“You asked him to recount the details of corporate real estate closings?”
“These were really complicated contracts.”
Now who’s the weirdo?
• • •
I THOUGHT ABOUT what she said for weeks, bristling at the notion of promoting anything bordering on magical thinking. I like to believe that I’ve provided my son with a modicum of security and a realistic understanding of the workings of the world.
“You want to be an indie rock star? That’s great, but I hope you like Subway!”
Losing our home didn’t just leave a mark on our mother. A day doesn’t go by when I don’t picture myself pushing all of my belongings in a shopping cart. I am stunned and awed by people’s ability to function in the world. How does everyone do it? How do they manage to make their lives work? How secure are their family’s finances? What kind of secrets are they keeping? I’ll look at a home and wonder what their story is and whether they’ll ever have to get out of Dodge in the middle of the night.
• • •
I’VE LIVED IN the same home since my son was born, in the hills of Los Feliz, a neighborhood bordering on the eastern end of the Santa Monica Mountains. With its steep inclines, once I deduced that I could avoid that scorching Southern California sun by exercising at night, I quit the gym and started going on evening runs. A bonus is that the neighborhood is an architect’s worst nightmare. Each home was built with seemingly little thought to the style of neighboring properties. A Spanish colonial abuts a New England colonial. Some are ranch style with xeriscaping and seem appropriate to a desert clime, while others, with their merlons and hoardings, look like they’ve been airlifted from the Scottish Highlands. Others have so many competing designs, it’s a reminder of what they say about makeup: you have to choose between eyes and lips. I lose myself in elaborate fantasies about the people who live in these homes as I run.
When Ezra was in middle school he started joining me a few nights a week.* We delighted in rating the hominess quotient of the houses on our route, creating lurid backstories and weaving family mythologies into a tapestry we call “There’s No Place Like Homey Home.”
Neighboring houses that are twins: The lives of the people who live in these houses mirror the lives of those who live next door; they find themselves thinking the thoughts of their neighbors. They must be careful not to meet because when two parallel universes collide, it causes a disruption in the matrix and entropy occurs.*
Houses with naked porch light bulbs and tinfoil over a window: These people don’t put sheets on their mattresses and eat meals off paper plates, and there’s at least one closet with a cache of empty vodka bottles. The inhabitants are embroiled in a contentious custody battle, so who can blame them for hitting the sauce? There’s a cousin “with issues” living in the back bedroom who only emerges once a day to eat bowls of dry cereal.
Houses with a prefab bump-out bay window in the kitchen: These people have squirreled away money in their IRAs instead of renovating the entire kitchen. Don’t take no for an answer—you should be able to sell them at least two boxes of candy bars for school fund-raisers.
Sometimes our notions have proven to be right. There’s a boxy McMansion on our block that so closely resembles a bank branch, I’ve been tempted to stick my ATM card into the mail slot. A family of bronze deer are posed on the front lawn, although a closer look reveals that their hooves are chained to the ground. We noticed the owners installing more and more elaborate security systems. First they put a metal fence, then they added a locked gate on the driveway, cameras, and bars on the windows. Even the second-story ones. Not long after the bars went up, we read in the paper the house was owned by an Armenian Mafia don. He put in solid-gold toilet seats just prior to getting arrested and sent to prison. The deer were really the clue; those padlocks on their hooves looked a lot like house-arrest monitoring bracelets.
It was while conducting our epistemological investigation of homey homes that we discovered Cat Town. At least, that’s what we call it.
There’s a set of eight historic bungalows known as the Snow White Cottages just down the street from our home. Built in 1932, they’re adjacent to property where the original Walt Disney studios were located, now a food store. The stucco and brick storybook cottages have lopsided, sloping shingled roofs, miniature paned windows, and exposed wooden beams that outline their edges. A shaded, vaguely foreboding, winding path connects the tiny houses. Locals claim that indie rocker Elliott Smith wrote his heartbreaking lamentations in a claw-foot attic bathtub in one of the bungalows. They were featured in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. One of the animators who worked on Snow White is rumored to have lived there and used them as the models for the dwarfs’ cottage in the film.
We dubbed it Cat Town because we’ve never seen anyone there. Not a single person walking in or out in seventeen years. Only cats padding down the pathways or peering out of one of the narrow windows. How they’ve managed on their own has become an elaborately detailed, slightly macabre story we’ve made up, and when I say “we,” I mean me.
I told Ezra to be careful when passing by because when the cats get lonely they breathe their magical cat breath into the mouths of neighborhood children. The breath casts a spell over them and the kids play with the cats for hours on end. “If you ever notice you’ve lost a few hours, Ezra, it’s probably because you were hypnotized in Cat Town.”
“But how do they pay rent, Mom?”
“Well, when the last human who lived there died, the cats tore into a sofa, took out the filling, and taxidermied her. They control her like a puppet with strings. You know how cats love string? They use the strings like levers, wrapping them around their claws, so she can write out rent checks by hand.”
I’d noticed him rolling his eyes at my more recent demented twists to Cat Town, but then, things took a turn for the transitional. I was running errands in the neighborhood when I noticed that a padlocked metal fence had gone up around the perimeter. I was heartsick.
“I guess we were wrong; there’s no way cats put that fence up. You need an opposable thumb to work that lock,” I said to Ezra when I returned home.
His eyes lit up with that familiar spark of terror or imagination, and he sat me down and calmly explained that the felines of Cat Town suspected that humans were onto them but since the advent of computer touch screens they’d become self-reliant. “See, now they don’t have to worry about writing checks or typing into computers. One of the cats dragged an iPad back to the bungalows with his teeth; a city council cat tapped the screen with his paw and ordered a locksmith. That was a combination lock you saw, wasn’t it, Mom?”
“Well, yes it was, as a matter of fact.”
“The kitties work that combination lock by grasping the dial in their mouths and turning it,” he added, and then bounded out of the house. I was grateful for his crackerjack improvisation and struck with a “What on earth was I was thinking, concocting these lunatic fairy tales?” pang of guilt. This was not the plan—or was it?
I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a family mission statement. I read an article about how Stephen Covey, who authored The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, posited that families should borrow from corporations to create “a clear, compelling vision of what [their] family is all about.”* Covey’s family came up with this:
“The mission of our family is to create a nurturing place of faith, order, truth, love, happiness, and relaxation, and to provide opportunity for each individual to become responsibly independent, and effectively interdependent, in order to serve worthy purposes in society.”
That is the mission statement of people who would seem to belong to a different species than my family. I have friends who’ve crafted statements that are less ambitious: “We love nature. Our family’s mission is to spend time in the great outdoors and leave no trace.” I was hoping to borrow from the Nike slog
an—“The mission of our family is to just do it”—or to use the tagline from Alien as a jumping-off point: “In our family no one can hear you scream.”
My husband and son made merciless fun of me. “You can’t find your keys every morning, and you want to make a mission statement?”
“Yes! It will be good for us. A mission statement works like the unifying theory that Einstein was searching for. He was convinced there was an all-encompassing, coherent theoretical framework of physics. A ‘theory of everything’ that fully explains and links together all physical aspects of the universe. Once we have that, we’ll know where we came from, who we are, and where we’re going. As I understand it, it hasn’t panned out, but we’re talking about the whole universe, and there are just three of us. Our mission statement will bring the world into sharper focus and surely that will help me locate my keys every day.” They weren’t buying it, but I am my father’s daughter in more ways than I’d like to admit.
I watched from the front door as Ezra’s lanky frame disappeared down the street to meet up with Harmony Tiger Lily or someone else he hangs out with whom I don’t know because he’s seventeen and so independent. Ezra will be leaving us to go to college next year and I’ll still be living down the street from Cat Town. A family mission statement formed in my head: “We’re a family that tells tall tales to add a little magic to our realism.”
The torch has been passed down, as we say about the teachings of the Torah, l’dor v’dor, from generation to generation. Or he was just fucking with me.
I’m not sure why I thought Dorothy needed to wear so much makeup, but it was the 1980s.
there’s no people like show people
In the 1982 blockbuster Tootsie, Dustin Hoffman plays an actor, Michael Dorsey, who, despite his visible five o’clock shadow and Mr. Potato Head features, minces his way into America’s heart while masquerading as a female actress, Dorothy Michaels, on a trashy daytime television soap opera.
In the film, Hoffman accompanies his costar and BFF, Julie, played by Jessica Lange, to her childhood home. It’s an immaculately maintained white-shingled colonial, surrounded by wheat fields, with a sturdy swing on the front porch and glowing embers crackling in the library’s fireplace. Julie’s childhood bedroom has been lovingly preserved by her doting, big-hearted, but lonely widower father, played by Charles Durning, who, wouldn’t you know it, falls head over heels for Hoffman. Hilarity ensues. Spoiler alert: there’s a happy ending!
People loved that movie. I loved that movie. It was a huge hit, but the plot was preposterous. Hoffman makes a plausible if hirsute woman, but once we got a glimpse of Lange’s background, I laughed so hard, I peed a little in my pants. People who come from stable, loving homes do not go into showbiz.
Gérard Depardieu has been famously quoted as asking, “Who abandoned you?” upon learning that someone is an actor. No one abandoned me, but I learned at a young age that the theatrical community is the mother ship for those of us who don’t fit in anywhere else.
Not to say that my first theatrical forays were in any way triumphant. By all accounts, I was a painfully shy child, but by virtue of having a dress shirt and a pulse, I managed to get cast in a production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying at my summer camp. There was little in the way of sets or costumes; it was more of an “I’ve got a barn, let’s put on a show” production that attracted campers who preferred hanging out in a barn to swimming laps in the cold lake. I was Secretary Number . . . something. Maybe 35? There were a lot of us in that secretarial pool, which was composed entirely of girls.*
Our big number was an ode to coffee. I will pack my own grounds and espresso maker if I suspect I might have limited access to strong coffee for even an overnight trip, but at twelve I had no idea why anyone would write an entire song about the importance of unfettered access to caffeine.
At one point, the word “coffee” is repeated a number of times. One of our ranks was to shout, “There’s no more coffee!” to cue the end of the number. I was that office worker. I was supposed to count the number of times we repeated the word “coffee.” It might have been two or fifteen or twenty-two thousand—even then I had no aptitude for math, but somehow, I’d been chosen for a role where the ability to sequence numbers was a prerequisite.
On the night of the big show, we were sandwiched in a conga line, making churning motions with our arms, like the wheels of a steam engine, and chanting, “Coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee.” I got lost in the sound. The word “coffee” disappeared and we were no longer a group of pimply prepubescents, we were one undulating pimply prepubescent. Suddenly, a voice cried out, “There’s no more coffee.” Wait . . . that voice was supposed to be mine. Secretary Number 17 or 21 or 33 stepped in and saved the day. I have no idea what profession Secretary someone-other-than-me works in today, but I hope she became a highly sought-after accountant, because it really was impressive how she managed to keep track of all those “coffees.” Despite the humiliation of missing my one and only line, I was hooked on a feeling.* It was the kind of kinship enjoyed by that subspecies of Homo sapiens the Homo thespian. It was clear I was headed for membership in the melting pot of teenage malaise: the high school drama club.
Thespian Troupe 391 was the cheerleading squad for stoners, closeted gay people, class clowns, kids looking for an outlet for outsized melancholy or exuberance, kids with secrets, kids who were too fat/too thin/too tall/too small, kids with low self-esteem/undeservedly high opinions of themselves, kids with terrible acne they hoped could be concealed with stage makeup, and that undiagnosed ADHD kid who had animated opinions on subjects of little to no importance. Except for the gay part, which I consider a failure of my imagination, you could have put me in any of those categories at one time or another.
Now that it’s acceptable, at least in many urban communities, to identify as LGBTQIA* in high school, theater seems to attract a distinctly different breed of young person than in the past. The cast of Glee has much better skin and is more well-adjusted than the angst-ridden misfits depicted in Fame, the Glee of my generation.
Those years of moving around the country and financial ups and downs left their mark on me. I had accumulated an unarticulated repository of grief. Actors typically list special talents on their résumés. These range from the genuinely intriguing (speaks seven languages, Olympic javelin medalist, or hula hooper) to the mystifying (sings exceptionally off-key, ability to manufacture on-screen chemistry with Tom Cruise, or “fast talker”). One of my special talents was taking plays that contained a kernel of sadness and making that the central feature of the drama. Onstage at Miami Beach Senior High School, I was the most put-upon Cinderella ever. My performance wrung tears out of dry eyes, mostly mine, since I’d taught myself to cry on cue during the hundreds of hours spent honing this skill in my bathroom mirror. I turned The Wizard of Oz into a Greek tragedy. When I noted, as Dorothy, “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” it wasn’t an observation, it was a primal scream. The majority of the cast was stoned, which also slowed the pace down considerably; our version clocked in at about three hours. But we killed. Literally. Our audience was bused in from the neighboring retirement homes and ambulances were regularly stationed outside the auditorium. On several occasions, we were asked to pause while an elderly person was carried out on a stretcher. Honestly, it wasn’t the biggest deal; Miami Beach was lousy with alter cockers (that’s Yiddish for “farty old people,” but not in a mean way, just in the endearingly gaseous way that you get when you’re old), so this kind of scene was not unfamiliar to us. We never learned the fate of those senior citizens, but it’s possible that we bored them into a merciful passing, which, come to think of it, isn’t the worst way to go.
Those long hours of rehearsing, and even longer hours of pretending to rehearse but screwing off together, fostered a kind of intimacy—though I wouldn’t have used that word at that time—that appealed to me. I had been indoctrinated int
o keeping family secrets. It wasn’t hard to follow my mother’s directive “If someone asks what your father does, don’t answer them,” because I genuinely didn’t know, but it was unsettling to be warned that if the phone rang I should tell creditors that my parents weren’t at home. My parents weren’t home from 1971–80.
A play has well-defined rules, dialogue and blocking that are repeated each time the play is staged. Relationships, no matter how volatile, resolve with reliability. The emotional timbre might vary from performance to performance, but Brutus is always the betrayer in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. If an actor blurts out, “Et tu, Mark Anthony?” that’s a production that’s gone off the rails.
This temporary abolition of ordinary existence provided a tonic to the unpredictability of my family life.* Every time I’d do a play, it was like being rescued from a sinking ship and put into a lifeboat. I’m sure people on sports teams feel buoyed in much the same way, except that in a play you also get to pretend to be someone else whose last name doesn’t set them up for constant ribbing on the order of “Are you a good witch or a Gurwitch?”
If a young person who’s been bitten by the drama bug manages to avoid being incarcerated or institutionalized, they might head off to college to study theater. Once there, they will quickly discover that there are distinct tribes in the nation of show people.
You’ve got your musical theater types. These hambones live to sing show tunes and are never happier than when in the company of their brethren. These folk are not unlike American tourists traversing distant lands. When they happen upon someone who looks like they might be from their hometown, their faces light up in recognition. Broadway babies will throw out a line from Gypsy, “If ya want to bump it . . . ,” and if “Bump it with a trumpet!” comes back to them, abandon all hope; they’ll “stay all night and sing ’em all.”*
Wherever You Go, There They Are Page 2