The History of Great Things (14 page)

A
ll right, then. Your life isn't ruined. You grieve. You join a support group to talk about it. You tell the group that you had a complicated relationship with your difficult mother, but that you loved her, and you miss her. You wonder if you'll ever stop crying, and it takes time, but you do.

But now another year's gone by, and you still don't have much to show for yourself. You've stopped drinking, but haven't really started anything else. You teach at a preschool for seven dollars an hour, and you like the work, but it's demanding, and you could make more at Starbucks, where you'd also get the health insurance you still don't have. You want to be a writer, but don't have idea one about how to make money doing that, so you decide to use the money I left you to quit the preschool job and go back to school to get a writing degree. It might be a good idea to keep your job, but you've already established a pattern of kicking up dust behind you, so this isn't any different in that respect. You enroll at the University of Chicago. You've seen an Off-Broadway play, or whatever the equivalent of that is in Chicago, an Off-Michigan play, and it's weird and experimental but also inspiring, so you decide
to study playwriting, which really seems to be your thing. Of course, the plays are all about you, or mostly about you, or about you and me and how I ruined your life, even if you insist I didn't, but they're also sort of experimental, like maybe I'm dead but return as a stray dog you can communicate with psychically; they're definitely funny, you were always funny, like your father, and you get some attention when your first play is put on at a prestigious Off-Broadway-equivalent Chicago theater, and you fall in love with the man who plays the stray dog version of your father, which is weird, but there it is. By this time you're forty, though, so it's basically too late for you to have children, but you discuss it with the stray dog man, and he doesn't believe in bringing children into the world anyway, though he would consider it for you even though he's one of these idealistic radical types who believes he'd ever see a world where that happened, zero population growth, so it's a big deal that he'd even consider it, and you would both certainly consider adoption, but together you just table the conversation indefinitely. Secretly—you'll never admit this to anyone—even though you like kids, and have always been good with them, you're not so sure you'd be a good mom anyway. You've lost your patience babysitting a time or two, and fear that any parenting style you might come up with would be a response to whatever you think I did wrong, like a lot of parents do, like maybe I did, maybe, which of course only fucks up their children differently.

You and the stray dog actor, his name is Leonardo—

—Hold up.

—What?

—I thought I was a novelist.

—Let's say you're both. People do more than one thing, don't they? I did.

—Sure. It's just that I was hoping to have a through-line here.

—Can't you go back to the TV chapter and revise again so that you write a play instead of a novel?

—I could. But that's kind of a pain in my ass.

—Practicing six hours a day was a pain in my ass.

—The thing is, novelist is so much closer to the truth.

—But how interesting is it?

— . . .

—I think playwriting has more dramatic potential. Also, isn't every other character in every book already a novelist? Or a journalist?

— . . .

—I'm right!

—You're not right, Mom, it's a very hyperbolic statement.

—You know there's some truth to it.

— . . .

—Okay, moving on, can you at least give my guy a regular name?

—What do you have against an Italian name?

—I don't have anything against them. I just think that's your preference, not mine. Plus, the most exotically named person I ever dated was Herschel.

—Oh, I remember him, he was very sexy, and his mother was a porn star.

—That's not actually true.

—She showed her tits.

—Can we get back to my fictional boyfriend's name?

—What would you like him to be named?

—I like the name of the person I'm with. If I'd written him into my life, I might have given him the name he actually has.

—You're with someone? Oh, sweetheart!

—Yes. I'm with someone.

—What's his name?

—His name is Ben.

—Benjamin! That's a really nice name!

—Just Ben. I mean, yes, Benjamin, but just Ben.

—I want to call him Benjamin. It's more actory-sounding. And it's not Italian.

—Fair enough.

—I'm really sorry I didn't get to meet him. He sounds wonderful.

—I haven't told you anything about him.

—I'm sure he's wonderful.

So you and Benjamin, the stray dog actor, who is also a director and writer, you get together and decide to form a theater company. You rent a space somewhere in Chicago, wherever it's cheap, some crummy location south of downtown. I don't know Chicago all that well outside the Loop. The first few years at the Betsy and Benjamin Theater Company are financially iffy, you pour a whole bunch of money into it that you don't have, but the two of you are hugely proud, and the notices are good, and you keep moving forward with it until you get a huge grant from the NEA or wherever—

—HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

—that allows you to rehab the space and advertise properly and get larger audiences in.

—Is this your idea of a resolution for me?

—Yes. I thought you weren't about happy endings. This is happyish. It's a compromise.

—When did I say that?

—Maybe I'm just giving you what I wish you'd give me. I didn't have the happiest ending.

—I know. But I'm going for a sort of realism here. An imagined realism, anyway.

—Mmf.

J
ust before you return to Baton Rouge, Carolina arranges for you to audition with New York City Opera. This audition does not get you into the company on the spot, but it goes well enough that Carolina reports back that they'll see you again in a year's time, and that now is the moment for you to move to New York and fully dedicate yourself to studying. It's a dazzling prospect, but you remind Carolina that you have a husband and a child.
Life gives us difficult choices
, Carolina says. You go back to the Barbizon that night, draft a letter. Many versions go into the trash. You should really fly home to tell Fred in person what you're planning, but you also know that if you do that, and if I start asking any questions about how long you're going to stay this time and if it will be forever, that you'll only end up postponing the inevitable. So you write your husband to say that you've decided to rent an apartment, and that you hope he'll reconsider coming to live in New York, though you've talked about this, and he's already said that he'd live almost anywhere but there. He's a small-town boy and Baton Rouge is plenty big enough for him. He writes a letter back to this effect, adding that he doesn't think New York City is any kind of place to raise a child, especially right now; reminding you, again, of
his godforsaken perfect childhood in Mount Pleasant, telling you that he watches the
CBS Evening News
, that the crime rate has never been higher, and that he has strong reservations about the effect that will have on Betsy, her safety, and so on. You write back to say that the Upper West Side is perfectly safe, and that the public schools there are considered quite good, and that the culture that she'll have access to in New York is impossible to put a value on, and that you want more for me than you'd had in dullsville Muscatine for eighteen years, where the most stimulating topic of conversation was that nasty old grain smell. (Breathing it in was bad enough, talking about it day after day seemed like enough to drive anyone away forever.) After two more letters, Dad's done enough thinking about this for a while, and says he wants to wait to talk further until you return to Baton Rouge. When you get there, he tells you that Betsy is going to stay put and that's his final word on the subject, and you accept this for now, because he is the man; but “final word” gets stuck in your head, and you promise yourself right then that yours will be the
final
final word.

But for now you leave me behind with him, delaying, again, the conversation that is coming. You do keep returning to Baton Rouge, though a little less often, and two years later, when you are accepted into the company at New York City Opera, you write another letter, this time asking for a divorce, and managing to convince Dad to bring me to you rather than him forcing you to come down one last time to collect me.
Children need their mothers
, you tell him. Dad is as angry as Dad ever gets, which is to say that some vague but recognizably unpleasant feeling that some other person might recognize as anger stirs within him, an odd, unfamiliar rush of heat in his hands and feet, though he appears to have no need to explore it further. He's been my
primary caregiver for the last three years, and all evidence shows that I'm well adjusted, bright, and happy in Louisiana with Dad, and he tries to remind you of this as calmly as he can, but he already senses that he's losing, and he can physically feel his anger as it deflates into something like sorrow, which is also not a feeling he wishes to experience, and so he rather abruptly stops talking, and from here forward, almost no dialogue will ensue between the two of you that doesn't serve some practical purpose. He knows I've missed you, and since the conventional wisdom at this time is that kids go with moms, with little consideration given to other details of care, you say
This is happening, Fred, you can bring her or I will
, and he relents and brings me to New York, and leaves shortly after. And almost as soon as he's gone, it flashes through your mind that this was a terrible decision, that you
should
have left me with him, that I
had
been well cared for, and that if you had done that, you'd be free from the huge responsibility you now face, to provide for a child with the minimal income provided by the opera company. But these are not thoughts you like, these are not things mothers think, so you redirect. Best to put it outside you. You and Dad haven't discussed money yet, you'll do this by mail as well, and during the separation, until a legal agreement is reached, he'll send thirty-two dollars a month for my food and clothing, which to your mind is a small fraction of what is needed, and to his mind and calculations is exactly what is already being spent, and so therefore should be sufficient.

And there's another little shift here, inside you, a little shift where it feels, physically, like the amount of air in your lungs is now just over capacity, that someone's inside your head with a flail, that if you were to loosen your jaw, which is currently clenched as though wired shut, packs of rabid hyenas would
fly out. To say that these feelings and thoughts are a shock is not strong enough, and at first you simply shake, not knowing what to do with it, but soon enough you understand that it has to come out, you are sure that if you let it out it will be gone, and so you turn to me, because I am the one who is there, and you do manage not to scream—you can see that I am still only a six-year-old, just as I was the day before—but you say, with an intensity that I know means you are screaming in your mind,
Your father is not who you think he is!

Y
our theater company thrives. You have a big hit with a show called
Why Does My Mother Have So Many Problems?

An excerpt:

The set consists of three bare walls and a small, worn floral sofa in the center with an ancient standing lamp on one side. Suspended from the rafters in front of the two side walls, facing each other, are two massive frames. The frame on the left features a Chuck Close–sized portrait of me; the frame on the right holds a mirror. Ben is seated on the sofa, reading; Betsy is stage left, looking into the mirror.

B
ETSY:
I've been thinking of redecorating.

B
EN:
(
takes a beat
) I think that's a really good idea.

B
ETSY:
What do you think about a sectional sofa?

B
EN
looks up at the audience, deadpan.

B
ETSY:
(
still looking deeply into the mirror, which of course reflects both herself and the portrait of her mother
) My mother has so many problems.

That guy who did
Titanic
buys the rights to make it into a movie. There's talk of Julia Roberts playing me; ludicrous, but I guess Catherine Deneuve wouldn't be able to play young me.
Either way, the movie never comes to be. Still, it doesn't matter, the movie rights buy you and Benjamin a beautiful house on the lake with a view of the Chicago skyline.

—Mom, surely you know that James Cameron is not going to buy the rights to an absurdist play.

—Absurdist? Who's James Cameron? Do you want a lake house or not?

—Okay, yes, sure, why not.

You're way too old to have kids of your own now, so you adopt a fourteen-year-old girl, Maritza, but you're in way over your head on that one. You would have done better to take home a boy. Ordinary fourteen-year-old girls are tough, and this one's been in foster care for too long; thankfully she's not on drugs, like a lot of them, but she's got more than enough on her plate without that, she's just pissed at the world, and the world has given her reason to be; you do whatever possible to help her, send her to an excellent private school, ask her what she's interested in, with the idea that you'll help nurture those interests, but right now she's interested in one thing, a sixteen-year-old boy. This is an area of expertise, an area you're sure you could help her with—you were fourteen once, you know this and that about boys—but you're not getting through to her, because she's fourteen.
You don't understand, old lady!
she screams.
I don't know what it was like back when you were fourteen or if you were ever really fourteen but you have no idea what it's like, old lady.
She only calls you “old lady,” refuses to call you by your name, and “Mom” will never be an option; this was the first thing she told you when she walked through the door and so far she's sticking to it.

You cry to Benjamin about this every night. Maritza's right.
What was I thinking?
you sob,
she's half Puerto Rican and half black and half Portuguese and what do I know about any of that? I should have thought about all that! I thought we could just love her!
He's very sweet. He doesn't have too many ideas about what to do, either, but he promises you'll get through it together, swears that all she needs is time and patience; she's been horribly neglected and god knows what else for years; she has no reason to think we're any different from anyone else.
But we are, aren't we?
you ask him, and he says
Sure we are, of course we are
, but you're not totally sure, maybe you're fundamentally part of the problem, that you're part of the universe that allowed this to happen to her in the first place, and he's not totally sure either, but you wonder what you could do to change that, not just with Maritza but maybe at the theater, initiate some community arts programs, get underserved kids involved in some way.

—This is getting a little closer, Mom, but I think there's a missed opportunity here. I think your story is still more interesting than mine.

—And whose fault is that?

—Why does something always have to be someone's fault?

—How could anything not be someone's fault?

—You're missing my point.

—Can't some things just be what they are?

—What?

—Look, I can't help it if you think I'm more interesting than you. But honestly, Betsy, would you ever have wanted to be inside my head?

—I feel a little bit like I'm inside your head now, which is why I'm only writing this about an hour at a time.

—Right, and you don't know the half of it.