ALMOST

The floor was glossy and smooth, polished wood. The walls were white. The el-shaped room I stepped into was bright and empty, just a beige phone on a shelf.

There were sliding glass doors. I stepped through them onto reddish tiles, a rooftop garden edged with a low wall of white stucco, holding bushy green ferns. A metal railing overlooked the quiet leafy lane below.

We have just come from the airport. I have never been here before, in this apartment, in this country. Everything is going to be all right here. Everything will be much easier. It’s warm and sunny here. There are flowers. I saw them from the taxi.

There is a real kitchen here with yellow linoleum, a tall fridge, a stove, counters and cupboards and a sink by the window. Already, so much more than we had in New York. And we didn’t grow into this, the way I imagined we would in New York. No, we just switched countries and now we have all this.

Natvar has an idea of how we could get couches. We can’t just buy furniture. There is no money. But there will be. Everything is going to be all right now. Natvar said.

We buy some heavy white cotton fabric, the kind people here shade their verandahs with. I saw these stretched blue canvas shields all throught he city as we drove.

Natvar buys the fabric in white and has the man who usually makes the shades make four over-large, over-stuffed rectangular cushions, hard as rocks.

We place the cushions on two matching wooden boxes that have come our way. We push each couch against a wall so that they are at right angles to each other, near the sliding glass doors, facing the front door. They look gloriously white and expensive. A coup.

People must think we are rich, at ease, successful, busy, international. This is who we must be.

At a concert one night at the Acropolis our host for the evening introduces us to a chic woman my age who says she works for Vogue.

“That’s what you should be like,” Natvar says later. “Why can’t you be like that? You could get a job writing for Vogue,” and I imagine myself with a real job, a profession, an actual assignment. I imagine myself that confident woman in her short black dress and heels.

I have the dress, a perfect short black dress, expensive, bought at Bloomingdales on my mother’s credit card that we will never pay. I can almost imagine myself that woman, but no one has given me that job, and that’s the part I cannot imagine. It’s as if she comes from a world I have never been able to figure out how to access.

But Natvar has told me this is the person I should be and I know I could almost be that person. Maybe I am jut not trying hard enough. I must work harder, make this happen, correct what is lacking.

I am in New York a few months later for two weeks. I call the offices of Vogue. I say I am a journalist living in Athens, that I’d like to write for them. I’m told to come in at a certain time and I meet a woman, sit across from her in a small office. I stride in with a smile and a firm handshake. I have some ideas what I could write about and the person behind the desk agrees and tells me to send her whatever I complete.

But I can go no further. I return to Athens, to the apartment where I am on some kind of track I can’t get off of. I can prove that I tried. I had the appointment at Vogue just like the chic woman at the Acropolis would have done. But it has not turned me into her.

No, I must clean. I must fill any empty moment with endeavor, a job, a chore, an assignment, a duty, or else I am not doing my part. And there are days at a time when things go quite smoothly, and other days when Natvar criticizes me so harshly, building a case, layer by layer at the dinner table while the others listen, building the case that I am emotionally damaged, lazy, heartless.

SHARDS

In that house the animals came and went. I did not pay too much attention. No one did. My mother did the caretaking – housecleaning, gardening, feeding us, caring for the animals. Not that the phrase "caring for” would have been used.

When Red, the dark auburn cocker spaniel, stayed out all night and returned with a bleeding paw it was my mother who wrapped the paw in a sheet and spoke of how he had bled through a whole sheet. Red lay in the kitchen. Maybe he went to the vet. He got better. And then he disappeared.

Puppy was the last dog I shared that household with. A bouncing barking short-haired dog my mother found through some ad. Puppy came with his name. I heard later, after I’d left, that Puppy would not stop chewing his tail. And Puppy too eventually disappeared.

Jeffrey, the boyfriend I lived with, got a kitten, a black kitten with no tail whom he named Golem.

I can’t write of these things. How Golem became the monster he was named for and why.

I was raised in harshness. It makes you afraid to be soft.

“Your kids are wimps,” my mother’s sister said to her once.

The harshness my mother came from was worse.

Her father, an angry frightening man I am told, is the one though who had the books and was not made to farm.

And the man my mother married must have seemed like a softie to her – a man who couldn’t fix anything or watch sports or shoot – a man who liked a good suit, who listened to classical music records, who could waltz.

She had two brothers, one who had some delicacy and education, and another who ran a paint store.

The first one died, the second one sends a Christmas card and my mother urges me to write back, but I just can’t do it. It’s hard enough to write to the people I know. Uncle Dick is all right, but he is not in my life and I am not in his.

I haven’t thanked my Hungarian aunt for the late Christmas present she sent, a book I will never read, a copy of which I already had.

Now that my father doesn’t exist anymore it is hard to maintain the thin thread of connection to my namesake. It does not really matter to me. I cannot make it matter more.

And yet I find myself envying others their vibrant families, the community of which they are a part.

Both my parents left their parents thousands of miles behind on opposite sides of the globe. No member of my mother’s family met any member of my father’s family. A few of them met my father once or twice. I saw my grandparents a handful of times – three or four times – in my life. Aunts and uncles and cousins, once or twice.

And yet they have a certain reality that other people don’t have. More weight. I have heard their names all my life.

The one person I talk to, the one I go to see is my mother. I have two sisters I have not talked to for about eight years. I do not miss them though something is missing. I don’t want to call them up. I don’t even want to hear their news anymore.

I hold onto my mother though. Mostly because the sound of her voice is so familiar.

KEEPSAKE

In the beginning he was an exciting boy with dark hair pulled back in a straggly pony tail tied with an elastic I’d only seen girls wear. He sat across from me around a long rectangular table in a basement corner room with  small windows at the tops of two of the walls with about 20 other college students and the writing professor at the head of the table.

It was summertime and it was evening and I was here because my father had suggested to me in a way that I felt I had no choice that I sign up for a summer course at the prestigious college he had always wanted me to attend that I had failed to get into despite the afternoon on a weekend when my father had driven me to the campus, me dressed up in my favorite long red corduroy skirt and peasant blouse embroidered with multi-colored flowers – the one I’d actually bought in Hungary not Macy’s – to introduce me to an old Belgian man, an economist my father had admired for years, a professor at the college.

We visited the old man somewhere – his home, his office – and my father’s introduction of me was more of a “See, isn’t my daughter pretty?” I felt very pretty but that I had nothing to say to this old European intellectual. I felt stupid in his presence, as if there was nothing to me. I knew when I impressed people and when I did not. Walking back to my father’s beige VW bug a student with a camera asks if he can take my picture, and I pose, and my father is pleased that I have attracted this attention.

I sign up for the writing class to assuage my father and because it means that every Wednesday I can borrow my mother’s green VW station wagon and drive it two hours to the campus on I-95, spend two hours in the class, then drive back. I love to drive, to have a car of my own, to speed down the highway, to weave nimbly through traffic.

And then there is this boy, right away, in the first class, sitting across from me, in the crowd, and when the teacher makes us laugh, I notice the boy always catching my eye.

After the class, in the pale light of the summer evening, I walk alone to the parking lot and my car, and I see that boy again, walking a block or two away, unaware of me. He too is alone and I like what he is wearing – a cotton smock, something very different from what most people wear.

I find it hard to fine the clothes I want to wear. I don’t know where people find them. Once I saw a hippie walking by the side of the road wearing a sort of woolen poncho, but not the typical kind and I went to the Elephant’s Trunk, the store in a neighboring town most likely to have something similar, but they did not, and I couldn’t describe it, just that it was different.

I could embroider my jeans and sew patches on them, but I didn’t know where to find a cotton smock like the one that boy had.

The next week the boy and I talked after class. We sat outside on the porch of the building and he said he had written a novel. he’d written a novel. How did he do that? I hadn’t written a novel. I hadn’t done anything even close.

During the week the boy wrote me a letter. It came in a thick envelope to my house where my parents and two little sisters lived, the white clapboard house that sat up on a hill overlooking the road where the mailbox was – the mailbox I checked every day, hoping for another letter from Mark, the intriguing tall, skinny boy who wrote plays and was three years older than me.

The boy’s letter was typed and single-spaced on crinkly paper. It was like the piece of a manuscript, dense. I love you, it said.

We met up before class in a library, a modern library, built half underground. Me wearing the yellow smock I had sewed a few months before and a yellow ribbon in my long dark hair, and this boy who had written a novel, had a pony tail, wore smocks that were just what I wanted, and who said he loved me.

He loves me. This means something about me has turned him on. I don’t what it is, don’t know how to keep this tiny flame alive. Because I want him to keep loving me. He is not like clumsy Bill in high school or Mark who is so hard to draw out.

The boy invites me for dinner, to his place. He will cook. “What do you like to eat?” he asks.

I don’t know what I like to eat. I don’t know a good answer to this. My new friend Ruth has shown me many things I didn’t know before like Maxfield Parrish and Joni Mitchell’s album Blue, and how you can get patterned sheets and make them into curtains, and Marimeko and modern dance and the Metropolitan Museum, discount clothing stores and bagels. She mentioned eating Eggplant Parmegian once, and so I answer, “Eggplant Parmegian,” thinking this is something someone else would say, someone whom this boy might like, someone who has friends and knows her way around.

PENNY SONGS

My father raps the roof of the car with his wedding ring in time to the Hungarian song he is singing as he drives. He looks straight ahead most of the time, his right hand on the wheel, his left arm bent, elbow resting on the ledge of the open window, his left hand reaching up so his finger can rap against the metal of the car roof. This is when he is singing one of the marching songs, or one of the fast, pretty songs, the ones I like. Some of the songs are slow and sad with tunes I don’t like. My father likes those ones just as much though. I sing with him. I don’t know the meanings of the words, but I have heard the songs so often that I can copy the sounds. I lean my elbow out the window the way he does, but I cannot reach the roof without lifting my elbow up and stretching my arm.

When my mother drives, when my father isn’t there, she sings different songs. She sings Someone’s In The Kitchen With Dinah. She sings My Darling Clementine about a girl who drowns. I picture that girl over and over, slipping, dying. My mother sings a slow, sad one called Old Black Joe and a song I like about an Indian Maid. That one has a lovely melody, but my mother is never quite sure of the words and though we can do the first line or two, we end up mumbling. Which is sad because it's my favorite tune and I wish we could really sing it, but it always stays just out of reach.

In boarding school we sing an American song called The Big Rock Candy Mountain and I think it is pretty much the best song I have ever heard. My favorite is the line about how you never have to change your socks, and there are lots of good rhymes. I have always loved good rhymes.

In boarding school now there are the good singers and the not-good singers. Lucy Ann is the best singer. She has a very pretty face when she sings it sounds like an opera singer even though we are both nine.

Sister Barbara sings sometimes at night. She is old, but she is the best singer of all the nuns. She sings up in the choir, up in the balcony that overlooks the chapel during Mass. At night, after lights out, she walks slowly up and down the two narrow corridors lines with curtained-off cubicles. I lie in bed in one of the cubicles in the dark and I can hear her go by, long skirts swishing, singing in her melodious old-lady voice, When Grandpapa Kissed Grandmama In The Second Minuet.

Now there is a new songbook for school. We are each given a copy, a set of about twenty pages stapled together, typed in pale purple. These are new songs. I like them. Michael Row The Boat Ashore and I learn the little bit of harmony you can throw in and it sounds so pretty and Sister Camilla – Camel, we call her, behind her back, of course – plays her guitar for us now, sometimes even in church. Sister Camilla is like a gym teacher, tall and energetic. In the evenings she runs the dispensary, a little closet on the second floor landing under the stairs. She stands inside surrounded by densely packed shelves of drugstore things. We wait in line, sitting on the wooden floor along the corridor, to go in one by one to buy what we need.

Ann does not sing well. She sings flat, she says, and others say it too. Ann has short thin straight hair and she likes to do boy things more than girl things. Nicola sings well, but not as masterfully as Lucy Ann. Madeleine comes first in the class almost every week when the list is posted and organizes our plays. She is the most grown-up. Nicola draws like a miracle – horses and dogs that look real. And Nicola can run on all fours like a horse – light, as if she is made of weightless rubber.

And she is not afraid when we go riding. She is so unafraid that Colonel Rutland puts her on the prancing Arab pony who bucks her off, and still she isn’t scared. While I am always scared, scared on cold grey slopes, feeling the pony underneath me dying to run and gallop free. Lucy Ann isn’t afraid either, nor Madeleine, so I must pretend that I am as enthusiastic as they are though I dread Fridays when Colonel Rutland, old and grumpy with a moustache, picks us up in his green car with the wood strips, and takes us out to his farm.

On the drive over he tells us who will ride which horse. He has it written down on a scrap of paper. I hope for Pullover, an old quiet horse. Not Brandy or Biscuits, mother and son, both of whom are small powerhouses who want to get rid of their riders and have the open fields to themselves.

TOO FAR TOO CLOSE

I spoke with my mother this morning, me calling her back after she sent a card and left a voicemail. It was my turn. Our last conversation two weeks ago had been ragged and I wondered if I would feel I should apologize. That would be an easy way to move things back into smooth waters, but really I had nothing to apologize for.

“I’m sitting here trying to identify a leaf,” my mother said right off. “I think it’s a Live Oak. I have the tree book that you gave me – do you remember? You gave me a tree book when I moved to the Catskills.”

I didn’t remember.

My mother describes the tree – an evergreen, but not a fir – and I Google it on my phone as I talk to her. She describes the leaf she has brought in from outside and I Google “Live Oak images” and together we agree it is a Live Oak, except Live Oaks, Google says, have acorns and my mother doesn’t remember seeing acorns.

“I’ve asked people around here what that tree is,” she says. “But they don’t know.” She laughs. “They don’t even notice them.”

I picture my mother in her low-rent one-bedroom apartment in a small northern California college town. She doesn’t belong there, but she is there.

“When you first started that yoga,” my mother says as the conversation shifts, “Dad and I went to a therapist. We thought you were getting into a cult.”

“Oh,” I say. “What did the therapist say?”

“Not much,” my mother says. “Dad blamed it on me. He always blamed things on me. Like when Liz did her suicide attempt he blamed that on me.”

This is unusual material. I am listening.

“He was always down on you kids,” my mother continues. “We’d go out to dinner and we’d spend the whole time talking about the children and he’d be so worried you were becoming drug addicts. You know, he wasn’t American, he didn’t know. And I always thought you kids were doing all right. I mean, you all worked and made your own money right from high school on. But he’d always bring up some other kid who’d been sent to some high-priced college. Until one day I just said to him calmly – like they taught us in Al Anon – that I’d only eat dinner with him if we didn’t talk about the kids. And he looked at me in utter astonishment, and then he changed the subject and we never went through that again, and I thought, wow, this Al Anon stuff really works.”

I want my mother to keep talking. She is dipping back 30-40 years. But I can’t chat here. I feel my own discomfort. I can’t talk too close with my mother.

I change the subject.

ME AND THEM

Lying in bed alone at night, my parents somewhere downstairs, it is black night and my eyes are closed. Whether my eyes are open or closed I can see tiny particles dancing, as if sand is pouring down on me but never arriving, and I wish the screen would go blank, but there is no way to erase these tiny particles pouring and moving like a universe of stars that will not go away. And I can’t ask my parents what to do because I cannot describe it.

I take a nap on the same bed in the afternoon, a single bed along a wall under the slanted roof of the attic. My mother takes her nap downstairs. I look through a book that my grandmother has sent. I can’t read, but I look at the pictures and tell myself the story as if I were reading the words.

My father says that on Saturday mornings I must clean my room. I dread this time. I don’t know what to do, I don’t see what is wrong with the room that needs correcting. My father’s rules weighs on me like stone. Every day of the week has a different color. Mondays are blue. Tuesdays are yellow. But Saturday is brown.

There is one time when my mother is sick. She is in her nightgown and robe and it is Saturday and she offers to help me clean up my room. It is sweetness, this offer, a cool breeze that lifts the stone.

Like the time I come home from school. My mother is in the kitchen. She shows me how she has written my name in icing on a piece of wax paper. She puts the paper on the kitchen table so I can see it. This has never happened before, something unexpected, sweet, easy, for me.

In the kitchen my father cooks one time. He cooks the dinner because my mother is sick, sitting in the living room in nightgown and robe. She is never sick, but it happens this one time and makes everything different. My father is in the kitchen, laughing, pouring red wine over beef and adding shiny green peas. I am with my father in the kitchen, watching, knowing this will be the best meal I have ever eaten, my father laughing a if cooking is fun.

My mother doesn’t laugh like that. She pulls a leaf off a tree or plants we are passing and chews on it. She talks about the plants as we pass – this is an oak, see? you can tell by the leaf -- oh, look at the skunk cabbage! Sometimes she takes me walking in places where the signs say No Trespassing, and I am afraid. These are always scary woods or old orchards. She says everything is fine and I must keep walking, but I am afraid. Sometimes she stops the car to go into some old abandoned church or old-fashioned school. Sometimes there are old-fashioned books left behind on the floor and my mother picks them up and looks at them. I am afraid we will be caught in this place where it is clear we are not supposed to be, an abandoned old place where the people have left. Sometimes my mother digs up a plant she likes. She see it while we are driving. She pulls over, digs it up, something from the side of the road, and puts it in the car for her garden.

This is what my mother and my home are like. Something is rougher than I see in other places.

My father though does not have this roughness. I know when he takes me somewhere it will work out. We will not get lost. Nothing will go wrong. We will dress up. And when we walk it will be on paths, or even actual roads. And he will have his walking stick to swing and point with.

Sometimes he shows me how when he was in the Hungarian boy scouts they were told to put a stick behind them, held in the crooks of their elbows and to march like that, with their backs straight.

My father wants my back straight. He wants me to use a handkerchief and not sniff. He wants me to shine his shoes and has bought me a kit of polish and brushes and rags. He wants me to correct the words I mispronounce, to color inside the lines and to paste the postcards my grandmother sends from Budapest into a special book with black paper pages.

He sits me on his lap in the kitchen after dinner and points to his eye, his ear, his nose and I try to remember the Hungarian word. Don’t ever be a bubblegum person, he warns, and I know what he means, not in words but because I can see what he sees. Don’t be ordinary, he is saying, like the people in the supermarket and the hardware store. Be like the people in the concert hall. If you are not careful, you will become the wrong kind of person.

SOMEWHERE ELSE

The house was white with a peaked roof. It overlooked the road from a slope. My mother had dark green shutters put around the windows. She planted the Christmas tree on the slope. You could walk down the slope to the road, but there wasn’t a real path. Later, when there was a paved driveway, that’s how you usually went down, and walking across the slope, on a diagonal, past the dark almost black branches of the short Christmas tree firs – two or three of them, planted randomly – felt like something from the past.

The door to the basement opened onto the slope, a wooden door with two panes of glass, set inside the stone foundation of the house. It was a dark cold damp basement, the furnace in one corner, the washing machine and dryer side by side. There were steep steps leading down into the darkness of the basement from the dining room.

This house that seemed part of us, a member of the family, as if we all came from the same gene pool, making room for each other, invisible to each other because we were all of the same cloth – house, sisters, me, parents. All part of the same club.

My father brought a flowering azalea bush in a flower pot to me in the dark the evening of my fifteenth birthday, him coming home late from the office in the city, me already in bed at the top of the stairs in the attic room, he climbs the stairs, still in his overcoat, leaves the flower pot on the floor at the top of the stairs, leaves it without coming all the way up, says, “Happy Birthday.”

My mother planted it later, somewhere near the old Christmas trees, on the slope that overlooked the road. I did not see if it flowered again.

Part of the house too was the sprawling maple tree that stood just a few feet away. When we first lived in the house and I was very small, my mother hung a swing from one branch, a plain board hung from two fine chains. Later, when we returned, and left, and returned again, the swing was gone, but I felt the presence of the tree, its branches reached to my attic window, and it too was part of us. Like the stone walls that criss-crossed the other slope, behind the house where the woods were.

We lived in other houses over the years, but they were other people’s houses. The white clapboard house was the one we returned to, the one that was ours.

It didn’t look like other people’s houses. It didn’t look like the houses of other people in my school or the places where I babysat -- houses and homes that their inhabitants took for granted. But I knew I would never live in smooth places like that, places that seemed to come out of a mold – appliances and wall-to-wall carpeting and ease and comfort softening every rough edge. Those places did not look beautiful to me, but they marked their inhabitants, defined them as people who had been included, people who were part of something I did not think anyone in my house could possibly ever be part of.

STARTING IN YONKERS

Yonkers. Like Hungary and Canada I used to think these were places that only we had heard of. These were our places, places that other people didn’t know about.

Yonkers was the first place. You stepped into a space without windows – a table and chairs where my father drank coffee in the morning, and further back, away from the door, a kitchen counter, the stove. My mother hovered there like a shadow. 

The living room had the windows, windows that I knew looked out towards a river. I heard them say so. I could sense we were at a height and that there was space beyond those windows, and light. That was where my father went during the day, somewhere into that big space and light. My father, who brought home a briefcase in the evening, a hard rectangular one that opened with the snap of two gold clasps.

My room -- farthest away from those windows. A crib with bars. And this room too is dark though it has a window that looks out onto the walkway that brings you down from the sidewalk to our door.

We move to the white house where my mother and father do work like painting – things with paintbrushes and ladders, hammers – because this is an old broken down house, with broken glass in the dirt around it and splinters in the floor. My mother says you can tell it’s an old house because the floor boards are wide.

Workmen sit together at lunch time away from the house, down by the road where my parents park our yellow car that they call “The Rambler,” and the men unwrap thick meaty sandwiches that I wish I could taste.

I sleep at the top of this house, under a pointed roof against a wall. My parents put a bar along the side of my bed because they say I fall out at night. They tell me not to draw on the wall.

Now I have a sister, a baby. “Watch she doesn’t roll,” my mother says, leaving me with the new baby as she takes the dirty diaper down the short hall to the bathroom at the end. I watch the baby who lies on her back watching me on the big bed where my mother sleeps at night.

My mother washes my hair with Breck shampoo in the bathtub. She pulls my hair and it hurts. She says it’s nothing. One time I resolve to not make any noise the whole time. Just to see if I can do it. I make it through.

The next time my mother says it is time to wash my hair it is after lunch and my father is home. We climb the steep stairs together. The first room at the top is my father’s room where he watches the news in the morning as he gets dressed. I invite my father to come watch me get my hair washed without making any noise. But he says he needs to take a nap. I don’t try to accomplish my feat a second time. It is too hard.

Next to the bathroom is my mother’s darkroom. I know she has trays of liquid in there. She takes a lot of pictures. She has two or three cameras and a square brown leather camera case with a long strap. You can sit on the camera case. It is like a little bench.

My mother holds the oval light meter in the palm of her hand. It has a white plastic dome and dials she moves back and forth.

She sells myrtle out of the garden. She puts an ad in the paper and people drive up and my mother hands them clumps of plant and dirt in newspaper.

Myrtle: this is something else that is only ours – the plant, the word.

My mother shows me how there used to be a road behind the house. It is an open grassy lane and we walk down there to where there is a clothes line – a pole, like a tree with strings for branches. My mother hangs things up and takes things down.

If you keep walking you get to the Kaisers’ house. I slept there the night my sister was born. They are old people who live in a white cottage. I can go there by myself. I sit in their kitchen and they give me hot sweet milky tea. I ask my mother to make it for me, but it doesn’t taste the same.

My mother tells stories about being a girl in British Columbia on a farm. She speaks of animals and plants and six brothers and sisters, an English father, a mother with a Spanish accent.

My father speaks of hiding from the bombs in the basement during the war in Budapest, about the fruit trees his father planted that the rabbits ate, of the 18 boys who asked his sister to marry them.

When my parents tell their stories I picture the farm, the basement. These become places I know.

Grandparents are people who live far away. One grandmother sends a big box of wrapped presents every Christmas. The other grandmother sends stiff picture books and things you don’t want to play with. A family is the people in your house.

A PERFECT PLACE

I lay on the bed next to the boy from the writing class.

It was a water bed. I’d never been on a water bed before, but I did not tell him this.

We were in his apartment -- one room really, at the end of a corridor on the third floor in an old building.

He had invited me over for dinner. When he had asked me the week before what I liked to eat I did not know what to say.

It was as if I were finally in the movie I’d been hoping to get into, but I did not know the lines and I did not want to improvise because I wanted to stay in the movie.

“How about Eggplant Parmigian?” I had asked. We were in a parking lot. I had heard of Eggplant Parmigian because my friend Ruth had mentioned it once. She was the first friend I’d had in many years and had introduced me to many things I hadn’t know about before: bagels, discount clothing, Maxwell Parrish, modern dance and making curtains out of colorful sheets. Also, colorful sheets.

I liked the shelf of plants in Geoffrey’s apartment and the long purple tube lit up and suspended above them. My mother had houseplants, but they were geraniums and African violets that sat on window sills. This boy had plants on a back wall above an old couch covered in clothes and notebooks. I liked the unexpected green of the plants and this purple light, something new to me, something I would have been able to set up myself.

None of this could I have had in my own life, this independent home complete with waterbed, telephone with a long long cord so he could talk in the bathroom, or the kitchen, or even out in the hall if he felt like it. And the long row of beat-up records housed in old red milk cartons, and the dumpy armchair by the window with a green plant hanging from a hook with long long trails of small green leaves, a gorgeous plant that looked so perfect here.

He acts like all of this is nothing, very ordinary, and I feel like I must keep myself perfectly disguised here, not let one drop of truth emerge. I must never be found out or he will stop liking me immediately.

I want him so much to touch me, to start kissing me and I don’t know why he does not. We are lying so close, inches apart.

He has his own TV too, just for himself, propped up right by the bed. And it’s a double bed.

Isn't this the part where he kisses me?

Note on a Sunday morning

Dear Friends, I've been sick with cold/flu etc. and though I've done some writing I have not been up to the task of typing it and posting it. But I am very much on the mend and will have some new pieces for you soon. love, Marta

RESTING ON SAWHORSES

I have a long piece of plywood set up on three sawhorses.

I found a hardware/lumber store through the yellow pages not too far from the apartment and though I am not supposed to buy anything until I pay Geoffrey back, this desk seems so crucial I think it transcends the obligation temporarily.

I have pictured the desk here for months, ever since I knew I was coming back to this apartment. I knew this room with the dark salmon-colored walls and the parquet floors.

When I lived here before – or sort of lived here – this room had a large four-poster bed in it, a color TV at its foot and a nightstand for the ashtray. Geoffrey’s father, Arthur, spent his evenings after work lying on top of the bed, sitting up in his clothes, legs outstretched, smoking and watching TV.

Sometimes Geoffrey and I sat with him. Geoffrey liked his father, was always energetic and talkative with him. Arthur was a small, dapper man, who didn’t talk or emote much.

When I knew I was coming back I knew that Arthur didn’t live there anymore. “Please get ride of the four-poster bed,” I asked Geoffrey, “before I come,” because that room was going to be my room. Where I would write, and I saw the plywood desk I would set up under the windows.

“Really? It’s a beautiful bed,” Geoffrey said. We were talking by phone, me in London, he in the apartment he had never left. I loathed even the idea of that big elaborate bed that took up all the space in the room. I wanted the space to be almost empty, a studio.

We’d be living in the apartment together, crazy-in-love lovers, years older than the first time we had tried it.

And there had just been a Japanese girl living in the room with the four-poster bed, a Parsons student who had answered an ad, needing a room to rent, and she’d moved in and become his girlfriend, but he had asked her to leave because now I was coming, and though her name was still part of his everyday life, a name that kept coming up, he had asked her to go to make room for me and she, Geoffrey said, was happy to take the four-poster with her.

“Can you get me a futon?” I asked from London, imagining the clean light lines of thick cotton fabric and pale pine wood.

When I entered the room for the first time there it was – just the single futon bed with a navy blue cover and the long low chest of drawers that Arthur’s TV used to sit on.

I brought one oversize suitcase from my four years away. I unpacked the little gifts and mementos from London, knick knacks I’d collected, and laid them out purposefully across the surface of the bureau – the paperback of Whitman poetry Julian had given me for Christmas, the little black metal car from somewhere, the condom Lisa and I had bought from a vending machine the one time we went out to a pub.

I scattered these things across the surface so that I could appear as someone with a life, someone with friends, a woman not alone. I wanted Geoffrey to see these things and know that I had a lot that he was not part of. And it comforted me to think of the people I’d left behind, all of them who came to my going-away party. I liked looking at my collection of memorabilia.

I took the expensive mass-produced Paloma Picasso silver brooch from Tiffany’s that Geoffrey had sent me and pinned it to the navy blue cover of the futon where it looked very good.

Geoffrey had said I would need my own bed. The Japanese girl, though she usually slept with him in his room as I would, always had her own room, “so that it doesn’t just become routine,” he said, “so there’s somewhere else to go,” and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to manage this intricate dance that he and the Japanese girl had managed so effortlessly.

I bought the lumber and the sawhorses one afternoon when Geoffrey wasn’t home. I had to. That’s what the space underneath the windows was for.

RIDE

The man who picked me up somewhere in California, when I was still going down, before I had turned left to head across to New York, drove a cramped sporty sedan. He had cans of soda in the car and offered me one. He had dark hair and was a little older than me. Not a hippy. But he would do. He could be my boyfriend maybe.

“Why are you out hitchhiking by yourself?” he asked.

“Because none of my friends have any guts,” I said, giving him the answer that sounded best to me. I imagined my imaginary normal friends back in some imaginary homeland, a place where I talked on the phone a lot and raced around in cars with other kids.

Sandi was short and round with thick braces on her teeth. Cynthia was tall and heavy-boned with long red hair who wore a purple thick polyester dress at least once a week.

These were the two girls who liked me the most and came at lunch time to where I was sequestered in a wooden carroll in the school library, the place where I ate the thick liverwurst sandwiches my mother packed in a brown paper bag.

The cafeteria where everyone else ate I didn’t know how to walk into, didn’t know where to sit, who with. I pictured a noisy circus where everyone else had figured out their place, but I had come too late, that must be the reason, not arriving until tenth grade, but the reason didn’t hold water. Dino was a handsome easy boy who got absorbed quickly, and Nancy with her tidy long hair, arriving this year, knew just what to do too.

“Well, it does take guts,” said the man in the car with the soda, and he let me off at the side of the road, another possibility ending, because each ride was maybe the one that would give me a new road to follow, would be a man who would scoop me out of my life, fix it, or a group of kids who would love and absorb me into their life-on-the-go, their sleeping bags on the beach with guitars and a fire.

I get out of the car with the man who hadn’t been what I’d been looking for, but he had been a man alone, a man who had his own car, who drove freely wherever he wanted. If he had fallen love with me I would have stayed.

A WORD FROM ON HIGH

My aunt from Budapest sent me the photocopy of a short letter she had received from a man who had just heard of my father’s – her brother’s – death.

The letter is written on stationery printed with the man’s name at the top in a fine delicate script. The guy is a baron and he has modestly drawn a line through his name and title as if we are not supposed to notice it.

The man writes two paragraphs – more than good manners demands – about how he will miss my father, of the great work they did together, the conferences they organized.

I read the letter, thinking how much my father would have loved reading it, would have soaked up every word – especially the crossed out aristocratic title. I don’t remember anyone speaking of him so highly.

I was looking recently at color photographs taken during those conferences, held in Hungary and Belgium, that my father had organized and been so proud of. I remembered thinking that in all the photos he was alone, never in conversation. I looked at him so closely in those photographs, confident I could read his every expression, not trusting that he was doing anything more than trying to make a good impression on somebody.

He had talked to me of these conferences with great excitement. When I visited Hungary in the late nineties he showed me the beautiful villa they had rented, and I had listened with only restlessness. What were these co-called conferences, anyway? Who came to them? Did they really accomplish anything? I didn’t think so.

My father was proud that he was working with a bonafide baron, and he mentioned too with almost equal satisfaction the name of an English banker he was working with. I realized with embarrassment it was the same sleazy man I had met once at a disgustingly sleazy London dinner party, but I said nothing. 

During the same visit my father and I had the kind of shouting fight that only lovers have, and the words that came hurtling out of my father’s mouth at the peak of our exchange were, “You have never cared about my work.”

No, I never did. It was always an abstraction, a disguise my father could hide behind, the disguise of the gentleman, the man of letters.

But who are you really, I wanted to know.

Days before I was due to leave I accidentally broke a window in his apartment, sending shattered glass into the courtyard below, minutes before his secretary was due to arrive for her weekly bout of dictation.

My father hustled me out of the apartment with a broom as he ushered in the young woman with a smile. It made me furious! Tell her we just broke a fucking window and we have to clean it up, I wanted to scream. It’s okay to be normal, to have something go wrong in front of someone else.

And then here today was the baron, writing more than he needed to, acknowledging the foundation, describing a conference that would be held in a couple of weeks, saying my father would be missed. For a moment I felt a tug pulling at me to sink beneath the waves and believe the nice baron’s words, believe that my father was just who he said he was.

I am glad he wrote, that these kind words exist for a man none of whose three daughters attended his funeral. Although the letter did not lull me for more than an instant, it is an unexpected part of the collage, a finishing touch to a picture that will never be finished.

WHISPER

The ceiling slopes sharply on both sides so that really I can only walk upright down the center of the room. I stoop to open the cupboard doors that line the short walls. I have painted the doors bright sunshine yellow. It was my idea. They were white before, my mother’s color.

The floor is covered in beige wall-to-wall carpet. It was added to the house while we were away for five years. My father made a lot of changes to the house while we were away and now it looks a little more like other people’s houses, a little more grand. Like the carpeting. We never had wall-to-wall before, just the dark wide boards with the old square nails. There is a softness to the carpet, a sense of comfort that seems foreign.

I like it here in this attic room at the top of the house. One of the new things is the set of narrow French doors my father put in at the bottom of the steep carpeted stairs, so I can close them and I feel like I have my own apartment up here.

In the morning, dressing for school, I use the French doors as my full-length mirror. They don’t work very well, with all those panes of glass framed in white wood. Sometimes I go into my mother’s room where she has an old square mirror framed in wood, propped against a wall. I can only see my bottom half with that mirror.

I wear the pink cotton shirt that used to be a dress two years ago, but I cut off the bottom. Or I wear the beige knit top, a body suit that snaps at the crotch, a little too affected an item for a hippy, but I like how I look. Or I wear the bright orange, colorfully striped hotpants body suit as a shirt with jeans. This one has no snap at the crotch. I have to unzip and pull the whole thing down to go to the bathroom. But it looks great.

I wore the hotpant suit with white cork-soled sandals, my first high heels, three years ago when we still lived in England. I’d worn them to catch the train with friends for a day in London. I was 14, and I heard a little boy refer to me, talking to his mother, as “that lady.” No one had ever referred to me as a lady or a grown-up of any kind before.

In the attic room I am alone except for the male DJ’s on the radio. I have a Panasonic stereo – a turntable/radio and two separate speakers. The stereo sits on the floor and when I enter the room I walk over and flick the radio on with my toe and the neon-green dial lights up.

This stereo is the kind of thing that other kids in my high school class have -- the girls who have a different pair of corduroys to wear every day, the boys who jump into their own cars to get home. I have this stereo with its two separate speakers because my father bought it for an apartment he lived in for a year near Washington DC, the year after he quit the London job and tried to be a consultant. When he left that apartment the stereo was one of the things that came back with him, and it was extra, so I got it. I actually got my own stereo.

It’s the kind of thing I could show to a friend if they came to visit, like the two rectangular cushions – a dull peagreen and black tweed – left over from the couch we had when I was little, the one I lay down on when I had an earache, lay down holding a little cushion against my ear that my mother had warmed in the oven.

Now I have those cushions on the floor, a place where I could sit with other people and listen to music and pass a joint maybe. But I don’t know anyone to invite. At school I do not speak. I watch and listen as it all happens around me and I feel I have no place there. Which is not right, is not how it should be and this empty room reminds me of my failure all the time.

I should have more records too, a big casual collection that shows how much I know about music. But one record costs more than I make on a Saturday babysitting. Last summer I bought three used records for 50 cents. I didn’t know the singers, but at least they added bulk.

I listen to the deep voices of the men on the radio, talking about the music. And I listen to the words of the songs, the melodies, the wistfulness, the guitar picking, the stories of being on the road with always a beautiful, fierce, wild, mysterious woman. Like Suzanne who takes you down to her place by the river…

I ask my mother for a guitar and she finds one second hand and for lessons she drives me once a week to the Y in White Plains where I sit in the back of the crowded room and wonder how how how did other people live different lives – how do you get out of the attic room, the VW station wagon with your mother who doesn’t notice that the rain has stopped and the windshield wipers are still going, shrieking against the dry glass?

Blowing in the Wind is the best of the easy songs – only 3 simple chords. I buy the Simon and Garfunkel songbook and try, but music like what I hear on the radio is a universe away, another thing that only other people can do -- though I can walk by the side of the road, sometimes even hitchhike, and carry the guitar in its black case and just like I am supposed to.

“See me!” says the guitar wrapped in its black case. “Fall in love with me. Pick me up. Take me somewhere. Make it so I can talk to you and laugh and have sex, make it all happen. Please. You out there, boy with a pony tail, pick me up.”

THE UNEXPECTED

I live in a yellow house with twists and turns and steps – rooms tacked onto rooms, making it an unpredictable place. 

The floors are wood, worn.

There are animals – cats and a dog, maybe even squirrels in the walls.

As I walk up the crooked, uneven path to the front door I eye the disintegrating garden, looking for color. One of the pink daisies I bought in the Spring just put out one last small burst of flower – the color deep and strong though the bloom itself is small. 

I am disappointed in the garden this year. The zinnia – usually so reliable for color – turned brown and sickly right away – plants don't flourish here and I am frustrated, wondering do I have to spend a ton of money on fancy soil just to get flowers? That doesn't sound right, and each year I try again, always with such limited funds, and there are pockets of fleeting success, but I haven't mastered the sense of abundance and color I am hunting for.

Gardening should not be expensive, but it is. For instance, now's the time to plant bulbs so that in the Spring color will burst forth at a time when your heart really needs it, and you don't want to plant cheap WalMart bulbs, you want them from some kind of trusted source like Victoria Gardens, but they're a good $5 a pop, and I haven't done it yet.

I garden like my mother gardened. She's the only model I have. She gardened naturally, but roughly. She was not a Martha Stewart gardener.

The first time I heard of Martha Stewart was in the late 90s. I was still living in the ashram.

I had a dear friend, Amma, who had moved out of the ashram with her husband and 8-year-old daughter. They moved to an old farmhouse in New Hampshire where Amma painted a colorful sign in her perfect calligraphy for the front door that said “Welcome,” and they bought a few sheep and some chickens. 

Ruefully Amma admitted that she subscribed to a magazine put out by someone called Martha Stewart.

Amma and David and Libby were big figures in my life. Amma was tall, blonde and beautiful with an exceptional singing voice and a deep laugh. Her husband was tall, gangly, boyish and shy. Libby, when I first met her just 4 or 5, was shy too, but Libby fell a little in love with me. We were all still living in the ashram then.

Libby liked to read. When she got in the car the time I was taking her to see Little Shop of Horrors – a true aberration from ashram life – she brought her Grimm's fairytales, a paperback about 4 inches thick, small print, no pictures, and she read to herself when we weren't talking. 

Libby said she wanted me to be her godmother so we made up a ceremony, going to the Bade Baba temple on a snowy December night. 

The Bade Baba temple was the jewel of the ashram, located in the most celebrated area, the area where Gurumayi lived, where the nicest rooms were for the wealthiest guests, where the gardens were the most manicured, where the biggest meditation hall was with its glorious turquoise carpet, tiered floor and chandeliers. Everything was better in the Main Building – the name of this part of the ashram that had once been a Catskills hotel. Two other hotel complexes made up the rest of the ashram, all linked by a shuttle bus and footpaths.

But the Bade Baba temple was the nucleus, the most sacred, holy place. It was a small white building, almost circular, each side of the polygon-shaped building held a wide, tall plate of glass, looking out onto the smooth lawns and tidy gardens. 

In the center of the temple was a larger-than-life bronze statue of a man in the lotus posture, set up on a white marble pedestal and encircled by a ring of four white marble pillars. Plush turquoise carpeting made the place deeply quiet, like the inside of a shell.

So Libby and Amma and I went there for the godmother ceremony, offering Bade Baba a coconut and some prayers and afterwards we went to the Winter Garden to celebrate, a cafe that had been set up for the holidays in the lobby, complete with white tablecloths and fancy desserts, strings of white Christmas lights, menues and waiters, young people doing their seva – their selfless service. 

A few years ago I was being interviewed by a small new-age magazine about our Authentic Writing workshops, and I spoke with great enthusiasm and fluidity. “Well,” said the editor when we were about done, “would you like to say a few words about the value of service? We're doing an issue on service and asking this question of everyone we interview.” 

“No,” I said. “I don't want to say a word about service. That's totally not my subject,” and the man cracked up. He had thought I'd launch into all the predictable platitudes about service and I had refused. I had just been talking about wriing, something that really means something to me – there was no way I was going to spout a bunch of crap about how service is a good thing. 

When Fred and I were first a couple we went to visit Amma and Michael and Libby. Libby was about 10 and writing books at the computer about gnomes. There was a new baby. They gave us their brand new guest room, an addition they had built where everything was perfect – from the smooth down quilt to the two unused bottles of expensive lavender shampoo in the brand new shower. 

Amma had a spinning wheel going in the living room, using the wool from their sheep and she and Libby sang the song that Amma had written for all the neighborhood kids which had a chorus of “If you love your parents, clap your hands.”

At one point, in a private moment during our stay, Amma said something about how she'd had to come up with a story for Libby about how Fred and I could share a bed even though we weren't married. 

The ashram mantra played quietly and continuously in the kitchen.

When it came time to leave I saw that Fred was walking out of the room, leaving the bed we had slept in a tangled jumble of sheets. I knew the proper thing to do in this house would be to make that bed, even though Amma would be pulling it apart to launder everything. To leave that mess untouched seemed sacriligeous. I checked my impulse to tidy up and left it as Fred would have left it.  

A year later I invited Libby of course to be my flower girl at our wedding. 

But they had a conflict, Amma said over the phone, another wedding of someone from the ashram I hadn't even realized she was friends with. But perhaps in some stressed out way they could travel back from Nantucket in time to make our wedding – because how could they miss it? And Libby was so excited.

But they did not come. Nor sent a card or gift. It ended in silence. 

Somehow, through a vague trace on Facebook, I have picked up that Libby might be at a college now a few miles from my house. Maybe one day, by herself, she will look me up. Maybe not. 

I look back at that friendship – see some red flags along the way that at the time meant less than the substance of the friendship.

I hope for friendships that last, that are grounded on real appreciation, that don't make demands or depend on shared dogmas. 

The ashram brought so many disparate people together, brought us so close we became family, even the people I only knew by sight. Now I see through Facebook all these people scattered – the woman who was so close to Gurumayi during my time has dyed black hair, a botoxed face, and vivid red lipstick firmly in place in every photo. 

CONCRETE

Part of the reason I wanted to hitchhike was that anyone who picked me up did not know me, didn’t know that I had no friends, didn’t know I rode a school bus to a high school and sat in classrooms. When I stepped into a car or up into the cab of an eighteen-wheeler I could be the adventuress I was sure I was supposed to be.

I told Joseph I had older brothers. Not true. I didn’t mention the two actual younger sisters. Older brothers at least put me in the company of men. It implied that I hung out with them and their friends. I liked the idea of older brothers.

Days later when he was still with me and now we were going to my house where my mother and two little sisters were waiting I explained that well, now that you’re actually coming to my house you might as well know that we don’t talk much about my brothers at home, they’re kind of in trouble right now, mumble, mumble.

Joseph did not prod me, just nodded okay. Joseph in his dark beard and hippy hair, his overalls and dark eyes, his short working-man’s body that I had wanted so much to be mine from the first night when with such deliciousness he had shown me how we could sleep on the concrete ledge under the overpass of the interstate, here on the roll of cardboard we’d picked up from the side of the road in the afternoon because Joseph had said we would need it, and he was right, the cardboard made a difference, a little bit warmer than lying on the bare concrete – and Joseph saying, we have to lie close together, our body heat will keep us warm, and I am more than eager, a man, finally, to lie beside at night, I have wanted one for so long and there has been no one except dully pimply high school boys.

Joseph does not kiss me. He wraps me in some kind of bear hug in the dark on the cardboard above the lanes of traffic.

I have been hitchhiking for a few days by myself, but here has been no one interesting, and now there is Joseph and we are only in Nebraska so there are miles more to go before New York and we are traveling together, on the road, a couple, just like I wanted, and Joseph is not a kid who doesn’t know this world. He knows this world.

“You need better shoes,” he says and we get off the highway in Milwaukee and go to a Salvation Army where I get lace-up men’s shoes for free – I am so happy – and in a field he shows me how we can eat ears of corn right off the plant – we don’t have to pay or ask anyone – and best of all he takes me to a friend’s house somewhere, an old farmhouse, almost no furniture, pot growing outside, the friend picks some, spreads it on a cookie sheet, bakes it in the oven so we can smoke it. This is all exactly as I had hoped – drugs and hippies.

But I cannot talk. Even now that I am where I so much wanted to be. Joseph and his friend talk late into the night. We are in a plain room with a couple of old armchairs and we pass a pipe and the boys talk, but I cannot find a way in, and stay silent, and this I fear will give me away – that I am not at ease the way I want them to think I am.

Alone with Joseph he can make me laugh. I feel connected. He is my friend. He waits for me when we go to the bathroom in the rest stop and then get into the big tractor trailer. But even Joseph says, “You don’t talk much, do you?” and I have been discovered and must do all I can to get him off the scent. Bluff fast.

It is almost perfect. If he would kiss me at night it would be perfect, but he does not. He says I am too young, that he could go to prison. What is he talking about?

And we stop in Buffalo for the night at a house on the street, a woman comes to the door, his wife. “Oh,” she says, “come on in. I was just going out on a date.”

His kids are there – two or three of them – and when the mother leaves Joseph and I babysit and when the kids are in bed we sit on a couch in the dark and now he kisses me, finally.

Cards and Calls

My aunt in Budapest sends me two color photographs, one of my father’s grave, heaped with flowers. The second of a ribbon around one of those bouquets imprinted with my mother’s name, my name, my two sisters’ names and some strange unrecognizable name at the end.

In the photo you can’t see my father’s gravestone, which was what I looked for. Instead you can only see the gravestone next to his with the names of my grandparents. A big stone cross stands between the two stones, a grave with some status, planning and pretensions.

My father buried next to his parents as if he didn’t get far.

My mother on the phone last night saying finally, “I’ll let you go,” and me feeling almost hurt though I was aching to get off the phone, wondering why I can hardly tolerate two minutes with mymother one the phone though I always want to hear her voice and know she is there, I never want to tell he anything, never want to then hear her response which always feels off the mark, and always she keeps me on the phone longer than I want to be be except last night she actually said, “I’ll let you go,” as if she too did not want to be on the call, and we hadn’t mentioned my father, I didn’t mention the photos that had arrived just hours before, and maybe I thought as I hung up, maybe that’s what’s different that we – I – don’t want to talk about it, want that his death means nothing, in a way it’s easy to go that route – he’s been so gone for so long – out of the country for 25 years, in some kind of senility for a year, and even when he was in this country and functioning, always not someone we wanted around – me, my sisters or my mother.

But now he’s really gone and I think as I walk to my car how I will never ever see him again.

But I don’t want to talk about it with my mother.

A gravesite has nothing to do with the person. In a way, I wish my aunt had not sent the pictures. I didn’t want to see something so gruesome. But it’s real and I claim to always prefer the real.

My sister’s name on the ribbon was the name she rejected about 30 years ago and legally changed 20 years ago.

My aunt in the note she sends with the photos makes no mention of the card I sent after I heard of my father’s death.

I chose a card from the Omega bookstore. Its main image was of a strong red heart.

I didn’t know if the image would mean anything to my strict, bare bones aunt, but though I didn’t’ buy the card the first day I saw it, I chose it because the red heart said to me what I wanted it to convey to her – thank you, I appreciate the burden you carried – caring for my father for years -- though I didn’t offer to help you.

I put $20 in the card. I had never sent money before though I knew it was needed. This time I did though it was a low-cash period at home. I wanted to put in a $50 bill but just couldn’t do it, so folded up a twenty and wrapped it in tin foil – a haphazard attempt to foil the attempts of anyone who might be able to figure out the envelope held cash. I had no idea if tin foil could mask such things, but hoped it might, though it kept making me think I was sending cocaine through the mail.
 

MONDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 10, 2011

Tamar the dog pants, indicating she is in pain or at least uncomfortable.

It reminds me of Claude panting in his last weeks.

It is the first time Tamar has been so unwell. The doctors say she should feel better tomorrow. She’s had the first two doses of antibiotics and today she had a B12 shot and some dog aspirin and I could tell she rallied.

She hasn’t peed or pooped all day and can’t walk.

Everything they say will clear up and I am sure that it will. Still, it is hard to see her so uncomfortable.

This morning for the first time in her life she did not get up, but stayed in her bed all day.

I went on our walk without her, to smell the woods and move. I ran into Nancy who lives across the street with a small overweight dog called Sammy. “Where’s Tamar?” she immediately asked.

Both yesterday and today we have taken her to the vet. Both times I have had to overcome my kneejerk reluctance to let medicine intervene, but both times have been so reassuring. I felt like that was why it was so expensive – because I felt so much better afterwards. Less in the dark, optimistic.

Every single person in both facilities – receptionists, assistants and doctors, about 10 people in all – were female and, except for one, very young. The assistant today had blunt nails painted silver.

I am working on my manuscript, perhaps the thing closest and most important to my heart, not counting some living breathing entities who shall here remain nameless.

This lovely three-day stretch away from the office gave me a new start on an early morning ritual that I hope will stay with me, revisiting several pages every day for a buff and polish.

Also in these three days I have drawn a line. I have said no and no more to a woman who was coasting, a woman I thought of as a friend, but a person who was draining, drawing on me, not much you could say, but a steady drip drip drip like the faucet that I walked over to Timo’s about, early on one of these refreshed summer mornings, walking down Tinker St. before the town is awake with the weekend spread out before me, hoping I would find Timo to come fix the faucet.

The woman, the friend, I let her down. Out of nowhere. She didn’t see it coming. But there was no pretty way to do it. It was something that I slowly realized really had to be done, to leave her, send her back to the quicksand of her life to let her come up with something, to withdraw the rope I had thrown and that she would not let go of.

And I painted a room in the house and found the perfect table at a yard sale for $12 and tomorrow I will go back to work and people will ask, did you have a good weekend? And I will say – it was fantastic.

KEEP UP

On the wall it hung, from a long leather strap a couple of inches wide, a leather strap decorated with cut-outs and fringes.  A flask covered in short brown hair, smooth like a horse’s hair, a wooden stopper sealing the flask’s mouth.

I did not touch the flask because of the smooth brown hair. I imagined it would shiver if I touched it, move, be alive.

I knew the flask was Hungarian, one of my father’s things, special, better than ordinary things. He spoke of the flask to me, in a proud voice, a voice designed to convince me what was right, what was wrong, and what was better, a voice with force and gusto, something that it would always take an effort to live up to, but that that was what was important -- living up to something, a standard, something that kept your head above water, better than other people, something that saved you from drowning.

SOMEWHERE AROUND THERE

In first grade at the new school in Virginia I am jumping rope outside. Two girls are turning the long rope and I am standing to the side, attuning my body to the rhythm of the rope slapping the ground so that I know the exact moment I can leap in and become one with that turning rope. It’s a small miracle to be able to run in at the right moment that doesn’t interrupt the rope’s smooth turning and now I am in the middle of its loop, jumping and shouting, “Paul John George Ringo! Paul John George Ringo!”

I know they are the Beatles, but I don’t know which is which. The name you are shouting when you mess up and the turning rope stops is the name of the one you are in love with, a thought that makes me and my friends squeal in disgust for a moment before it’s the next person’s turn.

I’ve only been at this school for a little while. I came in on my first day in the middle of things – the middle of the year, in the middle of the morning – I still had my coat on, the one my mother liked, navy blue, woolen, the kind of coat you could wear with dresses – and the teacher stood beside me as she introduced me to the class, the two of us side by side while everyone else sat at their desks and looked at us. The teacher introduced me, said my name and I said nothing, hating this part where I was not yet part of them, but someone separate and strange. I kept quiet always in the beginnings.

It was an old school and had a darkness to it as though it were always in shade. The floors were made of wood and there was a staircase like in a house that led up to floors I never went to. My classroom was at the bottom of the stairs.

We had come to Virginia in a truck – me, my father and another man – my mother driving in a car with my little sister. I sat in the cab of the big truck that had all our stuff in it. My father drove the truck. Of course he did. My father could do things like that, things we hadn’t done before, my father could always do these things.

There were a couple of crushed beer cans in the cab the men had drunk and then reflexively crushed before dropping them on the floor. I held a crushed can, one in each hand as we drove, me between the men, and I pretended the cans were people. First the one in my left hand talked, then the one in my right hand. I watched them. They talked silently.

And we lived in a big white house with a long driveway at the top of a hill, far away from the road and surrounded by fields with cows in them and sometimes when my father took me for walks through the fields on a weekend, the dog sometimes with us and sometimes wandering off on his own, we passed something called a silo and there was a sweet rich smell.

Walking with my father, long long walks, much further than I wanted to go, him always talking. About so many things – the story of the novel he was reading, or Budapest when the bombs were dropping, or Hungarian countryside when he was a teenager, or a story about taking a girlfriend some place fancy for the weekend not knowing how he was going to pay the bill, or how in Geneva after the war he went everywhere by bicycle.

My father was always the hero on those walks. In the stories. In my world.

Though he made me cry when we played Monopoly at night, him buying hotel after hotel while I had nothing and then buying more hotels and laughing as I could not keep up.

Under the trees my sister and I made a store selling small rocks, an acorn – for 5 cents, 10 cents – inviting my parents to come and buy by the sandbox. There was a sandbox there and a turquoise tent, a tent my mother put up for me to play in, but I didn’t go in there, the small turquoise tee-pee – a tent being something from my mother’s world, but not from mine. My mother came from a place of outdoor things – a farm, British Columbia, a garden, bicycles and tents. My father was different, from the city. I liked him better.