Habit Read Free Page B

cleaner’s bag over his head and now nobody wants to go near it.
    â€”That will be fine. I’ll need a pillow, though, and some sheets. And I see you have a French class the next day. I’ll come with you to that.
    â€”Oh my gosh. Please don’t come to my class, nobody’s parents ever do that. It’s tiny and the professor is really boring.
    â€”Nonsense. I’ll be fascinated.
    (This was a class with only four students. We would sit around a small table with the professor, and he really was very, very boring. Ma came as promised, sat right next to him, and was snoring within the first ten minutes.)

    Williamstown, 1980
    After college, I made a beeline for Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan where I hoped to become an actress of the Chekhov/Shakespeare variety. I took great pleasure in breaking out of the conventional mold in which I’d been raised, and got an optimistic start in Macbeth, off-off-off Broadway in the Bowery. (I felt particularly drawn to the nutcase roles because they reminded me so much of my mother. Playing Lady Macbeth was like pulling on a comfy old bathrobe.)
    My parents were polite but dubious about my career choice. My father had made it crystal clear that after college I’d be taking care of myself, so there wasn’t much Ma could do, although she was worried about my dodgy new neighborhood. I’m still not sure if I liked living on the rougher side of town simply in order to reject my roots, or because Ma would be less likely to visit. She had always seemed disappointed in my boyfriends, and began looking for opportunities to introduce me to nice young men who lived on the East Side, with promising, solid but dull futures. My roommate and I didn’t need an alarm clock because most mornings started at seven a.m. with a wake-up call from Ma, wanting to discuss my prospects:
    â€”How did you like that nice boy, Matt Thing?
    â€”Who?
    â€”You know, the one who went to Andover and Penn and drove you back to the city last weekend after you were here.
    â€”Oh. Stupid.
    â€”Susie!
    â€”Really, he was. When we got to my corner, he took one look at the guys standing outside the deli and he said he couldn’t let me out of the car in such a dangerous neighborhood. These people are my FRIENDS, Ma.
    Not long after I got to New York, I did manage to fall in love with David Morse, an actor who wandered in for a bowl of chowder at the bar I was tending on the corner of Fifty-first Street and Ninth Avenue. Barely any words were exchanged at our first meeting other than a brief discussion about the quality of the soup (David thought it was lacking in heft). I didn’t think much about the encounter till the following week when he wandered in again, looking as if he sort of didn’t know what he was doing there. The restaurant was deserted except for the cook in the back and me in the front—we weren’t open yet, and when I asked David if I could help him, he asked if I’d like to go out some time.
    Yes, I said, somewhat baffled (not just because I’d accepted a date with a complete stranger, but because he then nodded, turned abruptly, and walked back outside and down the street).
    Our courtship took place over the bar. David would bring friends in to get their approval of me or something, and the friends would do most of the talking. I began to wonder if he ever planned to mention that date possibility again. I finally decided to bring it up myself, and by the second date, we were pretty much fused at the hip.
    I almost ruined David’s extremely cagey marriage proposal. He had just found out he was going to have to go to L.A. for an undetermined amount of time to play a doctor in a new hospital series called St. Elsewhere . This was exciting, but it felt worrisome to think of the geographical distance.
    â€” Have you ever thought about getting married? he asked.
    Sensing some degree of reluctance, I parried:
    â€” To who?
    This