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August 13, 2001
Mid-August fall is its own season. Through the heat today there was something autumnal in the air. You could be convinced that the phenomenon of the American summer, so neatly folded between Memorial and Labor Day, was coming to an early close.
A visit to the dentist. I’m in the chair waiting for numbness after the needle, looking out of the window at the premonition of fall and listening to the dialogue of an old black and white movie on the recently installed TV, which I can’t see from my seat. Do voices still sound like that? I think not. Have voices changed or did the sound recording then make them sound creamier, layered, like cake?
The dentist has disappeared, his assistant had come in to tell him that a patient was in the waiting room with an emergency.
“She wants you to take out all her teeth.”
“Is she in pain,” he asks.
“No, but she’s crying.”
Coming from the waiting room is the persistent howl of a woman, a cry that rises and falls but refuses to wane. This, coupled with the strangely racy dialogue of the old movie, is creating a ball of hysterical laughter that rises through me. The dentist returns to tell me that the woman, who is 93, may be demented but she knows exactly what she wants: She wants her teeth out. His assistant joins him and the task of reupholstering my rotten teeth begins. He drills, she holds the suction pipe, I try to make accommodating spaces for their instruments. There is an element of mirth in the room not usually associated with dental procedures. By now the woman has gone, she will return tomorrow to have her teeth extracted. The three of us gathered around the drill can barely contain our embarrassed glee: the terrible weeping has ceased, we are not 93, we are not having our teeth pulled.
Summer Blockbuster
In the blockbuster of your summer
How is the love interest;
Is your leading man convincing.
And what of your plot points, are they driving
towards a clever resolution.
You didn’t realize you had to play the silly ingénue again?
Listen, count yourself lucky,
The producers thought you a little long in the tooth
To be playing anything at all.
August 6, 2001
I mentioned a night out with a friend B. and waking the next day feeling miserable (May 22nd). During my visit to Ireland I had dinner with her. She apologized for not having phoned the next morning after our night out in New York; her husband had gone on a Sopranos tour and she had sat in the sauna of the hotel and wept. She hadn’t been sure why she had spent the day weeping but mentioned having these days of late.
My clearance of the books led to a desire to clear everything. I tackled the boxes of photos and was doing well until I encountered the past. Photos are all the past, but some—it’s partly to do with the quality of those photos, they are good photos, and with the point in time when they were taken—render the past in a more acute manner. One set of photos is particularly redolent of this phenomenon. In the photos it is apparent that it is not warm. We are in Donegal. There are five of us; four women. We are swimming naked in the Atlantic, drying our shoes with hair dryers in the cottage and walking on sea foam covered rocks. B. is there. It’s probably seventeen years ago. There is a very vivid sense of movement in the photos, of us walking on the beach, jumping across rocks, of wind. There is something not quite static about them, as if they might start up again at any moment and subsume the present. The past has distributed itself unevenly in the box of photos, some are merely old, but in the ones of Donegal there is a great glut of old time silting up the images.
I mentioned to B. at dinner in Dublin that I had awoken in a similar state after our night out in New York. I hazarded the lost girlhood theory as an explanation for our melancholy and knew immediately by her reaction that for her this was not the case for her.
August 2, 2001
Tribes spotted while passing through summer SoHo: herd of tourists betraying themselves with backward backpacks, strange shoes and their refusal to cooperate with that widely held belief that if you are not in a hurry in New York there must be something wrong with you: at least know how to get out of the way quickly. Starved mother: birth is no excuse for a few extra pounds. Good pant girl: girls with pants that make both wearer and observer pant.
July 30, 2001
During this visit to Ireland I rediscovered the joy of socializing with my mother while seated within the confines of her disintegrating car. Hurtling along, with the necessary exchange of power provided by me being at the wheel, delivered an ease that was absent in the home. We talked, laughed and performed dull chores together: the purchasing of a new mattress, the repair of the vacuum, the gathering of the groceries. For me, one who is always alarmed by the challenges of the simplest task, assisting my mother suddenly lent me an efficiency I don’t associate with my daily existence. There was no room for foundering, for getting lost in the jungle of north Dublin, no possibility that we shouldn’t be able to find a parking space. I became the warrior of chores, understanding that our unheeded progress was vital to the maintenance of our camaraderie. We made our way to Classic Furniture to buy a new mattress. En route we pass the Cadbury’s factory. We stop at the traffic lights and I become hypnotized by the purple script declaring the brand of product being made within. The C of the sign is a purple whirlpool, the d and b mirror images of each other. I want chocolate.
Classic Furniture is one of those stores that provides its own form of relief by containing nothing that you could possibly want. I want to proclaim from atop its highest CD tower: “Classic Furniture, you have temporarily freed me of desire.” Nothing in Classic Furniture is remotely classic, it is all a dull modern conglomeration of shoddy function that has bypassed anything conversant with the pleasure that can be derived from form. However, in the back we find a good orthopedic mattress to replace the tired noodle that my mother has been folding herself into for too long. She asks strange questions of the salesman that he answers with patience and conspiratorial smiles directed at me. I have fallen into one of the armchairs, my mother has shifted gear into an uncharacteristic spending spree: why not replace all of the mattresses? On our return home I phoned my friend Una who had recommended Classic Furniture as the nearest mattress outlet; we had devised a vague plan to meet there that afternoon as she too was in the market for a new mattress. Her trip to Classic Furniture had been somewhat less successful, she had left without purchasing a mattress as her two children had immediately thrown tantrums, used the beds as trampolines and filled their diapers to capacity. I sympathized with them.