Radiance

On the first morning of her new life as my third mother, still in her bridal nightgown, with her long hair falling down her back like black paint, Ada made me breakfast. Hard-boiled egg, bitter greens, Saturnine corncakes, and a thin, almost translucent slice of pink pork from the rooftop farms in Tithonus. She even let me have coffee. She poured it into a cup meant for one of my old dolls, then poured herself a much bigger cup. We both got cream, I got sugar, and Ada Lop looked at me with those famous gigantic dark eyes and asked me what kind of mother I wanted her to be. She was very frank that way. She just asked things and expected straight answers, even when they were inhuman, unrealistic, performative questions. She performed even her most intimate conversations. As if we were recording all the time. I suppose we were, which is probably why Ada lasted so long in our house. No one in the world talked out loud like Ada talked. Not even people in plays. It’s too hard to write. Embarrassing to everyone else, but nothing embarrassed Ada.

[SEVERIN’S voice deepens, a cigarette-voice, feathery and Slavic.]

What does love look like to you? What do you think a mother is?

I was ten and a half. I was ten and a half and she was asking me for stage directions. I said, rather churlishly: A mother is whatever a father isn’t. She’s a detective. She’s a bandit. She knows 770 faces. A mother is a person who leaves.

Honestly, Ada Lop was the best interviewer I ever met. She got you off your guard. She asked things nobody asked. You never got to know her, but she’d get every last drop out of you and in her cup. I always wear her wedding ring when I interview somebody. It has a black amber stone in it with a golden flaw, like an eye. And she did exactly as I asked. Whatever my father failed to do, she picked up; taught me how to fix a cannon and do my own taxes and do a perfect plié and that to perform, to really perform, you have to make yourself ugly at some point. Nothing real is pretty, she said. Only a doll is pretty. And a pretty doll drinks out of a tiny cup forever. A woman wants a big cup.

There’s a fairy tale where all the good fairies come to bless a princess and give her something she needs. Beauty, a good singing voice, manners, skill at maths. But they forget to invite one fairy and so she curses the girl to die young and a whole heap of nonsense follows on—I don’t really care about the rest of it, it’s a just lot of overwrought handwringing about who marries who.

Point is, I didn’t have twelve fairies, but I guess I had seven.

[SEVERIN leans into the lens conspiratorially, inviting anyone and everyone into her confidence. Smoke curls around her face.]

I’m thinking of actually putting this stuff in the final cut. Everyone wants to know about my mothers, so why not lay it all out? But then I’d have to start over. From the beginning, because the beginning is where the end gets born. I suppose I could edit it back together so it looks like I started with Clotilde, which means starting with myself, with that morning and that doorstep and that ridiculous blanket. But that wouldn’t be honest. That wouldn’t be real. That would give you the idea that a life is a simple thing to tell, that it’s obvious where to start—BIRTH—and even more obvious where to stop—DEATH. Fade from black to black. I won’t have it. I won’t be one of the hundreds telling you that being alive flows like a story you write consciously, deliberately, full of linear narrative, foreshadowing, repetition, motifs. The emotional beats come down where they should, last as long as they should, end when they should, and that should come from somewhere real and natural, not from the tyranny of the theatre, the utter hegemony of fiction. Why, isn’t living easy? Isn’t it grand? As easy as reading out loud.

No.

If I slice it all up and stitch it back together, you might not understand what I’ve been trying to say all my life: that any story is a lie cunningly told to hide the real world from the poor bastards who live in it. I can’t. I can’t tell you that lie. That’s Dad’s game, and I’ve been sick of playing it since I was four.

If I fixed it so time goes the way you expect, you might come away thinking I know what the hell I’m doing.

So. Act One, Scene One. Arriving shortly after Scene Two but well before the swelling Overture. We’ll get to the trumpets and the timpani when this big bullet fires into Jupiter orbit.