DIVA’S BED

(Age Eleven)

Three months after our life in London was over, we had moved into Mom’s childhood home, a charming coach house on a tree-lined street of Toronto. Mom’s parents had died a few years back and we’d been renting the house out, but now the renters were gone. We’d had our things shipped and unpacked, and gotten me registered in my first “normal” school. And I would be going with my real last name: Burke. Lalonde had only been Mom’s stage name—her way of separating herself from parents who never understood, or approved of, her career choice.

I liked Lalonde better. I was used to it and wanted to keep it, and no matter what, my mom would always be Margot-Sophia Lalonde to me, because that was what she had chosen for herself. But now she was choosing something else, and since Burke was our legal name, arguing was pointless.

So, fine. New name. New start. I would be in sixth grade in the fall, and I was excited, figuring I’d finally have a chance at having friends—the kind you don’t have to say good-bye to after a few weeks.

Meanwhile, Mom had gone from positive to stoic, had soldiered on.

But once she got us settled in Toronto, she went to bed.

I watched and waited and hoped she would get back up after a few days, like the times this had happened when I was younger, but days turned into weeks.

At school I discovered that I knew too much of many things and not enough of others to be trying to make friends just yet, and quickly decided to aim for invisibility instead. Every day I would come home, let myself in, and listen from the foyer, hoping to hear Mom up and about. Hearing nothing, I would then slip off my shoes, coat, and backpack, and tiptoe upstairs and stand outside her bedroom door and listen again, every bit of my being focused on her, on willing her heart to be beating and her lungs to be taking in air, at least.

Sometimes I would still hear nothing, and it was such a loud nothing, like the sound of that curtain falling—soft to nonexistent, and yet so final.

And so I would slip forward carefully, one foot and then the other, the door swishing against the ivory carpet as I gently pushed it open, just enough to step into the room.

In the darkened, stale-aired space was the giant bedstead from the silent auction in London—one of the few pieces that Mom refused to sell, and insisted on shipping to Canada, despite the impracticality and expense. It had a gold-leaf headboard and a canopy hung with diaphanous sky-blue, white, and gold silk, with long tassels. The top part of the canopy was so tall, we’d had to have it affixed to the ceiling.

Once I was close enough and standing very still, I would detect the subtle rise and fall of the sheet, and all the rigid, frightened pieces of me would come back together in relief. I would creep closer and then just stand, breathing with her, each breath dissolving small portions of the dread I carried with me all day long at school, and then on the way home, and worse and worse down the block, and then up the stairs and inside.

I wanted to touch her. Climb up onto the bed and curl into her, around her. But then I might wake her, and I couldn’t bear the things she said when she was awake.

“I want to go to sleep and never wake up.”

You would have to be an idiot to miss the meaning of that.

Curtain.

Stay with me, I would beg in my mind, sending my will through space to the defeated form on the bed. Stay.

I was not an idiot.

As the months of sixth grade passed and my mother failed to die, I also wanted her to get up and live.

I didn’t want to be mad. I knew what she’d been through. But after the initial worry and subsequent terrifying realization that she wasn’t going to just snap out of it, I was like an orphan—alone in a new house in a new city, nothing familiar, no friends or family, and motherless.

I knew why. Of course I knew. But I started to boil inside. I started to stare down at her in the bed, the words GET UP screaming in my mind.

Get up. Get up.

I need you.

How she could drop me into this new life and then just abandon me to fend for myself, I could not fathom.

Get. Up.

She was a crumpled, diminished, washed-out, fireless shell. But the mom I knew, the dedicated, optimistic, magical mom—she was in there somewhere and I wanted her back. I felt terrible and guilty for being so angry, so full of hate sometimes. It was the wrong feeling, I knew.

But I had lost the same things she lost. Plus her. Not the same, exactly, but still. At eleven years old I wasn’t supposed to be buying groceries with my mother’s credit card, depositing dividend checks from the modest investment portfolio my grandparents had left us, making all my own meals plus someone else’s, not that she ate.

I didn’t have to be a math genius to see the dividend checks weren’t going to be enough for us to live on.

Please get up.

There were days she tried, days I’d come home to find her in the kitchen, having cooked half a meal, or sitting in the living room with a stack of self-help books, trying to read.

“Is there anything in there that can help?” I asked one day, pointing at the book in front of her.

She looked up, met my gaze, and then started to shake. “I can’t even read. I can, but . . . nothing goes in.” She pointed to her head. “And everything is so . . . slow. Thick.”

“Mom, you need to see a doctor.”

“I’ve had quite enough of doctors,” she muttered. “I just need to rest.”

“What about what I need?”

“Oh, sweetheart . . .” Tears formed in her eyes.

“You can’t just stay in bed forever, Mom,” I said, my repressed anger bubbling toward the surface. “You can’t just lie around feeling sorry for yourself. You have a daughter, in case you haven’t noticed.”

A wailing sob came out of her at this, and she got up and hobbled, hunched over and crying, and threw her arms around me. I hugged her back and eventually managed to get her upstairs and into her bed, where she cried for five solid hours. I sat outside the door, feeling helpless, remorseful, and still furious.

The next day she got up and made breakfast and was awake and cooking more food than we could possibly eat when I got home from school, and then she stayed awake all night, walking back and forth, up and down, weeping and talking to herself. She’d been drinking Red Bull and taking super doses of vitamins.

It wasn’t an improvement. And the next day she crashed back down again, staying in bed for a solid month.

I felt like setting the house on fire, calling in the army, howling at the moon, anything, just to make something happen. But I was also afraid of anything happening, because it wouldn’t necessarily be good, as evidenced by the Red Bull/vitamin incident.

Then a letter arrived. It was from one of the few friends—a costume designer from Vienna—who’d made a small effort at keeping in touch.

The envelope contained, in addition to a chatty letter, a newspaper clipping containing a review about a brilliant new soprano—someone we knew, but not well—in a breakout performance. Screw it, I thought, and delivered it to Mom on the pretty bamboo tray I’d been using to bring her anything I thought would tempt her to eat.

“Want me to read it to you?”

“I’m fine,” she said, scanning it from her reclined position on the pillows.

“Okay . . .”

“A slap in the face,” Mom muttered a couple of minutes later, and dropped the clipping onto the floor. And then she sat up a little straighter. I was about to pat her arm, but drew back when I saw fire in her eyes.

Fire was good. Fire was better than despair—it had to be.

Yes. Get up. Get up and fight.

I picked up the clipping.

“Take it away,” Mom said.

I went softly out, heart pounding, and dropped the clipping into the bathroom garbage.

Something will happen now, I thought, and I was right.

From Mom’s bedroom came a ripping sound, followed by a bellowing roar: “Down!”

I froze.

“Bring it down!”

I unfroze, shot back to Mom’s room, and found her out of bed and wild-eyed.

“Bring it all down,” she cried, gripping one of the diaphanous bed curtains in both hands and pulling at it until it ripped from the ceiling. Bits of plaster fell down all around us, and the beautiful curtains lay pooled at her feet. “Bring it down!”

“Mom, stop!” I cried, crossing the room. This, again, was not what I’d been hoping for. “Mom! You’ll bring the ceiling down on us! Come, you love this bed; it’s your diva bed!”

It was the wrong thing to say, the diva part. I knew that right away. And if there’d been any doubt, the wail that rose up, seemingly through the depths of the earth all the way through Mom’s weakened body and up through her damaged vocal cords, made it clear.

Wrong thing.

Another curtain, this one seeming to shriek as it tore along the seams.

“Mom, Mom, stop . . .” I was forced to move, and almost tripped in my haste to get out of the way as Mom launched herself across the bed to attack the curtains on the other side.

“Stop it, stop it, stop it!” I continued to shout, my voice barely penetrating through the wailing and the ripping and tearing and the raining plaster. And then Mom started to pick up other things—a ceramic cat, a music box—and throw them at the wall. The smashing sounds were epic. “No, you’re ruining everything, all the beautiful things! Please, please, stop . . .”

“Everything beautiful is already ruined,” Mom roared, proving she was listening, at least.

“It isn’t!” I snapped, so tired, so frightened, so tired of being frightened, and so very frustrated. “Margot-Sophia!” I hollered, and I flew across the room to the bedroom door, grabbed the handle, and began to slam it—open and slam, open and slam—over and over as hard as I could.

“Margot-Sophia!” (Slam, swoosh, slam.)

“Get hold of yourself!” (Swoosh, slam, swoosh.)

“Get hold of yourself and stop being so baroque!” (Slam.)

“You stop this!” I slammed the door hard, three times, my voice a roar that came from my deepest depths. “Now.”

Mom stopped, her dark hair still flying around her face for a few seconds after the rest of her paused, holding in one hand a figurine from Germany dressed in frothy-looking porcelain lace.

Her eyes locked on me as I stood, hand on the doorknob, ready to slam it again.

For a long moment I figured the doll was going to come flying at me and thought about how that lace might be sharp at certain velocities.

And then Mom’s lips twitched and her body quivered, and I figured we were about to go back to the shaking and crying, maybe for days, maybe worse this time. Maybe I’d made a terrible mistake.

But then she began to laugh.

She laughed. Laughed until she was helpless, until once again I feared for the doll, and therefore stepped forward and took it from her, setting it back on the writing desk.

Mom was still laughing, which meant maybe after all this she was actually losing her mind. But if it was madness, I would take it, because she came to me and took me in her arms and I started laughing too. If it was madness, maybe we would just go mad together.

We laughed until we had tears coursing down our cheeks, laughed ourselves onto the floor among the mistreated curtains and crumbled plaster, laughed until our stomachs hurt and our throats were dry.

And then she grabbed my hands and said in her beautifully focused, intense way, “Oh my dear, my sweetheart, of course you are right.”

“That you were being baroque?”

She snorted. “That too.”

“That the ceiling is going to come down?”

At this, she took my face, kissed me on both cheeks, then stared into my eyes and said, “That everything beautiful is not ruined.”