The day before my Yale audition, I took the train to Philadelphia, where the last round of auditions were held, borrowing the dorm room of my mother’s friends’ son, a medical school student named Steve Zamore, someone of the sort I was supposed to marry if all else failed. I got no sleep. Not a second. In an anxious fog, I rehearsed all night like someone praying in prison knowing they’ll be shot in the morning.
The next day, when I walked onto the empty stage, I saw a middle-aged WASP, apparently gay and so bored or hung over, his lids seemed at half-mast. He sat in the 5th or 6th row in semi darkness in a prove-it-to-me slump, and spoke from a distance. I believed he took one look and thought “New York Jew,” sealing my fate before I opened my mouth.
As I began, I focused on the imagined bloody knife in my hand, tried to stay present, to find the space where I could slip into the character and roar my hatred and fear and relief at having killed "my" mother. But fear and fatigue mixed with adrenalin and I was wobbly. I tried to catch the wave but it passed; I swam desperately after it, getting more and more shrill, less and less able to recover. I was awful.
There would be no place for me in the next class, of that I was sure. No place for me anywhere as I’d only gotten waitlisted this time at Old Vic and rejected at Julliard. Though I now had a maid’s room with 8 other roommates in an “iffy” part of the Upper West Side, I headed back to my parents’ house. I don’t recall a moment before or since when I felt more certain that life had caved in on me for good.
I stood before my mother in her bedroom, so shaken and ashamed, I couldn’t even look at her. I told her what had happened. In the silence that followed, eyes still lowered, I started to lean toward her, an instinctive tilt, hoping, perhaps, to be caught in her arms; wanting, with my whole being, a safe place to land. Then, Crack! She slapped me, hard, in the face. It was a very committed slap.
“You did it to spite me! You did it to spite me!” she cried and ran from the room.
I stood, I think, for a very long time with no words that were safe to say, no thoughts that were safe to think then lay down in the darkness of my brother’s old room for a second sleepless night, my mind in a strange suspension; I could not let myself think, though I remember there were tears. At dawn I rode the subway back to my crowded apartment with the splintered floors and lopsided toilet seat, in the crummy neighborhood, dodging drug dealers and addicts stung out along West 101st Street as I went.
There have been times over the years when I’ve looked back, trying to find the secret for my despair. With all the misery the world holds I’ve told myself, well, I hadn’t lost a home or a child or a war. And I’ve reasoned: To lose something, you must first have it. And to have it, you first must want it. So perhaps mine was the desolation of not wanting enough to have: a disturbance in desire.
But sitting here today, I know that’s not it. Really, that’s not it at all. I did want; actually I wanted desperately, to an extent I didn’t fully understand. But the worm in the heart of my wanting was the wanting of my mother. And if her wanting had words, they might have been: Whatever you are, I am part of. You are a reflection of me. You MUST succeed and I must be part of that success.
So part of what undid me, shamed and enraged me was that my wanting wasn’t completely mine. Perhaps my mother knew that. If I knew at the time, I couldn’t let myself know I knew. It was too dangerous so I kept myself in the dark. No matter how trivial the externals seem now; they bring to mind a friend who told me about a similar time in his life. “I’d stand on a subway platform, watch trains go by and think why can’t I jump? I’m too much of a coward to even do that.”
In the end, perhaps my mother was right. Perhaps I DID do it to spite her—never fully aware of the struggle I was in to get the beast off my back until decades later.
****
The Tony’s are over; the winners chosen though who loses, who wins . . . well, it’s such a thin line, especially in a room full of people pinching themselves to be able to make a living doing what they do. When I compare the Tony’s to the Academy Awards, I realize why my dreams were stubbornly fixed on the living stage. Doesn't even seem like the same business.
My daughter is dribbling on my leg, the wire over her right eyetooth starting to cut into me. She’s sound asleep, having nodded off for good around Chita Rivera’s dark number from The Visit. I switch off the TV and sit for a moment, thinking about how way leads to way in that Frost poem and how, along with him, I know that I will never be back at that particular crossing. And that my very winding way has led me to this place, a life lived somewhere between longing and gratitude but mostly listing toward the latter.
My daughter’s left arm is draped over my knee, her hand hanging limp; around her wrist a friendship bracelet she wove of colored threads in camp last summer. Though she has that small Southern Chinese stature, her fingers are long, and on the fourth finger of her left hand, she wears the ring my mother wore until the day she died, a gold, double band coiled in the shape of a snake, the little head with its diamond eye looking up at me.