Managing Expectations by Minnie Driver

Author:Minnie Driver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

6

A Weekend Away

My agent called me at the end of January.

“I think you should go to New York.”

“Why am I going to New York?”

“Because Circle of Friends is coming out in a few months and I am sensing this would be a good moment for you to go and introduce yourself to some casting directors and for you to meet with American agents.”

“Okay. Sounds good. One problem: I don’t have any money to buy a plane ticket or pay for a hotel or any food.” My agent sighed.

“What exactly do you do with the money you earn, Minnie?”

“I spend it. I get excited that I have it, and then I spend it.”

“What do you spend it on?”

“Well, last week, with the last of the GoldenEye cash, I took everyone to San Lorenzo for dinner.”

“Who’s ‘everyone’?”

“Twenty of my nearest and poorest.”

“You can’t afford to take twenty people to San Lorenzo!” she shouted.

“Not anymore I can’t!” I shouted back.

After a moment’s impasse she said,

“Okay. I’m going to lend you the money and you are going to pay me back when you get your next job.”

“You’re very nice to me.”

“I know. But you are basically a high-risk investment and I’m just choosing to ride the fluctuations of the market until it stabilizes.”

A week later, the evening before I left, my mother came over for dinner.

“There’s no food,” I said as I opened the door. “I spent the last food money on tights for New York.”

“Don’t worry, I bought fish,” she said, pulling a packet of fish out of her bag.

“It’s halibut,” she murmured conspiratorially, in the same way some people say “It’s Dior.”

“Ah no, Mum! No! Not fish! It stinks the place out when you cook it, and my hair will reek on the plane!”

“Stop complaining and put your hair in a towel. This fish is delicious and so good for us.” She barged in and headed upstairs to the tiny galley kitchen and proceeded to fry the halibut. I ran around opening windows, hair in a towel, wishing she didn’t have such a bizarre relationship with food. Whenever my mother would gain a few pounds, she would start eating oranges, and only eat oranges until the extra pounds were gone. At fifteen I’d been in the throes of adolescence; I’d had mild acne and had put on a fair bit of weight. I went to my mother that summer and asked for her help:

“Can we eat healthier, Mum?” She started to point toward the fruit bowl, but I cut her off.

“Don’t say ‘Eat oranges’!”

The next morning, I came downstairs and saw that there were new decorations all over the kitchen. Detailed, pen-and-ink drawings of skulls and crossbones, with the word “poison” underneath them, had been painstakingly drawn onto large adhesive stickers, the stickers had then been slapped onto anything my mother thought we should avoid: the cereal box, the bread bin, the cookie jar, the fridge itself. She always said that the war and rationing—having turned most food into contraband on the black market—had ruined her ability to figuratively metabolize it in a sane way.

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