Rocking the Pink (7 page)

So much for polishing my Oscar-acceptance speech.

Why the change of heart? Because the rubber had finally hit the road on an internal wrestling match I'd been waging my whole life: In one corner, there was my heart—my creativity and dreams—looking
sort of like a headband-clad Ralph Macchio in the original
Karate Kid
. In the other corner, there was my head, looking surprisingly like Ralph Macchio's blond nemesis in that same movie, standing with a combative expression on his (its) face.
I'm superior to you,
my head taunted my heart.
I'm analytical, pragmatic, and far more respected by society . . . and by your family, too.
And with that, my head landed a roundhouse kick on my heart.

I'd been told from a young age by my family and teachers that I was off-the-charts smart, and I took their opinions in this regard to be unquestionable fact. If it was true that I was a brainiac, as the adults said, then I supposed I'd better not waste my big, fat brains on pursuits for dummies—even though most of the left brain–centered classes, like algebra and chemistry, were torturous. To do otherwise would be such a waste, and a disappointment to everyone, wouldn't it? And yet if I were to pursue others' projections of me to fruition, rather than what bubbled inside me like molten lava, how would I ever achieve Judy-dom? Over time, I reconciled the conflict this way: In addition to winning the Academy Award one day, I'd also invent the next Ziploc bags or achieve some other history-changing feat, too. That seemed like a fair solution.

With each passing year, I felt the strain of my inner conflict: Should I surrender to the allegedly analytical and conventional person others seemed to value in me, or let my freak flag fly and unabashedly pursue my name in lights?

On the first day of my senior year of high school, I sat in Mr. Brown's trigonometry class, a Cheshire cat–like grin across my face, smug about the fact that, unbeknownst to anyone else, I'd staged an
illicit protest. I had been slated to take calculus that year, but instead I'd covertly signed up for trigonometry—one step
behind
the advanced algebra course I'd completed the year before.

I'd spent the last three years of high school studying myself into a stupor, and, by God, I was going to enjoy my senior year, especially now that Brad was embarking on a party-filled freshman year at the local university. Besides, I needed to free up more time for the one thing that had unlocked my soul more than anything else: singing. I had starred in every high school musical, and I'd reveled in every minute of every performance—except for the time when my shirt fell off in the middle of a performance, leaving me standing, aghast, at center stage in my Maidenform bra and the audience gasping, “Oh!” in unison. And so I had decided, at least for my senior year of high school, that it was high time for my heart to reign supreme.

As Mr. Brown drew a figure on the white board, the classroom door opened and the calculus teacher stormed into the room. The class looked up at him expectantly, full of dread. The calculus teacher surveyed the room, until his eyes fixed on me.

“You,” he said, pointing. “You're supposed to be in calculus. Come with me.”

Please! Don't hurt me.
“I'm not taking calculus this year,” I said meekly.

He paused, assessing me. “Tell that to Mrs. Beldam.”

With all eyes staring at me, and a few scattered snickers, I excused myself and made my way to the assistant headmistress's office.

Mrs. Beldam was a stark woman who invoked terror in every student—even more so than the actual headmaster, who happened to
be her husband. Even her smiles were chilling. Think Nurse Ratched in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Or maybe, more aptly, the Wicked Witch of the West.

“You are supposed to take calculus this year, Laura,” Mrs. Beldam said, her voice steely. It was petrifying to hear her utter my name. “Trigonometry is a step backwards for you,” she continued. “This is most unlike you, Laura.” Again, terror.

“I'm not . . . really . . . interested in taking calculus this year,” I answered.

She let this information set in. Her expression was one of disappointment and disdain; apparently, I was not the scholar she had presumed.

“Do your parents know about this . . . my pretty?”

“Yes, they do.”

Well, implicitly.
When a kid barricades herself regularly in her room to study for hours on end, there's no need for parental pressure, is there?

“Is calculus a required course?” I asked, but I knew the answer.
You can't make me!

“No,” she answered with reluctance. She was pissed.

“Okay, well, then, I'll just stick with trigonometry.”

And with that, I hurled a bucket of water at her face and then leaped back in horror as she started fizzling and melting into a puddle on her desk.

“Oh, what a world, what a world!” she howled amid the rising steam.

“May I go back to class?” I asked, sweetness personified.

She stared me down. “Go ahead.” She shot daggers at me.

I skipped back to class, resisting the urge to whistle. I had stood my ground against a powerful, green-faced witch and had adhered to my principles—even if my newfound principles were laziness, sloth, and lack of ambition. I'd avoided evil calculus, ensured a glorious senior year with my college-freshman boyfriend, and paved the way for my continued pursuit of Judy-dom.

And then, at the end of the school year, I marched off, triumphantly raising Mrs. Beldam's broomstick into the sky, all the way to the theater school at UCLA.

Score one for the heart.

And yet only a few short years later, by the time of my college graduation, my head had stormed back and waged a come-from-behind victory, relying on my willingness to please, as well as my utter spinelessness, as its weaponry. By then, as a result of societal and familial influences, real or imagined, I viewed the phrase “I'm a people person” as code for “I have no definable skills.” “I want to be an actress” equated to “I'm self-absorbed and delusional.” Basically, anything short of conventional, left-brained pursuits had become, in my mind, the equivalent of running off to join the circus. And since I was born with an enlarged desire to garner approval from society, as well as from my law school–educated family, I certainly did not want to be perceived as the sword-swallowing bearded lady.

“You'd make a fine judge or professor or CEO one day,” Dad and his parents often said to me, intending to convey a sincere compliment.

Aren't families
supposed
to encourage young girls to shatter glass
ceilings in male-dominated professions? To kick ass and take names in courtrooms and boardrooms across America? Of course! I'm not complaining about my family's high aspirations for me—it's just that, in retrospect, I know I should have responded: “Thanks, but I don't really care about civil procedure. I just want to be on
Saturday Night Live
.” And yet through absence of clarity or courage, or maybe both, I didn't say any such thing.

And anyway, as much as I'd absolutely loved being among the artsy types in the theater department, I knew I wasn't one of them. At theater parties, everywhere I looked, someone was experimenting with drugs or sexuality (or both), or doing a manic stand-up routine to an audience of three. And me? I was the Girl with Her Head on Straight. The Girl with a Boyfriend Back Home. I didn't have any interest in luxuriating in angst or drugs, or in “finding myself.” I was the only person I knew who'd never even smoked pot, for Pete's sake.

I wasn't a thespian like my roommate Holly, who was angst-ridden and deep in a way I couldn't fathom; I was just sort of . . . faking it. But one day soon, if I continued down this gotta-be-me path, I worried, the jig would be up and I'd wind up with no marketable skills, serving “Adam and Eve on a Raft” at a truck stop forever.

At the time, I am sure, I couldn't have articulated any of this. But in retrospect, it's clear that my head had finally beaten the pulp out of my heart, after years of epic struggle. And so, for all of these reasons, I jumped the first train to Plan B and joined Brad in law school.

Score one for the head.

Although Brad and I had spent many a weekend together up to this point, living together full-time was an adjustment. I would go to the grocery store to buy what I thought was a week's worth of groceries, only to find that Brad had emptied the refrigerator a mere two days later. And since I'd never had a brother, I wasn't hip to all the pointless and imbecilic teasing that's second nature to boys.

Once, when there were two cookies left on a plate, I asked Brad for one of them.

“Sure,” he said, and then he picked up both cookies, licked them with exaggerated gusto, and held them both out to me, a cocky grin on his handsome face. “Which one do you want?”

I was aghast. “You're an animal!”

He just laughed his silly, infectious laugh.

And Brad learned new things about me, too—like the fact that I was a somnambulatory lunatic.

“Honey, what are you doing?” he asked, dumbfounded, having awakened to find me gingerly patting a large houseplant in the corner of our bedroom.

“Shhhh!” I admonished with intensity. “You'll scare it!”

Brad turned on the bedroom light and said, “I'm pretty sure I'm not gonna scare a houseplant.”

I awoke from my trance. “Oh,” I said, bewildered. “I thought it was an injured German shepherd.”

In addition to learning about my nighttime secrets, Brad discovered (as did I) that my Brooklyn-born mother's “from
da nay-buh-hood”
accent had tainted my speech since birth.

Sharon and I had visited our Brooklyn grandparents during many childhood summers, endlessly amusing ourselves with our simulations of that distinctive accent. My favorite pastime in the world was to sit in the muggy summer air on my grandparents' front porch (“the stoop”) and, simply by sitting there, lure the neighborhood kids to me like moths to the flame. What Brooklynite could resist chatting with the visiting girl from California?

“Say
dwahg,”
one of them would prompt, after a small crowd had formed.

“Dog,” I'd answer politely, in my perfect Grace Kelly diction, my California-bred superiority wafting from every pore.

Hysterical laughter would ensue from the menagerie.

“Say
cwahffee,”
one of the kids would shout.

“Coffee.”

Peals of laughter.

“Say
mirr-uh.”

“Mirror.”

Mass hysteria.

I
amused
them?
Okay, I'd let them enjoy their alternate reality, even though I knew, without a doubt, that
they
were the amusing ones.

And so, years later, when Brad and I finally shacked up and each day brought a new revelation about the other person, I was blindsided to learn that, despite my holier-than-thou tours of duty on that stoop in Brooklyn, my movie-star pronunciation had been compromised at the cellular level.

“Hand me the spatuler,” I instructed Brad one morning as I scrambled eggs for our breakfast.

“The
what?!”
he asked, an incredulous smile forming on his lips.

“The spatuler.”

“It's called a spa-tu-la,” Brad said, imbuing every syllable with condescension.

“No, it isn't,” I countered.
You idiot.

“Yes, it is.”

“No, it isn't.” In a huff, I pulled out a big dictionary and slammed it onto the kitchen counter. I was positive I was right. My mom was a great cook, and I'd heard her use the word “spatuler” my whole life!

I flipped to the appropriate page of the dictionary and scanned down the left column until . . .
I'll be damned, it's a spatula.

There was no denying it: I was half Brooklyn-ese.

 

 

I had signed up with a temp agency and was assigned random office jobs—typing, answering phones, data entry—usually for a day at a time. After a few weeks, I got a plum assignment: organizing file cabinets for
a full week!
The best part was, if the employers liked me, they might extend my contract for three months. I'd be in the money.

The night before starting my new assignment, I went to bed plenty early to ensure optimum file-cabinet-organization readiness the following morning. About an hour after I'd drifted off to sleep, I dreamed I was standing on a train track with a train hurtling toward me at an alarming speed. The train light was rapidly advancing, but—oh no!—I was rooted to the middle of the track! To save myself, I leaped with abandon out of the way and into an adjacent thorny bush.

As it turned out, I actually made that life-or-death leap in the real world, too—off my bed and into my nearby closet. And right onto my face. Without breaking my fall, even a little bit. My face smashed right into the high-heeled shoes sitting at the bottom of my closet.

The next morning, as I arrived at my new temp job, I had a swollen shiner, scratches all over my face, and a broken blood vessel in my eye.
Hello, my name is Laura! Nice to meetcha!
How's that for a first impression? My new coworkers immediately asked me what on earth had happened to me. My response? The classic response of anyone feeling too embarrassed to admit a shameful truth: “I fell.”

Now, I ask you, which do you think is a better sell to a new employer: “I have night terrors that cause me to leap out of bed and slam my face on a pile of shoes in the middle of the night” or
“I am the victim of brutal domestic abuse”? Apparently, I thought the latter. But letting an employer believe I had battered-woman syndrome turned out to be the wrong choice: Despite my expert filing work, the company did not renew my temp contract at the end of the week.