“Charmed ditto.”
After a drunken first date, and after I called him (taking control!) we ended up a passionate pair. Far enough from home, I was finally able to forget my history. We fell into each other instantly, sensing our mutual shyness and odd pasts, but never discussing them. Instead, we mocked the art world (but secretly craved its acceptance). Nigel got me and judged nothing. He bought me jewelry and clothes, attracted to my whole body.
Over the next two years, as I travel-wrote in Paris and then returned to Harvard, he quit jobs to join me. He showed up in my rooms, ready to carry my bags, fix my furniture, anything I wanted. At first, I glowed in his attention, happy for help with the things I’d always had to do alone. But slowly, his dedication began to confuse me. He arrived as a surprise the weekend before my thesis was due to feed me, make photocopies, glue images. “Thanks,” I kept saying but I’d felt edgy. I’d spent my whole life doing my own homework. I didn’t need help with that. Then again, he was there when I pushed PRINT, calming my panic attack, telling me it was time to let go. Despite my moods, we kept coming back together, folding into each other’s lives like two ends of a collar.
He was the best. My first true love.
And all I could think was that, if I just moved the steering wheel a tiny bit to the right, the passenger side would gently ram into the mountain and I’d kill him. I began to focus on the minutiae of the plan—all it would take was two inches of movement of my wrist, less than that of my ankle, and a relationship would be trashed, a whole life ended.
“Careful here,” he said.
You be careful, I wanted to say.
We were driving through a shantytown, which always sounded to me like a kind of low-alcohol Caribbean drink, a euphemism for the pungent poverty. I’ll have a shantytown and a fried plantain salad, thanks. We were on the highway, protected from the criminal potential of the fenced-in town, but what I had to be careful of were the kids who used the highway as a soccer field, kicking balls, as I’d done in my suburban Canadian street hockey days. Only, not on a highway in a country with no laws about speed. Really, no laws at all. I slowed down, scared of hitting someone, amazed at how two cultures lived together, in the same exact space, but used it differently, their lives askew. A playing field for the blacks, a mode of express travel for the whites. All the cars in that country were white, as if to emphasize the difference.
“Turn here,” Nigel said, forever the cartographer.
I turned and parked.
We walked together to the wooden-slatted hut from which pylons of smoke and of cackles rose to the sky. Nigel was as short as I was, and at times thinner, an old man and a little boy wrapped into one. He explained to the Afrikaans hostess that we had a reservation for the special eleven-course barbecue. South Africans, I thought, had no problems indulging—that is, white South Africans. I did not know about the others.
I sat down at my place in the shade—we were the smallest table, being just two of us in this group-oriented culture—and let myself take in the surrounds. The ocean in front of me was Matisse blue, the coast empty except for our culinary camp and the chefs (all black) who were barbecuing in the pit in the hot sunlight.
Nigel smiled for both of us. “It’s so beautiful. I can’t wait to show you the rest of the country.”
“Mm,” I mumbled, wishing he would get his own guidebook to write.
The first course was ready. Apparently it had just been fished out of the sea moments before. Alive to dead in seconds. Nigel and I waited in the line next to the pit. A server topped my plate. It was some form of tentacle, grilled, simple white zeros. I took it back to the table, where Nigel moved his chair closer to mine.
I let him, but did not reach out to touch him.
Our neighbors, a party of at least ten, were cutting dried fish off the netting décor and popping them into their mouths. They told one another jokes, laughed loudly.
“Eat it like this,” Nigel said to me, serious, placing the grilled seafood on his tongue. Eating an almost-alive octopus leg was nothing for an Englishman who grew up in a small town. But it was everything for me, who’d been eating unkosher meat only since Peter. I was still unused to opening my walls to so many new things.
I scrunched the circle into the fork prongs, and without thinking, stuffed it in my mouth quickly, as if I was killing a spider.
• • •
THAT NIGHT WE arrived at the small hotel outside Stellenbosch that I had to review.
“The only room available has two single beds,” the receptionist said.
“Fine,” I said.
“No!” Nigel insisted.
I glared at him. This was my work.
And, I’d been relieved.
“It’s just for two nights,” I said, sweaty from the long drive.
“I came all the way here to be with you,” he hissed. “We’re a couple, and are getting a double bed.”
The more I ran, the more he chased. The more he chased, the more I ran.
“We’ll push them together,” I whispered. “It’ll be the same.”
“Find another room,” he told the woman.
Thankfully, her long tie-dyed dress matched her demeanor and she calmly flipped through a binder. “I’ll make it work.”
Nigel grinned. I felt sick. He’d recently been diagnosed with depression, and I made him happy, he claimed. But was it actually me that he desired, or just any filling for his holes? He wanted me too much, and wanted too much from me—to save him, to give him joy, purpose.
Like Mom.
I was beginning to worry that everyone I let in was crazy.
“Let’s have a great few days here,” I said. “And when we get back to Cape Town, let’s spend a few days apart, to reinvigorate things.”
“Fine,” he said, and downed the water from his bottle.
I breathed.
• • •
FREEDOM, I THOUGHT, unpacking in my solo room back at the Cape Town hostel. Once the romance floodgates had been unlocked, my physical confidence upped and my reliance on alcohol cemented, I realized: I didn’t want to be locked into “my first.” Cape Town was a party and I wanted a part. By that evening, after just minimal flirting during my day’s research, the hostel phone was ringing for me. House parties, dinners, dates. “Sure, let me check my calendar.” I was Woman, see me soar. “Yes, yes, yes.” I kissed random boys at clubs and fell into bed with a Swiss banker who then ignored me even though we lived down the hall from each other, and I didn’t even mind. In the mirror, I saw firm muscles, dark skin, sultry eyes. I was the anti-me. I drank beers at breakfast, made out with the maintenance man who days later started seeing my friend—Derek. And then, Chris. The pool boy at a local hotel. Sweet, exotic; he invited me to a staff barbecue but was too shy to make eye contact until the others left. We ended up spending the night on his tiny bed, in the basement room below the deck where he lived.
The morning after, he asked for my address at home so he could write me letters. Seriously? Why? Then he kissed me and stressed that we’d used good quality protection. “It’s really important here,” he said. “AIDS is rampant.”
I jolted up, covering myself with his sheet. Of course it was.
What the fuck was I doing?
• • •
I NEED TO MOVE. My hair was wet, my legs were still damp. The shower hadn’t washed away anything. Go go go.
I fumbled for my keys. I’d take my white car on one last trip. A deletion journey. All the way south. To the Cape of Good Hope.
What did Nigel even know about me, about my past? Nothing. I’d sent him back to England in pain. The one person who liked me, who’d care for me, I shipped off.
What am I doing?
I stepped on the gas, flashing to a scene from Campden when I was three years old. I was sitting on Bubbie’s white toilet, my feet perch
ed on a white child’s stool, my book Pig and the Blue Flag perched on my thighs, when I heard the neighbors’ German accents floating in through the open sash window. For years, they’d been fighting with Bubbie about her tree whose leaves fell onto their part of the yard, and Bubbie called them Hitler, but now they were discussing dinner. “Potatoes, wine, pork,” rang out, simple syllables jolting me out of my story, crystal clear as if they were directly intended for the crescent-shaped entrance to my ear. There I was, half naked, exposed, in my most vulnerable position, and confronted by the voice of the enemy, unkosher meat right in Bubbie’s bathroom. Warmth crawled up the back of my neck, and I pulled Pig over my upper thighs. Then I shot up, leaving wet traces along the inside of my leg, and climbed onto the bath ledge where I peeked at their heads and shopping bags through the window. Suddenly, my sweat turned cool, my world sliced itself open and I understood: I could hear and see them but they could not see me, safe, in Bubbie’s toilet. It was not always a two-way street. Relationships were not reciprocal. We didn’t know how we impacted the people around us.
I stepped on the gas even harder. South Africa had no traffic rules, no public bus system, no barriers to protect hikers along the mountain. It was the land of private police, a country where you clutched your purse, even in your own house. Fishing nets, but no safety nets. Everyone was responsible for herself. There was no one looking out for me, no one. Bubbie is gone. Perhaps how it had always been, but it seemed so obvious here.
I drove alone, like Thelma sans Louise, all the way south, until there was no more land, no more Africa. The farthest tip. Cape Point. I got out. In front of me—ocean.
The sun blazed, but the water was Antarctic. I was alone, but surrounded by penguins, who looked cute, but smelled like vinegar.
The taste of metal lingered in my mouth. I tried to recall if there were any holes around Chris’ tongue piercing, any way for our blood to mingle.
I noted two penguins having sex. They squawked wildly. Had I even felt it? I was amassing notches on some bedpost that no one would ever count. My nakedness was just another costume. Overinvolved or underinvolved, walls that were too-thick or too-thin, it made no difference.
I was writing a travel guide, but I had no idea where I was going. I could have done a million smart things; instead, here I was, unable to take responsibility for my actions and how they affected others. Just like my mother, I thought.
I was at the edge of the world, teetering on the brink of the hemisphere. Harvard, Europe, Africa. Dorm, hostel, sublet. I’d been pretending to be adventurous, a confident self-contained unit, when really I was just running away, hiding. I wanted to be unattached but I was totally disconnected, empty.
I had no stuff at all, and still, chaos.
• EIGHT •
24 WEEKS: FLIPPING OUT OF MY MIND, CONT.
New York City, 2011
The therapist’s air conditioner was driving me insane. The appliance—a growth in the window like an ugly tumor jutting out of the building onto the Upper West Side streetscape—was so noisy, I felt like I was in an emotional sweatshop rather than paying premium rate to heal my history. “Pardon?” she screamed over the noise. “Can you repeat that?”
Repeat it? Insights, emotions, utterances are in the moment, I wanted to say. Why don’t you know that?
I took a deep breath and patted my stomach. Stillness. In all this hubbub, no response. Eleven p.m. when I was trying to sleep, my pancreas got the shit banged out of it, but now, nothing.
“I’m pregnant,” I said. I’d seen this therapist before when I’d been stuck in hair-pulling ambivalence over what career to pursue. I’d felt plagued by potential but was unsure how to harness it; I’d hoarded dreams of varied professions. “I’m freaked out.”
“Pardon?”
For fuck’s sake. “I. Am. Pregnant.”
Her eyes lit up. Large. Shocked. “I just wanted to make sure I’d heard correctly.”
Great. Even she thought I couldn’t do it.
“So . . .” she struggled. “How do you feel?”
“I’m freaked out,” I repeated, slowly, getting louder as I went.
“Parenthood is frightening,” she said. “It means financial responsibility. You won’t sleep much. You’ll have to balance work and family. Is Jon upset? Men can be jealous of the bond.”
Huh? What was she talking about? I mean these were all concerns, but not mine.
Then it dawned on me. “Do you have kids?”
“Um . . .” She struggled. “No. Does that make a difference to you?”
“Um . . .” Hell yeah! “I guess so.”
“Why does that bother you?”
Well, because you’ve never been through this totally psycho-insane, life-changing, life-disrupting transformation and risked losing every single thing you’ve ever worked for. “I guess I wonder if you can understand.”
“You think I can’t connect to the ambivalent desire to mother the interior mother of another?”
Now I felt the cooled air’s particles swim into my cochleas, swirl right down my auditory canal, entering my brain, body, lungs, stuffing up each alveolus, pushing out my precious oxygen. I looked around her consulting room (womb?) and its shag carpets, leather chairs, plaid, and books. I hated it. All of it. I gasped. Why was I even here?
“Time’s up,” she said. “We’ll unpack your mistrust of me next time.”
“OK,” I said as I got up and walked out, but I doubted there’d be a next time. Right now I needed somebody to guide me, a parental role model. I closed her door, noticing the MSW on her gold label. She wasn’t even a PhD. Even I was a doctor.
I got into the elevator, chastising myself for being snobbish. Who cared? I didn’t work in academia anymore. But I knew what I did care about. That gold label. What would happen to my sense of self if it wasn’t based around school and work, which until now had defined my standards of success and growth and even how I organized my time? Who would I be if I was no longer known for my brain—an identity that had saved me? What if my thoughts were drowned out and I lost my ability to focus, to think straight, to pursue my many outstanding goals?
What if I lost my mind?
The air was thick, too thick, I needed to run, but when the elevator doors opened I was confronted by a brown brick wall. “Where are we?” I stammered to a stranger getting in.
“The roof,” he said. “You must have pressed R.”
R was for rez-de-chausée, French for lobby. But I hadn’t lived in Quebec in twenty years. “Right.”
I took a deep breath, remembering that lungs worked through negative pressure. The organ first became big, reducing its molecular concentration, and then, and thus, air entered. Sometimes we do not mature into dealing with situations, but situations force us to expand into them.
I pressed L.
Intellect hadn’t always helped me, I reminded myself, as the elevator jetted all the way down. It had also hindered, taken me along the wrong paths.
THE MUSEUM OF HOME
London, 2001
The double-decker passed my favorite road sign, BEWARE: LOOSE CHIPPINGS, and my second favorite, HUMPS FOR 90 METERS. My growling stomach did its own humping and loose chippings as I mentally rehearsed my lines for my imminent job interview: “I’m particularly interested in the representation of domestic experience because . . .”
Because everything. Because I was a schlub from Côte Saint-Jew from a family of crusted chaos, an eternal alien, Lubavitch winter coat and all.
Because here was my chance at reinvention.
Four days after 9/11, while CNN whispered welcome to the real world and my post-college-post-travel future seemed murkier than ever, I moved to London—which felt like the exact opposite of my roots. Pristine, sophisticated, subtle, cut-glass. A place of history, gravitas, and extreme alcoholism. The antishtetl. The British had a clear class s
ystem, banks were banks for three hundred years (and still used the same technology), people lived minutes from where their great-great-great-grandparents had resided, if not in the very same house. They still had a royal family; “order” was as engrained as the tendency to say “sorry” (for anything and everything—the national anthem).
I’d won a scholarship to pursue graduate study on theories of domesticity and contemporary art at a posh British art institute. I was becoming an official expert of the home and insisted on renting my first adult space. Though I’d flipped with stress over which neighborhood—Was I artsy? Hip? Literary? Which flat was me?—I gravitated to a large room with shiny wooden floors, their gleaming slats straight lines. The “flat” (ooh, it even implied magnificent geometry) was in central London, Zone One, in an area called Angel for its intersections’ resemblance to the star atop a Christmas tree. I adored my sparsely furnished room with its simple desk, two funky chairs, two wiry candlesticks, and exactly ten abstract art books that I placed along the windowsill, hoping I’d caught Victoria’s design savvy. Everything in plain sight, no blaring television. Sure, it was set in a small red building on top of a pub with a wooden staircase that would have been a death trap even for Victorians and my flatmates were hard-house DJs who took Ecstasy in order to get the most out of their McDonald’s dinner (I’d spent whole mornings staring at the proximity of their toothbrushes to my own, wondering what those strangers’ bristles soaked up), but my “empty nest” was worth every pence.
And indeed, I’d spent every pence of my scholarship on my little slice of sanity. I’d rather dehydrate, I thought, than live in a cramped bedroom, lost among Edwardian row houses and the suburban sprawl that made up much of London’s Zones Two and up. My dinners comprised store-brand penne noodles on which I heaped chunks of cheese—the cheapest hot meal I could conceive that involved a minor vestige of protein. Dinner or Diet Coke was a daily decision. For the first time, I wanted more pounds.
Which is one factor that brought me here, on this bumpy bus ride to East London, heading to an interview as a research assistant at a museum. And not any museum, but a British museum of home, the alter ego of Bubbie’s bazaars and Mom’s bizarres, of loud emotions frying up in the crowded kitchen, leaving oniony stenches that followed me around all day. I loved the museum’s cool conceptualism, sophisticated internationalism, detached intellectualism. I loved the value placed on each individual object, the scent of flowers and citrus. “Curator” was the least Yiddish word I knew and I wanted in. And, unlike the other art history students in my program, many of whom were from families that owned old master paintings, I desperately needed the money. My stomach growled again.
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