by Cara Mentzel
“He thought I needed a snack!” I shouted as I recounted the moment to Dina.
She cocked her head to the side, stuck out her tongue, and said, “Tho thexy,” and then we laughed until our stomachs hurt. I left her room wondering who had taught her how to kiss, wondering what girls without big sisters do. I left her room feeling lucky.
The summer before I started high school I returned home from camp with mono. If I had to guess, I caught it the night I went with Geordan Reisner to the empty soccer field and let him spend twenty minutes swinging his tongue around the inside of my mouth. A step up from Ryan, Geordan did not take the term lip-locked literally so I was able to take advantage of the ample oxygen the outdoors had to offer. Geordan was hot, but the trade-off for our make-out session hardly seemed fair. I missed the first month at Syosset High School.
Dina was a senior there when I was a freshman. When I recovered from mono she showed me around, made sure I knew where all my classes were, and introduced me to teachers and friends. When I met people at school, I wasn’t just Cara, I was Dina’s Little Sister. It was a title that existed before I took my first official step through the school’s double doors. Dina even introduced me to David O’Brien, my first high school boyfriend and biggest heartbreak. People sang jingles about David and me, jingles spiked with sexual innuendo that pretty much summed up our relationship. His, to the tune of the o.b. tampon commercial, “O.B. set yourself free. Just try O.B. and you’ll see.” Mine, to the tune of the Sara Lee baked-goods commercials: “Nobody doesn’t do it like Cara Lee.” (A play on my middle name, Leigh).
And when David broke up with me—probably for not “doing it”—I was devastated. Dina crawled into bed with me, leaned her head against mine, and folded herself around me. She spooned me while I sobbed and until we woke up for school the next morning.
Besides helping me with my romantic troubles (and tending to her own), Dina spent much of her time in high school developing her voice. She studied everything from classical music to contemporary. She even started to write her own music and recorded her first demo, titled, “Too Late for Love,” which she’d written during a brief breakup with her long-time boyfriend, Glen. I remember thinking that if high school was too late for love, then things weren’t looking so good for me.
Perhaps the biggest contributor to Dina’s growing vocal versatility was the weekends she spent singing at weddings and bat mitzvahs. In her junior year she lied about her age and took a job in a wedding band. Two to four times a weekend, she would slip into a black cocktail dress and then into her red Nissan coupe and drive all over the tri-state area singing songs from four generations, Motown to Madonna, and learning lyrics en route. I remember when Madonna’s lyric-rich “Vogue” was released and that it took a lot of practice for Dina to memorize all the words, “Greta Garbo and Monroe, Dietrich and DiMaggio, Marlon Brando, Jimmy Dean, on the cover of a magazine…” I once got to see Dina sing a duet of “Tonight I Celebrate My Love for You” with the slimy wedding-band leader. He was Italian, wore white suits, and had a thick mustache. Every time they sang the line, “When I make love to you,” and looked longingly into each other’s eyes, I worried that he had bad breath and wondered if Dina wasn’t only destined to win a Grammy one day, but an Oscar.
Mom supported Dina’s job as a wedding singer, which reflected a change from her previous position on Dina’s pursuing a career as a professional singer during Dina’s childhood. When Dina was in elementary school, Mom was at the bus stop with her one morning and watched a mother pull her crying daughter off the bus for an audition in the city. “Mommy, I don’t wanna go!” the little girl screamed and the mother insisted, tugging her daughter by the hand to a nearby car. Mom told herself she’d never be that kind of mother. And she never was. She encouraged Dina’s singing, but not a career as a child star. When Dina saw an audition announcement in Backstage magazine for Broadway’s Annie, Mom refused to take her, and she didn’t hunt down acting agents for Dina either. She protected Dina and wanted her to have a real childhood and strong sense of self. There was enough time to open herself up to the criticism that waited for her in the world beyond school.
Dad wanted Dina to succeed, too, but he worried about her entering a competitive industry where so few people found success.
“Just make sure you have a plan B,” he told her when she was applying to New York University’s new musical-theater program. Mom was quick to disagree with him.
“You can’t have a plan B, Dina. You can’t let a fear of failure take your focus away from a dream like that.” That may have been easy for Mom to say because she never doubted Dina’s future success. Somewhere a stage waited for Dina and Mom knew time would take her to it.
I appreciated Dad’s caution, but I admired Mom’s insight. There was an inherent maternal wisdom in my mother that prevailed despite her own mother’s failures. There was a light in Mom, like her unwavering faith in Dina, that reached us through what—given her upbringing—could have been an impenetrable cloud.
When Mom told Dina to pursue her dream wholeheartedly, I wondered what would happen to someone like me, someone who didn’t even have a plan A. While I’d often told people I wanted to be a veterinarian—I loved animals and biology and the image of myself as a brainy doctor—I wasn’t as certain about it as I let on. My wanting to become a veterinarian was partly an attempt to identify with something the way Dina identified with singing. When it came to having dreams, I only had one: to be a mother. But being a mother didn’t feel like enough of a dream when set beside Dina’s dream of stardom. As a mother, I would be one of many, not one of a few like Dina. To feel accomplished, motherhood might have to be paired with something else I hadn’t identified yet.
Furthermore, my fantasy of performing in some way, singing or acting, being on a stage, persisted. I was embarrassed by it and tucked it away in my back pocket where I could keep it safe without having to fully acknowledge it. But sometimes, like one morning during choir, the fantasy was impossible to ignore.
“Stand up if you want to give it a try,” my choir teacher said in ninth grade, as if trying out for a solo were as benign as recording an outgoing answering-machine message.
I sat in a metal folding chair in the top row of our auditorium-style classroom and watched as half a dozen girls rose to their feet. Some shot straight out of their seats, some stood up slowly, tentatively. I knew them and weighed their potential: Nicole, I bet she’d be good. Natalie, I think she takes voice lessons, and others. But me? I considered my chances. I wasn’t certain that I would suck, but there was a good chance I would. My singing had proven unreliable. Plus, I was nervous, and when I was nervous my trachea tightened around the notes and warped them on their way out. But I also wondered if it was possible that time or estrogen (or a miracle) had tuned my vocal cords. Was it possible that my voice would glide through the room the way Dina’s voice always did?
The girls on either side of me remained in their seats and I wondered if they were tempted to stand up, too. If, like me, they were too afraid to try. But wasn’t the risk of failure greater for me than it was for them? If I sang, I wasn’t going to be compared to Nicole or Natalie, I was going to be compared to the best—to Dina. It meant that if I failed, my failure was bigger than anyone else’s. It meant that my mistakes would be louder. And this was a downside to being Dina’s Little Sister. Teachers and classmates always asked, “Can you sing like your sister?” “No,” I’d say, and then smile in the awkward pause that usually followed. I’m fine with it, with the “no,” I liked to tell myself. I was proud of Dina and of being her sister. But behind that smile and in that pause, beneath the “fine” and “proud,” was the belief that something was missing in me. Because every “No, I can’t sing” was a subtle reminder of who I wasn’t and what I couldn’t do, at a time when I’d yet to figure out who I was and what I could do. With Dina near, my identity was developing in relation to her; I wasn’t figuring out who I was as much as I was coming to un
derstand that I wasn’t her.
I could feel my pulse tapping in my ears. I wanted to stand up and try to sing the solo, but my limbs felt numb, thick, and heavy, like drying cement. I was looking at my feet and wondering if they could even hold my weight when the sound of the piano drew me out of my thoughts and back into the classroom, where, through no fault but my own, the teacher called on a girl who wasn’t me.
In Syosset High School, if you had acting aspirations but couldn’t sing, your performing options were limited. Syosset didn’t put on plays, only musicals. Plays were so scarce that apart from Shakespeare’s Juliet and Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire, I couldn’t even name a play with a leading female role. In my high school, as in elementary and middle school, people starred in musicals or they didn’t star at all. If you weren’t one of the top singers in school, you were relegated to the chorus. If you wanted to act, the only option was the Forensics Club. In Forensics, students prepared eight-to-ten-minute extemporaneous pieces or dramatic interpretations for competitions. Forensics wasn’t full-on theater—but it was better than nothing.
Dina had departed for NYU’s musical theater program, when, in the beginning of my sophomore year of high school, I considered joining the Forensics Club. Dina had participated in Forensics, and the teacher, Ms. Eslinger, was an elegant blond woman who had been her champion. They’d been close and were still in touch. Even with Dina gone, the thought of trying out for Forensics felt like knocking on the door of their private party. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I didn’t belong there.
I imagined performing a monologue for Ms. Eslinger. How would she keep my performance separate from Dina’s performances? I remembered listening to Dina rehearse a monologue from the play (and later a movie starring Barbra Streisand) Nuts. Would Ms. Eslinger watch me on a split screen, with Dina—her sloppy-haired Barbra Streisand in a psych ward, conjuring tears, declaring, “I won’t be nuts for you!”—on the left, and me on the right—performing who knows what? Would it matter? Whomever I played, I’d be performing side by side with Dina, and I didn’t want to risk looking ridiculous in comparison. I didn’t want to be pitied. “Did you see Idina Mentzel’s sister trying to act today? Yikes, must be rough,” someone might say.
Even if I showed promise, all possible outcomes made me uncomfortable. At best Dina and I would be different, but at worst one of us would be found lacking. I didn’t want to be the one lacking, but I didn’t want Dina to be, either. I didn’t want her to be less so that I could be more. I simply wanted to be extraordinary in my own way.
There were countless imperceptible ways that I backed away from interests that overlapped with Dina’s. But because of Forensics, there was one notable moment when I consciously decided that singing and acting were pursuits that belonged to Dina alone. On the day that the Forensics Club would be starting after school, I closed my binder, waited for the bell to ring, and went home.
Dina wasn’t the only reason I moved away from New York after high school, but she was one of them. My desire to be close to her remained, but I knew I needed to be someplace she hadn’t already been.
In my thirties, I found the old VHS tape of the Guys and Dolls camp performance in the bottom of a rubber storage bin. I watched myself sing “Take Back Your Mink.” There I stood in a white dress at the edge of the stage.
“Take back your mink,” I sang, and removed the first shoulder strap of the dress.
“Take back your pearls,” and removed the other strap.
“What made you think, that I was one of those girls,” and I shimmied the dress down to the floor until I stood more than half naked in that silver tube top and miniskirt.
When I shimmied and lost the dress, a hundred boys whistled and screamed like young men at a bachelor party. I winced as I watched the striptease of my thirteen-year-old self with the eyes of a thirty-year-old teacher and mother of two. I remembered that moment of contradiction, how it felt good to be liked, but it didn’t feel right. How I loved that everyone’s eyes were on me, but still wished I could find a sleeping bag to slide into. Then, staring at a freeze-frame on the television screen of myself with the dress at my feet, it occurred to me that starring as Adelaide may have had less to do with any talent I possessed and more to do with my olive skin and long legs. I felt sorry for the girl on the screen, sorry as if she were my daughter. I wished I hadn’t watched the video. I wanted that young girl to think that she’d scored the leading role because of her talent, not in spite of a lack of it. A few minutes earlier, I thought I’d found a sweet memory in the bottom of that bin. But really, I’d lost one.
PART II
MOVING ON
Lesson 4
HOW TO MEASURE A YEAR
I found my place.
At first glance, the University of Colorado at Boulder looked like it was plucked out of Tuscany. The vast majority of its buildings were constructed of pink sandstone from Colorado quarries and Tuscan-red barrel-tile roofs, features that gave continuity to architecture that ranged from college Gothic to modern, and reflected the changing styles of the university’s 135-year history. The university stood in a valley against the Flatirons, monstrous red rocks that jutted out of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and slanted away from the university like giant hands gesturing toward a work of art. “Voilà. Here’s Boulder,” they said.
On a self-guided tour of the campus with my parents, I noticed three fraternity-type upper classmen across the street. While looking at the college incarnation of “the cool kids,” I walked straight into a parking meter. If there were a way for a halo of twittering birds to circle my head, they would have. There was no question that the laughter across the way was at my expense. But more jarring than the impact or the embarrassment were the realizations that although the landscape had changed, I could still make an ass out of myself, and still had no idea where I was going.
I originally applied to CU because just north of Boulder was Colorado State University. CSU has a prestigious veterinary graduate program, and completing my undergraduate in Colorado would bring me that much closer to a study of veterinary medicine. But during my senior year of high school I interned at Syosset Animal Hospital and realized that veterinary medicine wasn’t for me. Not because the enema blow-out of a chocolate Lab was the most vile experience I’d had to date, but rather because being a vet seemed like a lot of guesswork, trial and error, and I didn’t like that the treatment for most questionable diagnoses was a pill or a surgical procedure. I changed my mind and applied to CU as an “Undecided” major.
CU was a fresh start. I didn’t know of one student from my high school attending with me and there were approximately twenty-five thousand students there at the time. For once I looked forward to getting a little lost in the crowd. My first order of business was to get rid of “Long Island.” I traded in my four-hundred-dollar jappy Justin cowboy boots for a pair of wool socks and Birkenstocks—and yes, I wore them together. I wore no makeup, had no hairspray, and listened carefully to my Colorado roommate, who, to me, sounded like she had an accent, but really what she had was a lack of accent. I wanted that, too. I wanted an absent accent.
“Where ya from?” people would ask.
“Long Island,” I’d say.
“Oh, Lawng Oyland, hah?” They’d repeat like it was an original reaction, like I’d never seen Mike Myers do “Coffee Talk” on Saturday Night Live.
In Boulder I wasn’t Dina’s Little Sister, I was just another freshman student with a new Target comforter and Brother word processor. But I didn’t entirely fit the incoming freshman profile for CU. In 1992, CU was one of the top-ten party schools in the country and I didn’t party. I chose the substance-free dorm (an odd concept since all dorms were theoretically substance-free). I had a copy of that “Footprints in the Sand” motivational passage, the one that ends with “When you saw only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you,” in a Lucite frame next to my bed. I wasn’t religious. Judaism was my heritage, but t
o me it was about brisket and chopped liver, bat mitzvahs, and the calming depth of our cantor’s tenor. I was spiritual. I liked to meditate and talk to God. To me, God wasn’t a gray-haired bearded man in a robe—not Jesus or Allah—God wasn’t so much a person as a symbol of Love and a guiding force in the universe. I believed in platitudes like “God never gives you more than you can handle” and “Whatever is meant to be is meant to be.” At college I had hoped to surround myself with like-minded peers, but in that first month at school I learned that the substance-free dorm had less to do with booze and more to do with Bibles. Incessant invitations to Bible study nearly drove me to drink.
In Boulder the only person comparing me to Dina was me, and I didn’t compare us often. But occasionally, in the white solitude of a rounded library study carrel, I would remember that Dina had graduated from Syosset High School with a 94 grade-point average and I had graduated with a 92. I don’t know how or when I stored our high school GPAs in my memory, but I could retrieve them as quickly as my own birthdate. Remembering them was irrefutable evidence that I compared myself to my big sister more than I liked to admit. The shame of having remembered those numbers was far worse than the inadequacy I felt because of the difference between them. And what was the difference between them? Two points. Were two points even statistically significant? Probably not, but part of me believed Dina’s 94 meant that even when the variable of our ages was controlled for, she was better than me, smarter than me. This was another tricky part of being Dina’s sister, of being anyone’s sibling, probably. Comparison is built into your very existence. Someone is always the Smart One. The Talented One. The Funny One. You can’t both be fast, one of you has to be faster—the Fast One. Even if someone else isn’t passing judgment, you’re making the comparisons on your own.
School was hard. Friendships were fleeting and I was lonely, but I also felt accomplished, if for no other reason than that I hadn’t walked into any more parking meters. I’d hauled myself more than halfway across the country and I was okay. I did my work and found my bearings around campus and town. It helped that I lived against the dignity of the Rocky Mountains. They were the spine of Colorado’s landscape and I felt stronger and more stable in their company.
