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It was Thanksgiving, a day where you really are supposed to have a place to go, a day that should be populated privately with people not from work, not your neighbors or all the usual people you run into during the day.

I am in Los Angeles, a place that isn’t right for Thanksgiving. It’s too warm. I live in a one-bedroom shag-carpeted cottage with two 40-gallon saltwater fish tanks that stand at a random angle to each other in the middle of the living room floor, my boyfriend’s two latest must-haves.

There’s no office to go to which opens the day wide open, my feet can go in any direction, something that always feels good when I open my eyes in the morning, and that by 9 or 10 o’clock feels like a burden, money I don’t know how to spend.

All I know is that I am wearing Levi’s and a tight white tee-shirt. I buy them three-in-a-pack, always size small. It was my boyfriend’s idea. Something about his favorite costume for a girl: Levi’s and a white tee shirt. I have on my garb and my dark hair is parted in the middle and hangs long.

I will go for a walk. It will fill the time and I will feel in motion, like something is happening.

I walk. In Los Angeles no one does this, and no one does this on Thanksgiving. The sidewalk is wide. The streets are more or less empty. The houses have neat lawns, all more or less the same size. I walk with hands in my pockets, enjoying the elasticity of my body, the feeling of strength like I could go forever. I do this well, walking. I am in my element even though I know I will just turn around in the end and go back. Nobody else knows that.

The sky is washed blue. The sidewalk and street are beiges and gray. I walk fast, my strides are long. I am just walking and it is Thanksgiving day.

Ahead I see two boys walking towards me, enough my age, older or younger but enough my age to know that they will see me and I don’t know what will happen.

I am walking, I am striding, hands in pockets. The boys are closer. Maybe as we pass I glance up because it would be too obvious not to.

“I like the way they bounce,” one says with a smirk.

I keep walking. I pretend I don’t hear. The boys laugh of course. They have noticed me. Again, my looks have drawn attention. I am used to this. But I hate the boys, hate them impotently.

There is always a point in a walk when you are not going anymore but coming back, especially in random city walks, a moment when I give up, let go of the spring that propelled me forward. It’s a disappointing moment, the anti-climax.

I like the first part best, the bursting out of the house, full of promise.

JACKSON BROWNE

I came into the apartment and Jeffrey was home. I think it was a summer day. I had probably been out working some temp job in some office in some skyscraper and I entered the apartment – my home, sort of – I entered it very alone, stepping into this territory that was supposed to be mine, or shared-mine, supposed to be my refuge, the place I’d been waiting to get back to all day, the place I felt torn from as I sat under fluorescent lights before my IBM Selectric amongst people who really seemed to think and care about carbon copies and memos.

I came home and Jeffrey said he had a song he really wanted me to hear, a new Jackson Browne song and instead of going into our bedroom that was really his bedroom that I slept in – the walls had been painted an unrelenting, harsh blue by his stepmother, the furniture was left over from his childhood apartment that had not been shared by this stepmother, and the stereo Jeffrey was usually monitoring was set up within easy reach of the bed – we didn’t go in there this day or into the living room where the TV was, the other main fixture of our life in this apartment though I didn’t like TV much, Jeffrey could watch it for hours. Instead, he led me into the bare almost lifeless room where his father slept, or used to sleep. He wasn’t coming around so much anymore. In the beginning, the apartment had been rented to house Jeffrey and his father who was going through a rough patch with his second wife. Jeffrey’s father’s room had a four-poster bed in it, a nightstand and a TV at the foot of the bed on a dresser.

Jeffrey and I sat on the edge of the bed and he played me the song. Jeffrey was excited for me to hear the song. Jeffrey and I had had some sort of huge fight I think that morning or the night before. Somehow, this song was supposed to cure something. Or maybe I’d had a particularly horrible bout of depression that I couldn’t hold back the way I usually did, and it spilled out into view and Jeffrey had found the song that would address it. Or something. I don’t know. To Jeffrey the song was relevant and a big deal. I almost wrote the word “important,” but that word does not go with Jeffrey. To use that word here would give him credit that I just don’t associate with this scene.

I listened to the song. It did nothing for me. It pierced nothing. And it made Jeffrey angry that I didn’t get it – I even felt that maybe I wasn’t getting it. I just remember sitting there, on the edge of the double bed, in a room that didn’t get much light and Jackson Browne’s song is for Jeffrey, not for me. And I don’t know if what I want is so deep Jeffrey will never able to reach it, or if I am so lost that things like this song, things that can save other people, are swinging in a world I can’t get to.

DAD

I see him walking down the street across from me, a man who is not exactly a friend, but a pleasant sort of acquaintance. I’ve heard him play music – singing songs he’d written that were witty and rhymed well, playing a guitar skillfully. I’ve been to his house, he’s been to mine. When I saw him the other day he was hobbling, holding a cell phone tightly to his ear, his body distorted to the point of being frightening. He has the same disease as my father so I thought of my father – I was driving through town – I was almost home, passing the familiar string of Woodstock shops in summer – and I am thinking again: am I missing something, am I doing it wrong, letting my father go, not calling, not writing, knowing he is sick and riddled with trouble. And who am I not to be at his side, helping?

My father sat in the dining room at the head of the table on Sundays. After dinner – or lunch really, it was lunch though it looked like dinner – he would sit a little longer. He would linger and we had to linger too.

“When I am old,” he said once with a laugh after lunch on a Sunday, with a smile and a challenge in his eyes that told me I must not question this, “I will divide the year in three and spend four months with each of my daughters.” He said it in an ironic tone as if he wasn’t being serious – and I knew I would somehow manage to escape this – it wouldn’t really happen, but I know now I am absolutely supposed to be there, taking care of my father, his real wife.

That’s true, and at the same time, that possibility feels small and distant like it’s at the end of a very long tunnel, a telescope even. Marta taking care of her father isn’t as real as it used to be.

I picked him up from the airport the day he came back from Dubai, a crazy crazy last-ditch trip he made when they were so broke they were selling the house and declaring bankruptcy over credit card debt and my father flew to Dubai with a loose-leaf binder of black and white photos of houses for sale in Westchester County, a real estate license being one of his attempts to get back on financial track, the trip looking maybe, almost, like the years of glamorous business trips in his heyday when I was little and he would go and come frequently with heavy leather luggage and a passport with extra pages inserted to hold all the stamps.

I was about twenty-four when he went to Dubai for a week. A little piece of me hoped it would work. A big piece of me was pretty sure it wouldn’t and that it would make things worse because it would add more failure to the heap.

The one thing they still had was a brand new Suburu station wagon and while my father was gone with the binder in Dubai, hoping he’d find some takers for this real estate – my father who is no salesman, who has no gift of the gab, no easy manner to put people at ease – my little sister, a teenager in high school, crashed the Suburu one night. She was unhurt, the car totaled.

This I felt would be unbearable. My father, already on his knees, to hear the car is gone, the one thing they owned.

“I’ll pick Dad up,” I offer. “I’ll give him the news.” I am living in New York City, things aren’t going so well but I am holding them at bay, I have my finger in the dike. Having a family to answer to adds a little structure to my life, populates my bare bones canvas. My mother agrees. It’s unspoken. I am my father’s favorite person. I will tell him, as he comes off the plane from a failed trip where the last coins in the bank account have been wasted. I will let him know his car doesn’t exist anymore.

“I have not felt this bad since I first came to the States,” my father says from the passenger seat, and I know he means the suicide attempt he made before I was born, before he married my mother, when he was here alone, in the States, not speaking the language, forced to work in jobs that made him feel like an ordinary person, a plain person, a person he could not bear to be. I know he took pills. No one has told me all this. I have put it together.

I’ve never had a relationship with my father, I think as I approach my driveway. I think in terms of real connection. It has always been a calculation on his part, a struggle, a resistance, a disappointment on mine. I could never go be with someone I am not really in relationship with, and pretend that I am.

“I gave a lot in the past,” I think, as I start to turn. “I gave for years and years and years. Now I’m paying myself for all those years.” And I felt a pang of pleasure, like when you’ve worked a long time and then the money comes in and you can spend it.

I run out long on the leash, get jerked back for a moment, then run on long again, the image of my father sitting, in dark clothes, hunched in his Budapest apartment, waiting silently for me. Though, no matter what, I will never ever go.

OUT IN THE OPEN

I used to have two sets of twin sheets. A set of white ones with dark green stripes, and a set with pink flowers.

My younger sister had given me both. I valued them. I preferred the pink flowery set. I made my bed with them in the room I had to myself for three years, a single bed up against the wall and in the corner almost underneath the window. I lived there for three years. Opened Christmas presents with my mother there. Decorated it with Christmas lights. Wrote there at the small yellow desk I found in the corridor. Covered the windows with plastic in the winter and opened them in summer so I could hear the school bus/shuttle roll in three times an hour to stop at the small bus stop just a few yards away where the teenagers hung out late into the evening, making too much noise for me who wanted to fall asleep early so I could wake up before dawn.

“Which set of sheets did you prefer?” my sister asked me years later. “The pink ones,” I said. “She laughed with surprise. “I thought for sure you’d like the pin-stripe ones.”

I have a few 100% cotton sheets now, picked up here and there, never bought. They’ve taught me that neither the pink sheets nor the green striped ones were full cotton. They were 50/50. I assumed at the time that they were cotton. Could not imagine my sister giving me anything less.

I wrote a card to my mother on Saturday. It took me less than a minute to write. It was a flowery card that a charity had sent me in the mail in the hopes that I would make a donation. It had lines for you to write on inside, like the lines on that green paper we used to write on in third grade, copying the letters from above the blackboard.

It was a note I’d been hovering over in my mind for a few weeks. I picked up the pen deliberately. I had finally made up my mind.

I told my mother that I needed a six-month break. Not to worry. To call Fred if anything big came up. Said too that I realized this would be a strain for her. Said I appreciated her support.

Sealed the envelope and stamped it and wondered if I would think of something important that had to be added, but I didn’t.

And it went.

And there are moments, waves that wash over me when I think how could I, but many many more moments when I feel like I have opened the door to a room I have been longing to enter for along time and never thought I was allowed – a field more than a room, an outdoor place with a lot of sky.

When I was nine I asked to go to boarding school. I didn’t make a formal request. I mentioned it in the wistful way I mentioned any number of things I wanted, but didn’t expect to get. Going to boarding school was too big to actually get.

But I went to boarding school. At the time I thought I was getting my wish. Now I know it was a magnificent coincidence. I would have gone that year to boarding school even if I’d never longed to.

Even then I was trying to get into the room or the field where I wasn’t allowed to go. I stayed in that school for three years. I liked it there. And then betrayal hit and I wanted to go home and my mother said yes of course, I could come home. She didn’t ask what had happened and I would not have told her.

Home. I did not want to be there, but I knew no other place to go. A dark shadow closed over me and hung there for years.

I never liked living with my mother. But right now that’s not the point. She could be a living saint and I would still write the card.

On the drive home this evening I see a bank of grass by the road covered in dense red flowers. I slow down to look at them more closely. I don’t know their name. “Indian paintbrush” I hear in my mind, a flower’s name that my mother taught me. I think of digging some up to bring home and plant here. That’s what my mother would have done. She did that a lot when I was little and I never knew why she wanted to do those things that no one else I knew did. But today I want the same thing, and I think as I pick up speed again, of the things I got from her, but that’s not what this is about. This is about having a turn in the field.

ON TOP OF THE WORLD

My father invited me to have lunch with him. He was working in the World Trade Center, a business man in the American world with a Hungarian accent and a European flair. I was a young and pretty college student thinking regularly about suicide, living mostly with a boyfriend whose family is rich. I live in his apartment most of the time. It has two bedrooms and two bathrooms, a balcony over Washington Square Park, cable television, lots of pot, my boyfriend’s fancy stereo and his record collection. There is usually music playing because he plays music all the time when he isn’t watching television. When we fight and I go to spend a night or two in my own place, there’s no music and no television, not that I would listen or watch if there were. I have a tiny dark room in an apartment I share with people I don’t know. I only have to pay $50 a month. You can’t beat that.

My father invited me to lunch at Windows of the World, the restaurant on the top floor of the World Trade Center. I’d never been there before, but I knew what to expect. My father’s invitation to lunch is like a narcotic that I swallow yet again. It dissolves in me, this anticipation that I will meet my father – we will both look good and there will be an instant leap of recognition. I will dress up within the boundaries of my hippie taste so that I look good in both worlds – mine and his – and my father will be in his suit and tie, full of lavish energy. His eyes will appraise me in a flash and find me to be exactly what he is looking for and I will roll on the wave of that enthusiasm, buoyed by its flourish and we will sit at a table with linen and silver, two or three globe glasses at each setting, a neat little bouquet in a silver vase. There will be wine that my father will taste first as the waiter stands aside respectfully, wine that he will of course agree to with a nod, and there will be large menus and I will order and I will eat. I accept the invitation as if any other response were possible.

Perhaps I wear the long, full white skirt made of light wool and the white v-necked blouse with Geoffrey Beene’s initials embroidered in red on the pocket. I usually wear things that my boyfriend’s stepmother gave me when I dress up. Kitty is a rich, exciting and glamorous woman so I feel rich and exciting and glamorous when I wear her cast-offs or things she picked up on a shopping spree and tossed my way.

I arrive downtown and go first to my father’s office, riding up the smooth elevator. He hasn’t been at this office long, a year or two. He introduces me with gusto first to the receptionist, then his secretary, then some young man fresh out of college, then an older man. I am a big hit. I’m good at this. This is so easy, to be gracious and beautiful, a little witty, friendly. I am good at the two-minute relationship.

Delighted, my father sweeps me back to the elevator and up another twenty or thirty flights.

He makes sure we get window seats. We sit across from each other as we have so many times. My boyfriend has been sleeping with an older woman called Harriet who is a writer with paperbacks you can find in stores. I will be done with college in a few months. I keep track of how many more papers I have to quickly type up overnight. I am writing a long short story, using my boyfriend’s stepmother as the main figure because she’s fun to pretend to be. I smoke pot every day and do any drug that comes my way – quaaludes, acid, cocaine – nothing exceptional. I try not to eat at all except when I’m in a fancy restaurant and someone else is paying.

“Now,” says my father, and he puts on his serious face. “I need to talk a little business with you.” We have told the waiter what we’d like and I am neatly pinned. “Now that you have almost finished college, I’d like to make a proposal.” He draws out the word “proposal,” putting a little spin of irony on it to inject a little humor here, a little but not too much. “You know, money does not grow on trees.” He lifts his eyebrows and looks at me.

I smile to make this easier for him.

He continues. “And so, now that you are almost finished with your schooling, we need to think about how to pay the bill! I hope you will agree that it is not too much to ask that you help your daddy. You don’t have to do much.” There is something said about monthly payments. I am nodding. I take a sip of water and look out over the city that I am hovering over.

My father’s conversation moves on now. He’s made his point, gotten my agreement, so now we can enjoy our lunch. He is drinking his wine, putting large gobs of butter on the soft white rolls, careful not to butter the whole roll and bite into it, but tearing off a chunk, putting the butter on – not spreading it, just placing it with a quick swipe of the knife – and popping the soft, buttery morsel into his mouth. This is the correct way to eat bread. He has taught me and I have learned. Because we are partners, capable of the style that my mother and sisters are not.

The meal becomes every meal we have together, the part I forget when I say yes and pop the pill – cloudy hours with my father talking and me, eating and nodding to prove I am still here and he has nothing to worry about.

FINE TUNING

Aliki, the rich aristocratic Greek-turned-English woman whose friendship we were cultivating, gave Ariadne – Natvar’s charming little blonde daughter – a yellow tee shirt. It was too big, and I think that’s how I got it, a pale yellow tee shirt, brand new. Valuable. Anything brand new was valuable.

We were living in a furnished apartment off Sloane Square, an unstylish cheap apartment with a stylish, expensive address. Again, Natvar had managed this real estate feat – finding a cheap place at an address that assumed you were rich.

It was our second address in London. The first one was in Kensington, not a posh part of town. It was the spacious apartment they were living in when I arrived from Athens, a few days before Christmas, leaving a mound of unfinished business behind me, but convinced that everything would be easier and better in London. This move from Athens to London was what was needed. It had to be the right next step.

And in the Kensington apartment I did have my own room, a real room, and there was a kitchen you could sit down in. They didn’t meet me at the airport though, after all the lucsiousness on the phone, the honeyed persuasion urging me to come. They did not meet me and the walk from the subway station on the snowy sidewalk, carrying heavy suitcases, was not glamorous. I arrived feeling very ordinary, not the star I had been on the phone. And they took me in and we stood in the kitchen drinking tea, awkwardly trying to revive the enthusiasm of the phone calls and Natvar said sternly, “Don’t think you won’t have to work. London is expensive.” “Of course,” I assured him. “Of course.”

We moved to the Sloane Square place a few months later after the Kensington place was broken into, the front door smashed when Mark – the third member of our reduced family – came home one afternoon, and Natvar now in pitched battle with the landlord over who should pay, me writing long letters on his behalf about why we will not pay, making empty threats with complex sentences, the only weapon at our disposal besides Natvar’s rage.

The second place, the Sloane Square place, has two bedrooms: one for Mark and Natvar, and one for Ariadne. That’s okay of course. Marta can sleep on the couch, keep her clothes in this closet. Natvar opens the door of the empty closet and explains with a wave of his hand how I can fill the shelves here and hang my things there – he is smiling and happy, we have a new place, this Sloane Square address, and he tweaks my ear, calls me “Murtz” and I smile with the pleasure of his attention. The only response any of us gives to his happiness is to mirror it and make it last as long as possible.

At one end of the new apartment is the living room, at the other end the kitchen – both spacious – and connecting them is a straight corridor opening onto two bedrooms and two bathrooms, not so spacious. There is no natural light in the corridor. The best room is the kitchen because it’s big and the table is made of blonde wood and it feels light in there -- even hip and with it, a kitchen other up-to-date Londoners might have.

It is better here than when we lived together in Greece. I leave every morning now for my job and return in the evening. We only have to be together in the evenings and on weekends. And I am bringing in money.

I think that I am happy, that this is what I want, to be with Natvar, Mark and Ariadne, to make a good life with them.

My parents and two sisters don’t know where I am. When we lived in Greece, although my mother didn’t know exactly where I lived, she got the address of Natvar’s brother from Natvar’s ex-wife, and she sent me things, little parcels. A cotton skirt once. That I wore. Something new. Valuable.

Now my mother does not know I am even in England. We are more invisible than ever. This too is good.

My mother told us stories – me and my sisters – in the many times when my father was not present – about her growing up: the farm in Depression-era British Columbia, the one-room schoolhouse, the six brothers and sisters, the capable if unsentimental mother, the educated but angry father with his library of French, German and English leatherbound books. I grew up familiar with this landscape though I never actually saw it. It was not a happy place, this place of her stories, but I did not think of it as an evil place. Just a place I was glad I did not have to live in.

She didn’t tell these stories when my father was present. It was rare to be with both of them at the same time. There was always a tense silence between them, at the very best it dissolved into teasing, a little joke, a brief elbow-dig. But these moments of a shared joke were only moments and always had the feeling of a respite, like a held breath released for a second. When they were in the same room they didn’t talk to each other, not about pleasurable things. If they were in the living room together each might be reading. But even this was rare. They were usually in separate rooms, or separate places – my father in the city, my mother in the country.

I see a weekend. So my father is home. My mother in the kitchen, standing, making lunch. There is a saucepan or two on the electric stove, meat roasting in the oven. A green salad on the counter dressed with oil and lemon juice and a little sugar. Meals have three or four ingredients in our house. There are no sauces, no blends, nothing new. There are boiled vegetables, meat, potatoes, salad. Jello, ice cream or cookies for dessert. My mother prepares food without much mess or flourish. It’s a job she does.

Maybe my father enters the kitchen. Maybe it is Sunday morning and he has been up in the woods behind the house, raking brush, trying to get all the roughness out so that it will be a smooth park.

My father enters the kitchen cautiously. Perhaps he wants a glass of water. Maybe he is hungry, hoping lunch is almost ready or that he can sneak a quick snack.

“It smells very good in here!” he says with artificial cheer, testing the waters. How angry is she this time?

“Well, it’s not ready yet,” my mother replies without looking at him, angry, furious for a thousand reasons.

“Okay, okay, no rush,” my father says in a soothing voice, trying just to avoid her outburst. He too is angry, furious – why can’t she be nicer? He leaves the room.

I set the table in the dining room with its failed antique table that my father bought with so much fanfare a few years ago. The table is divided into two halves that are supposed to fit neatly and invisibly together, but the pegs are loose in the holes and there is always an unsightly opening between the two halves. We ignore it. We still treat it as a valuable table. My parents sit at opposite ends with us kids in the middle and nobody talks much except my father. He cannot bear the silence.

Strong Measures

My mother is an old woman who I think has just returned from a week in California visiting her two other daughters who decided about a year ago not to talk to me, which actually suits me quite well. I just wish they all didn’t want to talk to me.

I typed a note on the computer at work, just practicing the note I am thinking of sending her.

I bought a pretty card during lunchtime, the kind of card all her daughters buy her – two chickadees. You always get my mother an animal or a flower, something related to nature.

I looked at the racks of cards. All of them had pretentious sayings on them, sayings I’d been seeing for years on cards. I got scared that maybe this incense-drenched bookstore only sold cards with inspirational words on the front, but then I found an Oriental-looking one with just a frog – no words – but still a little more sophisticated than is my mother’s style. It might have to do. I pulled it off the rack, flipped it over to check the price. $3.95. Pretty steep. Kept looking. Two chickadees. Only $2.50. I’d found the card.

I was in the bookstore with my new friend Eleanor. She’s English. “Here, Eleanor,” I say, “for your new office.” I show her a hefty table-top statue of some kind of Hindu god, seated cross-legged with a naked woman facing him on his lap, legs wrapped around his waist. The statue is semi-hidden. It totally does not fit with the rest of this store with its thousands of books and CDs about how to become pure and its little gold earrings with Om signs, and its expensive stretch-cotton yoga clothes.

Eleanor gives a good guffaw. It’s one of the things I like about her. She’s good for a laugh.

Then she points to a drum up high on a shelf, says how much she wishes she could have it. She says it with real longing. I know she has a $25 gift certificate to this store in her pocket, something her husband gave her years ago that she hasn’t used.

I reach up high high high and coax the drum off the shelf. It’s stretched leather with a picture of a palm and a spiral painted onto it. The price tag is $200 more than Eleanor’s gift certificate, and as we are looking, heads bent, another drum crashes to the floor. “Eleanor did it,” I say to the store in general and Michael, alone on the other side of the lofty room, catches my eye and laughs. He’s an aloof person and this is rare contact.

I don’t tell Eleanor the card is for my mother and that I want to write a note that tells my mother to leave me alone – don’t call me, don’t make surprise visits.

For awhile. The note comes out gentler than I feel, on the computer screen. It might buy me two weeks. That would be something. Because right now I have no time at all because it was her birthday last week plus she’s just returned from a trip and because when we spoke on the phone last time she mentioned that my father and my aunt in Hungary were wondering about me, why I hadn’t been in touch. I am supposed to respond to this and call them.

I would never be friends with these people if I met them under other circumstances.

I google from my office phrases like “adult children” and “guilt” and “parents”, and of course I don’t find anything helpful – just conventional bits about how to manage guilt, by drawing boundaries, and deciding how much responsibility to take. “You can’t do it all,” they say. But I don’t want to do any of it. I realize I am just looking for someone to say – an anonymous stranger way out in cyberspace – “You don’t owe them anything. They used you for all you were worth.”

The card isn’t written yet. I didn’t get to it this afternoon. It got covered with a white flurry of emails printed out so I wouldn’t forget them, a scramble of tasks involving typing and phone numbers – I imagine I will do it as I sit with tea in the early morning.

I am working on divorcing my family. I think it’s possible. A process. But possible. This card like a medicine I must take, for myself.

NEW YORK

Suzanne and Bob sit across the table from me in the cramped coffee shop booth – anywhere else they’d give you a few more inches, but this is Manhattan and every inch is worth money. It’s a gray day and we have walked the two or three blocks north from their apartment, up Second Avenue, past the cable cars at 59^th Street. I have no idea what time it is. It is Sunday and I am not thinking about things like time.

“Did you see the cable car that got stuck up there a few years ago?” I ask, out of the blue, suddenly remembering that story. “Yes,” they say. They’d been out late rehearsing, had stopped for pizza, heard about the stuck cable car that had been hanging suspended all day, and went to look. “Were the people waving?” I ask. “Were they looking out the windows? Was there like a whole crowd down here?” Suzanne and Bob point to where the car had been. “No,” says Suzanne. “They were pretty grim, pretty serious actually. They were being taken one by one with a crane by then.”

I had been the first one up. I’d gone out, borrowing a black polar fleece jacket that was hanging by the front door and an umbrella that opened at the touch of the button, the umbrella so clearly more expensive and much better made than the ones I usually end up with that I vow to only buy expensive umbrellas from now on. There is something so satisfying and strong about this umbrella. It feels almost permanent.

Yes, it is raining and it is cold and I walk back to the Starbucks we passed last night at about midnight, Fred and I walking across town from the theater where we have both been so deeply moved, and I so deeply inspired. We walked slowly last night, no schedule to keep and after the circus of Times Square the city quieted and it felt like we were going back in time. Up Fifth Avenue a few blocks, then up a few more on Madison. Not many people on the sidewalks. Most of the stores darkened so that my eye did not stay at the usual eye level of shop windows and crowds, but looked higher at the outline of the buildings against the sky. “These are still the original buildings,” I commented to Fred, thinking how there is always so much talk of how different New York is, how it has changed, and I always feel out of step with common wisdom because for me New York never changes – just like a person you know well for years and years never changes – and for the first time there was actually some concrete evidence to back me up, the old-fashioned rectangular buildings lining the avenues, clearly the same ones that had to have been there when I was eighteen, I thought, and then I thought again, the same ones that must have been here when my father thought of this place as his city.

We come to Park Avenue and tonight it looks magnificent to me, this double boulevard. I pretend I am from another country and imagine seeing it for the first time. Park Avenue has never been much more to me than a rich person’s place, a street that takes twice as much time to cross as all the others, a place you just have to get through on your way to somewhere else. But tonight I am innocent and Park Avenue impresses me for the first time.

“I love this city so much,” I say to Fred. It is not a new feeling, but it is new to feel it this acutely, like a lover that I can be afraid of losing.

The Starbucks we noted last night is still here in the morning, more or less where I remembered it, a relief because now Fred will be pleased. I stand in line and order and walk back with my cardboard tray with two cups and one croissant. I will have the leftover raisin nut loaf I brought from Woodstock. I pass a woman in a party dress. She is middle-aged. The dress – I imagine her dressing up the night before. There must have been anticipation. She is alone now. It looks like it didn’t work out. Her face is worn with cigarettes and some kind of hard living. She is standing still, trying to make a phone call on a cell phone.

While Fred bathes and enjoys his coffee I sit in the living room at the glass coffee table. Suzanne and Bob got in late. I don’t know what time. I didn’t hear them come in. I have no idea how long it will take them to wake and come down. I start to read the bright green brand new paperback I have noticed on the table, a play.

I am so comfortable here. I keep noticing that. I keep thinking of thirty years ago when I’d be with Jeffrey and two or three of his friends and I would be on edge every moment, always feeling that every word I said was the wrong one. I keep thinking how if then was now I wouldn’t be able to drink this tea and read this book and curl up in the big leather chair and get the afghan to make myself warmer. Somehow all these things are easy now. How hard it used to be to be with other people, harder still to sleep in their houses.

RANCH

The buzz of several fat loud flies is in the room. Insects in the house. There have been ants too the last few days. A minute ago it was winter.

The fly buzz makes me think of my aunt’s ranch in British Columbia. I was only there 3 or 4 times in my life, all within the first 16 years of my life. It looms large.

Hot days that smelled of pine needles and grass as if rain never fell in this place. A place where cows wandered in the shade of woods and there were no buildings on the horizon, no buildings anywhere except a few ranch ones. That was the first time I went, a little girl, and the ranch was a huge place where one aunt panned for gold wearing a two-piece bathing suit. I’d never seen anyone do that before but here in this British Columbia world of my mother’s family you panned for gold when you took the kids swimming in the river. I see my aunt, a woman with dark hair and a face like my mother’s, crouched over the water, a metal screen in one hand. She is looking for gold in the water. She didn’t find any that day.

There were a lot of adults at the ranch, always people I didn’t know, men and women. My father didn’t come on that trip. I never saw my father there. He went once before I was born, and maybe once more when I was a baby, and he never went again. It was not his kind of place. It was a rough place. The ranch was anyway. It had no softness at all.

My aunt’s house, plopped in the middle, a few steps from the barn, from a corral, from a sludgy pond, was a gray kind of house, unpainted, no porch. You stepped right into a room that served as a living room – dumpy chairs, an old sofa or two, dim light, books and old newspapers scattered. This was not a place where people cleaned and tidied.

My aunt wore jeans and men’s shirts and her hair was short like a man’s. My mother said this aunt was beautiful when she was a girl, but “beautiful” didn’t seem to go with this person who was my mother’s sister. Her voice was full of cigarette smoke and coughing. She sat at the end of the long table in her house where everyone gathered to eat. She said she’d just gotten a book out of the library. “It’s called Below the Salt,” she said. “I got it because I thought it would be about the ocean. Turns out it’s about the Middle Ages, and if you weren’t rich enough you had to sit at a different table, below the salt. Rich people sat near the salt.” It made sense that my aunt had chosen a book, thinking it was about the ocean. My mother was like that too, always thinking about nature.

The adults hung out around the table a lot. They were noisy. I didn’t hear my mother’s voice amongst theirs. She kept quiet. They teased her. “Hey, Gin, get your nose out of that book!” They called her “Gin” since she was a kid. Most of her brothers and sisters had nicknames. They called her “Gin,” she said, because she had a laugh like a ginny hen. I didn’t know what that sounded like.

At night I slept with my sister in my grandmother’s little house which was also on the ranch, just beyond the barn and the corral. My grandmother’s house was not a scrappy house like my aunt’s. It had a blue front door that was split in two so you could close the bottom and keep the top open, and there were flowers outside, and my grandmother’s home-baked bread and the water that came out of her kitchen sink you had to pump it. It felt more peaceful and normal and less scary here. Not so many people. Just my grandmother in her housedress and apron and another aunt who lived with her. Just them. It was quieter here. At night though I knew my mother was over at the other house with her brothers and sisters. They didn’t all live there, but they gathered there easily. They came to the ranch from different parts of B.C. to be together. We were the only ones who don’t live in Canada.

My grandmother sat at her kitchen table and smoked cigarettes. The tobacco came in a tin. She plucked the brown shreds and rolled the cigarettes, her eyes looking out the window. She had glasses and light eyes and gray hair pinned up, a wide face and many wrinkles. When she laughed there was the sound of many cigarettes smoked long ago in her throat. You could hear them when she spoke too, her voice was deep. She didn’t want to be bothered with details. She baked bread and took care of things, was kind to me without being too gentle. Children were all right here. There were many children at the ranch. My grandmother was the kind of person to whom two or three children more or less didn’t make much difference.

I DO SOMETHING

I walk along the road. It’s countryside and about 3:30 in the afternoon, and spring is on its way and I am wearing a long wooley gray coat that I have gotten compliments on for years, a coat my mother saw in a consignment shop and bought for me back when I was living in the ashram. I’m also wearing a soft red scarf that Fred gave me for Christmas a few years ago. I always think of him when I put it on. I think it was sort of expensive when he gave it to me and I already had a couple of red scarves but he saw it, I guess, and liked it and gave it to me without thinking about whether or not I needed a red scarf, and for years I kept it carefully folded with my sweaters instead of just letting it hang on a hook in the messy coat closet, until this year when I started treating it like a scarf and it seems no worse for wear.

I have left the office late in the afternoon just to take a walk. I didn’t walk with Tamar this morning. Usually she and I go out after breakfast, but today I took it easy. She came to the front of the house at the time when we usually go and saw pretty quickly that weren’t going today. She accepts it, doesn’t whine or beg. I know that if I were to go get the leash out of the basket with the handle that holds all the cans of catfood, she would go delirious with barking, run to the front door, releasing all her excitement to go for a walk in the woods, but the leash isn’t reached for this morning so she ducks her head and goes back to the living room or back to catch a few more winks with Fred.

This morning when I went back to find the Harpers magazine that I thought would go nicely with my morning cup of tea, Tamar was sleeping on the floor on Fred’s side of the bed. Usually she’s on my side, and sometimes Fred hints that he wants a dog for whom he is the prime focus, but this morning Tamar was assuring him that she has his best interests at heart most of the time.

It is quiet on the wooded road where I walk and warm enough to be comfortable without a hat or gloves. It is a pleasure to be out of the office. I pass the small farm I have been passing all winter. I see a human being there for the first time. I think about waiting for her to come close enough to ask her the names of the two bassett hounds who live there, but think better of it. I’d have to wait too long. But I see there are chickens on the farm now. I hear a rooster, and I hear the donkey braying. I would like to know these animals better.

The last few days I have turned the radio off in my car and driven in quiet. Something I haven’t done for a long time. I don’t pray in words and I don’t meditate with the iron-clad discipline I learned in the ashram. But I do something. It’s almost like I try to notice and be with the layer that is not about getting to work on time or late, the layer that doesn’t worry about money or health, but a layer that has a trust in it, a calmness.

As I walked this afternoon, again seeking out, but in a gentle way, this calmness, I thought how years ago when I left the ashram I put an end to all words like “god” and anything I couldn’t see. I’d spent a long time believing fervently in things I couldn’t see and I’d had enough. Fuck that shit.

Something gentle is seeping back in. I am still careful. I have many friends who take a lot of things for granted: crazy healing schemes, pendulums, crystals, astrology and – worst of all – anyone who claims to be a teacher. I wish they’d be more cautious.

So I am still cautious. But I am also alert to what might really be true for me, or helpful to me as I navigate this strange segment of life with this almost fantasy world I work in to earn a check and health insurance, my two-sides-of-the-river life: writing and home on one side, crazy fantasy world on the other – a world that can’t just be dismissed, a world that is also some kind of place for me to expand.

I said to Fred the other day that my job – that I’ve had for five months now – is kind of like going to high school all over again, except I’m not the shy kid anymore who can’t speak because she’s so self-conscious.

I used to listen to people in high school Everything they said sounded stupid to me. Yet I deeply envied them that they could speak. It wasn’t fair. What they said was stupid, but I knew what I said was even worse – it was awkward. At least they seemed tat ease with their ignorance. That’s what it felt like.

I have a pink spiral notebook from 1985 or so. It’s the oldest writing I have. Not that old, but I don’t have any of my writing from before then. But somehow I still have this notebook. Now and then – every couple years – I look at it. I am in Greece in the book. I am less than thirty. I am in Natvar’s household. In the book I write about how stupid I am. I mimic Natvar’s words. It’s his voice in my head that I write down in the pink notebook. But I opened the door to his voice very willingly. It was a welcome guest. Sit down, I said to Natvar, make yourself at home.

HORSEBACK

Sometimes I think of the portable record player sitting open on top of the tall wooden radiator cover in the far corner of the large hall, 5 or 6 or 7 girls in school uniforms dancing beside it. It was the first place I danced to rock & roll.

When I first came to that hall I was 9 years old and I played Addams Family there, continuing a game that had been going on the year before in 3rd grade, at a different school in a different country. Now we had moved to England, but it was just another new school.

I knew the feeling of new school, knew the feeling of not knowing anyone yet, of having to pretend I knew more than I did, the feeling of keeping my shyness and uncertainty tucked away where it couldn’t be seen and instead doing my best to appear part of the same fabric as the others though I knew I stood out as new and different. Still, I knew no other way to be new than to resist and insist until I wasn’t new anymore, until the place felt like my place.

The hall was where the nuns let us loose after dinner and homework and before bed. There weren’t many rules in the hall. You could run. You could yell.

Sister Felicity sat in the semi-circle of window seat, plying her black rosary beads, watching over us, shaking the wooden-handled bell when playtime was over. Sometimes other girls sat beside her, the ones who weren’t running around.

In the evening hall crowd I didn’t notice the other girls much though I knew each one by sight and name. I played with complete focus with my small gang – Lucy Ann, Ann, Nicola and Madeleine. Very rarely did we let anyone else in.

After Addams Family we moved on to Jacks. From there to Stones, which was harder. Playing horses moved in and out of all of it – being the horses sometimes because Nicola was so good at being a horse that we all had to try. She made it look so much fun. Not on all fours, but bending over, knees bent, palms on the floor, skimming across the floor on hands and crepe-soled, buckled brown leather sandals – snorting, neighing, tossing our heads – and sometimes playing the rider, the owner of three horses – girls in the books we read often had three horses, and then you could name them, my favorite part. In one book I’d read the horses were called Symphony, Sonata and Serenade and I liked the prettiness and symmetry of those names and often named my make-believe horses with those three beautiful names.

Play horses were much more fun than real ones. It was my dirty secret I dared not share that I often dreaded our Friday afternoon riding sessions with Colonel Plowman who came to pick us up in a small square green car with wood strips cross-hatching the green and took us to his rough and ragged, windswept little farm where the ponies were strong and rugged and usually knew exactly what they wanted – they wanted the wide open spaces and as soon as they stepped into them – into the cold windy fields, away from the stable yard or the hedge-lined lanes, they ran and nothing could hold them back. I knew it was coming and the fear would be like a rock inside of me. And the anger of Colonel Plowman when you couldn’t control your horse and the scariness of being on the back of a creature who might do anything at any moment – and to be surrounded by girls who said horses were wonderful and wasn’t riding wonderful and why couldn’t we do it every day.

SPACE AND TIME

My sister is the first one to come to mind. Her unsmiling face looking at me, her long hair falling down either side of her face. Pale brown hair. I had the dark hair. She was the blondie when we were two little girls.

Once, I threw her brand new toy out of the attic window – a brightly painted wooden house my father had just brought for her from one of his exciting trips abroad – I was that furious. The house smashed to pieces on the ground and I got in trouble. She could make me speechless with rage – reduced to slamming doors -- back then.

I didn’t like her much much of the time, but she was usually the only person around. When I decided to make a store that sold rocks – each with a price tag – that my parents were invited to shop at – I let Chris play. I let her in on my games when there was no one else.

She often teased me in later years, saying that I would get so excited about a game, and we’d play it for one afternoon – and I’d promise that we’d play it again, and then I’d never feel like it. Like the time we took our bicycles and found a place amongst bushes by a stream that I declared would be our secret place, that we’d return – and for that one afternoon I’d been caught up enough to believe it, but when my little sister came around the next day, suggesting we go do it again, I didn’t want to. I’d lost interest. I wanted to stay on my bed reading Gone with the Wind.

I am in England when I tell these stories. We all are. I am lying in the small narrow room that was mine, a red room because the long red drapes dominated the small space. I have a horse stable on a table and two or three rubberized horses – a prized Christmas toy that I was surprised to get, I had wanted it so much.

There are board games to play with my sister, and card games. And in the afternoons we walk home from school together, she with her leather satchel that has straps so she can carry it on her back, both of us in the blue convent uniform. I am now a fellow student at her school, a comedown – she plays alone too – she plays cowboys by herself, pulling the gun, shooting, then falling to the ground – the shooter and the shot.

She tells me there were times when she thought about jumping out of her bedroom window and killing herself on the cement path below. I was sympathetic when she told me that though I never felt my sympathy was enough. I came up short. I did not have enough.

In the small English house where we lived our drama so close together – the four separate bedrooms on the second floor – each a different color depending on the drapes, each just a few steps from the other, my father’s next door to mine, a door leading from his room to mine, but a door that was always kept shut, never used. If I wanted to get to his room, I walked around the landing and went in through the other door, which made his room the farthest away. But he was not usually home. Only there on weekends. A gentleman with a country home. That’s how he liked to think of it. Returning from a sophisticated week in the city to his weekend retreat, or going away on trips.

His trips were a shower of glitter in the beginning. Trips of excitement – his and mine – the airport, the suitcases, the beautiful white shiny halls of the airport where you could run to meet him down wide empty spaces, your footsteps slapping the marble with sound, knowing his suitcase had present inside – toys, he always brought wonderful presents.

Now, in England, it is not exciting like then. He brings back ugly things that he likes from Ethiopia, Morocco – the black-and-white pen sketches done by a business associate in a bar, a heavy piece of blackened bronze once used to make coins.

And this time he asked me to help him pack so I had to be with him in his room as he lined everything up so orderly it was deadly dull – his shoes wrapped in newspaper. My father does everything so slowly and carefully it makes me restless, but I must stay there and be acquiescent, as if I am a pony like the ones he rides on Saturdays, and my restlessness is merely quaint, something that he must tame, and I must let him tame it. My unruliness must be ground down, polished like a stone.

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.