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.

CHRISTMAS MORNING

Ariadne often wore a plush, pink terrycloth bathrobe with a wide collar that framed her face like a fur. She looked pretty and cuddly in her pink bathrobe. It was a special item we had bought it for her. We didn’t have money ordinarily for clothes, but we managed some special things for Ariadne, things that made her look like a well-to-do, stylish little girl. Natvar didn’t want his daughter to appear anything less. It was one of the things he had against Neysa, that she dressed his daughters like plain little American girls from the suburbs.

We bought Ariadne a small electric Casio keyboard for Christmas our first winter in Athens. The keyboard cost about $100 – like $1,000 to us. But Natvar wanted her to have the keyboard more than anything.

We didn’t have a tree, but somehow we had Christmas morning. Mark had written a little rhyming song for her, and he played it for her on the new keyboard, while she leaned against him, smiling. Mark was in his seersucker robe, his wide feet bare. It was one of the moments when Mark and Ariadne were loving each other, Mark the endearing, creative uncle.

We were indoors for Christmas morning. By then, December, we were no longer eating out on the tiled roof garden. We had furniture now, not like the first few weeks back in June when we’d arrived and were eating on a sheet spread on the floor.

A year later on Christmas day we took a color photograph, all of us seated in a row on one of the two white couches we had had a tailor make. Not a regular tailor, but one of them men – and they were everywhere in Athens – who made what Athenians called “tents,” custom-sized pieces of thick, stiff canvas that people used to shade sections of their terraces.

It was one of the very first things Natvar had bought for the apartment, a large rectangle of royal blue canvas that we stretched over the back of the tiled garden, back where we did not take guests, back where we hung laundry, just outside the sliding glass doors of Ariadne and Traci’s room.

Natvar had gotten the idea to ask the tent man to use thick, white, rough-textured fabric to make several large cushions. Placed on two wooden bases that we picked up somewhere for free they made cheap but expensive-seeming couches.

We sat on the couch, each dressed in our best clothes. It is a picture each of us wll send home to our family – that’s the point of it. Above us on the wall is a large batik in reds, blues and beiges that Mark had thought to bring from New York. I had never noticed the cloth in New York, but he had brought it and Natvar and he had stretched it tight across a frame and hung it above the couch in the living room, facing the front door. Mark and Natvar had gone out and found a small brass museum light and placed it above the batik. Both of them could create these things flawlessly – nothing crooked.

Everything here is homemade, or feels that way, but it gives the impression of wealth, especially here in Athens where most of the homes I have seen are drab and tasteless. There is a lot of ugliness here, as if beauty were too expensive. I have seen how impressed the Greek clients and friends are when they step into our living room. They have never seen anything like this.

The idea of the photograph is to show our families that yes, we are doing fine, but also that we are very sophisticated, doing mysterious, high-level things. I sit on the couch in the battered gray high heels that Mark and I stole out of Arianna’s apartment for the court appearances. I wonder why I never look like someone who wears high heels all the time. I have on the earrings I stole from Bloomingdales. It’s as if I have all the ingredients: jewlery, the shoes of a socialite – but I feel like an ugly person, trying to convince others that I am glamorous.

In this context Traci is prettier than me. She is much better at wearing the clothes, and her clothes were actually bought for her, fancy designer clothes that we bought for her during one of the Bloomingdale’s shopping sprees. I have one or two designer dresses too, and I do feel much more confident in them, but they are summer wear, not the right thing for Christmas morning.

LIVE MEMOIR

HIGH RISK MEMOIR -- from our performance last Saturday at the Woodstock Library, January 23, 2010. Click here.

Morning Thoughts

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted – either here or at Mostly Memoir. It’s been a very full time schedule-wise and I’ve gotten behind on my typing. I write pretty much everything long-hand.

This morning I was inspired to set other things aside and type up my work. It is an act of defiance and self-strengthening and empowerment. I was beginning to go down. To let the drudgery of the 9-5 get me down, to let other people’s opinions get me down.

It is easy when you are doing something as unsupported as undisguised personal writing to feel alone and to even be tempted to dismiss your work. A form of suicide. I am so happy to have revisited my writing by typing it up and posting it. Oh god, I feel better.

RUNAWAY

It was pretty this part of Athens, cloistered away from the raw cement, traffic and smog of the city by trees and gardens, houses usually only partially visible, set back, with now and then an ornate gate. The roads I walked along were only wide enough for one vehicle, and there weren’t any to speak of, nor did I meet anyone on the narrow strips of sidewalk.

I just walked. It was all I wanted to do. I wore my usual costume – brown leather pumps, the narrow knee-length navy skirt, a blouse – clothes that distinctly felt like someone else’s, but I insisted on them because Natvar insisted on them. They overrode my old hippy tendencies, my blue jean past, all that silliness before I had learned from Natvar to dress, to be adult, to be part of his world.

I came to a large open patch of grass, almost a traffic circle, almost a little piece of park. It was warm and this bright warm sunshine was the first of the season, the first after a long gray winter, the first promise of summer.

Cars passed now and then by this long rectangle of grass. I was coming out of the shadiest parts of the neighborhood now, getting closer to the busy street below with its stores and steady traffic. I lay down on my back and I slept. I slept with pure ease and sweetness, sinking down into its comfort, every muscle relaxing. It was perfect.

And when I became aware that I was sleeping, I pulled my awareness back down into the oblivion, pulling it this time, not sinking effortlessly. It was 3 or 4 o’clock when I opened my eyes finally and though I tried to linger, lying on my back, the sun was cooler now, the day was passing.

“It is 4 o’clock now,” I thought as I stood, “But 6 o’clock won’t come. And tonight won’t come.” It was an old trick from childhood. When dreaded things loomed in the future I could convince myself that the time would never arrive.

The rhythm of the day had shifted, the traffic picking up. I walked down towards the busy street. I would get something to eat. I would check out the movie – after all, Natvar had actually suggested it. I could follow his direction and have pleasure at the same time. And these things would take a long time – food, movie.

To walk into the pizza place. To choose a slice. To sit and eat. Alone. No one watching or commenting. Natvar had given me this. Could I really spend this money? I am spending it. I feel guilty, indulgent, but I continue.

I buy a movie ticket, enter the cinema, take a seat. I have not been to the movies for several years and more years since I have been alone. See, the movie hasn’t even started yet so there is still all this time before I have to go back. I don’t know what will be in this movie. By the time I leave the cinema I will know the movie. I will have seen it. So that is a long way away. Another time. Not this time. In this time I will never have to go back.

I watch the film – the opening credits, the first scenes, the story, the end. I sit until the lights come up. I am here, at the end of the movie, the place where four hours I thought I would never be. When I walk outside it is dark. The traffic continues to stream by, and still people on the sidewalks, a nighttime city. My sweet warm sun has gone.

I wish there was another place to go, but there isn’t. I have used up the long delicious leash Natvar gave me earlier. I must return now. But still, I am not there yet, and there is still the long slow walk back. Perhaps if I don’t think about it the end of the walk will not come.

But the streets slide by me, step by step, until I am in the small dark street below the apartment. My home is up there, but I can’t get to it. It feels fortified against me. The car is back, of course. They have returned. The apartment is in darkness. They have all gone to bed. Good. I can’t bear to see them. I like being alone so much. I know it’s not good, it’s weak, but if I can hold onto this aloneness I will.

I slip upstairs and into my tiny room off the kitchen. I take off my clothes, lie down, sleep a few hours and awaken at dawn, long before anyone else. I wash and dress quickly, not making any noise and slip out again, down the stairs, back out into the relief of the street.

Don't Be A Baby

I stand next to my father and he sits comfortably in the armchair. I stand to his right, my head a little above his. He is dressed in a suit – white shirt with cufflinks, a tie, matching jacket and pants with a sharp crase. His hands are fleshy and broad. He wears a thick gold wedding band and a thin expensive round watch with a shiny sligator strap. My father likes hi things – his cufflinks, his watch, his wedding band, which never looked for a moment like anything to do with romance. My father’s wedding band was a bade of stability, of all-rightness, a middle-class man, educated, tasteful, married.

He told me to come to his room because my report card has come in the mail. I am not concerned. I am 9 years old and I’ve had plenty of report cards and they’ve always been very good and school has never been hard.

It is a Saturday. That’s why my father is home. This is his room. We don’t use it for anything else. When he is not here it stays empty. It is a green room: dark green drapes and a dark green spread on the single bed. The house came with these things. These are not things we have had before – drapes that go all the way to the floor and close with a cord, matching bedspreads. This dark green room looks like it’s the man’s room.

My mother’s room in this house is pink – clearly where the woman is supposed to go though there is nothing pink abut my mother. They had someone else in mind when they prepared this room, placing inside it not a desk and armchair like in the dark green room, but a glass-topped, kidney-shaped vanity with a stiff pink-and-white-striped skirt. My mother doesn’t sit at it though I wish she was the type who would.

This is the house we have moved into. It is a rented house with all the furniture inside, but it is small, like a doll’s house.

My father holds the white sheet of paper that is my report card from the school I started a few months ago. I like the new school. I like that I don’t have to come home, that I can live there. I like my friends there. I like all the playing we do and the fat letters we have started writing to each other during this Christmas holiday.

My father starts to read the report card out loud. He reads very slowly so that I can hear each word. He doesn’t look at me. The first teacher is saying that I am not doing well, that I need to try harder, that I am careless.

I wish I could leave the room and never come back, but I can’t. I can’t go until he says I can. My throat is hurting now like when I see a really sad movie.

My father starts to read the next part from the next teacher. This teacher also talks about how I am lazy and that my handwriting is sloppy.

I didn’t know my handwriting was sloppy. We write with fountain pens at this new school. We fill them up from the ink pots in our desks. I liked buying the new pen the nuns said I had to buy. I chose the red one.

Now and then my father lifts his gaze to see if I am paying attention. His eyes are sort of laughing, like he is making fun of me, but he keeps reading, sometimes stopping to ask me something like why hadn’t I done better on my exams.

I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it.

The math has been hard, but math is always hard. At the new school they were doing fractions and I’d never done fractions. Once when I was doing my homework the teacher came up to me and was shocked because I was trying to find the answers by drawing pies and cutting them up into halves and quarters.

I want to cry and cry. But I must not. I. Must. Not. Cry. I must pretend this is all right, that we are having a normal conversation. I tighten up everything I can, and I know I am not hiding it perfectly. I wish I could hide it perfectly, and I fight and fight to hide everything, but I know he is winning, he is stronger. He can just sit there and keep reading with a bit of a smile on his face, and he can read all the way to the end and tell me I must find a way to do better, that this is not acceptable. He doesn’t yell. He says it in the same even voice he always uses so that my tears that keep wanting to burst out seem absolutely wrong and out of place.

When You Can't Hold It Back

That afternoon I was coming down the stairwell when a guy I hardly knew came in and said, “Where are you off to?” because it was only about 11 and I said I’d just been fired and that’s when the tears rushed into my voice. I didn’t want them to show. I hardly knew this guy. I’d only been at Fotonovel for a few months and I’d hated every minute of it – from the dullness of sitting at a phone that didn’t ring to having to watch the rich pretty blond I’d known vaguely in college 3,000 miles before, now the rich handsome boss’s girlfriend. But I hadn’t thought they’d fire me. And it made me feel like a little girl, sad, crying, trying hard not to show it, but not having the strength to hold it back in front of this almost stranger.

It was Los Angeles and it was summer, hot and bright on Sunset Boulevard, that dense part with all the billboards and Tower Records – just before it turns all hushed and green and Beverly Hills.

The sun though is harsh and I don’t live in that hushed green part of town. I live in the cement of West Hollywood, just below the fumes of Sunset. There are lots of plants and even trees clumped around my white L.A. cottage, but the drive there is never sweet. It is always harsh and headache and I am only here because my boyfriend wants to live here. I don’t know how to live by myself. Though I feel very by myself. It feels just a little safer to stay with this boyfriend who, when I say I am leaving, starts to cry. And that’s when I feel that hot tangible strap that binds us to each other. We have been together since I was 18, and I am 21 now. We have graduated college. We have driven across the country. We are sharing the white cottage and my mother and little sister are coming to visit this afternoon.

I have not seen them since I got here last year. They are coming and I have to show them a good time. They have come into town by bus. They are at a downtown L.A. hotel and they are waiting for me to come and pick them up.

Will I tell them I’ve just been fired? Yes, probably. But I won’t make a big deal about it. I’ll get another job. I’ll toss this off as another minor adventure. The tears are just for that almost-stranger, and for Jeffrey, the boyfriend, who has seen me cry a million times. Before him no friend had ever seen me cry.

It was one of the new things in my life when Jeffrey and I began. A boy I could cry with. I hadn’t known I had wanted to. Hadn’t imagined a place where crying would be okay to do that. But it was gloriously okay with this new boyfriend.

The first time I cried with him was a drizzly night and we were in a playground on the upper East Side, near his childhood apartment that we had to ourselves. Late night walks in New York City with a boyfriend was very new. I stood in the light rain, with him very close, his arms around me and it seemed that the only way to hold that comfort was to let tears come. I wasn’t crying about anything in particular. Just somehow the rain, the night, his arms – I wanted him to hold me forever, and he had held me and he had taken care of me like I was delicate all that night.

It’s gotten much more complicated since then. Most of the time I don’t want to be where I am – here in Los Angeles, with Jeffrey, in these awful office jobs. I always pretend to my invisible family back East – my two disjointed parents and my two little sisters who are still in school – that I am doing great – hip and cool and living in L.A.

I take Jeffrey’s car to go meet my mother and little sister – she’s about 12 years old. Jeffrey’s car is bigger than mine. It’s a boxy four-door Mercedes, a leftover from an uncle of his. No one in my family has ever owned a Mercedes or anything even close. I drive Jeffrey’s car so we can fit the suitcases, but also because it is proof of my new grown-up, non-family life.

A few blocks from the hotel in downtown bumper-to-bumper traffic the car leaps forward without my touching the gas. I jam the brake, lifting myself up to put as much of my weight down on the brake as possible, and just miss the car in front. I know the moment I let up the car will lurch forward, like a galloping horse. I’ve never heard of a car doing this.

The car engine is racing. I see just half a block ahead an indoor parking lot and I make it that far, turning into its dark entrance, thinking, here, out of traffic, I can turn the thing off. But once inside, the entrance slopes steeply downhill and now I can no longer hold the car back. I am careening downhill towards a cement wall. I see it rushing up towards me and I give up. I say I don’t care. Let it fucking happen. And we smash into cement.

Except it is not cement. It is thin sheetrock and we smash right through it. The car stops.

Now I am sitting in the tiny parking lot office with men who look at me like I’m crazy. I call Jeffrey, hoping he will not be too angry. He just spent $50 on a paint job for his car, the cheapest paint job in L.A., advertised on late-night TV. He asked the guys – way out in some forgotten part of the city -- for chocolate brown. They delivered army green, and Jeffrey did not complain. Not to them anyway.

And then I walk to my mother’s and my sister’s cheap hotel room, the one I know my mother cannot afford. My poor mother. My poor little sister. I must make them happy. I must or we will be washed away in this sadness.

From last night's workshop...

I sat in a chair this afternoon in my boss’s office. We were supposed to meet at 3:30 but she’d been pulled into a crisis. I had checked through the glass door of the executive director’s office at one point to see if that meeting was interruptable, but even I felt that I should stay away until they were really done.

Now it was 4:15 and I knew she had to leave at 4:30, and I didn't want to linger anyway and had been planning on slipping out the moment she was gone.

I have been getting more and more savvy about finding pockets of time in the work day that I can shoplift, no one noticing.

Yesterday I managed a 20-minute cat nap in the conference room at a busy time of day. I had to do it. There was nowhere else to go and I had to close my eyes and get even a few moments of unconsciousness. I managed it – actually sleeping for five minutes, then waking myself up in time for a meeting in the same room during which I had to keep pulling myself back from a magnetic brink of unconsciousness.

I am sitting now in my boss’s office. I have scheduled myself into her tomorrow to make up for the time lost today, but tomorrow’s appointment could be easily blown off at the last minute too so I have opted to make use of her first 15 minutes of free time today to get at least a couple of things done.

I have a folder in my hands in which I have stacked all the things I need her to see in order of their importance.

When I get my 15 minutes with her I don’t want to waste a moment of it.

It’s like when I worked for Gurumayi, so like it sometimes. You’re responsible for making sure they see stuff on time, their time is unpredictable and spare – you try to be ready at all times and on the look-out for when you can gently, elegantly spring. You have to be appealing because you are bearing stuff they would love to put off.

I haven’t mentioned to Erica, my good-natured boss, how I often bump into déjà vu as I do my best to serve her. She has read the book about my time with Gurumayi and liked it a lot, but I fear the parallel might make us both uncomfortable.

We began going through some easy but important matters, then someone knocked on the door. “Come in,” my boss called out, popping an almond into her mouth from a bag she held on her lap.

The person stuck her head in, then offered to come back later. “No, no,” said my boss, "what’s up?” And the person proceeded to step into the room and tell her what was up.

I kept my eyes down, not getting into the conversation, allowing myself to be mildly pissed off that Erica hadn’t asked them to come back later since she’d kept me waiting for 45 minutes. But I know that one of the things I like about Erica is that she doesn’t mind being interrupted. I like that you can almost always knock, enter, talk.

I could feel the sadness that I’d been feeling all afternoon plant itself on my face. Erica glanced over at me as she spoke to the other person and I noticed how her look paused, as if she were taking a closer look at me, as if she had seen something and almost asked what it was.

And as we resumed our small bits of business I thought about confiding in her. After all, we are close enough that she noticed some subtle shift in me. I wondered if I could tell her the story of the last day or two, wanted to, but then thought, no, I can’t. She doesn’t have the capacity to hold me in the complete way I would want if I were to tell this story. Though it’s almost there. I think she thought about asking in the same way as I thought about telling. But I kept it to myself, and she dashed off to her daughter’s first piano concert.

Writing Workshops in Manhattan

UPDATE: April 2010. This series was successful so that now we meet once a month on a Saturday morning at TRS, 44 E. 32 St. between Park & Madison.


I will be offering three Authentic Writing workshops in Manhattan on Saturday mornings -- if you want to do some writing, this is the place to be.

All the writing will be from life -- spontaneous and personal. The workshops are for people who have written for years, people who have wished they were writing, people who write in their heads but don't manage to get it down on paper and everyone in between.

These are studios more than workshops, a place for artists to come together and practice their art -- without competition or comparison.

I do almost all my writing in these workshops. The Guru Looked Good was almost all written in workshops.

You may take one or more workshops, or you can sign up for the series of three.

We will meet at:
TRS, 44 E. 32 Street (between Park and Madison), 11th floor

Dates and Times:

October 10, November 14, December 12.
10am - 1pm.

Rates:
$75/workshop (please specify which date)
or
$180 for all three workshops

To register:

You can use PayPal
or
email me at: martaszabo@yahoo.com
or
call me at: (845) 679-0306

Cupcakes

I wore the dark blue cotton dress with the tie around my waist that tied in a bow behind me. Not a big wide fancy bow like you saw in movies. Just a regular, narrow bow, like on your shoes. There was white smocking across the chest and no sleeves so my mother taught me to wear a white blouse underneath. I could see how the plain white blouse suited the somber blue fabric. This was my best dress. I wore it the day I got my first holy communion. I did it by myself on a Sunday. Only my mother came with me to church. My father was away that year.

We went to church and when it was time for communion, before everybody else came up, the priest made an announcement about me and invited me up first.

A month later it was my birthday and it was Sunday and I asked my mother if I could bicycle to church. We were not hardcore church people. I liked church though especially now that I could stand up with the grown-ups and go get communion.

I wore the same dark blue dress and I wore a brown wool winter coat and I bicycled. As I coasted down a steep hill, a dog leaped out at me, barking, snarling, jumping, his teeth bared. I kept going and got past him.

I left my bicycle out in the grassy parking lot amongst the cars and when I came out it was bent out of shape. I couldn’t ride it. I couldn’t walk home. It was miles. There were no cars left in the parking lot. Everyone had gone home.

The only person I knew was probably still around was the priest. I had never talked to him. But I had no choice. I walked back into the empty church. I walked down the side aisle to the door of the room that the priest went into after Mass. I had never been in there before. I knocked. He opened the door, dressed in plain black clothes now. I explained how I couldn’t ride my bike. “Here,” he said. “Why don’t you use this phone and call your mother.” He sat me before a large black telephone. My mother suggest I should walk to the store and she would come get me.

I knew where the store was. I walked over there. It only took a couple of minutes. It was an old store, painted red like a barn, with a long wooden porch. It always made me think of the times when I was really little and we were living here the first time and my father would stop here on the way home from church and he would buy the Sunday New York Times which seemed much too big to me – a giant newspaper. How could anyone read that thick thick bulk of pages, all black-and-white and tiny print? My father laughed when I told him what I thought. He laughed because he could read it and I could not.

Inside the store the light was dim. I had never been in here before. Not like this. Only when there were lots of people and I was lost amongst their legs, holding my father’s hand while he steered me through. Now I was by myself and there was almost no one here.

I walked over to the magazines. I looked at the covers. I didn’t touch them. Now and then I heard someone come in, walk to the counter and buy something. I wished I had some money. I wanted to buy a package of Hostess cupcakes, the chocolate ones with the white squiggle of icing and the creamy white inside.

I waited some more. I walked up one dimly lit dusty aisle, lined with canned goods. Then the other. Then I went back to the magazines. My mother was taking a long long time.

“That’ll be $2.65,” I heard the man behind the counter say.

“Oh, just put it on my credit,” the customer replied and left without giving any money.

I waited. No one else was waiting like this. Everyone else came in, bought something and left.

“Can I help you with anything, hon?” the man behind the counter asked.

“No,” I said. “That’s okay.”

I read all the magazine covers again. I looked at the racks of yodels and ring dings and the cupcakes I wanted. I wished so much I had some money. I was hungry now too.

I took a package of Hostess cupcakes and went to the counter. “That’ll be 95 cents,” the man said.

“Can you put it on my credit?” I asked.

“Do you have credit with us?” the man asked. “What’s your name?” I told him my name and he said something that let me know that what worked for the other customer wasn’t going to work for me.

I put the cupcakes back. I waited. My mother finally came. She had thought I would be outside on the porch. I don’t know why she thought that. She hadn’t told me to wait on the porch. She said she had been driving up and down the road, looking for me.

What Holds It Together

My parents’ anniversary was January 2. When I was little my sisters and I would each sit down at the dining room table and make them a card, then deliver it on the day after New Years. It wasn’t much of a holiday, but better than no holiday at all, the last little whisper of Christmas season specialness that went steadily downhill after presents were opened on Christmas Eve.

If I asked my parents where they met they said “at a party.” There was never more detail given – how did they notice each other? what was the conversation? – and I have pieced together a story from scraps found in other stories they told, and woven it with what makes sense to me.

This is how I see it. My father was a handsome Hungarian refugee living in New Haven because he had an uncle there. He had some kind of graduate student status at Yale, but I can’t quite figure it out because he also could not speak English and was forced to do menial work. The menial work was torture to him – a man who liked to dress up and go to the opera.

He’d come to the States on the invitation of a rich pretty Smith girl on her Junior year abroad in Geneva, but when he showed up at her door at Thanksgiving she didn’t like him anymore. He’d looked better in Europe than in the States.

Life in America has been cruel. He meets my mother. They are both 28 and marriage is way overdue. My father has had one marriage, back in Europe, but it had only lasted 6 months. They are both very alone, both family-less foreigners in Eisenhower United States.

My mother liked European refugees much more than the typical rich boys she was meeting around Yale with their crew cuts and baseball pleasures. She wasn’t a Yale student. She was working in a lab nearby. She meets this tall (taller than her, rare) dark Hungarian refugee – and, look, now he’s in hospital, and she can go visit him.

If someone is sick my mother knows what to do. If they’re sick or in any way down on their luck my mother has a niche she knows how to fit into. If they are well, thriving, soaring, then she feels at a disadvantage.

Shortly after they met – my stitching together of half-told stories – my father was in the hospital. My parents have never named the ailment. It always has had a curtain drawn across it, telling you not to ask. I think my father tried to kill himself with sleeping pills.

My mother was tall and awkward. Glamour was something mysterious that other girls had. She came from the outback of British Columbia where most people quit school after 8th grade, but she had soldiered on through high school and college.

And my mother says they had fun in the beginning, that my father would go camping, and do things on the cheap in the beginning – they were both so penniless that their first home together was a camper parked in New Jersey from where my father commuted to Wall St. She says that once he started getting real work and the makings of a career then he didn’t want to do things like drive cross-country in an old Pontiac anymore. He wanted to buy land, he wanted to impress people.

I remember my first home with them. I was the first child and the three of us lived in the bottom floor of a house – white with red trim – in Yonkers, a house built on a hill so that the front door – which was not ours – opened at sidewalk level, but to get to our door you walked downhill, down the side of the house. There was openness behind the house -- space -- and I sensed a river and a railroad track down below but they were hazy to me, something only grown-ups could see and understand.

My father wears a trench coat in these images. He disappears during the daytime --- out the back, down the hill, like a bird taking off into a landscape I cannot see – and then he’s back at night with a briefcase with mysterious papers inside.

I sit on his lap when he eats breakfast. He puts the sugar in his coffee. I ask him if I can stir it and he says yes. He says yes! I get to be part of the grown-up world for these moments – stirring – this is something he does that I can do just as well. It is pure pleasure.

There is an afternoon about 20 years later when I pick my father up from the airport. I volunteer because I know my father will need as much comfort as possible. He is broke and even broker after this failed business trip that was a fools’ errand at best to begin with. I know neither my mother nor my sisters can lighten his load like I can.

As we drive out of the airport, my father, sunk in the passenger seat, says, “I have not been this low since –“ I don’t know what he calls that time – New Haven? The early fifties? Since I first got to this country? But he says something so that I know we are talking about that dark time, that is connected to the hospital stay, the one when my mother used to visit, the one you don’t ask about.

I have a theory. Something to do with unspoken grief and sadness that gets passed invisibly from parent to child, shrouded in what cannot be spoken at all and what cannot be spoken outside the family circle. I feel ancient crazy sadness inside myself, have felt it since I was little, have always thought I created it. Sometimes it feels like a Greek tragedy where to free yourself you have to find a way – any way -- to sever bonds so ancient they feel like your own flesh and blood.

AWAY FROM THE CROWD

It happened one evening, after dinner. All of us younger classes were in the hall for an hour of free time before bed, and it was mayhem. The hall looked like it had once been a ballroom with a high ceiling, a long, broad wood floor with alcoves and window seats. At one end was a gallery where musicians might have played in olden times. Girls from a higher class used it as their common room. I had never been up there. Below, the 8-, 9- and 10-year-olds played tag like we used to do. But we were older now. We knew about sex and periods.

That evening I stood and talked to Sheila and Jane. Sheila was a tall, quiet, pretty blonde. Jane was a dumpy, plain girl. They had been best friends for years, as inseparable as a married couple. Jane and Sheila were all right. They were not part of my main gang – the group of five who were the smartest in the class and got into the most trouble – but Jane and Sheila were in the next tier. Friends, just not best friends.

By the end of the evening I had agreed to ask to be transferred out of my cubicle and into their dorm. They needed a third person, they said, and wanted to know if I was interested. Sure, I said, not knowing any other way to answer. I hadn’t been unhappy in the cubicles, though we liked to complain about them. For a moment, there with Jane and Sheila, it seemed adventurous to ask the nuns for a change (I’d never known anyone to do that), to move away from the cubicles where almost everyone else my age was living into a dorm room, which seemed, for a moment, like moving into an apartment.

The three of us became excited, planning our new life. When Sister Felicity blew her whistle, signaling that it was time for bed, Sheila and Jane walked up the big staircase to their dorm room, and I walked down the passageway that led to the chapel, then on past classrooms, through a locker room to the cubicles.

The cubicles were in an ugly new wing, a chunk of practical modernity tacked onto the old school building next to the courtyard and the clock tower where you knew horses had once stood and stamped their hooves on the cobblestones, waiting to be mounted.

“The cubicles” – that’s what we called them -- were two long rows of cells, each with a window, a tiny sink, a bed, a wardrobe and a chair to put your uniform on at night. The floor was white linoleum. At the foot of your bed you drew a white curtain across to close yourself off from the corridor and the cubicle across from you.

Lucy Ann and Madeleine and Nicola and Ann were all there as I brushed my teeth along with everyone else along the corridor, as we all changed into nightgowns and slippers and bathrobes and walked up and down to the toilets at the far end. The usual calling back and forth was there, the usual laughing and jokes that I loved to dive right into and be at the center of. But tonight I realized I had a secret. I couldn’t tell my friends what I’d done. I knew they’d be mad. They wouldn’t like it. I didn’t know why, but I knew I had a problem.

I went to bed with strange feelings of dread, wishing I could turn the clock back and erase the evening. But I was trapped, headed down a chute in the wrong direction. Old Sister Barbara walked up and down the two cubicle corridors a few times in the darkness, singing softly, “When Grandpapa Kissed Grandmama in the Second Minuet”, and then she was gone, but I could not sleep.

I lay in bed in the darkness and silence and began to cry, silently, in the boarding school way, making sure no one could hear me. As I cried I thought about our puppy who my mother had said in her weekly letter had just died at home. The little puppy I had played with that summer. She said Buffin had died. No one knew why. He’d just gotten sick and died. I cried and cried for the hopeful little pup and for my mother who had been so excited about that puppy. She had bought him. We never bought our dogs, but this one she went out and chose and bought because he reminded her of the dog she had as a child. So I cried for my mother too and for how she had taken me to the muddy little traveling amusement park I had begged to visit the week before. I cried, thinking of her expression as she clutched the baby and gripped the bar of some ride, her clothes tailored, a black-and-white check suit with a full skirt and heels. I could tell she wasn’t having fun, but I was. I loved the rollicking capsule we were jammed into, the way it swung and jolted us.

After the ride one of the silver combs from my mother’s hair was missing. My father had brought her those combs from a business trip to Morocco. As I lay in bed the loss of the comb the week before felt catastrophic, as if I had done something criminal and cruel in asking my mother to take me on a ride she didn’t want to go on. And then, look, she had lost a silver comb. I had asked for too much. That’s what it felt like.

I cried, rolling from one wave of sadness to the next and back again – the dog, my mother – and through it all this bitter promise I had made that my friends were not going to like.

What You Can Get Into

I grew up making my bed every morning, thinking you had to. I guess it started in boarding school, 9 years old. The nuns woke us up in the dormitories, small rooms at the top of the grey stone building that had once been a rich person’s mansion. The rooms way up on the third floor – some with slanted ceilings – held different numbers of beds. Some rooms had three or five, a big one had about 11. They woke you up and before going down to Mass or to breakfast, depending on what day it was, you had to turn down your bed – pull down the top sheet and your eiderdown – your quilt. Each girl brought her own eiderdown from home. It was something you could choose, something that did not have to match everyone else. I picked the prettiest one I saw in the store, a delicate pink floral pattern.

Pulling back your covers “aired” your bed while you ate breakfast, something I had never of before, words my mother never used, and then when you came back to your room – we moved in packs – to chapel all together, to the dining room, then back upstairs – you made your bed and brushed your teeth at the sink that each dormitory had.

We washed in that sink every morning from the waist up– baths were scheduled two or three times a week in the evenings, each girl remembering when her shift was. The bathtubs were scattered about the third floor and given numbers so you knew which one to use, tubs set alone in small rooms. Once after I’d gone to bed I was awakened. An older girl, scheduled to have a bath after me in the same tub, had registered a complaint that I had not left the tub clean enough. I was returned to the scene of the crime and went through the motions of cleaning – maybe for the first time that night, maybe for the second – cleaning didn’t register for me yet. I didn’t know what dirt looked like.

There were many moments of sharp shame during the three boarding school years though shame was not a word I used for myself yet. I walked in blindly, nine years old, like a puppy, going where I was led. We had just moved to England in June and in September I began school. I changed schools every year or two so that part did not surprise me. But it still never felt good to walk into a new one. It was a short walk through fire you had to do by yourself.

It made it much worse this time that my school uniform had not arrived and I had to wear my regular clothes when every other girl was in uniform. That was bad. But I did not say anything. That was one thing my mother couldn’t stand – my father either but he was not around much. My mother did not like it when I said I didn’t like something. It made her angry. Her voice got loud and harsh.

Sometimes her hand whipped out and smacked you. It felt mean and scary and I did my best to see her anger coming and get out of the way somehow or other.

So I didn’t say anything about the clothes and was relieved when the right ones finally came and I could match everyone else in my brown tunic, my beige cotton button-down shirt, the striped tie I learned to knot.

I slept in a row of three girls in the corner. You were allowed to bring trinkets to place on a bureau top – I brought my two kissing-alligators – Mr. and Mrs. Florida that Leslie Rider had brought for me in second grade – and the head of Abraham Lincoln that looked like it was made of sugar. I told my new friends it was made of sugar. I lied sometimes – I always had – to increase my street cred. I was on TV I told a kid once, figuring there was no way she could find me out. It sounded so good I could not resist.

“Go upstairs and wash between your legs,” the nun had called me up to the front of the class as we sat doing homework. She murmured this to me, letting me know that I smelled bad. I swallowed it down, went right upstairs to one of the tubs on the third floor and did as I was told, hoping to scrub away all offense. These things could come at you from any direction. You’re swinging along, blithe, and then someone informs you that you’ve made a very big mistake.

When it happened at the end, when my friends turned on me – the friends I had had so much fun with for years, the ones to whom I wrote deliciously long letters during school breaks when we were apart for four long weeks, the ones who sent me back fat envelopes with long handwritten missives in return – the friends with whom I got into trouble beautifully, like an art form – getting detentions for sneaking into forbidden territory, getting marks in the nuns’ little books carried in their hidden pockets – friends with whom I rode a wonderful wave of play and then the rising tide of sexual information. When one day they would not speak to me because I had chosen the wrong roommates – I asked not to return the following year. I asked my mother, scared and embarrassed to want something that much.

Why Would I?

I call my mother, never sure. I call her in the moments when it’s been not only at least a couple weeks since we’ve spoken, but also moments when I am pretty convinced the obligation quotient is fairly low and I am doing this pretty much because I want to. If you asked me why I wanted to I’d have a vague answer – I want to be in touch, there is a definite sense that having my mother on this earth and available to call is an option I will only have for a little more time. Maybe ten more years. Maybe much less. Who knows when a person is 85? Even if she still drives and works and does all the things she has always done, more or less, in smaller doses.

Sometimes she refers to the future, just a little. We never talk about it for more than a sentence or two. This time she mentions how she doesn’t see well and how she probably won’t be able to renew her drivers license come the Spring her current one expires.

“How do you feel about that?” I asked. This was take the conversation down a non-family road. The normal thing would have been to say something that didn’t rock the boat or try to change its course.

I guess recently I’ve been wondering if maybe I’m too shut down when it comes to my mother. Maybe she attempts a little more contact, maybe I rebuff her.

“So how does that make you feel?” was a little tentative experiment.

“Well, you know,” my mother said matter of factly, “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,” and case was closed.

All the doors in my family are closed. We do not open them and we do not look behind them. We are unknowns to each other.

In this last conversation with my mother on the phone a few days ago I noticed myself not asking about my two sisters nor my father. When I talk to my mother it’s a matter of coming up with questions for her to answer. I have taken to asking about the neighbors as if they were family members, which for a few years – that at the time felt permanent – they almost were. I could tell that since these neighbors are fading out of my mother’s life and long ago faded from mine I won’t be able to use them much longer.

Until recently I asked about my sisters though we haven’t spoken to each other for a couple of years. I have idle curiosity. To ask about them feels like leafing through a People magazine. But they too are floating farther and farther from view and now if my mother doesn’t mention them we leave it out.

And my father, always slightly present for me, a dim figure in a dark apartment in Budapest. I have no idea how he spends his days but I know what I will get if I try to find out – simply more of the man I have always had, a person whose presence does not help me stay connected to who I am.

When he dies will I go to Budapest? I wonder things like this. That’s what people do. Their parent dies, they’re not expected at work the next morning. They go to where the action is. But will I? My sisters will be all over that stuff. They love that stuff. They do what they are supposed to do – when my mother can no longer live in her house they will organize the next step, I’m sure they’ve already done some research and it will probably involve my mother going out to them, to northern California.

I imagined the moment of the funeral. Why would I go, I wondered. I could not think of a reason. These things will be their show and I don’t want to be in their show. They love taking care of business and being adults.

I did make one inquiry. A good friend of mine had let drop something about a really cool community she had found – or her daughter had found actually – where she planned to go when her time was up, a place where older people were welcomed. It was in New Jersey and I got the website from her. It felt strange to be doing what I’ve heard and read about so many of my contemporaries doing.

But I knew right away it was no place for my mother. It just wasn’t. It made no sense.

And so I let it all be. Let my mother’s life run its course. Let my father’s life run its. Feel like a bad girl sometimes, but just keep trying to have the fullest life I can have.