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.
The boxes are sitting on my Seattle steps, bright white against the dark, mildew-stained stairs. I heft them up; they’re surprisingly heavy. I elbow my way inside the front door and drop them on the table with a thump. The red and blue lettering reveals nothing about what’s inside, though I have my suspicions.
I piled everything into a boxy folding cart, the kind only New Yorkers use because we don’t have cars to haul junk in, and pushed it to Goodwill, around the corner on Second Avenue. It was my seventh trip that week.
I was gazing out at Provincetown Bay through the enormous picture window in Norman Mailer’s home. Betty Friedan’s classic analysis, The Feminine Mystique, sat open on my lap. Jessica, an administrator of the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, entered through the patio door, bringing in the chilly fall air and the news that Norris Church Mailer had died.
