Title: Starving for Attention
Pairing: None. Actually, there is no mention of Roger in this story.
Notes and Disclaimer: To begin, I do not own RENT, nor do I own its characters, as all belongs to the estate of Jonathan Larson.
As those of you who have read the rest of my stories can probably tell, I thoroughly enjoy torturing Mark, with whom I relate quite a bit. Maybe it's a sadomasochistic thing, but nevertheless… This story stems from a need to give Mark a bit more backstory than, 'Grew up privileged and gifted, had a whacko mother, went to Brown, moved to New York.' I'm not entirely pleased with the finished product, but if you have any thoughts, please review and tell me what you think. Enjoy!
I remember a play that we read in high school, in ninth grade Literature I think it was. Honestly, though, I don't really know why I still remember it. It's not that this play was poorly written or a chore to read, and it certainly isn't that it's been too long since my ninth grade Literature class; that's not what I mean. Usually, though, when something sticks with you, it's because it's moved you in some way. Something in the words, maybe, or in one of the directions, a picture, perhaps, inserted into the semi-glossy pages of the American Literature anthology, something struck a chord or tugged at a heartstring, and that strike or that pull left a mark somewhere, in the form of an emotional scrape that never heals, only scars.
This play left me cold. I, who have always been one of those library poster children who becomes virtually bewitched by books, just couldn't connect. While I hid in my room and cried at the end of Les Miserables and ached at the horrible mix of innocence and injustice in To Kill a Mockingbird, where Anthem left a twelve-year-old me secretly dreaming up idealistic plans of freedom and Sartre's works kept a slightly older version of myself blessedly awake at night thinking over the capacity of the imagination, I Never Sang to My Father left me unpleasantly distant.
I thought, at first, that the work itself was to blame. Maybe there was a key plot point missing. Maybe the character development wasn't strong enough. Perhaps we were left to infer too much. Maybe not enough was left to consider. From the way that one girl, though, a girl a few years older than me, as I was a few years younger than everyone in my class, was quietly crying into her hands and trying not to be noticed, I had to reconsider. How could a poor piece of drama move someone to tears, anyway?
When it became clear that I couldn't blame the author, I took to blaming growing up. Maybe, in my eleven or so years of reading and being read to, in watching all the movies I could possibly watch without angering my parents, I had become completely desensitized. The thought crossed my mind that I would never again be able to enjoy a work of fiction or philosophy or cinema, because I would be completely jaded by the time I was twelve. Then again, I thought as I lay on my stomach in bed and idly traced the flannel lines on my sheets, maybe I was going through a phase. Maybe, before I grew any taller or any stronger, I would have to grow stony and cold. Quite possibly, I reasoned, perceptive as I was in my preadolescent years, I would have to lean to be as icy as my father, who never sang to me, before I could understand the grief in never having sung to him.
I didn't come from a so-called "broken home." It's important to know that. Please know that. My father wasn't abusive. He didn't come home drunk, he didn't hit my mother, and he didn't kick my sister and me around the house just because we were small and vulnerable. He just worked long hours. He was frustrated. He was a doctor. Is a doctor. For as long as I've ever known my father, he's been, more than anything else, a doctor. More than he was a storyteller or a make-believer or a confidant or a counselor or a friend, he was a doctor. More than he was ever a father, even, he was a doctor. A physician. A no-nonsense man of medicine whose job it was to have the cold, hard, scientific answers to everything. I'm not saying this to put him down. There is a place, of course, for objectivity and for sternness of tone and heart and mind, but I think now that the home isn't exactly the right place.
Not that he was home all that much. Between his practice and the hospital, my father was constantly out of the house, leaving before I woke up for school in the morning and not returning home until I was nearly ready for bed, at which point he would generally retreat to his office or to his bedroom, sometimes acknowledging me with a nod of his head if I waited long enough at the kitchen table for him to actually say something.
"Your father's very tired, dear," my mother would explain as she tucked me into bed. "I'm sure that he would be glad to read with you or paint with you or just sit down with you and talk, but there are a lot of very, very sick people that need him to help them get better. Do you understand?"
And I did understand. How could a little kid argue with logic like that? Who was I to take my father away from people who could quite possibly die if he didn't see them? Wasn't that selfish of me, to even consider it? Why couldn't I share? Why couldn't I, who was otherwise so privileged, give my father to those sick people? My sister, who is ten years my senior, was always very good at letting him go. As far as I can remember, and I remember fairly well, she never showed any signs of unhappiness when it came to our father. The only time she waited up for him at the kitchen table was if I asked her to wait with me, and she wasn't much of an artist, really, so she never had any water-color paintings to give to him to shuffle in with the rest of his papers or leave under his coffee mug. Cindy's grades were always sufficient enough for Doctor Cohen, and her choices in friends were safe enough. She would go far, no doubt about it, would excel in anything she wanted to do, and while my father didn't praise her like my mother praised both of us, the two of them could actually engage in conversation beyond the nod of a head or a single, curt, "Mark."
Don't get me wrong, though; I'm in no way jealous of my sister. Not consciously, at least. While my mother was often pleasantly aloof, unwilling to see the imperfections in her family, where my father was constantly distant and unfriendly, my sister was a parent of sorts. She was the one who helped me with my homework, who read to me if my father wouldn't or didn't have time, who took care to stick my drawings to the fridge or to a corkboard in her room. Maybe that's why my father preferred Cindy; she did her best to keep me out of his hair and seemed to have an inborn sense that gauged the best times to attempt any sort of parent-child relationship with him. I, from the way a very young me trailed behind him until he shut his office door, obviously never possessed such a gift.
I mentioned, I think, that my father was a doctor. A physician. Not a pediatrician. Definitely not a pediatrician. Why, though, would my mother have considered sending her children to a practicing pediatrician for their check-ups when there was a doctor in the house? A ridiculous idea, of course, but one that might have saved my relationship with my father. When I was five, you see, and about to enter the first grade, a dirty trick on his part found me squirming around on the examination table in his white, white, and sickly grey office, hugging my knees close instead of my mother, as my father had told her to stay in the waiting room. There should have been dinosaur wallpaper and a bear with a yardstick on the wall to show me how tall I was. My mother should have been holding me. But there weren't. And she wasn't. And there were the cold, metal tables, the unforgiving white and grey of everything, and my callous father, who whipped through the motions of a child's examination with all the tenderness and understanding of a professional wrestler.
I didn't know what the cotton ball and the alcohol swab meant, of course, and didn't know to be afraid when my father took my right elbow in his hand; he was my dad, after all, and would take good care of me. I did know, though, what the needle meant, and as soon as he produced it in his free hand, the fear kicked in and I screamed, much to his initial surprise, as I was never, ever loud. I remember wriggling and squirming as fiercely as a five-year-old child could wriggle and squirm against his father, crying for my mother or for my sister or for anyone to help me, for him to please, please, please not hurt me, while my father spat at me to be quiet, to quit it, to shut up. I remember not being able to see him but being able to hear him, and I remember twisting a little too far, and I remember a moment of stunned silence when I saw my own arm twisted into a very wrong direction, when I saw the shock and horror and rage in my father's face.
The tears immediately started up again, as did the horrible, high-pitched crying, but the struggling stopped when a nurse finally came in and administered the needle, while my own father held me down and let her do something like that to me. I couldn't believe he let her do that to me, he who was supposed to protect me from all the bad things that could ever happen to one's child.
I didn't get a band-aid or a sticker or a lollipop, but my father did do me the favor of popping my elbow back into socket and avoiding a trip to the emergency room, dismissing me with an order to go back to my mother and a promise that we would discuss the incident later.
Like you can discuss something like that with a five-year-old.
Our so-called discussion, which was held behind the closed doors of his home office later that night, consisted of a lecture through gritted teeth, a speech about maturity and self-respect, about growing up, about sucking it up and meeting challenges. It consisted of a raised voice and no voice at all, of a furious man and a petrified child, of a swift smack and a whimper and a sob and the demand that I think again before humiliating my father in front of his colleagues.
( I would get the same lecture, the same shame in the eyes, the same smack across the cheek almost ten years later, when I couldn't stomach the birth of Cindy's first child, an event that left both mother and child healthy and safe but brother and uncle pasty and sick on the floor. Evidently, I would never be a doctor. )
My mother turned a blind eye. My sister let me sleep in her room that night. My father stayed cold. I remained afraid.
For months, I avoided him. I fled to my room when I heard him come home, or I pretended to be engrossed in a book or a painting if he found me sitting at the kitchen table. I didn't wait there for him anymore. I stopped trying to impress him with crafts and stopped trying to earn his praise, knowing full well that he wasn't going to go out of his way to acknowledge what I was doing in school or in piano lessons, unless, of course, it was time for me to take a scholastic placement test to skip an even grade. Needless to say, I always performed well on those. Needless to say, it was just one less thing for him to worry about.
Cindy would later tell me that it was sad, watching a little kid slink around his own house with his metaphorical tail between his legs, that she wished there was a way to put me at ease, that she hoped that life outside of Scarsdale would find me emotionally unwounded and ready to face the growing up that I had done far too quickly as a child. Right before I left for college, she advised me to slow down, to stop living for him and to start living for myself, and it took me three semesters to figure out what she meant, even as bright as everybody says I am. Unfortunately, though, living for myself means being cut off financially and emotionally, being verbally battered over the phone, being denounced and abandoned, because living for myself means getting away from the higher education and the higher path that my father tried to force me to follow.
But when the yelling stops and the dial tone buzzes, I'm neither groveling nor in tears. I'm smiling. For once, I'm actually smiling, and it's a real smile, too, not the lopsided grin knocked crooked on the side of my father's hand so many years ago.
Additional Notes: Thoughts? Feelings? I'm very interested to know what you all think about my take on things, so, as I've said, please review if you enjoyed it or have any ideas on how I could improve. Thank you kindly.