Dance While You Can

by Shirley Maclaine

  Thank God, I thought. It’s possible. She won’t mind if I don’t have a ticket.

  “I don’t have a ticket,” I said. “But I promise I’ll buy one when I land.”

  She literally laughed. She waved the pilot on, who was watching with an intrigued expression on his face.

  “Impossible,” said the official. “We have another flight in two hours. Let me help you with that.”

  I turned toward the pilot and waved some more, this time with even more mustered intensity.

  Then I turned around and ran back into the airport. By that time a senior official had been dispatched to deal with this crazy movie star. She had a kind face, but even if her face had been the Temple of Doom I knew I really needed to impress her. I can’t say that what I did was an act—I really honestly felt it. However, it is not a choice I would have made in a scene. In fact, I would have strongly balked at a director who suggested I do what I did.

  I got down on my knee and burst into tears. “My daughter is very ill,” I sobbed out. I looked over at the pilot who was now witnessing the scene through the cockpit window. (I made sure I played it up against the window of the airport, which, by the way, was well lit by the morning sun.) The pilot seemed mesmerized. He wasn’t going to move. So I had a little time.

  “My daughter is going in for surgery in three hours in L.A. I have to be there! I must be with her! If I’m not she’ll feel I’ve neglected her; and I already feel guilty about having done that in her life.” The kind-faced official stared at me. This was not the kind of confession one expected in an airport departure lounge. “Please,” I went on, “please.”

  I turned toward the plane. It was still stationary. “You see?” I said. “The pilot wants to take me. He hasn’t left yet. He’s probably already missed his place in the take-off line.” I was reaching on that one. I knew it.

  The official looked out at the pilot. He waved. She looked back at me. “Let me see your ticket,” she said.

  I thought of all the movies I had seen about people during the Second World War who didn’t have the proper papers for freedom. Whole movie scripts had been written about how they talked their way onto trains and planes to cross borders. My little speech seemed singularly unimpressive and more than a little melodramatic.

  “I promise I’ll buy a ticket when I arrive,” I said. “Don’t let an airline ticket stand in the way of my being there for my daughter. Please!”

  No one could resist that. Besides, I meant it. I thought of the controversy over the journalist’s fabricated tears in Jim Brooks’s Broadcast News. The tears had been real in the first take. But on coverage he needed an “Oscar bottle” (bottle of glycerine) to achieve the original effect.

  I wasn’t sure I could have done a retake on my airport bended-knee scene. As it turned out, it wasn’t necessary.

  The senior official (who I think might have some guilt dues of her own) melted. “All right,” she said, as she waved to the pilot, who was an eager participant just waiting for direction. She pushed another hidden jetway button, and like “sesame” the door opened again. She led me down the jetway toward the plane and knocked on the side of the door. I wondered what it would feel like to make a sudden emergency escape from that door. When automatic and traditional procedures are interrupted, emergency pictures flood the mind.

  Suddenly the stewardess inside the plane appeared. The plane was open. I was going to live the visualization I had concentrated on while being judged a dangerous scissors hijacker at the security point. It wouldn’t make a bad third act ending, I thought.

  “You are so wonderful,” I said to the senior official lady, meaning every word but fully realizing how patronizing such a truth sounded under the circumstances. “What is your name?”

  “Linda,” she said. “And I’ve enjoyed so much of your work, especially Terms of Endearment. I identified with that.”

  So she did have a daughter, and there were unresolved issues in her life too.

  “Make more movies like that,” she said, “and you can get on any plane without a ticket!”

  “Thank you, Linda. I’ll never forget this.” I wanted to mention that she should see Postcards for more of an update on mother-daughter relationships.

  She pushed the jetway button, which was now beginning to sound with the frequency similar to a department store elevator alarm.

  I walked into the first-class section and sat down, feeling privileged beyond belief and even more guilty because of it. No one looked up. They were reading the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, preparing for business in L.A. Since so many from L.A. were moving to Seattle, I wondered how many more times a scene like mine would be duplicated in the coming years.

  I sat back in 1A, put my feet up on the bulkhead, and prepared to be there for Sachi. She would laugh at my drama, and she would also have been fine if I hadn’t made the scene work for me. I was the one who needed to be there for her. I needed to repair the past by attending to her in the present.

  When I arrived in L.A., I rented a car and drove to Sachi’s place to pick her up. She is a suggestible person who, knowing she would have a general anesthetic a few hours hence, was already in a slightly spaced-out mood.

  She was completely prepared to depend on me to make sure she had everything. Her little hospital bag, even though she was an outpatient who would come home that night, was stuffed with hair paraphernalia and pajamas and slippers. She seemed fragile and apprehensive, yet capable of strong resilience in the face of adversity.

  Her boyfriend arrived, and my sense of being so exquisitely needed was slightly interrupted by his presence and the prearranged agreement that he would drive her to the hospital and I would stay with her until she could come home. I wondered what kind of mother-in-law I’d be when she eventually married.

  I had obviously never been a typical nurturing always-attendant mother. I knew there were those who would say I had not been much of a mother at all. In fact, I would say it—wrongly maybe, but I’d say it.

  I thought of how her father and I had agreed that an upbringing as a movie star’s child in Hollywood was not designed for stability and a healthy way of life. I had seen too much wealth, power, dope, and money ruin too many of my friends’ children. So we enrolled Sachi in an international school in Tokyo, Japan, where Steve lived and worked.

  We were separated most of the time, but our marriage was comfortably open to us and admittedly unorthodox to others, and it didn’t matter. What we felt Sachi needed was loving support from us—even though I couldn’t always be with her—a good education, and an approach to life that would contribute to the world instead of Hollywood. I knew she would be loved and nurtured by Steve, and I knew the governess we had hired was loving and attentive.

  As the years slipped by, and we nearly always spent her long school vacations together (one month at Christmas, one month at Easter, three-and-a-half months in the summer), she seemed to be developing into a sensitive and charming person—not too overloaded with self-assurance, to be sure, and shy sometimes, but incredibly sensitive to other people’s feelings and anxieties, and always responding in a loving and compassionate way to anyone who was in trouble and needed help.

  But now, as we lived our lives and our relationship in my middle-aged years, and she in her thirties, we were seriously involved with working out our mother-daughter issues and were more than committed to resolving whatever difficulties we had with each other.

  It wasn’t easy. We went to therapy together, where I learned how remiss I had really been during her childhood. I had lived with the illusion that her father had really been there for her, but that had not been the case and Sachi had never complained to me. She had borne her loneliness without me, without him, and ultimately without a family sounding board to bounce off against. In some ways that was an advantage for her; but I now felt that I had let her down, because I had not been aware of what was going on with her when I wasn’t there.

  Sachi had begun her own quasi-spiritual search,
never as curious about such matters as I was, but still intrigued enough to want to resolve her own identity and what that meant to her spiritual growth as a human soul alive in the world. She seemed quite willing to accept her life, her childhood, and her problems as issues that were hers, chosen by herself, and designed to serve her enlightenment. She always has believed that we participated in the choice of being mother and daughter and that we have been around together for many lifetimes. If you asked her if she believed in reincarnation, she’d probably say no or she doesn’t know. But if you asked her if we knew each other from some other time and space, she wouldn’t hesitate to confirm it. She couldn’t prove it, she’d say, but she felt it.

  So Sachi, given her troubles and problems, has always taken responsibility for them, never assigning blame to anyone else. That doesn’t negate our problems together or troubles she may be having with anyone else, but it does make it more possible to work them through.

  One of our issues has been my guilt at not having been there for her as much as I feel I should. My mother had raised me in the traditional way. She cooked my meals, kept the house, helped me with my schoolwork, my dancing, and my boyfriends. She was, on the face of it, always there for me. Yet the first realization I had in my own therapy years ago was that I had an orphan’s psychology (the psychiatrist’s term, not mine). I knew it was true, but I didn’t understand why it was so. How could I have an orphan’s mind-set when my parents had always been there? I was to learn later that it had only to do with the quality of the time we spent together, not the quantity.

  That made me feel much better where my time with Sachi was concerned, but it didn’t assuage the guilt.

  So when I sat beside her hospital bed as the nurse attempted to insert the IV into her arm and Sachi winced in pain, I grasped her other hand, squeezed it, kissed it, and wondered how many other moments of pain she had experienced in her life that I had never even known about. She was so brave as I saw the vein in her arm reject the needle. The nurse was gentle, but the forcing of the needle was more than I could bear.

  Sachi looked over at me with a desperate plea in her eyes. How many of those pleas had I missed? How much had she borne without me in her stoic courage, accepting a childhood fate that had been essentially that of an orphan?

  “Please,” I said to the nurse. “Couldn’t you give her a topical anesthetic to prevent pain before inserting the needle?”

  The nurse looked at me and nodded with an apology. “Oh yes,” she said, “but that can only happen on the third floor. Here on the second floor this is how we have to do it.”

  I could hardly contain myself. I looked over at Sachi. An imperceptible tear spilled from her eye. Then she nearly fainted. The nurse pulled the needle from her vein.

  “I’ll tell them,” she said.

  Sachi’s ordeal was over until the third floor. She stopped hyperventilating and began to joke about her aversion to pain—a typical thing for her to do. Her stoic willingness to accept the pain had almost signaled a secret understanding that she felt she deserved it somehow, and in the final analysis, regardless of whether the pain was physical or psychological, she had somehow not done something right and was therefore being deservedly punished.

  “I’m such a wimp,” she said. When I heard her say that, I knew she would utter those same words regardless of what she was going through. Would I have been able to alleviate those feelings had I been there for her? Had I made her fearful by my absence or by my negative programming to protect her when I was with her? Had I stamped out her individual courage by insisting that she be too careful? My mother had done that to me, and it turned me into a rebel instead. How had I affected Sachi?

  Soon the orderly came to wheel her bed into the elevator. Sachi wore her hair in a blond pony-tail. Little loose wisps of hair played around her face. Her sea blue-green eyes blinked in slight confusion. What would happen to her when they took her from me? Could anything go wrong during this routine operation? What could I say to her to reassure her?

  “I love you, Mom,” she said as though reassuring me in that way that children who have touched real heart pain understand. She was more concerned with my fear than her own condition. How true it was that regardless of how remiss parents are with their children, the children are usually concerned with leaving the parents alone. They identify with abandonment. We children ultimately feel responsible for our parents—I of mine and Sachi of me. Why was that? Were all parents fundamentally identifying themselves with their own mortality through their children? And if parents let their children go, were they in effect relinquishing their guarantee of immortality? Did the children pick up on that? All those thoughts scampered through my mind as they led Sachi away on the stretcher bed. What would I do without her? Would I feel that I had programmed her demise should something happen to her? Again I thought of Aurora.

  What would they find when they opened her up? Was it simple endometriosis? Or would it be more? Again my own flight of dramatic fantasy horrified me. I turned it off. I didn’t know where it came from. Could it be true? Was acting out a fear a way of expunging it or would it really manifest into a reality?

  “I love you, Sachi,” I said, trying to invest thirty years of meaning into those words. “Just trust that it will all be all right, sweetheart. Trusting is half of everything.”

  Sachi looked up and over at me as she disappeared down the hallway. “I will, Mom. I know. I love you.” Then the elevator doors closed behind her.

  I waited for word that she had gone into the operating room. The doctor had promised to tell me. I checked with the nurse in charge of the waiting room.

  “She’s not out of surgery yet,” she said. The nurse was slightly goofy from some kind of booze. (I found out later that she wasn’t really a nurse, just a volunteer that read the communications from upstairs.)

  Not satisfied with what was going on, I set out to find Sachi, wondering at the same time if I would embarrass her by barging Aurora-like into a pre-op room wanting to know what was happening to my little girl.

  I found her. Like a homing pigeon I followed my feelings to a door without a window. I opened it and there she was alone, lying peacefully in her stretcher bed staring at cartoons on the wall that some hospital supervisor thought would be amusing right before surgery. She had been there for hours.

  Again I reflected on all the moments of stoic loneliness she must have endured over the years. I leaned over and kissed her. She was so endearingly grateful that I had found her. She had been amused by my insistence at finding out what was going on. I had thought I would embarrass her.

  Such misconceptions we have of ourselves and our children. I had always shielded her from my pain, my anxieties, my fears and desperations. In our therapy together, she had pointed out how distrustful of her that was of me.

  “Why don’t you let me know you?” she had asked. “By sharing that with me, you trust me, respect that I can handle it, allow me to be there for you.”

  I had never seen it that way. I hadn’t wanted to burden her with my woes. She had enough of her own. But as I was learning, woes were not the issue—what we did with them was.

  It all came down to the mutual trust we had of one another to allow ourselves to be vulnerable. Such an allowing was the ultimate act of love. My mother had never allowed herself to share her pain with me. Sometimes she shared her burdens but never her pain. I had never done that with my daughter either. It was a tradition that Sachi was now allowing me to break.

  The IV nurse arrived. Sachi began to hyperventilate again. I took her hand.

  “Don’t worry,” said the nurse. “You’re on the third floor now. Here you get a local anesthetic so the IV won’t hurt.”

  Sachi smiled.

  The nurse quickly applied the local, put the IV in as Sachi looked into my eyes, and when it was over Sachi never even knew it had happened. She broke into a sunny smile and her mood elevated ten notches.

  “I just had a needle with no pain!” she gu
shed. “Everything’s fine now, Mom. Don’t worry.” Soon after, another orderly wheeled her away to surgery, and I knew she really would be fine.

  The operation was successful, and there was no further threat to look for.

  I waited for her to come out of the anesthesia and, except for the fact that the nurses thought she was some other patient (insisting that she eat and drink a great deal while still asleep!), her gradual coming around was uneventful.

  When she was discharged I drove her home, put her to bed, made some dinner, and relaxed into the time and understanding that it took to be a mother.

  For the next three or four days we became mirrors for each other. I took her to my place in Malibu. She drifted into sleep, dreamed, talked of her dreams when she woke, and slowly regained her strength.

  She had been rehearsing a play for a theater production and was scheduled to open in her first preview five days after the surgery. But Sachi wasn’t nervous or apprehensive; on the contrary, she seemed balanced and completely in the present. It was incredible for me to observe her. I would have been projecting far too far into the future—would I be well enough, how would I choreograph a move corresponding to the surgery?—and on and on. Not Sachi. She lived in the moment of her healing process. I was impressed. My daughter not only had guts but a wonderful pool of inner calm.

  We watched television together, made meals together, dished about mutual friends, and talked about our lives as mother and daughter and now equal friends. She was going through some rocky shoals with the man in her life and dealing with the basic question of potentially being alone as a young woman in the world today.

  At the end of the week she was well enough to go back into the world of show business, and I was to return to the Pacific Northwest. She didn’t want me to come to the preview. She wanted me at the actual opening instead.

  I was dressed and ready to leave for the airport. I walked into the living room. Her back was to me, and she seemed to be looking out the window. I could feel something was wrong.