Dry Your Smile (22 page)

She
is
blameless. She did what she thought was best for me. That's also a truth.
A
truth. A truth caught in the subway rush-hour of truths.

Am
I
blameless, then? A child has to grow up, after all, and she's always said I could be or do anything I wanted. But if I'm blameless as well as her, why won't
she
acknowledge
that
, the way I've done in so many fights with her—saying how I
don't
blame her, how I love her, but that I can't
breathe
anymore, I don't know who I am, it's time for me to lead my own life. I'm seventeen years old, for Christ's sake. (It looks weird to swear on the page.) I'm a grown woman. Certainly
she
reminds
me
of that often enough, when she feels I've been irresponsible about something
she
wants me to do.

Another truth is: if she won't acknowledge my blamelessness (and acknowledge that I grant
her
blamelessness), then I myself won't ever really believe it, deep down. What's
wrong
with me? So then, at this point in the wheels-within-wheels brain routine, I start to feel guilty.

Because yet another mashed-up truth is: she made me.

Frau Frankenstein and her Creature.

If I like what I am (and sometimes I almost do), then how can I blame her? If I
don't
like what I am (which is almost all the time), then am I not liking me precisely in order to blame her?

She's always been a fighter, and she made me one. She herself gave me the equipment (which I was never supposed to use, I guess, against
her
).

She's given me everything. I can't even sort out what's my own. For instance, this feeling of always wearing a mask, or layers of them in lightning-quick changes. It stirs through me so frequently, like a ladle being circled listlessly through leftover stew by an arthritic hand. (I wonder if that's good writing. No, Julian, get back to just putting it down, don't get trapped into watching the writing again …)

This feeling that everything's fake can be a
good
thing—in Buddhism and Hinduism, anyway. Maya, illusion; Nirvana, nothingness. Well, knowing about Maya and Nirvana comes from Barbara—but
feeling
them comes from Hope's influence, though she wouldn't understand it and would insist that I didn't feel it. But it does come from her.

Whatever confidence I have is rooted in her belief in me. And it can't endure against the opposition of the one who made it, either. I better not forget Hope is the double-message master. Like preaching material things don't count so I shouldn't have harped on having a room of my own, but meanwhile being obsessed about money herself—her stocks and bonds and Dow Jones averages. Or like the menstruation-and-sex conversation years ago, a real beauty. All that stuff about how menstruating was natural and clean and nothing shameful, how sex at the right time and with the right boy was not scary and was just grand—and me coming away feeling sort of repulsed and thinking it must be
me
because she said all the right things. And finally figuring out that she'd said them in a tone of voice just above a whisper. Double-message Momma.

She always seems to radiate unbounded confidence in her own opinions, even if they're superstitions or lies. She radiates confidence in my opinions, too—but in the
abstract
. When I express a
specific
opinion, and god forbid especially if it might diverge from hers, she withdraws her approval lightning-fast. (Of course she denies this.)

It's as if Hope has no notion whatsoever of her power over me. She can whine and she can thunder. She can crack me like an eggshell so that I splatter out in pity for her. Yet I'm terrified of her. Why can't I be selective, pick some part of her to affirm but reject the rest?

Well, this kind of writing must be real because it's making me sick to my stomach. And my gastrointestinal system has to be authentic, even if not much else about me is. I'll stop this journal entry now. But I won't give up.

I'm going to write my way through Hope. Maybe somewhere I'll find Julian.

I just looked back at the last entry and realized that Hope's “nerves” and fainting fits and nausea is one way she controls me. So maybe it's a sign of health that I'm daring to get nauseated on my own?

Just another tactic that would come from her, and so probably be useless against her.

Everything is useless against her. I don't know who I'll be when she dies.

But more than any of my feelings
about
her, I feel
her
, somehow. I used to watch how she tried to avoid the role of stage mother. It broke my heart with pity for her. But I hated her for it, too, because it meant that in public, with Them around, she never pushed me forward, never contradicted a director, never praised me. In private, ho ho another story.
There
waited the expectations, the criticisms, the “stand a fraction upstage but if you're caught don't say I told you to do it because they'll bar me from the set.”
I feel all of her, all the time
.

I'm too central in her life. And she's a giantess in mine. By the time I'm forty, of course, she won't be. But by then I'll be too ancient to do the things it's worth being free of her in order to do.

I know writing all this must be a cliché—the thing I
dread
. Though Barbara used to say a writer has to dare write his way through
miles
of clichés even for years maybe before he gets down to the creative original. With Barbara gone, it's harder to think of myself as a someday writer. As for that crap about Hope being worried Barbara didn't challenge me enough: Hope was
jealous
of Barbara. Barbara knew it and so did I.

She was like the teacher right out of “The Corn Is Green.” Severe, challenging, but also mild. She even smelled good, and that fabulous grainy-gravel low voice—I used to sit fascinated while she talked about writers and language and human rights and politics and religion and anything. She never treated me like a freak adolescent performer dabbling in intellectual pursuits. She asked, she listened, she
heard
.

That first session after Hope hired her as my tutor, Barbara looked at me across the coffeetable in the livingroom (she'd asked whether we should work in my room, and raised her eyebrows ever so slightly when told I hadn't a room of my own). She leaned toward me and suggested we use the first session to get to know each other. Then she asked me who I was. And right away I knew she didn't mean my name, rank, and Employed Minor registration number. I thought I'd die.

I remember I said I was a labyrinth, a maze. (I wanted to show off how much I'd read in mythology. I was only fourteen, after all.) I said the labyrinth had a starting place and a center, but between these two was an enigma. I told her I wanted to be a writer. I'd never said that aloud before, and I was stunned to hear my own mouth put it right out there. Then I started to talk about myself as an actress—but she went directly back to the writer part.

“What kind of writer?” she asked.

I thought I'd die again. Or that I had and was now in paradise. We were off from there. It poured out of me like a flood. That I wanted to make people laugh and cry and think and change, have an effect the way I'd sometimes had as an actress, but with my
own
words and thoughts this time.

Barbara is one of those people who can sum up all your inarticulate gurglings in a few magical words and you know you've been understood.

“So,” she smiled at me. “You want to be of use.”

“Even worse,” I heard myself say. “I want to change the world. I know that sounds hopelessly fourteen.”

“Or hope
fully
a sign of positive evolutionary mutancy,” she shot back. “I believe it, Julian.”

And she wasn't smiling when she said
that
. She believed it. She
knew
it. She
respected
it.

So what's the use of wasting notebook pages on Barbara now? Hope managed to find reasons to dismiss her—for having committed the sin of trying to save my life. It always comes back to Hope's power over me.

Like cutting me off from Barbara, because I loved the
me
I was when I was with Barbara, and I loved Barbara. Like keeping distant any friends I might have—on the rare occasions someone near my own age has wanted to be friends with a person like me. Like managing to throw up a Dead End sign about Bramwell. For fear of
what?
That two teenage prodigies (except he was one and I'm really not) would fall in frenzied mouth-frothing love with each other and screw night and day and get me pregnant? When he has to sit at that piano of his and practice a minimum six hours a day in between
his
tutor and homework and concert tours and things that make him as disgusted with his life as I am with mine?

She encouraged it at first, like she always does. The night we met, both of us headliners at a benefit for the New York City Youth Scholarship Fund, it was Hope who invited Bramwell and his mother over for coffee and snacks afterward. When they left, she and I giggled together about how cute he was. When he came to lunch the following Saturday, I had planned to cook something but she took us both out to the Japanese restaurant around the corner. She got tickets for her and me for his next concert at Carnegie Recital Hall. She told my press agent about it and there was an “item” in Leonard Lyons' column about the two “youthful talents” being seen around town together—which made me want to shrivel up with embarrassment. But she let us be friends.

It was only when he and I started to
be
friends that she changed. Whenever I saw him, she'd ask me, sort of “girlfriend to girlfriend,” how it was going, what had we done, what had we talked about. But I didn't
want
to tell her every detail. Some of the things we discussed were private. I suppose that was the kiss of death. She started sniping about him: he was too full of himself, his career wasn't going right, why didn't he take me to an opening night on Broadway where we'd be seen and it would help both our careers. She and I started to fight about it. Then he called and told me that she'd called his mother and told
her
she thought it was best “if the kids gave each other a rest because they're both so young and shouldn't monopolize each other's time.” His mother was angry about that but what could she do, so
she
told
him
, and what could
he
do? There was nothing at all I could do.

I really loved Bram. Sure, probably I was in love with him, too. At least I think. It's very hard being a teenager, because you think and feel everything strongly and at the same time everyone is telling you that you only
believe
you're in love, you only
think
you're depressed, you only
imagine
you're confused. (To me in particular this feels like Charles Boyer secretly turning the gas lights up and down in order to drive Ingrid Bergman daffy.) Also, you would give anything in your adolescent life
not
to be a sophomoric “teenager.” Which in fact you are. Disg
ust
ing state. So the more you try not to be all those things the more you feel yourself being and doing them. Arrrggghhhhh!!

I'd give anything to be able to peel me off myself. Then I get frightened that this is the kind of thing people who commit suicide say. But I want to
live
, not die. It's almost a surprise that I look forward to the rest of my life.

This time I want to pick up on what I was writing about Bram. Because he really
was
wonderful and gorgeous and I've never dared say or write that to anyone—definitely not him, certainly not Hope.

I'll try to describe him. That's good practice for being a writer. He had (well, he still has, I suppose, even though she managed to put him into the past tense as far as it concerned me) he
has
dark blondish hair, the color of old brass, and it curls a little at the base of his neck. He has brown eyes, but not like mine; his are glinted with amber flecks and they just take your breath away when he looks (looked) at you. He's got this divine chin. And when he sits down at a piano and rips off a Bach prelude or lets loose with a Chopin ballade, you might as well swoon. The thing is, he was only a year older than me (still is, dumbbell), but even at seventeen he had, not just sophistication, but
maturity
. He'd been concertizing since age five, playing classical music. Not a grinning, shuffling kid who sweethearted her way through one vomitously darling part after another, who got nonalcoholic drinks at fancy restaurants in New York named after her the way restaurants served “Shirley Temple cocktails” in Hollywood. Bram at least had been
himself—
even if he was put on display. But he wasn't pleased with himself, either. Because all
he
wanted to do was compose, not perform. He wrote wonderful music, too. He worried that it was “derivative,” the way I hate the idea that I have to trudge through miles of clichés to reach what Barbara called “one's own unique voice” on the page. But to me, his music sounded the way I want my words to sound, lyrical and powerful and inevitable and surprising all at the same time.

I wish I
had
slept with Bram. (Hope better NEVER find this notebook!) Frankly, I'm so tired of being a virgin I could screech it from a broadcasting transmitter. And it would've been just lovely if Bram and I had been the first ones for each other. I just bet he was a virgin, too, though of course we never talked about that. But we talked about almost everything else. Music and composers and books and how it felt to get a standing ovation and how putrid most tutors are and how it must feel to go to a regular highschool and what hell it is to go on tour once you get over the excitement, and how you have no friends your own age. And about the mixed-up love and fear and hatred you feel for your parents, though in my case it was parent singular.
*