Greg and I were Going Out. In high school, that was a big deal. Anyone could date, but Going Out was serious. It meant passing cryptic and affectionate notes to each other in class. It meant slowly and unconsciously beginning to dress like each other. It meant sharing friends, having comfortable dinners with each other’s families, and loyal monogamy. And it meant making out.
My mother and I are working our way down to Moab, where I will be leaving her in the care of my brother. A road trip with her is a risky thing; in motion, she can become as unmoored as any poor creature in the universe, and as desperate. Thus, I have put Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion in the tape deck, thinking it will sooth her and, if our luck holds, buy us a hundred or so miles of calm. It’s worked. For a long time we have been mostly silent, caught in a spell of organ and strings.
He works in mathematical algorithms; I work in failed utterances. In the borders of what language can’t or won’t or shouldn’t say, but does. And vice versa. Sometimes I wish I could explain why this leads to sleepless nights, or how it feels to be overcome by that frustrating yet oh so exhilarating, even sexy, burning fire to simply express.
Like the House of Cadmus—the doomed royal family of Oedipus and Antigone—the gods cursed my family. No, we’re not doomed to marry one another and gouge our eyes out with stickpins. Instead, the gods constructed our bodies like those wooden puppets one finds in old time toy shops—those rigid little soldiers or scarecrows who stand erect on cylindrical pedestals, but who, with the press of a small button, instantly dissolve into a crumpled jumble of limbs.
There are family traditions, then there are family traditions. Ours was the Thanksgiving sage stuffing. My immediate family now deceased, I’m not embarrassed to say this single tradition stood alone among our more common conventions of secrets, indiscretions and the occasional malfeasance. These things were our family traditions to the younger me, growing up in two households in Hawaii in the sixties.
If I were the type to write happy endings, I’d end with the four-foot, six-inch fence. It stood in the center of the brightly lit indoor ring of Cedar Lodge Farm, a show barn in Stamford, Connecticut. It was a November evening in 1982 and my hour was just about up. My mother would arrive any minute to fetch me for dinner and homework.
“Why is there a bed?”
Dad was under the impression he’d been hired to work as a doctor again, although Mom had explained to him, many times, that he would be living here now. Obviously he’s unable to accept that this could really be happening to him. Or maybe he’s confused because his former colleague, Frank, lives at Huron Woods, too. They were ear, nose, and throat doctors together for over two decades.
Sometimes leaving a person alone is an act of love.
I was riding on a bus along Christopher Street when I looked out the window, past the gingko trees that were just turning yellow and dropping stinky fruits on sidewalks around Manhattan, to see Jason walking with his arm resting across the shoulders of his long-time girlfriend, Clarissa. Her long black hair tumbled over his steady shoulder. He enfolded her in his warm embrace. His lips were near her ear, and by his half smile, I imagined he was saying something clever. Jason’s face was heavier than when we were a couple.
We lived, my grandmother and I, next to the line that separated white from black. There was, in that time and place, no legitimate mixing of the societies. If I looked west from my yard along Bay Street, I could see the black side of Mullins, but I could never go there and had little reason to look. My life was on this side.
… So ran the 1988 TV commercial for Time-Life Books’ Mysteries of the Unknown series—something I always associate with my first time. I was 9. And by “first time”, of course, I mean the first time that crippling panic consumed me. After seeing that ad, I couldn’t sleep for months.
