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November 1, 2001
I walk the seven or so blocks to drop G.’s little blue quilted jacket off that she had left behind at the weekend. She is being charmingly naughty, an act which makes me realize I would be a lousy mother. I just want to laugh. Her grandmother from Kentucky has sent her a baby lion costume for Halloween, one that she has lovingly sewn. It has three constituent parts: a zip up body suit, a cap with ears and a cape/mane made with many shades of thick wool. The suit has a stuffed tail with a tuft matching the mane. Sewing is so rife with love. Coincidentally D. and I had discussed maternal love and sewing over the weekend. Her mother had lovingly recreated Burda patterns while her daughter impatiently fidgeted through fittings. My own mother could never quite submit to the discipline of patterns but she sewed and adjusted items for me with endless patience and few questions. I think the punk aesthetic left her somewhat confused, nevertheless she attempted to follow my directions and several outfits emerged as envied concoctions of that era’s slipshod brilliance: the tartan beaver-grazing mini skirt, shortened from something that must once have belonged to a diligent office goer and retrieved from a Mansion House thrift sale; an old shirt of hers that she had sewn in her youth which we converted from an interesting blouse to a colorful straight jacket; and endless projects involving string vests (string vests may be an Irish/British Isles only phenomenon) and gold lamé. I only know one contemporary who has this ability to throw bits of fabric together into wearable items. The last time I visited her home she was running up an evening dress for the millennium. She was pinning her svelte-self into it in front of a full length mirror while juggling two children under the age of three. Merely witnessing this energy, which was unfolding inside her huge Georgian house in Dublin, made me wilt and flee. Knitting is different from sewing. It accommodates more anarchy if you can give up the notion of following a pattern. Utilizing very fundamental technique you can actually create yourself a quite wearable item if you have even a modicum of tenacity. Why do I find myself thinking of these Victorian and traditionally female pastimes? Something in me, perhaps induced by sojourning out of the city on a regular basis, craves to be more self-sufficient. I have always found these activities deeply rewarding: baking, pickling, knitting. Can gardening be far behind? I even gave myself a hair cut and dye job this week. That’s several less hours performing tasks that are dull but not remedial in order to earn money. My exterior may start to look more peculiar but my interior will be less so. At least this is the hope.
October 11, 2001
I was on the West Side, realizing it is a month later but nevertheless enjoying one of those days that we live for: light strained through prisms of lemon essence, an astringent to every edge, the climate resolved briefly to perfection. A police car with a siren going is accompanying a van East on 23rd street. I continue with the efficient knitting of the self absorption of my days: leaving the dentist, relief at the end of a series of unpleasant treatments, the pain in my jaw retreating, excitement at the prospect of more time on the North Fork. Only the faded underline of guilt beneath the pleasure. I notice the van has the words City Morgue written on it. There is nothing clinical about the van, it is a gray cube van. Shouldn’t it be white? Morgue, America’s charming love affair with older English, mortuary is a more recent term. What are the other words illustrating the archaic strains of American English? What is it carrying? I become fixated on the arrangement of the interior of the van. Is it like the bread van that used to deliver bread to our house? Layers of narrow shelves with deep wooden trays each containing the fresh, soft loaves in waxy wrappers. Are there torsos, limbs, fragments of bodies laid out on trays, in body bags? Parts that were cherished. It occurs to me that dying in a less violent fashion, to die whole, not to be in parts, is a great privilege. I can’t get beyond the imagined horror of the van’s interior, wondering at its system, but only the van brings me close, briefly, to what has happened.
October 10, 2001
I’ve been meaning to leave New York for so long that it’s become one of those comforting embarrassments that you carry around like a stuffed animal way past the developmental sell by date. I’ve been meaning to leave New York for fifteen years; I had intended to stay for a year. The vanity of plans in a city of such seductive powers. My friend C. is a producer by profession and as with many talented and successful people her professional skills are often evident in her personal life. While I was slowly maneuvering around the idea of terrorist attacks acting as a catalyst to pry me out of the city she was in a car scouting the North Fork for houses. Before a considerable portion of the populous had settled on flight as an appropriate response, she had managed to procure a house, at what seems a ridiculously nominal rent, with four bed rooms, a fire place and a kitchen in which you can imagine performing endless, complicated and deeply satisfying culinary rituals. Her rationale in renting the house was not to escape the fear of terrorism, it was to “cheer us up.” Producers are often in charge of morale.
I’m not sure how one would make a living out there—a job at the Cutchogue McDonalds—so weekly stints in the city are still required. But I find myself wondering why I have prolonged the wearing of such an ill fitting shoe—permanent residency in Manhattan—for so long. “If in doubt, run away,” has frequently served as my motto. Economic necessity, moral paralysis? That part of a life that grows up around you in a city as you get older: a lover, friends, the unfounded conviction that you have to persist with your role as an extra in the drama of a great metropolis? Medical needs, the ability to get a shrimp stuffed squid at 10.25pm on a Monday night? I think I’m ready to relinquish them all, presuming that the lover and friends will visit. Especially when I think of the shed in the garden that M. sat in on Sunday working at her laptop. Returning from my bike ride I looked at her through the window and thought that there are few visions as pleasing as watching someone enjoy their work undisturbed. She emerged amazed at how much work she had done.
The house is ours only until May, but I suspect that this venture that C. so beautifully produced in her producer way—with certainty, without misgivings (though she might argue otherwise), and with a deep conviction of the possibility of outcomes that parallel and exceed dreams—has finally broken the seal of my self-siege in Manhattan. I’ve been crying wolf for so long with regard to city departure and finally there’s a train in the station that permits, even encourages, those that have been hallucinating wolves for years to board.
October 9, 2001
The potato boiling authoress’ book party reminded me of something that I had forgotten about her. She is one of many good looking sisters. A many sibling’d splendor. Her closely shared DNA can be found orbiting about her in many permutations. In a room she and her family are their own galaxy. One sister is present at the party with two of her own offspring; two girls stamped in their familiar gene foundry. The leit motif of feature, a varied palette of eyes and hair, but all with the echo of their own blood. Displaying that ability some families have of apparently subsuming the other half of the genes: “look no daddy, we cloned them.” Celebrating the way that a large family derives a degree of buoyancy from its own mass, creating a mythology out of its members.
I once had a roommate with a similarly large, predominantly female family. There were six sisters. I couldn’t keep the sisters names or the various strains of their soap operatic lives straight in my head. I was drowning in sisters, apparently I was living not with one sister but with all of them. Such proliferation of life both fascinated and repelled me. My own family always felt like a drifting triangle, winding down, two-stepping with entropy. Being without siblings, without offspring, and at the end of a series of small, withering families perhaps I merely console myself with this theory out of cold necessity, but somehow it has always felt like a suitable arrangement to me. I harbor a perverse pleasure in the fact that we are dying out. Relieved that the tribe is ready to relinquish its double helix at the gates of extinction. Prepared to revel in the ecstasy of dénouement, the accelerated pleasure of ending. To clock out from the factory of evolution. A delicious blasphemy.
A friend’s grandmother used to say on bringing her and her siblings to one of the vast Irish beaches and finding other humans present on it, even two or three, “Eugh, people....” She would turn on her heels, dragging the army of small children she had custody of for the day and seek out another beach. Fortunately for all involved it is not impossible to find an Irish beach empty of people. There she was with her tribe, gregarious with her own flock but not willing to descend onto the planes to mingle with the great soup of humanity. I have missed out on this grandmother’s conviction that one’s own are more than merely “people”, and on the pleasure she derived from being surrounded by the delicious infinity of variation she witnessed in her family, that which rendered her extended family simultaneously transparent and acutely visible to her.
I was looking down at the beach delighted that there were people there, people that looked very different from my own tribe; I went and joined them.
October 4, 2001
An invitation to a book party. The author, a friend unseen for years from college who resides in Ireland, has written a children’s book being published in the US. When I first lived here, in a self-made Irish ghetto on Flatbush Avenue Extension, she came to stay in what we referred to as nightmare dormitory. Whether it was a long standing thing or something that developed in the close quarters of the walk through apartment I don’t know, but she developed a passion for one of the permanent occupants, another friend from college. She would get up very early, before the staggered stagger to the bathroom, and boil potatoes. The potatoes were intended for the loved one’s breakfast. They would sit dry and floury in a pot waiting for him to arise and for her to fry them to perfection. Her attentions, particularly the potato boiling, irritated him. Living six to an apartment, boiling potatoes, drinking whisky. It would be a play to avoid on, even off, Broadway. Somebody I had developed a similarly misguided crush on once made a remark about the potato boiling authoress. It must have been spring or summer as she wore a series of slightly anachronistic cotton dresses that all featured a cut out triangle on the upper part of her back. He asked, “Where does she keep all of the triangles?” It endeared him to me even further. These things and her good skin came to mind when the invitation arrived.