Honey, you’re 7-Eleven in Potomac famous.
Phoebe Basquait did soaps — the television shows that aired during the day, the kind you watched in retirement homes or coin-operated laundromats. Over the course of her fifteen-year run on Hayden Hills, Phoebe’s character, Sadie Grace, had three failed marriages, two illegitimate children, one life threatening illness, one failed suicide attempt, three cases of amnesia, two resurrections from the dead (contract negotiations), a colonoscopy, and a ratings-winning storyline chronicling her scandalous excommunication from Hayden Hills.
As it turned out, America hated Sadie Grace and viewers savored the scenes where Sadie had to pawn her jewels and furs in the cruel and seedy city of Genoa. America wanted Sadie in acrylic, eating macaroni out of a can, her face weathered with age. Now America wanted Sadie for-real dead, so the writers created a storyline where Sadie endured a fatal gunshot wound — a stray bullet resulting from a gang turf war on her block. She was at the wrong place at the wrong time, etc. The previews alone had every suburban SUV-driving mother clutching her pearls and drinking through a case of Chardonnay. Studio executives told Phoebe that, if anything, she was sure to get a Daytime Emmy out of all this.
Phoebe Basquait did not win a Daytime Emmy.
When her prospects dried up, her agents and managers suggested an extended staged photoshoot in some impoverished, subterranean country where she’d trek miles to bring clean water to a starving village. Or perhaps she could adopt a Vietnamese baby?
“So you’re basically asking me to sit in a cold bath with a pack of razors and a bottle of Xanax?” Everyone in the room heaved a collective sigh over having to explain the obvious. “It’s your fucking job to get me the auditions, and you have me going out for canned soup commercials?”
“We have to change the state of play. Adopt a Vietnamese baby,” said her agent, Maxwell.
“I barely see my own daughter, who hates me, and you expect me to raise another child?”
“I didn’t say raise. I said adopt,” Maxwell said. “You need a story to stay relevant, Phoebe, and right now your story is ‘has-been soap star who can’t even land commercials in Japan.’” To his newest assistant he snapped, “Can someone get me a fucking espresso?”
“We’ve seen some traction with older women taking up with famous, younger men,” said Jenna, her manager. “We could set you up with a YouTube star or a former Disney actor who may or may not have a drug problem.”
“I am famous,” Phoebe shouted.
“Honey, you’re 7-Eleven in Potomac famous. We all need to start facing the reality of the situation.” And by “we” Jenna meant Phoebe.
“This can’t be real. I’m America’s daytime villain — I deserve more than soup.”
“Your death was last year’s biggest story for the over 40 crowd. You even made it into the weeklies! But let’s face facts — everyone hates Sadie Grace,” Maxwell said. Every few minutes, his assistant shuttled papers for him to sign, emails that required an immediate response — everything except for the espresso. Turning to the intern he said, “If I don’t see something that resembles coffee on my desk in 60 seconds, I’m going to impale your boyfriend here with a fucking butter knife. That’s the last time I hire a boy toy from Reseda.”
“I’m not Sadie Grace, for fuck’s sake.” Phoebe lit a cigarette, smoked it, and lit another. As soon as Maxwell’s assistant set the miniature cup on the table, Phoebe scooped it up and downed the shot.
“For all intents and purposes, you are Sadie Grace. Now we have to come up with the comeback story. The penance, purgatory…you get the point,” Maxwell said.
Another espresso materialized.
“We talked about diversifying, Phoebe — a cable movie project, the celebrity dance competition, or even a small role in an indie where you play the wayward hooker who finds a really good rehab center, but you didn’t listen,” Jenna said. “No, you wanted A-list studio films and a Showtime series. But, Phoebe, baby, you’re at the back of a very long line. The longest line.”
“She’s not even in the line,” an intern muttered, taking a selfie.
Phoebe pointed at the intern, wagged her finger violently. “Why is this here? Why is this in the room?”
“This might be your manager if you don’t start getting work soon,” snapped the intern.
“Just think about the Vietnamese baby,” Maxwell said.
“Or a really good drug addiction,” Jenna. “We could get People for a rehab story.”
Phoebe put on her shades and rode the elevator down. She walked the stretch of the parking lot, and when she finally found her car, she slid in the back seat, curled up in a ball and cried for an hour.
After a few bottles of wine at Shutters, Phoebe crawled around the lawn of her Brentwood home looking for her keys. “Where are my fucking keys?” she shouted until the maid let her in, cleaning the floors as Phoebe sullied them. Phoebe walked into the TV room where her daughter Alice sat in the dark watching The Shining.
“They have me going out for soup commercials, baby,” Phoebe cried. She repeated this over and over in front of her teenaged daughter, who appeared to be fixated on an axe-murder. Alice’s eyes didn’t stray from the television when she said, “I heard you the first fifty times, Phoebe.”
“I’m not Phoebe; I’m mom.”
“Did you have fun with the tourists from Ohio, mom?”
“How did you…?”
“You’re all over Instagram,” Alice said, rolling her eyes. Her daughter wore a t-shirt that read: future corpse. Phoebe wished she had the luxury of being fifteen and dramatic.
“It felt nice to be wanted. Maxwell wants to pawn me off onto some teenager. I was the star of the longest running daytime soap…”
“No one watches Hayden Hills, mom, so please stop wallowing.”
“Sadie Grace’s death made it to the weeklies and now a teenager is handling my career.”
“I have a geometry final tomorrow. Can we take a rain check on your hour of self-pity? By the way, Max called. You didn’t get the soup gig because of Sadie’s abortion last year, but you got a call-back for the wrinkle cream.” Alice turned off the television and gathered her books. “And Ben Gray left a message. Something about Fiji? I really hope you’re not fucking Kevin Gray’s father. The kids at school hate me as it is — I don’t need you banging the husband of a woman dying of cancer as further ammo. Just tell me before I find it out on TMZ.”
Phoebe watched her daughter leaning against the entryway, the familiar look of shame and disappointment washed across her face, and Phoebe couldn’t find the words to make it better or right, she only knew that she didn’t get the soup commercial and the man she was in love with was married to a woman dying of cancer. She knew he was married — of course he was married, but cancer? Fucking cancer? No one comes out of cancer clean, but how do you break up with the only person in L.A. who returned your calls?
“I didn’t get the soup thing,” Phoebe said.
“No, mom. You didn’t,” Alice closed her eyes, bolted up from the couch, ran up the stairs and slammed her door shut.
Phoebe forgot that it was her daughter’s birthday until she heard her younger brother James’s voice on the machine, serenading Alice from New York. At the end of the song, James laughed and said, “I can’t believe you still have one of these things. I tried calling your assistant but apparently she’s no longer your assistant? Anyway, Phoebes, I’m getting married next month and I want you and Alice to be there. Oh, and Cheryl saw you in Us Weekly buying shampoo!”
It was her daughter’s birthday. I’ll make a cake! Phoebe thought, or I’ll have Maria make one. The idea of the cake, of doing this one small thing, fueled Phoebe until Maria shook her head and said she had already baked Miss Alice a chocolate cake. I watch her blow out all the candles! Before Maria left for the evening, she set out a plate of leftover cake for Phoebe. Look at the has-been soap star that couldn’t land commercials in Japan, eating around the icing that spelled her daughter’s name. That was Phoebe’s story.
*
Before she was Sadie Grace, and before she was a mother who forgot her daughter’s birthday and ate all of her cake, Phoebe Basquait was Yuli Kravinsky. Her mother was a slovenly woman, a waitress who made a dollar a day in tips if she was lucky, and her father was the only man banned from every bar in Sunnyside, Queens. They lived in a building where it was the norm for wives to be beaten with belts and brooms in the space between one paycheck and the next. Suddenly, the men surfaced with amnesia and couldn’t remember the card games they lost and the horses that didn’t come in at the OTB and the beers they drank lamenting their collective losses. It was the scheming women who sneaked away dollars bills out of their wallets! On Wednesdays, they came home to a dinner of roasted potatoes and salt. Up and down the stairs you could hear muffled screams, tearful pleas, and shattered plates. Phoebe’s father was no exception. Phoebe sat on the fire escape, the volume on the television turned way up and she worked on her multiplication tables with her younger brother James nestled between her knees. Come morning, the women surveyed the damage and took inventory of what had been bruised and broken.
On Friday, the men marched home with their checks and freezer steaks and they kissed their wives and tended to their wounds and they were a family again until the day they were not.
When Phoebe was twelve and James was seven, they walked home from school a few hours before the weekly beatings began. They approached their door and Phoebe paused with the keys in her hand. “Let’s go to the Park,” she said. Just this one time she didn’t want to hear her father’s unsteady footfalls on the stairs. Hours later they came home to the same quiet. The door was slightly ajar and through the thin slice that separated home from the hallway, Phoebe could see the back of her mother standing over the stove, frying steaks. Phoebe crept further in. James trailed, clutching the back of her shirt. Their mother was humming an old nursery rhyme she used to sing to them. A plume of smoke rose above her head. The table was covered in food — beet and fennel salad, schnitzel, cauliflower and ginger soups, and a large loaf of bread sliced neatly, slathered in dill and whipped butter — a distant cry from the Wednesday night fried potatoes. They had more than they needed but not enough of what they wanted; their wants were, and always would be, bottomless.
Phoebe would’ve tripped over her father’s body had her brother not cried out. Her mother turned and leaned against the stove; she took long drags of her Kent 100 while Phoebe’s father lay face down on the floor with a knife lodged in his neck. James edged backwards, while Phoebe stared. Sometimes you wake one morning and realize you’ve had enough. So you do the only thing you can do. A pool of blood eddied, framing her father’s still-warm body. His eyes were wide as if his wife, who came up from behind holding a knife she spent the morning sharpening, had surprised him. Phoebe could hear sirens in the distance, if only briefly muffled by the sounds of the other beatings in the building.
“Sit down and eat before your food gets cold,” her mother said. James sat on the floor against the door, his mouth gaped wide but no sound came out. Phoebe grabbed a steak with her hands and ate it.
“Come, hug your mother one last time before the police come,” Phoebe’s mother said before everything went dark.
Sometimes you wake one morning and realize you’ve had enough.
*
Phoebe stood over her daughter’s sleeping body. “I fucked it all up,” she said, her voice waking Alice from her sleep.
“It doesn’t matter,” Alice said, pulling the covers over her head. Alice reached for her phone under her pillow. Phoebe could hear the familiar sound of her daughter tapping, of pages being endlessly scrolled through, of photos edited, captioned, and posted. Phoebe inched closer to Alice’s bed but didn’t sit down on it because the act of occupying the space where her daughter slept, even at the edge of it, felt like a violation. Her daughter was forever creating invisible lines around her body; signaling how close one could come. Phoebe couldn’t remember the last time she held Alice. Was it when she was five or ten — the years, they go so quickly. Now she only equated the passage of time to seasons of Hayden Hills.
“Why don’t we take the day and go to the Beverly Center? We can get manicures, ice cream, the works.”
“I have a geometry final,” Alice said.
“This weekend, then?” Phoebe begged.
“None of it matters, Phoebe.”
“What? Why are saying that? Alice…”
“Fine.” Phoebe tossed off the covers and sat up in bed. “You want to give me a present? Stop fucking Kevin Gray’s father.”
“Alice, I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I’m not…”
Alice held up her phone to Phoebe’s face, and on that phone was a photograph of Phoebe and Benjamin Gray kissing.
“You were saying?”
Phoebe kneeled on the floor and started crying. “I didn’t want you to find out this way. Me, Ben, the affair — it’s business. I didn’t know about the cancer, Alice, I swear it. How would I know?”
“The whole fucking world knows, mom,” Alice snapped. “Save the tears for your wrinkle cream audition.”
“When did I become such a worthless piece of shit?” Phoebe whispered to herself.
“I hate to break it to you, mom,” Alice said, stomping to her closet. “But you’ve always been this way. Weak. Pathetic. Needy. You’re only now just figuring it out. I have to get dressed and go to school and take my geometry final and then I get to hear about what a whore you are.”
“Alice…baby…”
“Can you just fucking leave?” Alice screamed.
*
The last time Phoebe saw her brother, she walked in on him twisting his girlfriend’s arm. She was in New York on a press junket for the Hayden Hills finale. Why not surprise him, she thought. Why not meet this Edie he’s always talking about? Phoebe had a spare key and the address to her brother’s home in Spanish Harlem, but how did she miss the muffled sounds she’d known so well as a child? How did she not hear what was on the other side of the door before she walked through it? When did her brother become her father?
The first time Phoebe spoke to Edie was in the back of a taxi on their way to Lenox Hill Hospital. James already started in with the apologies, and Edie turned away, stared out the window as they raced down Second Avenue. Parts of her face were bruised and other parts were bleeding. I already know what to say, she said. I don’t need a script. To Phoebe, she apologized for the inconvenience of it all, for having to waste the few days she had in New York escorting a stranger to the hospital. Phoebe couldn’t speak, even when her brother muttered to her, “Don’t you believe in a phone?”
“What the fuck are you doing?” Phoebe said to James, later, when they were all home and he was ordering Chinese take-out while Edie sat mute in front of the television, her arm in a cast, the other gripping the remote control.
“Did you ever stop to think that maybe mom deserved it?” James said. In a smaller voice he taunted, Yuli.
*
What if Phoebe told Alice all of it? How her grandmother didn’t pass away in her sleep after a long life well lived, but instead was shot dead by two police officers that stormed into their home, trying to wrench the knife from her hands. Sometimes you wake one morning and realize you’ve had enough. Should Phoebe tell Alice how the food went cold because she and James were too frightened to eat it? How James shielded himself with his small arms because he didn’t want to see the dark that Phoebe felt so comfortable standing in? Can you tell us what happened here? Can you tell us who did this to your father? Did your mother do this? All the blinding flashbulbs, all the wiping of prints, all of the do you have any family we can call? All of the bodies carried down the stairs in stretchers. That night, they slept in a crowded room filled with children on twin beds. Children who cried out in their sleep, children who didn’t sleep at all — had their mothers had enough too? James left his bed and snuck into hers and Phoebe pulled the wool blanket over their heads as they shook and sobbed and wondered what kind of home is a home you could no longer go home to? Would it matter?
Later, much later, Phoebe phoned James and said I can’t come to your wedding because mom didn’t deserve it and hung up. She called Benjamin Gray and said I can’t see you because your wife is dying and we’re not and hung up. She left message after message on Alice’s phone. Phoebe didn’t know what to say so she repeated her daughter’s name Alice, Alice, Alice, and hung up.
