I'll Be You(70)

But after five months of talking it through with GenFem, I thought I saw a new truth behind this stillness: It wasn’t peace, it was stasis. I no longer wanted to remain motionless, too. And yet it still hurt me to see the wounded expression on his face. He truly didn’t understand why I didn’t want to stay where we were, just the two of us, forever together.

I banished him to the guest room until he came to his senses. And as I watched my husband move his pajamas and toothbrush down the hall, looking like a kicked hound, I felt a strange kind of victory. For the first time in my life, I was taking a firm action—a hard action—for my own good. All these months of emotional labor with GenFem had shown their worth. I was becoming a strong woman. I thought I was finally on the path toward the life I deserved.

Iona told me that it might take a few weeks before Chuck would see the light, but that he would eventually come around. She was wrong. He would never sleep in the master bedroom with me again.



* * *



—

That first night alone in our big king bed, I dreamed a child into existence: the baby that Chuck and I might have conceived. A little girl, towheaded like her parents, folds of soft fat at her wrists, thighs like meringue. Green eyes from Chuck, and dimples that revealed themselves when she laughed, just like the ones that Sam and I shared. She would grow up to be creative and a caretaker, like me, or controlled and thoughtful, like her father; or maybe she would deviate from us both and turn out to be funny, or wild, or studious. But for the duration of that dream, she was just a child, with all the potential in the world, waiting to see what fate would choose from all the possibilities that lay before her.

In my fantasy, she toddled in front of me, through a grassy field busy with bumblebees and sunflowers. I called to her, and she turned around so that I could see her face and I lit up with recognition: It’s you, my baby. And she lifted her arms to me, begging to be picked up, crying “Mama?” When she was in my arms—warm, smelling of soap, sticky with kisses—I suddenly felt all the potential that remained for me, for us together, mother and child. A warm yellow light poured through my heart.

And then the dream ended and my child vanished. I found myself alone in a dark, empty room, listening to the sounds of my husband farting in the guest bedroom down the hall. And all that was left inside me was rage, an all-consuming fire, hotter and brighter than the yellow light of hope that had so quickly faded away.





22




HERE’S ANOTHER TRIGGER MOMENT that I failed to ever share with Dr. Cindy, even though I knew that she’d want me to: the day that I found my sister passed out for the first time.

We were sixteen, back in Hollywood. The second season of our show On the Double had recently premiered and we were in the middle of a press tour that seemed to have no end. It was a beautiful sunny weekend. Back in Santa Barbara all of my old friends were swimming or at the beach, but Sam and I were stuck in a suite at the Beverly Hilton for two days of meet and greets with members of the media.

Magazines for teenage girls, entertainment websites, cable TV shows, foreign trade publications—I would imagine my face in their pages and cringe. Acting felt unnatural to me, but I had learned to grin and bear it, to hide behind the character I was playing. Press days, however, made me feel like a bug inside a vitrine, taxidermized and exposed and inhuman.

Our publicist positioned us side by side on a blue mohair couch, in coordinating denim-skirted outfits, our makeup heavy and TV-ready. “Be funny, be upbeat.” She smiled at us, her faux friendliness nevertheless laced with a steely disapproval, as if she expected the worst from us. “And remember to be on-brand. This is a family-friendly show, so nothing off-color, nothing racy. Remember your primary audience is girls who are still in training bras. So we show only our best behavior, OK?”

She sat in the back of the room as the media entered, one by one, to examine us under their magnifying glasses. The questions were the same every time: “How are the twins on your show different from you two in real life?” “What do you like about working together?” “What’s the best part of being a twin?”

I obligingly dimpled and dimpled and dimpled on cue, trying to give every press outlet a different answer even though the questions were identical. I didn’t want them to get in trouble for not getting a good interview. Print journalists sat across from us with poised pens and whirring recorders, and when they didn’t write my words down I worried that I was being too boring. Behind them, I studied the face of our publicist, looking for the microscopic facial twitches that might reveal that I’d said something off-brand. My skirt was too short, the T-shirt made me sweat, and the mohair couch irritated the backs of my legs, but I didn’t dare complain.

Sam took center stage, of course. She was impish, a little sassy, delighted to be the center of attention, quick with a witty response. The journalists loved her, which left me mostly off the hook. But by the end of the eighth interview the repetition had gotten to her and she grew surly, short-tempered, monosyllabic with her answers. She kicked the edge of the hotel room coffee table until it scuffed and then she asked to go to the bathroom. When she came back, her pupils were large and her breath smelled like buttered gasoline, but she was loose again, and silly.

I thought I knew why, and I hated it.

Another hour, two more interviews, and we were finally released for lunch. Sam said that she needed to get something from our hotel room, so my mother and I headed down to the restaurant alone. The burger that we ordered for Sam grew cold and congealed; the ice in her root beer melted into a watery syrup. “What on earth could she be doing?” my mother muttered, looking at her watch. “She won’t have time to eat before the afternoon session and you know how Sam is when she has low blood sugar. Will you go check on her?”