Page 20 of Playworld

“Hungary.”

“What about your grandmother?”

“From Russia.”

“Is she still alive?”

“She lives in Los Angeles. We don’t see her much.”

“Was your father not close with them?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I heard my parents fighting about him once.”

“Tell me,” Naomi said.

It happened after I applied to matriculate into Boyd’s seventh grade class. I’d been acting for five years by then and treated my interview like another audition. Mom, who’d escorted me, was invited into Mr. McElmore’s office at the interview’s start. It was located in the Old School, like some Gothic dream out of Tolkien, giving on to the New School, the modern wing. McElmore was the head of admissions, and he chatted up Mom, obviously charmed. After Mom mentioned she was getting a master’s in American literature, he told her he also taught senior English, and they nearly forgot me while discussing names from the spines crowding his office’s bookshelf. Mom’s brown hair was pulled back, her smart black sleeveless dress showing off her dancer’s arms, her high heels accentuating her ballerina’s calves, eyeliner bringing out her irises’ deepblue. At times such as these, I was made aware of how beautiful she was. Mom’s outfit somehow signaled the interview’s seriousness—I could tell she was nervous—though she gave me no preparation beforehand or on the bus ride there, except that I should “be myself.”

“It was lovely to meet you,” McElmore said to her, and then escorted her to his door, touching the small of her back before indicating the couch outside. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, Griffin and I will have a chat.”

What was I thinking, then, when McElmore asked me about my acting career, and I slipped into obvious shtick? “I gotta tell ya,” I said, outer-borough-ing my accent and standing, without asking permission, to take off my blazer, unclip my tie, and then roll up my sleeves, as if the head of admissions and I were about to have a fight. “I’m not comfortable in this monkey suit. I’m used to wearing clothes that are morerelaxed.” I unbuttoned my collar and, after sitting again, made a great show of cracking my neck. “Now,” I said, “what was your question?”

McElmore chuckled. “I was wondering if you ever suffered from stage fright,” he said. His broad mustache was shaped like a whale’s fluke; there were even whales on his bow tie. A port wine birthmark splashed across his cheek. He could barely hide a smile behind his steepled fingers, which he touched to his lips as I talked about the challenges of learning my lines and sharing a dressing room with John Belushi.

The fight between my parents happened soon after my acceptance letter arrived—one of their arguments that I could hear as I rose in the elevator, that grew louder as I stepped into our hallway, that made me slow-walk to our door and ensured, as I quietly turned my key in the lock and then snuck into my room, that I might eavesdrop on them in complete secrecy.

“All those synagogues your father sent you marching off to,” Mom said. “All those weekends in Brooklyn or Queens. ‘Here’s a quarter, Shel, buy yourself some lunch, but only if they don’t feed you there. And don’t leave without getting paid.’ ”

“Oh please.”

“What does Elliott think about you making your son another little cantor?”

“He’s already signed a contract.”

“Break it.”

“Even if I could, I can’t. Don’t you understand, Lily? I’m short, all right? I haven’tgotit.”

For a long time, my mother was quiet.

My father lowered his voice. “I can’t do it alone,” he confessed. “When are you going to get that through your head?”

It was, I realize now, their central conflict, the problem they were always talking around. Mom, hunkered down—she’d been a professional dancer and now taught children ballet at Carnegie Hall in the afternoons. It left her mornings to study, to write her papers and take classes, and “that’s my contribution,” I often caught her saying to Dad, “that’smytraining.” “Your mother,” Dad said to me after one of these fights—I’d ask him while we walked to the grocery store why she didn’t get a different job—“isn’t corporate material.”

Mom, Dad, and I had a talk that night. This was formal business, conducted in our living room. I sat on the sofa, my parents across from me.

“Your father has something to tell you,” Mom said, and gave Dad the floor.

Dad sat forward. His voice’s register: very serious. His role: somber patriarch. Nothing he was about to say was anything he wanted to. “Your mother and I are thrilled about your new school. As you should be. Because it’s a very big step, in your development. But it’s also a major financial commitment.”

“Which you should be aware of,” Mom said.

“So that you’re invested,” Dad said.

“In your education,” Mom said. “In your future.”

---