Six Generations of First Born Women

Can I help you?, Sex and Lies continues... Tuesday, June 17, 2003

He's a sculptor. Tanned and just returned to Boston from a residency in Roswell New Mexico. He's looking for studio space. His name is Robin. I am blinded by him. The moth drawn to a flame now has meaning.

It's part of my job to help artists find suitable work space. "Can I help you?" I ask. We both know in that moment exactly what I mean. The rest is a dance.

He needs some temporary space immediately while he looks for something more permanent. I happen to know about an available loft in a building close to the gallery, I give him the contact information, we chat for a bit, then he leaves. Renee is looking at me shaking her head. I'm flushed, I giggle, "he is beautiful".

The next day, he returns to thank me. The space will work for him. He is using it as a working studio while living in a temporary apartment on Newbury Street till he finds a live/work loft big enough to accomodate his stone carving. He lets me know that he will be in his new place working and he'd be happy to show me some things, if I feel like stopping in.

I have never in my life gone looking for a man, gone to his place to search him out, to see him, to know him. That day I went to find him. His studio is flooded with sunlight. His back is to me as he seems to be working on a plaster relief. It is a contemporary version of "The Three Graces". It is simultaneously classical and of our time. I'm impressed. I'm standing behind him, looking over his shoulder. He slowly backs up a step. My breasts just graze his back. I am acutely aware of every cell and pore in my body. He keeps gently pressing backward. I think I may die. The spell is suddenly broken. He turns to face me. He looks down at my feet, they are bare in sandals. "I need a model for feet for a piece I'm working on. Are you available?"

HERE COMES TROUBLE, Sex and Lies continued...

I have sexual amnesia when I try to remember those most intimate moments with Pete. Sex had lured him to me but my attraction to him was a more conscious, calculated thing. Once, after we had been married about six years I suggested we consider having other sexual relationships within the context of our marriage. Marge and Dave were an extremely attractive couple with a little girl about Erika's age. They were close friends. I always felt an underlying sexual tension when we were all together and I guess I had them in mind when I made this suggestion. Pete fumed. He nearly popped a gasket. It's the last time this idea is brought up.

Construction on my Fort Point studio continues. I'm also working part-time as a gallery director in the BVAU gallery on Washington St in Boston's North End. The organization moved there when we lost our luxury digs in Government Center. It was a great job for me. Flexible hours, I shared the position with my good friend Renee. She and I each had a desk facing the gallery entrance so we could see everyone who came in. Somedays we would be there together planning exhibitions, meeting other artists, writing the grants that helped to keep the whole operation afloat. My lawyer friend Frank was still very active with the group. He donated tons of time and expertise to our cause which was artists rights. He was also looking to date some cute gals.

One warm, sunny afternoon Renee and I are both sitting at our desks. There is a bulletin board by the main entrance where we post notices of available loft space, exhibition opportunities, jobs, etc. I tended to be the more gregarious so the job of greeting visitors and trying to get new members for the organization generally fell to me. On this day in 1980, I glance towards the door. The most adorable looking man I have ever seen is standing there scanning the bulletin board. He glances my way. I am mesmerized. I rise from my desk like I'm levitating. Renee stares at me and mumbles, "Uh-oh, here comes trouble".

FINDING THE EXIT, Sex and Lies continued... Monday, June 16, 2003

This marriage will suffocate me. Now the lying begins in earnest. I open a separate bank account in my name. We'd always had a joint account. Neither of us had much concern about money perse, just as long as we could meet basic needs and feed ourselves seemed to be enough. We never fought about money. After that scene several years ago when I made a last ditch effort to get him to quit drinking, we never fought at all, about anything. I was just happy that he seemed happy and left me alone to pursue my work.

I start depositing all my pay checks in my account. I tell Pete that I have to find a new studio, the garage is just not big enough, the paintings are forcing me out. He understands. At a BVAU (Boston Visual Artists Union) meeting I connect with 5 other artists who have found some studio space at Fort Point. This is an industrial area in Boston that has a lot of vacant manufacturing space built around the turn of the century. It was like no-man's-land in the late 1970's and early '80's and the original owners, The Boston Wharf Company, were renting whole floors to artists. Thousands of feet of space with high ceilings and huge windows overlooking the channel to Boston Harbor were being rented for a song. Of course they were just shells with no insulation, some heat or too much heat, freight elevators and that's about it. They invited me to come see the space, they needed one more person in on the deal to make it work. It was an entire floor on the fifth floor at 215 "A" street. This is right near where Boston's "Big Dig" is today. I had never ridden in a freight elevator before. It clanked and groaned as the ropes and pulleys hauled us up. It was a little scary. I step out into the space. It is so huge, so open, so empty it takes my breath away. This is unchartered territory. I can begin something new right here. I sign on.

We figure we can divide the space into 6 studios, but we will have to build the walls ourselves. Any improvements on the individual spaces will have to be done by the occupant. Plumbing is a problem. I didn't know a thing about this stuff, I had to trust my partners, all guys, two worked in construction. We only have plumbing and bathroom facilities at one end of the space. Not my end. Turns out, to extend plumbing and have running water in all the spaces was way beyond our means. We would all have to share one big industrial sized sink, one bathtub with a jury-rigged shower and two toilets, all for 6 people, their partners, lovers and friends. Now these spaces were not zoned as "live-work" spaces, but almost everybody lived in their studios and Boston Wharf company closed their eyes and collected the rents. We started building the walls right after signing the lease. I would be working there late in the evenings. Pete knew we were doing the work ourselves. He had no idea I planned to move in as soon as it was finished.

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE, Sex and Lies continued... Sunday, June 15, 2003

Work on the Dream House was over. Not that it was finished. We just stopped the improvements. It was livable. I spent much of my time painting in the garage/studio behind the house. I'm a physical painter. I didn't do "over the sofa" sized paintings. I liked to use my whole body, make big gestures when I worked. Since meeting Pete, sports themes were a focus. Confrontation describes how I felt every time I looked at a blank canvas. I had to make the figures lifesize to really get into the bodies. Painting for me was like sex. When it was best you'd be in the zone and be driven by the pure energy of the whole thing, surprising yourself with discoveries, and then collapse, exhausted, at the end. And, like sex sometimes does, that energy is transformed, it becomes a being with a life of its own.

My work was going well. It had been selected for exhibition in some major local competitions at the Danforth Museum and the Brocton Museum. A dealer with a gallery on Cape Cod wanted to add me to his roster. A dealer in New York contacted me. He had read a review and wanted to know if I could bring some paintings down for a new gallery he was opening on 57th street focusing on sports themes. I was a young unknown, he was willing to give me a chance, but would not pay for shipping the work to the gallery. So one Saturday morning, Pete and I loaded half a dozen of my monster sized paintings in the van. They barely fit, we had to leave the rear doors open but tied with rope. Off to New York. Man, was I excited. It's every artists dream to make it in NY. We get to 57th street and can't find a place to park. Pete drives around the block several times while I run up to the gallery (it's on the second floor) to see what they want me to do. The dealer runs out and manages to hold a parking space across the street, Pete pulls in and he and I start to unload. It was a great scene. Pete was pulling the paintings out, I had to prop them up against the building behind us. Passersby started looking and talking about the work. Wow! my first show in NY and I'm not even in a gallery. But they ignored me, went over to Pete and started complimenting him on his paintings. He seemed bewildered. I had to laugh. I was pleased. So they thought my work was good enough to have been done by a man.

Pete would help me when I called on him, but he had no idea what I was doing. We never talked about art. He just wanted to see me happy. Sometimes he would get a little resentful and refer to my "arty - farty friends". My activism with the Boston Visual Artists Union was continuing. We union members decided we needed our own gallery and started fundraising. We got a georgous space in Government Center donated by a major Boston realestate mogul. We did seminars for artists on copyright law, how to negotiate dealer contracts, and we campaigned against entry fees for competitions. Artists should not have to pay to get their work considered. It's tough enough, few artists make any money at all from their work. We managed to get entry fees banned in Boston. It was an exhilarating time to be an artist.

In one of our increasingly rare weekends at home together, Pete and I were sitting on the porch. He was sitting comfortably in a rocker with a beer in his hand. The kids were riding their bikes. He's musing, "this is heaven. I want to stay here forever and have our grand kids here." The lights go out in my brain. I know in that moment I can't do it. This is not the end for me. It is only the beginning.

GOING HUNTING, Sex and Lies continued... Saturday, June 14, 2003

We were driving from Boston to New Jersey. Pete had the rifle in the back of the van. It was Thanksgiving and deer season in Jersey. At the time, my folks lived on the side of a gravel road in Mine Hill. There was a dense wooded area behind the house.

My dad never went hunting as far as I know, but when he met Pete his testosterone level seemed to rise. He became interested in hunting equipment. He bought these professional hunting bows and a big target on a tripod that he set up where the yard met the woods. The bows seemed huge to me. It took incredible strength to pull the string back far enough to send the arrow into the target. My younger brother and I humored my dad and gave it a try. It seemed pointless to me. My brother was no athlete. I can't remember if he managed to hit the target, but I certainly couldn't. Mom didn't venture out of the house. She was safely ensconced in the kitchen with the turkey.

As in most things athletic, Pete wowed the family with his ability to get a bull's-eye nearly every time. Even after a few beers, his aim stayed true. After dinner, it was still light enough out to go hunting. It was doe season. I think they had gotten a special license that only permitted hunting doe for a few days. Pete got out the rifle and wanted me to come with him. Everyone else stayed home.

We walk into the woods behind the house. Pete gives me a lesson in hunting. The idea repulses me but my curiosity is peaked. He trys to teach me how to walk without making noise. Then there is the gun. He wants me to shoot it. I've never even held a gun before in my life. I don't want to but he says I should learn how to use it so I won't be afraid. It's heavy. I have trouble raising it to my shoulder. He shows me how to aim and tells me about recoil. I'm pretty nervous. He helps hold up the barrel while I aim at a tree. Pull the trigger he says. Pow! my ears are ringing and the shock to my shoulder almosts knocks me down, but I didn't fall. O.K., that's it, i did it once and don't want to again.

He still wants me to tag along. It was a beautiful late fall afternoon and the woods seemed so benign. We are walking very slowly. Pete's got the gun at his side. I almost forgot what we were there for. The low setting sun sent deep shadows acoss the leaf covered ground. Pete stops stock-still. So do I. I look to my left and see a deer staring right at us about 50 feet away. The deer looks like a statue, frozen in place. It is a doe. At this distance it is a sure shot for Pete. I am standing to his left. He slowly raises his rifle to his left shoulder and takes aim. My heart is pounding. My arm flies up and pushes the gun straight into the air. It goes off, the deer turns and disappears. Pete never takes me hunting again.

MOTHERLOAD, my last post was a bummer... Friday, June 13, 2003

Writing about my mother was worse than living with her. How to say something about that relationship that has some truth, some balance, without having ulterior motives.

I do not love her. To try to tell why is a snake pit of twisted experience and convoluted thoughts.

Feelings of hatred would often cloud my vision, but that's a weakness on my part. Get OVER it!! She is just an old lady now and she tried and she's YOUR MOTHER for Christ sake!!!!

I left for work feeling satisfied with the mornings post. My live-in chief critic usually reads what I write when he gets up. I later ask him what he thought. Silence. A bad sign. He knows me like no other ever knew me. He knows all the people I've written about. He's been the target of my mother's wrath. He points out that I have made certain assumptions that may not at all be true. He questions me on the source of her fear. He says it was my father, her husband that she was afraid of. This is not true I insist. I am agitated and angry that he challenges MY VIEW OF MY MOTHER!!

This exercise has exhausted me. Writing usually leaves me energized. I have no distance from this relationship. Perhaps I never will. But it will plague me until I can get it right.

MOTHERLOAD, Sex and Lies continued...

My mother was a fearful woman. I think what made her most afraid was me. She told me when I was a tot I'd throw tantrums. I'd lay down in the street and kick and scream at the top of my lungs. She would walk away and pretend she didn't know me.

Control was the way my mother dealt with fear. As long as you controlled how things looked - then it didn't matter how things were.

I was a thumb-sucker. This caused my mother great embarrassment. She tried an endless number of "cures" to get me to stop. Even the foul smelling goop she would smear on it would not deter me. She watched me like a hawk at family events to make sure I wasn't sucking the offending member. I'd always try to sit next to my gramp on the sofa. He would sit a little forward and let me slide behind his back to sneak a quick suck. I was forever grateful.

By the age of five I was in kindergarten. We lived about a mile from Grove Street School in Montclair NJ. It seemed like 100 miles to me. There were many obstacles to overcome, not the least of which was the loosely knit gang of teenagers who hung out by the corner store. I'd have to pass by them every morning. My mother walked me to school the first few days. It was a scary new world out there. The main street was heavily trafficked. Those kids on the corner were always smoking and jeering. Just getting near to the spot where I knew they'd be and my heart would palpitate. I needed to hold my moms hand. After the first week my mom felt enough was enough. I knew the way. It was time I walked to school by myself. Monday morning panic. I begged, I pleaded with her to walk me, just one more time, please, please, please, oh please!!!!!!!!! I grabbed her and would not let go. She was kind of laughing but weird laughing. It scared me even more. She pushed and shoved and maneuvered me to the living room, shoved me out the front door, slammed and locked it. I stood on the porch alone. I thought I was going to die. I went around and banged on the windows to get my mother to come. Not a sound from inside. At the same time I knew I had to get to school. It was bad to be late. I turned and started to run. If I ran to school fast enough, nothing could get me. No harm - if I only ran fast enough. It must've been in that moment that I overcame the greatest fear, abandonment. I had been abandoned (more existentially than actually) and survived. Perhaps my mother had been too well loved. No one ever put her to the test, challenged her. She had no resistance. She never learned to overcome her fear.

BOYS AND THEIR TOYS, Sex and Lies continued... Thursday, June 12, 2003

My Dad always satisfied his desires. No matter what the families financial situation was he always managed to buy himself a new car every two or three years. Mom and I would never know when he would pull in the drive with the next best thing. I used to wonder about the money. It was a forbidden topic. Once when I was a little kid I over heard my parents mention my dad's salary. I thought it was something to brag about so I went and told all my little neighborhood friends. It got back to my parents and they beat the crap (as dad would say) out of me. We never talked about money. They are now almost 80 and I have no idea what their assets are.

Dad was a Cadillac kind of guy. Boats were also a big thing with him. We always had one. It started when I was little and he got a 14 footer that was fast enough to pull a skier. Soon after that came the bigger boats with the inboard motors. We kept them at the Jersey shore but would take them down the East River out to Long Island Sound for the summer. Dad docked at Mattituck, a short drive from Orient Point. It was the North Fork of Long Island. Now it is all vineyards, and stables for the horsey set. Then it was all potato farms.

My dad taught me navigation, how to read the maps of the New York and Jersey coastline. Not that he needed me to navigate. We always had motor, not sail boats and they had all the sonar and depth reading equipment a captain would need. My dad loved driving the boats and the cars. He loved the equipment. My mother often declined to go boating so my dad would take me. So there we'd be, tooling down the East River with the majestic City of New York on either side of us and the huge tankers and luxury liners making us feel like a floating pea. Once, when we were at our summer house, dad wanted to take the boat out. He had been drinking. There were gale wind warnings off Mattituck. My mother refused to go but he goaded me into coming with him. I think I did it to show my mother up, to curry favor with my dad. I was about 9 or 10. The boat at that time was a 23 foot skiff with a flying bridge. Not a big boat. The harbor was gray and ominous but looked flat. My dad is energized, eager to get going. He assures me everything is fine and if it gets bad we'll just turn back. We head out of the harbor. As we get just beyond the jetty, the sea starts to churn and we get caught in a cascade of huge swells that threaten to swamp the boat. Walls of water rear up on either side. I think I'm going to die. I am frozen with fear, terrified. My dad is manic, I'd say, ecstatic. He's up on the bridge. I'm laying face down on the rear deck holding on so the waves don't wash me overboard. He can't turn the boat around in this, he has to keep heading out to sea. That's all I can remember. The rest is a blank. Obviously we survived.

Later came the REALLY big boats with the sleeping cabins, bath and shower, galley with a stove and fridge, sofa and TV in the lounge area and covered flying bridge with leather padded seats. Just like with our houses, my mom got to select the decor, the pattern of the curtains and color of the canvas seats. When I was a kid, dad always named the boats after me, The Cindy I, The Cindy II, etc.(That's what they called me. Cynthia was used only when I was being bad.) When I married Pete and Erika came along the boats were named Erika Lee I, Erika Lee II, and so on. Boating in the summer became the focus of our social life. I loved being out on the water all day in this floating ball of luxury. I felt guilty about it having spent most of my life rejecting everything my parents stood for. Pete had no such problems. He loved to fish and sail and drink. My Dad loved to take Pete fishing although the big boats were really for partying, not fishing. Dad and Pete bonded. I think Dad loved him. Thats why they rejected me when I left him.

Thursday, June 12, 2003
BOYS AND THEIR TOYS, Sex and Lies continued... Thursday, June 12, 2003

My Dad always satisfied his desires. No matter what the families financial situation was he always managed to buy himself a new car every two or three years. Mom and I would never know when he would pull in the drive with the next best thing. I used to wonder about the money. It was a forbidden topic. Once when I was a little kid I over heard my parents mention my dad's salary. I thought it was something to brag about so I went and told all my little neighborhood friends. It got back to my parents and they beat the crap (as dad would say) out of me. We never talked about money. They are now almost 80 and I have no idea what their assets are.

Dad was a Cadillac kind of guy. Boats were also a big thing with him. We always had one. It started when I was little and he got a 14 footer that was fast enough to pull a skier. Soon after that came the bigger boats with the inboard motors. We kept them at the Jersey shore but would take them down the East River out to Long Island Sound for the summer. Dad docked at Mattituck, a short drive from Orient Point. It was the North Fork of Long Island. Now it is all vineyards, and stables for the horsey set. Then it was all potato farms.

My dad taught me navigation, how to read the maps of the New York and Jersey coastline. Not that he needed me to navigate. We always had motor, not sail boats and they had all the sonar and depth reading equipment a captain would need. My dad loved driving the boats and the cars. He loved the equipment. My mother often declined to go boating so my dad would take me. So there we'd be, tooling down the East River with the majestic City of New York on either side of us and the huge tankers and luxury liners making us feel like a floating pea. Once, when we were at our summer house, dad wanted to take the boat out. He had been drinking. There were gale wind warnings off Mattituck. My mother refused to go but he goaded me into coming with him. I think I did it to show my mother up, to curry favor with my dad. I was about 9 or 10. The boat at that time was a 23 foot skiff with a flying bridge. Not a big boat. The harbor was gray and ominous but looked flat. My dad is energized, eager to get going. He assures me everything is fine and if it gets bad we'll just turn back. We head out of the harbor. As we get just beyond the jetty, the sea starts to churn and we get caught in a cascade of huge swells that threaten to swamp the boat. Walls of water rear up on either side. I think I'm going to die. I am frozen with fear, terrified. My dad is manic, I'd say, ecstatic. He's up on the bridge. I'm laying face down on the rear deck holding on so the waves don't wash me overboard. He can't turn the boat around in this, he has to keep heading out to sea. That's all I can remember. The rest is a blank. Obviously we survived.

Later came the REALLY big boats with the sleeping cabins, bath and shower, galley with a stove and fridge, sofa and TV in the lounge area and covered flying bridge with leather padded seats. Just like with our houses, my mom got to select the decor, the pattern of the curtains and color of the canvas seats. When I was a kid, dad always named the boats after me, The Cindy I, The Cindy II, etc.(That's what they called me. Cynthia was used only when I was being bad.) When I married Pete and Erika came along the boats were named Erika Lee I, Erika Lee II, and so on. Boating in the summer became the focus of our social life. I loved being out on the water all day in this floating ball of luxury. I felt guilty about it having spent most of my life rejecting everything my parents stood for. Pete had no such problems. He loved to fish and sail and drink. My Dad loved to take Pete fishing although the big boats were really for partying, not fishing. Dad and Pete bonded. I think Dad loved him. Thats why they rejected me when I left him.

STUCK ON THE STAIRCASE, Sex and Lies continued... Wednesday, June 11, 2003

The dream house needed work. It's like getting to know a new lover. In the first 5 seconds of the encounter there is the zap that tells you whether or not this is worth pursuing. If the feelings are consumated, then the real work of building something begins.

We invested everything we had in that house. Before moving in Pete and I painted over the rainbow walls (all 9 rooms), sanded all the floors (I'll never forget the part where we used this tacky cloth and on our hands and knees wiped up every speck of dust before we polyurethaned)and wallpapered the bedrooms. Erika picked pink flowers with a ribbon border. I have a vivid memory of us all in her room while Pete teeters on a ladder pasting this wallpaper border where the ceiling meets the wall.

The house had everything that all the houses of my childhood didn't. There were 3 porches with curved overhangs and carved wooden railings. There were working fireplaces with mantels and big bay windows that filtered in light from every direction. Perhaps the most unique feature was the circular staircase to the bedrooms on the second floor. It also had a slate roof that leaked. We tried everything we could to save it and finally gave up. It was like a death in the family the day the roofers came and pulled off all that 100 year old slate and replaced it with asphalt shingle.

At some point we actually just started living in the house. Much of the work had been done and the rest never got done. The first spring we were there we had a big party in the yard for Erika's seventh birthday. We strung balloons everywhere. Pete loved being the ringmaster at the kid's parties. He strung up some contraption with a waterbag on Erika's swing set. He sat under it with a beer in his hand while the kids tried to pull the string that would dump all the water on his head. The kids thought it was hysterical. I felt sad.

We were like a strange tribe in our upper class neighborhood. That fall Pete went hunting and bagged a deer, a big deer. He brought it home on the roof of the van and hung it from a limb on the tree in our side yard. It had been gutted and it had to hang for a day or two to let the blood drain before he had it butchered. We ate everything he shot or trapped or caught on a fishing line (except shark). At the time I didn't think about it but the neighbors must've hated us. Erika had guinea pigs and a rabbit, a gorgeous rabbit that lived in a hutch Pete built behind the garage. Pete also brought Erika a small lamb that she kept for a while as a pet. That fall she dressed up as Little Bo Peep and went trick or treeting, door to door, with her dad and her sheep.

Winter came down on us that year and it was tough keeping the house warm. Heating bills were astronomical. The kids were always cold. Then the blizzard of '78 struck. The city came to a halt. I was just trying to keep up with the housework, the laundry, the cooking, the dirt. There is a stark moment. I have a basket of clothes in my hands. I'm standing in the middle of the staircase. I have forgotten if I was going up - or - down.

DREAM HOUSE, Sex and Lies continued... Tuesday, June 10, 2003

My family moved frequently and I never knew why. It would always go something like this. Dad would find a plot of land somewhere in northern New Jersey. Once he found the spot, he'd take us to see it. Not that we had any say in the process. Then he would pick some stock house plan - not a prefab - just some standard plan, in one case it was a flat, 3 bedroom ranch plunked on a half acre of swampy ground. Mom never protested. Dad let her have her say by deciding what colors the rooms should be painted and the style of knobs on the kitchen cabinets.

There was never any family discussion that I can remember about moving. It was my father's choice. It was a mystery. It's not that his company relocated him and we had to move. He had bought-out his boss long ago, owned the company and it was permanently ensconced in an industrial park in East Brunswick NJ.

These houses that we lived in were always brand new and devoid of character. Rectangular boxes with a roof. There was never any evidence that real people lived in them either. Order and cleanliness reigned supreme. Maybe we moved when Dad felt the house got too dirty. Or maybe it had something to do with his affairs which none of us were aware of at the time.

The only house that ever felt like a "home" to me was my Grams house on 198th Street in Queens NY. I was born in that house. It had been built in the late 1800's, had a staircase, an attic, a sun porch, a kitchen with a breakfast nook and a magical garden that had an ornamental fish pool where my grampa kept Koi.

In 1976 Pete got an offer to coach at Tufts University. He had been at M.I.T. for 16 years, long enough to pull a big chunk (for 1976) of money out of his pension fund ($30,000) plus get a monthly payment. He decided to make the switch. We were still living in a dreary rented apartment in Newton. We had talked about moving but I knew I'd have to act soon or the money would get peed down the toilet like so many cases of beer.

Pete was away on a long weekend. He and some buddies chartered a small plane to fly up to Canada to do some salmon fishing. It was a georgous, golden late September day. Erika and I were out on our bikes, just crusing around town when we saw this house on a corner with a For Sale sign out front. It had a mansard roof with bay windows and cornices and porches, front back and side porches. It had a garage that would make a perfect studio. It was my dream house. Erika was sold when I told her she could have pets if we lived there. We peddled home like speed demons, I called the agent and made arrangements to go back immediately and see the inside. Some hippy types had painted the walls with rainbows, but other than that it was in pretty good shape. It had a curved Bulfinch style staircase and partially renovated kitchen and baths. There were two working fireplaces. Price was $60,000. "Sold" I told the agent on the spot. I wrote a check from our joint account as a binder. I figured no problem getting a mortgage.

Later that weekend I hear the van pull in the driveway. I run outside and before Pete gets out of the van I hop in and tell him to drive. He's a little surprised but doesn't balk. The house is only 10 minutes from where we live. It is still light out, the sun was low and bouncing off the bay windows as it set. I tell Pete to stop in front of the house. "Do you like it?" I ask. "Yeah" he says. "It's ours, we bought it." "Fine by me" he says. And that was that

ART IN THE TOILET, Sex and Lies continued... Monday, June 09, 2003

Before marrying Pete, during my undergrad years in Art school, I worked as a waitress at the M.I.T. Faculty Club. It was on the top floor of the Sloan School of Business. I enjoyed waitressing. Especially in the rarified air of that dining room. Lots of Nobel Prize winners, scientists and engineers working on the first space schuttle and lots of young entrepreneurs.

I'd mastered the art of flirting at an early age and in waitressing, that's the name of the game if you want to earn any money at all. A group of recent Sloan school grads used to meet regularly at the faculty club, for lunch or happy hour. They'd always ask for me. Among them was a funny little guy with a beard. He reminded me of Toulouse Lautrec. His name was Frank. He had a law degree from Harvard and a business degree from Sloan. He was one of the smartest men I'd ever met, and he had a dry sense of humor that I liked. After my shift was over, they'd always invite me to join them. Sometimes we'd go out partying as a group. Sometimes Frank would maneuver to get me in his car alone. He'd often try to kiss me. Problem was there was no chemistry. I'd gently reject his advances. We became good "friends".

We stayed in contact after I met Pete. I confided in him. He knew I'd been spending a lot of time painting and he told me about a new artists activist organization, the Boston Visual Artists Union (BVAU) that he thought I should join. They met regularly in a classroom at M.I.T.. One night Frank picked me up from our apartment. (This was after the shark incident.)Pete knew where we were going.

We get to the meeting, a room full of artists, animated, loosly organized, intensely discussing the future of the organization. The energy in the room filled my battered soul. This is it. This is my lifeline.

The discussion centers on the Museum of Fine Arts. A revered Boston institution with an amazing collection of Impressionists, but almost no contemporary art to speak of, no curator of contemporary art and not a single living Boston artist in it's entire collection. We decide radical tactics are necessary. We had tried meeting with Museum officials to voice our concerns. They were not moved. They gave us the usual bureaucratic yada, yada, yada...

We plan a guerrilla attack. We plan an unauthorized exhibition at the museum to be held in the basement bathrooms. We set a date. Selected artists are to enter the museum with small works that they can carry under their coats. The works are then hung on the walls in the bathrooms. We have a large mailing list of wealthy Boston collectors who have an interest in the avant garde and who are disappointed that the museum has blinders on when it comes to homegrown talent. We plan an Opening Night Event. When the elegantly dressed patrons start entering the museum and stream down to the bathrooms, the guards are in shock. The press has been alerted and there is commotion, and great energy. Everyone knows they are part of some groundbreaking event. The museum administration has been caught totally off-guard

The next day, headlines in all the Boston papers. You can imagine the trashing that the museum got for relegating living artists to the toilet. Soon after museum appointed their first ever "Curator of Contemporary Art". Today, many living, Boston artists grace the walls of the museum.

JUMPING THE SHARK, Sex and Lies continued... Sunday, June 08, 2003

Pete was an Olympian but he never really competed, he was a natural. He had the body of a runner and could turn the speed on and off. He would win at tennis and squash without working up a sweat and looked good while doing it. He was loose. He always had a beer in his hand.

We left our M.I.T. Eastgate apartment when Erika was 3. School was looming in her future so we moved to Newton, a city with a reputation for great schools. We had a ground floor apartment in a two family. There was a yard, a driveway on the side and garage in the back. It had three bedrooms. Unbeknownst to the landlord, I turned one into a studio.

Erika was enrolled in nursery school. I had more time to paint. Pete had more time to go fishing on the weekends with his buddies. They were all heavy drinkers. We socialized with them as couples and the wives drank too. The guys all worked in sports, coaches for the most part. Pete was the only one among them who had achieved world class status as an athlete. One of his close friends had lost a teenage son in a drunk driving incident. That seemed to plunge the family deeper into an alcoholic haze. I hated to visit them. Their home was falling apart. They were bathed in despair.

It was hot on a late August Saturday afternoon. I hear the van pull in. Pete had been deep sea fishing off Scituate. There is a commotion in the driveway. There is a small group of neighborhood kids standing around a large gray mass lying on the hot, black asphalt. Pete is laughing. I go out to take a peek. It's a 6 foot shark. I can't believe he hauled it home in the back of the van. The van was just a metal shell inside, no air conditioning. In summer it was like an oven. The smell was not good. I was incredulous. "Why did you do this? We're not going to eat it. Why did you bring this thing home?". Pete was not totally clear about the point of this. Something about showing the kids. He tells me he's going to gut it. This is insane. I go back to the cool quiet of my studio.

Not long after I hear screams. Kids are scattering - I see Erika's babysitter dash across the street to home. The shark is now a gaping putrid, foul mass of guts and stench all over the driveway. The smell assaults me. I run back to the house to get a cloth to put over my mouth and nose - I can hardly breathe. Pete is nowhere to be seen, then, I hear him. Sounds like he is puking his guts out behind the garage.

He spends the rest of the afternoon cleaning up the mess. I don't know how he did it. I was not a witness. Late that evening, he comes in, takes a shower, dresses in a clean, pressed shirt and slacks. We bag his fishing clothes and throw them out. He seems to think the whole thing was pretty funny. I think it was grotesque. I try talking to him about his motivation to do something like that. He has a beer in his hand. How many has he had today? Who counts? We can't seem to carry on a conversation. To an outsider, he looks fine, clean, stands up straight, no stumblebum he. But I can't hold a conversation with him. He can't seem to respond rationally. The room is dark. We have not turned on the lights. I'm petrified. I beg him to stop drinking. I kiss him, I hug him, I plead with him to stop. He laughs, says there's no problem. I'm on my knees clutching his legs, sobbing, begging, please, please, please stop drinking. I snap. I attack him. I beat on him with all my might, everything I have. He does not resist. I take the ends of his shirt in my hands and rip it apart, the buttons go flying. He grabs me and holds me still. He is quiet. I'm exhausted. He goes to the fridge and gets himself a beer.

I've seen my future. What do I do now? I will never again ask him to quit drinking.

The phrase, Jumping the Shark, is defined here:

http://pub79.ezboard.com/fglitzycapefrm1.showMessage?topicID=29.topic

and here:

http://www.jumpingtheshark.com

CAMPING OUT, Sex and Lies continued... Saturday, June 07, 2003

Hopping in the Winnebago, driving to the nearest recreational area to hook up to the electric and hot water was not Pete's idea of camping. He loved the outdoors and the closer he could get to it the better. He especially liked to bring the kids. Pete was an ex-marine among other things and I had to remind myself that his survival skills were way up on the list of why I married him in the first place.

I, on the other hand, feel anxiety when I don't have access to my hair dryer and mascara. I never liked to be seen without my make-up, so camping, the way Pete liked to go camping, was a major challenge.

In July, 1970, Erika was 2 months old. We had the other two kids with us for summer vacation. Pete says, "Lets go camping". I was breast feeding so that simplified the amount of gear we'd have to take. All Pete needed was a fishing pole, a tarp, some rope, a hatchet and a case of beer. We head off in the direction of New Hampshire in our old Ford 150 van with the rust on the side. (It was all we could afford after Pete totaled the Mustang.) Pete is familiar with the area from hunting in deer season with his buddies. We pull-off to the side of the road and park. It all looks like the same dense forest to me. It was a very hot, sunny day. Crystal clear blue sky.

We get all the gear. I have the baby tied to me in front with a sling. This way of carrying babies was just catching on. I think we WASPS picked it up from Native Americans, very practical. Pete thrashes through the woods with the kids in front to make a path. I tip toe behind. I have no sense of direction and tend to get lost at the base of our driveway - so I'm on high alert in the woods.

It had been pretty dry that year and Pete picked a smooth, open area right on the dry edges of a river bank to set up camp. We could see the river running over the rocks a short distance below us. It was a beautiful spot. Pete and the kids set everything up. He put his case of beer in the river to keep it cold. My job was to nurse the baby. The plan was that he and the kids would catch fish and he'd cook'm for dinner. They went off. I sat on the rocks with the baby and kept an eye out for bears, ants, squirrels, hawks and other scary things.

Nothing much happened. They did get some fish. We had enough peanut butter and bread to full the gaps. The kids thought they were in heaven. It started to get chilly at dusk so we crawled in our sleeping bags early. I had the baby with me. We all dozed off.

In the middle of the night I'm awakened by a low rumble. Without warning the sky seemed to open up in a torrent. The river rose so fast, we were stumbling around in the dark as the water rushed down the mountain. I was terrified. Most of our gear had already been washed away. We had to find our way back to the car in the pitch dark as thunder roiled over our heads. Pete salvaged one flashlight. He had to lead us through the woods in the blinding rain. Pete went first, we had the two kids in the middle and I came up behind clutching the baby. Pete stumbled and fell. He broke a tooth but was unfazed. Finally we emerge by the road and see the car parked about 50 feet away. We pile in. I just want to go home. Pete suggests a motel for the night.

We find a cheap place with a vacancy. The hot shower was nirvana. The next morning the skys have cleared. Pete wants to go back to the camp site. I think he's insane but the kids beg and reluctantly I trudge along. Back down the road to a spot that will remain burned in my brain for eternity. Down to the river we go. It seemed so benign in the morning sun. Pete sends the kids down river to search for the remains of the case of beer. Now I realize why we had to come back. It was Sunday. The liquor stores were closed. That case he'd left in the river the day before was his last hope of making it to Monday morning.

HAVING BREASTS, Sex and Lies continued... Friday, June 06, 2003

Being pregnant had some pleasant side effects. I had breasts. Not that I didn't have breasts, it's just that they were relatively inconsequential. Early on I learned to make the most of what I had. My rib cage is rather high and prominent. At puberty I practiced in front of a mirror and saw that if I stood-up really straight, pulled my shoulders back, sucked in my stomach muscles, it looked like I really had acceptible breasts. Men were attracted to me. It was all an illusion. I owed it to excellent posture.

In pregnancy my breasts became lush, large, and the nipples seemed to darken. It was as though I wasn't me. After Erika was born they said I had to stay in the hospital until "my milk came in". It seemed almost ominous to me at the time, but I was sure I wanted to breast feed. Everything I had read seemed to say this was the best way to go. I also had this urge to have that wiggly little creature next to me at all times. This is from a women who would never have had a baby by choice.

By the end of the first 24 hours in the hospital, I REALLY wanted to go home. Nurses kept coming into check to see if "my milk came in". I think they give the baby sugar water or something while we wait for this phenomena to occur. I was beginning to worry. Maybe something went wrong and my body couldn't manufacture this stuff. The morning of the second day, I opened my eyes. In front of me where these two gigantic breasts, I mean the Himalayas. I couldn't see past them. We're talking hard and huge (relative to what I had always lived with). The nurses seemed pleased. My milk had finally come in.

SERIAL MONOGAMY, Sex and Lies continued...

RG's dad is approaching 80 and it looks like wifey number 4 is waiting in the wings. The son of wifey number 3 (who recently died) called RG to express his concern about the dad's competance, the new women's REAL motive (money as opposed to love), she is more than 20 years younger, and so on. The son thinks he stands to loose some cash if this marriage is consumated.

It all started about 55 years ago when RG's mom left the dad in question. A good Mormon family, but she was moving on to a new life. Husband number 2 turned out to be a real asshole, much worse then the first (see above). At some point things got so bad that husband number 2 morphed into husband number 3. Children were produced along the way. All good Mormon children of course. (except RG who got excommunicated from the church, but that's another story)When I met mom, she was on husband number 4. This could be the end of the road for her - but I wouldn't stake my life on it.

My folks chose the alternative to serial monogamy. They went the secret affairs, sex and lies, let's pretend we're monogamous route. They are still together, dying together in what looks like living hell to me, but I'm not them, so who can be sure?

One monogamous marriage was enough for me. After that I tried multiple, parallel-simultaneous relationships held together with sex and lies. Until I met RG and everything changed.

COOKING WITH MARTHA, a diversion from Sex and Lies... Thursday, June 05, 2003

Women lost a couple of big rounds today as all those stupid white men continue to try to drag us back to 1950, or in my case with abortion trials and tribulations, 1969. I never thought it was possible that we could loose so much ground in so short a time - mind boggling. But I'll bet you dollars to donuts if some little hotty that Rumsfeld or Tom DeLay is stumpfing on the side gets pregnant or if some very wealthy stupid white guys wife runs into trouble in the last trimester of her pregnancy, they will have no trouble getting an abortion.

Poor Martha Stewart. She did not look good coming out of court yesterday. People I know who have met her do not have nice things to say about her personality - but hey, she made it to the top and she didn't get there by sewing doilies. What makes me insane is the utter hypocrisy of everyone involved in her case. What she did with her IMClone stock may not have been kosher but she did not screw thousands of stock holders and company employees out of their life savings either. It's a matter of degree. While the big boys at Enron, Arthur Anderson, WorldCom etc. have long faded into the woodwork, the media will still be roasting Martha on a spit.

I was never a Martha fan but I do love to cook. I retreat to my kitchen for solace after a day in the trenches of fundraising for documentary film. Cooking for me is like yoga or Zen. I should give Martha a buzz and suggest she try retreating to her kitchen in these trying times.

To read the complete "Free Martha" story, go to:

http://boston.com/dailyglobe2/156/business/Free_Martha+.shtml

BABY I'M YOURS, Sex and Lies continued... Wednesday, June 04, 2003

My diaphragm and I never got along. It sure put a crimp in my style. I used it consistantly, I swear - even though the thing would slip out of my fingers and boomerang around the bathroom. Sometimes it would take me so long to get the thing in place (or so I thought) Pete would be sound asleep. Hence my surprise when they told me I was 3 months pregnant. After some intense inquiry from my doctor, turns out I was putting it in backwards, or something like that - therefore it was not too effective.

So, a 6 month pregnancy goes by a lot faster than a 9 month pregnancy. When I think how little I knew about the effects of my diet and behavior on my body and on my fetus during the 3 months I was pregnant and had no clue... I was too young and stupid to even worry.

They figured the baby was due in May, sometime around the 20th. I had wanted to work until labor started. I was working in the office of the Dean of Fine Arts at B.U. during the day. When I was about 7 months along, THE DEAN (a geezer - I remember he came from the music dept. and his bushy gray eyebrows gave him the look of a schnauzer) suggested that I resign from my post for "my own safety". He actually said I made it uncomfortable for him to have a pregnant woman around the office. I was bullshit. How could he force me to quit?? Well it was 1970 and they could do stuff like that then - and if the Christian Coalition got their way, they'd be doing stuff like that now. I think they probably still do in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana - but I digress from my story.

Reluctantly I leave my job. Two months to go and I'm getting too big to stand at my easel and paint all day. My feet swell. Pete is so attentive it's annoying. It was a very warm, early spring that year. On a weekend when I'm close to term, Pete suggests we go fishing. It was unseasonably hot. We drive to the Cape on a Sunday afternoon. He's got his fishing gear and I've got the Sunday NYTimes. I'm set. We get to Scituate harbor and Pete goes to make arrangements to rent a rowboat. He was handing his money to the guy with the boats when the guy spies me walking over from the parking lot. "You're not taking HER out with you?!" "Sure" says Pete, "Why not?" - "Well, look at her! She's ready to pop any minute." They were talking about me as though I wasn't there. I felt like pushing that asshole's head in his bait box. Pete said he would pay an extra $10. and take full responsibility if anything happened. It didn't. We had a lovely, lazy afternoon floating around Scituate Harbor.

I was really ready to have this baby. I weighed 165 pounds. I had taken advantage of eating everything in sight - except for two things, meat and coffee. My body was smart and rejected this stuff even though my mind told me I wanted it. I don't think I drank either.

On the night of May 22nd I started to go into labor. Pete rushed us off to the Brigham and Women's Hospital in downtown Boston. They admitted me, took us up to a labor room and prepped (shaved) me. I had not done any practice work. Birthing classes with fathers included was just not done (maybe in communes but not at Brigham and Womens). Dads were not even allowed in the delivery room. Do you believe it? It's 1970. I was not one of those brave women, I had asked my doctor to give me anesthesia when the going got rough. Unfortunately that night my pains stopped. They sent Pete home and said he could pick me up in the morning. Most of the nurses left. I was the only one in the labor room. I did not want to leave that hospital in the morning without a baby. I got off the table I was laying on and started to jog around the room. I did a few deep knee bends for good measure. Suddenly I had to go to the bathroom. There was a bathroom right in the labor room. I hadn't seen a nurse in awhile, they must've been napping. I sat on the toilet thinking I had to shit. It wouldn't come. Then the pain, I'm talking REAL PAIN, started. "Oh my god, I'm going to have this baby in the toilet and it will drown." I'm too blind with pain to think about pulling a cord for help. I roll my body off the toilet on to the floor. Up on my hands and knees I start crawling towards the door. I'm nearly out the door when Pete comes running down the hall, "I couldn't sleep at home without you. What the hell is happening around here? Where are the nurses? Why are you on the floor?" He picks me up and maneuvers me back on the table. The nurses come scurrying. They part my knees, take a peak, slap my knees together again and say, "Mrs Close, DON'T PUSH! We have to wait till the doctor comes, we just called him". I say "Fuck you I don't care who is here I'm having this baby NOW." I hate them. The pain is intense. No one even thought to offer me an aspirin. I don't care.

Someone says they see the doctor running down the hall. I do not care. They wheel me out to the elevator (delivery room one floor up). I tell everyone in the elevator to fuck themselves or something and more. The doctor tells Pete he hasn't heard language like that since the Marines. Ha-ha. The OR doors swing open. Pete can't follow. We barely get inside when they yell at me to look, look in the mirror. Through the blinding pain I see a miracle. I see a living creature emerge from my own body. It was otherworldly. I will never, ever forget that moment. Unfortunately, the idiot with the anesthesia decided then was a good time to shoot my spine with the epidural I now did not need. But I had seen my beautiful, wiggly, wonderful daugther. We named her Erika.

READING AND WRITING, a diversion from sex and lies...

John Updike taught me how to read. Not literally, he was just the first writer I discovered in high school that I wasn't forced to read for a class. THE POORHOUSE FAIR was the book, one of his earliest. I picked it up at a yard sale. He spoke to me in a voice I could hear. I was not an avid reader but I fixated on Updike. THE SAME DOOR, a book of short stories came next. I love the short story form because I have a short attention span. My gram supported my Updike habit and would give me a new Updike book every Christmas. RABBIT RUN was her first choice. What a great book. There is something of me in Rabbit. I think it has something to do with writing in your own time, writing in a voice that is very present in your own time. Joyce Carol Oats also filled my book shelves in college, but no one ever replaced Updike in my ranking of writers.

I have read nearly everything Updike has written and each new book seems to tell me something about where I'm at in my own life at that time. It's as though he's stalking me. The novel "S" was too close for comfort. A few years ago, my best friend gave me JUST LOOKING, Updike's essays on Art.

Now, here I am on this blogging thing. It's not much about reading or writing. It's about "blogging". Marshall McLuhan had it right, the medium is the message.

THE BRAIN TUMOR, Sex and Lies continued... Tuesday, June 03, 2003

It had only been a few months since the abortion. I wasn't feeling well. I ignored the symptoms,there was too much going on. I was fighting jealousy problems, internally fighting them, over Pete's relationship with the kids. They were sweet kids. Good kids. A little confused, like everyone else trying to figure out where they were in the hierarchy - our new family order. Pete was oblivious to any negative feelings. He either was genetically predisposed not to recognize them or he held me on a pedastal and always saw me as the perfect one, or he managed to maintain a certain level of alcohol induced numbness.

My painting had been going well. B.U. still let me use my studio, even though I'd graduated. When I met Pete I got sucked into the world of sport, formerly alien to me. All those great looking bodies. Pete was the kind of coach who brought his work home. Since he coached track at M.I.T. these kids were all smart. I enjoyed their company. They were my age. Pete used to tell me that all his married colleagues were jealous because his wife never complained about him bringing the team home for dinner. I also did not complain about his weekends fishing or hunting with "the guys". I never cared when he got home, never grilled him about his whereabouts. I was in my studio painting every spare minute I got. This new world of sport inspired me. The hockey guys with those incredible masks, so primitive, like a long-lost tribe. The sexuality and sensuality of baseball players. How they would touch each other and touch themselves on the field for all to see captivated me. These became my themes for art. Pete was also Sports Information Director and he had an "in" with all the local sports writers. We were often in the press-box at Celtics, Bruins and Red Sox home games. I got to meet Bobby Orr.

My appetite had disappeared. I was loosing weight with no explanation. I ignored the symptoms. My period stopped. One day I was out shopping in Filene's. I had bags of clothes and I was stuffed in an elevator with a jillion people. I blacked out. When I came to a man was standing over me. I didn't recognize him. He was just some kind soul who had pulled me from the elevator. I was flat on my back on the ground and dazed. "Do you do drugs?" he asked me. "No" "I'm a married woman" I replied a bit indignant. I was weak, I was scared. I asked the man if he would call my husband. I gave him Pete's work number. The medics showed up with a stretcher and told the man what hospital they were taking me to. I was panicked. What the fuck is wrong with me. By the time we get to the hospital I'm feeling better. Pete is already there in emergency waiting for me. By now I can walk under my own steam. I want to go home. The doctors won't let me go. They ask about my recent symptoms. Pete is by my side and corroborates everything. The doctor fears I may have a brain tumor. He actually says the words "brain tumor" to my face. I have never been so scared in my life. Pete goes ashen. Doctor orders a brain scan immediately. Pete and I are locked, side by side. Neither of us can move or look at each other. The fear is mesmerizing. First, before we do the scan, the doctor says he will do a complete physical. I'm showed to an examining room and asked to get undressed. I'm naked on the exam table, knees in stirrups, Doctor is poking around and starts to laugh. I think this guy must be a sick-o. He says nothing to me, orders me to get dressed and to meet him in his office with my husband. I think the world has gone nuts. I get dressed. Pete and I, again together, sitting across this big desk from El Doctoro. The doctor was like the giant head in the Wizard Of Oz. "You're PREGNANT" he says, "three months pregnant to be specific". I'm in shock. How can you be delivered from a death sentence, be ecstatic, and disbelieving at the same time. Pete is overjoyed. I look at him and see a man blinded by joy. I want to kill myself, but I know that is dumb. I accept my fate. I guess I'll be a mother whether I like it or not.

DRINKING WHILE DRIVING, Sex and Lies continued...

Sometimes Pete would pop a beer first thing in the morning. Usually this would be after a night of heavy partying. I can't even tie my shoes without a caffeine fix. I try to lure him to the world of the totally awake but he refused to go there.

Pete became the family favorite. Everybody loved him. Dad used his connections with auto dealers in NJ and got us an incredible deal on a brand new Mustang. That car was hot. Electric blue. It had these vents on the side like a shark.

Pete never seemed to be working. I don't mean that he didn't work. He always had a job. But he always managed to enjoy himself. Even when he was training for the Olympics, he said he didn't really put much effort into it. It was one of the few things in his life I think he regreted. He did make the Olympic team. That was in 1960, 7 years before we met. He drank beer even in training. He told me himself. I didn't think that was allowed, but it didn't seem to inhibit his performance. He went to Rome that year. He didn't medal, he'd gotten some intestinal bug the day before the race. But he ran the mile (1600 meter)anyway and came in fifth. He had made friends with some guys on the American basketball team. Some names that became stars in professional basketball (several played for the Celtics) that I can't remember at the moment.

A gigantic Olympic flag flew high on a pole in the middle of Olympic Village where all the athletes stayed. One night Pete got his basketball buddies together and snuck out to the pole where the flag flew. Pete climbed on their shoulders and managed to unhook this flag. He was the fastest so when the guards realized the flag was down and the alarms went off Pete had disappeared. The cops never found the flag. We used it now as a bedspread. Pete's Connecticut hometown newspaper ran the story of the big flag heist every year before the Turkey Day Race, when Pete would go back home to run. After the Olympics he toured Africa with the American track team. I have photos of him dressed like Lawrence of Arabia sitting on a camel in Egypt. Other photos, jumping over a huge turtle that had crawled out of the jungle on to a makeshift track, somewhere in Africa.

Pete was modest. He was a man's man, but the modesty made him well liked by both men and women. He was a master at tennis and squash. I used to watch him at the squash courts at MIT and was amazed that a human could move so fast. One Sunday morning, after a night of very hard partying, Pete got up early to drive down to the Cape to go fishing with some friends. I stayed home in bed to sober-up. I didn't expect him back till late that evening. That afternoon, Pete shows up, barefoot, in his tennis shorts, he's a mess. He never made it all the way to the Cape. He'd taken a few beers with him for the ride down. Somewhere, just over the Bourne Bridge, he's in an accident. The Mustang is totaled. He had no way to get back to Boston. The cops on the scene took pity on him. Some of them knew him from his sports connections. The cops formed a kind of relay team (cops are not allowed to drive over the city/county lines of their jurisdiction) and drove him from town line to town line where he would get dropped off by one and picked up by another. That's how he made it home. No charges were pressed. He'd hit a telephone pole. It was just an accident. It was a miracle he wasn't hurt.

A WALK ON THE MOON, Sex and Lies continued... Monday, June 02, 2003

The motel was not far from the Justice of the Peace. It was so nondescript I can't remember a thing about it. Our honeymoon, we spent the night there. The next morning I feel the urge to call my folks and tell them. It was a sense of duty that compelled me. It's the minimum I could do. We are still in bed. I fumble for the phone on the night-table. Mom answers, "Hi, where are you?" "In a motel in New Hampshire." Silence. I wait. "Is Pete with you?" she asks. "Yes, we're married." "You're kidding". I knew she wouldn't be happy about it. At the time I thought I was doing her a favor. No big wedding to plan, no expense, no debt, no dealing with inlaws she doesn't want to know. In retrospect I see how I cheated her. Attending my own daughter's wedding was such fun, such joy-but this is now and then was then. I didn't care what my mother thought.

Pete and I loll around for awhile, then get dressed and head back to Boston. I have a job working in the Dean of Admissions Office at the Art school, helping with portfolio reviews of incoming freshmen. At night I teach painting at Arlington High School in Adult Ed. classes.
Pete's divorce was pretty brutal. He had huge alimony payments. His wife had his entire summer salary attached to the settlement. Pete knew he didn't have a leg to stand on. He fell for a younger woman, had an affair. Wife has two kids. End of story. He and I knew what we did. He loved his kids. It was difficult for him. He wanted liberal visitation rights and got them. He deserved that. In spite of leaving his wife, he was a great, I mean really great father. He was 1/2 a kid always. He knew how to make kids laugh and love him but he was a disciplinarian-in the best sense. It was a trait I admired most in him. After having a father who was clueless in how to treat children, I married one who was a master at it. The one trait they had in common was their drinking.

We were married in June of 1969. In July that year we had his kids, Jenny and Pete Jr. for the weekend. We'd been at Singing Beach that day, came home to Eastgate. We lived on the 22nd floor, corner apartment with windows all around. A glorious view of Boston across the Charles River. The moon was high in the sky that night. We called the kids to the window, pointed out the moon's shimmering reflection on the river as the glow from the TV in the corner showed Neil Armstrong as he took his first walk on the moon.

---

THE CAKE WENT SPLAT, Sex and Lies continued...

Meeting the parents was the next step. That need to preserve a sense of family runs deep.

My graduation from B.U. was coming up. I was pretty pleased with myself. The first in my family to go to college and to stick with it for a masters degree. So, it was a degree in ART - my parents seemed proud of me. Everyone in my small family came to Boston in the spring of 1969; gram and gramp, my brother, mom and dad. What they didn't know was that they would also meet my husband to be.

I was pumped. My family got a room in a hotel in Kenmore square. What they also didn't know was that I had already moved in with Pete. His divorce wasn't final, but we managed to get an apartment in Eastgate, an apartment tower in Kendall Sq reserved for faculty and graduate students at M.I.T.

After the ceremonies I made arrangements for dinner when they would get to meet THE MAN. Pete is a relaxed, easy going kind of guy. The kind of person everybody likes. We didn't say anything to my parents about living together. I also didn't mention marriage. We did talk about Pete's other family. There was some tension.

After dinner my dad takes me aside and wants to speak to me ALONE at the bar. This is a rare occurance. He had had a few drinks at dinner but was not drunk. I steel myself for the onslaught. It does not come. He is tender. "Honey, this man is trouble. You can get who ever you want. He's too old for you. Do you understand the burden of children?" and on it goes. He and I have a drink or two. I sympathize with my dad. I'm more touched by the fact that he cared enough to have this conversation with me. We did not talk about love. If he'd asked me if I loved Pete, I couldn't have answered.

The next day the family goes home to NJ. Pete and I go home to Eastgate and wait for his divorce to become final. We get the word the papers will be processed at a date in June. We plan to go to New Hampshire the very next day to get married by a justice of the peace. We can't get married in Massachusetts since they had a 6 month waiting period following divorce before you could remarry. We planned to drive up with our best friends Marge and Dave as witnesses. Dave was the Sports Information Director at Tufts. The sky was a flat gray the day of the trip. I wore a very short dress with a plunging neckline. Marge's dress was so short it looked like a belt. She had great legs. They were to follow us up in their car.

We're in our little caravan driving north. I'm deep in thought and then start to clutch. "Pull over". Pete seems flustered. I'm having doubts. Dave and Marge pull over behind us. They seem confused. We all sit in silence. Pete cajoles me. Not quite begging. I start to feel embarrassed. Something pushes me forward. I don't know what but we decide to drive on.

The rest is like the Beatles movie HELP!. The pace seems manic. We're in the justices' office (It's actually a real estate office but they do weddings too.) Dave is wearing a vest covered with buttons and political jibes. (Dave and Marge had been smoking weed). Pete had on a suit. The gezer who marries us doesn't know whether to stare down the front of my dress or at Marges legs. There's a planter with a philodendron in the shape of a telephone on a desk. Dave picks it up and starts talking into it. The gezer looks confused. I'm a robot. I say something after he reads something. It's over, we're married.

Across the highway from the office is one of those catering halls for big events. We ask if they will serve us. We don't have reservations. Dave tells the waiter this is a wedding. They laugh and seat us at a table. We are the only ones there. It's a huge empty hall. We start drinking. Hysterical laughter. The waiter brings me a big white decorated cake. It is a gift from the hired help. No wedding should be without a cake. Our car is parked across the road. It's a busy highway. I have the cake in the box. We all make a dash for the car. I stumble and drop the box in the middle of the road. I can't go back for it. I watch as car speeds over the box. The cake went splat.

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FEAR GETS THE BEST OF ME, Sex and Lies continued... Sunday, June 01, 2003

We meet for dinner, Igo's on Mass.Ave. I'm struck by his vulnerability. He is sheepish. We talk for hours. He doesn't want to pressure me. (Just the fact that I'm there, I knew what was coming). He loves me.

What next? At least we make another date. This goes on. He shows me his apartment. There is nothing in it, some clothes, a mattress on the floor. He says he has to go back to his house in Hanover Mass. to pick up a few things. He asks if I want to go. The wife and kids are gone for the weekend. My curiosity wins. What did he give up?

We drive for about an hour out of Boston heading south. It is dusk when we pull into the driveway of the house that you always see in your imagination if you are a woman who wants a man, some kids, and a house with a picket fence. It was over 100 years old. Lovingly restored by Pete. With pride he shows me the wide pine floors he sanded and refinished. I feel terrible and wonderful at the same time. He is making me an offering. He's showing me what he is capable of. I start to feel sick. He grabs a few things and we go.

A few days later he calls and asks to meet me at a local park, in the afternoon. It's odd, but I don't ask questions. He is there when I get there. He has two children with him, Jenny and Pete Jr. The girl is about 4 and the boy is 9. They are on the swings. Who am I supposed to be for these children? I have no idea. What is he doing? Another offering. This is what I give for you, not explicit, but implied.

Emotional turmoil. He wants to marry me. The little score card in my brain gets busy. I'm an artist, soon to get out of grad school. How will I survive? Obviously this man loves me. Look what he gave up for me. Other details: Pete was a former marine, a former Olympian (runner in Rome 1960), a Hunter/fisherman extradinaire. If ever the world blows up and goes to hell and there is nothing but a few people, some squirrels to hunt for food, and we are among them, Pete would save us. We would survive. I give up. I give in. O.K. I'll do it. I'll marry you.

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IT MUST'VE BEEN LOVE, Sex and Lies continued...

Six months go by. Pete tried calling at all-times of the day and night. I ignored him. After awhile the calls stopped.

I entered my first year of graduate school. Money was really tight. B.U. offered me a graduate teaching assistantship which paid my tuition but I still needed a place to stay. One of my professors set me up as a live-in nanny with Harold Tovish, a sculpture professor, and his artist (also a sculptor) wife, Marianna Pineda. They lived in a huge house in Brookline with a studio to die for. I was thrilled to be there. Occasionally when they had a life model they would invite me to draw with them. My job responsibilities were minimal. Nina at 8 years old was their youngest child and the only kid still at home. I was the baby sitter. They entertained at home. Julia Child, famous Boston chef, TV personality and cookbook author was their good friend. Once I served Julia a meal at a party. I was star struck.

It was 1967-68. The Tovishes were very politically active. They went to Wahington and participated in huge, angry, anti-war marches. Harold filmed the experience, brought it home and showed it to me. He introduced me to political activism. I started participating in student held antiwar rallies. B.U. was a hot bed of political radicalism then. Ray Mungo wrote for the student newspaper and was a student leader. When the campus riots started, B.U. was the first in Boston then it spread to M.I.T., Harvard was the last to jump on the bandwagon.

My painting was going well. Philip Guston was brought in to lecture us grad students. He had just started moving from abstraction back to figurative work. We were the first to see it. Powerful images of Klu Klux Klan type hooded figures, giant heads smoking. Guston was battling his own deamons in those paintings. We all went drinking with him. I know.

One day I get a call. "Hi, how are you?" I recognize the voice. "I've left my wife, I've filed for divorce and I have my own apartment in Boston. I'll understand if you don't want to see me. Can I invite you to have dinner, just dinner?" My mind speeds up to fever pitch. A thousand arguments for and against in 5 seconds. "Yes, O.K. Where should we meet?"

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SEX, LIES AND MEETING PETE

The Head of the Charles is a popular college rowing event held in Cambridge every spring. I was at the B.U. boathouse that year to provide moral support for a guy I was dating who rowed for the team. It was a chilly day in April and I was under-dressed. There was a group of older guys a short distance from me. They were drinking something alcoholic in paper cups and not paying much attention to the races. There was a lot of loud bantering and I had the impression 2 of them were trying to attract my attention. They asked if I'd like a drink. One of them was quite attractive,tall,lean,wavy black hair and laughing eyes. Turned out they were sports reporters for the local Boston papers, the Globe and the Herald. The good looking guy was the Sports Information Director and track coach at MIT. His name was Pete. His buddy wrote for the newspapers. There was some tension, a competition seemed to be going on between these two and I think I was the prize. They each tried to make some bet with me about the outcome of the race. Pete had it set-up so no matter what the results were, he would take me out to dinner. That's what happened. I had to go back to my dorm to get a jacket. He agreed to pick me up there later that evening.

I was living in a small dorm, a brownstone in Kenmore Square. It was called "The Honors Dorm". It was supposed to be for girls not only of high academic achievement, but also girls with high moral values and a sense of personal responsibility. Dean Melville actually had me transfered there from the big warehouse dorm on Babcock St. because they felt I was a "disruptive influence" on the other girls. It was a great move. The parietal rules did not apply to us in this dorm. No sign in or sign out. We were on the honor system.

Pete picked me up right on time. I was pretty excited. My dorm mates peeked out from behind the drapes to get a look at him. The older man. He was about 10 years older than me. It was 1967, my senior year, I'd graduate in a few months. We went out to dinner, had a great time and soon I was seeing Pete regularly. He would invite me to go on trips with him when he traveled with the team. We'd stay in motels, always eat out, the sex was pleasant, even interesting at times.

One Saturday I was waiting for Pete to pick me up. The phone rang, it was his buddy from that first day at the boat house. "Hey," he says, "did you know that guy you've been seeing has 2 kids, a wife, and a house in the suburbs?". I sucked in my breath. There had not been a hint about this from Pete. No slipping away while we were together to make sureptitious phone calls to home, no kid stuff in the car, nada. I smiled to myself. That bastard. The bell rang, I opened the door and smiled, got in the car and did not say a word. All during the evening I dropped hints that I knew. I gave him openings to come clean. I wanted him to confess. He avoided the obvious. My blood was rising. We get back to the dorm. We sit in the car. I don't get out. I wait. Silence. Then I explode. "You asshole, you creep, you lying son of a bitch - get out of my life - don't call - I never ever want you to darken my door again!" I slam the car door and don't look back.

The next day, Sunday, there is a delivery for me. A package with a bottle of my favorite wine, a loaf of French bread, some cheese and the Sunday NYT along with a note from him to go on a picnic and "talk it over". I give the wine and cheese to a friend and go off to my room to read the paper.

To be continued...

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PARIETAL RULES Saturday, May 31, 2003

I'd stolen my freedom at 14 so by the time I went off to college I took that freedom for granted. Was I in for a rude awakening. In September 1963 my mom and dad helped me pack up the family station wagon and my dad drove us to Boston. Dad hated Boston immediately. He drove across the Mystic River Bridge 3 times thinking it was a different bridge each time and swore he would never return.

I'd won a scholarship, mom and dad were resigned about me studying Art. I'd been assigned a room in the brand new freshmen dorms on Babcock Street. When we arrived on that hot and sweaty September day, my room was not ready. In fact the dorm, overlooking Nickerson Field, was still under construction. The lower floors were finished, the upper floors where I was asigned were not. They told me some of us would have to live in the lounges together until our rooms were ready. It was a girls dorm but the construction workers roamed freely everywhere.

My parents had had it. They unloaded my bags at the door, and took off for home in NJ. I stood there in a yellow dress I'd bought especially for my first day in Beantown. I was so excited I almost burst. The euphoria did not last. Constuction went faster than expected, we were ensconsed in our rooms within a week. During freshmen orientation I heard about "parietal rules". It was like a death sentence. I felt totally betrayed. What the fuck is going on here? I worked hard for my freedom. I'm an adult. They told us "girls" (several hundred young women in the girls dorm with 2 boys dorms on either side over looking the football field) that we had a dorm "mother" who was "in loco parentus", the university would be acting as surogate parents. Our "mother" was Dean Elsbeth Melville. She looked about 75 years old, had her tightly curled gray hair in a bun. She was 6 feet tall and never smiled. (I know she couldn't have been 75 in 63 because I recently read her obit in the NYT). We were instructed that we each had name cards at the front desk. When you left the dorm you had to "sign out" say where you were going and upon return, note the time and "sign in". The dorms were locked at 10:00 pm weekdays and 11:00 pm weekends. If we did not make it back before the doors were locked, they would send out the campus police to look for us.

This was nuts. I come to a big, cosmoplitan city to go to a UNIVERSITY and I'm treated like a 5 year old. I decide this is wrong, I'm not going to pay any attention this. I ignore the rules. I get into minor scirmishes but lie my way out of them. The worst happens in October. Saturday night, a drunken frat party. Mostly football players It was a hot fall, I'm still wearing sandals. The kitchen floor in the apartment is flooded with beer and broken bottles. I'm pretty plastered and my foot slips out of my shoe. I'm ankle deep in beer. A red sploch spreads into a huge puddle. My date, a sweet gorilla, tries to get my attention. I'm meserized by the growing red puddle at my feet. He looks down and says "Oh My God, you're bleeding, we've got to get you to the hospital." He picks me up, wraps a dirty towel around my foot and carries me out to his car. I start to realize I'll never get back to the dorm in time. We get to the emergency room at Boston City Hospital. Not too busy in the ER, they stitch my foot up and gorilla takes me back to the dorm. The doors are locked but we go around to the service entrance and a janitor lets us in. We have to sneak past the sign-in desk and get to the elevators without getting caught. Somehow we manage this, he hands me my new crutches, kisses me good night and the elevator door closes. The next day, ELSBETH calls me to her office. "YOU DID NOT SIGN IN LAST NIGHT!" "What are you doing on crutches?" - "I'll call your parents and have you suspended!" I begged her not to, I'd loose my scholarship and yada yada yada...She checked my records. Just like in High School, the academic stuff saved me. Bad girls always had bad grades, but I faked them out. She let me stay.

I spent the rest of October on crutches. By November my foot had healed. On a beautiful late November day, I was walking down Commonwealth Ave to class. Something was dreadfully wrong. People were pulling their cars over to the curb, some stopped in the middle of the street, everyone was crying. It was surreal. I asked a women who was sitting on the curb sobbing what was wrong. She said the president was shot.

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DUCK AND COVER

The alarms would erupt with an ear shattering blast. We knew what to do. They showed the film in class. Our teacher demonstrated how to squat under our desks, draw our knees up, tuck your head down. Some of us cried. It was my kindergarten class 1950. The fear factor embedded itself in my psyche here. I'd peak out of the corner of my eye and see a speck, high in the sky. It was a plane. I'd hear the engine and imagine it crashing in the window, explosions, fire. My heart was pounding in my ears. We were all 4 and 5 years old.

At some point, they stopped conducting those tests in school. But the fear factor remained. My dad had been a B17 bomber pilot in WWII. He was only 19 when he first took the throttle and flew missions over Germany. Can you imagine being asked to do that at 19? He had always loved planes and flying. I saw pictures of him as a kid grinning, holding the huge model planes he'd built. He was incredibly handsome, movie star handsome. Tall, blond, the Scandinavian square jaw, gray blue eyes - I have pictures of him in his leather bomber jacket with his crew, standing on the tarmac in front of their plane. I was in love with the image of my dad, the myth of my dad. He and my mom got married at 20. He wore is uniform in the wedding pictures. My mom never looked better than in those pictures.

The war ended, I was born and my dad's difficulties with alcohol surfaced. But it was a time when we all had to return to normal life. A structured life where we imagined we were in control. Ordering the surface of things became our life's work. If the house looked like the cover of House and Garden magazine, if mom and dad were attractive, well-dressed (at all times well-dressed), if we never ever talked about fear, everything would be fine. So that's how it went with us.

I could always forgive my father. No matter how bad things got, I'd come back to that image of the handsome 19 year old. I'd try to imagine the level of fear he must've experienced and overcome to function and fly 25 missions, get shot at, and survive. He became successful inspite of his drinking. Jobs after the war were tough to find but he started as an auto mechanic and was very good at it. He eventually bought the garage and business grew and he built a very large auto, truck and bus service company in an industrial park in northern NJ. He never, ever talked about the war.

My dad is 79 this year. Long retired in Florida. I tried to talk him into getting a computer and getting on the net but he refused. Not long ago he got a call. It was his old co-pilot from the B17. His former crew had stayed in touch after the war but lost track of my dad. They would have reunions and several of the guys were avid web explorers, had found my Dad's address and called. He was stunned. They had been looking for him for years. They were living scattered across the country, but all agreed to make the pilgrimage to visit my dad. They said they owed their life to him. He kept them alive. Mom and I never knew.

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SLEEPING TOGETHER

My parents slept in the same bed for 57 years. That I never saw them kiss on the lips, embrace with passion or any kind of feeling is astounding. I had no intention to write about this. I had other subjects on my list, but in plundering the nooks and crannies of my brain to write this blog not a single image of my parents touching each other beyond a pat on the back popped up. This can't be true. They must've touched each other. My brother and I exist. It was not immaculate conception. That they had sex without love is no shock. That they lived in the same house, slept in the same bed all those years, without touching, is a horror story.

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FAMILY SECRETS Friday, May 30, 2003

My father's father committed suicide when my father was 14. His family had immigrated to this country from Denmark. That's all I know about it. That I know about it at all is accidental. I overheard a hushed phonecall. My mother was talking to someone. From what I could discern my mother implied that there might be a hereditary factor. It frightened me. I started to worry that maybe something would happen to my dad. Guess I was 11 or 12. Why didn't anybody talk about this? Why were there no pictures of my real paternal grandpa?

My paternal grandmother had remarried and we called him grandpa. At some point I asked my mom what really happened to grandpa Eriksen. She said he fell off a horse, it was an accident. Did I make a mistake? Did I misread an overheard conversation?

Nothing ever seemed authentic to me in family life. Trying to figure out which one of my parents to believe. Who should I trust? It tortured me throughtout my childhood. I didn't know if either of them loved me and I was trying to figure it out. It was never clear. My father is the only one who ever touched me with affection. I remember it that way and the few photos I have of me being held as a baby are in the arms of my father. There is not a single picture of my mother holding me.

On the other hand, my dad had a drinking problem. I remember one horrendous moment when I was in the kitchen with my mom helping her dry the dishes. There was some nervousness because Dad had been drinking and we knew he was still up, sitting alone in the darkened living room. Suddenly he storms into the kitchen in a fury, grabs the knife I had been drying from my hand and holds it to my throat. My mother disappears. He accuses me of talking about him, with my mother, behind his back. We hadn't been talking about him at all. I thought he could kill me. He dragged me into the bathroom and locked the door. We were locked in there together. I remember nothing after that. Nothing.

As I got older, these scenes continued. One summer Saturday, when we lived in Dover, on the side of a steep hill, on a gravel road, he took my bike for a spin. He had been drinking. I was in the kitchen with mom when he came stumbling throuh the door. He looked at us and his face was unrecognizable, dripping in blood, hunks of gravel embedded in his skin. He had done a header off my bike, over the handlebars and landed face first. I screamed and ran to him and held him and said Dad, Dad we have to go to the hospital. He was laughing like a maniac and pushed me away, "no, no honey, I'll be fine, I'll be fine". My mom had left the scene. She ran into the bedroom and locked the door. I thought my Dad would die, that he would bleed to death. I had just gotten my drivers license and knew I had to get him to the hospital. I remember physically trying to push him into the car. He was laughing and in his drunken stupidity trying to push me away. I finally got him in (he was 6 feet tall and about 180 pounds) I drove to the emergency room, waited while they cleaned him up, picked the gravel out of his face, and sent him home. When he sobered-up the following day, he felt remorse. I was sitting on our staircase between the first floor and the bedrooms upstairs. He sat down by my side, put his head in my lap and cried and asked for my forgiveness. I was helpless. I was ashamed. I did not want my dad crying in my lap.

Not long after this incident I went off to college. I could put family life behind me. My mother and father stayed together. When they were both 77 my father revealed to my mother that he had loved another woman and had had a 15 year long affair with her and that the only reason he stayed with my mom was because this women wouldn't marry him. My mom came to me with this news, sobbing, and through her sobs she told me she knew that dad had always had affairs, even with a black woman once, but that she had no idea he had loved someone else. Family secrets.

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MY GOD IS BETTER THAN YOUR GOD

The God wars scare the shit out of me. We've got the Bushies stoking up the rabble on the right. God is here, God is with us, God is on our side, God is on my side, but only my God is the true God. Unfortunately the Muslims seem to feel the same way about Allah. A day doesn't go by when I don't shudder as views of Armageddon fill my brain. (Mine come from Mad Max movies, not the Bible)

I was born and baptized Lutheran. There was an old, stone Lutheran church about two miles from my house when we lived in Montclair NJ. The only time anyone in my family ever stepped inside a church was for a wedding, a funeral or a baptism. My parents however felt that a religious education was necessary for me. I don't know where that idea came from. There was no real religious life, no talk of spirituality or even philosophical reflection by anyone in my family, ever, as far back as my memory can take me. My Gram was the most outspoken. She would actually declare that as far as she was concerned there was no such thing as "God". She thought this was an idea invented by weak people. I wasn't with her on her death bed, so I don't know if she changed her mind at the last minute.

Getting up in the pitch dark on those bitter cold Sunday mornings finally convinced me. My mother would haul me out of my bed, make sure I had some decent clothes on (I was about 8 or 9 years old), give me money for the collection plate and send me off to Sunday school with instructions to stay on for the church service after. I had to walk the whole way. She went back to bed with my dad. The hypocrisy of this struck me even then. My resentment fomented. I went a few times and felt like an alien. Some scary folks taught Sunday school. Soon I would leave the house, but never make it to the church. I'd stop off at the local pharmacy that also sold the Sunday paper and had a soda fountain. I'd hang out there, spend my collection money and when church let out, I'd walk home. No one ever checked on me so this strategy worked for a long time. At somepoint, someone who knew me and my parents, told on me. There was a small scene, not bad. Their heart wasn't in it. That ended my religious period.

So, for me, religion goes hand in hand with hypocrisy and the Bushies and their followers have not shaken my belief.

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SIP AND SUP Thursday, May 29, 2003

The work ethic runs through my family with a vengence. Nothing is given, everything must be "earned". My dad was always "at work". When he did finally come home some nights for dinner, if he talked at all, he talked about work. Transmissions gone bad, leaky gas tanks, over heated radiators, my dad was an auto mechanic. I tried to act interested, I wanted to curry favor with my dad so I tried to understand what a piston was. I would actually have conversations with him about these things and have no idea what I was talking about. My mom was always "at work" too, even though she was home. Ironing, cooking, cleaning, shopping, and lots more cleaning. Even though we had all those ash trays around, they were never allowed to have ashes in them for long. Mom was on top of it.

I lied about my age on my first job application. You had to be at least 14, I was almost there, but not quite. I wore roller skates and waited on cars in the parking lot of SIP AND SUP, a drive-in restaurant on the busy corner of Route 10 in Parsippany NJ. In those days the cars, lots of convertibles in summer, would pull in to the parking lot, park and roll down their windows (unless it was a convertible). I had to roller skate over in my short little pleated skirt, take their order, skate back to the order guy at the service window, give him the order from my note pad and on to the next car. Picking up the orders (usually hamburgers and fries-this was before McDonalds)on a tray that hooked on the outside of the car. I'd have to check to make sure that they didn't drive away with the tray when they were done. The atmosphere was similar to a David Lynch movie.

When we moved to Dover I got a job at Dick's Dinner on Route 46. It was a busy place for summer people on their way up to the lake areas for vacation. It was also a favorite stop over for truckers. They loved the rice pudding. It was advertised as a special. What I knew and what the truckers didn't know was that the chef smoked cigars. He would make these huge vats of the stuff in the back of the kitchen and one day he called me back to show me his secret. I watched in horror as in the last few moments of stirring, he took the stub of the cigar out of his mouth and tossed it in the pudding. He kept stirring till it disintegrated and looked like nutmeg.

I liked waitressing. I flirted and learned how to talk to get the biggest tips. Families would come in. I'd be as nice as I could be. The dads seemed to do all the talking. More often then not, they would leave a big tip and the wives would take it back and leave little or nothing. I worked every summer and sometimes after school.My mom was the keeper of the money. I'd have to empty my pockets on the kitchen counter as soon as I got home. My mom would start counting my tips before I could even take off my waitress uniform. Piles of change mounted up on that counter, to be wisked away to some bank for my college education. I never had any money of my own unless I asked my mother for it. She would decide if the request was deserved.

In my junior year of high school I decide to apply to early admission programs for college. I did pretty well on my Junior year SATS. I knew I wanted to go to art school, or major in art at college and definitely a college in a big city that was not within easy driving distance of home. My Dad went bonzo. No way was he going to pay for any artsy fartsy education, I'd never get a job and would never be able to support myself. He said if I didn't go to Montclair State Teachers College, or go to nursing school, he would cut me off, no money for college, no living expenses, no nothing. So of course that clinched it for me. Art Now, Art Forever. I applied to Boston University School For The Arts, early admission, with an art portfoilio I'd worked on for years. I got accepted, got a scholarship and kissed New Jersey good-by. After a visit during my Freshman year summer, I never went back. I majored in Fine Arts, studio art. I was a painting major (click here to see some of my art). So far I've been employed, doing one exciting thing or another, in an unbroken stretch, for the last 45 years.

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A DEATH IN THE FAMILY Wednesday, May 28, 2003

It was my 14th birthday. Mom had fixed a big meal and the whole family was sitting around the living room trying to digest it. The TV was on in the corner and I was sitting at my Great Grandma Cook's feet. She was a sweet woman who still looked damn good for almost 90. My back was resting against her legs. There was a pleasant buzz of conversation around me. Then silence, sudden silence. The atmosphere turned tense. My mother ordered me to my room. No explanation, just ordered me to my room. There was confusion, rushing around. I was scared and had no idea why. I usually question everything my parents said or asked, but this time I just went to my room. My mother warned me not to dare come out. I was petrified. I had no idea what had happened. It was getting dark. I heard the sound of an ambulance. Lights flashing, it pulled into our driveway. I watched out my bedroom window as two medics rushed in our house with an oxygen tank. I heard cries and shuffling and commotion. I strained my ears and eyes to see to hear what was going on. I don't remember how long this was, but again there was silence. I saw the medics carry something, someone out of the house on a stretcher. They were covered with a white sheet.

No one came to get me. I stayed in my room. I went to bed. I couldn't sleep. Early the next morning mom came in and told me Grandma Cook had died. Just died. Right there in her wing-backed chair, comfortable after a big meal with her family around her, she closed her eyes and went to sleep and then just stopped breathing. I don't know what I felt. I can't remember. Maybe because they felt I couldn't handle it.

Since then there have been other deaths in the family. My Grandfather died in his bed in a very similar way. He just laid down one night, said good night to my Gram and did not wake up. He was the first dead person I ever touched. My Gram lived a long time. My mother (her daughter) complained about her constantly. As Gram aged my life took me in many other directions. It was left to her own daughter to care. My parents wanted to retire to Florida, get away from the cold winters in NY. My dad was tired of having his boat dock freeze up and get heaved out of the water every winter. So, they put Gram in a home in Long Island NY and moved to Florida. I was on my own personal odyssey and only visited Gram once in the home. She was cheery and seemed lucid when I visited her. After a half hour conversation, she asked the same questions all over again. It was funny, she was so chirpy and bright and seemed so aware, but nothing hung in there. It was like a hampster on a wheel, going round and round, but I loved her. I wanted to squeeze her, and kiss her, and take her home and care for her-but at that point I had no place to bring her. No home.

She died alone. My mother and father were in Florida. I was in Europe, living in a commune. They found some huge tumor in her. It was so big when they found it that there was no hope, no chance. They told my parents to just let her die. My parents and I were astranged at the time, so I never knew exactly when it was that she died. As I write this I'm crying. I loved my Gram. Nobody should die alone.

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