I awakened this morning at 4:30 to the sound of running water. A peaceful sound if one is near a waterfall. Not so great when you’re in a New York City apartment. It seems my son was steaming his only suit and fell asleep before turning off the shower. The bathroom was flooded, a painting on the wall curled inside its frame, and the suit was rather damp to say the least. I mopped the floor, hung the suit in an air conditioned room, ignored the dime-sized dollops of water clinging to the ceiling like glass bubbles (sort of pretty actually- gave me decorating ideas) and then sighed at the sight of puckered caulking that was once invisible. Too aggravated to fall back to sleep, I took my pillow and lay on the couch in my office. Watched the local news until the revolving weather and traffic reports got old, then read, and nodded off for about a moment around 5:30 until the churning of the garbage trucks began. The sun came up, shimmering through the slats of the Venetian blinds, tentative at first and then blazing. I recalled when the sun came up on the eastern side of our old house, a yellow-orange ball peeking over the pines, and wondered if I appreciated that vista at the time. I must have, since I remembered.
Along with the sun came the city’s awakening – the man dismantling his trailer-ed push cart that sells bagels, coffee, and pastries on the street corner, delivery trucks rumbling and coming to screeching stops, metal guards over shop windows rolling up with a clatter. Urban morning. To think, the birds used to awaken me in the suburbs…and I complained about them.
My friend Nancy visited on Monday. We met when my youngest and her oldest were in third grade, and became fast friends. When those third graders graduated high school, she moved briefly to New York City, then to a home upstate, then to Long Island, and finally to Dallas where a good job, better lifestyle, and good weather beckoned. We moved to New York City somewhere during her nomad days, and stayed put (although moved to three apartments in a four-year span). She and I could go toe-to-toe on who’s used the most bubble wrap. Once, our houses were a five-minute drive from one another. We saw each other nearly every day – sitting on my front porch in the warm weather and by the fireplace in my living room in the cold months. Divorced since her oldest was four, Nancy is an independent and forthright woman by both nature and circumstance. During the year that my husband and I were apart, I frequently cooked dinners for us (since I was the one who worked from home) and Nancy would come through the kitchen door and call out, “Honey, I’m home.” Although happy for me when Mark and I reconciled, we did miss those dinners.
As friends, we probably know one another better than we know ourselves. On Sunday night, we had a reunion dinner with our kids, and Nancy’s daughter (now a New Yorker) asked if I liked living in the city. Nancy answered for me just as my lips parted to speak.
“Stephanie doesn’t know where she wants to live. One minute it’s upstate, the next it’s here, the next could be Dallas.”
Her daughter asked if that was true.
I sighed.
“I suppose,” I said.
Nancy has this wonderful ability to make me feel transparent…and cut through the muck.
Am I restless? I asked her later.
Part of her answer hit home: You’re just always worrying about a trillion people and things.
For sure, that’s true of late.
I spent years after my kids got their driver’s licenses worrying that they got safely from Point A to Point B, waiting up at night, checking beds, making sure the last one home had locked the door. I’ve lightened up a lot – realizing for their sakes and my sanity, I couldn’t maintain that intensity. And then, just as the third child was leaving for college, my mother had a stroke. That was five years ago, and although it didn’t kill her, it took her life. Until that stroke, she always fretted too much about me: Where was I going? When would I be home? Why didn’t I call?
What would have happened had she remained well when our home was empty of children nine months a year? I’ll never know.
In the three months since she died, I have a delayed and unfamiliar sense of freedom now that my nest is truly empty. Would I prefer to have her here, asking where I am and where I’m going? Yes – but the mother who was well, vibrant, interested, concerned and even irritating. For both her sake and mine, I wouldn’t want the unrecognizable mother who was suffering.
So maybe it’s not so much that I don’t know where I want to live as Nancy said that night, but rather that I need to re-learn how. It was that phone call back in April that changed me so profoundly when I was told that my mother died. In that synapse, I changed – realizing that whether or not I had answered that five-year umbilical cell phone, the result would have been the same and out of my control.
We’ve had a week of storms on the east coast lately – storms unlike any in recent years: hail, thunder, and lightning in Manhattan so severe it could be Kansas. I was out and about in a storm on Wednesday – just me and my Gustbuster Umbrella – feeling safe and peaceful despite nature’s deluge. I suppose that’s part of the “how.”
Archive for July, 2009
Our youngest has found an apartment with two college friends. A true three-bedroom (a “find” in New York City), he is preparing to move out come mid-August. Yesterday, he was “stressed out” after spending yet another day searching for the perfect space – the “stressed out” part came after finding the apartment, and hoping they wouldn’t lose it. I sprung into action – doing what I’ve always done best throughout the years: listening, and then making a pasta dish – comfort food, to soothe the soul and his churning stomach. Today, Ben and I met with the mother of one of the roommates, the roommate, and two real estate agents: signed papers and wrote checks.
And yesterday, I missed deadlines (one of which is for this blog).
Ben went to Grand Central after the signing and hopped a train to Westchester to visit his girlfriend, a weekend bag packed. I walked to the subway, and waited 25 minutes for the local, sweltering in the humidity that is drenching the city today.
I questioned why I was not suffering the empty nest syndrome as others do as I rode the subway home. I also questioned why I was unable to read as I typically do on the train. And then when I walked in the door to this apartment, it felt strangely empty even though no one but Walter (our cockapoo) would typically be home on a Friday afternoon.
Stop! I thought, as I wondered what it will be like when I don’t hear the strains of Ben’s guitar in the evening. What will it be like to not check his bedroom at 4 a.m. to make sure he’s home, place the damp bath mat over the tub to dry, run the wash cloth over the sink where shaving cream and whiskers sit in pools of water. I mean, really how can I possibly think I’ll miss all that? Dammit, I thought, a part of me will.
Today, as Ben and I sat in the real estate office, I noticed that he has truly become a man. This one who has the burden of being the youngest child and the second son. Right, someone always has a beef about birth order: the oldest claiming that I was “inexperienced” when I had him – that he was a test case or something…the middle one saying that because she’s female, I was over-protective, the youngest, well, the youngest just not wanting to be the baby. “I can do it my own self,” Ben said from the moment he could speak.
My sentiment over this event is surprising. It’s quite true what is said about something feeling like “yesterday” and feeling distant all at once. Ben was born on a Thursday night, the 12th of March just before midnight by emergency C-section. I’d fallen when I was seven months pregnant (while carrying a laundry basket down a recently shampooed carpeted staircase), and although I felt him turn, the doctor said I was merely neurotic. Once in labor, the sonogram proved me right (and the doctor wrong), and I grabbed the collar of his blue scrub and insisted he “take” the baby before the day became Friday the 13th. Six days later, on his brother’s fourth birthday, Ben and I came home – with a fire truck and a train-shaped ice cream cake for David, and a stuffed animal for his two-and-a-half-year-old sister Ellie. Home movies show the three of them – Ben nestled in his pram, and the other two in lavender blanket sleepers, sitting in booster seats at the kitchen table looking shell-shocked.
“Just four years ago today, I had my first little boy, ” I am saying to David who is looking from me to the candles on the train cake, his eyes like saucers. He wasn’t buying the poignancy of the moment. And Ellie, hair tousled and eyes circled from six sleepless days without Mommy is blinking and uncharacteristically silent.
I had songs for each of them. For David – the child who didn’t sleep through the night until he was 13, it was Mr. Sandman. Ellie’s song came later when she left for college and I drove the suburban road from our house down to the harbor, missing her and playing Judy Collin’s ‘Home Before Dark’ (no one knew that until now), and for Ben it was Skinnamarink (the song that calmed him when he was an infant).
The strange thing is that ‘Home Before Dark’ ( “I won’t be long…don’t worry about me…I’ll be all right and you’ll be fine without me…”) now resonates in terms of all of them – these three adults whom I love so ferociously. Unlike a lot of my friends and women my age, I neither long for grandchildren nor do I lament that my children are no longer babies. I have no laminated plaque for years of service or a gold watch for a job well done. I can’t take credit for what the three have become…good people with keen minds, love in their hearts, and deep souls. I’m the first to figure I must have screwed up when things aren’t going right for one of them. They’re so close together in age that sometimes I look back and shake my head incredulously: I was really just flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, running on instinct, and sometimes on empty and trying not to let on as those three grew up.
While Ben is away this weekend, I am going to go through his clothes. I need and want to fold each shirt that we’ve carted around since middle school, put away the ones I know he’ll want to keep as mementos, take in the scent of him that’s gone from baby powder to menthol. When Ellie comes to visit, the apartment smells like lemons. Whenever David comes in the door, I notice he still walks in the same determined way he did as a little boy.
I just put Ben’s college graduation photo into a silver frame and made a special shelf for all my graduates. I showed David the other day when he came by to borrow the car.
“Right, he and Ellie get 8 by 10’s and I get a 5 by 7,” he said.
I began to protest.
“I’m just kidding,” he said.
I don’t believe he was…but it warms my heart that despite the fact they’re all living on their own, some things never change.
This past week, without a state occasion or major event, was the first time in as long as I can remember that my three children were at the same table at once. Stepping back, it’s an interesting study. Have the dynamics changed among the three? In some ways, yes. The two men have become the best of friends in a way that is intrinsically male: This was something I never thought would happen, although there were glimmers of it when the younger was a senior in high school. Then, however, the older one postured himself more as protector. Now, they take care of one another. In terms of their sister, I used to call her “the rose between the thorns” – in many ways she still is: her status as a middle child and only female is inescapable. The difference is that now there is tolerance, humor, acceptance and understanding – but the teasing remains. She will possibly never escape that. I remember not caring when I was pregnant with the third child (having already had a boy and a girl) as to the child’s gender – although secretly, I hoped for a boy, giving my daughter an “only” definition that might override the “middle” definition. She is, I’m afraid, both: only female as well as in the middle. What can I say? I always wanted three – my circle that I could draw beginning from the top, curving to the left, stopping at the bottom and bringing it round again to the top. That was the picture in my head.
On Wednesday, before my daughter went back home to Massachusetts (how strange that is to say and embrace – she came home here for a few days, went back home there), we stopped to see her older brother’s apartment. She hadn’t been there since his wonderful live-in girlfriend decorated. My daughter brought wine and a bouquet of flowers, and there I sat in the living room while my son showed her around…as she admired the touches that were clearly Kristin’s, the sports souvenirs that once were in David’s room in our old Victorian house. Ellie laughed as she loved how Kristin managed to blend David’s plastic encased autographed baseballs next to her hand-blown vases, her artfully framed photographs and tapestries hanging with his Phish poster in the living room.
I was sitting on the sofa as David and Ellie chatted, not quite knowing what to do with myself, not wanting to join in their conversation, wanting them, really, to have time alone, busying myself by erasing old messages on my cell phone.
“We just had lunch with Papa,” Ellie said, telling David about our lunch with my father.
“When was the last time you saw him?” David asked his sister.
“At the funeral,” she said, matter-of-factly.
“Ri-ight,” he said.
I’m not certain if a look came over my face at that exchange, if my breath caught just a touch. The Funeral. Of course, it was my mother’s funeral – the last time my three were together for an “event.”
It has always been my feeling that funerals serve three purposes: to celebrate the life of the person who has died, to comfort the living who mourn, and to give everyone a dose of reality that the person is truly dead. It is the following word I despise because I don’t believe in it – some form of “closure.” The problem with closure (for me) is that regardless of what we absorb, forgive, forget, or accept, memory steps in: With memory, there is the comfort of a spiritual eternity under certain circumstances like the death of my mother…and then that haunting feeling because the memories are there, but the person is gone. Is there really, therefore, closure?
I hate the euphemisms: She passed, she left, she’s gone, she’s in a better place. My mother would have hated them, too. She would have been the first one to say “I’m dead.”
Back to “The Funeral” – it was so odd to hear it in quite that way. Truly, it took me aback. As though Ellie might have said, “at the gallery opening” or some other place that was defined as some, well, event.
I was 24 when my mother’s mother died. The same age that my daughter is now. I was extremely close to my grandmother – far closer than my mother and daughter were to each other. My grandmother became ill shortly after I moved back north from Florida and left my first marriage. I recall telling her that I wasn’t coming back as I took the plane to New York. I went to her apartment and confided that in her.
She didn’t try to talk me out of it. She took my face in her hands and said she would miss me, but that we would still see each other although not every Sunday as we did when I lived there. She gave me her blessing, if you will, atheist though she was. I’ve often wondered if I’d stayed, would I have seen the signs of her illness? Caught it early enough to buy her more time? At her funeral, I don’t remember crying. I remember not wanting to deal with her death, not wanting to deal with my mother’s grief, wanting to have my life, my youth, the good times that might lie ahead although I was getting divorced while my friends were planning weddings.
It is three months tomorrow that my mother died…and on a Friday just like tomorrow.
Just the other day, I was walking with my husband, crossing one of the narrow one-way streets downtown here where the bicyclists delivering food at break-neck speed always travel against the traffic. An old woman was crossing with a walker, looking for the cars when I took her arm and stopped her as the bicyclist flew by.
She looked at me through glasses with lenses so thick her eyes looked three times their size.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” she said.
And in that moment I thought of my mother and my grandmother, and to tell you the truth, I look for old women on the street these days – ones whom I might save, or perhaps savor, just for a moment.
Last week, I had a brainstorm. I took a bottle of wine and two glasses to the rooftop terrace of our apartment building, and texted my husband as he walked home from the subway: “Meet me on the roof.”
Rather than come straight home, it might be that proverbial breath of fresh air…a segue, if you will, between the workday and that second shift of bills and letters. I even had dinner “ready”– except for the steaks which I’d throw on at the last minute. And, to make things even better, I took a book with me and read while I waited for Mark – even thought of writing a blog called “Up On The Roof.”
Watching Mark climb the stairs to the terrace, toss his briefcase on an empty chair, loosen his tie, and witness the tension melt from his face as he sat across the table from me with his wine said my plan was working. This was what we needed: time to re-connect, peace and quiet. Not to mention that although it’s hardly Montana, there is some semblance of open space if you’re above or level with the skyscrapers in Manhattan.
Reluctantly, we went back to our apartment. Well, I was reluctant. I wanted to wait until the stars came out – although we don’t see stars too often in New York City. It was well past dusk, nearly 8:30. Time for dinner and reality.
Once home, Mark uncharacteristically set the table as I popped the steaks into the stove. And then, just as he was about to set down the plates, he called my name. I turned to him with a smile.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said solemnly.
My mind raced: Oh, God, was this really the time for some sort of confession? Another woman? Was our lovely sojourn on the roof about to be ruined? All these thoughts in my brain in a synapse.
“What?” I asked, heart pounding, mind racing, bracing myself.
“We have a mouse,” he said.
Then, I did what any red-blooded woman would do: I screamed, hopped on a chair, and asked Mark to get me my Frye boots.
Please, PETA people – don’t write to me.
It was a toss-up as to whether I would have preferred to hear we had a mouse or he had another woman. My friends have since told me that I’m better off with the mouse. I’m not convinced.
“It’s just a little field mouse,” Mark said. “He ran along the floor board and into the utility closet.”
“There are no fields here,” I said. “That’s not working for me.”
“It’s just a baby mouse,” Mark said.
“Then there are siblings, and parents,” I said, shaking my head. “Nice try. Still not working.”
And there went the evening. We didn’t finish dinner until 11 – after Mark went out and bought humane traps that allow the mouse to be captured and released in some place other than our apartment. I slept in my Frye boots and a baseball cap. I know: Irrational.
Yesterday, the handyman came and pulled out the stove, dishwasher, and every a/c unit and plugged up every hole with steel wool and a sticky foam substance that dries quickly. He assured me that the mouse had probably left the building (or at least our apartment). He also assured me that although the building doesn’t have mice as a rule, every so often a little one gets in through a crack in search of water. I took off the boots, and put on my flip-flops: Courage. The little mouse is more afraid of me than I am of him (or her).
I was getting past this. I even developed a sympathy for the mouse, wished him well, hoped he’d move on.
But last night, Elvis (I named the mouse after someone known to have left the building) reappeared. We had all too significant face time. I was pouring coffee grounds into the filter when he popped up on the kitchen counter. I screamed. He leapt from counter to floor and scurried under the stove. I grabbed a mop – don’t ask me why. And then I picked up the humane trap, placed an appetizing piece of Parmesan cheese in its center, and the trap closed on my fingers (gently, I might add, so for all those out there who think this is not a humane trap, believe me, it is. It forms a safe enclosure – that’s all).
I slept fitfully last night.
This morning I went to make toast, taking the bread from the basket that sits on the counter, and there it was: the package eaten through, mouse droppings in the basket. I screamed again. I threw away the bread, the basket, and just about every dry good in the house since every bag of rice was slightly nibbled through. I cleaned more droppings, vacuumed, mopped, and “eeked.”
I went to the hardware store and bought three sonic pest repellents and a flashlight. Flashlights always make me feel safer.
I am less afraid of Elvis since I’ve named him. I am trying to picture him in a sequined top and tight black pants. It’s not so much Elvis, it’s that Elvis arrives with no warning. He pops out, dines on food not offered (I never even liked it when neighbors just “dropped in” when we lived in the suburbs). And, I will never eat anything with caraway seeds again since…well, you know…
But a couple of good things have come because of Elvis: My youngest son Ben actually asked me if I was OK. My daughter, Ellie, who has her own home and lives in the “country” has gotten over her own fear of mice. And my father laughed for the first time since my mother died. He laughed in almost the way she would have laughed if she’d been the one who happened to call in the midst of my mouse madness.
“Why are you laughing?” I asked my father.
He said it was the way I told the story…that I reminded him of my mother, and that he was sorry the little mouse was “irritating me so.”
“Well, if you laugh, then it can’t be so serious,” I said.
“How nice of you to say,” he said.
Wait a minute: What have they done with my father?
And then my mind hearkened back to good times in childhood when my doctor/father reassured me when I was sick…allayed my fears.
So, maybe the Universe really does work in strange ways. Perhaps Elvis served a purpose here. But now, I’d like to thank him for coming. And bid him a fond farewell after work well done.
These Days/New Skin (July 3, 2009)
Every summer from the time I can remember, I took the months to re-invent myself. This mission probably started around the fourth grade when I noticed who the “popular” girls were in the classroom. The girls who wore outfits that were put together – who wore penny loafers instead of saddle shoes, whose knee socks had good elastics holding them right below their knees, colors in their skirts and sweaters matching. I always looked, as my mother said, like an urchin. Either way, and after using Webster’s, I knew that somehow, no matter how hard I tried, I was just shy of Eliza Doolittle in demeanor.
So, I leafed through magazines like Mademoiselle and Seventeen when I got older, and despite the school uniform I had to wear come fifth grade, I made a conscious decision to be more put together come September – new clothes, new attitude, new presentation of self so that I could be one of the popular girls. But still, I lacked the confidence, that certain laugh, the quick comeback lines. No matter how hard I tried, it always felt like a bad hair day. I remember looking at one of the “popular” girls in my class as she watched a boys’ soccer game (we were an all girls school) – arms wrapped around her knees bent up to her chest, her bare feet looking tanned and perfect, her long blond hair streaming down her back – and thinking that her look was so effortlessly well-groomed, wondering how she did it. And although I swore that one day I would be that girl who wore things effortlessly and easily – like the “little flirty top” that was featured in Seventeen Magazine, a mascara that promised fuller lashes, lip gloss that “enhanced” the mouth… I never felt that I had the attitude that made one a “popular” girl. I just could never pull it off. I remained a mish-mash of colors, not quite up on the trends – the latter coming with a built-in excuse since I wasn’t allowed to indulge in so much of the pop culture that went along with “being cool:” no chewing gum, no comic books, no rock ‘n roll, no heels until I was 16 (an age I battled down to 14, and it was quite a war).
When The Beatles emerged on the scene and the girls in the coat room were buzzing with talk of who was a Paul girl and who was a George or a John girl and how there was even something about Ringo – how fickle we all were. But I had no idea what everyone was talking about until someone pulled out a transistor radio and I Wanna Hold Your Hand came on. Until that moment, and this is the truth, I thought they were talking about bugs. It was sheer desperation that drove me to take a Fifth Avenue bus down to E.J. Korvette’s, buy Meet the Beatles, and spirit it home in a paper bag. I played the record on my turntable, ear pressed close. When my mother came in the room, I pulled the needle off so quickly it scratched the vinyl.
“You’ve got to let me listen to this,” I pleaded. “It’s not fair.”
And so she relented, and I was off riding the downtown bus to Korvette’s with some regularity, buying albums and 45s, and despite her disapproval, playing the music softly in my room. At night, I fell asleep with a transistor radio under my pillow, listening to Wolfman Jack and Cousin Brucie calling out the songs. But despite the stealth foray into music, I still lacked the “cool,” unable to be one of those girls who tapped their fingers to the beat, or stood up on their chairs at a concert and danced. But in private, I danced, and sang along.
On the night after my high school graduation, I eschewed the parties that lasted until dawn. Instead, I went with my boyfriend to see Diary of a Mad Housewife (in a novel, that would be over-the-top foreshadowing), finally able to shake the peer pressure, no longer trying to be a member of the “in crowd.” After the movie, we went to his house in Greenwich Village (he still lived with his parents) where he played guitar for me, and then we ate pizza and listened to James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James and Erik Satie’s The Velvet Gentleman. It was perfect.
The funny thing is, I don’t know where those “popular” girls are now. Looking back, there was really just a handful of them. They vanished after high school. Or maybe I did.
The first and last time that I wore something where I felt put together and almost elegant was, oddly, at my mother’s funeral: I’d bought a blue peasant-style cotton blouse which I wore with a pair of black pants. I just didn’t want to wear all black that day. Now it’s become “the blouse I wore to Mommy’s funeral,” and although everyone commented on how the color suited me, I haven’t worn the blouse since. Nor can I give it away.
Lately, nothing I wear feels right: My skirts seems to short for – that dreaded expression – “a woman my age.” I put on jeans, and it feels like a cry for help. By the time I settle on plain old black pants and a black tank top, I’m as discouraged as I was back in high school, wanting to put on my old cotton nightgown, get into bed, call it a night.
The other evening, I was with my sister and two of her friends when one said that lately all she thinks about was aging. We all jumped in and rallied, “Oh, come on, now! Don’t talk like that!” Until we all confessed the same thought. And then I said it, we four – three of us recently motherless and one with a mother who is quite ill – have lost the shield.
The End of the Innocence just came on the iPod that plays without my mother’s rules about rock ‘n roll now as I write. Even in our fifties and sixties, maybe that’s it – a loss of innocence with this event. No more rules: I can chew all the gum I want now. I can buy an Archie comic. I can blast The Who if I were so inclined. But I won’t – because she once said not to.
And so, is it that we – that I – can’t choose what to wear once again, or is that we, newly touched by this loss, have to find a new skin altogether? A skin that feels like that familiar and worn cotton nightgown – the one that’s easy and effortless, that we know, and knew, so well.
These Days/Circles (June 25, 2009)
We’ve had two family dinners since last Sunday. Family dinners except for the absence of my daughter and her boyfriend which is far more than just an “except.” There was a significant gap at the tables for me, although given the level of my daughter’s happiness, where and with whom she lives, I’ve adjusted. A part of me envies her, wishes I lived in a town much like hers – surrounded by academia, quaint shops on a wide Main Street, houses that hover together in true neighborhoods. I write about towns like that in my novels with the addition of the town always being near water – a lake, the sea, a river.
It is an odd experience to be with children who are either approaching, or roughly the age that Mark and I were when we first met. And then there are the three grandparents, now in their eighties and nineties, and the fact that Mark and I met when they were roughly our ages now. It’s a life cycle wake-up call. Makes me think of Joni Mitchell’s The Circle Game, then adding on another 30 years as the circle continues ‘round. When I listen to the song now, the circle seems more like an arc.
There is an urgency lately that prevents me from wanting to be where and who I am right now. And no, it’s not a mid-life crisis: I’m past that, and (sadly?) never had the opportunity to indulge in one. Instead, I am taking stock, longing for yet another re-invention – the latter of which is probably what staved off the mid-life crisis, and took me down another road. I always want to change – just within myself.
In the last week, I dreamed twice that I am in my twenties and unmarried, dreamed of an old boyfriend, my ex-husband, and that I am the mother of a baby and have lost one of the baby’s shoes. The dreams themselves are probably significant, but more significant is the feeling of uncertainty when I awaken – far more telling than symbolism interpreted according to the online “dream dictionary” translating the dreams as loss of innocence, vulnerability, betrayal and restraint – although seeing those “definitions” just now in black and white is delightfully entertaining if not enlightening.
But when our subconscious is interpreted in a “dream dictionary” are we using our subconscious, conscious or both to interpret the definitions according to what we need to “hear?”
Too heavy, as we used to say.
Lately, it feels necessary to make life simpler, less intrusive, to use time in better ways. Something I have yet to master. Of course, I excuse my lack of expertise in these areas as the result of being rigidly “dutiful” chronologically – as a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, a worker, a friend.
I suppose unless one is a drifter or a recluse, our inability to set boundaries becomes understandably difficult as we juggle ourselves versus others, concerned that someone could be forsaken should we succumb, even momentarily, to our own desires. More pronounced, perhaps, when we are members of the sandwich generation – caring for parents at a time in our lives when the nest is emptying and we should be able to focus on ourselves…
Lately, reality is more difficult to interpret than dreams.
The other night, Mark and I met out-of-town friends for dinner in Tribeca, a neighborhood not far from where we live in downtown New York City. Good company in a lovely restaurant. I took a 60-minute yoga class before dinner, hoping the yoga would stretch my body and calm my mind, but getting into meditative mode was particularly difficult. The hour wasn’t nearly enough for calm. After dinner, when it was time to drive our friends back to midtown, I made my apologies, admitted that I needed to walk, said my goodbyes, and walked home. A small, yet monumental concession to a desire to be alone with my thoughts, and not fight urban traffic with my husband who drives like a typical New York “cabbie” as I clutch the leather handle on the car door, faux-braking with my right foot. I have yet to understand why my husband drives his car around Manhattan. In a past life, he must have been a carriage driver, holding the reins, bouncing on the cobblestones.
The streets were dark and empty as I walked through the not-quite-residential-yet neighborhood. Had I chosen the wrong time and place to indulge a relatively minor need? And then there were the guilty thoughts that perhaps I had inadvertently insulted our guests, and even temporarily abandoned my husband. But, selfishly, I needed the air. In just a few blocks, the neighborhood changed – as so often happens in New York City – and people were walking dogs, groups were tumbling in and out of bars and restaurants, and street lamps suddenly lit the avenues. I felt safe – and crazed with freedom.
About 40 years ago, I sat on the windowsill in my bedroom, drew the draperies around me, gazed at the stained glass windows on the church across the street, strummed my guitar, read Ferlinghetti, and just thought. I tried this on Sunday afternoon. Just holed up in my office after cooking the Father’s Day dinner and before it was served – put my iPod on the dock and leaned back in my desk chair to just think. And then my 22-year-old son asked if I was OK, what was I doing, and how come I was listening to weird music. If he’d been paying attention, he would have heard that the list started with Mozart and then the songs played alphabetically through the titles – Mr. Chow, Mr. Moonlight, Mr. Tambourine Man. Perhaps, yes, a little weird.
I have always been a rather solitary soul, happy when lost in a book, curled up alone watching a movie, going deep into my thoughts. A man once asked why I wasn’t a “normal” woman – preferring Borders to Bloomingdale’s. My grandmother called me a bookworm.
No doubt, solitude ended with marriage and children – both dreams that came true, but I am ready to embrace the oneness again – just once in a while. Have I forgotten how? The tricky part is remaining available to those I love and still being available to me – “before the last revolving year is through.”
These Days/Remote Control
My husband took the week off. I can’t recall the last time he did that. He took a day off here and there, and has missed only two days of work since we married: once when he had shoulder surgery and another time when he had a stomach virus. Oh, yes, and he’s taken some half days off for golf – but that’s because he conducts “business” on the golf course. For the most part, he works to the point of exhaustion: one particularly hot day last summer, he nearly passed out in the subway, and I rescued him from the 59th Street stop. That’s what happens when there’s a heat wave and you forget that a fifty-something body needs more than five hours of sleep per night and can’t spend nine days on constant “go.” He’s been doing one thing or another every day so far this week – golf /business yesterday and Monday, and rehearsing a power point presentation on Tuesday. In between, he bought some dress shirts on sale and two pairs of shoes. Knowing my husband, in about a week, he’ll tell me that the shoes hurt his feet and the shirts will go to the laundry and he’ll complain about the way the collars are pressed.
After nearly thirty years, I know him.
Today, he’s home. It’s mighty weird.
Neither of us showered this morning. I walked the dog – usually he walks the dog first thing in the morning. At the moment, he’s hooking up the DVD player in our bedroom that I’ve been asking him to connect every day since we moved into this apartment in February. This morning, I asked him again and he said what he always says, “Oh yeah, right, I’m gonna do that.” I asked him what about the notion that he always says that (with a disclaimer that I feel like a nag) and it’s still not done. So, now he’s burrowing in a box of tangled wires, and he reminds me of Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton when they decide to move a dresser and pull out all the drawers so it’s not that heavy – except they stack all the drawers on the dresser top. I’m skeptical.
We just had pizza. Our son and his girlfriend ordered a pie at 1:30 in the morning based upon the receipt. The pizza box was on the dining table this morning at 8 a.m. and I was relieved to see that there wasn’t a huge white mark from the hot oily box. I had been craving pizza since this morning. Yesterday, I craved pancakes. This morning, my husband and I looked through boxes of old photographs – some of them from 30 years ago before we were married. It was startling. Until you look at pictures from 30 years ago, you don’t feel the scourge of time. Yes, scourge – and it is truly onomatopoetic – say it slow and the word “scourge” just tears right through your soul as you see what time has onomatopoeically wrought. I think that’s what made me just say to hell with everything, and heat up the pizza. I can’t remember the last time I ate pizza let alone for lunch on a weekday. Typically, I have some berries and yogurt, almonds, maybe some granola if I really go nuts and drink a good 16 ounces of water or green tea. Seeing those pictures made me think who cares what I eat? Have all those nuts and berries and antioxidants really done me any good?
“Want some ice cream?” I asked my husband , half-joking, when we finished the slices.
“Funny,” he said.
“No, really,” I said. “Imagine if we were retired and we just sat around and ate pizza and ice cream. We could even buy an RV.”
And then we just looked at each other in mock horror that wasn’t so mock.
“Back to work,” he said, pressing his hands down on the table to hoist himself up.
“To work?” I asked, the pizza having interrupted the DVD hook-up.
“I mean the DVD,” he said.
Do I think my husband will successfully hook up the DVD player? Yes and No. I think that it will require three remote controls to get it to work, and I will need an instruction manual, and he will forget how he connected everything and I still won’t be able to watch DVDs. But I could be wrong. Historically speaking, I could be correct. That’s what happened in the last apartment.
He just called me into the bedroom. He hooked up the DVD. And my expectations were wrong – it only takes two remotes, and it’s not as complicated to use as I thought.
And so, when the day comes and my husband retires, what will life be like when one person who is bent on doing things yesterday and the other who procrastinates find themselves in the same place for hours at a time? What will happen since I work from home and he’ll no longer be suiting up, grabbing his briefcase, and heading to his office? Is this the reason that retired people become snow birds? Guaranteeing the prospect of warm climates year-round and avoiding the chances of being snowed in together for days at a time or holing up in hurricane season?
“Pretty good job, huh?” he boasted, handing me the remotes.
I was going to give him a round of applause, and decided that would be unkind and provocative.
“Thank you,” I said. “Wonderful.”
Now, it only took my husband about ten minutes to set it up with the pizza break in between – so how come I had to wait four months? The latter is a question not to ask on this momentous day off. After nearly 28 years of marriage, I know better. As for prospects of his retirement, I’ll postpone those thoughts for now.
These Days/Replica
Every Memorial Day weekend from the time I can remember, my mother packed up for a summer rental – usually a house near the sea, and for two summers to a 1932 pre-fabricated Sears Roebuck house in the “country.” In 1971, she bought her own summer house. For me, the rentals were more exciting…magical somehow as moved into a space that belonged to someone else and made it home. And there was always one locked room which, of course, held the special belongings of the owners (who were usually summering on Cape Cod or thereabouts), but for me it was all about mystery – leaving much to my imagination.
The houses were furnished, stocked with linens, dishes, pots and pans, and ramshackle. Their decors so different from the urban formality at home: over-stuffed sofas, canopy beds, hefty armoires, tattered rugs thrown on bare wood floors. In particular, I remember one summer room of mine with a pink canopy bed adjacent to a sun porch where I could watch the summer storms at night – a safe distance from the lightning, but close enough for a thrill.
Until recently, I never questioned my mother’s intentions all those summers when her husband stayed in the city, taking the train out on Friday nights for the weekend. It was just what we did in summers, a part of my landscape, my childhood. It is only in the last months since my mother’s death that I wonder why my mother, so opposed to living anywhere but Manhattan, felt it was so necessary to leave the city in summer. Her cousin Judy explained to me just weeks ago that it was my mother’s desire to have me experience a different kind of life – one with neither the regimen of sleep-away camp nor the worries that went along with navigating city streets and subways in the summers when most of my friends were away at camp or at their own summer homes. Perhaps it was also something endemic to those of my mother’s generation who were somewhat affluent: a social statement to have families at the “seaside” or in the “country,” although my mother was never one to follow societal mores, so I don’t think that was it. Judy insists it was for purposes of lending a different perspective – something I now believe to be true for both my mother as well as myself. Perhaps she, too, needed a respite, a hiatus, a different life – and the summer gave her a good excuse.
It never occurred to me during those summers if my mother was lonely without her husband during the week. Looking back, I have no idea what she did in the evenings when I was out with friends or holed up in my room with books and writing tablets and magazines. And, of course, as we barreled up on Memorial Day weekend and returned come Labor Day weekend, I never considered the effort it took on her part to pack the suitcases and boxes, making sure she had all my required summer reading, and generally transplanting our lives for three short months.
This is the first summer I find myself waffling on spending summers in the city despite this June which has been far more redolent of April what with the cool air and the rain. A few weeks ago we entertained the idea of renting a small retreat for summer weekends, but financially it made little sense in terms of how often we would be there. Kind of pricey for simply weekends – not to mention the distance we’d have to drive for a mere 48-hour respite. Somehow fighting weekend traffic felt counterproductive when the quest was for solitude, quiet, and peace of mind. If I stayed during the week without my husband as my mother did, I would miss him and feel lonesome. Of course, my mother stayed alone when her children were young – that also opens up a series of questions. So many questions…
Lately my heart reaches back to our old Victorian house in what was, in fact, a suburb but somehow felt like the “country” to me having grown up in New York City. The house was white, rambling and slanted as much as The Leaning Tower of Pisa, not at all like the cookie-cutter houses around us. The new owners have painted it orange with black shutters: It looks like an ode to Halloween. I want to knock on the door and ask ‘how dare you?’
It is the wraparound porch that I miss the most about the house – of course, on second thought, it may not be the porch precisely, but rather the friendships that were forged, sealed, and continued on that porch. Once the weather warmed, Nancy, Ellen and I sat on wicker chairs drinking wine, talking, laughing, crying, complaining, comparing notes – that’s what I miss more than I wish I did lately. In winter, we moved ourselves upstairs to my office – the place in the house that was “mine” – where I worked, where I retreated, where I entertained my friends when it was “all girls,” where my husband and I and the children and I had our “talks.” But in winter, I often felt isolated when the snow socked us in and my husband donned a suit and headed to Manhattan while I put on sweat pants and went upstairs to my office.
When we moved this past February, I made myself a home office that is almost an exact replica of the office I had in our old house – right down to the wine red sofa that opens into a sleeper for company and the walls of books. The “feng shui” is nearly identical in terms of positioning the desk, paintings, photographs, knick-knacks. Like my old office, this one also fills with sunlight and rain audibly taps the window pane – yet the urban sounds and scents are different: I have yet to be accustomed to the street noise – jack hammers, the beeping of trucks as they back down the narrow streets, the noontime serenade of the man who stands on the corner asking for change, the angry honking of horns, the sirens. There is no sweet smell of fresh cut grass, no birds chirping, no sound of the gravel as cars pull into the driveway or, going back even further in time, the screech of the school bus brakes reminding me that my work day has come to an end and I’ve been at the desk for eight hours and time has flown.
So, what exactly do I miss? That porch on hot summer nights. Those friends. How I could place a marble on the living room floor and it would roll downhill into the dining room. My mother. I feel myself channeling my mother, looking into myself as I look back upon her at roughly my age, understanding her better, and if not better, then making up stories that quell the need for understanding – perhaps projecting, comforting myself with the notion that she and I might have been more alike that I would have thought back then. Wondering if maybe my mother rented those beach houses because as much of a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker as she was (although she moved to New York City when she was in her thirties) and as much I am, there is something about the sea and salt air that quiets the soul in summer. Neon and pavement are better in winter. Maybe it’s all just as simple as that.
These Days/Middle Lane
The cab driver who took me from the train station in Springfield, Massachusetts to Northampton, Massachusetts on Monday morning had two very authentic-looking green eyes tattooed on the back of his bald head. He also drove with both hands off the wheel (was he using his knees?) while he talked and gesticulated about morality, the nonsensical illegality of marijuana as juxtaposed to the nonsensical legality of tobacco products, and how he believes in welfare, but doesn’t like the prostitutes at the bus depot (who “take” welfare, he said) and sell their “wares” as well as pills with kids in tow. In addition, he told me about his difficult childhood as the youngest of seven children whose father was a violent alcoholic, his sainted mother, his hard-working wife, his three small daughters, and how he feels that no one is ever entitled to boredom: All this during a 20- minute car ride at roughly 70 miles per hour in the left lane. I am a middle lane kind of woman who stays within the speed limit and keeps her eyes on the road.
Did I really just make that last statement? Am I really, with all my bravado, just a middle-lane kind of woman who proceeds with caution?
So, there I was visiting my daughter Ellie in Northampton since Monday – a promise kept as she and Larry settle into their new house while Larry was away on business. It’s the first time Ellie’s lived in a house except for the one where she grew up with parents and brothers in place. She was a little skittish about being “alone,” and their 55-pound dog Tucker is trained not to bark – not a great asset when you hear bumps in the night and want a guard dog.
Right now, Ellie and Larry’s house smells like lemons since I spent a lot of time cleaning. Alas, I know the scent will be only temporary since I can’t get either of them jazzed enough about the citrus scent – not to mention that long work hours for both don’t leave a lot of time for home maintenance. And romance is better.
The cleaning wasn’t entirely for them – although I would be a liar to say I wasn’t motivated. Cleaning is therapy for me – a combination of exercising my muscles while organizing my thoughts as I wash away grime and fold items of clothing like origami. There’s a synergy: Dull surfaces – mental, emotional, wooden, porcelain – come to a glimmer. Though the mini epiphanies during cleaning have to be written down or they’ll go right out of my head again…
The night before last, Ellie and I tooled around town before stopping for sushi: I bought her a refrigerator magnet that pictures a 1950’s “housewife” with a bobbed , gray shirtwaist dress and apron scrubbing a gleaming white bath tub. It says, “ A clean house is a sign of a wasted life.” Ellie insisted that I buy a coffee mug for myself – with a similar female image it reads, “”If by ‘happy’ you mean trapped with no means of escape, then yes, I ‘m happy.”
Yesterday morning, my mug was filled with coffee, and Ellie and I both laughed. This morning I used one of Ellie’s large floral mugs – ones once in our old house. The new mug haunts me now: It was a joke that evoked too much conversation last night and opened too many doors that should have stayed closed – with me behind them no matter how she pulled on the door knob.
What happens when we become our daughter’s “friend” if we discuss ourselves as wives is that we end up burdening them – making what we say subject to misinterpretation. After all, we’re either still married or once were married to their fathers. We try to answer questions truthfully, unable to fool women in their twenties, yet when we lay ourselves bare as women/wives, we become all too vulnerable as mothers. The thing is, these young women are still our children. They don’t want to see us rage on, shed tears, suffer confusion, endure uncertainty. We talk to them, trying not to cross boundaries – yet without the intimate explanations…the nuances…it’s like body surfing as the waves come up and over us as we fight the pull of the undertow in tandem.
So last night was a new course for me in motherhood titled perhaps How Much of our Lives Do We Reveal to Our Daughters? I believe regardless of the daughter’s efforts to allow us a “no holds barred” forum, mothers and daughters cannot talk about the mother’s life. We must bite our lips no matter the temptation…to the point of drawing blood.
This is a strange crossroads: Ellie is the woman I always wanted her to be. She is brilliant, sensitive, and perceptive. She is an innate feminist, and beautiful inside and out. But she is my child. And although she was cavalier about the purchase of the coffee mug, she doesn’t want to know when I take the editorial comment to heart even though she asked a million questions. Truth is, sure there are times I’ve wanted to escape, but at heart, I am the woman who drives in the middle lane – and from the middle lane you have more options: It’s easier to get to the fast lane and the slow lane depending upon the drive. Unlike the road, life is not linear (God, how many times do I say that?), but certain detours taken and navigated are personal maps. She’ll have her own journey.
As I left, Ellie said, “You’re my best friend, you know.”
I kissed her and held her close. Sometimes, for me, she’s still about six.
“Aren’t you going to say that I’m yours?” she asked.
Based upon last night, I said, “No. I’m your mother, and I love you. I can be your best friend – but you can’t be mine.”
Sometimes a coffee mug is just a coffee mug.
These Days/Masses
On Tuesday, my husband and I went to a mass at St. Catherine’s for our friend Joe who died too young one year ago Memorial Day weekend. St. Catherine’s is one of New York City’s anonymous gems. Located on the upper east side, nearly obscured by construction and scaffolding on a “side street,” the church’s jewel-toned stained glass windows, soaring ceilings and red brick walls define a sanctuary. Although not one for organized religion, or prayers said in unison, I recited The Lord’s Prayer with the others. How many times did I (rebelliously) recite that prayer each morning at school? It was both odd and comforting – and an homage to Joe.
Mark and I rarely find ourselves together on the Upper East Side. It is where Mark works, where I grew up, where my father still resides (for 52 years), and the place where my mother died. It is the part of town (and yes, New York is a small “town” especially when you’ve lived here for a lifetime) filled with a cacophony of memories and emotions – not to mention crowds. For those reasons, Mark and I choose now to live in the bowels of Manhattan’s old financial district where, come five o’clock, the streets empty and the bars fill, the restaurants close early, and the confluence of the two rivers tell us that, indeed and thankfully, we live on an island.
We timed our subway ride downtown to avoid rush hour, catching the express at 59th Street after a glass of wine at a little bistro. The 59th Street stop is one I rarely use now. As a kid, it was a destination point for meeting my girlfriends at Bloomingdale’s basement where once upon a time there were bargains. Just as the train pulled out of the station, two really buff young men in what I call sleeveless undershirts and the younger generation calls “wife beaters” turned on a boom box and began dancing and performing acrobatics as the train roared past the local stations. Somersaulting flips in the aisles and using the subway poles as pull-up bars and swings, they passed a hat at the end of their performance, and then moved to the local as the train pulled into Grand Central when our car all but emptied out of commuters.
Mark and I grabbed two seats next to a woman and her two children. The woman was perhaps 30, although the dark circles beneath her eyes and the pallor of her skin made her look not necessarily older, but worn. Her daughter, probably around 12, was a true beauty – shiny dark-hair, round deep brown eyes and creamy skin the color of toast. Unlike the pontificating conversation of the pseudo-intellect at the bistro who unfortunately sat at the next table waxing on about the “blow-hards of academia,” I was mesmerized by this woman’s conversation with her children.
“Mommy, Daddy said he’s giving us money,” the little girl said, nearly pleading for credibility.
“Don’t talk to me about him,” the mother said. “Stop listening to what he tells you.”
“But he promised…”
“You have to stop believing him. He gives us nothing. Nothing. Stop.”
And then there was her little boy, perhaps around nine, playing with an empty plastic cup that once held some sort of “smoothie” based upon the cup’s logo and the remnants of red juice at the bottom. He started to place the cup under the seat.
“Justin! You wait until we get off the train,” said his mother. “You throw that in the garbage.”
“But they threw their cups,” he said, pointing to a group of teens across the car.
“Don’t point. We are not like those people,” the mother whispered. “We are different from those kinds of people. You are different, Justin.”
And Justin, like so many boys his age, kept tossing his cup into the air, catching it, pretending that he would toss it under the seat and defy his mother. The little girl resumed the conversation about her father when a man came on the train dressed in rags, pulling bags of chips and pretzels from a filthy knapsack. He offered “free” food to those on the train unless they wanted to offer him whatever “change” they could for snacks. Justin leaned toward him, fingers splayed.
“You don’t take food from anyone,” the mother said, taking down his hand. “Sit back. Quiet now. We will be fine. We get our own food. Do you understand me?”
How patiently, wearily, firmly, gently she spoke to her children as the subway hurtled along the rails.
The subway’s red digital clock showed 7 p.m. What was the woman’s back story? I wondered. Was the Daddy a deadbeat husband or a deadbeat boyfriend? Was the woman just coming from work and taking her children home only to start her day again? That second shift when we feed our kids and help them with homework and get them into bed? Would she sleep tonight or lie awake and worry how she would make the rent, buy food, clothe her children, keep them from believing in false promises, direct them in different ways from her own to make their future?
I wanted to reach into my purse and hand the woman a stack of bills – and yet I knew that given the conversations she had just had with her children, it would be an insult.
What I would say to her if she was my friend?
There are signs on subway cars in both Spanish and English: “If you see something, say something. Si usted ve algo, diga algo.” An ad campaign born out of September 11, 2001 encouraging people to watch for an enemy, terrorists, a lone suitcase or paper bag on the platform, anything that seems to pose a threat. We have all become accustomed to the signs as well as the recorded voice that comes periodically over the loudspeaker reminding us to secure our belongings and not let anyone touch us in a way that is inappropriate. Just as the train neared our Fulton Street stop, I saw the sign in front of me: If you see something, say something, it nearly shouted to me. Well, I had seen something – should I say something? Before it was time to get off the train, holding my breath, uncertain as to how my words might be construed – not wanting them to sound either condescending or as though I had been eavesdropping when I was only a fly on the wall who knew little except what I heard, I leaned over to the woman.
“You’re a really good mother,” I said. “It’s not easy explaining certain things to our children.”
She smiled, and took my arm. “Thank you,” she said.
And then I turned to Justin, “Don’t tease your Mommy so much. You’re a good boy. Be a good boy for your Mommy, OK?”
And then again before I exited the train, she and I clasped hands. It was a moment in Anytown between women – one who has the luck of the draw, and another who has the odds stacked against her. But in that moment, we were both women and mothers and the playing field was even.
I wish I had stayed on the train with the woman until she arrived home. What I said to her didn’t feel like nearly enough. Our brief encounter wasn’t nearly enough.
Maybe in this small town of ours, I’ll run into her again one day…
I hope so.
