This is about a woman coming home from a four-day trip and standing on the corner of Broadway and 12th with her bags at ten o’clock at night waiting for her husband
This is about him being late and her wondering which other more important thing has delayed him; a call to his lover, one more email, a decision to take the long way.
This is about seeing his car on the other side of the street and the way she has to cross,
how instantly cross she becomes
This is about the shut of the car door and the pull into late night traffic
The way she doesn’t reach over the stick to bridge the gap, no hello honey kiss
The distance, the disappointment that has come out of thin air;
Suddenly, glad to see him, then angry out of nowhere.
This is about a conversation earlier in the day with her friend about how loving people heals us. About how we should love because it feels good in us, not because people are deserving of our love. This is about the way her friend nodded and kept staring at her as if that was the freshest idea she’d ever heard
This is about the man and the woman and how the conversation in the car moves to the kids and what’s happening tomorrow.
This is about domestic life.
About the slightly bossy way he asked her to lock the front door after they got home
The flat spans of dessert as they lay in bed, neither moving to connect. This is the mountain of shoulds, the way she sidles up next to him, her stomach facing his hip, her hand on his chest.
This is about a late night conversation where she suggests they talk about telling their 10-year-old about the lovers because it might be worse when she does find out and feels she’s been lied to
This is about him saying no
How she turns away
This is about coming home but not feeling at home
About a soft blanket of depression she reserves for this man,
About silence and exhaustion and retreat
A decision not to bring up money until after Valentines Day because it would just ruin things
And the long list she imagined making of all the ways she loved him; everything he’d love to hear, how happy it would make him
How down the drain that idea went, for no good reason.
This is about the way we turn away as easily as we turn towards
This is about choices,
Reasons to love, reasons not to
This is about a woman standing alone at 10 at night in downtown Oakland with her bags, which are packed. This is about not knowing if she’s coming or going.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
What they Loved
They loved the motel and they loved standing by the check-in counter, hands around the other, sometimes standing behind the other, hands on an ass.
They loved the motel bed, how crisp and neatly made it was, and they loved the fresh sheets and the fresh starts, they loved the little glasses, always two, with sanitized paper around the lip as if they were the first two, Adam and Eve, to drink from the cup.
They loved the clean, white towels, and they loved the ashtrays and that they were allowed to smoke, that they’d pay extra for that, and the big windows that opened wide and let them puff that smoke out to the bay
They loved the sound of cargo boats, the loading and the unloading, the sounds of commerce because they were a part of that commerce
had passed credit cards and photo IDs, triple A cards over the counter to the young Asian girl at the desk. Yes they said eagerly and nodded their heads, yes to the king sized bed and the ashtrays. Yes to the continental breakfast, the HBO and the complimentary morning paper.
They loved that the concierge never met their eye, never scrutinized, never even said goodbye as they silently slipped through the lobby three hours later and returned home, leaving beds un-maid and towels only slightly used.
They loved the privilege of being anonymous, of not having to answer questions. They loved the freedom of not needing much; a bed, an ashtray, a view of the bay; a window that opened, a working heating vent.
They loved the privilege and the freedom of not needing to answer to each other, not needing the details of where the other had been, what they had said and what they were going to do next.
They appreciated instead the sensible simplicity of a button, a zipper. Tongues were magical, there was nothing to lie about. Curfews were vague. Yes there were people who cared about them a few miles away but they would return to them soon enough.
They loved the peace of this and especially the relief after buttons came undone and boots were tossed and thrown.
They knew how to make the sounds and they knew some dirty words too. They would come hungry but they didn’t care what they cooked up, it was always what they wanted.
They never noticed the terrible brown fabric curtains or the funny little notes left on bathroom counters about forgotten toothbrushes and q-tips at the front desk
They appreciated the hotel’s concern for everything they’d brought and everything they’d forgotten, everything they’d leave behind after their three hours, after they’d mussed the bed and made the sounds, after they’d squeezed out every last bit of tension and stress.
All the things of the day.
The edges they walked, the money they owed, the people who loved them who they could not always properly love back. The lies they told and the people they paid to listen to those lies at $145 an hour. The silent prayers they uttered, the pills that helped them sleep, the tiny goodies they littered throughout their day to get them through.
This was their chance, their time
And they never wasted it
Never tried to fix the other, and if talk of a son’s basketball game went on too long or a story about a remodel glitch went on and on, one would silence the other simply with a smile and a hand placed on a hand, that might slip up to a chest or inside a blouse, and they would remember where and who they were and why they had come to the Extended Stay Hotel or the Phoenix Motel or the Comfort Inn or even the Red Couch.
Time was of the essence, there were bridges to cross and spouses to return to, surely a carpool to drive in the morning, and they loved those things too.
They loved the motel bed, how crisp and neatly made it was, and they loved the fresh sheets and the fresh starts, they loved the little glasses, always two, with sanitized paper around the lip as if they were the first two, Adam and Eve, to drink from the cup.
They loved the clean, white towels, and they loved the ashtrays and that they were allowed to smoke, that they’d pay extra for that, and the big windows that opened wide and let them puff that smoke out to the bay
They loved the sound of cargo boats, the loading and the unloading, the sounds of commerce because they were a part of that commerce
had passed credit cards and photo IDs, triple A cards over the counter to the young Asian girl at the desk. Yes they said eagerly and nodded their heads, yes to the king sized bed and the ashtrays. Yes to the continental breakfast, the HBO and the complimentary morning paper.
They loved that the concierge never met their eye, never scrutinized, never even said goodbye as they silently slipped through the lobby three hours later and returned home, leaving beds un-maid and towels only slightly used.
They loved the privilege of being anonymous, of not having to answer questions. They loved the freedom of not needing much; a bed, an ashtray, a view of the bay; a window that opened, a working heating vent.
They loved the privilege and the freedom of not needing to answer to each other, not needing the details of where the other had been, what they had said and what they were going to do next.
They appreciated instead the sensible simplicity of a button, a zipper. Tongues were magical, there was nothing to lie about. Curfews were vague. Yes there were people who cared about them a few miles away but they would return to them soon enough.
They loved the peace of this and especially the relief after buttons came undone and boots were tossed and thrown.
They knew how to make the sounds and they knew some dirty words too. They would come hungry but they didn’t care what they cooked up, it was always what they wanted.
They never noticed the terrible brown fabric curtains or the funny little notes left on bathroom counters about forgotten toothbrushes and q-tips at the front desk
They appreciated the hotel’s concern for everything they’d brought and everything they’d forgotten, everything they’d leave behind after their three hours, after they’d mussed the bed and made the sounds, after they’d squeezed out every last bit of tension and stress.
All the things of the day.
The edges they walked, the money they owed, the people who loved them who they could not always properly love back. The lies they told and the people they paid to listen to those lies at $145 an hour. The silent prayers they uttered, the pills that helped them sleep, the tiny goodies they littered throughout their day to get them through.
This was their chance, their time
And they never wasted it
Never tried to fix the other, and if talk of a son’s basketball game went on too long or a story about a remodel glitch went on and on, one would silence the other simply with a smile and a hand placed on a hand, that might slip up to a chest or inside a blouse, and they would remember where and who they were and why they had come to the Extended Stay Hotel or the Phoenix Motel or the Comfort Inn or even the Red Couch.
Time was of the essence, there were bridges to cross and spouses to return to, surely a carpool to drive in the morning, and they loved those things too.
Monday, November 26, 2007
The 23rd Floor
He would often say, “I love you,” with just that hint of something lingering at the end of the sentence so that his statement became a question. Did she love him too?
In the beginning and for many years, sometimes still he would ask her to say it, “tell me you love me,” he would say, and she would say it to make him happy, a little like giving in to sex if she was tired because then he would be happy for a little while and she could rest her efforts.
The other night in bed he told her how he loved her, something she can’t remember now, but it shocked her, “You love me like that?” she said, astonished, not realizing that he felt that way. She wasn’t concerned, but felt silenced, unsure of what to do or say and so she put her hand on his chest and moved her body into the spoon of his and into the crook of his arm.
They were lying in her parent’s old bed, the bed her parents had abandoned for the new one a few years earlier. They knew this bed as they knew the house; the hot tub, the bathrooms, which mirrors were best for sex. They knew how to live together, knew how to pack a suitcase for a trip, how to make a driving plan. They could manage the children and get to places on time. They were friends with her whole family. Everyone liked them, and they liked each other, but his statement startled her.
Now she remembered, yes, they had been at her aunt and uncle’s house the night before and he was standing on the balcony of their 23rd floor penthouse looking out onto the lights of Los Angeles. She was drinking a gin and tonic inside with her uncle, who was on his second or third.
Her husband was on the balcony, and what he was thinking, he said, “was how easy it would be to leap off, and if I did, I’d want to grab your hand and take you with me.” And then he’d connected it to love, that she was the great love of his life, and this combination of the leaping and the love, the romantics of that, it was so perfect for him, just like him to pull pain and love together like that, which is when she put her hand on his chest, maybe to soothe him or rest him into sleep or back into himself, to take the focus away from her, the object, the loved one, the person he would reach for as he fell.
She wasn’t concerned, mostly shocked. “You love me like that?” she asked as she put her hand on his chest. It was all she could do.
And a little while later when he asked if she would like to make love, she heard the voice inside of herself say no, and the no stood there like a child in a great hall, a great big echo of no
Until she broke it weakly with a yes
Because she could
Because he was standing all alone on the balcony of the 23rd floor of a penthouse in a Los Angeles high rise looking down on Wilshire blvd and the city of angels and a million cars racing back and forth and nightlights and swimming pools and money exchanging hands a million times a second right below him.
And because he came from farmland where the only thing you could count on was the smell of manure or the shake of someone’s hand and the way they looked you in the eye. And it’s not that she pitied him and it’s not that she worried, but he was alone, alone in a way she would never allow herself to be.
“Yes,” she said weakly, and her hand on his chest came alive and it began to travel. This was what was called for.
In the beginning and for many years, sometimes still he would ask her to say it, “tell me you love me,” he would say, and she would say it to make him happy, a little like giving in to sex if she was tired because then he would be happy for a little while and she could rest her efforts.
The other night in bed he told her how he loved her, something she can’t remember now, but it shocked her, “You love me like that?” she said, astonished, not realizing that he felt that way. She wasn’t concerned, but felt silenced, unsure of what to do or say and so she put her hand on his chest and moved her body into the spoon of his and into the crook of his arm.
They were lying in her parent’s old bed, the bed her parents had abandoned for the new one a few years earlier. They knew this bed as they knew the house; the hot tub, the bathrooms, which mirrors were best for sex. They knew how to live together, knew how to pack a suitcase for a trip, how to make a driving plan. They could manage the children and get to places on time. They were friends with her whole family. Everyone liked them, and they liked each other, but his statement startled her.
Now she remembered, yes, they had been at her aunt and uncle’s house the night before and he was standing on the balcony of their 23rd floor penthouse looking out onto the lights of Los Angeles. She was drinking a gin and tonic inside with her uncle, who was on his second or third.
Her husband was on the balcony, and what he was thinking, he said, “was how easy it would be to leap off, and if I did, I’d want to grab your hand and take you with me.” And then he’d connected it to love, that she was the great love of his life, and this combination of the leaping and the love, the romantics of that, it was so perfect for him, just like him to pull pain and love together like that, which is when she put her hand on his chest, maybe to soothe him or rest him into sleep or back into himself, to take the focus away from her, the object, the loved one, the person he would reach for as he fell.
She wasn’t concerned, mostly shocked. “You love me like that?” she asked as she put her hand on his chest. It was all she could do.
And a little while later when he asked if she would like to make love, she heard the voice inside of herself say no, and the no stood there like a child in a great hall, a great big echo of no
Until she broke it weakly with a yes
Because she could
Because he was standing all alone on the balcony of the 23rd floor of a penthouse in a Los Angeles high rise looking down on Wilshire blvd and the city of angels and a million cars racing back and forth and nightlights and swimming pools and money exchanging hands a million times a second right below him.
And because he came from farmland where the only thing you could count on was the smell of manure or the shake of someone’s hand and the way they looked you in the eye. And it’s not that she pitied him and it’s not that she worried, but he was alone, alone in a way she would never allow herself to be.
“Yes,” she said weakly, and her hand on his chest came alive and it began to travel. This was what was called for.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
What Keeps Me Awake at Night
I may have time to get to the Girl Scout store to get the new troupe numbers and Girl Scout USA insignia.
I wonder if those jeans are worth patching.
Is this middle aged spread or have I been eating too many nuts?
Nuts are good, right?
229 days till summer. Still time to work toward that bikini
My feet don’t hurt that much.
You know, my shoulder feels exactly like it did during the racquetball days.
Damn mosquitoes.
I don’t need any more new clothes.
I should make some soup this week.
I loved Yvonne’s white t.shirt and long flowered jacket. She is so beautiful and neurotic.
I felt pretty at the party but no one mentioned it. Prettier than I’d felt in a long time. Are they just used to my prettiness or am I not pretty at all?
Do I have any underwear that he hasn’t seen?
We should be getting that call from the basketball coaches soon. I hope practice isn’t on girl scouts night.
Get to the bookstore.
If I don’t invite more than two people over at a time we can all drink wine out of wine glasses.
I hope they take those boots back.
Mosquitoes. Will they retreat as it gets colder?
What if I run out of money?
Chocolate bacon, who would have thunk it?
I can feel my hips.
My breasts are like puddles. Exactly like my mothers.
I think I said goodnight to him.
One day my father will die.
Should we drive or fly?
Hawaii sounds nice. People take trips they can't afford all the time. They use their credit cards.
The house really is tilting. Maybe that’s why I wake up dizzy every morning.
200 X 180 =
What else can I offer my students? Will they hate me if I give myself a raise?
Get bread.
Don’t forget lunch for Friday.
Call Jan. Call Tom.
Rent.
I’m too nice.
But not to him. I’m not nice enough to him. I should have said goodnight.
Laundry soap.
I wonder when my haircut is.
I hope he says yes to ice skating with the girl scouts. What was I thinking?
I should get outside more.
My feet don’t hurt that bad.
Maybe the school girl skirt for Halloween.
R. will meet P. She knows about him now. I’ll give her the heads up that he's coming over.
Should I tell P. she knows? No. Some things are better left unsaid.
NANO month.
I could get up early and write.
Damn mosquitoes.
I wonder if he really will get a job.
His feet feel nice.
This room is tilting.
Could I really teach in Cabo?
I hope they take those boots back.
I think I can handle two days of racquetball a week.
Maybe my shoulder hurts from lifting.
I wonder if Janie is mad at me?
I hope that check comes soon.
I’ll stop when that bottle is empty.
The cat will get the mouse.
I’ll call her tomorrow. She’ll understand. I know it’s been a week but she never calls me on mine either.
Sometimes it’s a curse to have such good ideas. I could write that whole penis book in a NANO month. My mom says I could sell that puppy for a million dollars.
Maybe I’m not that smart.
I’m nice, but not that smart.
I am tired though.
I wonder if I’ll write another book.
Do I have to?
His feet feel nice.
I wonder if those jeans are worth patching.
Is this middle aged spread or have I been eating too many nuts?
Nuts are good, right?
229 days till summer. Still time to work toward that bikini
My feet don’t hurt that much.
You know, my shoulder feels exactly like it did during the racquetball days.
Damn mosquitoes.
I don’t need any more new clothes.
I should make some soup this week.
I loved Yvonne’s white t.shirt and long flowered jacket. She is so beautiful and neurotic.
I felt pretty at the party but no one mentioned it. Prettier than I’d felt in a long time. Are they just used to my prettiness or am I not pretty at all?
Do I have any underwear that he hasn’t seen?
We should be getting that call from the basketball coaches soon. I hope practice isn’t on girl scouts night.
Get to the bookstore.
If I don’t invite more than two people over at a time we can all drink wine out of wine glasses.
I hope they take those boots back.
Mosquitoes. Will they retreat as it gets colder?
What if I run out of money?
Chocolate bacon, who would have thunk it?
I can feel my hips.
My breasts are like puddles. Exactly like my mothers.
I think I said goodnight to him.
One day my father will die.
Should we drive or fly?
Hawaii sounds nice. People take trips they can't afford all the time. They use their credit cards.
The house really is tilting. Maybe that’s why I wake up dizzy every morning.
200 X 180 =
What else can I offer my students? Will they hate me if I give myself a raise?
Get bread.
Don’t forget lunch for Friday.
Call Jan. Call Tom.
Rent.
I’m too nice.
But not to him. I’m not nice enough to him. I should have said goodnight.
Laundry soap.
I wonder when my haircut is.
I hope he says yes to ice skating with the girl scouts. What was I thinking?
I should get outside more.
My feet don’t hurt that bad.
Maybe the school girl skirt for Halloween.
R. will meet P. She knows about him now. I’ll give her the heads up that he's coming over.
Should I tell P. she knows? No. Some things are better left unsaid.
NANO month.
I could get up early and write.
Damn mosquitoes.
I wonder if he really will get a job.
His feet feel nice.
This room is tilting.
Could I really teach in Cabo?
I hope they take those boots back.
I think I can handle two days of racquetball a week.
Maybe my shoulder hurts from lifting.
I wonder if Janie is mad at me?
I hope that check comes soon.
I’ll stop when that bottle is empty.
The cat will get the mouse.
I’ll call her tomorrow. She’ll understand. I know it’s been a week but she never calls me on mine either.
Sometimes it’s a curse to have such good ideas. I could write that whole penis book in a NANO month. My mom says I could sell that puppy for a million dollars.
Maybe I’m not that smart.
I’m nice, but not that smart.
I am tired though.
I wonder if I’ll write another book.
Do I have to?
His feet feel nice.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Do's and Don'ts
She called breathless and excited, certain that you and she, your lover’s wife, should write the book on open marriage. It would be fun, she said over the phone, and marketable too, with sidebars of do’s and don’ts, tips and etiquette, that sort of thing.
You’d thought about it of course, both of you were writers and in a position to actually share something. Nearly three years into this and still on your feet, still married and thriving. You might actually have something to offer people.
But a part of you worried that if you did start waving a flag the whole thing would come crashing down on you. You’d lose your marriage or lose your lover and then all your sadness and disappointment with life, your real fears would surface and you would have to accept a truer truth, which is that open marriage is great if you’re getting what you want, if somebody wants to be your baby. But without that, say your husband is having the time of his life with his girlfriend, but the guy you’re with disappears, well, so much for those helpful tips and those all those clever little do’s and don’ts.
At least she wasn’t calling because you’d done something wrong, because her husband had come home last night in a bad way. No, you’d left him in good shape and he was completely capable of making breakfast for the boys and taking them to school. Sure you’d made an impression on him, but you hadn’t left a mark. And as she spoke, all chatty and excited about the book idea, it appeared that she still hadn’t gotten wind of the other little tryst that had happened the night before with your husband’s lover and her husband, a former love of yours and who is closely associated with and the sometimes lover of your lover's wife.
And while it's true that you didn’t break any rules, you don’t mean to hurt people and you don’t want to lie. And so you hoped that you could simply have a whole conversation with her about the bestselling book the two of you would write about open marriage; all those sage words of advice; how to make it work and how not to fuck it up. You hoped to have just this conversation, wondering as you listened to her go on about the book, whether your friendship, if the book project could weather the complexity of this whole thing; everything said and left unsaid; all the tiny lies and the way we protect ourselves and each other.
You wondered whether her husband, a man of 60, would be here in ten years or whether his heart would give way the way his own father’s did at 65. You wonder if that happens whether you’ll have such good news to spread about your open marriage. Maybe you’ll know more about loss then. Maybe you’ll become at expert on that.
You’d thought about it of course, both of you were writers and in a position to actually share something. Nearly three years into this and still on your feet, still married and thriving. You might actually have something to offer people.
But a part of you worried that if you did start waving a flag the whole thing would come crashing down on you. You’d lose your marriage or lose your lover and then all your sadness and disappointment with life, your real fears would surface and you would have to accept a truer truth, which is that open marriage is great if you’re getting what you want, if somebody wants to be your baby. But without that, say your husband is having the time of his life with his girlfriend, but the guy you’re with disappears, well, so much for those helpful tips and those all those clever little do’s and don’ts.
At least she wasn’t calling because you’d done something wrong, because her husband had come home last night in a bad way. No, you’d left him in good shape and he was completely capable of making breakfast for the boys and taking them to school. Sure you’d made an impression on him, but you hadn’t left a mark. And as she spoke, all chatty and excited about the book idea, it appeared that she still hadn’t gotten wind of the other little tryst that had happened the night before with your husband’s lover and her husband, a former love of yours and who is closely associated with and the sometimes lover of your lover's wife.
And while it's true that you didn’t break any rules, you don’t mean to hurt people and you don’t want to lie. And so you hoped that you could simply have a whole conversation with her about the bestselling book the two of you would write about open marriage; all those sage words of advice; how to make it work and how not to fuck it up. You hoped to have just this conversation, wondering as you listened to her go on about the book, whether your friendship, if the book project could weather the complexity of this whole thing; everything said and left unsaid; all the tiny lies and the way we protect ourselves and each other.
You wondered whether her husband, a man of 60, would be here in ten years or whether his heart would give way the way his own father’s did at 65. You wonder if that happens whether you’ll have such good news to spread about your open marriage. Maybe you’ll know more about loss then. Maybe you’ll become at expert on that.
Monday, October 08, 2007
potatoes
I can’t write about the way I stuffed my face last night, my early dinner of potatoes, potatoes, potatoes, how I kept coming downstairs for more and the shame of getting into bed knowing that there was no way I could let my husband touch me, even though it was probably a good night, even though we’d been talking about it, even though it had been weeks, even though I can’t actually remember the feeling of him inside of me.
The relief of the movie in bed, our feet touching, then soon after, the relief of his snores, that another night had passed and I had escaped the intimacy, the awkwardness of touch and the movement toward each other.
I can’t write about how I’ve been wondering if the open marriage isn’t just terribly convenient, that the philosophy may be poppycock, that business about how the four square walls of marriage are limiting, too tight. That business about how other people allow you to express the untapped, that one person can’t be it all for you.
Lately I wonder if having a lover isn’t just a terribly convenient way to drift from each other, both of us a little high, a little drugged in the anticipation of the tryst, the way my step became just a little lighter when P. said he could make the Wednesday night date, how I found myself taking the first full breath of the day.
I don’t know if I can write about how difficult it is to move toward my husband, not for any good reason except that I am comfortable in my defense, tucked as I am behind my great wall. How right, how disappointed.
If they sliced me open they would find road blocks and ditches, and old refrigerators and ovens that people had ditched along the banks and which now blocked the flow of fresh water.
When my lover called to say Wednesday I think I giggled. I sounded like a child. I realized I could make it through today and tomorrow and the next day.
What I can’t write about are those dead refrigerators getting rusty and rained on and clogging up the river. I find myself unwilling to look or uncover. I find myself drifting and blaming and eating potatoes.
What I am unwilling to write about, what I find impossible to write about is the feeling each night of getting into bed with a man I care about but do not know how to move toward. The other night I wanted him to touch me. I wanted to ask but I felt guilty. It was only the pleasure I sought, not the connection. It could have been anyone’s hands, and this is a very hard thing to write about.
The relief of the movie in bed, our feet touching, then soon after, the relief of his snores, that another night had passed and I had escaped the intimacy, the awkwardness of touch and the movement toward each other.
I can’t write about how I’ve been wondering if the open marriage isn’t just terribly convenient, that the philosophy may be poppycock, that business about how the four square walls of marriage are limiting, too tight. That business about how other people allow you to express the untapped, that one person can’t be it all for you.
Lately I wonder if having a lover isn’t just a terribly convenient way to drift from each other, both of us a little high, a little drugged in the anticipation of the tryst, the way my step became just a little lighter when P. said he could make the Wednesday night date, how I found myself taking the first full breath of the day.
I don’t know if I can write about how difficult it is to move toward my husband, not for any good reason except that I am comfortable in my defense, tucked as I am behind my great wall. How right, how disappointed.
If they sliced me open they would find road blocks and ditches, and old refrigerators and ovens that people had ditched along the banks and which now blocked the flow of fresh water.
When my lover called to say Wednesday I think I giggled. I sounded like a child. I realized I could make it through today and tomorrow and the next day.
What I can’t write about are those dead refrigerators getting rusty and rained on and clogging up the river. I find myself unwilling to look or uncover. I find myself drifting and blaming and eating potatoes.
What I am unwilling to write about, what I find impossible to write about is the feeling each night of getting into bed with a man I care about but do not know how to move toward. The other night I wanted him to touch me. I wanted to ask but I felt guilty. It was only the pleasure I sought, not the connection. It could have been anyone’s hands, and this is a very hard thing to write about.
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Would you like to write with me?
I teach wild writing and I have a couple of spots open in my weekly classes. If you live in Northern California close to Berkeley and you're interested in joining my wild writing class, email me at lwagner@alamedanet.net and I'll tell you all about it. Classes start in September.
More real blogging soon, promise.
More real blogging soon, promise.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Post Thoughts
Something about my last post, as honest and as soberly written as it was, scared me. I read it and re-read it. I checked for signs of smugness and inflated stability, but I couldn’t find any; I wouldn’t change a word. And yet I woke up feeling cautious this morning, a feeling that this whole thing could come back to bite me.
I think it was the way I ended the post, the way I so soberly stated the possibility of a marriage crumbling that stuck in my craw. I don’t take that lightly, though the possibility is there in even the best looking marriages.
Last year, when I first got together with my lover, his wife made a comment early on when she realized that the feelings her husband and I shared were bigger than just the sex she had expected us to get together for.
“I hope I’m not going to lose my marriage over this,” she told me over the phone. And I said, “You might lose your marriage, but not over this.” Which is to say the ending of a marriage won’t probably, in our case, be the result of our open marriages, but instead because of the marriage’s own trajectory over time; the issues, the potholes and the changes couples go through.
You could blame the open marriage but I think that would be a mistake.
So it’s not the open marriage that scares me so much, though it does trigger painful experiences, which is why you have to have your eyes wide open if you’re going to do this. As I said in my earlier post, because it operates in the theater of love and intimacy we bump up against our deep woundings all the time; mommy and daddy stuff and who loved you and who didn’t and whether you got enough. But the opportunity here is to wake up, to realize that we each create dramas and stories in our life that mirror our deeper work, our wounding, so that we have something tangible to work it out with. The mistake most of us make is confusing the story and the drama with the deeper work. The mistake we make is hoping that other people will make changes that will make us more comfortable, rather than realizing that we created the very world we inhabit. Manipulating other people to change only keeps us from doing our deeper work.
So if I’m scared about anything, it’s that I’ll get trapped in the story instead of recognizing the deeper river of my work that runs underneath the drama. If I’m scared of anything it’s that I’ll focus on the ways people aren’t loving me enough and I’ll forget that my job is to show up for myself, because people will never love you the way you want to be loved, even if they love you very much.
I think it was the way I ended the post, the way I so soberly stated the possibility of a marriage crumbling that stuck in my craw. I don’t take that lightly, though the possibility is there in even the best looking marriages.
Last year, when I first got together with my lover, his wife made a comment early on when she realized that the feelings her husband and I shared were bigger than just the sex she had expected us to get together for.
“I hope I’m not going to lose my marriage over this,” she told me over the phone. And I said, “You might lose your marriage, but not over this.” Which is to say the ending of a marriage won’t probably, in our case, be the result of our open marriages, but instead because of the marriage’s own trajectory over time; the issues, the potholes and the changes couples go through.
You could blame the open marriage but I think that would be a mistake.
So it’s not the open marriage that scares me so much, though it does trigger painful experiences, which is why you have to have your eyes wide open if you’re going to do this. As I said in my earlier post, because it operates in the theater of love and intimacy we bump up against our deep woundings all the time; mommy and daddy stuff and who loved you and who didn’t and whether you got enough. But the opportunity here is to wake up, to realize that we each create dramas and stories in our life that mirror our deeper work, our wounding, so that we have something tangible to work it out with. The mistake most of us make is confusing the story and the drama with the deeper work. The mistake we make is hoping that other people will make changes that will make us more comfortable, rather than realizing that we created the very world we inhabit. Manipulating other people to change only keeps us from doing our deeper work.
So if I’m scared about anything, it’s that I’ll get trapped in the story instead of recognizing the deeper river of my work that runs underneath the drama. If I’m scared of anything it’s that I’ll focus on the ways people aren’t loving me enough and I’ll forget that my job is to show up for myself, because people will never love you the way you want to be loved, even if they love you very much.
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Regarding Open Marriage, Just a Few Things
If you can, you must allow yourself to fall in love a little. That’s where the juice is. You have to be willing to have a little skin in the game. Sex without love falls flat after a while. It can’t only be a good time; you have to be willing to unpeel yourself, put down your guns and not be so pretty all the time.
Managing that love can be tricky; to care, but not too much; to feel, but not be overwhelmed with feeling; to be able to remember in detail what he feels like inside of you, but still be able to make summer camp sandwiches and take a walk with your husband, to reach for his hand.
You can’t want to leave your marriage. If you’re looking for a supplicant or for a way out, you’re going to be sad. If you want to be trusted you can’t want to take someone’s husband away. Sure you want them to fall in love with you a little, but you can’t be hoping that your lover will solve all your problems or be your new daddy.
Which means that you need to work on your marriage and work on yourself. Open marriage can’t replace that work. Ideally your lover wakes up something sparky and delightful in you, something your own marriage has a more difficult time conjuring because of the 101 things that make it so perfectly domestic; kids and dishes and bills and did you water the garden? And didn’t I ask you to return those videos? The idea is to wake up and to bring that awakening home to your marriage and to yourself.
And speaking of waking up, Triggers R Us, which is to say, you will get hurt or confused or be full of longing or the desire to strangle someone. We’re in the land of sex and intimacy now, and if you thought you had that shit handled, if you thought 16 years of marriage gave you an E Ticket that bypassed heartache think again brother. You will return to every issue you ever had about who loved you and who didn’t. You will find yourself checking your cell phone. You will be distracted, sometimes unable to sleep, you will swoon and it will remind you at times, especially in the beginning, of your teenage years. But mostly you will return to the uncooked parts of yourself, which means welcome home to some very juicy unfinished business and a chance to grow.
Tell the truth and stay in excellent communication with the players; your spouse, your lover, his spouse. Check in. Ask permission. Email or call to thank the spouse of your lover after a date. Try not to take your time with your lover for granted. His wife is the gatekeeper; if they’re doing well she’s more likely to share him, but anything can happen, so play nice. Your job is to return your lover back to his wife neither dented nor disturbed; you can make an impression, but you shouldn’t leave a mark.
Spouses have veto power. You have a date you’ve been patiently waiting for, but there’s a crisis at home or a change of heart. Let it go, the marriages come first. Less is more. Let days and weeks pass, then find your lover. A major part of what makes this special is the unavailability, the great passionate gaps in between your time together. Want it, long for it, let the hunger happen, that’s what keeps it alive, because in the end we’re just people and our lovers are not so incredibly different from the people we married, which is to say over time we all become tedious. So enjoy that you don’t pay bills or do laundry or share a carpool schedule with this person. Enjoy the small amounts of time you get to see each other, savor those sessions and leave your date just a little hungry.
It’s all good until it isn’t, and each person has to make that decision for themselves. Sharing your spouse, getting intimately involved with another person is not for everyone and if it’s not for you, make a change. Get out and hopefully with everything you came with. But you can’t say. It’s a slippery slope, a Pandora’s Box, and there are no guarantees, but then there really isn’t in marriage either.
These are just a few things for now.
Managing that love can be tricky; to care, but not too much; to feel, but not be overwhelmed with feeling; to be able to remember in detail what he feels like inside of you, but still be able to make summer camp sandwiches and take a walk with your husband, to reach for his hand.
You can’t want to leave your marriage. If you’re looking for a supplicant or for a way out, you’re going to be sad. If you want to be trusted you can’t want to take someone’s husband away. Sure you want them to fall in love with you a little, but you can’t be hoping that your lover will solve all your problems or be your new daddy.
Which means that you need to work on your marriage and work on yourself. Open marriage can’t replace that work. Ideally your lover wakes up something sparky and delightful in you, something your own marriage has a more difficult time conjuring because of the 101 things that make it so perfectly domestic; kids and dishes and bills and did you water the garden? And didn’t I ask you to return those videos? The idea is to wake up and to bring that awakening home to your marriage and to yourself.
And speaking of waking up, Triggers R Us, which is to say, you will get hurt or confused or be full of longing or the desire to strangle someone. We’re in the land of sex and intimacy now, and if you thought you had that shit handled, if you thought 16 years of marriage gave you an E Ticket that bypassed heartache think again brother. You will return to every issue you ever had about who loved you and who didn’t. You will find yourself checking your cell phone. You will be distracted, sometimes unable to sleep, you will swoon and it will remind you at times, especially in the beginning, of your teenage years. But mostly you will return to the uncooked parts of yourself, which means welcome home to some very juicy unfinished business and a chance to grow.
Tell the truth and stay in excellent communication with the players; your spouse, your lover, his spouse. Check in. Ask permission. Email or call to thank the spouse of your lover after a date. Try not to take your time with your lover for granted. His wife is the gatekeeper; if they’re doing well she’s more likely to share him, but anything can happen, so play nice. Your job is to return your lover back to his wife neither dented nor disturbed; you can make an impression, but you shouldn’t leave a mark.
Spouses have veto power. You have a date you’ve been patiently waiting for, but there’s a crisis at home or a change of heart. Let it go, the marriages come first. Less is more. Let days and weeks pass, then find your lover. A major part of what makes this special is the unavailability, the great passionate gaps in between your time together. Want it, long for it, let the hunger happen, that’s what keeps it alive, because in the end we’re just people and our lovers are not so incredibly different from the people we married, which is to say over time we all become tedious. So enjoy that you don’t pay bills or do laundry or share a carpool schedule with this person. Enjoy the small amounts of time you get to see each other, savor those sessions and leave your date just a little hungry.
It’s all good until it isn’t, and each person has to make that decision for themselves. Sharing your spouse, getting intimately involved with another person is not for everyone and if it’s not for you, make a change. Get out and hopefully with everything you came with. But you can’t say. It’s a slippery slope, a Pandora’s Box, and there are no guarantees, but then there really isn’t in marriage either.
These are just a few things for now.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
schoolgirl
On Friday afternoon they told us to come to the retreat the next morning dressed in something that our parents wouldn’t have let us out of the house wearing and something that we were still uncomfortable in.
Nine months earlier I had bought a schoolgirl outfit online because I’d wanted one for a long time and because I knew that somewhere in me a naughty girl lurked, though in all of my 46 years I had never road-tested her.
I’d seen my friend Jane dressed in something like that once; a short kilt and motorcycle boots. That was the look I loved; hip, sexy, confident and just this side of bad. But Jane was tall and skinny and had legs for days. I was shorter and stockier, muscular. I didn’t think I could carry it with the same appeal. People might grimace exactly the way I grimaced at women who dressed too young or whose own bodies spilled over their tight clothing. But my relationship with P. had unleashed something utterly free in me. The first night we were together I danced naked for him. I’d never done that for anyone. I still remember the smile on his face as I moved; total appreciation. And it had been like that ever since; I could take risks with him, it was safe and it was time to explore the schoolgirl.
My outfit came a week later. The black and red kilt was short, see-your-underwear-short, and the black top was totally pirate—just a loose piece of black fabric that tied my breasts together in a big knot, and which exposed my whole tummy. I waited until my family had left the house and I tried the ensemble on in the full-length mirror in my bedroom.
Big mistake. What was I thinking? It was so wrong. My legs were too muscular, too stocky and my stomach wasn’t sexy and concave like the girls in the catalogue. How could I have even thought I could carry this off? I was so ashamed that I took it off immediately and stuffed it in a cruel ball under a chair cushion in my bedroom. Out of sight, out of mind for nine months until last weekend, until the workshop, until I put it on, zipping up the little skirt and tying the pirate top tight. I pulled on my black cowboy boots and looked at myself in the mirror. This was it. This was the outfit I wouldn’t be caught dead in.
People at the workshop were kind. Black men love my “thick” legs, “we just do,” a really handsome man my age said. Another man whispered that my legs were stunning. A couple of women said I was sexy. And as nice as those comments were, mostly what I tasted that day was the kind of exhilarating freedom that comes from unleashing something that has been terribly, horribly, miguidedly repressed. I was enfused me with aliveness and after about an hour I had forgotten about everyone else, forgotten what I looked like to others and was instead appreciating the freedom of my strong body in those sexy clothes.
And so what happened, what I saw was that within a day I went from being a girl who wanted to wear a short skirt and boots, but who couldn’t because she didn’t have the body, to becoming a girl who could wear a short skirt and boots. It was very different from “trying” to love my body with affirmations, something I’d been working at for years. This was me taking an action, a contradictory action that had me live into a different story about me and my body, and in doing so, I made it real.
Nine months earlier I had bought a schoolgirl outfit online because I’d wanted one for a long time and because I knew that somewhere in me a naughty girl lurked, though in all of my 46 years I had never road-tested her.
I’d seen my friend Jane dressed in something like that once; a short kilt and motorcycle boots. That was the look I loved; hip, sexy, confident and just this side of bad. But Jane was tall and skinny and had legs for days. I was shorter and stockier, muscular. I didn’t think I could carry it with the same appeal. People might grimace exactly the way I grimaced at women who dressed too young or whose own bodies spilled over their tight clothing. But my relationship with P. had unleashed something utterly free in me. The first night we were together I danced naked for him. I’d never done that for anyone. I still remember the smile on his face as I moved; total appreciation. And it had been like that ever since; I could take risks with him, it was safe and it was time to explore the schoolgirl.
My outfit came a week later. The black and red kilt was short, see-your-underwear-short, and the black top was totally pirate—just a loose piece of black fabric that tied my breasts together in a big knot, and which exposed my whole tummy. I waited until my family had left the house and I tried the ensemble on in the full-length mirror in my bedroom.
Big mistake. What was I thinking? It was so wrong. My legs were too muscular, too stocky and my stomach wasn’t sexy and concave like the girls in the catalogue. How could I have even thought I could carry this off? I was so ashamed that I took it off immediately and stuffed it in a cruel ball under a chair cushion in my bedroom. Out of sight, out of mind for nine months until last weekend, until the workshop, until I put it on, zipping up the little skirt and tying the pirate top tight. I pulled on my black cowboy boots and looked at myself in the mirror. This was it. This was the outfit I wouldn’t be caught dead in.
People at the workshop were kind. Black men love my “thick” legs, “we just do,” a really handsome man my age said. Another man whispered that my legs were stunning. A couple of women said I was sexy. And as nice as those comments were, mostly what I tasted that day was the kind of exhilarating freedom that comes from unleashing something that has been terribly, horribly, miguidedly repressed. I was enfused me with aliveness and after about an hour I had forgotten about everyone else, forgotten what I looked like to others and was instead appreciating the freedom of my strong body in those sexy clothes.
And so what happened, what I saw was that within a day I went from being a girl who wanted to wear a short skirt and boots, but who couldn’t because she didn’t have the body, to becoming a girl who could wear a short skirt and boots. It was very different from “trying” to love my body with affirmations, something I’d been working at for years. This was me taking an action, a contradictory action that had me live into a different story about me and my body, and in doing so, I made it real.
Friday, June 22, 2007
The Light
It was a surprise when he told my sister and I, that if we wanted dessert we had to stand near his side of the table with our legs together. He said if he could see a space between our thighs, if he could see the light, then we could have some ice cream.
If I had known this was going to happen maybe I wouldn’t have eaten so much at dinner, but I'm sure I ate a lot; my mother made so much good food and I always remember being hungry. Up until this time I had never thought about my thighs, or any part of my body with concern, so I got up and stood by his chair with my little sister.
It was over so fast. There was no light between my thighs, and I didn’t get dessert.
Now I stand at that same table for every meal, constantly checking and monitoring myself to see if I deserve to eat. I pay for the food I do eat by working out nearly everyday, and going without food when I can.
If I had known this was going to happen maybe I wouldn’t have eaten so much at dinner, but I'm sure I ate a lot; my mother made so much good food and I always remember being hungry. Up until this time I had never thought about my thighs, or any part of my body with concern, so I got up and stood by his chair with my little sister.
It was over so fast. There was no light between my thighs, and I didn’t get dessert.
Now I stand at that same table for every meal, constantly checking and monitoring myself to see if I deserve to eat. I pay for the food I do eat by working out nearly everyday, and going without food when I can.
Monday, June 11, 2007
This is what she said
She said, “You fucked up. So what? So fucken what?”
That’s what my 70-year-old mother said to me last week on the morning after the night of the two monster martinis, the drinks which I hadn’t seen coming as I drove down the mountain to Los Angeles, nervous and excited as I was to see my high school friends after a 30-year separation. Didn’t see it coming because it was a beautiful, clear day in the basin, and because I’d just spent a week at a writing retreat where I rock and rolled my way through my writing and came away feeling whole and strong and trustworthy. And that first martini was excellent and by the second one I had forgotten that I hadn’t eaten, forgotten how strong a martini can be, forgotten that when you haven’t seen friends for 30 years and one of them has just finished telling you that her 25-year marriage might be over you don’t launch into the big talk about your open marriage and your lovers, no, you don’t do that. And I forgot that my mother was waiting for me back home a few miles away, had lit candles and opened a bottle of wine for the date we had made for the later part of the evening, the date she’d promised me because I’d asked for it, because I don’t live in her town, because I love her. Instead I came home a martini mess, and leaning against the door of her office, I slurred, “Drunk. Can’t talk. Bed.”
In the morning, sober and sorry because I had to leave town and say goodbye to my mother. Sober and ashamed because I had capped off an amazing week with a big drunk and had been insensitive, I thought, to my friend. Tired and hung over and wondering what in me had to keep maiming things, making things harder.
I came into her room to apologize, but she looked at me and she lifted my chin in her hands and she said,
“Honey, you fucked up. So what? So fucken what? The world doesn’t need anymore perfect people walking around, and the world doesn’t need anyone dragging a brick tied around their neck feeling guilty and ashamed either. Who the hell cares what you did? No one!”
That’s what my mother said.
That’s what my 70-year-old mother said to me last week on the morning after the night of the two monster martinis, the drinks which I hadn’t seen coming as I drove down the mountain to Los Angeles, nervous and excited as I was to see my high school friends after a 30-year separation. Didn’t see it coming because it was a beautiful, clear day in the basin, and because I’d just spent a week at a writing retreat where I rock and rolled my way through my writing and came away feeling whole and strong and trustworthy. And that first martini was excellent and by the second one I had forgotten that I hadn’t eaten, forgotten how strong a martini can be, forgotten that when you haven’t seen friends for 30 years and one of them has just finished telling you that her 25-year marriage might be over you don’t launch into the big talk about your open marriage and your lovers, no, you don’t do that. And I forgot that my mother was waiting for me back home a few miles away, had lit candles and opened a bottle of wine for the date we had made for the later part of the evening, the date she’d promised me because I’d asked for it, because I don’t live in her town, because I love her. Instead I came home a martini mess, and leaning against the door of her office, I slurred, “Drunk. Can’t talk. Bed.”
In the morning, sober and sorry because I had to leave town and say goodbye to my mother. Sober and ashamed because I had capped off an amazing week with a big drunk and had been insensitive, I thought, to my friend. Tired and hung over and wondering what in me had to keep maiming things, making things harder.
I came into her room to apologize, but she looked at me and she lifted my chin in her hands and she said,
“Honey, you fucked up. So what? So fucken what? The world doesn’t need anymore perfect people walking around, and the world doesn’t need anyone dragging a brick tied around their neck feeling guilty and ashamed either. Who the hell cares what you did? No one!”
That’s what my mother said.
Friday, June 08, 2007
Trust Me
You are in a dressing room in the little girl’s department at Macy’s in San Francisco and you are crouching and whispering into your 9-year-old daughter’s ear, “trust me,” you say, your arms wrapped around her, your mouth breathing warm into her ear, “honey, trust me, I promise you that I am right here.”
And you are, right here in a large, white dressing room on mother’s day with your two daughters who are shopping for party dresses and shoes to wear to an upcoming bat mitzvah. This is you loving your daughters, this is you shopping with them on a Sunday in the city, a treat, a gesture of connection. This is what mothers do with their daughters.
But now after three frilly dresses that have either cut her off at the waist or been impossible to zip or not gotten over her head, your youngest daughter has started a rapid descent to a place that you have only seen twice before with her, and one that you are not entirely prepared for now. You hadn’t readied yourself, hadn’t seen it coming, didn’t remember the rhythm of the thing, just how dangerous a dressing room can be.
And so if you thought this was going to be a simple shopping trip for party dresses you were wrong. And if you thought it was enough to have the money in the bank to pay for the dresses or even the time to devote to the trip to the city, think again mommy. It’s not even enough to love them you realize now because the damage is deep and what this moment calls for is a turn in the road, a left where you normally take a right. And even though you have no idea how to do this you must because what you see now is too much to bear.
Because everything you tried to avoid by denying yourself food, by suppressing your appetite, by daily trips to the gym, and by hundreds and hundreds of dollars in diet aids is now sitting on a padded, floral bench in her underware and socks clutching a crumpled t.shirt against her chest to hide a tummy that is tumbling over her legs, a tubby little tummy that won’t cooperate, that won’t suck in the way she wants it to, a tummy that announces itself from t.shirts and dresses, that topples over swim suits. A tummy that now has your daughter hyperventilating and whimpering, her eyes scrunched up to cast away tears, a tummy that has her hating you and her older sister because you’re witnessing this and because then she doesn’t have to hate herself and her body which she believes is all wrong because at age 9 she’s a size 12, and because she has a sister who at age 12 is a size 10.
Your cell phone is ringing and from the screen you see it’s your lover calling you to wish you a happy mother’s day.
You don’t answer it, you can’t, not because you’re with your daughters, but because you are in a very different place than the place you meet him in. This is not a happy, I had time to shower and make myself smell good and put on that red underwear you like so much and let’s have a drink first and catch up slow and then make our way to the studio to have the best sex of our lives time. This isn’t that time.
This is you trying to zip up a young girl’s dress and tugging at the fabric hoping you don’t rip it, this is you trying to be chipper as you pick yourself up from the dressing room floor saying, “no problem, I’ll be right back with a better size.” This is you walking out of the dressing room each time and chanting to yourself, “breath, breath, breath.” This is you trying to minimize the problem and pay attention to both sisters, even the older one who doesn’t have anything to cry about, who is having the time of her life because she just found the cutest sandals with gold ribbons that wrap around her slender ankles, who is looking lovely in the new blue halter dress that exposes her delicate bird-like shoulders, and her strong legs, a girl who is beginning to realize that she will turn heads at the bat mitzvah next month, a girl who is now leaning against the dressing room wall, arms crossed over her chest and who has just sneered at her little sister to “lose the attitude Zoe,” something that a friend of hers mother said to her last year in a completely different situation, and which crushed her and now sitting here you are struck by how the very things that hurt us lodge within us and are brought out to hurt others, even if you didn’t mean it, even if you thought you’d sufficiently stuffed the pain away or hardened yourself or gotten over it, even if you thought you’d lost the attitude, you realize that the monster that came after you, and now I’m talking about myself, has been patiently waiting all of these years and has now come home to eat my young.
This is you on a diet from the time you were 14 years old, and the grim business of clothes shopping with you mother who mostly kept her mouth shut because she didn’t know what to say as your own torn and safety pinned clothes from all of your weight gain and distress sat huddled in a pile in the corner. Didn’t know what to say to you as you tugged on pants that were too tight, or tried to zip up dresses that were too small, you opting for big, flowing clothes that might highlight the Rennaissance beauty in you but could never hide your terrible failure for not being a Los Angeles skinny, straight-haired well adjusted girl who could just go shopping with her mother without it exposing every flaw in her orbit. This is you remembering a comment that came from the dressing room alongside of yours on one of those trips where some woman said to her companion, did you see, she spit, how awful that skirt looked on that girl? And you knowing that she was talking about you. This is you not hating that woman, but hating yourself instead for your great failure. This is you remembering the little game your dad sometimes played at dinner, asking you and your sister to stand at the table with your legs together and if there was a space between your thighs you could have dessert. This is you not realizing then that your father was the child with the fat thighs, the child whose parents didn’t think he was beautiful enough or smart enough, but you didn’t know this then and so this is you deciding not long afterwards to hide all of your ugliness, not in extra weight, but in a tight, hard-grip body that was a fucking fort knox, this is you throwing away the key.
But enough about you because there’s something more pressing, more dangerous, more frightening at stake here, which is your daughter collapsed on the floral bench in the dressing room, the way she is coiling in on herself, the way she is retreating, the way she has been apprenticing all along, watching you, the way she is making her way to her own fort knox, a place that even you, mommy, won’t be able to find your way into. It’s the way she turned to you in the car a few months ago and out of nowhere asked, “Mommy, are you afraid that I’m going to be fat when I grow up?” even though you’d never mentioned her weight, even though you’d never talked about diets, even though you’d made sure never to say anything bad about your own body in her presence.
It’s what she did see; that you never got anything for yourself at the ice cream shop. That you never eat bread and pasta, and when asked why you shrug it off, saying you don’t like those foods, which is a lie because they are your favorite foods. It’s your obsession with getting to the gym five days a week because it’s the only way you can breath. It’s all the ways you have denied yourself, it’s your secret mantra that the best appetite is no appetite. It’s your deep desire to not need anything from anyone.
It’s the way she turned away from you in the car the other day on the way to speech therapy because you giggled when she emphasized those dastardly R’s that she was practicing, “orange, artichoke, orangutang” and how she thought you were laughing at her but you were only laughing at her sweetness, how much she wanted to get those r’s right. But the power of her turn from you, how she locked you out, her hand on the door of the car like she was going to leap, the same way she is turning now in the dressing room, turning in, turning toward her own orbit of flaws, and how well you know this moment, all the ways you’ve locked yourself out with your hardened grief, which was alright for you, but impossible to watch now in the form of your beautiful nine-year old who you never meant this to happen to, but who has become someone who sneaks food from the kitchen and has perfected the art of chewing without moving her lips, a child who now pulls clothes off of a rack that are meant to hide who she is, big, floppy pieces of fabric, much the same way she began wearing daddy’s t. shirts to school this year because she said she liked them and you wondered whether it was that she liked daddy so much or couldn’t bear herself.
There is a moment here, a chance and you hope it’s not too late, to divert this train wreck that became the cornerstone for your own life, to step in, one tiny movement, one intimate gesture, one chop of your machete to clear a path that in 47 years you have never taken because you needed to keep punishing yourself, because you thought it was your fault, that you were, in your daughter’s own words about herself, “a failure.” There is a moment here, a chance to bring even yourself home, if it’s not too late, and even though you don’t know where this path will lead you or if you can walk it, and even though you don’t know what words come after the ones you think to say now, you open your mouth and you begin in the most loving, most sincere way you can, because you are strong and you love this girl and my god, you love yourself, you do…
“Trust me,” you say, your arms wrapped around her, your mouth breathing warm into her ear, “honey, trust me, I promise you that I am right here and I know what to do.”
And you are, right here in a large, white dressing room on mother’s day with your two daughters who are shopping for party dresses and shoes to wear to an upcoming bat mitzvah. This is you loving your daughters, this is you shopping with them on a Sunday in the city, a treat, a gesture of connection. This is what mothers do with their daughters.
But now after three frilly dresses that have either cut her off at the waist or been impossible to zip or not gotten over her head, your youngest daughter has started a rapid descent to a place that you have only seen twice before with her, and one that you are not entirely prepared for now. You hadn’t readied yourself, hadn’t seen it coming, didn’t remember the rhythm of the thing, just how dangerous a dressing room can be.
And so if you thought this was going to be a simple shopping trip for party dresses you were wrong. And if you thought it was enough to have the money in the bank to pay for the dresses or even the time to devote to the trip to the city, think again mommy. It’s not even enough to love them you realize now because the damage is deep and what this moment calls for is a turn in the road, a left where you normally take a right. And even though you have no idea how to do this you must because what you see now is too much to bear.
Because everything you tried to avoid by denying yourself food, by suppressing your appetite, by daily trips to the gym, and by hundreds and hundreds of dollars in diet aids is now sitting on a padded, floral bench in her underware and socks clutching a crumpled t.shirt against her chest to hide a tummy that is tumbling over her legs, a tubby little tummy that won’t cooperate, that won’t suck in the way she wants it to, a tummy that announces itself from t.shirts and dresses, that topples over swim suits. A tummy that now has your daughter hyperventilating and whimpering, her eyes scrunched up to cast away tears, a tummy that has her hating you and her older sister because you’re witnessing this and because then she doesn’t have to hate herself and her body which she believes is all wrong because at age 9 she’s a size 12, and because she has a sister who at age 12 is a size 10.
Your cell phone is ringing and from the screen you see it’s your lover calling you to wish you a happy mother’s day.
You don’t answer it, you can’t, not because you’re with your daughters, but because you are in a very different place than the place you meet him in. This is not a happy, I had time to shower and make myself smell good and put on that red underwear you like so much and let’s have a drink first and catch up slow and then make our way to the studio to have the best sex of our lives time. This isn’t that time.
This is you trying to zip up a young girl’s dress and tugging at the fabric hoping you don’t rip it, this is you trying to be chipper as you pick yourself up from the dressing room floor saying, “no problem, I’ll be right back with a better size.” This is you walking out of the dressing room each time and chanting to yourself, “breath, breath, breath.” This is you trying to minimize the problem and pay attention to both sisters, even the older one who doesn’t have anything to cry about, who is having the time of her life because she just found the cutest sandals with gold ribbons that wrap around her slender ankles, who is looking lovely in the new blue halter dress that exposes her delicate bird-like shoulders, and her strong legs, a girl who is beginning to realize that she will turn heads at the bat mitzvah next month, a girl who is now leaning against the dressing room wall, arms crossed over her chest and who has just sneered at her little sister to “lose the attitude Zoe,” something that a friend of hers mother said to her last year in a completely different situation, and which crushed her and now sitting here you are struck by how the very things that hurt us lodge within us and are brought out to hurt others, even if you didn’t mean it, even if you thought you’d sufficiently stuffed the pain away or hardened yourself or gotten over it, even if you thought you’d lost the attitude, you realize that the monster that came after you, and now I’m talking about myself, has been patiently waiting all of these years and has now come home to eat my young.
This is you on a diet from the time you were 14 years old, and the grim business of clothes shopping with you mother who mostly kept her mouth shut because she didn’t know what to say as your own torn and safety pinned clothes from all of your weight gain and distress sat huddled in a pile in the corner. Didn’t know what to say to you as you tugged on pants that were too tight, or tried to zip up dresses that were too small, you opting for big, flowing clothes that might highlight the Rennaissance beauty in you but could never hide your terrible failure for not being a Los Angeles skinny, straight-haired well adjusted girl who could just go shopping with her mother without it exposing every flaw in her orbit. This is you remembering a comment that came from the dressing room alongside of yours on one of those trips where some woman said to her companion, did you see, she spit, how awful that skirt looked on that girl? And you knowing that she was talking about you. This is you not hating that woman, but hating yourself instead for your great failure. This is you remembering the little game your dad sometimes played at dinner, asking you and your sister to stand at the table with your legs together and if there was a space between your thighs you could have dessert. This is you not realizing then that your father was the child with the fat thighs, the child whose parents didn’t think he was beautiful enough or smart enough, but you didn’t know this then and so this is you deciding not long afterwards to hide all of your ugliness, not in extra weight, but in a tight, hard-grip body that was a fucking fort knox, this is you throwing away the key.
But enough about you because there’s something more pressing, more dangerous, more frightening at stake here, which is your daughter collapsed on the floral bench in the dressing room, the way she is coiling in on herself, the way she is retreating, the way she has been apprenticing all along, watching you, the way she is making her way to her own fort knox, a place that even you, mommy, won’t be able to find your way into. It’s the way she turned to you in the car a few months ago and out of nowhere asked, “Mommy, are you afraid that I’m going to be fat when I grow up?” even though you’d never mentioned her weight, even though you’d never talked about diets, even though you’d made sure never to say anything bad about your own body in her presence.
It’s what she did see; that you never got anything for yourself at the ice cream shop. That you never eat bread and pasta, and when asked why you shrug it off, saying you don’t like those foods, which is a lie because they are your favorite foods. It’s your obsession with getting to the gym five days a week because it’s the only way you can breath. It’s all the ways you have denied yourself, it’s your secret mantra that the best appetite is no appetite. It’s your deep desire to not need anything from anyone.
It’s the way she turned away from you in the car the other day on the way to speech therapy because you giggled when she emphasized those dastardly R’s that she was practicing, “orange, artichoke, orangutang” and how she thought you were laughing at her but you were only laughing at her sweetness, how much she wanted to get those r’s right. But the power of her turn from you, how she locked you out, her hand on the door of the car like she was going to leap, the same way she is turning now in the dressing room, turning in, turning toward her own orbit of flaws, and how well you know this moment, all the ways you’ve locked yourself out with your hardened grief, which was alright for you, but impossible to watch now in the form of your beautiful nine-year old who you never meant this to happen to, but who has become someone who sneaks food from the kitchen and has perfected the art of chewing without moving her lips, a child who now pulls clothes off of a rack that are meant to hide who she is, big, floppy pieces of fabric, much the same way she began wearing daddy’s t. shirts to school this year because she said she liked them and you wondered whether it was that she liked daddy so much or couldn’t bear herself.
There is a moment here, a chance and you hope it’s not too late, to divert this train wreck that became the cornerstone for your own life, to step in, one tiny movement, one intimate gesture, one chop of your machete to clear a path that in 47 years you have never taken because you needed to keep punishing yourself, because you thought it was your fault, that you were, in your daughter’s own words about herself, “a failure.” There is a moment here, a chance to bring even yourself home, if it’s not too late, and even though you don’t know where this path will lead you or if you can walk it, and even though you don’t know what words come after the ones you think to say now, you open your mouth and you begin in the most loving, most sincere way you can, because you are strong and you love this girl and my god, you love yourself, you do…
“Trust me,” you say, your arms wrapped around her, your mouth breathing warm into her ear, “honey, trust me, I promise you that I am right here and I know what to do.”
Thursday, May 17, 2007
A sweetness breezes in
After nearly a week of awkwardness, a week where the house felt too small, our bed a postage stamp, a week of sideways glances and small blames that had him retreating to the couch, or had us leaving the house without goodbye, the way we’d refer to each other in front of the children, “your father,” I’d say, “your mother,” he’d say. After nearly a week of this, a sweetness breezes in, as if on loan.
It was the way he sat in his office chair and slapped both hands on his thighs motioning you to sit down. And the way you do, the girls in the other room watching a show or doing homework. And his thighs feel warm under his jeans and he puts his arms around you, though your own arms stay crossed.
Why they’re crossed you do not know. Why you have such a hard time loving him, letting him in you do not know.
The other night after a few hours with P., after all the fun was over, he fell asleep beside you, and you listened to the sound of his snores. An hour later you were back at home in your own bed, leg to leg with your husband listening to his snores, and the whole scene could have been completely interchangeable. You could have spent the evening making love to your husband. The men, their snoring, you, what's the difference? And you think that it’s not so much that one is more deserving of your love, but that you princess, you have become quite the choosing committee.
Name it baby, you like to wear the pants around here, you like it better when you’re in charge, when you’re calling the shots, making the rules, and then, well, thank god somebody left the window open, thank god after a week of awkwardness, you acting like his mother, his roommate, reminding him of carpools and bills unpaid, all said with the faintest glare, and him giving it right back in his perfect way; not coming to bed or saying goodnight.
After nearly a week, a sweetness manages to drift in, and he slaps his hands on his thighs and says sit down and it really doesn’t matter if your arms are crossed because you do sit down and you let the weight of you, the grief of not loving, the effort of so much holding and controlling fall away and you realize how tired you are.
And even if later or tomorrow, the way he says it or does it or forgets the carpool, whatever it is, god help you, put down your weapons woman, surrender, cry uncle, whatever you have to do, open a window and pray, pray for a little sweetness.
It was the way he sat in his office chair and slapped both hands on his thighs motioning you to sit down. And the way you do, the girls in the other room watching a show or doing homework. And his thighs feel warm under his jeans and he puts his arms around you, though your own arms stay crossed.
Why they’re crossed you do not know. Why you have such a hard time loving him, letting him in you do not know.
The other night after a few hours with P., after all the fun was over, he fell asleep beside you, and you listened to the sound of his snores. An hour later you were back at home in your own bed, leg to leg with your husband listening to his snores, and the whole scene could have been completely interchangeable. You could have spent the evening making love to your husband. The men, their snoring, you, what's the difference? And you think that it’s not so much that one is more deserving of your love, but that you princess, you have become quite the choosing committee.
Name it baby, you like to wear the pants around here, you like it better when you’re in charge, when you’re calling the shots, making the rules, and then, well, thank god somebody left the window open, thank god after a week of awkwardness, you acting like his mother, his roommate, reminding him of carpools and bills unpaid, all said with the faintest glare, and him giving it right back in his perfect way; not coming to bed or saying goodnight.
After nearly a week, a sweetness manages to drift in, and he slaps his hands on his thighs and says sit down and it really doesn’t matter if your arms are crossed because you do sit down and you let the weight of you, the grief of not loving, the effort of so much holding and controlling fall away and you realize how tired you are.
And even if later or tomorrow, the way he says it or does it or forgets the carpool, whatever it is, god help you, put down your weapons woman, surrender, cry uncle, whatever you have to do, open a window and pray, pray for a little sweetness.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Excerpt from a letter to a friend
...the truth is, i have gotten closer to love in the last two years; I have had my heart cracked open. I have become softer and more receptive, but not because I was thinking big (baby), but because my path to love was so littered with pain, which was the only way I could be broken of my great defendedness. I didn't get any closer to love because I believed I was worthy of love. I got closer to love the way a bloodied, broken-nosed fighter keeps getting up to take the next punch in the face and then finally falls flat and concedes. I conceded to love.
Friday, January 05, 2007
Producing a Eulogy
“We need more scenes,” I told my dad on the phone. “Good writing is full of live action. You can’t just say, ‘he was a good man, everyone liked him.’ You need real scenes, actual events that show that goodness or else it’s not going to be believable. I need to see you doing more, you know, actually engaging.”
“Mmm,” says Dad. “I see.”
Dad is On My Case.
He wants me to write his eulogy. He’s not so old at 76, and he’s not sick, but he wants the eulogy written before he dies. He wants to see it.
Dad Looks Great On Paper.
He gives away hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to many deserving causes. A champion of social justice, he gets behind progressive issues, has parties at his house to raise money for Universal Health Care. He’s taken care of whole families in Mexico, sending their children to college. He funds documentary films about the West Bank, rents commercial space cheap to non-profit groups like Planned Parenthood. Last year, at his house for dinner I shared a table with an Indian man who heads the Gandhi Peace foundation, a woman who led Sri Lankan village mothers into the jungle demanding that rebel armies release their kidnapped sons, and an American woman who ran a bra factory in Sri Lanka that had profit sharing for the workers. Just another night at my parent’s house. Dad even helped put braces on the teeth of a young Chinese woman he randomly met in Tai Pei, but for the life of me, I’m having a hell of a time coming up with the kinds of scenes that will really make his eulogy rock. The thing is,
People Make Dad Uncomfortable.
“Wally,” my husband said gently on our last day in Hawaii, “I think you should consider coming down to the pool with me.”
“Mmm,” said dad.
”And you might want to put on your bathing suit,” added hubby.
“Oh,” said dad.
“But you wouldn’t have to go in the water,” he said.
“Yes,” said dad.
And that’s how my dad came to be down at the hotel swimming pool on our last day of the trip. It was the annual sighting of grandpa, a man who prefers to spend his sunny, grandchild filled Hawaiian vacation indoors, in a dark office, reading newspapers and books and taking naps. But there he was standing poolside, a newspaper tucked under his arm and talking to a women I’d met a day earlier, a freelance correspondent for CBS, while his six grandchildren looked on, heads cocked, a little startled perhaps at seeing my dad in the light.
“And he looked horrible,” says my mom, laughing. “I thought, ‘who is that old man coming toward us.’ Did you see what he was wearing? That old dome topped Chinese Rice Field worker hat? His face is so narrow and that hat is so tall it just made his face go on forever! And his tummy?” she continued, “it was bulging and he was wearing that awful yellow shirt and he shuffled, did you see him shuffling? Mark was holding onto his hand.”
Dad Felt the Pinch.
“I need it for the eulogy,” I’d said earlier in the day. “We’ve been here nearly two weeks and I need a scene dad, something that will help me lead the piece off, like, ‘I’ll never forget the day dad came down to the pool to visit the grandkids.’ Something like that, but then I need you to actually do something,” I said. “Could you put one of them on your lap or maybe even order a drink?”
“Mmm,” said dad. “I don’t know. I should be at home reading. I have so much to do.”
Dad Tried
He stood there, lots of pool activity going on around him; lots of Marco Polo and vacationing families tossing children and balls from the shallow to the deep. I’d met lots of people in the week we were staying in the hotel next door to my parent’s house and I’d talked a fair amount about my mom and her house, how lucky we were to get to come to Hawaii fairly regularly. “Is your dad still around?” I got this question more than once from new friends because I hardly mentioned him. “Um, yeah,” I’d laugh. “He’s around here somewhere.”
Now he was actually at the pool, but sadly, it wasn’t really scene-worthy, I mean, he stood there looking like a Martian who had just landed. “Sit down, dad,” my sister said. He looked around at his family; his wife, his four children, their spouses, their children, a nanny or two. “Uh,” he said, searching for a place to sit amidst beach towels and smoothies, books and sand toys. “Uh, I don’t know. I think I’ll walk over to that grass over there and read.”
“Bye bye grandpa!” some little tot shouted as he trudged away.
I’d used the eulogy before as a way to get him to engage with the grandkids, who he doesn’t see very often. My nine-year-old had given him coupons for Christmas, little squares of paper inviting him to do things like take her to breakfast, get his back scratched, read together or take a walk. “Whatever you want,” she had told him. Even at nine she was trying to make it easy.
“I can use that for the eulogy,” I suggested, “taking her out for breakfast would be a nice scene.”
“Mmm,” he says.
People Are Talking.
“You need to keep an eye on dad,” my brother had mentioned on the phone a week before the trip. “I got a call from the dentist, the one he’s been going to for years. The nurse said he fell asleep in the chair and woke up disoriented and angry. They’d never seen him like that. I think he’s slipping,” my brother said from his big leather swivel chair at the office. “So watch him, and get back to me.”
Dad Wants His Eulogy Now.
“You don’t have much time,” he’d said. “I mean I could be dead soon.”
Like I said, dad’s not sick or especially old, but he’s giving away all of his money and hopes to be perfectly broke in five years. “Then no one will want anything to do with me,” he says, “and I can die in peace.” I have no idea what he means by this, all I know is that this eulogy is going nowhere and I need help.
“So what kinds of things do you want me to put in there?” I’d asked him. “Is this about your accomplishments or do you want me to say weird things like you know how to use a lasso, or the only food you’ve been known to cook is oatmeal?”
“Mush,” he corrected.
“Or how I’ll always remember that time mom threatened to cut my hair if I didn’t get that rat’s nest of a knot out of it, and you got on your knees and combed mayonnaise and peanut butter through my hair for hours until it came out.”
“I don’t know,” he says uncomfortably.
“I have something that you could use,” my younger sister offers. Apparently my 38-year-old sister had sliced her finger cutting pineapple that very morning, “and he actually kissed my finger,” she says. “It was the most loving thing I can ever remember him doing.”
“I kissed it?” my dad says, coming into the kitchen to re-fill his coffee.
What's Up?
Finally it was time to leave the island. Dad drove us to the airport as I fed him pieces of sushi from the front seat. “It’s more than I can eat,” I promised, “here, have some.” He said he hadn’t eaten all day, but that he wasn’t hungry. He said this as he stuffed sushi into his mouth.
At the curb, after we’d unloaded our bags, I leaned in to kiss him. “Dad,” I started to say, “I love…”
“Save it for the eulogy,” he said, landing a peck on my cheek, and then driving off into the balmy, Hawaiian night.
“Mmm,” says Dad. “I see.”
Dad is On My Case.
He wants me to write his eulogy. He’s not so old at 76, and he’s not sick, but he wants the eulogy written before he dies. He wants to see it.
Dad Looks Great On Paper.
He gives away hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to many deserving causes. A champion of social justice, he gets behind progressive issues, has parties at his house to raise money for Universal Health Care. He’s taken care of whole families in Mexico, sending their children to college. He funds documentary films about the West Bank, rents commercial space cheap to non-profit groups like Planned Parenthood. Last year, at his house for dinner I shared a table with an Indian man who heads the Gandhi Peace foundation, a woman who led Sri Lankan village mothers into the jungle demanding that rebel armies release their kidnapped sons, and an American woman who ran a bra factory in Sri Lanka that had profit sharing for the workers. Just another night at my parent’s house. Dad even helped put braces on the teeth of a young Chinese woman he randomly met in Tai Pei, but for the life of me, I’m having a hell of a time coming up with the kinds of scenes that will really make his eulogy rock. The thing is,
People Make Dad Uncomfortable.
“Wally,” my husband said gently on our last day in Hawaii, “I think you should consider coming down to the pool with me.”
“Mmm,” said dad.
”And you might want to put on your bathing suit,” added hubby.
“Oh,” said dad.
“But you wouldn’t have to go in the water,” he said.
“Yes,” said dad.
And that’s how my dad came to be down at the hotel swimming pool on our last day of the trip. It was the annual sighting of grandpa, a man who prefers to spend his sunny, grandchild filled Hawaiian vacation indoors, in a dark office, reading newspapers and books and taking naps. But there he was standing poolside, a newspaper tucked under his arm and talking to a women I’d met a day earlier, a freelance correspondent for CBS, while his six grandchildren looked on, heads cocked, a little startled perhaps at seeing my dad in the light.
“And he looked horrible,” says my mom, laughing. “I thought, ‘who is that old man coming toward us.’ Did you see what he was wearing? That old dome topped Chinese Rice Field worker hat? His face is so narrow and that hat is so tall it just made his face go on forever! And his tummy?” she continued, “it was bulging and he was wearing that awful yellow shirt and he shuffled, did you see him shuffling? Mark was holding onto his hand.”
Dad Felt the Pinch.
“I need it for the eulogy,” I’d said earlier in the day. “We’ve been here nearly two weeks and I need a scene dad, something that will help me lead the piece off, like, ‘I’ll never forget the day dad came down to the pool to visit the grandkids.’ Something like that, but then I need you to actually do something,” I said. “Could you put one of them on your lap or maybe even order a drink?”
“Mmm,” said dad. “I don’t know. I should be at home reading. I have so much to do.”
Dad Tried
He stood there, lots of pool activity going on around him; lots of Marco Polo and vacationing families tossing children and balls from the shallow to the deep. I’d met lots of people in the week we were staying in the hotel next door to my parent’s house and I’d talked a fair amount about my mom and her house, how lucky we were to get to come to Hawaii fairly regularly. “Is your dad still around?” I got this question more than once from new friends because I hardly mentioned him. “Um, yeah,” I’d laugh. “He’s around here somewhere.”
Now he was actually at the pool, but sadly, it wasn’t really scene-worthy, I mean, he stood there looking like a Martian who had just landed. “Sit down, dad,” my sister said. He looked around at his family; his wife, his four children, their spouses, their children, a nanny or two. “Uh,” he said, searching for a place to sit amidst beach towels and smoothies, books and sand toys. “Uh, I don’t know. I think I’ll walk over to that grass over there and read.”
“Bye bye grandpa!” some little tot shouted as he trudged away.
I’d used the eulogy before as a way to get him to engage with the grandkids, who he doesn’t see very often. My nine-year-old had given him coupons for Christmas, little squares of paper inviting him to do things like take her to breakfast, get his back scratched, read together or take a walk. “Whatever you want,” she had told him. Even at nine she was trying to make it easy.
“I can use that for the eulogy,” I suggested, “taking her out for breakfast would be a nice scene.”
“Mmm,” he says.
People Are Talking.
“You need to keep an eye on dad,” my brother had mentioned on the phone a week before the trip. “I got a call from the dentist, the one he’s been going to for years. The nurse said he fell asleep in the chair and woke up disoriented and angry. They’d never seen him like that. I think he’s slipping,” my brother said from his big leather swivel chair at the office. “So watch him, and get back to me.”
Dad Wants His Eulogy Now.
“You don’t have much time,” he’d said. “I mean I could be dead soon.”
Like I said, dad’s not sick or especially old, but he’s giving away all of his money and hopes to be perfectly broke in five years. “Then no one will want anything to do with me,” he says, “and I can die in peace.” I have no idea what he means by this, all I know is that this eulogy is going nowhere and I need help.
“So what kinds of things do you want me to put in there?” I’d asked him. “Is this about your accomplishments or do you want me to say weird things like you know how to use a lasso, or the only food you’ve been known to cook is oatmeal?”
“Mush,” he corrected.
“Or how I’ll always remember that time mom threatened to cut my hair if I didn’t get that rat’s nest of a knot out of it, and you got on your knees and combed mayonnaise and peanut butter through my hair for hours until it came out.”
“I don’t know,” he says uncomfortably.
“I have something that you could use,” my younger sister offers. Apparently my 38-year-old sister had sliced her finger cutting pineapple that very morning, “and he actually kissed my finger,” she says. “It was the most loving thing I can ever remember him doing.”
“I kissed it?” my dad says, coming into the kitchen to re-fill his coffee.
What's Up?
Finally it was time to leave the island. Dad drove us to the airport as I fed him pieces of sushi from the front seat. “It’s more than I can eat,” I promised, “here, have some.” He said he hadn’t eaten all day, but that he wasn’t hungry. He said this as he stuffed sushi into his mouth.
At the curb, after we’d unloaded our bags, I leaned in to kiss him. “Dad,” I started to say, “I love…”
“Save it for the eulogy,” he said, landing a peck on my cheek, and then driving off into the balmy, Hawaiian night.
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Where is the Love?
Primordial Love
“It’s like standing on a high dive,” your mother says, “and there’s no water in the pool below, but you insist on diving, believing that there will be water when you get there, even a little water to save your fall, but it’s just concrete, it always is.”
Phone call for Mz. Wagner
You are with your family on an enchanted island. Your mother’s house, a Japanese fortress of glass and wood sits on the edge of the cliff overlooking the sea. Beyond the lanai there is a bright green lawn and purple bouganvilla spilling down the cliff. This is paradise, a chance to take a break from your worries, your anxieties. You were glad to get away and especially from certain dramas back home. The salty, sea air will be healing. The ocean waves will be baptizing. You’ll have sex with your husband, lose a few pounds, take a break from the ensuing drama of your lover’s wife. Beauty and bliss surrounds you. So why are you checking your cell phone and your email?
Where is the love?
In the supermarket in Waimea you and your husband see a young, curly haired woman who has a purse just like yours, only not hot pink like the one you have, but beige. It’s a hard purse to find because it’s only made by this woman up in Canada, and so you chat the woman up and find out that she has been flown to the island from Seattle to cook for a family who lives near your mother’s house on the beach. “Who is the family?” you ask, wondering which family is rich enough to get a catering staff for three weeks. “I can’t tell you,” she says, “I’m not allowed to say.” Rock star, movie star, politician. Could be any one of them. You’ve seen Neil Young on the beach before. Michael J. Fox too. Suddenly a trip to the beach or to the gym is filled with promise. Maybe you’ll see one of these important people and more importantly, they will see you.
Are you my mother?
You are pumping free weights and he walks in. Is it Dana Carvy? Beck? You can’t tell because he’s got his jacket covering his mouth, but the messy, sandy hair seems right. He’s so small. Beck, you think. The aerobics instructor is playing his music in the next room. Maybe she has seen him too. Your arms look so good today. Hope he looks over. Who are you? Who is that woman with the blue bandana and the lean, tan torso? Does he see how hard you’re working out? Has he noticed how you do the whole weight circuit and then run on the treadmill, and then do the whole thing again and then again? Has anybody noticed? Who is this marvelous, important creature that is you?
Soups On
Your mother has brought back chicken soup from Costco because you felt woozy all day. Everyone else is eating salad and chicken for dinner, but the glutenous, thick soup is for you, her first born. It doesn’t look very tasty; all goopy, with huge pieces of white meat and thick slices of carrot and celery bobbing in the broth, but you’ll eat it anyway because it is a gift from your mother. As you’re preparing to take the last of the dishes out to the lanai so you can all sit down to eat, you, in a very prompt and grown up way turn to her and say you, “You know, I don’t feel like the soup tonight.” And it’s not that her face falls, and it’s not that it’s turned hard either, in fact you don’t wait to see her expression at all. You simply realize, in an instant, in anticipation of her possible upset, that you can’t afford to say no to her offering. You will drink the soup.
Father
He wants nothing for Christmas, he never does. Sometimes you bring him books on the Middle East because that’s his real interest, but even then, he’ll have already read them or he’ll say a light “thanks.” He’s a hard man to please. So you tell him, “My gift to you this year is a walk.” You sacrifice your morning workout, your chance to see Beck or Dana Carvey or whoever that sandy haired person at the gym was, just to walk around the hotel and the beach with him. He is slow. He’s older and there’s a paunch around his middle. But you love your dad, you always have, and every staggered little step he takes you take too. Screw your glutes, screw the sweat, you’ll work out later. And it’s not that he doesn’t ask about you, he does. And it’s not that he puts you down, he doesn’t, never has. But somewhere along the walk you both fall silent and you realize, this is it, this is my relationship with my father and it’s just what it is. He loves me enough, but even his love, the love that’s supposed to save me, won’t.
The boyfriend
You’ve been meaning to tell him that you want to spend more time talking, being together to balance out the fucking, but the first thing he tells you when you call from the enchanted island is how much he enjoyed the sight of you sucking his cock last week, the way your hair hung down around your face, your little ears, how beautiful that was. The conversation turns light, it always does. You manage to tell him toward the end of the phone call that you don’t just want to just drink and fuck, that in the New Year you should vary the dates, do other things. “But I took you to the opera!” he shouts in mock protest, referring to the date with his son and wife, the two hours of tedium in the opera house and the family dinner afterwards. You laugh, “sure you did,” you say. He agrees to more proper dates but you’re sad after the call. You wanted something and you’re not sure what it is. You wanted something and you’re pretty sure he can’t give it to you.
Glutes Away!
There’s that Beck, Dana Carvey guy again. He’s speaking to that woman by the free weights. She’s kind of pretty with wavy blond hair, nice enough body, but she’s not special, not rock star special. Maybe it’s not Beck. There’s another guy by the leg weights, he looks like somebody from t.v., Can’t remember his name. Ray something. He’s looking at you. Maybe he’s a movie star. Maybe they’re all movie stars. Maybe they think you’re a movie star too.
The family dinner
If you can just manage to keep it to two meals a day, no, a meal and a half, you’ll still look trim for the family party on Friday night. If you look fat you’re sunk. If your dress is wrinkled, forget it. Hope it’s a good hair day. You’ll wash it the day before so it’s slightly distressed for the party. No time for a pedicure, maybe mom has some clippers and polish. The idea is to look tight, together. The idea is to look perfectly beautiful wonderful. The idea is not to give anybody any reason to gossip about you, your hair, your dress, your body, any imperfection. The idea is to be adored, admired, envied. If you can manage this you will stay safe. You will get the love.
“It’s like standing on a high dive,” your mother says, “and there’s no water in the pool below, but you insist on diving, believing that there will be water when you get there, even a little water to save your fall, but it’s just concrete, it always is.”
Phone call for Mz. Wagner
You are with your family on an enchanted island. Your mother’s house, a Japanese fortress of glass and wood sits on the edge of the cliff overlooking the sea. Beyond the lanai there is a bright green lawn and purple bouganvilla spilling down the cliff. This is paradise, a chance to take a break from your worries, your anxieties. You were glad to get away and especially from certain dramas back home. The salty, sea air will be healing. The ocean waves will be baptizing. You’ll have sex with your husband, lose a few pounds, take a break from the ensuing drama of your lover’s wife. Beauty and bliss surrounds you. So why are you checking your cell phone and your email?
Where is the love?
In the supermarket in Waimea you and your husband see a young, curly haired woman who has a purse just like yours, only not hot pink like the one you have, but beige. It’s a hard purse to find because it’s only made by this woman up in Canada, and so you chat the woman up and find out that she has been flown to the island from Seattle to cook for a family who lives near your mother’s house on the beach. “Who is the family?” you ask, wondering which family is rich enough to get a catering staff for three weeks. “I can’t tell you,” she says, “I’m not allowed to say.” Rock star, movie star, politician. Could be any one of them. You’ve seen Neil Young on the beach before. Michael J. Fox too. Suddenly a trip to the beach or to the gym is filled with promise. Maybe you’ll see one of these important people and more importantly, they will see you.
Are you my mother?
You are pumping free weights and he walks in. Is it Dana Carvy? Beck? You can’t tell because he’s got his jacket covering his mouth, but the messy, sandy hair seems right. He’s so small. Beck, you think. The aerobics instructor is playing his music in the next room. Maybe she has seen him too. Your arms look so good today. Hope he looks over. Who are you? Who is that woman with the blue bandana and the lean, tan torso? Does he see how hard you’re working out? Has he noticed how you do the whole weight circuit and then run on the treadmill, and then do the whole thing again and then again? Has anybody noticed? Who is this marvelous, important creature that is you?
Soups On
Your mother has brought back chicken soup from Costco because you felt woozy all day. Everyone else is eating salad and chicken for dinner, but the glutenous, thick soup is for you, her first born. It doesn’t look very tasty; all goopy, with huge pieces of white meat and thick slices of carrot and celery bobbing in the broth, but you’ll eat it anyway because it is a gift from your mother. As you’re preparing to take the last of the dishes out to the lanai so you can all sit down to eat, you, in a very prompt and grown up way turn to her and say you, “You know, I don’t feel like the soup tonight.” And it’s not that her face falls, and it’s not that it’s turned hard either, in fact you don’t wait to see her expression at all. You simply realize, in an instant, in anticipation of her possible upset, that you can’t afford to say no to her offering. You will drink the soup.
Father
He wants nothing for Christmas, he never does. Sometimes you bring him books on the Middle East because that’s his real interest, but even then, he’ll have already read them or he’ll say a light “thanks.” He’s a hard man to please. So you tell him, “My gift to you this year is a walk.” You sacrifice your morning workout, your chance to see Beck or Dana Carvey or whoever that sandy haired person at the gym was, just to walk around the hotel and the beach with him. He is slow. He’s older and there’s a paunch around his middle. But you love your dad, you always have, and every staggered little step he takes you take too. Screw your glutes, screw the sweat, you’ll work out later. And it’s not that he doesn’t ask about you, he does. And it’s not that he puts you down, he doesn’t, never has. But somewhere along the walk you both fall silent and you realize, this is it, this is my relationship with my father and it’s just what it is. He loves me enough, but even his love, the love that’s supposed to save me, won’t.
The boyfriend
You’ve been meaning to tell him that you want to spend more time talking, being together to balance out the fucking, but the first thing he tells you when you call from the enchanted island is how much he enjoyed the sight of you sucking his cock last week, the way your hair hung down around your face, your little ears, how beautiful that was. The conversation turns light, it always does. You manage to tell him toward the end of the phone call that you don’t just want to just drink and fuck, that in the New Year you should vary the dates, do other things. “But I took you to the opera!” he shouts in mock protest, referring to the date with his son and wife, the two hours of tedium in the opera house and the family dinner afterwards. You laugh, “sure you did,” you say. He agrees to more proper dates but you’re sad after the call. You wanted something and you’re not sure what it is. You wanted something and you’re pretty sure he can’t give it to you.
Glutes Away!
There’s that Beck, Dana Carvey guy again. He’s speaking to that woman by the free weights. She’s kind of pretty with wavy blond hair, nice enough body, but she’s not special, not rock star special. Maybe it’s not Beck. There’s another guy by the leg weights, he looks like somebody from t.v., Can’t remember his name. Ray something. He’s looking at you. Maybe he’s a movie star. Maybe they’re all movie stars. Maybe they think you’re a movie star too.
The family dinner
If you can just manage to keep it to two meals a day, no, a meal and a half, you’ll still look trim for the family party on Friday night. If you look fat you’re sunk. If your dress is wrinkled, forget it. Hope it’s a good hair day. You’ll wash it the day before so it’s slightly distressed for the party. No time for a pedicure, maybe mom has some clippers and polish. The idea is to look tight, together. The idea is to look perfectly beautiful wonderful. The idea is not to give anybody any reason to gossip about you, your hair, your dress, your body, any imperfection. The idea is to be adored, admired, envied. If you can manage this you will stay safe. You will get the love.
Monday, December 11, 2006
Sleeping with the enemy
When we discovered the big butcher knife lying under the covers of the master bed when we turned down the sheets to get into it, we were naturally shocked. If you walk into a kitchen and see a butcher’s knife you don’t think twice. But when you pull down the covers of a big, fluffy down bed and you see a knife lying there it stops you, and it takes a moment to reconcile what you see; bed, knife, knife, bed. You generally don’t put the two together unless you’re watching a horror film. Or living in one.
We were at a meditation retreat and we were supposed to be keeping noble silence, but my friend who I was sharing the bed with, she gasped. Our eyes went wide and our jaws went slack. “Shit,” she said.
At first I thought it was a joke.
And then I remembered that the knife belonged to the woman who owned the house, who slept in the bed, who wasn’t at the retreat with us, but whose husband, our friend, was.
My friend’s wife sleeps with a butcher knife beside her in bed. I need to say that again because it’s so grave and has so many implications, not to mention the affect it might have on my friend’s love life.
My friend’s wife sleeps with a butcher knife beside her in bed.
I knew it was hers because my friend had mentioned this knife in passing once when he was trying to drum up compassion for the plight of his marriage. He wanted us to understand just how deep-rooted his wife’s paranoid fears were. “She sleeps with a butcher knife beside her in bed!” he implored.
“Sure she does,” we said, not entirely believing him. I mean, hearing about someone sleeping with a knife can sound like a metaphor, you know, knife in the bed, elephant in the room, until you actually see that knife lying in the bed you’re about to climb into. So we were sort of half listening because we couldn’t picture this knife and also, we knew his wife well; she was our friend too and we were fond of her. But here it was in living color: The butcher knife.
For hours after we’d discovered the culinary weapon I kept thinking about what it must be like to be someone who sleeps with a butcher knife. I’ve slept with the phone near the bed. I’ve occasionally slept with a heavy flashlight when my husband was out of town, but never a knife, and I wondered what it would be like to live with that degree of fear. I could feel it in my belly, how being so afraid would color everything.
It was easy to put my friend’s wife into the crazy corner, to see her fear as a sickness, a sign of how far gone she was. And it lived like that in me for a little while, but as I say, we were at a meditation retreat and so I got to sit with myself which meant sitting with this monkey-minded drama going on in my head that I was obsessed by. It involved some of my friends and it had something to do with sex and who had said what to whom and who I thought I could trust and who I couldn’t and what I was going to stop doing and what I would do more of. I sat there for the first whole day of the retreat scheming how to keep myself from being hurt by these people.
And all this scheming got very tiring and so I welcomed the knife and the diversion it presented.
I knew about some of this woman’s fears; how she thought the roof of the house was going to collapse on them. How she was sure her husband was going to separate her from her wealth. How the palpitations of her heart were a sure sign of a heart attack. I knew how many times she’d been taken to the emergency room because she thought she was going to die, only to be sent home with a sedative. And although my fears were different and seemed much smaller, the thing I realized I had in common with this woman was that we both believed the things we feared were real. She to the point of sleeping with a butcher's knife, and me, who had begun shutting out the people around me who I loved because they could not be trusted. And I realized at that point it doesn’t matter if you’re sleeping with a knife or sleeping with an elephant. You’re in a horror film and it has become your life.
We were at a meditation retreat and we were supposed to be keeping noble silence, but my friend who I was sharing the bed with, she gasped. Our eyes went wide and our jaws went slack. “Shit,” she said.
At first I thought it was a joke.
And then I remembered that the knife belonged to the woman who owned the house, who slept in the bed, who wasn’t at the retreat with us, but whose husband, our friend, was.
My friend’s wife sleeps with a butcher knife beside her in bed. I need to say that again because it’s so grave and has so many implications, not to mention the affect it might have on my friend’s love life.
My friend’s wife sleeps with a butcher knife beside her in bed.
I knew it was hers because my friend had mentioned this knife in passing once when he was trying to drum up compassion for the plight of his marriage. He wanted us to understand just how deep-rooted his wife’s paranoid fears were. “She sleeps with a butcher knife beside her in bed!” he implored.
“Sure she does,” we said, not entirely believing him. I mean, hearing about someone sleeping with a knife can sound like a metaphor, you know, knife in the bed, elephant in the room, until you actually see that knife lying in the bed you’re about to climb into. So we were sort of half listening because we couldn’t picture this knife and also, we knew his wife well; she was our friend too and we were fond of her. But here it was in living color: The butcher knife.
For hours after we’d discovered the culinary weapon I kept thinking about what it must be like to be someone who sleeps with a butcher knife. I’ve slept with the phone near the bed. I’ve occasionally slept with a heavy flashlight when my husband was out of town, but never a knife, and I wondered what it would be like to live with that degree of fear. I could feel it in my belly, how being so afraid would color everything.
It was easy to put my friend’s wife into the crazy corner, to see her fear as a sickness, a sign of how far gone she was. And it lived like that in me for a little while, but as I say, we were at a meditation retreat and so I got to sit with myself which meant sitting with this monkey-minded drama going on in my head that I was obsessed by. It involved some of my friends and it had something to do with sex and who had said what to whom and who I thought I could trust and who I couldn’t and what I was going to stop doing and what I would do more of. I sat there for the first whole day of the retreat scheming how to keep myself from being hurt by these people.
And all this scheming got very tiring and so I welcomed the knife and the diversion it presented.
I knew about some of this woman’s fears; how she thought the roof of the house was going to collapse on them. How she was sure her husband was going to separate her from her wealth. How the palpitations of her heart were a sure sign of a heart attack. I knew how many times she’d been taken to the emergency room because she thought she was going to die, only to be sent home with a sedative. And although my fears were different and seemed much smaller, the thing I realized I had in common with this woman was that we both believed the things we feared were real. She to the point of sleeping with a butcher's knife, and me, who had begun shutting out the people around me who I loved because they could not be trusted. And I realized at that point it doesn’t matter if you’re sleeping with a knife or sleeping with an elephant. You’re in a horror film and it has become your life.
Friday, December 01, 2006
Leftover Stew
Leftover Stew: When you’ve run out of time to write a good piece and instead have to pull yesterdays moments from your head, scrambling like you do for a matching pair of socks when you should be out the door, hurling undies and bras and stories out of your drawer, out of your head and over your shoulder like some cartoon character
Here’s what you remember:
1. the slight lilt of guilt and pleasure you catch in your friend’s voice on the phone this morning because you know and she knows that your husband is on his way over to see her right now so they can get in their hour or two of sex because her children are at school and her husband is at work and because you saw your own boyfriend the other night and might even see this same friend’s husband next week.
2. how California that sounds.
3. how you will have to tolerate the little smiles and nudges these two give each other tonight when she comes over with her kids for dinner, and even though you love them both and are happy they are lovers, you don’t, just say it, take pleasure in witnessing their little moments of reverie. You just don’t. It’s a private thing and has nothing to do with you.
4. the pleasure, the thrill, the shock of being 46-years-old and having a husband and two lovers and how sometimes you have to say that out loud, sometimes to your friends, which might annoy them and which should embarrass you because you’re bragging, but really, you say it because you can’t believe it, because down deep you still feel like that fat, squat little girl standing with her legs together at the dining room table letting her father check to see if there’s a space between her thighs, which will dictate whether she can have dessert or not.
5. there has been so much dessert lately; the apple pie and the pumpkin pie and there’s chocolate in the freezer. You feel your tummy rolling over your jeans. Everyday is a new scheme to stop eating, to trim yourself, to reduce, especially with Hawaii coming up, and next weeks date with your friend’s husband. Trim, reduce, deny.
6. the shock and the surprise of listening to your 8-year-old in therapy yesterday talking about her own tummy rolling over her jeans, the way she sat there looking straight at Steve, her therapist, telling him what it was like to wear daddy’s shirts to school because then her tummy wouldn’t show.
7. how you told Steve that thing about your thighs and your dad at the dinner table. The way, when the session was over, Steve looked you straight in the eye and said, “there is nothing wrong with your body, your body is fine,” like he was trying to cement that in on your last session together, like if he said it real nice and slow like that you might hear him, and the way you looked back at him, appreciating what he was trying to do, but didn’t smile in agreement, didn’t shake your head wearily like a dope, just looked at him from a million miles away, from a place he could never imagine.
8. no one believes how small you feel sometimes. You compensate so beautifully.
Here’s what you remember:
1. the slight lilt of guilt and pleasure you catch in your friend’s voice on the phone this morning because you know and she knows that your husband is on his way over to see her right now so they can get in their hour or two of sex because her children are at school and her husband is at work and because you saw your own boyfriend the other night and might even see this same friend’s husband next week.
2. how California that sounds.
3. how you will have to tolerate the little smiles and nudges these two give each other tonight when she comes over with her kids for dinner, and even though you love them both and are happy they are lovers, you don’t, just say it, take pleasure in witnessing their little moments of reverie. You just don’t. It’s a private thing and has nothing to do with you.
4. the pleasure, the thrill, the shock of being 46-years-old and having a husband and two lovers and how sometimes you have to say that out loud, sometimes to your friends, which might annoy them and which should embarrass you because you’re bragging, but really, you say it because you can’t believe it, because down deep you still feel like that fat, squat little girl standing with her legs together at the dining room table letting her father check to see if there’s a space between her thighs, which will dictate whether she can have dessert or not.
5. there has been so much dessert lately; the apple pie and the pumpkin pie and there’s chocolate in the freezer. You feel your tummy rolling over your jeans. Everyday is a new scheme to stop eating, to trim yourself, to reduce, especially with Hawaii coming up, and next weeks date with your friend’s husband. Trim, reduce, deny.
6. the shock and the surprise of listening to your 8-year-old in therapy yesterday talking about her own tummy rolling over her jeans, the way she sat there looking straight at Steve, her therapist, telling him what it was like to wear daddy’s shirts to school because then her tummy wouldn’t show.
7. how you told Steve that thing about your thighs and your dad at the dinner table. The way, when the session was over, Steve looked you straight in the eye and said, “there is nothing wrong with your body, your body is fine,” like he was trying to cement that in on your last session together, like if he said it real nice and slow like that you might hear him, and the way you looked back at him, appreciating what he was trying to do, but didn’t smile in agreement, didn’t shake your head wearily like a dope, just looked at him from a million miles away, from a place he could never imagine.
8. no one believes how small you feel sometimes. You compensate so beautifully.
Monday, November 27, 2006
My Father
When Measure 89, the Clean Money initiative lost a few weeks ago I called my father because he had spent the last two years putting all of himself into it, trying to get it to pass. I wanted to call him to say I was sorry, but I was afraid he would blame me for it’s failing. “Well, did YOU vote for it?” he shouted once I got him on the phone.
”Yes,” I said, a little sheepish, like a child. I wasn’t lying, but I did lie about that other thing he wanted me to do, which was to email everyone I knew about the proposition and tell them which way to vote. “Did you send it out?” he asked a bunch of times after he’d sent me the original email. “Yes,” I lied, and changed the subject. The thing is, I don’t like sending mass emails to my friends, especially if they’re political, even if they do come from my father, who is smart and on the left.
In our regular phone chats he asks me about the girls, about my husband, the house plans. Sometimes he throws a curve ball and out of the blue he’ll ask whether I ever bought that computerized bridge program for the kids that he was obsessed by a few years ago, thinking they needed to learn bridge OR ELSE. Or out of nowhere he’ll ask me whether my kids are learning Spanish or if I’ve been following MY TEAM. But since I don’t follow sports and have no idea what season it is EVER, or who MY TEAM is, I am left speechless for a moment and then I lie in no particular order, “yes, no, yes, no.” Bridge, yes, Spanish, no, MY TEAM, yes, and he laughs because he knows I’m lying and I laugh because this is how we bond; me in my half morning daze, my cowboy boots and coffee, my list of plans; the phone calls and emails, and he in his cluttered office in Los Angeles, reminding me of either a lost planet or space debris, I don’t know, but he’s up there orbiting, trying to make sense of his world, pulling all the little pieces together, just as I try to do in mine.
This morning when I called he said he was overwhelmed with so much to do and I said maybe he ought to take a break after two years of hard work on Measure 89, and he tells me that he usually naps for 30 minutes. I said “Good, rest yourself, it’s a long walk toward death,” and he laughs and I laugh. We don’t know what it means but it bonds us.
”Yes,” I said, a little sheepish, like a child. I wasn’t lying, but I did lie about that other thing he wanted me to do, which was to email everyone I knew about the proposition and tell them which way to vote. “Did you send it out?” he asked a bunch of times after he’d sent me the original email. “Yes,” I lied, and changed the subject. The thing is, I don’t like sending mass emails to my friends, especially if they’re political, even if they do come from my father, who is smart and on the left.
In our regular phone chats he asks me about the girls, about my husband, the house plans. Sometimes he throws a curve ball and out of the blue he’ll ask whether I ever bought that computerized bridge program for the kids that he was obsessed by a few years ago, thinking they needed to learn bridge OR ELSE. Or out of nowhere he’ll ask me whether my kids are learning Spanish or if I’ve been following MY TEAM. But since I don’t follow sports and have no idea what season it is EVER, or who MY TEAM is, I am left speechless for a moment and then I lie in no particular order, “yes, no, yes, no.” Bridge, yes, Spanish, no, MY TEAM, yes, and he laughs because he knows I’m lying and I laugh because this is how we bond; me in my half morning daze, my cowboy boots and coffee, my list of plans; the phone calls and emails, and he in his cluttered office in Los Angeles, reminding me of either a lost planet or space debris, I don’t know, but he’s up there orbiting, trying to make sense of his world, pulling all the little pieces together, just as I try to do in mine.
This morning when I called he said he was overwhelmed with so much to do and I said maybe he ought to take a break after two years of hard work on Measure 89, and he tells me that he usually naps for 30 minutes. I said “Good, rest yourself, it’s a long walk toward death,” and he laughs and I laugh. We don’t know what it means but it bonds us.
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