By the time I was fifteen, I was a regular in a bar. Which, back then, wasn’t all that unusual. It was the late-60s, we lived in Queens, and the bartender was a barmaid, a novelty at the time. Gracie. Black spit-curls, white boots, black miniskirt, white scoop-neck blouse. She called me Hon. She called everyone Hon. This one’s on me, Hon. She was our barmaid, and Foxie’s was our bar. We spent more time there than we did at home. And yet, we played the same song over and over again, nearly the entire crowd shouting out the refrain: “We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do! …Girl, there’s a better life for me and you.”

There were several sad old men who shared the bar with us, men who never seemed to go home, who sat in the same seats every night, positioning themselves by the ice. When Gracie bent down to fix a drink, the men tried to look down her blouse. I can see them now, angling for a better view, rising up off of their stools. She had the deliberate, buoyant optimism of someone who had been through a war, slightly ravaged, but resolute, willing herself to go on. Her mascara would sometimes seep into the tiny web of cracks around the eyes, like a miniature oil spill. Her eyes had a rubbed look, rubbed and raw, so that you could easily imagine her crying.

She was old enough to be my mother.

* * *

The first time I had a gun pulled on me, it was the night of Christmas day. I’d just dropped off my girlfriend, and was standing at the bus stop, resigned to the long ride home, when two men approached, asked if I was waiting for the bus. I thought they needed directions, which bus went where, but when I said yes, one of the men told me to come around the corner. The other pulled out a gun. I can see it now as I write this, the black revolver, waist high, pointed at my stomach.

At first, I couldn’t believe it. It was about 11:00 at night, we were standing on a busy street, cars driving past, an outdoor mall across the road (though most of the shops would have been closed), a large, busy diner on the opposite corner. And for some reason, I don’t know why exactly, I started arguing with the thieves.

Man, I said, you can’t be doing this to me.

Both of the men were black, and I think I suggested they go to a wealthier neighborhood, mug someone with more money, that it wasn’t right to rob someone who didn’t have very much to take. I went on and on like this—You can’t be doing this to me, I said again and again—until one of the men, the one without the gun, became impatient.

Give me your wallet, he said, give me your fucking wallet!

I gave him my wallet, he fled around the corner, but I was still arguing with the other man, the one with the gun.

That’s all the money I have in the world, I said.

Which was ridiculous, I was still living at home. I had twenty-four dollars in my wallet, most of which had been given to me for Christmas.

Come around the corner, said the man, now more agitated than me. Come around the corner!

I walked with him, pleading my case the entire time.

When we got around the corner, he asked how much money I’d had.

Twenty-five dollars.

He took out a large wad of bills, peeled off two tens and five, and gave them to me.

We didn’t want your money, he said. We wanted your ID.

Which startled me.

Okay, I said, after a moment, but it isn’t real.

I had a phony draft card—maybe it was genuine, but it wasn’t mine—as well as several fake birth certificates, which I’d made for several girls (proof, we called it), to get them into bars. At the time, copiers would print reverse copies, white to black, black to white. All I had to do was take a real one, which was black with white letters, cover the names and details, copy it, fill in the new information, copy it again.

Okay, said the man, absently, thanks.

Hey, I said, as he turned to go, when you’re finished with it, can I have it back?

The man was speechless.

I’ll give you my address. You can mail it to me.

I don’t have a pen, he said, flustered.

Someone happened to be walking by at that moment.

Hey, I called out, you got a pen?

I have a pen, said the thief, with some desperation, I have a pen!

And then, without a second thought, I gave my home address to a man who was holding a gun on me.

When I turned to go, I almost wished him Merry Christmas.

I never received anything in the mail, and, stupidly, I never told my parents. The whole thing was stupid, reckless, wild with risk, a headlong leap into the naked, electric unknown.

* * *

Drinking was like a job I had, a job I was good at, with its own familiar routine, starches (baked potato or bread) before going out, water (a quart of water) before bed. It was only when I opened my eyes that the room would stop spinning. If I turned sideways, it would be worse, my head whirling like a ball off a bat, the darkness swirling like a painting by Van Gogh. Eventually, I knew not to turn, not to move my head. The trick was to fix on one point in the room, like a sailor staring at the horizon.

There is a tendency—in me, my family, in the culture at large—to make a joke out of this, especially in retrospect. But it wasn’t a joke then. And yet, it was. It was a relief from the very fact of yourself, your very pitiful self, a fact that drinking only seemed to confirm. Drunk, you were aware of the misery of it, of the need to get drunk, even as you were free of it, free of the daily, redundant self-disgust, simply because you were drunk, or drunk enough.

We drank in stairwells, doorways, garages, drank behind the funeral parlor. We drank under the windy overpass of the parkway, standing in ankle-deep snow, numb hand wrapped around a beer can, scotch smuggled in a peanut-butter jar, whiskey in a mouthwash bottle. I can see myself passing out on the sidewalk, in a closet, pissing on the floor, sleeping in my own vomit, vomiting green when there was nothing left to vomit. I can remember not remembering, oblivion lingering like a migraine, the previous day surviving only in brief, disconnected flashes, like a landscape made visible by lightning.

In high school, when I happened to come across the twelve warning signs of alcoholism, I was surprised, and yet oddly gratified, to find that nine of them described me.

* * *

My uncles taught me how to drink.

Pace yourself, they said. Pace yourself. Always remember to eat.

At large family gatherings in cavernous catering halls, my uncles and my father would look down on any man who stumbled toward the toilet or his chair.

Amateur night, they’d sneer, it’s amateur night.

The point was to drink without showing it, and I was schooled from an early age. And what is clear to me now (though it wasn’t clear then) is that the first time I got drunk—the first time the room spun around on me, the first time I lost my footing, lost consciousness, vomited—it was at one of those large family gatherings in the Bronx, just after my grandmother’s funeral.

* * *

I can still see my grandmother now, the easy smile, hook nose, the deep creases in her olive face, the scent of garlic on her skin, the flower print dress—she was the first great love, the first great loss of my life. I can still see those endless Sunday dinners in her crowded living room, the small tables crammed together, chairs backed up against the sofa, my sister and parents and cousins and aunts and uncles eating and drinking and shouting throughout the long afternoon into the night.

Now that she was gone, the family began to get together in one of those same large catering halls in the Bronx, as part of what would come to be known as the Cousins Club (one of my uncles actually had letterhead printed up), whose stated purpose was to hold the family together now, in the wake of Grandma Minnie’s death.

The Cousins Club, though, for all its good intentions, would meet no more than once a year.

The selflessness, the devotion, the glue that had held the family together was an Old World glue. None of the women of my aunts’ generation, the generation that had been born here, wanted to take on such a daunting burden. No one wanted all these people in her home. No one wanted all that unavoidable work, the careful shopping, sizeable expense, endless cleaning, the artful cooking, my uncles’ blunt critique—no one wanted to go through all of this even a few times a year, let alone every week. My aunts had families of their own, and these families had other lives, lives outside the life of the large, extended family. And so, we began to see less of my aunts and my uncles and my many cousins.

I’m not sure I sensed this happening back then, sensed my life changing. I’m not sure I felt the world changing around me.

* * *

It was around this time that I stopped going to church. I would leave home each Sunday morning as if I were going to mass, then when I was several blocks away, turn toward the avenue and the diner, where I would meet up with my friends. I can’t remember the name of it now (we called it the Greek diner), but I remember the excitement of it, the chrome tube of a building, like a submarine, the tiny juke box at each opaline table, the selections on flip cards, the round chrome handle, chrome buttons, chrome speakers, the thrill of forcing the rest of the place to listen to whatever you selected, the thrill of ditching church, of ordering coffee, the thick white porcelain cups, the thrill of being treated like an adult. It was almost as exciting as hanging out at the bar.

Eventually, for some reason, I told my mother I didn’t want to go to church anymore. She talked to me quietly in my room, asked me why.

I said I no longer believed.

My mother, hazel eyes, pokey nose, hair permed into curls, inclined her head, considered it, and surprised me. She said I no longer had to go.

My sister called out from her room: I don’t wanna go either!

Why? said my mother

Because he’s not.

That’s not a good enough reason, said my mother. And my sister, at thirteen, was still expected to attend.

This was who my mother was. She listened. She was generous and thoughtful and kind. She was loving and selfless and cheerful. (Unlike my father. Which was one of the dire mysteries of my childhood, how she wound up with him.)

What I didn’t tell my mother that day was that even though I’d left the Church (and wouldn’t go back), I had already made a secret pact: with God.

Late one night when I couldn’t sleep, when the terror wouldn’t let me sleep, I begged, whispering as if I were praying—which, in a way, I was—pleading with Him to spare me, spare my family, refrain from killing us, and if He did this, I promised, I swore, I would never smoke another cigarette, never take another drink, never touch a girl’s breast.

* * *

When I was fifteen and floundering, sometimes I would dream away an entire day, without even realizing it. I might be sitting on the edge of the bed, black sneaker about to swallow my foot, and I would find myself looking at a pattern in the headboard. Sometimes I would see a face staring back at me, a face in the wood grain, and I would try to keep it in front of me, so that if I were to look away, the face would still be there when I looked back. But it rarely was.

When my father came in, I was sitting on the edge of the bed, examining the frayed green laces of my sneaker. It took a moment to adjust to this, the incongruity of his presence in my room.

My father was a man who worked with his hands, wide ears, long nose, trim moustache, reminiscent of Clark Gable. He often worked two jobs at a time.

Joseph, he said almost tenderly, what is it?

Tell me. Is it a girl?

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. It was a girl. And yet, it wasn’t. I thought it was a girl. And yet, what it was was much larger than this, larger than I could possibly say. I didn’t see this then. I didn’t see many things (I don’t see many now). But back then I thought I saw what it was. I thought it was a girl.

And maybe it was.

I knew it, my father said. I knew it!

Now I’m grateful for this, the focus my father made of me that day. But I wasn’t grateful then. I was sneering. I was aloof. I was exposed.

Joseph, listen to me. I’m gonna tell you something. I’m gonna give you some advice. The words were strange in his mouth. I’d never heard them when they weren’t attached to a threat.

You listening? This is my advice. Here’s the girl, and he snatched up a knickknack from the top of my bureau, a small ceramic tiger, its glazed stripes reflecting the overhead light.

Here’s the girl, he said again, waving the tiny figurine. You want the girl? You want the girl? This is what you do.

He smacked the tiger down on the bureau. Then turned, and left the room.

I watched his huge mass retreat down the short hallway, then reverse itself, growing large again as it returned. When my father stood in the doorway, he nearly filled the frame.

You want the girl? he said, reaching for the little tiger, squeezing it between his thick fingers. Here’s the girl.

He slapped it down.

Walk away.

And, agile for his size, he spun around, ambled out of the room, and did not come back.

* * *

I’ll marry you, I say, declaring what I believe to be the ultimate declaration.

The bus swerves, its great bulk heaving like a ship, the oblong window swinging out, attached only at the top, opening like a door, then slamming shut.

Kathy stands out of her seat, the floor lurching beneath her feet, penny loafers, knee socks, wraparound skirt. She walks the length of the bus, throws herself into the back row, shoes on the wheel casing, bare knees in the air, face pressed against the window.

She’s the kind of girl who’ll go to a party or a dance with me, then hide until I find her.

I will, I say, sitting down beside her. I’ll marry you.

Are you for real? Where would we go? How would we live?

I’ll do whatever you need me to.

She rolls her blue eyes. I’m not, she says, head shaking, black hair flying, I’m not gonna quit school—I’m not even sixteen!

But what if you’re…?

I know, those blue eyes swimming, I know. I don’t want to talk about it.

I’m the kind of boy who believes in talking. Which Kathy, as a rule, finds pointless, boring.

Look, there’s nothing we can do. We just gotta wait is all.

She’s right. A week later, she’ll call. You can forget it, she’ll say. I got my friend. It’s all right.

But right now, all I know is: it’s my fault.

What I don’t know, what Kathy doesn’t seem to know, is that we haven’t really done what we think we’ve done. All I did was come between her thighs—then the two of us feverish with guilt, her eyes inflamed, mascara running down her face like soot. And a month or two later, the proposal on the bus. It was ridiculous, I could see it was ridiculous, impossible, overblown, but it was no less humiliating when she turned me down.

After calling to say everything was fine, she never went out with me again.

* * *

Half a year later, I was arrested by plainclothesmen for drinking in the park. I was on my sixth half-quart of Colt 45. Even the cops were, or pretended to be, impressed.

I was drunk, but not too drunk to try to get away. The cop was holding me by the arm of my jacket, and I thought I could just run out of it. But before I could slip it off, he grabbed me by the neck.

A few blocks later, I tried to throw up on him, shock him, so that I could run away. He just stepped back, held me at arm’s length.

It was only at the precinct that I started to register what was happening, sitting in a big wooden chair, waist-high partitions dividing the room, the uniformed cops eating ice cream out of a large paper bag, and then the realization: that my father would soon be there. It was summer, the wide heavy windows were open to the sultry night, and it suddenly occurred to me: that I could jump. I actually calculated the drop—we weren’t more than two stories up—and waited for my chance, watching the movement of the cops. At one point, they happened to be busy on the other side of the room, I had my moment, but before I could work up the nerve, there he was, a man the size of a door, glaring at me like a guard dog.

My father had the body of a defensive lineman, no neck, arms like legs, hands like sandpaper. His life hadn’t taken the kind of criminal turn that seemed to define my uncle Babe (who made the Daily News, who did time), but as a kid, my father had run wild. I’d heard the stories, jumping rooftops, riding in stolen cars, hanging out at the track, punching a cop, going AWOL in the Army.

When he got married, he said, he left that life behind.

The moral of these stories was often pointed in my direction. Don’t even think of taking a step sideways, I’ve been there, I know where the risk is in the world, so listen up, do as you are told. But there was another moral that went unstated, implicit in the telling itself, a moral having to do with the very authority with which my father spoke.

This is what a man is, this is what men do.

The trip home from the precinct was excruciatingly slow. My father made me walk ahead of him, his presence behind me radiating like fire, my thoughts scrambling like pigeons, my legs tacking involuntarily, my eyes like a camera that had been tossed in the air.

At one point, when I tried to turn around, tried to explain, he cracked me across the head hard. So hard, I still feel it.

Years later, my father told me why he had done it. He was laughing, he said, and didn’t want me to see it.

* * *

Of course, I was punished. Two months in my room. Two months during which I started to see myself differently. Which is when I came to a frightening realization. I enjoyed it, the silence, the solitude, the time spent inside my head. Contemplation is not a suitable climax in a novel. But it is in life. It changed me, that solitary time in my room, the uninterrupted thinking, the books I was reading—I can’t remember now which books they were, other than that they were stories in which I found people as confused and screwed up as I was.

Which opened my eyes: to the fact that each of us lives with secret fears and doubts and failings. Which, in turn, connected me to my friends in a new way. And yet, at the same time, it cut me off from them. I started to see myself from outside myself. I started to see others this way as well: from a distance. Separated from my friends, I began to see that I was independent of them. Their opinions did not reach me in my room. Their daily rituals, their relentless, competitive insults (a sport at which my uncles and father also excelled), went on without me. I was irrelevant, I was not who they thought I was.

They were Irish, I was Italian, and I had a new name among them (among the friends who would soon become my former friends). I was Ball. Which was short for Greaseball.

(Even though I didn’t look Italian at all. I had freckles and fair skin.)

This is not to suggest that there wasn’t an air of hilarity attached to it. This is not to suggest that it wasn’t cruel. The hilarity itself was cruel. The cruelty was hilarious. And everyone, everyone was subject to it.

I remember one poor girl being laughed at, right to her face. Regina.

You. Are. Ug. Ly! Uhhh-hug-leee!

(It comes back to me now that this girl was Italian, with a large, Italian nose.)

Everyone was attacked. Everyone attacked everyone else. The threat of ridicule, the threat of violence, was always present, always pressing upon us.

Jimmy C. used to tell the story of how he and a few of the guys from the park—Cuban heels, black stovepipes, swirling pompadours—amused themselves at a dance. They would arrive drunk, head straight for the men’s room, where they would comb their hair, then come out swinging—at whoever happened to be standing near the door.

Jimmy C. was older than us, a hitter, as we used to say, and this had been his time, a time of gang wars and ruined virgins and illicit joyrides. I can still see an overturned car in which three had died. I went down to the police station to see it, the blood on the ceiling thick and gaudy, swirling like stucco. I can see a purpled back that had been whipped with chains. And then the gang fight between our park and another. Drunken war hoops, zip guns, bottles and antennas used as weapons. Which was the only world I had known.

Jingle, the older boys would say, before I’d turned ten. You were expected to hop, to make any coins audible, so that they could then be taken. I can see one sly, sad boy, Brian, trying to muffle the sound, holding his pockets while he jumped. They lifted him by the ankles, upended him, shook the money out, like apples from a branch. Brian was often beaten up, and so was I.

But now fighting was suddenly obsolete, men were men without it, women weren’t attracted to men who were violent. A societal shift—having to do, in no small part, with Vietnam—entered my life like a reprieve.

And around this time, I started hanging out with a different circle of friends in the park, friends who sat on the scraggly lawn within the large oval of the track, friends who wore their hair long, played guitar, read books, did drugs.

One of these new friends once told me he was beaten for wearing a T-shirt, a washed-out, rainbow T-shirt with one word emblazoned across its narrow chest: phlegm.

Greg said the men who had beaten him had done so simply because they couldn’t decipher that single syllable, they didn’t know what it meant. In our neighborhood, wearing such a shirt was like raising your hand in class. It was considered arrogant, living beyond your caste, your origins. And when Greg told me this story, there was a kind of knowledge that seemed to pass between us, as well as a kind of sadness.

He made a point of this, that it was preferable to know such sorrow, to know extreme highs and lows, than to live your life in a comfortable, sheltered monotony, never knowing overwhelming despair or blinding delight.

It was an idea that spoke to me then. To lose yourself in raw sensation, fevered passion, heat. There was a new imperative, a new religion in the wind, and it danced in my veins, it sang in my brain, it breathed its sacraments into my mouth.

And yet, the paradox of that time is that my own raw sensations, my own fevered passions, were unbearable to me. I couldn’t live with them.

* * *

After the death of my grandmother, the night frightened me in a way I had never known. It wasn’t my dreams, it was my head—I couldn’t turn it off, couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing what I didn’t want to see. I can’t remember now what it was, what was haunting me. But it seems likely it had something to do with her passing. There were thoughts in my head I just couldn’t bear to think.

The one image that comes back to me now, as I write this, is my grandmother’s colorless face in her coffin—the flesh flaccid on the bone, like chicken that’s been cooked too long—an image, it seems likely, I couldn’t not see, couldn’t shut out. It seems likely there were others like this, torturing me, obsessing me, the dread of my mother dying, my sister, me.

Eventually, in order to fall asleep, I’d tell myself that the things inhabiting my head were a movie. I’d even imagine a literal screen onto which they were being projected, and at first, the movie would be indistinguishable from whatever else was going on in my mind. Then, in my head, I would step back, so that the movie was completely contained within one precise rectangle. I’d step back again and again, so that the rectangle would become smaller and smaller, shrinking until it disappeared, that final, flickering dot just before this would happen, a tiny bluish flash of light, like an ancient television when you turned it off.

But as soon as it got to this point, the point of vanishing, another rectangle would appear, larger than before, showing the same movie, as though my mind were battling back, insisting on its own autonomy. I’d battle back, too, imagine a projector, imagine myself shutting it off. And the screen would go blank. This was always a tenuous victory. I’d have to keep it there, that screen. I’d have to concentrate on keeping it empty, a broad, white, immaculate geometry. But then I was conscious of myself inside my own head watching the blank screen. And this in itself, the image of me sitting there in my own mind, this would become the movie I was now watching. Which would lead me back to places I didn’t want to go.

I was often up for hours.

* * *

Before I turned sixteen, I started doing drugs, largely because my mother couldn’t smell them on my breath. After I’d been arrested for drinking in the park, she’d stop me each night before I went up to bed, leaning in close, inhaling deeply. Whatever she might have been able to smell, she had no idea what it was. Which I found funny, even as it alarmed me. I was always anxious I’d get caught, always amused that my mother couldn’t catch me, the amusement, like the anxiety, amplified by the very thing she couldn’t detect.

Back then, almost everything was funny, almost anything could be frightening. Steve, a speed freak—thin face, freckles, wild eyes—would stand on the same street corner for hours, scoping out each passerby.

Narco, he’d say. He’s a narc.

Everyone was a narc, a hardhat, a suit, an obese woman wheezing as she walked, even a withered old man with a crutch, one leg dragging behind him.

When I laughed at this, Steve laughed as well, laughing at himself, even though he wouldn’t back down.

I know it looks ridiculous, but that’s how they get you, man.

Many of my friends thought Steve ridiculous as well, even though two plainclothesmen had once come out of nowhere, even though we knew the cops by name—they were so familiar to us. I can’t remember those names now, but I can still see them. One was older, black, tall, suit jacket, dark glasses, the other short, white, thick mustache, hair over his ears, long as mine.

They’d lined us up in the park. We were standing shoulder to shoulder on the track. They told us to empty our pockets, but before anyone could, Johnny was flying, arms and legs like pistons, one of the cops racing after him, the older one, belly jiggling, jacket flapping, his gun in the air. All these many years later, I can still see the flash from the nozzle, can still hear the shot, the shock of it. The line-up, the race, the gun going off—all of it was terrifying.

And yet, it was electrifying.

Later, I’d find out Johnny had heroin in his underwear. He was the son of a cop, and knew the officer couldn’t shoot him, could only fire a warning shot. He also knew he could outrun him. Which we found hilarious, that the cop never caught him, was too paunchy, too out of shape to catch him. It was hilarious that Johnny kept running, didn’t stop, didn’t even flinch at the concussive blast of the gun.

We all admired him for this, though not one of us would have admitted it.

* * *

At about this point, my friends in the park began talking about the books they were reading, books I might not otherwise have read, Steppenwolf, The Stranger, The Fall. At the time, I gave myself to these books. I swallowed them whole. And it mattered, mattered profoundly, that my friends were as deeply affected by them as I was. We talked about them without really talking about them directly, as though it were a test of their power, or a sign of respect for that power, as in certain religions where one is forbidden to speak the name of God.

My mother, attentive and, as I look back on it now, generous with her time—she was working full time, managing two kids, a husband, a home, falling asleep to the monotony of the TV—my mother took an interest in my reading, asked to borrow my copy of Demian.

When she gave it back, she wondered what I’d thought of the plot, started to offer her idea of the theme.

My memory of this is that I actually snarled at her. I can see my face twisting around my lips.

It’s not a plot, I said, dismissively. It’s true!

At fifteen, I really did believe this. I thought every novel was true.

I don’t remember my mother’s response, though it seems likely that my words would have left her speechless. In any event, she never brought the subject up again, and after this, I don’t think she ever asked to borrow any of my books.

I’ve reread Demian since that time, and was taken in again by the characters, the urgency, the mystery surrounding them. But I found myself recoiling at certain sentiments, all those ardent sentences about evil as a benign entity, the blind, dark blossoming of your own true destiny.

“Each man,” says the novel’s hero, Emil Sinclair, “had only one genuine vocation—to find the way to himself. He might end up as poet or madman, as prophet or criminal—that was not his affair, ultimately it was of no concern.”

In Hesse’s Steppenwolf, another book of supreme importance to me back then, Harry Haller is a man divided between his two natures, the ordinary man and the free roving wolf. Unlike the wolf, the ordinary man can’t “live intensely.” But the wolf, says Harry, is seething with a “wild longing for strong emotions and sensation.” He is swept up in a “rage against the toneless, flat, normal and sterile life.” He has a “mad impulse to smash something.”

Whether you’re a madman or criminal is of no concern. All that matters is raw sensation, passion, the authenticity of the self.

Somewhere in high school, I had begun to believe that what was real was only what you feel, as long as you feel it intensely. Which was difficult to resist, to see the world as you want to see it, the vivid picture dancing in your head. Soon, very soon, I would be taking almost any pill that was offered, without even knowing what it was. I would soon be hitchhiking hundreds of miles, without even knowing where I was going, walking naked in the woods, doing acid, losing my mind on acid, taking three days to come down. Then doing it all over again. Friends of mine would soon be shooting heroin. I would soon be trying to talk them out of it, out their addiction. Too many of my friends would soon die.

Our world would soon open up like a wound.

But at fifteen, I didn’t really know what was coming. I didn’t really know what I was doing. Back then there wasn’t anything to consider. There wasn’t any hesitation, any ambiguity.

“We are only what we feel,” sang Neil Young, somewhere in those years.

And I believed him.

IT STARTED THAT SUMMER with Bookie & Reynaldo’s mom, the one with blonde hair who looked like T-Boz from the R&B group TLC. The boys and their mom lived in an apartment down the street from us until one day their windows were boarded up and they were gone. My friend Nina, who had a crush on Bookie, told me their mom had been selling drugs and now she was in jail.

“Their mom sold drugs?” I heard her just fine, but I was having trouble believing the news.

I stared at their building and wondered how people could disappear while the world kept moving along without a pause.

This was the summer I was twelve years old. I had first met Nina a few weeks prior when I was in the corner store getting candy with my younger sisters Ann and Emerson. Nina looked to be about my age and also had two younger sisters with her.

Nina and her sisters watched how we placed our orders with Pam, pointing out our selections behind the glass counter that displayed rows and rows of brightly colored candy. The labels competed for our attention. Made with real strawberry flavor! Lucky Lights, the candy cigarettes that are just like Dad’s! We paid with food stamps because candy counted as food.

Rosie, the owner and store’s namesake, was a rotund woman with hair the color of a ripe tomato. She sat with her legs up in an armchair all day while she barked orders at Pam. Pam was plain with short gray hair that she always covered with a hairnet. She ran the cash register and cooked on the store’s grill, behind which Rosie had placed a sign that read, Please don’t embarrass us by asking for credit. I didn’t understand because nearly everyone in the neighborhood had a tab.

“You girls must be new,” Rosie said to Nina and her sisters.

“Yes. We moved here from Puerto Rico,” Nina said.

“Rhode Island’s a long way from Puerto Rico,” Rosie commented.

Outside, the youngest sister walked up to Emerson. She wore sparkly pink jellies on her feet and reached into her bag to offer my sister a piece of candy.

“Hi, I’m Chelly.” she said.

We started hanging out all the time. We would meet them outside Rosie’s in the early afternoon to buy a snack then retreat to their bedroom to hide from the sun and watch Spanish language soap operas. Nina would tell us the back story and translate each of the scenes as the gorgeous actors screamed and cried and kissed one another.

“She was kidnapped and that’s her husband and she thinks he saved her, but he was really behind the kidnapping the whole time,” Nina explained as she bit off a piece of candy necklace.

I loved to look through their closet at the carefully arranged outfits, each pair of shorts with its matching top and sometimes even a headband. My sisters and I had stopped wearing matching outfits years earlier, but Nina and her sisters often coordinated theirs. Pink one day, plaid another.

We would walk to the local park that had a couple of playgrounds and a pond everyone referred to as Social Ocean or we’d sit on the steps outside their apartment building. Our new friends would play in our yard from time to time, but we never invited them inside our house. There was too much inside that required explaining, like why our baby brother Johnny screamed in his high chair for hours in front of the television or why Mom was sleeping at two o’clock in the afternoon. Dysfunction was to be guarded like a family recipe.

Just before we met the sisters, we were watching television one night when blue lights began to dance along the living room walls. When I peeked out the window to see what was going on, I saw Mom pulling the car into the driveway with a police cruiser behind her.

My sisters ran to the window to join me. We watched as the police and Mom spoke.

“Let’s open the windows.” Emerson moved to slide the glass up.

“No, shhh.” I pushed her hands away. We could only watch so long as we went undetected.

As Mom turned toward us, I expected her to walk up the driveway and the police to drive away but instead they placed handcuffs on her and led her to the back of the cruiser. My younger siblings cried and screamed and asked why they were taking Mom away, but I had no answers for them. I only had questions. Why couldn’t the cops let her go? Did they know she had children? If so, did they care if there was another adult home to care for us? Wasn’t getting into the driveway like being safe in a game of tag?

In response to Mom’s DUI, Nana sent Uncle Cliff to stay with us under the pretense that he would help out. Although he was over six feet tall and in his mid-twenties, his immaturity and freckles made him seem younger. I doubted his utility from the start, and as the days passed, I learned that I was right in this assumption. He didn’t actually do anything to help. He didn’t cook when Mom forgot, he manipulated my younger siblings into doing him favors, and he never helped feed or bathe Johnny.

When I went into the basement where Uncle Cliff had set up a cot to sleep, I was looking to take out my new purple 10-speed bike for my first summer ride. It wasn’t there. I raced upstairs ready to murder one of my siblings for riding it without my permission.

“Where’s my fucking bike?” I demanded. They barely moved their heads away from the television program. Uncle Cliff, however, smirked like he had a funny secret.

“That was your bike?” “Yeah, it’s mine.”

He laughed. “It’s not anymore. I sold it.”

I wanted to punch him in his face. Instead, I decided to get Mom after him. Then he’d have to go home. I ran to the dining room.

“Mom, did you hear that? Uncle Cliff stole my bike!”

“He did?” She looked at me blankly with shrunken pupils. “Mom, what are you going to do about it? He stole my bike!”

She mumbled something that was apparently a threat to her brother as her chin fell to her chest.

I tore through the living room and hurled myself up the stairs two at a time. I wouldn’t give Uncle Cliff the satisfaction of seeing me upset. I slammed my bedroom door shut and flung myself on my bed. I cried hot, angry tears. I envisioned punching and kicking my uncle until he bled and cried. I was even more pissed at my mother for her failure to take action against him. What was wrong with her? Since when didn’t she protect her kids? I wanted to shake her awake and force her to protect me.

Ann came upstairs later to tell me that Uncle Cliff had bragged that he spent the money from my bike on prostitutes and crack. He taunted me later when I came back downstairs to watch The Ricki Lake Show.

“Did the little baby have a good cry over her bike?”

“Fuck you, Cliff.”

I fell in love with Nina’s older brother the first time I saw him. My sisters and I were lounging around in Nina’s room when Gabriel rushed in to give his sisters a few dollars.

“For lunch,” he said gruffly and hurried out.

He was only a year older than me, but he had a way of rushing around like he was overwhelmed as the man of the house. I wondered if his dad had told him to take care of things or if he just fell into that role. I didn’t even know where their father was, but I didn’t ask because I didn’t think it was polite. Plus, I didn’t want to have to explain the absence of my own father.

I was always on the lookout for Gabriel when I was in Nina’s apartment. I craved a glimpse of him. I thought only of his brown eyes and the scent of his cologne. I started taking special care with my outfits and applied my mother’s Covergirl foundation and mascara to look my best. Most of the time he wasn’t even home, and when I did get lucky enough to see him, he largely ignored me. Still, I lived for those times when he did appear. A smile or a nod from him provided me with sustenance for days.

One evening, my sisters and I were listening to music in Nina’s room when Gabriel showed up. Instead of running in and out like usual, he sat on the twin bed, nodding his head to the music. I froze, stopped singing along, and focused on breathing.

As Soul for Real’s “Candy Rain” played on the radio, Gabriel reached over and ran his fingers along my shin. Thank God I had started shaving my legs.

“So smooth,” he said, smiling.

I was never leaving.

“It’s getting dark out. Shouldn’t we go home?” Emerson asked me.

“It’s fine. We can stay a little later.”

There was no clock in Nina’s room, but it must have been close to midnight when we finally walked home. There were no lights so I figured we had lucked out and could sneak upstairs and Mom would never know what time we actually got home.

“Where have you been?”

I couldn’t see my mother in the dark, but the cherry of her cigarette glowed. She was sitting in the rocking chair waiting for us.

“We were at Nina’s.”

“You’re all grounded for the rest of the summer.”

“But Mom! It was Kristin’s fault.” Emerson had no shame in calling me out. “Go to bed.”

We headed upstairs. There was no point in arguing with her. Mom didn’t have too many rules but being home before dark was one of them. I had always hated that rule, had thought that nothing fun happened until nighttime, had wanted to be grown before I was even a teenager. Yet, a part of me was buoyed by the fact that she had stayed up to wait for us. It meant she still cared and that there was still hope.

After three weeks of complaining, Mom relented and our curfew was restored to dusk. We made sure to be on time, even when she started going out at night.

Mom sent Uncle Cliff home after he stole her Firebird and crashed it into the side of someone’s house. After that, I watched her retreat. People say that eyes are the windows to the soul and Mom’s eyes were different. It was as if part of her had disappeared deep inside and we were getting only the small part that it took to get through each day.

Nina introduced me to two girls who lived in an apartment above Rosie’s store. Rita was the older sister but appeared to be no more than ten. Her small stature, combined with short, unruly hair and teeth that were crowded like a shark, made her an easy target for neighborhood bullies. Her sister Maria was beautiful with long, wavy hair, but more than anything, she was her sister’s protector. No one could talk shit about Rita if she was around. Plus, if she couldn’t stop the bullies, the sisters had a bunch of older brothers that could be alerted if needed.

We rarely saw Maria and Rita’s mother, but she made herself known when she was around. If our windows were open, we could hear her screaming at her boyfriend from their balcony. Their grandmother would try to calm her down but once she was on a roll there was no stopping her. One time, she threw his clothes onto the street. Jeans and boxers and sneakers rained down and covered the cement. I wondered what he did to piss her off like that.

 

When a new convenience store opened down the street and the prices were cheaper than Rosie’s, we gladly spent our money there. I didn’t think anything ever got Rosie out of her armchair, but she came out to the street screaming at us whenever she saw we had bags from another store. We’d run past her on the other side of the street, laughing our asses off, not stopping until we rounded the corner out of sight.

The store sold candies I’d never seen before and Nina introduced us to quenepas, a fruit the size of a grape with a green outer shell and a pulpy center. We used to sit in the shade and crack the shells open, suck out the edible part, and spit the seeds into the street. We had a competition to see who could get them to go into the storm drains. In these moments when we were free to savor the tangy sweetness of the fruit, it didn’t matter who our mothers were or who they weren’t. It didn’t matter that we bought the snacks with food stamps we stole from their purses. We were just girls passing time in the middle of summer.

 

In those days, we saw Dad sporadically. Once a date was set to take us on a visit, he’d ramp up the telephone calls in advance. Sometimes Mom would let the phone ring and ring and other times she would pick up and I’d listen to her side of the conversation.

“But they need new school uniforms.”

“No, I can’t afford to buy them myself.”

“What guys? I’m fucking the mailman? I can’t deal with your shit today.”

My body tensed during these phone calls and I felt a rush of energy within the depths of my guts. I hated what he did to her and wished for him to leave us alone forever.

Dad arrived one afternoon, pulling his latest dilapidated vehicle up to the house. It was a truck with a covered bed, haphazardly spray-painted a red that almost matched the color of the rust eating away at the body.

“Make sure you hold on when we get on the highway,” my father said as we climbed into the back.

Dad drove through the neighborhood streets on the way out of town.  We threw Boston Baked Beans out the back and watched them bounce along the cement roads.  In between tosses of the candies, Emerson told my father that Mom had promised her a new toy if she was good at school.

“Your mother is a cunt.”

Emerson said nothing in response. I doubted she even knew the meaning of the insult. It was the worst word I knew.

I felt a wave of hot lava run through my body.

“So is your mother,” I said.

I didn’t really think that about her. We barely knew our grandmother. She had taken Ann and me to the ballet in Boston once and bought us giant pretzels. I remembered that her house was immaculately clean and smelled of potpourri.

My father pulled the truck over onto the side of the road and turned to face me. “What’s wrong with you? he sneered. “You’re a jerk. Get out.”

I grabbed my backpack and jumped out of the truck. My siblings knew better than to say anything. Whoever did would be Dad’s next target.

I walked through the front door about an hour later.

“Dad kicked me out of the car.”

“Where is he?” Mom looked over my shoulder like she feared the rest of the kids being sent back too.

“In the car. I walked home.”

I hovered there, waiting for something more. Anything. She said nothing.

“I guess I’ll go rent a movie. Can I have your Blockbuster card?” I asked.

She gestured toward her purse. I took the card and some money.

“Is there anything you want to see?” I asked, hopeful for a movie night with her. We’d crank the air conditioner up high and snuggle under throw blankets while eating popcorn.

“Get whatever you want.”

I walked down to Blockbuster as the sun made its nightly departure, the sky the color of raspberry sherbert. I meandered through the aisles, ditching the kids’ movies in favor of dramas. As I stepped around a guy decked out in head-to- toe Red Sox gear, I spotted a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio, my favorite heartthrob. Ann favored Jonathan Taylor Thomas and had woken up every morning staring into his face—okay, to a poster of his face— until someone had stuck gum over each of his eyeballs. No one ever fessed up. I didn’t care for JTT, but I would watch anything with Leo in it. After pausing to stare lovingly at Leo’s image, his sultry pout and messy hair in contrast with his prep school suit and tie, I flipped over the cover to read the description of Basketball Diaries. Based on a true story, the movie promised to tell how Jim Carroll went from rising high school basketball star to drug addict. Yes, this was the movie I needed to see.

I grabbed the lone copy before someone else snatched it away from me and headed to the checkout. Mom was one of those parents who didn’t put any restrictions on the account so there was no need for me to show any identification to rent an R-rated movie. I grabbed a box of sour candies that I knew were overpriced but I bought anyway because I was high off the power of having five dollars in my pocket to spend.

At home, I slid the VHS into the player right away. I watched my precious Leo maneuver his way across the basketball court with the grace of a ballet dancer. As he coped with a friend’s death, the pressure to succeed, and the advances of a pedophile coach, Leo’s character went from experimenting with drugs to performing sex acts for heroin within the first hour. I was enthralled. At school, D.A.R.E. had taught us the dangers of drugs but I was greedy for the real story. What did someone act like when they were high? What did it look like to be addicted to drugs? How did someone ever come back from an addiction? These were the details I was craving but that I couldn’t ask my mother.

She was sitting in the next room, never making the move from dining room table to couch to join me. About two-thirds through the movie, as Leo heaved up vomit and sweated profusely from withdrawal, she called out to me.

“Does that impress you?”

I paused for a moment, surprised by her question.

“No,” I replied.

Truthfully, it did impress me a little. Hollywood had combined Leonardo DiCaprio and heroin and somehow made it sexy. However, I thought of my selection as reconnaissance. Watching this movie was my subtle way of letting my mother know I was on to her.

Neither one of us said anything after that and I resumed watching the movie. If her question was an opportunity for a real discussion, my mother and I missed it.

The thing I remember most about Nina’s mom is that she was always on the telephone.

“She misses Puerto Rico,” Nina would explain. It made sense to me. If I was far away from my family, I’d want to talk to them all the time too.

One morning, Ann and I took a ride with Nina, her mom, and a guy who Nina said was her mom’s friend. He drove while we sat in the backseat and watched the buildings whiz by as we drove to an unfamiliar part of town. When we finally parked, I wondered if we were still in Rhode Island or had crossed the nearby border into Massachusetts. Graffiti covered the walls of buildings and people stood around on the corners. We waited in the car.

The leather seats were slick against our thighs and the air was thick without a breeze. After about forty-five minutes, Nina, Ann, and I got out of the car and sat under the shade of a tree on the sidewalk. We watched people walk by, and each time, I wondered if this was the person we were waiting for.

There were only so many games we could play before boredom set in. Still, we waited. Nina’s mother gave us a couple dollars to go buy a snack. There was a payphone outside the corner store and Ann took a quarter to call Mom. We thought she’d be worried about us. The phone rang and rang and rang but no one picked up.

We eventually got back in the car and left. I don’t know if Nina’s mom ever got what she was waiting for. It was dark by the time we got back to our neighborhood.

“Do you think they were waiting for drugs?” I asked my sister.

“No way. She’s a mom.”

She said it so assuredly, like I was silly for even suggesting it.

We arrived home and Mom was sitting in front of the television, which wouldn’t have been so odd if there were a program playing and not the fuzzy black and white scramble of no signal.

“Mom, we tried calling you, but you didn’t pick up,” Ann explained.

She looked up at us like she hadn’t noticed that we had been gone.

“Where were you?”

“We went for a ride with Nina’s mom,” I answered.

“Don’t do it again.”

She should have at least grounded us.

 

A few weeks later, I went down to Rosie’s to buy Mom a pack of cigarettes on one of those sweltering days when being out in the sun seemed like a punishment. I handed Pam the dollar bills and she grabbed some quarters to feed the vending machine in the corner of the store. She slid the quarters into the slot, pulled the lever, and handed me the red packet.

“Put them in your pocket and go straight home,” she whispered. It was the same routine every time.

“Those girls upstairs. Did you know their mother died?” Rosie asked me.

“Rita and Maria’s mom died?” I asked.

“Yeah. Speedballing–you know, heroin and cocaine together. Gets ‘em every time.” Rosie took a bite from her giant sandwich, unperturbed by the death.

Pam added, “All I heard last night was the little girls crying out for their mother.”

I walked home from the store contemplating the news.  I didn’t even know their mother did drugs. I wondered if Maria and Rita had known and if it had made them sad. Had they asked her to stop?

It probably shouldn’t have been such a surprise to me. At least twice in the past few months, I had seen a SWAT team rush silently past our house, guns perched on their shoulders as they headed into the alley to raid another neighbor’s apartment. Those buildings now stood empty and covered in spray-painted tags. We cut through there as a shortcut on our way around the neighborhood, careful not to get broken glass in our flip flops, the same broken glass that Nina and I used one afternoon to become blood sisters.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the death of Rita’s mom. She was way too young to die. I wondered what would make a mother choose drugs over her children. In the books I was reading in the library, there always seemed to be a character willing to sacrifice herself for something else, a notion that I found enticingly romantic. Oftentimes, this character was a woman or a mother. That must be love, right? The idea of taking a bullet for someone else seemed to me the ultimate act of selflessness.

“Mom, if someone pointed a gun at you and said you can save your child or yourself, which option would you choose?” I asked her.

“Myself,” she answered without hesitation.

Too stunned by her response, I didn’t ask any follow up questions or challenge her. I had been so sure that she would choose to save one of us. Wasn’t the role of the mother to sacrifice for her children? But since she chose herself, didn’t it mean that she wanted to live, and by her living, we would continue to be okay?

 

Gabriel came by our yard with his sisters one afternoon with a bottle of perfume, a bowl, and a book of matches. We watched him as he placed the bowl on the ground, poured in the perfume, and lit a match. I anticipated the blaze of the flame, but instead of dropping the match in, he blew it out.

“Almost forgot.” He jumped over the bowl from front to back, then jumped over it once from side to side, making the sign of the cross.

“We have to protect Mommy,” he explained for his sisters’ benefit, then lit an- other match and tossed in in the liquid. Blue flames licked the edges of the bowl. We stared at the fire, mesmerized, until the perfume burned off and the flames disappeared.

I wanted to laugh at him, to challenge the idea that he could do anything to protect his mother, but I knew I was no different. I prayed to God regularly, begging him to protect my mother. I avoided cracks on the sidewalk. I would have lit perfume on fire if I had thought of it first.

 

The following week, as August winded down, Ann and Emerson went by Nina’s apartment to find it boarded up, just like Bookie & Reynaldo’s had been earlier in the summer. My sisters reported this information to me, along with the scoop from Rosie.

“Nina’s mother was arrested for selling drugs,” Ann said.

“Where are the kids? I asked.

“They went on an airplane,” Emerson said, eager to supply useful information.

That night, I sat on my bed and picked at my cuticles until the skin around all ten of my fingers was red and raw. Mom could be the next to disappear.

 

I’ve never met a Caroline I couldn’t fantasize about. When someone mis-pronounces my name more than once, I tell them, “It’s like Caroline, but Emma. Emmeline.” When they ask where that name comes from, I tell them my mother read it in a book. I tell them that Emmeline is often a side character in nineteenth century novels, cousin Emmeline who died young of tuberculosis before she could get married, or something like that. I used to wish my parents had named me something simpler, something that didn’t prompt a question. But as I got older, I liked the attention.

Now, at parties, I like to drag the story out. I tell strangers that my mother wanted to name me Clementine, but my middle name is already a fruit so my father had to draw the line somewhere. I sip my drink and savor the reliable laughter, the eyes on me.

Still, I feel a strange jealousy burning the back of my throat whenever I meet a Caroline. This could be because the ones I tend to meet are tall and blonde, the types of girls who wear silk blouses and delicate gold chain necklaces with little pendants that fall right in the hollow at the base of their throat.

 

Popular In High School Caroline

During the first three years of high school, Caroline and I were not friends. I was one of the new students in ninth grade, while she was the ringleader of a clique that had been in charge since middle school. Her father owned one of the larger real estate companies in our town, so everyone saw her last name stamped on every other construction site, which was certainly part of her mystique. Someone told me that she lived in a house that took up a full block, a former mental hospital her father had purchased and transformed into a mansion for five people. I imagined parties there, people sneaking into wings that were off-limits, where they made out in former isolation rooms. Caroline went to a boarding school in Europe during junior year for opaque reasons that were gossiped about endlessly, plot lines we ripped out of television shows and slapped onto her life: her parents are divorcing, her older brother is in rehab, she’s modeling, and came back with an aristocratic lilt in her voice and the word queue in her vocabulary.

The year she returned, I spoke to her in the early morning dark before first bell on the first day of school. Making her laugh was a better high that I’d had in high school so far, so I set to work trying to get her to fall into friendship with me the way only teenage girls can, feverish and enjoying it. She brought me to parties, and helped orchestrate my first make out. In her mint-green bedroom, on the softest mattress I’d ever sat on, she made sure I knew I was lucky. She once told me, of her friend group: we don’t always like new people, but we like you.

I don’t know how to describe being friends with her. It was like confidence, or a benediction, or free calories. I was addicted to gossip, and her secrets were the only ones I kept. I was also addicted to bread, and pictures of us were the motivation I kept in a folder on my phone.

We lost touch during college. She does not attend our high school reunions, and rarely posts on social media. The last thing I heard about her was a rumor run through two degrees of remove, maybe misinterpreted and probably exaggerated. What I heard was that her eating habits had made having a roommate untenable, that the other girl was moving out because of a fight over a squash. She wouldn’t go pick one up for Caroline before the organic grocery store closed. I imagined the voice I’d been addicted to, bubbly but burst, now tinny through a phone speaker. I wondered what she’d said, I made up the words in my mind, you know this is the only thing I can EAT.

 

My Best Friend’s Girlfriend Caroline

I spent my junior year of college in a three-street town falling off a crag into the Scottish ocean. I met Caroline while walking through the tall grass to a house party. Her hair was shinier than made sense in the moonlight, her legs brittle sticks that might crack. She asked for my name, and said we rhymed.

At the party, I watched the boy I had kissed the night before put his hand on her jutting hipbone. Later, the three of us took a shot, and I told myself the jealous burn in my throat was from the vodka.

I was best friends with them both, and could not for the life of me tell who I was more in love with. He and I spent afternoons on the cold sand beach getting salt in our eyes while he almost cried. He told me about his father, and how football saved his life. Caroline and I prepared for parties in her dorm room, eating Nutella from a jar and sipping poorly made gin cocktails. She told me how he was in bed, the words he liked to hear her say.

Caroline and I were often a terrifying pair at bars, dead-eyed and still buying shots. Black out or back out, we liked to say. We put the pieces of our nights together during mornings spent clutching hot coffees in clammy hands, scrolling through our camera rolls for clues.

She never ate much on these coffee dates, save a block of chicken broth stock she would drop in a cup of hot water. Her fridge was full of carrots. Bent, her arms made unnatural angles. While I sometimes day dreamed about surviving like she did on diet soda and barely dressed salads, I had supposedly recovered from my eating disorder, and I wanted to tell her that we were allowed to walk around without being woozy from hunger, that sometimes it was boring but mostly it was like a warm bath. I brought it up once, my hot fingers on her frigid, tiny wrist. She did not seem interested in changing, and I didn’t feel like I had enough to offer her on the other side. I had a stomach that didn’t gnaw at me all day, but it wasn’t flat, and I didn’t have her boyfriend or her instagram following.

Sometimes her boyfriend, my friend, got aggressive when he drank too much. His insecurity and his rage, kept meticulously separate in daylight, mixed with liquor and sparked. Across the room, I saw him grab Caroline’s arm and shout something in her ear. He pushed her against the wall and the confusion on her face rapidly became fear. I pulled him off of her and dragged him outside, what the fuck are you doing.

His suit was too big for him, and my dress was too small. He balled his hands into fists and rubbed his eyes like a child while he cried in the spitting rain, and I couldn’t go back inside. I walked him home, my breath and my heels catching on the uneven cobblestones until I took off my shoes and started crying too. I tucked him into bed and slept on the couch in his living room.

In the morning, he wrote her an apology letter, and I begged her to forgive me over text. She told him not to contact her again, and met me in one of our coffee shops. We were supposed to go to Budapest the next day with a few other girls. I thought she was going to ream me out for helping him get home, but instead she brushed it off, dropped her cube of chicken stock into a paper cup of hot water and murmured ‘I’m scared to go to Budapest’ so softly I barely heard her. She shivered as she told me the prospect of only eating meat and potatoes terrified her. She kept her coat on throughout the conversation, because she was cold or because she wanted to keep it brief or both, and told me she had cancelled her flight already. She said she hated that she canceled social plans because of food, but it was an anxiety thing, and that she didn’t want to talk about it. I told her we could find things she could eat, that I had been like that too, that she could tell me more. I offered to stay in town, to buy her a pastry, to buy dinner.

She told me to go, so I went to Budapest, and when I came back she swerved my invitations to hang out, feigned sick and busy. We still hugged emphatically at parties. She clutched me momentarily in her skeleton frame as her ribs strained against her crop top. I don’t know whether she really was angry about that night or whether she couldn’t maintain a friendship with someone who might ask about her eating, or someone who simply knew her limbs did not refuse flesh naturally. I wonder whether she told me only once I had betrayed her, so she would have an alternate excuse. I still follow her on instagram, where she shrinks into the Instagram square, grows increasingly bony to a steady stream of comments reading “omg so beautiful” “fire emoji fire emoji fire emoji,” and “teeny tiny skinny legend.”

 

Dead Author Caroline

After college, I worked in a corporate fashion job I hated and recommitted myself to my eating disorder. I lost twenty pounds and collected compliments and coffee shop loyalty cards, both bittersweet and addictive. Eventually, like my high school friend Caroline, my selfish antics drove my roommate not out of the apartment but into slamming her door the minute she got home. I couldn’t drink as much on an empty stomach, and kept needing to be taken home.

My mother’s friend, a recovered alcoholic, recommended a book: Drinking, A Love Story, by Caroline Knapp. I devoured it, and ordered her other book, Appetites: Why Women Want, about her anorexia. For her as for many of us, these issues are deeply entwined. But she was the first author to overtly tell me so: saying her “starving gave way to drinking,” one denial “gradually mutating into a more all-encompassing denial of self, alcohol displacing food as the substance of choice.” Both disorders have extremely high relapse rates, a euphemism for the truth, which is that they are lifelong conditions, and both are on the rise among women.

I finished both books, and on a hunch typed ‘alcoholism anorexia hysteria’ into google. I read Melinda Kanner, who contended that alcoholism and anorexia were the twentieth century’s answers to the nineteenth century’s hysteria, “women’s diseases” with no discernible organic basis that are very resistant to treatment. I couldn’t decide how the word hysteria fit around my neck, whether it was a necklace or a noose.

Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English wrote about the nineteenth century ‘cult of female invalidism,’ the trendy exhaustion that male doctors diagnosed wealthy women with basically whenever they evinced a desire to have a thought, prescribing them a rest cure that was simply their existing lifestyles, distilled to a fine cognac and meant to be drunk in bed. Under a medical surveillance system that interpreted dissatisfaction with a life of leisure as indicative of imminent physical breakdown, a new disease began festering in the bedpans under women’s sickbeds.

Some of the lounging ladies began shaking the bars of their gilded cages, seizing and fainting, going mute and refusing to eat. The doctors called this hysteria. Ehrenreich and English wrote about the doctors who, because their treatments had little to no effect on the disease, accused women of pretending, and began outlining a “hysterical type” in their medical treatises: she was a “petty tyrant” with a “taste for power.” Carrol Smith-Rosenberg understands hysterical fits as revolutionary outbursts: women expressing rage, despair, or even just pent-up energy within the language their doctors had given them, fucking up the master’s house with his prescription pad, if you will. Ehrenreich and English wrote about women “both accepting their inherent sickness and finding a way to rebel against their intolerable social role.”

After her multiple recoveries, Knapp refused to give up cigarettes, and died in her early 40s of lung cancer. Honestly, I get it. We all need a barrier between our rushing, bloody insides and the bracing cold of living in society, and replacing the warm fur jacket of alcohol with a layer of flesh between your skin and your bones is exhausting, especially without the warmth of nicotine coursing through your veins. I want to have been in her diagnosis room, and have seen her laugh or cry.

 

Joe Biden’s Niece Caroline

At the peak of hot girl summer, my friend kept seeing the same woman outside a bodega in Tribeca. Eventually, she spoke to her, an interaction she recounted to me days later. The girl was wearing massive, face-obscuring sunglasses and a huge black knee-length coat in eighty-degree weather. I wanted to know where she gets her hair dyed, because it was the perfect blonde, my friend says, so I went up to her and said hey, you look so good, can I ask where you get your hair dyed?

She rips her sunglasses off and grabs my arm like we’re friends and says, in one breath, oh my god no I don’t I literally spent all morning throwing up. I ate a STEAK last night. Anyway, the salon is like three blocks away, tell them Caroline Biden sent you.

On swiveling seats in a dimly lit bar, my friend instructed me to google Caroline Biden. I did, and the results included a New York Post article titled “Joe Biden’s Niece Remorseful After Avoiding Jail in Credit Card Scam” and a New York Daily News article titled “Joe Biden’s Bad-Girl Niece Gets Probation For $110G Credit Card Theft.” I quickly learned that Caroline Biden borrowed someone’s credit card with permission to spend $600 at the luxury cosmetic store C.O. Bigelow, and instead spent $110,000. Caroline Knapp, in Appetites, wrote not just about women’s appetite for food and drink, but also for things. A hysterical consumption: many privileged white girls dabble in kleptomania. She wrote about “the ravenous displaced need” fueling addictive behaviors, from alcoholism to shopping addiction. She wrote about women falling into thousands of dollars of credit card debt, their “deflection of hunger writ large and etched in plastic.”

She wrote that “consumerism thrives on emotional voids,” and anorexic and alcoholic women have those in spades. The language of madness, the hysterical tendency, creeps into her analysis of the allure a new belonging can hold in a society where women feel constricted in so many ways: “there is abundance in shopping instead of taboo, and so it’s no wonder a woman can go mad with acquisitiveness.”

To her hearing for the C.O. Bigelow larceny in Manhattan Criminal Court, Caroline wore a huge brown fur coat over a plaid schoolgirl skirt, a tight black tank top, sunglasses, and a crucifix necklace. In the photos of her in the courthouse, her dye job is objectively impeccable. She is a 26-year-old woman dressed like a schoolgirl. Every ligament in her upper arms is visible when she shrugs off the fur. I want to know which pocket of her coat is hiding a flask.

I would love to hate her (spoiled brat, .01% wealthy and stealing), but honestly, I hate that I kind of love her instead. She is Serena Van Der Woodsen shimmying into her school uniform after leaving the scene of the crime, still drunk, or Caroline Kennedy on Ketamine. She is the petty tyrant those condescending nineteenth century doctors wrote about, throwing a fit in the language she was raised speaking (luxury) and wasting the court’s time. Heiress fucking with her fortune, political scion lighting the revered patriarch’s reputation on fire. Girl, interrupting. I can’t stop scrolling.

Another article, titled ‘Biden’s Niece Booked by NYPD’ is only four brief sentences, which describe Caroline slapping a cop who tried to break up a fight she was in with her roommate. This is accompanied by a photo of her wrapped in a white sheet and strapped to a chair, her small frame concave. The only visible part of her body is a slim wrist poking out of the sheet, pulling it over her face. A policeman is pushing the chair across the street as paparazzi jostle to photograph her.

Someone who purports to be her friend describes her as a “hot mess” addicted to alcohol and Adderall. From a rehab center, this source tells the New York Post her antics are “a desire for attention, a cry for help. She’s a very complicated girl who has a lot of feelings and a lot of issues.”

The female hysteric throwing a fit, communicating the only way she knows how.

 

Famous on Instagram Caroline

But the hot blonde addict who really captured our attention last summer was Caroline Calloway. As a narrative genre, her dramatic friend breakup with the girl who used to ghostwrite her Instagram captions might be Elena Ferrante for coked out girls with disposable income.

We received the story in chapters, like the equally overwrought serials about private school girls we used to buy at suburban Barnes & Noble, but now we waited over our phones with breath caught in our throats, reading the story in Instagram captions. We gasped and retweeted when we read Caroline’s proposed title for her memoir, And We Were Like, “as in the way girls tell stories.” This might be the vocal fry feminist manifesto of the century, we wrote in our group texts, unsure whether we were mocking her or ourselves, but aware that someone needed to be mocked.

I read the essay while biting my lip until it bled. I met a girl who was everything I wasn’t, wrote Natalie Beach, now estranged from that girl after a tumultuous, obsessive friendship.

Soon after meeting Caroline, she became her “conspirator and confidante,” a role I knew well from my own obsessive relationships with girls named Caroline. She listened raptly whenever Caroline opened her mouth, standing in the streetlight glow of her attention, balanced on one foot to stay in its thin band of light. She craned her neck to see into Caroline’s closet and hoarded her compliments like heirlooms, running her finger over their gilt lining until it wore down, showed the nickel underneath. But then she took it one step further, offered to write her Instagram captions, and became her voice.

She did what I never could with either of my own Carolines. She came right out and said what she wanted, can I step into your mind, and Caroline said sure, unlocked the door and let her into a room painted tiffany blue. “What happens to me next?” Caroline asked her, and Natalie forgot all about her own life and began writing in a tense she calls “first person beautiful.”

This is a tense many girls dream and journal in. Watching my Carolines live in it was harrowing, a fact Natalie’s jealousy prevents her from seeing. When Caroline leaves a restaurant abruptly after a group of men in suits sends free shots to their table, Natalie does not consider the possibility that she might have been afraid of their intentions.

Natalie and Caroline spent nights getting high and writing pages of memoir, speaking fast until their voices grew hoarse, and then they opened their laptops and spoke with one voice. Together, they created “the Caroline character,” a “fantastic YA protagonist” who “looked good crying.”

When they cried, I thought my Carolines were so beautiful it made me dizzy. In retrospect, I can see that this was console them. I was Natalie offering to write Instagram captions, desperate to become indispensable. I read them love letters I’d written in my head, in the tense I’ll call second person beautiful, and when they sniffed and asked if I really meant it I nodded so zealously I could have given myself whiplash.

In my relationships, I was Natalie with Caroline’s addictions. While I was starving for affection and anxious to please, the only thing I wanted more than the approval of a girl who was everything I wasn’t was to be her, and since I couldn’t do that being in the void of a substance high could at least get me out of my own mind (a more all-encompassing denial of self).

Natalie mentions Caroline’s struggles with substances only obliquely, too distracted by her ability to attract men, her blonde hair and expensive shoes, to notice that living in the first person beautiful has become unsustainable. At the tail end of their friendship, when everything is going awry, Natalie visits Caroline in Cambridge, where she has ripped the carpeting off her dorm room floor with her bare hands, and where she stays up all night online shopping in a fur coat. At first, Natalie attributes the destroyed floorboards to Caroline’s superficial desire for hardwood floors. And then, she tells us, I saw a trash can full of daffodils beside a trash can full of prosecco corks, and empty Adderall capsules in a drawer.

When Natalie was watching it unfurl on Instagram, a filtered stream of European boyfriends and sundresses in Roman ruins, Caroline’s mirage shimmered. Then Natalie crossed the Atlantic and watched it crack, saw not “someone I wanted to be but a girl living with one fork, no friends, and multiple copies of Prozac nation…a person in need of help that I didn’t know how to give.” This became clear when they traveled to Amsterdam together, and one night Caroline returned to their rented apartment with the only set of keys, and for unexplained reasons that probably include alcohol and sleeping pills, did not answer any of Natalie’s calls until the following morning.

Caroline Calloway ignoring her best friend’s calls, getting high in her room alone. Caroline Biden eating pills and screaming at her roommate until she calls the police. One Caroline alone, instagramming her way to fame and fortune. Another Caroline also alone, on the street, being pushed around by a male security professional. Or in court, surrounded by her lawyers.

Ehrenreich and English’s final judgment of hysteria acknowledges that hysterical fits worked decently well as temporary power plays, giving women “brief psychological advantages over a husband or a doctor” but points out their fatal flaw as a form of revolutionary guerrilla warfare: “hysterics don’t unite and fight.” Instead, they usually end up ensnared in a web of male professionals, policemen or doctors or reporters and paparazzi.

I know my own hysterics isolated me, left me alone even in crowded rooms. My college friend Caroline and I, each mired in our own quicksand’s, could not hold hands tightly enough to pull each other out. I imagine Caroline Biden and Caroline Calloway meeting in the halls of a rehab center someday and wait with bated breath for one of their memoirs.

 

Notes:

Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English, Complaints & Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness, 1971

Caroline Knapp, Drinking: A Love Story, 1996

Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want, 2003

Natalie Beach, “I Was Caroline Calloway,” The Cut, 2019

@carolinecalloway, Instagram, 2019

BF Grant et. al., “Prevalence of 12-Month Alcohol Use, High-Risk Drinking, and DSM-IV Alcohol Use Disorder in the United States, 2001-2002 to 2012-2013,” JAMA Psychiatry, 2019 Marie Galmiche, Pierre Dechelotte, Gregory Lambert, and Marie Pierre Tavolacci, “Prevalence of Eating Disorders Over the 2000-2018 Period: a Systematic Literature Review,” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2019

I BUY A BASIL plant for the summer. The plant had stood alone, perched on a barren shelf at Trader Joe’s—lush, a tempting canopy cloud of green. I do not expect it to last the summer, not weeks of leading hiking and camping trips for middle-schoolers throughout the High Sierras of California. But my heart had leapt so involuntarily when I first spotted it, sparkling from a recent watering, blooming happily below a tray of yellowing mangos, that I couldn’t resist. I didn’t care if the basil eventually died. It was my first time leading children into the wilderness, and I had spent the previous day on the plane to San Francisco, journaling frantically.

What does it mean to be a good leader? What is most important to embody? I want my kids to love the world, to see how beauty and connections thrum in the air, soil, and water—I want my kids to love each other.

I wanted badly to do it right, the leading of the next generation, and seeing the basil with its leaves so large and tight together, made me think of my mother taking a pot of basil from the windowsill above our kitchen sink. Pinch the top leaves gently, she had said to me, her shoulder-length dark hair falling across her cheek as she brought the basil down to my eye-level. Right at the stem. My young fingers fumbling along the tender stalks. There, yes. A curling leaf snapping off between my thumb and forefinger.  It’s good to take the leaves, she said, standing up and carefully placing the pot back on the sill. It promotes healthy growth.

In the grocery aisle, bright visions swarm—gathering around the basil every morning with the kids, watching them pour a gentle stream of water from their Nalgenes, teaching them to pinch the minuscule flowers, helping them pluck a few choice leaves to dazzle our spaghetti night. We care for this plant, I imagine proclaiming to a cluster of entranced 11-year-olds, all who had fought valiantly for the privilege of watering the basil.  And in return, it takes care of us. I imagine connecting the lesson to how our group would care for one other on the trail when we were all we had for miles and to our responsibility to the earth—with its glacial lakes, red-rooted sequoias, billions of squirming microbes dying and birthing and eating each other in thick fertile soil— which gave us life and breath, so freely.

“Sure,” my co-leader Lewis says, blue eyes amused. He has tight brown-gold curls and reminds me vaguely of a bear. “Why not?” I cup the basil with two hands, the warmth of the knotted roots soaking through the thin plastic pot. On the ride back to our hotel, I hold it on my lap for fear it will get crushed.

 

A four-thousand-year-old herb with a golden lineage tracing back to India, Egypt, and China settles on the vibrating dash of our fifteen-passenger white van as we drive shouting children through the California dust. Ociumum basilicum—sweet basil, a member of the great mint family, famed for its extensive culinary uses, and twisted in its own tempestuous, clashing mythology. In a lengthy introduction to the basil literature within different cultures, Basil: An Herb Society of America Guide proclaims: “In terms of legend and symbolism, basil has been both loved and feared. Its associations include love and hate, danger and protection, life and death.”

 

On our first night near the summit of Mt. Diablo, I hold the basil up to the cluster of kids waiting in headlamps around the picnic table for their dessert. This was after an eternal, exhausting evening. After a dimpled Boy-Scout of a kid told me that he was Knife-Certified (by whom? I should have asked) and proceeded to stab his palm five-minutes into cutting red peppers. After a quiet boy with neat blonde hair hid among vines of poison oak. After a swarm of raccoons covered our food cooler and their leader—a scraggly fellow with glinting green eyes—crawled menacingly towards the children and Lewis gave everyone permission to throw rocks to keep him at bay. After a dinner in pitch darkness. After a tiny girl from the Hamptons taught me to star-spin—wheeling in circles upon circles and falling to gaze at careening specks in the sky.

“This is our Power Object,” I say to the kids, extending the basil like an offering. Its leaves flutter darkly, a picture of health. “It’s incredible because whoever’s holding Basil has the floor to speak. The person with Basil has our full respect, our full attention. Everyone here has important things to say.”

The kids murmur, giggle, peering at the strange, shadowy faces of each other. I pass Basil to the girl next to me so that we can start sharing our Highs and Lows of the day. It is difficult for the kids to control their excitement, their nerves—laughter breaks, shouts pointing out new raccoons creeping in the trees.

“Hey,” Lewis says in his gentle voice. “Who has Basil now? Who are we listening to?”

Their eyes turn, searching.

 

Dioscorides, a Greek physician whose classical botanical works were referenced for over sixteen centuries, warned that too much basil can “dulleth the sight…and is of hard digestion,” but John Gerad—who became one of the most prevalent English botanists in the 1500s—applauded basil as a remedy for melancholy.

A kid, sobbing of homesickness, hugs her knees under the pines while the other kids spread mayonnaise on turkey sandwiches. She doesn’t eat for the first day and a half, takes small bites of plain yogurt, throws up in the bathroom while I rub her back. On our afternoon hike to a waterfall, she lags. Another taller girl—known for the stuffed otter she packed inside her sleeping bag—falls in step beside her. “I was sad too, at the airport,” the taller girl says softly. “I didn’t want to let go of my mom.” That night, the homesick kid holds Basil, a borrowed stuffed otter tucked into her lap, and says to the group: “I want to thank my new friend for making me feel at home.”

 

For a few blissful days, we leave Basil outside on sunny stumps while we go hiking. But in the Yosemite, we return to tragedy—Basil torn and bitten, clawed to pieces, a handful of straggling leaves remaining of his once full canopy. After that, we put Basil in the bear box whenever we leave camp—long times of darkness, squeezed in stale metal-air between our cooler and the trash bag from breakfast. I take him out as soon as we return and place him in the sunniest patch I can find, but the evening light is never enough. I glare at every fat squirrel who dares to sniff around our picnic table.

 

An herbalist named Chrysippus wrote of basil’s heady, intoxicating scent in pre-206 B.C.E.: “Ocimum exists only to drive men insane.”

In the moments when Lewis and I are looking away, when we are unloading bags from the trailer, boiling water, setting up tents, our wildest kid leaps on the quiet boy infected with poison oak and punches him in the jaw. Lights the hand-sanitizer that he squirted into his cupped palm on fire. Catches Knife-Certified dimpled kid in a chokehold. “Tap out,” wild kid says through gritted teeth. “Tap out!” His arm bulges around Knife-Certified kid’s neck. Knife-Certified’s face is turning red.

“Never! I’ll never surrender!” he sputters. He sees us running toward them.

 

‘You’re in charge of Basil,’ I say to the girl sitting behind the passenger seat. Basil is on the floor by her feet. She nods without looking at Basil and ten minutes through the drive, swings her legs enthusiastically—Basil flies and flops all over the van floor. Soil spilling, Basil limp and pathetic as a runover animal, a green goldfish out of his bowl.

“No worries, no worries,” I say to the unconcerned girl, scooping up the soil as if every second is frantic and precious. “No worries, we’ll fix him.” She nods, looks back to the friendship bracelet tied to her water bottle.

 

It was strongly believed in Ancient Greece and Rome that basil would only grow well under conditions of verbal abuse. During planting season, sowers would swear at the seeds.

In the Victorian Language of Flowers, giving sweet basil conveyed your best wishes. In Crete, people placed basil plants where they needed protection from the devil.

 

‘I don’t think you understand,’ I say, treading the clear water of Lake Tahoe, craning my neck to gaze up at the twelve kids frowning down at me from a tall rock jutting out over the lake. They want to jump from the rock into hip-deep water, and I can hear the ankles snapping, shins jutting. ‘It is my job to keep you safe.’

 

A boy, tall and gangly, falls off his bike and breaks his front tooth in half, scrapes running down his legs. Blood on his chin. “Don’t send me home,” he begs. First words out of his mouth. “I want to finish.” Finish biking hundreds of miles along the winding wildflower coast, steep hills rolling up to mountains, golden grass tumbling near tight drops, the ocean always roaring wetly below. I don’t want to leave either, ever. I want to curl up in the long grass until I feel like a rabbit or a mountain lion, until I cannot remember who I love. We put the shattered tooth in a Ziploc bag, and when the grey-haired dentist with the German accent tells us that the fragments aren’t needed and that the boy is fine to keep riding, I offer to throw the bag away. The skinny boy grabs my arm, grins skeletally in relief. “No, I want to keep it.”

 

“Basil has bugs in him.” Lewis shows me the tiny critters, grey and crawling around the thinning stalks. Tiny holes in the remaining leaves. “And a mold problem.” Baby-blue mold, pale and fine and furry, tenderly covering the damp soil. It’s almost cute—Basil hosting other life.

 

I wish I would have known that a French doctor named Hilarius in the 1500s claimed that basil caused the “spontaneous generation of scorpions” and could prompt scorpions to grow in the brain. After I had made an urgent announcement that Basil was too weak to give any more of his leaves, a punk kid looked me dead in the eye, plucked the biggest curled leaf, and put it in his mouth. I wish I could have told him that his brain would soon fester with nests of scorpions.

 

When did it become more than basil?

 

It triggers a vulnerability, some hope deep inside of me, memories of past basil plants I cannot hold back. The basil that I had bought in Dublin to spice up the loneliness of my single room while I was studying abroad. I woke each morning to the basil outlined in the faint sun from the tiny window that faced the bricks of the Guinness Factory. It was the first time that I was cooking for myself—I bought exotic, real-adult foods like avocados with pride— and I used the basil sparingly in my consistent meals of chewy angel hair pasta.

The basil that I bought the August of my senior year at a farmer’s market, the North Carolina air hot and humid, oaks and dogwoods sweltering. I put the pot on the windowsill of my first-floor room in between a row of books. My first love of four years, a boy with dark hair and long eyelashes, adored the basil. Before he would leave my room in the morning, he would often walk over to the windowsill and bring the plant close to his face, as if he was kissing it.

“Basil reminds me of my mother,” he would say. “She made the best pizza when we were little.” When I broke up with him after graduation, I couldn’t look at basil without thinking of him, of his mother’s hands kneading dough to feed a young son.

Then the basil of Italy, only a few months back, growing in a thick bush in the terrace garden. I did not have to care for it because it grew so well. When rain swept through in curtains, bright red poppies sprouted around it like hearts, like lips. In the evenings, I would go down to the garden with a beautiful girl whose black curls sprung like ringing bells in the wind, and we would pick basil leaves to crush for pesto. We kissed for the first time in an old stone room where the fattoria stored their lemon trees in winter. We painted a poem in rainbow colors on the white wall—there are enough ballrooms in you to dance with anyone you’ll ever love.

 

“They say nothing lasts forever,” Ocean Vuong writes in his novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. “But they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.” I’m reading Ocean’s novel on the shore, and Lewis stretches out above me on a bone-white tree trunk, tanning his already golden skin. His curls shine when drenched in salt-water.

 

In parts of Italy, sweet basil is thought to influence attraction, and some call it “bacia-nicola”—or “kiss me Nicholas.” A basil pot on a windowsill is meant to signal a lover.

 

Sometimes, it seems that Lewis’ body is mine, and mine is his. When I move to take down tents, he moves to clean dishes. I don’t have to look to know he is crouching with the kids around a map, showing them the blue lines of the rivers, the steepness of the slopes. He shaves the side of my head, fingers slow and careful, while I sit in the bright sun on the edge of a cliff, watching pale moths flutter to flowers.

The thoughtless way we share. He hands me his sandwich; I give him my coffee. We pass toothpaste and deodorant back and forth. He buys two different flavors of ice teas and stands in front of me, pouring tea from bottle to bottle, until the swirl of black and lemon is smooth and perfect. When the kids ask questions that we can’t answer, we repeat: “Lewis and I are going to talk about it” or “Jackie and I are going to talk about it,” until they roll their eyes. After the kids are asleep, we sit together on the ground, exhausted, and look up at the stars over the dark pines.

I forget what it is like to feel alone.

 

I wish that he had a girlfriend or someone he was hooking up with, so that our possibilities could continue to be nothing more than they are at this moment—I am his friend, his partner, his co-leader. I want to always stand by him, to have this easy, unquestionable loyalty remain unquestionable. If I remain his friend, I will never have to leave him.

 

Do you want to go grocery shopping, he says softly, our cheeks touching. We’re in between trips and without kids, huddled behind a stack of driftwood. We had walked miles down the beach in the wind, eyelashes crusted with salt. We had been thinking of buying bananas for dinner, chips and salsa, anything we didn’t have to cook. Not really, I say. Me either, he says. In the kiss, I feel grains of sand. Our lips don’t match quite right at first, and I don’t mind at all, I want his skin so badly.

 

The Herb Society Guide: “In his seventeenth-century herbal, Parkinson claimed basil could be used to ‘procure a cheerful and merry heart.’”

Frosty, fog-drenched beaches. Lewis and I eat fresh strawberries and chase seagulls. We build a boat out of sand and sit inside it together, looking out at the waves, squealing when the water splashes over the prow—it seems as if we are deep out at sea. We arm-wrestle on the floor of our hostel, play cards, sleep huddled under a dark bridge, under an orange moon.

 

He laughs once, while we’re in the tent. Whenever we’re kissing, he says, you get this look on your face. So contemplative. Like you’re torn, you’re thinking so much.

I cover my face with my hands, instinctively.

How to tell him— a boy who can lay on the shore and naturally think of nothing, like an ancient monk who has spent years perfecting the art of giving into oblivion, of losing the self to the feel of warm pebbles pressing into the back—that my thoughts haven’t been this still in years? That in this summer brimming with Band-Aids, snow-capped peaks, and massive unfolding paper maps, I haven’t had the energy to tear into my doubts about the future and life-purpose and so I have been entirely happy?

Until there aren’t any children around and I realize—I want him. And the wanting brings my shivering, hibernating self to life—it stumbles out of its cave and into the sun, blinking, turning, confused, questions whirling around it like a swarm of crows. How far do I go? What do I give? Am I allowed to need him? Will this hurt?

 

The thing I most want to tell him and don’t: Lewis, if you’re happy, I’m happy.

 

Basil, linked to sprouting at the foot of Christ’s cross and determining chastity, is said to “wither in the hands of the impure.”

Stay alive, I think, picking off yellow, fragile leaves. Lewis’ hands in my hair, my hands pulling up his shirt. We are in each other’s arms, sun setting over white swirling water, seals diving in frothy surf. Stay alive.

 

The real thing I most want to tell him, that I am most afraid to tell him: I like you so much that the like slips into deep tenderness, slips into an aching desire to have your cheek against mine, slips into love like a seal swimming through underwater crevices.

 

Where is the narrative? Where is the thread? An invisible needle driving through us all, the first ten kids, the last twelve, Lewis and I. Basil trembling on the van dashboard, down to a scattering of ragged leaves, passed around our dessert circle every night from small hand to small hand.  Sandy coast paths lined with crimson columbines, fountain-like harebells, clusters of smoky mariposas. The Knife-Certified kid muttering, “The bus doesn’t stop in your neighborhood,” as a pigtailed girl talks about how much she adores her butler. We climb jagged ridges, up and up, kids following like ducklings until we can go no further. A baby bear trundling off the trail, kids oohing. Snowdrifts up to our waist. Days of burning blue water under a rising moon, strings of seaweed dripping off rock walls as I press myself against the bottom of a cliff, waves lapping my numb toes, huddled in a concave that the ocean tides and I managed to find. Lewis wades around the corner after a few minutes, a flowery faded pink towel draped around his neck. We stand close, flattening ourselves against the seaweed hanging like tinsel, as the tides rise higher.

 

Somehow, through everything, Basil survives the summer, straggly leaves thrusting, the blue mold and grey bugs vanished.

But in the chaos of packing and cleaning, it isn’t till we’re flying back to Massachusetts that I realize we left Basil alone in the Holiday Inn parking lot, tucked under a small tree.  Part of me thinks—better that we forgot him. Better that we didn’t deliberately choose to leave him behind. Better that the decision of abandonment was made for us, that we didn’t have to watch him while he died.

And then the other part of me hopes—Basil is free. He is wild. Unlocked from bear boxes, he grows unstoppable in the fresh air, in shifting sunlight and shadows, untamable by human hands. He is bursting into bloom, sending green tendrils and baby scorpions racing through the parking lot, wrecking love among the hotel staff, unbeholden to the end of summer.

 

 

Clinton, New Jersey

 

She’s really beautiful. Can you find some I Love You Cards and send them to her and just sign my name? I have a teddy bear being made and a matching ring earring and necklace set.

–Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387

 

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Seen from the air, the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women (EMCF) appears like a wheel-shaped medieval city, its modular units the beige color of the inmates’ uniforms surrounding the century-old Warden’s Hall. Instead of a moat guarding the fortified walls, double strands of razor wire coil between watchtowers to isolate the beings inside. The violent offenders.

 

&

In Maximum Compound, the holiday that captures the barbed wire universe’s essence isn’t Thanksgiving or Christmas; those nostalgia holidays subtract you to zero. Turkey and yams that you bastardize in the microwave. When you bow your head and give thanks, it might be the microwave you’re most thankful for. Thanksgiving belongs to the free world, a leftover like the sweet potatoes saved from Mess Hall to be doctored with brown sugar and syrup. Voila, glazed yams. No Cubano sandwiches on Christmas morning, the meats piled so high between slabs of French bread that you need double mouths to take a bite. As for the wild party of New Years, noisemakers and drunken cheers are against the rules, so the inmates toast their off-brand vintage soda to that yardstick of time served.

 

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Valentine’s Day is the Maximum Compound’s signature holiday. The love day celebration that topples the walls made of rules: DO NOT TOUCH ANOTHER INMATE, DO NOT REACH FOR AN OFFICER, DO NOT LEAVE YOUR AREA, DO NOT SPEAK DURING COUNT. This day the flicker between eyes is celebrated, this day, girlfriends are made to feel special. This day, the inside expels the cold and rain an animal coming in from the wild shakes over a room. Girl love is celebrated, and even the officers can’t spoil it. Outside in the world, I know the space between people grows; we live in digital capsules, three-screen universes, and our lovers receive the least of us. The opposite is true in Maximum Compound among the murderers, the father killers, the kidnappers, and armed robbers.

 

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Valentine of Terni became installed in legend as the priest who bequeathed his name to the holiday of lovers. He is said to have performed baptisms and marriage ceremonies for Roman soldiers during the reign of Emperor Aurelian in 273. Medieval texts speak of his decapitation. Valentine of Rome, another priest swept up in the reign of persecutions, too was executed on February 14th. Hearsay has Saint Valentine cutting parchment hearts and giving them to soldiers. The Basilica of Saint Maria displays his ancient, flower-scented skull.

 

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I’m going to make Natacha a chocolate cake and dinner. I think you would really like her.

–Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387

 

KRYSTAL

Google Krystal Riordan and her name alone suffices, and news article after news article comes up. AT PROSTITUTE’S SENTENCING, MURDER VICTIM’S MOTHER READS STATEMENT DETAILING HORRIFIC CRIME. The reader learns that Krystal Riordan, age 20, a New York City prostitute witnessed Draymond Coleman, her pimp/boyfriend, rape and strangle Jennifer Moore, age 18, in their rent-by-the-week room. A kind of duel was played out in the shabby hotel between the 265 lb. rage-fueled attacker and a 100-pound soccer player, fighting to breathe. Krystal froze, fearing for her own life. Surrounding them–Weehawken’s geography, exits, and billboards, green signs sprouting up like trees in a lightning-struck forest. After four years in custody and facing the death penalty, Draymond accepted a plea bargain that required he implicate Krystal. The Internet twilights hold the 20-year-old Krystal, and the 24-year old Krystal, 5’9” and taller than her public defender. She’s gained 40 pounds in her four years in Hudson County jail, her tear-stained face delicate as a lilac in the rain as she, at last, speaks for herself. “I’m not a bad person,” she answers in what I imagine is a trembling voice. The judge has asked her if she has anything to say before he pronounces the sentence. He listens, then says, “There’s only one victim here.” He sentences her to the maximum. FORMER ORANGE WOMAN SENTENCED TO 30 YEARS.

 

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Yet there is more than one victim here. Eva, Krystal’s birth mother, stares at the camera with anthracite eyes that glitter as if they could withstand a miner’s pick. Her black hair, too, gives off a costume gem’s gleam. A striking woman on whose olive-complexed face I recognize Krystal’s petal lips but little else. The birth mother, a short woman, appears chiseled from rock while her daughter seems soft in comparison, the cream-puff skin and sometimes blue and sometimes hazel eyes. The reasons for Eva’s neglect of her children, unknowable. She worked as a prostitute. Krystal holds onto few memories of her earliest years before she was taken and put into foster care—joining a children’s crusade of the blighted. How did she learn to speak? She remembers there weren’t any toys. Eva bequeathed to Krystal her old crack pipes, and her daughter played with them, pretending the pipe stems were bridges over the maroon rivers of spilled wine. When she crossed the river, she’d find herself in a forest. Birds whistled, and she understood their every word, no matter the pitch. She smelled the dreams of the leaves. Or she held Eva’s hand mirror under her nose and waded into the ceiling. As an adult, she searched for her birth mother, and saw her twice. “I looked for her and found her. I wish I hadn’t. She stole my money,” Krystal says. Disappointment settles between her shoulder blades and trickles down her back like a desecrated childhood.

 

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After her birth father’s arrest for selling drugs, Child Services removes Krystal and severs parental rights. After spending two years in foster care, she’s adopted. Who are these strangers prominent in Connecticut politics, the adoptive father, a founding partner in the accounting firm that bears his name? Who is the sharp-featured adoptive mother also an accountant and quick to criticize? In a dress with puffy sleeves and wide sashes, Krystal tries to smile at her first Easter, but there’s a bewildered look on her face. The night is dark for six-year-old Krystal. She hardly knows how to speak. Her adoptive father later will describe how she screams in her sleep. She will bear their surname Riordan.

 

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She grows tall and plays basketball, dribbling balls, and shooting baskets. Called a natural by her basketball coaches, she pleases her new parents, but upon reaching adolescence, she rebels. The adoptive parents become her persecutors. Staying out all night and running the streets, she tests them as someday Dray will her. Krystal is sent to Élan in Poland Springs, Maine, the now notorious and shuttered facility for troubled teens. “It was a lockdown, therapeutic boarding school. I was there for three years. If I’d never been sent there, I might have had a full basketball scholarship,” says Krystal. Tuition of $42,000 – $56,000 a year purchased a student to teacher ratio of 40 to 1. Therapy consists of a teen standing alone in a corner while hundreds of students yell, curse, and call him or her names.

 

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Her adoptive parents will pay for her to go to college, but after the regime she’s lived under, she wants her freedom. How can anyone graduate from years of Attack Therapy and be ready for college? Freedom is a suspect word. Krystal calls Keri-Ann, a girl she knows from Élan, who shares an apartment in Manhattan with her boyfriend/pimp. Yes, Krystal can stay with them under the condition she’ll work as a prostitute for the girl’s boyfriend, too. Krystal agrees, and in the beginning, it’s easy as beginnings often are. The sex work draws her. She and Keri-Ann from Élan, go shopping for clothes and purses and shoes. Real labels, not knockoff brands. She pierces her nose and loves the feel of money, and she’s generous to others and always buying gifts.  One of Keri-Ann’s friends stops over. Draymond Coleman, fifteen years older than Krystal, is tall, muscular, and seething with the righteous anger of an unwanted foster care child. Although Krystal perceives him as a gentle giant, funny and attentive, he’s violent. Dray’s eyes, like Eva’s, hold the resurrection of a mine shaft.

 

Dray was funny and liked to laugh. He was really attentive when it came to me. It was like I was brain-washed. I thought I couldn’t live without him.

— Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387

 

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At first, he showers her with attention. They talk outside the apartment where they go to smoke cigarettes. Her friend’s boyfriend decides to sell her to another pimp. “That’s when Dray stepped in,” Krystal says. “He fought for me.” They leave together, and she begins working to support them. “Dray was a pimp, and I was his moneymaker,” says Krystal. “He would bring girls over on a regular basis for threesomes. I always did what I was told by him.”  Her love for Draymond will lead to low-rent hotels with shared bathrooms where they will stay for the sex work. Her love will lead to shambles of sheets and stained mattresses, sagging drapes and chicken bones scattered under beds.

 

The guys were mostly okay. There were a few jerks, but the police were the worst. I had a gun put to my head. A knife to my throat. They demanded free sex, usually weird stuff.

— Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387

 

&

The police officer already has his zipper down, and a thumb hooked in her mouth. Work it. His pinkish meat threaded with blue veins like those movie rivers she’d always wanted to visit, like the Mekong, the Volga, the Seine. She pictures herself as one of the floating flower sellers. A long-haired girl, oaring her canoe carrying a white sea of orchids.

 

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And always doing what she was told by Draymond leads to tragedy and murder. The men blur—white, black, Hispanic. Most come to the room, and some rush, and others like to be coddled. “Baby, hey,” she whispers, “feeling any better?” She reaches over and cups the man-baby’s forehead. She runs her hand down his chest, offering him her mouth, her vagina, her ass, just as she offered all she had to the basketball court—her biceps and calves, especially the skin of her hands.

 

The baby wasn’t real to me until she was born. Being pregnant only meant my clothes’ size changed.

— Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387

 

&

Krystal uses condoms with strangers but not with Draymond, so when she misses her period for the second month, she takes the pregnancy test. A positive. She tells him the news, and he’s happy, but he insists she keeps on working. Her belly incubating life means little to her except a change in her clothing size. She makes more money pregnant than not as her dates pay extra in tips. Some men find pregnant women irresistible. We don’t see Krystal, her hair a thicket, kneeling, blowing a man, another, and another. The clam chowder of semen growing a fishy mucous, sex filling her mind, the little nymphs swimming to her ample hips.

 

&

She’s not a druggie, although she likes to smoke weed. Draymond keeps her on a short leash, which means he loves her. He must. He never loses his thirst for more women in the circles of midnight, in the hangover of morning turning to the afternoon. Her clothes chaff her pregnant belly like cardboard. Her dreams feel green, and things keep budding. Ants build humongous castles, and ferns grow fleshy and their heavy breathing disturbs her sleep-turn on your side. Inside, separated by a thicket of blood vessels, the old miracle takes place, sperm and egg meeting, carrying the double helix, the chromosomes for sex, eye color and skin, height, bone structure, potential, and possibility. The fetus absorbing its mother, the womb-trance.

 

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She gives birth to a healthy girl. The past doesn’t say hello or goodbye either; it expects you to do all the work of bringing it back. It requires curiosity. The baby becomes real when she leaves the hospital. How long before she’s working again? Is she still bleeding, still stitched up? She hardly has her baby long. One night she returns from work to find her daughter gone. Draymond has called Child Services, telling them to come for the ‘unwanted’ infant. There’s not enough strength in her to fight for her daughter. The nineteen-year-old is under Draymond’s control. Friends have questioned this story, telling me her signature would be required in a closed adoption case. Krystal was never mothered. What a sensation it is to hold a baby. When the newborn is your own child, can there be anything like it? But could Krystal feel the wonder? It will be years later when she asks me to look for her daughter on Facebook. The daughter of Krystal and Draymond is white, black, and Hispanic. A beauty. She’s inherited her mother’s long legs and expressive lips—lips like eyes. Her daughter is a teen now and distant from the baby Krystal gave birth to.  When Krystal thinks of Trinity it is as if her daughter has become a waking dream.

 

&

Now Krystal is thirteen years into her sentence. Love’s an obstacle course that sometimes ends in blood. Girlfriends come and go, and relationships flame only to turn to cinder. In Maximum Compound when fights erupt, they are usually about the cheating of a girlfriend. Couples bond and then break apart, and yet love is celebrated on Valentine’s Day like no other.

 

I’m doing a redo Valentine’s Day because we were in Lock on February 14th.

–Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387

 

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Perhaps Krystal meets the beautiful Natacha in the dog cage. When you are in  Isolation the officers stop by each cell in the morning, asking who wants to go outside. Time outside lasts two hours. Many cells are occupied by women locked in solitary for 100 days, and most stay in. Isolation’s haunting of the mind works its evil. Handcuffed, inmates are marched to the enclosures. Four women fit inside each roofless cage where they’re uncuffed. If it rains, they must still sit for the scheduled two hours, no exceptions. No matter if rain clouds darken the sky to a stormy green. If not rain, the hours spent in the unshaded sun make your head beat.

 

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Or, the two met in Lock, not in the same cell but neighboring ones. Thirty cells side by side, two women in each, and the noise never subsides. You’re allowed your tablet and headphones, but you’ll need batteries, and they’re $4 a pack. Isolated inmates are permitted to spend only $12 on Commissary per month. The yelling from cell to cell, and the shouting to get the guards’ attention goes on around the clock. If your girlfriend’s also here, then you’re afraid she’s having sex with her cellmate. You’re on half-rations and irritable. Every third day you rise again from the stink of Isolation and are brought out in handcuffs and escorted by two officers to the shower. You’re carrying shampoo and soap and clean underwear. The rain you lift your face into cleanses body and soul.

 

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And so, for my inmate friend, Valentine’s Day is the awaited for day. Even if she must create it from her almost bare Commissary trunk and State pay, she’ll give her girlfriend a Valentine’s Day to treasure. Krystal tells me Natacha soothes her. Is her voice like smoking a cigarette when you’re lying in bed, and it’s a cool morning? Bare, peaceful, explaining things lips. Krystal marches to Mess Hall, and breakfast is a cup of grim coffee, two boiled eggs, three pieces of bread, a spoon of margarine. She’s spreading margarine on her second piece of bread when the Officers tell her to get moving. Maximum Compound is all about the undertow of love dragging your feet out from under you.

 

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Chaucer spoke of the mating season of birds, and men and women. Or Valentine’s Day could be pagan. Lupercalia, a Roman festival of fertility and coupling. A priest would cut the throats of a goat and dog near the sacred cave of the she-wolf.  The mythological she-wolf who nursed the abandoned twins, Romulus and Remus. The good lupus mother. The hide of the goat was then sliced into strips that were soaked in blood. Half-naked young men would dance through the streets of drunkenness, flicking pregnant women with blood to safeguard the mother and ensure the live birth of the child.

 

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Krystal wants desperately to care and be cared for by this woman, this Natacha arrested for attempted homicide. Like Krystal’s crime, Natacha’s homicide occurred on a hot July day. It involved a male friend who had been staying in Natacha’s apartment. The town is Tinton Falls; once called the Iron Plantation, where slaves were brought to labor in the ironworks. The ruins of the grist mill seem the town’s only tourist attraction. Natacha becomes angry at the man, shouting for him to leave. He packs and carries his gear out. On either side of the street, milkweed and red cedar grow from the silty-clay soil. She rummages in the drawers, finds two large butcher knives, and then chases him down the sidewalk. After throwing one knife, she stabs him in the chest with the other. Not far away, wild turkey and woodpeckers wander the marshlands. The police are called, and an ambulance rushes the bleeding man into the red dusk. And now, Natacha experiences the hunger of Krystal’s love.

 

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What drives Natacha to assault someone she invited into her apartment? There are her daughter and her dog Charlie, whose head likely breaks through the skin of canine sleep when he hears the knife clatter and shouting. Did Natacha’s ex beat the hell out of her? Did the idiot think she’d squirreled that money away in her stomach, and that’s why he kept hitting it? No boyfriend was going to go through her body drawer by drawer, swinging his fists.

 

NATACHA

When Krystal asks me to go to Facebook and print some photos of her new girlfriend, I already know the process of elimination. It won’t be Natacha from Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aries, not the news editor for the New York Yankees, not the IT consultant Natacha with a multi-national. It will be another Natacha whose on-line life stopped in 2015. Yet this Natacha is beautiful, and her apartment looks airy as if a flutter of ship’s sail has passed through it. In short black strapless club dress, she blows wasp-stung kisses. One of her admirers lingers in the social media bushes wowed by her legs. Natacha’s daughter and dog are shown sleeping in her bed. “Two babies,” she comments in her post. She exudes late night drives when the stars are bright as magnolia blossoms, and you want to reach up and pull them out of the sky and eat them. There are more photos of nightclubs, darkening places, padded leather doors, deep booths, smoke-polished maroon wood. Billie Holiday crooning through the murderous hip hop. Hoop earrings, gold-flake eyeshadow.

 

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The she-wolf who exemplifies instinct and loyalty, the unselfish she-wolf mother who suckles abandoned children can become the she-wolf, devourer. Women who have been wounded horribly sometimes wound others. Lethally.

 

Me and Natacha broke up. Yesterday she told me the real reason is because she got a crush on someone else. The lady she’s got a crush on looks like Shrek. I don’t get it. She said everything she told me she meant and she really loves me. This is the reason I always feel like I’m not good enough and ugly.

–Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387

 

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The thirst of this place is going to drink Krystal into it. The imprisoned body is the chapel or the toilet to be adored or shat on. Imagine the joy with which Krystal told me of Natacha, then the crashing disappointment of seeing her girlfriend with hickeys on her neck. Krystal is sure those love bites are aimed at her heart. Idiot. She must be ugly; she must be unlovable. She pictures herself as a lizard. In actuality Krystal is beautiful.

 

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Krystal needs to talk to her Natacha. She needs to be comforted. They’ve moved Natacha to a different unit. It is 1 a.m. at the correctional facility when the fire alarm goes off, and all the Units march outside into the Yard where the inmates are supposed to stand in silent lines. The inmates are talking guessing who pulled the alarm or started a fire. Maybe the moon shines, and at midnight it’s a fat scoop ice cream you want to climb into the sky and lick. Everyone talks, someone yells Natacha! And Krystal is waving her arms, crazily. The moon is filling their bodies with love. The mermaids of after midnight are swimming. Natacha turns away.

 

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There are three counts a day at 8 a.m. – 8:30 a.m., 11 a.m. – 11:30 a.m., and 4 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Mid-afternoon, Krystal goes into the bathroom with her Bic razor filed away. What does she see in the mirror? The mucky walls, her time? A summer girl shrinking into winter, a 20-year-old when she was arrested, she’ll be 40 upon release. Where is the way out, the way away? She wants motion; she wants to flow. Madly heading somewhere. First the nick and then the trickling begins. If she’s brave, the shimmering red taillights of her veins will open. Have to do this. Have to struggle the blade in, no stopping. No creeping. Claustrophobic nearness of the walls. Her heart pulses where her bunkmate Lucy’s name is tattooed. They inked each other’s name on their left wrists, the arteries that run directly to the heart.

 

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She cuts her left wrist, deep, the deeper the cut, the better she feels. Nearness of music. Blood is streaking her hands and thighs. The cuts are forgiving her for the I Love You cards and the necklace set; the teddy bear. Krystal remembers touching the mole on Natacha’s back. Pressing her thumb into the mole’s blue softness. The last endorphin rush feels like a gentle, loving mother. An inmate finds her and runs to tell an officer to check on Krystal in the bathroom. She’s on the floor and lying in a pool of red running from her left wrist. An inmate stretcher crew arrives, and they carry Krystal to the Medical Unit. She receives both internal stitches to tendons, as well as numerous external stitches. Her history of cutting and depression go untreated.

 

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In the outside world, there is Valentine’s Day as well. Tepid, well-dressed couples get in and out of taxi’s and Uber cars, and they walk on the sidewalks lined with bursts of bergamot and jasmine. Restaurants fill with musk-fragrant suited men, and young women dressed in sheaths, the smooth silver of an ice shaker. Hair, heels, electricity. Credit cards. Couples with cheeks like glowing shots of amaretto. The inhabitants living on the continent of freedom celebrate romantic love.

 

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Inside Maximum Compound, Valentine’s Day celebrates love of the she-wolf. What the officers learn of the inmates is nothing compared to what the inmates have learned of each other. Strange things lie on the bottom of us all, things we are ashamed of, and yet most inmates believe that what love embodies reigns supreme even in the barbed-wire world.

 

 

It’s easy enough to find, sadness, for there are so many stories of it disseminated on social media we might all stay quivering in our small rooms for as much time as we have left. In only the last week, besides the politics and polemics, the pipe bombs and opioid epidemic, I’ve learned that we live on a world where sunlight causes cancer, and a large number of Australian koalas have an STD. I’ve read that several times in our long and polluted history we’ve managed to catch water on fire, and everyone you see today is someone who just hasn’t died yet.

I know there are enough nuclear weapons in our arsenals to keep the earth burning for a thousand years, long after all the time capsules we’ve buried to speak to our future selves should have been opened, and there’s a thought, how often we record ourselves, through pages or pictures, for posterity, afraid as we are of endings.

The nearest any other planet ever gets to Earth is around 160 million miles, and no one knows how big the universe really is, nor how it began or where it ends. No one knows if the voices we spoke back when we were crawling out of caves are still rebounding into space, still hoping someone hears us.

Most laugh tracks were recorded in the 50s, which means you’re hearing dead people laugh when you watch a sitcom to ease the tension of your life or political leanings. That star you saw last night is likely dead too, and out of all the sweeping of the universe we’ve never found a sign we’re not alone: not a signal or song from any planet, and despite the vastness of space it’s a little depressing to think how alone we are as we careen through the void.

One day your mother put you down and never picked you up again, and your children will never again be as young as they are right now. The smell of fresh cut grass is the grass trying to heal itself after you’ve cut it, and that smell after a rain is the way the world really smells, which makes me wonder why it can’t always be like that, why we have to wait and wait for what we really want and afterward wish it were still that way.

There’s a whale in the Pacific Ocean that sings at such a high frequency no other whales can hear it. Scientists have been monitoring it for over twenty years, and for all that time it’s been alone, still hoping someone is listening. Speaking of singing, every year on the anniversary of its arrival the Mars Rover sings Happy Birthday to itself, millions of miles from anyone, and if that doesn’t send some wind sweeping across the ocean of your insides, I don’t know how to reach you.

It seems every day there’s a new loneliness loose in the world. Last week I read about a turtle whose shell had been fractured so the zoo made a wheelchair out of Legos, and watching it crawl around I cried like a child, that here was something so beautiful it hurt, like my grandmother in the days before she died saying she didn’t like the color of the curtains in her hospital room.

There’s also the unbearable sadness of school shootings, the systemic violence and oppression, the men who grease the wheels of government with their greed, but even without the wars and the worry and all the horrors we hear every day, we carry too much weight with us. Our thin skins can’t even keep out the weather, much less the changes in our atmospheres. I try to remember the last time I picked up my grown daughters and I might as well be searching the vastness of space.

Still, the search is worth it. Out there, past the bright unbroken stars of what we remember, is what we do not know. And somewhere in the asteroid belts of our lives lie the fragments we are forever trying to piece together, to understand what it means to walk around on this good earth.

There’s the warmth of your mother’s hand on your forehead, the coolness of the other side of the pillow. The fresh spill of snow that means no school today, the brightness of the world when we get just a minute to look at it. The tickle of carbonation on your upper lip from the Sprite right after a swim the year you turned eleven and learned about girls. Or boys. Or football or music or whatever you learned that year, still skipping across the hot summer cement, before acne and awkwardness set in.

And even that wasn’t so bad, remembering the way your date looked at Prom your junior year. Or the way your whole small town stood and cheered when your basketball team ran onto the court to the tune of whatever song was popular then or the way on summer nights you circled town like the stars spinning in the night sky or the way everyone told you to stay cool when they signed your yearbook.

At the end, I bet you’ll remember the sound of the garbage truck on the street in the morning with something like nostalgia. You’ll remember your first wife putting on her make-up, mirror still steamed from the shower, before all the growing apart began. You’ll see again your father, and I’ll remember the last time I held my daughter, the time I put her down and never picked her again, except to say, when she was overwhelmed by all the anger in the world, that I was still here, that whatever happens my voice will still be searching for her through space.

I’m trying to see stars the same as when I was a child, wondering not what’s out there for me, but just what’s out there. I’m trying not to imagine dead solar systems but that light still leaks from them long after they are gone. I want to smell the air after the rain and be thankful for that moment, no matter how long we have to wait for it. For every injustice in the world there is a spider crawling up a waterspout. For every anger, an echo. For every wrong, a right now.

You’ll never be as young as you are right now, which makes right now the best now. If our parents put us down and never picked us up again it’s because the weight of their worry grew too much, the same as we’ll be unable to carry our children to completion, the same as we’ll be unable to walk with them into the wherever.

But what beauty it will be to hear those long dead live again, not the pre-canned laughter of some stupid show but what waits for us in the wherever. I hope if we do end up burning the earth aliens will see the smoke from the fire and perhaps make different mistakes than ours. Or none. Or all of them, and learn, before they begin the burning, and when the light of our fire gets to them, they’ll see only a night sky, our planet perhaps a little brighter against the darkness.

And sometimes I think of that whale and realize he’s still singing, even if no one else is listening. It’s beautiful, that song, the way it moves through the water of our bodies, where we are all alone. And the Mars Rover, singing to itself as well—someone programmed that. Someone marked the milestones in its metric or electric or whatever it is the Rover runs on, years maybe, or lines drawn in the Martian soil to measure its days so far from home, so far from where it came into being. I don’t know what the song sounds like, but I know it is good. It is sad and slow and sweet, and it echoes all through the universe of our small hearts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Turtle, Senator and I sat at a table at the Beachcomber on Wollaston Beach while the redheaded guitar player, billed as The President of Rock ‘n’ Roll, roared:

There’s a riot goin’ on!

Down in cellblock number nine.

I was in the slammer with Albert DiSalvo, shouted Senator over the music. He nodded his head at the bandleader. And Myles too. This didn’t sound right. Albert DiSalvo, known as the Boston Strangler, confessed to raping and killing a dozen women. I couldn’t picture Senator, real name Jim White, doing anything that might land him in prison. In Cu Chi he had kept a low profile. A college graduate, he was about 26 to our 19 or 20. Balding. He looked like a Senator so we called him Senator. Turned out he wasn’t actually locked up in Walpole, just a teacher. Now he worked as a security guard at a construction site, making good money reading dirty magazines in a trailer on the overnight shift. Turtle, chubby, slow talking, slow moving, pink skinned, blond crewcut Turtle, hailed from Thomaston, Georgia. After Vietnam he worked a shit job in T-Town for three years, bought a new car cash, and headed north. Stopped to see Hagey in North Carolina. Hagey was doin’ awright. Got hisself enrolled in college. In Philadelphia, Dave Winton was doing awright too. He was an exec-u-tive now, drivin’ a Mazda RX-7. In New York State Spanky was fixin’ to reenlist and head for Germany where the frauleins were waiting with open arms. Me? I was killing time in the post office and going to school now and then. While we waited for the grand reunion, the reunion came to us. A reunion on wheels: Turtle. Myles Connor, the fiery rock ‘n’ roller, stopped by our table between sets. Senator told him I played piano and Myles urged me to try out with his band. We need a keyboard player, he said making it sound like a done deal. An exciting opportunity, but I could barely play so the tryout never happened. A good thing, perhaps. Myles was said to have a genius level IQ but was a notorious criminal who once wounded a cop in a shootout with police on a Back Bay rooftop and later beat a double murder charge. Less than a year after the Beachcomber gig he stole a Rembrandt from the Museum of Fine Arts in broad daylight. A fucking Rembrandt!

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The First Day of Our Second Year Without You

We visited your grave on Christmas Eve. Elliott helped me find you like we were playing hide and seek. Is Granny over here? No… Is Granny over there? We found you surrounded by poinsettias and candy canes. Elliott picked up a small branch and traced your last name on the headstone, slowly announcing each letter. At age 3, he believes that you’re dead like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. He tells me you woke up in heaven and you live there now, but you will come back. When I am really, really old, he says daily now, I will go to heaven. Sometimes he adds, Mommy, I don’t want to go to heaven. 

How to Use Vanilla

You told me that when you were young, poor girls used vanilla extract as perfume. I imagine you rising, your scent growing stronger in the sunbaked fields. A young woman picking cotton or blueberries and adding something new—but, of course, a poor girl wouldn’t waste vanilla on the fields. You’d save it for secret dates, for sneaking off to carnivals. One drop for an older boy, two drops if Daddy disapproved of him for driving too fast. You’d touch the small space behind each ear, hoping that your chosen boy might pick up the scent and find you delicious. A few years later, you would bake dessert for your husband—baby balanced on your hip—and recall those warm evenings, the thrill of a field boy’s rough palm. I suddenly understand why, whenever you made simple syrup for waffles, you always replaced the maple with vanilla.  

I Was Afraid It Would Be Empty

Do you remember the notebook I gave you as a Mother’s Day gift five years ago? I asked you to write to me about your life: how you didn’t learn about periods until you thought your sister was bleeding to death, how you snuck out with grandpa for a carnival date. You are one of the few people I can—could—sit with for hours on a couch, TV off, only our stories and us. When we knew you were close to death, I thought about asking if you’d written in the notebook for me, but I didn’t ask. I didn’t want you to feel guilty if you hadn’t found the time or the words to write. When we went through your bedroom after Christmas, I found the notebook in your dresser drawer. I opened it quickly. It was blank, but there was a jagged edge in front. The first page was torn away. 

After Your Strokes, I Ask If You Found Your Clitoris

I read about a woman who was 70 before she realized she had a clit, and I became concerned that you might not know about yours. What if you’d never had an orgasm? With Grandpa gone, I wasn’t sure I should ask, but the mini-strokes had shaken off your shyness. I knew your wedding night story—how you knew nothing about sex until that day, how two kids in the early fifties couldn’t quite make it work, how you went to bed crying instead. I’d heard stories of Grandpa patting you on the bottom when he thought no one was looking. One time he bought you a black leather jumpsuit like Olivia Newton John wore at the end of Grease, but you were too embarrassed to wear it for him. Even in the recovery room after his heart surgery, Grandpa playfully brushed his fingertips across your palm, an old signal that he wanted you. Did these actions add up to your pleasure? “Granny, I’ve been reading this book,” I began. “It talks about how our culture is so focused on men’s bodies and we aren’t supposed to talk about women’s bodies. A lot of women don’t even know about their clitoris! Did you and Grandpa find yours?” “Yeah,” you said quietly, as if someone on your end of the phone line might hear you. “So you did orgasm too?” “Yeah,” you said with a little chuckle, as if it were obvious. 

Your Death Explained in Birds

Death is the great egret at the swamp, picking newly hatched green herons from their cypress nest. I am the pregnant woman on land looking for something to throw. I am the mother heron, too small to fight back, and the runt deep in the nest. Death is the egret dropping fresh young birds into the swamp with barely a ripple. I am the pregnant woman standing horrified and helpless. I am the mother heron shrieking and snapping on the branch below. I am the smallest green heron in the nest. I stick my head out in the stillness after everyone else has gone. 

He was dissecting a cat when I arrived for the interview. The lab-coated doctor sat hunched over the splayed legs of an immobilized gray kitty. I looked away. This wasn’t what I had signed up for. He was supposed to be a neurologist, not a vet.

“You the gal they sent to take Mary’s place?” He spun his stool around to face me, the sharp instrument still in his hand. His words were broken by a slight accent. I glanced toward him, relieved to find that his long torso blocked all but the cat’s tail. 

“Yes, Mary, your secretary,” making clear that the typewriter was my tool, not the scalpel. Whatever would I do if he asked me to assist him? I was an English major, for goodness sake. “You need a typist while she’s on maternity leave, right?” 

The doctor tossed his lab gloves into a bin and shut the door between lab and lobby, leaving the dead cat and the smell of formaldehyde behind. A Swede with thinning gray hair, glasses, and a narrow face, he was tall in an awkward, gangly kind of way—like an adolescent boy whose trousers, no matter how new, always land inches above his ankle. His name was embroidered in red script above a pocket stuffed with pens. My eyes passed over his bulging Adam’s apple and landed on a grin. 

“She’s part of my research project.” The doctor nodded toward the closed door. 

I’d just finished my college freshman year and was working Saturday mornings as a receptionist at the EEG lab of the university’s medical complex. Filling in for the doctor’s secretary was a fulltime summer post with a much-needed salary increase. As far as I could tell, my older sister Sandy was the sole breadwinner in our family, and how much could a twenty-two-year-old secretary earn? 

Mother was enjoying the single life in Miami Beach where she’d gone to reclaim her runaway second husband. Any jobs Mom held during her four-year-and-counting stay barely covered her own living expenses. Our father had left a decade ago. His ten-dollar weekly child support checks disappeared on the stroke of our eighteenth birthdays without even a goodbye note… kind of like his earlier departure. My full scholarship covered tuition, but we’d turned down a student loan meant to cover the rest. Debt wasn’t something our family did. Luckily, I was able to live at home.

“I’ll show you around,” he beckoned, walking ahead in his size big shoes. I followed, wobbling in my two-inch heels. It was the mid-sixties and young women in the Midwest didn’t sport jeans or pants yet, but wore skirts, blouses, and even stockings if it wasn’t too hot. 

The quick tour revealed a reception area offering a desk, file cabinets, and one cracked leather armless chair for the random visitor. Patients were seen at the medical school’s clinic. A worn, brown carpet led into a tiny office that boasted a narrow window offering an encapsulated view of the high-rise buildings that made up the venerable medical complex. The desk was populated with stacks of paper, journals, and books. A credenza stood similarly cluttered, but for a framed photograph peeking out from the piles as though vying for the doctor’s attention. It showed a younger man, one arm circling the shoulders of a curly-haired woman, and the other holding a gap-toothed little boy. 

“My wife and son. He’s 14 now,” he offered, pausing to acknowledge his family. “They’re in Stockholm all summer.” Looking back at me, he waved his hands around the space. “And this is where I do all my great thinking and writing. Your job is to keep me organized and type up my notes.” Would he be joining them? This was to be a summer-long position. And I needed to get all those paid weeks in. A muffled siren from outside signaled the arrival of an ambulance.

“When can you start?”

* * *

I soon settled into a routine. Each morning I’d leave the apartment my sister and I shared and walked the few blocks to the Delmar bus, my brown-bag lunch in hand. A written assignment in the doctor’s scrawl would welcome me to my desk. I’d start pecking away on the IBM Selectric, stopping to take an occasional phone call. During my lunch hour, I’d roam the gentrified neighborhood shops, landing at the local Left Bank bookstore—browsing but not buying. Libraries were my go-to place for books.

I missed the camaraderie of the EEG lab: Laughing with the young female technicians, or greeting apprehensive patients who were about to have their scalps treated like pin cushions to map brain activity for migraines, epilepsy, or worse. Here it was just the doctor and I. He’d be in the clinic most mornings and in the afternoons, he holed up behind closed doors reading. As I had been forewarned, the doctor was not much of a conversationalist. “Hello,” “goodbye,” or explanations of assignments were his offerings. So, I was surprised when I returned from a lunch stroll to be welcomed by his loud greeting and a vase of yellow roses. 

“Your boyfriend dropped those off,” he announced from his desk chair as I entered, as if he had been waiting for me to return. Wow. Billy had never given me flowers. We’d met early during my freshman fall semester. With oval brown eyes, dark hair, and olive skin, he was a Jewish Omar Sharif who came equipped with still-married-to-each-other parents, a three-bedroom ranch house, and membership at the local synagogue. By that summer we’d begun our journey skipping down the yellow brick road to happily ever after. We’d made it past holding hands to making out in the vinyl-clad front seat of his car. And now he’d sent me flowers.

“Uh, I didn’t bring you flowers, Renee,” Billy declared on the phone when I called to thank him that evening. “I mean, not that I wouldn’t have liked to. Why would that guy tell you that?” 

That guy with the M.D., PhD? 

“Must be his weird sense of humor,” I puzzled. What was I to do? Scold the doctor? Laugh with him at his prank? Relax and enjoy the flowers? Should I feel flattered? Other than high school dance corsages that always pricked when pinned on, no one had ever given me flowers. Much less a dozen roses. I said nothing. Over the next few days I‘d watch the buds stretch and bloom, petals open wide to embrace a brief life, their perfume filling the office. Later when hardened, curled leaves dropped onto the patient notes I was typing, I tossed the flowers, washed the vase, and placed it on top of the file drawer. An arrangement of pink roses arrived the next week and I was greeted with the same story. Should I ask Billy again? Maybe he actually had sent these, not wanting to be outdone by the doctor? 

“No Renee, I did not get you flowers this time either. I’m sorry. I love you, but I don’t have money for roses right now. I’ll pick you some from my mom’s garden if you want. You sure you want to work for this guy? What’s with him?” 

“Oh, he’s harmless. Just having fun. Likes to joke. The work’s easy; the pay is good. Should cover all my textbooks and supplies.”  

I didn’t add that I loved getting roses and enjoyed the attention. After the second dozen roses had died, I found a collection of Winnie the Pooh books on my desk, still wrapped in their original cellophane. The day before I’d completely missed the doctor’s reference to Eeyore when describing a patient. 

“What, you don’t know Pooh and Tigger and Christopher Robin?” This gift the doctor acknowledged. I read the entire four-volume collection of charming stories that night. Years later I would read them to my young daughters.

The surprises continued. One morning I walked out of my apartment building and the doctor was out front in his ‘60s Chevy sedan, waiting to drive me to work. He lived in a nearby suburb where many professionals owned homes because of the good public schools. My sister and I were in the apartments clustered on the fringes—many populated by medical students on a budget. 

“I got a late start, so I decided to save you some bus money,” he explained, leaning over to open the passenger door. Had he gotten my address from my job application? No matter. Maybe I wouldn’t mention the ride to Billy. He might not have understood how nice it was to be driven somewhere without having to ask. Our family had never owned a car, unless you counted the few months we lived with our stepfather before he too walked out. Sandy had just started saving for a Chevy Nova. 

Growing up, destinations had been limited to those on bus, or streetcar lines, or within walking distance. My attendance at social events or club meetings was dependent upon begging a ride from friends, knowing I couldn’t reciprocate. My surprise at seeing the doctor’s car, despite its mud-splattered tires and scratchy seat covers, turned into delight, not skepticism. I was reminded of those long-ago Sunday afternoons when my father pulled up to the curb in his ‘50s lime green Plymouth, with the rounded roof, for one of his twice monthly custodial visits. I’d dash out and jump into the front seat eager for the fun adventure to begin. Until the day he stopped coming.

“Thanks!” I slid in. The doctor didn’t say much on the short trip, but it didn’t matter. The car ride was much better than the crowded bus where I’d stand, hanging onto an overhead strap, bouncing off other passengers at every jolt. 

My longest conversation with him occurred when he invited me to lunch midway into the summer. 

“Do you like Miss Hulling’s Café?” he asked as he popped out of his office, another unanticipated gesture. His morning pick-up hadn’t recurred, though I’d still paused and looked. 

“Sure!” I could easily abandon the American cheese sandwich and banana I’d packed that morning. We walked the few blocks; I had to hustle to keep up with the long strides of this man who was at least a foot taller than I. Grabbing our trays—mine piled with roast beef, mashed potatoes, and a chunk of corn bread; his with bratwurst and sauerkraut—we sat down at one of the Formica tables. The red plastic chair squeaked as I pulled it close. 

“So, is Billy a good boyfriend?” 

Luckily the potatoes slid down my throat, silencing my gasp.

“Um, yeah.” Not really sure if we shared the same definition of good boyfriend. “Yes!” deciding to sound more enthused as I buttered the bread. “We like the same things. Movies. The Muny opera.” Did the doctor even know about the summer musical troupe?

“Do you go to the Muny?” I asked, trying to redirect the conversation. 

He shook his head. Should I ask him about his wife? His son? 

“Tell me about Sweden,” I cut up the roast beef, ignoring the unfamiliar smell of pork from his plate. 

“Oh, it’s lovely. You should go,” gripping his knife and fork in the reversed manner Europeans use. He popped a chunk of meat into his mouth. 

I stirred the mashed potatoes with my fork feeling their hot steam on my face. 

“So, is Billy romantic? Does he send you love letters?” He reached for the salt shaker. 

Love letters? Did a Valentine’s card count? Billy sent as many letters as flowers. “Uh…no.” Was Billy romantic? We kissed often. He said he loved me.

“Love letters are beautiful.” He attacked his sauerkraut. “You know Swedes believe in free love.” 

Free love? This was a few years before the 1968 summer of love, and flowers in your hair. I was an eighteen-year-old virgin sipping lemonade. 

“You finished? Let’s get some ice cream.” He scraped his chair back. I followed through the revolving door.

As we launched onto the sidewalk toward the local Velvet Freeze, the doctor took my hand. His large fingers wrapped around mine with an unexpected gentleness. I hesitated and looked up. He was staring straight ahead and hadn’t missed a step. Should I drop his hand? Would he be angry? Did I want to? I wasn’t frightened, just surprised. Sexual harassment wasn’t in anyone’s vocabulary back then. Rape wasn’t mentioned out loud. The words weren’t screamed on headlines or TV; social media didn’t exist. Doctors were educated professionals. I felt safe. The summer sunshine offered comfortable warmth, not the usual sizzling, unbearable heat common to the Midwest. Orange day lilies in full glory lined the curb. Men, women, and children strolled the wide sidewalk. What did they think of us? A graying suited-up man holding the hand of a teenage girl? Or did they even notice? Were we such an oddity? For a doctor and his employee, the behavior was an anomaly. But a father out with his daughter? How sweet. 

I ordered a chocolate nut fudge ice cream cone; he had chocolate mint. 

The next morning, I arrived at 9:00 as usual, called hello to the doctor, who grunted a good morning. An envelope with “Renee” on it, written in his familiar script was on my desk. I opened it. 

“Dearest, 

‘Each morning I listen for the sound of your footsteps coming down the hall toward the office. I eagerly await the moment you open the door. Your arrival fills me with such joy and tenderness. I so love your blue eyes, your soft blonde hair. I long to kiss your pink lips.’”

The letter dropped from my trembling hands landing next to that day’s stack of patient notes and the doctor’s instructions. I grabbed my purse and yanked open the office door, heard it click shut behind me. My heels clattered on the hardwood floors as I ran to the elevator and rode down to the first floor, relieved to find the red and white city bus still at the curb, promising me a ride home. I displayed my student pass to the driver, turned down the aisle, and collapsed into one of the empty seats before me. As the bus groaned away, I looked out the front panoramic window at the giant buildings comprising the complex: a consortium of hospitals, clinics, and one of the most revered medical schools in the country. I was a mere speck in that landscape. Leaning my head against the cracked black leather seat, I cried. For the money? For the roses? For me?