HALLIE EPHRON: Last week, it was my great pleasure to teach a three-day class on "Writing from Experience" for the Studios of Key West.
As always, I'm intrigued by the many reasons we humans seem to need to revisit our pasts.
Preparing to teach the class took me down the worm hole of my earliest writing. Not the fiction I write now, though surely my memories infuse my fiction. Or the how-to essays that channel me as a teacher.
But this early essay, written back when I was starting to write thirty years ago, is a painful examination of growing up in a family of writers and the ugly truth about my mother.
At that turning point in my life, my mother was very much on my mind. Because she was a writer. And I was only starting to recover from the belief that I was nothing like her, therefore I COULD NOT be a writer.
Preparing for my Key West class got me diving back into that early piece of writing. Looking at it now, it has me thinking about WHY do people like me write essays like this. Is it for others to read and understand? Or for me to examine what I think? Or is it to excise trauma by putting it on the page and examining it in the cold light of day and with the benefit of hindsight.
Eventually (decades later) I revised this essay and parts of it ended up in an essay I sold O Magazine. But I rather fancy an earlier version that this excerpt is from.
Here's how it starts...
MIRROR, MIRROR
Since I was a teenager, I have carefully contrived my life so that nothing reminds me of my mother. I have no pictures of her on my piano alongside my children. No letters. The few good pieces of jewelry of hers that I have are stashed in a safe deposit box. I erased her from my mind, from my space, and from my identify. She was a writer by profession. I was not. She lived in Beverly Hills. I lived in a New England suburb.
She had live-in help. I helped myself. She was an alcoholic.
I thought, if I can just outlive her, then I can stop worrying about becoming her. But now, as I approach the age at which she died, having for decades denied that even the smallest part of me resembles her, I find myself recognizing her in my body parts. Her stubby feet, red from the hot baths that I, too, love to take; her flat chest and thickening middle; her slim ankles and well turned calves. And her hands -- short, efficient fingers, the nails cut short for typing. To her, long painted nails were the stigmata women who didn't work. When I'd ask her what the wife of one of their friends did, she'd snort and quip, "Her nails."
When I think of my mother, it's not the carefully coiffed and suited screenwriter who, with my father, scripted dozens movies. It's certainly not the tall, slim, stylish young woman who was living the Bohemian lifestyle in the 1930's when my father met her and immediately proposed -- she told him she'd have to read one of his plays before she'd give him her answer.
The person I see is the much diminished matriarch who presided over Thanksgiving dinner in 1970, the year before she died.
That afternoon, my husband and I took the subway and then the cross-town bus to get to the modern East Side apartment building where they'd moved since quitting Los Angeles three years earlier. Even though it was Thanksgiving and we’d been invited, I was apprehensive walking the sixth floor hallway, never sure what we'd find. The door was ajar and the smell of roast turkey wafted from the opening. A good sign.
I knocked. I could hear the sound of a TV from somewhere inside. I knocked again, a little louder. My father’s once brisk, now shuffling footsteps approached. He opened the door, grinning his snaggle-toothed, slightly lopsided grin.
“You’re here!” he said, hugging us both. His jet-black hair was greased into place and he wore a jaunty red cravat at the neck. I caught a flash of matching red socks as he hitched up his trousers and tucked in an escaping shirttail.
“Phoebe, they’re here,” he bellowed.
“How is she,” I whispered.
“Fine, fine. Come in,” he said.
We stepped into the brightly-lit foyer that led to the living room.
“Mom,” I said tentatively. She cleared her throat and coughed.
She was lying on the sofa, almost lost in a billowing gold caftan. One arm, a twig, extended from the wide sleeve. A cigarette trembled from yellow-stained fingertips. Her head wobbled slightly on her long, slim and still proud neck. Gold clip earrings, flowers with a diamond at the center, anchored her jaw in place.
Her hair was cut short and, now thinning, stood out like the puff of a ripe dandelion. She took her free hand and pushed the hair straight up and back from her ear.
Her cheeks, flushed with broken blood vessels, gave the cruel illusion of robust health. Her eyes, once gray and sharp, seemed filled with warm brackish seawater. I leaned over to kiss her and inhaled Palmolive soap, Elizabeth Arden skin cream and Kent cigarettes. And beneath that, scotch whisky.
My mother was disappearing and she knew it. All but her belly which was an enormous hard mound beneath the golden caftan. It was growing while the rest of her was shriveling away to nothing. Water was building up in her abdomen, the doctors told us -- one of the symptoms of liver disease brought on by years of alcohol abuse. I had visions, not of impending death, but of a golden beach ball marooned on the white couch when the rest of her had finished becoming invisible.
I went on from there to talk about her increasing isolation due to hearing loss, compounded by the way women were relegated to observers in the movie making business. Her daytime perfection and nighttime rages.
How determined I was to never be anything like her.
And yet there I was, writing this essay. And here I am thirty years later, reading and revising it and discovering it's not half bad, taken in with the benefit of some distance.
I'm sure I'm not alone, finding that memories that were once too painful to write about and then reread, have become important enough that I want to write about then, and then read what I've written.
Does anyone else find that act of putting pen to paper is a way of exorcising demons?
