OIL SLICK

I sat on the lime-green-and-white wall-to-wall shag carpet in the large corner closet of the bedroom, here in this L.A. cottage. I sat in the closet not moving, not responding when Geoffrey spoke to me, urging me to get moving, to say something, anything. 

I couldn’t move. I had folded into myself in some kind of hopelessness and dread. It must have been a weekend, one of those days that the work week promises: on Saturday you can be yourself, on Saturday everything will be all right, on Saturday you will write.

Outside the sky was probably blue again. When you looked up from the small terra cotta porch outside you saw palm fronds, big green leaves printed against that blue sky, leaves from trees that didn’t grow back east, trees not in the business of giving comfort.

We had come to L.A. together from New York. I came because he asked me to and it was delicious to be asked, to hear him say that he had been waiting to leave until I was done with school. I had not known this. It had not seemed that way. 

We had gotten into his car, an old boxy four-door Mercedes, passed on from an uncle, in the snowy depths of February, the car filled with his records in red plastic milk cartons, his cat, two travelling cases of mixed tapes, a supply of joints rolled by his sister. I threw my new Army Navy duffle bag into the trunk.

Now in the corner closet the green duffle bag stands nearby. It’s still where I keep everything. 

Other people in the city are moving through their day, doing all the right things I think of our neighbors, Lenny and Nancy. I am sure they are breezing along – Lenny swinging a tennis racket, Nancy smoking a cigarette. They would not know what to make of me right now. No one would.

But I am here, doing all I can to be dead without actually killing anything. But I cannot bear any of it, this being that is me. Nothing is right – this secretary life, the pathetic writing dream, the days that just rotate: coming home every evening to dinner, pot and TV – though Geoffrey assures me nothing is wrong and I watch him being happy: checking off everything in the TV Guide a week in advance that he wants to watch, running out in the afternoons to flip through bins of used records, or to the aquarium store to pick out a new fish for the salt-water tanks that he just set up, or typing up a screenplay at his IBM Selectric, or staying up all night to get the segue between two songs micro-perfect on the tape he’s making. 

While I wonder what to do. 

Having to be at work at 9 and stay til 5 answers so many questions, but only the dullest person would work like this and not have weekends that burst with the kind of writing I am sometimes sure is inside me, but it’s gone when I sit down with a pen.

I sit on the lime-green-and-white shag carpet, frozen, maybe hoping I can make everything stop forever this way.

Finally, Geoffrey gets up. I hear him walk to the kitchen with its mustard-yellow linoleum. He stands by me now, holding the jug of oil he uses in the electric fryer. He is laughing. “If you don’t get up, I am going to pour this over you.” It is old oil. It’s been used at least a couple of times to fry chicken. I don’t move. I don’t care. I don’t want anything.

The oil pours down over me, over my hair and shoulders. I get up. 

QUICK EVENING

Geoffrey sat cross-legged, back to the window, on his side of the bed, the side squeezed up against the stereo, so close you had to scoot down to the bottom of the bed to get off it. He was telling me he’d dropped acid or something a few hours before and my anger and hurt were so strong they showed. It felt so bad to learn that all afternoon or all through dinner – whatever it was – he’d been high and I had not known. I felt like I’d been lied to hugely, but my complaints went nowhere. Instead, he looked at me blearily and said – in wonder -- how much he loved me and though it sounded like he meant it, the way he said it, with a smile I wasn’t really part of, it did not soothe me the way it usually did. 

The old black bureau stood near the bed, pushed up against the hard blue wall. He kept his journal in the bottom drawer. Sometimes I read it. Sometimes I came across little scribbles in the margin – Hi, Marta! – shaming me. But I had to keep reading though it did not help, did not bring me closer or make me safer.

The black bureau was from his childhood. So was the low oval wooden coffee table that stood in the center of the narrow room, covered in anything that dropped there – mail, change, bag of pot. The room held what was left from the apartment he had grown up in, an apartment I had seen in the very beginning, but which had been cleared out when Geoffrey moved in with his father who lived a fancier life because of his second wife. 

Geoffrey kept his records in one of the closets – lined up on a shelf that was supposed to hold sweaters. In the other closet were rarely worn clothes – like a musty suit jacket for funerals – and memorabilia from childhood, yearbooks, boxes of letters.

I was supposed to be there a lot but have a home somewhere else where all my stuff was.

I had the cheapest room I could find, $50/month for a small dark room in an apartment with people I did not know. After 6 months at school in the city, friends had not really happened. That part was still a mystery, and so I answered an ad, got the room on 107^th Street, proud of my Manhattan address.

I liked it better down at Geoffrey’s where the TV or stereo was always on, where he cooked dinner every night – manically, privately, but the food always delicious – and we smoked pot and watched Letterman -- and even if these were not my things, they were all his things, I knew this because when I was alone I did not watch Letterman or any TV at all – but here at least there was light and sound and this Geoffrey with his gravelly voice, black erratic hair, his button-fly Levi’s and black tailless cat, doing everything he would do whether I was there or not. 

WILDERNESS

You got to the ranch by following a long empty dusty dirt road, dusty because it was always summer when I was there, smelling of hot pine needles. There were several buildings -- my aunt's house and then the barn with a pond in between, and a little further on the small one-story house where my grandmother and aunt lived.

Except for my grandmother's house, things were in disrepair. As a kid I'd seen an older cousin's foot come through the floor of the hay loft above me, something that made the other kids laugh and keep going without pause, but I didn't like being in the barn after that, every footstep suspect.

My grandmother wore housedresses and her gray hair thrown up on her head with a few invisible pins. She spoke in a voice thick with cigarettes and a strong accent. She sat at the kitchen table with a round tin of tobacco and rolled a cigarette when she wanted one. She laughed easily and did not ask for much.

Neither did Billy, the aunt who lived with her. Known in the family as "mildly retarded" Billy was always a little off, but not scary. It was the other house that I tried to avoid without seeming to, the gray unpainted two-story house, dark inside, where no housekeeping was done, where the furniture was just whatever was lying around. Everyone else liked it there.

My aunt Moon lived there, smoking too, her hair short like a man's and gray, her face wrinkled and tanned, with a skinny body dressed in men's work clothes. It was her ranch, her land, the cows roaming, her cows. My mother, Moon's younger sister, told the story of Moon shooting a coyote that had been getting at her cows. Moon didn't seem to have much use for anyone who couldn't drive a tractor or throw a steer down on the ground for branding.

I prefer to think of this landscape as I have heard my mother speak of it in its beauty almost 100 years ago. Not the same piece of land, but close by. My mother saw the snow-capped Rockies every day for the first 18 years of her life, and she has described to me the alpine meadows they hiked to -- acres of color that have since been slaughtered by developers.

Though when she drove cross-country with my father in the first years of their friendship to show him her people and where she came from she refused to stop at  the house she'd grown up in.

I was present a few months ago when my mother's younger brother called and I listened as she went into what felt like a different mode, hunkering down with her brother who ran a paint store all his life and is a dedicated member of the Elks, or the Moose. She spoke to him of the place they'd grown up and though she always spoke of this place as I was growing up so that I felt like I knew it, when she talked to him the detail was finer -- specific roads that I had never heard the names of. 

DON'T MAKE ME TELL YOU AGAIN

I drove with my father – him driving and talking, me quiet beside him in the Ford Granada – his car -- into the city and when we sat down in the plush seats of the opera house, before the curtain went up, he said, “What you did yesterday, with Alex, this was not elegant.”

Alex was a boy with curly dark hair and a drooping moustache to match and he was the closest thing to an appealing boy that had found his way into my suburban world where otherwise the only boys were the ones at school, some of whom got my attention but none of them even close to boys I imagined when I listened to Me & Bobby McGhee or Dylan’s all-knowing voice, rasping of people he had known.

Walking over to Alex’s house on a Saturday afternoon without mentioning where I was going, through woods where I hoped one day to run into a boy with a pony tail and a guitar who would notice me so strongly that he would bring me not only into his embrace but into the wide circle of friends I imagined he would have, walking through the woods with these pictures in my mind but not coming across anyone at all, and Alex is not home.

And sitting next to my father I am so angry I cannot speak because I am not allowed to speak. Anything I could say – if I could even say it – would be so beyond inelegant that I know it is not allowed. I don’t have to be told this. It’s in the air I breathe. You are not allowed to say anything ugly, anything disruptive.

Your mother does sometimes and look how vile that is, how far that does not get her.

My mother yelling at my father at night when they are the only two still up because they are the grown-ups, or my mother at the breakfast table saying all the wrong things – every single thing wrong – while my father’s fingers tighten around his coffee mug and he plods a chunk of cold butter on a torn much smaller morsel of toast – and me sitting there too, knowing if I do anything except not be affected I lose the game. Do not be affected. Let nothing show. This becomes easier than speaking.

You see, your mother is letting it all show, and see how ugly it is?

Until even if you wanted to, say, one day, for a change, you want to yell when you’re angry, you actually can’t even try it. You can’t. The words stick, condemned before the syllables form so there is this seething blank space that is only confusing. Confusing and mute. And you can’t blame anyone for it. You’re just inarticulate.

FORGET ME KNOTS

I walked with my father almost every weekend, starting in the days when I rode on his shoulders, clutching his black hair.

Year after year we walked when he was home from the office – on Saturday or Sunday – and we went by ourselves, him and me. My mother stayed home. My sisters stayed home. 

The walks were long. They lasted much much longer than I wanted them to. But to my father the hours were effortless. He chose roads and paths surrounded by trees and fields. He did not scramble through bramble patches the way my mother did. He wanted the way clear and the scenery beautiful. 

He talked without stopping as we walked. Often he spoke of this thing called “the war” that had taken place in a past beyond reach. I imagined the places he described to me: the basement of the apartment building in Budapest where all the families lived together while the bombs dropped outside. 

I imagined the storage areas for coal, each family sleeping on their allotted pile, and I saw my grandmother spreading sheets over the black heap just a few feet from the next family. My father spoke these stories to me as if it had been fun, as if now it were unbelievable, even to him. 

He told me of the old military man down in the basement who refused to drink the tea he was brought because the cup did not match the saucer, and I knew from my father’s tone that this was how he wanted me to be, and that I would try.

And when the time came when the boy in the cotton smock turned towards me, when for the first time the right boy turned towards me, I knew I had to be careful. I had to be someone like that old distinguished soldier, someone who had figured certain things out, someone who had drawn her lines nice and clear.

When I first slept with Jeffrey I did not tell him it was my first time. I knew it was not his and I said nothing that would betray my pretense that this was old hat. I pretended as he stayed for three days with me alone in my parents’ house in the summer.

Weeks went by. The boy still called. He took me to spend weekends with his rich family. He continued to be the most precious boyfriend, one I thought I could never keep. And he said telling the truth was important. I had never had someone to tell the truth to.  

In the fall, both of us back in school, he said on the phone that he had a ride and would come see me. “I have something to tell you,” I answered, “but not til you get here.” And as we were lying in my friend’s twin bed, the room borrowed for the occasion, me so happy that at least this year I have a boy to borrow a room for, I laid out my piece of truth, and there, it was done. I had come clean.

Was it that night that he complained my breath was terrible? It might have been. 

FAMILY TIME

The grass was rough. We called it “the grass.” We did not call it “the lawn.” It was an irregular shape that drifted into woods on one side and into the house on the other. In places, it sloped, good for somersaults. In one spot, near the tall, wide purple lilac, lay a square pale gray stone, “the well.” My father crossed the grass on weekends wearing khaki shorts, shoes without socks and no shirt, pushing a red lawnmower. My mother had some kind of garden patch with strawberries, and where the grass sloped up towards a grandfather oak, where the grass turned to myrtle, she sometimes stood with strangers who had just driven up, she stood in her garden work clothes, handing them clumps of myrtle cradled in newspaper in exchange for money.

Years later my father tamed the house a little with a garage, a rose trellis path and even an asphalt driveway, things that helped us pass for normal.

In the old days the house faced the road below, faced it with a bare blank stare. And then – in the new days – you ignored that stare. You drove up the side of the house on this new asphalt and entered from the other side, the one with the new verandah and the screened-in porch, so much gentler.

But it was the bare plain side of the house that was our real face.

Frills were suspect, a weakness, artificial. I knew it.

Lunches on the weekends were the only time all five of us ate together, my father home. This is the new years, with the rose trellis, with the make-believe antiques my father had bought just a couple of months before when we still lived in England, cramming the dining room table and the tall armoire into the tiny apartment-sized dining room of our rented English home. The antiques made the voyage back to the States with us, the dining table, a soft rectangle with legs that each curved and ended in a wooden claw clutching a wooden ball. The table was made of two halves that were supposed to fit securely, invisibly, together, but never did, the pegs always falling short of their holes, though we kept pushing, thinking maybe this time they will hold together. Because my father said it was a fine aristocratic table, with its set of matching chairs with their green velvet seats, standing on the old wide floorboards that my mother liked so much.

But we sat at this table, each person always in the same place, and it was as if we ate the same meal over and over again, my mother at the end near the swinging door to the kitchen, an unadorned woman who has given up and is not the person my father wants. My father at the far end, orchestrating the conversation. Without him there would be almost silence. He teases me, my sisters. He irritates us and yet we only mildly complain. We cannot really complain. My father eats large portions. He tells my mother how good her food is. She stops just short of ignoring him. He doesn’t want to make her angry. None of us do.

I clear the dishes. I bring dessert -- the jello or the supermarket ice cream. I like eating, but there is no other reason to sit here. Except that I must. It is impossible to oppose this rule, the one that says we must sit here, be polite, and not upset anyone.

And afterwards we go to different places, each person to their room, and the house is silent. My father naps on the living room couch. My mother reads the New York Review of Books. Each younger sister stretches out on her twin bed with a book. And I go up to my attic room, back to living in my head with book or radio, imagining my life when I am grown up.

The afternoon is long and quiet. We have not fought. It is a relief and an accomplishment. 

I'LL TELL YOU EVERYTHING

In the beginning there were white see-through curtains that the light shone through. They were in the living room and I didn’t know what was on the other side. It was something big, too big for me to go into by myself. It had no boundaries, a place my father stepped into every morning in a trenchcoat, with a briefcase, going, I knew, to a train somewhere, somewhere down below, and returning from that big open space at night.

And from the bright room was an interior with no windows, a place with refrigerator and counter on one side where my mother stood in shadows, and on the other side a table with chairs where my father sits in the morning with a cup of coffee. I sit next to him and I can take a spoon of sugar, I can put it in his coffee and stir it for him, and he laughs. He is happy. I am happy too.

And lastly there is my room. Just a small narrow room with my crib opposite the door, my father’s grey filing cabinet, maybe a table.

I can see out the window from my wooden crib. Sometimes an old man walks by and taps to me on the window. This is a very good thing.

And then there is another house, an old white house that needs fixing and there are bits of broken glass in the dirt around it all the time, as if already many things have happened here. My mother stands in the kitchen patching holes in the walls and paints them white. The jacket I wear is black and white checks.

And then there is school where I wear a red plaid pleated skirt with straps that cross in the back and come down the front to fasten at the waist with buttons. I have a rug – each kid has a rug – at school that we lie on at naptime. Mine is a dark red color, one of the colors my mother likes. She and my father call it wine-colored. She also likes navy for clothes and she likes dark green for shutters that need to be on a white house.

And both my parents talk about the houses we pass when we drive. I hear them say, “It’s nice, but it’s too close to the road.” My father says this. My mother says this – the same way they say to each other, “Did you see the joke in the New Yorker?” or the way they always say about the mail, “Just bills.”

I have a sister now, a baby. My mother puts her on the double bed in her room. “Watch she doesn’t roll,” my mother says in a sing-song voice as she leaves the room with the dirty diaper, and I watch to make sure the baby doesn’t fall off the bed, but she never does, she never rolls, she lies on her back.

It started the day my father helped me get dressed in the living room. Everything was different. He put my yellow ankle socks onto my feet and took me to the Kaisers. The Kaisers were two old people in a small white house. I visited them sometimes by myself because I could walk there. Mr. and Mrs. Kaiser had a kitchen with a table, everything a bit dark in there, but they were nice to me and gave me cups of Kaiser tea, milky and sweet.

I slept upstairs in their house that night, up in the attic. I had never done that before. Mrs. Kaiser called something up the stairs about not letting bed bugs bite.

After that I had a sister.

The car is yellow. The seats are green, a plastic weave. My parents call it The Rambler.

My mother hangs a swing for me from a huge tree.

One morning I watch her and my grandmother carry our dog across the patch of grass. My grandmother in her housedress holds the front paws, my mother holds the back paws, and Casey, the German Shepherd, hangs dead in between.

I tried once to sit the way Casey sat. I came down beside him on the porch. He had his back legs propped one on either side with his body stretched out between them. I wanted to copy him. I sat, bent my knees, feet flat on the bare boards of the porch that looked down the slope to the road. But my body would not stretch forward and flatten itself the way Casey’s did.

And in the background is a party. The grown-ups. My mother’s brown hair is pinned up. There are plates of salami and green pepper. My father is playing records -- Mozart and Beethoven -- on the record player, loud so that the music comes out across the grass where people stand and talk as it gets dark, and in the morning he tells me how he waltzed a lady all the way down the driveway. He tells me with cheer and with pride.

DEATH'S DOOR

The house is yellow, freshly painted, darker than our house but still very yellow. I have never been here before, to Peter’s house in Virginia. It is a rainy morning. We ring the bell. A small dog erupts into yapping, but otherwise nothing happens. Peter knows we are on our way. He is expecting us and we have triumphed by arriving early enough to meet him at the house. It feels like an acknowledgement of closeness – a privilege -- that we were invited not to just show up at the funeral, like strangers, but to come to the house first.

We ring again. Perhaps he has left. But the door opens and there is he – so pale, looking like an old man now, an ill one. His face does not smile. He just looks shocked. Fred steps in. I step in. A few words get said. No one has hugged anyone. I break in, step forward, give Peter a hug.

Fred disappears to the bathroom and I follow Peter into the kitchen where he begins to boil water for tea. He is my husband’s completely unidentical twin and though he and I have only met a few times we are bonded by the family circle.

Peter speaks of this and that. I am sitting on a stool, attentive. I ask him how he is doing. “Well, I’m a falling down wreck,” he says, adjusting the flame, and it sounds genuine, like those are actually his words not somebody else’s.

We sit in the living room, the three of us. Tidy furniture, prints on the wall above a spotless fireplace. I see an old photograph, framed, and ask Peter who it is. “Our mother,” says Peter and I stand, cross the room to examine this picture of a young bride alone. I have never seen a picture of Fred’s mother.

I am watching the time, and suggest perhaps we should go. We stand. We’ve been talking as we probably would on any other day. I see a bunch of flowers in a vase – yellow and white – and ask, “Oh, are those the flowers we sent?”

“Yes,” says Peter but doesn’t warm to the subject.

And I ask to see the room where Rosemary spent her last months because I want to see and imagine and Peter takes us to a large almost empty neighboring room, and shows u the corner – now empty -- where she had lain. Somehow I had expected something – a view, some wide window that she would have looked out of, but there is almost no window in this room. And I stand in the dark empty room and I cannot say anything. I want to say something, but I am so horrified by this bleak room that I cannot overcome, cannot say anything with anything good in it.

We park at the church, our two cars. With Fred, I follow Peter to the door. He walks with a limp, in a pale raincoat that flaps and a pale rainhat. There is something awkward about his movements, like a marionette gone awry.

The door of the church opens from inside. A smiling bleach-blond young woman in a short tight skirt and high black patent stiletto heels says, “Good morning, Mr. Poole.” She must be a friend, I think, imagining Peter a member of some circle of some people somewhere.

We step into the carpeted entranceway. Everything is new, like a school. Although we are not technically late, the church people are acting as if we are – or as if Peter is – the priest, his tall awkward assistant, and the cluster of women who seem part of the team. There’s no time to be lost, it seems.

Before going in, the priest gathers us in front of the coat rack for a prayer. I tune in. I want to feel this. I want to have a good church experience. We have come a long way for this. I meet the priest’s eye for a moment. He is handsome. He seems sincere. I notice Peter reach out and hold onto the wall during the short prayer, and it is as if I glimpse his real life for a moment.

We file into the chapel to the front row, Peter on the aisle, then Fred, then me. We sit, stand, sing, listen. I pay attention, sing heartily, listen to the two Biblical readings closely, but can draw not a shred of meaning from either. Fred and Peter share a hymnal and this sight is touching to me. Perhaps there is actual closeness despite everything.

The priest opens by saying that Rosemary was in the Foregn Service and taught art history – so you know from this what kind of person she was, he says. She is not mentioned again except when her name is inserted into the funeral text when the word “Name” appears.

Near the end the priest puts his hand on what appears to be a box covered in an embroidered church cloth and I wonder if Rosemary has been cremated and if those are her ashes.

Afterwards we stand outside the chapel in a wide sunny corridor, while the team of women move here and there, including the blonde in stilettos who I have figured out is employed by the church. This is her job. It’s like a receiving line and these people are all neighbors, each and every one. They have nice things to say about Peter and Rosemary, and I think maybe he is not alone.

But then at lunch we sit at the circular table and everyone chats and eats – and Peter has a quip for everything. He talks about what publishers want these days and the thriller he is writing. He says he came a few days ago to make arrangements with the restaurant, how they gave him samples of the food all of which were “terrible,” he says, which gets a laugh. He is their old curmudgeon writer.

And then people are standing and saying good-bye. I want to connect. I want him to feel loved, for us to feel something together, but he says good-bye to me the same way he has said good-bye to everyone.

And later, as I stand by the coat check he comes to retrieve his coat. The restaurant is quiet now, almost everyone gone. He puts on his coat and leaves without noticing me, a few feet away, a man walking out alone.