Hello… No response.

Hello, I say, more loudly, insistent.

hel-lo… He whispers the word, barely able to talk.

hhhh…   hhhh…   hhhh… hhhhnn… The rest isn’t words, just a semi-vocalization, as though he’s learning how to coordinate speaking and breathing.  The sounds seem to come from a distance, as though he isn’t holding the phone directly to his ear.  He’s breathing hard, fast; by the time I register what’s happening I’ve heard him pant four, perhaps five times.  I hang up.

This is the second time I’ve hung up on him.  The first time, about three weeks ago, he’d called at 2 a.m.  That time he hadn’t even said hello.  He’d uttered a couple of half-moan half-grunt sounds, quickly, and then I’d hung up.

He has only called twice, but already I think of him as “my caller,” already I expect to hear from him again.  He will call, I will answer.  He will give some audible indication that he is masturbating, I will hang up.  A routine has been established.  We have a relationship.

I am not afraid but I am slightly worried, concerned that it might be one of my students.  I have no idea, of course, who it is – instinct, more than logic, suggests a student, although there is a degree of logic involved.  The caller is clearly a man, and many of the men I know are current or former students.  If it is a student, then I am disturbed more than fearful.  I love my students, can’t imagine anything bad resulting from even this warped version of communication with one of them.  I am not afraid, but I tremble when I hang up the phone, tremble as I get back into bed.  I’m hardly afraid at all.

Both times he’s called I’ve had the urge to yell into the phone.  Say something, motherfucker!  You asshole, don’t call me again! Following the anger, there’s been curiosity, almost concern.  I’ve wanted to ask, sincerely, Who are you?  Do I know you? And I’ve fantasized chatting with him, casually, flippantly, as he jerked off: So, what makes a man pick up the phone at this point in the process, exactly?

We’ve had less than thirty seconds of contact, but he has entered my world.

I wonder if it’s purely coincidence, my number picked at random.  (But saved, for he called again…)  I wonder if he knows where I live, what I look like.  I wonder how old he is, what he looks like.  I have begun to picture him as a particular student, a tall, blonde nineteen-year old who would email me from time to time during the semester he attended my class, a year ago.  He seemed like a decent kid, but was a poor student.  We’d had little contact outside of class – I can’t even remember his name – but I’d sensed a jittery energy about him, a kind of edginess that registered only vaguely at the time.  He never had anything of consequence to say in his emails, would write hi, hope you’re having a nice day…  I’d respond yes, you too, don’t forget to turn in your essay on Monday.

He is probably not my caller, but my brain finds it helpful to focus on an image, understands that it’s easier to deal with something concrete than something abstract.  And so I picture this kid, think he was a mediocre student, he would probably be a mediocre stalker.

It’s not until I write those words that I realize I must be at least a little worried that my caller might stalk me.  I’m surprised at this response, see it as an over-reaction.  I remember my former student: he is too lazy to stalk me, I think.  I try to laugh.

After the second incident I attempt to learn his number, use the *69 phone service, but the number has been blocked.  I can report the problem to the phone company, but that would result in my number being changed.  I don’t want my number changed.  I don’t want my life interfered with at all.  What I want – even more than wanting the calls to stop – is to know who he is.

I want him to know that he has interrupted my sleep; to wake to his urgent breathing is  profoundly disorienting, cruel.  I want him to know that I cried after the first time he called, that I felt deeply lonely.  When I think of touching my lover I sometimes think of him, and have to stop.  When I touch myself I sometimes think of him, and have to stop.  He has not altered my ability to fantasize but he has altered my ability to proceed unharmed; he has affected my understanding of intent and desire; he has slithered into my psyche and I pray for him to leave.

I hope he is not simply an angry, violent young man, that he is something better, someone capable of change, someone who will abandon this habit – the habit of summoning a woman; of creating, for himself, a witness – who he thinks of, I imagine, as a participant.  (I hope he is just a stupid kid thinking he’s not hurting anyone.  I hope he is not cruel.  I hope he is not lonely).  I want him to know that I am not a participant, am not his lover, his girlfriend, his partner, his wife.  And I want him to know that I want him gone, I want to light a match at the edge of his image and watch it burn.  He has trespassed into my dreams, an intruder, a coward; he has transgressed boundaries with almost as much force as if having lunged bodily from the bushes outside my bedroom window.

I am not afraid but I am alive and because I am alive I am unable to stop thinking and one of the things I think about is him and perhaps in a way he has complicated my life, made my imagination richer and for that I wonder if I should thank him.  Thank you, I think, thank you, my caller.  I pity you I worry about you; you make me sick you make me furious you make me feel like we are the only two people in the world.  I am awake in the night, alone, my body curled quietly under the stars.  And you are somewhere else, one hand on yourself, the other hand reaching for the phone.  You call and I answer.

We are the only two people in the world and so we do what people do: reach out.  And damnit, I have romanticized the situation but part of me believes it: he reaches out by calling and I reach out by writing.  He has chosen to reach toward me and I have chosen to reach back, though indirectly – he will never read this – but still, I am writing, in part, to him.  And although part of me has softened to my caller I do not want to hear what I hear when he calls.  And so we thwart each other: I hang up on him; he does not, cannot hear what I say here.  And because the idea of failing to connect breaks my heart I am sad, and because I am sad for this stranger who has, quite clearly, injured my imagination, I am angry.  And because my vocabulary often reaches its limits when I am angry, all I can think to scream at him is FUCK YOU.  Fuck you, caller.  Fuck you.

You make my heart tired, caller… but what you do with your body does not interest me.  No, wait, it interests me to this extent: I am curious about why – why do you call?  Does your desire have any relationship at all to my understanding of desire; do you think about intimacy, loneliness, fear, love, pleasure, sadness, rage?  What we do with our bodies, alone, together…  how we confront ourselves, how we expose ourselves, how we face one another… what we hunger for, just how naked we can feel…

How alike are we?  Why do you call?
These questions shake me up, my caller, as much as your whisper in the night.

I had met all of these comrades by way of my mother; for once I’d finished clear-cutting the juvenile stacks at the public library, she became my primary source of reading material. She was adept at eyeing my emotional condition and assuaging it with the appropriate nineteenth-century novel, and I’m not sure that it would ever have occurred to either of us that I might benefit from a jolt. It did, however, occur to my father, who, rushing through the house on his way to work, paused long enough one day to hand me his paperback copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

To understand my reaction to this book, you need to understand not only how white I was but how naïvely white. And how naïvely female. Of course I knew I was a white girl, sister of another white girl, daughter of white parents. Nonetheless, though my parents were well educated and well read, both had been born into the rural-industrial working class: into small-time farming and coal mining, steel-mill labor and truck driving. My parents had struggled to evade that fate: they’d gone to college; they’d read books; they’d attained advanced degrees. Yet although we now lived decorously on the outskirts of a city, where we patronized bookstores and listened to classical music and supported liberal causes and ate fish (a horrifying food, as far as my Appalachian relatives were concerned), my parents remained fearful of urban dangers and thin-skinned about their past. They were nervous about visitors, suspicious of outsiders’ motives, self-flagellating about their shyness.

As a child, I often and easily imagined our family of four on an island in the center of a deep lake, in a Conestoga wagon jolting across an endless prairie. We were cut off, cut adrift, dependent only on one another; yet also cherished, yet also protected. So when I return to that moment when my father handed me the autobiography, I also see now what I didn’t see then: my father’s bravery. Given his own fears, I can still hardly believe that he was the one person who encouraged me, wide-eyed and clueless, to open a book and crash face-first into cruel, brilliant, unforgiving Malcolm X.

The books that hate me may be very different from one another in most ways, but all share a particular characteristic: they ruthlessly dissect attitudes that I’ve tended to take for granted. Novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, for instance: she’s an author whose books hate me, though on the surface her Edwardian family novels might seem to have more in common with Dickens et al. than with The Autobiography of Malcolm X. But in truth, Ivy is the meanest writer I know, and the especial target of her excoriating comedy is my humane and optimistic assumption that “we can work out this problem if we just sit down and talk about it.” Fat chance, as the opening of her novel The Last and the First makes clear:

“What an unbecoming light this is!” said Eliza Heriot, looking from the globe above the table at the faces around it.

“Are we expected to agree?” said her son, as the light fell on her own face. “Or is it a moment for silence?”

“The effect is worse with every day. I hardly dare look at any of you.”

“You have found the courage,” said her daughter, “and it is fair that you should show it. You appointed the breakfast hour yourself.”

Lady Heriot did not suggest that anyone else should appoint it.

Her characters certainly do talk; in fact, talk is about all they do. But they purposely use family conversation to ridicule, to flay, to tyrannize. In a Compton-Burnett novel, nobody ever feels better after a chat. Talk equals damage, and Dame Ivy makes it clear that anyone who believes otherwise is a fool. She is a writer who takes a gleeful, amoral pleasure in identifying with her tyrants, and she is so skilled at her work that a reader quickly, and dreadfully, begins to do the same. As essayist Thomas Rayfiel has written of Dame Ivy, “One is complicit with the artist’s indulgence in her vice, executed so skillfully, argued with such convincing intelligence, you find yourself nodding in unwilling agreement with rapists, torturers, murderers whose actions are justified by arguments that seem, in the context of what she has created, incontrovertible. This can’t be happening, you think. This can’t be happening to me.”

In a way, the same could be said of Malcolm X, who buttresses his opinions and assertions with what seem, in the context of the Autobiography, to be incontrovertible arguments. There’s no answering him. Later, away from the book, I might begin to invent some rejoinder, some defense. But with his book in my hand, his words spilling into my addled brain “like steam under pressure”: then, even when he wrong, he’s right.

“I started to be aware of the peculiar attitude of white people toward me,” wrote Malcolm. “I sensed it had to do with my father. It was an adult version of what several white children had said at school, in hints, or sometimes in the open, which really expressed what their parents had said—that the Black Legion or the Klan had killed my father.”

I was a very fair-skinned child, not quite as pale as a redhead but close: the sort of white kid who is prone to blushes and rashes and can sunburn in half a minute. Around our house my complexion was the focus of fretting and, for my sister, annoyance: as in, “We can’t go to the beach because Dawn is too white.” I’d never felt especially happy about my paleness. But until I read the Autobiography, I had never heard it so intensely and obsessively chronicled and generalized—or so reviled.

White, white, white! No longer did the word refer to my own irksome coloring. Now it had become shorthand for every member of my family, all of my teachers, all of the other writers I was reading, all of the violinists I was listening to, all of the composers I was studying. For the first time in my life, I became conscious of belonging to an unsavory subgroup that was not denoted by my relatives, or my parents’ money struggles, or my terrible performances in gym class, or any of the other worries that had heretofore beset me. I was white. That’s all it took. I was white. Therefore, I was tainted.

If I’d been older, I might have gotten angry at Malcolm’s assertions. If I’d been a boy acclimated to heroics and grandstanding, I might have worshipped the fervor while smoothly exempting myself from blame. But I wasn’t able to exempt myself, and this speaker’s fervor, like the fervor of every overbearing man I’d encountered, terrified me into silence. What’s more, I believed he had the right to hate me. For in the same hot and scornful breath as his generalizations, he offered proof. Had my father been murdered by the Klan? No, my father was sitting peaceably in his study grading papers. I may have worried over a million unlikely events, but I had never, ever, worried—not even once—that the Klan would break down our door and murder my father. Malcolm, however, had worried, and his fears had come true.

Thus, within the first twenty pages of his book, did Malcolm X assert his supremacy over me. No matter how unfair he was, how wrong, how hateful, he always managed to twist my arm behind my back; he always managed to win. He accused me of thinking thoughts that I never remembered thinking, of drawing conclusions I never knew I was drawing. He announced, “What I am trying to say is that it just never dawned on [white people] that I could understand, that I wasn’t a pet, but a human being. They didn’t give me credit for having the same sensitivity, intellect, and understanding that they would have been ready and willing to recognize in a white boy in my position.” He declared, “This is the sort of kindly condescension which I try to clarify today, to these integration-hungry Negroes, about their ‘liberal’ white friends, those so-called ‘good white people’—most of them anyway. I don’t care how nice one is to you; the thing you must always remember is that almost never does he really see you as he sees himself, as he sees his own kind.”

Just before I entered first grade, my family moved from Maryland to Rhode Island, into the house where we stayed until I was almost thirteen. Next door, on the other side of the peeling picket fence, lived Maynard and his parents: Judy and Maynard Senior. Maynard, who was my younger sister’s age, possessed a desirable swing-set and a dippy overactive mongrel named Choo-Choo. Despite these advantages, his yard was small, whereas our corner lot possessed a climbing tree as well as numerous good places to hide. I don’t know whether it was Maynard Senior’s or my father’s idea to remove one of the slats in the picket fence; but very soon after we moved into our house, my sister and Maynard and I were wriggling back and forth through that fence, from one yard to the next—swinging, throwing sand, chasing each other, barking at Choo-Choo, hiding under the rhododendrons.

The year was 1970 or 1971, and Maynard’s family was black. Malcolm X’s assertions vibrated in the aether, but my six-year-old ear was oblivious. Did I give Maynard credit for “sensitivity, intellect, and understanding”? Probably not, seeing as it wouldn’t have occurred to me to give anybody credit for those attributes. Did I treat him “with kindly condescension”? Yes, I did; I certainly did. But not because he was black: because he was a four-year-old kid, the same age as my little annoying sister, whereas I was six and was thus entitled to boss him around.

As I grew older, I played with Maynard less often. He was a boy, a younger boy, veering off into boy interests that I didn’t share. But the family stayed in our lives. Judy and my mother occasionally drank coffee together; Maynard Senior kept an eye on our house when we were away. During the six years we lived next door to Maynard’s family, I have not the slightest memory of any parental conversation about skin color, no sense that my father could “never . . . really see [Maynard Senior] as he sees himself, as he sees his own kind.”

What I do remember is that, on the day young Maynard came home from school and found his heart-diseased mother dead on the kitchen floor, my mother was the person he called for help.

A touching story, but Malcolm X would have spit on it. Not a detail, not an anecdote, not even Judy’s dead body would have changed his mind about the speciousness of “‘liberal white friends” and the idiocy of “integration-hungry Negroes.” What’s more, simply recognizing that he wouldn’t have fallen for this version of history, knowing how much he would have scorned my so-called “innocent” reverie, makes me question it myself. Clearly, at a level beyond memory or bewildered argument, I share the guilt of my race. But that’s not the only guilt I share, and not all that the Autobiography hates about me.

For yes, it’s the book itself that hates me, and that will hate me forever. Malcolm may have been dead for more than forty years, but his chronicle never stops seething. Its words and paragraphs, its splintering yellow pages, the chipped cover with its creased, angry photograph assemble a composite life. Sometimes, as a child, I seemed to feel the paper smoldering beneath my gaze. Words leapt like portents from another planet: zoot suit, reefer, hustle, daddy-o. “A friend of mine [was] named ‘Sammy the Pimp,’” shrugged the book. “I wore my guns as today I wear my neckties,” it announced. And, dreadfully, “I believe [Uncle Tom’s Cabin is] the only novel I have ever read since I started serious reading”. . . meaning that “I—yes, this scary, in-your-face polemic—I am what equals serious reading. You, with all your novels, your idiotic poems: you know nothing about it.”

The Autobiography was first published in 1964, the year I was born. Its scorching presumptions cowed me when I was fifteen, and they continue to cow me each time I reread the book. Every single page finds a way to remind me that I am ignorant, that novels and poetry aren’t serious reading, that Bach doesn’t hold a candle to Lionel Hampton, that “marriage breakups are caused by these movie- and television-addicted women expecting some bouquets and kissing and hugging and being swept out like Cinderella for dinner and dancing—then getting mad when a poor, scraggly husband comes in tired and sweaty from working like a dog all day, looking for some food.”

This last ignorance may have been the most devastating one to discover. For at fifteen, when I first read the Autobiography, I also learned that I shared the guilt of my sex; and when I say guilt, what I really mean is that deep, habituated, anxious sense of unworthiness that so many women share. For Malcolm X is ruthless about us, and his pronouncements are austere, chilling, irrevocable.

“All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak: they are attracted to the male in whom they see strength.”

“I always had the feeling that Ella somehow admired my rebellion against the world, because she, who had so much more drive and guts than most men, often felt stymied by having been born female.”

“I’d had too much experience that women were only tricky, deceitful, untrustworthy flesh.”

“To tell a woman not to talk was like telling Jesse James not to carry a gun, or telling a hen not to cackle.”

According to the Autobiography, when Malcolm finally does find the perfect wife, she is perfect because she is perfectly obedient to him:

Betty . . . understands me. I would even say I don’t imagine many other women might put up with the way I am. Awakening the brainwashed black man and telling this arrogant, devilish white man the truth about himself, Betty understands, is a full-time job. If I have work to do when I am home, the little time I am at home, she lets me have the quiet I need to work in. I’m rarely at home more than half of any week: I have been away as much as five months. I never get much chance to take her anywhere, and I know she likes to be with her husband.

Nevertheless, he can barely bring himself to admit that he is fond of her: “I guess by now I will say I love Betty. She’s the only woman I ever thought about loving.”

As a devotee of nineteenth-century novels, I’d already read plenty of books that tacitly agreed with such presumptions about women. Writing about Flora Finching, the middle-aged romantic chatterbox in Little Dorrit, Dickens might as well have said, “To tell a woman not to talk [is] like telling Jesse James not to carry a gun.” Writing about Mrs. Proudie, the bishop’s overbearing wife in the Barchester novels, Trollope might as well have said, “She, who had so much more drive and guts than most men, often felt stymied by having been born female.” But these stereotypes, if no less wrenching in fact, were more palatable to me because they were individualized. As characters, Mrs. Proudie really was an obnoxious loudmouth who made unnecessary trouble for her timid husband. Beneath Flora’s silly chatter, I found a loyal, kind-hearted woman who deserved her reader’s patience and goodwill.

But the Autobiography was different. Its blanket pronouncements claimed to reveal real women, not characters; real white people, not characters; a real hero named Malcolm X, not a character. What else could I do but believe its message? I was fifteen years old. I was longing for love, and smitten with that longing. I was melancholy, overexcited, prone to outbursts, vain, nervous, self-defeating, and talkative. Not only was I white, but I showed every sign of growing up to be exactly the kind of woman that Malcolm would have despised. The Autobiography hated me, and the news was appalling.

Thirty years later, I’m a different person, a different reader. I’ve aged. I’ve become better acquainted with the worlds of men and politics and polemic. By and large, I’ve learned to disconnect myself from the prejudices of the books I read. I’ve learned what not to reread: what poisons are too lethal to try twice. I’m also more aware of this book’s authorial mysteries. As the title page suggests, its creation depended on “the assistance of Alex Haley.” Though I can only guess at how much and what sort of aid Haley offered, I know he was a novelist and thus was likely to have influenced story organization and development. Clearly, Malcolm X could formulate his own speeches and polemics, so perhaps what Haley did for the book was to collaborate with the man to create the character.

And that complicated character is why I keep reading the Autobiography. Perhaps my reluctant attachment arises, at least in part, from Malcolm X’s fervent honesty to his own convictions. As my friend Nick reminds me, “he was assassinated for making [Nation of Islam leader] Elijah Muhammad’s many marital infidelities known to the outside world.  So [even though] he had some truly close-minded ideas about women, . . . he understood that fidelity is an important aspect of human relationships.” That perception seems, in my case, to apply to literary relationships as well. My fidelity to the Autobiography requires, as marriage does, a certain commitment to blindness—that particular sort of blindness that is the flip side of trust. It’s dangerous, this fidelity; for it tests both self-negation and self-respect. It requires me to believe. This isn’t to say that I have to force myself to accept every one of Malcolm X’s pronouncements. But when I read, I do have to believe in his fervor; I do have to believe in his courage; I do have to believe in his rhetorical intensity and his insistent, rhythmic oration.

Oh, that sound! Really, I think that’s what lures me back and back to this difficult book. It’s like a crazy dance that won’t stop, that won’t ever stop, that will kill you on the dance floor.

If you’ve ever lindy-hopped, you’ll know what I’m talking about. With most girls, you kind of work opposite them, circling, side-stepping, leading. Whichever arm you lead with is half-bent out there, your hands are giving that little pull, that little push, touching her waist, her shoulders, her arms. She’s in, out, turning, whirling, wherever you guide her. With poor partners, you feel their weight. They’re slow and heavy. But with really good partners, all you need is just the push-pull suggestion. They guide nearly effortlessly, even off the floor and into the air, and your little solo maneuver is done on the floor before they land, when they join you, whirling, right in step.

There’s no way in the world I’d ever risk going out onto that floor with Malcolm X. Talk about poor partners: good Lord, he’d be better off trampling me under his sharkskin shoes. No, I can’t dance with this man. Everything about me is wrong. But still, I want to watch from the sidelines. I want to see him work; I want to see him shout. At least, when I’m reading his book, I get to breathe the smoke; I get to listen to the trumpets wail. I might matter less than any other character in the world, but at least I get to play my own pale and clumsy bit part.

“Should Ophelia trust Hamlet’s expressions of love?” Ms. Baker asked.

“No way!” Keena called out. Several others also shook their heads.

“Why not?” Ms. Baker pressed. “Mavis…? Are you with us? No? Tran? Don’t look at me. Look at the text.”

Keena started to speak but Ms. Baker shushed her, making brief but meaningful eye contact with each of the other dozen or so students facing her.

She waited.

I watched. In a few weeks she would be leaving for a six-month stint teaching in South Africa; only marginally employed, I was trying to decide if I wanted to be her replacement.

One boy, with his back to the horseshoe arrangement, had his eyes fixed on the Boston skyline a mile or two away. This million-dollar view was a selling point for me, and I enjoyed the irony of finding it here in Madison Park, a vocational high school in one of Boston’s most blighted neighborhoods. The other dreamer, a girl wearing headphones, had her eyes half-closed and inclined toward the ceiling while she mouthed the words to her song. The rest of the students had their noses in Hamlet.

“Perfume?” one small voice said.

“Way ta go, Maria.” Ms. Baker said. “Laertes compares Hamlet’s words to perfume. But what’s so bad about perfume?”

Maria shrugged.

“Look at the text. James? Damien?”

The room was silent. Ms. Baker waited. Five long seconds…maybe more.

“It’s sweet but not lasting!” Maria cried out.

“Yes!” Ms. Baker said, breaking into a big smile.

I had approached this class skeptically. Hamlet? The language of Shakespeare is a stretch for most native English speakers, and would be doubly so, I assumed, for these students, the majority of whom were born in—you name it—Brazil, Cambodia, Vietnam, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, Guatemala, Somalia, Nigeria, Cape Verde. . . . And it was a stretch. When they read the text aloud, even the most proficient students struggled to pronounce the words. Making sense of them required an almost physical effort that left the students thrilled but spent. Yet line by line, under Ms. Baker’s direction, everyone seemed to grasp the story line and give themselves over to the characters’ dilemmas. Everyone, that is, but the two tuned-out students. (“Up all night selling drugs,” Ms. Baker later said of the boy. And of the girl: “Bad situation at home.” She wasn’t just being flip, I later learned—she knew each kid’s story.)

“So what is Laertes advising his sister?”

“Not to do it with Hamlet?” Russell proposed.

Ms. Baker nodded. “Exactly!”

I wondered if I’d just hit them on a good day when the subject was spicy and close to home. But subsequent classes over the next couple of days convinced me that much of Hamlet was uncannily relevant to these students. For one thing, the violence was familiar. Even the substantial number of students who lived in safe, orderly households were never far removed from the high-drama tales of murder and revenge that appeared in the neighborhood papers and spread through the corridors at school. Furthermore, as Ms. Baker reminded them, the Prince was seventeen, a student like themselves who studied in a foreign land, far from home. And Ophelia, she was even younger and had all the questions about love and sex and trust that they had. Everything about the way Ms. Baker approached the material conveyed her belief that Shakespeare was writing for them as much as anyone else (as of course he was), and the students bought it.

I was impressed. Inspired. The kids seemed bright and motivated; they touched and excited me. There was Nadine, an African-American with attitude to spare, a novel-in-the-works at home, and a new gender-bending get-up everyday. (Black lipstick and lacy long-Johns beneath army fatigues!) And there was Ha. In her native Vietnam, she had been severely burned by a kerosene fire and unable to go to school for five years. Now she was on her way to being valedictorian. Slight and quiet, she had the grace of a heron and the tenacity of a bull terrier.

Ms. Baker assured me the work load would be manageable. A student teacher would take two of my courses, leaving me with just four others—two in Senior English, two in Journalism, all relatively small and each meeting only twice a week. As for overseeing the school paper, Maurice, the student editor, was highly responsible, and besides, the kids knew the routine.

I decided I was game. So what if I was “overqualified,” as the dean had brusquely pronounced upon eyeing my resume documenting almost twenty years of teaching writing in colleges and graduate schools. I needed a job. And although this one didn’t pay particularly well, it offered adventure, a way to break out of a life that I had noticed was becoming increasingly insular. As a high school girl in Queens, New York, I’d acquainted myself with the wider world by reading—Black Boy, Black Like Me, The Other America. I was president of my high school’s “Human Relations” club; I participated in exchange programs with students from Harlem, and, in the summer, I lived and worked on a Blackfoot Indian Reservation in Montana. During college and afterwards, I traveled extensively, both physically and psychically. As a college teacher, I attended dozens of panels and workshops with titles like “Dismantling Racism” and “Valuing Diversity.” Even so, I’d noticed that although my son seemed entirely at home in his racially balanced school, all the friends he invited home were white. I didn’t have to look far to find possible explanations: my own guests were an equally homogenous bunch, and when my son and I were out on the streets of Cambridge and I ran into people I knew, they, too, were almost always white.

So, yes, I had my selfish reasons for wanting this job—I felt I was missing out by not having more contact with people of color; I wanted to feel more at home in my own multi-racial community—but also, I thought I could do a good job. Although my experience with high school teaching was limited to brief stints in largely white, upper-middle-class schools, most of them long ago, teaching was teaching, I told myself. I had a Master’s in the Art of it, and, as a veteran teacher of College Writing, I knew what high school seniors should be working toward. At the very least, I reasoned, I’d do a better job than the disaffected, untrained sub they would otherwise most likely get. Furthermore, I’d have two more weeks of training in which I could learn from Ms. Baker.

Two years would have been better, but already I had picked up a lot. I had noticed, for example, how physical she was with the kids—hugging the ones she hadn’t seen in a while, affectionately clonking the heads of the ones whose attention drifted—unless, that is, she’d made a calculated decision to ignore a particular dreamer or doodler for the day. I saw how she, a statuesque, olive-skinned Jew (I’m a petite, pale one) earned their trust by coaching the girls’ basketball team and staying late to teach a prep course for the SAT’s. How she make it her business to learn about their families, their churches, their talents and traumas. How her sternness was always mingled with compassion—a compassion so habitual and far-reaching, it extended even to a bug-ridden computer with whom I once noticed her empathizing. She’d be a tough act to follow but I figured that the structures and routines she’d established, and the positive attitudes she’d nurtured, would carry over to me.



My main job during my official training period was to help students with their Hamlet term papers. These were a requirement for graduation, one for which Ms. Baker had lobbied hard, because she wanted—expected—a good portion of her students to go to college, and for that they needed experience with academic writing.

Of course I agreed, but after a few hours of working with individual students, I began to appreciate the enormity of the task before us. The critical articles they were expected to read (and utilize and cite) were downright tortuous to most of them. And while several students could relate the play to their own lives in powerful and touching ways (“My father also died and my mother dishonored his name by marrying too soon”), such comparisons didn’t add up to an arguable thesis. I figured that the best first step would be to simply chat with students about what had struck them in the play. Laureen and I got off to a slow start but when she casually called Hamlet a transformer, I thought we might be onto something.

“Yes, go on.”

“A transformer,” she repeated.

“You mean he has a transforming effect on others?”

She shook her head.

Transformer? Some new pop psychology phrase akin to “enabler”? The only other “transformer” I knew was the metal cylinder on power lines, beaming out possibly dangerous electro-magnetic fields.

After a lengthy who’s-on-first-like exchange, I realized Laureen was comparing Hamlet to one of those brashly-colored, monstrous plastic action figures my eight-year-old had recently introduced to me. Push a button, one head retreats, another pops up; pull a lever, the shoulders sprout wings.

Hamlet. Transformer.

Transformer. Hamlet.

The comparison seemed both ludicrous and marvelous, but before we had a chance to explore it further, the bell rang—at which point, I glanced at the boy next to Laureen whom I’d intended to “help” next, and saw that his paper was shredded. So many times had he erased what he’d written that not a single word remained intact. By the time Ms. Baker left, maybe three quarters of the students had completed a paper she deemed successful. This seemed miraculous, especially considering that several of the remaining quarter had shown up only once or twice since the semester began. (Next to one of those names in the grade book, I noticed the word “incarcerated.”) It would be my job to help and prod the ones who still had a chance. This was the only bit of old business I had to deal with. As for future World Lit texts, I was limited by what books were available—Ms. Baker had ordered Salman Rushdie’s Haroun. Beyond that I could more or less do my own thing and Baker encouraged me to play to my strengths, i.e., work primarily on student writing.



I had what I thought was the perfect first lesson. I would ask students to free-write on their names, then read aloud or just talk about what they’d written. I had used this ice-breaker with countless groups of various ages and levels and it had never failed to increase people’s comfort with writing, with each other, and with me. It also helped people plumb deeply buried feeling and it always elicited much wonderful writing. Now I had what would surely be the ideal group for this exercise—hailing from so many different places and having names both splendid and strange.

I began with brief instructions on what I meant by “free” writing—my usual spiel:

Write quickly, don’t stop. Don’t worry about grammar or spelling or punctuation. Don’t worry about what others will think of what you’re saying. These won’t be graded and you don’t have to share them if you don’t want to. If you get stuck, don’t stop, just keep repeating yourself or writing ‘stuck’ ‘stuck’ ‘stuck’ until a new thought comes. The writing, of course, will be messy and full of mistakes but that’s okay—these are meant as a warm-up, a way to mine your brain. We’ll write for about eight minutes. No talking while we write. Any questions?

Usually there are a couple, but this time the questions, the balking and bitching went on and on:

“Do we write about our first name or last?”

“There’s nothing to say about mine.”

“I don’t have a pencil.”

“I sprained my thumb yesterday.”

“I miss Miss Baker.”

Most kids, I think, genuinely wanted to cooperate, and in the end, quite a few came up with something interesting—one boy was named after an uncle who died choking on a chicken bone; another, after Portugal’s greatest soccer player—but what should have taken twenty minutes took forty-five and a couple of kids produced nothing at all. One had spent his time drawing magnificent cartoons. And another—I had been excited to see him writing non-stop, but when I took a closer look I saw his name, again and again, in giant loopy script—three or four pages of this and just this. He, I later learned, had “special needs,” as did many of my students. The term was relatively new then, new at least to me, for colleges had not yet started to admit such kids, at least not knowingly. The phrase so clearly implied that someone knew what those needs were and knew how to meet them, but if that was the case, no one had shared their knowledge with me.

When it was time to read aloud or just talk about what they’d written, only two students volunteered. When, near the end of class, I asked students to exchange phone numbers so they’d have someone to call about the homework if they were absent—creating a sense of community is always my first priority. Well, I was prepared for some flack at the h-word (Ms. Baker had told me it was hard to get them to do any.) but what surprised me were the several students who refused to give out their numbers. “My mother told me to never give it out,” one shy Latina girl explained. Others, I later learned, were worried about calls from the immigration officials or a cousin’s parole officer.

The day wasn’t a total failure, I decided on my drive home, but I was struck by the amount of energy it had required to achieve so little, and by how I, too—like Hamlet, like my immigrant students—was in a foreign land. There was a lot I would need to learn before I could demonstrate even a modicum of cultural sensitivity.

Overqualified? I’d had my doubts all along (had long ago switched from high school to college teaching in part because the latter was a breeze in comparison) but now I cringed at the foolish vanity that had allowed me to bask in the dean’s assessment and even grant it some credence. What use were my elaborate, well-honed systems of responding to first drafts, of teaching students how to evaluate their own work and respond to the work of their peers, if there were to be no drafts to begin with, or not enough trust to share them with others?

Sobered, I arrived the next day with a new bag of tricks: two “Name Your Baby” books and several Xeroxed copies of the book’s special section on popular African-American names—the Asians had to go it alone. The books created much excitement. “My name means lion,” one boy roared. “Mine, king,” said another, flexing his muscles. I thought high school students were a little old for such unabashed strutting; still I was delighted by the enthusiasm. One boy was so turned on he wanted to Xerox the whole book!

In another class, after trying free-writing again (and encountering only slightly less resistance), I handed out an excerpt from Sandra Cisnero’s House on Mango Street. This two-page meditation on the name Esmerelda, had been a real crowd-pleaser when I’d used it with college students and adults. Sensuous and lyrical, imaginative and emotional, it would serve as the perfect model for the revision I wanted these students to do of their free-writing—or so I thought. In fact, several students seemed intrigued, but near the end of class, a girl named Lupita loudly proclaimed: “With Miss Baker we were doing term papers on Hamlet. Now we’re doing baby stuff!”

Baby stuff. The phrase haunted me, even though Lupita’s “friend” had looked at me sympathetically and said, “When we were doing Hamlet, she complained about that!”

The ironies both amused and unsettled me. Here was a Latina female snubbing Cisneros in favor of Shakespeare, personal reflections in favor of term papers. I was reminded of an article I’d read years before. Lisa Delpit, an African-American educator, argued that free-writing was all well and good for elite white students who knew standard grammar and needed loosening up, but most minority students, she insisted, needed to learn standard grammar, in order to gain entrance into the dominant culture. All that loosey-goosey stuff, she said, was selling them short. I didn’t agree at the time; I believed there was room for both imagination and mechanics, freedom and discipline, just as I have always believed there is room for both dead white males and live women of color. But now I wondered if I ought to ally myself more with Delpit. I started second-guessing myself at every turn.

Of course, every teaching situation—every student, really—requires one to continually reassess and recalibrate. Jose, one senses, needs pumping up; Franklin a kick in the butt. Last week, Darlene needed time out to cool off; this week, she needs to be pulled back in. Such is the delicate balancing act any good teacher must perform. It requires dozens of little decisions every few minutes with success dependent on one’s abilities to read countless subtle cues. Are tears, for example, evidence of too much stress, or a calculated ploy for leniency? Is a complaint that work is too easy to be taken on face value or is it a cover-up for embarrassment that what sounds easy feels hard? I’d always prided myself on my ability to assess which students needed what, and how hard I should push, but now, unschooled in the culture of poverty and racism, and confronted by so many different personalities and codes of behavior, I was misreading some cues and being misread. How else to explain the costly blunder I made some time after that “baby stuff” complaint.

I had come across an editorial by long-time Teacher’s Union President, Albert Shankar, much of which was in the voice of a straight-A student from the inner-city who then transferred to a suburban school where she received C’s for comparable work. Realizing she didn’t yet know half of what she would need for success in college, this girl, in a stern but compassionate tone, was trying to warn her brothers and sisters not to rest too easy.

I made copies of the article, passed it out, and we read it together. It seemed like a good way to convey that I, like Ms. Baker, had no intention of selling them short. I believed they were capable of making it to college, but it wasn’t going to happen without a lot of hard work. Probably some students took the article in the spirit I intended, but Nadine—my source for much information, no doubt not all of it true—told me later that some students were insulted by it. They felt I was putting them down.

If anyone else had delivered this news, I would have been quicker to shrug it off, but Nadine had some kind of hold on me and I took the comment to heart. I even considered the possibility that some part of me hidden to myself had wanted to put a few of my students down. It was true I’d been feeling frustrated, embarrassed even, by my inability to control the few unruly ones who made it impossible for the others to learn. But no, I concluded, I wasn’t trying to get back at anyone; rather I’d made the mistake of imagining that these kids would react to such a wake-up with renewed determination—just as I would have. Now I realized that I—my psyche, my habitual ways of reacting—might not be the best source of information about how these students would react (and I’m still learning that I shouldn’t even assume that those more like me will react to things the way I would.) I hadn’t considered how fragile many of these kids’ self-images were. (“Why would you want to teach here?” more than one student asked me, bringing tears to my eyes.) I didn’t think enough about how many times each day they were dragged down by reasons to give up; I didn’t realize how easily they might interpret my attempt to motivate them, as my way of saying they were too far behind to ever catch up.

Just how damaging that mistake was, I’ll never know. I do know that shortly after it, I seemed to enter a period where I was getting, not merely sullenness and lack of preparedness, but rudeness and hostility. Take Henry—too handsome for his own good, I decided. Flashing his disarming smile, he’d arrive twenty minutes late and charge across the room, belting, “Yo. Wassup? How’s it going?” Take Nadine. From that point on, she seemed out to get me at every turn. When I gave the winner of some class contest a prize (a never-touched blank journal I was reluctant to part with), Nadine publicly proclaimed it a cheap gift. Only now does it occur to me she might have been chagrined she hadn’t won the contest herself. Or maybe she just saw how hard I was trying, how insecure I was, and she reacted as any self-respecting adolescent would: perversely. Quite likely, her cruelty and Henry’s histrionics and Veronica’s surliness were just standard issue—part of a lengthy testing period these students—so frequently themselves the target of abuse—subjected all authority figures to? When I e-mailed Ms. Baker about some of my frustrations, she wrote back that it took her “six months to get them to do anything” and she was sorry to hear that apparently they were going to “make me do all that work over again.”

I don’t mean to imply that those first few weeks (months?) were disastrous. They had their bright spots, the brightest of which may have been working with my student teacher. Though it seemed farcical for me to be mentoring anyone when I so needed mentoring myself, I loved observing and advising and conversing with Karen, and my insights and suggestions helped her prevail through some classes that were downright fiascos.

There were also encouraging moments in my own classes. In one I shared my free-writing on my name, saying that my father had changed his so it wouldn’t sound so Jewish and hamper his business success. I confessed that while I longed for a name that felt more genuine, I was sometimes glad that I could keep my Jewishness hidden. I’m not sure what the students made of this but their rapt attention told me they knew I was speaking from my heart. And this name unit that had started so inauspiciously led to several more spirited classes where we discussed an Israeli story called “The Name.”

A woman is pregnant and her father wants her to name the new baby after his nephew who was killed in the Holocaust. The woman, on the other hand, objects to all reminders of the horrific past; she wants to give the child a modern, forward-looking Hebrew name. In my more rambunctious class (with Nadine and Henry, et al.), we debated whether it is better to remember or forget painful events. We listed the pros and cons of each approach; we tried free-writing again and James shared his piece about a fight he’d gotten into with a childhood playmate in Honduras. I don’t remember how he’d offended her, but for some reason she was out to get him and did so stupendously by throwing a pepper in his face. “It was the 3rd hottest pepper in Honduras,” James wrote. This was just the kind of spectacular detail free-writing often breeds, and a poignant reminder of all the knowledge this boy had that was common and crucial in Honduras but nearly useless here—except, of course, in its power to delight the likes of me. When I got frustrated, as I often did, by just how much some of the students didn’t know (how to address an envelope, for example; where to put the stamp), I reminded myself of all they knew that I didn’t.

Our discussion of the Israeli story led us to a poem by the Mexican-American Lorna de Cervantes. Students enjoyed probing the images and the question the poem posed: What happens to our childhood memories that are “mown under”? Some spoke passionately about the pain of losing contact with their native country and the childhood they had there. They puzzled over what they would find if they dug up those memories—a “corpse” or a “seed.” For homework, Celeste, a sixteen-year-old mother (there were two or three in each class) wrote about having lost out on all the fun of being a teenager. That period is like a corpse, she wrote, “gone forever.” Another student, who was responsible for the care of her severely asthmatic mother—as well as several younger siblings, one of whom was awaiting a liver transplant—wrote that she’d never had a childhood at all.

In these few memorable classes, students saw, as they did with Hamlet, that literature could speak to their deepest concerns. They experienced the magic of metaphor, the power of their own voices when they speak their heart’s truths. And they saw how a well-chosen detail can evoke a whole, long buried world. I also noticed they were less inhibited about revealing themselves by connecting to what they read, than they were if I simply asked them to write about themselves.

These successes sound substantial to me now, yet at the time my pleasure in them was overshadowed by the number of students who came without their homework or didn’t come at all. And as I moved into what I think of as the middle and most discouraging period of my six-month stay, the victories began to feel more and more piddling. Maybe because my sense of urgency was growing. How would we ever get out even one issue of the school paper? How would my seniors learn even a quarter of what they needed to make it through a month of college? What should I be doing here, anyway? Would college teachers and future employers value a heightened self-knowledge and poetic sensibility as much as I did? Maybe I should put all my energy into teaching sentence structure, vocabulary, the use of the apostrophe? Like Delpit, I wanted to give the students the currency they needed to succeed in the dominant culture, but I also had misgivings about concentrating solely on that, for, as the prominent African-American writer bell hooks has said, “Every step into the white, educated world is a step away from the only culture in which minority students have felt at home and validated.”

Of course, every good teacher struggles with the problem of too much to do in too little time, but in large, urban public schools the needs are generally greater, the stakes higher, and the interruptions and impediments overwhelming. I wanted to scream every time the loud speaker went on to announce a track team victory, every time we all had to huddle outside because some kid got his kicks pulling fire alarms. During my initial visits, the vocational emphasis of the school excited me. The TV studio and hair salon, the print shop and a student-run restaurant—they all made Madison Park a sexy, happening place. But now that I’d seen how many students didn’t know “two” from “too” from “to,” didn’t even have a notebook or folder where all their English assignments went, I was becoming a back-to-basics fanatic. I started resenting the school’s progressive features that I formerly would have applauded. These kids didn’t need more stimulation, I thought. They need quiet and calm. They ought to have English every day, I raged. Two out of five won’t do it, especially because one of those is often missed in favor of some internship, field trip or special visit from a local business. Better still, they should go to boot camp. The gentle kind, in a pastoral setting, far away from the baby brothers who need to be taken to the emergency room, from the uncles who need translators at court hearings, from the monotonous, deadening after-school jobs that buy them things they need to feel cool. I had an inkling of the psychological cost of leaving one’s family and community, but from inside the chaotic world of this school, I was beginning to wonder if there was any other way.

Meanwhile, I seemed to be wasting more and more class time sparring with Henry, who didn’t see why we shouldn’t have a little party whenever he decided to stroll in; and with Lupita, who refused to put away her nail polish. I remember after one particularly unproductive class, one of the most diligent students said: “My family worked so hard and risked so much to come to this country so I could get an education, but,” his eyes welled up, “I can’t get one here. Nobody else wants to learn.”

My eyes welled too. I felt he was wrong. There were others, some who would even have admitted it. I berated my “overqualified self” for not knowing how to do right by them. At the same time, I realized that even the most seasoned teacher would have her work cut out for her here because the tone was controlled by those who bragged about their F’s.

I felt sad and fed up. I’d discover that a boy who said he’d gone to his internship never actually got there—had gotten lost and felt too defeated or embarrassed to call for better directions. I’d spend an hour with a kid discussing an alternative to the never-delivered term paper and he would then disappear for three weeks. I’d try calling the parents of absent kids, but either no one was home or they didn’t speak English or I’d leave a message that the student would erase before anyone else heard it. And the one time I did actually meet with the parents of one particularly bright, disaffected African-American boy, they were at as much of a loss as I was and could only bemoan their choice not to bus their child to a white suburban school. I was so exhausted by 1:45 when the school day was over, I could only hope I’d be able to make the short drive home without falling asleep at the wheel. And Nadine—her usual fascinating, infuriating self, always quick to jab me where she knew it would hurt the most—one day, she loudly (there was never any soft with Nadine) accused me of never staying after school like Miss Baker did.

What could I say? I had stayed a few times near the beginning, but less and less as fatigue and irritation settled in.

And then. . . None of this is easy to reconstruct, but the days got longer, and it wasn’t quite so grueling getting up at 5:45. In our Journalism classes, the bare bones of articles came trickling in. Karen and I started working with their authors one-on-one, and it began to look as if we might get out an issue after all. Hilda sweated through five or six drafts of her lead article gleaned from several of Miss Baker’s letters from South Africa. Nadine and Maurice worked hard to construct arguments for and against Ebonics. Tom polished his jazzy poem on why teachers shouldn’t patrol the hallway. (Actually, I was the one who decided it was a poem when I saw the jagged margins; Tom told me he just didn’t know how to format on the computer.) There were the usual diatribes against the Walkman Rule and the nasty lunch food, but there were also articles on the lack of black history in the curriculum, on the suspect popularity of Tommy Hilfiger, on abortion, gay marriage, sexually transmitted diseases; on what it means to be a man, and on how it feels to live all alone—which this student did. There were reviews of art exhibits and original poems on God and love and Martin Luther King. And although a lot of the writing looked to me like it was done by much younger kids, the newspaper had substance, passion and pizzazz. I couldn’t have been more proud.

By then it was mid-May. Karen had to leave, and the very class that had once tortured her threw her a party with presents and loving, appreciative letters. As for the classes intent on torturing me, small victories continued to occur. When we wrote about my friend’s double-exposure photographs, for example, or when we talked about why Rushdie believed so passionately in the power stories have to transform our lives. I can’t claim there was any dramatic turn-around; nevertheless, something started to shift in me.

I’m not sure what did it. Insights from veterans certainly helped. One day over lunch, I admitted to a guidance counselor that some of my students seemed amazingly immature—“amazingly” because I would have thought that with all their responsibility, taking care of younger siblings and working after school, that they’d have been more mature. “Yes and no,” the woman said. “They’ve been forced to grow up too fast—and without the nurturing that allows someone to really grow up.” And in late spring, during a late spring professional day, a guest speaker said something that stuck: “It’s true most inner-city kids are years behind, but don’t get angry at them for being where they are.”

Perhaps I just got better at picking my battles? Or maybe now that we were in the home stretch, I was simply able to let go a little and relax? All I know is around the time that the newspaper came out and Karen was packing up, I was falling in love with the kids.

They’d gotten under my skin. I don’t know how else to describe it—except to croon that line, as I often did then, smiling and shaking my head. Not that the aggravations ceased or even lessened, but I stopped taking them so personally and paid more attention to what gave me pleasure: Eric’s pride when he taught me how to cut and paste on the Mac; Celeste’s excitement when she told me she’d seen one of our vocabulary words in a magazine. I knew I would miss a lot of these kids, even—especially?—some of the ones who gave me the most grief. And I was full of “if only’s.” If only I hadn’t been so green, so easily thrown off course by a little lip. If only I’d had my own classes from the start and not had to deal with the students’ anger over Ms. Baker abandoning them. If only I’d had more time; even Ms. Baker had foundered for six months, and I was convinced I was getting the hang of it now. I went to the dean and told her I’d be interested in a more permanent job.

Senior classes end a good month before graduation, and I remember that last month as my best—not because I only had half as many classes, but because I began to see a lot of the seniors individually. They came voluntarily—eager for help finishing long-overdue assignments or for my feedback on their graduation speeches. Many of the students did their best work those last few weeks—maybe because individual help was what they needed all along. Maybe because graduation mania was in full swing and already students were waxing nostalgic about their suddenly wonderful school with all its awesome teachers. Some started visiting me just to chat. Not Nadine, but I swallowed my pride and nominated her for the Intellectual Curiosity Award—which, in spite of everything, I believed she deserved. When she won, she must have found out who’d nominated her because a day or two later, she thanked me. No small victory, that one.

Graduation conflicted with some other obligation I had, but when I heard about what an emotional event it was, I regretted not making it more of a priority. One hot day in late June, I finished up the rest of my grading, cleaned out my drawers, said a few more good-byes and turned in my keys. But all summer I dreamed about the place—even after I had accepted a part-time job teaching writing at Tufts. I dreamed, mostly, about Henry. He had plaintively begged me to pass him, but I didn’t feel I could. I wondered if he’d gone to summer school or just given up on the whole education thing.

In the fall I went back to Madison Park for a visit. While I was hoping to see some of my sophomores and juniors, I went mainly to see Ms. Baker, who hadn’t responded to the messages I’d left on her machine. I was eager to learn what impression she’d gotten of the job I’d done.

When I arrived, she was talking to another teacher in the hall—and she just kept talking to that teacher for a long time, not acknowledging me at all, though I was sure she had noticed me. I was tempted to give a little smile and wave and then disappear, but that isn’t my way and besides, I couldn’t imagine why she was being so cold—so rude, really. I knew I hadn’t been a smashing success, but I thought I’d done pretty well, all things considered. So I kept standing there feeling increasingly foolish until she couldn’t avoid me any longer. When we stepped into her classroom, she came out with it:

She was upset that I’d failed so many seniors, especially because among the failures were a couple who had pretty decent skills.

I was shocked. I didn’t know how many I had failed—I guessed six or seven, which didn’t seem like a lot out of over fifty, especially since a couple of those had never shown up and one had come only once and only, it seemed, to show off the flashy pet iguana he cradled under his jacket. Of the others, either they hadn’t done the term paper or they had but they’d done nothing since. None of these even seemed like hard calls—except possibly Henry, and only because he’d begged me and flashed me that smile of his that was so hard to resist.

Still, Ms. Baker blamed me. Why didn’t they come to class? I could imagine her wondering. Didn’t you make it exciting enough? Didn’t you call their homes after every absence like I told you to? Don’t you know what they’re up against? How complicated their lives are? How precarious their faith in themselves? How crucial it was at this juncture to give them the benefit of the doubt?

For months afterwards, I caught myself rebutting her:

I tried to make some classes fun, but these kids are eighteen years old—they shouldn’t expect everything to be fun.

Even if I had stayed late, Henry wouldn’t have come, Lupita wouldn’t have come. Could you at least give me a pat on the back for the school paper? Several people said it was the best issue ever!

I hated how defensive I sounded. In hindsight, I was sure I could have done better.

All this was years ago and I’ve more or less made my peace with what I did and didn’t accomplish at Madison Park. I never really pursued a permanent job there; I was offered a position at a prestigious university and I took it. As an adjunct, I don’t get paid much there either, but I can teach whatever books I’d like, use their massive library, and stroll through their gardens and galleries. I don’t need a key to go to the bathroom, and on my way home, I don’t doze off at the wheel. I have quite a few students of color but few who aren’t middle- or upper-class. Sometimes I miss the kids at Madison Park—their rawness, their hunger and daring; James’s mastery of the hierarchy of Honduran peppers; Jose’s all too intimate acquaintance with the brutality of the Guatemalan military, Paulina’s muscular knowledge of Cape Verdean rhythms. I miss feeling as if, just possibly, I could make a big difference in someone’s life.

On the other hand, my current students generally come to class, do their homework and show up for appointments. Many of them will eventually get good jobs, jobs that can make a difference, and I tell myself that I can influence what they will do with the power they will have. I encourage them to live an examined life; I expose them to theories about white privilege and interlocking oppressions; and I assign them readings about the lives of kids who go to schools like Madison Park.

I met her for the first time at her father’s apartment just outside Washington, DC. I’d agonized over what to wear. Work clothes would be too formal, but jeans would make me look too casual, too young. I settled on a blouse, cotton pants, and a pair of loafers. With a spray of perfume, I tried to mask the cigarette smell that clung to my coat from happy hours in downtown bars. I wanted to make the best possible impression.

“I don’t know if I want you to come to my home,” her father had said, when I called to introduce myself one week earlier. “I don’t know you.”

I offered to meet in public, but he resisted.

“How old are you?” he asked. “Got any kids?”

I answered truthfully: “Twenty-eight,” and “No.”

“How would you feel if a 6-foot-5 black man came to your door and said, ‘I’m going to advocate for your child?” he asked.

I paced back and forth in my basement apartment, searching for an answer among the second-hand furniture, which now made me feel even younger, more inexperienced.

“I understand your concerns,” I said, “but believe me, I have good intentions.”

I wanted to make it clear that I was not afraid of commitment. Maybe I wasn’t ready for a family of my own, but I was ready for my life to be about something more. I was prepared to enter into a long-term relationship with his daughter.

“My daughter and I are going through a hard time right now. She’s twelve,” he said. “You remember what it’s like to be twelve?”

That, I said, I could do.

Now, one week later, Joe Williams answered the door of his apartment in a white T-shirt, jeans, and high-top sneakers. He held a cigarette in his hand, smoke drifting up and across the lenses of his broad eyeglasses. He was as tall as he’d claimed to be on the phone.

At barely five feet tall, I found Mr. Williams intimidating. To my surprise, he seemed rushed and nervous — intimidated by me.

“Destiny,” he called behind him, “the lady’s here.”

The walls of the apartment were white and bare. As I stepped inside, I detected the mild scent of burning rubber, like that of an old vacuum that had just made a quick tour around the room. I sat down on a worn black leather couch facing a large-screen TV.

That’s when I saw Destiny.

She entered the room and smiled shyly, her round brown eyes staring at the beige carpeted floor. She was petite and naturally pretty, with clear skin and short black hair pulled up into a ponytail. She wore jeans and a white t-shirt with a round neckline that revealed the strap of a bright pink bra – provocative, I thought, for a girl her age.

She looked up only to offer a polite hello.

I unbuttoned my coat and took a few moments to explain that I’d be visiting regularly, helping to make sure Destiny had everything she needed, like a tutor or vouchers for the bus. What I didn’t mention was that I was supposed to make sure that Destiny appeared safe and Joe appeared sober.

“And of course,” I said, “I’ll make regular reports to the court.”

Before I had to ask, Joe began to share the details of their family history.

“…I’ve been out of work since… They got me on these meds now … My daughter’s been through a lot … You heard about her cousin? What he did to her?”

I’d read about all of it in Destiny’s files – her parents’ drug addiction, the sexual abuse by a teenage cousin — but somehow it felt wrong to say so. I nodded and took notes as if I’d never heard it before.

Without my asking, Joe presented Destiny’s latest report card, which had been resting on the dining room table. She had earned A’s and B’s, with one C-.

“Destiny needs to read more,” he said, “otherwise, she’s doing good.”

It felt strange to be privy to such information, all because I had used the word “court.”

I asked Destiny what she liked to do on weekends. She said she liked to go the movies or to the mall.

“Why don’t I come pick you up on Sunday and we’ll do something fun?” I suggested.

“That’s it?” Joe asked, looking relieved.

“That’s it,” I said, and rose to leave. I had never taken off my coat.

He ordered Destiny to walk me to the door, which she did, in dutiful silence. Then she walked me down the apartment hall and held open the door of the building for me.

“I’ll see you on Sunday,” I said.

She smiled at me and nodded, just a flicker of appreciation in her round, brown eyes. Then she turned away and walked back down the hall.

For the last four weeks, I’d spent evenings and weekends learning about the child welfare system. I memorized laws, read practice cases, and role-played with the other volunteers in my class. Now, armed with a red binder full of paperwork and a letter of appointment from the judge, I was supposed to be able to determine the best interests of a child.

I quickly realized this would be no easy task.

On the following Sunday, Destiny’s shoulder-length hair was blown straight and shiny. With a black wool beret pulled down just above her left eye, she looked older than the last time I’d seen her, and older than I had at her age. She asked me to take her to the mall so that she could look for hair extensions.

In training, they’d told us to take kids to parks or for walks in their neighborhoods. But I didn’t know the area, and I was new at this. I had few responsibilities on weekend days, and loved to shop. Maybe, I thought, this would be an opportunity to bond.

It was February, and we’d had a light dusting of snow the night before. Destiny politely kicked the slush off her sneakers before getting into my car.

She commented on my “fancy” Honda Civic, which to me was boring but practical — nothing compared to the expensive new models that lined the streets of my neighborhood.

Then she noticed my purse. “Kenneth Cole!” she said. “Expensive.”

“Got it at Filene’s Basement,” I said. “I’m a bargain hunter.”

I wanted to disabuse her of the idea that I had a lot of money — or that I was going to spend money on her.

I let her tune in a local hip-hop station on the radio then suggested that she program it so that she could always listen to it when we drove in my car.

“If you want,” she shrugged, unimpressed by the gesture. Then she turned and stared out the window for the rest of the drive.

At the mall, we stood by a marquee and plotted a course through the garden-variety chain stores. Out of nowhere, Destiny asked, “Did you commit a crime or something? My brother said maybe you did something wrong, and this is your community service.”

“Spending time with you is not a punishment,” I said.

“My brother said maybe you would buy me presents.”

“Sorry,” I said, “but that’s not why I’m here.”

I knew right then that the mall hadn’t been a good idea. I was supposed to be gathering information, learning about her life at home and at school. Instead I had brought her to a place full of expensive, unobtainable things, and I was sure to disappoint her.

As we walked through the mall, I asked questions about classes and friends. Her answers were brief. Eventually she mentioned missing a recent field trip because it was too expensive.

“Next time let me know and I’ll talk to your case worker,” I said.

Maybe, my role as an advocate was open to some interpretation. As long as I could be a mentor, and help Destiny get the things she needed, I would be doing some good.

When we cruised by the food court, Destiny declared that she was hungry. I offered to buy her either a hot pretzel or an ice cream cone.

“Can I have a pretzel and an ice cream cone?” she asked.

I looked at all the kids standing in line with their parents, and I couldn’t say no. I just hoped that her father wouldn’t find out that I was already spoiling her.

Over the next few months, we got to know each other better. Destiny showed me pictures of her favorite niece, who lived in Las Vegas with Destiny’s sister. She told me about the boys in her class who liked her. She was smart and self-assured. She had been through a lot, but I had reason to be optimistic about her future.

Meanwhile, I did some background work, checking in with a school guidance counselor. “The good news is,” the counselor said, “I don’t know the child. That means she’s not in any trouble.”

The caseworker confirmed that there was no pressing need to reevaluate Destiny’s living situation. “After all,” she said, “We’re just looking for minimum standards of care.”

I was working in an office with mothers who talked about their kids’ college funds, trips to Europe, and internships on Capitol Hill. To me, “minimum standards of care” didn’t seem like much to aspire to, but for the time being, I concurred.

One evening after work, I was surprised to be greeted at the Williams’ door by a man I’d never met before. He wore a skull cap and held a cell phone to his ear. While talking on the phone, he let me in and cruised back toward the bedrooms with the leisure of someone who lived there. In the living room, Joe lay on the couch, his long legs dangling over the end.

He nervously rearranged a blanket on his lap and told me he was “down with a cold or something.”

Since the shopping mall trip, I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t feed Destiny any more junk food. But I felt the need to get her out of there.

“I’m starving,” I said. “Have you eaten?”

She wanted a Big Mac meal. “It’s only two dollars,” she said.

At McDonald’s, we sat and ate burgers. I thought of the other advocates from my training class and wondered whether they were all abiding by the rules, feeding kids nutritious snacks while I fed Destiny greasy fries. I asked her whether things had changed at her father’s, whether she felt scared by strangers in the apartment, whether anyone had hurt her.

She just dipped her French Fries in a pool of ketchup and told me, repeatedly, that everything was fine.

I remembered a warning I’d gotten — off the record — from experienced volunteers. No matter how badly the kids are treated by their parents, they always want to stay at home.

I thought of whisking Destiny away to my apartment and keeping her until the strange man was gone and Joe looked upright and sober. Destiny had never been to my apartment, but I had described it to her and shown her pictures of my orange Maine Coon cat. But it wasn’t my place to take her away from her father. Reluctantly, I drove her home, resigned to calling her caseworker in the morning.

“Do you visit other kids, too?” she asked before the got out of the car.

“No,” I said, “just you.”

For the first time, she gave me a hug.

That night, I crawled into bed, comforted by the purring of my cat. But I lay sleepless, wondering whether I’d done all I could to keep Destiny safe.

2.

Destiny’s grandmother, Teresa Jones, was a sixty-something woman who had raised nine children of her own and taken in a few nieces, nephews, and grandkids along the way. Friendly and energetic, she called me “girlfriend” from the first time we met. She lived in a high-rise apartment building within just a few miles of Joe’s.

Destiny had been living there since an uncomfortable court hearing in which the judge admonished Joe for not submitting to drug tests and ordered Destiny to be removed from his home. Destiny herself was not present in court. Her father had done what he felt to be in her best interests and sent her to school.

In the courthouse, I’d been afraid to approach him — afraid he’d blame me for losing his daughter again. But it felt wrong to ignore him, so I said a polite hello.

He shook his head, eyes downcast. “Destiny just needs to read more,” he said. “Other than that, she’s doing good.”

No one – not Destiny, not the caseworker, and not Mrs. Jones — had heard from him since then.

Destiny’s new home was all flowered upholstery, needlepoint, and stray toys from whichever child happened to be visiting — or living there — for a while. On my first visit, I looked quizzically at a plaque in a corner that read “WWJD.”

“What Would Jesus Do?” Destiny said, looking shocked that I had to ask.

I didn’t bother to tell her that I was Jewish, but nodded as if to say, “Of course.”

She showed me the bedroom she shared with a cousin. She slept on a bottom bunk in a bed covered with pillows and stuffed animals. The room smelled of perfume from a row of miniature bottles along the dresser top.

Mrs. Jones had strict rules, but she assured me they would be good for Destiny. According to her, Joe had let his daughter get away with far too much.

“I would never turn my granddaughter away,” she told me, while Destiny was out of earshot, “but it’s another mouth to feed. And the department doesn’t give you much. I get paid for kids when I was a foster mom — just some cash for groceries, you know? But I don’t get any money for Destiny.”

Folded in my wallet was a $20 bill that I would probably blow on a couple of beers later that night. I considered handing it to her. What would be the harm?

But I thought of our trip to the shopping mall, and remembered the dangers of setting the wrong expectations. I said that I was sorry, but she would have to take it up with Destiny’s caseworker.

I told Destiny that I would see her in two weeks, after she had settled into her new school. Then I said good-bye and left, thinking of the $20 in my wallet – a nice Jewish girl, wondering what Jesus would do in my place.

Over the next year, Destiny and I took trips to the library, a couple of museums, an amusement park, and a women’s professional basketball game. We went to the planetarium along the wooded Rock Creek Parkway, where Destiny looked out the car window and exclaimed, “I can’t believe this is the city!”

We went shopping together once again — to Target, after she’d received a $50 voucher from her social worker to buy school clothes. At the register, she discovered that she had a few dollars left, and to my surprise, offered to buy me a pair of earrings.

“They’d look good on you,” she said, holding up a pair of rhinestone studs.

“No, thanks,” I said. “You keep that money for yourself. It’s yours.”

Then I turned so she wouldn’t see the tears brimming in my eyes.

The following summer, Destiny failed a class and learned that she would have to go to summer school. Classes would keep her busy for a few nights a week, but I worried that too much unstructured time might get her into trouble. The mothers in my office talked about soccer, basketball, and art camps for their kids. I wanted Destiny to have something to do other than wander around the city, looking for places to escape the heat. She deserved more than just minimum standards of care.

With her caseworker’s help, I got her enrolled in a camp at a nearby YMCA. Destiny was looking forward to it, but she didn’t want to take the bus by herself on her first day, so I took a few hours off of work to drop her off.

In the YMCA parking lot, kids kissed their mothers or fathers goodbye, leapt out of their cars, and bounded up the steps of the building. Many wore blue T-shirts with white lettering — camp uniforms that Destiny, a latecomer, had not yet received.

We got to the registration desk to find that Destiny’s payment had not come through. Frustrated after spending days making phone calls and faxes on her behalf, I raised my voice louder than I’d intended.

“Look,” I said, “I know for a fact that Child Welfare Services sent a payment. I’m not leaving here until she’s registered.”

Behind me, Destiny shrank back. She rolled her eyes and tried to distance herself.

I realized that I’d drawn attention to her as a kid in the system — a kid whose parents couldn’t pay for camp, a kid accompanied by a volunteer — when she only wanted to be like everybody else.

Within a few minutes, we were escorted outside to an athletic field, where kids were slowly gathering around their counselors. We found Destiny’s group leader, a gregarious young African-American woman, who immediately welcomed Destiny. “We’re gonna have a good time,” the young woman said.

I liked her already. From the way Destiny smiled, I could tell that she liked her too.

As I walked back to my car, I stopped by the side of the building and watched as Destiny stood on the periphery of the group. Like a nervous parent, I lingered, hoping she might wave good-bye or signal that she was all right.

But after another moment, she disappeared into the group, just like any other camper.

By 15, Destiny was no longer the soft-spoken girl who carefully kicked snow off her boots before stepping into my car, the girl who politely walked me to the door of her apartment building. Now she had attitude.

She started missing curfew, disappearing to “get the mail” and not coming back. She wore tight jeans and borrowed low-cut belly shirts from friends. Buxom and curvy, she changed hairstyles on a regular basis. Sometimes it was blown straight and shiny, other times it was braided tight against her scalp in intricate patterns.

“Three boys like me,” she told me. “But don’t worry, we’re not hittin’ the skins.”

Her grandmother was exasperated.

“Destiny lies. She manipulates,” she said. “She’ll convince you the moon is made of cream cheese.”

Destiny said her grandmother set unreasonable rules. Why wasn’t she allowed to go to the Rec. center on Saturday nights? All her friends hung out there. And why did she have to be home so early in the evening?

I tried to reason with her: “Look, just live by your grandmother’s rules for the next few weeks. Once she starts to trust you again, she’ll loosen the reins.”

It didn’t work. Destiny ditched classes. More than once, she got caught drinking and smoking pot. It wasn’t such unusual behavior for a kid her age. But she was a kid in the child welfare system, and the system intervened, moving her in and out of her grandmother’s home — through treatment centers and group homes — over the next two years.

3.

“Destiny’s gone,” her caseworker said. “She took off two days ago.”

By this time, Destiny was 17. She had moved from a shelter back to her grandmother’s home just a few weeks before.

I was sitting in my cubicle at work when I got the call. I spent the rest of the day preoccupied with worry, feeling guilty because I hadn’t seen Destiny in far too long.

I called the police, who didn’t seem particularly concerned — maybe because she was a kid in the system, a kid who’d already been in trouble.

I wondered if she was doing drugs and couch surfing with friends, or whether she’d hopped on a bus to Vegas to join her sister and niece.

Like Destiny, I had moved over the years – through apartments, jobs, boyfriends. I wondered whether I was suited to be Destiny’s lady anymore. Our visits had become less frequent, and less successful. We didn’t relate the way we used to, gossiping over ice cream sundaes. Maybe Destiny needed something different, and that something wasn’t me. Maybe I didn’t need her as much as I had before.

A week after she’d disappeared, she strolled into her grandmother’s apartment, said hello, and casually opened the refrigerator.

She was back.

I arranged to meet her outside her grandmother’s apartment one morning the following week. When she walked out of the building, I was surprised and somewhat ashamed that I barely recognized her. She had changed so much in such a short time. She was a young woman now – thin and toned, a bright smile, the morning sun glinting off long auburn hair extensions. Tight denim shorts capped off her shapely legs.

“Grandma said you were looking for me!” she said, and threw her arms around my neck.

“Of course I was,” I said, surprised and moved by how much it mattered to her.

I decided to stay on.

That same year, Destiny’s mother, Yvonne, reentered her life. A petite, slow-talking woman with faint freckles, Yvonne had gotten sober and secured a job as an aide in a nursing home. She began visiting Destiny regularly at Mrs. Jones’ – her mother’s — apartment.

Destiny always greeted Yvonne with affection and cuddled up to her. The two would sit on Mrs. Jones’ flowered couch as Yvonne stroked her daughter’s hair or rubbed her back. They didn’t seem to bicker like a typical mother and daughter. I figured they didn’t spend enough time together to fight.

Whenever Yvonne mentioned Destiny’s name, she would add, “Bless her heart.”

“Destiny doesn’t want to go out with you today, bless her heart.”

“Destiny wasn’t happy living with her father, bless her heart.”

One day, Yvonne, Destiny, and I walked to the park and decided to get soda and ice cream from the Good Humor truck.

“Thank you, bless your heart,” Yvonne said, and stepped away, leaving me to pay for all of us.

Yvonne had lost custody of all nine of her children. One, an infant, had died after being left to sleep in a dresser drawer. Another had lost part of a thumb after Yvonne bound it to keep her from sucking on it. She had been clean for years, but she couldn’t get Destiny or her other kids back until she found her own place to live instead of drifting through her friends’ homes.

I treated her with respect, but I resented her for putting Destiny in danger. Even more so, I resented Destiny’s loyalty to her.

As an advocate, your job is to solve a problem. Once that problem is solved, your role is no longer necessary. I realized that maybe I didn’t want Destiny to move back in with her mother because then the case might be closed, and I wouldn’t be necessary anymore.

When Yvonne’s name finally reached the top of the list for subsidized housing, the judge allowed Destiny and a brother and sister to move in with her. The caseworker was pleased. If Yvonne could pay the rent and keep the kids out of trouble, the case could be closed. Destiny was ecstatic. Mrs. Jones was relieved to think that perhaps her childrearing was done for good. Everyone was happy, except for me.

I saw the inside of Yvonne’s apartment only once, shortly after Destiny moved in with her. The family was living among boxes, the floors still bare. Still, they were all excited to be on their own, as a family. They had adopted a kitten. Destiny would start another new school that fall.

From that point on, almost every time I called Yvonne’s apartment, the voice mailbox declared itself full, preventing me from leaving a message. On the rare occasion that someone answered the phone, it was a friend or neighbor who happened to be hanging out there. Destiny wasn’t home, they said, and they didn’t know when she’d return.

Within just a few months, I had no idea how Destiny was doing in school — or whether she was going to her classes. I wasn’t even sure which school she now attended. She had fallen so far behind it wasn’t clear whether she would graduate on time, if at all. I wondered who she was hanging out with — or hittin’ the skins with. It seemed like we were back to minimum standards of care.

Before long, the caseworker informed me that Yvonne’s neighbors were complaining of loud parties and people coming and going at all hours, occasionally via the second-story balcony. The rent went unpaid. Yvonne got evicted. Destiny’s life was disrupted once again.

In the courtroom, I recognized the judge, but not Destiny’s attorney — a young African-American woman in a fitted navy blue power suit. She sat close to Destiny and touched her shoulder protectively. I waved to Destiny from the back of the room, but she looked at me with empty eyes and turned away.

I wondered what Destiny had told this attorney. That she wanted to stay with her mother? That from now on, she would go to school and abide by the rules? That the moon was made of cream cheese?

Destiny had a different attorney at practically every hearing. They usually wouldn’t meet until just beforehand, when Destiny would tell her side of the story. I no longer concerned myself with these rotating attorneys because the judge usually sided with the caseworker and me. Today we were calling for Destiny to move back in with her grandmother, who could set better limits that Destiny’s mother could.

But this attorney was particularly engaged. When it came time for her to speak, she requested that Destiny and her mother be allowed to live together in some kind of temporary housing. Destiny had moved far too many times already, and she deserved to be with a parent for once and for all.

Before she finished, the attorney leaned down to let Destiny whisper in her ear. Then she stood up, straightened her suit, and announced, “Your Honor, Destiny also says she doesn’t want to have an advocate anymore.”

The judge asked why.

“They don’t get along,” the attorney said.

I looked around a courtroom full of faces I hadn’t seen before. Over the years, Destiny had been through multiple caseworkers, attorneys, and therapists. Maybe I hadn’t always been the best advocate, and maybe I hadn’t always done the right thing, but I was the one who’d been here all along.

When the time came for me to speak, my voice trembled with anger and frustration.

“Your honor, this is the first time that Destiny and I have disagreed about her best interests. We are going through a hard time right now,” I said. “But I think that this is a time when she needs an advocate the most.”

The judge ordered Destiny to move back in with her grandmother and extended my appointment for another six months. But I never saw Destiny again.

I now worked more than 20 miles from Mrs. Jones’ apartment, but I fought rush hour traffic to visit one more time. When I arrived, Destiny was inexplicably missing.

Mrs. Jones was mortified. “I think you should go help somebody who wants to help herself,” she said.

It sounded as if her grandmother was about to give up on Destiny. I didn’t want to give up, too, but I felt like I didn’t have a choice.

I told myself that it wasn’t me she was rejecting. She was tired of being in the system, and that she no longer wanted the court – or anyone associated with it – in her life. I wanted to believe that the time I’d spent with her had made some kind of difference. But all I could do was be thankful for what our relationship had done for me – when I’d felt alone, when I needed a purpose, someone to care for.

Once I resigned, I had no more reports to write and no more rush hour drives out to the suburbs. My weekends were free to take road trips or meet up with friends. I didn’t miss the responsibility.

But after a few months, I did miss Destiny. I wrote her a letter in care of Mrs. Jones. By this time, Destiny would have aged out of the child welfare system. Her case was closed. I hoped that she’d graduated from high school. Maybe she was heading toward college, or maybe she had moved to Vegas, where she was living happily with her sister and niece.

I never got a response.

I still wonder what happened to that letter. Maybe Mrs. Jones gave it to Destiny, who kept meaning to write back, but forgot about it. Or maybe Destiny crumpled it up and tossed it into the trash – just a reminder of her time in the system, a time when she was a kid without parents, a kid escorted from place to place by a volunteer.

Maybe it’s for the best that I don’t know what became of her. Maybe I should leave it at that.

Or maybe I’ll just write her another letter.

Petrified: the word tossed around in my head like a buoy – scared to death. My arm hairs stood on end as if they had feeling, as if they were also terrified.  Sitting at my desk in the Office of Alumni and Parent Relations at my undergraduate alma mater in upstate New York, I was cold and uncomfortable and shaking slightly from within. I rubbed my palms over the pricks of clammy skin, trying to erase the signs. I did not want people to see that I was anything but fine.

The dizziness came in spells, like the altitudinal drop of an airplane just before a crash: engine failure, death on impact, if not first from the snapping of the neck due to the fall, too dramatic for any body to handle. Several times I felt my stomach sink, as if the floor was being taken out from under, without warning, no time to brace myself. Luckily, I was in the basement of Erwin Hall, the College’s administration building, a floor that rested upon the earth, which shouldn’t give way, I told myself, this was not California where the ground splits apart: it was New York, where things held together. I was quite light-headed and nauseated from the narcotic painkiller: I had just had my wisdom teeth removed.

My wisdom teeth were like cranky children, digging their heels in, refusing to let go. They were hidden under my gums and attached, as if by cement, to my jaw bone. In pulling them out, there was a lot of drilling and excavating –- blood and tissue. It was a horrible, mangled mess. I remember lying there, awake, under the knife, my body full-length on the chair, head and shoulders tilted behind me, almost like a back bend, my neck elongated like an ostrich’s, the nitrous oxide turned on.

“There are risks in undergoing this procedure,” Dr. Burgart had enumerated, “nerve damage, loss of feeling, even death can occur.”

I preferred to think that Dr. Burgart, the dentist, was really named Bogart. Once aggravated by his ego, grown out of proportion by his tendency toward dental sarcasm, I changed my mind about him while under the influence of the nitrous oxide. He was tall and tan and blond and forty-five, and married with three teenaged children, and, at twenty-six, I thought I might be developing a crush. Once or twice, in my head, I rehearsed asking him to elope with me. He would whisk me away from all this chaos.

Dr. Bogart had a strategy to the extraction, approaching each tooth with deftness  and care, with an intimacy and an intensity, as if he were making love. I left my eyes open during the procedure. I wanted to see everything as I wore the mask, taking in the gas with each breath, trying to keep my mind intact.

I was running. June 21, 2000, the Wednesday after Father’s Day, a few weeks before my wisdom tooth extraction, I was running, listening to the oldies station, the only station I could access on my radio walkman. The scenery of Geneseo, where my alma mater was located, was magnificent, but radio reception was near absent in the depths of the valley, where the track was, beside the alfalfa fields.

I was jogging to the rhythm of the music, my lungs taking in the air and letting it go. It had been four months since my father confirmed himself cancer-free, almost a year since forty percent of his left lung was removed and labeled: malignant. I recalled that fateful July 1999, and the morning after my father’s cancer diagnosis, when I awoke beneath a blanket of shock, turned on the television, and heard the initial coverage of the disappearance of JFK Jr.’s plane. I remembered the way I thought, how do they know what is true? A few days later, as I stood in the check-out line at the local Wegman’s, I saw the words flickering from TIME magazine: John F. Kennedy Jr., 1960-1999.” The headline read: “JFK Jr. Feared Missing, Presumed Dead.” I stared at this picture: the philanthropic brown eyes, the groomed brows full and dark like mindful caterpillars, the dashing grin – all pronounced dead before the person they were a part of had been found. It had been decided for him. He was wearing a lot of makeup, I noticed, a creamy foundation. I wondered, had anyone ever seen what was really underneath? I was mesmerized by the issue. It churned inside, tossed and turned, ruffled, agitated like rough seas. I could not stop the thoughts from coming, crashing forth like the tide.

This drew me in:

The plane – it had disappeared from radar and had plunged into the foggy depths of America’s collective mind, the remains thought to be mixing with the waves that crashed and lapped in comfortable cyclical motions, gentle as a baby rocked, beside the shores of Massachusetts. According to the article, John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette and her un-famous sister had not yet been found in the flesh. Still, the cover of TIME confirmed: hope was gone.

“Abrupt descent,” are words reporters use to detail plane crashes. They also use phrases such as “stabilizing mechanism,” “final moments,” and “sudden engine failure.” They illustrate the course of massive structural damage on the television news. They show reenactments in slow motion, like cartoons. TV technicians become like children with video games that simulate the event, their appetites insatiable for the vicarious replay, over and over and over again. Correspondents and official sound bites speak of the aircraft at large: the cockpit voice recorder, the flight data recorder, the “black box.” They chronicle those things found: the suitcase, the novel and the bookmark, the toothbrush – the personal effects. These found remains are, of course, all but the person. The person they never find. At least not intact.

Sometimes, when authorities exhume the wreckage from the ocean floor, they put it on display at the local yard for investigation. It will later be placed at a town museum for the public to look at in awe, or for the schoolchildren to study for a class project, like the pieced-together bones of a dinosaur: this is Tyrannosaurus Rex, minus a few ribs and a femur we could not find. You can look all you want, but please do not touch. It is not practice to put the remains of the passengers, even one or two, on display, that would be too real, it cannot be done. The truth, if you must know, is that the people you knew have become so mangled from what has happened that they are no longer knowable. Why upset yourself by looking at what can no longer be recognized, by viewing what is no longer distinguishable or definable? It would be too hard for you to handle, you would collapse or have a nervous breakdown, you would never be the same. Something would switch off in your brain.

There are attempts to deal with the aftershocks, the emotions, of course, to put them in ordered compartments, to make you feel better, to help you feel more settled, in control, at ease. They call it “closure.” Causes and effects: these labels are explained and digested.            
You try to comfort yourself with overused maxims such as “death is a part of life” or “the healing process,” or the practice of religion, “everlasting faith.” You hold on. You tell yourself the deceased is not really gone but is living on in spirit. “The soul inspired” leaves the walls of the body. You picture it. Like steam, it rises through the chest cavity, up through the head, or flows from the mouth like warm blood, with the last exhalation. The personal effects, however, are left behind. Except for the body, the person. Touchable evidence of a life once lived you must let go.

People are sorry, though they are not personally responsible for what has occurred. They did not want it to happen. There are regrets. There comes a list of things to be done differently the next time, a set of instructions, a recipe: “How to Prevent the Fatality.” But there are holes, something is missing. Ruefully, it will transpire again. And once again. That’s life. Yield to those forces beyond your control, it’s the adult thing to accept the imminent. Trying to change the inevitable doesn’t do a person any good. It just makes things messy.

Now it was 2000, a year later, and I still continued to look at the issue of TIME and think with a wistfulness, let it all swirl in my head, the scene: JFK Jr. would appear on some secret island off the Cape, handsome and strong and debonair and above all put-together, as everyone depended on him to be. The Prince of Camelot. The hero. The role model. Possibly, he had needed some time off by himself, away from the eyes of the needy blank faces that made up modern-day America. He hadn’t told anyone, of course, because to do so would’ve sabotaged the whole idea of “time off.” He’d just wanted to be in a place where he didn’t have to play a role, where there were no expectations of him, where he could be anonymous, fallible – human – for a few quiet breaths.

What was wrong with that? It’s what they call denial.

I was running, listening to the oldies station, when the breeze picked up and a large shadowy man parked his red pickup truck and got out of the vehicle, unleashing a big black dog. The animal began to gallop fast, faster, faster, towards me. I stopped breathing, freezing for a moment, cold in my tracks:  it was coming right at me a pulsing fear washing over me like an ocean wave –

Lord have mercy on the boy from down in the boondocks –

The dog turned, his black coat shining with a sense of urgency – Go home. I had to go home.

When I reached my apartment, I found my answering machine flashing. There was one message. It was from my brother, Neal. I had missed him by ten minutes.

“Tracy,” he began, “Dad got in a bit of trouble today, he’s okay for now, but he had to have some emergency surgery on his brain. Call me.”

I hadn’t yet caught my breath as I dialed Neal’s phone number. There was no answer. I wanted to demand, where was my brother when I needed him?

I could not wait. I dialed my father’s number, I would speak with Anne, his wife. He had gotten remarried two years after my parents’ divorce, when I was twenty. He had met Anne on the Long Island Rail Road, he said, it must’ve been fate, she had changed his life.

“Your father –” Anne’s voice stalled, like a motor, after the initial greeting, coughed like a carburetor. “He –”

“What?” I prodded. This question stopped my breath: Was he dead?

“He started not feeling well,” Anne said. “He had a migraine, and eventually the pain got so bad he collapsed. I had to take him to the hospital in the middle of the night. He passed out in the car. The doctor says it was a tumor that bled on itself.”

“But I just spoke with him the other day and he was fine,” I said. “When did this begin?” I was not focusing, the words were a dust storm in my mind, the meanings caught in my mouth. I already knew it had begun months ago, my father had mentioned the headaches several times, but he had ignored the signs, had thought nothing of the recurring pain.

“Two days ago.”

“Why didn’t anyone call me then?” I asked. My heart began to pound against my ribcage as if it was trying to break out of a prison: hard, hard, hard, I thought I might die slow, slow, slow, I thought it might cease.

“Oh Tracy, don’t you give me that,” Anne said, “there were other people who were more important than you to call.”

“But I’m his daughter.” I felt ashamed of my voice, because it sounded small.       “Well then you ought to act like one,” Anne’s voice escalated, “you’re never here when he’s sick, you’re only around when he’s well.  Some daughter you are, he might be paralyzed and I don’t think I can deal with taking care of that for the rest of my life!”

The words lingered in the air, these price tags of love.

“I want to speak with him,” I said.  The backs of my thighs were shaking;  my hands,  my neck felt clammy. “What’s the number for the hospital?”

“I don’t know,” Anne’s voice scattered like dandelion seeds.

“I want to speak with my father,” I said it again. My ear pressed, ached against the receiver.

“You can’t,” Anne’s voice pushed against me, bruising, like an admonishment. “He’s not able to speak with you right now.”

“Well, his doctor, then,” I said.

“Don’t you dare call his doctor,” she said. I heard it as a growl. Her words bit. “The last time you did that you really embarrassed us.”

“But I’m his daughter,” I repeated, the word “embarrassed” sticking to me like glue. “I have a right to know what’s happening to my father, to hear the truth.”

“The truth,” Anne’s voice turned cold, “is that if your father knew how you really are, how you are treating me, he would be very disappointed in you. In fact, I know he already is.”

“This isn’t the time to be discussing this,” I heard my voice outside myself. “Right now my father is the issue.”

My tongue was flypaper, thick and numb and sticky, and too big for my mouth, for my words. I wanted my father, I felt I’d lost him, and yet I also wished with urgency for him to die. I could not say why.

I shrunk back, then, like a turtle. I hung up the phone and took off my sneakers and clothes and got into the shower and stayed there for a long time, letting the sobs go as silently as I could so that no one would hear me or know what I thought, how I felt, my tears indistinguishable from the pin-needled stream, the rushing sound of the water.  Vigilance: that night an old ritual took over – my body’s, my mind’s – of not sleeping. I was a little girl, I regressed, I was afraid of the dark, afraid of the big monster under my bed, hiding in the shadow in the hallway, lurking in the darkness, waiting for the precise moment to spring on me. I remained on guard with fear as my cloak. My eyes remained stuck open, on the watch, unblinking, until eventually, after several hours passed, the lids grew too heavy to support. Finally, I let my body give in, let the dark heaviness take over, and, consumed with restless slumber, I closed my eyes.

I began to have this recurring dream:

There wasn’t much of an event sequence, just this pervasive sense of impending disaster. I was in the passenger’s seat of a car, my father was behind the wheel, driving, despite his blind spot, the vision damage caused by the brain tumor. “I don’t have vision problems,” he said, “my eyes are fine, it’s my brain that isn’t getting the message.”

On a curve in the road, my father lost control of the car. There was the slow-motion skid, and then we crashed. I felt myself dying. I heard a voice – it sounded like my mother’s – saying “oh no,” with sheer morbidity. Then it was over.

In the days that followed, I imagined that when the tumor came apart in my father’s brain it was like a plane’s explosion: first the dull headache and nausea from the drop in altitude, then the disorientation, the pounding, the force of gravity taking over, the body’s tumultuous plummet, down, down, breaking through the invisible shield, leaking a bloody red fire, insides turning out upon outsides. As a word, gravity is a close cousin to “grave.” Meaning: serious. Weighty, like tired eyelids. His condition was grave. Grave: a place of burial.

My father had survived the emergency surgery, but the long-term prognosis did not look favorable, though that was what I thought, not what my father told me. I’m fine, he said so himself. But what I heard from my father and what I held in my heart were separate entities at odds with each other, in conflict, diverged within.

This made my mind run and my heart race.

“Trace?” Dr. Bogart probed, removing the instruments, and himself, from my mouth. His voice lilted, “What’s the matter?”

There were black spots, the edges of my vision were closing in, toward the center, the world before me darkening, like a curtain fall only this was from the sides instead of from ceiling to floor. I thought I was losing consciousness, my heart was pounding hard, and harder. I wondered if this was what it was like for my father when his blood pressure went down to zero during his chemotherapy session, which he had called to tell me about at ten o’clock at night, saying he was only abiding by my wish to know what was going on. He made it sound as if I had brought it upon myself. My mind froze and then, it seemed, my whole being tensed up like a cornered animal. It was all I could do to tell him to never call me that late again before I hung up the phone.

I was squirming within my body as if it were a prison, which still lay in the chair, trying to break free from its bounds. I thought I might be suffocating. I could not speak. There was fluid filling my mouth, sliding down my throat. I thought it was blood; it tasted salty. I swallowed it, but a thick warmness filled up the space, far back, once more, and again. I started to choke. I could not speak. I grasped at the mask.

“Lower the gas,” Dr. Bogart shot a look at the nurse with the red hair who was positioned on the other side of me. The nurse went through the motions quickly. “Trace?” Dr. Bogart said.

I was thinking about the scene: my father, the tumor bursting in his brain, the blacking out, the pressure dropping to zero, the rush of the oxygen mask, the breaking up of my voice calling to him, Dad! Dad! can you hear me? Dad? He did not answer, for he was no longer there. It was a bad dream from which I could not awaken. This was how it was going to happen. This was what it was like, going under. This was how it felt to just let go.

Cut to black.

“Trace,” Dr. Bogart called to me again, calmly, “I’m turning on the oxygen, just breathe in and out, in, out.” He demonstrated for me, inhaling and exhaling. I looked up at him, at his masked face and surgical microscope glasses, which made him look not only handsome but intelligent. “You feeling better now?”

I was not. I shut my eyes tight. I felt my heart falling, down, down, down, my insides rising up through the top of my head. I was dying. I wanted my father. I wanted my mother. I wanted someone, someone to hold my hand. Someone to hold your hand? A voice berated within. I was twenty-six years old and I was acting like such a child, this was unbecoming. I turned my head, “no.”

“You’re going to be okay,” Dr. Bogart said, unwavering, as if he had seen this scene before. “You had a bit too much of the nitrous oxide, you were hallucinating on me, I don’t wanna know what you were dreaming.” He chuckled at me. “Just breathe, in and out.” Once more he demonstrated for a few rounds. “You okay?”

It was passing. I was actually feeling a little better, the breaths were coming more easily now, the air was more accessible, cooler, in my lungs, I was more in control of my heart, the pounding had relaxed to regular, steady beats. I was seeing things more clearly. I nodded, “Yes.”

“Good,” he continued, “I’m going to ask you that more often than you may want, but it’s just so I know you’re still with me, okay?” I nodded, “Yes.” His voice remained even. “The nitrous is on lower now,” he said, then reinserted his fingers into my mouth.

It occurred to me that if anything were to happen, there was no will.

When my father was first diagnosed with the lung cancer in July 1999, I asked him about this. At the time he was enjoying the sugar on top of a cinnamon bun, which, according to the oncologist, he should not have been eating. We were at the food court at LaGuardia Airport. I was sitting across from my father, waiting for my flight to Rochester, watching, wondering. I wanted to know his wishes, for his future, for his past, for his life, for his death, for me, about me, in relation to – I wanted to know, before it was too late. I wanted to have an understanding. I wanted him to.

He was thinner than usual because of the chemotherapy. He was telling me he had lost six pounds because he wasn’t eating very much, he wasn’t very hungry, he was wasting away. I wanted to tell him I had lost weight too, but I did not say it. I figured he would see it himself if it was noticeable, if it was anything. He should see these things. After all, I thought, he was my father.

When I asked him if he had a will, he didn’t look up at me. He nodded no. “I had one when I was married to your mother, but I don’t have a current one,” he said. He was not paying attention to me. He was preoccupied with the food. “Why? Are there particular personal effects you want?”

I was surprised to be stunned by his question. I had not anticipated it. “All I want is you,” I said.

He spoke like the Cookie Monster, to the food in his hand, “Goooood,” and then to me: “You want some?”

“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m not hungry.”

It was the forceful tug and pull that alarmed me, like a mugging. The tooth would not budge. I could tell Dr. Bogart was perplexed, frustrated, his arms strained, taut and quivering and fueled with what seemed to be all his strength, and yet still he could not remove it. I thought, there’s something very strange about watching someone pull with all his might for nothing else but to get a tooth out of your mouth.

“She’s got to let go some time,” he murmured. For a moment, he paused in thought. Then, he turned on a drill that looked like a miniature pinwheel one might only find in the country of Lilliput – small but all-powerful, and capable of mass destruction – and put it inside my mouth, into the dark red cavity of bone and gum and tongue, and flipped the switch. There was the sound of a motor running, a salty, chilling spray when he removed the silver machine, a sharp sucking noise as he thrust a thin plastic tube with a rubber-tipped end into the warm, moist hollowness. He continued with the motions.

I recalled how, a few days after my father almost died from the metastasized tumor in his brain, he told me over the phone from his hospital bed that he saw the Grim Reaper standing in the doorway, “You know, with the cape and the scythe?” he said. “He just stood there, and then he left.”

Was he saying he had been visited by Death? That Death was at his door? I wondered. Was he saying that he had outsmarted him, as in a game, escaped his grasp? Was he warning me he would be back?

My heart began to pound as if all my blood was pouring out, I felt my eyes widen into a silent scream. My body was giving up, I was losing myself… this time it was for real, I was dying. Stop, stop, I commanded myself, thinking such thoughts is enough to leave anyone gasping for air like a fish out of water, they will not help you.

“Trace,” Dr. Bogart was calling me again, firmly. “We’re almost done.”

It was happening again. There wasn’t much of an event sequence, just this pervasive sense of impending disaster. I was in the passenger’s seat of a car, my father was behind the wheel, driving, despite his blind spot, the vision damage caused by the brain tumor. “I don’t have vision problems,” he said, “my eyes are fine, it’s my brain that isn’t getting the message.”

On a curve in the road, my father lost control of the vehicle. There was the slow-motion skid, and then we crashed. I felt myself dying. I heard a voice – it sounded like my mother’s – saying “oh no,” with sheer morbidity. Then it was over.

I saw Dr. Bogart and the nurse with the red hair exchange concerned looks once more across my body. “Turn off the nitrous, give her some more oxygen,” said Dr. Bogart. The nurse did as she was told. Dr. Bogart peered at my face. He tilted his head and looked down at me through his surgical microscope glasses, which made him look not only handsome but intelligent. “It’s all oxygen now,” he said, “just focus on breathing.” He inhaled. I followed his lead. We exhaled together. He cracked a small smile. “I think you’ve had enough of the mask,” he said, removing it from my face. I could feel the air cooling the damp sections of my cheeks, the edges of my nostrils, the bridge of my nose uncovered.

I was in the chair but I was not. I was lost in my mind, which rewound, went back in time, searched desperately for the exact moment when it all went wrong, as if finding the root would allow me to go back, take control, flip a switch, reconfigure history.

My life flashed before me.

“What, did the surgeon remove part of your brain when he took off part of your breast?” my father yelled with bite. I was seventeen and standing in my bedroom doorway, listening to my parents argue in the kitchen in our house. I could hear silverware sparring with food on the dinner plates. I imagined my father was cutting his meat with the jagged-toothed edge of his knife. There was silence. I imagined in the silence that my mother was answering by dishing more peas onto her plate, letting them tumble in circular patterns, poking their middles with the points of her fork.

I heard the smash of pots and pans, perhaps thrown, hitting the floor. I wondered if my father had caused the noise or if my mother had, in response. The sound, and my sense of the consequences, terrified me. I decided to get into the shower, drown it out with the water. I prayed it would be over when I got out, but when I did things had only gotten worse.

Without the mask on, now, the scene was not distorted by curved plastic, and I caught a sharp glimpse of the hands, Dr. Bogart’s, which were covered in latex, the palms splattered with my blood, the fingers drenched with a glimmering, vivid, deep red as they prodded and probed and maneuvered in and out, within my mouth, pulling down on my jaw, the sockets, stretching, opening wider, wider, loosening the joints, which were like the rusted hinges of the Tin Man. My bad habit of gnashing my teeth at night had worsened over the past year: this might loosen the clenching mechanism, Dr. Bogart thought aloud, kill two birds with one stone.

It was happening again. There was this pervasive sense of impending disaster. I was in the passenger’s seat of a car, my father was behind the wheel, driving despite his blind spot, the vision damage caused by the brain tumor. “I don’t have vision problems,” he said, “my eyes are fine, it’s my brain that isn’t getting the message.”

Through the windshield I could see in the distant sky ahead a jet plane taking off. Up, up, up it went. Then there was the nosedive. Then it exploded. It happened in slow motion. I felt my stomach drop. I heard a voice – it sounded like my mother’s – saying “oh no,” with sheer morbidity. “All those people, dead.” Then it was over.

“It’s over,” Dr. Bogart said. “Thatta girl.”

But it was not over. Dr. Bogart was still breaking the fourth and final tooth. He was breaking it piece by piece, now, determined. He inserted a knife, and another knife, carving at the fleshy gums, reaching for the root. Then, twisting with a wrench-like tool, he turned it like driving in a screw, but really the motion accomplished the opposite as the tooth finally lost its grip, giving out a resounding crack as it broke off the jaw frame. Dr. Bogart grunted slightly then stood back, holding the bone between his forceps, high up to the light.

I was lost in the past.

I found myself at the family dinner table, at seventeen, in an emotional prison, locked in by silence. My parents were dead, though their bodies still appeared in the house, in front of me as tormented spirits in Limbo, tortured and ghostlike. I observed them taking in their meals, my father swallowing his anger, my mother swallowing her self-worth. I could do nothing but wait and watch, watch for the shoe to drop, wait for the imminent end. What I wanted was resolution. What I wanted was for them to make a decision: if this was going to be the way, then end it – abort, abort! like a pilot shouting from the cockpit. Swerve off the runway before take-off, before that point of no return, try, try with all your might, with your judgment, to avoid casualties. Do it for the sake of your passengers, who hold their breaths in your lifelong moment, who depend on you, the pilot, or co-pilots, at the helm, who look to you who are trained to know how to fly aircraft – aren’t you? – you, who they count on to carry them all to safety, to handle emergencies like these. This is your responsibility, this is your job, this is your role. They put their trust in you, they put their lives in your hands.

Once and for all, don’t let this drag on like torture like that endless ride in that cargo train packed with bodies and souls on their way to their final destination: Auschwitz. What, who they wanted to hold onto they could not. Neither could they let go.

“It’s best to stay ahead of the pain,” said Dr. Bogart, as he placed a prescription for Norco, the narcotic painkiller, in my hand. I was to take one pill every six hours. He also handed me a prescription for a bottle of orange-pink pills; these were the anti-inflammatory drugs, two every four hours. “You’ll probably bruise quite a bit, with your coloring,” he continued. “You’ll want to ice it once you get home. For such a little girl you had some pretty big teeth.”

I did not want to be pitied. I was aware I was shaking slightly from within. I imagined that on the outside I looked a wreck.

“Here,” said Dr. Bogart, handing over my teeth, two at a time, wrapped in a mound of gauze. “You can keep them.”

I held these four fossils, my bones, in the palm of my hand. They were oddly-shaped, I thought as I stared, these hooked roots of spiraled corpses. The dead ends were stained a brownish-red. It upset me more than I thought it should have to see these parts of myself, which belonged inside, not on the outside, once attached, now removed, severed from me. Family of four: gone. And yet strangely there I was holding them, together, in my grasp.

My thoughts, my memories, came in dismembered pieces.

I remembered the day I heard the news that my father moved out of the house. It was my freshman year of college, just before Thanksgiving. I had called home. Your father is gone, my mother said, he left the house this morning. Dad took his things, said Neal, the lamp from the family room, the grandfather clock, the television set, he did not even say goodbye, he just left. And that was that. I took it in and when I hung up the phone I thought to myself, how could I blame my father, when I had just left too?

(And now, I thought, now, how could I blame him now, he was not liable now that he was sick.)

I remembered how he had asked me so many times the months after I hit puberty, the summer I was thirteen, he said, You know I love you, don’t you? And I answered so many times, always, Yes, but he kept asking as if the need for this affirmation was insatiable. Maybe he left because I did not love him enough. Maybe he left because I loved him too much. Maybe he had not really loved me at all. Even if he had wanted to, perhaps he just couldn’t, or he had tried and it just was not possible, because of something about me, within me. These questions ate at me like children of want, swallowing me with their unmet needs and hopes, with love’s beggary.

“The good news,” said Dr. Bogart, “is you won’t ever have to go through this again. The bad news is you’re going to be in a lot of pain when that Novocain wears off.” He leaned on a padded stool. “I want you to rest here for a while, you’ve been through a lot.”

I did not reply, mostly because I couldn’t with all that cotton and gauze he had stuffed in my cheeks, but also because I had decided answering no longer mattered.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes to check on you,” Dr. Bogart said. He put one hand on my shoulder as he walked away.

“Thank you,” I managed as he left the room, forgetting the wads in my mouth, my words muffled and dazed. Numb. I felt nothing at all, except a little sorry for Dr. Bogart; I hadn’t done very well in there. I hadn’t been able to control my fearful reactions. I hoped I hadn’t upset him. I remembered that dentists had the highest suicide rate of all people in America. It’s because they don’t know what to do with all that pain.

5

Dust

People told me my mother was beautiful. By the time I was able to perceive her face, I only saw the mouth turned sharply down at the edges and a glimpse of wildness in her eyes.

When mother and I returned to the Boston house after the summer, the help were still there to keep it dusted and clean and to serve meals. Then, little by little, things began to change. It was 1941, and the two cheerful Irish maids, Tina and Annie, left for better war jobs. Hannah, the cook, was getting old and found it too hard to manage without them, so she soon left. Others followed. There was no gas for the chauffeur, and the house began to fill with a ringing silence that was disturbing.

My father and brother went off to the war in 1941. My sister found another family and lived with them. I didn’t see my father for the next six years. My mother divorced him and left him to his ladies. The war years were the best of his life, he later said. He was stationed on an island in the South Sea, responsible for a nurses’ unit.

Eo, my nanny, had left when I was five and started nursery school. She came back after everyone had left, to my delight. One day about a month after she returned, we were walking in the Boston Common when Eo turned to me and said, “Millicent, I have to tell you something.” I grabbed the soft upper part of her arm from which she usually shook me off. “I’m leaving,” she said.

“But why, Eo, why?”

“It’s your mother, I can’t be around her.” Even at that age I was amazed, for Eo never said a bad thing about anyone. I was devastated and wept for days.

By the time I was seven, all the help had left, some to better war jobs, some out of fear of my mother’s outbursts and often odd behavior. I lived alone with her in that large house in Boston for the next seven years. I don’t know which I became aware of first, the slow disintegration of my mother’s mind or the dust settling on the empty house with its sweet acid smell.

She had two persistent themes to which I did not answer back – I already knew that it was dangerous and I wouldn’t win. She said that I was a rape baby. (I didn’t understand what a “rape baby” was, except it was some way my father had hurt her.) I didn’t understand that maybe she didn’t want me. She also said that I was full of poison, poisoned by the unpasteurized milk from my father’s farm. I soon learned to avoid conversations with my mother at all costs. I knew it would end with her two themes and she would win. I also became accustomed, very quickly, to understanding that there would be no more meals, just odd things like shad roe and cocktail cheeses in a cold icebox. On the dark evenings, she took to sitting motionless in the large chair by one of the windows or standing behind the maroon velvet curtains in the living room entrance.

Little by little, hardly realizing it, I was moving into that other world of silence, dreams, and daydreams. Slowly over the years, in my childhood dreams and psyche, I felt I made connections on the other side, and I learned things others didn’t seem to know. I started watching myself and others from a distance. Sometimes I yearned for freedom from their world and their strange ways, and I began to make decisions inside myself. It became a habit not to listen to what people said because it had nothing to do with what I wanted and needed, and besides, I preferred my world a thousand times to theirs. Still, I watched with fascination to see how they behaved so I could pretend and act like that too. I could never really get the hang of it and was puzzled by how they learned to behave so naturally, so comfortably protective of their right to be here. Then I would give up and fall back on my daydreams and stiffly turn my head away from adults.

The silence shifting through the dust in the house began to feel dangerous. I began locking myself in my room. I couldn’t leave like the others had. I never liked the house, but my favorite room was the green room. It had high ceilings and light lettuce-colored walls with long, silk chartreuse curtains that fell in puddles on the floor. There was a grand piano, which I spent hours coaxing sounds out of, and elegant French and Italian antiques. Most important of all, I was fascinated by the beautiful mirror over the fireplace with its gold frame, smoky glass, and black spots where the mirror had worn out. I loved to look in it and imagine other worlds.

But gradually I became afraid of looking in the mirror, and started turning my face away from adults and teachers. I didn’t want them to see my eyes. I became terrified as the years went on that if I looked in the mirror, I wouldn’t see my reflection, but my mother’s face staring back at me, smiling slightly, and perhaps, without knowing it, I would sense she wanted me to die. Even more frightening, though, was my fear that I would look in the mirror and see no one at all.

6

Driftings

“Sorrow is the servant of the intuitive.”  Rumi

About two years after the servants left, the driftings began. The house slowly became covered with black city grit, wrapped in cobwebs and adorned with rotting silk curtains, filthy windows and empty iceboxes. I started to dream that I opened the icebox door and was bitten by a vicious slimy creature. The house was silent and totally isolated from the outside world – and filled with traps! If demons and fiends exist, they lay waiting in dark corners. Danger, always danger. Heavy maroon velvet curtains hid Lucy, who would stand behind them and listen, then float through the house or up to the attic without a sound, or sit in a dark room without moving.

Lucy had hired a lovely lady, Mrs. Whighton, a Christian Scientist and secretary, who came in once a month or so. She made sure I got my monthly allowance. She filled rows of black notebooks, full chapters, about poison milk, undulant fever (or brucellosis, its medical name for the illness caused by unpasteurized milk), and how I behaved because of it. My mother invented this idea that I had undulant fever so that she could accuse my father in court of poisoning his child, as she was in the process of divorcing him. Mrs. Whighton left when I went to boarding school. I remember mother was awfully cruel to her. Perhaps she had stayed on to help me. She came to mother’s funeral and told me something I was to hear so many times. “I couldn’t stay any longer – your mother was frightening.”

Lucy started coming home at odd hours of the night, then often not at all. In later years I learned she was “working” at the Officers’ Club in the Commons, greeting the boys and the wounded as they got off the boats. I do remember her learning to put bandages on me, which was fun. Lucy said she had always wanted to be a doctor. She had times that made it seem as if everything was all right; but it wasn’t. That as if behavior lasted almost to the end of her life, when anyone could see clearly she wasn’t well, but until then it was impossible to explain to people who met her socially and who didn’t know her well, or to my teachers, that my mother was often quite mad.

I remember years later when I was eighteen, my Aunt Nan took me to a psychiatrist, as my professors at college felt I needed help. He explained the “as if” personality—the psychiatric term for people whose identities are fluid: they can appear fine one minute and frightening the next. For instance, Lucy would be working with Mrs. Whighton and she would suddenly start screaming at her.

When I got older, it was hard to avoid noticing that she was greatly interested in men. Even when I was a child of about twelve or thirteen (during the war), she often didn’t come home from the Officers’ Club at night. I think she was incapable of feeling love, but she also left me with the feeling that men were an important part of one’s happiness. When she got very upset she would have nosebleeds, trailing drops of blood on the stairs or on a desk, and leaving blood-soaked handkerchiefs in small red balls around the house.

Lucy didn’t appear to mind that everyone had left.

It was the nights that were devastating. I tried to get home before dark. I had a little gold cross on a gold chain, and the key to the house hung around my neck on a dirty piece of string. I was afraid of losing it and being locked out. I’d let myself in and make a dash for my room. At all costs, if Mother was home, I wanted to avoid her in the dark. Safely in my room, I would slam the black bars of the Spanish locks, my skin and muscles tightening as I gasped for breath, hair raised on the back of my neck in fear. I felt like an animal.

I stayed in my room listening to the music from my little white radio. Its melodies and minor tunes kept coaxing me back to earth – coaxing me to feel things as I looked out my window at the cross on the steeple of the Church of the Advent, solid against the sky. I seldom got to sleep until around 4:00 A.M. I lay in bed and waited and watched and thought and thought. I was trying to figure it all out so I could survive. I started banging my head against the wall, asleep or awake, until it hurt. As it got dark, I’d think I heard a noise outside the door, and I sat there on the bed wondering if that evil energy could slide under the locked door. Did Lucy wander through the house carrying a knife? I wasn’t altogether sure where Lucy would draw the line. Lucy, like those primitive sorcerer-priests who killed their enemies by waving a bone at them, she was dangerous and powerful. But I kept an unspoken truce between us in spite of the fact that my simplest needs—food, clothing, attention, love—were not met.

Over time, I was removed too long from the usual influences of society and relatives to understand that the affluent often felt more self-important than the poor; I only saw there were kind people and unkind ones, crazy people and supposedly sane ones.

I was unseen by my mother and by the people around me – as though I didn’t really exist. I learned to arrange my face into what I assumed was a normal expression. But I couldn’t stop my eyes from being full of pain. I was also relieved that against my wishes some part of me betrayed how sad I was.

I was moving more and more into the world of fantasy, symbolism and metaphor. Eventually, when the pressure became too overwhelming, I felt as if I had moved out of my body altogether to a place where no one could reach or touch me. I could watch everything from the outside, ice cold, and safe, but still hearing the north wind whisper of fear. I became a girl who had lost all other feeling, a girl who was no longer able to express her anger.

I think it was about then that I observed my friends with wonder, trying to understand how they come to feel so comfortable in this world. I had moments when I simply lost the ability to understand how to behave: where to put my eyes, my arms, and my body. I believe this is when I started disconnecting from people and sensing that I didn’t belong in the world.

School became a problem; I started flunking my classes. I tried to hide in the back row, dripping with perspiration, so afraid I’d be asked a question that I would go numb and speechless, and longed to be back in my room where no one could see me. I was captain of the soccer team and made lots of friends among the “unpopular” girls. I knew how they felt.

In music class I loved to sing and was sometimes asked to sing a little something on my own. I started singing in my friend’s Unitarian Church choir. She was the minister’s daughter and lived next door. Lucy tried to stop me from singing in the choir but I wouldn’t let her. My singing had nothing to do with her. It was a gift from another place and I wasn’t going to let her take it away from me. She called the minister and said she didn’t want me to sing in the choir anymore. It was one of the few confrontations I ever had with her. Standing on the stairs, I shouted that she couldn’t stop me, then ran to my room and slammed the lock on my door shut. I continued to sing in the choir, but I started to be a little flat, as if fingers were squeezing my neck.

I loved to write too, especially as there was no one for me to talk to in the house. I wrote and wrote all my feelings, secrets, and conversations with myself. I hid the notebooks under the bed until one day, they all disappeared. I was crushed, but I didn’t want to ask Lucy if she had taken them. It didn’t stop me from writing, though, and I loved to read – my favorite story was the children’s version of At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald. It is about a little boy called Diamond who lives in a loft above a horse barn. The North Wind begins to visit him at night. “Her hair fell down all about her till her face looked out of the midst of it like a moon of a cloud.” She is the most beautiful lady he had ever seen. Sometimes they dance and sometimes she takes him in her arms and they travel over rivers, land, mountains, and the sea, and when Diamond looks up at her he sees the loving eyes of a great lady. “The next moment her black hair went streaming out from her as she flung herself abroad in space amongst the stars with Diamond.” One day the North Wind sinks a boat and all the sailors perish. Diamond is very upset and afraid, but she holds him next to her heart and explains that is what she is and does and she bears it: “Through all the noise I hear the sound of a far off song and music and it is quite enough to make me able to bear the cry from the drowning ship.” In the end Diamond asks the North Wind, who terrifies him, yet whom he loves very much, to take him home, but not to his old home. That’s how he goes to live at the back of the North Wind where she sits on a throne of blue ice and crystal icicles filled with sparks of lights, in the land of death. The North Wind – death – became my teacher.

Since there was little food in the house, I ate at school, had dinner at the drug store and stole candy bars from subway newsstands. As the years went by, my clothes got smaller and smaller and worn out. My polo coat had large threadbare patches around the buttonholes where the white inner lining showed through. A friend of Aunt Nan’s saw me one day on the street and called her, using words like vagabond and orphan to describe me. I soon received a care package from my father, delicious clothes fit for one’s mistress, slinky black dresses and a leopard print scarf.

I often sat on endless train rides to sitters’ homes or to my Aunt Nan’s in Greenwich, Connecticut, where I spent several summers and holidays and weekends. On dark, rainy nights in the reflection of the train window, I couldn’t distinguish the raindrops from tears – nor could I have expressed the devastating thought that I simply wasn’t wanted.

For two summers at the beginning of the war, I was sent to live with my grandfather, Andrew Carnegie II, on the North Shore outside of Boston. Grandmother had died and Grandpa and I were in a big house by ourselves with a nurse for him and the servants. There was no one to play with except my grandfather, a very dear man whom I liked very much.

I was always climbing on the roof; once I was caught by Grandfather, who heard a noise and came out with a gun. Other times I slept at night under the magnolia bushes, to be found on his morning walk, or sneaked out of the house at 4:00 A.M. to climb an enormous pine tree and watch the first light. In the early fall, when it came time to go back to school in Boston, I would walk a mile to the nearby railroad station. It was hardly a station really; there was no station house, just an unused parking lot. I would stand near the track and hail down the engineer to stop. Sometimes there were one or two others, but usually that big train stopped just for me.

My sister came to see Mother and me once, soon after I arrived back in Boston for school. She got into a terrible battle with Mother – something I had learned instinctively never to do, as I knew one couldn’t win with her and it could be frightening to deal with a mind over the edge, out of control. On this occasion Mother, who was wearing a long green velvet dressing gown, got down on the floor on all fours and started crawling toward my sister, swinging her head from side to side as she screamed, “You have always tried to murder me, always tried to kill me, always, always!” To be accused of murdering my mother would have been more than I could bear. My sister backed away and left immediately and didn’t come back.

Soon after that incident my Aunt Nan sent up a Trappist nun who had left her abbey after having lived there in silence for years. She was a small, stiff, stern sort who wore shoulder pads. I still have the letter she sent my aunt: “I have never been through or witnessed anything like it in my life. I cannot stay here one more moment.” These words had become a kind of litany that would continue of for the rest of Mother’s life, a sentiment repeated again and again by others who came to stay.

As I never spoke with anyone about my life with Lucy, I became inarticulate about what I felt. I think it was around this period of my life that I lost a sense of time, the sequence of things that most people have. It never occurred to me to mention that I was miserable and didn’t know what to do about flunking so many courses or being so afraid when I sang my solo on Sunday that I would be hoarse and the tiniest bit off key. I just rearranged my face again for the world until I could take it all back to my room and my cross and my river and the people walking by under the window. In my imagination the cross flew across the sky and said, “It is proper to suffer.” The cross in some supernatural way not only gave its protection and special meaning to my circumstances, but also held up its iron arms against my anger.

7

Great Vows

When I was about nine, Mother hired an accommodator, a person who comes for a month, or one day a week. I called her Cookie. She was probably Irish and had silver hair touched with yellow and plump fingers. She moved into the basement. I wasn’t allowed to go in the kitchen, which was in the basement, so I seldom saw her, and in any case I hated the kitchen. There were narrow stairs painted deep blue going down to it. It was below ground level and dark, and the furnace sounded like a human heart, beating away. There was a heavy breathing sound. Cookie was to become one of the long list of people who came and left in a hurry.

One day when I got home, I ran upstairs and locked the doors to my room and bathroom. Cookie was to put my dinner in the elevator on a tray at 6:00 P.M., and I was to ring it up. One night before 6:00, I heard a knock on the door, and Cookie asking to come in. She was carrying my tray and weaving around a bit. She told me to sit on the bed and she proceeded to feed me burned spinach, spoonful by spoonful. I ate it partly out of bewilderment and partly because I sensed for her it was an act of kindness; there was a shared but unspoken sense of danger between us in this house. The next night I rang for the tray and nothing happened. Finally, I summoned up my courage and went down the four flights of stairs. “Cookie,” I called out. No answer, just a heavy silence. When I arrived at the kitchen door, I found her. She was lying under the kitchen table. Her body lay in a pool of blood, one arm flung out from her side with a large carving knife next to it; she wasn’t moving.

As usual I couldn’t find Mother anywhere, so I fled upstairs and called my friend next door, the minister’s daughter. The ambulance came, and they took Cookie. She wasn’t mentioned to me by anybody again. I don’t know if it was a suicide. It looked like it to me. I have no idea if they even found my mother before they took Cookie away. I had gone to my room.

I couldn’t sleep that night so I pushed my bed over to the window in order to watch the world below. I tuned my old-fashioned little white radio to play its endless round of popular songs, and placed my stuffed animal, Dazzle, carefully on the windowsill. Dazzle had been with me for at least six years. He was made of gray and white crocheted wool and might have been a mouse except his nose was too long and made him look more like an anteater with long ears.

It became a ritual. Having set my kingdom in order, I would arrange my long white nightgown and place my elbows on the windowsill and observe the world. It was by far the best time of day because it was too late to do anything else, even my homework (which I never did), and I liked being alone.

My window above the world looked out over brick houses and slate roof tops, old city streets that emptied onto the esplanade where soldiers and their girls, old men, dogs, and people of all varieties enjoyed walking in the grass and sitting on park benches.

Beyond the park was the river that ran through the city and under the Salt-and-Pepper Bridge. That is what it was called because it had four stone towers at either end that looked like old-fashioned silver salt-and-pepper shakers. Above all this was the Carter’s Inn Clock, which lit up at night in wonderful green and orange colors, except for the time itself, which shone forth in a luminous white. I thought it was a marvelous thing that someone had donated that clock so that all the people in the city could see the time. And I would watch my river roll by the esplanade and the cross on the Church of the Advent race against the clouds and the sky.

I sat there talking to Dazzle, who had a magnificent gift of silence, my elbows digging into the hard, dirty rim of the window until they were well worked with sore red lines. As the evening moved by below, the mood and feeling of the city changed, the people went home, the air seemed lighter, and the rather sickly smell of a warm city disappeared, but most of all the quality of light changed as if the darkness might succeed in blotting everything out before the dawn. As I sat there, I found myself thinking over the day’s events.

For quite some time now I had the feeling small animals must have when constantly attacked by large predatory beasts, a kind of constant alert, a raising of the fur and a sniffing for the odor of danger or fear. Suddenly the world was becoming unpredictable, and it was getting harder to compete with the growing importance of the poison in my mother’s mind. I was being squeezed out of the grown-up world and my place of “becoming” was my seat by the window. Sitting there contemplating these things, I found myself feeling it was important to decide what kind of person I should be: How should I react? How do I want to fit in? Should I be good or bad? I was convinced I had a choice.

I pictured myself swaggering down the school hall, my Scottish kilt swinging wildly behind me, dragging my dirty, green book bag, broadcasting in my walk that I was mean and tough. Then when I got home, I would say things to hurt Lucy, scream back at the endless confusion – viciously. But I kept thinking I didn’t want to be vicious.

Something drew my attention back to the city scene in front of me – some subtle occurrence, an unusual ringing sound, a shift of light, I’m not quite sure what. It was very late, perhaps around 4:00 or 5:00 P.M. Everything was quiet; all the cars and people had disappeared. The river looked black and more mysterious as it rolled under the bridge and the Carter’s Inn Clock stood out by itself; all the other lights had been turned off. Silence seemed to blanket the city in an eerie stillness. Captured and folded into its soft, black feathers, I didn’t move, didn’t even breathe, but sank slowly to a silent place, where if I knew how to look and listened hard enough, I felt I could hear a whisper or a secret or perhaps even an answer. It was my first glimpse that maybe there were other worlds, something inside, an inner voice or something perhaps sacred in the silence. It was the first time, since my dream as a young child of talking to God, that I felt that subtle longing—not for a mother but for something I couldn’t define.

Perhaps it was in a place where great rivers flow quietly through space and clocks filled with light tell time without ticking and float over sleeping cities, and where the morning light shifted and tangled and pushed at the blackness – pushed to come back and give new shapes and forms to things again.

“The Star-Spangled Banner” suddenly blared out from the radio. Startled and by now very tired, I picked up Dazzle, hugging him so tightly that his loose stuffing bulged in yet another spot, crawled under the covers and whispered into Dazzle’s ear, “It’s all right, Dazzle, I’m not crazy. I am going to be good.”

8

Poisonous

Lucy decided to put me in the hospital when I was about eleven, two years after Cookie disappeared, to have me “cleaned out” of the poisonous, milky substance. Then she could write long letters to her lawyers, to judges, her relatives, friends, Aunt Nan and doctors telling how her ex-husband had poisoned me so that I was seriously ill and in the hospital.

I found myself standing at the entrance to the scrubbed and clean smelling ward, my two brown braids neatly pulled behind me, thinking, “I feel fine. What if they find out I am fine?” I was afraid I would be caught in the lie, and even if it wasn’t my lie, I felt humiliated. Glancing down the rows of beds, I saw only older women. Occasionally, some beds were separated by a glass partition, but for the most part there was just a white curtain.

A nurse led me to a large private room that looked out directly onto the wall of another building. Lucy followed us in, inspected the room, and put down my bag and schoolbooks.

“You’ll feel better soon,” Lucy informed me. You know your test was positive. You have undulant fever from the milk, but Dr. Tobin says he can help you.”

I turned my head away from my mother. “I don’t want to stay here,” I whispered.

“You’re a very sick girl.” With that, Lucy left. I didn’t see her again for the three weeks that I stayed in the hospital. There were no visitors, and it never occurred to me to call anyone. Who would I call? I was forbidden to see any of my fathers’ relatives by Mother. She had made that very clear to them too, and during the war, men left, and often wives, if possible, followed them to army camps.

The hospital was a teaching hospital, so I saw a great many interns. They came to study me, a specimen of undulant fever, a sickness brought on by unpasteurized milk. They kept asking me questions, and I kept saying that I felt fine. I seemed to have a lot of colds, but that was all. Sitting all day by myself in a room with nothing to do but read or look at the walls, I felt as if I were being punished. The doctors, serious and in a hurry, wearing their white coats and carrying the authority of God, told me I was being tested for undulant fever, and that they were going to try out a new drug on me. I took it all in and began to feel overwhelmed by the authority of these doctors who agreed with my mother. What if it were true? I began to grind my teeth, often without realizing it, and I sang a little singsong litany against the doctors whom I did not like or trust and against Lucy, whom I didn’t trust either. “The milk is not poison, the milk is not poison.”

Lucy had talked about this disease as if it were dangerous, as if it could kill people and dogs, and I wondered, in spite of myself, what it was that made the doctors believe my mother. Lucy had told me that her friend Carlyle’s feet had turned black and she had died from it, and now these men took it seriously. What bothered me the most was that they believed my mother. To people she met casually, Lucy was believable.

After five days of tests and sitting in my private room alone, I asked to be allowed to go to the ward. The doctors in their wisdom, or curiosity, had decided to give me injections of the newly discovered drug penicillin, every two hours, night and day. By the second day my arms were sore, but moving into the ward at least provided some distractions and lots of attention. In spite of myself I wanted to please these doctors who seemed interested in me; I enjoyed and delighted in the unusual attention, but I was puzzled. My father had insisted I drink the milk when we lived on the island. Why would these important doctors keep me in the hospital if nothing were wrong? I couldn’t sort it out, I became confused and the confusion kept going around in my head.

The nurses gave me odd jobs to do, and a large, Italian lady named Sophie took me under her wing. Sophie had few inhibitions and would laugh and holler and waddle up and down the ward, a large cross swaying from her neck, talking with all the patients in broken English. She had had a serious operation, and I guessed from the conversations of the nurses, which I sometimes overheard, that she was not at all well. Next to my bed was an old lady with gray hair who hardly ever spoke. She died in the night, and there were lots of whispers as they took her away.

After two weeks my body became sore all over from the injections. The nurses tried to find new places to inject the new drug. The night time was the time I disliked the most. After being woken up for the injection, I would lie in bed, watching the nurse walk around the ward in her soft, gummy shoes. There was just enough light to see the outlines of the beds and the warm glow of the nurses’ station at the end of the corridor. I would lie there and think to myself, “I am not ill. I do not have undulant fever. I am perfectly healthy. I am not full of poison, I am not full of poison, I am not full of poison.” But what I couldn’t say to myself and what began to form in my mind was, “What if I am full of poison? What if I am bad?”

(With thanks to Atlas & Co. Publishers for agreeing to the publication of this excerpt from Songs of Three Islands, available through Amazon.com and other bookstores.)

Saturday, September 3, 1985

Three a.m. Saturday morning, Labor Day weekend. I’m behind the wheel of my beat up Chevy Blazer, wearing a red and grey-striped softball jersey, with “Holden Electric” scripted in crimson across the chest. In the passenger’s seat, my wife Carole, a white cotton ball stuffed in each ear, is dozing off. The tape deck blares out a medley of Beach Boys’ songs from the “Endless Summer” album, my favorite road trip music. Still five hours left to go on this crazy, impulsive excursion.

We left Sutton’s Bay, a chi-chi, Lake Michigan resort town at ten p.m. last night, en route to Houghton, an old northern mining town located on the western tip of Michigan’s fabled Upper Peninsula. It’s a nine-hour drive. And we’re out here halfway between whistle stops like Manistique and Munising because my former softball mates–a fastpitch team I’d played on and managed for fifteen years–is competing in the state finals for the first time. Their game starts at 9 a.m. And as much as I hate to own up to it, I desperately want to make it there on time. My dilemma, for which I take all the blame, is that Carole and I are booked on a transatlantic fight from Detroit to Paris; and the plane leaves on Monday afternoon at 4 p.m. That’s less than three days from now. What the hell was I thinking when I made this knuckleheaded decision?

I look over at Carole, still sound asleep and curled up in a fetal position, her head pressed softly into the pillow. Even in baggy, faded jeans and an oversized red sweatshirt, even with no makeup, at forty two Carole still has that same unadorned beauty she has always possessed—naturally curly auburn hair; expressive liquid brown eyes; long, dark lashes, a perfectly shaped nose, soft, smooth cheeks, pouty lips, and that lilting childlike voice tinged with a New Yawk accent, a tone of voice that’s captivated me ever since she was a seventeen year old high school senior.

With Carole, what you see is what you get. Her artless appearance matches her calm, unaffected demeanor. But I know I’m testing her composure. I may have already pushed her too far. Carole stirs. I turn the music down.

“Hey, I hear the Upper Peninsula is gorgeous at this time of year,” I say.

She yawns and pauses for a long moment.  “Is that why we’re driving through it in the middle of the night?” she says, her lower lip curling into a tiny frown.

“We’ll make it back for the flight, I promise.”

My Adam’s apple knots up before I can even get the words out. Carole rolls her eyes, turns her head toward the door, and sinks back into her pillow. She’s been onto me for a long time. This dance, in fact, has become all too familiar to both of us.

I’m a forty-five year old writing professor and Carole’s a visual artist who has been living with my softball “jones” ever since we migrated here from New York City twenty-one years ago. Last September, almost a year ago to this day, I assured her I was done playing and managing this team—a team I’d handpicked and organized fifteen years ago while I was still working on my Ph.D.

Carole doesn’t trust me; and she’s right. My track record in the “I am quitting” department I admit is pretty dismal. God knows I’ve had enough excuses to step away, to gracefully phase myself out. But for as long as I can remember, precious few experiences have matched that intermittent sense of belonging I felt when I was part of a team. And, lately, I’ve been anxiously wondering what, if anything, is going to replace that jolt of elation that follows say a game-winning hit; or the “I really did that” sensation of catching up to an unreachable fly ball; or the bone-weary contentment that washes over you after you’ve played three consecutive games on a sweltering Sunday afternoon; or the afterglow at the local bar, where we’d hang around for hours in our uniforms and praise each other for the all “money” plays we made?

Over the years, I’ve even developed a strange attachment to those late night postmortems, where diehards like Billy Hurth, our no-nonsense centerfielder and Steve Pollok, our fiercely competitive shortstop, would linger over a beer with me, dissecting and replaying the screw-ups and flubs that helped us lose the game.

It’s all pretty crazy making stuff, even more so when you’re my age. I look over at Carole again, and a sudden but familiar panic overcomes me. Deep down I know that for the last few years, Carole has slowly been drifting away from me.

Over the past three summers, Carole, who by nature keeps her own counsel, has been spending more time with her women’s art group. They’re all fiercely independent women, and I know when they get together they talk about their personal relationships. I also know that some of them have very strong opinions about the way their male partners have treated them. I wonder if Carole talks to them about our marriage. And if so, what does she say?

Maybe I’m being overly paranoid, but I’m aware that lately Carole has seemed uncharacteristically distant, even moody, two qualities that until now, have never been part of her makeup. A piece of me senses that largely because of my stubborn insistence to keep on playing ball, our marriage may already be at the tipping point.

I remind myself again that Carole doesn’t ask for a hell of a lot. And the trip to France is as urgent to her as playing softball is to me. It’s something she has looked forward to since she took her first art history class fifteen years ago. Besides, it would be our first trip abroad together. But last fall, when I announced my intention to quit playing and managing, I didn’t count on my old team making it into the state finals, the only goal we hadn’t achieved in the fifteen years we’d been playing together.

Now, here I am driving anxiously through the night, one moment feeling like a giddy college kid anticipating his first Spring Break, and the next like an abject hypocrite. This last year I’ve been slowly realizing there’s a lot at stake here. And as we head toward Houghton, still some four hours away, I have nothing but time to think about it.

***

Five a.m. and we’ve just passed Munising where Route 2 west intersects with Route 41 northwest. Still some three-plus hours to go. As the last strains of “God Only Knows How Much I Love You” fade out, the tape deck clicks off. And for a moment I’m not sure where I am. I look out the driver’s side window, searching for some landmarks. When I pass a boarded up wooden building whose faded lettered sign still reads “Starlight Supper Club,” it strikes me that despite all the mythology I’ve heard about the Upper Peninsula being “God’s country,” throughout the years we’ve lived in Michigan I’ve never been curious enough to visit it.

The UP, as native Michiganders refer to it, is famous for its natural beauty–large tracts of state and national forests, cedar swamps, more than 150 waterfalls, and low population densities. And because of its extensive coastline on three of the five Great Lakes, the UP is one of the most desirable vacation destinations in the Midwest. Unfortunately, as Carole had earlier pointed out, in a lightly sarcastic tone, “But we won’t be seeing any of those natural wonders tonight, will we?” Her remark makes me wince.

When I pass an abandoned old ball field, the outfield snow fence lying on the ground in pieces, I think about some of the simpler pleasures of playing ball in small farm towns all over the state: the chirping of midnight crickets, the pungent aroma of a new fallen rain on the grass; the musty scent of fresh-cut hay and alfalfa; the flapping sound when the wind ruffles the corn stalks behind the outfield fence; and the calm tranquility I feel when I’m standing in left field between innings on a sunny Saturday afternoon in a lake resort town like Charlevoix or Petoskey, playing catch or just shooting the breeze with my outfield mate, Billy Hurth, while we watch squadrons of white gulls swoop in over Lake Michigan.

I remember the anticipation and excitement I felt when I first began playing in weekend tournaments; driving to road games, windows rolled down, fifties and sixties rock and roll music cranked up to the threshold of pain, and me singing the words as loud as I could and looking forward, just as I did in childhood, to a whole weekend of nothing to think about but playing ball.

I glance at the dashboard clock. It’s 5:30 a.m. A sudden stab of pain shoots across my lower back; and I feel a vice-like tightness in both hamstrings. Well what did I expect? Except for a few pit stops, I’ve been driving nonstop for almost six hours. And now that the adrenaline has worn off, I’m left with a visceral reminder of what got me thinking about quitting in the first place.

In my early forties, my reflexes, never really my strongest suit, were becoming considerably slower. I was a mini-step late charging bunts I used to be able to anticipate. So I volunteered to move from third base, a position that demands quick, almost automatic reactions, to left field. My eyesight was also starting to deteriorate. When fly balls came spinning through the arc lights, I saw only half the ball: unfortunately, it was always the dark half. Whenever we played a night game then, I relegated myself to being the designated hitter. Even back then, a piece of me knew I should quit. But I kept convincing myself that thirty-plus years of experience as a player and manager would be enough to sustain me for a few more years. Maybe I should just play part time, or be a full time designated hitter.

I look over at Carole who’s still sound asleep. I’m grateful for everything about her; her steadiness and patience, her common sense, the subtle emotional support she gives me. Carole hasn’t come right out and said it; that’s not her m.o. But I’m wondering again if she’s preparing to move on without me. That’s when another episode of anxiety begins to settle in. Why am I so bent on doing this? Am I really going to risk losing my partner of twenty-one years just for the sake of showing up to what will certainly be my last softball game?

***

Six a.m. And we’re about sixty miles out of Marquette. By now, we’ll have been on the road for almost eight hours. My stomach is still churning and my hamstrings are screaming. Usually, Carole and I readily agree to share the driving. And for a long minute, I think about asking her to spell me, just for an hour, just until we get to Marquette. But under the circumstances, that’s probably not a very smart move.

Even during the times when we’ve been at odds, Carole and I have always been good traveling companions. During the year, we’ll drive to Chicago, or Ann Arbor for some small combo jazz or a good independent film; or to Detroit or Grand Rapids for a show or a concert. In the early days of softball, we drove all over Michigan, pursuing one weekend tournament or another. We agreed that taking these trips was a good way for us to spend time together. It was also an excuse to explore the state. But that’s before softball became a source of disagreement between us, though I’m sure if you asked Carole, she’d describe it somewhat differently. That’s because for the past five years she has chosen not to accompany me on softball road trips. This is a pretty extreme action for her. It’s not exactly an ultimatum; but it’s clearly meant to be a wake-up call for me. It makes me think that the only reason she’s taking this trip is because she wants to make sure I don’t screw up our excursion to France.  Just the thought that I need to be chaperoned makes me self-conscious and edgy.

Then again, I tell myself that I’m not the only middle-aged guy who carries this affliction. What about my teammates? None of them are kids. They all have jobs and families. How come they’re still playing?  Carole’s art group, I’m sure, would be quick to say we’re all just a bunch of immature guys reliving our childhoods. And from their point of view, they might be right.

But is every one of us guilty as charged? We are, after all, a pretty eclectic mix. Cliff Goodman and Carl Cluley are factory rats; Jimmy Holden is an electrician who runs his own business; Billy Hurth, a Clark Kent type–mild mannered state employee by day, aggressive center fielder by night, is college educated and the father of two children; Steve Pollok is a tough workman’s comp lawyer with an advanced degree; Jerry Murphy is a street smart Oldsmobile lifer. Finally, the academic types, a PhD like me and Kevin Ford, who’s a highly regarded Psych professor.

We’ve been playing together for years. And despite our differing educations and personal tastes, even the guys who have relatively satisfying, even successful lives, still play because when we’re out on that field, we’re living in a parallel universe. After every ball game, whatever the outcome, for better or worse, we’ll head back to real life and the responsibilities we left behind the moment we slipped into our uniforms and gathered to take batting practice, whip a softball around the horn, and wait, with giddy anticipation, for the evening’s first pitch.

For the next half hour I’m locked in, thinking about the possible scenarios that might play out after we arrive at Houghton. What would happen if Jimmy actually needs to use me? Would I even be physically capable of playing?

About two years ago, I realized that even against mediocre pitchers, guys whose best offerings once looked as big and round as an inflated balloon, I was swinging at pitches a millisecond late–which in this game is all it takes. To mask that deficiency, I started to take pitchers as deep in the count as I could, hoping maybe I could get a walk. But I knew I could only fool myself for so long.

For most of my ball playing life, my strongest asset was an accurate throwing arm. Even after I’d moved out to left field, I could still, on occasion, throw a strike to home plate from almost 250 feet away. But last season because of the sharp ache in my rotator cuff, every time I tried to hit Pollok, the cut-off man only 100 feet away, I could barely shot put the ball to him. So what the hell am I thinking?

I look over again to my right. For the last two hours, Carole has been staring out into the darkness. Neither of us has uttered a word.  Even in the best of times, I’m never very comfortable with silence. But this is no ordinary silence. A palpable tension hangs in the air.

**

7:30 am. And here we are, at first light, approaching Houghton and the playoffs–and the uncertainty of our future together.

“Hiya, Bill,” he said, dropping the truck in the patch of dirt beneath the front windows. There was no garden, no bushes in front of his house like mine, no tall flowers or pine trees – only a strip of dirt and a chipped gray foundation.

Billy and I sat on the front steps, crushing small rocks with larger rocks. His Dad slid his iridescent sunglasses into his hair and squeezed the back of Billy’s neck. He called me “Tony,” the only one who used that nickname, and it always made me feel like he knew some secret about me. I smiled politely as he walked past us and into the house.

The inside of Billy’s house was like a wound, something delicate ripped wide open. Josephina’s juice boxes and melted ice pops left hard red blotches on the beige carpet. Crushed saltine crackers dusted the stairs. The big red couch was stained with Coca-Cola and one of the cushions was torn so badly it looked like it was sliced with a steak knife. When we watched TV, Billy pulled chunks of cotton from the couch and threw them on the floor.  Billy’s father didn’t seem to notice.

His father walked down the hall and into the bedroom. I heard him say something to Billy’s mother and shut the door behind him. Billy nudged me with his elbow, thin black hairs curling over his top lip as he grinned. He muted the television and crept toward the hallway. Maggie sat with perfect posture at the kitchen table behind a fort of math and science textbooks covered with brown paper bags. Josephina was alone with her bucket of chalk in the driveway. Billy beckoned me toward the hallway.

We got down on our hands and knees and crawled toward the bedroom door. I was right behind Billy, the black bottoms of his bare feet inches away from the tips of my fingers. He turned around and slid backwards on his butt until his back was against the wall. I crawled forward and sat next to him. Billy put his finger to his lips.

His mother moaned – a soft whimpering, the whispers of a foreign language. Steady and breathy, as if there wasn’t enough air in her bedroom. Billy giggled quietly, thrusting his hips into the air. I’d heard these sounds in the movies Billy and I watched on cable late at night, men and women rolling in bed with sweaty, painful expressions, but I had never heard them in real life. She moaned louder; I pressed my ear to the door.

“Billy!” Maggie whispered, peeking over her thick textbook. “Get away from there.”

Billy looked at her, gave her the finger. She shook her head and looked at me. I shook my head, too, with half a smile as if I didn’t want to believe what was happening. Part of me didn’t. Part of me was frightened of what went on inside their house. The other part was curious.

Her moans quickened and for the first time I heard the bass of his father’s voice, then silence. Normal sounds slowly broke through the blood-rush in my ears – the scratching of Maggie’s pencil, Josephina’s singing in the driveway, the cool outside air blowing through the curtains.  The bed creaked, and we ran back to the living room.

A few minutes later, his father came out of the bedroom and walked into the kitchen. He stretched in front of the open refrigerator with a can of Diet Coke in his hand. He popped the top and took a long swallow; each gulp audible in his throat. I pretended to watch TV as I stared at him leaning on the refrigerator door, absently flipping through a stack of Josephina’s drawings stuck to the freezer with magnets shaped like fruits and vegetables. He held up a family portrait – the mother in a long bathrobe with wild hair, Maggie standing up straight, neat clothes, arms full of books, Billy holding a toy gun, spraying bullets in the air like a cowboy, and the father smiling in his white Camaro, three lines shooting out from the back of the car to show how fast he was going.

He put the portrait back on the freezer and finished his Coke. The delicate echo of the empty can on the counter followed by the papery slap of an envelope filled with money. He kissed Maggie on the cheek and walked into the living room, said goodbye to me and Billy, took a quick look around the house, put his sunglasses on and closed the door. We heard him whistle as he walked across the front lawn. Through the window, I watched him get in his car, the convertible top blossoming as he drove up the street.

Billy’s mother shuffled out of the bedroom, her bathrobe never completely closed, always revealing too much. A blotchy breast, a pale veiny thigh. She seemed to sleepwalk everywhere she went – the kitchen, the backyard, the elementary school to pick up Josephina. In the evenings, Billy forced her to walk to McDonald’s and get us food. Screaming and cursing, he told her to get a pen and write down our order. He said it was okay, that I could go ahead and tell her what I wanted. She knelt beside me with a pen in her hand, looking up at me with exhaustion, as if my answer could save her.  I told her what I wanted.

As chaotic as Billy’s house was, I didn’t feel threatened. His life was so completely different from mine, equally exotic and incomprehensible, that it seemed too far away to do any harm. I was a voyeur, an extra. My house was only a hundred yards up the street, but it was miles and miles away.

When I returned home, I stared at Mom’s garden, the finely-trimmed lawn, and the blue sky shimmering in the pool, a reflected world washed clean of consequence.  At the dinner table, I ate with visions of Billy’s house safely tucked away inside me.

__

Since Billy was younger, we never saw each other in school. I was closer in age to Maggie and sometimes I’d see her at the bus stop or in the corner of the library. If the hallway was empty, sometimes we’d wave to each other, our hands never any higher than our hips. Most of the time, we looked the other way.

My mother and I often saw Billy’s mom walking around town in her bathrobe. She limped up a quiet side street, her face caged in black hair. She shuffled along the white line, cars whipping by at forty miles an hour, her bathrobe undulating in heavy waves like a waterlogged cape.

“That poor woman,” my mother said, her tongue clicking on the back of her teeth.

We never stopped to give her a ride. We thought about her only when we saw her and drove on.

I didn’t want to associate with Billy or his family outside of his house. Inside his house, I was not myself. I was Billy’s protégé, his understudy in the ways of evil, learning how to be bad. Outside, I was the polite, chubby, red-cheeked child with the permanent smile. Always polite, always got along with others. I was known for my ability to share. But inside, I longed to learn Billy’s language, to communicate with the world the way he did.

It was the opposite for Billy. Outside of his house, he felt vulnerable and weak. Once, I invited him to visit my grandparents in New Jersey. He agreed, and I imagine I felt comfortable with the situation because we’d be far away from our hometown and no one would know us. My parents asked me if I wouldn’t rather take another friend, someone I knew better. They didn’t know as well as I did what went on in Billy’s house, but they sensed something, as if a sinister soundtrack became audible as soon as Billy appeared. As my father loaded Billy’s backpack into the car, he looked at me as if I might still change my mind.

Billy didn’t talk the entire trip. Not one word. Nor did I see him eat anything. When my grandmother asked him if he’d like some lasagna or a slice of meatloaf, he just shook his head and sat at the table with his head down. Though he was obviously uncomfortable, I marveled at the power he had over the table, each of us not sure how to behave in his presence.

__

Josephina was five, but still couldn’t talk. She communicated in one-syllable sounds and hand gestures. She’d point to a box of chicken McNuggets and open her mouth wide, waiting for someone to feed her. She’d squeal and scream, reaching for a can of soda on the counter until someone boosted her up. When she wanted to go outside, she scratched at the door like a small dog begging to escape.

With her bucket of multi-colored chalk, she drew bright worlds on the hot black driveway. Smiling yellow suns coaxing laughing purple flowers from tall magenta grass. Herds of unicorns and giraffes and dinosaurs ran together through open fields. She sang songs to herself in her own language, baby-talk much too young for her, as if there were an infant ventriloquist hiding behind her, controlling every word she said and lyric she sang.

Billy rode his bike up and down the driveway, screeching to a stop over her drawings until her worlds were blurry and his bike tires were coated with chalk. His mother and sister yelled and chased him down the driveway as he peddled just enough to stay ahead of them, laughing. I sat in the grass, the urge to stop him surging up in me, to kick Billy from his bicycle with the tip of my sneaker like a peasant suddenly spearing the dragon with his sword. But I didn’t. I watched Josephina stand above her world crying, a stub of chalk in her hand, wondering where to start.

__

One day, Billy and I were in Maggie’s room. Maggie was downstairs. Their mother was asleep. Josephina sat on the edge of Maggie’s bed as we flipped through a dirty magazine and dialed the numbers in the back. We used Maggie’s telephone, the trendy kind made of clear plastic so all of the inner workings were visible. The transparent receiver blinked in Billy’s hand.

“What’s that?” he said, “you want to speak to Anthony? Okay. Here he is.”

Billy tried handing me the phone but I ran to the other side of the room, tripping over Josephina’s Twister mat. He laughed and gave the phone to Josephina instead. I picked up the cordless phone on the table and listened. A woman on the other end moaned softly, asking Josephina what she wanted. She said she wanted to please Josephina and make all her fantasies come true. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, baby? Josephina seemed soothed by the voice, as if listening to a nursery rhyme. Billy hung up the phone and Josephina screamed, holding the phone to her ear, slapping all the buttons, trying to make the voice come back.

This is when I would leave. Josephina would scream and Billy’s mom would wake up and run to her – What? What is it? What’s the matter? – but Josephina couldn’t tell her, couldn’t speak her language. She’d just scream and reach out in the air for some invisible savior. I’d slip out the back door and run home.

I slept over there only once. In the middle of the night, I began to sleepwalk. I got up from my bed and walked down the stairs. Somehow, I made it through the obstacle course of toys and dishes on the living room floor and into the kitchen. My hands searched the walls for the door knob and as I began to turn it, Billy’s mother touched my shoulder.

“Anthony,” she whispered, “where are you going?”

Her question woke me, and I was suddenly inches from her face, her wrinkled olive skin, long thin black hair. She looked like a zombie. She was breathing heavy; she must have chased me.

“Home,” I said, “I have to go home.”

“It’s late, though. You can go home in the morning.” She turned me around and sent me back through the house, back upstairs, back to Billy’s room.

In the middle of the night, I heard Billy guiding Josephina down the dark hallway, into his room. The rustling of Billy’s blanket. Josephina’s mysterious language. Billy whispered; she giggled. Silence. Then I heard only Billy, no words, only breath.

In the morning, Josephina was gone. Billy was sleeping. I snuck out the back door and walked home, no one there to stop me.

__

Though I couldn’t see in the darkness, Billy and Josephina’s sounds drew pictures in my mind like chalk on asphalt. I felt I could no longer safely watch lest I be responsible for what I was witnessing.

But I continued to go over there. It was not my life.

I’m 15 or 16, floating in the swimming pool out back, gazing up at blue space. My ears submerged, I can still hear Burt Bachrach’s song, “You say the sky’s in love with you,” sounding from my tape deck at the pool’s edge. For years that’s how I think the song goes. Floating, looking up, I try to imagine what it would be like disappearing somewhere up high, what it would be like to erase my thoughts and feelings, the moment. Would I then be able to be who I am? But I can’t think too long like this, can’t sail beyond the infinity of the weight on me that is home.

*            *            *

They say home is what your heart keeps returning to. But for some it’s an accidental place, an extension of someone else, not yourself, something you arrive to by association. That’s how it was for me.

In 1964, we arrived in New Canaan, Connecticut by way of Chicago, Illinois, by way of Talara, Peru, by way of Bogotá, Colombia, my mother’s country. My dad, John, was a blue-eyed blond from Iowa, and my mother, Maria, a dark-eyed beauty from Bogotá. Lined up, we, their five kids, looked liked UN reps — blonde, almondy-skinned Mara; red-haired, fair Jane; slanty-eyed Jake with his yellowy complexion; and the tannest among us, Blaine. I was dark too, and wore my medium-length blackish hair with bangs. Our ticket into WASP-land was our dad being a gringo and top executive with a big plastics company.

In the beginning, our parents must have had a dream to create an amazing union between north and south, dark and light, or what they conceived as these. We kids felt the burden of their challenge down to our very bones. There was so much fire between our parents, and it translated down to us, mostly in the form of ire. What must have started out as affection and desire turned to argument, and we kids never ceased struggling to find a place somewhere in-between all their differences.

It’s a curious fact that after moving to New Canaan, we who as kids had draped ourselves around our father’s back and shoulders, once obediently held our mother’s hand, once wrapped around one another in child’s play in South America, became distant, even unfriendly with one another. I never once saw my parents embracing, and we kids never got a parental hug or acted tenderly with one another. I wonder now if in an attempt to be all-American, we instinctively followed our father’s hard, unyielding stamp.

The habit of not exchanging tenderness of course began with our parents who themselves had an antipathy toward expressed love and need. Our mother seemed consumed by need, and it was poison to our father.

At 14 or 15, I am standing in the hallway before my parents’ bedroom, watching my father bolt after my mother who’s trying to seal herself inside her closet after plucking a handful of coins from my father’s dresser and tossing them at his face. My father’s wearing only tennis shorts, and his powerful, ashen white legs taking off look like weapons to me. He throws my mother on their massive bed, pinning back her arms. She’s gone haywire because he’s come home late again.

“I can’t take it anymore! I can’t take it anymore!” she spews into his face.

“Control yourself, will you, please!” he shouts between gritted teeth. I can see the trinity of medals on his silver neck chain – Jesus, the Virgin Mary and St. Christopher – dangling before her face as he straddles her, clamping down on her arms. “Jesus! What’s wrong with you! Can’t you control yourself!”

She’s sobbing now, but he keeps shaking her — to get rid of her tears, for they too are an affront pointing at his weakness and failure to be there. Weakness and failure have no place in my father’s life, or ours. Not here, not now. Not ever.

*******

New Canaan was then and remains a paean to what my mother used to call “Anglo Saxonism,” and, during her more virulent moods, “the pallid perfection of Anglo Saxonism.” In the late 1960s, you strolled alongside the cool façade of Colonial style buildings along Main Street in tennis whites, golfing apparel, Brooks Brothers attire, your team uniform, your emblem of belonging, seemingly unscathed by what was roiling the world at large – the Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, the Vietnam War, the feminist and Black power movements. New Canaan moved to the beat of its own drum – the country club imperatives of money, good social standing and conventional order that compelled my father too. As an only child born during the Depression, he knew what it was like to want and was driven to succeed. To make money and to spend it well must have been his all-abiding dream.

My dad grew up on a Midwestern farm, the only child of a Welsh mechanic and  drunk, and a woman of German and Sioux Indian heritage who believed the sun rose and sank on account of her boy. John was a straight-A student and graduated early from high school, then college, and after the second world war got bit by the bug to travel and see more of the world. He hungered for what was exotic, and found its penultimate form in my mother whom he met while working as a young engineer for Standard Oil in Bogotá. She worked part-time for the company, moonlighting in the theater, her first love.

Dark, zaftig and dramatic, my mother looked like Ava Gardner in her youth, and, as the story goes, when my father passed by her wearing a red bow tie and brandishing a cigar, she confided to a fellow secretary, “I’m going to marry that blond gringo.” Even then, he had the brisk air of a man sure of himself and of conquering whatever lay in store for him. John and Maria were married inside of three months.

My father struck his in-laws as a model American – concerned for the world at large yet rooted in family values. In fact, he was eager to start a family of his own, to have the brood he’d never been a part of. He and my grandfather, a judge, shared similar simple but deeply grounded views – Kennedy was the good man of the world, while Castro represented all its evil. My grandmother, a Spaniard who’d grown up privileged, saw in my dad a man of vision and drive who would take my mother places and go far.

My mother was the antithesis of my dad, fun-loving and madcap, a superb horsewoman who rode and partied with her own circle of British admirers. She had jumped half naked into fountains and once stuffed smashed bananas into the trousers of a male friend who lay passed out drunk on a couch after a debauch. She was a fabulous dancer, and there was no party where she failed to be the center of attention, flirting wildly, whirling her skirts, flinging back her head, while surrounding male admirers yelled, “Viva!” “Ole!”

After their marriage, Dad assigned himself the role of keeper to my mother’s flame, at parties, positioning himself, drink and smoke in hand, at the periphery of the circle at whose center my mother caroused. If she got out of hand, he would grin wildly, biting down on his pipe or cigar tip, as if that might automatically set a limit to my mother’s intemperance —which, incidentally, never had to do with drink. Throughout their years together, that’s how it always was.

Our parents first lived in Bogotá, where I was born, then Mara, then Jane, all of us 13 months apart. Soon after Jane’s arrival, our father was transferred to Talara, a small Peruvian town alongside the Pacific coastline, where a Standard Oil refinery loomed like a giant spider and foreboding emblem. There, we lived in a camp for engineers of Standard Oil and their families, among Brits, Texans, Colombians and Peruvians. We were nurtured by nannies, fed by cooks, and while we kids cavorted alongside the sea, our parents indulged in an endless round of cocktail parties, picnics, fishing and golf. In the midst of this, Jake and Blaine were born.

After school, I’d cross the street and perch on a high dune, overlooking the sea. I was sure Dad’s country sat on the horizon. Squinting, I tried to make out the details of buildings and things in the distance. My Dad’s country was the land of Marilyn Monroe, skyscrapers and cotton candy, and I longed to go there. My dream came to be, when, after failing to get a long-awaited promotion, dad decided the best way to pay back his company would be by leaving. Overnight, we found ourselves in Chicago, where Grandma Jenkins lived.

The first images I recall on the black and white TV at the Ridgeview Hotel in Evanston, our temporary home, were replays of the assassination and funeral of John F. Kennedy. It was my first time seeing television and my first time seeing snow. Evanston’s tall, gloomy buildings rose out of a white covering that seemed to stretch to infinity. From a high window perch, I could see a park, snow-covered benches and swings below, but no kids. I ran my forefinger along the windowsill, picking up the soot and grime of ages, and thought my life was over. I had just turned 10.

It was a time of doubt for everyone and we too worried about the future. Wondering how our family would fare if Dad didn’t find a job, Jane and I bought a piggy bank and started collecting pennies, nickels and dimes. Our mother, who’d grown up with hired help, barely knew how to cook, and now struggled learning how to drive and write checks. A rotten driver, she smashed the brakes too hard at the mere sight of another vehicle. She was an equally bad cook, and her failed attempts led to tantrums, feet stamping and tears of frustration, and dad wasn’t there to placate her nerves. Thankfully, Ana, a young woman who’d come with us from Peru, helped out, taking charge of my brothers who were still very young and pacifying our mother with her gentle humor.

Ana was only 18 when she came with us to the states. As a girl, she would accompany her aunt, our cook, to our home in Talara to babysit us. She was one of several girls from a neighboring village who’d been plucked up by Americans and Brits to work in the camp, “one of the lucky ones,” our parents would say. When the time came for us to leave, we couldn’t bear to let Ana go; her aunt, her only living relative, approved our taking Ana with us out of the country and a life of poverty, which is the only other kind of life she would have known.

In the United States Ana quickly assigned herself the role of big sister to us and angel to my mother, always there to lend a hand. From the first moment of arriving in the states, our mother seemed overtaken by a heightened sense of imperative about how an American mother and housewife should be. She was on a mission to get noticed and accepted, and this extended to me. Her idea of helping me fit in at school was forcing me to perform a Spanish dance in front of my Girl Scout troupe, decked out in a flamenco dress, flaming red lipstick and heels. I’d grown up performing Spanish dances that my mother taught my friends, my sisters and me at the Staff Club in Talara. I’d danced then for my grandmother, my mother’s mother and people we knew in the camp. But this wasn’t Talara. And Sucita, my nickname for my grandmother, had died of cancer just months before coming north. I felt freakish raising my arms, playing castanets and performing steps to music that seemed as strange here as it must have seemed to my all-American classmates. Spanish dancing felt wrong here, out of place. To top it all, I had just started wearing glasses, pale blue and horn rimmed they were, with sparkly tips. I felt like a bad imitation of my mother. Everything about her seemed wrong here — her accent was too thick; her voice and make up and clothing, too loud. I wanted her to disappear. And myself with her.

After school, I played listlessly with a new, blonde Barbie, a doll I’d gotten for my 10^th birthday. With her long legs and big boobs, she too was foreign. Although I’d begged for her for a year, I couldn’t coddle her, or even pretend to like her. I resented her as much as this cold, sad place that was a poor substitute for our better life in Talara.

Just as I felt myself sinking helplessly into feelings of loss about my past and childhood, dad did find a job, and announced we were heading east. He flashed his new business card at us which showed he was “Assistant Manager of the Western Hemisphere.” We were all so impressed.

“That’s bigger and more important than being president of a country,” I said.

“The whole western hemisphere?” asked Mara.

“Yes, all of it,” said Dad. In two years he’d become manager, then vice president, and in five years, the youngest president the company had ever had.

That summer, we headed east in the blue wood-sided Buick, singing “La Cucaracha” and “Pío, Pío,” songs we knew from our childhood, and new ones just learned, watching The Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show — “I wanna hold your hand,” “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.” Every other mile, we kept asking, “When are we going to get there?” just so our mother would reach for the sour ball jar she had tucked alongside her and Blaine, who sat on her lap the whole way. The sourball jar was her lure to keep us quiet.

“Oh, can I have a red one, please?”

Finally, we reached Connecticut with its winding roads and greenery everywhere, flush up to the sky.

Gazing at the back of my dad’s head, I said, “Everything is so green here…”

“Yes,” he cackled, “green like money.”

We turned right off Route 123 onto Valley Road, then right onto Hickok Road. Our house sat at the top. Gray shingled, with white shutters, it was three stories high and set on close to two acres. At the end of the back drive was a basketball hoop and the front yard sloped so we could sled down the lawn and driveway when it snowed.

“Ah, ha,” my father announced as it came into view. In the rearview, I watched his bright eyes widen then narrow into focus. We all gasped delightedly, as if this was our first true home.

Soon after we moved in, Mrs. Ross, a Swede up the street, invited us to swim in her backyard pool with her two pale children, and promptly informed our mother, “You’d better make sure your children don’t get too dark. They’ll put them in the back of the bus come September.” The comment, delivered straight, put my mother in a state of apoplexy. But instead of following Mrs. Ross’ advice, my mother did just the opposite.

My two sisters and I, who tanned easily, had always been forced to wear hats in the South American sun to protect our complexions. My mother’s own fashion trademark was the big wide-brimmed hat – that, and big sunglasses. Now we no longer had to wear hats. I could almost hear our mother thinking, “We are going to be who we are, goddammit.” The following summer, dad installed a pool for us in our own backyard.

In New Canaan, my mother registered the coolness at large, but was not about to be stymied by it. She’d encountered bigger obstacles growing up during a period called The Violence in Bogota, where people like her father who declared themselves to be against the oligarchy could be shot dead at any time. Once, when my mother was five, while stepping out of a courtroom with her father and some of his friends, a car stopped below the steps of the building, a car door flew open and someone began shooting. A friend of my mother’s father ferreted her to safety in a taxi, and no one was killed or injured that day.

My mother’s papito had invited her into courtrooms where he presided, and later, into the bars and cafes he frequented, to join male society, discussing politics and issues of the day. She had witnessed plenty of conflicts, some, life and death, and the experiences must have stamped her deeply. She would not let her legacy go to waste, and in the United States held onto her past, her family and her country by writing about them.

She wrote about peasants, idealistic priests and members of her family who had been writers, activists and just plain crazy. There was her great grandfather on her father’s side who had been so jealous of his young wife’s singing voice that he imprisoned her in an attic, where she died mad while still in her twenties. There was a distant cousin who tied a rope to a chandelier in church and took a plunge from the choir during the middle of a mass, landing buck naked at the foot of the altar. My mother wrote about her Uncle Saul, who wandered the streets of Bogotá, a paper slip tucked inside his jacket pocket on which he claimed was the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe.

Our mother was torn by her desire to be a good mother, a good wife and a good writer, and, unable to fathom that she could be all three, determined that to be a good writer came first. It was a decision she frequently announced at the cocktail hour whenever Dad was around.  “My priorities are my writing, my children and my husband, in that order,” she would say, tossing us a wink. She said it to prick dad and make us laugh, but we also knew it was true.

Our mother told stories and lived in them. Two images of her stand out during this time, our family’s coming of age in New Canaan. In the first, she is upstairs in the writer’s studio dad built for her, typing on the old Remington that had belonged to her father. She poured out her stories about Colombian campesinos, her father, mother and the past on that fine, black metal instrument. Her excitement registered even in the way she pronounced the name of her writing tool, rolling the rr’s and placing an accent on the final o. “I am going upstairs to write on my Rrrremington.”

In her study, surrounded by books and the past, she could be herself, thriving in an isolation fed by intellectual constants and memory. Immediately to the left on the dark polished oak table was a wooden stand, built by my dad, on which sat the American dictionary. Further left, a pocket Thesaurus propped like a mouse on the elephantine back of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Shelved in the bookcase at the end of the room were my mother’s favorites  — collections of The Best American short stories, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marques, Graham Greene, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Anita Brookner.

Afternoons, other kids returned home from school and were greeted by the cacophony of vacuum cleaners and pots and pans clanging in the kitchen, while we were treated to the symphonies of Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky and the accompanying, rhythmic clatter of our mother’s typing, drifting downstairs from her studio on the third floor. She had a sign always posted on her workroom door that read, “Please in the name of God, do not disturb me!”

Our mother’s studio had three large square windows overlooking the back yard and woods. She sat on a flat cushion on the hardwood bench she preferred to a desk, her back erect, her restless hands with their red painted fingernails feverish upon the keys, creating the fresh staccato of our North American lives. The staccato, like her presence and stories, called us back to what we had left behind, pressing it into memory.

Her studio had been the attic. I’d hide in its closets stretched out in a small space in front of storage boxes and empty luggage. Overhead were slanting wood slats dividing long sections stuffed with pink insulation, and to the left near the cubby entrance, one solitary light bulb. I would stretch out on the rough wood planks reading Jane Eyre, Little Women, and Nancy Drew mysteries, and later, the forbidden books – Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, Jill Johnston’s Lesbian Nation — both of which I ferreted from the library. I fingered the sparkly pink insulation, which I expected to feel cottony, then had to deal with the sting of invisible needles pressing through my fingers and palms as I turned book pages. For hours, I read and perspired and felt myself to be insulated from the nagging, noisy outer world. I felt I was growing in secret.

The other image I have of our mother is that of the woman virtually immobilized by her responsibilities, trying to raise five incorrigible children on her own. In this second frame, I’m maybe 16, having just learned to drive, and almost all of us are in our teens. My mother’s left hand folds faintly around the wood banister leading to the first floor and basement. Close up, a slight discoloration is visible on her ring finger underneath her platinum wedding band that is surrounded by two diamond-studded rings. The center diamond on the main ring, round and prominent, belonged to my grandmother. I remember my mother telling me about the ring as we sat together in one of the dimly lit rooms at the Ridgeview Hotel. She had traced her mother’s hand before she died, and then, in the apartment in Evanston, raised her own hand, examining it, as if it held clues to the past and the future. Leaning against one another, we’d dreamed of days gone by, revisiting times with Sucita, tangos and finca gatherings with our aunt, uncle and cousins, all the familiar that had been snatched from us in an instant by an unnamable entity.

In New Canaan, I see our mother as if for the first time. Her long, dark, elegant, lean hand that does not grasp the rail, alights on it like a bird unsure of landing. She stares straight ahead at no one in particular, eyelids fluttering as if to protect her eyes, which are black, radiant, yet intent upon nothing.

“Go, I don’t care what you do…”

“Really,” I say, unbelievingly. My brothers and sisters have just run downstairs past her and out the front door against her protests, not bothering to ask her permission. It’s what we do whenever he, the authority-that-is-no-longer, is not home. And because he is rarely home, we too are almost always fleeing. It seems the thing to do, the ultimate rebellion. I’m about to follow, but am just looking before I go, just checking – because no matter how selfish we become, as the first-born I need to know. It’s my habit.

Our father is away on one of his many business trips and there is chaos now and no order. There will never be order in our family again, not as we knew it, just as our father will never be a part of our family again, just as we will never again possess the close-knit sense we once had when we were kids that was itself a kind of promise, a false belief in our own family’s immortality when we were living in a dream in South America.

We were surrounded by rituals then that held us together. In Bogotá, and Talara, greeting guests, going out, even going to bed happened in unison, and we had the warmth and kindness of an extended family, friends and hired help to make life easy. But here in the north, the days of dressing up just to greet adults, of exchanging pleasantries, of exercising politeness “just because,” dissipate and die. We rush ahead, no longer part of a unit but competing against one another, with no time left for kindness or consideration.

My mother’s husky, normally mellifluous voice is flat in this frame, utterly devoid of feeling. Moved by momentary concern, I find myself asking if she wants me to stay, but she says no, so I am free to go.

Later I learn from Mara that it’s because the doctor has prescribed Valium for her to ease her anxiety that she’s acting so cool and detached. Normally, our mother is anything but laid back. Mara also informs me that she and my mother smoked pot together. Where was I that I missed that? Mara said our mother took two puffs – “Just to try it, but she said it didn’t do anything.”

Our mother is on Valium. We think that is so cool. It feels like a boon to us. For years we tease her about the way it made her.

“Mom,” we would say, “the house might have caught fire and you could have cared less when you were on that stuff.”

“You mean becuss oaf mai leetle peels. Tank god, forr mai leetle peels.”

*********

Our mother’s spells of depression consumed us. When her writing did not go well, it was darkness everywhere, and she became a different person. She gazed at us, contempt in her eyes. Beading, her eyes told us that somehow we were to blame. Nothing we did or said could make things right. “My five serpents,” she called us, eliciting a vision of Minerva with snakes coiled around her head.

Didn’t the snakes inspire, keep her company?

On the bad days, she misplaced her glasses, her purse, her keys and you could find them anywhere, even in the most unlikely places. Her big, black-framed glasses might be found propped on a refrigerator shelf looking like a weird accident. On such days, my mother couldn’t do anything properly. One time, distracted, she seared a roast, still with its plastic wrap on. When I mentioned to her that she was burning plastic, my mother, the inventor, insisted the butcher had told her this is the best way to sear meat!

If her mood was merely dark and not malevolent, I could approach her.

“Mom, are you okay? What can I do?”

“Nothing, nothing, Arya. It’s not your fault. It’s my writing, my life. I will never accomplish anything. This has all been a waste.”

“Oh mother, that’s not true. Please don’t say that. You’re very good. I love that story you wrote the other day about the campesinos. It’s wonderful.”

“No, no. That story is shit, shit. No one is going to publish that. No one here wants to read about South American peasants. I am cursed, Arya, cursed.”

It was virtually impossible to lift my mother from her deep, dark place. Even though my siblings and I each took turns playing doctor, psychologist, clown and muse with her, on her bad days, we succumbed, growing listless with her, un-talkative, a little afraid. Will she ever come out of it? What does dad think? Does he know she’s so depressed?

If there were prayers, they were surely private. Although we’d been raised Catholic, we avoided Mass. When dad was away and Sunday came, we pretended to go to church, running out the door and packing into the red Mach I, the kids’ car. But instead of going to Mass, we crossed the New York border to buy Boone’s Farm wine, then cruised, drank and smoked dope.

Like most kids we knew, we just did what we wanted. With our friends, we competed for the biggest allowances, the coolest cars and clothes, the latest and best models of skis and tennis rackets, the most decadent parties.

By the time I was 17, we were all teenagers in our family, each of us with our own habit of constantly harassing our mother for favors, staying out late, getting our way. We didn’t take no for an answer, and our mother just couldn’t take it. Once, she just threw herself on the floor, screaming, shaking her head and kicking, her hands gripping her hair. She was desperate, and it stopped us all right. Mara ran into the bedroom she shared with Jane and sealed herself inside the closet. Jane jumped into bed, pulling the covers over her head. Jake ran upstairs and got on his knees in the middle of the bedroom he shared with Blaine and began praying. Blaine hopped into his bed, placing the small narrow pillow he’d had since he was a baby over his face, and began rocking to and fro. It was the way Blaine dealt with his migraines too, which were almost a daily event. I remember taking charge that day by running into my parents’ bathroom, grabbing hold of the nearest towel, dampening it and swishing it gently across my mother’s face.

Her periods of depression intensified with our bad behavior and our dad’s absences, and could only be assuaged by a miracle, it seemed. The small miracle was laughter, which we kids could sometimes work. Blaine was a great mimic and could slay us all with his imitations of teachers and ladies we knew playing tennis. All he had to do was twitch his raised eyebrows like someone debonair to crack our mother up. But the only happiness she really wanted was a short story acceptance in a literary magazine.

We rejoiced with her when she won top prize at a big writing conference and each time she got published in The New Yorker, and we became giddy with her when she succeeded in publishing her first novel. The bigger the success, the longer the period of elation. But we always knew, even as we experienced the joy of one of her accomplishments, that the mood would not last long and that a descent into darkness would be inevitable. The bigger the triumph, the deeper the plunge that followed.

In those days, before therapy was a staple of North American life, we didn’t have a clue about bipolar disease, and simply viewed depression and unpredictability as our mother’s natural states. Aside from her brief stint with Valium, my mother’s only medication for her highs and lows was her writing. It was her panacea, demon and savior.

Her bad days were awful, but when she was in good spirits, she could lift you so high, it erased everything that had come before. On her good days, all our mother had to do was walk into a room full of people and there would be no one else anyone paid attention to. She delivered a story, gesticulating with her hands, flipping from English to Spanish, mesmerizing, making you look and listen with your entire being and hunger for more. It was also true that she listened with the same degree of intensity and enthusiasm, and this was also what drew people to her.

She wanted to seduce with her writing too. My mother wrote in a frenzy. There was so much to say and she only had a few hours to get it all down before we returned home from school and devastated her peace and quiet.

I understood from the start how truly important writing was to our mother and did what I could to help, even editing her stories. The changes I made usually had to do with grammar, the order of a sentence, a misspelled word. She was always so grateful for the corrections, as if they were a kind of love for which she was desperate and the only kind of love she cared to get. She kept saying she wanted “to conquer the English language,” and strove to get rid of her accent, which she viewed as an obstacle. She never did get rid of it, turning it into an asset, an exotic charm that accented her amazing vocabulary.

My sisters and I were passionate advocates of our mother’s writing and avid readers like her. Weekends, in our early teens when our dad was away, we hung out in our dad’s den with our mother, reading and discussing, Jane twirling a stray strand of her auburn hair with one forefinger as she pored over the works of Jane Austen or the Brontes. Mara, who favored Dostoevsky, Proust and Collette, sat with an open book on her lap, back straight, reading in the fashion of our mother with one hand propping her chin. I liked to read lying down, stretched across the soft brown leather couch in the den, my face so close to the page I could practically smell the text. Reading for me was sensual, and I preferred the short story form and the minimalists, as did our mother. Dressed in a colorful mu-mu, a turban on her head, my mother presided in my dad’s “king” leather chair.

We couldn’t read without opining. The more we read, the more we learned to discuss articulately what we felt about what we were reading. My mother encouraged us to be bold, even outrageous.

“Absolutely,” or “Absolutely not!” she would cry out, raising the forefinger of one hand to feed or stymie one of our opinions. A blow to a favorite writer was always personal.

“How can you say that!”

We couldn’t disengage from what we loved. Hearing our commotion on their way outdoors to play tennis or football, my brothers would peer into the den, gazing at us askance, somewhat suspect that an idea, a story, could hold us in such thrall and elicit such emotion.

The rare moments of these gatherings may have given us the illusion that we were close, a unit, but we were far from that. It was as if each one of us was that one firecracker every family tends to have that keeps everyone in a state of constant attention and alarm. In our household, there wasn’t one person like that, but seven, and with time, we seemed only to progress toward combustibility.

One wintry day, after an argument, Mara and Jake decided to resolve differences re-enacting the switchblade fight scene from West Side Story, knives in hand, across the street on a frozen pond. The Sterling boys stood behind Jake yelling, “Get her! Get her!” while Jane and I stood by Mara.

“You die, you die,” Mara kept saying as she circled Jake, jabbing the air with the small kitchen knife that was her weapon. Whenever Jake and Mara got too close, slipping and sliding on the ice in their rubber boots, Jane jumped in, “Okay, cool it! Cool it!” Mara grabbed a corner of Jake’s ski jacket and threw him down, then pounced on him, aiming her knife at his jugular. Luckily, it was a clear win, so no blood had to be drawn.

Violence was in the air and under our skin. Our dad had a harsh, cold temper. This meant you did what he said or suffered the consequences, which usually meant a mighty blow. He yanked his daughters by the arm and attempted to stare us down, teeth gritted, to win a point, and pinned my brothers up against a wall and raised them up by the scruff of the neck if they didn’t do as told. He never played with us as if we were kids, tackling us playing football and stepping on our heads when he came up behind us in the swimming pool. Rough and hard, he acted with us as if we were his equals physically, bullying us to get his way. There was no time to be gentle, only time to get ahead.

Our mother hollered a lot and banged on doors to stop a ruckus, and threatened to tell my father all the things we’d done wrong when he got home. There was so much to tell though, and she was so exhausted by the time he got home from a trip, and so fearful of his reactions to being told the truth, that there was little choice but to keep the crap she knew about us to herself. When dad did get home, he just wanted to play tennis, drink cocktails, watch football and relax. He didn’t want hassles. He didn’t want to know about Jake’s smoking pot, or his stealing Ana’s car and being caught driving up a one-way street in town during the wee hours. He didn’t want to know who’d just gotten suspended from school or whose fault it was there was a dented car in the driveway. He just paid for the problem and tried to forget about it, going back to what he liked doing best, living in his distractions. It was what we each did best.

Dad bought a hot red MG to drive to play tennis, fearing his Benz was too wide to take down the narrow, winding roads to the club, and he bought a sailboat that slept seven that decorated his view of the bay alongside his office in Rowayton. His toys were his rewards, but not for us. He was wise not to let us drive the MG, and, although we did on occasion go out with him on his sailboat just to enjoy a ride, it became the vehicle he used to leave everything, including his job, taking off for weeks at a time on excursions with his buddies along the Hudson or to fish along the coasts of Maine or Cape Cod.

On the Talareña, his sea mistress, he concentrated on the ritual of keeping us on course and became a different man, somber and intent, without the aggression that his business on land demanded. Watching him grip the wheel, his eyes on the distance, you sensed him disappearing into an infinite and unfathomable loneliness, and he held onto that wheel as to his loneliness as if they were the only things he truly possessed.

**********

In New Canaan, my relationship to my dad ended and a new relationship began with my mother, one in which I played mentor. The perfect image I’d had of my dad, the little girl’s image of the heroic strong guy who would always be there, shattered as he kept disappearing, lured by the demands of his job and the promise of money, success and power. Dad’s business took him for months to places like Brazil, Amsterdam and South Africa, and when he was gone, my mother, sisters, brothers and I were left to fend on our own. Once in a while, dad took our mother with him on a trip, leaving us with Ana, who was mild-tempered and easy to be around. She didn’t know how to cook much more than rice and beans, hamburgers and hot dogs, but she did all the other chores our mother couldn’t handle, and we considered her part of our family.

Once, when I was 12, and Ana, visiting her aunt in Peru, our parents decided to take off for two weeks to Europe. Grandma Jenkins agreed to fly east to sit for us, but swore afterwards never to do it again. It was a time she would not soon forget.

Jake put a ladder up against the house and disappeared out the window of his third-story room almost every night to party with his friends. We smoked whenever and wherever we felt like it. I got drunk with a friend on sherry from my dad’s bar. We got so out of hand, our grandmother locked us out of the house, so we broke into the freezers in the garage, stole ice cream and pies and set meats that had been stored there out in the sun, where they rotted. We got our grandmother so riled she couldn’t speak, just chase us around the house with a broom. Nights, she dragged us into Mara’s and Jane’s bedroom,  and kneeling before Jane’s bed, her clasped hands stretched across the mattress quilt, prayed aloud, “May God bless your poor, poor parents and all they have to endure with you kids.”

*            *            *

Before our whole family devolved into madness, during a season of hope when my mother was studying to be a writer, I met my first love, Jim, who was my age, 13. He was the son of my mother’s first writing teacher, Jean Cushing, and had what was for me the enviable position of being the only child of two intellectuals – his father was a publisher. During one of her inspired moments, my mother asked Jean bring her son along one afternoon when they were scheduled to discuss writing over tea.

Jim was like no one my age I had ever met, well versed in music and literature, quick-witted, conversant and shy, all at once. I remember us sitting together in the basement den of the house, listening to Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe.” Jim was wearing loafers, shorts, a long sleeved, khaki shirt and red, white and blue tie. He had blond hair with thick curls, and as he began riffing on what he knew of music, which was considerable, and well beyond me, he kept fidgeting with his tie, stuttering slightly, a characteristic that endeared me even more to him.

Soon after our first meeting, Jim and his parents moved away to California, and for two years Jim wrote me long, extraordinary letters, his take on what was happening in our time and in the world. From him, I learned about Jim Morrison and the Doors, Frank Zappa, the peace movement and McGovern, and the tragic mess of Vietnam. By the time Jim had saved up money to see me again, we had all rounded the bend toward chaos in New Canaan and he found himself visiting a disaster in the making.

Jim was the sort of boy who demanded attention and quiet time together and I couldn’t give him enough of either. Besides, the eyes and ears of my siblings and parents were on us. The sensitivity I so treasured in Jim was viewed as fey by my sisters and brothers, who made no effort to mask their derision, and their negative attention threatened to strip away what had been both private and sacred to me. So, in a fashion that would become characteristic for me, I severed the tie with him rather than see it spoiled. He threatened to cut his wrists in the basement room of our house where he was sleeping, muttering under his breath that we’d have “a bloody genius on our hands,” but after a couple of days he quieted down. In the end, he simply shook my hand and went away. There were no more letters after that. Years later, I would seek him out and not be surprised that he’d become a poet and teacher. It seemed fitting that he’d taken the gifts I’d spurned, honing them exquisitely, and offered them to others.

*      *      *      *

At 15, I was the kid our mother called a Mexican Jumping Bean, skipping around the house, singing popular tunes, trying to make everybody happy. But at night, I holed up in my room to write poetry – usually about death. It was everywhere after all. I wrote about kids overdosing, about soldiers dying in Vietnam and about someone who felt old inside, like she’s dying.

Mara was almost as tall as my dad, her blond hair darkening, although she still wore it in braids. She was a jock and rebel and liked sounding off to authorities, parents and teachers alike, which got her suspended then expelled from the private school we both attended. She became part of a doper crowd at the public high school, then, at 14, ran away. Wearing her favorite Converse high top sneakers and our dad’s trench coat, she disappeared among pimps, prostitutes and drug addicts in New York’s East Village for two weeks that were a lifetime.

My father searched for her with a young man from his office and handed Jane and I each a wad of tens and twenties so we could corral people on the street to help find her. Jane and I flashed Mara’s passport-sized photo to shop owners and hippies, handing over bills for clues that might lead us to her. We were led down rickety stairs to decrepit basements, where there were grimy, stained mattresses, discarded needles and foreign debris. Once, we waded in dirty basement water up to our knees, only to have our guide disappear somewhere ahead in the darkness. The filth was unbearable, frightening, strange, and nowhere was our sister. We couldn’t fathom she was spending time in such places. In pieces, Jane and I heard a story too outrageous to believe from a blond hippie who informed us she’s “whoring for a black pimp, selling dope and doing all right on the streets. She’s cool.” We didn’t believe him, of course.

Eventually, our dad found Mara smoking dope in a circle of hippies at a corner of MacDougal Street. Her hair, out of her braids, was in an Afro and she was wearing striped pants, boots and a vest, clothes that didn’t belong to her. She wouldn’t come home, and afterwards, Mara told us she refused even though our dad begged. “Please come home. Please,” he said to her, teeth gritted, teary-eyed, fists clenched at his sides. Mara finally did come home on her own after the party had run out, after she’d been assaulted and taken for too many rides and gotten tired of the price of being a tough girl on a long night out.

Habits being the only pull toward intimacy we follow, one dull, fall day, Mara and I find ourselves both straying from the house at the same time for some tugs on a joint and a cigarette. Mara’s wearing a smart tan jacket, new tan corduroy pants and desert boots bought by my parents — as if a brand new outfit might erase her internal fray and return her to how she used to be. I don’t remember how she used to be. I only know the stranger she is now.

Her hair’s in a loose ponytail and she’s wearing a peculiar scent I later recognize as patchouli. We crouch at the periphery of some woods as she reaches into her jacket pocket and pulls out a plastic bag with stringy dope that she deftly rolls into a joint. Her hands are long and graceful like our mother’s, so I fix on them, the only point of familiarity. I still feel like I’m walking on glass shards around her, still raw from all the feelings the search for her with Jane dredged up.

“What was it like, Mara?” I want to know. She keeps turning toward the street, taking short fast tugs, holding them in for a long time. She frowns, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” It’s her way of telling me it was bad, whatever happened was bad. She doesn’t feel like anyone I know, and this makes me desperate. “Are you back? You won’t go away again, will you?”

“I don’t know,” she tells me. “I’m still thinking of it,” like “it” is a form of suicide. Her response cuts through me, but I don’t say anything, just nod, the cool nod that people give that means everything and nothing at all.

It’s in part to keep Mara from getting bored and leaving  home again after she returns that Jane, Jake and I embark on a routine of intense partying that rivals that of just about everyone we know. Our parents send Mara to a shrink and we carry on together – Mara, Jane and Jake and I — rather than let her go off into bedlam alone.

Jane, the pretender, acts like she’s fucked up when she really is somewhere above it all, gauging her footsteps into the future, a bright future where adult responsibilities clearly await her, and she is not afraid. She is the one who comes in-between all our disagreements. Brave, stalwart, she stretches her athletic arms between warring parties and yells, “stop,” and for a moment makes us. She is the one who is respected back, even if only silently, mentally, who never asks for anything and never gets what she wants, which is everything.

Jake’s presence like our father’s becomes ephemeral soon as he starts learning to be a man. At age six or seven, he’s the boy who runs crying into the house after accidentally stepping on a mole alongside the swimming pool fence. Inconsolable for the small thing he killed, his tears don’t let up, even after he is teased and taunted. Exposing vulnerability, he has broken an unspoken rule. Somebody’s voice in our household always rings out in the wake of somebody’s failure or flaw. The voice belongs to all of us, and to our parents too, and never lets up, pricking at weakness until it is gone.

Jake, the first-born son, was expected to learn men’s games early on. When he started playing Pop Warner, he exercised, decked out in his uniform and helmet, running up and down the steps of our house for what seemed hours — even after our mother nagged him about wearing down the rugs. It was a kind of meditation preparing for football season and Jake was a finely tuned athlete, the quarterback of his team. The local newspaper published photographs of him tossing the ball, and our father became obsessed with that one who seemed most destined to become like him. The love took the form of attending Jake’s games and pushing him with constant man-to-man chats, intimidating stares, visceral expectations that could be felt in the very air. I can still see Jake, stationed on the footstool in front of my father’s leather chair, his elbows propped on his knees, long hair dangling over his face in an attempt to keep his gaze from meeting our father’s intense glare. I remember overhearing an attempt to bribe Jake to run as president of his sixth grade class. But the attempt, like all others failed, serving only to drive Jake away. He ran away twice himself, overnight disappearances, mischievous larks, nothing on the scale Mara had pulled.

All summer long through our teen years we hold an open air den that anybody who contributes anything illicit to can join. We keep brews cold in a small refrigerator in the one-car garage that has been converted into a shed at the end of the back drive, and drink, smoke dope and hang by the pool, until we get so fidgety we have to take off somewhere, anywhere. There’s a round white table and blue umbrella in one corner, and I sit there, my bare feet propped on the table as I nurse g & t’s in a tumbler. Drinking is easy, and dope everywhere. If someone brings hits of mescaline or acid, we pop that.

People come and go. Sometimes we know them, sometimes not; either way, it doesn’t matter. When we get bored, we hop into somebody’s car and go some place else, somebody else’s house, anywhere, to smoke somebody else’s stash and drink somebody else’s brew. Our friends live in sections of houses rarely if ever visited by their parents, with their own television, film screens and sound systems that allow them to blast sound to the moon. Eventually, we come back to our place and party some more. People often pass out by the pool, but no parents ever call, and no one ever comes to pick anybody up who can’t make it home on their own. New Canaan is that place, after all that while affluent and trendy, is missing something crucial. Nowhere can you find its heart. Perhaps the disease of heartlessness that affects us here affects the culture at large, but I don’t know about this, only where I live.

I remember always longing for conversation with somebody, something truthful exchanged. But there were lies everywhere. The lies of silence, yelling and nobody there. My boyfriends came and went. I let their pale, cool bodies sidle up to my warm hips under the sun during the day in exchange for the free tokes they provided at night that were as intimate as anything we shared, hovering close, lingering over the scent and the smoke, touching each other’s fingertips when we passed a joint.

I remember Jay with wild hair like a jangled sun, and riding behind him so fast on his motorcycle, his narrow hips disintegrated in the wind beneath my touch. We rode to see A Clockwork Orange, and I got up during the movie to get something to drink, and reached for money, but the two Quaaludes and one g & t Jay had fed me, had screwed me up so much, I couldn’t find my pants’ pockets. All I could think was how great it was that you could get this high on just the calories of one drink. And I thought too watching the screen – the actor with the huge painted eye, the plastic penises cavorting, the whipping in the rain — that everything was meaningless, including the empty ticket beside me dissolving into laughter.

My mother’s voice interrupts the night. I can still hear her hollering her mother’s credentials into the dark. She knew we were smoking weed and partying, but there was nothing she could do, although there was a while when, just as we as we came in the back door, she peered into our eyeballs, checking for redness, as if that was the only telltale sign of being high. We carried around bottles of Murine to stump her. Our mother’s voice rang hollow when she sang our names as if into an empty well. It was just the night, and we each fed it with our small hopes and empty prayers, but there were words missing for me – they slept somewhere, and I missed them as much as care.

*            *            *            *

Our mother did what ever it took to reel us in, and our father too. Shards of humor always mixed with desperation. She thought nothing of driving up to the Lake Club to yank our father off the courts if she felt he’d played too long and risked compromising his health in the heat. Wearing one of her signature wide-brimmed straw hats as if to alert everyone she was coming, she’d start calling, “John! John!” while descending the steps to the courts. “John!” “John” she’d holler from behind the wire mesh of the court where he played. “Please, in the name of God, stop!” She lifted the door latch if necessary, and entered, waving her arms hysterically until there was no option for him but to stop. Wiping sweat off his brow with one arm, grimacing maniacally, full of resentment, dad had to comply. Like a dutiful child who’d been punished and forced to return home early from play, my father followed his wife up the steps, shaking his head with annoyance, thwacking the air vigorously with his racket to fend off her disturbance.

My parents played and partied as hard as they worked. Between the club scene and gallery jaunts and my mother’s writers’ conferences and New York trips to see plays, they amassed an impressive collection of friends that included Broadway producers, actors, artists and writers like Anatole Broyard, the New York Times Book Review editor, and his wife Sandy, who was a dancer. Long before it became the subject of a book by his daughter, Anatole confided to my mother, who liked to fancy herself part Black, that he had African-American roots.

Dressed to the nines, wearing impressive jewelry my father brought back from his trips to South Africa and Latin America, my mother flourished her hands with many rings, her short cropped handsome head turning from side to side as she played the role of diva raconteur. My balding father stood on the sidelines, looking the part of the mogul in his navy jacket and bow tie, grinning confidently, with the props of his martini and cigar – our mother was his, after all.

Among our parents’ friends were the Steins. She was a musician, a descendant of the suffragette Susan B. Anthony, and her husband, a world-class sculptor whose egoism was legendary. Their son Jacob was always trying to make things, and his father, always telling him he didn’t have talent and should give up trying to be creative because what he was doing wouldn’t amount to much. His mother often complained to our mother about how oppressed she felt in her marriage and how helpless to defend her son against his father’s wicked nagging. It took years after Jacob left home for her to get up the courage to leave her husband.

Jacob fell into drugs and never got out. In my 20s, I would glance out the window of the AA room I frequented in a church in Westport and watch him running shirtless around the parking lot, dragging stacks of truck tires attached to his bare torso by chains. Later, I heard he was evicted from an apartment in Black Rock, where he lived alone, collecting rats for an experiment of some sort.

But in the 60s, when we were just kids, hanging out together while our parents got drunk and high on their accomplishments, Jacob was a sweet boy, always in a corner alone, tinkering with a toy or bunch of sticks or incongruous things. Shaggy haired and wide-eyed, he was like one of those popular painted gamins on black velvet that were considered tacky, cliché.

While we drank and ran away, our mother just kept writing. It helped alleviate her sense of alienation and gloom, bringing her back to what mattered most to her. Her memory percolated with dramatic stories from her past that couldn’t compare to the daily drudgery of being a housewife in New Canaan. Yet, tragedy did erupt out of the doldrums, unexpectedly as fire. People lived in mansions set so far from the road you couldn’t see them when you drove by, and led invisible lives no one noticed until something broke or someone died.

In my early teens, I babysat for our next door neighbors’ one-year old, Charlie. Mrs. Parker paid me with gifts instead of money. I remember a pastel-colored ceramic clown that I used as a pen holder, and also a biography of Queen Marie Antoinette, which I read. The Parkers’ house was always dark, and Charlie, a beautiful, curly-haired Gerber baby, slept angelically, curled up in his crib, his eyelashes quivering over the boat of his kid dreams.

Whenever the Parkers returned home from an outing, Mr. Parker, who was an attorney, went swiftly to his den to work on papers, and Mrs. Parker joined me in Charlie’s room. Sitting quietly on a chair, still in the dark, she’d ask me how I was, what my parents were up to, always commenting, “It’s so quiet here. Isn’t this house big?”

The Parkers had moved to New Canaan from the Midwest, like us, and I thought it odd that even on dusky afternoons when I babysat for them, even when he was not home, she would silently navigate the house in the dark, wine glass in hand, touching objects delicately, the tops of dining room chairs and tabletops, as if she’d finally found friends in whom she could confide and that understood her, wordlessly.

When Charlie was around two, Mrs. Parker got it into her head that it would be a good idea to clip a pimple that had appeared on Charlie’s butt with a pair of scissors. Her husband promptly had her committed for that. A month or so later, she hung herself with a bra strap in a mental institution down the road. A year or so after that, Charlie and his father moved away.

The idea of suicide like a malevolent ghost drifted up and down Mariomi Street, just missing our own street. We should have dubbed that ghost the Mariomi Killer. The ghost found women who’d been abandoned by their husbands and had somehow failed to fend off the demands of the culture at large – To be attached, to thrive as an appendage, a woman cushioned by her husband in what was still a world of men.

The Mariomi ghost took the Sterling’s mother too. A widow, she had raised three boys alone. Cocktail and cigarette in hand, wearing a short black dress and net stockings, her red lipstick smeared so that it made her mouth look raw is how I always remember her. I’d come over to baby sit her boys and she’d be manic, going on and on about the men coming to pick her up that never returned. Do you think he’ll like me? How do I look? She would repeat this strutting around the house, calling her boys, who never came or did as told. One day, after school, her youngest, a third grader at the time, found her in the garage, the engine switched on. Car exhaust, and pills mixed with booze had got her. That’s what we heard.

Ingrid Decker, an artist friend of my mother’s, who suffered from depression related to her art, my mother said, killed herself too, all these women, all in the space of about three years. She painted watercolors, pale landscapes that hung in large plain wooden frames in her house. Tall, thin and reserved, Mrs. Decker was a New Englander who knew how to speak Spanish because she and her husband traveled a great deal to Mexico and Spain. His business was exporting or importing, and he spent most of his time abroad. Even after his wife’s death, I never saw him home.

Although I hardly remember Mrs. Decker, Mara and I knew her sons well. The older one, James, wore a thin beard and was a junior when I was a freshman, and Mara and Jane, still in grammar school. The other son, Andy, blond and frail, was Mara’s age. An artist too, he sketched wild psychedelic creatures in pen and ink. It was Andy who found his mother stretched out on her bed after she’d put a bullet through her brain, and Andy who seemed to suffer most in the aftermath of her suicide. For a while he hid from everybody, starving himself, taking only sips of water and morsels of rice. One day, in this state, he ran into my mother at the local library.

“What is the matter with you,” she said to him in her characteristically direct fashion.

“I want to be like Gandhi,” he told her.

“You are going to kill yourself. Please, in the name of God, you have to eat!” Soon after that, Ana, who my parents had sent to the Decker’s to help out after Mrs. Decker’s suicide, reported to us that Andy had returned to eating  arroz con pollo and was drinking leche, not just water. Our mother said when she ran into him at the library, his pants “looked like sacks and his arms like sticks. He was disappearing.”

Our mother disappeared into her writing and we disappeared into our respective routines of school and after-school life and rarely convened to share anything personal, not even what was happening in our daily lives, except over dinner when our father was home. It was the only time we found ourselves together, and we chatted so much that our dad imposed the rule of not talking at all except to answer his structured questions. He’d grab a radish from the bowl of them that always accompanied his main meal, brandishing the radish in the air as if for emphasis as he contemplated a current events question. Our eyes would roll and our hands fidget under the table. Our mother, who abhorred authoritarianism, couldn’t resist interrupting, and launch into a colorful tale. And we’d follow suit, each one of us trying to outwit the other, doing what we could to stretch out the laughter.

Over the years, no matter how far away each of us got, we always found our way home, to search out what was there, to pretend to be a part of a whole. Blaine became a tennis pro, and went out to live in the Midwest, and Mara became, of all things, a librarian, and jazz critic. During the first Gulf War, Jake took off for Patagonia, hoping to re-create the idyllic life of his youth, fishing, and writing about his adventures like the literary son of Hemingway he was. Like a true son, he followed in his father’s footsteps and drank himself to death, leaving two children, a boy and a girl, who were only five and seven when he passed away. Only Jane married, and with her husband, raised three splendid kids while maintaining a job as top financial executive. It still strikes me as both odd and fitting that the middle one among us, the one who always got left out growing up, would turn out to be such a bright star in the end.

Mara’s free-spirited impulse to see the world appeared to condemn us. In truth, it should have been viewed as a wake-up call. After all, it wasn’t up to us children to come up with answers, even if a child like Mara could, with one willful stroke of brilliant clarity, point out to our parents that all they had assumed was right for us was not.

Blaine informed me recently that Ang Lee, the director of Ice Storm, a film set in New Canaan in the late 70s, interviewed hundreds of people in our town while making the film, and used him as a model for the young, messed up kid with the bull whip who liked blowing things up in the backyard.  Jake and Blaine both had a fixation with a bull whip and unfortunately, it was small animals they usually blew up in the woods.

Things really were far worse than Lee depicted in his movie, far more cruel and alienating. How it is that Jake could have gone from being a tender boy who wept over dead animals to one who would blow them up, I don’t know. I don’t know what triggered the switch for him or what trick in his brain led him to believe it would be wise to turn alcoholic either, although I could relate more to that plan. For everyone I knew for many years, the best choice was to obliterate, not to think, to find comfort somewhere behind the numbness of being. Of being what, I wonder – Forgotten children? Americans?  Not quite of one world or another? It is true, I think, that not one of us knew who we were, and it is the pretense I am remembering, our terrible pretense of being. From that place, how could we have seen one another?

**********

I went to lunch with a man I was getting to know who suffered from depression but was disciplined and productive. His name was Peter. He was red-headed and fit, but he had a look I thought sad. He told me about a woman he had recently broken off with. She wasn’t smart enough, he said, turning up his palms. I don’t remember how the subject arose. Maybe I asked if he was seeing someone. It was the kind of question I would pose to someone I was becoming friends with, although Peter might have brought her up. He said she was beautiful and quite a few years younger than him. She wasn’t interested in him sexually, although she was disappointed when he called it quits. I was curious to know if he would have continued seeing her if she had wanted sex, smart enough or not, but I didn’t ask because the answer seemed obvious, and at some point or other I had been both in his position and hers. I thought Peter was taking me into his confidence, but the disclosures made him appear dejected and a little mean. Other things he said formed the opposite impression. He had started from humble origins to become a celebrated poet. He’d strengthened his body after a debilitating illness. I was impressed but felt I would need to watch out if I crossed him.

Maybe I decided to do that, and as I consider the possibility I’m reminded of an incident from childhood. I’m three or four, in the front courtyard of our building in Washington Heights, where I’m allowed to play with other kids, and maybe my sister is there, watching me. I spot a razor blade on a ledge. The building is made of white brick and the ledges are cement, and the razor is sitting there, as if a devil has positioned it just so. It’s rusty and I know it cuts, but I’m not sure which edge is sharp, so I pick it up and slide it along the pad of my index finger, and the skin parts like a curtain and I look inside as blood pools and spills. I’m not exactly afraid because I have done it to myself, or maybe I am afraid but don’t feel entitled to the emotion fully so don’t feel it, and it’s a revelation there is a valve inside you can switch on and off. It’s the start of a series of experiments I know ahead may end in suffering. How else to explain the repetition? People will try anything once, but what if you are willing to try anything twice or more times? Maybe these temptations make us look bolder or more beautiful to ourselves. When my mother took my bleeding mitt in her scolding hand and cried out, as if I had cut her, the pain switched on.

My lunch with Peter was nearly over when he told me about a dinner he’d arranged for four West Coast friends and an East Coast visitor. He called it a guys’ night, and he said the men had gathered at his apartment. He was illustrating how he emerged from solitude to sociability, but the anecdote beckoned to me like a razor blade, and I asked what comprised a guys’ night. He shook his head and said he had never given it thought. I asked if when men were together they spoke in a particular tone or about certain subjects. When men separated from women, they often framed it as escape, and who wants to be escaped from? Peter hadn’t said anything of the sort, and his head moved back, and he said, you are so self-reflective, which I thought meant shut up. He said it would never cross his mind to ask why I’d spent an evening just with women. I said I could explain. He said go ahead. I said, suppose you told a black person you felt like spending an evening just with white people. He flushed a dark red and objected strongly. I said, I know you would never say that. You would understand why a black person would be interested in a selection process based on color. I’m interested in selections based on sex. He relaxed a little, and I knew I would never see him again, and I felt responsible for causing trouble and do now as I recall the conversation, and I don’t know what to make of this courting of difficulty except to suppose it must for moments cast me in a flattering light to myself and eclipse the jealousy I felt about his success.

At the time of the lunch, I was working as a cater waiter, serving at parties in a tuxedo and bow tie. Whenever the phone rang, I would say yes. The day after the lunch with Peter was Thanksgiving, and I joined two other servers and two chefs to present hors d’oeuvres and dinner to eleven adults and five children in a long, wide apartment on Sutton Place. Yellow leaves on the trees looked lit from within as I made my way there. Beyond them the East River rolled gently along. Two actor friends, Paul and Jessica, were among our group, also Tina, the chef, and Ernst, her assistant, who, when he was not cooking, sailed as a merchant marine for the European Union.

I liked these people in a soft, distanced way. It was like a blanket, the sense of belonging to a group because you worked with them. It was one of the reasons I said yes to jobs. The chefs had been at the apartment for several hours when the rest of us arrived at 3:30 and were directed to the service elevator by one of four doormen. The space was piled with garbage bags and looked as if it had not been swept in many years. A pretty, Spanish-speaking young woman got on with us and wished us a happy Thanksgiving. She was carrying a load of shopping bags, and we wished the same to her and to the elevator operator, who spoke with an Irish brogue. I meant what I said, for I was glad for a place to be, and I was struck by how solitude, which I often crave, can, out of nowhere, cut you.

We were supposed to have two hours to organize things, but guests arrived early. I set the table, while Jessica went out for more ice and Tina and Ernst finished cooking. Paul served drinks. The guests were neither friendly nor unfriendly, rude nor gracious. We didn’t look at each other. We were like two separate families finding themselves at the same dinner.

The menu included turkey, gravy, stuffing, two kinds of cranberry relish, mashed potatoes, haricots verts, baked lady apples, sweet potato compote with marshmallows, and miniature buttermilk and chive biscuits cut in the shape of hearts. There were five kinds of passed hors d’oeuvres, including shrimp dumplings with a spicy plum dipping sauce. For dessert there were individual tarts tatins and pumpkin pie with whipped cream, plus chocolate dipped strawberries, petits fours, and cookies. I mention the food because it radiated a sense of plenty I tucked myself into.

Each guest requested a different arrangement of items, and if it was not as specified—say, three slices of white meat with gravy on the side and extra mashed potatoes but no stuffing—the plate had to be redone, even though platters of seconds were butlered around as soon as the dishes were set down. I wondered why the guests needed to assert themselves in this fashion, and I thought maybe because they had spent so much money on the meal and fussing made them feel consequential, and I was reminded how phantom-like the feeling of solidity is and how no one can ever quite possess it.

All in all it was an easy job, and the catering team worked as one. Between courses, I washed and dried plates, silverware, and glasses. As we performed our tasks, we nibbled rather than sitting down, and people chatted about their lives. Paul had been in Austin for several months, acting in a play he’d liked. Jessica’s ex-girlfriend was still calling her all the time. After serving dessert, we cleaned the place until it looked like we had never been there, and when there was nothing more to do, pain switched on.

The next day I went to a yoga class taught by a woman named Vanessa. She had been in Croatia for two months and was returning to a class of five. She looked scared when she saw how few we were. During her absence, Eric, a charismatic teacher, had come back to the club. The class Vanessa was teaching had once belonged to him, and while she’d been away he’d joked about “kicking her to the curb.” One of the things people liked about Eric was his cruelty. It made them push themselves, his combination of toughness and attentiveness.

I had not taken many classes with Vanessa because the kind of yoga she taught was repetitious. I would begin a series of poses and soon irritation would rise up like acid over the lip of a beaker. My friend Adam liked the repetition. It reminded him of practicing the piano as a boy. He had become excellent at both endeavors, and, stretched out beside him on my mat, I felt I would always be sabotaged by rebellion.

Vanessa had the body of a lobster that could bend and twist in and out of itself, and I focused on enjoying this. Today, she decided to mix things up, which I appreciated, although even if I’d been bored I wouldn’t have left. I was rusty and lazy. Had Eric been teaching, he would have hounded me to do a better job, and had I been Adam accomplishment would have added to my happiness. I didn’t need accomplishment for happiness, I was discovering. I just needed accomplishment. It created a feeling of well-being inside or off on the margins. To be happy I needed to perform other deeds, even though the same people I performed them with would drive me howling into the wilderness if I spent too much time with them.

After class, I reminded Vanessa it was Thanksgiving weekend and people were away. She nodded, saying her life wasn’t working out in New York. Her time in Europe had shown her that. She said she didn’t know how to fix things. She was working on a master’s degree in English literature and wasn’t sure what she would do when she finished. The thing she liked most was talking to people about literature. Maybe she should work in a book store, she mused. I said my life wasn’t working out that well, either. She said, really? I said yes, and as I said it I knew it was true and that it did not hurt so much to admit it because it was a pain, I suppose, I had organized. Anyway, just at that moment I wasn’t in pain because I wasn’t alone and neither was Vanessa.