The Madwoman and the Roomba

by Sandra Tsing Loh

  There is one she is familiar with: Cats.

  The song: “Memories.” Fine!

  In the—yes—now ten days we have to prepare for the audition, I instigate a kind of Broadway homeschool program. Instead of Fame HIGH school, think Fame HOME school.

  In the morning, we do stretches and short dance routines I make up on the fly—step step STEP turn! Step step CLAP turn!

  I coach her on announcing herself: “ ‘Today I will be performing a monologue from Love, Loss and What I Wore by Nora Ephron.’ No,” I correct myself, “even better, say ‘by the great’—and then take a beat and give a big smile—‘Nora Ephron.’ ”

  She will be auditioning for a drama teacher named Rivka Mandelbaum—you think Jewish, yes?

  “Memories” from Cats is still a problem, because Hannah and I cannot agree on what the melody actually is, but no matter.

  DIANA ROSS FAMOUSLY had a tunnel built from the wings to the stage so she didn’t have to look at the little people. Unfortunately, in Hannah’s case the “little people” include her sister. There’s no room for a tent in our then-Volvo back seat. As Hannah chimes “Mem’ries!” for the hundredth time, Sally screams, “Go to middle school already and get out of my life!”

  IT’S THE DAY OF the audition. My shoes are pinching me. I’ve come dressed as a Stage Mom, in uncharacteristic blouse, skirt, and heels. I’ve got on lipstick and a red hair band. The school should know this future star’s mother is ready to bake cookies, fund-raise, usher, write personal checks, scrub tiny junior high school toilets!

  But now we arrive and I see a terrifying vision. Fifty other stage moms and their daughters, all feverishly running their lines. (Is that the sound of “Mem’ries”?)

  Oh no! I think. To get into acting school, my daughter forgot to be a . . . boy! Hannah doesn’t feel horrible afterward. She says her song and monologue went okay, and she flubbed the dance, but so did some other people.

  To my absolute amazement, she gets in! But now, the horrible experience begins.

  Because this turns out to be the Cruel Performing Arts Middle School (CPAMS). For the next three years, Hannah does not say one line on stage ever. CPAMS turns out to be this Studio City wormhole where parents in the entertainment industry send their kids. These pint-sized professionals have had head shots since second grade and it’s a total nightmare.

  The stars are the same three to five kids over and over again. We’re talking the kids who have won the genetic lottery by evading any of the acne, weight gain, metal braces, or general loss of center of gravity that typically comes with adolescence.

  Chaotic dance recitals with canned music would typically star the dance teacher’s daughter Sierra. Sierra had maintained the ninety-pound gamine-like frame of her girlhood and could do showy gymnastics in a style we might call “sexy cat.”

  At the annual “all-school” dance show, Hannah and literally seventy-five other girls would run out on stage, not even in straight lines. They would do a bit of a Charleston and lift one another and that was their whole number.

  This is the exact opposite of how Tiger Mom Amy Chua raised her daughters. Tiger Mom thought playing “Villager Number 7” in the school play was a waste of time. At CPAMS, we would have been thrilled if Hannah got to play “Villager Number 7”!

  But since Hannah loved theater so much, she still wanted to be part of the production. So she worked on crew, delighting in her wireless headset. Even though it meant you had to stay an hour after the actors left and pick up their costumes like Cinderella.

  As Hannah said, “CPAMS destroyed my dream.”

  FOR NINTH GRADE, Hannah’s neighborhood school becomes Big Urban High School (BUHS). It does not have the same stellar reputation as CPAMS, where everyone wants to go. But I’m thinking, Hey, wait a minute. Let’s send her to the “mediocre” performing arts academy and maybe she’ll get to speak a line ever.

  But while a bit ghetto-looking from the outside, BUHS is not at all mediocre. Head of the theater department is Mr. Wells, a Vietnam war vet turned drama teacher. He rules his kids with military precision. This goes beyond showing up and being on time, about which he is manic. (To this day, I’ve never seen any producer start a 3:00 p.m. performance at 2:55.) It’s about rehearsing and rehearsing and rehearsing. That’s until 6 p.m. every weekday, then six hours every Saturday.

  When is there time to do the homework you need to, for . . . UCLA? (And would you like fries with that?)

  So Hannah goes and auditions for the play, Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

  I stand on the sidewalk, look up into the sky and say, “Please, God. Give her any speaking part.”

  And astonishingly, she gets the very last part with a name. Audrey. Six lines. Eventually cut to four. But she . . . gets a part!

  Now come auditions for the musical, her bête noire. Hannah rehearses for it with her two girlfriends. They practice together in the living room. They’re adorable.

  Her two friends get cast. Hannah doesn’t.

  “Oh honey,” I say, “at least you’ll have a lot more time for your schoolwork.”

  “Oh no, mom,” she says. “I’m going to go to the rehearsals anyway. To learn the show just in case anyone drops out.”

  But indeed, there’s a guy playing A Drunk who has three lines. Due to the long rehearsal hours for so few lines, he sensibly drops out. Hannah suggests to Mr. Wells that she could play the Drunk as a female, because she’s there every day anyway.

  He says he’ll think about it.

  A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER, he says no.

  Her spirits are flagging, but she keeps turning up.

  And then suddenly another girl drops out and Mr. Wells puts Hannah in! And so it goes. She gets a good part, a bad part, a lead, an extra. . . .

  And now comes the big musical—Beauty and the Beast.

  She knows shooting for Belle is a reach, but is hoping that, because of her comic timing, she might have a shot at Lumiere.

  The text:

  LOL, Mom. I got cast as “Chorus Girl Number Five.”

  I type back:

  Congratulations! Five is the best one, honey. You wouldn’t want to be Chorus Girl Number Two, or Four.

  Months of endless rehearsals follow. Time that could have been spent studying for the SATs. Grinding down on those maps for AP world history.

  I maintain hope that a youthful passion for theater transitions into lucrative management consulting or an amazing corporate sales career. (“It’s global synergy, innovative products, engaged customers!”)

  But just as likely not.

  And yet.

  And yet.

  On the upside, I’m developing new skills. I’ve discovered how to use my iPad as “the Hannah Cam.” To wit: Among thirty chorus kids running around on stage, I’m always able to frame my kid in the exact center of the shot, as though she were the actual star. It takes some effort. In the big dance number “Be Our Guest!” I keep muttering, “Okay, Belle, enough singing, step aside!” or, “Yes, teacup girl, we get it—you can jump up and do the splits! You’re blocking my quietly seated daughter” or, “Oh no. Here it comes to obscure everyone—a frickin’ giant twirling cake!”

  But then for some reason, the video doesn’t save. I end up going to the show four times, to try to get it right.

  There are Tiger Moms, Panda Moms, Sloth Moms. (What’s below UC Merced?) I’m the mom who drove her daughter to all the rehearsals for her flyspeck part, and who can’t even manage to get decent amateur video.

  And yet.

  And yet.

  High school theater is its own kind of magic.

  The following year, the musical is Cole Porter’s Anything Goes. Hannah is in the chorus, without any numerical distinction at all. But perhaps it’s the most magical performance.

  Picture yourself driving up gritty Van Nuys Boulevard past taco trucks and tattoo parlors. At the end of the street, a lit auditorium beckons. A live orchestra is warming up. How did they manage to gather thirty mu
sicians at the Big Urban High School? Because that’s its big urban spirit: you can enter in ninth grade with no musical training, and they’ll start teaching you where you are.

  Roll of timpani, lights up . . .

  There are fifty kids on stage, in curled hair and 1930s costumes, on a massive cruise ship!

  It’s a cinematic thrill! The audience bursts into applause.

  The songs are classic: “Anything Goes,” “It’s De-Lovely,” “Let’s Misbehave.”

  My daughter’s exact role doesn’t matter (I have, in any case, given up on videotaping). The point is, fifty kids of all colors, shapes, and sizes get to sing and dance. There’s some deftly choreographed Busby Berkeley stuff (crowds can be precise when a Vietnam veteran is drilling them). The tapping has this insane verve. Even the smallest roles are full of brio. A small blonde boy in a yachting cap two sizes too big runs around the edges of a crowd scene as if to say, “I am the purser! I am the purser! This ringing of this ship’s bell is very important!”

  Every night, the chorus members and crew backstage act out the scenes taking place on stage, switching out who plays the stars.

  Our Second World children are perhaps neither elites nor victims. What are they?

  A storm of joy.

  Thanksgiving

  IT’S DEEP, deep autumn.

  Every twilight is like one of those Magritte paintings, with the dark houses in front and silhouette trees and lit-up sky behind them, fading.

  It’s the most beautiful time of the year. Also, inexplicably, the saddest.

  Typically, every year I take the girls to see grandpa in the morning, and then bring them back to their dad’s for them to have Thanksgiving in the evening.

  This year, Thomas has taken my dad to see some of Thomas’s growing extended family in San Diego. There’s not much actual Thanksgiving feasting these days, in any case, with my dad’s GI tube.

  So we just went out for breakfast this morning at Du-par’s (open every day of the year) and now I’ve dropped them off.

  As usual, when I drop them off, the door opens and closes, as though by an unseen hand. Perhaps an errant “Happy Thanksgiving!” is tossed out, or piece of misdelivered mail.

  Usually I would speed back to Pasadena, but today, I can’t bear to, just yet. The emotion of November hangs on me.

  I sit in my parked car and look back at my old house.

  Ben keeps it in great shape. There are always pleasing updates to admire. The driveway is newly asphalted, bushes are trimmed, the garden gate, at the left, has just been repainted.

  I remember all the Thanksgivings of the past, here.

  I remember when my father, sister, and brother, all the Lohs, descended on what is now my ex-husband’s house. We put two tables together lengthwise in our small but warm living room. That year, Ben did a Julia Child recipe. It took days of preparation, pureeing chicken livers with sweet butter and dolloping it all sensually on toast points. There were four pies (pumpkin, apple, blueberry, cherry) and a cheesecake.

  The meal was so rich, my father fainted at the table. We had to call 911.

  That said, everyone was pretty jolly about it. My sister snapped photos as buff EMTs strapped my dad onto a gurney. My brother continued to eat, taking over my father’s portions. My father had sustained so many emergency room visits over the years, it was its own holiday ritual.

  Now Christmas is coming. I’m both relieved but also a touch sad to see that Sally, the youngest child of the five grandchildren, she of the much-hated pants, infelicitously positioned stuffed animals, and forever-lost toothpaste caps, has set the bar quite low for Santa this year. Wasn’t it just three years ago that she demanded we rig a video camera so she could get photographic evidence of Santa? (Which we did: the live—if dark and blurry—footage shows a fat man in a red suit scrambling out of the fireplace and letting forth a dramatic startled “What the—?” And if Santa sounds a little like Charlie—that’s the magic.)

  No, this year, curiously: “I just want a booklet of cookie recipes with Post-its showing Santa’s favorites,” she has said, acknowledging, without acknowledging, her transition into teenhood.

  I look at our old living room picture window, its big square panes framed in green, eggshell curtains. I remember Ben and me sitting there, in front of that picture window, now almost ten years ago, telling our little girls we were getting a divorce.

  I remember their feet, so little, hanging off the couch.

  Did it have to be that way? How many hours have I missed with them? Half their lives.

  For years, I have told myself that being a divorced mom has been an unexpected blessing.

  When I lived here, Ben often traveled almost half the year, so I was essentially a solo parent. Not thinking things through, I wrote full-time at home with no child care (that would be outsourcing motherhood) to the 24/7 crunch of Trader Joe’s Pirate Booty and blare of Dora the Explorer (they’re learning Spanish!). Instead of quality time, it was poor quality time. (Or do we call that quantity time?)

  I would type on my laptop and throw—what else is in this pantry?—stale Halloween candy at my daughters and beg them to continue watching television.

  Astonishingly, what parenting experts don’t tell you is that eventually Second World children find television boring. Into the fifth hour, they would snap it off of their own accord. So I would devise the sorts of meaningless time-wasting games you might for pets. “Here’s a roll of Bounty paper towels. Tear them up into tiny pieces.” “Let’s play a game called Let’s Go into Mommy’s Purse and Wash All Her Change.” “Let’s put on a princess dress and heels and run on mommy’s treadmill.” Someone has to.

  But no, my girls always wanted all of us to do projects together, to bake cookies and squeeze lemonade. But I could barely keep the cooking and laundry and driving together. I could barely keep us in milk and underwear. The thought of the exploding flour and sticky lemons and seventeen-piece juicer? It was too much to contemplate.

  In short, upon splitting up our household, when I had my girls just 50 percent of the time, I had gazelle intensity. I was able to Bring on the Mom they never had. I helped them with homework, drew baths, rubbed backs. We’ve done things once thought unimaginable—like going bowling and miniature golfing and to country fairs. We baked cookies and carved jack-o’-lanterns—one year, as an experiment, we carved one out of a pineapple, just to see what would happen. The first time we sparked up my new Target juicer and let it rip, it was like finding Narnia.

  I WONDER WHETHER that’s just a story I tell myself, though.

  Because in the depths of November, I see there’s no rerolling the film. Quality time or not, it’s all just time.

  The Gardening Fairy

  SUDDENLY, IN THE MIDST of what seems a year of eternal orangey psychic dusk, global warming, and unpredictable wildfires, the heavens open and it rains. A lot.

  I would like to be able to say at this point, to passersby of our front yard: “Shield your eyes—I don’t want you to be blinded by my wildflowers.” But no. Perhaps my wildflowers, like my basil, have their own internal clock. To incubate, they need a few more months/seasons/years/millennia.

  As the weeks go by, though, we do start marveling over the grass, which is now almost waist high. I use the word “grass,” but in fact this greenery looks subtropical. There are teardrop-shaped leaves and thick leathery stems and twisting vines and clover.

  “Is that what it’s called, you think?” I ask Sally. “Clover?”

  “Whatever it is, I think it’s pretty.”

  “Overall, we are not displeased with our front yard, are we?”

  “It’s nice and green!”

  “Which reflects well on us.”

  “As if the rain were a personal talent of ours.”

  But it is looking a tad, well, wild and unkempt, so Sally and I decide we are going to attack it, together. I will pay her twelve dollars an hour, like a real job. We have absolutely no idea what we are doing, but we’re
not going to seize up in panic about that. We’re going to relax—ice to water, water to air—and be very Zen.

  I suggest we need a holistic gardening “gestalt,” à la . . .

  “Everything green is fine. Our gardening knowledge is adequate. We don’t need to know more. An ankle-high carpet of green is satisfactory.”

  “Wherever there are flowers,” Sally agrees, “we leave them.”

  “Exactly. It’s like an English garden concept.”

  Our garage boasts a rusty push mower, Weedwacker, and some buckets with moldy sponges in them, presumably for car washing, which also hasn’t been done for a while.

  Where did we get those mannequins? I wonder in passing as I pull out our tools. The Weedwacker lacks the bright blue plastic string that does the whacking. No matter. I pull my laptop onto the deck and wikiHow: “How to restring your weed eater.” Two grainy YouTube videos later I give up. Might as well try to knit a pussy hat.

  I take the Weedwacker to True Value. Happily, near the paint aisle, there’s an orange-vested staffer with a beard and round belly, like a friendly local beaver. Restringing Weedwackers is his particular art. Hello, Tenth Husband.

  “First you have to find the eyehole,” is I think what he says, “and the number two grommet, and then flip it over to dig in here for the key nut—”

  “Really?” I say, eyes wide. “Wow.” Fueled by my intense interest, he now in fact flips it over to dig in for the key nut. “No way,” I say, “cool.” My sincere awe blossoms into surprised gratitude as, while continuing to narrate what I should do, he methodically restrings the entire Weedwacker himself, free of charge. I am thrilled.

  When I return, I find Sally, in an improvised “farming” costume—overalls, red bandana, and flowered sombrero, weeding, with pure focused attention. But she is doing so one weed at a time, excavating them by the roots, almost as if she has named each one (“Jeannette!” “She was my best friend!”). At this rate, half our planet’s species will be extinct before our yard is done. Since we lack gardening gloves (Charlie used them for a Hindu fire pit) to protect her hands, Sally is literally using an orange cloth dinner napkin from Cost Plus. It’s like she’s “massaging” the weeds out, as one might pull warm baguettes out of a country oven.