Elizabeth Crane - The History of Great Things

You’re a couple grand deeper into debt than before you left, with one more résumé credit you don’t really need. What you really want to do is write fiction. You can do that anywhere. New York is too expensive and you don’t want to be there anyway. Clearly, it’s time to move to Chicago. Just because it’s the first I’ve heard of the idea doesn’t make it surprising at this point. You will move and keep moving until you land in the right spot. This move happens with more or less the same amount of haste and suitcases as the last. Weirdly, I can tell just by the sound of your voice over the phone, about a week after you get there, that you’re happier in Chicago. The way you gush about alleys and abandoned buildings sounds like you’re describing Prague or Copenhagen. It’s my place, Mom. I’m glad, sweetheart. I know you needed to go. I can come visit.

But I’m sick with cancer. You’ve decided you were a fiction writer the whole time, that you had to get the TV job to know this for sure. You come home to visit while I’m in the hospital and read me some scenes about me from your novel that are pretty funny, but you don’t have any big plan about where to go from there. You say I’m not about plans , I say Yeah, I got that . You move from LA to Chicago to be a fiction writer and I get sick and this messes up your not-plans.

It’s a wonder you don’t start drinking again, and when you come to the hospital you try to argue with me while I’m hooked up to twenty kinds of machines and wires.

— You’re seriously trying to say I started an argument with you when you were in the hospital?

— We had an argument. You stormed off. Can I finish?

— Yes, I can’t wait.

There’s an old lady in the bed next to me and she’s rambling on and on about I don’t know what, but she keeps talking even though the curtain between us is drawn. You and Victor are visiting and this lady’s chatter about I-don’t-know-what is making me nuts. Lady! I yell over. Stop talking! The curtain is pulled! Mom , you say. Don’t Mom me! This is my time with my visitors! That cunt is invading my privacy! Mom! Oh don’t be all holier-than-thou, Betsy. Okay, I’m going. That’s great. Walk off. I liked you better when you were still drinking! You peer around the corner and whisper that you’re so sorry to the lady before leaving the room.

— That’s the argument I started. I said “Mom.”

— You made me yell.

— I made you yell. You called an old lady with cancer a cunt.

— I didn’t say it to her face.

The next two years in Binghamton are all about the baby. You should have known. You sew the most precious clothes for the baby; later you make several sets of matching dresses for you, me, and my doll, one out of a darling red toile, another in pink with white rickrack trim, another from a tiny floral print. You genuinely enjoy having a girl and dressing her up and showing her off. (The doll alone gets a reversible raincoat, solid on one side, coordinating gingham on the reverse, not so much as a single stitch to be seen on either side. It’s an engineering marvel.) You have not forgotten about singing, or New York City at all; even though you’re an attentive new mother, even though it is a strong instinct in you, you vocalize when you can; why didn’t you wait just a little longer to have kids? Don’t some people do that? You still veer off, in your mind, baby in arms, to a life onstage, reviews in the New York Times , a high-rise apartment, a flash of someone with his arms around you who isn’t Fred. You shake it off, that’s not how it’s supposed to go, but those flashes visit you daily, and when Dad gets a tenure-track job at LSU and moves us all to Baton Rouge, they become a constant presence for the next two years. Before the move, there’s a brief discussion about how well it was going for you in Binghamton before the baby, that if you just wait until she’s in nursery school and you have the time to get going on your performing career, it would be good to stay (though it could conceivably help your case if played right, you deliberately fail to mention how much closer Binghamton is to the city than Louisiana — one thing at a time, to ease him into the idea, seems the best way to go), but he’s the breadwinner, and even if he’s not the most conservative early-sixties I’m the man kind of guy, not by a lot, the reality is that he’s generating the income and this is a job he can’t turn down. You suspect he secretly wants to keep you from having a career, though he’s said nothing to indicate as much; in fact, he’s even mentioned that Baton Rouge and New Orleans are both cultured cities where you can develop your voice and pursue work. There will be moments, after I’m in nursery school, when this obsession sends you to your bed for extended naps; Dad knows nothing of this, as somehow you manage to get back up every afternoon and put an apron on over your full skirt and blouse (no heels until dinnertime, to heck with that) to make supper at five when he likes it, but you know that the only real solution is to pursue your career. You discuss this with him, he is still in favor of it, believes as you do that you have the talent, although he is less sure when you raise the idea of traveling to New York on your own for proper training and auditions. You convince him that you are sure you can make it all work, though you’re not at all sure that you can make it all work, you aren’t even sure if you can make some of it work, but he is convinced and that’s all that matters right now and so you dip into your savings account and he sends you off on your first trip to New York.

Your room at the Barbizon is tiny, but it has gloriously high ceilings with wood floors and crown moldings, and Grace Kelly once stayed there, maybe even in your room, and there’s a heavenly skyline view, if you lean out the window a bit and look to the right. The hotel is filled with wide-eyed women just like you (though even by this age you are sure there is no one on earth just like you); over breakfast in the formal dining room, you make several new girlfriends, all as eager to forge their careers as you are, aspiring journalists and actresses and even a poet (about which you think — poet? You have no imagination for what that life would look like, post — Emily Dickinson). You observe that some of them have potential and drive, and others are entirely delusional about their prospects. One young woman you chat with, named Evelyn, wants to be a model, but she’s not what you would call anything other than plain; compared with the beautiful, stylish women you’ve seen in the lobby or on the streets just since you arrived, this woman doesn’t have a chance. Why don’t people know this, that they don’t have a chance, why not just accept it instead of holding out hope for some unattainable thing? It does not occur to you at this time that the city is also full of aspiring opera singers, several of them right here in the hotel, and that talent or not, your chances may or may not be better than anyone else’s. You are certain that your spot is assured. Almost certain.

The opera director from Binghamton has recommended a vocal coach. You choose a pale-pink dotted Swiss blouse and your favorite wool gabardine skirt for your first lesson. Her name is Carolina, she’s Cuban, sixty-something, with a cottony blond updo and a flair for the dramatic — you walk in and she says Muy bonito! Come in, bonito! offers a cup of tea, asks if you drink tea; you say Occasionally , she says You must drink tea now and forever, every day, it is a must! Everyone who meets Carolina falls a little bit in love with her and you are no exception.