The Long Goodbye by Meghan O'Rourke Page B

of playing a boy in front of the class and our parents. I didn’t know what to do. It seemed so awful that I couldn’t even mention it. Instead, I nursed my shame in private, thinking that something would keep it from happening. The day before the play, I couldn’t eat anything. I pushed the food around on my plate. My mother gave me a look. At bedtime, the panic worsened. I lay in the dark and wept quietly. Somehow—and how I don’t know—my mother heard me. She came in the room in her bathrobe and pushed the hair away from my forehead and said, “Sweetie, what’s wrong?” I wouldn’t answer. She quietly said, “Whatever it is cannot be as bad as you think.” Somehow this sentence unlocked me and I confessed. She smiled. “Honey, no one is going to care. You’re not really a boy. It’s acting.” When my mother said it, in the dark, in her nubbly maroon bathrobe, I believed her fully, as I would have believed no one else, and I relaxed as she stroked my hair and shushed me to sleep.
    Whenever I inwardly berated myself about some failing, my mother was the one who knew best how to pull me out of my self-assault. Often she was the only one who noticed. To this day, when I am struggling with a difficult task, I pace my apartment feeling off-kilter, thinking, I need something; what is it? And I realize: my mother. She had, as my father put it, a clear compass. Once, in the eighth grade, instead of going to a chaste slumber party at our classmate Carly’s, my friends and I sneaked out with some boys to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show , and a couple of days later one of the boys I’d gone with told on me after getting kicked out of class, in the hope of distracting my mother from his antics. When I walked by her office, she crooked her finger at me. “You,” she said, from behind her desk. “Yes, you, Meghan, you’re not going anywhere till I talk to you.” I went in, tears of guilt already springing to my eyes. But she just looked at me and said, “Meg, you need some better friends.” I stiffened. She said, “ The Rocky Horror Picture Show , hmm? It’s OK. But find some friends who don’t rat you out afterward.” And then she said, “Now get out of my sight, sweetheart, and don’t lie to me again.”
    I thought of my mother as more natively relaxed and outgoing than I was. But every so often something would happen that would make me realize we were more similar than I’d thought—my mother would idly say how shy she’d been when she moved to New York, and met my father’s friends. I remember how nervous she was when she had to speak in public for the first time, at a school meeting just after she’d become head of the middle school at Saint Ann’s. (She must have been the same age I am now.) She fretted all that morning, dressing. I agonized with her, because I was deeply shy, and such a task seemed heart-freezingly frightening. Afterward I asked her how it went. She said, “You know, you just have to do it. You don’t have a choice. And then once you’ve done it, you can do it again, and it isn’t so bad.” She was a pragmatist at core: if you could be present, intensely present, the rest would work itself out. Later I realized that this was much harder than it looked.
    Once when I was in college, my parents had a dinner party with some teachers. It was a festive midwinter affair and everyone got a little lit on red wine. As two young teachers were talking past us, my mother leaned over to me and said, “I just wrote my mother a letter about what she meant to me. We’re bad at saying these things in my family, but she’s getting older and I wanted her to know. And it made me think about you, and how there are so many things I don’t say to you, but I want you to know.” What she said next was just that she loved me and was proud of me, but