Single mother

On the street there’s one of many small houses, the front door close to the street, the front yard a little plot of green, the house has a screen door, a cluttered porch, windows with grey curtains. A pregnant woman with thick eyeglasses and two children and a yellow shopping bag trudges towards the door, needing a drink but having to cook dinner. It’s not the boy with the speech impediment, the one spewing words as if trying on new clothes, singing the words that she can’t understand, it’s the older boy, the quiet boy, the good boy, the one who looks like his father, the one who’s good with numbers and keeps her grounded, the first boy who watches over his brother and patiently teaches him the pronunciation of words, he’s the one keeping her awake in the night.

Spud

Obituary in today’s Times, the headline called him, “a Philosopher of Art”.  His life, he had been quoted, had changed in 1964 upon encountering Andy Warhol’s sculpture, “Brillo Box.” Not unlike a philosopher, some of the world’s view of the artist’s work is, “what the hell is it for, what’s the function.” The Brillo box’s function is to hold the Brillo pads, and sometimes it functions well, and sometimes it gets wet on the kitchen counter and becomes useless. The sculpture, more permanently made of silkscreened plywood, functioned as art because an art gallery in New York presented it as such, and you had to be smart enough, educated enough, to know what art is. Who the hell cared? In my small city there is a well-thought-of collection of abstract-expressionist paintings and sculpture lining the halls of government that my gym teacher in freshman year, an assistant baseball coach with a substantial neck and white crew-cut named Spud, referred to as “crud” that “any shitass could have made in his garage," suggesting that  baseball would give our young lives meaning and Mark Rothko was an idle and shiftless troublemaker without a decent curveball. The Philosopher of Art, said the obit writer, struggled with meaning and purpose, with “the relationship between knowledge and belief, photography and truth…” Art, Philosophy, the reasons that we live, think, struggle to stay alive, to hold on to something memorable and value it.  It is true there are baseball games I will never forget, burned in my memory. What use a sculpture, a drawing, of a Box of Brillo? It may simply be worth what somebody, a philosopher or a gym teacher, says it is.

Sidewalk drawing

I used to draw on the sidewalks in front of my house, using the same expensive oil pastels I now put to paper. Perhaps money was less of an object then, but even then I knew how I needed to spend my time: while other husbands might use their warm-weather weekends to paint the porch or hang shades in the dining room or put in a patio or pound posts for a fence, I knelt on a cart in old jeans and a t-shirt, copying drawings out of art folios or children’s books, which lay open on the lawn beside me with a brick holding the page against the wind. Over the years I drew Aladdin and Batman, a unicorn, and an American Indian boy, and Uncle Sam. On Halloween trick or treaters walked around a pastel black cat with yellow eyes or Lon Chaney as the Phantom, or Picasso’s Madonna and Child, a Modigliani woman, or a Van Gogh self-portrait. 

One summer a family from India rented the upstairs apartment of the brown two-family house across the street with an open porch where the grandmother would sit, dressed in layers of cloth on the hottest days, I could see her eyes and part of her nose but little else of her face. She watched her grandchildren playing down below, in the street with a ball, or standing over me making smart, nervy comments. I made a lot of neighbors nervous or distrustful for a while, until they knew I wasn’t going to take their children’s souls like a pied piper, and these two children, I made them nervous too, they were under 10 years old but their voices were too loud and their words too challenging as if conjuring up courage to overcome me and my oddness. My boys didn’t like them, the girl, the older, was a sneak, and the boy, only six or seven, was arrogant and hard with a brittle high voice of false cleverness. I suspected either of them capable of spilling juice or scuffing their feet over a new Superman or a Maurice Sendak monster when I wasn’t around, but they were afraid to challenge my sons who watched them with distrust or their grandmother’s placid observation from her perch. 

One early Sunday morning, out alone lost in the peculiarities of the pock-marked cement and the wonders of Picasso’s drawing skill as I tried to replicate his Portrait of Jacinto Salvado as Harlequin-1923, our city street perfectly quiet like from another century or a primitive country, no cars or sirens or children, just trees and lawns and old houses and rough gardens and the sidewalk, I looked up at the early sun over the two-story house across the street. The grandmother was standing, swathed in colored cloth, staring down at me and our eyes met and she lifted the layers of cloth to remove her arm and wave at me, and she nodded, her eyes so big and black that even from a distance I could see she was smiling.

Thugs

It was 1975 and an old high school friend was visiting from Boston, full of bluster and fear, rejected by graduate school and a girl named Michael. He slept on our couch and seemed to be counting on me for older brothering, even though we were the same age. I left him to go to work during the day and he holed up in our apartment, timidly stepping out for food or air. New York in the ‘70s was brittle, affordable, dirty, pre-Rudy and still a haven for starving artists and a winning group of grim Yankees, tough and unforgiving but willing to die for each other, Munson and Guidry, Jackson and Chambliss. The city was safe if you followed the rules. My friend came with tales of Boston, a city without rules. He had been mugged two weeks before, beaten badly near Harvard Square by a gang of roving thugs who simply wanted to rough up a college boy; he turned a corner, they surrounded him, mocked him, beat him with their fists, broke his glasses. Over the years our friendship cooled, as he had learned to be a thug himself of a kind, wealthy, smug, preachy, with a new bluster and a swagger of insecurity. And he never left Boston, married safe and unhappily so no one named Michael could hurt him again.

Agoraphobic

To outsiders the house seems like a prison, no locks but chains on ankles that make the walk from the dining room to the front door unnavigable. The cords to the window shades are beyond reach and if they could be grasped the stabbing, the burning, the charge of pain in the shoulder and the wrist and the hips would prevent their hoisting. There might be a small circle of white cloud above one shade across which dark birds migrate, the sky appearing cold and uninviting, and above it only the universe imagined as an endless descent. But for the inmate, the cell is warm, colors and flavors can be imagined, one is never too cold or too thirsty, too noisy or too naked, and if the phone isn’t answered, there’s no one sharing the news or asking questions. 

Spanish steps

Torremolinos Parade           

Young men on horses

shuffle into line behind

carts shackled to oxen

whose tails chasing heat-flies sway

like the aunts and girl-cousins

who dab their lacquered hair

and their glacé faces

move as if to dance

dismissing with their fans townsmen

who whistle and leer

while the pounding parade begins

on a year's worth of dust

drums on each moaning cart-bed

played by wild boys who

suckle flagons of wine

 tango with their abuelas

kitchen slaves and fishwives

riding the tide up the callalateral

behind the wooden Mary

 tottering on her cart

diamonds in her tiara

sapphires on her brown pocked brow

while a blue-gowned crinolined angel

waits her turn swirls her black fan

pouting at dark mustachioed uncles

whose white-brimmed hats shine up

off her new patent leather shoes

My friend, facebook

This is a test, touching on a bit of this and a bit of that that I don’t know, of all the things I should know, or could know, or are knowable. Every day I draw, do I know why, what do I know about my drawings, how can anybody like them, what do they know about drawing, what do I know about me? I do two drawings one day, seven another, and I put them someplace, in plastic, in a drawer, on facebook, in an e-mail, I don’t know if they’re good and don't even know how much I like them. I waver between being certain and being stupid. A few people, not many, buy one, or another, not many. I don’t know how smart the drawings are, or if they're art, art is a funny word, whether they make people laugh, or disgust them, or find them pathetic. There are people, my so-called friends, on facebook, who say they “like” them, and some write, “really like!” in the comments box, and I wait for those, I try to find something in those two words and it occupies me for a moment, but not much differently than drinking a glass of water slowly. There are thousands of these little tests that I put on my timeline, and for a few the comments in the comments box are abundant and Why is something else I don't know; I thought one would give pleasure but ah no it's another and the one I think I like no one else seems to notice. This morning’s drawing, cartoon-y and sloppy, and I don't think I like it, I don't think it's good, I don't think it's art, is of a long girl with no clothes but not grossly naughty standing like a traffic guard at a crossroads, it's called Proceed With Caution, and facebook, my friend in judgment, refuses it; each time I try to post it, an error message in red appears in the box when the drawing should resolve like a reverse image of Alka-Seltzer in water: Error. A kind of comment from my friend, facebook, who seems to know something that I don’t, about drawing, about art, about resolving images, about what my friends need to see. facebook knows something I don't, no surprise there. But is my own blog a friend, a critic, a judge, a resolver? This is the test.

Humans

Women are called heather, and rose, but none sage or tulip. They’re called joy and gloria, but never bliss or alelulia. Some men are called happy. They’re also called glen, but not forest, or lake. They’re called rod, but never reel, or spinner, or bait. Some women are called tomatoes, and parts of some are called melons, and buns, but not croissants or lemons. There are men who are toms, and tigers, but none are rhinos or lizards; some are sharks and some are pigs. One man was called hoss.  Why was eve called eve?  Women are jeans and men are levis. I’ve never known a man called vest or a woman called dress. I knew a girl who was a skirt once, and several men who were dirt bags. No one I’ve met is named for a body part, a man named liver or pancreas, a woman named ankle or eyelash. Some men and some women are grey and blue and red but no human being is named puce or mauve or orange or crimson or turquoise. Alelulia would be a good name for some woman I knew and loved some time in the past. 

Inheritance

When he was 12, my father, precocious, expressive, restless, was an artist, close to his paternal art-loving grandfather. Together they made a paper mache sculpture of Gulliver. Living with his father, a cab driver, his mother, an angry hyena, and his three sisters, Flora, Lillian and Eleanor, each one hysterical, demanding, selfish, on Coney Island, he took a painting class. One piece survived for many years, first on the wall in our Long Island kitchen, a framed drawing, a sepia wash, that ended up in my mother’s possession after they divorced and lives now in my memories of it, a cabin in the woods, dry branches blown by high winds, an  unwelcoming, desolate place, where one might unhappily live forever. Throughout my childhood, I thought I was disappointing him, regularly, not doing what I could to succeed in his eyes, and thank god I realized after 60 years, it wasn’t me who had disappointed him, abandoned him in the woods, left him alone and cold and afraid. Had he lived a bit longer, perhaps a hundred years or so, he might have found some happiness as the parent of my precocious, expressive, restless old age, as an artist.

Wait wait wait

said her eyes from the bed

he heard before he swung

as he blew the candles out

over the sound of the motor revving

covering her face from the camera

his grandfather touching his shoulder

not letting go of the clip on her bra

she shouted from the platform

the door closing behind them

touching her hair while her fingers shook

he thought the earth was crying

Handyman

You live in an old house in a working-class neighborhood, there’s nothing charming about it, not from the inside. If you, a stranger, came in from outside on a dark night, and the foyer was lit only by quaint orange light casting the faux-chandelier in shadows, you might be charmed by the white-painted molding around the stained-glass window at the bottom of the stairs, the old-fashioned radiators recently covered with tasteful moss-green paint, a few minor antiques that we got from Joe after he went into the nursing home, a mahogany cabinet, a simple mirror in a matching mahogany frame, a few wooden chairs with wicker seats and backing. You wouldn’t see the black tar stains on the hardwood floors; they’re covered with a simple rug of Barbara’s classy eye for the good deal. In a better light the moldings are worn and the white paint reflects uneven bumps and knots. And in that same better light, though there might be a better word than "better," the stained-glass window, blue and yellow and clear swirls, at best is “unremarkable" and is in fact an ugly old thing.

It was a fixit house right from the start and whatever it was needing fixing, it was too little too late, always reacting to crisis, an upgrade in the electric power when the fuses refused to stop crashing, the new roof when the attic leaked, the moving of a refrigerator and a stove that provided some needed counter space for chopping vegetables, but never a room big enough to inspire gourmet cuisine or heated family conversation while dinner was prepared. It was a fixit house, all right, right from the start, and now we have a Mr. Fixit come when we can swing it, to paint the porches, and mend the old window in the attic, weed and spruce up around the front flower beds without flowers, just funny bushes whose names we don’t know, put up a railing at the top of the stairs for Barbara’s mother. It’s not easy to find a good Mr. Fixit in our small town without being ripped off; we’ve tried many strangers and have settled on Tony, who is everything you could hope for in a good fellow down a bit on his finances and his health, a handyman, affordable and trustworthy.

Strong women at a distance

P.A. was the first girl I wanted as a girlfriend; I was six, she was five. One summer day, she and her family moved into Number 8 three doors down.  I can still smell her sweat and the rain in the pores of the suede Davy Crockett jacket she didn’t take off all summer long.  She had crooked front teeth, hard puffy cheeks and long blond womanly hair, the cleanest longest stroke-able hair, and she could beat me up. T.M., who I wanted as a girlfriend in third grade, had hair with body and glow like a model’s. Taller than I, superior in every way, I loved the way her lips parted when she wasn’t speaking; I never got close enough to hear the sound of her voice. On an eighth grade school bus trip to the Cloisters, I sat four rows in front of C.E., whose hand I yearned to hold and squeeze. She was always pretending she was a party girl, laughing with a mean hysteria, her darting black eyes not quite crossing mine, a thin bossy Jewish Gina Lollobrigida, a tiny girl, crushing me with coldness. E.C. in high school social studies forgave me my moony adoration by ignoring it and making smart, ironic jokes. In college acting class, M.W. was not pretty and her voice was piercing and I wept in my dorm room pillow when she wouldn’t let my Romeo kiss her Juliet’s lips, to swallow her up with my romantic mouth. I don't know to this day what she thought of that mouth. 

In every dream you would fly

The beginning of a list for eternity

Heaven would be a place where everything you ate was good for you, and things that you thought tasted awful were lush and savory and sensuous, like seaweed, and hummus, and Brussel sprouts, and Wheatina.

Hell would be closing your eyes every day feeling you have to vomit but not being able to.

Heaven would be knowing you taught your boys well, to not merely survive, but to soar, to fly above you, to teach you contentment.

Hell would be every day swimming against the rip tide with your boy alone on the speedboat, seven years old and singing to himself, and everyone’s gone and what were you thinking, leaving him by himself in a little boat in the ocean, and you’ve turned around and are swimming as hard as you ever had and getting no closer and you’re tired and your will is sinking and his sweet high voice is talking to you and you never get close and you never drown and he never knows.

Heaven would be knowing you know better that all the distrusting voices in your head.

Hell would be knowing your memory was slipping away, just always out of reach, like a speedboat in the ocean.

Heaven would be closing your eyes every night knowing in every dream you would fly.

Alone with the sea

Island Time

Away from the house

I look at the cellphone.

8 am. No self-imposed deadline.

Plenty of time, in any event,

For a side trip, extended solitude,

To the beach.

Plenty of time, for a walk beside the ocean.

I park. I take my license

Out of my wallet. I take a business card out.

I put them in the pocket of my bathing suit for ID

Should I wash away in one place

And wash ashore in another.

I consider not taking my cellphone.

I leave my sneaks and socks on the back seat,

And walk gingerly onto the road,

Up toward the beach above the dunes

Where just a bearded man

Is sitting, playing in the sand with a small boy.

I consider turning off my cellphone.

As I walk, I think about my feet

Gripping the sand. I observe,

The water is choppy, but the whitecaps are easy,

And I like the wet sand,

Copper-colored, as it kicks up

While the waves expire on the shore.

I see a seated body ahead.

I look down at my feet.

I pretend to watch the horizon,

Take a deep breath.

I think about the possibility of a violent turn.

She waves hello.

I apologize twice for disturbing her peace.

Not at all, she says.

She’s older, maybe, than I,

With a Tuscan face. I walk on,

The sun behind me.

I wonder if I look as good from behind

As my long shadow in front of me.

I take my hands out of my pockets,

Where they have been clasping my license,

My business card, and my cellphone.

My shadow is improved.

I wonder if I should walk

Beyond anyone’s sight. I wonder

If I should sit on sand or driftwood.

I sit on driftwood, and look left,

Back at the seated woman, look right

At the copper sand and breakers.

I look down at my feet

Trying to grip the sand,

At my old toenails, feel my legs

With no more hair on their calves.

I take a deep breath, move my feet,

Look back toward the woman

And fantasize about her,

Reaching my hand up to pull her down

So she sits in the sand, between my legs.

I kiss her neck and her cheek from behind,

And tilt her chin back to me to kiss her lips.

I start thinking about work,

About the uncomfortable memo I need to write;

My hand holds her head as we kiss. I think,

I don’t mind about her age,

In fact it’s better;

She’s a passionate, experienced, kind woman.

I am surprised how exciting that is.

I wonder about what I’m thinking about,

About how old I am becoming.

She lets me, she wants me to,

Reach under her sweatshirt.

I think about The Last Tango in Paris.

I think about my career,

The big, dull picture. I think,

The rest of the day will be

Dull and bearable.

I wonder what time it is

And slide my cellphone out of my pocket.

I look back at the now-empty beach,

Then straight out at the edge of the horizon,

Where there is nothing;

Just a straight line in either direction.

The scream

It was never a dream and I don’t live where cats scream in the night. It was a scream of terror, hysteria, fury, like one would hear silently in a nightmare. Lying half-asleep in the total dark, trying to will unconsciousness into my eyes and sinuses, my tense neck and shoulders, my teeth, with my exhausted mind, I seemed in that unreal place of dread, where everything is both clear and confused, confident and at risk. And then the scream with a piercing wildness: I thought if I lifted the window shade a fire-spitting yellow-eyed black feline with its fangs splayed would be flattened against the window, its wispy white belly breathing moisture against the glass, its sharpness stabbing through to me as if by osmosis, the noise itself with a capacity for maiming and ruining, the unreal dread turning to action, the final true meaning of what it is to dream until you die.

Blues

The damp basement

Our basement only recently

started to feel moist

as if it were perspiring:

droplets like large tears

suspended on the asbestos pipes

after 25 years of perfect dryness

when it could have been wet

for all we cared

for all the time we spent

in its unfinished dark—

Have my boys grown so large

that the basement is theirs to flood?

Have we bequeathed a besotted foundation?

I’ll tell you this: There’s nothing better

than to be reminded what it feels like

to be asked to sing the blues

the bass over Ben’s shy slumped shoulders

the guitar cradled by Pat’s grown-up fingers,

my voice summoning an old rainstorm,

my smiling boys tapping time on the crumbling cement