True Stories from an Unreliable Eyewitness

by Christine Lahti

  In kids’ defense, this low embarrassment threshold is probably a good instinct. They are becoming socially aware. They don’t know who they are yet, and we do, so it makes sense they would want us to shut the fuck up and give them some space to figure shit out. It’s a healthy kind of narcissism that will eventually be annihilated anyway, as it was for us, once we realized that nobody really cares.

  For me this vital life lesson didn’t occur until well into my forties. I recall being paralyzed with shame, afraid to go into public places, if I got a negative or even a mixed review on a performance. After I shared this devastating paranoia with my therapist one day, she said, “Hate to break it to you, Christine, but you can count on one hand, and probably even less than that, the people who actually care.”

  But no matter how painfully long it took you to get over yourself, you will be shocked to find that they haven’t. Only last night, I was walking home from a restaurant with my twenty-two-year-old son. Without thinking, for some insane reason, and not without some effort, I started to skip. “What are you doing?” he asked derisively, keeping a socially safe distance from me as if I had just urinated on the sidewalk. Which was also true.

  Unfortunately, as your kids mature, although you’d expect the reins to loosen up a bit, what you have to look forward to is being ridiculed mercilessly about your behavior and your looks. This can get especially agonizing for us more senior moms.

  My disses included but were certainly not limited to: my ever-deepening nasal labial folds, the flaccid wattle under my arms, and the peach-pit crepeyness of my stomach that didn’t bounce back after my pregnancies. Even though this one was entirely their doing.

  Hopefully, as a wiser, more mature parent, you will know not to take any of it personally; your sagging skin must be as thick as a wet suit. But if you are like me, still not quite ready to cuddle up to and embrace all your imperfections, you might be kept awake in the middle of the night, full of nagging self-doubt. Is it rude to send my french fries back, sometimes twice, when they’re not crispy enough? Am I overly friendly with fans who recognize me on the street? Am I really tone-deaf? Does my breath smell worse than vomit? Do I overreact to . . . everything?

  The most disheartening part of all of this was that just when I finally thought I’d outgrown being an approval junkie early in my fifties, now I wanted my children to be proud of me! If you find yourself needing that also, well, don’t kill the messenger, but good luck; that’s like wanting your goldfish to be proud of you.

  I realize that I’ve painted a pretty bleak picture here, and that you may now be rethinking this whole child thing. Or maybe you’re thinking this must all be hyperbolic, a perfect example of my tendency to overreact . . . to everything. I understand. Until you go through it, you can’t possibly know how true all this will be. So let me try and soften the blow by sharing this recurring dream I had before having kids.

  While walking around my small but adequate apartment, I’d suddenly discover a brand-new door that opened up into a palatial, magnificent ballroom. I’d lived in this one-bedroom home my whole life and thought it perfectly acceptable. But then I came upon this magical space that I had no idea was there.

  I’d never seen a ballroom like this before. Late-afternoon sun streamed through the massive leaded windows. Towering over polished dark wood floors, the ceilings looked like they were painted by Michelangelo. It was filled with beaded crystal chandeliers that made the whole space glow with an amber light.

  Then I had children, and it was exactly like that dream. And it didn’t stop with just that ballroom. With each new child, I would discover yet another door that would open up to yet another glorious room.

  You may not be able to do as much singing and dancing in it, but you simply can’t underestimate the value of all that additional real estate. It’s the mother lode.

  15

  Running on Empty

  The closest I ever felt to my dad was when we sang the Michigan fight song and I helped him pee—not at the same time, mind you. Let me back up and give you some context.

  I didn’t see my dad much when we were young. He was a general surgeon. “Everything but the head and the heart,” he’d explain to anyone who cared. He worked long hours, often called in the middle of the night for emergencies. When he was home, he more or less glued himself to the television, watching sports. Mom would shush us if we ever got too loud. Apparently his games were as high-stakes as his lung cancer operations.

  He didn’t speak much at family dinners. Isolated at the far end of the long dining room table, he focused instead on cutting and chewing with surgical precision. “Can’t talk while the flavor lasts,” he would tell Mom and the six of us kids. If one of us ever asked, “Hey Dad, how was work today?” he’d just shake his head, mumble “Hippocratic oath . . . ,” and then resume the careful dissection of his roast beef. I’d watch his large, smooth hands work the utensils. Without any wasted movements, they performed their task, and then he’d gracefully place the knife back down before he took each bite.

  I had heard how much his patients worshiped him, but to me he was just the boss of our family. I never saw him cry. He never said the words “I’m sorry.” Getting praise from him was nearly impossible. One report card with all As and one A-minus was greeted with a deep frown and the question: “What’s with the A-minus, Chris—what happened there?” My father seemed more interested in grading his children than in knowing them. Granted, this was a very different era of parenting; being close with your kids wasn’t in the job description. Forget helicoptering, our father barely knew our birthdays.

  It was hard to find a way in. But when I left for college, I thought I’d found the key. I was Dad’s first child to get into his beloved alma mater, U of M. That first semester, we’d meet in Ann Arbor for football games and tailgate picnics of Reuben sandwiches and Budweisers. I got good at pretending to like football.

  But only two years later, as a brand-new hippie, I wouldn’t be caught dead at a fucking football game. It was right around that time that I was home from college for a visit, and Mom had a lunch with her philanthropic women’s group. Dad and I found ourselves alone together, so we decided to take a walk. We went to the parklike grounds of Cranbrook, the nearby private school. It was like taking a stroll with your dentist. We had nothing to talk about. I stared at my feet, wondering what to say, realizing I’d never been alone with him.

  “So . . . you think it’s going to rain later?” I asked, breaking the silence.

  “Yup, the forecast said an eighty percent chance.”

  “So how’s Michigan doing in the basketball playoffs?” I asked, pretending to care.

  “Well, they play Ohio State next week, and they have that new shooting guard from . . .”

  But I’d stopped listening, because my brain shuts down when it hears sports talk. I wanted to talk about women’s rights, about race, about the Vietnam War. I wanted to know if he actually believed, as I had so often heard him state, that “there are no children in America who go to bed hungry.” But he’d voted for Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, so I already knew his answer. It was like a conversational minefield. No matter what we discussed, it was likely to get explosive. So I said nothing and continued walking silently with my dad, who felt more than ever like a stranger.

  After I moved to New York and began to work professionally, there was a real wind shift in our relationship. Right after I was cast in my first movie, . . . And Justice for All, before I’d even shot it, he met me at the Detroit airport. A familiar columnist named Shirley Eder from the Detroit Free Press happened to be there. Practically accosting her, he said, “Excuse me, but you should meet my daughter, Christine Lahti—she is going to be a very famous actress one day.” I was mortified, but I sensed I had found another way in.

  As I became more successful, he’d watch everything I did over and over again, he and Mom stuffing massive scrapbooks with every single article ever written about me. Every tiny listing in the TV
Guide would be treated like it was the front page of the New York Times.

  When I’d come home for Christmas, he, like the rest of my family, wanted to hear about all the famous people I’d met and fancy places I’d gone to. But from up on an unfamiliar pedestal, this new attention felt hollow, especially coming from my father. He was my number-one fan now, but he felt more out of reach than ever.

  I became most acutely aware of this on the way to the Academy Awards when I’d been nominated for Best Supporting Actress. As my mother, father, husband, and I sat in the back of our white stretch limo, Dad fidgeted in his seat and complained about the heat. He had to be proud. After all, I’d finally achieved the biggest prize of all, an Oscar nomination, for God’s sake. Yet he seemed distant and a bit uncomfortable. As I opened the champagne, he looked over at us and anxiously cleared his throat, saying, “Christine and Tommy. Put your seat belts on, please.”

  “Dad, we’re in the back of a limo. We’re fine.”

  As we all sipped our Dom Perignon, he started to lecture us about the importance of wearing a seat belt. He recounted horror story after horror story of mangled people who were thrown from their cars and ended up in the emergency room or dead because they didn’t buckle up.

  “If they’d had a seat belt on, they’d have walked away without a scratch,” he stated, lighting up his pipe.

  “Okay, Dad.” I chuckled a bit. “Can we maybe change the subject?”

  “You wouldn’t be laughing if you saw the guy who came in last week. No seat belt? Ended up in a field somewhere. Paralyzed from the neck down.”

  Mom looked at us, embarrassed, and kept the champagne flowing. That was our entire conversation for the long forty-five-minute celebratory pre-Oscar ride.

  When my mom died at age seventy-five—Dad was seventy-seven—they had been together for more than fifty years. A few weeks after her death, he called me from Arizona. I didn’t remember him ever calling me before. He was in a panic.

  “Yeah, Christine. Listen, I need your help with something.” It was the first time he’d ever asked me for help. I suddenly felt like I was about to fail a pop quiz.

  “Uh, sure, what is it, Dad? Are you okay?”

  “No, actually, I have a problem. I’m . . . um . . . all out of detergent!”

  “Okay, well, why don’t you go get some, Dad?”

  “I can’t. I don’t know where to get it.”

  “Well, Dad, it’s going to be okay. You just need to go to a grocery store.”

  “I can’t remember the last time I’ve been to a damn grocery store. Just tell me! Where the hell do I find the detergent in a grocery store?”

  I told him. He thanked me. I hung up. A year later, he remarried. And that was the end of his reaching out, at least for a while.

  A few years into his second marriage, I noticed his hands shaking while he was trying to take a picture of us at the LA County Museum of Art during a visit with his new wife. Then at the age of seventy-nine, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

  During the period before his illness became completely debilitating, Dad joked that one of the positive sides of his memory loss was that he still could watch my Chicago Hope episodes multiple times, but now it was as if he’d never seen them before.

  Inevitably, Dad’s health declined, and just as predictably, his new wife left him. He was now alone, living in a nursing home near my older sister in Florida. Dad also suffered from hallucinations. He had episodes when he imagined that he was once again a medic in World War II and he needed to sew someone’s hand back on. Other times he was late for an emergency gallbladder operation. I wondered, when I heard these stories, if he ever hallucinated about us, his family.

  When I’d visit him, he mostly just seemed concerned about two things: where his wallet and, even more importantly, where his Viagra was, although he probably had no use for either. In his more lucid moments, he’d ask me, “How do I find a young woman like Anna Nicole Smith? Her old husband was eighty-nine. I’m only eighty-two!” He seemed dead serious.

  One warm evening, a few years later, we were at our lakeside cottage in northern Michigan, where we had spent every summer growing up. Dad was now in a wheelchair. It was sunset, and my husband, brother, and I gingerly lifted Dad’s frail six-foot-three body and lowered him into the Jacuzzi on our redwood deck. He moaned as the hot, bubbly water soothed his brittle joints. I watched his surgeon’s hands hold on to the edge of the tub. Once so nimble and assured, they were now stiff and quivering, with a life all their own.

  There was nothing Dad loved more in the world than sipping his Manhattan while watching sunsets from this deck. When we were kids, he’d call all of us to come outside, every evening, to make sure we didn’t miss one second. On these humid summer nights, we’d obediently sit with him and watch as the sun sank behind the hills across the lake, its waves finally flattened, as the water mirrored the fiery red clouds. I didn’t get to talk to him much, but at least we got to harmonize together. He’d sing, “Well Irene, goodnight Irene, Irene goodnight.” Then we’d join in, “Goodnight Irene, goodnight Irene, I’ll see you in my dreams.”

  Tonight on the deck, though, I looked at his face, captivated by the sunset, and wondered how many more of these moments he’d get to have.

  Later that evening, once he was put to bed, his nurse left for the night. I was heading upstairs when I heard the urgent ringing of the little brass bell that sat on my father’s bedside table. Dad needed to use the bathroom. I went into his room to help him sit up. I retrieved his bedpan. I gave it to him. About to walk away to give him some privacy, I noticed his hands shaking so hard that he couldn’t open up his boxers. He stared at his turbulent fingers as if they belonged to someone else. With great effort, he finally got his penis out of the opening in the shorts, but now his hands were trembling so badly he couldn’t aim it properly. His head down, his eyes fixed on the ground, he said, “Take it . . . quickly . . . just hurry . . . put it over the pan . . . now!” I did. He peed. I placed his penis back into his shorts and helped him to lie down, tucking him in.

  I turned off the light and walked out of the room. I glanced back at him through the window. His gaunt face looked so naked and frightened as he lay there alone in his rented hospital bed, still so undiscovered. I stood there imagining myself going back in his room, holding him and comforting him to sleep, maybe caressing the paper-thin skin on his forehead. But I couldn’t.

  The following day, we hardly spoke. I brought him his ice-cold beer as he watched the golf game, the volume turned all the way up.

  The last time I saw Dad, he couldn’t speak at all. He was only able to make guttural jackhammer sounds, as if words were too painful for him, like spoken pieces of broken glass. He seemed pulled into the horizon of his favorite sunset. I sat with him, trying to talk to him. Nothing. I sang, “Irene, goodnight Irene . . . Dad?” No luck.

  I decided to make one last attempt. I started singing something we’d sung together hundreds of times before:

  “Hail! to the victors valiant, Hail! to the conquering heroes . . .” Suddenly, Dad started to sing along with me, clear as a bell, in a full, strong voice.

  “hail! hail! to michigan, the leaders and best! hail! to the victors valiant, hail! to the conquering heroes . . .” We finished strong, “hail! hail! to michigan, the champions of the west!”

  I cheered, shouting “go blue!” I could have sworn he smiled. I wanted more. I held his stiff shoulders. “Go Blue, Dad!” He looked away again, distracted. “No—Go Blue, Dad! Dad?”

  But he went back to his sunsets. When I told him that I had to leave to catch my plane an hour later, I stooped to kiss his forehead good-bye. He emerged again without warning. He turned and stared, as if suddenly recognizing me.

  “Nooooo,” he whispered. I touched his face. We looked at each other for a few seconds. I’d never really noticed how pale blue his eyes were. They grew wet.

  “Hey, Dad, don’t worry, I’ll see you soon. I love you.”
>
  At my father’s funeral a few weeks later, a stranger came up to me and said, “You don’t know me, but your dad was a hero to me. I worshiped him. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here.” Then another one approached me and said, “I’m sorry to disturb you, but I have to tell you how incredibly grateful I am to your dad. We all felt so close to him. He saved my mom’s life. He was our hero.”

  I thanked them and walked away. What could I say in response?

  Toward the end of the service, I suddenly remembered something that my mother had told me. In the movie Running on Empty there’s a scene in a restaurant between a daughter, played by me, and her father, who have been estranged for fifteen years because of radical political differences. For me, acting it wasn’t exactly an emotional stretch. What I learned from my mother was that Dad had memorized every single line of dialogue from that scene, and often spoke it out loud while watching it. Both parts.

  It moved me deeply to think of him bathed in the cold glow of the television, by himself, reciting those lines. He wept. My mom said so. My dad, who never cried, said all the lines and wept.

  I’ll never understand exactly why my father acted out this scene. I’ve often wished he could have found a way to express all that loss and regret to me directly. But maybe it was the only way he could mourn what might have been. With his daughter. Whom he barely knew.

  16

  Panic

  “Excuse me, Joe? I’m so sorry, but I . . . I’m having trouble breathing. My heart is racing,” I whispered to my director. We were on a break during our last rehearsal before we started shooting the movie Out of the Ashes, in Vilnius, Lithuania. It was 2002, and we were in a large, brightly lit conference room in our hotel.