I should have known my life would resemble tectonic plates not meant to hold still when my first sentence at the age of nine months was “eff routine”. I didn’t say it out loud, of course, or even know the words. But inside I felt their meaning. I couldn’t walk or talk yet, but I threw myself into the part. A restless method actor.
I knew, when at a year and a half, I reached over the top of my net playpen for the scissors my sister left too close to the edge of the dining room table, and cut an escape, only to find myself, in the next frame of the movie of my consciousness, at the bottom of the basement stairs, with new information about how many somersaults it takes to descend 13 stairs.
When, at age five, I played a game of dare with my five-year old neighbor that involved taking turns throwing kitchen knives at each other. Whoever flinched first lost.
When my idol, at nine, was Patty Hearst. That began every little girls’ fascination for trench coats and hot rollers, right? And fantasies of being forced by “bad guys” to rob banks while looking stylish and innocent? A victim, really. That was so cool. A no brainer that there’d be a guaranteed happy ending, based on her family’s wealth. Not like that Charles Manson scenario. That was ugly. Gruesome. Stephen King. Not my genre.
But the Patty Hearst story? I ran with the Patty Hearst story. Practiced, in my bedroom with the door closed, posing with a semi-automatic hairbrush/weapon after tightening the belt on my bathrobe/trenchcoat. I imagined I was being filmed by bank surveillance cameras, as I gingerly sidestepped in my bedroom, trying to appear both menacing and frightened, aware that it was all being played back in black and white on the TV in my parents’ living room. A Grimm’s fairy tale, narrated by Walter Cronkite.
My pretend parents gasp, lean forward in their stuffed Tudor chairs, (did Tudor’s even have stuffed chairs?) study the grainy image, to see if I am alright and how scary these bad guys look. Do they grab me and push me around? Do they make me shoot anyone? Should I send signals for help in the way I hold my shoulders or the way I look at the other gunmen?
My father pulls a fountain pen out of his breast pocket and begins writing a check with a lot of commas and zeroes because I’m worth it. My mother, while comforted that I’m still dressed well and my hair is nicely holding its curl, cannot stop making and remaking my bed, involuntarily pausing to admire her wallpaper choice, and staring at the porcelain doll collection on my shelf. She caresses their dusty, ceramic cheeks and remembers when I was a child. This was not how she imagined my life would turn out.
Buckling under the stress, my mother sits on my bed, and smoothes out the already smooth bedspread while staring at the photos of me in my English riding boots, jacket and helmet, clutching my blue ribbons in the same hand as my crop. How did this happen? She sobs into her hands. Why us?
When I was six or seven, playacting with some dolls in my room, using a different voice for each doll, a different accent even, my brother walked in on me and teased me, “You’re talking to yourself!!” The way he said it, indicated that talking to one’s self is a sin. It could make you blind! I was so humiliated I didn’t stick up for myself. But…but…but…I’m just playing! To prevent feeling the humiliation of being caught again, I stopped that altogether. He could tell other people in the house. They’d all know.
I have always benignly ignored my son, Vincent, when he is playacting about the house, a silent agreement between us that started when he was under two. He would whisper-talk both sides of dialogue while moving Lego men around forts he’d built, and I would go about my chores, dropping off piles of laundry, and acting as well. Acting as though I was too busy in my thoughts to notice that he was carrying on two sides of a conversation. He would stop if he thought I was eavesdropping. I played distracted, to give him the space to act freely.
I think Vincent also feels his life resembles tectonic plates not meant to hold still. He just joined a theatre class downtown. He didn’t want to go and protested vociferously the closer it came time to leave, even though he’d asked for the acting classes for a Christmas present. But when he walked into the large, one-hundred-year old brick houses that have been combined into one, took in the large, sliding metal doors that went from floor to ceiling, he said “I want to work in a place like this when I get older.”
He wants to do what I’ve only had the courage to do in my mind. He wants to get up on stage and act. In front of real people. Not imagined parents that aren’t even his, who have fountain pens for props, and an unusual compulsion to stroke bedcovers when under duress.
In front of real people. I can’t wait!
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