Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!

by Fannie Flagg

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Upstairs in apartment 6D a note was on the table. “Mother, I was here. Love, Dena.” Three weeks later the note she had left on the table in the living room was still there. Mrs. Cleverdon told her so on the phone. Her mother did not come back. Her mother had disappeared off the face of the earth. But Dena did not cry. Not once. Back at school, if anyone asked how her Christmas had been, she lied. She pretended it had never happened. It took years for Dena to really believe that her mother was not going to come back.

  That next Christmas her grandparents wanted her to come and be with them, but she took a train to Chicago and spent the holidays alone in a room at the Drake. The first day she got in a cab and went over to the Berkeley and stood outside the building for a long time and then went back to the hotel. Christmas Day she dressed up and went downstairs and had Christmas dinner in the Cape Cod room. She sat at a table by the window and ordered a lobster. She had never had one before so she decided to try one. People looked over at the pretty girl sitting all by herself with a lobster bib, trying to crack the shell and figure out which part you were supposed to eat, but she did not see them staring at her because she spent most of her time looking out the window as though she was expecting to see someone she knew.

  Me and My Shadow

  New York City

  1978

  “And you never heard from your mother after that?” asked Dr. Diggers.

  “No. Nobody did. Anyhow, that was a long time ago and has nothing to do with what’s happening now.”

  “Wait a minute. So you don’t really know if she’s living or dead.”

  Dena dismissed it. “I don’t know and I don’t care. Really, it doesn’t matter to me one way or another.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “Because—” Dena looked up“—it’s not anything I’m particularly proud of.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know, it’s just embarrassing.”

  “Let’s talk about it.”

  “Let’s don’t. I am not interested in the past. I don’t even remember most of it; what’s the point? Look, I’m a little old to sit around hugging a teddy bear, whining about my mother. I don’t have time for that; it’s all I can do to keep my head on straight without spacing out or getting myself whipped up about yesterdays. You get one mother and one father and if you’re lucky, you grow up and it’s over, get over it, and become an adult. I didn’t have a great childhood but I’m not going to dine out on it. I hate whiners. And I don’t need anybody to feel sorry for me.”

  Diggers rolled over closer to Dena. “Sweetie pie, I do feel sorry for you. And you have a right to feel sorry for yourself. That was a terrible thing that happened to you.”

  It was the first time Dr. Diggers had called her anything but Dena and it caught her off guard.

  “You are going to have to talk to someone; it might as well be me. OK?”

  Dena heard herself say, “All right.”

  “Good girl. I know it’s hard for you to talk about but we have to. We have to look at this thing head on and not sweep it under the rug, because until you face what really happened and deal with it, you are not going to know what you are feeling about anything. I won’t lie to you; it is going to be a long, hard process … but we have to start somewhere.”

  Dena was really listening to her for the first time.

  “Are you willing to start and work with me now?”

  “Yes.”

  That night, Elizabeth Diggers thought more about Dena. She had grown very fond of her. She could still look at her with a cold, trained, professional eye, but there was more there—something more beyond the usual patient-doctor relationship. Lonely people have a way of recognizing each other. She could see past that beautiful face, past those eyes that did not reveal. When she looked at Dena, she saw that fifteen-year-old who never got out of that room. She was still sitting there, looking out the window, still waiting for her mother to come home. Diggers’s job was to go inside that room, take that girl by the hand, and bring her out. Get her out into the sun and fresh air so she could continue to grow. Diggers knew all the clinical names, all the medical and psychological terms for what was bothering Dena, but it could be summed up in simple, human terms. Her heart had been broken and she had never gotten over it.

  Session after session, Dena would close her eyes and try to remember, but she seemed to have a block. What was she like? Dena was even having a hard time remembering what her mother looked like. She tried her best but she was unable to come up with anything but the shadow of a person, darting in and out of the picture. She remembered apartment buildings, smells, long halls, names—the Sheridan … the Royal Arms … the Bradbury Towers—eating alone in big cities—the Windsor Arms … the Drake—afternoons in ladies’ lounges in department stores, reading, coloring, waiting for her mother to stop work when she would have her all to herself, where she could sleep next to her. The Altamont, the Highland Towers, the Hillsborough. She remembered walking past city windows full of warm, soft sofas and easy chairs and rich, dark, shiny tables and chairs; beautiful mannequins in the latest fashions, shoes, hats, gloves, dresses, fox furs. Park Lane, Ritz Towers, Ridgemont. She remembered standing, shivering, waiting for the streetcar in front of a window where tuxedos, tails, and top hats were displayed. Windows with a hundred different glass bottles on display, blue, green, and clear, full of amber-colored perfumes. She remembered riding a hundred different streetcars across strange cities. But who was her mother? What had she thought about, what had she felt, had Dena loved her, had she really loved Dena? Didn’t she know she had a little girl who adored her, needed her? She had faded into the city, disappeared, gone, and as much as Dena tried, the woman she remembered was like someone she had seen in a film, not a real person at all. At times she wondered if her mother had ever really existed, if she wasn’t remembering something from a movie. It was all mixed up. It was as if her childhood never happened and she had simply wakened one day, an adult.

  But Dr. Diggers persisted, asking her the same questions over and over. “How did you feel when your mother did not come home?” As time went by, Dena lost her patience. “This is so stupid! Why do I have to talk about this all the time? I’m so tired of it I could scream. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

  Dr. Diggers put down her pad. “Why do you come here, Dena?”

  “Frankly—you want the truth—I come here because you won’t give me my damn prescription for Valium unless I come here. Why do you think I come here? For the candy?”

  “I think you come here because you’re scared. You need a place to rant and rave and lash out at someone you feel safe with, someone who can see through your bullshit. I know you can walk right out that door and find a thousand doctors happy to give you all the tranquilizers, the mood elevators you ask for; you can charm your way into getting whatever you want and take all the pills in the world. You can do that. You can either become a dope addict or an alcoholic or you can jump out a window, or go through this and get it over with and hopefully feel better.”

  “Hopefully?”

  “Dena, in life there are no guarantees. But I feel that you are making progress.”

  “OK, I know my mother didn’t love me like she should have. She walked out; so what good does it do me? I still feel lousy. It doesn’t make it any better. I don’t care anymore—why can’t you accept that? Why can’t you understand that I just want to forget about it?”

  “You can do that, you can put all the Band-Aids in the world on it, but it is still not going to get to the bottom of what is causing your stomach stress and anxiety. And whether you admit it or not, Miss Hickory Nut, you come here because you want to get better. So what do you say we start again, OK?”

  Dena, thinking it over, finally said in resignation, “Oh, give me a piece of that rotten candy, then. But you know I hate you.”

  Dr. Diggers laughed. “Oh, I know.”

  “No, I real
ly do.”

  “I’m sure you do. Now, let’s get back to where we were.”

  Weeks went by and then one day, out of the blue, Dena suddenly burst into tears and started to cry uncontrollably. “What is it?” Diggers asked. “What are you thinking about?”

  “I … always thought she’d come back … but she never did,” Dena blurted out between sobs, “and I don’t know what I did wrong.”

  Finally Dena stopped fighting. Dr. Diggers’s hypnotherapy began to help Dena relax and she was remembering more and more each session. Today, she put her under a little deeper. Dena had her eyes closed and could almost see her mother. But she was still an indistinct figure. Then, Dena said, “She had taken me shopping. I don’t know what city we were in … New York, maybe. Oh I don’t know, but I remember we walked by this big store and it had all these pianos in the window. She stopped and we went in … and she walked all around, looking at all the different pianos … and way in the back she saw one … she must have liked. She sat down and opened it up and she had this odd look on her face.…”

  “Like what? Describe it.”

  “Oh, I don’t know … like I wasn’t there or something. And all of a sudden she started to play a song. I was so surprised. I didn’t even know she could play. She played some sort of waltz, and I remember she looked so happy. I had never seen her look so … well … happy is not right. She looked like she was somewhere else; transported would be a good word. Then this old man who worked there opened the door to his office and he stood listening until she finished. He had some sort of thick accent, and he said, ‘My dear young lady, where did you learn to play like that?’

  “He asked her to please play something else but she told him that song was all she knew, and we left. I said, ‘Mother, why didn’t you tell me you could play the piano?’ And she acted like it was nothing. But she must have been good or else that man wouldn’t have come over.”

  “Did she ever talk about her parents?”

  “No … just that they were killed in a fire.”

  “Did you ever see any pictures of them, or of her when she was growing up?”

  “No. She said everything burned up.”

  “Weren’t you curious?”

  “She didn’t want to talk about them, it upset her. So I just didn’t.”

  “You spent a lot of time not upsetting your mother, didn’t you? Can you remember that?”

  “Yes …”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because … I was enough trouble as it was.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Well, because she had to look after me.”

  “Let’s go back to your feeling of being afraid. What were you afraid of?”

  “I told you, I don’t know.”

  “Was there something that made you think your mother was frightened?”

  “No.”

  Diggers sat back and waited. Then Dena said, “I think she was afraid of that man, one time.”

  “What man?”

  “Some man she saw … when we were still living in New York. We were coming home and it was snowing. We turned the corner and when we got to the apartment building she stopped all of a sudden. I looked up at her and saw that she was staring at the man talking to the clerk at the desk. He had his back to us and all I saw was a big man in a black-checked overcoat. I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ Before I had finished, she grabbed me by the arm and almost dragged me down the street. I asked, ‘What’s the matter, Momma? What is it?’ She said, ‘Be quiet and let me think.’ She was walking so fast that I had to run to keep up with her. I was panicked now. So I said, ‘Did I do something, Momma?’

  “ ‘No,’ she said, ‘come on.’ In a minute she told me to go out in the street and get a cab, wave one down.

  “ ‘Me?’ I said. ‘What do I do?’

  “ ‘Just go and wave; go on.’

  “I ran and stood on the corner and waved and waved but nobody stopped. I ran back to her and said, ‘They won’t stop.’ She said, ‘Is anybody coming?’ I looked up and down and nobody was. She practically ran to the subway and we caught the first one and she sat down and just looked straight ahead. I was convinced I had done something wrong and I started to cry. She said, ‘Why are you crying?’

  “ ‘I’m scared,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter.’

  “ ‘Oh, Dena, it’s nothing. I just saw someone I didn’t want to see, that’s all. Don’t be so sensitive.’

  “ ‘Who is he?’

  “She said, ‘Oh, nobody, just some man I used to work with, nobody important. I just don’t want to see him, that’s all.’

  “I asked, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘He’s been bothering me to come back to work for him and I don’t want to.’

  “ ‘Why don’t you just tell him?’

  “ ‘I would rather not hurt his feelings. Now stop asking so many questions.’ Then she looked up for the first time and noticed where we were headed. She stood up and we got off at the next stop and changed subways and we went all the way to the Village. It was really snowing and it was hard to walk but we got to West Twelfth or maybe Eleventh Street. We stopped at a coffee shop and she made a phone call. After she came back she seemed a little more herself. She said, ‘We’re going over to see Christine.’ ”

  “Who was Christine?”

  “A friend of my mother’s who was a dancer at Radio City. She said, ‘She’s invited us to come and spend the night with her; won’t that be fun?’

  “She lived in a basement apartment on St. Luke’s Place and was very glad to see us. She let me play with her cat, Milton, and then Christine put me in this long gown of hers and I slept on a pad that she made up for me, and Momma slept on the couch. At about daybreak I woke up. I looked over and saw that my mother was sitting by the window. I remember having that cold, scared feeling in the pit of my stomach again. I knew she was unhappy and I didn’t know why. I was scared to ask her because I thought maybe it was me. Maybe she wished she did not have a little girl. I don’t know why I thought that but I did.”

  “Dena, I’m going to count to three, and when you wake up you will feel rested and peaceful.… One … just like you have slept for hours … two … feeling calm and serene … three.”

  Dena slowly opened her eyes.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Fine.” She yawned. “Hate to disappoint you but I don’t think I was hypnotized. I remember everything you said.”

  Diggers smiled. That’s what everyone she hypnotized said.

  Wall-Cap Productions I

  New York City

  1978

  Ira Wallace was listening to an idea Capello had for a television news show. Although Wallace did not trust Capello as far as he could throw him, the more he heard about the idea, the more he liked it. Capello elaborated. “We cover all the Hollywood stuff; I can feed you enough material from my files to keep you supplied for years. We set it up as a news thing—legit gossip, headline stuff, cutting-edge, hard-hitting, red-hot items. I’m telling you, it’s a uranium mine. It’s what the people want.”

  Capello threw a copy of his supermarket rag’s P&L for the year across the desk. Wallace glanced at it. The profits were impressive. He said, “I don’t know, it sounds good, but you know Winchell tried a gossip show like that in the early days of TV and it didn’t work.”

  Capello had an immediate answer. “Of course it didn’t. He was too hard. We soft-sell, we get some hair-spray head or some good-looking broad to sit up there, tell them to smile, and I guarantee you got a hit. You just have to package it the right way.”

  “You talking network?”

  “No, I’m talking syndication. That’s where the money is. We own it, we sell it, no regulations. We can cover stuff the networks won’t touch.”

  Wallace was suspicious. “Syndication? What do you need me for?”

  “Experience. With my story contacts and your TV experience we can flood every major market within five years. Somebody is gonna d
o it … if we get a jump on this and do it right, I’m talking millions, maybe billions, Ira.”

  Wallace leaned back and relit his cigar. “You may be right. Get some legit, recognizable anchor … like maybe a David Thorenson? Have you been anywhere else with this?”

  “No, you’re the only one … so far. I need to move on this thing as soon as possible, Ira.”

  “How soon?”

  “Today.”

  Wallace looked at Capello. The dirt-digger had not seen the light of day for years and had unhealthy, blue-white skin and lips the color of raw liver. Wallace, who was no beauty, wanted to throw up at the sight of him. But he thought, as he fought back his nausea, You rat bastard: someday somebody is going to slit your throat and I wish I could be there to see it. But in the meantime, Wallace was smart enough to know a damn good idea. “What’s the deal?”

  “Sixty-forty.”

  “Jesus,” Wallace said.

  “Hey, without me, you got no show.”

  Two months and what seemed like forty-eight lawyers later, Sidney Capello and Ira Wallace were, as they say in the business, in bed together and Wall-Cap Productions was formed. As the thing took shape, looking good, looking very good, they again discussed talent. Capello dropped his bombshell. “I want Dena Nordstrom.”

  “Yeah, and I want the queen of England but she ain’t available.”

  “Why not? She’s got the following, she’s got the looks, she’s got the class; we’d have a built-in audience. She’d make it legit. Mass plus class.”

  “Sidney, she’s now the most popular female newscaster in the business. Nordstrom would be anybody’s first choice. But you are dreaming. I know her and she ain’t gonna do it. First of all, she hates your guts. Second of all, she hates your guts, so forget it, we’ll get some other blonde.”