What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  ACT I - Unbridled Good Fortune

  Scene 1 - Stage Fright

  Scene 2 - Unbridled Good Fortune

  Scene 3 - Wedding Plans

  Scene 4 - Italy

  Scene 5 - Rosh Hashanah

  ACT II - What I Know

  Scene 1 - Days of Awe

  Scene 2 - Yom Kippur

  Scene 3 - The Wichita Option

  Scene 4 - My Left Side

  Scene 5 - Under the Radar

  Scene 6 - Solo Theater

  Scene 7 - Adoption Option

  Scene 8 - A Litigious Mood

  Scene 9 - December

  Scene 10 - Labor

  ACT III - An Unexpected Life

  Scene 1 - In Hospital

  Scene 2 - Home

  Scene 3 - January

  Scene 4 - Home Remedies

  Scene 5 - April Fools

  Scene 6 - The Wedding

  Scene 7 - The Bat Mitzvah and the Trial

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Alice Eve Cohen, 2009

  All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston. Copyright 1942 by Zora Neale Hurston, copyright renewed © 1970 by John C. Hurston.

  The Brocaded Slipper and Other Vietnamese Tales by Lynette Dyer Vuong; text copyright 1982 by Lynette Dyer Vuong; used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Cohen, Alice Eve.

  What I thought I knew / Alice Eve Cohen.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-05093-4

  1. Motherhood—United States—Case studies. 2. Mother and child—United States—Case studies. 3. Pregnancy, unwanted—United States—Case studies. 4 Fetal growth retardation—United States—Case studies. 5. Birth weight, Low—United States—Case studies. 6. Cohen, Alice Eve. 7. Cohen, Alice Eve—Family. 8. Parents of children with disabilities—United States—Biography. 9. Mothers and daughters—United States—Biography. 10. Jewish women—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  HQ759.C644 2009

  306.874’3092—dc22

  [B] 2008051576

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  For my wonderful family

  author’s note

  All the events in this book actually occurred. As this is a memoir, my telling of the events is filtered through the lens of memory and emotion, and altered by the passage of time. I’ve changed the names and identifying details of some people in this book to protect their privacy. Conversations and dialogues have been modified by memory, and sometimes intentionally compressed and reshaped for narrative purposes. My intent throughout the book is to re-create for the reader the story as I experienced it in the moment, and in the state of mind I was in at each stage in the journey. This is how I remember my life during this period of time.

  There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you.

  —Zora Neale Hurston

  ACT I

  Unbridled Good Fortune

  Scene 1

  Stage Fright

  This was going to be a solo show. That’s what I do. I write and perform solo plays. Dramatic tales with multiple characters, for adults. Comic plays and folktales, for children. I’ve performed for half a million people, in tiny theaters and high-tech performance spaces, in international theater festivals and school cafeterias, on four continents.

  I rarely get stage fright. But the thought of performing this story in front of an audience was like willingly entering my recurrent dream—the one where I am standing under a blinding spotlight on a rickety proscenium stage. I face the audience, open my mouth to speak, and realize: 1) I can’t remember my lines; 2) There is a marching band entering the theater; 3) I’m naked. Shouting over the brass section, I stammer and blurt out improvisations, hoping my lines will come back to me before the audience showers me with rotten vegetables, but the band drowns me out. As they approach the stage, I see that the musicians are wild animals in military dress. I wake in a sweat.

  On Friday, the eve of the Jewish New Year, September 10, 1999, I was rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital for an emergency CAT scan. “I’m here with your patient,” said the radiologist on the phone to my doctor. “She appears to be in shock.”

  I sat down to write this story as a solo show, but I got stage fright and couldn’t write anything for years.

  Seven years later, on Friday, the eve of the Jewish New Year, 2006, I started to write. Unexpectedly. Urgently.

  I won’t be performing this story. In a book I am just as naked, lit under as unforgiving a spotlight, but I’m willing to divulge these secrets for one reader at a time. I’ve been writing as fast as I can, without telling anybody. For fear that I’ll stop. For fear that the Evil Eye will catch up with me. Again.

  Scene 2

  Unbridled Good Fortune

  This is the happiest I’ve been in years. As if in a perpetual state of inebriation, I laugh for no reason. I celebrate the end of the decade and the millennium.

  The first half of the nineties was less celebratory. Infertility. Divorce from Brad after thirteen years together. A custody battle for our three-year-old adopted daughter, Julia. The loneliness of single parenthood. The exhausting discipline of raising Julia on my minimal, freelance income. The fear of raising a child in my crime-ridden building. Before taking Julia out for a walk in her stroller, I had to look through the peephole to make sure my drug-dealing neighbor wasn’t starting a gunfight with an unruly client.

  In the spring of 1999, I indulge in the pleasurable delusion of eternal youth. Michael, my fiancé, is ten years younger. I’m forty-four. He’s thirty-four, but he looks like a college
kid, with his wayward curly hair, earnest blue gray eyes, baggy jeans, and thread-bare T-shirt, cradling his guitar and singing the song he wrote last night instead of sleeping. He’s smart, funny, cynical, affectionate. He’ll never grow up, and as long as I’m with him, neither will I.

  We met three years earlier at a children’s theater conference, where we were both performing solo plays. He drove me home, came back for dinner the next night, and spent the night. Because of our age difference, we had no expectations that our fling would develop into anything more. Because we had no expectations, we shed our armor. When we shed our armor, we fell in love.

  Michael grew up in New Orleans, and was the only one in his conservative, devout Lutheran family who’d ever moved north of the Mason-Dixon Line. After his family recovered from hearing that he was dating a Jewish New Yorker—a divorced, single mom, ten years his senior—they teased him about acquiring an instant family. Michael had always preferred to let his life happen to him, rather than plan it.

  Michael was nearly penniless, by design. Money didn’t interest him. His professional passion was creating theater with kids in the country’s poorest communities—impoverished school districts in southern Appalachia, children of Mexican migrant workers in El Paso, Texas—where he slept on the sofas of local families and barely broke even. He paid the rent with his more remunerative corporate theater jobs.

  From the first day they met, Michael and Julia, then five years old, hit it off. I left them in the apartment while I picked up dinner from the Cuban Chinese restaurant down the block. When I returned with the yellow rice and black beans, they were sitting on the floor of Julia’s room inventing an elaborate story, which they animated with Julia’s stuffed animals and a talking basket. When he moved in with us a year later, he brought everything he owned: hundreds of books, a crate of handmade masks and puppets, two guitars, and the futon he’d carried with him to the fourteen places he’d lived since graduating from the University of Virginia.

  In the spring of 1999, Michael and Julia, now eight, are great friends. He wants to raise Julia with me, but he doesn’t want to have more children. Neither do I.

  Brad moved to Los Angeles when Julia was five. Three thousand miles has done wonders for our relationship. Julia keeps a photo of Brad by her bed, a formal performance portrait: Tall and thin, with intensely dark eyes and thick black hair, he is wearing a tuxedo and conducting the final, wrenching movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. Julia visits him in LA on holidays.

  I am in school, finishing up my MFA in writing for children at The New School University, an easy subway commute from our Upper West Side apartment to the Greenwich Village campus. Because classes are at night, I can continue my freelance work during the day. In exchange for The New School’s reasonable tuition, I’m getting the degree I need to teach college, and the luxury of two years of creative immersion. When Julia was younger, I couldn’t afford to write anything that didn’t pay the bills.

  I love being in school, and I’m writing day and night. I still dress like I did as a Princeton student in the midseventies, half my life ago: jeans and a T-shirt, my long dark hair (now with a few renegade grays) worn loose. After class, I drink beer with my grad school friends at Cedar Tavern, a ragtag Greenwich Village bar with dark paneling, cheap beer, and an infamous history of ill-behaved artists—Jack Kerouac was thrown out in the forties for pissing in an ashtray, Jackson Pollock in the fifties for ripping the door off the men’s room.

  One night, my friend Dylan catches my eye when he enters the classroom. Gay, universally flirtatious, and mercilessly beautiful, Dylan has a habit of breaking his professors’ hearts—dating, breaking up with, and intellectually disabling otherwise erudite teachers. Dylan kneels in front of my chair, gazes into my eyes, and whispers, “You’re pregnant, Alice, aren’t you?”

  “No!”

  “Yes you are. You have that erotic glow that only a pregnant woman has.”

  “I’m not pregnant.”

  He examines me more closely and whispers, “Then you had really hot sex last night.”

  In fact, Michael and I did have hot sex last night, after he proposed to me and I said yes. My erotic glow is showing! In this deliriously happy spring, after my postdivorce winter that lasted half a decade, I have found the fountain of youth.

  My unbridled good fortune gallops on at reckless speed.

  My agent books a full season of performances of my solo theater works, in humble and exalted venues throughout the East Coast, lucrative and fun work.

  The manager of my building evicts the drug dealers and hires a doorman.

  The New School hires me to teach solo theater, starting in the fall.

  My part-time editing job, plus the new part-time teaching gig, gives me a steady freelance income and a flexible schedule.

  We can afford a family vacation—Michael, Julia, and I are going to Italy in August.

  For the first time in years, I have time to write, I don’t have to buy clothes at the thrift store, I’m not worried about making rent. I can breathe.

  I’m in love.

  I lie in bed in Michael’s arms one night and tell him, “This is the first time in years that I am truly happy!”

  ... which is an idiotic and dangerous thing to say!

  In Jewish folklore, declaring your good fortune aloud arouses envy and tempts the Evil Eye. To ward off this malicious spirit, the very moment after saying something so carelessly self-congratulatory, you must spit quickly three times through your middle and index finger—Tuh! Tuh! Tuh!

  Evil Eye? I’m neither superstitious nor religious. My assimilated Jewish parents rejected their own orthodox upbringings and kosher homes. They raised me and my two sisters without Hebrew school or bat mitzvahs. We celebrated the major Jewish holidays, supplementing our repertory with Christmas presents, Easter egg hunts, and marshmallow peeps.

  My mother was a sociology professor with a well-developed sense of logic. But she retained some vestigial Old Country beliefs—from her father’s Russian side, her mother’s rural Oklahoma side, and her grandparents’ Latvian side of the family—which she synthesized into an eclectic array of rituals and phobias.

  When Mom spilled salt, she threw it over her left shoulder for good luck. When there was an electrical storm, she made us sit in the middle of the room, out of reach of sinister and highly motivated lightning bolts. When she taught sociology at City University, she walked up ten flights rather than take the death-defying elevator ride. When we went to the beach, Mom parked our beach towels twenty feet above the high tide line, in case a shark decided to evolve on the spot into a predatory land animal.

  But her most powerful protection against the Evil Eye was to make sure she was never happy for too long, a lesson she repeatedly demonstrated for me.

  I am three years old. I’m sitting on the floor, watching Mommy dance in her friend’s living room, just for fun, for the pure joy of dancing. Her friend plays gypsy dances on the piano. Mommy spins and leaps, sweaty, red-cheeked, and laughing. “I love dancing!” she shouts, mid-leap. Then she crashes her foot into the piano bench and breaks her big toe. No more dancing.

  I’m twenty-two. I have just graduated from college. Mom is fifty-seven. To prove to her that I’m a grown-up, I treat her to lunch at a nice, cheap Indian restaurant in the East Village. Mom has finally recovered from breast cancer and a long depression, and has found the teaching job of her dreams. Over vegetable pakoras and mango chutney, Mom tells me, “This is the first time in years that I am truly happy!”

  We both forget about the Evil Eye. Mom speaks freely of her happiness. She arouses the envy of the gloomy professor at the next table. She neglects to break a toe. She doesn’t park our beach towels far enough from the sharks. She leaves the spilled salt on the table by the chutney. She forgets to spit three times. Two weeks later Mom died suddenly from a cerebral hemorrhage, caused by a ruptured aneurism.

  So I should have known, happy as I was in the spring of 1999, that I was i
n grave danger. That the Evil Eye was lurking in the shadows, waiting for the moment when I dropped my guard and admitted to Michael aloud, with childlike glee and momentary suspension of my adult disbelief, “This is the first time in years that I am truly happy!”

  Tuh! Tuh! Tuh!

  One day in early April, three weeks after Michael and I were engaged, three weeks before my New School graduation, I woke up with an upset stomach. The nausea didn’t go away. New symptoms emerged each day. Insomnia, mood swings, sore breasts, low energy, an urgent need to urinate. When I missed a period, I called Robin, my gynecologist.

  “We expected that. When I switched you to the lower dose of estrogen, I told you that your period would end.”

  “But I’ve been so tired . . .”

  “Welcome to menopause.”

  “. . . and sick to my stomach.”

  “See a gastroenterologist.”

  I’m infertile.

  When I was thirty and married to Brad, we wanted to have a baby. My period stopped for a year. One doctor said I lost my period because I had recently lost weight. Another insisted I was in menopause at age thirty. A third doctor suspected my fallopian tubes were blocked and sent me for a procedure called a hysterosalpingogram, which hurt like hell and which revealed my deformed uterus—Bicornuate, Latin for two-horned or two-chambered.

  The deformity was caused by exposure to DES, diethylstilbestrol, the synthetic estrogen my mother took to prevent miscarriage when she was pregnant with me. I found out about DES when I was in college and Ms. magazine broke the story with the terrifying headline, “DES, Cancer Time Bomb!” My mother, heavy with guilt, brought me to her gynecologist to find out what injury she may have unintentionally caused me by taking the drug routinely prescribed as the “pregnancy vitamin.” Since then, I’ve had an annual colposcopy—a microscopic examination of my cervix for possible cancer.