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Midge had never thought much about being a good mother. If she had, she supposed she would have assumed that she was one. She made sure her children were fed, clothed, and cared for, by her or Joel or their parents or someone else of generally acceptable comportment. She loved them, and maybe she never loved them so much that they took precedence over her own dreams, but that seemed like an unreasonable ask, in Midge’s opinion. Maybe there women somewhere, in the Midwest, perhaps, a place like Missouri, or possibly North Carolina or Oklahoma, who were mothers and nothing else. It was the sort of thing that men liked to demand of women, and maybe some women were happy to give it.
But no one had ever asked such a thing of Midge, not even Joel; even if she hadn’t had comedy, she would have had an endless closet to maintain, a perfect skincare routine to complete, parties to plan and tea parlors to frequent and bars and shows and clubs and all the other revelry of 60s’ New York to enjoy. So she raised her children around her lifestyle, instead of changing her lifestyle for her children, which was exactly the same amount of courtesy her own mother had shown her.
Esther and Ethan seemed to resent that now, and perhaps they were right to; Midge didn’t know. But they’d grown into functioning, successful adults—Ethan’s fondness for dirt and cabbages not withstanding (and no one could ever tell Esther that her mother thought she was successful, lest her reputation as a Proper Jewish Mother be utterly ruined)—and that was enough for Midge. She’d taken her own upbringing and wrung it to shreds, building a new life in adulthood that suited her far better than anything her parents could design for her, and she rather expected her children to do the same. It was a rite of passage.
She’d given her children the best life she knew how to, assuming that no matter what she did, they would rebel and resent and destroy just as she had. It never occurred to her that her children might have wanted a life they never had to resent in the first place.
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Midge woke up in her New York apartment on August 4, 1966, and it was just another day.
She washed off her face cream, unwound her curls, spent an hour picking out a dress. She roused her children, who, as per usual, did “not want to go to school, mommy!,” and pulled together a lackluster breakfast. She yelled at her parents, who had their own place but were currently in the process of remodeling and so had invaded her home once again, this time without even asking for permission.
She lived that morning like most others, and in many ways it could’ve been any day, in any year—1957 or 1961 or 1965.
But it was August 4, 1966, and Lenny Bruce had died late the night before. Her father read it on the second page of the paper, and he quietly placed the article in front of her. She tried to ignore it at first, uninterested in her father’s preoccupation with world events and politics and more focused on the day ahead. But he persisted, and she read the headline, and she crumpled to the floor, sobbing, the coffee she’d been holding pooling around her knees.
Except she didn’t. She had the sensation that she was there, hard laminate against her legs, even as she stayed standing, sipping the same coffee that she should have dropped. She read the article, and she nodded once, sharply, then again for reasons she didn’t quite understand. She clenched her dress in her hands for a moment, and then she was moving again, packing the children up for their walk to school, reaching for her purse, slipping into her shoes. She locked her door behind her, made it to the street, sent her children on their way.
She went about her day exactly as she’d planned to when she woke up, all the while thinking that she should be feeling something, anything. But it all just felt the same way that yesterday had, and the day before that, and the day before that.
She’d lost Lenny five years ago, in a vast white hallway. She remembered having the sense he was a guardian angel, and since then he’d been nothing more than a memory, faded from the years between and tarnished, despite her best efforts, by sensationalist news.
The sad truth was that Lenny could’ve been everything to her, but time and circumstance had reduced him to a side character, a stepping stone on her path to something greater. Their relationship was special, yes—he always wanted the best for her, of her, and she idolized him in return. She’d once wanted everything he had, minus the lawsuits, probably. They both demanded too damn much. Neither of them were capable of being what the other hoped they were in 1961, and they clearly hadn’t become it by 1966, either.
Everything had changed, because he was gone, and yet nothing had changed at all.
So she played her show, back at the Gaslight again, and she tried not to resent it. Maybe she owed him more than that, owed him her sadness or her mourning or some other maudlin emotion, but mostly she just wanted to do this and get it over with. She’d done bigger shows, and she’d do them again, and until then the Gaslight felt like a prison.
Her set was a tribute to him, a comedic recounting of their relationship but for a few moments that she couldn’t bear to hand over to strangers. Miraculously, she recognized a face or two in the crowd who had been there the night he played and introduced her.
Let them remember him, then. Let them turn their memories over to the masses with tears in their eyes. She couldn’t do it, wouldn’t allow it. Mrs. Maisel did not mourn, and Midge had far more important things to do.
Midge finished her set, and she never spoke about Lenny again.
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Friends were few and far between in comedy. Comradery, sure. Sparring partners, of course. But the cocktail parties and fancy tea services and backstage binges and awards shows didn’t lend themselves to legitimate interpersonal connection any more than sleeping with Penny Pan led to a successful marriage.
She’d have liked to lean on her old friends, from before, but she traveled too often, and her life became too big and unexplainable to fit into bite-size packages suitable for infrequent consumption by those who could never quite understand. Imogen and Archie still came to a show occasionally, sometimes stopped backstage to exchange pleasantries, but they hadn’t had anything substantial to discuss in years. Midge’s relationship with Joel, once strengthened by the forced proximity of co-parenting, had waned as the children grew older and needed them less. As her fame grew, so did his jealousy, and there were some things you just couldn’t quite overcome.
Tabloid photos showed a myriad of famous companions, the rich and talented and a few that were neither, but the fact was that her most constant source of support was Susie. That is, until she wasn’t. When that ended, her trusted managers’ absence from her life was obvious enough that everyone assumed that the end of Midge and Susie’s working and personal relationship must have been catastrophic: a blowout of epic proportions, a difference of opinion so vast that even decades of friendship could not bridge it.
If Midge had ever deigned to answer the press’ intrusive questions about her breakup with her manager, she’d have said that she couldn’t remember why. It would have been a lie, but the truth wasn’t so far off—she wasn’t sure exactly when they became broken, irredeemable. When had she decided not to fight, to let that final straw break their backs? It was the kind of thing that usually happened all at once, after a betrayal or knock-down drag-out fight. For them, it had been gradual, over the course of years, a relationship chipped away by perceived slights and misunderstandings and a growing apart so slow that neither had realized it was happening until it was over.
Someone had once described Susie as an elevator—a manager for those going up or coming down, but never for those at their peak. Midge had not entertained the idea then, but now she understood. It was no fault of Susie’s, not really; it was just that Susie was, unbelievably, too moral for show business. After enough years of touring and booking more prestigious gigs for her clients, Susie had the money for anything she’d ever wanted, and she was surprised to find that her biggest dreams were not massively larger than anything she’d had before. Once she bought the big, beautiful apartment, once she’d tasted fame, she mostly just wanted to spend her mornings at the Stage Deli and her evenings at the Gaslight and the time in between yelling at people who annoyed her.
Susie told Midge as much in a green room in Hollywood.
“I want to spend time with my sister and her kids, I don’t even think they remember my name. And I want to have time, you know, to watch comedy again, to find the up and comers and help them get where they’re going. Up here, at the top, it’s… I’m tired, Midge.”
What she didn’t say, but what Midge knew to be equally true, was that she’d met someone back in the city, improbably, impossibly. There was possibility there, with the unnamed person who’d turned Susie’s head, and by prioritizing a relationship she was doing what Midge had never been able to do.
Some secret corner of Midge wanted those things too, but not more than she wanted success. Not more than she wanted love, unconditional and unfailing, even if it came from strangers.
More than anything, she did not want to be alone. And her father was dead, and her children were children, and her mother, for all that she was, was not and had never been a friend. So when Susie said she was leaving, Midge knew she had an option—let her go, send her on her way with a smile and a “good luck,” lose the professional connection but maintain the friendship—and she simultaneously knew that she didn’t have any choices at all. Her only friend, her only person left alive was abandoning her, and she could not abide it.
“Fuck you,” she told Susie. “If you’re too weak to handle this, you can go. I’d rather you leave than stay here to embarrass me.”
Susie’s chin wobbled, and it was a testament to how far they had fallen that she walked silently out the door, not saying a word, not arguing, never looking back.
It was the worst thing Midge had ever said or would say, and she would regret it every day for the rest of her life.
But sometimes, in the darkest hours of the night, she thought that as much as she didn’t want to be alone, nothing had ever felt quite as good as being in control—of an audience’s attention, or her own goddamn life.
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The bright lights bore down on her, causing a bead of sweat to course its way down her temple. She was probably shiny enough at this point to reflect all those spotlights back into the crowd like a mirror ball. She suspected that her makeup had started to settle into the fine lines on her forehead and beside her eyes, and she knew that her corset was digging painfully into her waist.
And yet, for perhaps the first time in her life, she didn’t care. Here she was, on stage at Carnegie Hall, not for the first time. In fact, in an interview earlier today she’d been asked exactly how many times she’d performed here, and she couldn’t remember. Four or five, she thought, but the decades started to run together with all the glitz and glamour and drugs and alcohol (the 70s had gotten the best even of the perpetually put-together Mrs. Maisel).
It was unfathomable, in this moment, to think that she’d achieved such success that she couldn’t remember how many times she’d played Carnegie. And still, she didn’t care about the dissonance of it all. She just felt… contentment, maybe. It was hard to tell; she’d never felt it before.
Miriam Maisel thought of all she’d given up to be here—time with her children, a life of safety and certainty. Her first husband, and the potential second marriage to Benjamin, and the three subsequent, relatively short-lived moments of wedded not-bliss that followed. Privacy, and so many moments when she could have otherwise chosen the right, moral thing if she weren’t so devoted to her own success. The friendships she sacrificed on her own altar. The love she never let herself have, for fear that it might rob her of this very moment.
There was a lot to regret; a lot to judge her for, and the press had never shied away from it. She’d damned herself, too, on so many lonely nights during long, lonely years.
But she never regretted most of it at all, and especially not on nights like tonight. Not when she was glowing brighter than the sun, faces rapt around her, jokes falling out of her mouth like jewels—valued and appreciated and adored.
She finished her set—“and that’s how you get the rabbi, folks!”—and laughs cascaded around her, buoyed her through her bows, followed her off the stage and all the way to her dressing room.
Midge looked at her ruined reflection: older than she’d once been, but younger than she felt, somehow. She studied the painstakingly chosen pink dress, covered in sequins as the times demanded; the high forehead she’d once hated and the light in her eyes. She felt her heart still beating fast from the thrill of the evening. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel looked at everything she was, everything she once doubted she would be, and she whispered, just to herself, the mantra she’d been repeating for years, on nights she believed it and nights she didn’t. She mouthed the words like the prayer they’d become long ago:
“I didn’t blow it.”
And Midge smiled.