Rock n'Roll Girl

Tonight I lie atop a bed with a blue flowered quilt, under a blinded window, and I’m listening to a young Van in my headphones. Irish storytelling, Irish scat, Irish famine, all wrapped up in Van’s poetics champions compose, his TB sheets, his Astrial Weeks. His is the voice I return to time and again when life wants to throw a few punches. And then when she was murdered and he hung himself, we stood, unknowing, before a diminutive Van onstage at Tanglewood—he in a brown polyester suit—and we sang his Irish songs under a clear summer night. It was August. We saw Yeats and Joyce that night on the stage, and we sang our joy, took our literature seriously. On the way home—our car windows open to the warm summer night—we had Van in our hearts. We drove with our headlights lighting up the promised highway, the night stars overhead, and the radio alive… Two joyous souls that late night in August, and our Irishman…

When we round Swan Street, we hear the urgent beeping of an answering machine from the open window two stories above. And a note from the police department asking him to call. Two people dead: a woman who loved her son and her propriety; and an elderly intellectual who had made all the decisions. Call your sister, the note reads in the thin metal mailbox. When we get upstairs, the moon looks in on us through the bay window as he dials the phone. I stand shivering and waiting and hearing Van in my head. My father killed my mother and then he killed himself, he says, after his sister had answered the phone… We sit together on the bed and wait for the dawn, too terrified to move. Waiting for the promise of a new day. And we are grateful for Van…

Years later, he would take me to a restaurant in Dublin. We order pints and sit at a small table and talk. And suddenly the table next to us—14 people in all—erupts into song. I lift my glass in joy, and he says, this is what they do. I listen… Shaw, Beckett and Wilde in their ancient voices. In Kilkenny, we stumble into a funeral and make many new friends. Paddy this and Paddy that. And their castles and their stories. Always their stories… Rock n’roll in that way….

And then there’s Paul Westerburg and The Replacements. We owe him a debt of gratitude for so many lines, but mostly for “the ones who love us least are the ones we die to please.” But that excludes too many other things. And the show in Boston—a snooty, racist town—and Paul told them so. Me, the small town girl hitching a ride, who watched the chaos unfold on stage. These were Westerburg’s bastards of young, his unsatisfied, his answering machine, his Tim. And what did I know about that—other than my own misfit, my own stifled language? What I witnessed that night onstage was transformative, was smart. And it changed me—leaving a rundown club on Boston’s southside, sweaty and spent. Alive…

It’s many summers later that I head alone to Irving Plaza where Paul performs solo, an older man and his rock n’roll songs. I am the only woman in the front—and when Paul takes the stage, the crowd begins to vibrate. I am crushed between the weight of euphoric, unleashed men who know all the words to his songs. I am afraid… And then Paul strikes the opening chords of “Unsatisfied,” and I know I can’t possibly get hurt here in this undulating crowd tonight. Because it is only rock n’ roll after all…

And you who do not understand this, so quintessentially American. I’ve seen Richard Pryor, Little Richard, Johnny Johnson, Bill Hicks, Lucille Clifton, the Pretenders, Lucinda Williams, Johnny Cash, and old pipe smoking Clarence Gatemouth Brown himself, perform. And a whole lot of other talented folks, too. Rock n’roll is a sensibility, is art. And some nights it saves us—like me here tonight, alone, in an otherwise quiet room, the night outside filled with unknowable things…
***

Trash

I come from a long line of very distinguished French Canadian drunks. That’s it: that’s my claim to heritage and history in a quiet nutshell. And who are you to tell me that’s not a good thing? Or that it’s something I shouldn’t say? We are story tellers, musicians, artists—this family--and waitresses, cashiers and laborers because of all that. We got poverty in our blood, and snow under our rugged fingernails. No finery for us, no Sunday crossword puzzle.

Where the hell did you come from? I’ve heard time and again. With a saucer under my cup, a book under my arm, and a yearning for something other than where I was then. You and your Parisian French, my mother used to say. Miss La-tee-da. Without my grandmother's piercing black eyes and oversize feet she’d swear I was someone else’s child.

And I am all of that, yes. A good old fashioned French Canadian stew—with a dash of Cajun dirt and cuisine. I am storyteller and reader, waitress and teacher, with the threat of poverty and hunger munching on my well heeled shoes. Don’t tell me about your perfect family, your manicured life—because for years I believed it. Carried the loose change of shame in my back pocket and savored your made-up stories like peppermints on my tongue. You with your dental insurance and summer vacations, your framed family photos. We were the trash down the road, I believed…

And now I’m under scrutiny again—and the past I shrugged off kicks up the dust. I see him quietly observing and scribbling notes in his pad. More transparent than he knows, he takes my measurements and misreads my history. Thinking in his comfort and distance that I am not doing the same… So many people equate poverty with other things, and I wonder if he might believe that, too. He considers how much I will ruffle, how much I'll require--me in my hunger and my cold history. And I am poised to tell him: some days too much, and other days too little.

But he should know this already.

And so we drive together to a crusty New England town--and he navigates the highway with both hands on the wheel. We are to visit a quiet woman who knew him as a boy. The sun shines in through the dusty car windows as we tell our stories and put lights on our selves. We talk, sticking one toe in and pulling it back out again. And we laugh at the broken mirror of family--but not too much because we see our own shards in there.

In a room down the hall, two aged women sleep, the blinds drawn to the hot July day. Separate beds; separate families who don’t come often enough. But all the rest is shared... And while we have been busy knitting our lives together, the women are acquiescing to the end of theirs—not knowing of course that their separate trajectories would land them both here. They sleep the sleep of oblivion—against the static of a solemn TV—while he and I talk about difference, about past, about future. Yet this is where we will come in the end--in ill-fitting shoes or fine Italian leather, to a room very similar to this—the storytelling daughter of a Welfare mother, or the educated son of a no-nonsense nurse. It makes no difference. We will come here to wait... To sleep... To awaken sometimes to discover a nephew caressing one delicate hand...
***

Know

When I snap off the lamp, we lie in the dark for a few moments, not talking. She is in the bed just a few inches from mine, and I can hear her breathing. Later she will pull the blankets and a pillow over her head and sleep a protected sleep—away from memory, away from the din and disruption of her father’s house. But we are here tonight in this hotel room, the blinds shuttered tight, the room obliterated—just the quiet lighted numbers on the night stand clock. We are both tired from this day of meeting people who lay claim to us. We search each other’s faces for something familiar, something to latch on to. What connects us, really? This family scattered like ashes by the mighty hand of circumstance. We stand awkwardly along the shore of a troubled lake, feet unstable on the river rocks. What we discover enthralls us, disappoints us, as we move around each other, navigating this new terrain, trying not to slip on the rocky shore.

She laughs the nervous laugh I have come to know as the prelude to something she’s ready to reveal. The darkness of the room makes us feel safe, protected. I lie absolutely still and wait.

He left us alone for three days when we were six, she says. Her voice moves on the pitch black stage—with its own character and body, even though we can’t see it. And the police kicked in the door...

I let her words drift along the dark for a moment.

And where was I, I think, when this was happening? Many miles north, suckling a hungry son, making tea, weeding an abundant garden… I trusted the things he told me, even though I knew I should not. And now she is here beside me covered in bruises that the world cannot see—does not want to see. She is a throw-away in her motherlessness, her court dates, her cheap shoes. The judge’s calendar filled with too many of these children, as her stomach growls for lunch…

Another laugh in the darkness, and I cover my belly with both hands.

And there is blood from her nose and mouth—her father’s wrath on a Sunday afternoon—and her brother on the floor getting kicked. And waking up to a man lying on top of her… And moving and moving and moving. Each time someone suspected, each time the rent man came knocking: leaving. No roof, no bed, no food…no medicine for a toothache that lasted months. This young girl beside me understands the word no. With me in my fertilized blindness, creating a yes world for my son…

***

Assaulted

She is a young version of me—which is especially true in the way that she reveals painful things impetuously, punctuated with a laugh. Testing the waters to see if the person sitting across from her can be trusted; molding her laughter around the nugget of hurt so that it springs along like a ball bouncing over the lyrics of a song on TV… But her stories do not rhyme; they are not musical or lyrical; they can’t be captured by a haunting beat. They are the destructive, annihilating truth that people turn away from.

We are on top of the Empire State Building on a flawless afternoon in July. This new world that is slowly being revealed to her opens like a sunburst as we step onto the observation deck. We are in heaven looking down on the dirt and noise below, looking down on life as this young girl knows it. From here we have a better understanding of how things work, how things are linked, and what purpose they serve. She snaps our picture—one pretty girl on the cusp of constructing her life; the woman beside her smack in the middle of dismantling hers. We’re happy for this moment, she and I. She scans the rooftops far below and all around us is the language of people sharing this moment, talking in tongues that each other understands.

He hurt us, she says, as she turns away from the sky. She is perfect in her revelation: long dark lashes folded over her eyes; shoulders squared. Then, just as quick: Here, she says, can you take my picture? And she lifts her face to the sun, and flashes a cotton candy smile.

On the subway ride downtown, she grips the metal railing and hangs on tight. Are you scared, I ask, wondering how anyone who has seen what she’s seen can be afraid of such things as a train speeding along a darkened, convulsive track. Then I wonder if she’s holding on for the crash—like when her mother died and she was left alone with him.

Later we ride the Staten Island Ferry, and she holds her camera up to the Statue of Liberty as we pass. I take a picture of her taking a picture of a symbol of freedom and hope. I want to preserve this moment, to show her it’s possible. Even when we are hurt and injured, it’s still possible to be free…

***

Masks II

Yesterday I packed two kids into the car and off we went to get bludgeoned by art at MOMA. We do the weekend family program quite often, my son and me, but today we also have my niece with us. She is visiting from Florida and it’s her first time being in NYC. She is excited and chatty in the front seat beside me, and I watch the dance in her eyes when I’m not dodging traffic. She has seen way too many things, this girl, and it’s a gift that her eyes still know how to dance.

At MOMA, we check in, getting our names printed in bold letters on peel-off nametags outlined in red. We meet our tour guide, Ada, whom I like right away. Ada is my age with wild hair that was once dark—there are still hints of it sprinkled throughout her long gray curls—and I can see in her actions, the way she moves her hands, that she is an artist. Of course I wonder about her life and the many sacrifices she’s made to do what she does. Like being here with us on a lovely Sunday morning in July when there are so many other things an artist can be doing. There’s also something about her that tells me she’s brave.

Today, Ada says, we’re going to look at masks. And she asks the kids about playing dress-up and wearing Halloween costumes. She gets them—and us, the parents who hold back and let the kids do the talking for once because we are terrified to talk about art—thinking about wearing costumes and masks and “playing the part,” and still being "you" underneath it all. Whatever that means, I think: still being “me.”

Upstairs on the 6th floor, we visit a new show featuring James Ensor, a turn-of-the-century painter from the Belgian coast. He seems wholly uninfluenced by the French Post-Impressionists, but what I know about art wouldn’t fill a thimble. I know that it makes me happy inside to see it--although it sometimes makes me sad, too. And that’s all that I know.

We settle on the floor in front of the first Ensor work and study a painting in which two people wear masks. The colors are dark, the room sparse, the masks ominous. One person sits at a small wooden table near the door, and another person is coming in (or backing out, one of the children in our group observes). The children see things in the painting that we adults do not see because they haven’t yet had the round flattened out of them, haven’t yet been molded into neat little boxes. What I see frightens me--two poverty stricken people trying to survive--but the kids see all kinds of magical things.

Yet it's “Skeletons in the Studio” that's the most interesting to me. Ada, our tour guide, tells the children to ask their parents about the phrase “skeletons in the closet.” This painting, she explains, is a lot like that. My son and niece and I huddle together on the floor and talk about what that means. A dark cloud passes quickly in front of my niece’s sunny eyes because she has many skeletons in her closet—many I don’t know about yet, many she will never share. And already, at 13, she is wearing her masks...

I study Ensor's painting and see it all there. The skeletons littered around the room--and there near the center of the painting is a leather portfolio: well thumbed, torn, almost scratched at. All his many creations rejected, haunting him. Mocking him. It’s the way I feel about this... And there are masks on the wall in the painting, like the ones I wear to get through the day, some happy, some sad. And there too on the wall, a tiny disembodied hand, that appears almost blood stained. The tool that labors to create what won’t be created…

And one of the kids points to the painting and says, look, the cloud outside the window has the face of a skeleton. And even Ada stops to look, lifting a solid mass of wild curly hair away from her face. She smiles. Yes, she says, delighted, I never noticed that…
***

Motherhood

We leave work early yesterday and sit on barstools by the door with fifty-five minutes before we have to go pick up the kids. Hit me, we say to the not-so-young woman behind the bar—who is only too glad to do so. Her tip jar hungry and waiting on a hot afternoon in July. Plus, we are no threat to her in our also not-so-youngness. She puts two tall drinks down on the polished wood of the bar and immediately they both begin to perspire. I edge round the ice with my straw and settle in.

I tell the bartender I’m on vacation. She smoothes on one of her smiles from a basket of expressions she keeps under the bar. She’s heard it all—everyone making all kinds of excuses to drink—and this is one of the easier ones to respond to. Then there’s me and my vacation—this woman who’s been on her feet her whole life.

Good for you, honey, she says colorlessly.

Another drink and it’s thirty-five minutes before we have to pick up the kids. And I waste eight of those minutes in the ladies room. By the time I take care of business and put a shine on my lips, the big hand has headed into the homestretch.

When I return to the bar, my friend is chatting up a robust man sitting two stools down. He tells us about a brewery in Pleasantville, a winery next door. The clock behind the bar ticks. Do they have childcare, I ask? And everyone laughs. But our laugh—the two mothers at the bar—rings a little hollow around the cold hard nugget of truth it shields.

I don’t want to go home, one of us says—and it doesn’t matter who because we both feel it. Home to chicken nuggets, SpongeBob and fights—when here in this air-conditioned bar there’s a juke box, beer nuts, and glass shelves behind the bar filled with possibilities. Or so it seems, of course.

We sigh, shake our heads, and look at the clock.

Hit me, we tell the bartender again, and we laugh—a bit ruefully this time. After the two new glistening drinks stand at attention on the bar, the cocktail straw an indefinite salute, she says, almost whispering:

My period is late.

I widen my eyes as if to say what the fuck.

Yes, she says, and begins to laugh. Knocked up at forty-four. Can you imagine?

No. I. Can’t. The two of us with our shared infertility and all those invasive tests. My infertility finally untangling itself just before the clock ran out. And she with her two children and a husband who left.

Years ago, I drove my friend Amal to the abortion clinic, first thing on a muggy summer morning. Her third abortion, with another one coming that neither of us knew about yet. She sat nonchalantly in the passenger side of her Ford Pinto, while I made small talk all the way to the corner until we ran out of gas. Then me pushing the car with the door open and one hand on the steering wheel down the long quiet decline of James Street, to the gas station five blocks away. Out of patience with her for getting pregnant again and for not putting gas in her car...

But back at the bar, my friend and I have ten more minutes before we have to go pick up the kids. And suddenly we both break into the words from that old Paul Anka song, “Having my baby…” And we laugh—heartily—because three vodka tonics can make things like this seem terrifically funny. We are still laughing as the robust man two stools down settles his tab and leaves.
***

Falling in Love

They wore hunting jackets with Flintstone-sized pins securing the license on back. Drove pick-up trucks with Skeeter riding shotgun beside them. Plodded through dirty snowbanks in unlaced workboots, their rough, working-man’s hands chapped by the cold wind… These were the men I grew up with in that solitary Upstate town. Their football games, their Utica Club; every outing in a bar ending in a fight—fists pumping; tables overturned; the crowd—sweaty and exhilarated—huddled around to watch. Faggot this and faggot that. And whatareyoufuckinglookingat? They ate testosterone for breakfast and sprinkled it at night on their venison stew.

I dated none of them. Not one. Wouldn’t have--even if they’d asked. Which of course they did not.

What to do with a girl like me—with her hips and her darkness and one coal black eye cocked in disdain—when they desired girls the color and shape of a popsicle stick? My sixth grade teacher told my mother I thought I was better than the rest. Me, the girl in hand-me-down clothes and a free-hot-lunch card. I didn’t think I was better; I thought I was smarter—which was easy to feel when your 6th grade teacher misreads you like that.

And, finally, the night of graduation, walking across the stage—to a paltry smattering of family applause—a big boned, bookish girl who loved to smoke pot. My teachers, their breath sucked in, ready to diatribe, and me scoring 99 on the English Regents and a perfect 100 in French. This is your brain on drugs, Rachel, they tried… Oh really? And Principal Metcalf handing me the diploma, shaking his head—you could have done better than top ten in the class—but I just kept walking: across the stage, down the steps, up the carpeted left-hand aisle to the exit sign, and out into a clear June night—walking in my own deliberate, flat-footed way to the bus station on First Street to buy a one-way ticket south. The bus exhaling its way out of the dock, my cardboard box of possessions like a friend in the seat beside me.

Of course I was scared, of course I was lonely. And sometimes I thought about going back to that town as I stepped beyond the dungeon-sounding door of my apartment building, venturing onto the boulevard…

But at least there was a boulevard. And traffic lights and stores. And highways leading off to unknowable places. And people. Interesting people talking about interesting things. And different kinds of men—some of them in tight pants and sneakers with loud orange laces. Crossing their legs, playing music—lots of music—and dreaming and laughing. Not a hunting jacket among them, not a can of Utica Club. I watched from the corner, observing it all…

And one night as he sat behind me on the couch, I felt him play with my hair. Imperceptible at first, then a slightly stronger touch that thrilled the back of my neck. And I knew that this is how I wanted to fall in love... On a hot summer night, listening to music--with him tapping out the rhythm on his leg.

Eventually we would ride our bikes together at 3am, along the deserted streets of the lower North Side, feeling very much alive, the only ones awake at that hour, the only ones out falling in love…

The Car Show

When we leave the restaurant, night has settled. Lights are sprinkled like confetti in the hills across the dusky river, and someone has lit bamboo torches along the riverwalk, the flames licking hungrily at the dark. We are sated, happy. Ready for something new.

Across the road, tucked into a parking lot in the shadows, is a car show. Hidden away from people like us—in our khakis, our watches, our clean lines and comfort, sipping Mojitos at the outdoor bar. He likes cars, and so we make our way into the dimly lit parking lot to look at each shiny jewel, each polished trophy, around which patched-up men stand in baseball caps with bellies straining against thin cotton t-shirts. Patriotic country music pumps sluggishly through old speakers set up on a truck. The men laugh, smoke; caress smooth, curved metal and chrome with lint-free cloths.

We have stepped into their world, the tall man and me, strangers still to each other, strangers in a strange world tonight…

The first car standing with its mouth wide open is a 1969 Chevy Camaro—as shiny as hope itself, a brand new penny on a breezy Sunday morning. The man in the dirty cap beside it grins when he sees us look. He tells us the car’s history, her value, her secrets. There is an intimacy between them that’s clear, he and this car. More than an intimacy, he finds his salvation in her; purpose. Listening to him talk makes me wonder what I know about love—what I know about joy.

But we have stumbled in late, and already they are packing up to go home. A small caravan of vintage cars and their craggy drivers make their way out to the road, heading home to their hard earned lives. But one man is in no hurry. He waits for us to walk by, to notice him, to talk. He stands beside a cranberry colored Cadillac with rich red leather seats. But tonight it’s not about the car—it’s about fear, about death, about connection. He recognizes on this quiet July night—the sky littered with stars—his aloneness, his own quaking mortality, as two strangers pass by. The car is merely the rope he casts out to catch us—which we both grab hold of: two strangers as we already are, looking for truth in each other, not quite certain if it’s there. We don’t know at first what we have latched on to—we are, after all, looking for something new—but the man with the raspy voice and cranberry colored Cadillac is as lonely as the night sky, as terrified as the thin, ground edge of a knife. He tells us of his cancer, his payments, his plans. We three of us pretend it’s about the car—peek inside at the tufted leather seats, bend over to look at the white wall tires—but it’s about fear tonight, about loneliness. In a darkened, near-empty parking lot, three strangers trying to make a connection, trying to stave off the hungry hand of fate, if just for a few moments more.
***

Arabian Nights

“Is it possible, that by telling these tales,
one might indeed save one’s self?”

Scheherezade thought so—and I do, too. Although she and I need saving from very different things. Hers a physical death, and mine a spiritual one.

Jim tells me to beware of telling these stories. Be cautious, he says. Circumspect. But I don’t know how to do that when the words often unleash themselves of their own damn will. Thy will be done, Jim. You—much more spiritually evolved than I—know that.

Today I went boldly into the world. Pushed a large metal shopping cart down aisles crowded with happy people constructing their lives. We glide past each other, careful not to touch. I buy dish detergent, hot dogs, lemonade and cookies. When I get to the checkout, the cashier is not young. It’s a Sunday afternoon in July, and she ought not to be sliding groceries across a windowed scanner; ought not to be standing there in a lazy green smock with a plastic nametag upon which someone has printed in uneven letters, “Mary.” We smile. I hand Mary my debit card—and resist the urge to lean over and tell her I am not what I seem. Me in my middle-classness, my credit cards, my capris. I want to confess to Mary that I’m making things up as I go. That the young boy who rides the bottom rung of the cart in his flip flops is a gift that I don’t always know how to manage. That my house is untidy. That bills go unpaid. That during the week I teach inconsequential things with a made-up authority to people who are probably a whole lot smarter than I.

Mary hands me the receipt—proof that I have followed the rules—and smiles at me, at my son. You are a good woman, she says. I glance quickly around, convinced the good woman Mary sees is not me. How can it be me, living such a preposterous life? And yet there’s no one behind me, no one but me…

This afternoon I jumped off a diving board and into the deep end—an act of faith, throwing my body into that greedy water. It’s been too many years since I last did that, having grown cautious in my living long before it was time. These days I drive too fast and wondered, as I watched them dive, if I might welcome the silence that awaits us down there. And yet when I jump, I’m surprised at how fiercely I struggle to come back up and break the surface of the water. To see my flat-footed son’s joy at his mother’s abandon. He claps, standing wet and dripping on the steaming cement. Waiting for me to climb up the ladder and do it again.
***

The Witching Hour

It’s the dead of night in early July. The fan oscillating on my dresser makes a slight clicking sound as it travels the same path--back and forth, back and forth—beside a small metallic clock making steady progress in the night. Outside, trees rustle in a tired wind.

Down the hall, the nightlight from my son’s room bleeds around the crack of my closed bedroom door. I like it dark when I sleep. Quiet. Unlike my brother who sleeps an urban sleep in the spare room when he visits. The voices and static of talk radio coming from the nightstand, a cell phone that beeps periodically throughout the night—and him snoring over the cacophony and occasionally crying out in his sleep.

It’s the witching hour, a friend tells me in my office the other day. She has rounded the corner of eighty, and talks to me about the invisibility of being old in this country. Everyone over seventy knows about the witching hour, she says, that happens at 3am. Fate sprawled out in front of you, hogging the covers, and taking up all the room in the bed.

Earlier tonight I looked at your photos. Saw you smiling in a green shirt and caught by the camera bending over to dance. A face in shadow, still a stranger to me… And then to another page where she presents her life in a series of still shots—husband, wife, daughter, son--their faces lifted to the camera, open, revealed. Arms circled round each other like protective ropes holding their love in. Reminding me of what I have lost.

And I live in a glass house at which life has been throwing too many stones. It is an old house, a tired house, that settles quietly in its fatigue. I chase the cracks with packing tape, tugged from a resistant roll, trying to meld the fissures, pull the two broken sides together—as all my neighbors watch--but the cracks spread quicker than I can keep up with them along each smooth, transparent wall.
***
***

The Reunion

When I hear about the festival and learn that he’ll be there, something begins to happen. I find myself spending too much time in front of the mirror, trying to see what he will see; too much time imagining what he looks like now. It’s been fifteen years since we last saw each other, and twenty-five years since we last made love...

I confess I’m anxious to see him, to see if time has knocked him around a bit, to see if his handsome has faded, his seriousness lightened, his sometimes awkward and slightly effeminate way of moving has been replaced by something more definite, more confident, now that he’s 49.

So girls like me have no business falling in love with dark, handsome musicians. Why? Because we spend most of the relationship feeling grateful that someone like them could care about someone like us. A small town girl in her not-quite-right clothes, moved alone to the “city.” Hanging with the in-crowd—with an albatross of insecurity joyriding on my back. Watching all those pretty girls in their skin-tight clothes and perky new breasts, clustered around his side of the stage.

Fell. In. Love. I did. Not the half-portion kind of love. Super-size love. The Grand Slam. A take-my-head-off-my-shoulders-and-deposit-it-on-a-shelf-‘cause-I’m-not-going-to-be-using-it kind of love.

He loved me, too—regular size. Side salad size.

Really what he loved most was me not loving anyone else but him—while he loved any girl who had an itch between her legs. Turns out, there were hundreds of them looking to get scratched. But what did I know about that? Me sitting doe-eyed in front of a weary gynecologist, who had to write out a script each time I came in. I understood that it was a sexually transmitted disease, but I never followed the logic of how such a thing came to be. Rachel the Pathetic, holding on to her dirty love.

But nothing lasts forever, not even ignorance. Mine eventually helped along by someone smart enough to shake me by the shoulders on a rainy afternoon. What the hell’s wrong with you? she’d said, half nuts with it all.

But once I got it, I was done. D-o-n-e. Oh, the tears (his, not mine); the flowers; the gifts; the waiting on the front steps of my apartment; the following me in his car (me discovering him behind me whenever I stopped at a light and happened to glance in my rearview mirror); the phone calls; the showing up at my job; the unannounced middle-of-the-night visits to my apartment to plead his case and to check to see if someone else was there; the phone call in which he threatened to kill me on Christmas Eve; and eventually jumping my new boyfriend in a bar and knocking him over the head with a beer.

The man was like a dog with a bone.

Funny how people only want you after you realize you no longer want them…

Then today… I am standing beside an outdoor stage on a hot and muggy evening in the dead of summer, back “home” in that rusty Upstate town. Got my posse of old girlfriends, and my 5-year-old son. Roadies move around us, adjusting cords, changing guitar strings, setting things up and taking things down. Aging musicians in varying degrees of hair loss arrive with their gear.

And suddenly—a tap on my shoulder—he’s there. He smiles the pursed lip smile that I remember. We embrace. Not too long, but enough for me to smell him, feel the roughness of a threatening beard against my cheek, his chest against mine. We stand back and examine each other: there’s a sprinkle of gray at his temples and places on his face where life has landed a few good punches. But other than that, the years have been kind. Very kind. And suddenly I’m remembering things I have no business remembering…

And of course I wonder what he finds when he looks at me. The slow erosion over time rarely noticed by the daily observer—me and my mirror—but I’m laid out tonight on a pretty lace doily. And of course he says nothing.

We talk. I introduce him to my son—who he studies with an intensity that surprises me. He talks to my son, getting down on his knees to engage him eye to eye. When he stands up and adjusts the legs of his jeans, he tells me my son looks exactly like me.

Afterwards it’s dark. My little guy has gone home with his aunt. The girlfriends have yawned their way into an early night. So I’m alone on a table they’ve set up behind the stage. He leans his guitar case against the table and sits down beside me. We swing our legs. It’s hot. He sweats from the heat of the night and the stage lights that were just on him. I tell him it was a good show. He nods. Touches my hand in one quick, awkward gesture.

It’s good to see you, he says, and we both look away.

The next band begins to play, the melody and thud of the kick drum a bit faded back here. He tells me that his mother died last year, that he took care of her at the end. That he was grateful to be able to have done that. I can see in the muscles of his jaw how much this pains him to say.

But, he says, on a much lighter note, look at this. And out comes the cell phone, which he opens to reveal a picture of a dark haired little girl holding a blanket.

My daughter, he says. Ella.

I lean in to get a closer look, but I can see nothing other than the pure unfiltered white flash of pain. I fold my arms across my belly where the blow has just landed. His daughter?

That’s her binkie, he says, and his face and smile and eyes are lit up. Radiant. Head on crazy about the little girl staring back at us from the palm of his hand. With our little girl flushed away that hot June day twenty six years ago. Me on the table and that awful doctor telling me to scooch down. For nearly a year I heard her cries from the gutter in my dreams at night. I knew it was a girl, felt it deep down, even though it was never confirmed.

He continues on about his daughter, yet I hear nothing but the roar of my own raw pain, which shocks me, even as I reel from it. I thought I had put this to rest years ago—especially after my beautiful little boy came squalling into the world, red, fierce, demanding. Mine.

Finally the cell phone snaps shut, and Ella disappears. Replaced by our own little girl. Our own unwanted little girl who is making her presence known. I search his face for her imprint, her touch. I can feel the desperation in my eyes.

What? he says as I look at him.

I open my mouth to answer, but our nameless little girl sits silently, heavily on my tongue. Unmoving, unmovable. There to make sure that I never forget her.

***

Friends

We are in the middle of the New Mexico desert when Nancy reveals that her mother has cancer. It is night time, and we are stretched out on the hood of her Saturn on a blanket she bought for five bucks in Tijuana many years ago when we were there. We each bought one—Nancy, Sue, me—on our outlaw road trip where we all misbehaved. But we are older now, and things are happening.

Don’t be scared, Rachel, she tells me. Nancy comforting me, and it’s her mother who’s dying. But I have recently buried someone who was murdered—along with the man who put his neck in a noose and kicked away the chair—and I am afraid of all this dying. And there is still the memory of the rust colored blood stain near the bed, even after the cleaning service had been there. And me, tip-toeing down the basement steps on that quiet August afternoon, and finding the chair still under the beam.

I sigh and look to the heavens, littered with stars and unknowable things. And in the darkness, on that warm night, we share stories of her mother. Of Joyce. The woman with the Grand Canyon smile who sits at the kitchen table with her back to the stove—an unintended statement—over coffee and a pack of her beloved Marlboroughs. A woman who dreamed of a much bigger life than she finds at a table in a quiet Upstate town, her husband in the next room in front of the TV...

I worry, Nancy says, that I haven’t learned everything I need her to tell me. And it’s this statement that scares me the most. My own mother a thousand miles away, and me not always listening… Yes, what do I need to know?

It’s another two years before Nancy takes a break from grad school to care for her mother. Helping Joyce find dignity in death. Nancy tells me later it was like a machine shutting down. Brave, brave daughter helping her mom let go…

And I am an inadequate friend, a shameful friend, when Nancy comes to visit after all that. She is hunched and a bit broken—as if she’s been stepping on glass. Is she, my new friends ask, much older than you? I try to explain what I cannot describe—the loss we feel when we bury our mothers. Yet what do I know about that? I cannot know what Nancy has given up, what she feels she’s been given... On this visit, Nancy drinks too much and finds all the places in me that hurt, that will react to her pain. I do not recognize that she is a motherless child—I grow impatient, defensive—that she is a woman walking alone. A woman terrified… And instead of giving her what she needs, what she deserves, I litter more glass under her footsteps. Tell her one night, as we sit outside, to stop. Just. Stop.

Who is this woman I threaten? This friend? She is Keats’ beauty—his truth—delivered American style. Delivered in a burlap bag. Delivered with a cold hard blow to the jaw. Delivered in the right question, the right silence, a knowing nod of her head. I get mad at her sometimes—this woman who can laugh, who can heal, who can sprinkle the coarse, hard grounds of life into your living. When she wants to. So why won’t she let others see the woman I know? Because she reveals her when she’s ready. When circumstances demand. Like when the old man in the nursing home needs something to think about, other than his own beckoning fate—Nancy’s laugh mingling with his shaky one, down a quiet, sterile hallway one night when I stop by to pick up her keys. Or the many times she took Tammy, a young woman defeated by MS, and her customized wheelchair, lifting both of them into her overburdened Chevette—the headrest sticking out of the hatchback—to go to the movies. This, while the rest of us were dancing, out celebrating being young. Or when she gives her income tax refund to an unknown single mother; drives 225 miles roundtrip to get a newly settled Afghan family the stroller I was going to throw out; uses the last of her vacation days to drive to Biloxi after The Storm. Part of no organization, just her in her used Saturn, a few pennies to spare, to roll up her sleeves, to listen, to let one dazed woman sitting on a ravaged front porch know that it was going to be okay…

Nancy walks the quiet walk of her own convictions, cracking acorns with her teeth—as rough around the edges as humanity itself. We, who invest in the silicone heroes offered up on TV, know nothing about this woman who lives and works where she is needed the most: among indigenous peoples, the poor, the sick, the dying. Hey sister! she says when I call…

This is the friend I threatened that night when she needed saving… After all those times that she has saved me.

***

Crying

Down the hill from my house is a walking path that circles an enormous fountain that ejaculates into an unassuming pond. A sign says 3 laps around = 1 mile. There are benches scattered along the way, a wooden dock, and a raised flower bed with shade-loving plants under a group of oak trees. I walk this pathway often—almost always at dusk—with my iPod singing in my ears and a pair of Old Navy flip flops on my size 10 feet. I can do eleven or twelve laps around—easy—with me and my music. Me and my dreams.

Tonight my thumb circles the flat white disc of my iPod, and there is Roy Orbison. I’m walking...

I notice that the pond has turned the color of a gray-black Tahitian pearl. And Roy Orbison sings, "I was all right…for a while..." Just beyond the water, the leaves on a cluster of trees are haloed by a heroic sun.

It’s not until the second time I play that song that I have to sit down. Sit down on the wooden dock overlooking the quiet water. And sob. Pull my knees to my chin and give in… An older woman in new white sneakers stops. You alright? she asks, a voice in the dusk.

How do I say all that I want to say to this stranger tonight? It’s beautiful, I tell her, waving my arm to take in the water, the fountain, the leaves. But it’s also very sad.

She nods and reaches down to touch my hand. All her living, her troubles, collected in the age spots sprinkled there. I know, she says quietly. I know…

And she steps back onto the trail, and I watch her walk off into the distance, her grayish-white curls lifted to the last of the sun. A stranger stopped to comfort me tonight by the water, with Roy Orbison crying in my ears.

***

4th of July

Happy birthday, America. Three cheers for the money-bred, blight and blue. For your Statue of Bigotry. Your skid row(s), your mall street(s), your movie stars. Yeah, America, you’re all that. And a lot more, too.

On this day we assemble—a motley crew, an American bunch—at a place of relative privilege in a county known mostly for its wealth. But we ain’t none of us rich. We work, we worry, we move funds from this place to cover that. But there’s food on our table today—and lots of it. Even got a red, white & blue cake because someone besides America is having a birthday today, too. The cake comes with miniature flags attached to toothpicks, and long after the crowd has packed up and gone home, I find those flags littered over the ground.

So we spread our wealth out over two picnic tables pushed close together. There are many such tables here under the trees. Beyond us, gas grills, shuffleboard, ping pong, volleyball, a kiddie pool with an enormous ceramic whale that sprays water from its snout; and an Olympic size pool with two diving boards. Here is where we’ve come to celebrate the day. One (lovely) daughter of Israel; her Argentinian husband who took 15 years to tell her he is gay; their two black children who were caught as they slipped from the legs of unprepared mothers in Texas; an African-American man in white dress slacks who’s been kicking it in the Bronx just a few years too many; a 9-year-old East Indian boy who claims he’s the “third generation Moby Dick reader”; and a quiet couple who sits protective of a son whose mother dropped him off for a visit and never came back. And me, whoever I am.

And so? And so this is who we are, Americans all. Motley. Flawed. Connected. Working the American Dream, trying to get our slice, on this Independence Day. We don’t pledge allegiance or fly the flag. We don't pontificate. Don't have any answers. Don't know how to make things better--other than this.

I’ve visited every state in the U.S. except Alaska and Hawaii. (And I got it from a good source that I’m not missing much in the 49th-parallel.) First time I headed south was on a 6-week road trip, with a map of the U.S. and a copy of the “Jazz & Blues Lovers’ Guide to the United States.” Our first stop was in Memphis—walking the same streets, visiting the same haunts that Lucille Clifton would later reduce me to tears reading about. We ate BBQ and grits, and ended up hanging out one night with Clarence Gatemouth Brown himself. Then on to Sun Studios and, yes, after that Graceland. Headed out of Memphis along Route 66, past shotgun shacks, and into the Delta, looking for Robert Johnson's crossroads… And down into Louisiana, the bayou, Professor Longhair and a spicy crawfish stew. The muddy Mississippi before Katrina. Over to Austin and all that. Saw Gwendolyn Brooks read at the university. Hit the open roads of the American West where it made me feel lonely, seeing those houses standing alone, mute and isolated. Made me think about the women inside… Santa Fe, the Grand Canyon, Phoenix and Tuscon. And a long midnight ride through the Mojave Desert, the landscape in our headlights looking like the surface of the moon. And then…Cal-i-forn-i-a. Hell A, Hollyweird, Big Sur, San Francisco. Portland and Seattle. And an endless, sleepless drive through the entire state of Montana because “the rodeo was in town.” Yosemite. Mount Rushmore. And a wonderful Kansas City. Then straight-out-of-a-David-Lynch-movie, St. Louis, Missouri. To the Windy City and the Taste of Chicago, staying in some downtown hotel where you could feel the bullet holes from those long ago gangsters. And then, finally, home…

An American movie, that. Makes me tired just to write about it because there's so much in all that.

Now blow out the candles, America, and go back to your TV.

Fireworks

Last night Ruthanne and I take our kids to see the fireworks. We are two tired mothers and our 3 kids. We set up chairs close to the Hudson, among a small crowd because it looks like it will rain. Night is coming on with a steady hand. The sky is the color of mud, and boats list on the temperamental water. In the distance, a black cloud advances, lightening licking at it now and again. I hope our boys will not notice the cloud because they are fearful little boys. Just like we are fearful women—who are also very brave.

The kids play. On our feet, at our shoulders, on our laps, between our legs, behind us, in front of us, and right at our sides. They want icecreamcandyglowsticksflagspopcornpeanutsgum. Their eyes seek out the next thing even as we hand them the first. We are up out of our chairs before we’ve finished sitting down. Hehitmenoyouhitmethatsmineknockitoff. And ihavetogotothebathroom. Andimthirstyimhungryimtiredimbored. A cacophony that drowns out the slapped-together band behind us that never bothered to learn all the lyrics.

Give us some space, we tell the kids. But they do not listen. Do not hear us. We are here only to give them what they want, what they need. I dab at the orange stain of Capri Sun on my jacket, feel the chicken nuggets under my fingernails; the belly that once carried my boy to life, folds heavily over the top of my jeans. I look at Ruthanne, and she cocks one cobalt blue eye—the same eye that captivates men at the bar—and I know what she means in this one little gesture. Women lie to each other about so many things—and especially this.

Beside us an older couple sits. They are quiet, watching the water. They sip red wine in clear plastic cups. I envy them their quiet, even as I know they are waiting for grown children to call, to come by—and who probably won’t.

We don’t know yet that the night will end with a woman slumped against a crumbling cement wall, wheezing for breath in the rain. That Ruthanne will put down her chairs and her purse and the jackets and the toys and the snacks to help this woman. I take the two youngest kids away where they cannot see—my son coming into my bed each night with his nightmares—but Ruthanne’s son will not be distracted. He worries about his mother, about the woman on the rough, gravel strewn sidewalk, leaning against the wall.

Go find a police officer, she tells her son. Calmly, matter of factly. And he judges the distance from where his mother stands to where the police car is parked. He does not want to leave her. But finally decides to go.

The police come and it is all flashing lights and the screech of sirens. We collect our things and our children and walk. The rain comes down, ruining hair and make-up, sending wet dirt between the toes in my flip flops.

I need to get more comfortable with being lonely, Ruthanne says, as her daughter whines for the bathroom, and the two boys fight. I think about lonely as we make our way up the hill. L-o-n-e-l-y. And tonight it seems like nothing I can understand.

***

Masks

He shows me the mask quickly, as we move through the house. He is nervous, sweating. It’s hot. He knows already what he is going to say: that things have changed. I do not yet know that I will leave the house shortly, assembling a quickly crafted mask that sits askew, not quite covering things. My mask nothing like the mask that hangs on his wall, with its long, twig-like hair and angular face… Alone in the car, I drop my mask and cry.

The other morning Sally asks me if I’m really her in disguise. I wish, I want to say. I wish. Sally with her gut laugh and funky glasses, her braids, her blackness. Her put-together life across a dirty river from me. It all seems so sane over there… We laughed in the early days of motherhood about how we would fail our children, how the kids would end up writing about us. But that was years ago. And Sally has constructed her life; and me, mine. Suburbia as the shared backdrop, and our manicured lawns. We wear our Masks of the Everyday, Sally and me—our MFAs tucked neatly away in a drawer, in some box—as we do the dishes, make macaroni and cheese, grade papers, laugh. We also wear the Mask of Womanhood, standing naked before the mirror, gathering the courage to look; protective of our bear cubs, our caves. But these days, all my masks have a mirror inside. A sharp, reflective thing that confirms the chaos it finds. I see myself slip, get up, and fall down again. And Sally?

I try not to covet other women’s lives. Like the pretty woman I see sliding summer tops along the rack at TJ Maxx. She holds up a pink thing with ruffles with her long, graceful arm, a bracelet, painted nails. What is behind all that, I wonder, as she examines the blouse. She wears no mask—at just this moment—as she studies the cloth, runs her fingers along the seam, holds it to her shoulders. Then makes the choice to leave it. Digs in her purse for her keys and walks toward the door—and I see the mask come on as she pushes through the glass doors into the afternoon sun.

This morning AmyRuth talks to me about Conflict Theory and Symbolic Interaction—I’m interested and I watch her eyes light up as she speaks. We are relating to each other as symbols, she says—but I think it’s really about masks. About how we market ourselves and are marketed. I am the symbol I’ve constructed—woman, mother, colleague, daughter, lover—and that has been constructed for me. Each of them different, changing, demanding, needy.

And so when he asks me who I really am, how do I know? I am this; I am that—at any given moment. Like you. Just like you…