The Heart of Cruella de Vil

I remember this time my stepmother and father visited me in New York, his fourth wife at the time, along with my two half-sisters. 

We loaded in a taxi and my stepmother was wearing this garish fake fur that looked just like Cruella de Vil’s. I think it actually had a Disney tag. It was a poignant match for who she was—flagrantly mean, yet obliviously tasteless. 

It was always such a psychedelic experience being with those people, who’d flown in from Ohio to watch tennis in Queens before seeing me. These people I’d been so tortured by in the past but who had now resumed relations with me after enough time had passed. Enough time so that we’d become different people with different unspoken memories of all the dysfunction that had happened. 

The cab driver was from India. And I think the best way to share my stepmother’s personality at the time was how she attempted to communicate with him. Not by asking him questions but by sharing with him her own questionable experiences she’d had in his country—some trip she’d taken after college and some hole in the ground she’d had to relieve herself in and some skirt she’d had to hoist up and some Indian man she’d inadvertently offended. 

Oh it was painful to witness in such tight proximity as she sprayed the cab with a round of her semi-assault laughter, and I rolled my eyes with the one sister I could always count on to share in my utter disbelief, while the others focused on storefronts and the merchandise inside. And the driver sped through her diatribe toward our destination, seemingly unfazed by her variety of inebriated inanity and we arrived at the Broadway show we were there to see. 

At the time I was working at Beauty and the Beast behind the scenes in the make-up department. 

As a child I had longed to be on Broadway as a performer—choreographed in my bedroom every song from Chorus Line and Gypsy—but had come to terms that I had lost that dream. That I had become someone who preferred the reality behind-the-scenes than the garishness of performances I had grown tired of from my stepmothers and my own mother. I wanted instead to be a narrator. Someone whose job was not to further confuse dysfunction with song and dance but to strip the costumes off and make sense of it all.

My mother at that very moment was in a hospital in Arizona. I’d committed her for the very first time a few days prior bc she’d had her head in an oven and was telling me goodbye. I had called 911 and gave them her address while my roommates were guffawing to the Simpson’s in the room next to mine. 

My mother had been a caretaker of an elderly woman named Gladys. She’d faked her credentials but had done a good job until Gladys died of old age and my mother had nothing to do but go nuts. 

I stayed on the phone until the ambulance arrived at which point my mother didn’t want to go. She began to scream at me that I’d had her committed against her will and that I ought to acquaint myself with the Francis Farmer story. The ambulance driver snatched the phone from her and said to me, “Honey, you know better than to listen to such rubbish. You sit tight and someone will call you once she’s admitted.”

There was no sense to make of any of it. No song to sing. No costume to wear. No laugh track to join. Just the private hum of dealing with dysfunction all by myself. 

I learned the art of disassociation from being the lonely witness of my mother’s reality and my stepmothers’ realities and my father’s avoidance of reality. And I juggled this otherworldliness while riding in this cab to this show that I still secretly wished I was in but could never be.

And then the lights dimmed and the programs stopped rustling and the story on stage began to take over the perspective of my own. Until something new happened. It was like a dam broke. And I couldn’t hold my insides in anymore. There, in my seat in the dark, I had my first panic attack. I literally couldn’t keep my confusion contained enough to sort it out. I kept trying to shove it back in but it kept slipping back out. As much as I tried, I could not anchor to a single thing. 

I excused myself quietly past all the people in the dark, up the aisle and into the women’s room. A haggard attendant had just flushed a ciggie down the toilet and her realness soothed me. And I stayed there in a bathroom chair until the near end of the show, thinking of my mother all alone in a hospital in Arizona, my father 50 feet away whispering how talented everyone on that stage was, his wife nodding in agreement, having no idea how hard I’d tried my whole life to wow him with my own sparkle that he never seemed to notice.

After the performance, I had managed to muscle through the panic attack and anchor to that solid something deep within that I’ve always been grateful to have, but I still couldn’t quite maneuver in the world. I felt so dizzy. I told my father it was vertigo. He’d had vertigo before. And so had I. It’s always easier to share familiar ailments than to try and explain how one’s reality had just been disintegrated by the massive vortex of the fucked-up-ness of the world’s realities colliding into the fault-line of my foundation. 

But the weird fucked up thing that happened next involved my stepmother—the woman who’d been so self-righteously wretched to me all the years I’d lived with her. “Hold onto my arm,” she said. And as I did, she held onto mine. And we walked like that in the briskness of some midtown street. And I remember the softness of her ridiculous Cruella de Vil coat. And how demented it felt to accept comfort and support from someone who had shut me down and repeatedly diminished me throughout my formative years. But yet there she was, a warm body, holding me up in that street when I had nothing or no one else. And I both connected with and disassociated from the warm fuzzies that some desperately deprived younger version of myself had been waiting her whole life to feel.

I think it was the next year that I married Chris. I remember seeing a friend afterwards. She told me how worried she was about me. That I seemed like a shadow of my former self. It stung when she said it. But the truth was, I married someone who was there, in a way no one else had ever been. He wasn’t perfect and we probably weren’t even right for each other. But he was there. Like an anchor. Like an arm that felt healthier than the softness of a Cruella de Vil. An arm that wasn’t just there right at the moment I was about to fall. But one that was there so that I could begin to stand on my own and make sense of myself and my life.

-JLK