Dry Your Smile (16 page)

Dear Diary,

Soon it will be Christmas and no school and a whole week with no other lessons either. But we still do the show. And there are presents. And we celebrate Hannukah too (sp?) and that's more presents. I am so lucky.

Merry Christmas and Happy Hannukah,

Julian

Dear Diary,

Well it's the New Year which is 1951. Happy New Year! It still feels funny to be living in the 1950's, even if we already did that for a whole year. That's because I've spent almost my whole life in the 1940's, Momma says. What is even more funny is to think way ahead to things like the 1960's and 1970's and even 1980's. They don't seem real, sort of like science fiction, and it's a strange feeling to think that unless I suddenly die or there's a war and they drop the atomic bomb and I can't get to duck and cover under a desk or table in time like we're taught to do in school, then I'll actually be a grownup and have my own room or maybe even my own apartment or house and not be living with Momma anymore. Of course I would miss her very much but probably I'd see her every day so it would be alright. I think about that a lot, especially around my birthday and like now, New Year's.

I didn't make it through 1950 perfect on the chart and now there's all of 1951 ahead of me until October to try and get perfect again and stay that way. I don't know why but that makes me depressed.

But I'm going to be positive and full of hope, like Momma!

Yesterday Momma and me went out to dinner and she showed me how to eat a lobster with the claws and all. You get a big bib just like a baby which I hated but they give you these nutcracker things which I liked. Also I liked that you're supposed to get as messy as you want, the waiter said (he recognized me and so we gave him an autograph for his little girl who watches me all the time).

Happy New Year!

Julian

P.S. I'm reading Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grim now and I love it.

Dear Diary,

I know it's almost Easter and Pesach (spell?) together and I haven't paid you much attention. I apologize. I've been very busy doing important things but I still love you.

Mr. Ehrenreich got me out of the exclusive contract with Miss Unger so now I can play Ingrid and other parts too if they don't have a “time conflict” because playing Ingrid has to come first it's steady. And we had to give up the raise in salary to get the contract different. But I got to play Alice in Wonderland on a TV special!! So I'm very busy, you have to understand and not complain, dear diary. I just finished reading The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen and it is my favorite now of all stories in the world. I love love love the Little Robber Girl. I love Little Gerda too. I even think the Snow Queen herself isn't so scary. I think she's beautiful, in fact.

Your friend,

Julian

Dear Diary,

Momma says we're going to give me special private swimming lessons at some club soon so I'll never die like Ophelia did. I'm scared of learning but I know it's important not to drown.

If I die in the first lesson, remember that I loved you, dear diary.

With love, for real,

Julian

Dear Diary,

No news. My swimming teacher, Hank, says I have a terrific (sp?) backstroke and he could train me to be in the Olympics but Momma says I should just learn how not to drown. She says there I go again, her little talent factory!

Esther Williams

(no, really Julian)

Dear Diary,

Momma says I'm hopeless and I've been forgetting to tell you when I write in you. I apologize. Today was June 11th, 1951. Mr. Jonas wants to enter me in the New York State piano competition in the third year student group. He thinks I can win. Momma says now
that
would be something, not like being in the Olympics. It gives me nerves so I am practicing hard and won't have much time to write in you.

Arthur Rubinstein

no ha ha Julian)

Dear Diary,

Like Momma says, how time does fly!

Here it is September already again (the 6th) and school starts soon. I meant to write more in you over the summer but I was very busy and did a lot of extra shows. I must be making more money but we're still in 3-A and can't be in an elevator building with my own room yet. Momma gets depressed with her stocks but we're being positive and we have hope. Maybe next year.

Julian

Dear Diary,

Life is very busy so you still have to not complain that I write so little or with such long times in between. I stay awake in bed sometimes and think about what I would write in you. If I wasn't too tired to write it down, I mean. I made up an imaginary
(looked it up, Momma!)
friend named Bunker who is half-girl and half-boy and goes with me everywhere. Momma doesn't mind and says that shows imagination
(l.i.u.M!)
but it shouldn't go too far and carry me away. Bunker is only a kid too and not strong enough to lift me or carry me, so I don't worry about it. Anyway, at night I tell Bunker things I would write in you. If I wasn't so tired, I mean. I hope that doesn't insult you or make you jealous, diary.

Please understand.

Still your friend,

Julian

Dear Diary,

It's the night before my ninth birthday and I'm excited to see what all my presents will be. I can tell you what I got Momma because she won't read you until tomorrow and by then she'll have it so it won't ruin the surprise. I gave all the saved up money (because there still was nobody to take me shopping on
her
birthday in July so back then I made her an ashtray out of modeling clay because even though Momma doesn't smoke cigarettes you never know there could be a guest come over who does), anyway, I gave the saved up money to
Papa
in secret at rehearsal and told him what to get and he got her a
magnificent
pink silk stole (that's like a big scarf) from Saks 5th Avenue, all wrapped and perfect and will she be surprised! I've made it through to tonight pretty perfect on the chart with a few slip up no star days but all in all Momma says very good. But I didn't want to repeat myself this year by doing the chart all over again because you should never repeat yourself or you get typecast (which is why it's so good I'm doing other parts and not just Ingrid all the time) and it is
death
Mr. Ehrenreich says for an actor to get typecast.

So I don't think I'll do the chart ever again.

Tomorrow will be my last birthday ever in a single number. The one after that will already be my tenth birthday and I'll be in two numbers then and stay that way for the rest of my whole life, unless I live to be 100 years old. Momma would be dead by then, which is hard to imagine. It's hard to imagine the rest of my life. But I guess it will really happen.

Happy Birthday to you dear diary, you're almost one year old. I apologize that I'm so busy I hardly tell you things anymore. You understand. That's how it is. I loved you anyway. For real.

Your friend, with love,

Julian Travis.

CHAPTER TWO

Autumn, 1981

Laurence Millman stood at the stove and thought about Tillie Olsen. All those readers. All those hands turning the pages of her now famous piece that began “I stand here ironing.” All those people who had bought her book
Silences
, about the erasure of women. All those women who had touched their own anger and wept; those few men, himself included, who had wept to touch their own guilt. All those people.

“I stand here sautéing onions,” he said aloud to the empty kitchen. Ridiculous. The rhythm was wrong, as lacking in dignity as he seemed to himself—a fifty-two-year-old political organizer who had made no impact on society. Not a dent, not a scratch in over a decade, because he had been too busy wielding this revolutionary weapon of a wooden spoon, too preoccupied believing such an act was vital for men, too active rebelling against the male stereotype by being passively obedient. Just his luck, to have been born male and white at this point in history. What rotten timing. Then he had to go and become a pro-feminist man. Exchange all of the privileges and power for all of the consciousness and guilt. Never again now to see the world solely through his own eyes.

“I stand here irony-ing,” he tried aloud. Less ridiculous, but too arch. Neither good theory nor good practice, which should be effortlessly married. Did he still believe that? Even when this politics—
her
politics—had convinced him that for a man the spatula was mightier than the sword?

“Never really believed it,” he proclaimed aloud, lifting the colander of rinsed tomatoes from the sink and beginning to slice them into thick rounds. But hadn't he? Hadn't he wanted some force, sudden and beautiful as the mountain blizzards of his Colorado boyhood, to bear down upon him and swallow him up, a force savage as history, that would put his talents to use against suffering? Who would have expected such a force to wear the face of a seventeen-year-old girl?

She had indeed engulfed him. Everything got drawn toward Julian's gravity, a gravity she herself couldn't perceive or acknowledge, so obsessed was she in trying to tear herself loose in turn from the magnetic pull of Hope.

Laurence combined the onions and tomatoes with the already boiled and drained pasta and peas, and began to grate cheese over the concoction. It was the best thing he cooked. “Laurence's Baked Dish,” he called it—an aromatic conglomeration of noodles, onions and garlic, melted cheese, and assorted vegetables. Julian was definitely not a vegetarian. Julian was a carnivore. Although she had, he granted, made every effort to like the casserole (pretentious East Coast term). What she hated was that he always made it in large quantities. “When I see the Baked Dish,” she would tease him, “I know that fourteen people are coming to dinner or else that two people will be consuming the same fare for a week.”

“Well,
I
really
love
it, dammit,” he muttered to the shredding curls of cheese. If he had his own way, he'd be a total vegetarian, not just settle for the compromise of chicken or fish they agreed on most of the time. If he had his way. I once had a way, a personality, he thought. Who was it? Where did it go?

Into Julian. His ideas, skills, energy—sucked toward Julian. And Julian's life still sucked toward Hope. Everything devouring and being devoured in turn, everything distorting at the speed of light as it ran its course toward Hope, all matter and energy disappearing into that voracious Black Hole wheeling through the universe.

“I once had an identity,” he announced without conviction, as he closed the oven door on the Baked Dish. ‘One of the most promising political minds in America,' the
National Progressive
had called him. He knew parts of that article by heart. Just as well, since the clipping had disappeared into one of Julian's files and the
Progressive
had long ago folded. Student organizer of the first campus strike in the country, when he was only twenty. Brilliant tactician, dynamic activist, even right through the Death Valley days of the 1950's. A speaker so charismatic he could turn a rally into a march, a sit-in into a building seizure. Architect of the grassroots protest that had driven strip-mining out of a whole region of Colorado—and kept it out. A tireless coalition builder who could talk to the press, U.S. senators, minority communities, and back-country farmers with equal persuasiveness. A young Lenin, they had called him. One of those who had laid the foundation for the 1960's.

“Ha,” he snorted. He poured himself a glass of jug wine and went into the livingroom to wait for her. She was late, of course. Not her fault: the plane delayed, or the meeting running longer than expected, or the necessity of going for coffee with the local women after her speech … she was always apologetic, but it never changed. She'd eventually totter in exhausted, despite her maddening ability to fall asleep the second she got on a plane. He looked up at the advance copy of her latest book on the Franklin stove pseudo-fireplace mantel they'd built together. There had been a time when they were introduced as “Laurence Millman—and-his-wife.” Not that this had given him pleasure. On the contrary. Hadn't he taken pride in building her politics, nurturing her tactical instincts, feeding the hunger that raged through her for tools and skills with which to forge change? He shook his head more in confirmation than in denial.

All of his friends had warned against it. In those days, Julian had no friends, of course. But Hope was against it—and Hope was a sufficient barrier to whatever she chose to block. He watched a brief downdraft stir the ashes in the Franklin. What more challenging inspiration could two lovers have had than unanimous opposition to their love?

“You wanted me for the very qualities you've crushed in me,” he murmured to an invisible Julian, as if she sat on the mantel next to her new book.

God, but he'd been defiant in those days! Defiant against everything he'd fled from: the alcoholic, battering father, broken by a life in the mines, the mother who never made a sound when she cried, the poverty of experience that left him perpetually intimidated by shopkeepers and train conductors and headwaiters.

He drifted back to the kitchen, checked the oven, started to pour another glass of wine, then switched to a diet cola.

“I had defiance to spare, then,” he told the jug, pushing it aside. Defiance against everything he had fled
to:
ivy-covered academic walls that turned out to house more departmental jockeying than educational riches; state politics that he discovered had settled for becoming yet another establishment; the great Eastern city that promised such power but extracted as payment his feeling insecure as a country cousin.