ON CREDIT

I wanted to be a writer not because my head was bursting with beautiful things I had to say, but because my most profound and meaningful experiences came through reading and I thought that if I could somehow become one of those people who could translate life into words that would be worthwhile. I’d be satisfied.

Sometimes, like now, when I am refusing every story that knocks cautiously at my door, I long instead for just strings of fancy words, some well hung phrases – the begrudgers must be at work, must be burping with satisfaction that they’ve got me out of action.

I see Jeffrey sitting up in the unmade bed, the NYC apartment window behind him, the hard blue walls of the room. I am standing in the doorway facing him. Maybe it’s the night we did acid and it was his idea that we color and draw while high and it sounded fun, but I could never get high enough to let go with the colors, and I couldn’t do it, but he did and I remember the drawing on an 8x11 sheet, horizontal, and there was a brown door in the drawing, opening or closing, and some words with the word “Tuesday” amongst them, and Jeffrey explaining something about how Tuesday is worse than Monday – and for me it is one more – not that I needed another – piece of evidence that he is the artist and I am not.

And I remember sitting at the round marble table in the apartment in Athens, on the bright shiny blonde parquet floor, giving Natvar a theory for why I had so many shortcomings, that I was like my mother, I offered, and could always provide material comfort to to thers, but nothing more. Natvar chewed my creative thinking with approval as he drank his coffee from the beautiful blue and white cup, part of the set he had picked out in Bloomingdales, picked it because one of his wealthy upper East Side clients had the same set, and we’d bought it on my mother’s credit card, and brought it when we fled to Greece. There wasn’t room to bring much. But we brought this coffee set and the IBM Selectric – things that set us apart from other people in Athens – crucial to Natvar that we appear to be aristocrats, something familiar to me because my father was the same – not so daring – my father wouldn’t have left the country because the cops were after him – my father would have turned himself in – though, he would argue, didn’t I get out of Hungary on the sly at the end of the war? Yes, Dad, but you were always so careful around authorities when I knew you, always careful to have your papers in order.

I see Natvar out on the terrace in Athens. Ythere were sliding glass doorsx in the living room. You stepped out onto terra cotta tiles, flowerbeds on the sides, a black railing overlooking the quiet, shady lane below. The terrace was spacious. Natvar grew bright colorful zinnias in the beds that lined it. There was a large basil plant every summer in a terra cotta pot. Natvar told us that in Greece everyone has a basil plant for the summer. You have to have one. The hibiscus tree flowered easily out there and a cascading wall-climbing vine with orange trumpet flowers. I see Natvar out there wrapped only in his silk robe, burgundy paisley, also from Bloomingdales on the card.

It had been part of the last year in NYC when it seemed Natvar was becoming a star, rich woman after rich woman enlisting his services as a private yoga instructor and confidante – some of them famous – and Natvar beginning to want and want the lovely things he saw in their apartments. The clothes for instance. He wanted us all to look good. Him first. Then Mark, his lover, and his two little daughters. Then Tracy and me. But we had nothing to spend except my mother’s credit card.

We went to Bloomingdales and Natvar bought three fancy dresses for each daughter. And after he and one little daughter ran away to Athens – when it was just Mark, Meredyth and me left for a few months in NY – Mark played Natvar, took me and Meredyth to Bloomies and bought us Tahari and Yves St. Laurent, clothes I had no idea how to even try on. “You can do it, Murtz,” Mark said. “See, how you look like somebody.” Wow, I thought. Is that all there is to it?

He sure looked like somebody when he wanted to, spiffed up as Natvar had taught him. He could look like a choir boy. And Tracy would put on the spiky high heels and make some lavish dinner and guests would come and we would present ourselves: Natvar and Mark, half-brothers, we said. Ariadne on Natvar’s lap, little blonde princess. Marta the secretary. Tracy the cute little cook. And the guest would be made to feel like royalty.

I would look back on my days with Jeffrey. Those had been meaningless. This what I was doing now was serious work. I believed Natvar had some secret access to something life-giving and important and I couldn’t back away. I was committed. There was no way out except to give up and say I can’t do this, I am an utter failure.

When I finally did leave it happened quickly. I sat at the kitchen table. It was London now and many things had changed, but that night I had realized that many things had not and never would. The fight had been huge. At the dinner table of course. Most fights were at mealtimes. The table in London was rectangular, not our white marble circle from Athens that we’d had to leave behind. And Natvar had cursed me, holding up his hand in the Greek gesture of fuck-you, the palm facing me, all fingers spread wide, blocking me from his sight.

I sat by myself in the kitchen. Ariadne was in bed. The dishes were done. Natvar came in, wrapped in the burgundy paisley robe.

“I’ll leave,” I said, frightened that he’d erupt again, but he didn’t. In the morning I left early, sneaking out, taking what I’d need for a few days, afraid still he’d block me, but he didn’t. I didn’t know where I would sleep that night. It felt like stepping off a cliff, taking the one step I had refused to take for seven years until it felt like the only one left. And when I did not tumble into endless freefall, when I did not die, the delirium of the next few months was sweet. It was happiness peace and pleasure that I had not even tasted for seven years.

WINTERY MIX

I wondered today if you could – and I’m sure you can – type in something like “weather winter 1978 New York City” and get a site that would tell you what the temperatures and snowfall were that year.

I think it came from the radio mentioning that the record for the lowest temperature on today’s date was in 1978 and I thought of me in 1978 on that day. It was a cold winter. There had been snow and the office had closed early and Eric the lawyer in the office where I was temping had driven me home down Fifth Avenue in his black Porsche and there were no other cars, just one or two people cross-country skiing down Fifth Avenue.

He dropped me off and it was all in keeping because my boyfriend had started sleeping once a week with an old woman he’d met at a writing class – an evening writing class – at the New School – an old woman who had a seven-year-old daughter and published books already so it fit that the lawyer in this office would flirt with me, then take me out for lunch at Le Cirque where I only ordered tomato soup and a Margarita (Come on, he kept saying, don't you want something to eat?) and we only stayed about half an hour before heading back to the office and he started kissing me in the elevator. It all fit neatly. It was just what I needed, a lawyer who had his eye on me and seemed capable of making it happen.

How cold was it that winter, and the one before that and the one before that when I always seemed to be on 119^th Street, walking head-down from Amsterdam to Broadway against the bitter wind in the long brown coat with the hood that my mother had paid $100 for at Macy’s in the suburbs, a coat that I loved, Red Riding Hood, a romantic coat, long and full, not tight and belted like the trench coats my parents liked, long, full and flowing, and the six-foot Icelandic scarf that my almost-useless high school boyfriend had given me, the one present he really got right. The scarf and the coat and the fierce wind and the grey unforgiving sky. The tiny Apple supermarket and the dress shop where I bought a tent dress in browns and greens, cotton, full and cheap, but a shopping mistake. It doesn’t get worn. It gets thrown out somewhere eventually before or after the drive to California just a few weeks after Eric drops me off in the snowstorm.

I buy a duffle bag at the Army/Navy store, a long green sausage, and I put all my clothes into it and put it in the trunk of the big white boxy Mercedes that is my boyfriend’s car. Of course he has a Mercedes. He has everything.

He is driving to Los Angeles. Now he is saying I can come if I want to. He has often said he will go to LA to become a film director and I am sure he will. I don’t say anything about coming with him. I don’t know what I will do when he leaves. I don’t think about it. There is too much to think about with him going once a week to spend the night in Harriet’s apartment – I imagine him there, I imagine a dark place, the little girl, this woman who is so old but he wants to sleep with her and she is so much a writer that there are paperbacks with her name on them and I have no idea how to get from here to there, but she knew how to do it and now my boyfriend sometimes likes her better than me and this is like a knife in my stomach that I say doesn't hurt.

And then somehow he is inviting me to go with him to this California where he will become a film director and I am sure he will. I do not know how I will become anything. He says he has been waiting for me to finish school so we can go together, but I didn’t know that, he never told me, and it didn’t feel that way – Harriet and Eric -- but it is fine with me to go too, to go to California now, sure – go with him, be part of his adventure that is now filling the apartment. It takes me fifteen minutes to put my clothes in the green sausage, but he is making tapes for the road – each color-coded: red for fast tapes, blue for slower ones, violet for sleep tapes – each with a title like a book, each made as carefully as a stained-glass mosaic, and he buys two small cases to carry them in – two little sort-of suitcases especially for cassette tapes and his trip is all there is so of course I will come too, as if I were really part of it, and his sister comes a day or two before we leave, Buf, his sister, with her blonde spaghetti hair – that’s what their little half-sister called it – I remember Buf coming home and telling us about it, laughing – she always laughed so intensely, they both did, as if there was a lot at stake in that laughter, as if you better join in or else -- describing the taxi ride and the cute little sister saying “spagheti hair” – and the fact is that Buf is plain. But she rolled us an ounce of pot into joints so we’d have enough for the road. My boyfriend and I always smoked with pipes, neither of us could roll, but Buf had learned somewhere along the way and she did it for us. Mostly, she is exactly the same as my boyfriend and the ways in which she is different do not count. Except for that she can roll. This is maybe her only difference that is cool. She and my boyfriend always laugh at the same jokes, are always part of one world -- one they made together -- or maybe he made it and she is Citizen Number One -- I am allowed in, but only with a visa.

SIT TIGHT

Don’t be fresh. It was scary when my mother said that. It was a threat. I knew not to go any further. I never understood what I was saying that she didn’t like, but I knew not to take whatever it was I was pursuing any further.

Don’t talk back. I never understood that one either. These phrases would shoot out of nowhere like bullets stopping me, forcing me down, before I was done.

The miniature house with the dull green carpeting, not our house, a rented one, none of it really feeling like ours. It was too small to be real. It was a tiny house, but with four bedrooms, a living room big enough only for a two-seat couch and one armchair, inches apart. There was never much reason to be in that strange little room. My father stayed in his room when he was home – reading there, doing his bills at the desk by the window. All the furniture came with the house, like a hotel.

We stayed there five years, longer than what that house was really capable of. It was a place for a weekend, or for a couple, but we lived there. In the dining room where you could only just get around the dining room table.

It was into this house that my father brought, during the last two months of our stay there, two large new pieces of furniture, both went into the dining room. He replaced the rectangular table that had come with the house with a polished wood table with thick carved legs and a glass top. The table came with six matching chairs, with high backs and soft green velvet seats. He placed against the wall a tall armoire – that’s what he called it – a wide cabinet that reached almost to the ceiling with glass doors on top that each closed with a little key and below three wooden doors each also with a key. Behind all these doors were shelves.

These two pieces of furniture gobbled up the almost non-existent space of the dining room.

My father said they were my mother’s birthday present, but I knew they weren’t. They were his birthday present and they didn’t fit in the room. It was so obvious and transparent. I knew my father didn’t like my mother, that he tried hard to be away from her as much as possible, that she just made him angry. She made me angry too. Why did she keep doing – mostly saying – those things that instantly set his teeth on edge?

I am quiet when one comes out of her mouth, tense now but superior because I know better than to say something so combustible. I sit to my father’s right at the dining room table, she at his left, getting up to bring things from the kitchen – not much, nothing fancy, though we like it – mashed potatoes, roast beef maybe or pork chops. And this is only on weekends. We eat together like this only for Saturday and Sunday lunch. The rest of the week my father is away and my mother and I and my two little sisters eat in the kitchen.

I clamp down when the words zing out, when my father tenses and pretends not to hear. “I am reading an excellent book,” he beings, leaving my mother’s question unanswered because it was only asked to irritate. “Yeah?” I say, minimal but not non-existent. That would cause too much attention.

Or if the zing has gone in deeper, my father tenses and says something in a low warning voice without looking at her. “Now, Joan –“ and she will say it again like someone driving with a blindfold on – while I pass the potatoes down to my sisters, wanting to be far far away with people who are young and hip and cool, in my own apartment somewhere in a city.

WANTING SOMETHING

I always go first to the kitchen these days. It used to be my room in the attic, but these days it’s the kitchen and it’s high school and it’s just me in there, sitting at the head of the small rectangular table – unpolished wood -- , my back to the swinging door and facing so I can look out the window. My mother stands at the counter, almost out of sight, making sandwiches, the radio plays classical music and somber announcements and the floor is dark brown. The stove is electric and there’s a small round fan just above it, built into the wall. You lean up and over the stove to pull the string of little metal balls to get the fan going or to stop it.

My mother and I don’t talk much, just maybe a few practical things – dress warm, it’s going to go down to 25 today – mostly, I am quiet. I am not a quiet person, like my sister. I am talkative, but something has come over me the last few years – a gag or something – and it makes it hard to say anything.

The only things that come easy to say is when my mother is in a good mood and I am making jokes to make her and my sisters laugh – I can do that. I can be a good clown. I don’t do it when my father is home. When he is home I mostly strain to get away. I stay up in my attic room – out of his sight as much as possible, because if he sees me he starts to talk to me and it is always about something I want to get away from. His questions are always about how well I am doing, as if he is asking questions and watching me at the same time, checking me as if if he didn’t watch me closely I will disintegrate into the wrong kind of person, a failure like my mother, which I am afraid is happening anyway. Either his conversations are mini-exams that I can’t help but fail, or they are requests for help: help with yard work or paper work, or (unspoken) help with my mother who irritates and makes life hard for him.

I never say no when he asks. I am afraid of him. I have never said no, so it’s not like I know what would happen, but I know he’d be mad and I’d be at fault. So I have to keep my end of the bargain and say yes. My yeses though are unenthusiastic. I also feel sorry for him.

Last night I overheard a man say how every generation complains about kids today.

My parents banded together and refused to allow me to wear my beautifully patched and tattered jeans into the city when that was the whole point of going, to walk around with Cyndi attracting attention in my favorite clothes, the ones who told you who I really was.

I didn’t smuggle my jeans out of the house. I didn’t think of that. I obeyed.

Both my parents scared me. Their anger was terrifying. I did what I could to keep them quiet.

I hitchhiked across the country by myself the summer I was sixteen and did not tell them. They wouldn’t have allowed me, I knew that. So I suggested to them that I visit my grandmother in British Columbia and travel by Greyhound. They bought me a month-long pass. It cost $150. It pained me that they should have to spend all that money on me. I wanted to get on the road like all the hippies I saw standing by the inter-states, holding signs, in their lovely worn-out jeans and lovely long hair. I wanted to be standing with them instead of looking from the passenger seat of our green VW station wagon.

So I had the ticket and I started by bus, wondering how I’d get out there on the big highways. It seemed harder now that I was this close.

I did it though. I did get out on the highway, though it was comforting knowing the ticket was in my back pocket, until it wasn’t. I knew before it happened that I would lose it. I hadn’t been careful and I’d noticed I wasn’t being careful and sure enough about fifty miles from my grandmother’s ranch – after I’d found out that sleeping in a bus station isn’t as fun as it looks and that they come around and ask you to move – the ticket is gone and I know I will have to get rides not only to the ranch but all the way back to New York because I cannot tell anyone that I have lost something worth $150. I couldn’t bear my parents to have to find that money again. It’s too painful. I know we don’t have enough money anymore. We used to have more, but even then I never felt rich.

I always felt poor with my mother. Even in fancy stores or restaurants because I could always feel how awkward and out of place she felt – just being with other people, but especially if we were someplace fancy. She liked being outdoors best where she could look at plants and point out birds. My father liked the fancy restaurants, the pretending of great wealth, the flourish, the luxury.

But there wasn’t much of that anymore. Not much money. I knew not to ask for anything. If I wanted something, to do without or find a way of getting it myself.

OLD MAN

It was a crowded cafeteria in a bus station in British Columbia, late in the day.

I was sitting by myself. I had a small back pack. I had jeans on and a short yellow top and a red bandana holding my long dark hair back. I was sixteen. I was going West to spend two weeks with my grandmother who lived out on a wild ranch. My parents had bought me a bus ticket, an expensive one that let me take as many rides as I wanted for a month. But I didn’t want to use it much. I wanted to hitchhike, travel like the hippies, be on the road. Greyhound buses weren’t very cool.

“May I join you?” I looked up, interested by the English accent. I’d lived in England for five years. The voice came from an older man. He had grey hair and a navy blue suit jacket on. He looked like a professor.

“Sure,” I said. “Are you English?” I knew my question was an invitation.

Of course he was English and of course he asked me if he could give me a lift and of course I said yes.

“Back home in England I have an MG,” he said. “This station wagon is just a rental.” When he got out to get gas I looked in the glove compartment and saw the registration with his wife’s name on it.

When night came he drove to a hotel, a huge fancy hotel. The Banff Springs Hotel. It’s a famous place though I’d never heard of it. “Let me go in first and see if they have a room,” he said. When he came back a few minutes later he said he had rented us a room. “I’ll go in first. Wait a bit and then come in after me,” he said. I knew he wanted to hide me.

Inside, it looked just like a hotel my father would love, rich and old. I went up to the room, not like a Holiday Inn, more like something out of an English manor house. A double bed.

I was a virgin, but I didn’t want to be and I was hoping this road trip would bring me home accomplished. I hoped that someone would stumble upon me on the road, like me, fuck me and get me out of this sticky childhood that was refusing to let me go. This hotel room was sort of what I wanted, though this old man was not. Still, he was better than nothing.

I went into the bathroom to undress and came out in my nightgown, white cotton lace with blue ribbons, a pretty one I liked. I had my period. I wasn’t sure what people did when they had their period, as far as sex went.

He was standing, naked by then. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said, half apologetically, spreading open his arms a little.

“Oh, no,” I said casually. The important thing was to pretend this had all happened to me a thousand times before.

He held me in bed. He didn’t take my nightgown off. He felt me. He said, “Oh, you have your period!” He said it sweetly, as if this delighted him in a gentle way.

He put his hand over my breast. “A breast shouldn’t be too large,” he said. “It should fit under a champagne glass.”

And when he heard I was a virgin, he held me tight, as if this was a precious thing.

At one point he came. I remember only the small amount of white cream that spurted.

In the morning he ordered breakfast to be brought to the room. We ate by the window – tea and toast. He went out to check on his car and returned, saying, that unfortunately his car was having problems and he would have to drop me off back on the highway. The car, he said, could be driven, but only very slowly. I pretended to believe him.

He drove me, slowly, back out to Highway One, the main highway that cuts east-west across Canada. We didn’t talk much.

He said he would call me. He gave me his number. He said he would meet me in British Columbia and we would walk on the beach and find driftwood.

I called the number from my grandmother’s house but got no answer.

Wall to Wall

The house stood on a hill that overlooked the road. There was something a little forlorn and raw about it, nothing like the smooth suburban houses my friends lived in. Our house was different the way we were different, the way my parents weren’t American and my father didn’t come home at night.

The hill was short and steep. The house was white with dark green shutters. There were no shutters in the very beginning. They came a little later, my mother’s addition and there was never any question about what color they would be. Shutters were dark green. Houses, rooms and sheets were white.

My mother washed the clothes in the basement and hung them up to dry behind the house and down a wide path that she told me used to be a road, long long ago before there were cars. It was overgrown now. The line for drying the clothes was on a pole that twirled. If you kept going on the overgrown road you came to the neighbors, but I only went that way once or twice.

Everything was rough about our house. You could get splinters from the floorboards. My mother liked the floorboards because, she said, they were wide and only old houses had wide floorboards.

My mother planted our Christmas trees on the slope that led down to the road. She planted other things there, always at random. Dark plants. I don’t remember color there.

Across the street an old man called Old Tony lived in what my mother called a hot dog wagon. It was a dark green truck. Not a pick-up truck, but the kind with a sliding door on the side. There where no windows except up front, the windshield.

I visited Old Tony. Sometimes with my mother, sometimes by myself. When I went by myself he opened a can of beer by punching two triangles in it. One triangle for him, one for me, and then some bread with sliced cucumbers. We ate outside. He had some kind of table in the woods next to his truck. Once, he got up to pee and I watched him, not thinking much about it. “You can touch it if you want,” Old Tony said. I reached out my forefinger and touched his penis. I hadn’t thought about touching it, but he seemed to want me to. I rubbed my taut finger back and forth once, twice and then stepped back. I didn’t like how it felt, the skin loose, the penis like a branch underneath.

There were lots of dark woods back there. Edgar Lane curved through those woods, a dirt road, no pavement, with old houses here and there along it – one had burnt down a long time ago. You could just see the stone chimney and bits of house, an overgrown place that you could tell had once been a garden. My mother liked to walk through and around that house. I hung back. I didn’t like these journeys in the past and sometimes into forbidden places that she like to take, into orchards where threatening signs hung “Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted” or, as we drove by, stopping the car to go look into an old closed one-room schoolhouse that smelled of old books.

I didn’t feel safe with my mother. I felt safe with my father, felt that whatever came he would be up to the fight.

We left the house on the hill for a couple of years, came back for a year, left again. When we came back the second time after being gone five years I was fourteen. There were two sisters, and my father had re-made the house. He had always loved the place. Had bought it despite my mother’s protests, a story he told Fred just last year when we visited him in Hungary, an old man now, sitting in a distinguished old-world room, lined with books, telling Fred how Joan didn’t want to buy such a rundown place, but it was such a bargain, she could not be listened to.

$10,000, two acres, 1960, his first house in America after living in first a trailer with my mother which – I’ve seen a picture – was really a camper – and then a rented apartment on Warburten Avenue in Yonkers. Now – a whole house in a place called Westchester County – you could commute to the city and still have trees.

While we’d been gone my father had added an asphalt driveway that led up the hill, delivering you to the back of the house. Before the driveway my parents had parked the yellow Rambler perpendicular to the road in a cleared rectangle at the bottom of the hill. Now you drove up this smooth driveway and when you got to the top my father had put a white garage, then a flagstone walkway to the front door covered by a white trellis that roses were supposed to clamber over, then there was a front porch, a new wing – not big – but enough to hold an impressive front door, a screened-in porch.

And he’d carpeted much of the house in a beige low-pile carpet, wall-to-wall in the living room, the new front hall, up the stairs, up into the attic that was my room. A much more standard house, now standing with its back to the road.

I knew my father liked it much better now.

There was also a freestanding bright red Franklin stove in the small living room. My mother had always wanted a fireplace and this was my father’s response.

When we came back it was the same house, but different.

My mother made wastepaper baskets for each room with brown paper bags, this in the first days as we waited for trunks to arrive from England.

My father went to work and came home in the evenings now and slept downstairs in the new little wing he had added that during the day was a front hall with a yellow couch and at night became his bedroom, the couch opening into a bed, the coat closet his suit closet, the new bathroom his bathroom, and narrow sets of French doors added so that the front hall could be closed off from the living room, the living room from the stairs, the stairs leading up to the attic from the rest of the house.

My mother, in the very beginning, had made a darkroom in the room that was now my little sister’s. She didn’t think about darkrooms anymore and when my father would sometimes say things like, “You used to make such nice pictures,” she would look angry and irritated, and I’d get angry too, I didn’t know why – there just seemed something so off and phony about his words, and he spoke like he was talking to a child, using one of the childish words of my family vocabulary – “pic-chies” instead of “pictures” – we had many such words – mixes between baby words and Hungarianized English.

In the end the house got sold before its time, when the debts scare the hell out of my father and he sold the place, sold it all, a place he still thinks about, has a framed photo on the wall in Budapest.

A SPECIAL FLOOR

The kitchen had a brown floor that looked more or less like linoleum. It had a smooth finish. My mother said a few times that it was special, made out of cork or pieces of cork or something, and I was glad it was special and not cheap, but special, maybe better than what other people had. Something I could be proud of, though it was just a dark brown kitchen floor.

I ate breakfast there before school, my mother always ahead of the rest of the house in the morning, calling up the stairs to wake me in the winter darkness, then dressed and busy in the kitchen when I got that far, toasting toast, boiling eggs, making sandwiches for me and my two younger sisters who got later buses.

I sat while she stayed standing and moving. I sat at the head of the rectangular unfinished wood table, facing a window that looked out onto a bumpy sloping small lawn. It was a view I had known as a very small child. We had lived here when I was very small, and then we’d moved away for two years, returned for one, then gone away again for five. So although I knew the house from when I was little, I hadn’t lived here the whole time. So living here was like looking at something and then closing your eyes, and then opening them and the thing you are looking at has changed a little though it’s still obviously the same, and you are a teenager instead of a first-grader.

So I sat and looked out the kitchen window. My mother used to point out this same window to cardinals in the snow when I was little. “Look! A cardinal!” she’d say with real excitement, as if we were seeing something very very rare.

My father is in the living room as I eat my soft boiled egg and two pieces of toast, one plain and one with jam. He is listening to WQXR, “the classical music station of the New York Times,” on the big stereo that he bought when I was in second grade and we lived in Virginia. He had showed it to me with pride then, leading me down to a room I hardly ever went into – his study or something – pointing out the brand new Fisher speakers.

We still have that same stereo all these years later. It sits inside the big piece of fancy furniture that stands against one wall in the living room. It has glass doors in the top half and polished dark wood doors on the bottom. It’s my father’s piece of furniture. He bought it. He loves it. He keeps his folded shirts from the dry cleaners in it. And the turntable. On the top shelves behind the glass doors he keeps decorative things like the pretty little antique enameled pill box that his Swiss girlfriend Helga gave him. It says on it “I am yours while life endures” and my father keeps the two gnarled little gall stones that they took out of his gall bladder when we were in London inside of it. There are other things on those shelves – foreign things he got on his travels – because when I was little it felt like my father was always on business trips.

Now he never goes on business trips. While I eat breakfast, while my mother stands at the counter making thick liverwurst sandwiches on rye bread with lettuce, while classical music plays or the somber tones of the very serious radio announcer talk about something, my father gets dressed, slowly, almost like he is in a slow dance. From the kitchen I cannot see him, but often when I walk from the stairs to the kitchen I pass him in his underwear, buttoning his white shirt carefully, as if performing a ritual, choosing a tie, throwing his head back as he flips one end of the tie over the other, then pulls the knot snugly around his neck.

I grab the brown paper bag and shoot down to the bottom of the driveway. I have done my homework. I always do my homework. I am not a good girl, but I am not a bad one either, and it doesn’t occur to me not to follow the rules of homework. I give it cursory attention up there in my attic bedroom, but I do the assignments, and when Cyndi, my best friend though it’s not so great, asks if she can copy part of my autobiography for a college essay, I am shocked – such a thing would never have occurred to me -- but give it to her.

When Agnes my little sister reads the autobiography about eight years later – after I’ve been to college and then LA for three years and am living back on the Upper West Side and it’s her turn to be a senior and write her autobiography, when she has morphed from my cute baby sister to a pretty teenager with black-rimmed eyes and multiple earrings – she says, “Oh, Bim, it’s so literary.”

For a long time I thought me and my sisters were pretty interchangeable. I don't think so anymore. We are not interchangeable. We are very separate.

CAVE IN

My mother and I talk on the phone. She on her end. Me on mine. Somehow I’ve been wanting to check in each week. Sunday evening. There’s something sort of sweet and comforting and familiar about Sunday evening, around dinner time, just before 60 Minutes. I’m almost always at home then and she is too. We don’t talk long because I get restless. I like to hear a little of what she has to say. I like just to hear her voice for a few minutes. She always wants to talk – about her cats, or the people she works for or neighbors or what she’s cooking. If she pauses, I often prompt her, “So how’s the disabled man in Monticello?” And I try – now much more than I used to – to add one or two ingredients of my own to this soup. Not much, but something. And then I’m saying something about – well, I guess I better…

My sister is coming from California with her husband Steve to visit my mother for a few days. My mother lives about 50 miles from where I live here in upstate New York. My sister and her husband are coming and they will sleep at my mother’s house, but me and my mother don’t talk about that. They will come and go and I won't see them.

Once or twice over the past week I have thought maybe I will send a little birthday card or present to this sister because it’s her birthday on Saturday. I could do it. It’s like a party trick I can do well so I am sort of compelled to do it, to please her. It is so easy to buy someone a present.

My mother likes to give presents.

It’s harder not to.

I thought about it as I raked leaves on Sunday. When I do things like that I always think of my mother, or my family. I guess it’s the only other time I’ve watched or done yard work. Both my parents did things outside, though never together and always in very different ways – my father liked the lawnmower. My mother liked kneeling in the dirt, digging with a trowel, transplanting things she’d dug up from the side of the road.

And I thought about this thing with my sisters as I drove home tonight too and the newscaster on the radio said there were airport delays in New York – my sister is flying tonight, and a switch went off and I thought maybe I’d call my mother, see if everyone made it in okay. You know, that kind of thing. The show of concern when you’re not really afraid, you’re just kind of calling because we’re all kith and kin and we stay connected.

No, of course I won’t call. That idea went out the window pretty fast, along with the one about the birthday present. It’s not that I have a huge festering anger towards this woman, my sister. Sometimes I do. I can work myself up into it if I want to. But mostly it’s just that I am on a soaring track – and she probably is too – if I just let myself keep soaring and moving, if I just let things be without feeling I must do something because I can do something – what will happen then?

I have thought in this last week – raking leaves, then driving home tonight – of a similar time back in the late 80s when I’d been abroad for almost 5 years, and they didn’t know where I was and I couldn’t tell them, and when I came back I took all of the repair upon myself without question, was convinced – by whom? by what? – that I was a bad person for having disappeared and that it was up to me to bridge the gaps that had grown between me and my sisters.

I wanted to bridge that gap so much that I joined up with their spiritual movement, swallowed it lock, stock and barrel, guru and all – never considering it important that I’d been steadfastly psychologically tortured all those years abroad, that maybe I needed something desperately when I returned to the States, that maybe my sisters weren’t more important than I was.

Not this time. I thought driving home tonight how they have never approached me to hear the story. They like to say I am bad for disappearing into Europe, then disappearing into Woodstock and writing, but they don’t try to cross over. I did. Or maybe I didn’t. I don’t know. It sure felt like I did.

But I’m going to sit still this time. And let things cave in or flourish, whatever they want to do. i

Extract from THESE STRANGE HOURS, the autobiography of Loren Eiseley

I stumbled upon this book, written in the early seventies by a man who came of age in the thirties. It is beautiful and brilliant and delicate. And here is a very small piece of it that particularly moved me and I thought worth sharing with all who have a passion for writing their lives.

"In all the questioning about what makes a writer, and especially perhaps the personal essayist, I have seen little reference to this fact; namely, that the brain has become a kind of unseen artist’s loft. There are pictures that hang askew, pictures with outlines barely chalked in, pictures torn, pictures the artist has striven unsuccessfully to erase, pictures that only emerge and glow in a certain light. They have all been teleported, stolen, as it were, out of time. They represent no longer the sequential flow of ordinary memory. They can be pulled about on easels, examined within the mind itself. The act is not one of total recall like that of the professional mnemonist. Rather it is the use of things extracted from their context in such a way that they have become the unique possession of a single life. The writer sees back to these transports alone, bare, perhaps few in number, but endowed with a symbolic life. He cannot obliterate them. He can only drag them about, magnify or reduce them as his artistic sense dictates, or juxtapose them in order to enhance a pattern. One thing he cannot do. He cannot destroy what will not be destroyed; he cannot determine in advance what will enter his mind."

ON THE RUN

Bennett is due at our house at 6 o’clock. I leave work early. It’s almost dark as I pull out of the large but rural parking lot and drive down the road through the woods that leads out to the main artery that will lead me to the next main road and the next all the way home.

I am watching the temperature gauge, that white needle that this morning was starting to swing way up to the mid-point and even a little past it. I had turned tense this morning, watching that needle, visions of the car exploding in my mind, willing the car to keep going, get me to work.

It did, but now it’s time to make the return trip. Within a few minutes, the needle is climbing and I feel my face tense into a mask. I turn off the radio – my source of distraction and pleasure – so that if the car starts making an unfamiliar sound I’ll hear it right away.

Cars don’t explode, do they? I’ve never heard of one exploding. People haven’t been warning me about that since I was a child. And they would have if it were a real possibility, right? Cars just die if they get too hot, right? But all that gasoline…

This is one of those times I wish I had a cell phone. When I turn left at the Exxon station I crane my neck in the opposite direction of where I am turning, trying to see if they have a mechanics area. No, just the convenience store.

I start across the bridge, a mile and a half (I know because I measured it once) spanning the Hudson River. There are several phones along the bridge. If I break down here and make a call, people passing will think I’m on the verge of suicide. That’s what the phones are for. People do jump off this bridge. A friend of mine saw someone hanging from the George Washington Bridge a couple months ago.

I cross this bridge twice a day and often think – not of actually wanting to stop and jump myself – but I think of it. I think of how I read once in an article about Golden Gate jumpers that hitting the water is like hitting cement –a survivor said so. Another survivor spoke about the flash of regret they felt once they were airborne. I feel death close by on the bridge, there if I want it – even as I look at the beautiful wide river or the sunset colored sky on the way home.

Come to think of it, I don’t usually have jumping thoughts on the way home when the sky on the other side of the bridge, spread out over where home is, is orange and lilac. Usually it’s when I’m going in the other direction.

But I make it across the bridge. The needle hasn’t climbed any higher. I am halfway there. I notice I am relaxing just a little. Not because I feel any safer, I note, but because I’m used to the level of fear. I think of people in a war, how they must just get used to the level of terror and live in it. I think of people still in Baghdad. They must be poor not to have been able to leave. I imagine myself one of them, saying, “Go? Where can I go?” and really not knowing where I could go and how I could get there.

Another ten minutes and I’ll be pulling into Woodstock. The Mobil station will still be open. I could go right there and ask them to take a look. Mike and Anthony are my friends. I brought them chocolate croissants last week when they had my car fixed on time. That’s the thing. The car was just fixed.

But I also have to get salad things for the Thanksgiving Pot Luck at work tomorrow. I can’t show up empty-handed, and salad isn’t something I can pick up on the way to work or something. I have to make it and I have to make it tonight. Plus, I have to get a couple of things for dinner. Bennett is coming and he’s a vegetarian. I was going to pick up some burritos, but that would be a good $20, and we are trying not to spend if we don’t have to. There’s the new car (well, not new-new) to think of, not to mention the mortgage payment, months overdue. I got an idea for something I could make tonight – it needs protein so I guess I’ll pick up some flavored tofu, but no – how about walnuts? That would be more interesting.

I am torn as I twist and wind down Sawkill Road, one of the most dangerous roads in our county, people are always getting into accidents on the Sawkill. What’s more important – making sure about the car or getting the Pot Luck? If the car’s no good, how’ll I make it to work tomorrow?

I pull into the health food store parking lot and leap out. Bennett will be at the house in half an hour. I move fast through the store, picking up a Romaine lettuce, broccoli – there’s Debbie. I haven’t seen her for about a year. I don’t tell her I’m rushing my pants off as we talk for a few minutes.

Out the door, back in the car and up the hill to Mike and Anthony. Great, they’re still open. The light is on in the office and I see Mike through the window, behind the counter. I pull up right outside the door and go in.

“Yeeees?” Mike drawls without looking away from his computer screen.

“Mike, the needle started to climb like crazy this morning.”

He looks up. He’s got glasses and a moustache. He’s wearing his mechanic’s navy blue coveralls. He comes out from behind the counter – this is JUST what I wanted – opens the door and steps out to the car, me close behind. He gets in the driver’s seat and turns on the car.

He looks at the white needle. “Is that as far as it’s going?” he asks, pointing.

“Yeah,” I say. “It just started this morning. It used to be way over on the left.”

Mike asks a few more questions. “It’s fine,” he says. “You’ve got nothing to worry about unless it goes way over to the right.”

I speed home. Steam the veggies. Saute the onions and walnuts. Make white rice instead of brown. Heat up that exotic-looking sauce I picked up on the weekend that will save the day I hope. Bennett arrives right on time. And dinner tastes great. Something I’ve never made before – a risk, a chance, done on the run.

SO SURE

In the very early 80s I went to the supermarket one afternoon with my father, out in suburbia where he was still living with my mother. They were going from one rental to another after selling the house that had held us together, selling it – a fire sale – to pay creditors, and now my parents – my father jobless, my mother going from one babysitting gig to the next.

I am in New York City. I have quit publishing and the 9-5 world and I am doing yoga now almost full-time and learning about things like raw food and juicing and I wear baggy violet cotton pants and spaghetti strap cotton camisoles and my body is elastic. I am powerful in that elasticity.

My father says something about how maybe he will go back to Hungary. My father seems like such a loser to me. I watch him having to have a drink every day. I watch him always wanting to lose weight, always eating – and I know so much. It’s easy for me not to eat. I have this unique group of friends in the city. We run a yoga school together and we are friends like no one else is friends. We are doing some kind of great work, something Natvar – who started the school – has really mastered and will teach us. Us. Anjani: small, and white-haired, dark-skinned and pretty. Me. Tracy. Mark. Eve. David. When we see each other we kiss on the lips. We are a little dizzy, like being in love. I bounce into the school, having tied up my bicycle down below and when it gets stolen I say it doesn’t matter – and Natvar laughs with delight that I can be so casual.

Natvar makes sure we clean down into the tiniest cracks, and he makes sure that Anjani brings up the lights on the dimmer and brings them back down just right during class, and makes sure that the books in the little bookstore – just a set of pretty display shelves that Natvar built before I got here – makes sure each book is laid out with equal space between each one and dusted though no one ever buys.

Hardly anyone comes to our classes besides us.

When my father says something about going to Hungary, I am dismissive. “You can’t run away,” I say on the check-out line, something like that, something like: that won’t solve anything. Something like: you have to stay and face yourself.

I am so sure. My father looks like such a loser. I tell him he should fast and he tells me he tried it, until about 4 o’clock.

Natvar tells us what we have to do and all I do is try to do it. It is like trying to climb a cliff and the ground keeps dissolving into gravel so you can’t get a grip, but I just start up the cliff again, over and over.

And I don’t think my father will make any progress, get any smarter, by going back to Hungary.

But he goes of course. And he stays. And twenty-five years later he is still there. And I don’t call him or hardly write. I let him go. Because I don’t feel like anyone is really there. No one has ever been there, behind his eyes. Not for me.

Yes, I think of his voice. I think how happy he is when I do call. It’s like a little flame goes up, I see it flash. And then it’s gone and the words that pass back and forth don’t touch me and don’t touch him. So I hardly think of my father.

LUNCHTIME

I am in the loft on 28^th Street, between 7^th and 8^th, on the south side. The ceiling is high – a tin ceiling, imprinted with a pattern, something from the 19^th century. There is thick burgundy carpet under my feet. We take great pride in this carpet. Or Natvar does. I take great relief. The day it was installed, the months of construction were over. Natvar is proud because he says he got a bargain because he impressed the head of the carpet company so much. It does look beautiful. Before the carpet everything looked rough.

Now I wear skirts here, mostly a narrow navy blue skirt that reaches past my knees. It is a hand-me-down from Regina and made of light wool. Natvar approves of it. I wear a pink blouse made of well-ironed cotton. It has pleats down the front and buttons in the back. I bought this. I liked it. Some clothes make me look pretty and some don’t. I thought the blouse did, though it’s prim. It’s not the thriftstore clothes I used to buy, the army/navy surplus, the funny jackets.

I’ve always been very purposeful in what I wear though it doesn’t always look that way. I liked to look elegant by accident.

But I dress differently now. Natvar didn’t like my big ballooney drawstring pants. In the beginning he liked everything about me. He seemed to delight in me – we made each other feel good. But now I come up short all the time. I never do anything right. I am ugly, my clothes embarrass him. He wants me wearing clothes from Regina, wants me dressed up, even made up, and I try very hard. I do look ugly now. He’s right. And these clothes and this makeup only seem to emphasise it. But I don’t know how to see.

I am standing alone here, moving towards the front door. I am alone in the mornings. Tracy goes to work for Regina in her apartment. I guess I couldn’t be spared. I’m Natvar’s secretary. He says I’m terrible at it. But Tracy is our little one, my little sister kind of – about six years younger than me – pert, brunette, petite. She has left her home on Long Island and her young handsome, chiropractor husband who she looked so in love with when she first came to our yoga school – she’s left all that and moved in with us, to the loft bed above Mark’s desk in the cubicle we built called the office. It doesn’t have a window of course. None of the little rooms we built have windows.

The only windows are in the lobby, up at the front, big windows that swing open and look down from four flights – the top of the building – to the street below. The windows at the back are in the meditation hall so they are blocked off.

Mark has gone out to meet Natvar. He often does that. Natvar loves him to do that and I know Mark loves to get out. He can only do it if Natvar invites him. Natvar leaves every morning after breakfast. He dresses meticulously, taking his yoga clothes with him in a colorful cloth bag that he treasures, that looks still like new, that one of his clients gave him. His clients are rich. He goes to their apartments one by one, changes and gives them a private yoga class. Then he comes back for lunch.

And I have to have lunch ready when he arrives. As soon as he comes through the door we both know everything will go probably go wrong, that he has had a wonderful morning away from here, going to all these rich people’s homes, people who give him delicious cups of coffee on beautiful china, people who tell him what a wonder he is, and then he must come home to me, homely, unhappy me, who still can’t make the rice right, who can’t get a simple meal together – fresh and healthful, delicious and cheap.

LONDON ~ Three

My sister sends a purple batik silk square from India. The other sister sends me a copy of a paperback book she thinks I should read called Women Who Love Too Much. I am touched by both gifts. I try, but cannot read the book.

I speak to mymother on the phone in Lisa’s living room – the living room of the flat I am sharing. The telephone is by the window which looks out into a small inner courtyard that provides light, but not much else. I have never stepped into that courtyard. I think maybe it is possible to do so through Lisa’s bedroom, but perhaps it is sealed off completely. It has no plants, no bench, no fountain.

I am glad to hear my mother’s voice, to be able to reassure her that I am back, that I never really meant to go away, that it was a mistake. I want her to know that after many years of hiding from and lying to her, I am me again. She says her sister has just died, that she is going to British Columbia for the funeral.

Sometimes I sit in the living room and kitchen which are quite large, spacious and complete with things like a video player, comfortable adult furniture, the “mod-cons” as the London ads call them – modern conveniences. I sit with Lisa and her brother Julian. Lisa has long dark thick curly hair. She is pretty, not terribl smart. She has just bought a microwave and likes to talk about how great it is to come home after word and cook a whole chicken in half an hour. She is having a semi-affair with her boss who gets calls from his wife on the mobile phone in his car when he is giving her rides home. She will let him touch her large breasts, but does not let his hands go further.

Julian is handsome and trim, arrogant, sure of himself. When I need to buy pot the night Jeffrey arrives I call Julian and he comes to our door – Jeffrey and I are not staying in my room. We are staying in an exquisitely appointed townhouse that I didn’t know about until the drive back from the airport – a townhouse with several floors, drapes, polished furniture – everything cleaned, ready and empty. “Kitty said we could stay there,” says Jeffrey and of course it’s no contest though I’d been looking forward to being with Jeffrey in the room that is all mine, the one with the peach-colored quilt and the tiny shiny white bathroom. I call Julian from the townhouse and yes he comes with an ounce and I am proud in front of Jeffrey that I found pot in London when he asked for it and proud in front of Julian that I let him into this fancy palace with a cute boyfriend at my side.

At the office are two women – Sue and Linda – everyone excited for me that the boyfriend who has been faxing me a letter every day on the fax machine I just purchased for the office is coming to visit.

My office is separated from the front office where Sue and Linda sit by glass doors. The clients come into the front office to leave off the typing they need done. They are lone businessmen without secretaries of their own and they come to us: Kent, the American, who is trying to sell safes to hotels, Mr. Daniels, another American, but a plainer one, who rents an office downstairs; Mr. Tubbs, small, bald and British who rents an office and has for years upstairs. Sir Geddes – an old classic Brit whom we give special attention to because he is our only sir.

Upstairs Nigel plots his future. Nigel is my boss. I found this place in the yellow pages when Natvar told me it wasn’t enough to be in London with him. I’d better go out and get a job. Nigel was a big old plumy Brit with a red cheerful face, white hair and a corpulent body. He was happy to have me run the downstairs so he could sit n the conference room and work on the plan to develop some land in Marbella on the south coast of Spain, a vile tourist trap that he took me to for a weekend with his diminutive bohemian girlfriend Theresa.

Linda has short hair, a plain face and a big body. She has two little girls at home and a live-in boyfriend who will not last forever, but hopefully for a little longer. She works hard, tells me story after story about what her girls are doing and saying. “I had to call for help once,” she confides. “I thought I was going to kill my baby.”

Susan is older, a blonde who has pretty much traversed the path into gray, a single woman, smart, a little dry.

And there is Fiona who comes when we need her, Fiona who has red curls, is a painter, has a baby girl called Medea and a young skinny husband called Peter who is a musician. When I travel across London one night to hear Peter and his band play he greets me, surprised and pleased. “What loyalty!” he says – a word I had not expected. I lik Fiona and their home where she has painted the walls and doors with colors and pictures, where the little girl is never put to bed because they don’t ever want to send her to school or to bed – at least, Fiona does not. I sense that Peter is flagging. And I tell Fiona that I will try to get her a show in New York when I go.

When I go.

I have been stealing money. When I go once a week to take money from the bank for the petty cash box I take some extra and I keep it.

I am still living with Natvar when I start doing this. It is before I leave him and all of it. It is when I am still essentially his. That I leave every morning and don’t come back til evening, that I bring home a pay check every week – these things make it borderline tolerable to live in the same apartment with Natvar, Mark and Ariadne. Tracy used to be with us too, but she has stayed behind in Greece. She has left us.

I am still here.

“You don’t get paid enough,” says Natvar. “You work all those hours and look what you receive. I make that n two appointments with Lady Russell.”

“You need better clothes,” he adds.

And so the first time I take the money and Natvar goes with me to Harrods and helps me choose two pairs of shoes, shoes I would never buy alone – high heels, open toes. When I wear them I look like other people – graceful, assured. “That’s better,” says Natvar with satisfaction.

LONDON ~ TWO

I am in a room where I can close the door. That’s all I want. A room where I can close the door. This one makes me feel like a princess because attached to it, through a second door, is my own bathroom that I do not share with anyone else. It is tiny, but it sparkles it is so new and white and I keep it that way every second because even though he is invisible Natvar is still with me, watching. “How dirty you are. How sloppy. Look at you. Disgusting.” And so I keep it clean clean clean. You’d think no one ever used that little bathroom. And my clothes are folded on the shelves in the closet like Aliki’s clothes are kept – as if this were the model, this is how it must be done, how it is done best, proof that I am not ill or damaged. My clothes are folded like they are in department stores.

I must stay amongst those who do things correctly. I must work hard, make that effort. If I don’t I will slip and slide and be lost amongst the worthless.

Peach. The cover for the bed I buy is peach. I take delight in the smoothness of the color, of the fabric, bright in the drab simple room that has one window below the sidewalk. It is September and London and the light is always waning, the sky often grey, but grey in a way that makes the colors complicated.

Most days I walk in the park, looking at the shape of black leafless branches against the sky, the water of the pond with the straw-colored rushes, the gravel I walk on. I am eating with my eyes as if I have been starved for a long time. I do the unthinkable and buy watercolors and two brushes, a thick one, a small one and sit at the heavy desk below the window that looks up at people’s legs and I make colors on a white dinner plate and delight when I make a new mysterious blue, a green that has many greens inside of it. I dab the colors on paper. I don’t really paint pictures. I try the branches once – black against the sky – but not in London, a few months later one evening alone in Manhattan. I sit at the dining room table that no one ever eats at, high over Washington Square Park, facing a window that stares downtown at the twin towers and I try to recreate the London time, try to paint those black branches I can still see, and fall so far short that I put the paints away forever.

But in London I don’t try for too much – fields of flowers that are really just streaks of my greens, dots of my reds and blues, all of it so much prettier than I expected.

I have quit my job. That’s what I have done. I have opened my days wide open, left them empty. I don’t want to fill them with anything. They have been so crammed and stuffed and suffocated for so long that they are almost dead. I breathe life back into them. So I just walk every day. Not in the streets, but always in the park to look at colors and plants, the sky – things of nature that do not ask anything of me, that I can just look at -- and sometimes – once – I take the subway half an hour north to a different park, a wilder one.

Mixed with the pleasure of all this is here and there the fear that it will not last, that the sky will close over me again, but I peddle fast to keep it, to keep it open.

Lisa, who also lives in the flat, lends me her yellow plastic Walkman so I can listen to the tape that Jeffrey sends me – Van Morrison’s one called “No guru, no method,” and I listen to every song, every particle of every word and note as I walk and look. I want the new life I am preparing, the one in New York City, to have all of this inside of it, to continue all this delicacy. Jeffrey, I think, will be different this time. He has even told me that he has read some books channeled by someone called Michael, and this is so different from the Jeffrey I knew that I think perhaps his rigid adherence to the concrete, to his preferences of red meat and cold Coke and TV snapped on with a remote, maybe he will set that aside a little so something new can come in.

I read Kahlil Gibran’s The Propphet. I remember it form high school and although I have always dismissed him as lightweight he says what I want to say to Jeffrey, especially the party about how lovers must let each other go so each can live as fully and abundantly – I write down this chapter on love with a calligraphy pen that I buy and black ink on cream-colored parchment paper and I decorate it with my watercolors, and I send it to him and yes, he is very touched by it, he says, and by my painting, so I know something gis very different and I am hopeful. This is the Jeffrey I have always wanted.

I have two books during this time, these three months. One is a big expensive coffee table book of Van Gogh’s paintings, letters and his journal. I read him as if I am reading myself. What is it? His sadness, despair, desperation. His madness. His lostness. But always he paints.

And for Christmas Julian, who also lives in the flat, gives me Leaves of Grass and I want all of that too, I want all of it now.

“Can you help me in the afternoons?” How does it happen? I meet Mark and Natvar at some fucking party. What am I doing at one of these formal London parties where I don’t know anyone? But they are there. I have not seen or spoken to them since I left four months ago, back in September and it is December or January now. And they are friendly to me now. we are strangers now compared to what we were – seven years, living together, eating every meal together, every day ferociously together, our lives so interwoven there was not a drop of air. But now there is a little air. Natvar laughs when I make a joke. He tweaks my ear. Suddenly I am cute again. “Ariadne needs to be picked up from school. Mark and I work all afternoon. Could you?” His warm brown eyes. “My love,” he says. He smiles, catching the tip of his tongue between his teeth, as if he were just a shy little boy.

I am not working. I have no reason to say no. I would be saying no to a ten-year-old little girl, his daughter. How can I do that? I would be cruel if I said no.

LONDON ~ One

I slammed the door. It was metal and it clanged in the empty corridor in which I never saw any of the other doors open, where I never saw another person waiting for the elevator, as if I lived on a stage set of a corridor thirteen floors above street level in which only one apartment had people in it.

I went to the stairwell. It was a lot of stairs to descend, but I couldn’t risk standing by the elevator. he might come out, start talking to me, get me to change my mind. He could always do that. He could always get me to change my mind, do what he wanted. I thought he should have been a lawyer. He could make a case for anything.

A few weeks ago he had told me that we were invited to some friends for dinner, people I didn’t know very well. On the way home, I brought home a pie from a fancy bakery to take with us. “No, don’t bring it,” he said. I really wanted to. Finally, he said, “I want it. Don’t take it. I want it.” On the way to the subway I was ready to stop for flowers to bring instead. I hated the idea of showing up with nothing. “Why don’t you wait til we’re nearer their house?” he said. We argued. He won.

Finally, on the subway, he showed me the two tickets he had hidden in his pocket – Bruce Springsteen at Madison Square Garden. That’s where we were going.

I told the story the next day at the office to the older woman I had become friendly with, emphasizing the surprise part of the story, but she didn’t smile. “Didn’t you think something was up?” she asked, puzzled. No, I hadn’t. Those little arm twists were normal.

I had come about six months ago. Come back after seven years, seven years spent mostly with Natvar in a nightmare. Coming back to New York City, leaving Europe, coming back to the States and to this boyfriend had seemed so fairytale like.

When, back in London, I told my friend Aliki that I had suggested to Jeffrey that I come back and live with him again, she said, “You shouldn’t have done that.” Aliki was so old I paid attention when she said things like that.

She had become my friend. Sort of. A conditional friend. An old woman. A wealthy woman. An aristocratic woman who brought her servants from Portugal. Greek she was, originally, but she had lived in England most of her life, had married a well connected Englishman, the cousin of Bertrand Russell, a man with a title. He had been the British ambassador to Spain. She had hosted the queen.

John, her husband, had died a few years ago, recently enough that he was still present in her mind. “You know what he told me once?” she asked me one morning, sitting in her bedroom which is where I always met up with her, the bedroom with the big double bed, the little vanity where she applied her make-up without looking because she couldn’t see much anyway, the TV she drew her chair to and sat two or three inches from the screen to see, the drawers where Natalia, her personal maid, a plain unhappy woman Aliki said she had saved from poverty, a woman with one Thalidomide arm and very little English, the drawers where Natalia folded every pair of socks perfectly so that when you opened a drawer it was always neat and in perfect order. “Aliki,” he said, “you have never bored me.” She smiled at the recollection.

Aliki had been a sculptor, but I didn’t like her creations, the ones I saw in photographs – cold steel abstractions.

Still, she had been excited for me when Jeffrey was coming to London to see me after six years. I took him to meet her. We had tea in her elaborate and tasteful drawing room. Afterwards, she chided me. “He s not good enough for you.” And I knew she was right, but but but, there was nowhere to go but straight ahead, nowhere at all to go except where I was determined to go: to New York, to my lover, to my one true love.

“Enduring love is so precious,” my sister had written to me from India where she was when I surfaced after having disappeared for four years. Yes, I thought, enduring love, that’s what it is.

I had Jeffrey’s tape to prove it. He had brought me a tape when he came to London, a mix of songs he had put together just for me. “You’ve been down to the bottom with a bad man, babe, but you’re back where you belong,” growled Dylan, and it seemed right. “Out of this world, out of the blue, out of this love for you,” sang someone else, in smooth yearning tones.

He must love me. It must be this romance. I showed Aliki the photographs we had taken of ourselves using a timer. I was excited to show them to her, I was filled with my week of visit with Jeffrey, wanted only to think of it, of its good parts.

My heart had dropped when he didn’t look back, walking through the gate at the airport.

Aliki and I walked to a tea place. Aliki liked me to walk with. That was one of the conditions. She put her arm through mine. I walked slowly.

I showed her the photographs. Jeffrey and I on the delicate embroidered couch in his stepmother’s fancy house. She looked at them thoughtfully. “He is very drawn to you,” she pronounced. And then, “How is the sex? That is very important.” I assured her it was just fine. And it had been. My first sex in six years. It was fine.

And so much wrong with the plan. So many boulders to overlook and climb over to keep my fairytale intact.

And when Aliki called me in New York to see how I was doing, I knew she knew I was lying and that it would be our last conversation.

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.