Barry
“What are you doing in here?”
Trudy jumps. She sets the framed picture she’s been holding down on the coffee table. It’s an old photo of me, Ron, Sid and
Teddy—all wearing Santa hats—after a holiday Church of Mary.
“Hiding from Teddy.”
“We all do that on occasion,” I say with a smile.
“I bet more than occasionally.”
Trudy winks.
“Was my granddaughter being nice to you?” Trudy continues, nodding beyond the patio doors toward the pool where Ava is napping
under an umbrella. “You two have been talking a lot at the pool.”
“She’s honest,” I say, looking at Ava. “I need some unflinching honesty right now.”
“She’s a teenage girl,” Trudy says. “You’ll get that whether you want it or not.”
“Teddy’s basically a teenage girl, too,” I add. “You’ll get his opinion, too, whether you want it or not.”
I enter the living room, my hair still damp from the pool, wearing a matching bright yellow terry cloth shorts and shirt,
which I didn’t button. Trudy’s eyes float down my body.
“You’re in great shape,” she says.
“Thank you, although that almost sounded like an accusation.”
“No, no, I just don’t see many Midwestern men my age so fit.”
“It’s part of my profession,” I say. “It’s part of our community. You can’t be fat in Hollywood, and you can’t be out of shape
as a single gay man, especially as you get older.”
“Whyever not?”
“We’re a very close but judgmental community,” I explain. “We end up combining a lot of the judgment that is placed on us
by society with our internalized anger and taking that out on our own. It’s not right, but it’s just the way it is.”
“Ralph was so out of shape,” Trudy says.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I say. “I can’t imagine.”
“Thank you.” Trudy picks up another photo of the four of us. “I know this sounds monstrous to utter out loud, but he was already
dead. I was, too.”
She shakes her head and continues. “We both got so complacent. Well, that’s not even the right word. We both simply became
invisible to one another. We stopped caring about what we looked like, what the other ate, what the other did . . . we lived
in the same house, but we were no longer husband and wife.” She touches the framed photo. “I don’t even think we were friends.”
Trudy looks up at me. “Instead of us going for a walk together in the morning, Ralph would make a huge breakfast of bacon
and eggs. Instead of working in the yard, he would sleep in his recliner. Instead of us making a healthy dinner together,
he would run through the drive-through at McDonald’s and bring me back a Big Mac and fries.” She looks down at herself. “And
suddenly, twenty years are gone, and you look like this.”
She puts the photo down. “And then he’s gone, and for the first time in decades, I sleep through the night. When I wake up,
I’m not even mourning his loss but simply grateful for a do-over.”
I stare at her, stunned by her honesty. I cannot find any words, so I say, “Well, speaking of do-over, your ’do does look great.” I gesture to her hair.
She laughs. “Nice segue. Ron took me to see . . . was it Casper?”
I laugh. “Gaspar,” I say. “His prices will scare you like a ghost, but he does know how to pull off a glow-up.” I wait until
she looks at me. “So do you, I think.”
“Thank you.” She picks up a framed cast photo of me with the Golden Girls. “I think you do, too.” Trudy points at Coco. “I
did a little online sleuthing while I was in here hiding . . .” Trudy hesitates. “Actually, to be totally transparent, I was
just in here hiding from the world. It seems I’m very good at that. I didn’t mean to snoop.”
I walk over to the modern walnut bookcases that flank the flat-screen TV in the living room.
“Oh, Coco is public knowledge,” I say. “It’s just that the public doesn’t know he existed.” I touch the face of a character
I’m still running from. But he was really just me all along. “Please, take a seat,” I continue, nodding at the low-slung mid-century
sofa.
Trudy places the photo back down and sits.
“Speaking of Coco, that’s why I came inside,” I say. “I was just about to watch an episode of The Golden Girls. I have to preview one for our upcoming show.”
“If you can believe it, I’ve never watched an episode of The Golden Girls,” she says. “In fact, I’ve never watched a sitcom in my life.”
“Well, we have something in common,” I say. “Besides an occasional disdain for Teddy. I never watched a sitcom either until
we started doing our show.”
“My father didn’t allow us to watch such nonsense, said it would rot our brains,” Trudy says. “We couldn’t listen to secular
music. We couldn’t even shut our bedroom doors. They had to remain open at all times. Teddy and I would sneak downstairs,
though, on Saturday mornings when my parents were hungover and watch cartoons.”
My heart pings, and I imagine little, fierce, funny Teddy fighting to survive. I watch Trudy hug a pillow. My eyes meet Coco’s on the bookshelf.
How the hell do any of us survive?
We fight, or die.
I scroll the TV.
“If you can believe it,” I finally say, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this episode before.”
The episode is titled “Mary Has a Little Lamb,” and it is about a teenage girl named Mary, who is pregnant and seeks the women’s
help after failing to get support from her father. Dorothy steps in to offer advice and guidance.
“Is Dorothy always the one who stands up for someone in need?” Trudy asks toward the end of the episode. These are the first
words she has spoken since it started. I look over and see she is still holding the Jonathan Adler pillow, clutching it, rocking
it like a newborn.
“She is the truth teller,” I confirm. “Just like Teddy.”
“Our mom’s name was Dorothy,” Trudy muses. “Did you know that? Teddy was named after her. He was with her when she died. They
were watching The Golden Girls together.”
“He told me about that after we met in therapy,” I say.
Trudy turns to me. I pause the show.
“Therapy,” she sighs. “So that’s something people actually do.”
I don’t mean to laugh, but I do.
“Not to offend you,” she says quickly, “but that is not a staple of Midwestern life that I grew up with, like milk and eggs.
Men didn’t address their emotions. They drank. And if they drank too much, they didn’t get sober, or else they were told they
couldn’t hold their liquor. Women cried in the bathroom when their husbands were asleep, bathtub faucet running to hide their
pain. And children mirror their parents: We become just like them because it’s easier to please than become . . .” she stops
and meets my gaze “. . . ourselves.”
“It took me a very long time and a lot of therapy to realize that running away from my pain wasn’t solving anything,” I tell her. “I was simply running. To nowhere. I was just masking it all with isolation, anger and bad decisions.”
“Masks,” Trudy whispers. She looks at me intently. “Are you okay now?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ll ever be, but I’m trying the best I can. Sometimes, you have to face the pain
head-on, and I feel like the train is closing in on me. It’s closing in on all of us.”
“Ron said you see a lot of younger men. Is that a way to cope? Is it about control?”
“You want me to discuss my man troubles with a Christian woman from Ohio?” I ask. “Now, that is a sitcom.”
“I won’t judge,” she says. “I promise. Ava won’t ever talk to me about her boyfriend. I know she has one. I know they sneak
around. I’m trying to change. I’m trying to listen. Ron told me the best thing someone can do sometimes is to just shut up
and listen.”
So I tell her about the young men. I tell her about Kyle. I tell her about what happened, about praying on my knees to a false
idol, about what I’ve had to do to become famous again.
Trudy only listens. Finally, finally, she says, “We all do things to survive, Barry. I have to believe God can forgive us when we are pushed into a corner and
have no other option but to walk through fire to make it to the other side, even if our souls are scorched. Maybe then we
can heal, and we can help others, even if it’s our final act.”
“Speaking of acts, do you know what makes a sitcom work, Trudy?”
“I have no idea,” she says.
“Sitcoms have followed the same basic format throughout the history of television. Every show starts with a cold open that throws you directly into the action, followed by three acts and a finale. That’s it.
It finally dawned on me while rewatching episodes of The Golden Girls that life is just like a sitcom: three acts.
We are born, we grow up, we die. And the finale always leaves you in tears because
it’s so hard to say goodbye to something you love. The biggest surprise of all? A half-hour sitcom isn’t even thirty minutes.
It comes in around twenty-two minutes without commercials, which isn’t a very long time at all to enjoy the show.” I look
at Trudy. “We all have so little time to enjoy the show.”
Tears well in her eyes. “We’re all in our third act, aren’t we?” she asks.
“The train is coming right for us, Trudy,” I say. “The best thing I’m learning we can do is scream in fear and excitement
as it approaches, just like I used to do as a kid when I’d stand on a train track with my friends. I’m also learning that
being scared again in life can lead to really great things. You just have to walk through that fire.”
Trudy yells suddenly, and I jump.
“It feels good to scream,” she says. “Can I tell you something, too, Barry?”
“Anything, Trudy.”
When she’s finished talking, I stand and walk over to the sofa and sit beside her. Trudy puts her head on my shoulder, and
I put my arm around her.
She does not cry. She simply asks, “Can we watch another episode?”