Heart of Glass by Wendy Lawless

class, I limped to the subway to get the train uptown.
    Going back to the apartment had become a monumental drag. I found myself going to coffee shops after school, or catching a movie, so that I didn’t have to return to my current home. Michael hadn’t worked as an actor in six months, his unemployment had run out, and he had not gotten a plum role he’d desperately wanted in a play at Lincoln Center. The atmosphere was so oppressive, like tiptoeing into a cage with a grumpy, sleeping animal and hoping it wouldn’t wake up. I was afraid of his depression—of his anger and neediness. It was as if he was turning into another version of my mother, another person I’d had to watch carefully. He sometimes turned his negativity on me—which often manifested itself in criticisms. Suddenly, there didn’t seem to be anything heliked about me. My clothes were too downtown scruffy, and my skirts were too short.
    â€œWhy can’t you just wear jeans and a normal shirt?” he’d ask.
    Because I’m not boring, like you, I was tempted to say. “Michael, I don’t own a pair of jeans, and black is cool. I like it.”
    â€œI like your hair best when you wear it up in a bun,” he said to me one day, making a sad puppy-dog face.
    The next day after class, I went to the Astor Place Barbershop and told the hairdresser to chop it all off.
    â€œAre ya sure? It’s really gonna change the way you look.”
    I looked at her, tattoos covering her arms and the backs of her hands, a small cupcake with a cherry on her neck, and said, “I’m sure.”
    When Michael saw my new hairdo, he freaked.
    â€œJesus Christ! What the hell did you do?” He looked at my short, spiky pixie cut in dismay. “It’s so . . . severe.” He practically shuddered.
    He hated it.
    â€œI think I look like Jean Seberg in Breathless . It does make my neck feel cold, though.” I ran my hand back and forth, savoring the feel of my newly shorn scalp.
    The hairdo had been a fuck-you gesture, meant to horrify my boyfriend. But looking in the mirror, I saw a tough girl; it made me feel powerful and new. I wasn’t going to change the way I dressed or styled my hair for him. I was going to rebel.
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    That weekend, we went to Boston to visit Michael’s step­father, Robert Brustein, a revered intellectual man of the theater. He was a big celebrity in that world; he’d written plays and myriad books on the theater and run the Yale School of Drama before leaving to start the American Repertory Theater (ART) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. If that weren’t enough to live up to, Michael’s father was a hugely successful Broadway and television producer, and Michael’s half sisters were all young, gorgeous supermodel/actresses. He was surrounded on all sides. I felt for him and saw the ways in which we were alike, with our broken families, even though that similarity didn’t seem to bring us any closer.
    I had only met Brustein once before, when Michael and I had first started seeing each other and we’d been invited to tea. Brustein had been married to Michael’s mom, who had died suddenly at the age of fifty-one of a stroke the year before Michael and I met. I had been so immersed in my battles with my own mother, I had probably not been especially aware of the depth of my boyfriend’s grief over the death of his mom. It had hit me that afternoon, during our visit to Brustein’s grand house on Brattle Street, when I saw all the framed pictures on the walls and tables of the beautiful and beloved woman who had died so young. I was hugely intimidated in Brustein’s presence. He was so imposing, intelligent, and effusive, holding forth on topics I knew nothing about—from politics to Jean Cocteau to gravlax—he seemed to know everything or certainly acted as if he did. He terrified me, and I