My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (38 page)

Instead of stopping by for a cup of coffee, my girlfriends join me for long walks around the farm. We share ideas and our favorite news stories, and sometimes even talk politics—but there’s no gossip allowed. We laugh sometimes and I call them “church walks,” because nature is my sanctuary. I can almost hear music in the leaves on a windy day. And if I stand very still, I can hear the sound of geese napping their wings as they fly overhead. The blue sky and the smell of fresh-mowed fields are a tonic for me, and fill me up like a prayer.

I’ve had many good friends walk with me over the years. My friend Mary is a fine arts photographer who looks like Grace Kelly and has a belly laugh you can hear across a crowded room. We got to know each other when she interviewed and photographed me with Schuyler for her book
Mother.
Mary always documents what’s going on in her life, and motherhood was it at the time. Back then she and her husband, David, were raising three rambunctious boys, and Mary had become an expert.
Mother
was a follow-up book to
Giving Birth
, which I’m kind of glad I didn’t see before having any babies. Ignorance is bliss, in this case. Mary grew up in Virginia Beach, and she spent her childhood surfing and beachcombing. One day she found a small, lifeless shark on the sand and threw it around her shoulders and carried it home, cheek to cheek, to show her little brothers. When her mother saw it, she said, “Mary, take that disgusting thing back to the beach.” So Mary walked it back and tossed it in the water… and it swam away. My brother Robbie would have really liked her.

Whenever Mary arrives for one of our walks, she laughs and says, “C’mon, Sissy! Let’s go count our blessings.”

One night in early 1988, Mary, David, Jack, and I met for dinner at La Hacienda, a local Mexican spot with Formica tables and velvet sombreros nailed to the wall. I said to them, “We have some great news!”

“We have some, too!” said Mary,

“Ours is better!” Jack said.

“Nope, ours is better!” David said.

We all should have known something was up because Mary and I both skipped the 99-cent margaritas. Finally everybody blurted it out at once—we were both pregnant. We had found out on the same day.

After three boys, we were all praying Mary was having a girl. I was just happy to be having another baby. One child changes your life so much, you might as well have more. Who knows, Jack and I loved being parents so much we might have had a dozen if we had started sooner.

You would think we’d have been better prepared this time around. One September morning, while we were out feeding the horses, I felt my first contraction. I looked at my watch. Jack went inside to take a shower. While I was taking off my boots, another one came. And then another.

“Jack, I think it’s time to go!” I called into the shower.

“The contractions have to be twenty minutes apart,” he called back.

“But they’re two minutes apart.”

He was toweling himself off. “No, we don’t have to worry until they’re twenty minutes apart,” he said.

“Jack, I think it goes the other way....”

While we were racing to the hospital, I called Mary. She still wanted to document all of her girlfriends’ deliveries. And I wanted her there.

Jack and I had expected the contractions to go on forever like last time, but I barely made it to the hospital. There is nothing more ferocious than a woman in labor, especially the second time around. I wasn’t worried about making noise this time, and I was mean as a snake. Some poor young nurse came in to give me an injection and he couldn’t find my vein. His hands were shaking like crazy. “Get out of my room!” I yelled, “And send somebody who knows how to give a shot!” He stumbled out of the room, terrified.

Mary arrived just in time. When the doctor walked in, she had her scalpel ready.

“Put that down!” Mary barked like a drill sergeant. “Leave her alone! She doesn’t need it.”

“Yeah! Listen to her!” I screamed.

What made the scene even funnier was that Mary was nine months pregnant, standing up on two chairs, trying to balance herself while yelling instructions and photographing the birth with a large Nikon camera. The nurses were beside themselves; they didn’t know whether to help her or me.

The baby came moments later, and there was no need for any intervention. After an hour or so I put my blue jeans back on, Jack scooped up our new daughter, and we all drove home. We named her Virginia Madison Fisk.

While Mary was photographing the delivery, she felt her own baby begin to drop. And a few days later she gave birth to a girl, Natasha, who would become Madison’s best friend.

(I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Kay Halsey for performing her duties with patience and professionalism while under intense battlefield-like conditions … ambushed by two enormous, wild-eyed pregnant women swearing and shouting orders.)

Madison was the spitting image of her father, with brown eyes and a mop of dark hair. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Schuyler and her cousin Austin considered her their personal plaything, so she had to grow up tough. Jack was a wonderful father, but like most men, he was a little more lax around our girls than I was, and I always held my breath when I left them alone with him. My fears were confirmed when he showed me a video he’d made when Madison was a few months old. She was a pudgy baby and Schuyler, who was about six, was a peanut. But there, on tape, is little Schuyler carrying around and jiggling her baby sister, who is slowly sliding out of her arms. Then she hoists Madison up on the bed, leans all her weight on her, and coughs a wet, rumbly cough right in her face. It was like watching a Stephen King movie for mothers.

Somehow Madison survived her infancy, and grew to be a bright, precocious toddler. She always had a special relationship with her dad. One morning she came downstairs for breakfast and saw that Jack had shaved his beard. She had never seen him without a beard before.

She looked at him closely and asked, “What’s your name now?”

“It’s still Dad,” he said.

Another time he wanted to get her up from a nap. She was still half-asleep and in her dream when she opened her eyes and said, “Did you know Beethoven was also a person?”

I always told Madison and Schuyler what my mother had told me: that the kingdom of heaven is within. When I did, I would place my hands over my heart. One Sunday morning Jack and I took the girls to the lovely old stone church down the road from the farm. Madison, who was about three, was listening intently to the minister’s sermon. “Where is God?” the minister asked. “Where
is
God!?” Suddenly Madison piped up, loudly enough for all the congregation to hear, “God is in your chest!” she said.

I had to laugh. My mother would have been proud.

Madison and Natasha were like me and Vickie Johns, always riding horses and getting into mischief together. Madison had a bay Welsh pony she called Treasure and Natasha had a little chestnut Arabian named Mr. Pie. They taught their horses how to rear up and to jump hedges. They were such natural riders that I would let them go off on adventures, like riding bareback on the trails in the woods around the farm.

Not long ago, Madison asked me, “Mom, how could you let us ride up the mountain all alone? We were only, like, nine years old!”

“Well, I gave you walkie-talkies.”

And I would do it again. I can’t imagine having a childhood without being left on your own some time and being able to have some freedom. Jumping horses, riding bicycles and skateboards, and climbing trees all involve taking some risks. But how else can you know what you’re made of if you’re never allowed to test yourself? Our daughters both had plenty of mettle, but their personalities were very different.

Madison was a tomboy like me, always running barefoot or swinging off a tree limb with her clothes on backwards. Schuyler was a born performer. When she was about seven, she made her film debut in a dark comedy Jack directed called
Daddy’s Dyin’… Who’s Got the Will?
After that, she had stars in her eyes. She became convinced that we were ruining her career by not living in LA. During one visit to Los Angeles, she turned to me and said “Mom, why don’t we live in LA like all the other actresses?”

I said, “Schuyler, honey, we moved to Virginia so you’d have a wonderful childhood like I did, riding horses, playing in the woods, swimming in the pond, running around the farm barefoot. We didn’t want you to grow up in a city, with traffic and pollution. We wanted you and Madison to grow up breathing clean fresh air, not smog.”

Schuyler took a great big deep breath of air, threw out her arms dramatically, and said, “But I LOVE smog… I LOVE traffic!” I realized in that moment that I’d met my match.

I explained to her that she didn’t have to live in Hollywood to be an actress. If she wanted to learn to act, she should try out for her school plays. So that’s what she did. (I assumed that she would soon tire of performing and lose interest. But as Loretta Lynn always told me: never assume.) She debuted in
Charlotte’s Web.
We sat proudly with the other parents as she portrayed a bee with great flair. The floppy wings that her dad had made for her slapped all the other little insects and farm animals in the face as she danced around the stage. When she was in sixth grade, she played the lead in the musical
Annie.
I cleaned out the downstairs backstage area so the actors could have a safe, comfortable place to wait their turn to go onstage. I also volunteered to do hair and makeup, and curled up one of my movie wigs for Schuyler to wear as Little Orphan Annie. The show was so good that kids from other schools came to hear her sing, “The sun’ll come out tomorrow.” But we didn’t realize what a star she was until Schuyler and I were strolling through a small shopping center in town at Christmastime. Some schoolgirls raced up to us waving papers and pens. We both thought they wanted my autograph until we heard them say, “Schuyler! Schuyler! Are you Schuyler Fisk? You were in
Annie
, right?” Her whole face lit up as she signed her first autographs.

Schuyler had small parts in several of my films, but when she was eleven, she won a major role in
The Baby-Sitters Club.
Some mothers might have hesitated to let their child get into the business at such a young age, but acting was in Schuyler’s blood and she had grown up around films. It was as natural to her as chewing gum. We made sure she was safe and kept up her schoolwork. Jack and I traded off traveling on location with her. The whole family moved to Ireland one summer when she starred in
My Friend Joe.
She played a circus performer, and I’ll never get over the sight of her walking a high wire with a harness but no net. Madison, who was about five, was not in the film but had such incredible balance that the aerialist tried to talk us into taking her to France for training.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “She’s going home to start kindergarten instead.”

Schuyler was a fearless, tough-minded kid, like I was, and very precise about how she wanted things to go. Just as I had worn my father down to get a horse, Schuyler had used a similar technique to have her ears pierced when she was about nine years old. We finally relented and brought her to an ear-piercing booth in a local mall. The whole family got dressed up and came along for the occasion, and Jack took a video for posterity. It’s painful to watch. The machine was supposed to punch a hole in her earlobe and leave a little gold stud behind. But the machine got stuck and the stud broke off. Soon the excitement on her face crumpled and she started to tremble. She was trying to be brave and not cry, breathing in little puffs to control the pain. But within minutes she’d regained her composure and got the second ear done. And she paved the way for her little sister, as all older siblings do for the younger ones. Madison got her ears pierced a short while later with hardly any begging.

Our daughters came along just at the right time in my life, at the height of my success. Kids don’t know you’re famous, and they don’t care. They’ll kick you to the curb every time. You say frog, they don’t jump; they say frog, you jump. When Schuyler cut most of her hair off with a pair of dull scissors when she was about four years old, it sent me into quite a tailspin. When Madison did the same thing at about the same age, I just shrugged and thought,
Well at least we have that over with.
(Of course neither of these episodes was nearly as bad as when my brothers cut off my ponytail right at the rubber band.)

It was not always easy combining career and family. In fact, it was kind of like patting my head and rubbing my stomach at the same time. I felt like the lady trying to keep all the plates spinning in the air. When I was making a film, I worried about the parent/teacher conference I was missing. When I was in the carpool line, I wondered if I’d ever work again. But I somehow managed to do both, and survived to tell the tale.

We spent most of 1994 in Texas shooting two projects back-to-back:
Streets of Laredo
and
The Good Old Boys.
Tommy Lee Jones was making his directorial debut with
The Good Old Boys
, a cable TV drama about cowboys trying to hold on to the ways of the Old West. Sam Shepard and Frances McDormand were in it, too, along with a newcomer named Matt Damon. The script called for my character to ride her horse sidesaddle, and I wanted to make it look good. So I found a beautiful period Sears and Roebuck sidesaddle and took it to a leathersmith in Virginia who repaired and conditioned it. It was beautifully engineered and built for serious riding and jumping. I worked with a national sidesaddle champion every day for months and before long I was cantering along the trails like I knew what I was doing.

I brought Schuyler and Madison with me for the filming, and they had a great time riding ponies bareback with the ranch kids who lived nearby. In fact, the whole movie felt like a family affair. Sam Shepard’s teenage son, Jesse, was the wrangler on the movie, and he had a special horse and saddle ready for me when I got there. The horse was a handsome paint, but he was persnickety and had been schooled with an old Mexican parade saddle. When I got on him with my own saddle, he started bucking me across the field. I managed to stay on, and eventually got him calmed down. In the end, I came to love that paint horse. But I don’t know if Tommy Lee ever trusted him after that incident.