Chapter Twenty-five
I had my fifteen minutes of fame, and amazingly, when the clock struck the quarter hour, I was still famous.
My mother and I had become, it seems, symbols that the world wasn’t on such a fast and ugly track, after all.
It makes sense, when you think about it.
We live in a time when the evening news is laden with one depressing story after another.
Sadly, none of it surprises us anymore. We sit in our living rooms, on our plush sofas that a decade’s affluence has allowed us to purchase, and we shake our heads at the stories.
Sometimes—boldly—we turn off the news or change the channel.
What we rarely do is ask why. Who has declared that murder is more newsworthy than the heartwarming story of an elderly woman who delivers Meals-on-Wheels to local AIDS sufferers?
But, as Dennis Miller says, I’m off on a rant.
It’s just that I have seen firsthand that celebrity is not the utopia I’d imagined, and it has made me question my interpretations of the world around me.
Famous people have more money . . . and less freedom; they have more choices .
. . and less honesty. Everything is a trade-off.
And when we let the media choose our heroes for us, we are lost already.
What Mom and I discovered was that we are not as isolated—any of us—as we believe. People want good news as well as bad, and they loved the story of my redemption. Girl hates mother . . . girl learns to love mother . . . girl gives up career to keep from breaking her mother’s heart.
People loved it. They loved me.
But most of all, they loved my mother. They heard the story of her whole life, laid out before them like a novel, and they cheered at what she had overcome.
She became something more than a celebrity .
. . she became one of them. An ordinary woman, and surprisingly, it made her more famous and more beloved.
I listen to her on the radio now, and I hear the responses. Every now and then she gets an angry caller, who labels her a hypocrite and a loser for abandoning her children.
The old Nora Bridge, I think, would have fallen apart at such a personal and accurate attack.
No more. Now, she listens and agrees, and then goes on, talking about the gift of mistakes and the miracle of family.
She hopes that people will learn from her bad choices.
And she wraps that spell around them, the one only she can spin, and by the end of the show, her listeners are reaching for tissues and thinking about how to find their way back to their own families.
The smart ones are reaching for the telephone.
There’s no substitute for talking to the people you love. Thinking about them, dreaming about them, wishing things were different . . . all of these are the beginning. But someone has to make the first move.
I guess that’s one of the things I learned this summer, but it’s not the most important; it’s not the thing I will hold close and pass on to my own daughter when the time is right.
The truths I gathered on Summer Island were so easy; they were lying right there on the grass.
I should have tripped over them. I would have, if only I’d opened my eyes.
As mothers and daughters, we are connected with one another. My mother is in the bones of my spine, keeping me straight and true. She is in my blood, making sure it runs rich and strong. She is in the beating of my heart.
I cannot now imagine a life without her.
I know how precious time is. I learned this from my friend, Eric. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I see him as he once was, laughing, standing at the bow of his sailboat, looking forward to the rest of his life. I hear his voice in the wind, I feel his touch in the rain, and I remember . . .
Life is short. And I know that when Eric loses his battle with cancer, I will find the missing of him unbearable. I will reach for the phone then and call my mother, and her voice will bring me back to myself.
A daughter without her mother is a woman broken. It is a loss that turns to arthritis and settles deep in her bones. This I know now.
I left Los Angeles as a hard, bitter, cynical young woman with a huge chip on her shoulder. On Summer Island, I became complete. And it was all so easy. I see that now.
I went in search of my mother’s life, and found my own.
“Do you think they’ll be coming home soon?”
Dean didn’t need to ask who Eric was talking about.
In the three days since Nora and Ruby had left, he and Eric had speculated endlessly about their return.
Dean knew that Eric often forgot their conversations on the subject.
Sometimes, they would end one discussion and moments later Eric would ask the familiar question again.
Do you think they’ll be coming home soon?
“They’ll be here any day,” Dean answered.
Although he always answered similarly, he wasn’t so sure, and the uncertainty was killing him.
It was Nora who called every night to talk to Eric; Ruby was always off somewhere, doing publicity or “taking a meeting.” She’d talked to them only once, and although she’d said all the right words to Dean, he’d felt a distance blossoming between them.
She was famous now. It was what she’d always wanted, even as a little girl; she’d dreamed of being loved by strangers. He couldn’t blame her for enjoying every minute of her newfound celebrity, and he couldn’t help wondering if there would still be a place in her life for him.
Eric coughed.
Dean turned away from the window. For a split second, the sight of his brother shocked him.
The past few days had been like that. Eric’s decline had come so suddenly that sometimes, from moment to moment, Dean was caught off guard.
Eric was so hollow, so shrunken; smiles were becoming rare.
He seemed exhausted by the simple act of breathing, and the medications didn’t stave off the pain for long.
“Can we go outside?” Eric asked. “I can see what a beautiful day it is.”
“Sure.” Dean ran outside and prepared everything. He set up a wooden lounge chair in the shade of an old madrona tree, placed it so that his brother could see all the way to the beach. Then he went back upstairs and bundled Eric in heavy blankets and carried him outside.
It was like carrying a small child; he weighed nothing at all.
Dean gently placed his brother on the chair. Eric settled back, sinking into the mound of pillows. He closed his eyes. “Man, that sun feels good on my face.”
Dean looked at his brother, whose face was tilted up to catch the sunlight. What he saw wasn’t a thin, balding young man huddled in a multicolored blanket . . . what he saw was courage, distilled to its purest essence.
“I’ll be right back.” He ran into the house and got his camera, loaded it with black-and-white film, and hurried back out into the yard. He started snapping pictures.
Eric’s eyes fluttered open. It took him a minute to focus, a few more to comprehend the silvery box Dean was using. Finally, he gasped and held up a weak, spotted hand. “Oh, God, Dino . . . no photos. I look like shit on a lounge chair.” He turned his head away.
Dean eased the camera from his eye and went to his brother, kneeling down. “Come on, you put Tom Cruise to shame.”
Eric turned to him. “I used to be a fine specimen of a man,” he said, smiling crookedly. “And you wait until I look like something out of Alien to take my picture.”
Dean stroked his brother’s damp forehead. He could tell that Eric was tiring already. “I missed those years, pal. I don’t want to miss these. I’ll need . . . pictures of you.”
Eric groaned. “Shit.” He brought a hand up, rubbed his eyes.
“You know what I see when I look through this lens? I see a hero.”
Slowly Eric opened his eyes and smiled. “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.”
Dean finished the roll of film, then tossed the camera onto the picnic table, and lay down in the grass beside his brother.
“Do you think they’ll be home soon?”
“Any day now.” Dean rolled onto his side and looked up at his brother. “Ruby’s famous now. Remember we saw her on Entertainment Tonight yesterday? It’s what she always wanted.”
“Yeah, well, I used to want to be an astronaut. Then I took a ride on some vomit-comet at the state fair.”
“I think Ruby needed to be famous.”
Eric scooted onto his side, groaning a little at the movement. He stared down at Dean. “You think fame is what she wanted?”
“I’ve seen the media up close. I dated a supermodel a few years back. It can be a pretty wild thing, everybody loving you.”
“That’s not love.”
“Yeah,” Dean said, but he didn’t feel the truth of it in his bones.
“I know what love is, pal. She’ll come back to you, and if she doesn’t, she’s too stupid to live.”
Dean came up to a sit. This was the one subject they’d steered clear of, the thing Dean had never been able to ask and Eric had been too cautious to mention.
But it had always been between them. At first, it had been the size of a boulder; now, it was a pebble.
But always, it was there, nagging, waiting to be released.
“What was it like between you and Charlie?”
Eric made a little sound of surprise. “You sure you want to go there?”
“Yeah.”
A slow, heartbreakingly earnest smile transformed Eric’s face, made him look almost young again.
“I looked at Charlie and saw my future.” He grinned.
“Not that this seemed like a good thing at the time, mind you. I mean, I knew I was supposed to see my future on a body that held a uterus. I didn’t want to be gay.
I knew how hard it would be . . . that it would mean giving up the American Dream—kids, a house in the suburbs, my own family. It tore me up inside.”
Dean had never thought about that, about what it really meant to be gay. To have to choose between who you were and who the world thought you should be. “Jesus . . . I’m sorry.”