QUESTION, NO ANSWER. QUITE.

I met a little girl a few days ago, 9 years old, the same age I was when I went to boarding school. My adult friend told me how the little girl was stressed because her mother had left her with her grandparents for a few days, all as planned, a summer vacation.

It made me wonder again why at 9 years old I had been happy to go to boarding school, relieved to be on my own.

A few days ago, chatting with a friend I asked her, “Do you remember being little and thinking – like, on the street – that as long as you were walking by yourself people would think you were an adult?”

She and I had been looking out the window at a four-year-old boy walking through the parking lot, keeping a careful distance between himself and a man we identified as his Dad.

“Oh no,” my friend laughed. “I never wanted to be alone. I panicked if I was alone!” And I imagined a big expressive family where she felt at home, a family that – now in her 50s – seems hard to be free of.

When I was 16 I was getting ready to babysit some small little child. The parents were gathering their things, ready to leave. The child started to cry. The mother crouched down. “I love you, sweetie,” she said. “I’ll be back soon.”

Something in me froze, caught. I love you. Those words. Words I had never heard from a parent to a child. I thought those words were just for romances, and I was waiting for mine, hungrily, waiting for the boy who would go crazy for me, love me the way Loenard Cohen and Bob Dylan loved their lovers.

They told me I was going to boarding school and I was excited, thinking of books I had read of girls in schools who were friends and played tricks on each other and on the teachers. It sounded like a great place to be, much more fun than where I was.

The school was built mostly of grey stone, an old-fashioned building with windows that opened by turning handles. It looked like a place that rich people had lived in once with a long driveway and a circle in the front where your parents’ car stopped.

The front door was made of thick wood in an arch of stone. A square sign said “Ring Bell,” and a nun opened the door, usually with a smile.

This is where I said good-bye to my parents and stepped into the high-ceilinged front hall with the polished wood floor and the wide staircase that curved up to the next floor, making you turn twice as you went up. I could imagine old-fashioned ladies coming down those stairs slowly in long dresses with fans on their way to a ball.

I missed my mother at night, in that margin of time after the lights went out before I fell asleep, missed her with an ache, wanting her to come and lean over and kiss my cheek and say good-night and be in the next room.

She did those things when I was at home and I liked them. She went to each of our three beds. Each kid got a cheerful good-night and a peck.

We were living in England then, in a small house with many rooms crammed into it, like a doll’s house. My father was proud that he had found it so quickly, in one day of looking at rentals within commuting distance of London. My father told me when he did things that proved he was better than other people. He told me with a big smile, and a “You see?” in his voice.

There were four bedrooms upstairs, one in each corner of the square second floor. My room was at the top of the stairs, defined by the red curtains that fell floor-to-ceiling and opened and closed with a string. When I sat on the floor, leaning against my bed, my feet touched the white-wood wardrobe. 

My two sisters shared the next room, defined by blue curtains and bunk-beds. My mother’s room had pink curtains and my father’s were dark green. Curtains that came with the house.

The tiny front hall had a smooth black and white checkerboard floor, the stairs leading up from its center and also turning you twice to get you to the top, but a tiny miniature of the stairs I knew at school.

When I was home I ate supper in the kitchen with my mother and little sisters. We only used the dining room when my father was home on weekends.

At night sometimes from my bed I could hear my parents fighting downstairs, a terrible sound that I wished and wished would stop, the harsh sound of their voices, please stop.

The parents and sisters visited me in school once a month. I preferred being in the school, uninterrupted, wished my parents lived in Kenya or Bahrain like other girls’ parents so I could just be here, as myself, without them.

And then 3 years later suddenly overnight friends turned against me, girls said mean things, girls I had been playing with for years, girls I wrote long letters to during school breaks, girls whose fat envelopes in return burst through the brass letter slot and onto the black and white checkerboard floor of the front hall. Overnight, the temperature changed, and I asked my mother to change schools. She did not ask why. I did not say.

And the next year I began at a school near the little tiny doll’s-house house, a school I returned home from every afternoon. And now everything was different. I was in the wrong place, an ordinary school, not a place that put me in a different, separate world, the way my father was in a different, separate world. A school where I had no magic, no friends appeared as they always had before, and I became what I dreaded, a side-figure, a someone more like my mother than my father. 

YOU AND YOUR LUNCHTIME SCRAPS

Last night “Sixty Minutes” talked about eating sugar and “the reward center” in your brain. I didn’t know this was a scientific term, its use taken for granted by the reporter and the doctors on the show. The reward center. I was to understand that eating sugar was addictive and connected to this place in the brain that lights up happily when you reward yourself.

I thought of my father – so fond of his Viennese pastries and his whiskies and sodas – these, I realized, were moments when he could sit down and reward himself. No one else was going to.

“Sixty Minutes” also talked about people who can’t recognize faces, not even those of their own children. And I thought of my first few weeks at my current job and how I divided people by hair color, unable to see differentiating characteristics in the crowd of new faces. And now I could never mistake Melissa for Amy for Rose even though they all have long blonde hair.

My father is dead and my mother is 88 and when I asked her last week if, by the way, Dad had a will she said no, but that she was going to have everything split evenly three ways between me and my sisters and that she’d been paying monthly into a fund since the late 80s that would cover the cost of her cremation. I hadn’t wanted to know any of that.

My mother is having a hernia operation on Friday and my two sisters will each do a bit of homecare. I am not there. I will send an audio book of one of the books featured in the memoir festival. I was going to send her Townie, but maybe I should send her a McCourt book. I wanted to send a pretty nightgown too. And flowers. But I haven’t done any of it yet. I am scared to spend money. It’s awful, but I am. An irrational reflex fear that if I spend it’ll all be gone forever.

Where I am sitting there is a small birdcage with a tiny potted jade plant inside that looks pale but alive. The birdcage – far too small for any bird – but pretty with a domed roof, made of wood painted a pale olive green, sits at an angle on a bed of moss that still has most of its green but is drying out and going brown fast. A bunch of ferns, thoroughly dead, has been thrust between the birdcage and the wall. If I looked further I’d see that dead sunflower in a glass vase, but I turn away and look, instead, out the window. 

SMOOTH, SLIPPERY, AND ROUGH

Her tanned arm to my left on the steering wheel. Her black tank top and jeans.

We are chatting as we drive. I catch her eye and imagine this is a moment when her boyfriend probably tells her she’s beautiful. She has twisted her long blonde hair up off her shoulders and her brown eyes have their cute, pert look.

Often she looks different – efficient and executive, taking her job seriously, frowning, a little ticked off about something that is not going well. 

This evening though she is young and happy that it’s summer and she can afford to go out for dinner. She has handled her modest income well. School debt and car debt paid off. She signed up for the credit card with the most frequent flier miles.

I don’t want to write about work.

This morning I got to Maria’s coffee shop at about 8 and got my table by the wall and the iced coffee with half & half for $2 plus a quarter for the tip jar.

Nothing has to go any particular way.

The last few chapters have been going smoothly. The whole Greece section will need at least another read-through. It’s been difficult and I’ve given up once or twice. But the end of the Greece section moving into the London piece has been fun and easy to re-enter. 

I read the sentences I wrote a year or two ago and I step back into those scenes. Sometimes as I am reading I feel like it’s not good enough, I am not saying enough, the sentences seem so bare, like the skeleton of the scene without its flesh. But unless new words come quickly, I urge myself not to worry, not to linger, to just keep reading.

My boss today asked me how I was. In a firestorm of activity and rushing, she turns and says, “How are you?” and I say, “I’ve gone back to the manuscript. Remember how I told you I had set it aside?” She nods, brightening, easily forgetting the person who is on hold and the email she must answer five minutes ago. We last talked about my writing about a month ago at a wedding, both us drinking wine, making conversation easy and slippery. This afternoon she says, “Good!” immediately and talks about my other book which she liked and I soak up her sweet generosity. 

This afternoon I found myself being angry at a woman who keeps saying with passion and sincerity how much she wants to write and come to the workshops. But she doesn’t come. Or she says she will and then her sink gets clogged or her cat gets sick.

I was having angry thoughts about this woman. And then I thought about how if I wasn’t careful I probably wasn’t going to write anything for the workshop tonight, how I wanted to, but it was going to slip away from me and I was going to let it just like that woman. And it gave me the strength to move like an arrow – straight to a friend’s office to ask for a tea bag, straight over to the café with notebook and pen, to sit down with the empty page.

OPEN DOOR

I am in the dark in bed against the wall. My parents are downstairs, far away. I lie here against the wall in the darkness.

In the afternoon I lie here with a story book my grandmother sent. I turn the pages. My mother is downstairs. She feels very close, not like when it’s night and my parents are all the way downstairs at the bottom of the house. She is just below in her bedroom and if I call she will say something back. I have to stay here though as long as I can bear it in the quiet of the afternoon, turning the pages of the book, telling myself the story by looking at the pictures.

My father brings home presents from his business trip. Toys. I like when my father comes home. It is exciting. There are presents. He is laughing. He gives my sister a wooden house, brightly colored. Hours later my sister makes me very angry, very very angry and I take the new wooden house in both my hands and I drop it from the window at the top of our house, the window that fits right into the V of the roof. I drop the toy house from the window where it falls all the way down to the ground and smashes, right below the big spreading maple.

My little sister is blonde with round cheeks. People say when they come to visit that she looks like my mother and they say I look like my father. I don’t see what they are seeing, but it happens every time. This is fine with me. I like my Dad best.

My mother on the phone two nights ago asks me about my life. She really does. And I hear myself telling her things, speaking for a few sentences at a time. It is unusual, her holding the door for me like this, and holding it still longer so that I really step through. It feels different. Most of the conversation is about what I am doing, and I feel her hand on the rudder gently keeping the direction of the conversation in place. This is brand new. And she tells me of a conversation she had years ago with someone who was describing me, something she remembered, and she told me what the person had said. I don’t remember receiving like this from my mother. 

My mother made sure we ate three meals a day. She made sure our clothes were clean, our bed was made, that we had a warm sweater and enough blankets. And then when most of our contact became phone conversations – decades of them – I kept quiet. I let her talk. And when I got bored I said good-bye, and then I would miss her and call again. 

When I miss my mother I miss her voice most of all. “You’re so private!” she said once, teasing. Her other kids, she said, tell her more than I do.

I didn’t feel room to talk. I didn’t want to talk. When I tried, the words felt like heavy stone blocks, not worth anyone’s effort.

But two nights ago it was different. I felt my mother’s fondness for me, as if she might really like me, miss me.

She lives now in a northern California town. It feels so alien, like not a place where my family tribe would live. My sisters put her there, she, the 88-year-old who grew up in the wilds of frontier British Columbia is in a one-bedroom apartment with an air conditioner and yes, it’s comfortable, and yes, she has made a new life there, but it will always feel like an uprooting to me. 

Before she lived in a small house that I found for her that seemed perfect, and was, but not permanently so, and this is what took me by surprise.

When I visit my mother now I sit at the small round table in the kitchen half of the long room that is a living room in the other half. I sit while she stands, stooped, over the stove, stirring, peering. I take in her familiar gestures. They have become precious to me. There is that and there are also glimpses of other moments.

I sat, we were talking the last time I visited, disagreeing about something. I felt her rock-solid wall, an obstinancy that refused anything coming in from outside. That hardness I remembered and I knew my father knew that irrational closed door.

There’s little cause these days for seeing that part of my mother though she hinted at it the other night. Referring to the surgery she’s about to have she said “and I’ll take plenty of drugs because I get very crabby when I’m in pain,” and as she said the words I could feel the anger behind them, or maybe I imagined it, but I felt the ball of fear inside of me at the thought of my mother’s anger. 

PASSING TIME

There is a grey cat who has started to pass through our yard almost every day. He is a dark tabby with only half a tail. I said to Fred the other day that I had glimpsed him. “He showed himself to you,” Fred said, implying that it’s up to the cat who sees him and who doesn’t, and it’s true, I see him more often, and I want to offer him a home if that’s what he wants, the whole 9 yards.

Two weeks ago the cat with half a tail sat on the back deck and talked to me through the screen door so I put out a bowl of dry food. He dashed away. A few minutes later I looked out and there he was, eating. I went for my glasses to get a better look. It wasn’t my grey tabby. It was a large, plump raccoon.

Someone says that my dog Tamar is going grey. I wonder if they are right and this morning, putting away the old – decades old – sepia photos my aunt just sent from Hungary, I study a photo of Tamar when she first came to us eight years ago. With relief I see her nose in the photo is no less grey than it is today. But she no longer likes to go for a walk with me in the mornings. She still will chase the ball, but she’s content to stop after two or three rounds. I used to never be able to throw it long enough to suit her.

And I have been with the same person now for 12 years and we look the same to me each day, but I see old photos and yes, I suppose, we look a little younger there.

I have started to draw. Last week I did not go to the office, and I didn’t travel to a distant place. I wanted to be home with nothing to do.

I have started to draw. It is a bit of a miracle, drawing, looking at something – the wheelbarrow, the bricks – and making marks on the page with the black pen, the marks so different from what I am looking at, but making them anyway, and then there is a drawing.

I stopped drawing when I was 9 because Nicola could draw so well. Her horses and dogs were perfect.
I’ve started to draw again though, like writing, the hard part is stopping doing other things, and wondering each time: will I draw again?

I sat in a cool, shaded place near my home with pen and pad, a place I had never realized was so perfect for sitting. It’s been there all along, just yards from my house, and I had never sat there before.
Another morning I walked into town, early, bought an iced coffee then -- as a real, unusual treat – a New York Times, lingering, sitting outside, paging through the paper though I had seen its headline online two days before.

The next day I took my laptop, entered the manuscript where I had last left it a month or two ago and continued each morning – the early walk into town, the iced coffee with half and half, $2 and a quarter into the tip jar, outside with laptop, describing the time in Greece.

The first day back at work I walk first into town, get the coffee, sit not for an hour and a half, but for 20 minutes, and then don’t make it back the next day.

Friends post an article on Facebook about how being busy isn’t good for you, but I don’t read past the headline. I know this already. I want my time at home to be like my childhood was in summer – the idleness part. I want my brain to get off track.

I clean a room that has been neglected for months, but I don’t clean it down to the ground. I clean up the major messes, and leave it at that, and don’t get to a bunch of projects I thought I might.

Often, in these years, I contrast choices I make now to how I thought things should be those many years I lived with Natvar where if you cleaned something it meant there was not a dust mote left when you were done, where empty time was a selfish sin, where everything that was not strictly regulated was dangerous and at fault.

COLLAGE

I hated the air in L.A. To my New York senses, there were no seasons there – no fresh Spring, no crisp Fall – just some kind of glue air, a glue that seeped into my brain and bones and made it very hard to feel that anything was ever working.

I used to think if I could just walk down Broadway for half an hour everything would be all right, but driving through the lights of La Cienega or past the billboards of Sunset, the Hollywood hills hung in the background, hazy and green, old dead green, not fresh alive deep-breath green.

And after two years when I finally slammed the door on the cottage with the lime-green-and-white shag rug and drove in the middle of the night to a new building, to the furnished apartment where I would live by myself – then I thought maybe Spring had come, maybe there would be newness now.

Back in the cottage, the boyfriend was always so occupied, his time filled in a way mine never was, where the best I could do was say, “Today I’m going to make a collage.” Someone must have said something about making a collage, someone I admired, maybe Thea, the friend back in New York who I wanted so much to be my friend because she was beautiful and because she longed for art, it seemed, the way I did, and maybe she mentioned collage and there was one day when I tried it – determined – I will not break down, I must make something, if I cannot write at least I will make something called art and it will mean I am somebody I want to be.

And I sat on the lime-green carpet in the small square living room, in a patch of carpet Jeffrey did not inhabit – it had nothing to do with the brown couch and the color TV or the coffee table with the round ceramic ashtray and the long blue pipe. It was a piece of floor where I stacked those magazines and went through them and glued bits down and made something – not large, 8x11, and I put it on the small shelf that was mine, propped it up there next to the hand mirror with the stem and the curlicue initials I had bought at the Salvation Army, but it didn’t seem like anything compared to the screenplay Jeffrey was typing up on his IBM Selectric or the music tape he was making with headphones and precision, he who made things without hesitation and loved what he made. I could say to Thea that I’d made a collage next time we spoke on the phone, my words like a paper airplane that sinks to the floor. 

Perhaps in the new place with its robin-egg blue paint, maybe there.

I took myself to art galleries often on Sundays, alone, wanting to understand this impenetrable foreign language. I tried turning the boy next door into a boyfriend. I tried turning the women I knew into friends. I bought a stereo because it seemed important to have one, but it was an effort to turn it on. 

And when, eight months later, the job asked if I would move back to New York with the company, a publisher of bodice-rippers, men’s adventure and something good thrown in now and then, I didn’t hesitate for a second. How perfect. I could leave. And they’d cover the cost of my plane ticket, something I had never figured out how to do. 

But the boyfriend, still hovering, was furious. “You didn’t even ask me,” he said, blindsiding me, making what had seemed so unquestionably easy into a minefield. 

UNDER THE HOLLWOOD SIGN

I knew where I would go when I slammed the door. I had seen the sign a few days ago – Furnished Apartments – on a building on a street sloping up to the Hollywood sign.

I drove my orange and white Pinto there. It wasn’t far, but it was 3 in the morning. I parked, set the seat back as far as it would go, and slept.

I had gotten out. I was alone. And Jeffrey, the boyfriend, didn’t know where I was . I’d gotten this far before. I knew this sweet ecstatic feeling of finally being alone and able to move, speak, think freely. I knew too that he was lurking, not just over in the Fountain Avenue cottage, but in my brain. He was there, wanting to come back in. He always had before, but I had the door chained right now, there wasn’t the slightest chink he could look through. I was all alone.

I slept, parked on the street, the front of my car higher than the back, until early morning – 7am or so – when I rang the bell.

A small old woman in a dressing gown with dyed red hair and a burning cigarette came to the door and walked me up the stairs on bare, thin carpet, down a dark corridor to the second door on the right. It was a long sunny room with two windows at the end, a couch, coffee table, a long low bureau. I liked the small bathroom  painted a robin’s egg blue, and I liked the built-in wooden table and benches in the kitchen, painted the same bright blue. The bed pulled out of the wall. It was fine. It was my place.

I bought a white bedspread from Pier One to cover the couch. I lived here.

There was a black and white TV on the floor. It was a pleasure not to have it on the way the color TV had always been on at Fountain Avenue. I watched it just enough to find out that Reagan had been re-elected, which took me by surprise. I had assumed a bad thing like that would not happen.

I liked the oversized black pullover I had with the V-neck. I liked its artsy look and on a day when my hair was long and dark and wavy I took photos of myself in this sweater in a mirror that was also in the main room.

It was hard to fill my life now that Jeffrey was not there, taking up all the space.

I wanted this to be a place where friends came. I didn’t really have any, but I worked with what I had.

I baked granola on cookie sheets in the oven, this wonderful new concoction that Muf, Jeffrey’s sister, my age, had learned with me, both of us happy to find something that the new health food books said was good for us that was also addictive.

In some ways, Muf was my friend. “But you probably wouldn’t be friends with me if I wasn’t Jeffrey’s sister,” she said sometimes, as if trying to pry the lid off of me and get to some buried secret that would be the truth, a good painful truth that would hurt her and hurt me.

But I did know her better than anyone else in L.A., and although she had the hardness that Jeffrey had, it was softer than his and I was usually ready for it, and I bought her a chef’s hat for Christmas and we bought our first Nikes together and tried this new thing called jogging, did it on Sunset Boulevard where it starts to get grassy.

And I invited another woman over, a woman with strawberry blonde hair who was a few years older than me. She had a house and a husband and there was something serious about her that made me feel that maybe we might be real friends. She came to my Hollwood-sign place and as we sat on my couch she told me about how her baby had died. From something she called crib death. I listened as best I could, but a baby and a baby dying seemed something out of my reach.

And Michelle came over to smoke pot and she said, “I can tell you don’t smoke cigarettes by the way you hold the match. Any smoker knows to hold it upright. See? It doesn’t burn so fast this way.”

And my father visited me here, after I wrote him that letter, the letter that wanted to break and break through all that had come before, the letter that told him how I really felt.

Jeffrey had pushed me to write the letter. Not directly. But in the five years with Jeffrey I had found out what it was like to be with someone close up, to have to say things sometimes, to be with someone who noticed you and asked you questions and put you on the spot. And it made me want to say some real things to my father, to say things that were different from all the make-believe things we usually said. “I’m going to be in Texas on business,” was his response. “How about I come to L.A. and visit you afterwards.”

He came to my place on a Friday night. He said he had already driven around and found the place he wanted to have dinner, a Japanese place, he said, with a beautiful view over the city.

“Do you mind if I get high?” I asked because this was who I was and this was the point of this meeting. Jeffrey got high with his various forms of parents, while mine didn’t know that pot was as close to them as it was.

My father wrinkled his nose, and said in some kind of cartoon voice, “Oh, no, I don’t think that would be very nice.” I deferred.

And as the dinner progressed – all lovely and to my father’s taste – I asked, “Well, Dad, do you want to talk about my letter?”

“Oh, let’s not do that now,” he said, leaning back and sipping his Scotch and soda. “We can do that tomorrow.”

OVER TIME

Yesterday in the car – we are on a two-hour road trip to Westchester, Tamar in the back seat – Fred, searching his iPhone for the date of some election says, “I think it's September 13th,” and my impulse is to say, “Oh, that's Jeffrey's birthday,” but I don't say it because that wouldn't be much fun for him to hear, I imagine, why would he want to know an old boyfriend's birthday, or that I am remembering it? 

A few weeks ago I thought seriously for about 15 minutes of calling the old boyfriend and suggesting a short visit when I was next in the city, just because he is probably there, and when I look at certain bits of the past he looms large, that boy, now old middle-aged guy, looking at 60.

He was a wiry boy then with the long wild dark frizzy curls I demanded from a dream boyfriend. He was the opposite of the clean white high-school boys who were still virgins too. His studio apartment was an parent-free pile of houseplants and record albums, a TV, a phone, a waterbed and an electric typewriter, a bong and a tiny kitchen where he made me something called Chocolate Chess pie. He seemed confident, his movements jerky, he wore tortoiseshell glasses like I did for movies and TV.

And from that collegey beginning we had a phase in Manhattan within the penthouse walls of his family's extra apartment, walls painted a dark salmon, rooms with furniture, a mixture of things chosen by someone who never lived in the place and scraps left from Jeffrey's unglamorous childhood. In that apartment things were harder. The doors slammed. I stood on the balcony, wishing I had the nerve to jump, not knowing how else to bear the stab of that postcard propped on the bureau from the woman he'd met in screenwriting class, and when we had burned pretty much every fire we could think of, and he was set to leave for Los Angeles to become a director he asks if I'd like to come, and then says he'd only waited this long because I was still in school. I had not known this, had thought he was just going to go to L.A. and have his big successful life and me, what would I do, I had no idea, somehow be a wrter though that seemed so much something only Jeffrey and the people who had been born differently from me could do. So when he asks, I say yes – a mix of oh, he must love me and now I have an adventure too. And after a month's drive across the country in an old Mercedes with a black cat, a collection of his meticulously engineered mix-tapes and the joints rolled tightly by his sister we began the California phase – the white stucco cottage, the green shag rug, the fish tanks, the palm trees, and that too became too hard and there were no sidewalks to run to for comfort in L.A., just cars and heat until that too escalated so high and I was jettisoned back to N.Y. as if by an explosion of despair and good fortune.

And years go by in which he plays no role, where others take over the center stage of how I wake up in the morning, how I go to sleep and how I do everything else in between, and when that escalates and blows, it's him I reach back out to, him, certain that the connection that feels as strong as ever to us both will have the rosy fairytale ending it was supposed to.

And this chapter plays out again in N.Y. It only takes 6 months this time. And that was almost 20 years ago. There's been a couple of visits where I expected connection and found none, and a short phone conversation two years ago when I hung up mid-sentence.

Once in awhile, though, I still think to do a live check-in, like a scientist or an anthropologist, examining a speciman.

THINGS YOU DON'T EXPECT

When I smell pine needles on a hot sunny day I am in British Columbia, my mother’s place. British Columbia is her place. I don’t think anyone else has ever heard of it. Just like Hungary is my father’s place. These are our places. They belong to our family.

The Ranch was a wild place with a barn and a couple of corrals where once I watched with everyone else while men grabbed and sat on animals, laughing and branding them, a pond where you always had to pull the leeches off you after you swam in it, and acres and acres of woods and open pastures. It was my aunt’s place, my mother’s sister, a woman with dark gray hair cut short like a man, a wrinkled face that didn’t smile much, a cigarette and a smoker’s voice. She wore men’s clothes. No one on the ranch made things easy. When I was six I slept in a tent with my cousins, all older than me, all kids who had been growing up together, kids I didn’t know at all. They talked with glee about the snakes outside in the dark and I was too scared go out and pee and just wet my sleeping bag. When I was twelve I watched three boy cousins shoot a chicken for fun and smash its head with a rock.

But when I smell pine needles on a hot day I think of that land. I told this to my sister many years ago when we were still speaking and she surprised me. “Yes,” she agreed. “That’s what it smelled like there.” She remembered it that way too.

On the bus drive in this morning I asked myself, “If Mum died tomorrow would you go to her funeral?” The only thing stopping me is that my two sisters would be there. Right now the answer is no. I wouldn’t go, but I know that could change. Death is a powerful event and it changes the landscape. Slowly. I am learning this.

I was lying on the floor of my office yesterday afternoon, taking a stealth nap, when the thought that I no longer had a father scared me intensely. As if something had fallen away, some kind of foundation stone, the kind you take for granted.

When he died last August it didn’t feel like a momentous event. I didn’t cry, or mourn, or regret our lack of contact. I knew that even if I’d been at his side the way he would have liked, contact would have been nonexistent. My father was far away, had always been, even when he was in the room. To talk with him you had to make sure you were far away too.

I have been thinking about him more though lately. He is easier to be with now. I bite into a piece of dark chocolate flavored with espresso and think, “Dad would have liked this.” I don’t have to fight him off anymore. I took his old watch to the jeweler the other day. I wanted them to make it shiny again, the way I remembered it, and I wanted to know what kind of watch it was. I wanted it to be a fancy and expensive one – the kind of thing that made me angry when he was alive – the way he could never buy the cheap version of anything – now makes me proud and affectionate. Though I know if I had to go meet him for dinner tonight everything would be as impossible as ever –each of us disappointed in the other.

At lunch the other day I sat with two men I knew only slightly. Kurt used to be the football commissioner for some state and looks the part. I’ve talked with him about what it’s like to referee a football game and I can easily imagine him with a whistle around his neck, calling the shots on the field. And Rick, whom I’ve always thought of as a casual aging hippy, his hair still long and dark, his body skinny and wiry.

“Back in the 70s,” Rick says, “we were all shooting heroin. And then AIDS came. We didn’t know you could get AIDS from needles. We thought you had to be gay.”  And I am relieved to be sitting with someone who can talk about shooting heroin instead of light therapy or chakra cleansing. I listen and encourage him to keep talking. He tells us about working in a hospice. “You’d see people come in – young and vital – they didn’t even look sick – and you’d watch their bodies just shut down, day by day,” he said, his face still holding the surprise and shock of seeing this. “Suddenly they couldn’t talk no more, couldn’t hear. I had to quit after a couple of months,” he said. “I couldn’t take it.”

And Kurt nods. “My wife died a while back,” he says. “When she got really sick in the hospital I asked her what she wanted to do, and she said, ‘Come home.’ So I took care of her at home – the last thing in the world I ever wanted to do, nurse someone like that.”

“Oh, Christ, I’m like a little girl,” I hear Rick murmur, and I turn to see him wiping his eyes and laughing gently at himself. “But you did it, Kurt, and, you know,” Rick says, “it’s just not so scary after that.”

ON MY WAY

All I really wanna do
Is baby be friends with you…

So wailed Bob Dylan as I listened, very closely, not doing anything else, lying on the piece of the el-shaped silvery crushed-velvet couch that only had one arm rest on the narrow screened-in porch with the stone floor, listening to Bob Dylan as if he were talking to me, as if he were narrating the movie I wanted to be in -- really wanted to be in -- wanting to be wrapped in that voice and the arms that went with it, somewhere that had nothing to do with this screened-in porch that was my father’s territory, a sort of office he had created with his heavy desk in the corner, a desk that looked like it came from another time in history, something perhaps my parents had rescued from a sale in Columbia county. I could see it had that gummy sheen -- my mother must have stained it -- back when she did things like that. I was a little girl then and it seemed that she would always be staining bits of old wooden furniture, as if that were part of who she was. But she didn’t do that anymore or develop pictures in a darkroom or sell clumps of myrtle, their roots lightly wrapped in newspaper, clumps pulled up from our woods and sold to people who came in cars, having read the ad.

My father’s grey filing cabinet stood next to the crushed-velvet couch, the filing cabinet completely his, as was the couch – silver and crushed velvet, something prettier, more modern than my mother ever would have chosen. It came from that apartment he had lived in by himself near Washington DC and had furnished with a Panasonic turntable and speakers, white china with a tasteful green-and-gold pattern around the edges of the cups and plates, and the el-shaped couch, part of which was crowded into the living room now, part of which was banished to the screened-in porch. I lay on the couch in summer afternoons and listened to my records – not many of them, they were expensive – looking out through the mesh of the screens, listening to Bob describe love affairs and cities and foreign countries and complicated feelings, sometimes Leonard Cohen – men who lived out there in some kind of land I wanted to be part of.

It’s why I hitchhiked across the country – thinking if I just got out of here, away from my high school and my mother’s station wagon, away from everything, if I went out there and stuck out my thumb, then maybe they would stop for me and let me in, welcome me, make it easy, let me into the song.

Most of the trip wasn’t like that and I came back feeling like I had failed again, though now at least I had some marijuana seeds someone had given me in the back seat of a car where a purple copy of Be Here Now had been tossed, seeds I could sprout in secret between damp paper towels, and I had been in bed with a man – an old man, but still better than going to a dance in a gym with a shy high school boy, I had more materials to make believe with but I knew it wasn’t real yet, not at all.

WHAT'S LEFT

I wrote to my mother this morning on a card I had saved years ago, a card someone had written to me on. “Congratulations!” said the card. “Love, Sue.” I didn’t remember who Sue was or what I was being congratulated for, but one side of the card was blank, and the bright red flowery illustration was something I knew my mother with her partial eyesight would still be able to enjoy, so I did what I learned in the ashram, cut off the side of the card that was written on and used the sort of postcard that remained.

I didn’t want to say much. Just a thank you for the $35 check she had sent ostensibly to cover the cost of xeroxing my father’s writing and sending it to her to give to my crummy little sisters over there in California.

They are crummy. I have a new reason to be mad at them. They went together to Budapest a few weeks ago to go through my recently deceased father’s belongings. I had received a couple of missives here and there over the last years, tight-lipped letters about powers of attorney, a booklist which I was invited to check off if I wanted certain titles from his library when he died. I ignored all of these well-behaved letters for they seemed so cloaked in subterfuge of an undefinable nature, I just knew I wanted nothing to do with whatever these sisters were dabbling in. Certainly, I didn’t want to plan for my father’s death. My sisters like to do these things, years in advance.

When I was visiting my mother last month she told me the sisters were off to Budapest to go through Dad’s stuff. “I’d like his watch,” I heard myself say. “Could you ask them to bring that back?”

I was thinking of the wafer-thin square watch with the bright gold face and the shiny alligator strap.

The box came form my mother last week. She’d used the box her checks from Bank of America had come in. She’d stuffed it with cotton balls and inside were three watches. Two cheapos, and yes, the watch I remembered, still ticking when I wound it, its gold face mottled with age.

Did the sisters as they went through my father’s things notice anything they thought I might like and bring it back for me? No. They didn’t. Such crummy people.

I want to get the watch cleaned and restored to its confident bright shine, the one that made my father feel good. I hope it won’t cost too much. I took a lovely old wind-up watch for fixing recently and was told $250, something that will have to wait.

Last week Fred and I drove down to see my mother’s little house and meet with the woman who has been reenting it for the last two years. My mother wanted to show the flag and also just make sure things looked okay. So there I was again, on that ground that had once meant so very much. It was a little painful, revisiting this place that I had thought was permanent, but I was happy to see the warm yellow paint and the new tiles Susan had added to the kitchen, the soft green she’d painted the living room – the weird furniture not at all my mother’s.

I will always mourn that my mother had to leave that place, no matter how much the facts are in favor of her new life in California. I didn’t know how short years were. Snap snap snap, they’re gone.

COLD COMFORTS

I sat in the car on a winter night, waiting while my mother delivered two sleds on behalf of my Brownie troop to a local orphanage. I looked up at the rows and rows of dark windows and wished I could live there.

Mostly, I wanted to be away from my mother. She was angry a lot and it usually came out of nowhere. You’d say one thing and she’d be blasting you, yelling, accusing you of being spoiled and sometimes she hit you, but it was the anger and the yelling I dreaded.

So I was eager when they said I was going to boarding school.

My mother was quiet as we toured the school, my father doing most of the talking, charming the nuns. This was his kind of place. My mother wore her simple black high heels and the suit with the small black and white checks and lipstick, and her purse. She didn’t sparkle when she dressed up. It was almost like a man dressing up.

My mother wrote to me every week in boarding school. Always a small white envelope, blue ballpoint pen and her round, even, loopy handwriting on small white sheets of paper – two pages, front and back.

Letters were laid out in the morning after breakfast when everyone went to the hall for assembly, a vast, high-ceiling room with alcoves and lead-paned windows. I could imagine in olden-times people dancing in this room in long dresses. The letters were laid out on two wooden radiator covers, and it was always good to spy an envelope with my name on it.

We read our letters standing up in the buzz of the crowd as people gathered and then took their places, head nun up front, everyone in several rows, standing with their class, in a horseshoe shape around her, hearing announcements.

My mother would tell me in her letters when they were coming to visit. It was about once a month. I didn’t want them to come. Not much. I envied the girls whose families were abroad. That seemed more grown up.

when my parents and sisters were due, on a Saturday morning, I sat waiting for them where you were supposed to in the curved wooden window seat in the Ante Room. It was a small room that looked onto the round open space outside where cars pulled up. I sat in the window seat, looking out the old-fashioned windows until the big gray car pulled up. Even just seeing it made me a little carsick. It had red leather seats that gave off a sweetish smell. Inside was my father in the driver’s seat, my mother beside him, my two little sisters in the back seat.

We went to the Grosvenor Hotel in the nearby village. My father talking with gusto, my mother in the background, minding children.

Sitting in the dining room for lunch, something that takes so long because my father is telling me how Napoleon’s army marched through Europe and he uses the salt and pepper shakers to demonstrate where they went. He is only talking to me and I have to pay attention though I wish he would just stop.

Afternoon they take us someplace outdoors where we walk. The sky is gray. There are ruins. My parents read the plaques. We walk. Maybe I run with my sisters. But this is never a place I want to be. I would prefer to be with my friends back at school.

Only at night do I miss her. Only at night, alone in my bed in the dark do I want my mother to come. I want her to come and kiss me goodnight and I cry because she is not there and will not come. Not every night, but sometimes.
 

ON THE STREET

On Sunday mornings I walked down Broadway from where I lived on 119th St. to Coliseum Books on 57th, an almost-straight line. A long line, that I walked swiftly and purposefully.

Walking is something you can do by yourself so well. It makes you feel like you have a place to go. And if you walk down Broadway on a Sunday morning it feels like anything can happen, and will happen, any second now. You are as far away from aloneness as is it possible to be.

The worst part about my alone life was that I was not supposed to be alone. My aloneness was a huge embarrassment. It had been for years. Ever since I’d come back from England, 14 years old, sure that this move back to the jazzy hip United States would snap me back to where I should be, snap me back into circles and circles of friends.

Three years of high school and deep embarrassing isolation I could not explain. How did everyone else make friends? Not that I wanted their friends. But still. I watched them. How did they talk so easily? Not that I wanted to say anything they were saying. Everyone's chit-chat seemed so stupid. Something had happened to me. I remembered being at the center of things, it being so easy I didn’t even notice it.

But now I am 14 and I have lost my touch. Only the outcasts notice me and I am repelled by them. I don’t want Sally – round with thick braces – or Rachel – tall, big-boned, dressed in polyester – to come talk to me in the library at lunchtime where I am eating the liverwurst sandwiches my mother put in a brown paper bag in the same wooden booth, off to the side, in the corner, an area few people frequent. I don’t want Rachel and Sally to seek me out and pull up a chair and tell me about the Girl Scout camping trip, but I listen and talk, I am polite, I must be, and really, they are okay – I even get interested – we laugh, and sometimes being even with them feels better than the utter silence of talking to no one.

Maybe it even looks better to be laughing with misfits than to be sitting alone.

But Sally and Rachel are not my people I know they aren’t. I will never ever be a Girl Scout. I listen to Leonard Cohen. The women he sleeps with are not Girl Scouts.

I walk down to Coliseum Books and I go in and I look through the riches there, the treasures, the fresh new paperbacks. I thumb through. I open here and there. I look at the brand new hardbacks too, but never buy one of those. Too expensive and too stiff. I wait for the soft paperbacks you can bend and soften.

Maybe I buy something.

And then it is time to go back. I don’t want to go back, not the way I leapt out of my room this morning, bright with the joy of a destination.

On the walk down it has been easy to feel the surge of confidence that I am hopeful will this time turn into words on paper the moment I sit at a typewriter. If only I had a typewriter with me right now, I am sure this super-charged excitement could spill out and become something as rich as what I see at Coliseum.

Instead, though, it is time to return, to leave this bookstore – so worn and warm – this place where writers end up, their words – how do they do it? – neatly packaged, glowing.

I can’t walk back up Broadway as fiercely as I came down.

I make my way. Back to the small room in the linoleum suite – not a real apartment -- I haven’t figured that out yet – this narrow room with the small vinyl-topped desk at one end, and the typewriter I inherited from my mother. I cannot look at it without seeing her, without seeing my whole family, the whole story of where I came from that must be erased – how can I write anything like what I see in all those piles of beautiful paperbacks when I am who I am?

Here in the room it is impossible to be free of it all the way I was just now on the street. Here I am the person I have always been. Out there, I was a stranger, someone who maybe had a chance of being a writer.

CREVICES

I sat at that desk by the entrance to the office. Just me and the phone and a wasteland in between.

In front of me was a series of doors, all lined up. Inside each door was a narrow windowless room, each with a drafting table. That’s where the artists worked, the real people with real lives, older than me. In their twenties.

I had a boyfriend a few blocks away, a boyfriend who didn’t like other people much. I sort of wanted a home where people came and went easily, but he didn’t like people to show up, especially if they were my friends and not his. He doesn’t like my friends and the way he talks about them I don’t like them much either.

Like Jan, the blonde secretary whom I finally invite over, just for a little while, before we go out to eat somewhere.

Jeffrey doesn’t come out. He has told me in advance that he will pretend not to be there. He will stay in the bedroom so Jan and I hang out for awhile in the living room with its lime-green-and-white shag carpeting and the two bubbling fish tanks and the brown Salvation Army couch.

Jeffrey and I have lived here for a couple of years. Los Angeles. West Hollywood. A place where there are palm trees and the supermarket stays open 24 hours a day. Los Angeles. California.

I drive an orange-and-white Pinto that Kerry gave me. Kerry is beautiful, older, sophisticated. The set of keys she gave me has a plastic fried egg attached that has a perfumey smell to it.

I drive Kathy to work every morning. She lives a few cottages down in this shady line of cottages. She lives with Stanley who is black, while Kathy is blue-eyed and blonde. Kathy smokes. There are little lines around her eyes. She wears a nurse’s white uniform to work and their living room is filled with adult furniture.

Stanley and Jeffrey hang out during the day. Stanley is an actor and Jeffrey writes screenplays, sometimes, sitting at the heavy wooden desk in our bedroom at the beautiful self-correcting typewriter that I never in a million years could afford.

Jeffrey drives an old four-door Mercedes. That’s the kind of thing that would never happen to me. His Uncle Elliott passed it on to him. We drove that car cross-country. Jeffrey made tapes for the trip. He bought two special tape-carrying cases to store them in for the trip. He cuts out from construction paper a cover for each tape – red for fast tapes, purple for sleep tapes, the ones he plays to fall asleep to, blue for tapes of slow songs.

And he types up the song titles onto the construction-paper label. And he gives each tape a title as if it were a book or a record. Sometimes he uses words I don’t know.

And before the cross-country trip his sister rolled us dozens of joins because Jeffrey and I have never learned to roll. We always use a pipe, like the pipe Jeffrey bought as we passed through San Francisco, ceramic, long and blue, shaped like a wizard with a beard. That’s the pipe that sits always now on the vinyl-topped coffee table in the West Hollywood cottage along with the ashtray, round, large, painted in earth tones from a trip Jeffrey went on in high school to Morocco.

After I got back from dinner with Jan Jeffrey was on the couch, watching TV. “She was so stupid,” he said. “Why would you want to spend time with someone so dumb?”

And I know what he means. There isn’t much to Jan, but in the office somehow we are friendly, something sets her apart, I’m not sure what it is, but I can’t pit her against Jeffrey’s friends from college and high school all of whom he thinks are so great.

I have a shelf in the cottage, one of the built-in bookshelves. I put there a mirror I bought in the Salvation Army that day when we got the couch. It’s an old-fashioned hand-held mirror with a stem and curlicue initials on the back. There’s something sweet and pretty about it, like I can imagine being a woman wrapped in a satin dressing gown sitting in the morning, taking the pins from her long hair. I don’t tell Jeffrey why I get the mirror. I don’t know why I want it. I just sense that we have something in common, me and the mirror.

I hate the sticky yellow linoleum in the kitchen from the oil in the electric deep fryer. I hate the freezer splashed with dried brown liquid from when Jeffrey’s coke exploded. I hate the tiny fish tank on the shelf, never cleaned, where some mushroom-like creature seems not to die.

April Visit, Part One

Here with my mother, I speak, using words I only ever used within my family, words and phrases we made up, some unintelligible syllables, others based on my father’s Hungarian accent, or words that one of us girls uttered when we were babies. The family vocabulary. It rolls easily off my tongue when I am there, and I enjoy uttering these phrases again, each with its own particular familiar cadence – phrases that at other times I have banned from my speech, phrases that it never occurs to me to use in other contexts.

Ruth, college freshman roommate and first friend in many years, said to me once, “You know, your sister Liz says that she wishes you all wouldn’t talk that family talk that you do,” and it was the first time that I heard the language we relied on acknowledged like that, and criticized. I could hear my sister’s criticism and immediately felt chastised, felt that yes, I have done something wrong and foolish, which was how Liz had often made me feel ever since her suicide attempt, her swallowing of the pills a big fat statement that she was suffering, that we were not, that she had the courage to speak up against the status quo that I had been so much a part of maintaining.

But this week in California I speak the language of childhood easily, almost with relief that I need not restrain myself – though my mother does not follow suit even though she created much of the vocabulary. She and I were the creators of this language though I have to think about this – everyone spoke it so freely we did not think about who was contributing the most.

I imagine my two sisters are quite strict about not using these childhood phrases that no one else understands, these phrases that covered up so much of what was wrong, phrases that made us laugh when maybe something else more mature was needed. Yes, I see how the language added to – maybe even created – the wall that kept us all safe from the rest of the world, hid a lot of reality, and my sisters are both so dedicated to doing things properly – one a 12-step sponsor to the masses, the other a food purist – that they probably forbid the speaking style. But I let it rip, surprised at how on the tip of my tongue it all is.

April Visit, Part Two

A few months ago my mother had mentioned that my father’s sister had sent some writing she had found that my father had done. “I’ll make three copies of it,” my mother had said, “and send each of you girls a copy.”

“Where’s that writing of Dad’s?” I ask when I am there. My mother goes into her bedroom and returns with a large white padded envelope, and I start to go through it, about 50 pages of onionskin, typed.

I have seen these pages before I realize. I come across two passages I thought I had lost forever. I had first read them decades ago when I found these and similar pages in my father’s filing cabinet. Most of the writing, I surmised at the time, was about politics and economics and I breezed over it. But I had always remembered two short pieces – one a few lines long about a child identified as “M,” pointing from a window, and another description of being in a New York City coffee shop, ordering coffee, the cream congealed and disgusting.

I had never thought I’d see those pages again, but they have traveled back and forth across the globe and are back in my lap again.

This time I read the other parts a little more closely and see things I did not see before. They are dated 1959. “Gosh, Dad’s English was good,” I say to my mother after reading for while – because the writing is fluent and sophisticated and I know he’d only been speaking English then for less than 10 years.

“Yes,” says my other. “He was smart then.”

I read. I hear a man writing in a tradition I identify with the thirties and forties, not personal, but lyrical. The lack of his being willing to really reveal himself on the page pains me – everything expressed in grandiose terms like “democracy” and “the common good” – I recognize that that’s how I used to write when I seriously started as a teenager, how my writing then was similar to his, how his writing and outlook were my model – and how still it is those two poignant real moments he captures – a description in a few words of what must be me, a two-year-old pointing from our Yonkers home down to a ship passing on the Hudson, and a more detailed description of ordering coffee, the congealed cream and pancakes that the menu described as being “made in Heaven.”

And through this short period of time with my father’s pages, I feel again for the first time in a long, long time that thin thread that connected us, that made us very different from the others in the family.

“I’m going to go out and make my copy,” I say to my mother, wishing I could keep these crinkly originals, but they don’t belong to me.

“Oh, just take them,” my mother says. “The girls won’t care. They’re not interested.”

WHAT'S TO BE MADE OF IT?

My first two-wheeled bicycle was blue. I went with my father on the weekend to get it. It was parked in someone’s driveway. We were answering an ad in the newspaper.

This was also the time my father showed me how to peel apart the little green helicopter leaves that fell from the big maple tree and stick them on my nose. It was something he was pulling from his own childhood that had happened a very long time ago, in a different country, before The War. The War was something huge that had happened a very long time ago. Old people knew about it. But it was over and it would never happen again.

Instead, now, there is my mother with her brown hair pinned up and her plain face without makeup or jewelry, without colored nails.

I like her jewelry pouch made of green satiny fabric, round with a zipper, and her necklaces and earrings inside. She keeps it in the top drawer of her bureau and sometime I sit with it on her bed and look through the strings of smooth pearls or the silver earrings with their tiny screws.

It seems like other women – the ones my father likes – the ones who sometimes visit, the ones who drink and laugh -- are prettier and younger than my mother and my father likes them much better. I wish my mother was different. I wish she wore high heels, but instead she parks by the side of the road in high grass and takes me with her to look at the old church she noticed as we drove by, a church nobody goes to anymore. It has signs on its locked front door, but my mother walks over the bits of broken glass and gravel round the back and finds a side door she pushes open. I keep hoping she will turn back, but she wants to go in. Sometimes she finds old books, old things left behind that she likes and brings home.

My father doesn’t do things like this.

My father walks on wide paths or dirt roads, places where it is easy to walk, places where there are no cars and you can see fields or woods, but where there is a path, and he brings always one of his walking sticks, sticks he has bought as if they were jewelry. He shows them to me and I know by the way he flourishes his cane, sometimes swinging it in a circle as he walks or using it to point to something, that the stick is like a good friend to him, the stick makes him feel better, the stick believes in him.

Sometimes my father wears his overcoat spread over his shoulders like a cloak as we walk, leaving his arms free.

He has taught me to fold my coat so that when I put it down somewhere the lining is on the outside. My father has shown me this carefully and when he teaches it to me I feel like I am learning something everybody knows, like the alphabet.

Both my parents take me on walks. I go with my mother through woods and orchards without paths. She pulls a leaf off a branch to chew on as we go. She exclaims about a jack-in-the-pulpit or a skunk cabbage or a cardinal. My father talks to me as we walk. He talks the whole time. I listen. Sometimes he tells me the story of the book he is reading. Sometimes he tells me something about history like Napoleon, or the Inquisition, or Hitler. Sometimes he talks about being a teenager in Budapest, about the bombs, or about the village my grandfather grew up in. One time he asks me what my friends at school call a boy’s goo-gah . “Weiner,” I answer. Then he tells me something about how men and women get in bed and the weiner falls in the woman’s goo-gah.

My father likes to lay a game after lunch on weekends. This is the only time my sisters and I eat with both my parents. My mother sits near the swinging door to the kitchen, my father at the other end.

One by one he invites each daughter to stand on his knees and hold his hands. He begins by bouncing his knees slowly, holding my hands, looking at me with his bright blue eyes, smiling, singing a Hungarian song about a circus pony. I like the beginning. I can balance on my father’s knees, the tune is bouncy. I sing along. But always my father quickens the pace and the game is to stay on as long as you can and you always end by losing, falling, he catches you, laughing.

When people visit my father urges me to play piano for them. I hold out as long as I can. I don’t play well. I never practice, am never confident, but he always insists, smiling, never stern, but immovable, and I give in, playing making mistakes.

His hair is black and grows straight back from his forehead. He combs it with a small plastic comb. Combing with one hand, smoothing with the other. “They said I looked like Beethoven,” he tells me, delighted.

“Intelligent people have high foreheads,” he says, and I feel like I am learning something everybody knows, that this is a fact. Like the alphabet.