IN BETWEEN

They left in August. We were living in Greece then, in a leafy part of Athens. We’d been there just over two years. Me, Natvar, Mark, Tracy and Ariadne.

We lived in a two-bedroom apartment with a spacious roof-top terra cotta tiled garden, just three floors up in the corner of town – removed from the polluted center – where small lanes twisted and interwove lined by trees and houses with gardens of rich roses and bougainvillea. Natvar was proud of our address. It was an expensive part of the city and he had scored us an apartment there (right on the very edge of it, but still), another of the miracles that only he could pull off.

Natvar had fled Manhattan two and a half years earlier with his little blonde daughter Ariadne. The cops were after him. Ariadne, at a key moment, had said, “I want to stay with Daddy,” and at least in some very important ways she defined the rest of her short life with that choice.

Mark, Tracy and I joined them two months later. We’d all been living together for a few years, ostensibly to run a yoga school, but things had gone wildly off track – an initial spark of affection and enthusiasm that got tangled up in Natvar’s cruelty and craziness and our unflagging attempts to appease his demands.

And then they left Athens for London – Natvar, Mark and Ariadne, leaving me and Tracy behind. It was just supposed to be temporary. Natvar had grown tired of Greece. Whereas when we first arrived he proclaimed proudly how Greece – the land of his birth -- was so much better than New York – a place of human warmth and culture and fresh food – now, after more than two years, the bloom was off the rose. “This place is just a third world country,” he’d sneer. “We can do better.” They’d made an exploratory expedition to London the previous Christmas, Natvar making a few quick contacts there that he hoped to parlay into a living.

Within two weeks he had Ariadne somehow enrolled with a scholarship in an exclusive London school that normally had a long waiting list and we knew they weren’t coming back.

It was just me and Tracy and Celia, the new little black puppy that Natvar had let Ariadne bring home from the islands just a few weeks before he decided they were leaving.

Celia slept on my bed and Tracy wasn’t home much. Everything was changing. The first few days after they left Tracy and I got up promptly at the same time as always, made the coffee in the same way and the oatmeal the way Natvar liked it, sat at the marble table in our assigned seats, drank from the official blue and white china. We did all this at first as if these were our own choices. Then little by little we began to change the design.

Tracy had a boyfriend now, a Greek guy and she started spending nights at his place. Phenomenal. Being celibate had been an unspoken rule. Not for Mark and Natvar who shared the double bed in the master bedroom, but for me and Tracy – she sharing Ariadne’s room and me sleeping on a cot in the tiny room we called an office.

By then I had a job. I’d had a job in the city for about six months. That was ground-breaking too. I’d even had my own apartment for a few months when the fights got too awful, but I was back. I was living back in the apartment again, drawn back. It would be different this time. And then they left for London and then they said we should pack up and come too.

It was October and November. I hadn’t had sex for years and I invited Costas out. I wasn’t crazy about him, but I knew he was interested in a sick kind of way that I should have left alone. A friend of my boss, he used to come by the office now and then, older than me. I didn’t pay him much mind until my boss – a small chubby man with a redeeming amount of personality – said that Costas wanted to know if I’d go on vacation with him to look after his kids. No, I had said, disgusted, but six months later I was inviting him to something I had tickets to and I fell for the old get-the-girl-drunk trick, ended up in his single-man’s apartment – a place absolutely bereft of all life – where he insisted on showers and clean sheets after sex.

I went home on the bus alone the next morning, feeling I’d been had, but at least I was back in the game.

“Come to London,” Natvar was crooning on the phone. “You will love it here.”

How to get to London? I had no money. How to pack up the apartment? I tried, but I didn’t know where to begin. Store things in Athens? Ship them to London? Everything cost. And how to get it right because Natvar would be there in London and I could hear his voice, “You paid HOW MUCH to ship this rubbish?” “You left THAT in Athens?” “HOW much money are you wasting to store that crap?” “Ariadne would have made better decisions!” “Why didn’t you just give those away?” “You gave THAT away?” I froze. I couldn’t do anything about the house, but knew I had to.

Tracy was supposed to help, right? But she was absorbed in a fast developing new Athens life her boyfriend was leading her into. She had a book of photos now, all ones of her in sexy model shots, sometimes wearing the elegant dresses Natvar had picked out for her back in New York that we paid for with my mother’s credit card, others in bikinis and high heels. “Vassilis thinks I can get a part in a movie,” she called, running out the door.

At night sometimes I sat in the evening in the living room which we still kept picture perfect as if Natvar might walk in any moment. I sat with Celia, the little dog. I was alone. I hadn’t been alone like this for years, alone to sit and watch the twilight turn into darkness. I felt peace in those moments. It felt sweet and holy. like something remembered.

A man came to see me one night. I’d half fallen in love with Petros a couple of months before when I’d gone to interview him for the magazine I worked for. He was tall and broad with dark hair. My heart had sunk when later, at home, I had read his brochure and saw he was married. But we’d carried on a little anyway and things were heating up.

He came over one evening. Tracy was out. It looked like I lived here more or less alone, in this apartment. Perhaps it looked normal. There was only one double bed to take him to. I pretended it was mine.

I lay down with him in Natvar and Mark’s bed, telling myself just not to think about it. There was no way Natvar would ever find out. But I couldn’t do it. I didn’t explain. I just said I couldn’t, put my clothes back on. And Petros went home, back to his wife.

LOST PAGES

My mother called a couple of mornings ago. When I came downstairs I found her message. She’d called before 7, very unusual for her to call so early. I dialed my voice mail right away. Had my father died? I am always waiting for that call. No, she had called to give me his email address. It’s not his address. It’s his secretary’s. My mother said it’s the one my two sisters use now because Dad hasn’t mastered the computer so emails go to his secretary who brings them over once a week.

One thing my father said when I last saw him nine months ago was that the older you get the harder you work. I don’t know what he meant. I mean, I see it for myself, work seems to keep growing and growing, but I don’t know how my father could say it for himself.

I wonder what his secretary does for him these days. When I get a card or a package from him two or three times a year, it is addressed by her. I’m not sure my father writes anymore at all, let alone the writing he used to be so ambitious about – pages of economic theory on how the world should be run.

A few years ago my sisters asked him to write about his childhood and I received a copy – about ten typed pages covering his earliest years. Although my father seemed to spend much of his time telling me stories of his youth when I was little, I heard stories I’d never heard before in this written version. Last September I asked him to write more. “When I have time,” he said wistfully as if he were a busy man.

What I saw was a man partially crippled by Parkinsons, moving slow from room to room. Yes, he still has his big desk placed diagonally across the room that was once my grandparents’ room. And the long heavy desk is covered in books and papers. There’s a fax machine to one side and a small computer off in the corner.

I think his words about “when I have time” were a cover. I imagine it is too difficult for him to write now. Perhaps he cannot hold a pen. He hasn’t typed since I was a very young child. Then he used to type at home. I don’t remember actually seeing him do it, but I have seen the many pages on onion skin that he bound into black-covered volumes, pages that were mostly about things I wasn’t interested in – like international politics – but which once in a while contained a precious description, like the milk curdling in his coffee in a Wall St. diner, or a child waving to him from a window. He doesn’t name the child, but it must be me.

These journals that my mother threw out. Not exactly on purpose, not totally consciously, but which she allowed to vanish when my father moved back – temporarily he thought – to Hungary and she was left to sort out what was left after the house was sold to pay the bills.

He came back on a visit, partially to get his journals and they were gone. He kept going through the little storage shed my mother had rented, going through box after box, over and over, thinking he must have missed them.

I don’t think they had a knock-down drag-out fight over it. I think my father was furious and devastated that his years of journals were gone, journals from maybe as far back as the war and his years afterwards as a young man with a bicycle in Geneva. But I don’t remember him ever yelling at my mother unless she egged him on so hard he lost it. And even then his fury came out not in words but in gestures – stopping the car, getting out and walking home; yanking the tablecloth so all the dishes crashed to the floor. It’s not that he felt so tenderly towards my mother. I just don’t think he knew how to do it, was terrified of the destructive possibilities of fury and afraid to damage the tentative structure that linked him to my mother – the way she always took him in – not because she was in love with him, but because that was what she knew.

NO COMPROMISE

The front of my sister’s card to me is a picture in shades of what look to me angry defiant red. I have opened the card twice and each time my eyes avoid the picture. I know it is a picture of a woman dancing – hair flying, limbs in every direction. It’s supposed to be about freedom, I know. But in my mind is stamped only anger.

Anasuya wrote to say how horrified she is by the writing she foundof mine on the internet, how I am bad for having violated her most sacred privacy, that reading my work made her feel as if she were back in our quote unquote “toxic” family. She is sickened and infuriated by my words. And for what? she says. You’ve done all this, she says, for what? Accusing me with those two words of writing for absolutely no reason. She sees no reason for any of it. These words, according to her, should never have been written.

We’ve been at war since were little children and for the first time I feel like it’s out in the open. There’s no resolving it. I will not write back. I don’t want to see her. I am happy for her to go her way and I’ll go mine.

But her words are brutal and they linger in the air like pollen, or grey dandelion fluff. The only thing to do is to keep writing.

Anasuya, this sister, is here this weekend, visiting my mother, but she will not come to see me. Fine. tomorrow my mother comes to my house with her brother, my uncle Dick and Betty his wife. They are visiting from British Columbia, a trip billed as their last to the East. I guess they’re fixing to croak. I don’t know, but it’s in the air. As it is with most of my relatives, everyone has their eye on the big departure. I do too, I suppose, in a way, sometimes.

I kind of like that Anasuya isn’t coming. A spade being called a spade. I imagein myself being quite strong tomorrow, not the nice girl all the time, just a bit of bite to me. Yes, I’m a writer. Yes, I post my writing on the internet, Uncle Dick. That’s just what I do, and I like it, and nobody taught it to me, I created it myself and people who don’t like it do not interest me very much.

I do not want Anasuya’s barbs to stick in my skin like a tick that you don’t notice until days later when the damage has been done. That’s what I’m scare of – I am scared of the guilt that I feel. It just comes up unbidden out of nowhere and I have to make sure I notice it. I don’t know how to battle guilt.

I hate her card. I hate what she writes. And I have endured so much rejection from her for year and years.

I think of her and Diane. Diane was another woman in the ashram. An unattractive, troubled woman, but a very smart one. You couldn’t beat her for facts. I often had to work with Diane in the art department. When I first arrived, I actually had to supervise her – she was a part-time proofreader of the magazine and I coordinated all proofing. Diane battled me, undercut me and at the same time managed to pass herself off as my friend.

My sister Anasuya was also in the art department then. I had just moved into the ashram and was thinking that this huge move on my part would close the gap between us – how could she doubt me – I thought she doubted me, I thought she thought I was a wimp, a superficial person – but how could she doubt my earnestness and trustworthiness now that I was giving up everything to live in the ashram too? But nothing changed between me and Anasuya. She remained aloof. She and Diane were good friends. They went into the woods together, studying herbs and feminine tribal customs, witchcraft, plant craft, full-moon goddess stuff. Diane followed Anasuya around like a puppy dog and treated me usually with condescension. And together they shut me out. I pawed at that door for along time.

Anasuya mentions the toxic family atmosphere that I am dragging her back to as if I was at least partly responsible for it.

She talks about her woundings and healings. Much of her talk is clichéd, taken from self-help books and circles. I really must find a way to be free of all this. I am speaking in my writing more clearly and completely and truthfully than anyone in her world has ever spoken – certainly more than I have ever even come close to doing before – I was never ever able to say anything of importance within the family, while my sisters and mother chatted away. Now my words finally find their way out and Anasuya says they’re bad. She’s wrong.

FOREVER

I was sitting in the small room off the kitchen. It had a linoleum floor. It had a single bed pressed up against the wall underneath a small window. There had been a small built-in closet in the room. We had taken the door off the closet and built a shelf in there for the IBM Selectric typewriter – our prize possession. I could sit there and type, the shelf becoming a desk.

During the day we covered the single bed with a maroon cloth and pretended it was a couch. The room became a tiny waiting room, presided over by the big electric typewriter. When clients arrived, I greeted them at the front door in my navy blue suit I had stolen out of Arianna’s Upper East Side apartment, the suit that here in Athens, Greece looked haute couture, and the brown leather pumps and white stockings, my hair pinned up, make-up and earrings. I didn’t feel pretty like this, but Natvar assured me that at twenty-nine nothing else was acceptable.

Today I was in the little room that didn’t have a name – the office, the waiting room, my bedroom. It was tiny, more like a large closet, but I could close the door. It was Sunday. Natvar had just hit me in the face as we sat for breakfast, all of us, all five of us, still in bathrobes, breakfast on the blue-and-white china, all of us seated around the white marble table.

As people rose to dress, I retreated. I didn’t know what to do. I could hear Mark doing the dishes on the other side of the wall, Mark in shorts, tee-shirt and flip-flops, his wide feet pointed out, his strong calves and high arches all marking him as a dancer – his blue eyes that could be soft and dreamy, Mark who looked most natural with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth – a cigarette that he never allowed himself anymore – a boy who was made for long languid afternoons with other men. I could imagine him standing at the sink, looking out the window, his eyes far away.

Natvar finally came in. He was dressed now in his pressed pants and cotton shirt, everything about him fresh and crisp. “Here,” he said. “Here’s 2,000 drachma. Go see a movie or something. The rest of us are going to my mother’s.”

I nodded, did not say anything much. I heard them leave. They were going without me. Almost every Sunday we went out into the country to visit Natvar’s old mother in her two-room cottage. It was the first time I hadn’t gone with them. The first time any of us had been shut out of a group event.

There had been plenty of fights. It was hard to get through a meal without one. There had been violence and the threat of violence before. But there had never been money handed over for someone to use all on their own for themselves. We’d never gotten rid of someone before.

The afternoon stretched in front of me. I was alone. I went outside onto the quiet shaded street and began to walk. I had no destination. Walking gave me something to do and the gardens I passed were pretty. I walked until I came to a small park, a stretch of grass, and I lay down on my back in the sun. I fell asleep. The sleep felt perfect. I wanted it to last forever.

I woke, knowing it was late afternoon. I still had some time left before I had to go back. I didn’t want to think about going back, maybe the hours would keep stretching for me. I walked down to the main wide boulevard with shops and crowds. I ate something small, not wanting to spend much and I bought a ticket and saw the movie. I hadn’t been to a movie in years. I hadn’t been to a movie by myself for even longer.

When I came out it was dark. I had nowhere to go but back. I walked slowly. Maybe I could make the walk back last forever and never get there.

FIRST TAKE

I am on the phone with Direct-TV when I see through the window the little blue moving patch that is Brian the mailman coming down the driveway. He’s early. Usually it takes him awhile to get here on Mondays. Pretty soon Tamar explodes with barks at the front door, but I keep patiently talking to Rochelle who wants to know why I am cancelling our account, and I hear Fred explaining to Tamar that it’s just the mailman and then I hear Fred saying, “Oh no,” a couple of times, loudly so I’ll hear but in a sort of joking tone – not a real Oh No, but I am tuning him out so I can hear what Rochelle is saying and trying to get off quickly without being horribly rude.

I go look at the mail. It’s right on top, a flat square envelope from my sister Anasuya. It’s her turn to chime in about my writing. Esther wrote a couple of weeks ago so shocked she said and hurt that she wasn’t going to read it anymore, and now I guess Anasuya’s going to let me have it.

She’s coming to see my mother this week for a few days. Anasuya lives in Berkeley. My mother lives in Sullivan County, about an hour south of here. So when my sister comes to visit my mother, there’s usually one visit with me scheduled in.

I spoke to my mother yesterday, inviting her to come up on Friday. The reason for all this visiting is that my mother’s younger brother will be in town from British Columbia. So I invited them up and my mother said lightly that Anasuya wouldn’t be able to make it and I too pretended it was just a normal scheduling mishap.

I am happy not to talk to my mother about all the conflict with my sisters. It wouldn’t do any good. I like that she seems willing to take me on my own terms, to have her own connection with me regardless of what my sisters are complaining about.

I go to where Fred is and hold up the card. “Okay,” I say. “Let’s read it.” And before I open it I say, “I’m not guilty, right?” And Fred says solemnly – he’s not joking now -- “You are not guilty.”

It’s a card, a picture of a woman dancing wildly. It turns me off. There’s something abrasive about it, something “I Am Woman” about it. I flip open the card, note how both sides are covered in quite small, tidy black-pen handwriting.

“It’s a beautiful sunny day here,” my sister begins. She is sitting in her garden. Then she gets started – how reading my writing makes her feel back in the vile toxic atmosphere of our family, how my writing violates her privacy, how it wounds her all over again, how she is proud of the life she has created with people who appreciate her and she doesn’t need me. “And you’ve done all this,” she says, “for what?” She doesn’t want to see me any more than she can avoid and that despite all this she wishes me well.

It’s a stupid, nasty letter. And yet it feels like all the black murky water I have been skating over with her for decades – that I began to notice in my late teens, ever since she swallowed the pills and all the years afterwards when it felt like the most she could do was tolerate me while I searched and searched for what I was doing wrong, assuming her scorn must be deserved – all this dirty water was finally flowing out of the pipe and it was a relief to see it in broad daylight.

You’d think the whole blog was about her. There are over 60 pieces of writing on that blog and I can’t even remember what the few references to her are. And plus the second blog that is describing my twelve years in the ashram, many of which I shared with her there – not a word about this ashram book that I know has to fascinate her.

It reminds me of 1993. I was becoming a celebrity in the ashram, a public figure. Every morning I was standing up in front of hundreds of people after the long morning chant before breakfast and giving a short talk on the chant, then conversing back and forth with the guru who sat a few yards away on her chair – I was in the spotlight, being spirited around to secret meetings with the top brass – Anasuya sat down next to me one afternoon outside after lunch. She had asked to meet with me. “Everyone thinks you’re great,” she said, “but you’re not.” She stood up then, furious, and left, and I sat there feeling like she must be right, to some degree anyway, and that I had better be very careful, more careful than I was already being, or otherwise I might overlook my own faults.

Today though I don’t sit here thinking she is right. I think she has a very small mind, not to be able to see beyond the handful of times her name comes up, not to have any idea at all why I am writing or see any value in it at all.

THROUGH MIST

I was dealt a mother from British Columbia, a tall woman – slim, small-breasted (“flat-topped,” she called it), long legs. A woman who never thought of herself as beautiful, a woman whose head was full of voices that told her her feet were too big (“You’d be tall if you didn’t have so much turned up at the bottom,”), her nose and her hands, also too big. A woman who felt ungainly and unpopular in a crowd.

I was dealt a father from Hungary, a damaged man, damaged by I’m not sure what – Word War II, but things earlier and more subtle than that.

I was dealt two sisters, both younger than me. They live an hour apart from each other with their husbands in California. They do things like Christmas, Thanksgiving and birthdays together. Funny, how things shake down. The alliances between us have shifted back and forth over the years. Currenlty, and I think now forever, I am the one separated out and they are linked together. I wouldn’t have predicted it, but now it makes a lot of sense.

Writing and making my writing public by posting it all on the web has drawn the line in the sand.

One sister is a bodyworker and nutritionist who lives in Berkeley and does very progressive sustrainable agricultural things with the small piece of land she bought with her husband. They will retire there, I imagaine. They are people who think about retirement and have been planning and living their lives with retirement being an important consideration.

The other sister is a financial consultant to the very wealthy. She likes giving advice. She thinks of herself as a very fair, straightforward, approachable and – most of all – practical person. She believes in conservative financial practices. She was still in high school when my father went belly up and the house was sold from out from under her and she was told, oops, no money for college, sorry. She balances all her accounts religiously and gets very angry if her husband uses the debit card and forgets to write it down.

I used to get mad about things like that. Terrified, actually.

I was dealt being born first when my parents were living in their first apartment in Yonkers. Before that they’d lived in what they called “the trailer.” I’ve seen pictures of it. Nowadays you’d call it a camper.

When I was born we lived in the downstairs of a white house with red trim. I thought of it as a red house. It was built on a hill sloping down from the street. We walked down some steps from the sidewalk, and entered through a side door into the middle room of the apartment. There was a brown formica-topped table here with thin black metal legs. My father sat here in the morning, drinking his coffee. He let me put the sugar in. He let me stir it.

He disappeared during the day. He went somewhere, out through another door in the living room, a door that led to the outside which I could not see but which contained a railroad down below and a river. And at the end of the day he came back from there, carrying a rigid square briefcase that opened with a snap of its two brass clasps.

My room was the smallest. My crib was there, in the corner, by a window that looked out onto the steps that came down from the street. It was a shadowy room. My father’s filing cabinet was in there and a table at which I remember sitting once when I had just received a plastic electric organ. It was my birthday or Christmas. There are pictures of me sitting on my father’s lap in front of this little keyboard and it is hard for me to know what is actual memory and what is from the photos – but unlike most baby pictures when I have no recollection, when I look at this series of four or five black-and-white photos of my father and me – me on his lap – playing the organ together, they look familiar, like I was just there. We are both in pajamas and bathrobes, but I think it was morning, a rare thing – in my family you dressed before breakfast, a habit I have broken.

My parents slept in a fold-out couch in the living room. The curtains on the windows in that room were long and white and filmy, covering what lay beyond, giving me the feeling that everything out there on the other side of the windows was misty and difficult to see or understand.

I knew that we were Hungarian. My mother wasn’t. But my father was and somehow I was too. I didn’t think anyone else in the world was. I thought of it as a private condition, and Hungary as a country no one else had heard of. This Hungarianess filtered through my father’s conversation. It pulsed quietly from the rounded, off-white vase painted with flowers that my grandmother sent. We lived in this house until I was three. And then we moved and the first sister was born.

ABUSE

I am sitting in the nice green leather chair with high back and foot rest that I once found so comfortable. Martin the shrink sits across, about six feet from me on a matching chair. I have traveled into the city – two hours on the bus – and paid him $75 for 45 minutes of his attention and I don’t know what to say and the minutes are ticking and soon he will be standing up, my time will be up and I will be back on the bus for another two hours. When I first started coming here – a month or so ago – I talked up a storm. Now I feel stuck. Why am I even coming? I forget. This is crazy.

Martin asks about the so-called selflessness that yoga, generally speaking, advocates. I think he is wondering how I square that with starting therapy. I say something about how that part of ashram life came pretty easy to me. “I grew up pretty stoic,” I say. “Pretty spartan. Not a materialistic life.” I am thinking of my mother. I don’t think of my father with those words. I think of my mother, and Martin asks for more and so I focus on my mother for awhile – though it feels like I’m walking down a fruitless path.

I say how she grew up on a farm with six brothers and sisters on the frontier in British Columbia during the Depression, one-room schoolhouse, carrying her shoes to school so they’d last longer. “My mother,” I say, “has never told me a story about anyone ever cherishing her, or even liking her much.”

“Like what?” asks Martin. It’s painful having to give him a whole tapestry thread by thread, a tapestry that has been woven since I was born.
“Like the way her brothers and sisters always ran away from her, and how someone killed all her rabbits one day.“ This I know is a very vile story that I think still haunts my mother, the day she discovered the hutches all open, the rabbits dead. It was that kind of life. People were cruel to each other. At Christmastime her brothers and sisters wrapped up whatever they already had to give to each other – a pretty stone, an old doll they didn’t want anymore -- and then they’d fight and take things back. My mother always tells these little tales with a laugh as if they were amusing. School was finished at 8th grade. If you wanted more you got it by correspondence course. My mother was the only person in her family, besides the oldest child, a boy, who put herself through high school by correspondence. They called her a snob.

Then I talk of my mother’s rages. How my father tiptoed around her. How I did too. We tried very hard not to set her off. I’ve thought of and talked of and written about this before, but when I say it today it feels new.

Then I stop. I pause, unable to keep going. My mind is freezing up. I manage to voice the thought that is coming up. I say, “I’m afraid you will dismiss me. You’ll wonder why I’m here.” It is so hard to talk here, to believe that whatever I say is acceptable. It feels like I am being asked to slide downhill holding onto nothing. This is much harder than I expected.

Martin says it’s funny I should say that just at that moment because he was just thinking how my childhood sounds very difficult to him.

I cannot bear to examine it. I have spent my whole life bending it all so I could bear it, finding a way to look at it that made it merely quaint.

I know I want to look at it in a new way. “It’s hard for me to sympathize with myself,” I say to Martin.

Part of me is starting to advise that I quit now, give up on the possibility of fruitful therapy with Martin. But it’s a small voice and I don’t take it too seriously, but something in me is very uncomfortable.

“Does it feel like betrayal?” asks Martin.

I feel like I’ve moved past betrayal long ago. Why is he asking me such a banal question? Maybe he’s a bad shrink.

My throat though is tight and there have been tears hovering most of this session. I am holding them back. I don’t know why they are there and I don’t mention them to Martin. Not on purpose, I just don’t get that far.

Martin says something about how when I first came to him I was talking about wanting to be very independent of my family, but that probably I have actually a very important interest in understanding the family more. I don’t like it at all that he characterizes me as someone who thought she could be Miss Independence. I’ve always liked Martin until now, but I’m not sure today how much we are connecting and I have a hard time understanding him. But it seems it’s all about revisiting and re-examining that family, those years. I would like to do that. But our time is up and I am back out on the street.

I think of jumping quickly onto a subway, fleeing the city, catching the earlier bus and just getting the hell out of here as fast as I can. I am tempted, but I question it. I recognize a certain feeling inherent in the desire to get the hell out. There’s something self-destructive about it. I’m in the city. It’s a warm light summer evening. I could enjoy it, but instead I want to rip it away, dive away into my sadness.

No, I think, I’ll stay as planned another hour or two. I’ll go to a bookstore. If I see something I like I’ll buy it. It’s been a few weeks since I’ve really wanted to buy a book, but right now it feels necessary, like salve on a wound.

I scan the group of new memoirs where last week and the week before I saw nothing of interest. My eye today falls immediately on a new book. I pick it up, open it. A woman who finds herself in abusive relationships. A sister who is killed by her lover. The writer hunts through her past to find the roots of all this. I scan the writing. It looks good. The book feels alive in my hands, like something, an ally, that has come to help me. I haven’t been thinking about abuse today, but suddenly I feel right at home. I buy the book.

THE TRIP

I came back from going to Switzerland with my father. I was eleven. It had been very exciting to fly from London to Geneva by myself. An air stewardess was assigned to watch over and deliver me to my father. I remember my luggage was lost, but that was a grown-up problem, not something I had to worry about. It was background music.

In the forefront was the big skyscraper rising up by itself on the side of the mountain. My father had been talking to me a lot about this place for a year or so, describing it with delight, how much fun he had there not skiing but ski-bobbing, some kind of skiing where you sat the whole time. He explained to me also with delight the term “après ski,” describing his time at the bar in the ski lodge as a real highlight of civilization and refinement. Now he was actually showing me the place. “Crans” it was called. Crans was the name of the village. Super Crans was the name of the skyscraper.

It was fancy the way my father liked things. I slept by myself in someone else’s apartment. My father slept in his own smaller apartment, the one he had just bought or was planning to buy.

In the evening we went downstairs to the fancy restaurant you had to dress up to go to and he introduced me to Helga. She had short blonde hair, blue eyes and a tanned face. The three of us had dinner together. My father ran his finger down Helga’s nose and said her nose was like a ski jump. I’d heard that line in a movie somewhere. It was strange to hear it coming out of my dad’s mouth, this secondhand line.

They were saying something about black people and Helga said to me, “You would never a black man, would you?” I said I would marry whoever I wanted and they laughed. My father sat at the head of the table, Helga on his righthand side. That meant that she was more important than I was.

My father took me to a fancy hairdresser in the village and asked the ladies there to give me a haircut. My mother never took me to places like this. My mother never left me in places like this and came back to pick me up. When my father came back the hairdresser ladies were brushing my hair into two high pony tails. Over the rubber bands that held the pony tails they clamped special bands of black velvet. They showed these to my father and he bought several sets for me to take back to boarding school. He also bought me a storybook with pictures in French about a doll and a small English/French dictionary.

Other things in the forefront during that visit are returning to Geneva and staying in Helga’s big fancy house. Her husband Freddie who also seems to be my father’s friend though not as much is there too. They are rich. Again, I stay in a room by myself. My father points out that when we are at the dining room table – a heavy table in a heavy formal room – that Helga can call the servant by pressing a button under the carpet with her foot.

Next to my plate is a small gift, wrapped. I ignore it, pretend I don’t see it. Nobody else mentions it so I don’t either until my father says something like, “Now, what is that I see by your plate?” So I open it. I don’t know what it is. My father likes it very much. It is made of red leather and has the American eagle stamped on it in gold. They explain that it is a cover for my passport. Helga smiles. The gift is from her.

When I come home with my father, when we are in the taxi together, driving from the London airport out to the house where I live with my mother and my two sisters – I live there when I am not in school and my dad lives there when he is not other places – I feel pretty confidant now I know how to be a grown-up. I talk to him, pretending I am a grown-up. I make him laugh and he talks back as if I were a grown-up too. It’s easy. I am surprised by how easy it is. Until I call him “Mickey.” That’s what Helga called him. I’ve never called my dad anything except Dad or Daddy. I have never called him a name and this feels very scary. Like now I am going to get into big trouble. My father doesn’t seem to notice thought. He keeps laughing and egging me on, but I quieten down. I didn’t like that feeling.

And then I go back to boarding school, the convent way out in the country. I’m in the middle of my third year here. I feel very at home here. I know this little world. My friends are the smartest, most dazzling girls in the class. We do wild things together – putting on plays, daring each other to run to the candy shop at the end of the mile-long driveway or climb up the forbidden tower in the dark. I don’t want to be friends with anyone else.

It’s my first morning back. I wake up in pain. My belly is hurting and it won’t stop. And then I see it, the blood in my underpants. Oh my god, all the pink pamphlets and giggly whispers were true. It’s happening to me. It hasn’t happened to any of my friends yet so I have to go to Jane Garber, another girl in our class, who has always seemed older than the rest of us. Jane gives me all the packages I need. She says she won’t tell anyone that I’ve started, but I know she will tell her best friend Sheila.

I don’t tell anyone, but two days later, as we are hiding amidst dustballs under beds, Madeleine hisses at me, “I have a bone to pick with you.” She looks mean. She says she knows I’ve started and that I am mean because I told Jane and Sheila I would move into a dorm with them. They asked me to and I don’t know how to get out of it. Madeleine says I’m mean because I’ll be leaving Ann behind. Ann is my official best friend. I never thought going to a dorm would make any difference to Ann. She sleeps across the aisle from me in a long row of curtained off cubicles. I’m not turning my back on Ann. I’m just moving when I don’t even want to. But Nicola sides with Madeleine and won’t speak to me. The days of playing Addams Family are over.

NO TITLE

I think about writing back to my sister Esther who wrote last week complaining about my blog, saying that she would not read it anymore. I hadn’t known she was reading it, but I wasn’t surprised. Responding to her letter seems like the right thing to do and I compose sentences in my head, constructed to keep the channels open without giving an inch. But I haven’t done it yet.

I was talking to Martin the shrink about Murray Bowen who created the Family Systems theory, something my last sort-of-shrink was very into in an unorthodox kind of way so my knowledge of it is spotty. “Well, remember,” said Martin, “that Bowen never suggested cutting off from the family completely. That actually makes the patterns more entrenched.” When he said that I thought: oh, well, I have to respond to her then.

I haven’t done it. Maybe Bowen is wrong, I think. Just because he said so doesn’t mean I have to do it. Though it would be easy to buy a card or some nice stationery and compose something and send it off – that is a familiar path to me: doing what I ought to do and doing it quite well, and making it appear – even to myself -- as something I want to do.

It’s scary, not to do it. I don’t want a freeze-out of contact with Esther though the kind of limited interaction we’ve had the last few years doesn’t add up to much. Our lives don’t really intersect whether we see each other once a year and stay on safe topics, or not.

My other sister, Anasuya, who I often picture as an Amazon, breathing fire, has put the freeze on – we made it through Christmas just fine, but if one sister was reading the blog in February you can bet the other was too, and I haven’t heard a peep out of her. I know she’s pissed. Anasuya is often pissed.

My knee-jerk immediate response to their damnation is to think they are right.

It was quite a surprise to me the other day when a new thought floated in out of nowhere – how come neither of them says anything about how great it is to see me happy, to see me writing which they know with every cell in their bodies I have spent my whole life wanting. Esther says in her letter how she wishes me “peace,” but, hey, how come it makes her furious that I’m walking in that direction?

I keep thinking back to when I came back from Europe in 1988. I’d been gone for four years. I’d been with Natvar, a sadistic brutal man who had me utterly enslaved. I managed to get away and returned to New York. During those years I hadn’t been in touch with my parents or sisters. Natvar had no use for other people’s families – or anyone -- unless they were useful or wealthy. My sisters – who had been my friends before the whole Natvar era, said they were cautious now. It might take them awhile, they said, before they could trust me again. Without questioning this at all, as if they were the only two people in the world whose friendship I needed, I set out to win them back.

I wish I had gone looking for people who wanted to know what had happened to me in Europe, tender people who could embrace me. I wouldn’t have found them. I didn’t know then that people could be that way with me or anyone.

Probably half the reason I leapt so completely into the ashram world almost as soon as I got back from Europe was to prove to my sisters that I was trustworthy. The ashram then was their territory. I thought it would erase all boundaries between us. I needed to be let in somewhere, having burned every bridge I had.

The boundary between me and Esther melted quickly back then. But not the one between me and Anasuya. She never let me back in. And I can trace it even further back to when she was 15 and I was 18 and she swallowed that bottle of pills. That got to me, on some deep non-verbal level. After that I always felt I owed her something I’d never be able to pay back.

IN THE CITY

Catherine and I stand close together in her narrow studio. She is barefoot, dressed in comfortable soft cotton, her rounded arms bare, her cheeks also rounded and plump. She shows me a new exercise she wants me to try and as I begin her attention shifts to how I am holding the bow, the tightness of my wrist, the rigidity of my pinky finger. Immediately, she wants me to try moving my arm up – “I think of it like I’m in an elevator,” she says, “and the doors are closing and I have to squeeze into –“ She demonstrates. I try it. And then she takes a quarter and places it on the back of her hand and plays without the quarter falling. And then she puts the quarter on the back of my hand, cupping her hand underneath to catch it if it falls, which it does immediately, but I try again, slowly and I become aware of each increment of change in the position of my hand – it’s as if she has slowed the movie down so I can see it frame by frame – it’s miraculous.

For forty-five minutes it’s like this, Catherine suggesting tiny adjustments in movement and position of my hands, fingers, arm. I feel like blotting paper, soaking it up.

At one point she says, “I don’t know whether to add something else, or just leave it.”

“No, tell me,” I say and add, “I’m very patient with this.” It’s true. I am patient with this. Me, who isn’t patient with anything.

Catherine says, “You’ve learned to play in a particular way that works more or less for you and I hesitate how much of that to change. You know, it’s like a tapestry – you look at it and it looks okay but there’s some things in the middle that kind of isn’t right and you have to find your way in and just pull out one or two threads without ruining the whole thing.”

I don’t mind at all that we are not getting to my pieces today. I want to learn how to hold and move correctly with the violin. I love the complexity. “You’re a natural,” Catherine said today, and it sounded like she meant it, though I don’t know exactly what she meant and didn’t ask, not wanting to unravel the tapestry of that sentence that looked so beautiful to me. It’s not that I’m very good yet at creating beautiful or even bearable sound. But I love just holding the instrument. I love to see my fingers curled over the strings. I love the rasp of the bow against the strings. And I love Catherine’s endless observations and suggestions and creations of little exercises designed to teach my right arm how to bow across the E-string or my second and third fingers to stay together as they move across the strings.

She asked me to play a simple exercise – this was right at the beginning of our lesson and is what led into the avalanche of unplanned suggestions that came to an end too quickly for both of us with the arrival of the next student with whom, I like to think, Catherine does not have nearly as much fun, but she asked me to play something simple, a warm-up, adding what she called “traction,” digging into the strings more with the bow rather than just sliding across them and then she asked me something about how I felt about the E-string, which is the highest string on the violin and I found myself saying how I hold back from that string – it’s too high, I never feel as comfortable on that string as on the others. I’ve always felt like E was a universe unto itself and that it’s harder to make something sound good up there. All this was true, but I’d never consciously thought about it before. And I just enjoyed that she’d noticed and drawn this out of me.

I come into the city twice a week these days. On Wednesdays to meet with Martin my new shrink and on Thursdays for the workshop of course, but also for my violin lesson with Catherine. both short intense appointments during which I feel very alive – both expensive in terms of time, effort and money, but both so stimulating and exciting.

I remember the year or two in the late nineties when I would come into Manhattan from the ashram every Wednesday. I’d be in New York by 9am and I had until 7 that evening before I had to get back on the ashram shuttle to return to the Catskills. Those Wednesdays had the very same feeling to them – something precious and rich, every moment of which seemed to count.

When I am talking to Martin the shrink I don’t waste a moment on small talk. He is very strict with his 45-minute appointment and I am hyper-aware when I am with him that this is my time, it is all for me, and I am paying for it and I don’t hold back. I voice the thoughts that come though it’s not always so easy – like yesterday when my mind kept hitting up against high black walls it couldn’t find a way through.

Always when I leave Martin or Catherine part of me is already turning around to return and continue.

When I left Martin yesterday I felt chopped up inside. I walked to the phone booth at the end of the block and left Fred a little voice mail that I hoped didn’t sound too awful and then I walked downtown to the little café I recently discovered, run by an ashram devotee. Gurumayi’s and Baba’s and Bade Baba’s pictures all hang there, discretely, and familiar chanting tapes play. My voice might even be one of the voices in the crowds of chanters recorded. I go there because I like the food and it’s close.

I sat at the counter – so full of feeling I could not define. I better write, I thought. And I did. Just a few sentences and there the word is I’ve been hunting for. Shame. That’s what it is. That’s what Esther’s letter complaining about my blog elicits.

PAYBACK

I was hungry when I was 18 and 19. I had just moved to New York City for the first time, had chosen a college there only because it would give me a place to live in Manhattan. I chose the school also because a friend of one of my friends wrote letters about how much fun she was having there.

I moved in in the middle of the school year, in January with thick heavy snow and dark grey skies. I slipped into Manhattan and into this school with nobody noticing, no fanfare, just an unpacking of boxes, the placing of books onto shelves. And then I was there, absorbed into the silence.

Two weeks before my 15-year-old sister swallowed a bottle of pills upstairs in her bedroom while we were all at home. It happened in the middle of our little marooned family, in our house into which so few ventured. She survived and we were all left just kind of awkwardly looking at each other with no language for this new territory. We basically ignored it. I mean, my parents got her a shrink. The hospital probably suggested it. I don’t think my parents would have thought of that on their own. But as far as what we talked about in the kitchen or at Sunday lunch, nothing changed.

I was glad to get away, or so I thought. Away from the family house I thought I’d soar.

Instead I fought to pretend that the life I actually had in New York City was the one I had imagined.

When my boyfriend called after 11 at night when the rates went down, when he called on the black dial phone that I had had installed in my small room at the end of the corridor, the room I’d been sitting in all evening with the door closed, trying to fill the hours, when he called I pretended whatever I could – that there were people in my life like there were people in his. He liked his life. He liked where he lived, he liked his friends, he liked his record collection, the food he cooked, his ex-girlfriends, his TV shows, his family. He even liked his own writing.

He got up after noon, got high and didn’t eat until night when he’d cook a big rich meal and spend most of the night eating and snacking before falling asleep before dawn. I liked the uniqueness of his habits, so much more interesting than getting up in the morning and having breakfast.

I still got up in the morning, but I stopped eating breakfast. And if I tried hard I could skip lunch too. I did not want to eat. Eating seemed a horribly banal weakness. I didn’t need to do it.

There was a tiny Apple supermarket downstairs from the skyscraper in which my small cement block room was suspended. I liked having my own neighborhood supermarket. there was something adult about it. It was one of the things my boyfriend had introduced me to – going supermarket shopping without parents.

So this would be my supermarket. Its 4 or 5 short narrow cramped and dusty aisles. But I must not spend money. What a waste. I set an amount. $5. That should be enough for the week. I bought a box of Grape Nuts. Jeffrey had them in his messy New Haven studio. We ate them sometimes late at night. I’d never had snacks late at night before. I’d never had cereal any time except at breakfast and not even then. I should be able to get by on a bowl of Grape Nuts a day. I always broke down, ran to the Chop Full O’Nuts for a doughnut.

I read up on calories. You were supposed to consume about 2,000 a day. I tried hard not to go over 1,000. I weighed myself. 127. 120. 115. 110. The charts all said I should weigh much more, but I scoffed. They were wrong. How huge I would be if I followed their direction.

On Wednesday nights I had something to do. On Wednesday nights I dressed up as if I had a date. I felt pretty in my long red corduroy skirt that flared over the tops of my leather books, pretty in the white blouse embroidered with bright flowers. For once I had a reason to get on the subway and I moved with purpose, enjoying how I’d learned to navigate the underground warren to Grand Central, then up the escalator and across the street.

My father would be waiting in his club, upstairs at the bar. He’d be sitting in an armchair in a suit that had originally been such good quality that its age now didn’t matter. His head would be back against the high back of his chair, eyes half closed, a scotch and soda in his hand.

His eyes light up when he sees me. I know I make a good picture and savor the moment of success. There is a buoyancy to our first few sentences that I work to sustain as we move to a table weighed down with heavy linen, silverware and glasses.

My father asks a question or two – what are you studying, what are you reading – in his Hungarian accent with its innate respect for words like “study,” “professors,” “interests.” None of these words apply to me. I am not “studying.” I don't have "interests." I am panicking because my boyfriend wants to fuck other girls. I have a paper due tomorrow that I will scribble in the morning. I spend too much time alone and silent in an empty room, fighting off a monster who leers at me, threatening, “You are nothing. You are not an artist. You are not a writer.”

After two or three chipper sentences I fall flat and lose my voice somewhere in the folds of the heavy linen. My father picks up the slack, shaking open the huge menu with satisfaction and telling me how he has organized his office, charting the prices of commodities on special charts with magnets and magic markers. Every Wednesday night I eat with abandon. Roast beef. Potatoes. Rolls and butter. And something huge for dessert. I can have anything I want.

ART MUST OFFEND

About a week ago I wrote an email to each of my two sisters, letting them know about my new guru blog. I had never told them about the other blog where I post many of my weekly writings, though I had sensed they had found their way there. But I was splashing the news of the guru blog in every direction I could think of, pretending I’d just been published by Random House or something. This was not a piece of writing I wanted to hide. On the contrary. Since both my sisters are part of the Siddha Yoga community I figured word would reach them about this fabulous new book, the first of its kind etc. So I figured it might be better if they heard about it from me.

While emails pour in in response to the guru story there’s not a peep from my two sisters.

Until today when a long white business envelope arrives with Agnes’s handwriting. A letter. An actual letter. Aint seen one of those suckers in a long time.

Agnes’s first sentence is about how she came across my first blog in February and read it until the end of March when I posted a piece that revolved around the pinched card she had sent me. Now, she says, she will no longer read a word.

She refers only to the one or two or three pieces that she felt insulted by. She doesn’t like that I could write “my family doesn’t support me.” She really didn’t like the suggestion that I was all lined up as a convenient spinster, placed next door to my aging mother, ready to take care of her for the rest of her life. “We bought that house because you asked us to so you’d have a place to live when you left the ashram.” Her voice is shrill.

I don’t like her letter. I find it dull, its phrases all out of self-help books and the like. I am not convinced that Agnes has really touched any deep part of herself through writing this. I find it pretty easy to dismiss.

It is just so almost unheard of amongst the five of us – my two parents, my two sisters and me – for anything very real to get said. It’s very hard to say anything real in our little mini-culture. Even I didn’t say anything. But I wrote a lot.

Last week I drove down and had supper with my mother. It was a long light warm summer night in early April. I knew it would be an easy visit, a happy one. I took my violin and played badly, but at least I played something. And I gave her a birthday present I knew she’d love. And I brought her a bag of things on loan for her trip to Hungary – a laminated map of Budapest, a phrase book.

I asked her what she remembered about when I left boarding school. It’s a period of time I’ve been exploring lately, it seems it was a real turning point for me and I hoped my mother might help me remember. “Well, we came and picked you up and went to that hotel for lunch,” my mother answer pragmatically. That wasn’t quite the kind of answer I was after.

“Do you remember at all what I was like then?” I try again. We are sitting at her small table by the window that overlooks her patch of lawn and then the quiet road. “Because after that life got much harder for me,” I say.

“Oh,” says my mother. Now she looks worried. “I should have paid more attention. I didn’t know…” I see my mother veering down a road I don’t want her to go down. I don’t want her to start berating herself. That’s not what I came for either.

“Do you remember when I went to Switzerland with Dad?” I ask her. I went to Switzerland with my father when I was eleven. I have some disturbing memories from those few days and as I’ve thought about it it looks like from that trip on, over the next six months, my life went down like a row of dominoes.

“No,” my mother says, looking at me blankly. This surprises me. “Remember?” I say, “I lost my luggage?” This was the least of it, but it’s an easy detail I feel safe mentioning.

“Oh, yeah,” my mother says. “Did you stay with Helga?”

Helga is part of the difficult part of my Switzerland story, my father’s pretty rich Swiss girlfriend who even my mother apparently likes to continue to pretend was/is just a family friend. I am uncomfortable when Helga’s name comes up -- so blandly too – calling me to go along with the pretense. “Yeah,” I say vaguely. This drink is too strong for me. I back off.

I tell Martin my shrink about this event, this conversation with my mother. Martin sits in his chair, tall and thin, like a long skinny rectangle in a button-down shirt and pants. He questions why I didn’t just let my mother respond as she wanted to respond, let her have her moment of wishing she’d done it differently. “You say that your mother has a hard time getting to feeling,” he says, “and then when she does you steered her away.”

And then Martin asks something about if I’d ever told my mother about feeling bad before. No, I say. Never? he asks. No, I say. “In all those years of depression you never once said anything to her?” He is gently incredulous. “No,” I say. “That was the first time.”

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.