Fear of Dying (6 page)

 

 

 

There are some women you meet and you know immediately you can trust them with your life. Isadora was my soul mate, protector, godmother to my tall, beautiful, redheaded daughter.

“You'll never regret having a daughter,” she said—and she was right. I even blessed my crazy ex-husband for my daughter. She was the silver lining in the storm of my life, my daughter whom I love more than any human being on Earth, my daughter who can make me angrier than any human being on Earth, my darling actress daughter who can make me laugh until I cry, my daughter who is both thorn and balm for my heart. Now she is five months pregnant. When she calls, I jump.

“Mom, meet me at the doctor?”

“What time?”

“Twelve noon, sharp.”

I get there at eleven-thirty (to avoid a daughterly tongue-lashing) and wait for my super-prompt daughter, who swans in at ten of twelve. “Why did you get here so early?” she demands.

“So I wouldn't be late and piss you off.”

“You never piss me off,” she laughs.

“Glinda?” the nurse announces.

“Can my mom come in with me?” Glinda asks.

“Of course.”

*   *   *

Is this the place to tell you about Glinda's father? He was a poet and a playwright whom I adored when Glinda was born—before his jealousy of my love for the baby led him to abandon us both. I know he didn't want to abandon us and I often find myself hoping that this shared grandchild will somehow bring us to be friends again. He is an important witness to my life and Glinda's. Because of Glinda, I'll never regret him. His name was Ralph, but he had changed it to Rumi, somehow hoping to suggest he was a Persian poet and a dervish. Smitten with Sufism, he believed that all the world needed was peace. He frequently quoted Rumi's verses—particularly the one that goes something like this:

We may think we know ourselves.

We may be born Muslims, Jews, or Christians.

But until our hearts are healed

we see only differences.

He was such an idealist. He believed he could make the world a better place through poetry. In many ways, Glinda is like him.

Glinda and I go into the exam room, where the nurse fits my daughter's belly with a fetal monitor and suddenly the whole room resounds with the rapid heartbeat of my grandson. This little creature who is destined to outlive us both fills the room with his thundering will to live.

“Does it sound normal?” Glinda asks Dr. Wilder, a pretty blond ob-gyn in her forties.

“Perfectly normal. Here, let me feel how you are.” She reaches inside my daughter. “No problem.”

“Damn,” says Glinda, who has had a perfectly horrible pregnancy. Morning sickness day and night for five months, rashes, swollen hands and feet, not to mention genetic terrors in the first trimester. Both Glinda and her husband are Ashkenazic and had to wait until all the genetic tests were run. Glinda has been a heroine through all of this, but now she wants it over. She is praying for some condition that will make her doctors induce an early delivery. No such luck. The baby is already five pounds or more but not ready to hatch. In my family, we all have huge babies.

“Don't tell me what a great pregnancy you had with me!” Glinda says. Then to her doctor: “My mother always says she adored pregnancy. It infuriates me.”

“All pregnancies are different, darling.”

“Your mother is right,” says the doctor.

Glinda glares at me as if she can't believe I'd ever be right about anything. “How can she be right when she named me after a witch?”

“It was either that or Ozma,” I said. “I wanted you to live happily in the land of Oz.”

“A good witch,” says the doctor. “The Good Witch of the West.”

Glinda rolls her green eyes.

“Dr. Wilder, I want an epidural the minute I go into labor.”

“We don't torture women anymore,” the doctor says.

“Good.” I cannot bear the thought of Glinda being in pain. But I know how unpredictable labor is. I expect Glinda's baby to pop right out even though I myself had a C-section after nine hours of labor. I don't say this. There's nothing I can say and I know it. Half of motherhood is shutting up—as I said before. All I can say is I wish I'd known this earlier. Sometimes I think we should give every new mother an embroidered pillow that says what Kafka supposedly had over his desk:
Warten
(wait).

*   *   *

After the exam, Glinda and I go to lunch.

“I'm never having another baby,” Glinda says. “I told Sam and he agrees.”

“You don't have to ever have another one. One baby is fine. Nothing wrong with only children. Look at you.” I know Glinda will change her mind a dozen times about this and everything else.

“I don't know how the human race ever survived,” she says.

“It's astonishing, isn't it?”

I remember saying the same thing right after she was born. I was sitting in my hospital room watching a right-wing politician and a Catholic priest going on about the evils of abortion, and I threw the apple from my lunch tray right at the TV screen. Nothing broke. Nothing changed either.

I looked at the beautiful little creature in the plexiglass cradle and marveled at her perfection. Jaundiced, yes. Wrapped in a flannel blanket of pink and blue, wearing a unisex knitted cap like a yarmulke on her reddish curls—but perfect from toes to top of soft skull. She was both beautiful and terrifying. I wanted nothing but the land over the rainbow for her. I wanted her to inhabit the land that
I dreamed of once in a lullaby
.

*   *   *

“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament,” the feminists of my generation used to say. What had happened to all those feisty women? Where are they now when we need them most? Dead? How did the word “feminist” get to be an insult? All we wanted was to make an unfair world more fair.

Glinda didn't have to be convinced of any of this. She seemed to have inhaled feminism with my milk. At sixteen she quit school to star in a Brat Pack movie. At seventeen she won a Tony as a singing Juliet on Broadway. At eighteen she soared above the West End as Peter Pan. At nineteen she played the young Elizabeth the First of England in a wonderful film. But shortly thereafter she was at Hazelden detoxing from an addiction to coke.

She took to Hazelden as if it were her spiritual home. From the moment she found clarity, she never wanted to lose it again. She became a mentor to other kids in the program. Sobriety became more important to her than anything. I admired her tenacity and grit even more than I admired her acting—which was splendid.

“Mom, you should be working,” she said over a chicken Caesar salad at Sarabeth's.

“You should be too.”

“I will, as soon as the baby's launched. But you can't stop acting. It was your lifeline.”

“I don't want to play grannies. I want to
be
a granny, not play one. Do you have any idea of the stupidity of the roles that are out there for women? The tragedy is that you get better and better at what you do—and the roles get worse. You feel confident of your craft for the first time—just before they throw you on the trash heap.”

“Then produce your
own
stuff. Play King Lear as a woman. Get Asher to bankroll you. He would love it. He'll do anything to top his father.” Asher's father had lost everything, which was one reason Asher had been so driven to accumulate money and power.

“Queen Lear? But my mother is Queen Lear. I'll have to wait for her to die!”

“No, I mean King Lear as a woman. Grab the good roles and play them. If casting is colorblind, why can't it be gender blind? It's a brave new world. Don't accept the crap they give you to play. Make up your own. Plunder Shakespeare or Marlowe or Shaw or write your own stuff. Work with your friend Isadora! Doctor Faustus as a woman conjuring up Adonis instead of Helen of Troy. You don't have to give up. I
hate
you giving up. Asher hates it too. He told me the other day that he thinks you're depressed and he wants you to work again. He really loves you.”

“Finding roles at sixty?” I ask.

“Sixty is the new forty.”

“And eighty is the new sixty. What does that make you at twenty-five? Five?”

“Probably. Mentally at least. My brain seems to have gone on hiatus since I got pregnant. Look, I need you
not
to give up. How am I going be sixty if you don't show the way?”

“You're right.”

“Don't say I'm right and then go away and forget what I said. You're falling into a pit with Grandma and Grandpa.”

“They're in their nineties and wear diapers—but I guess the nineties is the new seventies.”

My cell phone pings with a text. I delete it without even looking.

“What's that?” Glinda asks. I don't answer.

“Every time I go to see them, I want to kill myself,” I say.

“They've had long, full lives, daughters who love them, success beyond anyone's wildest dreams, no major illnesses. You have nothing to feel guilty about.”

“Then why do I feel so guilty?”

“Because you're crazy. The fact is, you don't have to feel guilty about anything—not even me. You saved my life, Mommo. I will never forget that as long as I live. Now you really have to get back to work.”

“Come on—you saved your own life. I couldn't have saved you if you were hell-bent on self-destruction.”

“It was you, Mommo—you, you, you. But I really want you to get back to work. You
need
your work.”

*   *   *

Glinda's acknowledgment takes me back nine years to another autumn—an autumn of maternal terror.

I remember four sudden insistent rings at the doorbell. (Only Glinda rings four times, so I know something is wrong. Glinda has followed in my footsteps and is supposed to be in L.A. shooting a movie.) The housekeeper answers. My beautiful nineteen-year old daughter bursts into the apartment sobbing.

“Mom,” she says, “I think I'm going to die. You've got to listen!”

She is skeletally thin, her hands shake, and her hair hangs greasily over her wasted face.

My first thought is to say, “It can't be that bad,” but something stops me. I don't want to believe my daughter is an addict—what mother does? But I realize both our lives may depend on my believing her. So I do the mother thing: shut up.

“Mommo—I don't sleep anymore—too wired. Then I take pills to come down. I'm afraid I'll be one of those people who never wake up. I'm turning into a coke whore. You have no idea how easy it is to be a coke whore in Los Angeles.”

I never liked coke, so all this is hard to imagine, but I have enough friends with dead kids to believe her. I have friends whose kids jumped off buildings, inhaled CO
2
, smashed up cars, sliced their wrists.

“I think I need to go to rehab. I really do. It terrifies me. I'll lose my movie. But otherwise I think I'll lose my life.”

I hold her in my arms, smelling the sour smell of vomit. I remember her baby smell, her sweet head smelling of baby oil, her sweet pink tush smelling of baby crap. How can your children get so far away from where they started? Where do they go in adolescence? It's certainly not the Land of Oz. I immediately start making phone calls. By that night, Glinda and I are on a plane for Minnesota.

Even though it's November, Minnesota is frozen. Minnesota is always frozen. We are in baggage claim when a tall chubby man in a parka comes up to us.

“Glinda?” he hisses toothlessly. His skin is red, his head shaved and tattooed. Most of his teeth are missing.

“I'm Vanessa, this is Glinda.”

“I'm your ride,” he says. “I'm Cal W.”

We get into a station wagon and drive north. It starts snowing hard. I hold Glinda's hand.

“I'm scared, Mommo.”

“No reason to be scared,” says toothless Cal calmly. “You're in the right place. You're where you belong.”

I wonder if we'll ever get out of the frozen northern wastes. We drive and drive. Cal barely speaks—except to ask us if we need a bar or a bathroom.

“A bar?” I ask.

“Some folks like to tank up for the last time,” he says.

“Please, no,” says Glinda. “I never want to tank up again.”

“I could use a bathroom,” I say.

We park in front of a diner with a flashing neon sign that reads:
MOM AND POP'S DINER—ALL U CAN EAT
.

I go in to use the loo and wonder if Cal and Glinda will be there when I emerge. The bathroom smells of fake roses and shit. It has cutesy cartoons of dogs and cats on the walls.

On arrival, we seem to have entered the frozen tundra of America. The entrance to the building is down a snowy path. The place seems deserted, yet a few minutes after we press the bell, a handsome white-haired male nurse greets us. Glinda grabs my hand.

“I need to talk to Glinda alone now,” he says. “You should probably wait outside.”

“Don't go, Mommo.”

“I think I should.”

“Glinda,” says the white-haired man, a counselor called Jim R., “I need to ask you some specific history of what brought you here, and I think you might be more comfortable talking if your mother isn't here.”

“Okay” she says.

I wait outside in a cubicle, muttering prayers under my breath. I am full of remorse. How could I have let this kid go to L.A. alone? How could I have been so immersed in my own problems? Glinda stays with Jim R. an hour or so while my mind races. Then she comes out, her eyes red, her nose running. Jim and I walk her down the hall to Detox and there are papers to sign. Glinda is taken into a little room with a bed and a sink. Another nurse comes in and searches her luggage.