another week fading into dusk

It's on Friday nights when I think about it the most, and always with an odd sense of happiness and nostalgia:  I was so out of place in college -- fraternity boys and sorority girls everywhere one was to turn.  In a place where people all seem to know each other, everyone also notices whomever it is that no one seems to know -- and on that campus, one of those people no one knew would have been me.

Not like in New York, where you can be alone if you want to, even with a total stranger pressed up against you as you brace yourself against the closed door of the lurching, crowded subway train.

Or maybe I'm really just describing the difference between childhood and adulthood.  For me, New York is synonymous with the end of adolescence.  I'd hated college.  Living in the dorms, you couldn't really stay in and write letters to your sister or your best friend on a Friday night, even if that's what you really yearned to do, given, finally, the chance.  Not without taking a lot of flak, that is.

Not that one should be incapable of standing up for oneself, but doing so can take an awful a lot of energy and taint the simple pleasure of finally, after looking forward to it all week, one was left alone.

So in college, I'd avoid those conversations by quietly stealing away to the study hall across campus -- the one that was open all day and night, every day and night, seven days a week.  It was a huge, quiet, "echo-y" room, in a 19th century academic hall, with a high ceiling and a sort of balcony at the top from which people upstairs could look down on the even rows of long tables punctuated by desk lamps that gave off a visual sort of warmth.  I could bring food, coffee, a book, my journal -- whatever I wanted. I could bring whomever I truly was.

And now? Living by myself in my own home, if I want to sit inside in my sweat pants and write on a Friday or Saturday night, I don't have anyone I have to get away from to do that.

Or, if I want, I can do what I did late yesterday afternoon and into the evening, a Friday:  I set out for the Brooklyn Bridge, moving toward Manhattan, toward the sunset, watching the sky turn pink and then a thick, milky, dark blue against the outlines of the buildings as they lit up. Around me, tourists and families and couples holding hands, and here I was on a Friday night, above the river, in the chill of the air, alone -- and was no one's business; they have their own lives.

And when I returned home, all was quiet, and the epsom salts dissolved in the steaming hot bath, and everything was right.

It took terrible things happening for my upstairs tenants to move out, to take with them their stomping up and down the stairs and coordinating Friday night bar trips loudly in the halls, on their cell phones, but I don't regret any of it now.  Because it got me here, back to my life.  It's not all said and done yet, not official yet, but there's a plan on the horizon that could make it affordable for me to stay here by myself after all.

Last week I was on the phone with a woman from the bank who'd called to respond to my complaint about my loan modification denial.  She was friendly and warm, good at her job.  Back in my hometown, she owned not one but two houses.  Her home, it turns out, was built the same year of the Victorian era that mine was.  She admired photos from my appraisal, complimenting me on the paint job I'd done on the front door.  Further conversation revealed that her home in the old historic district was officially classified as a mansion.  It was clear that she lived alone.

What on earth does anyone do with all of that space? All of those things?

I don't need all of these walls or rooms, it is true.  I don't ever want to own enough to fill them.

Except for with stillness, with my thoughts.  Here, my imagination has the space it needs to stretch outward, up, through the beautifully carved -- if weathered -- old Victorian banister.  Reaching upward through the space around which banister curves around again at each landing, until reaching the top of the house, limited only by the clear boundary of skylight glass that lets the moon begin to show its face to me again through that opening at the top of where I live.

You can go now.

Yes, I would be fooling you if I gave you the impression that my house had not already seemed, from the beginning, to have other demons. I recall how the woman who'd sold us the house confided in me -- as she led me back to the sidewalk after having just given me, for the first time, a glimpse inside the run-down townhouse (what a fancy word for such a dilapidated mess)-- about her own divorce. 

“See this gate?” she'd said to me, holding open the heavy black iron one by the doorknob on it. “My ex-husband put up this fence. Last thing he did, the good-for nothing. I said to him, 'thank you very much. You cheated on me; you were no good. Now leave.' ”

And wouldn't you know that that gate was the first thing to fall off its hinges the moment my ex-husband and I moved in to this house -- still so full of dusty toys and broken down appliances and an old couch? The contract of sale had of course said the place had to be “broom clean” when we took possession of it, but after it took eight months to close, due to ten percent of the house belonging to some mysterious man in a faraway country – the ex-husband, I would gather – my own at-the-time husband's thoughts on this had been, also, “Thank you very much, but no; please don't bother to clean up after yourselves. Just go.  Just please leave.”

At the time, of course, I'd thought he was crazy. It would cost us money and time to clear the place of all the belongings that had been left behind. But then I'd never been inclined toward homeownership to begin with, so what did I know. I didn't have the know-how that he had, having grown up duct-taping and re-duct-taping his hoarder-family's house -- so full of things that it came to be known in my mind as the world's smallest 17-room house – constantly together. I hadn't yet realized that when it came to owning and fixing up a house, there would occasionally come a point when either time, money, or patience became the thing you had the least of – when you would, in exchange, expend almost any amount of one or more of the other items just to save you the one. 

And so it wasn't for another seven years that I would come to this point, to this realization, myself. In my case I would have paid almost any amount of money. And my thoughts were just that, simply, “I would pay anything. Just get out of my life.”

Where did I get them?

Knowing doesn't always matter.  Where the bugs came from exactly, when they arrived, is immaterial.  Is history.

What I do want to know is, where did I get these things -- and by these things I mean both this, that tendency to have been driven to near madness over them, and that, the endurance to do whatever was necessary to kill them off -- and even if, yes, it meant losing both my mind and ten percent of my body weight in the process.

Of my parents' four children, I'm the one who looks like my mother.  My father of all people would have known, and this was one of the last -- one of the only -- things he ever said to me before dying.

My mother...a haunted person.  And all my life, I, in turn, have been haunted, always, by her.  It's not a criticism.  It just is.

But there's more.  I've always felt that it's from my father that I inherit my strong body, compact, wiry.  And maybe, just maybe, it's from this same thrice-married man -- this man who had a fondness for cigarettes and alcohol -- that I get this persistence, this unrelenting hunger. He has been, for me, a last name,  a word in English -- one that says I come from ordinary people who worked with their hands.  It all starts to make sense.


Where do you come from?

Sometimes it seems like everyone in New York has an interesting, yet easy, answer to that question.  A story of immigration eventually told by rote.  And so, for many of us originally from nondescript American families -- in nondescript American cities -- it feels, sometimes, as though we came from nowhere.  My curiosity to know more -- to have a story --  gets me nowhere.  Not with one parent dead.  Not with the other one not talking.

But this much I do know, and maybe it's sufficient for now:  my hair springs up into perfect ringlets -- curls  that come from my father.  My hair is, simultaneously, perfectly straight -- and that comes from my mother. 

But what about me?

Me? I come from myself. Or I come from nowhere. Or everywhere, simultaneously.  From a lack of compromise.  From conflict. 

I am from both confusion and determination.

Bedbugs can too fly.

On airplanes, that is.

Personally, I have never had the pleasure of being on an overnight flight in first class, and I hope now that I never will.  In fact, if I never find myself hermetically sealed, at however many thousands of feet, with hundreds of other blood-filled, exhaling furless beings, crammed into the upholstered seats of one great big movie theater in the sky, except with pajama-filled cloth bags that have recently been splayed open on one or more beds, both above me and all over the carpet floor beneath , well, frankly, I will be just fine with that.

As if being surrounded by other people in close quarters had not already presented enough annoyances.  Now, despite the urban legends, I actually have very little fear of getting bedbugs from someone on the subway.  The seats, the poles, the walls, the doors -- everything is a cold,  unwelcoming hard, slick plastic or metal or graffiti-resistant plexiglass of sorts. Half the time, it's too cold on those trains for humans, let alone bugs whose interests include cuddling in bed.  However, the subway has its own problems, most notably the young people, the volume of whose iPods announce, from the other end of the car, that either 1) there's something wrong with this young person's earphones,  2) there's something wrong with this young person's ears, or 3) there will very soon be something wrong with this young person's ears.

But no matter.  It is clear, based on the present state of pestilence, tornado touchdowns in Brooklyn of all places, earthquakes, etc., that the end is near anyway; who needs to hear all of the final screams?

10/10/10 Dream

All of my life, I've had dreams about someone breaking into the house; sometimes it's the house where I grew up, and sometimes it's the house where I live. Usually I'm home and trying to keep the person from getting in. Sometimes I'm pushing against the door to try to keep the intruder out.  Sometimes I'm rushing upstairs to close a window that I remember that I've left open, racing against a menacing figure that's lurking outside, trying to find a way in.  Other times, I dream that I'm living in a city that's at war; the enemy has flooded into the area, and I'm looking for somewhere to hide because I know that they're coming, and it's just a matter of time before they find me and kill me.

In my waking life, I've never been afraid of anyone breaking in; I've never had anything worth stealing.  But when I sleep at night, somehow, this is what I dream about.

Last night, in this latest dream, I had just come home. Nothing else in the house had been touched, only the bedding -- all of which had violently been ripped from my mattress, torn in places.

Beneath that, I noticed that the bed suddenly looked old and and gray.  At the head of the bed, beside the pillows, when I looked closer, I could see that there were gashes in the mattress now.  The gashes oozed pus as though it were a living thing.  Living, but in pain and slowly dying.

Wanted Alive, Leaping with Joy

When I was growing up, we always had outdoor cats, and they often had fleas.  I don't remember whether they bit anyone else, but they certainly bit me.  I'd get this intense itching on my ankles and reach down to grasp the small, shiny black bug firmly between my thumb and forefinger and roll it back and forth until it was dead.  You can't just squeeze them, you see; they survive that.  They have a hard exoskeleton to protect them.  They are survivors.

That, and the fact that they hop.

You go to grab a flea, and if you're not sneaky enough about it, you watch it seem to literally disappear.  One minute it's on your skin, and the next it's just not.

Blood-sucking insects are magical this way.  Other ways too.

Think of the bedbug:  evolved to come after us -- we who have opposible thumbs and fly swatters and flashlights, we who can destroy the earth several times over with merely a word -- while we are soundest asleep.  Designed to inject us with an anesthetic that keeps us from knowing.  Designed to be as thin as a piece of cardboard (the non-corrugated kind), able to hide almost anywhere (including inside the holes of the kind of cardboard that is).  

Designed to feed upon what is abundant.  What's a drop of blood in the oceans of our bloodstreams?  They aren't vegetarians; it is true.  But they aren't carnivores either.  In much the way we know that a cow won't notice a little missing milk, they know, as well  -- with their bodies, that is --  that there will be an endless supply of nourishment for them if we stick around.  You see, we're no good to them dead.  They want us awake and worried in the middle of the night, driven to the refrigerator for a nervous snack.

Alive.

Well, I've been alive; I'll say that.  Drenched with sweat in the middle of the night, next to my flea-bitten cat who's been shedding the disgusting "black pepper" form that the dried, digested blood from the fleas' meals usually will take.  A lot on my mind, I suppose, to be breaking out in a sweat like that. A lot going on in my life.

And a glance down to reveal tiny spots on the still-moist bedsheet, exactly at the place where the cat had snuggled up next to me.  Fear, my heart leaping.

But part of my drive for life, I suppose, is also my intellectual curiosity, too -- the mad scientist  that lurks inside of me. 

Pulling some specks of flea dirt from my poor cat's scalp and sprinkling them on the sheet (disgusting, yes, but science is calling), I am  off to the bathroom for a spray bottle of water, which I use to spritz a light mist over where the "flea dirt" is.

Lightly, I press the skin of my arm down onto the dampened flea waste, and there they are.  Beautiful, brownish red. 

Spots.

I am saved.

No big deal, then.  Just some hard-shelled, blood-sucking insects that leap into the air when you try to kill them and that make my cat scratch himself angrily for relief.

Not these horrible, polite little bugs that have the decency to hide from me.  Not these insects that, unlike us, wouldn't even know the first thing about taking more than they need.