Habit Read online

  Jeffrey releases Ma’s blood pressure cuff.

  —Shipley? We played against them in high school.

  —Really? It’s very different now. When I was there it was a girls’ school. In the back of one of the alumni bulletins last year, there was a picture of three young women. . . .

  (I have a feeling I know where this is going.)

  —One of the women was an alumna. She was posing between her new wife and the female chaplain who had just performed their wedding. I wrote the headmistress that it simply wouldn’t do.

  I watch to see how Jeffrey will take this. Not a blink. Good for him.

  They do an x-ray and there is no obstruction. They decide the cramping is due to the senna tea Ma took for constipation, and recommend she see a colorectal surgeon as soon as she can. We are free to leave.

  On the ride home, we notice it is after midnight, and I point out it is now my birthday, which I had insisted I didn’t want to spend with her this year.

  Ma crows in delight:

  —Right at the time of day you were born!

  My birth was not an easy one. There were fifteen years and five miscarriages between Ma’s first child (my brother, Felix) and her youngest (me). Two sisters between us survived, thanks to luck and whatever god-awful drugs they used back then to deal with our parents’ unusual situation: Ma had that rare Rh-negative baby-killing blood, and Daddy’s was Rh-positive. This incompatibility could have been seen as a sign of the greater obstacles they faced as a married couple, but it was particularly problematic when producing children. The babies in this situation tend to inherit their father’s more common blood type, which is eventually lethal to the mother. So Ma’s body had to automatically produce antibodies after Felix, her first Rh-positive child was born, in order to keep her blood cells intact. These antibodies would then kill off the rest of her Rh-positive babies one by one, her body deliberately rejecting its own offspring in order to save itself.

  Ma’s always told me she was sick as a dog during her pregnancy with me, and even wished at times that I’d get it over with and abandon ship like the other five miscarriages.

  —But you didn’t. I couldn’t understand why you were being so stubborn.

  By my birthday in 1959, the doctors were attempting a few new tricks. Since my mother’s blood and its lethal antibodies would enter my system during delivery and kill me, they swept me away within hours of my birth for two complete transfusions and stuck me in an incubator for almost a week. I can still make out little scars between my fingers and toes from their incisions. I’m a miracle of science.

  —Actually, I had already guessed you were Special because of my veins.

  Ma had been a smoker for years, through all the other pregnancies and births. I guess no doctor in the 1940s or 1950s knew enough to point out that everyone involved might be better off if she’d quit. Still, just after Ma knew she was pregnant with me, she says, when she took a drag of a cigarette the veins on the backs of her hands immediately hurt like the dickens. So she stopped cold turkey. Her theory is that Someone was looking out for us, because I was Special.

  Philadelphia, 1960

  According to my mother, it was important for me in particular to survive this antibody thing. I’ve never been entirely clear as to why she thinks I was chosen to make it in 1959, or if such a thing is even possible—this someone’s supposed plan is taking time to reveal itself. There’s one thing we know for sure: My other siblings aren’t geographically, physically, or emotionally available right now to drive Ma to the ER for a matter of Life and Death.

  I went along with Ma’s Special Susie theory for a spell. My Montessori school was seen by her as her finest discovery to date as a parent, following years of disappointment in the early education options for my older siblings. My brother and sisters saw the delight she took in my resulting supposed brilliance as favoritism. There was a four-year gap between my next oldest sibling and me; I was the prized, irritating baby who sucked up all the attention, and none of them could hide their disgust at seeing me trundled out to recite Shakespeare or sing “The First Noel” for the dinner guests at age three.

  It didn’t occur to me not to accept the petting and praise until the treatment began to rankle as a teenager. That’s when I figured out that distance was optimal. Till then, along with all the religious conversions there had been an awful lot of school switches for one reason or another—not all of them, in fairness, due to my mother’s whim—nine moves in total. By a twist of luck, I was shipped out to a Rhode Island boarding school in eleventh grade, followed by college in the Berkshires.

  I felt liberated once I was away from home, but not quite liberated enough. My parents separated temporarily after I left, due to intense disagreements, which could have otherwise led to mass casualties (he thought she spent too much, she thought he drank too much—they were both right). I discovered the theatre, and they would each take turns coming to see me perform. Daddy would drive up with one change of underwear and a couple of bottles of vodka stashed in the trunk of his VW beetle. He was pretty self-sufficient, but Ma had a knack for picking the most academically stressful weekend possible and making peculiar demands:

  —My bus arrives at eleven tonight.

  —I have a ninety-page paper due in the morning.

  —That’s all right. You can meet me at the bus and help me carry my suitcases to your dorm.

  —But that’s completely across campus! Why do you want to come to my dorm at eleven at night anyway? Can’t you go to the hotel and meet me for breakfast?

  —I can’t afford a hotel because of your father. Find me a room in your dorm.

  —Ma. There’s only one empty room in my whole dorm. It’s empty because the last person who slept there had a breakdown. They found him in the closet with a dry cleaner’s bag over his head and now nobody wants to go near it.

  —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.

  —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.

  —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:

  —How did you like that nice boy, Matt Thing?

  —Who?

  —You know, the one who went to Andover and Penn and drove you back to the city last weekend after you were here.

  —Oh. Stupid.

  —Susie!

  —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.

  —Have you ever thought about getting married? he asked.

  Sensing some degree of reluctance, I parried:

  —To who?

  This seemed to stump him. He paused for so long, I had to quickly rescue us both (not to mention our future children) by proposing more directly myself.

  California, 1984

  We went together to L.A., and it seemed that my metamorphic escape was complete. Philadelphia was virtually in another country, and Ma’s early morning phone calls had to stop because of the time difference. I managed to act in occasional plays, but mostly got roles in small movies and guest appearances on sitcoms.

  It’s hard to look me up because I couldn’t settle on a stage name. Before I met David, I was foolish enough to try my maiden name, von Moschzisker. This seemed to irritate people. The z is silent—if you ignore the schz and make it a sh sound you can come close to being able to pronounce the name unassisted, but still: Susan von Moschzisker? That girl didn’t stand a chance.

  My married name was not an option—the Screen Actors Guild had a Susan Morris, and they said they’d get us confused. When my agent put her foot down about von Moschzisker, I tried being Susan Wheeler Duff, using my two middle names. Even that seemed excessive, so I finally shortened it again, to Susan Wheeler. This turned out all right, although I kept worrying that people might check and think I was padding my résumé, claiming false credit for jobs that Susan von Moschzisker and Susan Wheeler Duff had done.

  Just when Susan Wheeler began to hit her stride, our daughter, Eliza, arrived, swiftly followed by twin sons, Ben and Sam.

  Twin sons came as a bit of a shock. By the time Ben and Sam were born, David’s series was over and he was traveling more for work. I think I may have had a mild but undiagnosed case of postpartum depression or something—I was terrified of accidents and didn’t want to be alone with the children. So I was uncharacteristically glad to see Ma when she came to meet the new babies. Ma’s visits were usually not in response to an invitation, and mostly fraught with tension—she’d spend a lot of her stay trying to convert me to whatever her latest religion was. Or she’d hand us an itemized list on her way back to the airport of what should have been in the guest room:

  A lamp by the bed

  Pleasant, interesting reading material

  A full-length mirror AND a small hand mirror to check the back of one’s head in the bathroom

  A television or AT LEAST a radio. With a clock.

  A telephone, preferably with its own private line and answering machine

  Fresh water, flowers, and a bowl of fruit

  A mini-fridge to store extra food, in case the fruit is not to the guest’s liking

  But that visit when the boys were infants was truly remarkable. Ma loves babies and seemed more than happy to pitch in. She did all the grocery shopping, held one twin and entertained Eliza while I nursed the other, and generally made herself so indispensable that when it was time for her to leave, I completely surprised myself by asking her to stay another week.

  Sherman Oaks, 1992

  It’s important to give credit where it’s due. All that kindness without the comfort of a mini-fridge.

  It quickly became clear that having two acting parents was not ideal for children. I really loved mothering, and David was the bigger earner, so it seemed natural for me to give up auditioning for sitcoms and embrace my inner Susan Morse, especially after our Sherman Oaks house was destroyed in the Northridge earthquake in 1994. We abruptly decided to move our headquarters to more solid, familiar territory in Philadelphia. This was David’s idea, and I agreed, partly because Ma and Daddy had moved to Florida a few years before and were not showing any signs of returning. Eliza was five, and the boys were two. Adolescence was around the corner, we knew L.A. was risky for teenagers, and we just couldn’t imagine them having their childhoods in New York. David loved my old stomping grounds in Stone Mills, a walking neighborhood on the outskirts of Philadelphia with good shops, near a rambling city park. I’d heard the insular, self-satisfied Preppy Handbook quality that used to bother me as a kid was changing, and I got the feeling we’d be in good company. A number of old friends had also spent their early professional lives in larger cities, where they’d had a chance to broaden their horizons a bit before returning to raise families in a child-friendly environment. The idea of embracing the best of my roots to establish the kind of happy family I felt I’d missed out on was a tempting challenge—a chance to “get it right.”

  Everything went as planned until a couple of years later, when our father died. I spent some time down in Florida with Ma while she was presiding over his last weeks in the ICU. Observing her careful consideration and poise during that rocky transition was an experience just as intense and precious as when the babies were little. Ma’s better, twin-tending side seemed to really kick in if birth or death was afoot. I knew she was getting on in years and there was no family at all nearby in Florida. There was also the unfortunate discovery that Daddy had made no provision for Ma to cope alone in their Florida house; it was mortgaged to the hilt. On impulse, knowing that none of my siblings would consider tackling the job, I asked Ma to move home. Five minutes from my house.

  And thus began Operation Ma.

  I’m the self-appointed CEO/CFO of Op Ma: a series of maneuvers we siblings design as we go, to make our mother’s years as a widow (left with suddenly limited resources and risky ideas) as comfortable and safe as possible. David is away on location many months out of the year, our three children are teenagers, and we have a temperamental old house, a dog, and two cats, one of whom, Marbles, has been with us since the earthquake and is now hanging on by a thread.

  And I am pre-menopausal.

  I voted against George Bush twice in a row. The second time, I campaigned vigorously for his opponent.

  My mother told me she was voting for Ross Perot in 2000—she doesn’t remember doing it now, and she doesn’t remember why she might have. She began watching Fox News after 9/11.

  —The Muslims are taking over and he’s the only one who sees how dangerous they are.

  —Excuse me?

  —They are evil, craven, and George Bush understands them.

  —Sure he does. He did not have a passport when he was elected. He could not name the leaders of several countries, but somehow he understands Muslims.

  —Susie, you don’t realize how serious this is—

  —Well, yes, actually, I do, Ma. That’s why I’d like to have a president with half a brain.

  When Ma helped reinstall the
president in 2004, something began to unravel in me. While she communed with Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, I spent a solid two years compulsively glued to Jon Stewart and National Public Radio. Our consternation with each other increased, until things came to a head in 2006. I was in the middle of a rather tricky project, sending all three kids off on service trips to various third-world countries, and planning Eliza’s twenty-stop college tour. I had asked Ma to try and avoid any urgent disasters for a few weeks until I got through that crunch. With her uncanny sense of timing, she managed to have her Toyota impounded for expired registration and close to a thousand dollars’ worth of unpaid parking tickets.

  Ma (dressed in Bergdorf’s on credit, standing with me to pick up her car amid a sea of equally battered vehicles, taking in the long line of other dejected traffic offenders): This is something I have in common with Blacks.

  Ma was always a narcissistic driver, viewing things like Stop signs, speed limits, and No Parking zones as irritants installed and enforced with no rhyme or reason by bureaucratic pencil pushers with nothing better to do. Friends and family had hinted for years that it would be good to get her off the road. I’d passed these observations on to Ma, along with my own opinion, and definitely didn’t let her drive anyone in our family around. But I didn’t feel it was my place to apply too much pressure until the car’s incarceration, when financial things were up to me. David makes a good living; he’s well thought of enough to have steady work, but like most working actors, it’s a living, not a Tom Cruise-like fortune. Plus, this was an opportunity to make the roads a little safer.

  The deal I offered Ma for the impounded Camry was wily but appropriate. To her credit, Ma saw the sense in it. Operation Ma would bail the car out of jail as long as she would take a senior citizen’s driving test to see if she was safe on the road. This seemed more than fair to her, mostly because Doctor Maxwell warned me on the phone that unfortunately most of his elderly patients managed to take this test and keep their credentials even though their families were sure they would not.