Down the dungeon path
I spent almost two years in a ratty college apartment with a roommate who was my best friend, my partner in crime. What I remember: the feel of the sparse carpeting on my feet, the constant hangover. Early on, before she moved in (having come back from a stint in eating disorder rehab followed by a few months spent at her father’s place), I would walk home from work through the Eastern Shore shimmer of humidity to cook my lunch, a BLT on a poppy seed roll that I purchased especially for the task. Mayonnaise. Bacon hot and crisp from the pan. Iceberg lettuce and hothouse tomato (this was the 80s, before the food resurgence, and this was also rural America). I had a half an hour for lunch and, having no kitchen table or even much furniture, I ate the sandwich over the stove, leaned over so that the juice and grease would fall back into the pan, before I rushed back to my job at the basement college bookstore.
Gin and tonics. Vodka. Beer. The night Peter threw rocks at my window until I woke up and we went on a tandem bike ride down to a small beach. The night my boyfriend, worried about me, knowing we were about to end, drove from Chesapeake City to Chestertown only to find Peter hiding under my covers. TC, tall, dark, handsome and forbidden. J., my next big (doomed) love. Tequila-fueled dancing on the edge of the roof. Learning how to really cook. Falling out of friendship, almost permanently.
On the 25th anniversary of the assassination of JFK, my roommate and I parked in front of her small TV and watched the coverage of an event we weren’t old enough to have witnessed in real time. We sat on sagging couches whose holes were masked by batik fabrics, our drinks in plastic cups on plastic tables. The sixties still felt close enough to touch and we were impossibly young and sad, both of us on our own way too early, both of us struggling with who we were and who we were going to be.
All the lights were out. We sat in the glow of black and white. Her family would be driving up from Virginia in a couple of days for Thanksgiving and I was headed to my boyfriend's magical family's house, with the amazing food and all the people and the unlimited supply of Grolsch. We sat in silence, mourned for a time of pill-box hats, of simplicity. And the drinks were too cold and I can't remember where Frank the cat was in all of this, curled up somewhere next to me? Up in my attic room?
The theme
I can't remember where Frank was. I remember a time of no responsibility, of ever-flowing alcohol, the games of hide and seek I played with love. But I barely remember the cat, my childhood friend, the one I neglected in his final years.
We build our lives out of our actions, the choices we make. We choose wrong and we try to do better. We make excuses, we dodge responsibility or we look at it too baldly, right in the face. Frank was there. He even followed me to DC the following year, where he eventually died of kidney failure. I don't know why my flow of thoughts took me here, from the anniversary of a president's assassination to a time of personal turmoil to my youthful shirking of responsibility. It's the lack of sleep perhaps. It's my own continental drift.
The question is: where was the joy? When I look back at that time, where do I see the joy? And where is the joy now? It comes in dribs and drabs, in the moments when I can be present. It happens when I am totally absorbed in something like writing or reading. It's there, it is, I'm just too damn tired to feel that way and I've let my brain lead me down the dungeon path again. In the therapist's office yesterday, there was much talk of my sleep, how little of it I get, how getting more needs to be a priority. The therapist said that it appears as if I feel like I have to be ever-vigilant, that my anxiety (though I don't feel it as "anxiety") is a sentry, the thing that keeps me thinking of all the things I need to do, that if I don't take care of, no one will. It's a time of hyper-responsibility, of over-responsibility, and even with the sentry I feel like I'm doing a lousy job of it.
The solution
So, add "relax already!!" to the list. Or visualize a scene, go to a place with no past or future, a sunny day on the Bohemia River, the wind pushing the sailboat along. My skin is warm, my hair bleached blonde by summer. The sun glints off the river's calm surface. Or be here at the moment, sunlight angling through the picture window, one cat next to me, the other behind, the dog catching a patch of light on the rug. There's the buzz, always the buzz, the sign that I am alive, that my blood flows.
There are the moments between sadness, when all that is necessary is to be present, to be there.
There is the hope that some night I will slip, slip, slip into darkness, not stirring until the light of day gently nudges me awake.
And there's the writing, the reminder that my brain is here, intact, still plugging away, trying to find a pattern in my circuitous thoughts.
From the prompt "It's raining."
Image of the old place in Chestertown. Our apartment was on the top two floors.
Testing, testing ...
Today I am taking the GRE . The last time I took this was probably in … 1991? Twenty years ago. I took the train to Mom and Kevin's place in Wilmington and she later dropped me off at the testing site which was in Newark or in Philadelphia, where I sat with a bunch of other children in the high-ceiled room of a library, us with our scratch paper and our pencil marks and our dim light and our nervousness. Five years before, I had taken the SAT – my main memory of that is that it was scheduled the day after a Halloween party and I was tired and slightly hung over, but it went fine, because my brain was young and supple and accustomed to tests.
In the fall of 1985, along with every other junior in my high school, I took the PSATs. Except that I had to leave early for my ultrasound appointment, so that they could check on the age of the fetus, which I fudged the whole time, holding on to my lie until the pregnancy’s sad end six weeks later. All I remember about this pretest was the auditorium, my unexplained secret, the way we had to talk to the guidance counselor about my early dismissal without actually telling her the reason I had to have a doctor’s appointment right then. Now I wonder if I really have to have it then. We were in emergency mode by that time and skipping one half of the PSATs probably seemed unimportant.
I remember the before, sometimes a bit of the during, but I hardly remember the aftermath of these tests. Generally, I did ok. But here I am, over 25 years from a math class, knowing that I am going to totally screw that part of the GRE up. I’m worried and not worried about it at the same time. It’s like the logic midterm, knowing that I am going to toss myself over the side of a cliff and knowing that there is little I can do about it.
I failed the midterm, but luckily almost everyone else did, too. This is where my connection to my fellow philosophy students, all young men who were at CUA on a special scholarship where they were in the seminary (none of them became priests) while simultaneously getting a bachelor’s and master’s degree in philosophy. They used their power (not that they had a lot of it – these were tough years for these guys) to toss the results of the test out. It was true, our instructor was an ethicist, not a logician, and often would write long proofs on the chalkboard only to have a student point out a flaw in his formula, necessitating an entire rethink. There was a lot of crumpled paper in that classroom, a lot of groans. In the end, I got a C.
Last night I went to bed before ten p.m.. I read my escapist romantic book, A Town Like Alice, and I dreamed of phone calls that didn’t go through and children waiting for absent parents. In the last dream, I was in an elevator that was fluffy with loose insulation. I took it down to the basement, to the place of secrets where the walls were ripped away, showing their vulnerable insides. I watched the men working. I worried about their lungs, about the fibers floating in the air, about the way we contain the past. I waited for a sign that it was time to go back up again.
From the prompt "Surprise, surprise!"
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Edited slightly beyond the 12-minute mark.
Image by randomduck. This picture makes me homesick. The Childe Harold is no longer there, but I spent a lot of time in that basement bar in my 20s. J's cousin was a bartender there. My husband and I had at least one early days date there (I even remember the conversation) and a coworker took me there for a final beer after I quit my last full-time library job. Zorba's, the Greek restaurant to to the right of the Childe Harold, was where I went for an (illegal) Guinness on my first or second night in DC in the summer of 1989, drinking, eating, and reading under a Dupont-blue night sky, watching the people go by.
I need to visit. It's been too long.
Watery path
In Wilmington, Delaware, we lived near the Brandywine, a rocky creek surrounded by trees and parkland. This is where Kevin, my mother's boyfriend, found Louise, a shivering irish setter mix, where on my trips home from college, my mother, Kevin and I walked the dogs along the race where the mill used to be. In the fall, persimmon trees dropped their fruit and shook scarlet leaves. Winter exposed the muskrats. They swam from one side of the race to the other under thin sheets of ice, their bodies dense and quick. We discussed the voluptuousness of their fur, the fact that some people still ate muskrat, how Brandywine algae and chemicals would make the meat bitter.
There was Chestertown, the year and half in college and then dropping out of college, the walks by bobbing boats, the night Peter and I rode a tandem bike through sweet summer air across the Chester to his garden patch, the strolls along the river with my roommate Martha, our sob stories, our parental complaints, our barely post-adolescent struggles. Or J's family place across the lane from the Sugar Shack, the beauty of the creek, the ominous duck blind, the backfire of shotguns on November mornings. When I told him how beautiful it was, how I loved the tall trees along the driveway and the way the moon reflected off the water, he told me he had stopped noticing such things long ago.
College in Washington, DC wasn’t about the Potomac, it was about the place, the power, the buildings, the smooth marble and cool granite. I loved it all, lived in every quadrant but southeast, but left it for library school in Illinois. Champaign-Urbana turned out to be dry and featureless, flat and sparse. On deadly August nights, the thunder reverberated as it searched for a place to call home. My next-door neighbor beat his girlfriend with muffled thwacks and I, filled with women's studies courses and a strong sense of justice, called the cops. Nothing changed.
After graduation, my boyfriend and I moved to Columbus, Ohio, a city at the confluence of two rivers. We moved in the middle of a winter so frigid that we couldn't touch our bedroom walls comfortably without an intermediary: gloves, a thick blanket, the stretched woolen sleeves of a sweater. By spring I got my first library job in a building that overlooked the Scioto River. I can only picture the river in winter, the wind flying off the water's surface to slap me in the face as I walked to work from the Short North or from Old Towne East, the way the sun reflected pure light in the late afternoon. Boyfriend, then marriage, animals, a brick Victorian: it had all the trappings of a life, but my mind was on the East Coast.
We moved from Columbus to DC, from DC to a Takoma Park house near polluted Sligo Creek, where we walked our sheltie dog and had increasingly stressful conversations about my husband's bad work situation. His old job was still available and he took it, returning to the banks of the Scioto on the weekend of our second anniversary. Less than a year later, our marriage's dissolution pushed me back to Dupont Circle, where the brick buildings soothed and I could walk for hours contemplating, comforted by the flow of traffic. It was the flood from an upstairs neighbor's broken water heater, the gush that didn't stop for three days, that floated the cats and me across the Potomac to my new boyfriend's Alexandria apartment.
Years passed. We moved to Adams Morgan, within walking distance of two bridges. We ran along paths in Rock Creek Park, watched black-crowned night herons fish from the zoo grounds. We got married on a beach in Southern California against a backdrop of rocks and kite surfers, drove up the coast for a honeymoon. Two years later, the baby arrived. We stayed as long as we could in our one-bedroom apartment. Then, another move across the Potomac, one cold lonely winter in Alexandria scuffling through snow drifts, visiting National Airport with the boy to watch the planes take off when I couldn’t take another minute of being in that house.
Today I am in Berkeley, a 35-minute walk to the edge of the San Francisco Bay. We live in one of the cooler spots in the city, where the fog collects and the breezes whip off of chilled bay water. But I am not of the water anymore. Instead, I am beholden to the land, the way it contours. Gravity plants each step I take. I know the earth will shake someday, will rattle the bricks loose from the fireplace and crack the picture window in the living room. Perhaps the bay waters will rise and lap at the concrete slab out front.
When it happens, I won't hesitate. I'll improvise a boat and float away, letting the currents pull me where they wish.
Image of Brandywine Creek and bridge (fairly certain this is the Washington Street bridge, which is where Kevin found Louise) by tcd123usa.
From a old prompt: Where am I? Sometimes the water theme feels tired to me, but what can I say? It resonates. Looking forward to starting a new Round Robin soon.
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.
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?
godless wonder
—What’s ash?
Erica’s question—it was one of those brilliant moments. Kevin and Ciara looked at each other. They smiled. There were no coal fires in the house and neither of them had ever smoked. The cooker was electric. Nothing was ever burned. There was no real religion, at home or in school, so Erica had never noticed the gray thumbprints on Ash Wednesday, on the foreheads of the old and the Polish. A child like Erica could get this far without knowing what ash was, until she saw it spewing from a mountain. -- Roddy Doyle, "Ash," New Yorker, 24 May 2010.
I am not a religious person, though I received a bachelor's degree from the Catholic-to-the-core School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America. My closet friend there was a seminarian, a kind-hearted young men who accepted me, though he prayed for me to feel god's love, to take on the golden cloak of the believer. But it was philosophy that led me to atheism, to the idea that if you couldn't prove something, why cling to it? The proofs of god's existence seemed so medieval and naive, so pointless. I let go of my belief in an afternoon of paper writing, was not bereft at the loss of the First Cause. What protection had It offered me?
Belief in god was a given in my childhood, even without church, even without being baptized (my mother didn't believe that a newborn had any sins that needed washing away). I occasionally attended the Methodist church where a friend's father was minister and I also sometimes went to temple with a Jewish friend and her family. God was in the air. When I was eight, I read Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. After that, I talked to god in the shower at my grandparent's house, stared at my distorted reflection in the taps as I sat on the bumpy stool and let the water go cold. I gave him my confessions and hopes. Perhaps it was a form of self-mortification, the bracing water, the red round marks the stool left on my flesh. But I think it was the idea of having someone listen to me, someone who took a personal interest in my well-being that made these conversations so long.
My father-in-law eventually discarded religion and my husband has as well. My mother, who was briefly Catholic, now leans more Buddhist than Christian. My father has never been a churchgoer. I know I will never be religious, can never talk about god in any concrete way. I can't suspend my disbelief in the face of religious lore. If there was a first cause, it doesn't care about me or my problems. I don't see a divine need to suffer, only human beings and animals that live and struggle and feel joy and sadness before disappearing into the ether.
Still, I'm not a Christopher Hitchens, religion-hating type. I can distinguish between entities like the Catholic Church (which I have a lot of problems with) and individual Catholics, though I admit that any sort of fundamentalism gives me the willies. I know many religious people who are intelligent and thoughtful. Some are more conservative than others, but they are generally compassionate, kind-hearted folks who have taken it on faith.* They believe in god because he feels real, because they have an experiential knowledge that defies proof or rational surety. And I no longer describe myself as an atheist, even though I don't have any concrete belief. I can't say that there is no unifying force in the universe, that we are just soulless bodies waiting to rot (though we may be just that and I'm not betting on discovering the truth, if there is one). Life is a mystery.
The world my son is growing up in is devoutly secular, but it is also one in which we still need to talk about belief and religion, about god. I'm not sure how to do it without removing all of the mystery, without making it sound like I know something for sure. How do we leave the door open for him to make up his own mind? I want him to know about ash, about belief and how we think about death. He has questions. He worries about ghosts, buries skeletons in the planters, has seen enough to ask about the crucifix. My explanations of why we celebrate Easter and Christmas are painful: "There was a man named Christ who some people believe was the son of God . . . . " These are Christian holidays, even though you can celebrate them without a word about Christ's birth, death, and resurrection. To tell the kid that god is a story does both the kid and belief a disservice. But still I struggle, with the questions, with dogma, with how to frame the question of the god I don't quite believe in respectfully.
*And sometimes people are blinded by faith, use religion to dictate how other people should live. In this piece, I am not talking about homophobia or the anti-abortion movement, or about people killing in the name of god.
Images: Top: The kid burying Big Skully, the Skeleton King, in our former sugar snap pea patch. Middle: Newspaper clipping from the family prayer book.
Shoot him 'fore he run now
J. had a freezer full of goose breasts riddled with shot. His family owned property on Broad Creek with a duck blind right against the water, where the menfolk, clad in camouflage, would sit on brisk fall mornings, guns poised. He showed me the blind that first summer, took my hand and led me through a tunnel of cornstalks gone brown. We sat close on the austere bench, hidden behind grass that had become hoarse with whispering over the years. I am sure he kissed me in that humid July air because we did a lot of that then, sweet lingering kisses in between fights and sarcasm.
He’d told me that a former tenant of the Sugar Shack, the house he and his brother were renting from their grandmother on the far side of the property, had keeled over one afternoon in the back bedroom, dead from a heart attack. By the time they found the body, the man’s faithful dog had chewed off half of his face. It probably started with wake-up licks that progressed to nips and then frantic biting. But J. was often full of shit, and I’m not sure if he was just trying to scare me. If so, it worked. I’d spend the night there holding it, too nervous to walk the ten feet to the bathroom, picturing the gory scene, the spiritual remains of this lonely person floating over the room.
One muddy November night, when lingering kisses had turned into the fire of post-fight sex, I realized I was on the edge. J. and I had gone from chemical intensity to a kind of in-between thing that wasn’t satisfying but was just enough to keep me hooked. We’d spent the evening at the bar, drinking and picking at each other. By the time we shoveled into the Sugar Shack driveway, my brain was crackling. We had a fight about something ridiculous or something deep-seated and heavy, it doesn't really matter, and at some point I grabbed a shotgun from the gun cabinet.
As I write this, I can’t believe that I did such a thing, so dramatic, so serious. Could I be making this up? No. I was drunk and sad and teetering on the edge of the abyss, so I grabbed one of his (unloaded) shotguns and pointed at my face. Maybe we struggled. All I can remember is me stumbling in the shabby living room of the Sugar Shack where it was cold and damp. J. was lit from behind so that his face was cragged in shadow. I was hysterical with pent-up emotion, struggling to keep hold of this unwieldy gun. Eventually J. took it away and returned it to the cabinet. We went to sleep. I woke up the next morning barely able to move, felt around for his sleeping form and remembered that he was probably hunkered down in the duck blind with his cousins.
I’m sure he chalked the night up to my overgrown sense of drama, another mark against me to go with my unfaithfulness and love of alcohol. Thank god I've tossed aside those crutches for the most part, though I miss the drama sometimes. Drama sparks up the night, shines a little light into the abyss. Without it, you have only darkness, have to bravely perch on the edge until the abyss slowly creeps away. And that's where I seem to be right now for reasons that are unclear to me, dirging it out until the fog lifts.
"Shoot him 'fore he run now," is a lyric to the song "Shotgun," originally by Jr. Walker and the All Stars. Click here for a danceable, levity-producing version from the documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown. It features some of the original Motown sessions musicians and the late Gerald Levert as singer.
Image from the Washington College magazine.
The bitter scent of coming winter
I remember preparing a meal for him in the decay of autumn, after the leaves had dropped from the trees and lay rotting in the gutter and the breeze was turning cold and harsh. I was just 21 years old and could focus on the kitchen, had the time to think about cooking, and it was all still new, too, love and cookery. There was a recipe in Gourmet for roasted fall vegetables. I skinned and hacked a heavy butternut squash, added knobby shallots, garlic, and chunks of red potato, then tossed the vegetables with olive oil and roasted them in the oven. Near the end of cooking, I added slivered sage leaves, the bitter scent of coming winter.
Sage takes well to butter and olive oil, get crisp and intense, medicinal over gnocchi, tucked among thick slices of potato. My husband and I grow sage in our front yard. The plant sits between the flat-leafed parsley and the lemon verbena, its silver green leaves upright, purple flowers still drawing honeybees. I’ll have to trim it soon, deadhead the flowers and clean off the spider webs in preparation for the feasts and sadness of fall.
Here is the original recipe, from Epicurious. Add 2 tablespoons slivered sage in the last ten minutes of cooking to recreate my more winter-scented dish.
Roasted Autumn Vegetables
1 1/2 pounds small red potatoes
1 pound shallots (about 24), peeled and trimmed
5 tablespoons olive oil
1 bay leaf
1/4 teaspoon dried thyme, crumbled
4 garlic cloves, crushed
2 pounds butternut squash, peeled and cut into 3/4-inch pieces (about 4 cups)
fresh thyme sprigs for garnish, if desired
In a bowl, toss together the potatoes, quartered, the shallots, 4 tablespoons of
the oil, the bay leaf, the dried thyme, the garlic, and salt and pepper to taste. Spread the vegetables in an oiled large roasting pan and roast them in the middle of a preheated 375°F. oven, shaking the pan every 5 to 10 minutes, for 25 minutes. In a bowl toss the squash with the remaining 1 tablespoon oil and salt and pepper to taste and add it to the pan. Roast the vegetables, shaking the pan occasionally, for 10 to 20 minutes more, or until they are tender. Discard the bay leaf and garnish the vegetables with the thyme sprigs.
Gourmet
October 1990
Image: Attractive sage bush, much nicer than ours, from eHow.
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.)
Shadowplay
The year was marked by the scent of patchouli. It roped and twisted its way into my room, coated the curtains, soaked into my skin. Some pseudo-hippy incense-burning chick with Camarillo brillo hair lived in the room next door and I put up with a lot of unwelcome odors. Pot smoke, sweat masked by scented oils, cigarettes and sandalwood. My least-favorite scent is an amalgam: Fall Term 1987.
Fall Term 1987 wasn’t limited to the waftings of pseudo-hippy chick. There were hints of puke (my own, my friends: we drank a lot), late night clothes exuding flat beer fumes and the remnants of cigarette smoke, the sticky 18th birthday remains of Coco Lopez and rum. That fall I comforted myself with baked potatoes clotted with butter and sour cream, used their earthy scent as an antidote to the disinfectant-sharp dining hall air.
Then there were the freshly opened condom packets; musty sheets left to go grey on the bed; my roommate’s apple shampoo; and the dangerous pull of Carl’s room across the hall. His walls were bare. In fact, the room was practically empty, save for a dead rose propped up in the empty whiskey bottle on his college-issue desk. I remember the smell of alcohol on his breath, sweet as molasses, as he unlocked the door.
He introduced me to the band Joy Division and to the previously unknown pleasures of the grownup crush, revealed the depths of my ability to obsess about certain kinds of men -- rebellious, prone to dressing in black, ready-made blanks for my projected fantasies. I wrote a short story about him for a freshman composition class that began "Carl is tall, dark, and handsome. Not classically good-looking ...." It was true. He had a Jeff Goldblum look, the dark-haired, smart, slightly nerdy ectomorph with his thick orange turtleneck, heavy boots and thrift store coat. He smelled like whiskey and cloves. The pull to Carl was obsessive. Single-minded. And pointless: I had a boyfriend and Carl was almost completely uninterested in me.
The real danger was Alonzo. Twenty-six, a senior from South America attending our small college on a sports scholarship, Alonzo was friends with Carl, but seemed to prefer the company of freshman girls. Rangy and tall, with hair like the young Kafka, Alonzo hung out in the dorm, crashed our parties, insinuated himself into our budding social lives. “Come on! What’s the problem?” he’d ask, eyes bulging, hand outstretched for my roommate Martha, making an offer we couldn’t refuse.
By the spring semester Martha had dropped out of college to get treatment for her eating disorder. I was unmoored, lost without my fellow drunk from a dysfunctional family. One snow-fresh February night Alonzo offered to take me out for a Procolino’s pizza. Afterwards (his intensity, his forcefulness) I reluctantly went back to his place, a windowless room in a Spanish professor's basement.
Shadowplay II (Gordana & Marko Zivkovic)
The professor wasn't home. Alonzo switched on a desk light, turned on the clock radio and reached for me. I could smell his cologne in the air. Polo. Not a good sign.
You know where this is going, right? It’s an old and very common story. I hesitate to call it rape, rape with its violence and violations and death threats and nightmares. This was more like coaxed coercion. Alonzo, all exploring tongue and crawling hands, used his knee to push me onto his thin camping mattress. I protested. He insisted, did what he brought me there to do. (I recently found out that Alonzo had been inducted into the college’s athletic hall of fame. The entry noted that he was so eager to get a U.S. education that he was willing to sleep on the floor. Yeah. That's right.)
Afterwards, the room damp with forced intimacy, I focused on the radio. George Michael was singing Faith. Martha loved George Michael. She also had a crush on Alonzo, similar in intensity to my crush on Carl. Now there was something between us. Another lie. I already had a moat of lies between me and my boyfriend, a series of flirtations and one night stands that I excused by thinking of his early treatment of me, as payback for the 1 a.m. visits, the nights he lost to bong hits and Elephant beer. It was getting uglier and uglier, wasn’t it? What was I becoming?
Alonzo the conqueror drove me back to the dorms in the professor's car. I headed for the showers. The coed bathroom was empty, no need to shout all-clear. Little blue toiletries bucket in one hand, towel tossed over the curtain, I turned the hot water on full-force.
I couldn’t wash the smell of him off me fast enough.
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?
Seven facts
Instead of passing it along, I offer it up to anyone who would like to participate.
7 FACTS about Jennifer
1 - WORK: I was a reference librarian for about ten years, first for a state legislative agency, then for a Washington, DC think tank, and finally for the "world's greatest deliberative body." Four years of working 40-50 hour weeks in a basement paging through Congressional Records, locating report language, and watching C-SPAN with my colleagues for the laughs led to disillusionment and burnout. (Note: There is really much more to the job than that, but an exhaustive listing of what we did would bore most readers). I quit to go to culinary school.
Took a detour to be a stay-at-home mother and freelance writer.
2 - EDUCATION: After one false start, I received a bachelors in philosophy, a masters in library science, and a certificate from a culinary school. My first college experience was about drinking; my second, about thinking, my third, about getting a job, and my fourth about taking a chance while I still could.
3 - FRIENDSHIP: When I do make a friend, it is generally for life (even when I am not good at keeping in touch). I’m still figuring out how to make connections as a reserved person without a traditional working life in a place I don’t know very well, since we’re still fairly new to Northern Californa. It isn’t easy, but I am getting there. I don’t need a posse, just a few confidants.
4 - RELATIONSHIPS: My second husband and I have been married five years as of last Saturday, and have been together for ten. After a tough 2007, we’re in a good place now. Happy belated anniversary, honey!
5 - WWW: The Internet was just taking off when I was in graduate school. I remember becoming quite engrossed in the usenet groups. Gopher -- a kind of menu-driven WWW -- was the hot technology during my first library job. It’s a totally different world now. Completely addictive, too, especially now that I am blogging.
6 - FITNESS: Run 3x a week when I can, other exercise on the off days, walk almost everywhere. I’ve been mainly vegetarian (some fish) for 13 years and don’t see going back to eating meat.
7 - DREAMS: One basic dream: that I make an authentic life as a writer. A better way to put it: I am living an authentic life as a writer, making the dream a reality. (Thank you to The Fearless Blog for cheerleading the idea that we must think something to make it so.)
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.