That Went Well: Adventures in Caring for My Sister (12 page)

BOOK: That Went Well: Adventures in Caring for My Sister
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Sherry looked embarrassed as the door slammed, and said, “Listen, this job is harder than it looks. See, Irene doesn’t wipe herself after going to the bathroom. I mean, yesterday morning, when I dropped Irene off at work, she was sliding on something
on my car seat, and when I looked at it when she got up, I realized it was her own poop! My car still stinks!”

We stood there, staring at each other. I was horrified, for Sherry and for Irene. “Did you let her go into the workshop like that?”

“Well, yeah…it was the end of my shift and I had to go to my other job….”

It took me a few minutes to absorb the reality that this was as good as this program is going to get, given the budget, the age of the staff, and staff turnover. These young people on the staff, good kids who wanted to make a contribution in the world rather than flip burgers for maybe fifty cents more, were all doing the best they could. And they didn’t stay long in the job because it’s hard and dirty and frustrating and they were getting paid very little. The good people who run the group homes hire the best talent they can find for the price. I knew they were doing their best, too. Many of their clients thrived in the program we had set up. Maybe Irene was thriving, in her own fashion, and I just got too picky, forgetting that nothing is perfect.

“Thanks, Sherry,” I told her, “for telling me how it really is. I’m sorry to be so critical.”

Sherry left. I did Irene’s mountain of dishes while she watched me. I took out the garbage. She asked me for money. I felt sorry for her. I gave her two dollars. “Get quarters so you can do your laundry, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, hugging me.

I learned later that after I left she went downstairs to the candy machine and had a very happy evening. A helper found the candy wrappings the next morning. And all the laundry in her drawers was still wet.

I lay awake all night. Many fine group home providers existed now, and Irene was in one of the best, as far as I knew, but it really didn’t work for her, or for me. Did I have enough in the trust fund Dad and Mom left for her care that I could make it last all her life? How would it work if I moved her in with Paul and me? What if she outlived me?

I couldn’t ask Paul to take her in permanently, although I know he would make the effort and help me until we found a better solution. In the morning, I told him my dilemma. “You can’t fix everything every minute,” he said. “Let Irene’s life be
their
problem.”

“The group home supervisor called me a raging codependent and told me to get a life,” I told him.

“Well, sticks and stones,” he yawned. “What is a codependent?”

“A person who needs to make everything all better for people, even when it’s impossible.”

“Hmm,” he said. “The shoe really fits, doesn’t it?”

“Oh shut up,” I said, cuddling into his arms.

A week later, I got a letter from Michelle, apologizing for being critical of me and reaffirming that she really had Irene’s best interests at heart. She wanted me to know that what I wanted for Irene’s life was often not what Irene wanted. Also, what Irene wants, she pointed out, is usually not what she needs. She suggested that I had a hard time separating things and activities that I would like from things that Irene would like. She said if I could work on separating myself a little more from my sister, she—and I—might have happier lives in the long run, which was all the staff was trying to do for us.

I read the letter and stared out the window for a long time.
Of course, Michelle was right. I remembered the previous New Year’s Eve, when I was going to a glamorous party and fussing that Irene had nothing to do on this festive night. Finally I bought tickets for First Night, our city celebration held downtown, with everything from jugglers to ballet performances. I sent them to Irene with the suggestion that one of her helpers could take her down there.

Well, it completely ruined her New Year’s Eve. She did not want to go downtown in the crowds. She wanted to stay home with her helper, eat popcorn, drink fake champagne, watch a video, and see the ball drop in Times Square. But knowing I had a different plan for her, absolutely sure she would love it, she reluctantly bundled up and went with her helper to the car. Whereupon she began to hit herself over and over because she didn’t want to be cold and crowded. The helper turned back toward home and Irene wailed, “No, Terrell wants me to go! I have to go! She’ll be mad I didn’t use the tickets!” After two hours of turning toward home and then turning back toward town, they finally got back and Irene fell into bed, swollen-faced and exhausted.

I pinned Michelle’s letter to my bulletin board as a constant reminder to myself of how much I had yet to learn and how maybe I had abused her well-meaning staff. If I weren’t so obsessed, I
could
leave Irene in the program across the city, trust the staff, and let her live her own life without so much help—or interference—from her sister. Surely they must be right and I must be a very sick person. This was my dark night of the soul. Michelle told me to get a life. But Irene was a part of that life. I didn’t think Mom and Dad would like the way she was living.

12
 
Trying to Get a Life
 

I
wanted to say to Michelle, listen, it isn’t as if I don’t
have
a life. I
have
a life. I’ve had many lives.

Looking back on my life, I realized that at Stanford, I was doing what young women did in the 1950s: looking for a suitable husband. The dean of women there said to me, “I hope you’re not going to just give your life to a man and end up sorting his socks. Too many bright Stanford women end up spending their lives sorting some man’s socks.”

I had heard that she was unmarried, no doubt jealous of happy homemakers with families. So I ignored her completely, found a suitable husband, and landed in my laundry dungeon in the basement, sorting his socks and ruminating on how right she was, how Paul should sort his own damn socks, and how I really should be elsewhere, using my fine mind and God-given talents.

I wrote my weekly newspaper column, made the odd television commercial now and then, and nagged legislators about programs for the developmentally disabled—but I had no real
career. While I folded laundry, I ruminated and fantasized about what I should really be doing that would be satisfying.

My favorite fantasies had to do with going on the stage. I just knew I would be terrific. I certainly nailed every role in my living room as a child, singing along with all Mom’s Broadway record albums when everyone was out of the house. My dancing seemed quite fine to me, too.

One day I climbed up the stairs with a load of clean laundry and a new world opened up to me. A newspaper article on the hall table almost leapt from the page: Auditions Held for Local Productions. And there, before my very eyes, was the show, in capital letters:
GYPSY.
I put the laundry down, sat on the stairs, and read that auditions for all parts were being held in two days.

It never occurred to me that I could not be the lead in
Gypsy.
I was perfect for it! I hurled myself over to the theater and put my name on the audition list. Then I asked where I could find a piano player to help me. They gave me her name, and in two days we had worked up a little song. I had been in show business since I was three. I knew what I was doing. Okay, so it was only doing commercials and radio spots, but I knew I could do this.

When it came time to audition, I saw that the fellow doing the auditioning was my old pal Keith, who had been with me in about a hundred commercials from early television days. He saw how very much I wanted to be in this show. I sang my heart out. Keith said thank you, he’d call me. If there was a look of tragic pity on his face, I never noticed it. That night he called. “Listen, Terrell, we are using Sue Ane Langdon from L.A. for Mama Rose, but would you like to be the walk-through for her part until she gets here?” Then, he said, the director, Tony Tanner, would place
me in the show in a role appropriate to my experience. I nearly died of joy.

After the first rehearsal, when Tony heard me sing, he took me aside and said, “Tell me something. Why would you, with your very limited stage experience, try for the most demanding role ever written for a woman on Broadway?”

I didn’t realize that by the fourth song I would be hoarse, and by the seventh song my voice would be gone and I would be whispering. For Mama Rose, you need lungs the size of dirigibles and the stamina of a Marine. He also told me I was way too nice to be the fiery, fierce Mama Rose. Why I thought I could do it, I’ll never know. But the director knew it, and when Miss Langdon arrived, he put me where I belonged. He let me be a Christmas tree, a waitress, and in my most memorable role, the back end of the cow. He also suggested I might want to take a singing lesson or two.

My daughter Marriott was a shepherdess in the first act, and two of her friends joined the cast as well. Every night of the three-week run I sat in my cow costume on the steps leading into the orchestra pit and listened to the best overture ever written. It was heaven. Everything was coming up roses for me, even though I didn’t have quite the role I wanted.

I took the director’s advice and took some singing lessons. When I practiced in my living room, our black cat, Chimneysweep, would come close to me, and when I hit a high note, she would bite my ankle to get me to stop. I never once took it as a hint about my talents. I just thought poor Chimneysweep had sensitive ears.

It was about this time that I got a volunteer offer I couldn’t
refuse. Two young men had hatched an idea for a Utah film festival that would feature classic old films and have famous people come and talk about them. A sidelight of the event would be to invite independent filmmakers to show their work in a juried competition. The third goal was to get more film companies to make their movies in Utah. One of the young men was John Earl of the Utah Film Commission. The other was filmmaker Sterling Van Wagenen, who was the cousin of Lola Van Wagenen, Robert Redford’s wife at the time. They had heard that I could organize things pretty well, and that I might be a good person to help them get started. They called me and introduced themselves, and then the conversation went like this.

“We want you to be on the board of the new Utah/US Film Festival.”

“Oh, listen, guys, thanks for thinking of me, but I really can’t. I’m way too busy.”

“Well, then, Robert and Katharine will be really disappointed. We know they were eager to work with you.”

“Robert and Katharine who?”

“Redford. And Ross.”

Long silence. “Well, you know, maybe I can work around some of my projects…”

Thus, indeed, is a sucker born every minute, and I was the one that particular minute, hooked by my own star worship. “Okay,” I told them later, when they announced that a real meeting was taking place, and that Robert was there waiting, and Katharine was flying in, “but I get to drive Katharine down to Sundance for the meeting.”

“Done!” they said.

I was dying to meet the gorgeous Katharine Ross. I called
her hotel room to tell her I was ready to drive her down to Sundance. “Oh, I’ll be right there!” she said.

“Katharine?” I asked. “How will I know you?”

“Well, I’m in blue jeans and a maroon silk blouse…”

“Katharine,” I said, “Just kidding.”

She was so tiny she came up to my shoulder, and she was even more beautiful in real life. I asked her what she thought of this festival idea. She said she was just happy to be invited to Utah and go horseback riding with her friend Bob. She had certainly never heard of me or anyone else on the festival staff.

When we got to Sundance, we walked into the meeting, and Robert Redford jumped up to wrap his arms around her. Then they introduced him to me. He did not look thrilled to meet me or relieved that I had accepted the board position. In fact, when we all sat back down, he said, “Now what’s this meeting about, anyway?”

They described to him the festival idea and its goals. “A film festival?” he said, ballpoint pen in hand, autographing one T-shirt after another, handed to him by his assistant, for some charity auction somewhere. “Don’t have a film festival. They’re a dime a dozen all over the world. If there’s any project around film that should be done, it should be one I’ve been thinking about: having a sort of workshop, or institute, on the improvement of the whole industry. One week would be devoted to just lighting designers; one to just cinematography, one to set design, see what I mean? Maybe a week on scripts, or directing. Who’s in charge of your festival thing?”

His cousin-in-law Sterling pushed the first Utah/US Film Festival program, already printed, thousands of copies, in front of him. It said, “Chairman: Robert Redford.”

Redford was horrified. They told him, come on, you’ll come to love it. It will be good for Utah, you’ll see. He looked at us all around the table and then at the ceiling, probably counting to ten to calm himself. I just shook my head, wondering how I could let these people from Wonderland hook me in so easily by wanting to be around famous people.

In the long run, for me it was a bizarre and wonderful adventure. The second year of the festival, the awards banquet for independent films, which they asked me to emcee, actually drew Frank Capra, Jimmy Stewart, Robert Stack, and several other stars, in a tribute to Frank Capra’s films.

Jimmy Stewart was the consummate pro. He and Frank Capra arrived and shook our hands, and then Jimmy said to me, “Okay, let’s go strolling.” He knew exactly why he was there: to have his picture taken with as many people as he could before dinner started, as a special perk for the $500 they paid per ticket. I escorted him around and watched. When people tried to hold onto him, he had the loveliest way of patting their hand on his arm and saying, “I’m strolling now. I know you understand,” and they’d release their grip. At dinner he sat next to me, there at the Alta Club, where Paul and I had held our wedding reception. If Gene Autry was my big brush with the stars, hey, look at me now!

When it was my turn to announce the winners of the independent film competition, I had each filmmaker stand up while I read his credentials. The only thing was, I had the wrong credentials for each filmmaker. Each time a filmmaker stood up and I read his titles, he would shake his head. It got to be like an episode of
I Love Lucy
. The audience was hysterical, slapping their thighs, it was so funny. At the end of the nightmare, I just
gave up on trying to match the right film with each filmmaker and had them speak for themselves. Jimmy Stewart came up to me and put his arms around me and hugged me for a long time, shaking with laughter. “Just thought I’d show you how we do things in Utah,” I mumbled into his chest.

“You made my day,” he said, kissing me on the top of my head.

I left the board the third year, when an angel by the name of Chuck Sellier donated $75,000 to get us out of the debt the festival had incurred. I felt I had done all I could to them. It was time to move on to other glorious triumphs.

Apparently my dreadful performance at the film festival dinner had made our current governor, Scott Matheson, laugh, too. His assistant called me the next week and asked if I’d come visit the governor. He told me he wanted me to come work for him. He had in mind some job for me that had to do with the arts, as he thought that’s where my skills lay. But there was no particular opening in those departments. Then he remembered that I was good with the downtrodden and handicapped, and he settled on asking me to be his assistant for community relations. I would have to give up my newspaper column, but after thirteen years it was just as well. I had just written a column about my little friend Shannon and her jump rope, and her mom called to tell me, “It was even better than the first time you wrote it ten years ago.” So it was time to move on anyway.

As it turned out, my job was to meet with all the people the rest of the staff did not wish to see. This included the blind, the deaf, the mentally handicapped, war veterans, and people who believed they were being chased by aliens from a planet far, far away. My problem is that I personally believe anything anyone
tells me, and I do my darnedest to make things right, so I found myself checking for interplanetary aliens on the street and asking the governor to help with all sorts of impossible tasks for people who continued to concentrate on larger issues.

When I ventured into the larger issues, I learned that a cat in the form of another staffer would come and bite my ankle, big time. One day the state geologist, who was my pal, came to my office and put his head in his hands. “It’s the MX missile project,” he said. “The Pentagon wants to install this giant racetrack out in our west desert. Cars with missiles will be going around on it. One missile will be the real thing, the others will be fake, and the Russians won’t know which is which.”

“You have got to be kidding me. It sounds like little boys playing.”

“I know. Here’s the thing, though: we don’t have the water to make the cement for it and no one seems to be noticing.” His face scrunched up. “I’ve tried to tell the governor this is the stupidest plan ever for this state. I can’t even get in to see him. Can you help?”

I went straight to the governor’s office, and he beckoned me in. I began to tell him what the state geologist had told me when one of his staff chiefs came in and said they had an urgent matter to deal with, so I should leave.

Later, this same man found me in the hall and said through clenched teeth: “Now you listen to me. I don’t care if we cement the whole state over if it means jobs for Utahns. You stay out of this issue!”

“Do you think we have enough water for this brilliant project?”

“I don’t care. We are going to get this contract!”

He made sure I was transferred out of the governor’s office soon after that.

They don’t fire you. They transfer you with a raise so you won’t make any trouble. I found this out when I ventured out of my cubicle in the new department and found lots of others in cubicles, all of whom had either blown a whistle or stood up for some principle their boss didn’t like. I left after six weeks, raise notwithstanding.

It was right about then that the leaders of the LDS church sent out a position paper against the whole missile project. “We did not travel to this state to be a warlike people,” the statement suggested. That was all it took. The MX missile project was dead in Utah, and it never came to pass in any other state either.

Back home, coming up from the laundry room again, I noticed another audition call at the University Theater, this time for the
next
best musical:
Damn Yankees.

Despite my previous experience, I knew immediately that I should go try out for the part of Lola, the devil’s sexy temptress. Of course I could get that role! Sorting socks has a way of blurring reality for me, and once again I hied over to the theater to sign up.

When I auditioned with the song, “A Little Brains, A Little Talent,” I felt I had done well. The stage manager came back to pat me on the back. “Terrell. You got a callback.”

BOOK: That Went Well: Adventures in Caring for My Sister
12.24Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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