The Child (11 page)

She had to get in. But how?

These questions became central to her existence, and by sheer brainpower, total immersion, and focus, she began to find some answers.

At this point in the process she turned thirty. How to learn unwritten rules?

She had to be twice as good to get half as much, four times as good to get just as much, and five times as good to get ahead. Once she’d hit on these odds, Mary started workaholicking like a racing demon. She never gave up and she never stopped going. Ambition was her pep pill.

After three more years at this pace, Mary was desperate. By age thirty-three she felt–as very few people ever do–that she had taken every possible avenue to better her condition.

So finally, at this point Mary realized she was completely dependent on the recognition of strangers in order to achieve her goal. She was dependent on their grace.

She didn’t need her own grace, because no one was dependent on her.

If anyone really important ever noticed her, she had to be ready to maximize it. So when she would find out about something that mattered, she would incorporate that thing into her vocabulary.

Example:

Then when September rolled around, Mary called him, faxed him, e-mailed him, and he never, never, ever, ever, ever responded. She left messages like: “If you don’t want to do what you said you would do, just
tell me
.”

But he would never say no.

Finally, she dressed up as a messenger, delivered a package to his office, and confronted him in person.

“I asked, and you said
yes
,” Mary cried. “So I believed you.”

“What I really meant,” Steve said, looking at his watch, “was that if someone else were to do all the work of shepherding this not uninteresting play through the system, well then, at that time the door may not be closed, especially if you get famous for something else. I was just being polite, but you clung to my kindness. You fixated on it and became so needy that I had to protect myself from your monstrous, diseased insanity.”

“Couldn’t you just have said ‘I changed my mind. I’m sorry I hurt you’?”

Innocent outsiders who have neither the calling to be playwrights nor the experience of being absolutely the opposite of the profile for privilege would often ask if she couldn’t hold on to some small kindness. This was a loaded question. Yes, she was ultimately happy that he finally took the responsibility to say no. In fact, this was a great relief, and it helped a lot. But it did not get her play produced. And for those for whom expression through vapid but beautiful actors is the only time they feel alive, there is nothing that makes not getting your play performed okay.

At the root of this was that Mary had been raised to keep her word, so she believed what other people told her. Second-guessing them was a skill she had never acquired. She just believed what others said. If they said yes, then her investment of faith in other human beings was to believe they were telling the truth. She could not live and do otherwise.

Yet, as was inevitable, after many experiences like the one above, Mary came to know these creepy people like the backs of her hands. She could see their pubic hair through their clothes. That’s how intimately she had come to know this kind of person. The Unaccountables. Mary stared at herself in the mirror. How could she become like them? She wanted to. It was the only way to have the opportunity to be herself.

Trying to learn this system was difficult. It was a new language of a subculture she had not been trained in. It was taught in some schools and some families and some circles, but not hers. So after serious observational study and consultation with various participant observers also on the hovering fringe, Mary wrote out these phrases on flash cards with their interpretive meanings on the back. So, whenever she was stuck on a subway train, or on her way home from a temp job, she would take out the cards and try to get their information through her thick skull.

Here were some of her flash cards:

She practised speaking the new lingua franca when she was alone, to see if comprehension would improve with practise. But when she meant to say “I’ll call you on Wednesday,” she just said “Go
away,” which defeated the purpose of the code in the first place. Because saying “Go away” made her accountable. It was easier to say “Ill call you tomorrow.”

What was the bright spot in her light? Hope. No one goes to these lengths unless positive fantasy is at the wheel. Every time she tried to be like them, she imagined it would work. That felt great. Then she imagined what it would be like to be treated with respect, to live decently, and, most important, to see her plays alive before her. And that felt so sweet, so dear, so tender and right that the imagining was itself satisfying, comforting, and fun. She couldn’t wait to see how good the real thing was going to feel. And it would. Feel.

If after all the joyous hope it in fact did not work out, she was devastated and had to think it all through again. In some ways she did not want to become the kind of person she now resented. But then again she did. It was the only way to not get hurt by them, again.

She had a girlfriend to cry to and cheer her on. When she tried again, Eva would say “I believe in you.” Mary appreciated this, but she also knew that the words were offered somewhat in innocence. Eva, after all, was a lifelong New Yorker, and a lawyer, and although she was accomplished, she was not ambitious. Eva didn’t realize what it was like to need help to realize your natural calling, how humiliating that was. Eva had been handed everything. She was born in New York, after all, and knew how to act.

Telling Mary “You can do it” and other cheers was in some ways a contrivance for Eva to feel more sympathetic, i.e., the person she wanted to be. Ever since the legal clinic had been defunded, Eva had been depressed. Mary knew she felt disappointed in herself. Eva was embarrassed by her own failure, and by the suffering it had caused her clients. Mary felt bad for Eva, but she was also sick of it.
It was time for Eva to move on to something better. After all, what was happening to Mary was worse. Eva at least had a law degree; she should be able to solve her problems. Thank God that Hockey had gotten her a new gig. It was good for everyone and would keep the focus where it needed to be.

Eva had loved the clinic, and Mary had been filled with hope. Now Mary felt deep inside that there was a secret connection between Eva not being happy and no one opening the door for Mary. In a vague and unarticulated way, she felt that Eva’s disappointments were exactly the thing keeping that door from opening. Now Eva had to be very, very happy so that Mary could finally make it.

After eight years with Eva, Mary had learned a lot about Jews. No matter what they got, it wasn’t enough. They always wanted more. Regular white people were too satisfied. Like Mary’s family. They thought that wanting anything was asking for trouble. That’s why her own family didn’t get her. She wished for something great, and they found that uncomfortable. Maybe that was the very attitude that kept her from knowing how to get the thing she needed. It was the hidden injury of class.

Mary’s father had been afraid to want, and it didn’t serve him, either. She loved him so much and wanted him to be on her side. For the last ten years of his life, she called him with every detail of hope or expectation, but he never got excited. He couldn’t. He loved her, but her ambition was just a blur. He worried that she was setting herself up for defeat. It smelled to him like covetousness and being too big for her britches. It made him uneasy and it was painful to pay attention. But if he was the example of what happens when you give up on your dreams, it was a fate she wanted to avoid. Mary couldn’t call him after two in the afternoon, because
he would be drunk. Her mother would also be drunk. Her mother just disappeared into vague rambles about nothing.

It was so childish. Not having dreams. They were like kids. But she didn’t want them to be. They were her parents, and she loved them no matter what. Couldn’t they put down the bottle and reciprocate? If she called too late in the day, her dad was really out of it. But before two he was usually okay. Sometimes even gruffly funny, like when she was a kid. If Mary went to visit them in Del Sol, they would drive drunk. The few times Eva came along, she had a shit fit. She couldn’t stand all the drinking and the accompanying silence. She would complain about it, call it “morose.” But she would also use her credit card to rent a car so that they didn’t have to ride with the drinkers. Mary’s credit card was maxed out. Eva tried to help, but after two days of straight vodka and silence, she would go in the next room and watch TV until the holiday was over. She met them halfway. But Mary wanted it all.

Eva was nice when Mary’s dad got sick. She did talk about “end-of-life issues,” but was kind. She put Mary first. Her dad drank until every organ in his body turned to water. Mary saw him in the hospital bed, bloated, like an ocean wrapped in skin. One day the skin burst open and all the water came out. Then he died. That night, her mother went out for drinks. After that, her mother, Delilah, would occasionally repeat her dead husband’s phrases, but in a more understated slurry tone. They were:

Eva insisted all the way home that “because I don’t want to” is not a reason. A reason is something like “because I’m afraid that if I try, I will fail and be ashamed.” Statements that Mary and her family would never make in a million years. If she did, Eva would just respond, “You can do it.” So what would be the point?

The truth was that Mary mistrusted Eva’s logic system. And she trusted her parents’ logic system. Even though one belonged to winners and the other to losers. But she was raised in it like she was raised to do the dishes. It was mother’s milk. The trilogy: (1) ambition is dangerous; (2) praise encourages it; and (3) don’t try to better yourself beyond what your folks have achieved. That’s what was so heroic about Mary ultimately, so optimistic. That despite all her conditioning, she tried as hard as a person could to make herself happy. To have the life she had to have. To do what was right. She acted on her own behalf. And she hoped.

When Eva’s father died, after very expensive heart surgery, Nathalie went back to school and got a PhD in education. She studied end-of-life issues among the Jewish elderly. She indulged. When Mary’s father died, Delilah got a new boyfriend and a blender. She got over it. She and Tom liked to make vodka drinks with orange concentrate and crushed ice or some fruit from the garden. They let Eva in the house and even sent her a Christmas card. Eva buys Delilah and Tom the most ambivalent Christmas presents possible, like soap. It’s so embarrassing. How are they supposed to understand why she doesn’t have the right kinds of gifts? Everyone celebrates Christmas. Nathalie and that Ethel treat Eva and Mary like dirt. But they think they’re superior. That’s what Jews are like. They always think they’re better, no matter how they behave. That was a big part of the problems Mary was having professionally. All
of these rich WASPS from Ivy League schools and Jews who grew up in New York. They run the world.

“I’m never going to make it.”

“I believe in you,” Eva said. “You can do it.”

Driving upstate with Hockey, Eva remembered all her dreams of country houses with big stoves, a writing studio for Mary, a dog. Isn’t that what grownups had? Someday. It would be so lovely. A picture window right over their bed so that the sun would crawl in beneath the trees, and the crisp air, coffee, pancakes, making love, going for walks, talking. The bright, quiet way. What did these houses cost anyhow? It shouldn’t be too impossible. Some day.

Then Hockey turned into Ossining and she remembered her last client to reside here, Fred. The cool black senior citizen who never stopped charming and never stopped cocaine. In and out of jail well into his seventies, but somehow not pathetic. She’d get mail from emergency rooms where he checked in for diabetes, refills of Coumadin, grandpa stuff. And then he’d wrap a way-out mad scarf around his neck, find an old Nehru jacket, and look like one bright dude romancing younger ladies and smoking cocaine.

This time, though, she and Hockey were neutral, in ugly old lawyer clothes. Dull and ill fitting. They didn’t talk much, listened to the radio. Clients are mirrors of lawyers’ wishful wannabe selves. And David was as bland as they get. No acne or drooling; he didn’t look like a monsignor or mortician. Just a regular video store clerk in his forties, a loser with someone to love. Being incarcerated did nothing for him. He didn’t bulk up like most, or act tough. He just stared at the ceiling. That was depressing. This life wasn’t for him; he wasn’t accepting enough to figure out how to get by.

“Can you get me out?”

“I know,” Eva said, “it’s awful.”

“I’m getting fat, I’m growing breasts. How do I get out?”