Family News

Congratulations to my beautiful sister, Lori, who is now engaged to the wonderful and handsome Paul.  

Thanks, but I'd rather not

Ad from American Airlines.  Circa 1960.  From gwen at Sociological Images.

I am Snow White: an excerpt

The Duke of Eastchester is dead, and thank God for that.  I had gotten sick to death of the stink of his sick room.  He farted, he vomited, he shit himself.  The smell permeated into every room of the castle.  I avoided him entirely that final week. I busied myself fucking the carriage boy in the stable.  Harry is a good boy with strong muscles and I shall keep him on.  I shall however get rid of the Duke's laywer, an idiotic man who believed that women have little use for finance.  Well he shall see, won't he?  I will also get rid of "Cook" an old bitch with a warty nose who hated me.  She thought me a commoner who had married above my station, and so I had but that was because I had the finest tits in the land, and now a pox on anyone who crosses me!

I pretended to cry when the physician led me into the sick room as the Duke was breathing his last.  I tenderly stroked his fevered brow when in reality I desired to crack his head open with his chamber pot.  I held his puffy, swollen hand and thought about biting it; each finger, one by one, until they bled.  When I knelt down on the prieu dieu pretending to be overcome with grief, inside I was a giddy as a young lamb in a spring meadow.  When they washed his dissolute body down with soap and water, I wanted to claw out his vacant eyes.  At the graveyard as the parish priest dolefully intoned the 23rd Psalm, I could scarcely keep from laughing and dancing on his grave. 

I am not by nature a wicked woman.  The Duke however was the devil incarnate.  In the beginning, he was the perfect gentleman.  My poor mother was speechless before his pomp and circumstance, his gold carriage, his team of stallions, his brocade jackets.  I was a young girl, barely fifteen, when he took me as his bride.  He savagely deflowered me on our wedding night.  For hours I couldn't move.  I was in such pain.  My white eyelet gown stained in blood.  He slipped out to join a pack of whores he kept waiting in the stables.  I cried  myself to sleep.  And the next morning too shamed to ask for help, washed out the blood from beneath my fingernails, washed out the sheets. 

I tiptoed down the grand staircase into the dining room.  My legs were weak and shaking.  The Duke was enjoying toast and tea.  He completely ignored me.  I spent the years summoned to his bed whenever he requested.  I endured his temper and his violence when he was drunk.  Often he beat me, though never about the face. Why did I not leave?  I believed I was enslaved.  In captivity.  And I wanted my mother to have some peace, and she did.  The Duke bought her a fine house in the countryside, and though I wasn't allowed to visit her, my spies told me she lived a good life.  I was permitted to attend her funeral and wept bitter tears. 

But now he is dead, and his kingdom is mine.  There is but one fly in the ointment.  Four days after his mouldering corpse was laid to rest, I was summoned to the main salon.  And there before me stood his bastard child.  A shivering, tiny slip of a girl, perhaps 13 or 14. And so pale she looked like a ghost.  She looked up at me, and said,

I am Snow White.

The story of the blue wallet

Out walking Molly this morning, the temperature hovering around 40.  Warm enough for a nice stroll through Cobble Hill.  Streets were quiet, sky was the color of milk, rain was coming.  I had a coffee, a green scarf looped around my neck.  I turned left on Baltic, found a pile of trash outside an apartment building, the East River and the BQE close by.  I stopped to look at the books since I'm such a fiend, saw a few I had read already, and a wallet. Powder blue leather with a red rose stamped on the front.  Really nice. 

I thought what a strange thing to toss out onto the street.  So I opened it and saw a young woman staring up at me.  Clarice (not her real name).  Blond hair, blue eyes, five foot seven inches--- according to her driver's license.  A Brooklyn girl. Opened up another compartment and found credit cards, Master Card, Visa.  Found business cards.  She goes to my vet.  No money, just some change.  Impossible that Clarice had just tossed this out.  More likely Clarice had been robbed.

I took it home and emptied out its contents.  I was hoping to find a phone number. I imagined how relieved she'd be when I said, I have your wallet!  I didn't find her number, but I began to construct her life with the clues provided; she had to live or work close to Park Slope because she had a business card from a coffee shop.  Ten visits and she gets a free cup.  Five holes had been punched out. 

I found recent bank receipts that showed a balance hovering around three or four hundred dollars, so she wasn't rich.  A card from a visiting nurse--- perhaps she had a sick mother.  A card from a gallery on Atlantic Avenue.  She had an Amazon.com credit card, so obviously she liked to read.  I began to imagine her as a younger version of myself.  Struggling, but educated.  Good looking. A coffee drinker.  Maybe out on the town, lost her purse.  In that moment, I couldn't help but remember all the times I've stumbled home, late at night, often drunk or stoned.  Often obvlious to how dangerous NYC can be. 

Then I found a phone number tucked away inside a pocket. A man's name; James (not his real name).  What the hell, I thought, maybe he knows who she is.  So I called.  It was ten in the morning, and James answered.  I said, "Hello, you don't know me, but I found your name inside of a wallet. I thought perhaps you know this woman."  I was careful to only give her name, no other information. He told me that yes he had a met her last night at a party. 

He accurately described the piece of paper I was holding. He didn't speak to her very long--- she was leaving to go to another party, Jewish.  And since he wasn't Jewish, he wasn't going.  This was at Church Street.  After he spoke to her and gave her his number, he spoke to a "Muslim gentleman."  Why was he so talkative?  To a stranger? Then he went on and on about how he had met another woman on Court Street, but she was only like four feet eleven inches.  This was definitely getting weird.  I told James good bye and called the police.  Which of course is what I should've done in the first place.

They were at my apartment in 15 minutes.  They were bored.  Two cops; one fat, one slim.  Molly was yapping and jumping all over them.  They took the wallet and left. Wherever you are Clarice, I hope you got home safe and sound.  I hope you have the same kind of dumb luck that protected me all the years when I was young and foolish.  I hope you are happy to get your wallet back.  Call me.  We'll have coffee.

Good luck Tippy

My niece Angelina has finished school, and won't be here four nights a week.  She's been staying with me since last May.  I know I've helped her a great deal.  I made it my business to provide her with a quiet, stable home.  Every young person starting out in life deserves this.  Especially women.  The first freedom is economic after all.  Bring home your own bacon. But she has certainly brought life and light into my life as well.  I liked the fact that in the summer when I got home from teaching and she got home from school, we'd take Molly, and get an iced coffee at TAZZA on the corner.  Angie always got the iced mocha with extra chocolate syrup.  Being 30 years older, I got the plain iced coffee with skim milk.  Once she brought home a miniature lemon tart that was so bitter she threw up in the bathroom.  I honestly couldn't stop laughing.

Then of course there was the time she wrangled fifteen sponges from behind my kitchen counter.  I wrote about this in an earlier post. She was Felix and I was Oscar.  That's the Odd Couple for those of you who don't know your Neil Simon.  I hadn't cleaned out my fridge in a very, very long time.  When she asked my why, I said, "I can't deal with washing out every semi-empty jar of olive tapenade, peanut butter, jelly, spaghetti sauce, apple sauce, horseradish, salad dressing and marinated olives that's been sitting there for about a year."    So one night, with steaming hot water running into the sink and bleach, she systemically and efficiently did the job.  Of course, I joined in, but I was merely the lieutenant to her general.  This was her mission.  Almost impossible if you ask me, but she did it.

Lately we had been taking turns making dinner.  One night two weeks ago, I trudged home in the dark, from the Bronx, completely exhausted.  I walked into a bright clean kitchen and  fresh Fratelli ravioli for dinner.  Last Tuesday I made lemon chicken cutlets and mashed potatoes.  She always had Cheez-Its, Lucky Charms, milk, yogurt, and raspberries in the house.  One morning I woke up, walked into the kitchen and found her at the kitchen table eating cereal and bagging up her lunch at the same time.  She had two plastic baggies in her lap.  She was filling one with salad greens and another with tomatoes. 

I loved hearing about her bitch clients who didn't tip even though she transformed them.  The woman who came in with orange hair.  The woman with 100 foils in her hair.  She had all the gossip; the petty jealousies and the competition, the teachers she liked, and the teachers she hated. But most of all I loved watching how much she loved what she was doing.  Sometimes it was hard.  Her youth. Her vitality. Her belief in love, in marriage and happily ever after.  I truly hope I was able to mask my cynicism and even hope that some of her optimism rubbed off on me. 

The last night she was here, we ordered in Thai and split a bottle of wine and watched Untamed Hearts with Christian Slater and Marisa Tomei.   Saturday morning, I decided to get up and have breakfast with her.  When I walked in the kitchen, she said, "I'm sad Tippy."   I know how she felt.  I was sad, too.  Tippy BTW is our mutual nickname for each other.  Don't ask why.  It's one of those you-had-to-be-there things.

I know I will certainly miss her.  I ask myself; are you going to clean the house on Monday even though Angie won't be here on Tuesday?  Are you going to continue to keep the fridge clean?  The floors washed?  I think so.

Good luck, Tippy.  You will always have a home in Brooklyn.

One of many obsessive self-portraits

I call this:  Insomniac's Delight.

Light in December -- The close up

The same attenuated light on the same corner.  Not a view of the sky, but the street.  Same shot. Next to the Lebanese restaurant, but now, in the foreground, you see a young girl in a pink coat  in a grove of miniature Christmas trees. Framed by taller trees in the background.  Her brother and father hovering nearby. But it's almost like they are underwater, as if the light is filtering down from the surface of a river or an ocean.  The trees become anemones with red velvet ribbons.