In the final semester of an English major that had seemed nothing but endless afternoon discussions of character, or fate, or motivation, I signed up for two art classes to fill out my hours.
Literary criticism had refused to tell me how, insisting always on the moral or psychological—upon what. Looking at the syllabus for the painting class, my yearning for technique pounced on the kabbalistic vocabulary of required equipment: cadmium red, Alizarin crimson, Rose madder, Mars yellow, Titanium white, phthalo blue, linseed oil, Dammar varnish, hog hair brushes, gesso.
The only familiar thing on the list was Saran wrap, which had to be the inexpensive type that clung to everything.
The large, dirty studio had the carelessness and potential of an empty stage during rehearsal—windowless, overheated. Bus carts, splattered with paint, idled like robots around the room but the easels were grouped—with something of the ghosts of their previous masters still palpable.
The acrid smell of turpentine quickly became a favorite of mine.
March 15, 2014
February 26, 2014
February Funeral
The snow that lay on the fields grew thicker—the left-hand pages of a novel—as we drove north. The highway was a shoelace. The radio was silent.
A storm was coming from the south, and we just had time to drive up, proceed with the small service, and get home before the juggernaut. The ultramarine was withdrawing from the sky like a refugee. Salt blotched the macadam.
In town, the funeral home sat aloof from the corner of a busy intersection, its boxy additions and hasty portico all but obscuring a fine old manse somewhere in the center of the expansion. Only the gingerbread dormers were visible, peering out as if above a lid.
I slipped on invisible ice and—abandoning my fear of people—embraced the opportunity to tell the greeter. She asked me to show her precisely which spot—here? or here?—and we busied ourselves in a lively, polite exchange as I admired her slender, Neiman Marcus triumph over age.
Thus I delayed going into the room with all the lights. I held back, waiting for Gary to burst like a pierced golf ball, to surrender his civility—his amiable, efficient, sportsmanlike thing—into the arms of someone deeper in his history than me.
A storm was coming from the south, and we just had time to drive up, proceed with the small service, and get home before the juggernaut. The ultramarine was withdrawing from the sky like a refugee. Salt blotched the macadam.
In town, the funeral home sat aloof from the corner of a busy intersection, its boxy additions and hasty portico all but obscuring a fine old manse somewhere in the center of the expansion. Only the gingerbread dormers were visible, peering out as if above a lid.
I slipped on invisible ice and—abandoning my fear of people—embraced the opportunity to tell the greeter. She asked me to show her precisely which spot—here? or here?—and we busied ourselves in a lively, polite exchange as I admired her slender, Neiman Marcus triumph over age.
Thus I delayed going into the room with all the lights. I held back, waiting for Gary to burst like a pierced golf ball, to surrender his civility—his amiable, efficient, sportsmanlike thing—into the arms of someone deeper in his history than me.
January 26, 2014
Wide Awake at 3:00
The easy sleep ends like a ferris wheel halts, my legs and back swaying from lost momentum, and the hard sleep begins.
Working down, and over, I read the numbered clues to the evening's puzzle—nouns I cannot remember. The darkness has obscured the record of my rages (or weeping) like a bad paint job. Gary breathes heavily and easily: he speaks the night's language.
The cats cross each other running ahead of my flashlight like subway rats.
Climbing down the narrow book-lined steps, as I descended Sargent Mountain 20 years ago, I reach a hostel stocked with despairing calculation: one candle, one bottle of spring water, aspirin, and sleeping pills.
I unfold myself into the bath.
The room is umber; the tiny flame is orange and red—a steamy Caravaggio, smelling of Calgon.
I count down until dawn.
Working down, and over, I read the numbered clues to the evening's puzzle—nouns I cannot remember. The darkness has obscured the record of my rages (or weeping) like a bad paint job. Gary breathes heavily and easily: he speaks the night's language.
The cats cross each other running ahead of my flashlight like subway rats.
Climbing down the narrow book-lined steps, as I descended Sargent Mountain 20 years ago, I reach a hostel stocked with despairing calculation: one candle, one bottle of spring water, aspirin, and sleeping pills.
I unfold myself into the bath.
The room is umber; the tiny flame is orange and red—a steamy Caravaggio, smelling of Calgon.
I count down until dawn.
December 15, 2013
Ars Practica
I am alone in the house.
The kitchen is bright and clean and empty. The dishwasher has groaned its final bars and the silence is delicious.
I slice a Stayman apple on the scrubbed maple cheek of the butcher block.
The change in my status, the kitchen sink's blinding white regard, creates an atmosphere of vision. There have been too many biographies. All I know about myself, all I ever cared, is that I am not Tolstoy.
Yet I have been each person I read: blushing at the sophomorics of Plath, dyspneic as Jean Stafford and Dylan Thomas drank themselves to death, stepping alongside Wallace Stevens to the office ... understanding Genet's lust too well.
I have been Cinderella too long, and all that's here is laundry. The only stars are in the graniteware. There's a full day of work.
That seems to be the thing, not being afraid to work. My poet's hysterics—my campy phrases and comparisons, my perfect eye, my brilliant feelings—never got me anyplace. That was the only thing I knew how to do: react.
Now in this house we will see what can be done; at this late hour, in the face of melancholy itself. I have waited long enough. Now I shall fetch what I need myself—and perhaps a bit more.
The kitchen is bright and clean and empty. The dishwasher has groaned its final bars and the silence is delicious.
I slice a Stayman apple on the scrubbed maple cheek of the butcher block.
The change in my status, the kitchen sink's blinding white regard, creates an atmosphere of vision. There have been too many biographies. All I know about myself, all I ever cared, is that I am not Tolstoy.
Yet I have been each person I read: blushing at the sophomorics of Plath, dyspneic as Jean Stafford and Dylan Thomas drank themselves to death, stepping alongside Wallace Stevens to the office ... understanding Genet's lust too well.
I have been Cinderella too long, and all that's here is laundry. The only stars are in the graniteware. There's a full day of work.
That seems to be the thing, not being afraid to work. My poet's hysterics—my campy phrases and comparisons, my perfect eye, my brilliant feelings—never got me anyplace. That was the only thing I knew how to do: react.
Now in this house we will see what can be done; at this late hour, in the face of melancholy itself. I have waited long enough. Now I shall fetch what I need myself—and perhaps a bit more.
November 26, 2013
Valley Forge Winter
Re-reading Canterbury Tales my nose is again cold, walking west on the tracks away from the tiny yellow station—into the woods. It was the winter of 12th grade English: Idylls of the King, Macbeth, and Jane Kernshaw's year-long tan.
I loved only the weekly vocabulary list—desultory, recalcitrant, peregrination—syllables strung together like chords out of Schoenberg.
I walked in the deep snow toward the chapel, through the long stand of pines. The park, my sense of the world, was like a sealed white paper envelope.
Back in the apartment my mother made softballs from the used wrapping paper and pinched dead poinsettia leaves. Glen came over in his reindeer sweater and Bonnie Franklin haircut and we took turns posing for my new camera. She apprehended the impossibility of the friendship as rapidly, as silent and confidently, as a shutter opens and closes.
Now the pilgrims forever walk those tracks, dodging the Norfolk Southern as it blasts out of Abram's Yard.
They come out of the woods below the parking lot, behind the tiny stone chapel where Julie Nixon was married. The site is pushed up against Route 23 like a tenement with a carillon, but the grassy slope across the road—down to the white spring house and back up to the high ridge of County Line Road—is the subject of many photographs. The children with sleds and toboggans put Currier & Ives to shame.
Over their shoulders, looking back across the Schuylkill River valley, Vaux Hill Mansion is too perfect—an historic fiction, a trompe-l'œil. Beyond its tree-lined driveway the slopes of John James Audubon's home recline like firm green buttocks.
I sat with a glass of Christian Brothers Burgundy—even at 16—cheating on my homework with the Bible. Our new minister was 'Full Gospel' and I chased the Holy Spirit like a lover; but I was too intense even for Christ, who needed His space, in the end.
But Glen complimented the beauty of my glossolalia.
I loved words.
I loved only the weekly vocabulary list—desultory, recalcitrant, peregrination—syllables strung together like chords out of Schoenberg.
I walked in the deep snow toward the chapel, through the long stand of pines. The park, my sense of the world, was like a sealed white paper envelope.
Back in the apartment my mother made softballs from the used wrapping paper and pinched dead poinsettia leaves. Glen came over in his reindeer sweater and Bonnie Franklin haircut and we took turns posing for my new camera. She apprehended the impossibility of the friendship as rapidly, as silent and confidently, as a shutter opens and closes.
Now the pilgrims forever walk those tracks, dodging the Norfolk Southern as it blasts out of Abram's Yard.
They come out of the woods below the parking lot, behind the tiny stone chapel where Julie Nixon was married. The site is pushed up against Route 23 like a tenement with a carillon, but the grassy slope across the road—down to the white spring house and back up to the high ridge of County Line Road—is the subject of many photographs. The children with sleds and toboggans put Currier & Ives to shame.
Over their shoulders, looking back across the Schuylkill River valley, Vaux Hill Mansion is too perfect—an historic fiction, a trompe-l'œil. Beyond its tree-lined driveway the slopes of John James Audubon's home recline like firm green buttocks.
I sat with a glass of Christian Brothers Burgundy—even at 16—cheating on my homework with the Bible. Our new minister was 'Full Gospel' and I chased the Holy Spirit like a lover; but I was too intense even for Christ, who needed His space, in the end.
But Glen complimented the beauty of my glossolalia.
I loved words.
October 26, 2013
Fall Weekend
Gary scrapes the hoar frost off the windows and drives away with his bag of gifts, flowers, and his best suit.
I stand in the driveway and wave. I am thinner, and I feel the map of my former body—smell the ghostly breath of old love falling and crying against my torso and thighs.
But the busy sun banishes the frost from the Ipomoea vine, and I am alone in the house. The dogs turn quiet and dig in for the long wait.
My companion—my consolation—is a pack of Marlboro I found, unopened, on the ground.
Back then it was Benson & Hedges, and before that Winstons (by the carton), and before that Dunhill ... and of course before everything were the gold-tipped Sobrane "Black Russians" that Sara fed into the garbage disposal when we were 22.
My boss in the copy shop on Walnut Street asked me Does it come off on your lips?
I was narrow and lovely. There are too few photos.
But I was 31 before my fingertips started to warm, going from one to the other, waving goodbye in cold apartments, subsisting on French toast and reading Absalom, Absalom! in the television-less evenings.
My twenties were hard as ice.
I quit my job and moved into a whore house in Fishtown. I still have the pages of tic-tack-toe I played with one of the boys in between rounds of sex. Walking to the El stop, I was so stoned the blocks seemed to multiply in front of me. I biked for hours in Wissahickon Park with a minister—his mother was the first female eye surgeon in the country—just for apple pie and ice cream at Valley Green Inn ... and the twenty he slipped me when he dropped me off.
I was what they called easy to be with; a good listener, my shirt cuffs folded up high on my arms, my Salvation Army loafers two sizes too big dangling from my instep like luggage, my rent always overdue.
Once, my mother called: I mailed her one of my twenties.
A tooth that had flamed in pain for months crumbled like an oyster cracker in my mouth during a dinner date with a sculptor; I excused myself, spit the fragments into the toilet, and returned to the table.
Running on Pine Street to make the half-price cover charge at a new club, a hole in my shoe landed on an upright carpenter's nail projecting from a plywood sidewalk panel in front of a renovation. A perfect, bloodless puncture, I leaned against the brick townhouse and untwisted the shoe from my foot. A company nurse at the job I had started only a week before saved my life.
But now the sun is unfurled onto the dining room floor, and Gary has already called asking for directions north around a stalled interstate. In my haste, I discover the Google search page no longer links to maps.
I decide against a fourth K cup. The dogs turn in their sleep.
Shivering on the back porch, sucking deeply on one of the Marlboros, I wonder:
Do we live one life or several?
Am I the same person, or a different one?
I can feel my hip bones, again, just beneath my jeans.
I stand in the driveway and wave. I am thinner, and I feel the map of my former body—smell the ghostly breath of old love falling and crying against my torso and thighs.
But the busy sun banishes the frost from the Ipomoea vine, and I am alone in the house. The dogs turn quiet and dig in for the long wait.
My companion—my consolation—is a pack of Marlboro I found, unopened, on the ground.
Back then it was Benson & Hedges, and before that Winstons (by the carton), and before that Dunhill ... and of course before everything were the gold-tipped Sobrane "Black Russians" that Sara fed into the garbage disposal when we were 22.
My boss in the copy shop on Walnut Street asked me Does it come off on your lips?
I was narrow and lovely. There are too few photos.
But I was 31 before my fingertips started to warm, going from one to the other, waving goodbye in cold apartments, subsisting on French toast and reading Absalom, Absalom! in the television-less evenings.
My twenties were hard as ice.
I quit my job and moved into a whore house in Fishtown. I still have the pages of tic-tack-toe I played with one of the boys in between rounds of sex. Walking to the El stop, I was so stoned the blocks seemed to multiply in front of me. I biked for hours in Wissahickon Park with a minister—his mother was the first female eye surgeon in the country—just for apple pie and ice cream at Valley Green Inn ... and the twenty he slipped me when he dropped me off.
I was what they called easy to be with; a good listener, my shirt cuffs folded up high on my arms, my Salvation Army loafers two sizes too big dangling from my instep like luggage, my rent always overdue.
Once, my mother called: I mailed her one of my twenties.
A tooth that had flamed in pain for months crumbled like an oyster cracker in my mouth during a dinner date with a sculptor; I excused myself, spit the fragments into the toilet, and returned to the table.
Running on Pine Street to make the half-price cover charge at a new club, a hole in my shoe landed on an upright carpenter's nail projecting from a plywood sidewalk panel in front of a renovation. A perfect, bloodless puncture, I leaned against the brick townhouse and untwisted the shoe from my foot. A company nurse at the job I had started only a week before saved my life.
But now the sun is unfurled onto the dining room floor, and Gary has already called asking for directions north around a stalled interstate. In my haste, I discover the Google search page no longer links to maps.
I decide against a fourth K cup. The dogs turn in their sleep.
Shivering on the back porch, sucking deeply on one of the Marlboros, I wonder:
Do we live one life or several?
Am I the same person, or a different one?
I can feel my hip bones, again, just beneath my jeans.
October 10, 2013
On the Eve of My Marriage
Sitting in the tub, pointing my chin into the milky old silver shaving mirror, I draw the razor across my face.
A single candle burns.
It is my last date with myself.
Tomorrow I will find out that I have been loved despite myself—the pouting, querulous, monster child who spoiled his loves like freckles of marinara on a white linen shirt.
There were many. I sent them running.
And I guess I wish she were here for it, the blindly selfish, myopic—gorgeous—monster from whom I was cut, a depressed ginger snap.
But at last we are not alone, Marion. We are not as bad as all that.
The mirror clouds with steam, the water circles down the drain, and we are off!
A single candle burns.
It is my last date with myself.
Tomorrow I will find out that I have been loved despite myself—the pouting, querulous, monster child who spoiled his loves like freckles of marinara on a white linen shirt.
There were many. I sent them running.
And I guess I wish she were here for it, the blindly selfish, myopic—gorgeous—monster from whom I was cut, a depressed ginger snap.
But at last we are not alone, Marion. We are not as bad as all that.
The mirror clouds with steam, the water circles down the drain, and we are off!
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