Icing On The Cake

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.”

“It wouldn’t be true.”

“Darling. Success is about selling the sizzle, not the steak.”

For about three seconds I actually think about this approach, which just goes to show how desperate I am for new customers.

“I’ll just ring for sherry. No, something more festive. “When her Brazilian housekeeper appears, Sally announces, “Gimlets, Ines!”

She waves me into a herringbone-stenciled leather side chair. “Tell me all about your life. Is it thrilling?”

“Let’s see. I’m still parenting two grown daughters. I own a business trying to claw its way back into public consciousness. Oh, and I rent and have a business mortgage I can barely meet.”

“So then, sell and relocate.”

Sally always says sell the bakery. It’s the only thing she and Ted agreed about, ever. But relocate? That’s new. “Where would I go?”

“Miami?”

“Too hot.”

“Tampa.”

“Ditto. You know I blotch in tropical heat zones.”

“There’s no humidity in Tucson, or Santa Fe. Or Denver?”

“Altitude makes my head feel like the lid’s on too tight.”

Sally sighs and subsides onto her sofa. “I did try to help. Remember that, when you and the cat are moldering away.”

“Can we discuss something else?”

“Certainly. What did Ted the Bastard leave you?” Though Sally has followed the family tradition of no cussing, since the divorce she always refers to Ted as if ‘the Bastard’ is part of his legal name.

I fiddle with the metal tip of the drawstring to my pants. “Why would you expect him to leave me anything?”

“The bastard stole you blind. If you’d have let me hire a real divorce attorney…” Sally’s expression completes her thought. She’s swimming in money and would gladly share an end of her pool with me, if I hadn’t inherited her stubborn determination to live on my own terms. Even if it kills me. “Why wouldn’t he leave you something if he cashed out first?”

“He had a new wife maybe?” I throw up my hands. “Oh, I don’t know why I’m being coy. It’s still so un-fricking-believable! Ted forgot to update his will. The one he had leaves everything to me.”

Sally’s brows peak in interest. “How much?”

I take a deep breath and say the words quickly. “Fourteen million.”

“Darling!” Sally claps in delight. “You’re set.”

“Not quite. The will leaves Talbot Advertising to me plus one million and change in insurance to the girls. So, she’s suing.”

Not even Botox injections can keep faint frown lines from forming on Sally’s face. “He left nothing to the slut?”

“Technically no. There were things already in her name, like the house, some cars, a few tanning salons—”

“A few what?”

“Don’t ask. But the will itself leaves her nothing.”

“How absolutely delicious!” Sally’s smile is wicked. “Yes, yes, Ines, put the drinks here.” She pats the place in front of her for her maid, in a black-and-white uniform, to lay out refreshments. She blows Ines a kiss then gives a little finger wave of dismissal.

She passes a gimlet to me then clinks her glass to mine. “To you, darling! Take the money and run!”

I can’t drink to that. I can’t even explain what I’m feeling. So I start with the least logical emotion. “I don’t need charity from a man who walked out on our marriage.”

“What charity? This is vindication. Ted saw the error of his way in leaving you and Mr. Can’t Admit I’m Wrong used his departure to make it up to you.”

“Sally, this was an accident, like a clerical error. He screwed her by mistake.”

“You bet his screwing her was a mistake! And now she’s going to pay for it. It’s karma, dearest.”