Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here(15)

And those are just my friends’ reactions. Last year at the Drama Club fall potluck dinner, Dawn rushed in, tugging down the hem of her electric-blue bandage dress, with boxed Entenmann’s cookies she tossed hastily on the table with the other moms’ homemade casseroles and pies.

“Who’s the old skank?” Ashley asked Natalia, not quietly (she probably thinks sotto voce is a type of coffee), knowing perfectly well that the old skank was my mom.

Later, predictably, they sang “Take Me or Leave Me” from Rent as both sets of parents filmed it from opposite sides of the audience, because to get only one angle would have been a huge social injustice.

At worst, Dawn and I don’t get along. At best, we confuse each other. Like, she’s in a zillion Meetup groups that all have some misleading title like “Melville Museumgoers” but are just a cover for a bunch of women drinking pinot grigio in someone’s den and talking about how shitty their kids and ex-husbands are. She comes home, and I ask her something pointed like “Did you check out the Goya exhibit?” and she replies distantly, “I had a really good share today.” Then she pours white wine over some ice cubes, goes into her bedroom, shuts the door, and listens to one Macy Gray song on repeat.

Dawn thinks I should open up and be more receptive to groups. I remind her that history rarely reflects well on groups of people who bond and get carried away. “You’re more like your father every minute” is her muttered reply. Sometimes I get the feeling she wants to squash the Dad half of me like it’s a cockroach. She even tried to get me to use her maiden name for a hyphenated surname. I said the only way on Earth I’d do that is if her maiden name was Barr, which it is not.

Her most blatant attempt to “connect” with me came in the form of a trip to Disney World. We drove down, sharing a motel bed on the way. But my mother omitted one important piece of information, which was that we could only afford the vacation in the first place because some timeshare was having a promotion. In exchange for the discount rate, we had to sit through a three-hour tour of available units and get the skinny on why going in on a three-bedroom condo in Fort Lauderdale was the Best! Decision! Ever!

I knew I’d have to distract Dawn from the details of the pitch because she’s one of those people who always says “Yes!” when canvassers in New York stop us and ask if we care about starving children or if we get our hair cut. Even that time it made us twenty minutes late to see her favorite musical, which obviously is Rent.

To preoccupy her, I started whispering stories about the employees as they showed us around: “Milania and Alex commiserated about what a waste college was last week at TGI Fridays and wound up sleeping together even though he has a girlfriend.

“Devin who just offered us Diet Cokes obviously wanted to be an actor, and every time some retiree stops his pitch mid-sentence to ask a question, he hopes that they’ll request the ‘ABC’ monologue from Glengarry Glen Ross, but of course it never happens.”

She stared at me.

“Don’t tell me you don’t remember,” she said.

“Remember what?”

“Your dad used to do that.”

I’d forgotten, but it came back to me in bits and pieces as soon as she said it. He’d tell us voyeuristic tales of the people in front of us at the DMV and make up backstories about the waitresses to keep us entertained while we waited to be seated at Perkins. At least, he’d do that in the rare instances he wasn’t locked in his bedroom working on his novel.

A lot of my memories from when I was little revolve around that closed door and Dawn taking me to get Dairy Queen or putting on a really inappropriate movie like Basic Instinct or Fatal Attraction to distract me. We had even less money than we have now, so it made no sense to me when Dawn would say, “Daddy’s working.” I get it now that I’m older, but sometimes I worry, like a big old Lifetime movie child-of-divorce cliché, how much I had to do with him leaving. If I’m part of what he wanted to upgrade from.

Dawn was waiting for me to say if I remembered or not. But it’s not a time I like thinking about.

“Look.” I pointed to a pretty girl at the wheel of a Lexus, text-ing frantically. “Alex’s girlfriend just found out she’s pregnant.”



I check my phone. It’s eight twenty. We’d be well into the episode by now. I feel like I’m in detox. I decide to call my stepmom, Kira, who is an excellent person to answer what I want to ask because she’s written about pop culture for basically every highbrow magazine and blog on the planet.

“Hello, Scarlett!” Her lilting English accent is like aural Vicodin.

“Hey. Why do people like Jennifer Lawrence so much?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I don’t think I like her, but if I tell any other American, I’m worried my citizenship will be revoked.”

Kira laughs, and I hear my baby half sister, Matilda, giggle, probably from Kira’s lap.

“Well, what don’t you like about her?”

I twist my mouth into a frown at the wall, struggling to find the words. I always want to be especially articulate for Kira.

“It’s like . . . she has such a good PR team that she knows she should pretend to have no PR team. Or she’s so overly calculated that she knows she should pretend to be uncalculated.”