INTO THE WATER

When I was little and we went as a family to the beach my father would leave us to go on what felt to me an endless swim. I watched him walk down to the water, hitching up the navy blue swimming trunks that my mother, never a craftsperson, had knitted before I was born. The swimming trunks had no elastic and always needed help. I watched my father’s black head of hair advance into the waves, through the crowd of people squealing, jumping and doing normal things, and now he is swimming, purposefully, past everyone, out, in a straight line further and further and further than anyone else even thinks of going, my father, now just a black dot, disappears from us into an expanse of time so long I lose track. He is gone. Until, later in the afternoon, long after I have not forgotten but become absorbed in 100 other things closer at hand, he returns, water streaming, a laugh of pleasure on his face.

SUMMER SAX

Last week some time one evening when the windows were open I heard the sound of a saxaphone. Someone was playing a sax – I was pretty sure it was a sax -- somewhere nearby. I felt like I was in a movie: soft evening summer light, the sound of a lonely saxophone. It played no real melody, but you could tell it could if it wanted to. It went on for about 30 minutes, someone making something up as they went along, plaintive and sweet as I washed the dishes as quietly as possible.

Maybe it’s that guy who lives next door, I thought. For the last year or two or three I’d caught sight of him in his yard; and then one day during the winter he came to the door, introduced himself as Norm, said he lived next door, and asked us to clean the snow and ice from the end of our driveway because his wife was having trouble negotiating it with her wheelchair.

Maybe it’s Norm, I thought.

This Saturday morning I was pulling out of the driveway and I saw Norm with a small white dog at the end of a retractable leash making his way through his yard. He walked with a cane, awkward and bent over though he is not elderly. I stopped the car, got out and approached him.

I began with a wave. He waved back. I asked him if he’d been playing the sax the other night. “Yes,” he answered, “who are you?”

“I’m Marta,” I answered, “I live next door,” and I pointed.

“Oh, yes, yes!” he said, brightening, remembering.

“Your music was beautiful,” I said. “I felt like I was in a movie, hearing it.”

“Thank you,” said Norm. “That really feels good. Thanks for letting me know. I used to be a pro, you know, played all the time. But now, well, life is full of chores.” Here he paused and untangled his dog’s leash.

“Yes, it is,” I assented. I had to agree with him. Life can sometimes feel very full of chores.

“Listen,” he said,” “I’ll tell you a story. I used to have a tenor sax, but I lost it about 10 years ago.”

“You lost it?” I asked.

“Well, I sold it. I needed the money. “  And immediately I saw his ill-health, his wife’s. I saw the need for money, had a sense of what he had been through. Here was a person who had been up against it.

“So I played a lot of wooden flutes, Indian flutes, things like that. Then last year my daughters got together and bought me an alto sax, and it’s like I got my soul back.” His voice and his face were elated now as he spoke. “Thank you so much,” he said again, “for saying you liked my playing.”

LONG AFTERNOONS AND NO EVENINGS

I answered an ad in the paper and got the job, secretary to Larry who sold advertising in the yellow pages. Larry looked exactly like you’d expect him to: mouse-colored hair, wire-frame glasses, a tie clip. He had his own office. I had a desk outside and so did Roxanne who was the receptionist answering the phone and polishing her nails. I typed Larry’s letters. He didn’t have too many of them. In between I wrote a story on a yellow legal pad about a man who lived alone and pasted pictures of girls on his walls and how the pictures whispered to him.

When I was 14 in school I had written a long story about a man in solitary confinement. The man with the girl pictures was similar, both people who were completely alone and going a little crazy. 

Working for Larry was my first full-time job. We had just gotten to LA and moved into the cottage in West Hollywood that Kerry, Geoffrey’s glamorous older friend, had found for us in advance.

The cottage had lime-green-and-white shag carpeting in every room including the bathroom, yellow linoleum in the kitchen and mirrors pasted on one of the bedroom walls.

I didn’t have a car. I was the only person in LA who didn’t have a car, and I would never have one because how does anyone buy a car? Geoffrey has his Uncle Elliott’s castoff Mercedes, a big box 4-door that we drove cross-country in. Geoffrey doesn’t have to work because he’s on the payroll of his fathers mail-order jewelry company and gets a check for $80 every week.

So he stays home. He is sleeping when I get up and put on my black pantyhose and skirt, when I walk the two blocks up to Sunset Boulevard in this Los Angeles city to catch the bus.

I am always glum. I look out the window on the way to Larry’s office and every single thing is wrong – this job, me a secretary while my talented boyfriend stays home to write screenplays on his self-correcting IBM Selectric, an instrument I never would have thought a person could buy and have in their own home. Geoffrey’s sits on the heavy wooden desk we bought at the Salvation Army and placed two feet from the end of the bed against the wall.

At the other end of the bed, behind our heads as we sleep, is the full stereo with turntable, top-of-the-line dual cassette recorder and Geoffrey’s big puffy black headphones. 

We came to LA because Geoffrey wants to be a film director. He likes to write screenplays about good-looking witty people who have affairs with each other. I read his screenplays and always feel like I could never be friends with his characters, or that they would never want to be friends with me. I don’t really know why Geoffrey says he loves me. I am not likes the people he likes though I try.

I hate not liking myself and I hate hating my life. I hate Larry’s office. One day he calls me into his office and gently, without a reason, fires me and I have to fight hard not to cry in front of him. 

I continue to live in the white cottage that stands in a shady line of identical white cottages, across from a line of identical white cottages, a cement walkway in between.

I go on to the next job, this one a little better because at least we are creating books. I answer the phones at Fotonovel. Fotonovel takes stills from movies and pastes in bubble of dialog. The guy in charge is very handsome, remote, wealthy and stylish and I recognize his girlfriend form my college back east, but she and I don’t speak. I sit across from the artists, people just a little older than me who have their own windowless offices and do the paste-up. I admire them their title.

One night I sit in the living room at home. There is the brown Salvation Army couch and the color TV and coffee table and the blue ceramic ipe in the shape of a wizard. There is the TV Guide that Geoffrey has gone through, making everything he wants to watch and tape, and in a blur of tears I am cutting my hair without a mirror, just cutting it off.

Fotonovel fires me too, and I hold my tears this time until I get to the stairwell where I run into Steve, one of the artists I have not dared to speak to. I blurt out that I’ve been fired and my tears show and he only looks at me. He doesn’t know what to say so I keep moving down the stairs and into the bright summer light of Sunset Boulevard.

New Dog

The weekend is just about over. Sunday afternoon, a chill entering the air. It was so sweet and warm today. I took Bird up to the Comeau for the first time. On the leash, which is something Tamar did not need and I will have to get used to it. But I liked it, the leash. Suddenly leash-walking is in. Just this afternoon I read something from a woman I respect who lives near the Comeau, asking that everyone obey the leash law – she doesn’t like being bounded upon by unleashed dogs, and she says people are always calling  and calling for their lost dogs. 

That’s what I was doing a couple of nights ago and there aren’t many things worse than not knowing where your dog is. 

Bird has now been identified as “a runner” and she will be on a leash for a long time, maybe until she is an old lady years from now. But for the time being she is our new dog and it is such new territory. 

Getting Tamar did not feel so traumatic, so seismic a shift. I notice how committed both Fred and I are though. We really love her and want this to work. It made me so happy last night to wake up in the dark realizing she had clambered up beside me. She spent the night at my side, sharing the bed. She was a thoughtful sharer of space, willing to shift when needed. 

I love the colors of her fur when I look closely, the browns of her head, like wood, soft subtle hues. And this afternoon I noticed that the tip of her tail is almost red. She is a beautiful palette of browns. 

YOUNG NIGHTS

This morning, driving to work, the radio on, a song begins. I hear the opening chords and immediately relax. I don’t recognize the song, but I recognize the tone. Perhaps, I think, it will be a boring song, a mundane song, one that is embedded in my past, but too familiar to be interesting. Still, something in me settled down deeply, with pleasure, as if into an old familiar armchair. This was not going to be a brand new song I needed to pay attention to to see if I liked it. Nor would I have to endure a song I didn’t like much, or turn off the radio to silence one I hated. No, something was coming that my body knew I loved. 

And then the voice came in. Of course, Van. Into the Mystic. 

And I am transported to the cocoon of bed and night and Geoffrey then. 

We do not go to bed without music. In his apartment there must always be a soundtrack. For sleeping, he makes special tapes. The wrapper he makes for them is of lavender construction paper with the songs of Side A typed in a column on the left, the songs of Side B typed in a column on the right. He types the title on the spine, then cuts the paper with scissors to fit perfectly into the hard clear plastic case. There are many lavender tapes, and many other collections, all typed, titled and color-coded -- red for loud rock, blue for softer.

The lavender sleep tapes weave a soft web.

I listen as we fuck every night in the sheets we rarely wash. They have a comfortable familiar scent, the smell of New York City apartments that have been lived in a long time. The same with the nubby electric blanket. 

Into the Mystic, Van’s voice, Madame George – these endless strings of soft, warm sound carry me beyond where I am. I yield to those songs so easily in the dark. These nights with Geoffrey’s body so natural to mine, so easy to fall asleep with, his arms with no ambivalence around me, his body under me, still inside, my head fits his shoulder perfectly. And Van sings so long, so far out into the night without boundary, far enough away that we all stay lost till morning. 

AT HOME

My father sits at the restaurant table. It has a creaseless white linen cloth. The white linen napkins are large and starched. The cutlery is heavy, polished silver. The glasses shine. The waiter stands like a soldier at my father’s elbow, gently pours a small amount of the red wine into the globe. My father sniffs the wine, swirls it and sips it, then nods his assent. Not once does he argue with the wine. It is always just as it should be.

When guests come on a Sunday afternoon, they are people we do not know, a man and his wife from my father’s office. My father directs me to pull out all the tiny green weeds growing up through the white gravel path that leads to the front door. He drives to the Eidelweiss bakery in the Bedford shopping plaza and buys pastries. Sometimes he buys a few new glasses, a bottle of Johnny Walker, and my mother receives these things in the kitchen as an affront, as unnecessary, a waste of the money we don’t have.

After the lunch my father insists though that I play the piano for our guests. I pull back, I say no as politely as possible, sure that the guests do not want to hear my clumsy playing, but my father does not give up.

I do not enjoy my weekly lessons with Miss Spottiswood who does not enjoy them either. I might enjoy them if I practiced in between lessons, and I leave each session with Miss Spottiswood intending to do just that so as not to repeat the awful hour of plonking through what I have not looked at since the week before. But after each class I let the next day go by, and then the next, and another week disappears on me.

I do not play anything well.

If there are no guests, my father likes to have each daughter one by one stand on his knees while he holds their hands, bouncing his knees in time to a Hungarian song about a circus pony. The song gets faster and faster, you shriek, you lose your balance, my father catches you. Everybody laughs.
Usually the house is very quiet, each person by themselves.

On the back slope that leads down to the road are a few scattered evergreens, Christmas trees from years past that my mother has planted. Also there is a small azalea bush that my father gave me for a birthday. It was covered in flowers that night when he crept up the attic stairs after I had gone to bed and left it on the top step. My mother planted it on the back slope, which remains an ignored place. Not like the front of the house that my father tries to make look like something.

Often on weekends he dives into the woods opposite the front door with a lawnmower, telling me to pull out patches of brambles. I do as I am told though I want to stay up in my attic room listening to the radio. I can complain, but not completely cross my father. I must do what he says. And in the evening he and I will dress up and he will drive us into the city to Lincoln Center and we will glide into the crowd, the only time we are in synch, gliding up the red velvet stairs.

I want to like opera, but most of it is unintelligible and not meant for me. Still, I am happy to be somewhere, to be in New York. My father has a small smile on his face, pleased with the surroundings and with the pastries we order at intermission.

“A park!” he says to me once about the woods back home. He wants the woods to look like a park.

My mother despairs when she sees him with the lawnmower. “He runs over half my plants,” she laments. “He doesn’t know the difference.”

There is my mother in the kitchen, in the house, in the garden, housecleaning, making bag lunches for my sisters and me, making three meals a day, easy simple meals but never missing one, reading the New York Review of Books, a novel – Dickens or something from the library. This is what I see of my mother’s world. 

My father’s world is his new Ford sedan, is his subscription to the Metropolitan for Saturday nights, is his whiskey and soda on the rocks at night (or cheap wine) with classical music on the Fisher stereo and Somerset Maugham or Iris Murdoch as he sits in the living room in an armchair in lamplight, the narrow French doors closed at the bottom of the stairs, the rest of us upstairs, each in a bed.

“You ruined my life!” I hear my mother cry out one night in the living room. I had heard her get out of bed and go downstairs and knew a fight was coming. My father’s tones never match hers in the late-night fights. It is always her voice that makes the fight, his that tries to tame it all back down.

And in the morning my mother is still distraught, her face creased with pain. I have never seen her carrying the fight over into the next morning. I suggest perhaps she just leave. It seems that this would solve alot of things. We are standing in the living room. “But you kids are all I have,” she says, and I am disappointed. Nothing is going to change. 

BLACK CLUES

Now and then, at really aimless moments, I still look for a trace of Geoffrey on the internet. There is nothing except some comment he made on a Bob Dylan fan site almost 20 years ago. Otherwise nothing.

I am not so stirred as I was 10 or 15 years ago to look him up. No, I won’t do that, but I do think of him from time to time and wonder what his life is, who did he become.

I imagine him alone in the large family apartment overlooking Washington Square, the same place I occupied as a 20-year-old in the 70s. The computer world no doubt suits him, its anonymity, its lack of need for any real contact.

I have even wondered if he was a threat to his two young nieces, born after my time. I have seen Geoffrey’s sister’s profile on Facebook – a lifeless profile, so constrained – and seen the profiles of the two adult daughters. Even from this great distance I can tell that one is more troubled than the other.

I remember Geoffrey liking white cotton underpants and small breasts and I have made the leap to wondering if what he really wanted was a little girl. 

In those harsh summer months back in 1977 when he had started his out-in-the-open affair with HB, a writer much older than either of us whom he’d met in a writing class, I took to reading his black and white copy book journal that he kept in the bottom drawer of the tall black bureau brought from – and still smelling of -- his childhood apartment. 

I read Geoffrey’s awkward stick-figure handwriting, pages of it, looking for clues to who he was, always with the approach of admiration. Geoffrey was an enticing mystery to me then. I wanted so much to enter and be at home in his world. I’d been trying for years. Though sometimes I gave up, preferring my own world more and more.

In the journal I read of a memory of his of being a child and being in bed with an older boy who showed him how to jerk off. Something like that. Sexual. With an older boy. He had never told me this story.

In the margins of his journal he wrote here and there: Hi Marta.

I used to dress in white tee shirts, no bra, and Levi’s, no make-up, long hair parted in the middle – it was how he liked me best and how I felt the best too. 

His sister, who is now a shrink in LA, was a provisional friend. First of all, the two of them were so tight I had to find a way to fit in.

During the first few weeks of meeting this new boyfriend he took me to his childhood apartment where he’d lived all his life. The apartment was in disarray, its three occupants all moving on – Geoffrey, his sister, their mother. His sister was on her way to college. She sat on her bed amidst half-packed suitcases as the three of us hung out, Geoffrey and her making jokes, me trying my best to be part of this circle I was so new to. Part of the challenge was that his sister did not have a shirt or a bra on. She sat on her bed, folding laundry and chatting with her large breasts fully exposed. 

I could sense that Geoffrey liked her toplessness for the coolness it implied and I did my best to take it in stride. 

There was a lot of laughter between Geoffrey and his sister, as if they could not be together unless they were laughing and I learned quickly how to crack the right jokes when I was with them to earn my keep. Much of their banter came from Geoffrey teasing her. Much of it came from her picking up the thread and teasing herself before he could get to her. Geoffrey was the prince of his family: the smart Ivy League boy. She was the girl, more plain of face, assumed mediocre though hard-working, who would have to fend for herself. Even her eventual PhD would never be able to compete with what we all took to be Geoffrey’s natural talents. 

Once Geoffrey’s mother, long and far removed from his life, a chain-smoking alcoholic from and living in Mississippi played a tape for me of Geoffrey as a little boy. He was saying, “Toy, toy,” and the grown-ups were laughing and saying, “No, Geoffrey, that’s your little sister.” “Toy, toy,” he kept insisting.

When I first met him – me 18, he 19 – he was so much more in command of his life than I was, a life with so much more contained within it – divorced parents, a stepmother, a stepbrother, a half-sister plus New York City apartments, a house in the Hamptons, possessions, friends. I had none of these things, my life so contained by my small family and its poverty. 

All I really had was reading and the dream of writing. Geoffrey already had a typed manuscript, a full novel. It didn’t matter that I didn’t like his book, that I didn’t like that he chose the title by lining up a few phrases that he liked the sound of and asking me to pick one. I chose “Pure Effect,” slyly giving my comment on the content. But he had written it. And he liked it. And I couldn’t write anything without tearing it up.

Then he was young with a quick tongue and it was all going to happen for him in the future. And now we are in that future and I am pretty sure it has not happened for him. I imagine him in shadow and alone with no more youth to protect him. Everyone else really did grow up and get a life. Geoffrey never thought he would have to. I imagine he still laughs at the expense of others and keeps the steel chains across his character and history firmly in place, making him dangerous, vicious and someone I now know better than to go near. 

TOO DARK TOO SOON

My mother says that my sister will go to Hungary in the spring to visit our aunt, my father’s sister. Uh-huh, I say, blandly, and don’t think about it again until tonight when I am driving home in the dark and the rain, railing against the black heavy curtain that falls like lead in the middle of the afternoon. Early darkness has never bothered me before. I thought back to London in the late 80s, just this same time of year I was there, walking every day through parks, looking at everything with pleasure – the colors of wet bark and brown grasses, noticing that the days were short – “the sun goes down before it comes up,” I quipped – but it didn’t touch me the way these fall days do, and I rail against what can’t be changed and feel like I am in prison.

You can spend half the year in the other hemisphere and have it be summer all the time – it’s not the cold that bothers me, it’s that impenetrable darkness that says, “It’s over.”

We brought a little black dog home last week and after naming her and really thinking for 24 hours that we had a new dog, we realized we could not sail the rough seas of bringing a new and young dog into our home. And so we gave her back. I like to think she had fun with us – a couple of long walks in the woods, a wonderful time digging up the foam cushion in the window seat, and working it out with the cats. We had to give the little black dog back, sheepishly. That Sunday, surrounded by dogs who needed a home we had wanted to take two, but they had rules against that, and then even the one had been too much.

We plan a trip to Florida, a place for which Fred has had nothing but scorn ever since I’ve known him. “The two worst writing topics,” I’ve heard him say, “are ‘money’ and ‘Florida.’” And now we find ourselves planning a trip there because for several years we have said we must go South and get some heat in February, and year after year we don’t do it. I haven’t been serious about it for one thing, but this year it seemed crucial to me. Mostly, I want it for Fred.

We scour Florida for a place we can stand – all the other options are just too economically challenging – and yesterday we think we find it, and today too it has held, despite inviting people on Facebook to talk us out of it, no one has, despite alternate suggestions. It appears that we will go to St. Augustine, which promises to have art, architecture, and personality, plus the ocean, plus a state park.

It was while talking to Dinah last week that I put it into words. Up till then the working plan had been to drive through the Florida Keys, but walking with Dinah, my friend since 1969, with about a 40-year hiatus until the Internet reunited us, I could bring to speech things that were floating in my thoughts without form.

“I want a cottage by the ocean,” I said, “and I just want to stay there. A place with our own kitchen, and the ocean right there. I want a place to rest, not a week when we are moving the whole time. I’m not tired, but I want some stillness.”

I can say things to Dinah that I don’t say to anybody else. I only see her every few years. She lives in New Zealand. This was our first visit when it was just her and me, and it made a deep impression. It meant a lot to have her here. I think we have a lot of love for each other. It comes as a surprise. When we were 13 and 14 we were in the same foursome, but we were not official best friends. We each had an official best friend, but these were arranged marriages, marriages of convenience that could not be cut asunder. I think I knew that I liked Dinah the most back then, but I couldn’t act on it for fear of hurting her best-friend-spouse and mine.

We talked about it last week for the first time, almost shyly. It was her determination to track me down that got us back together. She just spent five weeks traveling through England, Scotland and Scandinavia, seeing people from her past, not willing to let these bonds go, and I know I was – though it scares me to say it – pretty high up on that list.

When she boarded the bus for the airport in the dusk I got back in my car and burst into tears, and that loneliness comes back from time to time as the days go by.

It’s strange these tears, like the tears I still cry for Tamar who I miss so much. I don’t understand these things. I’m not much of a crier normally.

At 4:15 this afternoon I tear myself from the poisonous computer screen to walk in the dusk and the light rain, fast, and I think of how I used to walk in London, how the darkness didn’t bother me then, how I was living on pure fantasy then, a make-believe romance that sustained me for months.

TAKEN BY SURPRISE

Last week Polly said how she had only just now really noticed that Tamar is not in the workshops anymore. “You must feel bereft,” she said. I do. Very much. In a way I have never felt before.

I have never really grieved before. My heart has not been touched by death like this before. And part of me can hardly believe these feelings are real.

We had Tamar for 10 years. It seemed like almost no time at all. I walked with her a thousand times on the Comeau property, the stretch of woods near the house and often I thought how one day I would have to survive her dying, but no matter how much I steeled myself to be ready, even when she was just three and four years old, it seemed distant and unreal.

Although her time with us feels like a snap of the fingers now, it was enough that she is still embedded here. When I step in the front door I expect her presence, when we plan a trip to Brio’s I automatically think three of us are going, and when the room gets quiet for writing she is for me especially absent, her warm black form. No head on my foot.

I have never in my 57 years cried over someone’s death. And one or two thoughts of Tamar can easily do it.

I have dreamed of her three times.

Fred and I both feel ready to invite another dog here. I do dearly want another dog. It will help, not to forget Tamar, but to let life keep moving.

Even on her last day, a Friday, when I knew it was her last day, it was impossible to take it in. I cut the grass, I gave her a raw egg to eat, I asked Maritza, who came to clean, to please go back home, and for the last 45 minutes I sat with Tamar as I read a book. When it was time to go to the vet she tried to elude me, going to her green cushion. I had to pick her up, go against her will. But she had become that way about most car trips.

As we drove down the curving road of Sawkill, I watched her in the mirror as I always did. She sat with her nose near the open window. As a young dog she used to stand and hang her whole body out the window as we drove. Lately, it had just been her nose. But I was happy that she was not suffering too much not to still enjoy the fresh air going by.

I avoid places where I went with her. Yesterday Fred and I were near Colgate Lake and I was relieved that there wasn’t time to even talk about going there even though I don’t remember ever going to Tannersville without visiting Colgate Lake. I haven’t been to Big or Little Deep either.

I remember about 5 years ago driving with my childhood friend Dinah who had come to see me after 40 years from New Zealand. Dinah had had a younger sister with Downs Syndrome, Catherine, who had not lived past her 20s. “What happened?” I remember asking Dinah from the front seat, she in the back. I was hungry for information. The three of us – Pauline was there too – all friends from the same time and meeting up for the first time as adults, had been talking like girls at a slumber party – non-stop about everything.

“Oh, I can’t,” said Dinah, and I heard the catch in her throat, though Catherine’s death was probably 25 years in the past. But I thought Dinah was different than me, soft-hearted Dinah who still mourns her mother and now her recently deceased father.

Part of me is relieved that I am not so tough after all, part of me is suspicious of my almost daily tears. Sometimes I just cry and say I want my dog back, and I know part of me still wonders if I didn’t time it wrong, call the vet too early – though I know I would do the same again.

OUT THE DOOR, Part One

I stood on the small porch that we had never used as a porch, only as a way to get from the cement walkway to the door. It was a spread of terra cotta, supported by two round white pillars, all of it set down in a small forest of unfamiliar almost-tropical California greenery.

I was leaving. It was morning. I was leaving the little house, Los Angeles, California, my boyfriend of forever. I was slipping out almost without having to say, at least to the boyfriend, I am going, we are breaking up finally forever. Neither of us really believed it though I hoped so much that someone would take his place and thrust him into my past. But we were saying good-bye as if I were going on a trip.

I stood on the porch and he stood in the doorway. We had come to L.A. and California and this house together, three years earlier, the little house with the wall-to-wall shag carpeting, stick-on squares of mirror on the bedroom wall, the Salvation Army furniture, the round piece of stained glass hanging in the bedroom window made by one of his two closest friends. It was one of Jeffrey’s most prized possessions and he’d broken it one morning, throwing a shoe in fury as I left for work.

Kelly and I went to work together each morning. She was blonde, wore a white nurse’s uniform, smoked, lived a few cottages down with Bobby. Boyfriends throwing shoes was normal to her.

Fighting with boyfriends, love and hatred, seemed to be natural companions. You couldn’t have one without the other. Kelly and Bobby confirmed it. Their fights were noisy and crazed too. The fights, then the making up, then a little bit of calm. That was love.

I had left the little cottage almost a year ago, moved across town in the middle of the night on the wave of a slamming-door fight, going to an apartment building I had picked out a few weeks earlier, going there and staying there and even sleeping with one or two others, but still it did not feel that we had fully separated. Though life was very different in my own apartment, a place where on Sundays I went to art galleries by myself, trying to find art that I liked, and never finding it, but always looking, always trying to see what others must be seeing. 

And in the apartment I was able to have a friend over now and then, always new friends, women I was hoping would become friends and they did though the friendship could only go as big as the short time we’d known each other. 

One woman with strawberry blonde hair came and talked on my couch about the baby she had lost from crib death. I listened, I sympathized, though I had never heard of crib death and did not know anyone who had had a baby yet. Still, I felt at home with people who were sad.

Buf came to this apartment and with her I laughed and got high and baked granola though there was always in our friendship something we could not ignore. She was Jeffrey’s sister. She, getting her PhD. In clinical psychology, liked to try and nail me. “You only want to be friends when Jeffrey is not around.” Both she and Jeffrey liked to nail you to the wall in the name of truth-telling. No,” I’d say, but she was never convinced and neither was I. 

I wanted my life in the furnished apartment with the Murphy bed to be perfect, with weekends filled, a new boy in my bed, but these were hard things to accomplish.

I had my camera. I had a black-and-white TV that sat on the floor near a mirror, propped up also on the floor. Wearing my favorite oversize black sweater, my long hair hanging down, I took pictures into the mirror, but didn’t like them much when they came back from the printer. 

And I took a several-week course in masturbation and had my first orgasm alone in the Murphy bed. This counted mostly as something I could report to Jeffrey, something I hoped would raise me in his esteem. So I was making progress, I thought, I must be. Though it did not feel like it. 

I liked Rose downstairs who ran the place. Ancient, in a housecoat, her hair dyed red, always with a cigarette going.

The only other person in the building I met was the boy next door, clearly a Jeffrey-replacement candidate. I sat beside him on his bed one night, probably smoking a joint. “I’d like to make a pass at you,” he said. I deflected him then, feeling like I already had a boyfriend, but returned on a night when I felt like I didn’t. I spent a half hour in his bed before returning to mine. When he asked to store his skis at my place I said sure, but when I left the apartment – leaving L.A., leaving California, leaving Jeffrey – I did not tell him I was going. I wanted him to lose his fucking skis.

HIGHWAY THOUGHTS

My father always said I was Hungarian. My mother didn’t claim me in this way. To my father it was very important that I be a proud Hungarian like himself and for many years I followed his lead, being the daughter he wanted, sure that he knew what was best. And because I sensed early on that he didn’t like my mother much, was not proud of her when in the company of others, I followed suit there too, hyper aware of my mother’s social awkwardness, committed to not being like her ever.

That was one level. On another level she was my mother, always present in a way my father never was. My mother almost prided herself on being, what she insisted on calling, a plain person – not flamboyant, not terribly interesting or talented. That's how she would describe herself. As a plain person she did plain things, took us ice-skating in the woods on a pond, cooked plain suppers of hot dogs, mashed potatoes and boiled broccoli. The things my mother provided were plain, but they created a solid world that my father only highlighted here and there with a trip to the opera or a blue velvet dress.

In boarding school at night – 9 years old – it was my mother I wanted, not my father. But that was only at night. Mostly, I didn’t want any of them.

Driving home this evening I thought of the card I came across the other night, something my father had written to me a few years ago, something about wishing me well, sincerely. As I drove down 209, past Kingston, I wondered again why his love for me didn’t get through, didn’t get across, and why I was so angry and disappointed in him even years after his death, that I can’t soften up.

I thought of how hard he made me work. I wondered if I’d had a kid if it would have been any better. Everyone says how hard it is to be a parent, and I see it everywhere. But I couldn’t, as I drove, really believe that if I were a parent I wouldn’t find a way – maybe just once or twice – to be with my kid, to get across to them that I supported them, that they could count on me. Something, a moment, where I wasn’t asking for anything, just being with them.

My dad’s words on the card sounded almost anguished in their sincerity, as if he were trying desperately to let me know that he wanted me to be happy.

Was it too late? Had he already convinced me that I wasn’t what he wanted from a daughter? Because I could see the image of the daughter he had in mind as clearly as if she were real, and though I styled myself on her I also had many things she did not – she only had a few dimensions, where I was an actual person.

My father wanted a sedate picture-perfect family – wife, children, life. He had ideas of what he wanted and all of us – mother, me, sisters – were much too messy to fit into the Christmas card reality he really thought was possible.

CHRISTIAN'S MONEY

I was driving when he texted again. I glanced at the solid block of words, got the gist, kept going. 

My mind was made up. There it was. I could practically see my mind and its certainty. The answer was no. You cannot have your money back. I don’t believe you. You’re bullshitting. No.

He wanted his $500 by noon. Otherwise, he said, “my ass is grass,” meaning that he’d be in trouble with his new landlord.

So why did he come asking for the money only last night, why had there been no response to our letter last week saying that we would not return his security deposit? To at least partially compensate for the FedEx package he had lost that contained Fred’s newly repaired hearing aid. 

Fred wanted to just hand the money over and be done with it. And the night before I had finally grudgingly agreed though the idea of giving that man $500 threw me into the kind of extreme emotional turmoil that reminded me of how I used to feel 35 years ago during fights with Jeffrey.

I had said ok, had driven to the ATM, taken out the $500, brought it back, put it in an envelope, placed it on the table, held in place by the small solid ivory Buddha that is always so handy for holding things in place. Then I’d gone into the bathroom and cried for a moment as though my heart were breaking. Fred was doing the dishes, letting me be in my world while he was in his.

I sat down to my computer, came upon an email offering a workshop. I read the description, my interest growing. Everything was fitting into place – the teacher, the subject, the date, the price. I hadn’t signed up for a course in anything for years and years. The prospect gave me joy, gave me a feeling of moving forward, away from this struggle over $500, over what was fair.

On the wave of this surge I signed up, clicking the keys all the way through.

And in the morning, driving to work, when one more text came from our ex-tenant I ignored it. I had promised Fred that if Christian wrote to me again I’d refer him to Fred who would give him the money, but yesterday morning I did not want to. I had thought I could but I could not. “You need the money, my ass,” I thought, thinking of this child-like man, playing the part of a poor man, playing innocent. I didn’t want to contribute to his theater production.

And all day I hardly thought about it. Things with Christian often disappeared of their own accord. He forgets from one day to the next what he has said. Maybe he would storm our house that evening. Just having the money there, should I change my mind in his presence, felt like enough of a conciliatory move.

He did not come last night. His dramatic noon deadline came and went. Good, I thought. Perhaps it’s done. And we didn’t have to give in to him.

I lay in bed.

New thoughts came into my mind. I watched them. Nothing really to do with me. New thoughts arriving, like mail.

He believes he is entitled to that money. He’s not trying to fool us, steal from us, he sincerely believes it. Money is filthy. I am fighting over money. It is polluting. Better to give the money than run the risk of being wrong over this. He is a child, a middle-aged child. He should be willing and eager to compensate us for the hearing aid, but guess what, he’s not. Losing the package was an honest mistake, not something he did on purpose.

I get up. I find Fred. “I’m having new thoughts,” I say. Fred is eager to follow this path. It’s what he has wanted essentially from the start, though his reasons feel a little different than mine. I don’t argue these fine points.

I text Christian that he can come the next day for the money. I don’t apologize. Part of me wants to, wants to be present when we return the money, wants to do full penance, but I follow the natural pacing that I feel is almost being dictated to me. And there is too a sense that I can only wash myself as clean as the circumstances I have created will allow. 

LAST NIGHT

I have the evening off. Fred is in the living room, his headphones on, leading the telephone workshop and there is still some light left in the day, though it is cool, not a pure summer night, but an evening with just enough summer in it to call me outdoors, to leave the dishes behind and just walk out into the evening.

I have always loved to do this in summer, to wander into town after dinner when it’s warm and still light, but this summer it became almost an addiction.

Tonight I walk more quickly than usual, hoping to get to Taco Juan’s before it closes, which it does whenever the string of customers dries up which could be early or late. But if I can get there on time I can get an ice-cream. I don’t even really want an ice cream tonight, but I want the goal and because it’s been an integral part of so many evenings in the past. There is something about the cone that rounds out the stroll, and so I rush along, aware that I am missing half the joy of my walk because I am not pausing to look in shop windows, I am not savoring the air, not taking it all in. I am rushing.

I see a light up ahead at Taco Juan’s that gives me hope and as I approach I see the heavy manager/owner guy sitting outside on a bench. He has grey curly hair and glasses. You can still see the youth in his face, but I don’t know his name and have never seen him smile.

“Thanks for still being open,” I say, hoping to open some kind of friendliness with him. “Don’t be so sure,” he says, so that my ice-cream anxiety returns and I worry that though the door is open and all the lights are on, the person behind the counter might still turn me away.

She’s a nice woman behind the counter. She appeared towards the end of the summer, not one of the kids, older, motherly, warm. Her hair is bound back with a scarf. A small boy ahead of me asks for Caramel Cream and as she goes to scoop it for him she asks him if he likes that flavor and solemnly he tells her yes.

I get my Killer Chocolate scoop and go back out into the evening. Now I can move slowly. I feel the warmth and familiarity of this street, this small piece of town. There are not many people out, and I follow my usual path off on a sidestreet to Family, a shabby building with a front porch. I wander in. Family is just a nice place to go. You can look at the books being given away, inspect the dishes to see if something is so pretty you have to have it. Tonight no one is sitting on the plastic chairs chatting with each other or the people manning the phones, or even just sitting in silence. I look through the clothing but nothing catches my eye. It is a place of treasures and trash and sometimes I get lucky. Most times I don’t, but it makes for a good game.

LOOKING UP

I sit on my father’s lap at the kitchen table, facing him. It is evening, after supper and it’s just him and me. His face is large, more square than round, up above mine. I bend my head a little to look up at him, his eyes, laughing eyes, are cast downward to meet mine.

We are playing a game. My father points to his eye and I try to remember the Hungarian word. Usually I can’t remember and he must remind me, laughing, though I like it best when I do remember. Then he points to his nose, then his mouth. Some of them I can always remember, some are hard, like ear and neck.

Hungarian people come to our house sometimes. They are my father’s friends, mostly, that my mother has made friends with, sort of. My mother is always on the edge of these small parties in our living room where the men wear suits and the women wear skirts. They drink drinks and talk in Hungarian and if I am lucky Robert Major, who has grey hair, will do coin tricks for me. 

Sometimes I sit amongst them, looking at the way they across their legs. I look at my own legs that stick out straight when I sit in a chair. I would like my legs to be adult enough to at least bend over the edge of the chair. I try crossing them anyway.

My mother is the only one who does not speak Hungarian so sometimes they speak English. My mother is learning Hungarian from a book and she tries out phrases.

I would like my mother to blend in better somehow. There is a way that things could easily fall apart and my mother is the fault line, the place where the seam could break. If she could be different, part of the other side of the fault line where my father lives and where things seem to be bright and move easily.

She would be less serious. Her face would be younger. She would be more girlish instead of often wearing shorts and sneakers and kneeling in the garden. She would not pull leaves off bushes as she walked to chew on them.

Then my father would laugh with her and she would laugh back, maybe everyone in the room would laugh and look to her for the next joke.

But is it not like that. My mother sits on an arm of the couch while the others chatter. This is not her place like it is my father’s place. Her place is out in the woods.

One morning my father tells me how the night before, when it was dark and I had gone to bed, he had waltzed one of the ladies all the way down the driveway.

He tells me the story with the big smile he has when he is pleased with himself – happy and proud of who he is and how nobody else is like him. He waltzed another lady – of course not my mother. Of course, someone else.

And all the way to the end of the driveway. He did this. No one else even thought of doing it.

His eyes are focused outside the house. People beyond us get his attention. He does turn back and gaze at us – me, my mother, my little sister – from time to time, but my mother is never dressed right and my little sister is a duplicate of her, on the edge and shy. Then there is me, and him. His eyes light up as they meet mine and make me feel that I can do the things he does. Maybe. Almost. If I am to hold his gaze. 

FRIENDSHIP UNRECOVERED

My friend, Ruth, whom I have known for almost 40 years, texted me this morning, saying she is sad for her father who died this week, and sad for herself for no longer having a living father.

And I am up against the quandary again, of having felt no sorrow when my own father died 3 years ago, no tears for the person who was the center, the shining light, of my first years.

I wonder about this over and over. Once, my father wrote to me during his last few years, asking to be more in touch. “We used to be such good friends,” he wrote.

This was only true when I was a little child. It was true until the time he and I were out on a walk, a common thing we did together. Since I was a little kid riding on his shoulders, my father had taken me with him on long weekend walks, walks that always felt much too long, my feet hurting.

My father always talked on these walks – telling me the history of Napolean, or how the Germans and then the Russians came through Budapest, about the bombs, or about how when you went to visit someone in Budapest before the war and they were not home, you left your card with one corner bent over. 

There were certain things my father loved, and bending the corner of a visiting card was one. The visiting card itself was another. The things he loved usually involved other people, or Hungary, or Switzerland. They were customs and habits from other places or things other people had said. They were never things here at home.

On this day he was talking about the Pope and my father asked me a question. Not an unusual question, but I did not like the feeling it gave me. I didn’t like that I knew I had to answer it in a right way, that my father was waiting to assess my response. So I just shrugged.

“Come on,” said my father with restrained irritation. I was letting him down.

I was about 12 for this conversation and it never went back to the way it had been.

It was always a mix after that, a mix I did not know what to do with except to pretend it was not there. 

Suddenly I noticed I did not like my father coming home on weekends, his arrival  an unwelcome interruption, the way he poked his head in at the door of my mother’s room where I was watching my weekly show. No, I did not want to talk to him right then, did not think it was funny when he made fun of what I was watching as if anything I was doing just for fun proved I was stupid.

I did not like him coming into my room to look over the pictures from magazines that I’d cut out and pinned to a big piece of burlap, the way he scrutinized them, making some flat joke about the women being prettier than the men while I knew he thought the whole thing incomprehensibly silly.

He asks me to help him clear the woods on the weekend. It is a few years later, a different house, and my father likes to clear all the woods behind the house – to “make a park” he says with excitement. I don’t want to turn our woods into a park. I want to listen to Bob Dylan, but I must go out and labor beside him or pull weeds from the path of pure white gravel that leads to our front door before the guests arrive.

And though I know I am still his favorite company over my mother, over my sisters, and though I still look forward to our Saturday evening trips to Lincoln Center, dressed up, as soon as we are in the car alone I feel the wall rise up, the way it rose up when he asked me a question on that walk when I was twelve, and I don’t trust him, cannot speak to him beyond monosyllables because I know he wants more from me, always more, and it makes me feel like not giving him anything. It is the only way I can give voice, or at least a little voice, to this anger that is not allowed. 

Anger, especially around my father, is not allowed. It’s one thing -- one of several things -- my mother gets wrong. She gets mad at him, at us, she yells, she loses it.  We tiptoe around her so she won’t explode. So I must not explode. That’s for sure. At least I can please my father that much. It’s one thing I can master to his satisfaction: to smile when I am furious.

NEEDLE AND THREAD

I don’t sew. Not the way some people do.

I can make no sense of patterns

or the machines that look like they will sew your finger to the table.

But I sew.

Buttons and hems, a rip in a sheet.

Not often, but when I do

there comes a gentle softness of simplicity

and memory.

Sewing a button today and

I am six years old

prick-prick-pricking the needle up from underneath

in blind search of a hole.

Convent needlework classes

taught me things I still own

like the tidy 3-point stitch just for hems

and the deft move that lands a knot right at the end of your thread.

I do a small repair today,

bringing out the sewing box I assembled

a couple decades ago at the beginning of some new life,

and I am sitting in the garden in Athens

hemming linen napkins

pretending to be invalid to stay out of the fray.

I am glad for this consistency of sewing.

Each time I return

It is the same.

They might say boys should sew their own buttons.

OK.

But I would miss this corner of ability and accomplishment and peace.

There are three little girls next to the buckets of fresh flowers out on the street. Two mothers are talking to each other, oblivious to their offspring who are equally oblivious to them, playing a private game that involves stamping their feet. They are wearing dresses and I already have pulled out my phone, am calling up the camera function impatiently, dying to photograph flowers, dresses and small stamping feet while appearing to be doing something else, which is not so hard with a phone as it used to be with a full-scale camera.

I only get one shot of the little girls, not really the one I wanted though maybe tomorrow it will look better. As I continue walking I keep the camera function operating, and unobtrusively point it towards the people I pass, pressing the button as casually as I can, never sure that I have gotten any picture at all, let alone a good one. I feel a twinge of guilt, taking people’s pictures without them knowing, but reassure myself that I do them no harm, and the fun is too enticing to refuse.

My mother had cameras when I was a little girl and a darkroom in the room nearest the bathroom. I was used to cameras and the light meter she held in her hand before every shot.

In high school I pulled off the shelf The Family of Man, a book of black and white photographs from around the world, mostly of people unaware that they were being photographed. I kept the book in my room, unable to put it back. I loved every photograph, every face – some in pain, some laughing, faces caught in motion.

I took the high school photography class, the first place that felt like my place. I still felt shy there, and could not speak, but I was not scornful like I was everywhere else. My mother let me use her Exacta. I started out trying to recreate photographs I saw in my head, was always disappointed by the results that never matched what I saw inside, and learned quickly that I liked my photographs better when they caught something unexpected.

Still, how to capture people’s beautiful unaware faces in the street? How to get pictures like in The Family of Man? It was scary, pointing my camera in public. I tried stopping people and asking if I could photograph them. That was better than nothing, but not really what I wanted. 

I couldn’t afford a zoom lens and was jealous of my friend who had no trouble photographing gangs in Alphabet City. 

A few years ago it came to me. I started wearing the camera around my neck and just pointing it at people as they went by, taking a chance on what I’d get. And I started to get pictures that excited me. 

And now with the iPhone it is even easier. I never had more fun than I did last weekend, taking these pictures on the streets of Manhattan. 

(And then I kept thinking of more photos I wanted to show you -- made myself stop. But the last 3 are from 2010 in Venice, Italy). 

WORRY

I have not been in a small private plane before. I have not been with a rich boyfriend before who can invite me to Southampton for the weekend, a place I have not heard of. He says we will fly there from Manhattan and that it’ll take about 30 minutes. He is a kid like me, but it is his father’s house and his father’s arrangements that include the plane. I pretend that this is no big deal but I am nervous, and I hate that I am nervous. Not nervous about the plane. That's nothing. Nervous about being with these people who are not nervous about anything.  

I like the way my new boyfriend looks – especially his long dark curly messy hair. And he’s a writer. He’s written a novel. Already. I am out of my league, but any boy who is not my old high school awkward gangly boyfriend makes me feel out of my league. I feel out of my league with everyone actually.

Jeffrey was in this summer’s writing class that I only signed up for because my father wanted me to take a class at his favorite college. The writing class met once a week around a seminar table in a basement with tiny windows along the tops of the walls, giving us a groundhog’s view of cut grass. 

I noticed Jeffrey during  the second session when he kept catching my eye every time the group broke into laughter. I’d laugh, look up, and there would be that boy’s brown eyes, laughing like everyone else but looking straight at me.

A few weeks later and he has written to me a single-spaced two page letter on crinkly white onion skin that says at the very end “I love you” – words so precious I am immediately afraid of losing them. Words given to me by a boy I have noticed for his pony tail and the interesting cotton smocks that he wears, smocks I have never seen before and wonder where he gets them – he has said these magic words though we have only spoken once or twice, like when he mentioned that novel after class. A novel. He’s written a novel. How did he do that? How does anyone do that? How will I ever be able to do anything like that? 

The house in Southampton is a mansion with a circular drive, and people who all know each other, family and friends of family. Jeffrey, this brand new boyfriend, who says he loves me but it is hard to believe it, feels at ease here. 

He laughs as we stand outside in the dark, talking to a boy named Eric who is Jeffrey’s stepbrother. A stepbrother. A stepmother. Divorced parents. All things that my plain family cannot claim.

“How are you?” asks Jeffrey to Eric, who responds, “Stoned,” and Jeffrey laughs. I do too, happy to be with people who smoke pot and know where to get it. Jeffrey has plenty of pot, and a bong to smoke it from. He also knows how to have sex. I have been looking for a boy who can take me across, and Jeffrey has, in my mother’s double bed when the family was away, under the framed photograph of me as a two-year-old – and of course I did not tell Jeffrey this was my maiden voyage. He must not know. 

For I am his third sleeping-together girlfriend. He’s already had two, and mentions their names easily, telling stories from time to time, laughing – already he has so many lover stories and I have to let him assume that Bob was an appealing ex-lover too.

“How are you doing?” Jeffrey asks during one of the Southampton weekends. “Me and Jane used to play the Truth Game. It means you have to answer the question and say the truth.”

We are sitting on the bed in the well appointed bedroom we’ve been assigned for the weekend. Jeffrey sits cross-legged, barefoot, in tee shirt and jeans. 

It’s come up before, this truth thing, this saying the truth. It seems to be part of having a real boyfriend who says he loves you.

I can’t say how awful it felt to play backgammon when he is teaching me and winning over and over. I can’t say how bad it felt to sit with him and his sister as they made each other laugh while I just guessed at what might be the right things to say.

But this time I do say something. I say I’d like to leave. With him. To go back to the city.  “Really?” Jeffrey is taken by surprise. “Why?”

I’m not sure, I say. 

“Well, ok,” says Jeffrey, “but you better tell my father.”

I had not expected this, had not realized there would be protocol, but what do I know of families and mansions and weekends? 

I tap on the door of the room that Jeffrey’s dad and his wife share. I have been here before. Have sat on the king-sized bed with Jeffrey as the family banters – but now it is just Alvin. In this family you call the grown-ups by their first names. 

“What’s up, sweetheart,” drawls Alvin, hardly looking up. He is a small man, sitting on the bed made by women, leaning against the headboard, his legs extended, watching television and smoking. He wears an ironed button-down shirt and pants with a crease. 

I say apologetically that although it’s only Saturday afternoon I’d like to go back to the city.

I don’t say how much easier it is to be with Jeffrey by myself, that that’s when I like it best – when it’s him and me in that Manhattan apartment, littered with Jeffrey’s childhood but where no one lives anymore, where we can walk up First Avenue in the middle of the night for an ice cream sundae or a hamburger in a coffee shop or into a movie theater in the afternoon – all things I have never done before.