Morning Pages. Day 1.
I will do these. Every morning.
First thing.
Before coffee. Before my brain kicks in and kicks out again.
Morning pages. Day 1.
I already wrote that. Shit.
How should I begin?
I used to love beginnings. The sloppy adrenaline rush of starting something new. Thinking faster than I could type. Not anymore. These days, beginnings feel ravenous and needy. “Give us a middle!” they shout. Middles are hungry for conflict though, and that’s a problem for someone as conflict-averse as I am.
I don’t like what I’ve written so far.
It doesn’t matter. Keep writing, Elise. Just keep writing.
I’ll write about yesterday.
Mom got stuck in her bathtub. Alan called. It was around 2:00 in the afternoon. Before Marsden got home from school. Alan has never called me before. I’ve known him since I was five, and yesterday was the first time I’d ever spoken to him on the phone. When I picked up and heard, “Hi Elise, it’s Alan, the doorman from 212,” I got so excited I shrieked into the receiver, “Alan! Oh my God, I can’t believe you’re calling me!”
I don’t know why I did that.
Alan’s voice sounded serious, not quite somber, but weighed down with discomfort. He said, “I’m sorry to bother you, Elise, but there’s an issue with your mother; she seems to be stuck in the bathtub.” Neither the absurdity of his words nor the soberness of his tone resonated. I was delighted that my favorite doorman had called me, and I responded by asking him, “How are you? How’s the building? How are things in New York?”
“Elise, your mother is stuck in the bathtub, in her apartment, she can’t get out of the bathtub.”
“Oh no. That’s terrible,” I replied this time.
It’s possible, I suppose, that we may have never known that Mom was stuck in the tub until it was too late. We only found out because Aunt Rosemary had a premonition that something was wrong. At least that’s what she said. Mom wasn’t answering her phone and Aunt Rosemary got worried. Instead of calling me, she called Mom’s building and told Alan that there’s an emergency, that someone needed to check in on her sister right away. Alan alerted the super—there’s a new one but I can’t remember his name—maybe it’s Elon. I still can’t believe Mr. Fuchs died. This super is baby-faced and handsome and polite and no match for Mom, and when he found her in her bathtub she was agitated and swearing like a woman who has an expansive enough vocabulary to comfortably perform triage and discard the respectable words.
I wonder what he said when he found her there. “May I please help you out of the bathtub, Mrs. Hellman?”
And her reply? “Who let you into my apartment? Get the hell out of here, you perverted motherfucker!”
After that, Alan called me. He didn’t want to chitchat. “Elise, what would you like us to do?”
I wanted to say, “Keep her in the tub.” The idea of sentencing my mother to the bathtub for the rest of her life is, I’ll admit, somewhat appealing.
Instead, I said, “Alan, thank you so much for letting me know. I’ll figure something out and get back to you.”
I called Aunt Rosemary and filled her in and asked if she would go uptown to Mom’s to help her.
She said, “Wild horses couldn’t keep me away. I sensed something was wrong. I always know when something is wrong with Trudy.”
I don’t know if Aunt Rosemary actually had a premonition. All I know is that she has a nose for drama. Even the way she looks is dramatic. At 77, her hair is still a passionate shade of singed auburn. It doesn’t so much frame her face as form a separate entity around it. It’s a dome under which her face resides—that mountainous forehead, over-chlorinated pools for eyes shielded by a pair of wire-rimmed bifocals, a perfectly fixed nose, and cheeks that seem shaped differently every time you see her. And when she speaks, her lips not only form words. They mold each and every letter within those words. I suspect Uncle Bill found a lot of pleasure in those all-encompassing lips.
Aunt Rosemary took a cab uptown. I know this because she likes to complain about the high cost of taking taxis yet says she’d rather be waterboarded than ride the subway and compares taking the bus to a slow dance with eternity. I called the super and stayed on the phone with him while we waited for Aunt Rosemary to arrive, which seemed to take forever, so while we were waiting, I asked him if he’d try again. “Tell her, ‘I’m talking to your daughter, and she has asked me to help you out of the bathtub.’”
But Mom didn’t believe him. “You’re not talking to my daughter. She’s working on her play. She refuses to talk to anyone when she’s working. I know what you’re really after.”
When Aunt Rosemary arrived, the super told her that he’d wait in the front foyer, but when he heard screaming, he ran into the bathroom and found Mom draped in a towel and standing over Aunt Rosemary who was lying on the floor hollering, “My back is broken!”
This is what was reported back to me by Alan. The super called for an ambulance and the EMTs raced in and brought Aunt Rosemary downstairs on a gurney.
I couldn’t get Mom on the phone until late last night, and when I did, she said, “She’s fine. Of course she’s fine. You know how your Aunt Rosemary is. It’s always something and then it’s nothing.”
She also said she decided not to go to the hospital with Aunt Rosemary because she was famished and exhausted, so she scrambled some eggs and crawled into bed—which was also her excuse for not picking up the phone even though I must have called 30 times.
Aunt Rosemary called me from the hospital just before midnight.
“Elise, they drove like my life was slipping away. I almost had a heart attack, and then I spent four hours in the blood-stained bowels of the emergency room listening to a concert of falsetto screams before being seen by a magnificently incompetent doctor.”
“Oh, Aunt Rosemary, I’m so sorry this happened. How’s your back?”
“They claim it’s spasming,” she said.
I should drive down to the city to make sure they’re both okay. If I leave Dedham at noon, I’ll miss rush-hour traffic and will get to New York by 3:30. But Marsden is with me this week—and I was going to force myself to sit at my computer and write. No excuses. No procrastinations. But maybe this isn’t an excuse. This is an emergency.
It’s not really an emergency.
Mom is okay. Aunt Rosemary is probably fine. What would I do if I went? I’d get in a fight with Mom. I’d lose a day of writing. I have deadline creep. I can’t lose a day right now. I need my days. I’ll stay.
I need to be here for Marsden also. To make sure he focuses on his college essay—and not his bong.
I’ve written three pages. Three pages-ish. I have finished something. Accomplished something. Morning Pages Day 1 is completed. I have two months and four days—which I have calculated is 65 days—to finish Deja New. Sixty-five is a robust number. It’s more than nine weeks. But barely. God creating the world in one measly week has set up unhealthy expectations for the rest of us, but nevertheless, I can surely finish writing a play in 65 days.