TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 40

[Tobie Shapiro]

October 26, 20000000000000006


Dear Too,

	So now that I've turned down the infamous 
rental house ripper-offers, I am back to 
searching Craig's List for housing, hoping to 
find a house to rent or buy.  In the meantime, we 
settle in, and I try my best to accommodate my 
mother's quirks.  She's 86, so her changing is 
not likely.  She is wonderful and I adore her. 
But, here's the thing:  she follows me all around 
the house watching me.  Wherever I go, she comes. 
If I get up from the table and start to walk 
upstairs, she follows.  If I leave the room, she 
leaves the room.  She asks me what I'm thinking, 
if I'm silent for  more than a minute.

	Yesterday, she handed me a couple of 
envelopes saying that it was the forwarded mail. 
I said, thank you, and started to open one from 
the Social Security Administration.  She kept 
standing there.  I focussed on the letter, which 
was a form to fill out.  She stood there 
watching, from less than a foot away.  I opened 
up the form and began to fill it out.  She stayed 
where she was.  I could feel her hot eyes on me. 
"Something bad?" she asked.  "No, it's just a 
form," I answered.  She stayed there.  I filled 
out the form, and she remained at her post, 
watching me the whole time.  This is the tip of 
the iceberg.  I want to have this sort of thing 
roll off my back is what I want, but it gripes 
me.  I am an inferior daughter, therefore.  And 
it is I who should have my head examined.

	Examine this.


                                    ‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡


Pearl

	Adventure Theater was a group of amateur 
actors, directors and stage workers who got 
together and put on plays for children.  This was 
in Maryland in the late 1940s and early 1950s, 
though they could still be active for all I know. 
My mother got involved with Adventure Theater 
through Pearl Shear, a woman whom she met at a 
social event for the cooperative nursery school 
that I went to.  Pearl became my mother's best 
friend almost instantaneously.  They were both 
displaced Californians, and both didn't fit into 
the mold of crisply dressed and coiffed young 
mothers at the cooperative (with their little 
hats).  I remember the inside jungle gym set up 
on the dark brown linoleum tiles, with streaks of 
beige and black in them.  I learned how to hang 
upside down by my knees on the bars and I went 
quickly to get one of the mothers on duty to come 
see my miraculous trick.  I led her back to the 
jungle gym and made her stand and watch me as I 
repeated my trick.  Unfortunately, for the 
performance, I fell on my head and cried as the 
mother on duty took me to the first aid center. 
Why do mothers let their children out of their 
sight at such a young age?  Nothing good can come 
of it.

	Pearl was a brilliant, scatterbrained, 
nervous woman.  She was married to a doctor, 
Meyer, whose nickname was, "Mickey", which is my 
mother's nickname too.  So when the four of them 
got together, it would be Pearl and Mickey and 
Mickey and Justin.  And when the women went off 
by themselves to plot and laugh, leaving the men 
to fend for themselves, it was still Pearl and 
Mickey and Mickey and Justin.  Pearl was given to 
excesses.  Once, she was found to have an 
under-active thyroid.  She was always fighting 
her weight, and when the thyroid pills, four of 
them a day, had her losing weight, she decided, 
on her own, to take eight of them a day instead. 
This resulted in exopthalmia, protruding eyes, or 
"popeyes", which never went away.  How did a 
highly intelligent woman wind up doing that to 
herself?  Ah, it's neurosis.  The player who runs 
the show for most of us.  Nevertheless, Pearl was 
a terrific actress who could take any part 
acting.  She was wonderful.  We all loved Pearl, 
and still do.  Pearl played the part of Simon in 
Simple Simon.  She danced around the stage with 
big floppy feet, slapping them down, her arms 
waving around, and making gurgling noises.  In my 
book, Pearl was always the star, the lead, the 
top of the marquee.  I loved to watch Pearl and 
Mom when they were together, because it was the 
happiest I ever saw my mother.  She'd laugh until 
tears came to her eyes and rolled down her 
cheeks, and they'd joke around or delve deeply 
into private talk.  There has never been a friend 
like Pearl for my mother.  The other friends my 
mother met wound up mistreating her, twisted 
relationships, in which they hurt my mother's 
feelings and insulted her.  Never Pearl.  They 
never fought, and never had a falling out.  The 
friendship remained solid over time and distance.

	It was Pearl who got my mother involved 
in Adventure Theater.  She had her painting sets 
and making props.  This, for real live theater 
events.  She took me with her sometimes, and I 
wandered around while the grown ups built the 
sets, painted them, and while the props were 
being put together.  My mother says she liked the 
challenge of having to come up with, say, a giant 
pie for simple Simon, or the long hair in a 
cascade for Rapunzel.  My mother made all  those 
things.  One day, when I came along with her, we 
were painting sets.  Another woman was watching 
over me while she painted a big construction dark 
blue.  I took a paint brush, dipped it into the 
dark blue paint and painted profiles of people on 
a door jamb.  I had just figured out how to draw 
profiles.  And I painted animals, too.  The woman 
said we were going to have to cover up the 
figures I'd painted, but she was very clever at 
this.  She told me, whispering, that only she and 
I would know that my faces and animals were there 
under the blue paint.  It would be our secret. 
That sounded marvellous to me.  It was like a 
conspiracy between friends.  Only we would know. 
Of course, now you know.

	One of the plays that Adventure Theater 
put on was "Mr. Popper's Penguins".  I don't 
recall the plot or any of the human characters. 
But I do recall the penguins, because the 
children of the members of Adventure Theater were 
called upon to play the penguins, and I was one 
of them.  My sister was one, too.  She got to 
play one of the penguins who got in a fight with 
another penguin.  There were two different kinds 
of costumes for the penguins.  There were baby 
penguins who were grey and white with pink bills 
and feet, and double circles painted on the head 
for eyes.  These were all toddlers.  And there 
were the grown penguins who were black and white 
with pink bills and big puffy pink feet.  Every 
penguin had a name plastered on his or her back. 
The way the names worked was that black banners 
which matched the black of the penguins' backs 
were emblazoned with white lettering, and these 
banners were pinned to the backs of the penguins 
before we went out onto the stage.  There were 
only a few penguins whose names really mattered, 
and those were the ones who got into a fight and 
who climbed up a ramp and flopped down a slide on 
their bellies.  Not all the adult penguins did 
this.  My name banner said, "Veronica", and I 
grew very attached to that name.  Right before 
one performance, my name, Veronica, wound up on 
some other penguin's back, and I protested loudly 
with tears and flailing.  There was no time for 
good parenting, so they had to go find Veronica 
and rip it off of the back of the lucky kid who 
got it, and plaster it onto my back.  Never did a 
tantrum ever get such swift positive results. 
I'm sure it ruined me.

	Pearl and her husband, Meyer, left 
Washington, D.C. and moved to Los Angeles a year 
or so before we moved back to Berkeley.  Meyer 
set up as a heart specialist, and Pearl entered 
the wonderful world of Hollywood.  Every once in 
a while, during the time I was growing up, we 
would see Pearl in some television show, or a 
commercial, or a movie, playing everything from 
bit parts to major roles.  And when we did, we'd 
call Pearl and tell her we saw her.  Pearl has 
been a fixture in our lives since my mother met 
her those decades ago in Washington, D.C.

	About six years ago, Pearl slipped and 
fell outside her house in Sherman Oaks.  She hit 
her head badly and there was a lot of internal 
bleeding and brain damage.  For a few weeks, she 
was in a coma and they considered her to be in a 
persistent vegetative state.  So her two 
children, Kerry and Stuart, finally had the life 
support removed.  That's when she came out of the 
coma.  Before she came out of the coma, we'd gone 
through her injury as if it were her death. 
Then, she woke up and we went to visit the 
resurrected Pearl.  She wasn't talking much yet, 
but we knew she was aware because when Meyer came 
to visit, she grimaced in disgust.  I never saw 
any two married people fight as much as my own 
parents, except Pearl and Meyer.  As time went 
on, Pearl deteriorated, and now she's in a 
nursing facility, not remembering much of 
anything, and unable to engage in meaningful 
conversation.  My mother is afraid to call her, 
even to say hello.  Pearl, for all intents and 
purposes, is dead now.


                                    ‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡ø‡
-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net