Confessions Of A Falling Woman And Other Stories

A Brief History Of Us

We are all chameleons in my family, always adaptive, always reflecting back whatever environment we're in. Of indeterminate Anglo ancestry, we're mutts, with not even the identifying marks of a Scot's plaid or a German weakness for bratwurst. Our religion mutates safely among interchangeable Protestant sects. Our history tells a story, though not, strictly speaking, our own.

Look back two hundred years and you will find us somewhere in the picture, blending into the scenery. Our ancestors fought in the American Revolution and the Civil War, always on the winning side. We still have great-uncle Howard's sword. Then we moved west with the railroads. There are photographs of us dressed in coveralls and straw hats, sowing wheat across the plains of Kansas. We are posed in front of tepees in North Dakota, the small children in starched petticoats standing next to a Sioux chief. During World War II, we worked in the shipyards and manned the lookout towers, and after V-J Day we all moved to the suburbs.

My own small part in our history began in 1957. I was the first child of a young couple who bore a striking resemblance to Jack and Jackie. She was slender and quiet, always poised in her matching heels and pillbox hat. He was a go-getter, as handsome as a quarterback, smiling into his future. Their pictures appeared in the local newspapers above articles about the Chamber of Commerce and the Junior League's spring fashion show.

I was supposed to be a boy, but since I was not, they changed my name and had another child fifteen months later, also a girl, and then there was a miscarriage that we don't talk about.

Here is a color Polaroid of us. My mother, my sister, and I are all dressed alike because we are girls and it is Easter Sunday and our mother has made us each outfits. Because it is the late sixties, the fabric is a bright, flowery cotton brought back from a Hawaiian vacation. We stand in a row, each of us clutching our purses with cotton gloves. My sister is the one who will not smile for the camera. This is the only clue that we are not entirely as we would like to appear.

A few years later, my mother begins to resemble Mary Tyler Moore, and my father grows a mustache in imitation of Robert Redford. Our pigment darkens into burnished tans. Predictably, we have taken up skiing. Après-ski, we drink Chablis and eat quiche in the lodge. This was taken in Aspen or Sun Valley. My close-lipped smile hides a tangle of braces.

I am by now in the flux of adolescence and perfecting my genetic mutability, an honor student who hangs out with unsavory types in parking lots. I sing in the youth group choir on Sunday mornings, still hung over from the night before. I have come to realize, without being told, that my survival depends on being all things to all people, so I lie about my age and my whereabouts and my friends. My sister, less agile, gets caught smoking dope and is suspended from school.

It is nearing the eighties: my father drives a Mercedes, my mother starts up an interior design business, and my sister gets pregnant and keeps the baby. I graduate from a small liberal arts college, with a double major in drama and poli sci. We haven't seen each other for weeks, but we leave messages next to the phone. When my father meets the younger woman, we get divorced like everyone else. Even our few tragedies feel impersonal, borrowed.

I move to New York to become an actress. What better use of my inherited talents than this? I mouth other people's words with agility, I can simulate anger and joy and horror. I am as comfortable on stage as in my own living room, more so actually. When I go to auditions, the long line of my family trails invisibly behind me. They're a little nervous. They've never had an actor in the family, though come to think of it, someone on the paternal side was in a silent film once. While I'm belting a show tune, I hear them whisper in my ear. They tell me I'm a little flat. I blow the audition, but they say they're proud of me. No matter what I do. They ask me if I've met anyone famous yet. They wonder when I'm going to be on The Tonight Show.

When I join the Screen Actors Guild, I have to change my name. Not because it sounds ethnic, but because it sounds so perfectly generic that someone else in the union is already using it. While I'm at it, I change it completely, first name, last name, even the initial in the middle. I erase my identity and pull a new one from thin air. For months after, I keep forgetting who I am.

I begin to sleep with men who tell me I remind them of someone, their daughter or their old girlfriend or someone they can't quite place. In actuality, they've seen me on television, selling credit cards and peanut butter and cough syrup. If not a star, I do well enough to incur envy. My agent returns my calls. I make money. I spend it. I spend some more. When I've had a stressful day, I leaf through mail-order catalogues. It soothes me, the glossy photos of chinos and anoraks and polos, the people wearing them who look vaguely like me, maybe a little happier. I call a 1-800 number and order sweaters, in celery, in cactus, in dusk. I meet someone and we drink blue margaritas.

Given all this, this surfeit of normalcy, how to explain the eight months when I cannot get out of bed? How to explain the inarticulate terrors of morning, the black slumps round about four? I cannot trust my own judgment on such matters, so I follow the masses wending their way into therapy.

The first session, she asks about my family. She invites them into the room, and they come piling in. They take up every chair and nudge me over on the couch. We're all uncomfortable, but we make an effort. When asked to confront our inner workings, we try. We tell what may be the truth, what we think she'd like to hear, and we wonder if we are boring her. She believes us to be hedging, resisting the awful secret truths of her calling. We fumble to oblige her, we search for something that sounds original and genuine, we weep in frustration.

At last, through the graces of a new movement, we are given the words to express our emptiness. We are the soul-murdered children of blank-aholics. We love too much. We have past lives more colorful than this one. We are each of us creative. We are each of us unique. We decide to become Native American. We remember a Sioux ancestor back there somewhere. We buy bundles of sage and turquoise-studded bracelets. We dance with wolves. We feel our shape shift, our history elide. We're back in the saddle again.