Page 105 of Playworld

“Can I try the sake?” I asked.

“It’s rice wine,” Mom said, and slid me the tiny cup. It tasted like hot rubbing alcohol. “When your father and I were working at Radio City Music Hall I used to go out for sushi as much as I could. We were doing four shows a day, seven days a week, with an extra show during the holidays, so I was always depleted. They even had dorms in the theater. Rows of beds like in a hospital, for the performers to sleep, the job was so round the clock.”

It occurred to me that I knew next to nothing about Mom’s life. I knew her birthday but not the year she was born, and I had only the foggiest idea of where she’d lived growing up.

“Who’s older, you or Dad?”

“Your father is. He was born in ’33, and I was born in ’38.”

“How did you meet?”

“At Radio City Music Hall. I was in the corps de ballet, and he wasin the chorus. He had a solo. The Toreador song fromCarmen.Do you know it?” She hummed a few bars and I nodded. I’d heard it playing on WNYC in the mornings a million times. “And I’d think,Whoisthat handsome man?And then one day we’re in rehearsal, and I was dressed as a nun and someone comes up to me in a fox costume. I mean like a Disney character with paws and a bushy tail. And I can’t make out his face through the scrim in the jaws, and it isn’t until he takes off the head that I realize this person asking me on a date is your father. We got married six months later.”

“That’s so fast.”

Mom shrugged. “It didn’t seem like it.”

“What year was that?”

“Nineteen sixty-one.”

“You were working with Pilates and doing all those shows too?”

“No, I was Pilates’s demonstration model when I came to New York the second time, in, let’s see”—Mom, counting, touched her thumb with her long nails, which were as elegant as her cursive and looked as solid as marble—“that was ’59.”

“Why the second time?”

“Because the first time I wasn’t ready. I stayed for less than a year. I was studying at Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and working as a secretary and nothing panned out. I was lonely and discouraged, so I went back to Portland, where your grandfather was stationed. Actually, you know how I got back? Several people I was studying with, about six of us, we got a job delivering taxi cabs for the Portland fleet, so we drove them across the country, and I ate chocolate the whole way to keep awake and gained five pounds by the time I arrived.”

Mom’s laugh erupted. This happened sometimes. It sounded like a yelp, and I laughed with her, partly because it was funny but also so that she didn’t feel alone and embarrassed. She covered her mouth, and we looked around at the nearby diners, who returned to eating.

“Is that where you mostly lived when you were my age? In Portland?”

“Well, I lived all over because of your grandfather and the war. I was born in Falls Church, and then we moved to Puerto Rico until I was three. Then after Pearl Harbor we had to leave Puerto Rico on a transport ship, and there was a lot of fear during the voyage that we weregoing to be attacked by U-boats. And then we lived in Spring Valley with my mom’s parents, who were very dear to me. Your great-grandfather Edward, he was an army colonel in World War I. That was where I got sick.”

“Sick how?”

“My kidneys. I had nephritis with nephrosis. It’s inflammation. Of the organ. I started losing too much protein.” She raised a hand to her mouth and whispered, “In my pee. It could have been easily cured with penicillin, but all the antibiotics were going to the troops. So my grandfather got me admitted to Walter Reed.”

“Was it bad?”

“I was there for nearly seven months. I had to miss almost all of first grade. I even went into a coma for ten days. I’d just turned six and had to learn to walk all over again.”

“That must’ve been scary.”

“It wasveryscary,” Mom said. “Although in some ways the scariest parts were the children there who had polio and were in iron lungs. Do you know what those are?”

“It’s the big tube, right?”

“In a room as big as a basketball court full of them. And I will never forget this woman who had come out of one of the concentration camps, she was in the bed next to me for several days and told me that to survive she and the other prisoners had to eat rats. That terrified me so much I couldn’t even talk to my mother about it.”

She was briefly distant, but then the waitress appeared with our sushi on thick pine blocks.

“These aretekka maki,” Mom said, pointing at the rolls with her chopsticks and naming them. “And these arenigiri. Dip the fish side of those in the soy sauce. Not the rice. Just a little.”

I followed her orders and then bit into half the piece. “Where else did you live?”

“San Francisco, near the Cow Palace. But for most of high school in Portland.”