Dawn #2
I cringed at myself. Chicken. This is why you’re not a real filmmaker.
Though I’d improved over the years, I’d always battled what I’d only realized in the last year was called anxiety.
As a kid, I’d been called “nervous,” the kind of student who always got sick—and I mean throwing-up sick—before important tests, who shied away from trying out for the school plays even though I wanted to, who majored in film with the intention of becoming the first female director to be a household name, only to move to San Francisco after graduation for a props job at the Curran Theatre that my mother had secured for me through some old friend of hers.
And since I showed a talent for knowing exactly what to add to any set to make it come alive, I’d moved up through the ranks quickly, no doubt due to the many en plein air excursions Mom had taken me on, with my very own easel and paints, where she taught me how not just to see but to imagine what might enhance a scene.
Now I could pick my projects, but I always stayed in my lane.
I sometimes thought that, too, was part of my success; I didn’t question the higher-ups.
Directors knew I’d get the job done without being a diva.
Talking to Dennis at the museum had been very out of character for me, and looking back on it now, my stomach clenched at my own boldness. What had I been thinking?
I needed more time to get my bearings. I needed to not feel unsexy for suggesting coffee instead of a cocktail. I needed to come clean to the people closest to me before I started going on coffee dates with strangers.
I glanced at Mom’s moody depiction of our favorite beach in Carmel that hung over my couch a few feet away, and I felt a pang of guilt.
Mom. Miranda Hartley, the first woman vintner in Napa.
Mom, who had no idea I was trying to stop drinking.
How could I possibly tell her? How could I possibly tell her that I couldn’t handle the thing she made, the beautiful bottles she’d refined and perfected over fifty years, the science and art she’d dedicated her life to.
She always insisted winemaking was both science and art, and I wondered if that was because she was a painter at heart.
It made me happy to see her indulging this love of hers as she got older, traveling to museums all over Europe and taking various classes abroad.
Mom and I had always shared everything, and here I was not telling her what had become the ruling factor of my life.
Lately when she asked me how I was doing, I’d taken to giving her one-word answers like fine and tired, then steering the conversation toward something not-me, like the highly suspicious pickleball trend or where she was traveling next, all of which went against everything we’d ever been to each other.
Dawn and Miranda were the Hartley Girls long before Rory and Lorelai were the Gilmore Girls, with a long-standing Sunday-evening ritual while I was growing up: We’d laze around on the couch eating popcorn and Red Vines while watching whatever old movie was on the local channels, eventually graduating to rented VHS tapes when those came on the market.
“No ads!” we gleefully said as we popped one of those into the shiny new machine that made all those satisfying clicks.
But Mom always made sure to pause the tapes so we could talk during a few breaks like we always had during commercials.
It was during those evenings that I’d share about the girls who were being mean to me, the boys I liked, the teachers I feared.
Mom shared, too—her worries about the vineyard, which included her search for organic pest control, her stress over finding a new head grower after Emilio died suddenly of a heart attack, not to mention her intense sadness at losing such a close friend and colleague.
Emilio had been at every family celebration, even after Grandma Joan died, and I shared Mom’s sadness in losing him.
My father was the only subject that had ever been off-limits.
“He was a typical artist and didn’t want to be a father, and he asked not to be contacted” was all she’d said.
When my eyes filled with tears and I sniffled at this blunt information, she put her arm around me and offered a box of tissues and said, “I know, baby. It hurts. But really, it’s my fault.
I should have known better than to get involved with someone like him.
If you need to be mad at anyone, be mad at me. ”
When Gilmore Girls came on TV, and we saw ourselves so clearly in the single mother and teen daughter characters, we started watching it religiously every Thursday night at 8:00 p.m., both of us tucked under blankets on our respective couches, our then-state-of-the-art Nokia phones on mute while we texted all during the hour, then exploded into live talking over the phone to dissect the episode, then everything else in our lives.
When the show ended after seven seasons, we mourned but eventually found our way to Parenthood, which we both loved for all kinds of reasons, starting with the fact that it was set in Berkeley, California, half an hour east over the Bay Bridge from me, and about an hour down 80 for her.
Some nights, we didn’t get off the phone until close to midnight, especially in the last months with Clark.
I drank less on those nights, mostly because being cozy on the couch talking to Mom made me feel so at home.
But Parenthood had its finale six months ago, in January, and we hadn’t yet found a substitute.
For about six weeks in the winter, I drank heavily on Thursday nights, often taking the opportunity to go out with girlfriends.
After the Incident and I decided to stop, Thursday nights became white-knuckle hours like all the rest.
All that time, and I never told her I was struggling with my drinking.
I never told her about the 2:00 a.m. sweaty wake-ups, the regret about things I’d said while drunk, the burning shame at what I couldn’t remember.
It felt terrible to have kept such a big secret from her, as terrible as the fact that I’d lost control of my drinking and couldn’t be like her, able to have half a glass once in a while and to savor it for its nose and tasting notes.
Instead, I’d drink a whole bottle after a cocktail or three and not taste a damn thing.
Instead, and this was maybe the worst part, I was more like her father and her sister, both of whose deaths were drug related and before I was born.
I used to think that since both of them had taken equal amounts of drugs and alcohol, those other substances were what I really had to be afraid of and careful around.
But I didn’t even like weed. I loved alcohol.
Turned out, it was the thing you loved that you needed to be careful of.
I couldn’t stomach the idea of Mom looking at me with the same pain and disappointment that clouded her features anytime her sister’s name was spoken.
Winnie. Winifred Hartley. When she was alive, Grandma Joan had rarely mentioned her at all and usually changed the subject if her name did pop up in conversation.
“Such a waste of talent,” I remember Grandma Joan muttering once.
I glanced at the clock.
Damn it.
I needed to get to work.
Fretting about Dennis and Mom had cost me going to yoga, so I got in the shower and prepared to face my day.
—
I spent the day researching nineteenth-century settees and drapery for a room I was doing for a curator at the de Young who wanted museumgoers to literally walk into a Berthe Morisot painting.
Then I stopped by City Lights because I loved the store and needed to be somewhere beautiful that didn’t serve alcohol at 6:00 p.m.; plus, I had to pick up the first book in the wildly popular Vineland series for kids because Carol Robillard was paying me an absurd amount of money to transform her Victorian mansion into the boarding school featured in the book.
In a month, she was throwing a party for her twelve-year-old niece on the release day of the sixth and final book.
Incredibly, no one knew who the author was, which only enhanced the books’ fame, and I wondered if I’d be able to work this mystery into my party design.
I loved working with Carol, a bona fide San Francisco eccentric who’d once sung soprano in the Opera, then retired on her family’s millions to throw parties, mostly for charities.
Our Roman bacchanal, pointedly created for maximum guilt-giving to the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, had been especially memorable.
In some ways, parties were more satisfying to design than stage or television sets—even though they were less prestigious—because I got to make up my own story.
And that story was manageable, just for one night and one purpose.
When I started thinking about a narrative for a show of my own, or a movie, I immediately felt overwhelmed and intimidated. Did I have vision like that?