New Year's Resolutions 2012

1. Send in the paperwork to FINALLY adopt my Cabbage Patch Kid. I've spent twenty-seven years with Luna Nadine and I'm really to make it official, honey! No one is going to take her away from me!
2. Calculate my Weight Watchers points at the beginning of the day rather than at bedtime as to prevent sobbing to Dan that I ate 42 points worth of jellybeans three times in one week.
3. Spend a week alone in Nantucket collecting shells and staring ponderously at the ocean in a carefully chosen pair of J.Jill clamdiggers and a white, flowing sweatercoat. Kinda like the lady in a herpes medication ad.
4. Repeat number four with Dan in Ocean City or Long Beach Island. Substitute ocean pondering for drinking and J.Jill outfit for playful, flippy sundress.
5. Work out kinks in novel manuscript. Can a one-armed popcorn stand owner REALLY stand up to the mafia?
6. Update my Amazon wishlist so my recommendations don't make me look so nerdy: "Hey Alisa, we recommend the box set of Star Trek the Original Series as well this coffee table book about Bigfoot Legends!". Also, flaunt my Federation mug and be proud of all that I've learned from Jean-Luc.
7. Where the f*** is the Mary Celeste, missing ship of the 19th century Azores? Get scuba certification. Learn to swim. Get over fear of sharks. Find her. Find her.
8. Who is the one person in Germany reading this blog? Can you email me?

There's a Girl Crying on This Train

There’s a girl next to me on this train: she drops tears like the beads of a cheap necklace.
He’s not coming, she breathes to me, a sympathetic stranger. She clamps her phone closed and cries. Not coming. Not coming. The refrain is a closing valve, signaling the soon-shutdown of her whole being and her eyes ask, what should I do? What do I know? What can I tell her? She’s about nineteen in a hopeful white scarf and navy peacoat. There’s a man my father’s age sitting across us doing Sudoku. He shifts his eyes to us for the length of a breath. He comes up for air like a slow moving whale, shakes his head a little. He dives back down into his nonsense puzzle.

Here’s what I know, girl on the train, sobbing over some creep in Brick Church or South Orange who isn’t meeting you. Here’s what I know, old man across the leather seat who should say something to help her, to help me. Inside every man lives another man. Antechamber to antechamber we run, hopeless to find the center. Men: brick walls I’ve scaled all my life. Crawling over you, sliding down you. Once I fell off a roof, a stupid girl in the razor-cold snow, just to prove to them I was interesting and brave.

It’s been a really long time since I’ve cried that hard, I tell the crying girl, reassuring her that you can only hurt like that over love a few times in your life.

And then we started laughing, because the man across the seats from us had fallen asleep, and his mouth rolled open, like he was dreaming about his first kiss.

Diving Test: Holmdel Pool Club

In the mid to late 1980's, clearly unimpressed by my high pitched wailing, my parents firmly insisted I take swimming lessons. Again. "Stop it with the damn books already, you've read enough," my mom shouted, becoming the first and only mother in American history to pry a novel from her kid's hands. "You're soft and white and floppy. You are going to drown one day and all the moms on our street will blame me. I won't have it. Put on your bathing suit and get in the damn car!"

I know my mom's anxiety about me drowning is a deep-seeded neurosis planted by her friend Elaine. Years ago my parents had plans to dig a pool. When the nice man came to measure our yard for what would surely be the key to my life-long popularity, the women of Union Street emerged like superstitious villagers of medieval times. "Never, ever, ever, would I put in a pool with two young kids," they all said, shaking their heads with disbelief, as if my parents were installing a basement dungeon equipped with studded maces and a live Civil War cannon. "They could drown, Maria. Do you want that on your conscience?"

It became a thing after that. It was like if my mom went ahead with the pool plan, the whole neighborhood would think she was a bad mother. She was also growing increasingly concerned about the reckless antics of my daredevil brother Billy, who was fond of holding me captive underwater at Sandy Hook. Rather than reprimanding this bad behavior, it seemed more practical to have her daughter formerly learn to swim.

So we joined the Strathmore Pool Club, and later, moved on up Jefferson-style to Holmdel Pool Club, a slightly swankier pool facility with 25% less soggy french fries in the lap pool.

Unfailingly, Mom enrolled me every year in swimming lessons at the start of every summer season. It became embarrassingly obvious by fifth grade, and my thus fifth round of swimming lessons, that I would never progress with my age group. I was doomed to chill with the Guppies while my friends swam upstream to Trout and Shark.

These designations-- Guppie, Trout, Shark-- and the various levels in between pretty much worked like karate belts. Each kid "graduated" a level every summer, keeping with their cohorts, usually kids they knew from school or from day camp, where their gleeful mothers dropped them off to do six hours of forced crafting in the open sun. (Oh yes, it was good times.)

I was mortified on many levels during those lessons. First, they occurred at seven in the morning, when the temperature outside was a crisp sixty degrees (and sometimes windy) and the pool was a terrifying ice bath. I hugged my bathing suit, gasping with cold, dreading the moment when the teacher, fresh off a night's worth of prescription pill abuse over at Kean University's summer housing dorm, made us jump in. Every summer started with the placement swim test and ended with the diving test.

It was dreadful, and I was so powerless: I knew if I didn't pass that dive test, I wouldn't advance out of Guppy. And by my third time around, it became apparent they weren't going to socially promote me. This was the eighties. I was going to be sacrificed up to the work ethic god. Ronald Reagan with his weekend ranch hobby would approve. This little girl is going to swim. And not only that. She's gonna have to DIVE. It's so American.

I stood one morning in August on the edge of the board. The kids gathered around in encouragement. Most of them were at least three years younger than me, compounding my sense of doom and pressure. One kid had missing fingers on one hand but that clearly didn't stop him from having the strongest breast stroke in the class. That kid is probably a world class surfer right now, and there's me, softly crying on the diving board, worrying about getting water up my nose. Worrying I might hit my head on the bottom.

"You can do it!" barked the instructor. Oh, what was his name? Scott. So handsome towering above me in the morning pinks and whites of another New Jersey summer morning. Once I had a bloody nose and he escorted me to first aid to get an ice pack. It killed fifteen minutes of pool time. And I, although around ten years old, was old enough to innocently enjoy the attention of his brown eyes and the wingspan of his tan, long arms. (Where are you now? Sporty lifeguard pool teacher of Holmdel Swim Club? You're probably 45 now. Did you know I faked that bloody nose by scratching at it deliberately? Why couldn't I tell you that I didn't want to do the dive, and that all he had to do was check it off his stupid clipboard, and pass me along to Trout? I already felt like a little freak, with my bunny teeth and noseplugs. But at that age, you fear authority, as fragile and absurd as his authority was, it kept me adequately anxious about that diving test all of July. For years!)

I tipped my head down and leaned forward. It's so easy, the free-fall part; I've seen it done a million times; my own father, in his younger years, could fold beautifully like a jacknife into the Atlantic and come up to the surface in one unbroken line.

All eyes on me, and I held my breath.

I did what I always did: flail downwards, like a diving bird, grabbing my nose at that last precious moment, half-diving. Half-not diving.

"Aww, she didn't do it," lamented my classmates, hopping on alternate feet, shaking the water out of their ears.

"I don't care. I hate diving. I hate swimming," I said nonchalantly, heaving myself up the ladder and hiding inside my yellow towel. I scanned the snack bar ahead for my mother's signature sun hat.

Honestly, I wasn't permanently traumatized. I had come to terms with my small failure by age eleven or so; my interests were in writing stories, lazying around those strappy lounge chairs with a Babysitter's Club book, or playing kickball with my friends. Swim lessons were a small price for the epic days of summer, where each day sometimes was its own self-contained adventure.

But there's a space inside of me. Not a void. Not a longing. Just a small gap. Picture a kid standing on a rock over water. She needs to leap widely to get to the next stone. She's seen her friends do it, so she knows it can be done. She wants to do it because she wants to cross. She wants to do it because everyone is watching. She needs faith in her feet to not slip, even though the distance isn't really that great. It's as small as the gap between a dive and a fall.

Mechanics

The most powerful and enigmatic man in my life this time of year, it seems, is actually not just Jesus (sorry, Mom). It's the guy who fixes my car. Last year my car needed major work just before the week long vacation and just after I spent probably four hundred dollars on Christmas presents. The car did this on purpose.

Keith is my mechanic. Last night he kindly informed me that my car not only has a deflated tire, it has three deflated, floppy tires and one snarky, dying tire in the rear that "doesn't have much time left". He wanted to know "if I've been off-roading". The entire car is sagging for want of tire. And the muffler, he helpfully showed me, is dragging on the road, creating sparks. And danger. Ugh. Big bucks.

"Oh no, Keith. How much?" I asked, standing awkwardly under the dripping oil of my inconsiderate car. The men were all around me in their manly-car-world, blasting music and shouting at each other. Pictures of their kids taken in 1986 are plastered everywhere, as well as wise ass signage such as "5 cents for whining" and "my ex wife got the Rolls." There are old school dirty (literally and figuratively) pictures tucked away from my eyes in that back room, I know it. Everything seems like an engine: whirring and churning. I always feel so stupid in the auto shop, like a wrongly dressed rube, bait for the con. But actually the men at my garage are very nice.

"Do you play chess?" asked Keith, carefully filling out the estimate form. He has huge, cracked hands covered in oil and the pen sometimes slips from his fingers. My father has hands like this: dry; when the first wind of November blows, he'll wince and put on bag balm to no avail. My own hands are the same. Pink and lined and dry. Baby gorilla hands.

"Why? Do you want to play me in chess? If I win, do I get free car repair?" I replied, trying to be cute, fishing for that discount. Am I too old to play this role?

"No. I teach it at the adult school. You should come play. It's right by your house at the elementary school."

Hmm. My mechanic the chess player. I guess in such informal surroundings I didn't see this in him. But it makes perfect sense. He's deliberate, considers everything he says before he says it.

"I'll teach you," he said after informing me that my car needs almost nine hundred dollars worth of work. "Nothing like chess."

He gave me a lift home and told me about Christmas at his house in West Orange. He and his wife set an extra two or three places for anyone who wants to come in and eat, anyone who needs a meal.

"Aren't you afraid of that? I would be afraid," I said almost automatically.

"My door is always open. I'm not worried about anything," he said.

I was humbled by this. I was especially touched when he called me this morning to tell me that in the spirit of the holidays, he wouldn't charge me labor on part of the job, saving me a nice amount of money. "For a nice schoolteacher," he said into the phone, and I could hear the men in the background chuckling.

I guess I'm going to take a chess lesson...

Bridge and Tunnel Girls

Last night I watched a flock of girls in comically tiny, cheap black dresses push their way like queens into a New York City cab in front of Penn Station. "Webster Hall," said one girl loudly. I could tell by the way she said it, by her shiny stockings, by everything, that she'd never been there before.

I took the escalator down to make the 1:24 Dover train home, thinking about how their night is just beginning and mine winding down. It was freezing and I was exhausted. A part of me, though, wanted to dive into that cab with them. My husband, maybe reading my mind, smiled and shook his head. I wanted to talk about those long nights I'd had in my early twenties, how those girls were just like me, dressed all wrong for the weather, their insecurity and vulnerability so pronounced, it was like I saw them naked.

For a very short stretch of time, I too used to plan Saturday nights around Hoboken and Manhattan. "Where are we going this weekend?" I asked my new best friend-of-the-month, Louisa, who lived in Brooklyn with her noisy parents and a mysterious upstairs kitchen we weren't allowed to walk through (old school Italian).

"Tunnel," she'd utter. We'd slip our feet into awful, heavy black shoes. I'd dip my hand into a jar of Aqua Gel and carefully arrange hundreds of spiral curls and blow dry it carefully. We'd select our strappy halter tops and debate over wearing a coat.

Louisa would need to be lectured: if you meet someone at the club, I'd say, please don't leave me alone too long. I'd be pressed up against a wall, the music grinding me down like a tooth, but life pumping through me with all its romantic, dramatic promises. I was terrified of the men, all those handsome, aggressive Israelis, those silent, angry Russians, the playful dance gods otherwise known as Filipinos. (Somewhere right now a guy in Brighton Beach is blogging about standoffish, uppity girls like me in those clubs, scrunched up against the wall and coldly avoiding everyone's eye. You never really know. He could have been a wonderful guy. But in those settings, anyone could be a serial killer. Everyone in the flesh parade. Everyone vaguely terrified until stone-cold drunk).

Louisa was replaced by a few other casual girlfriends. In and out of the city, racing in my stupid shoes to make the 2 am Bayhead train. NJ transit like a circus. My make up smeared on my face with sweat and dance club fog machine grit. My nose a perfect 90 degree angle reflected in the train window. So many anxieties on those rides home. I gave out my number, will he call? Am I too drunk to drive my car home from the station? Will I ever meet someone? It seems like I fretted away my life on those train rides.

We went into the city yesterday for my friend's birthday. I wore flat boots and a warm coat. My husband drove us to the station and we soberly took a taxi from the restaurant. On the train he held my fingers and he let me kiss him when the lights flickered. There were squawky, drunk people everywhere going home. But for the girls piling in the cab, the night stretches open. The necessary abyss.

We have to humor those girls, those flocks of NJ transit girls, running for that last train. Wincing on the sidewalk with their bad shoes and sometimes crying. Sometimes laughing too loud and looking at me like I came from some distant planet, not knowing I'm just like them, just two or three stops ahead on the same line.

There is No Dana, Only Zool. And Other Single Woman Dangers of the '80's.

When I was kid, I was utterly captivated by Sigourney Weaver's character in Ghostbusters: the tall, sassy single cellist living in an amazing apartment in Central Park West. There's this classic scene where she's carrying groceries up the elevator (a perfect brown bag with overlapping leafy greens and a bouquet of flowers in hand) and she spreads her stuff out on the kitchen counter one by one. I always thought this was so awesome. I wanted to be like her. When I fantasized about being a grown up, the image of that grocery bag in my hand was always present after that. (There are similar such props in movies including Romancing the Stone, another sassy single girl adventure story with a dark subtext about being single and independent: you will somehow almost end up in an alligator pit, so watch out.)

Of course, when Dana's back is turned, the eggs starts to sizzle and fry right there on the counter, the first sign of supernatural occupation. Later, Dana herself becomes supernaturally occupied, temporarily the "Gatekeeper' for some ancient Babylonian demon uprising (or something). Again, the single girl: always in peril. I might argue what happens to Dana is sort of a safe depiction of rape, but I don't feel like exploring that angle. I'm fascinated by Dana's overall character trajectory: independent woman/paranormal sexcat/fuzzy headed victim.

The most enchanting part for ten-year-old me is when Dana is getting ready for a date with smart-alecky, but charming, Bill Murray. She's on the phone with her mother, haphazardly pulling off her winter scarf as she talks. She tugs off her jeans, revealing tights underneath. She is telling her mom, "He's a Ghostbuster…(waits a beat.) Those guys on TV." She seems a bit annoyed by her mom. I remember thinking to myself several things: WOW. Tights under jeans??! How cool is that!??? And I was more than anxious for Dana: the subtle staging of the whole scene is a bit ominous. As soon as Dana gets off the phone and closes her eyes briefly, the armchair she's nestled in suddenly starts erupting into a full-on monster dog, dragging her screaming into hell. I can remember yelling at the TV screen on her behalf.

It's hard to be a single girl in the city. Long before Carrie Bradshaw shoe-shopped her way through bad puns, there were girls like Dana, and Dana's sexually aggressive alter-ego, Zool. And the message to me then was this: better off staying in the suburbs. Better off with a husband.

Could these heroines have affected my whole generation? Did Hollywood perpetuate this anti-single-girl agenda deliberately? Or was it just a mirror of the 1980's, where rising divorce rates and women in the workplace became more of visible threat to some oppressive other agenda?

At the end of the movie, Dana is covered in Stay-Puffed Marshmallow Man debris/goo and kissing Bill Murray, her rescuer, with wild abandon. I wish I could have told her, there's a sequel coming. Better ask him to move in.

Keira Knightley's Snaggle Tooth

I just watched Pride and Prejudice for the hundredth time; it's nice to see another girl with a snaggle tooth just like mine depicted in the media as a great Hollywood beauty. When you're marginalized, it means a lot to see people who look like you on television. Ask any African-American woman how she felt back in the '60s when she saw Lieutenant Uhura at her little control table on Star Trek. That's right. That's a woman driving that spaceship. That's a black woman driving that spaceship. It was a historical moment. That's why when I see snaggle toothed girls in the movies-- leading ladies at that-- it affirms what I already know. I'm not just the "before" pic at the dentist office. I'm Keira Knightley. We are beautiful. We're rising above the oppression of conventional beauty. We're changing things. We're not opening up beer bottles for your amusement anymore. If you need us, we're standing like enchanting wood nymphs in the field, having our faces tenderly cupped by Mr. Darcy.

Virginia Woolf Time Machine

I've been fantasizing about this time machine that would enable me to slash a direct path through the universe to my favorite writers, right to the moment before they die. I want to save them. I'd be such a hero, they'd name the English department wing of York College after me: the AZ School of Literary Suicide Prevention. The pamphlet has a picture of Hemingway on it, sitting at his desk, with me sitting on it facing him, embracing him lightly. He's shaking his head with delight. In the background, my assistant in a white lab coat is gently putting the revolver back in the case and explaining everything he needs to do to cross over the time portal.

Or, the moment before Virginia Woolf dips her foot into the river, I could be there. I will beg and plead. Come with me, I'll say. To 2011. To my house in New Jersey. I will make you coffee. You can take the train into East Village. You'll love it. I can get you some Cymbalta or Paxil and a laptop and I think it'll be okay. Don't go.

All this maybe because I'm reading Mrs. Dalloway this week. Like Clarissa, I can float through the day, thinking about the past, the characters over the years I've met, the friends who've come and gone. All the mistakes and misunderstandings, the things that went unsaid. The part when she sits on her sofa with her visiting ex-suitor Peter... watching him play with his knife and getting all flustered and annoyed. It's all charged up with the unsaid. How he's thinking she's going to judge him for getting a divorce and loving a married woman (some younger girl he just met) and how he feels he needs to prove something to her, that someone desires him, and that Mrs. Dalloway needs to be reminded after all these years that she should feel regretful that she didn't marry him. And he's thinking all this, and then he cries all of a sudden (I thought the Brits were repressed), and they kiss on the couch. But I don't know if this is a passionate kiss or just an ambiguous polite kiss between friends. I'm too embarrassed to Sparknote it.

What I'm saying is, who wouldn't want a do-over? To go back and say, I should have told you....

I should have told you....

And of course, while we're at it, bending laws of time and space, why not save Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf?

You know this, though. If I brought over Ernest Hemingway through a time portal to my house, he would pillage for my three buck Chuck and eventually seal his fate with what he thought was his destiny. You can't fix it.

And Virginia Woolf would become a threat to me with her brilliance so I would have to make her stay with Allison or Jill ("She's so quick. She writes like ten poems a day. And they're good. I hate her face. Just let her stay with you. Also, she keeps crying.")

Or maybe the three of us would sit down in my living room and just talk and eat Chinese food.

"Thank you," they'd say in unison, marveling at the 21st century poem that is General Tso's chicken. "This is fun."

"I didn't know that so many people would be reading my books," Virginia might say.

"People don't really listen," Ernest might say. He's tipsy.

"I was out here listening all this time," I might reply.

Robert Plant Photo: 1973 Madison Square Garden

I'm wondering if this poem speaks for itself. In case it doesn't, there is nothing hotter than the footage of Robert Plant writhing on the stage of Madison Square Garden in 1973. He seems to be a combination of both male and female sexual energy. (His golden stomach and long hair and posturing). I can picture the millions of girls watching, the removed longing, the safe space of sexual admiration that only teen idols and their fans seem to create and re-create every generation.

Robert Plant's Stomach, 1973 Madison Square Garden

Across the slick madness
of young desire

I thought of you, your picture,
so many quiet breaths

between the years,

when men weren’t real to me,

yet lit up like Apollo
under my burning hand.

Holding Grudges, Or, Billy Was Mean to Me in Washington D.C.

When I was nine or so, my parents took my brother Billy and me to visit Washington, D.C. We stood at the White House gate and took the obligatory awkward family photo: I was wearing a pink T-shirt with a Smurfette iron-on. I squinted, gap toothed and pleased, at the camera. Billy was reluctantly standing a bit too far from me, his arms behind him, gripping the gate. His lack of proximity to me—suggesting irritation—appears to be the only thing he could control that hot summer day. We followed our parents around in the July haze from monument to monument, pestering them with our endless squabbles, my perpetual whining and tattling. There is no parent stipend for taking your kids out for a bonding weekend, but looking back, I give Mom and Dad credit for bearing our bickering by alternating two methodologies: stoically ignoring us, but occasionally smacking us.

As we both gazed thoughtfully at the White House lawn with our cheeks stuffed with Tootsie Pops, I told my brother that President Reagan waved to me from the window. It was a falsehood so outrageous that no one bothered to pay much attention to it when I said it. But it irked Billy so much he had to give pause. “You lie all the time. You are such a liar.”

I don’t remember if I actually started crying, but I might have produced some tears. It simply tore me up, for some reason, that he didn’t believe me. Why couldn’t Ronald Reagan be working at his desk and look out the window and see me and give me a little encouraging wave? It seemed utterly logical to me. Of course, the idea violated every law of reason and physics (even if we could see through a White House window from so far away, Ronald Reagan was likely too busy to hang out around the perimeters of his house, waving to children).

In response to our little fight, my mother stood close to my brother, gripping him by the shoulders. She said something like, “Why don’t you just believe her? If she says she saw Ronald Reagan wave to her, you should believe her!” She was very upset with him. I guess she wanted him to learn to humor me because that’s how kids are: they shape the world according to their own desires, no matter how nonsensical. My dad is getting me a horse. The guy at the mall says I could be a model. Bruce Springsteen is coming to my school because I wrote him a letter. That sort of thing. Not really lies, because when I said them, some part of me believed it possible. The reality of a kid’s life is sometimes not that interesting. If I look closely enough, I might remember painful things: even going back and re-constructing them seems difficult. I’m prone to dipping those images with the careful glitter of my adult logic: well, all kids at that age feel ugly. I know that now. Or, it wasn’t really that bad. I got over it.

What am I hiding from?

I’m starting to think that everything that ever upset me in my life has to do with my ego. The incident at the White House—so minor, I’m sure my brother doesn’t remember it at all—is a typical annoying-kid story. But at the heart of the story is the kid who insists she’s right when she’s wrong, the kid who sulks and cries. Unlike my brother who readily forgives and moves on with his life (and to the next squabble, always threatening in the distance), I held grudges. Isn’t this thing I’m writing now some form of a grudge?

I still won’t forgive the kid in seventh grade who taunted me on the Matawan school bus. I can tell you his name. I can recount what he wore, what he said. I can hear his voice, lilting like a demonic elf from the parallel boy-universe. Right now, he’s probably a normal, nice enough family guy with a few kids and a mortgage in West Long Branch. But still, I hate that guy! In Hoboken in the early 00’s, he wanted to buy me a drink at the Cadillac Bar. He was filled with tipsy nostalgia for the good ol’ days. Instead of burying the hatchet, I was pleased to coldly decline. In my short little dress and with an artificial, flippant martini haze, I fancied myself a hot little number: the nerdy girl who’s now the most coveted prize in the room (well, something cute anyway). As if he’d remember that day on the bus! What an amazing conversation we might have had if I hadn’t been obsessed with that grudge.

Or what about the kid in the hallway who saw me passing between classes in fourth grade? She said loudly, “is that a boy or a girl?” And some kids started pointing and laughing. At the time I had a very short haircut I hated. I offset the bad haircut by wearing a trucker’s hat and baggy T-shirts and shorts; I was experimenting with a form of androgyny I thought might protect me from ridicule. Something like, if I look like a boy anyway from the neck up, I should just throw in the towel and be mostly boy. But I remember thinking, I’m wearing pierced earrings. My socks are pink. I’m clearly not a boy. She’s just being a jerk.

A few years later in middle school I saw that same girl at a school dance standing by herself. She was waiting for friends who hadn’t come yet. I, however, was with a large group of friends (middle school was a good time for me. I was quite popular for about six months. You know—the perm. I rocked Debbie Gibson ripped jeans and a black hat). She had the most appalling look of anxiety on her face. If I were an adult in that light-pulsing gymnasium seeing her, I might shake my head in sympathy, for the dreadful insecurity of the age. How at any moment, your social circle could collapse all around you. You could end up alone and humiliated as fast as the dee-jay changes records.

But the middle school girl in me still thinks, serves that little runt right! I hope she’s in therapy right now expressing the suppressed horror of junior high rejection and how that’s why she ended up getting herpes as an adult.

(Even as I typed that, I felt sort of awful. But then again, what balm for childhood grief than the bloodless immaturity of mocking italics?)

One of my students jokingly said to me yesterday, I think you became a teacher because you want revenge on all the girls who were mean to you.
I was sort of intrigued and horrified. I said, gosh, I hope not.
But you still hold grudges, said one girl who was a bit too smart, who was afraid to see herself end up like me. Holding grudges.

But then I told the class: I think I became a teacher to tell you that’s it all going to be okay. Look at me! I think I’m actually fine.

And we all smiled at each other, shaking our heads. And when I looked at their unreadable faces, their complicated little faces, I really was.

The Copy Room Sestina

I was thinking about still being a teacher forty years from now (that would make me 73. If you follow the news, that's probably not an unrealistic retiring age). It was a frightening prospect. Our lunch room at work is straight out of the late seventies. It's a time capsule; if you move the furniture around a bit, you'll uncover fallen scraps of old notes from 1982: grade macbeth papers! buy milk!

I wonder if I'll be there so long, I'll sit next to some young and beautiful 23 year old and say, "this room hasn't changed since I started here in 2004." She'll say, "2004! I was only a baby then!"

Anyway, pondering the mildewy decor of our English teacher's lounge, I was feeling a kinship with the ghosts of these women who have passed through the halls of schools for the past few decades. Women who chose career over marriage; women who taught briefly but left to have a family, maybe with a regretful heart, maybe with relief. Women who went on to do other things.

It made me imagine a character: the unmarried, slightly mysterious older English teacher...I've had a few...bright and elegant. Maybe I'm channeling the teachers my mother had in the '60s in parochial school. What were their lives really like? I hope their lives were filled with more than just decades of Gatsby scantrons and essay grading (yes, I know. Teaching is more than that. But you know what I mean).

Anyway, I'm proud to say I wrote a sestina thinking about this idea. A sestina alternates six ending words in a specific pattern. It's supposed to be in iambic pentameter, but I couldn't swing it.

The Copy Room Sestina

Before school I find the copier cold to touch.
It requires the murmur of a pulled switch: though books
have kissed its glass face, it won’t stir easily. My hands
stumble like white birds, trying to make the copy
of the essay about some story that is about you.
There is nowhere else like this room.

Here’s a hive, a humming place, a room
where a machine stings with ink should I touch
the wrong gear, the wrong wheel. You
might say it’s easier to submit each page
I need, every packet, to some secretary to copy,
but I find it simpler to use my own hands.

I try to hide them, my hands,
because the light hides nothing in this room
and I already feel old, I feel like a copy,
a copy of young girl once lit up by the touch
of autumn rain in her mouth. But all the pages
inside me have lost their master. What about you?

And now you have copies to do, too. How like you
to stroll up to the machine with your able hands
and yank the lid like it’s your car door, the page
of your Hemingway nonsense clogging up the room
with smoke and men and nothing anywhere about touch,
nothing original to say. You just have to make a copy.

I wonder if this whole room—this universe even— is a copy,
somewhere replica me and replica you
shoot like comets and collate, the only feature where papers touch
inside the copy machine as intimate and lovely as praying hands.
There is so much I can say about this room.
(It is also a sexy place. But we aren’t on the same page.)

The problem with early morning copying is this. I have this book.
I come in ahead of the mob and hope to make copies.
But I start to think I may die someday standing in this room.
My heart is still thing, but it beats, wanting something—you—?
And I can’t escape the notion that my hands,
like a old watchmaker’s, wind down days with only this touch.

Here is what I fear: you are here making copies.
I am in this room, seeing you.
I have not lived. I have only copied from a book.

The Mast in the Sand, Barnegat Light, LBI

I had it in my head like a record refrain, some odd memory of my father a few years ago telling me about this wrecked boat in the sand somewhere on Long Beach Island, all the way out on the end by the Barnegat Lighthouse. His face was buried in the cheap newsprint of The Tin Can Sailor, a press for old Navy veterans. He showed me the picture. “Don’t you remember when I took you to see it when you were a kid?” I didn’t. We weren’t really Long Beach Island people and I wondered if my dad was mixing it up with some other sea curiosity. “I love it when things end up where they don’t belong,” mused my father, in his way, pensive and thoughtful in the way of an old salt, forced to live on the land and work for a utility company.

This past summer, I spent two weeks at a writing program in Boulder, Colorado trying to write this story about two kids who fell in love in Seaside Heights. The boy, Jason, is a baseball player and in one scene he takes her to this masthead, which sticks out a good fifteen feet into the air, the rest buried by sand. He has grandiose plans to dig up the boat moored underneath, to restore it, and take his female counterpart sailing around the world. I wanted this to be a romantic and significant moment in their relationship. Two kids driven by imagination finding themselves in a mystery. Perfect! I’m ready for my Pulitzer.

Jogging as if I was underwater through the high-altitude muck of Boulder, the image of that masthead kept presenting itself to me in an almost Jungian way. I decided to visit it as soon as I got home. After fourteen days of Buddhist education and half-assed meditation (since it turns out I can’t sit still to actually meditate, but I love the adoration of ringing bells), it seemed an almost cosmic invitation.

On my thirty-third birthday I took the trip down to South Jersey. I was meeting friends in Atlantic City to celebrate my birthday and my husband was in Chicago on business. It was a perfect opportunity to disappear for a few days and do what I liked. The summer still stretched charmingly before me and I was free to wander around the beach in my hat and sundress just like a character from a novel, or better: I will write my own novel, and this is research. An hour in the library before I left confirmed a few facts; the boat is the Sea King, foundered in 1963, and depending on the wind and erosion and other technical variables, locals have been measuring time by the boat’s position in the sand. People my mother’s age can remember playing on the boat as kids; these days, the mast is the only thing you can see, tipping to the sky like a reedy grandfather clock.

My friend Tim met me in Barnegat Light and escorted me to the right place: the 10th street beach where a few sun worshippers lounged, oily and brown and sleepy. It was swelteringly hot as we made our way down the path where the dunes were waist-high. The bright umbrellas dotting the shoreline were wavy and blurry, almost a mirage. Every step I took burned the soles of my feet so I carefully placed each one in the tiny strip of shadow against the wire and wood barrier fence.

About a hundred or so feet from the shoreline the mast stood like a huge crucifix in the heat, casting an impressive shadow. A sort of watchtower, slightly bent forward, cradling a few birds. The wood was baked and splintered and unforgivingly hot to the touch.
I tried to imagine my characters, the ones engendered in my brain, standing there. What would they say? How can this story take shape? Is there even a story?

As I looked and looked, my head felt empty save for the immediacy of the sun pelting my shoulders and back and my burning feet.

I didn’t bring my camera or a notebook anyway, so after a brief moment of looking, I made my way back to the car and drove to Atlantic City.

Driving down the parkway with the air conditioning on full blast, I thought about my dad’s delight in the idea that things sometimes end up where they aren’t supposed to be. Shoes on the side of the road or thrown up around telephone wires, for example. Or shopping lists that end up blowing around the edges of the supermarket parking lot. Or the slightly magnificent creepiness of a children’s toy, left behind in the road.

Of course, the person (mostly me) is standing there in the summer heat, gazing up at the mast in the sand, waiting for that moment, that moment that says, you haven’t been wasting your time. This will be a story. You aren’t being weird. This means something.

That person isn’t quite like the masthead, staring down the water for forty years, fixed and unfixed, depending on the whim of the wind. The person is not the thing in the wrong place.

I hope.

Things I Wish There Were Specific Words For

1. When I take a sip of something that I think is Sprite, but it turns out to be water. That feeling of disappointment mixed with it's-not-that-big-of-a-deal.

2. the feeling of being let down when I don't see anything in my email inbox, even at school, when emails usually signal more work.

3. the odd emotional tug on my heart when other people's children are being difficult and my friends say, "usually, she's so good" or "he's not usually like this." I feel a bit anxious and a bit sad and a bit bad in general but not enough to label it with those actual words.

4. the feeling that I need to talk to my mom when I'm in Shop-rite and I can't figure out what to cook for dinner but somehow I won't just call her and ask for help. It's not really laziness, not really pride, but something else! What is it??

5. the weird stab of something like annoyance, but also tinged with envy, when my husband gets the pancakes and I get the eggs and I want to split but he's not that interested in my eggs.

6. the awkward feeling I get at school when I keep bumping into the same person all day and I'm not sure if I have to say hi to them each time.

7.the urge to tell everyone how and when I lost my virginity but I know it's inappropriate.

My Grandma Really Wants to Cut Up Some Fruit For You

Just now, I'm watching my husband carefully add some raisins to his oatmeal. He has two bowls lined up on the counter and is emulating the style of the cooks on TV: everything he needs to make breakfast (carton of milk, currants, raisins) taken out of their homes and neatly lined up like little soldiers reporting for duty. He inquires if I want raisins in my oatmeal, or currants, or both.

It brought back a vivid memory of my grandmother who used to put out every cereal box we had on the kitchen table, with two bowls for my brother and me, and two spoons, and two different kinds of milk (whole milk and Lactaid for herself). This used to delight me to no end when I was a kid. Cereal buffet! Grandma has put out all the boxes! Maybe I will mix two different kinds together this morning; my mother never facilitated such options for me at breakfast.

Then she would start cutting up the fruit like a hundred people were coming over. Apples, pears, strawberries.

"Here," she'd say. "Eat this. Have some peach."

"No, grandma," I'd say. "I'm good with this cereal."

She would grow irate: "I cut up all this fruit for you!"

I can see her hands so clearly: small and white, the bright diced peach resting between her index finger and her thumb.

On mornings like this, when I committed to baking a birthday cake, or when I committed to doing anything domestic, I miss her; I miss grandmothers in general, how they always had kleenex, how they sat next to me in church and kept me quiet with sugar free candy, how they baby-sat me when my parents went out to dinner on those wintery nights when ordinarily I might have been afraid.

Roadhouse on AMC, can't go out now....

I don't know what it is exactly, but whenever I see that Patrick Swayze's bouncer-Christ sacrifice tome Roadhouse, I have to stop everything and watch it.

I think it's a combination of several factors. First, Swayze's messiah of the juke joint/speakeasy is pure hotness. He practices some kind of aikido or tai chi but approaches his new job with the calm prowess of a Western vigilante. He's on the classic Joseph Campbell Hero's Journey, but wow, who knew the journey would involve a monster truck squashing a car dealership?

And oh. That love scene with Kelly Lynch. Be still my cowgirl heart!
And oh. The dialogue. "Pain don't hurt" and a degree in NYU Philosophy. Come on over, Mr. Dalton. Come on over.

Preta (hungry ghosts)

what do i do with desire?

growling dog with blue teeth
lighting up the night?

prowl the Ping River at midnight:
the people who love me
have stuffed my mouth with feathers.

burned city inside me:
when there is nothing left
I will love the bones.

1927 Goss Street

you left
the astonished mouth of a front door
open
and a hammock in this tree: shroud for fallen leaves.
their spice in the catacombs of the yard
the only undead thing--
even the mailbox is a crushed lung
slowly breathing.

and still
I hear
what’s always
left behind in your garden (basil, begonias):

the wild
throb
of the half-eaten
heart.

Mormon Bride to Be, Boulder, CO

Where the earth splits
for final judgement
like holy burned bread
she will kneel
in a crater
and beg God to swallow her up.

But now her bag rubs against mine
on the bus up the mountain
in a most sinful way.

She talks about the river road,
how in December it freezes like a icy fist
and won’t let anyone pass
unless they walk;

how the Rockies holding
the sky are hands touching
heaven.

I ask her: fish with me
with this borrowed pole,

sleep with me
in this borrowed tent.

But at the falls
where air is thin and gray
we part ways.

I saw her loop through the pines
as alone and white as a bird.

The Naked Man Festival (Hadaka Matsuri)

Here’s the Spirit Man:
touch him as he passes
like a tossed orchid
through the wet street.

Mark him, his tenement,
win a year of good luck.

By the seventh hour his scratched face, eyes
pool blood, bearing the tattoo
of ancient pain:
tissue, bone, sweat—

you can’t really watch this if you’re a woman.

The festival forbids it: it’s for brothers, fathers:
men who wrap their dead sons and
they pray for a better year.

Even the reporter on the scene is a man
telling his crew what to blur and when,
until we can’t see what is an arm
and what is a jaw, an eye,

and what is a man anyway,

his chassis like broken stone?

When I Annoy You with My Feminist Soapboxing, Fill Out This Form

Dear ____________,


Today you offended me/the group with the following offense(s): (Circle all that apply)

*long winded rant about the new Summer's Eve commercial
*referencing “patriarchy” as well as other superstitions again
*paranoid theories about gas station attendants
*telling stories from the 90’s, when feminism was cool
*calling your husband “your partner” in an attempt to be inclusive and sexually ambiguous


Your recommended punishment:

*watch several episodes of Charlie’s Angels in silver hotpants
*listen to Lil’ Jon’s “Get Low” and not comment on misogynistic lyrics (we know you have it in your Ipod anyway)
*spend two days fishing with Uncle Johnny, who thinks women-folk belong in the kitchen

Buying A Corset from Helen Hirsch

The store Helen Hirsh is a West Orange strip mall staple, but I'm not a native. I came to live there with my boyfriend after a near decade of directionless projects like teaching preschool, working at a college, and graduate school. I say the place is a staple because the moment the engagement ring was on my finger, old women everywhere east of St. Barnabus Hospital (West Orange natives with names like Muriel and Aunt Beatrice) firmly instructed me two things: “You need to go to Helen Hirsch on Eagle Rock Avenue for your wedding day underwear. Also, you will be fitted.” I was intrigued, mostly by their almost ominous insistence that I heed Helen’s verdict on the destiny of my breasts, my wedding, and perhaps, my life.

Helen Hirsh already had a sort of mythical reputation to me. I passed it hundreds of times on my way to the movie theater at Essex Greene; the sign’s lettering was an old fashioned curli-cued invitation, slightly sad in its 1950’s undertone of confidence: it really says: Shop here, because Helen Hirsch is all you need to know. I got a good laugh when I got closer to it one day and saw the shop window loaded with mannequins in corsets and stacks of Playtex bra boxes towering proudly, the breasts of the cover models fading in the sun. Before Victoria had a secret, there was Helen Hirsch. And she doesn’t keep secrets. She screams at you.

Helen herself did not greet me when I finally visited one spring afternoon, however. I had finally picked out my wedding gown and indeed needed a corset to wear underneath. As it turns out, there are only two or three places in the county to even get a corset, so this was finally my time to meet the ladies in the time-frozen storefront.

As soon as the bell jingled to signal my entry, two women sprang like panthers from out the back. They were shrewd and mean and just shy under 5 feet. They wore bifocals and flowing cardigans; measuring tape draped round their necks like amulets and they spoke in unison like some ancient oracle. I’m not sure we had even exchanged formalities before one said with a gleam in her eye: “What’s your bra size, honey?” Her nametag read Phyllis. I knew in that moment that this was Phyllis’s favorite game. It was like a Clint Eastwood western when the drifter enters the saloon and the cocky local cowpoke says, “Now you ain’t from these here parts, are you boy?” You know, it was like a sort of throwdown. Phyllis thinks I think I know my bra size. But really she’s fucking with me. In a grandmotherly, shop lady, sort of sweet way, but still, fucking with me.

“Um, 38 C,” I ventured, already weakened somehow. I could feel my bra under my clothes start to itch. Maybe I am wearing the wrong size. Maybe I’m a B cup. After all, I’m plump, but my breasts aren’t really that big, it’s actually just my back that’s sort of wide, like a swimmer. Except I only dog paddle.

Phyllis threw back her head and roared. “Flo! Flo! Here’s another one who thinks she’s a 38 C! Flo! Come here!”

Flo responded with total consternation: “She’s a 38 C and I’m a tin of peaches!” Then Flo grabbed my breasts. I couldn’t help but giggle. She literally squeezed them like she was pondering a melon purchase. If she could have confirmed their value by smelling them, I think she would have. Then she began plotzing: “Oh no, honey. Oh no. You need to be measured. Follow me.”

Flo and Phyllis had no qualms about following me into the dressing room—which had two rickety swinging doors with at least three missing slats—and watching me wriggle out of my T-shirt. They shook their heads in disappointment when they saw my beige, nubby bra with the floppy straps. After I described to them my wedding dress and my urgent need to make my size 12/14 frame look more like a 10 on my wedding day, they nodded, eyebrows knitted together with the cooperative power of a top secret government think tank. I felt a surge of hope. They might criticize, they might taunt, they will, and will again, squeeze my breasts. But they will make me look thin.

Out came the measuring tape. As Flo measured me under the watchful eye of her twin, I had two thoughts:
1) All the perverts in the world with their creepy internet sites and convoluted schemes to video tape women in the buff should just have lunch sitting on the carpet of Helen Hirsch, because all I keep seeing are nipples and pillows of pink and brown flesh: the dressing room doors are just an inconvenient boundary for Flo and Phyllis, who keep coming in and out, regardless of how their naked customers are.
2) I have stepped into a magical world where my lumpy nudity is just another everyday challenge for strong Jewish women to surmount. There is no chubby belly a good girdle can’t smooth; there is no slooped shoulder a good brassiere can’t wrangle; there is no size 12 Vera Wang satin gown without its secret counterpart of firm spandex and ribbing. How you look naked is of little concern. It’s what Flo and Phyllis have in the back of their store that is the challenge. And they are glorious together, like two queens solving a mystery together, speaking to one another rapidly: Maybe the Chantelle. Maybe the strapless corset with the stays. Does Playtex still make that one with the buttock rounder?

The measuring itself revealed what I secretly knew all along: I’m not a 38 C, a size easily found the back of the rack of most major retailers. I’m a weird, hard to find size, and my right breast is at least three tablespoons bigger than her inferior sister. I didn’t bother committing the actual new size to memory. Instead, Flo and Phyllis began lashing me into a complicated contraption that involved dozens of hooks and old fashioned stays, and required Flo to cheekily pick up my breasts and literally scoop them into the cups so that they are presented as luscious half-moons to the world.

“Oh yes, doll. See? You look good.” This is from Phyllis, nodding with sagelike approval, squaring my shoulders to the mirror so I could admire my Mae West curves. Several other customers stepped out from their dressing rooms to weigh in on my corset at the main mirror. They nodded like a Greek Chorus, praising my tiny waist, my flat stomach. One women, bless her heart, kindly reminded me that on my wedding day, I might consider wearing silky shorts under my dress as ammunition against the dreaded “chub rub”, the clinical term for when your thighs rub together in the heat.

The corset cost a staggering eighty dollars. But what could I do? I was terrified of defying Flo and Phyllis, whose firm authority I had come to depend on after about five minutes. As I pulled out my credit card, I found myself asking them, “Where can I get a good chicken salad sandwich around here? Why is my fiancé so weird about two checking accounts? What do you think about a cruise for our honeymoon?” It was remarkable.

Several months later I had my wedding, and it was everything a good wedding should be: stressful, beautiful, with dancing, champagne, and a night alone with my exhausted new husband at the Clinton Inn. As he unhooked the forty buttons from the back of my wedding dress and watched it pool like a collapsed marshmallow at my feet, he saw my corset and assessed it with dismay and curiosity. “Now that looks uncomfortable,” he said, and with little ceremony, merrily unlashed me like a gardener unstaking his plants after a storm.

Escaping From Alcatraz

I. Escaping from Alcatraz

For courage,
men must first
imagine the night:

dark folds of stars,
the bloom of camellia perfume.

They must imagine
their girls from home, still young when they went away,

bare-breasted and longing across
the guarded shore.

To climb free from
barbed wire cages
some built boats with tires and rags.

By dawn their bodies lay
like flung lilies on the sand:

the Pacific won’t swallow them.


II. A Small Article in the Sunday Times

The Nazis buried a Jewish doctor alive.

They found his bones last year in the Belzec trench.
He ate one of his leather shoes
to buy time.

His granddaughter’s hands
held the shoelace up to the sun

like a string of sapphires—
they have not won.

Somewhere he stands,
urges us on: keep rowing, keep running.
The old man with one shoe.

Hitchhikers, Rt. 83 Lancaster, PA

A cornfield breathes them out,

two girls lithe and green

as blades of grass,

their hair bright with sun.

I’m sorry I drove by, wary

of time, my purse. 

Now when I drive alone

I wonder about them, their empty arms:

where are you going?

If I could do it again

we’d all coast together

past sunflower farms,

fenceless fields,

face the day’s gloaming

like barnstormers.

I might tell them about how poems

are letters of regret.

How even though the road stretches on

in front of us

like an uncertain, outstretched hand,

how light I’d feel

if we all walked together,

carrying nothing.

Harry Houdini Exhibit at the Jewish Museum

Your things are on display like an open casket.

Needles on a string you pulled from your mouth.
The awed, rusty faces of locks.
The milk can, the Chinese water torture cell,
manacles, keys.
Photographs of you
underwater, the four minute show,
nothing but lungs, bones. Chest, waist—
concave stomach. You smirk: what can you do?
How long can you hold your breath?

Fragile skin of journal pages—
the letters slant like a man upside down.
How you stood on East 79th Street,
remembered your father’s voice, wept—
you were ashamed to tell your wife.
There are buildings you can’t leap from.

And here,
silk shorts you wore only
a minute on Coney Island
till you stood
naked near the water’s break,
the crowd almost angry.
Let us see a man drown.

You cut through the water like
perfect praying hands.

A Poem about Hemingway....

I gave a friend of mine this picture of Ernest Hemingway in Key West. He looks so young and happy and prolific, doesn't he?

Photo of Hemingway in Key West, 1928

There are things I want to tell you but

even in my imagination

we wouldn’t talk at a party.

I’d view you from some corner like

a new map without the pleasure

of a fold.

I might say
these landlocked days

we sit in an empty rowboat
going nowhere

or

the world is a face cracked in half

or

my father fought in the Six Day War

but says real men bake bread at dawn

in Throggs Neck.

                                          

You might say,

a baker knows what a soldier doesn’t:

what you touch soon crumbles.

Everything sweet is measured in spoons,                             

then dissolves.

Tall man with brown hands:

come watch the tall ships

drift the horizon

and drink whiskey with me.

We don’t have to speak at all.

Guy on my Driveway

A few months ago I was startled to see a man standing on the end of my driveway, hands in pockets, in the early fog of my morning commute. He scared the hell out of me and wore an oversized floppy raincoat. As I walked to my car, I said, "Good Morning?" as in "Can I Help You?" or as in "Please Don't Kill Me, I'm Nice."

He just smiled and waved at me, backed away slowly, and started walking. As I drove past him, shuffling on the curb, I realized he had Down's Syndrome and was significantly older than I thought.

I was a bit unsettled about it, but figured he lived in the neighborhood and meant me no harm. Why he was standing on my driveway, as if waiting for me to come out of the house, was a mystery. I'd not really seen him before.

Since then I've seen him often walking around town, looking disheveled and thumbing for rides.

I didn't see him all summer, but he recently cropped up on my driveway's end, again, just hanging out. A few days ago he asked for a ride to Seymour's, a little coffee shop around the corner, but I shook my head no. Then he shuffled away, waving at me as I passed him on the side of the road.

Sometimes I wish I could be that person, the one who gives rides to people, the one who isn't afraid of that kind of connection. I sort of miss the liberal recklessness of my early twenties.

I can honestly say I wouldn't give a strange man a ride anywhere, but part of me wonders where's the harm in a man with Down's Syndrome who needs a ride a quarter of a mile on a rainy morning?

I wonder if I'll have this dilemma every week for the rest of my life in this house.

I'm Trying to Be a Blogger

Hi friends! I'm trying to do this blogging thing again...mostly as a forum for my poetry. I would love feedback!

Here's what's on my mind today: this girl I went to elementary school with, Krista, was my best friend for about three weeks. I remember we had the same panda bear patterned button down shirt and yellow leggings (purchased from Bradlees). She was tall and blonde and beautiful; I worshipped her and hated her, too.

In third grade, I learned, really learned, about feeling ugly.

I was looking at a picture of myself on Facebook after completing a 5k...all I could see was this pernicious blue vein that bulges from my forehead that lately has been in every picture of me. I wonder if this vein has always been there or if it's one of those weird things that starts happening in my thirties?

That vein really got me stirred up. I tried to focus on how good I felt, completing the race with a not-horrible time considering my lack of practice and all the hills.  But that third grade inner voice called me up...the one that says, Krista is so pretty, everyone wants to stand near her.

Where did you go, Krista? Probably standing in front of some mirror, mourning every line. Does she remember us, the two girls laughing in line for the water fountain, gap-toothed and happy?

 

I'm Gettin' Jiggy with the 21st Century!

Due to popular demand (well, my one friend Allison mentioned it once) I am starting an online resource for my writing and an online journal of narcissistic musings about daily life in the New Jersey suburbs. Some people are sitting around somewhere, going, "If only there was a blog I could read where there are poems about boat propellers and Harry Houdini as well as a lusty monologue or four about the sensual cut of Bruce Springsteen's jib." Now, it's here.