Diamonds and Rust

Susan has put Jeremy down to bed. It was breakfast for dinner, which is his favorite. A meal of ketchup and syrup. Sometimes he’ll eat the eggs and pancakes, too. I am sitting out on the back porch. One of those white, plastic lawn chairs. Late summer, very warm, humid. Los Angeles. The wisteria on the terrace is beginning to die. I am drinking a glass of wine, my second, and smoking a cigarette, the one Susan allows me ungrudgingly after dinner. Susan is in her studio writing away on her ancient Dell. The keys stick. The lights from the valley, the source obscured by the hills, illuminate the sky a discomfiting purple, a bruisy gray the color of nausea. I am feeling so tranquil, so safe swaddled in that intimate color, in the intimacy of my routine. Later I will grade papers on helical structures and the difference between genotype and phenotype. It is lovely out. It is eerie.

The phone rings, but there’s no one I need to talk to. Susan picks up. It’s for you, she calls. I stab out my cigarette and pick up the wireless phone that’s just inside the doorway. Take it back outside.

Got it, babe. I turn on the phone. Hello?

Sal?

Oh! That voice! How do I know it so immediately? How do I know it in my intestines and in all of my extremities before I can even think of her name? How wrong I could be after ten years, having seen her face in ice cream parlors and strip clubs, in restaurants and at Jeremy’s soccer games. Sometimes, terrifyingly, flashing across Susan’s face, or other times in Jeremy’s own. Sometimes startling myself in my own unthinking reflection.

Fiona. Fiona of the long lashes. Fiona of the inexplicable laugh. Fiona of the capacious sexual appetite. Of the ukulele strings. Of the little wicker baskets. Of the rosewater. Fiona the Cruel. Fiona the Ambivalent. Fiona the Terrible.

It has been ten years.

Where are you calling from? I ask.

Taos. Taos, New Mexico. Fiona of the bird bones and animal skulls.

What are you doing in Taos?

I’m here for a gig.

Are you at a hotel?

I’m at a payphone.

You’re calling me from a payphone?

You haven’t changed your phone number.

It’s called spontaneous recovery. A dog who has been conditioned to salivate at the ring of a bell, and is then put through a period of deconditioning still retains the memory of the conditioned response. After a week of silence the dog will still salivate at the sound of the bell. Fiona has called. I am drooling.

Why are you calling me?

Fiona the Wreck. The Impetuous. We had, the summer between our freshman and sophomore years, maintained an enthusiastic correspondence, although we spoke to each other nearly everyday, anyway. Sometimes we would read aloud our letters to each other over the telephone; such was our pleasure. I wrote:

June 21^st, 2000

(father’s day)

Dear Fiona,

You left a few hours ago for Boston. I didn’t even have to cry this time, but I still feel sad. I can’t even tell you how much I hate goodbyes. Gwendolyn (the girl I babysit) is napping now. I really like her. A lot. She’s become very affectionate with me, and sometimes I’m tempted to snatch her up like a teddy bear and curl her into myself in bed and just sleep and sleep and sleep. We watched Sesame Street, today, and painted. Her mother is subletting a room to this post-grad lacrosse-playing hippie named Nathaniel who shamelessly flirts with me while drinking nettle tea (I had some. It tastes like I’d expect nettles to taste.) He told me that his friends in college used to call him “Plain Yogurt,” which is just about the sorriest excuse for a nickname I can think of. I stole one of his American Spirits last week, which I don’t like as much as I like to say I do.

She wrote:

July 6^th, 2000
Sal—

Today was—without a doubt—a two cigarette morning. Perhaps you know what I mean. Two cigarettes, and I’ll probably have a third after I finish my Red Eye, which I only drink over ice. I went to an 8:15 therapy session this morning. Needless to say, it required me to smoke two, maybe three, cigarettes, and order an extra shot of espresso in my coffee this morning, and I will take the jitters that inevitably follow as happy consequence. I always like it when my knees shake.

We were nineteen and twenty in the year 2000.

Yours was the only number I could remember. My cell phone broke. You know… payphone. Nobody has to remember anybody’s number anymore.

What do you want?

A friendly voice, I guess. I’m sorry. I know this is awfully inappropriate of me. If—I just wanted to know how my dear, old friend was. Is.

I do not know what to say. What do you say to a reanimated corpse? To the stuttering coma patient? She continues,

It’s been so long, Sal. I think about you everyday, you know. If there’s anything I think about everyday it’s you.

I did not tell her that for ten years she had inhabited my closets and bed sheets and dishware. The empty O’s of my breakfast cereal. Certain chords played on the guitar, certain city smells.

I’d just like to catch up.

Ketchup?

What?

Wasn’t funny. Nevermind.

Just. Tell me something about yourself.

All at once, I am sick.

August, 2000. She came to visit me in Los Angeles. And I, like a big dope, met her at the airport with a picnic basket. Flowers. She liked sunflowers because they cheered her up. I’d bought her a big bunch of long-stemmed sunflowers, which she subsequently decided not to take home with her on the plane, four days later. They lasted almost until the end of the month in my room. My gift to her.

I’d taken her to Venice Beach because she’d never been to the Pacific Ocean before, and we’d had one of our typical conversations, a little bit drunk off the wine and not having had eaten enough soup and bread at all. We were both trying to be so skinny, back then.

What’s your favorite thing about me? It was the sort of indulgent blather lovers like to get away with.

Considering your shitty personality, she said, I remember, I’d have to go with your eyes.

My eyes?

Your breasts. Your hips. Your canines. I don’t know. You bite when you kiss. Sometimes you’re funny.

I love you, I’d said. She said,

You’re my companion. She was selfish. She was selfish and unfeeling. I didn’t know that then, so I continued.

I think I like your mouth the best. When you smile, it’s like the sides of your mouth pull up by fish hooks.

You’re my best friend. I was flattered, I remember being flattered at the time.

Do you want to swim, I’d asked. She looked into the sea, the girl who’d only been to the Atlantic.

No, she said. The sun is so warm. Later on that day, when we had gone from the beach, she said, I love you tremendously. She meant it, but she was such a whore. She went back to Boston a few days later.

She wrote:

September 3^rd, 2009

It’s not simple, Sal. Can I be your friend without losing the intimacy I’ve come to depend on with you? Can I be your lover without being sexually attracted to you? I like kissing you, Sal. And then sometimes I don’t.

What I don’t want, Sal, is for you to act differently towards me, for you to even feel differently towards me. There is not a vocabulary large enough, there is not a culture advanced enough, to categorize the myriad manifestations of love. This, Sal, is why it is not simple to me. I am not trying to be abstract. I just. Am. Abstract.

She was so goddamn cute. She was so good with words. She would ask me questions like, would you rather know a little about a lot, or a lot about a little, or, if you weren’t in school where would you be right now? She had a way of biting her lower lip. When she’d met my mother she had flung herself around her neck and said, thank god, I finally meet you! Every perfect thing she ever did now turns my stomach.

Are you punishing me?

What? Her tone seems genuinely alarmed, but she never claimed to be disingenuous about anything. For godsakes, Sally, no. I decide to light another cigarette.

You still smoke? She asks. She must’ve heard the match strike over the phone, or correctly interpreted the pause. Me, too. Camel Reds. I bet she still smokes Camel Reds. I don’t ask. I exhale.

It’s not like I have a flair for drama or anything, Fiona. I think you know that. But I don’t think I can talk to you. You know the phrase “my blood is boiling?” My blood is boiling.

I wouldn’t just do this to you, Sal.

I am so sick of you. I am being unfair. She doesn’t know I’ve been seeing her face in doorknobs for ten years.

No, Sally, she says. I’m sick.

And she wrote:

July 12^th, 2000

Christian wants to drop acid today, because it’s his birthday, and I don’t, but I probably will and by the time you get this letter you’ll have heard all about it or else maybe I’ll write about it here if I do. I told you about my aunt who ate acid when she was 19 and still has flashbacks where everyone is a cartoon? I shouldn’t do it if I’m sad, or if I’m even anything but riotously happy, it seems to me, or at least in a mood for exploration, but I have been putting it off because I’ve either been working or I’ve been with you or I was sad. I don’t think I like the sound of psychadelics. It sounds like Alice being trapped in Wonderland for hours and hours too long. Like you can’t turn your mind off. I like to turn my mind off. Or go away. Maybe it will take me away?

I’m wondering if I should go abroad my junior year. I think I’d like to go to Spain. Maybe even just for a semester

Cancer, she says. Breast cancer. I’m going to have a mastectomy. I’m scared. I am speechless. Somewhere between rage and perplexity, I know she shouldn’t be telling me this. She is in Taos, New Mexico, playing guitar and singing for a bunch of ex-hippies and mine is the only number she could remember when her cell phone broke. And then I understand.

The gig?

Nah. I’m in L.A. I thought maybe I could see you.

Where is it… when—

Cedar’s. On Thursday. I didn’t think I’d care so much. About a boob. Tit. Breast.

Left or right? I can’t help asking. Not that it matters.

Right. My guitar playing side.

Fiona—

I know you still hold a grudge. Sal. For godsakes. Please get over it. I am being cut open on Thursday. I’d like for you to be with me.

She wrote:

July 23^rd, 2000

I’m already thinking about next year. Wonder if I’ll get my shit together. Stop smoking. Find a therapist. Do my work. Get employed. Start running again. Go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning. It’s all very daunting (I’m not kidding—I’m legitimately nervous), but it’s exciting, too. I’ll be ready to be in New York by the time I get to New York.

And I replied:

August 1^st, 2000

I’m already thinking about next summer, too, which seems appropriate because I started thinking about this summer last summer. We will both live in New York and I will swing a free trip to Israel, as is my right. I will surf around Brooklyn and Manhattan on my futon, and, hopefully, be very much employed, or maybe get an internship at some clinic. And I will sleep with you whenever I possibly can.

Your very good friend,

your lover, bunkmate, band manager, companion, partner in crime, etcetera, et al,

Sal

In the last few months I knew her it was obvious that something was wrong. Women, people, perhaps, especially women maybe, are very intuitive. I don’t know if you could call it a sixth sense or what, but there’s something sensory, something meta-sensory, a way in which you see and calibrate her every word, inflection, movement or half-movement, voluntary or involuntary, notice subconsciously where her eyes rest, when they won’t catch yours; the way a kiss becomes perfunctory, the subtlety of distinguishing that perfunctoriness from a comfy familiarity. It’s when talking on the phone becomes easier than talking in person, because there aren’t eyes to meet, no hand to grab. The way you reassure yourself because of the easy telephone chat. The way Doubt’s million little claws will relax their pinching hold and you will tell yourself that that vague anxiety you feel has no foundation, that your friends see you together and tell you how they wish they were you, that at parties you still hold hands and when you’re drunk you sloppily whisper in her ear to come upstairs with you, to take her pants off, and when she says no, dear, you tell yourself to not take it personally, it was neither the time nor the place. Women, people, some women maybe, give very little credit to this… this intuition. Women, people, are so—Fiona is, was… is—very complicated.

Twice, we fought. The first time was because of something I said. I told her she talked a lot but usually didn’t really say anything. I was joking a little, a little too on the nose, I guess. Fiona—Fiona the Broadcaster; Fiona of the syllables and syllables and chatter and debate. Fiona the Raconteur, she got quiet at first and then said, that’s the worst thing anybody’s ever said to me.

And the second time was when I finally grew brave enough to ask her what was going on (I said, even, what the hell is going on).

I wrote to her once:

June 30^th, 2000

Fiona, I, too, have been raised with a vocabulary of psychobabble—with as many words for neuroses as Eskimos have for snow. Love is never love, it is obsession. Love is never love, it is codependence. Love is a dangerous, shadowy thing whose traffic creeps along a highway from your heart to your head and confuses the two. Love is not merely emotional—it is intellectual, psychological, controllable and uncontrollable in as far as you can choose what to think and how. Love, as I have grown to understand it, makes you weak rather than strong.

And if I ever loved you in that way, it is certainly not how I love you now. I love the thing that has been created between us, but more importantly I love you. Because you never cease to dazzle me, and to impress me. Because you are smart, and worldly, and savvy. And passionate. And thoughtful. And talented. And I am my very best when I’m around you. My love for you.

is.

pure.

When was it that I became an adult? Where is the threshold? I had a crummy childhood and my journal entry from my thirteenth birthday reads, I will never get any older. I am so old. I was initiated into the customary rituals of sex and drugs and even bills and taxes and college tuition, of red tape and bureaucracy and grocery shopping, of tact and reticence and propriety at all the normal times, if not earlier than most people I know. There was an obvious point where I thought I’d found myself, as if Identity was a purely heterosexual thing and that the emotional zenith of a lesbian’s life is when she concedes that she, yes, is, in fact attracted to women and she can join the masses screaming for her cause, but is suddenly excluded from the rest of the clubs, the other kind of clubs for conditions that novels get written about. At least you know who you are, people have told me. Susan loves you. Jeremy is a blessing. Who I am has never been determined by me. I was once talking to one of my roommates in college about Fiona and she said, stop, stop right now. There’s a line.

How dare you call me, I say into the phone.
For godsakes, Sal. It’s been ten years. We are talking nonsense to each other. I say,

You’re making me feel like a child, as if I didn’t think we weren’t all, ambiguously, children.

I need you right now. I am already a mother of one. I mean, of two. I say,

This is impossible.

Sal, are you okay? Susan is calling me from her studio. I must’ve been yelling into the phone. Her voice is like the rope that pulls you out of the gulch.

I’m gonna go now, Fiona.

You’re just gonna go?

This is impossible, I say again.

Sal don’t be weak. Please, please—

I?

– I’m very confused.

In one world I hang up the phone right here. In another, I keep talking to her, I walk her down off that cliff just like I used to when she’d spiral into depression. In another world I say, very maturely, very melodramatically, goodbye. In another Susan comes out and, knowing instinctively whom I’m talking to, makes my decision for me by taking the phone from my hand. Another one Jeremy wakes up screaming from a dream. In another, the phone beeps; call waiting. In another, the phone simply melts or explodes.

Objective

He tells me that his mind does him in;

That he overthinks his thoughts and that they spin

Inside the skull and numb his touch until

His skin becomes cold from his within.

And he'll apologize, and cry and cry,

and I, I'll kiss his eyes.

The brain's a masochist that quietly entices

Each plume of though down an oblique tangent

Into grisly forests of the mind.

Behind my eyes lie trapped half-truths and truths

That stretch into gruesome hyperbole and lies;

They mask the retina and they fool the hand,

Thus blind, I cry.

And in my mouth apologies, like soap, like bile,

Foam forth in weak disguise.

I'm grateful: he reciprocates,

He'll kiss my eyes, 

They all will kiss my eyes,

And murmur wordless sounds of empathy

That move like animals along the spine.

Is this how it has always been, will be? Or

Will there be a time when I

Can stop a thought before its path divides,

And, like a smiling animal, fulfill myself by

Grinning at the eucalyptus tree, or lying in the sun?

(2007)

Poets have told me I can be a poet,

But the door to the future is small,

And the handle sticks.

It looks like the door to a public restroom.

If poets live behind there,

Up against the shadows of skyscrapers

And crammed into tin cans, flower pots, match books,

Slaughtering each other with their pens for tenure and

Proselytizing metaphors,

Then perhaps I'll stay out here a while longer:

Bus tables, look for Jesus in the mayonnaise and

Mary in the jam,

Notice Fibbonacci in the sunflower's maw.

I can slap someone in the face with a bouquet of nettles,

I can kiss my sister on the mouth and shout,

Here's a poem for you all,

You ugly freaks,

Sayonara, but I've found my poems in the

Tree, the pinky toe, the toilet bowl,

And I'll never even write single word.

Instead, perhaps, I'll learn to blow the best

Smoke rings that anyone has ever seen,

So beautiful that people will weep at their perfection,

And helplessly try to catch them in their hands,

They'll be reminded of their mothers,

And first sexual encounters,

The Venus de Milo and Spaghetti-O's.

Perhaps smoke rings seem more democratic to me,

Or else I'm scared that I ain't got what it takes--

But when blown correctly a smoke ring can

Rim your head like a nimbus,

And also a cat's arched back will sometimes make me cry.

(2008)

What You Have Heard Is True

There are many and many things you've heard,

Things that are true about me.

It's funny, it's funny the things that are true

Of all that you've heard about me.

I'm an obelisk cowering in wind-whipped sands

Of a desert, that's how they left me.

I, who had swaddled them both in white dresses,

Had suckled and brought them to be;

Had housed in my body, had twice halved my soul,

And loved unconditionally.

Unimportant, it seems, are the ranch hands, the horse blood

Through which trembles our legacy.

Trifling, perhaps, are the words that I read them,

Yeats' torch songs and Annabelle Lee. 

Shoved under the door on a Wednesday, wet spring,

Lay an envelope addressed to me,

And its letter bore words and each word bore a will

Whose intent was to kill me, kill me.

It was written by doctors with faces as mean

As African death masks; who see

Only themselves bearing scepters of science, as gods

of divine Psychology.

The doctors, those doctors have torn them away

From my breast, from my bed, from me;

Hacked away at the trunk and split with an ax

The roots of my family tree.

And I'm left here among the debris.

May their snowcovered faces wax round as pink-moons and

their sicknesses lift by degree,

May they sing cowboy songs to their daughters and never

Be ruined; but may they grieve for me.

For they never meant less to me.

They never meant more to me.

They are me,  am me, were me.

Part Crow

What she does is she collects:

Words- written on the walls-

Ceramic pigs, jewelry, paper clippings,

Birthday cards, and photographs

Clutter the corners of her house

Like sticks do a nest.

Part crow, she'd give away her very wings for

These shiny tokens;

They are symbols, she thinks, of other things,

love.

It's a strange language she speaks,

One of metaphors and exchanges:

A stone for a stone,

A key for a kiss,

Or a live heart for something promised--

Anything less than a live heart makes her despair,

Curl up into the center of her nest and

Bury herself amidst her crocheted pillows

And empty beer cans,

The television humming the grey

Sound of trapped insects.

And she gives so much:

She'd pull her soul out through her

Mouth with pliers if she could,

Disentangle her own heart from the

Mess of organs in her chest

And make it a gift wrapped in

Gauze bows,

Its presence Momentous and Terrifying

on the living room table, and

so heavy it cracks through the wood.

She falls through the sky when she gives up

Her wings.

The cripple whistles through the air

Like a suicidal angel

Landing blackly with a thwack of feathers,

the snap of hollow bone

Out of her mouth slips the

Soul

She's bared so many times;

Its snaky ascent to the sky

As invisible as what she's

Tried so hard to give, and to receive

(2008)

Dad

When you got off the plane the heat

Hit you like a wet rag, and

The dark boy called Chief said, we ain't in Kansas anymore, ladies.

You got called Sherman, because of your glasses.

The first night the rain came, you said, it came hard,

and you were afraid.

You didn't use the ponchos

Because the sounded like dice in a tin cup:

(a dead giveaway gives way to dead).

The first night the rain came was black as

The spaces in between stars,

Black as an Asian eye,

Black as the inside of a body or a gun.

You didn't use the flashlights;

(Too bright, you said, too bright).

Dimly greening in the jungle you found mysterious

Leaves the glowed eye-bright,

Bioluminescing tokens that you tacked

To the backs of your helmets to keep track of one another.

You must have resembled and army of elf-men

Winding wayward through the trees

In your apple; peacock; olive drab.

(Inconspicuous prey).

What would the enemy have though to see

Your throng?

In the gloom with their feet wet and the skin

Becoming raisin-rot inside their shoes,

Their insides parched, their mossy outsides slipping down

Their skeletons; would they have spooked?

Would they have taken you for ancestral spirits, or

Is the trick of the glowing leaves known to them?

Your 36th day out, the tall blonde one

Shot a buffalo in its bulbous eye,

No reason.

When the bullet sang through you,

You said you contemplated god, didn't you.

Why was it, again, that you

Decided not to pray?

Apart

Circles have lost their circumferences,

birds fly in their particular trajectories,

the carbon cycle continues

irrelevantly

here,

things are not yet dead, and

I am caught in early autumn’s purgatory.

indecisive—

I am the leaf that’s yet unfallen

even yet ufurled—

I wait.

Hold me again.

Swaddle me in your sake.

Lick, again, the salt that rims my eyes,

Burrow, again, into the divots of my back,

The caves under my arms;

Burrow, again, into sleep into me.

Let us insinuate ourselves into

The rabbit holes that intersect above our heads,

Let us meet for hours in this floating underground;

Let us hibernate the heart until December.

I don’t see circles;

I don’t see birds.

My breath is invisible, until

on a cold day it will suddenly appear

before me,

like cumulous clouds drifting out of my mouth.

(2009)

Salsipuedes Street

the best thing I’ve ever seen is a mother with her baby’s fingers in her mouth

sucking them to keep them warm.

early autumn and the baby—with

pierced diamond ears—

wears a pink sweater, and her mother,

full of love,

a grey pea coat. 

(2008)

Portland, OR, June 4th Conversation: On the Bus Ride Back

I’m on the bus. The Weather People have promised biblical rain and lightening. But it’s still fair outside. Very humid, and I’m glad the bus is air-conditioned.

My cell phone rings. The ring tone is the theme song from I Dream of Jeanie. It’s my mom.

“Do you know what happened today?” is how she starts off. I had been on various busses for an hour and a half already—interviewing for a job that had come to nothing.

“What?”

“David Carradine’s dead.”

“I know,” I say. “He hung himself. I mean hanged himself. In Bangkok.”

“He hanged himself?” she says, like she can’t believe it. “He was off drugs. He didn’t even drink anymore.”

I’m awfully beat, but it’s nice to have someone to talk to, even if it is my mom, so I try to keep the lust for sleep out of my voice. “Prolly why he killed himself,” I say.

She brays (very familiar). “That’s exactly the sixth funniest thing you’ve ever said,” she says, marking detail like she thinks she’s J.D. Salinger. “Because I’ve been keeping track. But hell.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Your father and I knew him.”

“I know.”

“He got your father arrested.”

“I know.” I know the stories as well as she. I know them better, probably, but I don’t say anything to upset her. History’s her subject. “How are you?”

“I’m good, I’m fine. I went to your sister’s award ceremony the other day.”

“I didn’t even know she had an award ceremony.”

“Well, she did.”

“Did she clean up?”

“Do you know what she got?” Mom asks. “She got the Spanish award. I didn’t even know she spoke Spanish.” “She’s terrible at Spanish.” I know. I used to conjugate the verbs for her homework.

“I don’t really know her,” she says. And then, “She got the Spanish award. And she got the lawyer award, or whatever. And she got the Psychology award, which I like to attribute to me.”

I laugh, hard. I bray. I cover my mouth, because people on the bus look at me. “That’s the funniest thing you’ve ever said,” I say. Dancing on the edge of a knife. When I’m done laughing—and my eyes are wet I’m laughing so hard, inappropriately so, my laugh turning into a cough that I try to disguise so my mom won’t guess I’ve been smoking for the last 10 months— I ask, “Was she happy?”

“I didn’t see her.”

“What? Why not.” The knife. I shouldn’t have asked.

“I’m not welcome at those things. I had to ask Pamela to come with me I was so nervous.” She brays, again, like what she’s talking about a particularly hysterical sketch on SNL. “I wore sunglasses and a black turtleneck. Haha. We sat in the back like the Blues Brothers. Ha. I had to have a beer beforehand I was so worked up.” Everything she says is careful and deliberate. I am, I know, her last surviving audience from the previous world.

“I saw the Bellwoods the other night,” I say. I like to think that I’m above the emotional word games we play, but I feed her ammunition like a animal eager to get shot. “Peter sends his love.” Peter always, always sends his love.

“Oh god,” she says, her tone her own perfected composite of weary disgust. “I don’t care.” I am silent on my end for a second too long. “Or it’s just that we don’t even have anything in common anymore, and they chose their side and everything.” We might as well be reading off a script, one that has been tattooed on our hands or on the insides of our skulls, ones that we ourselves wrote.

Peter and Sarah, or definitely, at least, Peter, don’t think that they chose sides. They are under the impression that they were dumped—unceremonious casualties of divorce.

“Your mother,” Peter, with his comforting Londoners accent, says to me whenever I see him, “was very special. People were inevitably drawn to her. She would start talking to her and everyone would fall in love with her. I loved her, I love her still, very much.”

I want to lecture him. I want to tell him how many friends she once had. I want to tell him how many business partners she’s chewed through and abandoned. I want to tell him that she’s good for a few years and then she makes you into her enemy: her mother, her father, her brothers at one point or another. Her best friends. Her husband. Her. Daughters. I’d like to shake his hand and congratulate him, I’d like to look him in the eye in all sincerity and say, “god, man, don’t you understand the bullet you dodged? Don’t you know how much easier it is to be without her? Don’t you realize that all my therapists have told me that she is incapable of real love? Don’t you see that she has no one with whom she started out?”

I don’t know what I really think. I know what I really think. My mother taught me to confuse think and feel. My mother taught me how to answer the phone properly;

“Is Hallie there?”

“Yes, this is she…”

She taught me how to hold the steering wheel of a car, how to make up golden excuses, how to lie. She taught me to like Yeats, and Raymond Carver, and Dorothy Parker. She taught me that a clean cook is a good cook. She taught me how to run. How to fasten your pants lying down so your jeans fit. She taught me quarter tricks and bar games. She taught me that boys always fall in love with girls who can play the guitar. She taught me that there is nothing more important than my family.

Family cannot abandon you.

Family can abandon you.

Family. Abandons. You.

“When are you coming back to California?” she asks. I’ve told her this a million times. Every time I’ve talked to her since Dad got me the plane ticket back.

“I fly to San Francisco on the eighth,” I say. “I’ll be in Santa Barbara on the ninth.”

“Well, come around if you want.”

“Mom…”

“I know, but come around sooner, too, if you want. You always, always have a place here.”

“I know.” I know what I know. History is my subject.