Love, Ellen: A Mother/Daughter Journey (15 page)

The irony is that in spite of the difficulties, or maybe because of them, during this period of hardship Ellen and I became even closer than we already were. This raises another important point about love and acceptance. It works both ways. We parents need it from you kids just as much, even when you don’t understand everything we’re going through.

O
W, OW, OW
! That’s what I was feeling emotionally and physically when I came down with what I thought was just a really bad stomachache. What an underestimation.

The next morning I was being wheeled off to emergency surgery because gallstones, which I didn’t know I had, had punctured my duodenum. After the surgery an infection set in which required another operation and a longer hospital stay than the mastectomy. Ow! again.

All my life, I had never had any illnesses. How odd that I should go through two life-threatening illnesses within the first five years of my marriage. El has since said that she feels there was a direct correlation between the inner turmoil and undercurrents of my life and the physical manifestation of disease. I would have to agree.

As before when I was feeling awful, Ellen managed to make me smile with the following message, which she sent to the hospital:

In my usual fashion, I wasn’t out of commission for long. Soon I was back at work, school, and my array of hobbies and projects. One creative project I undertook as a surprise for Ellen was a song I wrote that described her entire history of jobs, set to the tune of “Holiday for Strings,” played and sung on tape with my own violin accompaniment. Delighted, El wrote back:

Reading these letters now, I feel very humble about my daughter’s deep love for me and her gift for expressing it. Of course she knew I had all the love in the world for her and would give her all the moral support I ever could. Maybe having a number one cheerleader in her corner helped give her the courage to stick out the rough-and-tumble days in her early career.

In any event, in October of 1981 Ellen made a major, gutsy move—all the way, on her own, to San Francisco, California, where the comedy scene was really starting to boom. El wrote excitedly:

Starting to work clubs like the Punchline and the Other Café, she was getting an enthusiastic response. But going from being a medium fish in a medium pond to being a little fish in a big pond wasn’t an easy transition. And so it was back to a day job as a salesclerk. When I asked her on the phone how that was going, she admitted, “Boring. My mind wanders. I just want to be a star—now! I hate waiting.”

“Hang in there,” I told her, my usual refrain.

In some letters, though she didn’t say it, I detected a note of homesickness for friends and family, including her big brother:

Ellen was right. I do have a real neat son, one whom I really missed in those years when he was out on the road with his various bands. Until one of my visits to New Orleans, when Vance picked me up at the airport, I don’t think I realized how popular his playing with The Cold had made him, especially with all the young girls, or groupies, as they’re called. Well, at the airport, I was met by Vance in the middle of a swarm of fans asking for his autograph. He had to push his way through the crowd to let me know he was there.

During all this time, he had never been able to make it up for a visit until finally his band the Backbeats played a gig in Shreveport and brought him close enough that I was able to go watch him play and then have him ride back to Atlanta with me. It meant so much for him to finally see our home. The visit was sweet but short; the next day I drove him back to Shreveport and he was off again.

A little while later, by popular demand, The Cold reunited. Again they came very close to breaking into the national music scene. But again the right combination of hit records and, perhaps, strong management just wasn’t there. Vance then formed a band which had a cult following for a while. I remember when he told me what they were calling this band.

“Tell me what you think,” he said excitedly, “We’re calling ourselves The Petries.”

“The Petries?” I asked, a little tentatively.

“Sure, in honor of Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore,” he explained.

I told him it was a wonderful name. As I said before, my kids were always hooked on TV.

C
HANGE WAS IN
the wind for all of us. By the summer of 1982, El had returned to New Orleans after deciding that things just weren’t happening for her in San Francisco. Going it on her own was very lonely, she had told me not long before coming back. “And it’s scary too,” she said. “Sometimes I wonder what it’s all for—if it’s worth it.”

In New Orleans, Ellen headed back to the local comedy circuit. Sadly, her original launching pad, Clyde’s Comedy Corner, had closed, so she supplemented her income as a gofer in a law firm—where she would remain for almost a year. It was to be her longest-held day job, but also her last.

In March of 1983, still there, she sent me a quick note on the law firm’s stationery:

She never ceased to crack me up.

Driving along the Louisiana interstate, I thought of that “P” and started to laugh again. I needed to laugh. Once again, my marriage was in trouble and I was making another attempt to leave B. It was the same issue—the incident with Ellen.

Though I was a master at denial, I could never quite erase my concern. Obviously, I knew deep inside that something very wrong had happened and I couldn’t rest; I couldn’t leave it alone. He shrugged me off most of the time, but each time we did discuss the subject, he would slightly change his story or some little detail.

That was the clincher, I realized as I drove and watched the now familiar scenery pass me by, the giveaway that we couldn’t continue sweeping this under the rug forever. It was there, and sooner or later I would have to deal with it.

Hoping to make it sooner, I moved back to New Orleans and got an apartment with my favorite daughter Ellen Lee.

Because I wanted to avoid a scene with B., I told him the separation was only temporary, figuring that I would work up to telling him it was permanent once I was settled in. I even got a secretarial job and was just starting to look into enrolling in school—to finish my bachelor’s degree, finally—when I was notified by LSU Shreveport that I had been given a scholarship to complete my undergraduate degree there. I had only a year to go and Shreveport also had an excellent master’s program in speech pathology.

When El came home from a long day’s work at the law firm, she found me pacing the floor of our living room. This was, incidentally, a cozy, nicely decorated apartment. Ellen has always had an excellent sense of style and taste; even when she had little or no money, somehow she usually managed to create a warm, pleasant atmosphere wherever she lived.

“What is it?” El asked, knowing immediately that something was up.

I told her about my dilemma, admitting, “I don’t know if I can pass this up.”

“But why go back to him when you’re not happy?”

I talked about what not going back was going to entail—an unpleasant, probably ugly divorce; putting off finishing college one more time; being stuck with a secretarial job again. Or, I told her, I could go back to a secure life and continue to ignore the problems in a flawed marriage until I completed the education that would allow me to be on my own.

Ellen looked at me, concern in her eyes, saying only, “Do what’s best for you.”

And so I took the practical route—the path of least resistance—and went back to B. and my scholarship. To independent individuals of a different generation, this must seem weak-willed. But for many women of my generation, especially those of us who put off school to marry and raise our kids, our options narrow as time goes on. We learn to survive and make do as best we can, sometimes, sadly, at the expense of marital happiness and our own self-esteem.

M
Y NEXT JAUNT
down to New Orleans marked an important event—to meet Ellen’s girlfriend Kim, with whom she was living at the time. This was the first time I had ever met any of Ellen’s girlfriends, and I was excited about getting to know the person who had captured her heart.

When I arrived at their apartment, El greeted me with a hug and then gestured toward a warm, attractive young woman with dark, dark eyes and short curly auburn hair who stood by her side. “This is Kim,” Ellen said. And to Kim, she gestured toward me and said, “This is Betty.”

It was obvious that Kim cared for Ellen, and I liked her right away.

In those days they were renting a small half of a typical New Orleans shotgun double which, in spite of Ellen’s terrific sense of style, they had painted and furnished in a dazzling pink and maroon color scheme. (Sorry, Ellen, I know you’ll be horrified when you read this.) I happen to remember because I spent several weeks crocheting them a pink-and-maroon afghan.

We spent a lovely afternoon talking about how things were going. The good news was how well Ellen was doing with her stand-up. From the sound of things, she was about to become a big fish. It was also clear that Ellen’s days as a gofer at the law firm were numbered. The humiliation of having to run errands and bump into the same people who saw her performing in the comedy clubs was becoming too much.

And at the office, whenever she made a mistake of some sort and explained that clerical work wasn’t really her calling, that she was really a comedienne, no one seemed very amused. “OK, you’re a comedienne,” they’d tell her. “Could you copy this file?”

Ellen told me how she would protest, insisting, “Really, I was big a little while ago. People knew who I was.” That got her a laugh or two. But then—

“All right. We need some more coffee. Could you get that filter changed?”

On this visit Ellen and Kim shared their exciting plans with me. The two of them had decided to move together to San Francisco. “I’m going to do it right this time,” El said. “I wasn’t ready before. Now I am.”

In fact, by the fall she was getting enough bookings in local and area clubs to quit the law firm. Since she and Kim were pooling their resources for the move, all systems were go. Saving the money still wasn’t easy, though. I laughed again when Ellen wrote to me in January of 1984:

Ellen had had an impacted wisdom tooth extracted, and now she went on to describe the follow-up in detail. She was pretty well healed, she said, and noted that it cost twelve dollars to have the stitches taken out.

When I went to the mailbox a few days later I found a bumpy letter that appeared to have some kind of gift enclosed. When I opened it up, I discovered the wisdom tooth, a memento I still have. Oh, that Ellen.