Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (41 page)

BOOK: Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience

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W
e take our seats near the orchestra to the right of the stage. Andy and I are at the Kennedy Center’s annual presentation of
The Nutcracker.
Our twelve-year-old Ania is playing two roles as an extra with the Joffrey Ballet: a mouse and one of the boys in the party scene. She’s less thrilled with her parts than she is with the idea of being in a production with her favorite male dancer, a principal who used to be with the Paris Opéra Ballet. She knows him from watching hours of dance online while practicing poses in her playroom, an attic-like space upstairs. That space is the heart of the house just as my parents’ old screened-in porch was, except that Ania and I used it for tea parties rather than cocktail hour for priests. She always dressed in a pink cape, giving me the red velvet one. During those tea parties, I often wondered if she felt alone as our only child. If so, she has at least thirty cousins to make up for the lack. She is never happier than on a visit with her cousins. From my family alone she has six girls in her age range, and three cousins close in age on Andy’s side.

As the lights dim, Andy and I reach for each other’s hand. He’s got that somber look on his face. Is he fighting tears? It’s Thanksgiving weekend. Andy’s father has recently died, and Andy has been missing him.

In my family situation, one critical change will soon come to pass: after tears and a painful argument, Mom will explain that a stewardess on a Scandinavian airline gave her a thalidomide pill on her flight to Germany. Finally we have a sense of calm in our relationship. We speak in softer voices. When my mother says my name I hear “Eileen,” the name Mom chose before I was born because it was a good Irish name and it flowed so naturally from “Mary.”

Here in the Kennedy Center, I’m fighting joyful tears as I think back to my dreams of being a ballerina. Sitting in the audience, watching my daughter dance, is even better than my childhood dream.

The orchestra begins the opening music, which leads to a family happily rushing to a Christmas party. Andy and I tighten our grip on each other’s hand. At moments like these, it feels as though we are about to jump together from a high cliff into a pool of water. My stomach drops. Is Ania ready to be onstage, our shy daughter who has to be coaxed and prodded even to make a phone call? The first dancer steps onto the stage, and to our surprise it is Ania. She’s tossing a gift box, playful and confident in an eighteenth-century boy’s suit with a fez-shaped hat. This trickster character reveals a side of my daughter I have never seen before, and yet it makes perfect sense. There she is, our Ania, leading her family into the party.

Acknowledgments

This book could not have benefited more than from the open-minded, objective, and reflective editorial skills of Amy Cherry. Similarly, I am deeply grateful to Wendy Weil, the agent who put me in touch with Amy. Wendy’s unexpected death is an enormous loss. Thank you to Paul Bresnick for helping to ease that transition and to my new agent, Emma Patterson, whose grace and wisdom made the completion of the book run smoothly; to Allegra Huston, for superior copyediting; and to Anna Mageras, for managing a million details. As always I am grateful to Andrew Lakritz for sharing his brilliant literary talents, among so many other gifts, and to Ania Lakritz for her patience. Thanks to Danielle Ofri, MD, for early instruction in the art of writing memoir and for the support from the
Bellevue Literary Review
. Thanks to Benee Knauer for her careful read and especially her insight into the families of children with disabilities. Many thanks to all of my writing group members over several years: Deborah Forbes, Sara Hov, Beatrice Edwards, Frank Morring, Sean Carman, and Anne Levy-Lavigne. Thank you also to my memoir workshop leaders at Bread Loaf and Squaw Valley, Jane Brox and Lynne Freed respectively. I am grateful to the Carlisle family’s scholarship to the Squaw Valley Writers’ Conference, to the Hall family for their dedication to the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, to Wheels for Wheels for their scholarship to the Vermont Studio Center, and to the Vermont Studio Center for a fabulous retreat. Thank you to Alan Cheuse, in whose class I wrote the first scenes for this book. I thank Dr. Joshua Ellenhorn for his assistance with medical information. Thank you to Nell Favret Boyle for always being there. Thank you to my mother, and a thousand thanks to all of my siblings.

I am grateful to the following magazines for publishing versions of several chapters of this book:
Bellevue Literary Review, The Literary Review, Third Coast, Slice,
and
Narrat
ive.

Author’s Note

The events in this story are told as I remember them, except that I have changed names and minor details relating to individuals and establishments in order to respect their privacy. Where dialogue appears, I strived to re-create the essence of conversations, in both content and delivery, since it was not possible to recall the precise words.

Frontispiece by C. Richard Cronin

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

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Book design by Chris Welch

Production manager: Devon Zahn

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cronin, Mary Eileen.

Mermaid : a memoir of resilience / Eileen Cronin. — First edition.