In Pieces(91)
I began to dodge her, to wait in my bedroom upstairs so I could sneak, robber-like, into the kitchen as soon as I heard the pop of her bedroom door closing. And there was always the pop of doors closing, a door-slamming opera that echoed through the house from early morning till late at night. I never knew if it was a loss of hearing on her part, or a conversation meant for me to interpret. And if it was, then what was she saying?
June 25, 2007
Tonight. I was in the kitchen cooking dinner when Baa’s report came in and after she hung up the phone we just stood there, staring at each other. It seems that Baa has several small growths?… tumors?… in various locations all over her body—remnants of the breast cancer she beat ten years ago, or so we thought. The doctor reassured her that there are countless drug options available, treatments that they’ve had some success with, and advised her to start immediately. “Well,” she said after a while, “it had to be something, sometime.” Then laughed, saying she was just happy she wouldn’t be slowly losing her mind. That was one disease she didn’t want. “Okay, there you go,” I said. “Thank God for small favors.” I put a big glass of red wine in front of her and when she went to call Rick and Jimmie, I called Peter, then Eli, and finally Sam.
She knocked on my door around 9:00, said she wanted to be with me and that she was a little bit drunk, maybe. She was a lot drunk maybe. I told her to get into bed and we could watch TV, but instead we ordered books for her online. Everyone has to face death sometime, she said to me with a slur. I told her it was a good thing she was drunk. Who wouldn’t be? I’ve always been uncomfortable when she’s messy drunk like that, but tonight I tried to let it go, to move past it, to let her be fragile. She’s scared I guess and wanted to be with me. I’ll remember that always. It’s going to be hard to understand all that I feel about her. I’m going to lose her.
Once, when I was about twelve, I asked my mother, “How do you get a boy to like you?” She thought for a moment, then answered, “You listen to everything he says and laugh at all his jokes.” Now I was sixty-three and she was eighty-seven, cancer-ridden and savaged by the unsuccessful chemo treatments, but whenever she’d hear me starting dinner, she’d mosey out of her room with a paperback mystery in hand, then patiently sit at the kitchen counter, listening to everything I said and laughing at all my jokes. We chatted sweetly, stiffly discussing the kids or their kids, or Princess and her daughter, anything to keep talking. But then we’d be struck with it. The quiet. If I looked at her, she’d look back down at her book, and when I turned to the sink, I could feel her eyes on my back. I’d clamp my mouth closed in a soundless scream, then turn back toward her, my face showing nothing as I pleasantly chopped and stirred and served—a do-si-do that went on and on. I felt helplessly locked into step, unable to shake it off and reach out to her.
On the rare mornings when I didn’t have to get up before the sun, when I didn’t face the hour-long, traffic-filled drive to and from Burbank, where the Brothers and Sisters sets were located, I’d wake to the slam of a door, followed by the nonstop barking of Baa’s look-alike dog, the dog that peed every time I tried to be nice to it, the dog that went insane, running up and down beside the steamy, overheated pool while Baa swam her few laps. On those mornings, I’d sit in my bed, or on the floor of my room, unable to breathe. Baa, in the ongoing battle for her life, was downstairs swimming in the pool, while I was upstairs drowning in nothing, feeling panicked and futureless, as if I were the one who was dying. And when I felt like I was going down for the count, I finally reached out for help.
Dr. Dan Siegel quietly led me into his glass-filled office, then sat in a straight-backed chair, while I sat on the sofa across from him with my heart pounding. After a moment of stillness, he gently asked what had brought me there. Slowly, I started telling him about my life, dribbling it out until it became an emotional flood, as if I’d been storing everything up, waiting for this one moment. I relived memories, episodes, and events that had happened long ago, but which now felt fresh and scab-less.
One day, after we’d met a handful of times, Dan asked me in a casual tone if I could name all the different parts of myself. “Parts or fragments or aspects or personalities, whatever feels right to you,” he continued.
“I call them pieces” was my reply. No one had seen me like that before, as being a divided person, and at the time I hadn’t yet begun to see it clearly myself. But, as if it were a question I’d answered before, I immediately, without hesitation, named all the pieces of who I am. From incident to incident in my life, I could name the parts of me that had been most present, and if any others were involved. Little by little, memory by memory, I could see it, could feel the system of behavior, the cooperation and alienation between the members of my interior family. It was something that I had known instinctually but had never pulled into the front of my awareness and certainly never articulated. The powerful, elusive Madwoman who had always frightened me and the deeply sad Ragamuffin who had fueled much of my work but whom I despised and would banish from my mind, except when acting. Then there were the easy ones, the red rage of Fire, reliable Rock, and Airy, the entertainer. Dan urged me to talk to each of them, to visualize them in my brain like they were separate people and, as if I were playing a game of “Red Rover,” to finally call each one over, to allow them to join the group, and me. It was a version of the very scene I had played in Sybil.