Esperanza, the trailer, was in a flat field, although it’s true Cayuga Lake was only a short distance away.
Still, there were plenty of similarities. But I had forgotten all about it, pretty much, even though they had—a few years before—made this book into a film.
It was a really big production, a major picture, and it was in Russian.
Part of the movie was filmed in Crimea, on the Black Sea. So they flew me over to see the shoot. I took Willow, who was about eight at the time, and my mom.
We flew to Kiev, then we had to change airports, I think, and then fly to Crimea, and then get to the odd, remote hotel in the dead of night and wake up the manager to take us to a room.
A driver from the movie crew took us in a van the next day three or four hours to the location. There, we were given a cottage. We wandered down to the set. On the beach, they had blown up the trailer the day before.
Actually, it wasn’t really a trailer. The book had been altered to star Russian actors, and the Russians didn’t live in trailers. They had built—for the film—a beach house on stilts and blown that up. It was in the book: the little boy had turned on the propane stove and it blew the place up.
We missed the big explosion scene by one day; the set was just a huge heap of rubble on a beach on the Black Sea. I was wearing a big beach hat and my mother was wrapped in some kind of blanket because she was cold, and Willow had on her own costume, a giant flared skirt from Chile, I think, or whatever else she had deemed suitable, since I would never argue with anyone about his or her choice of clothing.
We stood looking at the disaster zone for a minute, and everyone on the shoot—the cameramen, the director of photography, the lighting people, the sound guys, the hair and makeup artists, the actors—stopped to stare.
Finally someone came over. “Excuse me,” she said in Russian. “Can I help you?” Of course I didn’t know what she was saying, but she got someone over who spoke English. It turned out, I was later told, that when the three of us arrived on the beach, the whole crew had just quit what they were doing to stare because, as one person said, “Who the hell are those people? They look like materialized characters out of the film!”
After they figured out who we were, though, they were friendly. My mom started muttering. “Oh, there’s a Chinese crested! It’s Lily.”
I looked around. There was no Chinese crested dog, let alone my mom’s deceased Chinese crested, who was named Lily. “No, Ma,” I said. “Are you okay? There’s no way you would find a Chinese crested in Crimea.”
I just didn’t know what to do. Was this a sign that my mother was developing dementia? It had been a struggle, getting her on the campus-to-campus bus from Ithaca and then to Brooklyn on the subway and then to Crimea, but that was because her legs hurt. Maybe the trip had been too much for her?
They were filming this dude—he looked kind of like Joe Dallesandro from an Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey film—as he came out from under a broken wreck of a car on one of those dollies the mechanics lie on. He had a big spliff in his mouth.
It was a really great scene, I had always loved Andy Warhol’s films and I was just so happy that they were making a film like this.
I had totally forgotten, it was in my book.
Then they shot another scene. They brought out a Chinese crested dog. It looked just like my mom’s dog, Lily. Only it was named Lula. They took this dog and they put it on a couch that was floating in the Black Sea. Then the actor who looked kind of like Joe Dallesandro dove into the water and rescued that dog from the sofa. That was the dog my mother had seen earlier, which was whisked off the set, leading to my idea she had dementia.
Do you see why I am so confused? In my book—which I had forgotten—one of the family’s xoloitzcuintlis had gotten tossed into the water in the explosion and one of the boys in the family, who looked like Joe Dallesandro, who wanted to be an actor, dove into the lake to rescue it.
To recap: the original book had EIGHT Mexican hairless/xoloitzcuintli dogs.
The Russian movie did not have xolos but did have ONE Chinese crested, which was a dog that I had had.
I actually had two, but I ended up giving one, Lily, to my mom. My mom used to take that dog to her office at Cornell, and then to teach class with her. Lily had her own chair at the seminar table.
I still can’t make sense out of what I am doing with my life, let alone what happened.
The trailer Esperanza blew up years after I wrote my book. It was years after the movie shoot. I had eight poodles. The police came. I did not fall in love with the cop the way the girl did in the book.
But they made a really great Russian film from it.
1850
I tried to do the research on my new place. I obtained things like diaries of people’s lives in the area:
A farmer in the 1900s had to do many things by hand that are mechanized now and he made or devised tools and implements he could not readily acquire. Among the many things Fred mentioned doing are rewooding a tackle block, soldering a milk can, making whiffletrees and a 25-foot pole ladder, constructing a stone boat and a wire stretcher to string fence. . . .
He slaughtered his hogs himself until one bit him and thereafter had Lawrence McCarthy the butcher do it for 30 cents and later 50 cents each. He smoked some of the meat, cut up and put some in brine, and made some into sausage.
(from Mecklenburg Farm Life 1905–1919, compiled from the diaries of Fred Dickens and Harriet Kennedy Dickens, by Shirley Dee Taber Watt)
For more information, I went to the Schuyler County Clerk’s Office. This is located in a large brick courthouse in the center of Watkins Glen. It’s got everything in it: the city court, the DMV, I don’t know, a lot of social services, and you have to go through a metal detector right beside the only UPS pickup in town—it gets picked up once a day at three, and if you have a UPS package that is small and flat, you can ship it here, otherwise, you have to go for, like, twenty miles to find a UPS or FedEx office.
So you go to this room, the county clerk’s office, and they will explain to you what to do. There’s a room with books in it. You can go there and you can look up the previous sale of your house. It is not done on computer. You go there and you pull books off the shelf. You first go to one book and it has the name of the owner who sold it to you, and it has the name of who they bought it from, and some numbers, which you go to another book on another shelf to look up the one prior to that.
I got a lot of these deeds of previous owners, going back to about 1884, before I gave up. I couldn’t figure out how to retrieve the previous owner information.
The deeds said things like:
THAT TRACT OR PARCEL OF LAND, situate in the Town of Hector, County of Schuyler and the State of New York, bounded and described as follows: BEGINNING at the Southwest corner of the farm now owned by parties of the first part (the Miller Farm) and a short distance Westerly of the Logan Road; then North 06 55 19 East a distance of 2,650.68 feet along the Westerly line of the said Miller Farm, the Northerly portion of which line is designated by a fence and hedge row to a steel pin designating the Northwesterly part . . .
It didn’t seem like any owner had ever been able to hang on to the place for more than thirty years. Whatever. I’m telling you, it COULD be interesting to someone.
I couldn’t focus, though. A man came back there. He had a long gray beard, missing teeth, and overalls. The county clerk was bent over one of the big books, looking up something.
“Hey!” the man said. “Psst! Hey! I got some tomatoes in the back of the truck. You wanna buy some?”
He acted kind of guilty and seemed suspicious. I don’t know where he got those tomatoes.
The county clerk said, “What kind of tomatoes?”
“Small ones.”
“How much are they?”
“Five dollars.”
“I don’t have any money on me right now,” the county clerk said.
It was the time of year before the tomatoe
s were ready locally and I am guessing the man might have had a greenhouse. Or maybe they fell off the back of a truck.
In Brooklyn, when we first moved there, the neighborhood was rough. There were no restaurants. Tim went out to the Arab bodega. A guy comes over to him. “You look like you are new around here!” he said. “Here’s my cell phone. You want marijuana, I will deliver.”
You couldn’t get anything to eat, but you could get home delivery of marijuana.
I knew my old ’hood back in Brooklyn. Now I knew where to score tomatoes off season in Watkins Glen.
I gave up on researching the house. It was just so much more interesting that there was a tomato dealer in the county clerk’s office of the courthouse than who had struggled to live in my house before me.
another day, another nursing home
Mom’s newest nursing home was a hospital wing. It was clean and had a beautiful view, but it was as bleak as you can get.
In the previous places, there was always some activity taking place: students playing the violin and flute or belly-dancing even though no one could get out of a chair. They had a strange man who came in and talked to them about funerals he had attended. A nurse brought her horses into the atrium.
This was not a Jewish area. This was not a people-of-color area.
Still, those Christians did have things they provided for occupational therapy, like giving the inmates Cheerios and glue and food coloring to make pictures on paper plates. And there were always piles of washcloths, tea towels, and napkins to fold.
The new home, in the local hospital, was only fifteen minutes away from my new house. I had been driving forty minutes to an hour each way before this. Here, there was a spectacular view of Seneca Lake. There didn’t seem to be many activities, though. One day I saw a lecture was being giving in the dining hall. Finally, something my mom could listen to! I wheeled her in. There were about ten people in the room. There was a slide show taking place. The pictures were of marginally alive, naked and beaten, emaciated Holocaust victims.
The man giving the lecture was standing at a podium with his computer. He looked angry that I had come in, wheeling my mother. “We are having a show and lecture on the Holocaust!” he said, like I was intruding.
I wasn’t going to stick around to try to figure out why. “Okay!” I said. I wheeled her out.
That nursing home cost $10,500 a month. Fortunately my mom still had some long-term health insurance coverage left. It was running out fast, though. After it did, any money she had was going to pay for this. “Look, Mom,” I said, “what if I build a little house for you, on the property where I’m living? You will be in the country. It will have a view. I will be there for all the meals. I will sleep there at night. I will get you a hospital bed and I will get staff for the day—and it will still be cheaper than if you stayed here. And we will watch TV at night and the dogs will be with us.”
“Great!” my mom said. “When will it be done?” These were the first coherent words she had said to me in a long time.
Initially I had thought there would be a way to make the Greek Revival farmhouse accommodate her needs. But by now, she was going to need a special shower to bathe, a bigger wheelchair, a hoist, wider doors. She needed full-time care; she could not turn over now. So I discussed it with the contractor. And he said he would be able to build a small house for my mom, right next to mine. And he would build it for a hundred thousand dollars.
At night we drew sketches. It was fun, lying around in bed, drawing and trying to explain what kind of roof I wanted on the place, showing him pictures of Japanese houses and Chinese houses, because I didn’t just want your local tract/ranch house and I didn’t want your local log cabin place . . . if I was going to have my mom in a tiny house, I wanted something aesthetically pleasing. But I knew I didn’t want a “modern” house here, or a glass house, because it was going to be too jarring to look at, right next to my Greek Revival.
I just couldn’t seem to communicate what I wanted, though, until one day he said, “Git in the car,” and he drove me to the abandoned train station. And I loved it. I had driven past this station hundreds of times and never paid any attention to it, but the contractor—he had noticed it, and now, from his looking at pictures of old Japanese houses with disbelief, it turned out he knew exactly what I was trying to say.
If there was a building like this next to my house it would look like, maybe, once there had been a train station here.
Then he found out: a structure for human habitation, larger than five hundred square feet, needed to have an architect’s stamped set of plans. So he went in the Dandy one day. The Dandy was the local gas station, where you could buy stale chips and devices to lure turkeys. Sooner or later everybody bumped into everybody there. He asked a woman who worked there, “Say, do you know any cheap local architects?” and she gave him a guy’s name.
I was to meet the contractor at the architect’s house. The architect lived in one of those big old houses in downtown Ithaca, a large innocuous house maybe from the early part of the 1900s, stucco, on a very tiny piece of property surrounded by other houses. The contractor was already there, in the big truck, waiting for me on the curb. And so I went and knocked on the architect’s door.
When he answered, he didn’t seem to know why I was there. He looked right through me. He didn’t ask my name or who I was. He said the contractor should sit on the porch. He didn’t offer water, although it was a hot day. He was a very tall, bony man, like a stork or some other wading bird, slightly hunched and uncomfortable. We sat on his porch and then he said to the contractor, “Well, what is this place you are building for?”
“It’s a house.” The contractor showed him the sketches and drawings.
The architect began to shout. “You said you had plans already! These are not plans! These are nothing! Nothing!”
It was alarming. And the contractor said, “Well, they have all the specifications on them. The one thing I had trouble with was the roof.”
And the architect got more upset. “You told me on the phone you were coming to me with plans for the house. These are not plans. You said you wanted to hire me for ten hours of work—this is going to be twenty hours of work! Why would I do this project?”
The contractor tried to calm him down a bit and smooth his feathers.
Finally the architect agreed he would take another look at the drawings. “Why would you have a door here?” He got irate all over again.
“It’s for a person in a wheelchair,” I said.
“What?” Before, the architect hadn’t seemed to acknowledge my existence. He didn’t say, “And how are you associated or involved with this project?” Maybe he thought I was just the contractor’s girlfriend, I don’t know, but it was still odd.
Maybe by now I was invisible. You know, there is a whole percentage of the population of the United States who are invisible. They are the middle-aged women with fluffy gray hair. They are the women who get ignored, waiting on line or in an office waiting room. They are the women who try to be kind and good and decent and dress nicely, and because of that they become invisible.
My hair wasn’t gray, but there is still this veil of invisibility that gets tossed over a lot of women.
Now he suddenly registered my existence. “You didn’t tell me this was going to be a structure for someone who is handicapped! What is wrong with this person? I was not told this was a project for someone who was sick!”
“It’s my mom,” I said.
“You will be stuck with a back door in this house when she is able to walk!”
“She’s not going to be walking again.”
“She will never get up again? She will get better at some point!”
“No.”
“No? Oh really, please. Cut it out. . . . And you can’t have a door in a bedroom.”
“I can’t have a door in a bedroom? How do people get into their bedrooms?” I said.
He let out a squawk. “I mean a door to
the outside, in a bedroom! That’s terrible. And these windows! Look at these windows, why do you need all these windows?” He took a pencil and began to sketch, making a picture of a house without windows. “You don’t want windows or doors in a bedroom, you want privacy!”
“But I want doors in a bedroom. French doors.”
“No!” he was livid. “Maybe sliding glass doors, but not French doors. What kind of curtains are you going to have?”
“I don’t know!” I said. “Venetian? Venetian . . . blinds?”
“Who’s going to clean them? Do you know how difficult that is, to clean venetian blinds?”
“Okay—regular curtains? Maybe with little flowers?”
“Um, it’s the roof we need help with,” the contractor said grimly. “The company I use doesn’t build trusses like these.”
“I don’t understand. What are you possibly thinking you are doing with the design of the roof?”
“It’s . . . we want it . . . it’s supposed to be like an old train station.”
“You know the train station in Burdett?” I said.
The architect’s bird eyes softened for a moment. “Yes,” he said.
“You do?” I was surprised.
“I know it,” said the architect, and he drew a roof. It wasn’t really like the roof of the train station in Burdett, but I was so surprised he knew this abandoned train station in Burdett, and that he had suddenly stopped shouting, that I nodded at his sketches and said “Oh, great.”
Finally the architect calmed down enough to agree to draw the plans for the house, and we agreed that we would pay him for twenty hours, and the contractor gave him a “retainer” for a thousand dollars that would be refundable. Even though by now the architect must have figured out that I was the client, he still didn’t speak to me or look at me when we left.
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