Heart of Glass Read online

  In the car on the way back to New York, while Michael chattered away and fiddled with the radio stations, I occupied myself with feeling horribly guilty about being a cheater. I hadn’t planned to sleep with Oedi; I thought I’d just sort of flirt and maybe make out with him on the sofa. I was also freaking out about not having brought my diaphragm with me.

  I’d felt older and even a bit nostalgic looking at the old house in Belmont—as if I’d moved on, grown up. But in truth I’d only moved out. Intimidated by and disenchanted with film school, experienced yet unsophisticated, resentful of Michael but nevertheless clinging to him, I was weighed down by a lot more baggage than just my Ciao! suitcase. I was older now, yes, but no more mature than the lovely teenage girl standing in front of our old house, clutching the cat that used to be mine.

  chapter three

  MOMMIE NEAREST

  When we got back to Michael’s apartment, his answering machine was blinking. He was excited, expecting to hear about a callback for a David Rabe play supposedly heading to Broadway. But it wasn’t his agent; it was my mother. She’d found me. I stood there in the dark, wondering how she’d gotten Michael’s phone number.

  “Hello, Wendy.” She paused and took a theatrical drag on her cigarette. The sound of her voice, slightly nasal, with its sneeringly arch tone barely masking her fury at me, made me want to puke with fear. “I thought perhaps I’d inform you as to my plans for the remainder of your possessions.”

  I had basically walked out of our house in Belmont with a suitcase and the clothes I was wearing. Everything else, the contents of my bedroom, I had left behind. That was three months ago, which until this moment had seemed like light-years in the past.

  “I am now living in a lovely condominium in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Your things are here. I, of course, paid to have them shipped.”

  I couldn’t believe she had returned to Ridgefield, where, as a family, we had spent a torturous year with our mother becoming first the town nymphomaniac before devolving into a perpetually-nightgown-wearing drunk. I was also surprised that the State of Connecticut had let her back in. I thought that when she had tried to return her Volkswagen Dasher because “it was a lemon” to the governor, Ella Grasso, by driving it up onto the poor woman’s front lawn and leaving it there, she’d been banned for life from returning. Apparently I was wrong, and she was now a half an hour away by car.

  “I am willing to sell you your yearbooks, clothes, and ­records. Oh, and do you want your portrait?” She took another suck on her Merit.

  Charcoal drawings of me and my sister had been done by Pedro Menocal, who had painted Mother’s portrait when she married my stepfather in the Dakota. Pedro had done ours later, while we were living in London—when I was eleven and my sister was ten—and they hung in pretty gold, oval frames.

  “Uhhhh,” I croaked, bending over and clutching my stomach as the razor-winged butterflies escaped from their cage inside me.

  “I can sell them with or without the frames—that’s entirely up to you.”

  I could see her, sitting in her little flat, perched on the olive-green velvet chair with the pretty ornate carved legs, flicking her ash into a cloisonné ashtray on the marble-topped side table next to her.

  “I’ll telephone you later in the week, so we can negotiate a price. Good-bye.”

  She had such a talent for making me feel small, unloved, and unimportant. God, I hated her.

  Michael pushed the erase button, Mother’s message sounded like the high-speed voice of a chipmunk while it played backward, before disappearing.

  “Jesus, your mom is a fucking nutcase. What’s she going to do? Burn your stuff on the front lawn?”

  “Well, yeah . . . I mean, that’s probably on her list of options.” I suddenly imagined driving the Dart up to Ridgefield and staking out Mother’s condo. Maybe if I waited for her to go out, I could break in through a window or a back door and get some of my things. Or maybe I could hire someone to break in? Where did thugs for hire hang out in cutesy, little commuter towns? I mentioned this to Michael.

  He shook his head. “Not a good idea.”

  Rats, I thought. Of course he was right. I didn’t care so much about my stuff, just that she was using it as a way to get to me in a way that only she could. She still made me doubt myself, wonder if I really was the ungrateful child she’d told me I was when I was growing up. Walking away from her hadn’t resolved the feelings that she brought up in me. Those emotions weren’t just going to disappear overnight now that I had left her behind. In a way, I was still there, still in the relationship with her. Somehow wishing it were different, wishing I had a mother who could love me. I thought I’d made my getaway—but I was still in the shit.

  Mother didn’t call back that week or the next. Maybe she was dancing around a pile of my burning books and clothes or sticking pins in a voodoo doll of me—I didn’t care—I was glad for the reprieve, however temporary. Since her call, I had been having nightmares and tremendous anxiety. Taking advantage of my student health plan, I went to see a shrink named Lopez at the NYU clinic a few times. She was tall and thin, with dark, lustrous hair and café-au-lait skin. She dressed elegantly, exclusively in camel and black. Always wearing two-tone-colored clothes struck me as odd, but she consistently looked fabulous, and she was a shrink, right? We all had our little quirks. She lived in an airy, light-filled apartment with windows that looked out on Washington Square Park. She’d sit in an Eames chair while I blathered on about my problems.

  I told her about my recent hideous nightmares, which were always about being trapped at night in a glass case or being lost in a room full of taxidermic animals, like a sort of freaky natural-history museum with all the lights out. It was dark, and sinister, with terrifying, twisted faces surrounding me like the opening-credit sequence from Rod Serling’s seventies TV show Night Gallery.

  “Well,” Dr. Lopez said in her calm, low voice, “you’re clearly under a great deal of stress—the dreams are a manifestation of your fears. Your mother is a trigger. The next time she calls you and you pick up the phone, try instructing her to be civil. If that doesn’t work, simply inform her you are ending the conversation. Then put the receiver down.” Dr. Lopez recrossed her legs and pulled gently at the hem of her beige wool skirt.

  “You mean hang up on her?” I realized that as I was saying this, my eyes were bugging out.

  “But, you see, you are not hanging up on her. You’re giving her the opportunity to behave properly. And you are telling her that if she doesn’t, you will end the conversation.”

  “Wow.” It had never occurred to me to hang up on Mother. She was the one who hung up on me, generally after delivering a blistering critique of my character or her latest list of demands.

  Dr. Lopez put her hands up in a “Stop! In the Name of Love” position. “You need to learn to lay down some ground rules and protect yourself. Especially when dealing with such an irrational person.”

  “Okay, I’ll try.” I smiled weakly.

  I walked back through the park in the dusky, cold air under the fuzzy glow of the streetlamps, struggling with the mind-boggling notion of attempting to set boundaries with my mother. She had always run the show and had defined the limits, not me. How would I ever be able to defuse her? To not feel a slap across my face at the sound of her voice? I descended into the West Fourth Street subway station and shoved my token into the turnstile. In the overheated train car, I felt a trickle of sweat run down my back as I stared at the graffiti-covered walls, every space filled with a spray-painted obscenity, initials, or savage curlicue designs. I was so used to seeing it, I hardly noticed it anymore. But now it looked like the sound track of my mind, a terrifying roar, a vomit of confusion.

  • • •

  Michael had almost finished his renovation of the kitchen. He told me I could choose the paint color from a fan of shades. Barely thinking, I picked a pin
kish lavender that might have been passable in a discount department store ladies’ lounge but that looked out of place and rinky-dink in a kitchen. Something about seeing that kitchen painted such a horrible color convinced me that it was over between us. I shouldn’t have chosen it, he shouldn’t have let me. It was like our relationship—wrong.

  I was sitting on the living-room sofa, trying to do homework, staring at the cream-of-kidney wall when Michael came home.

  “Hi, sorry it took me forever, the subway was packed.” He took off his peacoat and draped it over a chair. “Should we just order? Chinese maybe?”

  I nodded and chewed on my pen.

  He started riffling through a drawer next to the phone where he kept all the take-out menus. “Whatcha working on?”

  “A paper on Citizen Kane.” We had watched it twice in class; my professor had seen it more than eighty times.

  “Oh, I love that film. Do you want me to help—look at what you’ve got so far?”

  He looked all eager-beaver, and I was annoyed that he seemed to think I couldn’t write a simple paper without his assistance. I loved the film and had been doing fine until now.

  “Um, no, thanks.”

  “You know that Welles didn’t actually write the movie script, don’t you? Herman Mankiewicz did, and Welles took all the credit.”

  “Well, that’s not in my textbook.”

  “But it’s true. He also tried to take credit for the cinematography that James Wong Howe created.”

  “Really?” I started leafing through the chapter of the book dedicated to the movie.

  “Absolutely. James Wong Howe invented deep focus and used it in Citizen Kane, but again Welles said he invented it.”

  “But Gregg Toland was the cinematographer.”

  “No, that’s wrong. It was James Wong Howe.”

  “Michael, it’s here in my textbook—see?” I got up off the couch and walked over to him to show him, using my finger to point to the paragraph about Toland’s groundbreaking techniques in the film.

  “That’s wrong!” Michael became agitated.

  “No, Michael, look—right here. It’s in my book. You’re wrong.” I chuckled smugly, relishing proving him incorrect.

  “I’m not!” He slapped me across the face.

  No one—besides my mother, of course—had ever hit me before.

  He immediately tried to take it back, but I was struck blind with rage.

  “You asshole!” I screamed, throwing the book at his head.

  “Wendy, stop! I—”

  In a furious rush of adrenaline, I grabbed him and pushed him as hard as I could across the room. “I fucking hate you!”

  He hit the wall with a thump. I dragged him along the wall toward the window and tried to throw him out, mushing his face against the glass. Holding his T-shirt in my clenched fists, I realized that what I actually wanted to do was push him out of my life.

  Letting him go, I grabbed my coat and walked out the door into the December evening. I started walking up Broadway to Jenny’s, stopping at every phone booth to try to let her know I was coming. The line was always busy because her Korean roomie was always on the phone to his girlfriend in Queens. When I made it to the building, I rang the buzzer, and she let me in. I was shaking and crying and fell into her arms when she met me at the elevator. When I raised my eyes to her face, I saw that it was covered in tears.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  She started to sob and took my hand as we entered the apartment. Her boyfriend, Pete, sat in the dining room with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a shot glass on the table in front of him. He looked the saddest I’d ever seen him.

  “Some psycho just murdered John Lennon in front of the Dakota.”

  • • •

  I crashed on the couch in the living room for a few days, refusing to talk to Michael each time he called. Jenny had never said that she didn’t like Michael, but ever since he’d called her feet “flippers” once when we were all out to dinner, she had cooled a bit on him. In his defense, she wore a size 11 shoe.

  I had met Jenny in my huge anthropology lecture class at BU two years before when the teacher, who was discussing taboos in society, mentioned the taboo of the student-teacher love affair. A handsome, reedy type, he wore a safari jacket and an ascot, like a faux David Attenborough. He clearly fancied himself quite a bit and suggested that it was almost always the student who was the aggressor in these forbidden relationships.

  A cream-skinned hand shot up about ten rows ahead of me, the nails impeccably painted Jungle Red.

  “Yes?” the professor called on the girl who belonged to the hand, and she stood up, tossing her butt-length, light blond hair behind her shoulders and sticking the beautiful manicured hand on her hip. She had the pretty, clean good looks of a model you’d see in a fashion magazine or a Sea Breeze commercial and dressed in the quintessential preppy style—clogs, jeans, and a Fair Isle sweater, with a white turtle­neck peeking out at the neck. I noticed her makeup was perfect. She was a typical shiksa goddess type, but with an edge, a snark factor that made her stand out.

  “It takes two to tango,” she declared emphatically, raising her chin defiantly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  She put both her hands on her hips now. “I said, it takes two to tango.” She delivered this line with a flourish, like a prized athlete delivering the final thrust or executing the perfect smash over the net.

  The class erupted in applause. Jenny flashed a winning smile and sat down. Wow, I thought, I want to be friends with her. I followed her out of class and back to her dorm, which was right next to mine in a little row of town houses off Commonwealth Avenue. We sat on the floor in her room, trading life stories, smoking Marlboro Reds, and eating Nestlé Crunch bars. She left for Barnard soon after, but we’d been friends ever since. Whenever we went to a party or even just walked down the street, all the guys looked at her, not me, but that was just the way it was. It never bothered me that she was the beauty and I was “the friend.”

  Although Jenny’s place was only ten blocks from Michael’s apartment, the neighborhood where she and Pete lived was quite different, more sketchy and run-down. Her building was between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive, with a single-room-occupancy hotel across the street. With the ongoing economic crisis of the city, thousands of mental patients had been turned out onto the street as the city scrambled to find shelter for them, and the homeless population grew visibly. The SROs were a Band-Aid for the problem, but created new ones: many people living on the fringes of society in close quarters, with easy access to drugs and alcohol. People constantly hung out the windows, shouting out to someone in the street, playing loud music, partying. One man hung around on the sidewalk all day, wearing paint-encrusted clothes and a potato sack over his face. We called him Potato Man; he seemed harmless.

  Jenny’s apartment was prewar, with high ceilings and wood floors—but the walls were coated in layers of paint and grime, and continuous wear had scuffed the floor. The furniture had been salvaged from the street mostly or left behind by the prior tenants. The tatty, white-gray foldout sofa, where I was currently sleeping, we dubbed “the golf course” for its lumpiness and bulging springs. A few sad armchairs and a wooden-crate coffee table accompanied it, and a big desk sat in the corner where Pete did his studying and cramming for exams. One wall held bookshelves sagging under the weight of all the books former tenants, mostly Columbia and Barnard students, had read while they lived there. Three or four copies of The Powers That Be, The Prince, The Awakening, Jane Eyre, and the condensed version of the OED they used to give away with a subscription to the New York Review of Books formed a veritable in-house syllabus. The stereo rested on the bottom shelf, and records lined the wall below along the floor. Even though it was a trifle dilapidated, with its scruffy furniture and a major cockroach problem, I loved that
apartment on Ninety-seventh Street because Jenny and Pete lived there. It was a place I was always welcome, where I felt safe and accepted for just being myself.

  There was one bathroom, a kitchen, a dining room, and two small bedrooms besides Jenny and Pete’s, where their roommates lived. A Korean American kid named Hee-Jon lived in the back bedroom—I had never seen him actually—and a guy named Anthony lived in the room behind the kitchen when he wasn’t at Juilliard studying to be an actor.

  I came home from class one evening to find Jenny putting groceries away in the kitchen. “Ugh—Michael just called, sounding all hangdog. You’re gonna have to talk to him sometime, Vend.”

  “What’s for dinner, honey?” I asked, ignoring her advice.

  “I’m making fish for supper, with green beans and rice. I hope that’s okay?”

  “Great, thanks—I’ll clean up.”

  Jenny pulled a gallon bottle of cheapie white wine from the fridge and poured us each a glass. Daintily unwrapping a piece of Saint André, she put it on a wooden cutting board, with a little dish of shiny olives. She sliced a baguette and placed the pieces elegantly around the cheese. Jenny was a foodie before there were any. Per her instructions, Pete would take the butter out in the morning before he left so it would be room temperature and easier to spread on her croissant when she got up and had her breakfast.

  I heard the front door slam—Pete was home. He came barreling into the kitchen, dropping his heavy book bag on the floor with a loud thump, and took Jenny in his arms. They had a mad make-out session right there by the stove.

  “Must you suck face with such zeal?” I rolled my eyes. It was kind of embarrassing—as if they were going to drop and do it on the scuffed-up linoleum floor. They had been together for two years but still couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Theirs was the kind of deep, true love I dreamed of having, but I didn’t really need the floor show.

  “Sorry.” Pete leaned over and gave me a peck on the cheek. He was over six feet, with brown hair and little, brown, nubby teeth that Jenny called his “Indian corn.” He laughed a lot and was the kind of person who could do a lot of different things really well: speak French or Spanish, draw, tell jokes, pick up any instrument and play “Turkey in the Straw” on it immediately. Five years older than me, Pete was incredibly sweet, book smart, and kind. I was very much in awe of and had a sort of little-sister crush on him.