A Christmas Memory

          I.

          

          The Social Security Death Index only says "Dec 1971." 

          I remember it so vividly that the abbreviated date seems vaguely insulting.  

          There was no snow on the ground, and I was walking home from school on Starr Street, which stretched from our apartment complex, past the Acme, all the way to the steel factory like a spool of satin ribbon fallen from a table.

          The walk seemed endless.

          I often took it with my friend Everett Ashenfelter. At 12, he was already fat. But he was kind; meaning, that he spoke to me rather than taunted me.

          On this particular day I was alone. Quite likely, I was wearing the black, sherpa-lined boots my mother bought for me that slipped on and off so easily, and perhaps even the ridiculous faux fur coat that made me look like a pre-pubescent Tallulah Bankhead.

          My mother was also fond of dickies, the tightly collared sheaths that fit under V-neck sweaters—functionless and abbreviated, not unlike "Dec 1971."

          That day, I might have been carrying my plastic Bundy clarinet in its black velour-lined case, double latched, indestructible as a Kelly green tank. My reeds—I had two—slipped into a tangerine paper folder with the name of the music store on Bridge Street rather carelessly rubber stamped onto each side.

          Perhaps my mother had called the school. I might have been dismissed early and told, without explanation, to return straight home. Today, I can look at a map online and determine, with the accuracy of nostalgia, that it must have been at about house number 759 that my mother's white Ford Mustang passed me, then turned into the Acme parking lot and stopped.          

          I got into the car. 

          Brian was in the front passenger seat looking frightened and sullen.

          No one said anything. 

Old Clothes

           Whenever I've tried to buy new clothes, it's never worked out. I'd spend what seemed like an enormous sum and come away with something that always felt wrong on me, that I never wore.

          I have always known exactly what I like, without ever thinking about it.

          I needed Roosevelt-era stuff: big wool overcoats; split-toe Oxfords the color of flan caramel; narrow, shiny brown belts; kitten-soft tartan plaid scarves; heavy old wristwatches than lose 30 minutes a day; and, my God, fedoras.

          How my mother would laugh at my hats! I simply couldn't be myself without a fedora—Hemingway without a typewriter. I needed a gray felt crown.

          The language of my body began when I discovered thrift shops in the early 1980s in Kensington, underneath the Market-Frankford el. I still have the tweed coat I bought with Bob there. I took it to my mother's apartment in King of Prussia and she sewed the full-length tear in the back and restored to it buttons.

          That was the closest we ever got—when I was crashing and burning at 24. Job after job and never any money.

          But I looked fabulous.

Four Months in 1983

These memories, which are my life—for we possess nothing certainly except the past—were always with me.

—Evelyn Waugh

I don't think love should make you feel uneasy. When you feel sick, I don't think that's love—that's infatuation.

—Alexa Chung

          I'm sitting in a dark, chilly room in Maine in early September. 

          But Tuesday it was hot when I went up to the attic with a box of cheap cards and two large rolls of Christmas wrapping paper.

          I paused by the box of little red books, then decided to see if I could find 1983—the oldest one.

          It was there, so I flipped the yellowed pages to August. I thought it might have been the 15th, but there's no mention of him on that date.

          I pass the 20th, the 25th, then I'm at the end of the month.

          And there the little boxed episode appears at the bottom of the page on August 31—which is today, 38 years ago.

          The coincidence of looking at this entry on this particular day spooks me, reminds me that my attempts to decommission the memory, to cool it sufficiently so that it could be safely handled, are themselves an error of survival—of age: pardonable but nevertheless inaccurate.

          I wore a boys size cardigan sweater umpire-striped in forest green and cream. I still have the jeans, faded sky-blue, that I wore that night.

          The meeting after a long bar night was promising but not magical—that was yet to come, perhaps when I accepted his invitation to a housewarming party or, more likely, that first evening sitting on the futon in that room.

          That room. 1719 Spruce Street, Philadelphia. 

          Third floor.

         

Neighbor's Raised Beds

          The mystery of how an idea comes, a product of body chemistry—or breakfast.

          Our neighbor had been almost tearful getting ready to leave with her husband and four kids for two weeks out west. Friends they hadn't seen for a decade came for dinner the night before, and I could tell her generosity and 30-something charm had been stretched to their limit.

          For—of course—she was the organizational force around which her family orbited, quite efficiently thanks to her. She was that contradictory thing that women in her role can be: a servant and a superstar. We have had no serious conversations, but she once said to me You have your dogs; I have my kids and my plants.

          Thus it happened that I decided to remove absolutely every weed from her two raised beds of cucumbers, peppers, cherry tomatoes, and zucchini the size of forearms. You couldn't see the plants through the groundswell of hairy galinsoga, which had laid a chartreuse tablecloth over everything.

          She was coming home tomorrow, and I had set aside the entire day to work on the beds. 

          After an hour and a half in my gardening pants and a T-shirt, I stripped down to Speedos and doused myself a couple of times with the garden hose—but the water never ran cold. The sunscreen on my neck and shoulders dissolved into a vile nougat under the lunchtime sun. I was pretty much naked in my neighbor's backyard, pulling weeds as fast as I could.

          And that's when I heard our screen door open and shut.

          Gary would cross the driveway and come over to ask me how it was going. He'd see me doing this typically emotional, over-the-top thing for our neighbor, and he would smile down at me. 

          I prepared for this moment between us—anticipated it, savored it like the first sip of Sauvignon Blanc on a July evening.

          I kept glancing up, but I never saw him. 

          After a while, I heard the sound of his circular saw come from our garage. He's building a set of bookshelves for me.

          How we all, constantly, miss the bulls-eye with one another. 

          But she'll cry when she sees her tidy raised beds! I'll say I left one weed for you to find!

          

Old Yellow Book

          I still think about Cora Sadosky wanting to borrow "Mornings in Mexico." The musky cloth-covered boards the color of a ripe lemon—the three faded green words centered—seemed, already, to deliver the freshness and Latin sensuality of its title. It was a pretty, old book, lying on its back on a table as she walked through to a dinner of perch and cooked spinach, and it caught her eye. 

          On this morning, the shades are pulled and the fans are going but there is still a bit of fresh air at 7:00, and I don't mind my hot coffee. For a few precious moments I don't feel guilty about my dog, living his life incarcerated under the kitchen table.

          Going outside makes him too nervous. I am apt to agree with his philosophy of the world beyond one's dooryard. Hell is other people, Rob Kleinstuber said once at a book club dinner, high above Dupont Circle in their living room decorated with Oriental reproductions from Sears. Rob and I had almost identical thoughts. He had the same attitude about that canto of "In Memoriam"—Dark house, by which once more I stand—and our scary similarity made us so much more than strangers. We never spoke.

          I wonder if he is dead, too.

          I have found myself around a table with many different people, almost all of them extraordinary, like Cora—the daughter of Argentina's premier female mathematician. I am profusely ordinary, and I could never follow the conversations. I was uncurious about politics and books. Dinner talk always seemed to proceed like a racquetball game; I ducked for safety.

          This will be a hot summer. The Windsor chair kisses my naked back. The cat elongates herself across the doorway like a fox collar.

          At times, life has been like two birches rubbing together in the wind, their speech a cat's cry: high pitched, arbitrary, musical—wholly accidental. There was never a plan, only indulgence. So much to enjoy!

          I have never been to Mexico.

The Sketching Date

Lonely people, in talking to each other, can make each other lonelier.

—Lillian Hellman

          

          I.          

          

          The email arrived in all caps.

          BILL, I HAVE AN IDEA [...] IF YOU BRING YOUR PAINTS, WE CAN HAVE LUNCH AND PAINT. YOU AT ONE END OF THE COUNTER, ME AT THE OTHER.

          I'd been so busy all month that the absurdity of it seemed like a divine relief.

          Aleksandra and her husband John had built the log cabin after camping on the land for years. They raised six kids in one of the mansions of Rye, New York. When they got ready to move to Maine they told each one—now adults—to put their name on whatever piece of furniture or artwork they wanted. The nine bedroom house was emptied, and Aleksandra and John started all over again.

          "This time, honey, can we have some red and blue?" Aleksandra had done the estate in pale coral, sugar snap pea pastel, and seafoam ivory, like mint cream candies.

          "L.L. Bean. I get it!" was her reply. John died in 2011.

          And it is consistent. Everything is scuffed, weathered, and like a theater stage nothing is added to disrupt the vast negative space of the single room with the wall of French doors staring out at Taunton Bay. Yet the eye keeps discovering picture frames and iron soap cradles and objects of delicate comfort arranged with great precision. It is L.L. Bean if it had turned slightly steampunk—then lunched at Bergdorf's.

         

Spring Report

           This past week the last winter coat hanging on the pegs in the hall got taken upstairs. Its alpaca lining always felt like a hug. But the scarves still sleep twisted on top of one another in their basket like tartan cats, and my Astrakhan hat still reigns from the shelf above—expensive, authoritative, wonderfully inappropriate. 

          I feel hollow and chalky white in shorts.

          This year the dandelions are so dense one would describe the yard as dotted with green rather than the reverse. Gary pulls them sporadically in the same way that he finishes up the dishes and scrubs the stovetop—with a gentle, persistent optimism that breaks my heart.

          The hummers disclose their little bodies furtively at the feeders, or alight on a branch—animating the lilacs. The males have gorgeous necks like ruby Arrow collars, but the females are friendlier.

          It still isn't warm at 4:30, when we sit with sweaters on the deck, drinking and eating olives. It used to be 5:30, then it became 5:00. I can't remember proper nouns anymore, or last night's dinner, but living seems pointless without a Happy Hour.

          A succession of daffodils provided a centerpiece for a few weeks. I transplanted a brace of them I discovered blooming—as out of place as my Russian hat—in the brown, trash-filled gulley below our yard. The moment I saw them I said, out loud, You're coming to my yard. 

          I do so love a hopeless case. Is there really any other sort of beauty apart from tragedy? The bravery to shine when nothing or no one is watching; to do one's best simply on principle. The quality of not questioning the goodness and supremacy of life, of believing past all evidence—the kitten in the trash can. 

          Gary's Publisher's Clearinghouse bulbs laid on the kitchen countertop in the envelope for a month. Three of them died, but the last one is basking in the morning sun in a huge pot of rich soil, the object of frequent baby talk from me.

          The elegant gray-green fists of the grape vine are cupped in anticipation. Slugs dangle from the iris. It's going to 79 today but my fingertips are cold as I type.

          Our lives run alongside one another, a series of non-concentric circles—the aged and the young, the luckless and the fortunate, intersecting in a few moments of quiet clarity that become our happy memories.

          Now up and down the block the lawnmowers wrestle with the turf, spitting stones, stalling out into brief, delicious silence.

Peppermint Tea

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily remembrance of things as they were.

Marcel Proust

          I got a huge bottle of Halston 1-12 on eBay for ten bucks and free shipping but it didn't quite remind me of getting ready to go out in Philadelphia in 1984, but Celestial Seasonings Peppermint Tea—even as I am opening the box, which hasn't changed in 40 years—is able to put me right back into the pyramid at the top of the Chelsea Hotel sometime in the 1970s. This sensory umbilical cord has never weakened, much less been severed. It persists, powerfully, to this day. Like C.S. Lewis' wardrobe, there is always an exciting trip waiting inside.

          I don't remember how old I was, or when it was that we went to New York, or how many times we went (I think it was more than once). I just remember that I was a teenager, that Amtrak was so crowded we had to stand the whole way from 30th Street Station in Philadelphia—how my mother bitched!—and that she was using a set of pink luggage.

          I remember the luggage because my brother said "Oh MOM! It's the color of PEPTO BISMOL!" Always the exaggeratedly queer inflection, a sort of mash-up of Phyllis Diller and Margo Channing.

          Actually, Tim Curry in Rocky Horror is spot on, as if he had modeled the manner of speaking on Bruce—which I have occasionally thought he did.