Laurie
Sugars up and down
Stabucks, June 25, 2007
Richard’s in bed when I go to make tea. I bring him a cup, and he’s propped on pillows, eyes open, and he’s saying something emphatic and incomprehensible. What? There’s always lag time recognizing a low sugar. “Let’s do a test,” I say on the way to the kitchen for the kit. “I’m fine,” he insists, sounding like a surly drunk. “Don’t do this. You will make me angry.” I’m scared I’ve really set him off, but even if he resists I’m supposed to jab his finger with the spring needle, squeeze out a drop of blood, hold it against the testing strip, wait for the count down from five on the glaucometer, and read the screen. It says 56. Not that low but the reason for his mood.
I bring glucose tablets, and he chews three fast. I toast bread and spread it with jam. As he comes back, he says he doesn’t remember fighting. He’s tired. His muscles hurt. His t-shirt is drenched with sweat, and he needs a fresh one.
We don’t get out until pretty late and when we return he lies on the couch reading The Jewel in the Crown, grooving on the gorgeous set-piece descriptions, breathing the air of empire that is part of being English, the way drinking smoky Typhoo tea is. I’m at my computer and when I turn around he’s on the floor. “I feel funny. Something is wrong with me.” His voice is coming from an echo chamber. He’s dripping wet. I get the kit. He tries to get on his knees, but his head goes down to the floor. His eyes look through me, though he’s sort of smiling, not belligerent, jellylike. “I don’t think this is just a sugar. I think something is wrong with me.” I test his blood, and the meter reads 42, not as low as it’s sometimes gone but down there. He drinks orange juice, and I make a sandwich which he chews slowly, like an animal at a formal dinner, vaguely amused. Coming back from the low, he shivers from the drying sweat. I get a fresh shirt, and he has trouble getting his arms through. Gradually he returns, smiling softly. “I had no idea who I was, didn’t know my name, what I did, where I was, but I recognized you and knew your name.”
Friday, February 27, 2009
Heat
Laurie
Heat
Coffee Plantation, June 15, 2007
Afternoons, I walk to the mailbox. The blond woman in a blue bikini floats in the pool on her belly, her back to the blaze. I angle my umbrella, slipping into patches of shade. Today in The NY Times, an article describes Phoenix as the first doomed city, a place that doesn’t belong in a desert and will prove untenable as temperatures climb, as they already do summers, to 120 and beyond. In the shade. In the sun, add another 10 or 15 degrees. This past week, it’s been 110 every day and cooling to 85 before the sun rises again. Richard says we will have 100 days above 100. He’s adjusted, doesn’t sweat. It’s so dry here—on average 8% humidity—moisture is leached from your pores as you walk.
Saturday morning, we hike a trail called Dreamy Draw. It’s 95 by the time we get there: windless, hazy, and dry. The trail’s name derives from the mercury mined there in the 19th Century, “dreamy” referring to the effects of mercury poisoning—the madness of hatters who used the element to mold felt. We walk through scrubby pines until emerging onto a familiar scene of blooming cacti, thorny ocotillo plants with licks of flame shooting from their tips, slithering lizards, and brown rabbits whose long ears have adapted to circulate blood and keep them cool. Mountains in the distance look like giants around a feast, their backbones and rib cages jutting into the sky. The desert comes to life after a period of coolness and rain, but it doesn’t really happen this year.
As we walk, dust gives way to red soil and everywhere are rocks burnished black with desert varnish: sun-baked bacteria, the oldest living things containing DNA. I collect rocks with colorful markings to cheer up our cement patio. Richard arranges them in sinuous patterns, complaining about my “shopping” in the desert.
I’m carrying my umbrella and covered in a silk shirt, but sweat trickles down my sides. I like trailing behind, taking in the beauty and strangeness. When I catch up, he talks about the scientific method—the recording of facts that can be tested and measured—replacing “knowing” through the body. When we sit for a while at the top of a hill, sit in a bit of shade under a tree, I say that numbers can’t convey this heat. You have to experience it in the flesh. Every year hundreds of Mexicans die crossing the border. Traversing fifty miles of desert, they become dehydrated, fall unconscious, and expire fast.
Later, as the sky darkens, we sit beside the pool at our complex. Birds warble and ducks wander up from a nearby park. Compared to New York, Scottsdale is bucolic. I don’t miss the city’s anxious energy, don’t miss my mother. When I call her, I hear the dreamy draw in her voice. The call has pulled her back from somewhere else. She asks if I talk to neighbors, if I’ve made friends, if I’m lonely—as if I am a bride without work come to live in her husband's world. She must have felt that way when we moved to Long Beach and she left the streets of New York that gave her a reason to get out of bed. I talk to no one and don’t care. When Richard leaves for work, I write in our little rented house. When I think about New York, I see my mother’s body.
Heat
Coffee Plantation, June 15, 2007
Afternoons, I walk to the mailbox. The blond woman in a blue bikini floats in the pool on her belly, her back to the blaze. I angle my umbrella, slipping into patches of shade. Today in The NY Times, an article describes Phoenix as the first doomed city, a place that doesn’t belong in a desert and will prove untenable as temperatures climb, as they already do summers, to 120 and beyond. In the shade. In the sun, add another 10 or 15 degrees. This past week, it’s been 110 every day and cooling to 85 before the sun rises again. Richard says we will have 100 days above 100. He’s adjusted, doesn’t sweat. It’s so dry here—on average 8% humidity—moisture is leached from your pores as you walk.
Saturday morning, we hike a trail called Dreamy Draw. It’s 95 by the time we get there: windless, hazy, and dry. The trail’s name derives from the mercury mined there in the 19th Century, “dreamy” referring to the effects of mercury poisoning—the madness of hatters who used the element to mold felt. We walk through scrubby pines until emerging onto a familiar scene of blooming cacti, thorny ocotillo plants with licks of flame shooting from their tips, slithering lizards, and brown rabbits whose long ears have adapted to circulate blood and keep them cool. Mountains in the distance look like giants around a feast, their backbones and rib cages jutting into the sky. The desert comes to life after a period of coolness and rain, but it doesn’t really happen this year.
As we walk, dust gives way to red soil and everywhere are rocks burnished black with desert varnish: sun-baked bacteria, the oldest living things containing DNA. I collect rocks with colorful markings to cheer up our cement patio. Richard arranges them in sinuous patterns, complaining about my “shopping” in the desert.
I’m carrying my umbrella and covered in a silk shirt, but sweat trickles down my sides. I like trailing behind, taking in the beauty and strangeness. When I catch up, he talks about the scientific method—the recording of facts that can be tested and measured—replacing “knowing” through the body. When we sit for a while at the top of a hill, sit in a bit of shade under a tree, I say that numbers can’t convey this heat. You have to experience it in the flesh. Every year hundreds of Mexicans die crossing the border. Traversing fifty miles of desert, they become dehydrated, fall unconscious, and expire fast.
Later, as the sky darkens, we sit beside the pool at our complex. Birds warble and ducks wander up from a nearby park. Compared to New York, Scottsdale is bucolic. I don’t miss the city’s anxious energy, don’t miss my mother. When I call her, I hear the dreamy draw in her voice. The call has pulled her back from somewhere else. She asks if I talk to neighbors, if I’ve made friends, if I’m lonely—as if I am a bride without work come to live in her husband's world. She must have felt that way when we moved to Long Beach and she left the streets of New York that gave her a reason to get out of bed. I talk to no one and don’t care. When Richard leaves for work, I write in our little rented house. When I think about New York, I see my mother’s body.
Bright, young people
Richard
Bright young people
Starbucks, December 5, 2008
I picked up Bright Young People, The Lost Generation of London's Jazz Age, by D.J. Taylor, from Laurie’s pile of uncorrected proofs. I like these volumes with their typos, sketchy chapter headings, and missing indexes, allowing you a glimpse into the stages publication. This one chronicles the “bright, young people” of London’s 1920’s—the generation between the wars whose London upper crust staged all-night parties in public swimming pools to the accompaniment of Negro jazz bands. George Orwell loathed these people and so did I until, reading on, I began to feel some sympathy for them. One result of the slaughter of men in World War I was to liberate women. At the same time, depressed by the losses and savageries of war, they often acted desperately. I saw a kind of earnestness in their frivolity. The competition, let’s say, to go into the streets of Mayfair and purloin a policemen’s helmet seemed almost, though not quite, poignant.
Walking over to meet Laurie for our daily write, it occurred to me that my generation was in transition as well, with one foot in the old, gray England following World War II and the other foot in the psychedelic flower power of the 1960’s. Caught in the upward draught of social mobility and rising expectations, educated beyond my origins but never quite fitting the clothes or speech patterns of the class my education pointed me to, I have needed all this time to see my formation. It’s difficult to admit I’m only now measuring my past in this way. Laurie seems to have a firmer grasp on the period that made her, the 60’s and 70’s, than I have.
My memories of childhood flow easily, but I go to sleep when I think about my early twenties. Now, as then, I still stop myself from seeing things. Some moments are illuminated in the dark: fucking Marylyn in the doorway, marrying her, taking off from the house where we lived together. But far vaguer is the emptiness of all those rented rooms Meg and I drifted through: stoned, listening to the Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendricks for escape. I need to let it come to me without the self-justifying censor piping up, “You were the victim of circumstance.” In reality, I was a situationist. I remember a situationist cartoon in a French political magazine of the early ‘70s. In it Tonto asks the Lone Ranger what his politics are, and the masked man says in a bubble above his grainy, black and white image, “I drift, mainly I just drift.” For many years so did I, from place to place, person to person, not quite knowing why. This is the story I am locating.
Bright young people
Starbucks, December 5, 2008
I picked up Bright Young People, The Lost Generation of London's Jazz Age, by D.J. Taylor, from Laurie’s pile of uncorrected proofs. I like these volumes with their typos, sketchy chapter headings, and missing indexes, allowing you a glimpse into the stages publication. This one chronicles the “bright, young people” of London’s 1920’s—the generation between the wars whose London upper crust staged all-night parties in public swimming pools to the accompaniment of Negro jazz bands. George Orwell loathed these people and so did I until, reading on, I began to feel some sympathy for them. One result of the slaughter of men in World War I was to liberate women. At the same time, depressed by the losses and savageries of war, they often acted desperately. I saw a kind of earnestness in their frivolity. The competition, let’s say, to go into the streets of Mayfair and purloin a policemen’s helmet seemed almost, though not quite, poignant.
Walking over to meet Laurie for our daily write, it occurred to me that my generation was in transition as well, with one foot in the old, gray England following World War II and the other foot in the psychedelic flower power of the 1960’s. Caught in the upward draught of social mobility and rising expectations, educated beyond my origins but never quite fitting the clothes or speech patterns of the class my education pointed me to, I have needed all this time to see my formation. It’s difficult to admit I’m only now measuring my past in this way. Laurie seems to have a firmer grasp on the period that made her, the 60’s and 70’s, than I have.
My memories of childhood flow easily, but I go to sleep when I think about my early twenties. Now, as then, I still stop myself from seeing things. Some moments are illuminated in the dark: fucking Marylyn in the doorway, marrying her, taking off from the house where we lived together. But far vaguer is the emptiness of all those rented rooms Meg and I drifted through: stoned, listening to the Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendricks for escape. I need to let it come to me without the self-justifying censor piping up, “You were the victim of circumstance.” In reality, I was a situationist. I remember a situationist cartoon in a French political magazine of the early ‘70s. In it Tonto asks the Lone Ranger what his politics are, and the masked man says in a bubble above his grainy, black and white image, “I drift, mainly I just drift.” For many years so did I, from place to place, person to person, not quite knowing why. This is the story I am locating.
The way she made tea
Richard
The way she made tea
Starbucks, January 23, 2009
It was in Leicester, 1970 or thereabouts. I’d left Marylyn and was staying with Chris at his place. Only later did I learn that he was skipping classes in the afternoons and driving over to Syston to fuck Marylyn, while I was trying to set up life with Meg. I couldn’t blame him, really. It was Chris I’d invited into our bed that night when we’d all come home late from the pub. I fell asleep wondering if he and Marylyn would get up to something, half hoping they would. Some time in the night, I was roused by heavy breathing next to me and the soft rocking of the bed to the rhythm of a samba.
I got up and took the bus to work and didn’t return to the house. That’s the truth of it, although the truth has a way of drifting into obscure corners that casual recollection brushes past. In these writings, all details eventually show themselves, like the fact that Meg was originally Chris’s girlfriend and I’d gotten to know her by spending time with them. Eventually I’d taken his place, so no wonder he felt okay accepting Marylyn’s invitation to take mine—a symmetry that was all around in the late '60’s and '70’s. In the spirit of incestuous coupling, he’d had the decency to invite me to share his small flat on the London Road in Leicester when I was facing homelessness.
On one of those afternoons, Chris’s mother, Mrs. Jacobson, was up to visit from Golder’s Green. I’d never met such a jumble of coarseness and sophistication. She wore flamboyant, Dame Edna sunglasses and drove a red Rover recklessly. She called her son “Baby” and would grab him as he passed and clutch him in a strong embrace. An enormous diamond embedded in a thick gold band glittered on one of her tapered fingers, and her manicured nails announced she did no manual work. I must have seemed equally alien to her—a thin, long-haired, shambles in full hippy regalia of flowered shirt and beads.
“Would you like a tea, darling?” she asked.
“I’ll make it.” I jumped up, glad of something to do while we waited for Chris to return.
“How polite he is,” she remarked to no one, “a perfect gentleman, he is.”
I knew how to put the kettle on, but I have to say I’d never actually made a cup of tea the way Chris did in his small galley kitchen. I only knew how to spoon loose leaves into a teapot; tea bags were a mystery. I found a packet of them in his cupboard with only a half dozen left. I took down two mugs from hooks and dropped a tea bag into one. When the kettle came to the boil, I poured water in and swirled the bag around with a spoon. Chris’s mother came up behind me as I placed the tea bag into the second cup and poured in water.
“Oh my God,” she shouted, making me jump. “What the hell are you doing? You poor boy. Don’t worry, we can spare a tea bag. You’re not at home, now. Some of us can afford not to hang up our tea bags.” And she broke into laughter and pulled me to her and laughed and laughed and laughed.
I felt burned by the way she used the words poor and home, and I immediately began to hate both her and Chris. I hated they way they saw me. I hated how she’d interpreted what I’d done, and it was many years before I felt confident enough to use one tea bag for two cups. I’m still a bit self conscious about it.
The way she made tea
Starbucks, January 23, 2009
It was in Leicester, 1970 or thereabouts. I’d left Marylyn and was staying with Chris at his place. Only later did I learn that he was skipping classes in the afternoons and driving over to Syston to fuck Marylyn, while I was trying to set up life with Meg. I couldn’t blame him, really. It was Chris I’d invited into our bed that night when we’d all come home late from the pub. I fell asleep wondering if he and Marylyn would get up to something, half hoping they would. Some time in the night, I was roused by heavy breathing next to me and the soft rocking of the bed to the rhythm of a samba.
I got up and took the bus to work and didn’t return to the house. That’s the truth of it, although the truth has a way of drifting into obscure corners that casual recollection brushes past. In these writings, all details eventually show themselves, like the fact that Meg was originally Chris’s girlfriend and I’d gotten to know her by spending time with them. Eventually I’d taken his place, so no wonder he felt okay accepting Marylyn’s invitation to take mine—a symmetry that was all around in the late '60’s and '70’s. In the spirit of incestuous coupling, he’d had the decency to invite me to share his small flat on the London Road in Leicester when I was facing homelessness.
On one of those afternoons, Chris’s mother, Mrs. Jacobson, was up to visit from Golder’s Green. I’d never met such a jumble of coarseness and sophistication. She wore flamboyant, Dame Edna sunglasses and drove a red Rover recklessly. She called her son “Baby” and would grab him as he passed and clutch him in a strong embrace. An enormous diamond embedded in a thick gold band glittered on one of her tapered fingers, and her manicured nails announced she did no manual work. I must have seemed equally alien to her—a thin, long-haired, shambles in full hippy regalia of flowered shirt and beads.
“Would you like a tea, darling?” she asked.
“I’ll make it.” I jumped up, glad of something to do while we waited for Chris to return.
“How polite he is,” she remarked to no one, “a perfect gentleman, he is.”
I knew how to put the kettle on, but I have to say I’d never actually made a cup of tea the way Chris did in his small galley kitchen. I only knew how to spoon loose leaves into a teapot; tea bags were a mystery. I found a packet of them in his cupboard with only a half dozen left. I took down two mugs from hooks and dropped a tea bag into one. When the kettle came to the boil, I poured water in and swirled the bag around with a spoon. Chris’s mother came up behind me as I placed the tea bag into the second cup and poured in water.
“Oh my God,” she shouted, making me jump. “What the hell are you doing? You poor boy. Don’t worry, we can spare a tea bag. You’re not at home, now. Some of us can afford not to hang up our tea bags.” And she broke into laughter and pulled me to her and laughed and laughed and laughed.
I felt burned by the way she used the words poor and home, and I immediately began to hate both her and Chris. I hated they way they saw me. I hated how she’d interpreted what I’d done, and it was many years before I felt confident enough to use one tea bag for two cups. I’m still a bit self conscious about it.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Explode a moment
Laurie
Explode a moment
Lake Forest Starbucks, July 21, 2007
By the time I board the plane, I can’t remember what Richard looks like. There is a picture of him on my computer, but I don’t know his size or how his body fits with mine. I don’t know who we are together because we aren’t yet something. I wear a black dress with straps in the back, so he will see a bird flying. It’s an early plane, and I don’t sleep. I look at the plane’s wing slicing clouds and try to picture Richard’s shoulder. The dress is uncomfortable and I look tired.
He is waiting at the end of the walkway. We are on cell phones, and I’m pulling my little trolley, clip clopping on high heels. A shop on one side sells tiny cactus plants. There is a newspaper stand, a Starbucks, and then the security tables and conveyor belts. Beyond that is a slender arrow in black with a cap of silver hair. He has his weight on one leg. I am beside his smile, and he circles me, but before that I feel something leave my body. A ghost of fear moves out. His eyes scrunch up like little fists, and we touch.
Explode a moment
Lake Forest Starbucks, July 21, 2007
By the time I board the plane, I can’t remember what Richard looks like. There is a picture of him on my computer, but I don’t know his size or how his body fits with mine. I don’t know who we are together because we aren’t yet something. I wear a black dress with straps in the back, so he will see a bird flying. It’s an early plane, and I don’t sleep. I look at the plane’s wing slicing clouds and try to picture Richard’s shoulder. The dress is uncomfortable and I look tired.
He is waiting at the end of the walkway. We are on cell phones, and I’m pulling my little trolley, clip clopping on high heels. A shop on one side sells tiny cactus plants. There is a newspaper stand, a Starbucks, and then the security tables and conveyor belts. Beyond that is a slender arrow in black with a cap of silver hair. He has his weight on one leg. I am beside his smile, and he circles me, but before that I feel something leave my body. A ghost of fear moves out. His eyes scrunch up like little fists, and we touch.
Toby museum
Laurie
Toby museum
Starbucks, April 24, 2008
Eight weeks before my mother dies, she’s admitted to the hospital with mysterious bleeding. Bladder cancer is suspected, but I don’t believe she has it. I think she’ll return to her apartment, that I’ll see her again, that she’ll meet Richard, even if she has no idea who we are. She doesn't have cancer, it turns out. She dies at home in her bed, approaching ninety-three.
“She’s gone,” Ellen says on the phone, driving to Toby’s apartment. Primrose arrived after Maureen, another aide, called to say she couldn’t arouse Toby from sleep. After her stroke, she learned she had fibrosis of the lung, which is incurable and untreatable. It was supposed to have finished her a long time ago, and finally it did. According to the coroner, she suffocated in her own fluids.
Richard speaks about two types of museums. The kind like Noah’s Ark that aim to exhibit samples of everything that exists, such as The Museum of Natural History in New York. And memory palaces: idiosyncratic collections commemorating local history you find in any small town. Or apartment.
I sleep in Toby's bed for three weeks, organizing her things. When Ellen and I learn that her furniture has value—a lamp, for instance, is designed by Gino Sarfatti—I vote to auction it, including a small table I’ve thought of keeping—preferring capital that floats. Toby wore a deco diamond ring on her left pinky that I would follow as her hand swept this way and that. “You’ll have it when I’m dead,” she would say, smiling, unable to imagine her extinction, same as everybody. I didn’t understand why she was wearing it in the hospital. I thought it might give her comfort so I didn’t remove it for safe keeping. When it was stolen, I felt like fainting, realizing I’d fallen for the same old con.
I make my way through Toby’s freezer, cooking chicken pieces that look like arthritic fingers. I pack up a set of black, silver-rimmed plates, service for twelve, never used. Outside, my mother still skitters along 58th Street, still stands in front of the Plaza Hotel on the red carpet secured with brass rivets, still chats with the doorman while scanning the distance for the dot that is me. She’s worried I’ve been abducted by aliens. I should be so lucky.
My mother wouldn't have cared about the garbage bags stuffed with her clothes, still in plastic from the cleaners though some with stains, and her chipped, everyday plates with the autumn leaf design worn faint. I throw away a dozen pairs of Easy Spirit shoes, character style, with a strap across the instep. She wouldn't have minded looking into the wilderness of her closets and drawers, awaiting their next pilgrims. I see her at the dining table with the harlequin inlays, above her the modernist chandelier, a burst of twelve tulip fixtures selected by Julie Stein, the interior decorator she trotted behind in the late 1950’s when our summer cottage was converted into an all-year-round house. Toby is bent over a book resting on a stand, a conservative talk show blasting from the radio.
Eight months before she dies, she’s admitted to St. Luke’s Hospital after a psychiatrist deems her in crisis. The aim is to get her started on a new mood stabilizer—the previous ones having failed. Otherwise, her aides can’t stay on the job. My sister is fed up with Toby, who is screaming pretty much all the time. Ellen is disowning her mother with the freedom of the loved child. But Toby touches me and reminds me of Al Swearingen, the sympathetic monster at the center of the HBO series Deadwood, who also reminds me of myself. Played by British actor Ian McShane, his dark eyes ringed with pain, he is always stealing himself for the next brutality he is going to unleash on his world, as if his savagery is against his will, as if his cruelty is a tyrant driving the obliging but reluctant servant that is also him to carry out his deeds.
I call my mother on her 92nd birthday, and she sounds groggy but there. “I disappointed you by not giving you money and by calling Richard ‘a poor slob.’”
“Why did you say that?”
“I didn’t mean anything. I say the same things about my son-in-law.”
“You’ve known Mark for forty years. You’ve never even met Richard.”
“Yes, you’re right.”
She seems in a place where she can see herself more clearly, even as she slips away.
In Arizona, Richard and I stand on our patio and watch lightning fracture the black sky. Pollack flings of furious beauty skip across the night, and the darkness shudders like a body waking from the dead. I squeal with each illumination, night becoming day in a confusion of the natural order. “Everything gets rubbed,” Richard says, looking up at the crackling night.
I propose we write about the concept of the muse, a marble thought that’s been tumbling in my head. A professor friend has been teaching my work and has referred to Toby as my muse. At first I shove the idea away, but it takes root and I see that every piece I have written about longing—and isn’t everything we write about love or something hurting what we love?—starts with an ache for my mother. It has the shape of shadow moving over desert mountains, across giant saguaro cacti with their arms outstretched, across higgledy-piggeldy rocks, some red colored, some blackened and inscribed. It is a blank sky—like a brain before it’s marked with impressions.
Toby museum
Starbucks, April 24, 2008
Eight weeks before my mother dies, she’s admitted to the hospital with mysterious bleeding. Bladder cancer is suspected, but I don’t believe she has it. I think she’ll return to her apartment, that I’ll see her again, that she’ll meet Richard, even if she has no idea who we are. She doesn't have cancer, it turns out. She dies at home in her bed, approaching ninety-three.
“She’s gone,” Ellen says on the phone, driving to Toby’s apartment. Primrose arrived after Maureen, another aide, called to say she couldn’t arouse Toby from sleep. After her stroke, she learned she had fibrosis of the lung, which is incurable and untreatable. It was supposed to have finished her a long time ago, and finally it did. According to the coroner, she suffocated in her own fluids.
Richard speaks about two types of museums. The kind like Noah’s Ark that aim to exhibit samples of everything that exists, such as The Museum of Natural History in New York. And memory palaces: idiosyncratic collections commemorating local history you find in any small town. Or apartment.
I sleep in Toby's bed for three weeks, organizing her things. When Ellen and I learn that her furniture has value—a lamp, for instance, is designed by Gino Sarfatti—I vote to auction it, including a small table I’ve thought of keeping—preferring capital that floats. Toby wore a deco diamond ring on her left pinky that I would follow as her hand swept this way and that. “You’ll have it when I’m dead,” she would say, smiling, unable to imagine her extinction, same as everybody. I didn’t understand why she was wearing it in the hospital. I thought it might give her comfort so I didn’t remove it for safe keeping. When it was stolen, I felt like fainting, realizing I’d fallen for the same old con.
I make my way through Toby’s freezer, cooking chicken pieces that look like arthritic fingers. I pack up a set of black, silver-rimmed plates, service for twelve, never used. Outside, my mother still skitters along 58th Street, still stands in front of the Plaza Hotel on the red carpet secured with brass rivets, still chats with the doorman while scanning the distance for the dot that is me. She’s worried I’ve been abducted by aliens. I should be so lucky.
My mother wouldn't have cared about the garbage bags stuffed with her clothes, still in plastic from the cleaners though some with stains, and her chipped, everyday plates with the autumn leaf design worn faint. I throw away a dozen pairs of Easy Spirit shoes, character style, with a strap across the instep. She wouldn't have minded looking into the wilderness of her closets and drawers, awaiting their next pilgrims. I see her at the dining table with the harlequin inlays, above her the modernist chandelier, a burst of twelve tulip fixtures selected by Julie Stein, the interior decorator she trotted behind in the late 1950’s when our summer cottage was converted into an all-year-round house. Toby is bent over a book resting on a stand, a conservative talk show blasting from the radio.
Eight months before she dies, she’s admitted to St. Luke’s Hospital after a psychiatrist deems her in crisis. The aim is to get her started on a new mood stabilizer—the previous ones having failed. Otherwise, her aides can’t stay on the job. My sister is fed up with Toby, who is screaming pretty much all the time. Ellen is disowning her mother with the freedom of the loved child. But Toby touches me and reminds me of Al Swearingen, the sympathetic monster at the center of the HBO series Deadwood, who also reminds me of myself. Played by British actor Ian McShane, his dark eyes ringed with pain, he is always stealing himself for the next brutality he is going to unleash on his world, as if his savagery is against his will, as if his cruelty is a tyrant driving the obliging but reluctant servant that is also him to carry out his deeds.
I call my mother on her 92nd birthday, and she sounds groggy but there. “I disappointed you by not giving you money and by calling Richard ‘a poor slob.’”
“Why did you say that?”
“I didn’t mean anything. I say the same things about my son-in-law.”
“You’ve known Mark for forty years. You’ve never even met Richard.”
“Yes, you’re right.”
She seems in a place where she can see herself more clearly, even as she slips away.
In Arizona, Richard and I stand on our patio and watch lightning fracture the black sky. Pollack flings of furious beauty skip across the night, and the darkness shudders like a body waking from the dead. I squeal with each illumination, night becoming day in a confusion of the natural order. “Everything gets rubbed,” Richard says, looking up at the crackling night.
I propose we write about the concept of the muse, a marble thought that’s been tumbling in my head. A professor friend has been teaching my work and has referred to Toby as my muse. At first I shove the idea away, but it takes root and I see that every piece I have written about longing—and isn’t everything we write about love or something hurting what we love?—starts with an ache for my mother. It has the shape of shadow moving over desert mountains, across giant saguaro cacti with their arms outstretched, across higgledy-piggeldy rocks, some red colored, some blackened and inscribed. It is a blank sky—like a brain before it’s marked with impressions.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Something I've hidden
Richard
Something I’ve hidden
Barnes & Noble, October 29, 2008
For a brief period in the 1960’s I stole books. It felt as if someone else were doing it in my body.
I stole philosophy books I didn’t understand but wanted to—Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Frege, Wittgenstein. The reading came in handy later, when I was studying philosophy at university, but at the time I was drawn to the authors’ names on the spines and to the titles: Fear and Trembling, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, Sense and Reference, Zettel. I didn’t care about actually reading the books. Oh, the unconscious mind, I mean I was stealing books called “fear and trembling” and “on truth and lies,” and I didn’t even find it ironic!
I stole from the Midland Educational Bookshop in Leicester, before it went out of business in the 1970’s. If I contributed to its demise, I deeply regret it. I liked to nick from the top of columns of books stacked on a stand at the top of the stairs, beside the lift. An easy duck. A step or two, and down and away. Not that I fled, until the end. I would saunter along and slip a slim volume into my jacket pocket and with heart pounding continue the charade of nonchalance. I would do it during my lunch break when I worked selling hose pipe licenses at the Water Department and thought I would never, ever escape my life.
If a policeman caught me, what would I say? I didn’t plan to steal books, officer, the urge just came over me one day? The splitting was what I was after, the kick of watching myself as if I were someone else, which is what I was dying to be, although I didn’t know how unhappy I was. I was still living with Marylyn. Trevor was only a year or two. I hadn’t yet met Meg and made the dash to another life. Was I hoping to be caught, lose my job, break everything apart? I can’t say.
That possibility loomed, however, one day mid-week. Few people were about. It was a good time to pilfer. I spotted Alfred North Whitehead’s Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect, and I was fumbling to pocket it when a man and a woman passed me, having just come up the stairs. I jammed the book in the pocket and folded over the flap, and as I did I saw the woman looking at me. She was middle aged and wore a black velvet hat pulled low on her forehead. As she passed, she glanced down to my pocket and leaned over to whisper in the man’s ear. He wore a tartan wool cap and had a small, neat mustache, and I saw him shudder slightly, but he placed his hand on the woman’s elbow and walked on and then both turned to look at me, as if to gather an understanding of the biblioklept or maybe decide whether to let him go or turn him in. I was not in my body, but I did not know what to make of the thief, either. I wanted to run but circled the stand with the missing volume and made my way to the stairs and slowly walked down and out of the store, not daring to look back.
I didn’t return for weeks and when I did they’d replaced Whitehead with Jean Paul Sartre. I paid for Nausea, which I took home and read and, ironically again, didn’t understand, even though the novel is about a man in whom objects produce a sense of sweaty dread. And this was my secret until now.
Something I’ve hidden
Barnes & Noble, October 29, 2008
For a brief period in the 1960’s I stole books. It felt as if someone else were doing it in my body.
I stole philosophy books I didn’t understand but wanted to—Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Frege, Wittgenstein. The reading came in handy later, when I was studying philosophy at university, but at the time I was drawn to the authors’ names on the spines and to the titles: Fear and Trembling, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, Sense and Reference, Zettel. I didn’t care about actually reading the books. Oh, the unconscious mind, I mean I was stealing books called “fear and trembling” and “on truth and lies,” and I didn’t even find it ironic!
I stole from the Midland Educational Bookshop in Leicester, before it went out of business in the 1970’s. If I contributed to its demise, I deeply regret it. I liked to nick from the top of columns of books stacked on a stand at the top of the stairs, beside the lift. An easy duck. A step or two, and down and away. Not that I fled, until the end. I would saunter along and slip a slim volume into my jacket pocket and with heart pounding continue the charade of nonchalance. I would do it during my lunch break when I worked selling hose pipe licenses at the Water Department and thought I would never, ever escape my life.
If a policeman caught me, what would I say? I didn’t plan to steal books, officer, the urge just came over me one day? The splitting was what I was after, the kick of watching myself as if I were someone else, which is what I was dying to be, although I didn’t know how unhappy I was. I was still living with Marylyn. Trevor was only a year or two. I hadn’t yet met Meg and made the dash to another life. Was I hoping to be caught, lose my job, break everything apart? I can’t say.
That possibility loomed, however, one day mid-week. Few people were about. It was a good time to pilfer. I spotted Alfred North Whitehead’s Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect, and I was fumbling to pocket it when a man and a woman passed me, having just come up the stairs. I jammed the book in the pocket and folded over the flap, and as I did I saw the woman looking at me. She was middle aged and wore a black velvet hat pulled low on her forehead. As she passed, she glanced down to my pocket and leaned over to whisper in the man’s ear. He wore a tartan wool cap and had a small, neat mustache, and I saw him shudder slightly, but he placed his hand on the woman’s elbow and walked on and then both turned to look at me, as if to gather an understanding of the biblioklept or maybe decide whether to let him go or turn him in. I was not in my body, but I did not know what to make of the thief, either. I wanted to run but circled the stand with the missing volume and made my way to the stairs and slowly walked down and out of the store, not daring to look back.
I didn’t return for weeks and when I did they’d replaced Whitehead with Jean Paul Sartre. I paid for Nausea, which I took home and read and, ironically again, didn’t understand, even though the novel is about a man in whom objects produce a sense of sweaty dread. And this was my secret until now.
Village life
Richard
Village Life
October 20, 2006
I wrote this at Yaddo in response to a prompt Laurie suggested. I had told her about marrying my first wife when I was 17, who was pregnant at the time. Also about our son, whom I raised with her until he was three when we went our separate ways—she to other relationships and then remarriage, me into the 1960's and a debriefing from Timothy Leary. My son is 40 now. We haven’t seen each other since he was 15—when contact felt strained and communication very difficult. Laurie understands that I carry the loss with me all the time. In her gentle but urgent way, she said, “Write the story.” And I did, with enough alteration–I wrote is as a story not as memoir–to make it possible.
The photographer shouted, “Okay everybody, look at the camera. Groom’s family in a bit. Come on, let’s get friendly. You sir,” gesturing to the older brother of Marylyn, the bride, with one hand, holding the shutter-release in the other. “No fags, please. Wait for the reception. There’s a good lad.” Ernie, who was standing in for Marylyn’s missing father and had just done the honors by giving her away, folded his leg and stubbed out the cigarette on the sole of his new shoe, bought with the money given him after his recent release from prison. Flashing a cheeky grin all around and shrugging, he took up position with the rest of the wedding party.
The camera went “Whap!” The bulb flashed, and suddenly our groom, Michael, was beyond sound and vision—no friends smiling and congratulating him with a slap on the back, no mother and father looking strained and tired, no bride appearing radiant in her floor-length, powder-blue wedding dress—just a silence, and in the center of it an overwhelming realization that he had made a terrible mistake. “Whap!” the camera went again, and he was back, offering that soft smile of surrender. The moment of clarity—half a second at most—would be unavailable again for many years.
It was Saturday, June 8th , 1968. Michael and Marylyn were seventeen. Marylyn was five months pregnant, which the dress concealed deftly. Like dominoes falling, the chain of events leading to this day had begun with a comment a year earlier, when Michael had said to Marylyn, “I think I love you” on a single-decker, Midland Red bus, as it traveled country lanes from the village of Snarston, where they lived, to Market Harboro. Nothing much went on in the Market Harboro, but it was preferable to Snarston, where nothing at all went on. The real advantage of Harboro, as locals call it, was the Dog and Gun pub near the bus station, for the landlord served beer to teenagers in the back lounge, even when they were obviously under age, reckoning he couldn’t start too early recruiting lifetime customers.
The pub was their evening destination, which they’d returned to since first meeting there through friends. On that first encounter, they happened to get the same bus home, and he noticed her, and they got talking and she asked if he’d like to go out, for she wasn’t at all shy with boys. Things developed from there. Or rather they didn’t really develop, because mainly they went back to the pub or wandered around the village, and that was about it. Still, they drew close, finding themselves among friends who either liked the Beatles or the Stones, but not both, while they were drawn to the Memphis sound of Stax Records—Sam and Dave, Booker T and the MGs, Irma Thomas, music that was bluesy and gritty.
Six months after they met, the bus was, as usual, approaching the outskirts of Harboro and fields were giving way to monotonous streets of red-brick homes when Michael uttered the fateful phrase. He hadn’t felt any deep sense of love welling up that needed expressing but rather a vague sense of obligation to make a declaration, given how long, Marylyn pointed out, they’d been going together. The caveat “I think I love you,” which he’d unconsciously borrowed from a Jim Morrison song, was the most he could produce. And so he was surprised and gratified by the snogging with tongues on the back seat of the bus that followed. That was, until the conductor shouted, “Oi, Romeo and Juliet, not on my bus please, save it for down the bloody recky!,” by which he meant the recreation grounds local councils in each village provided teens for smoking and groping.
The next thing Michael knew Marylyn was miraculously offering to have sex with him while they sat in the Dog and Gun. She’d just downed three Babychams, and he was finishing a single pint of Best. They were at their usual table, and it was littered with empties and fag stubbed out in the large ceramic ashtray. Marylyn liked to have her back to the wall, so she could call out to men she knew from the factory as they made their way to the toilets at the back. Her friend Annie was next to her, and Annie’s boyfriend, Brian, an old school friend of Michael’s, was there as well. The girls giggled. The boys compared their favorite bands. Jimi Hendricks’ “Hey Joe” was playing over the sound system and Michael’s right leg vibrated to the bass. As a cheer rose from the front as someone hit triple-top to win at darts, Marylyn leaned over to Michael and whispered, “We’ll do it tonight if yer like.”
He nodded and as he drained his glass and caught sight of the woodpecker on the beer mat, he wondered where they would go. He was a lucky bird. He noticed that one of the horse brasses nailed along the wall was missing. Someone had nicked it. He was dying to leave.
He had full coitus for the first time standing up outside in the dark against the front door of Marylyn’s council house home. He gasped an unqualified, “I love you,” as his orgasm rapidly approached and her mother, hearing huffing sounds from her upstairs bedroom, shouted, “Is that you our Marylyn?” The young woman didn’t answer, rather adeptly pulled him out, rearranged her nylon panties, tugged her miniskirt back into place, and slipped a key in the lock, pausing to turn and say, “See ya, tomorrow.” Then she was gone.
He was left to return his penis to his trousers, zip up, and set off for the mile-and-a-half journey home. With all that is possible at seventeen, he was half way back before his erection subsided and he was in his bed in less than fifteen minutes. He felt better than he had ever felt in his life. Marylyn wasn’t the sharpest conversationalist, but she was good looking and available.
She stood five foot-two and had dark auburn hair cut in a page-boy that framed a round, open face. Despite her sugary diet, she had Chiclet white teeth she considered as dazzling as any model’s. She painted her full, kissable lips with Mary Quant pink lipstick, and she had bright clear eyes, done up with liner and mascara and notable in that one was blue and the other brown—in fact, she was known in the village as “the girl with the different colored eyes.” Michael liked that her breasts were small and even more that she was happy for him to feel them as soon as he tried.
That Marylyn had never directly asked for love didn’t register on him, and why exactly he needed to make such a declaration he could not have said, but that night each of them—Marilyn in the room she shared with her three sisters and he, alone in his room, at the other end of the village—wondered about the implications of his avowal. Would he be having sex again tomorrow? She was asking herself if she’d have to take this boy seriously and quit shagging the others she’d managed to conceal from Michael. The answer to both questions was yes, at least for awhile.
A mere six hundred people lived in their village, and yet, oddly, they hadn’t met until that night in the pub. Marylyn had moved to Snarston from Leicester when the council informed her mother that a three-bedroom house, big enough to accommodate her large family, had become available. They’d left the two-bedroom terraced house—now in the path of a new bypass—that Marylyn’s mother had struggled to pay the rent on. The council even provided furniture, and so now there was enough left from her welfare check to keep her family in food, fags, and the occasional night down the pub.
Marylyn had left school at fifteen to work in a shoe factory on the outskirts of Market Harboro. Michael had attended the local grammar school but had left at fifteen as well. Owing to a miscalculation, he hadn’t attained enough O levels to go into the lower-sixth form, so instead of re-entering the fifth-form he and his parents had decided—although not with reasoning he embraced—that it would be best for him to leave school altogether. There was a haziness in his family about matters others thought crucial, a slackness that Michael loathed and yet slipped into. He was attending, or pretending to attend, the local community college for an Ordinary National Diploma in Business Studies. He had no plans for the future, didn’t think he needed them.
He lived with his parents in a dull but trim bungalow in a cul-de-sac off the main road to Leicester. His father was an assistant manager at Barclay’s Bank. Marylyn’s father had never lived long in any home and when last heard of was somewhere in Lincolnshire dealing in scrap metal. Michael’s mother considered Marylyn’s mother and her brood of four daughters and four sons “common.” She hoped her only child would get over his infatuation. Marylyn’s mother thought kindly of everyone she didn’t owe money to and, more to the point, thought that our Marylyn was a scamp and that Michael was “a precious duck.”
Village Life
October 20, 2006
I wrote this at Yaddo in response to a prompt Laurie suggested. I had told her about marrying my first wife when I was 17, who was pregnant at the time. Also about our son, whom I raised with her until he was three when we went our separate ways—she to other relationships and then remarriage, me into the 1960's and a debriefing from Timothy Leary. My son is 40 now. We haven’t seen each other since he was 15—when contact felt strained and communication very difficult. Laurie understands that I carry the loss with me all the time. In her gentle but urgent way, she said, “Write the story.” And I did, with enough alteration–I wrote is as a story not as memoir–to make it possible.
The photographer shouted, “Okay everybody, look at the camera. Groom’s family in a bit. Come on, let’s get friendly. You sir,” gesturing to the older brother of Marylyn, the bride, with one hand, holding the shutter-release in the other. “No fags, please. Wait for the reception. There’s a good lad.” Ernie, who was standing in for Marylyn’s missing father and had just done the honors by giving her away, folded his leg and stubbed out the cigarette on the sole of his new shoe, bought with the money given him after his recent release from prison. Flashing a cheeky grin all around and shrugging, he took up position with the rest of the wedding party.
The camera went “Whap!” The bulb flashed, and suddenly our groom, Michael, was beyond sound and vision—no friends smiling and congratulating him with a slap on the back, no mother and father looking strained and tired, no bride appearing radiant in her floor-length, powder-blue wedding dress—just a silence, and in the center of it an overwhelming realization that he had made a terrible mistake. “Whap!” the camera went again, and he was back, offering that soft smile of surrender. The moment of clarity—half a second at most—would be unavailable again for many years.
It was Saturday, June 8th , 1968. Michael and Marylyn were seventeen. Marylyn was five months pregnant, which the dress concealed deftly. Like dominoes falling, the chain of events leading to this day had begun with a comment a year earlier, when Michael had said to Marylyn, “I think I love you” on a single-decker, Midland Red bus, as it traveled country lanes from the village of Snarston, where they lived, to Market Harboro. Nothing much went on in the Market Harboro, but it was preferable to Snarston, where nothing at all went on. The real advantage of Harboro, as locals call it, was the Dog and Gun pub near the bus station, for the landlord served beer to teenagers in the back lounge, even when they were obviously under age, reckoning he couldn’t start too early recruiting lifetime customers.
The pub was their evening destination, which they’d returned to since first meeting there through friends. On that first encounter, they happened to get the same bus home, and he noticed her, and they got talking and she asked if he’d like to go out, for she wasn’t at all shy with boys. Things developed from there. Or rather they didn’t really develop, because mainly they went back to the pub or wandered around the village, and that was about it. Still, they drew close, finding themselves among friends who either liked the Beatles or the Stones, but not both, while they were drawn to the Memphis sound of Stax Records—Sam and Dave, Booker T and the MGs, Irma Thomas, music that was bluesy and gritty.
Six months after they met, the bus was, as usual, approaching the outskirts of Harboro and fields were giving way to monotonous streets of red-brick homes when Michael uttered the fateful phrase. He hadn’t felt any deep sense of love welling up that needed expressing but rather a vague sense of obligation to make a declaration, given how long, Marylyn pointed out, they’d been going together. The caveat “I think I love you,” which he’d unconsciously borrowed from a Jim Morrison song, was the most he could produce. And so he was surprised and gratified by the snogging with tongues on the back seat of the bus that followed. That was, until the conductor shouted, “Oi, Romeo and Juliet, not on my bus please, save it for down the bloody recky!,” by which he meant the recreation grounds local councils in each village provided teens for smoking and groping.
The next thing Michael knew Marylyn was miraculously offering to have sex with him while they sat in the Dog and Gun. She’d just downed three Babychams, and he was finishing a single pint of Best. They were at their usual table, and it was littered with empties and fag stubbed out in the large ceramic ashtray. Marylyn liked to have her back to the wall, so she could call out to men she knew from the factory as they made their way to the toilets at the back. Her friend Annie was next to her, and Annie’s boyfriend, Brian, an old school friend of Michael’s, was there as well. The girls giggled. The boys compared their favorite bands. Jimi Hendricks’ “Hey Joe” was playing over the sound system and Michael’s right leg vibrated to the bass. As a cheer rose from the front as someone hit triple-top to win at darts, Marylyn leaned over to Michael and whispered, “We’ll do it tonight if yer like.”
He nodded and as he drained his glass and caught sight of the woodpecker on the beer mat, he wondered where they would go. He was a lucky bird. He noticed that one of the horse brasses nailed along the wall was missing. Someone had nicked it. He was dying to leave.
He had full coitus for the first time standing up outside in the dark against the front door of Marylyn’s council house home. He gasped an unqualified, “I love you,” as his orgasm rapidly approached and her mother, hearing huffing sounds from her upstairs bedroom, shouted, “Is that you our Marylyn?” The young woman didn’t answer, rather adeptly pulled him out, rearranged her nylon panties, tugged her miniskirt back into place, and slipped a key in the lock, pausing to turn and say, “See ya, tomorrow.” Then she was gone.
He was left to return his penis to his trousers, zip up, and set off for the mile-and-a-half journey home. With all that is possible at seventeen, he was half way back before his erection subsided and he was in his bed in less than fifteen minutes. He felt better than he had ever felt in his life. Marylyn wasn’t the sharpest conversationalist, but she was good looking and available.
She stood five foot-two and had dark auburn hair cut in a page-boy that framed a round, open face. Despite her sugary diet, she had Chiclet white teeth she considered as dazzling as any model’s. She painted her full, kissable lips with Mary Quant pink lipstick, and she had bright clear eyes, done up with liner and mascara and notable in that one was blue and the other brown—in fact, she was known in the village as “the girl with the different colored eyes.” Michael liked that her breasts were small and even more that she was happy for him to feel them as soon as he tried.
That Marylyn had never directly asked for love didn’t register on him, and why exactly he needed to make such a declaration he could not have said, but that night each of them—Marilyn in the room she shared with her three sisters and he, alone in his room, at the other end of the village—wondered about the implications of his avowal. Would he be having sex again tomorrow? She was asking herself if she’d have to take this boy seriously and quit shagging the others she’d managed to conceal from Michael. The answer to both questions was yes, at least for awhile.
A mere six hundred people lived in their village, and yet, oddly, they hadn’t met until that night in the pub. Marylyn had moved to Snarston from Leicester when the council informed her mother that a three-bedroom house, big enough to accommodate her large family, had become available. They’d left the two-bedroom terraced house—now in the path of a new bypass—that Marylyn’s mother had struggled to pay the rent on. The council even provided furniture, and so now there was enough left from her welfare check to keep her family in food, fags, and the occasional night down the pub.
Marylyn had left school at fifteen to work in a shoe factory on the outskirts of Market Harboro. Michael had attended the local grammar school but had left at fifteen as well. Owing to a miscalculation, he hadn’t attained enough O levels to go into the lower-sixth form, so instead of re-entering the fifth-form he and his parents had decided—although not with reasoning he embraced—that it would be best for him to leave school altogether. There was a haziness in his family about matters others thought crucial, a slackness that Michael loathed and yet slipped into. He was attending, or pretending to attend, the local community college for an Ordinary National Diploma in Business Studies. He had no plans for the future, didn’t think he needed them.
He lived with his parents in a dull but trim bungalow in a cul-de-sac off the main road to Leicester. His father was an assistant manager at Barclay’s Bank. Marylyn’s father had never lived long in any home and when last heard of was somewhere in Lincolnshire dealing in scrap metal. Michael’s mother considered Marylyn’s mother and her brood of four daughters and four sons “common.” She hoped her only child would get over his infatuation. Marylyn’s mother thought kindly of everyone she didn’t owe money to and, more to the point, thought that our Marylyn was a scamp and that Michael was “a precious duck.”
Sudden reversal
Richard
Sudden reversal
Starbucks, June 15, 2007
I set about using the prompts to explore my life as a diabetic. I brainstormed with Laurie. “Needles,” “diagnosis,” and “altered states” were some of the topics that came up, and one by one I ticked them off. After I’d generated material, we began to shape it into a text called Sugartime for a performance piece, a la Spalding Gray’s monologues. In the prompt practice, ideas and memories flow, although if I’d tried to carve a narrative from whole cloth, I would not have known where to begin and I suspect I would have grown discouraged.
The Egyptians first recognized diabetes around 3,000 years ago, although the hormone insulin wasn’t identified until 1921. Ninety percent of diabetics (roughly three million in the US) have type 2, caused by overweight, sugary diets, and genes. Type 1, also known as juvenile diabetes or insulin-dependent diabetes, affects only 10% of people with the condition. I am one of those.
With type 1 diabetes, the immune system destroys the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas. Current theory suggests both genetic and environmental triggers, although the reasons remain unclear. Without insulin the body can’t transfer the sugar in blood to cells where it’s used for fuel. Blood sugars too high for too long, and you wind up with kidney failure, blindness, nerve damage, amputations, heart attacks, and strokes. Blood sugar too low, and you can’t think straight, although the altered brain states low sugars produce are temporary and cause no brain damage. Unless you go into coma. High or low sugars left untreated too long and the result is coma and death.
I became diabetic at twenty-three, which means I’ve had it for thirty-six years. I’ll die with the disease but perhaps not of it.
After the diagnosis, a nameless hope swam inside me that I could bring my sugars under control, step out of the mental fogs they usher in, and save myself from a future of blindness and missing limbs. The wish went unanswered until, in 1984, I read in a magazine about a diabetes study recruiting patients and I volunteered.
In a small annex of New York Hospital, a nurse interviews me about my health history, what I eat, how I sleep, and whether I think I’m a robot. A few weeks later, on a cold November day, the coordinator of the study hands me a phone. A voice on the other end says, “Wait,” while someone in Washington DC looks at a random number table, or checks me off a list, or tosses a coin to determine my assignment either to standard care, which will change nothing, or the experimental group, which can point me to a future. I never learn how the decision is made, but after moments during which I feel myself dancing lightly over a plank bridge that at any moment can plunge me into a cold, rocky stream or deliver me unharmed to the other side, the voice says, "You’re in the experimental group." And that is how I become a patient in what will turn out to be the world's most comprehensive study of diabetes, the DCCT or, to give it its full title, the "Diabetes Control and Complications Trial.” I feel chosen, you could even say liberated, as I will many times in America, where my English accent—a salad toss of nonOxbridge vowels—sounds Beatles sexy and urbane, as opposed to, in England, a set of notes that can shut doors.
I join with over 1,400 other volunteers in a nine-year international experiment to see what happens when diabetics, balancing food and insulin, try to maintain blood glucose levels as close to normal as possible—not less than 70 milliliters of glucose per deciliter of blood and not more than 120. When the results are announced in 1993, they are hailed as the most important finding in diabetic care since the discovery of insulin. They show that good blood glucose control (in the target range as often as possible) slows the onset and progression of the major debilitating complications. Indeed, the study reveals that any sustained decrease of blood sugar helps ward off illnesses even in people with poor control.
For those of us fortunate enough to be in the experimental group—where we test our blood glucose four or more times a day, give ourselves multiple daily insulin injections, stick to a diet and exercise plan, and visit the study’s health care team for monthly monitoring and testing—the risk of eye disease is reduced 76%, nerve disease 60%, and kidney disease 50%. The results are so dramatic that the comparison study is suspended a year early and all those in the standard-care group are offered to move to the experimental regime.
As part of the study, I’m assigned a diabetes educator named Clair, whom I see every month for many years and who says at our first meeting, her mouth swerving to the side, "It's easy to follow the protocol, you just have to think about diabetes every twenty minutes for the rest of the study." She might as well have added, “And for the rest of your life.” And that's what I do, me who disdains all routines. It’s interesting the shape you can assume with a gun to your head.
I once ask Mary, the psychologist I visit during the first few years, whether there is a diabetic personality. “Oh yes,” she replies, smiling, "there are those who are at war with the condition in themselves—and they develop the complications first—and there are those who find an identity in the disease and it helps if, like you, they’re neurotic compulsives." Well, yes, that’s true but never mind. I’m less interested in the Freudian profile she draws than in the philosophical one—pleased to be seen not as a Cartesean with a separate sense of body and mind but as the decidedly Aristotelian monist I consider myself to be: a person who, in choosing to be his disease instead of heroically trying to beat it, is free to complain all he wants of its irksome requirements.
During an examination, a doctor in the DCCT study tells me I should try harder to maintain tight control because I’m a representative for the thousands of diabetics who aren’t in the study. Like I am suddenly responsible for all those other poor diabetic slobs! I say, “I may be representative of a thousand diabetics, but I’m certainly not a representative for them. There was no election, and if there were one, I wouldn’t run. And if I ran, I wouldn’t be elected. And if I was elected, I would oppose the notion that volunteer patients should be fed this crap.” It’s the first time I realize that because a person is a doctor wearing a white coat with a tongue depressor in the pocket she’s not necessarily right. I want to slam out of her office, but I’m wearing one of those gowns where your ass sticks out the back.
Sudden reversal
Starbucks, June 15, 2007
I set about using the prompts to explore my life as a diabetic. I brainstormed with Laurie. “Needles,” “diagnosis,” and “altered states” were some of the topics that came up, and one by one I ticked them off. After I’d generated material, we began to shape it into a text called Sugartime for a performance piece, a la Spalding Gray’s monologues. In the prompt practice, ideas and memories flow, although if I’d tried to carve a narrative from whole cloth, I would not have known where to begin and I suspect I would have grown discouraged.
The Egyptians first recognized diabetes around 3,000 years ago, although the hormone insulin wasn’t identified until 1921. Ninety percent of diabetics (roughly three million in the US) have type 2, caused by overweight, sugary diets, and genes. Type 1, also known as juvenile diabetes or insulin-dependent diabetes, affects only 10% of people with the condition. I am one of those.
With type 1 diabetes, the immune system destroys the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas. Current theory suggests both genetic and environmental triggers, although the reasons remain unclear. Without insulin the body can’t transfer the sugar in blood to cells where it’s used for fuel. Blood sugars too high for too long, and you wind up with kidney failure, blindness, nerve damage, amputations, heart attacks, and strokes. Blood sugar too low, and you can’t think straight, although the altered brain states low sugars produce are temporary and cause no brain damage. Unless you go into coma. High or low sugars left untreated too long and the result is coma and death.
I became diabetic at twenty-three, which means I’ve had it for thirty-six years. I’ll die with the disease but perhaps not of it.
After the diagnosis, a nameless hope swam inside me that I could bring my sugars under control, step out of the mental fogs they usher in, and save myself from a future of blindness and missing limbs. The wish went unanswered until, in 1984, I read in a magazine about a diabetes study recruiting patients and I volunteered.
In a small annex of New York Hospital, a nurse interviews me about my health history, what I eat, how I sleep, and whether I think I’m a robot. A few weeks later, on a cold November day, the coordinator of the study hands me a phone. A voice on the other end says, “Wait,” while someone in Washington DC looks at a random number table, or checks me off a list, or tosses a coin to determine my assignment either to standard care, which will change nothing, or the experimental group, which can point me to a future. I never learn how the decision is made, but after moments during which I feel myself dancing lightly over a plank bridge that at any moment can plunge me into a cold, rocky stream or deliver me unharmed to the other side, the voice says, "You’re in the experimental group." And that is how I become a patient in what will turn out to be the world's most comprehensive study of diabetes, the DCCT or, to give it its full title, the "Diabetes Control and Complications Trial.” I feel chosen, you could even say liberated, as I will many times in America, where my English accent—a salad toss of nonOxbridge vowels—sounds Beatles sexy and urbane, as opposed to, in England, a set of notes that can shut doors.
I join with over 1,400 other volunteers in a nine-year international experiment to see what happens when diabetics, balancing food and insulin, try to maintain blood glucose levels as close to normal as possible—not less than 70 milliliters of glucose per deciliter of blood and not more than 120. When the results are announced in 1993, they are hailed as the most important finding in diabetic care since the discovery of insulin. They show that good blood glucose control (in the target range as often as possible) slows the onset and progression of the major debilitating complications. Indeed, the study reveals that any sustained decrease of blood sugar helps ward off illnesses even in people with poor control.
For those of us fortunate enough to be in the experimental group—where we test our blood glucose four or more times a day, give ourselves multiple daily insulin injections, stick to a diet and exercise plan, and visit the study’s health care team for monthly monitoring and testing—the risk of eye disease is reduced 76%, nerve disease 60%, and kidney disease 50%. The results are so dramatic that the comparison study is suspended a year early and all those in the standard-care group are offered to move to the experimental regime.
As part of the study, I’m assigned a diabetes educator named Clair, whom I see every month for many years and who says at our first meeting, her mouth swerving to the side, "It's easy to follow the protocol, you just have to think about diabetes every twenty minutes for the rest of the study." She might as well have added, “And for the rest of your life.” And that's what I do, me who disdains all routines. It’s interesting the shape you can assume with a gun to your head.
I once ask Mary, the psychologist I visit during the first few years, whether there is a diabetic personality. “Oh yes,” she replies, smiling, "there are those who are at war with the condition in themselves—and they develop the complications first—and there are those who find an identity in the disease and it helps if, like you, they’re neurotic compulsives." Well, yes, that’s true but never mind. I’m less interested in the Freudian profile she draws than in the philosophical one—pleased to be seen not as a Cartesean with a separate sense of body and mind but as the decidedly Aristotelian monist I consider myself to be: a person who, in choosing to be his disease instead of heroically trying to beat it, is free to complain all he wants of its irksome requirements.
During an examination, a doctor in the DCCT study tells me I should try harder to maintain tight control because I’m a representative for the thousands of diabetics who aren’t in the study. Like I am suddenly responsible for all those other poor diabetic slobs! I say, “I may be representative of a thousand diabetics, but I’m certainly not a representative for them. There was no election, and if there were one, I wouldn’t run. And if I ran, I wouldn’t be elected. And if I was elected, I would oppose the notion that volunteer patients should be fed this crap.” It’s the first time I realize that because a person is a doctor wearing a white coat with a tongue depressor in the pocket she’s not necessarily right. I want to slam out of her office, but I’m wearing one of those gowns where your ass sticks out the back.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Computer
Laurie
Computer
Starbucks, February 10, 2009
The right arrow key on my new Sony Vaio doesn’t advance. Otherwise, it’s a beaut with its matte black case and brilliant screen, dense with pixels. At Fry’s Electronics, Richards says it is ten times faster than the sluggish ThinkPad I’ve been using. It’s a present from him, and we float through payout because no one is buying anything in Phoenix. The great, black-box stadia of stuff are echoing ghost towns.
I leave Richard to set it up. We’ve already had a row about how, whenever he sits at my computer, I jump around, fearing he’ll change a setting. He’s experimental with machines, and they sense his power. He’s the computer whisperer. Me, I’m a set-me-up-exactly-as-I-like-it-and-don’t-teach-me-anything girl. The computer is me—like when your mother is cold and she says, “Put on a sweater.”
Richard thinks AOL uncool but kindly installs a couple of versions that pretend to be upgrades but screw things up until we get one that works. Word 2007 looks unfamiliar, and I wake up asking, “What has happened to ‘select all’?” And, “How to you set line spacing?”
But soon the machine is ready and I begin working on a document, and the right arrow key is really sticking. Richard is working in the bedroom. I knock and go in. He looks up. “What?”
“The right arrow key doesn’t work.”
He sighs and rises. If he were telling this story, he would say I need things to be exactly so as a show of power and entitlement. He loathes shows of power and entitlement. He sits at my computer, and I give him a wide berth. He presses the right arrow key hard, tap, tap, like a mallet. “It works.”
“But I don’t type that way.”
He tries to lift up the key pad, but it won’t pry off. He presses it down again, firmly. He resets the speed of the keys, but nothing helps.
“What can I do?”
He shrugs. “I mostly use the space bar and the mouse. How often do hit the right arrow key?” He thinks I should get used to it, but I am thinking: I’m going to work on this computer for four or five years, many hours a day, and I will hit that key hundreds of times a day, and it will never work.
“I use that key a lot.”
He throws up his hands, and his eyes get dark. In his family, you don’t complain and you are never supposed to return something to a store. You suck it up and make the best of your situation, and you do not make others meet your needs, especially store clerks because, as Richard has pointed out many times, English clerks don’t believe in providing service. They despise being seen in that role and are contemptuous of anyone who reminds them of it. “Okay. Let’s put it in back the box and return it,” he shouts. “You don’t have to have a new computer. I’m not going to set up another one.”
“But shouldn’t it work?”
“Call Fry’s. They will send it to Sony, and it won’t arrive back here before you go to New York.”
I call Fry’s and a nice young man named Chris says, “Bring it back right away, and we’ll give you a new one.”
Richard calms down immediately. It’s the damnest thing. Thwe problem is off his hands, and he gets an idea. “Ask if they’ll swap out the hard drives.” Chris says he can do it but there may be a fee. Now we’re in my field of expertise. I say, politely but firmly, “I don’t think there should be a charge. I’ve had it less than a week.” Chris says I can speak to a manager, but by the time we arrive he’s already taken care of it. On the ride over, Richard is smiling and relaxed, and I say I will buy him the Grateful Dead CD he’s been wanting. Chris exchanges the hard drives, and I test the keys, and they all work, and we are out the door in twenty minutes, and all I can think is that living with my preferences and restlessness about Arizona—and thinking he has to fix everything—is making Richard’s head explode.
Computer
Starbucks, February 10, 2009
The right arrow key on my new Sony Vaio doesn’t advance. Otherwise, it’s a beaut with its matte black case and brilliant screen, dense with pixels. At Fry’s Electronics, Richards says it is ten times faster than the sluggish ThinkPad I’ve been using. It’s a present from him, and we float through payout because no one is buying anything in Phoenix. The great, black-box stadia of stuff are echoing ghost towns.
I leave Richard to set it up. We’ve already had a row about how, whenever he sits at my computer, I jump around, fearing he’ll change a setting. He’s experimental with machines, and they sense his power. He’s the computer whisperer. Me, I’m a set-me-up-exactly-as-I-like-it-and-don’t-teach-me-anything girl. The computer is me—like when your mother is cold and she says, “Put on a sweater.”
Richard thinks AOL uncool but kindly installs a couple of versions that pretend to be upgrades but screw things up until we get one that works. Word 2007 looks unfamiliar, and I wake up asking, “What has happened to ‘select all’?” And, “How to you set line spacing?”
But soon the machine is ready and I begin working on a document, and the right arrow key is really sticking. Richard is working in the bedroom. I knock and go in. He looks up. “What?”
“The right arrow key doesn’t work.”
He sighs and rises. If he were telling this story, he would say I need things to be exactly so as a show of power and entitlement. He loathes shows of power and entitlement. He sits at my computer, and I give him a wide berth. He presses the right arrow key hard, tap, tap, like a mallet. “It works.”
“But I don’t type that way.”
He tries to lift up the key pad, but it won’t pry off. He presses it down again, firmly. He resets the speed of the keys, but nothing helps.
“What can I do?”
He shrugs. “I mostly use the space bar and the mouse. How often do hit the right arrow key?” He thinks I should get used to it, but I am thinking: I’m going to work on this computer for four or five years, many hours a day, and I will hit that key hundreds of times a day, and it will never work.
“I use that key a lot.”
He throws up his hands, and his eyes get dark. In his family, you don’t complain and you are never supposed to return something to a store. You suck it up and make the best of your situation, and you do not make others meet your needs, especially store clerks because, as Richard has pointed out many times, English clerks don’t believe in providing service. They despise being seen in that role and are contemptuous of anyone who reminds them of it. “Okay. Let’s put it in back the box and return it,” he shouts. “You don’t have to have a new computer. I’m not going to set up another one.”
“But shouldn’t it work?”
“Call Fry’s. They will send it to Sony, and it won’t arrive back here before you go to New York.”
I call Fry’s and a nice young man named Chris says, “Bring it back right away, and we’ll give you a new one.”
Richard calms down immediately. It’s the damnest thing. Thwe problem is off his hands, and he gets an idea. “Ask if they’ll swap out the hard drives.” Chris says he can do it but there may be a fee. Now we’re in my field of expertise. I say, politely but firmly, “I don’t think there should be a charge. I’ve had it less than a week.” Chris says I can speak to a manager, but by the time we arrive he’s already taken care of it. On the ride over, Richard is smiling and relaxed, and I say I will buy him the Grateful Dead CD he’s been wanting. Chris exchanges the hard drives, and I test the keys, and they all work, and we are out the door in twenty minutes, and all I can think is that living with my preferences and restlessness about Arizona—and thinking he has to fix everything—is making Richard’s head explode.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Corn
Laurie
Corn
Spotted Dog, August 25, 2008
I am an admirer of Julie Hecht, and having just finished reading her latest collection of short stories, Happy Trails to You, I tried a prompt using her deadpan delivery and comic awareness of mortality.
Lana asked me to collect corn, tossing over canvas bags. "Take thirteen. It won't matter." She picked strawberries for the farm, and the extra corn was her tip. The canvas bags had seen better days. The straps were frayed, and bits of soil clung to the insides. What would be a better day for a canvas bag? Being packed with a picnic and carted off on a tropical cruise, maybe. The times I’d been on sailboats I gotten seasick. Once I sailed up the Hudson with a young man I had hopes for, but he found me argumentative.
I picked out the fattest ears from the bin and looked at them with apprehension. Lana was having people to dinner and would expect me to eat at least two. She was a food Maoist. You had to eat corn the day it was picked, and you couldn’t refuse it. The food you brought into her house had to be organic. To her a supermarket egg was a bomb. When I see corn I think carbohydrates and see fat, lonely old age. It would be impossible to abstain tonight.
Lana gathered lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and string beans. A crate was piled high with winter squash the color of pumpkins and on their rinds grew warty patches that looked like the shins of old men. Lana said she didn't eat winter squash in summer. I said I would take one, thinking I could defend myself from the corn, even though winter squash is high in carbs too. I hadn't eaten any sort of squash in a while. The man with whom I’d sailed up the Hudson now had the scaly shins of an old man. He thought at this point of life, when nothing was going to last that long, maybe we had a shot. I pretended not to know what he was saying. I was living the life of a house guest and in that circumstance could eat corn.
Lana cooked the ears just right and set a platter on the table with gray salt from a moody, turbulent sea. I picked up the largest ear and sank my teeth in. I had never tasted anything so good. The sweetness, the crunch, the perfume, the Naples yellow of the kernels. Corn is a weed encouraged to colonize the planet because it feeds cattle, whose methane gas emissions comprise a large percentage of the greenhouse gases dooming Earth. The man who sailed up the Hudson liked to pack a canvas bag with caviar and toast points and imagine he was Noel Coward and Gerty Lawrence setting off for a day of ease. I finished off two ears and part of a third, forgetting I was going to die of some damn thing food could not protect me from and that the Earth was on its way to becoming a garbage dump.
Corn
Spotted Dog, August 25, 2008
I am an admirer of Julie Hecht, and having just finished reading her latest collection of short stories, Happy Trails to You, I tried a prompt using her deadpan delivery and comic awareness of mortality.
Lana asked me to collect corn, tossing over canvas bags. "Take thirteen. It won't matter." She picked strawberries for the farm, and the extra corn was her tip. The canvas bags had seen better days. The straps were frayed, and bits of soil clung to the insides. What would be a better day for a canvas bag? Being packed with a picnic and carted off on a tropical cruise, maybe. The times I’d been on sailboats I gotten seasick. Once I sailed up the Hudson with a young man I had hopes for, but he found me argumentative.
I picked out the fattest ears from the bin and looked at them with apprehension. Lana was having people to dinner and would expect me to eat at least two. She was a food Maoist. You had to eat corn the day it was picked, and you couldn’t refuse it. The food you brought into her house had to be organic. To her a supermarket egg was a bomb. When I see corn I think carbohydrates and see fat, lonely old age. It would be impossible to abstain tonight.
Lana gathered lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and string beans. A crate was piled high with winter squash the color of pumpkins and on their rinds grew warty patches that looked like the shins of old men. Lana said she didn't eat winter squash in summer. I said I would take one, thinking I could defend myself from the corn, even though winter squash is high in carbs too. I hadn't eaten any sort of squash in a while. The man with whom I’d sailed up the Hudson now had the scaly shins of an old man. He thought at this point of life, when nothing was going to last that long, maybe we had a shot. I pretended not to know what he was saying. I was living the life of a house guest and in that circumstance could eat corn.
Lana cooked the ears just right and set a platter on the table with gray salt from a moody, turbulent sea. I picked up the largest ear and sank my teeth in. I had never tasted anything so good. The sweetness, the crunch, the perfume, the Naples yellow of the kernels. Corn is a weed encouraged to colonize the planet because it feeds cattle, whose methane gas emissions comprise a large percentage of the greenhouse gases dooming Earth. The man who sailed up the Hudson liked to pack a canvas bag with caviar and toast points and imagine he was Noel Coward and Gerty Lawrence setting off for a day of ease. I finished off two ears and part of a third, forgetting I was going to die of some damn thing food could not protect me from and that the Earth was on its way to becoming a garbage dump.
A thing I can't explain
Laurie
A thing I can't explain
Starbucks, August 9, 2007
I don't understand our tree, Palmy. When we found him in front of the oleander hedge, stuck in a black plastic tub, he was a stick with a dusty frond. The tips of it were burned. “Look,” Richard pointed, and I rushed over. “I knew you’d have that reaction.”
The tub weighed thirty pounds. Richard lugged it to our patio. Then we bought a big pot and soil at Home Depot. For the first few weeks, I gave him water and placed him in the sun. I snipped off the burned bits from his sad frond, and he looked worse. After a while, a tiny, pointed baby frond poked up from the heart of the stick. Palmy may have been on the brink of extinction, but he’d averted the abyss.
Yesterday Ellen brought Toby to see a psychopharmacologist who spoke to her in Yiddish. Her eyes lit up. She said she wanted to come every day. Prim said she could live another five years. My mother is the Palmy of human beings.
In the park, I noticed Palmy’s relatives growing lush green fronds in the shade along a stream. I removed him from the sun, kept his soil moist, and misted him every few hours with a hose. “You’ve created the conditions of a rain forest,” Richard said. Palmy began sending forth frond after frond, each one larger than its predecessor and hairier—lacey fibers adorn healthy fronds. So far five, lustrous green fans have unfurled. A baby shoot faces the previous one, then, as it emerges, twists out at a 90 degree angle, its accordion pleats opening slowly, the stalks growing springy and strong.
My mother dreams of running for a bus. Strangers watch the tottering old woman and yell for the driver to stop. Toby thanks them, smiling, dimples in her cheeks. She takes the gloved hand of the man who helps her up the stairs. “Oh, thank-you. My legs aren’t young. I wish I had your youth, darling, I wish you all the best, you are so kind." She turns to say goodbye to the people watching her on the street before disappearing into the wheezing chariot.
A thing I can't explain
Starbucks, August 9, 2007
I don't understand our tree, Palmy. When we found him in front of the oleander hedge, stuck in a black plastic tub, he was a stick with a dusty frond. The tips of it were burned. “Look,” Richard pointed, and I rushed over. “I knew you’d have that reaction.”
The tub weighed thirty pounds. Richard lugged it to our patio. Then we bought a big pot and soil at Home Depot. For the first few weeks, I gave him water and placed him in the sun. I snipped off the burned bits from his sad frond, and he looked worse. After a while, a tiny, pointed baby frond poked up from the heart of the stick. Palmy may have been on the brink of extinction, but he’d averted the abyss.
Yesterday Ellen brought Toby to see a psychopharmacologist who spoke to her in Yiddish. Her eyes lit up. She said she wanted to come every day. Prim said she could live another five years. My mother is the Palmy of human beings.
In the park, I noticed Palmy’s relatives growing lush green fronds in the shade along a stream. I removed him from the sun, kept his soil moist, and misted him every few hours with a hose. “You’ve created the conditions of a rain forest,” Richard said. Palmy began sending forth frond after frond, each one larger than its predecessor and hairier—lacey fibers adorn healthy fronds. So far five, lustrous green fans have unfurled. A baby shoot faces the previous one, then, as it emerges, twists out at a 90 degree angle, its accordion pleats opening slowly, the stalks growing springy and strong.
My mother dreams of running for a bus. Strangers watch the tottering old woman and yell for the driver to stop. Toby thanks them, smiling, dimples in her cheeks. She takes the gloved hand of the man who helps her up the stairs. “Oh, thank-you. My legs aren’t young. I wish I had your youth, darling, I wish you all the best, you are so kind." She turns to say goodbye to the people watching her on the street before disappearing into the wheezing chariot.
Aretha
Laurie
Aretha
Starbucks, January 20, 2009
Aretha stood in front of the million people gathered in the frigid D. C. air, looking out with her practiced performer’s cool. A ridiculously extravagant hat in the shape of a giant bow sat at a jaunty angle above her brow. She sang America with her smoky, opulent voice. “Land where our fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride, on every mountainside, let freedom ring.” The words shot into the icy air and drifted down, warming the crowd. Her velvet voice covered our glistening cheeks. She took her time in Club Planet, this woman with the proportions of a fertility goddess. She sang of how her life as a church singer was braided into the history of jazz, gospel, and soul, a history of black people in this country that produced the new president. She didn’t smile or shudder. She sang of choosing love over hate, although hate is comforting. Barack is the baby come out of this mixing. He is young enough not to feel described by the insult of racism. It has not made him feel stupid or ineffectual, and his mother did not have to dislike herself or regret her life—largely because of activists fighting for black people and women. The past eight years it had seemed their efforts could be turned back, but now it appears that an idea whose time has come can’t really be stopped.
Aretha
Starbucks, January 20, 2009
Aretha stood in front of the million people gathered in the frigid D. C. air, looking out with her practiced performer’s cool. A ridiculously extravagant hat in the shape of a giant bow sat at a jaunty angle above her brow. She sang America with her smoky, opulent voice. “Land where our fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride, on every mountainside, let freedom ring.” The words shot into the icy air and drifted down, warming the crowd. Her velvet voice covered our glistening cheeks. She took her time in Club Planet, this woman with the proportions of a fertility goddess. She sang of how her life as a church singer was braided into the history of jazz, gospel, and soul, a history of black people in this country that produced the new president. She didn’t smile or shudder. She sang of choosing love over hate, although hate is comforting. Barack is the baby come out of this mixing. He is young enough not to feel described by the insult of racism. It has not made him feel stupid or ineffectual, and his mother did not have to dislike herself or regret her life—largely because of activists fighting for black people and women. The past eight years it had seemed their efforts could be turned back, but now it appears that an idea whose time has come can’t really be stopped.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Barack in a flash
Laurie
Barack in a flash
Starbucks, February 25, 2008
Barack Obama is strolling down a corridor in a TV studio. Beside him a young woman with glistening brown hair and an impish smile twitters, a little star struck, and the tall man has to stoop to hear her, bend at the neck and look up because a camera is trained on him. The reporter asks what phone number of a celebrity people would be surprised to find in his cell, and he squints, concentrating. He’s not annoyed that the question might trivialize him. In his well tailored suit, nothing could have that effect. He’s not slumming or truckling the way, during his first bid for President, Bill Clinton, appearing on MTV, came off uncool because he wanted to fit in. Neither need nor embarrassment rearranges Barack’s thin-cheeked composure. His hair is close cropped, revealing a skull you can call handsome, though that word isn’t easily attached to someone so gaunt and lanky, a man whose calves you can picture as tight little balls. There’s the swinging grace of him, the ease that doesn’t seem smug but almost shy. He considers the reporter’s question and in that moment he takes shape. Slowly, and a little hesitantly beause it's his manner to reflect carefully before answering a question, he says, "Well, I'm not sure if people would be surprised by this, but I have Jay-Z’s number in my phone.” The reporter beams and her hair swings, and she asks how they met, and Barack says at a fundraising event, which isn’t a surprise, really, when you consider that Jay-Z is one of the richest entertainers in music and the CEO and founder of two record companies, Jay-Z being worth around 600 million dollars although he grew up poor in the BedSty section of Brooklyn. When Barack mentions Jay-Z, we’re shown a clip of the rapper with jabbing hands and a gansta scowl. Barack says that Jay-Z is talented and intelligent. He’s not saying, “You might not think this but . . . .” He speaks about him as presidential candidate referring to successful rapper—peer to peer. In the way he regards this other young African-American striver—Barack’s education at Columbia University and Harvard Law School glinting from his intelligent eyes—in the seriousness with which he takes Jay-Z who is expressing an interest in electoral politics, maybe for the first time in a long while or for the first time ever, in the way he sails unruffled through this spot on an entertainment news program, he shows how he is captivating a generation of voters who do not want to be talked down to, who want to think that the man who might be president is someone who could get them. A smile forms slowly on his face, a patented smile, and his thin cheeks are etched with two deep creases that speak of late nights and worry. The viewer has no idea what he is really feeling, only sees that he is polite. The gentleness is compelling. It is very attractive. There is nothing of the snake about the long-limbed man.
Barack in a flash
Starbucks, February 25, 2008
Barack Obama is strolling down a corridor in a TV studio. Beside him a young woman with glistening brown hair and an impish smile twitters, a little star struck, and the tall man has to stoop to hear her, bend at the neck and look up because a camera is trained on him. The reporter asks what phone number of a celebrity people would be surprised to find in his cell, and he squints, concentrating. He’s not annoyed that the question might trivialize him. In his well tailored suit, nothing could have that effect. He’s not slumming or truckling the way, during his first bid for President, Bill Clinton, appearing on MTV, came off uncool because he wanted to fit in. Neither need nor embarrassment rearranges Barack’s thin-cheeked composure. His hair is close cropped, revealing a skull you can call handsome, though that word isn’t easily attached to someone so gaunt and lanky, a man whose calves you can picture as tight little balls. There’s the swinging grace of him, the ease that doesn’t seem smug but almost shy. He considers the reporter’s question and in that moment he takes shape. Slowly, and a little hesitantly beause it's his manner to reflect carefully before answering a question, he says, "Well, I'm not sure if people would be surprised by this, but I have Jay-Z’s number in my phone.” The reporter beams and her hair swings, and she asks how they met, and Barack says at a fundraising event, which isn’t a surprise, really, when you consider that Jay-Z is one of the richest entertainers in music and the CEO and founder of two record companies, Jay-Z being worth around 600 million dollars although he grew up poor in the BedSty section of Brooklyn. When Barack mentions Jay-Z, we’re shown a clip of the rapper with jabbing hands and a gansta scowl. Barack says that Jay-Z is talented and intelligent. He’s not saying, “You might not think this but . . . .” He speaks about him as presidential candidate referring to successful rapper—peer to peer. In the way he regards this other young African-American striver—Barack’s education at Columbia University and Harvard Law School glinting from his intelligent eyes—in the seriousness with which he takes Jay-Z who is expressing an interest in electoral politics, maybe for the first time in a long while or for the first time ever, in the way he sails unruffled through this spot on an entertainment news program, he shows how he is captivating a generation of voters who do not want to be talked down to, who want to think that the man who might be president is someone who could get them. A smile forms slowly on his face, a patented smile, and his thin cheeks are etched with two deep creases that speak of late nights and worry. The viewer has no idea what he is really feeling, only sees that he is polite. The gentleness is compelling. It is very attractive. There is nothing of the snake about the long-limbed man.
God's Love Toby
Laurie
God's Love Toby
Starbucks, March 25, 2008
In the 1970s, my sister’s husband buys a health food store on 52nd Street, and my parents work there, my mother in the front, the Czarina of vitamins, my father, the ex-coat manufacturer, in the back, whipping up smoothies and lunch specials. “Where is Toby?” people ask, first thing. My mother is never happier; the streets are inside the shop. She kibitzes with Greta Garbo, pretending not to know who she is. “You, Toby,” Greta asks, “you know what it is, a man?” My mother shoots a look at Murray, who is slicing an avocado. “That’s what I know, end of story.” The store booms for ten years, but the landlord jacks the rent and my brother-in-law is forced to sell. After my father dies, my mother cooks for God’s Love We Deliver, the organization that feeds homebound people with AIDS. She stands on her feet during three-hour shifts, dicing onions, potatoes, and carrots, and she’s part of a crowd again. They drag her out for coffee and Chinese food. God’s Love is what she talks about: Karen’s dating debacles, Ben’s heart murmur. I volunteer there, too, and one day the head chef calls me complaining that Toby is making racist remarks. They’ve put up with it for more than a year. “Talk to her,” he says, and so I go to her apartment and we sit at the cherry wood dining table with walnut inlays.
“May I be struck by lightning if I ever said such a thing.” She doesn’t look me in the eye. “They're lying.”
"Frankie says you talk about ‘them,’ use the word ‘swartzers’. Everyone knows what that means."
"You're siding with them?" She shakes her head and presses her lips together. “I should have known. You’d sell me down the river in a heartbeat."
“I’m on your side," I say, but can this be true? She wants my allegiance no matter what, and I want hers. So what else is new?
She eyes a plaque on the wall: a reproduction of an Assyrian lion hunt from the Met. A lion is crouching at the feet of galloping horses, mighty in himself with eyes ablaze but cornered. "Who the hell are they to tell me what I can say? What, I’m going to be fired from a volunteer job?"
"How would you feel if people slammed Jews?"
"They hate Jews! That's why they’re ganging up on me."
"Ma, you’re doing the same thing."
"People are jealous of Jews, blacks included. I can't stand them."
"All of them?"
"No. Some, I like."
"Well. You have to think about other people’s feelings."
She sets down her cup, and the saucer rattles. "I thought about other people my whole life. I don't want to be gagged."
"Just stop being nasty. How hard is that?" I ought to know. I wake up mornings with lists of lost friends I’ve offended. The rats that survive the longest are the ones that adapt. The rats with the longest lives retain the fewest unhappy memories.
Toby is silent, searching for a way to be herself and yet remain at the party. In the end, she’s asked to leave, and she looks sad and ashamed when she tells me. I feel for her, but then blood flows into her cheeks. "I don’t need them. I don't need to work there anymore."
During the months before she dies, she goes in and out of dementia. When her aides go shopping, she flings herself from her wheelchair onto the floor and tumbles to the door, bringing down tables and chairs. She can’t walk, but there is strength in her right hand and leg. She strips off her pants and underwear, crawls into the hall naked, and bangs on neighbors’ doors. She wheels herself to the elevator, rides to the lobby, and tells the doormen she’s being beaten by her aides. She wants contact. Every time she falls, she has to be picked up and held. Before she was disabled, she was uncomfortable with touch. Afterward, she kisses people’s hands and slides them across her cheeks. All of her aides are black. She is scared that Primrose, who has been with her since she returned from rehab, will leave. I say she won’t.
In Richard’s family, hostility is expressed through pity. “Poor old uncle Henry,” his father will say, “he never did get much of a break in life.” My sister tells a story. My mother is having coffee after attending a class at Hunter College, when a voice burns through the cafeteria din, “So you’re still alive.” It’s my mother’s sister, Bell, who disappears, or maybe Toby lowers her head. Next a card with a picture of a rat arrives in the mail, signed Bell. “You believe this happened?” I ask Ellen. “Mom’s address and phone number aren’t listed.”
One time when Ellen calls, Prim asks my mother if she knows who Ellen is. Toby says, “My sister.” I think she may have confused Ellen’s name with Bell’s, or mixed up the words daughter and sister. When Ellen visits, Toby remembers a quarrel with Bell, and Ellen says, “She’s probably dead.” Toby bursts into tears, saying she has seen her sister on TV, waving to her.
On the phone, my mother tells me: “Primrose says you come to New York every week and don’t visit.” It’s not true, I say. “That’s what Primrose says.” My mother reminds me of my grandmother when she was old and confused. She once called me to report she’d read Toby’s obituary in the newspaper and wanted to know where her daughter was buried. Did she want Toby dead, given that my mother had refused to speak to her for over a decade?
On the phone, Toby asks if I have children.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“They’re not that easy to produce.”
“I thought you would have six by now.”
I look at my hands that are hers, small boned and veiny.
God's Love Toby
Starbucks, March 25, 2008
In the 1970s, my sister’s husband buys a health food store on 52nd Street, and my parents work there, my mother in the front, the Czarina of vitamins, my father, the ex-coat manufacturer, in the back, whipping up smoothies and lunch specials. “Where is Toby?” people ask, first thing. My mother is never happier; the streets are inside the shop. She kibitzes with Greta Garbo, pretending not to know who she is. “You, Toby,” Greta asks, “you know what it is, a man?” My mother shoots a look at Murray, who is slicing an avocado. “That’s what I know, end of story.” The store booms for ten years, but the landlord jacks the rent and my brother-in-law is forced to sell. After my father dies, my mother cooks for God’s Love We Deliver, the organization that feeds homebound people with AIDS. She stands on her feet during three-hour shifts, dicing onions, potatoes, and carrots, and she’s part of a crowd again. They drag her out for coffee and Chinese food. God’s Love is what she talks about: Karen’s dating debacles, Ben’s heart murmur. I volunteer there, too, and one day the head chef calls me complaining that Toby is making racist remarks. They’ve put up with it for more than a year. “Talk to her,” he says, and so I go to her apartment and we sit at the cherry wood dining table with walnut inlays.
“May I be struck by lightning if I ever said such a thing.” She doesn’t look me in the eye. “They're lying.”
"Frankie says you talk about ‘them,’ use the word ‘swartzers’. Everyone knows what that means."
"You're siding with them?" She shakes her head and presses her lips together. “I should have known. You’d sell me down the river in a heartbeat."
“I’m on your side," I say, but can this be true? She wants my allegiance no matter what, and I want hers. So what else is new?
She eyes a plaque on the wall: a reproduction of an Assyrian lion hunt from the Met. A lion is crouching at the feet of galloping horses, mighty in himself with eyes ablaze but cornered. "Who the hell are they to tell me what I can say? What, I’m going to be fired from a volunteer job?"
"How would you feel if people slammed Jews?"
"They hate Jews! That's why they’re ganging up on me."
"Ma, you’re doing the same thing."
"People are jealous of Jews, blacks included. I can't stand them."
"All of them?"
"No. Some, I like."
"Well. You have to think about other people’s feelings."
She sets down her cup, and the saucer rattles. "I thought about other people my whole life. I don't want to be gagged."
"Just stop being nasty. How hard is that?" I ought to know. I wake up mornings with lists of lost friends I’ve offended. The rats that survive the longest are the ones that adapt. The rats with the longest lives retain the fewest unhappy memories.
Toby is silent, searching for a way to be herself and yet remain at the party. In the end, she’s asked to leave, and she looks sad and ashamed when she tells me. I feel for her, but then blood flows into her cheeks. "I don’t need them. I don't need to work there anymore."
During the months before she dies, she goes in and out of dementia. When her aides go shopping, she flings herself from her wheelchair onto the floor and tumbles to the door, bringing down tables and chairs. She can’t walk, but there is strength in her right hand and leg. She strips off her pants and underwear, crawls into the hall naked, and bangs on neighbors’ doors. She wheels herself to the elevator, rides to the lobby, and tells the doormen she’s being beaten by her aides. She wants contact. Every time she falls, she has to be picked up and held. Before she was disabled, she was uncomfortable with touch. Afterward, she kisses people’s hands and slides them across her cheeks. All of her aides are black. She is scared that Primrose, who has been with her since she returned from rehab, will leave. I say she won’t.
In Richard’s family, hostility is expressed through pity. “Poor old uncle Henry,” his father will say, “he never did get much of a break in life.” My sister tells a story. My mother is having coffee after attending a class at Hunter College, when a voice burns through the cafeteria din, “So you’re still alive.” It’s my mother’s sister, Bell, who disappears, or maybe Toby lowers her head. Next a card with a picture of a rat arrives in the mail, signed Bell. “You believe this happened?” I ask Ellen. “Mom’s address and phone number aren’t listed.”
One time when Ellen calls, Prim asks my mother if she knows who Ellen is. Toby says, “My sister.” I think she may have confused Ellen’s name with Bell’s, or mixed up the words daughter and sister. When Ellen visits, Toby remembers a quarrel with Bell, and Ellen says, “She’s probably dead.” Toby bursts into tears, saying she has seen her sister on TV, waving to her.
On the phone, my mother tells me: “Primrose says you come to New York every week and don’t visit.” It’s not true, I say. “That’s what Primrose says.” My mother reminds me of my grandmother when she was old and confused. She once called me to report she’d read Toby’s obituary in the newspaper and wanted to know where her daughter was buried. Did she want Toby dead, given that my mother had refused to speak to her for over a decade?
On the phone, Toby asks if I have children.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“They’re not that easy to produce.”
“I thought you would have six by now.”
I look at my hands that are hers, small boned and veiny.
Keys
Richard
Keys
Starbucks, January 7, 2009
It was only when I arrived at the back of our apartment complex and I was looking for the key to unlock the gate that I realized I’d taken the wrong bunch. That didn’t stop me trying keys I knew wouldn’t work. I was a little self-conscious, as three of my neighbors had oddly set up beach chairs in the parking lot and were watching me fumble.
I could see them out of the corner of my eye, arranged in a row, as if waiting for a concert in a park, a family: parents in their late fifties and a daughter who looked twenty-five. They wore t-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops, and the man was drinking from a can. “You have to reach through and try the key from the other side,” he called out.
I’d seen him the day before, pushing a supermarket cart to the gate when Laurie and I were returning home. He hoisted up his twelve-pack of beer and asked us to hold the door open for him. When he’d passed through, we’d quietly shared our disapproval of his abandoning the cart. He said something to us, but his speech was a little slurred. Today his voice was clear. “Try the key from the other side,” he repeated. I knew it was futile, but I picked another key from the loop and made a show of trying it in the lock. “I have the wrong keys,” I shouted back. “I’ll have to go home and get the right one.”
He said something to his daughter, smiling. She walked over, putting her hand in the pocket of her candy striped shorts. “I’ll try my key.” The path was narrow. I could smell that she smoked. As she tried her key, I could see into her cleavage and the lace edge of her bra. Her key didn’t work either.
The man again. “Reach through. Try it from the other side. The lock’s busted.”
I was feeling trapped by their helpfulness or was it the part of me that simply cannot, ever, behave in a way that could be construed as impolite? A car drove toward the automatic gate around the corner. As the gate began its slow-motion parting, the mother said, “Run. You can get out now if you’re quick.” I don’t run. It’s a public thing, eyes on me, die of embarrassment, like the time in Blackpool, when we were sitting in a row in Stanley Park just like this family and my father reached under his seat and felt the token there and knew that the magician performing on stage was going to call him up front and instead of enduring the surpassing horror of that experience got us all on our feet—my mother, brother, sister, and me—and marched us off as the magician jeered at the cowardly spoilsport slinking away. Dad was trapped in either choice. “I don’t think so,” I said weakly.
The daughter said, “Why don’t you push on it while I try the lock.” I felt I had to follow her suggestion, and as I leaned in, her body brushed against my side, enjoyable, unwelcome.
The man got up, placed his can beside his chair, and walked over. “Let me try.” There were small scratches and bruises on his ruddy face. He’s been in a fight, I thought, or maybe fallen down drunk. What did I want so badly to escape from? The way he exposed his life for all to see or was it my fascination with his freedom? “Thanks, thanks,” I said.
He took the daughter’s key, reached through the gate, inserted it into the lock on the other side, and pressed his shoulder against the railing. It swung open, and he smiled.
“Thank you so much,” I said, “I’ll leave it open so I can get back in later.”
The daughter stepped through and picked up a large rock that was next to the wall. “I’ll prop it open with this.”
“Going to the store?” The man asked.
“To the coffee shop.”
“Don’t worry about the gate. We’ll still be here when you get back. How long are you going to be?”
I thanked him but didn’t say a time. I wished I hadn’t mixed up the keys, wished I’d driven. All the way to the coffee shop, I nursed my resentment for his help.
Keys
Starbucks, January 7, 2009
It was only when I arrived at the back of our apartment complex and I was looking for the key to unlock the gate that I realized I’d taken the wrong bunch. That didn’t stop me trying keys I knew wouldn’t work. I was a little self-conscious, as three of my neighbors had oddly set up beach chairs in the parking lot and were watching me fumble.
I could see them out of the corner of my eye, arranged in a row, as if waiting for a concert in a park, a family: parents in their late fifties and a daughter who looked twenty-five. They wore t-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops, and the man was drinking from a can. “You have to reach through and try the key from the other side,” he called out.
I’d seen him the day before, pushing a supermarket cart to the gate when Laurie and I were returning home. He hoisted up his twelve-pack of beer and asked us to hold the door open for him. When he’d passed through, we’d quietly shared our disapproval of his abandoning the cart. He said something to us, but his speech was a little slurred. Today his voice was clear. “Try the key from the other side,” he repeated. I knew it was futile, but I picked another key from the loop and made a show of trying it in the lock. “I have the wrong keys,” I shouted back. “I’ll have to go home and get the right one.”
He said something to his daughter, smiling. She walked over, putting her hand in the pocket of her candy striped shorts. “I’ll try my key.” The path was narrow. I could smell that she smoked. As she tried her key, I could see into her cleavage and the lace edge of her bra. Her key didn’t work either.
The man again. “Reach through. Try it from the other side. The lock’s busted.”
I was feeling trapped by their helpfulness or was it the part of me that simply cannot, ever, behave in a way that could be construed as impolite? A car drove toward the automatic gate around the corner. As the gate began its slow-motion parting, the mother said, “Run. You can get out now if you’re quick.” I don’t run. It’s a public thing, eyes on me, die of embarrassment, like the time in Blackpool, when we were sitting in a row in Stanley Park just like this family and my father reached under his seat and felt the token there and knew that the magician performing on stage was going to call him up front and instead of enduring the surpassing horror of that experience got us all on our feet—my mother, brother, sister, and me—and marched us off as the magician jeered at the cowardly spoilsport slinking away. Dad was trapped in either choice. “I don’t think so,” I said weakly.
The daughter said, “Why don’t you push on it while I try the lock.” I felt I had to follow her suggestion, and as I leaned in, her body brushed against my side, enjoyable, unwelcome.
The man got up, placed his can beside his chair, and walked over. “Let me try.” There were small scratches and bruises on his ruddy face. He’s been in a fight, I thought, or maybe fallen down drunk. What did I want so badly to escape from? The way he exposed his life for all to see or was it my fascination with his freedom? “Thanks, thanks,” I said.
He took the daughter’s key, reached through the gate, inserted it into the lock on the other side, and pressed his shoulder against the railing. It swung open, and he smiled.
“Thank you so much,” I said, “I’ll leave it open so I can get back in later.”
The daughter stepped through and picked up a large rock that was next to the wall. “I’ll prop it open with this.”
“Going to the store?” The man asked.
“To the coffee shop.”
“Don’t worry about the gate. We’ll still be here when you get back. How long are you going to be?”
I thanked him but didn’t say a time. I wished I hadn’t mixed up the keys, wished I’d driven. All the way to the coffee shop, I nursed my resentment for his help.
Avatar
Richard
Avatar
Starbucks, January 18, 2009
When Suzanne and I met a couple of evenings ago, she asked if I “really missed” the old car—a blue, 1993 Altima we’d put 165,000 miles on. She played with her coaster and looked up. “It’s been good to me.” She has a relationship with the car. Is it an avatar, a cyborg, or a familiar? That depends on whether she’s inside or outside it. When she’s at the wheel, the car becomes an exoskeleton—or a cyborg extending her body. When the car is parked, it’s more a familiar—like a cat she worries about exposing to lousy weather.
The Altima is headed for a retirement home or a scrap yard, like the discarded robots in Steven Spielberg’s film A.I. Laurie’s eyes welled up when I said I was thinking of donating it to the Kidney Foundation, where it would probably go to auction or be broken up for parts. Suzanne also gave me an alarmed look, as if I was evicting a defenseless relative. When I drive the Nissan, I feel a little down-at-heel, although it’s still got surprising pep. It’s an aging rake, like the glossy but worn out friend of Laurie’s we met in a bar this past Christmas. His hands shook a little as he sipped a glass of wine. His shirt collar was frayed under his elegant, expensive suit. Twice he left to smoke a cigarette outside. All that aroused tenderness in me, and it’s that way with the Nissan, which I have found myself referring to as Nissie, the nickname Laurie dubbed it.
Suzanne is passing back to me the 2003 Prius we bought together and that she has driven since our split—she’s just replaced it with a brand new model. The Prius stirs no feelings of identification. How could it, it’s such a clean, functional, and efficient hunk of machinery? It’s a Japanese car that reminds me of a Swede, something a visiting nurse would drive, or a careful consumer, or a sensible family man. Help, I miss Nissie as I pull slowly away from the stop light to maintain my MPG readout above 47. The car is taking over. I put my foot down on the accelerator and feel the fuel draining from me! It’s nothing new. A walking stick feels like an extension of your hand when it scrapes the gravel on a path, and likewise I feel the road through the Prius’ wheels, the weight of all those D-cell batteries as we corner. Neurobiologists say we have no souls but are tools “all the way down.” I believe them.
Avatar
Starbucks, January 18, 2009
When Suzanne and I met a couple of evenings ago, she asked if I “really missed” the old car—a blue, 1993 Altima we’d put 165,000 miles on. She played with her coaster and looked up. “It’s been good to me.” She has a relationship with the car. Is it an avatar, a cyborg, or a familiar? That depends on whether she’s inside or outside it. When she’s at the wheel, the car becomes an exoskeleton—or a cyborg extending her body. When the car is parked, it’s more a familiar—like a cat she worries about exposing to lousy weather.
The Altima is headed for a retirement home or a scrap yard, like the discarded robots in Steven Spielberg’s film A.I. Laurie’s eyes welled up when I said I was thinking of donating it to the Kidney Foundation, where it would probably go to auction or be broken up for parts. Suzanne also gave me an alarmed look, as if I was evicting a defenseless relative. When I drive the Nissan, I feel a little down-at-heel, although it’s still got surprising pep. It’s an aging rake, like the glossy but worn out friend of Laurie’s we met in a bar this past Christmas. His hands shook a little as he sipped a glass of wine. His shirt collar was frayed under his elegant, expensive suit. Twice he left to smoke a cigarette outside. All that aroused tenderness in me, and it’s that way with the Nissan, which I have found myself referring to as Nissie, the nickname Laurie dubbed it.
Suzanne is passing back to me the 2003 Prius we bought together and that she has driven since our split—she’s just replaced it with a brand new model. The Prius stirs no feelings of identification. How could it, it’s such a clean, functional, and efficient hunk of machinery? It’s a Japanese car that reminds me of a Swede, something a visiting nurse would drive, or a careful consumer, or a sensible family man. Help, I miss Nissie as I pull slowly away from the stop light to maintain my MPG readout above 47. The car is taking over. I put my foot down on the accelerator and feel the fuel draining from me! It’s nothing new. A walking stick feels like an extension of your hand when it scrapes the gravel on a path, and likewise I feel the road through the Prius’ wheels, the weight of all those D-cell batteries as we corner. Neurobiologists say we have no souls but are tools “all the way down.” I believe them.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Gesche
Laurie
Gesche
Starbucks, June, 2007
On a train to Germany, I met a doctor, Gesche. She was beautiful in a worn out way from late nights working, and she was stylish, with long legs and dark hair piled high with extension braids. Her skin was tanned and looked very dark against her gleaming white shirt and gold necklace. It was a long journey, and at first I sat with my eyes closed. When I rose to stretch, she began a conversation. I was attracted to her as soon as she boarded the train.
She was a neurosurgeon who had switched to pediatric oncology, having wearied of male colleagues who looked down their noses at women surgeons. She’d grown tired, too, of the anonymity of her patients, most of whom arrived with head traumas due to car accidents. She would operate, change their dressing the next day, and never see the person again. She went to Canada, entered oncology, and began treating children and their families. Some patients remained in her care for years. She described living in a cloud of grief, elation, and fatigue, and she recalled a visit to the grave of one young girl and weeping with the child’s mother, who was pregnant again. Gesche had been certain the girl would live, but after years of chemo, her system gave out.
In Canada, she fell in love with a cell biologist who was studying aging. She talked about the erotics of cells, how all they want—healthy cells, tumor cells—is more. She described the sex she had with this man, as if I were not a stranger, and I felt I wasn’t, that we were in a band of women who find each other as we drift toward the bodies of men.
One morning in Berlin, we met for breakfast. She had been awake since six the night before, working in a neonatal intensive care unit. The babies, kept alive on tubes and machines, were allowed a chance at life after only twenty-five weeks in the womb. Two were being sustained after only twenty-four weeks, each weighing twenty-five grams. She held out her hand as if weighing a pound of butter, to show how small that was. Everything on their bodies needed to be assisted. Their brain cells, still fetal, didn’t know how to regulate swallowing or breathing. The babies were intubated. She had to take blood from veins too tiny to see. She said it was thrilling. She felt skillful. She was wearing a blue t-shirt, a long sweater, and skinny black pants. Her eyebrows were fuzzy and dark, her dimples deep.
She ordered eggs, a baguette, and coffee, and we sat under an umbrella as yellow jackets buzzed the jam. She was directed outward, not involved with herself, although she admitted to a tendency to evade intimacy and escape into effort. At thirty-six, life billowed out before her. She was considering having a child with the cell biologist although, she said, they didn’t share a language. She didn’t mean German or English. She meant that what was big to her was little to him, and vice versa. What was central to her was women’s lives. “Don’t take what men say seriously,” she said, as much to herself as to me. “Men are not their words.” There was hope in her tired eyes as well as doubt, and I tried to see through them. How did I look, a woman past her prime who didn’t know what to make of men’s words? What kind of love would allow you to see past someone else’s contradictory understanding? Was it love? A bee got its feet caught in honey. It extracted one foot, thinking it was free, and then another got stuck. It was like that with me and words.
Gesche
Starbucks, June, 2007
On a train to Germany, I met a doctor, Gesche. She was beautiful in a worn out way from late nights working, and she was stylish, with long legs and dark hair piled high with extension braids. Her skin was tanned and looked very dark against her gleaming white shirt and gold necklace. It was a long journey, and at first I sat with my eyes closed. When I rose to stretch, she began a conversation. I was attracted to her as soon as she boarded the train.
She was a neurosurgeon who had switched to pediatric oncology, having wearied of male colleagues who looked down their noses at women surgeons. She’d grown tired, too, of the anonymity of her patients, most of whom arrived with head traumas due to car accidents. She would operate, change their dressing the next day, and never see the person again. She went to Canada, entered oncology, and began treating children and their families. Some patients remained in her care for years. She described living in a cloud of grief, elation, and fatigue, and she recalled a visit to the grave of one young girl and weeping with the child’s mother, who was pregnant again. Gesche had been certain the girl would live, but after years of chemo, her system gave out.
In Canada, she fell in love with a cell biologist who was studying aging. She talked about the erotics of cells, how all they want—healthy cells, tumor cells—is more. She described the sex she had with this man, as if I were not a stranger, and I felt I wasn’t, that we were in a band of women who find each other as we drift toward the bodies of men.
One morning in Berlin, we met for breakfast. She had been awake since six the night before, working in a neonatal intensive care unit. The babies, kept alive on tubes and machines, were allowed a chance at life after only twenty-five weeks in the womb. Two were being sustained after only twenty-four weeks, each weighing twenty-five grams. She held out her hand as if weighing a pound of butter, to show how small that was. Everything on their bodies needed to be assisted. Their brain cells, still fetal, didn’t know how to regulate swallowing or breathing. The babies were intubated. She had to take blood from veins too tiny to see. She said it was thrilling. She felt skillful. She was wearing a blue t-shirt, a long sweater, and skinny black pants. Her eyebrows were fuzzy and dark, her dimples deep.
She ordered eggs, a baguette, and coffee, and we sat under an umbrella as yellow jackets buzzed the jam. She was directed outward, not involved with herself, although she admitted to a tendency to evade intimacy and escape into effort. At thirty-six, life billowed out before her. She was considering having a child with the cell biologist although, she said, they didn’t share a language. She didn’t mean German or English. She meant that what was big to her was little to him, and vice versa. What was central to her was women’s lives. “Don’t take what men say seriously,” she said, as much to herself as to me. “Men are not their words.” There was hope in her tired eyes as well as doubt, and I tried to see through them. How did I look, a woman past her prime who didn’t know what to make of men’s words? What kind of love would allow you to see past someone else’s contradictory understanding? Was it love? A bee got its feet caught in honey. It extracted one foot, thinking it was free, and then another got stuck. It was like that with me and words.
Palma
Laurie
Palma
Starbucks, September 26, 2007
I’m on the terrace, speaking to Seymour on the phone, when I hear my name called. Palma from downstairs is standing in the heat, looking up. I say I’ll be down in a minute. “What?” she says. She’s hard of hearing. She once showed me her hearing aide, asking if her TV was too loud. She hauls herself up a few stairs and stands panting, leaning on the railing. I get off the phone and lead her back down. “Come in, come in,” she says by her door. She wants to kiss me but she’s sweating. She’s just returned from marketing, a 10-minute walk. How old is she? She could be my grandmother, except that would make her 130. It’s the old world manner, the accent, although hers is Italian, not Polish. She’s younger than my mother. I forget who I am.
I sit at a table covered with oil cloth. Where do people get this stuff? An ironing board stands in the center of the large white room, a white blouse dangling from it on a hanger. She mentions it’s her daughter’s, as if to say: This is what I do. This is what I’m needed for. She wants to tell me the story of her life as if I am a lifeboat and she is drowning. “I will make a long story short,” she says several times, not wanting to make anything short, not wanting to tell a story.
On the table is a small glass vase filled with artificial roses, and in the vase is a viscous liquid meant to suggest water. She says the table, the chairs, and the couch are hers. The rest her daughter gave her, including an enormous wooden unit housing a gigantic TV and slots for wine. “I don't drink wine,” she says. She wants to give me her daughter's phone number. I write my number to give to her daughter, who has told her to do this.
On Saturday she is flying to New York, where she lived for 45 years. She stands in her white blouse and tan skirt, her light brown hair crumpled from the heat. She smooths it over and over, searching for expressions in English she knows. She likes saying “como se dice,” in order to hear her language. She says she doesn’t write well in English, has lived in this country all this time but doesn’t feel at home in the language. She had a house in Corona, Queens. Her eyes grow round and excited when she speaks of this house. “I love New York. New York is life. Here,” she shrugs, “I came to see what it was like. My daughter said to me, ‘Ma, the boys can't take care of you. Arizona is warm. It will be better for your health.’ So I tried it. I don't like it, but I decided to stay. I sold my house to one of my sons. I will be away from here one month or two months, you never know. People make plans, but you never know. I used the money to buy this place.”
She doesn’t need me to get her mail or pay her bills. Her daughter will do that. She needs me to sit. She offers a cold drink. I say I am going out soon, to meet Richard, am just stopping by. She smooths her hair and says she has an appointment to get it done on Friday. It must be in the salon near the market. She doesn't drive. She's a woman who walks everywhere, sho is used to walking. What can her life be by the side of a golf course in the middle of the heaving desert, near a daughter who says she will take care of her but who has a husband and a little girl, this daughter who told her to come to Arizona, but where has she come?
Palma
Starbucks, September 26, 2007
I’m on the terrace, speaking to Seymour on the phone, when I hear my name called. Palma from downstairs is standing in the heat, looking up. I say I’ll be down in a minute. “What?” she says. She’s hard of hearing. She once showed me her hearing aide, asking if her TV was too loud. She hauls herself up a few stairs and stands panting, leaning on the railing. I get off the phone and lead her back down. “Come in, come in,” she says by her door. She wants to kiss me but she’s sweating. She’s just returned from marketing, a 10-minute walk. How old is she? She could be my grandmother, except that would make her 130. It’s the old world manner, the accent, although hers is Italian, not Polish. She’s younger than my mother. I forget who I am.
I sit at a table covered with oil cloth. Where do people get this stuff? An ironing board stands in the center of the large white room, a white blouse dangling from it on a hanger. She mentions it’s her daughter’s, as if to say: This is what I do. This is what I’m needed for. She wants to tell me the story of her life as if I am a lifeboat and she is drowning. “I will make a long story short,” she says several times, not wanting to make anything short, not wanting to tell a story.
On the table is a small glass vase filled with artificial roses, and in the vase is a viscous liquid meant to suggest water. She says the table, the chairs, and the couch are hers. The rest her daughter gave her, including an enormous wooden unit housing a gigantic TV and slots for wine. “I don't drink wine,” she says. She wants to give me her daughter's phone number. I write my number to give to her daughter, who has told her to do this.
On Saturday she is flying to New York, where she lived for 45 years. She stands in her white blouse and tan skirt, her light brown hair crumpled from the heat. She smooths it over and over, searching for expressions in English she knows. She likes saying “como se dice,” in order to hear her language. She says she doesn’t write well in English, has lived in this country all this time but doesn’t feel at home in the language. She had a house in Corona, Queens. Her eyes grow round and excited when she speaks of this house. “I love New York. New York is life. Here,” she shrugs, “I came to see what it was like. My daughter said to me, ‘Ma, the boys can't take care of you. Arizona is warm. It will be better for your health.’ So I tried it. I don't like it, but I decided to stay. I sold my house to one of my sons. I will be away from here one month or two months, you never know. People make plans, but you never know. I used the money to buy this place.”
She doesn’t need me to get her mail or pay her bills. Her daughter will do that. She needs me to sit. She offers a cold drink. I say I am going out soon, to meet Richard, am just stopping by. She smooths her hair and says she has an appointment to get it done on Friday. It must be in the salon near the market. She doesn't drive. She's a woman who walks everywhere, sho is used to walking. What can her life be by the side of a golf course in the middle of the heaving desert, near a daughter who says she will take care of her but who has a husband and a little girl, this daughter who told her to come to Arizona, but where has she come?
Starbucks Toby
Laurie
Starbucks Toby
Barnes and Noble, March 23, 2007
Toby sits across from me at Starbucks, her hair fluffy and white—a color close to the platinum bleach job she wore before the stroke. She’s out of her wheelchair, on a wooden seat, and spooning up a Frappacino mounded with whipped cream. She is licking her lips, saying she never eats between meals—is only doing it to please me—and I broach the subject of money. Usually I don’t ask her for things, but she’s given my sister her diamond ring worth more than $40,000, while I have received nothing. I’m commuting to Arizona because I’ve fallen in love. I am sixty and I want her to be nice to me. We want what we want. Hope dies but not wishing. I propose she give me $5000 a year for four years, half the value of the ring. She narrows her eyes, and her head snaps back. “I won’t give you anything,” she shouts.
She can’t get up, and I feel her entrapment. She’s bellowing, and we’re getting fidgety looks. I suggest we talk about something else—Ellen’s grandchildren or the biography of Harry Truman she’s reading. Why does she admire Truman? I’m not going to get into it. She doesn’t think it matters he dropped the bomb. It wasn’t on her people. She likes talking about money—how much you earn, when it could run out. I like talking about money. Money is desire before it’s transformed into something that can disappoint you. I want her jewelry and the little bowls she sets about. I want her things the way I want her. Toby isn’t surrendering her desires, and neither am I.
She squints, pushing aside her drink and reaching for her walking stick, her good arm shaking, her back twisting into a C shape. I help her stand, and she leans into me with distaste. Because we’re touching? Because she needs help? Because I can still walk? She orders me on how to position my feet, move the chair, and lock the wheels, as if I’ve never performed these tasks before. The chair takes on an alien aspect, and I forget to swing aside the foot rests to allow her a clear path. As she shuffles forward, she nearly falls, and we sway like drunken lovers at the end of a tango—Dean and Jerry, a broken double act, embracing and looking daggers. I laugh. When Toby is tickled, her nostrils quiver and her eyes tear. She once attached her sable scarf to my winter coat, and when I arrived at school and saw the furry snake poking out of a sleeve, I called her and she fell on the floor laughing. She plops her backside onto the seat and squirms. I slip my hands under her armpits, feeling the boneless dough of her, and I hoist her up until she’s settled. All the way back to her apartment, she shouts, chin up, so her voice rains down. Passersby stare. What does she care? I get a helicopter view of us rolling east on 57th Street: a shrunken old woman in a worn brown hat and her sixty-year old daughter in need of Botox. Friends say: You’re a masochist for loving her no matter what. So what else is new?
Starbucks Toby
Barnes and Noble, March 23, 2007
Toby sits across from me at Starbucks, her hair fluffy and white—a color close to the platinum bleach job she wore before the stroke. She’s out of her wheelchair, on a wooden seat, and spooning up a Frappacino mounded with whipped cream. She is licking her lips, saying she never eats between meals—is only doing it to please me—and I broach the subject of money. Usually I don’t ask her for things, but she’s given my sister her diamond ring worth more than $40,000, while I have received nothing. I’m commuting to Arizona because I’ve fallen in love. I am sixty and I want her to be nice to me. We want what we want. Hope dies but not wishing. I propose she give me $5000 a year for four years, half the value of the ring. She narrows her eyes, and her head snaps back. “I won’t give you anything,” she shouts.
She can’t get up, and I feel her entrapment. She’s bellowing, and we’re getting fidgety looks. I suggest we talk about something else—Ellen’s grandchildren or the biography of Harry Truman she’s reading. Why does she admire Truman? I’m not going to get into it. She doesn’t think it matters he dropped the bomb. It wasn’t on her people. She likes talking about money—how much you earn, when it could run out. I like talking about money. Money is desire before it’s transformed into something that can disappoint you. I want her jewelry and the little bowls she sets about. I want her things the way I want her. Toby isn’t surrendering her desires, and neither am I.
She squints, pushing aside her drink and reaching for her walking stick, her good arm shaking, her back twisting into a C shape. I help her stand, and she leans into me with distaste. Because we’re touching? Because she needs help? Because I can still walk? She orders me on how to position my feet, move the chair, and lock the wheels, as if I’ve never performed these tasks before. The chair takes on an alien aspect, and I forget to swing aside the foot rests to allow her a clear path. As she shuffles forward, she nearly falls, and we sway like drunken lovers at the end of a tango—Dean and Jerry, a broken double act, embracing and looking daggers. I laugh. When Toby is tickled, her nostrils quiver and her eyes tear. She once attached her sable scarf to my winter coat, and when I arrived at school and saw the furry snake poking out of a sleeve, I called her and she fell on the floor laughing. She plops her backside onto the seat and squirms. I slip my hands under her armpits, feeling the boneless dough of her, and I hoist her up until she’s settled. All the way back to her apartment, she shouts, chin up, so her voice rains down. Passersby stare. What does she care? I get a helicopter view of us rolling east on 57th Street: a shrunken old woman in a worn brown hat and her sixty-year old daughter in need of Botox. Friends say: You’re a masochist for loving her no matter what. So what else is new?
Museum study
Richard
Museum study
Washington, D.C., July 8, 08
When I was twelve I gave my father a small Penguin paperback called A Pictorial History of Nazi Germany as a birthday present. It was an odd gift as I look back, but the Eichmann trial was on television daily, and it was reviving my father’s memories of his time serving with American forces in the Battle of the Bulge: of finding American troops frozen to death in a clearing in the woods, the men awaiting death with their fingers still on the triggers of their rifles; of the smell of burning human flesh as he approached a concentration camp in a place where all the trees had died. He didn’t look at the photograph book much, but I did. The pictures mingled with the stories he told and became my memories, and in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., I see the pictures again.
The elevator opens, and we step out in front of a large photograph showing the silhouette of an American soldier—I can tell by the outline of his rounded helmet—and in the background is a barbed wire fence and wooden huts. Are there bodies on the ground? I can’t make them out. Here the story of the Holocaust begins at its resolution, with liberation from a human-made hell.
How to experience this narrative? If you are Jewish, the suffering on display is your own suffering, if not through direct family connection then identification with Jewish history. If you are not Jewish, you can try to identify with the victims or see yourself as a liberator, which in the iconography of the museum is the American soldier. And if not a liberator, perhaps you are the son or daughter of a persecutor who may identify with the guilty. I doubt any surviving Nazis visit this place, either to relive their experiences or to grieve for them, but you never know.
Everyone is invited to identify with the victims with the offer of a card that says, “[This is] the story of a real person who lived during the Holocaust.” On the outside cover is a crest showing the American eagle clutching an olive branch in one set of talons and a quiver’s worth of arrows in the other. Above the eagle’s head is a Star of David comprised of thirteen small stars. The thirteen colonies? The twelve tribes of Israel, plus the USA? Curving over the eagle is the motto: “For the dead and the living we must bear witness.” This national museum, which is also a national memorial, asks us to bear witness by a ritual enactment of the Holocaust story.
We enter a long corridor jammed with people. Documents, text panels, photographs, and film clips recording the rise of Nazi Germany from the early 1930s line both sides of the narrow passage. The glass covering the exhibits tilts out so the visitor has to stand back a little, which crowds the corridor even more. There are no colors here; all is blackness broken by the white of wall texts and the gray of photographic images.
The crowd, shuffling slowly along like a line of refugees, attempts to read every panel, something I have rarely seen in museums this dense with text, and it’s as if in their careful deliberation they’re expressing the seriousness with which they take their roles as witnesses. Mothers hush impatient children. No one pushes through the crowd. Except me. I am jittery, rebellious. I don’t want to move in an odd parallel to the people in the photographs made to wait for precious papers and dwindling rations. I don’t want to wait my turn for the next panel. It’s hard to tell if we’re being herded by the natural decorum of museum visiting or choreographed into subjugation by the museum’s intentional design.
The corridor opens onto a display of artifacts from Kristallnacht, when, on a single night in 1938, 2,000 synagogues were destroyed and thousands of Jewish businesses and homes ransacked. A clear Perspex case contains ruined Torah scrolls piled up as they might have been when first thrown into the streets by marauding Nazis. This part of the exhibit—marking the time when Nazi prejudice and persecution flared into open brutality—shows battered remnants: part of a shop’s stained glass, a broken ark, gates from a Jewish cemetery that no longer exists, the desecrated Torahs. We know what this devastation portends, and because these hurt and rescued objects foreshadow “the final solution” and in some sense embody and preserve it, they move me deeply. As do photographs that come next of prisoners lined up in a town square moments before they are to be shot.
I look into the eyes of one man in a photograph who stares at the camera. It is like looking into some kind of dreadful mirror. He seems to be looking back at me and asking me to put myself in his place. I see such fear. What happens to your mind? Maybe you become lost in a dream or think back to a happy time in childhood, or maybe you simply cannot comprehend that death is coming. I imagine myself frozen to the spot and frozen in time, as he is. A piece of newspaper skitters like a spider across the cobbled square in a gust of wind and comes to rest before blowing onto the boot of a soldier with a raised rifle, and this is the last image I see. The exhibit works on me despite my resistance, and it makes me understand my father’s reluctance to talk about knowledge that was so destabilizing that forever after he sought protection from risk for himself and his family—fear that dampened adventure, change, and openness to strangeness. Maybe the installation is designed to stir feelings of resistance to it at first, a sense of indignation that you have been folded into and implicated in this history—even though it is attached to me through my father and the Jewish women I have shared much of my life with. Maybe the resistance is meant gradually to melt into an understanding of the futility of resistance. And maybe these emotions are part of any mental visit to a time and place of utter helplessness.
Museum study
Washington, D.C., July 8, 08
When I was twelve I gave my father a small Penguin paperback called A Pictorial History of Nazi Germany as a birthday present. It was an odd gift as I look back, but the Eichmann trial was on television daily, and it was reviving my father’s memories of his time serving with American forces in the Battle of the Bulge: of finding American troops frozen to death in a clearing in the woods, the men awaiting death with their fingers still on the triggers of their rifles; of the smell of burning human flesh as he approached a concentration camp in a place where all the trees had died. He didn’t look at the photograph book much, but I did. The pictures mingled with the stories he told and became my memories, and in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., I see the pictures again.
The elevator opens, and we step out in front of a large photograph showing the silhouette of an American soldier—I can tell by the outline of his rounded helmet—and in the background is a barbed wire fence and wooden huts. Are there bodies on the ground? I can’t make them out. Here the story of the Holocaust begins at its resolution, with liberation from a human-made hell.
How to experience this narrative? If you are Jewish, the suffering on display is your own suffering, if not through direct family connection then identification with Jewish history. If you are not Jewish, you can try to identify with the victims or see yourself as a liberator, which in the iconography of the museum is the American soldier. And if not a liberator, perhaps you are the son or daughter of a persecutor who may identify with the guilty. I doubt any surviving Nazis visit this place, either to relive their experiences or to grieve for them, but you never know.
Everyone is invited to identify with the victims with the offer of a card that says, “[This is] the story of a real person who lived during the Holocaust.” On the outside cover is a crest showing the American eagle clutching an olive branch in one set of talons and a quiver’s worth of arrows in the other. Above the eagle’s head is a Star of David comprised of thirteen small stars. The thirteen colonies? The twelve tribes of Israel, plus the USA? Curving over the eagle is the motto: “For the dead and the living we must bear witness.” This national museum, which is also a national memorial, asks us to bear witness by a ritual enactment of the Holocaust story.
We enter a long corridor jammed with people. Documents, text panels, photographs, and film clips recording the rise of Nazi Germany from the early 1930s line both sides of the narrow passage. The glass covering the exhibits tilts out so the visitor has to stand back a little, which crowds the corridor even more. There are no colors here; all is blackness broken by the white of wall texts and the gray of photographic images.
The crowd, shuffling slowly along like a line of refugees, attempts to read every panel, something I have rarely seen in museums this dense with text, and it’s as if in their careful deliberation they’re expressing the seriousness with which they take their roles as witnesses. Mothers hush impatient children. No one pushes through the crowd. Except me. I am jittery, rebellious. I don’t want to move in an odd parallel to the people in the photographs made to wait for precious papers and dwindling rations. I don’t want to wait my turn for the next panel. It’s hard to tell if we’re being herded by the natural decorum of museum visiting or choreographed into subjugation by the museum’s intentional design.
The corridor opens onto a display of artifacts from Kristallnacht, when, on a single night in 1938, 2,000 synagogues were destroyed and thousands of Jewish businesses and homes ransacked. A clear Perspex case contains ruined Torah scrolls piled up as they might have been when first thrown into the streets by marauding Nazis. This part of the exhibit—marking the time when Nazi prejudice and persecution flared into open brutality—shows battered remnants: part of a shop’s stained glass, a broken ark, gates from a Jewish cemetery that no longer exists, the desecrated Torahs. We know what this devastation portends, and because these hurt and rescued objects foreshadow “the final solution” and in some sense embody and preserve it, they move me deeply. As do photographs that come next of prisoners lined up in a town square moments before they are to be shot.
I look into the eyes of one man in a photograph who stares at the camera. It is like looking into some kind of dreadful mirror. He seems to be looking back at me and asking me to put myself in his place. I see such fear. What happens to your mind? Maybe you become lost in a dream or think back to a happy time in childhood, or maybe you simply cannot comprehend that death is coming. I imagine myself frozen to the spot and frozen in time, as he is. A piece of newspaper skitters like a spider across the cobbled square in a gust of wind and comes to rest before blowing onto the boot of a soldier with a raised rifle, and this is the last image I see. The exhibit works on me despite my resistance, and it makes me understand my father’s reluctance to talk about knowledge that was so destabilizing that forever after he sought protection from risk for himself and his family—fear that dampened adventure, change, and openness to strangeness. Maybe the installation is designed to stir feelings of resistance to it at first, a sense of indignation that you have been folded into and implicated in this history—even though it is attached to me through my father and the Jewish women I have shared much of my life with. Maybe the resistance is meant gradually to melt into an understanding of the futility of resistance. And maybe these emotions are part of any mental visit to a time and place of utter helplessness.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Bribe
Richard
Bribe
Coffee Plantation, March 3, 2007
Laurie’s writing about her mother triggered thoughts about my family, and I began to use the prompts to retrieve a faraway England I carried around inside. I had been telling Laurie about my checkered career as a student, and this memory arose.
My dad once offered me a bike if I placed in the top ten of my class at the end of the school year. For the previous terms at Humphrey Perkins, I’d regularly come in around thirtieth or thirty-first in a class of thirty-two. The bike seemed a good deal, and I came in third.
It had a bright yellow frame, three Sturmey-Archer gears, straight handle-bars, and lights powered by a little dynamo installed in the wheel hub. It wasn’t exactly the sleek, light-weight, drop-handle-bar, racing bike I’d been dreaming of but I didn’t feel cheated, for it meant I could ride to the surrounding villages and be gone all day.
I never asked my Dad why he offered the bribe, and I don’t remember him doing it again, but I managed to keep my position in class fairly well from then on. Not that it was a stellar feat. My large grammar school had recently morphed into a pseudo-comprehensive, which meant it served the entire range of student abilities from “swots” at the top to “thick-o’s” at the bottom. I was closer to the “thick-o” end of things, in the basement of the C-stream form. The headmaster had told us on one of his rare visits to our classroom that we wouldn’t go to university like those in the A-stream, or get the better clerical jobs of the B-stream, but we could work in shops, thus avoiding D-stream factory work, and the road mending jobs of the E-stream—when they weren’t in prisons or mental institutions.
Yes, headmaster Dunn M.A. really made this cheerful prediction about us in the lower ranks, but as much a force as social class remains in England, I’m thinking more about my dad and why he took such an uncharacteristically direct approach with me. I would have expected him to wonder why I was doing poorly rather than offering the bribe. I assume he’d worked out that all I needed was a carrot of encouragement—that he believed I had the stuff to do well. I think he approached the issue on two fronts: one was to deal with me and the other to suggest to my mother that I should go to school more often than I did.
I was flagging in part because I was hardly ever there. All I had to do was sneeze or say, “I don’t feel too well today,” and my mother would keep me home. She was lonely in the Midlands, having moved down from Lancashire and smacked against the Toon family’s snobbish aloofness to anyone from the north. My father, who had taken over the tailoring business from his father—he’d died of it, but that’s another story—saw customers in the front of our house. My mother wasn’t invited to share the income-producing domain. Of her four children, I was the disobedient but lovable wit, and I took the entitlement for granted, at least in the family. I stayed home so often my form teacher said that if I was going to miss any more days he’d have to report me to the authorities. I didn’t know what the authorities were, but they didn’t sound good, and they have come, ever since, to haunt my life like disagreeable relatives you’ve never met but to whom you feel an obligation. When I told my dad, he took action, wishing to evade the authorities as strenuously as I did. I started to go to school, the bike was dangled, and I was expected to perform.
It wasn’t exactly the ideal form of ambition for your children. My parents would visit the school once a year and hear from my teachers how badly I was doing. They didn’t think my education was their responsibility. If I wasn’t learning anything, it was probably the school’s fault, and what could they do about that? I don’t remember them asking why I didn’t try harder or encouraging me. You weren’t expected to do well but rather as well as you thought you could, and if that wasn’t great, then okay. Nobody need get worked up.
Maybe I’ll talk to my dad about the bribe when I call him this weekend. He’ll say to me in his crackly baratone, “So son, how are you feeling in yourself?” And I’ll say “Fine, fine,” even if I feel like crying in his arms, which I sometimes do, and even if I am wishing now, as I did as a boy, that he’d show he wanted more for me than it was possible for him to imagine, that he wanted all of us in the family to break through the skins of tight control—including the soft pressure of his own evasiveness—and stretch toward the inaccessible.
In my father’s favorite photo of me, I’m six years old, standing on a wooden trestle bridge that spans a small stream. In shorts and a short sleeved shirt, I’m half turned, looking uncertainly back to the camera. My mother always brings out this picture when I come to England, spreading it and the other “snaps,” as she calls them, across the diningroom table. She smiles and asks if I remember when it was taken. I do. I remember the family outing to the damp hillside above the cotton mill town of Bury, in Lancashire, where we were living then. It was a visit to the local beauty spot of Hoakam Hill where, above the town of Ramsbottom, stood Peele Tower, the folly that locals called “Nut and Bolt,” with its squat stone building and thick chimney rising 50 feet. I remember the rickety wooden bridge across the stream and the green moss growing on its rotting planks. I remember my father saying that I mustn’t go near it, as it might collapse or I might slip. And I remember this feeling—the risk of possibly falling or possibly not—being too good an invitation to pass up. And there I am in the photo, caught in the act, doing exactly as I was forbidden and with that look on my face—an expression that says, “Approve of me, please, even as I disobey you, keep me with you no matter what.” My father comes into the room as my mother and I are examining the picture and he says, “I took that. Just look at you. You knew you weren’t supposed to be there. Just look at that expression.” And I do, remembering the burden—on me, on him—of that celebration, of that love. And my father chuckles.
It’s only in this last year that I’ve said to him, “I love you,” longing for him to say it back, and he did. When the conversation ends he always says, “Cheerio, cheerio.”
I think he’s never wanted a big life or been very ambitious, but I might be wrong. He was first in his class in the village of Syston, but his father, Horace the tailor, refused to let him stay on at school and apprenticed him at fourteen to become a sewer and pattern maker at Hart and Levi, the premier tailoring company in Leicester. The war came, and at seventeen my father lied about his age and enlisted. He witnessed American soldiers, having been cut off behind enemy lines, frozen to death while they held their guns in readiness to shoot. He smelled burning flesh in the air around concentration camps, but he didn't offer more than these details. After the war he went to Liverpool to manage a company that manufactured men’s suits, but the business failed and he returned to Syston and the business he dispised, and his mission now was to hold his family tight.
He’s ended up with a son who’s traveled far from the village and is only now trying to distinguish the unexamined father inside him from the unexamined son.
Bribe
Coffee Plantation, March 3, 2007
Laurie’s writing about her mother triggered thoughts about my family, and I began to use the prompts to retrieve a faraway England I carried around inside. I had been telling Laurie about my checkered career as a student, and this memory arose.
My dad once offered me a bike if I placed in the top ten of my class at the end of the school year. For the previous terms at Humphrey Perkins, I’d regularly come in around thirtieth or thirty-first in a class of thirty-two. The bike seemed a good deal, and I came in third.
It had a bright yellow frame, three Sturmey-Archer gears, straight handle-bars, and lights powered by a little dynamo installed in the wheel hub. It wasn’t exactly the sleek, light-weight, drop-handle-bar, racing bike I’d been dreaming of but I didn’t feel cheated, for it meant I could ride to the surrounding villages and be gone all day.
I never asked my Dad why he offered the bribe, and I don’t remember him doing it again, but I managed to keep my position in class fairly well from then on. Not that it was a stellar feat. My large grammar school had recently morphed into a pseudo-comprehensive, which meant it served the entire range of student abilities from “swots” at the top to “thick-o’s” at the bottom. I was closer to the “thick-o” end of things, in the basement of the C-stream form. The headmaster had told us on one of his rare visits to our classroom that we wouldn’t go to university like those in the A-stream, or get the better clerical jobs of the B-stream, but we could work in shops, thus avoiding D-stream factory work, and the road mending jobs of the E-stream—when they weren’t in prisons or mental institutions.
Yes, headmaster Dunn M.A. really made this cheerful prediction about us in the lower ranks, but as much a force as social class remains in England, I’m thinking more about my dad and why he took such an uncharacteristically direct approach with me. I would have expected him to wonder why I was doing poorly rather than offering the bribe. I assume he’d worked out that all I needed was a carrot of encouragement—that he believed I had the stuff to do well. I think he approached the issue on two fronts: one was to deal with me and the other to suggest to my mother that I should go to school more often than I did.
I was flagging in part because I was hardly ever there. All I had to do was sneeze or say, “I don’t feel too well today,” and my mother would keep me home. She was lonely in the Midlands, having moved down from Lancashire and smacked against the Toon family’s snobbish aloofness to anyone from the north. My father, who had taken over the tailoring business from his father—he’d died of it, but that’s another story—saw customers in the front of our house. My mother wasn’t invited to share the income-producing domain. Of her four children, I was the disobedient but lovable wit, and I took the entitlement for granted, at least in the family. I stayed home so often my form teacher said that if I was going to miss any more days he’d have to report me to the authorities. I didn’t know what the authorities were, but they didn’t sound good, and they have come, ever since, to haunt my life like disagreeable relatives you’ve never met but to whom you feel an obligation. When I told my dad, he took action, wishing to evade the authorities as strenuously as I did. I started to go to school, the bike was dangled, and I was expected to perform.
It wasn’t exactly the ideal form of ambition for your children. My parents would visit the school once a year and hear from my teachers how badly I was doing. They didn’t think my education was their responsibility. If I wasn’t learning anything, it was probably the school’s fault, and what could they do about that? I don’t remember them asking why I didn’t try harder or encouraging me. You weren’t expected to do well but rather as well as you thought you could, and if that wasn’t great, then okay. Nobody need get worked up.
Maybe I’ll talk to my dad about the bribe when I call him this weekend. He’ll say to me in his crackly baratone, “So son, how are you feeling in yourself?” And I’ll say “Fine, fine,” even if I feel like crying in his arms, which I sometimes do, and even if I am wishing now, as I did as a boy, that he’d show he wanted more for me than it was possible for him to imagine, that he wanted all of us in the family to break through the skins of tight control—including the soft pressure of his own evasiveness—and stretch toward the inaccessible.
In my father’s favorite photo of me, I’m six years old, standing on a wooden trestle bridge that spans a small stream. In shorts and a short sleeved shirt, I’m half turned, looking uncertainly back to the camera. My mother always brings out this picture when I come to England, spreading it and the other “snaps,” as she calls them, across the diningroom table. She smiles and asks if I remember when it was taken. I do. I remember the family outing to the damp hillside above the cotton mill town of Bury, in Lancashire, where we were living then. It was a visit to the local beauty spot of Hoakam Hill where, above the town of Ramsbottom, stood Peele Tower, the folly that locals called “Nut and Bolt,” with its squat stone building and thick chimney rising 50 feet. I remember the rickety wooden bridge across the stream and the green moss growing on its rotting planks. I remember my father saying that I mustn’t go near it, as it might collapse or I might slip. And I remember this feeling—the risk of possibly falling or possibly not—being too good an invitation to pass up. And there I am in the photo, caught in the act, doing exactly as I was forbidden and with that look on my face—an expression that says, “Approve of me, please, even as I disobey you, keep me with you no matter what.” My father comes into the room as my mother and I are examining the picture and he says, “I took that. Just look at you. You knew you weren’t supposed to be there. Just look at that expression.” And I do, remembering the burden—on me, on him—of that celebration, of that love. And my father chuckles.
It’s only in this last year that I’ve said to him, “I love you,” longing for him to say it back, and he did. When the conversation ends he always says, “Cheerio, cheerio.”
I think he’s never wanted a big life or been very ambitious, but I might be wrong. He was first in his class in the village of Syston, but his father, Horace the tailor, refused to let him stay on at school and apprenticed him at fourteen to become a sewer and pattern maker at Hart and Levi, the premier tailoring company in Leicester. The war came, and at seventeen my father lied about his age and enlisted. He witnessed American soldiers, having been cut off behind enemy lines, frozen to death while they held their guns in readiness to shoot. He smelled burning flesh in the air around concentration camps, but he didn't offer more than these details. After the war he went to Liverpool to manage a company that manufactured men’s suits, but the business failed and he returned to Syston and the business he dispised, and his mission now was to hold his family tight.
He’s ended up with a son who’s traveled far from the village and is only now trying to distinguish the unexamined father inside him from the unexamined son.
Goats and mushrooms
Laurie
Goats and Mushrooms
New Paltz, November 22, 2006
After I left Yaddo, I stayed with my friend, Amy, an artist, in her house in New Paltz, New York. Richard and I spoke on the phone and emailed each other furiously, but on this day Amy and I wroter together after a walk in the woods.
Amy and I encounter three goats. The youngest, with bright eyes and a twist of black fur on his crown, jumps up and puts his legs on the fence, stretching his head toward me.
“He’s the most aggressive,” Amy says.
“He wants love.” I rub his forehead, as we look into each other’s eyes. The fur under his chin is green from eating grass. It reminds me of my dog, Sasha, the way his head smelled of perfume from my kisses. The other goats prop their legs on the fence.
“They’re a family,” Amy says.
It’s obvious, but I miss it. Gray fur threads the parent goats. One of the horns on the male is broken and the other missing. The female has tawny stripes along her face. Long, soft rabbity ears curtain all their faces. If we had petted them forever, they would have stayed.
We tramp through woods. Amy says, “I hope you can get us back. I have no sense of direction.” I don’t care if we got lost. I am already lost with a man I barely know. We’re supposed to be drifting, hunting for something to burn to release us into the irrational. Earlier, in her studio earlier, Amy has shown me a painting of a bull stretched out on a pointillist pattern. Its legs are rampant, and it stares straight out like a goat. “That’s where I want to go,” Amy has said, ”to a place without a story. We’ll eat magic mushrooms.” Her fish-shaped eyes became slits as she laughed. Her black bangs shimmered like a hawk’s wing.
We come to a stream. Amy wonders if we should cross it. I see a house in the distance that needs investigating. We look through the fence. Two men are talking, and a little boy named Marley is playing with a golden retriever named Patty. Marley’s father is exceedingly handsome with a tall, athletic body and dark curly hair that sticks out of his backwards baseball cap. We say hello through the fence, and he opens the gate. He says he’s a builder, that he designed his log cabin house, that his son is named after Bob Marley. His wife, a teacher, spends her days in another town. I wonder how many other curious women find their way to the beautiful, secluded home of the dazzling, stay-at-home dad. When Amy and I are alone, I ask if he is the type she falls for.
“I don’t think men like that will be attracted to me,” she says, and I don’t know how she can think that. I think everyone is attracted to her because she is lithe and stylish, but she sees herself with a broken horn.
We walk on until we came to a thicket of exploding pods. Silky white fluff is poking out of spiky brown husks. The pods are ugly and exquisite, dead and alive, repellent and irresistible, as if some misshapen and not quite born things were trying to emerge. “This is what we should burn!,” we say in chorus. Gathering the stalks, we already feel unreasoning.
In the car, Amy talks about a lover she stayed with even after seeing his movies and thinking: “You are a man I want to strangle.” The women in his films could have been exploding pods, for all the sense of them he had. I wonder what kind of man Richard will turn out to be.
After dinner, Amy places the magic mushrooms on the table. I’ve seen them in her fridge and unaware of what they are have considered throwing them into a pot of soup. She isn’t sure how many we should eat. I remember Richard saying he’d picked magic mushrooms on the Haworth moors and that he’d nearly been drawn into a brawl with a friend. They were drinking in the pub where Branwell Brontë, ne’re-do-well brother of the genius sisters, boozed himself to death. Richard’s friend was jealous because after years of no-hope jobs Richard had gotten himself to university. The friend must have felt the way Branwell did, knowing that his sisters, and not he, were going into the world. I call Richard, and he guesses an amount we should eat. Amy breaks three dried caps and a few stems into powdery bits. “Just eat them,” she says, caterpillar-like. I pop an earthy-smelling morsel in my mouth. It doesn’t taste bad. We divvie up the pile, licking dust from our fingers.
As the stoned feeling comes on, Amy plays a “Talking Heads” CD, and we make a list of intentions to burn. We pledge to be softer, welcome in more joy, offer more of ourselves to others. “Fat chance,” I think of me. We place the list and the pods in a ceramic bowl. Amy lights a match and as the pods flare we dance around, Amy’s taut, strong body twisting and jutting gracefully. I think she is magnificent. I am in love with whatever I see. She says we should eat more mushrooms. She wants colors to be more vivid, sounds more intense. She wants her senses to unfurl like awnings. An hour later we are very high.
Amy says that being with people is hard and so is being alone. She says her sadness is old. She can’t remember herself without it. We stand on the lip of her sadness and look into its crater. We are walking on the moon, and the crater turns into a sea lapped by wavelets, and Earth is reflected in the water. White tailed deer drink at the edge and velvety moss with the geometry of snow flakes grows on dead rocks. Larger growth spills up from the land. Heavy trees arise entwined with glossy leaves we can see ourselves in.
The next morning Amy cries while cutting vegetables for Thanksgiving dinner. She is back from a yoga class where she’s run into a former student who herself now teaches art. The student has embraced her and reported that she and two friends have just been remembering what a marvelous teacher Amy is and that, separately, have used the same words to describe her.
“What did they say?”
“I didn’t ask,” Amy says. “It would have been indiscrete. She would have told me if she’d wanted me to know.”
How could she not ask?
Goats and Mushrooms
New Paltz, November 22, 2006
After I left Yaddo, I stayed with my friend, Amy, an artist, in her house in New Paltz, New York. Richard and I spoke on the phone and emailed each other furiously, but on this day Amy and I wroter together after a walk in the woods.
Amy and I encounter three goats. The youngest, with bright eyes and a twist of black fur on his crown, jumps up and puts his legs on the fence, stretching his head toward me.
“He’s the most aggressive,” Amy says.
“He wants love.” I rub his forehead, as we look into each other’s eyes. The fur under his chin is green from eating grass. It reminds me of my dog, Sasha, the way his head smelled of perfume from my kisses. The other goats prop their legs on the fence.
“They’re a family,” Amy says.
It’s obvious, but I miss it. Gray fur threads the parent goats. One of the horns on the male is broken and the other missing. The female has tawny stripes along her face. Long, soft rabbity ears curtain all their faces. If we had petted them forever, they would have stayed.
We tramp through woods. Amy says, “I hope you can get us back. I have no sense of direction.” I don’t care if we got lost. I am already lost with a man I barely know. We’re supposed to be drifting, hunting for something to burn to release us into the irrational. Earlier, in her studio earlier, Amy has shown me a painting of a bull stretched out on a pointillist pattern. Its legs are rampant, and it stares straight out like a goat. “That’s where I want to go,” Amy has said, ”to a place without a story. We’ll eat magic mushrooms.” Her fish-shaped eyes became slits as she laughed. Her black bangs shimmered like a hawk’s wing.
We come to a stream. Amy wonders if we should cross it. I see a house in the distance that needs investigating. We look through the fence. Two men are talking, and a little boy named Marley is playing with a golden retriever named Patty. Marley’s father is exceedingly handsome with a tall, athletic body and dark curly hair that sticks out of his backwards baseball cap. We say hello through the fence, and he opens the gate. He says he’s a builder, that he designed his log cabin house, that his son is named after Bob Marley. His wife, a teacher, spends her days in another town. I wonder how many other curious women find their way to the beautiful, secluded home of the dazzling, stay-at-home dad. When Amy and I are alone, I ask if he is the type she falls for.
“I don’t think men like that will be attracted to me,” she says, and I don’t know how she can think that. I think everyone is attracted to her because she is lithe and stylish, but she sees herself with a broken horn.
We walk on until we came to a thicket of exploding pods. Silky white fluff is poking out of spiky brown husks. The pods are ugly and exquisite, dead and alive, repellent and irresistible, as if some misshapen and not quite born things were trying to emerge. “This is what we should burn!,” we say in chorus. Gathering the stalks, we already feel unreasoning.
In the car, Amy talks about a lover she stayed with even after seeing his movies and thinking: “You are a man I want to strangle.” The women in his films could have been exploding pods, for all the sense of them he had. I wonder what kind of man Richard will turn out to be.
After dinner, Amy places the magic mushrooms on the table. I’ve seen them in her fridge and unaware of what they are have considered throwing them into a pot of soup. She isn’t sure how many we should eat. I remember Richard saying he’d picked magic mushrooms on the Haworth moors and that he’d nearly been drawn into a brawl with a friend. They were drinking in the pub where Branwell Brontë, ne’re-do-well brother of the genius sisters, boozed himself to death. Richard’s friend was jealous because after years of no-hope jobs Richard had gotten himself to university. The friend must have felt the way Branwell did, knowing that his sisters, and not he, were going into the world. I call Richard, and he guesses an amount we should eat. Amy breaks three dried caps and a few stems into powdery bits. “Just eat them,” she says, caterpillar-like. I pop an earthy-smelling morsel in my mouth. It doesn’t taste bad. We divvie up the pile, licking dust from our fingers.
As the stoned feeling comes on, Amy plays a “Talking Heads” CD, and we make a list of intentions to burn. We pledge to be softer, welcome in more joy, offer more of ourselves to others. “Fat chance,” I think of me. We place the list and the pods in a ceramic bowl. Amy lights a match and as the pods flare we dance around, Amy’s taut, strong body twisting and jutting gracefully. I think she is magnificent. I am in love with whatever I see. She says we should eat more mushrooms. She wants colors to be more vivid, sounds more intense. She wants her senses to unfurl like awnings. An hour later we are very high.
Amy says that being with people is hard and so is being alone. She says her sadness is old. She can’t remember herself without it. We stand on the lip of her sadness and look into its crater. We are walking on the moon, and the crater turns into a sea lapped by wavelets, and Earth is reflected in the water. White tailed deer drink at the edge and velvety moss with the geometry of snow flakes grows on dead rocks. Larger growth spills up from the land. Heavy trees arise entwined with glossy leaves we can see ourselves in.
The next morning Amy cries while cutting vegetables for Thanksgiving dinner. She is back from a yoga class where she’s run into a former student who herself now teaches art. The student has embraced her and reported that she and two friends have just been remembering what a marvelous teacher Amy is and that, separately, have used the same words to describe her.
“What did they say?”
“I didn’t ask,” Amy says. “It would have been indiscrete. She would have told me if she’d wanted me to know.”
How could she not ask?
Zev and Bell
Laurie
Zev and Bell
September 27, 2007
“Zev fucked everybody,” Ellen says. She has spent the day with Toby who was remembering her sister, Bell. Aunt Bell was tan and wiry, thinner than Toby. In the Long Beach years, Toby put on padding, but never Bell. She was a stringy, tendony thing you would have to pull out of your teeth if you were a monster and ate her. “Zev would fuck anyone,” Ellen says, and I remember this uncle—a younger brother of my father—with a gleaming smile and wavy black hair. When I was a plump little temptress, he said to me, “You will drive boys crazy.” He was the Bill Clinton of furriers, an equal opportunity dog, and Bell’s mouth watered when Zev flashed one of his roguish, Clark Gable smiles.
Zev was married to Kate, a beautiful red head in the style of Rita Hayworth with skin as soft as a moth’s wing. Her people were civilized, and maybe Zev was trying file his claws and mute his howl in the way Jack Kennedy mated with Jackie. Bell’s husband, Eli, didn’t speak. Their daughter, Brenda, zoomed around, envious and restless, and a boy, Sam, left no image behind. My grandmother pulled Brenda to her bosom and stroked her hair, maybe because no one else was going to find this girl easy to love.
According to Ellen, Zev and Bell meet at a wedding both sides of the family attend. How else can Toby’s sister cross paths with Murray’s brother? What happens next? They arrange to see each other on the sly. Zev is rich. He wears handmade suits. He, Kate, and their two daughters live in a twelve-room apartment on Park Avenue. Kate works at the fur showroom, but Zev says he is meeting a buyer for lunch. Bell drives down from Westchester, and in the hotel she sits on his lap as he runs his hands along her tight little muscles, working to ease her impenetrable knots. He makes it better and worse for Bell, who wants more than the hour he can steal away to be with her; still, she treasures the dirty feelings of these afternoons. He says goodbye while she’s showering, tells her to spend as much time as she likes in the room. People pay so much for his furs he could live forever on the money, except he’s a gambler and dies young of a heart attack. "What heart attack?" my father says. He goes to his grave believing his brother was the victim of a mob hit for unpaid loans.
I see Zev on one of his rare visits to Long Beach, striding along the boardwalk like a movie star in his thousand dollar camel’s hair coat. Near him, we all walk with a bounce in our steps. The salt air smells like the Mediterranean, not iodine. This is the Zev I preserve even though he and Kate were at Andre’s house in Cold Spring the weekend Andre laid me on his bed, felt me up, and tried to have sex with me. Andre was their psychoanalyst and mine. I was fourteen, and they uttered not a murmur of protest when he announced that they would sleep in the guest room and I would share his bed.
My sister is nineteen in her memory of Zev. She is also Andre’s patient, and he has paid for her abortion. My parents don’t know, and Ellen doesn’t tell them until many years have passed and she is married with three kids. After the procedure, Andre arranges for her to stay with Zev and Kate, and while she is sleeping, she feels a body in the bed next to hers. Zev has slid under the covers and is pushing his cock against her behind. She’s bloody and exhausted, but she tells him to go away. I have said the same thing to Andre and he has left me in his bed, feeling guilty. When Ellen tells the story of Zev, she is laughing. She is sixty-six, and Zev and Andre are long dead.
Zev and Bell
September 27, 2007
“Zev fucked everybody,” Ellen says. She has spent the day with Toby who was remembering her sister, Bell. Aunt Bell was tan and wiry, thinner than Toby. In the Long Beach years, Toby put on padding, but never Bell. She was a stringy, tendony thing you would have to pull out of your teeth if you were a monster and ate her. “Zev would fuck anyone,” Ellen says, and I remember this uncle—a younger brother of my father—with a gleaming smile and wavy black hair. When I was a plump little temptress, he said to me, “You will drive boys crazy.” He was the Bill Clinton of furriers, an equal opportunity dog, and Bell’s mouth watered when Zev flashed one of his roguish, Clark Gable smiles.
Zev was married to Kate, a beautiful red head in the style of Rita Hayworth with skin as soft as a moth’s wing. Her people were civilized, and maybe Zev was trying file his claws and mute his howl in the way Jack Kennedy mated with Jackie. Bell’s husband, Eli, didn’t speak. Their daughter, Brenda, zoomed around, envious and restless, and a boy, Sam, left no image behind. My grandmother pulled Brenda to her bosom and stroked her hair, maybe because no one else was going to find this girl easy to love.
According to Ellen, Zev and Bell meet at a wedding both sides of the family attend. How else can Toby’s sister cross paths with Murray’s brother? What happens next? They arrange to see each other on the sly. Zev is rich. He wears handmade suits. He, Kate, and their two daughters live in a twelve-room apartment on Park Avenue. Kate works at the fur showroom, but Zev says he is meeting a buyer for lunch. Bell drives down from Westchester, and in the hotel she sits on his lap as he runs his hands along her tight little muscles, working to ease her impenetrable knots. He makes it better and worse for Bell, who wants more than the hour he can steal away to be with her; still, she treasures the dirty feelings of these afternoons. He says goodbye while she’s showering, tells her to spend as much time as she likes in the room. People pay so much for his furs he could live forever on the money, except he’s a gambler and dies young of a heart attack. "What heart attack?" my father says. He goes to his grave believing his brother was the victim of a mob hit for unpaid loans.
I see Zev on one of his rare visits to Long Beach, striding along the boardwalk like a movie star in his thousand dollar camel’s hair coat. Near him, we all walk with a bounce in our steps. The salt air smells like the Mediterranean, not iodine. This is the Zev I preserve even though he and Kate were at Andre’s house in Cold Spring the weekend Andre laid me on his bed, felt me up, and tried to have sex with me. Andre was their psychoanalyst and mine. I was fourteen, and they uttered not a murmur of protest when he announced that they would sleep in the guest room and I would share his bed.
My sister is nineteen in her memory of Zev. She is also Andre’s patient, and he has paid for her abortion. My parents don’t know, and Ellen doesn’t tell them until many years have passed and she is married with three kids. After the procedure, Andre arranges for her to stay with Zev and Kate, and while she is sleeping, she feels a body in the bed next to hers. Zev has slid under the covers and is pushing his cock against her behind. She’s bloody and exhausted, but she tells him to go away. I have said the same thing to Andre and he has left me in his bed, feeling guilty. When Ellen tells the story of Zev, she is laughing. She is sixty-six, and Zev and Andre are long dead.
A day with sugar
Richard
A day with sugar
April 25, 07, Starbucks
This is one of the first pieces I wrote about “my sugars,” as I refer to my blood sugar levels. Later I used the prompts to explore diabetes, something that floats in and out of my thoughts all the time. I have a chronic condition, but I’m not ill. Who am I in the altered mental states of low and high sugars? Not myself or, indeed, myself?
Years ago in England I had a green lizard. Somehow, sugar was spilt into his terrarium, just a teaspoonful scattered on a rock. He came rushing down from his tree limb and licked away furiously. After that he refused his regular food of wriggling mealworms, waiting for his next fix. It never arrived, and he starved to death.
I am that lizard today. I buy a glazed doughnut and devour it fast and secretly in my office. It sends my sugar soaring. When it gets to 300, I take a load of insulin, but I’m tempted not to. I want to let the substance do whatever it wants with me. I want to have lizard thoughts: slink around and lick things and stare with wonder at mysterious shadows looming above me. High and low sugars induce fantasies, among them the notion that your pancreas produces insulin. I leave the office and test my blood in the car. The count is still over 200. I take more insulin, and then I’m no longer the lizard, making a break for freedom.
What happened in my body has played itself out in the West’s hunger for sweetness, a bloody history mixed with slavery's past and our obese present. People have been willing to sacrifice their lives and take others into bondage to maintain the supply of sugar—this substance that delivers pleasure at the same time rotting our organs and moral compasses. Can Splenda save us? I think Splenda is implicated in my donut hit. A month or so ago I took up my girlfriend Laurie's habit of putting artificial sweetener in my tea. I think it created the craving, and the craving led to the donut. I blame Laurie, although the lizard does not.
A day with sugar
April 25, 07, Starbucks
This is one of the first pieces I wrote about “my sugars,” as I refer to my blood sugar levels. Later I used the prompts to explore diabetes, something that floats in and out of my thoughts all the time. I have a chronic condition, but I’m not ill. Who am I in the altered mental states of low and high sugars? Not myself or, indeed, myself?
Years ago in England I had a green lizard. Somehow, sugar was spilt into his terrarium, just a teaspoonful scattered on a rock. He came rushing down from his tree limb and licked away furiously. After that he refused his regular food of wriggling mealworms, waiting for his next fix. It never arrived, and he starved to death.
I am that lizard today. I buy a glazed doughnut and devour it fast and secretly in my office. It sends my sugar soaring. When it gets to 300, I take a load of insulin, but I’m tempted not to. I want to let the substance do whatever it wants with me. I want to have lizard thoughts: slink around and lick things and stare with wonder at mysterious shadows looming above me. High and low sugars induce fantasies, among them the notion that your pancreas produces insulin. I leave the office and test my blood in the car. The count is still over 200. I take more insulin, and then I’m no longer the lizard, making a break for freedom.
What happened in my body has played itself out in the West’s hunger for sweetness, a bloody history mixed with slavery's past and our obese present. People have been willing to sacrifice their lives and take others into bondage to maintain the supply of sugar—this substance that delivers pleasure at the same time rotting our organs and moral compasses. Can Splenda save us? I think Splenda is implicated in my donut hit. A month or so ago I took up my girlfriend Laurie's habit of putting artificial sweetener in my tea. I think it created the craving, and the craving led to the donut. I blame Laurie, although the lizard does not.
Diagnosis
Richard
Diagnosis
June 29, 2007, Starbucks
I was twenty-three when I learned I was a type 1 diabetic, and this is the way it happened. The material in this section was generated from several prompts. As memories surfaced, I saw that my relationship to diabetes and to the English class system were oddly entwined. They both asked for compliance, and I rebelled against them, at least inside. It wasn’t until I began to write that I saw the correspondence.
While shaving, I cut myself below my bottom lip, and it turns into an ugly bump that bleeds on and off for a week. It’s 1973, and I’m in the waiting room of Leeds University Student Health Center in the north of England. Around me are women in their late teens and early twenties. We fidget before our names are called, seated on steel chairs which make a horrible scrapping sound on the linoleum. It’s the first week of the autumn term, and most here are signing up for the Pill. The Center is the place for free birth control.
My girlfriend, Kay, has urged me to get the cut checked. I’m reluctant and self-conscious. The Center is located in a row of imposing Victorian houses. This one, staid-looking from the outside, is a maze of jutting staircases and corridors inside, and although the walls are painted a clinical cream, the environment still shouts upper-middle class home. I’m jittery in this typically English palimpsest of old breaking through new—where the values of sexual liberation and expanded opportunities for children of the lower classes, like me, are serviced in signifiers of establishment wealth and power. The mixture confines as it liberates, and no sooner do I enter a place like this than the issue of compliance rears up in me like a sleeping snake made irritable, even as it remains curled in its basket.
The English class system, like bacteria and fear of death, is amorphous and everywhere. Education is the only way through it—or the door out of it—for kids like me and Kay. We are part of the Labour Party’s postwar leap of change, whereby offspring from every class can go to university free. The government pays our expenses, so we can study without having to work. But my place in the class system is slippery. My father is a tailor—a bespoke tailor—and his shop is in our house, but our house has a back garden, and all these factors weigh in to your place in the pecking order. Depending on where you come from, as well as your accent and skin color, you navigate the class system the way Alice does Wonderland, in one context taking up all the space in a room, in another becoming the ball in a croquet match. Alice in Wonderland is a brilliant meditation on ways we feel small or large. It’s a parable about how children experience their place among adults. It also describes the feelings of people in a class-bound culture and of those diagnosed with an illness living amid the able-bodied and well. Class, education, and diabetes swirl inside me, one aspect of my condition moving me up in rank, another threatening my stability.
In time I’m called to see the doctor, a route that involves Kafkaesque wanderings up and down stairs. Dr. Cameron—big and beefy and with a ruddy complexion—speaks in a broad Scottish accent and wears a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows. He waves me to sit down, and it feels condescending. With a very firm hand-shake—perhaps in the manner of the doctor who might once have practiced here with his family and servants bustling in adjoining rooms—he asks what I’m studying. “Philosophy,” I say, and there is no reply.
Here is the doctor, a repository of established authority, and I want him to say something affirming about my class-vaulting choice. In the past few months, he’s probably asked a thousand students the same perfunctory question, and many, like me, have come trailing cultural aspirations he’s unable to address—perhaps even notice. He gets down to examining my cut and asks about my general health. He directs me to step behind a curtain and pee into a cup. I don’t ask why. A doctor directs, and you comply. That’s how I was raised, and that’s what I do. Afterward, he tells me to return to the waiting room where I sit long enough for a whole new crop of students to enter and leave. My lip throbs.
Eventually, a nurse calls me to the counter. She’s wearing a bright pink jumper like ones my grandmother knits for herself, and I’m disposed to trust her. She says I must taxi immediately to St. James Hospital on the other side of the city. The Center will pay the fare.
“Why the rush?”
“They’ll explain when you get there, dear, but your urine contains high amounts of sugar.“
Nothing registers, although the signs of diabetes are blaring. I’m playing my part as passive patient to the hilt.
“Can someone bring you pajamas and a toothbrush? It’s a Friday and you’ll probably have to stay a few days.”
On the ride across town, my thoughts are absorbed with class, not the possibility of serious illness. What awaits? Clearly, I’m too unimportant to have things explained. Leeds, despite housing the country’s largest urban university, still wears a grim, working-class aspect for the most part. We speed through labyrinthine streets of back-to-back terraced housing. Washing flaps on lines strung across side streets. Neighbors chat to each other from door steps. Pubs are the main life of the community, and there is one on every other street, interspersed by fish-and-chips shops and corner stores that sell sundries such as single fags for those too poor to afford a pack. Here and there soot blackened churches are becoming Sikh temples and Muslim mosques.
The hospital, a red-brick structure built in the ‘60’s, is part of Leeds’ urban renewal effort. I’m installed on a ward with five other men. One is a hemophiliac, about my age and from a village like the one where I grew up. He paces the corridors until he’s informed he needs an operation. Immediately. His chances of surviving are only fifty-fifty. Everyone hears. It’s horrifying, and I’m stunned by his reaction, which is no reaction. He says okay, his eyes cast down, his chest curving inward. I want to say: “Speak up for yourself. Ask questions. Are there other hospitals that specialize in my condition? Do I need a second opinion? What is the track record of the surgeons on my case?” I say nothing. What would I do in his place? Am I in his place?
In another bed, a bus driver past fifty who’s recovering from a heart attack is so frustrated by the lateness of his meal he smashes a plastic plane he’s spent the day gluing together. I want to smash something, too. It’s evening, and I still don’t know why I’m there. Kay arrives with my things and demands answers from the nurses, but they are tight lipped. “Wait until doctors’ rounds,” they say without informing us the doctors aren’t coming until Monday.
I remain in the dark until Saturday night when an orderly asks me to pee into a bed pan. Under his impatient scrutiny, I manage a trickle. I am handing over the pee when I notice, written along the side of the container: “Richard Toon—diabetic.”
“Does this mean I’m diabetic?”
“Yes,” he says, striding away with my pee.
On Sunday a nurse wearing a bright blue uniform briskly demonstrates how to inject insulin into an orange and then into my upper arm. It’s simple to impale the orange but something else when I’m expected to plunge a needle into my own flesh. “Go on,” she urges and after taking a moment to notice light glinting off the steel spike, I slip it into the fat layer above my right biceps. There’s a dull ache. I repeat the procedure in the other arm with the same hesitation followed by pain. I don’t complain or wince. I want her to commend me for getting the job done—for not gumming up the works.
Diagnosis
June 29, 2007, Starbucks
I was twenty-three when I learned I was a type 1 diabetic, and this is the way it happened. The material in this section was generated from several prompts. As memories surfaced, I saw that my relationship to diabetes and to the English class system were oddly entwined. They both asked for compliance, and I rebelled against them, at least inside. It wasn’t until I began to write that I saw the correspondence.
While shaving, I cut myself below my bottom lip, and it turns into an ugly bump that bleeds on and off for a week. It’s 1973, and I’m in the waiting room of Leeds University Student Health Center in the north of England. Around me are women in their late teens and early twenties. We fidget before our names are called, seated on steel chairs which make a horrible scrapping sound on the linoleum. It’s the first week of the autumn term, and most here are signing up for the Pill. The Center is the place for free birth control.
My girlfriend, Kay, has urged me to get the cut checked. I’m reluctant and self-conscious. The Center is located in a row of imposing Victorian houses. This one, staid-looking from the outside, is a maze of jutting staircases and corridors inside, and although the walls are painted a clinical cream, the environment still shouts upper-middle class home. I’m jittery in this typically English palimpsest of old breaking through new—where the values of sexual liberation and expanded opportunities for children of the lower classes, like me, are serviced in signifiers of establishment wealth and power. The mixture confines as it liberates, and no sooner do I enter a place like this than the issue of compliance rears up in me like a sleeping snake made irritable, even as it remains curled in its basket.
The English class system, like bacteria and fear of death, is amorphous and everywhere. Education is the only way through it—or the door out of it—for kids like me and Kay. We are part of the Labour Party’s postwar leap of change, whereby offspring from every class can go to university free. The government pays our expenses, so we can study without having to work. But my place in the class system is slippery. My father is a tailor—a bespoke tailor—and his shop is in our house, but our house has a back garden, and all these factors weigh in to your place in the pecking order. Depending on where you come from, as well as your accent and skin color, you navigate the class system the way Alice does Wonderland, in one context taking up all the space in a room, in another becoming the ball in a croquet match. Alice in Wonderland is a brilliant meditation on ways we feel small or large. It’s a parable about how children experience their place among adults. It also describes the feelings of people in a class-bound culture and of those diagnosed with an illness living amid the able-bodied and well. Class, education, and diabetes swirl inside me, one aspect of my condition moving me up in rank, another threatening my stability.
In time I’m called to see the doctor, a route that involves Kafkaesque wanderings up and down stairs. Dr. Cameron—big and beefy and with a ruddy complexion—speaks in a broad Scottish accent and wears a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows. He waves me to sit down, and it feels condescending. With a very firm hand-shake—perhaps in the manner of the doctor who might once have practiced here with his family and servants bustling in adjoining rooms—he asks what I’m studying. “Philosophy,” I say, and there is no reply.
Here is the doctor, a repository of established authority, and I want him to say something affirming about my class-vaulting choice. In the past few months, he’s probably asked a thousand students the same perfunctory question, and many, like me, have come trailing cultural aspirations he’s unable to address—perhaps even notice. He gets down to examining my cut and asks about my general health. He directs me to step behind a curtain and pee into a cup. I don’t ask why. A doctor directs, and you comply. That’s how I was raised, and that’s what I do. Afterward, he tells me to return to the waiting room where I sit long enough for a whole new crop of students to enter and leave. My lip throbs.
Eventually, a nurse calls me to the counter. She’s wearing a bright pink jumper like ones my grandmother knits for herself, and I’m disposed to trust her. She says I must taxi immediately to St. James Hospital on the other side of the city. The Center will pay the fare.
“Why the rush?”
“They’ll explain when you get there, dear, but your urine contains high amounts of sugar.“
Nothing registers, although the signs of diabetes are blaring. I’m playing my part as passive patient to the hilt.
“Can someone bring you pajamas and a toothbrush? It’s a Friday and you’ll probably have to stay a few days.”
On the ride across town, my thoughts are absorbed with class, not the possibility of serious illness. What awaits? Clearly, I’m too unimportant to have things explained. Leeds, despite housing the country’s largest urban university, still wears a grim, working-class aspect for the most part. We speed through labyrinthine streets of back-to-back terraced housing. Washing flaps on lines strung across side streets. Neighbors chat to each other from door steps. Pubs are the main life of the community, and there is one on every other street, interspersed by fish-and-chips shops and corner stores that sell sundries such as single fags for those too poor to afford a pack. Here and there soot blackened churches are becoming Sikh temples and Muslim mosques.
The hospital, a red-brick structure built in the ‘60’s, is part of Leeds’ urban renewal effort. I’m installed on a ward with five other men. One is a hemophiliac, about my age and from a village like the one where I grew up. He paces the corridors until he’s informed he needs an operation. Immediately. His chances of surviving are only fifty-fifty. Everyone hears. It’s horrifying, and I’m stunned by his reaction, which is no reaction. He says okay, his eyes cast down, his chest curving inward. I want to say: “Speak up for yourself. Ask questions. Are there other hospitals that specialize in my condition? Do I need a second opinion? What is the track record of the surgeons on my case?” I say nothing. What would I do in his place? Am I in his place?
In another bed, a bus driver past fifty who’s recovering from a heart attack is so frustrated by the lateness of his meal he smashes a plastic plane he’s spent the day gluing together. I want to smash something, too. It’s evening, and I still don’t know why I’m there. Kay arrives with my things and demands answers from the nurses, but they are tight lipped. “Wait until doctors’ rounds,” they say without informing us the doctors aren’t coming until Monday.
I remain in the dark until Saturday night when an orderly asks me to pee into a bed pan. Under his impatient scrutiny, I manage a trickle. I am handing over the pee when I notice, written along the side of the container: “Richard Toon—diabetic.”
“Does this mean I’m diabetic?”
“Yes,” he says, striding away with my pee.
On Sunday a nurse wearing a bright blue uniform briskly demonstrates how to inject insulin into an orange and then into my upper arm. It’s simple to impale the orange but something else when I’m expected to plunge a needle into my own flesh. “Go on,” she urges and after taking a moment to notice light glinting off the steel spike, I slip it into the fat layer above my right biceps. There’s a dull ache. I repeat the procedure in the other arm with the same hesitation followed by pain. I don’t complain or wince. I want her to commend me for getting the job done—for not gumming up the works.
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