Next time, don't come.

A year after we moved to America, my mother, faced with the burden of supporting me and my sister and herself for the first time in her life, had a kind of nervous breakdown.  One day, she dropped us off at school and disappeared. 

Over time, I've begun to wonder if abandoning us was a strategic move or surrender. Make of it what you will.  I don't suppose I'll ever know and I have tried with all that is in me to make that time a minor episode rather than a pivotal event in my life (I've been to therapy, I know there's damage). 

No one wanted me or my sister.  We got shuttled from one relative to another.  Years after my mom came back and life got better, I refused to see the relatives because seeing them made me hate my mother and reminded me of being unwanted. 

For three months or so, my sister and I stayed with my cousin CB in the Bay Area.  She couldn't keep us for reasons I didn't understand when I was 13.  Who could blame a person for not wanting to take on two adolescents? She never knew what to say to us, me especially. She watched us do our homework, she picked up my textbooks and my dictionary and studied my vocabulary words. Cousin CB began to study the dictionary the way I did. This probably sounds silly to Americans but to immigrants, learning new words is a big deal. 

One day she said, "Do you know what vex means?" Yep. 

"Do you know what ejaculate means?" She meant the other definition -- to exclaim, to yell. 

And so CB and I developed a way of talking to each other by using malapropisms and hyperbole. She used every opportunity to use the words vex and ejaculate. And even though it stopped being funny, I laughed every time.

Then one day in June after the school year was over, CB apologetically announced that my sister and I were moving to L.A. to live with other relatives.  My sister and I were driven down in the (covered) flatbed of a pickup truck to Carson, CA where another cousin's ex wife lived.  She wanted to take us in.

I avoided CB for years.  I eventually moved to the Bay Area as an adult and she called me repeatedly to ask me to visit.  At first I said no and then eventually stopped taking her calls altogether.  It was not until I moved to New York that I became comfortable around her again.  Each time we talked, she talked about those words and I faked a laugh.  No fail.  

This year, my cousin Danny's family moved to L.A.  His wife F is much older than him, religious and conservative and uncomfortable with my family's kind of excess.  His children are awkward and shy.

One day over the holidays, my brother asked me, "What does finagle mean?" So I told him. He tried to use it in a sentence, incorrectly.  So I corrected him.  He tried again. Bingo.  Then I told him about Finagle a Bagel in Boston.  My mother started laughing and making up stupid things just so she could use the word finagle.  My other brothers joined in and so did my dad.  After we wore the word out, I told them about CB, how she used to say vex and ejaculate all the time. 

This made everyone hysterical.  Cousin's wife F sat there staring in disgust while we laughed when one of my brothers said "F., you look so mad. We're just joking around. Please don't ejaculate."

Our mother, out of politeness, said, "Don't talk to your cousin like that.  She's not used to us." And then she started laughing again.

A few days later, we all drove to the Bay Area to CB's house.  CB looked at me (we had not seen each other in at least four years) and said, "You never visit even though I know you come to San Francisco every year. I am vexed." 

My mother and my brother said in unison "Don't ejaculate!"

F walked right out of the room and CB said "what's wrong with her?" 

That was the end of that.

This entry is about to get overlong and repetitive.  It's been a trying day.  A emailed wanting to get together.  I said no but I felt like shit about it.  M called and I didn't answer.  Instead I went home and tried to cry.  I was unsuccessful.  

I wonder now if my sadness is more intense than it was six months ago. I keep saying it hurts less but I realize I'm working too hard to not feel bad. The hurt is not so visceral anymore. Now I feel humiliated and reproachful and rational. Bitterness coexists rather peacefully with the longing.

It's probably fair to say that everything I wrote above has always been in me but it's only now that I can face it.  

Nowhere

I hope this doesn't turn into a sleepless night.

I am thinking of the word vacillate -- it reminds me of limbo, emptiness, and of course, indecision.  Vacate, vacuum, vacation.

Vac is the Latin for empty.

This is probably not the kind of conversation that will get things started at a party, but what the hell. It's a word that defines itself when you look at it on a page -- before I even heard it used, I saw that word once and knew what it meant.  Static but moving.  Vacillate is pendulous and weightless.

I've out-nerded myself.

Another thing I think of often and for no good reason:

WHOLE
HOLE

Get it?

Why a pair of pants but not a pair shirt?  A pair bra? What makes pants (two legs) a pair but not a shirt (two arms)?

And I don't know the right time to use despite and in spite.  Are they interchangeable? One would think I would just look this up rather than spending too much time thinking about it. But one day it'll come to me.

Book Love

One of the first books I ever stole was The Heather Blazing by Colm Toibin.  I still own that book (my old flame AL called it my trophy, this before I told him that I used to be a book thief which I think amused and then put him off). I still haven't read it. But just now I finished Toibin's newest novel Brooklyn and was fairly wowed.  I wonder if I will pick up the other book(s) now? I mean to buy since I don't steal anything anymore.

Towards the end of Brooklyn, there is a passage that is simply gorgeous.  I say this fully admitting that I am somewhat biased because it was a scene that could have been lifted from MY life, circa 2009 versus 1950s Brooklyn/Ireland.

The mother in Ireland avoids talking about the daughters life in Brooklyn.  The daughter wonders why her mother doesn't seem to have any interest in her new life.

The reading A.D.D. has passed I think.  Now I am on to compulsive book-buying and book-reading.  Purchases in the last month:

• The Museum of Innocence
• Lark and Termite
• Brooklyn*
• Love Begins in Winter*
• Generosity
• Gourmet Rhaphsody
• Prelude
• The opera reference book
  

*read so far

I'm missing a few more but this is what I can think off the top of my head.  This happens to me in the fall -- all the good books come out and I go a little nuts.

When I was insane, jobless, newly single and newly un-mothered, I started volunteering at a bookstore downtown to keep myself occupied. It was a bit of a pain in the ass, customer service is not my forte.  But now I realize that I love the time I spend at the store. I've found my niche -- I don't have to talk to anyone, the people who work there seem amused that I say very little but work faster than any volunteer needs to. I listen to old opera records in the sub-basement while I clean the old books. Sometimes some of the clients are there and we listen to the old music together. We don't talk to each other. The four hours go by quicker than I'd like and I'm always sorry I have to leave.

Beginning of this year when I was pregnant and A was in Upstate New York shooting a movie, I holed up in his apartment surrounded by his books.  I imagined myself reading to my baby or a child at a later age reading next to me. Then I would freak out and smoke to banish the image.

Then after the abortion, I would sit around and cry and stare at my books, wishing I could find any one of them compelling enough to read and lose myself in.  But those first few months were rough.  I did everything half asleep.  I read a lot of books and remember none of them.

It occurs to me that I expect my books to give me comfort.  Or maybe it's not books so much as words.  When I was 14, I wrote endless letters and I read shitty romance novels borrowed from the Los Angeles Public Library.  All those words made me less miserable. And when I was happy, the words keep me from being too happy.

Good deal for a few bucks.