Then Again - Diane Keaton [4]
“To whom it may concern”? Who was I kidding? And why was I trying to be such a good girl when what I really felt had nothing to do with pretend rules on a subject I was terrified of? This is what I didn’t write down but have never forgotten. Dave Garland and I were passing notes in Mrs. Hopkins’s ninth-grade algebra class one day. Dave was “really neat,” but he “couldn’t stand me.” He ended our exchange with six words: “You’ll make a good wife someday.” A wife? I didn’t want to be a wife. I wanted to be a hot date, someone to make out with. I wanted to be Barbra Streisand singing, “Never, never will I marry; born to wander till I’m dead.” I never did marry. I never “went steady” either. While I dutifully continued to please my parents, my head was in the clouds, kissing unattainable greats like Dave Garland. I figured the only way to realize my number-one dream of becoming an actual Broadway musical comedy star was to remain an adoring daughter. Loving a man, and becoming a wife, would have to be put aside. So I continued to pursue unattainable greats.
The names changed, from Dave to Woody, then Warren, and finally Al. Could I have made a lasting commitment to them? Hard to say. Subconsciously I must have known it could never work, and because of this they’d never get in the way of my achieving my dreams. You see, I was looking for bigger fish to fry. I was looking for an audience. Any audience. So what did I do? I auditioned for everything available while mastering nothing in particular. I was in the church choir and the school chorus. I tried out for cheerleader and pom-pom girl. I auditioned for every talent show and every play, including The Taming of the Shrew, which I didn’t understand. I was a class debater and editor of the YWCA’s newsletter. I ran for ninth-grade secretary. I even begged Mom to please help get me into Job’s Daughters, a Masonic-sponsored secret club where girls in a pageantlike atmosphere paraded around in long gowns. I wanted to be adored, so I chose to stay safe in the arms of Jack and Dorothy; at least, that’s what I thought.
Now that I’m in my sixties, I want to understand more about what it felt like to be the beautiful wife of Jack Hall, raising four children in sunny California. I want to know why Mother continually forgot to remember how wonderful she was. I wish she would have taken pride in how much fun it was for us to hear her play “My Mammy” on the piano and sing, “The sun shines east, the sun shines west, I know where the sun shines best—Mammy.” I don’t know why she didn’t appreciate how unusual it was when she took me to a room in a museum where a marble lion was missing the right side of his face; he also had no feet. The towering goddess in the other room had no arms. Mom was oohing and aahing, “Diane, isn’t it beautiful?”
“But everything’s lost. They don’t have their parts,” I said.
“But don’t you see? Even without all their parts, look how magnificent they are.” She was teaching me how to see. Yet she never took credit for anything. I wonder if her lack of self-esteem was an early symptom of forgetting. Was it really Alzheimer’s that stole her memory, or was it a crippling sense of insecurity?
For fifteen years Mother kept saying goodbye: goodbye to names of places; goodbye to her famous tuna casseroles; goodbye to the BMW Dad bought her on her sixty-first birthday; goodbye to recognizing me as her daughter. Hello to Purina cat food molding on paper plates in her medicine chest; hello to caregivers; hello to the wheelchair guiding her to her favorite show—Barney—every morning on PBS; hello to the blank stare. Somewhere in the middle of the horrible hellos and tragic goodbyes, I adopted a baby girl. I was fifty. After a lifetime of avoiding intimacy, suddenly I got intimate in a big way. As Mother struggled to complete sentences, I watched Dexter, my daughter, and a few years later little Duke, my son, begin to form words as a means to capture the wonder