Coming Clean: A Memoir (17 page)

I didn’t have to go back into the unventilated room this time; I set up shop in the middle of the production office and did my stand-up in front of the editors, animators, and interns.

I really wanted this, far more than I’d wanted any role since I’d done
The Importance of Being Earnest.
This show was about being myself on camera. I’d never done that before.

The call came a few days later.

“Hey, Kim, it’s Sebastian—we met earlier this week. Listen, we just heard back from Condé Nast and they loved your tape. You’re our host.”

I wanted to get up and run around my office screaming while simultaneously puking in joy.

“That’s great,” I said instead. “What are our next steps?”

“They’re going to call you about contract stuff, and after that’s sorted out, we’ll have you come in to shoot a promo.”

“Thanks, Sebastian. I’m really looking forward to this.”

“It’s going to be great. Talk soon,” he said before hanging up.

I squirmed a bit in my cubicle before calling my mother.

“I don’t get it, it’s a TV show for a magazine?”

“No, it’s a blog associated with a magazine. Mom, what do I do about law school?”

“Don’t go to law school.”

“What? But this show could get cancelled after the first episode.”

“Kim, I didn’t tell you this while you were applying, but honestly,
I don’t think you should go to law school. I’m probably the only Jewish mother in the history of Jewish mothers to say this, but you’re not a lawyer—this is what you were meant to be doing.”

I wanted to believe my mom, but I really liked the fantasy world I’d built around being a lawyer: long intellectual conversations, nice suits, and paid vacation days. In my head, it seemed far more enticing than waiting around hallways with a bunch of people that look vaguely alike, each one hoping that they’ll be the lucky one to give up their social life for the next three months for little to no pay and half-full audiences.

“Can I talk to Dad?”

My father’s response was what I would expect from him. “I kind of liked the idea of you being a lawyer, but what do I know? Your mother is probably right.”

I had the feeling my dad was really looking forward to three years of law school, of discussions with me about court cases and legal theory.

I asked the school I was most seriously considering for a deferment. I would have another year to decide whether or not to be a lawyer. Except a year later, I was still waking up at 5 a.m. every day to write headlines for the show, do my makeup and hair, and head over to the studio, where I would perform skits or go out on location to dance with Richard Simmons in the middle of Penn Station or interview Jillian Michaels at a fitness expo.

The show was nominated for a Webby Award and had accrued a respectable following, enough that I was asked to expand my role on the website and start writing daily columns for
Elastic Waist in addition to my on-screen time. My job was to be myself, on camera and in writing, and every day revolved around sharing another piece of myself with the world. With each post I sent to my producer for editing, I expected an email back saying that I was all sorts of screwed up and no one would want to read the inner ramblings of my insecure mind. But people did, and the reader comments that rolled in were from people who knew exactly how I felt, they said, because they felt the same way about their bodies, their stretch marks, and their daily battles with perfectionism.

A regular correspondent on our show had taken a job with a local news station and asked if I’d work for her there. After that I was approached by a fitness website. I’d gone from balancing a nonpaying acting career and office work to freelancing full-time as a blogger and hosting my own show.

Every morning I woke up and told myself to be thankful, that this wouldn’t last forever. Nothing was ever this good for this long.

I
SPENT MY FIRST
Condé Nast paycheck on a cruise. My mother had always dreamed of “eating her way across the ocean.” We’d had less than a handful of family vacations in my life, and I wrapped the gift certificate with a giant beach ball and gave it to them for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

“It’s too much,” my mother said.

“Well, I can’t get my money back, so you’ll just have to go.”

“Are you coming with us?”

“No, I’ve got too much going on with work. You’ll have to have fun for me, too.”

Every few weeks when I went home to visit, I would ask if they’d figured out where they were going to go yet, and every few weeks they told me they were still thinking about it. It was well after their twenty-sixth anniversary that they announced that their big trip would be up the coast of Canada.

“Canada?” I said. “Not somewhere more exotic?”

“Well, your dad doesn’t really like hot weather, and I just care about the food, so that seemed like a good compromise,” my mom said.

While they were away, my father sent me photos from his
phone: Dad cuddling with a giant taxidermied bear, he and my mom grinning at dinner, animals made out of towels waiting for them in their cabin. They looked happy, like they always did when they weren’t home.

“Hi, honey, we’re home,” the voicemail from my mom said. “We had a great time. Thank you again. Call me when you get this and I’ll tell you about our trip.”

When I called home it was my dad who answered—my mom wasn’t feeling well, he said. “Your mom was in a lot of pain during the trip. Something’s wrong with her stomach.”

I called over and over again in the days that followed until she finally answered the phone from the hospital.

She relayed being in so much pain that she couldn’t walk, and that she’d woken up my father in the middle of the night to hold her because she thought she was dying. He finally convinced her to go to the ER, but neither of them had considered calling me.

“I’m fine, I just need to get my gall bladder out,” she said.

“Do you want me to come home?”

“No, I’ll be in and out in a day. You can come out this weekend to help me.”

“D
ADDY,
I
CAN
’
T TALK
.
I’ll call you back during my lunch break,” I whispered into my phone. “I just got a call from Dr. Abadallah, Kim. There were complications with Mom’s surgery.”

My mother had called me that morning to reassure me that the surgery was no big deal and to make sure I was still planning to come out to the Island to spend the weekend with her, watching movies and ensuring that my father ate a vegetable or two.

“He said it was serious. She’s lost a lot of blood. We should get there immediately.” The words ran together as if he was afraid that if he didn’t get it all out in one shot he wouldn’t be able to get it out at all.

“Is she going to die?” It was all I could think of to ask—I needed some sort of cue to tell me how to react.

“I don’t know, Kim. It’s certainly possible.” His confusion was evident. I don’t think it had occurred to him in the past seventeen years, since her spine surgeries, that she might die before him.

The truth is that it hadn’t occurred to me either. I had always expected this call, but I expected it to be my mom telling me that
my dad’s heart had finally called it quits after years of peanut butter cups and cheeseburgers.

“Call me when you need to be picked up from the train.”

“No, you go to the hospital. I’ll meet you there.” I was already half-packed. “I love you, Daddy.”

“Right back at you, kiddo.” His voice faded off.

I was working in Midtown, a block south of Central Park, and stumbled out of the building to grab a cab to Penn Station. I couldn’t think, couldn’t keep my mind in the present—it was a montage of my nine-year-old self, standing or sitting or sleeping by my mom’s side in her hospital room or stepping outside to cry. But I wasn’t nine anymore, there were things that needed doing. I pulled myself out of my stupor and called my aunt Lee. There was a train leaving in seventeen minutes according to the train schedule I kept in my purse. I’d carried one with me since I left Long Island, never knowing when I might need to get home in a hurry.

“What’s happened?” There was no confusion on my aunt’s end. If I was calling her at work, something was wrong.

Faced with relaying it all again, I understood why my dad said it so fast; saying it aloud made it real. I told her what I knew and in the same breath that she needed to come to Penn Station immediately. I didn’t want to give her a choice. While my mother was fierce and nurturing, my aunt was the exact opposite: reserved and standoffish. I didn’t trust that she’d get the severity of the situation or even then that she’d bother to drop everything and come running. But I needed her there for my mother, so I just told her exactly what to do.

I dashed to the Ronkonkoma-bound train gate where I’d told Lee to meet me. I had taken the train hundreds of times over the
course of my life at all times of day, but on that day Penn Station was more crowded than I’d ever seen it on a weekday. I looked for Lee’s big red tuft of hair, but I couldn’t find her. I started crying.

I’ve always had the uncanny ability to fall apart in the most embarrassing places possible, yet when it’s perfectly acceptable to express emotions in public to remain completely stoic. At my grandfather’s funeral, when I was six, I pretended to cry because the woman next to me kept handing me tissues. I had been seated apart from my family; my parents, grandmother, aunt, and my aunt’s boyfriend all sat in the front row of the funeral home as the rabbi said the kaddish. There was no room for me with them, so I sat in a row farther back with my parents’ friend June. I didn’t want June to feel bad, so I took tissue after tissue to dab my dry eyes. Later, when I told my mom, she said, “You take after my family; we hate letting anyone see us cry.” In that moment, I had been so proud of that—my mom could handle anything, and I wanted to be just like her. I wondered how she’d feel about me now, beet-red and hyperventilating for all the station to see.

I stood alone in the whirl of commuters, who all avoided eye contact and kept their distance—all except one, a twentysomething man. He told the person he was on the phone with that he’d call them right back and came over to see if I was okay. “I’m okay, thank you.” I said, forcing a smile and thinking about how nice people can be.

With three minutes left to boarding, there was still no sign of Lee, and I started making my way to the train. I wasn’t about to miss it because she was too pigheaded to hustle. Which is, of course, when she finally showed up. I don’t know that I could
have forgiven her if she hadn’t started running down the escalator. I pointed to the track and start running myself.

I didn’t understand the bonds that siblings had, but I knew they were complicated. There was no one in my mother’s life that could wound her with a flippant remark like my aunt, no one that she was harder on, and yet no one she defended as much. They didn’t talk for five years after our house burned down—among other things, Lee had told our extended family that my mother burned down the house for the insurance money. They started talking again when my grandmother died, picking up right where they had left off.

The train was packed, and Lee and I found seats, thankfully secluded, by the conductor’s box. Twenty minutes passed without a word, each of us staring out the window or at the floor. And then Lee started babbling on about her vacation to North Carolina. I wasn’t expecting a hug or soothing words from her, but I didn’t care for the distraction. My mother had earned the right to be the center of attention. I refused to make idle chitchat and instead brought the conversation back to what was slowly sinking in as my reality. “If she dies, I have to move home. I have to take care of Dad.”

I couldn’t help but think that if my mother died, my life was over, too. At that moment I wasn’t sure if I wanted her to live more because I loved her or because if she was gone, so was my independence. I imagined my father’s life without my mother: bills lost in piles of paper, mounds of laundry taking over as he continued to buy new clothes instead of washing old ones, dishes piled up in the sink until they were beyond cleaning, empty jars of Marshmallow Fluff and peanut butter littering the
kitchen. My dad was so bad at adult things. He needed her. And without her, he’d need me.

“Your father can take care of himself,” Lee said. Even she didn’t believe it.

I started sobbing again and didn’t stop for the rest of the hour-long ride.

Anna was waiting for us at the train station. She didn’t say anything; she simply drove to the hospital, one hand on the steering wheel, one hand on mine. We saw Rachel, crying hysterically, as soon as we entered the hospital. I thought my mom was dead. “I can’t lose my mom” was the only thing I could think of to say to her.

“I know,” she said. “I just got here. They told me to find the surgical waiting room. Your dad is there.”

I needed to get myself together before my mom saw me, before my dad saw me. I repeated orders in my mind:
Stop crying. Just breathe. Walk.
I just needed to get to the waiting room.

The room was empty except for my father and his newspaper. I had been to this hospital so many times over the years—asthma attacks, broken bones, blood drives—and there was an odd comfort in its familiarity. The waiting room had been renovated since the last time I was there. They had flat-screen TVs now, and blue carpet replaced the linoleum floors. It looked downright homey.

At first glance, my father could have been waiting anywhere for anything, just passing the time reading the news, but on closer inspection he wasn’t reading the newspaper—he was touching it. Running his fingers through the pages, touching the corners, feeling around the headlines, the paper soothing him.

“Any news?” I honestly didn’t know if I was ready to hear whatever he had to tell me. He’d never been the kind of parent to wipe away tears and whisper comforting words. We always had an unspoken agreement that he’d give me it to me straight, and in asking a question, it was my responsibility to determine if I really wanted to hear the truth.