She went quiet.
Six months into my Frances sabbatical, I’d confessed to Aurora that not speaking to Mom really wasn’t so bad. She gave me a sympathetic, if slightly confused, look. Her mom was one of those people who organized family pictures at the beach where everybody wore the same color outfits and stood together in the dunes, loose limbed and breezy. My dear, kindhearted best friend couldn’t fathom any other kind of mom, much less mine. And that was the worst feeling of all. To know I was alone.
Frances would always be my unique burden to bear.
I cleared my throat. “It’s not the first time someone’s made that mistake.”
“Meg—”
“I appreciate your offer, but I’m not interested.”
I hung up and headed back into the dark room to pack.
KITTEN
—FROM CHAPTER 2
Fay had never seen anything quite so grand as Ambletern Hotel. Situated on the southern end of Bonny Island, the huge old house was constructed of tabby—the local concrete made of crushed shells and sand. It stretched out its wings, turrets, and segmented porches in all directions, like a giant white spider. The roots of a couple of oaks had grown up through the foundation, and Fay thought immediately of a fortress. The house would certainly never fall, not even if you rammed a bulldozer right through it.
Ashley, Frances. Kitten. New York: Drake, Richards and Weems, 1976. Print.
Chapter Three
The New York air was starting to crisp and purple to darkness. I had just come out of my favorite macaron shop in Chelsea (one dozen pistachio-and-lavender for Frances, another dozen of coffee for Edgar) and had stepped off the curb to hail a cab, when Frances flashed into my line of sight.
Her face was huge, her pale skin and red hair filtered with some kind of grotesque, photoshopped shadow effect. I couldn’t help it—my head swiveled to track her. An automatic response, I guess. Like people who light up a cigarette even when they’ve been told they have lung cancer.
The giant, airbrushed likeness of her plastered to the side of a city bus smiled enigmatically next to the new edition of Kitten. The book jacket showed the titular main character, a small blonde girl, standing in the open door of a Gothic mansion. She was dressed in a ragged green gingham dress and a turban with a drooping white ostrich feather. Garish red copy slashed down the length of the bus: FRANCES ASHLEY AND KITTEN: STILL KILLING IT AFTER FORTY YEARS.
The bus streaked past, grinding and squealing its way down Ninth, but in that brief glance, the lizard part of my brain managed to register every detail of the picture: my mother’s pirate eyes, her auburn sweep of hair, the face collagened and Botoxed and lasered to a hard sheen. Her scarlet lips cat-curled across her pale face as she smirked out at us all. And I couldn’t look away. You know what they say about the Mona Lisa? It was the opposite with my mother’s picture—no matter where I stood, her eyes seemed to look everywhere but at me.
Screw the cab. Walking would clear my head, keep the pins and needles at bay. I turned north, using the Chrysler Building as my compass. It was unusually cold, even for April in New York, and I’d only brought my flimsy Vegas wardrobe, so I shivered in the paper-thin dress and heels. I wished for a trench coat. I had a really nice one somewhere, I couldn’t quite remember where. It had been a Christmas present from one of Mom’s exes. The hedge-fund guy she’d ditched in Thailand, if memory served.
Eventually, I smelled the change in the air. As Chelsea turned into Midtown, then the Upper East Side, piss and old garbage and Indian food gave way to perfumed boutique air and Town Car exhaust. It was dark now. I turned down Central Park South, breathing heavily and bathed in a fine sheen of sweat, and zigzagged up to Sixty-Third, where I ducked into the florist’s shop.
After I gave her my name, the smock-clad girl behind the counter handed over two gargantuan bouquets wrapped in brown paper and cellophane. They smelled heavenly. Noticing the macarons, she offered a giant burlap shopping bag to carry everything.
“No card for the peonies?” she asked after tucking everything neatly in the bag and handing it over. She had an impossibly smooth ebony bob and two perfectly even sweeps of purple eyeliner.
I shook my head.
“How about a blank one you can fill in yourself?”
“No,” I said firmly and handed over my credit card.
When she saw the name on the Amex, she lifted her brows. “Oh my God. You’re that Megan Ashley.”
“That’s right.” I smiled tightly. I could see the lightning assessment in her eyes, the one I always got even though I’d been photographed with my mom a million times: Light-brown skin, vague ethnicity. Definitely not a chip off the porcelain-perfect Frances Ashley block. Which one was your father, again . . . ?
“Would you like to put these on your mother’s account?” she asked.
“No. No, thank you. The flowers are for her. I probably shouldn’t make her pay.”
I laughed. She laughed. Even though it was, in fact, not funny at all and something I’d become increasingly uncomfortable with: my mother paid for everything I did or consumed—indirectly, automatically, from a trust account on the fifteenth of every month. And now that the nonprofit job had evaporated, it looked like I’d be on the payroll until I could figure out what the hell I was going to do with my life.
The girl’s eyes took on a disconcerting sparkle. “I just have to say. I loved Kitten. I mean, really loved it. I guess everybody says that, but so many people say it for the kitsch factor, you know? I don’t. I actually saw the movie eleven times when they played it at the Angelika last year. I mean, You tell me a story, you weave me a tale . . .” She smiled expectantly, like she was waiting for me to chime in. When I didn’t, she barreled on. “It just gives me goose bumps every time. Can I ask you . . . what inspired her? I mean, how did she even write something like that when she was just nineteen?
“I mean, I’m a writer, you know? Not that I could ever be Frances Ashley or anything, I’m just saying I understand the whole writing thing because I’m in the trenches. I’m working on a thing right now, a trilogy? Not that’s it’s published or anything. But one day, maybe.” She colored slightly and touched her perfect bob. “I’m just saying, everybody always talks about the greats. But, I mean, what about the ones who aren’t necessarily great? But who make a ton of money? Screw the greats, right? I think your mother is better than all those guys. I mean, not a better writer. Just a smarter one.” She let out a squeak. “How did you even deal with having a mother who has managed to outsell the greatest writers of our day?”
“Well . . . ,” I said.
She caught her breath, waiting for the golden nugget of wisdom I was about to drop.
“I stay fucked up one hundred percent of the time, so that I am able to drown out the shame and self-loathing.”