by Cara Mentzel
She was staying in an apartment, part of an extended-stay hotel-type establishment. After a short drive and more roundabouts than I’d seen in my lifetime, the driver opened my door and helped me out. He was kind enough to walk my suitcase up a long flight of stairs to the second-floor apartment, where Dee had the door open for me.
“Hey!” she said and gave me a hug. “I’m not gonna kiss you. I might be coming down with something.”
“Oh no.”
“How was your flight?” she asked.
“Great! Thanks for the ticket. They gave me an eye pillow and earplugs, even my own toothbrush!” I said nothing about the wino. The stewardess and I had worked diligently with a rag and seltzer water to minimize the stains. I didn’t want Dee to know that first class had been tainted by her new best friend—and Emma Thompson’s. I followed her into the apartment and she gave me a tour.
There were three bedrooms and mine had two twin beds in it. There was a stately living room with a long, floral-printed couch with claw feet, end tables, lamps, and a large coffee table. I could hardly imagine Dee needing that much space, but she’d be there for a total of six months and was expecting guests periodically. On the way to the kitchen there was an elegant dining table with room for ten settings, and Dee had a few things piled on the corner, mostly paperwork, including a script lying on a large manila envelope. The kitchen was impressive, with marble countertops and all the fixings of a remodel, but apart from the hot pot for Dee’s tea, it looked largely unused.
We both went down for naps. We usually napped together, but given that she was trying to avert a sore throat and was waiting for the doctor to call her back, we decided to sleep apart. I shut the blinds over my window, pulled back the crisp white duvet cover, and slid into the fresh sheets. My mind was racing for a few minutes, wondering what the plan was for that evening, when I would see the show, if we’d go out after for a bite with the cast, and if Dee would feel better. Any respiratory infection was stressful for Dee. She once explained to me how she knew which notes she’d be able to sing depending on where the mucus was building up and where she was swollen. With high accuracy, she could determine whether or not she would be able to modify her performance or if her understudy would need to go on in her place. I had no idea she could map out her voice with such precision and I was thinking about how it all worked when I fell asleep.
I woke up disoriented. It took a second to remember where I was, and I had no idea how long I’d been sleeping. I’m sure it had something to do with jet lag. With the blinds shut I couldn’t tell whether it was day or night and whether I’d been asleep for one hour or whether it was the following morning. I opened my door and didn’t see Dee. I walked through the kitchen, noted the time on the microwave, nearly 4:40, and judging by the light in the apartment it was 4:40 P.M. I moved toward her bedroom door, but it was closed. I didn’t want to wake her so I opted to unpack.
Back in my room, I approached my suitcase, then knocked it onto its side. I rotated the little golden numbers with a fingernail until they read the correct code. I pushed the button and pulled the silver latch. Nothing happened. I tried the button and the latch at the same time. Nothing happened. I fiddled with the numbers a little to make sure they were perfectly aligned, tried a different code, and called back to the United States to confirm the code. Nothing happened. The suitcase wouldn’t open.
I was pissed. I never liked to be an imposition when I visited my sister, especially when she was working. Every performance was important to her. She hated to miss a show and let her fans down. She kept a strict schedule. She slept well, drank tea, took steam showers, and depending on how she was feeling or how many shows she had to do in a given week, she was often on “vocal rest,” meaning she barely talked. Over the course of our lives she’d made exceptions for me and we’d had a handful of brief, whispered conversations over the telephone. I liked to think of those chats as tiptoe talking. But I still worried that when I visited Dee while she was working, she felt responsible for entertaining me. Of course she wasn’t. Mostly, I traveled to see her perform, to snuggle with her, and to hear her siren. The latter was one of my favorite things about her. She’d roll her voice from low to high and back down again—out of the blue. Occasionally she’d apologize for the loud, unexpected sound, as if she’d burped at a dinner table. Sirens were classic Dee and always endearing.
But there I was in London with my big green problem. I called the front desk and described my dilemma. A kind female voice with a British accent said, “We’ll send someone right over.” I thought that perhaps this wasn’t the first time they’d been called to an apartment to help open a suitcase. Within fifteen minutes a maintenance man showed up with a big red toolbox. He was a bulky chap who clearly took pride in working out his biceps before he went to work in the morning, and he had a sympathetic smile. When the front desk said they’d send someone, I’d thought someone would show up with an elegant gold master key or pick. But he set his toolbox on the dresser with a clunk and took out a crowbar. He was focused on the suitcase so he couldn’t see how my eyes widened when he withdrew that hunk of metal and took it to the luggage. I wasn’t sure if he was going to open the bag or whack it until it cracked. He wedged the crowbar into the slit between the metal lock and the plastic case, like a knife in a stubborn clamshell. He rocked it back and forth, back and forth.
He pried that bag open in under a minute. (Funny thing, I hadn’t once considered that the damn suitcase wasn’t mine.)
“Well there you go,” he said, back on his feet, standing over the bag.
At that moment, I was grateful for two things. One, that teaching elementary school had given me plenty of practice holding my tongue when I wanted to shout a string of cuss words. And two, that the look of shock on my face could easily be mistaken for delightful surprise. I was too embarrassed to let him know that he’d just broken into someone else’s suitcase.
“Nice work!” I said and forced a smile. “Thank you so much.”
I couldn’t get him out of the apartment fast enough. I closed the door behind him and then stood over someone else’s floral dresses, underwear, scarves, beige pumps, and bras with cups so big I’d need a third breast to fill even one. Still a little foggy with disbelief, I got down on the floor and sat cross-legged in front of it. I nudged a pair of light pink classic briefs to the side with the backs of a couple of fingers. The possibility that someone else on my flight owned the very same suitcase was unbelievable to me. A black duffel bag or a floral set with rollers, sure, but this beast, no way. And yet it was true. The frickin’ bag wasn’t mine.
I learned that Dee wasn’t napping behind her closed bedroom door when she called from the theater to check on me. I was scared to tell her about my luggage and felt a familiar twisting in my gut. I didn’t want to hear her reaction, the irritated sigh. The “Ca-ra.” I didn’t want to be a problem, so I decided not to tell her until I’d called the airline and worked out a plan.
According to the airline representative, I needed to get the bag safely shut again, take a train back to the airport with it, and lug it to some special customer service/baggage-claim desk where they’d swap one ugly green bag for the other. Then I’d hop back on a train with my real suitcase and return to Dee’s.
Dee’s reaction was as I had suspected. She stood in the doorway of my room where the evidence lay untouched—apart from one pair of underwear.
“Ca-ra.”
“I know. I’m sorry,” I said. “But did you see my bag? Who would have thought it had a twin?”
“I just don’t understand why these things happen with you,” she started. “How you can take care of two boys by yourself, pull off camping trips every summer, and chaperone thirty third-graders on a field trip, but take the wrong suitcase?”
“I know. I mean, I don’t know. I was rushing. I didn’t double-check. I’m sorry.”
Another sigh.
“It’s no biggie, though,” I assured her. “I’ll hop on the
train and take care of it tomorrow.”
“No, I’ll take you. I don’t want you traveling around London by yourself.”
“Seriously, Dee. I don’t need an escort. You don’t feel well. I’m a grown-up. I may have taken the wrong fuckin’ bag, but I can certainly return it on my own.”
“You don’t know the city. I’m coming with you,” she insisted. And because arguing with Dee would only annoy her more, I complied.
So, I sat in that room feeling like a child in need of supervision, rather than a thirty-two-year-old woman and mother of two. The old insecurity returned and, like I’d done many times before, I pondered the irony—that the strong, confident woman she wanted me to be, I was more likely to be in her absence.
I wished I could believe that Dee insisted on joining me for the round-trip excursion to Heathrow because I’d flown over the pond to be with her and she wanted to take advantage of every minute we had together. But I doubted that was true. I felt sad and lonely, very likely the opposite of how Dee wanted me to feel. I wanted to be Dee’s equal, to take care of her as much as she took care of me. I imagined tickling her arm, making her tea, and finding us a good movie to watch. Instead, we’d be schlepping that stupid bag back to the airport when she should be at home resting.
The next day we boarded the train to the airport. I set the suitcase against the scuffed wall by the window seat and we sat down. Dee scanned the train car looking for evidence that we were on the right one. When she spotted a conductor on the platform, she hopped up, tossed her purse on my lap, and popped out the door to verify the train’s destination.
The doors shut behind her. Of course they did!
Dee didn’t actually say You’ve got to be kidding me as we stared at each other on opposite sides of the glass, but I’m certain that’s what went through her mind. That and, Fuck! Cara has my purse and my phone. If I wasn’t the pain-in-the-ass little sister before, I definitely was then.
London swept past through the windows. A rhythmic foomp, foomp, foomp sounded beneath me. And I hoped that not too far behind, my sister sat on another train watching the same landscape race by. It seemed I was destined to screw up with Dee every time. Like somehow my anxiety created static interference around me, a blip in my personal natural order. I wasn’t quite myself with her and I didn’t know how to change that. With Dee, I became the sister with the problems, and she became the sister with the solutions. Suddenly, I felt certain that had she not been a part of that trip to London, had I gone simply to visit a friend, I would never have taken the wrong bag off the luggage carousel. Nothing was Dee’s fault, of course, but it was clear to me that she and I had grown accustomed to the roles we played in our relationship, and we’d yet to figure out how to escape them.
I tried to remember a time when I took care of Dee. It was the last time she was green. Dried tears had left tracks in her Elphaba makeup. She was in the emergency room. It was the afternoon of her third-to-last Wicked performance on Broadway after nearly two years as Elphaba. I’d come into town to see her last show.
Eight times a week during Act II a trapdoor opened in the stage floor. Dee took three steps sideways in the dark, stepped on the plank, and descended—“melted”—beneath the stage. After hundreds of successful performances, the trapdoor opened too soon. It lowered beneath the stage without Dee. She stepped in the dark into the hole that remained and fell through the floor until she caught herself by the armpit and elbow. According to Dee, the fall knocked the wind out of her. She couldn’t breathe. She thought she was dying.
There was a flurry of activity in the lobby of St. Vincent’s Midtown Hospital. The check-in area was filled with her managers, agents, friends, her dresser, Joby, Taye, Mom, and me. Some paparazzi loomed outside the ER’s sliding doors.
When Dee first arrived, there had been a kerfuffle removing her costume. The value of her black Act II dress was estimated at sixteen thousand dollars. Dee was in excruciating pain and could barely move. She wanted the dress cut off her, the way street clothes would have been under different circumstances, had she fallen as Idina Menzel and not Elphaba. But there was a consensus among the staff at the hospital and representatives from the production that they should try to save the dress. Dee lay on a gurney in her wig and shoes, her microphone and its wires still taped to her bra, while a gaggle of people fussed over her to remove the dress.
By the time Mom and I sat next to Dee in the ER, she was in a hospital gown, her hair a flattened mess with a couple of loose bobby pins, and she still had green hands, wrists, nails, ears, neck, and face. We sat with Dee unamused as a few distracted and giddy nurses spoke in shout-whispers just beyond her cot to tell each other, “That was Taye Diggs!”
Dee had broken a rib and could barely take shallow breaths. Until the morphine kicked in, she tried not to move. She was devastated. She was looking forward to her final performance the following day and it was evident she wouldn’t be able to perform. She was also due to begin filming the Rent movie in two weeks. She would need to perform “The Tango Maureen” and could hardly imagine being up to the task. She was angry, worried, sad, and traumatized … and green.
“I’m still fuckin’ green,” she said, her voice scratchy but soft and her eyes full of another round of tears. I borrowed a couple of hand towels and a small basin of warm soapy water from the nurses. Mom and I took turns gently wiping Dee’s face.
“It’s no use,” Dee whispered to us. “For some reason, it only comes off with a full shower and Neutrogena soap.”
“We’ll get it off, most of it anyway,” I told her as Mom pulled Dee’s hair out of the way and I dipped a white towel in the warm water, folded it like a compress, and lay it across Dee’s forehead. After a minute I wiped what I could from her temples, brows, and forehead. By the look of the towel, it appeared I’d removed a significant amount of makeup, but she still had a green glow and there were traces of green makeup that had collected around her brows and the orbits of her eyes. It crossed my mind that in removing the makeup I was helping Dee say goodbye, one layer at a time, to the green girl she’d loved so much.
“Close your eyes,” I said softly. I wet the towel again and ran it over her brows one more time, then down the bridge of her nose, pressing the covered tip of my index finger into the crevices along her nostrils, and then, finally, under the tip of her nose into the sloping valley above her upper lip. I couldn’t remember a time when Dee had needed me. I hated that she was wounded, but I took pleasure in taking care of her and I felt a little guilty about that.
Taye had joined us when the doctor approached and said it was okay for Dee to put her clothes back on and head home.
“Uh, my wife arrived in a witch’s costume, remember?”
Dee left the hospital high as a kite, in oversize scrubs cinched loosely at the drawstring, with several of us huddled around her to keep paparazzi at bay.
The following day, Dee agreed to make an appearance at what was supposed to be her final Wicked performance on Broadway. She could barely move or project her voice, and was on painkillers, so Taye went shopping to find something loose and comfortable Dee could easily get into and wear to the theater. He returned home with a red Adidas tracksuit. Mom and I helped pull Dee’s hair into a tight ponytail and put a little makeup on her.
I still don’t know how Dee managed to get on the Gershwin stage that night, but it doesn’t surprise me that she did. Maybe she did it because she felt pressure from the producers, or didn’t want to disappoint her fans—some of whom had flown hundreds of miles to see her—or maybe she did it for herself and the cast and their sense of closure. Knowing Dee, it was for all those reasons.
I watched from an aisle seat in the audience as Dee took the place of Shoshana Bean, the understudy, and stepped out onstage in her red tracksuit to perform Elphie’s last scene in the show with Fiyero, her good friend and New Kid on the Block Joey McIntyre. The audience instantly rose to their feet with thunderous applause, whistles, squeals, and shouts of �
�We love you, Idina!”
I clapped and cheered with them, tears streaming down my cheeks and down my neck because I couldn’t stop myself from clapping for even the second it would take to wipe them. The standing ovation was long. Every time the applause waned, someone shouted and initiated a new round of cheers. It must have gone on for over five minutes. The theater was filled with gratitude and love and it was all directed at my sister.
Dee and Fiyero finished their scene. Dee was stiff and cautious, but that made her all the more lovable. As generous as it was of her to climb out of bed and get on that stage, the night was less about what Dee had to offer and more about the gratitude her fans and peers had the chance to show her. For sixteen months her portrayal of Elphaba had helped marginalized people of all ages feel strong and significant, and they loved her. I understood how they felt. In that huge packed theater, there was an intimacy, people bonded together in their affection for Dee. It was a crazy, ridiculous moment. She should have been in bed. Instead she was onstage. She was in a red tracksuit—in itself a random selection. She was transparent, both Elphie and Idina. And most notably, barely able to speak—no less sing—she was almost without the voice that had brought her there. I was one of two thousand in the theater that night who loved Dee, but shortly I’d be in a car with her, headed back to her place. I’d settle her back into bed, get the icepack, the medicine, and the remote. “What do you wanna watch?”
I was holding Dee’s black leather purse and the busted green bag when the train arrived at the airport. I waited on the platform for her. In less than five minutes she stepped off the next train and ran a hand across her forehead.
“Here,” I said and handed her the purse.
