What A Letter Brings, Part One

I received a letter from my father yesterday. From several yards away I caught sight of the envelope tossed onto a heap of newspapers and mail and instantly went into alert. I don’t need to see the envelope from close up to know it’s from Hungary. It’s in the handwriting. It wasn’t my father’s handwriting. He doesn’t write his own envelopes anymore. It was that I recognized that type of handwriting that I associate with Hungary and with Europe in general. I see that handwriting on an envelope and I am pretty sure there is a message from my father. Letters like this only arrive a few times a year.

I open the letter immediately, standing in the kitchen while Fred opens the oven and stirs something in a frying pan.

The letter is typed, another clue that my father is not well enough to write. I imagine someone else typing it, probably the woman who comes every week or so to do his secretarial things. She speaks English. She has been working for my father for twenty-five years and – with her husband -- has become a close friend of his. A surrogate daughter perhaps.

He is writing because he received the copy of my book that I sent. I only sent it because my mother asked me to, even slipped me a $20-bill to make sure I did it. It’s true – I probably wouldn’t have sent it except that I knew I had her money. Plus, she had gone and told him about it. I wouldn’t have done that either, but there it was, she had told him just as if he didn’t appear in the book.

My father isn’t a huge figure in the book, but there’s a few paragraphs I’d just as soon he didn’t read, ones in which he stars. But my mother somehow didn’t get that and just thought well, if someone writes a book their parents will be proud and ought to know about it.

My father’s letter was short, less than a page, typed and double-spaced, with many grammatical mistakes he never would have made 25 years ago when he returned to Budapest after 30 years in the States.

He thanks me for the book. Says that he and his sister are reading it together – he must be translating out loud to her. He says they have read only 50 pages so far. They are reading slowly, he says. Proof, he says, that they are reading carefully. There is a tone of sincerity in his voice that I note, but still hold at arm’s length.

There, finally, is his signature, this definitely in his own hand. It is a spindly version of the proud hieroglyph that used to be his flourish.

For a moment I think to call. And immediately think no. I dislike our calls, our conversations, our contact so much. I can’t bear it, ever. Just because there will be a time when I will not be able to hear the voice that was the soundtrack of my childhood doesn’t make me want to listen to it now.

Or does it? I could call. Hear his voice. I don’t think there’s a lot of time left. It’s not that I want to hear or say anything in particular. Maybe just be there. Maybe.

WHAT A LETTER BRINGS, PART TWO

My father wanted to be a writer. When I was little he had a typewriter. I remember a black and white photo of him in shorts, shirtless, at a card table, bare feet, a typewriter, his hair thick and black.

I don’t remember seeing him type. I saw some of the thick books of typed onionskin that he’d had bound many years later.

One set he gave me, three long essays, almost all of it trying to make points about economics and government, material that was impenetrable to me. But here and there would be a glimmer of something softer, and more personal: the mention of a coffee shop on Wall Street, the mention of a child at a window. He wrote one piece called Suddenly Late Summer. He wrote it in the late fifties, at the real end of a real summer – I have always imagined he wrote it in the bare-bones farmhouse in Columbia County that we owned for a few years, driving up from Yonkers. It was a place of bare wood floors, card tables and rhubarb growing wild that my mother would exclaim about and cook.

Suddenly Late Summer though was another treatise and after an opening paragraph of readability drifted into techno-talk I couldn’t read. The title has stayed with me though and the feeling it evokes.

He wrote a book in the seventies, spent more money than he had to have someone publish it. It was supposed to make him famous. When I went to see him the first time in Budapest after he moved back, I saw a copy of the book, shrink-wrapped, lying by itself on a small round table. In Budapest, it looked pretty good. If I were a not-too-savvy Hungarian I’d be impressed by this man who’d had a career in the States and a book in English to prove it.

In 1981 when I was living in NYC, when I’d just quit my publishing job to be a writer though I had no idea how or where to begin, I wrote two pages that I liked. The piece was called Small Runaway and it was about a morning I spent in Van Cortlandt Park, taking the #1 subway up north as far as it would go and then wandering for a few hours in woods. I wrote about what I saw – the pencil-yellow leaves on the ground, sitting while it rained, “tented" under a poncho, an abandoned car, a menacing woman in a black tee shirt.

I gave it to my father to read. I don’t remember the exact circumstances of his response – where we were – but I remember him going through it and pointing out his favorite phrases. He took it seriously.

Again, in the late nineties came a burst of writing and I sent him two poems.

I did not show writing to my mother like this, in the same way. I did read her a short story about being molested by a stray farm boy while visiting her relatives – an event that happened completely on her watch – her response was only an uncomfortable and incredulous, “That didn’t really happen, did it?”

My father liked the poems and again wrote me something about them in which I could tell he chose his words carefully – partially because he had a real interest, partially because he likes to be a man of letters.

I haven’t re-read the letter he sent last week though I have noticed it several times, lying on my desk.

But when I read his sentences about “reading carefully” I again felt his great respect for this thing of writing – as if he were a fellow worshiper at my side.

We rarely liked the same books. When I grew up I realized suddenly that his tastes were much lighter than mine – Somerset Maugham and Iris Murdoch. He always read, always read slowly and now that I think of it I imagine he is underlining throughout my book, something he did obsessively, hardly able to read even a newspaper without Mont Blanc ballpoint in hand to underline not just points he thought well made but just phrases that he liked.

As a teenager beginning to challenge him I would sometimes open a book he was reading and say, “But Dad, why did you mark this?” and I would read out loud a random selection of words he had marked. My father would look at me almost flirtatiously, and laugh – he didn’t know either, but he liked creating mystery and mystique. He wanted to be a personality, which created a huge impassable barrier to who he really was, something he didn’t really want to know.

A Shiny Floor

It was an apartment on the top floor of a three-story building, one apartment per floor. I never saw the other tenants. The stairwell leading up to the top had wide marble steps and smooth white walls and it curved gracefully up. Your footsteps echosed hollow as you climbed.

Our front door at the top was heavy and made of wood. once Natvar slapped me in the face there. I was coming in and he met me at the door, furious at the mistake I had made, and he hit me in the face. I didn’t say anything. I thought by then that perhaps it must be true that there was something mentally wrong with me.

I was tall and thin. I wore my hair up. I wore pressed blouses and narrow skirts and white stockings and leather pumps – all clothes that felt foreign, but what did not feel natural to me must be good. I was trying very hard, every minute, to get it right.

When you stepped inside the apartment there was a short hallway with low shelves of books on either side, just a few feet, a narrow space before you stepped into the spacious el-shaped room. You stepped into the living room, two white couches that we had made – they looked expensive because they were so white, but they had been cheap to make. The two couches were at right angles to each other, a square glass-topped coffee table in front of them. On the low table were Vogue magazines, lined up carefully like in a doctor’s office. Natvar wanted Tracy and me to look like the women in the magazines. “Why not?” he reasoned.

My job was to keep the apartment clean – the living room and the dining area with its expanse of shiny pale yellow parquet floor and Natvar-and-Mark’s bedroom. Once a week I did their bathroom and bedroom while they went out. I had to be done, relaxed and pleasant when they returned, otherwise Natvar would be very angry and lunch would turn into a tirade during which he would prove through beautiful verbal acrobatics that not only was I pathetic and inept, but I was vicious and unloving.

His bathroom had blue tiles that I must wipe carefully so no drips – pale and white – shoed. There were white shelves around the sink. I must take every item off those shelves, dust each item and wipe the shelves. Many of the items were the leftover empty boxes of expensive soaps. Natvar liked the feeling of abundance it gave him to have those shelves of attractive little boxes, even if they were empty. We could not afford expensive soaps or expensive anythings. I shoplifted whatever I could.

I did the shopping every morning, walking to the supermarket about 15 minutes away in the narrow blue skirt I wore most days, a skirt I had stolen back in New York from a well known client of Natvar’s. I had stolen a few pairs of shoes and a beautiful suit too that I wore when I needed to look especially together.

I purchased at the supermarket and stole to fill in the gaps. I had a certain amount of money, enough, Natvar said to feed an army. But I could never make it stretch. I had to buy cheese and olives, bread, yogurt, milk – everything precise – this kind of yogurt, that kind of bread – all the kinds Natvar had said were the right kind.

I walked home with heavy shopping bags in each hand. I wore foundation make-up and earrings for these daily expeditions because I was supposed to be the secretary, the assistant, to a very great man.

I had volunteered for shopping, just as I had back in New York. Mark couldn’t do it. Natvar needed his brains, talent, and love right by him almost all the time. Tracy was supposed to cook and do laundry. That left me.

Natvar is dead now. So is Mark. So is Ariadne, Natvar’s daughter, who was there too, an 8-year-old girl with blond curls and a pink terrycloth bathrobe. Just Tracy and I are left. And she doesn’t want to talk about any of it.

You Probably Won't Like This One

“Art is either plagiarism or revolution.” – Paul Gaugin

When Jeffrey comes in I don’t know which way it’s going to go. When I am in the blue bedroom and he comes in, or when I come home after work into the white cottage with lime-green shag. I take my cues.

In the summer apartment with the pale shiny wood floor always spotless and the sliding glass doors that lead out onto the terra cotta roof garden – in that place, the tension is high. I awaken there in the bed that is tucked into the tiny room off the kitchen – a room where a person who wants to appear rich could house a maid – a bed that I will cover with a piece of maroon velvety fabric during the day so that clients can sit on it as if it were a couch. There I wake up in the morning. There are no choices. I must shower and dress and fulfill my duties. I have a set of duties here – setting the breakfast table exactly the way it was set yesterday – blue and white china we bought at Bloomingdales on my mother’s credit card which we will never pay.

I have been a prisoner most of my life.

Dexter sits next to the window in his office while I sit across from him on the couch. I opened the window while he was coming up the stairs. The room felt stuffy and Fred had complained. Dexter sits next to the open window now. He is dressed in casual black. His hair, eyes and beard are also dark.

Somehow the spotlight of the conversation has settled on me. “Close your eyes,” says Dexter softly. “Finish this sentence,” he says. “If I don’t do it…”

“Nobody will,” I say, nt letting myself pause to come up with something more interesting.

“I have to do it because…”

“I can do it better.”

“If I make a mistake…”

“I will get in trouble.”

My mother called a couple of nights ago. Or I called her back. She had suggested a visit for this coming Sunday. For a day or two I had tried to see if I could fit in a visit with her and still feel like I had had a weekend – an opening, a space without restriction – but by Thursday I’d realized I was feeling completely squished and not only would I take a sick day off from work, I would postpone time with mother too.

I called. Came up with questions so there’d be a semblance of conversation. She asks me questions too sometimes, but I don’t like to give her answers. She has never been my real friend. She has not been an enemy in the dramatic sense of one – in easy fiction friends and foes are so easy to spot. There were years when I thought of my mother as my friend even though even then I didn’t want to tell her anything.

I explain how I can’t come this Sunday. It all feels plausible. Then she mentions my book. She has only mentioned its content once before – in one sentence – and now she brngs it up again, and starts to tell me what me and my younger sister were like as children.

It is interesting to me only because it is her perspective. It doesn’t change what I already know of that time from my own memory.

“Liz was so shy, and you were so bold when guests came, and those Hungarians could be so thoughtless – they didn’t know any better, they didn’t have children – if your Canadian grandmother had been there she would have made up for it and cuddled Liz. And Liz isn’t shy anymore, you know. She gives talks now and everything.”

I don’t care. My mother’s flounderings, attempts at communication, do not open my door. Her versions of the stories have nothing to do with me. Her blind spots and inabilities.

“But call, even if you aren’t coming down for awhile,” she says in that tone I recognize from the ancient days when that tone could immobilize me, freeze me with fear. It is a veiled threat. It is cold and hard and I ease further and further away.

Quiet Battle

You had to take sides in my house because there was a fight going on all the time. Usually, especially during the day, you couldn’t hear it. You could hear it at night, sometimes, after you went to bed. I could hear it from the darkness of my single bed, coming from downstairs, my mother’s raised voice, my father’s angry but fiercely controlled replies. That sound made me rigid with fear. I willed it to stop.

During the day the fight, the war, the battle was more subtle and you could pretend it wasn’t there.

The worlds of my two parents seemed like two different places that did not intersect except for the strange mistake that brought them together under this one roof.

That’s why it was easier when my father went away. Even though I liked him so much better, even though he was the one who did the fun things, it was easier when he didn’t come home. Then I just had to live in one world.

I noticed that I didn’t like him coming home when we were living in the small white house in England, when I had moved back home from boarding school. I was used to liking my father. “You’re Daddy’s girl, aren’t you?” the old nun had observed one evening after my father had visited and I had demurred proudly. I had never heard that expression before – Daddy’s girl – and thought the nun had created it just for me.

But now it is Friday afternoon and I am sitting alone in my mother’s bedroom, the one with the pink and white striped drapes that don’t look like curtains that belong in a room with my mother. this is a rented furnished house and so we live with what is here.

I am sitting alone in my mother’s room, watching our small black and white TV set. I like just sitting here, watching the afternoon kid show.

My father comes in downstairs. I hear the front door close and I hear him walk up the carpeted stairs, slowly. He always moves slowly. He has been gone all week. That’s what he does now. He lives in an apartment in the city during the week and comes home on the weekend. I have never questioned this pattern. It fits my father. It feels natural. His office has always been central to his life. It defines where we live – what house, what country, what school I go to – it takes him away on business trips. He carries a briefcase because of it, wears suits and ties, has heavy leather luggage.

Now he opens my mother’s bedroom door and peers in. He doesn’t come into the room. “And what are we up to here?” he asks. He has a smile on his face, but not the kind of smile that makes me want to smile back. It is a smile that is forcing me into some kind of corner. I don’t want to talk. I want to be alone and watch my show. “Ahhh!” says my father, his eyes falling upon the screen. “I see you are watching something very important.” A man on the screen is strumming a guitar, sitting on a high stool, and singing a song that is not a love song or a folk song. I want to listen to the words. I want to understand the song.

I know my father sees a useless person on the screen, some idiot with a guitar. He already knows what kind of music is the best – Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, Bach, Schuman, Schubert, Verdi – that’s about it, plus Hungarian folk music, many songs of which he likes to sing in the car. That is music. That is the end of it.

So I know when he sees me watching TV he sees a girl who is not as special as he would like her to be. She is wasting time, doing something very ordinary. He has tried so hard to make her special, but she is ordinary. Like her mother.

I don’t look at him. “Hi, Dad,” I say. I don’t want him to know how I feel. I disguise it thinly but just within the line of acceptability, a borderline I know well --- how much fight is allowed to surface and how much must be held back inside the dam.

LIES

No lies. We were in agreement about that. I was afraid of lies, of what he could conceal from me.

We were on the phone the first time it crept in. I was in the small square dorm room with linoleum floor. It was night, late because that’s when the rates went down, after 11pm when everyone else I knew was still easily awake, but I could have been asleep two hours ago.

I am sitting on the floor between small desk and bed, beside the trunk with my stereo on top, the one cool part of my room – this stereo which I only had because by a fluke we had an extra one at home after my father gave up that apartment in Maryland, another futile venture.

Jeffrey was telling me on the phone how he’d spent the afternoon with the girlfriend he’d had before me, the one he’d sliced his wrists for, the one I’d seen black and white photos of – not her face, just a naked blurry breast, an arm, the girl who still went to the same smart-kids college as he did, the one who’d come over during the Dylan concert, who had seemed so at ease, had made Jeffrey laugh right away – that girl.

“Are you jealous?” Jeffrey asked and I said I wasn’t. I held onto I-am-not-jealous with a vicious grip. I must not be jealous.

I am just miserable and sad almost all the time. I don’t say that either. I must, I have to get some kind of life that I can show to Jeffrey, display on a platter – see: I am happy and talented and satisfied.

But there are no people anywhere. I don’t know where other people get their people. Where did they find someone to have coffee with, to walk with? I don’t even know who to sit next to in class.

So I sit alone. Always alone. I make a proud art form out of alone.

I find now and then a man or a boy. I know how to do that. I can fill the space with them. One will always eventually come along and say hello like the one who came when I sat outside on the first sunny warm day. He comes along, he is dark and older than me, a real man and he suggests we go for a stroll and for an afternoon I have company. This is familiar and it feels good to have someone to walk down the sidewalk with, to hold hands with.

Or I can start talking to a boy in class and I can ask him to go get something in the diner with me, and I can corner him into sleeping with me. But is it really possible to have people you like to talk to? People you can call up? I hunger for those, pretend to Jeffrey that I have them, describe whatever friends I do have as greater, hipper than they are.

Because this reality is embarrassing. If he really knew, this love he keeps saying he has for me would not be there. He loves me because he thinks I am someone else. He thinks I am like one of the people in his novel, people who chat and make jokes and know a lot of other people. This is what his life looks like to me, and it’s how he describes his years in high school.

I don’t eat so at least I will be thin. I don’t eat for as long as I can every day. I sit in the Choc Full O’Nuts and have coffee and one of their donuts, crunchy and greasy to perfection. I know how many calories are in that donut. I should not be eating it, it is a failure, but I can’t help it. Jeffrey will never know I was here.

WHAT I HAVE, Part 2

I am on a Los Angeles city bus in the morning, going to work where I will type someone else’s letters and answer their phone. On the bus I sit and look out the window. Los Angeles is a city for cars. Every person in this city has a car and they drive it. I don’t have a car. I just got here a few weeks ago.

Jeffrey is at home, still in bed, sleeping. He came to bed hours after I gave up trying to stay awake. He watches television while he cooks, then as we eat, and I go into the bedroom, our only other room, to read. I just don’t want to watch television. I sit on the bed and lean against the wall that has large squares of mirror stuck to it.

Within minutes my eyelids begin to close. I fight it. they close. There is such relief in letting them go down.

The only other thing in the room is a heavy wooden desk with an IBM Selectric typewriter on it. I never heard of anyone having one of these for themselves at home, but Jeffrey went and got himself one. Sometimes he sits at it and types up the screenplay he has written on yellow legal pads with his left hand curled. Sometimes he disappears into writing for a few weeks. I know he is happy and excited when he is writing.

Something in me goes sad, watching him write, because I never do it. I keep wishing and waiting for it to happen but all I see is this apartment, my job in the office building, the bus I ride and the weekends that always disappoint.

I can never wait to leave the office and then the weekend comes and I don’t know if I will survive it.

“You can’t stay awake, can you?” he sneers, passing through the bedroom on his way to the bathroom. I know he sees me as pathetic, he hates me and loves me at the same time.

I go to bed early. I give up. He will be up for hours with television, pot, telephone, stereo. None of these things holds my attention. I slip away every time. I hold on for small amounts of time, sharing whatever it is that absorbs him for as long as I can stand it, and then I slip away, never to a place he wants to come to.

I try again. In the torpor of the afternoon while my boss is in a meeting I make myself write. I am at my bland office desk with its stapler and beige phone. I write on a yellow legal pad too because I like so much how Jeffrey’s look. I make up a story about a man who lives alone. He has pictures of girls – sexy and alluring – stuck on the walls of his room. I imagine him in that room at night, alone. He has no friends. He’s weird, he has no social graces. He is awkward, but I know him. I know exactly how it feels to be him.

So I pretend to be him and I write about how at night the girls come alive. They don’t leave their pictures, but they begin to talk to him. I didn’t know what happens then. I leave the story unfinished. The only part of I know is how it feels to be that man in that story and how there is one place where it is a little easier for him.

WHAT I HAVE

Jeffrey has a car. I don’t. Of course I don’t. I don’t have things, and I will never have such a thing as big as a car. I don’t have money and I do not have things. He does. He has from the beginning. In the beginning he had all sorts of things I didn’t: his own apartment – one in Manhattan and one in the town he went to school in. I had to hide that I d did not have things.

I was glad that my parents’ house looked, at least from the outside, a little bit grand. And our first time there – no one else was there so I could sort of pretend I had more independence than I did.

He came in the summertime, for a few days, this boy from the writing class in the college that I went to once a week. He took the train to my town and I picked him up in the green VW station wagon my mother had left for me. She had gone away with my two little sisters to spend a couple weeks in someone’s lake house. It was their vacation and I didn’t have to go. So I had this house and this car and this boy and I could pretend I had more.

We went upstairs to my room with the slanted ceilings at the top of the house and he asked to look at my records. I’d seen his records, cartons of them in red plastic milk crates. I had about ten records. I did not know how people got big record collections like his. One record emptied my wallet – and how to choose, one at a time?

I had one Dylan album though Dylan was my favorite artist. I just waited for his songs to come on the radio, but Jeffrey had all the records and they were beat up and well listened to and he knew which songs were on which album and what order they’d come out in.

I had the great hits double record. I had no idea what album each song came from I just knew all the words.

Jeffrey didn’t have a car then, but a year or two later his uncle passed one his used Mercedes. Jeffrey drove it out to my parents’ house. It was winter time and we had broken up for so many weeks that I had really thought that boyfriend was gone and I felt my heart was ripped out and sad. I had said we had to stop, but I knew if I didn’t say it he would, and that would be worse. How could he stay with me – when he had two ex-girlfriends to my none. When he had friends and so much in his life. I couldn’t bear waiting for him to realize how little I had to offer.

But he came back in the big white boxy Mercedes and picked me up and drove me into Manhattan where now I was going to live in a school dorm, and we went to the movies and we ate dinner in a restaurant and I thought maybe I could have this back, maybe he really would stay with me. He’d been crying hard when he called.

And a few years alter we prepare to drive to California. We live together in an apartment now, a fancy one his family owns and Jeffrey wants to go to Los Angeles where he will become a film director. I am certain this will happen for him. Things like that will not happen for me, but Jeffrey has already written a novel – it is a beautiful thick typed manuscript. It is so gorgeous to look at. I read it. I don’t like it. It is about people I don’t like – people who have a lot of friends, who have lovers easily and are much more blasé than I know how to be. These are the people Jeffrey likes, I think. And I know I’m not like them.

We will drive to California, says Jeffrey. I am going too. What else will I do? There is nothing else I can do. I cannot stay here in New York by myself. This boy, this passion, these words of love and sometimes hate are the only things I value that I have.

CLIPS

My father and I are in the living room. No one else is there. He is putting on my socks and shoes, yellow ankle socks. He has never done this before. My mother is the one who does this.

It’s a dark living room with dark bookshelves up to the ceiling. I stick one foot out at a time. My father holds first one in his hand, then the other, fitting a yellow ankle sock over each one.

I go to the neighbor’s house. They are two very old people with gray hair. their house is white and dark inside. Sometimes I go there by myself.

In New York City the streets near where I live are very cold and a dark grey color.

Where I work now there is light. The wood of my desk is pale and there is a skylight overhead that lets a lot of sunlight into the room. In summer I have to tie a brightly colored piece of cloth over my desk for shade.

When I walk in New York City that first winter I wear a long brown coat with a hood. I feel like a glamorous fairy tale figure in it. It is perfect and different form anything I have ever seen. My mother bought it for me. We went to Macy’s together. It cost one hundred dollars. It is the most expensive piece of clothing I have ever had.

In Virginia my coat is red red red with white fluff around the hood. It is a ski jacket. My mother calls my coat a ski jacket. I picked it from the Sears catalog and she ordered it. Our house when I am wearing the red ski jacket is large and white with fancy furniture that doesn’t belong to us. There are fields all around the house, sometimes with cows. My mother buys my sister and I two baby chicks at Easter time. One is bright pink, the other bright purple. As the chicks slowly grow up, their bright dyed colors fade to the tips of their feathers, as if the color were washing away. We move again and the chicks don’t come with us.

To get to the house you have to drive up the hill from the main road on a long dirt road. at one point on the drive up you have to go slow over the cattle grid. It is a metal grate set in the road. Cows won’t walk across it because their hooves will get stuck between the bars. The cows belong to someone else. The land, everything, belongs to someone else who I never see. We just live here. We live here twice. We come and go, and come back because my father likes this house. We live in one house in the summer and the big white one in the winter.

In the summer the house we are in is dark and shady and musty and acts like no one has looked after it for a long time. Things don’t work in this house. It’s a bit like camping out. My father sits outside on the grass and drinks a beer there. He eats cantaloupe because it’s not fattening. My father its trying to lose weight. He eats Ry-Vita instead of bread. His stomach is big.

I walk home from school down a road through green woods and I think the whole time about the rabid foxes that all the grown-ups keep talking about. One will come out of the woods any minute. I know it.

My grandfather sits with my father on the grass. My grandfather does not talk much. He looks grouchy and sad almost all the time. Sometimes he cries a little. He is visiting from Hungary. He and I don’t talk to each other because he doesn’t speak English, but I don’t think my grandfather would say much anyway. His wife, my grandmother, talks more, and my father, their son, talks most of all. My father is never quiet. My mother is quiet, as if she can’t think of what to say.

My father buys a reel-to-reel tape recorder while we are in this summer house. He shows it to us in the dark living room. The tape recorder makes him happy. He likes to press its buttons and make it work. No one else touches it. It’s his.

Here too is when I take a test because they want to put me in a different school. My father tells me I have passed the test. He is pleased. This is good.

They want me to leave my school. The one they put me in is newer, more modern. with bright lights and hallways. The school I leave behind is dark with a staircase and kind Mrs. Turner who never gets angry with me. She has brown hair she wears pinned up in a bun. Her desk is at the back of the classroom. The desks are in long rows, one child behind the next. During recess I play jump rope – two girls hold each end, turning the long rope. I stand to the side, getting the rhythm of their turning until in I leap and I am jumping and we yell out PAUL JOHN GEORGE RINGO over and over, and the one that trips you up is the one you are in love with.

Down the Rabbit Hole

It is cold and not cold at the same time, the sun moving in and out of clouds, the wind whipping up from time to time, but the colors always extra clear in the moments of strong sunshine – white rock, new green leaves, lilac blossoms fragrant, pale and dark in places.

I walk with Fred, taking it allin. We walk slowly. It is a way to be together. When I am alone I walk quickly – not always at full clip, but I never walk slowly. I never amble.

But in this walk I am content to move differently, to stay connected as we move through the trees on the wide path, other people passing from time to time. Tamar the dog runs ahead, looks back to make sure we’re still there, then runs again. She too is happy to be in a new landscape, one she doesn’t know at all.

“Do you mind walking this slow?” Fred asks. He’s much more fond of this pace than I am. “No, this is good,” I say, and really I am glad to be together here.

I have many memories of this place that I have known for almost 20 years, and as I walk I remember being here with other people – the first time was with my two sisters and my mother. Anasuya brought us here that day, the sister who was living in the ashram then. I had only just moved in. I felt like the younger sister because she was so confident. She knew the ashram, she even knew this beautiful place to bring us to.

As I walk with Fred I remember that day, mostly the photographs we took. My mother wanted photos of all three girls together. Anasuya led the way all day. She had been bossing us around for 15 years since the day she took us by surprise and swallowed a bottle of pills while we were all in the house with her. She scared the hell out of us though none of us knew that.

So we trod carefully around Anasuya. When my mother asked us to pose for the photographs, Anasuya struck a goofy pose and Esther and I followed her lead. I have these photos. I can see my forced smile that is supposed to say I am having fun, that my sisters and I knew how to have fun together. I will go to any extent she asks of me to prove this is true. I don’t care about anything else. I am ready to throw myself away.

As Fred and I are nearing the end of our walk – after we have sat on white rocks and looked out over the whole valley and I have asked Fred to take pictures of me and Tamar, realizing as I ask him that it is new for me to ask for photos, usually I take them.

I don’t want to get to the end of the long oval trail, and I let our pace get even slower. Fred begins to tell me about the book he is reading about a man who almost became a priest and I am so glad that Fred is talking because often I know his mind is full though he isn’t speaking, so I am glad that he is spontaneously telling me about what’s in this book except now we are walking even more slowly and I feel my old impatience rising. I want to go a little faster, but I can’t because I am with Fred I think – and suddenly I am with my father and he is walking much more slowly than me and he is talking at me as if he cannot see me about the book he is reading, and I am pulling inside to race ahead and escape, but I can’t, I must stay here, crawling, and I can’t tell anyone because I am feeling the wrong thing.

Now I want to get to the car immediately. I am tired. I am not interested in the little girl who wants to pet Tamar. I am cold. Fred mentions the color of the water and I respond with a distracted word or tow. I want this all to be over. I want to sit, be warm. I want tea and cake.

“Do you want to walk down to the waterfall?” Fred asks. Another walk? Is he crazy? “I can’t,” I say. “I’m sorry. I’m just suddenly out of energy.”

Fred looks a little disappointed and I feel I am cutting something short, but I don’t know what else to do. We get in the car and Fred asks me to drive down a lane to the side to find the place he parked once in the eighties – I am sure we won’t find what he is looking for, everything is in the wrong place, he keeps saying things I am sure are wrong.

“Why are you objecting to everything I say?” he asks, and I realize maybe it’s not just all him.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know.”

Array

My mother had the big bed in her room. She put my baby sister on that bed when it was time to change her diapers. “Watch she doesn’t roll!” she almost sang to me, saying it with the same lilt as if it were a nursery rhyme every time. I knew I was to watch my baby sister and make sure she didn’t roll off the bed for the few moments that my mother left the room.

This was also the room where I stood in my party dress with the stiff petticoat beneath its skirts. My mother’s room was for special things. The narrow closet held her dress-up clothes, the narrow sleeveless dress, a cream colored background, a burgundy pattern, a line-like texture.

This was the room my father was in one morning, in the bed by himself, my mother up long before. My father lies in the messed up sheets. He smells a little sour so I don’t want to get too close. He is happy. He is singing Hungarian songs and wants me to sit on the bed and listen. I don’t like this song he sings. It is sad and slow, but he likes it. The song lasts a long time. I wait and wait for it to be done so I can go.

When my grandmother comes she stays in this room. I walk in one morning and catch her only half-dressed. I laugh at this old lady in her strange bloomers. It is fun to see my grandmother like this. My mother comes in and shushes me and scoots me out of the room as if she were embarrassed.

The stairs that lead downstairs are narrow and steep. They have a brown rubber mat down the middle, covering the middle part of each wooden stair. My sister squeezed the hamster on one of the stairs while I was taking a nap. It was an accident. She didn’t mean to.

My sister has blonde hair and round red cheeks. She is my mother’s child the way I am my father’s. She falls off the tricycle that is mine. It has blue and white long plastic streamers attached to the handlebars and she falls off it and my mother spends the whole night with her because she has cut herself and it hurts a lot. My sister hurts herself often.

We re stuck in this house. My father brings gifts from his trips away. He brings presents that are like magic, sweet perfume from inside his suitcases.

My father teaches me to tie my shoes. He takes me to the bank on Saturday with a silver dollar that we give to the man there. I sit on the counter. He takes me to a house and we buy a blue bicycle form a man there and bring it home, my first one with two wheels that you have to balance on. My father reaches down to the ground and picks up a pale green leaf. He separates the nub in the middle and shows me how now it will stick to my nose. He says that’s what they did when he was little.

My father is home on weekends, outside, in sunshine. Sometimes he pushes a red wheelbarrow that only adults can pick up and push. It looks easy, but I have tried and I can’t do it. Just like I can’t put my foot on the shovel the way my mother does and get it to go into the ground. I show my father my somersaults as he goes by with the red wheelbarrow.

My sister stays near my mother. There is something a little bit wrong with them. I can tell it is my father that people like. I don’t ever want to be like my mother, the way my sister is: shy, they call it, quiet. My mother likes plants. She looks at leaves and birds closely and says their names. There must be something wrong with that. My father simply marches through the outdoors, taking it in with spirit and pleasure, enjoying the scent of the air.

THE LANDING

The living room always had one wall covered with book-filled bookshelves up to the ceiling. They were there when I was little and there again when we returned to the house a decade or so later.

The bookshelves were made of dark wood, not shiny. My father’s books, almost all of them.

I look at those books, my eyes trailing along the spines, during afternoons when the house is quiet and I must find something to do.

I do it a lot in the English house where the books are up on the second floor, on the landing that overlooks the staircase that winds up from the little hallway below. Here the books are in white bookshelves that have glass doors you slide back and forth. I search for something to hold my interest. I look and look, looking at the same lined-up spines I looked at last time, hoping to notice something I have not noticed before.

The carpet is flat and a dull green. This is a rented house, this one in England. The landing is narrow. There is only room for the bookcases and a narrow space to walk. The landing is bounded by a railing – white posts with a black shiny railing along the top. Without that fence you would fall into the hole made by the staircase.

At the top of the stairs there is no bookcase and a little more space. My mother has put there a large black trunk that we used when we came here. You can sit on its broad surface and your feet don’t touch the ground. There’s a long window above the trunk with a white window sill. My mother has a row of plants along the sill. She has African violets there and when one of them blooms she says, “Look!” in a high voice. “A flower!”

I sit on the trunk with my little sister. I have an idea for a newspaper we could make. I can see this beautiful newspaper we will make and I can see how we will be able to make it every week. We will make it and sell it and I see this beautiful thrilling future that will inject my life with that mysterious ingredient that kids who live in books have.

My room is at the top of the stairs, its door right by the big trunk. My mother bought me a desk. She painted it white. It didn’t have any paint when it came from the store. She painted it and put it behind the door of my room. She got me the desk because now I live at home. I used to go to boarding school but I am back here now. I didn’t want to come back to my mother’s world. I thought I did for a moment. Being in boarding school was like being in my father’s world, the world outside the house.

But that didn’t matter when my friends at school turned mean. I didn’t want to go back there. I asked to come back here. I imagined it might be like Little House in the Big Woods and that I’d sit at the dining room table every evening doing homework with my sister, with soft lamplight. But it wasn’t that way.

The curtains in my room are a deep bright red. They go down to the floor and you open and close them by pulling a cord. This is fancier than our house in America. It feels like a hotel. My bed is in the corner, under the window above the garage so I know when my parents come back on the nights they go out. The babysitter is downstairs but I do not feel safe in bed until the sound of the car pulls in under my window and the headlights fan across my dark ceiling.

Along the landing is also a door. When you open it it’s just a bunch of wooden slats you can hang things from. It’s extra warm in there because of a water heater or something, and my mother hands wet laundry in there to dry. She calls it the drying cupboard, another strange English thing.

My father goes on business trips. Hanging on the wall on the landing are two small drawings, each framed in gold wood. The drawings are like scribbles in black ink on white paper. My father said he got them from a friend, some man he met on one of the trips. The man was scribbling during their meeting and my father asked him for the drawings. My father described how the many shrugged, sure, not seeing them as something of any value. The two pictures hang, one above the other, by bookcases, near my father’s room. They aren’t pretty, but when I look at them I remember that my father goes to other places and meets people that the rest of us will never see.

DARK NIGHT

The floor is hard smooth cold linoleum. It is my first Manhattan address. I am so glad to have my own place in New York City. It is something I have wanted for a long time, especially since I met the New York City boy who became my boyfriend. He has a place in New York City. He’s always had one. He grew up here, which is something I will unfortunately never be able to claim, that will always be a drawback, but at least I am here now.

I feel at home in this city, moving on its subways and sidewalks. I feel like I belong here, but somehow when I come inside into this room New York City leaves me, its influence recedes and I am exposed as the girl without friends and nothing to do.

But who can I be friends with? The girl in science lab? She’s so drab. The other girls in the suite? I like it when they’re there when I come in, sitting around the table in the hall by the black wall phone, but I can’t sit down with them, they know each other, I don’t know what to say to them, my words sound hollow, I hate saying empty words like: how as your day, like: it’s so cold out – I say a few things to them and then I slip into the room at the end of the hall that is mine.

My boyfriend has an apartment where he goes to school in another town, a place with Salvation Army furniture and a tiny kitchen that he cooks big meals in. He has a TV and a stereo and a long shelf of records he’s been listening to for years. He has a phone and a bong and an electric typewriter. When I am there it feels like something is always happening. He is always on the move, always moving – lighting the bong, wanting to go out for pizza or Chinese or a movie, watching TV, buying a record. I do all these things with him.

And then when I am here and he is not, none of those things interest me though I know he is in his town, doing that endless string. He never says, I don’t know what to do. Never pauses. Never walks just to walk.

At night, it’s cold out, I return to this room, so small. Thank God no one can see me in here with these books I have looked at, lined upon the shelves, so many times. There are no curtains or shades on the window. It is a blank black square. How can I get through the few hours of evening. I must stay awake until 11 because then my boyfriend will call. He will be wide awake and I will pretend that I am too.

But I long to hear his voice, the tangle of his scratchy voice that wraps me in a blanket, wraps me. I clutch at its comfort, wondering when it will be taken away.

POTENCY

I think that writing memoir is the most potent action I can take in this world.

When I sit down to write – not an easy place to get to – I feel all my energies and abilities come into one focus, one laser point – I feel like a bird, pausing in mid-air, then plummeting down into the waves, intent on that one fish that will save it.

I write, then come up for air, then look at what I have unearthed. It usually looks like just a handful of dust, not worth much. I could easily toss it out and forget about it. But I don’t. Not anymore. I add it to the pile. I am not sure what I am building, but this is all I have. For some reason, it is my most precious thing, the one thing that feels purely my own.

A Long Grey Dress

My sister wears a grey dress, a frumpy cotton one with a belt and a longish full skirt, so old-fashioned and out of place that it’s cool. I would never have noticed that dress if I’d seen it, never have thought to put such an ugly thing on, but I admire this quirky choice. Her long light brown hair is scooped back with a red bandana.

She is different than she used to be. She used to be nothing, someone who stayed below the radar, who kept to her place as number two, as younger sister who couldn’t do much.

She is stronger now, more daring. She is 15 and I am 18. She even looks pretty to me now. And I am unsure of every step.

She has a boyfriend, now, after the episode, and a few months later another one. They make dandelion wine in my mother’s kitchen. She says she won’t eat meat anymore. She is angry, defiant, daring us to stop her.

My mother is frightened. I am frightened too.

The night she swallowed the pills I am in the kitchen, home from college, Christmas vacation, a dark evening, back home, everything quiet. My parents are reading in the living room, separately. Each sister is in her own room. There’s no music playing, no conversation. This is normal.

I hear my sister call downstairs for my mother. I just keep going with the dishes at the sink. Everything is still normal. A minute or two later my mother comes downstairs and says that Chris has swallowed pills, they must take her to the hospital. This is severe and new and I have no script at all for this. Any word I say sounds wrong so I do not say much besides, “okay.” I don’t see my sister. I stay in the kitchen and the three of them leave the house.

My smallest sister, 6 years old, comes into the kitchen now. She is wearing small gold-framed glasses. She walks into my arms and starts to cry. “It’s okay,” I say, wanting to comfort her. “It’s all right.”

Something in me is just stunned and unmoving. We go to see her in the hospital a day or two later, my mother driving Esther and me. We try to be normal. It is embarrassing to have nothing to say after such a big event. Surely there is the right thing to say right now to lipe up to something this big – my 15-year old sister’s suicide attempt. If this were a movie there’d be tons of dialog. But there isn’t anything, except now I move to New York City as planned, to the new school, into a cold grey winter, me in my room alone at night not knowing how to enter a life that would have people in it. There must be something very very wrong with me that no one is coming, that I am alone here. This flaw must never ever be seen by anyone.

I stopped eating that winter.

RED DIRT SONG

My father stretched out on his back in satisfaction. It was the weekend so he was home. This time everyone had gone on this walk. We had driven somewhere – my father driving, wearing “black glasses” – that’s what he called them, and I still think of the word “sunglasses” as an unnecessarily fancy word that other people use.

My father drives, his thick fingers on the steering wheel, his arm out the open window, rapping his gold wedding band on the metal roof of the car in time with the song he is singing, a Hungarian song that I sing along with. I know the tunes and the strings of syllables that go with them. We sing loud and look out straight ahead at the road.

My mother sings too though more softly and she looks out the side window. She is dressed in brown colors, smaller than my father.

My and my little sister are in the backseat. She is doing something. I don’t pay attention. I lean forward a little, between the two front seats, singing.

My mother points and says how the dirt in Virginia is red. She likes this the way she liked that the boards in our New York house were wide and therefore old. The dirt she points to doesn’t look red to me. It looks rusty brown. Red is the color of my new ski jacket.

We walk uphill through woods. At the top we stop. My parents point at all the hills and woods spread out in the front of us. This when my father lies down on the smooth rock, propped up so he can keep looking, his suit jacket around his shoulders like a cape. My mother says, “Look at the view!” in the same way she talks about the red dirt.

HIM & ME

I look at the scenes of my childhood as if from a distance, watching the small dark-haired child with bangs. She is in the living room. Her father sweeps into the room, or out of it, always speaking with some kind of flourish as if he were perpetually on stage, as if he feels always that he is being watched. the child is the one who is watching him and this pleases the father very much. He looks back at her. They look at each other, and the father always makes sure he is worth watching.

That’s what it’s like, my father always wanting to be a personality, someone you remember and want to tell other people about, the way my father liked to tell me about the elderly gentleman who, when all the families of the Budapest apartment building were seeking shelter in the basement of the building while the Germans bombed, while they were all crowded into one room, this elderly gentleman complained when his wife brought him a cup of tea in a cup that did not match the saucer. This image was stamped in my father’s mind and I could tell by the way he repeated it to me – usually on our walks together, he and I walking together every weekend, he inviting me to come with him – not my mother, not my younger sisters – which made sense: we knew Mum and Dad did not like each other, and the two sisters were too young. Though I had walked with my father when I was their age. So I am the perfect choice – for my father the walks are his chance to talk to me. He talks without stopping in the car which is parks a thte entrance to the park which is a huge stretch of land with roads, fields and woods – even a house or two – we walk for two or three hours without seeing anyone else and my father talk the whole time. I am mostly quiet next to him, walking.

There is the walk when he asks me what word we use in school for a boy’s penis. I am in first grade, and we do have a word for this. “Wiener,” I answer, surprised to be entering this territory with my father. This kind of thing I only talk about with my friends. It doesn’t exist at home. I am alone with my father. We are in the woods and he tells me what men and women do. I listen. I know it is a secret.

There is a walk many years later, in the big park, on a Sunday, my mother left behind in the house where she is cooking lunch – roasting beef, boiling potatoes, chopping salad – while my sisters play cards upstairs – we are walking and my father is telling me something about the Catholic church and pope. He asks me something and I only half-respond. This angers him. “Come on,” he says, prodding me. I am supposed to converse and I don’t want to. I don’t know why I’m this angry. I know I am wrong and bad for not speaking. I wish I could cover up what I’m feeling and let something smooth and entertaining and smart roll off my tongue, but it is stuck. I have failed. the same way my mother fails, the same way my sisters fail, by being ordinary and uninteresting.

In the House

I sit in the living room with the grown-ups, my parents’ friends. I am surrounded by them. They are talking to each other, laugh laugh laughing, drinking their grown-up drinks.

We are in this house. I came here with my mother and father. There were workmen here for awhile. They sat down at lunch time at the bottom of the hill, outside, where we park our yellow car. They ate big thick sandwiches. My mother stood in the kitchen wiping white paste onto the walls with a wide metal knife. There were no guests then. Now there are.

My mother goes up the stairs. I can see her bare legs through the railings as she goes up. I can’t see her head, her face. Just her legs going up.

“Joan,” says one of the women near me, “your legs are so scratched! You must have been working outside!”

This makes my mother different from the other women here. Their legs will never be scratched like my mother’s. they don’t work outside like she does. They wear stockings and skirts. My mother is outside a lot. She likes the garden. I can tell that she is the ugly one here, the one the others do not like. My father is here with the guests. My mother is separate from them.

I can tell she is separate also because of how she is not smooth the way they are. Her face doesn’t really laugh or smile the way theirs do. Her laugh is not a real laugh. She looks like a kid in school who is pretending. She sits on the edge of the couch.

They call her Joan. Even her name is like a rock, weighing her down. It is as if the other grown-ups are standing on one side of a lake all together, close together, looking at her, laughing at her – not in a big obvious way but in their eyes. My father is with them.

I pull away from my mother. I don’t want to be like her, unable to protect herself.

It is the same house that we come back to many years later after living in England, but it has been made to look like a much more acceptable house, a house like ones that other people live in. I like it better. It isn’t the place with broken glass in the dirt all around it anymore. Beige wall to wall carpet covers the bare boards that used to put splinters in my feet.

It doesn’t have Hungarians in it anymore. Those bands of grown-ups don’t come anymore. Once or twice some couple from my father’s office comes, and he runs out that morning to shop for things my mother doesn’t think are necessary.

The people never come back a second time. I know my father always wants to impress them. He asks me to pull up all the grass that has grown up in the white stone path that leads to the front door, and after lunch he asks me to play the piano for everyone. I resist as nicely as I can, but my father always presses and presses and I have to play. My playing is laden with mistakes. Though I have good intentions, I never practice and dread the weekly lesson with the unfriendly English woman.

After the people leave – they drive back to the city – I do the dishes. My father goes to read. My mother goes to read. My sisters are each reading in their rooms. Sunday.

We gather in the evening in the living room to watch Masterpiece Theater. The TV is small enough to be moved from room to room, a black and white. We put it on the coffee table. My father sits on the couch with my mother and sisters. I sit on the floor, my back against the couch. The Brandenburg concerto pipes up as the show opens and Alistair Cook, a dapper Englishman welcomes us. My father is the one who speaks, who says something. He is happy to be watching the show. He likes Alistair. He would like to be Alistair with his nice English accent, dressed well, sitting amongst good furnishings. My mother doesn’t say much but she is smiling. I want to watch the story, but I want to stay far away from my parents, as far away as I can.

Then

The dining room table was made of smooth dark polished wood, its corners rounded. It sat on curved legs, each of which ended in a wooden carved claw clutching a wooden carved ball, a feature that my father pointed out to me privately in his Hungarian accent as an indicator of a proper antique. He admitted that it wasn’t a real antique, but an excellent reproduction.

The table consisted of two halves that were supposed to cleave together seamlessly, but the seam was always falling apart, just enough for us to keep pushing it together, pushing from each end so that the little wooden pegs slipped snugly into the little holes – and there, for a moment, it held, until the moment we released and then it sagged again, the two halves letting go of each other.

On top of the two wooden halves of the table were two protective glass halves. I wished we could get rid of the glass. That’s what really ruined it for me.

My father had bought the table and the six matching chairs that surrounded it. He bought them when we lived in England and crammed them into the tiny dining room of the rented house there. He bought them, he said, as a birthday present for my mother. I knew he bought them for himself. It was obvious. My mother never would have chosen them, but she packed them up and brought them back with us to the States when we returned.

We only sat at this table on weekends, the only time during my high school years that all five of us came together in one room.

My father sat at the end of the table farthest from the kitchen. The room didn’t hold much more than the table and its chairs. A small glossy piano fitted into the corner. We had brought it back from England too. My piano teacher, Daphne Spotiswood, a woman with an English accent who felt she was meant for better things, came to lunch on a Sunday once with her husband. With pride that we had an instrument, my father invited her with a flourish to play. She sat at our piano and played Mozart and Beethoven, music that our piano had never heard before. “It has a frightful sound,” said Ms. Spotiswood when she stood up, “not a good instrument at all.” We couldn’t tell. And even if we could we would not have said so.

My mother sat at the end of the table closest to the swinging kitchen door. I did most of the carrying back and forth. My mother had done the cooking. Now it was my turn. I wore jeans I had bleached in the bathtub, hoping they would come out differently than they did, patched with pieces of cloth left over from sewing projects that also never came out the way they should. Things I made did not come out the way I wanted them to. I did not know how to make things that satisfied. They fell short. I knew they always would. Just like my mother’s cooking and her sewing and her driving. She didn’t do things well and I knew I didn’t either. Not things I had to do with my hands.

My father initiated most of the conversation with false cheer, a smile on his face, a brightness that I knew was battling back blackness. We must all battle it back. “And what have my daughters been doing this morning?” His questions that I never ever wanted to answer, questions that instantly criticized whatever it was I had been doing – listening to a long-haired boy on the radio who sang about hitchhiking. I answer with as short an answer as possible. If it is too short it will draw attention. No, just enough to keep the scene going as it is.

“Your salads are always delicious, Joan,” my father says. It is one of the good things he has come up with to say to her. My mother doesn’t accept the compliment, doesn’t believe in it any more than I do. The salad is lettuce, tomato, oil, lemon and a little sugar. It always tastes the same. And yes, I like it too, but that has nothing to do with it.

The easiest moment is when my mother asks my father, or he asks her, “Did you see the joke in the New Yorker?” and they share a small moment of humor. They like the same cartoons.

When we are done I clear the table and do the dishes. My father retires to the couch, my mother goes up to her room, my sisters to theirs. I go upstairs too, to my attic room. And then there is quiet.

CRASH

The parking garage today on 24th St. looked exactly like the garage I crashed in in Los Angeles, the summer of '79, the same downward slope and sharp turn to the left, just like that time when the gas pedal of the Mercedes jammed and the car wouldn't stop – instead picking up speed as it sailed down the ramp -- and I let it crash into a wall, thinking I was driving into concrete and not caring. The car broke right through. It was a plaster wall and didn't even make a dent, though the new paint job was scuffed up, the ugly army green paint job that Jeffrey had found on a late-night local TV ad – they'd paint your car for $50. He asked for chocolate brown and didn't say anything, standing in a car lot in East Los Angeles by himself when they handed it back, now dull army green, like a tank.
It was an old Mercedes Benz with four doors. I don't know how many miles per gallon it got. I was 18 and didn't ask that question. A car either went or it didn't. My orange and white, hand-me-down Pinto went fine as long as you poured oil into it every fifty miles or so. Jeffrey's Mercedes was a hand-me-down from his uncle Elliott. That was the kind of hand-me-downs Jeffrey got. I always felt like a poor relative, no way able to keep up. In the beginning, when I'd only see him on weekends, I pretended to be as rich as he was. I got paid on Fridays so I could show up Friday evening with a lot of money -- $40 – and I learned quickly to just stuff it in the front pockets of my jeans like he did – no wallet – just crumpled up bills and if you spilled one or two it didn't matter.
The day I crashed the Benz in L.A. was the day my mother and twelve-year-old sister were coming to visit. I hadn't seen them for a couple of years, since me and Jeffrey drove out to California from New York. I wasn't supposed to come out with him. California was Jeffrey's plan. He had always said it with offhand confidence, like it had already happened: he'd go to L.A. and write screenplays and become a director. People liked him for having such a good answer when they asked him what he was doing. When they turned to me and asked, my answer didn't seem to hold any water at all. "I want to be a writer." Even I didn’t believe me.
Then when Jeffrey was actually leaving for L.A. he said I could come too, which felt good after our last few horrible months in New York when mostly we fought, or I felt so depressed I wanted to jump off the 13th floor balcony but all I could do was think about it.
Jeffrey said I must be allergic to sugar to be so depressed. After all, he loved me. It shouldn't matter – why should it matter – that he has become friends with Harriet, a woman in the screenwriting class he signed up for at the New School, a woman – not a girl – a woman who's in her thirties, who has a little daughter called Jessie and who is writing the paperback for Saturday Night Fever. It's not supposed to matter that he sleeps with Harriet -- who has a daughter and her name on book covers -- on the designated nights when we're supposed to be having our own lives and I go up to my tiny room on Amsterdam Avenue in the apartment where I don't know anybody. I look at the artsy postcard Harriet sends Jeffrey. It’s romantic to send your lover a postcard when you live in the same city and see each other every few days. Jeffrey leaves the postcard out on the dresser. It has a cryptic message only he and she understand and she uses just her initials to sign it.
On the afternoon of the car crash and my mother-and-sister visit, I have also just been fired. That day. From Fotonovel where I've been answering the phones up front. A Hollywood job. At Fotonovel they make paperback books out of movies. They take the still photographs from the movie and add in white cartoon bubbles of dialog above the faces of the actors. The boss is named Herb – handsome, young and rich. He's treated a little like a god. "Herb said this." Herb doesn't want that." Herb hardly notices me, the girl up front who cut her hair last night in her living room, stabbing at herself without a mirror.
I get fired that afternoon. I don't know why. I've hated the job, but I didn't expect to get fired. I always hate my jobs – hate the desk I sit behind until 5 o'clock, hate the phone and the typewriter that keep me pinned. At Fotonovel I look up to the "artists," the people who disappear into tiny cubicle-offices to paste up the pages of the next book. I'm just the receptionist, wondering how anyone gets out of this, makes the jump to "artist."
Jeffrey's done it. Was never a problem for him. The first day in class he told me he'd finished a novel. He showed it to me – a beautiful stack of white, crinkly typed pages. I read them, alone in my little dorm room, alone in New York City, read my boyfriend's novel and didn't like it, not really, but at least he could do it, could sit down at a typewriter and write.
I wrote at my office desk sometimes, wrote stories about strange, unhappy, crazy people. It was easy to imagine being crazy. It seemed much more true than writing about regular people. Jeffrey wrote about regular people all the time – good-looking white people who were witty and fucked each other easily. My people had problems, were stuck way out on the outside, but I tore them up, tore up the yellow pages from the legal pad, cried in the stairwell when Herb fired me, drove downtown to pick up my mother and little sister and crashed into a cement wall that snapped like a paper plate.