Dancing In The Light

by Shirley Maclaine

  It was clear her survival instincts were intact. What was disturbingly obvious was that she was determined to manufacture adversity so she could hone them even finer.

  “Scotch,” said Daddy, feeling it was time to participate again, “you just tell me what bone you’re going to break next and I’ll be right there. We’ll put a nice furry rug under the piss pot so we don’t have to worry about that anymore.”

  “I hate your vulgarity,” screamed Mother again, “and so does everybody else.”

  Daddy winked at me so she would see it. His competitive cruelty was one for the books.

  “You make a damned fool of yourself in front of people,” said Mother, her voice suddenly quiet. “I don’t like to see you do that.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because I love him, that’s why. And I don’t like someone I love to make a fool of themselves.”

  “I wouldn’t call that love exactly,” I said. “I’d call that being concerned about appearances.”

  She waved her hand at me and said, “What would you know about love?”

  I felt she hadn’t realized what she’d said. It was a line she delivered almost as a throwaway.

  “I know about love,” she stated as though the insistent self-sacrifice of a long stormy marriage proved it.

  I could only shake my head.

  She went on then, apparently unstoppable, through a catalog of Dad’s feelings and her own sufferings.

  All of her recalled stories painted a picture of hilarious, bizarre yet intense involvement. She was clearly outraged, yet unable to seriously consider leaving him. For two people who professed to be unable to live peacefully together, they just as obviously could not live peacefully without each other.

  When Mother’s tirade was finished, I said, “You always told me you loved him.” She stared at me.

  “I couldn’t help that,” she answered.

  I was floored. Sachi was too. After a pause for exhaustion, Sachi said, conversationally, “This is really interesting for me.”

  “Really, darling?” asked Mother as though it had never occurred to her that Sachi’s perceptions were being rather painfully sharpened.

  “Yes, Grandmother,” Sachi went on. “I’ve never heard people argue this way before. I can usually follow it better.”

  “Oh,” said Mother.

  “Well, Sachi,” said Daddy, “why do you think we argue so much?”

  Sachi looked at him directly and said, “I think you like to argue. I think you think it keeps you alive.”

  “I argue because I have to save myself,” said Mother. “If I didn’t, my ego would be destroyed.”

  “But you fall for his teasing, Grandmother. You want him to make you angry.”

  Sachi’s sweet, uninvolved observation seemed to grab Mother’s attention.

  “I do?” asked Mother.

  “Yes,” she said, “and if you don’t work that problem out, you’ll just have to come back again until you do.”

  Both Mother and Daddy stopped for a moment and thought. Dad spoke first.

  “But I thought when you come back everything is changed.”

  Sachi didn’t hesitate. “It won’t change to be better in the next lifetime until you work it out in this lifetime. That’s what progress is.”

  I was amazed at Sachi’s approach. And they were listening. She continued.

  “The way I see it, Grandmother, is that Granddaddy here is providing you with the opportunity to work out your problems of intolerance and judgment. He does so many things that you don’t like because you want him to.”

  “I want him to humiliate me and keep a dirty room?”

  “Yes, you draw it to you because you know you need to progress along those lines. It’s so obvious that you love each other and you chose to be together so you could work out this stuff in yourselves.”

  “But why doesn’t he just stop what he’s doing that makes me mad?” asked Mother.

  “Well,” said Sachi, “he probably would if you’d just stop being mad. Until you stop that, he’s going to keep on providing you with the opportunity to grow until you do.”

  Sachi was giving me a lesson in objective clarity of thought!

  “He’s giving you a gift by putting you through - all this. And you’re giving him a gift by helping him to understand that it hurts you. You each have to change yourselves, not each other.”

  Mom and Pad were halted in their tracks. I had never tried this approach with them.

  The living room was blissfully silent for a few minutes. Mother turned to me. “Are you ashamed of me, Shirl?” she asked.

  “Ashamed?” I answered. “Why would I be ashamed?”

  “Do you think I’ve said bad things about your daddy?”

  “Sure you have,” I answered. “I always remember you taking me aside and telling me how difficult it was with Daddy and if it wasn’t for Warren and me you’d leave him.”

  Finally Sachi said, “Boy, you two must have had some very complicated past lives together.”

  Mother’s answer to that was, “Well, it’s too late for me to change now. I’ve been listening to him for over fifty years and I’m just not going to do it anymore.”

  Now she suddenly started to cry. “I must really be an awful person,” she said. My God, where did this come from?

  I got up and put my arm around her. “C’mon, Mother, why do you say that?”

  “Because that’s how you’re all making me feel.”

  I hugged her close to me. “You are trying to prove you’re an awful person.”

  “It’s better that I don’t talk. Your daddy can’t hear me anyway.”

  Sachi got up and put her arms around Mother too. I looked over at Daddy, who coolly observed Mother as though he had seen this a thousand times before.

  “Daddy,” I said, “why don’t you tell Mother why you love her?”

  He thumped the pillow beside him and began to talk. As Mother’s tears slid down her cheeks, he described how he would be so proud sitting in the car waiting for her to come out of the supermarket. All the other “old biddies” would emerge with their hair messed up, falling unkempt around their faces. Their shoes didn’t fit and they were slumped over as they shuffled along with little tiny footsteps. But when Mother walked out, she was a queen, slim and trim, her hair styled and her walk proud and gliding. The other women had “odors.” There was never any of that with Mother. She smelled nice, of Emeraude, her favorite perfume. He explained that he appreciated how she had taken care of him, how she kept the house so immaculate, a damn sight cleaner than my apartment, and he told how he loved her cooking and never enjoyed eating out of those damn fool cafeterias where people bumped into him and spilled his coffee. He said he told her he loved her a dozen times a day. When I asked how he did it, he said he touched her shoulder every time he walked past her, and she knew what that meant.

  Then he said perhaps she was feeling left out and alienated because each one of the rest of us had had some honor bestowed on us and she was the only one who hadn’t. That she should realize that she had been the spark plug responsible for the success of all of us.

  Then, out of earshot of Mother as she went to the bathroom, he said, “I think she very much regrets that she didn’t become a big-time actress. Hell,” he added, “I could say the same thing if I let myself dwell on it. I could have become a big-shot Ph.D. in psychology if it hadn’t been for my having to support a wife and children. But that was over when I got married. I never gave it another thought. I wouldn’t have had one-tenth of the happiness I’ve had with you and Warren and your mother if I had become some professional psychologist somewhere or a fine musician at Carnegie Hall. In some ways, your mother is philosophical, but in others she’s not.”

  Mother walked back into the room. When he saw that she had returned, he looked straight at her and said, “As far as the money is concerned, it doesn’t mean diddly squat. It’s just so many fins on a Cadillac. I don’t know why she is so
paranoid.”

  My stomach turned over. I remembered how he used to do the same thing with me. I remembered how maliciously gleeful he had seemed when he told me the story of tying the tails of a dog and cat together so he could watch them fight. I had been horrified. He said it was life. And now he seemed to want Mother to continue to fight.

  But Mother didn’t say anything.

  I thought of how she used to recite poetry to me with mellow tones of inflection in her voice.

  She sat down carefully in her chair. “You know, Shirl,” she said in a completely reasonable tone of voice, “you have no idea what an effect the Depression had on people. It was something. I’ll never forget. To this day I can’t go in and buy a dress for myself unless it’s on sale.”

  “And,” said Daddy, “she looks much prettier when she’s dressed up than any of her friends.”

  “Oh, Ira, they don’t even fit me when I buy them. My shoulders are too hunched over.”

  “Well, you don’t have a belly like the financial wizards do. And your legs are beautiful.”

  “My legs are always breaking.”

  I stood up. “You know,” I said, feeling that the third act was over and I was tired and it was late, “I wish you wouldn’t focus on the negative so much.”

  “Well, you would be frightened, too, if you had a leg like mine.”

  I began to clear the table. “You’re addicted to falling and hurting yourself.”

  “If I fall again, I think I’d just go to bed for good.”

  “Mother”—I looked her right in the eye—“do you want to die?”

  She stopped a moment and thought. “I guess I haven’t made up my mind yet,” she said conversationally.

  I smiled.

  Daddy said, “Well, if you decide it’s yes, I know where the keys are.”

  She looked up at him. “The keys you’ve been making me search for in your filthy room?”

  “Yep,” he said, smacking his lips, “I just like to have you visit me in my room.”

  Mother shrugged, suddenly smiling. Then, making one of her swift transitions, she turned to me with a totally serious face and said slowly, thinking it out, “You know, Shirl. One of the things that’s held your daddy and me together all these years is the memory of the first night we spent together.” She paused. “Our wedding night.” And stopped again. “I had never known a man before. To me it was a marvel.”

  I waited, thinking she might go on, but she simply repeated, “That night was a marvel,” her thoughts lost somewhere in her memory. I thought she might be trying to tell me something else. So I asked her, rather hesitantly, “Mother, it must have been a marvel that lasted for more than one night?”

  “Oh, of course,” she said immediately, and with great conviction, “but when it was new to me it was wonderful.”

  Daddy was watching her delightedly, his mouth tender and mischief in his eye. Sachi’s eyes were glued open. She had certainly never expected to hear her grandmother bring up so intimate a subject. I decided this was a good time to ask something I’d always wondered about and turned to my father.

  “Daddy,” I said, “had you ever known a woman in bed before Mother?”

  His smile broadened and he immediately picked up his pipe. “Had I known a woman in bed before your mother?” he repeated, using an easy joke-stall.

  I nodded and Sachi leaned forward.

  “Why, no,” said Daddy, busily examining his pipe, “but that doesn’t count the women I had known on the floor.”

  Sachi howled along with me. Mother knit her brows at our noise and threw a lofty look at her husband, intent on holding our attention and making her own point. “So,” she went on, impervious, “I’ve known only one man in my life that way. And I’m glad. The memory of that night has always kept me from doing anything foolish.”

  Daddy tapped his pipe against the ashtray, a familiar maneuver to get the focus on what he was about to say. (Shades of not-so-subtle acting techniques …)

  “Monkey,” he said, in that way which meant we were going to talk about me now—and specifically about my sex life. “Have you heard anything further from that Englishman Gerry that you wrote about? I wondered what his reaction would be when he read that part where you told about his penis floating in the bathtub. That’s getting pretty personal, you know.” He was referring to a scene from Out on a Limb in which I had described Gerry soaking in a tub while we talked and how amused I was by the penis floating gently among the bubbles.

  Sachi batted her eyelashes. “Yeah, Mom,” she said solemnly, “a girlfriend of mine read that and said she had been in the bathtub with lots of men but the penises she knew never floated.”

  Mother’s hand flew to her mouth as she laughed on a large intake of air.

  “What did Sachi say?” Daddy asked, knowing perfectly well what she had said.

  Very seriously, and somewhat louder, Sachi repeated her remark.

  Equally grave, Ira Beaty regarded his granddaughter, and judiciously responded, “I can understand that.”

  Somewhat bemused, Mother chimed in, “Well. Well, do you think Gerry was proud of your writing about him? An awful lot of men would be proud.”

  “Grandmother,” said Sachi, “how could he be proud when Mother wrote that his penis only floated?”

  Mother shrieked. When she subsided she said, “Well, I wouldn’t know about that. I’ve only known one.” Now she shrugged again. “It was probably stupid of me.”

  Daddy took a long drag on his pipe. “Well, maybe,” he said, “but when people ask me what I do best I always say, ‘Look at my children and you’d know the answer to that. Obviously I do my best work in bed.’ ”

  “Oh, Ira,” Mother said, “you’re really awful.” She straightened up as though she had had enough. “I think I’ll die if I don’t go to bed now.”

  Sachi and I helped her up and into the guest room, where they would sleep together. I wondered how the double bed would work for them since they had arranged their homemade truce to include not only separate beds but separate bedrooms.

  We helped her into her pink filmy nightgown. She had bought it on sale for the trip to New York. As I helped dress her, I remembered that she had given me a nightgown for Christmas every year for as long as I could remember. I have never been able to figure out why.

  We helped her into bed. Sachi leaned over to kiss her. Mother hesitated. “I just want to say that after all I’ve done for your father, I want him to do four things for me.”

  “What are they, Mother?” I asked.

  She moistened her dry lips and formed her words carefully. “I want him to clean up his room, stop humiliating me in front of my friends with his bawdry humor, stop drinking, and keep a record of the checks he makes out.”

  “Yes, Mother,” I said. “Okay, we got the point. Now please stop fussing.”

  She sat up in bed and began to cry again.

  She looked up at Sachi and me and, incredibly, she said, “Don’t let me upset you. You two leave me here to cry. I will be fine. It’s not important. You need your rest.”

  “Grandmother,” Sachi said loudly, “you can’t do this to us. You’re telling us to leave you like this? You’re not being fair. You are too manipulative. I’m not going to bed until I see that you are all right.”

  Sachi shocked Mother, both with her logic and her firmness.

  “Oh,” she said, and stopped crying. “Then you just go and tell your grandfather what I said. And don’t let him have a drink out there in the living room by himself. That’s why he wants me to go to bed early, you know.”

  “Okay, Grandmother,” said Sachi, “I think everybody would like some peace and quiet now. You have a good sleep and remember how much we love you. I’ve got to go back to California early tomorrow morning, but I’ll call you when I get there. I love you, Grandmother.”

  “I love you too,” said Mother. “Have a good trip, darling.” Then she turned and looked at me. “You were so wonderful tonight, Shirl. It
was breathtaking.”

  “Thank you, Mother,” I said. “Did you love the audience when they recognized you?”

  “Oh, it was wonderful,” she said, “and there was one man in the row in front of us from Canada. He reached back and squeezed my hand. I was so proud to be your mother. Now, you run along. Don’t let anything interfere with the work you have to do tomorrow.”

  I kissed her and Sachi turned out the light by her bed and we left.

  I fell asleep marveling at the freedom with which my mother could express her fears, frustrations, and anxieties when she felt comfortable and safe.

  Of course my dad’s reaction to her behavior was as impressive as she herself had been.

  Neither of them could know it, but trying to analyze what she and Dad were to each other and to me would become the “work” I would be most interested in for the rest of the summer.

  At breakfast the next morning, Dad decided that Mother’s “emotionalism” the night before had been caused by some chocolate she had eaten in the dressing room.

  “Chocolate is worse for your mother than strychnine,” he said, cheerfully ignoring his contribution of a gooey chocolate cake when she was still in the hospital.

  Mother, however, was mortified. “I’m so sorry, Shirl,” she said, genuinely upset with herself. As difficult and alarming as it had been, I tried to explain the positive aspects of it.

  “Mom,” I said, “it was so important for you to get it all out of your system. You made Sachi and me feel very loved because you would expose yourself like that in front of us.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I never thought of it that way. It really was all right?”

  “Yes, Mom. It was more than all right. It was necessary and good for all of us. There are more positive aspects to expressing yourself than negative.”

  “Gosh, Shirl,” she said, “I was always taught to control my emotions and not upset anyone with what I was feeling.”

  “Well,” I said, “you don’t have to do that anymore.”

  “Thank you, darling,” she said. “Thank you for understanding. It’s a nice feeling to be able to be myself.”