In early September, in a year of hurricanes and floods, Hank and I decide to strip and re-varnish our back deck. We’ve been putting it off for several years while humidity, rain, snow, and neglect take their toll. We can wait no longer. The wood is turning green, and I worry it will soon begin to rot beneath us.
We have the television on constantly that weekend. Hurricane Katrina is battering New Orleans and the vicinity, and like most people we are horrified and fascinated at the same time. Coming from Florida, we have a deep respect for hurricanes. We feel the same way about alligators. They’re scary and unpredictable and yet they somehow define us—or at least they did. We no longer live in Florida or anywhere near a coast, and we do not envy the people in the path of this storm.
The weather is balmy in Charlotte—perfect for working outdoors. While I stand on the front porch admiring the clear Carolina blue sky, a large cobalt-blue butterfly with black trim etched on its wings comes dancing in front of me. Though I come from a family of rationalists, I tend to believe in signs, omens, messages from the gods. This butterfly making hieroglyphs in the air makes me think of transitions and transformations. Mother’s health, physical and emotional, is so erratic, that I wonder if the universe is sending me a warning. But when I speak to her later that day, she sounds fine.
Hank gets out the power washer. The work is long and laborious, and the green gunk so ingrained that I have to hold the hard, pulsing power washer just inches away from the wood. I shred much of it. It’s good to have something to do besides watch the bungling in New Orleans that’s costing people their lives. I am full of outrage, but like most people I don’t have much to offer besides a paltry monetary donation.
The hurricane passes and, though it was a bad one, it seems not to be as devastating as had been feared; the country will soon resume business as usual. Our televisions will return to their regularly scheduled programming, or so we think.
My life, at the time, seems to be on an even keel. A week earlier I went to a “radical forgiveness” workshop. The afternoon of the workshop I was piled on the floor with about thirty other people like puppies, everyone touching two or three other people in a human chain. Somehow in that moment I managed to let go of forty-something years of anger toward my father. I did this by letting myself remember how I felt about him when I was a little girl. Because he’d left us when I was so young, I didn’t know him well, and yet at one point I had loved him. I had loved him because he was my daddy and I didn’t know any better. I had loved him unconditionally. This was something I had not allowed myself to feel for him in all these years—simple, uncomplicated love. It didn’t matter that he was a shitty father. It didn’t matter whether he deserved it or not. I simply let myself feel what I had once felt for a brief time in my younger life, and it was good—like something black and putrid had been scrubbed from my insides.
On Monday the levees break in New Orleans and the poorest people in our land are left to drown before our eyes. My husband and I have the deck stripped and next we have to apply coats of varnish. At night we can’t work and so I stay glued to the TV, a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. We are all culpable in this travesty.
Eventually I turn away and go to bed. I wake up at 3 a.m., completely alert. Hank, who is often up all night, is nonplussed when he finds me working at my computer.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“I can’t sleep. For some reason I’m wide awake.”
And so I work until morning when I take Emmy to school and then go to Mom’s apartment to tend to her needs. I wash her feet, put ointment and Band-Aids on her toes, and put on her compression hose. Then we sit in the warm light from the windows, talking about hurricanes. One family story is that my mother’s favorite grandmother, Gammie, was so frightened by an enormous hurricane that hit Connecticut in the summer of 1938 that she died of a heart attack soon afterward.
Around eleven that morning, the phone rings at my mother’s apartment. I answer it. It’s my brother Jo.
“I need to tell you what happened,” he says in a gentle voice. “You can decide when and how to tell Momma. You know whether or not she can handle it. Daddy is dead. He died in the hospital this morning at 2:45 a.m.”
I hang up the phone and something completely unexpected happens: I burst into tears. “Daddy’s dead,” I say. I kneel down and place my head in my mother’s lap, and I let her comfort me. My father, whom I hardly ever thought about, is gone.
We drop our plans for the day and drive over to a coffee shop. As I sit there with my cup of cappuccino, I feel such grief. My mother also grieves. She grieves for the years she lost to this man who demeaned and vilified her, this man who slept with his students and brawled with men whose wives he took a liking to. She grieves for the brilliant young woman she was, whose musical talents overshadowed her husband’s, much to her chagrin and his rage.
She starts to tell me one of the stories, but I stop her. I’ve heard them all—the burned manuscripts, the master’s degree she earned at Yale but didn’t take so as not to be his “equal,” the sly insults that came from his charming mouth. I do not want to drink from that bitter cup on this day: Tuesday, September 6, 2005. We go to my house. I head upstairs to work, leaving her on the front porch to enjoy the weather. When I come back out, she’s sobbing.
A couple of weeks later, my brothers and I meet in Jacksonville for my father’s memorial service. He always said that when he died, everything he had would go to me and my brothers. He didn’t have a lot when he died except for the Steinway. What else there was of value (a Cadillac and a condo) belonged as much to his wife as to him. We thought it might have been nice to have some of his books (he had an extensive library) or some token to remember we actually had a father. Then, after the service, a middle-aged man we have never met before comes up to us and tells us our father “had been like a father” to him.
“Well, I’m glad he got to have that experience with someone,” I respond, glancing at the widened eyes of my brothers.
“When they moved to the beach condo, he gave me all these books,” he tells us. “I didn’t know what to do with them so I donated most of them to the library.”
What I learn is that my fate at fifty is to be needed but not necessarily wanted. Is there any cliché my life is not fulfilling, I wonder, dabbing hormone cream on my neck each night to prevent the heat coil inside me from glowing red. I spend my evenings playing Scrabble with my elderly mother so she’s not lonely. Mornings and afternoons I drive my teenage daughter to school in a seven-year-old station wagon that makes a horrible squeal, which no mechanic can identify. I stand in the checkout line at the supermarket with an enormous package of incontinence pads, resisting the urge to explain to the cashier that they’re not for me. I get a perfunctory kiss and squeeze from my husband before I totter off to bed each night.
This is not how I envisioned my life. Perhaps that’s the problem. I didn’t have a real vision. I didn’t make a plan. I set goals for various accomplishments, but I didn’t really have any idea beyond “write and publish a novel.”
Lest it seem as if I do nothing but measure my life in coffee spoons, I should add that morning drives to school with Emmy are respites of light and laughter. We blend in with the morning traffic, and I explain “lane science” as I shift from one lane to the next. We listen to her music—CDs by Bright Eyes or the Almost Famous soundtrack. Early on, I explain what’s going on in Conor Oberst’s lyrics in the song “Lua” when he says to the girl, “[You] just keep goin’ to the bathroom, always say you’ll be right back.”
“She’s doing drugs in the bathroom, baby,” I tell her.
We have a special street we like to look down as we crawl past it. It’s called English Gardens and it looks like it leads to some lovely alternate dimension where no one has any worries.
We also talk about whatever she has to do that day. One day she begins to recite the “5 C’s” of public speaking. When she gets to “confidence,” we spontane
ously break into The Sound of Music: “I have confidence in me!” We’re laughing like lunatics by the time she gets out of the car to go to school. Then I go over to my mother’s and she’s a crying wreck.
I’m going through my mother’s things. She’s always wanting help with “all these papers.” So many letters. So many people who admired her over the years. I open one of the cards from one of her Lost Colony friends and begin to read.
…I’ve been listening to our performances of ’80 & ’81: Vivaldi’s Gloria and Faure’s Requiem. Although the recording quality pretty much sucks, the phrasing & musicality, artistry & passion, still shine through profoundly. I want very much to obtain recordings of us doing Haydn’s “Mass in Time of War,” Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music that we sang in the gardens for Princess Anne. If you have copies of these, could you, would you make a copy for me and send it? I miss it all so much.
As for me, I’m doing better. Time has been the only thing that’s dulled the pain of losing Jose & I can tell it’s finally working. My health is still holding up okay. I take 5 doses of AZT every day which gets tiresome, but I figure the alternative is less than acceptable!
You’re a great lady, Roz. You’ve been a tremendous influence in my life & continue to be one to this day. I love you.
There’s no date on the card. The writer is probably one of her many gay friends who died of AIDS. She gets sad when she thinks of them. I don’t show her the card, but I can’t bring myself to throw it away. I place it in a box of other letters and cards—a reminder of who she is.
She needs reminders because in her present circumstances she feels like a nonentity.
Emmy has the same problem. Her second year of high school proves challenging. The seniors who had been her saviors the year before have graduated. She tries to find friends in her own grade, but most of them simply don’t know what to make of her. Emmy sometimes imitates the girls’ reaction to anything that doesn’t conform with their idea of the world: “Different . . .is, well, different .” And different isn’t a good thing to be. She does find some friends but they are not among the “double-names”—the pretty girls who all wear their blond hair parted on the same side. One boy manages to really get under her skin. As they sit outside after school, he brags about all the expensive cars his father owns. And then I pull up in the carpool line in my station wagon with the annoying squeal and the two fist-sized holes in the back bumper where an SUV rammed me; instead of fixing the car, I used the insurance money to pay for one month’s tuition.
But Emmy manages. The theater continues to be her refuge and her source of friendships. We ultimately realize why this school is worth the money: the drama program is innovative and exciting and driven by the students themselves. It is there that Emmy is introduced to experimental theater with its intellectual and artistic challenges. There she finds her métier.
While we are obviously different from the other families there, Emmy is generally happy with her two strange parents, both of whom work at home. She considers us more interesting than the lawyers and surgeons and CEOs who parent the other kids. She can let drop that her mother is a writer and that her father has an Emmy for his television engineering work on the Olympics. In her political science class, she is far more knowledgeable about the issues and the different stances of the two main parties because she grew up hearing us argue about Clinton and Bush, same-sex marriage, the Iraq invasion, global warming, or whatever is the cable news outrage du jour.
And she still has the Charlotte Children’s Choir. I spent my childhood entertaining myself while my mother was in one rehearsal or performance after another. I am spending my daughter’s childhood in much the same way. The highlight happens in her tenth grade year when her choir is the featured choir in a concert at Carnegie Hall. As Hank and I sit up in the balcony of that enormous ornate hall and listen to those angelic voices, I think of my mother, who also once played in Carnegie Hall as the guest pianist in a symphony orchestra. My thoughts are sentimental, I’ll admit, but musicians seem to me to walk with a lighter tread than the rest of us, and we live in a better world for their presence. Even my father gave his gift to the world. He played jazz his whole adult life—in bars and restaurants, with combos or alone. His music and his big toothy smile probably lifted the spirits of many an unhappy soul.
FIVE
SPRING AND SUMMER 2006
I try to incorporate my mother into my life whenever possible, but the divide between her world and mine is on the Grand Canyon scale. Once, while going through old newspaper clippings about her life, I found a cartoon showing a conductor with raised arms hovering over a prone long-haired individual holding a guitar. Above the drawing there was this quote: “The tight-lipped comment made by musician’s musician Rosalind MacEnulty when a fellow conversationalist opined that maybe classical music would come back now that the public had gotten a surfeit of rock ‘n’ roll: ‘It never left.’”
Perhaps she never appreciated rock music, but rock musicians appreciated her when they came into contact with her. On her mantel for many years were four beautiful Fabergé eggs given to her by the drummer of Pink Floyd, so the story goes. Now I have them.
One day in the middle of one of our rambling conversations about life, I ask my mother, “Do you feel complete?” I want to know if she’s okay with having reached the end of her life. Is there anything else she needs to do?
We’re sitting at the round table in her apartment where we always play Scrabble, and she taps her fingers nervously on the wood.
“I don’t want the requiem to die when I do,” she answers.
I think of the box of manuscripts in their tattered black folders—that box of poltergeists that follows us everywhere—now sitting on the shelf of her closet. The score needs to be put in computer format if we’re ever going to send it to a publisher and that will cost a few thousand dollars. And would anyone publish it?
“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “It won’t.”
For my little family, the masterpiece of the era is Harry Potter. Whenever a new Harry Potter book comes out, we clear the deck of all distractions, and each night Emmy and I retreat to Hank’s lair with a bag of gingersnaps. I read as many chapters to the two of them as my throat can handle. I have perfected each character’s voice so that taglines aren’t even necessary, and we become completely absorbed in the Hogwarts world. Hank sometimes loses track and insists that we back up, whereupon Emmy and I berate him for not paying attention. Sometimes I take a peek at the chapters ahead and, if they catch me, Hank and Emmy give me hell. I’ve done a few cool things in my life and been to some interesting places. But rarely have I been happier than when I am eating gingersnaps and reading Harry Potter to these two enraptured people—my husband and my child.
But this little family scenario is not my mother’s idea of fun. She needs an audience and we aren’t it. After my first Christmas with Hank’s family back in the early nineties, I showed my mother a videotape that Hank had shot of Christmas Day with his mother, father, sister, brother, and brother’s son. They were a group of ordinary people, and I liked them in spite of the Republican rhetoric that Hank’s father spouted. He was always kind and generous with me and he was knowledgeable about history. Jean, my mother-in-law, was full of family stories, and Hank’s brother and sister made me feel accepted. And they all adored Emmy.
I had spent so much of my life on my own that I had never expected to have a family. Not like this. When Hank and I broke up during my pregnancy, I thought I’d be a struggling single mom my whole life. Then one day I found myself in the sunny glow of Southern California with Ozzie and Harriet.
My mother dismissed the video with a sneer, and at that moment I hated her. I hated her groundless snobbery, her disdain for the ordinary pleasures that might, just might, have kept me from making some of the destructive choices I had made. Her pretensions filled me with rage.
My mother couldn’t stand to be ordinary. When I was in my late twenties, I was one of f
ive writers to win the Florida Screenwriting Award. I’d only had a few stories published, no books yet, so this was a big deal to me. And the Florida Film Bureau was treating it like a big deal. To give us our plaques, they had arranged a luncheon with certain state honchos in Tallahassee. I invited my mother to come along with me. She was younger then and firmly attached to her image as an iconoclast, a rebel who didn’t need a damn cause.
We were all seated at a round table in a dining room in the capitol. One of the bureaucrats, a nice enough woman in a suit, stood up to say a few words to honor us. My mother was in fine form, poking fun at everything. The speaker was no great orator. These speeches are, by definition, banal. But the food was free and tasty, and they were recognizing me for my writing. I was even in the newspaper and it wasn’t for committing a crime! I’d come a long way, baby, from the drug rehab to this fork-clanking event where the Secretary of Commerce, one Jeb Bush, was raising a glass of iced tea in my honor. I’d be getting a plaque, a trip to Hollywood, and a nice line for my résumé.
The woman began by saying, “We’re here to honor the winners. Well, we’re all winners, aren’t we?” Then Mom piped up in a fairly loud voice and said, “Not me. I’m not a winner. I’m a loser.”
All these years later, it seems innocuous, but at the time I was mortified and angry. This was supposed to be my moment. Couldn’t she just give me that?
She immediately looked sheepish, but it was too late. Mom just needed to have the spotlight. It’s the smartest-girl-in-the-class syndrome. Usually it wasn’t a problem because she was also kind and generous and fun to be around. But as she got older, the need for attention seemed to overwhelm her. If she wasn’t getting the attention, she literally couldn’t breathe.
Wait Until Tomorrow Page 9
