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August 18, 2001
It’s so reassuring to be reassured. One of the most reassuring things one can do on a Friday summer night in Manhattan, when you have been left behind on the island with all the others who haven’t gone to places with more verdure or ocean or both, is to take yourself to the back of the Corner Bistro and have a burger with fries. It was soothing after an evening that seemed to be intent on presenting Manhattan in horror mode. A homeless man wheeling his supermarket trolley, suitcase to his life, had something hanging over his shoulder or hugging his neck. As I looked again it appeared to be a child, the legs dangling down his chest, the head facing downward over his shoulder. Or was it a chimpanzee dressed in a baseball outfit? Whatever it was it was not living. The teenage girls at the front of the bus, all three with cell phones and braces, are staring too. As the bus slows for a stop I can look again: perhaps he has fashioned this dead humanoid leech out of stuffed items of clothing.
The beautiful one-legged woman in the shower at the gym, fresh from the pool, lopsided mermaid.
The homeless man begging through a cab window with a hand that has had all of its digits ripped off.
And I can go and have a burger and be reassured? Shameful but true.
Perhaps the sweetest thing
You may encounter
On a New York street
Is a pigeon toed girl,
Head angle poised,
Walking Alone,
Laughing.
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.