A Short Walk

          Piney Branch is not an easy street to cross. I avoid it subconsciously, like not calling someone back. I keep west, in the diminishing 'V' of car-less blocks formed as Piney Branch runs southwest to meet mighty Georgia Avenue—a blue collar road in a white collar city, check cashing places and windowless clubs with dancers.
          I wade forward in anonymity, dropping my pace and inhaling magnolia and English boxwood, atomized into the air by the afternoon sun. Children are in school. Everybody's at work.
          Each 4,000-square-foot lot tells a different story. Some are ringed by a simple iron fence, but others are cribs of chain link, the climbing roses poking through the rhombus gaps like yellow breakfast buns.
          At a large corner house, the weeds grow tall and the paint sags away from the concrete. The blinds in the windows belong to another time—eyelids shut with the dignity of well-earned rest.
          Across the street a canary-colored compound of bay windows and walled, unseen gardens is polite but reserved. A dinner plate of mulch mounds up below each crape myrtle, and the grass behaves.
          On a different block, a raised bed alongside steps puts armfuls of marigolds, cat mint, geraniums, lavender, asters, and Sedum at chest height, perfect for smelling. Along the curb, low branches of young trees brush you like dancers' arms. Up ahead, a single cat crosses.
          Azalea time has come and gone, exhausting and overstimulating as a college romance, and the bushes have resumed their green composure. June is here.
          My breaths are finally coming from deeper down, and my fingertips are purple and cool. I pick the mail up and unlock the door.
          It was such a short walk.

The House in the Middle of the Block

Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities. 

—Frank Lloyd Wright 

 I.

          
          I stand at the sink sorting blueberries, tossing the soft ones into the compost pail habitually.
          We cannot keep the house.
          I am fertilizing someone else's garden.
          The idea seems obscene.
         After we've left, I swear never to drive by.          

II.

          Houses are the physical manifestation of our dreams, partners whose high traffic areas and familiar kitchen window views have grown as invisible, and as profoundly comforting, as a spouse. The rooms are half public facade, half private chamber—stylish but cluttered, the mail always sitting out on the table, the pendulum clock on the mantle catching the light. Daily, we are exasperated and privileged, embarrassed and proud. Guiltily, contentedly, dishes pile up.

First Month

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

—John Updike

          Gangs of sparrows choke the feeders just outside the windows, swinging them like censers in a barren sanctuary—or like the tall fire escape at the end of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
          The neighbor's bathroom light goes on and off, meaningfully.
          The mailman is suddenly on the porch, in mid-conversation, and the dogs go wild. Who talks to him all day, block by block? 
          I talk to myself all day.
          I want to write the way Clara Ward sings "When the Saints Go Marching In," looking briefly skyward before impaling us with another perfect bar, flawless and confident. I want to make someone smile or cry without their wanting to, from deep within—as I smiled when, sitting alone in the row, I had my first take-off on a PanAm jet out of LaGuardia in 1986. As I cried on the first syllable of Gary's wedding vows.
          They are moments when the water and air is squeezed out of life, when it is crushed and concentrated like grapes, and rhythm lures the mind from indolence or compromise. 
          Every hello and goodbye is pressed between two brass bookends, every late sunny weekend morning in bed with someone wonderful and heartless, gorgeous and long gone.
          But gospel never fully translated into soul or pop, and its effect on us has just a single conduit, with an outdated premise. But like having a Sangria, we lift the fruit aside and swallow the contents.
          I have no stories to tell this month, and I will not write about myself.
          I look out the window at the birds, upside down, pecking at the seed.
          Apparently His eye is on them.
          But they're managing quite well on their own.

Downeast Again

          I started plotting the route in May, like a child connecting the dots—on the first page of a thick book—with a jaunty crayon. My favorite moment, memorized, was the golf course green sign for the Massachusetts Turnpike: East—N.H.—Maine.
          I always began smelling pine and saltwater when I saw that sign.
          When I was 7, it was my grandmother's big house and lawn in Southern York County. In the winter and spring of 1991 it was the North End of Boston, and the lithe reflection in the small accordion mirror above his kitchen sink as Gary shaved.
          But since the age of 34 my happy place has been Mt. Desert Island. My mother had insisted I join her on a trip back to her childhood home in Ellsworth, and I simply fell in love.
          By 42 I was going up twice a year, May and September—the two months property taxes came due, as my uncle dryly informed me. A series of Scotch-taped trail maps and my uncle's beloved sandwiches of luncheon loaf and Kraft singles had been my only companions on hundreds of day-long hikes ending with a boiled lobster dinner and blueberry beer.
          A single photo captures me, a tousled Adonis with a back pack, posing at the mouth of Hadlock Brook trail, about to disappear into the erotic darkness of woods highlighted by powder blue blazes painted on the granite or wedged into the slender birches, interrupted only by necklaces of tiny, noisy streams. The scented climb to the top of the treeline—and the view out to the Atlantic at the summit—often produced tears of awe.
          Now our Ford Escape faces town, and as we turn down into State Street I begin my recitation of history and fable: the bank where my aunt worked for 50 years, her first and only job; the headquarters of the historical society my uncle founded; the blinding white Congregational church; the five-and-dime where my mother had her first job; the house that was once the hospital in which my oldest brother was born; finally, in the beautiful old residence that became the Ellsworth library, I locate my uncle's history of the town, turning the pages of photos I took for him.
          As Gary takes the stairs to the men's room I sit on a bench facing the river. I'm pleased with myself for letting the pure September light and the joy of his first visit keep me from breaking down. Today there are no hellos in a town that, once, my aunt and uncle could not drive through without stopping to roll down the window—a minefield of school buddies and board members and bowling companions. My patience used to unravel, when I was 37 and trying to make it down onto the island for some hiking before the early September sunsets, when yet another old fart would pause at our lunch table to talk about the price of gas or somebody's granddaughter's baby.
          The past feels like a sweater I want to pull over my shoulders, even at noon—its familiar smell, the coat of a beloved pet, a phantom whiff.

* * *

          At the cabin the ducks gather at the bottom of the steps like trick-or-treaters, staring us down for the cracked corn they eat from our palms. They splash back into the pond with a sort of winged dive from the pink and green lichen surface of the boulders.

          Gary said he saw one, but I only heard the loons, screaming like kids, or laughing eerily at dusk.

          I built a fire in the pit but had to leave it to go inside and cook. I watched from the kitchen window. 

          Walking the dogs, we turned off the flashlight and marveled at the stars hanging above the tops of the trees, across the pond, that looked like a piece of black velvet cut with pinking shears. 

          Sunday began with steady rain but changed, as my uncle always said Maine weather would do, into a peculiar, blinding clarity. We drove down to Acadia and walked out onto the flanks of Cadillac Mountain—its lunar spaciousness studded with cairns, wild blueberry bushes, and midget spruce.

          Did you used to hike here? was Gary's only remark, slackly delivered.

          The place was too much for one person in one day, and I thought about the years it had taken me to memorize its summits and coves. 

          Yes, over there. I pointed to Bald Peak but couldn't remember its name. I said nothing about Sargent Mountain, like an old boyfriend too complex, too sensual, to describe to anyone else.

          The boardwalk trail around Jordan Pond was closed, but the perspective of the rippled water filling the glacial basin, crowned on her northern shore by the Bubbles dotted with climbers, delivered on its much-published promise.

          Monday night we packed for the long drive home.

* * *

          But now the dashboard sports a sheath of birch bark, taken from the two acres of wooded land we bought from my uncle's estate. The tract, still within the township, is all that remains, like a fingerprint on a silver case, of my delight and history in this place. 

          Its municipal, taxable reality seems assurance enough I am still a citizen of the ground I covered, in my New Balances and skinny black jeans, with such adoration.

          The promise of returning—for good—seems enough to keep in shape for.

Eating an Orange

          In a restaurant, my mother would scoop her painted fingers into the glass and bring out a slightly grayed, fully marinaded section for me to eat (along with the Maraschino cherry). 
          At home, however, she just reused a slice. pushing it through the evening's three or four Old Fashioned's then pitching it.
          Here I sit at noon with a navel orange sliced neatly into my Blue Willow bowl—so refreshing after lunch.
          But it still tastes like whiskey.

On the Lake

          Water is nature's tranquilizer.

—Diana Vreeland

          Perhaps there is no greater excitement than turning into a New England dirt road that leads—after great length, curving violently, dropping and rising like a roller coaster running through a dark curtain of Black Spruce—down to a lake. Stones ricochet off the car, the axle jolts into a rut, and the dust kicks up around the windows until you slow to a crawl.
          Then the first band of sapphire, glinting under the sun, appears through the woods. 
          This first glimpse of the lake is a primal, childhood joy. It comes from a place that was thought to be lost in the anguish of maturity.

* * *

          Thus we arrived at our home for the week, a log cabin with window boxes of coral-colored impatiens and tiny American flags. It overlooked the largest private frontage on the entirety of the large lake, a shoulder of land that faced northeast toward the open water and east into a cove, on the other side of which was a trailer campground.
          Between the cabin and the water's edge was a descent on an amphitheater of exposed granite and tree roots, across a narrow slip of bog, and past stands of day lilies.
          With a glass of wine in my hand, I traversed this many times during the week and can do so now, if I shut my eyes. I still feel the sun's warmth on the moss.
          The lap of the water against the rocks kept time like a broken, musical clock. 
          Ducks tilted on the wakes of the passing boats in groups of four.
          Each day, a resident heron departed and returned to a perch on the tip of a rock five feet from the dock, its wings spreading above me, as I swam, like Icarus.
          

* * *

          Behind and above the little cabin, situated on the very crest of the rocky land, was the owner's sprawling, boxy home. Sue was 72 and wore a different baseball cap every day. On the day we arrived, she was wearing one of black felt with a constellation of shiny metal rivets that made her look like a minor entertainer, or the conductor on a scenic railroad. 
          She walked us through the cabin and the land speaking in what must have been the pentameter of an old play, lines she had memorized long ago.
          Her mother had the cabin built in 1953, and in the years following Sue had replaced the roof, repainted and waterproofed the logs, refinished the interior pine walls, and installed a stove where the hearth of the beautiful, wide-open fireplace had been. But her mother's—and her own—paintings still hung in the bedrooms. One particularly successful watercolor of the cabin ("There were more trees then," said Sue) was mounted, regretfully, on the wall behind the toilet—invisible to the user but, perhaps by design, at the perfect perspective for the living areas because the heavy door of the bathroom hung persistently open.
          Sue and her husband lived in the cabin until their large home was built. Four years ago she lost him, two weeks after his cancer diagnosis. As she took us onto the old wooden dock and showed us the Belgian block steps, down into the water, that she and her husband had built ("We put them in ourselves and they've stayed that way ever since"), she told us her mother had died, at 101, only two weeks before we arrived.
          But there was still Cloe, her Black Lab, and she warned us we'd see them walking down the path to the water in the mornings. One afternoon—evidently rising late—she slipped and fell, and Alan and I ran out in the rain to help. I got my socks soaking wet. But Josh said "No—she'll know we're watching her, and she'll be embarrassed." 
          It was at that point I realized he knew her—from just two days.

* * *

          This was our fifth summer trip together and the boys had been on one of their habitually private walks when Sue gave them a sudden little tour of her house and garden. I pouted at the exclusion and listened with envy to their description. 

          And they met up again, walking on the road that I never took. Yet I think the encounters were more than propinquity—her gossipy warmth, telling them her life history and showing them her paintings and crafts, confiding her opinion of the campground owner ("An asshole") and her fondness for wine.

          I think Sue knew too well the ditch into which I had fallen. Like an animal from the woods that surrounded her, she could smell weakness and injury.

          The only thing she said to me, that first day, was You're too young for cataract surgery. She wanted none of me.  

          My friends, at the leggy, V-neck sweater-y, spiked-hair apex of their lives, their beautiful faces still free of the darker refinements forty would yet bring, were the natural audience for the stories of a septuagenarian artist—a big fish in a small pond, a wealthy woman still walking at a brisk pace with her dog, no fuller through the waist than any film star her age, her bust oddly pert under a sweatshirt, her expression like a Pinochle player on a trick.
          I told them to invite her down for our fourth of July burgers and baked beans, but she didn't come.

* * *

          I didn't like swimming alone in the "pond," as New Englanders insist on calling their lakes. The bottom was weedy and muddy, and the large rock that was the heron's perch attracted schools of big fish within the black chasms between the underwater boulders. Only on Friday, our last day, did I overcome this by floating on a body-length periwinkle blue raft meant for use in pools. Like a deep brown watery terrarium, I didn't want my legs to touch—or encounter—what my eyes could not see. 

          I preferred canoeing. Using a kayak paddle rather than the usual wooden one, drops of cool water refreshed me as I lifted it from side to side. Callouses developed quickly behind my thumbs.

          The pace of the canoe, its quiet caress of the water as I advanced, made me feel like a squaw (lubricated, conveniently, with Bain de Soleil). 

          I made a point to stop and enjoy the different properties. Most had perfect green lawns running down to the water's edge, punctuated with American flags, jardinieres of petunias, fabric-covered swings, and decks crowned with grills.

          But, occasionally, glimpses of an older aesthetic, a hardier sensibility, came through—rustic, miniature cottages with tiny framed windows, painted board walls, and stone chimneys laid out on a chessboard of rhododendrons, rusted metal hammock frames, and the humus of old walnut trees and roses.

          One such property had a narrow set of steps set into the stone retaining wall. Shaded by a mimosa tree, it descended into perfectly clean, shallow water with a pebbled bottom. For the second time that week, a part of myself unexpectedly thrilled at the diorama. I paddled past—quietly—again and again.

* * *

          I know (and care) nothing about the subject, but I can guess what psychology might have to say about a propensity to tearfulness. Keeping in the calm, objective center of the mind seems to be the only acceptable state, a sort of alert, highly functional banality—the perfect state in which to buy a house, or play a winning game of Scrabble.
          Yet, my truest sense is that the jury is still out on those who, like myself, must fight a familiar constriction of the throat, an abrupt, overwhelming vision—if that is the word—of the sad irony in a set of images, or events, as they are casually presented or discovered.
          For it is within the story itself, like the million twists of an old Russian novel, that heartbreak resides. For those susceptible to these sudden realizations, set off always by some inconsequential yet profound symbol, the passing of summer into fall, the last hours before a dreaded farewell, or the diminishment of any of the personalities or habitual conditions that compose our lives creates a terrible sympathetic resonance within—a sadness so powerful it is not unlike anxiety.
          I prefer to think that a sadder song plays in the minds of some people. It has always played, for them. Since childhood, it was never any other way, and as they mature they learn to jump up and change the record, comically—almost. I have clung to banality, focused my mind on something indifferent or commonplace, just to avoid a profound and terrible sadness. Wrapped up in the images and the story my mind has suddenly created—my talent for descriptive observation destroying me, as it were—I want nothing more than to cry for a very long time.
          Diverting it too soon is often a mistake, like passing in a card game too early.
          Toward the end of our week on the lake I took to sitting in one of the white plastic lounge chairs that were deposited—I can't say arranged—on a sort of lumber patio near the dock. I had brought with me Under Western Eyes and I was growing frustrated with Conrad's malapropisms, all the while, like a good Literature major, appreciating that he did not learn English until his twenties. 
          Perhaps there are no more keenly observant moments than when looking up from a book that has, after a spurt of determination, lost one's attention.
          Now I saw the two rotted half-barrels, one on either side of me, choked with weeds, that had, in years past, for guests long gone, been filled every summer with flowers. I looked straight ahead to the dock, its brick pylons bowed at a steep angle, its grey boards undulating and treacherous at the seams, the fenders pulling away like candles on melted icing.
          This property, one of the largest and oldest established on the lake, depicted in watercolors, lovingly inhabited by a young and fortunate couple, celebrated and maintained, was on its last handful of summers. Sue will never plant in these barrels again, or rake the beach. One morning not too long from now a motorboat's wake—too fast and too close to shore—will take out a section of the dock, and then another.
          The rich lady living alone at the top of the hill will sell.

* * *

          Checkout was strictly at 10:00, "unless other arrangements have been made" said the paper tacked up in the kitchen. The penmanship was artsy and clear. At the bottom she signed "Sue and Zoe."

          Zoe is still here with her.

          Perhaps we'll come back next July, and the same hummingbird will stall like a New York cab at our picnic table, undecided whether to dip his beak in our rosé or a lily.

          Perhaps I'll get a tour of Sue's place, next year.

          Change the music, please.

          Think of something banal.

Father's Day Reflections

          His wife and his mother—two living rooms!
          In the one, there is no trace of him, as the linoleum tiles must have been pulled up and discarded, or scrubbed until colorless and bald.
          In the other, his boyhood portraits—one on each side of the blotter—overpower the desk. On the piano, his face begins already to be sad, the strange bloating of his last two years apparent. His wartime snapshots, and those of the uncertain civilian years that followed, look like frames from Hud.  
          Then quite suddenly, he made 33 look like 50.
          I have his suede windbreaker with the leather buttons. I have his slide ruler in its rigid kid leather case with FOGLE in big block letters down the side. I have every driver's license and vehicle registration he was issued between 1946 and 1952 and his Pennsylvania Railroad passes in bright construction-paper colors. I have his christening jacket and cap and tiny cotton socks the color of tapioca pudding.
          But most of all I have his drawings, the caricatures of a too-privileged childhood on Philadelphia's Main Line. One group is a tablet of faces labeled "Village Hen," "Writer," "Hick," "Queer," "Genius," and "Young Jew." Everything is extrapolated, objectified, the traits made lurid in the funhouse mirrors of his observant, articulate isolation.
          All through elementary school I remember the word, in the warm navy-blue ovals of my mother's penmanship, on the line designated for Father: deceased. "Heart attack," she would say, checking on a pot roast or dead-heading some petunias.
          But my grandmother would close her eyes, then open them, her voice full of a sad honey: "Your father died of a broken heart."
          Once when I was 35 and visiting her for the weekend, my mother and I went up to Ridge Pike to buy some flowers for her patio. I missed the parking lot for the garden center and had to turn around near a church. "Your father and I were married here."
          Such disclosures came throughout my life as the bricks of an old foundation work their way up to the topsoil of a flowerbed. 
          When I was 10 we were cleaning out our storage area in the basement of our apartment complex and I found a small, black, musty three-ring binder. The tiny pages inside were filled with a clear, bold handwriting that recorded, with a strange candor, household life. The only line I remember from it is Marion may be pregnant again.
          I handed it to my mother and she flipped its pages, balling some of them up with her fist. After a few minutes she handed it back to me.
          I gave it to my grandmother. 
          I never saw it again.

* * *

          Knowing my mother as I do, now and then I subtract her robust traits from my personality and reflect upon the ghostly remainder of the equation. They form a fragile etching, these genetic touches from another person, entirely unknown to me yet so present during my childhood in my grandmother's house—the shoebox of pictures, the dark closet of sports coats, neckties, and shoes. 
          I admit I feel a kinship with his rapid, confident pencil lines—that blind impulse to express.
          A proliferation, a superfluity of nerve endings just at the surface of his consciousness amassing a toolkit of mouths and chins and noses and knees upon which—from which—he drew. 
          A thousand painful, spiteful, delightful impressions.