WELL BEHAVED

My sister and her husband say how they have hired a Feng Shui consultant because they know their house need something, but they didn’t know what. the consultant has made a lot of suggestions like changing the floor boards to a lighter wood. It sounds to me that what they really have is an interior decorator. I have never known why anyone would hire an interior decorator. It still surprises me when my mother, father and two sisters turn out to be so ordinary.

When I moved into the sparse little cottage after the ashram I called up a Feng Shui person, a devotee that everybody swore by. She came. Said I should paint my front door green and put mirrors in the four corners of the ceiling of the basement because it was really bad to have a garage under a house. A certain plant by the computer and a bowl – a white bowl – of salt.

I did all these things, even buying some cheap mirrors at the local drug store and climbing up a ladder and sticking them somehow to the fucking ceiling as if it were a spiritual practice, as if not to do these things would signal a failing, proof that I wasn’t serious and didn’t deserve good things.

Yesterday afternoon Maurice called to say that in the process of upgrading my computer he had accidentally erased my entire email program. Next to my writing, the most valuable thing on the computer. “But Sally did her intuitive thing and says it’ll be alright,” he said. “Bullshit,” I thought. An hour later Sally was still insisting that my mother lode of addresses would reappear. I heard her insisting in the background as he said, “Well, she isn’t usually wrong, but she sure was this time.”

Four young white mothers have gathered beside me in this café, each with a wriggling hardly-walking toddler. They talk about what foods each kid is eating. I hear something about “avocado diarrhea.”

My mother. Can I hate her? It seems utterly taboo, but I am drawn to this area as if it were the place on the other side of a wall I can’t see over.

I hate her for not having been a happy person, for having been so beaten down even before I was even born, a woman completely defeated who had decided the best way to survive was to not ask for much.

I’m not allowed to hate her. It makes me go to war inside. On one side: hatred. On the other: the voice that says I should care for this poor woman who is so gutsy and outspoken and cute.

But she wasn’t that for me. When I was little she was the one who said no, you can’t be pretty, you cannot be a success, you will not make it, how could you? These things were not allowed for me and now they are so foreign to me I cannot invite them in for you.

In my head she protests, says she always thought I was special. And I can imagine she did, back in some frightened crevice of her consciousness, but she had to make me normal to fit into her everyday, to make me someone she knew how to talk to.

And my father I hate with a rage that makes me scream at him to leave me alone. I rage against the years of his cloying presence, his assumption that he was welcome.

I have not written to or called him for several months and have not heard from him either. It feels easy. The other day, putting mugs away in the cupboard, I imagined the call coming from my mother. How will she put it? “Dad died this morning.” I feel ready. At peace. A thousand voices rise up, telling me this will not last.

The four mothers talk to their wordless babies in voices that rise up in swoops. “You don’t want to go hoooome??” The baby cries and struggles not to have its coat put on, but of course mother insists. “It’s not usually this hard to get her to leave!”

My mother. My mother. My mother. I looked at audio books today. It soothes something to imagine giving her a present. I could hide behind that. If I had money I probably would. I didn’t today. I knew it was extra, over the top, hiding something.

My mother sitting alone in her living room. Eating alone, by the window. I can remember feeling this way when I was nine years old, being left at boarding school. I had to be careful. She could be hurt so easily.

BLEAK STEPS

There was school up on Broadway and 116th St., a place of classrooms, lecture halls, papers due. There was Broadway itself between 116th St. and my room on 107th. I ate in the coffee shops, cheap falafel places.

It is dark. I am by myself, hungry, not wanting to spend money. There is a boy in one of my classes, very handsome, dark curls, not football-popular handsome. His face is sweet but there is also an air of the outsider about him, something uncertain and quirky that makes me imagine he might be for me, I for him.

I don’t talk to him or anyone in the classroom. I don’t know the teacher. I have been a student here for over a year, but don’t know anybody really. School and anything to do with so-called “campus life” seems embarrassingly infantile. I never go to anything I don’t have to go to, always ignore the pink flyer on the noticeboard about a “mixer” in such-and-such hall, always leave the campus as quickly as I can to merge into the city.

But then it gets very quiet. Alone walking down Broadway, hungry, eating something where it's cheap, going to the tiny dark room in the railroad apartment where three or four other people live. I thought moving in with a bunch of people would give me something adult and exciting to be part of, but it’s an apartment where residents rarely see each other.

I know if I go down to Jeffrey’s place there will be bright lights on in the living room, the color TV will be on and the twin towers will be lit up on the other side of the living room window. Jeffrey will be on the couch, using a wide flat book as a counter on his lap, skinning chicken with a pair of scissors in his left hand, holding the long blue ceramic pipe in his right, inhaling the smoke deep, holding it in long, laughing at the jokes on Mork and Mindy. The lights will be on in the bedroom too where a record will be turning on the turntable by the unmade double bed, the big puffy headphones thrown down among the sheets, a tape silently turning and recording the song.

All that is there but it’s one of those nights I’m not going down. We’ve had a fight. Something. There have been a lot of fights lately. I am staying up here in this part of town, my part of town. It feels a thousand miles away. I pretend I don’t feel empty. I pretend I like it up here.

If I could just spend the night with the boy in that class, have some kind of falling in love with him, it would help a lot. Jeffrey has a lot of people. He even has Harriet now. He stays with her one night a week. I haven’t met her, but I know she’s a writer. She writes actual paperbacks. And she’s old, in her thirties, with a kid.

Thinking about her makes me feel like I’m standing on the edge of a bottomless crater. I want to jump in and die.

After class I say something to the boy, something so that we are walking down Broadway together. We go to the falafel place. I look like a girl with a friend.

As we are eating I ask him if he would like to come to my place and spend the night. I don't tell him there isn’t room for two in the tiny room, but there’s the living room.

He says yes. We walk up the stairs. I unlock the front door. We step into the narrow corridor. “No,” the boy is saying. He is looking down the hallway. We have hardly stepped inside. “I can’t stay after all. I’m sorry. I have to go.” And he is gone.

If I tell the story to Jeffrey, I will be casual, say something about how this guy almost stayed over, but had to leave. It won’t matter to me.

I will be left with the grittiness that I don’t know what it is that covers everything I touch and don’t touch, that at best I can ignore here and there when for a moment it seems to blow away, but usually – especially alone – it accumulates in mazes of huge dark piles I can't find my way out of.

GOOD COMPANY

Windows on the World. The restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center. I was there once. It could have been any fancy restaurant. It was lunch with my father. I was dressed up. I looked forward to these meals with my father. I could order anything, the waiters would pretend to be servants and we would pretend to be rich.

I was almost done with college. College. One deadline after another stuck between temp jobs and the dagger-and-shark landscape of being with Jeffrey.

I was more or less living with Jeffrey in the fancy apartment looming over Washington Square Park that his father paid for where the TV was always on in the living room and rock and roll was always blasting from the stereo. Jeffrey – if he was up – would be making dinner, making a tape, smoking pot or on the phone. He made dinner every night, sitting on the couch with the TV, using a broad flat book on his lap as a countertop, only going into the kitchen to actually use the stove. His food was delicious, loaded with butter, sugar, cream – whatever it took to make it taste good. Vegetables forbidden.

Most of the time it felt a little like home. I stayed most nights, leaving when we had a screaming fight with slammed doors, but I always came back after the burst of relief that seemed so real disappeared on me. My alternative to the gaudy place over Washington Square Park was a tiny dark room – a bargain at $50 a month -- the first room immediately to the left of the front door in a railroad apartment with three or four other people, no one I knew. I had hoped I’d come to know them, had hoped that this apartment on 107th St. that I found through a noticeboard would be some kind of hub of busy people with full lives and friends that I could merge with, but it hadn’t turned out like that, just a bunch of people who met once in awhile over the sink in the kitchen.

The first chapter of Jeffrey’s novel took place in a girls’ college dorm. One girl comes out of her bedroom where she’s just fucked some guy. She starts talking about it all very casually – plenty of jokes and laughter – with the three or four or five girls who are all hanging out. When I read that chapter I was a virgin. I didn’t have friends that I could imagine talking about sex with, not in any honest or casual way. I didn’t have friends period. Not really. Not like the ones in Jeffrey’s book.

Last night when Betty McDonald, the jazz violinist, said something from the stage about being a hippy in ’69 – weren’t we all? she laughed, and a lot of people in the audience nodded – I thought about myself then, how I hadn’t been a hippy. Not a real one. I came along just a little too late, but I didn’t know that then. I thought if I just looked hard enough I’d find the hippies and join them on the beach. As I sat in the darkness last night, my eyes closed, riding the unpredictable flow of the music, I thought of being sixteen and hitchhiking alone from Michigan to British Columbia, down through California and back across to New York. For the first time I thought about how I hadn’t told anyone of my plans. There was no one to tell. I didn’t think of the trip so much as of the girl up in her attic room, thinking it all up by herself.

In Windows of the World my dad in a good suit, looking fresh and energetic, chooses a table by the window.

My father says somewhere between the roast beef and the apple pie that since I am almost done with college I should now think about helping him to pay for it.

Oh. Okay. I murmur. Nod. Chewing. Yes. Thank you. Swallow. Great lunch. The check. The coats. My father kisses me. and returns to his office where, if anyone asks, he will say that he just had lunch in Windows of the World with his daughter who is an English major at Barnard. Lovely. And I go back to wherever I came from.

MUTTERINGS

New at boarding school, I was nine years old in a convent for the first time, in England for the first time, away from home – first time – the English I heard around me from the other girls was sometimes almost like a foreign language that I struggled to keep up with.

I am walking outside on the school grounds in a crowd of girls – we are being shepherded from one place to another – and I hear a girl somewhere behind me say, "stale buns for tea."

Immediately, I say to the girl next to me that the buns we had at tea that day had been stale.

I have noticed that other girls complain sometimes. It seems sophisticated to me to complain out loud. It doesn't come naturally to me.

It doesn't take long to learn that "stale buns for tea" is an English-girls-boarding-school idiom, meaning: "old news." It has nothing to do with food and has to be delivered dripping with scorn.

This morning I said something to Fred about how the only thing I have wanted all my life was to be a writer. He said something like, "Well, you've always wanted to be yourself, and it takes the form of being a writer."

I had just said something about how all the things I did for my parents and sisters – the character I played for them to keep them happy – the cheerful spinster – none of it made any contribution to my writing.

I am almost not playing that role anymore at all and I have much more of my own life.

I imagined my mother telling my sisters that I haven't been good lately. "Bim's being bad," I imagined her saying to them over the phone. She would say it sort of as a joke, but the message would be there.

And I imagined my two sisters in California getting angry that even though they have let me off the hook for so much, I am taking more.

I listened to my mother's voice mail yesterday. She had left it two or three days ago, but I waited awhile to listen to it. I haven't done that before.

My mother sounded a tiny bit crazy, a little bit desperate, wanting me to be in touch but not saying so. She almost sounded like a lonely little child.

I sent her a card this morning. I didn't say too much in it.

I read Alice Miller as if I am drinking water.

I sat on a couch in a café this afternoon, reading Alice Miller who is a psychotherapist who writes about the importance of the child, how parents – even those with the best intentions – wound and traumatize the child. I read this stuff, wanting very mch to re-enter my own childhood which I used to think was very available to me and now I begin to realize how most of it is walled off.

I feel a little silly reading Alice Miller in this café where on one side of me a young Korean man plays noisy video games on his cell phone, and on the other a guy talks into a phone, saying things like, "Well, what does he DO that he has so much money?"

I also read a few pages of A Sentimental Education. I had looked forward to a few hours of reading and writing, but somehow I am not sinking in deep.

I look up Alice Miller on one of the computers the café offers. I don't know what I am looking for. She has a section on how to find a good therapist. "Ask questions," she advocates.

And I think how, over the phone, when I made an appointment with a therapist for the first time a few weeks ago he asked me, "Do you have any questions?" "No," I had said. "My friend's recommendation is good enough."

But it wasn't and after three sessions I stopped seeing that guy. But how impossible it was for me in that first conversation to ask him any questions.

I saw bits of Monster In A Box, a Spalding Grey monologue, the other night on TV. At one point he's describing himself meeting a new shrink and I got this impression that Spalding didn't enter the new shrink's office like a shy child, but as himself, a full-grown man to be reckoned with. If this thing with the new shrink was going to work the shrink would have to make an impression just like anyone else Spalding came across. I liked that. When it comes to shrinks, so far, I've been fairly good at being vulnerable. Not so good at having any confidence in my own impressions.

HOSPITALITY

To update my blog I get in our car, our beat-up VW that we bought four years ago when we re-mortgaged the house at a runaway interest rate and secured $18,000 in cash that we spent on fixing the roof, getting an above-ground oil tank and $2,600 went for the 1989 VW Golf with about 85,000 miles. It was a big step up from the little Metro that I'd bought for $1,800 when I was leaving the ashram and they let me plunder ahead of time the small savings account they made each of us maintain, a certain amount from your monthly stipend deposited there automatically so that whenever you finally left the ashram you weren't penniless. I remember when that rule came into being though no one else ever made the connection out loud.

She lived next door to me, a short woman with large-framed glasses and greying brown hair in a non-descript cut. Her face was scarred from acne. She had a tomboy quality, always dressed plainly. She was generally good-natured as far as I could tell and worked somewhere in the bookstore warehouse.

She wasn't a close friend, but because she was on staff like me and not part of the glamorous flock that went on tour, accompanying Gurumayi around the world, but one of us who stayed behind and made our way through the Catskills winters, someone who, like me, showed up for the big Saturday projects like planting trees in the rain or chopping massive amounts of vegetables in time for a celebration – she felt like family, someone I always said hi to.

A year or two after I moved in she got a cat somehow. Maybe a stray. She kept it in her room, which wasn't allowed. She thought somehow they'd bend the rules for her. After all, she'd been there so long. But they didn't. The struggle went on for several months until she gave in and found a home for the cat. She called the cat "L.D." I don't remember what "L.D." stood for.

It was such an upheaval – those months of resisting the administration – that the guru deemed it was time for her to go out into the world. The guru sent the message even though the guru was in India at the time. It came as a shock to all of us who traveled on the shuttle with her every day, drank chai with her at five in the morning on our collective way to the Guru Gita chant before breakfast, passed her in the dining room three times a day. Like hundreds of others, she was part of the décor.

It took a long time for her to leave because she had no money. I think the ashram ended up giving her money. After that the savings account rule came in. Heaven forbid they'd want you gone – especially someone as odd and unuseful as this woman – and they got stuck with you.

NEVER KNOW WHERE

I open up any Alice Miller book, anywhere, I can never read her page after page, but it works well to open up one of her books and read a few paragraphs at random. I feel immediately in good company. I haven't had this exact experience before with a writer.

Alice Miller writes about the abuses that every child experiences in one form or another. She doesn't try to reduce their importance, but to pay a great deal of attention to them. She writes as a professional observer, but imbues her prose with empathy. You know, as you read, that she is seeking to know for her own sake.

Her writing invites me to think beyond the safe fields I've been staying inside until now. Several months ago when I was hit by a strong depression that seemed to come out of nowhere It was her books that provided the first comfort, not because they had any rosy aphorisms in them, but I think partially at least because what she writes about is mysteriously relevant to me right now and provides some kind of needed release. She paints a new landscape of possibility and I step into it as easily as if I already lived there but didn't know it.

I went to see a therapist about it, but he didn't seem too interested in these things, as if, yes, of course, talk about them if you want to but I don't think you'll get very far. He wanted to press on my meridians and open up the blocked channels, and when he pressed they did feel blocked but afterwards I realized slowly that I wanted to be with someone who was interested in those landscapes I had started to discover. There seems to be something very important for me there, something so taboo that the moment I have an excuse to drop it I do, like being with a friendly professional with a good rep who doesn't see much point in it, who makes me feel like an overly verbal intellectual.

It's a weak spot of mine. I've been accused of being too much in my head and it always sounds right. I'm touchy about it. But you know, I think I'm onto something and I'm going to keep at it. Somehow. I hope. I'll open up an Alice Miller book and see what happens.

For the last few years I didn't buy books. I didn't think I could afford to and by most reckonings I couldn't. I don't make New Years resolutions but one came to me spontaneously this year. Fuck it, I was going to buy books again – not second-hand ones over the internet, but a brand new one now and then.

I looked through titles for half an hour in our little local bookstore, an independent survivor, before finding the one I wanted. I didn't look too closely, just enough to sense its possibilities. It was a memoir called LISTEN.

At home, the first three pages were perfect, all written in her mother's voice as heard by the narrator. I read this book slowly. Usually, when I find a book I like I gobble it up greedily even as I know that the faster I read the sooner it will be over and I'll be book-less again. This one I savored, shutting it every few pages. Partially because the writing was not so facile that it slid down that easy, it was intense writing, serious – all of it first person, all of it telling while exploring a real story.

It becomes a story about a father and a daughter. And incest plays in the background. It's not center stage. You could even miss it if you wanted to.

When I finish I write her an email, saying how much I liked her book and why. And then about my own tentative steps into uncovering incest in my own life. I sign off and put at the end my blog address with the implication that if she wants to she can check it out.

I don't hear back from her.

"Bitch," I say to Fred. To make him laugh.

While cleaning out my spam yesterday I catch sight of her name. Quickly, I fish out her email and see it was written the day after I sent mine. She is appreciative, has read my blog, says I gave her some ideas she hadn't thought of.

I forward the note to Fred and don't think about it too much. Hours later Fred comes in. "Boy, you really connected with that woman!" he says. "Did you see what she said?" I have rarely seen him so excited.

Once again, I guess, I have overlooked something, made it smaller than it is.

NOVELTY

The shrink on the phone, the one I called tonight, thinking I'd get his voice mail, but no, even though it's after-hours he answers, but that's okay, I don't mind talking to him. I say how I can't make Wednesday's appointment, which isn't true, I can make it but I don't want to, but then I add how – and I think this is a very decent way of putting it – I don't have "the commitment for this work" and that (pause) I don't think (pause) well, I don't think I'll be continuing for awhile.

I'm expecting case closed, but he says I should come in for one last session so that there's nothing (pause) "fuzzy" left behind.

Okay, so now the conversation is getting tricky, tricky for me anyhow as I watch myself go into hyper alert, trying to make sure I don't get intimidated into short-changing myself, trying to see my thoughts very clearly as if they were three-dimensional so I don't miss anything, trying to manage the cloud of fear that descends as I realize we are pulling in opposite directions.

"I don't feel fuzzy," I say, adding an artificially hesitant tone to soften the blow.

"Well, you and I have a relationship and it's important that there be closure and (pause) that's just how it should be done," the shrink says in his nice Jewish New York earth-father yogi voice.

I'm talking to a shrink, one I've poured my heart out to, though only three times. I didn't want to blow him off, but it's becoming inevitable. I thought he'd say: Okay, it's been great, call me if you need me. And I would have said it was great too and maybe I would have called him the next time I wanted that kind of thing.
So I lie, say I'll call, and the call is over.

That conversation was familiar, someone arguing with confidence, telling me my choice is wrong, that they somehow know better. So often I have believed them and sent myself to jail, to reform school, as if they were right and a little extra punishment wouldn't hurt.

It was all the times he said "should" that clued me in.

Thank god, I thought. Thank god I didn't keep going to him for another couple of years, wondering every week if I was doing the right thing while I made excuses for him.

I woke up early this morning not at home but in someone else's apartment. It was still dark out. I thought I'd try watching some television. Recreational television is a novelty for me. It is seared into my bones that anything other than the high class stuff will kill off cells – Masterpiece Theatre was a light as we got at home.

In today's pre-dawn I found a documentary on Townes Van Zandt who I didn't know before, an acoustic guitar player, singer-songwriter from Texas. He looked a little like Woody Guthrie, gaunt, rough.

The movie was satisfying for about an hour. I liked the part where he says how somewhere along the way he realized he could really do this – play the guitar, write songs – but it would mean leaving everything else behind: family, money, comfort. I liked this picture, leaving things behind so the art can happen.

The doctors told his parents he was manic-depressive and they okayed a series of vile hospital treatments that wiped out all memory of his childhood.

He seemed a tortured person – tons of drugs and drinking. There were clips of home movies of him as a baby, being pushed in a stroller. The family was well off and supposedly happy, which I did not believe. I know happy family photos hide a much bigger reality.


My mother had left me a voice mail when I came back this afternoon after five days away. I saved it to listen to later. I still haven't listened.


When I told the shrink last time I saw him – it was the last two minutes of the session and it didn't have too much to do with where we were at right that moment but I wanted to get it in because it had been so much on my mind – I said how I was really thinking about pulling away from my family, really reshaping the current relationships utterly to my own measurements – but that I wasn't sure. He almost rolled his eyes. I saw a fleeting expression of "oh, here we go, the same-old family hang-ups."

"Well," he said, "let's use your talents. Write up the reasons you want to be in touch, and all the reasons you don't want to be."

My talents? I thought. That's what you think my so-called writing talent is about? Writing lists?


In the movie this morning Van Zandt says how he left his mother behind to go become a musician and didn't call her from July til Mothers Day. "That's nothing," I thought. "I've gone much longer than that many times."

NAMESAKE

My aunt's Christmas card from Hungary, the aunt I am named after, my father's only sibling, his younger sister who in old photographs is pretty and laughing who now is mostly stern and weathered, the older she gets the less she smiles. Her Christmas card, which came because we were just there, it is not a tradition that she sends me a card, her card was mostly about some Hungarian author who, she said, has been translated into English and we should both read him and then we can discuss him because something about Hungarian literature. This kind of thing in a Christmas card felt very familiar -- it's like only giving children educational toys -- you know? Something akin to the work ethic, I think, except what is especially familiar to me here is how instead of lightness, frivolity, warmth -- the kind of thing a Christmas card from an aunt who had been genuinely happy to see you might be an occasion for -- it's used as a little literature lecture, and considered higher quality because of it.

My aunt dresses severely and plainly with no attempt to be pretty, in fact a definite attempt not to as if vanity were a sin she must not commit.

I knew my grandfather had once been a Protestant minister. When you're Catholic, which I was though not as utterly Catholic as some, all Protestants are the same. It wasn't until this last visit that I figured out he was a Calvinist, a Presbyterian -- which I don't know much about but there's not much tolerance for frills and leisure in that church. And I started to see how those tendencies had trickled down through my father to me.

My mother is very no frills. She grew up on a farm during the Depression way out in British Columbia with six brothers and sisters. She doesn't know what to do with lace or fancy gloves or a low-cut dress. So, though my father is one for the parties and theaters and custom-made suits, he thought my mother would be the right kind of person for a wife -- not for a girlfriend, not for someone to get scented letters from, but to build a home with and raise proper children with -- a home and children he could dare show his parents and the people from the office.

When I was eighteeen I found a Playboy magazine in a bottom drawer of my father's rented room at the Yale Club. Which kind of sums up what I'm trying to say. The Yale Club room -- spartan but proper, a gentleman's room in a supposedly gentelman's club with naked chicks tucked into the bottom drawer.

My grandmother -- my dad's mother -- was another severe one. Even though she was Catholic there was nothing Latin about her. She wore flat lace-up shoes, straight skirts and sweaters, again with zero attempt at color or frill. She was a schoolteacher and looked like one though you almost missed it. She had a pretty face and pure white hair that curled beautifully around her face.

My aunt looks like her mother's daughter but she doesn't have those soft white curls, the pretty face that defies age.

Years ago I went to visit my aunt. I hadn't seen her since I was a child and didn't know her at all. I'd been living in Greece with Natvar and Natvar had always liked having current issues of Vogue magazine around. They made him feel wealthy. In Greece Vogue magazines were expensive. So I took my aunt a Vogue magazine. She smiled politely. Now I can't think of a worse present to have given her.

I don't think my father is a natural Calvinist. Perhaps its straitjacket explains some of his inner damage. My father seems very damaged to me, like shards of broken pottery held together with a little bit of sticky tape.

And my aunt makes me angry. She's practically a nun -- I was about to tell you all this stuff, like the crosses in her room, like the Catholic books her shelves are filled with -- and then I remembered her talking about some progressive feminist theologian she was working with and I got hit by a wave of guilt that I was mis-representing her, that I don't know her at all.

Anyway, I think of her angry face that she has allowed to grow ugly, her ugly-on-purpose clothes and I get mad. I don't want her -- and that -- to keep me prisoner.

ELEGANCE

My father drives me into Manhattan in the tastefully green Ford Grenada – four doors, beige interior – as sedanish as a sedan can be – my father who would never think of himself as someone who would drive a Ford sedan, only Americans would do that, people who don't know any better, not like him who grew up in Budapest, who was there while the city was bombed and the bridges spanning the Danube collapsed, not he whose favorite – whose only – dance was the waltz, who listened to Mozart and Beethoven – you get the gist.

Anyway, he drove me into Manhattan, to Lincoln Center, to the Metropolitan Opera House on a Saturday night and while we sat in our theater seats waiting for the lights to dim, he aid that my walking over that afternoon to see Alex, a beautifully long-haired, moustachioed man-boy, was not "elegant."

Quote, unquote.

I don’t remember saying anything. I had perfected the art of freezing up into absolute steel.

What did he know?

What did he know of my dreams about Alex who was the best guy within reach I had seen so far?

I wrote his name over and over in the margins of my note book at school, watching myself do it, knowing I wasn’t quite as lost in the thought of Alex to really justify the doodling of his name but I guess wanting the fantasy so much – the guy, the romance – and this part – the doodling – was one piece I could supply myself.

Alex looked the part but that was about it. For awhile we had some sort of not quite romantic something but he was just a schizophrenic on meds living with his parents. I liked him because he was different.

I was so dying for the right horse to come galloping by and I’d leap on its back and get carried away. I thought it would be easy. You get done with school. You get away from home.

I hated home, but not enough, or I didn’t know enough how much I hated it, how antithetical it was to me. These good people – this noble Hungarian, this something-or-other mother, these innocent sisters, this house – our house. I must not betray any of it.

Something like that.

Though they would all deny it, each in their own way. They would each say that they want me to be happy. Can I just go straight ahead without them at all? Make no concessions whatsoever? I can hold onto this clarity for about thirty seconds.

STRAIGHT & NARROW

My father gave me a manicure set, leather, zippered around the sides, a small pair of curved scissors, something more serious-looking for toe-nails, a metal file, and a few other mysterious tools, each held in place by a leather loop. Fingernails had to be short. I could not imagine cutting my own. A half-moon must always be showing on each nail, my father said seriously, as if to let one disappear would really get you banished from the human race.

He told me things like this in his room across the narrow corridor from my mother's bigger room. His room had a tall grey filing cabinet with our TV on top. It had a table with narrow black metal legs and a dark brown smooth fake-wood top on which were lined up my father's small red stapler and a small plastic cube that held a roll of grey-blue stamps. This table was his desk.

I played there sometimes when he wasn't there during the day. Once I stood at it with a few slices of white bread, cutting them into small circles so I could make believe having Communion, the one part of Mass that looked like fun, to walk up the center aisle to the front with your hands folded in a line with everybody else – all people who were old enough – and then kneel down as soon as you saw an opening at the railing, tilt your head back, stick out your tongue, let the priest put the white disk on your tongue.

I also sat at my father's desk with the book he brought me. All the pages were black. My father had suggested I glue postcards into it. I didn't see much point, but I started to do as I was told, taking the postcards my grandparents in Hungary sent from time to time. I never thought those postcards were interesting – color photographs of churches or buildings with daffodils blooming in the front. My father presented me with the project as if this were important, something that had to be done. It was one of the things he approved of. There were lots of things he didn't approve of.

Chewing gum was pretty much the worst. TV.

Things had to be serious. Though my father didn't seem serious when he was having fun. He looked happiest when other people visited. Then he would talk and pour drinks and eat salami and cheese from the plates my mother put out.
But I didn’t think he would like me to have fun like that. He wanted me to play the piano when the guests were there. I never wanted to, always tried to get out of it, there was nowhere to go. I'd play, plonking through whatever it was the piano teacher had assigned that week.

I knew it was better to read certain books than others. My father said if you started a book you had to finish it and he looked down on my mother because she skipped the paragraphs that bored her. This, in my father's world, was not allowed and further evidence of my mother's shortcomings.

I admired my father for a long time. I liked how he underlined books, even magazine articles – he did not read anything without a pen in hand. I was mystified by what he marked – fragments of sentences, sometimes whole paragraphs. Once or twice I asked him why he underlined these particular words. He liked that I was interested, and that he had baffled me. He had no real answer.

SOME PEOPLE I KNOW

My dad, the sweet old man who deserves a call on Christmas Day. Makes sense that I try three times and his line or the international circuits – I can't tell which – are busy.

I don't think to call him the next day. Well, I guess I do think of it, but feel no pressure to do so. Not compared to Christmas Day anyway.

The armies lined up across from me take the form of the people I love. It feels like love. I love these people: my two sisters, my two parents. Even my sisters' husbands who feel like brothers.

My mother – getting smaller all the time. The little lady with her long white hair pinned up, wearing a soft mauve turtleneck and a bright turquoise cardigan. My youngest sister in nice casual – sort of weekend jeans you see in L.L. Bean catalogs with the nice sweater. She is letting her hair go grey. So is my other sister. Both of them colored their hair for decades but now that they're going grey they've decided to go natural.

I shouldn't get catty. I'm getting catty, right?

I called one on Christmas Eve. We never speak on the phone. Just a few emails a year and a visit or two when she comes East. If I read that description in a magazine I would imagine a relationship so different from the one I have with my sister. It doesn't feel like we are hardly in touch. Though I know little of her day-to-day life I feel like our lives are almost in overlap. I hear her voice on the phone and it's like she's in the room, facing me and I am trying hard to forge a little distance. At least, I guess that's what I'm doing.

And the moment I tentatively sketch a conclusion the painting dissolves again, refusing to be seen.

Three weeks ago I was seeing my father as a molester. That picture held for awhile, its clear charcoal outline a relief, but it too has slipped away from me. Daddy is laughing. I can't catch him.

Fred said something the other day and for a moment it was clear again, something about the family not allowing Marta to be fully alive – something like that. It made sense. I see Esther – the little sister, supposedly – she was almost my little daughter sometimes, the way we leaned on each other – but I see the parasitic side of that, or sense it. She claws at me. I see it in her angry cold face when she greets me with a smile that I know is not real. I think a lot of her is not real and that probably none of it has much to do with me.

It's funny how my sisters have become grown-ups, separate from each other, from the family, random grown-ups out there. We have less and less to do with each other, but the hooks are in so deep.

TALK TOUGH

I don't remember him saying it specifically, but I think he must have talked about it just once or twice, about his worry that he was a mere dilettante, not a real scholar. Most of the time my father worked to give me a very different impression. He was proud that he'd gotten his PhD by the time he was twenty-one. I wonder about this PhD. What kind of degree could he have gotten? Was it something to do with the war, that people were handed doctorates in a hurry? The few people I know who have pursued these things spend years grinding away in agony. My father has no such stories. It's like he got it by snapping his fingers. Maybe he faked it. My father is the kind of PhD who likes to be called "doctor."

My father liked to describe himself to me. He liked to talk abut his height. He was 6' he told me with a smile of self-satisfaction. He talked about his hair too. "My friends used to say I looked like Beethoven!" he said to me, alone, with delight. He told me that when he first came to the States in his early twenties that he'd been persuaded to get a crew cut. He said the words "crew cut" as if he were smelling something bad. Clearly, a crew cut was one of those tasteless American things that he would never lower himself to again.

When my father got a new suit, he showed it to me. "You see," he might say, "this is a real tweed, the best you can buy." There was a month in the mid-seventies when he thought to try a pipe. He went out and bought the pipe and a tobacco pouch and showed these things to me. Another time, also in the seventies, he tried carrying those leather male purses. This too he showed me. Neither the pipe nor the purse lasted.

When he first got a Water Pic – I was still in high school – he had to show it to me and explain how it worked.

And I was always polite, or showing as little interest as good manners allowed. It was as if there was a certain agreement or tension between us that I dared not break. I dared not say fuck off and leave me alone.

I could yell stuff like that at my mother and sisters, but I think I was more afraid of my father's fury. I knew my rebellion would unleash a really scary anger. I didn't go so far as to even contemplate it then. It's just that when I look back now and try and feel what it is that stops me from yelling at him, it's fear.

My father didn't get out-of-control mad very often. My mother did all the time – out of nowhere she'd be yelling, swatting – she was scary in a different way. I was careful around her. I was careful around both my parents, monitoring their conversations, stepping in when the needle veered into the red zone.

My father had a way of letting me know he was angry. He might raise his eyebrows and look at me directly. He might raise his index finger or jab it into the tablecloth as he spoke, or put it along the side of his nose. "No daughter of mine…" might be the start of his sentence.

I did get angry at him twice, I think, to the point of yelling.

The first time was under Natvar's influence, Natvar who made fun of all our parents, who told us we were all under our parents' thumbs. I wanted to prove that I wasn't afraid of them. We needed money. Natvar had gone on ahead to Athens and was telling us to join him. I knew he'd be able to do it, conjure money out of thin air. I tried doing what I'd seen him do. I dressed up in the woolen suit and the high heels a client had passed on to me. With Mark, my brother in crime, I drove out to the elegant little home my father had finagled – he'd gone broke, they were homeless, my father had started going to church again, a friend from the church had told him about this caretaking position.

I was scared going out there, but I thought the only way to succeed was to act like I wasn't, to put on an invisible suit of armor and act like I was invincible.

TAKE CARE OF YOU

There is no door to my attic room except the two narrow French doors at the bottom of the steep enclosed carpeted stairs.
Before that, in my twelve-year-old's room with the long red drapes – a small narrow room at the top of the stairs – there are two doors, one that's never used goes into my father's room.

My father comes in whenever he wants to. Through the regular door. Wherever I am, he's allowed in. He expects to be let in. I cannot refuse him, the poor immigrant homeless Hungarian. It doesn't matter that I wish he would go away. What he wants is more important.

When I am seventeen I am in college and my father comes for the weekend. He suggests -- since it is not too far -- that we go to Niagara Falls for the weekend. He drives. We go to a good restaurant in the evening. That's the part I look forward to: the dressing up, the sense of luxury, the limitless food. My father is good at conjuring these things. I know I am pretty in my embroidered peasant blouse, my favorite red corderoy skirt that flows past my knees and the high leather boots, things I have patched together from the local mall, the trip to Europe, a thrift store. "You seem so much more mature than your friends," my father says and I am pleased and embarrassed. I know what he means though I don't have words for it. It has something to do with how he would never invite my friends out for dinner – not Janine and Ruth, in their jeans and sweatshirts, their faces shy as they shake his hand. I have this thing where I can shake a stranger's hand with confidence and see the interest in their eyes.

I am in college because of him, because my daydreams of joining the Peace Corps or just hitchhiking around the country amount to nothing in the face of his assumption that I will go to college, and not just any college.

Once, years later, he said rather grumpily, "Well, why didn't you tell me you wanted to join the Peace Corps?" As if he would have listened. My voice would have been feeble anyway, dismissing itself before he dismissed it. Instead, he drove me to Yale to meet with an old Belgian economics professor whom he'd known and admired for years, thinking that somehow this might help my half-hearted application, presenting me to him as if we were in some living room and I would now play a sonata on the pianoforte.

I am thirteen and we're all – both parents, both sisters – in Budapest visiting the grandparents. My father takes me with him into the country, to the ancestral vilage. We drive all day in his beige VW bug, our luggage with my sanitary pads strapped to the roof of the car and I am bleeding – almost for the first time – with no idea how to ask him to stop the car, unstrap the suitcase, lift it down and let me open it. I sit around smiling as relatives ply me with cakes, keeping my knees together in case it's all showing, waiting until finally I am alone in a room with my suitcase.

I can only have what I want when I am alone.

My father comes home from work – sometimes it's a weekday night, sometimes just a Friday night for the weekend. I don't want him to come home. Something in me draws back when I hear his car or hear him call up the stairs, but I always answer in cover-up because he is a poor sad immigrant from Hungary whom nobody appreciates and I cannot bear it that even I don't like him.

Expectations

My brother-in-law, David, wears those very thick glasses that make your eyes very small behind them, small rectangular lenses, his eyes appearing almost like dots behind them. His hair is slicked to the side. His face is round and boyish. You'd never think he was past fifty. Well, maybe you would, but still he has that boyish youthful quality. He wears a brown checked shirt tucked neatly into belted pants. He has lost weight but is still leaning towards chubby. He has small feet. I don't know this for a fact, but when I look at my inner pictures of him the feet are small.

When we go outside he wears a black leather jacket with the name of a computer company emblazoned across the back and he wears bright brown leather gloves that look straight out of the package. He offers to transfer some logs from the trunk of my mother's car to ours and does it in about three seconds. He likes to be helpful.

And when Fred and I drive away David comes out into the yard to look at the crescent moon, the dying light in the West, to sniff the air. I remember he did this last time too, coming out of the house as we left to wave, but also just to take in whatever nature was doing right then. He's no big nature boy. He just likes to look and see what's going on.

As we sat in my mother's small living room, Fred in the big chair that doesn't look so big anymore, the one we used to call "the throne," the chair my father used to be so proud of – upholstered in a buttery velvet with a high back and carved curving arms – my sister Esther tucked into a corner of the small couch with a plate of goat cheese and smoked salmon – my mother on a dining room chair off by Fred, a little out of the circle of conversation, David mentions all the new presidents of South American countries who have recently been elected; without effort or showing off he refers to them by name – so and so in Chile, so and so in Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil.

David walks just a little pigeon-toed. His legs are short. It adds to his child-like appearance. He's sort of cuddly. My sister says on their first date he ordered a hot chocolate instead of a beer and she loved that about him.

I noticed my sister calling my mother "Joan" on this visit. Not all the time, but sometimes, matching her voice to her husband's.

Three months after I first moved in with Fred my mother went into hospital for an operation. She needed someone at home with her for awhile afterwards. I was the obvious choice. After all, just a few months previous I would have been there anyway, living right next door. No one had really taken in that I'd moved away. And even though I'd moved away I wasn't far, only an hour or so by car. Instead, I spoke with a Mexican friend of my mother's who needed a place to stay. She was thrilled to hear that she could stay with my mother. But Esther said mother deserved better. She called up the Mexican woman and told her she couldn't stay, and flew out from California herself. I didn't say anything. I just melted away. I never thought my family would end up so stereotypical.

My mother once gave me power of attorney. Esther had that changed because she says she is much more involved with my mother than I am. And she is. She has burrowed into the finances of both our parents, giving advice, and monthly checks. She calls it being responsible.

She owns the little white house right next to my mother's. Doesn't live there, just owns it. The two houses are almost identical. She bought it just as I was leaving the ashram. It was where I was supposed to live. Perfect. Right next to my mother. Since it looked like I wasn't going to get married, I might as well take care of my mother. I only stayed six months. Then I moved out into a much bigger arena, here in Woodstock, a place where really anything can happen. It's way scarier than the half-acre in Sullivan Country where I was alone in a one-bedroom cottage. I thought I'd write there, alone in my little white house looking out into woods from my computer. Instead, I got into a rocket ship.

NO WORDS

I think of lying on my back in my crib in the dark, in the middle of the night. It felt like the middle of the night because it felt like the whole world was asleep and I was the only person awake. I am in my crib with its pale wooden bars. My crib is in the smallest room of the apartment, a place where my father has his desk and his tall grey metal filing cabinet. I am awake. I can see the room around me, dark with shadow. There is a small man suspended up above me, somewhere near the ceiling. His face is stern and unsmiling. He is staring hard at me. I know that I must look back at him and I must not move. If I move I will die. I can hardly breathe.

So what. Maybe it's nothing.

But that feeling of being pinned down, of having no choice. I associate that feeling with my father.

I used to be so angry with him. I remember the day it started. My father and I are walking in the vast park near our house. We went there every weekend, he and I. My mother and my two younger sister stayed home. Nobody questioned this arrangement. Everybody knew my parents didn't want to go for a walk together, and my sisters were too young. I had been going for these long weekend walks with my father since I was three, but now that I was twelve they seemed too young for walks. I was the better choice. My father and I were like a matched set. No one thought to separate us.

We drove the few mintues to the entrance to the park and began to walk along the narrow paved road that wove through the woods and then out into open fields. We never saw other people there.

We walked side by side, my father talking and swinging his walking stick. He liked to carry a walking stick as an accessory. He didn't need one. My father was talking and talking, and then he asked me some sort of question and I didn't feel like answering it. For the first time, it felt like some huge effort to bother to answer. I shrugged. "Now, come on," my father said impatiently. He didn't like rudeness. I could see I was making him angry. I felt he was right to be angry. I just didn't feel like answering him anymore. I couldn't even think of a nice way to fake it.

From then on, for decades, it was like that most of the time, a vast surging anger that left me mute. I never could put my fury into words, which made me think there was something very wrong with me. He seemed able to put everything into words. I didn't even know what it was that came over me when I was with my father as we drove into the city on Saturday nights when we would both dress up and go to the opera, stepping into the crowded lobby, climbing the staircases -- everything in sheathed in red velvet with chandaliers sparkling in bright light and always crowds of people and the buzz of conversation, everyone dressed up, and I feel confident being there with my father, confident that he can navigagte a place like this in a way that my mother just can't. But afterwards, back in the car, I can't talk to him, cannot tell him anything, can only stare out my window and wonder what is wrong with me as he continues to talk like he always has.

And I flash on the old man he is now in his Budapest apartment. I don't think any of these things are on his mind. He washes his mind with a few glasses of wine each day, a scotch and soda when he can. He is getting lost in some nice fog of old age. I imagine. I don't know.

LITTLE GIRL

I wonder if I will tell my mother. I think about it. For a moment I imagined that my telling her might make her sick, might make her die.

A few weeks ago I wrote to her and said that for a few weeks I wouldn't call her. I'd be in touch by mail. I haven't written for a couple of weeks now because suddenly there is too much to say. A cheerful little card with a robin on it would be so false I can't bear to send anything. So I know she's thinking, wondering, probably worrying, waiting to hear from me no matter how independent she is.

I keep finding more shreds of evidence, all circumstantial, nothing that proves anything, but the shreds are everywhere.

I thought of the time in England. I was ten or eleven or twelve. I remember the nightgown I was wearing then, a pink one with no sleeves, not one I liked very much. It was plain and straight, something standard my mother had picked up. I had learned that on cold nights I could lie on my stomach, my arms stretched out beneath me, my hands pressing just a little in the place you don't talk about, and it felt good in a strange, wild way. I remember bringing it up with my father. It felt like playing with fire. I wanted to see if he knew about things like this. I told him that when it's cold at night I lie on my stomach with my arms underneath. That's all I said. I left out the unmentionable part. I wanted to see if he'd get it, or give some sign that he knew what I was really talking about. He didn't. The moment passed.

I think of the time in the taxi. I was eleven and my father and I were returning from a few days spent in Switzerland. I had never been with him on a trip like that before. I'd flown by myself to meet him in Geneva. The first night we stayed in a fancy hotel. I had my own room, my father had his and they both connected into the bathroom. I saw a bidet in there as my father was giving me a tour of our suite. "What's that?" I asked. "It's where ladies wash their wee-wee's," he said. "Oh," I said, embarrassed.

The next day we took a train into the mountains. My father was very excited to show me the place he'd been going to and telling me about for the last year. It was a tall modern skyscraper right on the mountainside, surrounded by snow. My father said he wanted to buy an apartment there. In the evening we had dinner downstairs in the fancy restaurant and a woman joined us. My father said to call her Aunt Helga. I could tell that he liked her alot. He kept running his finger down her nose and saying her nose was like a ski-jump. She smiled and laughed. She had short blonde hair. She wore make-up and jewelry and pretty clothes. She was the opposite of my mother. I had alwyas known that my father liked women like this. Even when he was getting along with my mother, at best it was like she was his sister. He never looked in love with my mother and she never looked that way with him.

My father dropped me off at a hairdresser the next day and spoke to them in French. The lady there washed my hair, cut it a little and then divided my hair into two ponytails which she wrapped in special black velvet bands. When my father came to pick me up he bought several sets of the black velvet bands for me to take back to boarding school.

On the taxi home from the airport I am with my dad. We are talking back and forth in a way we never have before. Something about this trip has given me a kind of confidence, a new language, and I am making grown-up jokes with my dad and he is laughing and joking back just like I was a grown-up like him. I call him "Mickey" just like Helga did. I am surprising myself how slick I am.

And then I stop. Maybe it's calling him by that name. Something makes me pull back and not let this go any further. Something in me smells danger, like I'm in a go-cart hurtling downhill without brakes.

These are a couple of the many many scenes that have been passing through the last few days. Other ones were coming through last week.

The words "molest" and "abuse" say so little. They are words easy to dismiss as overused. But it all makes so much sense. I have no proof except that it feels like I have found a missing piece.

I thought of the time, again, still in the English house, on a Saturday morning when my father decided I had blackheads in my ears and they had to be removed. My mother seemed in agreement. The operation happened in his room, me lying on my back on his single bed with its dark green silk cover. He is leaning over me, squeezing these fucking blackheads. It hurts and I am yelling and he will not stop. Blackheads are hideous. He must remove them. His daughter must not have such blemishes. He keeps going until he is satisfied.

It all fits. My mother letting things like this happen. It must have helped to have a daughter to pick up the slack. to absorb the husband's attention, a husband she didn't really want to have much to do with, a husband she was incapable of being close to. It must have soothed something to give him the little girl to play with. The little girl clearly liked him better anyway and he clearly liked her better too. So, good. Let them go off together, leave her alone. It made the home tolerable.

UP ABOVE

I think the drive will take about twenty minutes, that I'll make that right onto Apple Lane, a road I have passed for years, and then the left will be right there and then the second driveway on the right.

I turn onto Apple Lane, expecting a little development, a few make-believe roads and cul-de-sacs, but Apple Lane has higher aspriations. It starts climbing a mountain. The left I am supposed to take comes after a couple of miles, not yards. I have left the town behind below me and I am on a steep road climbing up. The trees are all grey and leafless. The sky too is grey.

Perhaps I've missed my way, but no, there is the driveway he said would be there. There's a small building off to the right, separate from the main house. I stop the car and look over at the quick notes I made last week while I was on the phone. Yes, he said there'd be a separate building. This must be it.

I step out of the car and lok out across a Catskills expanse. I feel way up high. It is beautiful. It is not often that I get up into the mountains I live so close to.

I open the door and walk in and he comes to greet me. "Stan?" I ask, extending my hand. He nods and smiles. I look at him. So this is Stan. It's been a couple of years since I've come to talk to a therapist. I'm not sure I want to be here. No, I do want to be here, but still.

He looks like this: a little bit like one of the seven dwarves, a type I am generally comfortable with. Comfortable looking. A cardigan. Sweatpants, socks, and a little round knitted cap on the back of his grey head.

He asks me gently to leave my shoes by my coat and I step into a room that feels made of wood. There's a desk in the corner and windows on both sides of the corner. He sits at the desk, turned in my direction, and gestures towards an armchair nearby.

I imagine my friend Jane sitting there. She told me she's been going to see Stan off and on for twenty-five years. I have chosen him for this reason alone.

I sit in the chair and pause before I leap into conversation. I look around the room. I want to see where I am. There's a fire -- real or fake, I can't tell -- in the corner opposite Stan's big desk by the windows. I cross my legs under me and somehow we get talking. Perhaps he says, "What brings you here?"

His voice is calm and deep. He looks trustworthy and I want to trust him. He doesn't smile. His face is serious. He's paying attention. He's sitting cross-legged now too as if my doing so has given him permission, and we sit there like two old yogi's. I had guessed from the prayer flags outside that he's into something or other and this confirms it.

I tell him lots of stories, mostly from the past, a little from the present. I talk alot. It's easy to talk. There's alot to say.

I wind around to the punchline.

"I have all this evidence," I say, "all this evidence that points to my father fucking me, but no memory in the center that proves it, just a blank space."

I feel like a cliche. I wish there were better words for this.

But it's like a door swung open a few days ago and opened up into a chasm I feel I'm hanging over now. Suddenly the strings of memories that have kept me company all these decades look very different -- there is a harshness I never saw before, a barrenness, and the romantic father doesn't seem so romantic. He seems like a monster, a lost and forgotten monster, unaware of his own demons.

Stan asks if I would mind standing up. He says that part of the way he works is to get a sense of a person's physicality.

I stand up about five feet from him. I put my hands in my pockets. I don't put on a defiant show like I might have ordinarily. This is a place I want to be very honest. I look down at the floor.

"Your legs are long," says Stan and I want to kill him. I flash on the boy thirty years ago who asked if I was a dancer. I hated him. I was wearing a leotard and jeans and my hair was in a tight ponytail. I knew I looked like a dancer that day, but it made me furious that he would fall for my disguise.

I feel Stan's gaze on me. "What are you feeling?" he asks.

"I have this feeling of 'unjustness,'" I say, struggling to put it into words, "like I'm being taken advantage of." And I do, like he's over there at his desk on some private trip and my body is supposed to be part of it.

I look towards the armchair. "Sure, go ahead," he says and I sit down. "You grew up too fast," says Stan and then he adds gently, "You don't have to do anything here that you don't want to."

It sounds nice, but it's not that easy. I am so used to doing things I don't want to do.

I like the room though. I like the wood and the mountains beyond the window. I can't see anything from where I sit except mountain and it feels like I'm in a special, privileged place.

PRESENT LIMBO

I thought I'd do it last year, buy a bunch of small things -- like a box of Sucrets, like a pack of Stim-u-dents -- little things that my father used to like when he lived here, little things that don't exist in Hungary where he lives now. I got the idea to send him a box of things like that for Christmas.

I bought one thing for it, one of those round metal tins of small European-looking candies. These were orange flavored and they were right by the register at Deisings where I'd gone for a buttered hard roll to eat on the bus into Manhattan. It was only October and I felt good getting a running start on my father's Christmas present. I never got any further and sometime in February or March I put the candies out on the counter for the workshop. I think Fred at most of them during the week. Now it's Christmas time again. I have just in the last few days begun to let the feeling in, and the idea of this Christmas package to Budapest is floating around as I walk through Eckerds, but I still put it off.

My father never wrote his Christmas cards til after Christmas. It was one of his private rituals each year to go into his office ? there was always a room wherever we were living that held his desk ? and write his cards. I don't know who he sent them to ? people related to his work, I think, mostly -- or what he said to them. My mother, my two sisters and I were not included. I only know what his cards looked like because he showed them to me each year with pride. I never liked them. They were always black and white, an etching or something very serious and adult with his name printed by a printer inside. And he enjoyed telling me that Christmas cards did not have to be sent before Christmas as long as they arrived by January 6.

Last year this theory bought me some time, but then I never got the package out.

I imagined this morning taking a few hours to just focus on it, get it done and out, but the idea went up in my mind like a lazy firework, dying down just as quickly as it went up.

It's a good idea, this Christmas package of little things, but that's all.

Natvar used to say often how he hated good ideas. He meant that he hated people who didn't follow through on their good ideas. He hated it if I suggested a solution to one of our many problems. To him my suggestions were empty words. So worked hard to make everything I thought might help happen. I considered it a spiritual discipline. I honestly thought if I made myself do things I didn't want to do I would be a better person.

I think of sending my aunt and/or my father ? who live together ? a $20 bill. It's not huge in Hungary either, but it's enough, say, for two people to go out for a pretty good dinner. They could do something with twenty bucks and they seem like they would welcome it. But maybe the cash will get stolen before it gets to them. Maybe my father -- if I send it to him -- will lose it on his desk or forget he ever received it. I'm told he's done that. So maybe I should send it to my aunt who would
never lose or misplace a $20 bill. But should I say it's for her, or for him, or for both of them? They are not very friendly. They live together out of necessity. Kind of like my mother and father did. I loathe the idea of joining all the womenfolk and treating my father like a child, but lost money doesn't appeal either.

In Hungary, out in a small, historic town called Eger, we said good-bye to my cousin Laci with whom we had just spent a meaningful twenty-four hours. Out on the street Laci introduced us to his cousin, Andras, a young, dark, good-looking man dressed neatly in black. Andras was driving back to Budapest and would give us a ride. I had never heard of Andras, but it seemed we were distantly related.

He didn't speak much English and seemed to prefer to drive in silence. His car was tiny. I sat in the front, Fred in the back. Andras did say that when he was a little boy my parents sent him a box of colored pencils. It startled and pleased me. He said his little girl, Angela, was turning one that weekend. I vowed to myself to send her some colored pencils. Or crayons. Or paints. Andras would get the reference. I would send her something every year because after several hours I came to like Andras very much even though our words had been few.

But as I walk into town this morning, I think how a one-year-old isn't ready for even crayons yet. So maybe a teddy bear? Or something for the parents? Or the little woolen booties I got for Chantal's baby except that she never let me know when or if the baby was born. Are those booties big enough for a one-year-old?

I remain in present limbo.

THE NEW

This morning I called Betty McDonald again. Betty McDonald is a wild jazz violinist who lives down the road from me and is well known in the Hudson Valley. She performs a lot with different bands here and there. I heard her once and I could tell that she could just go wherever the music feels like taking her.

Last year I was flipping through the bins of sheet music at the annual library book giveaway when everything is for free. There was a short grey-haired woman next to me also going through the music. We said a few things to each other, found out that we both played violin. Then the woman said she lived locally and did some teaching and if I ever wanted to come round to call her. When I asked she said her name was Betty McDonald.

My first reaction was not to believe that she was offering me a lesson. She was just being nice, I thought, as I thanked her and moved away. A few minutes later though I realized that Betty McDonald had just offered me a violin lesson and I went back and really thanked her and said I would call.

My favorite part of our lesson was when she played a tape of music over her stereo system and asked me just to play along with whatever came to mind. And when I left she said, "Go outside sometimes, into the garden or the woods, and just start playing anything, any notes at all."

I never did. I stayed with the regular violin teacher I had then, a nice big quiet guy who never gave me a hard time, was always patient and willing to work with whatever I came with. I always left my lessons with Ryan excited to play more and to practice and I could see that I was making progress even if it was glacial.

Though I did complain about Ryan sometimes. Ryan is so laid back that sometimes I think he's going to fall over. He broke his violin about six months ago and hasn't repaired it yet. No problem, he plays his viola instead. He rarely thinks ahead to have new music ready for me. I find myself hunting for more things to play. I left him three messages a couple weeks ago about scheduling before he got around to calling me back. He talks a lot during our sessions. Maybe that's the thing I'm really tired of

My friend Henny is also friends with Betty. "God, Betty was so happy to meet you!" Henny told me last year. "She was so excited. She thought you were so brave to be taking up the violin. She really liked you." "Why don't you call Betty," says Fred. "Remember how she liked you?" I hadn't paid much attention to Henny's enthusiastic report. It's hard for me to think of anything about me and the violin except that I am still very much in the beginner phase and surely I should be doing better, and surely any music teacher must dread spending an hour with someone who plays as badly as me.

I called Betty and made an appointment to see her. On the morning of the day I was supposed to go see her -- this was last week -- I cancelled. I'd been feeling sick off and on for a few days and that morning I woke up convinced I was too sick to go. I called her right away, at 8:30 in the morning -- before I'd even had my tea -- and cancelled. As the day wore on I didn't feel so bad. Maybe I could have done that lesson, I kept thinking.

Every time over the next few days that I thought about calling Betty I backed off. Did I really want to have a lesson with her? Maybe I should quit violin. It's too hard. Maybe I should start guitar.

When I called her this morning I felt strong. I want something that can lead me out of my pasture, out into land I do not know, and I think Betty can do that. It's scary. But in my strong moments it feels important and I am glad I chose violin as my instrument because if it were something else I wouldn't be able to go to Betty McDonald who I think is a musician the way we are writers.

She Doesn't Try

I stood next to my father. He was sitting in the armchair in the corner of his room. It was our house in England. We had moved there in the summer. Then I'd gone away to school and now I was home again because it was almost Christmas and it feels like we have always lived here.

It is morning. My father stopped me on the landing just outside the bathroom. He said, "Your rport card came yesterday. It was not too good. And it was not too bad. We will talk about it after breakfast."

So I am in his room and the door is closed and we are by ourselves as we often are. Sometimes it's like my mother and sisters live in one world and me and my father live in another.

He is holding my report card in his hands. It's my first one from this new school here in Engliand. It is a long white piece of paper. Each subject is in its own rectangel on the paper. The teachers have written comments in the different rectangels.

I didn't know they were going to do this.

My father starts at the top. It's Math. They call it "Maths" here. The teachers says that I am careless and that I don't try and she gives me a low mark. My father reads each word out loud, slowly. I want to cry but I make myself not cry. I had thought I was trying. I hadn't thought about it.

The piece of paper says I came #22 out of 24 girls. I didn't know they were counting like that.

School was easy before I came to this school.

In this school my classroom is in a set of three classrooms that are in their own building apart from the rest of the school. We are in a wooden building, long and low. Each classroom has its own door to the outside and a set of steps. Everyone calls this building -- this set of three classrooms -- "the huts." Inside you can walk from one end to the other, from one classroom to the next, opening and closing the doors that separate each of the three rooms.

In the beginning I was in the first classroom, the youngest class in the whole school. Everything there was easy and it felt like playtime, not school. After a few days they said I could go be part of the next class, so I went through the door and I was with a different group of girls. They were older than me and they wrote with pens that had ink in them, not pencils.

My father just keeps going, reading how badly I have done and I can't not cry. I have to cry. It gushes out. It feels very bad, all these people saying I am messy and careless and I don't try. "Trying." I never thought about trying. I thought I did everything they wanted. I didn't know they were going to do this. I thought everything was fine. Nobody told me.

I hate this. That I am crying and my father keeps reading and he won't stop.