The landscape of change
The air is cold with a hint of the warmth to come. My picnic basket is packed with healthy, delicious food that I’ve prepared myself, and in the grove of trees off in the distance, the rest of my life awaits. There are people I’ve never met, eagerly anticipating a new connection, and the people I’ve known for years, my close loved ones, the friends who are part of me, they are mingling with the new, happy to see me change and to be a part of it. There will be feasting and dancing and when the sun goes down we will gather by a bonfire fed by the things that didn't work in my life, irrational fear and muddy sadness and self-protective separation going up in flames. I will sit near the fire, my son tucked close to me, his father next to him, both a vital part of my transformation.
The rules I set for myself, the ones where I showed my goodness through self-sacrifice (a conscious choice, not a martyrdom) and removal from the world, do not apply to this new self. I can have an outside life and a happy child. I might even be capable of long-term connection, might allow this heart of mine to sink into true, unselfish love and support.
This shift is permanent, not that there won’t be trouble along the way. I know myself. I can be true to her, authentic, present. I don’t need anyone to show me the path, though I do need people to share the journey with me, to accept my weaknesses and share joy in my strengths, while I do the same for them.
This is a better representation than yesterday's (deleted) post about my inner state. More sleep and a conscious attempt to eat more help with my equilibrium.
Image of the shoes I'll wear on the journey, because I want to look natty along the way.
The present of presence
It may not surprise regular readers to hear that I have problems with family and connection, that it’s easier for me to remain self-sufficient than to ask for help even from those closest to me, and that even though I have a small family of my own, it has been difficult for me to be present with them. This is something that has come up in various therapy work, how to feel like I am a part of things, how not to stay separate, how groupings of three are threatening, especially for those who have generally been excluded in such groupings (child, parent, parent; child, parent, parent’s love interest).
And you know what? It’s gotten better. Not perfect, but better. There is a thread of connection between us. I’m less absent (again, not perfect, but so much better) when we’re together. I didn’t want to run away from home on my birthday, though I thought about it a lot the week before. We have had times when all three of us could sit quietly in a room, comfortable in our separateness, connected, too, without fraught, silent history hanging over our heads. This was the first year that my husband and I coordinated on the boy’s Christmas and also worked out a Christmas Eve misunderstanding without me exploding (tough, especially when the house is full of people and I am tense with the requirements of it all).
I worry about my parenting and the worry gets in the way of figuring out what is good for me. Sometimes I imagine going up in a poof of smoke, the midnight disappearance, the running off to another town, just to be free of the potential pain that connection brings – the threat of loss (it is inevitable, no matter what), the future break between child and parents, the wrenching ache of death and abandonment. I’ve created a life of total submission to child and home, which only makes the stakes higher and the center of my life more fragile, which ramps up the anxiety, the feeling that the walls in my small room are closing in on me.
I’m figuring it out. I focus on the future, on the grad school path, while keeping an open mind. No matter the path to external happiness, to contentment, to self-sufficiency, I will not lose the connection. I will be present.
So this is Christmas … a holiday I don’t totally care for, one that takes over, all macho with its Christian origins and its focus on consumerism. Today I focus on the rest of it, the boy, the greenery, the lights, the feeling of gratefulness for my wavering yet strengthening ability to be here, and for my friends, those of you I’ve known for years and those of you with whom I’ve developed a friendship across the mysterious Internet ether. I am so lucky to know you.
I am grateful for family, too, for the spark of connection, the elusive silver thread. It's not a trap. No matter how things change and shift for me – how I make them change and shift – the connection will be there, the history, the shared, ineffable love.
Merry Holidays!
Image of the boy playing at the park yesterday.
Obviously, I was able to carve out an hour or two for writing -- it's one of the benefits of waking up at 4:30 in the morning!
Blinded me with silence
And, of course, we would call our crushes, just for the adolescent thrill of hearing the love object's voice, or knowing that the phone was ringing in his house. When someone answered -- was that him? Or his brother? -- we didn’t breathe heavily. Instead, we sat on the other end listening, our hearts beating faster. The relieved laughter came after we hung up the phone.
When I woke up this morning in the quiet after a night of lightly drugged sleep, in the silence of a house about to be filled with people, one of our crush calls came to mind, which I only remember because Maureen wrote about it in a letter at the time. Funny what sticks in one’s mind.
Phone: Ring! Ring! Ring!
D (my eventual boyfriend) answers: Hello?
Silence. My face flushes and my heartbeat quickens.
D: Hello?
Silence. Heart pounding.
D (blows into phone) woosh, woosh Hello?
Silence.
D (raps receiver with knuckles) knock, knock, knock
Silence.
D: Hello? (blows into phone) woosh, woosh… (knocks receiver with knuckles) knock, knock, knock
Silence.
etc. etc., until D hangs up and Maureen and I collapse into a heap of giggles on her dining room floor.
(D wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. I think he actually believed something was wrong with the phone.)
For D, this silence indicated a mechanical problem. For me, the silence was meaningful, it said volumes, told of my immature love and maybe held my regrets as well, regrets for letting him take something he shouldn't have away from me.
On its own, silence is fine, of course, it isn’t a bad thing, it can be totally neutral. It can be partially neutral. Or it can be a canvas onto which we paint our insecurities.
I've just finished reading The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir, a well-written and somewhat brutal compilation of three novellas on women going through crisis. One of the things about it that struck me is how each narrator interpreted the silence of the other (the wayward husband, the absent child), what the silence meant to them and how they created an entire story about what was going on in the other's head without ever having a conversation about it.
We each come with a history. The history has taught us to interpret signals, to read facial expressions, body language, and silence. I grew up in an atmosphere where I could get yelled at for entering the room and sitting down in the wrong way, where my very presence was apparently odious and led people to turn away from me, where most silences held anger and resentment. I am very versed at reading (or misinterpreting) the signals of rejection, to anticipating the moment when it will all end. Silence. An eyebrow raised. The friend with arms intertwined facing away from me. Furrowed brows. Frowns. The tone of a voice. I tend to go for the most negative interpretation and wrack my brain for how it happened, how I finally did it, how I gave away my true ugly self (this is not how I am really thinking about it, but I do think it's part of the underlying framework of my thoughts, one that I have been slowly exposing and rebuilding).
At least now I am aware of my reaction, of the way I read faces and stances and silence, and of the internal struggle between "what did I do wrong?" or "when will this person leave in a disgusted huff?" and the mantra of I'm ok, I'm ok, I'm ok.
Still, it's hard, these internal pep talks, these nights of deep breaths and afternoons of well-massaged panic. And each time I worry, each time I go down that dungeon path, I also have to remind myself that I might be right! That maybe the silence, the stance, the raised eyebrow does mean something bad. But that doesn't mean that I am bad or that the meaning will destroy me.
On some level, it seems ridiculous to make this clear and obvious to myself. Still. That's how it is for now as I renovate and rebuild this strong solid self of mine. I just have to accept it and get on with life.
Image by gilderic.
Written in the body
This man, the first familiarity, melts away and suddenly I am kissing my body double. His legs match the length of mine. His feet are tanned and small. Our similarities, the smallness of our combined frames, surprises me. I mourn the body who went before. It is the last time I let the physicality of someone, their solidity, the feel of their lips, the way their legs intertwine with mine, become an object of attachment.
When my body double leaves me, I don't mourn the loss of his corporeality. I mourn the loss of tenuous connection, the closeness of two damaged souls meeting periodically to solve the problem of the human need for touch. And when the next man comes along, his feet like miniature anvils, his body broad and short, I let the concept of physical attachment go completely. I don't record the feeling of him against me, the pressure of his hand in mine. It simply doesn't matter anymore. All that remains are the labels. After that marriage ends, I often catch myself almost calling the new man by the old one's name. A matter of habit.
This was the sloughing off of connection and association. We are animals of contact, of the burrowing together under covers, the familiarity of the loved one’s body, of their smell and the way their chest rises and falls, the cadence of their walk. I remember the first man best and after that let go of the musk, of the tracing of thighs and knees, of the texture of hair between fingers. I simply do not want to get too attached. The pain of the inevitable break is too much.
But to realize it! There I am in a fast car looking down at his feet, here I am on bright blue wall-to-wall and he is about to kiss me, here we are together at a country-western bar, talking talking talking. And here he is, boyfriend #4, husband #2, with me for over thirteen years now, the long history, the beauty of context. He knew Kevin, my mother’s cruel boyfriend. He met my grandfather, dead since Valentine’s Day 2002. He’s known my animals. He’s the father of my child. Our history goes on and I know the feel of his hand in mine, have cried in his arms, a sensation I have deliberately and slowly forgotten.
I need to remember again.
From the prompt "The key." But this had nothing to do with the prompt. I've been thinking about this bodily attachment, how detached I am from it now and why that happened. When I was up at 1:30 this morning, one of the images going through mind was of D's feet, his foot on the gas pedal, and how strange it was when I started dating J, how the differences between them were so obvious and palpable and how I missed what had come before. That was the last time I mourned someone's physical presence, more of my self-protection system doing its job overzealously.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I rewrote this one entirely, though I'm having a hard time taking it further. They've upped the dosage of the little purple pills (because that's how it works) and my thoughts are hard to hold on to this morning.
Image by William Degen.
Confidential to Dissed in Detroit
You will have to rely on my accounts, on this unreliable narrator.
For Mr. Stop and Shop
Remember the night the streets pulsated, how the restaurant rug snatched at our feet, the pressure of the sky? "I don't feel anything," you'd told me an hour earlier, so we split another tab and entered the nightmare of a landscape alive, the trees tapping with bared bone branches, the apartment buildings and houses glowing temples to evil. At every pay phone you called your girlfriend collect, looking for calm in the bad trip. Finally we took a cab, a roller coaster ride along the DC streets with a grim reaper cabbie to my place in far-off northeast. And, yes, you slept in my bed, and no, nothing happened, but when my boyfriend, WASP #1, came the next day and I was so strung out and exhausted and freaked, he sniffed my sheets, looking for evidence. Like we ever did anything but kiss, and even then it was lighthearted, even the week before I left for Illinois and I thought I'd never be back and we drank sambuca and fooled around on the couch.
I'm lucky to know you.
For the one who was once my Platonic Other Half
How did those two men end up in our apartment? It was something to do with drugs. Were they connected to the "give me a cell" guy (who in my mind looks like Mike Tyson, but that can't be right)? It was winter and maybe I had already dropped out of school or was on the precipice of doing it and there were those guys and that's all I remember about it, the shiver in the living room, the undercurrent of danger. I'm not sure we could talk about it in person now. That moment belongs to the former us, the former we, to a friendship that crumbled.
We survived each other, the craziness, the tequila-fueled dances along the edge of the roof, the teary reunion at DC Space, the alcohol and strangers. We each have a son now. I'm relieved that there aren't any daughters in the mix. Girls scare me with their complications and symbolism. Or maybe I don't have enough confidence in my parenting abilities to think I could pull it off, could separate myself from my own girlhood enough to raise a girl right.
Oh: one more thing. Sometimes I still laugh when I remember the night you called M drunk and sang the Star Spangled Banner into his answering machine. There are some people I still want to do that to just for the surreality of it.
Miss you.
For Wasp #1
I was sick that weekend with one of those horrible stomach aches that still slam me every other month or so. We were at your ancestral home on the water. I was useless.
"Maybe you're pregnant," you told me jokingly. Mean. "Maybe I am," I replied sarcastically. Scared. A year later, we were on the phone and you mentioned your new girlfriend. I finally told you the truth. We cried. I mailed you a copy of the receipt as proof and we've not really spoken since.
For You Know
Haunted by history and habit, I phoned you a day late to tell you the news. We pulled through, worked together to prepare for his arrival, for the finest thing we've ever done. We had months and motivation and togetherness and then he showed up and he's still here.
I love you both. Will forever. No matter what happens. But you know that.
For Me
I know you still dance along the edge of the abyss, that you have to keep reminding yourself that with ambiguity comes creativity, that the solution isn't always simple and immediate, that no matter what it will be ok.
Remember this: the image of you with fists upraised, the permanent fighting stance, that gave way to a new interpretation, the tree in the meadow with a thick shaggy trunk, its branches feathered over with pale green leaves. You reach for the sun, you reach into the earth. You are strong.
Image: Flowers for the weary and ignored and forgotten.
I write this stuff and I believe in it with all my creative force when I'm writing it. Then I put it out there and doubt, doubt, doubt, until I write the next post and can leave this one to the past. Tell me what you think about it if you wish. Silence is ok, too. And if you see yourself here, know that I valued you enough to write about you, to hold you in words.
The kiss
This is where we did it:
In the back of my stepfather's car after the Sadie Hawkins dance freshman year of high school, my friends beside us, my mom at the wheel. It was my first real kiss with tongue, all for a relationship that lasted about three hours, most of them spent dancing slow, me in my Gunne Sax dress (burgundy, form-fitting with lace trim), you so short that you could rest your head against my chin.
Down at the beach, the moonlight playing off the Elk River, Led Zeppelin floating out of a car, the yellow street light making us into silhouettes as we walked away from the parking lot. We were arm in arm up the road, clung to the shoulder as a car passed. It was all anticipation, the best part, the tingle before everything tips, your lips against mine, me leaning my head back, back. A year later we kissed as I sat on the hood of your car, sweet, entangled, a moment I recorded forever in my mind: this is going on right now this is going on right now this is going on right now. I measure time against it even now, the way we can hold on to sweetness after it sours, can erase the bad for the simplicity of two bodies.
In musty movie theater seats, the armrests pressing into our chests, popcorn scattered on the floor, our shoes tacky against the remains of spilled soda. It was the second time we had not watched Ghostbusters. Your hands here and there, mine struggling against them. We were just this side of shameless. Our friends turned their heads. Later, you were sad. You told me you loved me. I see you now, see how much a part of the Eastern Shore you were, you are, like another life, the reality I could have lived, the ribbon of road that bisects cornfields and woods.
After dinner at the Iron Gate, you a gentleman, the long wanting kiss at the door. You waited deliberately to go further, three dates of gradually ratcheted passion, so by the time we got beyond extreme make out sessions, we were in love. I still dream about you, J, despite our almost total incompatibility on most levels.
In my apartment or on the street? Our first kiss is lost, all of them are, but I remember how we met "cute" -- me drunk (alone) on some horrible watery beer, making the walk after midnight through a thin-wind Illinois night, carefully stepping over the ice patches in the sidewalk. I struggled with the refrigerator doors at the 7-11, not noticing that the beer cases were locked because it was too late to buy. There was a witticism, likely yours, since I could barely talk. Did you know I was drunk? Were you drunk? Somehow I gave you my number. We made plans. We went out. Eventually we kissed. You spent the night a time or two. Made me a couple of Pixies tapes. We wrote letters to each other over break. You even picked me up at the airport. But then I met someone else.
After your marriage was over. Before: we held hands in your car and you told me you were poison. Later you said you hated the melodrama of that line, but it fit the situation, you at the end of a marriage, the unfinished business that made us impossible. We didn't kiss then, though I had dreams about it. We waited five months for the air to clear and then, in the fresh-scrubbed beauty of April, it happened. Arrangements for divorce. The kiss. The Squeeze tapes you lent me beforehand, me wandering around Champaign with my Walkman on, happy to be alive, to be chosen. Stolen lilacs, gallons of beer, the celebration of love and food.
In a bar in a different city, both of us drunk, you chain-smoking American Spirits. After closing time, we danced. You spun me around by the waist before losing your grip. I ragdolled to the floor, laughing as I got up, leaning back to find your lips. I'd seen you before at that bar, the nightly drunk, the troubled man, and knew that after I stumbled out the door, I'd never see you again.
After a day of laughter, back at my place, you lunging across the couch. A couple of weeks before, you told me you were "interested," but I was too confused and sad about my marriage ending to know what to think. Then, kisses on the couch, kisses upstairs, you falling asleep fully clothed on the bed, my first exposure to your nap talent ("Did I fall asleep?" you asked at 2 a.m. groggy and happy.) The beginning of something larger than I expected.
This is where we didn't do it:
On the Metro, you visiting from out of town, me living apart from my husband but still married, still a good girl.
Over my cubicle at the library, me blushing in your presence, you talking out your fears over turning thirty, how you wanted to make a film of me smoking and riding a scooter, wanted to capture the suppressed me, the relief of exhale. You were going to call it "Smoke."
During the Friday night dinner or maybe during a class, all of the other women batting their eyes, lucky to be in the presence of the young, cute, talented chef.
This is where we shouldn't have done it:
At the door. In the car. On the couch. On the bed. Against the wall. At the bar.
Anywhere mistakes can be made.
Image by gmayster01.
I was going to write something about my latent (or not so latent) pull towards self-destruction, or really I was going to write about self-destruction, the urge to be bad, in a fictional or evocative post, but a conversation with a Facebook friend about how I categorize my FB friends pushed me in this direction.
In case you are wondering: I have actually kissed 4.5% of my Facebook friends, have wanted to kiss 6% of them, and wish I hadn't kissed 1.5% of them.
Artifacts
But these tapes don't necessarily show that part of my musical history. They contain shared memories or were meant as part of my musical education. I've held on to them because I hold on to everything, old letters and pictures, ephemera from boys long gone. I hold on to people in my mind, too, keep them close and safe, warm in the glow of a shared past.
In no particular order, here are three samples:
The relationship mourning tape
The this is music you need to know about tape
Part of my musical education, a tape made for me by a Hollywood Beach regular, M, who was about seven years older than me and had a plethora of albums from the sixties onward. This was my first exposure to the Velvet Underground. It still has the best version of Jimi Hendrix's Little Wing that I've ever heard (and haven't been able to find anywhere else). Sometimes I track down Heartbreaker's Beach Party on YouTube because I want to remember M and the Hollywood Beach crowd, the beach bonfires, the alcohol, kind M hanging out in the background.
The college friendship tape
This mixtape is from freshman year in college, made for my roommate Martha and me by fellow Third Floor Nerd Floor resident Kitty Hill. Kitty lasted at our small liberal arts college for a year before going back to Cincinnati (and that is her real name: I'd love to find her). I lasted slightly more than a year and Martha finally graduated a few years behind schedule. I'm attached to this tape less because of the music than because of the fleetingness of the time it represents, that brief strange period I had in the dorms. My memories of Kitty include her drinking Purple Jesuses (grape Kool-Aid and vodka) and singing Unhappy Birthday on her birthday and the spring 1988 trip we took to Annapolis in Imran's crumbling Mazda RX-7 to see the Navy boys.
If I were to represent my current life in a mixtape, I'm afraid it would be high on the melodrama. That's where my emotional musical tastes lie at the moment, in songs that can coax the feelings out of me. I do better when I can cry about something else, something unrelated to the present, like a memory from 25 years ago or a song about someone else's pain.
I'll spare you the drama. Let's start with something fluffy and light, danceable, a nice accompaniment to a glass of white wine or sparkling water, that 80s classic, Things Can Only Get Better (thanks, Kitty).
Top image: Keep it in Mind, a clip from ZigZag magazine that used to be on the wall of the Little House. I regret tossing the old issues away.
Wish it were fiction
LETTER ONE, NOVEMBER 1984
Excerpts from a letter that is (unintentionally) funny and tragic. It fleshes out the character of the teenaged me. The barely fifteen-year-old me. When I write of poetry below, I really mean: crap. Because that's what we wrote. Really really bad "poetry," though it was more like horrible lyrics to terrible songs. I can still quote some of these "poems" verbatim, however, which may attest to their, umm, powerful nature.
I've deleted the long dull paragraphs about beer and waiting for the person I was "dating" at the time to call me.
What strikes me the most about this letter is that I was just a kid. Just a kid, involved in things way over my head, with no one watching over me.
Six months after I wrote this letter, part of it had come true.
COMEDY
Maureen,
Hi! I worked with your poem, and mine. I think I helped with yours, (Sorry if I changed too much.), but mine might need some editing from you. Your poem sounds better without that part about his mama dressing him funny. Also, the part about "All your movements are hot and runny" -- YUCK-E-POO!!! I dunno, that just gives me this really gross vision. What I don't like about my poem is mostly the part about rabbits, pelicans, and pelibits. Oh well. I should be down to the beach in a couple of weeks, so we can work on them then.
TRAGICOMEDY
"The rabbit died" -- I swear to God, you should go into school and start screaming "Oh no -- Jennifer's in so much trouble -- THE RABBIT DIED!!!!!!!" Can you imagine the looks on some of the peoples' faces???- Especially people who know about this summer. You should try it and see what happens. Make them believe it, just like how you told CN I was killed in a car crash. It would be a veritable laff riot. (Don't ask- it's just one of my unusual sayings). Or, even better, I could write you a letter:
Dear Maureen,
I've got some really horrible news. The rabbit died. That's right, Maureen. I'm pregnant. We're still trying to figure out the father: Is it D, J, B, the Hot-Dog-Man, or my latest, R? Oh Maureen, you've gotta help me!!!!!! My abortion is scheduled for November 6-please come to Wilmington to help me through the operation.
Your pal and bestest buddy,
JLC
When you think about it, that's not so funny. I could easily be writing you a letter like that. God, that's scary!!! One thing I know I don't want to be and that's pregnant!!! Never, ever wish that on me, 'cuz I just might kill myself if that happened. (Geez, that would make it two sins!!!) Let's get off this morbid subject!!!
THE LONG SIGN-OFF
Your pro-abortion, pro-premarital (and teen) sex, pro-birth control, pro-de-manhoodizing for D and Y, great pal and BESTEST BUDDY,
JLC
LETTER TWO, AUGUST 1985
I wrote this letter sometime after the night we stole my grandfather's car, the night that ended our friendship. The date on it -- 4 August 1985 -- surprised me, since I had assumed the auto theft was in spring. Most of 1984-87 is a murky blur for me, though.
I probably wrote this assuming that Maureen's mother would read it. I addressed it to Bobohead #2, with my return address going to Bobohead #1.
I'd call most of this tragedy.
Maureen,
Hello. I thought I'd write a letter, since I have this distinct feeling that your mother would hang up the phone if I tried to call.
Why in the hell did you wait until this morning to tell her the fantastic news? She must have really bitten your head off! You know, she told Pop-pop that he should have you arrested. :-) I think she's overreacting just a tad. The woman must really hate me. I don't know. Right now, I am in a state of shock. At least I've stopped crying. (Kind of. Your mother triggered my tear ducts all over again.)
Hoh gee. Life's a bitch and then you die. Oh, your mother told me not to tell you this, but she hasn't exactly done me any favors lately and I really can't do a thing about what she thinks about me anymore, so I'm going to tell you after I finish this incredibly long sentence. She asked me if we used illegal drugs -- such as pot -- down here. I like your mom, but geez, how can you live with her? I'd go nuts within a week. Then again, I'd go nuts with any parental authority (or over-protectiveness). Oh well. I guess I've made a permanent enemy.
I know this letter is pretty flip (look it up if ya don't know what I mean), but I really feel guilty about the whole thing. I mean it's not just "Awww shucks, we got caught! Better be careful next time" (as if we'll ever see each other again for the rest of our natural lives). But I really regret it. I hate hurting people. And your mother really made me feel like scum of the earth. I mean, I already feel that way! Seriously, Maureen, do you feel in the least bit guilty?
Oh -- there's another tape of yours down here. I'll probably mail it to you or drop it off sometime (as you dodge the bullets from your mother).
You know, I think each other's parents think that the other corrupted the other. Huh? That made no sense! What I mean is that your mother thinks I'm a bad influence on you, and Pop-pop thinks you're a bad influence on me. I think we're a bad influence on each other. Like when we get together, we ignore all the rules. Oh well. I wish I could shut up about the whole stupid thing!!!
In fact I guess I'll finish this letter. Write back! I'll probably call you tomorrow anyway. BYE!
Your bestest, stupidest, scum of the earthiest, jerkiest, not to mention sexiest (ha ha ha) BUDDY!!!
Jennifer
These letters are breaking my heart.
Clove-scented memories
I've barely gone through the letters yet, but one thing is clear: I was obsessed. With D, with R, with being bored, with feeling depressed, with obtaining alcohol (aka "impedimential liquids"). I cursed a lot. Joking insults between the two of us were common. We had code names for everyone -- common pink marshmallow, the Yick, the Dick. We covered the backs of the envelopes with jokes or long notes to the mailman.
And I mixed my metaphors, my music, my thoughts. In one letter, written on January 14th, 1985 on Susan Boynton paper (picture a mouse dragging an elephant, with GO FOR IT written in floppy yellow letters on each page), I wrote SKANK OR DIE! in angular print on the first page, as though I was some skateboarding fiend. I moon over D, who was seeing someone else at the time and apparently showed up at the Little House one weekend, which confused me. I worry over an English presentation. I quote extensively from Careless Memories, a Duran Duran song (also the name of a post I eventually deleted, but lives on in ignominious glory on feedburner), then conclude with an Echo and the Bunnymen line. On the envelope, I have other lyrics: Darkness, by the Police and Ha Ha Ha by Flipper. Geezopeet, as I used to write. Was I a fan of pop or punk or post-punk? At fifteen, I could afford to be flexible.
I'll probably be posting some of the letters here. Maybe. Most of them have peoples' names in them, too many to redact. I sound like a teenaged idiot. I sound like a broken record.
Here's a sample, part of a four-page letter I sent in September 1984.
First, the back of the envelope:
Then, my diatribe against Maureen's phone. Here I show my talent for the delicate insult. In my defense, I think "moralistic bitch" was kind of a pet name for her at this point. "Dumpkopf," however, is not only misspelled, but goes beyond the pale. Still, it's nice to have proof that I once talked regularly on the phone:
Image: Letter to Maureen, September 1984. Is this interesting to anyone else but us?
I had other post plans today, worked for a while before daylight on something, but it will have to wait for the weekend. Still have to finish my assignment for class, too.
False starts
him
In my intermittent dating life, I don't remember many "first" dates.
My first boyfriend D and I stumbled into each other in the dark, went from acquaintance to midnight visitor in a matter of days. We didn't go on a date until we'd known each other for a couple of years. My ex-husband and I were classmates. One month we were flirting at library school happy hours, two months later we were lamenting the love that could not be (because he was married, albeit very unhappily and long-distance), four months after that, his marriage counseling failed and divorce arrangements made, we were practically living together. There were a couple of now-nameless people in between, contrived experiences over candlelight. The meal out with the graduate assistant of my politics class, who later complained that I never paid for anything (it was the summer of poverty, when I wasn't even able to pay the rent on time). Hamburgers with the freshly-minted architect in Georgetown on Halloween, a night that ended with an awkward unwanted kiss as I exited the cab. Nothing came of them, no drama, no further relationship.
Even my husband and I just kind of fell into step. I met him at work, out in the library atrium where we kept the magazines. I remember thinking he was sweet, cute in his green shirt, and funny, especially because in our first conversation he made some amusing remark that I was just about to make (something that is a daily occurrence between us now). We worked together. I helped him with dissertation research. We became friends. And when my first marriage fell apart, shortly after I made the decision to pursue divorce, we became a couple. Was that dinner at Lebanese Taverna, a just-friends get-together, our first date, all that talking over gamey lebneh and unctuous stuffed eggplant? How about that cold, rainy March Saturday in Ocean City, Maryland, where everything made us laugh, from the wind-whipped, half-dead palm trees to the corny motel names, the night that ended with dinner in Annapolis and our first kiss? We just became, morphed from one thing to another, naturally.
But then there was J, my second long-term boyfriend, my first "first date."
I was 19 years old and a recent college dropout. J, 24, was a teller at my bank, cute with his blue eyes and unruly blonde hair. We had run into each other two weeks earlier when I was leaving the local bar. “I know you’re leaving with this guy,” he said as the room swirled around us, “but could I call you sometime?” I wrote down my number on a napkin and we briefly made small talk before I walked out into the heady March night air. My age was “discouraging” but he called anyway and we made arrangements for dinner.
So there we sat at the Black Gate, one of two good restaurants in our small Eastern Shore town, the same one where my roommate Martha had just gotten me a waitressing job. The lights were low. Romantic. Thankfully, Rebecca, our waitress, didn't card me when J ordered a bottle of white wine. We sat in silence as she wielded the corkscrew and poured a taste. This is how our slightly awkward evening started, lubricated by wine and romantic interest and the fact that people with crushes forgive awkwardness for the sake of proximity. Our sad three-year journey began with oaky white wine and, for me, the cheapest thing on the menu. Stuffed boneless chicken breast. Of the rest, I remember nothing.
I had dropped out of college only a couple of months earlier, just decided to quit halfway through the second semester sophomore year, a decision I made immediately after I turned in a philosophy paper declaring that I could no longer believe in god. I spent several weeks sleeping in and fielding phone calls from my panicked mother before Martha got me the job. We quickly fell into a late-night lifestyle, hanging out at the bar, staying up until 3 a.m. with our tequila and our gin and tonics, sometimes with drugs that would keep us awake until dawn. We befriended Joan, a college senior who was also waitressing at the Black Gate and didn’t mind downing a drink or two with us.
Joan, who would soon be dating J’s brother, had given me background on Rebecca and J before our date: Two years earlier, when J returned home from college, he was a manager at another restaurant where Rebecca was a waitress. Their work relationship quickly became an affair. (Picture illicit sex after hours on cool veneer tabletops, quickies against the rippled metal door of the walk-in freezer.) They were almost exposed when Rebecca came home late one night and had to explain the rug burns on her knees (picture two pairs of knees chafing on tired restaurant carpeting or pressing into threadbare wall-to-wall at J's house, the Sugar Shack). She came up with a story to appease her husband, and although plenty of other people in the small town knew what was up, he remained in the dark.
Knowing my date and our married-mother-of-two waitress had slept together, at least once in a position that resulted in rug-burned knees, added an odd element to an already stressful situation. Still, it brought a little depth to J, who up until this point had just been that cute friendly guy at the bank. Joan, who was working the night of the date, reported later that Rebecca was nervous, too, that her hands had been shaking as she pulled the cork out of the bottle, but I was too shaky myself to notice. I never found out what J thought of the situation.
One date led to another. The spring of 1989 was kisses and new love, drinks at the bar (Dirty Irishmen, Black Russians, Dark and Stormies), a drunken loverly haze sweetened by the scent of tulips and magnolias and the religion of sex. But as summer came, things went south. I took advantage of Martha, who was carrying us financially, and we had a falling out. She moved out early and slept with my barely-ex-boyfriend, D, whom I had also treated badly. When J was out of town on a family trip, I was unfaithful. By August, when I left for college in Washington, DC, Martha and I weren’t speaking and J and I were trying to repair things.
It was the booze, it was me, it was the fact that I was barely out of a lousy adolescence, that I was 19 and then 20 and then 21 and a mess. It was so long ago that sometimes I can’t believe that was me. I was grappling with myself, stuck, fulfilling my internal monologue that I was a bad person. It's a monologue I still battle against, try to remove of its resonating power. I battle it with good behavior, with the reminder that just because bad things happened to me doesn't mean I am a bad person, that I am good and as such will make the right decisions.
And I'm grateful to have avoided more first dates.
Related posts: I remember the heavy air and the smell of gin, Beware of Estonians bearing basil *recipe not included*, Love letter
Image by Lottery Monkey.
Other houses, other lives
Offer me tea, kombucha, beer in a glass. I sink into your couch or perch uncomfortably on the edge of the easy chair. I cross my legs and lean against the wall as your cat rubs his chin against my fingertips. On the opposite wall, you've hung a still life, a single mottled pear resting on a wooden pedestal. I want to pluck the pear from the painting, cup its coolness in my warm palm before I take a bite. The juice coats my chin. It drips on my shirt. I apologize for my lack of control, the drips marring your futon, ask you to forgive me my destructive ways.
Will you reach for the core? Do you fetch me a warm wet cloth and dab it against my chin, press it against the fabric of my shirt?
For now, I smile behind my glass. I gesture awkwardly, sit on my hands when they threaten to take me somewhere I'm not yet prepared to go. I note the stacks of papers, the dishes sitting out on the table.
***
1975, Kindergarten. My mother drops me off early at my best friend's house (whose mother is also my after school babysitter). The contrast between outside, the grey winter morning, car exhaust trapped in the air, and inside, the house sweet, warm, and comforting, makes my heart ache. In the sunlit kitchen, her family sits around the breakfast table. I smell pancakes and butter, syrup and sausage, coffee and cream. It's as though I have stumbled onto an extra family, intact and loving. I am grateful when they invite me to the table, but also embarrassed, as though they think I don't have breakfast at home.
The warm house, the sunlight against the table, the bronze copy of the Kiss by Rodin in the living room, the older brother's mysterious attic sanctum. It was my introduction to other peoples' houses, their dinner tables, the pantry with the garlic salt I sprinkled on my palm, the stairs that led from the kitchen down to a dark cellar, the sleeping porch off the office where a lobster trap hung in the corner.
***
The damp living room in the Sugar Shack, J's brother's painting on the wall (keep this coupon/drop this coupon). The rattan furniture. The college apartment with the bed on the floor. D's family's house with his grandfather's artwork (The Fall of Icarus, the family portraits), his mother's loom in the corner of the dining room. Family dinners, blurry with Grolsch and toasts (proost!). We met at the tot lot my first week in Berkeley or we introduced by mutual friends on a street corner. We were an old item, a new item, had barely touched, had already kissed (in Metro tunnels, on the floor at my place, on the tan couch with the dog looking on). Now here we are, exchanging parenting stories. Making out on the couch while the movie Hairspray flickers across the room. Spending Christmas Eve in sleeping bags on the basement floor because your parent's house is full of family.
1998. My husband's old family home, empty of people. His mother was in the hospital and his father was by her side. He wanted to show me this place that was so much a part of him, more the landscape than the house, though the house was that, too. I admired the open floor plan, stood out on the deck and breathed in eucalyptus and sage from the canyon that he and his brother used to scramble down. That Christmas was my first with him, the only one where we stayed apart. In later visits, we slept in his old bedroom on crumbling foam mattresses, listened to the coyotes howl from the yard while his brother cocooned in a sleeping bag on the deck.
***
Maureen's house. The front porch swing on Canal Day, the two of us wielding 20-inch sparklers at the line of cars leaving town. The mysterious plumbing, with separate faucets for hot and cold. The couches, formal downstairs, soft velveteen upstairs. The walls with their Williamsburg colors.
Gayle's house, midcentury, clean-edged in a neighborhood of Colonials. Boxy furniture, teals and turquoise, black and white. The tiny room she shared with her little sister, the slumber parties downstairs, watching Fridays and laughing at her goofy dad.
Climbing through Peter's bedroom window to sit on the tin roof of his porch, talking about James Brown or Tama Janowitz or Washington, DC.
Mr. X's apartment in Champaign, forbidden territory at first, then a love den with its treetop views and Ikea furniture, a little kitchen for the hollandaise sauce, for the bacon, for the hot and sour soup, twelve Berghoff bocks stacked in the half-size refrigerator.
Resting my head on DT's couch the day of my divorce (the early morning flight to Columbus delayed so that I almost miss the court appearance, the awkward lunch with Mr. X at Rigsby's or was it at the brewpub we used to go to, a sad heavy pint between us?). Hot July day mitigated by cool air conditioning, the blinds closed, the feeling of sadness and happiness, of relief and comfort. One thing ends, another begins.
***
I don't know what your house will bring. I will remember the way the light slants through the blinds in the late afternoon, that painting opposite the couch, the conversations built around a core of curiosity and contrast, the moments before, before, before.
Image: Another person's house (my mother's house), mid-1980s, by me
This started with a photo prompt and went off from there. I'm not sure what to call this, a mix of fact and fiction, memoir and concealed wish.
Disambiguation
I remember you, how you fit into my small world, expanded it briefly before disappearing, how you coaxed me into feeling comfortable before kicking me in the shins. You didn’t understand what you were doing. How could you? You were barely 21 years old and knew nothing of the rest of my life.
We talked, it was endless talking, you speaking, me listening, interested, supportive, engaged. It wasn’t until I reread your letter that I remembered we met in a Shakespeare class, though I can bring the class to mind, the prof with lank chestnut hair and metal-rimmed glasses. I loved that class, especially the paper writing, the way I could take a topic and mold it, how it was all about language. We were all about language too, discussions of plans, what we were working on, your school paper movie reviews, your thoughts on lacrosse, on philosophy, on writing.
Mid-October 1991: We stood at the base of the concrete steps by the campus convenience store. I clutched the iron handrail. I wasn’t wearing gloves and my hands were cold, my cheeks flushed. The ATM in the tiny bank on the hill still gave out one dollar bills and I was still in love with DC and all it meant, the power, the machine. The sun was low, the sky glowing pink. You made me laugh. Soon I would take the Metro back to my claustrophobic studio apartment where I'd eat mashed potatoes with plain yogurt for dinner again. But before that, I swam in the words, bobbed along your stream of consciousness. It was entertaining. Like me, you are a thinker. You’ve upped the vocabulary, have years of scholarship holding up every linguistic diversion, but essentially your approach, the free flow of ideas, is the same.
We talked before class. After class. About class. Did we talk on the phone? No matter, it was talking, always talking. I don't remember how it got romantic, but once it did, the air around us deadened and stilled. We walked in silence.
Another memory: a nighttime drive in a beat-up car to Gravelly Point to watch airplanes land at National Airport. The tall trees of campus swayed and blurred as I stared out the passenger seat window. At the Point, the planes lit up the water, blew our hair around, filled the air with fumes and noise. It was one of those moments that I was a part of and apart from, pulled into the drama of the landing gear, the inevitable worries about how close the planes were to the ground, and the anticipation of what was happening between us.
I wish I had kept a journal then, had some primary source to pinpoint our brief romantic turn. I remember the pain of it ending, but can scarcely concoct the joy of it beginning. Was the night at Gravelly Point before or during? The after has lasted years. Our brief romance? Weeks.
Autumn pressed on. It grew cold and dark. We spent an awkward evening at a Capitol Hill bar (you told me that Magic Johnson had AIDS, a shocking revelation at the time), we shared an awkward dinner at my place -- do I have the order of events right? -- and then you put an end to it.
The ending was painful, a deep heavy pressure on my heart, out of proportion to the amount of time that we knew each other.
As usual, I drank. I listened to James Brown (and Friends, Live: The Soul Sessions), to Robert Palmer. I turned the music up loud and danced. Cold Sweat, Out of Sight, Sneaking Sally Through the Alley, I'll Go Crazy: In the weeks after you dumped me, I gyrated in a funk frenzy around my studio apartment, jostled the roaches out of their hiding places, made the parquet floor shimmy. I danced until I was gasping for air, until my mind was empty and my heart numb.
I didn't know then that the future stretched before me, beckoned with promises that things would get better. At least I had a brain and some semblance of good looks. They would make up for my pathos. I still had time to create a life. Which I did. Two years later, I found someone (reasonably) normal and supportive who wanted to spend his life with me. With his help, I built that life up. I dug deeper than I needed for a foundation, the walls were two feet thick, and every window triple-paned. In the end, I left it and him behind. I knew I was capable of stability, that I didn’t need a fortress around me. But that was later. When I met you, I was struggling to figure out how to live like a normal person. I identified more with the homeless people scattered across my block, interrupting me on my way home from the Metro station, than I did with our classmates. I didn't let many people in. You were one of the very few I trusted.
Over the rest of that school year, I slowly shut down my college life. I studied for comps, wandered around the Capitol Building almost every night, reveling in the view, the beauty of the spotlit dome, the Washington Monument piercing the sky, my Walkman on Nirvana and James Brown and Ministry. I worked and read, drank and cried. J, my on-again, off-again boyfriend (did you even know about him?) visited sometimes, as did Martha, my old roommate. Some weekends I traveled to see them on the Eastern Shore. I loved them both. We each had pain between us, had gotten comfortable with the ambiguity, with our carapaces, our walls.
My last memory of you is from graduation, a crowd of twenty-somethings muted by robes, the campus swarming with parents, siblings, relatives. I looked up and there you were, focusing a video camera. Perhaps we smiled. I turned and walked away.
Later that weekend, after hours at Andy's bar in Chestertown, I danced slow to Frank Sinatra songs with Mark, a regular who was a decade my senior. He was a kind man, easy to talk to, no pressure. We slipped into a kiss against the wall in the back. I freed my heart without giving it away, knowing that J would be there again for me, or maybe you, that Martha was waiting behind the bar, that time would flow in and out and back again. Someone would find me, would recognize that I was worth more than I believed. I was getting away from this place soon. The rest of life was waiting.
"You've got to live for yourself, for yourself and nobody else . . . "
For a different take on this same time and the time immediately after, read Hello . . . Columbus?
The stepchild
I spent so much time at my best friend Maureen's house that her mother, Meredith, called me her stepchild. Meredith was tireless, a blur of movement. When she wasn't at work, she was making dinner or doing the dishes or gardening or hovering over Maur and me as we baked a cake. Their house, a boxy Colonial in a small Maryland Eastern Shore town, was a work in progress. Meredith repaired walls, restored furniture. She painted. She waxed the floors. I don't remember her sitting in the TV room watching a show or reading a book on their expansive porch. There was no time.
Meredith's face was long and smooth. She had thin lips and auburn hair styled in a poufy permanent. Her eyes were unreadable, glossy and cool whether she was happy or teasing or angry. She was not one to hold her tongue. A self-taught artist, she preferred to paint winter landscapes, liked the simple beauty of the naked trees, their limbs chafed by cold, their bark furrowed and complex. The bone-bare limbs of a tree in winter remind me of her, of the oil painting in the kitchen, a tree's dark silhouette against a grey sky.
She grew up on a farm in post-Depression Alabama. I imagined cotton fields and sticky summers, a pre-Technicolor landscape, the women in house dresses and aprons grey from too many washings, the men in straw hats. Everyone spoke with a syrupy drawl, though Meredith's accent was sharp, like the smell of crushed ginkgo berries. She told us stories of poverty and farm life. The only detail that stuck with me is that her family used corn husks for toilet paper, probably in an outhouse with a crescent moon carved into a door, a stack of husks next to the seat. It was best when the corn was still green, pliable and fresh, but people who use corn husks for toilet paper take what they can get.
From third through ninth grades, I slept over at Maureen's house at least once a month and spent many post-school afternoons hanging out there. We walked down to the corner store for Dixie cups, flung ourselves off the backyard tire swing into piles of leaves, annoyed her older sister Karen with our Three Stooges fake snores. In the early years, Maureen and I danced around the spacious living room to Goofy Gold, with songs like Transfusion and Mr. Custer, her younger brother tagging along (later it was Prince and Duran Duran, the brother supine on a couch in the den, a wet washcloth plastered across his temple, the television humming in the background. He spent most of his early adolescence in this position.). The living room flowed into the dining room, with a cabinet stereo and a gravity heat register in the corner by the stairs. Maureen and Karen dried their hair over the grate every night, tipped their heads upside down into the heat and let it lift the strands.
I learned how to properly hold a fork at Maureen’s house. I regularly gorged on junk food there, too, barbecue-flavored potato chips, cheese curls that I would let melt in my mouth, smoky Slim Jims. For a kid from a health food household, it was the stuff that dreams are made of. I played endless Atari games and savored leisurely baths in the old-fashioned tub on the second floor. The weekend my mother decided to kick my stepfather out, I was at Maureen’s, a weekend I remember as being hazy with worry about what was to come. My first cigarette was in the woods out back, I had my first joint on the side porch, and heard Madonna for the first time in Maur’s third story room.
Then, in the spring of 1984, my mother met Kevin. I quickly became peripheral to her life. By that summer, I spent most weekends at Maur's or my grandfather's place at Hollywood Beach, a small community on the Elk River. Sometimes I was alone, sometimes Maureen came for a visit. We slept in the Little House, an unheated guest cottage without plumbing or a telephone line about 20 feet from the main building. My grandfather, who had been in an industrial fire in the mid-1960s, was almost deaf. He had a prosthetic foot that he removed at night at the same time that he switched off his hearing aids. Maur and I were completely unsupervised.
We did what many rebellious fourteen- and fifteen-year olds would do if given the chance: siphoned liquor from my mother and grandfather's supplies, (I can’t smell whiskey and Coke without being immediately brought back to that mildewy house, to the puking and sneaking and the excitement), stayed out all night, brought older guys back. Stole my grandfather’s car.
Well, not exactly stole. That late spring night in 1985 we had been drinking, me much more than her. Maureen had recently gotten her learner’s permit. I cajoled her into taking the car, actually an old loaner from the dealer while my grandfather's was being repaired, down to the river. Maureen wasn't sure it was a good idea, but I pushed her until she agreed. It was less than a mile’s drive along quiet neighborhood streets. What could go wrong? When we were almost to the beach, almost home free, she noticed that the driver's side door was slightly ajar. As she moved to close it, she accidentally turned the steering wheel sharply to the right. The car tumbled into Mr. Polke's yard, scraping against the decorative log border. The impact loosened the exhaust.
That's when things got complicated. My erstwhile boyfriend, D, who was dating someone else and usually showed up at the Little House after midnight, drove by shortly after it happened. He stopped to help and Mr. Polke, who had come running out of his house when he heard the commotion, became convinced that D had run Maureen off the road. Concerned for our safety, Mr. Polke backed the unmuffled car carefully out of his yard (the tire tracks! the logs askew!) and drove us back to the house. And then – my memory may be wrong here, pickled from too many nights of Johnny Walker Red chased with Budweiser – Maureen went out with another friend for most of the night. I sat up drinking, alone, hysterical. It was getting light when Maur finally returned. I was still awake.
A few hours later, me bleary-eyed, Maureen half-asleep, we told my grandfather the story, minus the drunkenness. It was an awkward conversation that started as all conversations with him did, with a pantomime to turn on his hearing aids. He took the news stoically. Meredith, however, was livid. We had taken advantage of my grandfather's handicaps in addition to stealing his car. She made a special trip later that week to apologize to him and give me a scathing lecture. Maureen was forbidden to visit. We split the cost of the exhaust pipe repair. Sometimes we talked on the phone. But the friendship was over.
Of course, my mother was angry, too. She probably made a venomous call to my father, see what I have to deal with in your absence, the same call she made when she returned from Kevin's one evening to find me drinking. She screamed, she kvetched -- what to do with me -- but she didn't stop me from going to my grandfather's house. In fact, two months later she bought a small house down the street from his and I moved into the Little House permanently.
This could simply be a story of teenage hijinks, the ill-advised “borrowing" of a car, the stupid, relatively harmless accident, the appropriately strict parent. I see the aftermath as being another abandonment, a confirmation of my battered self image, an unsettling thing to happen at a critical moment. I was fifteen years old. I shouldn’t have been in a position to stay out until dawn, to drink my grandfather's whiskey and sour Paul Masson wine, to be spending the night with a 21-year-old man who was someone else's boyfriend. Bad things happened, I courted those things, and even when my parents figured out the extent of the trouble I got myself into, nothing changed. It was enough for decades of therapy and a lifetime of writing material. It's material I wish I didn't have.
Maureen and I diverged. It would have happened anyway, as it sometimes does with childhood friends in adolescence. One goes punk while the other embraces pop. One picks up a drug habit, the other becomes a straight edge convert. Hormones and peer groups do their damage. I was lost and I lost her, I lost her family. The few times I was with them as an adult – I was in her wedding several years ago, a nostalgic nod to a childhood promise – I was uncomfortable. “You turned out to be a good person,” Meredith told me a while back, after the struggles of adolescence were long over. She seemed surprised. I’m not sure if it is because of what she thought I had in me, or if she understood, years after the fact, what I was up against.
I wish I could stand before her, stark and bare, honest, and tell her how much I missed that time when her house was a safe place, where I could swing from a tire into a pile of leaves or play endless games of Space Invaders and forget the rest of my life. It was childhood and it was wonderful, until it crumbled. Meredith did what she had to do as a parent, but I wish she could have seen the trouble I was in. Maybe she would have reached out for me, would have helped me out of a situation I didn't understand. But she was as blind as the rest of the adults were around me, human, unaware. And so I went on living as though I was fully grown, alone, independent to a fault.
This is from a photo prompt, a picture of a streetlight and telephone pole. I looked at the photo and stared out the living room window at the bare branches of a neighbor's tree against the dawn sky. It brought Meredith (not her real name) to mind and the end of my friendship with Maureen (also not her real name; none of these are real names). I've tried to write about this before, but have been unable to make it work. Still a lot to unpack, like so much from those years. I'm not sure if I've succeeded in transforming it here.
Confidential to Maureen, if she is reading: My apologies if I have misrepresented anything.
Image by lovestruck. I'm having scanner issues, hence the many photos from other people.
I remember the heavy air and the smell of gin
The kitchen on Queen Street was out of proportion, with a large linoleumed space that could hold a table for six but contained only an old refrigerator and a telephone jack. The stove, sink, cabinets and counter space were jammed into an adjacent galley. Everything we owned -- pots, pans, dishes, and silverware -- was a parental hand-me-down. In the mornings we would linger over percolated coffee diluted to a muddy brown with half and half, the perfect solution to a mild hangover. Some days I would come home for lunch from my job at the college bookstore to make BLTs on poppy seed buns, the bacon still hot from the pan, tomato juice and mayonnaise dripping down my fingers.
This was the place where we learned to cook, tried recipes from Gourmet Magazine and the Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook. In our year there, we made pizzas from scratch, cleaned and fried squid, and grilled chicken marinated with olive oil, lemon juice, and rosemary. A boyfriend showed us how to make pesto and a cook at the Ironstone brought us a bushel of crawfish that we steamed in a cauldron of boiling water.
I have a file of recipes from that period, most of them copied by hand from my boyfriend D's mother's cookbooks, some of which I still make, like Lebanese Cucumber Soup, and Rice with Garlic and Walnuts. I even have the pizza recipes from Gourmet, which seemed so exotic at the time (Sun-Dried Tomato Pizza with Peppers, Onion, and Garlic Confit, Broccoli and Ricotta Pizza). Going through them reminds me that I never clip recipes anymore, just search around on the internet or Epicurious to see what looks good. Recipes on paper are another thing I miss from the pre-internet days, another reason to toss our modem out the window. I want a paper trail blotched with oil and tomato sauce. I want tangible memories. I want to have my mind and time returned to me (brief interruption while I look at Facebook: see what I mean?).
Still, the memories remain. When my family returned from vacation last Friday, there was a half batch of gazpacho, vinegary and bright, waiting for us, courtesy of our housesitter. Gazpacho was one of D’s favorite foods and I thought of that long-ago summer, which was also the first time Martha and I made the soup. The recipe called for peeled, deseeded tomatoes and we were mystified. How did one peel tomatoes? Like, with a vegetable peeler? Or by hand somehow? And, umm, the seeds? What was the problem with seeds? Finally, Martha called her mother. She gave us instructions: put a big pot of water on to boil, remove the tomato stems and cut Xs in the blossom ends before immersing them in the boiling water for under a minute. Then remove the tomatoes with a strainer and plunge them into an ice bath.The peels would slip off in our hands.
Gazpacho recipe, copied in the summer of 1988.
It worked. Martha and I pureed the still-seedy tomatoes with bread crumbs, garlic, vinegar, olive oil and tomato juice, adding onion and cucumber at the end. The soup chilled while we chopped the garnishes. It was late July on the Eastern Shore. The air was resistant, fluid, like water. Heat flattened the landscape, made the houses across the shimmering street one-dimensional. While I poured the soup, Martha filled two cups with ice and gin and topped them with tonic and thin wedges of lime. We sat in the living room with our drinks, the bowls of gazpacho balanced on our laps. The soup was bracing, the acidity of the tomato and vinegar complemented by the bite of onion and coolness of cucumber.
Sometimes all that remains is sense memory -- the taste, the scent, the aching loss, the joy of conquest -- or a suspicion that something else must have happened. Maybe Martha and I went our for a walk that night after the sun went down, barefoot on sidewalks that radiated a memory of sun. Or maybe we refilled our cups again and again and cried about our crazy mothers, our absent fathers. Or we danced to Prince or sung along to Paradise by the Dashboard Light. D may have spent the night, the two of us still and quiet on checkerboard sheets, feeling the pull of the window fan in my attic bedroom, while downstairs M let the smoke from her cigarette drift out of an open window.
What actually happened that night is lost. But I remember the heavy air and the smell of gin, our kitchen counter splattered with tomato juice, the closeness of friendship at a time when the world was new.
Images:
Top: Me, a blurry goofball in the yard on Queen Street.
Middle: The original gazpacho recipe.
Bottom: The checkerboard sheets, the I Love You This Much statue, the orange crate. The artfully-placed bottle of Corona.
Remember part of me is you
Where it takes me:
*A hot Delaware day, late July or August of 1986, D. at the construction site. He wears cut-off shorts and a torn, sleeveless shirt, has wrapped a red bandana around his head to catch the sweat. Somehow on him sweat is sweet, necessary, like the damp of a spring rain. D. stands on a ladder at the roof line, swings his hammer. On the backstroke, the claw end meets his eyebrow, tearing a gash that requires fifteen stitches. I wasn’t there, but I can imagine it, the blood, the truck ride to the emergency room, the endless bowls of marijuana that he probably smoked to counteract the dull throb. Later I held my fingers above the stitches, lightly kissed the jagged rays of black thread.
*D. at the wheel of the Newport Custom, gunning it over 100 miles an hour on Town Point Road, the flash of grey-green cornstalks rushing past the window, the curve before we reached the woods, cool and dark, my heart pounding, the tape deck blasting Manic Mechanic. I cupped the wind, I caught it, let it flow across my body to his.
*Early on: waiting by the flicker of the television set in the Little House, falling asleep to Kung Fu or Fantasy Island reruns, waiting until 1 a.m.. Waiting even later. Just waiting, sometimes for nothing, a replay of my waits of early childhood.
*Still early on: The weekend he rode his bike home from college, logging almost 100 miles, to wish me a happy sixteenth birthday. Me, waiting. Him, appearing at 10:30 or so, a reasonable hour, with a half-consumed bottle of vodka. My present. He knew I would be leaving Maryland soon, but he didn't know why. He didn't find out until after the drama was over.
But it actually wasn't a photograph that brought this back, it was a poem from one of my Round Robin writing partners last week, something about the love of men who work with their hands. D. was (and still is, I presume) a talented carpenter, a man who framed houses and built furniture. Despite the endless nostalgia of my brain, the way the past rolls out of my fingers and clogs up my mind on a daily basis, I don't think about him very often. He's from the far-away past. I don't wish I was back in Maryland living the life I rejected when I was still a teenager, making the roundtrip from home to grocery store to liquor store and back again. And although I look back on him with sweetness, the pain I feel in writing this surprises me. It's a secondhand ache, pain at his early treatment of me that echoed my parents' treatment, sadness at how I ended up treating him ultimately.
I still puzzle over how people drift away after love, after the intensity of the burn is over. In early 2002, when my mother's boyfriend Kevin was in for his final hospitalization, I called D. to talk once or twice. I called him because he was there during the worst of my teenage years. He was my closest friend then, the only insider. He knew Kevin as a healthy, often cruel man. D. was there through nights heated by kerosene and electric heater, he held me when I cried, and he cried in my arms when he found out about my pregnancy after the fact. So I called him from Kevin's hospital after a particularly harrowing day. I was nervous, paced in front of the wall of windows in the Critical Care Unit hallway. We had an awkward, didn't-I-used-to-know you conversation. D. didn't remember much. Who can blame him? It wasn't his intense life, it was mine. I remain the only witness.
When old friends disappear, a bit of our memories go with them. I mourn the shared experience, the fading away. I wish I could gather them all up, friends long gone, the ex-boyfriends, the ex-husband. We would talk and laugh again, would remind each other of our once-live connection. I would pull them with me into the present, link the people we used to be to with who we are now. I would tell them, "Remember part of me is you."
Image: Pixelated D. in the Little House, Winter 1985/86. Some of my readers know this guy and I feel a little strange for putting his picture out there. Hence, the pixels.
Some of this is from a prompt, "Rectangular."
While your heart still beats
The pavement was slick and there were potholes and too many trees by the side of the winding road. The first to go were two juniors who were cutting school, doing what teenage boys do, driving too fast, maybe drinking or passing a bowl while the tires screeched and the car fishtailed. They ended up upside down in the creek that snaked by the road. They died. There were others in high school who died in car accidents, too, though at this point I mainly remember the names of the survivors (thanks, Facebook, with your updated images of people from the past).
Since my grandmother died, I’ve developed a strong sense of mortality, of my own, of other peoples’, of the various cats and dogs that have been in my life. Sometimes it hits me more than others, generally when I’m feeling low and isolated, when the sun hasn’t been out in weeks. It doesn't help that I've been spending an hour or two a day writing out the details of illness and death for my novel manuscript. And I’ll have dreams about these people, the dead from high school, usually as represented by David Anderson, the last one to die, the one who made it into the yearbook, a ghost by the time the book was printed.
There are other “deads” as my son calls them, like Carolin, a friend from college who had some sort of birth defect that we never discussed. She’s been gone for seventeen years, sometimes still visits me in my dream version of our college dorm. My grandfather shows up less and less now as I deal with the past, though I am sometimes reminded of how much there is to deal with (another nod to Facebook, where people who knew me peripherally during one of the darkest times in my life show up, and I remember just how bad it was and I want to die with the memory).
As I was wrestling again with that long-ago past, something that I keep thinking should be a “dead” itself at this point, as I was having a good cry after washing the dishes Thursday night, Nora, our Russian squirrel hound, came clicking into the kitchen. She likes to comfort the sad and inexplicably lonely, especially if it involves a pat or two for her. I knelt down to stroke her chest and was struck again with memory. There I was, ten years old, in what used to be my grandmother’s room, petting Greta the miniature schnauzer. Greta's fur was warm and soft. She groaned as I scratched behind her ears, reached out a paw as if to say "Don't stop." At the time, I was struck with the exquisite transience of it all, the way a heart stops and the lungs give out, the vulnerability of our soft bodies and delicate skulls. Disease creeps in. A car slams into a tree and then into you. You ignore the deep cough until it is too late. No matter the trajectory of the story, we all know how it ends.
Greta was killed by a hit-and-run driver when I was in seventh grade, about six months after we left my grandfather's house for Wilmington. He let her out when he was getting the mail. As he limped to the mailbox, Greta trotted to a neighbor's yard. She was halfway across the street when a car came tearing past and knocked her into a ditch. Either the driver didn't see her or didn't care to stop and my grandfather caught only a glimpse of the car's tail lights. It was the violent conclusion of Greta's brief story.
I knelt in the kitchen, my arms around Nora, and added up the dead. I felt their hands in mine, the touch of a gentle paw, the sound of a meow. Greta and I sat together in the dusty sunlight, her eyes brown and serious, her heartbeat strong. Sidney played a game of capture, batted at the pencil I pushed under the door. Louise curled up on the dining room table, a dog pretending to be a cat. I brushed against a boy in a hallway as he ran by, late for class. And my grandmother croaked out "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" while I giggled from the swing that hung from the maple tree. Even the tree is gone now, but like the rest it exists in my memory, in the stories I tell.
I held Nora tighter, tried to appreciate the moment, knowing I would think about it when she was gone. And the sweetness of it almost killed me.
Top photo by Jane Underwood, Writing Salon mistress and photographer extraordinaire.
Bottom photo by Mr. T from Nora's first week with us in 2003.
After writing this prompt and struggling with various versions of it for the blog, I got out my senior high school yearbook (theme: "A Unique Blend." I had forgotten that high school yearbooks had themes), just to check on some of the facts. There was David Anderson, still in with the living seniors, but at the front of the book was a dedication to three other people from our class who had died, two of them in car accidents: Pat O'Donoghue, Rob Klaczkiewicz, and Joe Lombardino. There were others who died while I was at school, specifically those upperclassmen in the first paragraph of this post, though I could have some of my facts wrong about the accident. They died in the mid-80s, well before our lives were digitally monitored, before you could have a Facebook page even after death. The fact that there was no trace of these young men made me sad. It was almost as if they had never existed.
A sense of place
We lived in that first Adams Morgan apartment for five-and-half years. It was a stately, if somewhat shabby one-bedroom with a working fireplace in the living room and an ornamental fireplace in the eat-in kitchen. The ceilings were high and the front wall had three windows set in a subtle, pleasing curve. Just off the kitchen was a sliver of backyard space that I planted with impatiens and elephant's ear that first summer, before we figured out that the upstairs air conditioner dripped on our heads, left the small landing permanently damp, and that the dryer vent above would sometimes let loose flurries of lint. There was also no coat closet. Shortly after signing the lease we remedied that by buying the armoire at an antique shop around the corner on 18th Street. So the armoire was first. The dog, the marriage, the kid, they all came later. The apartment saw it all.
The one-bedroom was on the bottom floor of a four-story townhouse and the family that owned the house and lived in the floors above us had two girls and a pug. They weren't overly noisy, didn't have loud parties or screaming fights, but since our space was separated from theirs by a only couple of thin interior doors, we heard everything. There were pounding footsteps and scraping chairs, the sad howls of their dog when they left her alone over long weekends, fourth of July firecrackers set off three feet from our bedroom. Once the baby came along, the baby that slept like an insomniac, whose sleep we were desperate to encourage, we left the apartment for larger digs in Alexandria, Virginia, though our son was sixteen months old by the time we finally moved.
Moving to Walnut Street brought us full circle. The drafty three-bedroom house had a fenced-in yard, two floors, and a second bathroom and was on the very same block Mr. Trinkle and I had lived on when we first moved in together in late 1999. But it was temporary from the beginning: as we were packing up our DC apartment, we got a call that led to my husband's current California job. In the end we lived in Alexandria for only six months. I remember that time through a haze of rain and snow, of grasping grayness and cold feet. We were a 25-minute Metro ride into the city, but felt very far away from our cozy, familiar neighborhood in the heart of DC. My husband often didn't get home from work until after our son was asleep and we no longer had our occasional babysitter. I tried to keep sane, joined some mom's groups, bundled up the boy to get into the city when I felt up for dragging a stroller on the Metro or schlepping our 25-pounder on my back. Just as spring was beginning to dab the trees green, to coax flowers out of the soggy ground, we moved again, to Berkeley.
And it was tough. The first year here was lonely. Our son hated playgrounds and other children in general and I knew no one. Mr. Trinkle was grappling with a new job situation and I was grappling with an unacknowledged past. It's hard for me to believe now that up until the summer of 2007, I wrote nothing. Nothing. Well, maybe the occasional whiny journal entry, at the rate of one or two a year, but that was it. I started writing and Mr. Trinkle and I started repairing and then I found a friend or three and a writing group and a good place for the kid to go to preschool. And then Mr. Trinkle finished his dissertation (I could be calling him here "Dr. Trinkle," but he nixed that one), something that had been hanging over him, over the two of us, for our entire relationship.
We've been talking about what is next. It could be a move from here back to there, back to the center of the policy universe with its wonks and its humidity and beautiful houses. If we lived in Washington, DC, my family would be geographically closer. I have long-time friends there that I miss, and there are those cherry-tree lined streets and majestic buildings. I just don't know if it's home anymore.
Home. DC used to be home. It felt that way from the beginning, from the day I moved there at nineteen. It was all about the houses, the formal public architecture, the restaurants and street people. I took pride in living in the center of a very specific universe, the place where people would gather to march and protest, where the federal government would slowly crank out laws, regulations, and decisions. Even the wonks, in their rumpled suits, walking with a sense of purpose or the wide-eyed look of the permanently distracted, were endearing to me. (The K Street lobbyist/lawyer types left me cold.) I still feel truly alive wandering the neighborhoods there, sludging through summer heat or pressing my boots into the slush. However, I've never lived in DC without a shield, a barrier between myself and other people. The town was made for shields, all that talk about policy and none about emotion. The emotions go underground, are sublimated by intellect. It's so ... male and macho, in an über-rational sort of way.
Berkeley's architecture does nothing for me. My general reaction when I walk around our neighborhood is "meh, bungalows" though I do enjoy getting up into the hills where the air is rarefied. It's the people and the philosophies here that I love, the crunchiness of it all. Berkeley is where I had the freedom to come clean and to become a writer. I don't feel (much) of a need to explain myself here, to talk about why I don't have an outside job, to stumble over the "what do you do?" question. And I've made some real friends here, too, women that I want to know even better, that I want to have years with, so that our children can be lifelong friends, too.
Home is eucalyptus-scented. It's juicy local strawberries all year long. It's hills with bay views and streets with devoted bike lanes. It's where my son is making friends and where I am, too, friends who don't know me as a librarian but as a writer and a mother, a woman with a past who isn't defined by that past. This feeling, of home and openness, is fresh and delicate. I don't know if it will survive a move.
Ask me next week, though, and I might be pining for marble and brick, for trail runs in Rock Creek Park, for fireflies on June nights and snowstorms in January, for dinner with friends at Lebanese Taverna or Oyamel. I'll tell you that I can maintain those new friendships, can adapt to life back in the District, that proximity to my family will make things easier, will give my son the safety net of an extended family.
I'm split. We'll figure it out soon enough (I hope) and I'm sure you will be reading all about it.
Upper image: View out kitchen door, Washington, DC, Winter 2005?
Lower image: Our sidewalk, Berkeley, 2009.
Beware of Estonians bearing basil *recipe not included*
Peter was only after the blender.
I was working in the college bookstore, propped up on a stool behind the register, when he came in to buy something small, a pack of gum, a used book, a cassette tape, I don’t remember. As I passed his change over the counter, brushed my fingertips across this stranger's calloused palm, Peter said “I know you from the newspaper. You told it like it was.”
A month earlier I was one of five or six people chosen to answer a question for The Elm: what did we think about the proposed student fee increase? Below my photograph was the statement “I know nothing about it. I have no opinion.” Ignorance and flat honesty prevailed. It was my statement, my stand on nothing in particular that got me the boy.
Or maybe it really was the blender. After asking my name and relationship status, Peter went straight to appliance ownership: if I had the blender, he had the basil. He knew where to score pine nuts and a fine wedge of pecorino romano. Peter wanted to come back to my place, make a little pesto.
The blender sat on the stained linoleum kitchen counter in the small college apartment I shared with my roommate Martha, right beside the coffee percolator that she filled with Folgers each morning. Martha bought it with plans for soup-making, warm vichyssoise in winter, refreshing gazpacho during the humid summer months, but in reality we used it make frozen drinks. After the Piña Colada incident the appliance went fallow, gathered cooking grease and flour dust.
Peter's basil source was a garden across the Chester River, a plot of rich soil courtesy of his employer, Anthony's Landscaping. We rode there one sticky June night, pedaled his tandem through a landscape defined by moonlight and shadow, moved our legs in time to the percussion of crickets. The basil had formed a moat around a pair of tumbledown beefsteak tomatoes. Rabbits and groundhogs had ravished the rest. As I smoothed my fingers over the soft leaves, pale in the semidarkness, the basil sighed, let out a breath of spice and earth and warm sun, a promise of pasta sauce and anise-tinged kisses.
When you are 18, most of the world is still a mystery, or it should be. I already had a boyfriend, and Peter knew it, but something about his earnestness – his habit of tossing rocks at my window for midnight bike rides, the fact that he was as aimless at 24 as I felt at 18 – made him irresistible. He was an English major whose literary mind had been muddled by deconstructionism, an Estonian-American who later taught me the best places to go in Washington, DC for Ethiopian food and the blues. Peter liked to pass things on. It was insider information: the slightly off-kilter notes of Thelonius Monk; the tuneless pounding and punk bands of d.c. space; the Biograph movie theater; linguini with pesto sauce.
His pesto obsession was endearing. And it was an obsession. In circa 1988 Chestertown, Maryland, pine nuts were an exotic foodstuff. Without a car, Peter had to finagle his way 75 miles and back to DC to procure one expensive cupful. He arrived at our place on the appointed night, clutching two bouquets of basil, a greasy paper bag half-filled with pine nuts, and a crumbling hunk of cheese. Martha and I had already peeled the garlic, purchased a good-enough olive oil. We had wiped down the blender. In the kitchen, I started grating cheese while Martha opened beers. Peter began tossing pine nuts and knobs of garlic into the machine.
The blender turned out to be an inferior pesto-making tool, or perhaps it was all in the technique. Crammed in the bottom, the garlic and pine nuts slowly turned to paste, while the basil calmly refused to be pulled into the fray. Peter finally grabbed a wooden spoon. The high-pitched whine of the blender was interrupted by a thunk as the bottom of the spoon splintered against metal blades. Too late to go back now. He picked out the shards.
Twenty minutes later, Peter offered a fingerful of the final product. Eyebrows raised in anticipation, I kept a cheerful expression, gazed past the green film coating his glasses to look directly into his eyes. The pesto tasted of garlic and more garlic interrupted by a heady nip of basil and the punch of sharp cheese. Raw pine nuts, resinous and rich, just barely kept the other ingredients in tune. As olive oil ran down my chin, I carefully deflected a splinter with my tongue, a little kick from Peter's secret ingredient.
(First image: Me, Chestertown, MD, Summer 1988, taken by "Martha." Companion picture of Martha not included. Second image: Basil plants, from Vultus Christi.)
Alarmed by the seduction
The daffodils were just starting to droop, to turn brown along the edges, when J, my second serious boyfriend, the one who still shows up in cruel attempts at seduction in my dreams, for whom no pseudonym works, asked me out. That first April date kicked off a sweet season of mixed drinks with cute but somewhat foreboding names – Dirty Irishmen, Black Russians, Dark and Stormies – as well as watery draft beer. Sex took on a religious quality, became a sacrament. The chemistry kept us limping along as summer eroded into fall and the relationship thinned at the edges.
Impatiens on the front steps.
Then there was Mr. X, my future ex-husband, another April romance. After his estranged wife finally agreed to a divorce, we leapt into commitment. Mr. X brought me a bouquet of stolen lilacs, fragrant and in full bloom, along with a homemade tape of the band Squeeze. We ate thick chunks of asparagus over al dente pasta, moved on in summer to goat cheese, basil, and sundried tomatoes on seeded bread from Strawberry Fields. Those first six months were a bacchanalia of Berghoff bock and bacon, of homemade hollandaise, of chorizo burritos as big as our heads. Because he was not yet divorced, we tried to hide our relationship, played footsie under the table at the weekly library school happy hour. It only added to the excitement, to the feeling of being so lucky and in love. Chosen.
Mr. X is to blame for my love of gardening. After we moved to Ohio, he introduced me to seedlings and compost, to the pleasures of growing our own food. Our second spring together we planted a garden in the shared backyard of our downtown Columbus duplex. I couldn’t get enough of it, kept on putting flowers in here and there, wanted to grow eight different kinds of tomatoes. Unfortunately, our shaky relationship didn't survive past the fourth spring. After we moved to DC and his new job turned out to be untenable, he returned to Ohio State. He left six months after we moved, coincidentally on the weekend of our second anniversary, though it was not intended to be a separation. Distance brought perspective. One cold March day, I decided on divorce.
With that April came ... love. I'd been friends with D (now Mr. Writing to Survive), a coworker, for months, but suddenly our relationship shifted. It was a mixed-up, uncertain time. I was suspended between two lives. Mr. X and I had to come to an agreement over the house, divvy up our possessions, and fight over the dog and cats. D's mother, thousands of miles away in Southern California, was dying of cancer. My own mother, having left Kevin temporarily, was living with me.
But D and I were deep in the process of discovery, our minds tousled with passion. There were memorable evenings, late night dinners at Lebanese Taverna, sitting by the Lincoln Memorial in the pale pink of sunset watching the cherry trees turn into blurs of white, nights spent just hanging out talking, developing our shared sense of surreal humor. My mother liked him, too, and would smile when he told her "Goodbye, Mrs. Casey!" upon leaving the house. He was like the polite high school boyfriend I never had. One wind-whipped day, the weather damp and cold, D and I drove to Ocean City. We couldn't stop laughing, in part at ourselves for taking a beach trip on a day that was a holdover from winter.
It was the spring we started building the foundation for our lives. It was also a spring without a garden, when I let the lawn dry out and the dirt harden. Without water, the young azalea bushes that bordered the house died. I could barely cook a potato, let alone take care of plants.
Basil plants.
Spring returns, and with it the renewal of lust, the desire to stroke new greenery, run my fingers through the dirt. It is the beginning of love all over again, to join with my husband and make things anew.
It takes over everything, this garden lust, takes over my brain and my time, pushing everything else out. My writing has gone to seed and I haven't been visiting my blogging friends, choosing instead to sink my hands into the soil, to fill up pots with new seedlings, to transplant root-bound herbs. At my last count, we had over thirty pots filled with vegetables, herbs, and flowers. One plant remains, a sugar pumpkin that will go by the back fence, will eventually wrap its tendrils around a trellis, and that's that.
It is about time that I resisted temptation, maintained fidelity to the plants already in my life. I must avert my eyes from seductive seedlings.
Who are these people and what are they doing in my blog?
DATE: May 1981
OCCASION: My mother's second wedding.
LOCATION: Eastern Shore, MD.
PERSONNEL (from left to right):
Mom: Barely 31 years old. Obscuring new husband's mother.
Grandfather: Looking pleased. The bridegroom had a reputation as a good guy. Even though he had spent the year before the wedding happily unemployed, lifting weights in the Little House, and waiting for my mother to come home from work and make dinner (though perhaps this view is a little one-sided).
Me: Eleven. And a half. Wearing my mother's dress
Best friend (from ages 8 - 14): Total support. Very funny. We went from childhood to rebellious adolescence together, from dancing around her living room listening to "Goofy Gold" to sneaking cigarettes and chugging 7-oz Budweisers. I miss her.
Cousin: Seven years old. Now an Episcopal minister. I haven't seen or spoken with her since my first wedding in late 1995. Our mothers don't speak either.
Oh, and I almost forgot. Here's a better look at ...
The car: Then-stepfather's 1968 (?) Oldsmobile Cutlass, permanently awaiting a paint job. I hated that #%*& thing, though it did get us from Point A to Point B.
Yeah, I've been going through my boxes of life detritus, old photos, letters, embarrassingly boy-crazy journals. The process has has brought up thoughts about friendship, loss, and connection. This picture stuck out, less for the time and situation (which, wonderfully, have lost their power for me) but for the strange posed/not posed quality of it, and for the relationships that have slipped away.
There's the next post, though I'm not sure where I'm going with it. And hopefully fiction will be returning when my writing class starts up again next month, or even sooner if I can pull it off.
Hello ... Columbus?
Capitol Plaza Apartments
The studio at Capitol Plaza Apartments was cheap and within easy walking distance to Union Station. On the first floor of an eight-story building, it had a large window overlooking the basement roof and a hemmed-in view of surrounding structures. Small and dark, with parquet floors and “apartment-sized” appliances in the not-even-galley kitchen, it was a cozy cave, the right place to hide out for my final year of college. I moved in August 1991.
To pay the bills, I took out more student loans, got a better paying part-time job working in a library at a high-profile law firm. That’s where I met Chas.
Chas had recently divorced and was trying to figure out his newly single life at 39, the house gone, his routine changed. I was a loner 21, a strange combination of vulnerable and shuttered, talking more to the homeless men who bivouacked on my street than to my fellow college students. We were both in love with DC, with its high crime rate and crack wars and the insane mayor-for-life Marion Barry. The brick rowhouses, the policy wonks, the strange political celebrity, the feel of it all: It was home.
Chas had left Columbus, Ohio in the early 1970s and headed straight for the District. He would tell me stories of growing up the city, where his large family lived in a massive brick Victorian. It sounded exotic in its blandness, the spread-out burg with the solid architecture. “They just don’t make houses here like they do in Columbus,” he would chuckle, and I'd smile as if I knew what he was talking about. Chas got his own apartment at 16, a few years before he moved to DC. Since I’d been emancipated from parental supervision from the age of 14 or so, he felt like a kindred spirit, another concealed soul, self-protective and insular.
Most of our conversations took place on my early evening library shifts where there was no one else in the office to interrupt us. He would discuss the pursuit of church ladies (they were a tough bunch), explain his theories on electromagnetic radiation, how the destructive energy fields from power lines were spreading cancer and causing miscarriages. We would stare out the window at the office building across the street, watch the after hours workers work or not work, watch them watching us. There was one man who was always talking on the phone, standing with his back to the full-length window glass, earpiece pinned between head and shoulder. It was a performance just for us, the man’s hands swooping and slicing the air as though the person on the other end would be persuaded by gesture. On the street below, commuters dallied or rushed, flagged down taxis, spilled out of the Metro station on the corner.
A lone wolf on the streets of Dupont Circle.
I told Chas all about my former roommate Martha, my escapes to visit her in Chestertown, where our evenings at Andy’s were blurred through multiple glasses of Dark and Stormies, a potent mixture of Goslings Rum and ginger beer; he’d get the details of the Bass Ale-soaked nights we had at the Irish Times or the Dubliner. Sometimes I would give him sanitized versions of barhops with Abe, an old friend from Delaware. Abe and I usually mixed our liquor, beer, wining and cocktailing it to the final rounds of Long Island Ice Teas. These evenings generally ended in an argument over something petty. We screamed across disco lights and crowded dance floors, tossed barbs in the back alleys of Georgetown, only to do it over again a month later.
In none of these conversations did I tell Chas about my drunken flirtations, about the Marines Martha and I dragged back from the bar one night, about the make-out sessions with Eastern Shore acquaintances, the booze-fueled pursuit of contact. Alcohol always uncovered the chasm, brought the need for other people to the surface.
In between the pickups and the throw-ups and the work and the studying, I’d occasionally see my faraway half-boyfriend. But most weekends were quiet. “Friday night drinking night?" the corner liquor store owner asked me during one regular visit, to which I gave a weak nod and smile. I’d drink, study, write papers, maybe catch the PBS Saturday night movie on my crappy box of a television. The Capitol Building was close to my apartment and I would walk around its lit-up beauty at night in all kinds of weather, braving bracing November winds, floating through the incredible sweetness of spring, when the cherry trees and azaleas were in bloom. (“I am alive, I am alive” I would think as I walked a path of fallen pink petals, feeling the joy rise up in me).
The week before Martha drove me out to Illinois in a battered U-Haul truck, Chas and I went out for one last round of beers, a temporary goodbye. I had every intention of returning to DC immediately after graduating from library school. But then I met a guy who got a job and we moved to a new town together: Columbus, Ohio. We started to build a life, adopted some animals, and finally bought a house. It was a four-bedroom brick Queen Anne in the Old Towne East neighborhood, a steal at $125,000. When I gave Chas the address, he was quiet for a moment.
“That’s the same block I grew up on,” he finally told me. Almost exactly across the street from our new house was an empty lot, the location of Chas’s childhood home.
Franklin Avenue house and neighbor (we never had a flag up and the neighbor will have to be a story for another day). Photo from Old Towne East Neighborhood Association.
It was a strange coincidence. What were the odds?
You guys are great!
About a month back, a new blogging friend, Melinda, wrote about saying her gratefuls. That’s what I’d like to do today, focusing specifically on this strange and wondrous virtual universe, the blogosphere: I am eternally grateful for the recognition and support of my fellow bloggers.
Last week, Karen of The Pitfalls of Life passed two awards my way.
and
Karen has another blog, Five Little Kids Named Larrow, where she writes stories about a very difficult childhood with an amazing clear-headedness, capturing the child’s innocent point of view. I think she's courageous, too, as well as a fine writer and photographer. Through the struggles of the past and present, she always finds a way to rise above. Thank you, Karen. You really are a good friend.
Also last week, Dori of A Yellow House in England passed the I Love Your Blog award along. Dori’s blog is about her adventures as an American expat married to a Brit. Written in a breezy conversational style with tales of little towns she visits and other stories from her life, A Yellow House is a fun read with some nice photography as well.
Finally, Susan Helene Gottfried of West of Mars not only received a bunch of awards (no shock there!), but she also gave a shout-out to blogs she enjoys reading, including writing to survive. Go to her blog to read her always-engrossing fiction, to peruse book reviews, or just to join in on the conversation.
I’ve been in a bit of a blogging slump lately, not feeling creative or chatty enough to leave comments. I’m getting tired of dropping my Entrecard all over the place. I haven't had much to post about. Even in my current ennui, I recognize that this virtual universe has helped bring me back to life. Blogging and the support of fellow bloggers can take a large part of the credit for connecting me with the world again, not only after a hard year in a strange place, but also after many years of keeping most people at a polite distance, years of sitting on my secrets and keeping my mouth shut.
This wasn't even the point of starting a blog for me initially. Building a community was far from my mind. I just needed an impetus to start writing. In that sense blogging has helped me connect back to myself, has helped the words flow.
I’m not sure where I’ll be going with this space. Starting next month, I will be taking a writing course in which will entail writing every day, including holidays and weekends. I hope this little push will not only help me find a local community but will also propel my writing forward. It doesn’t mean I’ll stop blogging or commenting, but it does mean that I will have to cut back. Or maybe I'll bring you all along with me on this new venture with updates and postings of my half-baked work. I don't know exactly how it will work.
What I do know is that I am grateful for my blogging friends. You have supported me on my journey and I look forward to having you along for the rest of the ride.
Thank you.
Heathen can wait
There was no other conclusion. I couldn't believe in God. This wasn’t a question of whether or not he existed, but was a question of my own belief. No proof was sufficient and I had no faith, no religious background, no desire to hide behind the wimpy safety of Pascal's wager.
Shortly after I reached this conclusion, a product of a paper I wrote on God’s existence in a Philosophy 101 class, I dropped out of college. It was the middle of the second semester, sophomore year and for a while I kept it quiet, kept on accepting my father and step-mother’s checks, which were enough to cover my half of the rent. My roommate, in shaky recovery from an eating disorder, was working as a waitress. As the money dried up, she got me a job waiting tables.
It fell apart. We drank and drank, put ourselves in dangerous situations. I was moving to DC, she didn’t want to come. She slept with my longtime boyfriend, I abandoned her for an Eastern Shore boy who lived with his brother in a place called the Sugar Shack. That fall, my mother drove me and the cat to a small rowhouse in NE DC where I was renting a room. I was starting a new life as a sophomore at Catholic University.
This was the atheist’s choice? Catholic University? I was thinking of majoring in education and Catholic had a good program. The school was located in Washington, a city I wanted to live in. My decision was sealed during the interview, when my interlocuter -- Miss DC 1988! -- told me I was in. But on that first day of school, I jettisoned education for philosophy. It was the most interesting thing going.
Amy, my housemate, was 30 years old to my 20, a Peace Corps survivor. Amy counted her potatoes and onions, and even recorded the shape her peanut butter was in -- the knife slashes, the peaks and valleys and indentations -- before she put the lid on the jar. I found her tallies of produce, her vivid peanut butter descriptions, recorded in tiny script on a piece of paper hidden in the pantry. When I moved in, she had envisioned late night bull sessions with her new gal pal. What she got was an unhappy, underage semi-alcoholic, quiet and removed. She coped by counting her vegetables, a safeguard against (non-existent) theft.
I found salvation on the second day of classes, while taking notes for the History of Ancient Philosophy. N., a Basselin scholar, started up a conversation with me and his fellow Basselins joined in. They were men my age, in the seminary and on the road to priesthood, in addition to being philosophy majors on steroids. If it weren’t for N., who pulled me in, supported me, got me a job when I was desperate, and on occasion gave me food "donated" from the seminary kitchen, I’m not sure I would have survived. He was -- and is -- a good friend.
N. is happily married now, to a kind-hearted, amazing woman. They have five kids. He and his wife have accepting of me, of my quiet atheism. They approach me without judgement.
But am I still an atheist?
I don’t have faith, but I am not as slavishly devoted to proofs. For those who believe, God is real. As for me, I’ll have to be content with not knowing.