What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir (18 page)

But Eliana enjoys being brushed, we like brushing her, and she lights up whenever she sees Joanna . . . and Cathy . . . and Brynna, who in my unprofessional opinion are all geniuses.

Even Dr. Abigail Arbogast gets smiles from Eliana, though she leaves us in the waiting room for ages before every appointment. Dr. Arbogast is fiercely dedicated to her Russell-Silver syndrome patients, and she will do everything in her power to help Eliana thrive and grow.

Scene 5

In early March, Dani Athena called. I hadn’t seen her since my fall semester solo theater class. I’d been thinking about her, wondering if she was still alive.

“I’m having an April Fools party and I want you to come. You’ll have a wonderful time, and it would mean a lot to me if you were there.”

“I’d love to come. . . . How are you?”

“Terrible. The cancer has spread all over. I’ve decided against chemo treatment because it would add only a few months, if that much. Anyway, I want to have this party. It will be a performance . . . the next incarnation of the piece I started in your class.”

Dani’s April Fools party was in her friend’s loft in Tribeca. Lit by dozens of candles, the maple floors glowed, the room shimmered and gave everybody the look of a hand-painted antique photo, rosy cheeks and red lips over sepia skin. Dani was much thinner than when I’d last seen her. Her sleeveless silk dress bared her angular collarbone and neck. Her guests were feasting on a buffet of Greek food.

Dani handed each new guest a playing card and instructed us to find the other person at the party who had the same card. This party game ensured that her disparate guests introduced themselves to one another and shared stories, talked about how they knew Dani, and ate and drank with one another in their quest for their card’s mate. I found the mate to my eight of hearts, Katrina, a dance teacher who taught with Dani. Katrina and I sat down with our paper plates of moussaka and stuffed grape leaves and plastic cups of red wine.

Many of Dani’s guests were dancers, some of them teenagers, several elderly white-haired dancers, and a little boy in tights and ballet shoes. The dancers darted and disappeared barefoot into hidden rooms and sleeping lofts, followed by the resident golden retriever, and reemerged in costumes, carrying props and musical instruments.

A pair of high school students in brightly colored sashes ushered everybody to the designated performance space, folding chairs facing a wall draped with Indian fabrics. Dani sat cross-legged on the floor, holding a single playing card—the Joker—and facing the audience. The room quieted. We looked at Dani. She looked at us, her skeletal body very still under the flickering candlelight, her dark eyes ablaze, deeply inhaling the room full of friends and students and teachers and dancers and poets and musicians and admirers. Only the muffled sound of traffic from seven floors below, a clock ticking, the dog’s tail rhythmically slapping the floor, and the sound of Dani’s breathing. There was a tacit understanding in the room of the implications of this silent exchange—Dani was saying good-bye, celebrating her life, welcoming her death, asking us to remember her.

After several minutes, she bowed to us and took a seat in the audience. A ragtag performance ensued. Kids and old folks bumped into one another, leaping onto the stage whenever there was a lull. The performance boundaries dissolved, tricksters and clowns emerged from every corner. An old man played a balalaika on top of the refrigerator. A young woman recited Hamlet’s soliloquy from inside a clothes hamper. Teenagers read their poems aloud in the bathroom. Nearly everybody took a turn—played the recorder, danced, recited from Ovid and from
The Brady Bunch
, sang Beatles songs and Irish ballads and Greek folk songs. At midnight, Dani gathered us again. Her face was flushed with sickness and euphoria. “It’s late, but for anybody who can stay, my wonderful friends Pablo and Conchita will teach you how to tango.”

Men and women, men and men, women and girls, the little boy and the dog, paired up to tango. I couldn’t stay. Michael was flying to Chicago early the next morning and I’d promised not to be back too late. I said good-bye to Dani. “Tonight I found the way to tell the story I needed to tell!” she said. I hugged her, running my fingertips over her bare back, feeling the outline of every vertebra and rib. On the street, I looked up at the candlelit windows on the seventh floor.

She died in May.

I told my solo theater class about Dani’s April Fools party—the event as the culminating performance of her life, her performance as a gift, her discovery of the story she wanted to tell and how she wanted to tell it, the connectedness of performance and ritual, clowning and death. My students indulged me by listening politely, though they were less interested in Dani’s story than in their own. They were fairly bursting to get back to their own stories of first love.

It was Ken’s turn to perform. He asked if someone would read the voice-over for his new scene while he danced and mimed the story. Esther Levine volunteered. He handed her his script, and Esther read with total commitment and not a hint of self-consciousness, endowing his text with her squeaky, eighty-four-year-old Brooklyn-inflected voice: “When we were hidden in the darkness in Central Park, Enrico asked me to unzip him. I pulled down his jeans and I saw the biggest cock I’d ever seen in my entire life. I put my mouth on his huge dick, while cradling his enormous balls in my hand. He pushed my head down on him over and over. . . .”

After the class gave Ken feedback on his new scene, it was Esther’s turn to perform her piece. She had been writing a play about her long marriage. For four decades, she had silently submitted to her husband’s verbal abuse and sexual infidelities. Each week, she presented a new scene from her marriage, in reverse order, from the end of her marriage to the beginning. The effect was of Esther getting younger each week. Early in the semester she performed the last scene of her marriage, when she walked out on her husband in 1972 in an unprecedented act of feminist rage. Tonight she performed the first scene of her play—her wedding night in the summer of 1940.

In our fluorescent-lit classroom, Esther shed sixty years to channel her twenty-four-year-old self in a room in the Plaza Hotel. “Ah, ah, ah, ahh, ahhh, aaahhh, aaaah, aaaaahhhh, AAAAAHHH, AAAAAAHHHHH, AAAAAAAA!!!!!! . . . ahh- hhhhh, aaa . . .”

Esther arched her ancient back on the folding metal chair, her body shuddering as she relished her first orgasm with her husband. She sighed loudly and slowly, allowed the soft wrinkled folds of her body to sink sensuously into her chair. “Oh, Jerome, I’m so relaxed. Shall we go to Ruby Foo’s for Chinese?”

Scene 6

“Are we really having a wedding in June?” asked Michael reasonably in mid-April.

“I guess so. We already paid for it, didn’t we?”

“Don’t we have to do things? Like invite people?”

Because we had no time, we planned in no time. We made and printed our own invitations, “Michael, Alice, Julia, and Eliana invite you to celebrate our wedding and our new family.” Julia punched holes in the cards and tied silver ribbons through them. We all stuffed envelopes. We invited everybody we knew, hoping not to exceed our space and budget limit of one hundred, and predicted accurately that few of our out-of-town friends and relatives would come.

I phoned the French chef at Round Hill House, chose a menu—interesting food for the grown-ups, boring food, at Julia’s request, for the kids. I asked if he could also take care of the flowers, on our minimal budget.

“You are zee bride. What type of flowers do you want?” he asked.

“Whatever you think looks best. You know more than I do about flowers.”

“What are your colors? Zee bride always has strong opinions about flowers.”

“Not me. I trust you completely,” I said, holding the receiver with my chin, retaping the formula tube to my nipple after spilling formula on Eliana’s head, and feeling exceptionally unbridelike.

We got our marriage license and hired Dan, an unorthodox cantor, to officiate at our decidedly unorthodox mixed marriage.

We booked a bus and driver to drive our car-free Manhattan friends to and from Round Hill House, an hour north of the city.

We enlisted Eliana’s babysitter Jasmine to come with us.

I bought fluffy dresses for the girls. Michael rented a tux.

“Buy this pale gold dress, it looks great,” said my friend Melissa, who pulled me from store to store on a high-speed shopping trip four days before my wedding. “Get these shoes. No, you don’t have time to look in another shoe store. Buy these stockings. This bra. This lipstick. This necklace.”

The night before the wedding, I packed the wedding essentials—our marriage license, Eliana’s diapers, bottles of formula. Eliana was six months old, and she and I had amicably agreed to stop breastfeeding as scheduled. I dumped the plastic tubes and tape in the trash without a trace of nostalgia.

Round Hill was a gorgeous, big old house with a wraparound porch, reminiscent of a southern plantation.

“I hope you are happy with zee flowers I chose,” said the French chef. He had bought roses of a breathtaking deep orange. I couldn’t imagine more beautiful flowers.

It was an overcast morning. Our guests were outside enjoying hors d’oeuvres on Round Hill’s beautiful grounds, when there was the rumble of thunder. Dan urged us to start the outdoor ceremony immediately.

The marriage license was not in the suitcase. It wasn’t anywhere. More thunder. I panicked, but Dan calmly assured us, “When you sign the katubah”—the Jewish wedding contract we’d written ourselves—“you’ll be married under Jewish law. New York State can wait till you find the license, and your guests don’t have to know.”

The gusty wind blew women’s long hair and long dresses helter-skelter. Our friend Mark, Sophie’s dad, played guitar. Michael and I walked hand in hand down the aisle and stood under the chuppah—the traditional Jewish wedding canopy, the corner poles held by my sisters, Michael’s sister, and his best friend, Sean. My long skirt danced frenetically. The sky darkened to an ominous gray, the leaves flashed silver. A roll of thunder and a few drops of rain. Our guests squirmed anxiously in their folding chairs.

Dan began by teasing us. “In Jewish tradition, rain at a wedding signifies fertility.” Michael and I groaned. Everybody laughed, except Eliana, who started to cry. Jasmine took Eliana from Julia’s lap, and quieted her with a bottle. A moment later, the wind died down and a ray of sun lit the chuppah. Our guests applauded. The sun shone for the rest of the ceremony. Julia carried our wedding rings to us on a silk pillow, Michael’s mother read a passage from the New Testament. We recited the Hebrew wedding prayer Dan had taught us, we exchanged rings, we kissed, we were married.

A clap of thunder. Everybody raced into the house and it poured for the rest of the day. At the end of the party, I led the Second Line, the traditional New Orleans jazz parade celebrated at weddings and funerals. Michael’s mom and his sister and his aunts and his girl cousins and I held miniature decorative umbrellas, which bobbed up and down as we snaked and circled and zigzagged—our mixed-up, mismatched wedding rituals weaving our mixed-up, mismatched family together.

The owner of Round Hill House found our marriage license the next day under a bag of Pampers, behind a chair, where Jasmine had changed Eliana. We went to Dan’s apartment to sign, my sisters and Michael’s lesbian friends from high school joining us as witnesses. For our brief, euphoric honeymoon on Block Island—while Daisy stayed home with the girls—Michael and I crammed as much bike riding, lovemaking, and lobster-roll-feasting into three days as we possibly could.

 

 

Under the careful tutelage of her physical therapist, Eliana’s body began to straighten out of the C-curve. She became stronger. Her tight muscles relaxed.

So did mine.

Eliana delighted in the new sights and sounds of summer.

So did I.

She smiled more.

So did I.

Life was good again.

Scene 7

Three years later. Julia is thirteen. Eliana is almost four.

Julia’s bat mitzvah rehearsal was on a Wednesday afternoon, November 8, 2003, ten days before her bat mitzvah—the Jewish rite of passage for a thirteen-year-old girl. Standing between the rabbi and the cantor, taller than the rabbi and looking very grown up, Julia chanted confidently from the Torah in Hebrew, despite her bad cold, while Michael and I cheered her on from the otherwise empty synagogue. Eliana was having too good a time running through the aisles to pay attention to Julia’s run-through.

November 8 was also the day before my medical malpractice trial was to begin. Originally scheduled for September, the defendant had twice requested a postponement, and the trial—expected to last for two weeks—now coincided uncomfortably with Julia’s bat mitzvah.