DVD commentary: "Hi, Ma (Sunrise, Sunset Remix)" part 2
Part 1
I admit I felt a bit uncomfortable shifting to first person, suddenly, for the last segment - but I’d already committed to myself to follow the structure of the original story, which was the only way I could see to make my remix version make sense. I considered changing it to present tense at least, which is more familiar to me in 1st person. A few paragraphs in, though, I stopped noticing anything was weird.
A week after the baby was born she still didn’t have a name. “It’s a disgrace,” I told Joe on the ride to Jimmy’s, after he picked me up from the airport. “Nine months she’s been in planning, they couldn’t have bothered to pick something out?”
Joe’s mouth turned up in a faint smile. “Some people only give names at the bris, which would only have been tomorrow if she were a boy.”
It was never said in Hi, Mom that the baby wasn’t named by this point - however, they kept calling her the baby. Since I didn’t feel comfortable naming “Dee’s” baby, I made up a nice little excuse, and had Judy complain about it (voicing my own opinions, incidentally, about not naming a baby/revealing the name until the bris. How, people? How?)
BTW, if you’re interested, Dee later elaborated: What should they name the baby? Daisylily and I agreed at one point it'd be "Maria Susan," but when Wilson told them, his relatives weren't too happy about her having the same name as one of the highest Catholic saints, and then House realized that Maria was the heroine of not one but two musicals and vetoed the name as "too gay." House keeps pushing for Vicky, but Wilson refuses to name their daughter after the drug eating away at House's liver. And of course, House won't allow the name of anyone Wilson's ever kissed, so that knocks a whole heck of a lot off the list right there.
“She isn’t a boy!” Joe didn’t seem perturbed, but then, he hardly ever was. “Before you know it she’ll be starting kindergarten and everyone will still be calling her ‘the baby.’ It’ll give her a complex.”
“Don’t pressure them, Judy,” he said easily.
“Pressure? Who’s pressuring? Did I ever put pressure on you and Evelyn?”
Joe spared me an amused glance before returning his eyes to the road. “I was so terrified of you on the days after each birth that I named my sons after three Christian apostles. What does that tell you?”
Some more fanwanking, c’est tout.
I let out a small puff of air. My son-in-law was exaggerating, of course, which I made a point of pointing out, but Joe was already tuning me out in that way he had, listening to some modern music on the radio, something from the seventies.
Jimmy greeted me when we arrived. “It’s great to have you here, Nana,” he said, easily lifting my suitcase with one hand and giving me half a hug with the other.
“Wait, let me look at you,” I said, taking a firm hold of his chin, and he smiled, obviously trying not to wince. The very tips of his sideburns were sprinkled with light gray, and there were tiny wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. But his skin was smooth and fresh, just like when he was a boy, and he looked relaxed. Comfortable. “You look good,” I said, pinching his cheek.
A wolf-whistle sounded behind Jimmy, and he stepped aside with an exasperated sigh. Greg House was smirking at me. “Now that,” he said, strolling towards me, “is one hot piece of cane.”
There are few lines I can actually hear House say in my head, even when I’m writing him, but this is one of them. This line is House and Judy.
I tapped my gold-tipped cane on the ground once, and let Greg kiss me on the cheek. “Stop, you’re making me blush.”
“Oh, you’re not the only geriatric gal to swoon over me,” he said, stepping back to lean against the porch rail. “Epic poems have been written.”
“Have they?” I asked, as Joe helped me up the two steps to the front porch. “As much as I‘d love for you to flirt with me some more, Greg, you’re not the most interesting person in the house at this moment. Now, where is she?”
“Mom’s in the living room,” Jimmy said, and bless him, I hoped he didn’t think I was actually looking for Evelyn.
“She’s with the baby,” Greg added, rolling his eyes at Jimmy. Ah, the feigned impatience of young love.
When I entered the small living room I paid no attention to interior design; there would be time to offer my critique later. For now, I only had eyes for my daughter, cradling my great-granddaughter in her arms and whispering the same lullaby that my grandmother had sung to me when I was a just a baby, passed on by generations of parents through the frozen winters of Eastern Europe and to this warm, loving home in Princeton, New Jersey. Sleep, sleep, my little baby, my genius girl, I heard her sing. Grow up to be a good woman, a smart woman, have children of your own, overcome your fears and learn to have peace.
Try googling Yiddish lullabies. No, seriously, try finding one you can work with. It’s impossible. It’s one of those little details you want to add to a fic that becomes a monster of ten open firefox tabs, too much information to browse through and none that’s actually helpful. And the few lullabies I could find were addressed to the male form, ie, “my smart little boy, grow up, learn Torah and become a lawyer”. In the end I translated one myself and turned it into a female form - it’s not as if I’d need it to rhyme with anything here anyway.
Evelyn looked at me with red-rimmed eyes and smiled, and then her gaze moved beyond me to James and Greg, bickering about something by the kitchen door. I didn’t know what had gone on when she’d arrived; clearly there must have been a confrontation of some sort, but judging by looks of it issues appeared to have been settled. With the baby in her arms, Evelyn finally looked peaceful.
That last line was added in the editing stage for the sake of those who hadn’t read the original, to clarify that yeah, something had happened, and Evelyn was suddenly chummy with the boys for a reason.
The boys were arguing over whether adding vegetable flavor to their daughter's formula would help cultivate a healthy diet from early on in life, and as Evelyn caught my eyes, her expression a mix of pride and wonder, I knew what she was thinking.
There would be fights, there would be laughter, there would be babies crying in the middle of the night. It was all starting over again.
I could have ended the fic here if I didn’t have backstory to fit in (which was kind of the whole point). But here, this is life: circular, constant, each generation learning from and making its own mistakes. Judy had hers, Evelyn hers, and you can bet House and Wilson will have theirs.
*
A few hours after dinner everyone had retired to their beds, and I walked out to the porch to get some fresh air. I sat down on a cushioned rocking chair that must have been a brand new purchase by the fresh fathers, and closed my eyes, feeling the warm summer breeze on my skin. Drier than Florida, but somehow, tonight, more serene. I wished Stan were here with me.
Stan is either dead or unable to travel anymore; explaining why he wasn’t here didn’t flow, and I decided it didn’t matter anyway.
(Also, drier or dryer? I struggled a lot with that one.)
“That’s my chair,” came a deep voice behind me. He sounded surprised.
“Eighteen hours,” I said, automatically slipping into the familiar tirade. “Eighteen long hours of labor until I gave birth to the woman who gave birth to the man you’re living with. Eighteen hours, Gregory. Get your own chair.”
I heard a chuckle, and a few moments later something dragging across the wooden floor.
Greg slowly settled into his chair and took out a rattling bottle of white pills. He closed his eyes, swallowing one.
“Mine are prettier,” I noted. “Got more colors.”
He smiled faintly, but didn’t say a word. Very uncharacteristic for him. He opened his eyes, gazed up at the sky and exhaled.
“Why the heavy sigh?” I asked.
“It‘s been a… strange couple of days.”
“In what way?”
“Lots of people in the house. One, in particular, more than I‘m used to. Not getting much sleep.”
I studied his face more closely. “But that‘s not what‘s troubling you. I saw you today, at dinner.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Seriously, you were watching me? Jealous that I can still eat steak?”
Digs as a defense mechanism, but we already knew that. Also, he really does enjoy teasing her, especially knowing that she enjoys their banter too.
I smiled inwardly. I liked his sense of humor. “Things seemed strained between you and Evelyn.”
This time, he turned his head to look at me and I nodded silently, an unverbal understanding between us that what gets said in the porch, stays in the porch. It’s no wonder that Jimmy fell for those intense blue eyes. Better than Nixon’s. “Evelyn,” he said, pronouncing the name as if it were a new word he was trying out, “did not even know I was with Wilson until yesterday afternoon. Apparently.”
When did House turn into Barney McSharing? You might be asking yourselves. Well, At this point, House has had a glass of wine, it’s late at night, it’s been a long day and an emotional week, and he feels comfortable enough with Judy to confide in her. “What’s said on the porch, stays on the porch” was added just to enforce it all.
Oh, Evelyn.
“The thing is,” he said neutrally, “that I knew I wasn‘t going to be able to count on my parents for anything. But Wilson‘s a pretty good person, and I thought his mother might be useful to have around because he turned out pretty much okay. And now I discover that… for Christ‘s sake, she didn‘t even know my name.”
I sighed. That was my girl. I hated that something that had been causing her pain caused pain for other people, and I felt a by now familiar sense of guilt and regret settle over me. “I‘m sorry, Greg.”
“There‘s nothing you have to apologize for.”
“No, there is,” I admitted. “Evelyn‘s behavior is partially my fault.”
He rolled his eyes. “She’s your daughter. You can say that on some level everything she does is influenced by you. But I‘ve seen the way you‘ve acted since the moment Wilson told you. Saying her bigotry is your fault is a ridiculous and slightly arrogant claim.”
“Have you met Jimmy‘s uncle, Harold?”
Greg frowned, looking puzzled at the non-sequitur. “I might have. I don’t really pay attention to anything other than symptoms when I‘m being introduced.”
You can’t tell here because this fic was mostly dialogue, but character X looked/seemed adjective is a combination I really, really overuse. It bothers me when I reread a long time after posting.
I smiled, but quickly felt it fade. I could almost feel my cheeks sagging heavily, feel my whole body sagging under the weight of what I had done. I let it out in a burst of air. “Harry was Evelyn‘s younger brother. When he turned eighteen he told us he was homosexual.”
Greg’s eyes widened slightly. “This would have been in nineteen seventy…”
“1971,” I supplied, “just a few years after Jimmy was born.” For a moment I was silent, just listening to the soft, creaking noises my chair made as it rocked. “I didn‘t accept it, of course. There was no question about it. My son was going to live a normal life, a safe life, the one we‘d intended for him all along.”
Judy’s flaw, revealed. I like that she has a flaw, otherwise she would have been perfect, and even though I don’t think anyone over 60 can qualify as a Mary Sue, perfect characters are annoying. And not real.
“What about Evelyn?”
“Evelyn wanted what was best for her brother, and as far as we were concerned, that meant marrying a good woman, having good children, working at a good job.”
“Living a good little heterosexual fantasy,” Greg said, a hint of bitterness touching his voice. His cane was in his lap, and I could see he was gripping it tightly.
“Of course, Harry was eighteen,“ I continued. “When you‘re eighteen you know everything, even more than you did when you were fifteen. And however much I begged and pleaded, Harry didn‘t want to listen to me.”
“It took some fucking guts for him to come out at all,” Greg muttered.
“I know it did. But Greg, it wasn‘t just for my sake that it didn’t want it to be true. The world was a dangerous place then. It still is, for people who are different. You‘re a father now, you‘ll understand it soon. Above everything else, I wanted to protect my child.”
Greg didn’t reply.
“One day, Stan, my husband, called us to the hospital. Some boys from Harry‘s college had beaten him within an inch of his life. He was…” Images floated up like scenes from an old horror movie. “Greg, I don‘t ever wish you the experience of watching someone you love in so much pain. Of wondering whether they‘re going to live or die. For me, it was a breaking point.” I took a deep breath. “I gave Harry an ultimatum. Either he‘d agree that it was all just a temporary phase, or he wouldn‘t be a part of our family.”
Greg was staring furiously at his cane, his knuckles white by now, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “What happened?” he finally asked.
“For three months, I didn‘t speak with Harry. I didn‘t invite him to holidays or Friday dinners. I wouldn‘t accept his calls. I cut off whatever money we‘d been giving him. And I made sure no one else in the family contacted him too. Then one day he knocked on the door and introduced us to his girlfriend, and that was the end of that.”
This is the kind of story you don’t see a lot in media, I think. There’s the accepting family and the rejecting family; the lucky gay guy and the loner. I can’t remember any characters who came out, and were pushed back in to live a normative hetero life, but there are plenty of those in real life: it’s not the happy ending, but it happens, and having a wife and kids makes it that much harder to come back out again. When I was writing this, my mom had just told me about a woman she worked with whose husband was currently in the process of going through a sex change. They had two little kids. It’s hard.
Greg leaned back in his chair. “That’s it,” he said tightly. “Cured for life.”
“You met him at the wedding, actually. He’s Tina’s father.”
Greg stood up, leaning heavily on the cane, and walked a few steps down the porch. Distancing himself from me. “You know, this kind of sucks, because I kind of liked you.”
“Don‘t be ridiculous,” I said, ”you still like me.”
He leaned back against the rail, fingers tapping against the wood. “Oh, yeah?”
“Don‘t make me get up and smack you, Gregory.”
He snorted softly, but didn’t turn his body towards me yet. “Listen to me,” I said quietly, and to my own ears my voice sounded old. “I wasn‘t always a very good mother. In this case, I know I wasn‘t. I thought I was doing what was best for my child, and in the long run I can‘t regret it: I love Tina and I love her sisters, and I can‘t imagine a world where they don’t exist. But at the same time, I know that my son spent a great deal of his life… discontent. And I don‘t take it lightly. And Evelyn… Evelyn loved her brother, Greg, and I wasn’t there when Jimmy told her he was homosexual too, but I can promise you she wasn‘t thinking about him as an embarrassment to the family name. She was seeing Harry lying in that hospital bed with his eyes swollen shut and his liver bleeding into his body, and then she saw her son in that position as well, and she thought she knew the way to prevent that because when I handled it with Harry, the problem was fixed. But these are different times, now.”
Let me just say, this bit was hard to phrase without making Evelyn sound offensive, and I had to choose my words very carefully. It’s still not perfect, but the emphasis here is on Evelyn’s meaning, not on how she phrased it.
This time I got up and took a few steps until I was standing right in front of Greg, and I took his chin in my hand, forcing him to look at me. I’m eighty-two-years old; I’m allowed to do things like that. “I have since learned better,” I said, stressing each word. “And Evelyn has learned better. She loves Jimmy and this child and you more than anything, and it might have taken her time to accept it but she is here now, just like me. And if she ever walks down the street and hears a slur about you boys, I guarantee she will rain down on someone with her purse and her Yiddish and the fury of a woman scorned, and she will take them down. Just like I would.”
And finally he smiled with genuine amusement. “You wish.”
He sidestepped me and pulled himself into the rocking chair I had vacated. No respect, that boy. Or maybe he was giving me a hint.
“I‘m going to bed,” I stated, not about to start wrestling him for my chair. Let him have some time alone.
“You’ll be okay in the house?” he asked. “You remember where your room is?”
“Please, do not use me to practice your mothering. You have a baby for that.”
“All right, Judy,” he said with half a chuckle.
I stopped when I got to the front door. “Greg,” I said. “You and Evelyn. You‘re going to be all right?”
Greg gave me a long, assessing look, almost as if he could read my mind. Trust her, I hoped I was conveying. She‘s a good girl too. “Well, you took all the fun out of resenting her by pulling out the trauma,” he said at last, with rather more nonchalance than was required. “Once you analyze people through the lens of trauma, you can't take it back. Everything can be rationalized.”
(Hmm, can this be veiled meta at ODOR? Certainly not.)
Good. With Jimmy and Greg and Evelyn and Joe, it would be fine. Everything would.
I smirked. “I‘d ask you about your own traumas, but I’m afraid I’m going to be dead soon, and simply can’t spare the time.”
He pointed his cane at me. “You know, some day you will be dead, and then you‘ll regret you said that.”
“Don‘t worry about me, dear.” I took a step inside the house, leaning slightly on the door frame. “I‘ll try to get some sleep now, before your unnamed daughter wakes up.”
“Her mother will quiet her down in no time,” Greg assured me. “Wilson loves getting up in the middle of the night. Probably why he‘s so grumpy in the morning.”
“You should try morning sex,” I suggested.
Greg choked something unintelligible, and I grinned. “What? It‘s not like either of you have childbirth to recover from, and god knows it‘s always helped me relax.”
“Jesus, Judy!” I heard him splutter as I closed the door behind me.
Well, honestly. I hadn't taken him for a prude.
This was one of the first scenes I knew I’d have in the fic; you know when you get a plotbunny, and three or four moments or lines immediately pop into your mind? Judy giving House sex tips was one of my first. The original line involved waking up in the morning and comparing a certain something to a tipi and playing Cowboys and Indians, but there’s a limit to the ways I can force a conversation to go and this just didn’t get there.
*
And in bed, I thought about Stan.
They’re good boys, I told him in my head. You’d be proud of Jimmy, for being true to himself after three wives, for finding love. You’d even like Greg - he seems smart enough to have a chance at beating you in backgammon. And you’d adore the baby. At least when she’s old enough to laugh when you make stupid faces at her. Babies are one of the few population groups that aren’t afraid of your nose hairs.
I remembered one of the last conversations I had with Stan when he was still clear-headed. He’d been sitting on our sofa, watching TV, while I was in the kitchen making tea. “I got a call from Jimmy today,” I’d said. “He‘s buying a house.”
“Little Jimmy?” he‘d replied, ”good, good. Good for him. Who‘s the girl?” It had already gotten hard for him to remember little bits of information, and sometimes the big ones. “It‘s not a girl, dear,” I told him, “his name is Greg.”
And for a moment he frowned, and then he shrugged. My dear Stan, he shrugged, and said with a quirk of his eyebrow, “well, everyone‘s a little bit faygaleh these days,” and returned to the TV.
Another line I knew I was going to add right from the start, and I even knew this line would be in the last scene. Modeled after Avenue Q’s “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist”, or more accurately its parody, “Everyone’s A Little Bit Jewish”. If everyone’s not a little bit feygaleh in fandom, I don’t know what fandom is.
Times have changed, Stan.
A hungry baby’s cry pierced the silence of the night.
These are good times.
***
End
There’s the baby again, circling back to the sentiments expressed earlier: it’s all starting over again. I admit, I hadn’t known this was what the fic was going to be about: I’d thought it would be about exploring Evelyn’s character and seeing House’s acceptance into the family. But once I got into Judy’s head, she started noticing things I hadn’t, and going on about tradition, and suddenly gave everything extra layers meaning - I love it when characters do that (and characters I write always do. They see me getting to the end of a story, flailing uselessly, and decide to help me out and get all introspective and deep.)
And this is where Sunrise, Sunset came from and why it fit so perfectly: I’d heard one of the tricks people used to name things were stealing song lyrics, and in a flashof inspiration, suddenly thought of Fiddler on the Roof. I looked up the song list, found this, and really, what could be more right? It’s Jewish. It’s about parents, looking at their children and realizing that they’re all grown up, and wanting to help and knowing that they’ll have to make their own mistakes. It’s Fiddler, so these children’s matches are not what their parents had in store for them, but in the end they’ll accept them anyway. And the sun rises, and the sun sets, and years fly by so quickly, and life, life goes on.
Thank you for reading.