by Kari Lizer
Oh great. Now they’re getting along. And I’m the odd man out. How did this happen? I used to be the funny one. I’m a professional comedy writer! Oh God. Now I really am my mother.
Whenever we used to make fun of her, she would tell us how she was on the ski team at BU and skied Stowe. No matter what we were making fun of her about.
It could be her driving, her cooking, her lack of ability to use a telephone… somehow her response was always, “I skied Stowe!”
And now here I am, a prickly, humorless woman, shivering on a bench, the butt of everyone’s joke, insisting I’m a comedy writer while nobody laughs.
Back at the house, I locked myself in my room and decided to give up on the forced family fun time. If they wanted to sleep until noon and park themselves in front of the TV, it was fine with me. I had to stop springing out of bed asking who was up for a hike or maybe a movie marathon at the Arclight. “Popcorn and Diet Coke for breakfast, anyone?” No one was buying that I was the fun mom. Apparently, no one ever had. And that was fine. I could occupy myself very nicely on this winter break. I didn’t need them. Even so, when they walked into my bedroom that afternoon and found me watching myself acting in an old episode of Quantum Leap, it was a new low.
“Oh God, Mom. Is this what you do?” Annabel said, all of them looking at me as if they’d found me with my pants around my ankles.
“No!” I protested. “This isn’t what I do. It was just on, and I stopped to watch for a second because I wasn’t sure if this was the episode I was in.”
Elias took the remote from me, and like Columbo, who had solved the crime but wasn’t all that happy about revealing the perpetrator, he pointed the remote at the TV and revealed that I was watching a recording.
“Fine,” I said. “I set a search on the DVR with my name to record everything I’ve ever been in.” Elias set the remote back on my bed like he’d accidentally picked up my vibrator. “So what? I can watch myself. I was a good actress! I was in Matlock! Andy Griffith thought I was very talented. He loved me!” Suddenly I was fucking Norma Desmond. It was Sunset Boulevard in my bedroom. The kids walked out and shut the door softly behind them, my shame complete.
Later, the dinner was quiet. Of course I still made dinner because I’m pathologically maternal. The kids gave each other looks across the table like they were afraid to set me off.
Dayton spoke first. “Mom. We’re sorry. We were just joking on the hike. We didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. If you didn’t have a cold, you probably would have beaten us up that hill. We’ll go to the movies with you if you want to.”
Elias chimed in next. “I actually heard Creed was good. It’s about a boxer, like you. Want to go see that?”
Then Annabel: “We could go tonight, but if it’s too late, we could go in the morning and have popcorn and Diet Coke breakfast. You love that.”
It was 5:30 p.m. But she was right; it was too late. I would never make it.
“I’m not crazy,” I told them. Which is what crazy people say. “It’s just… I got some bad news a couple weeks ago, and I guess it hit me harder than I thought. I think I was putting too much pressure on our winter break to make me feel better. But it’s not your job to make me feel better.”
They stopped eating and stared at me. Dayton wanted to know what the bad news was. I could tell I was scaring them, so I decided to tell them. “I sent away for my DNA profile. You know those commercials for 23andMe? You spit into a vial for about five minutes—which, by the way, is so much harder than you think it’s going to be. You know how I couldn’t run up the hill today? I had to rest three times spitting into a vial for five minutes. Anyway, once you get the spit collected, you send it off to these scientists, and they send you back a link to your DNA profile results that tell you all these interesting things about yourself. And, well, I got mine back a few weeks ago.”
They nervously waited for me to go on. “Most of it was stuff you could tell from looking in a mirror: sixty-six percent Scandinavian, freckles, blue eyes, light skin. But my muscle profile was really upsetting. It just said, ‘Not a sprinter.’”
They stared back at me, trying so hard to be on board. They really are nice people.
Finally, Dayton said, gently, “Did you think you were a sprinter?”
“No! I know I’m not a sprinter. Have you ever seen me run? When they made me run in school, I always pretended to twist my ankle so I wouldn’t have to lose so badly. But ‘not a sprinter’ means there’s never any chance that for the rest of my life that will change. No hope. No possibility. Just. Not a sprinter. You know?” They didn’t.
Annabel: “Well, you are, like, sixty.”
I heard Elias slug her leg under the table.
“It’s okay, Elias,” I said. “It’s not the sprinting. But I’m never going to be a college graduate either.”
Elias: “You could. There was a ninety-four-year-old lady that graduated from Emerson last year.”
“But that’s not going to be me. I have no retention.”
Annabel: “It’s true. She can’t even follow Harry Potter from one movie to the next.”
Dayton: “Yeah. She calls them Harry, the girl, and the redhead.”
“And I’ll never play the piano.”
“You could take lessons.”
“No, I don’t want to. It’s a weird time of life. There are more closed doors than open ones. And it messed with me a little. And you guys are out of the house now more than you’re in it. And the days of dance parties and us all being together all the time might be past, and I was trying to recapture it. I didn’t want to close that door yet.”
There was a long pause when I thought they were really getting me. Then Annabel spoke. “You know you were the only one who thought the dance parties were fun, right?”
“I’m going to miss you guys when winter break is over.”
They nodded.
“And you’re going to miss me.”
They didn’t nod.
“Say it,” I said.
They said it.
“And you’re going to miss me when I’m gone.”
“Where are you going?”
“Dead. And you know what you’ll never say? ‘I wish my mom loved me less. I wish she didn’t want to spend so much time with me. I wish she didn’t put Nutella on my pillow when I came home from college.’ You will not spend hours in therapy because your mother spent too much time thinking about what would make you happy.”
They nodded again.
“You know what you might say?”
“What?”
“I wish I hadn’t said, ‘I loved Texas.’”
Then I released the hostages and let them go to their friends or play video games or watch back-to-back TV episodes on their computers. And I washed the dishes.
It’s not their fault. It’s just nature’s unfortunate timing. They are at the time of life when they want to spread their wings. While I am losing my feathers.
Growing Pains
For my fortieth birthday, I went up to the wine country in Sonoma, California, all by myself. With three kids under eight and a show in production, I was never alone. I couldn’t wait to eat, sleep, wake up, and go to bed on my own for three glorious days and nights. I stayed at a lovely spa, taking cooking classes during the day and treating myself to various pamperings when I got back to the hotel in the evening. One of these treatments was called a Watsu massage. The brochure said it was their specialty, the ultimate in relaxation, performed by a highly trained Watsu therapist in the hotel’s custom-built Watsu pool, heated to the exact temperature of the human body. When I was booking my appointment, the lady at the spa asked whether I preferred a male or female therapist. I didn’t want to specify because I was afraid of what the stranger on the other end of the phone would think of me. If I said female, I was afraid she’d think I was uptight because I didn’t want a man to touch me, and if I said male, I was afraid she’d think I was a pervert because I wanted a man to touch me. So I
said, “Either. Whatever. I’m just doing it for the massage,” which definitely made me sound like an uptight pervert.
Andre, my male masseur—thank God because I really wouldn’t mind being touched by a man—slipped into the pee-warm pool and laced his arms through mine from behind me. I wore a one-piece Miraclesuit—those bathing suits that promise to make you look fifteen pounds lighter but just make you look fifteen years older. He wore loose cotton yoga shorts—and nothing else.
Andre leaned his head close to my ear and whispered in a soothing/creepy voice, “Lean into me, Kari. Let me support you. I won’t let you down.” How many times have I heard that?
I tried to do as he said, my back rubbing up against his wet, hairless chest, and he started to rhythmically sway me back and forth in the water. The resistance of the water pulled on my legs, creating a pleasant tension. My wet back and the slight pocket created by the space between Andre’s nicely defined yoga pecs made a sucking sound every time they detached at the end of the movement before he swayed me back the other way. I took deep breaths and said a silent prayer for maturity that I wouldn’t be overcome by the giggles. I finally started to relax and understand the appeal of this massage: the water, the weightlessness, the strange sensation of having another human being, whom you can’t see, supporting you from behind, moving you through the water. It was like a dream, and I started to drift away. Andre could probably feel me letting go and pulled me in tighter to secure me. Now he was more or less spooning me in the water, moving me around the pool, in his arms—the friction between my back and his front increasing, and that’s when I felt it: Andre had an erection. It was poking me right in the small of my back through his cotton massage shorts. He didn’t stop what he was doing. He didn’t change position. He didn’t do anything. He just kept Watsu-ing me in the same rhythmic motion as before—but my mind was racing. And, yes, I’m sure it happens all the time. It’s certainly a predictable physiological response to rubbing up against someone in a pool for fifty minutes, but to me it felt like a threat, like a holdup, a gun in my back. Because as much as I love nature, I am not one of those “Hey, it’s natural” kind of people. I believe if someone farts in yoga, they should stand up, roll up their mat, walk out of the studio, and kill themselves.
All I could think about was the moment when the massage was over, when we would emerge from the pool and Andre and I were going to have to look at each other, both of us knowing what we knew, and that was unacceptable. So I resorted to my failsafe technique for when I’m confronted with awkward, embarrassing, and sometimes even dangerous situations: I pretended I was asleep. My second go-to, which also worked in a pinch, was to fake an intense stomachache. Both of these had been reliable in getting me out of almost all unwelcome, mostly sexually awkward circumstances. I’m reminding you that at this point I was forty. I’d had children. Three. I had a job. A house. I had employees, enough to qualify as a staff, and yet instead of using my voice to express my discomfort, I was pretending to be sound asleep in a swimming pool in Sonoma with a stranger’s boner in my back rather than open my mouth and say, “Excuse me, sir; I’m not enjoying my Watsu.” And if I was this ill equipped to take care of myself at forty, imagine what a disaster I was at twenty.
When I was twenty, I got what I thought was going to be my big break: a guest star part on the TV show Growing Pains, a popular sitcom starring Alan Thicke and Kirk Cameron before he was Christian-crazy. There were five days of rehearsals before we shot the show in front of a live audience. And every day when the producers came down to watch us run through the show, they laughed every time I opened my mouth. Every day when I got my new script, there were more lines for me. I could feel something happening. Something good. And the timing was perfect because I was dead broke.
Alan Thicke was the wise and wry patriarch of the show, Dr. Seaver. If Fred McMurray couldn’t be my dad, or Lorne Greene, or Brian Keith, or Courtship of Eddie’s Father—I’d take him in a heartbeat.
I don’t know why all my fantasy dads were parenting without partners… why I wanted them all to myself… but I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything in regards to my relationship with my own father; those things are never very complicated.
On the third day of rehearsal, Alan Thicke approached me at the craft service table. This was it, my big break; I just knew it. He asked me if I had any plans for lunch that day. This was it, my big break; I just knew it. I told him I didn’t. I didn’t think he needed to know I was going to eat the leftover bagels from the morning because I didn’t have any lunch money. He said he’d get me lunch. This was it, my big break; I just knew it. He told me his car was in the shop and he needed to get to his house to check on some construction workers he had there. Did I think I could give him a ride? Was this it? My big break? I didn’t know. That was not what I was expecting, but I didn’t know what to say except yes. Maybe he was going to talk to me about starring in my own show while I gave him a ride to check on the workers at his house. That was possible.
At lunchtime, we walked out to my forest-green Volkswagen Beetle. I apologized for the mess and tried to clear out the front seat of all the discarded pages from last week’s auditions and Del Taco wrappers as best I could. He was tall and classy, and my car was miniature and filthy. His knees were dangerously close to the dashboard, and the seat didn’t move. I apologized. Again. And again. And again. He directed me to his house in Encino from the Warner Bros. ranch in Burbank. We made small talk. He mostly asked me questions.
“Where do you live?”
“Venice.”
“Where’d you go to college?”
“Didn’t.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No.”
I drove nervously, very aware of how terrible it would be if I crashed and killed Alan Thicke. Everyone would be so mad at me. I never noticed before how rickety my car was. It was fine for me, but I was carrying valuable cargo now, and it didn’t seem like a proper vehicle to transport Dr. Seaver, Mike, Carol, and Ben’s lovable dad on the hit show Growing Pains.
We finally got to his house. And when we did, I noticed two things. The first was, his house was a mansion. The second was, I didn’t see any construction workers. We entered the kitchen, and he offered me something to eat, but I was too nervous. It felt strange to be alone with a big star in his house. I couldn’t wait to tell somebody. He didn’t mention the workers anymore; he just offered to give me a tour. Which started in his bedroom.
Okay, I want to say right now: there was nothing wrong with me at twenty years old. I didn’t have to wear a helmet. I didn’t live in my parents’ garage. I wasn’t on medication. And I wasn’t dumb. I wasn’t catching on because what was happening was highly inappropriate, and my mind didn’t work like that. Yet. I just thought he liked my acting. And I thought he knew he was old.
So we get to the bedroom, and still, no workers. We were completely alone. He showed me the two-person shower. Nice. Although I’ve never liked the practice of showering with another person. It takes all the romance out of being naked. And by romance, I mean darkness.
He showed me the balcony that looked out over the massive pool with rock sculptures and waterfalls. He had tiny lights installed in the ceiling of the bedroom—he demonstrated how it looked like the night sky when you turned off all the lights. I could feel him moving closer to me in the pitch black. He was slick and smooth, and I couldn’t swallow my spit. I moved away from the sound of his breathing and blurted that I thought we were going to be late getting back to rehearsal and we should go.
On the ride back to the studio, Alan Thicke’s mood was unchanged, but I felt completely weird. Then Alan Thicke asked me if I wanted to come with him to the Growing Pains wrap party as his date. I felt like a trapped squirrel. I said the first thing that came into my head and told him that I had a boyfriend. Sorry. But thank you for inviting me. Now Alan Thicke’s mood instantly changed. His lilting, talk show, “everything I say is kind of a joke” voice wasn’t like that
anymore, and he snapped back, “You just told me you didn’t have a boyfriend.”
I stumbled around. “Well, I do actually. I don’t know why I said I didn’t. But I do. I lie sometimes for no reason. I sometimes tell people I have diabetes, but I don’t. My roommate does.”
He seemed so mad. But why? Why does Alan Thicke give a shit if I have a boyfriend? He has a TV series and a mansion. I had a Volkswagen full of burrito wrappers and paid for acting class by painting shitty apartments. But then it never occurred to me that this grown-up wanted anything more than a ride to check on his house. Until it did. I thought he was going to offer me a television show. Until he didn’t. I thought it was my big break. Until it wasn’t.
Disappointed and flustered, I hit a dip in the road too fast and Alan Thicke’s knees slammed into the dashboard of my Bug.
He screamed in pain and the word bitch came out of his mouth easily. So easily it must have been there all along. He was done with me. We rode the rest of the way in silence, me breathing away tears, his fists balled in rage.
When we walked back on the soundstage, everyone turned to look at us. We were late, and the crew and cast had been waiting. And we were together. Alan Thicke turned back on the talk show smile and cocked his head—giving a look like we’d just walked out of the closet at a Seven Minutes in Heaven party. Several of the crew guys chuckled. I watched the information travel around the set, from one person’s knowing eyes to the next. And I felt the heat travel up my neck to my face, like I’d been discovered doing something shameful.
The rest of the week, people still laughed at me, but it didn’t feel the same. Kirk Cameron and Tracy Gold, the “kids” on the show, avoided me like fish that had gone bad. When I came in in the morning, they gave each other looks and moved to the far end of the table, making it clear they didn’t approve of Alan Thicke’s conquest of the week. Problem was, I wasn’t.
I made speeches to no one in my car, wrestling back my dignity. Addressing the crew and their dirty minds, setting the record straight. But I knew it didn’t matter what I said because I went to his house. Alone. “Why would she do that?” they would ask. Why did I go? Because he was who he was and I was who I was, and before I figured out why I was there, I was staring at stars on the ceiling of his Encino master bedroom. A woman’s intelligence is always suspect in these situations. What did she think was going to happen? In his mansion. At the spa. In the Watsu pool. What did she want?