Cyclorama, page 6
*
Depressive Manor was an oppressively warm and dank five-story apartment building located above the Hollywood Diner in downtown Skokie. The diner served any sort of meal at all hours it was open, but for some unidentifiable reason its dark, carpeted stairwell seemed to preserve an eternal odor of boiled cabbage and beef stew, neither of which was actually on the menu. Judith couldn’t say for sure if the bleak establishment and the dwellings above it attracted depressives or turned people into them; she didn’t even know which was true for herself or her mom.
She stomped up the stairs, jingled her keys, slowly opened each lock, then threw open the door, slammed it behind her, and turned on the hallway light before yelling “Ma, I’m here!” The intent was not so much to dramatically announce her arrival as it was to give her mother time to stop whatever she might have been doing—vegetating in bed, watching shitty TV shows, snarfing crap out of the fridge, hurling in the bathroom—and let her pretend she hadn’t been doing any of those things. Mr. Densmore had certainly made the right choice when he cast Judith as Edith Frank, vainly trying to comfort a daughter who kept pushing her away, but that wasn’t the way it was supposed to work for her in real life, was it? At seventeen, shouldn’t she have been the one who still got to play the child?
“Ma?”
Whenever Judith came home, she felt like a detective gathering evidence of what her mother had done with her day. When Judith would ask how her mother was, Estelle Nagorsky would say she was “just fine, thank you” and had spent the day doing “chores,” but Judith would invariably find some stray detail that told a truer, more troubling story: crumpled Oreo cookie boxes stuffed in the bottom of the trash; an empty mouthwash container that had been full in the morning; and, one time, a stuffed toilet with cigarettes and a pair of condoms floating around in it, all of which Judith had extracted with a ladle and plopped into the trash. She had asked no questions.
“Hey, Ma?”
Judith tried to sublimate all the thoughts that assailed her whenever she didn’t know where her mother was: Where were the first aid kits? Would the CPR she’d learned in Health Ed actually work? She cased the apartment, looking for a note like the one Lorna had forged for her father: Went out to run errands. Be back soon; Went to throw myself onto the Edens Expressway. Be back never. Judith wrenched open the rear kitchen door: still misting out there; the back steps were creaky and wet. She walked down in her socks and noted that her mom’s Cutlass was parked in its space. What was it doing there if her mom wasn’t home? She cupped her hands to look through the driver’s-side window. No one inside. No telltale smell of exhaust.
Judith took her socks off, balled them up, and walked back upstairs barefoot—both terrified and oddly exhilarated by the possibility that her mother might have disappeared for good. She imagined living alone there until autumn, when she would move into an apartment closer to college. She could invite friends over for dinners or parties as opposed to having them drop her off in front of the building, fearful of which Mom they would encounter at home: the antisocial catatonic one; her jittery, manic counterpart; or the terrifying personification of rage.
Judith reentered the apartment. Her mother was standing in the front hallway, shaking out a black umbrella.
“Ma, where were you?”
Estelle Nagorsky took off her raincoat and hung it on a hook by the front door. “Where was I?” Her tone was nonchalant, vaguely sarcastic. “I was out having dinner.”
“Wasn’t I supposed to be home so I could make you dinner?”
Estelle went into the kitchen, twisted a burner on the stove, and lit a cigarette. “I suppose,” she said. “But since you were eating with your father, it didn’t make sense to wait.”
“I was worried,” Judith said.
Estelle smoked. “Why?”
Judith’s mind cycled through all the obvious responses: Because, as far as I know, you’ve spent the last three months inside; Because I thought you might be dead. She settled on “No reason.”
“Hey,” she asked her mother. “Do you have plans Friday night? Wanna go see a play?”
“Do I strike you as someone who has plans?” Estelle Nagorsky asked.
*
The day she had tickets for Kabuki Macbeth, Judith got home from Anne Frank rehearsal at seven. Depressive Manor was as depressing as it always was, but her apartment less so, it seemed. The shades were up. There was classical music on the radio, and the place smelled like perfume that called forth distant memories. It was the same Chanel “Russia Leather” her mother had worn to symphony concerts, musicals, and downtown restaurants before the divorce.
Mrs. Nagorsky stepped into the hallway, all in black—a tight leotard top, a short leather skirt, and hose. (Her mother never wore “tights,” only “hose.”) The only bit of color was the slash of bloodred lipstick. The effect was not so much slutty as an imitation of sluttishness, the sort of clichéd outfit an inexperienced actress might wear to audition to play a streetwalker in Sweet Charity. Judith had opinions about the outfit because it was the one her mother had purchased for her from Crawford’s for her sixteenth birthday; Judith had rejected it, saying that if she wanted to act like a whore, she would, but she saw no need to dress like one.
“You look great, Ma,” Judith said.
As Judith drove east to Wisdom Bridge, she listened to her mother prattle on about her memories of the theater: the time Avon Long winked at her at the curtain call of Porgy and Bess; the time she had seen Hair and only the fat actors got naked, while all the “good-lookers” wore T-shirts and shorts; the time she walked out on A Raisin in the Sun because she thought Lorraine Hansberry “had a chip on her shoulder.”
Judith parked on Custer Street and walked arm in arm with her mom. Nearby, a group of boys about Judith’s age were practicing kung fu kicks on a dented mailbox.
“That your mother?” one of the kids asked Judith. He had long, skinny legs and his face looked as though it were frozen in a permanent masque of laughter.
Judith pulled her mother along. “C’mon, Ma.”
“Hey, can I date your mother?” the kid shouted. “She’s lookin’ fine as hell.” His friends laughed.
“Lovely neighborhood you’re taking me to,” said Mrs. Nagorsky.
Judith spoke through clenched teeth. “Ma, shut up; let’s just go.”
When Judith and her mother entered the theater, a couple in their fifties stood to let them into their row. The man was wearing a navy-blue sport jacket, tan slacks, and a white shirt with a plain red tie. The woman wore a forest-green pantsuit and a cream-colored blouse, a string of gobstopper-sized pearls around her neck. The couple grinned at Judith and her mother.
“Where’s the doctor tonight?” the man asked.
“Pardon me?” asked Judith.
“Dr. Nagorsky,” the man said. “Are you the daughter?”
“Oh, she has to be the daughter,” the woman said. “Herb talks about you all the time—his daughter the actress. What’s your name? Julie?”
“Judith,” said Judith.
“That’s right,” the woman said. “I knew it started with a J.”
Judith answered the couple’s questions with “Mm-hms” and “Uh-huhs” while her mother fiddled with her hands as if she were Lady Kabuki Macbeth, trying to rub away evidence of her ex-husband’s new life.
They were Sanford and Beverly Pinker. They lived in St. Joseph, Michigan, but kept a studio apartment on Chicago’s Gold Coast where they stayed on weekends, now that their kids were out of the house. He’d worked for thirty years in the engineering department of the Whirlpool Corporation. They had a son who attended the University of Chicago business school and a daughter engaged to a “fella” who worked in “site location” for Burger King.
Mrs. Nagorsky rubbed her hands. “I’m uncomfortable; I just feel so uncomfortable,” she said. “When did they say the show would be over?”
“It’ll be over when it’s over.” Judith tried to refocus her mother’s attention. “Look at the set design, Ma. So minimalistic; just shoji screens and ikebana plants. Isn’t it lovely?”
Mrs. Nagorsky shifted her head rapidly with tight little movements as if she were a paranoid bird. “What time does it let out?” she asked. “What time did they say?”
“It’s right about to start,” Judith said.
Mrs. Nagorsky made for the aisle.
“Ma, where’re you going?”
Mrs. Nagorsky waved off her daughter. “Stay, stay; I’ll be right back.” She walked toward the exit, both hands clutching her purse.
Judith sat and waited. All the seats in the theater were occupied save for the one between her and Mrs. Pinker. The doors closed. A gong sounded. The house lights dimmed. Judith climbed over the Pinkers as three women wearing black kimonos and white masks appeared center stage. The moment one asked, “When shall we three meet again?” Judith was out the door.
At the corner of Howard and Custer, the same teenagers who had been kicking the mailbox were taking turns trying to balance atop a trashcan they had turned on its side.
“That lady was buggin’,” the skinny kid said. “She was B-U-G-G-I-N! Buggin’!”
Buggin’. A more polite word than the one Judith would have chosen, but she knew who they were talking about, and it was an apt enough description of her mother. Buggin’. Probably, if she could see herself in a mirror, she’d look like she was buggin’ too.
Judith walked down the block, then stopped. Shit. Where she’d parked the car was an empty, sedan-sized space. Of course the car was gone; of course Estelle Nagorsky was physically incapable of allowing her daughter to have a normal evening.
There was a pay phone in the parking lot of Big Rick’s Adult Books. Judith kicked aside some gravel and broken beer bottle glass scattered in front of the phone. She shoved coins into the slot and dialed her home number. She let it ring. No answer. She called again. Same thing. She reached into the inside pocket of her jacket and took out the paper with Fiona’s phone number on it. When Fiona answered, Judith said, “Thank God.”
A quarter of an hour later, Fiona pulled up in front of Wisdom Bridge in a maroon Triumph Stag blasting Graham Parker—“Temporary Beauty.” Judith got in the car and the girls embraced.
“Oh my God, you’re a lifesaver,” said Judith. “How are you?”
“Top hole,” Fiona said. “What about you?”
“Bottom hole,” said Judith. “Is that a phrase people use?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Fiona said. “But it sounds good; perhaps I’ll try it.”
“I don’t mean to be such a bother, but I think my mom might’ve done something stupid to herself. And by ‘stupid’ I mean even stupider than usual.”
“No bother at all. Where to?”
“Is it okay if we go to my apartment? Do you have anyplace you need to be?”
“Not a place in the world, love.”
When they got to the Hollywood Diner, Judith directed Fiona into the lot behind it. She found herself both heartened and dismayed to see her mother’s car already here. Part of her had been morbidly looking forward to an evening spent with Fiona, cruising from police stations to emergency rooms, showing old pictures of her mom (because she didn’t have any new ones) and asking if anyone had seen this woman. She had entertained vaguely romantic visions of holding hands with Fiona and walking futilely alongside canals and the lakefront, then of sobbing in the Grenfalls’ living room and telling them she guessed she would have to live with her dad and stepmom. The Grenfalls would pour her a glass of sherry and say things like “ta,” “cheerio,” and “jolly good” and tell her certainly not, Judith could stay with them as long as she liked.
“Be right back,” Judith told Fiona.
“Do you want me to come upstairs with you, love?”
“Lord, no.” Judith could only imagine the conversation if Fiona entered Depressive Manor: “What is that grotty odor, Judith?” “Why, which odor do you mean, Fiona: the Listerine or the caramel scent of Roach Motels?” She climbed the back steps fast, hoping speed would overwhelm her gnawing sense of dread.
Lights were on in the kitchen, bathroom, and living room.
“Ma?”
Estelle Nagorsky was on the living room couch. Her hose-clad feet were up on the magazine table. She looked quite pleased with herself as she smoked a cigarette, flicked ash into the tray she held in her palm, and watched shit on TV.
“Ma, what the fuck?”
Mrs. Nagorsky put the ashtray down. “You’re early,” she said. “How’d you get home?”
“How I got here is immaterial. What is material is that you busted out of the show like a fugitive from a fricking chain gang and I had to chase you down to make sure you were all right. Are you?”
Mrs. Nagorsky regarded her daughter as if she were a construction project going on outside that was interrupting her important television viewing. “Of course I’m all right. What time is it?”
“Eight forty,” Judith said. “What the fuck difference does that make?”
“They told me the show let out at ten thirty.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So I had at least another hour before I had to go pick you up.”
“Oh, that was your plan? That would’ve been nice to know.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Nagorsky, “do you know what else would’ve been nice to know? That you got those tickets from Herb and we would be sitting with his two friends.”
“I had no idea who those two twats were,” Judith said. “Why do you have to do this every single time? Why do you have to make everything about you? Why can’t you ever prioritize my needs over your own?”
“About me? I never ask you a thing. All I want is to be left alone to read my books and watch my shows. It wasn’t my idea to see some Oriental Macbeth. And why can’t people just do plays the way they were written instead of jazzing them up the whole time? If they want to jazz them up, let them write their own play.”
“Ma, you are buggin’.” Judith felt triumphant when she uttered that last sentence, but by the time she got back to Fiona’s car, her hands were shaking. “What a nightmare,” she said.
“Got something for you.” Fiona reached into the back seat, produced a bottle of white wine, and poured Judith a mug of it. “That’ll put some hair on your chest, love,” she said.
Judith took a sip, then licked her lips. She knew nothing about wine save for what she sometimes smelled on her mother’s breath or what she saw poured into goblets at her father and wicked stepmother’s condo, all of which she felt predisposed to despise. Whatever this was, though, she felt as though she innately understood it. “Shit,” she said. “This is really good.”
“Yeah, it’s not tosh, is it?” Fiona said.
“No. Definitely not tosh. Are you having some?”
“Not while I’m driving, love. Maybe after Kabuki Macbeth.”
They got back to Wisdom Bridge near the end of the first intermission and found their seats just as Sanford and Beverly Pinker were returning from the lobby. Mr. Pinker looked at Fiona, then at Judith. “Your mother’s looks have improved,” he said.
For the next hour and a half, Judith stared, immobile, chin cupped in her hands as she watched the play. In that brief time the rest of the world fell away: her father’s cold indifference, her mother’s madness, Ty Densmore’s mediocrity, Rob Rubicoff’s bullshit about “improper behavior,” the world that murdered the Franks and Van Daans. Instead, Judith found herself completely immersed in this Japanese Scotland of the imagination—its costumes, its makeup, its atmosphere, its language. She wanted so badly to do this herself, to create a world so much more lovely than the one she lived in, to create something that could make her and everyone around her see that hope and beauty were still out there somewhere. The moment after the final blackout, she rose to her feet, threw her hands out in front of her, and clapped, clapped, clapped.
When the applause died down and the houselights went up, Fiona whispered to Judith, “So tomorrow, then?”
“Tomorrow, then, what?” asked Judith.
“Tomorrow, shall we come back to see it from the beginning?”
And that idea was so perfect and so unexpected that Judith hugged her friend and said yes, yes! She put her arm in Fiona’s and they went to the box office, where Fiona purchased two Saturday night tickets on her charge card. “Don’t fret about the cost,” Fiona said. “Mutti and Da believe in subsidizing cultural education, and I’m sure they’ll be happy I finally found a friend.”
“Is it hard for you to find friends?” Judith asked as the two of them walked out of the theater.
“Harder than you might expect,” Fiona said. “It’s a bit of a bugger, really.”
The same teens were still on the corner; they were passing around a joint. “Evenin’, my ladies,” the lanky, grinning kid fond of the term buggin’ said. “Can I ask y’all a question?”
“Yes, love?” Fiona asked.
“Uh, yeah,” the kid said. “I was just wondering if you two fine ladies were lookin’ for a night on the town or whether you were of the lesbian persuasion.”
Judith was about to let loose with a torrent of expletives, but Fiona spoke first. “That sort of question’s a bit beneath you, isn’t it?” she said.
A couple of the other kids laughed. “Dah-yumn!” the lanky kid said.
“Look,” Fiona said. “If my friend and I are lesbians, that’s really no business of yours. And if we’re not, well, then, you just ruined your chance for a ‘night on the town,’ now, didn’t you? Come on, then, doesn’t a handsome young man have anything better to do than drink soda, smoke reefer, and harass young women?”
“Well,” the kid said, “it ain’t as if anyone’s gonna buy us beers.”
“Such a sad story,” Fiona said. “Fine young men with no one to buy them beer. I’ll tell you what: If we buy you that beer, will you refrain from this ungentlemanly behavior?”
