the habit of being

My mother, after I give Frank McCourt as an example of someone who had “transcended his class” (a topic that came up with a discussion of dog breeds) replies:

“He wrote a book like that.. about his own family… you call that transcending?”

I know then that I am not off the hook after all. I never will be. Might as well be a lawyer. Might as well just give up right now, because I’ll be hiding my writing forever.

A few days later, I also know that all people are basically the same, when an eight-year-old trust fund boy (a child who mumbles in four foreign languages between of telling me how bad my skin is and trying to convince me he’s brushed his teeth when he hasn’t in plain English) lays in his bed before falling asleep at night and says, “The worse thing in the world to me, worse than going to hell, is when my mother cries.”

“Me too,” I tell him and turn out the light. It begins to snow outside.

The next day I’m watching it though the window at the coffee shop, surrounded by people studying for their LSATs.

. . .

It is winter. I work my week and fall into my routines. I wake up automatically at 8:30 AM, but stay in bed until 9. I go to work, I make my to-do lists, I do them. I may stay for a yoga class. I often spend my nights here at the bookstore, reading, or trying to write, under the bright flourescent Buy Something lighting, until closing at 11.

Ever so often, it strikes me how different things were once, and I cannot get over how allowed I am. I look around at the other people in the store, and see that they do not question my presence, do not even see me. I do not think of them, or wonder what they are thinking of me. I am just another customer.

When I was on the road, shop lighting meant sanctity from whatever domestic dispute was happening in the tent, a momentary escape back into the Rest Of The World, a sigh of relief. Shop lighting was my vice, my secret pleasure. I took refuge in Barnes and Noble, in Target, even in McDonald’s, whenever I could. These were places I could pretend to still be my old self. These places were the same in every city we came to.

Ironically, I complained about this to the people who gave us rides, how these megacorporations were quickly killing of all trace of individuality, landscape, local color. But in a world where I had no home and no security, I took comfort in any familiarity I could find.

To me, the stores represented the old world I’d left behind, but it was obvious to everyone inside them that it was not my world anymore. It was plain to see that I wasn’t there to Buy Something, and this threw everyone off. People stared at me. People smiled at me. People would see my gear, my torn up clothes, my dirty hair, and ask if I was travelling.

There’s something very powerful about being “travelling,” as opposed to just being “homeless.” Travelling implies some sort of conscious choice. It implies politics, along with stories. It implies that the person bearing the title is in one way or another the enemy of the customer, the middle-class consumer, the whole store. A traveller in a franchise is a very odd thing. (It’s not just that I can’t afford to be here, but that I shouldn’t want to be here.)

An employee would walk up to me, hold out a bill, saying “one of our other customers wanted me to give you this.” Employees would also try to come up with veiled ways to ask me to leave. It is only a testimony to how nervous and stressed out I was on a regular basis that all the stress of being such an outsider barely even registered with me. I curled up in the big comfy chairs at Barnes and Noble with everything I owned situated all around me on the floor and read Tropic of Cancer, wrote page after page in my journal, took notes from What to Expect When You’re Expecting, breathed easily for a while.

And now, instead, I sip my lattes and carry around my Coach pocketbooks, the meat on my bones, all the elements of my Buying Something passport, making me quite invisible. The lighting isn’t comforting anymore. I worry about losing myself in the routines, the alarm clocks, the inflow and outflow of money, and it’s still kindof scary, even knowing that while living outside of it all was very “real,” is was also rather awful.

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.

He brought home Italian soup and gingerbread, and the pizza place was already closed. We didn’t watch a movie because he had to go in to work at 8 this morning. Now it is almost 9 this morning, and I just ate three calcium supplements in a row. There goes the forth. It’s not candy, he says. Yes it is, I say.

This weekend there is the Whole Foods Chirstmas Party, which he thinks we should go to because it would be something to do. I am reminded of the Tranquil Space party, which I got dressed up for and didn’t go to because it was cold outside and he wasn’t in a good mood. We walked to Safeway and I bought $58 worth of groceries. Most of it was gone when I came home from Georgia, where my mother never made me that soup I like, but I had two Ritz Carlton shrimp coctails. Starts with “sh..” ends with “ocktail,” I said, when Ray asked me what I wanted, and then we were all “sh’ocktailing” for the rest of the trip.

Ray asked me if James had ever hit me and I lied. My twelve year old brother said it’d make Christmas for him if he could just have one punch. The trip was okay though, for the most part. I made a gingerbread house. People gave me money.

For someone who believes desire to cause suffering, I am desirous of very much:

First, to be a still pool of water, with no knowledge of hydrogen bonding, unaware of adhesion, cohesion, surface tension (It is no one’s fault that the Jesus lizard so rarely sinks beneath the surface and drowns). Then, a white porcelain serving platter, shiny and so clean that running a finger tightly across the surface produces a high pitched tone like an out of tune piccolo. And I’d like to be the symbol for an integral, the thin S shape that is just as sexy as a sand dune, and worthy of nearly as much respect. To be blank and wide open simultaneously, to lose the calendar and symbol system for daily passages.

Or to be gone, with nothing remaining but a single photograph, taken on a day when I was smiling and uninhibited. For everyone to believe that one image to be the sum of me, not to know any better.

Transient or transparent.

- - -

Two virgins, tangled. It is three in the morning, and this is their intercourse, which is not sex, but just as real:

The first, lying on side, makes a capture, a long hand, thin wrist, and pulls in near, smuggling it quickly under all weight, rolling on stomach to keep it near and trapped below. A triumphant smile in the dark.

The second: “That is my hand.” Lying on back, staring at ceiling or wall or darkness, with a smirk.

The first: “It is mine now. I have it.”

“But it is my hand, and my wrist, and my arm. I need them.” And the second tries to regain these treasures from the thief.

The first holds tight, brings the stolen hand close to face, holding, cherishing, possessing. “It is had.”

“You can’t have it. Perhaps it has you. I have you.”

At this, the first rolls over again, close to the second, covering the second, even, weighing down. “I have you. You are had.”

From below, “No, you are had, and you love it.”

“I like to be had.”

“So do I.”

- - -

It is Christmas day, and the air surrounding the volvo station wagon is chilled, even in Georgia. The way I am thinking, as the cement flows a grey river, splitting a marathon of trees giving chase, one after one after one, I may as will be in the shower, drenched in steam. My mother sits beside me, presumably thinking on some other abstract notion.

Previously, we have been to Perry, with the sweet and simple, happy and nonjudgmental relatives of our Ray. There, we are giants, with our long legs and silly ponderings, visible even from the outside, with such comparison. We play endless games of Skip-Bo, and we smile, and we pretend we are not so awkwardly out of place. And we leave, with a sigh of relief, to the silent ocean of the interstate that will take us to Atlanta, to the life we never had. We smile, share an “I know” glance, and I turn on Diana Ross.

We arrive at the Ritz Carlton in the early evening, collect our room keys, deposit our things, and descend to the lounge for drinks. A dry martini for my mother, and curiously good fruit juice for me. She takes out a complementary copy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, scans the movies playing at Phipp’s Plaza. I stare out the window, this time at outlines of huge buildings, one after one after one, and few motion blurred trees. A woman walks in, wearing a mink coat, tight black sequined dress, that diamond solitaire necklace from the DeBeer’s commercial. Maybe the man with the eyes gave it to her. I smile in her direction, she doesn’t notice.

Maybe we will go see that movie, the one that would never play at home. Perhaps we’ll return to our room, to the mints on our pillows, and order the Caesar salad from room service, with creme brulee for dessert, and the city lights shining in our huge window will welcome us into the fold…

(From an essay I had to write for school, actually, on a “family holiday tradition.”)

- - -

Notes:

metaphase

Ruby

gold coins
kohl + eyes = saucy.

signs of the times
cap and gown

tuxedo. violins.