QUEENS of SHEBA a Project Presented to the Faculty Of

QUEENS OF SHEBA

A Project

Presented

to the Faculty of

California State University, Chico

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

English

Spring 2017

QUEENS OF SHEBA

A Project

Daria Donoghue Booth

Spring 2017

APPROVED BY THE INTERIM DEAN OF GRADUATE STUDIES:

Sharon Barrios, Ph.D.

APPROVED BY THE GRADUATE ADVISORY COMMITTEE:

Rob Davidson, Ph.D., Chair

Paul Eggers, Ph.D.

PUBLICATION RIGHTS

No portion of this project may be reprinted or reproduced in any manner unacceptable to the usual copyright restrictions without the written permission of the author.

iii

DEDICATION

This project is dedicated to

Russ, Catherine, Al, Norah, and John.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to Rob Davidson and Paul Eggers, my advisors and graduate project committee. Your teaching, sage advice, careful consideration of my work, support, and encouragement, were a driving force that was integral to creating and completing this project. I am deeply appreciative of your roles in my development as a writer.

Thank you to my writing friend Jill North, who suggested I read Wendy Ortiz’s essays, to help me figure out how to write about running away.

Thank you to WOTS, my writing group, for your thoughtful and honest feedback, for sharing your writing, and for your encouragement.

Thank you to my supervisors who allowed me to complete my degree while working at Chico State.

Thank you to the fee waiver program, and the very kind people who make it run so well.

Thank you to my fellow returning students, especially the ones who are older than

I am. I liked having you in my classes.

Thank you to Mrs. Armstrong who liked my haikus.

Thank you to Norah and George Donoghue, Catherine and Alexander Boyce,

Russ Booth, and John Francis Donoghue. I loved your stories and I always will.

Thank you to libraries.

Thank you to the lady with the pink umbrella in the rain on that day in San

Francisco in front of the public library, for saying, “The rain, it’s so soft.”

Thank you to my mother, Kathleen, for listening, for your encouragement, and for laughing at my jokes.

Thank you to Hannah for inspiring me, for laughing with me, and for your musical expertise.

Thank you to Alan, for your love and patience, and for bringing coffee in the morning.

Thank you coffee. You’re the best.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

Publication Rights ...... iii

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgments...... v

Abstract ...... viii

CHAPTER

I. Critical Introduction ...... 1

CHAPTER

II. Essays ...... 26

Queens of Sheba ...... 27 Kitchens ...... 46 Wonder Widow ...... 68 Bullies ...... 80 Booth’s Anatomy ...... 94 Mad Man ...... 109 Running Away ...... 123

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………. 141

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ABSTRACT

QUEENS OF SHEBA

Master of Arts in English

California State University, Chico

Spring 2017

Queens of Sheba is a collection of six personal essays that seek to present both personal story and universal themes. In my essays, I share stories of my family, my father’s dementia, the loss of my first husband, my relationship with food and body image, my grandmother and her kitchen, and running away from home. I intentionally hop from story to story, like stepping-stones across a creek, exploring the themes of the richness of the ordinary, loss and the grieving process, and sisterhood or “sororitas.” In his introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, Philip Lopate states, “At the core of the personal essay is the supposition that there is a certain unity to human experience” (xxiii). In my essays, the personal anecdote may be the springboard to the larger topic, or it may be interwoven throughout, eventually merging with the over-arching theme, connecting my story or reflection with a universal idea or question. In the Critical Introduction, I discuss how I choose to emphasize the “personal” part of the personal essay, embracing both its memoir-like study of complex character and the broader aims of the personal essay genre.

CHAPTER I

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

In the essays collected in Queens of Sheba, I emphasize the “personal” part of the personal essay, embracing both its memoir-like study of complex character and the broader aims of the personal essay genre. I look at a family photograph, which prompts a memory of my grandmother, and I write about how she fixed my hair when I was small.

In the essay “Queens of Sheba,” I share this anecdote and weave through the essay thoughts about hairstyles, beauty salons, and women’s clothing. These thoughts lead to broader themes such the meaning of beauty, sisterhood, and female empowerment. The foundational personal story in this essay is about my first job as a hair washer in my uncle’s beauty salon, where “the women drank Tab, had frightening chemical treatments done to their hair that smelled like poison and probably were, and they were happy in this place.” Through this reflection, my understanding was expanded to know “. . . the true power of a great hair-do and the way that it could transform almost any woman, and the value of and need for women to share their joys and sorrows with each other” (32).

In his introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the

Classical Era to the Present, Philip Lopate states, “At the core of the personal essay is the supposition that there is a certain unity to human experience” (xxiii). In my essays, the personal anecdote may be the springboard to the larger topic, or it may be interwoven throughout, eventually merging with the over-arching theme, connecting my story or reflection with a universal idea or question.

I write in this genre as it allows a freedom of expression in looking at the large and the small, the outrageous and mundane, my grandmother and all women. Through

3 my personal lens and unique voice, I spark the reader’s attention and entice her to join me in a conversation. Anne Fadiman discusses the Familiar Essay genre in the preface of her collection, At Large and At Small, differentiating it from the Critical and Personal Essay genres, “Today’s readers encounter plenty of critical essays (more brain than heart) and plenty of personal—very personal—essays (more heart than brain), but not many familiar essays (equal measures of both)” (xxx). She further describes the writer of this genre:

“The familiar essayist didn’t speak to the millions; he spoke to one reader, as if the two of them were sitting side by side in front a crackling fire . . . His viewpoint was subjective, his frame of reference concrete, his style digressive, his eccentricities conspicuous, and his laughter usually at his own expense” (x). Similar to Fadiman, I derive inspiration from conversations overheard at my childhood dinner table, and by my lifelong propensity to pay rapt attention to the things people say and do. Whether it is via eavesdropping on strangers while walking down the street, or in a direct exchange with someone I know, I am often both fascinated and moved by what I hear and see, and feel compelled to frame it in a larger context. The minute and often telling details born of close observation are what bring a story or memory to life for the reader. In the essay,

“Mad Man,” when my father is about to confront me, what I remember so very clearly are his eyebrows: “He’s looking at me like I’m a stranger, his eyebrows sticking straight out, at least half an inch, black caterpillars, yelling at each other, yelling at me” (109).

This physical detail provides a visual picture, but also insight into his character, as seen through my lens.

In my essays, I share stories of my family, my father’s dementia, the loss of my first husband, my relationship with food and body image, my grandmother and her

4 kitchen, and running away from home. I intentionally hop from story to story, like stepping-stones across a creek, exploring the themes of the richness of the ordinary, loss and the grieving process, and sisterhood or “sororitas.” Looking at ratios of heart and brain, and overall themes in my writing, the collection of essays in Queens of Sheba as a whole, are a version of the personal essay genre.

The power of the ordinary is a prominent theme in my writing. Whether it is an event, a verbal exchange, a living being, or an inanimate object, I champion the extraordinariness of the ordinary thing itself, but also emphasize how it can hold a whole memory, conjure a person, or define a relationship. It occurs organically, in particular when the observation of the ordinary thing or happening stands in for a person, or a larger emotion or sense of a situation. A seemingly mundane object can become transcendent, as with the refrigerator in my grandmother’s kitchen in the essay, “Kitchens.” My home refrigerator in New Jersey was an ugly green, rectangle; however, “My grandmother’s

Brooklyn kitchen fridge has rounded edges, and it’s a creamy white like whipped cream or Easter shoes. The handle is like a shiny hood ornament; it’s so much more than a thing to pull to open the door.” I describe the contents. “The refrigerator is crammed with completely foreign things—a bunch of carrots with the green tops still attached, making me think of Bugs Bunny, and an open can of condensed milk with a picture on the label of a pretty cow with long lashes. Even the milk is different, a small carton, an unfamiliar brand, but I like it better than the one we have at home” (46).

The refrigerator and its contents are as clear as a photograph in my mind, and focusing on them brings to mind the entire kitchen. The kitchen is intertwined with my grandmother—the room and the objects in it convey her essence, and she is practically

5 painted into the wallpaper. I see the refrigerator, and the lens widens so I see my grandmother’s whole kitchen. Then I see her, and my view expands to see and feel my childhood and my love for my grandmother, all in the single memory of the moment of opening the refrigerator door to get the milk to make an egg cream.

An object like the refrigerator is more than an appliance and can conjure a flood of memories. It is a signifier of the time, the place, my grandmother, and my childhood.

Beyond my connections, it is an example of a design from the past that is admired and yearned for, and since it no longer exists, it has become a symbol of the loss of that time, that kitchen, and that grandmother. Kitchens are the anchor in this essay, and I traverse through a lifetime of them from childhood to the present, stopping in each to reflect on what was happening in that place. I carry certain things, like “ . . . the spice rack with the built-in AM radio, a treasured remnant from my grandmother’s old kitchen that was in the box of things she gave me for my apartment” (52), and I consider the meaning of this room, traditionally a space for women’s work, but also where women gather, connect, and share.

In his essay “Images,” Robert Hass writes, “Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have that explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is” (275). He writes about spending a morning “collecting and considering images,” which is a poet’s job, but I believe I am doing the same thing in my essays. The power of image is in how it conveys pure story, more through feeling, than thought, yet it is concrete. Hass says, “Images haunt,” which makes me think about “The Brown Wasps,” an essay by Loren Eiseley, written in 1956.

In the first few sentences Eiseley compares aging, dying, homeless men finding refuge from winter in a train station, to wasps: “. . . on a sunny day in midwinter, a few old brown wasps creep slowly over an abandoned wasp nest in a thicket. Numbed and forgetful and frost-blackened, the hum of the spring hive still resounded faintly in their sodden tissues. Then the temperature would fall and they would drop away into the white oblivion of the snow” (239). I have re-read this essay many times, and am inspired by how he captures the melancholy feeling of time passing, and memory versus the changing world. The movement of the wasps, their frost-blackened hive, and their death in the snow, are unforgettable images that describe the plight of the aging men in the train station, through pure story; it is beyond metaphor, it paints the feeling.

The use of image helps to emphasize the solidity, and the depth of a memory.

Focusing on the seemingly insignificant object or being, increases its significance, making it a vehicle for the bigger picture. In “Wonder Widow,” I describe receiving a spouse’s ashes at the mortuary. “They will be in a plastic bag with a twist tie, inside a white cardboard box, and it will be smaller than you might have imagined, maybe the size of the box of Arm and Hammer baking soda you have in the refrigerator” (70). The box of ashes is then driven home and placed on the fireplace mantel, where it dons the deceased spouse’s hat. The banality of a twist-tied plastic bag, in a cardboard box, as the receptacle for what remains of the physical body of a person who died, is what makes it feel poignant, and utterly melancholic. Like a lens focusing in close, and then expanding to the whole picture, thinking of the person in the little box, leads me to question and ponder the purpose of this persona having existed at all. What did this person’s life mean? Did they even exist at all? I answer these questions in the essay by describing the

7 impact of the loss on those left behind, and the objects that defined a life, a life shared with others.

Haas discusses Haiku masters in his “Images” essay, and referring near the end of the essay to Buson, he says he finds “. . . something steadying and nourishing about the art of Buson, about his apparent interest in everything that passed before his eyes and the feeling in his work of an artist’s delight in making. This does not mean that he made no discriminations, that he thought this was as good as that; it means that he acted as if he believed that any part of the world, completely seen, was the world . . . ” (308). He ends the essay saying, “Buson is not surprised by the fullness and the emptiness of things.”

Seeing the world in everything is a concept that aligns with my thoughts about the ability to accept what is, and I know there is both fullness and emptiness in every experience. I know this, but still am learning it, over and over again. Images, and honoring the ordinary, can bring glimpses of this understanding. At the end of the essay “Wonder

Widow,” I consider the widow’s unknown future as “. . . more of feather blowing away in front of you that you make a half-hearted attempt to catch and hold” (78). The image of the feather evokes the potential lightness of the future, but at the same time, in the widow trying to catch it, half-heartedly, she must take a heavy step, and she may or may not be ready or able. It is an experience that is both full and empty.

In Virginia Woolf’s essay, “On the Death of a Moth,” she describes a moth at the window: “. . . it seemed as if a fiber, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body. As often as he crossed the pane,

I could fancy that a thread of vital light became visible. He was little or nothing but life”

(410). In the fluttering of a moth’s wings, Woolf sees the energy of the world. In the

8 moment it flies across the window, she sees in this seemingly insignificant thing, there is the essence of all life. This close observation provokes a contemplative state that allows one to consider the whole of life. Like Eiseley’s brown wasps in the snow, and Woolf’s dying moth, I see in an insignificant grocery list a larger definition of the emotion of grief.

In “Wonder Widow,” a sense of grief is illustrated by the grocery shopping list that includes “Cheerios, Wine, and Milk” (69), as if these items are the most a grieving widow can be expected to consider as staples for her and her daughter. In this way, I utilize my own experience to describe an everyday activity, but it is conveyed as advice to the fellow widow, evoking a sense of grief via this most ordinary thing. The items are mundane, especially Cheerios, and to me, thinking of, or even saying the word

“Cheerios,” is funny because it is ridiculous when it is mentioned in a conversation about the death of a spouse. Because it is such a common and specific thing, it makes the scene very real.

Childhood is a theme that is intentional in my writing, yet it also represents an instinctive yearning to understand the past, and it certainly is a place of great inspiration.

The essay “Bullies” was initially inspired by an exchange with a colleague where I was accused of bullying. This exchange brought to mind my own experience with bullying in junior high school. In addition, at the time there was a frequently-aired public service television commercial about bullying. This was a declaration from the universe echoing my line of thinking. In the essay, I weave together several personal stories of bullies and the bullied, including Kevin Fry from the fifth grade: “Kevin was the smartest kid in the class and the tallest—at least a foot taller than everyone else. His legs didn’t fit under the

9 desk in the usual bent-at-the-knee position, so he splayed them out to the side like a broken marionette. Flung over the top of the desk, his white noodle arms ended in long thin hands with slender, white fingers hanging over the front like fringe” (81-82). I do not remember this level of detail in the appearance of many other kids from my class. He was unusual-looking, and bullies created a group focus on him; however, my ability to provide a vivid picture of Kevin is attributable to the fact that I have often thought about him over the past forty years. I wonder what happened to him, how he coped at the time, and how much he thinks about our fifth grade class. This prompted reflection on my own experience that I had not fully considered before, especially as a parent. I consider the idea of reflection as an activity in writing that serves a greater purpose than pondering, as it can be a conduit to transformation. As I contemplate these questions about Kevin, and about my past, I re-consider the experience with my colleague. I am enabled to see something I didn’t see before, and so in reflecting, I am transformed.

In “Bullies,” my response to being bullied as a child was to create a magic potion:

“I found a stick and mixed, in the can, a huge dog turd, the nails, some dirt, ketchup, syrup, spit, water (for better consistency), pepper, sugar, a Virginia Slims cigarette, and dish soap” (84). The memory and the image of the concoction, spreading out on the sidewalk in front of the neighbor’s home, connect my past and present. The act embodies the way children think in terms of what is gross, and what they want to do to the people who have wronged them. At the time, I felt particularly empowered after I did this, and to be honest, I still feel a little impressed with myself. This memory expands in feeling, beyond a child’s anger and feelings of revenge, to include an adult’s admiration for a younger self and concern for the younger self’s well-being, as well as consideration of

10 the bully and all bullies. I needed to go to the past, to gain an understanding of my response to the bullying accusation in the present. Weaving in the story about the bus driver who was bullied, and connecting the 300 pound bear incident to the topic of bullying, is a way to move beyond my story, to thinking about the issue and what it means to all of us.

I was inspired to apply this threading of stories and memories in my essay by

Rebecca Solnit’s essay collection, The Faraway Nearby. Solnit demonstrates flexibility with a wide range of topics from caring for her aging mother, to Iceland, to rotting apricots. Yet through the diverse essays, and within individual essays, is a thread about place and the inner and outer landscape. Solnit conveys different periods of time, going backwards, forwards, and sideways, in a seamless way. Each essay has a one-word title, and like a journey, it ends at the beginning with the first and last essay sharing the same title, “Apricots.” The two essays serve to bookend the collection, holding and connecting themes of story, place, and imagination. Solnit compels us to listen to but also to question our stories and ultimately become the storyteller.

In the opening essay, Solnit connects the arrival of a hundred pounds of apricots to her mother’s memory loss; she incorporates exposition about her mother’s disease, and stitches together a crazy quilt of the stories and fairy tales she started to read when the apricots happened to come her way. In this essay, I saw the freedom the personal essayist has in going everywhere and anywhere, along with the challenge of artfully connecting the tangential themes and stories. The essay begins with a short question and short answer that are most captivating: “What’s your story? It’s all in the telling” (3). She continues to explain what stories are and what they do as she unfolds the story of her

11 mother and the apricots, which her brother gave her, from their mother’s tree. At the bottom of the pages, through each essay to the end of the book, is an essay, which serves both in content and visually as a thread connecting the essays. One can read it all at once, or in conjunction with the other essays. It feels like a challenge to look at the book as a whole, and to think differently about the path of the essays—as multiple sentences on a page, or as one long line of sentences, or as a thing at the bottom of the page one can choose to ignore. The first line of this essay, on the first page of the first Apricots essay is, “Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds” (3). The image of a tear- drinking moth is indicative of the poetic quality of the rest of the book. This moth harkens me back to

Woolf’s moth, and Eiseley’s wasps, (not that all nonfiction writers are also entomologists, although I’m sure there are some), in that they exemplify how the smallest thing can convey the beauty of the world, or the sadness of the aged, or the energy of life.

This threading of image and story is a technique I learned from Solnit that I embrace and employ in many of the essays in Queens of Sheba, notably in “Kitchens,” where I traverse through kitchens, from New Jersey to California, through family and relationships, through life and death. In the final and current kitchen, “I wash the dishes looking into the dark window above the sink. I see my reflection, my mother’s face, my grandmother’s, and then my daughter’s, and I imagine us laughing in a kitchen, this one, or my grandmother’s in Brooklyn, or my daughter’s, which doesn’t yet exist” (67).

The pull of childhood memories is incontrovertible. Contained in the essays in

Queens of Sheba are stories that I have been thinking of, dreaming about, and telling for decades. I had always described running away from home as a funny story. It was the tale

I pulled out at gatherings; more than once I told the story at workplace icebreaking

12 exercises where they asked us to share something no one knows about yourself. The essay “Running Away” is close to how I might tell the story, but peppered with present reflections, and connections drawn between past and present. This is the beauty of writing about childhood memory in the personal essay, which might be its ultimate form of creative expression. It is a way to answer the question, “Why does this story keep coming back?”

I had difficulty finding the voice and format with which to write about my experience of running away as a teenager. My writing friend Jill urged me to read Wendy

Ortiz’s essay, “Mud Myths,” a non-fiction story written in third person narrative, which was published in Watershed, Chico State’s own literary journal. As Jill suggested, utilizing this type of narrative allowed me to reflect on the experience from a current self- perspective, while still recalling and honoring the feelings of the fourteen-year-old person that I was at the time. I can describe fourteen-year old Daria sitting in the Metropolitan

Museum, leaning against a marble column, frightened and exhausted, “. . . not really knowing what to do next. She holds her eyes closed trying to put her thoughts in order, but they keep falling away, like a crumbling wall” (129). She imagines what her parents are thinking. I step forward in time to the present-self, the Daria who knows, “She can’t truly understand the depth of their worry and fear—not until along time later when she has her own daughter.” Choosing to write in the third person provides emotional distance that allows me to tell the story, not completely sans the drama, but avoiding sentimentality. Portraying myself as a character, and telling the story this way, enabled me to see more in the scenes I remembered—I could recall more clearly what I was

13 seeing and thinking while walking in Manhattan. The walk from Port Authority Bus

Terminal to the West Side was rich with sensory detail:

Out on 42nd Street the morning light and the smell of exhaust and burnt

peanuts slap her in the face and get her walking again, walking fast, as if there’s a

destination. A rule of survival in the city, her mother had told her once, always

look like you know where you’re going.

She heads towards Fifth Avenue, momentarily confused by Broadway and

Times Square, when the streets don’t make sense for a few blocks, past the nudie

shows and porn movies and street people, the hot dog vendors, past a man lying

on the sidewalk curled up, and a man leaning in front of a liquor store, who looks

at her as she passes, and says, “You a good girl.” She ignores him, putting on her

best “I know what I’m doing” face; he’s the only person to acknowledge her so

far this day. (126-127)

We best remember the moments that may have seemed insignificant at the time, rather than the major events; I think more about the man lying on the sidewalk on 42nd street, or the lady I encountered in the bathroom in the museum, than I do about being reunited with my family. The third person narration of the scene, feels more real than if I told it in the first person: “She washes her hands, and arms, as they are streaked with sweat and grime, and dabs at her face with the paper towel. A lady at the next sink smiles at her as she washes, and so she smiles back, raising her eyebrows like it’s no big deal—doesn’t everyone wash their arms in museum restrooms” (129). When I think about running away, I recall most vividly things like how the shower water turned black as it washed away the grime that had accumulated after spending four days and nights

14 outside in the city. I can remember with great relish the taste of the vanilla ice cream, with walnuts and chocolate sauce that I ate in the apartment in the Village. Using the objective third person narrator necessitates describing the emotion of a scene or exchange entirely through the actions of the characters, the sensory details, and the setting.

Growing up, I did not allow myself to work through the trauma of this experience, and so I had grown a thick scab over the emotions, and didn’t write about it. Instead, I told it as funny story. I experimented with and ultimately employed an objective third person narrative, to access the emotion, and better describe and understand the experience and aftermath of running away.

There isn’t a single definition of grief, with the grieving person experiencing an unending wave of emotions—the whole gamut of feelings from sadness, to terror, to great joy, to unfathomable fury, to surprise, and guilt. Grief and the use of creative expression to understand and integrate loss into my life is a significant theme in the essays in Queens of Sheba. I explore different aspects of my personal loss, in terms of the relationship I had with my deceased husband, the impact of his death on me and my daughter, and the grief process in general.

Brenda Miller’s article, “A Case Against Courage in Creative Nonfiction,” inspired me to consider a format and tone for an essay about widowhood that would allow a self- imposed emotional distance with this topic. In writing the essay “Wonder Widow: Your

Go-To Guide to a Fabulous Widowhood,” I was particularly influenced by Miller’s discussion of how form allows the emotional depths to be tapped. She describes the

“hermit crab” essay where “. . . sensitive material finds a carapace outside the self. Such essays can take the form of a ‘how to’ article, for instance, or a ‘to do’ list, or a menu, or

15 a field guide” (87). She suggests this technique as a way to find artistic meaning by turning away from one’s “stuff” or completely removing the “I” out of the narrative, as is the case with the “hermit crab essay.” As Miller asserted, this format and technique works well in the essay about widowhood; it clarified the voice, and allowed me to

“enjoy the view,” by inhabiting the empty shell of a “how-to” manual as my own.

I also was inspired by Lorrie Moore’s short story, “How to Become a Writer,” a mock “how-to” guide, written in the second person. Moore may be writing to the aspiring writer, or she may be the writer herself. Here she gives the blow by blow of the development of an idea:

“Tell your roommate your great idea, your great exercise of imaginative

power: a transformation of Melville to contemporary life. It will be about

monomania and the fish-eat-fish world of life insurance in Rochester, N.Y. The

first line will be ''Call me Fishmeal,'' and it will feature a menopausal suburban

husband named Richard, who because he is so depressed all the time is called

''Mopey Dick'' by his witty wife Elaine. Say to your roommate: ''Mopey Dick, get

it?'' Your roommate looks at you, her face blank as a large Kleenex” (1019).

This is a favorite passage, for the humor, because it’s about Melville, and because I love the comparison of a blank face to a large Kleenex. Moore mocks the stereotypical writer conveying his or her “big idea,” who then receives the all too familiar response of friends and family, a blank face. Using this format and mocking tone, the story is both funny and disheartening. I utilized this format to write about the experience of being a widow because I feel it best conveys this entanglement of emotion, and with humor, allows the reader, whether they know this experience or not, to get a sense of what it feels

16 like, without being maudlin. Of course, grieving is sad and difficult, but it is everything else too—hilarious, ridiculous, infuriating, and universal. The title of the essay, “Wonder

Widow: Your Go-to Guide to a Fabulous Widowhood,” is lampooning the plethora of self-help guides that over-simplify the solution to a serious problem, in a one-size-fits-all way. In the essay there are sections with titles such as “It’s time for a trip to the mortuary!” (70), which is actually a dreadful experience, but the exclamation point serves to truly solidify this reality, even though it isn’t the punctuation one would typically use when making this statement. Aspects and events of the first year after a spouse dies are described, such as your child’s response to the loss. The “Guide” provides the scenario:

The bank calls asking for your husband. You are asleep on the couch so your

daughter answers the phone. She says to the bank lady, “No, he died.” The bank

lady asks for you, and your daughter says, “She’s lying on the couch and can’t

come to the phone.” The next day, flowers and a condolence card arrive from the

bank. (72)

This is what really happened, and when the flowers were delivered, I was baffled and then I laughed. I think it has much greater meaning, and connects more with the reader, conveyed in the second person as if giving advice. I think it also makes it harder for the reader to separate themselves from the possibility of the experience. In other words, if I’m telling the story, they can feel separate, as in “glad I’m not her,” but in the second person they are put in the position of being the widow, and are more likely to consider, “what if this happened to me?”

This format also created a distance, which is what Miller recommends in her article, better enabling me to share the larger view of my personal experience, and to use humor

17 as a response to grief. Having been in a grief group, I know that while everyone’s story of loss is unique, there is also common ground, and in sharing the stories, we connect and we heal. My hope is that some readers with similar experiences might tune right in to the

“Wonder Widow” essay, already knowing these truths, and others may find it jarring which is a different, yet also positive effect.

I explore grief and loss as well in “Mad Man,” a character sketch of my father and a chronicling of our relationship, with snippets of his decline into dementia and finally his death. Part of the grief process is reconciling the past and present, and accepting what is, rather than what we wish. On a visit to his care facility, another resident came up to us, and my father wanted to shake her hand:

He put his hand out to shake hers, but she was confused and continued to

stare. Another aide came over, ‘No John, remember, no hand shake, only this,’ and

he gently demonstrated a fist bump, holding my father’s hand and touching it to the

air near the lady, where her hand might have been, had she any idea of what was

happening. They both remained utterly confused, but my dad was still grinning. He

had been banned from shaking hands because he squeezed too hard and it

frightened the other residents. (110)

I had hated how he used to do everything so hard, including hurting the hand of the person with whom he was shaking hands. The scene at the facility however, is just sad, and in seeing him in this state, I can forgive what he was, and appreciate that he taught me the importance of a good handshake.

The women in my family have always been a source of inspiration, and my connection to them is the genesis of the theme of sororitas in the essays in Queens of

Sheba. I write about my grandmothers, the one in Brooklyn, with the wonderful kitchen, and the Irish one who gave me sugar curls (a dreadful styling process) and who told tall tales. I connect my pictures of them (the “Kitchens” essay grew from a photograph of

Grandma Boyce, in her kitchen, holding a bunch of lettuce on her head) to the ways all women are connected and the traditional places that bring them together, such as kitchens, and beauty parlors. I portray the gathering of women in my family in the essay

“Kitchens” with the creation of a Sunday dinner. The creative act of cooking, the sharing of inside jokes, the comfortable familiarity with each other, the caring of others, all plays out as if it is a symphony:

The sounds, the smells, the voices, and the movement create a sort of kitchen

symphony; there are solos, a chorus of voice, utensils, pans crescendo and then

settle to a soft pianissimo when a certain topic is discussed in whispers. The

movements are fast as something hot is pulled from the oven and space is made on

a counter, and then they slow down. These patterns repeat, climbing to a frenzy as

the finished meal is transferred to the dining room table, and then the dinner

movement begins. (48).

The development of a voice and persona is particularly important in writing the personal essay. Lopate states: “The personal essay has an open form and a drive toward candor and self-disclosure. Unlike the formal essay, it depends less on airtight reasoning than on style and personality, what Elizabeth Hardwick called ‘the soloist’s personal signature flowing through the text” (xxiv). This aspect of the genre is evidenced by some of my most admired contemporary essayists, none more so than David Sedaris. When I first heard him on the radio, I began to find my own path toward creative non-fiction

19 writing.

I recall listening to Sedaris’s “Santaland Diaries” on public radio at Christmas time.

I laughed out loud, and wondered, who is this guy, and how come he gets to tell his story on the radio? I had weird jobs too! His story is not just about his stint as Crumpet the Elf at Macy’s Santaland, but about the insincerity, and commercialization of the season, as well as alcoholism, and small-mindedness. Ugly and hilarious at the same time; he paints uncomplimentary, yet realistic pictures of others. He is just as critical about himself. I love him. During the holidays, for my family, listening to “Santaland Diaries” on NPR is as important as burning the Yule Log and drinking eggnog.

I am greatly inspired and influenced by all of his books of essays, but the first I read, Naked, has had a lasting effect. Any essay by David Sedaris is almost immediately recognizable, especially if one has had the opportunity to hear him read in a live performance. His actual voice is particularly recognizable and once you’ve heard it, it’s hard not to hear it when you read his work. But I think it’s the style and the unique lens through which he sees the world that best demonstrates his persona and voice. In his essay “Naked,” he makes a phone reservation to stay at a nudist colony: “. . . I heard the man shoulder the phone and raise his voice to shout, ‘Mom! Hey, Mom where’s the weekly price list for the two bedroom rental trailer?’ This person was not only standing around naked in broad daylight, he was doing it with his mother” (255). He describes the experience, the innkeepers and guests, in a way that both endears us to them and horrifies us:

I tried to start my day naked but made it no farther than my picnic table

before returning to my trailer and throwing on a T-shirt that covered me to mid-

thigh. . . . I came upon a group of elderly men and women gathered around a gravel

court. It was midmorning and I got the idea that something important was about to

begin. A woman stooped to rake the stones. She wore a short-sleeved shirt, but no

skirt or pants, and her ass was a landscape of pocks and wrinkles, the blue veins

crossing her thighs like a topographical map of creeks and rivers. Seated on a

nearby bench were two other women, each dressed in T-shirts. One wore a visor,

while the other favored the type of bonnet I associate with milkmaids of old. This

was a broad-brimmed, ruffled contraption tied in a bow beneath the lowest of her

several chins. “Howdy,” she said. “Hey, look, everybody, we’ve got ourselves

some new blood! (257)

The sheer humanness of real naked people doing things they would normally do clothed is hilarious. Sedaris can be snarky and snide, but he also delights in the normal, yet odd, behavior of humans. He is also self-deprecating with his humor, which makes the snider moments acceptable. Plus, it is laugh out loud funny; this is the book I give to friends who are sick and need to laugh. I once read excerpts from “Naked” at the Enloe infusion center to the nurses and cancer patients, which they thoroughly enjoyed. I’m convinced laughing helps the body to heal. I think humor is an incredibly effective tool for making a topic approachable and accessible, and allows us to take a hard look at our silly humanness.

Lopate identifies this as the personal essayist’s “mischievous impudence” (xxxii), and describes how several well-known essayists have used a self-deprecating, cheeky, as well as conversational manner, as if he or she is speaking directly to the reader, sharing the joke, or using his or her own human failings as a way to broach the larger issue.

Humor is a prominent feature in my writing, and it is where I find my most authentic voice. I differ from Sedaris in that I elevate the topic or idea beyond my own story, and I don’t do snide at the same level or with his natural agility. I do embrace and employ his style of close description of appearance, and sometimes biting commentary on the odd thing, such as the milkmaid bonnet in the passage above. In “Booth’s Anatomy,” I describe my fear of skin cancer, and losing my nose:

. . . Thankfully, there are surgeons/artists who have created prosthetic

noses that look quite good. I’m not terribly comforted by this, but glad to

know something can be done should I start to resemble Voldemort. . . I ask

my husband if he would still love me if I was bald and had no nose—just two

holes in my face below my eyes. He takes a little too long to answer and I

snap at him. Really, tell me, I demand. He looks like he’s in pain, and he says

don’t be ridiculous. I think if he Googled “rhinectomy” he would be singing a

different tune. (100)

I am joking, but I am also truly fearful of losing my nose. I can’t be the only person who has these thoughts. I Googled “rhinectomy” and spent an inordinate amount of time looking at pictures of a variety of noseless people, as well as a diverse array of prosthetic noses. It was research for my writing, and the essay is therapy for the neurotic.

In the essay “Running Away,” I describe a scene where my parents have caught me smoking pot at home:

She quickly lights the smiley face candle someone gave her from Spencer’s

Gifts in the mall, and blows it out, waves the smoke away. Her father yells up the

stairs, what the hell is going on here, were you smoking? No, she shouts back, it

was a candle. She steps halfway down the stairs, not too close, holding the smiley

face candle in front of her, like a shield. The father’s face is turning purple. The

hairs on the back of her neck stand up. He says that’s no candle, I’ve been to a Kris

Kristofferson concert, I know what marijuana smells like. (130)

This is a truly funny statement, but when it was happening, it was terrifying. The scene continues:

They look at each other, both wild-eyed, and suddenly he lurches towards her,

grabbing her leg. She shakes off his grip and gets to the bathroom at the top of the

stairs, miraculously locking the door just in time. He pounds on the door, furiously

screaming for her to open the damn door. He pounds on the door with his fists, and

then the doorframe. The doorframe cracks. She thinks he’s going to kill her. (131)

This part of the scene is decidedly not funny. However, I now know he wouldn’t have killed me, and I can laugh at the Kris Kristofferson line. I like this scene because it is from real life, and I think the humor serves to pull the reader into the story, in a way that makes the whole story more accessible.

Similar to Sedaris, I find humor in the odd ways people present and adorn themselves, as in “Queens of Sheba,” the male client’s special hair-do:

When the water hit his head, what had appeared to be a largish mound of hair,

suddenly washed away and a bald dome appeared. It surprised me and I gasped

louder than I would have wished. He just scowled, but said nothing. His hair was

still there, but it was one long piece, attached to one side of his head. This long

swath of hair had been grown out purposefully, and the man had masterfully placed

it concentrically about his head, like soft serve ice cream. (42)

I am enamored of Sedaris and feel a kinship with him however, when I read

Fadiman’s preface, and the twelve essays in At Large and At Small, I felt I had come upon my writing tribe, the essay world where I would like to hang out. Coupled with the inspiration of Sedaris’ humor, it aided me in understanding and embracing my voice.

While Mary Karr’s book The Art of Memoir is specifically about that genre, her chapter on voice, “A Voice Conjures the Human Who Utters It,” was revelatory to me.

She emphasizes the importance of voice, which Sedaris and Fadiman so deftly demonstrate, and she gives practical and straightforward advice. Her own creative writing is testimony of her knowing of which she speaks. Her advice in this chapter is directed to the memoirist, but her words of wisdom apply to any writer’s work. The entire chapter is chock full of things that speak to me. There are a few standout messages, such as, “The voice should permit a range of emotional tones—too wiseass, and it denies pathos; too pathetic, and it’s shrill. It sets and varies distance from both the material and the reader— from cool and diffident to high-strung and close” (36). I needed to know and understand this aspect of my writing voice to achieve the tone and feel I want to achieve in the essays in Queens of Sheba. Karr also discusses the importance of self-awareness and the need for writers to examine their lives. She writes, “. . . someone who has a hard time reconsidering a conflict from another point of view—may not excel at fashioning a voice because her defensiveness stands between her and what she has to say” (37). I felt like

Roberta Flack after reading this chapter, she was “strumming my pain with her fingers, singing my life with her song.” This chapter has had a significant impact on how I approach writing my essays. Karr helped to guide me away from glibness, and towards having a memorable and believable voice. In “Running Away,” a combination of voice

24 and character, myself as character, make believable, the unbelievable act of sleeping behind bushes in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

She notices the Frisbee kids periodically climbing the steps to the top by

the museum entrance, and hoisting themselves between the columns. She watches

this for a while, figuring out they must be going back there to pee, in the little

space, high up between the front of the building, and a long, thick row of

boxwoods, accessible only by climbing up and crawling between the columns.

Perfect.

It smells like pee, but it feels safe, and it would be hard for anyone not

young and agile to get into the space. She pulls out her nearly useless blanket, and

curls up in a corner, her head on the backpack, her hands folded under her face,

just like the man on the sidewalk on 42nd Street. She sleeps in this place for the

next four nights. (132)

Truth is subjective, and there is room for the unique truth of one’s own memory to stand in creative non-fiction. In this genre I feel encouraged to lay it all out, the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, the difficult, the gross, the bizarre, whatever is real. It is fascinating. I write from my own experiences as a starting point or backdrop, and then consider the larger view or topic, to understand the human condition, to find and appreciate how we are connected to each other, and to fulfill the need for creative expression. This is the literary path I keep turning to, and where I will continue to hone my skills, writing unique and lyrical prose.

My writing entertains and it makes people laugh. I believe it appeals to a diverse range of readers who are interested in contemporary creative nonfiction, who may find

25 common ground in my experiences, as well as those seeking creative expression to explore and contemplate their own issues, such as loss and grieving. Writing has been a part of my process in becoming a storyteller, in integrating loss into my life, and managing chronic depression. It is also my art. I collect images the same way I like to collect shells and sea glass on the beach. I gather, I lay them out, put them in a pleasing sequence, and write the essay.

I foresee myself submitting the individual essays contained in Queens of Sheba to a wide variety of online and print literary journals. The collection will be expanded, and pursued as a longer, complete work. I see this project eventually being published by a small independent press. I think this is the world where my work belongs, and it is where

I find the writing I most like to read.

CHAPTER II

ESSAYS

Queens of Sheba

My Uncle Chet owned and operated Exclusively Yours, a ladies’ beauty salon, on

Broadway in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. Across the street there was a store called Browse that sold fire sale merchandise, and on the opposite corner was Wilke’s Delicatessen. At the other end of the block was an Italian Bakery that sold cannoli, a traditional pastry with a sweet, deep-fried, tube- shaped shell and a creamy filling made with whipped ricotta cheese, and bits of dark chocolate, citron, and nuts. My very first purchase with the hard-earned pay from my Uncle’s shop was a single cannolo wrapped in a little paper doily, then placed in a small pink cardboard bake shop box and tied with red and white twine. I took this perfect and beautiful gift home, after a Saturday of washing hair, sweeping hair, cleaning hair out of brushes, and enduring demands of “can you scrub me a little harder, dahling.” After dinner, I sat by myself with my pink pastry box, avoiding all parents and siblings (I had no intention of sharing), carefully untied the twine, and extracted my treat. It was so delicious. I still remember how it tasted, dense, sweet and creamy. It was completely mine, my own purchase, and it was from a real Italian bakery—ubiquitous in that part of the country, but not as easily found in Northern

California where I now reside.

Some say cannoli originated in Palermo, some say it was Sicily. I’m fond of the story where cannoli originated in Sicily when it was occupied by Arabs. Some harem women honored their sheik by creating a pastry that “resembled” him—hence the tubular shape, hard shell, cream-filling. I think you get it. I was thirteen at the time I bought and savored this particular cannolo, but I’m not sure my interest was in the shape resembling anything. I think I just liked sweet things and presents. It was a novelty to have my own

28 money, and a new purchasing power. I worked most weekends at Exclusively Yours for the next several years, through Junior High and High School.

My Uncle’s shop was and still is the kind of salon where ladies go weekly for the wash, set, dry, tease and lacquer routine, creating a “helmet o’ hair,” that lasts until the next week. In the early 1970s, before I started working at the shop, I recall my mother’s hair routine and the extreme care she took through the week to keep her hairdo intact.

This involved a bedtime ritual of strategically placed bobby pins, a carefully applied hair scarf and creative pillow placement, designed for minimal hair mussing through the night. In the summer she also swam with her head completely out of the water, like a swan doing the crawl. In contrast, our teenaged baby sitters had long, straight, seemingly effortless hair that was parted down the middle, just like Cher’s. My favorite sitter was

Dorothy who lived up the street from us; she looked like Peggy Lipton on The Mod

Squad, and I once watched her straighten her hair, using the iron and ironing board in our kitchen. She wore exotic shirts from India, told me about her boyfriend, and I had a crush on her. A girl friend of hers came over once while she was watching us and I watched them roll each other’s hair using empty frozen juice cans as curlers. This was just as strange and puzzling as my mother’s hair maintenance, maybe even more so, but I was deeply fascinated, and grateful to be allowed to watch and learn. Dorothy begged me not to tell my mother that her friend had been there, which I solemnly agreed to, as it meant we had a kinship—I was in on the secret, so I was one of them.

My hair didn’t curl easily, and so of course I yearned for curls even more because we always want what we can’t have. In answer to my pleas, or so I thought, my not-so- sweet Irish grandmother once gave me sugar curls, a problematic hair curling technique

29 that involved using sugared water to hold spring curls (hair wrapped around a finger) in place. Not only does the recipient of the sugar curl have to sit entirely still while the water dries the hair into a very boing-y-looking, yet stiff and crispy, curl, she also then must endure bees flying around her head until she cries and it is summarily and roughly washed out by the not so sweet Irish grandmother. Every woman I know has a

“hairstory,” replete with tales of the childhood hair disasters, the beloved hairdresser, the bad dye job, as well as the shared sense of uplift when we leave the shop after a good cut and blow out, renewed and strengthened, feeling good, because we feel beautiful.

After working at my Uncle’s shop for a few weeks, I was sharing with my mother that I couldn’t understand how the women who went there were happy, as it appeared that going to get their hair done was the most important thing they did all week—didn’t there have to be something more than that? She said it was not just about getting their hair done, it was social, and they got away from their homes and husbands to focus on themselves for a few hours. She said it was the only time she had to herself, when she could count on not being bugged by anyone. (“Anyone” meaning her kids, including me.)

Exclusively Yours had a front desk near the entrance, sometimes manned by my

Uncle Chet, who was tall, handsome, charming, sported a dashing goatee, and who wore colorful wide collared shirts, with several of the top buttons open (it was the 1970s).

Down the center of the long room with high ceilings was a bank of hair dryer chairs, with women sitting underneath, like a helmeted island of chattering birds. The stylists were not called stylists yet—that came later in the 1980’s. Here they were called “the girls,” and they filled the perimeter of the shop; their stations were stationed against the walls, each with an identical, ornate, oval gold-framed mirror. They were grouped by

30 friendships, a little by ethnicity, and by shop seniority. Sherrie, who did my mother’s hair, was next to Diane Policastro. These two were the hierarchically superior goddesses of the shop, because they had been there the longest, and because they were tall, thin, and had dramatic hair. Sherrie had a mass of blonde streaked, permed curls á la Barbara

Streisand in A Star Is Born. Diane had long, black, straight hair with long bangs that were winged back revealing perfectly-shaped, mostly drawn-on brows. Per the fad at the time they both wore multiple gold chains, high-waisted jeans and cool wedged sandals that made them tower over everyone, including my Uncle Chet.

The Beacon Theatre in New York has a beautiful art deco interior. Its proscenium is dominated by two huge statues of the goddess Minerva, standing on each side of the stage. I remember thinking how much the Minerva’s flanking the stage reminded me of

Diane Policastro. Minerva had a strange birth: Jupiter had a horrific headache from which he could get no relief, so Vulcan (no relation to Spock—this Vulcan was the smith of the gods who made Jupiter’s thunderbolts)1 split open his head and out popped Minerva in full armor with a shield and spear. Impressive. She is the goddess of arts and crafts, and was particularly good at weaving. There is a story about a woman named Arachne who wove a beautiful picture. Minerva tried to find fault with it, and when she couldn’t she tore it to pieces and turned Arachne into a spider. I was a little afraid of Diane

Policastro—not of being turned into a spider, but of her fierce glare and the way she said what she thought without hesitation. Her straightforward confidence was to be admired;

1 Apparently he also made women of gold to help him in his smithy. Interesting--the original “Gold Finger” who, no surprise, needed women to get the job done.

31 she was a great model for a teenaged girl coming from a household where outspokenness was frowned upon.

Across the shop in their own corner were Cella and Elsa, sister hairdressers, who catered to the small cadre of Spanish speaking clients. They were both quite short and sported short, not so trendy, haircuts. This style seemed to mirror their lightning fast, clipped speech, especially when speaking Spanish, and their efficient work on hair where they could roll a whole head of curlers in perfectly straight lines in what seemed like seconds. They had non-Spanish speaking clients as well, in fact, most Exclusively Yours customers were white and Jewish, which was the demographic of the neighborhood.

While there was certainly a consciousness of the different backgrounds, the atmosphere and culture of the hair salon tended to transcend any differences. This was a place where the common goal of beautification, and the accompanying female camaraderie, trumped other dissimilarities.

I don't remember the names of all “the girls” but I can remember their faces.

One of my tasks was to ask them for lunch orders for Wilke’s deli which entailed going to each station, carefully interrupting the conversation they were having with their client, and asking if they wanted a sandwich from the Deli. I was not terribly shy, but just shy enough to feel embarrassed when having to ask the Spanish speaking girls to repeat their sandwich order three times, because I didn’t understand and then just praying I was writing it down correctly. Thinking back, I can now interpret the expressions on some of their faces: a particular annoyance with the boss’s niece for invading their territory, and for apparently not being capable of getting their sandwich order correct. On one occasion

Cella had to repeat “turkey” at least three times, on the third repetition she rolled her eyes

32 with her client. I’m sure I turned scarlet red and my eyes must have looked teary because she quickly said it was “okay” and patted my back. I recall this with a lingering tinge of embarrassment.

There were many moments like this, as I was the youngest worker, the errand girl and the one who was given the most menial and dirty tasks, all for about $2 an hour and tips earned from washing hair.

One time my uncle asked me to pick up toilet paper at Wilke’s. As I’m running out the door, eager to accomplish the task, he yelled, "Ask for drip-dry!" I ran across the street and dutifully reported the order from Chet for toilet paper: “Drip-dry please." I had no idea at first why they all burst out laughing, including the teenage sandwich maker with hair like the Bee-Gees who I thought was really cute. My face burned red to the tips of my ears with embarrassment, at first because I didn't understand why they were laughing, and then because I did.

The salon was a place for socializing, sharing photos of kids and grandkids, gossiping, recipe swapping, a place to get the news of the neighborhood. The women drank Tab, had frightening chemical treatments done to their hair that smelled like poison and probably were, and they were happy in this place. I came to fully understand the true power of a great hair-do and the way that it could transform almost any woman, and the value of and need for women to share their joys and sorrows with each other.

During the time my grandmother was in an assisted care facility, she’d gone into the hospital one night with severely low blood pressure, and was put on oxygen. She was not doing well, and my mother and aunts had been called by the hospital and told to

“stand by.” When the family called the hospital in the morning to check on her status

33 they learned she had checked out and was back at the care facility, where she had made it to her previously scheduled hair appointment that morning. Nothing got in the way of those appointments. Never underestimate the healing power of getting one's hair "done."

My grandmother’s prescription for the blues was to put on some lipstick and go out, do something fun; a version of “put on a happy face,” which, as most of us can attest to, has some merit. I used to think my grandmother’s advice suggested something superficial and phony, that perhaps it shouldn’t be necessary to put on the lipstick to make oneself happy. I don’t feel this way any longer, which I suppose I attribute to some sort of mellowing in my old age. The truth is I like color, lipstick has color, and so, I like lipstick. I like how I look with lipstick on and I like how it feels. Most of the time it works to put on some lipstick and go out, although for someone else it might be putting on a ball cap and driving a tractor, or splashing cold water on one’s face and doing a jumping jack. It may just be about taking an action, any action, to change your outlook. I do like lipstick though.

Chet’s daughter, my cousin Christine, who was four years older than me, and who

I greatly admired, was my co-hair washer. The ladies loved Chet, and so they always wanted Christine to wash their hair—and she probably did do a better job. I was just the niece, so I was a link to Chet but not as close as his daughter. Nevertheless, I adored her and she became my mentor who introduced me to some of life’s most important things, like glam rock, pot, eyebrow tweezing, birth control pills, and how to talk one’s way out of a traffic ticket. We were on our way to a Billy Joel concert, singing “Only the Good

Die Young” at the top of our lungs, having just smoked a little pot, when flashing red lights filled the car. Christine pulled over and in a serious voice I’d not heard before said,

“Don’t talk.” She shoved the little baggie of pot further under the seat, and rolled down her window.

She turned and allowed a smile to spread slowly across her face, looking up at the cop with her big brown eyes, as if this smile was especially for him, which it was. He was a young, good looking guy with a Burt Reynolds mustache, who put his hand on the roof above her window, leaned in, and returned her smile. My heart had been beating out of my chest, but at this moment it calmed down a little, as I sensed we were going to come out of this predicament just fine, and in fact, we did.

“So, do they?” he asked, leaning in a little further, “Do artists make better lovers?” He was referring to Christine’s bumper sticker, acquired when she enrolled in the Fashion Institute of Technology to learn fashion illustration.

We drove away with just a warning, and there may have been an exchange of phone numbers. I don’t remember because I was busy catching my breath and erasing the fear of going to jail, that I had imagined in great detail during the five-minute encounter with the Burt Reynolds cop. The bumper sticker helped, but it was Christine’s sex appeal and good looks that ensured our escape. She was and still is beautiful. I was jealous as a teenager at what I perceived was the ease of her beauty. Where I turned red and burned in the sun, she tanned and glowed, and while I was 5’7’’ she was another two inches taller, which made all the difference in the world. She was athletic looking, with long legs, and I was somewhat fleshier. You could tell we were related, although she inherited Italian good looks from her father, my Uncle Chet, and I looked Irish with a white and freckled complexion, courtesy of my father. Also, I had braces and a uni-brow. Thanks to

Christine, this last unfortunate quality was remedied with some serious and painful

35 plucking. With my head back in the hair washing sink, she went for my brow, transforming it into two neat and shapely lines, like a ferocious gardener clipping a hedge with abandon, all the while saying things like, “Jesus, it’s like a forest on your face!”

Beauty is pain, externally and internally. We have historically and continue to go to extreme lengths to achieve a certain outward appearance. We pluck, wax, strip, shave, poke, flatten, curl, dye, tattoo, vacuum out fat, sand blast our skin, and otherwise do radical things to make some things go away, and to make other things look smaller, and some bigger. Self-inflicted pain and suffering to achieve beauty is a very old practice. In the 1920’s women drank arsenic, yes, we poisoned ourselves, as it was believed this helped one achieve glowing skin and sparkling eyes. At least we know a little more today about what is safe. Or do we? I wonder about the long-term effects of the various laser treatments, and other painful procedures endured for a younger, more beautiful look.

One look at the bizarre, puffy, chemically inflated lips of several Hollywood celebrities is enough to know that it can’t be good for us. Having said all of this, I can emphatically state that I’ll never go back to a uni-brow. I will gladly endure the pain necessary to have separate brows.

I marveled at Christine’s ability to charm the customers in the shop, and how she seemed to know everything that was cool in fashion, hair styles, and music. She and her friends dressed up like “space cowboys,” inspired by David Bowie, and dominated a New

York dance club one Halloween night. She told this and other stories to the ladies while she washed their hair, they felt cool and hip just having heard the story, and she made great tips. The lesson learned here was the power of telling a great story—one where the listener goes along for the ride, and walks away a little different having heard the tale.

Christine and I became great friends while working at Exclusively Yours during the 1970s, the golden age of hair salons, when fashion and appearance went through radical changes, a continuation of the 1960s sense of freedom and self-expression, a move away from prim and proper to a counterculture style of “anything goes.” We had halter tops, peasant blouses, the wrap around dress, and minis turned into midis and by the mid to late 1970s, there were maxis. This was a younger person’s world; however, women of all ages were impacted by the changes in clothing and accessories. On a visit to our grandmother in Brooklyn one time, Christine and I were sitting on the living room couch, when she called from upstairs, “I’ve got a surpri-i-i-se for you girls!” My grandmother came down to the landing facing the living room, grinning, and then pulled up her dress to reveal pantyhose with panties, instead of her lifelong garb of stockings held in place with a clip and garter apparatus. We laughed so hard we were crying, rolling on the floor, as my grandmother continued to hold her dress up doing a little can-can and singing “la-di-dah.” Panty hose were invented in 1959 by Allen Grant Sr. in response to the coming change in hem lines that got shorter and shorter in the 1960s. The panty- included variation of hose arrived in the 1970s. One brand, called “L’Eggs,” came in a plastic egg.

Christine and I laughed a lot at our family gatherings and at work at the salon. We sometimes accidentally and sometimes on purpose let go of our water sprayers at the hair washing stations, creating a sprinkler that shot water halfway across the shop. If her father was there we got in trouble, and if he wasn’t we’d run to the back room to laugh hysterically while retrieving the mop and rags. She was the senior hair washer however, and the owner’s daughter, so I often had the less desirable tasks, as well as the more

37 difficult customers. Big Red was one of the customers Christine avoided, as she was not only demanding and loud, but also a really rotten tipper. When she came up the aisle toward the bank of sinks with her big red hair, teased up high and smoothed over into what looked like a huge red Q-tip on fire, and her red nails and red, so very red, lipstick,

Christine would go to the bathroom and leave me to fend for myself. Big Red always asked for Christine and I would stammer that she stepped out but could I help her.

Announcing her displeasure to everyone nearby with a loud “tsk” and a tortured sigh, she would say, “All right, but I like it scrubbed hard, Chrissy can scrub hard, can you scrub hard?”

I gave her an unconvincing yes and she, with a smirk of doubt and annoyance, plopped down in the chair. I gently put a towel around her neck, which she reached up and grabbed to hold in place, nearly gouging my hand with her red talons. I floated the plastic cape over her, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible, and then tried to snap the closure around her neck, but it didn’t fit. I tugged it lightly, cringing and cursing my cousin, but there was no way to snap it closed. Today it’s done with Velcro—bless you,

Velcro, for all of the problems you have solved from hair washing capes, to toddler’s shoes, to all things with difficult closures. I couldn’t close the cape so I wrapped it across her back and hoped for the best. All was going well; I managed to quickly get the water temperature adjusted and she wasn’t frowning. I was fascinated by the perfect black lines painted on the edge of each lid of her closed eyes; they were impeccably straight, with a quick and artful dash up at the end, the cat-eye look. I couldn’t imagine how this could be done and wondered if there was some kind of stencil or if someone did them for her.

Then I noticed the darker red line around her lips that created a perfect lip shape, which

38 reminded me of the red wax lips we got at Halloween. Meanwhile her frown had returned and so I set to scrubbing as hard as I could all around her scalp, above the ears, which on other customers seemed to make them purr with satisfaction. No amount of purposeful scrubbing could elicit a purr from Big Red and so I rinsed. She asked for a cool water rinse, and I obliged, but for some reason I still don’t quite understand I found myself reporting to her that the idea of a cool rinse being beneficial is not true because the pores in the scalp open right up again from the heat of the dryer. Why I needed to be a smarty pants at this moment I have no idea, but Big Red simply glared and I shut my mouth. I toweled her head. Thankfully, there was a larger towel that fit around her giant bowling ball head. I removed the cape and neck towel. She reached into her gigantic red purse with shiny gold lion’s head clasp—I imagined it roaring every time she unclasped it— and she handed me a dime.

“You got my back wet.” She turned and processed like the Queen of Sheba to her throne at Sherrie’s station.

My mother used to call my sister and me “Queen of Sheba”—as in “Who do you think you are—the Queen of Sheba?”—when we turned our noses up at clothes she’d made us, or Easter hats or shoes she’d picked out. I think there must have been a real

Queen of Sheba. She’s mentioned in the Bible—not necessarily proof of her existence but there’s usually some little nugget of truth in the stories. I read that Sheba was a seeker of truth and wisdom and had heard that King Solomon of Israel was a wise man. King

Solomon, however, had heard that Sheba had a cloven left foot and a hairy leg, and he wanted to see it for himself. So he decided to have his court floor polished so that when

Sheba walked across it, he would catch a glimpse of her cloven foot. His plan worked and

39 he saw the cloven foot reflected in the floor, but right in front of his eyes it transformed into a normal foot. The story goes on with Sheba testing King Solomon with riddles and questions, and he teaches her about his God and then she becomes a follower. I’m thinking there was creative editing here but I’m really still enamored with the cloven foot idea. Smart women must be devils (clue: cloven foot), so I’m still liking the story because she’s smart and a shape shifter. In fact, if Big Red isn’t happy with her hair wash, she can be the Queen of Sheba. I don’t have to like her stinking dime and so I can be the Queen of Sheba too.

Christine used to bring hand-me-down clothes to the shop where we would have a try-on session and mini-fashion show in the back room, while pretending to be washing brushes and organizing the bottles of colors and other foul smelling hair treatments. She listened to David Bowie and went to clubs in New York so her clothes were fantastic.

During a try-on session, I slipped on a pair of bell-bottoms with a paisley print. Chris said they were called “elephant bells”—I made a mental note not to repeat that in case it could somehow be said in reference to me being like an elephant while wearing the pants. I loved them and wore them often, until someone at school asked, “Don’t you have any other pants?” I never wore them to school again. She gave me leather hair bands with brass hooks that tied your hair into braids like a hippie or one of the dancers on Soul

Train.

She also experimented with my hair, which had mixed results. It was too tempting to be in a salon, surrounded by all of the supplies one could ask for, and just the tiniest bit of knowledge about how to use them. I came home from work one Saturday with two long, bright blond streaks framing my face, which I thought contrasted really well with

40 my dark brown hair. My mother said it looked trampy and my Uncle Chet had to fix them with brown dye the next week. I was told no hair dying, no significant hair cutting, no make-up and no fake nails. I did have that one week in between the Saturdays of being sort of cool, with my blonde streaks. I think my friends were most impressed that I’d gotten into trouble for it—I said it was worth it, with a tough girl smirk. Since my mother hadn’t decreed no permanent waves, this was still an option, so on one fateful Saturday

Christine twisted up my long hair in pink and blue perm rods with the stretchy holders, and poured on the terrible-smelling chemical that burned my eyes and scalp, while I pretended that I didn’t care and trusted her abilities implicitly. The result of the perm was not stellar. There were pieces of hair that didn’t curl next to pieces that were so burned by the chemicals they broke off in my hands. My cousin gravely stated that we had to tell her father. He said nothing at first but his eyes widened and turned reddish, making me think of the Tasmanian devil on the The Bugs Bunny Show. Then he shook his head and looked up at the ceiling, raising up his hands. I was nervous and frightened, and unclear as to what was happening; I thought he was going to pray, which seemed really weird, and then I thought one of those hands might be coming back down for a whack at one of us. He only dropped his hands to his sides and shook his head some more.

He said, “What the hell am I going to tell your mother?”

“Do we have to tell her?” I quietly squeaked.

He glared and told me to come with him. We went downstairs to the two stations used for cutting men’s hair, and where his office was, and commanded, “Sit.”

He ran back upstairs, I wasn’t sure why but imagined he remembered how I used to be afraid of the dark, and was leaving me down in this dark basement room to teach

41 me a lesson. He came back down with several bottles of stuff to “reverse the crap job your idiot cousin did on your poor hair for Christ’s sake.”

The end result was not great: imagine your hair as broom straw, both in color and texture, and that should give a good picture of my unfortunate foray into achieving curly hair through chemicals. It all needed to be cut off, quite short, which resulted in a hairdo that was not remotely close to any of the popular styles for junior high girls at the time— it was the time of Farrah Fawcett wings, and Toni Tennille page boys, or a gorgeous

Diana Ross-ish, long and free flowing afro. Short hair, like a boy, was not “in.” What followed was a brief but excruciating time of rumor and ignorant junior high school girls’ jokes all surrounding what this haircut must mean, when really it was only silly cousins playing with hair stuff and getting it wrong.

Thankfully, at the salon I was provided with multiple models of supportive female friendships, along with many more opportunities to change and enhance my “look.”

While I was sometimes jealous of Christine, and lamented my less shiny status at the salon amongst the ladies needing hair washes, I knew she was on my side. My uncle once asked me something about Diane and some of the other girls leaving the shop early, to help him make his case when he confronted them. I couldn’t give him the answer he wanted, and even though I was being honest, I felt like I’d let him down. Christine ultimately pulled the story out of me, even though I’d decided I wouldn’t tell anyone, and she said my uncle shouldn’t have asked me to do that, that it was putting me in the middle. I hadn’t thought of it that concretely, and as she spoke I realized how important it was to be aligned with her and with the girls in the shop.

It was a women’s place, this hair harem where I worked, with my Uncle as the lone male except for the occasional male client who would be brought downstairs where there were two wash stations, with spooky black sinks, and one hair station, where my uncle cut men’s hair. I was asked to take a male customer downstairs for a wash one

Saturday. We walked slowly down the red carpeted stairs. I noticed the lone painting of a clown in the stairwell—one of Christine’s. It wasn’t a bad rendition of a sad clown in a harlequin suit, a little cap on his head with a red pom-pom. The frame was tilted, askew to one side, and I noticed the clown was tilted too, as if she painted it holding her head sideways, or with the easel on a slant. Without a word the man sat at the wash station and waited for his towel and cape. I draped him as if he were a king, and I was placing his royal ermine upon his kingly frame. I felt very awkward, not having washed a man’s hair before, and being unaccustomed to the idea of men in the shop at all. My father went to the barber shop for his haircuts. This fellow was younger though, and wore bell bottoms with a cool tooled leather belt, and one of those fat mustaches, just like the flirty cop. He leaned back and closed his eyes, I turned on the water and checked the temperature.

When the water hit his head, what had appeared to be a largish mound of hair, suddenly washed away and a bald dome appeared. It surprised me and I gasped louder than I would have wished. He just scowled, but said nothing. His hair was still there, but it was one long piece, attached to one side of his head. This long swath of hair had been grown out purposefully, and the man had masterfully placed it concentrically about his head, like soft serve ice cream. With the magic of hair product, it stayed put, until hit by water. I had not seen this kind of appearance manipulation before on a man. I’m sure I’d seen toupees before, they just didn’t register. This hair replacement technique took what I

43 thought had to have been a much greater effort to achieve. It was not unlike bra stuffing, or make-up, and the thought occurred to me that there is a vanity about looks shared with men. Hair is very, very important. Our own feelings about our looks, and how we are perceived by others is of overwhelming importance to us. This was certainly ingrained for me via my first job in a hair salon during the 1970s. It was a unique opportunity to view all aspects of human interaction, couched in the atmosphere of a place dedicated to outward appearances. Yes, appearance matters, whether we like it or not, and yes, society idealizes beautiful people. I’m inclined to take away from my experience at Exclusively

Yours, however, the value in shared experience, the joy of camaraderie amongst women, in this case in the act of addressing outward appearance. I would argue that a great hairdo, and the ensuing feeling of well-being and confidence gained, bring together the external and internal aspects of beauty.

Sherrie bought Exclusively Yours from my Uncle Chet when he retired. I had several enlightening jobs after the salon, including a brief stint as a fruit smoothie maker at “California Smoothie’s” at the Paramus Park mall in New Jersey, and an even shorter one cleaning houses, truly not my strength. My cousin Christine owns and operates a franchise business doing painting parties where guests each get a canvas and instruction on how to create their own masterpieces. I go to a hair salon frequently as I now go through the same manipulations the ladies at Exclusively Yours did, to cover my now gray hair. The products and applications have changed, yet the motivation to have one’s hair “done” and the camaraderie of the shop, have not significantly changed. This shop has local art, hip jewelry and make-up for sale, and they play alternative music on a

44 satellite station. There are still individual stations, each with a mirror, but the women are no longer “the girls,” the clients are men, women, and children—all ages, all in one shop.

On the wall behind my Uncle’s desk was a poster from Redken, a hair product company, with two women, both with fantastic hairdos that defied gravity. Next to one face was the word “alluring” and the model was pursing her lips like she was blowing a kiss, and next to the other was the word “coquettish” with the model looking back over her shoulder, her eyebrow raised. When I looked at that poster, I would find myself involuntarily raising my eyebrow.

I tell Dana, my stylist about my uncle’s shop, and I describe the Redken posters.

She laughs, because it’s all so familiar to her; her mother had a shop like Exclusively

Yours. She brings me back to the wash station to rinse the stinky dye out of my hair, she opens a cabinet and says, “Check it out!” There are multiple bottles of Redken hair rinse, even “copper penny” was there, a favorite of Big Red’s, as well as “silver fox” and

“hyacinth,” the one that makes white hair a lovely pale blue. In their back room where they mix the dyes and clean the brushes, and where they eat something quickly between clients, is a hair product poster with a blond, pursing her lips. There is no doubt the stylists, the girl who sweeps the hair, and the one who answers the phone, run back here to laugh, gossip, and commiserate. There is a comfort in seeing the similarities, the things that are still the same, in this modern hair salon.

I think of my uncle in his big collared shirt, with a pattern that looked like Van

Gogh’s sunflowers each in separate squares. The fabric was shiny, something undoubtedly extremely flammable, but I liked the colors. I think of paisley elephant bell-

45 bottoms, and extreme comb-overs, and the harem of women, both “the girls” and the clients, and I feel fortunate to have been given this rich first job experience. Because of this, I learned early the value of a place where women come together. There is strength in groups of women, even when sitting under hair dryers. My grandmothers, Diane

Policastro, my hairdresser Dana, my mother, my cousin Christine, and Big Red—we are all Queens of Sheba.

Kitchens

My grandmother is bringing up a bottle of seltzer. Her steps are heavy and slow on the basement stairs. She has it delivered to the house; it’s left at the side door, which is half way down the basement stairs. I’m waiting by the kitchen sink where she’s already opened a can of Hershey’s syrup, and I’ve already tried to stick my pinkie finger in the triangle opening in the top of the can. She sets the seltzer on the counter and reaches for a tall glass from the cabinet. It’s frosted and has a gold rim—it looks special. We only get plastic cups at home; we might break a good glass. She picks up the Hershey’s, looks at me and says, “Here we go!” as she pours it into the glass. I watch the shiny brown stream of syrup fill the bottom of the glass. I’m grateful for the extra amount she pours. She wipes a drip from the can with her finger and puts it in her mouth with a “mmmmm” and a smile. She says, “Dari—get grandma the milk.” I pull the heavy handle on the big white fridge behind us. It’s much harder to pull than the one in my kitchen at home in New

Jersey. That fridge is a dull green rectangle with a thin, plain handle, straight edges, with a name in metal script letters at the top. My grandmother’s Brooklyn kitchen fridge has rounded edges, and it’s a creamy white like whipped cream or Easter shoes. The handle is like a shiny hood ornament; it’s so much more than a thing to pull to open the door.

The refrigerator is crammed with completely foreign things like a bunch of carrots with the green tops still attached, making me think of Bugs Bunny, and an open can of condensed milk with a picture on the label of a pretty cow with long lashes. Even the milk is different, a small carton, an unfamiliar brand, but I like it better than the one we have at home. I like everything better in my grandmother’s kitchen. I hand the milk to her

47 and she pours a little in the glass with the syrup and stirs it with a long-handled spoon. I watch the chocolate swirl through the milk until it’s mostly all one color.

How is it that I can remember so clearly how the chocolate syrup swirling with milk looked in this glass in my grandmother’s kitchen over forty years ago?

I’m waiting for the seltzer, I want to see how it works; I ask, “When does that part happen, the seltzer?” I ask, “Can I do it?”

She says, “It’s too heavy, honey,” and stirs the milk a little more. Then she picks up the seltzer and says, “Here we go!”

She squirts the fizzy water into the glass until it foams little just over the rim.

“One more thing,” she says as she reaches into the silverware drawer and pulls out a skinny, paper bendy straw, the kind they have at Howard Johnson’s, certainly not in someone’s kitchen at home. Everything is better in this kitchen.

* * *

“Streamline Moderne” is the industrial design style that dominated American design from the 1930’s to the 1950’s. Like my grandmother’s wonderful refrigerator with its smooth curves, and sleek enamel finish, and chrome handle, appliances developed during this time were simple yet beautiful with shapes that made the object appear it could move easily through space. The style emerged conceptually from industrial designers who pared down the ornamental aspects of Art Deco and incorporated instead an aerodynamic look and feel that was modern, efficient, but also aesthetically pleasing.

This design style gave us the Electrolux canister vacuum that looks like an elegant and fast Zephyr train, buildings like the San Francisco Maritime Museum that look like an ultra-modern cruise ship with glass brick walls and round rooms with no right angles to

48 be seen. This may be what made that Brooklyn kitchen refrigerator and stove so appealing to me: with their rounded edges and streamlined look they had personalities and seemed full of possibilities.

* * * It’s a Sunday dinner with all of us: me and my sister and brothers, my parents, my cousins, aunts and uncles. My mother, grandmother, Aunt Peggy, and Aunt Christine are in the kitchen where there’s hardly any room. The leg of lamb is roasting in the oven; it makes the whole house smell like hot fat and garlic. The salad is being made. I see hands, at my eye level, chopping, lettuce washing, peeling, and I hear voices, non-stop talking.

They are laughing and talking, sometimes over each other, along with yelling to the men in the living room. There are moms helping kids with getting drinks of water, or with a nosebleed, or a difficult zipper. Grandma is at the center of it; she is the hub of the chaos.

The chaos is not uncomfortable; it’s fun, warm and familiar. They are all laughing at something my grandmother has said. I hear my mother say, “Oh for God’s sakes.” She says that sometimes when she’s really angry, and sometimes when something is funny or ridiculous.

My grandfather shuffles through the kitchen and puts the glass he’s holding on the counter and waits. Without being asked my grandmother pours a little scotch and a splash of soda from the bottles that are always on the counter and says, “Here you go, Al.”

The sounds, the smells, the voices, and the movement create a sort of kitchen symphony; there are solos, a chorus of voice, utensils, pans crescendo and then settle to a soft pianissimo when a certain topic is discussed in whispers. The movements are fast as something hot is pulled from the oven and space is made on a counter, and then they slow

49 down. These patterns repeat, climbing to a frenzy as the finished meal is transferred to the dining room table, and then the dinner movement begins.

* * *

We are carrying grocery bags in through the side door to the kitchen in New

Jersey from the station wagon in the driveway. My sister Kelly, my brother John and I are helping my mother, while she is starting to put things away and also trying to situate my brother Kevin who is climbing the walls, literally, as he is hyperactive and, as we later discovered, had been hiding his Ritalin under the toaster next to the kitchen table. My mother picks up the phone. I can hear the loud voice of my Aunt Angie saying, “Hi Kay.”

My mother responds as if she is lying back in lounge chair, relaxed and friendly, and not standing amidst bags of groceries, bickering children, and one son climbing up the front of the oven. Suddenly Kevin is flying through the air past my head, there is yelling, the phone receiver clanks to the floor and my mother rushes by towards her son who has just flown across the kitchen. Kevin had taken her keys and shoved them into the electrical socket on the panel at the top of the stove receiving a good shock, momentarily making him airborne. He wasn’t badly hurt, just stunned. The excitement passes and the groceries are put away, and somehow dinner is prepared and we are all now around the oblong table, my mother listening to my father ranting about work, my sister separating the lima beans from the peas and carrots on her plate, me secretly checking under the toaster for more Ritalin pills, and Kevin refusing to eat the meat because my mother hadn’t cut it the right way.

After dinner my sister and I are supposed to clear the table, and empty and fill the dishwasher. She suddenly doesn’t feel well, her tummy hurts and she has to go to the

50 bathroom. She disappears and will not reappear until most of the work is done.

Amazingly this tactic works for her throughout our growing up together. My mother is still working long past dinner; there is laundry, homework, baths, and bills. I see her at the kitchen sink, finishing some pan or pot my sister and I had left undone, and then taking out something frozen for a meal the next day. I never asked her but remember wondering if she was happy, if she liked doing these things for all of us.

When I think about this kitchen in Ridgewood, New Jersey the mental pictures are blurred, as if I’m moving past them quickly, not stopping to observe. This may be because this kitchen had several iterations with new appliances replacing old ones, a wall removed, and lighting fixture changes. My grandmother’s kitchen stayed the same until long after I’d grown up and was on my own. In my mind, I can see my mother more clearly in an earlier kitchen in Teaneck, New Jersey, where I am much younger, and refusing to drink milk. I am sitting at the table and staring at the tall glass of pink milk she has made for me: a new Nestlé’s product called “Strawberry Quik.” She looks hopeful and a little irritated, so I drink it down. I actually like it but don’t want to let on that I do, as that would mean a victory for the milk pushers of the world, and so I shrug and say it’s just okay.

There is a window in this kitchen that looks out on a back yard where there is a slate rock patio and two apple trees. My brother and sister and I had to pick up the rotten apples for which we were rewarded with a candy at bedtime, an interesting practice given how ready my parents were at the end of the day for us to be asleep. My mother often fed us first and then waited to eat later with my father. Sometimes he brought home Chinese food for the two of them, and my mother always saved me a piece of shrimp toast, a

51 wonderfully salty, deep-fried treat, that she would wrap in a napkin and give me in the morning with breakfast.

* * *

The aunts are in my grandmother’s kitchen looking at a yellow-lined piece of paper and laughing. They pass the paper to each other. There’s quiet while one reads, and then they all burst out laughing. I want to know what it is, is it a picture? Or a story? I ask for the paper, “Let me see! Let me see!” I’m ignored. I sidle up to my grandmother who pats my back and tells me, “You’re a little too young, honey.” Later, years later when I’m a teenager and it’s another dinner, a Thanksgiving, someone mentions “the recipe.” They say, “Your recipe, Mom—the one about the turkey.” My grandmother goes to the kitchen table, near the phone, where the cookbooks, phone books, and mail are jumbled together on a small shelf, and she pulls out the old piece of yellow-lined paper.

This time I’m old enough to read the recipe. It’s a joke where the ingredients for stuffing include popcorn kernels, and it’s done when it “blows the ass off the turkey,” that’s the punch line. It’s funny mostly because of the way my grandmother laughs about it. I think,

They’ve been laughing at this joke for at least nine or ten years, and it’s not that funny.

But it is, actually, and I laugh too, because they’re all laughing. I wish I had that piece of yellow-lined paper with the joke recipe written in my grandmother’s curvy script; I would write a whole cookbook around it.

* * *

I’m in the kitchen in my first apartment in Boston. It’s a first floor flat in Allston, right near the “T,” the above ground train; it’s the cheap neighborhood where all the students live. It’s an ugly kitchen with wood-grain looking paneling and a dirty gold

52 honeycomb patterned linoleum floor that won’t get completely clean. On the wall I have hung the spice rack with the built-in AM radio, a treasured remnant from my grandmother’s old kitchen that was in the box of things she gave me for my apartment. It has two small shelves with dusty glass herb and spice bottles. I’m drinking tea in a cup she gave me, from a set of cups and saucers that she said were from her mother’s kitchen.

She said they were old, but they were not very good. They’re nothing special, she said when she gave them to me. The handles of these teacups have little ceramic birds that are whistles—you can actually blow the bird whistle on the cup. I blow the whistle, and then sip a little tea, but I left the bag in too long and it tastes bitter.

I look out one of the two dirty and filmy kitchen windows at the house next door, which is now an apartment building like mine. It’s a gray and cold day and I should be reading or writing or doing something, but melancholy has settled in like the fat cat sitting at my feet (we inherited the cat with the apartment), and I only have about $2.00, another good reason to sit and mope. I remember the window in my grandmother’s kitchen that looked across the alley at Mrs. Jenettas’ house. I thought it was strange that it was so close, but it had great possibilities; if your friend lived next door you could easily fly paper airplane notes to each other, or have secret meetings when you were supposed to be asleep in bed. Our suburban New Jersey home had room all around it with lawns, shrubs, and trees, and substantial front porches that people didn’t seem to use. Mrs.

Jenettas’ front lawn was a six or eight-foot square filled with plants and statues, including a hobo clown leaning on a lamp post, with a lamp that actually worked. My grandmother’s front lawn was the same size, but only had grass that my grandfather

53 mowed with a push mower, a brilliant machine I thought, as it didn’t require gas cans, bags or my father’s cursing. My grandfather could mow his lawn in about three minutes.

My apartment kitchen window is about a driveway’s width from the house next door, and I can see into their kitchen, which looks identical to mine. I think about cleaning the floor again, or wiping down the counters, to somehow bust out of this wretched ennui, but it’s just an apartment for a semester, maybe two. It’s too gray outside. The objects from my grandmother’s kitchen are a comfort, to hold or sip tea from, or to listen to AM radio while reaching for the oregano, but they don’t fit here. I feel I don’t fit either, in this apartment, or in this fine arts theatre program at Boston

University that I’d worked so hard to pursue—for which I yodeled in an audition and incurred a huge student loan, and where, as it turns out, I feel no real passion, no surge of creative expression, except when trying new drugs or testing my drinking limits. I wish that cleaning the floor could make it feel right, but I know that it won’t. I rinse my bird teacup and let the water warm my cold hands. There’s the briefest moment of comfort, and then I dry and carefully place the cup on a shelf, next to the industrial sized jar of peanut butter.

I think of her letters to me, my grandmother’s, with coupons for cat food and a few dollars for a movie. She always signs them “love, grandma” with her name, “Boyce,” in parentheses, in case it wasn’t clear whom it was from. She asks how the “play practice” is going. I don’t tell her that it’s not going, not going anywhere. I don’t tell anyone that I don’t want to be here anymore; instead I wait for something to happen to make it change. Her writing is much shakier than the script I recall on things like the recipe joke on the yellow-lined paper, and earlier birthday cards. I wonder if she could fix

54 this kitchen, just with her presence, but think it would be better if we could replicate her

Brooklyn kitchen, pull it out of Felix the Cat’s bag of tricks. I yearn for this for a moment, forever prone to wishful thinking.

I’ve never felt as comfortable in any kitchen since my grandmother’s: the old wallpaper, the rounded white appliances that hummed, the aroma of roasting meat, the seltzer, her apron, and the women, my aunts, my mother, their laughing, remembering, fighting over stories and recipes. How they roared with laughter, to the point of tears streaming down their faces, when they opened the wrapping for the goose, and out fell its neck, which was very long with a rather suggestive shape, hence the hilarity. This might have been in my Aunt Peggy’s kitchen, also in Brooklyn, on Schenectady Street; the memory is a little murky, although it’s the only time I believe the cooking of a goose was attempted. I seem to remember that it didn’t quite fit in the oven and had to have surgery prior to roasting.

I wish I had my grandmother’s recipe for cucumber salad. It was peeled, and very thinly sliced cucumber, white onion, white sugar and white vinegar. It was a perpetual condiment that lived in the big white refrigerator, and was periodically added to and refreshed. I’ve tried various combinations of those simple ingredients, in varying quantities and proportions, but it’s never quite the same as hers, in her impressive white refrigerator, in the kitchen on East 64th Street in Brooklyn.

I get a spark, and suddenly think I should roast something in this ugly kitchen in

Boston. Surely the aroma of roasting meat, a little garlic, would pour some life into the room, hide the ugly linoleum, and cure what ails me. I open the oven door, as I don’t think we had ever used it, and see an impossibly thick layer of black and brown, crusted

55 stuff looking like the surface of a burnt moon, that probably represents the remnants of meals from the last tenants, or the last seven tenants, given the quantity and certain aged scent of the contents. I close the oven door and retreat to my bedroom, which is the former dining room and is only slightly more comfortable than the kitchen.

After a late night working on a set for a play, bone tired from hammering, painting and taking snarky directions from evil senior classmates, my roommate Melissa and I walk into the apartment to find a kitchen window wide open and immediately we sense the space had been occupied by strangers. We had been robbed; they took clothes, toiletries, my bicycle, coins from a piggy bank, and $75 from a tin I had hidden in a desk.

The bicycle is a tragedy as it was a beautiful old Raleigh that had belonged to Mr.

Walker, an elderly neighbor in Ridgewood who clearly treasured it and was so happy to give it to me to use in Boston. We feel violated and frightened so we sleep together with the lights on, and put pots on the windowsills as a makeshift alarm. The next morning, we are visited by a brawny Boston cop, straight out of central casting, who seems to fill the entire kitchen. He looks bored while we sob out our tale of woe. His less than comforting response: “Welcome to the big city, girls.” His assessment: our robbers are Jamaican gang members looking for drug money and we shouldn’t have gotten a first-floor apartment. He says we’re lucky we weren’t home, and warns us to stay away from the community gardens and bike path near Fenway, because there had been an assault there the night before. We are not comforted.

The ordeal leaves us with an empty pantry and not a lot of money. A high school friend, who also attends Boston University and had been home in Ridgewood that weekend, delivers a couple of bags of groceries from my parents. There is a box of Raisin

Bran, more peanut butter, bread, a hunk of cheese, a jar of spaghetti sauce and dry spaghetti, some Fig Newtons, a box of Lipton tea bags, a couple of Hershey bars. The larder is full and we feel somewhat comforted by the sustenance from my family, but still sleep with the lights on and put wooden poles in all of the windows so they can’t be opened from the outside. Over the next month we frequent a bar where they sell hot dogs for ten cents, which works well with our food budget especially when we get someone else to buy our beers. We also go to The Grecian Yearning, the cheapest breakfast place in Boston that happens to be within walking distance and where we can get the 1-1-1 special: one egg, one slice of toast, one piece of bacon for one dollar.

We never cook in the kitchen in Allston. I last another year in Boston and then leave the BFA program, and move to San Francisco. I say it’s for a summer job, a break from school, but I secretly don’t plan on returning. I leave behind a bed, a dresser, and even the cat. I hear about her from the friend who sublets the Boston apartment. He says she climbed a tree and wouldn’t come down, so he put hot dogs in a basket and with a rope around the handle he flung it over a branch. The cat blithely reached into the basket and pulled out a hot dog slice, speared on a claw on the one paw, and ate it. Eventually she got herself back down to the ground, as if she had planned it this way all along. She was a smart cat.

* * *

In the late 1970’s my grandparents had their kitchen re-modeled. My grandmother was ecstatic to have her old appliances replaced, to have new wallpaper, and a new linoleum floor—all in the popular colors and patterns of the time, avocado green and harvest gold. They even added a small bathroom near the basement stairs. The white

57 refrigerator was gone. I was heartbroken. My grandmother was so happy, and since I had never really expressed my love for the old kitchen, I couldn’t say a word. She said, “Let me show you the new ‘terlit.’” That’s how she pronounced “toilet,” and “oil,” was pronounced “erl.” Somehow it was a comfort, her saying this word in this way, and lessened my grief over the loss of the old kitchen. She was still there and it was still

Brooklyn.

* * *

My very last apartment kitchen was in a building on California Street, above the

Stockton Tunnel, in San Francisco. It was technically a studio apartment, where some genius contractor turned an old Murphy bed space into a bathroom and sectioned off a sliver of the main room to make a kitchen. There was a window in the kitchen that looked out across a parking lot at the brick building next door, but if one stuck one’s head all the way out of the window and turned it to the left, one could see the bay. It happened to be the part of the waterfront where cruise ships docked, so there were often fireworks for the big floating city ships as they departed. I had an apartment with a view. I called it the

“Barbie Dream Kitchen,” because the refrigerator, sink and stove were tiny, like toy appliances, although, thankfully, nothing was pink. There were shelves in a space that had formerly held an ironing board, so it was not very deep, but held soup cans well. I had a futon from an old boyfriend, a drafting table I’d found abandoned on a sidewalk, and books stacked against the walls.

My kitchen furnishings and equipment were equally minimal; I used a stovetop espresso pot bought at Cost Plus, and still had my bird whistle tea cups and radio spice rack. I had a small pot used for heating tea water, soup, spaghetti sauce, ramen noodles,

58 and Mexican hot chocolate. I was addicted to the latter, a brand called “Abuelita,” which are these chocolate-cinnamon disks or “tablillas autenticas de chocolate Mexicano” that come individually wrapped and stacked in a bright yellow and red hexagonal box, with a very sweet faced granny pictured on the front, sipping from her own steaming cup. It is delicious and super cheap—and really superb with a generous splash of brandy. This was what I made when trying to impress or seduce, or both. Hot chocolate is a comfort food for most of us, and Abuelita not only has the extra panache of being international, but it takes a while to make, allowing one to stir it seductively over the hot stove top while entertaining one’s guest with witty comments and mysterious smiles.

I found a kitchen table, abandoned in a pier shed on Fisherman’s Wharf, while taking a short cut to my job. It was a homemade wooden structure, made of junky plywood that someone had most likely thrown together for a makeshift worktable, complete with dings and paint splatters. I loved it but had no way to get it home. I asked

Russ, a guy I worked with who had a pickup truck, who also happened to be someone I secretly liked, if he could help me get it to my apartment. While I was still prone to bouts of wishful thinking, I had become much better at acting on ideas, and managed to, with finding this table, furnish my kitchen and move a budding relationship a little further along.

He had to park far away, nearly in Chinatown, and carry the new junky kitchen table three blocks uphill to my building. It fit perfectly under the window, the view window, which I immediately demonstrated as soon as the table was in place. I gave him my one chair, which he had to angle sideways from the table, as his legs didn’t fit underneath. I was utterly charmed by his bony knees pushing through his dirty work

59 jeans. I dumped the books out of two gray plastic milk crates, as nonchalantly as possible, and stacked them to make my chair. We sat and talked about music, movies, artists, watches, Wooey Looey Gooey—the restaurant in China Town he liked, riding bikes in the city, and the best coffee in North Beach, at Café Trieste.

I said I could make us something to eat, but didn’t actually have much to work with. I didn’t want to leave the kitchen. It felt like the table had brought us together and if we went away from it, the connection would end. Opening the refrigerator door, knowing it was nearly empty, I acted like I was checking the stocked shelves, while I was really only testing the viability of the lone carrot. I pulled out the carrot like a woman with a plan, grabbed a couple of packages of ramen from the ironing board shelves, and started to make a very odd soup. I sliced the carrot trying to hide just how rubbery it really was and added it to the soup, along with some walnuts, which were only slightly stale. With several vigorous dashes of Louisiana Hot Sauce, my all-time favorite condiment, it was edible. He seemed to like it and I liked making it for him in my tiny Barbie kitchen with a view of San Francisco Bay.

We did not have Abuelita and brandy that night, but we did a few months later, the night he stayed over. A while after that we got married and I moved to his house in

Pacifica. The kitchen in Pacifica was in a 1914 cottage that had been built by a stonemason, so the fireplace was a marvel of smooth river stones with an ornate wooden mantel most likely intended for a grander abode. He had also given great attention to installing beautiful crown molding and the front porch had a railing scavenged from the

Orpheum theatre in San Francisco when it had undergone renovation. All of the doorknobs were made of glass. The kitchen was the biggest room in the house.

It was remodeled in the 1930’s as evidenced by a long, turquoise colored enamel sink and thick lathe and plaster walls painted a dark brown. There were built-in cabinets on one wall although they were missing the glass doors, and there wasn’t a great deal of storage. My husband had lived in the house for years before I moved in and had made some interesting decorating choices, such as nailing wooden shingles to the kitchen wall.

Nevertheless, I embraced this kitchen and this house. While it still sometimes felt like I was playing house, it was a real working kitchen, and I felt I belonged in it. I had someone to cook with, to eat with, in a place we could fill with the aroma of good food, along with talk and laughter, and our own stories. There was a window above the turquoise sink, and as we had no automatic dishwasher, it was where every dish was washed, and every pot scrubbed. I liked to wash the dishes after dinner, looking into the dark window, not seeing anything except my reflection, which would disappear the longer I looked. This meditation over suds, warm water and pot scrubbing allowed memories to rise to the surface, conjuring moments with snippets of talk, or sometimes just the scent of the water and soap in the sink in Brooklyn.

Over seven years in that kitchen there were Valentine’s day dinners, Christmas breakfasts, our birthdays—our daughter’s first five birthdays, arguments about money and house cleaning, impromptu dances while cooking dinner, dinners with friends with lots of wine, and many, many, common, yet extraordinary, meals.

I learned the value of having collected so many rich memories as our time together in this house was shorter than I’d expected. My husband was fifty years old, I was thirty-five and our daughter was five, when one night a blood vessel in his brain burst, and everything changed. After six weeks in intensive care, some surgeries, some

61 moments of consciousness, an unbearable goodbye with his daughter over a cup of Jell-O intended to make us feel normal, and a kind doctor finally telling the truth—he died.

After the immediate flurry of activity and attention that happens when someone dies, I left for a couple of months with our daughter, to stay with a close friend in

Colorado, and then to spend time with my family in Los Angeles.

Evelyn, a good friend, stayed in the house in Pacifica while we were gone. On the evening we returned the lights were on, there was a fire in the fireplace and she had dinner cooking; she timed it so we would walk into a warm kitchen alive with a big pot of soup simmering on the stove, and the sweet scent of baking bread. She knew how helpful this would be; it’s one of the greatest gifts anyone has ever given to me.

* * *

We are in our next kitchen in Petaluma, my daughter and I, making pretzels for her Girl Scout cooking badge. They are not a success. Those that look remotely like a pretzel are hard enough to pound a nail into the wall. The rest are a sticky, gooey, un- moldable dough that never rose; I’m thinking I must have killed the yeast. I’m so sorry honey, I say, I think the water was too hot and I killed the yeast. Poor yeast she says, and then we both laugh. We start singing, “Ding-dong the yeast is dead, the yeast is dead.” I tell her we’ll try again later or tomorrow, and she says it’s okay, she’s not worried about the badge.

This kitchen is from IKEA, and while it looks nice, black and white and clean, it feels a little bland, like a “kitchen in the box for people on the go.” There is however a commercial kitchen Wolf stove with an oven big enough to hold two twenty-pound turkeys, a stovetop with six burners, and a griddle. It really could have used a room of its

62 own, where it might stand in the middle, with a spotlight, to be thoroughly admired by all. It was wonderfully useful, but a bit excessive given that there were just two of us and with my work and her school, we didn’t cook big meals. At least two of the Barbie stoves from my first apartment could have fit inside the Wolf. When I told people I had a Wolf stove, those in the know, the foodies, would “ooh” and “aah,” and nod approvingly.

When we were kids and my father went on business trips we sometimes had pancakes for dinner. We thought it was incredibly wacky to have breakfast for dinner; it was so thrilling to do things the wrong way! I now understand how this was likely a necessity, when my mother simply didn’t have the energy or the budget to cook a regular dinner for a bunch of kids. She was not a single parent, but she single-parented nearly two weeks of every month while my father was on the road for work. I use the griddle on the fancy Wolf stove for pancakes several times a week. It’s the perfect meal for a family of two, with one small income and the circle is unbroken: the cycle of cheap meals with one parent presiding, pouring rounds of batter, sighing over the stove, spatula in hand, feeding the kid.

My daughter is a resourceful child, able to entertain herself and inclined towards leading the kids in the neighborhood with ideas like “spy club,” where they peeked through windows in neighborhood houses and wrote reports on their findings: someone’s father is drinking a beer in front of the TV; another’s mother is wearing shorts in the backyard. Prior to having surgery on my foot, I show her how to make scrambled eggs and coffee, and tell her she will be in charge of the cooking for a few days. She takes on the task like an important mission, wears an apron, presents plates of eggs with salt and pepper shaker, napkin, and fork. She watches while I eat, asking how I like the eggs.

They’re the best scrambled eggs I have ever had. She is beaming. She makes excellent coffee, one time brings it bed side while I am still asleep, with a note that reads, “Here is some cofee to wram you up.”

I still have the note. Now in her twenties, she frequently makes scrambled eggs but has added grilled cheese and a few other staples to her recipe repertoire.

This is a lonely kitchen where I learn how to be a widowed single parent, making school lunches, and small kid-oriented dinners, having a glass of wine after dinner with the television on in the background for company. I begin to spy on my neighbor, an elderly gentleman who lost his wife in the prior year. We are on a slight incline, so my house is a little higher and looks down on his yard and the side door of his house. I watch him from my kitchen window as he meticulously prunes the miniature rose bushes that are in a row in a planter along the side of the house. He sits on a little stool, and with small clippers he prunes, dropping the bits of old rose into a little box. He finishes one miniature rose bush, gets up and moves the little stool a few inches and starts on the next miniature rose bush. It seems so tedious but he spends a great deal of time with this activity, and the roses are pretty. He doesn’t talk very much; the longest conversation we have is when he warns about squirrels as I am hanging a bird feeder. He hates squirrels, and tells me how delighted he was when he saw a hawk nail a squirrel in his driveway.

One day while spying from the kitchen window I see him with a woman, they are smiling and talking, as he shows her his garden and miniature roses. He opens the side door for her and they go into the house. It looks like they are on a date. I’m both jealous and happy for him. Another neighbor tells me it was a date, and in fact they are “a couple.” I don’t see him as often and he stops his frequent rose tending. I learn he is

64 spending more time at his companion’s home. I no longer have a subject to view out the kitchen window, someone else’s life to observe and to occupy my thoughts.

* * *

I am in my grandmother’s kitchen in Brooklyn visiting from California, five months pregnant and with my husband who has never been to New York. She has made a cold spread, which is deli food: pickled things, condiments-several kinds of mustard, and rye breads, dark and light, and wonderful meats and cheeses, things that we don’t usually eat in California. My grandfather has put on a tie for the occasion and my grandmother has opened a bottle of Cold Duck, because she knows I love champagne. I toast her, drink a little but (thankfully) I’m pregnant and can’t drink any more than a tiny sip. The kitchen, although not the original beloved one, is still appealing and I wonder what it is that makes it special: the place or the people, or these particular people in this place—or is it the food? My grandfather’s crumpled into himself, seems a little shrunken, his tie in several folds, with some crumbs on top, and his big arthritic hands in front of him on the table, one hand clutching the ever present glass of scotch. My grandmother is the same as always, and I’m on the verge of tears being here looking at her, listening to her voice.

She asks, “What’s wrong honey?” I say it’s the hormones.

After lunch, my grandfather shoves a fifty-dollar bill into my husband’s hand and says, “Take her out for a steak dinner.” My grandmother wants to wrap up some food for us to take, but we can’t keep it cold so we don’t take it. She is standing on the front stoop waving goodbye and smiling. I think of all the times I waved good-bye to her out the back window of our car, after countless Sunday dinners, that at the time I thought we’d always have.

This turned out to be the last time I was in my grandmother’s kitchen and when I think about it now I wished I had stayed longer, taken the deli food, and carved the picture of her at her sink into my brain just a little deeper.

* * *

The sign on the outskirts of town says, “Welcome to Paradise, May it Be All That the Name Implies.” There is a metal ring, a halo, hanging over the word “Paradise.” This kitchen I’m standing in now, in this small town in Northern California, has been mine for ten years, the longest time I’ve been in one place since leaving New Jersey. It is homegrown with funky plywood cabinets and a big pantry. The couple who lived here built the house, and they didn’t want to leave it, but it had become too much for them to manage. They moved to a trailer park in town, and lived well into their nineties, but they’re both gone now. The man used to show up every now and then in the first year I was here, to make sure I knew how things worked, like how to turn off the water. He had built lots of shelves in the pantry and laundry room, which were filled with sparkling clean canning jars. There are fruit trees in the yard and I imagine the woman made lots of jams and pickled things.

The kitchen, living room, and dining room are one room, not huge but cozy, and there’s a wood-burning stove that currently serves as our main heating source. The kitchen stove is electric because we’re situated beyond the gas lines in town. I cursed this stove at first, but have grown used to it and appreciate that the oven is convection which bakes evenly and quickly. I didn’t have a job when I first moved into this house, and so I gardened and cooked, and attempted canning.

There is a wonderful apricot tree in the yard that has three different varieties of apricot grafted onto the main trunk. I gathered buckets of the ripe fruit, looked up a recipe for apricot preserves, and pulled down some of the former homeowner’s jars from the pantry shelves. I had bought new lids, and had a big pasta pot that I thought would work, to process the jam. I didn’t quite have all the equipment: the thing that holds the jars in place in the pot, and most importantly the special tongs that are made to pick up the hot jars from the boiling water.

All was going well; the whole house smelled like apricots and summer; I felt like a pioneer woman, putting up the fruit so we’d have something sweet in the dead of winter. Then I tried to retrieve the jars from the boiling pot with a combination of spatula in one hand and heavy potholder in the other. I dropped a quart jar on the floor and it smashed, sending searing hot apricot mush all over the floor, the cabinets, my arms and face, and the stovetop. First I cried, kneeling on the floor wiping up the sticky hot stuff, and feeling sorry for myself because I didn’t have a job and I’d gotten burns from the hot fruit. Then I got angry, and cleaned the counters with a fierce determination to make this work, to take this kitchen on and make it mine. Still unfamiliar with an electric stovetop,

I turned the burner on high to “burn-off” the sugar syrup that covered the coils. It made a loud pop, there was a blue spark and flame, and then smoke—the electric coil had exploded. This has become my kitchen story, which really is a way to “own” it, making the kitchen mine.

I don’t have the same feeling for this kitchen as I do for my grandmother’s in

Brooklyn, which hasn’t been her kitchen for many years now, but I do feel a connection to the space that is on the same level. I am the one in the apron standing at the sink, albeit

67 sans seltzer and the perfect cucumber salad. On March 17, my grandmother’s birthday, I put out a cold spread, and the one photo I have of her in her old kitchen. She’s joking around, holding a head of lettuce on her head. We toast her, my second husband and my daughter and I, and I talk about her, imitate her voice—how when I called she would say,

“Al, Al, it’s Daria, all the way from California.”

I wash the dishes looking into the dark window above the sink. I see my reflection, my mother’s face, my grandmother’s, and then my daughter’s, and I imagine us laughing in a kitchen, this one or my grandmother’s in Brooklyn, or my daughter’s, that doesn’t yet exist.

Wonder Widow—Your Go-To Guide to a Fabulous Widowhood

Welcome to Widowhood—Decisions, Decisions

Your husband died—now what? You’re a w-i-d-o-w widow. Welcome to widowhood, the unexpected place you thought was only for old ladies. Wait a minute, you say, I’m only thirty-five and had a plan for the future, or at least a notion, and this wasn’t what it looked like. Well, as it turns out it can happen to anyone, even you.

However, even though your life has taken a screeching left turn into the unknown, it doesn’t mean you can’t do it with grace and ease. Think of all the widows you’ve admired in history—now, do you want to be a Jackie Kennedy or a crazy Mary Todd

Lincoln? I think you know the answer to that question, and if you don’t, that’s okay, because your husband died, and you’ve lost your mind.

You are in a daze of disbelief with your guts turned inside out, which is as good a time as any to make those first serious decisions: cremate or bury, urn or no urn, memorial or celebration of life, bash your head into the bathroom mirror or crawl under the bed and sob into the floorboards. So much to do. You may opt for sobbing, then hitting the bed with a tennis racket until you can no longer hold up your arms. Perhaps a sleeping pill or screaming into your pillow is your style—it’s a personal choice, remember it’s your grief to express any way you wish. One way or another, get yourself good and exhausted, have a ten-hour dreamless sleep, and you’ll wake up unrefreshed and not really ready to tackle those first few days of hell.

You’ve got an obituary to write, a memorial to plan, and you still need to tell people what happened. It’s a whirlwind of activity after he dies. Don’t worry; there’ll be plenty of time later to fret about the future, your financial situation, and being alone.

Right now it’s time to buckle down and be in full widow mode, feeling numb, then feeling a knife twisting in your gut, then numb again—Hey, you want to know, which is it? Silly new widow, it’s both! Oh, all kinds of crazy things come with a tremendous loss.

A Handy Shopping List for the New Widow

In order to be a successful widow, you’ll need a few supplies.

 First, invest in a pair of large, dark sunglasses that you’ll wear for

weeks after, maybe months, to hide your tears as well as the

scathing looks you cannot help but throw at idiots and happy

people. The ones who say, “He’s in a better place,” and, “You’re

so young, you’ll find someone else.”

 Don’t forget to pick up a box of extra-large, heavy-duty Hefty bags

to throw away the food “the helpful people who mean well” bring:

sad casseroles with masking tape labels, “Sue’s Tamale Pie” and

“Cheesy Veggie Lasagna.”

 Go to K-Mart to buy your five-year-old and yourself underwear

and tee-shirts because you can’t do the laundry, because laundry is

for normal people.

 Buy Cheerios, wine, and milk.

A few important reminders: pour extra dog food and cat food in their bowls in case you missed feeding them the day before, or the day before that; notice the way that time has lost all meaning and how night and day are merged, one ongoing shapeless blur that is now your life.

It’s Time for a Trip to the Mortuary!

You need to pick up his ashes at the mortuary. They will be in a plastic bag with a twist tie, inside a white cardboard box, and it will be smaller than you might have imagined, maybe the size of the box of Arm and Hammer baking soda you have in the refrigerator. After you unceremoniously receive the box you sit in front of the pasty- faced man behind the desk who is showing you a brochure with pictures of containers for ashes. You hear him say something about them being high quality, not Walmart urns, chuckle, chuckle. He’s asking you about music for the service, about an easel for a photograph of your husband, a guest book, and complimentary boxes of tissues. You notice when he takes off his glasses how dirty they are, and you wonder how can he see through those filmy, smudgy lenses? It occurs to you there are dead bodies in the next room and you can’t quite believe you are in this place for this reason. Eventually you’ll notice he’s waiting for you to talk. Stammer something about scattering the ashes, even though you have no idea what you’ll do with the box of baking soda that was your husband. Thank the man, and stumble out the door.

Put the box on the passenger seat and drive home. Turn on the radio; the music will make you cry. Get used to this, it’s just the beginning of your widowhood. Quick note on tears: they’ll happen a lot at first and at inopportune times, like in line at the grocery or while sitting in a meeting at work. You’ll see your workmates look at you sadly, understandingly, except that one, that woman from P.R. It’s almost like she’s jealous of your grief. She has no idea how badly she doesn’t want this kind of attention.

Wonder Widow Tip #11: Do your crying before you leave the house and avoid

those awkward public displays. Especially if the bagger at the grocery store grabs

a box of tissues when he sees you in line.

Pull up in front of your house, now it’s your house alone. Go to the passenger door to retrieve the ashes, like it’s an elderly relative you need to help into the house. Set the box on the kitchen table, open the top and take a look at the gray, pebble stuff in the baggie with the twist tie. Don’t pull it out, you might not get it back into the box, and then you’ll have to put it into something else, a salad bowl, a lunch bag, a shoebox?

Place the white box on the stone mantelpiece above the fireplace, and put his herringbone tweed work hat on top. Think about putting the headphones on the box too. This would have made him laugh. Sit on the couch, unable to move, until you realize the room is now dark and you need to pick up your daughter. There’s that pesky inability to notice time again!

Kids Say the Darndest Things

Your daughter is tired and ready for macaroni and cheese, bath, book, and bed.

You stumble through these tasks using some magical store of energy that comes from who knows where. You are grateful she appears to be in the here and now, and that she needs you. She is the sole reason you are able to get your ass out of bed at all.

Wonder Widow Tip #7: Sorry Widow—you still have to take care of the kids. To

get your ass out of bed when you are curled up in the fetal position having cried

until exhaustion, try putting on the Super Woman Persona, you know, the one you

pull out when you have nothing left. She’s stronger than you might think.

You read Badger’s Parting Gifts to your daughter, a book about sweet old badger who dies and leaves his friends his favorite things, so they will remember him and feel happy. She doesn’t like this book. She wants you to read the Everything Dies book, the one about how when things are alive they are breathing and moving, and when they are dead, they are not doing these things any longer. There is an example of an ant. The ant was alive, scurrying across the sidewalk, and then it’s not anymore, because it’s dead.

Somehow this book is the one that connects with your five-year-old. She asks you again when her dad is coming home. You tell her again that he died, he’s not coming back, like the ant in the book. She asks where he went. You say you don’t know.

The bank calls asking for your husband. You are asleep on the couch so your daughter answers the phone. She says to the bank lady, “No, he died.” The bank lady asks for you, and your daughter says, “She’s lying on the couch and can’t come to the phone.”

The next day flowers and a condolence card arrive from the bank.

Planning the Memorial – It’s a Cinch

You know he wanted no fanfare, no religious service, and no crying crowds, so you try to honor that while doing something for all the living people. They need something, a way to say goodbye. After talking to your mother you realize there needs to be food and drink, probably flowers, and singing, and poems, celebrations of life. Your mother talks about what’s appropriate. Now you want to throw up, but there’s nothing in you, so you don’t. You ask your friend whose husband owns a restaurant can you have the lunch there? She says yes, at cost. You wonder what that would be, but don’t ask and hope for the best. You work things out with the mortuary. You feel a little bad telling the

73 pasty-faced mortuary man on the phone that you don’t want his music, no candles, please don’t make a prayer card, and you don’t care about the tissues. Just the room, and the easel. Your crafty sister will make a photo collage. Your friend sings “What a Wonderful

World.” She was supposed to be accompanied by the saxophone-playing friend, but he is sobbing and can’t make sound come out of his instrument, so it all sounds much more mournful than you had intended. Your other friend, the really funny one, reads a David

Letterman-style top ten list for why your husband will be missed. Everyone laughs. You feel sad to a depth you didn’t think was possible. You look around the gathered crowd.

He knew more people than you realized, or maybe you just never thought about them all at once. You hold your daughter on your lap. She’s gripping you like a barnacle.

After the memorial, the people go to your friend’s restaurant near the beach for a buffet lunch. This is the same beach where you kissed your husband seven years ago, and he said kissing felt like talking, and where you walked the dogs almost every day, and where he dipped his daughter’s feet in the surf, and she laughed. The lunch is penne pasta and salad, and long loaves of garlic bread. How yellow the butter looks. You fight the urge to retreat to the restaurant kitchen to scrub a stovetop. You’ll watch, and thank, and smile, and hug. You’ll notice people talking softly and looking in your direction, with sad, sad faces. You’ll know they’re talking about you and it will annoy you, but you’ll smile, to be polite. It’s all part of the wonderful world of widowhood!

After the memorial, (or celebration of life if you call it that, it’s up to you— remember, it’s your loss), and the lunch at the restaurant, a second feeding happens at your home, where the out of town people and your family gather. Someone, you’ll never know who, put out more food, and people are draped on every surface in every room of

74 your house, talking, laughing, hugging, and crying. You are done with this part, but they are still here. The only place to go is the backyard where the sugar-infused children are running around going berserk, playing with some toy handcuffs. They handcuff you to the Adirondack chair and you pretend to be stuck. You break free and run after them yelling, “I’m free, I’m free, Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last!” The children shriek and run away, you chase them. Your mother comes out to the front porch and motions for you to come over.

She whispers, “I don’t think you should yell that so loudly, people might get the wrong idea.”

She’s serious. You laugh like a hyena.

The people finally leave. A gaggle of women stay behind to wash the dishes and clean the kitchen, while you take care of your daughter. You whisk past the women in the kitchen and out the door, saying you’re going for a walk. Thankfully they let you go.

You walk and cry, so that you can sleep.

Lose Your Husband, Lose Your Friends

Sorry new widow, but you didn’t just lose your husband. All those couple friends, the ones from work you went out to drinks with, the parent-couple friends whose kids’ birthday parties you went to, the good friends you spent holidays with and played poker with until 2:00 in the morning—they’re gone now. Without the other half of your couple, it just doesn’t work. No one wants to catch your disease. Now you get to reinvent yourself and find new friends as a single person, and not just any run of the mill single person: a widowed single person! Hooray.

Silver Lining—Extra Closet Space

Your practical “can-do” friend wants to come over to help you clean out his side of the closet, to get rid of his clothes and shoes. She thinks you need to do this to move on. How charming and helpful, and not at all presumptuous. Put her off as long as possible, and don’t forget, you can get away with being bitchy, thanks to being in grief mode—best excuse ever! You try telling her the truth, which is that you can’t yet open the closet door, let alone move his hat off of the top of the box of his ashes still sitting on the fireplace mantel. She keeps offering and eventually you are worn down, and you let her come over. She sets up “storage” and “give away” boxes, marking them with a fat sharpie, moving quickly and efficiently. She’s really into this. Your best bet is to sit at the kitchen table with a large glass of wine while she asks you what to keep, and what to give away.

Wonder Widow Tip #3: Wine.

You tell your friend you want to keep the red shirt—it smells like him—like dirt and pine needles and sweat. You don’t tell her the last part. She carts away a few bags and boxes. She’s happy, she did her part. You keep the shirt, the hat, some boots, his wallet, his wedding ring, all of his cameras, his guitar, his bass, his records, his mother’s things from when she died, the small lock of his hair you took at the hospital.

Money Pitfalls Every Widow Should Avoid

Oops! It’s too late. You crazy, liberal, do-gooder. You spent the majority of your working life slaving at non-profit organizations, made no money, and you never got life insurance. Darn.

Back in the Saddle

Months down the road, when everyone has moved on, the well-meaning friends gently start to ask if you’ve thought about “getting out.” You say no. They wait, and then ask again, did you know there’s a “Parents Without Partners” meeting at the Episcopal

Church on Monday nights? You laugh, and say no. But then one Monday you think about it. You call a widow buddy and you both go, just to check it out, just as an excuse to go out later for a drink or cheesecake. You surprise yourself by putting on lipstick. A thought crosses your mind: you wonder, will you ever be naked with a man again?

Probably not. The men in the church hall are worse than you, sad and wrinkled, all giving their best “making the best of it” faces. They swarm you. They’re looking for someone to take care of their children. They’re mostly divorced, with one or two widowers, their desperation is palpable and you think how nice it would be, to be in your bed, alone

(except for the dogs, cats, and child).

The well-meaning friend calls a few months later to say there’s a guy at work, he’s divorced, his daughter’s the same age as yours, just coffee, just friends, no big deal.

You make yourself make the date. You call the guy and he sounds normal, he says he loves coffee, you love coffee, already something in common. He comes to your house.

You are not ready yet. You are sweating, and nervous, and trip on a toy on the floor on

77 your way to the door. He sees you trip and fall on your knee; you laugh, but it hurts like hell. He asks if you’re okay as you open the door. He steps inside the kitchen and you notice he’s impossibly tall, at least 6’6.” He’s Lurch. You get together once more with your girls to go ice skating. It doesn’t go anywhere, and you’re not interested, but now you can say you went out with someone and stave off the rest of the well-meaning friends. Your widow buddy will say it’s just first pancakes, they always get tossed.

Holidays Still Happen

You go to your parents’ home at Christmas because you want your daughter to have a normal holiday, maybe even a fun time, and you don’t want to be in your own house. You may not pull your own Christmas ornament box out of the garage for a few years. At your parents’ home there is eating, and drinking, and kids, and toys. You let your brothers swing your daughter around, rough house with her, tickle her belly and make her laugh. It is achingly bittersweet to watch.

No one says his name. It’s hurtful and odd, and you can’t think of what to say so you say nothing too, and let tears stream down your face at the dinner table. No one says anything. You hear knives on plates, a spoon scoops potatoes. Finally, your outspoken sister-in-law, the one who annoys your mother so much, blurts out, “Why aren’t we talking about him, for God’s sake, we should toast him!” You laugh. Your mother is annoyed, but it’s funny.

Congratulations Wonder Widow—You’ve Made It Through Year One

The New Year passes, the other firsts happen without him—birthdays, back to school nights, Valentines. Then it’s the first anniversary of his death. You’ve made it a whole year Wonder Widow, and look how far you’ve come. There is an inkling, a tiny glimmer of it being survivable. It’s not yet a full-fledged feeling, but more of a feather blowing away in front of you that you make a half-hearted attempt to catch and hold. And now in front of you, you have the rest of your life.

To the Second Year and Beyond!

And you thought the first year was hell. Good grief, Wonder Widow! The first year, with all the things that had to be done, or fixed, or addressed, or decided, or thrown away, or remembered—that was just survival. Now it’s time to actually feel the loss. You are alone, you need to reinvent yourself, and you need to revise all of your plans—no big whoop!

Let’s start with an assessment test.

1) Select the answer below that best describes your bedroom situation:

a. You still sleep only on your side of the bed

b. The dog, cats, and children are still sleeping in your bed

c. You don’t make it to the bedroom, and instead fall asleep on the

couch, waking up with your face seriously creased from the stiff couch

pillows

2) Which scenario best describes your laughter response:

a. You don’t, nothing’s funny

b. You laugh at the wrong times, and a little too loudly

c. You compulsively snicker when someone gets really angry over things

like a parking ticket, or a scratch on their car

3) For dinner you like to make:

a. Pancakes

b. Wine

c. You can’t remember

Give yourself 10 points for all a, b, and c answers, add the total, and give yourself a pat on the back for your score of 30 or greater. Good job, wonder widow, you’re moving in the right direction!

Bullies

A seemingly benign exchange at work between myself and two colleagues: greetings, grousing about this crazy place, or that it wasn’t Friday, I don’t remember the exact words. Prior to this exchange, one of the women had been cool towards me on several occasions. I asked the other colleague if she knew what was wrong. She happened to be her sister, and told me that’s how she is; she said, “She’s my sister, and I love her, but I can’t explain about her anger—she holds onto things.” Her advice was to stay clear, give it some time, and her sister would eventually let go of it, whatever “it” was. I thought I had put it out of my mind. However, on this day, as I continued to chat, she appeared angry, and with a glowering expression she rushed past me, and out of the office into the hallway. I followed her out the door and asked what was wrong—had I offended her in some way? She refused to say what it was, because I “should know,” and since I didn’t, she couldn’t help me. She admonished me for interrupting her lunch break and said she didn’t have to talk to me. I begged her—I couldn’t do anything about it if she didn’t say what was wrong. This comment only seemed to fuel her ire. I realized I had not really forgotten about whatever it was, and couldn’t bear not knowing the cause of this anger being hurled towards me. I felt as if I’d been slapped in the face, a physical feeling I was acutely familiar with from reprimands of the past, as well as a mental sting that connected with something about being silenced. I didn’t ponder this last thought further, although I also could not let go of this unfortunate exchange.

The gentle-speaking human resources man suggested I write an email asking to talk, so we might resolve the issue, and be collegial. I wrote and re-wrote the three or four sentence email until it sounded as neutral, but not too neutral as to sound shallow, as

81 possible. Her angry response, copied to several others, accused me of thinking I was better than others, that my work mattered more, and that I had been rude to her and her supervisor, who was a department chair.

In this message she also accused me of being a bully.

This indictment flew off the screen and punched me in the stomach. Unknown to the accuser, I had been the victim of bullying through junior high school. The accusation seemed exaggerated and unfounded. The human resources guy said “bullying” is currently a common accusation from staff towards management. The difference in our positions was a workplace determination, not mine. I had been a staff person for many years before my current management level job; I thought of us all as staff. I was baffled, but wondered if I had acted differently towards this person at some point. I thought a great deal about my intense reaction to the accusation, nearly forty years after my own junior high bullying experiences.

Difficult memories started to swarm like provoked bees, and I found it impossible not to allow them to play out in my mind. I needed to understand the reaction this person had to something I said or did, whether or not she had other issues. She felt bad and in her mind I was the cause. I know the feeling. Considering myself the bully, rather than the bullied, was nearly unbearable. Why was this so?

I remember Kevin Fry. He was in my fifth grade class with Mrs. Armstrong, who is the first teacher I heard say a swear word when another classmate broke the filmstrip projector. Kevin was the smartest kid in the class and the tallest—at least a foot taller than everyone else. His legs didn’t fit under the desk in the usual bent-at-the-knee position, so he splayed them out to the side like a broken marionette. Flung over the top

82 of the desk, his white noodle arms ended in long thin hands with slender, white fingers hanging over the front like fringe. His head had a distinct peanut shape with the brain- holding end being extra roomy and very round. Perfectly even, crew-cut hair sprouted over his head in an orangey-brown color that reminded me of our side-of-the-house doormat. He didn’t have any friends. There were whispered mean names and suppressed giggles. I’m sure he heard them, they turned his face hot red. Mrs. Armstrong liked him because he always had the right answer, she could count on him, but she somehow didn’t get that she only made things worse. One time she complimented Kevin on his speed in solving a problem. Kevin, grinning with pride, said, “It was easy, Mrs. Armstrong, easy as pie, apple pie!” That was it for poor Kevin. One seemingly benign phrase, ironically uttered in a moment of greatness, and he was doomed for the remainder of fifth grade. I wonder if he ever ate apple pie again. He endured unending variations of “easy as pie, apple pie” taunts (made easy because Fry and pie rhyme, and due to the unfortunate emphasis Kevin gave the word “apple” when he first blurted out the phrase) by a small group of dominant kids led by the main bully, a boy named Aaron. The funny thing is I can’t remember his last name. Yet I can see his crooked, chipped front tooth, I can hear his vicious, high-pitched laugh, and I can recall him mimicking me when I read a haiku to the class. The poem was about pollution, and mentioned “revolution,” and I think the word “solution” as well. Mrs. Armstrong was beaming with pride, so I had to read it out loud when she asked. Hence, I became a blip on Aaron’s bully opportunity radar. What is the deal with rhyming—how many future poets were squashed at age ten, never to rhyme out loud again?

Eventually, a short respite came for Kevin Fry, like a miracle from heaven, when

Kim Rigdon peed her pants leaving a remarkably large puddle under her desk. While

Kim became the object of cruel teasing that involved the “psssssssss” sound being made every time she walked in and out of the room, despite Mrs. Armstrong’s pleas to be respectful and kind, Kevin could relax. I wonder though instead was he waiting with anxiety knowing it was inevitable, it would start again. Of course it did—he didn’t blend in, he was just too tall. Even when the kid who broke the film strip projector got a weird, super short haircut after an underwater mask for the pool melted on his head in the sun, it didn’t stop for Kevin. I recall feeling bad for him, but not bad enough to be his friend. I recently tried looking him up online, not quite knowing what message I might send, thinking whatever I wrote it would probably make me sound like a stalker. His name wasn’t on the alumni list for Somerville grammar school on the classmates.com site, but mine was, as was my brother John’s, along with Janice Godfrey, who was my first true bully.

The Godfreys lived two doors down and had four girls all with J-names: Janice,

Joyce, Jeannette, and Judy. I thought Mrs. Godfrey looked a little like Grandpa on The

Munsters T.V. show, but my perception was surely colored by the unfortunate interactions I had with Janice, the oldest, meanest, ugliest Godfrey of all. She wasn’t physically ugly. They were all pretty girls and in fact I once overheard my mother saying to another neighbor, “Those Godfrey girls have enviable hair.” Her comment felt like a betrayal and annoyed me to the ends of the earth. Janice terrorized all the kids in the neighborhood, kicking our can over and laughing when not officially playing Kick the

Can with us, stealing Halloween candy (an unconscionable act in the world of kids), and

84 just causing general mayhem. She was tall and big, only a year older than me, but she seemed much older, and therein most likely lay her raison d’être for bullying. She didn’t fit in with us, the little kids, and she didn’t fit in with the older kids in the neighborhood.

Plus, her parents were oddly strict, apparently banning their girls from the use of

Clearasil and the eating of English muffins.

Janice picked on me for a while because I was bossy during games. One particular game we played was a variation on “house” that involved Margie McQuillan being the dad and the rest of us fighting over who got to be her husband. Janice really wanted to be

Margie’s husband more than anyone and I was stuck on things being fair. I recall backing down, a sense of self-preservation overriding the desire for justice, but nevertheless it led to weeks of individual bullying and a few choice random acts of violence. We were picking strawberries in the Walker’s yard on a lovely summer morning, when Janice came up behind me and kicked my paper plate of strawberries out of my hand, and then kicked my head. I ran home crying, through the Walker’s yard, and across the

Cunningham’s, but by the time I reached our yard I was seething with anger and plotting revenge. On a fury-fueled mission, I emptied nails out of a coffee can in the garage, dropped a few back in, and went looking for dog crap. I found a stick and mixed, in the can, a huge dog turd, the nails, some dirt, ketchup, syrup, spit, water (for better consistency), pepper, sugar, a Virginia Slims cigarette, and dish soap. I walked two doors down, looked left, looked right, and then poured the magic voodoo stuff from my coffee can cauldron onto the front walk of Janice Godfrey’s house. It was incredibly satisfying. I had a few days of fearing retribution or parental involvement, but it never happened. My

85 mojo worked, or maybe the act of making and delivering it helped me to retrieve my dignity and power.

Either way, unfortunately, the idea of taking action, of retrieving the power, of getting mad instead of sad, didn’t take hold. I suffered future bullying in silence and shame, which created a hard stone of hurt that attached itself to the middle of my sternum, and grew to become a palette of bricks, pressing down on my chest and making it hard at times to breath. I am grateful now there was no mechanism for cyber-bullying at the time, no cell phones so no prank calls or texts, no social media hate campaigns.

These new vehicles for spreading hate and crushing souls seem insurmountable to me, even now as an adult. Starting in the seventh grade at Benjamin Franklin Junior High I just dealt with plain old name calling, spitting, rumoring, cruel remarks, dodge-balls-in- the-face style bullying, mostly from the dreaded Tricia Clooney, my personal bully through the ninth grade.

Tricia was in my Girl Scout troop in the fourth grade, but aside from the time she accidentally, totally on purpose, threw my new canteen down a ravine during an unpleasant hike (hiking badge), we didn’t have significant interaction. The troop was not cohesive to begin with; I think the leader was having what I would now recognize as a nervous breakdown. She laughed like a maniac when someone spilled paint on her kitchen floor (craft badge), and had constant puffy eyes and red blotches on her face like she’d just been crying. At times she’d appear angry, her eyes red and popping out of her head, but her voice came out slow and sweet: “Kim, that is boiling oil and will cause severe burns if you keep fooling around by the stove” (cooking badge). Her disappointment in our lack of enthusiasm was palpable. The girls in this troop were just

86 not that into being prepared or earning badges. The troop eventually disbanded and we went our separate ways to different schools until junior high. Tricia’s initial taunting was tied to the fact that I hung out with Mr. Lucas, the earth science teacher, in his classroom after class. During a frighteningly violent game of bombardment, a variation on dodge ball that is probably now banned, one of the red balls found my face, and in the ensuing shock and stinging pain I heard the piercing screech of Tricia Clooney from across the gym, “You fuck Lucas!” She screamed “fuuuuck” and “Luuuuucas” in a drawn-out banshee wail. I should have mixed an anti-banshee potion and poured it into her gym locker. Instead, I ignored it, my face hot from embarrassment as well as from the ball.

The two gym teachers were watching, they had to have heard her, but they did nothing, and I certainly wasn’t going to snitch or be a cry baby. Until I was home, alone in my room and under blankets, where I could cry until exhaustion and sleep. The shame, embarrassment, and hot tears were all shoved down, and stored away in a protected place that grew not in size, but in density, so that it became a weight, both literal and figurative.

A protective shield that both deflected and absorbed pain and hurt.

Over time the incidences with Tricia increased, becoming meaner and sometimes physical. She would “accidentally” bash into me in the hallway, sending books and papers flying, shouting saccharine sweet apologies and then laughing like a hyena in concert with her posse. Anything could be latched onto and turned into a torture moment: wearing the same pants two days in a row, my hairy arms, anything new or different

(hair, notebook, shirt, earrings, make-up, etc.), or attention from a teacher. She was like a mean junkyard dog who you didn’t make eye contact with, or else. If she saw me go into the girls’ room, she and her posse would follow and say horrible things about me,

87 pretending they didn’t know I was there. I was the sole target of their cruelty, which escalated from mean taunts to smashing a jelly donut in my face in the cafeteria. This led to more damaging feats of viciousness like starting the rumor that I was a lesbian when I had to have my hair cut exceedingly short, due to my unfortunate choice to allow my cousin to give me a “permanent.”

It took a long while to recover from this time, and to re-build my squashed self- esteem.

Mercifully, junior high ended, and Tricia Clooney faded into the crowds of our high school. I didn’t see her again until a couple of years after high school. I happily sought the company of and was embraced by the bohemian types in high school, who were identified as “the wall people,” because they hung out on a wall near the football field and smoked before and after school. They were the artists, musicians, writers, and actors. I remember hearing a story about Tricia getting drunk at a party and then peeing in the back of Ann Murphy’s mother’s van. I didn’t feel sorry for her, and I can’t say my response wasn’t a tiny bit cheerful upon hearing this story. There was no doubt, however, that Tricia Clooney was in pain herself. Junkyard dogs aren’t born mean. I didn’t know what her family life was like, but I knew she was Irish and her father was in the Knights of Columbus, as was mine. Could he have slapped her face, or cruelly called attention to her chunky thighs, or embarrassed her in front of her friends? Did she look in the mirror and feel she was unattractive? Maybe she would have been less of a threat if I’d known one or two of these things, or had the wherewithal to find one thing we had in common.

Something that might have helped to explain her focus on me in the first place.

The current spate of public service commercials on television are about empowering the bystanders, those who don’t engage in the bullying, but who also don’t speak up. I think about Kevin Fry every time I see this one commercial where they show real footage of a kid being teased on the school bus. The other kids won’t let him sit down, then they poke and pull at him, and one nasty child hits him on the side of the head. The kid tries to shout back, without conviction, telling the kids to stop. All of the other kids on the bus just watch, no one says a word. I watch this and think of Kevin Fry, and I feel the pressing on my sternum, the bricks that were piled there such a long time ago. My hope is that Kevin Fry is laughing about this wherever he is or better yet, that he doesn’t remember us, and he eats apple pie with abandon.

I was home from college on winter break and walked into a downtown bank to deposit a check. Standing in line I was filling out a deposit ticket, signing the back of the check, and I didn’t look up until I was right at the window. I heard, “May I help you?”

Looking up with a smile I was suddenly facing a broad, familiar face, close enough to see the cracks in her make-up. I felt my smile involuntarily disintegrate while I simultaneously wondered if it was noticeable. Tricia Clooney grinned back at me.

She squinted a little, cocked her head to the side, and with the incredulity of the longest lost friend in the universe, said, “Daria? Oh my God, how are you?”

“Fine . . . you?”

I forced a smile out of ingrained politeness and she prattled on about working at the bank, asked me about college, asked did I know Linda Marmion worked at the furniture store across the street, wished me happy New Year. I was stunned, yet somehow

I murmured the appropriate responses and kept the ridiculous grin going through the transaction. I was transported as if in a dream to the sidewalk, passersby looked like

Fellini characters, and I fumbled for the keys to my mother’s station wagon. Had I missed something? Had we come to some agreement to forgive and forget and I blocked it out, or had she forgotten completely, or was she pretending all was well? Or, could she be holding a completely different memory of our special time together? This threw me for a tremendous loop at the time, but I now think more along the lines of who this girl

Tricia was, and what may have been the root of her behavior. Truthfully, it’s a story I like to tell. I tried to look her up online. It’s almost automatic to do this with anyone from the past. There were no links related to a Tricia Clooney in Ridgewood, New Jersey. While searching I did see a news story about a 300-pound black bear who appeared near an elementary school in Ridgewood, not far from where I grew up. It ran from police and animal control for several blocks and then climbed forty feet up a tree, where eventually it was shot with a tranquilizer dart. The crowd that had gathered gasped as the bear fell from the tree, and then collectively sighed as he landed safely on an inflated mat. The animal control guy said to the news person that the bear could have been angry, possibly injured, could have turned on the crowd at any moment. Luckily he was scared and ran up the tree. I remember Tricia Clooney, and I remember the hurt and shame I felt thanks to her relentless attacks. I’m also now wondering—had she been frightened, or hurt? Did she also cry under the blankets and not tell anyone?

There’s nothing like having your child enter junior high to bring the back the horror, the horror. The bright side is you get to impart your wisdom, make it different and better for her, and provide her with the armor to protect her from every nasty mean girl and queen bee who could possibly diminish her joie de vivre. The challenge, however, is that she really doesn’t want to hear a goddamned thing you have to say. Hannah played basketball in the seventh grade and loved it. I was overjoyed to think somehow I had created an athlete, a sporty girl who wore basketball shorts, and not just on the court, despite the fact that neither her father nor I had any athletic ability or interest to save our lives. However, by the eighth grade basketball became more serious, and she was benched for the better part of most games. It was hard to bear, and even though I “tsked” at the loud mouth parents, always shouting at their girls in the game, I yelled out, “Put in

Hannah!” Hannah banned me from all future games, unless I promised not to ever shout anything from the bleachers.

Thankfully she found her niche in music with band, where they exalted in their geekiness and proudly celebrated the tradition of the band nerd. She had found her own tribe early and in fact became a benevolent leader in band through high school. It was different for her than it had been for me. She had a few isolated issues with a few mean girls that were straight out of Rosalind Wiseman’s book, Queen Bees and Wannabes.

There was one where one girl calls another, and gets her to talk about a third girl who is secretly listening in on the conversation. Girl one and girl three then turn on girl two for talking smack about girl three. Hannah’s friend Alicia had invited her and another girl over after school one day. Alicia and the other girl had taken Hannah’s new Converse high tops, somehow tricked her into going outside, and then locked her out of the house.

She walked home in her socks, crying, but expressly did not want me to do anything about the situation. I honored her wishes, and the very next day she somehow worked it out with those girls. I still wanted to go after them.

Hannah got past it quickly, and spoke about it easily, and there is the big difference. She talks about what happens to her. I’m grateful and relieved she could talk to me, and at the same time I’m sad for my junior high self who wasn’t able to talk with her mother. I’m sure I didn’t hear every detail of every event, but I knew a lot more about

Hannah’s life outside of our home than my mother ever knew about mine. Neither of us suffered the extreme bullying that we hear about today on the news and afternoon talk shows, where cyberbullying leads to suicide.

Bullying has been around a long time, but it seems to have gone to a much more extreme and darker place thanks in part to the new vehicles with which a bully can cause harm. Cyberbullying includes things like sending hurtful or threatening emails or instant messages, and spreading rumors or posting embarrassing photos of others online.

Research has shown however, that sixty-eight percent of cyberbullying victims spoke up about their harassment to friends, parents, or other authority figures. While bullying is nothing new, according to the American Psychological Association there is greater awareness by parents and authorities, and psychologists have identified new ways to prevent it. When I was a kid there was more of a “children will be children” attitude, but now we are looking at what makes a person become a bully, and what makes a person likely to be a victim of bullying.

Many programs have been developed to build awareness and reparation campaigns are becoming more common, as in the case of the sixty-eight-year-old New

York school bus monitor who was horribly bullied by four junior high school students.

Karen Klein’s ordeal with the students on the bus, where they hurled insults and profanity, threatened and demeaned her, was captured by another student on a cell phone.

The video went viral and led to a fundraising campaign led by a former bullying victim whose goal was to raise $5,000 to send Klein on vacation. Amazingly, 30,000 people form eighty-four countries contributed $703,833. Thanks to this gift, Karen started the

Karen Klein Anti-Bullying Foundation with the message, “Your single act of kindness changed my life forever, now we will stop bullying in America.” I hope she also went on a vacation or two.

Karen Klein’s story feels like a victory for all bullying victims. My bullies gave me good stories. Was it worth the pain, shame, and humiliation? That’s hard to say yes to, but they certainly shaped who I am, and helped to focus my creative expression, first as a means of survival and now as a way to connect and share. My recent work incident conjured the junior high memories compelling me to think and write about Tricia

Clooney and others. Perhaps I should be grateful to my accuser. I am thinking about how she feels. Recently, she saw me struggling at a door with too many books and bags in my arms. She smiled and held the door open. I felt a rush of gratitude a bit over and above the level needed for the courteous, yet small act of holding a door. This was more than that, at least for me it was. Perhaps what anyone said or did, or didn’t do or say, is less important than the fact that this person felt bad. I have not expressed this directly to my colleague, but the incident has made me more mindful of my interactions with all colleagues, and in particular with how I say whatever I say. The tone and intention matter a great deal. Understanding the bully is of course an idea with great merit. There may be

93 pain in their hearts, or undeserved shame, or they may have unknown health issues, or anxieties. On the surface of their behavior we see malice, underneath there is the reason.

No one is born mean, not dogs, not people, not Tricia Clooney, not me.

Booth’s Anatomy

I collect doll parts—the legs, arms, hands, and heads. Taxidermy fascinates me, in particular when it is done very badly, but with great effort and all good intentions. Old science class illustrations of the human body, or parts of plants, or how a cow digests grass, or how the brain sends messages, are a favorite vintage store find. These things are connected as I have a sincere interest in bodies and living organisms. I like knowing anatomy, all the parts, bones, muscles, blood vessels, organs, and how they fit together, and I’m particularly intrigued by weird or random body facts, like there are a trillion bacteria cells in your gut. That’s like multiple galaxies of living things in everyone’s middle. We are all universes!

I went to an exhibition about the human body, called “Bodies,” where they had the real parts, vertical slices of a real cadaver in plexi-glass, so you can see all the bits and pieces, like giant baloney slices with olives. One plexi-glass body showed the entire circulation system, with real human blood vessels, colored red and blue. A sign next to the blood vessel body says there are 60 million miles of blood vessels in the human body, enough to circumnavigate the globe, twice! I am fascinated by this display and find I can’t look close enough, my nose pressed to the plexi-glass body, trying to see the intricacies of capillaries in a thigh, until a guard admonishes me. I could have been a doctor, a surgeon, actually.

There are twenty-six bones in your foot, and did you know that when you blush, the lining of your stomach blushes too? I think I’ve felt this, my stomach blushing. I intended to write anatomical stories about my own body parts, from head to toes, spring boarding off of some of the fun body facts I so enjoy. However, the stories diverged from

95 this idea and have taken their own path, although I’d like to think they fit together in some kind of system. Did you know our bodies are made up of 7 octillion cells? Who counted them?

Head

My head is large, as is my husband’s, and my daughter’s, but other than needing to find the large, at least size 7 ½ ball cap, cloche, cowboy hat, or what have you, it isn’t a great concern for any of us. You might be glad to know there are twenty-two bones in your head, including all the facial bones. Head shape isn’t typically noticeable, unless you’re bald or have little hair. Or if it has a particularly odd shape. My friend Suzanne’s son has a large head that is exceptionally flat at the back, as if it were Playdoh that had been pressed onto a table top. She had shown up one day at our door with her husband and twin sons, on their way home to Crescent City, after visiting other friends in the Bay

Area. I hadn’t seen the boys since they were infants. One was small, had dark hair, and large, brown, soulful eyes. The other had white blond hair, twitchy blue eyes, and a head with a flat surface, unobscured by a mess of knotted hair that stood out straight, like he had frayed welcome mat back there.

It was a little odd that this family had shown up out of the blue, but they were hippie types who didn’t adhere to typical visitor protocol. The boys were around six years old and only interested in video games. The adults sat around the kitchen table while the boys lay on the floor by the television, along with my daughter who was eleven and appeared completely unaffected by this unusual visit or anyone’s head. The flat-headed

96 boy’s profile was in my sightline and it kept pulling my gaze towards it with a strange force, more powerful than the television screen or an accident scene on the freeway.

How did this happen? Was it the result of leaving a sleeping baby on his back to long—one of those admonitions a new mother hears from her weird aunt or pushy grandmother?

“Put the baby on his side or his head will be misshapen.”

“Put the baby on his back or he’ll suffocate.”

“That cat will suck the breath out of the baby.”

“Don’t bounce the baby in your lap, he’ll end up bowlegged!”

The truly striking thing in this whole scenario was my inability to focus on the conversation, such was my preoccupation with the poor little guy’s noggin. Inwardly embarrassed and in a weak attempt to keep my attention on the kitchen table talk, I asked my friend about her boys, the twins, how were they different? As the words spilled out my face flushed hot, and I felt a flashing red light of fear imagining that she would think I was talking about their physical difference. Of course, she answered readily and without any sign of offense about how one boy is quiet and likes music and books, and the other is more “rough and tumble,” and always wants to be outside. So odd that I would have thought she would think this and even odder that I started to feel like I wanted to touch it, the back of his head.

Years later I got phone call from Suzanne. They were in Idaho now, near her mother, where she’d grown up. The boys were sixteen, in high school, taking Driver Ed, and one had a girlfriend. I couldn’t remember which was which by name, and was afraid to ask as I could only think of the difference in their heads. I also didn’t want her to think

I didn’t remember, but I suspect she caught on anyway. Later I mentioned to my daughter that I’d heard from my friend, did she remember, the family with two boys who showed up one night, unexpected. Yeah, she said, I remember that kid with the flat head--that was kind of weird. Not once in the years following their visit had she mentioned this, until this moment. And now, while they are not a common topic of conversation, when the family who showed up one night somehow arises in our thoughts and conversations, they are referred to as the ones with the flat-headed boy.

Eyes

If the world were flat, the human eye could see a flickering candle light thirty miles away. My irises are grayish blue, with brown spots, not unlike a robin’s egg. I never thought much about this, but do enjoy that my optometrist comments on them at every visit, and he has for years, always broaching the topic with, “Have I ever talked about the interesting color in your eyes?” I now say, yes, you have, but remind me. He told me if I had glaucoma, and had to use the recommended eye drop medication, my eyes would turn brown. I ask him to confirm that I don’t have glaucoma, and tell him about my cat who had it, and had to have his eye removed. This is the story I tell him at each annual visit, and I have for years, and he politely listens, and seems as interested as the first time I shared the tale.

The vet at the humane society sighed deeply, and with a practiced solemn tone said he was sorry, it’s glaucoma, and the best course would be to remove the eye. The left eye had grown quite large due to fluid trapped behind the lens that wasn’t draining. His sight in that eye was mostly likely gone, and he was in pain. We asked how much? He

98 said the pressure is constant, it is likely to be quite painful. We said that’s awful, but we meant the cost of the surgery. He said around $450. Just to remove an eye? He said there’s anesthesia, after-care, and medication. We agreed to have him remove Skitzo’s left eye, not knowing exactly how we were going to pay for the surgery.

Skitzo was a very large, beloved, white cat who at the time was the center of the household in San Francisco I shared with Kieran, a former boyfriend. He shared our loft bed, he walked on a leash, and strange enough, but oddly endearing, he masturbated on the colorful afghan on the couch, the one crocheted by my grandmother. He held the blanket in his mouth, and clutched it with his two front paws, and then went to town doing his thing.

We cherished this cat who charmed all who lived in our South of Market neighborhood, from the bail bonds men to the criminals leaving the Hall of Justice that was just across the street, to the older people who lived in the skinny and sad railroad flats below us. We decided to have a fundraising party to raise the $450 and succeeded in reaching a little over half that amount. The humane society kindly allowed us to make payments on the remaining balance.

I made him a little black eye patch for the party that, true to form, he wore with the same willingness he had for the leash. A few years later, after I’d left that household

(cat custody was retained by the boyfriend), Kieran called to say that Skitzo had disappeared. This was the cat that had played the baby Jesus in our Christmas card photo.

The cat for whom we ate ramen for a few weeks in order to take care of his glaucoma.

The cat who was our focal point, and who, when I finally moved out, I missed more than anyone.

Nose

Shostakovich’s first opera, The Nose, is a satirical work based on Nikolai Gogol’s story about a St. Petersburg official whose nose leaves his face and develops a life of his own. It’s a delightfully funny and vibrant opera with a happy ending where Kovalyov, the official, wakes up with his nose reattached and he joyfully dances a polka. Seems to me this piece has Disney written all over it—just imagine the cute little nose character. He could be voiced by Will Ferrell and learn important lessons in life! The merchandising possibilities would be endless. This is a funny idea, but the truth is that I am actually afraid of losing my own nose. Three times now I’ve had a pre-cancerous “thing” burned off my nose. It has a name and Dr. Vanucci, the dermatologist, tells me each time what it is, but I don’t seem to be able to retain the word. I am too busy imagining my noseless face.

The third nose procedure included a biopsy which involved a shot of numbing drugs between my eyes, and then the cutting out of a wee square of flesh from the top of my nose, as if a Lego piece had been embedded there and when pulled it extracted a few layers of epidermis. All because I ran around every summer of my youth at the Jersey shore with nary a drop of sunscreen. I don’t remember anything about SPFs and we sure as hell didn’t have the special hats and clothing for protection. Ozone schmozone! My poor old dad had serious sun damage that turned into skin cancer on his ears. They always stuck out and so they were an easy target for the ruthless sun. About sixty years later he had to have good portions of the tops of his ears removed and, to make it look

100 better, the surgeon fused his ears to his head. He was thrilled—finally his ears didn’t stick out. I’m not so enthusiastic about my nose one day requiring augmentation.

There is however a wide world of nasal prosthetics and in fact, it’s referred to as an art, which makes sense as it is like sculpture. Rhinectomies (surgeries to remove the nose) are more common than one might think and, thankfully, there are surgeons/artists who have created prosthetic noses that look quite good. I’m not terribly comforted by this, but glad to know there is something that can be done should I start to resemble

Voldemort. I ask my husband if would still love me if I was bald. He says yes, of course.

I ask if he would still love me if I was bald and had no nose—just two holes in my face below my eyes. He takes a little too long to answer and I snap at him. Really, tell me, I demand. He looks like he’s in pain, and he says don’t be ridiculous. I think if he Googled

“rhinectomy” he’d be singing a different tune. I can only slather the SPF 80 goo, the

Cadillac of sunscreens per my dermatologist, on my nose and try not to think about it.

Mouth

Breathing, eating, tasting, talking, singing, smiling, frowning, kissing are all great reasons to love and appreciate your mouth. And I do, especially eating and kissing.

Pondering my mouth however, other than the times I’m worrying about a tooth, or breath, or smeared lipstick, I think more about it in terms of mouthing off. My mouth has gotten me into trouble many times but then it also has gotten me out of same said trouble. I suppose it’s a gift of sorts.

I was watching the Dr. Phil show, as always drawn to the stories people tell about their horribly dysfunctional families on national television. He proceeded to tell off a

101 sullen teenager with a saying he learned from his father, “Your mouth is writing checks your ass can’t pay.” This made me think of one I heard often enough growing up, “Many a time a man’s mouth broke his nose.” I didn’t get it at first. I admitted to this at some family gathering which prompted a raucous burst of laughter from the adults. Not entirely sure whether I should be laughing along with them, pretending to be in on the joke, or furious at the possibility of being laughed at, I went with the latter. My mouth took over and blurted out, “It’s as funny as my Dad’s belly.” He had a beer belly that made him look pregnant. No one laughed at first. My mouth held an angry smile that started to quiver as the adults looked towards my Dad, waiting for his response with a few titters here and there. “There goes that mouth,” was all he said, and then he laughed. I got away with it.

Breasts

A compulsive doodler, my journals are filled with drawings and cartoons, and I am prone to drawing self-portraits. I did a series of drawings of my breasts while in different positions, showing how when I hold my arms at various heights, the breasts move up or down. If I hold my hands really high over my head, my breasts look absolutely amazing. Some might say I’m preoccupied with this body part. Perhaps so.

When I worked at Stanford University, I sometimes walked over to the Cantor Art

Museum to eat my lunch in the Rodin sculpture garden. In this small and beautiful place adjacent to the Museum’s café, there is a bronze sculpture of a reclining nude, her legs together and elegantly swung to her side, her arms draped over her head, and her breasts absolutely upright—nipples kissing the sky. No real breasts can defy gravity this way,

102 and only some fake or augmented breasts can stand that erect from a reclining torso. Even the fakes tend to be either looking in different directions, or somehow lean out, at least a little.

Nevertheless, I loved this reclining woman, because she looked so relaxed, it was relaxing to look at her. I named her Camille after Rodin’s mistress and muse, who was a sculptor in her own right. She may well have been Camille, or if not, she was probably a model that August stupidly fooled around with, right under Camille’s nose.

I felt rather loyal to her. If I arrived with my brown bag lunch, and someone else was sitting on the nearest bench, I would wait to eat until we could be closer. She kindly and helpfully informed my own reclining poses in bed. I experimented with holding my arms over my head just so, not to try to achieve the impossible standing breast at attention, but to display them in the best possible position, so they weren’t like pancakes sliding off the plate. This was done during the time when the person sharing the bed with me, especially if they were new, went to the bathroom. Upon their return, I would still be sleeping as beautifully as possible, with only the tiniest breathing sounds, perfectly positioned breasts gently rising and falling. Thank you, Camille.

One day as I was leaving the sculpture garden, I stood for a moment by my nude, admiring her stunning breasts, and reached down to touch one. It was so smooth, a perfectly curved shape, the bronze was gently warmed by the sun. My reverie was interrupted by the feeling of being watched, and of course there was a woman on a nearby bench who had observed the whole thing. She smiled and said, “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

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Ears

I was finally allowed to get my ears pierced in 1973 when I was in the sixth grade but was only permitted to wear “post” earrings, nothing dangling. The only exception was a gift from my grandmother, tiny Holly Hobbie earrings, dangling but dorky. We’re going to Grandma’s—go put on the Holly Hobbie earrings. I yearned for giant hoops or peacock feathers, both major earring trends at the time.

My mother had returned to work as a travel agent, and I was watching my baby brother who was about six months old. I had put him down in his crib for a nap, and when he was asleep, I went down to snoop in my mother’s room, my main activity when she out. I rifled through her jewelry box, touching each familiar necklace and ring, enjoying the perfumed and musty scent that rose up from velvet lined box. The coveted silver hoop earrings were in the box, the ones that looked like the ones worn by Dorothy, the cool teenager down the street. These were the earrings my mother wore with her paisley scarf when she was doing something interesting, like going into the city for lunch with her divorced friend. I put them on and admired myself in the mirror. I loved how the shiny metal felt brushing against my neck.

My brother started to cry. I quickly closed the jewelry box and ran upstairs to his crib. He was wet of course, so I carried him to the changing table and cleaned him up. As

I lifted him from the table, he reached out with his chubby little hands, and gleefully grabbed each earring hoop, closing his fingers around them, and then he pulled. I held in a scream and ran to the bed, where I laid him down and pried each surprisingly strong little finger from the earrings. There was blood. I plopped him back into his crib, and with a tissue wiped the blood off his fingers, which made him laugh. I ran to the bathroom to clean

104 my sore and bloody lobes, and twisted handfuls of toilet paper around each ear, until I looked like a giant paper mouse who was going to be in big trouble. I rinsed and dried the earrings and tore downstairs to put them back exactly where they’d been, before my mother returned. I pressed and pressed the toilet paper into my ears until the bleeding stopped and then tried to put the boring gold post earrings back in the torn pierced lobes. It hurt and they looked bad, but it was easier to deal with this, than with the wrath of my mother.

Undoing my braid, I brushed my hair forward, and kept my head tilted slightly forward for a few days. She never knew.

A more recent earring trend are ear gauges, super popular with the young and hip.

I thought I’m already halfway there with my torn lobes. They’re healed, but the wholes are long, and some of my earrings will go right through the hole I had no desire though to actually engage in ear gauges and forewarned my daughter that this body manipulation would never be okay with me. Naturally, she came home one day with little gauges in her ears. “They’re only ear stretching plugs,” she cried, “no big deal.” I reached up and felt my extended lobes and managed to keep my mouth shut. Thankfully, she decided on her own to forgo the fashion trend and her perfect little ear lobes went back to normal.

It’s nothing new. Most Buddha statues across different cultures and through the ages show the earlobes as elongated and often pierced. This isn’t a spiritual thing, rather it was a style in ancient India where men and women commonly wore ear plugs. Children had their ears pierced and a small clay cylinder was inserted. Increasingly larger ones were put in the lobe holes until they stretched nearly down to their shoulders. I shared this with my daughter, pointing out how everything old is new again. She said maybe she should put the gauges back in, and be more like the Buddha. Go for it I said, but imagine when you

105 are grandma’s age, your ear lobes will be touching your shoulders and flapping in the breeze. She said, “I’d be a cool grandma then.” I had no reasonable or intelligent response.

I just felt my longish lobes and let it go.

Feet

All of the women in my family on my mother’s side have big feet. I actually used to lie about my foot size which is ridiculous, since you can’t really lie because they’re right there, in view, at the bottom of your legs. So the lie I typically told would be subtracting a half size, especially if someone else said she wore size 10. I would quickly say, slightly apologetically, “Oh, I’m a 9 ½.” A woman is highly likely to know when another woman is lying about her feet, but maybe it falls into the category of the lies we all know we tell, but allow ourselves to tell anyway:

Can you believe it, I lost 7 pounds in three days!

Are you kidding—I broke up with him!

It’s not new, I’ve worn it before, you just haven’t noticed.

My feet are in fact a size 10. My Aunt Isabel, my mother, my cousins Lori and

Christine—all 10s. I am still envious of those dainty 7 ½’s and even 8’s, but when it is a

9, sorry sister, you’re in my category.

The gift to all large-footed women, and men who wear women’s shoes, is

Nordstrom’s Rack. The famous retailer, well-known for shoes, sells in their outlet stores the designer shoes in ginormous sizes worn by those 6’2” models—who, if they had smaller than size 11 feet, would topple over. I have shared moments of sheer joy in the

“size 10 and up” rows at Nordstrom’s Rack with women who, nearly in tears, find

106 beautiful shoes in their size. Finding the shoes you really want, in your size, with no need to special order, is as good as it gets in retail experiences—and most other experiences for that matter.

There is a certain fellowship of the foot amongst women with larger feet, and in my family, the mere mention of feet brings to mind a favorite story of a modern dance performance in New York. The Aunts and female cousins all went to the Dance

Umbrella, a famous dance theatre on 2nd Avenue that featured new works by groundbreaking choreographers. My Aunt had gotten tickets for the group, five of us next to each other in the middle of a row. On the stage was a grid of twelve plexi-glass boxes, about the size of a paper tray, or a small shirt box. They were filled with water. The show began with sound effects coming from a balcony—a woman in a feathered cap making squawking bird sounds. This would have been enough to set us off, but then the dancers entered the stage and proceeded to step and jump in and out of the boxes of water. One of us whispered to the group, “Our feet would get stuck in those boxes.” We held in our laughter as best we could, but it grew, and we laughed harder the more we tried to stop.

The theatre seats were connected to each other, and we were in the middle of the row, so our barely held-in laughter made the entire row shake, not so much to the delight of the audience members on either side. Someone complained, and we were asked ever so politely by an usher to shut up or leave. We tried our best, but ended up leaving at intermission.

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Toes

Fourteen of the twenty-six bones in your feet are in your toes. Toes are very, very important, especially the big toe, which keeps us balanced. There’s toe-stubbing, the bashing of your toe into an object, and then there’s dropping heavy things on your toe, either way, the injured one learns how, truly, toes are the center of your universe. Injuries and ailments of the toes become a common occurrence for most women at age forty and up, when a switch is turned on (or off), and everything starts to fail. However, younger sisters, don’t fear the forties, because it’s also when you know what you really want and can say so, and you come to terms with things like your foot size. You can still wear those super sexy high heels, just not while standing up.

In my younger and more vulnerable years, my mother gave me some advice that

I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “You’ll get bunions if you wear those shoes.” I wore them anyway. I never got a bunion from wearing pointy high heels, but did manage to injure my toe wearing heavy-duty, sturdy and practical hiking boots. I was invited to join my family and their friends on a rafting trip on the Colorado that began with an eleven-mile hike down into the Grand Canyon. It was a last minute invite when someone else had cancelled, and I had just broken up with a long-term boyfriend, so it was thought this trip would be good for me. Hiking downhill for eleven miles in brand new hiking boots turned out to be a disaster and I got a stress fracture in my right big toe.

There was nothing to be done except to take the soggy, useless Tylenol the river guides offered. My toe doubled in size, and turned purple, like an Italian plum on the end of my foot, which looked like it belonged to Fred Flintstone. Another adventurer on the trip, a tall blonde woman, got a blood blister under her big toe. The super-buff, minimally

108 clothed river guide guy performed wilderness surgery on her toe with a razor blade, holding her foot in his lap. After that he was her best friend for the trip and kept asking her how her poor toe was doing, while I was barely tolerated for wincing in pain when I couldn’t get my shoe back on my foot over the now giant and throbbing toe.

The Grand Canyon was grand, I made it through the trip, got over the break-up, and moved on with my life, but with toe pain. Arthritis attacked, and after many years of cortisone shots, I had surgery to fuse the joint in my right big toe. This resulted in what I fondly refer to as my “Frankentoe,” that, in addition to being a little gnarled, is always sticking up, like it’s waving hello to the left foot.

The surgeon sang Lyle Lovett songs while he cut into my big toe, fused the joint, and screwed in a metal plate. I know this because I wasn’t completely knocked out. In fact, I was awake and just loopy enough to sing along, which he and the nurses thought was hilarious.

I joke with my current podiatrist about how my foot-modeling career was ruined.

He says they no longer do this surgery this way, and they would never leave the toe erect.

I say it’s been that way for four hours, which is why I needed to see him. We laugh at this joke too. It is all we can do because it is what it is, and we are what we are, Frankentoes and all.

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Mad Man

My father was a mad man.

Standing at the gas grill, tongs in one hand, a generous scotch on the rocks in the other, my father lifts the London broil for a moment, looks absently at the white oak, and takes a long sip. I open the screen door slowly, avoiding the creak, and ease it all the way back to close behind me. His blue Bermuda shorts and black socks make me cringe, even though there’s no one else here. Walking towards the backyard, having been charged with the mission of retrieving a couple of tomatoes for dinner, I make a wide arc behind him as quietly as possible. I don’t look back but I can feel him looking over at me. I walk as quietly as possible.

“Get over here.”

At first, I pretend I don’t hear him, then think better of it. “Huh?”

He’s looking at me like I’m a stranger, his eyebrows sticking straight out, at least half an inch, black caterpillars, yelling at each other, yelling at me.

“Get over here, now.”

I walk over noticing the rhododendron, the giant white oak branches, the violets interspersed in the grass. I’m looking at everything I can possibly look at during the ten- yard walk to the grill. There’s smoke swirling around him, further obscuring his intentions; I’m Dorothy approaching the great Oz.

He’s staring at the meat, he takes a big swig, looks down at me and says, “Those legs look like they’re ready for the pork factory.” He sets down the tongs and drink on the tray next to the grill, and circles his leg above the knee with the forefinger and thumb of

110 each hand. “I can put my hands around my leg.” I hated him right then. I was ten years old.

Forty years later I rarely wear shorts and am prone to measuring my leg, right above the knee, the same way, making certain that my thumbs and forefingers still meet.

I don’t understand why or how he could have said this to his ten-year-old daughter.

Maybe his mother or father were mean to him, maybe it’s the alcohol, maybe his misplaced anger, or maybe all of the above. I still don’t get it.

The Friday after Thanksgiving, we were shuffling down the hall of Heritage

Home together, my arm hooked in his arm. My father’s beige stretchy pants were a little stained, it might have been coffee or juice. His shoes were a lighter beige with Velcro closures. One of the aides, a sweet Filipino woman, walked past smiling at my dad. She said, “Hello Poppy, your daughter is pretty and you are so handsome.” He grinned, said something in gibberish—he couldn’t form words anymore. I learned this is called

“aphasia.” I knew he had no idea what he was saying, but I interpreted it anyway as a thank you of sorts. Another Heritage Home resident came barreling towards us; she looked very frail, but approached at a surprisingly high speed, hugging the wall in her wheeled walker that looked like a giant baby high-chair. She stopped and stared at my father, her mouth gaping open. He put his hand out to shake hers, but she was confused and continued to stare. Another aide came over. “No John, remember, no hand shake, only this,” and he gently demonstrated a fist bump, holding my father’s hand and touching it to the air near the lady, where her hand might have been, had she any idea of what was happening. They both remained utterly confused, but my dad was still grinning.

111

He had been banned from shaking hands because he squeezed too hard and it frightened the other residents. He was friendly, exuberant, and didn’t mean to hurt anyone. He used to extoll the importance of a firm handshake. I felt so sad for him in this moment.

My father was in advertising sales. He was a real-life real mad man, although his office was on Park Avenue instead of Madison. He wore sharp suits and bright, white shirts with shiny gold cuff-links, and always had a cloth handkerchief. He looked great in a suit. He rode the train into the city from the town in northern New Jersey where we lived in our second house, big enough for five children, two cars, and a well-stocked liquor cabinet. Our first house was closer to the city, in a slightly less affluent town, where the schools were not considered “the best.” His relentless travel for work every month, sometimes two weeks at a time, earned him commissions and eventually allowed him to move his family and his stature upward to a bigger home and superior schools.

“Even better than the Catholic schools,” he said. He wooed clients over three-martini lunches. At night he took the train home, usually sat in the bar car, and regaled the smoky, boozy crowd of other mad men with his stories. When he came home, exhausted, inebriated, a little or sometimes a lot, we kids scrambled either to disappear, or look busy.

He needed time to decompress, and after that he might be playful and fun, doling out bags of penny candy he bought for us at Grand Central Station, or he might not be.

Family and friends used to call him “Jack,” a nickname for “John,” borrowed from the Kennedys, because he was good-looking, like a Kennedy, and Irish Catholic.

His parents crossed the pond landing in Brooklyn where the neighborhoods were segregated and defined by ethnicity. The Irish neighborhood was next to the Italians and

112 beyond that was where the Jews lived. You could tell he was from Brooklyn by the way he talked. His regional dialect grew stronger the further away from Brooklyn he moved.

Now and then he would soliloquize about playing stoop ball, or eating a Charlotte Rousse which, he explained, was a cup filled five inches over the top with whipped cream, a treat you could get from the ice cream man. My brothers and sister and I liked it when he told these stories.

The dinner table was his final forum of the day for table-pounding stories of the sons of bitches he encountered during the day, or the latest ridiculous whim of Roger, the firm’s owner and CEO, same name as the boss on the television show Mad Men. I wouldn’t be surprised if his boss was somehow the real inspiration for the character. My father was a company man; he wanted to be heard, although he often wasn’t; he wanted respect, but he didn’t always get it; and he wanted a title, more than anything else, and he never got the one he wanted. This was a primary source for his anger, but as a kid I just thought he was mean, someone to be avoided and feared.

His temper was evident in his every day acts and gestures. He screwed the cap of the toothpaste tube on so tight that no one else could ever open it, when he shook hands he squeezed too hard, grinning at the pained expression on the poor recipient’s face. He spackled butter on his toast thicker than the slice of bread, like a mason building a brick wall. He needed to be the center of attention and he usually was, charming and delighting people with his stories. His embellished tales had a nugget of truth, and were just shy of being completely outrageous. According to my dad, he sang with the Metropolitan Opera, invented licorice flavored ice cream, was sent on a secret mission during the Korean War, grew tomatoes in nothing but sand, and met John Wayne, with whom he shared a drink

113 and his acting tips. He actually did meet John Wayne once in an airport. A lot of pretending went on in our house, and fast thinking, which certainly was useful preparation for many life and work situations. The ability to make things up on the fly, and to charm and amuse, are skills my siblings and I have used to get out of speeding tickets, wow people in work meetings, and persuade many to choose, or buy, or give, or laugh. I used to find it hard to admit the influence my father has had on my daily life, especially at work, but the truth is I am good at what I do because of him. This I do understand: everyone we know has something to teach us.

A propensity for tall tales was in his genes—his mother Norah was a seanchaί, an

Irish storyteller of sorts. One time she told us she was changing a light bulb, when a snake came through the empty socket in the ceiling, so she quickly grabbed her big shears and cut it into nine pieces, and the nine pieces of snake didn’t die until sundown. She seemed intent on frightening children, while my father’s stories were a way to be more, bigger, the best, maybe famous. I think he was afraid of being mediocre or even worse, that maybe no one was listening, that he might not be heard. You could see him shift gears while telling a story if he noticed a lessening of his listeners’ attention, bumping up the fiction a notch. I was acutely aware of his hyperbole, and rather than finding it charming, I usually felt embarrassed. I do understand the fear of not being heard, or of being ignored. I don’t think we were athazagoraphobics (that’s the real phobia), but we shared a yearning to entertain, to have people listen to our stories, to be heard.

He loved to argue, especially about politics, and above all if he could engage someone with liberal leanings. His won arguments, or he at least exhausted his opponent, with his presentation, volume, and big gestures. His hands and eyebrows raised to the

114 heavens, or a fist pounding down on a table, rather than relying solely on facts and figures. If he met a teacher, he would say something provocative about the teacher’s union, hoping they would take the bait. If he was at a function where there might be non- conservative types, my mother would seek them out and try to warn them in advance. He once argued with my Uncle Chet, who is Italian, and used to own a restaurant in

Hoboken, and whose mother came from Italy, about how to make the best marinara sauce.

Thanksgiving was at my mother’s house, just her house now, since my dad was moved into the Heritage Home facility. After the big meal, my mother and I went to visit him, bringing a container of cookies from Vons. She had explained they “celebrated”

Thanksgiving there on a different day, in the dining hall, and he was at the point where visits home were too disruptive, too upsetting for him. We were buzzed in the locked front door and right away down the hallway I saw this shuffling, grinning gentleman in beige. I felt a stab of hurt for him, that he had to be in this place where the coffee was served in plastic cups, and his shoes had no laces.

As my father and I slowly moved down the hall, which is the only thing there is to do, he suddenly broke into a little shuffle dance step. I did it with him, which made him grin and me laugh. Alzheimer’s is a horrible disease, but I found I liked this gentler version of my father. We came across my mother sitting in one of the ugly worn chairs in an alcove off the long hall way, one of the few places to sit and visit. She was doing the

Times crossword puzzle. She came to see him three or four times a week, and she had a routine. He grinned at her and said, quite clearly despite the aphasia, “I love you.” She

115 looked over her reading glasses, with a small, self-conscious laugh, said, “I love you too.” He said it again, but my mother didn’t respond, so he turned to me and said, “I love her.” She laughed again, not a happy laugh, and said, “Oh, John.” She told me it’s all he says, over and over, it embarrassed her. I was amazed that this was what was left; these words were the only ones he could speak and seemed to know. How did this disease, making Swiss cheese holes in his brain, manage to miss the spot that held those words, and the place that let his mouth still say them?

He cared for us and loved us, but we weren’t a family that said those particular words out loud. I think about the things he said. He was decisive, opinionated, fiercely

Republican, and proud of his heritage. He told us that to be successful in our careers, we need only read the New York Times, every day, every word, cover to cover. I do read the

Times, online, a few times a week, always on Sunday. Some of the things he said were helpful, and I know now he meant well. But he also called my brother a clod while knocking him on the side of the head, and more than a few times I was told to wipe a look off my face, or it would be wiped off for me. He and I were alike in being drawn to confrontation. I was praised for being able to speak easily with adults, but was also admonished for making provocative statements. More often than not, rather than wiping the look off my face, I would extend it and add a daring, and sometimes unwise, yet precocious comment. This usually led to a face slap unless I was able to run away, and wait until the incident was forgotten, or anesthetized by his evening cocktail.

Junior high was an especially provocative time in our relationship. I recall the decision to invade his liquor cabinet compelled by a sort of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join

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‘em” mentality. Both my brother John and I would dip into his various bottles of clear and light brown burning alcohol, and then fill them up with water, or in what we thought was a brilliant move, a little of my mother’s perfume that was the same color as the scotch. Somewhere along the line his drinks had a little tinge of Arpége, the perfume he bought my mother every year for her birthday, until she finally told him she didn’t like it anymore.

One day I came home at lunch when my mother was at work, and for some reason, I still don’t know why, I pulled out the gin, the bottle with Queen Victoria’s portrait on the label. With a black magic marker, I drew a wart on her nose, hair on her chin, and wrote my sister’s name, Kelly, underneath the picture. I must have been angry with her. Then I poured an inch or two into a cup with some orange juice, gulped it down, and went back to school. It wasn’t noticed until months later. I recall hearing a roar of,

“What the hell is this!” I didn’t know what it was about, exactly, although the gin incident crossed my mind as I tried to make myself scarce. We three older kids were hauled together in a line-up and questioned until I broke. The punishment wasn’t the worst, a flash of severe anger and grounding for a couple of weeks. I considered myself fortunate. When we were younger, punishments involved spankings with a metal hair brush. I remember thinking how funny it was, with the gin bottle graffiti incident, that I wasn’t in trouble for drinking.

In my mid-forties, after my first husband passed away, I moved away from the ocean, to the Sierra foothills in Northern California, to a house with a big yard, fruit trees, and a partner. The partner didn’t work out and moved out soon after moving in, however,

117 the house was mine, so I stayed. My parents visited, offering to help in the wake of this failed relationship. My father and I worked in the garden, something we both loved to do.

In this realm I found his “know-it-all” mode more tolerable, perhaps because he was so passionate about the plants. On this visit, he helped me prepare the yard for planting a vegetable garden. I watched him step on the top of the shovel, shove it down with all of his weight, then pull up a block of grayish semi-frozen dirt in the raised bed. He turned it over and broke it up, with a ferocity that one might use to kill a snake.

He dispersed advice while shoveling, "You want to turn the soil first, let it sit, get some air; break it up a bit, break up the chunks, the hard parts, get the rocks out."

He said to mix in three, maybe four bags of fertilizer, pronouncing it fert-lizer, losing the second syllable. “Steer manure, it’s the best,” he said. My annoyance at being told how to garden in my own backyard was trumped by the fact that my father was doing the hard part, turning the soil over. He said he loved this, meaning working in my yard. Looking around he talked about what he would do if he could come up and stay for a couple of weeks. I cringed at the thought, and then felt guilty. I thought about how we'd not spent more than three days under the same roof for over twenty years. It was unlikely he or my mother would visit frequently or for longer than a few days. I still didn’t really want him to stay longer, but at the same time this conjured a melancholy feeling of something I may have missed, or would never have with him.

Most of gardening is the hard labor of getting rid of things: weeds, hard dirt, and rocks. The truth was I only really liked the last part of gardening: buying plants at the nursery and planting them. Even more than that, I liked the last, last part—picking the tomatoes. My father worked hard, for hours, making the garden ready for planting. He

118 stopped shoveling for a moment, to admire the soil under the crusty top layer. It was dark and rich, like steaming coffee grounds. I thanked him, hoping he'd keep going, until the job was finished.

My father was showing signs of his disease at this time, but we only came to see it in hindsight. He wore two hearing aids, so when he didn't follow a conversation, or hesitated when asked a question, we attributed it to a combination of him not hearing, and not being interested unless it was his story. I still wanted him to know me, to ask me a question, or listen with interest to one of my stories. He couldn’t do it. Nevertheless, he was turning my soil and I was grateful, so I offered a compliment, "Hey Dad, I loved the peonies you used to grow, I should plant some here." He looked at me blankly. I shouted,

"Your peonies, I loved your peonies!" I tried not to sound frustrated and shouted again,

"Peonies, the flowers, you used to grow!" He said, "Oh yeah, yeah." I realized he didn’t know what I was talking about. He acted like he did for a moment and then went back to shoveling the dirt. I pulled clumps of crab grass out of the dirt and threw them in the wheel barrow. He no longer knew what a peony was, or at least in that moment he couldn’t remember. We kept digging and weeding, my own mind was lost in thought and memory.

For many years after he was diagnosed, my father could still engage in a conversation. It usually didn’t make sense but there were recognizable snippets of stories, names and words. The old tales were still there but not in the right order. It was as if he tore the stories up into small pieces, threw them in the air, and then picked them up,

119 piecing them together in random order. He talked about New York saying it was “the place you better know where you are.” He talked about someone named McCloskey who taught him everything he knew about gardening, and who also happened to be a spy with him during the Korean War. He repeated things, sometimes twenty or thirty times in a half an hour. He confused my sister and me with our mother, and me with my daughter.

He seemed to hang on to knowing his sons for a longer period of time, and expressed admiration for them. He would point at one of them and say, “That is the best damn guy you’re ever going to meet.” Despite the memory loss, he danced with my mother at a wedding. He still knew how to dance and he still looked great in his suit. My father had been a great dancer. He could waltz, swing-dance, lindy, jitterbug.

As we shuffled down the hall at Heritage Home, towards his room with no pictures, no nice things, a beige blanket on the bed, he did his little dance step again. He was smiling. I asked, “How about New York, Dad, do you remember New York?” He tried to make words come out of his mouth, I could see he wanted to say something. He blurted out something that sounded like “New York, you’re there, you’re on,” but his words disintegrated into gibberish. I said, “Yes, you are!” I said, “Let’s dance Dad – do you want to dance?” He sat at a table, and started eating the chocolate chip cookies we’d brought, one right after another without stopping, until my mother took the box away.

She said, “That’s enough now, John.”

My mother mouthed to me “We have to go.” He sat on his bed. The room was painted a pale green, the window looked out onto a cement block wall. I couldn’t stand to leave him in this place. My mother said he didn’t know the difference anymore. We said to him, “We’ll be right back,” and we quickly left. We were nearly to the locked door, the

120 one we had to be buzzed in and out of, and he called to us—upset-sounding words that made no sense, but his frustration was quite clear. The door buzzed, my mother pushed it open saying, “Hurry.” I saw him for a second standing in the hallway. The nurse’s aide was there gently pulling him towards his room. I heard him say “hi dee, di, dee, di, dee, di” to her as he did a little dance step.

My mother called to say my father has another infection and is in the hospital. He is 83, has to be fed, stays in bed, and cannot speak. He still seems to know my mother, but he no longer can say the words. This might be it, my mother says, and the doctor thinks she should consider stopping any treatment. I go to Los Angeles a day later and meet my mother and siblings at the hospital. It’s a Dignity Health hospital with the groovy orange flower graphic and new age-y statements painted on walls in waiting rooms: “Humanity holds the power to heal,” and “Hello humankindness.”

We meet with a hospice person in a hostilely lit waiting room. Sitting at the very edge of her seat, her shirt buttons tight against her chest and belly, she looks uncomfortable. She speaks directly to my mother, while I listen, and she occasionally looks in my direction, constantly nodding as she speaks. She doesn’t look at anyone else in the room, because all four of my siblings are on their phones. One brother is texting the other brother about the hospice lady, my sister is reading her email, and I have no idea what the other brother is doing. I’m incensed by their apparent lack of focus and attention to the matter at hand. They are incensed that I comment on their phone thing.

One brother says he was looking up the hospice company and sharing info with the other brother. They didn’t like what they were hearing and needed to find an enemy—hospice

121 lady. We argue. My mother gets up and walks out of the waiting room. We are silent for a while.

The decision is made to move him back to Heritage Home, a familiar place, at least for us, where there are other people who care about him. This is not easy, requiring multiple phone calls and confusion, until finally an ambulance is arranged and we get the word he is back in his bed.

He is not unconscious, but he’s not awake either. His mouth is gaping open. I play music on my phone and hold it up to his ear. Bizet, Mozart, the Clancy Brothers, Sarah

Vaughn. There is a small box in the room near the sink with the words “Serenity Pak” printed on the front. Inside there is a handi-wipe, ear plugs, and an eye-mask for sleeping.

I guess this is in case one needs to tune out the person who’s dying, or the other relatives?

I take a few photos of the box. I take a photo of my father with my mother near him, his mouth still gaping open, his breaths are rattling. We go back to my mother’s house and begin to talk about what is next. It seems a little premature to me, even though I know it is where we are headed. We go back to Heritage Home the next day. It is Sunday and as we are buzzed in, the aide excitedly tells us that John Tesh and Connie Sellecca are here, entertaining the residents. This is too strange to comprehend, and I think I may have heard her incorrectly. But as we enter the hall, right at the doorway to the common room, there is John Tesh, still blonde but balding on top, banging away on the piano and singing. Connie Selleca is standing right next to me and my mother. We start talking. She is lovely, and tells us they come every couple of months to visit. She notices she and I are wearing the same shoes. In the moment, I did think I would write about this. I’m talking to Connie Selleca about our shoes while John Tesh plays piano to a room full of

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Alzheimer patients, who are clapping, or yelling, or staring, and my father is down the hall, less than a day away from dying.

My mother wakes me up at about 6:00 a.m. The home called. He’s gone. He died an hour ago. I’m confused and say, “Oh no.” We all get up and go to see him. It is a relief to not hear the labored breathing, and it is horrible to see the unshaven, shrunken, mouth- gaping man in the bed, under the dingy sheet, who used to be my father.

There is a funeral in a Catholic church with stained glass windows over the altar that look like Georgia O’Keefe flowers, the sexy ones. The deacon sings hymns like a

Broadway crooner, and my youngest brother gives the eulogy. I am deeply hurt not to have been asked to speak. I’m the writer and actor after all, and with this deacon, I would have fit right in. My mother was probably afraid of what I would say. I offer to carry the photo collage my sister has made out to the car. When no one is looking, I tear off the unattractive photo of myself she chose to display rather prominently, and shove it in my purse. At the lunch, I meet my mother’s group of widow friends from the pool. They all do aqua exercise together, and at seventy-seven, my mother is one of the young ones. I love these women. They know this scene so well, and they say the right things just the right way. They aren’t afraid to laugh. I talk my mother into still going on her planned trip to Panama a week after the funeral, a cruise with my Aunt Angie through the canal.

He has been gone for nearly two years, and the world doesn’t feel too different without him in it, but I am sad. I am sad when I see peonies, when I hear Irish music, and on the last visit to my mother’s house, when I see his straw boater, a hat he loved, on a shelf in a closet. It’s sitting there so quietly. He looked good in that hat. He was mad, but he was much more than that.

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Running Away

Monday morning at five o’clock she gets up, and goes downstairs to the kitchen, grabbing her Jansport pack. She takes from the pantry a box of Triscuits, a can of tuna, and a banana. She does not leave a note and sneaks out the back door. She is free. She doesn’t actually feel free. She cuts through the woods behind the house and heads to the bus depot in the middle of town. She’s feeling purposeful, propelled by a strange energy that’s a mixture of anger and fear, peppered with just enough “fuck you” attitude to keep her walking away, walking fast, like someone on an urgent mission. She is fourteen years old and in the ninth grade.

The Catholic church looms ahead, a cross rising up in her view as she heads down a hill; first the elaborate steeple appears, then the round stained glass window, and then the front steps. No one is around, it’s too early, but she stays on the other side of the street, an invisible force pressing her face to look the other way. She thinks of the time she was reprimanded by the ancient, scary nun, with giant false teeth that appeared to extend out of her mouth, not unlike Geiger’s Alien monster. She was pretending the holy water was perfume, dabbing it behind her ears and on her wrists, while her friends nervously giggled. Alien nun grabbed her by the shirt and pulled her out of line, “Young lady that is disrespectful,” she hissed, teeth with extended jaws obscuring the girl’s view of everything else.

She’s told this story for years, as a funny story, and she’ll tell it over and over for the next forty years to new friends, co-workers, priests, audiences, classes, her husband, her daughter, her second husband, and her mother (who says she doubts this really happened). She insists it has, making a mental note to stop once and for all telling her

124 mother about the things she did when she was a kid, the things her mother doesn’t really doesn’t want to know. She never tells her about this day and the next seven.

Another time, her nine-year-old self holds the communion host in her mouth, without swallowing, until she is on those steps outside of the church. Showing her siblings, she still has the body of Christ in her mouth, she gleefully plucks it off her tongue and holds it up for them to see. Her brother, practically flinching, expecting to be zapped at any moment by a holy lightning bolt, does a big side step away from her. Her sister says she’s telling. Go ahead, see if I care, she says, popping it back in her mouth like a potato chip. She crunches and swallows this Jesus snack—it sticks in her throat.

She passes the Friendly’s where waitresses dish out ice cream scoops into little silver cups and pour coffee into paper cones that sit in plastic holders. Kids go here after movies or to skip church, to drink coffee like adults and act out, blowing straw papers at each other, flirting, being self-conscious and nonchalant at the same time. She works at her Uncle’s beauty parlor, which is somehow less glamorous than waitressing at

Friendly’s or volunteering as a candy striper at the hospital, like some of her friends, but it’s better than babysitting. She slows down as the bus depot comes into view, keeping an eye out for familiar faces. She fingers the $2.65 bus fare in her pocket, carefully pre- counted to facilitate a smooth, uneventful entrance onto the bus. There are a few men in suits, standing, reading papers, smoking, and a woman sitting in the shelter, holding a purse, looking ahead at nothing. She stands to the side of the shelter, out of view, but not hiding. She focuses her gaze in the direction of the bus, willing it to arrive before someone who knows her drives by, or someone asks her why she isn’t in school.

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The bus roars towards them, “Port Authority Bus Terminal” clicking onto the front panel above the windshield and the waiting people jockey for position to get a good seat. As she steps onto the bus she gets a glimmer of a feeling that she is indeed an anonymous person in the world, on her own, not attached to a family, school, church, job, or town; no one knows her and it’s thrilling. She sits behind the driver where she can’t be seen in his rearview mirror, takes in a deep breath of bus aroma, it smells like the city, and stashes her backpack at her feet. Looking out the window she can see the town flying by, and at the same time she can see her own reflection. She’s feeling again like she’s starring in the movie of her life, watching it scene by scene, with swells of background music. It’s an afterschool special on NBC, like Dawn Portrait of a Teenage Runaway, with Eve Plumb from The Brady Bunch. Except Dawn turns into a prostitute (thanks to

Swan the pimp’s help) after no one will hire her, because she’s too young. This isn’t her story. She’s not sure exactly what it will look like, but she pictures her story more like she’s living in an apartment with a lot of plants, and Joni Mitchell music is playing, and she makes something for money, maybe note cards or cartoons. She can waitress, how hard can that be, and she’s lied about her age for years now, at least since she was eleven.

This is her fourteenth spring on the planet. She gets A’s or D’s in school, depending on whether she’s interested, she smokes pot, she babysits, she writes poems, she finishes the adults’ drinks when her parents have parties, she frequently mouths off making her father’s face turn purple with rage, she feels very dark sometimes, she is friends with the hippie mom in the neighborhood, Mrs. McGowan, who makes her own yogurt, and who shocked the other moms on the street when she went jogging when she was pregnant, and barefoot, no sneakers. She finds it easy to make people laugh. She

126 learns she can fake it to get a good grade, to get someone to stop asking her if she’s all right, and to make it look like nothing bothers her.

She has depression but doesn’t know it, or doesn’t think that maybe how she feels is different from how things are for anyone else. She doesn’t get a handle on this until she’s thirty-one years old.

The bus passes the high school where she is supposed to go next fall. It’s a brick building, with a tower in front with layers and layers of bricks that look heavy, and forbidding, like thoughts layered on thoughts, layered on thoughts, pressing in on the people inside, crushing them. She’s squeezing out through a crack in the masonry. She still feels a weight on her chest, imagines a pallet of bricks pressing her down, making it hard to breathe. She stabs her thumbnail into her wrist, hard as she can, until it makes an angry, red mark, and then she can take a deep breath.

As she rides a long, she ponders what went wrong with her life, and why—why, why, why, why, why, she ran away. She doesn’t have a plan, and suddenly she feels very stupid. After a long minute, in danger of losing her will, she summons the brave Fuck

You Girl, the one who understands that she needs to do something big, and take action that will shift the universe.

She quickly leaves the port authority bus terminal just in case some old “Mad

Man” from her father’s job might have wandered over to the west side, or worse some bus driver or cop would notice her and her obvious backpack. Out on 42nd Street the morning light and the smell of exhaust and burnt peanuts slap her in the face and get her

127 walking again, walking fast, as if there’s a destination. A rule of survival in the city, her mother had told her once, always look like you know where you’re going.

She heads towards Fifth Avenue, momentarily confused by Broadway and Times

Square, when the streets don’t make sense for a few blocks, past the nudie shows and porn movies and street people, the hot dog vendors, past a man lying on the sidewalk curled up, and a man leaning in front of a liquor store, who looks at her as she passes, and says, “You a good girl.” She ignores him, putting on her best “I know what I’m doing” face; he’s the only person to acknowledge her so far this day. She feels both pushed along by the sidewalk crowds, and pulled forward by an unknown force to where the west side eventually turns into the east side. She sees the familiar lions guarding the entrance to the library, Lady Astor and Lord Lenox, who were renamed Patience and Fortitude during the Depression. She knows this thanks to a field trip in the fifth grade, and it gives her a pang of something uncomfortable coupled with a sense of comfort in knowing exactly where she is standing. She turns left and starts walking up Fifth Avenue towards the park.

She’s thinking of a book she read when she was a kid, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs.

Basil E. Frankweiler, where a sister and brother run away to the Metropolitan Museum of

Art.

The author, perhaps unknowingly, provided some terrific street survival tips for future runaways. Things like hiding in public bathrooms, stealing coins out of fountains, blending in with school groups, and eating perfectly good food people leave on their tables in cafeterias. She has no illusions about sleeping in 18th Century beds in exhibits at night, like the kids in the story, but she knows the museum, again, thanks to annual field

128 trips. She has no real plan, and the invisible force continues to pull her towards the upper east side of Manhattan.

The day grows warmer, and she is tired and tense, hungry and thirsty. She goes into the park and finds a water fountain, and nearby some benches where working people on breaks are soaking up sun and chatting, and children are playing. This is where the first man approaches her. He has dark, curly hair and a camera, and a small child he is photographing. She feels the man looking at her, but she doesn’t look at him. She suddenly feels like she stands out too much, she is self-conscious of her backpack, her over-all jeans, her braids tied with the leather hair ties she had thought were so cool, like

Lori on The Partridge Family. The man gives the child a flower and tells him to give it to her. He whispers this like she isn’t supposed to hear, but of course she can hear him. She takes the flower from the child and thanks him, and he shyly runs back to the man. The man motions to her to put the flower behind her ear. She obeys. He asks if he can take her picture. She says yes. She feels nervous but she also likes how it felt to have this man look at her through the camera lens. He takes a few pictures. She then jumps up pretending to be late for something, and quickly heads out of the park back to the sidewalk along Fifth Avenue.

She could walk over a block and take a bus. Instead she walks fifty blocks up to

82nd, to the museum. Her legs ache and her mind is swirling with thoughts about what is next. She pushes down the fear and hesitation, marches up the steps with the throngs of families, tourists, school groups, fancy Manhattan museum ladies, and even a few other backpack wearers, and into the museum. Another wonderful thing she’d learned during her many trips to the Metropolitan Museum is that you don’t have to pay an admission

129 fee; it’s a suggested donation. She politely gives a dollar and accepts the little round metal “MMA” button and fixes it to her over-all strap, gives her backpack to the coat check, and heads to the restrooms near the cafeteria, passing through a long hall with rows and rows of white Greek statues.

She washes her hands, and arms, as they are streaked with sweat and grime, and dabs at her face with the paper towel. A lady at the next sink smiles at her as she washes, and so she smiles back, raising her eyebrows like it’s no big deal—doesn’t everyone wash their arms in museum restrooms? She spends the next few hours going to all the places she has been before. The Egyptian stuff from the fourth grade trip, the

Impressionist paintings from the fifth grade trip, the musical instruments from the sixth grade trip, when she started band. She tails a few classes, and then finds a bench near a cool marble column she can lean against, and close her eyes. She is so tired and she is frightened, not really knowing what to do next. She holds her eyes closed trying to put her thoughts in order, but they keep falling away, like a crumbling wall.

She imagines her father and mother and wonders what they are thinking, what they might be saying to each other. It hasn’t occurred to her how upsetting this might be for them. She figures they are angry and she wants them to feel bad and worried. She can’t truly understand the depth of their worry and fear—not until a long time later when she has her own daughter.

She wanders back in her mind to the catalytic event leading to her impulsive

Monday morning flight. It is a culminating scene, following months and months of discord, and angry, alcohol-fueled exchanges, and unfortunate, painful words branded

130 onto psyches, punctuated by humiliating slaps, and threatening fingers plunged into collarbones as points are made. That weekend her parents are going out and she has to stay home to watch her sister and brothers. Her friends come over, one of them has a joint, so she says let’s smoke it, and they say not in the house, are you crazy. She says they’re out, who cares, and we can blow the smoke into a pillow. It’s fine. They light up the joint and each one takes a hit; she exalts in blowing the smoke out into the living room, so daring, so bad, right into the room where they put up the Christmas tree and where they play cards with their friends. The key is turning in the front door lock, the door is opening and she hears the mother’s voice. The three girls look at each other, eyes widening as panic sets in, oh shit she squeaks, and takes the joint, stubbing it between her fingers, then puts it in her mouth and swallows it.

The girls jump up as the parents enter the room, they say hello girls, the girls mumble hello, and say we’ve got to go, bye. They rush past the parents and out the front door. She runs upstairs, as her father is asking what is that smell? She yells down they were just lighting candles. She quickly lights the smiley face candle someone gave her from Spencer’s gifts in the mall, and blows it out, waves the smoke away. Her father yells up the stairs, what the hell is going on here, were you smoking? No, she shouts back, it was a candle. She steps halfway down the stairs, not too close, holding the smiley face candle in front of her, like a shield. The father’s face is turning purple. The hairs on the back of her neck stand up. He says that’s no candle, I’ve been to a Kris Kristofferson concert, I know what marijuana smells like.

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That line, and her response, are the punch lines of this story as she tells it henceforth, through her life, a funny story relayed to friends at dinner parties, to charm new boyfriends, to write about in writing class, or to be funny at work.

She feels a surge of power, fueled no doubt in part by the weed, and snarls back to the father so what, she smokes pot and he drinks martinis, what the hell is the difference?

There is a moment of stillness after her reckless, yet also boldly stated line, as the father takes it in. She watches his rage surge upwards in a rapid boil. They look at each other, both wild-eyed, and suddenly he lurches towards her, grabbing her leg. She shakes off his grip and gets to the bathroom at the top of the stairs, miraculously locking the door just in time. He pounds on the door, furiously screaming for her to open the damn door.

He pounds on the door with his fists, and then the doorframe. The doorframe cracks. She thinks he’s going to kill her. For a moment, she thinks she should open the door and let him. She sits on the toilet thinking of how she might get out the window and climb onto the roof. He leaves. She stays in the bathroom for a very long time.

The next day there are finger in the face talks, with threats of Catholic school and a trip to the police station, and did that friend of yours, the bad influence, was this her idea?

The parents call her friend’s parents. Her friend calls and tells her an equally comical parent pot-speak exchange, where her father kept yelling about marijuana cigarettes, and the mother interrupted him to say, Jim, I think they call them mary janes.

She is a psychologist. The girls laugh. Later that night she pulls her books out of her

132 backpack and fills it with some shirts and underwear, a blanket and tooth brush, a flashlight and her wallet with about twenty bucks. The next morning she’s gone.

She leaves the museum at closing time and plops down on the steps in front, along with many others who are chatting away about the art, waiting to go to an early dinner or grab a cab home. People on the way home from work or school are stopping, some sit down to read the paper, or talk to the people next to them. The light is beautiful at dusk, a soft, pink veil streaming between the buildings, and as the tourists and visitors leave, the place turns into the neighborhood that it is, with people walking their small apartment dogs, and teenagers playing Frisbee on the wide sidewalk in front of the museum. It’s getting darker and she does not know where she’s going to go or what she will do, yet she is frozen in the place she is sitting, like the many statues with whom she just spent the afternoon. She notices the Frisbee kids periodically climbing the steps to the top by the museum entrance, and hoisting themselves between the columns. She watches this for a while, figuring out they must be going back there to pee, in the little space, high up between the front of the building, and a long, thick row of boxwoods, accessible only by climbing up and crawling between the columns. Perfect.

It smells like pee, but it feels safe, and it would be hard for anyone not young and agile to get into the space. She pulls out her nearly useless blanket, and curls up in a corner, her head on the backpack, her hands folded under her face, just like the man on the sidewalk on 42nd Street. She sleeps in this place for the next four nights.

She’s never questioned by a guard, or stopped by a policeman, or even given a passing glance by a field trip teacher, the museum coat check staff, or busboys in the

133 cafeteria. Over the next four days however she is approached by several men and one very kind young woman.

The second night, one man sits next to her on the front steps of the museum, and starts talking to her. He has a beard, aviator glasses, and is wearing a short-sleeved plaid shirt and khaki pants. He looks nerdy to her but he seems nice. Then he asks about her backpack, and she is immediately suspicious, so she tells a tale about living nearby, meeting her father later, says they go hiking a lot, hence the backpack, and the more she talks, the less convincing she becomes to herself and surely to the man as well. He gives her his name and phone number on a piece of paper, and says to call him if she needs anything. He says she can stay at his apartment. She thinks about it the next day, but doesn’t call him.

Another man with straight dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, black eyebrows and very white skin is sitting on a bench near her, on the side of the museum near the park. He’s holding a brown bag lunch on his lap and he keeps looking at her. He moves closer to her and they start talking. She’s watching the field trip school buses pulling up and letting out groups of kids with lunch bags and harried teachers, shouting instructions like find your buddy. Suddenly she sees one teacher with tall, perfectly coiffed silver hair, and she knows it’s her third grade teacher from Somerville Elementary. Third grade was Alaska; maybe they’re going to look at the Inuit art.

Thinking it best she stays out of the museum for a while, she keeps talking to the man, who asks if she wants to walk in the park by the lake, right nearby. She thinks this might not be a good idea, but she goes anyway. They sit near the lake and he shares half of his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She thinks it’s funny that he has a peanut butter

134 and jelly sandwich in his lunch. He doesn’t laugh when she does, so she starts to feel weird. He touches her face, and asks if he can kiss her. She stammers no, she’d rather not, and looks around to see where other people are and says she needs to get back to the museum. They walk back out of the park, and she tries to act like it’s not a big thing. He acts hurt, she notices he looks even stranger than she first thought. She gets away, her heart beating hard, and goes into the museum, and in the restroom she sits for a long time leaning her head against the wall of the stall.

Men approach her in the museum and outside the museum by the benches. One says he helps girls get jobs if she needs one, or if she needs a place to stay. She feels very small, and exposed. The Fuck You Girl has left the scene and she has to fend for herself.

She doesn’t want to go home, she thinks maybe she can find a place to go, like a shelter. The more time she spends in the museum, the more distant she feels, and the less she sees the art. It’s there, right in front of her, but she’s too nervous. She needs to figure out a plan. She borrows a phone book at the information desk and looks up Covenant

House, the place for runaways she’d seen in a television commercial. She writes down the number, but decides not to call.

She’s sitting on the steps in front of the museum envying the Frisbee playing teenagers, imagining they live nearby in posh apartments or townhouses, and go to private school and have vacations in France, and a Macy’s credit card to buy clothes. A young woman with long, brown hair and a peasant shirt sits down near her. She has a cloth backpack with embroidery and patches. She smiles. A moment later they are talking. The woman asks if she’s been to the museum, and they talk about their favorite exhibits. She feels comfortable with this woman so when she asks straight out if she’s a

135 runaway, she says yes. There is advice and an offer of help, and an urging to call her parents, but no pressure. She asks is there anyone else to call, a friend or other family member? She gives her name and address. She lives in Tuxedo, New York. The woman asks where she lives. She doesn’t answer, so the woman says she’ll go home eventually.

It’s hard to be out in the world at this age. She says you can deal with it a little longer at home, and then you can leave. She gives the woman her home address.

The next day she decides she can’t sleep another night in the space behind the bushes, against the museum, where the Frisbee kids go pee. She thinks of the woman she baby sat for last summer. It is her mother’s friend from her bridge group, who was getting a divorce and needed someone to watch her two boys every week while she met with the lawyers. After the divorce this woman ran away to the Village, to an apartment on Jane

Street, her mother had said. She heads downtown that afternoon, walking five miles from

82nd Street down to Jane Street in the West Village. She goes to every apartment building until she finds the woman’s name and hits the buzzer. Over the intercom the woman says she thought she might hear from her, her parents had called, and buzzes her up.

It’s very late, and she is tired, hungry, and very dirty. The woman gives her a towel and shows her the shower. In the shower she watches the water turn black as it runs down her arms and legs. Even with cleaning herself every day at the museum restroom sink, the city grime takes a hold and forms a layer she could scrape off with fingernails, leaving stripes of dirt and clean skin. It was one of the best showers of her life. She thanks the woman, her mother’s old bridge playing friend, and the woman introduces her to her boyfriend with long hair, a beard, and square glasses. The woman jokingly calls him the missing link, and he asks if they want to get high. So they do. Then they eat

136 vanilla ice cream, with chocolate syrup, and walnuts—the woman says they’re really into walnuts these days. Like the shower, it is one of the best meals she’s ever eaten. The missing link boyfriend says he hears she’s having trouble at home and he gives her a brochure about EST saying this could change her life. She politely reads a few lines in the brochure. EST, Erhard Seminars Training, is a course intended to transform one’s ability to experience living so that the situations one has been trying to change or has been putting up with, clear up just in the process of life itself. Is this another church she wonders? It’s too hard to understand but she pretends to have a sincere interest in order to be polite.

She sleeps on the couch for about thirteen hours.

The next day they visit with a friend of the woman’s who has children, and who lives in a townhouse where the kitchen is in the basement. She says the bridge friend could get into trouble for “harboring a fugitive.” Was she a fugitive? The decision is made to call the parents. She doesn’t really want to do this; she imagines staying in

Manhattan with her mother’s bridge friend until she goes to college or whatever. She knows this is magical thinking, and she knows that she’s going to have to go home. She appreciates that the bridge friend argues on her behalf for a short while with her friend, like she is on her side. She ultimately agrees that the parents need to be called.

She talks to her father because her mother cannot come to the phone, or won’t come to the phone. He is like a stranger talking like he knows her. He asks her how she is and says they were worried. He says he’s glad she is okay. They assumed she had gone to the woods in Harriman State Park, because she had her backpack and hiking boots. He asks if she knows how many people were looking for her. Never mind, he says quickly,

137 we don’t have to talk about that right now. She doesn’t know how to respond, but agrees to come home. She can’t stay in New York, she has no money, no plan, and she’s only fourteen. She thinks about how often she’d heard her mother say to others that she’s ten going on twenty-five, proud of how easily she spoke with adults. A plan is made to have her dropped off at a meeting place in New Jersey, two days later on Memorial Day, and they will then go directly to a giant family picnic at a park with all of the aunts, uncles, and cousins. She dreads this, but thinks about what the nice woman from Tuxedo said about it being too hard to be out in the world at her age. She is bolstered by the advice that she can deal with life at home a little longer, and then she can leave. She’ll be more prepared next time.

The Memorial Day picnic is awful and awkward with whispering adults and oddly jealous siblings. She sullenly picks at food and answers in single syllables. The first week back she stays home from school. A police detective wants to interview her to make sure everything is okay at home. At the police station he tries to bully her, he threatens they’re warming up the lie detector machine. He wants her to say something about her mother’s bridge friend in the village. She cries, but says nothing. In the car on the way home, her mother says the detective was making certain she had not been mistreated, that there wasn’t something serious going on at home, that led to her leaving. She can feel her mother’s embarrassment and anger.

She goes back to school where some kids treat her like a hero. This doesn’t last long, but is the time of the highest status she ever held in junior high. The summer is strange because her mother won’t talk to her and won’t make eye contact. She is grounded, but sneaks out more than she ever has before. She wears her clothes under a

138 nightgown and pretends to go to bed, and then sneaks out through the basement and out the back door. The summer is spent copping beer at the liquor store, playing quarters, getting drunk, and smoking pot. One night she streaks across Veteran’s Field with her friends, right behind the police station. Fuck that detective! More funny stories are gathered.

She is funny in high school. Her secret power is that she can make people laugh.

It often got her out of trouble as a kid, and now it gets her into trouble at times, but the kind of trouble that is admired by others. Theatre becomes a safe haven, a place for expression, a place to expend some of the store of hurt, and more often, to play and be funny, to elicit a response from others, to be heard—to use her powers for good.

After high school she goes to theatre school. It is intense, and she is still carrying that dense pallet on her chest that bears down at times, stopping her voice. She wonders if this is really what she wants to do, and if maybe it actually could be harmful to her? She is the proverbial small fish in the big pond, lots of people are funny. She starts writing her words down, sometimes for other people to say on stage, to be funny. Writing is an old friend.

She runs away again, this time to San Francisco. Although, it feels like she has somehow always belonged in California. This is an impulsive move, she knows, however some think she’s bold, like the runaway heroine in junior high school. She questions her actions, thinking she’s made a huge error. She pushes through, she finds creative expression in theatre, and especially in improvisation. Pretending is second nature to her, and she can think fast. She writes a play, she writes comedy, she writes crazy as well as boring things in a journal. She doodles impulsively, she briefly produces a cartoon zine

139 with her friend, they leave copies on benches in public places. She creates something every day. This makes her feel good.

At thirty-one years old she is married and has a baby. She is happy and feels loved. She feels sad after the baby is born, but doesn’t know why. People say it will pass, it will get better. It gets worse. She had done therapy, joined an adult children of alcoholics group, wrote through her anxiety attacks, and felt better. However, this time the feeling, she called it the “black hole,” didn’t pass. When she could no longer get out of bed, she allowed her husband to help her get help. She was treated for depression. It was like magic. She remembers the day she was driving in her car and had the sudden realization that she’d not felt sad for several days. It was different to feel better. Now she knew.

She has been managing depression, raising her daughter, writing, learning, grieving, achieving, reinventing, and expressing for over 20 years. She is driving to the job she where she’s not altogether happy, but also not unhappy, coming from a home that’s in a state of disarray, worrying about her family. She thinks about how this is not where she thought she would be at this point in her life. She could use that Fuck You

Girl right now. She thinks about the fearlessness that led her to make some potentially harmful decisions. Sometimes she feels the fear in the present, for the girl who ran away.

She also knows the fearlessness helped her to survive.

Stories are still rising and forming in her mind, some fueled by slippery memories, some sharp as broken glass, some are old and some are ahead of her. The more she remembers, the more she remembers. She wonders at what point she turned into

140 who she is right now, at this very moment. Moment to moment, image to image, this story follows the one before. It’s a spiral that goes in and out, always moving. She knows she still is that girl. What if she just keeps driving, past the job, out of the town, towards the ocean, to the edge of the western world? This is a thrilling thought. She feels the possibility. What if she leaves it all behind, and gets an apartment somewhere, and a waitressing job in a diner, where she can ask the regulars, how about a little warm up?

She keeps driving, and thinking, and creating, and moving forward.

WORKS CITED

142

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