She
She’s pretty. I was never pretty. At my best, I’ve been cute, sexy, attractive and “hot,” but never pretty.
She’s younger than I am by almost 20 years. As I watch her, I think, “What was I doing when I was her age?” Interestingly enough, at the exact moment of my pondering, She is on a stage … portraying me and what I was doing when I was her age.
She walks across the stage as if She owns it.
“A new badass rises,” I think to myself.
Two decades ago, I wore badassery like a badge of honor, and also like a shield.
Later on, a friend seated one row ahead will say, “You had so much edge when I met you. You’re a much softer person now.”
“Which do you prefer,” I ask, “the hard edgy me or the soft and mushy me?”
My friend doesn’t answer, just smiles sheepishly, which I guess is her answer. City folks love their edge.
On stage, the woman playing my mother interrupts and kvetches while She is trying to share the story of my life with the audience.
I don’t think I was able to utter a full sentence as a child without my mother interrupting me. Now two actors are doing our dance on stage.
I look at the audience. They are laughing and clapping. It’s a comedy, isn’t it? A little later on, pushed beyond her kvetch tolerance, She tells Mom to F off.
A woman sitting a few rows ahead of me puts her hand over her mouth. The audience goes quiet.
I watch as Mom walks off the stage pouting.
I was on the phone with my father in 1992. We were attempting to catch up, which wasn’t easy because my father was a man of very few words. My mother kept trying to interrupt. Mom had always been a bit, shall we say, loopy, but seemed to have lost a few filters in her later years. I heard her in the background screaming, “There’s a sale on razors, and I have a coupon and senior citizen discounts and two for ones at Wendy’s, and your cousin married a goy!!”
“Do you want to talk to your mother?” Dad asked. He sounded tired.
“Nah. She sounds too crazy right now. Tell her I’ll talk to her when you get back to New Jersey.”
They left for their drive from Florida to Jersey the next day. Mom went into cardiac arrest on the highway somewhere in North Carolina.
How many times have I replayed that conversation with Dad, my last chance to talk to my mother and wished I could have just gotten over myself for one agonizing moment and “taken one for the team.”
I could have said, “Sure, I’ll talk to Mom.”
Then listened while she went on endlessly about every deal, special, discount, bargain she was obsessed with that day. I had my whole life ahead of me. Why couldn’t I give her 10 minutes of it?
On stage, She is a bit wet-eyed. She apologizes to the audience, then goes into the next chapter of my life. I remember this night like it was months ago, not decades ago, my first big success.
“That’s what put you on the map,” a pal once said. But at what price?
Mom is backstage somewhere. I worry about her. The actress took a bad fall during rehearsal. This was an accomplished actress with a long and prominent career. I’d seen her on TV at least a dozen times. The doctor had given her pills for the pain, but Mom didn’t want to take them, lest they dull her performance.
“What a trouper!” we all said.
I’d come to know her enough to recognize the “real” winces of pain when she tried to bend or lift. The pain only added to her performance.
I don’t recall a moment in my life, when my mother wasn’t either sick or in some kind of pain. She was a petite woman, five feet tall and small framed. The daily ailments seem to be par for the course; that little body had to carry the extra 150 pounds with which she’d burdened it.
I think to myself, I hope Mom is comfortable backstage.
Mom emerges on the stage with a large photo album and plops it on the table with a loud thud. Then Mom retreats, leaving young me and the handsome man playing my side dish to look through it. As She sifts through the pictures, real images of my mother and family flash on the screen. There’s Mom’s college graduation photo, a picture of her posing on the beach when she was a beauty queen, her wedding photo with Dad.
How young and beautiful they both were. This handsome couple, deeply in love. They’re both gone now. My father died the year before the play had its first premiere. I told him about it, but his dementia had advanced too much by then.
“Dad they’re making a play about my life,” I said sitting at his bed, feeding him Cheerios. “You and Mom are in it.”
“More Cheerios!” he shouted.
A picture of me when I was younger than the actress playing me on stage flashed on the screen. I’ve got a bandana tied around my neck. I glare at the camera as if I’m posing for a mug shot. My parents are standing with me, smiling; two aging, suburban Jews visiting their demon child in New York City.
How many years had I spent rebelling before I’d realized there was nothing left to rebel against?
She, Mom and the handsome man are about to do the scene of the last vacation I had with real Mom. I’ve seen the play many times, I know it’s coming, but still feel the tears fighting to be free. I don’t let them out, but lots of people in the audience do.
When I was 17, my best friend said to me, “Don’t be right. Be kind.” I don’t know where she got the quote from, but it’s stayed with me ever since.
Why did I have to care so much about right? Why does everyone?
Mom comes on stage and recites the lines, almost verbatim that real Mom said to toward the end of her life. It was her wacky way of passing on her knowledge. It gets the biggest laugh of the night. It always does.
It’s cathartic, laughing, after having your insides pulled out.
The show gets cheers, bravos and a standing ovation.
She is still teary-eyed from her final scene as She, Mom and handsome man take their well-deserved bows.
Later on, someone asks me, as they always do, “How do you feel seeing your life on the stage?”
“Like I wish I could go back in time and kick myself in the ass,” I answer laughing.
The actress playing Mom comes up to me. I hug her gingerly, knowing she’s nursing a broken rib.
“How’s my Slovah?” actress Mom asks.
“How’s my Slovah?” I hear real Mom ask me as a toddler, a teenager, a young adult and a woman.
I kiss her on the cheek. “So proud of you.”
She is standing off to the side smiling, watching actress Mom and I converse, waiting politely for her turn. In real life, She is profoundly polite. “Sweet as the driven snow,” Mom would have said.
I blow kisses and she smiles.
“Stay sweet,” I think to myself. “if you can.”
I should go to her, but actress Mom has placed her hand on my shoulder. I feel the warmth of it. I close my eyes for a second and get a whiff of real Mom’s scent mixed with baby powder. I want this moment to last a little more than forever.
