Alice Eve Cohen - What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir

Table of Contents

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First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright Alice Eve Cohen, 2009

All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston. Copyright 1942 by Zora Neale Hurston, copyright renewed 1970 by John C. Hurston.

The Brocaded Slipper and Other Vietnamese Tales by Lynette Dyer Vuong; text copyright 1982 by Lynette Dyer Vuong; used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Cohen, Alice Eve.
What I thought I knew / Alice Eve Cohen.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-05093-4

1. MotherhoodUnited StatesCase studies. 2. Mother and childUnited StatesCase studies. 3. Pregnancy, unwantedUnited StatesCase studies. 4 Fetal growth retardationUnited StatesCase studies. 5. Birth weight, LowUnited StatesCase studies. 6. Cohen, Alice Eve. 7. Cohen, Alice EveFamily. 8. Parents of children with disabilitiesUnited StatesBiography. 9. Mothers and daughtersUnited StatesBiography. 10. Jewish womenUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

HQ759.C644 2009
306.8743092dc22
[B] 2008051576

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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For my wonderful family

authors note

All the events in this book actually occurred. As this is a memoir, my telling of the events is filtered through the lens of memory and emotion, and altered by the passage of time. Ive changed the names and identifying details of some people in this book to protect their privacy. Conversations and dialogues have been modified by memory, and sometimes intentionally compressed and reshaped for narrative purposes. My intent throughout the book is to re-create for the reader the story as I experienced it in the moment, and in the state of mind I was in at each stage in the journey. This is how I remember my life during this period of time.

Zora Neale Hurston

ACT I

Unbridled Good Fortune

Scene 1

Stage Fright

This was going to be a solo show. Thats what I do. I write and perform solo plays. Dramatic tales with multiple characters, for adults. Comic plays and folktales, for children. Ive performed for half a million people, in tiny theaters and high-tech performance spaces, in international theater festivals and school cafeterias, on four continents.

I rarely get stage fright. But the thought of performing this story in front of an audience was like willingly entering my recurrent dreamthe one where I am standing under a blinding spotlight on a rickety proscenium stage. I face the audience, open my mouth to speak, and realize: 1) I cant remember my lines; 2) There is a marching band entering the theater; 3) Im naked. Shouting over the brass section, I stammer and blurt out improvisations, hoping my lines will come back to me before the audience showers me with rotten vegetables, but the band drowns me out. As they approach the stage, I see that the musicians are wild animals in military dress. I wake in a sweat.

On Friday, the eve of the Jewish New Year, September 10, 1999, I was rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital for an emergency CAT scan. Im here with your patient, said the radiologist on the phone to my doctor. She appears to be in shock.

I sat down to write this story as a solo show, but I got stage fright and couldnt write anything for years.

Seven years later, on Friday, the eve of the Jewish New Year, 2006, I started to write. Unexpectedly. Urgently.

I wont be performing this story. In a book I am just as naked, lit under as unforgiving a spotlight, but Im willing to divulge these secrets for one reader at a time. Ive been writing as fast as I can, without telling anybody. For fear that Ill stop. For fear that the Evil Eye will catch up with me. Again.

Scene 2

Unbridled Good Fortune

This is the happiest Ive been in years. As if in a perpetual state of inebriation, I laugh for no reason. I celebrate the end of the decade and the millennium.

The first half of the nineties was less celebratory. Infertility. Divorce from Brad after thirteen years together. A custody battle for our three-year-old adopted daughter, Julia. The loneliness of single parenthood. The exhausting discipline of raising Julia on my minimal, freelance income. The fear of raising a child in my crime-ridden building. Before taking Julia out for a walk in her stroller, I had to look through the peephole to make sure my drug-dealing neighbor wasnt starting a gunfight with an unruly client.

In the spring of 1999, I indulge in the pleasurable delusion of eternal youth. Michael, my fianc, is ten years younger. Im forty-four. Hes thirty-four, but he looks like a college kid, with his wayward curly hair, earnest blue gray eyes, baggy jeans, and thread-bare T-shirt, cradling his guitar and singing the song he wrote last night instead of sleeping. Hes smart, funny, cynical, affectionate. Hell never grow up, and as long as Im with him, neither will I.

We met three years earlier at a childrens theater conference, where we were both performing solo plays. He drove me home, came back for dinner the next night, and spent the night. Because of our age difference, we had no expectations that our fling would develop into anything more. Because we had no expectations, we shed our armor. When we shed our armor, we fell in love.

Michael grew up in New Orleans, and was the only one in his conservative, devout Lutheran family whod ever moved north of the Mason-Dixon Line. After his family recovered from hearing that he was dating a Jewish New Yorkera divorced, single mom, ten years his seniorthey teased him about acquiring an instant family. Michael had always preferred to let his life happen to him, rather than plan it.

Michael was nearly penniless, by design. Money didnt interest him. His professional passion was creating theater with kids in the countrys poorest communitiesimpoverished school districts in southern Appalachia, children of Mexican migrant workers in El Paso, Texaswhere he slept on the sofas of local families and barely broke even. He paid the rent with his more remunerative corporate theater jobs.