Maud Casey - Drastic - Stories

I started working for Do Unto Others two years ago when my mother died. I called home one day and my father was so confused that when he answered the phone he was panting like a dog. “Rita,” he said, “I can’t talk right now. Your mother’s having a heart attack.” When he called back, she was dead.

My father called me a lonely spinster once, and that’s how I’d come to think of myself. I used to watch the talk shows just to feel better. When my mother died, I started playing the “Well, at least I’m not…” game. Well, at least I’m not being held captive by a married couple. Well, at least I’m not afflicted with a disease that causes me to pick at my face until I am bloody and unrecognizable. I clipped newspaper articles: “Woman Marries Horse: ‘He’s the Only One Who Really Understands Me,’” “Man Shoots Wife and Family ‘Just Because,’” “Ballerina Chews Off Million Dollar Leg in Bear Trap Catastrophe.” I imagined that I was the horse bride, the murderous husband, and the ballerina. I imagined I was them just long enough to be truly glad I wasn’t when I stopped.

Do Unto Others was looking for a substitute guest at about that time. They’d started to run out of ideas, and they feared that they would soon be taken off the air. Their real guests had become too demanding, complaining incessantly about hotel accommodations, not telling all so as not to give away the end of the TV movie being made about their lives. I brought in my cardboard box full of newspaper clippings, and Perry hired me on the spot. He didn’t know that I was already practiced at the art of relieving my grief by putting someone else’s on. I had no idea then that it would become my life, that I would be doing it still, two years later, at the age of forty-eight.

I’ll admit that at first it was an escape from my mother’s death. I left home long before she died, but still, she was my one true friend. “Rita,” she would say at some point during our weekly phone conversations, “you are a good woman, a very good woman.” When she said this, I imagined that the rest of the world thought this highly of me. Possibilities waited in some other room, in some other house miles away, if only I could get to it. The room was filled with friends and admirers who never watched Do Unto Others but would recognize when I arrived that here was a good woman standing before them, one who deserved to feel the warm, gentle pressure of a human hand touching her face.

I keep the envelopes from my mother’s letters by my bed. She sprayed them with her perfume, and late at night when I can’t sleep I sniff their faded scent. I inhale deeply, recapturing that feeling of hope. When I fall asleep, I sometimes have the dream in which Perry is my plastic surgeon, tenderly handling sections of my face as he sculpts and rearranges.

When my mother died, I realized that all her life she was meant to die. That her death was inevitable seemed like a mean trick, something she and I should have talked about more when she was still alive. I worried too that my father, in his old age, didn’t have the mental energy to preserve the details of my mother wholly in his mind. I imagined my mother fading completely from this world and I decided that it was my job to remember her. Do Unto Others is more than simple escape, more than the “Well, at least I’m not…” game. The show is my way of holding my mother to this earth. When I walk out onto the stage, I am grief personified in a mask turned inside out a million times. I’m a reminder to us all.

Over the years, I’ve learned to jump into grief like a swimming pool. The people I play on Do Unto Others have allowed me to swim through wet, sloppy sadness with a suitable stroke, a stroke that the audience recognizes, one that they can imitate.

“I know this isn’t anything like being raised by wolves,” a woman in a blue polyester pantsuit says during today’s show, “but sometimes the way my parents raised me felt, well, wild. Uncivilized.”

The members of the audience crane their necks to get a better look, as if finally this woman might provide them with an answer to all the questions in the world.

Perry turns to me, puts a hand on my shoulder. “Well, I’m sure that Shirley can sympathize with you. Can’t you, Shirley?” The sound of the audience shifting in their seats is the restless sound of animals about to stampede.

I’m wearing a wolf-brown wig. Faint tufts of facial hair dot my chin and jowls.

“Why yes, I can, Perry,” I say. I smile at the woman in the blue polyester pantsuit, and she smiles back. We are lifted momentarily out of that big pool of grief. For a second I suspend her above the child she lost in utero last year, the pending divorce, her daughter who hates her. Well, at least I wasn’t raised by wolves, she might be saying. Well, at least I wasn’t raised by wolves, I think. We are in this together, and the slope of my mother’s forehead drifts back to me, the way it looked when she pulled her hair back on days she couldn’t be bothered.

Today I am Tina, a married woman who is addicted to affairs with married men. I’m feeling a little confused because Perry is a married man, and last night I dreamed that he misplaced my nose during surgery, then pretended not to recognize me without it.

“If I were your husband I’d kill you and then I’d divorce you and then I’d kill the guy you had the affair with,” says one man, jumping up from the audience and screaming before Perry gets to him with the microphone.

I tuck a piece of my hussy-red wig behind my ear and smile the smile of someone who believes strongly in her infidelity.

“Let’s get this straight,” Perry says, pacifying the audience. “You’d kill her and then divorce her.” The audience laughs. Perry is on my side. He is here to give my grief away.

“Let’s get this straight,” Perry says again to focus the audience as he takes his seat next to mine on the stage. “You sleep with married men because this way you have the same amount to lose. It’s an exchange of risk and loss, if you will.”

“That’s right, Perry,” I say. “It’s a reciprocal relationship.”

Then Perry does something he’s never done before. He touches me. He puts his hand on my shoulder, letting his fingers slip past where my dress covers my skin. His hand brushes Tina’s jugular, burning with its foreign heat her skin so unfamiliar with touch.

He doesn’t stop there. He kisses me on the cheek. As it’s happening, I miss the moment already — the soft lips of it, the breath-minty breath of it on my face — already configuring itself in my dream landscape. He kisses me in slow motion and then, bang, back to normal speed, and he’s saying what he usually says.

“Thank you for sharing with us, Tina,” as if he’s never met Rita. This fresh agony snaps me momentarily out of the constant hum of grieving. Then, when Perry gets into his car to drive home after the show, waving good-bye as if it was just another day at work, the hum returns.

My cat ran away when I was seven, and there was a shallow dip of grief. It dipped in and touched my little soul. When my mother died, that grief went through me like a bullet, leaving a clean hole, taking parts of me with it. Then there is this new grief that falls somewhere in between a runaway cat and a dead mother, the minty blue wind of a man who kisses you the way no one has kissed you before, sucking the life out of you with his lips. This is the way it is with Perry.

As I get into my car, I look in the mirror and realize I’ve forgotten to take off the curly red wig. I toss it onto the passenger seat, reminding myself that I never intended to do this forever. I’m just never sure when sadness will brush past me like some rude stranger.