Celebrity Detox: (the fame game) (14 page)
And it was 1971, and I was at the breakfast table, and there was my mother in her fuzzy slippers and her electric blue almost velour zip-up nightgown. It was morning, and we were acting as if everything was all right, but it wasn’t. What was wrong? I don’t know. Even today I can’t say, because I’m not sure, because my memories are more in feeling than form. Maybe nothing happened, except in my mind. It almost doesn’t matter, because our minds are all we have; our whole worlds. I remember searching for a way to say a thing I could neither see nor understand. “A man came in my room at night and got me,” I told my mother.
I remember her asking me how he got into my room, and I remember telling her he got in through the window above my bed, which had a tree next to it. I told her he climbed the tree, climbed and climbed.
I must have been very convincing, because she had the neighbor, Mike, cut down that tree. Mike had us all hold hands and watch the tree tip, tip, and fall. Its crown came crashing down.
“There,” she said. “Now he can’t get in.”
But he did. And when I told her that, she said, “Roseann, you lie like a rug.” And I thought, “Mom, rugs can’t talk.”
Can they?
I learned not to talk. I learned not to bring the sore subject up, because her face, well, the look on her face when I told her he was still getting in, and when she told me I lied like a rug, that look on her face was something I never wanted to see again.
My childhood was spent doing whatever I could to avoid that look, to avoid the words that could cause such an expression of—of what?—to cross the features of my mother’s face. I lay, indeed, like a rug. I flattened out. I kept quiet. I ate my cereal at the breakfast table every morning, sitting there surrounded by words and Froot Loops, so much unsaid.
And then Barbara got up from sitting, because she was getting her hair washed, and walked over with a towel on her head and she put her arms around me from behind. She didn’t look at me. She looked at my reflection in the mirror and my reflection in the mirror looked at her reflection in the mirror, so we were and were not facing each other. Our reflections were facing each other; no, I would not do mirror to mirror.
I stood up. I tell people I love, have always told them: if ever you are in a fight with me and I stand up, leave the room. Not because I’m going to hit you—I have never hit a person and I have never worried that I would. But if I stand up that’s a sign that the rage is too big for my body. I have to move, to readjust the rage and the pressure of the past, so I did. I just got out of my makeup chair, my eyes full of teary rage, and she was standing, not in a chair, and her hair was wet.
If human beings were dogs, Barbara would for sure be an alpha. I stood up, and was therefore violating her authority. I could feel how in a single instance her whole soul became an exclamation point, a mandate:
Sit! Stay! Roll over! Come!
In my mind I could hear her voice, the voice I’d been hearing since I was a little girl, way back on Rhonda Lane, watching this woman on the TV. She was so much younger then, and gorgeous through and through; she still is. Her voice is resonant, a bell so full of itself its echoes are visible, dense quivering rings of repeats, words that will be heard. Barbara’s voice, her entire being, has never failed to instill in the listener a sense of awe, of fear. Only now, I sensed she could sense her effect was wavering, because I wasn’t feeling awe, I wasn’t feeling fear; it all took just a single split second, confusion, and then uncertainty flashing across her face.
“Why did you not call me?” I said. “For ten days you didn’t call.”
I looked at her. She was, and probably always will be, so hard to read, but I thought I could see it, or sense it really, a struggle inside, the need to maintain composure.
“Ten goddamn days,” I said, my voice now low and cruel. I paused. “You’re a liar.”
“Stop,” I heard a voice somewhere inside me say, but the voice was so low, I did not stop. I do what I always do when wounded. I go for the tender spot. “A liar.” I said this to a journalist whose job it is to tell the truth.
“I did everything I could,” said Barbara, “everything I could to squash the story.”
I didn’t believe her. How could I? The fact is, she is less than truthful in so many ways—everything she could? And for a second, right there in that makeup room, January, 2007, I had the feeling of hating her, but in hating her, I could see, I was also hating myself.
“Everything I could,” she said—and in my mind I was thinking,
everything? Nothing. You did what you needed to do to protect your hide.
We yelled, the staff stared, I tried very hard not to cry. We each took some shots, some hurtful, some primitive.
I must admit, she was a fantasy mother for me. This fantasy, I have it over and over again, with women I respect who are old enough to be my mother, to truly be her, the missing one.
Why do we never stop wanting to be loved like a child? Why do we never stop wanting to be so small?
“You’re a liar,” I said again, wishing I wouldn’t. My anger embarrasses me.
Barbara was looking at me, her face at once devastated and curious.
“Stop,” Bill Geddie said, or did I just imagine this? I was shaking, in a blur. So, I believe, was Barbara.
And then it was over. Somehow it ended. Time’s up. We were due on air. Right now. So we went out to that table, the set. During the fight, all nine of us had been in the room. The show watching the show. And then it was time to go. Oh well. Who said you can’t do a TV show where no one likes each other?
The View
hosts had been doing that for the past nine years.
We all got up, out of our seats. We rode the elevator up to the set, the one I had helped design—it felt like so long ago, last July, a lifetime ago, I had such hope then. And such hope after Streisand too. That hope was gone now. My view of
The View
had dilated, then contracted, and was squeezing smaller still.
We went onto the set. Imagine us. Four whitewashed women, our eyes startled, Barbara I believe probably wrecked behind her mask of makeup. We sat in our assigned seats. The tiny microphones were, as always, pinned to our lapels, the IFBs lodged in everyone’s ears except mine. I could hear. I have always been able to hear exceptionally well. Sometimes I think I have some kind of autistic streak. I can hear the sound of laughter from far away. I can hear creeping in the night. I can hear the sound of water washing down the drain from two rooms over, the sound of Kelli turning a page of the novel she is reading five hundred feet from me. But I could not hear Zoë caught in the car. I could not hear her fear or her despair, even when it was right up against me. Some sounds are so intense, some griefs so deep, they register in a key too pure and full for the compromised human ear. My ears. They were ringing. My head. Dizzy.
Welcome to
The View
!
“Wow, how was that,” Joy said, starting off the show, an absurd but appropriate beginning to an absurd but appropriate show, a show that showed us bombed out by strife, trying to cover.
I snuck a look at Barbara. My heart hurt. I hate to pretend.
“I dunno,” I said, forcing myself into my mode, the role. Those were my first words uttered on
The View
when I returned.
“Well, I don’t know, I gotta tell you something, it was pretty intense, I think I hit a nerve with that guy!”
I never said his name.
“Let me say definitively,” Barbara said, “that everything he said I said about her is totally untrue.” To me, it looked like she was visibly struggling. She looked into the camera. She read the prompter. These were the words. True or false, your call. Later, Barbara said, “that poor pathetic man,” which is a very vague statement, a statement about Donald, about herself, or about people, plain people, here and there, or everywhere.
You Know Where I Am
Two memories:
1
After I left my first show, I was shocked at the freedom. I now had the time to e-mail friends, and to take long baths too. In our house we have an under-four rule. If you’re under four you can bathe with Mama. Chelsea had turned five recently. Viv still an infant, that left me and my baby Blake. Tonight, we were having bubbles, Willie, a killer whale, lined up on the ledge with the great white and the blue. It was 2003. At that time, Blake was three, and all whales were killer whales.
Our tub was not normal. It was shaped like a figure eight with two levels; an adult and a three-year-old could fit without a problem. Blake was on the seat, the ledge they designed for rich women to shave their legs, and I was on the bottom. My tummy was hovering just above the water’s rim, like two hippos barely submerged.
He kicked at it, the hippos, my belly. I just watched. Then another kick. Then a pause.
“Mama, why you tummy so big?” Blake asked. I smiled, and said, “Because I eat too much food.” And Blake said, “Me no like it,” and I said, “Me no like it either.” And that was that. Willie did a triple jump and we both got out and dried off and got into our new matching pajamas. Thank God for Target.
The next day at breakfast, I told the story to Kel, and Geraldine, and anyone who would listen, and everyone laughed. Blake looked a little ashamed.
The next night, Blake and I bathed again. The water was perfect, the superheroes lined up. He stared at my stomach, again, and after a moment of direct eye contact he said, “Mama, I like your big tummy.”
“Do you feel bad ’cause everyone laughed when I told the story?” I asked, and he nodded. At three, he felt it, the subtle, self-deprecating shame wrapped in humor. And he was telling me that he can love even the parts of me others hate; that he can love even the parts of me he himself hates. We hugged.
Your children heal you.
2
I got the idea by accident, the first time I fell off my bike. The bike was new, a birthday present. My dad took me to pick it out. I wanted a bike like Jackie’s: small, pink, with streamers coming out of the handlebars. They didn’t have any like Jackie’s. I kept looking. My dad started sweating. I had to pick one quickly, before he changed his mind or got fed up, before my already ruined eleventh birthday became a total washout. I chose a burnt-orange banana bike, without streamers. It was too big and not at all what I was looking for. By eleven, I was used to that.
When Jackie got her new bike, her dad let her ride it home from the fire station. He drove behind her with flashers on, all the way up Marie Crescent. I asked if I could ride my bike home, like Jackie had. My dad said no. My mother was dead by then. She would have let me ride home, at least from the sump. I was sure.
There was sand in the street, left over from the melted snow. Spring had just arrived. My mom had been buried. I was cruising the neighborhood on my nowhere near perfect bike. I tried to skid, like the cool kids did, and fell off. I landed on my wrist. It hurt, a lot.
I ran, holding my wounded hand in my healthy one. I left my bike in the middle of the street and I ran. Where to run? That was the question. Not many choices: no Mom, Dad at work, a nana who couldn’t see, hear, or drive a car. I ran to a neighbor, Mrs. Nordin. She took me to get an X-ray, then on to Dr. Reichmann’s office, where I got my first cast. I got all kinds of attention. No gifts, though. I expected gifts.
When Howie Nordin got a cast, he got gifts. Howie got his foot caught in the escalator at E.J. Korvette’s. He was seven, wearing new sneakers; the laces got caught first, and then the whole sneaker got pulled under the metal moving steps. Howie started to scream, and so did his mom. Then, a miracle. Some man standing behind the Nordins jumped on the escalator handrail, slid down to the very bottom, and hit the “emergency stop” button. The ambulance arrived, the paramedics with crowbars, and they set his foot free. Howie went to the hospital and got a big cast on his leg. Everyone said he would have been killed were it not for the man who knew all about the emergency stop button. The man saved him, then disappeared just like Superman.
All the neighborhood kids watched as Howie was carried from the car, cast and all. We went to see him the next day, to give him his get well presents. We walked in without knocking, as usual. I couldn’t believe my eyes; it looked like Christmas, presents everywhere!
We bought him the Gunfight at O.K. Corral shooting gallery. I picked it out myself, because it was the best toy I had ever seen in my whole entire life, next to Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots. The Corral was $24 but my father bought it anyway because he always got sweaty and nervous in stores and I knew how to use that to my advantage. Howie got gifts. I got nothing.
I had a broken arm, and no mother, and still no toys. I went to school the next day, white cast in a sling, Magic Markers ready. I was reborn. I went from the horrific “kid with a dead mom” to the interesting “kid with a cast.” It was like a miracle. Eyes formerly filled with pity and sadness now brimmed with curiosity and intrigue.
“Can I sign it? How do you take a bath? Will they saw it off?” These statements had replaced, “Think she’s a ghost following you around? Think maggots are eating her eyeballs right now? Think your dad’s gonna die and you’ll be an orphan?” It was intoxicating and it was addictive. I had proof of my pain, white and heavy, for all to see. Proof I was being cared for and tended to, that I was worth taking care of. Proof that I had some value, enough to be fixed. And I found I wasn’t sad anymore. I was distracted. I had a new pain to focus on, one that was easier to heal than the original. There were many benefits to having a cast. In the middle of the night, it was a weapon.
I broke many bones after that first one, mostly by myself, in my bedroom, with a heavy wooden hanger or a small Mets baseball bat I got at bat day. My hands and fingers usually. No one knew. My secret.
My shrink tells me that that was how I survived, how I learned to cope, as a child. It no longer serves me. Even now, just remembering it, just writing it down, makes it more real than I want it to be. Acquired long before I had a voice, I cannot shake it, this longing for someone to salve what cannot be seen.
I never dream of her.
I would like to see her, one last time. Some night, Mom.
You know where I am.