23-Why I Forgot My Name, Again—Part 2
For those concerned: no, I’m not a psychopath, nor do I suffer from dissociative identity disorder. A lot of creative people, especially those raised over half a century ago when children had no rights or autonomy, compartmentalize their emotional and productive selves. Betcha lots of kids still do coming up today. That’s the price of emotional/psychological child abuse—the kind being perpetrated right now by “God-fearing Christian” legislators around the country.
We don’t all grow up to be serial killers. But we do grow up to be voters.
To circle back to why I forgot my name (again), I must needs return to my third self-betrayal.
For those keeping score, number one was leaving the Air Force, number two was returning my marionette strings to my mother’s hands rather than maintaining my independence in Chicago’s northernmost tip.
I also must needs explain the difference between marriage, non-marriage, and our marriage. Most people view matrimony as a commitment to love, honor, and alternately obey or cherish until death, disillusionment, lust, money, or boredom do they part. Tom and I, on the other hand, had been spiritually hitched for ten years by the time we repeated those vows before the judge, meaningless though they were to us both. As little as we knew of material consequence about each other, our immediate spiritual connection the day our paths first crossed slid our tacitly agreed-upon vows neatly in place.
I take you as my life partner. I will stand with you and defend you. Your enemies will be my enemies, and your friends will be forever welcome in my house.
I give you my strength, my courage, and my fidelity. I accept your weakness, your fears, and your indiscretions.
I will protect you and care for you. I will intertwine my life with yours from this moment forward.
That’s why he’d scooped up my stuff and run after me when I got too cold that day in the choir room. That’s why I stood unconcernedly by as he shagged every girl he could find who said yes. Our lives were already intertwined, whether we wanted it or not.
And I didn’t wanna!
I didn’t wanna be intertwined, I didn’t wanna get married. Yeah, I’d wanted to do just that when I was back in California, before my moment in the spotlight. But now, for the first time, I had “wants”—to be independent, have my own life, probe myself to uncover my real mettle. I didn’t wanna follow the traditions of my ancestors, and I sure as hell didn’t wanna knuckle under for the third time and put anyone else’s considerations before my own.
Besides, Tom was loud, a force of nature who rapidly cycled from crisis to crisis. His father had warned I’d be sick all the time—what about him being needy all the time?
“I’m doing it again!” Jeff yelled. “When is it ever going to be my time, for me?”
“He makes me feel alive and vital,” Bobby pointed out. “And he’s all about music. I love that.”
Howard was pragmatic, of course: “Let’s be real. I need a partner, someone I can belong to, who belongs to me. I’ve been alone, remember? And I’d only ever once taken advantage of Jeff’s fire to get me on a stage.”
“I’m gonna be miserable,” Greg whined. “I’m gonna have to be a wife when I should be a husband. I’m gonna end up taking care of him all the time instead of going for my own dream. How often do I even want anything? This is just me switching puppet masters, Mom for him. Where’s the upside to that?”
But Harris drew a long breath. “He makes Mom cringe,” I whispered, trying to conceal my glee.
And that he did. My mother disliked everything about Tom and his at-that-point-never-met family: his energy, his talent and dedication, his passion. “If you want to make it onstage, you have to give up everything else,” she always said, likely trying to console herself for not doing just that. But most of all, she objected to his “grip” on me. “He’ll never let you shine on your own. I don’t know why you can’t see it. He’s jealous of you.”
I’m not an empath in the shyster sense of the word, but I’d been viscerally feeling her displeasure from across the country ever since Tom stopped on the expressway and called her from a phone box to let her know we’d done the deed: we were legally married. She later claimed she hoisted a brandy to us, but my money’s on not. Mingled with her faux congratulations was confusion about why I’d suddenly become distant, why Tom had called instead of me. Layered over that was her relief that, thank God, I wasn’t going to New York on my own, I had knuckled under and accepted the yoke of marriage, and in another month or so I was going to return to her province and settle into a normal life, at which point she’d reassert her authority and dominance.
And while all that may not suffice as to why I can’t give you an imitation of four Hawaiians playing the ukelele, as Grandpa used to say, it’s nevertheless likely the reason I was oblivious when the nurse kept calling for Tom’s wife in the hospital waiting room the day we left the Midwest behind.
Okay, scene: we’d already delivered Tom’s heavier-than-fuck Fender Rhodes to his parents’ house in time to be loaded onto their moving van. Check.
“We can drive into Phoenix and pick it up as soon as it gets there,” I’d said, pragmatic as all Howard. “That way, it’ll only cost us gas money, and we’ll get to see their new house to boot.”
We’d also already turned over our apartment keys to the building manager. “No way we’re lugging all your bent, dirty pots and pans across the country or dragging your crappy mattress down to the alley. Just leave it!” Jeff insisted.
“This way, management can call the apartment furnished and up the rent on the next tenants,” Harris said.
“Either way,” Greg said, “it’s not our fucking problem.”
The hardest part was patting the Oldsmobile goodbye as we tossed its keys in its front seat and strolled away from one of the few non-no-parking spots in the neighborhood. “So what if somebody steals it?” Jeff said. “They won’t get any farther than the gas station. And fugetabout the city tracking you down to pay for towing. You never even got the title!”
Clearly, none of above were the words of a sweet, compliant, law/rule-obeying girl—a variation of me that’s never existed. I was cycling through Howard/Jeff/Harris, even if I didn’t know to identify as such at the time. And despite Greg’s misgivings, Tom had no problem with me as his husband/wife. He’d rather I handle all the decisions, arrangements, and money matters. He’d take care of the physical stuff since, real self be damned, I lived in a barely functioning girl body and his ripped human form had a core of steel and arms of iron to match.
So I stood by sweating in the heat and humidity that makes Chi Town such an ideal place to be from, not in, while he schlepped his boxes and boxes of books, albums, and sheet music down hall, into the elevator, out to the taxi, into the trunk, then out of the cab and into the Greyhound station. By the time he was done, we were both dripping wet.
“Let’s head straight for O’Hare,” said every realistic, pragmatic, and otherwise intelligent part of me. “That way we can relax the air conditioning for a few hours.”
Tom chose, instead, to have a meltdown.
Okay, it wasn’t a choice, and I suppose I should have seen it coming. My husband never handled change well, even when he theoretically-but-not-really wanted it. More than sentimental, he was nostalgic to the fourth power. We’d spent every free moment over the last few weeks saying his goodbyes: At our mutual high school, where all the office personnel knew and loved him, and teachers he’d never even had hugged him and wished him well. At every restaurant, bar, hotel lobby, corner grocery store… friend’s house, former girlfriend’s place, Musician’s Union hangout, and booking agent’s office… at our local library, city hall, and community center. He had to saunter down memory lane with absatively everyone. Everyone. He knew more people than Howard could count.
Most were surprised to see him go. All were shocked to learn he’d gotten married. Many shot me glares and dark looks until he, every time, pulled me forward and kvelled (crowed) over me.
“Oh, well, if Tom likes you…”
Now, with all those dozens of goodbyes behind us and all his possessions abandoned, shipped, or unreachable on the moving van, he started to shake. Urgent-care centers had yet to be invented, so he told the cabbie to drive us all the way back out to our soon-to-be-ex-suburb’s hospital, because it was familiar and comfortable. And someplace he hadn’t remembered to bid farewell.
He really did look terrible. If I’d been a good wife, I’d have been worried. But I wasn’t a wife, and I wasn’t good, and—just as a reminder—I wasn’t nice. What I was, was already used to signing my married name. I’d gotten a new Social Security card in that name, had signed onto Tom’s bank account weeks earlier, and had paid all his outstanding bills with checks instead of cash (Howard: “I can’t deduct expenses from a handwritten list of what you think you approximately spent.”) I’d also already sent letters to my mother using my married name, and Jeff had already ranted when she responded to my maiden tag. Long story short, I knew my name.
Ergo, I filled out the ER paperwork while an orderly immediately wheeled my pale, panting husband to a cubicle. “We’ll give him some oxygen while he waits for the doctor,” the intake nurse assured me. “He’s probably just overwhelmed by the heat and humidity.”
Probably, I thought. That, and maybe leaving the place he’s spent his entire life in to fly across the country for the first time and start a new life, too.
Had the term “panic attack” been invented, we woulda all been on the same page. But since that handy diagnosis was still decades in the future, I just found a chair after completing and signing—and signing—half a dozen pages of questions. The a/c felt good. I pulled out a Matt Helm book. Maybe four pages later, a nurse called across the room, “Mrs. S?”
I glanced up, shrugged, and went back to my book. Another chapter or so later, she reappeared in the doorway.
“Mrs. S? Is there a Mrs. S. here?”
Darting my eyes around—what kind of moron leaves when their husband’s in the emergency room? —I returned to my adventure.
A few minutes later, the same nurse showed up once again, this time directly in front of me. “Excuse me, but aren’t you Mrs. S?”
“Me?” Head shake. “No.”
“But your husband described you exactly, even down to your sandals. Aren’t you Mrs. Tom S?”
Tom S. Mrs. Tom S. Mental head slap. Even Jeff was laughing.
“Yeah. I am. Sorry about that. Is he ready to go?”
“No, the doctor hasn’t been in to see him yet. But he’d like you to come sit with him.”
“I can do that? You’d let me be in there with him?”
She gave me the strangest look. “Of course. You’re family. Family’s always allowed in with the patient.”
Well, damn. This was the very ER they’d brought me to whenever I got hurt in gym, two, maybe eight times a semester. They’d always said parents weren’t allowed into the cubicles until the doctor came. Another of my mother’s lies exposed and my father’s excuses belied.
More importantly, though, another disconnect to my own name. The second time in memory. Who knew how many others there had been? Not me. But that wasn’t, in fact, important at all, at least not to Greg-me.
“Told me so,” he-me sneered. “This is how it’s gonna be. I’m gonna have to cater to him just like I do with Mom for the rest of my life. Told me so.”
Even that wasn’t the salient point. As I followed the nurse to where my husband was now dead-to-the-world asleep, it struck me I was no longer merely girl/non-girl, boy/non-boy, dumbasfuck Claudia; reliable, steadfast Harris; capable, problem-solver Howard; audacious, edgy Jeff; or even happy-go-lucky, effervescent Bobby anymore.
I was now also Mrs. Tom S, wife of everybody’s most memorable student, everyone’s most beloved nephew, every Chicago musical concern’s most promising export.
Snug-of-a-nun. I was mere inches away from being someone of consequence.