October 18, 1946
It's been my birthday all week.
My stomach made the sound of a cab screeching to a halt. I could see my feet stepping onto the street. I had on black suede ankle boots with a zip up the side. I can no longer wear the boots. I never took cabs.
I once promised a man who was touchy about his privacy I would keep his secrets, and I kept his secrets. I have never made a resolution on New Year’s Eve or on any other day. I love my cell phone. I love that I will never understand why I keep wondering about a woman I don’t love. It makes me feel my whole life is stretched out in front of me. In a way, it is.
On October 18, 1946, three Guam kingfishers hatched at the National Aviary and were released into the wild for the first time in almost 40 years. The first annual Cannes Film Festival opened. Aaron Copland's 3rd Symphony was first performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra led by Serge Koussevitzky. And I was born to Toby and Murray and went to live with them and my sister Ellen in Washington Heights.
In Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), the obvious rule is don’t go outside. The birds can peck themselves into houses, sure, but it takes them a pretty long time. You don’t need to help them by going out for a smoke and ducking into a phone booth. You don’t need to stay in the upstairs bedroom, filled with birds, when you could open the door and move into the hall.
After I was born, my parents and my sister were my world. Not my entire world. Children were allowed to play chalk games and games with pink balls on the street, as long as you stayed on your block. When I was five, I went to summer camp for the first time for two months. Ellen was eleven. Camp was the future. I passed the deep water test.
When my family lived in Long Beach, my parents would drive to the city and walk the streets of the Lower East Side. They ate knishes and pickles. The cold is cutting their cheeks, as they walk arm-in-arm. When I was a child, I didn’t think about things they missed. I didn’t think of them at all, really.
Can you return in memory to the sensation of believing something you no longer believe? Yes, if you at least a little bit still believe it. Rembrandt didn't paint clouds. When Gregor Samsa awakes, he knows he is never returning to his former life as a human being. Every morning, we’re not returning to our former lives. Every morning is a one-way door.
A moment ago, I was reminded of a passage from Beckett’s novel Murphy: “A man is in bed, wanting to sleep. A rat is behind the wall at his head, wanting to move. The man hears the rat fidget and cannot sleep, the rat hears the man fidget and dares not move.” Every time I have told myself to accept the limits of another person, I have gone nuts.
After you left, I took to watching a cooking show with a chef who wore his hair long like yours and had your dark skin. If I ran into you, I wouldn’t ask you the question I tumble in my mind. I’d say, “Have you fixed the rotted parquet square in your apartment?” When I was younger, I would walk for whole days and nights, day after day and night after night, as if I had all the time in the world to let time do what time does.
In 1966, after Bruce and I got married, we lived next door to Adele Mailer, the wife of Norman Mailer he stabbed near her heart while drunk, claiming if he hadn’t stabbed her he would have died of cancer from repressed rage. Adele was raising her two daughters, and we could hear each other’s lives through our thin common wall. We became friends. Everything in her life was glamorous. She was acting, and in one play she was cast along with Hervé Villechaise before he became famous playing Tattoo on Fantasy Island. Hervé came to a big party we threw with Adele. He ate the Swedish meatballs I was serving in those days. He was charming and seemed a little lost and also witty and self-possessed. Adele opened us to a freewheeling and accepting world that swims back whenever I think of her.
When my mother was young, she has a friend named Ruthie. During the war, it took a long time for my father to be drafted but finally he was. My mother called Ruthie. Ruthie said, “Hold on,” and she put down the phone. When she came back, my mother said, “Where did you go?” Ruthie said, “I was looking out the window. I figured if Murray was drafted, the Germans must be down on the street.” My father was given time to liquidate his business. He made coats for girls. By the time the business was no more, he was considered too old to serve.
Last week at a party, I ran into my friend Jeff. We’d met while teaching at a program based in the UK. I said to him, "Remember when we were at Wroxton, and I’d find you in the afternoons and say, 'We're walking to Banbury. Let's go.'?” The walk was four miles there and four miles back. We’d go to a pub before heading home. Jeff said, "It was lucky it didn’t get that cold there." We were housed in a 13th Century Abbey. Along the roads were tufts of wool caught on barbed wire. You could smell lanolin in the wool. We talked about our lives in the gray light of Oxfordshire winters. We talked about being Black and being woman. The trees cast moon shadows across the road.
At twenty-six, I dreamed I’d die that year. When I didn’t die, I thought maybe I’d gotten it wrong and I’d die at thirty-six, but by then I’d fallen in love with Gardner and thought I could do anything I wanted because he was too old for me and it was not my real life.
Also occurring in 1946. Women can vote in Romania, Yugoslavia, Argentina, and Quebec. The first female police officers are hired in Korea and Japan. The Magic 8 Ball is invented by Albert C Carter and Abe Bookman. The Space Age is launched with Project Diana, when radar waves, bounced between the Moon and Earth, establish the exact distance between them and prove communication is possible between Earth and outer space. Italians vote to turn Italy from a monarchy into a republic and women are allowed to vote for the first time. Hermann Göring, founder of the Gestapo and recently convicted Nazi war criminal, poisons himself two hours before his scheduled execution. (How did he get the poison?) The remaining ten Nazi war criminals sentenced to death are executed by hanging in the gymnasium of the Palace of Justice, Nuremberg. Viet Minh forces begin a war against French occupying forces in Vietnam, succeeding in 1954 when France surrenders at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. Also born in 1946. Diane Keaton, Dolly Parton, Charlotte Rampling, Liza Minnelli, Joanna Lumley, Candice Bergen, Cher, Gilda Radner, and Sally Field.
In Nothing Compares (Showtime), a documentary about Sinéad O'Connor, there she stands, filling the screen with her gorgeous, fuck-you chic when she was young, guileless, and on fire. She’s clear from the start she won’t be made fit for mass consumption. I remember seeing the episode of Saturday Night Live in 1992 when she tore up a picture of the Pope and sang Bob Marley's "War" a cappella. No public person can be prepared for the wild and massive hatred that followed this performance—a brilliant protest against the control of women’s lives by the Catholic church. She arose from a tradition of Irish performers being famously political. What good is your fame, she thought, if not for grinding down the things that grind down women and Black people. On the documentary, we don't get to hear her piercing rendition of "Nothing Compares 2 U" because the Prince estate forbade it.
My mother came back from the dead. I said, “I’m glad to see you.” She said, “I must be dreaming.” I said, “You were right about me. I can see it now. I’m sorry you died before I could say that to you.” She said, “Do you think it would have changed my life?” I said, “We have a Catch-22 here. If I’d confessed my limits, you would still have raised a person like me.” She said, “I had another child.” It was lovely being in agreement with my mother. She was wearing a nightgown, and her hair was fluffy and blond. I said, “Let’s walk on the beach. Do you remember when we used to walk on the beach?” She said, “I was afraid of the waves. You were afraid of nothing. I made you that way. I don’t know how you could come from me. You’re nothing like me.” We walked with my dog, who was also returned from the dead. My mother patted the top of his head and said, “I’m afraid of dogs. I wasn’t raised around animals.” I said, “I had every advantage in life, and I’m grateful for the things you gave me.” She said, “I didn’t give you anything. You came out the way you are. You spoke in complete sentences when you started to talk. You knew what you wanted. I still don’t know what I want. You were terrifying.” I said, “I’m sorry.” She put her arm around me, and I could smell her perfume. We were barefoot and the sand was soft. It was neither warm nor cold, neither light nor dark. We were spending the perfect amount of time together. She pulled me to her and said, “What happened to your thin waist?”
Outside the window, the leaves are yellow or orange or greenish yellow or reddish green. The yellow leaves are so bright, they cast a glow of sunlight on your face although there is no sun. We don’t have language for units of sensation, only less and more. Free will is an unobservable fact. I want you to know how much I like being certain of nothing. Everyone can trot behind a hot dog dangled on a stick. Everyone dreams of a different hot dog.
Biz
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Such gorgeousness. It’s your birthday, but you give us a gift. XO.
"Every time I have told myself to accept the limits of another person, I have gone nuts." Oh my god, yes.