Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Page 29

  She paused, and only then did it dawn on me where all this was headed.

  “I’ll be well taken care of as a nun,” she sniffed. “No matter how little alimony your father winds up paying me.”

  Suddenly, I understood why women jurists are tougher on rape victims than men are. Watching her enlist the services of a feng shui expert, a psychic, and a twelve-step program for support … listening to her brag that she’d hadn’t missed a day of work, even as she fell asleep each night with the help of a few drinks and QVC blaring on the television … seeing her struggle to remain upbeat as her so-called friends called to report to her that they’d seen my father on a date—my heart repeatedly broke for my mother, then retreated in self-preservation. For years, my mother had been a force of nature, formidable and fierce. Yet seeing her diminished was far worse. It was too terrible, too sad. If I permitted myself to feel for her too much, I would drown in the sorrow and injustice of it. I would hate my father. I would lose all faith in love, marriage, and trust—in which I had very little faith left, anyway.

  Feeling gutted, bereft, hamstrung between my parents, I refused to accept the long-term parsing of loyalties, the schizophrenic love, the careful negotiations and balancing acts that divorce extorts from its children—and that become necessary, frankly, for the rest of our lives.

  Instead, genius that I was, I decided to alleviate my pain by treating both parents abominably, battering them with guilt, exhausting them with resentment. Calling them at odd hours, I’d sob, “Why are you doing this? You’re the ones making a mess. You clean it up!”

  “Don’t tell me you’re saving your own life!” I’d scream at my father.

  “Don’t tell me how much pain you’re in!” I’d yell at my mother.

  “Who cares about your goddamn happiness?” I hollered at both of them: “What about me and John? What are we supposed to do now that we don’t have a family? Where are we supposed to go for the holidays?”

  The first Christmas without my father was such agony that I bowed out early, selfishly, leaving my mother and brother stranded by her sad little Christmas tree, thick with the ghosts of Christmases past. Every silvery ornament, every strand of tinsel reflected our raw, gaping loss, our sense of abandonment, our amputated limb. Our mother had tried her best. It was just the three of us.

  “Hey, kiddle-dees,” she said with forced cheerfulness. “Who’d like a glass of sparkling cider to ring in the holidays?”

  She brought out three cut-glass champagne flutes she and my father had received for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. All we could see when she set them down was the fourth one, missing.

  “Who’d like to sing some Christmas carols?” she said, smiling painfully.

  As soon as I could, I’d fled to my friend Gabi’s. Her family had an annual Christmas Day bash that qualified as overkill even by New York standards. Almost immediately, I’d proceeded to get blotto on champagne. Two university students had been visiting Gabi from Italy—they were a couple of Adonises whose names ended promisingly in “o’s”—and I’d spent most of the party sprawled across their laps on the couch, giggling, enticing them to take turns feeding me hors d’oeuvres by placing them between their teeth. Of the one hundred people crammed into Gabi’s apartment, I alone managed to distinguish myself as the Great Yuletide Slut. I must have done quite a job of it, too, because months afterward, apparently, her neighbors were still talking about it.

  “It’s gone. Everything’s just gone,” I’d weep aloud to no one in my little apartment at night. “Where’s my family? What’s happened to us?”

  Often, I stayed out bumping and grinding with strangers at dance clubs, then engaging my friends in elaborate, sobbing melodramas in public bathrooms. I hung out with my high school friend Jeff at his bar, drinking until closing, then crashing on his plaid, fold-out sofa in Hell’s Kitchen if only so that I didn’t have to go home to the woeful messages from my parents on my answering machine. Hi, honey. It’s me. Just wanted to chat. Oh. Well. Guess you’re not there. I’m going to therapy in a little while …

  Most evenings, I called my brother at college in tears. “You won’t believe what it’s like here,” I sniffled. “Dad’s talking about getting his ears pierced. Mom’s thinking of becoming a nun. Everyone’s going crazy.”

  John had little patience for any of it. “Look, Suze,” he said flatly. “You’ve just got to deal with it.” As if to underscore his point, the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)” played repeatedly in the background. “Duuude,” I could hear his roommates shouting across the hallway.

  “Mom and Dad are adults,” John said irritably. “So are you and I now. If they want to go their own way, that’s their decision. You’ve got to be a grown-up about this. Their separation shouldn’t affect us.”

  That spring, however, when he came home for Spring Break, he immediately got into an enormous fight with my mother. After punching a hole in one of her closet doors, he wound up downtown at my father’s new bachelor apartment, where he proceeded to yell at my dad insanely and call him “a fucker.” By midnight, he was standing on my doorstep in hysterics. He spent the remainder of his break immobilized on my couch in his pajamas.

  “I’m glad to see you’re being a grown-up about this,” I couldn’t resist crowing. “Because really, their separation shouldn’t affect us.”

  My brother laughed bitterly. “What are you talking about?” he said, downing a glass of Yoo-hoo and wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his bathrobe. “All four of us are in excellent shape.”

  Eventually, our mother decided against joining a convent. “You know what I found out?” she said incredulously. “Nuns aren’t allowed to have sex.”

  “No,” I deadpanned. “You’re kidding.”

  “They can’t date. They can’t get married. They can’t even have an orgasm without thinking they’ll burn in hell for it,” she said. “Where’s the fun in that?”

  “I see your point,” I said.

  “I mean, if I want to feel psychologically terrorized, I certainly don’t have to join a convent,” she concluded. “I can just walk down Broadway or call up some of our relatives.”

  My mother’s creative problem-solving, however, wasn’t over just yet. A year later, as my parents’ divorce settlement slogged through the courts, and as my brother and I began to better navigate the wreckage, I got a phone call from my friend Maggie, who lived just a block and a half from my mother.

  “Suze, I’ve got sort of, well, a strange question for you,” she said carefully. I’d known Maggie since we were fourteen; in high school, we’d spent entire weekends at each other’s house listening to CSN&Y and eating raw cookie dough under the pretense of “baking.”

  “Is your mother, by any chance, a cop?” Maggie asked.

  “What?”

  “You’re going to think I’m crazy, but I could’ve sworn I saw your mother standing outside Food City this morning dressed in a police uniform.” Maggie wore contact lenses, and it suddenly occurred to me that she might be almost as nearsighted as I was.

  “My mother in law enforcement? Yeah. Right. I don’t think so,” I laughed.

  “I didn’t think so, either,” said Maggie. “But if not, I have to tell you, there’s a female police officer walking around the neighborhood who looks exactly like her. It’s really, really freaky.”

  A few days later, when I spoke to my mother, I mentioned this in passing. “Maggie says there’s a policewoman out there who’s apparently your doppelganger, Mom. How funny is that?”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line, then a sharp intake of breath.

  “Oh, dammit,” she said finally. “I wanted to surprise you.”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “You might as well know,” she sighed. “It was me who Maggie saw. Your mother is training to be an auxiliary policewoman.”

  “Excuse me?” I said again. She might as well have told me she was becoming a tran
svestite, a porn star, a CIA operative with the code name “Romulus.”

  New York City had a program, she explained, where ordinary residents could become part-time auxiliary police officers—the urban equivalent, it seemed, of a volunteer sheriff or fire department. A year earlier, she’d seen a flyer advertising it in the lobby of her building. “I figured I’d get some self-defense training. I’d get a badge and a uniform, maybe meet a few men. Most of all, though,” she said, “I figured I could finally do something about our neighborhood. Between the yuppies and the crackheads, it’s getting really obnoxious. You know I’m a stickler for people behaving themselves.”

  While auxiliary police officers didn’t carry guns, she said, they did have the power to patrol the streets, issue tickets, and assist with arrests. “Friday evening, I was out on the beat with Charlene and Enrique, my two superior officers, and we busted five kids jumping a turnstile,” my mother said proudly. “That’s Theft of Service, or T-O-S, in police lingo. So we had this T-O-S, you see, caught the suspects right in the act, then found out they’d just robbed a drugstore. I got to frisk two of ‘em, cuff ‘em, and help read ‘em their Miranda rights.

  “Two days before that, we interrupted a drug deal. Some guy selling crack on 106th Street. Nailed him on Criminal Possession of a Controlled Substance. Third degree.”

  Hearing her talk like this was surreal. I tried to picture my fifty-three-year-old, petite, gray-haired mother throwing a lanky teenager up against the side of a patrol car, jamming her knee into the small of his back, whipping out a pair of handcuffs, then wrangling them onto his wrists. I tried to imagine her jumping out from behind a Dumpster in a service alley flanked by two other cops with their pistols drawn, yelling, “Freeze, motherfucker! Put your hands in the air!”

  I’d never done hallucinogenic drugs before, but suddenly I had a pretty good idea of what the experience might be like.

  “I was going to wait until my graduation from the police academy next week to tell you,” my mother said cheerily. “That’s when we get our official shields, and shake hands with the mayor. Hmm,” she added vaguely. “I wonder if I shouldn’t make a little party here afterward to celebrate. Maybe get an ice cream cake?”

  “Mom,” I said faintly. “Just tell me one thing. You’re not doing this just for the handcuffs, are you? Because you know, there are mail order catalogues for that sort of thing.”

  After hanging up, I repeated over and over in my head, My mother the cop. My mother the cop, trying to get my mind around it. “Excuse me,” I imagined myself saying to a drunken Romeo attempting to nuzzle me at a bar, “but I’ve got to call my mother the cop at her precinct.”

  “Excuse me,” I imagined saying to a junk bond trader at my gym, “but my mother the cop has informed me that pushing people off a Lifecycle is a Class 2 misdemeanor.”

  Anytime my mother had put her faith in something conventional—a Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving, an interior decorator, a traditional marriage—it had failed her. What was left to rely on, really, except her own expansive imagination, her own refusal to be cowed?

  The day after her graduation from the police academy, I went to her apartment with a bouquet of roses. “Don’t come in,” she shouted from the bedroom, as she wriggled into her uniform. “Wait on the sofa.”

  In the living room, I noticed, she’d rearranged the furniture. All the shutters from the wall unit had been removed. Its shelves were overrun with great, cascading pots of ivy, glossy spines of art books, decorative filigree mirrors, iridescent vases, carved wooden birds from Mexico. Overflowing with glittery treasures, it now looked like an upended jewelry box.

  “Well. Here I am.” My mother strode out as if she were on a catwalk, then did a slow, 360-degree turn. The clumsily cut, navy blue regulation police uniform strained across her breasts and her butt. Yet it looked strangely alluring, like a sexed-up costume decorated with buttons and patches.

  My mother is a beautiful woman; from certain angles, she can look startlingly like Isabella Rossellini. But when I was growing up, I hadn’t thought of her like that. She was too troubled and agitated, too unhappy with herself; she went through phases of odd haircuts, severe head scarves, unflattering clothing. In many photographs, her smile was strained, as if she’d been ordered to say “Cheese” under duress. Since she’d separated from my father, her hair had gone silver and the lines around her eyes had deepened. Yet she’d become positively gorgeous, radiant, finally free to be herself, fully unleashed in all her physical glory. Men had begun to stare after her in the street and do comedic double takes. In her policewoman’s uniform, she looked adorable and formidable at the same time—a shining silver sunflower—albeit one with a nightstick and handcuffs.

  “So, what do you think?” she said, pivoting again. “Is your mother a first-class kook?”‘

  “No, not at all,” I said tearfully. And I meant it, too. I was swollen with pride. “I think you look amazing.”

  My father had saved his own life. But my mother, I saw now, too, was engaged in rescue work of her own. Just let the world try to dismiss her. Just let the world pretend she didn’t exist. She was not going to hide away in a convent, or swallow her hurt at a table by the rest-rooms. Oh no. If she had anything to say about it—and clearly, she did—the world was going to have to reckon with her for a good, long time to come. She would not walk the streets invisibly. She was a force to contend with. And now, she even had backup.

  Chapter 13

  Your Tax Dollars, Hard at Work

  IN 1996, IN WHAT CAN only be described as an epidemic of bad judgment, a congresswoman offered me a job and I, in turn, accepted it.

  Until that moment, the extent of my Washington experience consisted of falling into the Reflecting Pool during a protest march. While I did manage to vote—and complain to my senators on a regular basis—like most Americans, I found the words “federal government” didn’t inspire patriotism in me so much as narcolepsy.

  This is not to say I was disinterested in politics. In college, friends and I spent several evenings making miniature cruise missiles out of discarded toilet paper tubes. After attaching giant price tags to them, we pushed them around the local Food King in a shopping cart.

  “Do you think President Reagan is a good bargain hunter?” we asked unsuspecting shoppers, before ambushing them with leaflets we’d made that cleverly estimated how many day care programs and school lunches could be funded for the price of a single MX missile. “Thirty-two million dollars for a nuclear warhead is not smart shopping.”

  We expected that, upon hearing our spiel, people would instantly mobilize. “One Trident missile cost sixty-four million dollars? Why, that’s an outrage,” they’d cry, dropping their jumbo-sized packages of Pampers and Wonder Bread in shock. “Quick, Marge. Let’s leave our groceries here by the frozen foods aisle and take to the streets!”

  Instead, with the ironic myopia typical of college students, we’d somehow failed to notice that two of the biggest employers in the area were defense contractors. “Almost 60 percent of my paycheck goes to military spending?” said one woman, adjusting her bra strap. “Why that’s the best news I’ve heard all week.”

  As an activist, I’d gone on to build a shantytown in front of the dean’s office, defend abortion clinics with a group of drag queens, and walk around dressed in a garbage bag during “Fashion Week.” These, to me, seemed like far better ways to spark social change than something as dreary as running for public office. Surely, no one could be truly compelled to save the world without a performance art piece and a sing-along.

  Yet, in the end, I opted to work for Congress for the same reason most people do: No one else, it seemed, would hire me.

  For several years prior, I’d dwelt in the pathetic, groveling netherworld of freelance writing. As a career, this earned me only slightly more respect than if I’d been a prostitute. While people seem to understand that being, say, a coroner or a dishwasher repairman requires a level of skill, they tend to
regard writing as simply an extension of talking: It’s something any idiot can do if given enough paper. Worse still, given the quality of some of the books that get published, this view is not wholly unjustified.

  Whenever people at cocktail parties asked, “What do you do?” and I told them, “I’m a writer,” they sniggered and said, “But seriously.”

  Working in Washington, I figured, would finally endow me with some much needed professional credibility. I imagined myself sitting behind a vast mahogany desk flanked by an American flag and tall French windows overlooking the Capitol. Every so often, my boss would buzz me over a private intercom and ask me to deliver a national security briefing or write a speech that began, “I, too, have a dream…”

  Admittedly, I’d gotten these ideas from the movie St. Elmo’s Fire, in which Judd Nelson’s character goes to work for a senator and is immediately given a private office and a level of responsibility just slightly below that of the president. If nothing else, I figured, being a communications director for a U.S. congresswoman would impress the hell out of people at cocktail parties. That alone, to me, seemed reason enough to serve my fellow countrymen.

  But truth be told, I also moved to Washington due to a congenital illness. At the advanced age of thirty, it seems I’d finally contracted my family’s nearly hallucinatory political idealism.

  My family has always been pigheaded in its belief that politicians really can make a difference. Before I was born, my parents had enthusiastically supported a Democratic presidential contender named Eugene McCarthy, who inspired them so much, in fact, that in an act that could’ve been considered child abuse, they briefly considered naming my brother “Eugene.”

  As a young man, my Uncle Paul had been so moved by a politician called Stevenson that he actually did go so far as to saddle his son with the conversation-stopping middle name of “Adlai.” (“Can you believe he named me after a failed presidential candidate?” my cousin groaned. “I suppose it could be worse. I could’ve been named after Hubert Humphrey. How much would that suck?”)