The Delilah Complex

Forty-Six

My ex-husband had called me early on Sunday morning and told me what had happened to Dulcie over the weekend in Boston so that I’d be prepared.

I waited for her to come home that night. Sitting in the den without the TV or stereo on, I listened for the click of her key, holding my breath. Aching for what my thirteen-year-old little girl had gone through.

I had to hold myself back from rushing over to her and wrapping her up in my arms when she opened the door. I waited as her footsteps echoed in the foyer and stopped sounding as she walked down the carpeted hall to her room.

Only then did I get up and go to her.

She was sitting on her bed, the suitcase at her feet. Eyes red-rimmed, her hair lank.

“Hi, honey,” I said. Walking over to the bed, I sat down next to her, put my arm around her back and kissed her cheek. She buried her face in the hug. I didn’t know that she was crying until I felt the reverberation of the sobs on my fingertips.

“I want to quit the play,” she whispered through her tears.

“I know, sweetheart.”

Her small head was nestled under my chin. I wanted to kill my ex-husband for persuading me to let Dulcie do this. Life would offer enough pain, I had told him. Can’t our child have her whole childhood before she confronts the vagaries of the professional world?

Dulcie was crying so hard it hurt my chest.

I had held my mother like this, but then I was the little girl and she the adult. It hadn’t mattered; her heart had still been broken by the audience. By the love she needed so badly but could never have gotten from strangers watching her act on a stage.

“Dulcie, I love you.”

She nodded and hiccuped. “I want to quit,” she said again.

“I know.”

And I wanted her to quit. I wanted to call the director of the show and tell him that I was sorry but Dulcie had decided that she didn’t want to continue with the play. I knew exactly the tone of voice I’d use so that he would understand it wasn’t a conversation we were having. I was just giving him information and he would have to accept it. There were two understudies, and both girls were prepared to go on. And there was no reason that either of them wouldn’t do just as good a job as Dulcie. And her school would take her back. They’d agreed to that. She’d been tutored the entire time. She’d get up to speed quickly. The director would try to convince me that Dulcie needed to stay. Or maybe he’d be relieved that she wanted to pull out. How dare he think that? Dulcie was perfect for the part of Mary Lennox.

I wanted to laugh. My pride and my need to protect her were mixed up with each other.

I hugged her tighter, knowing that I wasn’t going to do anything that I wanted to do.

“It’s dinnertime. I made your favorite.”

“Made it?” Dulcie looked at me askance from under swollen eyelids. She was depressed but she was still her irreverent self. I had never been quite so happy to hear her sarcasm.

“Yes. First I purchased it at EAT, then I brought it home, put it on the stove and turned on the heat.”

“That’s not making it, Mom, that’s heating it.”

I laughed. She laughed and then fresh tears spilled out of her eyes, wetting her cheeks all over again.

We sat at the table in the kitchen and Dulcie proved that, no matter how upset she was, it didn’t affect her appetite.

“I thought I was fine.”

I nodded at her, listening to what happened in Boston on Saturday night.

“I wasn’t even nervous. I mean, we’d had so many rehearsals. I really knew my lines. And all the songs. And I wasn’t scared.”

I nodded again.

“But when I stood up there. I don’t know. It just stopped working. I couldn’t find anything. Everything was wrong. It was the most awful thing. And they wrote about it. How nervous I was. Even unprofessional.”

She started to cry again and I had to hold back from crying with her, in sympathy. She pushed the plate away from her, laid her head on the table, and started to sob as if it had just happened all over again.

I stroked my daughter’s head but didn’t say anything. I wanted to give her the space to feel the full brunt of the pain. Professionally, I knew that talking to her, trying to dilute the embarrassment and disappointment, would only dam it up.

When she picked her head up a few minutes later, the tracks of tears on her face made my stomach seize up. Of course I would let her quit the play. There was no reason that my child had to go through anything this terrifying. The world would offer up enough pain for her later that I couldn’t fix.

This was something I could stop.

“I want to quit.”

“Okay, let’s talk about it.”

“I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to quit.”

That wasn’t okay, as much as I wished it were.

“Dulcie, we have to talk about it. It’s much too big a decision not to talk out.”

“Dad said I could.”

“And I’m not saying you can’t. We don’t have to have the conversation now, but we do have to have it eventually.” I cursed my ex-husband for giving her the okay without talking to me. Of course she could quit, but it wasn’t good for her to make a decision like that without understanding why she wanted to and what it would mean.

I stood up and filled the kettle. “I’ll make some hot chocolate. We can watch a movie.”

“I hate that powdered hot chocolate. Instant!” She spat the word out as if she could taste the stuff and wanted it out of her mouth.

Inwardly, I sighed. She was acting her age. I couldn’t blame her and I didn’t want her to act any other age. But that didn’t mean I could cope with it. Of every aspect of motherhood, the one that I had the hardest time with was the idea that I had to adore every facet of my daughter’s personality. My daughter was stubborn and willful and sarcastic, and when she exhibited all those parts of her personality at once, it was as if a demon child had moved into her body and taken over.

I shut off the kettle and opened the refrigerator. “Do you want some cider? It’s fresh; I bought it over the weekend. I can heat that and put some cinnamon sticks in it.”

Usually she loved this fall beverage, but of course she shook her head. “No. I just want you to call Raul and tell him I’m out of the show.”

“It’ll be okay with you when the play opens in New York in eight weeks and you aren’t in it? You won’t regret this?”

She shook her head.

“I think instead of calling him, we should go down to the studio together tomorrow morning and tell him in person.”

“No,” she shrieked. “I can’t. I don’t want to see him.”

On some mental checklist I noted her reaction to my suggestion, not sure yet what it meant. Why was that such an abhorrent idea? I sat back down at the kitchen table, next to her. “We don’t have to do it when everyone else is there, Dulcie, but you have to see Raul and tell him yourself.”

“I said I won’t. There isn’t some stupid rule that I have to.”

“No, not a rule. But it’s common courtesy. He chose you out of three hundred and fifty other girls. He’s been working with you for months. You can’t just disappear without explaining why.”

“You tell him why. Mom-” She strung the word out so it hung on the air. If she had been younger, I would have acquiesced. Instead, I wondered what was really going on and why she wanted me to take over. Was it just a regression to wanting her mother to take care of her so she could feel like a little girl, all safe and protected after her foray into the unfeeling, the critical?

I didn’t think so. Even when she was younger, Dulcie had never been the kind of child who wanted me to fight her battles for her. She’d never relied on me to handle her confrontations, nor had she been afraid of them. If anything, like my ex-husband, she seemed to get stronger when faced with adversity.

“Raul thinks I’m an idiot. An idiotic baby who had the worst stage fright than anyone ever had in the whole world.”

I felt like a warrior who wanted to slay this dragon that had threatened my loved one. “He called you an idiotic baby?”

She shook her head.

“What did he say to you?”

“He told me…” She didn’t finish.

“Dulcie, it’s okay. I won’t embarrass you with him. Just tell me what he said to you. I need to know.”

Still, she hesitated.

“He told me…” she whispered.

I took her hand and held it between mine. Our fingers were almost the same length. I remembered a diminutive hand that used to grab onto mine with fierce strength. “What did he say, sweetie?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, tell me.”

She burst into tears. I didn’t think she could have that many tears in her. I scooted my chair closer to hers, gathered her into my arms and stroked her back.

“I…let…him…down… Oh, Mom… He won’t want me to work with him anymore…”

Finally, I saw the first glimmer of what was really going on. How could I have been so dense?

“Dulcie, all these weeks you’ve been asking me to pick you up from the studio ten or fifteen minutes late. Was it really because you didn’t want me walking in on a rehearsal or was it something else?”

She looked up at me from under her thick lashes that sparkled with tears. “I just didn’t want you to see me making mistakes.”

“I believe that was one reason. What I am asking, and you know it, is, was that the only reason?”

She didn’t have to say a word. I could see the answer in the way she looked away from me.

So many times during the last two months, I’d arrived at the studio to find Dulcie working with Raul on her part. They weren’t alone-there were always other cast and crew around getting ready to leave and talking to one another-but she clearly was spending more time with him than the other kids were. I knew that was because she had the lead. But did she realize that was the only reason? Was she seeking him out because she needed help or because she wanted the attention he gave her?

“He never minded that I hung around after rehearsals to talk about my part.” She was still in my arms and spoke her words into my neck. I could feel her breath, hot and moist, on my skin.

“I’m sure he didn’t mind,” I told her.

Dulcie didn’t say anything else.

She wasn’t eight or nine years old. She was thirteen. And now I knew she had a crush on Raul Seeger. Which was why my daughter was devastated that she hadn’t lived up to her director’s expectations.

“You have to call him for me, Mom, and tell him I’m quitting.” Her words were still muffled.

“Dulcie, Dad told me that the review also said you showed incredible range in your singing and you had serious star potential.”

“They were just saying that.”

“If they were just saying that about the good part, then why weren’t they just saying that about the bad part?”

“I…don’t…know.”

All I had wanted from the beginning was for Dulcie to stay in school and put off having an acting career until after college. Now I was about to convince her not to give up the play, because this wasn’t about her stage fright anymore. It wasn’t about the play being too much pressure for her.

It was a conflict of heart. Her first. And I was not going to let my thirteen-year-old daughter give up her dream because she was embarrassed in front of the man she had a crush on-her director.

She was sitting up again. The tears had stopped but her face was stained.

“Can’t Raul work with you on the stage fright? I’m sure he’s had lots of experience with other kids.”

“He said he could. All I had to do was ask.”

“But?”

“If I asked him to help me Mom, he’d know how weak I was. He’d know I wasn’t good at it and that I couldn’t do it without him.”

She was looking at me when she said it. And the way the light was shining on her face, I could see myself at the table reflected in her eyes.

“Well, that’s okay, sweetie. It’s okay to ask him for help. For him to know that you need him. He won’t think any less of you.”

I was hearing my own words. Knowing that I wouldn’t think about them now, but that they had their own resonance for me, too.

“I don’t know,” she said hesitantly.

“Did you like being in the play-once you got past that first scene?”

She nodded, now almost ashamed to tell me, some part of her realizing that she had not been quite honest with me about the crisis.

“The problem was in the show on Saturday night, right?”

She nodded.

“What happened during the matinee on Sunday? Was it as scary?”

“Well, part of the time I worried about screwing up.”

“What about the other part of the time?”

She got up and went to the fridge and pulled out a soda. “I guess it was okay,” she said with her back to me.

“Okay? That doesn’t tell me much. What was it like?”

She popped the top and turned around. “I wasn’t really there. Mary Lennox was. I was sort of seeing what she was seeing. It was like the play was real, and what was real disappeared.” She’d forgotten the embarrassment and was reliving the exhilaration of having slipped into another being’s soul and inhabiting it for a while.

“Your grandmother used to tell me that,” I said. A pang of loss, like a minor chord, reverberated inside me. You don’t ever stop missing someone you have loved, you simply learn how to make the longing for them a piece of you. You learn that missing them is the part of loving them that never leaves, but that doesn’t mean that every once in a while it doesn’t catch you unawares and shock you with its potency. “So I guess you are going to have to stay in the play,” I said.

“Why’s that?”

“Because actresses have to act, honey. That’s what makes them feel alive and fulfills them. And Raul can help you. I bet he’ll even like helping you.”

“Will I have to ask him for help?” She frowned.

“Here’s the thing, Dulcie. Even though you aren’t going to like admitting that you need help, the person whom you are asking to help you-if he cares about you-will be very pleased. It will mean so much to him that you need him that he will never even notice that you feel uncomfortable about it.”