Home Again

          The PVC glue had dried and all that needed to be done now was to connect the garden hose. The plastic shower stood at the bottom of a daringly short flight of concrete steps leading from the backyard, and the July sun was like a glamorous city skylight on the yellow- green algae of the walls.
          I put my glass of white wine on the third step up and covered myself with patchouli soap. I missed the country.
          The week had been like a celebrity biography, in which the subject takes half a year to do nothing—to shop, stay with friends in France, or read. Playlist followed playlist, sunset (with the sound of couples quietly talking in row boats) followed sunset, and I was never too full or too tired or too drunk. We played cards late into the night and once as I went to bed I saw daylight rising from behind the cedars, the color of fresh blueberries.
          I had quit my life but my young companions regarded me—spoke to me, waited for me to reply. I lost a little weight without trying to. I won a couple of the rounds of cards. I took my arms away from my face where I had braced them, waiting for my life to crash—to flip over into the Delaware canal on a rainy night, trapping me in the back seat with my memories.
          But this shower was a surprise, like a new friend or a wad of bills found in the hamper. After the sixth week of not hearing from the plumber, Gary plopped it down over the French drain with a chic little teak-wood platform and a dish for soap. After 22 years of baths in the old tub, ringed by a motley row of tiles and blackening caulk, the shower was a treat. 
          It stood tall in the cellar way with the top of its white neck bent like a swan's.
          I dusted off my ego and started steaming vegetables and exercising again. For the first time in years, I stood at the mirror and looked long at my face, trying to recognize myself in it. Something about the jaw was different—the spine of a book that has been fully read, laid aside.  
          I have come back. 

Minuet in G

          Crawling through ebay, I can never find it. The music was common as table salt—like book club copies of Gone With the Wind, or electric waffle irons—and the lithographed head of Beethoven is repeated in different lay-outs stretching back to the twenties. There are scores of copies in the 100+ drop-down view of auction listings.
          But none are the version from my childhood, my first piece of music—the first musical notes I ever read. The outside was a field of Creamsicle orange. Beethoven's head was dark blue and—I believe—in the upper right hand corner.
          Of course, even if I found it no copy would have the penciled letters, in the archaic cursive capitals, carefully written above each note. I had left my grandmother's disintegrating pile of sheet music behind, in that last half-hour walk through the house, picking up pieces of my childhood as if at a blue light special. I chose a mantle clock, a butter dish, a spiral binder of handwritten recipes—stuffed with cut-out panels from boxes of jello and recipes clipped from the local paper—and a bunch of Bibles.
          "That looks like it might be valuable," the man said, pointing to a decorative vase. I put it in my box out of politeness. I broke it a few years later and Gary carefully glued the pieces back together, my childhood and my adult life briefly, tenderly intersecting.

A Poor Player

          Daylight from the bedroom windows wakes me up at 6:00.
          My phone is not on my night stand.
          The lights are on, and the dogs wander the downstairs freely, not in their crates.
          I make coffee but it is too weak.
          And I remember what I did last night.
          Even my silence is not quiet enough for my past, and I see the same faces that my life grew away from, like a houseplant craning up out of a dark corner.
          Some of them are kind, and I wonder whether it is the kindness of good fortune—a happy childhood and a solid career—or the mercy that comes from suffering, from true character.
          I refused their civilities, insisting on love. Knowing it would never get better for me, I made it much worse. 
          I am terrified of the commonplace.
          I am Frances Farmer on This Is Your Life, her hair swept back into a brutal bun, a cravat like a silk noose, her eyes hollow and black, crawling back from the delicious excesses and articulate rages—a mannequin in a prim wool suit, her anger itching just below the neckline.
          I am still here. And look, I'm just fine.
          I have too many feelings.
          It is a diagnosis. It is not a respectable status.
          I have outlived my personality, and like an old T-shirt it hugs my belly, outlining my monstrosity. 
          I am a joke, told at a dinner party.      

The China Frog (A Belated Mother's Day Card)

          My canary yellow bedroom was on a corner of the large apartment my mother and I shared, for $140/month, when I was 10, 11, and 12.
          One Saturday morning my mother and I crouched below the windows, one looking onto the gravel parking lot and the other onto a high, treacherous sidewalk between the buildings, watching Tommy McCabe stagger from his Dodge "Rambler" to the front door of his apartment building across the way.
          Tommy had spent all of Friday night at the "Moose" Lodge and was just making his way home—lapsing in and out of consciousness—after my morning cartoons. My mother, smelling like Crest and Aqua Net, was absorbed by the scene. She had probably seen him pull into the parking lot from the kitchen window and had come into my bedroom for the best view. 
          Tommy was her lover.

6:00 a.m. Bath

          It is a rare thing, a cold May morning. The painted radiator is hot to the touch, and the noise of the pipes comes from the heart of the old house—comforting and anonymous as a pulse.
          Tiny rounded pieces of four or five different soaps float on the milky water: rose, lavender, sandalwood, and patchouli tadpoles swim around my belly, compounding their scents.
          The steam from the tap rises and meets the first light coming in from the window. The corners of the room are dark, still in night.
          Everything is the color of pearl. The old white tub is smooth and faceted as the inside of a giant shell.  
          My cat regards me from the top of the toilet seat, closing and opening her eyes more glamorously than any actress, more attentively than any nurse. She stands perfectly as a toy; she is an illustration of a cat.
          I hoist my dripping leg into the air, but I cannot hold it straight. I have coiled and tensed through all my years—no warmth can open me now.   
          I step into a thick, clean white towel.
          I still love the world.

Easter 1967

     1.

     In those days Pennsylvania Route 30, the Lincoln Highway, went through Lancaster and Columbia without a bypass. After Gap, and the half block of fussy, oddly contemporary Amish shops that were like a five-second commercial strip tossed into a corn field, you entered Lancaster, passing by the Hamilton Watch building and WGAL TV 8.
     But my mother would have already pulled over, probably someplace outside Coatesville, at a converted gas station or perhaps a simple wooden stand, to buy flowers. 
     One year, it was a single pink hyacinth in a pot—entirely plastic—that I held in my lap like a goldfish bowl or a delicate treasure, picturing my grandmother's face when I would hand it to her.
     Together in the blue bucket seats of her Mustang, I can still hear my mother punch the cigarette lighter into the dash to get it started, and I can smell the raisiny tannin of her Viceroy pack as I fished one out for her to light. She held the metal cartridge up to her face and sucked furtively, suffocating me.
     The metal seat belts lay across my lap like chrome barbells.
     The drive to my grandmother's house, "100 miles!" as my mother used to say, always rounding up, as imprecise as her gift wrapping or her motley Swedish meatballs, was the greatest pleasure I knew as a child. Crossing the Columbia-Wrightsville Bridge with its deco lanterns, driving by Lake Redman splashing up against the scoured-out rock of Route 83, and finally spotting the steeples—still only about as far south as Hametown—of the two facing churches at the very top of Main Street, each marker in the journey increased my excitement.
     A system of narrow, angled streets—and finally alleys—led to my grandmother's large backyard. As soon as my mother had pulled into the grass drive, defined by two handsome white fences and a lonely black lamp post, I was pushing against the heavy car door, running up the long flagstone walk with its treacherous caterpillars of sod between each gray or aubergine piece.
    The back door was already open, my Aunt Ada bracing it with her arm, one foot in the kitchen and the other on the top step, preparing to catch me in her arms like a runaway shopping cart.
     It is a moment—for the remainder of my life—with which I compare, by which I judge, every abstract pleasure. 
     It is a singular, ecstatic touchstone.
     Above my head, now buried in my aunt's apron, I could hear my grandmother greet my mother, her tone like contralto molasses.
     Well Marion!
     There was a reserved pleasure, and a hint of admiration—but nothing that you might expect toward a woman who likely predicated her much-loved only son's suicide.
     My mother would stay the night and leave after coffee and toast the next morning.
     The big old house, with its oversize furniture, lumpy carpets, and dark, stinky bathroom seemed stubbornly ill-suited to my mother's efficient style and constant grooming. The vanity lights on either side of the tiny bathroom medicine cabinet were never turned on except when my mother was there, applying or removing something from her face or daubing at her hair with a rat tail brush.
     Ash trays were produced from deep within cabinet drawers, and my mother's cigarette smoke hung in the air above the kitchen table—confused.
     The chiming clocks all had to be stopped for the night.

In the Alley

     Through a garage door two toilets sit together in a backyard smiling like ceramic dolphins.
     The sun is high and the shadows are short. No one is around.
     A sofa the color of Crayola #47, green yellow, waits for the trash man.
     Though I am walking slowly, too slowly for 53, the gaps in the stockade fences are still fleeting hints—accelerated as the dancing light from a film projector.
     The men in the group house gently float their muthafuckas into the air like quarter notes.
     My cat jumps off the step to welcome me home.