Here's the Story LP: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice (22 page)

Burlington, known as the “the world’s backhoe capital,” is a small town located on the edge of the Mississippi across from Illinois. We checked into a local hotel, called my relatives still left in town, and found the house where my mother grew up.

I stood outside the two-story home and tried to picture my mom as a little girl. The house was well kept. There seemed to be a relatively fresh coat of white paint. What I really liked was that it was still in the family. My mother’s aunt’s daughter lived there.

They let us in, and as I stopped in the entry, I again tried to picture my mother as a girl. It wasn’t hard. The house was decorated with antiques, which helped take my imagination back in time. As I walked up the stairs to my mother’s old bedroom, I held on to the handrail and imagined her hand on it.

The entire two days we spent there were imbued with emotion as I connected with relatives I’d heard of but never met. I met my mother’s mother’s sister. Though she was in her late nineties, I felt like I was almost with my grandmother. I spoke with one of my mother’s cousins, a woman who’d grown up with her. I spent hours asking questions. Even when she described the pain my mother endured throughout her life, the bus trips to the hospital to get shots, and how her syphilis was considered a dirty, shameful thing and hushed up, I felt my soul fill up.

I broke down many times, but at one point in particular, she stopped and asked if it was too much for me. I said no, I wasn’t crying because of the stories. I had tears because for the first time in my life, I was seeing my mother for who she was: the greatest, strongest woman I’d ever met.

Later, as we drove back to Minnesota, Michael wondered why I was just having this revelation, why I was only now discovering how strong my mother was, and then he laughingly described what it had been like to stand in front of her steel-gray eyes as she said, “You have a lot to prove.”

“You think your father is half as tough?” he added. “No way.”

I hoped I could be half as strong as my mother. Michael said I already was. “You get as much strength as you need for the next battle,” he added.

Neither of us knew it, but I was going to need more than I’d ever imagined.

Part
Four

Coming to Terms

L
ife was a soap opera—literally.

It was the summer of 2000, and I worked for nearly two months on the daytime drama
Passions.
I played Rebecca Hotchkiss, a wealthy, confused, somewhat kinky, lovelorn woman from a line of conniving, emotional women, one of whom had even arranged for John Wilkes Booth to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.

As for real life, I had mixed feelings about the job. On the one hand, it felt like a step down. On the other hand, it was the hardest work I’d ever done.

Every night I had to memorize a whole day’s worth of lines. It was grueling. I admired the actors on the show who were able to do it. Creatively, the work demanded a high level of tolerance. Not much happened. Working a soap was a daily grind. I was saying the same words in the tenth episode as I’d said in the first. My character never left her drama. It was the way I’d lived the past thirty years—stuck in the same role—and I had a hard time continuing even though it was pretend.

I politely declined an invitation to return for another season. I couldn’t do it. I knew the bedroom scenes were coming and I thought I’d be better off quitting while I was still ahead. Even so, it was tough to get away from Rebecca. Die-hard fans of
Passions
continued to stop me long after I was off the show and ask questions, as if I were still involved with the characters in the town of Harmony.

My next role had the potential for more drama. It was about six months later, and I was the lead in
Title to Murder,
a small feature that again paired me with Stephen Furst. I played a real-estate-title examiner whose life was put in jeopardy after she unearthed seemingly forgotten evidence about the case of a missing woman. An assistant district attorney (played by Christopher Atkins) provided help as well as romance. No one pretended it was an Oscar-caliber script, but the chance to work on a feature film with nice people trumped the lack of quality.

We shot in New Hampshire. One day I complimented Stephen on maintaining his weight, then added that I felt fat. He studied me for a moment and said I only needed to lose ten pounds. I was like, thanks for nothing, pal. Chris was a cutup, the guy on the set who kept things light, and a pleasure to look at. He came to my room at night, wanting to hang out and talk. At one point, I thought he might’ve wanted to cross the line. I didn’t want to go there. I didn’t need to. But as a forty-five-year-old mother who felt ten pounds too heavy, I took it as a compliment.

We shot in a sleepy little town that had one major nighttime attraction, a strip club, and one night Stephen and Chris took me there. It was my first time seeing totally nude dancers. I couldn’t believe I was there. I didn’t know whether to look and enjoy the women or cover my eyes and run out. I applied the old adage “when in Rome, do as the Romans do.” So I let Stephen and Chris order me a drink and I watched the girls. They were beautiful, in great shape, and totally bare-ass naked. They were smooth and shiny in front, too. I’d never seen that on a grown woman either.

Several of the girls asked if they could give me a dance. They were quite open and even giddy about the idea of straddling Marcia Brady’s lap. I didn’t blame them. I was having a good time. One girl finally persuaded me to let her give me a dance. She led me to a private room. I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t do it at the table, but she insisted it would be more special in the private room.

What the heck, right? But right before I stepped into the room with this gorgeous naked young woman, I came to my senses. I figured the room was filled with security cameras, as, most likely, was the club. The thought hit me: Oh my God, pictures of me here are going to end up in the
National Enquirer.
In a panic I sprinted out of the nightclub, leaving behind peals of laughter.

A
lthough I would’ve preferred to work more frequently, I enjoyed the jobs that came my way. I guested on an episode of
Ellen
, playing Ellen DeGeneres’s best friend from high school. Her courage, poise, and personality made me more of a fan than I already was. She was going through a breakup.

It was obvious she was preoccupied at work. We spent time together outside between scenes, talking about the breakup, and I was amazed and impressed by how she was able to share her feelings openly and honestly. She wasn’t afraid to expose her pain. She seemed so evolved to me. It had taken me thirty years to learn how to deal with my problems. At the same time, she was able to summon so much joy and share it through her work. It bubbled out of her on the set despite the upset she was going through. I thought she was remarkable.

I remember going home and telling Michael that I thought she was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever met. He gave me a look.

“Don’t worry, honey,” I said. “I’m not switching teams.”

“Phew,” he joked.

“Unless she calls and asks me out on a date. Then we’ll see.”

Why did I like to torture my poor husband?

It was because we’d survived the worst of times only to come out in a great place. I was going into my fifth year on Prozac and our marriage was better and stronger than ever. My family was a different story. They couldn’t take a magic pill to calm things down and straighten everyone out. My parents, in their early eighties, still had their hands full with Denny and Kevin, both of whom were in their fifties and still needed or demanded their full attention.

Remarkably, Denny’s spirit was still as pure as it had been when we were children. No one in the world said I love you with as much feeling or enthusiasm. Even as a middle-aged man, his face took on a childlike brightness. He’d gotten older without growing up.

Sadly, the same could be said of Kevin. Despite all his natural ability in various areas, including music and art, he hadn’t done anything with his life. My parents argued about it endlessly. My mother blamed my father for indulging him too often, and my father made me feel guilty for not having helped Kevin more, almost as if I was supposed to have found him a career in Hollywood alongside mine.

My father often remarked that I’d blown Kevin’s chance at success by not making an album with him. I disagreed.

It was difficult having a brother who was constantly at war with the world, with his family, and with himself. I understood why he frustrated my parents. The potential all of us had seen in him was in the past and instead he had turned into a quirky, angry, and sometimes frightening man. My mother confided to her sister that she thought Kevin might go off the deep end one day and never come back.

I tried to help Kevin. I hired him to take care of several rental properties I owned, but it didn’t work out. He said he couldn’t paint because the fumes made him sick. He also said he couldn’t take care of the gardens because the fertilizers might kill him. I also hired him to give guitar and drawing lessons to Natalie and her friends. But the lessons stopped after Kevin cursed out the daughter of a friend of mine and several other mothers warned there could be a problem.

At one point, he became obsessed with buying a van and driving it through Northern California. He spoke about getting away from things and disappearing where no one could find him. My father thought an adventure would be good for him, but my mother objected. I can still hear her saying she didn’t want any of her children living out of a car. She worried he would end up dead.

He ended up staying at home. But around that same time he moved from his condo into a three-bedroom home that my parents had redone before renting out. He claimed his condo was infected by mold. He played my parents a video he’d made, showing what he claimed were the contaminated spots on the walls and floors. He said he could die if he stayed there.

All this drama took a toll on my mother. She began staying in bed, complaining that she didn’t feel well. She didn’t really complain; that wasn’t my mother’s way. Instead she needed to rest much of the day. She couldn’t pinpoint any specific ache or pain. It was a general lack of energy.

I saw she wasn’t herself, and that concerned me. In the early nineties, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy. Although ten years had passed, my first thought was of a recurrence of the cancer. But I forced myself not to think about that possibility. Our family was only as strong as my mother, and at the moment neither was doing that well.

I
t turned out my mother suffered from more than just my father’s and Kevin’s wild theories. Near the end of 2003, she had on several occasions such sharp pains in her stomach that I hurried over to their house and took her to the hospital emergency room. Despite her complaints of severe pain and nausea, doctors were unable to find anything wrong with her. I pleaded with them to do more tests. Nothing was more frustrating than to hear them say nothing was wrong. Couldn’t they see she was sick?

By the new year, it seemed I was taking her to the hospital nearly every other day. Finally, after one episode at the emergency room, I said to the doctor, “Look, I can’t take her home unless we find out what’s wrong with her. You can see that she has something wrong with her. Isn’t there anything else you can try?”

For whatever reason, my alarm got through to this doctor. He ordered a certain kind of X-ray, one that I guessed the insurance company didn’t ordinarily pay for, and when it came back the radiologist let me see the film. It showed a mass on my mother’s kidney. The doctor said it was cancer. I pressed a hand against my eyes to stave off tears, stared at the X-ray, and asked him a question.

Was he sure?

Yes.

Was she going to die?

There were things they could do to fight it.

Could I give her the news?

Yes.

Good. I wanted to tell her in my own way.

A
fter the doctor left the room, I hugged my mother and told her the bad news in the most simple and straightforward words I could muster without breaking down. After a point, I couldn’t help myself anymore. I cried. But I assured her that we would get through it together.

She handled the news much better than I did. At home, she walked inside, saw my father, shook her head, and went to bed. My father asked several questions, then paused. Clearly overwhelmed by the situation, he asked what we were going to do. I said, “Whatever it takes.”

I knew that fell on my shoulders, but hey, it was my mother. Given my family, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Neither would Michael, who helped me prepare a list of questions for the doctor. The next day my mother and I met with a specialist and a few days later she underwent surgery to remove her infected kidney.

I stayed overnight in her hospital room and then brought her back to my house to recuperate. I’d already prepared Michael for that, and he knew it was pointless to say anything to the contrary when I said we would give her better care than my father and brother. He set up a room for her and helped tend to her with the same warmth and love that I gave her. In fact, one day I walked into her room shortly after he’d spent time with her and my mother was crying.

Alarmed, I asked what was wrong.

“Maureen, you’re the luckiest woman in the world,” she said. “You have the greatest husband. He loves you so much.”

I already knew that, but it made my heart soar to hear that she’d finally changed her opinion about Michael and discovered the man I knew as the love of my life. After nearly twenty years of marriage, he had proven himself to her. That likely happened years earlier, but this was her first time articulating it. She let me know that my greatest achievement was marrying—and staying married—to Michael.

After three weeks, she returned home. Sometimes I look back and wish I had never let her leave my house. It’s one of those things I would do differently if given the chance. But she came through the surgery and was well enough to be around her own things at home, as she desired. But I saw her every day and took her to her chemotherapy treatments, which was time we used to talk about everything.

One day I remarked that about five years earlier she seemed to have let go of all her old worries about syphilis, insanity, and the rest of her past. Yes, she said. She’d started to relax and enjoy life when she saw my life come together after I began the Prozac in the latter nineties.

She said it was me. I seemed to come into my own, and she felt good about my family, my husband, and my life. Like I was out of danger.

“You’ll watch your daughter the same way,” she said.

“I already do,” I replied.