ARM'S LENGTH

I've never thought that single beds would be any good for sex. But this new boy, Jeffrey, who has come out to see me for a few days, tells me with a little laugh about fucking his first girlfriend in a single bed. He talks about it with affection, as if the smallness of the bed had been part of the fun.

We start off in my single bed under the slanting attic roof. We are alone in the house – my father in the city, my mother taking advantage of an invitation from people we hardly know to stay on a lake in New Hampshire with my two little sisters.

This looks good. I can say to this new boy who wrote me a letter a couple of weeks ago – two pages typed singled spaced – a letter where he said he loved me – I can say to him – he who has so many things I don’t have and haven’t even thought of having – a phone, a TV – I can say: I am alone in a house. I can say: I have a father who stays in the city, and a mother staying on a lake.

This new boy has divorced parents and even stepparents, which I do not, but at least I have parents who don’t like each other and are usually apart.

I pick up the boy at the station. Yes, I have this car. It is my father’s, but I have it for these few days. I pick up the boy, wearing my soft beige cotton halter dress. In the car, the boy runs his hand up my calf. “Ah,” he says, “you shaved.”

Last week I hadn’t fully prepared for our first make-out session, and he had commented on my stubble, “I didn’t know you were the type who shaved.” I had been found out. He was supposed to think I had naturally smooth legs.

He is here, this boy who must not find out too much about me or he will lose interest. I show him my attic room with its pitched roof, its wall-to-wall carpet, the bright yellow cupboard doors I painted, the couch cushions on the floor, and my pride: the Panasonic stereo, a turntable with two speakers that I inherited from my father’s bachelor pad when he moved back in. This stereo looks like something a rich kid would have.

He looks through my handful of records. I only have one Dylan album, a double-album of greatest hits. I have listened to it over and over. I know the words to every song. “Funny the songs they chose for this,” Jeffrey muses – he knows every song and which album it’s on and what year it came out, plus how many bootleg versions there are.

We didn’t fuck last week. I pretended that I didn’t have my diaphragm with me. Now I am lying beside him in my single bed because that’s how he did it with Jane, and I have figured out my lie for this week. “I think I must have left my diaphragm in a box of things I left at school,” I say, though there is no box of things, and there is no diaphragm because – and this is my real secret – I have never needed one.

I don’t care though. I want to get fucked and I’ve finally found someone who I am sure can do it, because he’s had two girlfriends before me, he’s been fucking for three years, and I won’t get pregnant. I just won’t.

“We could use my mother’s bed,” I offer because really sex needs room, doesn’t it?

We go down the steep flight of stairs to my mother’s room with its double bed. I have always imagined fucking in a double bed.

I make sounds to show I’m into it, that I’m a pro.

Afterwards I suggest we change the sheets. I think it’ll be nicer for both of us to have clean dry sheets. I get the sheets from the closet in the small bathroom with its tub and no shower and when I come back this boy is sitting naked and cross-legged on the bed, looking at the framed photo that hangs over it, a photo of me as a little girl.

“I love that picture,” he says. “I want one. I’m going to photograph it.”

And I have a naked boy with black curly hair in a pony tail talking to me, sitting cross-legged, lighting up a joint. These are all the things I wanted.

A LINGERING

My father sitting in that apartment in Budapest, the one with the high ceilings, the double doors between rooms, the apartment he has known since he was four years old and his grandparents bought it, the apartment he returned to like a ship to harbor when everything in this country fell apart, a place all along he must have kept in mind as a place he could return to if all else failed. Which it did.

I think of him there though he is there no longer. I think of him sitting there for the last thirty years of his life, his life becoming smaller and smaller and smaller until it finally went out.

I remember visiting him early on when he was still active. He took me to another apartment in the complex one evening to visit a woman he had known since they were teenagers. She was an artist, her apartment filled with canvases. She gave me a piece of her jewelry, a bracelet of silver rectangles linked together. It was ugly, but I had very little jewelry at that time and I liked that this bracelet was old, held history, had come from someone.

My father dressed up for that dinner as he always did in the navy blue double-breasted blazer and a cravat. He said something to me about how wearing a cravat takes care of the need for a tie but is so much more comfortable. He said this to me with the air of triumph that he often used. Triumph. Everything had to be won and it made me always want to put down my pieces, not play at all.

He said something before or after the dinner, disparaging about the woman artist, something that implied he wanted to keep some distance between them. Yet he was proud that she was a painter, proud that she was a friend. I had the feeling that perhaps they’d been lovers, or that she wanted them to be – some history of some sort.

Like the dinner with Ilona, a woman in a different part of town, a woman my father assured me had once been very pretty when they were in high school. Ilona had definitely once been his girlfriend and now she was a widow in an apartment filled with old-lady things, cooking dinner for my father almost every night, a sad woman who still spoke of the war and how it had changed everything forever.

But by the end it was just my father alone with his younger sister caring for him. Maybe people came by or called. I don’t know. I wasn’t there and with so many barriers of distance, culture and language I don’t know at all how things really were.

But I think of him there, silent, perhaps brooding. The last time I called he could not speak and I didn’t know if he knew it was me. I didn’t know anything. I could hear him struggling, and he managed the phrase “keep in touch.”

Which I do. I keep in touch. I think of him. Without tears. I welcome the pieces of his writing that my aunt sends as soon as the translator finishes a chapter. Because my father remains a mystery. He never did succeed in explaining himself to me. He tried. But he edited out so much I was not left with much.

WEST HOLLYWOOD

I sit on the bus and look out the window. I am going to the office. This is vile. I got a job working for a man named Larry. There is him in his private office, me outside his office at a desk and Roxanne, the receptionist, who sits near the door and answers the phone. She’s older than me, not pretty, not anything. A woman with long painted nails who talks about what’s on sale.

Larry sells advertising in the Yellow Pages. I got the job by answering an ad. I have worked in lots of offices, mostly as a temp. This is my first full-time job, the first time I have not been going to school.

I am the only person in Los Angeles who doesn’t have a car. Jeffrey has one. He has a Mercedes Of course. That’s what Jeffrey would have. It’s an old Mercedes with four doors and we just drove across the country in it, with Golem, his black tail-less cat.

We live now in a small white cottage surrounded by big-leafed plants and shaded by unfamiliar trees even though it’s March. There is a lime-green-and-white shag carpet wall-to-wall on the floor of the living room, the bedroom and the bathroom. I keep all my stuff in a long green army duffle bag in the large corner closet in the bedroom. There’s nowhere else to put it.

I take the bus to my job. I sit at the desk. Sometimes I type a letter for Larry. He wears wide ties clipped in place. I hate this.

Jeffrey stays home. He has come to LA because he wants to direct movies. He sleeps in the queen-sized bed long after I leave, because he has always stayed up late the night before watching television on the couch, smoking pot from the long blue ceramic pipe he bought when we went through San Francisco. The pipe is in the shape of a wizard’s face with a long beard. Jeffrey bought it the moment he saw it.

I did not buy anything. I do not have any money and besides I didn’t fall in love with anything the way Jeffrey fell in love with that wizard.

I did see a large round purple candle with real flowers baked into its sides. I thought it was beautiful and Jeffrey bought it for me. This hardly ever happens. And I have the candle there on a shelf but somehow I don’t think I love and delight in it the way Jeffrey does the pipe, or the show he is watching or the songs he is stringing together on a tape or the fish in the salt-water aquarium he just started. Jeffrey finds things that make him happy and I keep hoping things like that will happen for me, and once in a little while I feel that way – light and witty – but mostly not. The things I like I don’t like enough.

I read one book after another, lost between covers, but at night, when Jeffrey watches TV, sitting alone on the couch, laughing out loud at Mork and Mindy, and I sit on the bed, leaning up against the wall with my book, I cannot stay awake. It is as if I have been drugged, weights pulling my eyelids down, and Jeffrey passes through to the bathroom and sneers, “You’re not reading, you’re sleeping.” “No, I’m not,” I say.

And on Saturday morning I leave the apartment, feeling like I could walk from one end of the earth to the other, and I walk through fresh empty early-morning West Hollywood, passing one little house after another, I walk, stride and stride, until I come back, and Jeffrey is still sleeping and if I were anyone at all I would now sit down and write, because look, I have all this time.

I do write at the office, at my desk, on a yellow legal pad because that’s what Jeffrey uses and I love the look of those yellow pages of ballpoint scrawl. No one sees. I write a story about a man who tapes pictures of women to the walls of his room. The women whisper and wink at him, they torture him. That’s as far as I get. I know this man. I made him up, but I know his lonely self, his craziness. I know how he feels. But I don’t know what happens next.

One morning Larry calls me into his office and says he has to fire me. Tears come to my eyes, tears he must not see.

Jeffrey will be home in the afternoon. Unless he is out shopping for used records. Or maybe Lenny, our black actor neighbor, has invited him to go play tennis. Or maybe he’s scribbling on a legal pad with his left hand, putting down words fast in that awkward stick-form writing he has, all angles, no curves, while he chews the pen cap to pieces. Or maybe he is typing the screenplay already at his self-correcting Selectric that sits on the broad wooden desk near the bed. He always likes what he has written and always, every time, I do not like it, not really, but I can twist it so that I do. It’s just hard to like his people who are not like me at all. They are good-looking, they talk easily, they have affairs, and nothing feels bleak to them, harsh or empty. They don't even think about things like that.

RACETRACK

In the beginning he was the boy across the table on the other side of the room, a narrow room almost filled by the long conference table, a room with no windows, just little ones at the top of the walls giving ground-level views of the grass outside.

I was here because my father wanted me to be. “Why don’t you take a summer course at Yale,” he had said in a way that I knew I had to, and I had to because he would be proud to say his girl was at Yale this summer.

I made the deal as good as it could be by picking a writing class that met at night once a week. And by getting to drive my mother’s green VW station wagon there, racing down 1-95, sometimes writing in my head, other times just tasting the power of accelerating and switching lanes.

I left behind the white clapboard house on the hill that had been there since I was three, the house we had moved away from and returned to repeatedly, so that even though many years had been lived in other places this house was the real house, one of us.

I left behind my mother in the kitchen, plain and worn, a woman who had given up on being happy, a woman who was angry so often I was careful around her. I left her behind in the kitchen making another supper of hot dogs and boiled potatoes and carrots. I left her with my two little sisters and my father who kept one foot in the house but most of himself out of it.

I raced out of there in my mother’s green VW station wagon with the beige plastic interior – green and beige being acceptable family colors. And I took my place with people I didn’t know at the long table with the dark sexy official writer sitting at the head of the table, brooding, a man you could tell still had a life, had not given it all away to play teacher, a man who was taking a break from something that included cigarettes, racetracks, women, booze and more, adult things I hadn’t gotten to yet.

And in this room where I never missed a week I notice one boy noticing me. I notice his eyes meeting mine every time the teacher or someone else makes us laugh. We meet in thee eruptions of laughter. His eyes are always there, waiting for mine, like a magnet.

I notice him because his hair is dark, wiry, curly, a mess, most of it in a pony tail. And I notice his shirt, a cotton smock, a shirt I don’t know how to get though I would like one. It will not be in Macy’s, or the Sheep Shack downtown. Maybe in the Elephant’s Trunk that sells pipes and peasant blouses, but I have never seen such a perfect smock like this boy wears.

His name he tells me when we get to that part is Geoffrey with a G. “My mother named me after Geoffrey Chaucer,” he says, and the shirts I learn are from Guatemala, brought to him by a stepmother, and I see them on the shelf in his shambly apartment. There is not just one smock, there are piles of them, each a different vivid color, all folded, pressed like fresh from a store, so many he hasn’t even worn them all yet. 

I do not have my own apartment. I do not have anything in profusion.

He has this apartment with an electric typewriter and its own tiny kitchen. He has houseplants, one big trailing one by the dumpy armchair at the window, and a line of smaller ones on a shelf over the dumpy sofa that is there to throw things on when you come in the door, not to sit on. The row of plants above the couch is lit by a long tube of purple light.

He has pot too. Plenty of that. A television, a phone, a waterbed, a stereo with a long row of records in red plastic milk crates. And a bong that I pretend I have used before.

I must pretend from start to finish with this boy. Somehow he has noticed me. It is a fragile thread that connects us, one I fear will snap any minute. How can this boy with a stepmother, a boy who grew up in Manhattan, a boy who has lost count of his possessions, a boy who lives in his own apartment – how can he stay?

When he invites me to come over for dinner I only think I must have fooled him well, but that it will not last. 

And when his letter comes to the mailbox at the bottom of the hill, the letter I read in my attic room, two pages, typed, single-spaced, on crinkly paper – when this letter says “I love you,” it is a sweet dart, it is everything, but I must keep working, pretending I am a member of his world, a rich girl, a casual girl. At least, though not divorced, my parents don’t get along. At least, the house on the hill, viewed from the back, looks sumptuous.

FAREWELL TO A CAT

Leo died yesterday. I just cannot take it in. He and his name don't belong in that sentence. It gives me a sense of time passing. We had Leo, and now he is gone. It's a big change. We are not who we were, and never will be again. 

FEELING AND EMOTION

I awaken in the dark and as time passes I realize sleep has left me. This won’t be one of those times when I roll over and fall back into it.

There are theories that you should stay in bed and theories that you should get up. This time I get up.

I can’t wrap myself in the warmth of my bathrobe because I spread it over the bed last night and Raffie, the white cat, is curled up on it.

I cross the living room in only a nightgown. Tamar the dog doesn’t come with me. Usually she does, but once in awhile she lets me wander off on my own.

The house is cold and comfortless at this time of night. I put on Fred’s old old bathrobe, the one I replaced for him at Christmas about 10 years ago. But he never threw the first one out and it’s good to have it now, spare.

I think to retreat to the small room that heats up quickly with a space heater. I plug it in, aware that this is at odds with the compulsion to just sit and do nothing, frozen into paralysis by the cold. I feel like someone else to be plugging in this heater, fighting back.

I think about the TV. That’s what people do, right, in the middle of the night when they can’t sleep? But I don’t think I can stomach the blare, the harsh light, too rough on my senses.

I didn’t get to read my book all weekend. I’m only a few pages into it. We haven’t become friends yet. It’s early enough to abandon it, but I will trudge a little further, hoping to take root in its soil.

I went to the library last week and browsed the shelves of old fiction, beat-up hardbacks that have been there for decades. It didn’t take long before I had a handful. I picked one book because I liked its spine, and so far it is the only one I have read, losing myself in it for delicious days. 

When I was 9 and 10, 11 and 12 I walked every Saturday after breakfast to the library with my younger sister.

We walked down our quiet street, past a field with horses, then turned onto the busier main road and walked up the hill.

The sidewalk we walked on was old and broken, with no sharp edge to separate it from the street. Woods and fences hiding maybe a house or two lined our walk. I walked on the light part of the sidewalk, she walked on the strip that was darker. Sometimes, if someone passed us, we spoke to each other in gibberish, hoping the passing adult would think we were foreigners.

We returned last week’s books at the desk where the one librarian sat. The children’s books were on shelves that stood independently in the middle of the shadowy, ill-lit room. You walked around them. The adult books lined the walls reaching above our heads. We chose new books, got them stamped and stopped to buy candy on the way home.

Often by the time we got back I was so angry with my sister I marched ahead, wanting her to disappear, wanting her wiped off the face of the earth, knowing there would never be justice.

Last night I read in the warm room, a heavy sweater on my lap for extra warmth. I didn’t turn the lamp on, just the overhead. I wanted more light, thought about eye strain and rebelled against the need for constant self-care. So many years of warnings about eye strain, and yet I can still see, what difference will another half hour make, perhaps they are wrong.

I hear Fred. I hope he will look in and he does, bleary but sympathetic. “I’m okay,” I reassure him, though the rumblings in my calm that erupted out of nowhere the evening before are rumbling again.

Difficulties storm my mind with no solutions though I tell myself that tomorrow I will think of something.

A friend the other night pontificated on the difference between feeling and emotion.

I think about it on the small soft sofa that is so accepting of people, cats, the dog. I liked that my friend had traveled to a foreign city and gone to a library just to look up these two words in the most complete multi-volume dictionary in the English language.

I think over his definitions, knowing that it is not important to me to differentiate. I know when to use one word and when to use the other.

FIRST AND SECOND

I sat in the front desk, the row of desks extending behind me. I sat towards the right hand side of the room, off center, away from the door. Mrs. Turner’s desk was at the back of the room.

I have come into this room, hoping they don’t notice me. Yesterday, a lady came into the classroom, stooped down to me privately as I sat at my desk, and suggested I come with her into the second grade classroom.

I followed her into a noisy room where all the kids were talking at once to each other. They didn’t sit in rows. They sat at tables across from each other. They threw things at each other and the teacher yelled at them.

So this morning I’ve come back to my desk in Mrs. Turner’s classroom, the first grade, and I hope they don’t come and talk to me again.

Mrs. Turner has brown hair pinned up in a bun. She is kind and gentle. She likes me. I like her. She invited me to sit in a chair facing the kids and read them the Peter Pan story. I like to hold up the book to show them the pictures the way teachers always do. Mrs. Turner interrupted me one time from her desk at the back of the room to explain how to pronounce the word “island,” which was coming up a lot in the Peter Pan story. I was pronouncing it the way it is written.

We pull our chairs into a circle, some of us, on the side of the classroom to read out loud. The book we are reading from – we each have a hardback copy, a dark grey/turquoise cover with black letters – has a long word in its title that I cannot decipher. Usually I am the one who knows all the words. I am embarrassed that I don’t know this one. I don’t ask anyone what it is.

I got home one day after school with Mrs. Turner because my mother cannot come get me. The creek at the bottom of our driveway is flooded and no one can get through. So Mrs. Turner takes me home with her.

She lives in a small house. She has a husband. The house is quiet. She puts me to bed in a tall, high bed, a double bed. I like this bed. It feels old-fashioned, so high up off the ground.

At playtime at school we play in the playground. We play jump rope. Two girls twirl the rope, one at each end, and we take turns standing by the edge of the turning rope, our body moving with its rhythm until we know the moment we can jump in without tripping or stopping the regular turn of the long rope. “Paul John George Ringo!” we chant as each girl jumps inside the circle of the turning rope. Paul John George Ringo,” and when finally each girl misses her beat, stumbles and gets in the way of the turning rope, whatever name was last called – be it Paul or John or George or Ringo – we know that’s the one she is secretly in love with, and everybody laughs.

The Beatles are four boys with black hair. I do not know which is which. 

PASSPORT

When I was 11 I lived in England in a white house with a bumpy, stuccoey surface. The roof came up in two peaks, one on the left, one on the right with a flat piece in the middle that ate the tennis balls I smacked against the one windowless wall. You walked through a short black swinging metal gate with a latch, from the sidewalk, along a short straight concrete path to a black front door with a brass letter slot through which letters got pushed in the mornings. 

It wasn’t our normal kind of house. It came with all its own furniture. Each bedroom -- and there were four -- had its own color of floor-to-ceiling drapes that opened and closed with a string and white chiffon curtains that were underneath, like a petticoat.

The floor-to-ceiling drapes with their pull-open strings were foreign, one of the things that no house of ours would ever have. Everything else was normal except the vanity table in my mother’s bedroom. It was glass-topped and kidney-shaped, but the most unfamily, unmother  part was its pretty pink and white striped skirt.

My mother lived in the pink room, my father in the dark green, my two little sisters in the blue, and I in the red. 

But my father wasn’t there much. He was a visitor on weekends, often away on business trips for two or three weeks at a time, returning with presents.

One time I was told I would be going to meet him. I was going to fly by myself, they told me, to Geneva, and he would pick me up.

My father was my favorite. He was the interesting person, the one who went away on trips, the one who was happiest, bursting into the house with a kind of cheer and good spirit that wasn’t present without him.

There was a stewardess on the plane with the duty of watching over me and handing me over upon arrival. I was not frightened.

There was some kind of adult fuss when I arrived because my suitcase was missing, but I didn’t attach any importance to a missing suitcase.

My father was there in suit, with swagger, and I knew I was in good hands, that he could take care of things like airports and hotels much better than my mother could. Things went wrong when I was with my mother. We missed turn-offs, got lost, and sometimes bashed up the car. But these things didn’t happen when I was with my father.

We went to a hotel. This was the kind of thing you did with my dad. He liked things like that. His restaurants were fancy, my mother’s were not.

My father showed me my room, his room, and the bathroom that connected them. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing at a bathroom fixture I’d never seen before. 

“It’s for ladies to wash their wee-wee,” my father said with some kind of smile, some kind of upbeat that I could not echo. I looked away, looking for the next stone to step onto, away from the strange object in the bathroom.

He took me out of the city to a skyscraper of apartments, a skyscraper out of place amongst snow and mountain slopes. 

He liked this place. He had been talking about it back in England, telling me with some kind of deliciousness about “après-ski.” He liked to tell me his things. He took me on walks, away from mother and sisters, and told me the good things in his life 

We sat at dinner in the glittery restaurant on the ground floor of the skyscraper, and a blonde woman was with us. My father said I should call her Aunt Helga. She was pretty, old like my father, her hair pale blonde and cut short. Her eyes were blue and she wore make-up and jewelry and high heels  and pretty clothes. She wore the clothes my mother never wore and laughed a lot with my father. 

My father ran his index finger down her nose and teased her for having a nose like a ski jump. She asked me if I would ever marry a black man. “I’ll marry anyone I want to,” I said, and they laughed.

My father took me to a French bookstore and chose some books for me to take back to school, picture books with French words and a tiny dictionary with a soft plastic cover that I could hold in the palm of my hand. 

And he took me to a hairdresser where the ladies cut my hair and put it in two pony tails, covering the rubber bands with black velvet bands. My father came to get me, talked French with the ladies, made much of their work, and pressed upon me that I must not lose those black velvet bands.

We went to Aunt Helga’s house in Geneva for dinner, a fancy dining room where I sat up straight. “Look,” said my father, so at ease and at home here, “she can press a button under the table with her foot so Maria knows to bring the soup.” 

There was a small wrapped gift to the left of my fork. I pretended not to notice. It seemed like the polite thing to do, not to assume anything was for me.

Towards the end of the meal my father suggests I open it. Inside, from Aunt Helga, is a red leather cover with the word “Passport” stamped in gold. I say thank you. My father expresses admiration for the beautiful cover. It is a grown-up present, not something I can play with.

And then I am in the taxi coming back from the airport. My father is in the spacious back seat of the cab with me. We are playing and goofing around in a way we have never done before. I am pretending to be a grown-up lady, like Helga. I am making jokes and my father is laughing at my grown-up jokes. 

And then I go one step further. I call him Mickie. That’s what Helga had called him. And with that word I pull back. I stop this game. It doesn’t feel good anymore. It scares me. 

IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE SO SAD

Perhaps it was on the short trip to Switzerland when I was 11. It was some time when I was alone with my father. It was evening, after dinner, and we were in the lounge of a hotel or a fancy restaurant amongst expensive couches, perhaps a blazing fireplace. I was sitting next to my father on a couch while he nursed a drink and he was telling me about the war, about Hungary and his eyes were full of tears. He caught my eye and smiled a little as if to acknowledge or apologize for the tears, which did not spill over, but remained in his eyes.

Recently, I was thinking about one of the stories my father liked to tell me. It was about how his father, as a young man, had planted fruit trees out in the country by the ancestral thatched-roof cottage in which he’d been born. By then my grandfather lived in Budapest, but the family returned frequently to the village for vacations. My father liked to tell me in detail how his father had dreamed of beautiful fruit trees, had purchased them, planted them full of hope and how the rabbits had eaten and destroyed the saplings. The lovely lovely dream came to naught.

It was told as a heartrending tale and I received it as such. My poor grandfather. He had his heart broken.

A week or two ago I thought – wait a minute. So what the rabbits ate them? Why didn’t he plant again, or figure out an anti-rabbit strategy? Why was one failure so important?

My father did a lot of giving up, I think, took failure very seriously. Lost his house, jobs, money, the bits of prestige that came his way.

He told me a lot of sad stories. When I was a little girl I said out loud one day, basing my opinion on my father and his friends who often came then to the house, that Hungarians are sad. This made my father laugh, and he repeated it for years, almost proudly, as if, yes, that’s how Hungarians are and should be.

When I visited him in Budapest where he went to live for the last 25 years of his life my father took me to the apartment of an old girlfriend for dinner. A plain woman now who spoke with earnest regret of all that had been lost in the war 50 years earlier.

My father told me a number of times of being a teenager and coming across his father in his room, looking through his wallet. “’Why are you going through my wallet?’ I asked him angrily,” my father said. “’My son, I am just putting a little money in it.’” And my father’s voice was filled with sad remorse each time he told the story as if he had caused his father pain and could never soothe it.

I know the feeling. If I were my father and I had a daughter I would tell her tearfully of the time my mother visited me in boarding school.

I was 9 or 10. I begged her to take me and my two younger sisters to the local, muddy little circus that was parked in town for a few days. She gave in when I could not stop asking. But I could tell on the ricocheting tumbling ride she was frightened, mostly for the baby she held in her arms. And afterwards she noticed one of the combs from her hair had disappeared.

I couldn’t sleep that night. Back in my school bed alone, in a curtained-off cubicle I could not stop crying, the kind of silent crying I had learned how to do in boarding school, the tears coming in relentless hot waves as all I kept seeing was my mother – in her black and white houndstooth suit with the long full skirt and her black dress shoes – gripping the bar in the metal capsule we were strapped into and the comb now gone forever. I had injured her, hurt her, and it was too late to do anything about it.

ON SCHEDULE

I thought of my father today for a moment or two. Wondered how his death had felt to him. Imagined him in the narrow room off the kitchen in the Budapest apartment, the room designed for a maid, the room that had originally belonged to my great aunt Dora, my grandmother’s sister, the designated artist. The family has lived in this apartment for over 80 years. 

My mother told me that when my sister visited there recently she objected to sleeping in that room because my father had died there. My aunt had responded that it was impossible to find a room in that apartment where no one had died. 

I just thought of my father being the first and the only one of us five to die, to have crossed over that mysterious border. My father, whose reputation amongst his wife and children, holds little dignity, yet he’s done what none of us have done. That’s what I thought this afternoon.

I remember the small room off the kitchen where my father slept in a single bed against the wall, in the corner. Above the bed hung an oil painting he was proud of because his cousin had painted it. He led me to believe that this cousin was a well known painter in Hungary, something I don’t think is true though I have been in that man’s home and seen that he was a true artist, devoting his life to it.

My father also had on the wall framed black and white photos of his parents in their soft, handsome youth.

The window of this room let in the only direct sun of the whole apartment, and only for a few minutes in the morning. My father pointed this out to me and spoke of how he wanted to plant red geraniums in the window boxes.

My mother had red geraniums in window boxes when I was little. She brought them into the dining room in winter. I did not like their furry leaves, the unrelenting red color. 

Living in Athens 25 years later I saw balcony upon balcony filled with geraniums in pinks and fucia, and when I returned to Manhattan I sought to duplicate that profusion on the tiny balcony overlooking Washington Square Park, and at every place I have lived ever since, welcoming geraniums, even red ones, so willing to bloom and add color.

Though my father only made me angry on that trip, always caring for things I did not care about, insisting and pushing, we were frequently at odds, blowing up at each other one night like lovers, him storming out the door, we reunite in the morning, catching the train we were scheduled to catch, saying nothing of the night before. 

REVISIT

I lay in bed a few nights ago, thinking about the woman who would be arriving the next day from India. I would be greeting her. “It would be nice to wear a Punjabi,” I thought, the long cotton tunics and matching pants that I had learned to wear in India. But I didn’t have them anymore. “I could wear a sari,” I thought. I had plenty of those.

I had not for one split micro-second considered wearing my Indian clothes since I’d had a woman turn one of my red silk sari’s into a short, strapless wedding dress, cutting up a second sari for the lining. I had so many of them, even after the laundry next to the ashram in Ganeshpuri failed to return a couple. It had taken me a long time to notice that two were missing – the laundry, from long experience with Westerners, knew this was a good risk to take. 

As I lay in bed, in the dark, not sleeping yet, I knew I wouldn’t wear a sari to work the next day, but I could wear a sari, I thought to the huge fancy dinner Saturday night. I pictured myself in a perfectly wrapped, graceful sari, taking everyone by surprise. There would be a good number of Indian women at the global conference dinner, and it could be my way of diminishing the barriers between our cultures. I loved the idea. I got up and told Fred about it with the peculiar excitement I get sometimes when I’ve come up with something brand new. 

As soon as I had voiced the idea, I drew back. Maybe I should dress a little more ordinary. I shouldn’t draw attention away from the people who were the real stars of the night, the ones who had conceived of and worked for over a year on this event. 

And besides, I didn’t have a sari petticoat. 

The next morning, in the early grey of dawn when I could have been writing, I looked online for an Indian clothing store nearby. Nothing. I found sari petticoats for sale online, but they would not arrive on time. Who did I know who was Indian who I borrow from? 

A woman at work had married an Indian man and lived with her Indian mother-in-law. I Facebooked a message to her and she replied quickly. No, she didn’t have one. “My friend uses a regular slip,” she suggested, but I knew you can’t wrap a sari with a regular slip. 

I showered. I moved through the still-early morning, still at home. Another local friend who knew so many people also had no ideas. And then I thought of all the women in my town who had been or still were part of the ashram world I had once been so completely a part of. I went through a few possibilities in my mind, trying to think of one who would speak to me and quickly alighted on Yvette, the beautiful French woman who I thought would still be friendly. She was not one of the sourpusses who crossed the street when I came along. 

I Facebooked her. An hour later I left a message on her home phone. 

Yvette called back that afternoon, friendly. Of course she’d lend me one. 

That evening I went upstairs to the closet I rarely open and pulled out the plastic box in which I knew the sari’s were folded, the box I had chosen about 20 years ago because it fit under my ashram bed, the only storage space I had back then.

I opened the box. They were as fresh in their air-tight box as if I had put them away a few days before. Each one had its own story – this one had been a gift from Christina, the Italian friend of Antonioni’s wife. This one had once been Hemananda’s and I remembered the morning when Gurumayi had spread out Hemananda’s old sari’s and invited us to the secret conference room to pick one. 

I tried on the little cotton blouses, each one a different color but absolutely identical. I had hoped to find one where the sleeves were not so tight, but then I remembered how the seamstress, somewhere in Bombay, had measured me and made them all exactly the same. I could still get into them, but only just.

“Let me see if I remember how,” I thought. Something in me was eager to re-enter these waters. There was something I wanted to feel again. I began tucking and folding, but one thing went wrong. I clicked on YouTube and watched a 4-minute video made by a young woman  and remembered the step I had forgotten.

The dinner was now two days away. Will I do it, I wondered as I went through my days. No. Yes. Maybe. 

And then I was packing for the weekend, packing two other dresses that would work just fine. I just had to slip one over my head and I’d be done. And now there’s just a few minutes before my ride arrives and I watch myself pull out the ironing board, iron the blouse, choose the blue sari because the drape of it is so beautiful – the stiffer fabrics do not hang so sweetly – and I take them with me, still not certain.

It is time to dress. There is no mirror in my single room. “I’ll try,” I think.  “Maybe it won’t work.”

The blouse, the sari still look perfectly pressed. They have made the journey well.

I tie the petticoat tight at the waist. I get my arms through the tight sleeves of the little blouse and pull each little hook through the tiny stitched eyelets made of matching thread. I lay the sari on the bed, look closely at the silk to determine which side is the right side, the one with the strongest colors, and I begin to tuck, seeing myself standing in that room in Ganeshpuri, the cool smooth floor, the square column in the middle of the room, the two pink bedspreads, mine in the corner, Kevali’s under the window.

I pin the sari at my shoulder then begin the pleats at my waist, the tricky part.

There were always beautiful women in the ashram who wore their saris perfectly, like swans gliding. Though I had tried hard somehow I had never quite pulled that look off. You can look so frumpy in a sari if you don’t get it right.

I tucked the pleats in and went out to the bathroom to look in the mirror over the sink. It looked all right. In fact, I think I nailed it. How could that be – how could I have wrapped this sari better than any sari I had ever wrapped before?

I stepped out into the evening, the silk caressing me. I moved easily, at home in the garment that I knew looked like an evening dress, but that I knew I could stack wood in if I needed to. 

FRIEND

I longed for Leela to be my friend. She said she was and all the discomfort that surfaced when I was with her I stuffed like newspapers into the cracks to keep the cold air out.

Leela had to do with being an artist in the city. That’s what I wanted to be. I had brought myself to the city, had watched as the sidewalk did not sprout friendships and typed pages like mushrooms, but there was Leela.

She had become beautiful since college. Her resume was so much better than mine. She’d become a model of all things, flying to St. Bart’s and Japan, showing up in Vogue.

I had tried it out in L.A. for about five minutes, had gone to a photo booth, taken four pictures and sent them to an ad. The man on the phone suggested I send him a photo with my hair down instead of tied back tight and somehow it just felt silly and empty and I wouldn’t win anyway.

But Leela had all that and a studio apartment in the Village and a job at an art gallery. She spoke of grown-up friends, like Jonathan who wrote for Rolling Stone and gave her ideas for what to read next. Paul Bowles.

She’d speak of these people casually, with a little laugh of amusement, and we read Oriana Fallaci’s autobiography and both wanted to be her: daredevil writer.

Leela had a large loom in her dark studio almost-unfurnished apartment. I loved the loom and that she knew how to use it, but when she and I went out to dinner she talked of how she wasn’t weaving.

We both spoke of becoming writers.

She talked of Milo, her boyfriend, and I imagined him dark, tall, sophisticated, sleek. And she had dinner with Salvador Dali who wanted to paint her.

Milo, the gallery, her model friends were in one world, and she kept me in a separate one. I wanted my life to flower. I wanted to be rushing to parties, and I was not. At all. She was, but on the other side of the partition, and I couldn’t quite figure it out – why I was not invited -- and answered those questions by not asking them.

She gave me a pair of earrings made of lapis lazuli. She named the stone as if it were magic as she handed me the small box in the tiny restaurant. I treasured the small blue stones. I treasured too the cast-off dress she gave me – not because it had been hers but because it really was a wonderful dress – blue and loose and long and flowing.

I was mad at her the afternoon we walked through Soho, her actually walking into the clothing stores that looked like art galleries, trying on cowboy boots that cost 100s of dollars while I wondered how to make $10 last the weekend.

I loved her face – the high wide cheekbones, the narrow blue eyes that became slits when she smiled. And I wanted my camera to capture what I saw. She stood for me once, dressed in black leather jacket, by the window of Jeffrey’s empty apartment where I was camping out. She stood by the window as I held up my mother’s 35mm Exakta, the one she had passed on to me, and I hoped for a rich black and white portrait of this face I loved to look at, and I printed two shots on 8x10 paper – one where she is looking at the camera like a model, and the other where she is laughing and blurry. Neither was what I wanted exactly.

She wrote to me two years ago, an email. There it was, her name in my inbox, as if I had always known it one day would be.

We spoke on the phone. When we hung up I knew I would not call or write again. What was it? A cold cold wind on a barren wasteland – somewhere between the words and what she said, the allusions to things that again cost more money than I had ever seen, her presence a place I knew could not give warmth or nurturance of any kind.

FIRST BOUNCE

Ann’s hair was short, thin, brown and straighter than straight. Her hair seemed to spring from one central point at the crown of her head to form a sort of cap.

Her name had no “E” at the end to fancy it up. Just plain Ann.

Her face was eager and friendly. We met during my first week of boarding school. She asked right away during evening playtime if we could be best friends and I said yes, not thinking about it very much. I would never have said no to such a request. That would be mean.

My dorm was down the hall from hers. I had been assigned a small room with two other girls, our single beds lined up under the eaves, and an older girl to watch over us, sleeping in a bed near the door.

The next day Ann told me with delight that she had jumped up and down on her bed shouting, “I’ve got a best friend! I’ve got a best friend!” and I was surprised. The event had not been so special for me.

But Ann and I remained an official couple for my three-year stay at St. Mary’s. 

She told me with pride that she came from a place called “the Lake District.” She spoke of it often enough that I could not imagine her coming from any other place.

During school breaks when each girl disappeared to wherever she had originally come from, Ann and I plus our small circle of friends wrote to each other long, long thick, thick letters. I sent mine off and waited for the responses, deliciously thick fat stuffed envelopes that the mailman pushed through the brass slot in the white front door, letters that plopped to the floor in the tiny front hall with its black and white checkerboard floor, perfect for playing Jacks.

My friends and I were Olympic-level Jacks players.

Back at school, in the evenings, after dinner and before bed, we were let loose, crowds of us in the long, high-ceilinged hall to play. Children ran, played tag, hide-and-seek, house – clumps of girls, each involved in its own world.

First we played Addams Family, a game I had been playing with other friends back in the States. But now we were onto something much more grown-up: Jacks.

The satisfying weight of the jacks, swept up with one hand, or flipped elegantly to the back of the hand then back to the palm, as the other hand caught the ball on its first bounce. It was a game to become proficient at, one we played night after night – Ann, Nicola, Lucy Ann, Madeleine and I – with possible visits from second-tier friends, sitting on the floor, each girl taking her turn.

Until Lucy Ann upped the ante, bringing a new game back from the holidays. Stones.

No rubber ball in Stones. Just stones. Stones gathered from outside. In Jacks you had the leisurely time of a rubber ball that would touch the floor and bounce back up to be caught. A stone, tossed in the air, had to be caught before it hit the floor, while some acrobatic was performed with the other stones, the other hand.

We climbed on board. After all, Lucy Ann had brought this game. Lucy Ann was my real favorite. Her face was unusually pretty, like a doll, and her singular talent, setting her apart from anyone I had ever known, was her grown-up singing voice, louder and more confident than anyone else’s, sounding like an adult’s. But it wasn’t just the prettiness and the voice, she was the most interesting, the one who saw movies during school holidays like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, movies my parents would not think to take me to. Her parents were divorced,. Sometimes she was with her dad, sometimes with her mother. She had an older brother. Her life at home more adult-sounding than mine. 

So I pushed to master Stones, but Stones was not a good-natured friend like Jacks. Stones had a harshness to it, a feeling of having to grit your teeth, but there was no going back. I had to keep up. 

A WRITING CORNER

I am here now, alone in the quiet of a Monday morning, not going with everyone else to work. I’ve pulled myself off the track and now there is nothing else except the white walls of my room, the white shelves that came from my parents’ house, holding mostly books from college English classes – poetry collections that span a few hundred years – Dante, Milton – the thick book of translated Japanese poetry with the picture of the sunflower on the cover. I like my collection of paperbacks. I don’t open them all the time, but I like having them there, steady companions, reminding me who I am, what I want.

I sit at the white wooden desk that my mother got for me as a child. I have a manual white portable typewriter you can carry around in a grey case, inherited from when my mother tried to teach herself to type. It types in small, cramped pica type, not the fuller Courier that most typewriters use.

I am here on W. 91st Street up on the fourth floor, and it seems like the right place for writing.

I don’t think too much about how to pay the rent. Maybe I can learn carpentry. So many artists have interesting off-the-map skills. I want one of those. Being a secretary is the worst thing I can think of, but this is what I have always done for cash.

I help two women clean up their apartment. They have been living together as a couple for 20 years and are splitting up. They have grey hair and I can tell they like me for my youth, energy and prettiness. I work mostly with the one who is moving out, she is the more quirky of the two, the one more at a loss. The one staying in the apartment has something tidy, organized, academic about her, a collection of ancient clay figurines from archeological digs lines her long window sills.

The one I help is an artist of some kind. She tells me about two carpenters she knows and I ask if I can apprentice with them. They are two young men doing fancy cabinentry in wealthy apartments. I tag along a few times, sanding, bored, I quit.

I do write a little. I describe the walk I took in Van Cortlandt Park, starving for greenery, taking the subway as far out of the city as it would go. I describe the gentle rain, the pencil-yellow leaves on the path, the abandoned car in the woods, the angry woman in the black tee shirt who glares at me as she passes.

This writing thrills me.

I move into a smaller room in the apartment to lower my rent and then when Natvar, my yoga teacher, the man who runs the school I go to three times a week now, the man who greets me with a huge smile every time I arrive, where I sit and drink tea after class with the same group of four or five who listen to Navar’s stories – when he says wistfully that he needs someone to rent the back room, I volunteer. It will be even cheaper than where I am now, and I will be helping him.

WINGS

My father’s voice on the other end of the phone, sounding serious and strict, telling me, no, don’t quit that job, but his voice is far away and I am going to quit this job. I was so extremely happy yesterday morning, striding down Broadway in my sneakers and flowing blue skirt, so sure and excited – yes, I’m going to quit this job, this office, this desk, this path to nowhere, and I’m going to freelance, do odd jobs, and sit down every morning and write. I’m going to live in New York City in my square, high-ceilinged corner room and every day I will write – something, I don’t know what, but surely something will come.

My father does not respond to my excitement. His voice is heavy and stern. No, do not quit that job. And I think again how silly he is.

In high school I gave him a copy of Babbitt. I’d just read it for English class and I thought it described my father, or at least that part of him that was ordinary and worried about things that didn’t worry me.

My father told me stories for years and years, stories of the bombs in Budapest, living with other families from the apartment building down in the basement, stories of him sneaking back upstairs with his friends to play records and dance.

His stories though are not real to me, not as real as this office I will leave in two weeks. It feels good to just walk away. “Why?” asks my boss, sitting at his desk when I tell him. He is a nice man, round, tubby, grey-haired, Irish, who originally wanted to be a ballet dancer which of course was not allowed, nor was being gay, but he was gay anyway, with a young handsome boyfriend called Andy. “Why?” asked Patrick.

And I really tried to answer him, tears coming into my eyes with the effort. Something about this life where the bookcovers had to please the salesmen more than anyone else, something about how if I stayed here I’d be doing the same thing for 40 years, over and over in a tiny world of editors and publishers – it felt claustrophobic and middle-aged and bland. I didn’t say that. I said something with the word “meaning” in it.

I remembered what another boss had said to me. “All editors originally wanted to be writers.” I must not let that happen to me. And my sneakers flying down Broadway promised me it would not happen, and my sneakers flying down Broadway kept me far far away from my father’s desperate voice, “Don’t quit that job. That would be a big mistake.”

AT THE DOOR

Steve is at the door of our one-bedroom cottage. It is night. He has shown up here in L.A. from New York. We haven’t been in touch. He was a blonde boy in New York who never tried to kiss me though I wanted him to, and now he is here at the doorstep, blonde pony tail, saying can he crash for the night?

Jeffrey, my boyfriend watching TV on the couch, doesn’t know Steve, and, knowing Jeffrey, doesn’t want to.

“Hold on,” I say to Steve. “Let me check,” and I lightly close the door.

This is not how I want to be. I want to be the hippy chick whose door is always open, who has friends who can show up any time. This is who Steve thinks I am. This is who I have professed to be. But he has never seen me with Jeffrey.

“Who was that?” Jeffrey glances up, his head bent over the long blue ceramic pipe, inhaling as he holds a match to the bowl.

“My friend, Steve,” I say. “He’s in town from New York. He needs a place for the night.”

I don’t have friends, especially friends that count. My friends, like my family, don’t count for much. Jeffrey’s do. He likes his friends from college and high school. He likes his sister, his father, stepmother, that whole crowd.

But my people seem shabby. Not bright, sophisticated, not quick-witted, not wealthy. Not from Manhattan.

“Well, tell him to get a hotel. There’s plenty of them up on Hollywood.”

Maybe I push back and forth a bit, but it doesn’t matter.

I have to open the front door and step out onto the small terra cotta porch and say to Steve, “I’m sorry, but I can’t put you up, but I can give you a lift up to some hotels nearby.”

Jeffrey has said this is normal. “You can’t just show up and expect—“ he had said, and so I am hopeful that maybe Steve is in the wrong and it’s okay and normal to send him to a hotel.

And I do it and he is gone and I try to just believe everything is all right.