Estranged Read online

  At least you’re Jewish, I reminded myself as Mr. Goodman took in the visual of this potential family, hoping that would help, given the play. But Jason wasn’t Jewish, and Cori, the senior who had nailed the audition for Nora, had strawberry-blond hair and blue eyes.

  Mr. Goodman explained that our set would be a two-story house, and that we’d remain onstage while other scenes were taking place. His friend from the city, hired as our technical director, was coming in to build it. I had to get the part. Please, God, I prayed, I’ll do anything. Rumor had it that a girl who lived on my street was playing the same role in the film version of Brighton Beach, to be released later that year. Looking back, this seems a crazy coincidence, though it turned out to be the truth. But at the time I didn’t think much of it or really care. My world was Rockville Centre, and high school drama club was competitive enough.

  At home that night, my hands shook as I unloaded the dishwasher and put the silverware away. My mother cautioned me against disappointment. It was better to tell myself I wouldn’t get it, she said. That way I’d be pleasantly surprised if I did. But I couldn’t stop hoping. The week of auditions had been the highlight of my life so far. Hanging out in the chorus room while waiting to be called onstage, sipping Diet Coke through a straw and looking over my pages, the camaraderie with the other hopefuls, the buzz of scene work, Mr. Goodman’s eyes on me. I couldn’t stand the thought that it could all come to an end just like that, before it had even begun. I needed Mr. Goodman to deem me worthy, to believe in me and believe I was good enough. Please God, Please God, Please God.

  The next morning I walked to school early and checked the drama club bulletin board across from Mr. Goodman’s office between every class. The cast list went up right before fourth period.

  There it was: Laurie . . . Jessica Berger.

  I GOT IT. It felt like the first good thing that had happened to me. I was the only girl in the entire ninth grade who’d been cast. Kathy was disappointed but gracious, and my parents and brothers kept saying how proud they were of me. This feeling, I tried to convince myself, made up for the others.

  * * *

  It was our first evening rehearsal, and I felt teenage and in the know, being at school after hours. We’d been working on the family dinner scene when Mr. Goodman said we could take ten but no more than ten. I couldn’t figure out why the entire cast other than Jason immediately left the auditorium and exited the building. Where could they be going? After a couple of minutes wasted debating what to do, I followed, prying open the school door that led out to the brick and slate colonnade with its blue tile pillars and the parking lot beyond.

  The cast was all there, taking a cigarette break. Cori was playing my older sister. Nina, a junior who had starred in Dracula the year before, was my mother. Andy, a handsome, shaggy-haired, and broad-shouldered senior in a Mexican Baja hoodie, played my uncle, the family patriarch. His mother had written a book I wasn’t allowed to read called Growing Up, Feeling Good. She traveled around to different school districts, helping kids deal with their feelings on everything from sex, drugs, and drinking to puberty and periods and masturbation. Mrs. Rosenberg had come to my elementary school when I was in fifth grade, passing out index cards so that we could anonymously write questions about tampons and ejaculation and training bras. My mother couldn’t stand her or Andy, who was friendly with my brother Josh, but the day she’d come to my classroom had been the most interesting day of my elementary school career.

  “Join us,” Cori said, opening the door wider for me. Then she and Nina started singing “Magic to Do” from Pippin, like we were living in a real-life episode of the television show Fame.

  They smoked Benson & Hedges Deluxe Ultra Light 100s. I took mental notes as Cori opened a new hard pack and unwrapped the golden seal, tapping the pack down on the underside of her forearm. I’d only ever snuck cigarettes with friends my age, or by myself while squeezed into the small strip of alley between my parents’ garage and the neighbors’ fence. Never had I casually lit up in the open as if I were at a dinner party.

  I considered asking to bum one, but figured they might think I was too young or that I’d end up embarrassing myself by not being able to light it properly or by coughing. It was more than enough, that night, to stand in the cloud of their smoke and listen to their conversation.

  Over the next several weeks of rehearsals, Nina and Cori befriended me. I figured Mr. Goodman had asked them to take me under their wing so we’d seem more like a family onstage. Whatever the reason, soon Cori was giving me rides home from rehearsal, playing mixtapes and Suzanne Vega’s first album, and smoking cigarettes out the car window, with me in the backseat and Nina riding shotgun. At the Golden Reef Diner on Sunrise Highway, Cori and Nina drank sugary black coffee while I ate french fries with ketchup or dipped mozzarella sticks oozing with cheese into shallow bowls of marinara.

  Nina wore black sweaters and lace-up leather boots and had wavy brown hair with golden Sun-In highlights, and when dressed up, she perched a silver bracelet cuff on her skinny bare upper arm. She came off as brainy and cultured and feminine. Cori had more of an edge, with a string of adult-sounding secret love affairs. The boys all ogled her because she had big breasts, and she and Andy, who were dating, would sneak into the costume shop in the auditorium basement. Cori and Nina seemed very sophisticated and rebellious to me, but really they were good kids who got great grades, and both ended up at Northwestern.

  None of that mattered to my mother, though. To her, Cori and Nina were the embodiment of every devious, extreme, dangerously older, decidedly bad influence imaginable. She wasn’t alone in her thinking. Many kids in school and parents in our town thought that the drama club kids were somehow depraved. They called us drama fags, a name we appropriated without realizing the implications of that loaded word. The freaks were a closely related social group, many of whom volunteered for stage crew. They wore even more black than the drama fags, and were more punk, and I aspired to be more like them. My friends and I were different from the rest of the kids in town. We didn’t fit in. We wanted to get out.

  Brighton Beach Memoirs was a sold-out success. Mr. Goodman said it was one of the best school plays he’d ever worked on. Jason was a great Eugene, funny and natural and endearing, our very own Matthew Broderick. Nina and Cori had a tension-filled adrenaline-pumping mother-daughter fight scene that felt both dramatic and real (even if Cori yelled most of her lines), but I felt safe on stage listening to them, something I never felt at home. When the movie with my neighbor came out that Christmas, everyone in drama badmouthed it. Our version was better.

  * * *

  Then the school play was over. I was fourteen and stuck at home again in the afternoons. After those few months of freedom, my house felt like a prison.

  My parents and I sat holed up in our separate rooms with our separate televisions and ate our separate “catch as catch can” dinners or the pasta shells with cold sauce that my mother left out. Kathy had dinner served, complete with protein, starch, and vegetable, every evening at six, even though her mother worked, too. But I was glad for the lack of structure and offhanded permissiveness that kept me at a safer distance from my parents. Once when my friend Julie was over, my father started screaming at Josh downstairs. This kind of thing went on all the time, but Julie seemed freaked out and afraid. We played “Three Little Birds” off her Bob Marley record a little louder.

  One night I was reading a book at the kitchen table during dinner. The family rules on this were murky. We rarely ate together anymore. When we did, my father often liked to read the newspaper during meals, and then I could read, too, but on this particular night he wanted me to have a conversation with him. I had nothing to say. I had homework and wanted to get my assigned reading done.

  “Put that away,” he said.

  “It’s for school,” I answered.

  “Not at my table. Not during dinner.”

  My mother stationed herself at the sink.

 
“Why not? You always read at the table. You’re such a hypocrite.”

  “Don’t you dare talk back to me,” my father said. “You’re going to get it this time.”

  I grabbed my school bag and ran upstairs to my bedroom, locking the door as I did each night after dinner, when I’d retreat to the privacy of my room to read novels and listen to the radio and smoke out the window. But the lock was a flimsy one that my father had installed himself so we wouldn’t accidentally see each other naked, not nearly strong enough to keep out an enemy combatant. My father ran up the stairs right after me and knocked on the door, loud.

  “You better unlock the door or you’ll never be allowed to have a lock on that door again,” he said.

  “Fuck you,” I whispered.

  He started to pound his knuckles. “You little cunt,” he said. “Open the fucking door.”

  I sat by the door underneath the James Taylor poster pulled from my parents’ old vinyl Sweet Baby James album and heard him breathing on the other side. The anticipation of what he might do was usually worse than the moment of being hit or slapped.

  “Don’t make this harder on yourself,” he said.

  I unlocked the door and ran to the other end of the room, shielding my face with my arms. He hit me with his fists and pushed me against the wall and then shoved me into the bookcase of the white bed frame that they’d found at a tag sale. On his way out, he picked up one of my shoes and threw it at me. Afterward, I bent into myself and cried while my mother came in and silently folded a laundry basket of clean towels. She meant to comfort me with her presence. But I dreamed of having a mom like the Farrah Fawcett character in the made-for-television movie The Burning Bed, who’d set fire to her house and husband in order to protect her children.

  * * *

  The big-deal assignment in Mr. Goodman’s drama class was called “revelations.” We were asked to expose something about ourselves, something real and hard to talk about. The self-disclosure/self-discovery exercise was supposed to bring the class closer together and help us get in touch with our emotions. Kids generally went fairly deep, talking about self-esteem or family stuff like divorce, at least flirting with the edges of true exposure.

  I was dying to talk about my father. For days, my heart pumped loud and fast with the possibility and what this might mean. Maybe Mr. Goodman would take me home with him to New York City. But then I imagined what could happen if I did tell. I pictured sirens and police cars and sketchy foster families. I saw my mother being fired and me being taken away, not to Stan’s imagined apartment in Greenwich Village (he actually lived uptown, but I didn’t know the difference) but to a juvenile detention center. I saw my brothers having to drop out of college and my father being sent to prison.

  When it came time for me to get in front of the class, I sat with my legs crossed tightly on Mr. Goodman’s desk and talked about how I had trouble making friends in elementary school, remembering how I sat on the sidelines and read novels during kickball games. Maybe I mentioned my weight. Maybe even my nose. My mother’s office was right down the hall from Stan’s classroom. Telling was never a real option.

  * * *

  Perhaps I could go away to boarding school, like Christina in Mommie Dearest. Two kids from my town had done that, so it seemed at least a thin possibility. Beth, a redheaded academic athlete whose mother taught in the English department with mine, was now attending a New England prep school. And a boy who was bullied mercilessly in junior high had gotten a scholarship to attend a small, progressive school in Vermont. I wondered if I could get a scholarship and enroll there, too.

  In the car with both my parents at the end of ninth grade or early in tenth, I decided to ask. We’d been arguing, nothing memorable, just the daily sort of bickering that ended with me crossing my arms and saying fine or else slamming car and bedroom doors and screaming I hate you. With Mark and Josh in college, I figured my parents would be happy to have me gone. For all I knew, they hated me right back.

  “Please, let me go away to boarding school,” I said. “I hate Rockville Centre. I don’t belong here.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” my mother said. “Do you know how much boarding school costs?”

  “I can’t live this way anymore,” I said, trying not to cry. “You have to let me go.”

  “Dream on,” my mother said. “End of discussion.”

  “You are so unfair,” I said. “You don’t love me.”

  “Save it for your book,” my father said.

  * * *

  We had jobs as soon as we were old enough. My brothers began with Pennysaver and newspaper routes. I babysat starting in eighth grade at a house that was straight out of a cereal or floor wax commercial, with the perfect stay-at-home mother, businessman father, and baby girl. By ninth grade, I was sneaking cigarettes in their backyard, snooping in upstairs lingerie drawers, and masturbating to Penthouse magazines and a copy of 91/2 Weeks after the baby went to sleep. Soon Josh got me a job as the weekend cashier and coat-check girl at Taiko, the Japanese restaurant in town where he worked. I made a few dollars an hour under the table, plus tips, and at the end of the night, the kitchen would send out dinner for me—a house salad with carrot dressing, a hot plate of chicken teriyaki with sautéed carrots, and a steaming bowl of white rice. I savored the seemingly exotic food while taking in the bar scene, being greeted by the hardworking American and Japanese waitresses who joked and unwound and smoked at the end of the night while counting out their tips in one of the tatami rooms. I needed my own money because I was saving to escape that summer.

  A brochure was thumbtacked onto Mr. Goodman’s bulletin board for the Ensemble Theatre Community (ETC) school, and a small square notice appeared in the back of The New York Times Magazine, advertising a summer theater school for high school students. The brochure said that scholarships were available, and I had my growing wad of restaurant and babysitting cash stashed away. (Ever since my classmate Caroline had auditioned for the drama club musical The Wizard of Oz, I’d lost any hope for a lead role at school. Caroline was a professional. She had her Actors’ Equity card. She’d played an orphan in the national tour of Annie and had even understudied the lead role. And she’d been on an episode of Reading Rainbow.) My parents weren’t sure they should let me go, but in the spring I filled out the application anyway. Mr. Goodman wrote me a letter of recommendation, and I answered essay questions about my strengths and weaknesses and previous theater experience, and was called in for an interview with Ann and Seth, the young couple who ran the program.

  My parents drove me into the city, and my father circled the block, trying to find a parking spot on the street outside Ann and Seth’s brownstone building on East Eighty-second and York. We walked up four flights of stairs, huffing and puffing, and were led into a small duplex with theater posters on the living room walls, and books everywhere, overflowing out of bookcases and stacked in neat piles on the floor, and a small galley kitchen where the teakettle steamed. Stairs led to a tiny bedroom and a greenhouse office with a desk and file cabinets filled with papers in a balcony above. This was the first Manhattan apartment—other than Uncle Leo’s on the Lower East Side—that I could remember being in. Ann wore a floral dress and asked us to take a seat at the kitchen table while pouring herbal tea into mismatched mugs. She and Seth, in a flannel shirt and jeans, briefly talked about the interview process before suggesting my parents take a walk around the neighborhood.

  “Go get some coffee,” Ann said, politely shooing them away. “Or lunch.”

  “There’s a diner around the corner,” said Seth.

  My mother, suspicious of what these drama school hippies might want with her daughter, looked skeptical about leaving me there alone, but my father dragged her off.

  Once they were gone, I performed a monologue I’d brought along and then was handed a series of short readings. The speech from Jean Anouilh’s Antigone in which Antigone confronts Creon; the children’s poem “The Four Friends” by A. A.
Milne; the first few lines of a Shakespeare sonnet. Ann gave me some direction and had me make a different “choice” and try it a new way. They asked me a series of questions about myself. “What are the world issues on your mind? Where do you imagine yourself in ten years? What makes you mad? Tell me one quality you like about yourself and one you don’t.”

  Then Ann and Seth talked more about ETC. Two dozen or so students, along with interns and faculty, lived communally in a big house each summer, studying acting, taking music and movement classes, putting on a children’s theater piece for the town, and working on two larger productions to present to families and the community and anyone else who wanted to come on the final weekend.

  When my parents returned, we moved to the living room, arranging ourselves on the couch and chairs. Ann was twenty-six but already commanding, with expressive hands and thick long hair that she expertly rewrapped in a big, loose bun while she spoke.

  A week or two later I was accepted and even given some financial aid. Somehow I convinced my parents to let me go. (It helped that Ann and Seth had graduated from Yale.) Late that June, my parents dropped me off in Eagles Mere, a tiny town in the mountains of rural Pennsylvania, winter population 120.

  We began the day with group warm-ups and ended it with cheese and crackers and mugs of hot chocolate and songs and chants and reflections on the day and meditative breathing exercises, which we called “unwinding.” We sang ourselves to sleep with ever quieter rounds of “Rose, Rose, Rose” until we were whisper-singing.