Sunday, March 22, 2020

Take Heart

Some of us see a dark future or no future, a lunar wasteland replacing the paradise we have only recently come to notice. Some of us see a renaissance, a flowering of art and justice replicating itself in all directions and dimensions like a hall of mirrors. And some of us can't make up our minds. We have good days when we inhale in common with the Chinese their freshly laundered air. And we have bad days when we're no longer certain where good retreats and bad advances. We have days that unfold in the paradigm of science - what little we understand - and days that unfold in the paradigm of metaphor, a more familiar territory. These are not points of view so much as personality types that come and go, even within the consciousness of one person. I can wake up a virologist and go to bed a metaphysician. In between, I scavenge for disinfectant. Some days, I vacillate wildly between thinking it's all random and knowing for an undeniable fact that it's my fault. I have eaten my fair share of BLTs.

Of all the words written since the beginning of the pandemic or, to be more honest, since the scourge, in a Marco Polo u-turn, reached St. Mark's square and the Campo de Fiori in Rome, the remarks of the Pope have given me the most comfort. Francis says, anticipating an end to the crisis..."Tonight before falling asleep think about when we will return to the street....Every second will be precious. Swims at sea, the sun until late, sunsets, toasts, laughter. We will go back to laughing together." I appreciate especially "return to the street." Francis, despite his clerical costume, has a novelist's love for the world.

Every day that the virus claimed more lives, new flowers appeared in Berkeley. I was there making my annual March pilgrimage to celebrate the birthdays of my niece and my sister, this year turning 85. There were California poppies the color of tangerines. Enormous bushes of rosemary smelling like leg of lamb and bursting with purple blossoms. Jasmine and camellias. My sister sat in her recliner and took it all in. On St. Patrick's Day, she and I performed our own arrangement of "Danny Boy," until we were undone by the Irish tenor high notes. We fortified ourselves with cashews. We did our trademark imaginary tour of upper Broadway, seeing if we could remember all the stores and all the shopkeepers from the fifties. Every morning, my sister read the dire headlines in the Chronicle. We explained that there was a virus like a wildfire in the Sierras spreading out of control all over the world and she nodded. You couldn't tell if it registered, if it meant anything. But then again what did it mean to us? No more Thai food? No more browsing and people-watching at the bookstore? It's not like a terrorist attack. It dawns on you slowly, this new day.

At first, I kissed her forehead each time I entered her room and each time I left, marking the coming and going as if my sister were a mezuzah holding a sacred text. And maybe she is and maybe I am and maybe you are. But in the last days of the trip, I was no longer kissing my people. We were communicating our love for one another virtually, sometimes in words, but more often in chaste adoring glances like shy Victorians. I put my hand to my heart and she put her hand to her heart. When I sat opposite her on the final day before heading to the airport in Sacramento with my N95 mask and my supply of blue plastic gloves, she was leaning back in her chair under a wool blanket. She reached out from under the weight of it and grabbed my pinky finger with her pinky finger. We made a pinky promise, the way schoolgirls do, and despite the potential contagion of her skin touching my skin, we promised to love one another no matter the wreckage of this broken world.


Please share your thoughts regarding this story and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by commenting here or writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Thursday, March 5, 2020

Twentysomething

When in doubt, tell stories.


There they were, round and puffed up in their winter coats, standing in her doorway around the corner from Barney Greengrass, her mother and father. She often spent Sunday mornings in Barney's lox and bagel establishment, doing the puzzle, reading the wedding notices with a rich mixture of envy and contempt. Delaying the time when she'd have to return to the empty apartment. She fought tooth and nail for this, this barely furnished, drafty studio, four blocks from the slipcovers and cushy carpeting of the family home. Now, she was stuck with it, its provisional feel, the high ceiling echo of its loneliness. Backpedaling was not an option.

The shaming and blaming went on for weeks. They weren't a screaming family. Too decorous. They were more of a sulking family. When things got really bad, her mother would take to her bed with a Victorian lack of amusement. Her father made it clear he didn't think she could manage living alone, paying the rent, that he couldn't understand why she wanted to live three blocks north and one block east when she had a perfectly good room with a matching maple headboard, dresser and desk at home. In the end, she hung in and moved out, her greatest adult accomplishment to date.

When she was small, she liked to bury her face in her mother's fur coat, an unexpected encounter between otherwise unacquainted mammals. She'd seen seals, sleek and dripping, sunning themselves on the rocks overlooking their pool at the Central Park zoo. But the coat, though dead, was more approachable. In the doorway, however, her mother was not wearing the Alaskan seal and this was noteworthy given the bone-shattering cold of the February day. Her mother was more modestly dressed in a gray cloth coat with no color at the neck. Funereal, Randy thought, bordering on churchy. Her father wore his signature fedora, but that didn't mean anything since he never left home without it. She'd been dusting the New York soot off her bookshelves and wasn't expecting them. Damn, it looked serious. Grandma was already dead so it wasn't that kind of emergency. But it was clearly something.

What do you say when you're twenty-two and your parents appear unannounced at your door? Surely not "can I get you something," since Randy didn't have a thing to offer. Her fridge was stocked with the remains of last night's mushroom pizza, an ancient, shriveled grapefruit and a jar of stuffed olives. She looked at the two of them and they looked at her, not even taking off their coats. They had something to say and, apparently, they were going to say it.

Randy's mother and father sat down on the couch, a slab of foam rubber covered in some muddy brown synthetic material and settled their swollen feet on the orange-lollipop colored rug she bought at Macy's. Her friend, Joanne, wondered why she'd bought a rug when she wasn't even married.

"We got a call," her mother launched in with a blank expression on her face. "From someone named Leila Weiss. We don't know her. We had no idea who she was. She said she was getting divorced," and here her father chimed in so that the words came out in stereo. "She's naming you as the co-respondent in her divorce case."

Randy didn't know what a co-respondent was. It sounded like something you were responsible for learning about in high school, in algebra class or English, maybe a part of speech. Randy didn't know Leila Weiss either, had never met her. But the name registered, rang a carillon of bells. It was clear that the call had come from Mark's wife. Mark was her boyfriend.

She met him in the elevator of the office building downtown where she was working as the intake person for civil cases at the Legal Aid Society, the next best thing to finishing law school. She had high hopes for law school, how she'd eventually be sitting behind an enormous desk with a great many telephones. But law school was a fucking nightmare. Four women in an advancing battalion of male faces, the professor calling on them randomly to analyze cases. Property. Contracts. She tried to make herself even smaller than she was, willing herself invisible and it must have worked because in the six sleepless weeks she was there at BU she never got called on. Not once. She didn't exist.

At Legal Aid, she had an alcove at the front with a desk, not enormous, but all hers. Clients would come in and sit opposite her and she got to ask them all sorts of personal questions about their income, their domestic arrangements, the installments remaining on their kitchen appliances. Mostly, it was landlord-tenant or slip and fall. People were either being evicted for being in arrears on their rent or they were trying to sue the city for failing to repair the sidewalk outside the building where they weren't paying their rent, so that they could get enough money together to pay their rent. She was six months out of college and it was her first real job. She loved it. For some reason, it was a slow season for family law so she wasn't up on the pertinent legal jargon. Had never run across a client who was being named as a co-respondent. This was virgin territory although that ship had sailed a number of years back.

Mark was a forty year old married accountant, but kind of good looking. Jeez. They were both standing in the elevator holding cups of scalding, undistinguished coffee. He caught her eye and gave Randy a sheepish smile that felt empowering. She was needing that bad after she had to drag her father up to Boston to bail her out of BU back in October. The two of them were ushered into an office wallpapered with framed diplomas for an expensive and mortifying negotiation. The dean noted that women weren't really cut out for the law. He and her father didn't seem at all surprised that she was packing up and going home. Expectations fulfilled.

Her parents had only met Mark once. It was New Year's Eve. The two of them had planned a big night, dinner out then maybe some music. But on the thirtieth, Randy woke up with a toothache so over-the-top that it dwarfed everything else in the world. There was only the toothache. It turned out to be an impacted wisdom tooth that had to come out immediately. If the dentist hadn't been her father's cousin, a grizzled person with medieval dental equipment, she never would have gotten an appointment right before the holiday. She probably would have been forced to kill herself. As it was, she had the thing extracted and crawled back to her parent's apartment, crushed, defeated and stoned on Percocet.

Mark came by at around eight with a dozen purple roses. Her mother was extremely impressed. He had taken off his wedding ring and just looked like an attractive Columbia graduate, which he was. A tad old, true, but charming and solicitous. Randy was lying on the couch, a slab of foam rubber covered in gold brocade. She was close to suffocating under a pile of blankets. Through the narcotic fog, she saw the two of them, Mark falling in age precisely between her and her mother. The scent of the roses mixed with the smell of her own unwashed body nauseated her. She mumbled a weak thank you and turned away.

Now, her father was looking at the orange rug. Randy could see that he was trying to make eye contact with her, but couldn't quite pull it off. "Just tell him you can't see him anymore," he suggested, sighing with weariness and resignation.

"Of course, we know it isn't true," her mother added, tight-lipped. "What this awful woman said. It's unthinkable that this Leila Weiss would lay this in our lap. Call us and say you were involved with her husband. Involved in that way," she added with emphasis. "Your father and I know you'd never do anything like that."

And Randy thought, I can't get credit for anything. Not even being a half-way decent bad girl.



Please share your thoughts regarding this story and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com