by Phoebe Fox
I took a deep, fortifying breath, looked my best friend right in her beautiful aqua eyes, and said, “Tell me about you and Stu. I’d love to hear.”
thirty-two
I left Sasha’s around four o’clock that afternoon with a heart lighter than it had been in weeks, a head full of complicated emotions about her and Stu, and in my purse, a compact disc containing the interview she’d conducted with my mother.
“Just listen,” she told me, pressing it into my hand when I’d finally left. “It’s interesting.”
At home I wandered into the guest bathroom and looked again at the gleaming tile that Dad and I had put in. I hadn’t talked to my dad since his revelation to me. I didn’t know what he was feeling—was he sorry he’d told me, worried how I was taking it, remorseful that he’d betrayed my mom—once by cheating on her, and again my confessing it to me? I needed to call him, to tell him how I felt—except I didn’t know yet. In the space of a few hours my entire idea of my father had changed, the whole dynamic of my family I always thought I understood, and I didn’t know what to do with that.
It was still early, so I hauled all the supplies my dad and I had bought inside from the garage and started working, mixing up a bucket of grout to finish off the bathroom tub. I carried in my laptop, too, and even set the CD into it to listen while I worked, but in the end I never pushed play, and I finished the job to only the scraping sounds of my trowel and the gentle drip of water from my sponge.
On Monday morning I wrote my column, and this time it flowed like floodwater:
What happens if, despite all your efforts, your determination, your calm, rational thoughts in the light of day, you still just can’t handle your bad breakup?
No matter how much we wish relationships could be broken down like scientific formulae, separated into their constituent parts that always react in predictable ways, they aren’t, and they don’t. Because they’re between human beings, and we are all messy and illogical and flawed.
Rejection touches a nerve so deep and primordial, sometimes we can’t stop ourselves from acting instinctively—for our survival. From our earliest societies, if your tribe rejected you—and ejected you—you were literally, utterly vulnerable to destruction: from starvation, from exposure, from saber-toothed tigers and bears. As children, we knew that without our parents’ love and care, we would die. Somewhere inside, we are still hard-wired to panic at rejection, to desperately cling to the people who love us. Our atavistic instincts make us fight to hold on to the safety and protection of love.
It’s hard to override instincts. The logical human mind is a wondrous and powerful thing, but it’s got nothing on ingrained unconscious drives.
So despite knowing better, you find yourself standing out in front of your ex’s house in the rain, staring into the windows and contemplating breaking in. You write the sappy letters; you make the ill-advised late-night drunken phone calls; you cry and scream and throw things and behave in ways you never—not once in your whole rational life—would have predicted yourself doing.
This may hurt, and it may be frightening, and you may not think you can live through the welter of pain and fear that has overcome your usual rational mind. But you can, and you will. This too, truly, will pass.
And in the meantime, if you are overwhelmed by your basic instincts, if you fight too hard and too fiercely to hold on to the love you think you will die without, if you make stupid, embarrassing mistakes—in other words, if you are human—forgive yourself: over and over and over again.
You messed up. You will probably mess up again. We can’t help it—that’s what we do. Don’t let those occasional lapses into irrational behavior define you or become who you are. Stand up, dust off, get back on your horse and ride.
Remember that romantic love—wonderful, intense, life-altering though it can be—isn’t the sum total of the love in your life. Your romantic partner isn’t your entire “tribe”; he or she isn’t the sole source of the acceptance and support that we all—to a person, without exception—need. Find all the rich veins of love running through your life and mine them: Family. Friends. Pets.
No, it isn’t the same. In the first swamping wave of rejection it won’t even feel like remotely enough. But it is there even when the person you think you can’t live without decides not to be there anymore. You are not alone. In the wise words of Gloria Gaynor, you will survive.
Forgive yourself. Forgive the people you love—even the one who rejected you, because they are human too, and dealing with their own insecurities and pain and mistakes.
Then take a breath, calm down, and cowgirl— or -boy—up.
My dad was right about the bathroom—finishing just the one little thing made a huge difference in how I saw the whole house. It had been so easy just to ignore the work it needed when I could escape to Kendall’s perfect condo every night. Now that I was literally faced with it every day, I had to deal with it. And suddenly, looking at how much we’d improved just that one little area, I wanted to. The vision in my head the night Sasha and I sat on my living room floor after my closing, dreaming of how we could make the house look—the one I’d carried with me until all the hidden little issues it had overwhelmed me and made me give up on ever making it into what I hoped—began to bloom in my mind again.
The Breakup Doctor was getting me—little by little, but finally close enough for me to get excited—back to my regular practice. I could be up and running within a couple of weeks, if I worked hard enough.
But regardless of how reluctant I might have been to tear myself away from what I wanted to be doing—working on the house—to what I needed to do—my new clients—the moment I sat down with anyone, everything else fell away and I was completely, totally involved in their problems.
Bristol MacGuire was currently in the on-again portion of the back-and-forth cycle she and her boyfriend James had perpetuated for years. “But I don’t know...the last few times it hasn’t been like I thought it would when we get back together,” she told me over coffee at the Sunrise Café off Cypress. “It doesn’t feel...healthy.”
“That’s because it’s not, and you’ve been trying to tell yourself that for years every time you break up with him,” I told her after listening to her entire story. “It’s scary to be alone. You won’t be forever—but you might be for a while. Do you have the courage to trust your instincts that are telling you that you want something better, someone different? Can you believe in yourself enough to make it through the hard part of ending it once and for all?”
She swore she wanted to try. I left her with my card, instructions to call me when her resolve faltered—no matter the time—and a bright, hopeful expression on her face that had erased the beaten one she’d shown up with.
I sneaked back to the house between all my appointments to get in as much work as I could—even if it was just painting a single wall with one of the random gallons of paint I’d bought half-price from the “oops” rack at Home Depot, along with a package of the cheapest brushes I could buy. (“They’re only really good for one job,” the paint clerk had warned me disapprovingly. “That’s okay,” I told him. “So am I.”) Then I would head out again to meet with whoever was next in my calendar.
Frank Farqu—unfortunate name—fidgeted and squirmed as we talked about his ex-girlfriend Carole. Finally, after creative probing on my part, I got the whole story out of him—she’d broken up with him two months earlier, but he couldn’t stand to let her go. He called her at all hours of the day and night, left notes on her car at her work, sent flowers every week, and was even in the process of closing on a house in her neighborhood—across the street from hers. “But I got it at foreclosure—really cheap,” he assured me, as though that explained everything.
“Frank,” I said gently, “you’re stalking her.” This time the memory of my own behavior brought up a flare of empathy, rather than shame.
He
looked horrified. “No! It’s not like that! I would never do anything to hurt her—I love her!”
There followed a careful discourse by me on the difference between dating and stalking (one was mutual, and the other was criminal). I managed to convince him not to close on the house—and I gave him the name of my friend Monique, a real estate attorney who could help him get out of the contract—but realized that Frank needed more intensive care than a brief Breakup Doctor consult could provide. We set up weekly appointments, with regular consults in the meantime, as I didn’t think Frank should be left to his own devices that long. And I managed to extract a promise from him that he would leave Carole completely alone for twenty-four hours, when he and I would meet again. Baby steps.
Finally, when I found a block of time one evening to get one entire room painted—my future office—I set up my ladder, opened and stirred the can of paint—“Elysian Fields,” a mossy green—then brought in my laptop and pressed play.
thirty-three
I heard the clearing of a throat, and then, “Okay,” came Sasha’s voice. “So let’s start with just making sure I have your name spelled correctly. Is it –I-A-N or –I-E-N-N-E?”
That startled a laugh out of me at the same time I heard one from my mother. I’d thought Sasha knew.
“Oh, honey, neither. Vivien’s just a nickname.”
“It is? For what?”
“Ruth Edna.”
I knew this story—the clunky, unmusical name she hated, legacy from each of her grandmothers. “You don’t look like a Ruth Edna,” my father told her when he met her, and he rechristened her Vivien because he said she reminded him of Vivien Leigh.
She didn’t look like Vivien Leigh, either. Not at all. But my dad met her playing Leigh’s most famous role—or at least a facsimile of it—and for all his other wonderful qualities, he was not a man of vast imagination.
As I stroked on the first line of paint along the top of the wall where it met the ceiling, I listened to Mom tell Sasha the story, and Sasha’s delighted laughter. “It’s perfect for you. It suits you much better than Ruth Edna.”
“But history will out,” my mom said. “Better print the real one.”
There was a strange intimacy in listening to my mother talking like this, her voice devoid of the careful tones she used when talking to me. As if I were eavesdropping on her in a private moment.
“So this role...” Sasha prompted her.
“Eleanor. The queen.”
“Yes. Katharine Hepburn played it first, didn’t she?”
“Not first. But most famously, yes.”
“Right...sorry.” I heard a whisking sound, and pictured Sasha slashing through something in her notes.
“The first Eleanor on Broadway was the British actress Rosemary Harris, in 1966. You’d probably only know her from those Spider-Man movies—she played Peter Parker’s aunt. Her Eleanor was opposite Robert Preston, an old Western actor. Did you ever see the film The Music Man?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Mmmm. Well, it’s a good one. That’s probably his most famous role—Harold Hill. Rent it sometime.”
“Okay, I will.” I rolled my eyes, but Sasha sounded earnest.
“And in that same Broadway production there was an up-and-coming actor who played Philip, king of France. His name was Christopher Walken. I’m guessing you know him?”
I could tell my mom was teasing her now from Sasha’s laugh. “Yes, ma’am. Him I know.”
“Well. It’s not the history of the show you came to talk about. Why don’t you ask the questions now.”
“Okay.” Another pause, and I heard the shuffling of some papers. I’d watched Sasha do interviews before, and been amazed by her technique: She charmed the socks off her subjects and got them talking, and pretty soon they were telling her things they’d probably never told their closest friends. This hesitant, rudderless interview wasn’t her style, and I could tell it was making her nervous to talk to my mother like this, one on one.
Another throat clearing. “Okay. So...um...how about we start with how you got this role? I’ve heard every actress in town was vying for it.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.”
“Well, I talked to your director, Howard Rollins, and he said competition was pretty fierce.”
“You talked to Howard?” My mom sounded surprised.
“Yes. And a couple of your costars. And your stage manager, Connie.”
“You’re a good girl, Sasha. Very thorough.”
“Thanks, Mrs. O.” She sounded so happy. How did I not realize how badly Sasha needed mothering, how much she had always craved it from my mom as much as I had tried to get out from under it?
“Well, the auditions were quite busy,” my mom conceded. “I will say that.”
“There were”—papers shuffled again—“eighty-one women who auditioned.”
A silence; my mom made no reply.
“Howard Rollins—your director—said”—more flipping through her notes—“‘I knew a number of local actresses who were well equipped to play this role, or I wouldn’t have selected this particular play. But only Viv Ogden was born to play it.’”
“He’s being hyperbolic.” But the raw pleasure in my mother’s tone was clear. I finished the first section of cutting in and stepped down to move the ladder. It wasn’t a bad color—a soft, cool green. Soothing actually—probably why it was so often used in prisons.
“Did you know Rollins before this play?”
“Of him, certainly. Most of my favorite productions have been directed by him. I do follow the local theater scene fairly closely.”
She did? I’d never heard her mention it once until the Mom Bomb.
“Tell me a little bit about your previous acting career.”
Career. Please. The mechanical precision required to cut an even line along the ceiling demanded all of my focus, but not all of my attention.
I knew these stories, and I tuned partway out as my brush deposited paint along the wall. My mother’s litany of her past theatrical triumphs formed a droning backdrop to the repetitive dip-wipe-stroke of the painting.
A green tongue of paint lapped over onto the ceiling in a sloppy stroke and I stepped down off the ladder and out to the garage for a rag. I didn’t bother shutting off the recorder as I left, and by the time I’d gotten back into the room, the rag dampened at the kitchen sink, and started scrubbing the errant strip of paint, my mother was still reciting.
“...That was the role that won me ‘Best Local Actress’ by the Tropic Times for the first time—out of three years running. And the year I was offered a partial scholarship to school.”
“Wow, I never knew that,” Sasha bubbled. “What school?”
“Juilliard.”
The one-word answer snapped my head around from cleaning my mess as if my mother were in the room. Juilliard? My mom had gone to Juilliard?
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Sasha’s response echoed my own thoughts. “You went to Juilliard? Jesus, Mrs. O!” In her excitement she forgot that it was never, ever okay to curse around my mother.
But for the first time in my life, my mom didn’t correct the language with a rebuke sharp as a slap. “I did not.”
There was a lengthy silence, and I tried to picture what they were doing. I wished the interview were videotaped so I could see the expression on my mother’s face.
“Why?” Sasha’s voice was hesitant—my mother’s tone was meant to put an end to the conversation. But even Sasha’s obsequiousness around my mother was no match for her journalist’s instinct for where the story was. “Why didn’t you go if you had a scholarship?”
For a long moment my mother didn’t answer, and I began to think she would simply stubbornly wait Sasha out—sit there in silence until my best friend went on to a new line of questioning. But t
hen she spoke.
“A partial scholarship. I didn’t have enough money for the rest of my tuition.”
“But weren’t your parents—”
“They did not support a career in the arts.” My mother’s staccato reply cut Sasha off, and there was another long silence. I felt for Sash—I could picture her sitting there, brimming with follow-up questions, biting them back because of my mother’s rigid response. I waited, slumped against a rung of the ladder, the towel limp in my hands, for her to start a new line of questioning.
Instead I heard a rustling, as though something or someone were moving. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. O. That really sucks.”
“Sasha...is there a need for the language?” My mother was obviously recovering herself.
“You know what?” Sasha’s tone was righteous. “Sometimes there totally fucking is.”
The laugh that burst out of my mother was like none I’d ever heard from her. Loose, loud, a guffaw almost. My mother did not guffaw.
Sasha’s giggle echoed it, and I felt a quick spark of resentment all over again. She was sharing the kind of moment with my mom I’d never been offered. Seeing a side of her my mother had never—would never—show me.
I dropped the towel and picked up my brush again to resume painting. Dip, wipe, stroke.
Maybe she couldn’t.
The interview had picked back up, that momentary lapse behind Sasha and my mom as they carried on with their question-and-answer session. All business again.
I thought about what my dad had told me, and tried to imagine my mother’s face when she’d found out my father had betrayed her.
My mother was the engine of our family. My dad was a wonderful dreamer, happy noodling idly with his woodworking and his newspaper and his projects—happy amid his family.But it was my mom who guarded the budget and wiped the noses and drew the boundaries and then enforced them so that everything worked as it should. So we grew up with structure.
