Free Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent by Anthony Rapp Page A

orange juice or yogurt or peanut butter sandwich, trying to imagine once again what that horrible night must have felt like to her, and wondering what I would have done in her place, and feeling grateful that she had survived the ordeal. But as much as the ad touched me (especially the sweet line about Little Rachel thinking she dialed 911), it also left me ashamed. Ashamed that I wasn’t mentioned. Ashamed that I hadn’t been there for Mom in a way that merited her thanks. But the truth was I hadn’t really been there for her, not in any way that mattered. Not only was I a thousand miles away, living an extremely hectic New York City life, but I didn’t call her as much as she wanted me to—certainly not in the wake of Wild Bill—or go home for visits as often as she’d like. When I did call, I rarely asked her about Wild Bill, or talked to her about that night or her recovery or her prospects. I told her about my latest auditions and callbacks and all of the roles I wasn’t getting, and spoke of little else. So she was right not to thank me.
    As much as I believed that, though, I still wanted some credit. I could feel the insidious pull of that need lingering in my gut. I was her son, after all, and she had told me that she’d made it through that night for all of us kids, not just her girls. So why didn’t she say that in print? Why did she strand Adam and me like that? It wasn’t fair. But as I stood at the kitchen counter and read and reread the notice and thought all of this through and swallowed down my shame and pride and fear, I glanced over at Mom placidly sitting on the couch reading a magazine, her foot bobbing incessantly up and down as it always did, her head slightly cocked, enveloped in her usual aura of calm, and I decided that I could never bring it up.
     
    A year later, in the log cabin in the woods of Wisconsin, I also didn’t mention that I’d noticed her bones poking out of her already thin frame when I hugged her. I didn’t tell her how that frightened me. Instead I chatted with her about my work and my life in New York.
    “I brought home some reviews,” I told her.
    “Oh, good, let me see.”
    Reading my press clippings was one of her favorite activities. She was much better than I at cutting them out and saving them in scrap-books, and I wasn’t good at sending them in the mail to her, so I was glad to share them with her in person. And since she couldn’t afford to fly out to New York to see everything I was in (and I couldn’t afford to buy her plane tickets), showing her my reviews was the next best thing.
    “It sounds very interesting,” she said after reading one of the reviews of my current show, a dark, three-character, gay-themed play called Trafficking in Broken Hearts.
    “I wear panties in it,” I said, provocatively. Her eyes grew wide.
    “Really? Panties?” Her brow furrowed. “Why?”
    “I’m playing a sort of confused character.”
    “Well, I guess so.”
    “His brothers raped him as a kid, and this is one of the ways he’s adapted.”
    “His brothers raped him? That’s terrible.”
    “Yeah, it is. But it’s a great part.”
    She started to read another review, peering down at it through her thickly-framed bifocals.
    “Why can’t you play a nice normal person sometimes?” she said after a moment without looking up from the paper.
    This was a conversation we’d had before. And whenever we did, I always felt that she was still holding on to the memories of my childhood performances as Snoopy, Oliver, Tiny Tim, the Cowardly Lion, and the Little Prince—roles that were sweet and innocent and appealing, in shows that were wholesome and clean. “Everyone always loved you in those shows,” she’d say, and that’s what she wanted to see me do again.
    “Well, I can play normal characters too,” I said as she continued to read, “but this is what I was offered right now, and I’m having a great experience in it.”
    She put the paper down. “I just