Crazy Enough by Storm Large

Author:Storm Large
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Free Press

The academy’s graduation ceremony was in a nice, cushy theater in the West Forties. Graduates would walk up on stage, people would clap and nod, diplomas handed out, then the newly anointed degree holder would walk the rest of the way across the stage, pageant-waving. That one trip across the boards would be many of our first, and most of our last, footfall on any Broadway stage.

I wore an expensive, sequined minidress my aunt Bitsy had bought me as a graduation present, but my hair was in a wet ponytail and I barely had time to put on makeup in the cab uptown. My name was called; there was respectable applause and nodding from my classmates and those in attendance. I walked across the stage, chubby, pale, and sparkling. In my head, I looked like a homeless person who had stolen a dress from a showgirl to wear to the unemployment office. I took the diploma from the school president, thanked her, and smiled. People clapped. As I walked the rest of the length of stage, I heard my mom howling again from the wings, “Yaaay, Stormee! Whooops! Oh . . . ex-cuse me! Oh! That’s my baby girl!”

She fell again outside the theater.

While she was talking very loudly to my classmate who had helped her up, I hugged my dad. “Dad. Mom is, she’s fucking . . .”

“Taking over? Yeah, I know.” He smiled his squinty smile, crushing his cigarette with a twist of his foot.

We looked at each other and, in a moment, I completely understood my father. He knew all too well the madness and sadness I was running from. I was too sensitive to fashion myself with an invisibility cloak, or use the locked box of bad feelings trick. That’s why he let me run. There were many sleepless nights for my dad, wondering if the phone would ring and it would be me in the ER instead of his crazy wife. However, even though I scared the crap out of him, he let me run because it was the only thing I could do. He would have run if his conscience had allowed it. His insides were elsewhere, surely, but his person stayed, numb and tethered, with a vow to protect and love and all the hogwash that comes with the traditionally ingrained, Episcopalian, Baby Boomer mind.

As much purposeful fucking up as I had done, I always swore that, one day, I would make him proud. And in that moment, I realized he always had been; he was just waiting for me to be proud of myself. I had astonishingly lived, schooled, and worked in New York City, on my own, and not only hadn’t died, I actually had done all right.

I was twenty-two years old.

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