What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

Copyright © Alice Eve Cohen, 2009

All rights reserved

 

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from
Dust Tracks on a Road
by Zora Neale Hurston. Copyright 1942 by Zora Neale Hurston, copyright renewed © 1970 by John C. Hurston.

 

The Brocaded Slipper and Other Vietnamese Tales
by Lynette Dyer Vuong; text copyright 1982 by Lynette Dyer Vuong; used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

 

Cohen, Alice Eve.
What I thought I knew / Alice Eve Cohen.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-05093-4

1. Motherhood—United States—Case studies. 2. Mother and child—United States—Case studies. 3. Pregnancy, unwanted—United States—Case studies. 4 Fetal growth retardation—United States—Case studies. 5. Birth weight, Low—United States—Case studies. 6. Cohen, Alice Eve. 7. Cohen, Alice Eve—Family. 8. Parents of children with disabilities—United States—Biography. 9. Mothers and daughters—United States—Biography. 10. Jewish women—United States—Biography. I. Title.

HQ759.C644 2009
306.874’3092—dc22
[B] 2008051576

 

 

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

 

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

For my wonderful family

author’s note

All the events in this book actually occurred. As this is a memoir, my telling of the events is filtered through the lens of memory and emotion, and altered by the passage of time. I’ve changed the names and identifying details of some people in this book to protect their privacy. Conversations and dialogues have been modified by memory, and sometimes intentionally compressed and reshaped for narrative purposes. My intent throughout the book is to re-create for the reader the story as I experienced it in the moment, and in the state of mind I was in at each stage in the journey. This is how I remember my life during this period of time.

There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you.

—Zora Neale Hurston

Scene 1

This was going to be a solo show. That’s what I do. I write and perform solo plays. Dramatic tales with multiple characters, for adults. Comic plays and folktales, for children. I’ve performed for half a million people, in tiny theaters and high-tech performance spaces, in international theater festivals and school cafeterias, on four continents.

I rarely get stage fright. But the thought of performing this story in front of an audience was like willingly entering my recurrent dream—the one where I am standing under a blinding spotlight on a rickety proscenium stage. I face the audience, open my mouth to speak, and realize: 1) I can’t remember my lines; 2) There is a marching band entering the theater; 3) I’m naked. Shouting over the brass section, I stammer and blurt out improvisations, hoping my lines will come back to me before the audience showers me with rotten vegetables, but the band drowns me out. As they approach the stage, I see that the musicians are wild animals in military dress. I wake in a sweat.

On Friday, the eve of the Jewish New Year, September 10, 1999, I was rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital for an emergency CAT scan. “I’m here with your patient,” said the radiologist on the phone to my doctor. “She appears to be in shock.”

I sat down to write this story as a solo show, but I got stage fright and couldn’t write anything for years.

Seven years later, on Friday, the eve of the Jewish New Year, 2006, I started to write. Unexpectedly. Urgently.

I won’t be performing this story. In a book I am just as naked, lit under as unforgiving a spotlight, but I’m willing to divulge these secrets for one reader at a time. I’ve been writing as fast as I can, without telling anybody. For fear that I’ll stop. For fear that the Evil Eye will catch up with me. Again.

Scene 2

This is the happiest I’ve been in years. As if in a perpetual state of inebriation, I laugh for no reason. I celebrate the end of the decade and the millennium.

The first half of the nineties was less celebratory. Infertility. Divorce from Brad after thirteen years together. A custody battle for our three-year-old adopted daughter, Julia. The loneliness of single parenthood. The exhausting discipline of raising Julia on my minimal, freelance income. The fear of raising a child in my crime-ridden building. Before taking Julia out for a walk in her stroller, I had to look through the peephole to make sure my drug-dealing neighbor wasn’t starting a gunfight with an unruly client.

 

 

In the spring of 1999, I indulge in the pleasurable delusion of eternal youth. Michael, my fiancé, is ten years younger. I’m forty-four. He’s thirty-four, but he looks like a college kid, with his wayward curly hair, earnest blue gray eyes, baggy jeans, and thread-bare T-shirt, cradling his guitar and singing the song he wrote last night instead of sleeping. He’s smart, funny, cynical, affectionate. He’ll never grow up, and as long as I’m with him, neither will I.

We met three years earlier at a children’s theater conference, where we were both performing solo plays. He drove me home, came back for dinner the next night, and spent the night. Because of our age difference, we had no expectations that our fling would develop into anything more. Because we had no expectations, we shed our armor. When we shed our armor, we fell in love.

Michael grew up in New Orleans, and was the only one in his conservative, devout Lutheran family who’d ever moved north of the Mason-Dixon Line. After his family recovered from hearing that he was dating a Jewish New Yorker—a divorced, single mom, ten years his senior—they teased him about acquiring an instant family. Michael had always preferred to let his life happen to him, rather than plan it.

Michael was nearly penniless, by design. Money didn’t interest him. His professional passion was creating theater with kids in the country’s poorest communities—impoverished school districts in southern Appalachia, children of Mexican migrant workers in El Paso, Texas—where he slept on the sofas of local families and barely broke even. He paid the rent with his more remunerative corporate theater jobs.

From the first day they met, Michael and Julia, then five years old, hit it off. I left them in the apartment while I picked up dinner from the Cuban Chinese restaurant down the block. When I returned with the yellow rice and black beans, they were sitting on the floor of Julia’s room inventing an elaborate story, which they animated with Julia’s stuffed animals and a talking basket. When he moved in with us a year later, he brought everything he owned: hundreds of books, a crate of handmade masks and puppets, two guitars, and the futon he’d carried with him to the fourteen places he’d lived since graduating from the University of Virginia.

 

 

In the spring of 1999, Michael and Julia, now eight, are great friends. He wants to raise Julia with me, but he doesn’t want to have more children. Neither do I.

Brad moved to Los Angeles when Julia was five. Three thousand miles has done wonders for our relationship. Julia keeps a photo of Brad by her bed, a formal performance portrait: Tall and thin, with intensely dark eyes and thick black hair, he is wearing a tuxedo and conducting the final, wrenching movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. Julia visits him in LA on holidays.

I am in school, finishing up my MFA in writing for children at The New School University, an easy subway commute from our Upper West Side apartment to the Greenwich Village campus. Because classes are at night, I can continue my freelance work during the day. In exchange for The New School’s reasonable tuition, I’m getting the degree I need to teach college, and the luxury of two years of creative immersion. When Julia was younger, I couldn’t afford to write anything that didn’t pay the bills.

I love being in school, and I’m writing day and night. I still dress like I did as a Princeton student in the midseventies, half my life ago: jeans and a T-shirt, my long dark hair (now with a few renegade grays) worn loose. After class, I drink beer with my grad school friends at Cedar Tavern, a ragtag Greenwich Village bar with dark paneling, cheap beer, and an infamous history of ill-behaved artists—Jack Kerouac was thrown out in the forties for pissing in an ashtray, Jackson Pollock in the fifties for ripping the door off the men’s room.

One night, my friend Dylan catches my eye when he enters the classroom. Gay, universally flirtatious, and mercilessly beautiful, Dylan has a habit of breaking his professors’ hearts—dating, breaking up with, and intellectually disabling otherwise erudite teachers. Dylan kneels in front of my chair, gazes into my eyes, and whispers, “You’re pregnant, Alice, aren’t you?”