As much as I like to pride myself in being unique and strong-willed, the truth is I'm really malleable. A piece of silly putty in a cheap plastic egg. I know this because of vacations I've taken.

When I leave New York, I decide I hate it. Wherever I am, Silver Lake or Vermont, I decide I've stumbled upon the life I should be living, the life I'm too afraid to reach out and grab. God, I think, what have I been doing with the last years of my youth?

But how can that be true? How can I be meant to live in a bungalow in the Los Angeles hills and hike in the desert and be part of a freer, lighter existence, light as the bright dry air there, and also be meant to birth babies in the Vermont mountains and take up yoga and own a canoe? The contradictions don't diminish my conviction when I'm there, however.

When I come home, back to New York, I feel glum. It's so dirty, and frenetic, and old, and stuffy, and stressful, and tiring, how long can I hump groceries home on swollen feet that ache from walking up and down, up and down stairs in heels, all over the city, all day? How long can I go without smelling grass and leaves?

And then I stay put for a few weeks. Back to work and my emails and my bed that's too small for both Billy and me, and my cats who greet me at the door when I come home, and all my little objects that I've carefully collected and to which I'm so attached, and I forget.

I don't really want kids, I think, and LA is so far away... There are other things to do and worry about, and I forget. Will I never leave? Will I stay until life ('Life') intervenes and I'm forced to change course? Is that unevolved, lazy, cowardly? Is it fine?

I should admit right here that when I worked at a small telecommunications firm briefly, two years ago, I started to think I wanted breast implants because so many of the women there had them.

I mean, seriously.

Babies

A few years ago, I discovered mommy blogs. I was working at a small, inconsequential publishing house, and I didn't have much work to do, and I was very bored all day. I was transfixed as soon as I found them. I'd scooch closer to the computer screen, kicking my pinchy flats back under my chair and resting on my elbows, reading about 5am feedings, bleeding nipples, fresh baby smell and postpartum depression. Dooce. Finslippy. Breed 'Em and Weep. These absurd website names.

The thing is, I never wanted children when I was little. Some girls play with dolls, and play house and pretend to be mommies? I scoured the woods for perfectly smooth sticks to use as swords, and tried to convince my nephews that the tire swing was a time machine that could shoot them back to the age of the dinosaurs.... If a girl coerced me into playing house, I chose the dad, or the 'cool brother.' I didn't give a shit about babies.

When I started reading mommy blogs, I thought that maybe I was turning some subtle corner. That a secret part of me was unfurling, opening like a small flower towards a hidden maternal light. Because seriously, I loved these blogs; loved hearing about what it was like to give birth and take care of a tiny helpless human, to be so suddenly alone in the world, home with this unknowable squalling being, the old life gone and with it the old friends, just the new mother with her sore breasts, stranger's body.

I've thought a lot about having kids, and as I've gotten up in years - I'm 28, as of a few days ago - I thought, well maybe. Maybe. But something happened: I spent a night with a child. Not a child brought to light by its mother's words, on paper, but a real one, a two-year-old girl, daughter of my boyfriend's cousin. She didn't speak much English, this girl, mostly Korean, and she sat placidly at the table with us one night a couple weeks ago, occassionally slurping on a noodle, twisting around to take her shoe off, putting her shoe on her head. The usual. And as I sat there and watched her, I wanted to feel something for this girl, this little one. I wanted to feel, I don't know, SOMETHING. And I did. You know what I felt?

Bored.

Hanging out with the child was boring. We had to pay constant attention to her, to make sure she didn't fall or grab something dangerous or put something dirty in her motuh. We cajolled her into accepting two spoonfuls of yogurt; I absently petted her hair and accepted a handful of napkins when she solemly gave them to me. These small moments were sweet enough, I guess, but mostly they were kind of tedious. I wanted to drift off into my own thoughts, but something about being in her proximity prohibited that - something inside of me prohibited that. I had to be on guard, on alert, for the tiniest trivial nothings. With little kids, the little nothings have to mean everything.

I felt wistful walking down the street afterwards, eyeing all the young pretty girls smoking their cigarettes, balancing on one foot as they adjusted their heel straps. They gathered in small packs, soft dresses and pinned-up hair, laughing on the sidewalks of New York. I thought what it would be like to be So-Jun, pushing her daughter in the stroller, pausing periodically to pick up the stuffed fish she kept jettisoning over the edge. It didn't seem romantic, like the way I'd pictured it all these years. It seemed sad.

When I read the blogs, even at their darkest moments, the lives of the mothers seemed intensely immediate. Worth it. They'd discovered a secret world the rest of us childless ones can only wonder at and, depending on our worldview, dismiss or pine for. But there I was, suddenly thrust in the midst of the real deal, and basically, I wanted to get away.

I think that motherhood might be just be another world I've conjured up for myself. Another imagination game I've been playing. When I was little, finishing a good book sometimes felt profoundly heartbreaking - I'd mope around afterwards, casting about for some replacement of that lost world. I don't feel entirely like that now, but I wonder. It's not entirely dissimilar.

I'm 28, and suddenly I feel so far from ready, so far from ever feeling ready. I'd like to wait another 10 years or so before considering it. Maybe 20. In my next life. The one after this one.

I don't want to give up the possibility, to let go of the dream of a family, because sometimes I still think I'd be good at it - that it'd be good for me. My own little world, my own little people. But they wouldn't me mine, would they? And then I think about my life, and my life not being my life anymore, and I just...

I don't know.

I’m soggy. I wish someone could pick me up, wring me out, give me a good shake and hang me up on a clothesline to dry. I need the bleaching power of the sun.

My birthday was last week, and James was in town, and it’s seemed like every night was a reason to celebrate. I also just love birthdays, love the absurdity of it, all that attention. I was trotting around all night on Friday telling people it was my wedding night. I am now so full of sake, champagne and beer that I am likely still drunk.

*

Edit – I’m now back from several meetings and feeling less thick-headed. I don’t have much to say here, but I’m feeling bad about neglecting ‘my writing’ since the program ended and am determined to get back in shape. Consider this me wheezing on the Stairmaster.

I’ve been trying to be productive. An easy way to do that is to pay my bills, which I’ve now almost completely done. Electric, Gas, Vet, done! Sailing out the door. I love the crispness of it, the thick bold lines of a check mark. Done.

Next week I leave for LA. Will I be productive, sitting side by side with James on our laptops as the bright California sun streams in through the windows? Will we pick oranges and wear sunglasses and take photos next to palm trees? Will we drive around in his VW and play all our old favorite songs? I’m already imagining the trip in retrospect, as a series of photographs I’ll upload to my flickr and stare at wistfully years from now. That’s one of my problems, I think. I’m always anticipating things in past tense.

Simplicity

The rain started falling in a steady grey mist while I sat inside the courthouse at Livingston Street. We watched a video about the significance of jury duty, complete with no-name actors dressed up as Europeans, and then I cozied into my chair and typed. Once or twice, I checked email. It was nice to be inside, knowing no one around me, knowing no one would talk to me for a long time. Occasionally a woman entered the room and called the names of people who were going to be interviewed and, most likely, selected for a trial. My name wasn’t called.

Then, she said we could go. “Ladies and Gentleman, you may all leave; the judge doesn’t need you. You are done for eight years.” She gave a rueful smile and thumped a stack of papers on the desk in front of her to organize them into a perfect pile. We could leave! There was a satisfied murmuring throughout the room as folks started gathering their coats, stuffing paperbacks into pockets and purses.

Ben and I waved at each other. I opened my umbrella and crossed the street towards him, and we walked up Smith Street together. This place, or that place? We read menus and deliberated. We had nowhere to be and decided to drink beer. We stuffed ourselves on French fries and sandwiches, slurped cold beer, gossiped. It was delicious. When I stood up, I stumbled into him and then tripped on my way into the bathroom. I realized with some embarrassment that I was drunk – or if not drunk, then on my way. But I couldn’t stop giggling.

We decided to “do work.” We walked in the rain for long minutes, our toes getting damp, complaining about the chill in the air, until we found a nice coffee shop. Ben complained about the way the girl made my English Breakfast tea. There was no internet service. We discussed Ben’s book and I tinkered with the piece I’m writing, a maudlin account of how death is handled in offices. It was supposed to be funny, originally, but as is typical, I became too serious about everything. Now I don’t know what to do with it.

Our stomachs were starting to turn uneasily from the bulky combination of beer, grease, meat and caffeine. We found an ice cream parlor with internet access, and observed the groups of children and their mothers who were sitting in the back. It was very quiet. The rain kept falling and the children squealed while the mothers spoke in low, soft tones. The children pulled on rain boots and touched the flowers in vases that were sitting on the tables. Goodbye, said some of the women cheerfully, leading their children by the hands out the door; Goodbye, waved the others, who were still sitting at their tables, sipping chai lattes and helping their children spoon strawberry ice cream into their mouths.

The rain stopped and we had no more work to do or emails to send, or if we did, we had given up the pretense of caring about any of it, so we went for a walk. Back up Smith Street, past the apartment he and Mark shared, the bars they used to frequent, and as we walked we reminisced about those years, and I tried to think of happy memories from that time period with Mark but couldn’t. We thought that was funny, that I had no happy memories, and giggled about it. It felt nice to be able to joke about it without much of a twinge at all, no twinge really, a healthy handful of years later. We said goodbye to Smith Street and walked uphill.

We found a small bar, a tiny bar, with fresh local beers on tap and a row of flavored bitters for various whiskey drinks. A few people came in, settled into tables, and Ben and I sat at the bar. The door was open and the breeze was cold. We sat with our coats on and complimented the beer. It was very crisp and delicious. Everyone at my office thought I’d spent the entire day at jury duty, and that knowledge was deeply satisfying. It was getting later, darker, but I wasn’t very tired or drunk. I had plans and so I had to leave, but I could have stayed longer. It was one of those days that came out of nowhere and pulled me along. It was one of the best days I’d ever had.

Stonington leaves

I keep thinking about my cat, who was put to sleep yesterday. I post pictures of him on the internet and update my facebook status to commemorate him. It is ridiculous. Someone listen, someone listen, I seem to be saying. I had a cat, and he was my childhood, and now he's gone. He's gone and my childhood's gone.

It is a layered sadness. I am sad, simply, because he was wonderful and I loved him. I am sad because I nursed him to health as a baby, and then kept him alive as an elderly cat, tempting him once with formula and later with tuna. I am sad because I got this cat when I was 13, turning the corner from childhood to adolescence, cognizance, angst, and he died when I was 27, turning the corner from outlived adolescence and young adulthood into plain, pragmatic adulthood. What I'm trying to say is that he was my steward into adulthood.

I don't know, what does one say about this? He was my cat, and I loved him. He purred constantly, at all times, while eating and sitting and walking. We called him Little Purrbox. He was outgoing and sweet and simple. Always hungry, always happy, an easy friend.

Over the past few years I've watched my father grow old, get sick, and I've been trying to come to terms with his impending death, my certain future loss of him. My cat's death feels horribly like a harbinger. Don't go, don't go, I want to say to them. Please don't leave. Please, stop leaving.

You can't get them to listen, you know.

My parents are moving houses and boxing their belongings and this will surely be the last place they live, or one of them lives, or one of the last places. I can't shake the feeling that we're rounding the final bend.

The glad years come

This is a personal essay I've been working on for a couple weeks. I'll likely revise it, at which point I'll post it again, but for now, here it is:


"The glad years come"

Megan Foley


On Valentine’s Day, my older sister and I are charged with cleaning our parents’ attic. They’re moving a few towns over in Virginia to a house better designed to accommodate my dad’s escalating health problems (fewer stairs), and they need us to clear out the junk before the movers come.

We crawl up gingerly, easing our way along the fold-out ladder, which always seems about to buckle to the side like an injured knee but does not, and poke our heads into the attic. It’s fairly typical, as attics go: cardboard boxes with sharpie scrawl, banged-up suitcases, an electric kettle and faded pillows, a lone ski boot; angled wooden ceiling beams so low you have to stoop. Our hands are soon thick with dust from thumbing over poorly boxed and bagged books, and our noses run; the air is stuffy, cloudy with particles of disrepair and inertia.

Once we’re done with the books, we spread out into opposite corners: her with the lumpy navy bag of stuffed animals, and me with the suitcase pile. Most of them (the suitcases, that is) are useless; old and heavy, without rollers. I’ve just parted with my paternal grandmother’s threadbare Oscar de la Renta (noticing, for the first time, its tag, finally understanding why she carted it around like a puffed-up bird well into her 80s), when I find the suitcase. The suitcase; the point of this essay.

It is small and maroon and utterly unremarkable, sitting in the shadows nestled between two other dusty relics. Unlike the others, however, it is heavy. When I lift it with the intention of tossing it downstairs into the garbage heap, I’m stopped by its heft.

“This one’s got something in it,” I say to Mia as I thump it down in front of me. “There are cards here signed by ‘Philip.’” This stops her. She crawls over, squatting down awkwardly, realizing before I have that this Philip is our long-dead grandfather, the famous Philip; Philip whose early death altered the trajectory of our mother’s life and became the crucible of her childhood troubles, described to us fleetingly, only in passing, as a long-lost loss. The great loss.

The lining of the suitcase is a very shiny pink, a shocking pink. We see from the initials under the handle that it belonged to our Nana, our mom’s mom, who died when we were children. At the very top is a man’s attaché case, which I have opened and begun exploring. I spread the wealth of greeting cards between me and my sister, and we take turns reading to each other. Happy Birthday, Dear Wife, states the cover of one. An illustrated woman in a 1940s dress and high heels arranges flowers on a table. Inside, a printed inscription: Happy wishes to you, wife. It’s your birthday, and you know, you grow nearer and still dearer as the glad years come and go! Below that, his looping cursive: “For I love you, sweetheart, and have you with me always in my heart. Love, Phil.” It is the first time either of us has seen his handwriting, found any personal article of his. The attic has suddenly been electrified.

On the left inside flap of the card, a woman’s face drawn in the shape of an apple puckers her red lips and bats her lashes; a hat shaped like a green leaf sits on top of her head. At the top, Philip has penned the date: February 1, 1944. They would have had the first two girls by then. My mother would come three years later, the final little one, the bean-faced runt. We know almost nothing of those years, the happy years. How they lived, what they did. We’ve seen a jerky, sped-up video taken from their honeymoon in St. Augustine, Nana in her skirt-suits and teetering heels, dark lipstick and coiffed black hair, waving on the boardwalk. Philip the quiet eye behind the lens, rarely figuring in the frame.

And he’s absent from many of the photos we find here, too, below the cards: Nana, posing in a fur coat and floppy cream hat in their backyard in Brooklyn, the neighbors’ row houses strung out behind her. Nana, glamorous smile, tucked into his wallet. But he does appear. We lightly touch the images of him now: here he is, squeezing into a photobooth with Nana, balancing her on his lap and flashing a pretty-boy grin; smoking a cigarette in a beige suit in Brooklyn, squinting in the sunlight; his dark, thick lashes and eyebrows, cupid’s bow lips. It’s never occurred to me before, but it’s obvious now, somehow: Philip was sweet.

The story, as told by my mother, goes like this: Philip came from an educated Italian family, and Nana was poor. His father was a doctor, he was a lawyer, and she, though she’d once been offered a scholarship to Julliard for opera, was a typist. His family didn’t approve, but they nevertheless had the big catholic wedding – the towering, cloying cake and heavy silk gown. They had the honeymoon, they moved into a house, they had the three girls. And then, eight years into the marriage, Philip got sick. A rare cancer in his retina. He was thirty-five when he died; my mother was two. If it’s nearby, she’ll refer to the only photo she has of them together, on the beach; she is plunked in his lap, scrawny and scowling, and you can see in his eyes that he’s tired. He’s frowning too.

In his will, he specified that Nana would be named the ‘executress’ of his estate, unless she died or were unable to care for the children. In that case, the money would go to his father, and then his mother. But one month after his death, his father died; and two months later, so did his mother. His brother Hector (and here the tone of the telling darkens, grows nefarious) went to court and claimed that Nana was unfit to manage the estate, petitioned to be named the executor, and won. The story tends to get wrapped up in a stark black bow: Hector kept all the money to himself, and Nana and the girls were set adrift.

Next in the pile is a hodgepodge of papers: a playbill from Radio City Music Hall (“Showcase!” trumpets the cover), a 1946 invoice for a refrigerator he must have bought her. Here is a little pencil case with his initials, PJB, doodled all over it, and here is his father’s death card, printed in Italian. We rifle through the last of these mementos and, satisfied we’ve explored them thoroughly, reassemble the attaché case and lay it aside.

The rest of the suitcase is less colorful; the emotional objects all seem to have been tucked away in the case, kept intact and protected, and what lies beneath are folders. Documents. We open the first folder, which is neatly organized, left side and right. The pages are thin, tissuey legal paper, and they seem to be correspondences, spanning years. I hand them over to Mia, restless before I’ve even had a chance to begin, preferring to flip through the rest of the suitcase’s contents for more hidden treasures. So it is Mia who sits still and makes sense of them and says, after some time, “She wrote the president.”

Now this is interesting. Nana’s rages are legendary in our family. We know that she struggled financially after Philip died, relocating from Brooklyn to Catskill, where she worked as a secretary and, at night, managed her parents’ bowling alley. We know she was stretched thin and felt chronically cheated from the life she should have had. We know that she was mentally ill, a little, that she had bipolar disorder and was sporadically hospitalized. But writing the president is a new, iconic piece of evidence in the case of Nana. It is deliciously, tragically grandiose.

Mia reads:

“November 14, 1961

The President
The Whitehouse
Washington, DC

My Dear Mr. President [this would have been Kennedy],

I am enclosing here within a copy of a letter, which I have directed to the honorable Abraham Ribicoff, and which is self-explanatory. Your intercession would be much appreciated. Thank you for your attention to this matter, which is of such extreme importance to myself and to my children.”

We find the letter to Ribicoff (the name means nothing to me, woefully poor student of US history that I was, though I later identify him as Kennedy’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare), which is itself an introduction to prior correspondences. We see, digging through them, both those she enclosed for Ribicoff and other, earlier letters; how much time she must have dedicated to petitioning for benefits, how increasingly frustrated and desperate.

What begins in 1949, following Phillip’s death, as perfunctory withdrawals from the estate evolve into more carefully-worded pleas: “I’ve put off making this request hoping I would be able to manage without further withdrawals,” she writes to a Veterans Affairs attorney in 1950, “however my illness has precluded my working even part time, and I find I just cannot make ends meet on the small income I receive...Christmas is almost here, and although I cannot afford luxuries for the children, still, warm new clothing would go far in making it a happier time for them.”

Like rocks skittering down an embankment, a foothold lost, we read her situation go from tenuous to perilous. Following the annulment of a short-lived marriage in 1954, she attempts to get her benefits reinstated, but is only allotted a third – $22 a month – of her previous payments. She’s essentially gone from receiving $568 to $168 a month, and I don’t know why, but the numbers fascinate me.

In 1956, she goes through a disappointing exchange with the VA again, this time trying to establish the dates of Philip’s employment, which she believes should now, due to a law change, make her retroactively eligible for disability benefits. She is denied.

Her letter to Ribicoff, five years later, reveals an obsession with this perceived injustice: “Since 1956,” she writes, “I have been brooding over what I know is an unfair and arbitrary decision. The referee at the time of the hearing was extremely annoyed with me, because I had caused him to miss his commuting train due to a traffic situation which delayed me in reaching New York City from Catskill, NY, where I was then residing. I explained why I was late, but he was still upset about it...”

I imagine her drawing herself up as she sits to type it, crossing her ankles and tucking them under her chair, chest high. Of course she never received a response.

And then, as abruptly as we made our discovery, we reach the end. We have finished our excavation of the suitcase, and there is nothing left to sort through. We close it back up, and I carry it back to where I found it. We have taken from it several of Philip’s business cards, which we found in his wallet, the photobooth picture of him and Nana, and white enamel deco necklaces, which we assume were Nana’s. I am pleased but agitated. For the first time, I have heard Philip’s voice, her voice, but my access to them is finite.



Four hours later, I am at a cocktail party with my older brother holding a sticky glass of pink champagne punch. We are surrounded by bowls of Hershey’s kisses and platters dressed with mediocre cheese, and I watch as a caterer pulls two bags of dumplings and mini quiche out of the freezer and shakes them onto trays, to warm in the oven and then circulate. (I feel like I’ve seen behind the curtain, and my anticipation of trying them correspondingly diminishes.)

“What was Nana like?” I ask. Duncan’s attention has shifted to the raffle the hostess is announcing from the top of her dining room table, and he takes an annoyingly long time to answer.

“She was Mom and Aunt Roberta and Aunt Jill,” he says, “she was all three of them.”

It is a pat answer, too easy, and I am dissatisfied. Which part of them? When? “But what was she like,” I prod.

“She was full of life.” He describes how our oldest brother used to make fun of the way she walked, encased in a pencil skirt and tottering on four-inch heels; he stands rigid and pokes his butt out, taking small tiptoe steps to demonstrate.

It is funny, and it is not enough. Why has he picked a juvenile joke to recount, out of all his memories of her? Why did she, for that matter, save a refrigerator receipt, out of all the things Philip gave her? I am playing an impossible game, I know, trying to piece together a coherent picture out of fragments, to ascribe my own narrative to others’ memories.

The next day, hungover from sugar and champagne, I find my mom in the kitchen and ask if she’d like to see the suitcase. I have an hour before I have to head into Washington to catch my bus, and though I’m tired, I feel a small thrill at the idea of witnessing her reaction to the items. But she declines. Next time you come down, she says.

And so I go back to Brooklyn, where I’ve lived for five years (not so far, ultimately, from where they lived), hanging Nana’s necklaces on my wall, propping up the small photobooth photo on my shelf.

Friends stop in, stay for dinner, and sometimes I take the objects out. These were hers, I say, proffering the necklaces, this was him. See how pretty? Wasn’t he pretty? I never knew them.

Wait wait don't tell me

Baby's newest game is hunting down my packaged food and ripping it open. Not to eat, apparently; for sport. This morning it was the brand new bag of coffee beans, hermetically sealed in thick metallic something-or-other, some durable air-proof material, which i found behind the counter, shredded. Why? Usually it's crackers, cookies, carby treats that she maybe craves since she only eats grain-free expensive blah blah. She pushes those off the counter and then Pern, the big fat one, who really does have a carb addiction, goes to town. But what use could Pern or Baby have for coffee beans? It's cruel.

Anyway, possibly this is boring to you. Possibly you're thinking, why should I care about this woman's cats? I've got no answer, except that right now the big one is spooning my hip, and it's damn cute.

Basically, I'm procrastinating starting my real work. I pinched a nerve yawning, that's how my morning's been. That and watching a Westminster judge appraise mutts on The View. Fucking A. Time to start.