My mother knew beauty; she knew talent. She loved Broadway and passed that love on to me. She loved show business, and seeing the stars on a stage. She was strong, my mom, very powerful, at least to me, in my mind.
I was ten when she died. And maybe because I was a child, she will be a certain way in my mind.
But now, as an adult, as a mom myself, I wonder why she made the choices she did. I want to know her, find her friends, find anyone who remembers a moment alone with her when something real happened between them. I want some random snapshot, some photos of my mother, and I have very few. I have only two, I think.
After she died I snuck into my parents’ room to look through her box of photos, memories she kept of her life. There was talk of who would get them. There were so few things. Her stuff went missing, like she did.
In the summer of 1973, after my mother died, my dad took us to Northern Ireland to visit his family, whom he didn’t really know at all, he a widower with five kids, taking them all to Ireland on his own.
Northern Ireland, greener than green, but the color didn’t come to me. Because after she left, it got all gray and dark. The memory of her color did not return to me for years and years, did not return until I held my son Parker for the first time.
I held him and . . . Oh yes. I remember this. Something stuttering to a start, deep in my brain, an ancient recollection, a feeling without words—I held my son. And I recalled what it meant, or felt, to be adored. And that is how I know she adored me. I know my mother’s love because it is her love that pours through me and allows me to adore the look on Blake’s face when I say brain fart or how it feels to take a tub with a two-year-old. What a relief it was, for me to have my children, to know I knew how to love a baby, because I was a baby loved.
I can find forgiveness because I am a mother now—with two daughters of my own. What were my mother’s choices, really? No work, no way of making money; it was a different era then. I forgive my mother. I forgive her for not protecting me in all the ways I wish she would have. I forgive her for chopping down the tree when I told her that at night a man was climbing that tree and coming in my window. I forgive her for her failure of interpretation, her literal response to my metaphorical truth. The tree came down. With it went its leaves, its roots, the circular lifelines in its flesh. When she left, a part of me went with her.
We returned to Nyack on January 7. The next day, I went in to work. And I was thinking, “How am I going to do this?” If there was one time in my life when I could have used an IFB, this would have been it. I wanted an IFB and I wanted Kelli to be in the control room, talking in my ear, telling me what to say when I spoke to Barbara. I was feeling ragged and raw. Her words. “Donald is a good friend of the show . . .” Those words convey no truths.
Every day, when I arrived at ABC, I rode the elevator down and went into my dressing room. There in front of me were three words in huge letters—All My Children—and every day these words made me smile.
All My Children. Every day at The View I saw those words as I settled into my dressing room. And then, once I was settled, I would meet with the other co-hosts and some staff in the hair and makeup room, which I always thought was the oddest place to have a formal discussion, but there it was.
That day was no different. I went to my dressing room. I read the three words. Then I walked down the long white barren corridor on the third floor of ABC, a surprisingly shabby corridor in a surprisingly shabby building whose slick exterior belies none of what it truly contains. The white walls are scuffed here and there, and the ceilings are made of those foam industrial tiles. There are no windows in these hallways. They wind through the building like old intestines, doorways opening on either side to reveal dressing rooms with framed portraits of soap opera celebrities, or empty rooms with ugly love seats, the backs shaped like hearts, the pillows gray.
I walked into the hair and makeup room and took my usual seat. There were, as always, hair dryers in their holsters bolted to the chrome counters and plastic bins full of spiky rollers and tarnished clips. There were combs of every shape and size, combs clutching the hairs of the rich and famous, brittle hairs leeched of color from years of chemical treatments.
I picked up a comb. I have no idea why. I sat in my usual seat, staring straight ahead, a large pebble in my gut, and I clutched a comb clutching hairs, which are the saddest things sometimes, hairs loosened from a human head. Stray hairs, damaged hairs, the tiny, almost microscopic-but-not-quite bulbs at their tips where they were once joined with the follicles from which they sprouted. Did you know that humans have used almost every type of animal hair there is to make brushes for painting? From the beginning humans have been so eager to paint—cave paintings make this obvious—that they have probably taken hair from you name it—foxes, squirrels, maybe even skunks—and bound them together, stuck them to sticks, and dipped them in the ground pigment of fruits and flowers. Why, I have always wondered, why has no one ever tried to make a brush using human hair? What would a picture painted with a human hair brush look like? Would it feel more real? Would the picture leap to life, and start to smell of apple, or daisies? Hair. I clutched the comb clutching the hairs and I saw how easily we are split.
My heart was pounding. My heart was clattering like the shitty cart at Target, the wheel wobbling around, and I thought, “Here is the beginning of a panic attack.” From the corner of my eye, I could see that Barbara was already in the room.
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.
CHAPTER 12
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 str
eet, 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.
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