Zoe and the Cat

Before I turned twenty-four and moved to Bay Ridge, I was a star. Last year, I started working at a wealth management office as an assistant. I man the phone and make appointments. Sometimes, I manage a client’s portfolio. I make just enough to pay the rent for an apartment above an old Irish tavern frequented by those no younger than 60.

The few times that Mom has came over to visit me, she has hinted that I should come back home and maybe find a job that’s better suited for me, but I always turn down the idea. She even tries to lend me some money every now and then and I turn that down as well. Living like this is not so bad, I tell her. She never seems to believe me and sometimes, I’m glad she doesn’t. We both know she can see right through me, but I am determined to make it on my own. After all these years of her taking care of me, it was the least I could do.

Even though I live right above a bar, it’s easy to sleep most nights. But Friday night is Karaoke Night, so if I happen to be home, I can hear the drunken renditions of “Don’t Stop Believing” and “All I Have to Do Is Dream” from below. Why a sixty-five year old would sing “Don’t Stop Believing” is beyond my comprehension and what he has to believe in at this point is just as confusing to me. There is no limit to the volume on Karaoke Night. This is intermingled once in a while by conversations between those who venture outside for a cigarette.The gossip of the tavern is loud enough for me to catch every word. If I stay up late enough, I can experience the vulgar transition into the night. Eventually, there is a lull in the air. The silence finally starts to creep in as the intoxication starts to wear off. This is broken only by the occasional “goodbyes” and “see you tomorrows”. I lay in bed for hours, dreading the routine that awaits them and myself come tomorrow. Things were different once.

My acting career began when I was five. Hypothetically. At the time, my parents and I lived in an apartment in Gonesse—the not-so-glamorous part of France—where our mailbox got burnt out by the street kids every other month. Dad was a volleyball instructor and a supervisor for a paper plate company; he would leave for work in the early morning and return just in time for dinner. He was tall and wide with thin black hair that was laced with white strands. Mom was a stay-at-home mom. She was a slim brunette with dark eyes and a young face—she was only thirty-seven at the time.

For a stay-at-home mom, Mom didn’t really stay at home much. In fact, the only time she allowed herself to stay inside was when she was in front of the sewing machine making new clothes for me. She brought me to school and picked me up every day and in between, she ran errands. All we had in our neighborhood was the local butcher, a small market, and an abandoned park with a sorry excuse for a swing, so she usually had to walk even farther to buy anything other than groceries. Mostly, she just wanted to buy fabric.

Mom’s opus magnum was the dress that she made me for a class performance in kindergarten. Everyone was to dress up as Native Americans—the girls had to carry baby dolls on their backs (cardboard boxes were to be attached to the back of the costumes) and boys were to carry toy hatchets. She used a fabric that was a lot like burlap and fitted it to my body. The dress was embellished with blue and white beads at the collar and clasped together with little buttons at the front. She topped it off with a yellow satin sash tied around my waist. I was chosen to be the narrator, so I had to rehearse my lines to perfection. When my time to shine arrived, I told the story of our village and how everyone had their own role in the tribe. Mom has a picture of me at the microphone wearing her dress and a strip of brown construction paper around my head with a red feather glued to it, courtesy of yours truly. My dark hair was split into two tight braids, with blue hair ties to match the beads. The performance ended with the boys and girls dancing with each other and we received a standing ovation.

To this day, Mom still has that picture in a frame on her bookshelf. Whenever anyone asks about it, she tells them that I had the biggest job of all and how all the other parents around her were telling her how great I was. She has a certain look in her eyes when she tells this story; they start to shine and it always looks like she’s about to cry, but the tears never come. Instead, she just smiles and fingers the picture gently, as if she longed to stand on that school playground again and listen to my small voice resonate all around her once more.

Back then, school and television respectively followed each other every weekday. Whatever moves I learned from Power Rangers or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I imitated at recess the next day. One day, I caught a soap opera on the television and my eyes widened in disbelief—how could there be real people on television? And why couldn’t I be on there with them? I had the acting experience! When I told Mom that I wanted to be on television like those people, she giggled and told me that she expected me to bring someone home named Oscar. I believed that I was destined to be the starlet coming out of slummy old Gonesse and therefore adopted a dramatic personality. The first time I used it on Mom, I was sent to my room with the life lesson that if she offered me water, I should, under no circumstance, rudely turn my nose away from it and ask for milk.

Mom showed her support by taking pictures of me in her summer dresses and hats. When she went to develop the pictures, I tagged along and watched her break out in laughter as she flipped through the pictures. She told me that my dark, brown eyes twinkled in the light and that I was the most beautiful star she’d ever seen. Her favorite picture went up on the refrigerator—I am wearing a red polka dot sundress, dark sunglasses, and a gummy smile. As easygoing as she was with her clothes, Mom never allowed me to go near her makeup. “When you become famous, you’ll have your own makeup and you might even have more than me,” she’d tell me.

I ended up never using makeup. Growing up, I dabbled with it, but it never seemed to yield the desired result. The lipstick wore off too early, the eyeshadow was sloppy, or the blush was too much. I never seemed to be able to get it right and when I told Mom that, she said maybe I was better off not wearing makeup at all. Not because I was no good at it, she said, but because I looked much more beautiful without it. I believed her.

I also believed that everything I saw on the television was real. Once, I woke up in the middle of the night while my parents were watching Jurassic Park. I groggily crawled in between them and watched in horror as a Dilophosaurus shot a stream of ink and attacked Seinfeld’s very own Newman in his Jeep. I did not sleep that night and I sympathized with all of the men that were lost in the making of the movie. My ambitions to become an actor came to a screeching halt.

It was late June the following year when Mom and I moved into an apartment in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn with my Aunt Diana—she agreed to take us in the week before when Mom called her telling her that her marriage was over. Dad couldn’t handle family life and just wanted to live alone in France. Adjusting to life in Brooklyn was difficult; unlike Mom, who lived in New York before, I didn’t know a word of English and Aunt Diana’s too-cool-for-your-shit seventeen year old daughter Jennifer had a good laugh whenever I tried to imitate her pronunciation of the words “zero” and “cereal” and ended up doing my own rendition with the throaty French “r”.

That July, I turned six. Family members that I had never met before came over to celebrate. There was chocolate cake, a karaoke machine, and a newfound ambition. I learned two things that night: the alphabet in its entirety and the fact that people will applaud and cheer for you if you have a microphone in your hand and can sing along to all the letters on the screen. I basked in the spotlight as my aunts, uncles, and cousins praised my ability to sing to them that now I knew my ABCs and next time, won’t they sing with me.

The microphone became the key to my future as a singer. It was the way out for Mom and I—I figured that with all of the money I would be making as a singer, I would be able to be there for her the way Dad wasn’t. I wielded the microphone whenever I had the chance to, serenading Mom and Aunt Diana with a string of letters that I believed I knew better than anyone else while Jennifer locked herself in her room. She only came out when a record that she cared about went into the karaoke machine. Then, it was my turn to watch and listen as she transformed into another person and jovially sang The Carpenters’ “On Top of the World” with Aunt Diana, and even Mom. Mom also became another person whenever she picked up the microphone. She would close her eyes and wave her body from side to side in tune with the music as her soft voice rang throughout the room. Every now and then, her eyes would open and she would always manage to find me with them. She would smile and give me a look as if to tell me not to worry about her.

I eventually mustered up the courage to ask Mom to sing the song with me. By then, I had heard her sing it enough to follow along. She gracefully accepted the offer and she even told my uncle to record us and put it on a CD. Mom let me have the CD and I played it every week, still shocked that it was my voice coming through the speakers with my family around to listen to it.

Becoming a full-fledged singer, I found out, took a lot more than knowing the alphabet. Mom and I moved into an apartment a few blocks down from Aunt Diana’s place about a year and a half later. She now worked at a jewelry store in Manhattan and I was starting second grade. It became more and more difficult for me to use Aunt Diana’s karaoke machine; we only visited her about once a week. I used the time that Mom went grocery shopping to look for the music myself. I was going on eight years old and by now, I knew “On Top of the World” by heart. I looked through some of Mom’s old cassette tapes and listened to them on the stereo in the bedroom. I discovered the vocal abilities of Celine Dion and Whitney Houston. I actually had to remember the words by ear this time, but it did not take long for me to bellow out “I Will Always Love You” while standing on top of the bed. I usually popped open the window in the bedroom in hopes that I lived next to someone who had an ear for talent and the power to make me a star. No one ever rang our doorbell with the good news and now that I think about it, I am pretty surprised that they didn’t ring our doorbell to complain about the noise. No one wants to wake up to a seven year old singing at the top of her lungs that she’s everything she is because you loved her.

Mom never knew that another reason I wanted to become a singer was to be a little more like her. I wanted her to know that we were alike in some way. Even though I looked like my dad and acted like him too, at least I could sing like she did, maybe. She never said a word against my singing, even when I knew I was off-key sometimes. Even though I never became a singer, sometimes I think she likes remembering the days when I did. She smiles to herself whenever she catches me singing now and I know she’s thinking back to the days when I had a dream of becoming something, something big.

The summer that I turned seven, Mom unveiled a very interesting truth to me. Apparently, dinosaur bones were scattered all around the world and there were people that got paid to dig them up! I was so determined to become the next big paleontologist that I took it upon myself to dig holes in our backyard with nothing but a spoon. Mom wasn’t too happy about that, but she laughs about it now. Probably because of how dirty I was. I gave up on becoming a paleontologist when I realized that finding dinosaur bones took a very long time. When Mom asked me what I was going to do now, all I said was, “I don’t know, Mom. I’ll think of something.”

Mom took it upon herself to help me along with the process of figuring it out. She came home one day and plopped a marble notebook into my lap while I was watching television.

“No more watching TV all day,” she said sternly. “From now on, you’re going to write one story in this notebook everyday. And I’m gonna check it when I get home from work.”

“But Mom, it’s summer vacation! I don’t wanna do work!” I whined.

“Just try it. And don’t argue with me. And lower the volume.”

So I started working on my first story the next morning at the coffee table. I wrote my name on the notebook cover, followed by my heading on the top of the first page. After much sitting around, I still had no idea what to write about. I ended up putting my head down and staring at the adjacent wall, a solid white giant that offered me no aid whatsoever.

I started writing at 2 o’clock. I wrote about a girl named Zoe and her cat Buttons, a girl cat. Zoe had red hair and she loved her cat more than anything in the world. One day, Buttons went missing and that made Zoe very sad. She looked everywhere for her and she asked all of her friends if they had seen her, but they hadn’t. She was surprised to find that when she got home, Buttons was already there taking a nap on the couch.

The story took up a page and a half, thanks to my efforts of trying to make the font as large as possible. At the very bottom of the second page, I drew a picture of a stick-figure girl with a smile on her face and an orange cat in her arms. When Mom got home, I hurried over to her with the notebook and told her to read it right away.

“Okay, okay! Gimme a minute, will ya?” she said as she put her bag down on the coffee table.

“I wrote about a girl and a cat, Mommy!” I proudly exclaimed.

I sat next to her on the couch as she was reading my story. I was so nervous that I kept asking her where she was up to, but she kept holding up a finger to her lips.

“What a good story!” she said with a smile. “Thank goodness Zoe found her cat!”

I blushed and gave her a bashful smile as I opened up the notebook and saw a big, green check on the first page.

I filled up the entire notebook that summer. Mom started taking me to the library more often and I brought home piles of books to be read. Spelling became my favorite subject because on Wednesdays, we had to write a story using ten of our Spelling Words. Mom stuck all of them onto the refrigerator.

Mom never complained that I had given up on a lot of my dream jobs. At one point, I even wanted to become a racecar driver, but she was real glad when I gave that one up. She seemed to be happy that I was excited about something, anything. It didn’t matter what it was, as long as I was excited about doing it. Writing stories was something I was excited about and she knew it. It was something she gave to me and I knew she didn’t want me to give that up.

All throughout junior high school, I spent most of my time outside of school in the library and I did well in all of my classes. At the end of each marking period, Mom would usually reward me by taking me out to dinner.

High school brought about drastic changes in my priorities. I attended the high school half a mile away from my house, right by the projects. Cutting class was easy—our school operated like a college and we had free periods in which we were allowed to go to the cafeteria, roam the campus, or study at the library. All you had to do was lie about when you were free and if you were asked to show your schedule, you would already have an extra one from someone else or from a previous semester.

Before Alan, I had never tried this out for myself. I was happy with the free periods that I was given and I had only missed one day of school for a dentist appointment. When I tried it the first time, I was surprised to find that it was as easy to get away with as I’d heard.

I met him in the very beginning of my sophomore year. He was in my biology class in the morning and we were both free during the same period. A handsome senior with dirty blond hair that was always tousled and dark brown eyes, he was perfect in every way. We were standing outside of the classroom waiting for our teacher to arrive when we met. He told me that this high school was nothing but a joke and that he wouldn’t even be going to this class if he didn’t need it to graduate. When I asked him about his other classes, he scoffed and said that you could easily stay on campus all day and relax and not get caught loitering, if you knew where to go. When class was over, he gave me a fake schedule and I eagerly followed him to a spot a few yards away from the never-used football field. We sat on an old wooden bench and he pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Marlboro Reds.

Amazed that I was the one he chose to bring to this spot, I clumsily accepted my first cigarette. Alan told me that he’d only found out about this spot last year and that this was maybe his fourth or fifth time here, but the guards never bothered to walk all the way back here, so we had nothing to worry about. Having never handled a lighter before, he had to light it for me and as he brought the flame closer and closer to the cigarette in my mouth, I felt the old me melt away. I humiliated myself on the first inhale, coughing like a child and fanning the smoke away with my hands.

“You have to let it go down smoothly,” he said with a grin. “Take your time, you’ll get it.”

I hesitantly placed the cigarette back in between my lips and watched as he closed his eyes and the tip of his cigarette lit up and turned orange. The smoke billowed out slowly from his mouth, just a whisper of it at first, and then a small cloud erupted and faded into the air. He found his way back to reality as the last wisps of smoke disappeared and glanced at me expectantly.

I took a small drag and somehow willed it to go down my throat. I exhaled quickly and released all of the smoke in one blow, coughing clumsily again. I looked at him with startled eyes as I started to feel light-headed. He chuckled and told me that I’d get used to it.

And I did. I happily attended Biology everyday knowing that he’d be there and what would be in store for us when that bell rang. I used my allowance money to buy my cigarettes through him and I threw all of my clothes into the laundry before Mom got home so that she couldn’t smell anything on me. It became our spot. We sat, smoked, and talked everyday until the final bell rang and we were allowed to leave the campus. I didn’t care that the roll call deemed me as absent everyday in my other classes, but the school did. It took them two weeks to realize that something was wrong and when Mom got a phone call from them at work one day, I knew that those days with Alan were over.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, cutting school?” She had never cursed at me before, yet these were the first words that came out of her mouth when she got home that day.

Taken aback by her language, my voice seemed to stop working and I could only shrug in response as I sat with my head down on the couch.

“Your guidance counselor says that you were doing so well your first year, but then she started getting reports from your teachers that you’ve been absent a lot,” she said as she paced back and forth. “But what doesn’t make sense is that your science teacher says you’re always the first one there in the morning, and I’ll be damned if I don’t see you walking out of that door to school everyday!”

“I dunno, Mom,” I managed to spit out. All I could think about was that Alan’s parents had probably gotten the same phone call.

“You don’t know?” she shrieked. “I don’t understand! What are you doing if you’re not in class then?”

“I’m in school,” I tell her unconvincingly. “I’m just…usually in the cafeteria or something with my friends.”

“The cafeteria? How many times can you eat lunch a day that you need to be in the cafeteria the whole day?”

“We just hang out there. I just didn’t wanna go to class.”

“Uh-huh. Well, that’s all gonna stop right now ‘cause you’re on probation. So if you step out of line, I’ll be the first one to know about it. You got that?” she said in one breath.

I told her I was sorry and that I’d stop. She went to bed without saying goodnight. That night, I lay in bed remembering something that Alan once told me.

“We moved here a few months ago and my parents are renting out an apartment. They say we have to move around all the time ‘cause I cause too much trouble in school—getting into fights and shit, but I’ve been doing okay here,” he said casually. “I mean, I have almost all the credits I need to graduate, so I think we’re gonna be sticking around for a while.” The smoke smoothly floated from his mouth as he spoke, each word accompanied by a grey strand. They went hand-in-hand, and by the time he was done speaking, the final trace of smoke had already vanished, as if to make his point final.

Alan wasn’t in class the next day and when I went to look for him at our spot, he wasn’t there either. I had no other choice but to attend the classes that I had not stepped foot in in weeks. I waited outside of my English class and leaned against the wall, expecting him to suddenly show up with an explanation. The halls started to empty out as the students filed into class and I was forced to follow suit.

The only seats available were the ones in front of the classroom, so I put my bag down by a seat in front of the board and took out a fresh notebook. Seconds later, a man with a head full of white hair who deceivingly looked to be in his mid 40s walked into the room with a brown briefcase. He grabbed a piece of chalk from the ledge and quickly scribbled, “Writer’s World—Mr. Calabro” on the board and turned around to face the class.

“You know what I never understood?” he began casually. “I never understood why students felt that they had to wait outside of their classroom, as if expecting something important to happen.”

I shot him a vehement look—I knew he was talking about me and it was not something I wanted to go through on my “first” day. The rest of the students didn’t seem to be fazed by this—they I decided that this class was complete bullshit and that I would hate it for the rest of the semester. When the bell finally rang, I was the first one out.

I trudged through the rest of the day wondering where Alan could be and if he had already moved without so much as a phone call. I was already on my way home when I saw him run towards me. It was unusually cool for an autumn day, yet he wore nothing but a t-shirt and jeans.

Frustrated that he hadn’t been in school all day, I avoided his eyes and looked down at the ground.

“Can I walk you home?” he asked.

I looked up at him and realized that I had missed him too much to be upset. I told him he could.

As we walked, he told me about everything that had happened last night. His mother immediately started crying and his father wouldn’t even look at him. When he finally mustered up the courage to ask them what was going to happen now, his father told him to start packing because they were going to leave New York as soon as possible.

“So we’re going up to Connecticut tomorrow night. My dad says he has a cousin there who will let us stay with him for a little while. Then, who knows.”

A lump formed in my throat as he took me into his arms for a brief embrace. I told him to keep in touch. “Don’t forget about me,” I urged. He smiled, nodded, and kissed me on the forehead. I watched as he walked away and his figure became smaller and smaller until he finally turned. We never said goodbye.

He called me as soon as he got to Connecticut. He tried to call me everyday, but Mom started noticing that I was spending more time talking on the phone than doing homework, so she limited my phone time. I resented her for it, but she told me it was for my own good. School eventually started to become hectic for the both of us, so we couldn’t talk as often. Even though I thought about him a lot, some part of me knew that the day he walked away was the day we came to an end.

I never told Mom about Alan, not even now, at twenty-four years old. It wasn’t so much that I thought she would get upset with me for prioritizing a boy. I just wanted to keep what Alan and I had secret. Looking back on it now, I do believe that Alan was my first love and I did dream about a future with him. But that was never the type of dream Mom would have wanted me to chase. Sure, I felt very passionately about Alan, but it wasn’t an approved passion. “What kind of boy would take you away from school and make you smoke?” she’d ask. After all these years of her supporting me dream after dream, I knew this was one dream I could not and would not share with her.

In Mr. Calabro’s class, we were just getting past the rules of grammar. The rest of the class seemed to be as tired of it as I was, but not Mr. Calabro. “Writing is a quintessential skill to have in your pocket,” he told us. “It can be used almost anywhere, believe it or not.” My ears perked up as I listened to him explain to us that sure, we can learn all these equations and formulas in math and science, but writing is just as important. Writing, and most importantly writing well, can get us anywhere.

I believed him that day. And I also forgave him. Forgave him for the day that he subtly pointed me out and made me feel like a fool. I realized that writing could do so much more for me than I had initially thought—it didn’t have to consist of writing little stories at the coffee table for Mom. I could make a living out of writing!

When we finally got to the writing portion of the class, I was eager to impress. I took every assignment seriously and frequently sought out Mr. Calabro for writing advice. He was always very happy to help and I think he appreciated the company too, for his office was almost always empty save for the occasional student that had received a less than stellar grade on their paper. When I told him about the summer that Mom made me write a story a day, he smiled and said that his mom had him do something similar when he was younger as well.

I passed his class, as well as the rest of my classes, with grades that earned Mom’s trust back. Ever since that incident, things had been different. There was so much distance in between us that I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that I had figured out that I wanted to be a writer. She asked me if I went to all my classes on a daily basis, even when I wasn’t on probation anymore. We spoke less and less and one time, I caught her shaking her head while she was doing the dishes and muttering something about how she didn’t know where she went wrong. We no longer ate dinner at the table—she would sit in front of the television eating in silence while I retreated to my room. When I showed her my grades, she cried and told me that she had never been so proud of me before. That was all it took to get us back to normal.

It is hard to believe that a good report card was able to do so much for us. I really thought that after that whole fiasco with skipping class, our dynamic would never be the same again. I think Mom saw the old me gleaning through that report card, the one that had ambition. The one that had dreams. That was who she was rooting for. Though she didn’t know it at the time, I was already running with something that I thought was going to be great for me.

On Graduation Day, I thanked Mr. Calabro and told him that his class made me realize that I wanted to become a writer. He smiled and said that I should probably also thank my mom for making me write all of those stories. I told him that I’d keep in touch with him throughout college and he gave me his e-mail address to make it a little easier.

It was during my first week of freshman year that I decided to tell Mom that I wanted to become a writer. I was afraid that she’d look down on me and tell me that it would be too hard for me to do. I even thought about not telling her at all, but I remembered our photo shoots from the days when I wanted to become an actor. From the days when we’d sing “On Top of the World” together and brought home our very own CD. When I told her about it, she seemed to be happy for me. “As long as you’re happy and you can support yourself” was what she said. Two weeks later, she came home from Barnes & Noble carrying a bag full of books about writing, and how to do it well. We were back to the old days when she’d help me fuel my ambition.

Throughout college, I struggled with the question of how exactly I was to become a writer. I sailed through the years with the comforting notion that I still had time to figure it out before graduation. I made money by working for a few hours every day at a daycare center. Every few months, Mom would ask me if I had figured something out and I would always tell her I hadn’t. Senior year came and went, and I was still clueless.

I ended up becoming a part-time dental assistant in the city. I made enough money to leave my job at the daycare center, but not enough to move out on my own. Which Mom seemed to be okay with. It took me a while to realize that I couldn’t let her take care of me all the time. I needed to move out. She was washing the dishes while looking out the window when I told her I wanted to leave.

“I’m going to start looking for a better paying job, Ma,” I told her. “I’m going to try to move outta here soon.”

She put down the plate she was scrubbing and turned to face me. “Oh,” she said slowly. “And why do you want to leave?”

“I just don’t wanna mooch off of you anymore, Mom. You can’t support me forever.”

She turned the water off and took my face into her hands, still dripping with soapy water and sighed. “Okay, baby,” she said to me as she looked intently into my eyes, as if I was already gone. “Go for it. I’ll help you anyway I can.”

And she did. Within a few months, I found an apartment in Bay Ridge and used some of the money that I had saved up from my time as a dental assistant to buy new furniture. I had already been working at the wealth management office for a month. Mom helped me pick everything out. She also helped me pack everything I needed. After getting through the initial wave of clothes and shoes, we got to all of the things that were under my bed. There was a big plastic bin that contained all of the photos she ever took of me in her outrageous clothing, all of the costumes she made for me, and the few CDs that we recorded together. Lodged in the right side of the bin were the notebooks that I had filled up with stories that summer.

“What should we do with all this?” I asked her.

She giggled as she flipped through the pictures of me in her clothes. It was the same sound she made when she first got them developed. “Ah, I don’t know,” she sighed. “It’s up to you.”

“You should keep the pictures. And keep the CDs too—I don’t really want to hear seven year old me singing,” I told her. “What about these notebooks?”

“You take them,” she told me as she placed the pile in my lap. “Keep them somewhere safe. Don’t forget about them.”

I looked down at them and told her I wouldn’t. We finished packing the rest of my stuff and by the end of the day, I was completely ready to move into my new apartment.

Mom never bothered me and asked me why I never pursued a writing career, even after all these years. I think she knew it too, that the day I decided to move out was the day I had given up once again. But I think she also believed that I would find my way again. That I would come up with another big idea to run with. And maybe I would finally stick with it.

It’s clear to me now that of all the things to get from her, it should have been patience. She was patient enough to stick with my indecisiveness after all these years, yet I was never patient enough to find a way to make things work, even if it did mean feeling more fulfilled. I find it unbelievable that Mom has never complained about it, but I know she’s holding back, especially now. How do you tell your twenty-four year old kid that she should have worked harder at pursuing acting, singing, or paleontology? How do you do that without making her feel like she’s not good enough?

I know Mom is waiting for the day that I’ll come over and tell her that I’ve decided to become whatever it is that I’ve decided to become. What she doesn’t know is that I am waiting for the same day. When that day comes, I know she will be there for me once more, except this time, I think she’ll make more of an effort to keep me on track with it.

Before I turned twenty-four and moved to Bay Ridge, I wanted to become a star. Now, I work at a wealth management office as an assistant. I man the phone and make appointments. Sometimes, I even get to manage a client’s portfolio. I’ve barely written anything since college and all of my old notebooks are stored in the bottom drawer of my nightstand. I visit Mom, who still works at the jewelry store, every week. We exchange work stories most of the time. When that’s over, she’ll lean in and earnestly ask me how I’m doing. Even though I tell her I’m fine, she never seems to believe me. And when she asks me if I’ve figured out what I want to be, all I can say to her is, “I don’t know, Mom. I’ll think of something.”