Sewing My Lovers' Mittens Together

stockings

2010-07-08T00:53:00.000-04:00

I spent most of yesterday -- or, rather, far more than I justifiably should have -- feeling sorry for myself. This, because Ben and I had plans to go upstate in the late morning, to a little town three-and-a-half hours to the north, called Coxsackie. (Apparently, Gary told me, this also happens to be the name of a disease. It IS a rather unfortunate name, no?) So Ben and I were supposed to drive up in his 1975 Volvo, bearing some sort of gift for the hosts (flowers, he suggested, or a lovely bottle of wine [I wasn't planning to have anything to do with the latter because the hosts are the wine critics for Martha Stewart Living, and even I know better than give wine critics wine.]) But then, even though Ben and I have spent the last month as each others' go-to significant other, building this crazy-fast intimacy and sharing conversations about, say, how I've been realizing the ways in which I recreated all these unhealthy dynamics of my childhood relationship with my mother in my relationship with my ex (I never use Robert's name, not with anyone anymore, if I can help it), and Ben never having been touched by his parents, how he sucked his thumb for years, all these many, many deep and personal details -- we still hadn't slept together.
In point of fact, we did spend one night in his bed, but the fooling around part didn't happen organically. I got sort of weepy about my ex, about feeling like I will never love another man, about how much he hurt me -- and when I say that "he" hurt me, I of course mean also to implicate myself in the whole thing... So that night, in Ben's bed, I just wanted to go to sleep. We kissed, but that's all. I could feel the stickiness of his fingers and how sharp his nails are and I just did NOT feel attracted to him, but neither did I trust my judgment, even enough to admit that out loud, because I felt so traumatized by the demise of my relationship with Robert that I wanted so, so badly to have something secure, something platonic, to hide in a place where I could be taken care of but never hurt... Ben called me out on it, saying that he'd never had a woman get into his bed only to turn her back on him to go to sleep. He used the word passion. He expressed an expectation.
We kissed. He crawled on top of me and we fooled around for about, oh, six minutes? No sex. I didn't sleep well, I woke up in the middle of the night sweating and he woke up, too, like he was very aware of my experience, and wanting to take care of me. He turned up the a/c, which helped some, but I woke up again, and again, never quite comfortable. I didn't like the feeling of his fingers on me, his clammy face. I don't want to dip into the waters of denigration, when all these things lead to the same conclusion: I'm not attracted to Ben.
Chemistry is such a nutty thing. I didn't feel it when I first met Robert. Or, rather, I felt a spark, but it was so far removed from the sort of magnetic pull I'd felt up to that point, I didn't know what to make of it. I didn't feel immediately sexually into him, the way I did with Richard, for instance. Robert and I were never like a couple of animals, not for the first month... And I don't know if that kind of gravitational pull is a requisite for dating, a prerequisite or whatever, for even undertaking what could be a friends plus maybe more, but I do think, especially after this chaste month with Ben, that your instincts tell you what you need to know on this front.

you better belize it/i-guana go home

2010-01-06T09:04:00.002-05:00

well, in a totally not shocking update... Robert and I are back together. Who knows how long it will last, such a crazy roller coaster. Last night he told me I'm mentally unstable, that I make his life a complete hell, that he thinks I'm trying to push him away in order to avoid getting married, etcetera. We fell asleep barely touching, his knee pressed against my back, after one moment in the dark where he took my hand in his hands and propped up on his elbows and said, "What was that about?"
And on the surface it was a story of our having made plans for the night, which he broke without actually canceling. I mean, first he'd suggested we cook dinner at home, then we'd decided to go to this show at the Cornelia Street Cafe, starting at 8:30. I called him at 4:30 to say I was picking up his shoes at the Cowboy Shoe Repair shop, he said he had to work late with Derek, and I told him he didn't have to come out tonight, I was happy to make other plans. But no, he told me, he'd be back by 8 so we could go.
At home that night, I got ready to go out: eyelash curling, lipgloss, tight white blue jeans (despite or maybe even because it's early January but not slushy, why NOT wear tight white jeans?) and then he never came. I mean, at 8:15 he called, from some restaurant in midtown, still eating dinner, but he didn't get home until after nine, at which point I was feeling hot in my irritation, like he'd let me down in some big way because not to have stood me up would have taken such little effort, i.e. all it required was a text message or some vague sense of knowing what time it was. Plus, I've been so afraid of falling into this thing where I prop him up on the home front, running around like a little miss merry wifey going half-blind trying to pair up all his almost-but-not-quite-identical black and navy blue socks, mopping up the bathroom floor after his showers, worrying -- really and truly -- about his health, including his mental health but extending to physical conditions like his recurring stress-induced stye & the dentist & seeing a podiatrist. It's bullshit, I guess, or at least I know he'd say (and in fact DOES say, at least a few times a day lately) that I'm completely full of shit, whatever it is I'm saying. Last night he said all I'd done since he got home was complain, in some kind of terrible psychopathic vitriolic way, about how I'd been, according to him, "hard done by" because of my trying to pay the bills or whatever. He says I don't understand or appreciate how hard he works and that his business supports our wildly expensive lifestyle. "I gave you X amount of money," he said, referring to an investment he made in my name, in his fund, "so you have all that." "I don't have access to it," I said, but I've never even tried; I don't know HOW to try, and of course the unspoken truth of the matter is separate from all this: I'm feeling like garbage for not making much money recently, scrapping up teaching jobs and scraggly, low-paying freelance assignments. Two days ago, in Belize, he asked me about how my book is going, then said, "You don't get a ten out of ten for effort." I know that's true, I know I need to really get down to work on it, but I wish -- I guess I ALWAYS wish -- he would be kind to me. Anyway, last night. He said, "I paid for this house." And, you know, what can I say? Honestly, he didn't even want to talk anymore, we were both exhausted, he was pressing this hot, damp rag up to this swollen eye, and my neck and back are all busted and bruised, first because of a pinched nerve on the left side that left me unable to sleep for three nights, then because of the acupuncture and cupping I had yesterday to fix it. The weirdest thing she did was rub something called Badger Balm all over my neck, then rub it incredibly hard with the metal lid (she couldn't find the right tool) in order to "get into" the tiny muscles deep in my neck.
The very night before this? Monday. It was a fabulous, fabulous, fabulous day and night. We danced by the fire, we laughed, we talked.
I can barely make myself keep writing, I'm so tired of this. Since the day after Christmas, we've had this challenge on, to see if we can go three days without fighting. And we haven't! It's so depressing I want to run away from home. How is it possible two people who really and truly love each other can't get along like peaceable friends for 72 hours (24 of which are spent unconscious)?!?

Prowling around with tomcats

2009-11-18T11:06:00.003-05:00

God, it's been a long time since I've been here, fully present, ready to bring something to this party. Last Friday, I went to Liza's 30th birthday party, at a gallery in Chelsea filled with framed black-and-white photographs of slippery male bodybuilders; I came early, with Andrew, and left before they cut the cake. When the elevator doors opened on our way down, Suzie was getting off. I couldn't tell you how long it's been since I've seen her. Or rather, there was that one time last spring, when I was having lunch at Delicatessen, on Prince & Lafayette, with Purva, after going to Virayoga with Colombe. And Suzie walked by the glass, we waved hello. Her book came out last March, a memoir written entirely in the second person, with a pink hardback cover, and I emailed her soon after, to say this:
Dear Suzie,
Hey! Funny to see you yesterday through the glass -- I've been meaning to write and congratulate you on your book. It's a terrific story -- full of your surprising humor and grace and energy and sparkling revelations -- and I'm so grateful to and secretly so proud of you. Bravo!
I hope this is a magical time in your life.
Yours,
Sarah
And she wrote back, "Aw, thank you, Sarah! I appreciate it. You helped in the birth of the book too, so I hope you take some pride/pleasure in this time too. It is very fun. xx Suzie"

I guess that's as good a place to start as any after close to three years away from this site. I was in graduate school when I started this blog, still so deadly in love with Robert I couldn't find my way out of a paper bag, blowing around after him like I was Ahab and he was the white whale. That's a whole long story, I guess, but it's funny to revisit these entries and see how, even then, I knew on some level that waiting for him, the whole engagement thing -- six years that might as well have been an extra day in February. So I guess I'm still trying to find my way out of it, free and clear, but it's been broken now, along with my friendship with Suzie.
That was a funny thing, with Suzie, because she wrote this whole long manuscript, worked on it for years, then one day in July of 2007, after she'd emailed it to Phoebe and me, she invited us over to her place in Ft. Greene for dinner on the roof and to critique it. I didn't know so much about books then, or publishing; the whole thing struck me as far away and impossible, even though Phoebe had hit it out of the park with her own memoir. So the three of us sat outside, Suzie's cat slinking around under our lawn chairs, while Suzie grilled vegetables and we drank wine I'd brought from the Green Grape, and Phoebe had picked up two kinds of insanely delicious ice-cream from Philadelphia, the dessert equivalent of a couture gown, in a cardboard container. One was sorbet, I think, and the other creamier. I kept coming inside to check my phone for texts from Marc Gerald, who I'd met at Jason's and been corresponding with obsessively, in this heated frenzy of sexual tension and conversations about books and plans for me to visit. Robert and I, even then, we were on a break that summer, still talking sometimes, and I kept hoping and hoping he would make up his mind about me and DO SOMETHING, come all in, see my bet and raise me a marriage.
Critiquing Suzie's book, I was both very, very honest and also totally disingenuous, the latter because I couldn't be objective about just how NOT objective I was being. I mean, I was IN the book, a stiff character, and Robert was in the book, and Phoebe, too, so there was that, but mostly, and most honestly, there was Suzie in her book, a narrator writing in the second person, and she wrote about all the things I'd seen her go through over that year, the most troubling of which was this weird sort of self-starvation, fueled along by a lack of Bronx boxing and obsessive cigarette-bumming from strangers. There's this one line in her book (which, for this private record, I never did end up buying, not even for half-price at the Strand) or maybe it was just in an email to me, I can't remember, or maybe she said it in conversation. It's about how she hadn't eaten in so long, she'd lost all this weight, and finally one day she stopped by McDonald's and bought a small order of fries, came back outside, and the wind almost blew her over, out into the street, because she was so skinny. I had hated this period of her life, hated hated hated seeing her disappear, seeing Suzie fall away from Suzie, leaving this skeleton there, sucking hard on borrowed Marlboros, her Red Cross bag slung over her shoulder, nothing there to hug. And this is touched on in the book, this whole period of denial and getting lost, and I had been too close to it to over any judgment of merit; I had no business criticizing her memoir, especially when I felt so deeply that I had failed her in some really basic way, failed, as her friend, to somehow witness and be present and save her life. Writing it now, it sounds trite and stupid, but that night, eating dinner out on the roof, I took off my kid gloves and didn't hesitate; I went straight in for the jugular without even consciously knowing that's what I was doing, or understanding just how pissed off and angry I was that she had done these things to herself and then made a big fucking joke about it, hiding in the second person. I thought what I was being was real; I thought hard truths meant authentic friendship; I was completely wrong. Phoebe did it better -- Phoebe almost ALWAYS does it better -- she went wide instead of deep, offered solid comments and suggestions, instead of abstract negatives.
And anyway, what I remember best about that night happened after we came inside, sitting around Suzie's kitchen table with our bowls of ice-cream. Phoebe told us that she'd decided to have a baby, and that she would either be pregnant by the end of the year or else she would have started the process of adopting a baby from Haiti. She said that she was going to do this with or without Andre -- though hopefully with -- that motherhood, having a baby, was more important than their relationship. Or maybe I'm just adding that last line, all conjecture, because that's what I inferred from her declaration.
I took the subway home and called Marc when I stepped up onto Spring Street off the 6 train. Suzie and I never really did speak again, not for my lack of reaching out to her for awhile after that, and to apologize, but she wouldn't have any of it. And I see now, in hindsight, that I made that dinner unsafe; what I know now is that the best way to criticize a friend's work is pretty much to stick to what you want MORE of, not the inverse, and definitely not to criticize her life. I know that now and I wouldn't do it again.
Still, when the elevator doors opened on Friday night, she put a tight smile on her face, I smiled right back. "Hiii," we both said, and I added a "How are you?" as I stepped inside, pushing the button to the lobby. The doors closed. I looked up at Andrew. "We used to best friends."
"Whoa," he said, and I thought about how it was true and not true. Yes, the friendship part was true, but neither of us is the same person anymore, so it seems odd even to use the word "we." It's like there should be a word to describe who you were, in the past, but I know that's impossible, it would change all the time, you could never keep up or have the right word. And sometimes maybe there is no right word for what it is you're trying to say to friends, not lovers, when you can't just take them to bed and show them with your mouth and body. I guess you just keep showing up for each other, making toasts and unpacking your days, slow and steady and basically autonomous. And when people get a little too vulnerable for your comfort, the worst thing you can do is flinch.
It's probably not the last time we'll wave at each other, through the window of a restaurant or shuffling in opposite directions. New York is funny that way, big and tiny. I thought about her a lot over the weekend, and I wish her well, but I don't miss her, because that would imply, at this point, that I want to go back to who we were, to our old lives. I love those girls, the best friends we were in graduate school, but I don't really know them anymore, and don't wish to.

Izvinite

2006-12-18T10:24:00.000-05:00

Please excuse me. It's been a long time -- so long, in fact, that I'm writing these words now the way I imagine you'd write them from a boat gone for lost: chicken-scratch on the back of a receipt, rolled up and whisked into a green glass bottle. Corked. Thrown out, into the sea. I was in a bad place last June, from June on into July and August and September, October. I came back and read these last entries that I wrote here and cringed because I could feel it there, so bad and so true, that I wanted to change my life -- but I wasn't strong enough to do much more about it than describe the desire.

I'm in Moscow today. Yesterday I was in St. Petersburg, with Robert, and we wore a hat that we bought on St. Mark's Place for fifteen dollars; it ties under your chin with two furry earflaps. The whole thing looks like a beaver that just crawled up on top of your head and died there.

So it is that cold here. Though, accordingly, it is still the warmest winter in something like 1,265 years. I hear New York is beginning to feel a lot like...balmy Palm Beach? I was in New York the weekend before last, first for the final walk-through of another apartment and also for a job interview, and even though the wind stung my eyes and I got trapped, momentarily, in the eye of a small tornado of garbage, I was so happy to be back.

In June, in the briefest of explanations, what happened is this: I flew up to New York for the board interview of a co-of apartment on 16th Street. While I was there, I spent two nights at Phoebe's (in her guestroom!), had drinks with Camille, got my haircut, bought some sunscreen, moved down to a hotel on the Lower East Side, and went to a party at my old semi-boyfriend's apartment, where I got so nervous in the elevator going up that I thought I might fall over. And that was all in the first two days, before Robert got there. (The party, by the way, turned out, after all, to be great and I walked east on 96th Street feeling slightly woozy and pink from flirtation and new acquaintances. The old "boyfriend" was remarkably unchanged -- an impeccable host, as charming as ever, and absolutely not for me.) The next morning, Robert arrived from London. We ate brunch, we went to Central Park, we talked and talked and talked -- and he told me that he doesn't want to get married. I told him that, in that case, we didn't have much to talk about. I refused to leave until after the interview but called American Airlines to make plans to return to Tennessee straightaway when it was over. ("I can see it," my sister said. "You, in East Nashville, living in a cozy bungalow.") So even if I wasn't over the moon about picking up the pieces and starting fresh, in my childhood bedroom, I was at peace with this resolve enough to realize that my life would go on, beyond Robert.

We went for one last walk before the board interview, where we would pretend to be like happy almost-homeowners, and had just finished eating two cones of gelato (strawberry for him and malted milk ball for me) when we found ourselves at the corner of Spring and Elizabeth, next to a wall of grafitti. And Robert said, "I have to ask you something but I want you to come to London so I can do it properly."

All sticky hands on my hips, I said, "If you want to ask me, you better get down on our knee." So weary, it had to be a joke.

And then, he got down on one knee. "Sarah, will you marry me?" Just like that.
I didn't exactly say yes -- but I didn't exactly have to. Hadn't I already been saying yes for a very, very, very long time?

The next day, I moved to London.

what we want most

2006-06-08T11:05:00.000-04:00

We're at the beach on St. George Island, in Florida. My sister's roommate, Amber, just asked me what my biggest pet peeve is and I ran through the usual suspects: backstabbers and close-talkers, people who insist on sharing long and convoluted dreams. But now, I think, what annoys me the most has as much to do with myself as it does with anyone else. It's this--when someone says that he or she wants one thing but then does nothing to facilitate that thing happening. When someone says, "My instinct tells me to do X" and then they do Y, over and over and over.

Which is really to say? That I feel like I've been crying wolf with my relationship for a long time now. It's finished, it's still going strong, we're breaking up, we're in love, I'm going to give him more time to make up his mind, I don't know what I want.

I do know what I want. I want Robert. What's been harder for me to admit is that I've chosen him to the detriment of my own needs. For months now (years?), I've been talking and writing about this. I've shared with him in letters and conversations, in dinners and long walks and overseas phonecalls, that I don't want to wait anymore. That I want to throw all the balls up in the air and run with this -- to live together, either in New York or London, to make a life where we see each other more than one week a month. Last August, I gave him an ultimatum not about getting engaged but about our beginning -- tentatively, in baby steps -- to plan for the future beyond my graduation from Sarah Lawrence. "Either we make some sort of plans," I said over the phone while we was on a fishing trip in Iceland, "or we need to free each other up to see other people. To live our lives."

He engaged, he changed his mind, you know the story. And I chose to stick it out, burying my faith in the fact that he had bought a ring, hoping the fact that at some point he had been certain enough of me to buy a ring, hoping that if I shut up for six months, if I didn't let myself mention it...that his momentary certainty would grow into something permanent.

I should have left then. But that's the problem with ultimatums, right? -- it's easy enough to deliver them without having decided whether or not you really care to follow through on your threat. And if it's love we're talking about, you don't want to admit that you've been reduced to threats.

So now I find myself nine months later, on the cusp of buying an apartment together in New York, still with no plan to actually live together. Robert's not moving out of London. I can't live in the UK legally and, frankly, I don't think it's in my best interest to get a job and move there right now, only for him.

For a long time, I've felt so stuck. I've felt like it whatever happened in this part of my life was out of my control. And it's taken me the better part of three years but finally I see that that's not true. Regardless of what Robert wants or eventually decides, I am free to live.

We talked yesterday, me lying on my parents' bed watching the ocean out the windows, Robert in London with a summer cold. I told him I will go to New York next week for the board interview, if he wants me to, because I have committed to it, but that he should consider whether or not he wants this apartment by himself. "I'm not going to go into our fourth year together still in different countries, like this," I said. "I'm sorry to tell you this now, sorry my timing is so bad, but there is never a good time. I don't think I can spend the summer with you in Europe. I'm ready to walk away from this."

He said he felt surprised, like he'd suddenly been hit. But, also, that he can't disagree with me. It's not like I haven't said this before.

I waited for him to say something more, to object, to come through, but instead someone called on the other line and he had to answer the door and so I said goodbye.

Now I'm going to play a(nother) game of Scrabble with my parents, bless them. They say they only want me to be happy. And also to join them later in a game of doubles tennis.

(un)flexible dates

2006-06-01T13:06:00.000-04:00

I just bought a plane ticket for my favorite teacher at Sarah Lawrence (also my thesis advisor and an astounding travel writer) to visit me and Robert in Paris for a weekend in July. She will already be in Prague teaching so the ticket wasn't much, two hundred dollars, and I know that we'll have a great time. The only reason I hesitated to do it sooner was because I don't even have my own ticket yet. What I have is a ticket from Nashville to New York on June 14th, returning to Tennessee sometime in October. But given that I don't have an apartment in New York anymore (hello, Storage USA?) the chances of my staying there seem really slim. Also considering that it's the first day of June and I started sweating outside before the sun came up, I think it's even more unlikely that I'll be here to welcome July. And August.

I have this tiny two-year-old cousin, Meredith, who I saw last weekend. She has white-white-blonde hair and she's very, very shy (one of those who are more comfortable in public behind her mother's leg than anywhere else). The only things I heard her say for two days were, "Achoo!" and "Oh no!" (The latter of those she said over and over again whenever anyone other than her mother got too close.) My grandmother looked at her the way someone who was starving would look at a country ham. She started out saying things like, "Meredith, let me hold you on my lap" and ended up, moon-eyed and desperate, saying, "Oh, I do hope you know who I am."

Plus my grandmother has started keeping butcher knives in all of the rooms that don't have doors leading directly outside. This is, she explains, in case the house is on fire and she can't push out the screen windows, she can use a knife to cut out the screens and then jump.

Meanwhile, not totally unrelated to the fear of getting old, my father is buying a motorcycle. He got his new license the same day my cousin William got his first driver's license. (By the way, I found out on Monday, apparently William is engaged-to-be-engaged to his model girlfriend. They have exchanged real wedding rings and he's getting a tattoo of a cross that she stayed up "until one in the morning for three nights" drawing. They're seventeen. Maybe I can be in charge of the guestbook?) Okay, so my father and his motorcyle. Every time he mentions it, my mother starts flapping her arms and threatening to join the circus.

But over the weekend, my dad told me outright that he thinks instead of getting old and hanging on until the age of 99 (like his grandmother), it would be better to go out in a motorcycle crash. I said, "Is this your mid-life crisis way of saying you won't live through a death of quiet desperation?" But then my grandmother came into the kitchen wondering how many years it's safe to keep chicken in the freezer before it goes bad. Specifically, she wanted to know, is five years too long?

Yes, we both said. And my dad's face read, "I think 95 might be the perfect age to get a motorcycle."

I haven't spoken to Robert since Monday, he's in Japan, and yesterday he left a message that said, "I'm working like a dog, I'm not avoiding you." For three nights in a row, I've had dreams about this other guy I know but haven't seen in almost a year. For three nights in a row, we've been walking along the river on the west side of Manhattan pushing a baby stroller and holding hands. Yes, I agree, it's unclear how two people can push a stroller and hold hands (and kiss!) at the same time, but while it's happening, it doesn't seem awkward at all. And then I wake up and write it down, wonder where we were going and what happened with that guy, if he ever wakes up from dreams about me, and what time is it in Tokyo?

A little bit of you, a lot of me

2006-05-31T18:01:00.000-04:00

I remember so clearly this moment when I was sixteen years old, standing beside the couch where my father was taking a nap downstairs. Holding a bucketful of broken tiles for Julianne's mermaid mosaic. Saying to him, "You are the most wonderful man in the world. I know that. And I'm going to keep knowing that until I meet the man I marry." He said something, thank you, and I wandered out of the room with my bucket.

It's a really odd thing to consider my own wedding, not least of all because I'm not even engaged (anymore). It brings up all these weird feelings I have about my family -- this family -- and the idea of creating my own family. Even though I've never been someone overly (or even remotely) preoccupied with a wedding and getting married and being a Mrs. Right, I have always understood that whoever Mr. Right turns out to be -- that he should be certain about loving me. I never thought that I would be three years in with someone who isn't sure.

I've come home to Tennessee for a couple of weeks. I've got hot pink toenails and a stack of books to read and things to write and revise and miles to run and the top of my head to stand on...We're going to the beach next week, with my sister, and then I'm going back to New York for two days so that Robert and I can interview with the co-op board. Unless something totally untoward happens, I feel confident that the apartment will be ours. Which is, obviously, an exciting thing, right? It makes our living together official, it will be the end of renting, the end of moving every nine or twelve or eighteen months, it will be the beginning of shared books, shared sheets, shared mail and breakfasts and a telephone number.

I feel two-thirds excited and one-third afraid -- of losing freedom somehow, of living there by myself because Robert will still be in London. Mostly, I think, I'm afraid to be with a man who loves me but feels trapped by our future. I can't speak for him, it's true, and I'm not really trying to. I just want to figure this out before it's too late.

It's so simple

2006-05-23T11:32:00.000-04:00

In less than three days, I will have moved out of New York and started the 889-mile drive to Nashville. Most of my stuff is in a 5 by 5 by 8 foot storage faciltity on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. What I have left here, mostly, are the necessities: bedding and towels, clothes, CDs, computer, and other extraneous things: the Jean Cocteau plate hanging in the window, our Indonesian windchime, 22 kinds of lipgloss, and 12 half-empty bottles of hair products. I keep making lists of what I need to do between now and then -- send three years of tax returns and W-2 forms to the co-op board, get the oil changed in my car, teach the creative writing class tomorrow morning in Queens, teach yoga on Wednesday night, fix the broken lamp in the kitchen, buy packing tape, pay the electric bill, cancel the Times' subscription.

When I let myself, in moments of weakness, I feel this crazy unfounded anxiety about the fact that before the week is up, I will no longer have either an address or a place to live. Robert and I have been counting on this co-op deal to work out but the truth is that despite all the information we've provided (12 letters of reference, credit checks, tax returns, bank statements, 10% down), despite all of that we have yet to arrange an interview with the board. I feel like a liability in some ways (our real estate agent and lawyer both keep suggesting that maybe the deal would be easier if I back out in order for Robert to be sole shareholder) -- and surely, I think, I must be the only potential shareholder who's primary income in 2004 came from Unemployment.

If it does work out, the move-date is August 1st.

So I work myself up into a foaming fit worrying about where to live and what to do and my career and I start to feel like a total wreck and then just when I'm beginning to revert to the idea that I'll move back to Guatemala and try to get a job at a tortilla shop in Antigua and not deal with any of this, I remember this story I read two weeks ago:

A woman had a 26-year-old son who was dying of cancer and so, in his last moments of life, she crawled into his hospital bed and held his hand. And just before he died, he turned his head towards her and smiled and said, "Oh, Mom, it's so simple."

When I think of this, all of my anxiety and running-away fantatsies fall away and instead of worry, I feel a tremendous wave of gratitude and love. On my birthday yesterday, I sat with myself on the floor for a little while, and resolved that this year I will try not to harbor negative thoughts. I will try not to say anything negative about people; I do not want to gossip. I crossed my legs and straightened my back and took deep breaths and meditated for half an hour, saying over and over in my head the word 'Sunari', which in Sanskrit means 'joy'.

And then, of course, before the sun even set, I had started to feel sort of sorry for myself and had for all intents and purposes fallen into a little hole. Robert came back home from a day of meetings, and he gave me a wonderful birthday card and a beautiful aqua and white Pucci dress, which I loved but when I tried on didn't think fit me very well. And we walked hand-in-hand across Houston Street to wd-50, and at some point between my sitting on his lap by the window and our collapsing into laughter about this ongoing thumbwar championship "final round" that's been going on for, like, six months, I stopped feeling self-conscious and old (not old, exactly, but a slave to the voice that's yelling, "Your life is passing you by!") and we had one of the loveliest nights ever. The loveliness was a combination of three things: us, the food, and the fact that we were sitting in a corner booth. We did the tasting menu, which was the reason I wanted to go there in the first place, and it was amazing. It started off with "chard shavings" that Robert said looked like someone had accidentally knocked over some fish food onto a plate (this was followed by his imitation of a very hungry goldfish...) and then included courses of food that I would never have imagined together -- cornbread ice-cream, a tiny piece of spring lamb with honeydew melon and a streak of carob sauce, wild rice krispie treats.

All day today I've been feeling blessed and well-loved -- and then I remember that I'm leaving in three days and I start, for a minute, to backslide into a state of fretting and hair-twirling. "It's all so simple," I say to myself. Sarah, let go of your worry.

Like a blowtorch

2006-05-21T20:26:00.000-04:00

This afternoon, sitting around the kitchen table. Cypress and Sandor were telling me about their most recent trip to India and I said, "How did the two of you meet, anyway?"
And they looked at each other. Sandor said, "We met at 18,000 feet on a mountain in Peru. Cypress was with her father -- and I was with my...father-in-law."
"We were both committed to other people," Cypress said.
"This relationship was like a blowtorch," Sandor said. "It set fire to the rest of our lives."

you remind me of the Artful Dodger

2006-05-19T10:11:00.000-04:00

At last night's meeting of our writing group, Marci said, "There's an old Russian saying about how if you don't love someone, then nothing -- nothing! -- is more annoying than watching them eat soup -- but if you love them, then they could pour their soup over head and you'd still think they're perfect."

Katie said that she'd told her "I-don't-want-to-be-your-boyfriend-right-now" that he reminded her of the artful dodger, and he said, "Who's that?" She told him it was from Oliver Twist -- and he said, "What's that?" And then she had to take the phone upstairs so her mom wouldn't overhear her telling her not-boyfriend who Dickens was.

Phoebe is the one who started this group; Katie and Marci and I had never met before last month. When Marci asked me yesterday if I was having "boyfriend woes," I said no, not really like that, and then looked at my hands in my lap and blinked while Phoebe said, "Together, they are very sweet to each other." When I share the fact that Robert and I have never lived in the same country, people are usually surprised and sympathetic. When I add that we see each other at least once a month, the sympathy turns into a question: "How is that possible?" The answer to which is a combination of frequent flier miles and not having an employer. I have no objection to the former, of course, but am feeling increasingly guilty about the latter.

I was brought up in a family where both parents worked full-time from the time I was born (well, in my mother's case, more like six weeks after) and are still working (except, again, in my mother's case when she took just a few years off to volunteer full-time on the school board). For thirty years, my father has woken up at five-thirty in the morning to exercise; my mother goes on six-miles hikes on Saturdays and Sundays. On the weekends, they take care of the lawn and the house and the recycling. They also read the newspaper every day and cook dinner at night and go out with friends on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights (the last one for the church group).

All of this is to say that by comparison in the last couple of years, I've had it very, very easy. Graduate school, reading, writing, exercise, margaritas, and travel. True, there have been some rough spots (like the moment, after I lost my job in 2003, when I accidentally set my fingernails on fire in front of the Brooklyn library and was too depressed for a few seconds to do anything except watch them burn) but generally, I've been able to set up a life that I love, almost entirely free from six a.m. alarm clocks. Two weeks ago, Robert's mother and my mother asked me, while we were walking along the Pacific Ocean, what I'm going to do this summer and I told them that at least for part of it I plan to be with Rob in London. My mother said, "Well, you need to have structure there," and I said that I was happy to volunteer although it would be impossible for me to get a job in the UK without a work visa. But no, his mother added, "Go on down to that Pilates studio and tell them you're a yoga teacher. Off the books."

Later, I told Robert that something was obviously wrong if his own mother was encouraging me to be become an illegal alien. So I've been thinking about what to do, how I can support myself again without having to use up sick days in order to spend three days with my boyfriend.

"The Hanged Man"

2006-05-18T11:55:00.000-04:00

Sooo, Monday is my birthday. I'll be in New York. I've been harboring this fantasy about either eating pot brownies and going to the Bronx Zoo or paying a visit to a sidewalk psychic. The last time anyone read my tarot cards (Buki, on a train from Rome to Florence in 2001) the hanged man showed up as the future of my love life and given all the stalled drama I'd been trying to pitch to Richard, it seemed depressingly appropriate. The last time I got stoned (a 2003 Halloween party with Shannon in Long Island City), I had to walk around the room leaning into the wall because I was convinced that we were on a boat in the middle of a storm and I was about to fall overboard. I'd also gotten separated from Shannon and stuck in the company of some guy who kept offering me Dixie cups of grain alcohol and lemonade and didn't understand until he saw me sitting on her lap what I meant when I told him that I was with Shannon.

Robert is coming to town on Sunday night, for two days, and I think the chances of my getting him excited about caged monkeys in an outer borough are slim at best. Better to forget that and ask if anyone can recommend a psychic of, at least, not ill repute?

Why I love Elizabeth Wurtzel (excerpt from Bitch)

2006-05-18T09:18:00.000-04:00

"And there have been long, struggling years, and my sadness at never getting it right with somebody has been huge. But I also believe in the human project I have embarked on by choosing to remain single (and it is a choice). In the abstract, when I discuss my life alone, my misadventures, my travels, whatever, people always say, "That's so interesting." Or "It's great that you do that." They marvel at the way I prefer to vacation alone, they think it's great that I'd rather provide for myself, buy luxurious and frivolous items for myself, that I love going to double features in the afternoon all alone, that there is pretty much nothing I don't like doing by msyelf. But at the same time that they are impressed or intrigued, this other question looms: Why aren't you married? (To which my favorite reply is: Why aren't you thin?)

"But I thought it ought to have been obvious by now that there is a real value in developing before marrying. We support this notion in men, we believe they should take their time to grow up. But there is a little support for a woman going it alone through some part of her life. Parly it is just risky--women can be raped, and they can be victims of crime, and somehow they make less rugged hitchhikers. And they don't age as well, plastic surgery or no. But still, I think we owe ourselves the opportunity to be free, and in this day and age, it ought to be a given. I want to be married as much as the next person--even Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain saw fit to get hitched--but I want to do it when I am good and ready, which is all that any man has ever asked--it is all he has felt entitled to--and it is all I should ever want likewise.

"After all, there is a point to mistakes, to crying on the bathroom floor searching for the last traces of cocaine. Now that I am thirty, I know for certain that there were things I did in my twenties that I needed to do. Perhaps I might have done them as a teenager or a college student, but I believe that I needed to do them as an adult, a free person, without a tour bus or a counselor or a parent or a roommate or some other guardian there to chaperone me through: There just were things I needed to do absolutely alone.

"I needed to spend a week in Florence by myself, to check into the Excelsior Hotel and eat breakfast and dinner in bed with a view of the Arno, watching soccer on Italian telelvision and be amazingly bored. I needed to walk the streets of this most romantic and recherche of cities all alone, I needed to have Italian men who could tell I was American as if I were carrying the Star-Spangled Banner harass me when I got lost in cul-de-sacs and say the only English words they knew, "aw, baby, you so pretty," I needed to find a kitten in a pretty little street and then find out his owner was a painter in an atelier just behind him, and I needed to talk to that man though somehow he spoke no English and I spoke no Italian; I needed to visit the Tower of Pisa alone and buy a cheesy souvenir replica of it alone; I needed to spend a month in Miami Beach by myself, to walk into a tattoo parlor off the main drag, get some touch-ups on a hand-done India-ink engraving some guy gave me with a needle and thread one drunken college night, and then I neede to fuck the tattoo artist--who had been working on my naked back for four hours--on the floor of the shop afterward just to make sure that the Penthouse "Forum" isn't all lies; I needed to walk the streets of downtown New York for hours a day, afternoons roaming by, shopping in SoHo, stopping for an iced tea at the T Salon, having a manicure once a week at a Korean place in the Village, spending hours going through the sales racks at Barneys, buying lipstick I didn't need at the MAC store, basically throwing away a load of money on a lot of nothing; I suppose, in some strange way, that I needed to have the IRS seize my assets; I needed to cop heroin all by myself on Avenue C or Stanton Street, where it is always midnight, and I needed to nearly get arrested trying to score some dope in Madrid; I needed, I guess, to spend a night in a city jail in Florida; I needed to sleep with the junkie lead singer of a bad heavy metal band and then sleep with his nineteen-year-old brother the next week; I needed to write my first book with no one looking over my shoulder, and I needed to go on tour to promote it with no one special to come home to; I needed to have the best girlfriends you can possibly have on earth, to have relationships with them that have spanned through college, through moves to the Ukraine and London and San Francisco and back again; I needed to believe that I would one day go to law school, that I would be the rightful heir to Clarence Darrow if I ever got into a courtroom; I needed to live, for five years, in a huge and beautifully appointed loft--that I unfortunately had to share with the psychologist who owned it, occasionally with her boyfriend, eventually with her baby and nanny, occasionally with a high colonics administrator, and sporadically with her patients, with many of my own friends who saw it as a crash pad as they passed through town, and ultimately with my roommate Jason, and most unfortunately with an inept flautist who gave flute lessons on Thursday afternoons; I needed, at age twenty-four, to be fucking a ridiculously charming man of forty-eight, so I could know I'd done it with someone twice my age; I needed to drop acid at Walden Pond and do all the ridiculous things people do on that kind of trip, which is, as far as I can tell, the only reason anyone ever goes there, and seemingly the only reason Don Henley wants to preserve it; I needed every meal I've ever eaten alone in every restaurant, I needed every waiter who insisted I read Atlas Shrugged, every waitress who told me what it was liek to be twenty-five and a single mother going to college part-time; I needed every conversation on every plane or Amtrak ride, every born-again Christian, every just-engaged couple who said I was the first the know about their betrothal, every vitamin salesman who gave me free samples; I needed to live alone in several different apartments, a fleabag motel, a luxe hotel and at my mother's house in Fort Lauderdale for a year and talk to almost no one I know almost never because I was so tired from all the other things I needed to do.

"And still, I know I needed to do them.

"I know that I would jealously hear of a vacation of a friend took with her boyfriend to the Loire Valley or with her husband to Montserrat and I would think: If only. I would think: I want to share these adventures I have with someone. But I have had excursions with boyfriends now and then, and I have always found that I preferred the possibility and uncertainty and rank risk of being alone. I needed that, those things.

"I did not want the life I have had until now, but I know I needed it."

Writer's block distraction

2006-05-16T13:56:00.000-04:00

1. What time did you get up this morning?
9:50. Which is just embarrassing enough that I'm telling myself (and you) that it's a result of still being jet-lagged from the return from Vancouver. Or maybe it's just because I didn't go to bed until after 1.

2. Diamonds or pearls?
My friend Sarah has the most beautiful necklace of black pearls and when I saw it a year ago, I was hypnotized. Within the past twelve months, though, it's fair to say my attention (obsession?) has been on diamond (singular).

3. What was the last film you saw at the cinema?
United 93

4. What is your favorite TV show?
I don't have a television anymore precisely because I used to have several favorite shows. Like, every episode of Law and Order ever made.

5. What did you have for breakfast?
A glass of cherry seltzer water and orange-tangerine juice. 3 hardboiled eggs with mustard. 1 cup of coffee with honey and cream.

6. What is your middle name?
Elizabeth

7. What is your favorite food?
Apples. All varieties so long as they're crisp but particular favorites are Fuji and Mutsu.

8. What foods do you dislike?
Soymilk yogurt, fried oysters, grape jelly, Mountain Dew, chicken nuggets (post-Fastfood Nation), ice-milk, sugar-free pudding, and Velveeta cheese

9. Your favorite Potato chip?
I don't really have one.

10. What is your favorite CD at the moment?
Ani Difranco Living in Clip, Disc 1. It's springtime music for me, and a packing and moving soundtrack -- it takes me right back to 16, ten years ago.

11. What kind of car do you drive?
A 2001 Honda CRV

14 Favorite drink?
Champagne

15. If you could go anywhere in the world on vacation, where would it be?
The Ashram, in Calabassas, California

16.What color is your bathroom?
Peeling white paint and no sink. But sparkling clean.

17. Favorite brand of clothing?
Calypso

18.Where would you retire?
I can't think about this question until after I've started working again.

19 Favorite time of day?
Early, early morning (contrary to current waking pattern)

21. Favorite sport to watch?
Basketball; it reminds me of my dad

24. What laundry detergent do you use?
I don't know, I drop it off across the street

25. Coke or Pepsi?
Coke, diet

26. Are you a morning person or night owl?
See #19

27. What size shoe do you wear?
7.5

28. Do you have pets?
Nooo but I can't wait to have a dog.

29. Any new and exciting news you'd like to share with your friends?
Yesterday Robert and I turned in the completed application-contract-10% deposit to buy an apartment on 16th Street.

30. What (who) did you want to be when you were little?
A combination witch-fairy princess

31. Favorite Candy Bar?
Peanut butter M&Ms

33. What are the different jobs you have had in your life?
Retail sales at clothing stores in Soho and at Kiehls on 3rd Avenue, office assistant , development assistant, temp, private tutor in Costa Rica, newspaper journalist at The Tennessean, yoga teacher

34. Favorite season?
Spring

35. Nicknames you've had?
Squealor, Narah Saurus

36. Piercings:
One in each ear and my belly-button

37. Eye color:
Blue

38. Ever been to Africa?
Yes, South Africa, Egypt and Morocco

39. Ever been toilet papering?
Yes, poor girl up the street, I'm sorry.

40. Love someone so much it made you cry?
Lord, yes

41. Been in a car accident?
No

43. Favorite day of the week?
Sunday

44. Favorite restaurant?
Prune (on 1st St and 1st Ave) for brunch in New York, Pancake Pantry for breakfast in Nashville (sweet potato pancakes!)

45. Favorite flower?
Tulips, orchids, roses, I love everything except carnations

46. Favorite ice cream?
Special Edition -- from 1992 -- Haagen Dazs Carrot Cake. 14 years later, I'm still rallying that they'll bring it back.

47. Disney or Warner Brothers?
Whatever

48. Favorite fast food restaurant?
Umm, Wendy's?

49. What color is your bedroom carpet?
Ha!

50. How many times did you fail your driver's test?
Zero

51. Before this one, from whom did you get your last e-mail?
Buki Esuruoso

52. Which store would you choose to Max out your Credit Card?
any bookstore

53. What do you do most often when you are bored?
Read, crossword puzzles, "think"

54. Bedtime:
In my ideal perfect life, I go to bed just after the sun sets. In this life, however, it's closer to midnight.

56. Last person you went to dinner with?
Robert, on Vacouver Island. We ordered room service and ate smoked salmon with cream cheese and triangles of rye toast, a green salad with tofu and dressing with cardamon, and cheese. And white wine from British Columbia.

57. Ford or Chevy?
I don't care

58. What are you listening to right now?
Rain, birds, a neighbor 4 flights down sweeping dried leaves

59. What is your favorite color?
Blues

60. Lake, Ocean or River?
Ocean

61. How many tattoos do you have?
One

62. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
The egg (but really, if you want to argue about this, you'll win)

64. Favorite Cocktail?
Margarita

65. Red or White wine?
White

66. Where would you go for a girls or boys weekend get-a-way?
Bikini bootcamp in Mexico

67. What do you want to be?
A published writer

68. Republican or Democrat?
Democrat

69. Favorite Family Vacation?
Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia

free candy?

2006-05-16T12:59:00.000-04:00

I went up to Sarah Lawrence yesterday to turn in the last of my library books (The Boys of my Youth, My Misspent Youth, and The Lives of Girls and Women -- judging by their titles, you might conclude that I've been kind of overtaken by nostalgia for the seventh grade, which would, obviously, not be the case. Hello, suicidal tendencies?) But the weird thing was that on the way to the library, I saw a poster, taped to a recycling can, that read, "F**K the DISABLED! May 12th 10pm FREE CANDY"

?? What is going on? Is that the unfortunately titled name of a band? F**k the disabled? That has to be, hands-down, the worst name ever, no?

This is why I have no willpower

2006-04-11T08:02:00.000-04:00

I ate the airplane food. It was beyond disgusting and I'm talking now about what tried to pass for chicken casserole but was actually boiling cream of mushroom soup with -- Truthfully? I don't even want to think about. Describing it seems like self-flagellation. There was some kind of pie called "Banatoffee" and I ate it, despite the fact that the list of ingredients probably rivals that of the atomic bomb.

Which is to say that when I'm feeling emotionally...fraught, I stop thinking about physical hunger.

Now that I'm back, it's like resetting a wind-up clock, relearning to rollerskate. I'm drinking my seltzer water-tangerine juice mix already thinking about breakfast (oh, thank you, thank you, for American flavored coffee!) and the train I have to catch to go to Sarah Lawrence in time for my classes. When we were just getting to be friends, Phoebe described drinking deli coffee in this context: "I coffee-slum all the time." The longer I drink coffee, the more I lean towards delis. In London, there's almost no choice: Starbucks is ubiquitous, moreso than in New York. So in London, I drink skim lattes and cappuccinos -- frothy espresso concoctions with sugar instead of Splenda and sprinklings of cinnamon on top. Also in London, there's no such thing as half 'n half. In New York, I walk half a block to the Gracefully deli and fill a small cup with Vanilla Nut-flavored and there's no one standing around saying, "More whip!" or "This isn't hot enough. Again!" Gracefully is right next to a rehab center, two flights up on 1st Avenue, and the people buying coffee with me are dusty and wide-eyed. We drink our coffee as if there were something else in the paper cups -- light and sweet methadone, maybe, or liquid gold.

Goodbye, Bup!

2006-04-10T07:56:00.000-04:00

I'm leaving for the airport in two hours, back to New York, back to my own life -- tangerine juice with cranberry packets of Emergen-C, sleeping in the middle of the bed (or, um, futon mattress), brewing coffee for myself, peeing with the bathroom door open, yoga classes and writing classes and subway rides, running along the East River, talking to Liz three times a day, Feldenkrais, therapy on 54th Street, a tiny class of eighth and tenth graders in Queens. I have to turn in 30 pages of writing tomorrow morning and I have no idea what it will be.

On Saturday, in Paris, Robert and I went out for a walk and he was acting kind of strange, kept suggesting that we "sit on a parkbench by the river" (which, I know, doesn't sound that strange but it's not something I can recall his ever having previously said). Walking across the Seine, I reached to tuck my right hand into his pants' pocket and he almost jumped -- and then stuck his own hand into the pocket and offered me his elbow to hold. I knew. I knew even before I glanced at his pocket that I would see a bulge there -- the shape of a tiny box, holding an engagement ring. And I didn't say anything. We strolled, we sat on a bench, we read the Herald Tribune and the Financial Times. We split three pieces of gum and had a brief bubble-blowing contest. We kissed and laughed and talked about Thomas Friedman's editorial and my maybe moving to London and our maybe living in Paris and we talked about the teenage couple sitting near us, the Chinese tourists -- four men -- taking turns posing for the camera, the boats floating past us, our dinner plans that night with his friends Kasper and Shirin. And then we stood up and walked home, his left hand in his pocket and my arm looked through his arm.

Last night, on the train back to London, I said, "I know you were carrying the ring in your pocket on Saturday." And he denied it. Five minutes later he said, "You notice everything, don't you?" But no, I said, not everything.

Saying goodbye makes me crave ice-cream and dark chocolate. Please, please, this is my penny-toss-wish thrown out into the hinterland: grant me the willpower to abstain from eight hours of airplane food...

Cutting them off

2006-04-07T09:14:00.000-04:00

My father says that my wanting to cut myself from his family (two brothers, one sister, and their spouses) is "a low-rent thing to do." His father, my grandfather, is dying in Tennessee. He is. It's not a false proclamation stated to inspire sympathy; his health has been ailing for a long time now -- his words becoming less and less coherent, his epic hours-long walks limited first to around the block then to the corner and back, then down the hallway, and now, if he's up to it, from his bed to the bathroom. I went home a few weeks ago, both to see my parents and to see him, for what I assumed would be the last time. And then, I decided I wanted to go back again but before I did, something else came up: the issue of an old inheritance.

My father and his siblings (along with my generation of offspring) have been left with 600 acres of forest -- and a house -- near the Smoky Mountains that belonged to my great-grandparents on his mother's side. There's been an offer for the property and everyone save my father wants to sell it to developers who plan to tear it all down and build high-density condos and golf courses.

My vote doesn't really count in this decision because, though the land was left to all of us, it is my father and his siblings who stand to benefit. (They would each receive the interest from the principle of the sale -- enough money, every year, for them to quit their jobs without really worrying about money for the rest of their lives. As for the principle, deeded to my cousins and my sister and me, we couldn't touch it until all four of them have passed away, decades from now.)

This is the letter I wrote to them two weeks ago:

My Dear Family,

This afternoon, I spent time researching Thomas Burnett Swann and was
astounded by the vast number of strangers online who name him as
their favorite author. I read essays devoted to explicating his
science fiction and I learned, too, that May 5th of this year will
mark the thirtieth anniversary of his death. Born four years later,
in 1980, I never had the chance to know him although his life is one
subject of conversations I shared with Great-Grandmommie that I will
never forget. She spoke of her son, as well you know, with a
tremendous amount of love and affection. The truth, of course, is
that she spoke of all of you with love, that she treated all of us
with graciousness and generosity.

Her behavior remains an example to me. Struggling to wrap a Chrismas
present, Scotch tape stuck to my hair, I remember her attention to
details--her beautiful bows and small ornaments, the preparation that
went into wrapping and table setting, flower arrangments and dressing
for dinner. Sometimes, walking down the street in New York, I
remember sitting beside her on the porch at Dandridge. I remember the
sound of clinking ice-cubes in her gin and tonic, Mr. French's Bloody
Mary, the plates of pre-dinner cheese and crackers, salted pecans. I
remember one such evening, the sun setting, as she told me a story
about herself as a little girl and then reached out and patted my
knee with her hand and said, "I love you, Precious." Perhaps that
sounds trite but, having grown up in an extended family rich in
intellect and sparse with displays of affection, her openness about
attachment to her family, to us, was nothing short of astonishing. In
her presence, I found I sat up a little taller.

With varying degrees of aspiration and success, she made me want to
be a warm person, to be disciplined, to always be in the middle of a
book, to rise early in the mornings, to swim and go for walks, to
lean over and smell the roses, to wear perfume and have a signature
scent, to care about the details and appreciate beauty, to have pride
without being boastful, to skin a dove, to put out fresh soap and
leave the lights on for guests, to give people my full attention,
and, perhaps above all, to be loyal to my family.

At stake is the issue of Dandridge but it also presents questions
about our family and how, together, we choose to spend our time, as
well as the gifts that Great-Grandmommie has bestowed upon us.

Though I harbor no false hope that it will sway you, my vote is in
favor of holding onto Dandridge. I appreciate that it is worth a
great deal of money, and feel increasingly resigned to the fact that
it will probably be sold at some point. But still, I feel that I
would be remiss if I did not go on record as saying that I do not
think it is ours to sell; I think, more accurately, that it is ours
to protect. This property is worth more than money; it represents, to
me, generations of our family's history and values and, in that
sense, I do not recognize it as something we have the right to sell
to developers who are open about wanting to plow down the forest and
put up "high density condos."

Really, now, what would be bought with these potential gains that
will still be around in twenty years? Thirty years? Groceries? Cars?
Vacations? Another house? At some point in this process, a fair
question to ask ourselves is how much money does one need in order to
be happy and to live well. It seems, at least to me, that one could
always "use" more money; why not?

A harder question to answer regards what in our lives is permanent.
Who and what can we count on? What do we know for sure? In answer to
the latter question, I have to confess that until last year I took
for granted the assumption that Dandridge would always be there, that
one day my own children would run around catching toads and rowing
around the ponds, that we would all (more or less) convene there on
the 4th of July forever. In consideration of the former question, I
want to say family. I want to believe that we can count on each
other, not always to agree, but always to be honest and, in honor of
Great-Grandmommie, I think that we are capable of handling this
matter with grace. I would like to believe that, with or without
Dandridge, we can get together and play Scrabble and go swimming and
eat homemade hamburgers (a veggie burger for Uncle Charlie) and spit
watermelon seeds into the grass and share decades-old embarrassing
stories and sometimes argue but generally just let out guards down
and be present with each other.

This is my real hope for us.

I'm so grateful to have such wonderful, rich memories of Dandridge. I
feel blessed to have known Great-Grandmommie, truly blessed, and I
believe that, regardless of how this issue is resolved among us, she
would want us to live peaceful and fulfilling lives. I hope to hear
from you and am determined to be more mindful to reaching out and
staying in touch.

With love,
Sarah

I heard from my father, my mother, my sister, my grandmother. But my uncles, my aunts? I have not heard a word from any of them. One aunt, by marriage, told my mother last weekend that my letter has offended her because they need the money, she said. "What it would buy is peace of mind." I've been thinking about this all week and, truthfully, I can say that I disagree. After the necessities are taken care of -- food, shelter, love, purpose in the morning -- I don't think that peace of mind has anything to do with money. Not hearing from them draws clear lines for me in the sense that, regardless of whether or not it looks bad, I am finished with the charade of pretending that these people are my only family. If your family doesn't bring you some sort of fulfillment, how in the world could you expect money to bring you peace?

I have said goodbye to my grandfather and have decided now to create space between myself and my extended family. I say this not out of acrimony but out of an understanding that our future, as a family, is one that these people are not particularly invested in. I wish for myself to stop feeling let down by them, to stop expecting anything from them. Instead of returning to Tennessee this weekend, I chose to come to London -- to kiss the man I love and try to let go of the fear that everyone eventually falls away and disappoints.

What I know for sure

2006-04-07T08:37:00.000-04:00

Things that help make me feel better:
1. Exercise that kicks my ass and makes me struggle to breathe
2. My forehead on a yoga mat in child's pose
3. Where the Wild Things Are, Eloise, books about Olivia the pig, Goodnight Moon, The Velveteen Rabbit
4. Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, Bruce Springsteen, Wilco, and 100.1 FM while I'm tooling around town in Nashville with the windows down
5. The real estate section of the Sunday Times, along with the Modern Love column in the Styles section (and, though this is a secret of shameful proportions, also the occasional Vows column and how they met description in the wedding announcements)
6. opening my mailbox to find magazines: New York, the New Yorker, Southern Living, O, and Audubon
7. Marc Chagall paintings
8. cappuccinos with whole milk and a piece of melting chocolate at the bottom
9. my old leather jacket
10. having a pink cheek glow, fresh from a run or fresh out of bed
11. poems by Galway Kinnel and Marie Howe
12. The Boys of my Youth by Jo Ann Beard
13. paperback mysteries, crossword puzzles, and cookbook photographs
14. Fresca
15. talking to my sisters
16. getting eighth grade Peter to participate during class, even if I don't understand what he's talking about and I've never seen him write on anything but the desk
17. Phoebe's French bulldog Guinness
18. writing every day
19. wearing Robert's shirts and boxers around the apartment
20. having cleaned my bathroom, changed my sheets, washed the dishes and the floor, vacuumed, dropped off laundry, and taken out the trash -- and knowing I don't have to do it again for a week
21. pedicures
22. holding baby Marley during yoga class
23. blowing bubbles with Extra Sugar-free gum
24. coming outside to find that my car is still there and I have not received another $75 parking ticket
25. sour cherry muffins, carrot cake, sausage, Monte D'Or cheese, frozen grapes, homemade whipped cream, Spanish olives, Diet Coke with lime, spinach salad, carrot apple ginger juice, seltzer water

Things that make me feel worse:
1. sleeping on an airplane
2. not sleeping on an airplane
3. skipping school
4. not writing
5. avoiding people and generally being a total flake
6. more than 2 glasses of wine
7. eating dinner at ten o'clock
8. hearing myself complain
9. not using birth control (and taking pregnancy tests every few months)
10. crumbs in my bed
11. sour cherry muffins, carrot cake, sausage, Monte D'Or cheese, whipped cream, too much coffee, too much anything
12. fear that missing Robert is making me miss out on life
13. conflict with friends
14. feeling, for whatever reason, like I have failed

Post-poned indefinitely

2006-04-06T13:23:00.001-04:00

Lord. I arrived in London last night and will be here until Monday, when Robert and I are flying back to New York together for "a few more days" -- or, whenever he decides again that managing his business from our kitchen table in Alphabet City is impossible. His friends Marcus and Priya were supposed to be getting married this weekend, starting today with festivities going on through Sunday evening. But their wedding has been canceled because, after they had an argument, Marcus didn't show up the next day to sign the marriage license and Priya and her parents waited long enough for it to become painfully obvious that this was not a promising start to a long and healthy marriage. But, of course, she says she still loves him. Marcus isn't even using the word 'canceled' -- he says only that it's been 'postponed' -- and do you even want to imagine the sort of words that Priya's relatives are using? So depressing. I feel horrible for her. They've been engaged since 2003. In talking about it, Robert reminded me that it's better for this to happen now. Yes, it would have been much better if it had happened a week or two earlier (like, say, before her entire extended family arrived from India) but still -- better for Marcus to show his true colors now, while she's free enough to get out of this relationship without a divorce and children and more years gone by.

Robert met me at Paddington Station and we came home, where he cooked fresh cod, encrusted in seasalt, and scallops, and opened a bottle of Chablis, and I set the table with candles. Then I sat on his lap in an armchair and we ate vanilla ice-cream with raspberries and I wanted to feel completely focused on being with Robert, to close my eyes when he kissed me and to relax. But instead, I felt this squirrely anxiety, I kept jumping around, and feeling self-counscious about my tummy. And then, in bed, he reached for me and I started to cry.
"I feel so far away from you," I said.
And he pulled me to his chest, stroked my hair. "I'm here," he said. "I'm not going anywhere."
"No... but we will have to say goodbye again in a week. And then see each other in another month. Knowing that, knowing how hard it is to separate from you, makes me not want to open up at all."
I couldn't have sex because my muscles were contracted and I wasn't in the moment, my head was already saying goodbye in New York, watching his taxi disappear around Houston Street in seven days. He lay beside me, touching my neck and my shoulders and my arms and my tummy, and when I turned to him again, in the candlelight, I expected to feel that same tense shut-off-ness but this time, I felt excited. When I woke up today, we were wrapped around each other and when he opened his eyes, he said, "Can I bite your nose?"

That anxiety is back again -- I've felt this pervasive sadness for the past couple of weeks -- and I can't put my finger on it, exactly, on what's causing it. My family used to go to this run-down Methodist church in Nashville, in a converted garage, and at the start of the Sunday service, everyone would say together, "It is good to be in the house of the Lord." It's different, I know, but all day I've been walking around Marylebone with that same feeling, this time about Robert's house, about being surrounded by love.

Come on down!

2006-04-03T09:46:00.000-04:00

I'm trying to get control of my life, beginning with my kitchen. Hello, Mop? Mop? Where ahhre you? Come on down and meet the floor! And the books, my god, the books stacked on top of every level surface. Yesterday, I looked at a co-op on 9th Street in the West Village and it was like coming face-to-face with my fate (well, an off-5th Avenue sort of fate). In 1200 square feet of space, this owner prides herself on having fit almost 8,000 books, 3 couches, 1 grand piano, mulitple armchairs, a television, a double bed, one cat and his assorted accoutrements (litter box, scratch pole, tiny toys), and -- lord, it is impossible to overstate the cramped feeling that standing in the middle of 8,000 books will give you. I walked out with a newfound motivation to cross the street when I get close to used bookstores. A new mantra: My home is not, and should not aspire to be, the public library. All the culinary mysteries I've been reading for the past month? Hello, sidewalk!

The past couple of weeks, since I returned from a week at my parents' house in Tennessee, have been really difficult. In addition to all the heightened stuff with Robert (we're still together, we continue to miss each other, I'm going to visit in a couple of days, and in two hours I'm going back to look at another apartment with a contractor), I've started seeing a therapist every Wednesday and was rejected from several literary magazines and a newspaper. One of my great writing friends, though, has sold her first book and has now crossed the divide that eludes most writers for decades: she is now able to support herself as a writer. I'm happy for her, really proud of her; this could not have happened to a more genuine and deserving person. Also positive is that my running is much-improved -- since January 10th, I've been running at least 15 miles a week in preparation for the Vancouver half-marathon on May 7th, with my dad and Robert, and now, finally, I'm starting to look forward to it. I know that I can do it. Also, on Friday night, I participated in a reading in Brooklyn. I stood up onstage at a dive bar (it opens at 8 in the morning) and read 2 essays into a microphone and I wasn't booed off. The best part of that was seeing my friends who came -- Tallu and Phoebe and Andrew and their friends. (The second best part was the guy who, I noticed, walked in front of me to get to the bathroom while I was reading and then came up to me outside afterwards and said I "did good." I was like, "Oh yeah? You enjoyed it from the bathroom?" And he held up both hands and said, "Hey! I didn't pee directly into the water so as not to make a lot of noise and disturb you. And I hesitated to flush!") Does life get any better than that? By "better", of course, what I mean is hilarious and humbling?

One of my best friends and I broke up. Did we break up? I don't know, we are taking a break. I'm going to have to think about this before I write anymore because I feel conflicted and still unsure how it even came to this point. That thing that Anne Lamott calls "K-FKD" -- K-Fucked, the voice in your head that delivers a constant stream of self-abuse -- has been playing loud for the past week, and considering the dissolution of what had been a solid friendship makes me feel horrible. I can think about this, or I can mop and clean my apartment, but I cannot do both at the same time. Maybe what I need now is a cup of coffee and Liz Phair, to get on my knees and start scrubbing.

My Sex and the City

2006-02-24T12:31:00.000-05:00

I haven't written in a while because I felt self-conscious about always prattling on about Robert (what is this crazy pebble world called love?) and also because I'm lazy and have had totally handicapped internet access (thank you, people in Apartment 2A whose wi-fi now requires a password -- although, you know, I actually had a great time trying to come up with potential passwords -- "1234" "Mine" "Not Yours" and then I gave up.) Last night, I ate dinner in Chelsea with Suzie and Phoebe (my version of Sex and the City) and they said, "That Happy Belated New Year has to go. It has to go." I said, "I don't think anyone cares enough to read the blog" and Phoebe said, "Sarah, write it for us." Which was such a nice thing to say, it's lead me back to here.

Robert dumped me on Tuesday night, which was so pathetic. The reason he gave? "You don't want me to go on business trips...I don't see how you can co-exist with my work."
What? I said, "Can you give me an example of when I've discouraged you from working in the last six months?"
Silence.
Arg.
But wait, I have to back up to the Friday before that, one week ago, on whch I sat down and wrote this letter:

From: "Sarah Norris"
Subject: Oh, Maxwell!

Dear Robert,

I keep thinking about some of the conversations we shared last
weekend, in both Paris and London, and want to communicate to you
what, specifically, has stayed with me. Earlier today, a friend was
talking to me about her fear of commitment that underlies all of her
relationships. I asked her how it was possible to possess the kind of
fear that she was describing when she’d just spent the previous six
years in a committed relationship. She said, “Oh, we were faithful to
each other but after awhile our relationship plateau-ed and instead
of deepening, we just maintained the status quo for a few years. It’s
easy to lie to yourself when it’s happening. I told myself that he
and I were completely honest with each other, that we were as close
as we could be…but the truth is that we were comfortable with the
distance between us. Because we were both afraid of experiencing real
intimacy, neither one of us asked for more. But the whole time,
underneath, I knew that something wasn’t right.” When she said this,
Robert, I felt like a light went off above my head: this is exactly
what I do not want for us. Recovering and maintaining distance—both
geographical and emotional—is becoming a pattern with us (at least
one that I feel is becoming apparent) and it is precisely for this
reason that I’m writing you this letter.

In January, when you took me to Heathrow after our month together, we
were talking in the taxi on the way to the train station and you
said, “I used to see your leaving as a resumption of my life; now I
see it as a cessation of my real life.” I was so touched by those
words because they seemed to be seeds of something growing—some kind
of solid plan for a shared future—and I have thought about them often
in the past month. Your kindnesses towards me when we are together,
your constant thoughtful gestures and words, are what sustain me when
we are apart. I try always to return them, to treat you with all of
the love and affection and worship that I feel for you. Over two
glasses of lemonade, another friend asked
me yesterday if you and I “have fun together” and I burst out
laughing. “Yes,” I told her. “So much of the time, we’re like two
little kids. We play together.”

And it’s true, I think, for the most part; in each other’s company,
we laugh and tease and make love and sometimes I look at you and it
actually brings the sting of tears to my eyes, I can’t believe how
much love I have for you. In those moments, I know how blessed we are
to have found each other and I make these silent promises to myself
to be less demanding, less confrontational. I swear to do better at
being easier, to be better for us, to make you happier. When we are
together, I wake up in the mornings and nothing in the world brings
me more joy than scooting over to wrap my legs and arms and body
around you, to press my lips to your back, to be there with you to
say good morning.

Then, after a weekend or five days (never more than fifteen), we
split again, back to different countries and all the promises I’ve
made to myself—all the progress you and I have made as partners and
lovers and friends—sputter out into a series of daily ten-minute
phone conversations in which we each say, “How are you?” over and
over again until it’s time to say goodnight. Ugh. The only way I know
of to break this habit is to commit to something bigger than a
vacation with you. In some ways, the past three years has existed as
a series of vacations and retreats, some of them impossible to
believe they’ve been so absurd and beautiful. I say that I spent last
summer living with you but if we’re going to be honest, I don’t think
that any real day-to-day living ever got off the ground. We didn’t
spend more than ten days in any one place—much of it was amazing,
parts of it were very hard and lonely, and none of it was
sustainable. As wonderful as our trips have been, the truth as that
our love for each other doesn’t live on the Nile or in Marrakech or
in Paris: it is in the details of the every day. It is in the ways we
turn love into an action, a verb, a behavior that moves us closer
towards sharing a home.

Last weekend, drinking red wine around the corner from your apartment
our first night in Paris, you admitted that the relief you felt about
backing out of our brief engagement wasn’t based solely on the
pressure I’d put on you. You felt relieved at the prospect of not
having to change your life, of not having to intertwine it with
someone else’s, of being pinned down and responsible for more than
yourself. I know that you live a peripatetic life; I know you are
afraid that a different kind of commitment might infringe upon your
ability to pick up one of your passports and fly out of town on a
whim, wherever you want. Though you have not said so in so many
words, I suspect you feel threatened by our making plans to live
together—to be weighed down by my expectations to have you there more
often than not, to be there for the gritty, boring daily goings-on,
the breakfast conversation from opposite ends of the table,
“Apparently, they discovered a new planet” a la Match Point. But last
night, when you called me at three o’clock in morning your time,
after you’d been working, you told me about the Chinese emperor you’d
learned about on television and I tried to listen to you, Robert, but
in my head, I heard another woman’s voice saying, “The only reason to
have a long-distance relationship would be if he was drafted in a
war.” Because it is one thing to have powers greater than ourselves
stand between us; and it is quite another three years on to speak
into pieces of plastic on opposite sides of the Atlantic about our
separate lives (your successful business, my thesis, my family, your
travel plans) knowing that what stands between us isn’t a war but our
own paralyzing fear of commitment and change.

You also told me last weekend that you know, when I threaten to break
up with you and see other people, not to take me seriously anymore.

And here we are looking at apartments in Manhattan to buy without
either of us having a real reason to be in New York, with your
business in London, and my struggling to focus my energies on
business that doesn’t involve you.

Believe me, Robert, when I tell you now that I am miserable with what
the distance between us has inevitably turned into our relationship
maintenance. These phone calls are a chore, and a sorry one at that.
We say we miss each other every day that we are apart but how many
vacations does it take to keep us together when we’re not wearing
swimsuits? Instead of asking you what it will take for you to make up
your mind about me, I am starting to seriously ask myself what it
will take for me to decide once and for all how much I think I’m
worth. Earlier today, I realized that the moment I start asking what
other people think is the moment I begin to go wrong. It’s my own
inner voice I should listen to on this subject, not my friends’ or my
mother’s or a stranger’s. I don’t imagine that you’ve learned anything
from reading this letter (I’m sure I talk about our relationship quite
enough for your comfort) but what I learned from writing it is that I’ve
missed sharing with you like this—speaking clearly instead of whining,
loving you instead of needing your attention.

When we met in 2003, I recall so clearly being struck by what a
wonderful conversationalist you were, how much joy I took when we
talked, how we could talk for hours, about anything. In that regard,
I am interested in maintaining: I want always to take an absolute
interest in the words you speak and write to me. I don’t want to fall
into patterns of small talk that run themselves dry and bored in
ninety seconds. I am as excited by you at the Royal Palace Recife as
I am in the ocean, in the kitchen, lying on our futon mattress,
walking through the East Village, eating a single scone at Podunk,
kissing your lips all over Paris. I don’t want to forget what brought
us together in the first place; I just wish I understood how it is
that the energy and spark that keep us together are part of what
keeps us apart.

I love you.
Your girl,
Sarah

So I wrote that letter and then...nothing. The next time we talked was two days later, (after I'd wandered into a reading and slideshow by the author of a book entitled "We All Die Alone" and saw that a man in the audience was wrapped in a blanket -- before fleeing back outside into the sunlight and calling my Robert in Switzerland) and it was just a shitty conversation. The expiration date on the long-distance part of this whole thing has expired. When we broke up two days later, I felt like I'd been deflated -- but, finally, I also felt relief. I can't imagine loving someone else as much as I love him. Which is part of why I felt relieved--quite simply, I just don't think I have anything new left to give him.

I don't know what is going to happen. I'm thinking of leaving New York, for reasons not entirely unrelated to a Sarah Lawrence Alumni Writers Panel, during which one of the speakers said, "If anyone here has any ideas about how to make money as a freelance writer, please come talk to me!"

What about Nashville? What about Mexico? What about stepping outside and not getting hit in the face with pieces of garbage that are blowing around at seven in the morning? What about not paying $2,000 a month in rent and $17 for 90 minutes of yoga? I just sent in my resume and cover letter for a job as an editorial assistant at HarperCollins--a job that pays less money than I made three years ago working at a nonprofit. And, I think, life in New York could continue to be absurd and energetic. Maybe Robert and I will get it together, maybe we will get an apartment and a dog and a homelife and I will get a job that I love (maybe even teaching yoga) and I will write and he will go on his business trips, unimpeded, and the anxiety about "the future" that I have carted around for the past 2 years with just...disappear for some time. We will love each other and we will make it work. Or, you know, maybe I will pack up my books and move south somewhere, eat quesadillas every other day and fall in love with someone else and life goes on.

There's a sign downstairs in my apartment building that reads, "EXTERMINATOR COMING ON FEBRUARY 31st" and, next to it, someone has written, "What the fuck?" And every time I walk past it, I'm happy it's still there. I think, "One day, I will miss this chaos." Then I put on my gloves, open the door to the wind, and prepare to be in the face by someone else's flying garbage.

Happy belated New Year?

2006-01-23T19:08:00.000-05:00

I haven't written in a long time -- over a month -- for reasons that snowballed. First, I went out of town and spent two weeks in Brazil alternately swimming with the fishes and shaking sand out of my hair. There was no internet where we were; the nearest town, in fact, only got electricity last year. There were no newspapers (or, I should say, none that weren't three days out of date and in Portuguese), no telephones. Robert spent an inordinate amount of time (hours! every day!) chasing hermit crabs around the beach. I floated on my back in the ocean, eyes closed, thinking, "If I ever see another hypnotherapist who tells me 'to go to' the most relaxing place I've been, I must remember this." We went for long, long walks on the beach and we held hands and kissed and drank aqua de coco in the morning and ate slices of papaya and mango and plum. At night, we went to the beach and looked at the stars and tried to guess which ones were planets and on New Year's Day we opened a bottle of champagne that Robert had brought along from London and we sat on a beach chair with my back against his chest and his arm around me until I got too cold -- and then we wandered back for dinner, fish and vegetables and cashew fruit for dessert. We talked some about how different this year's vacation was from last Christmas -- running from the tsunami in Thailand, visiting death camps in Cambodia -- but it was more than that. It's not just the destination; we have changed. Time makes us stronger. I love him more and more. Which brings me to the second, and primary, reason that I've neglected to write here since last year.

With the exception of my mother, this relationship with Robert has been the most challenging of my life. My friends know this. If you're reading this blog, then I can only assume that my romantic travails in the last two and a half years have presented themselves here as something that...I've devoted a lot of time to. And, on that note, I should add that more than one of my friends has been fairly disgusted with my (oh lord) single-minded focus on my boyfriend. My resolution this year is to treat my friends and my sister the way they deserve to be treated -- with time and attention and care, as much effort on all three fronts as I have given to my love life. That resolution extends to me as well. I want to treat my own endeavors and interests with as much respect as I have shown for Robert's work. It's been easy sometimes to put him first not only because I love him but also because that way, I wouldn't have to deal with my own messes and talents.

Not anymore.

Between now and the end of May, I am going to:
1. finish my graduate thesis (a collection of autobiographical essays)
2. send at least three essays out to various publications each month
3. celebrate my friends' birthdays like a respectable adult and not a shirking, shrieking person who arrives a month late to the party with a card that includes the word 'belated'
4. train for the Vancouver Marathon on May 7th (which I am running with my dad and Robert)
5. speak to my sister every week
6. find an apartment in New York with Robert
7. find some sort of job/plan for post-May
8. begin putting together a book proposal

I started running five days a week two and a half weeks ago and am in a constant state of soreness. It's wonderful and, truly, I can't recommend it highly enough, this feeling of my heart pounding while I run -- strangely enough -- puts me in a good mood. This is maybe absurd and definitely surprising coming from someone who's always prided herself as being the anti-athlete of the family. But I want to run a marathon; it's on my life list; I want to do it and then, if only for the sake of my breasts, I never want to run again. I've also been doing yoga regularly and I can't remember ever feeling so enamored of the stretching. Stretching! It's so much more my speed.

What I meant to say before I distracted myself was that I didn't feel like writing because I was judging myself. Even before I finished a sentence, I was pressing Delete and editing. Now, I've decided again, the most important thing is just to get it out onto the page. I just finished reading, fifteen minutes ago, the novel Lucy Gayheart, by Willa Cather. It's wonderful.

In it, Lucy falls in love with an older, married musician who subsequently drowns and, as she grieves, there is a passage that describes Lucy's wondering if "Life itself were the sweetheart" and then, in a letter, she writes, "I have found that I can't run away from my own feelings. The only way for me, is to do the things I used to do and to do them harder."

Perhaps it sounds melodramatic and too precious, but me, I read those words and I know they are true.

No One Here Gets Out Alive...except me. And I'm going to the beach.

2005-12-14T11:36:00.000-05:00

Last night I had a conversation with a close friend who, it was hard not to notice, has stopped using Robert's name. When she mentions him at all, she calls him, ahem, "the R-person."

"I'm just fed up with him," she said. "You are not getting any younger. YOUR LIFE IS PASSING YOU BY. And it's in his best interest to keep you unrooted, unemployed, just...available for him."
"But," I asked, "what's wrong with using his name?"
"I hate the way you say it with so much affection. He doesn't deserve it."

She's not the only close friend who feels this way and I have to wonder what I could have done to prevent this. The "R-person"? Should I have kept the dubious engagement story to myself? If I had, I think it would have eaten away at me; I wouldn't have been able to joke about it and the joking about is what makes it sufferable. In hindsight, I guess it would have been wise for me not to discuss certain aspects of our relationship but it's those very aspects of the relationship -- the distance, the loneliness, the time gaps between reunions, the pervasive feeling that I am leading two different lives -- that were eating at me. These things have been heavy on my heart and I think it would have felt dishonest, certainly disingenuous, not to have shared my feelings with the people to whom I am closest. I gather that some of those people are now fed up with the entire situation -- that one day I am in love, the next day I am still in love but unhappy, the next day I am out of the country -- and so I'm trying to think about how to handle this differently. One of the purposes of this blog, in fact, was to write freely about this relationship without talking someone's ear off, without being afraid of being judged as a weak or obsessed person. I feel, aside of the half-in, half-out part of my relationship over the past few months, like the real struggle is about finding a balance between my love life and the rest of my life without the aforementioned result of feeling like I have two different personalities.

I got off the phone last night and then Liz called from Atlanta and I asked her if she ever feels like her "life is passing her by." She said, "Oh, lord, well, when I was 23 and I'd been living in Rome for two years, my father used to tell me all the time that I was an old maid and that I was drying up."
"Did that bother you?" I asked.
"Hell to the no!" she said. "Please. Just because he and my mother got married when they were baaaarely twenty-two does not mean I was supposed to spend my twenties changing diapers."
"It just seems so frightening," I said, "the thought that we're just getting older every day. I feel exactly the way I did when I was sixteen, with more cleavage and the only groceries I sack are my own. Thank you, God, that I'm not still sacking groceries at Compton's. Two hours there and I swear I could actually feel my life passing me by."
"I know, right?" said Liz. "Some days I wake up convinced that I'm going to win the Quiz Bowl championship and then I remember that it's not 1997 anymore."
"Can I ask you something?"
"Of course."
"What," I said, "am I supposed to be waiting for with Robert? I have this idea that I'll give the relationship a finite amount of time and then, if I haven't gotten what I need, I'll move on...But I don't know what it is that I'm waiting for. I thought it was engagement."
She sighed. "I think it's commitment," she said. "You just want to have a plan to be together in a real way."
"We talk about plans all the time," I said.
"I know you do, I know," she said. "But there is a difference between talking and acting on it. My fear for you is that you are going to stay with Robert, making plans, until you're 29 or thirty and nothing will have changed. It will be harder to start over at that point than it would be now."

In my dream, Robert stopped speaking to me and I spent an entire day chasing him around, through crooked streets, calling and calling his name. Ugh. I woke up at 5 and took a shower, put on my silk bathrobe and came back to bed to reread my 18-page paper on mothers and daughters ("No One Here Gets Out Alive") and tried to stay warm. It is fourteen degrees, not including the wind chill factor, and I've been wearing my sleeping bag coat around in public, zipped up to cover my mouth. On the way to the car, I dropped off 24 pounds of laundry and the woman who works there told me to be careful because a flasher has been lurking in between the cars. I've been flashed enough times now -- on the subway, in Italy, at the grocery store in Brooklyn -- that I've committed to my future response. Instead of almost crying and running away, I am going to laugh. I might even laugh and point.

I am back in the school library. The girl next to me just swallowed Adderall with her coffee and I looked at her prescription bottle and said, 'Does that really do anything?" And she said, "Ohmygodyes. It makes you feel like vacuuming and finally, like, dealing with shit."

The last academic paper I will ever write. I am pleased as punch.

This is apropos of nothing

2005-12-13T12:05:00.000-05:00

but what are women thinking when they have long, personal conversations in public restrooms? Is there really nothing that can't wait until you're in a flush-free zone?

Sorry, sorry. In light of my resolve to be less nauseated and more upbeat, I'd also like to note my appreciation for today's sunshine. The sky is blue, the air is crisp; if you have a pair of gloves the sidewalk seems like the perfect place to close your eyes and turn your face towards the sun...or make a phone call.

It's a start. Kind of.

2005-12-13T10:30:00.000-05:00

I couldn't sleep last night. I kept rolling over and squinting at the clock and then shuffling the sheets around, squirreling into the duvet to get warm. Too warm. I stared at the ceiling. 12:32. I looked at the clock. 12:38. I got up and put on a pair of my father's gray sweatpants and my coat, ready to drive back up to Sarah Lawrence and go to the library. I spent seven hours there yesterday, finishing my paper, and then realized that there was some kind of virus on the computer so the file had been corrupted. I lost everything I'd done. It could have been worse, I know. It could have been an assignment in the real world, with ramifications that extend beyond one teacher's opinion and evaluation. Still, though, this is my very last academic paper, ever, and I'm motivated to make it great. Barring greatness, I'd even settle for coherence. After the corruption incident, I drank a Diet Coke and blinked at the computer screen long enough for me to decide I needed to get out of the libaray and come home.

And all day there was this voice in my head saying, "You take your friends for granted." I tried talking to my mother about it--the email from my friend, the guilt I'm feeling, this gnawing anxiety. I asked her if she thought my world was the size of a pebble and she said, "Oh, Sarah, that's not a question for me to answer."

Only after I pressed that that wasn't saying much for her legacy did she relent. "Okay, okay," she said. "You're not a pebble."

I'm back in the Sarah Lawrence library, chip-chip-chipping away at the paper. I drank a cup of hazelnut coffee and ran downstairs to talk to Jason from my workshop and while he was telling me about his 30-page essay on Maldova, I thought, "I am going to throw up now." Not because of anything he was saying, I just had that sick nauseated feeling. I leaned over and grabbed onto the armrest of his chair and he kept talking about medicated depression and I thought, "If I vomited here in the library, these people would help me. I've been arguing with Jason in class all semester but if I threw up next to his backpack he wouldn't judge me."

And then I felt an upspring of compassion for him, and for all the medicated depressives at the library, and the unmedicated ones, myself included. I can kick myself from here to the East River, saying I'm a failure, I'm a bad friend, I'm a tiny pebble, but to do so would be missing the point. Which is that every morning presents an opportunity for me to be better--and by better what I mean is not to take anything for granted. To be less defensive and hard. To exert more energy into the relationships I have with people other than Robert. To pay attention.

A good start, I guess, would be to listen to what Jason is saying without thinking about throwing up.

from pebble world

2005-12-12T07:49:00.000-05:00

I just woke up and read an email from a friend who I haven't seen in six months because she moved away from New York and also because I am horrible, no good and very bad at keeping in touch and returning phone calls. Her letter is angry. She is disappointed in me. She says sometimes she reads my blog and that I have "spiraled" into an obsession with Robert and that seems to be all that my life is (as small as a "pebble") and did our friendship really mean so little to me?

Now I'm obsessing and it's not about Robert.

First of all, maybe I'm just a totally single-minded person, not very good at maintaining friendships over the phone. I have thought about this friend so much, every night when I'm going to bed it's like a lightbulb goes off to remind me to call her -- and then the same lightbulb goes off the next night. And I can't explain it except to say that our friendship does mean a lot to me, you mean a lot to me, and I'm sorry that I've let you down. I haven't called because it's been a long time and I don't know what to say -- and I know that that's not good enough.

But our friendship is a separate issue from my boyfriend. It's true, I've been up in arms about all this drama in the past couple of months but I fail to understand how making me feel like shit about already feeling like shit is going to lay the groundwork for a great conversation. I don't want to ever be one of these women who obsesses about her significant other, or lack thereof. Nor do I ever want to be someone who stifles her feelings because she's afraid of being judged. I want to be your friend, I do, but now I'm even less sure of what to say to you.

my friend Camille

2005-12-11T18:16:00.000-05:00

Suddenly, I realize, it's almost 2006, which means that Camille and I have known each other for three years next March. We met when we worked as seasonal temps for a nonprofit in Soho, arranging visas for international students to work at summer places like Dippin Dots at Six Flags-Atlanta and 2 Slavs-1 Truck Moving in Astoria. Basically, we talked to a lot of people with thick Russian accents while trying to discern if these were all legitimate businesses. We worked in a windowless conference room, all five of us girls, four of us NYU grads, and we listened to a lot of Justin Timberlake "Rock Your Body" and used our lunch breaks to go on job interviews or buy some yogurt and Diet Coke or just keep working through lunch so we could make an extra six dollars and fifty cents, before taxes.

Camille joined us after Tikva left to tour with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and there was an office party on her first day. We stood around by the reception desk drinking wine out of plastic cups and I remember talking to Camille in her black suit and thinking, "I don't think we're going to get along. She seems so...direct."

And then we became really good friends. She is hilarious and acerbic and she's a master at making fun of the insane and questionable (a recent example is an entry on her blog with a picture of the Kenneth Cole T-shirt that says "I HAVE AIDS" and, underneath, Camille's words, "I want to help but I don't think I'll be wearing this.") For the last couple of months in the conference room, her presence was nothing short of a blessing. Which is really just to say that we laughed our asses off in between having honest and serious conversations. Always, I am caught off guard by how honest she is, and sometimes, I've been offended. But she never says it to offend you, she's just speaking her mind, so really, I think, why should I be hurt? She is a genuine person, ties with my sister as the least artificial people I have ever met.

We lost touch over the past year and met up again yesterday. We went window Christmas shopping in Union Square and ate vegetables at Angelica Kitchen and got pedicures at some place on First Avenue while we read People magazines out loud and said things like, "What is the deal with Tom Cruise? If he's not crazy, there is no excuse."

The best part was walking east away from the park. Camille's dreadlocks were on top of her head like a princess and she wore a tiny sparkly headband that looked like a tiara. She hooked her hand through the crook of my elbow and we walked like that together, navigating around street grates and piles of icy snow, and I thought, "We have known each other for years, now we are like old friends. I didn't even know how I had missed her until I saw her again."

Please step away from your computer and go watch Brokeback Mountain

2005-12-11T17:39:00.000-05:00

Towards the end of the Annie Proulx short story on which the movie Brokeback Mountain is based, there is this line:

What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger.

This movie opened something in me, some tiny voice that I'd shut off and stifled and stopped listening to. I saw it by myself on Friday afternoon, walked out of the theatre wiping tears onto the back of my hand, and the sky had turned black while I was inside. It gets so dark so early now and I had taken not ten steps when the phone rang and it was Robert, calling from Brazil, to say hello (and also, truthfully, calling because I'd given him a hard time about our pathetic dribblings of every other day "Hi, baby, how are you? Miss you, love you, see ya!" bullshite exchanges. "If we don't have two minutes a day to singularly devote to each other," I wrote in an email, "then I have been remiss about communicating to you what I need. Nothing is an important to me as hearing your voice and knowing that you're okay and that you wanted to call and hear my voice.") I thought about him so much watching this movie. And it was him I was thinking about but mostly, of course, it was my own feelings.

I remembered times when I have felt so overwhelmed by passion and attraction and animal hunger for lovers. I remembered having those feelings for Robert, the truth is that I still do. I am in love with my best friend and when I let myself really consider how I feel for him -- how much I feel for him -- I'm always surprised. Most days, you know, we check in, we check out, I do my own thing four flights up in Alphabet City, he does his own thing in some other part of the world and we talk a whole hell of a lot about the plans we have to be together. We're going to live here and here and here or there if not here and let's have a vacation hut in Brazil, let's make plans for what to do next Christmas, are you free the first weekend in May?

I sat in this full theatre and watched Brokeback Mountain tell me a story about a love that is true and aggressive and gentle and so beautiful choke on its own fear. It's different, I know it is, but on some level it's also a story about two people who spend their relationship compartmentalizing their time and living their own lives separate from each other.

So I got out of there after the closing credits and Robert called and he told me about his day and the swim he'd just had and won't it be great to see each other in a week? And, forgive me my impatience, I said, "Are we ever going to wake up together every day without feeling like we're on borrowed time?"
"Yes, Sarah."
"Most days, Robert, most of the time, I don't even let myself think about you in any real way. It's easier to put talking to you on a checklist than it is to let myself really miss you and wonder why we're not together. This movie, you see these guys fall in love and twenty years later, they're still in love but now they're old and all they have keeping them "in love" is what happened twenty years earlier."
And then my phone battery died.

I got home and Robert called again. He asked me what I was going to do for dinner, I asked him how is father is, I said I miss you, he said I miss you, I said Promise me that you will see this movie. I said Let me read you this line from the short story. It goes like this.

"Jonn, NO! Do not take my picture!"

2005-12-09T09:16:00.000-05:00

This is what I love most about winter: the feeling of waking up in early morning darkness and looking out the window to see snow falling onto snow. This is what I love most about Christmastime: having enough time off from real life to focus on your real life. Everyone in wool socks, my father preoccupied with building the perfect fire, my mom already suggesting board games, my sister at the piano plucking out the notes of some carol that my mother tries to sing along with from the next room, then stops singing to say, "It is so nice to have you both home." She pours a splash of rum into my eggnog, and hers, and runs around in her bathrobe until eleven because the whole days is stretched out wide open in front of us. My sister and I have watched the same movies for a decade -- Sixteen Candles, the BBC Pride and Prejudice, Uncle Buck, Beetlejuice, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. I love that my mother, to this day, sits with a notebook in her lap while we open presents on Christmas morning, jotting down what my sister and I have received so that we will remember everything when we write thank-you notes. I love the Christmas Eve service at the Unitarian Church in Nashville, everyone holding their tiny white candle while we sing Silent Night. I love that my father, every Christmas morning, trying to take pictures of us opening presents while my mother says, "John, no! Do not take my picture like this." And he always takes pictures anyway and then wanders around, playing with the stereo, making coffee for my mother and leaving the sugar out on the counter next to his banana peel.

Last Christmas marked the first time that I was not there; this will be the second. Robert and I were by ourselves last year, in Thailand. We went to the beach and drank pineapple juice out of coconut shells and went swimming in the ocean and read a three-day old English newspaper from Bangkok and he cut his leg on coral. We ate dinner by the water, with chopsticks--red coconut curry with prawns--and all day I thought, "This is so strange. We're skipping Christmas."

This year we will be in Brazil with his parents, who are wonderful although, of course, they're not my own. I didn't think it would be a big deal but I woke up this morning knowing, all of a sudden, that I am going to miss my family. My sweet sister. She told me last night that she'll come visit me in New York next summer and I said, "That is so far away!"
How is it possible, I wonder, to grow up with a sister you see every day for years and years and then to live, of your own volition, a life that allows you to see each other only once every twelve months? I need to make more time for her. (Which is funny because I know that I annoy her to no end and she thinks I am too demanding, too dramatic, too over-the-top with my emotional displays...and I always respond by being even more so.)

She will be 24 in less than a month. It's probably the last thing she wants but I am promising myself that next year I am going to be there with her on Christmas morning, beside the tree, smiling for my father's camera in our mismatched flannel pajamas.

It's always darkest just before it's pitch black

2005-12-07T08:48:00.000-05:00

Okay, okay, I haven't posted anything in 13 days but, in my defense (as if anyone out there has been breathlessly awaiting further Mitten diaries) in the past two weeks I have done the following:

1. returned from London replete with a cold, a UTI and...(this pains me to admit) dandruff! I could care less about the first two but the last one I have to explain. I think it's the water in the UK, or my shampoo. In any event, Robert and I were in bed together the morning I left, naked and kissing, when Robert pointed to my scalp and said, "Flake." It was, as I'm sure you can imagine, not the most romantic moment of my life. In retrospect, I think we're both lucky I didn't hit him.

2. turned in a ten-page paper for my Lit class

3. submitted work to five literary publications (woo hoo!)

4. woken up between four-thirty and six every morning for a week (perhaps this has less to due with my skyrocketing anxiety levels than it does, as Robert pointed out this morning, with the fact that I've been asleep before nine almost every night).

5. two days ago, I took a pregnancy test in the locker room of my gym. This was a highlight although any joy invoked by the negative result will be nothing compared to the way I'll feel when I get (please, please let me get) my period, now two weeks late. I took the test at the gym, by the way, first because I didn't want to be alone when I did it but mostly because I knew that if it was positive, it would be a long time before I felt motivated to work out. And Robert, when I told him that it was negative yesterday, said, "How do you feel about that?" To which I replied, "Um, relieved. How do you feel about that?"
He said, "Oh, you know, I'm relaxed about it."
And it's true. Robert might as well just relaaax himself right down the aisle.

6. Lastly, I've devoted myself to writing a 20-page paper on Simone de Beauvoir's memoir about her mother's cancer, A Very Easy Death; Carolyn Kay Steedman's sociological look at her upbringing, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives; and Vivian Gornick's embittered account of her mother, entitled Fierce Attachments.

At four-forty-five this morning, I woke up with my head at the food of my bed and the title of the paper came to me:

No One Here Gets Out Alive:
What Three Memoirs Reveal About the Tangled Relationship of Mothers & Daughters

and when, on the phone just now, I shared it with my parents, my mother went on to say that she "has always known that it will be up to Meg (my sister) to take care of her because I would leave her lying in a ditch."

Sarah: Excuse me? In a ditch?
Mum: Oh, yeah. You'd never want to take care of me. I didn't want to take care of my own mother when she was dying. But, I mean, who would?
Sarah: Well, apparently, Meg. This is a very disturbing exhange.
Mum: Get over it.
Sarah: Can I talk to Dad again?
(huffing noises)
Dad: Yo! Number One!
Sarah: Dad, did you just hear Mom say that I would leave her to die in a ditch?
Dad: I don't think she said 'to die'
Sarah: Dad. Whatever. How am I supposed to respond to that?
Dad: "I wouldn't leave you lying in a ditch for too long." or "I would call for help as soon as it was convenient."
(he laughs. I can hear my mom laughing in the background.)
Sarah: I can't get worked up about this right now, I have to go.
Dad: Wait!
Sarah: Yes?
Dad: I love you. Have a pretty good day!

Could I have come up with a more perfect ending than that? I leave you with it:
Have a pretty good day.

Making pie and giving thanks

2005-11-24T12:25:00.000-05:00

Last weekend, Robert put his head in his hands and said, "Mum always used to make a pumpkin pie!"
I rolled my eyes. And if I didn't actually roll my eyes, I'm sure I wanted to.
"Well," I said, "should we get your recipe and make a pie on Thanksgiving?"
His whole face lit up. "Oh, would you?" he said. "We'll invite my sister and do a whole Thanksgiving dinner." He dug his mobile phone out of his pocket and called Anne Louise. "Come over on Thursday evening for a home-cooked meal, Sarah's making a pumpkin pie. And I'm doing the main course."
When he hung up, I raised an eyebrow. "What 'main course' are you planning to make?"
I would love to write that Robert blushed but, alas, he looked right at me as he said, "I'll pick up a couple of lobsters."
"On your way home from work?"
He nodded.
"Robert," I said, "There's a difference between putting forth effort and throwing money at a problem..."
And we laughed.

This morning, we went downstairs to the fish shop and bought one and a half kilos of mussels, to be cooked in a cup of white wine and olive oil with shallots and no salt and then sprinkled with fresh parsley, and three fish cakes. After Rob went to work, I went to the cheese shop and bought pecorino and fresh bread to sop up with the mussels. Robert's mum emailed us her Prize Pumpkin Pie recipe and Robert dashed in and out of the apartment between meetings to help me make the crust. I toasted pecans to sprinkle on top of the crust and bought whipped cream to mix with a tablespoon of maple syrup before serving.

Nothing in the dinner belongs with anything else (pumpkin pie and fish cakes?) so I'm also making a roasted butternut squash salad with rocket, proscuitto, and pecorino. The grocery store was filled with more American women than I've ever before seen in London, all of us pushing carts around and bemoaning the dearth of ready-made crusts.

We don't have any napkins but it feels cozy here for the first time that I can remember. I had been so afraid that this apartment would break me open somehow, after last month's visit. In Paris, I looked at Robert and said, "If someone asked you if you'd ever been engaged, would you even say yes?" And he said, "I just want that whole thing to disappear."

Just now, up to his elbows in dough in the kitchen, I touched the hair above the nape of his neck and said, "I love you." He looked at me, he said, "I love you so much." I am grateful to be here today. I am grateful for the warmth and loyalty and graciousness of my friends and family. For my father's enthusiasm, Suzie's sense of humor, Phoebe's ringing laughter, Julianne's unwavering faith, my sister's gentleness. I am grateful for my friend Sarah in North Carolina, my friend Liz in Atlanta, Rebecca in Chicago -- and the way, with these women, we talk honestly about the sorts of things I could never talk about with anyone else. What it's like to be lonely in a crowd, what we're eating for dinner, who we love, what we're reading, what things were like when we were in high school and college and how we are now. God, Robert doesn't have the patience for those conversations and I love him for that. At heart, he is a giant goofball, my personal space-heater, a man who wants the best for me.

I want to remember the way it feels right now, to have everything I need, to give thanks for our pie crust that looks scrappy from the outside but tastes so good.

inevitability and invention

2005-11-23T13:23:00.000-05:00

I was supposed to fly home to New York this morning and instead I ended up on the Eurostar train from Paris to London. It wasn't an accident. Technically, I don't have to go home until next week because it's Thanksgiving break and I don't have class for another week. Robert had to come back to London for work and a few days ago he asked if I would come with him and I kept vacillating, uncommitted, until last night when I could suddenly see myself, so clearly, unlocking the door of the New York apartment and setting down my suitcase, taking off my boots, watering the plants, drinking a glass of water and wondering what in the hell I was doing back when I could have stayed with him. Also, you know, I have two massive papers to write for my lit class and I decided I'd get more work done if I didn't leave. Seriously. Two post-goodbye funk days spent in a fetal position on my futon wouldn't put much a of a dent in my scholarly pursuits. It makes so much more sense to lie around and make out by the fireplace in Paris.

Except, Toto, we're not in Paris anymore. The sun went down in London today before four in the afternoon and Robert is at work and I am back, four flights up, working on the outline for my first paper. An examination of the thematic pairing of memory and desire in Love in the Time of Cholera and The Lover. So far, I've come up with some key passages from each and the thought that memory enhances the experience of desire because in real time, a love affair plays out once while in memory, it unfolds over and over again, unending. Talking about this makes me feel like I'm high. So I just took a break to eke out a tiny list of groceries that I'm about to buy:

orange juice
plain yoghurt
pink lady apples
soup

I'm on my own tonight because Rob has a business dinner. Yesterday we went to the market on rue Montorguiell and cooked dinner at home. Roasted onions and carrots. Sauteed scallops and mesclun and tomatoes. Salmon with sage from the garden and honey. Champagne and red wine and glasses of water. Brebis blue cheese with slices of ripe pear. Robert looked at me from across the dining room table and said, "Isn't this a beautiful life we have?" --

I know, writing it now, and even in that moment, that it sounds like sort of thing that people shouldn't say. But it was true. It was especially true because the last few days alone together there were so precious and rare. There was no one we had to see, no place to which we had to report, no alarm clock, no constraints other than Robert's work and my reading. In my head I keep trying to turn my "have-to's" into "get-to's", as in turning the obligation of my paper-writing into a privilege. The grade is a non-issue, the contents of the papers will be seen by only my professor and whomever else has the interest in reading them. I have struggled somewhat with this class, feeling that I am not intellectual enough to offer opinions on Proust, et al. The truth is that I am proud and relieved to have taken this course because speaking about books, about great books, is something I want to feel comfortable doing. The only thing that has stopped me are my opinion of myself and also the heretofore lack of discipline in reading them. Ha! Three weeks from today (and thirty pages of literary analysis later), I'll be sliding right back into bed with some fat chick lit.

Oooh! All the Christmas lights outside are sparkling! And I HAVE to come up with three pages of paper in the next hour and a half. I must, I must, I must increase my...shopping list?

breaking hearts with gin, etc.

2005-11-22T05:00:00.000-05:00

My feet are freezing and unsocked, I'm wrapped up in one of Robert's bathrobes and we just drank hot chocolate and ate fresh croissants and I fell asleep last night crying on my side of the bed. When I think about saying goodbye to him, I am a wreck. I woke up drooling from some heavy dream about desecrated buildings and abandoned houses and he came in wearing a blue turtleneck sweater, crawled under the covers and tried to start some lovemaking and all I could think was Go away, I have to wipe the sleep out of my eyes, I have to take a shower, I have to get dressed, I have to start pounding my too many clothes back into my too-small suitcase. Ugh.

Yesterday I was reading an email from Julianne in California about a fallout with a friend of hers and we hadn't spoken since August so when Robert and I were sitting by the fire upstairs and he left to do some work, I reached for the phone and called her. And, of course, twenty minutes later she was telling me that she doesn't know why I'm still bothering with Robert, that he's not good enough, that all it does is hurt me. I thought, "No, no, you don't understand, I am happy with him." And I could HEAR her shaking her head no, sigh, saying, "There's such a correlation between unhealthy family dynamics and that fact that you've run back to him. How are you getting your schoolwork done with all this traveling? I'll pray for you."

I felt so lonely and shaken up at the end of our conversation that I could barely remember what it felt like to love our friendship, to look forward to our talks. The strangest part was that she had said, speaking about her own friend, that the two things she cannot tolerate from a friend are for her feelings to be invalidated (because they're seen as an overreaction) and to be abandoned.

Over Indian take-out of lamb and prawns and something called legumes maharana korma (with pistachios and creme fraiche), I told Robert about Julianne and how we had been "best friends" throughout middle school and high school and college. And how she became a born-again Christian, how she's never had a boyfriend, how reaching out to her feels like waking up and finding out that I've fallen off the bed.

escargots sounds so much better than 'snails'

2005-11-21T09:33:00.000-05:00

Over this Thanksgiving break, I wanted to meet Robert in Paris instead of London for two reasons:
1. Paris, in my mind, is an infinitely more beautiful city.
2. Getting through immigration at Heathrow makes me stutter and I am increasingly both terrified of and convinced that one of these trips I will be pulled into a side room and interrogated even more harshly than I yet have been. A 25-year-old full-time student/yoga teacher doesn't look like she has much business traveling to London every month unless it's a guise for actually operating as a mule. It's actually one of the first things that comes to mind when I think about marrying Robert -- after throwing mental confetti around in celebration of love and committment and togetherness, I feel relieved enough to sigh, thinking about passing right by Passport Control without heart palpatations. Those people are paid to instill the fear of God and when they've hammered you down into tiny pieces, they always say, "Have a good day, love." Like they hadn't just spent twenty minutes asking me how many credit cards I have, how much money I have access to, what my boyfriend does, what I do, how we met, how long we've been together, are we engaged, am I pregnant, where is he from, can they see my return ticket, and what sort of work do I plan on doing after I graduate.

That last one raises an interesting point, actually, given that very soon I should be in the process of applying for the same jobs to which I applied four years ago. I wonder, sometimes, if any other "creative types" are also tempted to turn the 'F' into a 'B', transforming an MFA into an asset instead of a drawback.

Paris is still beautiful. I hadn't known what to expect find, having read about the rioting in the suburbs and the burning cars and enraged minorities, but all of that seems to have ended. We spent the weekend walking around through the Marais and the Palais Royal, running around the Tuilleries, and eating melted Monte D'Or cheese by the fire. The year's Beaujolais Nouveau came out on Thursday and twice we've stepped into dark restaurants with big windows to drink glasses and eat snails with pesto and garlic. Yesterday, at the inadvertant suggestion of a woman whose blog I read every day, we went to the Musee Rodin and strolled through the garden and sculptures, stopping to turn our faces up toward the sun before we went inside. Then we took a taxi to Sacre Coeur, which Robert had never been to, ever, and we looked out over the city, using the binoculars to find his apartment by the Opera and then we went inside the church, where a service was going on.

At Le Fumoir, we shared a plate of brebis cheese with apricot preserves and drank wine and I was overwhelmed with remembering the first time we'd been there, more than two years ago, during a summer rainstorm, when we were first falling in love and getting to know each other at the same time.

I've spent all day reading Garcia Marquez and finishing Duras' The Lover while Robert has been working. Outside, the sky is overcast and heavy. I know it will be freezing but I'm wearing a short skirt and my vintage high-heeled Ferragamo boots and we will along the river and pretend that this isn't going to end in 36 hours. Robert is upstairs in his coat, calling, "Let's go. Come on! Sarah!"

Nothing personal

2005-11-17T16:05:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was my turn to be "workshopped" in class and I turned in a 10-page piece about my relationship with my high school boyfriend, Thom, and, later, my friendship with his college roommate, Andrew. Writing it brought up all this emotion in me -- protective feelings about myself at that age, maternal feelings for Thom and Andrew and (considering that both of them were using herion on a regular basis) a lot of worry and fear. I ended the piece by writing about running into Andrew a couple of years ago and then imagining an encounter with my own future child.

The piece has problems, I know, namely because the beginning and ending don't fit. It was my hope that the workshop would offer a chance for some constructive criticism and encouragement and that I would walk away with a better sense of what needs work.

Instead, it was all I could do not to cry while a couple of people were talking. I know, I know, I shouldn't care, I should pick and choose, I should block it out. But. These are some of the written comments I received:

1. "You have alot (sic) of good dialogue and descriptions here. However, I can't physically see them. I am also confused as to why you care about them or why they are important to you. There are other parts where I don't understand your motivations" -- Jason

2. "Try to avoid being too porno-y (no OFFENSE at all -- just thought you might think about it...the resemblance of this description to a bad romance novel...?)...It's over the top and kind of abrupt, you need to explain it better...He doesn't sound that bad, if that's what you're going for with this description. I SMOKE CAMEL LIGHTS TOO. This is so superficial. Your personality is random. Your judgmental tone is jarring, your voice is a bit harsh and unsympathetic (I have the same problem with being blunt, but--) and it's all cliche sounding. And that title -- HUH? Thanks" -- Juliet

My teacher wrote "Full of good writing and some of the best lines of descriptions I've yet seen from you. As usual, by not paraphrasing you're losing opportunities for development, characterization, observaiton..."

I want to reiterate that I was not looking for everyone to love it. Maybe I'm crazy but I found some of the comments people made to be completely unconstructive. It's my goal to leave a workshop wanting to do more work on the piece, feeling interested and enthused...and yesterday, I walked out of class and started crying. I felt like it was a huge mistake to share something about which I have such raw feelings; it makes me vulnerable and I couldn't help but that what they said personally. A mistake, I know I should know that by now. It's not personal.

here are my cards

2005-11-15T07:53:00.000-05:00

I have to tell you what happened on Friday night. I've been putting it off for three days and now, it's not even eight in the morning and I'm sitting at my kitchen table with a mug of coffee and a clean face and I can't think of a single excuse not to write this. Except, of course, that it's hard.

Shannon and I met the fall of our sophomore year at NYU, in a poetry class held in the basement of the business school. Sometime in that November of 1999, I ran into her at Starbucks buying hot chocolate and I had to hold onto the counter because I felt so nervous. And when she noticed me, my face almost touching the register, she said hi and smiled -- and I blurted, "You make me want to be a lesbian." She laughed, I laughed, and then she left and I went back to drinking chai tea with my friend Alex, and pretended to give him my full attention.

On the last day of class, she and I were the last ones left in the classroom and we walked outside together to find that it was snowing. We stood on the corner of Broadway and Bleecker and she said, "I've been staring at your legs all semester."
I put my hands on both of her cheeks and leaned in to kiss her. And we stood there like that for a minute, kissing in the snow, until she told me she had to go to her Economics exam but did I want to come over later?

I filled a pizza box with flowers and left it for her doorman to give her.
We spent every night for the next week together, waking up before dawn in the light of her fish tanks and the gray winter sky to make out and kiss and kiss and kiss until both of us had chapped lips. I was supposed to study abroad in Florence in the spring and after I went home to Tennessee for Christmas, I came back to New York a few days before my flight left for Italy and stayed with her. We did not have sex. I had never slept with a woman before and I felt clumsy in the face of her confidence and handcuffs and lubricant and sexiness.
I stuck to the things I knew I did best--I pranced around in my underwear and played with her hair and scratched her back and gave massages and I listened to her and I watched--and by the time I left for Florence, I was convinced that this was love.

In Italy, I walked along the Arno and stopped to scribble poems about her. I went to Budapest by myself and went to bed (or, um, went to couch) with a man who I thought might help me get over her. I dated an American guy from NYU and I remember his arms around my waist at a Ben Harper concert, where I wore my new red patent leather boots, and walking home with him in the rain and thinking about Shannon. I called her on her birthday in April, and before that, when she was in the hospital by herself. I wrote her love emails and she wrote me flirtatious ones. By the time I came back to New York, she was packing to move to Brookyn and when I called and left messages, she never called me back.

Months later, when we started hanging out, she told me that I'd gotten too heavy for her, that I came at her with "all of this intense...emotion." She had a new girlfriend, Amy, and then she had other girlfriends, whole strings of them, and she wrote a poem likening them to fresh cartons of milk. Once in a while, we kissed, and she would smile, and that would be the end of it.

Until the spring of 2003, when, one night, we went from sitting in our lawnchairs in her backyard in Williamsburg, to our knees, kissing in the grass. And then we moved inside to her futon and we took off each other's shirts and jeans and underwear and had sex. We woke up the next morning curled like two spoons and I turned around to face her and she crawled on top of me and we did it again. And it went on like that for months, more than lovers but not quite girlfriends.

It went on for months and we would have conversations in which I said, "I want only to be with you. I love you," and she said, "I love you, too, but..." She introduced me to her friends as "Straight girl" and I felt, all the time, like I had something to prove. And finally, six months later, after I'd met Robert and she and I had started fighting more and more, we just let it go.

You know, it's crazy how you can be in love with someone and still harbor this tiny hole for someone else, some little trapdoor that you think your partner won't see. I have thought about Shannon for the last two years, knowing (knowing!) that it would never work out with us and still missing what it was to kiss her on the sidewalk in the snow and all our months of laughing our asses off and counting change to buy gasoline and spreading our poems out across her kitchen floor. I have fallen in love with Robert and committed to him and never been as happy with someone and never been treated as well--and still, sometimes, have thought, "What would it be like if Shannon and I were together? How do I know I'm not in love with her anymore?"

I have told her about Robert but I haven't told her the whole truth. Which is to say that she knows I have a boyfriend but she didn't know until Friday that it's not a bad thing. I've always played it down when talking to her, changed the subject quickly, and brushed off her questions. On Friday, I drove up to Connecticut to see her alone for the first time since February and I looked at her and said, "I'm going to marry him."

She thought I was joking. I shook my head. "It's true."
I said, "Sometimes I think about you...It's hard to be in your company right now without touching you."
She said, "I'm just as confused as you are about us. It's something that doesn't go away."

But mostly, she told me about her art--her sculptures and paintings and shows--and I listened and nodded and she said, "You're not listening."
We hugged before I left and she said, "Do we have more to talk about?" and I said, "I don't think so."
She said, "How can you be serious about this guy? You've always told me he wasn't the one for you."
I said, "That's because I've never told you the truth about it."

And I left.

"Who stole my jalapa?"

2005-11-13T16:21:00.000-05:00

The other day, on this blog, when I was writing about reading Edward Albee in the cafeteria of my freshman dorm, it reminded me of a conversation I had with my then-roommate's boyfriend, Brian. I was eighteen, he was a few years older, and he told me, with no provocation, that he "could really see me hitting my physical peak around twenty-three, twenty-four."
At the time, I thought, "Yeah, okay, that's years away."
And I think about it now, at 25, and I'm like, "Oh lord, what if I've already...peaked?"
It's never more clear to me than in those self-obsessed moments that I need to be doing volunteer work. After all of last month's fallout with Robert, I called him and said, "We need to get out of our own heads. Let's go to Mexico and help build a well."
He said, "That sounds great." And then he paused. "Is this a trick?"
"What?" I asked.
"I mean," he said, "are you planning to go, too? Because I can just imagine showing up someplace in the desert and being told that you couldn't make it, you're on vacation with your new boyfriend, but here's a shovel, start digging."

He called me this afternoon in a panic to find, of all things, a silk man's dress from Morocco that we bought for him last summer (knowing, even as he tried it on, that there's nowhere in London he would ever wear it).
"Hi, baby," I said when I anwered the phone.
"Where is my jalapa?" he said. "I can't find it."
"I don't know," I told him. "Are you having a fashion show?"
"I've looked everywhere," he said. "I just want to know where it is."
"I'm sure Maria (his blessed and most patient housecleaner) knows where it is; I don't think you're going to find it unless you work cooperatively with her...Although I don't think it would be helpful to leave a note saying, 'Maria, where is my jalapa?'"
Rustling noises. "I found it!"
"So," I said, "how was your weekend?"
"I've been working."
"You work all the time," I said. "Are you sure it's a good idea to leave town for Thanksgiving?"
"I don't know," he said. "I don't know."
"You either need a catheter and feeding tube at your desk, or a vacation," I joked.
And he was not amused. "It's not helpful of you to remind me that I work so much."
I told him he was being overly sensitive.
We got off the phone with a "See you."

Honestly, I want to say I don't know what Robert got so irritated about but the truth is that I do know: He fears that that while he works so much, life is passing him by. I have the same sort of fear for totally different reasons -- I worry that while I dick around eating apples and reading paperback mysteries and writing a blog about it, life might pass me by.

Twenty-three, somehow, it just didn't feel like the peak.

No hablo ingles

2005-11-11T08:15:00.000-05:00

On Saturday, Robert and I were walking through Central Park, just north of the zoo, discussing the merits of living uptown when we saw a tiny boy grab his mother's pantleg and scream, "I hate black people!" He looked three years old. His mother leaned over and said, "Shhh! You can't just SAY that." He screamed: "I ONLY LIKE WHITE PEOPLE!"

Robert and I stood still for a minute, agape, until I said, "So much for raising a family on the Upper East Side."

Two days later, I was pacing the sidewalk in front of Angelica's Kitchen, telling the story to my friend Liz in Atlanta. "Do you believe that?" I asked her.
"Um, Sarah, of course I do," she said. "That's no different than Nashville."
"Really?" I said. "I don't think, in my whole life, I'd ever seen a bigot wearing diapers. And he didn't just come up with that himself, which is the worst part. He's learned from some adult that it's normal to feel that way."
"Right, right," Liz said, "he just hadn't learned that it's not quite as cool to feel that way in public."

Five minutes later, we got off the phone and I was heading inside for soup and steamed vegetables when I realized that if I didn't call Robert back before six my time, he'd be asleep.
"Hi," I said when he answered. "How are you?"
Just then, three African American boys (they looked like they were eleven or twelve years old) walked past and the one closest to me, eating a huge bag of Cheet-Os, said, "Yo, girl, you got a fat ass."
I turned around and looked at him and he looked right back and popped a Cheet-O in his mouth as he kept walking. "Did you hear that?" I said to Robert and then told him what happened.
"That's hilarious," he said.
But I don't think it was so funny. Unless, of course, it was p-h-a-t, in which case it's less offensive but somehow, no less dubious. Sometimes, very rarely, I wish I didn't speak English.

"Yeah, I'm totally heartbroken. What's your name again?"

2005-11-10T17:56:00.000-05:00

The other night, I ran into a girl whose name I couldn't remember -- we took a creative writing class together at NYU five years ago -- and we'd seen each other at Barnes & Noble in September of this year. I barely remember our conversation then, other than letting her know that our professor, Barbara Bejoian, passed away and we talked about what a wonderful teacher she had been. And then this woman (what is her name?) told me that she practices Reiki and I told her that I am a yoga teacher.

But there must have been more to it than that because when we walked past each other this week, we waved and said hello (we were both with other people) and she called out, "Did you get all your boy troubles sorted out?"

I stood there on the corner and blushed, embarrassed to have disclosed some personal and problematic detail of my relationship with Robert to a woman whose name escapes me, as do the contents of whatever I said. Robert is the most private person I have ever met and it is something that about him that I deeply respect and value.

I never have difficulties keeping other people's secrets but, until that moment, I had no qualms about spilling everything I feel and have experienced in private, to outsiders. Now I wonder if baring my own intimacies so freely doesn't somehow cheapen them.

I just painted my toes a color called Clean Machine and I'm off to teach a yoga lesson.

reading the reading

2005-11-09T22:24:00.000-05:00

I've lived in New York since 1998 but have never stopped being amazed by what you can see through windows. It reminds me of having a dollhouse, split open so you see Father in the living room with the bookshelf wallpaper and Mother in the bath and Sister and Brother playing hide and seek (he's on top of the refrigerator). Right now, I am watching the woman directly across the courtyard pour two glasses of red wine and pull up her bra strap and then she disappears from view. Two floors down, there's a black cat standing above the air conditioning unit, standing so still that if I hadn't already seen his ears twitch I'd wonder if he'd been taxidermied.

Last night Suzie invited me to join her at Cooper Union’s Great Hall for the PEN American Center’s second State of Emergency reading, in support of their efforts to end torture and arbitrary detention. Readers included Salman Rushdie, Paul Auster, Dave Eggers, Heidi Julavits, Walter Mosley, Rick Moody, Edward Albee, Don DeLillo, Philip Gourevitch, Sandra Cisneros. Each of them took the stage long enough to read a poem or excerpt from a story or essay about torture and I spent most of that time with one hand on my forehead, eyes closed, trying to block out the descriptions of pain. What I will remember about last night, above all the details of excrutiating loss, is what they looked like, these writers, and not what their voices said but what they sounded like and the way they walked across the stage.

I have read books by all of them and it is impossible to remember them without also remembering myself at those times, my own life --

The House on Mango Street was on my ninth grade summer reading list and we went on a family trip somewhere and I was sprawled out in the back of our old green minivan, marveling at what a good choice it was because the chapters were so short.

In the winter of 2002, I lived alone on 15th Street and 7th Avenue, in a fifth-floor walk-up, and I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius leaning back against my wooden headboard, my feet balanced on the radiator, and I kept putting the book down to call Lauren in D.C. and say, "Listen to this part..." while I darted into the cold kitchen for halved walnuts.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was assigned in a playwriting class my freshman year of college, when I lived in a dorm on University Place, and I took it with me to the cafeteria in the basement and ate yogurt with granola and honey and thought as I read it, This is the sort of homework I've been waiting my whole life for.

And it was in my childhood bedroom in Nashville that I read The Ice Storm and Purple America and Garden State, and where I flipped to the book jacket photograph of Rick Moody and wondered what it would be like if we met and was he too old for me and what if he was already in love with someone else?

Last night, Rick Moody wore black Converse sneakers and a tiny porkpie hat and he slumped over the podium while he read part of a story about Americans in Italy, being served a girl on a plate for dinner. "It is a siren," their host says. "This fish is a great delicacy."
"But it's not a fish!" the American woman squawks.
After much protracted argument, the Italians agree to bury the "siren" in the garden.
It was a relief for him to break the seriousness of multiple readings about smashed kneecaps and dislocated shoulders with some humor. He was a good reader, he didn't stumble and he used different voices for the characters, the way my father used to do when he read aloud to me and my sister before we went to sleep.

Dave Eggers drank a Diet Coke.
Walter Mosley wore reading glasses with plastic purple frames.
The actress Lili Taylor sat three rows ahead of us and everytime I saw her, I thought about Say Anything -- the scene where John Cusack is standing in the dark with a boombox held above his head, and Ione Skye is alone in her bedroom, between the sheets, knowing that Peter Gabriel's words are being played only so that she will hear them.

I'm not famous but I'll scratch your back

2005-11-08T07:21:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I found myself sitting on a bench in Union Square, on the receiving end of a monologue from the man next to me, an autograph collector. When I sat down, I heard him say, "Gorgeous, gorgeous," and I looked up for a just a second, wearing my most beguiling "who, moi?" smile -- and saw that his attention was directed at a large poodle. Apparently named Louie. Five minutes later, he said, "I see you're readin' a book. What are you, from England?" And I assumed he wasn't talking to the poodle anymore so I looked up, this time with my serious I-am-a-fulltime-graduate-student expression (for those of you who don't know, this is the same thing as looking very tired and poor and frightened of getting hit by loan collectors).

"No," I said. "I'm not from England."
"You talk like you gotta accent. You from England?"
"No," I said again.
"You an actress?" he said.
I shook my head and looked back at Love in the Time of Cholera.
"Hey!" he shouted. I looked up at him again. "If you were somebody," he rolled up his Post and smacked the armrest in between us. "If you were somebody, I would definitely get your autograph."

I can't think of any instance in which it would be a cool thing to even admit this but I was asleep before nine o'clock last night. At 8:36, I put down the Steve Buscemi profile in the New Yorker and yawned, set my glasses down on top of the crossword puzzle I'd been doing (anyone know the state tree of South Carolina?) and turned off the light. And then, in the dark, I was gripped by a horrible nagging fear that said: You are a boring person. If Robert were still here, you wouldn't have eaten dinner yet. Did you even eat dinner today?

Then, I thought, "Yes, yes, that's true, but the point is that Robert is not here anymore, I am alone, and I can sleep in the middle of the bed in a giant X-shape with a pile of books next to me and the window open to the cold without him threatening to get sick. And I ate lunch at four o'clock, followed by three apples." And I proceeded to sleep for nine hours.

Last Saturday morning, Robert and I woke up and walked three blocks to Prune, on 1st and 1st, for the best brunch in the city (I had the Caraway Seed and Sour Cream Omelet and lamb sausage and Robert had the Dutch-style Apple Pancake and Eggs Benedict with potatoes rosti) and then we took a Mexican blanket and the NY Times in a taxi to 75th and 5th. We walked around the observatory and spread out on the grass beside Turtle Pond, where we spotted turtles and I scratched his back and he played with my hair and exhibited enough public displays of affection to make the family next to us pick up their daughter, Lucy Jane, and move away from us and, when I noticed, for me to say, "Robert! No, you cannot lie on top of me." He read aloud to me from the Financial Times, an article about tribes in Iraq, while I nosed the grass looking for four-leaf clovers. On our way through the Ramble a few hours later, I saw Robert holding something in his hand and he squatted down to foraging level.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
He opened his hand and showed me two uncapped acorns. "Shhh," he whispered, "I'm going to give them to that little guy." Ten feet away stood a squirrel on his hindlegs. Just as Robert was about to toss him the acorn, a gay couple appeared beside us and one of them hooted, "Ooooh, dios mio. It's a New York City rat! Teeheehee!" The squirrel scampered away.

Yesterday morning, as I was making the bed, I noticed something on the shelf above the dresser and when I stepped closer I saw them: two acorns. Robert must have kept them in his pocket all day and thinking about him, crouched on the ground under an oak tree, it made me miss him so much I had to get out of the apartment. On my way up Second Avenue, I thought, "What I love most about Robert are the aspects of him that are like a little boy."

I've had that thought before, and had even told him so, crossing Marylebone High Street last month two days after he proposed and then changed his mind. We were holding hands, had just come from a dinner of steak and Rioja, and I told him that and then I said, "You're my baby." He shrugged and shook his head. "No," he said. "I don't deserve any kind words."

Maybe that's true, I remember thinking, probably not. There was no ring on my finger anymore and its absence stung but he pulled me forward out of the path of an oncoming car and suddenly I stopped asking myself How could he do this to me? and that thought was replaced with this one: I still love him.

It was as simple as that. We opened the door, walked up four flights, and were home. I started to pack.

I love anal sex

2005-11-07T07:14:00.000-05:00

My mother has found my blog. I think it was only a matter of time, really, given that I hadn't called her back in two days and had just received an email from her saying that, in case I'm ever in a coma or other "emergency situation that prevents me from returning her calls" she wanted to have my friends' phone numbers. Is it me or does that sound like an obvious ploy for sympathy, from my friends, not for my "coma" but for my neglect?

The options now are either to change names and start anew, or to attempt to frighten her away with titles like the above. Or, I suppose, I could just keep doing what I've been doing and block out the fact that she might read it.

It's my own fault, really, since I left a comment on my sister's website and all my mom did was follow the (impossibly easy) trail by clicking on her mouse. Last night I called home, though not, as you might expect, in a fit of anger. Honestly, I did my best impression of a cool cucumber, with legs, talking to her boundary-unfriendly mother.
Me: Mom, I just need a forum where I can express myself, uncensored.
Mom: But it's a public forum! I am the public!
Me: Yeees, but I'd prefer to be able to write without being preoccupied by what people with think.
Mom: I'm the adoring public.
Me: Mom.
Mom: Fine. Fine!

I'm reading Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera and it is fabulous, I cannot recommend it highly enough. The truth is that I'd put off reading it (for my literature class) because I expected it to be beautiful in the same way that Proust is important, i.e., masterfully written but impossible to read in a crowded coffee house and remember anything later. So in the meantime, I spent last Friday with The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters, by Elisabeth Robinson, like a meatier Bridget Jones (meatier as in more soul and substance, not more poundage) and, for a day of escape, I highly approve. In fact, if you live in New York and you're reading this, I'll give it to you. (Loved it, you know, but with limited bookshelf space, I'd rather live the illusion with a row of Prousts.)

In the the shower just now, I was thinking about all the things I need to do that would make me feel caught-up with people (as opposed to a left-behind procrastinator). There are friends I haven't called back in months, haven't seen since last spring, and I think I do this in part because I'm so used to feeling guilty that it offers more of a reason. What would it feel like to be fully in the present without a train of Post-its stuck to my inside head, reminding me (again!) to do things I wanted to do in September? To erase the feeling I fall asleep with at night, the voice that says, "Oh lord, you have to do this stuff this week." When I think of returning to a full-time office job, I wonder if that implies that things will fall by the wayside. I remember so well the feeling of never having any time for myself; and now, I've grown used to the feeling of barely having time for anyone else.

Except when random sexual encounters are on the table. I looove anal sex with strangers!

I miss that old dog

2005-11-04T08:11:00.000-05:00

This is my favorite time of day -- freshly showered and the sleep is out of my eyes, I can barely remember the dream I just had about being a robber, and I'm sitting on the (vacuumed) living room floor with a cup of Cocoa Spice tea. Today's high is 70 degrees, tomorrow should be even warmer, and I'm already starting to harbor fantasies about crawling Central Park with a picnic blanket and a basket of cheese and raspberries.

Robert and I had talked about going out of town for the weekend. Last fall, we drove out of the city on a Friday afternoon and four hours later ended up in a little town called Fleishmann, staying at a ramshackle house that turned out to be a "pet-friendly" bed and breakfast. We were the only people without a barking dog and a man down the hall walked in on us in bed but what I remember best of the weekend is the hike we took through the woods. Rob had chosen it from a book of possible "family hikes" nearby and he picked this one for its level of difficulty (the highest) and its length (8 miles) although, he swears, he did not choose it for its name: the Oscar the Grouch Hike.

I have this image of him running up through the rocks in his bluejeans while I stood by the rivulets of fresh stream water and checked my pulse and decided, right there, that it was time to take up an aerobic endeavor. We got lost three hours in but it was a beautiful day. Found again, we ate Mexican food at one of two restaurants in town and drank Negro Modelo straight from the bottles. When we got back to the B&B, rain was pouring down outside and we came in, up the stairs to our room, and made love before we fell asleep at eight-thirty.

He is sitting at the kitchen table as I write this, talking on the phone into a headset, and staring at his computer screen. His work is not going well at the moment (or all the week's moments) and so we will be here tomorrow and Robert will go back to London early on Sunday morning. I will have to make a point of not having good food in my refrigerator and fruit basket when he leaves because if I do, I will eat everything I have. That's what happens when he leaves. Crazy, huh? It used to be chocolate and cereal although a few months ago, in London, he left for Russia and I stood in the kitchen eating pasta sauce out of a jar thinking about my old dog, Shady, who had a similar problem with food and one time we came home and found that she'd eaten a half-pound bag of whole wheat flour. Strange how sometimes it has absolutely nothing to do with taste and everything to do with having company.

cleaning house

2005-11-03T18:26:00.000-05:00

Happy Thursday! In New York, we are at the slip-end of an Indian summer that has people spilling out of sidewalk cafes and walking around with pedicured (or, in my case, obvsiouly not pedicured) feet in flip-flops. I'm still sleeping with my bedroom window open and it is too chilly for iced tea but it's the perfect sort of weather for drinking your coffee outside on a bench in the sunshine. On Halloween three days ago, Robert and I met up with Suzie and ate oysters at Jack's Oyster Bar, tucked into a red vinyl booth in a little room with striped red and white wallpaper. When we'd finished, I looked up a few feet to the window but all I could see was the dark sky and the branches of a tree -- and it was just eerie and empty enough to make me turn back to Rob and Suzie and say, "Soon it will be Christmastime." Like it hadn't even occurred to me before.

At NYU, when Franny and I lived together on Broome Street, she always used to say, "The fall semester sucks. It just always sucks. And the spring is so much better." And then she would make a bong out of a plastic Coke bottle and we would get high and take turns listening to Method Man (hers) and the Cowboy Junkies (mine) while we talked about the two boyfriends of hers who had died and also about my Richard (who, you know, wasn't really mine at all, unless I can claim possession of the way he disappeared and never called only to show up once in a while and say, "Sarah, you're an angel. I'm not good enough for you. Let's have sex. Turn around.")

Hmmm. This is the last fall semester I will ever have and I'm spending it the way I've spent every other: I'm dicking around eating apples, reading Elle and Vanity Fair (what's up with Woody Allen admitting that his feeling towards Soon Yi are perfectly paternal??) while I practice the Chinese splits. Well, no, come to the think of it, I've never been able to do the splits before now although the feeling of procrastination is imminently familiar to me, an old friend, and she's here now, in the kitchen, reminding me of the twenty-page conference paper I need to write for my literature class, the thesis revisions that need attention, the emails I have to write right now. This is part of why I spent the last two hours on my knees cleaning my entire apartment with warm soapy water, Fantastik, Pledge, and Comet. The other reason is that this morning I came home with a cup of Macadamia Nut coffee and found Robert naked in the bathtub, looking up at me with pleading eyes and saying, "I'm just trying to feel clean." I looked right back at him and said, "You know we have a vacuum cleaner." And he just looked at me, blinking, until his phone rang and he was off the domestic hook. Moments before sitting down here to pay attention to you, I was cleaning the succulent on the radiator in the living room and thinking, "I've never actually dusted a potted plant."

Last night we went to Suzie's apartment in Park Slope with two bottles of wine and some water for her Celebrate Heartbreak dinner party. She cooked the most delicious pork with sausage and dried apricots and Phoebe brought her French bulldog, Guinness, and also some squash soup with ginger creme fraiche. And I loved being a room with three of the people I care about most. Suzie is, hands-down, the most gifted storyteller I know and after dinner, Robert was lying down on the couch next to Guinness, and Suzie was telling us about Mother's Day and we were all laughing, except for Guinness, who spent most of the night with his tongue sticking out at everyone.

love me like a cactus

2005-11-01T19:35:00.000-05:00

This morning, we woke up just before seven o'clock to the sound of the sixteen church bells that ring on Third Street and I said, "Shouldn't you go back to London already?" And Robert pulled me on top of him and said, "I'm not leaving without you. We're not going to be apart anymore." I felt overwhelmed and scared of not being alone in my own space, eating tuna out of the can with mustard and a can of Diet Coke, listening to Ani Difranco and talking on the phone with Liz in Atlanta about how she's having great sex with a man from Mississippi, walking around in my ripped-up underwear and gray T-shirt. And I also looked up at Robert and felt excited -- overjoyed -- at the prospect of waking up together every morning and coming home at night to find each other. I felt a push-pull, the way I used to feel conflicted about men holding doors open for me, like, "I am woman! I can do it myself." Then, squeaking, "Aren't you going to at least offer to open the door?"

For a long time, I lived two lives and one of them was here in New York and the other one was with my family in Nashville. And then for a couple of years, I didn't go to Tennessee very much anymore and so I split my life between New York and London. That's the funny thing about distance -- how it allows you to compartmentalize your whole life down into a little tray so that the peas don't touch the mashed potatoes don't touch the woman you've been sleeping with don't touch the man you're committed to don't touch your Christian friends don't touch your apartment, where you spend so much time thinking about all the people who don't know anything about each other.

When Robert told me he was here to stay, I felt the same way I did on Sunday morning when my mom turned around in the passenger's seat of Meg's car and said to me, "We don't see you enough and but we always want to." First I feel like, "Oh, come on, I don't deserve this." And then I think, "Maybe I should lash out and be mean so they'll go away because I know that I don't deserve it."

I've been reading Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood in which the narrator describes love as captivity. That she knows it's love when she tries to capture someone with a net and get them tangled up inside it; the wanting to possess is her proof. When I read that passage, I flinch because it's so far removed from what I see as love's definition. When we were in high school, Julianne read an article in Mademoiselle that said love was "an absolute interest." When she still talked about boys and dating, Julianne used to say that what she wanted was someone "who would seek her out across a crowded room" -- and, for a long time, that was what I wanted, too.

My parents' marriage is a partnership. They're either getting along like a house on fire or they're squabbling like two kids at Jefferson's haunted house. This weekend I noticed that they kept interrupting one another and talking over each other, my mother talking louder than my dad. And I noticed, too, how affectionate they are together, how my dad's coolness tempers my mother's heat. They are both easily pleased by the feeling that the family is connected, that we are all breathing the same air. They don't much care for presentation or neatness and their bedroom is always a wreck; but, on the other hand, they love people. My mother loves to rub our feet, my father loves to cook us breakfast and take us on walks to collect chestnuts so we can come home and roast them. When she's angry, my mother is the screamer and when he's upset, my father is the distancer.

I've used these highs with Robert to balance out the horrible lows. I use the difference between Sarah alone and Sarah-and-Rob-together to live two different lifestyles, to have two different laughs and two different bedtimes. I don't quite know how it's going to happen -- I don't have any idea -- but I see myself moving towards one life and somehow, it does feel right. It feels, actually, like this has been a long time coming.

Mother love

2005-10-31T20:58:00.000-05:00

I've been in sort of a hole lately, not returning phone calls, staying home to read at night (after reading and writing all day), and some of it has to do with the, ahem, quickie engagement but mostly, it's about me. I am embarrassed to have spent so long in such a volatile relationship because it's been exhausting for my friends and family to hear about. On and off and on and off and I decided last week that I needed, more than anything, to spend some time with my family. My flight to St. Louis was scheduled to leave LaGuardia at ten in the morning and at six-fifteen, Robert showed up at the apartment. So we went for pumpkin spice coffee at Kudo Beans and he told me that he's more certain of us than ever and that he is planning to look for a place to buy in New York and then move here. I listened to him and spilled coffee down my sweater and I said, "I'm not angry at you but I'm not ready to do that with you."
He said, "I love you. I'm sure of it."
I said, "But that wasn't enough two weeks ago...why should it be enough now?"
We hailed a taxi, I went to St. Louis and spent the weekend with my family, wondering, "Who is my real family?" Is it my parents and sister, and orbital aunts and cousins and grandparents, or is it the people I choose -- my friends and my love? Which one of those sides is more constant? With which one am I more myself?

At the St. Louis airport, I got off the plane and found that I'd gotten my period. When I called Meg and asked her bring me a tampon, she said No, she didn't have time. When I asked her if we could go out for a salad, she said Couldn't I just get myself food at the airport? By the time I saw her, I had worked myself up into a storm-cloud mood, I felt so jilted, and then, I spotted her blonde hair and it just went away. We don't have anything in common anymore, other than our childhoods (which, I know, is no small thing) and our ski-jump noses, but being with her feels like talking with a fun-house mirror version of myself. So much of it is familiar that I start to make assumptions and then, as soon as I think I know her, I realize again how wrong I am.

She teaches at an elementary school called Jefferson, surrounded by government-subsidized housing, and she and the other volunteer teachers were the only white people in the building. An Italian girl told me that people are always asking if she and Meg are sisters and when I was there, little kids ran up to me and said, "You related to Miss Meg?" Imagine this Halloween party. Imagine 400 kids in a darkened haunted house/gymnasium, screaming at each other, "I'm gonna kick your ass!" And add parents to the mix, women and men in their twenties and thirties and forties, and some of them, too, screaming, "I'm gonna kick your ass!" Now turn on the radio and a lot of strobe lights.

Meg loves it. She loves what she does, loves St. Louis, loves her apartment and roommate, her church and friends. I am happy for her in that regard (what more could you want for your sister?) but also worry for her. In some ways, I love her the way I will love my own daughter and in others, I know, she is my mother. We worry for each other. I want her to have a boyfriend, to date a man who knows himself and who will care for her and protect her and tell her she is beautiful. I worry that she has never really dated. She probably worries that I have dated too much, have now become too embroiled in this relationship with Robert. It makes her uncomfortable to hear about Shannon. She is reading a book entitled Real Sex: The Truth About Chastity, and plans to remain a virgin until she is married. I have not been a virgin since I was sixteen and when I get dressed up, I love a low-cut dress and high heels. Meg prefers baggy clothes and tennis shoes. Our mother suggested this weekend, after I bought a Sponge Bath Betty nurse's costume for Halloween, that perhaps we have divided things up too well. In so many ways, I am bad and Meg is, well...Meg is very, very good.

We spent Saturday night in a hotel suite with our parents, playing "2 Truths and a Lie" and guessing which was the lie. My mother's truth: when she was a girl, she spent 6 weeks every year sharing a bed with her visiting grandmother and they read Nancy Drew books together. My father's truth: as a boy, he owned a black widow spider. Meg's truth: she fell down one step and broke her leg in two places. We drank a bottle of Shiraz and ate in the hotel room after a trip to the grocery store: smoked salmon with whole black peppercorns, black olives, fresh shrimp, steamed brocolli with parmesan cheese, Neal's Yard cheddar cheese, goat's cheese and crackers, and later, fruit salad and a Honeycrisp apple. It's strange to say but the best part of the whole weekend was waking up to hear Meg's steady breathing, still asleep three feet away from me.

I left on Sunday morning, came home and found that Robert had filled the apartment with flowers. We went for a walk and stopped at Angelica's Herbs to buy a half-pound of tea because I think I'm getting a cold. We saw the movie Shopgirl (which I loved) and ate dinner at Angelica's Kitchen, steamed vegetables and kukicha twig tea. At home, we got into bed at eight-fifteen and held onto each other for ten hours straight.

At the end of Shopgirl, Steve Martin's character says, "Funny how you can miss a woman you kept a distance the whole time you were together so that when she was gone, you would not miss her." He is, like, thirty years older than Claire Danes, and when we talked about the movie, Robert said, "It's not fair to do that to her. He's elderly and she has her whole life in front of her."

I said, "Yes, but when I think about it, it's not fair to myself to spend years in a long-distance relationship, either. We make choices that sometimes aren't ideal but...who can account for feelings? Life goes on, no matter how you choose to live it."

My mother's favorite question, about anything, is, "If you had it to do over again, would you do it differently?" -- I hate this question. I think it's impossible to answer honestly because you are always a different person than you were before you lived it. If I could go back and talk to myself two-and-a-half years ago, I'd like to think I would have gone for Robert anyway, despite everything. If I could go back and talk to myself as a little girl, with a littler sister, I'd tell myself to be less of a bully and more of a friend. "Don't bite your sister!" I'd say. "Let her play with your toys. Share your clothes and your friends and access to the treehouse."

The worst that could happen, I think, would be for your family, chosen or blood-related, to be strangers to you. Isn't it better to be riled up or put out or interrupted or crazy with mother love than to be in the company of someone who makes you feel like you're alone? That's what I'm unsure about with Robert. I love him, I love him, but sometimes I have been in his company and just felt so lonely. I don't feel that way now but how do you know it won't come back?

"You are my Fifth Avenue"

2005-10-28T01:14:00.000-04:00

I went up to school today, for a workshop led by Mary Karr -- whose presence made me slip into a repressed Southern accent and aspire to use bad language -- and I learned some things. She said, "Voice -- a narrator's -- is made up of these: diction, syntax and tone." She said, "The whole point of memoir-writing is to reflect." She said, "Write from the beginning." She said, "I think, all the time, I am thinking about the reader. What does the reader know? What does the reader need to know?"
She said, "The part of yourself that you are most ashamed of will do whatever it can to keep you from writing the truth."

Afterwards, I checked out a book she'd mentioned called Remembering Satan, about police officers is Olympia, Washington who, after their daughters accused them, admitted to having molested them. Confessed in detail to ordeals involving disrobing and rape and accidental pregnancy and arranging abortions. But the truth is that none of it had ever happened. So, the question is, why did these men confess?

And from the library, I stepped outside into the cold and answered my vibrating phone, heard Robert's voice and all of a sudden, I wasn't okay with all this pretending-to-be-so-cool-and-compassionate anymore. I felt angry and betrayed. I felt, "How could you do this?"

Robert is on a plane now, coming to New York, and he will arrive at this apartment just as I am leaving for St. Louis to visit my sister. I'm happy I won't be here this weekend because I don't trust myself not to sleep with him, not to fall back into these happy patterns, and the truth is that I'm not ready to do that yet. I just went out with Suzie, down the block to Supper, for glasses of red wine and Postal Service and Tori Amos playing on the speakers, and I said, "In our lives, we are going to fall in love with other people."

When I think about not being with Robert, I feel something drop out from beneath my feet, I am so afraid of not loving him with everything I have. But when I think about being with him now -- when I think about putting on that sad ring -- there is a voice in my head that says, "Sarah? Sarah. You can do better than this."

morning glory

2005-10-26T15:22:00.000-04:00

Last night I dreamed I was a prostitute, earning $2,000 for a full weekend. There was a party, two guys and three women other than me, and the six of us were riding on top of a hired car to a restaurant when one of the women turned to me and said, "We can't afford to pay for this car. Can you pitch in?"
I said, "No. It's not my job. You're not my friends."
Everyone ignored me through the dinner and at the end of the weekend, the guys only gave me $500.

Somehow, later in the dream, I was reunited with Robert and he asked me again to marry him. When I said yes, he suggested that we crawl up the aisle on our hands and knees "like two little babies."

the Ramble

2005-10-25T11:38:00.000-04:00

Last Friday, my father and I walked from 2nd Street and Avenue A up to 106th and Broadway. I'd wanted to go the Whitney, which is one of my favorite museums because (I probably shouldn't admit this) I think it is the perfect size. We floated through the Edward Hopper room down the stairs, away from the permanent collection, to an exhibit of an artist who did earth works. Videos showed him dragging an island down the Hudson River and swirling huge tracts of snow into...swirls that look, from above, like something that is too perfect to let out of the house.

When we left, we walked across Central Park, through the Ramble, and my father talked about his involvement with Greenways and Walk-Bike Nashville and how, at one of their recent Small Group meetings on Sunday nights, the topic was sharing. The question was, "What are you doing to save the world?" And it clicked for there, on the bridge above the mossy pond in the Park -- I realized, again, that part of living is living not only in my own experience.

It is storming rain here, blowing wind so hard I hold my breath waiting for a tree to fall over. I cried when my dad left, despite the fact that there were moments when it was hard to share my space and thoughts. The best part was Saturday, another night so rainy, and we'd gone to the Greenmarket at Union Square and we cooked a feast and I lit tiny candles and we talked about books and then we talked about our family. I've decided to go to St. Louis this weekend to visit my sister for the first time -- and my parents will be there, my father is going to run in some kind of race -- and I think that part of the fallout of all this (broken) engagement drama is this: It reminds me who my family is. It reminds me not to take them for granted, these three people who really do put up with me and offer this stretchy unconditional love.

It is no small thing.

This morning, I woke up at six to proofread Shannon's poetry thesis because she is dyslexic and all of her misspellings are something that I find both incredibly endearing and also so hard not to want to fix. She wrote me an email with an attachment and it said, "That kind of bad sownding one about you? dont worry, after I rote it you got me off. rittious."
It is a poem about sex between two women who keep score. In different ways, I still do that, not in bed but with this idea I have that things should be even. Effort should always be reciprocated. I want to be less like that. I want to be the way my parents are with me, the way my sister is with everyone she meets -- I want to give my time and myself to the people I love and have faith that everything that's lost or gone unnoticed isn't for nothing.

the bright-light side

2005-10-20T14:51:00.000-04:00

In the past week, I have re-read Married: A Fine Predicament, by Anne Roiphe (one week ago, before I had any idea of my own leering tangle); and The Boys of My Youth, by Jo Ann Beard, and this book is the reason I ever applied to Sarah Lawrence's nonfiction program -- I spent this early morning in bed with her essay about her childhood best friend and, twenty years later, their divorces. I have read a novel called Ask Me Anything, by Francesca Delbanco (with a protagonist described in a blurb as "a cross between Holly Golightly and Elizabeth Wurzel"); I have read The Dream-Hunters of Corsica, by Dorothy Carrington, about people -- mazzeri -- who kill animals at night, in their dreams, then look into the animals' faces and recognize, in each one, the face of someone they know. That person will die within the next year. It sounds spooky and impossible to believe as real but it was actually a wonderful book to read on a long (and long-delayed and long-overdue) transatlantic flight.

Good things about going through a period of (un)romantic tumult:
1. You get to drink America's No. 1 root beer in your pajamas and read New York magazine without feeling guilty about not writing your thesis.
2. If you're hungry, you can eat Jell-O without your boyfriend making fun of you by saying, "You're not fooling me. Even I know that making Jell-O isn't the same thing as actually cooking."
3. Your attempt to give up caffeine is given a kick-start by your inability to get dressed and walk down the street. No, that's not true. I totally wouldn't mind putting on pants as long as I didn't have to take off Robert's T-shirt. Oops! Scratch that. I just spilled some raspberry Jell-O down the front.
4. Your close friends are wonderful listeners. Probably they'd get annoyed if this dragged on for too long but right now, if you need them, they are here.

Ummm, I think that's it.

After our workshop yesterday, I stood in the parking lot talking to a woman in my class named Theresa, who works as a florist. Her favorites are garden-grown roses but she told me the meanings of all kinds of flowers and colors (red is for passion, white for purity, pink for romance or chaste affection, yellow for friendship). I said, "I just read about a woman who received a huge vase of orange Gerbera daisies. Isn't that fabulous?" And Theresa said, "Erm, no, because orange doesn't mean anything. People try to make it mean something...but it doesn't. It's the same deal with purple." Then she told me about the kinds of poison that people used to send each other and that rosemary means remembrance. I told her about Robert and she said, "Oh, god. It's not my place to tell you what to do but...you should break up with him." In my head, I said, "No, Theresa, you don't understand. Robert and I are going to get a puppy!"

Today I am meeting with my thesis advisor, going to the gym, and teaching a yoga lesson. Tomorrow my father is coming to visit for the weekend and while I woke up feeling panicked about not being able to be alone and lie prostrate, crying, on my isotonic mattress pad for forty-eight hours, I'm now really looking forward to seeing him. Every year on Valentine's Day, my father sends me tulips.

"Stop the madness"

2005-10-20T00:38:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, not thirty seconds after I spotted Manhattan out the airplane window, my head started to pound and by the time I got home an hour later, it hurt so badly all I could do was drop my bags and take three Tylenol P.M. and go to bed. And get up ten minutes later to throw up. And then go back to bed, verrry carefully trying not to shake my head, and sleep for thirteen hours.

What I am realizing:
1. The way a person chooses to live isn't separate from who that person is. It means nothing to say that I love Robert but hate this situation because the way he treats me, the way he acts, isn't external. That's part of who he is.
2. People do what they want, consciously or subconsciously. I don't even know quite what that applies to but it seems like a big deal to me (or, at least, it did when I had a migraine). None of us are simply creatures of circumstance and fate. We do what we want.
3. Robert and I might break up. I'm saying it out loud for the first time.
4. I still love him more than anyone. I still can't imagine not living with him, not spending Christmas with him, not looking forward to hearing his voice everyday.
5. This sadness that I think we both feel isn't something that can be solved with words.

I told him today that I don't want us to talk for a few days, or see each other for awhile. I just don't have anything else to say. If he doesn't love me enough to marry me, why should I believe him when he says he's certain he wants us to spend the rest of our lives together? Why should I trust that he wouldn't wake up one day, five years from now when we have a crying baby, and say, "This doesn't feel right to me"? I have to keep reminding myself of these things because the truth is that I miss him horribly. I miss him, I love him, I'm still convinced, in so many ways, that he is perfect, that we are perfect for each other.

I just don't see how feeling so bad could possibly be good for me.

An eleven-hour engagement

2005-10-17T15:17:00.000-04:00

It happened like this.

Robert came home from work on Friday night at eight o'clock and we went to the gym down the street. Standing next to each other on eliptical machines, I listened to my headphones and didn't speak to him and after twenty minutes, I walked across the room to stretch out on the floormats. He followed me after a little while and sat down next to me and apologized for being late, explaining that he'd had a horrible few days in the markets, losing money.
I said, "I'm not angry at you, Robert. I just don't know what I'm doing here. Maybe this is very naive of me but I believe that when you have an out-of-town guest, no matter where that person is coming from, you are obligated to make them feel welcome. I'm here for four days. We see each other one week out of every month."
He said, "I need to do better. I will."
"But you've said that before," I said. "Last Friday night, one week ago, you told me you would call at a certain time, and you didn't, and I had to call you hours later. And you apologized and told me that I deserved better. And two weeks before that, you kept me waiting on a street corner for forty minutes on Friday night. I am always waiting for you."
"Do you think that would be different if we were engaged and married?"
"Yes!" I said. "At the very least, if we were married, I hope we'd be living on the same continent and I wouldn't be visiting you and feeling like I was in a one-down position. I wouldn't have traveled across the Atlantic for the weekend and been disappointed by the fact that you had to work. Right now, our relationship is determined by how the markets are doing. And I can't even talk about this to my friends anymore. It's the same story, over and over."

We came home and showered, changed clothes, and took a taxi to Nobu, where we stood at the bar and I said, "You don't make me happy anymore. I feel that you treat me like a dog."
"No," he said. "A dog?"
"The only difference is that if I were a dog, I'd have to go to the bathroom on the floor."
Over dinner at the sushi bar, the conversation didn't improve, not in an attitudinal sense. I felt checked out, distanced from him, from this, and I realized that I'd been lying when I told him I wasn't angry. I was, at it turned out, more than a little embittered. But I didn't cry and at the time, that seemed like something to be proud of. I had grown so weary of crying over this man.

We took a bath at home and I started to cry. "I feel like a failure," I said.
"No, don't," he said. "This is not your fault."
"But I can't make you love me any more than you do," I said. "And this just isn't enough for me."
I looked at his naked body in the water. He pulled me towards him and I pressed my nose against his shoulder and smelled his skin.

In bed, I turned off the light and Robert snuggled up next to me, kissing my neck, kissing my face.
"Do you love me?" he said.
"Of course I do," I said. "You know I do."
"How much?"
"I love you more than anyone in the world," I said. "Do you love me?"
"Yes."
"How much?" I asked him in turn.
"This much," he said. And in the dark, he handed me a tiny box.
"Oh my god. Robert, are you serious?" I sat up and opened it to find the most perfect ring I've ever seen. I flipped on the lamp.
Robert reached out and flipped it off. He now lay motionless with his head turned away from me.
"Do you like it? Does it fit?" he asked.
"Yes, it's beautiful," I said. "Robert?"
Silence.
"Will you ask me?" I said.
Silence.
"Robert?" I said again.
"Will you marry me?" he said softly.
I said yes. I asked him when he had bought it and he said, weeks ago, the beginning of September. I said I was overwhelmed and surprised and suddenly full of hope. He kissed my mouth then and we made love and I hugged him to me, on top of me, and looked at my ring in the dark, disbelieving, and told myself that everything was going to be fine now.
Afterwards, I said I wanted to call my parents. "No," he said. "Why don't we wait until the morning?"
"Are you happy?" I asked. "How do you feel?"
"I'm shocked," he said. "I'm paralyzed and terrified."
And we went to sleep.

In the morning, we made love again but there was the same disconnected feeling. I knew that he wasn't happy, not in the way that I was, and his lack of joy weighed on me. I felt that if he wasn't happy, there was nothing to celebrate -- but I kept trying to put on a good face. "I'm so honored," I said. He looked, in the moment, like he would rather be anywhere else in the world. "What made you do this?" I asked.
"I knew it was important to you," he said. "It was time."
"Do you feel ready?"
He shook his head. "I don't know if I'll ever feel ready."
We went for a walk in Regent's Park, sitting on a bench with his arm around my shoulders and my hand on his leg, both of us looking at this new ring on my finger.
"Do you want to call your sister and Simon?" I asked.
"Not yet," he said. "Let's just keep it between us for awhile."
"It doesn't seem real, does it?"
"No," he said. "I can't believe I did it. It hasn't really hit me."

We walked to the cheese store and bought some goat's cheese and some brebis, like the sheep's cheese we ate on Corsica last summer. The total came to just over nine pounds and, outside, Robert said, "It's not cheap, is it?"

We went to the grocery store and bought eggs and hummus, a jar of olives, a green pepper, one liter of semi-skimmed milk, fresh coriander, spinach, cherry tomatoes, thin-sliced ham, smoked Alaskan salmon, raspberries, apricot yogurt, and a copy of the weekend Financial Times. At home in the kitchen, Robert cooked scrambled eggs and I set the table.
"Do you want to celebrate?" I said. "I want to tell everyone. I want to drink champagne and make toasts and celebrate."
He took a bottle of sparkling wine from the refrigerator and opened it, poured two glasses. He looked horribly upset.
"This ring," I said, "means that at some point in the recent weeks, you were sure about wanting to marry me."
Before we sat down, I made the toast. "I know you are afraid," I said. "But I love you. I love you so much and I know that we are going to have a wonderful life together."
Halfway finished eating our eggs, we put down our forks and looked at each other.
He said, "This doesn't feel right to me. It's not you but I haven't done this for the right reasons. I don't want to do this."
I went to the bedroom and wept with my face in my hands and then splashed water on my face. I slipped the ring off and put it back in its box, came back to the table and set it down before him.
"Getting engaged," I said, "should make you feel elated. It should -- and one day it will -- make you feel like the luckiest man in the world. It wasn't designed to induce paralytic terror."
"I know," he said. "I'm so sorry."

It was such a funny thing, you know, because I had wanted it so badly for so long. And then when I got it, the ring felt like a very empty gesture and I didn't want it anymore. Like a shiny piece of fruit that turns out to be rotten.

And Robert makes the best scrambled eggs in the world. I remembered how he'd come to Tennessee in March, to meet my parents, and we had cooked breakfast on Sunday. He'd made these eggs and it is such a small thing but I felt so proud of him that weekend, I remember feeling blessed by his humor, his stories, his deep affection and love. The thought of eating his eggs now, eating anything, made me feel sick.

I asked him to change my plane ticket. I said I wanted to go back to New York. I went into the next room and started packing. He stood there in the doorway, unmoving, and then came to where I stood and said, "I can't do this. I don't want you to leave. I can't lose you."
We went outside for a walk, strolled through the Egyptian wing of the British Museum, and then turned back towards home.
"You know," he said, "I feel so relieved. I felt like I was acting out of a tremendous feeling of pressure and that just felt wrong. But the only thing I'm sure of is that I want us to spend the rest of our lives together."
I started to cry again. I wiped my nose on a torn-up piece of toilet paper in my pocket.
I said, "You don't know what you want."

At home, I went into the bedroom with the phone and called a friend in New York, who didn't answer. I could not imagine telling my parents. I felt exhausted. I wanted to leave. I couldn't think of when I had last had a sip of water.
Robert came into the bedroom. "I'm ready now," he said. "Let's go get the ring sized to fit you. I want you to be my wife."
"Please," I said, "please don't say that right now. I don't want to talk about it anymore."

I asked him again to call British Airways and he did so this time and then told me that we would have to buy a new ticket, the old one could not be changed.
"Don't worry," I said. "I'll stay until Tuesday."
In that moment, I chose not to cause inconvenience. I wanted to stop this drama and this pain but I felt relieved not to be leaving him. I still loved him. I still do.

We spent the rest of the weekend talking, mostly about this. We went to the park again, we met his sister and her small children at a playground and talked about Marcos' eardrum. We ate lamb sandwiches at the farmer's market. We read aloud to each other, we watched The Graduate and The Motorcycle Diaries, and last night we ate fresh lobster and stopped, on the way home from the gym, to sit outside and have a glass of red wine. We have shared a bowl of edamame and gone to Starbucks, twice, to sit across from each other and read the newspaper while I have a tall Kenya coffee and he has hot chocolate with no whip. I have felt particularly tired for two days, as if, at any given moment, I might just lie down on the floor. This morning, I got out of bed at eight forty-five and at ten, we cooked eggs. I set the table again, I cut slices of lemon for our water.

Everything has changed, in a way, but everything else is very much the same. I don't know at all what I want anymore.

What do you call this feeling?

2005-10-15T21:54:00.000-04:00

Robert proposed last night. I said yes, fell asleep wearing a beautiful ring, and woke up feeling elated. And then, at breakfast, he told me that he can't do it. It didn't feel right.

I am profoundly sad.

andiamo

2005-10-14T22:15:00.000-04:00

It's been dark for more than an hour. I got a lot of reading and writing done today and I was out, walking around in Westminster and to Regent's Park, which I love, although it's (surprise!) very gloomy outside. I'm still alone. Robert's been at work since this morning and I could steal a pair of his socks and walk to the gym but I want to wait for him and then go together. Last night, he came home and I said I wanted to go out and have a glass of wine and some cheese, which is not what he would have chosen to do -- he's very into "dining" and dinners with courses. We ended up at a little Italian place called Caffe Caldesi, eating cheese and meat and sharing seared tuna and vegetables, drinking Chianti and talking about his work and my writing and his phone rang a few times and he took the calls, stepped outside. He's having a hard week. I sat there by myself for twenty minutes at one point, pretending to read a pamphlet on cooking classes, thinking that I should have brought a book. When three French men at a nearby table started talking to me and invited me to join them, Robert looked inside and saw and then came back.
We went home and got into bed and while we were making love for the second time in as many hours, he said, "I think we could really work."
"Don't we already?" I said.
"No," he said, "I mean together, sharing a life -- a dog, a home, children."
It was weird, I thought, his timing, considering that we've been together for two-and-a-half years and he said it as if it had just occurred to him for the first time.

Later, I was telling him about the John Galliano show in Paris this week, how he hadn't used only supermodels but a whole array of people, including elderly red-headed identical twins. In her review of it in the Times, Cathy Horyn wrote that a man next to her had asked afterwards what she thought of the "monsters" and that she thought nothing ill of it. What she did see as unforgivable, however, was the fact that in all of the Milan shows, she barely saw a single Asian or black model on the runways.
Robert said, "We're so white, we should go to Milan and be models."
"What?" I said and motioned around his partially furnished apartment. "And give up all this?"

I can't understand working eighty hours a week and not feeling like you have a home. I can't understand his not being sure about wanting us to live together and create one. If he's unsure, I think, then what am I doing here? What, exactly, am I waiting for?

connecting the dots

2005-10-14T16:05:00.000-04:00

I take back what I said about Nabokov, about having felt that Liz Phair's lyrics -- and even, at one point, a bumper sticker I saw that read What If The Hokey-Pokey Really Is What It's All About? -- have more resonance and relevance than his writing. This week I had a revelation about my writing, all writing, while I was sitting in my literature class discussing his memoir, Speak, Memory. In it, I think, he tells us that the way in which we examine a novel, looking for themes and metaphors, is also the way in which we should examine our lives. A life does not just happen haphazardly; you must look at it in order for themes and patterns to emerge, and for it to be rich and wonderful. That we cannot just live it but must also remember it and that one of the methods of redeeming our short lives is by making art. ART. (I capitalize the word to further differentiate its meaning from that of most entertainment, like, say, reality television and all the glossy voyeuristic magazines that I love.)
"I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past."

In writing my thesis, I have been working on a collection of essays based upon events of my life between the ages of 16 and 24, more or less what I refer to as "lost years". They include accounts of having worked as a grocery store sacker when I was in high school, being on the beach in Thailand during last year's tsunami, an affair I had with my employer in Costa Rica, and a could-have-turned-into-something-so-much-more-horrible flirtation over a four-year period with the father of my best childhood friend. The writing, throughout much of it, is funny and sad and sharp, all the things, I'd like to think, that draw me to books in the Oxfam used bookstore downstairs. When people ask me what I write, I tell them that I want to write the sort of thing that hold people's attention on a crowded bus. I had a teacher last year tell me that in my writing, I am a ditzier Carole Lombard, I am all foot-in-mouth clumsy elbows and embarrassing disasters. As recently as two days ago, I told my current workshop teacher that these are all stories about the repercussions of not having any real direction.

"That's not enough," she said. "You need to look for over-arching themes and ask yourself about how these stories, if these stories, are really part of one larger collection."

One thing that Nabokov accomplishes repeatedly is taking two things that would appear to have nothing in common and connecting them. Towards the beginning of Speak, Memory, he recounts an event from his childhood in which a friend of his father's laid out matches in a straight line, end to end, and said, "This is like the sea in calm weather." Then the man rearranged them so that they formed zig-zag shapes and said, "This is a stormy sea." And then the two of them were interrupted by someone who, Nabokov later discovered, informed the man, the Supreme Commander of the Russian Army, that his presence was needed elsewhere. Years later, Nabokov's father was approached while crossing a bridge in St. Petersburg by a bearded man in tattered clothing who requested a match for his cigarette. His father recognized the fallen general.
I summarize this passage because it captures so profoundly the purpose of following themes instead of mere chronology. The brilliance of this writing is not the events themselves but his focusing on the matches. At the end of this long paragraph, Nabokov writes, "The following of thematic designs should be...the true purpose of autobiography."

I love blogs for the opposite reason, the same reason that people are transfixed by The Real World and soap operas, and I buy Hello! magazine -- there is no prospection or much retrospection (excepting sidebars about the women Tom Cruise was formerly married to). They capture life unfolding in the present and, as such, they don't require much more than a finger to flip the pages or press buttons on the remote control.

Sometimes, when we don't have the attention span or energy to really focus, fluff feels like enough. But, here is my revelation -- there's a reason people don't usually eat ice cream for dinner. It fills you up, yes, and (especially carrot cake flavor) is delicious, but afterwards, it doesn't feel as good as a real dinner. Too much chick lit makes you sick.

Did I really say coffee is a...miracle?

2005-10-13T21:13:00.000-04:00

I'm in London, sitting four floors up from Marylebone High Street, realizing that this is the first day in more than two months in which I haven't had a single cup of coffee. What I wrote yesterday -- about coffee being a liquid miracle -- those are the words of an addict. It's not cute anymore, the way I wake up and think about coffee, the way I get a headache in the afternoon if I've skipped it in the morning. I'm staging an intervention for myself, right here, and I might as well try to kick the every day habit while I'm away from New York, where Kudo Beans' Pumpkin Spice blend isn't calling my name when I walk down First Avenue.

Nineteen days ago, I gave up sugar, wheat, fruit, juice, and more than three glasses of wine a week. It started as a two-week test but I'm still doing it and I don't have any cravings anymore (I don't think I have as much energy either but I'm writing that off as due to my now skyrocketing cholesterol. Yea, eggs!) and I figure if I could get over the sugar hump (which, for me, hit every 24 hours at about 4 in the afternoon) then I can get through the no-coffee headaches.

Plus, I'm alone here, which I hadn't mentioned because I don't know how I feel about it. I got to Robert's apartment from Heathrow at eleven o'clock this morning and he was gone. I found a note from him and when I called, he admitted that he'd just gotten to the office and would be there until six-thirty or seven. I want to be the understanding partner who remembers what it's like to have real professional obligations but I'd be lying if I said I'm not the tiniest bit blue not to have found him here this morning, waiting to say hello, thanks for coming to England to see me. Is that awfully selfish?

I mention the food thing because normally, napped, showered, dressed, made-up, and waiting for Robert, I would be either eating chocolate or drinking fresh orange juice and Campari or spooning rhubarb yogurt out of, ahem, two or three containers. None of those things ever feels good because they've nothing to do with hunger or thirst. I talk more than I wish I did about how tired I am of waiting for him to change.

Listen, Sarah: any change that happens is going to be your doing. By comparison, coffee seems like the easiest thing in the world to give up.

wet dog damn day

2005-10-12T16:21:00.000-04:00

It hasn't stopped raining since I got my car washed. This morning, driving to Westchester, my windshield wipers were flipping on high speed and I still couldn't see anything because it was pouring so hard and it was foggy and half the cars on the road didn't have their headlights on. There were several looong bottlenecks in which cars had to go single-file through water that was three feet deep. Which meant that lots of cars couldn't even move because they would have been sunk, so they pulled off to the nonexistent side of the BQE. When it should have been my turn to drive through, this huge NY State CORRECTIONAL FACILITY bus came up behind me and pushed me into the deepest part of the water and my heart started pounding. The radio was still on, Z100 and the early morning deejays were talking about whether or not redheads are smarter or stupider than blondes, and I wanted to call someone to talk me through this.
I thought, "I cannot call my parents because I don't want them to worry. I cannot call Suzie because she's in an interview; Phoebe might still be sleeping; my sister is already at work. I cannot call Robert because I don't want to hear him tell me that it's a bad time for him."
And then I thought, "I cannot call anyone because I cannot look away from the road."
And then the car in front of me hydro-planed and spun around and hit the truck in front of it.

An hour and a half later, my coffee tasted like a miracle in a paper cup.

I'm in love with Alphabet City

2005-10-11T20:45:00.000-04:00

Dios mio. I am sorry to report that the wall on 2nd Street and Avenue A that had been covered with the words You've been Shampoozled has been painted over. I'd gotten attached to that sign; I felt that it really spoke to me. In a way, somehow, that Nabokov, bless his heart, just never quite will. Now, the wall is solid white except for black spray-painted words that read Reserved TatS CRU.

I stood on the sidewalk, my arms full of laundry and dry-cleaning that had been dropped off weeks and weeks ago, and stared up at the wall, disbelieving. A man with a spotted dog on a leash walked by and I said, "It's gone. The sign is gone." Both he and his dog looked at me to see if I was serious and then the man said, "It's alright, baby. Go for a hike and by the time you get back, I'll be ready."

Someone remind me, please, when I'm fifty and I have a whole house and garden and goat and acres of green, how it's possible for strangers to bring each other joy in crowded places.

straight girl soaps up

2005-10-11T13:24:00.000-04:00

"And I asked Henry, my bartender friend
if I should bother dating unfamous men
And Henry said, 'You're lucky to even know me.
You're lucky to be alive.'"

Isn't that brilliant? In the middle of a carwash, flipping through my tired books of CDs, I rediscovered Liz Phair and fell in love again. Of course, it started to rain ten minutes after I drove out of the lot -- and not sprinkle, mind you, but real "the Rapture is coming" buckets -- and normally I would have felt oddly discouraged about having driven to Brooklyn and paid for my car to be covered in water beforehand but I totally didn't mind. I felt, in fact, like I was on a date with an old girlfriend. Oh, Liz!

Speaking of old girlfriends, I have done something very, very, very bad and I don't know how to un-do it. (Which is such a lie, by the way, because I know exactly what I need to do and am just going to pretend that I need advice because I'm embarrassed and don't want to own up to it.)

My ex-girlfriend, Shannon, used to introduce me as "Straight Girl" and her best friend, Ursula, always had this small fake smile on her face when she saw me and once I even overheard her saying to Shannon, "I've just never seen you with a woman who acts so straight." The truth is that I was head over heels in love with Shannon and had been since we met in 1999 (I'll save you from the poetry I wrote); the truth is also that I'd only ever been with guys before Shannon (except for my high school girlfriend, Sarah, who doesn't count, I think, because we met at an all-girls high school and the choice for object of my affection was between a Coach Springer and Sarah. Coach Springer eliminated himself by saying things to me like, "I can tell that the wheels in your head spin around a lot" and generally doing gross things like encouraging his volleyball team to practice is binkini bottoms. By comparison, Sarah looked like an Adonis, one who just happened to be wearing a kilt and penny loafers.) Outside of the relationship that Shannon and I had when we were alone, I felt overwhelmed by insecurities about not being "gay enough" and wanting to prove it.

Shannon and I dated on and off for more than a year and towards the end of that year, I met Robert, who, at the time, seemed like a nice guy who was irrlevent because he lived on a different continent. So, when I assumed that nothing would come of spending time with him, I described him to Shannon as, um, a woman. Named Ro. And I thought, "Maybe if she and her friends know that I date other women, they'll start introducing me by my real name."

Fast-forward two-and-a-half years. Shannon and I are still good friends, although she's moved to Connecticut and we see each once every few months, at best. I am still with Robert and have told Shannon that I have a boyfriend but I've never mentioned his name.

Shannon: So, how's...your boyfriend?
Sarah: Oh, great. He is doing really well, we're happy, I'm going to visit him next week in the city where he lives.

I should come clean with her.

"funny but alarming"

2005-10-08T14:47:00.000-04:00

I just finished reading the book Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities, by Alexandra Robbins, described by The New Republic as "fascinating and eye-opening; it's a car crash you can't take your eyes off of..." Basically, blessed with the ability to pass for a nineteen-year-old, the author went undercover for a school year at an unnamed university and followed four sophomores around while they all got wasted (pre-gaming with thermoses of Absolut and Sprite), two of them got raped, one of them had an affair with Professor Stone, and various others did things like have sex on the lawn/floor of a bar/in the backseat and steal other girls' sundresses and thongs.

It reminded me of high school. Not the sex on the lawn but the cattiness that ensues when lots of girls (women? definitely not the group who call themselves womyn) form bonds and a social life that actually has less to do with each other than it does with a preoccupation to get a boyfriend. And a husband.

I spent three years in Nashville at an all-girls school (8th to 10th grade) and the weirdest phenomenon I observed was how easily girls would sell out their alleged friends by saying horrible things about them as soon as they'd left a room. At the time, it was so much more appealing for me to do "bad" and "rebellious" things like run around with my uniform shirt untucked and have Bronco squats (smoking cigarettes in the student parking lot between the SUVs) and crack coconuts on the sidewalk in front of the library with Kristina during lunch. Because I was funny, because I was the actress, because teachers liked my poetry and I did well enough on tests to make the Honor Roll, I had lots of friends and was pretty disengaged from all the social bullshit. But if I hadn't had any confidence to do my own thing, if I had actually wanted to fit in with these girls (imagine hundreds of Reese Witherspoons, who did go there, three years older than I), I think I would have been pretty...miserable. The most popular girls from my class ended up getting M.R.S. degrees at the University of Georgia/Bama/Tennessee/Missississippi and are now married, living in Nashville again. If they're working at all, it's for their fathers' real esate office/law firm and, across the board, they have their own memberships to the Belle Meade Country Club and will, inevitably, send their children to the same schools they attended.

Last night, Robert and I had another fight (about the fact that he had said he would call at a certain time and then never did...and I accused him of treating me "carelessly" and he said that the real problem is that everything is going to be pressurized between us until I have a ring on my finger. But no, I said, not everything is a marriage referendum; this really is just about doing what you said you were going to do) and while we were talking, I was writing baby names on scrap paper:
Ava Julianne Elizabeth
Ava Elizabeth Julianne
Ava Julianne
Noa Isabelle
bulldog named Norris

And finally I said, "I want to be free to see other people. I'm tired of waiting for you. I don't think it should be this hard."
I was thinking about Alpha Sigma Alphas on Spring Break in Negril, Jamaica, drinking from "ten to ten." Did they mean starting at ten o'clock at night or in the morning?
Robert said, "I don't think dumping me is going to solve anything."
I thought, Probably starting in the morning. No self-respecting sorority girl would sleep off a hangover in bed during prime tanning hours.
I said, "Robert, there's nothing else I can do. No one said anything about breaking up; what I'm saying is that I don't feel like I can count on you to do small things."
He was quiet.
"Rob?" I said.
"I'm here," he answered. "And I always get the big things right."
I played three games of tic-tac-toe by myself and I won two of them. The last one was a tie.
"I love you," he said.
"I love you, too," I said.
"I know you do. I know you love me."

I'm dropping the acid

2005-10-07T15:04:00.000-04:00

My favorite part of the Times' Book Review section on Sunday was written in response to a blog-turned-book, Julie and Julia, by Julie Powell, who spent a year cooking Ms. Child's French recipes in her cramped New York kitchen. David Kamp's review veered into a tangent that made me laugh outloud, in touching upon the "troublesome trend among young memoirists, who seem to think that repeated references to their poor hygiene and the squalidness of their surroundings give texture and depth to their work. No, no, no! Being subjected over and over again to images of your piled-up dirty dishes and backed-up plumbing (bodily and otherwise) only makes me want to put down your book. Stop it!"

Having now admitted that fulltime writers describing their dirty habitats is overdone and in general just a very icky thing to read about, I have to confess that I'm sitting at my kitchen table waiting for my neighbor to arrive with "the big guns." Fingers crossed that those guns include boric acid because the battle we're up against is bugs and I don't know what else to do about them. There's not an army of them, and they aren't even roaches, but everyday I see three or four of them -- I flip on the lights in the kitchen and I see a few tiny bugs (somewhere between the size of No. 2 pencil erasers and my pinky nail) scurry around. They have a special penchant for hanging out in the silverware drawer and frankly, I'm getting weary of rewashing my silver spoons and soup ladle.

My next-door neighbor, Mike, a guy whose appearance is screaming to be caught on film and titled "This is the East Village", usually keeps to himself, strumming his electric guitar behind closed doors or running down the stairs in Converse sneakers and a rumpled tie with a messenger bag slung over his shoulder on his way to work at an "indie magazine." Yesterday morning, we walked outside together and I asked him if he ever sees any bugs in his apartment...? And he looked at me over the rims of his plastic black sunglasses and said, "No one told you?"

"Told me what?" I said. He shook his head. "It's the guy below us. He's lived here forever and he's stuck in his ways and one of those ways...involves carrying things in off the street all the time."

"What kind of things?" I asked.

"Oh," Mike said, "you know, I saw him hauling a wooden rocking horse upstairs last week. Sometimes it's just wet cardboard boxes and stuff like flat tires."

Flat tires? What would someone do with a flat tire in his apartment? I guess you could sit on one side of your living room and roll it back and forth with someone. But if it's flat, how would it roll? Unless you patched the hole and inflated it. Or you could put a piece of wood on top and use it as...an exceedingly low table. But does this man sound like the type to have fondue parties on the floor? Does he sit on the rocking horse and...rock?

I'm sorry, especially so soon, to be one of those people describing her "squalidness" but I'm holding out hope for the boric acid. And then we'll never mention this again.

2005-10-02T13:41:00.000-04:00

At some point in the last decade, I was told that, for the sake of good luck, on the first day of every new month, the first thing I should say is "white rabbit." Where did I get this idea? I have no idea. It sounds so ridiculous that this is the first time I can even remember admitting it to someone. The real ridiculous part of it, of course, is that I actually do it. Yesterday morning found me in the kitchen wiping sleep out of my eyes and, before answering the phone to say hello, muttering, "White rabbit, white rabbit."

More than that, it seems like the first day of every month was basically designed to remind you of how little your life has changed since the last one. So much has happened, but nothing has changed. At least, for me, in this ostensibly "romantic" relationship with Robert, the first of a new month offers a reason for me to reflect upon the fact that another 30 days have passed and we still live in different countries with no plans to change that. In short, it provides the perfect occasion for me to beat the romance out of said relationship.
Conversation (always) unfolds like this:
Sarah: I can't even conceive of how I've spent two and a half years like this.
Robert: I know. You are desperate to get engaged.
Sarah: No, no, it's not even that. It's just this feeling of waiting, endlessly. Endlessly! Where is the end?
Robert: I wish I were there this weekend.
Sarah: Why aren't you?
Robert: I'm going to (choose a country on the other side of the Atlantic) tomorrow.
Sarah: Do you want us to be together? What is the plan?
Robert: (silence)

Oh god, it's horrible, isn't it? These go-nowhere throw-downs, I don't know why I bother, we've had the same conversation so many times. I feel like a crazy puppet, playing a role that I'm no longer in control of. I'm spending the day writing a paper on Proust and Paul De Man and the role of reading in Swann's Way. "In truth, each reader is, when he reads, the actual reader of himself."

wee blessing

2005-09-29T18:44:00.000-04:00

When I come home, I am always surprised to find that I haven't been robbed. I am pleased to see that the windows of my car have not been smashed, that the car still stands where I left it. I've come to expect the worst from people I've never met and that is something I would like to change. On 2nd Street, where I live, there is a whole wall that has been graffitied with the words, "Everything you know about hair care is wrong. You've been Shampoozled." It is a small thing, I know, but isn't it also a weird confirmation that people lie? All the time?
I lost a silver ring today. I slipped it off beside the computer in the school library and didn't remember it until I'd left. Walking back to check an hour later, one sneakered foot in front of the other through the mud, I knew I would never see it again.
It is not worth more than fifteen dollars but Robert and I bought it at a market in Istanbul last summer and, after trying on dozens, this is the one he pointed to and said, "I like it."
In Turkey, I learned that Robert loves mother-of-pearl. People who know Robert would not guess this, would not imagine, probably, that the existence of mother-of-pearl, all shiny pastels, has ever made an impression in his thoughts. After he said that, I looked back at the ring, I saw that it was perfect.

Just now, I stumbled back into the library and the ring was here, slipped into an envelope and left at the front desk by a stranger who found it and thought, "This belongs to someone else." I opened the envelope like it was a present left by Santa Claus, someone you should know by now doesn't really exist.

I am the dog

2005-09-29T16:23:00.000-04:00

"And even though I was having a great time and becoming a better writer, the truth was that the year I entered graduate school was the year I stopped making decisions that were appropriate for my situation and began making a rich person's decisions. Entering this graduate program was a rich person's decision. But it's hard to recognize that you're acting like a rich person when you're becoming increasingly poor."

"Like a social smoker whose supposedly endearing desire to emulate Marlene Dietrich has landed her in a cancer ward, I have recently woken up to the frightening fallout of my own romantic notions of life in the big city: I am completely over my head in debt. I have not made a life for myself in New York. I have purchased a life for myself."

--Meghan Daum, "My Misspent Youth"

Underneath her smiling book jacket photograph, it says, "She has recently moved from New York City to Nebraska."

And everyone I know keeps asking me what I plan to do when I finish school in May (except my boyfriend, who never mentions anything related to the future for fear of having another conversation about, erm, what is going to become of us). Depending on my stress level, these are my responses:
1. "I'm going to keep writing and sending my essays out. And then I will try to publish this -- dare I say the word? -- book."
2. "I'm going to get married and have a fat baby. Right, Rob? Rob?"
3. "I've always wanted to study reflexology."
4. "I'll keep teaching yoga and maybe I'll go back to grant writing."
5. "Temp?"
6. "I'm leaving New York as soon as I'm finished."
"Where are you going?"
"Either Mexico or Guatemala. Or London. Or Paris. Or Southern California. Or someplace else."

I am blessed not to have any student loans, indebted instead to the generosity of a deceased great-grandmother and parents who want, more than anything, for my sister and me to be happy. Robert and I have paid the rent for our apartment through May. I worked full-time during three years at NYU and have decided, now, other than teaching regular private yoga lessons, to give myself this time to write and read and sometimes write and read (and, admit it, do the Times crossword puzzles), in bed, all day, getting up to make mugs of tea and check my email and go to the gym. It's fabulous, particularly (and only) because I know that it won't last forever.

Last spring, Jo Ann asked us to write from the perspective of a dog in a truck. "A dog?"I thought. "I didn't come to graduate school to become a dog." (Didn't I, though? And a very pampered one at that.) But this morning, zipping north on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, my windows rolled down and the wind whipping my hair into a thousand fuck-knots, I got it. "I am the dog," I thought. "I am that kind of happy."

its an MFA in writing and I, like, totally earned it

2005-09-28T13:55:00.000-04:00

The token boy in my graduate nonfiction workshop this semester is named Jason. It is my second year at Sarah Lawrence and this is my first co-educational class and the truth is, of course, that I hated him immediately. Despite the fact that I spent last year bemoaning the lack of "male energy" -- blaming the circles of women (some of them actually knitting) for the easy slip that our workshops took as they adopted the feel of group therapy. We would read Anne's essay, a profile of her friend Sohrab, and go through the motions of discussing its structure until one of us finally asked what we had all been thinking: "Did you sleep with him?" Somehow, without men around, it seemed okay to do this. And Anne blushed, shook her head. Our teacher looked at her, said, "Well, then, what happened?"

For the past four Wednesdays, Jason has worn the same pair of cut-off jean shorts, black shoes with black socks that are scrunched down around his ankles, black T-shirt. It's not his fault that we've stopped discussing our sex lives during our *critiques* (that's due, I think, to the influence of a more serious teacher, who, when revealing her personal life, does not expound further than, "I really need...coffee"). But Jason has been offering the sort of criticism that goes nowhere. To a girl who wrote about a night at a comedy club, he said, "This just didn't do it for me. I didn't feel it. Show, don't tell. You need to build up the tension to an a-ha moment."
I raised my hand. "Actually, I disagree with everything that Jason said. The freeing thing about nonfiction, according to Philip Lopate, is that you don't have to 'show' us. And if you're going to build up something, why not let it be the a-ha-ha-ha moments? This is about comedy."
Jason annoyed me. And last week, when our teacher stood at the blackboard with a piece of chalk in her hand and said, "Some of you don't seem to know the difference between 'its' and 'it's'..." I started to feel claustrophobic. At the end of the two hours, I pushed back my chair and ran from the room.

I saw Jason in the library yesterday. Same shorts, same socks. Before I thought to stop myself, I waved my hand and whispered hello. He sat down beside me and we talked for a few minutes. "I haven't left my apartment in days," he said. "Are you sick?" I asked. He looked at me strangely. "No," he said. "I've been busy writing."
He offered to give me some of his work and fished around in his messenger bag for two essays. Half an hour later, I sat in the library basement, beside the Coke machines, reading them one after the other. They are about his depression, his suicide attempt while he worked in the Peace Corps. The words, sick and ugly, that he carved into his arm with a pair of scissors.

I am learning and re-learning that I can never have too much compassion. I am learning, the more I do them, how little it matters what you actually say in a writing workshop. What matters, I guess, is that the people whose work is being read feel that attention is being paid to what they wrote. I don't think Jason, for all his proselytizing about taking his writing seriously, needs to be critiqued as much as he needs to feel that we are listening. That I am interested in something other than a fight.

no baby gemini

2005-09-26T14:38:00.000-04:00

A week ago Friday, Robert walked in the door at eight o'clock in the morning straight off a plane from Sao Paulo, still in his suit from the day before. I met him in my blue bathrobe, feeling shy about the horrible conversations we'd had on the phone in the four days he'd been away. Lately I have felt overwhelmed by an itchiness to speed things up, to stop this endless and inevitable waiting that comes with years-long transatlantic relationships. I had delivered an ultimatum that we either get engaged or break up. Robert responded by flying from London to New York and staying with me for a week without ever mentioning it. My threat hung around, the elephant in the apartment that only seemed to take up more space the harder both of us tried to ignore it.
And now, we didn't exchange pleasantries or chit-chat about his flight, the news, the state of real estate in Brazil. Robert took off his jacket and hung it on the coatrack and then he picked me up, carried me to the bedroom, and put me down on my back on the futon that he loves to hate. He kissed the sweet spot on my neck, between my earlobe and collarbone. I took off his cufflinks and unbuttoned his shirt and spread my palms flat against his chest, and then his back, to pull him closer.
An hour later, I sat on the living room floor, trying to discern when, exactly, my fertile days were expected and whether or not we'd done something stupid. I say stupid because if I were to get pregnant at this point, I could not have an abortion. Despite all the reasons not to have a baby now, it is something I want too much. There is something absurdly primordial in my head, whispering, "babybabybaby." How tempted I am to throw all the balls in the air and just try to juggle all of them, to push Robert into stepping up and letting a baby choose committment for him.

Babycenter.com, calculating according to the dates of my last period, reported that I had already ovulated. If I were to get pregnant now, though, the due date would be June 15th and the baby would be a Gemini. They offered up a list of all the possible due dates in a calendar year and sorted them by astrological category. Babycenter.com was designed for hopeful, expectant parents, not single twenty-five-year-olds who have homework to do. (Seriously. Homework. I've been working my way through Proust's Swann's Way for the better part of two weeks.)

Last night I got my period and I felt relief. I stood in the bathroom watering the fern on the windowsill, spilling dirt on my hands, and I laughed at the ridiculousness of our having a baby now.
And then, I thought of the ultimatum I had delivered, and how that issue deserves to be decided because of how it feels for the two of us to be alone together.
No elephant, no baby, no pressure.

feeling beautiful

2005-09-25T13:29:00.000-04:00

When I was twenty, I wrote a book in the second person, addressed to my future lover, as yet unknown. “Saying I love you,” it began, “is saying I want to be your mother. I want to tuck your collar into your coat, push your hair behind your ear, brush breadcrumbs off your lips, make our bed clean with soapy-smelling pillowcases softened by handfuls of dryer sheets. Flannel sheets in the winter, crisp ironed cotton in the heat. Let me rub your back when you are tired, draw a bath for your homecoming after long days, squeeze you Valencia orange juice on your way out the door. I will buy the toilet paper, our peanut butter, massage oil, and my birth control pills. I will take care of the magazine subscriptions, The New Yorker, Vogue, our daily Times.
I will dress myself up for you, I will dress myself down, shave my legs, pay for and survive Brazilian bikini waxes, keep my eyebrows threaded into perfect arcs. I will purr for you, play geisha for you, schoolgirl for you in my kilt and knee socks, polka-dotted panties, kama sutra picture book open on my lap.
“Teacher, I’ve read the chapter and I’m ready for the final exam.”
“Open your book to page sixty-nine.” Love me, I thought, you just love me, and it will be enough and I will take care of the details.
You will never have enough of me, I thought; saying you love me is saying that you will never have enough of wanting.”

I’m five years older now. I read all the pages I wrote and they strike me as dramatic and too sexualized but then, I stop. I think, “With my lovers, with all of my lovers, I am nurturing and maternal. I feel most attractive when I am giving, when I am making the people that I care about feel good.”

When I think about my ex-girlfriend, Shannon, what I remember most is one night in February several years ago, when she was sick with pneumonia. I came over to her apartment – trampled through the snow and waited for the G train to take me, in the time I imagined someone could have cooked a turkey, from Ft. Greene to Greenpoint. Back on the street, I pulled my wool cap further down my forehead and got lost looking for her street. When I found it, twenty minutes later, she answered the door in flannel pajama bottoms with skiing penguins on them; her hair loose and tangled, and her glasses perched on the tip of her runny nose. In one hand she held a wad of damp Kleenex and in the other, her cell phone, on which she was talking to her mom about her brother, David, who had been getting into bar fights in Australia.
I dropped my bag, pulled off my boots, and unzipped my coat before settling into the corner of her velvet couch. She has never looked more beautiful to me than she did ten minutes after that when I said, “You’ve been lying in your bed all day. Let me change your sheets.”
She hesitated. “No, no,” she said. “I can do it.” She held onto the doorframe to steady her self. “Shannon,” I said, “I am going to change your sheets now. Sit down.” And she did. In her bedroom, I cleared off library books on lexicons and poetry, the black leather handcuffs tangled at the bottom of the bed, abandoned there in the early hours of Sunday, two weeks earlier. I put a jar of fish food on her bedside table, carried the dirty water glasses to the sink, and came back to fluff her pillows.
She looked beautiful to me that night, it’s not because she was vulnerable and sick and told me that she needed me. She never said that; she never would have. What she meant when she said that she would do it was, “I don’t need you. I can take care of myself.” And what I meant when I scratched her freckled back while she fell asleep after feeding her single wedges of a Clementine was, “Thank you for not feeling that you need to be strong all the time.” If I had taken a photograph, I don’t think it would have come through, how beautiful she looked, and it’s better this way besides, because I was the only one who saw.