Wait Until Tomorrow (13 page)

While we are obviously different from the other families there, Emmy is generally happy with her two strange parents, both of whom work at home. She considers us more interesting than the lawyers and surgeons and CEOs who parent the other kids. She can let drop that her mother is a writer and that her father has an Emmy for his television engineering work on the Olympics. In her political science class, she is far more knowledgeable about the
issues and the different stances of the two main parties because she grew up hearing us argue about Clinton and Bush, same-sex marriage, the Iraq invasion, global warming, or whatever is the cable news outrage du jour.

And she still has the Charlotte Children's Choir. I spent my childhood entertaining myself while my mother was in one rehearsal or performance after another. I am spending my daughter's childhood in much the same way. The highlight happens in her tenth grade year when her choir is the featured choir in a concert at Carnegie Hall. As Hank and I sit up in the balcony of that enormous ornate hall and listen to those angelic voices, I think of my mother, who also once played in Carnegie Hall as the guest pianist in a symphony orchestra. My thoughts are sentimental, I'll admit, but musicians seem to me to walk with a lighter tread than the rest of us, and we live in a better world for their presence. Even my father gave his gift to the world. He played jazz his whole adult life—in bars and restaurants, with combos or alone. His music and his big toothy smile probably lifted the spirits of many an unhappy soul.

SPRING AND SUMMER 2006

I try to incorporate my mother into my life whenever possible, but the divide between her world and mine is on the Grand Canyon scale. Once, while going through old newspaper clippings about her life, I found a cartoon showing a conductor with raised arms hovering over a prone long-haired individual holding a guitar. Above the drawing there was this quote: “The tight-lipped comment made by musician's musician Rosalind MacEnulty when a fellow conversationalist opined that maybe classical music would come back now that the public had gotten a surfeit of rock ‘n' roll: ‘It never left.'”

Perhaps she never appreciated rock music, but rock musicians appreciated her when they came into contact with her. On her mantel for many years were four beautiful Fabergé eggs given to her by the drummer of Pink Floyd, so the story goes. Now I have them.

 

One day in the middle of one of our rambling conversations about life, I ask my mother, “Do you feel complete?” I want to know if she's okay with having reached the end of her life. Is there anything else she needs to do?

We're sitting at the round table in her apartment where we always play Scrabble, and she taps her fingers nervously on the wood.

“I don't want the requiem to die when I do,” she answers.

I think of the box of manuscripts in their tattered black folders—that box of poltergeists that follows us everywhere—now sitting on the shelf of her closet. The score needs to be put in computer format if we're ever going to send it to a publisher and that will cost a few thousand dollars. And would anyone publish it?

“Don't worry,” I tell her. “It won't.”

 

For my little family, the masterpiece of the era is Harry Potter. Whenever a new Harry Potter book comes out, we clear the deck of all distractions, and each night Emmy and I retreat to Hank's lair with a bag of gingersnaps. I read as many chapters to the two of them as my throat can handle. I have perfected each character's voice so that taglines aren't even necessary, and we become completely absorbed in the Hogwarts world. Hank sometimes loses track and insists that we back up, whereupon Emmy and I berate him for not paying attention. Sometimes I take a peek at the chapters ahead and, if they catch me, Hank and Emmy give me hell. I've done a few cool things in my life and been to some interesting places. But rarely have I been happier than when I am eating gingersnaps and reading Harry Potter to these two enraptured people—my husband and my child.

But this little family scenario is not my mother's idea of fun. She needs an audience and we aren't it. After my first Christmas with Hank's family back in the early nineties, I showed my mother a videotape that Hank had shot of Christmas Day with his mother, father, sister, brother, and brother's son. They were a group of ordinary people, and I liked them in spite of the Republican rhetoric that Hank's father spouted. He was always kind and generous with me and he was knowledgeable about history. Jean, my mother-in-law, was full of family stories, and Hank's brother and sister made me feel accepted. And they all adored Emmy.

I had spent so much of my life on my own that I had never expected to have a family. Not like this. When Hank and I broke up during my pregnancy, I thought I'd be a struggling single mom my whole life. Then one day I found myself in the sunny glow of Southern California with Ozzie and Harriet.

My mother dismissed the video with a sneer, and at that moment I hated her. I hated her groundless snobbery, her disdain for the ordinary pleasures that might, just might, have kept me from making some of the destructive choices I had made. Her pretensions filled me with rage.

My mother couldn't stand to be ordinary. When I was in my late twenties, I was one of five writers to win the Florida Screenwriting Award. I'd only had a few stories published, no books yet, so this was a big deal to me. And the Florida Film Bureau was treating it like a big deal. To give us our plaques, they had arranged a luncheon with certain state honchos in Tallahassee. I invited my mother to come along with me. She was younger then and firmly attached to her image as an iconoclast, a rebel who didn't need a damn cause.

We were all seated at a round table in a dining room in the capitol. One of the bureaucrats, a nice enough woman in a suit, stood up to say a few words to honor us. My mother was in fine form, poking fun at everything. The speaker was no great orator. These speeches are, by definition, banal. But the food was free and tasty, and they were recognizing me for my writing. I was even in the newspaper and it wasn't for committing a crime! I'd come a long way, baby, from the drug rehab to this fork-clanking event where the Secretary of Commerce, one Jeb Bush, was raising a glass of iced tea in my honor. I'd be getting a plaque, a trip to Hollywood, and a nice line for my résumé.

The woman began by saying, “We're here to honor the winners. Well, we're all winners, aren't we?” Then Mom piped up
in a fairly loud voice and said, “Not me. I'm not a winner. I'm a loser.”

All these years later, it seems innocuous, but at the time I was mortified and angry. This was supposed to be my moment. Couldn't she just give me that?

She immediately looked sheepish, but it was too late. Mom just needed to have the spotlight. It's the smartest-girl-in-the-class syndrome. Usually it wasn't a problem because she was also kind and generous and fun to be around. But as she got older, the need for attention seemed to overwhelm her. If she wasn't getting the attention, she literally couldn't breathe.

This facet of her personality derailed what seemed like a perfect plan. Once she got settled at the Landings, I figured I'd just bring my work over there and then she wouldn't be alone during the day. She always said, “Oh, just a warm body in the house makes all the difference.” But it wouldn't be ten minutes before she'd be groaning and then gasping for air and I'd have to turn away from whatever I was doing to find out if she was dying. Sometimes I wondered why she didn't. If life was this difficult, this constantly nightmarish, was it worth the effort?

As my mother loses her past, I lose part of mine as well. Aspects of my childhood I simply can't remember. She doesn't remember either.

 

For two weeks at the beginning of July I teach at the Kaleidoscope Arts Camp for creative teenagers on the Winthrop University campus. This is my favorite two weeks of the year, but it's hard
on my mother because I am gone all day long and late into the night.

In a way, hanging out with these kids with their drama and their problems, their fears and their laughter restores to me my own lost teenage years. Emmy comes to the camp, but she is in the drama classes and stays in the dorm with the other kids, so I don't see that much of her except in passing.

Each year, I lead a little troop of seven or eight teenage poets around the campus, which is blanketed in the shade of magnanimous oaks. We visit the art museum one day. Another day we go to the dance studio. This year as the dancers rehearse their routines, I remember my own days as a dancer. I was certainly no prodigy, but when you truly enjoy something you're bound to get fairly good at it. When I was in the eighth grade, after dancing for eight years, I was given a solo on pointe in the yearly recital. Now, watching these young women practicing their pirouettes, I try to remember anything about that solo. I can remember the lighted stage, the cool cavernous dressing rooms, and the enormous auditorium, but after that—nothing. I don't remember the music or my costume. Did my feet hurt? Was I nervous? Was I good?

It's as if it never happened. There's no movie I can go back to, rewind, and watch. I think of the stacks and stacks of pictures I have of Emmy in her various recitals and performances. There are none of me. I never before thought it odd. In my family, performing was simply expected. Why bother to record it?

I wish there were someone who could tell me, oh, you were so pretty in your satin toe shoes, twirling across the stage. I'm like the tree who fell in the forest and no one heard.

 

When I am not working, I try to get Mom out of her apartment as much as possible. We go to Jason's Deli for the salad bar. We go to
see Emmy in her choir and theater performances. And there are all those nights of Scrabble playing.

Emmy gets jealous of the time I spend with my mother, but I don't know what else to do. She has no one else. Everyone at her retirement community shuts their doors at 7 p.m. to watch
Jeopardy
and then goes to bed when she's ready to party.

“I know I'm not smart like she is and I don't play Scrabble with you, but do you still like me?” Emmy finally asks me.

“You are number one,” I assure her over and over. But she misses me and she isn't good at hiding her frustration.

 

On Sundays I take my mother to church with us. This turns out to be a disaster.

The church isn't so much a church in the traditional sense as a weekly session in cognitive therapy. The two ministers are a lesbian couple, whom I like a lot. One of them is a singer/songwriter who often plays her guitar during the service and leads us in feelgood folk songs. This is not exactly my mother's idea of church. As nonreligious as she is, she is a firm believer in the Episcopal hymnal and the beautiful, complex anthems that she arranged and/or directed over much of the past century and on into this one. These four-chord guitar songs are simplistic and can hardly be called music in her mind. Unfortunately, she feels the urge to explain this to anyone who cares to listen to her.

A friendly bunch of people comes to this church—a fairly intelligent, artistic crowd. But Mother can't relate to anyone there except for one of the ministers, whose troubled past has turned her into a deep soul, unafraid of exposing her wounds.

One Sunday morning Emmy, my mother, and I go to church. Emmy has been coming to this church since she was ten years old. She learned guitar from one of the ministers; she is always fussed over by the regulars. I like to hang around afterward and chat with
various people. But my mother usually finds a chair somewhere and sits.

As we leave the church that day, Mother trudging through the crowd on her walker, one of the men jokingly says something to her. Mother spits out of the side of her mouth in fury, “Go to hell!” Then she trudges out the door. Emmy and I glance at each other, perplexed.

“What?” I ask. “What happened?” I did not hear the comment which ignited her invective.

Outside, I help my mother into the car. She's crying and won't speak. Emmy explains that one of the guys told Mom not to get a speeding ticket with her walker. Could that possibly be the impetus for this tantrum, I'm wondering.

“Tell me what happened,” I say as we drive away.

“He was mocking me!” she bursts out. “I'm going to kill myself!” She starts yanking at the door, but the door is locked so she futilely shakes the door handle.

Emmy gasps. She's in the backseat in utter shock. I realize that in spite of the occasional spats that Hank and I have, this level of high drama is brand-new to her. Bette Davis is in town, kid, so look out.

We manage to get home without my crippled mother throwing herself out of the moving vehicle. But by now I am in a rage. I never forced my mother to come to my church. She wanted to come. Of course, if I were as self-sacrificing as I should be, I would take her to a nice Episcopal service somewhere and suffer through the Nicene Creed and all the kneeling and standing. But the church I go to is where I get my mental health. I can't afford a therapist. “Think about what you want, not about what you don't want. Believe that you are worthy. Love yourself.” These are the messages I get every Sunday, and after a lifetime of self-loathing I am finally becoming acceptable to myself.