I couldn’t do that to you. Any cut-rate psychiatrist can figure out why I needed the public to love me after all I’d gone through. I wasn’t going to do the same thing to you. I wasn’t going to let you be ‘shamed’ that way. I wanted you to be who you were, become who you wanted to be without millions of people always pointing out what was wrong with you.”

We’re both crying now and neither of us has a Kleenex. Mimi wipes her nose with the back of her hand. Big rice-noodley strings of snot droop off her fingers. We both go, “Yuck!” She doesn’t know what to do with it. She looks around and then just wipes her hand on her T-shirt. We’re suddenly both laughing in that grossed-out, just-stepped-on-a-slug way.

Mimi goes, “Oh good Lord. Once a Bister, always a Bister, eh?”

My nose is running over everything now too. I wipe it off on my sleeve. “You and me both,” I say.

Mom stops laughing. She shakes her head with a little smile. “No, you aren’t, sweetheart. Being a Bister isn’t a hereditary disease. It’s not something you’re born with. It’s something you catch from other people. And you didn’t catch it. In fact, I look at you and I don’t see any Bister at all. What I see is Percy. To be honest, that’s another reason I took you off the air. I knew after all the surgeries I’d had that no one was going to recognize me. But the older you got the more you looked like your dad. Tall and healthy and with
that beautiful red hair. I was afraid you were going to blow my cover.”

Suddenly she looks small and scared. I put my big arms around her and hug her. She hugs me back.

“Now I have a question for you, Birdie,” she says into my shoulder.

I go, “Okay.”

She pulls back and looks me in the face. “Where do we go from here?”

Where
do
we go from here? A few weeks ago, I would have been terrified by that question but now it feels almost exciting. Just the idea that I’m
going
anywhere. I couldn’t even move before. I couldn’t get off my sorry behind. Now there are so many possibilities. I have a mother now. I have a couple of fathers. I have a boyfriend. I’ll check my e-mail when I get back to see if I’ve still got a friend. (You never know with Selena. If not today, tomorrow.)

So where do we go from here? I don’t know.

I smile and I shrug.

Saturday, 6 p.m.

You, You and Mimi

“Teenagers in Love.” Parents may be terrified of young love but psychologist and author Eliza Richardson believes it’s the key to future happiness.

We talk some more on the car ride back from the beach. It will be a while before I get the whole story, but bits and pieces are coming out.

Gershom knows everything. He was the first person Mom called after she talked to me Thursday night. Barnabas, her other cousin, took off in his early twenties. No one has heard from him since.

Anita doesn’t know anything. Mom hid the picture and ring in the chair to make sure Anita wouldn’t find out. (The way Anita is about cleaning out drawers, Mom had to be careful.)

Mom never paid Mrs. Hiltz back. Instead, she sent an anonymous donation of twenty-thousand dollars (plus interest) to one of Mrs. Hiltz’s favourite charities. That’s as much as she could stomach. She knew if she sent the money to Mrs. Hiltz directly, she’d just assume Minerva had stolen it from someone else.

Rosie didn’t win the lottery. Mom just made it look that way. It was her way of saying thank you.

Selena’s university is paid for. Selena doesn’t know it but Anita does. Anita just makes her work so she doesn’t get spoiled. Typical Anita.

Mom’s going to call Rosie soon.

She’s not going to call Percy. Yet.

She doesn’t want to talk about Embree. There’s only so far she’s willing to go.

She asks me to come home with her, but I can’t. Not now anyway. I don’t need to explain why. I introduce her to Levi outside the fish-and-chips joint and she understands immediately.

She looks him over, then says in this big, showy whisper, “Ooooh. Nice catch, darling!” It’s classic Mimi.

I hug her goodbye. I don’t know if it’s easier this time because she’s in Mimi mode or because maybe, a little, we understand each other now—but it feels almost natural.

I wave as she pulls out onto the highway. It makes me nervous—she doesn’t drive a lot. I’d feel way better if Tony were at the wheel but my guess is Ford Fiestas don’t usually come with chauffeurs. I want her to be okay. She’s my mother and I love her. (She’s Mimi and I love her. She’s Minerva and I love her.)

Levi puts his arm around my waist and says, “She’s some character, eh? I feel like I’ve seen her somewhere before. What is it you said she does for a living again?”

I look at him and laugh. I’ve got an awful lot of explaining to do.

First, though, I’d like to see how jealous I can make Krystal.

Levi’s okay with that.