RETURNING

I liked East West Books, but even better, because it felt less mass-produced, was Sam Weiser’s Bookstore, the Bodhi Tree of Manhattan, an eclectic clutch of weird books in a corner of downtown that felt to me like a treasure trove of information. I couldn’t afford to buy hardly any of its books, but I liked spending time there, my head tilted to read the shelves of spines, picking out some rainbow-colored book about rising signs, or Tibet, or how to grow sprouts. It felt good inside of Sam Weiser’s, cozy and fraternal.

I looked at its noticeboard, assured that whoever posted something there was a friend. It was the usual scramble of fliers and things for sale. Roommate Wanted, the notice said, Upper West Side. I took down the number and called. I had been staying in Geoffrey’s apartment for three months and I was restless to get away from a place that –though rent-free – would never really be mine, a place that wasn’t much more than a fancy hotel suite.

Scott was tall and gangly and going bald early. He wore glasses and kept his 10-speed in the hall and sprouts in jars in the kitchen. In his apartment – that had the high ceilings and random layout of a house – I could have a corner room. I signed up and moved.

Spring was just coming to New York City, I was just steps from Riverside Park and the new warmth, the new beauty of trees and plants, the newness promised by my new address lifted my spirits. I walked the 50 blocks to work in the bright mornings now straight down Broadway in my sneakers and skirt, proud to break glamour rules, and feeling like an elastic Superwoman.

I had liked meeting that man, Natvar at that yoga school on Eighth Avenue, but I hadn’t liked his class very much. It wasn’t hard enough. He talked a lot about following your breath as you moved, but I wanted something more demanding, something guaranteed to keep me skinny and young. I continued going to one yoga school and then another, hoping to find the perfection that had been the L.A. school.

But I returned to Natvar’s class. He was very happy to see me. He remembered my name. I was not surprised. I knew he had noticed me that first time just like I had noticed him.

After his class, I accepted the invitation of a petite dark-skinned woman, who seemed to be helping there, to linger and have some tea. She spoke softly and shyly. Her hair was gray and pinned into a bun. She wore baggy white yoga clothes and though I would have guessed she was in her 60s or 70s her face was still very pretty.

There were three or four other people lingering with styrofoam cups. The older woman ladled tea from a saucepan on a hotplate. I looked into the pot and saw simply steaming water with chunks of raw ginger inside, a recipe I had never heard of. The others kew each other and chatted easily, sitting on the couch and floor. I looked at the books in the little bookstore, an elegant set of 3 shelves built into the wall. The same man whose picture sat in the big chair in the hall looked out from the covers of the books that lay flat on display. I didn’t reach for them. I liked the curved wooden incense burner though. I wanted to buy it. I wanted to send it to Geoffrey as a gift. I thought he would like it. I wanted to send him something that would help him miss me. But I couldn’t afford it.

I walked a few steps over to the typed paragraph that was framed, hanging below the picture of a plump Indian goddess with many arms. The paragraph said something about how the blessings you receive are in proportion to the blessings you give, and right beside it was a small wooden box with a slot in the top.

I squirmed inside and moved away.

I returned again for another class, and this time the older woman smiled when I appeared and told me her name in a low, quiet voice. Anjani. Her old face held wisdom and warmth.

When I went to the other yoga schools you never saw who ran them or who had opened them in the first place. Those people were invisible. Here though Natvar was always present, teaching all the classes. Anjani was always at his side or in the background, helping out. Eve was there too, a painter with long hair and a nose ring. And a boy called Mark, a dancer with high arched feet and a ready smile.

Natvar loomed larger than anyone though. When he strode into class or stepped into the lobby afterwards it was always with great energy and purpose as if he could never be idle, as if he were enjoying every moment and wanted everyone else to too.

After class, he disappeared into the back and then joined us in the lobby for Anjani’s ginger tea. “Aha!” he’d say. ‘What great company,” as he drank his tea, leaning back on the couch now, his legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, his white yoga pants ironed with a crisp crease. And though it seemed it should be a place of ease I stayed alert in these small gatherings, aware that Natvar’s standards were high.

When he saw me he greeted me with tremendous joy and vigor. “Marta!” he’d call. He greeted all of us with this kind of unabating enthusiasm, and bade farewell to each of us after class with strong hugs, yet I never felt part of a crowd. I felt selected. I felt like I stood out to him as someone special – for my brains, my looks, my sensitivity. He saw me the way I wanted to be seen. Perhaps, I thought, he will be my next lover.

FIRST VISIT

I read the Village Voice carefully, turning its thick square pages at the long wooden unpolished dining room table by the window that overlooked Washington Square park and straight downtown to the two World Trade Center towers.

When I lived here with Geoffrey we didn’t use this cut-out part of the living room, but it had my favorite furniture in it – the gray wood table and the big set of shelves and cupboards, both of which looked like they came out of an Italian farmhouse. I cleared the table of the junk mail and scrap that had been tossed on it over the years and sat there in the mornings before work with organic grapefruit and wholegrain toast, foods I never ate when I was with Geoffrey, foods that he would never eat and a meal that he was never up for.

This kind of food went along with the other new things I was exploring, the things Geoffrey didn’t want to go near – the yoga, the astrology, the meditation – all of which were well represented in the Village Voice – ads and classes and talks. The Village Voice would lead me into the city, I thought, provide me a path into the maze.

I went to a meditation class at East West Books, a place that appeared permanently established in secret knowledge, and came home determined to practice as the teacher had advised. I sat in the living room on one of Geoffrey’s stepmother’s chairs, the only object that resembled a straight-backed chair – a shiny chrome frame with spongy blue fabric, artificially soft. I sat in the evening after work, eyes closed for as long as I could stand nothing happening.

I saw an ad for a free introductory yoga class at a school I had not yet visited. I walked over on Sunday afternoon, arriving a few minutes late to the Eighth Avenue address. I opened the door from the street and climbed the straight flight of stairs to the door at the top. A sign read The New York Institute of Classical Yoga. There was a window in the door covered by a curtain on the inside of yellow cotton. I pressed the buzzer. Someone pushed aside the cloth, glanced out and opened the door.

He was lovely – tall and handsome with a big smile, dressed in white yoga clothes and bare feet. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Kevin, come on in!” He pointed to a small cluster of shoes on the black and white linoleum floor and said, “You can leave your shoes here.”

“Very strange,” I thought, pulling off my sneakers. I had never been asked to take off my shoes before. It seemed as random and odd as being asked to hop.

I followed Kevin from the narrow front hall a few steps into a small but bright open room with olive-green wall-to-wall carpeting. There were a few colorful pictures on the walls and some shelves displaying yoga books. “You can change in there,” Kevin pointed me towards a door that led into a changing room that was tiny but tidy and cared for.

Kevin was waiting for me back out in the main room. “We’ll be starting in a few minutes,” he smiled. “Come on, I’ll show you into the hall.” Again I followed him back towards the front door, into the narrow hall with its black and white tiles where Kevin slid open a door I hadn’t noticed before. “Just go on in,” he whispered, “and sit on the left side.”

The room was almost completely dark with just enough light to make out the shapes of six or seven people sitting and facing the front of the room. I picked my way carefully over to the left side, noticing a narrow aisle had been marked out that cut through the center of the long room. I spread my towel and sat cross-legged like everyone else. The women were on this side of the aisle and the men were on the other side. How strange. There was some kind of music playing and the people in the room had their eyes closed and were murmuring along in a practiced way, uttering words I did not understand, as if they were a secret code. This didn’t feel like any place I could ever be a part of. The party had gotten started too long ago.

I heard the door slide open at the back and someone stride up the aisle to the front of the room where there was a little more light. It was a man. He stooped for a moment over something in the corner, bringing down the sound of the music and then sat down back in the center of the room, facing us as the lights in the whole room came up slowly and gently.

The man was smiling. His hair was brown though bald on top. His face was young though he was older than me. In his thirties, I thought. Behind him was a strange oversize chair with a framed photograph of an Indian man placed upon it. There was a little table to the side with a rose in a vase. I just wanted a good exercise class.

The man began to talk to us. He said his name was Natvar, a name that seemed to match the unusual accent he had – it wasn’t French or German or Spanish, none of the ones I was familiar with. His English though came easily. He didn’t give us a lecture on yoga. Instead, he spoke of things he had noticed on his ride over on the subway – an old woman, a young boy with a skateboard. He made them seem important. I liked the way he described the subway, the walk up Eighth Avenue. He had vigor and energy and seemed really happy to be talking to us and about to teach a yoga class.

I listened to every word. I had never heard anyone talk like this before. Not like a teacher. Not like a friend. I felt I knew this man from the inside, like he knew me. That we were relatives in some way, that our inner worlds were similar. It was like finding a book by an author who speaks for you. This man was putting into words pieces of myself I didn’t know could be voiced.

WINNER OF AN HONEST SCRAP AWARD!

I am truly honored to have just been awarded an Honest Scrap Award by the blog, Words, Words, Words, a blog that I actually love to check in with from time to time because she’s always reading and passing on something juicy.

The one condition of the award is that I list ten Honest Scraps about my own self and here they be:

1. I don’t like to cook though I like the idea of cooking.
2. I took so many walks with my parents (separately) as a child that it is in my blood and I have always walked a lot.
3. I want to become a better photographer and like to practice. My favorite things to photograph are strangers in the street who are not aware of me watching them. I find faces beautiful. And I love old architecture.
4. I love really good desserts.
5. I love dogs and cats. In that order.
6. I wish I had a pied-a-terre in New York City. And Paris. And…
7. I haven’t slept the last two nights. Hardly.
8. I just got my first iPod and am a little frightened by how easy it is to get new music. It used to be something I had to think long and hard about, and then usually postpone.
9. I think Obama is a great and historic figure.
10. I still think Bob Dylan is the greatest.

And now I'd like to thank my producer...

DANDELIONS

I was back in New York and I wanted to be busy. It was not easy. I did have yoga classes to sample. And I had the three college friends. Sometimes there was Thea. My parents and two sisters took up some of the remaining space.

My mother and father were selling the house they had owned since I was three years old, a house that though we had not always lived in it – moving in and out several times – had always defined us as a family. It was a part of us.

I remembered the house from when I was little and it was the very beginning. My mother spackled the walls of the kitchen and painted them white. Workmen sat around in a circle at the bottom of the hill and ate thick sandwiches of meat and cheese. There was glass in the dirt near the house.

It was an old house, my parents said, and my mother showed me how a road used to go right by the house, a road that was now just a grassy open passage, cutting through woods. The house – white clapboard – stood on a slope overlooking the new road. There was always something ragged about it, more rough-edged than the smooth suburban homes where other people lived.

By the time I finished high school and we had returned to the house for the last time, my father had refined some of the rough edges so that when you drew up to the front door now the house looked more luxurious than it actually was, a rose trellis leading to a two-car garage. He left the huge spreading maple from which my mother had hung a swing for me in the early years. By the end, the swing was long gone, but a path of white gravel led you to the front door.

And now they had to sell the house. I knew it was because my father could not pay his bills. He was declaring bankruptcy. I received the news as lightly as if he were mentioning that he was getting a tooth removed. We did not react to things. Feelings were embarrassing. We left each other’s inner worlds very much alone.

The house was within easy commuting distance from the city, easy to get on a train at Grand Central and get there in less than an hour. I was glad to have a place to go to on a warm Spring weekend.

My sisters were at the house that weekend – Basil had come down from Boston, and Esther was still in high school, living at home. It was the first time in years that all five of us – two parents, three daughters – had been together, and here, in this house.

It was exhilaratingly summery. The dandelions were blooming. My sisters and I – all between 15 and 23 – played music loudly from the stereo inside, loud enough so that we could hear it outside on the grass.

Our spread of grass was too irregularly shaped to be called a lawn. It sloped downhill and faded into woods on two sides. I remembered doing my first somersaults on this grass, demanding that my father watch as he passed by, pushing a weekend wheelbarrow. I remembered my mother and grandmother carrying the body of our German Shepherd, each of them holding two paws while his body dangled between, across the grass one morning to the hole they had dug. I remembered the blow-up wading pool on this grass and the game of red-light/green-light that a woman, the wife of a businessman who had come for dinner, generously played with us. The big lilac had always bloomed purple.

On this Saturday my sisters and I blasted reggae or Van Morrison and we danced, the three of us, on the grass. We had never done this when we all lived here. We had stayed alone in our rooms, reading, listening to radio privately.

But there was a new freedom that morning, a sense of power, and we danced almost as if we were taking over now. I felt it, a sense of flaunting – our beautiful flexible bodies that could do anything.

My mother prepared lunch in the kitchen. My father watched from a picnic table as he waited for the real estate agent who had said she would drop by. I put a dandelion behind my ear.

Yoga in the City

I did move into the apartment on Washington Square, which is the nice way of describing that place. The ugly, more accurate way of describing the apartment is to say that it was on the 13^th floor, but was called 14D. It was on a floor that didn’t exist in a bland skyscraper that did not deserve its romantic setting, inches from the arch of Washington Square.

The doormen and elevator men were always at hand, dressed in green uniforms. Only one of them was black and he was called Curly. His job was to stand in the elevator and press the button of your floor for you and talk amiably about weather or sports, your choice.

And yet it was spacious, the apartment. Two bedrooms. Two full bathrooms. Much more space than a 23-year-old in Manhattan was supposed to have. Not to mention that it was free.

I had lived here with Geoffrey and his father and sometimes his sister in my last couple of college years before we’d gone to L.A. Though “living with” is a stretch. People cycled through the apartment and right now it was empty. There were bits of furniture, things people had left behind. I didn’t want to be there long. I hated the ugliness of the apartment – the dark salmon of the living room walls, the bright blue bedroom walls. But there were times too when I showed the place off, acting as casually about wealth as Geoffrey did.

I brought Roy, the guy from the party in the East Village, there and didn’t say anything about the place, just let it be a mystery that I lived with a balcony over Washington Square Park.

When people at work asked where I lived, I answered either vaguely, “in the Village,” or, if more detail was needed, I’d have to explain what I was doing in an expensive old-people’s building.

I put sneakers on and walked to work every morning – 40 blocks – feeling like I was riding the wind, feeling invincible in the power of my stride. Our New York offices were pokier than the luxurious L.A. ones, but for awhile I didn’t mind. I was in New York.

I had to get a lover quick. Mostly to protect myself from the memory and presence of Geoffrey of whom I was still so conscious. I promised myself I would not call him for six months, and slept in our old bed, with his childhood furniture that smelled the way it always had.

The only thing I knew for sure that I wanted and knew how to get was a yoga class. I wanted to find the classes that would make me feel as perfect as those L.A. ones. I made a list from the yellow pages and began systematically visiting each school.

One was on 23^rd Street with a shiny wooden floor, lots of mirrors and green plants. The class felt more like a dance class. One place was too dark and burned too much incense. That wasn’t it. I went from class to class and none of them recreated the big hall in the white mansion.

I knew three women from college in New York – Anna, Sara and Meg. Once or twice they came to the apartment. Once they even slept over. Though they’d known me for years they hadn’t been there before. I could not have friends over when Geoffrey was there because he didn’t like my friends. Or my family. And when I looked at these people through his eyes I saw what he saw. Geoffrey’s family took us on vacations, out to fancy Manhattan restaurants. His stepmother gave us hash and his stepbrother was a bona fide schizophrenic. His friends had vast record collections and made him laugh. My friends and my family couldn’t begin to compete.

Anna and Sara persuaded me to take a weekend workshop that promised breakthrough via a system they swore by. I took the weekend and did not have the promised breakthrough, could not join in the party afterwards where everyone celebrated having gotten it. I felt as disconnected there as at any other party.

I brought one boy home to the apartment after meeting him at a brunch on the upper West Side, identifying him early on and bringing him home, hoping that he would be the next Geoffrey, that we would melt into each other, but it was like trying to get something to stick with cheap glue.

Something Begins

Alyssa was a few years older than me. Not many. Just enough to put her over the edge into the next category. She had short dark hair and a serious face. She didn’t laugh or talk much. There was something serious and self-contained about her, almost sometimes disapproving so that being with her was sometimes a little bit of hard work.

She moved into the white cottage across the walkway from us and I pursued a friendship. She interested me. She seemed to know things I didn’t and I wanted to push past the usual boundaries that exist when people don’t know each other so that maybe she would share with me that secret knowledge.

I went over to visit her in her cottage, stepping across the few feet of concrete from my shady stoop to her identical one. She did not come over to my cottage because Geoffrey was there and it was as obvious as weather that we could not have our conversations there. In fact, Alyssa – visiting Alyssa – talking to Alyssa was a way of creating or trying to create a small island to which I could go, an independent place.

Alyssa talked of things I had never heard of – reincarnation, tarot, and astrology as if it were a science not just something dumb in the newspaper. And she was so poised and adult that I listened to her.

Alyssa took me to a bookstore called The Bodhi Tree, shelves upon shelves of books all covering these subjects I hadn’t known existed. I had spent so many years in bookstores, and yet here was one that I had never entered or known about. It was like stepping into an alternate universe. “Where do I begin?” I asked Alyssa, and she suggested a thick red paperback.

It was slow going, but I did not stop, chopping my way through its humorless prose about ancient Egypt, hunting for clues.

Alyssa and I came up with a plan to drive up to Eureka together for a weekend. I had heard about the beauty of this northernmost tip of California and Alyssa said she had a friend up there we could stay with. I wanted to get out of the smog and concrete of summertime L.A. and Eureka promised to be almost virgin land and forest.

We drove all day, arriving in the evening at a small house on a river bank, set amidst dense forest. Her friend was a man, living alone, handsome and friendly. They were old friends, it seemed, who had not seen each other for awhile, and I left them to be alone and catch up for awhile. I sat out on a rock overlooking the water. There was no sound of traffic or people or industry. This is where I had so wanted to be, but still I felt on edge, not sure how long I should leave them.

I waited for a half hour and then joined them inside where we sat together and ate. Eventually they drifted into the bedroom. I slept in the living room.

Not much was said in the morning. The handsome rugged man drove us around a bit, showing us the small town, and I filled up any empty moments with Remembrance of Things Past which I had brought along, drinking in every succulent word from its thick pages.

Back in L.A., it was Alyssa who told me about yoga, which sounded as mysterious and remote as ancient Egypt. I looked up schools in the yellow pages and went to one in a part of town I didn’t know well, an area of large mansions and wide lawns. My first class was in a stately but slightly gone-to-seed white building, in a large hall with a high ceiling. We stood in rows in front of a teacher who looked about my age but who I assumed was older because she was already doing something she really wanted to do.

This was a place Geoffrey would never come to, and so it felt more authentic, more like a place where I would go. It wasn’t a place just for TV and pot and food and movies and shopping and chats with friends on the phone – none of that had ever found its way comfortably or permanently into my life. Those were the things Geoffrey was content to do for the rest of his life, things that seemed empty to me, like the scripts he wrote about handsome men falling in love with witty beautiful women.

The yoga class wasn’t like that. I liked the way the other teachers looked – the men handsome and the women confident, and all of them at ease with one another. They talked about who was going to India and who was coming back, and it felt like a community inside the white mansion, people having a good time.

I did not miss a class, driving to the white mansion two or three times a week. And after every class I felt good in a way I had never felt good before. I had never found anything that so reliably made me feel better – in body, in mind.

Leaving LA

I said good-bye to Geoffrey on the terra-cotta tiled stoop of the white stucco cottage, a bright Los Angeles February day, three years after we’d arrived.

We said good-bye as if I were just going on a trip. I had spent the night. He had offered to make whatever I wanted for dinner and I had asked for pot roast. His sister Buf was driving me to the airport.

Geoffrey and I said good-bye, not knowing what the next step was. I was just glad to be headed back to Manhattan, all of it paid for by my job. I was ready for wonderful new things to happen in the city where things happened. I had no lingering love for Los Angeles, the biggest suburb in the world.

On the airplane I read The French Lieutenant’s Woman and saw a young woman sitting, her eyes down, small headphones on her head, a small black cassette player in her hands. Wow, I thought. Very cool.

I took the bus and subway to the West Village, to Thea’s empty studio apartment. Thea, a friend from college, had inexplicably become a model and was often out of town.

I put the key in the lock, opened the door, put my things down. There was not much light in the apartment. The main room was empty except for Thea’s large loom with a piece of weaving in its strings, dark purples, blues and greens.

When Thea and I spent time together it was always at some little place for dinner where we talked about how our writing was going or not going. This was the topic that held us together. We both had a tortured sense that we weren’t making enough art and that life was useless if you weren’t an artist. During those conversations we felt like best friends, but then there were huge pieces of her life she kept hidden from me – all her other friends, for instance. Her boyfriend who I imagined as dark and ultra-cool since I never met him and his name was Milo. The art gallery crowd she worked and hung out with. I knew I couldn’t make it with those Soho sophisticates. Thea’s keeping me out confirmed it.

But I liked her, I thought. And I liked her unusual face – wide, and almost Oriental-flat with blue eyes that could become almost slits. She wasn’t tall and she wasn’t thin, but they’d made her a model. Salvatore Dali wanted to paint her.

There was one time that Thea invited me to Fire Island, to a small house she was renting with two men. They were pretty boys of some kind. I was aware of my plain navy blue one-piece bathing suit and my unmade-up face, something in me refusing to put on a show for people who obviously were all about show. I was confident that I was beautiful anyway and if the two boys didn’t see it, it would just confirm how lightweight they were.

“They said you were beautiful but that you didn’t know it,” Thea said later. It was soothing to know I’d been accepted that much.

Her single bed was stuffed into a small closet-room with no door, a few feet from the loom. The kitchen was a hot-plate and a coffee pot.

Outside I could hear the roar of Sixth Avenue and the whole city. I felt the huge impossible distance between what was happening, who I was, what I was capable of – and what I wanted. There was no way to get from one to the other. Like they were on two different cliffs with an abyss in between. This was going to fail.

And though it felt like going backwards or standing still, I called Geoffrey, settling for the comfort of his gravelly voice. “It’s going to be all right,” he said. I knew he never felt this way – desperate, at the end of the line – that it was easy for him to say, sitting on his couch, watching TV and smoking pot, that it would be all right. “Why don’t you go live in the apartment?” he asked. “It’s empty. No one is staying there.”

His family’s apartment on Washington Square Park. The one we’d lived in before L.A.

This Is What It Was Like

My last few months in Los Angeles I lived below the Hollywood sign. You could look up the hill and see it there.

I lived in a two-story building. I had seen a For Rent sign there once, driving around, and the next time we had a door-slamming, middle-of-the-night fight I drove to that building, parked my orange-and-white Pinto outside, put the seat back and slept, waiting for morning when I could go inside and rent whatever it was they were offering.

It was a large furnished room with a real sit-in kitchen complete with built-in breakfast nook. The bed came down from the wall. The bathroom was a bright robin’s-egg blue. The rent was low. It would do just fine.

Rose, my landlady, was a frail old woman with dyed red hair who shuffled in a housecoat and never left her own apartment on the first floor.

I liked the adventure of getting my own place. I covered the couch with a new Pier One white bedspread and took black and white photographs of myself, emphasizing the long dark hair and the oversize black Beatnik sweater. On weekends I went to modern art galleries by myself, looking for something. I wasn’t sure what.

Geoffrey and I hadn’t figured out if we had broken up or not. We weren’t very good at separating beyond the initial fury. We had separated 1,000 times, but never, ever, not once, for good. I was 23 and I didn’t know anyone else who had had the same boyfriend for five years. We were an institution.

Geoffrey didn’t come to my Hollywood apartment. If we were going to be together it was at the little white stucco cottage that we had shared for the last couple of years. The one with the green-and-white shag carpet and the fish tanks that held his latest obsession, brightly colored saltwater fish. He bought them with the same rapaciousness with which he hunted for second-hand records, spending hours on the fine art of purchase.

I tried to fill up my new apartment with new friends and things to do. I invited the woman I met in a bookstore over for dinner, someone a little older than me, married, with pale strawberry blonde hair. She told me how a year ago she’d had a baby who had died in his sleep. It was the first time I heard how easily this can happen. And because we spoke so intimately I hoped we would be friends.

I tried to turn the boy who lived in the apartment next to mind into another romance, but it was just a blow job. Funny how Geoffrey could have affairs so easily with women he claimed to really like and all the times I tried to do the same none of the boys came even close to the urgency I felt being with Geoffrey.

While I lived in the furnished room there were times when Geoffrey and I still fought, didn’t speak, hung up on each other, or when I didn’t answer the phone at all, knowing it was him. And one time when, after not speaking for one whole week, I came home to a thick letter shoved under my door.

There were other times when I went over after work as if I still lived there, when I ate the dinner he always made whether I was there or not – some recipe he had honed since childhood, something with a lot of butter or cream or whatever it took to make it perfect. Evenings when he would sit as he always did on the couch in front of the television, the wide flat surface of his childhood Atlas lying on his lap as a counter top for rolling egg rolls, or skinning chicken, or chopping onions.

I joined in by smoking the pot and watching the television, stilling my uneasiness that came from not really having anything to do here. But for an evening now and then, the comfort of predictability and the plain comfort of physical comfort, of having Geoffrey’s well defined world to fill my empty one, was enough.

And in December when Geoffrey's family invited me to go with them on one of their well-financed vacations and when Geoffrey assumed I'd be coming, I let myself be included.

I would be leaving Los Angeles soon. The publishing company was moving back to New York and I hadn’t hesitated for a second when they asked me to come too, a decision that had caused the most recent explosion with Geoffrey. How could I not have included him in the decision? was his complaint, a question poised with so much menace it pierced my own fury at being questioned, causing tears of confusion as I held the phone in my hands in my small-but-significant office on the 22^nd floor of the Century City tower, tears that caused my boss to do a dead-pan about-face when he walked in.

These were the worst fights – the ones where Geoffrey's thorned complaints doubled as evidence that he loved me desperately.

LAST VISIT

When we returned from my mother’s on Sunday afternoon there was a message from her on my phone. I had left my laptop at her house. I called her right away. She was apologetic, saying that she had given me too many things to take with me, that she’d made it impossible for me to be able to remember everything.

“It’s nothing,” I heard myself saying without hesitation. “I’ll just drive back down this week and get it.”

“Really?” my mother said. ‘You don’t need it right away?” She’d been ready to wrap it in yards of bubble wrap and send it Fed Ex. My mother who just went on food stamps.

I noted how easily I said I’d be back, the words coming out like they’d been waiting. “I’ll come after work on Wednesday,” the last day before my sister arrived.

“I’ll make us some supper,” my mother said.

And so three days after saying what I thought was my last good-bye and taking my last lingering look at the house, I am returning, alone this time, without husband or dog, just me.

My mother opened the door, diminutive now, she has shrunk so much, her back rounded with osteoporosis. But I notice her white, white hair and the childlike bob she has recently adopted. For a long time she wore her hair pinned up, but now it’s cut blunt and square to her ear lobes and it’s pretty.

I step into her small living room. It is more bare than it was on Sunday, closer to being empty. A small radio sits where the TV used to.

I feel tall and big in my mother’s living room. I start to take off my hiking boots as she turns towards the kitchen and then she turns back towards me. “Let me give you a hug!” she says.

I am surprised. She often bypasses hugs, or delivers them stiffly, but tonight she actually says the word and wants it.

It is still light out. I sit at the small wooden dining table that she and I bought from a thrift store in Narrowsberg about 13 years ago. It will be picked up by another second-hand store on Saturday.

I look out the back window, through the thin winter woods to the spread of lake that is a mass of brilliant sparkles, reflecting a sun that is going down. it is much more beautiful than a cheap acre of land in the most economically depressed county in the state has any right to be.

My mother and I talk of easy things. My mother talks. I listen and comment and ask a question here and there. I like the color she is wearing. Just a bulky woolen sweater and work pants, but they are a dark periwinkle/lavender, a color that flatters her. my mother, in her last decade or two, has started to wear colors very consciously and well and it fits with almost nothing else that I know about her.

She brings out a shallow bowl of cooked peppers – red and green – and onions, and the bowl is so pretty I wish I had my camera. It’s as if all the laws of symmetry are satisfied by this bowl and its contents. And again the gentleness of the bowl of food, its simple perfection surprises me. This is not where I expect to see such things.

“I looked up your town online,” I say. “It looks pretty nice!” I did look up the town and was pleased to see it has more heft than I’d imagined. But I can’t keep up this thread of conversation. It requires too much effort.

We eat. I make tea as I always do when visiting my mother, relieved tonight that our ritual is not over yet. But as soon as I drink it down I say I have to get going. My mind does not want to slow down too far. If I slow down I will start to say things that keep creeping into my mind like how she won’t see her daffodils bloom, or the lilac – grown so tall now from those stumps we planted.

“If you need help with the house or the renter, let me know,” I hear myself saying, me who has been so aloof.

She is surprised. “Oh,” she says, “that would be great. Thank you.”

We have things to put in my car – the flowering plant, the laptop, some candles. “And I’ll get a few logs from the woods,” I say.

My mother’s face brightens. “I’ll come with you!” she says, and I know we are both looking forward to those few moments – the short walk down to the pile of logs, picking up a few, putting them in my trunk. Something outdoors.

As I walk back up to my car, logs in hand, I feel the pull of this small piece of land – the two houses, nothing separating them, the one that used to be mine, for a short-but-long six months. I feel the land holding me, wanting me.

I put the logs in the trunk, my mother puts in hers. “Let’s go get more,” she says.

“No,” I say, “that’s enough.”

“That’s not enough,” she argues.

But it is. There is room for more, but something in me says no.

“Come check that you haven’t left anything,” my mother says.

I know I haven’t. I know she wants me to come back in just to keep me a few more moments.

And I’m happy to go through those motions. I glance around the bare room.

I hug my mother. “I’ll come see you real soon,” I say. I cannot linger. I just can’t. “Bye, Mum,” I say as if I were coming back in 30 minutes. I can’t bear to have it any other way.

ON THE MOVE

My mother is moving to California in a couple of weeks. Last I heard. Maybe the woman who agreed to rent her house backed out. I haven’t heard if the lease got signed this week like it was supposed to. I called my mother yesterday to find out but only managed to leave a message. It is very rare for me to call my mother during the week, during the day. A special occasion. I felt I was doing it because she may only be here for another two weeks. And also I’d like to know for sure if it’s really happening now.

When I first heard she was leaving, a few months ago, I felt very sad. I felt a great sense of loss, not so much about her, but about her in that house.

I was very involved in the purchase of the small white clapboard house she has lived in for the last 12 years.

I was still iving in the ashram in the late 90s and my mother wanted to move up to the ashram neighborhood, rural Sullivan County. She figured if she lived near the ashram she’d see a lot of me and my two sisters who visited the ashram from California once or twice a year. Plus, my mother by that time had a lot of friends of her own in the ashram world. She knew the ashram routines and customs. She even had a picture of the guru in her house. She was part of the ashram fabric, a quirky party, but a part.

In the late 90s I was living in a part of the ashram most off the beaten path, away from the fancier, more central areas. I had finally, after 6 years, scored my own room, now had a toaster oven for baked potatoes, a radio for NPR and my own bathtub to read The New Yorker in. In Spring evenings I sometimes walked down the road, past mis-matched houses, rather than dash to the evening chant the way I used to.

And one evening, just a minute or two down the road, I saw a small hand-lettered For Sale sign stuck in the lawn of a small square house.

It was perfect and though it took a few months, my mother purchased it with a $10,000 down payment, her entire savings account. Scraggly lawn, scraggly woods, even a lake just beyond her scraggly woods. A place for her to garden. She planted every year. My mother’s gardens are always erratic collections of things that are working and things that are not.

In January 2000 I moved into an almost identical cottage next door. My financial consultant sister wanted to buy the second cottage when it went up for sale and my plan was to live there, paying rent and writing. Except that six months later I moved to Woodstock and Fred. I left my mother.

While I lived in the cottage I was aware in the back of my mind that I was filling a role very conveniently. My sisters, both younger than me, were married and living on the other side of the country. It was very handy that I was single and content to live next door to my mother.

But I walked out on that job when life opened up so unexpectedly and I walked in a very different direction than the plan of living alone next to my mother.

I remember sitting in my mother’s living room – or actually, I think it was in mine. Our living rooms were the same shape, the houses laid out almost identically. I remember sitting at the table with her. “I’m going to move to Woodstock,” I said. “I’m going to move in with Fred.”

I knew it wasn’t what she expected, not what she wanted. I was aware I was ruining something. I had liked living next door to her, and across the street from the Dobsons, an ashram couple with a baby whom my mother cared for every day. I was walking out on something. But there was no debating it. No contest. I knew I wanted to go to Woodstock and be with Fred.

A few weeks ago, visiting my mother, she said, out of nowhere, with a shade of anger in her voice, or a shade of strong emotion – not something that arises often in our conversations – “But you’re like that,” she said to me. “One minute you like something and the next minute you don’t. You never know with you!”

I hesitated, not knowing what she was referring to therefore not sure how to respond. But I could sort of see that many scenes of disappointment were in her mind. There have been many years during which I have been someone she could rely on – though none of them recent – and a few very dramatic times when I have leapt off in a new direction without explanation, for myself, leaving her stranded.

And now she’s leaving the little house that suits her perfectly. My sisters orchestrated it. I would have not said anything and let her live there until she complained or it became obvious something had to change.

She has acquiesced, my mother. My mother, who never expects love, is maybe glad that anyone wants to do anything for her. And, okay, she just lost her drivers license which makes life in the sticks a very different matter. I still wish she had stayed until it was clear she could no longer.

And in my head is a mixture of sadness that one phase is so decidedly ending, and it would be easy to get sentimental. I don’t want to get sentimental. I want to stay alert. The story is much more complex than mere sentiment allows.

Maybe Somewhere Else

High school is finally just about over. A few more weeks and I will be done. It’s been a three-year slog. I came back to the American high school after five years of living abroad and none of it had really gone well.

The high school that I entered – age fourteen, grade ten – was modern and sleek, a beige one-story building built in the sixties, corridors lined with beige metal lockers and a smooth linoleum floor. The chairs attached to the desks in a mold of chrome and formica. Spiral notebooks and loose-leaf binders. Boys in blue jeans, tee shirts, sneakers. Girls who wore a different outfit every day.

I stepped into it, feeling like an alien, wanting very much to not only blend in, but be successful there. I wanted to be one of the girls with a boyfriend who slung his arm across her shoulders as they walked down the corridor between classes. I wanted friends of any sort, but something had caught in my throat two years before and though I’d hoped that the excitement of moving back to America – “America” – would dislodge it, I found myself still mysteriously crippled. There was something that hung over me that I could not shake off. I beat at it, tried to outrun it, but it was always there, a shadow, clinging to me, forbidding me to talk to other people, especially the ones I liked, or worse, admired from a distance. I shrank from the people I liked, so certain that they would crumple me up like a piece of scrap paper and throw me out if I cam anywhere near them.

So I was glad that graduation was in sight. I was sure that once I didn’t have to show up for these ridiculous classes and once I didn’t have to be with these people anymore, things would get better.

Then my father told me that he had arranged for me to go to Hungary for a month after graduation. It wasn’t couched as a graduation present. My father was Hungarian, my mother Canadian. They had never received graduation presents in the very different cultures from which they came, and although they had both lived in the States a good 20 years or so, neither of them became familiar with American norms. They remained outsiders, virtually without friends, and always with a strong resistance to anything American. Except for things like democracy and the right to vote, the word “American” was not flattering in the house I grew up in. American usually meant childish, spoiled and uncultured. “You sound so American,” my mother would sometimes say to my sisters or me.

So my father was giving me this trip, the purpose of which was to enroll me in a month-long program for children of Hungarian parents born abroad to teach us Hungarian language and culture.

Whatever.

I tweaked the trip a little. I asked to fly Icelandic to Luxembourg because, I told my father, it was the cheapest way to go. I didn’t mention how much I’d read about how everyone flew Icelandic to Lexembourg and smoked pot on the plane and I hoped maybe the shadow would melt away on that plane and I could turn into a girl in the back row, passing joints, in the thick of a crowd laughing and talking, with a boy or two falling in love with me.

I negotiated a backpack, a EurRail pass, a journey first from Luxembourg to England and then from England I’d make my way east to Budapest and my month-long program.

I wanted to be a backpacker in Europe. This might crack open my tomb. I had hitchhiked the previous summer across the States, alone, lying to my parents that I was on a Greyhound bus, and though this had brought me the company of Joseph, a worldly 27-year-old man of the road, and it had been almost my fantasy, I had still felt the lump in my throat, the inability to speak, the terror that if I spoke my fragile camouflage would disintegrate, someone would see behind it, and there would be nothing there that anyone could like at all.

On the Trail

I mailed a card to my father this morning. I sat down yesterday evening, found a card in the stack on the bookshelf that was adequate quality to send him, a card not perfectly suited for him, a card that would have been perfect for my mother, a colorful wood block print of birds – the artwork not fine and classic the way my father would expect, but the shades ob blue and gray were strong and striking and I could imagine him noticing that.

I wrote a card that said very little. It talked about how Spring was coming, how we and the workshops were doing well. I didn’t mention Paris in case he’d take offence that I hadn’t gone to Budapest. Or maybe I just didn’t want to say something that important. But I did respond, and this morning I left for work early so I could stop at the post office and send it on its way before it just languished in my purse for a week.

The sadness in my father is huge. When I was little I remember noticing how all the Hungarians who came to our house were sad. My father laughed when I told him what I saw – I was only three or four – and he always remembered and repeated it. But my father’s sadness went far beyond the sadness I saw in the guests, his friends.

But he was never glum He was always being the cheerful one. When I was little I loved the way he made everything better. And when I got older and became a teenager I hated what felt now like false cheer and like pressure to hold up my end of the bargain.

I stopped speaking to him. Not out of meanness or on purpose, but at some point I froze up against him and when he took me out to the opera or a concert or for an extravagant dinner – driving into the city from the suburbs -- something I looked forward to – my voice dried up, and he would talk and keep talking, telling stories from his Hungarian youth, or discussing some piece of history he was reading about. I froze, and I didn’t know what it was that had me glaring out the window. Later when I met him on Wednesday nights at the Yale Club for dinner when I was going to school and living in a city dorm – I didn’t know what it was that curdled our evening every week and made me want to get away.

I thought it was something more in me than in him, and I wished I could be the daughter I imagined him wanting – intellectual, European, Ingrid Bergman, laughing, entertaining. And all I could manage was to be very pretty and almost completely silent.

I would leave the Yale Club, cross the street into Grand Central and into the subway, with relief to be back on my own ground, to be in motion with everyone else, going from one thing to the next, though I would end at the dead end of my small dorm room where I closed the door and then there’d be nothing, a frozen space – my bookshelf, my records, but everything standing still.

And the only thing that brought real movement into the room was Jeffrey’s call at 11pm when the rates went down. I waited for it, the black phone and phone cord linking me again to a world where there was movement – his voice, his friends, his family.

As I spoke to him I always felt I was faking it, pretending to be someone that might have a role in the world Jeffrey was in. It didn’t matter that he said he loved me. It mattered in that I wanted to hear him say it, but the words provided only the most fleeting sense of safety.

I would take his world, pull it over me like a blanket, like camouflage to hide behind.

And it was all so scary because I knew I could not pull this off forever. This boy, who made all the difference, was sure to leave at any moment.

ON EDGE

There was a letter from my father waiting for me when I returned from Paris – typed, in a blue envelope – on the library table, lost in a heap of mail, papers and magazines. It stood out. Blue, typed, colorful stamps.

I opened it. One small page. Awkward misspelled English. My father’s English, though strongly accented, was fluent, but he hasn’t lived in the States for almost 30 years now, and he has really retreated into illness and old age so that he is hardly recognizable.

The letter was an attempt at friendship, an appeal of sorts. “We used to be such good friends. I hope we can do so again.” Something like that.

Plus a word about having read my book and something about how he was sorry things had been hard.

And enclosed an old color photo of him as a young man, sitting outside on the ground, writing in a notebook on his knee while I, a two-year-old, cause him to look up, our gaze locked on one another.

I do not want anything from my father so it’s not that there was not enough of something here.

My aunt, his sister, wrote a note at the bottom saying she had done the typing and apologizing for the “faults.”

I felt a little stab of pain that he no longer has the secretary who used to come once a week to his apartment to type up his letters.

I am out of touch with my father almost completely. I haven’t fired off even a breezy little card to make him feel better. I haven’t gotten to it and don’t know if I will.

My parents have always made me sad more than anything else and I can’t see any way to lift that – I guess I can send a card, but it all seems kind of meaningless.

My mother called last night and left a message. She’s found someone to rent her house and she is moving to California in three weeks. It doesn’t seem real. It seems so clichéd and like someone else’s story: my mother moves to California to be near two of her daughters who have found her some kind of senior housing. My mother isn’t the senior-housing type – she’s independent and vigorous for her 85 years, but her eyes, she says, aren’t good enough for driving anymore, and she is going.

“I guess I won’t be seeing you too much after this,” the message says, and then she quickly changes the subject because it’s all too scary.

I thought, oh, well, I guess I’ll go out there for a long weekend some time in the next ten months or so. But that too sounded like something out of someone else’s life. “She’s going out to California to see her mother,” I imagined people at work saying this, nodding, understanding, of course. This is what people do when they have elderly parents.

But will I? That’ll be a few hundred dollars and vacation time I don’t have. And what about all the other places I want to go and things I want to do?

These things bash at me.

My first thoughts are always: Oh, I will send a card, or I will go visit, and then those ideas just kind of wash slowly away. They don’t hold up. They are just ideas.

I had a friend years ago who lived way out in Wisconsin, being an artist, living on almost nothing. When she got engaged she immediately went to work to earn money for her wedding, which she wanted to have in Manhattan. She spent a year making money and had the wedding at the Plaza or something. I only saw the photos. They looked like movie stills from the Great Gatsby. Looking at them made me uncomfortable. They had nothing to do with the person I knew. The pictures weren’t telling me a real story.

Paris was very much a real story. The word “vacation” has within it a sense of getting into some kind of vehicle that just takes you on a coasting effortless ride from which you emerge rested etc. Paris had much more texture than that.

I think of the colors and textures of where we lived, pushing the buttons of the keypad on the street by the set of tall heavy dark wood doors. 45326, pushing open the heavy door and stepping into a dim inner courtyard, the curving stairs leading up, the raw unpolished grey wood of the stairs, the red door to unlock, the steps up and into our little place.

“What was this space used for originally?” I asked Nathalie, our landlord. “I have no idea,” she answered.

Its high ceiling, the long red striped curtains, classical music from Radio Classique, a station I found, or the person next door practicing piano in the mornings, making scales sound like virtuoso feats. And on our last morning there was an umbrella open and drying outside her door, and we could hear a man singing opera as she accompanied him. I always imagined the pianist was a woman.

The city. The streets. Finding my way.

Yesterday at work I went to YouTube and typed in Paris, looking for videos of the streets and places. Found a little of what I was looking for though it’s always someone else’s Paris, not quite mine.

I loved the bookstore, Shakespeare and Company. A wonderful, messy mass of books – the kind of place you can stay in for a long time, reaching out for this title, then that one. The way a bookstore should be. I really understood what the chain bookstores have robbed us of. I bought a book there called something like Rebel Bookseller, a guy writing about what it’s been like to have a bookstore – it’s his way of encouraging people not to give up the dream if you want to have a bookstore. Though I have often thought about it, I probably won’t do it, but I sure hope others do.

I hear there’s a group of people who might buy the Golden Notebook together and keep it going. If Woodstock were to lose its bookstore I would feel like the heart of the town had died.

I am going to hear Itzhak Perlman tonight. I so hope I lose myself in his playing, in the music the way it happens sometimes where you feel yourself disappear, the musicians disappear and you all are inside the music. I have been wanting to hear him for many years. This is so great that we can go. Violin is my favorite instrument. Its sound breaks my hears.