Wait Until Tomorrow (4 page)

I was my mother's sidekick. My father had gone off to mess up the lives of other women, and my two older brothers had graduated from high school and left home by the time I entered first grade.

Mom wasn't a great cook; we preferred restaurants. At the Derby House, I turned the salt and pepper shakers and the napkin dispenser into an ongoing story about a princess and a prince and a castle. I didn't like to stay home with babysitters, so she brought me to rehearsals. She got no child support until I was seven, when my dad, the son of a wealthy industrialist, had finally received some of his inheritance. Even then she had to take him to court and he was hard-pressed to part with that seventy-five dollars a month.

The very best part of my childhood was growing up in the theater. Jacksonville had two community theaters and one dinner theater. My mother worked at all three of them as the musical director. In community theater, the actors and singers were not paid, but the musicians were, and theater work was a significant piece of my mother's livelihood.

The Little Theatre was my favorite place to be in the world. During the first weeks of rehearsals, I would make a nest in a loft piled high with black curtains, silks, and materials for costumes and sets. For a child there was no more perfect place to daydream or to eavesdrop on unwitting adults.

Once rehearsals moved downstairs to the stage, I'd sit in the middle of the house, an audience of one. Night after night, I watched the shows:
South Pacific; Kiss Me, Kate; Mame;
and my favorite—
Gypsy
! Being a stripper seemed like a fine profession to me. I watched in awe as the actresses came out in their skimpy stripper costumes and bumped and grinded their way across the stage.

My mother had a closet full of black dresses for the orchestra pit. She was often the conductor and the pianist. She wore Estée Lauder perfume or Jean Nate bath splash. Each evening she carefully applied her “face”—foundation, rouge, eye shadow, mascara, and the essential red lipstick—before heading out for the night, with me in tow. She had an aura of elegance and power that enveloped me.

Once or twice a week, she'd get her hair done in a beauty salon until the styles finally moved away from that shellacked helmet look. A hairdresser once made her wait too long, and she stormed out of the beauty shop with her hair wet and stringy. When she shopped, she always told the clerk to “charge it.” She had impeccable credit.

Wherever we were, people fawned over my mother.

“Oh, Roz, that was simply wonderful,” I heard over and over again after performances and church services. She was gracious when the compliments came, but didn't seem to care much about praise. She was always moving on to the next thing.

Adults would often lean over and ask me, “Are you going to be a musician like your mother?” My mother and I might exchange a quick glance before I adamantly shook my head “no.” We both knew the absurdity of the notion. I had no intention of patterning myself after her. In my eyes, she had already perfected the role. Besides, I simply wasn't musically inclined. My mother says I did have perfect pitch as a child. I could identify notes on the piano and knew a third from a fifth chord, but I knew even then that you had to love something with all your being to play music the way she did. I much preferred to be outside, stomping in mud puddles and staring into the leafy branches of trees, rather than sitting inside at a piano for hours at a time the way she did—and always had.

We did give music a shot. I had piano lessons, guitar lessons, violin lessons, flute lessons, and even voice lessons. Though my mother arranged for these various lessons, she didn't seem particularly dismayed that they didn't take.

We discovered that I had a natural talent for the theater. When I went on stage, something clicked. But what talent was there wasn't enough to overcome the slide into depression and self-destruction that I took during my teens. One rejection and I was through with theater.

The only thing, the only lifeline, was this: putting words down on paper. So while my mother played the piano, and later while my daughter sang in the children's choir or took piano lessons, I settled down to wait somewhere with a book or with a pen and a notebook, and my mind left the building.

AUTUMN 2000

It only takes me a year to lose my teaching job. Not that I really lose it. I was hired as an instructor, a full-time untenured position, to teach creative writing and composition classes. I applied for the tenure-track creative writing position, which was unfilled at the time. After a series of interviews, they gave it to a guy who did not have the creative publications or awards that I had.

They tell me I can still keep the instructor position and teach four composition classes a term while the new guy teaches the creative writing classes I just taught. Fuck that, I think.

It's not exactly like what happened to my mother when she graduated from Yale. There was a teaching job open at the University of Miami in Ohio, and the dean of the school of music at Yale recommended my mother for the position. She applied and received a letter back saying, “Your qualifications are certainly impressive, but you can understand that we want a man.”

My mother never did work full time at a university. She taught at a public high school for a few years to try to help my stepfather get through law school. That didn't work out so well, and she was glad to dump the job as soon as she could.

So I will be like my mother in that regard, I guess. I'll do a little this and a little that and create some sort of a living out of it. Hank is not happy about my plan.

It turns out that this is a good year for me not to have a full-time gig, anyway, for this is the year that I am finally going to get my mother to stop nagging me. I am going to see if I can get my hepatitis C cured.

 

Sometime in the 1970s I contracted hepatitis C—most likely in a shooting gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. By the 1980s I had cleaned up my life, and I thought I was pretty much rid of my past. But around 1990 I realized I had an adverse reaction to even the smallest amounts of alcohol. It was easy enough to quit drinking, but a few years later I became desperately fatigued on a regular basis as the disease, which had lain dormant for a couple of decades, began kicking up its heels.

So now that I am on Hank's insurance, I contact a leading specialist in the treatment of hepatitis C, and we schedule a liver biopsy. The biopsy hurts like hell, but when the nurse asks me if I want something for the pain, I tell her, “No, ‘something for the pain' is what got me into this mess in the first place.”

After the biopsy, the doctor tells me I will have to give myself shots of interferon three times a week for six months. He says there are side effects to the treatment, including and especially depression. The alternative is that I will likely develop liver cancer.

I do my first shot at the doctor's office so that they can make sure I am doing it correctly. I pinch the skin on my thigh and jab the needle in.

“You'll probably experience some flu-like symptoms,” the doctor's assistant tells me.

I take Emmy to her choir rehearsal that night—the first one of the season—and join the other parents for the annual meeting in the fellowship hall. Suddenly, as we're sitting there listening to the kids perform their new songs, I begin to shake uncontrollably.

Oh, this doesn't look good, I think. How can I get Emmy out
of here and go home? I slip out of the meeting through a back door and stand outside, shivering in the August heat. I begin to sing James Brown's “I Feel Good” to convince myself I am okay. Finally the interminable meeting ends and Emmy comes out and finds me.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“I feel good,” I tell her as my trembling hands attempt to open the car door.

On the way home, I continue to sing “I feel good” as loudly as I can. I am crying and shaking with my terrified child in the passenger seat. When we get home, I sink into a hot tub of water filled with lavender bath powder while Hank, who never really believed I was sick until tonight, takes care of our daughter.

I am so delirious that I am not sure what year it is. That night I relive my years as a junkie. I am baptized in the waters of the past, immersed, drowning, former comrades and forgotten crimes resurfacing to leer at my beaten body. When dawn finally arrives, I have new respect for the phrase “dark night of the soul.”

After that I give myself the shots at night so that I will sleep through the side effects. I never get the crazy chills again, but I need to sleep extra on the day after the shots.

At least my fatigue is predictable during the treatment. I know which ones will be good days and which will be “bed” days. More importantly, the six-month treatment gives me time to forgive myself. Perhaps the side effects of the medication—fatigue, shortterm memory loss, skin rash, and hair loss—create some sort of unconscious penance for the irresponsible way I once treated my faithful body.

 

In October 2000 my friend Kitty from Tallahassee visits us because she needs to see the doctors at Duke University for some experimental stem cell treatment. Kitty, who is in her early thirties, has
stage four breast cancer. In Tallahassee, it was a tradition for Kitty to wear a witch costume and give out candy on Halloween while we took Emmy trick-or-treating. She's the only one of my friends accepted by Hank, the only one with whom he feels comfortable enough to actually let her stay in our house overnight.

While Kitty stays with us in Charlotte, she and I spend our days sitting on the couch and watching the leaves fall outside the tall windows that look out onto the woods behind the house. Kitty says we're wearing lead suits. But this time with her is one of the most peaceful interludes of my entire life.

Kitty, whose curly dark hair is only now growing back from the last round of chemo, dresses up as “chemo-witch” for Halloween. Emmy, who is also dressed as a witch, could not be happier. We come home from trick-or-treating, make caramel apples, and share the spoils. Jaxson snatches a candy bar and eats it, wrapper and all. When Kitty goes back to Tallahassee, she strides onto the plane, wearing a mask that she has decorated with cat whiskers, to protect herself from germs.

I probably should do the same thing, but I don't have her panache. The hepatitis C drugs mess with my immune system. For Thanksgiving we go out to California to be with Hank's family and I catch a cold on the way out. I am pretty sure I am going to die in the land of the shopping mall as I lie comatose in the guest room. I don't die. But I do get numerous sinus infections, my fingernails grow ridges, and every time I take a shower, handfuls of my hair pile up over the drain. I get a cut on my finger that won't heal for months. But I never, ever get depressed, even though depression is supposed to be a major side effect of the treatment. I just keep counting off the shots.

Three months after I start treatment, I take a blood test. The technician screws up, causing blood to bubble out of my vein like a fountain when she takes out the needle. Emmy looks on, horrified.
That's probably the day she decides she will never take drugs. I survive the blood lab people, and a few days later I get the results in the mail.

That Christmas we go to see my mom in Edenton. One of Mom's friends has gone away for the holidays and we're staying at her gorgeous house on the Albemarle Sound. Christmas Day I give my mother the piece of paper with the results in a decorated envelope. When she reads “Test results for hepatitis C—negative,” she starts to cry. I have three more months of shots to inject just to be sure.

MAY 2002

“You come from a long line of strong women,” I tell Emmy. Emmy is twelve now, and getting a taste of life's disappointments. I often tell her the story of my grandmother, Skipper, who, during the Great Depression, comforted the distraught sheriff who had come to evict her and her four children from the home she herself had designed overlooking the Long Island Sound.

The other story I don't tell her, but which I often remember when I think about the women in our family, is that of my mother and the terrible night when I woke to the sound of her screams: “Fire! Fire!”

I was seven years old and encased in dreamless slumber when her panicked screams finally chiseled their way through my consciousness. My feet hit the floor and I dashed out of my bedroom in my flowered nightgown. When I ran into the living room, I found no flames—only a giant with his arm around my mother's neck as he dragged her toward the kitchen door. My mother craned her head around and saw me. Then she screamed out, “Run.”

It was March and the night was cool and black as I burst out of the house and ran across the weedy lawn, oblivious to the sandspurs. I ran to our neighbor's house and began to pound on the jalousie-windowed door. My best friend, Katie, lived in this
house. Katie's mother opened the door. I saw her dad in the background, buckling his belt. They pulled me in, and I told them what I had seen.

I stood in their bedroom as Nella called the police.

“What if he isn't a bad guy?” I said.

“Oh, he's a bad guy, honey,” Nella told me. I don't remember what her husband did while all this was going on, but soon we heard sirens slicing through the night. And the next thing I remember I was sitting on my mother's lap with her warm, comforting arms wrapped around me while an enormous policeman asked me what the man looked like. But I had no idea. I did not know if he was black or white, young or old. The only things I noticed in those few moments were my mother's face and the open front door.

Later, when I was older, I learned what had really happened. The front door had not been opened by my mother's attacker. He had kicked in the back door. As my mother heard the pounding of his foot on the flimsy door and the cracking of the wood, she had dialed the operator and screamed fire and our address, believing that she would get a faster response that way. She had opened the front door not to escape from the man but to allow her child to escape. The man had come in and dragged her through the kitchen, out the splintered back door, to the backyard, where he shoved her to the ground, held a knife to her throat, and raped her. After the police arrived, my mother had seemed like a fortress as she held me.