I went from music to art. Ours was a crafts-oriented art department and I loved the raw materials. There was silver, hunks of it. And, if you were good enough, gold. I made jewelry and cut silk screens and fired enamel. Once, with Mrs. Sutton, half of the husband-and-wife team who ran the department, I spent a whole afternoon pouring molten pewter into coffee cans of cold water. Wow! The shapes! I loved the Suttons. They approved all my projects, no matter how impossible to complete. I made a long-haired-Medusa silk screen, and an enamel choker of two hands holding a bouquet of flowers. I worked swiftly to finish a set of bells for a present for my mother. They featured the head of a lady with two arms forming a frame. Inside the frame were two bells with blue-heart nipples as the clappers. The bells made a fine sound.
I followed in the wake, academically, of my perfect sister. She was quiet, neat, and got straight A's. I was loud, weird, and obsolete. I dressed like Janis Joplin ten years after her death and I defied anyone to make me study or care. I still got by. Teachers, individuals, touched me. The Suttons and a few English teachers combined to make me care just enough-if you didn't point it out to me-not to become a druggie or a pothead or spend the free periods outside in the smoking lounge hiding doobies in my boots.
But I could never be a druggie because I had a secret. More than anything, I finally decided, I wanted to be an actress. And not just any actress but a Broadway one. A loud Broadway one. Ethel Merman, to be exact.
I loved her. I think I loved her even more because my mother said she couldn't sing and couldn't act but that her force of personality was so strong that she took the attention away from everyone else on stage. I wore an old feather boa and a sequined jacket that Father Breuninger held back for me from a church clothes drive. What I sang, as loudly and as charismatically, I hoped, as my idol, was her signature song. Traipsing up and down our spiral stairs with the bassetts as my audience, I belted out "There's No Business Like Show Business." It made my mother and sister laugh and my father loved it more than anyone. I couldn't sing either, but I would cultivate what Merman had, or try: force of personality. Bassetts at my feet. A little extra weight. Seven years of braces and rubber bands. There seemed no better time to break into song.
My obsession with Broadway and bad singing led me to friendships with gay boys in school. We sat outside Friendly's ice cream shop on Route 30 and sang the soundtrack from Bette Midler's The Rose. Gary Freed and Sally Shaw, voted the cutest couple in our school, walked by on their way to Gary's '65 Mustang after a Saturday-night sundae. They laughed at us in our black clothes and the silver jewelry we made for cheap in art class.
Sid, Randy, and Mike were gay. We were infatuated with people like Merman, Truman Capote, Odetta, Bette Midler, and the producer Alan Carr, who appeared on Merv in large, brightly colored muumuus, and who made Merv laugh in a way that other guests didn't. We wanted to be stars because as stars, you could get out.
We hung outside Friendly's because there was nowhere to go. We all rushed home to watch Merv if we knew Capote or Carr would be on. We studied Liberace. Once he flew in on a guy wire over his piano and candelabra with his cape spread out. My father loved him but my friend Sid didn't. "He's making an idiot out of himself and he's really talented," he said, as we smoked cigarettes outside Friendly's near the Dumpsters. Sid was going to drop out of school and move to Atlantic City. He knew a hairdresser there who, over the summer, had promised to help him out. Randy was sent to military school by his parents after "an incident in a park." We weren't allowed to talk to him anymore. Mike fell in love with a football player and got beat up.
"I'm going to live in New York when I grow up," I began to say. My mother loved the idea. She told me about the Algonquin Round Table and the people who sat there, how special they were. She had an outsider's mythology of New York and New Yorkers. She thrilled at the idea of me ending up there.
The year I turned fifteen my mother decided my birthday present would be a trip to New York. I think she worked herself up to go by pretending my excitement about it would keep her from collapse.
On the Amtrak train up from Philadelphia, she began to have a version of her panic. The dreaded flap. It grew worse as we sped toward New York. I was so excited to be going but as she rocked back and forth in her seat and her hands trembled-one on her right temple and one rubbing the space between her breasts-I decided we should go home.
"We'll come another time, Mom," I said. "It's okay."
She argued. "But we're on our way. You want this so much." Then, "Let me try."
She pushed herself. She fought to function normally. We should have turned back when we reached Penn Station. Both of us probably knew this. She was a mess. She couldn't walk upright. She had wanted to walk up from Penn Station to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Eighty-second and Fifth so we could see the shops and Central Park along the way. She had spent the weeks before planning it. Told me that on Forty-fourth was the Algonquin, and that I would get to see the Ritz and the Plaza, where she was sure my idol, Merman, often stayed. Maybe we would take a ride in a hansom cab around Central Park and see the famous apartment building, the Dakota. Bergdorf's and Lexington. The theater district, where Merman's musicals were playing. My mother wanted to stand in front of Sherman's statue and, as a daughter of the South, say a silent prayer. The duck pond, the carousel, the old men with their model sailboats. It was my mother's gift.
But she couldn't walk. We stood in the cab line out on Seventh Avenue and got in one. She could not sit up straight. She kept her head between her knees so she would not throw up. She said, "I'm taking my daughter to the Met."
"You all right, lady?" the cab driver asked.
"Yes," she said. She implored me to look out the window. "This is New York," she said as she stared at the dirty floor of the cab.
I don't remember the drive up save for crying. Trying to do what she said. The buildings and people were a blur to me. "I'm not going to make it," she began saying. "I want to, Alice, but I'm not going to make it."
The cab driver was relieved to reach the Met. At first my mother stayed in the backseat.
"Mom, let's just turn around and go hack," I pleaded.
"In or out?" the cab driver said. "What's the story?"
We got out. We crossed the street. In front of us were the monumental steps up to the entrance of the Met. I was trying to look around and take it in. I wanted to run up those steps thronged with people smiling and taking pictures. Slowly, with me leading my bent-over mother, we made it up some twenty stairs.
"I have to sit down," she said. "I can't go in."
We were so close.
"Mom," I said, "we made it, we have to go in."
"You go in," she said.
My fragile suburban mother sat in her good dress on the hot cement, rubbing her chest and trying not to throw up.
"I can't go in without you," I said.
She opened her purse and took a twenty from her wallet. She shoved it in my hand. "Run into the gift shop and buy yourself something," she said. "I want you to have a souvenir of the trip."
I left her there. I did not look back at her smallness on the steps. In the gift shop I was overwhelmed and twenty dollars didn't buy much. I saw a book called Dada and the Art of Surrealism for $8.95. I rushed back out after paying for it. People had surrounded my mother and were trying to help. There was no pretending now.
"Can we help you in some way?" a West German man and his concerned wife asked in perfect English.
My mother ignored them. The Sebolds did everything themselves.