So I have lowered my head against the wind, and my expectations, bought an overpriced book (Callas) at one of the few remaining independent bookshops in Manhattan, have given up hope of a predictable schedule, (pronounced the British way,) and decided not to run away, not today anyway. Somewhere inside me I am borderline terrified, as I have not been this old before and am surprised to still feel girlish. You never change from inside your eyes.
In the same book batch that I found Callas, I found a much cheaper little volume by Thornton Wilder, who at one time I imagined myself to be like, creatively anyway, full of bright imaginings as I was, not having come to terms with the truth that I would probably never find the creative partner for my soul. I was a little girl for a very long time, the happy conviction that I would be able to fulfill myself as a dreamer who could write and be realized, exacerbated by a novel, Sweet William, being optioned when I was in my early twenties (Sweet William), going back to my high school (Cherry Lawn, Darien, Connecticut, the capital of anti-Semitism in America, and us mostly Jewish kids, put out on the hill by confused or incompetent parents) for a movie that never got made (the star went to another film instead, taking the money and the deal with him.) I still get flashes of memory of the long weekend when it was still going to happen, and Bazz Burwell, my wondrous once drama teacher, sat musing , his fine face in his fingertips, and seeing me seeing him softly said, "I was just remembering you as a student." I really loved him but didn't have the money he needed, so the relationship didn't continue, the school went out of business, and I still don't know if the Carter Burwell creatively in the movie business is his son. "Age cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite variety" Shakespeare wrote of Antony musing on Cleopatra, but the relationship must not have gone on long enough.
Oh, Life she am a puzzle. As is this instrument of writing I am not quite sure what to call, typewriter that she really isn't. Laptop, I guess. Just as I am unable to maintain true sovereignty over the size of the print.
I could take it back to the Apple store, mercifully not that far away from the apartment left me by Maman, as I think of her in affected recollection, in spite of her oft murmured threats that she wouldn't, including once as she awakened from a coma. "You're not getting the apartment!" she grunted, before even opening her eyes.
I have to guess she really loved me, as much or as well as she could, having sold, lost or profligated everything she had, from the diamonds to the Jackson Pollock, The Blue Unconscious, 8 x 12, feet that is, which I slept under when home from school once she'd married Puggy, and turned it (and him) on its side("What difference does it make?"she'd said.) He had gone to school with Clement Greenberg, the art critic, who'd gotten Puggy (Saul Schwamm he was to fellow brokers who'd mostly had their backs to him, since he was a Jew) to buy the painting as he was the only one with any money. When their marriage ended... he'd fled, left everything, and she, a child of the Depression, had panicked and sold everything in the huge Park Avenue apartment for peanuts, almost literally, the Pollock for ten thousand. It is now worth maybe two hundred million. Maybe more by the time you're reading this. Gag. Oh, well.
It's only money.
Cost me only a hundred and ten dollars to go to the Christmas show at Radio City. I thought (not sure) I had gone there as a little girl, with my daddy, as I called him and was sure he was, except I liked my mother better, cruel though she was. Cruel is a heavy-handed, heavy-hearted word, but it applied to her. She was beautiful and brilliant, the first after minor plastic surgery: nose. Incredible eyes and a dazzling smile. Only one cavity her whole life.
There had to have been something truly mentally ill about her, as she was disproportionately smart, and had times been different probably could have become the head of General Motors. As it was, she knew how to downcast those eyes. But no idea how to look up into herself to become.
Poor Mama. Probably she was as enraged as she was having spent all those lunchtimes in a cubicle toilet in a bathroom at
school, eating the sandwich Grandma Gussie had made her, saving the two dimes, giving them, all added up, to Grandpa when she'd graduated.
Writing this, remembering as best I can, I am touched that she was only as crazy as she was. And only part of the time. Even more moved by how much in love they must have been, a few years later, Puggy the self-made Jew on Wall Street, Helen the social director she'd become after the struggle upwards from secretary she'd learned to be on the train as we Southerned towards Florida from Pittsburgh that winter. I'd turned five but had to pretend to be four as we didn't have the money for the ticket. Already knowing how to read, I could dictate to her as she practiced shorthand, and we moved towards her improbable Destiny.
