Forgiving Glenn Close
Can a popular TV show that traces the ancestry of celebrities leap across the airwaves like lightning and strike a family torn apart by secrets and loss?
Whenever I see Skip on TV with his research spread out before him, I try not to think about the time I hit him. Really hard.
We were just teenagers then. Playing football. Now when his program airs on PBS, I watch though not too closely.
But who am I kidding? The very act of trying not to think about something—means I’m obviously thinking about it. So that’s not really what gets to me. What gets to me is the unspoken truth behind my harder-than-necessary hit. The truth of what I was feeling that day.
“How could this little runt of a guy be so much smarter than me?” I thought. “His father works as a janitor. His mother cleans houses. My parents have a lot more money. That’s why I’m in Jack and Jill.”
I didn’t know the word rankle yet. But I know it now. Only these days it’s not Skip who rankles—it’s the thing I have trouble facing.
It was supposed to be a simple game of touch football
I knew that, and I hit him anyway. Hit him hard. And he went down hard. So of course I blame myself for his difficulty walking later in life. Even though it was a doctor that did the real harm by misdiagnosing the fracture. Told the boy’s parents it was all in his head.
None of that crap from the past is supposed to matter now. So how come I still feel guilty about it? Besides, my unsportsmanlike behavior didn’t stop Skip from skipping ahead of everyone. He got into Yale. Graduated summa effing cum laude. From Yale! These days he’s Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. And he’s on TV every week, sitting across from some celebrity with genetic and historical research spread out before him.
If it were me, I’d probably be feeling pretty smug knowing all the stuff he knows. But no matter how hard I look at him, I never find any trace of the small stuff. Though there is something about his so-called academic distance that rubs me the wrong way. Dr. Grant has that look sometimes too. Like he’s judging me even though he’s pretending not to. But that probably doesn’t matter, either.
What does matter
is that this time the research on Skip’s table contains the ancestry of Glenn Close. Her tree of life, he calls it. Why this woman hasn’t received an Academy Award after so many incredible performances, I’ll never know. Eight Oscar nominations and no wins? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!
The way I see it, she must’ve pissed off someone at the Academy a long time ago. Maybe she doesn’t even know who it was. Could be some sneaky jealous bastard, the kind of person who hits hard during a touch football game. Someone who couldn’t stand how talented she is. Someone she rankled just by being so damn good.
2
I admire Glenn Close, but she unsettles me
And the reason is so stupid I’m embarrassed to give it a name. It’s called Fatal Attraction. Bitch wouldn’t die. Scared the shit out of me. Cut way too close to the bone. I’ve known my share of women who refused to let go. And the last thing I want is for my past to creep up on me like that.
And to think—it was my own mother who got me to watch it. Practically forced me to. “I want every one of my sons to see this movie,” she said.
“I always taught you boys to respect girls. But now you’re men. And I know how men are. I also remember how your father was—God rest his soul. Always telling the same lie about how a crowded streetcar swerved or hit a pot hole, and that’s how lipstick got on his shirt.
“How come the person standing next to him all those times was wearing lipstick? The law of averages says there must have been somebody drinking coffee or smoking a cigarette or chewing tobacco at least one of those times. But your father never came home with coffee or tobacco stains or ash burns on his shirt. Oh yes, I know how men are. That’s why I want every one of you boys to watch this movie. So you will understand that you’re flirting with danger when you do a woman wrong.”
Despite phenomenal performances
in The Wife, Hillbilly Elegy, House of the Spirits, and so many other films, I cannot forgive Glenn Close for getting inside my psyche in Fatal Attraction. Hell, I dreamed about that movie for years. And every time she popped out of that bathtub with a butcher knife in her hand, she had the face of some woman from my past.
(Note to self: Ask Dr. Grant if the fear of being attacked by a knife-wielding woman indicates a castration complex or merely castration anxiety. Also, is it possible that Glenn Close is a surrogate for my mother who insisted that I see the film?)
Anyway, as if the dreams weren’t bad enough, I saw something else in that movie I’ve never been able to forget.
Sex
It’s the scene when Michael Douglas is trying to hold Glenn Close down in the bathwater. Her whole body is struggling upward against him. Her arms are flailing, her legs are kicking up and down, and he is panting above her, exerting all his force to keep her down. Except for the knife and the water and the fact that they have their clothes on, what they’re doing looks like sex.
The kind of sex where the man is trying to kill the woman with his penis. And when it’s over, she has what the French call la petite mort—the little death that comes with orgasm. But at the end of Fatal Attraction, the little death of sexual release becomes the final, ultimate release of The Big Chill (another terrific Glenn Close movie).
When she’s finally dead
Michael Douglas turns his back on her, only to have her come back to life with a penis of her own—that butcher knife. Just like she does in my dreams—each time with a different face.
There’s no question that Glenn Close is a great actor—she once played a man in Albert Dobbs—but she makes me uncomfortable. There’s a certain look in her eyes that scares me. Even when she’s playing a nice girl in a white dress like in The Natural. It’s a look that cuts deep into your shadowy parts, a look that says I know what you did.
But tonight, she is sitting across from Skip—
Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.—and because I have issues with each of them, I pay attention instead of allowing the program to play in the background while I scroll through Instagram, Twitter, or check my listings on Real-Estate-dot-com.
I am also paying attention because Brianna is in the room. My daughter is a smart girl—got into Sarah Lawrence with a 3.9. But she would not be here tonight were it not for the pandemic.
“I’m here under protest,” she said when she stomped through the front door after the college decided remote-study was the safest way to protect students from Covid.
Since then, she’s been slamming doors, hiding out in her bedroom, eating alone, and staying as far away from me as possible. If I’m in the kitchen when she comes down for coffee, she marches back to her room till the coast is clear.
She could be watching this same TV show in her own room tonight. Or working on a term paper, or just hanging out online with other remote-study exiles. But she’s not. She’s sitting here with me.
Of course, she hasn’t spoken a word since she plopped down on the far end of the sofa. Like she might get leprosy if she got any closer. Nor has her icy disposition shifted. The cold shoulder she’s given me ever since she arrived feels just as cold. I can’t tell if her emergence tonight signals truce or escalation. So I keep my eyes on the TV and wait.
3
When you are 53 and you marry a woman of 30
you expect to be the one who dies first. You don’t expect her to have an underlying condition that puts her at risk for Covid-19, what the doctors call a co-morbidity.
When your daughter heads off to college, you expect to spend your empty-nest years with your beautiful now-50-year-old wife. Cruising the Mediterranean, drinking cocktails in a train’s observation car, visiting Ted Lasso’s England and the real Downton Abbey.
I knew of course that I’d be 73 by then. But when you bag a trophy wife half your age—and you love her as much as I loved Heather—it goes without saying that you intend to remain a silver fox for as long as possible. Reminding myself that my parents and grandparents lived long lives, I’ve always taken care of my health. I installed a gym in the basement and work out regularly. And I have one other advantage— Black don’t crack.
Heather and I had 20 good years. Then I lost her, which really took the wind out of me. But that’s nothing compared to what it did to our daughter.
“First, the pandemic took away my high school graduation,” Brianna said when she returned home under protest. “Now it’s forcing me to do college in my room. It isn’t fair!”
What she did not say
was that losing her mother was not fair. And I haven’t said it either. We have been tiptoeing around this subject for over a year, when Heather’s slight cough—the asthma she always got during allergy season—turned out to be Covid.
What’s not fair is that this vibrant, witty, still relatively young woman should be among the first casualties of the disease. Before there was any hint of a vaccine. One minute we were trying to decide if we should give Brianna a car for Christmas or wait till after graduation. And the next minute, Heather was in a hospital. We weren’t even allowed to see her because of Covid. Her illness was like a late-model Maserati moving from zero to 60 in four seconds. Before we knew it, she was in the ICU. And that was that.
4
It makes me feel ashamed
That’s what Glenn Close is saying to Skip on TV. She’s talking about her ancestors, the ones who owned slaves. Hearing this, something tugs on a loose thread within me. Heather and I rarely discussed race with Brianna.
Our beautiful biracial child was neither one thing nor the other but the best of both of us, we said. I did worry a little at first about not schooling her in the complexities of race. But Barack Obama became president when she was five, and it seemed that America was finally becoming post-racial.
Over time race mattered less because we lived in diverse upscale neighborhoods. Even now you can’t tell Brianna’s ethnicity just by looking at her. Her features are mainly European. She looks a lot like Heather and has her mother’s piercing blue-green eyes. But instead of Heather’s porcelain skin and sleek red hair, Brianna is olive with a nest of curly light brown hair that looks like a French poodle in desperate need of a trim.
It was Heather’s own mother who made the unfortunate allusion to race that sent her into a tailspin.
“Oh, I get it,” my mother-in-law said. “When a Black person and a white person marry, the children come out Mexican or Arab.”
“What’s wrong with you, Mom?! That’s a terrible thing to say. Are you MAGA now or what? And it’s not funny. It’s not funny at all.”
Heather always did have a volatile temper. It was because of her red hair, I used to tease. She would explode, then it was over. But not before going a few rounds with whoever got under her skin. When she and her mom went at each other that day, I left the kitchen stifling a laugh. To me, the joke was kinda funny.
5
Lots of people find out about slave-owning ancestors
on Skip’s TV show, but when Glenn Close says the word ashamed, it feels like she’s got that knife out again. And it’s cutting into dark places I’d rather not face.
Why is it so difficult to own up to shame? I wonder. Why did Ben Affleck ask Skip’s show not to include any of his slave-owning ancestors when it put together his family tree a few years ago? What was he more ashamed of? That his ancestors were slaveholders? Or that the incident became public and caused a controversy?
Was Ben Affleck ashamed to acknowledge his family’s past the way I’m ashamed of my more immediate past? Like hitting Skip that day—and other worse things I’m also ashamed of.
Like my last conversation
with Heather. The one that started when she said:
“How long have you been fucking around on me?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Rachel. And Tammy, Kate, Marie, Deanna, and Monica. Who the fuck are these women, Malcolm, and why have you been writing letters to them? How the fuck long has this been going on, you bastard?”
Her face became a contorted Halloween mask, as red as the color of her hair. She was talking fast, too fast. And I was angry. There was only one way for my wife to know those names. She had found them on my laptop.
That’s where I stored the journal Dr. Grant told me to keep. The one where I wrote letters apologizing to the women who haunt my dreams in reenactments of Fatal Attraction.
“In order to make peace with them,” he said. “They’re not for sending. They’re for healing.”
When Heather lit into me that day, I lost it. And we fell through a wormhole that took us into another realm where Heather was no longer Heather, and I was no longer me. She became my mother attacking my father for the lipstick on his shirt. And I became my father. And though I never believed he was innocent when their arguments began, I knew that I was innocent that day—and Heather was not.
Not only had she discovered letters on my laptop—which she had no business opening—she read them. I felt violated by her intrusion and said things you should never say to someone you love.
Unfortunately Brianna was home
at the time and heard everything. She heard her mother’s accusations. And the things I said in anger. She heard Heather quoting my journal as if my past affairs happened during our marriage.
And I couldn’t get her to calm down long enough for me to explain. Besides, I was too busy shouting about how she’d breached my privacy and how despicable she was for reading the letters. At some point, I heard the door slam, and I knew Brianna had left the house.
It wasn’t our first fight, but it was definitely our worst. And nobody went to bed happy that night. I slept in my office downstairs and woke to the sound of Heather’s cough. Only this time, it wasn’t the allergy-related asthma she usually got. It was Covid.
There are no words to express the shame I feel that this argument was the last thing between us before she died. And that my daughter had witnessed it.
6
The ice floe
When Brianna returned home from college, an ice floe broke away from the Arctic Circle and wedged itself between us. What should have been a joyful journey to college became her way to get away from me. Until the same virus that deprived each of us of the person we loved most in the world boomeranged and sent Brianna home under protest.
Ever since she walked through the front door, I have felt that ice floe chilling the atmosphere between us. She is civil but cold. She keeps to herself most of the time. Speaks only when spoken to—and then only as briefly as possible.
Which is why I am dumbfounded that she is actually sitting on the sofa with me watching TV tonight. She hasn’t said anything. But at least she’s sitting in the same room watching Skip reveal the good, bad, and ugly in the actor’s family tree.
Another branch
Glenn Close has apparently benefitted from the Ben Affleck controversy. She’s ready for the slavery parts when they come. She even says that learning the truth about her family’s past proves that she’s part of the dark history of white America—a history she finds abhorrent.
But during the rest of the program she learns that her roots go all the way back to the Puritans and a fornicating Pennsylvania Quaker. Skip tells her she’s also related to Clint Eastwood and Princess Diana. And after he shows her the birth certificate of an English ancestor born in 1620, he asks how it feels to know she’s connected to all that history.
She tells him her first thought was this: None of the people her ancestors owned have the ability to trace their origins in this way.
The melting
Skip confirms her insight, telling her that Finding Your Roots cannot trace the ancestry of any formerly enslaved person whose white ancestor is not known.
His words send a lightning bolt across the room. It jumps from the TV and hits hard when it reaches the couch. I feel it, and I can tell Brianna feels it too. Because she turns to look at me as if she’s seeing something for the first time. And I know exactly what it is.
What she does next happens in slow motion. She slides across the sofa until she’s sitting right next to me. Then she takes hold of my arm. When time begins to move again, she puts her head on my shoulder. And I feel the ice floe begin to melt one tear at a time.
We sit like that for a brief eternity in which we are transported back in time. Back when she was five and six and seven. Back when I was her hero and not the terrible things she heard her mother say before Brianna got tired of our argument and stormed out the front door. Never hearing, never knowing there was another side to the story.
What matters most to me right now is that she still doesn’t know the truth of those letters. But she’s accepting me anyway. Not because I’m perfect. But because I’m imperfect. And her one and only father nevertheless.
7
The haunting
What I realize in this moment is that the past haunts everyone. Not just in dreams where knife-wielding women jump out of bathtubs. Nor in guilt-feelings from a teenage incident motivated by jealousy. Nor in the unwillingness of a famous movie star to face his ancestors’ role in America’s slave-owning history.
The past also haunts us with nostalgia for things that no longer are. Or can ever be again. Except in moments like this, when your daughter becomes the child who once saw only the good in you. But is now grown enough to see much more.
This moment feels better than that earlier time because her illusions are gone now. We have been through a storm and are beginning to come out the other side. In reclaiming me, I feel Brianna is also reaching for something else.
Heather and I were so confident
the country was becoming post-racial, we hoped to spare our daughter the heartache of a painful past. Why dredge up old stuff and poison her mind, we thought? Why plant anger and resentment over things she could do nothing about? We meant well, but we short-changed her. In trying to protect her, we neglected to credit her strength.
“Dad,” she says eventually, as if reading my mind. “Last summer when I took part in the George Floyd protests, some guy got in my face and said, ‘Shut up, bitch, you ain’t really Black, so yo ass is safe.’ But I am Black, Dad, right?”
“Well, honey, you’re both Black and white.”
“No, Dad. I am a Black woman because I have Black blood, and I want to know more about that part of myself. I want to know my roots. Will you to tell me what you know about your side of our family, even if we can only go back so far?
“Of course,” I say.
“I’m not just talking about the party line—how your Dad made it big in real estate. And how cool it was to be in Jack and Jill. I want to know what our family went through before that. The price that was paid for the pigment I carry. I want to know what it cost, Dad. I really, really want to know.”
When I say of course a second time, she squeezes my arm a little tighter.
8
The second coming
The fullness I feel in this moment does not come entirely from the weight of Brianna’s head upon my shoulder. Nor from the tears that dampen my shirt. It comes from the knowledge that my daughter is no longer home under protest. And in knowing we can finally begin to heal by grieving together instead of apart.
For this and for everything that’s happened while watching Finding Your Roots tonight, I can finally forgive Glenn Close for invading my dreams and making me feel uncomfortable all these years. Instead of ducking the truth, she showed my daughter and me how to face the past and each other with courage and compassion.
And as long as I’m forgiving Glenn Close, maybe it’s time to forgive Heather too. For her volatile temper. For invading my privacy. For jumping to conclusions. And for dying before I could set things right with her.
Maybe now I can stop fretting over the Glenn Close of Fatal Attraction and remember the Glenn Close of The Natural instead. The one who said: “I believe we get two lives. One to learn with, and one to live with after we’ve learned.”
My second life with Brianna begins tonight. I doubt that this one will include slammed doors and ice floes. But even if those things come, I am absolutely sure of one thing: We will get through those times together. My beautiful Black daughter and me.
©2024 Andrew Jazprose Hill
Thanks for reading/listening.
Andrew--this was remarkable on So. Many. Levels. Poignant, but infused with the right balance of guffaw-invoking humor (That b&&cg wouldn't die.) I HOPE to heck you are working on a novel. Because whatever you create is something I will absolutely scurry to read.
As for post-racial America...I stood--(freezing) in DC with millions of people from around the world at Obama's first inauguration (my only claim to TV fame is that I was the parting shot on NBC nightly news)--thinking we were entering into a new and different era. How naive--and overly simplistic--my thinking now seems.
Thank you for reading and recording this fabulous story. D
PS Jagged Edge--equally creepy--but from a different angle. It took me years to recover from seeing Jeff Bridges in that role. (I think this movie may represent a woman's worst fears!)
A powerful story! I too thought you were writing about yourself, although parts didn't line up with what I thought I knew about you, and then your wife calling you Malcolm . . . Anyway, I very much enjoyed this and very happy to know this sad but poignant tale wasn't from personal experience, although I suspect that much was, under the surface, as fiction often is.