Lady McPherson found herself in a quandary. To any outside observer, it would appear she had it all—three delightful and delightfully precocious children (Abigail, aged 17, just on the awkward cusp of womanhood and prone to all the idiosyncrasies and mawkish behavior of girls her age; Conrad, aged 14, the prototypical middle child—caught between a slightly aggressive need for independence and an almost desperate striving for his parents’ approval; and Paul, “Paulie,” Lady and her husband Noah’s ‘love child’—born not out of wedlock but from a rather surprising—and all-too-rare—spontaneous burst of passion eight years previous after a Chianti-soaked and scampi-filled evening in a too-quaint-for-words Italian trattoria in New York’s Little Italy during a totally unexpected anniversary weekend).
Paulie, dear sweet little Paulie: Lady couldn’t help but tear up at the mere thought of him. Paulie was her special child, a victim she feared of a mild case of Asperger’s that she knew would affect him for the rest of his life. Of course she’d never taken Paulie to see a specialist nor had their pediatrician seemed overly concerned by his inability to recite nursery rhymes from memory at the age of two, but Lady knew in her heart that Paulie was different—special—and nothing would persuade her that all he suffered from (as Noah himself had suggested) was a relatively common case of late-bloomerism. Lady had argued that she was the expert in all matters of social-psychology—she was after all one of Los Angeles’s pre-eminent relationship therapists—so Noah should stick to what he knew as a leading biochemistry professor at UCLA, and let her be the expert on what she was convinced ailed their youngest child. Paulie suffered from Asperger’s. Case closed. Noah knew better than to contradict her.
To this outwardly perfect existence, add a stunning 16-room Mexican-style hacienda in Topanga Canyon with panoramic views of downtown L.A., a 3-bedroom guest/pool house, a heated infinity pool with its own waterfall, a state-of-the-art home theater and a bowling alley in the basement where they loved to entertain their Hollywood friends and acquaintances – back when they had Hollywood friends and acquaintances; a live-in Guatemalan maid called Rosie who never sassed back and never expected a raise (probably because she couldn’t speak much English, which is how Lady liked it, or also quite probably that she was an illegal, which was more problematic), and two ridiculously successful careers. It was a life to be envied and Lady knew she was envied but somehow for some reason she found herself spending too many sleepless nights wandering across the mosaic-tiled floors—imported from Morocco, no less—of her luxurious hacienda agonizing over why she felt so dissatisfied.
What was it? What could it possibly be? Lady was living a life that fit her name to a T—courtesy of Summer, her hummus-crafting commune-living mother, but more on that later. Lady’s life was so celebrated, in fact, that a producer at one of the top streaming platforms in the world— this, courtesy of her best friend Ashleigh of ‘Ash by Ashleigh’ fame—had recently approached her about turning her life into a reality show, the ultimate validation. It had been pitched as “A Lady’s Life.” She had been on the brink of committing to a two-season contract when at the last minute Noah had balked, out of concern that anything that might arise during the course of filming—true or otherwise—might jeopardise his shot at finally getting tenure at UCLA.
His vehemence had alarmed her—Noah was generally such a passive, cerebral man—that she felt she had no choice but to turn the platform down. The producers begged her to reconsider. The chairman himself flew out to meet with her in person, which she took to be the ultimate compliment, but alas Noah was adamant and even the chairman’s slightly off-kilter charm couldn’t change her husband’s mind. Maybe next year, she said. But that next year had never come, at least not in the way she’d envisioned. If there was a silver lining to this brush with reality TV stardom, however, it was that Noah received his tenure and the even higher esteem of his colleagues in the biochemistry field that, she supposed, counted for something even if it didn’t do much to bolster her healthy but increasingly neglected ego.
And now, here she was—5 AM of what would prove to be another action-packed day with Noah’s celebration party at the Getty that evening—standing alone in a lacy negligee that hadn’t managed to arouse Noah’s libido in the way she had hoped, gazing out at the fading lights of pre-dawn Los Angeles with a slight breeze blowing across Topanga and across her lustrous chocolate brown hair, fighting back tears that had nothing to do for once with Paulie’s self-diagnosed Asperger’s. Why am I so dissatisfied? Lady asked herself for the umpteenth time. What would make me happy? Am I even capable of being happy? What does happiness even mean anyway? With all her psychiatric expertise, not even Lady McPherson could diagnose what was wrong with her. But of one thing, however, she was certain: this Lady needed a change.
*
Like any typical weekday morning in the McPherson residence, by 7:30am the French colonial-inspired kitchen was abuzz with before-school and -work activity. Rosie was at the super-sized Aga frying up huevos rancheros with egg whites and soy-based cheese while Abigail sat at the counter, rapt in a furious text exchange with her best friend Cassie over the latest dramas in their personal lives. Lady preferred to stay out of her daughter’s life while Noah took a more hands-on approach to parenting that frequently put them at odds with their daughter and each other. Conrad was taking too long, as usual, in the bathroom. (Lady didn’t want to know what he got up to in there but she had her suspicions – best left unspoken, of course) and Paulie was in the kitchen jumping up and down and telling a non-comprehending Rosie that he wanted to squeeze oranges into their organic juicer because all he wanted was orange juice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
“Let him squeeze the oranges, por favor,” Lady said to Rosie as she poured herself a wheat germ, lemongrass and avocado smoothie. “It soothes him.”
At that moment Noah entered, just as Paulie’s insistence on making fresh OJ crescendoed to a near-deafening roar, so loud in fact that—and Lady hated herself for even letting the thought enter her head—if she hadn’t taken so much pride in her relative permissiveness as a mother, Lady would surely have slapped him. It wasn’t the first time she’d considered violence against her children and it wasn’t something she would ever admit to anyone—not even to her best friend Ashleigh—but every so often it all just became TOO MUCH, even for a woman like herself who was living proof that women really could have it all, at least that’s what the women in her book club always told her.
But could she? Again, the doubt and with the doubt, the increasing predilection for self-recrimination. There was a part of Lady that blamed herself for everything that wasn’t perfect in her life, not the least of which was Noah’s seeming indifference to her in the bedroom (a topic she needed to address with Ashleigh, preferably at Raoul’s salon before the party that night) and the fact, despite their pediatrician’s repeated assurances to the contrary, that Paulie’s Asperger’s—she believed—was a direct result of a shaking incident in the eighteenth month of his life when he refused to take her breast and she’d just lost it – really lost it – to the point where she’d seriously considered calling child services on herself. But eighteen months was too early, she thought, to make the transition to formula. Both Abigail and Conrad had nursed well into their second year, but Paulie had wanted nothing to do with it and, naturally, Lady had taken this as a rejection—the most traumatizing rejection ever. In fact, she’d never truly recovered. Six-and-a-half years on, Lady still harboured a wee bit of resentment toward her lovechild and it came to the forefront in trying moments such as these. Paulie reminded her that her life wasn’t perfect. Far from it, actually. Oh, why couldn’t he just be normal, for once?
“Paulie, darling, please!” she said, perhaps with a bit more venom than she’d intended. “Mommy can’t hear herself think!”
“Mommy’s created a monster,” Noah said as he inserted a pod into their Nespresso machine and pushed the brew button. “Damien 2.0.”
Lady closed her eyes and held her breath. It was the same routine every morning.
“Honey?” Noah’s voice was a nasal drone, cloying in the back of her mind like molasses.
“Yes, dear?”
“I’m having trouble with the coffee maker again. It won’t turn on. I put the pod thingie-or-whatever into the slot and nothing happens.”
“Is it plugged in?”
“Yes.”
“Did you press the power button?”
Bingo!
“Well, how’s about that?”
In the early years of their marriage—before the kids, before both of their careers had taken off, before they had fallen a little bit out of love with each other—this morning schtick of theirs would have delighted her. It was a ‘thing’ they shared, a bit of conjugal banter, an inside joke that only the two of them could appreciate—a mildly comic routine that bonded them and proved how much they loved each other without having to actually say it. Now it only made her want to scream. And it wasn’t just the Nespresso machine. It was everything: the man couldn’t even screw in a light bulb! Noah Steinman may have been a brilliant biochemist—of that there was no question—but as a husband, well, Lady felt he had a lot to prove.
“How’s about that indeed,” Lady muttered into her avocado smoothie.
“ORANGES! ORANGES! I WANT TO SQUEEZE THE ORANGES!” Paulie sounded like he was reciting one of the nursery rhymes he hadn’t been able to memorize when he was two. It was almost as if he was spiting her.
“Mom,” Abigail whined, “make him stop. He’s giving me a total headache. Like, seriously? Do I really need to overdose on Motrin before first period?”
“I told you not to get one of these fancy coffee thingamajigs,” Noah was saying as the Nespresso machine burbled and gurgled. “I was fine with Mr. Coffee.”
The rage. Lady tasted it in the wheat germ and lemongrass and avocado as she tipped the glass back and drained the pulpy dregs of her breakfast smoothie. It caused her to curl her toes in her Louboutins. I can’t lose it now, she said. This is part of my job as a mother, as a wife. Just breathe. Not to mention the fact that it was incredibly humiliating having a meltdown in front of her Guatemalan maid. It made her feel inadequate.
She counted backwards from five, taking a deep breath between each number (five…in through the nose, out through the mouth… four…three…two…one more time, in through the nose, out through the mouth…one). She placed her glass on the blindingly-white marble countertop, took another pause to make sure she was firmly collected, and looked up at her family with a smile that said I am in control. I love my family. I love my life.
Automatic pilot now: “Rosie, those egg whites smell heavenly,” she said. “Your culinary talents never fail to astonish me even though I’m afraid they’re totally wasted on us. Paulie, Mommy doesn’t have time to make orange juice now but let’s make a deal. If you’re a good boy now and stop making a spectacle of yourself, I promise, Rosie will let you squeeze as many oranges and lemons and grapefruit as you like on the weekend. Fuck it, you can throw in a couple pineapples too if that makes you happy. The two of you can spend all day Saturday and Sunday squeezing citrus to your little heart’s desire. Abigail, you are not wearing that outfit to school. How many times have I told you that your father and I work very hard to be regarded as pillars of this community and we can’t have our teenage daughter going to school looking like a…a…like one of those sluts on OnlyFans.””
“But, Mother,” Abigail protested. She always wanted the last word. “Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m being slut-shamed by my own mother! Anyway, Chastity from Sugar Bum Gum wore this outfit when they opened for the VMA’s. It’s like totally trending on all the TikTok. You have to let me wear it! I mean, like, get real.”
“Sugar Bum…what?”
Noah: “OMG,” Doing what he does best, Lady thought, taking Abigail’s side and not only taking her side but doing it in such a way that Lady felt undermined her integrity as a mother, “You mean you’ve never heard of Sugar Bum Gum? They’re like the hottest K-pop band in the world right now. Really, Lady, you need to get real.”
Deep breaths…one…in through the nose…out through the mouth… two…
“And there’s no shame in being on OnlyFans,” he added, delivering one final nail into the coffin of her tolerance. “Everyone’s doing it now. Who knows? If things don’t work out for me at UCLA, it’s a viable alternative. Just sayin’.”
They were stealing her thunder, taking control. She couldn’t let them. This was her moment and she needed to be heard. It was imperative she put a punctuation mark at the end of this sentence—preferably an emphatic full stop and not an exclamation mark. Lady hated to raise her voice. But sometimes—God help her—sometimes it took everything in her power to fight the urge to lash out, to tell each and every one of them exactly how she felt about them, maybe scare them just a little bit into submission. They took her for granted. Well, Noah did anyway. She hated the way he never had her back with the children, especially with Abigail who was clearly using it to her advantage, though what she hoped to get out of it, Lady couldn’t possibly even begin to imagine.
“You’re not helping,” she said to Noah who was standing there next to Abigail, the two of them sniggering and giving each other little high-fives that seemed to prove what Lady had long suspected. Father and daughter were in a conspiracy against her.
“Jesus, Lady, lighten up,” Noah had his Louis Vuitton man-bag slung over his shoulder, coffee in hand in his oversized Yeti cup, and was walking out the door leaving her to deal with what she suddenly—irrationally—had convinced herself was the collapse of their marriage. When had things gotten so bad? When had Noah turned their children against her? Even Paulie—sweet dear harmless little Paulie—seemed to be in on it: hopping around the kitchen like a coked-up Easter bunny, following a poker-faced Rosie as she dished out huevos rancheros that clearly no one was going to eat.
“Wait!” she snapped.
Noah stopped. Everyone stopped. Even Paulie seemed to stop in mid-hop. She had their attention now. Even Abigail looked cowed into submission, her mouth hanging open halfway between a sneer and a leering kind of smile that seemed the perfect complement to her ripped denim hot pants and tee-shirt emblazoned with the face of an Asian girl, red lips open all-too-suggestively, about to consume the biggest lollipop Lady had ever seen. Lady took in their silence, their shock, and gave herself mental kudos for wrestling back control.
“It’s your turn to take the kids to school today, Noah,” she said. “I have an early appointment at the office. I can’t be late.”
Noah opened his mouth to protest but she shook her head, cutting him off before he could say anything that would tip the balance back in his favour. “Absolutely no excuses.”
“That’s it?” he asked.
“What do you mean, ‘that’s it?’ You promised.”
Noah shrugged. He adjusted the strap of his bag across his shoulder, his brow twitching ever so slightly. He looked like a wounded little schoolboy. “Jeez-Louise. You didn’t have to be so dramatic about it,” he said. “C’mon, kids. Mommy’s being a cunt. Again.”
Abigail and Paulie dutifully followed him out of the kitchen, leaving Lady standing there with a perplexed-looking Rosie holding a greasy pan of huevos rancheros out in front of her.
“Don’t forget to take Conrad!” Lady called after them. “He’s in the bathroom. And tell him to wash his hands.”
The front door slammed. She watched them pile into the Escalade— Noah, Abigail, Conrad, and Paulie—and couldn’t help but feel slightly relieved that they were out of her hair at least for a few hours. In the pre-school run rush, she’d forgotten to take her Valium, also uncharacteristic of her. Based on how the day had started and what she knew lay ahead of her, Lady thought she might need to increase her dosage. But just for today. It wasn’t like she was a pill-popping addict or anything.
She then realized Rosie was still standing there, staring at her, the egg white grease from the frying pan dripping onto the ceramic floor.
“Signora?” Rosie asked. “You eat?”
Lady looked down at the mess in the pan and felt her stomach turn.
“No, no, no gracias,” she said. “More for you. None for me.”
“More for me?”
“Yes, yes…si si. Mucho, mucho mas for you. No point in letting it all go to waste.”
“Thank you, Signora. Gracias. Muy muy bien. I save and bring home to my children.”
Suit yourself, Lady thought. And then she realized that after all these years Rosie had worked for her, she hadn’t known or even thought to ask if Rosie had children—a family—of her own.
She really needed that Valium.
Lady McPherson found herself in a quandary. To any outside observer, it would appear she had it all—three delightful and delightfully precocious children (Abigail, aged 17, just on the awkward cusp of womanhood and prone to all the idiosyncrasies and mawkish behavior of girls her age; Conrad, aged 14, the prototypical middle child—caught between a slightly aggressive need for independence and an almost desperate striving for his parents’ approval; and Paul, “Paulie,” Lady and her husband Noah’s ‘love child’—born not out of wedlock but from a rather surprising—and all-too-rare—spontaneous burst of passion eight years previous after a Chianti-soaked and scampi-filled evening in a too-quaint-for-words Italian trattoria in New York’s Little Italy during a totally unexpected anniversary weekend).
Paulie, dear sweet little Paulie: Lady couldn’t help but tear up at the mere thought of him. Paulie was her special child, a victim she feared of a mild case of Asperger’s that she knew would affect him for the rest of his life. Of course she’d never taken Paulie to see a specialist nor had their pediatrician seemed overly concerned by his inability to recite nursery rhymes from memory at the age of two, but Lady knew in her heart that Paulie was different—special—and nothing would persuade her that all he suffered from (as Noah himself had suggested) was a relatively common case of late-bloomerism. Lady had argued that she was the expert in all matters of social-psychology—she was after all one of Los Angeles’s pre-eminent relationship therapists—so Noah should stick to what he knew as a leading biochemistry professor at UCLA, and let her be the expert on what she was convinced ailed their youngest child. Paulie suffered from Asperger’s. Case closed. Noah knew better than to contradict her.
To this outwardly perfect existence, add a stunning 16-room Mexican-style hacienda in Topanga Canyon with panoramic views of downtown L.A., a 3-bedroom guest/pool house, a heated infinity pool with its own waterfall, a state-of-the-art home theater and a bowling alley in the basement where they loved to entertain their Hollywood friends and acquaintances – back when they had Hollywood friends and acquaintances; a live-in Guatemalan maid called Rosie who never sassed back and never expected a raise (probably because she couldn’t speak much English, which is how Lady liked it, or also quite probably that she was an illegal, which was more problematic), and two ridiculously successful careers. It was a life to be envied and Lady knew she was envied but somehow for some reason she found herself spending too many sleepless nights wandering across the mosaic-tiled floors—imported from Morocco, no less—of her luxurious hacienda agonizing over why she felt so dissatisfied.
What was it? What could it possibly be? Lady was living a life that fit her name to a T—courtesy of Summer, her hummus-crafting commune-living mother, but more on that later. Lady’s life was so celebrated, in fact, that a producer at one of the top streaming platforms in the world— this, courtesy of her best friend Ashleigh of ‘Ash by Ashleigh’ fame—had recently approached her about turning her life into a reality show, the ultimate validation. It had been pitched as “A Lady’s Life.” She had been on the brink of committing to a two-season contract when at the last minute Noah had balked, out of concern that anything that might arise during the course of filming—true or otherwise—might jeopardise his shot at finally getting tenure at UCLA.
His vehemence had alarmed her—Noah was generally such a passive, cerebral man—that she felt she had no choice but to turn the platform down. The producers begged her to reconsider. The chairman himself flew out to meet with her in person, which she took to be the ultimate compliment, but alas Noah was adamant and even the chairman’s slightly off-kilter charm couldn’t change her husband’s mind. Maybe next year, she said. But that next year had never come, at least not in the way she’d envisioned. If there was a silver lining to this brush with reality TV stardom, however, it was that Noah received his tenure and the even higher esteem of his colleagues in the biochemistry field that, she supposed, counted for something even if it didn’t do much to bolster her healthy but increasingly neglected ego.
And now, here she was—5 AM of what would prove to be another action-packed day with Noah’s celebration party at the Getty that evening—standing alone in a lacy negligee that hadn’t managed to arouse Noah’s libido in the way she had hoped, gazing out at the fading lights of pre-dawn Los Angeles with a slight breeze blowing across Topanga and across her lustrous chocolate brown hair, fighting back tears that had nothing to do for once with Paulie’s self-diagnosed Asperger’s. Why am I so dissatisfied? Lady asked herself for the umpteenth time. What would make me happy? Am I even capable of being happy? What does happiness even mean anyway? With all her psychiatric expertise, not even Lady McPherson could diagnose what was wrong with her. But of one thing, however, she was certain: this Lady needed a change.
*
Like any typical weekday morning in the McPherson residence, by 7:30am the French colonial-inspired kitchen was abuzz with before-school and -work activity. Rosie was at the super-sized Aga frying up huevos rancheros with egg whites and soy-based cheese while Abigail sat at the counter, rapt in a furious text exchange with her best friend Cassie over the latest dramas in their personal lives. Lady preferred to stay out of her daughter’s life while Noah took a more hands-on approach to parenting that frequently put them at odds with their daughter and each other. Conrad was taking too long, as usual, in the bathroom. (Lady didn’t want to know what he got up to in there but she had her suspicions – best left unspoken, of course) and Paulie was in the kitchen jumping up and down and telling a non-comprehending Rosie that he wanted to squeeze oranges into their organic juicer because all he wanted was orange juice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
“Let him squeeze the oranges, por favor,” Lady said to Rosie as she poured herself a wheat germ, lemongrass and avocado smoothie. “It soothes him.”
At that moment Noah entered, just as Paulie’s insistence on making fresh OJ crescendoed to a near-deafening roar, so loud in fact that—and Lady hated herself for even letting the thought enter her head—if she hadn’t taken so much pride in her relative permissiveness as a mother, Lady would surely have slapped him. It wasn’t the first time she’d considered violence against her children and it wasn’t something she would ever admit to anyone—not even to her best friend Ashleigh—but every so often it all just became TOO MUCH, even for a woman like herself who was living proof that women really could have it all, at least that’s what the women in her book club always told her.
But could she? Again, the doubt and with the doubt, the increasing predilection for self-recrimination. There was a part of Lady that blamed herself for everything that wasn’t perfect in her life, not the least of which was Noah’s seeming indifference to her in the bedroom (a topic she needed to address with Ashleigh, preferably at Raoul’s salon before the party that night) and the fact, despite their pediatrician’s repeated assurances to the contrary, that Paulie’s Asperger’s—she believed—was a direct result of a shaking incident in the eighteenth month of his life when he refused to take her breast and she’d just lost it – really lost it – to the point where she’d seriously considered calling child services on herself. But eighteen months was too early, she thought, to make the transition to formula. Both Abigail and Conrad had nursed well into their second year, but Paulie had wanted nothing to do with it and, naturally, Lady had taken this as a rejection—the most traumatizing rejection ever. In fact, she’d never truly recovered. Six-and-a-half years on, Lady still harboured a wee bit of resentment toward her lovechild and it came to the forefront in trying moments such as these. Paulie reminded her that her life wasn’t perfect. Far from it, actually. Oh, why couldn’t he just be normal, for once?
“Paulie, darling, please!” she said, perhaps with a bit more venom than she’d intended. “Mommy can’t hear herself think!”
“Mommy’s created a monster,” Noah said as he inserted a pod into their Nespresso machine and pushed the brew button. “Damien 2.0.”
Lady closed her eyes and held her breath. It was the same routine every morning.
“Honey?” Noah’s voice was a nasal drone, cloying in the back of her mind like molasses.
“Yes, dear?”
“I’m having trouble with the coffee maker again. It won’t turn on. I put the pod thingie-or-whatever into the slot and nothing happens.”
“Is it plugged in?”
“Yes.”
“Did you press the power button?”
Bingo!
“Well, how’s about that?”
In the early years of their marriage—before the kids, before both of their careers had taken off, before they had fallen a little bit out of love with each other—this morning schtick of theirs would have delighted her. It was a ‘thing’ they shared, a bit of conjugal banter, an inside joke that only the two of them could appreciate—a mildly comic routine that bonded them and proved how much they loved each other without having to actually say it. Now it only made her want to scream. And it wasn’t just the Nespresso machine. It was everything: the man couldn’t even screw in a light bulb! Noah Steinman may have been a brilliant biochemist—of that there was no question—but as a husband, well, Lady felt he had a lot to prove.
“How’s about that indeed,” Lady muttered into her avocado smoothie.
“ORANGES! ORANGES! I WANT TO SQUEEZE THE ORANGES!” Paulie sounded like he was reciting one of the nursery rhymes he hadn’t been able to memorize when he was two. It was almost as if he was spiting her.
“Mom,” Abigail whined, “make him stop. He’s giving me a total headache. Like, seriously? Do I really need to overdose on Motrin before first period?”
“I told you not to get one of these fancy coffee thingamajigs,” Noah was saying as the Nespresso machine burbled and gurgled. “I was fine with Mr. Coffee.”
The rage. Lady tasted it in the wheat germ and lemongrass and avocado as she tipped the glass back and drained the pulpy dregs of her breakfast smoothie. It caused her to curl her toes in her Louboutins. I can’t lose it now, she said. This is part of my job as a mother, as a wife. Just breathe. Not to mention the fact that it was incredibly humiliating having a meltdown in front of her Guatemalan maid. It made her feel inadequate.
She counted backwards from five, taking a deep breath between each number (five…in through the nose, out through the mouth… four…three…two…one more time, in through the nose, out through the mouth…one). She placed her glass on the blindingly-white marble countertop, took another pause to make sure she was firmly collected, and looked up at her family with a smile that said I am in control. I love my family. I love my life.
Automatic pilot now: “Rosie, those egg whites smell heavenly,” she said. “Your culinary talents never fail to astonish me even though I’m afraid they’re totally wasted on us. Paulie, Mommy doesn’t have time to make orange juice now but let’s make a deal. If you’re a good boy now and stop making a spectacle of yourself, I promise, Rosie will let you squeeze as many oranges and lemons and grapefruit as you like on the weekend. Fuck it, you can throw in a couple pineapples too if that makes you happy. The two of you can spend all day Saturday and Sunday squeezing citrus to your little heart’s desire. Abigail, you are not wearing that outfit to school. How many times have I told you that your father and I work very hard to be regarded as pillars of this community and we can’t have our teenage daughter going to school looking like a…a…like one of those sluts on OnlyFans.””
“But, Mother,” Abigail protested. She always wanted the last word. “Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m being slut-shamed by my own mother! Anyway, Chastity from Sugar Bum Gum wore this outfit when they opened for the VMA’s. It’s like totally trending on all the TikTok. You have to let me wear it! I mean, like, get real.”
“Sugar Bum…what?”
Noah: “OMG,” Doing what he does best, Lady thought, taking Abigail’s side and not only taking her side but doing it in such a way that Lady felt undermined her integrity as a mother, “You mean you’ve never heard of Sugar Bum Gum? They’re like the hottest K-pop band in the world right now. Really, Lady, you need to get real.”
Deep breaths…one…in through the nose…out through the mouth… two…
“And there’s no shame in being on OnlyFans,” he added, delivering one final nail into the coffin of her tolerance. “Everyone’s doing it now. Who knows? If things don’t work out for me at UCLA, it’s a viable alternative. Just sayin’.”
They were stealing her thunder, taking control. She couldn’t let them. This was her moment and she needed to be heard. It was imperative she put a punctuation mark at the end of this sentence—preferably an emphatic full stop and not an exclamation mark. Lady hated to raise her voice. But sometimes—God help her—sometimes it took everything in her power to fight the urge to lash out, to tell each and every one of them exactly how she felt about them, maybe scare them just a little bit into submission. They took her for granted. Well, Noah did anyway. She hated the way he never had her back with the children, especially with Abigail who was clearly using it to her advantage, though what she hoped to get out of it, Lady couldn’t possibly even begin to imagine.
“You’re not helping,” she said to Noah who was standing there next to Abigail, the two of them sniggering and giving each other little high-fives that seemed to prove what Lady had long suspected. Father and daughter were in a conspiracy against her.
“Jesus, Lady, lighten up,” Noah had his Louis Vuitton man-bag slung over his shoulder, coffee in hand in his oversized Yeti cup, and was walking out the door leaving her to deal with what she suddenly—irrationally—had convinced herself was the collapse of their marriage. When had things gotten so bad? When had Noah turned their children against her? Even Paulie—sweet dear harmless little Paulie—seemed to be in on it: hopping around the kitchen like a coked-up Easter bunny, following a poker-faced Rosie as she dished out huevos rancheros that clearly no one was going to eat.
“Wait!” she snapped.
Noah stopped. Everyone stopped. Even Paulie seemed to stop in mid-hop. She had their attention now. Even Abigail looked cowed into submission, her mouth hanging open halfway between a sneer and a leering kind of smile that seemed the perfect complement to her ripped denim hot pants and tee-shirt emblazoned with the face of an Asian girl, red lips open all-too-suggestively, about to consume the biggest lollipop Lady had ever seen. Lady took in their silence, their shock, and gave herself mental kudos for wrestling back control.
“It’s your turn to take the kids to school today, Noah,” she said. “I have an early appointment at the office. I can’t be late.”
Noah opened his mouth to protest but she shook her head, cutting him off before he could say anything that would tip the balance back in his favour. “Absolutely no excuses.”
“That’s it?” he asked.
“What do you mean, ‘that’s it?’ You promised.”
Noah shrugged. He adjusted the strap of his bag across his shoulder, his brow twitching ever so slightly. He looked like a wounded little schoolboy. “Jeez-Louise. You didn’t have to be so dramatic about it,” he said. “C’mon, kids. Mommy’s being a cunt. Again.”
Abigail and Paulie dutifully followed him out of the kitchen, leaving Lady standing there with a perplexed-looking Rosie holding a greasy pan of huevos rancheros out in front of her.
“Don’t forget to take Conrad!” Lady called after them. “He’s in the bathroom. And tell him to wash his hands.”
The front door slammed. She watched them pile into the Escalade— Noah, Abigail, Conrad, and Paulie—and couldn’t help but feel slightly relieved that they were out of her hair at least for a few hours. In the pre-school run rush, she’d forgotten to take her Valium, also uncharacteristic of her. Based on how the day had started and what she knew lay ahead of her, Lady thought she might need to increase her dosage. But just for today. It wasn’t like she was a pill-popping addict or anything.
She then realized Rosie was still standing there, staring at her, the egg white grease from the frying pan dripping onto the ceramic floor.
“Signora?” Rosie asked. “You eat?”
Lady looked down at the mess in the pan and felt her stomach turn.
“No, no, no gracias,” she said. “More for you. None for me.”
“More for me?”
“Yes, yes…si si. Mucho, mucho mas for you. No point in letting it all go to waste.”
“Thank you, Signora. Gracias. Muy muy bien. I save and bring home to my children.”
Suit yourself, Lady thought. And then she realized that after all these years Rosie had worked for her, she hadn’t known or even thought to ask if Rosie had children—a family—of her own.
She really needed that Valium.
Lady McPherson found herself in a quandary. To any outside observer, it would appear she had it all—three delightful and delightfully precocious children (Abigail, aged 17, just on the awkward cusp of womanhood and prone to all the idiosyncrasies and mawkish behavior of girls her age; Conrad, aged 14, the prototypical middle child—caught between a slightly aggressive need for independence and an almost desperate striving for his parents’ approval; and Paul, “Paulie,” Lady and her husband Noah’s ‘love child’—born not out of wedlock but from a rather surprising—and all-too-rare—spontaneous burst of passion eight years previous after a Chianti-soaked and scampi-filled evening in a too-quaint-for-words Italian trattoria in New York’s Little Italy during a totally unexpected anniversary weekend).
Paulie, dear sweet little Paulie: Lady couldn’t help but tear up at the mere thought of him. Paulie was her special child, a victim she feared of a mild case of Asperger’s that she knew would affect him for the rest of his life. Of course she’d never taken Paulie to see a specialist nor had their pediatrician seemed overly concerned by his inability to recite nursery rhymes from memory at the age of two, but Lady knew in her heart that Paulie was different—special—and nothing would persuade her that all he suffered from (as Noah himself had suggested) was a relatively common case of late-bloomerism. Lady had argued that she was the expert in all matters of social-psychology—she was after all one of Los Angeles’s pre-eminent relationship therapists—so Noah should stick to what he knew as a leading biochemistry professor at UCLA, and let her be the expert on what she was convinced ailed their youngest child. Paulie suffered from Asperger’s. Case closed. Noah knew better than to contradict her.
To this outwardly perfect existence, add a stunning 16-room Mexican-style hacienda in Topanga Canyon with panoramic views of downtown L.A., a 3-bedroom guest/pool house, a heated infinity pool with its own waterfall, a state-of-the-art home theater and a bowling alley in the basement where they loved to entertain their Hollywood friends and acquaintances – back when they had Hollywood friends and acquaintances; a live-in Guatemalan maid called Rosie who never sassed back and never expected a raise (probably because she couldn’t speak much English, which is how Lady liked it, or also quite probably that she was an illegal, which was more problematic), and two ridiculously successful careers. It was a life to be envied and Lady knew she was envied but somehow for some reason she found herself spending too many sleepless nights wandering across the mosaic-tiled floors—imported from Morocco, no less—of her luxurious hacienda agonizing over why she felt so dissatisfied.
What was it? What could it possibly be? Lady was living a life that fit her name to a T—courtesy of Summer, her hummus-crafting commune-living mother, but more on that later. Lady’s life was so celebrated, in fact, that a producer at one of the top streaming platforms in the world— this, courtesy of her best friend Ashleigh of ‘Ash by Ashleigh’ fame—had recently approached her about turning her life into a reality show, the ultimate validation. It had been pitched as “A Lady’s Life.” She had been on the brink of committing to a two-season contract when at the last minute Noah had balked, out of concern that anything that might arise during the course of filming—true or otherwise—might jeopardise his shot at finally getting tenure at UCLA.
His vehemence had alarmed her—Noah was generally such a passive, cerebral man—that she felt she had no choice but to turn the platform down. The producers begged her to reconsider. The chairman himself flew out to meet with her in person, which she took to be the ultimate compliment, but alas Noah was adamant and even the chairman’s slightly off-kilter charm couldn’t change her husband’s mind. Maybe next year, she said. But that next year had never come, at least not in the way she’d envisioned. If there was a silver lining to this brush with reality TV stardom, however, it was that Noah received his tenure and the even higher esteem of his colleagues in the biochemistry field that, she supposed, counted for something even if it didn’t do much to bolster her healthy but increasingly neglected ego.
And now, here she was—5 AM of what would prove to be another action-packed day with Noah’s celebration party at the Getty that evening—standing alone in a lacy negligee that hadn’t managed to arouse Noah’s libido in the way she had hoped, gazing out at the fading lights of pre-dawn Los Angeles with a slight breeze blowing across Topanga and across her lustrous chocolate brown hair, fighting back tears that had nothing to do for once with Paulie’s self-diagnosed Asperger’s. Why am I so dissatisfied? Lady asked herself for the umpteenth time. What would make me happy? Am I even capable of being happy? What does happiness even mean anyway? With all her psychiatric expertise, not even Lady McPherson could diagnose what was wrong with her. But of one thing, however, she was certain: this Lady needed a change.
*
Like any typical weekday morning in the McPherson residence, by 7:30am the French colonial-inspired kitchen was abuzz with before-school and -work activity. Rosie was at the super-sized Aga frying up huevos rancheros with egg whites and soy-based cheese while Abigail sat at the counter, rapt in a furious text exchange with her best friend Cassie over the latest dramas in their personal lives. Lady preferred to stay out of her daughter’s life while Noah took a more hands-on approach to parenting that frequently put them at odds with their daughter and each other. Conrad was taking too long, as usual, in the bathroom. (Lady didn’t want to know what he got up to in there but she had her suspicions – best left unspoken, of course) and Paulie was in the kitchen jumping up and down and telling a non-comprehending Rosie that he wanted to squeeze oranges into their organic juicer because all he wanted was orange juice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
“Let him squeeze the oranges, por favor,” Lady said to Rosie as she poured herself a wheat germ, lemongrass and avocado smoothie. “It soothes him.”
At that moment Noah entered, just as Paulie’s insistence on making fresh OJ crescendoed to a near-deafening roar, so loud in fact that—and Lady hated herself for even letting the thought enter her head—if she hadn’t taken so much pride in her relative permissiveness as a mother, Lady would surely have slapped him. It wasn’t the first time she’d considered violence against her children and it wasn’t something she would ever admit to anyone—not even to her best friend Ashleigh—but every so often it all just became TOO MUCH, even for a woman like herself who was living proof that women really could have it all, at least that’s what the women in her book club always told her.
But could she? Again, the doubt and with the doubt, the increasing predilection for self-recrimination. There was a part of Lady that blamed herself for everything that wasn’t perfect in her life, not the least of which was Noah’s seeming indifference to her in the bedroom (a topic she needed to address with Ashleigh, preferably at Raoul’s salon before the party that night) and the fact, despite their pediatrician’s repeated assurances to the contrary, that Paulie’s Asperger’s—she believed—was a direct result of a shaking incident in the eighteenth month of his life when he refused to take her breast and she’d just lost it – really lost it – to the point where she’d seriously considered calling child services on herself. But eighteen months was too early, she thought, to make the transition to formula. Both Abigail and Conrad had nursed well into their second year, but Paulie had wanted nothing to do with it and, naturally, Lady had taken this as a rejection—the most traumatizing rejection ever. In fact, she’d never truly recovered. Six-and-a-half years on, Lady still harboured a wee bit of resentment toward her lovechild and it came to the forefront in trying moments such as these. Paulie reminded her that her life wasn’t perfect. Far from it, actually. Oh, why couldn’t he just be normal, for once?
“Paulie, darling, please!” she said, perhaps with a bit more venom than she’d intended. “Mommy can’t hear herself think!”
“Mommy’s created a monster,” Noah said as he inserted a pod into their Nespresso machine and pushed the brew button. “Damien 2.0.”
Lady closed her eyes and held her breath. It was the same routine every morning.
“Honey?” Noah’s voice was a nasal drone, cloying in the back of her mind like molasses.
“Yes, dear?”
“I’m having trouble with the coffee maker again. It won’t turn on. I put the pod thingie-or-whatever into the slot and nothing happens.”
“Is it plugged in?”
“Yes.”
“Did you press the power button?”
Bingo!
“Well, how’s about that?”
In the early years of their marriage—before the kids, before both of their careers had taken off, before they had fallen a little bit out of love with each other—this morning schtick of theirs would have delighted her. It was a ‘thing’ they shared, a bit of conjugal banter, an inside joke that only the two of them could appreciate—a mildly comic routine that bonded them and proved how much they loved each other without having to actually say it. Now it only made her want to scream. And it wasn’t just the Nespresso machine. It was everything: the man couldn’t even screw in a light bulb! Noah Steinman may have been a brilliant biochemist—of that there was no question—but as a husband, well, Lady felt he had a lot to prove.
“How’s about that indeed,” Lady muttered into her avocado smoothie.
“ORANGES! ORANGES! I WANT TO SQUEEZE THE ORANGES!” Paulie sounded like he was reciting one of the nursery rhymes he hadn’t been able to memorize when he was two. It was almost as if he was spiting her.
“Mom,” Abigail whined, “make him stop. He’s giving me a total headache. Like, seriously? Do I really need to overdose on Motrin before first period?”
“I told you not to get one of these fancy coffee thingamajigs,” Noah was saying as the Nespresso machine burbled and gurgled. “I was fine with Mr. Coffee.”
The rage. Lady tasted it in the wheat germ and lemongrass and avocado as she tipped the glass back and drained the pulpy dregs of her breakfast smoothie. It caused her to curl her toes in her Louboutins. I can’t lose it now, she said. This is part of my job as a mother, as a wife. Just breathe. Not to mention the fact that it was incredibly humiliating having a meltdown in front of her Guatemalan maid. It made her feel inadequate.
She counted backwards from five, taking a deep breath between each number (five…in through the nose, out through the mouth… four…three…two…one more time, in through the nose, out through the mouth…one). She placed her glass on the blindingly-white marble countertop, took another pause to make sure she was firmly collected, and looked up at her family with a smile that said I am in control. I love my family. I love my life.
Automatic pilot now: “Rosie, those egg whites smell heavenly,” she said. “Your culinary talents never fail to astonish me even though I’m afraid they’re totally wasted on us. Paulie, Mommy doesn’t have time to make orange juice now but let’s make a deal. If you’re a good boy now and stop making a spectacle of yourself, I promise, Rosie will let you squeeze as many oranges and lemons and grapefruit as you like on the weekend. Fuck it, you can throw in a couple pineapples too if that makes you happy. The two of you can spend all day Saturday and Sunday squeezing citrus to your little heart’s desire. Abigail, you are not wearing that outfit to school. How many times have I told you that your father and I work very hard to be regarded as pillars of this community and we can’t have our teenage daughter going to school looking like a…a…like one of those sluts on OnlyFans.””
“But, Mother,” Abigail protested. She always wanted the last word. “Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m being slut-shamed by my own mother! Anyway, Chastity from Sugar Bum Gum wore this outfit when they opened for the VMA’s. It’s like totally trending on all the TikTok. You have to let me wear it! I mean, like, get real.”
“Sugar Bum…what?”
Noah: “OMG,” Doing what he does best, Lady thought, taking Abigail’s side and not only taking her side but doing it in such a way that Lady felt undermined her integrity as a mother, “You mean you’ve never heard of Sugar Bum Gum? They’re like the hottest K-pop band in the world right now. Really, Lady, you need to get real.”
Deep breaths…one…in through the nose…out through the mouth… two…
“And there’s no shame in being on OnlyFans,” he added, delivering one final nail into the coffin of her tolerance. “Everyone’s doing it now. Who knows? If things don’t work out for me at UCLA, it’s a viable alternative. Just sayin’.”
They were stealing her thunder, taking control. She couldn’t let them. This was her moment and she needed to be heard. It was imperative she put a punctuation mark at the end of this sentence—preferably an emphatic full stop and not an exclamation mark. Lady hated to raise her voice. But sometimes—God help her—sometimes it took everything in her power to fight the urge to lash out, to tell each and every one of them exactly how she felt about them, maybe scare them just a little bit into submission. They took her for granted. Well, Noah did anyway. She hated the way he never had her back with the children, especially with Abigail who was clearly using it to her advantage, though what she hoped to get out of it, Lady couldn’t possibly even begin to imagine.
“You’re not helping,” she said to Noah who was standing there next to Abigail, the two of them sniggering and giving each other little high-fives that seemed to prove what Lady had long suspected. Father and daughter were in a conspiracy against her.
“Jesus, Lady, lighten up,” Noah had his Louis Vuitton man-bag slung over his shoulder, coffee in hand in his oversized Yeti cup, and was walking out the door leaving her to deal with what she suddenly—irrationally—had convinced herself was the collapse of their marriage. When had things gotten so bad? When had Noah turned their children against her? Even Paulie—sweet dear harmless little Paulie—seemed to be in on it: hopping around the kitchen like a coked-up Easter bunny, following a poker-faced Rosie as she dished out huevos rancheros that clearly no one was going to eat.
“Wait!” she snapped.
Noah stopped. Everyone stopped. Even Paulie seemed to stop in mid-hop. She had their attention now. Even Abigail looked cowed into submission, her mouth hanging open halfway between a sneer and a leering kind of smile that seemed the perfect complement to her ripped denim hot pants and tee-shirt emblazoned with the face of an Asian girl, red lips open all-too-suggestively, about to consume the biggest lollipop Lady had ever seen. Lady took in their silence, their shock, and gave herself mental kudos for wrestling back control.
“It’s your turn to take the kids to school today, Noah,” she said. “I have an early appointment at the office. I can’t be late.”
Noah opened his mouth to protest but she shook her head, cutting him off before he could say anything that would tip the balance back in his favour. “Absolutely no excuses.”
“That’s it?” he asked.
“What do you mean, ‘that’s it?’ You promised.”
Noah shrugged. He adjusted the strap of his bag across his shoulder, his brow twitching ever so slightly. He looked like a wounded little schoolboy. “Jeez-Louise. You didn’t have to be so dramatic about it,” he said. “C’mon, kids. Mommy’s being a cunt. Again.”
Abigail and Paulie dutifully followed him out of the kitchen, leaving Lady standing there with a perplexed-looking Rosie holding a greasy pan of huevos rancheros out in front of her.
“Don’t forget to take Conrad!” Lady called after them. “He’s in the bathroom. And tell him to wash his hands.”
The front door slammed. She watched them pile into the Escalade— Noah, Abigail, Conrad, and Paulie—and couldn’t help but feel slightly relieved that they were out of her hair at least for a few hours. In the pre-school run rush, she’d forgotten to take her Valium, also uncharacteristic of her. Based on how the day had started and what she knew lay ahead of her, Lady thought she might need to increase her dosage. But just for today. It wasn’t like she was a pill-popping addict or anything.
She then realized Rosie was still standing there, staring at her, the egg white grease from the frying pan dripping onto the ceramic floor.
“Signora?” Rosie asked. “You eat?”
Lady looked down at the mess in the pan and felt her stomach turn.
“No, no, no gracias,” she said. “More for you. None for me.”
“More for me?”
“Yes, yes…si si. Mucho, mucho mas for you. No point in letting it all go to waste.”
“Thank you, Signora. Gracias. Muy muy bien. I save and bring home to my children.”
Suit yourself, Lady thought. And then she realized that after all these years Rosie had worked for her, she hadn’t known or even thought to ask if Rosie had children—a family—of her own.
She really needed that Valium.