In honor of the day, an excerpt from JESSE, A MOTHER’S STORY
My best friend
Out of this world cook!
Takes great care of me
Helps me go places and do things
Exceptional strength
Reads to me
I love you—Jesse (fifth grade)
EX-MOTHER’S DAY
My mother loved oversized sugary Mother’s Day cards with sentimental verses inside, rhyming couplets that somehow induced guilt and at the same time made your teeth ache. Every year I found myself resentfully pawing through pink paper tributes to motherhood at the card store, muttering under my breath. Once I became a candidate for the once-a-year drippy card-and-flowers deal, I let Chris know he was under absolutely no obligation–I wasn’t his mother, and Jesse was too young to get it. Maybe when he was four I could deliver the duped consumer victim lecture to Jesse. And later, I could tell him that Mother’s Day began with Julia Ward Howe and a plea for peace, so that mothers wouldn’t lose their sons in never-ending wars. But Mother’s Day got to Chris like an alien spore; some combination of surround sound advertising and free-floating pressure made him go to the store and buy stuff. When Jesse was still an infant I went into his room on Mother’s Day and found him in his crib cradling a card in one arm and scented soap in the other. Even though it wasn’t from Jesse, I enjoyed the soap. Later, in elementary school, I got teacher-directed cards. Nice of them to think of me, but the teachers wrote the cards. But when Jesse mastered the computer, he wrote me quirky poems, which changed everything. My son gave me words, his words, words that were teased out of painstakingly drawn lists, then shaped into thoughts. Words I treasured because they were from Jesse.
Now that I’m no longer a mother, I can ignore Mother’s Day. But I’m haunted by words.
So on the day before ex-Mother’s Day, I got the word that meant “Jesse” tattooed on the inside of my wrist, a semi-private part of my body that I can look at whenever I want.
I’m looking at it now: an indelible filigreed reminder of loss. It’s bigger than I originally intended, and the loop of the letter “J” curls around to the more public part of my wrist.
Jesse wanted a tattoo. During the summer he was thirteen, we were invited to a backyard barbecue in our neighborhood. We usually saw Forrest, a tattoo artist, or his girlfriend Rebecca on our daily walks to the marina and our dogs played together, Goody Prince of Dogs dwarfed by their giant lab. Forrest was goateed and laconic, and Rebecca was a sunny blonde; a Vermont native as robust and healthy as the Vermont Maid picture on maple syrup bottles. At their barbeque, Chris, Jesse and I were the only unadorned people in an elbow-deep cluster of beautifully embellished skin. Jesse was agog, looking around with a slightly dazed, but blissful smile, as if he were spinning on a theme park ride. I asked him if he would like to get a tattoo and he responded with one of his most emphatic clicks. I told him he would have to wait until he was eighteen.
I got the tattoo in the year Jesse would have been eighteen.
Chris and I climbed the steep stairs to Cobra Custom Tattoos, incongruously sited on the old-fashioned clapboard-fronted shops on Plymouth’s main thoroughfare. Forrest and Rebecca remembered us, though it had been years since they lived in our neighborhood. I told him I wanted a tattoo for Jesse and he showed me a book of memorial tattoos, some of which were huge portraits of the dead meant to span a shoulder or cover a broken heart.
Forrest created a scripted version of Jesse’s name with an infinity symbol underneath on a piece of thin, parchment-like paper. It was simple, elegant and monochromatic black. I approved it—not realizing that the size he showed me was to scale—and he set to work, after refusing any form of payment.
The skin is thin on the inside of the wrist, and it was painful getting the tattoo. I welcomed it. Forrest was a meticulous artist and his work was flawless. The tiny multiple piercings kept me alive in the world for the twenty minutes it took to mark me as a member of the ex-parent tribe. Jesse had been gone for a year and I wanted to be permanently marked and I wanted it to show. I wanted to flip off other people’s happiness with a flick of the wrist, fist raised, a power salute to death. Chris, silently watching the ritual, had no such impulse. That’s okay. He never needed words as much as I did, and I need this word, this symbol of Jesse. But now, after the rawness of the raised letters has healed, the red defiance has ebbed, and the word on the inside of my wrist is no longer an ashy lament. Today, the tattoo is an exuberant shout, a testimony to Jesse being in the world, an affirmation of his own wish to proclaim it, and a reminder that I was and will always be his mother every day for the rest of my life.
May 13th, 2012UncategorizedRead More >5 Comments
March 18th, 2012UncategorizedRead More >2 Comments
In honor of tonight’s Academy Awards, I’m reprinting an essay I did for the Boston Globe in 2007 about our adventures on the red carpet (Chris won Best Supporting Actor for Adaptation in 2003):
“The Wife”
Avoiding wrinkles in the red carpet requires a plan.
By MARIANNE LEONE | February 23, 2007
My husband is a celebrity. A movie star, actually, though he doesn’t consider himself one. He thinks he’s an actor, and a serious one, who enjoys research, rehearsal, and the give and take of performance. And he is a fine, serious actor. But when we go to an awards ceremony, or the opening of a studio movie, he’s a movie star, and he has to walk the line – that red carpet bounded on one side by roaring fans and the other by screaming press. This is part of his job, too.
I’m the smiling nonentity clinging sweatily to his hand, face flash-frozen into a death’s-head rictus. I should reveal that I, too, have appeared on the big screen, mostly in tiny roles in independent films or tiny roles in large studio films that had mostly disappeared once the films actually opened. My only claim to fame is that I played Christopher Moltisani’s mother in The Sopranos. However, if anyone recognizes me, it means I haven’t been getting enough sleep, since Joanne, my character, is a recovering alcoholic who looks so ravaged that old boyfriends get to chortle at how horribly I’ve aged.
For the award shows, I get the full glam makeup and hair treatment, courtesy of whatever studio is behind the movie my husband is representing. Still, there’s only so much they can do, since I’m over 50 and I refuse to Botox my way to a Kabuki mask where my face once was. My weight is typical for a middle-aged woman. That means when I’m in a herd of starlets, I am sasquatch, she of the thunderous footsteps lumbering behind. The mother in me wants to fling these little shadows onto gurneys and attach IVs to their puny arms, but my inner middle-schooler quakes in the presence of so many queen bees and wants only to bury her nose in a book by any of the Brontes and be transported to an alternate reality.
My husband now knows he can push certain limits, dawdling at the hotel until various publicists, agents, and managers are screaming over cellphones, “The doors are closing!” The first time, at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, we pulled up to a frantic aide announcing our arrival into a walkie-talkie as if we were heads of state – or perhaps wanted in 13 states. Once we exited the car and my husband was swept into the maelstrom of sound and light, I realized belatedly we hadn’t made a plan for the walk. I had pictured some kind of hazy Hansel and Gretel deal, two innocents holding hands, tripping through the forest of photographers and fans. Instead, he was suddenly standing alone between two huge roaring canyons. And I was left with the choice between the geisha walk-behind, the pushy “I’m his wife – take my picture, too!” maneuver (not my style), and the halfhearted hang-back. I chose option three.
Luckily, his publicist kindly guided my husband past the scarier interviews. She was also there to push me gently into the picture when the photographers asked for “the wife.” Here, in a burst of on-the-job training, and prompted by my husband’s sotto voce instructions, I learned to swivel my head in a half-Exorcist twirl while keeping a smile pasted on my face. He was great at this, the picture-taking, but then I had never seen a bad shot of him in our 23 years of marriage. I, on the other hand, had permanent psychic scars from school photos that had provoked uncontrollable hilarity from my own parents.
On the flip side of my “photo”-phobia, my husband is rendered mute with terror at the idea that he has to come up with a pithy sound bite. I’m as mouthy as he is reserved, so this is my chance to hold up my end of our yin-yang team. If the red carpet is a bizarro-world reflection of whatever’s powering our marriage, then this is the real picture: Opposites not only attract, they interact like mad when they need to protect each other.
At the premiere of The Patriot, I warned him of a flap in the news about 10-year-olds carrying rifles and that he should be prepared with an interesting comeback when asked about gun control. We thought up several replies. Loaded for bear, my husband walked up to the first interviewer with confidence. She flashed him a dazzling smile and asked: “Boxers or briefs, Mr. Cooper?”
Marianne Leone, actress, writer, and the wife of Chris Cooper, lives on the South Shore. Send e-mails to coupling@globe.com.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
February 26th, 2012UncategorizedRead More >No Comments
Even though Chris and I don’t observe commercial holidays and weren’t even in the same state yesterday, he is my eternal valentine. This man, this generous, gifted father, artist, man of my heart, is a gift. What I am grateful for: a man who doesn’t like to watch sports on television, a man who makes me laugh like I’m six years old and just heard my first poop joke, a man who feeds the birds every morning before he has his first cup of coffee–thanks, fates, for sending him. 
February 15th, 2012UncategorizedRead More >No Comments
If you no longer live
If you, my beloved, my love,
If you
Have died,
All the leaves will fall in my breast,
It will rain on my soul night and day,
The snow will burn my heart,
I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,
My feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping,
But
I shall stay alive,
Because above all things you wanted me
Indomitable
–Pablo Neruda
January 3rd, 2012UncategorizedRead More >10 Comments
December 31st, 2011UncategorizedRead More >No Comments
A few days before Christmas I checked my post office box and received a treasure cache of letters from Bridgewater State University students majoring in Special Education. They had all read JESSE, A MOTHER’S STORY on assignment. As I opened each letter, I felt like I was uncovering pure white light. Every one of these bright young people expressed the fervent resolve to use Jesse’s life as an inspiration to fully include their future students with disabilities. “Jesse made me realize that everyone is smart in their own way.” “Jesse’s story inspired me to always see a student as a child first and a disabled person second.” “I am more determined than ever to earn my degree and spend my career working with these wonderful children.”
Thank you, thank you, thank you for your fantastic letters and your goals to open the worlds of your future students. And thank you, Jess, for being such a gift.
December 29th, 2011UncategorizedRead More >No Comments
My
Chair
Bumps
Through
The woods
As we look for
The perfect tree
We leave a piece of
Silver for the wood sprites
The decorations are in storage
We dust off all the ornaments
Dad spends an entire day stringing
Together popcorn and cranberries
I’m happy to have Dad home this Christmas
The tree’s spine is crooked like mine and Mom’s
Stan’s homemade ornaments are placed on the tree
They hang on the branches like rings on fingers
Colored lights beat out white lights this year
This is our Charlie Brown Blue Spruce Christmas Tree
December 23rd, 2011UncategorizedRead More >1 Comment
We have two tiny little trees this year, rosemary plants shaped into trees, strung with tiny white lights. 
December 18th, 2011UncategorizedRead More >8 Comments
An article I wrote that appeared in The Boston Globe on Thanksgiving…
http://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/2011/11/24/for-marianne-leone-thanksgiving-goes-back-future/makJ34lLByTDA3kARlt8jN/story.html#share-nav
December 2nd, 2011UncategorizedRead More >2 Comments
