Celebrity Detox: (the fame game) (13 page)

So, let’s say I was reading about seahorses that day, that time, January 3, Barbara now back from vacation and taking her seat at the table again. I did not see the show and I’m glad for that, because I’m not sure what I would have done had I witnessed her essentially communicating with me through the camera, in public, choosing to explain to me her thoughts, her position, her sentiments, with such a broad brush. What I wanted was what any sane person would have wanted: an intimate heart-to-heart, but Barbara doesn’t do intimacy. I do, or at least I try, although it’s true I fail over three quarters of the time. But one thing’s for sure: even with all my interpersonal faults, I would not use the television to attempt conflict resolution with a friend or a colleague.

Which is what she did. Instead of speaking with me on the phone, or writing me a long letter, she went on air, January 3rd, 11 a.m., and, from what I later heard, said blah dedidi dah dedididah. Supposedly she read a carefully crafted statement all strategy, no heart.
“. . . clearing things up . . . Donald Trump . . . not happy with my decision . . . the truth . . . never regretted . . . hiring . . . clearing things up . . . truth . . . clearing things up . . .”

Nothing. It clarified nothing for me. If anything it made it worse. Because, like I said, my way of doing dialogue, of negotiating relationships, of working through fights, is not to address the person in question on the tube. But that’s how Barbara does it. That’s how she’s done it her whole life. Think of that. Practically her whole life on air. Way up high, in the thinness. What a wingspan! But how hard it is to breathe.

“Write to her,” Kelli said once we’d heard what she’d said. “Don’t tell her you didn’t watch it,” Kelli said. “Just write to her and say, ‘Thank you for the show today. Let’s put this behind us and start the New Year. Rosie.’”

I tried. I typed it out. I kept staring at the screen.
New Year. Rosie.
Thank you for the show.

Thank you for the show.

Five simple words, every one a single syllable. Those words kept clacking in my head. Thank you for the show. I couldn’t say it. Couldn’t send it. Stuck.

I was due back on
The View
January 8. So I had five more days left with my family. I tried to put all problems out of my head. We went out on our boat; we barbecued. We played Scrabble. We loved each other. The kids played with their Christmas presents and fought endlessly about Blake’s electric car, a miniature automobile that he could race around the driveway in, vroom, around he went, in circles, over and over again, hour after hour. What he was doing on the outside was what was happening in my head on the inside, around and around, electricity crackling, the synapses sparking, even though it was over. I knew it was not. For betrayal is deep. It is the fish flailing and it can’t get air. It’s epic, movie-esque. It is primitive and painful in a way that defies words. Time does not always heal. With time it got worse, not Donald, but Barbara, and the hurt, and the rage, five-fingered, fisted, too hot to touch.

Blake circled madly in his brand-new car; he would not stop. “Enough!” I screamed at him one afternoon. He stopped abruptly, pressed the pedal, and came screeching to a halt. He looked up at me, confused. “What?” he said. How could I explain that I wasn’t yelling at him? I was yelling at me. “Sorry, dude,” I said, touching his head. “Brain fart,” I said. He threw back his head and laughed. And I saw a look on his face I have captured a thousand times in his seven years on earth. It stills my soul. Smiling. He sped away.

She betrayed me in many ways, my mother. First off, she died. Disappeared like a Copperfield trick. For years I lived in a dream, waiting to wake. She just up and left, and didn’t give me directions as to how to find her. I looked for years. I am still looking. Lauren Slater shares the same birthday with me. I have many similarities with Slater, so when we discovered we shared the same birthday, it was weird. “What time were you born?” she asked. As if I would know. I do not know. I never have. I doubt I ever will.

She was vibrant, my mother was. She was size ten, I think, rough around the edges, pretty pleasant/ peasant-looking. She had a loud voice and a huge humor to hide her too huge heart. She could make you laugh, Roseann O’Donnell, and she did make you laugh. Schoolteachers at Rolling Hills Elementary School, Commack, Long Island, will tell you this. I still know them now. Miss Boy, Miss Leiner—young, smart, feminist women, they were maybe twenty-one, my mother thirty-five or thirty-six. She would have them doubled over laughing in the hallway. My mom was a star; really, she was.

My mother knew beauty; she knew talent. She loved Broadway and passed that love on to me. She loved show business, and seeing the stars on a stage. She was strong, my mom, very powerful, at least to me, in my mind.

I was ten when she died. And maybe because I was a child, she will be a certain way in my mind.

But now, as an adult, as a mom myself, I wonder why she made the choices she did. I want to know her, find her friends, find anyone who remembers a moment alone with her when something real happened between them. I want some random snapshot, some photos of my mother, and I have very few. I have only two, I think.

After she died I snuck into my parents’ room to look through her box of photos, memories she kept of her life. There was talk of who would get them. There were so few things. Her stuff went missing, like she did.

In the summer of 1973, after my mother died, my dad took us to Northern Ireland to visit his family, whom he didn’t really know at all, he a widower with five kids, taking them all to Ireland on his own.

Northern Ireland, greener than green, but the color didn’t come to me. Because after she left, it got all gray and dark. The memory of her color did not return to me for years and years, did not return until I held my son Parker for the first time.

I held him and . . . Oh yes. I remember this. Something stuttering to a start, deep in my brain, an ancient recollection, a feeling without words—I held my son. And I recalled what it meant, or felt, to be adored. And that is how I know she adored me. I know my mother’s love because it is her love that pours through me and allows me to adore the look on Blake’s face when I say
brain fart
or how it feels to take a tub with a two-year-old. What a relief it was, for me to have my children, to know I knew how to love a baby, because I was a baby loved.

I can find forgiveness because I am a mother now—with two daughters of my own. What were my mother’s choices, really? No work, no way of making money; it was a different era then. I forgive my mother. I forgive her for not protecting me in all the ways I wish she would have. I forgive her for chopping down the tree when I told her that at night a man was climbing that tree and coming in my window. I forgive her for her failure of interpretation, her literal response to my metaphorical truth. The tree came down. With it went its leaves, its roots, the circular lifelines in its flesh. When she left, a part of me went with her.

We returned to Nyack on January 7. The next day, I went in to work. And I was thinking, “How am I going to do this?” If there was one time in my life when I could have used an IFB, this would have been it. I wanted an IFB and I wanted Kelli to be in the control room, talking in my ear, telling me what to say when I spoke to Barbara. I was feeling ragged and raw. Her words. “Donald is a good friend of the show . . .” Those words convey no truths.

Every day, when I arrived at ABC, I rode the elevator down and went into my dressing room. There in front of me were three words in huge letters—
All My Children
—and every day these words made me smile.

All My Children
. Every day at
The View
I saw those words as I settled into my dressing room. And then, once I was settled, I would meet with the other co-hosts and some staff in the hair and makeup room, which I always thought was the oddest place to have a formal discussion, but there it was.

That day was no different. I went to my dressing room. I read the three words. Then I walked down the long white barren corridor on the third floor of ABC, a surprisingly shabby corridor in a surprisingly shabby building whose slick exterior belies none of what it truly contains. The white walls are scuffed here and there, and the ceilings are made of those foam industrial tiles. There are no windows in these hallways. They wind through the building like old intestines, doorways opening on either side to reveal dressing rooms with framed portraits of soap opera celebrities, or empty rooms with ugly love seats, the backs shaped like hearts, the pillows gray.

I walked into the hair and makeup room and took my usual seat. There were, as always, hair dryers in their holsters bolted to the chrome counters and plastic bins full of spiky rollers and tarnished clips. There were combs of every shape and size, combs clutching the hairs of the rich and famous, brittle hairs leeched of color from years of chemical treatments.

I picked up a comb. I have no idea why. I sat in my usual seat, staring straight ahead, a large pebble in my gut, and I clutched a comb clutching hairs, which are the saddest things sometimes, hairs loosened from a human head. Stray hairs, damaged hairs, the tiny, almost microscopic-but-not-quite bulbs at their tips where they were once joined with the follicles from which they sprouted. Did you know that humans have used almost every type of animal hair there is to make brushes for painting? From the beginning humans have been so eager to paint—cave paintings make this obvious—that they have probably taken hair from you name it—foxes, squirrels, maybe even skunks—and bound them together, stuck them to sticks, and dipped them in the ground pigment of fruits and flowers. Why, I have always wondered, why has no one ever tried to make a brush using human hair? What would a picture painted with a human hair brush look like? Would it feel more real? Would the picture leap to life, and start to smell of apple, or daisies? Hair. I clutched the comb clutching the hairs and I saw how easily we are split.

My heart was pounding. My heart was clattering like the shitty cart at Target, the wheel wobbling around, and I thought, “Here is the beginning of a panic attack.” From the corner of my eye, I could see that Barbara was already in the room.