I was twenty-one when I moved out of my parents’ apartment and into one of my own, ten miles away—or (more to the point for the New Yorker I had always been and imagined I always would be) nine express stops north on the D train. The building I moved into was tiny—a dollhouse of an apartment building—and crumbling, and tilting: if you set a pencil down near the north wall of my apartment, the one wall that had windows (two of them, which looked out on a weedy square of courtyard), it quickly rolled south into the “kitchen,” a shallow alcove housing just a miniature stove and sink. The refrigerator had its own alcove, perpendicular to the apartment’s door (and when I saw the apartment for the first time, I thought there was no refrigerator, because the landlord had left the door open: the refrigerator was hidden behind it). I spent just five minutes there before I told the landlord, “I’ll take it”—surprising myself (not by what I said, but by the way I said it: by my own decisive, grownup voice—imitating my father, it occurs to me now), and without giving him a chance to respond, to say no, I couldn’t have it—as I was so afraid he would—I had gotten out my checkbook and was writing a check for a month’s rent and a month’s security.
It was my first checkbook, and quite possibly my first check; it was the first of many times I would channel my father. It was, of course, the beginning of my adult life.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like her. I liked her fine—that’s what I would have said if anyone had asked me. But I knew better than to get too attached to the women who dated my next-door neighbor, John. Women cycled through his life pretty quickly, and so far all the ones I’d met had been crazy, anyway—too crazy for me, if not for him. John pursued crazy; he thought crazy was charming. And while she didn’t necessarily seem crazy, I’d learned that you couldn’t always tell at first (that actually you could hardly ever tell at first).
Did she like me? It was impossible to judge. She was friendly enough, always polite if not warm or “chatty”—John’s word, not mine (he had a way of using words like chatty and jolly, pronouncing them with a vaguely British accent, that I found both amusing and mystifying; I imagined it had something to do with his having grown up in Connecticut). Certainly she was more guarded than I (but then just about everyone I have ever met is more guarded than I). I could not have read her even if I'd tried. But I didn't try, because we weren't friends.
And then she cracked her skull—she almost died—and suddenly we were.
A long essay, "Seeing Things," in The Southern Review
and here's a review of it (part of a roundup of reviews of literary
magazines at http://www.newpages.com/magazinestand/litmags/default.htm)
Volume 43 Number 2
Reviewed by Sheheryar B. Sheikh
The Southern
Review
prides itself on excellence, on not letting the reader off the hook.
This issue has three essays on “Mind and Metaphor,” none of
which are an easy task to read, partly because each of will unsettle
your preconceived notions of those two abstract concepts. Michelle
Herman's exploration of expert advice on her daughter's rare
psychological condition makes for a terrific read. She meanders like a
sure narrator going for the kill with a ready spear, and the insightful
way her discussion weaves in the objectives and possibilities in
metaphor astound the reader. Herman scoffs science, reveres it,
magnifies its warm steeliness and fuses it on a nuclear level with
literature. Her included discussion on story-telling is worth reading
for every writer of character-driven narratives. [for the remainder of
the review, see the link above]
"El Fin del Mundo," in Stumbling and Raging, edited by Stephen Elliott (proceeds to support politically progressive candidates in the midterm elections).
"The Perfect Mother (A Cautionary Tale)," in O, The Oprah Magazine"Finders
Keepers," in O, The Oprah
Magazine
"Finding My Voice," in Redbook
"Performance," in American Scholar
Hear "Performance" on Wired for Books
...and hear Jamie Sims and The Cosmopolitans, as mentioned in "Performance," on their recently reissued album, Wild Moose Party
"Idolatry,"
an essay (about American Idol!),
in River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative
Excerpted from books:
from Dog, a novella (MacAdam/Cage, 2005; paperback, 2006)
The dog, the dog, the dog—the dog had taken over her life.
But this was not necessarily a bad
thing. Perhaps she had needed to have her
life taken over.
This—a thought on the fly, as it were, as she raced along behind the selfsame dog, the ridiculously expensive leash pulled so taut between them that if she stopped running to keep up with him, she feared the dog would choke to death—made her laugh out loud, and in response the dog stopped suddenly, too suddenly for her to stop, and she nearly tripped over him.
She was a little drunk.
No doubt that explained at least some of this.
The lament for sure, and possibly the wry judgment on herself. Almost certainly the laugh—a shock of
noise to both of them after fifteen or twenty minutes of pure silence
but for their footfalls on the sidewalk and the steady jangle of the
metal tags that hung from the dog’s braided leather collar (his
necklace, she called it when she took it off him each night after the
midnight walk, so that their clanking wouldn’t disturb her sleep:
Here, let me take off your jewelry, darling), plus her
hard and shallow breathing as she did her middle-aged best to keep up
with him. Also how close she’d come
to falling, to breaking an arm or a leg or spraining an ankle, all
because of a dog.
A
dog she had never intended to own. The
very concept—ownership of a living creature!—dismayed her. As did the concept of caretaking.
She lived alone. She did
not—it was not in her nature to—take care.
A dog she therefore had no business having.
The dog (but he was not even a dog yet
but a puppy, just over eleven weeks old) was sitting on the cold
sidewalk, considering her. He looked very
serious.
“Silly,” she said, and bent to pat his head. “It was just a laugh.” The dog cocked his head—he looked genuinely puzzled—which made her laugh again. But this time the sound of her laughter didn’t alarm him.
“A human thing,” she
explained, and oddly enough this seemed to satisfy the dog. He gave a little nod, or what looked to her
like a nod (did dogs nod? She knew nothing
about dogs), and stood and turned, then abruptly bounded ahead again,
yanking her behind him.
Her
name was Jill. The dog, unfortunately, was
named Phil. She had named him herself. She hadn’t noticed (and this was
strange, she granted, because she was a poet; you’d think it
would have been impossible for her not to have noticed) the rhyme.
Well, it wasn’t altogether as strange as it appeared to be. This was what she felt obliged to explain when people asked. To begin with, she had named the dog Philip. It had not occurred to her that she would call him Phil. She was not the sort of person who clipped names short. She disliked even the word “nickname.” She had never had one herself. She had a name that sounded like a nickname, but wasn’t—it was the only name she had—and she disliked it. “Jill”: so girlish, so truncated-sounding. So lightweight. Even as a child she had known that she was not a lightweight, that the name didn’t suit her. From the time she was ten she had signed her schoolwork “J.T. Rosen.”
She had named the dog in a hurry. He
had been called Dog—that was the poor
creature’s name—by the “foster father” who had
been keeping him, caring for him, since rescuing him from the pound. The man was a volunteer for an organization
called Fostering Care, which meant, he told her over the phone, that
his name was on a list of people who could be called to take in dogs
that were about to be “put down,” to look after them beyond
the pound’s two-week limit and try on their own to find permanent
homes for them.
He
couldn’t afford to become too attached to the dogs he took in as
“fosters,” he said. “I
made that mistake the first couple times. Learned
pretty fast.” Still, a dog had to be
called something—sometimes, he explained, he’d have one
with him for months before a home was found—and long ago
he’d settled on Dog, unless of course he already had another Dog
with him when he brought a new one home. Jill
considered this. How many dogs had he
taken in, then? she wanted to know.
“Geez,
who can say. Tell you the truth, I never
counted. Hundreds, I reckon.”
She
had to ask. “What happens if you
take in another one after you’ve named one Dog?”
“Oh,
I have four others out in my garage right now that’ve come in
after Dog did. This Dog, the one
you’re interested in, just so happened to turn up when I had no
other dogs here except my own. But two,
three days later came Pup, and then—bang—the next week
there was Girl, Boy, and Guy. All real
nice dogs. You might want to have a look
at them too, if you decide to come over.”
“How
about your own dogs?” Jill asked.
“Oh,
my dogs aren’t available to be adopted out.”
He sounded alarmed. “Those
are my dogs. I keep
them.”
“No,
I mean”—she was embarrassed—“do they have real
names?”
“They
all have real names.” Now
he sounded insulted. “Some names are
just more…you know, attachment-oriented than others.”
Jill
was silent, briefly, thinking this over: a man who felt comfortable
uttering the words “real nice” and “I reckon” and “attachment-oriented.”
“That’s
what I meant,” she
said. And added, delicately, “Names
that suggest you’re willing, even glad, to
be…attached.”
“Oh,
yeah, sure. They’re Gypsy, Lucky,
and Fido—Fido sounds like it’s kind of a joke, I guess. But I liked the idea when it came to me. You know, it’s so old-fashioned. Not many people name their dogs Fido these
days.”
“True
enough,” Jill said. And because he
seemed to expect it: “It’s a very nice name.
They all are.”
The
man’s name, improbably enough, was Bill. She
didn’t tell people that. They would
have made it part of the joke. She tried
not to think about it, actually. It made the whole thing seem a bit of
a farce.
from The Middle of Everything (University of Nebraska Press, 2005)
The night before
her third birthday, my daughter cries.
She doesn’t
want to turn three—this is what she
says when I ask what’s wrong. She
likes being two, she says. She is happy
being two. Why can’t she just stay
two?
She is sobbing,
and I am at a loss, as I have been so often
in the last three years—one day short of three years. It’s not just that the question is hard
to answer. It’s not even just that
it’s especially hard for a mother who has taken an oath never to
resort to the “Because I say so” or “You think
that’s unfair? Well, life is unfair” school of
parenting—a mother who explains everything, who enjoys
explaining everything, who is always up for a good healthy debate about
her explanation, even with a two-year-old; a mother who has been
explaining everything since said two-year-old was two days old. Because she wanted to set a precedent. Which she did.
Actually,
it’s the crying itself that undoes me, as it
always is. Compared to my ability to bear
my daughter’s grief or pain, even the impossibility of explaining
the passage of time in a way that will make sense to a
nearly-three-year-old seems like no big deal.
When she was a
baby, I would cry whenever she cried. I
would pick her up, cradle her in my arms,
coo and murmur to her, cover the top of her head with kisses, attend to
whatever needed attending to—all the while in tears myself.
And Grace at two
(as at four, at six, at eight) doesn’t
just cry. She sobs as if her heart
is breaking. And once she starts—and
she starts often; tears come naturally, too quickly, to her, as they
always have to me—she has difficulty stopping.
Once, when she was four, I made the mistake of bringing home a
video of “The King and I”—a movie I chose because she
had so thoroughly enjoyed “The Music Man,” had seen it so
many times she knew the dialogue and lyrics all by heart, and because
we’d graduated to “My Fair Lady” and then “West
Side Story” (the latter of which would soon succeed “The
Music Man” as her favorite movie, although what she watched was
an adulterated version: fast-forwarded past the rumble, the manhandling
of Anita in Doc’s store, the shooting of Tony).
“The King and I” seemed the logical next step.
I was right to
think she’d like it: she watched the
whole movie in one sitting with fierce, unswerving concentration,
unwilling to take even a two-minute bathroom break.
I just hadn’t reckoned on her reaction to the king’s
death at the end. She wept so long and
hard she frightened me. Hours later she
was still crying on and off, still talking in a hushed,
frightened voice about how terrible his death was (“After I got
to know him so well!” she kept saying. “After
I got to love him too, just like Anna!”). I
cried this way after seeing “Camelot” in a movie theater
when I was a little girl. I told Grace
this. “I cried on and off for days,”
I said, and she was horrified: “Then let’s never
rent that one.”
Even now, almost five years later, she recalls with reverent amazement the day she cried for hours over a movie death.
But at the
time I am speaking of she has not yet seen
"The King and I." She is only almost-three and what she is
sobbing over is the death of her two-year-old self. I am holding
her in my arms, sitting on the edge of the bed. A minute ago
she'd been tucked in, ready for sleep--so I had thought--in the
“big girl bed” she’s been in since shortly after she
turned two, not because we had decided it was time to do away with the
crib, but because we’d moved to New York for the year and left as
much as possible behind in Columbus. I am
on sabbatical from my teaching job; Glen has a grant from the Marie
Walsh Sharp Foundation that provides him with a large, many-windowed
studio in Tribeca—a far cry from the converted circa-1907 one-car
garage he works in at home. We are living
in a furnished apartment in Brooklyn Heights for which we have
bartered; Glen is remodeling it in exchange for our rent.
We’ve brought boxes of books, clothes, toys, cassette
tapes, art supplies; no crib.
The apartment
belongs to a woman named Pat, who grew up in
it, as did her own daughter, Ariel, who is now in her thirties and in
whose childhood bed Grace sleeps. Pat is
schizophrenic and lives in a group home upstate, near Ariel but not
with her. The husband of my old friend,
Vicki, who lives with her family in the building next door to this one,
has made these arrangements for us. The
two buildings form a co-op, and everyone in the co-op is pleased to
have us living in Pat’s apartment, which has been empty since she
was first hospitalized.
We have put most
of Pat’s furniture and other
belongings in storage for the year: we keep out just what we absolutely
need—a bed for Grace, a bed for us, bedding and towels, two
dressers and a couch, a kitchen table and three chairs, pots and pans
and dishes and flatware. Everything
else—hundreds of books and records and magazines, closets and
drawers full of clothes, a lifetime’s worth of papers,
Ariel’s childhood things, the contents of junk drawers and
desks—everything else is packed up, taken away.
We pay the monthly fee to keep most of Pat’s things safe,
and live with the rest of them, as gently as we can.
Our year in New
York is almost up. It has been a wonderful,
strange, idyllic year: a year without day care or babysitters; a year
in which I divide my days between writing and outings with Grace. Glen is with her in the morning, from nine AM
till noon or one—building with blocks or making paintings or
drawings, or else out at a playground—while I write, and then we
three have a lavish lunch together, our one family meal (ordered in
from the Middle Eastern place just off Atlantic Avenue, or from the
Vietnamese place on Remsen—one container after another of
different kinds of noodle soups), and after lunch, Glen will leave for
his studio and won’t be home until Grace and I are asleep.
In the afternoon,
Grace and I explore the city. By this
time—mid-June 1996—she knows every inch of the Metropolitan
Museum. And while six years later it will be almost impossible to drag
her into an art museum (she will fold her arms and insist that she has
already seen enough art for a lifetime), at two, at three, there is
nothing she enjoys more. She is
crazy about the Guggenheim Museum and MOMA, but best of all is the Met,
for the Temple of Dendur and the rooms full of furniture, which
captivate her (“This would be good to have,” she says
thoughtfully, standing before an ornately gilded dressing table), and
also for its Twentieth Century Wing. Sometimes,
while we are wandering through European paintings or in a nineteenth
century room in the American Wing, she will suddenly shriek, “Get
me to the twentieth century!”—for when it comes to
paintings, it is only the modern that is of interest to her, the more
abstract the better. She likes to talk
about what she sees in the paintings and make up titles for them:
“Bang!” and “Some Smokestacks” and “The
Bluest Blue.”
We also spend a
day or two each month at the Natural History
museum and have made a dozen visits to the Transit Museum (which is in
walking distance from our apartment on Willow Place, and features a
real city bus Grace can pretend to drive and subway cars from every
era—so that I have the pleasure of sitting with my daughter on
the hard wicker seat of a D train car, possibly one of the very ones in
which I traveled with my mother and grandmother when I was no older
than Grace) and at least as many visits to the Brooklyn Botanical
Gardens. She has been to the Aquarium in
Coney Island and the Hall of Science on the old World’s Fair
Grounds in Flushing, and the Brooklyn Museum and the Brooklyn
Children’s Museum and the Soho Children’s Art Museum and
Sheepshead Bay to eat lobster at Lundy’s, as I did as a child,
and Brighton Beach and the bead district on Fifth Avenue to buy
necklace-making supplies and up and down every street in the Village,
and if not every playground in Central Park then damn
near, and we have recently discovered the best playground in all of New
York, the one at the end of the Battery Park Esplanade, Hudson River
Playground, which has its own squad of Battery Park City servicemen who
patrol nonstop with toolbelts, and sculpture everywhere by Tom Otterness on which the children can
climb (a giant foot, a head in profile, bulldogs they can use as
footstools in order to reach the drinking fountains, dodo birds that
spit water from their beaks).
Sometimes we
don’t get back to the apartment till
bedtime. We’ll stop at a restaurant
on our way home and she’ll share whatever I’m having for
dinner—a cheap date—and order water in a wine glass for
herself. Over the course of this year,
Grace has learned to love restaurants, to take the subway for granted;
she has learned how to hail a cab. She
speaks with enough of a New York accent to ensure that she will not
grow up to pronounce “merry,” “marry,” and
“Mary” as if they are all the same word, the way my
undergraduates do, and when she points at a passing dog and declares,
“Dawgie!” for the first time, early in our New York
year, I am dizzy with relief.
Weekends, Glen
and I both take breaks from our work: he
plasters and paints the apartment and Grace and I visit my parents on
the Upper East Side, sleeping together in a fold-out sofa bed in their
den—the room that was my brother’s when my parents first
moved in to this apartment, in the late seventies.
Saturday nights, I cook—for my daughter and for my
parents, who otherwise order in their dinners every night.
Sometimes I leave Grace with my mother and spend hours walking
around the city alone, happy because I am home, because I am always
happier in New York than in Columbus, and because Grace is getting to
know her grandmother better than she ever would otherwise.
And Pat’s
apartment is becoming beautiful, thanks to
Glen. And Silas, my friend Vicki’s
son, and Grace are becoming as comfortable in each other’s
company as siblings. Vicki and Silas
accompany Grace and me on many of our non-museum outings (Vicki’s
convinced that Silas would run around like a maniac, bellowing at the
top of his lungs, in an art museum), and the children play at home
together, too, most evenings for at least a little while before bed. Grace teaches Silas the joys of playing
dress-up, and the two of them “take the subway” sitting on
her bed side by side, in shawls and crocheted hats, wearing necklaces
and bracelets and clutching their purses; Silas introduces Grace to a
game he calls “money money money,” which involves diving
off his playroom sofa into a combination of sofa cushions and thousands
of pennies, spread out all over the playroom floor.
Vicki and I give the children their evening baths together, and
we talk and talk.
Our kitchen
window looks out on the Statue of Liberty. Every
day Grace says good morning to it.
And I have just
about finished a new manuscript, and Glen has
had a dealer visit his studio and offer to take him on.
All in all, it has been as perfect a year as we could possibly
have hoped for—as we hadn’t dared hope for.
We arrived in New
York just after Grace turned two; soon
after her third birthday it will be time to leave.
She can’t even remember our house back in Columbus (and
when we do return in August, she will be puzzled by it for the first
few days, repeatedly forgetting where the staircase is that leads to
the second floor and her bedroom), but she does remember the people of
whom she was fondest there. Sometimes when she’s playing in our
Willow Place apartment she’ll pick up her toy phone and call
Amira Silver-Swartz, who is three and a half years older and the child
she likes best in Columbus. “Hello, Amira? It’s me, Grace
Jane. I’m still in New York. Everything’s fine here. How
are things in Columbus?”
In Brooklyn
Heights on this birthday eve, things are far from
fine. Grace is in my lap, sobbing, begging not to be dragged forward in
time, and I am tearfully doing my best to reassure her, as I have been
doing since she was a baby, when I’d pat and rub her back and
murmur, “I know, I know,” saying this so often that the two
words ran together for her, became one, a magic word, so that by the
time she was ten months old, I’d hear her muttering, IknowIknowIknow
to reassure herself when she was feeling bad.
By
this time, with Grace just
hours shy of three, “I know” has been expanded to take into
account the particulars of each unhappy situation, and as I hold her on
my lap, I stroke her hair and murmur that change is difficult for
everyone, even for grownups, that going forward is always hard and
scary, and leaving things behind is sad, but that she has lots of
things to look forward to, that not knowing what’s ahead is part
of what makes life interesting and exciting. And
I promise her that three will be fun, even better than two. That there are joys and adventures ahead,
things she will be able to do that she can’t even imagine right
now. You’ll learn to read. You’ll learn to swim.
You’ll learn to ride a bike. And all the while, I am doing my best
to hide from her not only my tears but also my surprise.
Who ever heard of a child who doesn’t want to get older?
I
don’t care! I’m not turning
three. I’m staying two forever.
What I have no
way of knowing is that this crisis will be
repeated in a year, on the eve of three about to turn four, when we are
back in Columbus, when she has forgotten all about the room she lived
in in New York, and what she remembers about the year itself is patchy
and vague, mixed up with what I have told her about it.
When the crisis
occurs again, in exactly the same way, the
night before she turns five, I am ready for it. Likewise
on the eve of five about to turn six. Six
turning seven. Seven turning eight. At some point along the way she becomes too
grown up to climb into my lap for a routine crisis like this one, and
she sits by herself with her knees to her chest, her head in her hands,
sobbing into them, and I sit on the edge of the bed, reminding her that
the year to come will bring undreamed-of pleasures.
I list for her—ticking them off on my fingers—the
things she has accomplished in the last year: You taught yourself
to swim, you read a chapter book, you learned to sew.
I mention a few of the things I know for sure are shimmering in
the future just ahead: piano lessons, New York in the spring for
Daddy’s next opening, Girl Scout camp.
She doesn’t
want to hear about it.
You jumped
off the diving board. You
wrote your own story about a horse. You’ll
learn to ride a horse.
I don’t
care, she says. I hate time. I hate the way it
never stays now, the way you
can’t even keep it still for a second. It’s
already then.
I am amazed
that she has figured this out.
It is the night before she turns eight.
And so I have
to ask her—I have to; I really want to
know—If you ran the universe,
I’d do anything to make her feel better, and I’d never purposely do anything to make her feel worse, so I’m shocked when this question causes her to sob harder.
No, I couldn’t. That’s the problem. That’s why I hate it. If time stopped, everything would stop. But it just keeps coming and coming. And it’s so terrible.