“Excuse me,” I said with a sharper edge than I intended. The guy flopped his head over, and I jutted my chin at the envelope. “This. Did you see who left it?”
“No. Why don’t you open it?”
I looked away. Rubbed my hands some more. He didn’t understand. But, honestly, how could I expect him to? How could a stranger fathom the singular psychological torture of receiving a letter from Frances Ashley? A guy like this couldn’t understand that if I picked up the damn thing—if I opened it—I couldn’t keep up the lie I’d been telling myself for three years: that I didn’t have a mother. That Frances Ashley didn’t exist.
The guy yawned. “Looks like an invitation. Wedding, maybe.”
“It’s not,” I snapped.
He lowered his sunglasses, and his eyes flicked from my face down to my hands. I felt myself go warm. I abruptly drew up my knees and locked my numb, tingling fingers around them. Focused on a lone kid splashing in the deep end of the pool. He was wearing green plastic frog goggles, and, in spite of a couple of giant water wings, he was still struggling to get to the edge. No mom in sight. She was probably huddled in a cabana somewhere, nursing a hangover, utterly unaware that her child was wretchedly out of place in Sin City. Hang in there, kid. Been there, done that. You got this.
My relationship with Frances had always been rocky. But it imploded for good three years ago. It was over a piece in the New Yorker—part of a series they were doing, Novelist as Mother. (I assumed they’d decided against Novelist as Block of Ice Megalomaniac Animal Who Eats Her Young.)
Unsurprisingly, Frances’s (“reflective, raw, powerful”) essay was unadulterated bullshit. For the most part she recounted fantasies, moments between us that had never happened. That is, with the exception of a charming passage about the day I got my period on a gondola in Venice. There, for some perverse reason, she chose to tell the truth.
The day the magazine came out, we squared off. It was after dinner at her Fifth Avenue apartment. While her housekeeper clattered in the kitchen, I informed Frances that she was a pandering, self-aggrandizing liar. She told me I was indifferent to her needs, an entitled, self-important princess who’d rather live on a trust fund than risk getting a real job. At which point I hurled a copy of the offending magazine at her head but missed and broke a glass bowl. She stared at me stonily for a few long moments, then glided out of the room and locked herself in her office.
Just past midnight, she found me, swaddled in an old robe, morosely watching a Full House marathon with a pint of mint chocolate chip. The shards of the glass bowl still littered the floor. She icily informed me that, per the editor of the New Yorker, I was invited to write a rebuttal to the essay. I had exactly one week to turn in some copy.
“Oh, gosh. Where to begin?” I said. “Christmas 2003? Otherwise known as ‘The Year Santa Got Drunk and Forgot’?”
She sighed. “Sure, Megan. Start with that.”
“Or . . . maybe I should lead with ‘The Time My Mother Bribed the Headmaster with a Signed First Edition of Her Book So I Could Skip Tenth Grade.’”
“You were too smart for that school. Finishing out the year would’ve been a waste of your time.”
“You mean a waste of your time. It was the only thing I had to do—be with my friends. Learn. Be normal. You just didn’t want to be tied down to one place.”
She sighed. Picked at the piping along the sofa arm. But I wasn’t done. It wasn’t enough to know I’d annoyed her; I wanted blood.
“How about this one?” I said softly, and her eyes locked onto mine. “‘Lolita, the Sequel: How My Mother Looked the Other Way When Her Underage Daughter Had an Affair with a Married Man.’”
In one moment—a nanosecond—everything froze around us. It was just the two of us, mother and daughter, locked in a primal battle for survival. In that moment, I saw her inability to give me what I wanted and the pain I caused her. I saw my own meanness and desperation for her to erase the past. As we stood there, eyes blazing, pulses racing, the inevitability of it all became clear. When the two of us came in contact, we were always going to do this—react like incompatible chemicals in a lab experiment. Sizzle. Spark. Then explode.
We needed each other—possibly even loved each other in some strange, flawed way—but it didn’t matter. We were doomed to destroy each other.
I spent the next three Christmases and New Years at random friends’ island villas or apartments in Paris, dodging questions about why I wasn’t with my mother. I eluded three birthday-dinner invitations, missed three birthday parties. Radio silence reigned supreme—no emails, phone calls, or texts passed between the two of us. For the first time in my life, I felt free. It had been three years since our fight. Three years since I’d spoken to my mother.
Three wonderful, Frances-free years. Well, wonderful might be stretching it, considering my stalled career and dry spell when it came to men. But it was a start. And I wasn’t going back to the way things used to be.
Now, sweating in the scorching Vegas sun, with my ominously silent phone and that vile envelope, I felt lost all over again. Angry and unfocused. I was me, three years ago.
I scrubbed my face with a towel and glanced at the water bottle, wishing it was a Bloody Mary. Then abruptly turned to see the freckled guy sitting up and flipping the envelope between his fingers, a magician rolling a quarter. He grinned at me.
“I could be your plus-one.” He leaned close to me and ran one finger down my leg, all the way to my ankle. He stopped at the bumpy white constellation on my skin—a birthmark—and circled there. I jerked my leg away.
“Trust me, you do not want to come to this party,” I said and reached for the letter, but he snatched it back.
“Trust me, there is no party I don’t want to go to.” He tore into the envelope. Held up the gilt-edged, engraved card to block the sun’s glare and squinted. Then guffawed in disbelief. “Oh, dude. Do you know what this is? This is from Frances Ashley.” He thrust the card at me. “You just got a fucking engraved invitation to Frances Ashley’s birthday party. Tomorrow night!”
“Hm,” I said.
Another thrust of the card. “That’s amazing!”
I said nothing.
“She’s a legend. How old is she, like forty?”
“Sixty.”
“No way.” His lip curled in faint disgust. “Dude. She’s hot.”
I suppressed an eye roll. “Just goes to show you what bathing in the tears of purebred puppies can do.”
“Frances Ashley . . .” His brow furrowed. “That bitch probably throws like the sickest birthday bash ever, man. She has got to throw the fuck down, you know what I’m saying? With, like, absinthe and clowns juggling flaming chainsaws.”
I considered telling him that my mother threw down by forcing her guests to listen to tiresome stories about how she’d learned to sword fight from a reformed jihadist or how she mastered Vedic yoga in one week in Tibet with Michael Douglas’s manager’s ex-wife.