Habit (3 page)

Williamstown, 1980

After college, I made a beeline for Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan where I hoped to become an actress of the Chekhov/Shakespeare variety. I took great pleasure in breaking out of the conventional mold in which I'd been raised, and got an optimistic start in
Macbeth,
off-off-off Broadway in the Bowery. (I felt particularly drawn to the nutcase roles because they reminded me so much of my mother. Playing Lady Macbeth was like pulling on a comfy old bathrobe.)

My parents were polite but dubious about my career choice. My father had made it crystal clear that after college I'd be taking care of myself, so there wasn't much Ma could do, although she was worried about my dodgy new neighborhood. I'm still not sure if I liked living on the rougher side of town simply in order to reject my roots, or because Ma would be less likely to visit. She had always seemed disappointed in my boyfriends, and began looking for opportunities to introduce me to nice young men who lived on the East Side, with promising, solid but dull futures. My roommate and I didn't need an alarm clock because most mornings started at seven a.m. with a wake-up call from Ma, wanting to discuss my prospects:

—How did you like that nice boy, Matt Thing?

—Who?

—You know, the one who went to Andover and Penn and drove you back to the city last weekend after you were here.

—Oh. Stupid.

—Susie!

—Really, he was. When we got to my corner, he took one look at the guys standing outside the deli and he said he couldn't let me out of the car in such a dangerous neighborhood. These people are my FRIENDS, Ma.

Not long after I got to New York, I did manage to fall in love with David Morse, an actor who wandered in for a bowl of chowder at the bar I was tending on the corner of Fifty-first Street and Ninth Avenue. Barely any words were exchanged at our first meeting other than a brief discussion about the quality of the soup (David thought it was lacking in heft). I didn't think much about the encounter till the following week when he wandered in again, looking as if he sort of didn't know what he was doing there. The restaurant was deserted except for the cook in the back and me in the front—we weren't open yet, and when I asked David if I could help him, he asked if I'd like to go out some time.

Yes,
I said, somewhat baffled (not just because I'd accepted a date with a complete stranger, but because he then nodded, turned abruptly, and walked back outside and down the street).

Our courtship took place over the bar. David would bring friends in to get their approval of me or something, and the friends would do most of the talking. I began to wonder if he ever planned to mention that date possibility again. I finally decided to bring it up myself, and by the second date, we were pretty much fused at the hip.

I almost ruined David's extremely cagey marriage proposal. He had just found out he was going to have to go to L.A. for an undetermined amount of time to play a doctor in a new hospital series called
St. Elsewhere
. This was exciting, but it felt worrisome to think of the geographical distance.

—
Have you ever thought about getting married?
he asked.

Sensing some degree of reluctance, I parried:

—
To who?

This seemed to stump him. He paused for so long, I had to quickly rescue us both (not to mention our future children) by proposing more directly myself.

California, 1984

We went together to L.A., and it seemed that my metamorphic escape was complete. Philadelphia was virtually in another country, and Ma's early morning phone calls had to stop because of the time difference. I managed to act in occasional plays, but mostly got roles in small movies and guest appearances on sitcoms.

It's hard to look me up because I couldn't settle on a stage name. Before I met David, I was foolish enough to try my maiden name, von Moschzisker. This seemed to irritate people. The
z
is silent—if you ignore the
schz
and make it a
sh
sound you can come close to being able to pronounce the name unassisted, but still: Susan von Moschzisker? That girl didn't stand a chance.

My married name was not an option—the Screen Actors Guild had a Susan Morris, and they said they'd get us confused. When my agent put her foot down about von Moschzisker, I tried being Susan Wheeler Duff, using my two middle names. Even that seemed excessive, so I finally shortened it again, to Susan Wheeler. This turned out all right, although I kept worrying that people might check and think I was padding my résumé, claiming false credit for jobs that Susan von Moschzisker and Susan Wheeler Duff had done.

Just when Susan Wheeler began to hit her stride, our daughter, Eliza, arrived, swiftly followed by twin sons, Ben and Sam.

Twin sons came as a bit of a shock. By the time Ben and Sam were born, David's series was over and he was traveling more for work. I think I may have had a mild but undiagnosed case of postpartum depression or something—I was terrified of accidents and didn't want to be alone with the children. So I was uncharacteristically glad to see Ma when she came to meet the new babies. Ma's visits were usually not in response to an invitation, and mostly fraught with tension—she'd spend a lot of her stay trying to convert me to whatever her latest religion was. Or she'd hand us an itemized list on her way back to the airport of what should have been in the guest room:

• A lamp by the bed
  
• Pleasant, interesting reading material
  
• A full-length mirror AND a small hand mirror to check the back of one's head in the bathroom
  
• A television or AT LEAST a radio. With a clock.
  
• A telephone, preferably with its own private line and answering machine
  
• Fresh water, flowers, and a bowl of fruit
  
• A mini-fridge to store extra food, in case the fruit is not to the guest's liking
  

But that visit when the boys were infants was truly remarkable. Ma loves babies and seemed more than happy to pitch in. She did all the grocery shopping, held one twin and entertained Eliza while I nursed the other, and generally made herself so indispensable that when it was time for her to leave, I completely surprised myself by asking her to stay another week.

Sherman Oaks, 1992

It's important to give credit where it's due. All that kindness without the comfort of a mini-fridge.

It quickly became clear that having two acting parents was not ideal for children. I really loved mothering, and David was the bigger earner, so it seemed natural for me to give up auditioning for sitcoms and embrace my inner Susan Morse, especially after our Sherman Oaks house was destroyed in the Northridge earthquake in 1994. We abruptly decided to move our headquarters to more solid, familiar territory in Philadelphia. This was David's idea, and I agreed, partly because Ma and Daddy had moved to Florida a few years before and were not showing any signs of returning. Eliza was five, and the boys were two. Adolescence was around the corner, we knew L.A. was risky for teenagers, and we just couldn't imagine them having their childhoods in New York. David loved my old stomping grounds in Stone Mills, a walking neighborhood on the outskirts of Philadelphia with good shops, near a rambling city park. I'd heard the insular, self-satisfied
Preppy Handbook
quality that used to bother me as a kid was changing, and I got the feeling we'd be in good company. A number of old friends had also spent their early professional lives in larger cities, where they'd had a chance to broaden their horizons a bit before returning to raise families in a child-friendly environment. The idea of embracing the best of my roots to establish the kind of happy family I felt I'd missed out on was a tempting challenge—a chance to “get it right.”

Everything went as planned until a couple of years later, when our father died. I spent some time down in Florida with Ma while she was presiding over his last weeks in the ICU. Observing her careful consideration and poise during that rocky transition was an experience just as intense and precious as when the babies were little. Ma's better, twin-tending side seemed to really kick in if birth or death was afoot. I knew she was getting on in years and there was no family at all nearby in Florida. There was also the unfortunate discovery that Daddy had made no provision for Ma to cope alone in their Florida house; it was mortgaged to the hilt. On impulse, knowing that none of my siblings would consider tackling the job, I asked Ma to move home. Five minutes from my house.

And thus began
Operation Ma
.

I'm the self-appointed CEO/CFO of Op Ma: a series of maneuvers we siblings design as we go, to make our mother's years as a widow (left with suddenly limited resources and risky ideas) as comfortable and safe as possible. David is away on location many months out of the year, our three children are teenagers, and we have a temperamental old house, a dog, and two cats, one of whom, Marbles, has been with us since the earthquake and is now hanging on by a thread.

And I am pre-menopausal.

I voted against George Bush twice in a row. The second time, I campaigned vigorously for his opponent.

My mother told me she was voting for Ross Perot in 2000—she doesn't remember doing it now, and she doesn't remember why she might have. She began watching Fox News after 9/11.

—The Muslims are taking over and he's the only one who sees how dangerous they are.

—Excuse me?

—They are evil, craven, and George Bush understands them.

—Sure he does. He did not have a passport when he was elected. He could not name the leaders of several countries, but somehow he understands Muslims.

—Susie, you don't realize how serious this is—

—Well, yes, actually, I do, Ma. That's why I'd like to have a president with half a brain.

When Ma helped reinstall the president in 2004, something began to unravel in me. While she communed with Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, I spent a solid two years compulsively glued to Jon Stewart and National Public Radio. Our consternation with each other increased, until things came to a head in 2006. I was in the middle of a rather tricky project, sending all three kids off on service trips to various third-world countries, and planning Eliza's twenty-stop college tour. I had asked Ma to try and avoid any urgent disasters for a few weeks until I got through that crunch. With her uncanny sense of timing, she managed to have her Toyota impounded for expired registration and close to a thousand dollars' worth of unpaid parking tickets.

Ma
(dressed in Bergdorf's on credit, standing with me to pick up her car amid a sea of equally battered vehicles, taking in the long line of other dejected traffic offenders):
This is something I have in common with Blacks.

Ma was always a narcissistic driver, viewing things like Stop signs, speed limits, and No Parking zones as irritants installed and enforced with
no rhyme or reason by bureaucratic pencil pushers with nothing better to do
. Friends and family had hinted for years that it would be good to get her off the road. I'd passed these observations on to Ma, along with my own opinion, and definitely didn't let her drive anyone in our family around. But I didn't feel it was my place to apply too much pressure until the car's incarceration, when financial things were up to me. David makes a good living; he's well thought of enough to have steady work, but like most working actors, it's a living, not a Tom Cruise-like fortune. Plus, this was an opportunity to make the roads a little safer.