The Venus Fix

Forty

My mother had a snow globe that sat on her battered dressing table in our dingy apartment downtown. Inside was a theater marquee with the words The Lost Girls on it, along with my mother’s name spelled out in what looked like tiny yellow lights.

Now that globe sat on my dresser, among perfume bottles and picture frames. When she was growing up, Dulcie had loved it as much as I had, and would sit and play with it for a long time, enchanted by the way the snowflakes fell over the marquee.

I was having one made for her next birthday-with her marquee and her name and the title of the play she was appearing in. When my taxi pulled up to the theater, the marquee was indeed brushed with snow just like the scene inside the snow globe. Dulcie and I were still talking, albeit cautiously, but she’d accepted my decision about her not doing the audition.

For the first time in hours, I forgot about the kids from Park East and the strange sense I’d had that Amanda and Timothy knew something I needed to know-the sooner the better.

Inside, the doors to the theater were shut. Harold, the usher, saw me, smiled and let me slip quietly inside.

I stood in the back, behind the last row of seats, and looked at my daughter on stage. No matter how many times I watched the play, I was still surprised each time I saw Dulcie in the footlights. There was always a first rush of shock that she was there, on Broadway-not in her junior high school auditorium, not at a summer camp production, but a professional, performing for strangers every night.

At the same time that I was incredibly proud-the audience had burst into applause as Dulcie finished up her second-to-last song-I felt the rise of a low-lying anxiety fluttering up from under my ribs. She was so vulnerable. And as the play moved ahead to its finale, I saw the teenager on stage not as my daughter, not as my mother’s granddaughter, but as a wholly independent creature-like the kids I’d been working with earlier. They each had secrets inside of them that their parents, their teachers and their families didn’t know about, couldn’t guess.

What secrets did Dulcie have from me? From Mitch?

I wouldn’t know, even though I’d had secrets, too. Kept them close to me and away from my father, from my stepmother, and from Nina.

But that didn’t make it any easier for me to accept when it came to my own daughter. At thirteen, her secrets might still be innocent and harmless, but with each piece of knowledge that she hid from me, afraid that I would not understand it or that I would interfere, she moved farther away from me. She was at the age when the chasms appeared. And I knew, because I had counseled patients about this-about how important it was to love your child for who she was, for who he was, to not be disappointed about whom your child didn’t turn into. That the best a parent could do was to listen, be sensitive, not give up. But when it came to my daughter, following my own advice was far more difficult than I’d imagined.

The orchestra played the first notes of the finale. Dulcie found her position. She finished her line, took a breath, segued into her last song of the evening. Her voice, like liquid gold, poured into the cavity of the theater. The richness of it, the purity of it, melded with the orchestra and rode just on top of the music, merging but never getting lost. She carried the song for the first twelve stanzas and then was joined by the others.

When the song ended, the notes and the voices died out, and all that was left was the reverberation in the air. Finally that, too, was gone. Silence held for ten, fifteen seconds and cracked open as the applause swelled. I joined in, more excited than I thought I could be, more moved than I wanted to be, more caught up in Dulcie’s moment-and feeling her excitement-than I was prepared to be.

Feeling her happiness should have pleased me. It would have had I not also realized that standing up there made my thirteen-year-old so much happier than anything else in her life had. I recognized the look in her eyes as she took her bow. I’d seen it before.

I knew better than to merge them like this. My mother. My daughter. They were two separate beings. Thirty years separated the last time I had seen my mother and tonight when I was seeing my daughter.

How could I begrudge Dulcie adulation because of my failing and my insecurity?

Mitch told me I was too protective of our daughter. So did Nina. But when I was in that state between sleep and wakefulness, when I talked to my mother in my head, she told me that I was right. That Dulcie was too young. That I needed to keep my daughter from the things no one had kept her from.

After the crowd thinned, I walked down the center aisle and onto the stage and then behind the curtain and into the wings. I knocked on my daughter’s dressing room door and waited to hear her response.

No answer.

I knocked again.

Maybe she was in the bathroom. I opened the dressing room door and then instantly regretted doing that. She wasn’t a baby anymore. I couldn’t barge in on her.

“Dulcie? I’m sorry. I knocked, but-”

She wasn’t there.

I walked over to the small bathroom. The door was shut. I knocked. No answer. I knocked again. Still no answer. This wasn’t like her. Even when she was angry, she responded, her voice dripping with her effort at adult fury.

Finally, I tried the door. It wasn’t locked. The bathroom was empty.

She must have gone into someone else’s dressing room; I’d sit down and wait. Normally, she didn’t linger when the play was over. None of the kids did. They were tired and hungry and had been with one another all day. But that didn’t mean it never happened.

After a few minutes more of waiting, I went out into the hall to search for her. The car and driver the theater arranged for every night would be outside waiting and it was getting late and God knows how much more snow had fallen while I’d been inside and how bad the traffic on Broadway would be.

I asked everyone I ran into, but no one had seen her since the last curtain call.

Finally, I found Raul, the director, talking on his cell phone by the back door. At first he didn’t get off the phone, but when I didn’t politely go away, he cut the call short.

“Something wrong?”

“Have you seen Dulcie? I can’t find her.”

“Not since the last curtain call. Did you check in the car?” He’d suggested the most logical place, and as I went back into the dressing room to grab my coat, I felt foolish. Of course. She didn’t know I had been in the audience. I didn’t always come inside. Dulcie had probably been in such a hurry to get home that she’d raced out of the dressing room and was waiting for me, wondering where I was.