This house! It was the first time I ever had my own bedroom, as well as my own patio in the backyard, also made of white marble and forming a little semicircle that looked out onto a lawn perfectly mowed by Yannis, our gardener. There was a fig tree right outside my bedroom window. There were lemon and orange trees, roses and night-blooming jasmine, and the enchanting, deep, and full smell of their blossoms would perfume my glistening marble room, bouncing and lobbing, drifting in slow motion off my white marble floor. I inhaled the perfume in my dreams.
But the coup d’etat was the pink bidet in the bathroom. The what? Yes, a bidet, where girls could sit and dip in hot water during their time of the moon.
So my “start” story often begins there, in that Eden called Mati, when I was busing down to Athens on the same road the marathon runners had traveled thousands of years before, busing down to the Herod Atticus Odeon and watching classical Greek plays beneath the gleaming white of the Acropolis. Sipping wine on the ancient stone stairs under the stars, I fell in love with the theater. Surrounded by aromatic sage and blankets of jasmine hanging like bulging laundry from the stone, we shuddered for Oedipus. His demise was no mystery; the Greeks could practically recite the words to perfection.
I’m not sure, however, that any “start” story actually has a definitive beginning, or a singular inspiration. I can trace performance—or exhibitionism at least, and certainly the love of an audience—to Japan. There were plenty of early family stories documenting “front porch theatrics,” which we kids performed in Yokohama, hanging quilts that had been sewn by my grandmother on our front porch, setting out seats for the neighbors, popping popcorn, selling tickets, and hamming up our version of The Princess and the Pea, no laugh too cheaply won.
A more mature appreciation of the theater occurred years later in Greece: I can trace being in awe of actors who were calling in rich voices upon the gods to the stone benches of the Parthenon, as I sat beneath the stars in Athens and watched Medea in red billowing gauze howl for her two children she had just murdered. This calling to the gods, with explosive, atomic emotion so much larger than life, howling with joy or sorrow—I could relate to this grief and giddy, surging happiness.
Mom had told all of us kids when we landed in Greece to “figure out the buses and go see Athens.” And we did. We stayed at the American Hotel while we were looking for housing, and the waiters taught us enough Greek to get around (alalti is “salt” and pipéri is “pepper”), and soon we were ditching the museums in favor of the theater. Theaters where you could drop a pin in the middle, and supposedly hear it fall from anywhere in the space. The Acropolis and the ancient theater of Epidaurus were visited by thousands of tourists gathering in huddles with their tour guides, waiting to hear a pin drop to the ground. (Which, for the record, I never did hear, though it was tested several times by my sisters and me.)
But the concept of my “start” seems to me to have to do with the creative work itself. It has to do with what happened after school, after I left college. It has to do with auditions and putting myself out there to be rejected or hired. It has to do with so much more than simply loving the theater as I learned to do in Greece, or enjoying the audience cooing at the antics of an eight-year-old from the front yard peanut gallery in Japan.
And this start, the start of the actual work that I won by competing with other auditioning actors, lands solely on my mother’s shoulders. After college in Greece and in Germany. After graduating from the University of Texas with a major in theater. After we closed down her parents’ home in Dallas, when her father died, and we divided the antique spinning wheel and the cranberry lamps, and all the treasures of her childhood between Mom and her brother George. After I had returned to Virginia and lived with my parents for a while, then left to be a grown-up and rented an apartment in Georgetown.
My plan was to audition for plays in the Washington, DC, area, to get my union card by doing extra work, and eventually to try to be an actor at the residential theater Arena Stage, and then maybe move to New York. But of course I had to pay the rent first, so by day I worked in a parking garage handing out parking passes to new apartment residents, and by night I served drinks in a private club called the Gaslight Club. I had an extremely ridiculous job as a Gaslight Girl, for which I wore a very sexy Gunsmoke-meets-Playboy outfit of red velvet and gold braids. It was like a fancy one-piece bathing suit with a push-up bra. I also wore fishnets, a velvet choker, high heels, and pretty hair, but more importantly, I had to sing during sets while I served cocktails. You heard me. Sing. I have never considered myself a talented singer, and for good reason. I’m not. I want to sing like a gospel singer sings! Praising God, my body shaking and notes bellowing out of the top of my head, but instead I am a tidy singer, slightly timid, careful with the notes, shy. It’s like math, so black-and-white. You can either carry a note or you can’t. One busy night at the Gaslight, right before I was to go up to the piano to sing “I’m gonna sit right down and write myself a letter . . . ,” a bunch of billionaires at a table started laughing, and I was given a hundred-dollar bill in exchange for NOT singing—and of course I took it but later cried in the locker room while yanking off my stupid fishnets. Oh, how I wished I could sing like Aretha Franklin! I would have bellowed R-E-S-P-E-C-T!
On weekends, I’d drive from Georgetown down the beautiful parkway in my yellow Volkswagon convertible to visit my parents and younger siblings for breakfast—perhaps one-eyed Egyptian sandwiches or Mexican omelets, orange juice that sweated on the outside of its small glass, coffee that my parents both drank black with no sugar no cream. Their Virginia house was a mile up from George Washington’s Mount Vernon, and I’d drive along the Potomac, sunshine and wind beating on my face, and arrive at their place in time to sit at the old oak table. One day, shortly after I had settled in for breakfast, my mom pulled out a newspaper article.
“Look, dear. There are auditions at the Little Theatre of Old Town Alexandria for I Ought to Be in Pictures.”
“It’s a musical, Mom.”
“No, honey, I don’t think so. It says it’s a play, by Neil Simon.”
“Uh, yes, I know, Mom. But it’s not a play, it’s a musical, and I don’t sing.” Memories of my Gaslight Girl singing attempts still traumatized me.
Mom read the notice more closely. She described the role of Libby, an adolescent daughter who visits her unsuccessful screenwriter father in Hollywood. She wins her father’s love. Oh, boy . . .
“Mom, it’s a musical, and I’m not going to audition.”
“Well, I think you should go. If it is a musical, just don’t sing. Just leave the audition. Would that be okay?”
In the silence that ensued, I could feel, and resented, my mother’s longing for me. She ran her fingers through her soft black curls and smiled, neither pushy nor disapproving. Only hopeful. It irritated me that she thought I was stronger than she was. She thought I was talented and she assumed I could withstand the hurts and rejections of Show Business. She thought I was a fighter. She wanted me to succeed, or at least to try to succeed. She wanted me to push to have a voice that she had never had, or was just now trying to build with her flower arranging. I didn’t like her assumptions about me, and I didn’t like her diminutive attitude toward herself. I mean, hadn’t she just been recently appointed an important position in Ikebana International? Wasn’t she a powerful woman in the Japanese flower-arranging world? Wasn’t she a very important woman in Washington, DC? Why didn’t she see herself this way? Once, Mom had said her strength was like a willow branch. Bendable, flexible, yet unbreakable. Yes, she was! An unbreakable willow branch! And she had tremendous poise and grace to boot! But I knew what a struggle it was for her to speak in public, to show confidence and command. Confidence and command. That was the strength that Mom thought I had, and I did, kind of sort of maybe not really. I had it on the surface—Mom never quite understood that underneath it all was a gaping hole of insecurity.
I was silent. She persisted.
“I don’t think it’s a musical, honey. Why do you think it is? Where do you see that?”
She was peering over her coffee, reading the audition notice.
“Mom, please? Stop” was my brilliant rejoinder.
“Well, we could call,” she said. “Look, here’s a number. Should we call? Should we call and find out, honey?”
“I won’t get it, anyway. Even if it’s not a musical, there are probably tons of actors that the theater knows and has worked with before. They’ll cast them, not me. That’s how it works, Mom.”
“Well, it doesn’t hurt to call. Honey? Okay?”
Big, big sigh from me. “I guess. If you really want to.”
She called. Turns out, it wasn’t a musical. I had to prepare an audition. I wore a black beret. And I got the part.
Mom and Dad came to the opening night and cried in all the touching moments. I got good reviews, and that year I won an award from the Little Theatre of Old Town, Alexandria for my portrayal of Libby in I Ought to Be in Pictures. And I took those reviews and the notice of the award, and made a brag sheet out of it, and every subsequent audition I went on in Washington, DC, and later New York, I showed this brag sheet to the directors and producers. I showed it to all the casting directors so they would know that a critic had liked me. And eventually, I got another play. And more good reviews. And a union card. And that is how I got my start. All because my mother wouldn’t give up on me auditioning for a play that was not a musical.
Years later, Mom would visit me in New York City, helping me move from the rat-infested Martha Washington senior and girls housing unit in midtown to the George Washington Hotel, which had several floors reserved for NYU students “at affordable prices,” though they were still barely doable for me. Real estate was being bought up left, right, and center in downtown New York—which was creating quite a furor among the edgy, spikey-haired crowd on St. Mark’s Place and the easy hippies of the East Village. I could understand the sadness at the loss that was occurring as corporate change became a reality, but nevertheless I was glad to find an apartment I could barely afford. Now I could start grad school at NYU Tisch School of the Arts with safety and focus. I was going there on a full scholarship thanks to Zelda Fichandler, our acting chair, and Mom made the trip up again to New York from DC to help me pack and unpack.
My room at the George Washington was 125 square feet. You could lie in bed and pull the drawers out from the dresser, which was crammed against the wall on the right, and extract your outfit for the day all without ever rolling over. Mom hollered from the bathroom, “I have to be careful not to step into the toilet when I step out of the shower!” There was just enough room on the floor to plant your feet and turn around. There was only one window. Mom liked to throw it open and hang out with her bosoms just resting on the bottom frame, mimicking all the other New York women at similar windows up and down the block on Madison Avenue, women watching people, women watching life on the streets of New York. The sunlight glancing off her left cheek, her hair damp and curly, her smile wide at the adventure we were on together. “OH, LOOOOOK!” she screamed. I ran to the window, and we saw an entire VW Beetle that had fallen into a pothole. Just the blue top poked out of the enormous chasm. No one was hurt, and we laughed and laughed that morning, at crazy New York City.
That afternoon, Mom was walking around the West Village by herself. It was the first time she had ever been on her own in the city without me by her side. I was in class, and Mom was going to talk to real estate people about other available apartments. She got scared. She felt out of place, as if everyone could just look at her and tell she wasn’t from New York. She started shaking, and had her purse cemented so tightly under her arm that her knuckles were white. I had been mugged a couple of nights before, and the traces of that fear still clutched at her stomach, and made her jerk her head to the side to make sure she wasn’t being followed, even in broad daylight. “Now, Beverly!” she thought. “What is it about everyone else that seems so comfortable? There are students and old women and people of all ages and walks of life! Now stop and LOOK around you!” She backed up to a glass wall and saw that almost everyone was carrying an ice-cream cone. A backpack and an ice-cream cone. A purse and an ice-cream cone. A green balloon and an ice-cream cone. Bicycles and scooters, and ice-cream cones. Hazlenut and pistachio, cones and cups, strawberry sorbet and chocolate-covered vanilla. Waffle cones drizzled with milk chocolate, and napkins already scattered on the sidewalk. She turned around to discover that her back was pressed up against a Häagen-Dazs store. Inside, a stream of cones and color and ease was emanating from the frozen sweet counter. She told herself, “Now, Beverly! You march right in there and get yourself an ice cream!” Which she did, pistachio with a small regular cone. “And then you march right outside with all those other New Yorkers, and you just decide that you belong!” And so she did.
By late fall, when Mom returned once again to help me move into a fifth-floor walk-up on Morton Street in the West Village, she was behaving like a seasoned New York veteran. We hauled boxes up those five flights, yelling at the cabbie that we’d be right back and Please don’t put our boxes on the street! We lit a Duraflame in my illegal fireplace. We climbed out the rickety metal fire escape and up over the trees to the open rooftop so we could look at the sky together. So many times in our past, my mother and I had gazed up at the stars, at this same sky. When I was seven years old, we had traced the same Big and Little Dipper when Mom took our Bluebird troop camping in the deserts of California. We had traced this same Orion’s belt in the Bon Odori sky of Japan, and the same Milky Way had hovered over the tragic actors at the Acropolis in Greece. Now, we saw a shooting star and made wishes. I knew we were both wishing for love, for ourselves and for each other. We had been without romance for too long. She wanted to rekindle her marriage with Dad, and, for me, I had been alone for awhile—it was time to fill a void in my life. We yearned for romance. Man love. Protector love. Gentle love and sexy love. Safe. Embrace. Approve. Consistent. Nonjudgmental. Adventurous. Ours was a complicated wish, and it lasted long after the shimmer of the shooting starlight faded in the black sky. We needed a larger star. Perhaps a comet. We craned our necks up to the inky sky, on the rooftop in the West Village of Manhattan. We craned our necks up to the sky looking for God. Our hearts were bursting with the hope of being seen by more than the stars, bursting with the hope of being in the stars, the way you hope you are in the pocket of your loved one, and want to put them in your pocket, too. To be inside them, and they in you, not in a sexual way, but in their skin. To be them. Years later, I understood that this was called codependency, but then, even now, the utter surrender of losing yourself and meshing with another person, the odd vacancy and erasure of self that happens when first in love, it was what we wanted. It would make us feel complete. We prayed, heads dropped back and eyes wide open, and saw ourselves up inside the stars, swimming in their shimmer, wearing gold dust star capes and flying like superwomen in the cool spheres of heaven, flying in the heart of God. We closed our eyes and squinted them tight, and I felt her hold my hand. Soft skin, cool fingers. I clenched her hand tight. Then we opened our eyes again, hoping for more stars, more wishes. But there was only black night. Sated, we backed down the cold metal staircase, quietly ducking low so the creepy guy who stood naked for hours at a time in the apartment window opposite from mine wouldn’t see us. We crawled awkwardly through the window, and made chamomile tea.
Several months later, we rode cabs through Central Park, and gasped when we saw the forsythia in bloom, cascading like yellow frothy waves over the rust-and-gray stone bridges traversing the cross streets from Central Park West to Fifth Avenue. And even though we were under the draping forsythia, peering up from our cab window, we could somehow also see it from above: we could fly up over the bridge and look down upon the park, tracing yellow forsythia blossoms and yellow cabs in a curving line through the damp black cross streets and white museums, around the Great La
wn, and on up into Harlem’s redbrick brownstones. Mom said the forsythia branches looked like stars.
Later we bought forsythia at the local Korean Mart in the West Village. Mom reminded me that in Japanese arrangements, one made a triangle, and the different lines of the triangle were shin, soe, and hikae, or heaven, earth, and man. Forsythia was perfect for line material, and the shin, or heaven line, would be the first and longest line of the arrangement we would build. She bought two branches of dripping yellow forsythia. She would use it for the shin, and also for the second line of the triangle, the soe, or earth line. The final piece of the triangle, the flowers at the base, would be the hikae, or man line.
For the flowers, Mom bought white alstroemeria. It dawned on me that she was going to build a starry sky with the flowers, and indeed at home, she chose two flat half-circle black vases, the traditional suiban container—together they would make a circle, but she set them off-center so they were two black half-moons facing each other. She placed a small kenzan in each container, and carefully cut the forsythia underwater so that the cut created a bit of suction, water sucked up inside the branch. She trimmed the old petals off the branch, and caressed it into a slight bend. She measured the branch so that it was the full length of the container, then doubled the length and added two inches as that was the width of the flat moon container. She then cut the second branch to two-thirds of the length of the first. After that, she draped the forsythia back and forth, arcing from one vase to the next. They looked like stars burning and bursting forth from a dark sky. She then cut the alstroemeria underwater, and placed these flowers at the base of the forsythia in the left container. The alstroemeria were white, and appeared to be newer, fresher stars, sparkling beneath the older burning yellow stars. I stared at the yellow forsythia and the cluster of white alstroemeria arcing between the two black moon vases, and I imagined she was one vase, and I the other. The arrangement itself was in conversation, and in some abstract way, it was actually us in conversation, though we hadn’t said a word.
The Seasons of My Mother Page 7