Laura Castoro - Icing On The Cake

“The hell he did!” I toss the papers as if they’d suddenly burst into flame. “He—I…the bastard! What kind of—of—?”

“Mom, you’re stuttering,” Sarah points out unhelpfully.

“Don’t let this weird you out, Mom,” Riley adds in solidarity.

I swing my head toward Riley but I can’t focus on her face. My eyeballs are jumping as if I have a tic in both at the same time. “I’m fine. Perfectly fine.”

When I’ve subsided into my chair Lionel says, “Mrs. Brandi Talbot claims the aforementioned items seem to be in order. Therefore, the estate mentioned in the will would seem to include only Talbot Advertising and Mr. Talbot’s retirement fund. His insurance has been left in trust to his daughters.”

“How much?” I ask this after a second’s hesitation because I know my girls are reluctant to.

“The insurance in is the amount of one million dollars to be held in trust until Ms. Sarah and Ms. Riley Talbot reach the age of twenty-five.”

“Holy shit!” Riley says this in an unusually subdued voice.

“I would suggest,” Lionel says, “that both Mrs. Elizabeth Talbot and Mrs. Brandi Talbot seek counsel, who will look for a solution that will keep this out of the courts.”

“You’re advising arbitration?” Sarah is taking notes. My daughters have assumed the sisterhood alternative to her suited sharks.

“It would behoove both parties to consider it.” Lionel is one cool customer. “A protracted legal battle will tie up assets on all sides for the foreseeable future. An equitable agreement reached before the will is filed for probate would greatly simplify matters.”

“Like hell!” She folds her arms under her rib cage, drawing attention to what money can buy. “My attorneys say I should fight this.”

The other man in black, who until now has been mostly silent, speaks. “There’s every possibility that there will be a second claimant against Mr. Talbot’s will.”

The hair on my head snaps to attention. Oh, that’s right! She and Ted…

My gaze tracks down her front to where her dress wraps like cellophane about her torso. It’s been two months since…could it be?

Unflappable Lionel says, “You have informed these offices of Mrs. Brandi Talbot’s potential for procreation.” Who, but an attorney, talks like this? “The real question is—”

“Are you pregnant?” Riley, who has been hunkered down in her chair like a military combatant, springs to her feet and approaches her. “Well, are you?”

She dips her head. “Possibly. It’s still too soon to know.” She lifts eyes swimming in tears. “It’s what your father wanted. We were talking about it the day—”

It’s a good performance. I am maybe the only one in the room who doesn’t believe for a second she’s pregnant. There are tests accurate to within days of conception. Yet I wouldn’t put it past her to do something sneaky underhanded drastic.

But that’s not the reason I suddenly feel threatened. I don’t want anything to do with any of this. I don’t need—who am I kidding? Who doesn’t need half of thirteen million? I need any piece of it I can get. No! What I need is to get out of here and think. Think? What’s there to think about? I won’t know until I get a chance to do it.

I rocket to my feet, little puffs of flour escaping the folds of my baker’s duds. “If you will excuse me I need to find the ladies’.”

“Me, too. Me, too,” my girls echo, popping up from their chairs.

“I’m going to sue. I can sue, right?” she asks as I head out the door.

Sweet as they are, I don’t need daughterly advice just now. I bypass the ladies’ and step into the elevator. Events of this magnitude require consult with a higher power.

As the door closes I hear my daughters, caught short on the other side of the closing door, chorus, “Mom? Where are you going?”

“To Olympus.”

“Liz, darling! Isn’t this a nice surprise?” Sally busses both my cheeks. “But whatever are you doing here?”

She means how dare you, darling, show up at my apartment on the Upper East Side, and not telephone first. But, kiss, kiss, of course, I love you.

“I need to talk, Sally. Can I come in for a minute?”

She gives me a Carol Channing smile. “For you, darling, I have all the time in the world.” This means, she’s alone. “Come in, come in.”

Sally Blake reminds most people of Jackie O. At five-foot-nine-and-one-half inches with thick dark hair and a willowy figure, she has the same square face, at once formidable and vulnerable. The same strong brows, as if the artist became too generous with his charcoal. A wide, pretty mouth proclaims her ultrafeminine and yet positively patrician. That’s where the similarities to Jackie O end. Sally is as driven as Ethel Merman, with the same larger-than-life persona.

Oh, Sally is my mother.

From the crib I was taught to call her Sally because in 1958, nice girls didn’t have babies out of wedlock. Certainly a potential Rockette didn’t.

“Taking dance classes in the city,” I was much later told was the official explanation when Sally went to a maiden aunt in Baltimore to have me. Meanwhile my grandmother, a taxi dancer during the Depression, announced that she and Grandpa Horace had decided to adopt. Sally dubbed me Liz Taylor Blake, in the hope that a famous name would inspire me to become famous. My grandmother, who saw the drawbacks to such a moniker, made sure I was legally named Elizabeth Jeanne Blake.

Three years later “big sister” Sally was high-kicking in the most famous chorus line in the world, the Radio City Rockettes, while I was learning to tell when a bagel was done.

I don’t come to Sally for maternal comfort. I come for worldly advice. She’s the ultraglamorous older sister who swoops in occasionally with dazzling tales of her globetrotting adventures yet willingly listens to my “what I did at the bakery today” type life stories.

She leads me through the maze of boxes and furnishings into a room with a panoramic view of Central Park. She moves when the mood strikes, sometimes as often as every year. Sally says a smart woman doesn’t hang about Radio City Music Hall in a leotard and heels without finding ways to network. When the time came to segue from the stage into a different glamour profession, she had backers lined up. Today she owns a boutique Manhattan real estate agency. Successful, are you kidding?

When she pauses before a grouping of beige suede sofa units that could sleep three, her wide-legged stance opens the side slit in her Oscar de la Renta tweed pencil skirt. Who can blame her for showing off? Looking more than a decade younger than her sixty-three years, Sally can still high-kick a hat off a man’s head.

“What do you think of my new pied-à-terre?”

I give the room’s view a drop jaw gaze. What can I say? “It’s spectacular.”

“I’m undecided. Tony likes it.”

Tony Khare is Sally’s lover. They met five years ago when she sold him his first Manhattan condo. An Oxford-educated Indo-Englishman, Tony made scads of money long before it was news that American industry was outsourcing to places like New Delhi and Bombay. Tony is darkly gorgeous with that witty yet ineffable English reserve that’s a perfect foil for Sally’s old-fashioned glamour. The fact that he is twelve years her junior bothers neither of them.

“Look at you,” she says just as I’m thinking, let’s not. We may have the same thick dark hair but mine tends to frizz, and I am shorter with a not-so-willowy frame. You don’t try to emulate a mother like Sally Blake. You only envy and adore.

“You look wonderful, as always. What are you doing?”

“Pilates.” Sally runs a palm across her drum tight midriff. “You should try it. Customers would flock to the antioxidant properties of your spinach and tomato focaccia if they thought it gave your skin a refreshed glow.”