LIKE WITH LIKE

I ordered a book secondhand off the internet a month or two ago, a memoir by a woman who had grown up with Krishnamurti being almost her surrogate father. Krishnamurti was originally from India, a boy picked out by the theosophists as an avatar, a holy being, and a man who retained that aura all his life though he put down gurus and spiritual movements in general. It was fairly interesting and I was fully expecting to finish it – not word for word all the way through, but at least a thorough skim – when it disappeared from my living room the day that Mari cleaned the bookshelves.

I did read one line in it though that has stuck with me. A friend of Krishnamurti, not Krishnamurti himself, says to the child that she should not kill anything – not even little bugs. “Their life is as precious to them as yours is to you.”

But I killed the mosquito at breakfast this morning. It had already bitten me once and was hovering, getting ready for more and though I knew it valued its life etc. I killed it.

In yoga they taught us that everybody has billions of lives and that if you kill a bug you can actually be doing it a favor, allowing it to be reborn, hopefully as something with a little more staying power and therefore a greater chance at etc.

I liked that theory, that souls come back in different forms. I still like it. Sometimes it explains things that nothing else does. But, while I used to accept reincarnation as true because they said so, I now admit I have no idea and I don’t think anyone else does either.

I was driving with my friend Yolanda. She was driving. It was a Saturday morning and she had picked me up to spend a few hours at her house helping her organize her office. She does a lot of things to make a living, one of them is to teach hatha yoga, the form of yoga that most people have heard of by now. You can buy sticky mats in supermarkets.

“I have to really watch myself,” she said as we drove down Rock City Road. “Sometimes I hear the things I say in my yoga classes – I have to be careful.” Her voice trailed off.

“I know what you mean,” I said. “I try really hard these days to only say things I know are true.” We talked about what I call New Age Fundamentalism which she recognized immediately and defined as, “You caused your cancer!” and contrasted it to Judaism, which she said was based on asking questions.

We turned into the lane on which she lives. Our mutual friend, Molly, was walking with her brown-and-white sort of fancy cocker spaniel, the dog she acquired sort of to replace the little black one who had been her sidekick for almost twenty years. The new little dog is cute, but somehow I don’t feel the closeness, the inseparability that was there with the first little dog. Maybe I will in twenty years.

Molly looked worn and unhappy. Yolanda paused the car while I said hi through the window. I wondered if Yolanda and Molly were getting along these days – they lived near each other – and I had the impression that sometimes they were better friends than at other times.

It was one of the hottest days of the summer. “Call me,” Molly said, waving me on. It was too hot to talk.

I know Yolanda’s dog had been killed on this lane about two years ago, hit by a car while Molly was taking her for a walk. It was an accident. Cars are always racing down this dead-end road. I don’t think Yolanda blamed Molly. Still, if that’s what I thought of, here on this road with the two of them, maybe that’s what they think of too.

My friend Yolanda wants me to streamline her office which is also her art studio and make it so that all the papers just land in the right places when the mail gets delivered, when she returns from her day with her bag bulging with fliers, announcements, contracts, instructions, magazines, articles. It’s a small, glassed-in porch and it’s gotten to the point where she just has things in piles. I go through the piles while she works on her computer. I bring the piles into the living room and I begin to sort them – bank statements, bills, stationery – and that’s about all I can do – put like things together. Maybe, I say, next time we can look at the space together and think about perhaps picking up some stackable trays – something to help keep things separated – there isn’t room for much.

Fred comes at 12:30 to pick me up. He knocks on the door. I call that I’ll be right out. There really isn’t room for him in here. When I go out into the damp heavy heat Fred and Irwin are not in sight though the car is there. I meet them halfway down the lane. They are talking about the Democrats as they come slowly walking towards me. Only Irwin, I think, would suggest a stroll on a day like this.

PINK AND WHITE

It’s funny how my parents, right from the start, from when I first became aware of them, before the two other children were born, when grown-ups were huge, strange creatures, a different species, when my legs stuck straight out when I sat in one of their chairs instead of folding nicely over the edge so that they could be crossed the way adults crossed them – back then I saw my parents as in conflict, in a battle, straining in different directions and against each other.

I placed the blame on my mother and tried to make up for her limitations. Otherwise, daddy might leave. I knew he wanted to, could sense his restlessness and eagerness to be gone. And he did go. He was the one who got to leave. On business trips. With great fanfare – the luggage, the passport, the airport, his flushed excitement. He was the one who got to leave.

I wanted to leave too. Just like dad. And I did. First chance I got. Nine years old, eagerly showing up for boarding school that was trickier territory than “High Jinks at St. Claire’s” or “More Fun at Mallory Towers” had prepared me for.

So when my parents divorced in their sixties it was meaningless, just a signing of papers. But my father calls my mother every weekend. She sends him Christmas and birthday presents and a little extra cash now and then. They turned out to be together forever, not creating – well, they did create separate lives – but never really letting each other go. Maybe because they’re in separate countries they can be so close.

I posted the first piece I wrote this weekend, the one from Friday evening, up on my random stories blog. I titled it “Harrassment.” Within half an hour two responses had come in, both threatening. One says, “It’s only just begun.”

As I put the mugs out on the counter I noticed my hands were trembling.

I imagined them starting to harangue my mother. I even imagined the stress of it shortening her life. It will freak her out if she gets much wind of all this. She’s trying hard to glide through her last years making the most unnoticeable waves. She might have to take a stand. She might vote with those who think this is all very inappropriate.

Not that I’m not trying to glide through too. I don’t think of myself as a big outspoken person – I think of myself more as someone quite like my mother. Usually, I just want to get along. This has kind of happened by itself. The writing did it, and I do put the pretty much first.

I dreamed a couple weeks ago that an ashram friend greeted me warmly and then drugged me. I felt myself going under, knowing that while I was unconscious the ashram was going to clean out my memory, take my writing away from within me, and I struggled with every possible ounce of strength I had to resist them.

Last night I shot a man in a dream, held a gun, surprised him, pointed it at his throat and shot him right in his Adam’s apple. I thought it would kill him, but it didn’t. I had to kill this man. It was him or me. I beat his head with a pipe as hard as I could three times. He was down, but not dead, and I had to run away at that point.

I don’t dream much usually. Lately, the dreams have been big and real. They kind you always remember.

My pen stops. I lose the thread. I wait. I can’t find it. Should I go back to childhood and the parents, where I started out? But I’m not landing in a scene, just the same ribbon of scenes I always see when I look.

My mother, young, with brown hair, seated on the arm of the sofa, an uncertain smile on her face, two or three guest women on the couch, clutching chunky glasses, laughing up at my father who stands, holding their attention. While one of the husbands, an older man in a suit, shows me magic tricks with coins.

The Armonk house. The dining room table only used on weekends when my father is home, symbol of odd formality. Eating in the kitchen with my mother and sisters is normal life. My father’s arrival on Friday night, he steps in and shifts the atmosphere, puts me on edge, I have to be more careful now. I am watched. “What are you reading?” I know the question comes not out of unselfconscious interest, but because cultured people discuss what they are reading. They exchange ideas back and forth. They debate and I will not. I answer with two words, my shoulders shrugging even as I don’t move. Leave me alone, I am always saying to him without actually saying it – partly because I don’t want to hurt his feelings, partly because I am afraid of his fury.

Or the house in England, the way you could hang over the railing that formed three sides of a square – all of it tiny – and look down into the tiny front hall with its black and white tiles and here I am a child, my mother is alone, my sisters are little, and my father is mostly not home.

My room is red because of the floor-to-ceiling drapes that open and close with a string, my sisters’ room is blue, my mother’s is pink, my father’s dark green. It is a rented furnished house, like a doll’s house with someone else’s reality, a reality where the wife likes pink and has a kidney-shaped, glass-topped vanity table with a pink-and-white striped skirt covering its drawers. I liked that pink-and-white striped crisp shiny cotton. It was pretty. But had nothing to do with my mother who slept next to it alone for five years.

PARANOIA

I was in a workshop recently, an evening organized by some friends and offered to me free of charge. At one point you were supposed to speak as if a year or two had passed and you were bringing people up-to-date on what had happened in your life. “Well, you all saw Oprah, I guess,” I said when my turn came. Yeah, I could dig all that, the big exposure, talking about Authentic Writing while Oprah sits next to me with a make-believe expression of interest on her face. I could dig all that and sometimes it feels like it’s going to happen. “You’re going to be famous!” my friend Dinah said as we sat outside the Café Reggio, meeting up for the first time in thirty-five years. She had no doubt and when she said it I didn’t either.

I have imagined being one of those people who is famous for a little while and then disappears from view for the rest of their lives.

And the whole fame thing? I don’t know. Yes, I’m reaching for it though not in the way that people who are really serious about it reach for it – like Madonna who is really famous just for being famous.

Some of the emailers accuse me of only wanting fame, and that is so obviously off-the-mark. They aren’t reading what I’ve written. They’re freaking out.

I called Dinah the other day. She lives in New Zealand so I don’t do it often. Her British voice came through on the answering machine – neither she, nor her husband, nor her three kids were home. I’d been feeling down, suddenly devoid of energy, a strange feeling, and I was looking forward to her great comfort. I didn’t tell her that on the message though. It was the day the first real avalanche of bad emails was coming in. Fred was away. I didn’t want to think that the cacophony of witch-hunters had anything to do with how I was feeling that day, but it was hard to ignore the synchronicity.

I had woken up with a muscle inside one of my shoulder blades freezing up so that by afternoon I was having a hard time turning my head. I wandered into town, something I like to do when I’m trying to take it easy. It makes me feel like I’m on vacation and it takes me away from the computer.

I passed by my friend’s little store where she sells her own art work. She’d left me a message a few days earlier, sounding desperate, going through some horrific emotional upheaval, so I came to see her. She said her shrink had upped her meds and she was feeling better. I didn’t contradict. I just listened. She looked defeated, but not as desperate and tearful as she’d been a few days ago. She had been trying to get off the drugs, she said, partially because her boyfriend didn’t believe in them.

I told her about my frozen shoulder and she sat me under a tree and pummeled my back with experienced fingers. “I guess I just have to accept …” -- her voice trailed away. “You don’t ‘have to’ anything,” I answered. I didn’t like the sound of “I have to be different, I have to change.” I wanted my friend to feel okay just as she was. And I could feel the strength surge back into her voice. “You’re right,” she said. “I don’t have to anything.”

I was wearing a bright red tee shirt. I wondered as I walked along the sidewalk if anyone drove by and noticed me walking, anyone from the devotee group here in town, perhaps the person taking the brochures. I thought of Barack Obama, always needing a security detail. How exposed you can feel.

When I came home the key that’s always on the front porch was missing. Someone’s taken it, I thought. Just that morning I had thought that I should hide that key more effectively, and now it was gone and I was locked out. I called Robbie, my friend and neighbor, to whom we gave a key several years ago because she was here so often, watching over Tamar and Mousie while we were away. She was in town, cleaning out the little house she’s going to be moving into in a month, and said she’d be right over.

She didn’t have the key anymore. Don’t know what happened to it – I tried every possible one on her heavy key chain. She’d gone round the side of the house and by the time I caught up with her was half-way through a living room window that I hadn’t been able to open.

“Oh, Robbie!” I was so happy as she opened the kitchen door from inside. “You are the absolute best!” And I told her of my fears that someone had taken the key. I checked my office, the library table – no key. So I hadn’t by mistake brought it in myself.

Then I saw it hanging tidily by the front door. “I’m a jerk,” I said. “Look, it’s right here.” And it was. I hadn’t been prowled upon. Life shifted back almost into normal.

Usually I hate being in the house alone at night and can hardly bear to go to bed. Having Tamar, the black dog, helps a lot, but still I feel vulnerable and paranoid. But that night it was suddenly easy. I turned all the lights out and slept with confidence, and the next day, though I wasn’t at all-systems-go energy, I was much closer to normal, and the frozen muscle had almost completely unclenched.

WHAT I DO

It was very important to my father what he could tell other people about what I was doing. it seemed to me that he just wanted to be able to say, “My daughter is at Barnard," or "She is an editor," or "She is married and has two children.” Things like that. I could tell by the way he reported on the offspring of his business acquaintances. Big Judy comes to mind.

Big Judy was around in my childhood, the only daughter of a Hungarian couple with whom my parents were pretty good friends. We’d go visit them in Philadelphia and the Poconos. they’d come to see us – in Armonk , even down in Virginia I remember Big Judy coming to stay with us.

Big Judy was three years older than me -- almost precisely – and could beat me at practically everything. She wore glasses. I yearned for glasses, thinking they’d boost my adult qualifications, lying to the eye doctor about what I could and could not see, and even stealing some empty frames when my mother was in the eyeglasses store.

Now Big Judy is a professor of archaic Viking languages at a university in northern England. I haven’t spoken to her for about thirty-five years and my parents have almost lost touch with hers. But my father will mention from time to time Judy’s fabulous accomplishments that are so easy to define and I can feel his sense of something missing when he looks at me, that he is really looking at himself, wondering how on earth to tie the scramble of loose ends that are his life into a perfectly presentable package.

He lives in Budapest now. He has for the last almost twenty-five years. He went there kind of to take a break and think things over and no better option ever presented itself and now he finds himself stuck there, looking at death, planning for it.

In my mother’s note to me last week she said how my aunt – who lives with my dad, her brother – with the assistance of my baby sister – is planning how to prepare for the time when -- my mother details in her note to me – my father will need someone to come in and bathe him, how they might have to install a commode in his room, that so far he can usually manage these things, but.

My father has Parkinsons and is eighty-three. I saw him a year ago. He was still able to hold it together pretty well.

I have really abandoned him. There is really not much I can do to help. I don’t feel badly about this. I don’t think about it too often. It has always been a relief – since I was about twelve – not to have my father around.

He raped you, he raped you, he raped you – one unidentified emailer harangued this week. And I wondered for a moment, seduced by the anonymous intruder, did he? I don’t think so. Though a few days ago I dreamed of him, putting me to bed, leaning over me – oh no, I thought, he’s going to do it again and he comes closer and closer to kiss and I am trying to scream and my voice has deserted me.

I hope my dad dies soon. I know he doesn’t want to die. Of course, he doesn’t. And for that I want him to live. But if he slipped away tonight in his sleep I would not be sorry.

I don’t mind that my sisters have cut me out either. That’s a relief too. Ten years ago I thought of them both as my best friends. This morning I thought of Anasuya saying to me once, “In high school you always wore see-through shirts. You could always see your nipples.” She said it as an accusation, a something I had done wrong, some horrible flaw I had. Or the time I wrote about in the guru book when she said, “Other people thing you’re great. But you’re not. You’re a phony.” And both times I took these statements in as if I deserved them, like the way I dealt with Mukta, an enraged woman I had to work with for several years who screamed at me once, “All the saints say that anger is sacred. I’m just getting my anger out!” And I sat there thinking I had to be the good one, the understanding one.

Now when people write to me about what a bad person I am, how I need therapy and medication, I print out their message for the record then check Reject without the slightest pang of guilt that I should let everyone have their say because we’re all equal in god’s eyes.

HARASSMENT

It’s been a long time since I’ve written. About three weeks. My life Is changing shape for the first time in seven years and I am not so often in our weekly groups, working on other projects, some that bring in some direct income, some that promise to.

Yesterday I had to thumb through all the stories I have posted on-line. Not the guru book, but my other blog. I had to go through those stories, ferreting out a small flood of vile comments that landed there, sprinkled amongst the different stories.

I saw all these pages of stories. It made me a little sad for a moment. Like, oh no, my writing life is over. I felt how precious all that writing is. And it’s always different to look backwards and marvel at all the writing that managed to make it through, and to look forward into emptiness. Will there really be more writing? How will I write if I get the full-time job I interviewed for last Wednesday, dressed in that super-sharp navy linen suit that I’d found for $10 at Woodstock’s consignment shop. Even my friend who met me right afterwards for a walk in the public gardens expressed a little surprise when she first saw me. I think I definitely looked like someone who wanted that job.

I do want it, but it feels very strange – strange and exciting – to be possibly on the brink of a full-time job again. I have images in my head of actually worrying about other people’s projects – or, not worrying about them, but suddenly my head being filled with other people’s endeavors instead of my own. I sort of feel like I will be an actor. I will go step into someone else’s play, but it actually feels like a role I’d like. I cold get into it.

They haven’t offered it to me yet, but at the beginning of the interview the woman was saying that she’d be inviting some people back for a second interview, and by the end of my interview she was saying she’d like me to come back. But I haven’t even gotten that call yet. I hope I get it on Monday.

When I spoke to my mother on the phone I told her I was having this interview. I knew she’d be happy that I was doing something as ordinary as looking for a job. In fact, she suggested I could go to Kingston to the unemployment office and check the listings there. She suggested this several times. I said I would. I am polite with my mother, and sometimes genuinely warm. But not so much the last time we spoke.

Somebody had printed out for her a couple of stories from my blog, stories that had to do with my growing up, the family. This person who is supposed to be my mother’s friend and who I once – about twenty years ago – thought of as my friend – printed out these stories and brought them over for my mother to read.

She read them and then wrote to me because she thought I had misunderstood a letter that my aunt had written to me. And she said on the phone, “And you wrote something about how it had been with me and your father and I thought when I read it – wow, that’s so sketchy. I could write much more about that! But then I thought, well, if that’s how you saw it, that’s fine.”

“You should write about it, Mum, that would be great!” I said.

“Well, if I did I wouldn’t publicize it,” my mother said. “Because it’s so, you know, personal.”

“Well, that what I like to write about,” I said, and I think we left it at that.

Except that she also asked at one point. “Weren’t you scared when the ashram said they’d sue you?”

“No,” I said.

I told her about the interview, but I didn’t tell her where and I had a fib lined up if she asked.

My mother has her feet in both camps. Many of her friends are ashram devotees. If my mother knew where I was trying to get a job it might leak to one of the fundamentalists who is trying to do me in and I can see phone calls being made. “Don’t hire her. She’s not what she appears to be.”

After the rain of nasty, distorted emails I’ve been getting from people who do not identify themselves, I am cautious. After noticing that someone is methodically removing our brochures from the local health food store, I am careful.

Lawnmower

My father's favorite tool
was a lawnmower.
I know this for two reasons.

One:
I saw him use it alot
Saw him push it through woods
trying to turn woods into parkland
on weekends
Saturday after Saturday
my mother silent in the kitchen
me under his direction
pulling weeds I didn't want to pull
not knowing I could refuse.

Two:
I feel it now when I mow
what he must have felt
how pleasing it is
and how easy
with a lawnmower
to make things look
just like you want them to.

Barack Speaks To New Orleans

PLUS AND MINUS

A voice mail from a man whose name and number don’t show up on the caller ID. He says he’s been reading my blog with great interest and that if I need legal help to call him. His message is hard to plumb – his voice is polite, friendly, but also not frank and casual. You can tell he’s not showing all his cards. I save his message.

A friend says she’ll call a local journalist. She thinks the ashram’s threat is newsworthy.

Jonathan emails at 7 a.m., advising me to tell the agent who’s looking at my submission about the threat. He thinks it’ll help.

Part of me wants to fold up the drama into a tiny wad of paper, make it disappear and me along with it. Not most of me wants this, but I feel the strong urge to shrink back into the shadows, an urge that for a long time seemed like something good people, pious people, would follow. Let me stand in the shadows until someone peers into the darkness and notices me. That’s what I must wait for. Anything else would be unseemly. Now I push back against that urge to disappear and pretend I am not here.

It reminds me of my mother.

Lots of things remind me of my mother.

The way I worry about money, how even when I have it I am thinking that it won’t last.

My father went bankrupt. First, he spent a lot of money. Mostly in the life he had when he wasn’t at home. He had two lives and he liked the one that was separate from us better. in some ways. But he liked to come back to the house to rest and recoup.

He brought a leather handbag home once. He tried to use it for a little while. It was the seventies and I think there was a brief fashion attempt to get men to carry handbags.

He decided to call up one of those companies that publishes your book for you. He didn’t try to find an agent. I think he submitted it perhaps to one contact, someone his doctor knew and when that didn’t work there was no way he was going to go through the humiliating process of trucking that manuscript around. He’d do it himself.

He gave himself a party at the Waldorf Astoria and invited about fifty people to dinner where he stood and gave a talk about his book from behind a lectern.

And that was about it.

His book was about economics.

You talk to my dad for five minutes and you’ll get maybe a couple minutes of his actual attention and then he will pull the plug and start to talk about how they never should have moved away from the gold standard after World War 2.

My mother, in the years before the bankruptcy, my last three years of high school, split pennies, bought hot dogs, said one sweater is all you need and finally started answering ads in the Pennysaver to take care of invalids and old people.

I remember when she started doing that. It was strange. It had an independence to it, but also a giving up, a giving in as if all along there had been a voice in her head that who did she think she was, she wasn’t worth more than an hourly wage to clean up someone’s puke.

She wore a dress then, a narrow belt at the waist, the top like a button-down short-sleeved shirt, the skirt loose, past her knees – white cottony fabric with a pale red pattern. She’d gotten it from a catalog. Her slip showed beneath it sometimes. She didn’t look pretty anymore. I could see she had given up on that too.

And then my father on weekends running out to the fancy bakery before the guests arrive. Buying new wine glasses hours before the guests arrive. Credit cards.

“Going bankrupt was the easiest $50,000 I ever made,” he said to me, laughing as if it were funny but knowing it wasn’t.

They sold the house. That was the other part of the solution, the house he’d bought in 1960 for $10,000 and held onto for just over twenty years – proud of that house he was.

My youngest sister has a framed photo of that house on the wall in the ranch house on the cul-de-sac in Siloicon Valley that she and her husband bought about twelve years ago. When they bought that house I thought of it as two young kids buying a house so they had a place to sleep not too far from the office. It took me a w long time to realize that no, they actually chose that house. Two adults who wanted to live there. I thought I knew my sister, but I knew her only as a family member, not as an adult.

My father has the same photo of the Armonk house framed too.

I don’t. I dream about that house pretty often. And I drive by it every year or so though it has become something I don’t recognize anymore, dolled up to match the neighborhood.

I spoke to my father on the phone a couple of weeks ago. He said my mother had told him I had published a book and he wanted to read it. “It’s just on the Internet,” I explain, wondering why my mother mentioned it to him. “It’s not a real book yet.” My mother knows that my father wants to read anything I write and she has already told me that my book isn’t “tactful” enough, that I have “ruffled people’s feathers.” Why would she want to draw my father into it when it’s so easy to keep him in the dark?

“Send me your book,” my father says, with forced cheer, as if this is a happy simple thing. “I want to read it so much.” I say that I will.

And then my father almost begins to cry. “Life is short,” he says. “It’s over before you know it.”

FAR AWAY

I got a letter from my aunt today. She’s my namesake. Her name is Marta. She’s my father’s younger sister, his only sibling.

They were such a picture-perfect family. I’ve seen the photos – my grandfather seated way over on one side, gruff, in a suit. Seated way over on the other side, my grandmother – pretty white curls, slim, dignified, faint smile. My aunt – pretty and dark haired draped near her dad, smiling. And my dad – handsome and suave in a suit – standing over his mother. All in sepia tones.

My aunt never writes to me. She doesn’t speak much English, but this is a full typed page with some handwritten additions. She explains that she got her goddaughter to translate.

It’s all about the apartment and what they should do with it. It’s all about money and how the two of them – my aunt and my father are roommates – will live. I’ll have to read it again to get the details, but I think my aunt is saying she has enough money for herself. So I guess that leaves my dad. She’s asking if I can send money. Otherwise, they might have to sell the apartment. Her grandparents bought it in 1928.

The bank is threatening to take my house back so I can’t help with theirs. I will send a nice letter. I’ll write about how I do love that apartment, but I don’t love it that much. and even if I did it’s beyond my reach.

She says that she and my father don’t agree on what to do with the place, how to proceed. It seems like she’s writing behind his back, but his signature appears at the bottom too. At least, I think it’s his signature. I looked closely.

This geographic distance between my father and me and my aunt is more than just geography. It’s not a coincidence that we live on different continents. My father says he never intended to be cut off like this, but he was cut off all along, even when we lived in one house.

I think of us, say, at the dining room table in the Armonk house. This was the house I’d known since I was three, though we hadn’t lived there solidly. We’d move away, rent it out, move back in, move away again, come back. Now it was high school and we were living there again after coming back from five years of relatively extravagant successful living in England, my father traveling to Switzerland and Morocco regularly. Now we were back and we were broke. There was a feeling of barrenness, of sparseness, of having what we needed but not a hair more.

My father really a weekend presence as he had become while in England, a weekend presence, a guest. It wasn’t just that he wasn’t there, it was more about what it was like when he was there, what it was like to be in the same room with him.

“Come on,” he’d say to me from the end of the table, a challenging smile on his face, not a smile of warmth and receptivity, but a smile that demanded some sort of combat, some sort of prove-it-to-me. Prove it to me that you’re smart, that you’re ambitious, that you’re winning, that you’re cultured and not just another useless all-American teenager. “Come on,” he’d say it a little sharply. And this wall would rise up inside of me that did not want to let him over, but I had to hide the wall, just like he was hiding his wall with that smile. “I’m a friend,” that smile was supposed to be saying. “I’m innocent. If there’s anything missing here it’s your fault.”

To get up and slam the door was not an option. And so I’d squirm and prove only that I was none of the things he was looking for -- not the bright conversationalist, nor the learned scholar.

STONE WALL

Boy, that was a strange conversation with my mother last night.

My mother lives next door to the ashram in a community of people still loyal to the ashram and the guru that I’m writing about.

My mother goes every Sunday morning to chant the Guru Gita, a one-and-a-half-hour Sanskrit chant that I used to do every morning with a few hundred others before breakfast, before dawn.

My mother doesn’t chant in the ashram. People are not allowed to visit the ashram anymore so the local devotees have organized their own Guru Gita. It’s on Sunday morning in someone’s home or office and then they hang out for breakfast together, bringing food. My mother often cooks something and brings it. Pretty much all her friends are devotees.

My mother is not the pious sort. This is her first religion. But now and then in conversation she’ll surprise me and refer to Gurumayi as if she were a compass point, as a source of truth, as god.

On Monday morning this guy from the ashram, calling from about one mile from where my mother lives, called me to tell me to take my guru blog down or they’ll go after me legally. “Okay,” I said, hung up and went on with preparing the three chapters I was going to put up the next morning, and then, because eof the call, I added another chapter that otherwise would have waited a week, a chapter about the weird, ultra-secret rituals we did in the ashram to try and prevent the New York article form coming out.

A couple of days go by, filled with messages form the internet, offers of support – financial and otherwise – should I need legal help. And I figure I better call my mother. It had been two weeks – that’s about as long as I ever let it go, plus I thought she must have caught wind of all this. I better check in.

My mother wanted only to talk about the little girl next door, the zucchini recipe my sister was sending, the new job she was starting tomorrow. I went along with the chit chat, thinking, okay, maybe I just have to break in and say something, but it was as if my mother was building a stone wall between us and each stone was saying, “No, don’t talk to me about this.”

We spoke of the book about a month ago. She’d read at least some of it. Her main, unexplained comment back then was that I should have been more “tactful.” I could tell my book made her uncomfortable.

But last night she didn’t say a word about it. Didn’t ask how’s the book going? And I was stunned. I didn’t bring it up. I could have. I’ve done things that require much more strength than that. I could have said, “The ashram doesn’t want me to keep publishing,” but then she would have had to take sides, I guess, and she really doesn’t want to.

It’s okay. But it was very strange mouthing that conversation last night. When she asked me how I was doing I could tell by the reluctance in her tone that she didn’t really want to know. As long as I had enough to eat.

It’s good to know where I stand. To see my mother more and more clearly. She wants this much but not more.

I guess it’s funny too because I was more willing than usual to be more open with her. We’ve been friendly lately. I needed some help a few weeks ago and she helped me easily, no questions asked. In the past she has always told me I was too private, that I never told her anything. And it was true. And I was ready last night to open up something real – the call from the ashram – but the stone wall was there, mounting, one stone at a time, those gray, moss-covered, rounded stones like you see in New England.

ONE FOOT IN FRONT OF THE OTHER

We moved to Virginia in the middle of first grade just after Kennedy got shot. I didn’t know it then, but we were moving to Virginia because my father had taken a job in the State Department and was all excited to be part of the Kennedy administration, and then a week or two before we depart Kennedy is killed, so the whole move began, I guess, on the wrong foot.

We stayed two years. I was six and seven and eight, and it seemed like a long time to me then. We lived in five different places during those two years. I had my tonsils out, went to two schools and my mother gave birth to my second sister. A disappointment. I’d been hoping for a brother. My grandmother from British Columbia visited for the birth. My grandparents from Hungary came out of Communist Hungary for two visits, or maybe just one. I played at being a cripple – walking awkwardly on sticks the way the blonde girl, Claudia, walked in our second-grade class. I was envious of her crutches. They seemed exotic, interesting.

The last place we lived was a skyscraper and it felt temporary even to me, a little like staying in a hotel. I had never lived in an apartment before. I liked it. I liked the elevator with the buttons you pressed and the pool downstairs I could go to by myself and I liked the way there was a gang of kids and we could roam around the building, doing what we wanted.

We could buy PayDay candy bars in the lobby. We could meet in the basement and look at Playboy magazines.

I started piano lessons that summer with a woman in the building. I had two books – one for playing, one for learning how to read music.

I practiced on a toy electric organ that I’d had since I was three. The teacher was angry when she heard after a few weeks that this was all I’d been practicing on.

When we left the apartment and came back to our old house in New York, my mother got a second-hand piano with a tall straight back and put it in a corner of the living room by where the stairs went up.

I had asked for a long time to take piano lessons, but now I didn’t want to, but I didn’t know how to get out of it. It was third grade and my father had gone to work in England. I didn’t like being with my mother and two sisters much. My mother could get angry very quickly, very harshly. I didn’t like that. And things were not exciting around my mother the way they were around my father. I don’t remember missing my father, but when my mother asked if we should move to England too, I said yes, of course. I thought it was the biggest non-question I’d ever heard. Of course we should go.

We did. I was nine. I’d just had my first holy communion in church. It happened on a Sunday. I wore my blue jumper with the white smocking and a white blouse underneath. And the priest asked me to come up the aisle first before everybody else came for communion because it was my first time. I was shy walking up there by myself, but I was glad to finally be able to take Communion, the most fun part of Mass, the part you had to be old enough for and now I was old enough and could go up with the adults.

But not my mother because she wasn’t a Catholic. She’d almost become one. For awhile in Virginia she’d gone and talked with a priest – she liked him and talked about him at home – Father Parera he was called, but we moved before it all got finished.

On my birthday I bicycled to the church by myself and after Mass my bike was broken, run over by a car and I had to go back in the church after everyone had left. I had to find the priest, had to knock on the door of the room he went into after finishing Mass. It was terrifying to knock and ask him to call my mother. She told me to wait in the store down the street and I waited all morning before she found me. A dog had leapt at me that morning, barking and growling, as I rode the bike on the way to church and years later my mother held up the coat I had worn that day and said, “Look, the lining is all torn. That dog must really have been biting at you,” as if she was believing me for the first time.

We went to England and my father was there and he brought us to a small little house that he had rented for us, except he wasn’t there very much. He had an apartment in London where he stayed during the week so he wouldn’t fight so much with my mother. He came home on weekends, but I saw that all later.

At first, I just went away to a boarding school. I left my mother and my two sisters just like my father left them and I went away by myself to a school, a convent school, twenty-two black-and-white nuns with not a scrap of hair showing, with long flowing black skirts and long black veils down their backs and a little black sort of cape that hung gracefully over their chests.

I liked it there. Again, it was a little like a hotel, and more exciting than home.

I learned about periods in this school. And about sex. Though when I heard about sex I realized that’s what my father had been talking about on one of our weekend walks back in Virginia when I was in first grade. He’d told me that the man’s wiener goes into the woman’ goo-gah when they are sleeping, but it didn’t seem very likely and I had semi-forgotten about it.

I had four main friends in boarding school. We were a gang – the smartest, most interesting girls in the class. It was like that for two and a half years and then something happened almost overnight it felt like – my friends turned cruel and mean, they made me feel that I was not as good as them and I asked my mother if I could switch schools.

I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to go back home and start at the school my little sister went to. I knew it was a more ordinary place. It felt more ordinary. I didn’t want to do these things, but I could not stay at St. Mary’s and face my cruel friends.

So I came back to the circle of my mother, my two little sisters, my father on weekends. It surprised me that I didn’t like it when my father came home on Friday nights. He acted like a guest. I had to treat him like a guest. He wanted attention when he came home, wanted me to stop, interrupt, come talk to him, his stilted conversations – teasing that was not funny, questions. I always felt defensive, an under-the-surface anger that felt wrong, pulling to be allowed to return to my room, my book, my game, my TV show. I didn’t want to pay attention to my father like the way you have to pay attention to company when they come for lunch.

My father liked to go riding on weekends. He was no sportsman. He’d just begun to ride, always had a big horse he could ride like sitting on a couch. When my mother took me to ride it was some scruffy pony in a scruffy field. My father liked the stables in Windsor, he liked Mr. Dent – the cranky World War II veteran who wore tweed and hobbled and yelled at the stablehands. Mr. Dent came out with us. He and my father rode ahead of me, side-by-side, talking, down the Long Walk with Windsor Castle behind us. That was riding for my father – a nice way to be outside, in pleasant surroundings, with symbols of wealth and grandeur on the horizon.

FRESH PAINT

My mother lives in a small white clapboard house. When I drove up last week I noticed the paint is peeling. It needs a new paint job. I wish I could offer to have her house re-painted. I remember when it was done a few years ago, how good and bright it looked. I hate the sad way the paint is peeling now, that hopeless sign that there isn’t money to fix it. It hurts me, this sense that she might be feeling any pain at all, and at the same time I know it’s crazy – my mother doesn’t care if her paint is peeling, just like I don’t care much that mine is. Our peeling paint doesn’t make either of us suffer, just my seeing hers does.

There’s a small stretch of grass in front of my mother’s house and then the road and then a large fake-Tudor house directly opposite. Inside the Tudor house lives a couple in their young mid-fifties and their adopted daughter.

The couple is a little bit like my mother’s kids – they often act like a daughter and a son-in-law – and the little girl is the closest my mother has to a grandchild. The girl has real red hair. She is nine years old and pretty big for her age. They’ve had her since she was a few months old.

The woman and the little girl are going to move to Iowa where the woman’s parents live. The parents have each had strokes and the woman wants to go take care of them. She has always at least half-wanted to move back to Iowa and the country land where her original family is. The husband doesn’t want to go. He is going to stay. They will visit once a month. They say they are not separating or getting a divorce.

It makes me a little nervous. I guess because having the couple and the little girl across the street has always seemed to me part of the fragile structure that has come into being almost of its own accord, the structure that takes care of my mother.

When I arrive my mother is ironing for the woman across the street, something she does for pay. She keeps ironing as I sit on the couch and look at old photographs she found lately – pictures of my grandmother back in Uruguay as a teenager. I read a letter my grandfather wrote to his sister in 1907. My mother stands for a couple of hours, ironing. “Do you hate ironing?” my mother asks. “Most people tell me how the one thing they hate doing is ironing, but I kind of like it.”

“I don’t mind it,” I say, absently. “I only iron one thing at a time.”

I wish the woman across the street wasn’t moving away with her little kid. It seems mean, breaking up the family for the sake of her parents. I know the man will miss his daughter terribly though my mother says she’s been hard to raise.

I don’t like the colorless dress that my mother is ironing. My mother holds it up, without judgment, just showing me and it makes me angry, the grey-blue dress with the floral print from the seventies. It makes me mad again at the woman across the street. She should wear things with more style.

I know the couple. The man’s name is Daniel. He chose the house they live in. I remember when it was for sale, almost twenty years ago. I passed it often. “Baba slept there,” people said, referring to Baba Muktananda. I wanted to buy that house. How impossibly wonderful, I thought, to live in a house in which a saint had slept. I was surprised that it took over a year before the For Sale sign came down.

Daniel had bought it. I didn’t know him very well. He worked in the vast Purchasing department of the ashram and I heard he had a real estate license and I asked for his help when I saw the little white house across from him for sale a few years later. My mother had asked me to keep my eyes open for something she could move to. She couldn’t stay for free in the Curry’s garage apartment forever. She’d have to find something cheap to buy and Sullivan Country is about as cheap as you can find.

Daniel bought the house at least partially because Baba had slept there. His wife was never such a passionate devotee. I don’t think the house meant as much to her as it did to him. I slept in the room where Baba slept one weekend when I was housesitting, the weekend I rented Trainspotting, during the years I was getting ready to leave the ashram but didn’t know it, knew only that I was craving hardcore art like movies about heroin instead of just yogic treatises.

For a few years there I’d stuck to a diet of yogic treatises, convinced that I could grit my teeth and tighten my belt for as long as it would take for the cosmic pay-off, and then I started to think that maybe yoga wasn’t about just who could follow the rules better than anyone else, and I started to find ways to have my own things inside the ashram world until it led me all the way out of that world.

I watched Trainspotting in the house where Baba slept.

And then I moved in across the street – not into the house my mother was living in now, but the almost identical one next door – a perfect writer’s cottage – I’d meditate and write and copyedit for money and trust in Feng Shui and live next door to my mother, a nice simple life that because it was so different from what I’d just torn myself away from – ten years on staff in the ashram – seemed fabulous and daring and full of possibility. I knew there wasn’t much going on around me in this deserted corner of New York State, but I’d pump it full of meaning – I’d find art in the smallest places and make this a town worth living in.

But I only stayed six months. The vista of Woodstock beckoned, so much larger and more colorful. It was almost as if I tried to start life over, to keep it small and in the corner, something I could manage with my eyes closed -- just my mother and me and my birds -- and it stayed in place for a few months and then got out of hand all over again – huge and vigorous and consuming.

WALLFLOWER

When I left L.A. it was a little like awakening from a dream – at least for awhile. I’d gone to L.A. with Jeffrey because I had nothing else to do and he wanted to be a movie director. I’d stayed there three years. I had often wanted to leave, but that took money and I never had any after pay day. And then my publishing job invited me to go back with the company to New York City. I didn’t hesitate for a second. Yes, I said, count me in. I want to go back to Manhattan. I never liked this palm tree town. And buy my plane ticket and pay for my records and my books and my stereo to all go back with me. It was a dream come true.

It wasn’t so easy getting out of L.A. Jeffrey made a huge fuss. When he didn’t like things I did he had a way of throwing them back to me as crimes, like all of a sudden he loved me in ways I’d never imagined and I must be the most cold-hearted person in the world. So he had me crying a lot and freezing up into depressions, trying to twist my insides so that when they showed they looked right, but I made it out of town because the company was waiting and even Jeffrey couldn’t take on the company. So I flew out of town in February 1981, 23 years old, reading The French Lieutenant’s Woman and seeing someone with a Walkman for the first time on that plane.

I thought it would be so easy. Slide into Manhattan, join the crowds with their brand new Walkmans on the sidewalk. They would propel me along with them.

But the very first night, my first night back in Manhattan, I am in my friend Thea’s apartment. She is out of town and letting me stay a few nights and she’s not that great a friend like I had once thought. She’s a Vogue model now, traveling round the world and buying $500 cowboy boots in Soho when she feels like it. Her apartment is a squalid, dark studio on Sixth Avenue just north of Eighth Street and I’m stranded. I don’t know why. Now that I’m here, it doesn’t seem so easy to go out and join those crowds on the sidewalk. They will not take me in.

I call Jeffrey back in L.A. and there is his sweet familiar gravelly voice, the only person I can say “I feel terrible” to. “You’ll be okay,” he says. He is watching TV. I know he’ll fill up the bong and make dinner on the couch. He will just keep on going. He doesn’t need me for his routines.

I don’t think of the word “lonely.” No, I think of words like: what is wrong with me that all I know to do is to go to bed at 9 o’clock? How come I don’t know how to be part of all that noise out there? I feel like I’m in a foreign country, not home – and I am ashamed and must not let this feeling of being on the outside show.

It’s like when I was in high school and I did not know how to join in. Now I’m in New York City and it’s the same. I don’t know how to join in.

Thank god for the office. And that’s what I hate most of all. That I need that 9-5 corporate office to get me up in the morning, to give me a place to go like everybody else. It’s all I have, that warren of offices for people with no imagination.

I like walking to work though, wearing sneakers with my skirt, walking so fast in the fresh morning air that I feel like a sprinter, my body elastic –and I feel a tremendous new energy surge through me at times that I know has nothing to do with my old life with Jeffrey, an energy that only runs free when I am away from him because such things are too wholesome to interest him.

But more than anything , I must find a new boyfriend. I can’t bear that Jeffrey will be with some new girl – I am sure it will not take him long, he likes so many girls – I must beat him to it, must find someone just so he knows I am strong and happy and independent – and so I know it too – but even the one or two boys who come around, the ones I corner at parties where I don’t know anyone – maybe they look cute for a minute or two – but they never feel like home the way Jeffrey feels like home. I don’t let myself call him though I long to.

Lethal Sounds: Deadly Sonar Harms Whales

SUGAR BLUES

During the last of my three years living in L.A. with Jeffrey a book came out called Sugar Blues. It was about 1980 when this book came out, a paperback with a dark blue cover. Jeffrey told me about it. “Maybe that’s why you’re depressed all the time,” he said. “You should try not eating sugar and see if it helps.” Jeffrey was a repository for new-frontier psychological theories.

When I first met him, a few years before when he was 19 and I was 18 he suggested I go see a shrink. The possibility had never ever occurred to me. But Jeffrey said he saw one and I could too, and it wouldn’t cost anything if I went to the school clinic. Jeffrey was a Psych major. Not because he wanted to be a shrink but, I think, because it was an easy major and he was mostly interested in things like the effects of hallucinogens. He liked being told how people’s minds worked and being able to explain things. His sister – almost his twin – was getting her PhD in Psych, on an unambivalent express path to becoming a shrink. She added generously to Jeffrey’s stock of theories.

I was about 23 when Jeffrey told me about Sugar Blues. No one had ever said anything bad about sugar before except that it made you fat, of course, and gave you cavities. But depression? That seemed so weird.

“You have to stop eating any sugar,” Jeffrey said, throwing a bottle of coke into the freezer, and of course I had to try. Otherwise, it would look like I wanted to be unhappy. Maybe it was that simple too. Maybe I just had to stop eating sugar.

I reached for crackers at the office, then thought to look at the list of ingredients. They had sugar in them. Most of the things I picked up to eat – even if they weren’t sweet – ended up having sugar in the list of ingredients. I thought if I swallowed any at all I’d be guilty of welcoming depression.

I got up early in the morning to be at work by 9. Jeffrey stayed in bed. He didn’t have an office to go to. He could spend all day in this one-bedroom cottage with the wall-to-wall lime-colored shag carpet, but I had to put on a skirt and panty hose. I walked out to my car that was parked on the street. No one was around. It was L.A. and early morning. The street was lifeless. I drove one block north to the huge supermarket on Sunset that was open 24 hours a day. I went in and bought a large bag of cheese doodles and ate them as I drove to my office. There was no sugar in cheese doodles so I could eat as many as I wanted, but it felt wrong, like masturbation, something I wouldn’t want anyone to see, me driving, eating a whole bag of cheese doodles before 9 o’clock and feeling finally spent as I park my car – not in the office parking lot because that cost money, but several blocks away.

My car is an orange and white Pinto that a friend of Jeffrey’s gave me. They say they blow up if you get rear-ended. It is not insured. I know nothing of insurance. It leaks oil. I don’t take it to a garage to have it fixed because I am certain this will cost money it would be impossible for me to pay. The only money I have is the paycheck I get every two weeks and every penny of it is gone by the time the next one comes. I keep cans of oil in my trunk and pour one in every day.

I walk to the skyscraper where my office is up on the 22nd floor. There are two skyscrapers in this part of L.A. – Century City – and my office is in one of them. When earthquakes come the buildings sway and if you’re in them it feels like you’re on a ship.

I have my own office. This was a triumph. When I first came I was a secretary with a desk outside the office of the editor-in-chief. Now I’m an editor. It’s the first time I have my own office and my own business card. I get to write copy now and I see the words I have written on paperback books in stores.

Part of me is ashamed that I am so not an artist that I have an office in a skyscraper – while Jeffrey who is unquestionably an artist can stay home all day and be happy. He always know what to do with himself. He gets high, watches an Errol Flynn movie on TV, goes out to buy a new fish for his tropical fish tank, plays some tennis with Leonard, an actor who lives next door. When I am home I don’t know what to do. I wait for the weekend all week and then I become desperate because I can’t do anything. If I just get high and go to the movies with Jeffrey I don’t have fun the way he does. I feel a clock ticking inside of me like a bomb: empty time, empty time.

It disgusts me that I sometimes catch myself taking comfort in the office. I cannot roll up into a ball here. I cannot stare at the wall. I am grateful to have things to do here – photocopies, phone calls, chit-chat – though here too I hear the tick tick tick in my ear. I want every minute of my life to count, but it is rare that any minute feels well spent. And so even without sugar the despair remains, unabated.

KRISHNAMURTI

Yesterday I began a memoir written by a woman who was a child in Ojai, living very close to Krishnamurti, almost as his daughter. Her parents were his best friends, her mother his secret lover. I am glued to the book. It’s well written. I feel myself in responsible hands.

Krishnamurti has been one of my companions since the mid-eighties. Natvar, my first cult leader – a smalltime guru of Greek heritage – became the yoga teacher for an upper- class Greek upper-Eastsider whose mother swore by Krishnamurti. Natvar got in very tight with this family and we all began reading Krishnamurti’s books and watching his videos.

Krishnamurti was still alive then and we went to see him speak in Madison Square Garden. I listened respectfully, fighting to stay awake. He was a plain, old gentleman who sat on a simple chair on the large empty stage, speaking in a monotone as he always did.

Natvar and Nellie – the mother of the upper-Eastsider, a short round woman with a round face, bushy grey hair and mischievous eyes, would have long conversations in the lobby after dinner, after the small group of yoga students had left, while Mark and I did the dishes and Tracy put the girls to bed – Nellie smoking her cigar out the window – she and Natvar lounging back on the silver crushed velvet sofa that had once belonged to my father. We would join them when the work was done and sit on the lush burgundy carpet that had just been installed over the bare splintered boards we had been laboring over for months.

Mark, Tracy and I sat on the floor, listening with the raptness of devotees. I could not follow their conversation – sometimes it went into Greek, but even when Natvar and Nellie spoke English they leapt so far into abstractions I could only listen and hope that one day, if I worked hard enough, I’d be able to talk like that.

Krishnamurti I found almost impossible to follow too. I struggled through his books and tapes. But still I liked him. He was so unflashy, his face so serious and beautiful, he had to be trustworthy.

Years later, in my last years at the ashram, I bought one of his books again, heretical though it seemed. And still, although difficult, I trusted him. He was unique amongst philosophers. He refused the guru title.

And now I read of Krishnamurti, the man. Not the celibate holy man. Another man, another human being. It’s an important story for me.

I even visited his home once in Ojai, a remote and charming stone cottage with a lawn smaller than my own, and plump roses, the whole place perfumed by the groves of orange trees below in the valley. It was such a simple place, closed that day so we couldn’t go in, but I felt that a good person had lived there. He was dead by then.

And I am learning what a human human person he was. I have stopped believing in saints.

THESE DAYS

I keep thinking about calling Philippa and Daniella, the two friends who visited me last week after we hadn’t seen each other since we were fourteen.

I keep thinking about calling them – Philippa about six hours ahead in Rome, Daniella about sixteen hours ahead in Melbourne. I will call them, but I am nervous.

How to recreate that intimacy we had last week? Is it possible?

I keep imagining them retreating from me, finding reasons why not to be friends anymore. Maybe I shouldn’t write the things I write for instance.

I think of calling Philippa and Daniella because I experienced so much love from them last week it was intoxicating and in these difficult days I want to go back to that, and I am afraid it won’t be there.

And I feel needy, like I’ll call them just out of that need and there’s something wrong with that.

These are the thoughts I have, but I know I will call within the next few days.

This morning I was thinking maybe I should just clean the house and cook and do the laundry and stay out of the business side of things.

With surprise, it reminded me of the time in Athens when Natvar declared that I would be the maid from now on. I’ve remembered this before, but what I remembered today was how although it was degrading, there was some relief for me there too. Natvar was saying I couldn’t handle the complexities of dealing with his yoga clients, that I was not like him and Mark and Tracy who, he implied, were plugged into some adult understanding that I was too crazy for, or too damaged for. It felt like he was giving me permission to turn half my brain off and just keep the floors clean, and for brief periods of time I took refuge in that.

It was strange though to hear myself think these same things on my own: maybe I should just cook and clean.

My mother trying to entice me now into confiding in her. My mother is a nice person. That’s the trouble. She’s a nice old lady. I don’t find it easy to criticize her. I’m not even that interested in criticizing her, but I have to say a few things.

You can’t coax someone into confiding in you. Especially after fifty years. Especially after you’ve read ten chapters of their memoir – not their novel. And you can’t tell them in one breath that they don’t have enough tact in their writing, and in the next invite them to talk openly with you. Take your pick.

My mother should be smart enough to see at least that much.

I think, well, I’ve never been a mother so what do I know.

But my mother wants to get away with just doing her jobs – taking care of elderly people younger than she is and paying her bills. She wants to slip out of this life easily. I should think about all the fun times we had at the ashram and not mention that we were all – at the very least – under somebody else’s large thumb.

I guess “mother” – even when she’s a little old lady in Sullivan County – is still spelled with a capital M.

THIS, OR DEPRESSION, CRUSHING DEPRESSION

A few days ago I got a letter from my mother. She was sending me an old photograph of myself that I had sent her almost thirty years ago. I knew because I turned the photo over and there was my cheerful Christmas greeting from 1980 when I was twenty-three years old, living in Los Angeles, thinking of suicide most of the time. My mother was sending me the photo because, she said in her letter, she doesn’t want to leave a “big mess” behind when she dies. Not that she shows any signs of going any time soon, but she’s preparing.

Her letter went on to say that she’s read a few chapters from the book I’ve been posting on-line for the last couple of months. I write about my years in an ashram with a guru, a place and a person that my mother knows well. She says in her note that my writing is too “serious” for her, that she was grateful to the ashram because it was such a respite from losing her house to bankruptcy and the awful chaos of her life at that time.

Then she writes for a page about having to clean out her fridge because a new one is being delivered.

So I called her up. It was time for a call anyway. After a few sentences I took the bull by the horns, “So, you’re reading my book?” This said in a nice cheerful tone.

“Yes,” says my mother, her tone almost forbidding. I know that tone, or where it can go when it’s full-blown. I feel fear. “You’ve ruffled a lot of feathers, Bim,” my mother says. “I think it’s important to have some tact.”

“Oh?” I say. I am polite. The only thing I don’t do is make this easier for her. I also don’t say, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Somehow the conversation goes into other things, the usual things. As we are about to end the conversation my mother asks me how I am. I give some kind of stock answer which is what I have always done. I have never told either of my parents how I am. My mother has called me “private.” She says that now. “Oh, you’re so private,” she says. “You know you can tell me if things are rough. I can take it.”

My mother knows that I have wanted to be a writer all my life, that there has never been anything that I have ever wanted to be. And I have written a book. It is not my first book, but it is the first one she knows about.

It scares her, this “ruffling of feathers.” Not that I’ve written anything terribly damning. I write my story about being in a cult very gently. I go through it slowly.

My mother has mentioned a few times in recent years that I don’t confide in her. Here it is, my memoir. It happens with my sisters too. They don’t like what they see. They don’t like this Bim. They like the other one. The one that joined in the masquerade that this was just a happy, jolly family. With a loser of a father of course, but the women were wonderful – they were all best friends: imagine that. Three sisters and their mother. How quaint.

I read this morning about covert incest and immediately recognized myself as a victim of this. It begins with a parent who abdicates, a “shadow parent.” My first memories of my mother are of her in the shadows of the kitchenette in the little apartment I was born into in Yonkers, New York. And then the other parent turns to the kid for what they need. And boy did I give it. Boy was I good at that.

This memoir that’s on-line right now? It’s just the beginning.

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.