Homesick (21 page)

Liz has a ten-year-old daughter, and she and Becky get to trading stories about what it’s like raising girls. “When something happens to your child,” Liz says, “the littlest thing, like they don’t get asked to spend the night when all the other girls are asked—it hurts you so badly. It breaks your heart.”

“Do you remember this fall?” says Becky. “All the little girls were asked to spend the night at this party, except for my daughter. And I’m calling Liz from the car, and I’m like . . .” And she breaks down in a burlesque of sobbing. “I was ready to go over and have a
word
or two with that mother. Oh, God, do you remember that? We had to go over my mother’s house. It was so bad, we had to go to Mama.”

Liz smiles. “You had to have a Coke.”

“And let me tell you—my mama started telling stories . . .” Becky continued.

“. . . about when
I
had been left out . . .”

“She said, ‘Oh, Lord, I remember when some little girl did that same thing once to you.’ Now, I’d forgotten about it a month after it happened. But my mother was still
wounded
.”

“And it’s so funny about those kinds of things,” Liz says, “because you can’t tell your husband about them. ’Cause he’s just not going to understand. So you call your friends. And whenever I call Becky and tell her something like that, she says, ‘Now, what’s that girl’s name?’ ”

Becky knows her cue. “I say, ‘I have
never liked
that girl, and she is
not
pretty.’ ”

We all guffaw.

“Liz will get over it, and I’ll still be carrying a grudge. ‘Just look at her,’ I’ll say. ‘Legs like tree trunks!’ We’re loyal if nothin’ else, I’ll tell you that. . . .”

Once the plates have been cleared away, out comes the homemade ice cream. I step into the other room to check on the kids, and when I come back Becky’s barreling into a story I know she’s been saving all night.

“Y’all wouldn’t believe how awful my feet were!” she says. “They had these thick rings of skin around ’em that looked like inner tubes. I sat there buck naked on the edge of my bathtub, going at ’em with a pumice stone. Lord, I worked myself into a sweat, and got nowhere.

“Then my precious angel of a husband came in and saw I was sweating. What a gentleman my darling is. He got right down on his knees and commenced to scrubbing. Do you all know that my nasty ol’ feet wore that big strong man out?

“So I got dressed and went down to the hardware store. I went in there and asked the man, ‘Do y’all have electric sanders?’

“He looked at me like I was a silly woman who didn’t know what I was talking about, and he said, ‘Do you want an orbital sander, or a regular one?’

“I told him, ‘One that’ll work on my feet.’ He told me, ‘I can’t help you.’ So I went myself and picked out one of those cute little mouse sanders they make.

“Well, I took it home, took my clothes off, and set myself up on the side of the bathtub. I got that sander to going, and
y’all!
It was like a snowstorm in there! Those inner tubes were just comin’ to pieces, flyin’ all over like a blizzard!”

The rest of us are doubled over by now, holding our sides. Finally one of us catches her breath enough to ask Becky how her feet came out.

“Oh, honey,” she says. “They were like butter. Smooth as a baby’s bottom. I’m a believer in that little ol’ mouse sander. Now, Howard, you’re a venture capitalist. What you need to do is get these things manufactured in pink and set me up on QVC, and I’ll sell the hell out of these things. We’ll just call it the Ped-o-file!”

And the laughter and stories carry us through to the end of the night.

8

......................

Now comes the hard part. I’m going to tell you about the worst season of my life. Yet, as painful and challenging as it was, in the end it was also a season of growth, of closure, and peace.

I look back on that wonderful gathering down on the farm, family and friends eating and drinking and laughing together, as if it were a picture postcard from another world. I could not have foreseen how long and bleak the winter that followed would be, nor how much I would despair that spring would come at all.

Days after returning to Los Angeles, I was sleeping late one morning when I felt Howard’s hand on my shoulder, shaking me awake. His voice was tight in his throat. He said he’d just received a phone call from Sam, the contractor doing work on our house. “He was crying,” Howard told me. “He said you won’t believe it, but somebody flew two planes into the World Trade Center.”

Was he serious? I was still coming out of sleep; none of this seemed real.

I scrambled out of bed and sat with my husband in front of the television, watching the world come to an end. We cried. We were in shock. We never left the TV. On some level we couldn’t accept what we were seeing. It felt as if we were standing outside ourselves, watching this happen. I’ve since heard that many New Yorkers at first couldn’t believe—literally could not believe—that someone had flown passenger planes into the Twin Towers. A friend stood on the Brooklyn Bridge, watching the towers burn, telling himself:
They won’t fall
. Thirty seconds later the south tower collapsed, and my friend had to flee with an exodus of thousands to Brooklyn, just ahead of a cloud of dust and ash.

We may have been on the other side of the country that morning, but we didn’t feel safe. Where would the terrorists strike next? We didn’t let the kids go to school. I didn’t want anyone leaving the house. We desperately wanted to go to the farm. I called my producers and said, “Look, if something major happens, we’re headed to Mississippi.” It’s a very painful thing when you are trapped by things over which you have no control—as I was to learn again and again in the coming months.

I was angry that I didn’t have the freedom to protect my kids. That day Austin asked me, “Mommy, are they going to hurt my school?” I said
no
—but I wasn’t sure I believed it. Who could say for sure? There is a major shopping mall near his school, and as silly as it may seem now, on the morning of September 11 everything seemed like a target. I’ve talked to women from all over the country since then, and everyone, no matter how small and out-of-the-way their town was, felt just as vulnerable.

Then news reached us that Chic Burlingame, the brother of an old friend of our family, had been captain of the plane that was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon. Investigators quickly concluded that the terrorists murdered the pilots of the airplanes before commandeering them. I called Chic’s brother, Brad, to offer condolences, and he was sobbing on the phone. “They killed my brother. They killed my brother.” Chic’s birthday would have been September 12.

Of course, the authorities closed commercial airspace over the entire country in the immediate aftermath of the terror strikes. At night I would hear fighter jets flying overhead, and I’d think we were about to be attacked at any moment. I had nightmares about terrorists chasing me, or being on airplanes and having them narrowly miss a building. Howard and I tried to keep Austin and Anabella from seeing how frightened we were.

Now, you can allow yourself to be paralyzed by such fear, or you can learn from it, and act on what you’ve learned. Howard refused to be a passive victim. He went out to buy batteries, water, and other supplies we might need in case of a long emergency. No matter what happened, I knew that Howard would take care of us. I’m not ashamed to admit how desperately I needed to feel shielded, sheltered, and cared for during those days. Knowing my husband was there for us, come what may, helped me in turn to be strong and comforting to the kids.

Before the week was out, we began to hear talk of fund-raisers and charity events, but I was torn. I’ve always tried to be generous in this regard. But after 9/11 all I felt I could do, at least at first, was to stay close to my family, to be with Austin and Anabella. I didn’t want to leave them, not for a minute more than was absolutely necessary. So many moms had kissed their children goodbye for the last time that morning, before going to work in the Twin Towers. I couldn’t get out of my head a story I’d heard about one Brooklyn mom seen walking in a daze near the subway as the towers burned, telling passersby that she would have been there at her desk if her little boy hadn’t made her late by crying so much about her leaving. You never know when that hug from little arms will be the last one you’ll receive.

The one thing I did agree to was the September 21 telethon to raise money for the victims in New York and Washington. I’d felt so powerless, especially being so far away from New York, and I was glad for the chance to do something I knew would be meaningful. But I was scared, in part because the FBI had informed Hollywood executives that there’d been specific and credible threats against the studios that very morning. Howard and I left the kids at home with their nanny, and even as we were driving over to the studio he took my hand and wondered aloud if we were doing the right thing by going together. “What if something happens to us both? What about the kids?”

But we’d been assured that security for the event would be airtight, and we took from that enough comfort to continue. I’ve never heard a sound as reassuring as the whirring of helicopters circling overhead when we pulled up to the location.

The feeling on the set that night was low-key and friendly—as much so as I’ve ever experienced at a Hollywood event. Some, like George Clooney and Julia Roberts, were friendly faces I’d known and worked with before. Others were new acquaintances. I sat with Clint Eastwood; he’d been worried about his grandchild, who attended a school not far from the World Trade Center. We were all in the same position that day, humbled both by the magnitude of events and, I think, by the incredible courage and devotion we’d seen among the people of New York.

Those days were a time of great pain for us as a country, but they were days, too, when the meaning of our lives seemed suddenly clarified, amplified—more tangible, more real. They made me think of a story Walker Percy once told, the true account of a married couple on the Mississippi Gulf Coast who had been strangers to each other for years. When Hurricane Camille struck, they had to take refuge from the flooding in a tree house, of all things. As the eye passed overhead, they made love for the first time in years. The trauma of the storm shocked them out of their selfishness, and made them look at each other for the first time in ages. In the passing of the eye, they found that moment of revelation.

Maybe something like that happened to America on 9/11. People who donated blood, collected money, delivered food or aid or comfort of any kind to their fellow Americans rediscovered a lost sense of neighborliness, of human kindness—the virtues that made America home. As Becky might have said, everyone did the right thing.

Can we still? Can we carry the love and pride and self-sacrifice that got us through the tough times with us now that life is getting back to where it used to be, more or less? I suppose it’s a challenge we face as a country: how to be as decent to each other in good times as we were in the depths of crisis. As Rabbi Heschel said, “Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but rather how to remain human in the skyscrapers.”

When November rolled around, Howard and I knew one thing instinctively: The Sherman family was going to spend this Thanksgiving together in Los Angeles, close by one another in our own home. It wasn’t an easy decision; it meant we wouldn’t make it to Mississippi, and I knew that would disappoint Mama as much as it did me. I think we were all sad not to be able to celebrate as we had so often in the past, with all the generations gathered together at one table. But the truth is, I was scared to death to put my family on an airplane so soon. And there was another thing: It had begun to dawn on me that my kids didn’t really know what it was like to celebrate a holiday in their own home.
Maybe it’s time they learned,
I thought.