Ask Me Again Tomorrow

by Olympia Dukakis

  It wasn’t until much later, after I had visited the part of Greece where she was from and learned more about the emotional heritage of her people, that I understood that this kind of display of withheld pain, rage, and grief was the only way that many women of my mother’s generation could express themselves. But at the time, all I wanted was to put as much distance between me and my mother as possible. I found a willing accomplice in my father.

  My father took to engaging me in discussions about worldly topics while excluding my mother—even if she was in the same room with us. I would come home from school, drop myself into a kitchen chair, and begin my homework while my mother was fixing supper. If he was not working or staying out late, my father would come home, take off his coat, and join me at the table. He would quiz me about my school day, ask what I was reading, doing, and so on. All the while my mother would be working with her back to us, like a servant, washing the dishes. If my mother ventured an opinion in a conversation she clearly had not been asked to join, my father would tell her to “shut up.” He believed that my mother’s opinions were uninformed and not well thought out—and she accepted his treatment. She knew her place and she’d simply slip back into a state of silence. If they were going out and he didn’t think she looked appropriate or attractive enough, he would tell her to go back upstairs and change her dress. I could see her humiliation and shame at these times, but she never contradicted my father. Worst of all, I never came to her defense.

  I found myself behaving in a similar fashion toward her. My contempt for her grew. When my father treated her in ways that I found demeaning or disrespectful, I kept waiting for her to stand up for herself. But she never did. At those times, I honestly hated her.

  Chapter Five

  JUST AFTER I began the ninth grade, my family moved again, this time to Arlington, Massachusetts, which was just a few towns away from Somerville—but which, in so many ways, felt worlds apart. It was 1946, World War II was over, and my father had saved enough to buy us a house of our own. When we left Lowell, I had to learn to survive in a world of ethnic hostilities that was much more vicious than the one I left behind. In Arlington I found myself living in a very homogenized, very “white” community where my Greekness really stood out—where the discrimination was based on an absence of diversity rather than on a clash of cultures. I found this lack of racial plurality to be so unsettling, I asked my father if I could at least finish my first year of high school back at my old school in Somerville. Much to my surprise, he said yes. After the first year, I had no choice but to transfer into Arlington High School and this transition was tough.

  First, I was one of only a handful of ethnic girls in my class. On my first day of school at Arlington High, when the teacher asked me to come to the front of the room so that she could introduce me to my new classmates, she said my name and everyone laughed. Surrounded by so many American last names, my sense of being an outsider—of being Olympia Dukakis—became excruciating. I channeled all of my separateness, all of my natural aggression, into playing every organized sport I could find.

  Aside from my first true love, which was basketball, and which I’d played since junior high, I was more comfortable competing one-on-one than working with a team. I found it difficult to embrace the idea of “teamwork” with people who I felt looked down on me for my ethnicity. I found myself drawn to sports where I would have to rely solely on my own wits, skill, and competitive appetite to prevail. Ironically, these sports also involved wielding some kind of weapon—a tennis racket, a fencing foil, a rifle, and even a Ping-Pong paddle.

  In retrospect, I’m very lucky to have found sports when I did. Sports gave me an outlet. They provided a safe forum in which I could be myself without shame or fear that I was being “too much, too over-the-top.” I found my way into fencing when I was recruited to spend Saturday afternoons with a friend, sharing a class. Our teacher, Cliff Powers, trained us using a French foil, with an emphasis on form. My friend quickly lost interest in fencing but I didn’t; I loved having a sword in my hand. I loved the quickness of the sport. The blade was an extension of my arm—of me. I continued my training at the Boston Fencing Club, where I met Master Vitale (students called their teachers “Master”), who was the fencing coach at MIT. He specialized in the Italian foil, which lent itself to a more open and aggressive style of fencing. It was at the Boston Fencing Club that I first saw a team of Hungarian women train. These women were incredible! They were athletic, loud, fast, aggressive, and very focused. I yearned to be as free and uninhibited as they were. It was inspiring to see women so unapologetically playful and competitive.

  I joined a rifle club in high school and went to the Arlington police station several times a week to practice in their firing range. We had state matches and I would compete with a black patch over one eye. I couldn’t—and still can’t—close just my left eye. On the night of my junior prom, I shot a perfect score in the “prone” position, firing from flat on the ground. In my senior year, also on prom night, I shot a perfect score in the “sitting” competition. I could shoot a man through the heart at twenty paces, but I couldn’t get a date for a dance.

  I played basketball, but we had to play by “girl’s rules,” which was frustrating. The ball could only be dribbled twice and then you had to pass it. No body contact was allowed. To play all out like the boys was not possible. Many years later I went to see the professional women’s team—the New York Liberty—play at Madison Square Garden. I wept to see them playing at full throttle, unashamed of their competitiveness, without apology. Their grace, strength, and agility were so moving to me.

  I also played tennis, with a racket my father had bought at a used sporting goods shop for twenty-five cents. It didn’t matter, I loved playing the game. I was named captain of the team. I played a lot of Ping-Pong with my cousins, and in the winter I skied and went ice-skating on the ponds around Arlington with my very own hockey stick and puck.

  I graduated from Arlington High in 1949 and got some financial aid for college in the form of a work-study grant from Sargent College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was then affiliated with Boston University. I commuted to school each day and worked after class, organizing the costumes and props in the school theater loft. I had declared a major in physical education and planned to earn a bachelor’s degree and become a gym teacher.

  Once I got to Sargent, I continued to fence at the Boston Fencing Club and my life began to open up in other ways. I started to make some friends and even began to date a little. I remember one time when I had been out late with a group of new friends and I got home about four o’clock in the morning. I was barely through the front door when my mother lunged from the shadows toward me, her face crazed. Before she could raise a hand to me, I spoke first. I stared right into her eyes and said, “If you hit me, I’ll hit you right back! I am bigger than you now.” This stopped her dead in her tracks. That moment, it turns out, marked a turning point for me. From that time on, my mother never raised a hand against me—she never again tried to rein me in by using physical force. What transpired between us in the middle of the night was profound and significant, yet we never spoke of it again.

  This was the first of many steps I took toward autonomy, but I was at an impasse. The gap between what I aspired to be and what I was taught was appropriate, created tremendous turmoil. I came dangerously close to breaking down before I was able to rebuild myself. I had feelings of anxiety, depression, and despair. Yet these years in my twenties helped liberate what is most vital and essential in me as an artist and a person.

  I continued to fence. Once I had switched from the French to the Italian foil, I also switched teachers. I started going to MIT to work with Master Vitale, who I had met at the Boston Fencing Club; I would help him maintain the equipment and spar with the younger members of the MIT fencing squad, and in exchange, he gave me three classes a week.

  After about a year of working together, he finally registered me for the Junior Divi
sion of the New England Fencing Championship. The only requirement was that I would need a regulation fencing uniform.

  We had no money for extras, much less money to spend on a fencing outfit. My mother asked me to take her into Boston to a sporting goods store, where she examined the women’s fencing outfit, making detailed drawings. At home, she got out large sheets of newspaper and began to draw a pattern, something she’d learned in her work at the WPA. Two days before registration closed, I found a package on my bed: the jacket and pants of a white fencing outfit. She’d even made a bag for my foils. Though it was not a “regulation” outfit, my mother had done a terrific job of approximating a commercially produced fencing uniform. Without one word or iota of fanfare, she had given me exactly what I needed. This was the beginning of my understanding that the support I thought was missing was there; it was silent support.

  Thanks to my mother, I made my way into my first New England Fencing Championship—but I was nearly thrown out of the competition after my very first match. It was held at Harvard University and I would be competing against girls from all over the area, many of whom attended one of the many exclusive private schools in the region. My first match was against a blonde girl who embodied, in my mind, everything that I was not. She carried herself with an air of Waspy assurance that I both coveted and hated. The referee signaled for us to prepare, and then, with the utterance of the words “En garde!” we began our match. I could see immediately that she was not a strong fencer just by the stiff way she held her foil. I began to go after her as though I had just stepped onto a battlefield and I was facing my mortal enemy. I began to lunge and move as though I meant to draw blood, and the sounds that came out of me! The art of fencing was a century old, and here I was, grunting and thrusting and screaming as though I were in a street fight. At the close of the match, which I won handily, Vitale could barely make eye contact with me.

  “Olympia,” he said. “You’ve got to stop this and fence.” I knew he was right, but I did it again. This time, he threatened to pull me from the competition.

  Fencing is an art, and it is an art with discipline; it marries athletic prowess with form. Every encounter begins and ends with a bow to your opponent, regardless of how aggressive you feel. Fencing requires you to channel competitiveness appropriately. I desperately needed this form, these boundaries. I desperately needed the safe structure the sport offered my contradictory and overwhelming emotions. I promised Vitale I would not lose control again. I kept my word: I went on to win the Junior Division title of the New England Fencing Championship that year and for the next two years as well.

  I found myself increasingly self-conscious about my looks. I had always been aware of how “ethnic” I looked and it had become more and more difficult for me in high school. Now I was in college, trying to make a social life for myself, and I felt that my looks were standing in my way. I had always thought that my prominent Greek nose (which was the spitting image of my mother’s) was the first thing everyone—especially boys—noticed about me. I was always talking behind my hand as a way of shielding whomever I was speaking with from having to gaze at the large bump that sat on the bridge of my nose. During the summer between my first and second year at Sargent, I met a girl who boasted to me about her recent surgery, and how she had had her nose “bobbed.” I was amazed by this frank admission. I approached my parents about having the surgery. My mother remained silent as always, but my father, much to my amazement, agreed. So in the summer of 1949, at the age of eighteen, I had a “nose job.” It was one of the first major decisions I ever made that was about helping myself, about freeing myself. I didn’t want a pug nose, or some version of the perfect, all-American nose, but I didn’t want to spend my life thinking about my nose, either, and now I would no longer have to. Even though I still have a strong Greek nose, I have one that I have lived with comfortably for more than fifty years.

  During my sophomore year, a classmate, Joyce Kadis, and I were selected to put together an original stage revue that would be performed in front of the whole college. I was excited about this, but nervous as well. Whenever I walked by the auditorium in high school and watched the theater club rehearse, I had always wanted to join in—I just never dared to. Though I had appeared in some of my father’s benefit productions, and had put on neighborhood plays with Apollo, I had never been involved in anything this ambitious before. Our idea was to do a series of skits based on popular movies. We made a soundtrack based on the hit songs of the day that we wrote new lyrics for. I even enlisted Apollo, who was in high school then. We shared all of the duties of acting, directing, and making our costumes and scenery. I was in a skit as Rudolph Valentino, playing opposite the shortest girl in the school (who was also an all-American lacrosse player), who played the “desert beauty.” I loved all of it: the writing, the rehearsals, and figuring out the staging and the props. I felt alive, present, and happy. We did a good job and when the show was over, I knew this was something I had to pursue.

  I announced to my parents that I was going to leave Sargent and pursue a degree in theater arts at another school. I remember my father being struck dumb, as though he couldn’t understand the language I was speaking. Theater was what you did after you finished your workday: it was a hobby, a leisure activity, albeit an honorable one. My mother’s reaction was more to the point.

  “Olympia,” she said. “We just don’t have the money to send you to college for another four years, for you to start again. It’s Apollo’s turn now. If you want to study theater, you will have to pay your own way.” Even though I had my work-study income at that point, my parents were still covering much of my tuition. I appreciated her being so straightforward with me and then I set about figuring out how I could move forward with my new plan. Given the reality of our finances, I realized it would be foolhardy to quit school when I was halfway to a diploma. I decided to figure out how to make this happen, even if it meant I had to delay my goal for a little while.

  One of the highest-paying jobs for women at that time was that of physical therapist. Sargent, coincidentally, had only one other major program besides physical education and it happened to be physical therapy. I had always been a strong science student, so instead of dropping out, I decided to switch my major and, within two years, complete the bachelor’s degree in physical therapy. Then I’d be able to work, earning enough money to put myself through theater school. This was a pragmatic, even mercenary decision on my part. I was no Marie Curie. It was 1952 and terrible polio epidemics were sweeping the country. I received a full tuition scholarship from the National Foundation of Infantile Paralysis in exchange for working for two years as a “field” therapist after I graduated. But I had no idea what I was signing up for, what I’d experience before I was able to again set foot inside a theater.

  The course work for physical therapy majors was demanding. We were expected to excel in calculus, physics, chemistry, physiology, and, especially, anatomy. In the physiology lab, I was one of the only students who could pith a frog or dissect another animal without even flinching. The other students turned to me when they couldn’t do their own dissecting and I would do it for them. It was only much later, once I had moved beyond my life as a physical therapist, that I realized how detached I was during this time. I kept up my determined march toward graduation, with no distractions.

  I continued to work with Vitale throughout college, and I continued to compete—until I became interested in something far more compelling my junior year: I fell in love. Then something equally exciting happened—Vitale got a call from the United States Olympic Fencing Team. They had heard about me and wanted to come see me work out. One afternoon these officials showed up at the Boston Fencing Club and watched as Vitale took me through a rigorous and grueling workout. We sparred for well over an hour, and when we were finished, every muscle in my body was shaking. I stumbled over to the water fountain. “Don’t drink,” Vitale demanded, “and don’t sit down.” I stood panting, leaning against
the wall. “If you drink something, you’ll throw up. And if they’re interested in you, we’ll be working like this every day so you better get used to it.”

  I knew, at that instant, that despite how competitive I had been and still was in many ways, I just didn’t have that kind of desire anymore. At least not for fencing, and besides, I was in love and wanted to take walks by the Charles River, have hot chocolates at Schrafft’s, and make out in doorways.

  Though I had dated some (always tentatively and uncomfortably), meeting N changed my life. He was the son of friends of our family, but they had moved out West when we were both young, so we really didn’t know each other until we were reintroduced while we were finishing our undergraduate degrees in the Boston area. One Thanksgiving we found ourselves sitting next to each other at dinner. N was very charming—and very handsome. He was also a wonderful listener and looked at me as though I were the most enthralling person on the planet. And he had the bluest, clearest eyes I had ever seen. We began to date and from very early on I was sure N was someone special. Something was opening up inside of me and it was thrilling.