IN THE RAIN

Tamar had been inside now for two or three days so this afternoon I invited her to come with me. I had a couple of errands to run and I thought I’d drive up to the Comeau to see if she’d like a run. She doesn’t like rain, but I thought maybe it had lightened up enough. Tamar grabbed her ball and dashed to the car. I brought my camera. There was an incredible tree trunk I had passed two days ago that I wanted to photograph. It was gnarled and wrinkled and looked like an old witchey woman’s torso. It never works for me to go back to something I have seen to photograph it. If I don’t catch what I see immediately it goes away, but I wanted to give this a try especially since it was a grey drizzly afternoon and I thought the tree trunk would look good in the rain. Woody Allen said he likes to film on cloudy days best and this has filtered into my own preferences.

Tamar and I drive through the Bearsville Flats. Tamar jumps into the front seat as soon as the car begins to move. She doesn’t like the back seat. There’s a structural malfunction back there that makes it sound like the back seat is going to fall through the floor and she doesn’t like it. So she hops into the front seat and pokes her head out the window that I have opened just for this purpose. but the windshield wipers are squeaking and this is scary too. Each time they squeak, Tamar jumps. She turns toward me, licks my face, but I say some strict words because her timing is bad and she retreats back to her passenger seat. I turn off the wipers. I don’t need them that much.

The tree I saw was on Wittenberg, not far I thought, but of course it’s farther than I remember. There it is, at the foot of someone’s driveway. I slow down and look. Yes, I can see what I saw two nights ago, but the spark I feel before taking a photo is not there and I know the picture will be lifeless. So I turn around and head back.

I’m never satisfied with my tree pictures anyway. I think of that huge gnarled one I took pictures of a few years ago in the Brookly Botanical Garden early one Spring. I tought with a tree like that I couldn’t miss, but the photos didn’t catch the texture, the monstrousness of that animal tree.

there’s hardly any rain now, less than when we left the house a few mintues ago. I have to get to the bank before five, but we’ve got plenty of time for a run up at the Comeau.

Tamar begins barking when I make the turn and as I pull into the parking lot she scrambles into my lap to exit through my door. I let her out before even turning off the engine. She is always in a huge hurry at this point.

We walk out into the beautiful hilltop field from which you can see a horizon of mountains, Tamar running ahead. I see a new sign has been posted on the gate – typed and laminated. I stop to read it. It tells me that it’s now soccer season and time for the Easter Egg hunt and if I don’t want to pick up after my dog to walk somewhere else. I keep walking.

As I approach a line of trees I see Tamar way off in the winter-brown field hunched up in her taking-a-shit position and hear my name called. I stop. I don’t see anyone. Then through the trees I see Dave walking with a pole in his hand. He comes up to me in a hat and rain jacket. “How long have you been out?” I ask. It’s been pouring for two days until just now. “Oh, about an hour and a half,” he says. “I been fooling around with drainage. You know how I like playing engineer.” I try to keep his eyes on me, hoping he will not notice Tamar.

As we talk I wish I could photograph him. He looks so fresh and strong, just out of the rain. I know he would love this photo that I can see as I look at him, but the camera’s in the car and it’s another photo that I will see but not take.

GOIN' AFTER IT

Here’s the background real quick.

In October-November I got hit by a real hard bout of depression. It took me by surprise. It wasn’t the usual sort of bad day gloom. It was thick and black and wrapped itself around me so tight sometimes I’d just stand still and cry. It was the way I used to feel when I was 18 in New York City or 20 and 21 in L.A. when thoughts of suicide were constant companions. Back then I had flicked the switch by hurling myself into yoga and then yoga groups, involvements that took me away from the icy dark sheets of turmoil.

And then this past autumn they were back. Only two things felt good during this time and both I discovered by accident. One was scribbling mad paintings with bright creamy pastels, clashing the colors, blurring them together. It was something I could do without thinking.

The other was reading books by Alice Miller. I’d come across her before but never found a footing. She’s a world-renowned psychiatrist who writes about how widespread and unacknowledged is violence against children – sexual and otherwise. I read her, feeling like I’d found a wise intelligent friend. I felt like someone was on my side in a way I had never ever felt before. It was profound. Perhaps, I thought, I should pay attention. Perhaps there is something way back in my earliest years that led to decades of undiagnosed unhappiness.

Alice Miller wrote that the best way to get to the bottom of your own experiences of violence – subtle and otherwise – is to find a shrink who can really be your ally. It’s not easy, she says. So many shrinks claim to be on your side, but when it comes down to really upsetting the apple cart, questioning the goodness and best intentions of, say, parents – most shrinks will urge their clients to wrap it up quickly, forgive and move on. In the end, the shrinks will usually protect the authorities. It’s so ingrained. Honor thy father and thy mother.

So I set out to find me a shrink. “Ask a lot of questions,” Alice advises. I had never asked a shrink questions before. I tried a local one and quit after three sessions. It’s not easy to quit a shrink, especially a nice cuddly one with an office perched on a mountain, who’d been highly recommended by a wise, experienced and dear friend.

I found another one. but he’s in Manhattan and he had no time on Thursday to see me, the one day I am in the city. But I went through quite a process to find him – filling out a long questionnaire from an institute that another friend told me about. I reviewed the institute’s web site and they really did seem unusually non-conventional. I was impressed and applied and it took a few weeks for everything to filter down to this one referral. I had to check him out, even if it meant going into New York on a Wednesday.

I’ve seen him three times now. I think I might really like him. He expects you to commit to one year, once a week. The only time he has is Wednesday. I can’t do this, I think. There’s no money for two trips to the city each week. I don’t want to give up almost a whole day to spend forty-five minutes with this guy. I am ready to quit after the second visit.

“I think it’s really important that you do this,” says Fred, and something in me flies up, something that had been invisible and silent while I figured out how I could not see this shrink, this silent invisible part of me flies up to the surface and says Yes, that’s true. So what if I can’t afford it -- all those things – if it’s there and I have found it I shouldn’t discard it, but hold onto it.

So I go see the guy a third time. I got into New York City by myself, paying $30 for a roundtrip ticket with coins salvaged from a jar – two hours there, two hours back – for this forty-five minute session.

I get right into it. I don’t have much time. I’d told him in the first session that I wanted to explore the possibility of sexual abuse, but we get into specifics this time.

I tell him the story of the visit I made when I was eleven, traveling to Switzerland by myself from England, meeting my dad in Geneva – the fancy hotel we stayed in, the bidet in the bathroom – I’d never seen one before and asked, “What’s that?” “It’s where ladies wash their wee-wee’s,” my father said and I was embarrassed – and the next day traveling out to the Alps where we meet a friend of my father’s – a pretty blond woman he says to call Aunt Helga, but she doesn’t look like an aunt to me, there’s nothing cuddly or familiar about her and I know she’s my dad’s girlfriend or at least that he wishes she was – and then in the taxi on the way home how I hear myself talking to my father in a way I have never done before. It’s as if I’ve suddenly learned a new language, like I’m talking in tongues. I’m talking fluently, like a grown-up, entertaining my father, teasing him, being witty and flirty, and he is responding to me, enjoying the game, being witty back. Then I take it one step further. I call him “Mickey,” the way Helga called him Mickey – and then I stop. It’s too scary what I am doing.

The shrink listens. I feel like a fucking idiot saying all this stuff to him, but I have to say it. “That’s profound,” he says. I feel like my crazy words have been taken in, received. It is an unfamiliar feeling. It is like receiving water after years in a desert. We talk back and forth a little more. He doesn’t think I am crazy.

The next day I say to Fred, “I think I am feeling lighter.” I am feeling something new enter. It feels childlike, that feeling of having fun, of being able to enjoy something. I can taste it on my tongue. “Maybe it’s the shrink,” I say.

I fall asleep on the bus the next day, going in again this time with Fred for our evening workshop on East 32nd St. When I wake up Fred says, “I’ve never seen you look so peaceful.”

This thing about going to the city on Wednesdays. My initial sense of how no, I couldn’t do it. It didn’t fit with the pattern of my week. But I feel a bulldozer plowing through my pattern, digging up fresh earth.

A SMALL WHITE HOUSE

Outside our small white house in England was a quiet residential street. Each house was a little different from the next one and had a name instead of a number. Each stood on about an acre or a half acre. That was on the other side of the street. From our front gate – a small black wrought iron gate that was really only for looks, it was useless to keep anyone actually out – but from that small black useless gate we could see across to two houses, each tucked behind trees and a nice patch of modest suburban grass.

Our side of the street was different. From our house down to the main road was a big open fenced-in empty field. Our house – small and white and very close to the street – stood like a sentry at the end of a grand driveway, the entrance of which, just a few yards from our front door, was flanked by two high curved walls.

The mansion to which this driveway entrance belonged wasn’t visible to us and I only saw it once or twice. Our landlords lived there. The matching exit of the driveway was much further down our street, and between the entrance and exit were thick ragged trees fenced in by a right row of tall narrow grey weathered planks. Except for much further down, we were the only house on our side of the street.

Although we lived in the English house for five years, we didn’t know our neighbors, not even the two houses right across from us. We knew that the woman who came down to the field behind our house twice a day was called Mrs. Stephens. She stood at the gate and called to the four or five horses who spent their days in the field, collecting them in the evening, walking them up the driveway to their stables and bringing them back in the morning. I never spoke to her. I never saw my parents speak to her though the gate she used was maybe fifty feet from our kitchen door.

My father was not home much. He came back from London or his travels on Friday evening and left on Monday morning and was hardly part of our life there.

My mother spoke to two or three people. There was Mr. King who drove a large black taxi. He had a round ruddy cheerful face and was just what you’d want from an English cab driver, sort of like a friendly Winston Churchill without the cigar. My parents liked him a lot. I could tell by the ring in their voices when either of them mentioned his name, “Mr. King!” as if he were a cartoon character that belonged to them exclusively. They liked that they could call him and he would come and take care of them – drive my father to the airport or my mother into London.

There was Mrs. Grub who came and cleaned sometimes and a fat woman who babysat us. There was Susan, my favorite babysitter, a teenager with long brown hair down her back who seemed to have stepped fully into the mysterious world of adults and could give me information like if I had an oval face or a round one.

There was Mr. Dent, the bent angry World War II veteran who ran the stable my father liked to ride at, and that was about it.

The phone didn’t ring here. It was mostly my mother, my two younger sisters and me. We read books. My sister and I walked home from school and to the library on Saturdays. We watched two TV programs before dinner. After that there was nothing else to watch. It was all grown-up programs like the news. We ate in the kitchen around a small rectangular table.

My youngest sister was four and five as I became twelve and thirteen. She was adorably cute with round cheeks and curls and I could tell my mother liked her the best. She treated her a little like a doll. There was something soft in my mother around Esther that I’d never seen in her before. It irritated me, made me angry. It seemed fake and unjust. I thought Esther was cute too. I just didn’t like how my mother was so obviously different with her, fussing with her hair.

In summer I hit tennis balls against the one outdoor wall that had no windows.

I had come home to this. I was a little bit an outsider. I was getting to be a grown-up. I could feel it. I wanted a subscription to Jackie magazine that had tips about make-up and stories about girls with boyfriends. I felt separate from my mother. Like my father was separate from her. I was separate from my sisters too. My father always separated me out. He had always made me feel separate from my mother and sisters. He had always selected me.

I had been in boarding school when we first came to England back when I was nine. My father away on business trips, me away at boarding school. Me and my father leaving my mother and sisters at home. That’s where they belonged and we did not.

But I had come home. I had come home, bruised from boarding school, my friends had turned on me, friendships in which I took such pleasure turned vicious and I ran home, though it felt like a comedown, to go back to day school, to live with my mother and sisters again, but I had no choice. I couldn’t stay amongst the girls who said they despised me now.

The new school is terrible. I hate it. It always feels so ordinary and drenched in my own failure. The girls who want to be my friends are not the ones who interest me the most, but I have lost my confidence. I cannot shake this feeling of being rejected even before I start. And so I become quiet, someone I don’t even recognize. This isn’t me. I know it’s not me. It can’t be me. Now I always feels like two people – the one I wish I was, and the one who is pretending, who is doing her best to convince the others that she is that girl, the one she wishes she was.

INTERLUDE

I have a few minutes before the violin lesson so I stop at St. Mark’s bookstore to see what new memoirs they have out. I go to the section under new non-fiction marked “Biography” and begin to scan the spines, my head tilted to the side. Most of them I remember from last time. My eyes move quickly past the books that are about other people – the life of George Sand – but stop at a cover I haven’t seen before. It’s a color photograph of a living room and a girl sitting on a couch except you only see the legs and torso. You can tell it’s a girl because she’s wearing a dress. The face is outside the photo, cut off. I stoop to look more closely. Sure enough, it’s a memoir. I thought so. They have a certain look, many of them anyhow. And this one is by Darcey, my advisor at Goddard a few years ago. She’s finally published a memoir, I think, after all those dumb novels. I’m a little jealous her memoir is out before mine. I’ve been writing memoir much longer than she has. I’ll read it though. I liked her memoir stuff. I flip to the back to see her photo and upon seeing it – the tattoo, the blond hair, the skinniness – I remember her, what she looked like. I’d picked her as my advisor because by that time all I wanted was to get my piece of paper with as little effort as possible and get out of there. I’d given up all hope of learning anything about writing at that place.

I write down the title in my tiny notebook – there’s no money for books this week – and drift over to the new paperbacks. Two young men stand right behind me. “There’s Elizabeth’s book,” one is saying. “Where are ours?” asks the other. “Oh, they’re in the back because they’re not brand new,” says the first one. We’re in front of the poetry section so I imagine they’re poets. Published poets, a rare breed. I thought of turning around, but I knew seeing them wouldn’t help me identify them. Instead, I leafed through a large edition of Howl, replications of Ginsberg’s typed pages with his handwritten notes. It would be a neat thing to have. I thought of how my friend Will would love it.

There was a book of new poems by my old friend Charles Bukowski who I got sick of about six months ago. But I opened it up and read a couple of them and remembered why I’d liked him so much in the first place.

I’d looked at pretty much everything I’d come to see. I looked over one last display table. A big volume on Patti Smith. I had considered her one of my people until a few weeks ago when I saw her on TV and she looked so ugly and sounded so bad I thought maybe I’d been wrong about her – without too much interest I began leafing through the pages, especially the early ones with lyrics from the albums that I knew so well. There was a photo of her kneeling like a disciple in front of William Burroughs, a writer too eccentric for me, and a photo of her obviously chummy with Ginsberg, and another of her sprawled in a chair holding a photo of Dylan’s face over her own. I liked the company she kept. For a little while I wanted to be her in those late seventies years – something to do with late nights in New York City and lace and defiance and jeans and sneakers. I came out of my building on Eighth Street late at night to buy ice cream and there she was, walking past with a few others and I just said Hi and she said Hi – and some of those songs – as I read the lyrics in St. Mark’s Bookstore I could hear her wailing voice and the guitars and drums -- just immediately evoked the rooms and places of that time.

I closed the book. Gathered my things. Went back out onto the street to walk the block or two to Catherine’s place. The rain was finally over. She had warned me that the front steps of her building were being worked on so I couldn’t climb them to ring the bell. We’d have to make eye contact through her window which is just above the street. But when I arrived the curtain was drawn. In books and movies, I thought, people are always throwing pebbles at windows to get people’s attention. Now was my chance to try it. I stooped down and found a translucent white pebble. I threw it. It missed the window by an inch or two and bounced off the sill. I started to reach for another to try again, but Catherine had pulled the curtain aside and was waving. She came out through the basement door. “Did you hear the pebble?” I asked, excited. “Yes!” she answered.

SAME BUS, DIFFERENT DIRECTION

Yesterday I saw the new shrink a second time. His name is Martin. He dresses neatly, everything tucked in carefully. He is slim and narrow. I bet he jogs. He manages to blend friendliness, intelligence, interest, questions within very distinct boundaries. His waiting room is New York City narrow, lamps, a couple small tables, a couple of comfortable but not too comfortable chairs – wooden furniture, sort of classy antiquey upper West Sidey, but not ostentatious. The magazines are up to date and lined up perfectly: Harpers, the New Yorker. I love the chair I get to sit in while I talk to him. I think it’s made of leather with a high back, wide enough to sit cross-legged and an ottoman to put your feet on. You can pretty much sit in any position in that chair.

It was hard day for me. Felt like I was battling uphill through the city everywhere I went. It was raining and cold. I didn’t have the right coat. Its wool was good for cold but useless for wet. I scrambled with the tiny umbrella, the violin case and the small bag that held everything else. Worst of all I wore the wrong shoes. Too small, and everywhere I had to go seemed blocks and blocks away from the subway stations.

I have turned my back on my mother. That’s what it feels like. My mother of the $20 bills, of the three $100 bills to go to Hungary with. Even Fred was touched by that. I imagine her wondering what she did wrong. I imagine her thinking I’m bad and ungrateful and too big for my boots.

Yesterday I met a man who I’ve known peripherally for a few years. I’ve never liked him much, but he’s familiar and friendly and we say hi a couple times a year. He used to call himself a jewelry designer, but he always seemed like a small-time business man to me. Once or twice I saw a piece of “jewelry” he had “designed” – hideous, ugly, machine-made. Anyway, I ran into him yesterday morning, both of us getting on the New York City bus on a mid-week day when the tickets are cheaper and he said business was bad and he was thinking of taking a workshop with me and Fred. “Years ago,” he said, settling down in his seat across the aisle from me, “back in the sixties, I had an idea for a screenplay, and someone passed on the idea to Ron Howard, and Ron wanted to see a treatment, but of course, I never wrote it.” He’s a little trim man with graying baby-boomer hair who wears pressed jeans and could even be handsome if he had a different personality. “I’ve always thought I was a good writer,” he continued, “though I haven’t been TRAINED ~ so I thought maybe I’d take your course and write that screenplay.”

“We’re pretty anti-training,” I said pretty quickly. I wanted to set him straight real fast. We’re not a place to come do that screenplay you’ve been meaning to do for years, we’re not a place to come when you want to make some money quick – I didn’t say that – I talked about ART and PERSONAL writing and as I spoke I started thinking about the energy that is created when you write, when you make the commitment to write down what you know, and in the process of writing – of choosing what to say and what words to use – not choosing in the sense of thinking about it, but choosing the way you do when you write, moving quickly, taking this path not that one -- there’s a friction between all that could be written and what you actually choose to write, and I think that friction really is life-giving in some way. I didn’t say all that, but I was thinking it. I hadn’t thought of it quite like that before. Ric said that sounded great and started making cell phone calls.

OFF THE RAILS

Last week was my birthday and I turned fifty. We said we’d have a party.

When my mother visited a couple of weeks ago, sitting in the shadows of the little room I call the library, sitting there on a cheap hardback chair I got from her actually sometime last year when she was giving away a bunch of small furniture that she’d been storing for a friend of hers – a woman who’d lived in the ashram for years and years – had children there and everything – a pretty woman with dark skin and a South African English accent – she stored her stuff at my mother’s for years after leaving the ashram, then decided she didn’t want most of it and Fred and I got first dibs – so now my mother is sitting on one of those chairs in my library on a Wednesday afternoon. We are drinking tea. Fred is there, though sometimes he gets up and leaves the room which I don’t do, I guess because it’s my mother and she’s driven fifty miles to see me. It was her idea.

She asks me if I’m going to have a party and I say I’m not sure, I don’t know. I have been quite quiet during her visit, not going out of my way to entertain her. When I speak with her a few days later she comments on that. She says, “You were a little quiet. Is everything all right?” and I say it is and feel guilty because here she is, showing concern, right? But I cannot take her seriously, cannot for a moment consider revealing anything of my actual life to her. “Well,” she says with a wry laugh, “I’ve come to realize I just have to let my kids have their own life.” I make some kind of noise that seems appropriate. I am faking everything here.

She sends me a card a few days before my birthday. I open it. My main interest is to see if there is a check in it. There is. $50. $25 less than last year.

Part of me breaks at the thought of my eighty-two-year-old mother sending me anything at all, let alone a check.

I sweep the kitchen floor, make lunch, thinking about inviting her to the party after all. It's only two days away now.

I ask Fred to call her. He’s been making all the party calls. I hear him speaking to her on the phone. I listen from the next room with big big ears. The conversation is surprisingly short. No extras, just when and where.

Fred comes into the room. “How was it?” I ask. “She didn’t say much,” he says. “That she’ll come if she can.”

I thought it would make her happy to be invited. I like the thought of making her happy. but there was no resounding response to this late-issue invitation.

Then I kick the whole thing out of my head. Whether she comes or not, whether I should have invited her or not – I kick it all out of my head and feel ready to go with whatever happens.

She calls the day of the party, leaves a message on Fred’s phone, she can’t make it.

It’s unusual. My mother usually so happy to have an invitation.

I call her the next day, the day before my fiftieth birthday, a time when usually things would be as smooth as silk, I feel a distance, as if she is holding me at arm’s length.

It’s as if someone has told her that I have been writing about her and me over and over again, and posting these stories on the blog – they are not private anymore – these stories are out there, words about my mother – I think my sisters have finally found them, I think they’ve said something to my mother, something like, “Don’t be so nice to Bim.”

Bim is crumbling. Good old Bim who was so nice to have around. Oh my god, she’s disappearing. I think it’s good. I think it’s good.

HOME SWEET SOMEWHERE

I remember his fingers pressing my throat, me standing up against the wall of the bedroom – not our bedroom – none of that place was ours – it was his and it was night and he was naked and it was dark and I wasn’t really frightened that he would kill me, knew that he wanted to hurt me very much and I was surprised how close this felt to having all my air cut off forever. I heard myself heaving in air with a rasping sound, but not fighting back, this all so expected, an evening with the lawyer boss – I’d gone because I was flattered to be invited – he an utter grown-up, in his forties with a Porsche and a divorce – me with a temp job and a few papers away from graduation and it’s winter, the December in 1977 when it snowed so much that day that all the offices closed early and people were cross-country skiing on Fifth Avenue, he drove me home – his car a romantic bubble inside the snowstorm – though it wasn’t my home – I didn’t have something as difficult to establish as a home – he drove me home – me the temp, he the lawyer I was just supposed to type for, he drove me to the big expensive apartment building where my boyfriend lived – the boyfriend who called this place home without hesitation – and where my boyfriend’s father lived – sometimes – during the week – though for him it was more of a holding pen, the result of some huge fight with his volatile wife, this their solution, the father would sleep here during the week on a four-poster bed in an otherwise bare room except for the TV – this apartment that had held so many scenes of harshness, bleakness that I had decided were part of being in love with someone, months -- by now it had been years, of Jeffrey talking about having other lovers – after all, what difference would it make really? – and then him finally going out and getting one – all fall, his delight in having someone else to go to, someone else to send him artistic postcards – he has someone else who knows him differently than I know him – and there is not a drop of fury in me just the black sheets of suicide always falling thick and fast because she is better than me, she must be – and so it is easy to say yes to everything the lawyer suggests – the lunch at the ultra posh restaurant where I don’t bother with food, just the margaritas or was it wine, and then, another day, I go to his apartment. It is not a secret. I don’t go on the sly. I remember only the hash, damp and dark and sticky, and the sex – not the whole nine yards -- I’m afraid to take all the freedom I supposedly have – but enough to make my point. I have somebody’s interest and he is interesting enough to have good hash, he’s not a little high school punk. Jeffrey has his published author with young child. I have my upper East Side lawyer with good hash. But I don’t spend the night. “I don’t like to sleep with two people in one night,” I say. It’s a line from a movie or a book I read once. It has nothing to do with me, and I go back downtown, back to the spacious apartment where Jeffrey’s dad sleeps away off in one bedroom and Jeffrey slams me up against the wall in the other, his fingers pressing against my throat.

PRETTY GOOD

I sit in Phil’s narrow kitchen at the small half-circle wooden table that is pushed up against the wall. I face the window down at the far end of the room between the sink and the refrigerator. It is afternoon. Nobody else is here. I am thirteen stories up and the wind whistles through some tiny space between the window and its frame so that sometimes I think the kettle is whistling, but it’s not the kettle. It’s the wind off the river.

I am reading the book I bought two days ago, a new hardcover memoir, my latest favorite way to spend money. New hardcover memoirs. When I finish one I place it next to the last one on a bookshelf that long ago ran out of space. I have begun pulling out books that don’t seem to belong there anymore, books that I want to keep only because they are part of my past. My yoga books, for instance. They’re going now, historical relics, valuable only for that, but not valuable enough to be in the set of bookshelves that I consider mine. There are some bookshelves that are all Fred’s and some that are starting to mix. But this one set of shelves I like to keep for myself because when I look at this collection it’s like looking at myself, a small piece of my history. I say “a small piece” because for a long time I didn’t have any books. Even though almost every book I’ve ever owned has been precious to me, I’ve turned my back on them, given them all away or even thrown them out at certain times when something else seemed more important than owning anything. I have sworn never to do that again, and so I covet my books, and I like making space for the new ones on prime real estate, the shelves at eye level.

It is so nice to be sitting in this kitchen utterly in repose, reading this book that I am just deciding I like very much. I wasn’t sure for the first few chapters. I am very aware of being at peace, at ease.

I am proud of the big jug of environmentally sound laundry detergent I managed to find this morning in Phil’s not very hip neighborhood. It sits on the small kitchen table and I think Phil will be surprised and pleased to see it when he gets back. This morning I found the laundry room in his building and managed to wash and dry the sheets we’d used even though to use the machines it turned out you had to have a special tenants card, but I negotiated my way through and now there are clean sheets back on the bed, ready for Phil’s next houseguest. I’ve stayed here with Fred many times and always only got as far as leaving a pillow case full of used sheets for Phil and Andrea to deal with. I really like that I’ve managed more this time. Usually I make sure to bring them food – a jar of jam, some cheese, apple cider -- but last time I did that I felt just like my mother when she comes to visit me, and besides, Phil and Andrea are away for four days now so food didn’t seem like the best idea, nor tulips. I liked my clean sheets and environmentally friendly laundry detergent solution. I had seen a jug of their laundry detergent at the bottom of a closet, had noticed they had a health food brand, not some crap from the supermarket that I still get because it’s cheap. I bought a big jug for them and thought it might please them too because they do all their grocery shopping on bicycles and this would be damn heavy to have to drag home on a bike.

Later, in the street, I have too much to carry and have to plan my carrying strategy carefully, what fits into one hand, what fits into the other. The day has turned springtime warm and though I’d hoped I could wear the coat with the buttons undone, within two blocks I stop, put down my bags and violin and take off the coat, and find it a place amongst my carryings.

I will take the bus across 23rd St., but first I will stop at the art store. I want to buy another notebook for my violin teacher to write down her notes and suggestions for me. The notebook I brought to her last week for our first lesson was too small and precious. She needs something with big pages and no lines. I could get something probably at the Duane Reade, but I’m crazy. I want a nicer notebook than that for my violin lessons, and I struggle the extra two blocks to the art store, find something not quite as beautiful as I want, but it will do, and then the bus and then the subway.

I arrive for my lesson ten minutes early and stand outside on the sidewalk. I don’t mind.

JUST ASKING

Somebody left me a message on my blog a few days ago, telling me that I am blind to my mother’s innocent, well meaning love and that I am acting like a sullen teenager. It was the longest response I’ve received to any of the almost fifty stories that I’ve posted. She – I assumed it was a woman ~ it had that voice – ended by saying that I wrote well.

That part mystified me more than anything else. I can’t imagine liking the writing of someone who appears in the writing as an utter jerk.

Anyway, I called the message my first hate mail, as if I had accomplished something.

It also felt like a letter from my own alter-self.

I have often treated my mother as if she were a sweet innocent person whom I should do my best to take care of. And it worked perfectly. The only parts that didn’t work were the huge headaches I got sometimes, and how I never felt at ease to talk about myself with her instead always listening and the way that often after visits I’d feel empty, like I’d been used up though I hadn’t noticed the siphoning.

While I lived in the ashram my mother lived in a garage apartment on the property of family friends. The main house was almost two hundred years old, a small farmhouse with low ceilings, slanted roofs in the small upstairs bedrooms, dark wide floorboards and rambling roses outside. My mother’s apartment above an empty garage filled with ancient farm tools had a nice rough edge to it. It wasn’t a smooth plastic place. I liked visiting there, watching videos and escaping the asceticism of the ashram. I liked the giant sunflowers my mother grew and the morning glories that blossomed on the railing of the steps leading up to her door where, in the fall, a pumpkin always sat.

I came down to spend the weekend once to celebrate her birthday. My two sisters lived a few thousand miles away, my father even further. It seemed that if I were not there my mother would be alone and I could not bear that. When she woke up that morning I had decorated the kitchen table with a small forest of marigolds -- plants she could add to her garden – and I had brought her special tea and a tea pot for brewing it because she often said she couldn’t taste tea the way she used to.

I haven’t called my mother since she visited ten days ago. I’ve lost the card I wrote to her, saying nice things about her visit. I knew my sisters are amongst those who don’t think I’ve behaved well.

It was one sister’s birthday yesterday and I did nothing. I had a few mild plans of things I might do – a small gift (which I ate myself), an email I never wrote. Everything I thought of ended up feeling like a cover-up I didn’t have the energy for.

I think about the other sister who for awhile fifteen years ago or so was accusing my father of having molested her when she was a baby. For a few years there she didn’t talk to any of us, except my mother, of course. She never cut herself off from my mother. I was thinking how this sister returned to the fold pretty quickly and more than thoroughly. Now she sends money to my father every month, asks him to write down his memories of childhood, traveled to Europe to visit him.

When I was in Budapest last year I saw a photograph collection she had made of her trip there. The last photo was a close-up of her and my father, looking perfectly satisfactory as a friendly loving father-daughter portrait.

I think my mother handles the big scary monster of life by – by what? I grew up hearing her tell me stories about how her brothers and sisters didn’t like her. “They used to run away from me,” she told me many times. I always saw her as someone people didn’t like very much – including me and my father – not because she was mean, but because she couldn’t take care of herself, because she had sort of anti-charisma, no strength, no belief in herself, no ability to really support another person.

One thing I can say for sure is that my mother does not ask for much. She doesn’t expect much. She is happy with her little home and her routine of getting up early, manual tasks, low-paying jobs. This smallness of hers drove my father crazy. I think he felt her always pulling him down—she who didn’t want life to get too big.

Natvar would accuse me of the same thing and I had no defense. It sounded right. Like my father, Natvar would talk big as if he had big plans and just needed to be discovered. And he thundered at me when I couldn’t keep up with him, when instead of rising to greet him on this wave of enthusiasm, I was numb. “You want to sabotage me, don’t you,” he’d say, and I thought he had to be right. I was always afraid of becoming my mother and it did not surprise me when it seemed to happen.

Natvar is dead. My father is crumpled and pretty much out of sight. My sisters obey the conventions of family obedience. My mother plays innocent child, the one you can’t find a way not to like. She sends my father $100. She tucks a $20 bill under my soap dish before she goes home.

The person who wrote the nasty email tries to explain that my mother is just trying to tell me she loves me. That explanation is actually already a very familiar one. I know that interpretation. It’s a very small explanation though, a ready-made one. It’s like trying to cover a big bowl with a small piece of Saran wrap, stretching and stretching, saying it fits, but there’s that big gap.

YEAH, BUT WHY?

My father and Natvar are the two people I have known who tried the hardest to civilize me in the name of culture and civilization and sadism too, I suppose, underneath it all.

Natvar was an expert on everything correct. Not that he wanted to be ordinary. He wanted to be superlative in every way like I thought I had to be.

Natvar was a yoga teacher on Eighth Avenue whom I met because of an ad for a free class in the Village Voice in the very early 80’s. He was tall though not much taller than me. He didn’t have a dancer’s body. In his late thirties, which seemed advanced to me in my early twenties, his body looked well exercised, gleaming with health. He said that before yoga his body had been stiff. It was hard to imagine.

He’d been an acting student in Athens, had run away from Greece and his own history to live in London which had seemed to him the pinnacle of civilization. He described to us as we sat on the couch and on the floor of the tiny carpeted lobby of his little but perfectly appointed yoga school how he had walked into the fanciest mens clothing store on Bond St., pretended to be experienced, and got a job behind the counter, selling suits of fine tweed, silk scarves and crisp cotton shirts.

He told us how he practiced his English accent over and over at night by himself so that no one would guess he was a poor, uneducated Greek boy. He told people his name was John Phillips instead of Yanni Philippoussis and as he told us these stories he made them all sound grand and heroic, like a movie where everything goes exactly as it should and the light is always bright.

We began as a happy family, a bunch of renegades. It was easy to hand over the reins to Natvar. He was eager to take them, starting with loving suggestions of what to eat when you didn’t feel well, rising to impatient corrections on how to clean a floor – don’t you people know anything? Fill the bucket with hot water and what is this tiny scrap of a rag you are using – here, let me show you – and he takes a large fresh cotton cloth, folds it neatly in two, dips it into the hot water and wipes the floor in long strokes, going into each corner, under the baseboards – there, you see, that’s how it should be done – while we stand and watch, we who thought we were grown up because we didn’t live at home anymore, but look, we know nothing, can’t make the brown rice so it isn’t sticky, look how sloppy we are and careless – Mark used eighteen inches of dental floss last night – spoiled Americans, no consciousness, that’s what it is.

I labored to get it right. Why did I listen so hard, that’s what I want to know. Why was there not the smallest cell in me that pulled away? Well, there were a few cells that wanted to pull away, but I fought them as if they were rebels who had to be put down. I knew how to do that. I knew how to say no to urges for pleasure, to think the grim way was the better one.

By the time we were in Greece, I was taking slaps in the face. I was accepting that I was fit only to be the maid. I was believing that, as Natvar said – furiously – I was psychologically damaged. I began to feel like an invalid, someone others had to tolerate and care for, who could not participate in the world as other people could.

There was a day when we were running out of Athens, running away from Natvar’s wife who had shown up the day before, waiting for Ariadne, their seven-year-old daughter, when she came out of school. Following Daddy’s orders, Ariadne had ignored her mother, and climbed into our friend Edianna’s car as usual. Edianna had risen to the challenge, driving at high speed through back roads to shake Neysa off her tail and preserve the secret of our address. It was the closest we’d come to being discovered.

After putting Ariadne to bed with extra cuddles, Natvar had been up most of the night, on the phone, talking in rapid-fire Greek to Edianna, to Irini, to Gelly, to Katina – all women who could always respond to his impassioned voice with matching Greek verve for hours and hours. When he spoke at dinner, pounding his fist on the table – his dilemma, his cunt of a wife who, like all women, was a scrap of pathetic slime – I found nothing to say that could possibly satisfy his rage. I, who had once thought we were best friends, sat there as I had by now a thousand times, mute, trying to force my brain into ideas of what could be done, how I could help. But nothing came and it seemed to prove that I did not care, that the human nerve of compassion was dead in me.

The next day I volunteered to go down and bring a cab back to take us to Piraeus where we’d catch a boat that would take us out to the small island of Aegina where Edianna said we could stay at her summer house. No one would find us there.

I volunteered always for the jobs I thought I could do: getting taxi’s, going shopping, which meant walking to the supermarket every other day and buying for our family of five, spending the money as I anticipated Natvar wanted it spent and shoplifting to fill the gap between what Natvar demanded and how I could stretch the drachmas. Mark was smart enough to share Natvar’s bed and help with manly things like strategy and management. Meredyth was the pretty one who Natvar said could cook, do his hand laundry and share his daughter’s bedroom. I got the leftovers: cleaning, errands.

So I went down to the big road, flagged down a yellow cab and brought it to the front door of the three-apartment building on the shady side street on which we lived.

I went upstairs, confident I had at least managed this. Natvar met me at the front door and hit me hard in the face. “You bitch,” he shouted. “You fucking cunt. Are you blind? Do you want to get us all arrested? You do, don’t you? You want to turn me in like every other fucking cunt in this world.” He dragged me to the window overlooking the street below. “That’s not a taxi,” he hissed. “I could see from here what you could not see even as you sat in the fucking thing. Can’t you see that’s not a taxi? What’s wrong with you? That could be a cop for all we know.”

I held myself together, went downstairs in my narrow navy blue skirt and leather heels, a costume that was supposed to make me look like a sophisticated executive who had it all together. I apologized and told the man to leave. He shrugged and drove away. He too must think I’m a crazy person.

Okay, okay. It goes on from there, but what I’m asking is why on earth did this all feel acceptable in its own strange way? Acceptable to feel like a psychological invalid? Where were the friends that when I first met Natvar might have pulled me back and said, oh, come on, what do you see in him? Natvar seemed much better, much more worldy and experienced than any of my sorry friends. Again, when I met Natvar I had nothing that I wasn’t willing to give away, nothing I wanted to hold onto. Life with him would be more counter-cultural and interesting. I went for it, and as I fell deeper and deeper there was nothing to break my fall.

MOTHER VISIT - Part Two

Tamar starts to bark. I hear the squeak of the screen door and my mother’s voice, “Yoo hoo.” She’s here.

I have set out three chairs in the small room off the kitchen that I call the library. I’ve planned it in advance. We’ll sit there. “It’s a good room for appointments,” I said to Fred. “If I start a fire and we sit in the living room it’ll be hard to have a short visit.” My excuse will be that it’s warmer in the library, which is true.

I have lots of cookies left over from this week’s workshops. I have filled the kettle. I will make a pot of organic Earl Grey tea. I have thought through all of this.

I open the door. My mother is small, one step lower down than me and leaning forward with bags in her hands. Her grey head is bare. She has a silk scarf of bright colors – greens, reds, blues – loosely around her neck and shoulders. She steps in, the dog is barking and I am saying welcoming things and she comes in, into the kitchen, unloads her bags onto the counter – there are the salted nuts I wrote about, the chocolate, a tin of coffee. “All from ShopRite!” she says. We haven’t really looked at each other yet. She unwraps a beige squash. “I know you don’t like them,” she says, “but I thought maybe you could use it,” and I say something about how it’s great while part of me thinks I’ll cook it, I know they’re good for me, I should eat more of these things and part of me can’t believe she’s bringing me another butternut squash left from her garden when she knows I don’t like them.

She goes back to the front door to take off her boots and takes them off without having to sit down. I’m impressed. I ask if her feet get sore without any shoes – that mine do – but she says she’ll just be sitting and she’ll be okay.

And she sits and I’m at the stove and Fred comes and we sit and I pour tea and my mother talks like a stone skipping across a lake. I think she must be nervous. Fred asks her how she’s been and she says pretty much the same – that she doesn’t like change too much – and she describes her day, when she gets up, how she warms up her car, how her cat steals her chair, how she goes to bed at 8:30, what she does on Sunday.

I don’t say much. I feel tired. I have no energy for this. My mother says she’s supporting Hillary because Hillary’s a woman and Fred goes on the attack, talking about Hillary’s support of the war, firing a dozen facts at my mother. I shrink a little, but just let them figure it out. My mother says something about how Hillary has a lot of experience, or should be given a chance, and I can tell by the expression on her face that she is copying what her friends are saying. And I picture my mother in her small community of delusional ashram devotees, cut off from so much of the world.

I move to the floor and start to brush out Tamar’s thick black fur. Tamar lies on her side and appears to fall asleep. She is often not in the mood for detangling and lets me know by baring her teeth, so I am grateful for her current cooperation.

My mother says something about how Obama is too young – something that people who haven’t heard him speak say. I tell her about the speech we listened to from Selma – how it was so inspiring it almost sounded like a prophet. This is something I am interested in saying. “Well, maybe,” my mother says, as if the things that have been working fine back home don’t stand up when she brings them to Woodstock.

She asks about the workshops. I say they’re doing great. I never feel like saying more. I have never enjoyed talking about my life with her as if all that occurs in another language and I don’t know how to translate. And she asks about my violin and again I answer briefly. There are a few periods of silence that I don’t rush to fill.

She says she talks to my father every Saturday these days and that he is unhappy and that he hopes someone (meaning one of us girls) will come visit him. “He says, ‘I never meant to be so cut off from my family,’ but he never cared much about us when he was here,” my mother says with a little laugh and a glance at me and I instantly am sure that she is trying this line on me because it always gets a laugh from my sisters, but it’s an old line and I don’t rise to the bait.

I ask if my sister Esther and her husband are still planning to go to Budapest in the Spring. My mother doesn’t look at me. I’ve been getting the feeling lately that I am not allowed in on information about my sisters, but she nods, says Esther has been too busy to pin it all down (I have visions of Esther running about her corporate offices, doing “real” work), but they’re planning to go. “They’re due for a visit,” my mother says. “It’s been two or three years.” I didn’t know there was a quota.

She says she might go with them, and later adds the detail that Esther, hearing my mother was interested in seeing my father probably for the last time, had suggested that they go together. “We both could imagine him, standing on the balcony, with his bags all packed, ready to come back with me if I went alone,” my mother says with a half-hearted laugh.

I don’t want anything to do with my father right now, but I don’t want anything to do with my mothers and sisters despising him either.

“I wanted to bring you some logs,” my mother says, “but they’re stuck under a tarp under all the snow, and the snow’s frozen solid.”

My mother leaves soon enough, and for the rest of the evening I feel I should have done more. I am beset with these feelings. And I don’t know how to reconcile the little old lady with her bags of ShopRite groceries who I will miss when she is no longer able to make these trips with the often vicious woman I’ve been writing about – the mother of my childhood.

When she hugged me at the door yesterday it was a longer hug than usual, and I felt like she was really trying. I just don’t know what she is really trying. I just feel, I guess, her yearning for something, and part of me feels I could assuage it all, make it so she was absolutely content, and I don’t. I don’t step forward to fill the gap.

I wrote her a card that night, saying how nice it was to see her, but then I didn’t have a stamp and it’s still sitting here, written but not sent.

MOTHER VISIT - Part One

My mother will come to visit this Wednesday. She will drive the fifty miles here, spend one hour or until I “kick her out” (her words), then drive back. It was her idea and I said okay.

Then I had misgivings. I shouldn’t make her drive all the way here. I should meet her halfway. But that would take up most of my day. I didn’t want to do it. If she just showed up here and stayed an hour, that would be fine, but she’s eighty-two. I should be protecting her. What if she had an accident. She wasn’t a great driver forty years ago.

I go to get my haircut. The hairdresser asks me questions like “What’s your favorite car?” and I just don’t have the energy to banter with him. Luckily there are other people there he can talk to. I’ve seen him three times now, but I’m never sure that he remembers me. He’s never called me by my name. I feel like a stranger every time I go there.

My mother originally wanted to come up last Wednesday, but I had this haircut appointment. I told my mother I couldn’t meet her that day. I said I had “an appointment.” I didn’t say more and the absence of explanation pushed at me a little, but I pushed back.

My mother has probably started to fill up her trunk with logs. I know she has logs she can’t use that she wants to give us. And she will probably bring some mixed nuts from ShopRite for Fred, some cheese, some chocolate. Maybe some tea. And most of it we will use.

I begin to think if there’s something I can give her when she comes. I should have something. A sample CD came in the mail a few weeks ago – a college lecture on literature or history. My mother has often said she’d like to study those lectures they advertise so I sent it on to her. When I do something like that I feel like I buy myself a little time.

I remember the first time my mother and a sister visited me here in Woodstock. I just went into visit mode. I acted with my mother and sister the way I was used to: non-stop talking, dumb jokes, teasing. You know, the stuff you have to do with these people. I didn’t even notice it. I thought I was being warm and friendly. I remember Fred’s expression. He was mad about something. Why couldn’t he just get into it? Looking back, I imagine he thought I had disappeared. I hadn’t noticed I had disappeared.

On the phone Sunday evening I call just to say yes, this Wednesday will work. My mother tells me that she’s watching a man on 60 Minutes who says the economy is going down the tubes, that she hangs up her wet laundry now to help global warming, that my sister’s daffodils in Santa Clara are blooming –

“Let’s not talk now,” I break in gently. “We’ll talk on Wednesday.” And the call is done and the visit will happen and it will only be an hour and I will still feel like the day is mine and not somebody else’s.

A COUPLE MOMENTS OF CLARITY

In high school, sitting up alone in my attic room, I said I wanted to be a writer.

I liked books. Words, the right ones, moved me more than anything else in the world. In other people’s words I found a confirmation of my own inner reality. I didn’t find it anywhere else. For me, only writers knew how to communicate what being alive really felt like and I thought the greatest thing possible was to put into words what was otherwise never talked about. I wanted to do it.

I thought I would sit at a desk somewhere and do it. And as I dreamed in my attic I imagined myself being good at it, that I'd like what I wrote and other people would too.

"You don't make the art you want," writes the painter, Odile Redon.

Now I really am a writer and it is not like this at all. It means becoming completely vulnerable. It means reaching into my inner world much more deeply than I was prepared for. It’s not fun. I can easily imagine a life not doing it. I could go get a job, bring home a check, become one of those people who pays her bills and lives in a moderate way. But I have done that. For years I did that and I was bitterly miserable. I thought the misery was because I wasn’t writing, because I was stuck in a meaningless 9-5 job. But the misery came from somewhere else I am realizing now. Because I am not doing the 9-5 job anymore and, lo, I am often as miserable as I ever was. And as I write my way back into the past I had forgotten, I think perhaps I am uncovering the roots of that misery.

I can imagine stopping this process. Going out and getting that job. Putting aside my violin because it is so difficult to play even the simplest melody. I imagined doing these things just yesterday. And what came crashing in is how I’d feel a few years from now, a couple decades from now. I’d be wondering what I would have managed if I hadn’t given up these things, if I had kept writing, if I had kept up my violin. So I can’t stop writing or playing. They are such difficult things. I wish life was easier.

“The older you get the harder you work,” my father said the last time I saw him. I don’t know what he meant. I don’t go to my father for information anymore. But the phrase has stuck in my mind. Maybe because the more I write, the harder writing gets.

I DIDN'T LIKE MY MOTHER

There was an afternoon. My mother had said we would go to a puppet show. It was just her and me and my little sister who was more or less a baby. It’s a grey kind of day, overcast, but I am excited. We are going to a puppet show.

We put on our coats and walk out the modest front door onto the narrow porch, down the steps that are on the side and begin to walk down the steep hill to the car parked down near the road. My mother stops at the dark basement door that stands underneath the porch. It is a dark, built-into-the-earth kind of basement. The door has a glass window in it.

Something happens. Glass breaks. My mother says she has cut her hand. She has to put a bandage on it. We can’t go to the puppet show. I don’t cry. I don’t remember saying much of anything, but I do remember being deeply disappointed. I hadn’t expected this disappointment. I had been so excited. How could my mother say that no, we weren’t going to go?

This is the kind of thing that happened with her. Things did not succeed. I could not count on her.

And my little sister was like her. She just was. The grown-ups were right. She was like my mother. Not a winner. She fell and hurt herself a lot. She fell down the steep uncarpeted stairs more than once. She broke her nose while crawling under the coffee table. She cut herself so badly on the tricycle that she could not sleep that night because it was too painful to urinate. All this before she was six. And then after six, she cut herself horribly on the rusted metal bands around an old wooden barrel, and then again on a bicycle doing down the hill we rode down many times.

The one time I heard my mother say “darling” was when she went outside, hearing my sister calling, I was right behind her, and she saw my sister’s knees, I saw them too, deep cuts, the skin sliced into. “Oh darling,” broke out from my mother.

I didn’t like either of them, my mother or my sister. I didn’t like the way my mother looked. I didn’t like that when she dressed up her clothes were like a man’s – the same stiff fabrics and formal cuts. She had a square bottle of perfume that my father had given her. It sat on top of her plain wooden bureau and lasted for years and years until another little sister poured it into her bathwater. My mother had a soft zippered case, dark green an d quilted, that held her jewelry – two or three pairs of earrings with tiny screws, a string or two of pearls. I liked to finger the jewelry in the daytime when it was put away. The perfume and the jewelry were things set apart, not for everyday, zippered away just for those times when she went out with my father in the evening.

I didn’t like my mother, did not like her severity – the way she could get angry so fast, her hand flying out with a slap or harsh words out of nowhere, “Don’t be such a spoiled brat.” The words hurt. I did not feel like a spoiled brat. I didn’t like going for walks with her in the woods. My sister liked it. My sister liked looking at plants. I didn’t. Too slow. I got scared in the woods, behind barbed wire fences, under signs that said Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted, a word that sounded the same to me as “electrocuted” and “executed.” Those signs really frightened me, but my mother shrugged them off. Don’t be a baby, she said.

I didn’t like her plainness, did not want my friends to see her, her plain brown hair pinned up with bobby pins. It was like she didn’t know how to be a grown-up the way other grown-ups did. She made me nervous, the way she could not talk to other adults, did not enjoy being with them.

My mother made a dessert once called Floating Island. She told us it was special, that she’d had it as a child or something, that it was impossible to make, so difficult. She tried it once. I knew it would not come out well. She could never make anything look nice. She made me think it was impossible to do anything difficult. Her cooking remained basic – anything with any refinement was something only other people could do. I knew when she sewed something, it wouldn’t be quite right. It just went into my bones, that these things could only be done well by other people who had something we did not. I hated my mother for being always deficient, and for having to pretend that she was not.

SUBMISSION

There is a commanding voice inside of me that tells me not to write anything in which I am weak, or a victim, or helpless.

I hear Jeffrey’s scornful voice. See his sneer.

I hear my mother saying Don’t be a baby.

I see imaginary people turn away in disgust and I want to turn away with them. I want to run long and hard in the opposite direction of these stories that seem my truest stories just because they are at the bottom of the barrel.

This is sort of a disclaimer, I guess. But also a story of its own.

I think this is what makes writing hard for me.

It is very hard to get as soft and willing and pliable as the truth demands.

I see the note I wrote to myself a few days ago. I’d forgotten about it. It’s just two or three short sentences, scribbled in the heat of the moment to remember the feeling I wanted some day to write about. It’s an ugly little note, the kind of thing you’d find in someone’s diary, not the kind of thing that is supposed to be seen by anyone else. It’s something you’re supposed to hide. I knew that when I wrote it, but it seemed crucial not to forget.

Still, I’d much rather not tell this story again. But maybe I can tell it more fully than I have before, maybe I can be on my own side more fully than I have before. That's what I'm aiming for.

I’m in my father’s room in the daytime. I know it’s a Saturday morning because (a) my father is home and (b) he has Saturday morning energy to get things done. On this Saturday it’s the blackheads that he says are in my ears. He noticed them this morning in the kitchen. I’ve never heard of blackheads. I don’t know what they are. He says they are ugly and have to come out. He will take care of it. I should come to his room. My mother is a shadowy figure in the kitchen, complicit, not looking closely but agreeing.

My father tells me to sit on his bed. It has a dark green silky cover. There are windows that look out over a small field, but I can’t see the field from where I sit, only the sky.

My father leans over me, tells me to tilt my head to the side. His fingers go inside my left ear and his fingernails begin to squeeze a tiny piece of my skin. It’s like he’s using pincers. I yell. “Dad, it hurts!” I try to jerk my head away. “Now, now, now,” he says in a distant voice as if he were talking to someone who isn’t there, “Don’t pull away. I can’t do it if you pull away.”

Out of the corner of my eye I can see his eyes focused on the inside of my ear. It feels like he has a tiny knife in there. I yell again, but he insists. He does not let up. He's holding a towel in one hand, bending over me, and my mother is somewhere behind him like a nurse in the operating room.

This is my father, the man who leaves the house on Monday mornings to go to the office, fresh from his bath, in a good suit, radiating energy, leaving us behind. Always confident in his opinions, confident that he is better than almost everyone he meets.

STRINGS ATTACHED

Last week I carried out the futon and frame that my mother gave me when I left the ashram years ago to move into a writer’s cottage in the woods – the futon that she had slept on for about ten years, the futon that wasn’t comfortable as a couch and which, because it was so low to the ground, had become Tamar-the-black-dog’s perch in my office, not mine. I’d been thinking about getting rid of it for a long time and hadn’t been able to. My mother’s bed? A gift from her? Not easy to leave on the street with a duct-taped sign on it saying FREE FUTON. Which is what I did.

This week she sent a $20 bill folded into a Valentine. She always sends one, one that’s cute and funny, with no signature, just question marks. I remembered the year I was just back from having disappeared into Europe for four years – I was back and behaving, working as a strait-jacketed legal secretary on Park Avenue, and of course I sent her a Valentine. It was witty and made her laugh. So much nicer for her than not knowing where I was.

I thought I owed her a lot because I’d been gone all those years without being in touch. Of course, all those years I’d been living practically with a gun to my head, captive to a vicious guru-type who slapped me around, convinced me I was mentally disabled and so ugly and useless that nature would never let me reproduce. But when I managed to run away from that and return to the States, all I was was worried that I’d been mean to my mother.

I did not thank her this year for the Valentine or the $20 bill inside. I always make sure to thank her for what she gives me. This time I called to make sure she was okay after the snowstorm though I knew she was. There was another gun to my head telling me to call anyway. I kept the conversation brutally short. I didn’t mention her card or the money. I felt it hanging heavy in the air between us, especially when she described the heart-shaped cookies the neighbor had given her, but I said nothing.

I think I am carrying a great deal that I don’t need to. I am carrying my mother’s painful childhood, and my father’s -- childhoods that they will never admit were horrible. Instead, all that pain slides down into my lap and I too must keep quiet about it.

I’ve been a good soldier. I can keep quiet about anything.

I can see that the new land ahead – if I want to keep striking out for new land and it seems I always do – will mean doing things differently. Maybe even hurting other people’s feelings. Or making them furious. Things I have always avoided at any cost.

FIND ME

I realize that in my mind when I think back I am in the dining room – or sort of suspended above the dining room in the far corner so that I can see through the swinging door into the kitchen and through the other door into the living room. I look down and through these rooms as if they were a stage set, the walls reaching only ¾ of the way up, the ceilings not there.

The Armonk house. Sold when my father went bankrupt. I see my mother in the kitchen like a shadow, my father in the living room. There is a certain silence that hangs over the scene. And empty space.

I am up in the attic, a room where the ceiling comes to a point. It slants steeply on both sides so you can only stand up straight walking down the middle of the room. I’ve painted the white cupboard doors a bright yellow.

I like it up here. I have this whole top floor to myself. I wish I knew people who would come over and sprawl on the old couch cushions I have on the floor. I wish I had a lot of records that I could play for them. I’d know all this music and I’d turn them on to all sorts of things they hadn’t heard before – obscure John Prine, Dylan, Leonard Cohen – but I don’t have all those records. Records cost too much. And when these people came we’d get high and they’d ask me about the curved, twisted piece of driftwood I have standing on top of one of the speakers that sit on the floor on either side of the turntable/radio that is also on the floor and I’d say casually as if it was nothing that I brought it back from British Columbia when I hitchhiked there and back last summer when I was sixteen. It sounds so good to be able to say that, about hitchhiking. It implies so much that isn’t actually true. The hitchhiking part is true, but not the implications. Those never happened, but no one needs to know that. They can assume I’ve done the drugs and had the sex.

When a boy calls and says he wants to take me to the movies I wait in the living room by myself with my nylon-stringed guitar. I want him to find me like this, the guitar tossed casually on the couch though I can’t play very much.

It feels good to carry it though. I like to carry it in its black case down my driveway in the afternoon after a stifling day at school where I didn’t speak to anyone, down the road that’s mostly woods with a few houses here and there hidden in the background. It’s not a road where you see people, but now and then a car goes by. I like it when one does. I want people to see me – a girl with long hair and patches on her jeans carrying a guitar. I’d love a boy to see me like this. I’d like him to stop.

I carry my guitar to Edgar Lane which is close by, a dirt road and I walk into the shady shadows of Edgar Lane to where there are two old stone pillars marking where someone’s driveway used to begin. The driveway is all grown over. It was never paved. It dates from a time before there was paving. It’s a very long driveway – it goes for a couple of miles and the house it once led to has long since disappeared.

I sit by the pillars on Edgar Lane and open up my guitar case and I play Blowin’ in the Wind. It’s the perfect song and only has three chords, all easy ones. Now is the perfect moment for someone to find me. They will see a pretty girl playing a guitar in the woods. They will love me. They will want me.

I get restless. I don’t know too many songs. No one drives by. Or maybe one car. There are fewer cars here even than on the main road, but that’s partly why it would be the perfect place to be found. I pack up the guitar, walk back, back up the driveway, back up the two flights of stairs. My mother is in the kitchen making dinner. Making supper, that’s what we call it. Dinner is too fancy a word. Each younger sister is in her room on the second floor, their doors closed.

My mother calls up the stairs when she wants us to come down. By then I’ve done my homework.

We eat in the kitchen, me at the head of the small table that’s pushed up against the wall, under the window, my mother on the side closest to the stove, my two sisters side-by-side. My father comes home later from the city. He’ll eat by himself in the same chair I’m eating in now.

Sometimes I am quiet during dinner, not saying anything. Sometimes I am angry quiet, sometimes just empty quiet. Sometimes I say things that make my sisters laugh or my mother. I can entertain them while in my mind I am racing away. I want to go places my mother has never heard of. I know – I am certain – there are worlds and worlds she knows nothing about. I hate it when she says I can’t do something – like the way she told me I can’t wear my best most patched jeans to the city. I hate her tiny world. She doesn’t know anything about what’s in the songs I listen to. She gets mean sometimes. She says no – she shouts no – and she doesn’t give a reason. She says she doesn’t have to give a reason.

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

I’m in a small room at the end of the hall with the door closed so no one can see me. For all they know I am busy in here. This is not what I thought living in New York City was going to be like. Moving to New York City had felt like buying a new dress. It would change everything.

It felt very good to say to Jeffrey – the New York City boyfriend – the one I had liked so much – or rather the one who I wanted with desperation to like me – the one who a few months ago I had said to in the afternoon in his Salvation-Army-furniture one-room apartment that I liked so much because I had never had a boyfriend with an apartment before, I had said we should break up.

I said it because liking him and this life that he brought me into – this one with sex, finally, and an ounce of pot in a plastic bag next to the waterbed, with people who called on the phone or rich adults who were friends of his stepmother who asked you to drive their red Triumph convertible back from Southampton and hand it over to a doorman at the Plaza, and Bob Dylan concerts and movies in the afternoon and hamburgers in coffee shops – all these things – it was all excruciating, on loan as long as Jeffrey thought me gorgeous. He stared at me and said I was beautiful, but I couldn’t be that beautiful and he knew so many girls who didn't sit up against the wall and cry – ones that laughed and chatted, even ones like him who took Manhattan apartments and having a car for granted. Not to mention all the girls who had something to say when you asked them what they were doing. Like Tammy, so cute and petite in her parents’ Woody Allen upper West Side apartment, who gushed as we came in, “God, I’ve spent all afternoon making a dragon out of clay!”

I had broken up with him, the new boyfriend, the first boyfriend really, to get it over with. He could have changed my mind in three seconds, but he let it go that time. And then called two months later, sobbing. No boy had ever sobbed for me before. That’s when I got to tell him I’d be living in Manhattan now, going to school there instead of in that vile hick town.

But now I am here and I am the only person in the city with her door closed.

I want to be writing. I say that, but look at me. Jeffrey just gets high and sits down at his typewriter when he wants to write. He stays up til dawn and finishes his screenplay. And then he’s really happy. He loves his screenplay. He’s written a novel too that he likes alot. I’ve seen it. A whole three inches of white typed pages. He just sat down and wrote it. No big deal. I didn’t like his novel when I read it, but still.

When I write it’s little gnarled words on the page that I tear up and then I go to bed as soon as it’s nine o’clock so I can get out of here.

Here in this room. With the same books as always on the tall narrow bookshelf, looking down at me, and my ten or twelve records leaning against the trunk that is the table for the turntable. It’s like having people in my room who have made things – songs, guitar playing, stories – how did they do it? I am not one of them. I’m a fraud.

I had thought I’d write at this desk, but now that I am here, it’s not how I imagined it. I hadn’t imagined that dark laminate of fake wood. Or the soft yellow plastic of the seat of this school dorm chair. Or the smooth grey of the linoleum floor that I try to warm by throwing a fringed cloth over the trunk.

I walk to the classes on my schedule where teachers talk about this great book, this brilliant writer, that masterful poet. I wanted to be one of them. I had thought I just had to get out of my parents’ house, then out of that hick college town. Still, it has not happened. I write the little things I must for school, but those don’t count. I want to be the kind of writer who writes out of her own insistence not because the teacher is waiting for his assignment.

I hate the words “I want to be a writer.” No writer would ever say that. And I fucking say it all the time.

STILL STRANGERS

I knew when I was still little enough to imagine being a bride in a long white dress carrying red roses, when I was still little enough that when we went to the place with my mother with several little books plump with green stamps that she had licked and stuck in and I could pick whatever I wanted I picked the bride doll, sleeping in a box beneath clear cellophane. When I was still that little I knew my dad had been married before. He had told me. In the back seat one day I came up with a good idea. “Did you have any children in your other marriage?” I asked him. He said no, which was too bad because I wanted a brother.

My mother hadn’t been married before. From what I could tell she’d never had a boyfriend to speak of before she met my father in her late twenties. She mentioned a few times going to a regatta once on a date. I’m not even sure what a regatta is. Something to do with boats. My mother spoke of it as something she had really looked forward to, had really thought of as something special, but when she told the story she kind of injected a mocking tone as if she had been so ignorant then to be impressed by a regatta. It was easy to imagine her though, excited that something was finally happening for her, that perhaps now there’d be glamor. The story ended with her anticipation. We never heard what happened or who was the boy who had invited her.

My father told me about some of his girlfriends. I heard about Ilona, the first one I think, the one in high school. Then there was some countess. I think that was the one he spent a weekend with in some fancy resort, knowing that at the end of it all he wouldn’t be able to pay for even half of it, but going ahead anyway. He liked telling me that story. Then I heard about the American girl -- a Smith girl on her junior year abroad who told him to move to the States, and he did, in time to go to her family house for Thanksgiving when she spurned him. And somewhere along the way I found out that he started seeing her again after I was born. My mother found a letter. We were still living in the basement apartment on Warburten Avenue in Yonkers.

On my sixteenth birthday, wandering through the house -- a house far from the one on Warburten Avenue -- looking absently into drawers, I found a notebook that my parents had used for awhile starting from before my sisters were born. It had been my father’s idea. His is the first entry. He suggests to my mother that they write to each other in the book since they can’t talk to each other.

In one of my mother’s first entries she is suggesting they split up. “You can have the farm,” she writes, “and I’ll take the baby.”

Years later when I was in college, a time when I saw quite a bit of my dad, when he liked to take me out on his arm for expensive dinners, he told me how he had just run into that first American girlfriend again at some conference, how he had recognized her across the room and -- here he is so proud of himself as he delivers the punchline – accosted her with the line, “Dr. Livingston, I presume?” That was the end of the story as told to me. His witty pick-up line. He probably stuck on one or two more sentences about how happy she was to see him, but I don’t remember them.

Once my father was looking at a couple of small black-and-white photos I had of him in an album. They were from before my birth. In the first he is jaunty in a trench coat and cigarette between his fingers. He looks like he has the world at his feet. In the second he is no longer smiling. My father laughed ruefully. “Before and after the first marriage,” he said. I’ve been told it lasted six months.

He told me once, on the beach in Santa Barbara, that he had decided early on that he wasn’t good at relationships and that he would focus on his work instead. I was about twenty-two and I had written to him back in New York, my first attempt to break the fraud of our relationship, to tell him all the things I never had. He had written back, had said he would be in Texas on business and that he’d come see me in L.A. and we could talk about the letter.

He came on a Friday night. “Let’s not say a word about it tonight,” he said in my furnished studio. “We’ll have a nice dinner and tomorrow we’ll drive up the coast and we can talk then.” He told me all about the people in Texas he was doing business with. They were very into EST and he had done a seminar just to please them, had hated it, had subverted the process by pretending his name was George and walking around all weekend with that name on his nametag, had hung up on the recruitment phonecalls that came afterwards. But still he wanted to work with the men in Texas. He showed me their business card with its logo of the rising sun.

On Saturday as we drove north I asked what he had thought of the letter, but he said again, not now. We had our extravagant lunch – all I could think about was the letter I had written and what this conversation would be like, but again he said, no, no let’s wait just a little longer.

After lunch he suggested we walk out onto the sand and then he began to talk, saying that thing about not being good at relationships. In my letter I had complained about being brought up Catholic. He said that he had thought it would be good discipline, better than no religion at all. I'd said too that I'd wished he had been more upfront about the money problems while I was in high school. On the beach he said he'd wanted to protect me.

I took a stab or two at conversation, but each time he deflected my words with explanations. I had wanted to show him how grown up I was, or who I was, but I couldn't seem to get out of the back seat.

On the drive home he told me that if I wasn’t careful I’d become like my mother: no ambition. “Ambition” was not the word I would have used, but I knew what he meant. I was broken inside and had no idea where I would find the strength to create anything of any worth or meaning at all.

ARTISTS AT WORK

I sat down in the Hungarian Pastry Shop. It had been a few months since I’d been there and I missed it. They don’t have computers for checking email, their pastries are so-so and their weak tea is served in small cups, but it has something no other place has. Itself. When I’m there I feel at home.

I sat at the end of three little tables pushed together. A young man sat at the end of the threesome, up against the wall, his head down, plugged into an Ipod, scattered papers and a couple of notebooks giving him a fevered appearance.

A young woman joined him. They sat across from each other. He handed her a notebook right away and for a couple of minutes she read silently. Then she handed it back. “It’s pretty dark,” she said. “Isn’t it supposed to be love poetry”

“That’s just the beginning,” the young man said quickly. “I’m telling where I come from.”

The young woman opened up a lap top. They talked back and forth for awhile – she sitting up straight and very confident. He pretending to be.

She said she had to finish her play. “And when will I be able to read it” he asked. “Oh, any time,” she said. “A lot of people have read it – you know, friends and stuff – and they all say they liked it, but yesterday I had the best experience. Peter sat down with me and went through it word for word and told me how to make it better and what really worked.”

She starts typing. He is reading and writing. He wears a colorful knitted cap with long ear flaps.

“Isn’t this a great word?” she says, and tells him a long unfamiliar word. He copies it down. She reads him the definition from her computer dictionary.

“Have you read Bukowski?” she asks him later during another talk break. He says he hasn’t, not much. “He’s got this great line in one of his poems – something like, ‘beware ordinary men, beware ordinary women, they seek only ordinary love.’ Isn’t that great?”

She goes back to her typing after he says something like, “Writing a poem is crazy. Until it’s not. That’s all I can tell you about writing a poem.” He says it with a wry little laugh, and then adds that he goes nuts if he doesn’t chain smoke. He goes out for a cigarette and when he returns she starts spontaneously reading to him from her screen. I can only hear every other word or so. I can tell there’s an emphasis on lush language, something like this: And are they princes or are they whores these beasts that curse us underfoot, that crawl and crawl and do not ask for consequences…” Stuff like that. There are several mentions of the word “whore” spoken in lilting suburban tones.

“Did you write that?” the boy asks.

“Yeah,” she says casually, “But it’s hard, you know, how when you change one thing in a play then you have to think about how it will affect everything else.” She says this again two or three more times using slightly different words.

The boy says, “I know what you mean. More than I can say.”

During all this I am reading the Times. I write a few pages about the depression that keeps crashing in on me, and then I read a friend’s manuscript. I wear ear plugs so I can hear only what I really want to.

Her cell phone rings. She dives for it, has a quick cheery conversation with an invisible person and then leaves.

It’s time for me to go too. “Do you know a place nearby that has internet access?” I ask the boy and we look at each other for the first time.

“Do you have a student ID?” he asks. “You could go to Butler Library.”

“No,” I answer. “Not for thirty years.”