Fear of Dying. Erica Jong
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and grit even more than I admired her acting—which was splendid.
“Mom, you should be working,” she said over a chicken Caesar salad at Sarabeth’s.
“You should be too.”
“I will, as soon as the baby’s launched. But you can’t stop acting. It was your lifeline.”
“I don’t want to play grannies. I want to be a granny, not play one. Do you have any idea of the stupidity of the roles that are out there for women? The tragedy is that you get better and better at what you do—and the roles get worse. You feel confident of your craft for the first time—just before they throw you on the trash heap.”
“Then produce your own stuff. Play King Lear as a woman. Get Asher to bankroll you. He would love it. He’ll do anything to top his father.” Asher’s father had lost everything, which was one reason Asher had been so driven to accumulate money and power.
“Queen Lear? But my mother is Queen Lear. I’ll have to wait for her to die!”
“No, I mean King Lear as a woman. Grab the good roles and play them. If casting is colorblind, why can’t it be gender blind? It’s a brave new world. Don’t accept the crap they give you to play. Make up your own. Plunder Shakespeare or Marlowe or Shaw or write your own stuff. Work with your friend Isadora! Doctor Faustus as a woman conjuring up Adonis instead of Helen of Troy. You don’t have to give up. I hate you giving up. Asher hates it too. He told me the other day that he thinks you’re depressed and he wants you to work again. He really loves you.”
“Finding roles at sixty?” I ask.
“Sixty is the new forty.”
“And eighty is the new sixty. What does that make you at twenty-five? Five?”
“Probably. Mentally at least. My brain seems to have gone on hiatus since I got pregnant. Look, I need you not to give up. How am I going be sixty if you don’t show the way?”
“You’re right.”
“Don’t say I’m right and then go away and forget what I said. You’re falling into a pit with Grandma and Grandpa.”
“They’re in their nineties and wear diapers—but I guess the nineties is the new seventies.”
My cell phone pings with a text. I delete it without even looking.
“What’s that?” Glinda asks. I don’t answer.
“Every time I go to see them, I want to kill myself,” I say.
“They’ve had long, full lives, daughters who love them, success beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, no major illnesses. You have nothing to feel guilty about.”
“Then why do I feel so guilty?”
“Because you’re crazy. The fact is, you don’t have to feel guilty about anything—not even me. You saved my life, Mommo. I will never forget that as long as I live. Now you really have to get back to work.”
“Come on—you saved your own life. I couldn’t have saved you if you were hell-bent on self-destruction.”
“It was you, Mommo—you, you, you. But I really want you to get back to work. You need your work.”
Glinda’s acknowledgment takes me back nine years to another autumn—an autumn of maternal terror.
I remember four sudden insistent rings at the doorbell. (Only Glinda rings four times, so I know something is wrong. Glinda has followed in my footsteps and is supposed to be in L.A. shooting a movie.) The housekeeper answers. My beautiful nineteen-year old daughter bursts into the apartment sobbing.
“Mom,” she says, “I think I’m going to die. You’ve got to listen!”
She is skeletally thin, her hands shake, and her hair hangs greasily over her wasted face.
My first thought is to say, “It can’t be that bad,” but something stops me. I don’t want to believe my daughter is an addict—what mother does? But I realize both our lives may depend on my believing her. So I do the mother thing: shut up.
“Mommo—I don’t sleep anymore—too wired. Then I take pills to come down. I’m afraid I’ll be one of those people who never wake up. I’m turning into a coke whore. You have no idea how easy it is to be a coke whore in Los Angeles.”
I never liked coke, so all this is hard to imagine, but I have enough friends with dead kids to believe her. I have friends whose kids jumped off buildings, inhaled CO2, smashed up cars, sliced their wrists.
“I think I need to go to rehab. I really do. It terrifies me. I’ll lose my movie. But otherwise I think I’ll lose my life.”
I hold her in my arms, smelling the sour smell of vomit. I remember her baby smell, her sweet head smelling of baby oil, her sweet pink tush smelling of baby crap. How can your children get so far away from where they started? Where do they go in adolescence? It’s certainly not the Land of Oz. I immediately start making phone calls. By that night, Glinda and I are on a plane for Minnesota.
Even though it’s November, Minnesota is frozen. Minnesota is always frozen. We are in baggage claim when a tall chubby man in a parka comes up to us.
“Glinda?” he hisses toothlessly. His skin is red, his head shaved and tattooed. Most of his teeth are missing.
“I’m Vanessa, this is Glinda.”
“I’m your ride,” he says. “I’m Cal W.”
We get into a station wagon and drive north. It starts snowing hard. I hold Glinda’s hand.
“I’m scared, Mommo.”
“No reason to be scared,” says toothless Cal calmly. “You’re in the right place. You’re where you belong.”
I wonder if we’ll ever get out of the frozen northern wastes. We drive and drive. Cal barely speaks—except to ask us if we need a bar or a bathroom.
“A bar?” I ask.
“Some folks like to tank up for the last time,” he says.
“Please, no,” says Glinda. “I never want to tank up again.”
“I could use a bathroom,” I say.
We park in front of a diner with a flashing neon sign that reads: MOM AND POP’S DINER—ALL U CAN EAT.
I go in to use the loo and wonder if Cal and Glinda will be there when I emerge. The bathroom smells of fake roses and shit. It has cutesy cartoons of dogs and cats on the walls.
On arrival, we seem to have entered the frozen tundra of America. The entrance to the building is down a snowy path. The place seems deserted, yet a few minutes after we press the bell, a handsome white-haired male nurse greets us. Glinda grabs my hand.
“I need to talk to Glinda alone now,” he says. “You should probably wait outside.”
“Don’t go, Mommo.”
“I think I should.”
“Glinda,” says the white-haired man, a counselor called Jim R., “I need to ask you some specific history of what brought you here, and I think you might be more comfortable talking if your mother isn’t here.”
“Okay” she says.