the habit of being

My mother is in town, a list:

1. The difference between a gin and tonic and a vodka tonic is that gin tastes like pine trees and vodka doesn’t.
2. A dirty martini just has olive juice. No vermouth.
3. The only letter my grandmother ever wrote her: “Dear Sharon, Here are some cigarettes. Don’t smoke them. Love, Mother.”
4. Shh..octail = shrimp cocktail (from the Ritz Carlton bar.. those shrimp are SO BIG)
5. Little Somethings: French Connection shirt to match the French Connection skirt I just bought, Laura Mercier foundation stick in “warm ivory,” Poppytop Biscotti, the new Kiehl’s lipbalm, chocolate mice and penquins from Dean and Deluca, tonic water delivered to our door, pistachios, mosquito bites and long and good conversations I mostly didn’t participate in.

It took Allegri’s Miserere to start the tears flowing. It was my horrible idea to play it, but I didn’t think, except that I loved it and she hadn’t heard it, and then she literally ran out of the room halfway through, saying later that she just couldn’t handle anything with emotional content — it was all she could do just to get through the day. There, the night before her plane left, out came all the misery, and how she thought when she got me back she’d get me back and all the most guilt-inducing and untrue-yet-true-somehow things. I was crying shortly after, and it was enough to get the whole story out of me, so now she knows about the abortion, though she said she already knew, she could just tell. (That’s what she said after I lost my virginity too.) And of course she’d be the last to judge me about it, which I already knew, and why didn’t I just call her, instead of walking those three months with morning sickness in the sun? And what could I say? I don’t know. I couldn’t. But not because of her, because of me, because of him and how we were sick together. She would’ve done anything, she said. I could’ve lived with him in her house. She would’ve fixed him breakfast. Anything would’ve been better than what I did. Anything would’ve been better than losing me. But maybe, but maybe. She thought it was all her fault I didn’t love her and I thought it was mine that she could think such a thing. On and on and around, heavy and real, that nauseated in-trouble feeling I hadn’t felt since James left crashed into me as I remembered all the other sadness that hadn’t left with him — my grandmother is dying, my mother is friendless and so alone, taking care of her like she were a little child, lost to her, as am I (and what would be the point of her making friends, because they would not make up for it, and were mostly too much trouble) — and we decided maybe it was like with writing papers… we just couldn’t talk until we’d cried, something opened up, some hormones got released. And all the shopping and wittiness and gin is nothing, superficial she said, but amazing to most of those who witness it, our own little world. In truth though, we are that loneliness spilling over in the dark, mother and daughter together in the clock-ticking and happy child’s room (the landlord’s adored and artifically inseminated son who would never set foot in a public school, who’d been to Italy so many times by age 7 - the opposite of us, in our fake-high-class outfits, Chanel sunglasses and Anges b bags, bawling like south Georgia dysfunction personified.) She said she was real sorry I had to go through all that, and I said me too, and asked if she thought it meant I’d have bad issues forever, and she said maybe, she didn’t know, but maybe it’d make me strong. I said the wrong things, mostly, and how I always felt like she was looking for evidense that I was fucked up.

We’d eventually wipe our eyes and go downstairs, make another drink. I’d go off to sleep, dream of James chasing me, angry and out for blood, and I was running and terrified with a girl from my high-school, and when he’d caught me and was ripping at my clothes, I wished he’d just fuck me, because it was so much easier. And that was how it was with us, except in the dream I scrambled away and kept on running.

Mom left the next day and Miriam came with her heavy suitcases, just a stop on the way to Japan, full of excitement. I got lots of free sushi at a JET program reception, and we lay around on the floor in David’s study, looked through his notebooks with envy (Spanish vocabulary words meticulously listed, and Yiddish and other languages I don’t know, and so many quotations, newspaper clippings, and a list of women’s names, 30 of them with dates and places, ending in his wife), took pictures of his house, took the crying Jennifer (officially the long-distance girlfriend of a medical student) to dinner at the Indian place Ellen and I had gone a few days before. By now, she’s still on the plane to Tokyo getting free drinks, and I never got that kiss.

Last night I dreamt I asked my boss for a raise and we got in a spiteful fight, she said I wasn’t worth even $3 an hour and I couldn’t even back to take yoga at the studio anymore (really I got the AC fixed, stopped the water falling from the sea studio out the sky studio ceiling onto the heads of unsuspecting yogis, and she’s taking me to see Tori Amos next month), and then the lover came back from Cambridge and I tried to give him a hug but he got mad at me for wrinkling his business suit and I woke up, the old falling-apart copy of The Unbearble Lightness of Being beside me, and it was after noon.

Jennifer and I are learning to play Christmas carols on the piano, but neither of us can read bass clef. We took the Mercedes to get bagels, sent a picture of us and the dog and the plant we can’t let die to the landlords with a funny note. There’s no one staying in the house now, and I’m trying to apologise to Ellen for my behavior during her stay (I’d just walk out of the room without telling her where I was going, she said. And I said it wasn’t her, it was me.), and I can’t really determine when it was that things got so hard again all of a sudden. I was weightless for a time, it seemed. I made an appointment with my hair stylist for almost a month from now (he’s booked) and bought a $27 “self-management system” at Staples — starting tomorrow, everything’s gonna be different.

On the night of the Fourth, I sat in the grass on the National Mall, near the Washington Monument and a white trash family with red, white, and blue tie-dye on their daughters. The fireworks were larger than life, and I tried to imagine us all, so many people, as being something other than who we were, watching bombs and air-raids with the same awe. I screamed and cheered as the finale approached. Ash fell from the sky and gave me strange orange-ish dots on my skin through two showers. My mother asked me if it gave me a patriotic feeling, seeing the fireworks up close with all those people, and in a way it did. I’d never seen so many port-a-potties all lined up in my life, and the line to get through the security check point was about a half hour long. Afterwards, we, the not-so-humbled masses, swarmed out of the Mall, covering the sidewalks and the streets.

. . .

I adjusted him in his newbie downward-facing dog (”Down dawg!” he’d say, which annoyed me, but only because I was trying so hard to be annoyed), but that was about as close as I could get without feeling guilt-laced suffocation closing in. Every nice thing he did and said made it harder. I should have known better, but it’s alright. “You just have to believe you’ll be okay and you’ll be okay,” I said. “You have nothing to be sorry for,” he said, and he might have even believed it.

There is never a good enough reason to hurt someone. In an ideal world, we simply wouldn’t be capable of it, but in this one it does more good to protect yourself from being hurt by others than to strive never to hurt anyone else. One is possible and the other isn’t. All the same, I’m so sorry.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

The mantra of the AA children remains applicable. I told Marlon, who passed the chips with me in he Young Peoples’ Group (the young people in question being our parents), in a nostalgic instant message not so long ago, “the Serenity Prayer was to us what the Lord’s Prayer was to normal people!”

I recited it in bed last night, the first time I’d heard it spoken out loud in years. It was on a wall somewhere in every house I ever lived in as a child.

. . .

My father called me, after three months in jail, the day after he arrived in a Christian reformatory program designed for teenagers in Michigan. They cut his hair real short and won’t let him smoke cigarettes. A fortysomething who looks sixty, he’s carrying around hard candy in his pocket. He asked me if I still worked in the bookstore (I quit in January) and was shocked when I told him James and I broke up (he was maybe the only one I actually sold the story about how we were really happy to).

My mother called me, after I told her about the 35 year old I’ve been “seeing,” but she promised she wouldn’t get mad. It’s not age but the feeling you get that matters, she said. You’re an emotional girl, she said. In my experience, she said, chemistry leads to fire leads to explosions leads to serious injury. And we talked about the stomach ache, panic, and desperation we associate(d) with True Love, and I told her that I want to have a baby someday, and she said that would make her happy, and she would rock it so I could get some sleep, like her mother did for me. (Just not yet.)

. . .

Some Things I Underlined:

If an artist becomes too idealistic, he will commit suicide, because between his ideal and actual ability there is a great gap. Because there is no bridge long enough to go across the gap, he will begin to despair.

If your practice makes you worse, it is ridiculous.

We should not attach to some fancy ideas or to some beautiful things.

You should not mistake medicine for food.

She dances around the room, half naked and half drunk. Washing machine, vacuum cleaner, Janis Joplin screaming. Spring cleaning and rum, a grey bra and white panties (her mother’s and much too large, taken by mistake). Packing peanuts on the floor, pony tail holders on the floor, a bowl full of dirty crusty silverwear on the bed, filling and filling. The laundry is all tossed away into a towering pile in the kitchen, out of site, waiting for a vacant spot in the washer. Sheets and blankets all tossed away, pillowcases, the drawn-on jeans she wears everyday, a size 5 that fit better in the winter, when she was never hungry. And his clothes.

Smelly candles are lit to take away the scent of filth, with the fan on high the and the dehumidifier purring away. There’s no AC in the basement and she’s burning up and gyrating and twirling and bending down to pick up the packing peanuts one at a time, smooshing them into on big syrofoam blob in her palm. Bobby pins and coins and beads are indiscriminately either picked out of the carpet and set in her empty Easter basket or run over with the vacuum with murderous abandon.

“Take it, take another little piece of my heart,” she screams at the top of her lungs, slam dunking the peanuts into trash bag #3. She tears apart boxes to put out into the recycling bin, throws a string of mardi gras beads around her neck, and heads into the bathroom to watch herself dance in the smeary mirror. Two more hours till he gets home.

She remembers to call someone she mustn’t forget to call, leaves a spirited message on a machine, and dives backwards onto the bare matressed bed, letting out an 8-count yogic exhale. There’s an open bag of organic pecans on the bedside table, which is a file cabinet really, with a stuffed emu and a sticky dildo and a pair of conservative scratched men’s eyeglasses. A treasure chest full of pennies.

Trying to sober up on a bartlett pear, she accidentally eats the little sticker with the produce code on it. She sits down to calm herself in fornt of the computer and looks at the black and white nude photographs of her peers, beat up looking blonde girls with pretty eyes and hard nipples. Feminists are the new porn stars. She’d love to join the ranks, but the digital camera won’t turn on and she’s having a fat couple of months and her roots and getting darker while her hair is getting lighter and she’s only been hit a couple times anyway.

. . .

( The capturing of moments is both easy and impossible. What is accomplished through this documentation of the daily melt, the grind of second upon second in a real world devoid of symbolism? I am going to be one of those eternal journal writers who never publishes a thing, never finds a form, never gets over herself. I am going to be a great sleepy self-absorbed nothing waiting for someone to love her, as ever I have been. I only ever wanted to be loved. It is the same with everyone. It is obvious and witless and need not be said in so many words. In so many words it can never be said. )

. . .

There is an old man in the copy shop, from Afghanistan. He is sarcastic and lonely, and once he took the bracelet off my wrist and examined it under a huge magnifying glass. I go in serveral times a week making my pastel copies for the yoga studio. I go in sad and I go in tired and he will say “what is the matter with you?” He has asked me this many times. “Where is your energy?”

I make excuses.

He scolds me for leaving the pink paper in the copier trays, and picks on me for not being able use the fancy color machine. He asks me my name, even though he already knows, and he laughs and puts an arm around my shoulder. There is a sign on the wall that says “a lack of planning on your part does not constitute and emergency on my part” and framed documents in Arabic calligraphy, and a poster with a sad looking woman under a capitalized FREE AFGHANISTAN.

The man at the copy shop speaks five or six languages, and his prices are the cheapest in town. He has a glass elephant on his desk, and tells stories of the humor, love, and loss among his copy-making clients. He is there every day, and he’s one of my favorite people in this whole city.

I want to ask him if he still has family in Afghanistan, but I’m not sure if it’s a good idea.

. . .

James might move in with a guy who makes really good eggplant dip.

And I really do think maybe sex is the worst thing for writing.

We were in the Metro waiting for the Orange Line train, and there was a group of four college students paired off boy-girl, boy-girl. The closer pair were sitting on the platform in front of us with huge hiking packs - the sort of packs we used when we were traveling.

It was so strange because the packs were so clean, and they had those little airline tags on them, and these kids were so well-groomed and college-y.

It just didn’t seem right. They sat with their clean hiking packs and they talked about how dirty Mexico City was. This girl had been to some scuzzy South American cities, but had heard they were nothing compared to Mexico City, so she tried to avoid it. He concurred, pretentiously, having been there himself. She had glasses and a tank top and was from New Jersey, and he had a goatee and nose ring and a necklace with wooden beads that he fiddled with in a way that James found annoying.

“He was just doing it to get attention.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I can tell.”
(We discussed it in bed last night.)

It’s like, you can’t take a pack like that on a plane. It’s ridiculous. It’s cheating. It made me literally uncomfortable.

. . .

He wants to do it again. Traveling, I mean. Adventure. He wants a touring bicycle with paniers. He wants to travel like we traveled before, except in Europe. Except without me. Or maybe even with me, just without all that sickness and pain.

When he thinks of traveling he still thinks of adventure and excitement. I just think of the sickness and pain, the loss. I can’t imagine doing it again. I want Italy but I want a place to live too. I don’t like not having a home. I don’t like it at all. I don’t like not knowing where I’m going to sleep at night. I especially don’t like not knowing where I’m going to sleep at night when I do know that it won’t be anywhere comfortable, that I’ll wake up anxious and guilty.

. . .

On the train, there were these other people with a screaming baby. It wouldn’t shut up and it was really loud. They were a young couple with stroller, a few seats back. The father took the baby out of the stroller and it stopped crying for a minute, but then it bumped its head on the seat and started up again.

James pointed out that College Boy #2, who was wearing an Abercrombie tee-shirt, was currently engaged in the Unequivoclal Crotch Display, slouched in his seat with legs spread way out, for the benefit of College Girl #2, a blonde. Meanwhile, College Boy #1 was still playing with his beads.

. . .

When we got to our next stop, and sat down again to wait for the Red Line, James said he wished he were traveling.
“You couldn’t want to haul all that stuff around again,” I said.
“It’s a lot better than hauling one of those around,” he said, motioning toward the couple with the baby, who were waiting there too.

It was like someone slapped me. Again.

I walked to the studio. It was sunny on the snow and white everywhere and my cheeks were pink from crying.

I didn’t have a dollar for the bus. There was a ten clipped to his wallet and I wanted to borrow it and go get change at the Marvelous Market. He said he just wished I’d “prepared for this,” and that it annoyed him that his money became my money when he left it laying out.

I never prepared for this. I sat down on the bed and put my head in my hands and just sobbed. About bus money. I gave him his ten back and I walked to work crying.

There was a guy with headphones on the stoop. I said I worked at the yoga studio, and he said “is that leather?”

“It’s suede, yeah,” I said, fingering my coat.

“A yoga teacher? Wearing leather?”

“I’m not a yoga teacher.”

“Oh.”

The coat was my mother’s, and her mother’s. I never really thought about it. I had fake-meat tacos for lunch.

The guy on the stoop wasn’t Eric, the guy I was supposed to meet, to install the DSL. He didn’t tell me his name. I stood behind the iron gate and he sat in front of it, on the top step, holding a paper coffee cup. He had on a black hooded sweatshirt.

“Where do you come from?” he asked.

“Georgia, originally.”

He’d come from Denver, in January, but he has friends down south, a bass guitarist in Fort Lauderdale. Atlanta, he said, was expanding, with hand gestures, and then he said it was grotesque.

He asked if I knew what time it was.

“About 1:45.”

“Wow. I got up this morning at 7:45. Then went back to sleep, you know. I don’t have the slightest idea when I got back up.”

I wanted to say I understood. That my life had been like his. That my life was still like his.