Tide Pools

“Draw me a mermaid, Mommy.”

“Okay,” I answer my two-year old daughter. She watches me outline the figure in pencil on pink construction paper. The mermaid turns out to be feminine, unashamed of her bare breasts, and ready to swim in a dangerous ocean. I envy her.

My daughter pulls the bottle away from her mouth with a soft pop. “Draw a shark.” My shark is cartoonishly fierce. I am strict about media. No screens, no stories with villains or violence; my daughter has never seen anger depicted. 

“Now,” she says, “draw the shark eating a mermaid.”

My mouth opens to tell her that that would not be a nice picture, but I stop myself. On the one hand, telling her which drawings she should like doesn’t align with my feminist parenting agenda; on the other hand, neither does depicting violence against mermaids. While I'm working out this moral paradox, she’s staring at my hand holding the pencil, like a dog staring at a hand holding a tennis ball.     

Her brother snores gently against my breast in the green and white sling that has become a semi-permanent part of my body. Would I hesitate to draw a shark eating a pirate?

“Draw it, Mommy.”

I draw. The mermaid’s mouth is agape, and her hands flail like an old-fashioned damsel in distress. The shark’s teeth are clamped on her tail. Examining my drawing, I can hear the mermaid scream. Does she hear it too? Is she wondering if the shark is angry? Or simply hungry? She’s leaning over the table, her milk-smeared face inspecting my work, as if checking for typos. 

She sits back and says, “Draw another one.”  

“Another mermaid?”

“Another shark eating the mermaid.”

My heart sinking for the mermaid, I do as my daughter asks and create the same scene. She asks for another, and another. In all, I draw eight versions. And second guess myself with each one.

At last, she says, “Now draw the mermaid eating a shark.”

Barely hiding my relief, I produce a fanged and unapologetically vengeful mermaid. This mermaid is decidedly angry and takes no small joy in her revenge on the shark. Her hands claw around its body, and she grins above a semicircular chunk taken from behind the dorsal fin.

My daughter nods, says nothing, and wanders away. I am left with a pile of pink construction scraps, internal confusion, and a snoring baby.

She had refused to be born, preferring to swim inside me. After ten days, the doctor cut me open and reached in to fish her out of me. She bit him. She has her own names for things. That is a trink. This is my lega. Mommy, do you want a slusher-sludge? When I give her paints, her language transcends words. Pink washes to orange to yellow. Purple blends to blue to green. Bright reds strike against pale blues. She is Technicolor in my gray world. 

We drive over the ridge to the fogged-in beach and tote our picnic to the high tide line. She stamps across the sand, like she wants it to know she is there. Her brother’s eyes blink up at me from the shell of his sling. While he is focused on me, she is scanning the beach, the hills, and the horizon. 

We head to the tide pools. Mussels and barnacles are everywhere, impossible not to see. We’re looking for anemones and sea stars. I point out things to keep her close, while clutching my son against my body and trying to keep my own balance on the wet rocks. Checking every cranny for an interesting creature to peer at, I feel like I’m looking into other people’s apartments. At last, we find a purple sea star waiting for the tide. She looks at it, then shakes her head and I assume she’s frightened. I squat down awkwardly, take a breath and touch an animal I know nothing about. Running two fingers along the rough arm, I lie, "See, it’s not scary." 

At the touch of its prickled skin, I realize everything my daughter already seems to know. Its eyes may be at the ends of its arms, but the sea star looks right at me and my desperate-to-be-perfect parenting. These echinoderms creep on their hundreds of tiny tube feet across every inch of every ocean, from tide pools to twenty-thousand feet below, undisturbed by darkness, pressure, or the violence of predation. How many times has this creature lost an arm to a deceptively powerful mantis shrimp only to grow a new one? How often has it stretched its stomach out over a clam or a branch of coral, letting the enzymes slowly dissolve the prey before drawing the sated stomach back up into its body? I glance up at the seagulls circling; gulls who will eat anything with or without legs if they can catch it. I bristle at the meanness of nature. Then she is on the move again, and I have to blunder after her. I leave the sea star and the gulls to their conscience.

I roll up my jeans and push her leggings up over her knees and tell myself this means our clothes won’t get wet. One hand holding my daughter’s, the other resting on the bump that is her brother, we wade in. Splashing and laughing she pulls us farther in. The water rushes away from shore, pulling the sand out from under my feet, giving me the sensation that I’m moving. She wrenches free of me, throws her arms wide, and bursts into her siren song. A wild and joyful ululation.

I reach for her wrist, slippery now, and worry about those sneaker waves the news always warns about. My grip tightens but she gets away from me again, and again sings out, as if fetching her merfolk to come and take all three of us.

The fear seizes me. I see the three of us being sucked under the green water, past the tiny cove and the fishing boats, past the cargo ships. The waves tumble us past the twelve-mile territory sea, past the two-hundred-mile exclusive economic zone, and at last we bob into the open ocean that is owned by no one. 

Here, where she is at home, she will reach out for my arm. She will want to point things out to her brother. Circling around the axis of our joined hands, she will gaze about with contentment, and I will be frantic, desperate for the safety of my own small pond. Calmly, she will show me the whales singing below us. 

A wave hits her at waist height. She is soaked, but still upright. I get a hold of her wrist and with the promise of a snack, lure her back to our heap of belongings. I hand her a peanut butter sandwich and tell her she's frightened me. “The ocean wants to take you from me. Don't let it.”

“Oh, Mommy,” she scrunches her nose at me, “it's okay if the ocean takes me.”

I swallow my terror and say, “How about swim lessons? You can learn to swim like a mermaid.”

She ignores me, drops the peanut butter sandwich into the sand, and wanders off to play with a rope of brown kelp.

Days later, she chatters through the house while I tend to a thousand tasks and accomplish nothing. Mermaids are still a favorite. She is wearing her swimsuit, scarves, and beads.

As I answer her—not really listening but wanting her to think I’m listening—I am thinking about dinner and dishes, and if I should buy that sweater or save money, or go back to work even though I hated the job I had before. Through all this noise, I hear a small thing. My daughter’s voice, not chattering, but speaking to me. She says, “Mommy, you are the mermaid that eats sharks.” 

“What did you say?”

She’s gone already, dancing down the hallway, with scarves and beads dangling, and dripping milk on the floor. I look down at her brother, whose brown eyes blink back at me. I will never know if I heard her correctly, but the further away I am from that moment, the more I realize it doesn’t matter.

A neglected part of my brain has begun to shift, like a waking sea star creeping from twenty-thousand feet below. For a moment, I don’t see myself as a tired and gray woman, still so much like a girl, trapped in a small, safe pond.

For a moment, I see myself in Technicolor, fanged, and eating a shark.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Chaucer’s Wives Come Knocking

I first read the stories of the Wife of Bath and Patient Griselda[1] when I was sixteen, at the American School in London. I was there for a year while my father was on a sabbatical. He got a grant to leave his job in the Oncology unit at Kaiser Permanente Sunset in order to study new treatments for breast cancer at Guy’s Hospital. My mother sold our family home, the house in Los Angeles they bought for a song and traded in for what seemed like a fortune, wrangling places for me and my siblings at an American private school in St. John’s Wood. We settled into a series of short-term lets, and my sister, brother, and myself were set free as only carpooled children could be discovering a city with a safe public transportation system. My mother also felt loosened from the tight bonds of her role as wife and mother. She had been a second-generation Greek daughter of mountain peasants who fought against the expectations of her immigrant community to find her voice as a journalist and editor in Manhattan in the late 1950s. Then in 1962, she fell for my doctor father and followed him when he got a job in California. Having children, living in the infinite suburb of LA, she often loudly complained that her life in the desert city was a kind of death, a disappearing off the face of the earth. London was a chance for her to remake herself. She told me later she had no intention of ever going back, although that is not how things turned out. It was 1979, and like many other women, she was enjoying a new sense of freedom. She joined an amateur drama class and picked up a younger gay best friend. She met a lot of interesting bohemian Londoners who were also interested in her.

One of them was my English teacher, Don Jesse. We were encouraged to call him that, first and last, transforming the “Don” into an honorific, like Don Quixote or Don Juan. Don Jesse had grown up in Boston, the son of an immigrant Dutch maid and the princeling heir of her wealthy Jewish employers. At least that was the story. He was a self-invented character, bald and stocky with a rasping, deep laugh and a love of the tall tale. After a brief marriage to a Rothschild, he became an itinerant teacher, travelling the globe and landing in London where he lived for most of his life with a gentle-hearted man from Wales who could sew quilts and fix an engine. When it was time to teach us Chaucer, Don Jesse showed up wearing full courtly Medieval writer’s gear, complete with a sweeping velvet hat and wine-colored stockings. He made us memorize and recite the opening lines in the original:  

  Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
  the drocht of March hath perced to the rote
  and bathed every holt and heath in swicht liqueur
  of which vertu engendered is the fleur

The sound of the words rolled off his tongue and rumbled in our mouths with a satisfying, pebbly foreign sensation, close to familiar but far enough away to pull us along, and the images leaped into our minds. For the first time as a native Californian, I had lived through winter, and understood the drought of March, how worn down you could become by the sere, bare brownish grey, and the idea of sweet showers coming and piercing the earth, the way flowers suddenly crowded onto verges and front gardens: daffodils, tulips, lilacs; I loved it.

We read the tales; we had to write our own. I was drawn to the Wife of Bath, but at the same time, she embarrassed me, like my own mother did at sixteen. She seemed a comical character, played for laughs: a Lucille Ball broad, her young lover climbing the wall, her old rich husband, her appetites, her humiliating spillage. What did she have to be so boisterous about, I thought, furiously. She was fat and out of control, and it was easy to make fun of her. I wrote a mocking modern tale about a loud-mouthed woman in Los Angeles who sold real estate, like my mother did at the time. I got a good grade, and I proudly shared it with her. God forgive me.

The other character who really drew my attention was Patient Griselda. She seemed extreme in her masochistic acceptance of her fate, and yet venerated, there in the pages of the Clerk’s Tale. The peasant girl who got chosen by a powerful lord: a story as old as Cinderella. But after becoming a wife, Griselda was far from secure. She had one baby after another taken away, and still, she embodied fatalism and meek acceptance. Then the final twist: getting thrown out from her husband’s bed to the kitchens, while he told her he was marrying a younger, better version, a story I knew well enough from growing up in divorce-prone, self-discovery California of the 1970’s. After all that pain, Griselda achieved her reward: status, children, husband handed back on a platter. She was a model woman, held up in the pages of Medieval Literature to shine for all time. Old as it was, Griselda’s story circled like an electric fence around the idea of what waited for me in adult womanhood. There was something about Griselda that felt like fate. She horrified me, and she made me feel ashamed—not only of her, but of myself.  I understood already that part of being a woman was going to mean never feeling good enough.

It was about mid-way through the early child-rearing years that I started to hear the voice of Griselda in my head. I was living in London, yet again, having moved back across the Atlantic to marry a young British philosophy student I fell for in graduate school. By the time we started raising our family, I was a full-time writing teacher at a small American university in charge of two departments, publishing poetry and fiction, and felt secure and strong in my voice, as far from my mother and her fate, as far from Patient Griselda as I could get. With the birth of my second child, I stopped teaching “to give myself more time to write,” and soon I had stopped doing that, too. Years went by in the world of women and children, and I lost the thread to my former self. I felt delirious with love for my children, but also bereft and lost at times, living exactly the constrained, care-taking life my mother had so railed against.

During those sandbox years, Griselda’s voice insisted on my attention. She wanted to explain what it was really like, being picked out of the crowd by a handsome man on horseback, leaving her father’s cottage and moving into a distant castle, how her husband would go out into the wars of his times and slaughter other men as if fearlessly, and come back, drained and mud-caked, and how in the secret sanctuary of their marriage bed, he tossed and turned, woke up anxious, drenched in sweat, and how she tried to find a way to help him, to get him to pay attention to their children, to the life they were bringing into the world together. He did not trust her, and he started to find a way to test her, not believing she could really be as loyal as she seemed. I imagined what it must have been like for her to lose first her daughter, and then her son, the loneliness she must have felt, alone in her tower. She explained how even after that same man asked her to make way for a better wife, to leave their home and go down into the depths with all the other servants, she took up the dough between her hands and wrapped the scarf around her head and got to work. In the story, her final loyalty test involves her coming out with all the other servants to stand at the back of the chapel and watch her ex-husband get married to his new, young bride. Then a scene reminiscent of the Oscars; she is pulled forward, given her reward at last for having passed the tests he set: here was her daughter, here her son, here the warm embrace of family, husband waiting to place the crown back on her worthy head, his queen.

Why did Griselda rise up in me, insisting on her poem? Voiceless women in history and mythology have always drawn me. My first novel included re-imaginings of Greek myths from a woman’s point of view. Sometimes an imagined figure would start to speak, and I would follow her voice into myself. Ariadne, Persephone, Medea, Eve: all have visited me at times.

My husband was no cruel overlord. He was a sensitive and devoted father, who was a cheerleader for my work, my voice. We were equal in power, and before we had children, we promised each other we would remain so. Economics had pushed us into traditional roles. Motherhood felt messy and self-immolating. From the moment I started breastfeeding, I became as much liquid as solid. For years, I would travel with a change of clothes for three because both my children were prone to motion sickness, and one or all of us were liable to end any journey covered in vomit. Like many formerly cerebral mothers, I felt as if I were constantly fighting against a tide of rising chaos to find a few moments of quiet in my head, and I think I both embraced and resented my abject position. Maybe Griselda spoke to me about how I longed for the moment my sacrifice would be recognized for the marathon-level physical feat it really was, for some kind of medallion or trophy or even just a thank you. My husband, who was working hard, really hard, and had his own stress, sometimes seemed like the unwitting setter of tests I had to pass, tests that were about the loss of things that had once been precious: my work, my status, my girlhood, my girlfriends, my will, my voice.

When I think of those years, I seem to see Griselda all around me, in the women of my generation: not just in the mirror but also at the gym, at the school gates, in the culture. I remember one frail-looking woman I knew, a mother of four. She boasted that none of her children had ever eaten a store-bought biscuit or cake. Everything was baked with her own two hands, and her kids were enviably clear-skinned, kind, and energetic. She had been a senior nurse in a busy hospital but gave it up to raise a family with her salaried husband. One morning, she invited the class mothers over to tea. She dressed plainly, in smock-like dresses with no make-up, but her table was lavish: covered with multi-colored homemade cakes, biscuits, and pies we eyed up as if they were a field of mines. In those days, it seemed to me we were always bringing each other sweets we never ate. We were soldiers in a war whose rules we did not invent, willing to cut off our own arms to make sure we remained among the chosen, running businesses, running families, running in marathons while subsisting on pieces of watermelon. Many women I knew were half-recovered anorexics, still hooked on the habit of self-abnegation begun in high school. I wanted us to discover our strength, but all I saw were women putting themselves away. Griselda’s poem revealed that under her meekness was a fierce rage, a compressed and deeply packed away energy.

~

My mother used to say that Margaret Mead advised every woman to have three marriages: the first for love, the sexual attraction that helps you leave your family of origin; the second for co-habitation, to raise children; and the third for companionship. She claimed to have had all those marriages, but with the same husband. Probably around the third marriage with the man I have been with since I was 26, I began to think again about the Wife of Bath. Our two children were more or less grown; we had started to have noisy sex in the empty house. My newly discovered invisibility as an older woman felt liberating. I stopped dyeing my hair. I started to notice older women on the street, how beautiful they were, how settled into their bodies, how they carried their own weight with pride. At work, all the people who got things done seemed to be women of a certain age. I was looking forward to what the third or even fourth marriage with my husband might bring.

But all was not well with the wider world, I had not failed to notice. The two countries in which I held citizenship, the UK and the US, were in the grips of a kind of deadly return of the Griselda story: it was not just women, but the entire system of mutual care-giving, the rule of law, our ecological well-being, education—being pushed out of the bed of the heartless overlords of the new far-right. The years following 2016, the pink hat years you might call them, brought me back into an anxious engagement with politics, and maybe I needed to find a model from the start of capitalism in the West who seemed to stand up fearlessly in a full-throated voice, an archetype from Chaucer waiting all along. As I started to write a poem in her voice, I found I was not the only one who felt the Wife knocking on her inner door. I came across a new book about her as an enduring cultural character. According to the writer, we had misunderstood the ups and downs of women’s history. The Wife came from an era when English women were surprisingly empowered. It’s there in her lines: a businesswoman, a cloth trader, a traveler across Europe who fights the husband who tries to diminish her. Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor were a tribute to her. But soon afterwards, she slipped into the rising misogyny of the age of Enlightenment and colonialism. She became a hate figure, shunned and despised, feared and mocked. Up to the 1970s, you could find a version of her on an art house film poster, laid out as a frightening mass of rolling human flesh ready to swallow up the tiny male pilgrims who surround her. Recently, she has been given a new life—particularly by Black British women; she is the subject of extended poems and a play by Zadie Smith in which she is the absolute star.

Just as with Griselda, I started to see the Wife of Bath everywhere. She was marching beside me, holding a witty sign about the crimes of Boris Johnson. She was being interviewed on a TV program called Planet Sex in the body of a curvy, honeyed woman with silvery locs, talking about Tantric kissing between two adoring bear-like lovers: husband and boyfriend. On a train trip to Newcastle to visit my daughter, she was the voice in my ear of Iris De Menthe singing about “workin’ on a world” of a future we might never see; when my daughter and I went out for cocktails, I felt as if she were in the streets with her friends, wearing a tight tiger-striped dress over her enormous breasts, thighs as wide as the Tyne, gap-toothed, head thrown back, having the time of her life.

My poem about her though, was a bit stuck, until I put her into conversation with Griselda. Then it was hard to shut her up. She was the one who pointed out to me the way the two women were linked through time; they were two sides of a coin, two versions of being a woman, tamed and free—or so I thought. It was great to get rid of the rigidly formed Griselda and open myself up to the free-verse lines of the Wife of Bath. What value could meek Griselda have now in our fight to make the world safe for future generations? Even Margaret Atwood, published a story around this time in the New York Times: Impatient Griselda.

Then I took my poems and my commentary to my writing group.

“What about Griselda?” they asked me. “Have you short-changed her? Doesn’t she have anything else to say?”

Griselda! No way, I thought, I am well and truly finished with Griselda.

But sometimes criticism can open a new door, raise a question you did not know you had. When I got home to my own kitchen, as I made dinner and folded laundry, her voice in my head started speaking, and what she said truly surprised me.

Griselda asked me to consider if there was another role for her, beyond the Wife of Bath and her beautiful self-assertion. What did I think was going to move us forward into a better future if not some kind of enormous sacrifice of wants and desires, a tremendous act of care-giving, for each other, for the planet? She pointed out that she was there, during the Pandemic, when the economic engine of the world had shut down—she was making PPE in her kitchen for the nurses, stocking the supermarket shelves, picking up trash. The fight for the future Iris sang about was beyond gender, politics, or economics. It was something much bigger, what bell hooks calls an ethos of love[2]. When I hated myself for giving up my “real work” to look after my children when they were young, what was I telling myself about my own values? I painted Griselda as angry and energetic as a counter to a world that would have turned her into a doormat, stepping right over her in their getting and spending. I was so impressed by the Wife of Bath when I discovered she was a successful cloth trader and partner to five men, but Griselda might turn out to be a true revolutionary.

 ~

Griselda Speaks to the Wife of Bath

You were always on another page: a voice,
a threat, a joke, a bawd, a kind of girth:
gap-toothed, unbordered, queen of choice.
I was modesty herself, in needs, size, birth.

My one husband my entire tale: a Duke.
We had two kids, each lost in turn: a son,
daughter, ripped from my roots. Not a word
slipped from my lips. I never came undone.

Cast off to the kitchen, I kneaded sweet bread
for his new wedding and bride. Unprotesting,
pulled from the crowd, I bent my head down:
To find reward! Children grown; crown restored,

fame gained. To you alone I can boast my pride:
My coal heart was crushed to a diamond inside.

The Wife of Bath Explains a Thing or Two

Griselda, a sonnet! Why did you even try? It only makes things worse.
Loosen up your girdle and enjoy free verse—the lines should fit you,
not the other way around, no need to squeeze into some rule book,
cooked up by men to sing to their imaginary loves, who I am sure,
were well and truly sick of hearing their plaints: Beatrice, the Dark Lady—
give her a break and let her get on with unstrapping that old bra: idol,
pedestal. Climb right on down here. I felt for you, honey, all along—
so thin and wan, so mild and good. You never asked to be a prize,
a pawn in some man’s sick game of catch and release. He had it all,
and a great big hole inside, besides, and you don’t have to tell me:
golden toilet, golden tower, golden you at the top, it’s never enough!
He’s still around, sending his rockets to Mars, probing the oceans,
just like he plumbed his wife—the ultimate boundless mystery, right?
Now you’ve reached across the aisle after 600 years, and guess what?
We’re teamed up as ever! Chaucer gave me the most lines, but for ages,
you won first prize: Angel in the House, Madonna, Sacrifice. While I,
you’re right, remained the butt of laddish jokes, fat, loud, or worse,
hated and feared for my lusts, a figure of fun or the cunt with a bite,
held to account for my unruly appetite. Finally, the time’s come ripe
for us to muscle out the middleman, spill truths, grab the spotlight.
Personally, I knew you were more than you appeared. The self-denied
hold their own power: it’s modesty’s dark side. You were never
as simple as the tale told, good girl driven to distraction: dieting,
decluttering, working hard for your reward. A wife! Tricky business,
we both get that. I had five goes, and would have more. I salute you.
That Duke of yours, I bet you wiped his sweat at night, his psychic
sores. Under his great carapace, a trembling boy holding a sword.
He thought you might be keeping score. He had to lock you up, tight
knot we’ve all felt closing round our throats like prison walls.
Now you’ve busted out and want to talk, I’m here to cheer you on.
Let’s stop competing in a stupid game with rules we did not write:
chosen or mocked, virgin or whore, not enough or way too much.
This heartbroken old earth needs new songs and now’s our chance:
I’m an optimistic seller of new cloth, barging the barriers, my voice
getting louder and louder (and dear Griselda, welcome to yours.)
I hope a more ample table waits down the road for our hungry love.

Griselda Writes Back After a Long Time

Yes, my dear, a diamond is a hard rock.
Also, a form of light made out of dark.

You trussed me up in twelve tight lines,
but imagination is a wilder sort of ride.

Everything dies. People, ideas, sun, planet.
The self, however strong, will not save us.

Do you ever wonder if the universe may
be a woman breathing matter in and out,

here, not here, mothering and worrying,
coaxing out a bit more love each round?

Of course, I know you do. You worry so,
if that’s not too light a word—autocracy,

plutocracy, insect-empty fields and floods,
you long for some other story, a way out.

Maybe I can help. Self-sacrifice scares us;
it’s the role woman represents that we hate.

In a grabbing world, we show another way,
putting aside ourselves to make a path

for the generative future we call children:
not just womb, but some potential in us all.

As my friend, Sister Julian, promised, all
will be well and all manner of things well.

Thanks for the chance to stretch my legs.
You might not have seen me otherwise:

sewing PPE with other mothers, collecting
rubbish, emptying bedpans, shelving stock.

I hope you visit me again, visit with us both,
in the timeless where we are. The future’s yours.

[1] Marion Turner, The Wife of Bath: a Biography. Princeton University Press, January 17, 2023. 

[2] bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions. William Morrow Paperbacks, January 30, 2025.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Are You the One?

It was just before Christmas and the loop of carols played over the loudspeaker in the Mobile, Alabama airport. I had spent the day landing a client. My cheeks hurt from the smile I wore sitting across from him, side-eyeing the Auburn University Tigers football helmet, which served as the base for his desk lamp. My client’s office was decorated with photographs of him shaking hands with politicians including then President Jimmy Carter. On the wall was his university diploma, class of 1959. Doing the math, he was about ten years older than me. At thirty, I was a senior vice president of the mortgage banking firm I worked for. Seven years of hard labor traveling around the country over holidays and long weekends.

I listened attentively as my client shared his financial problems and addressed each one of them. And then I made the ask and waited. Silence. I glanced at my watch hoping that I wouldn’t miss my connecting flight. Bingo.

He leaned across his desk and shook my hand longer than was necessary. “We have a deal, Little Lady.”

I imagined myself picking up that lamp and throwing it at him for calling me “Little Lady.” I was hardly a Little Lady, standing 5 foot 7 inches in my bare feet. I thanked him for the confidence he had placed in us and told him I’d send a letter of engagement as soon as I was back in my office in Boston.

“I’ll look forward to hearing from you,” he said and shook my hand a moment longer than necessary. Was he flirting with me or was that just my imagination? He was hardly my type with his stomach hanging over his belt, his hair slicked back with too much pomade, and the cigar he pulled on during our meeting. He was much too old for me and geographically undesirable.

Why do unattractive men think every woman is fair game?

I should have been happy that my sales trip was a success, but I had done this one too many times. I missed my toddler son. I was tired of flying around the country, and I was still recovering from a messy divorce. Are there any other kinds (other than Gwyneth Paltrow style conscious uncouplings)? I often thought about quitting, but I needed the income. My ex couldn’t or wouldn’t pay me alimony, so it was up to me to keep a roof over our heads.

The Mobile airport was filled with passersby carrying shopping bags rushing to their gates to board flights or greet disembarking passengers. Men smiled at me as I walked through the terminal. Swinging my briefcase, I must have looked out of place, a “Little Lady” in a gray and white lynx fur coat.

I confirmed my reservation, filled out my company flight coupon, and gave it to the Eastern Airlines gate attendant. The short flight from Mobile to Atlanta was uneventful. We landed on time. I looked out the window as I climbed up the ramp; snowflakes were falling dusting the runways. I had never heard that there was snow in Atlanta. Waiting for my connecting flight to Boston, I settled into a seat in the Red Carpet lounge for frequent flyers of Eastern Airlines. Someone sat down in the empty seat next to me. I was reading a novel, or maybe it was TIME magazine. I was anxious to get home. The stranger addressed me, “Why is a stylish woman like you wearing a Mickey Mouse watch?” I looked up. The answer was that I had taken my son to Disneyland a few weeks earlier and wanted a souvenir.

While the announcement over the loudspeaker notified us of one delay after another with the snowstorm building in intensity, Stan introduced himself. He was a business consultant and had just had a meeting with the CEO of Coca-Cola. With thick brown hair and glasses, he stood 6’7” and was a smooth talker. He made me nervous, but I managed to hold my own telling him about the reason I was in the Atlanta airport. “I’m trying to get back to Boston, but it doesn’t look good.”

“I’m from Boston—Brookline, actually.” The street he lived on was three blocks from my house.

Stan asked, “If we get stuck here overnight, you want to stay at the same hotel? Separate rooms, of course.”

All flights up and down the eastern seaboard were cancelled. We had dinner paid for by Eastern Airlines and then walked around the Omni Hotel. It looked like a huge Tonka toy with an indoor ice-skating rink where skaters wobbled about and one or two feet as they practiced their figure eights and spins to organ grinder music.

“I love to skate,” I told him. “When I was growing up in Harrison, New York, my dad used to take us to an indoor rink, and when it was really cold, we went to one of the frozen ponds in our neighborhood at night. My sister and I took turns skating with my dad, and he loved to whistle as he glided around the pond. He was a good, all-around athlete. He taught me how to ski and play tennis.” Too much information? I looked at Stan, wondering if I was boring him.

“Sounds like you had a pretty nice childhood. I grew up in the Bronx. By the time I was sixteen, I was nearly the height I am today. Everyone thought I’d be a basketball player, but it was hard on my back. I swim. It’s good therapy for the mind and the body. There was an indoor roller-skating rink near our apartment where the gangs hung out. That was pretty much it.”

He added, “Different sides of the tracks, but things even out in the long run.” And then he surprised me with a strain from “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” His soft baritone sounded rich and warm.

“One of my favorite Gershwin tunes,” he said. “Do you know it?”

I nodded. And he sings too, I thought.

We said our goodnights. At eleven p.m. the telephone rang. It was Stan. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to sleep.”

“Want me to come to your room? I can sing you a lullaby or whistle.”

“No thanks. I’ll see you in the morning.”

There would have been worse things than having him wrap his arms around me. This time I didn’t judge a man for trying, but this was too aggressive. Years later he told me had I said “yes” that would have sealed the deal—a woman who took chances.

 ~

Seated next to one another on the plane (he had rearranged our seats), we were holding hands and the electricity between us was palpable. I stared at him while he had his nose in a book: deep brown eyes, perfect smooth skin, thick dark brown hair that was unlikely to fall out in old age, a trimmed mustache, and pillowy lower lip. He was dressed in a business suit—striped tie, starch white shirt, and navy-blue pants and jacket. He looked uncomfortable in his seat, which didn’t accommodate his tall frame. I was curious to know if all of him matched his height. I shivered. I turned away when he looked at my long reddish-brown hair, fair skin, hazel eyes, and Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress.

“Are you cold? I can adjust the air.”

“It’s not the air.”

He smiled and went back to reading.

We shared a cab from the airport to Brookline. Stan asked for my telephone number and gave me his. “Feel free to call me in case I don’t get back to you soon enough.” He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. We didn’t mention his offer to come to my hotel room. Maybe we’d get to know one another well enough to talk about it.

I unlocked the front door, tiptoed up the stairs, and kissed Josh goodnight. He didn’t stir. I ripped off my clothes and fell into bed.

The next few days the snow continued falling. Public transportation was shut down into Boston. People with skis shushed along the Metro tracks, and old ladies slipped on the ice that built up in front of grocery stores and pharmacies. Power had been cut off. We relied upon our two fireplaces to keep the house warm. Fortunately, we had a stack of dry chopped wood. My mother-in-law was with us and took charge of my son Josh while I caught up on work at home. The postal service was still operating. I typed up a letter of engagement, read it over the phone to my boss, and then sent it off to our client in Mobile.

I waited for Stan to call. When the telephone rang, I was excited and relieved to hear his voice. I admitted that he had tried my patience.

“I’ve thrown my back out,” he said. “Would you mind coming over with some food? And I’d love to see you, but I’m not at my best.” I bundled up against the frigid air and carried a generous package to his apartment. I found him lying on the floor groaning in pain. “What happened?” I asked.

“It’s not easy navigating a world made for people shorter than me—which is mostly everyone. I leaned over my bathroom counter just to shave, and I felt a nasty twinge. The doctor told me to lie down on the floor, take some aspirin, and wait for the pain to pass. He forgot to say that I needed the company of a beautiful woman.”

I blushed. Somehow, in spite of his handicap, we spent the next hour kissing. Nothing like the parchment pecks that my ex-husband begrudging planted on my cheek. His hands were strong and assured—there was nothing tentative about him. Was this the man I had been looking for? Was Stan the reward for having endured a passionless seven-year marriage?

“Could you get me a glass of water?”

“Anything else before I go? My mother-in-law is staying with us. I don’t want her worrying.”

I stood up, put my sweater on, and buttoned my jeans. He grabbed my hand and pulled me back.

“Wait a minute Mister. I’ll be back, I promise.” He looked so helpless. “I hope the next time I see you, you’ll be standing up. This isn’t a good look.”

Stan laughed. “Don’t I know it? Just let yourself out. I can’t stand up or I’d walk you to the door.”

I slid home over the snow boots barely careening into other pedestrians out at ten o’clock in the evening. My body was on fire. I didn’t feel the cold and took off my scarf to let the air dry my neck. When I got home, everyone was asleep. I kissed Josh, tucked the covers around him, and turned off his nightlight, the stars vanishing from the ceiling. I was so happy I wanted to sing. I whispered, “Lullaby and Goodnight,” although he didn’t hear me.

I ran a bath and soaked in the warm water; it would have been easy to close my eyes and drift off. Instead, I toweled off and got into bed, pulled into a deep dreamless sleep. The next morning the sun poured into my bedroom window, and I heard the drip of icicles melting. I wondered if this was it—the storm had blown through, and we’d soon have electricity and heat. Josh crawled into bed with me, his hands gently caressing my face while he murmured, “Mama, Mama.” The sweetest sound. I curled my body around him.

I wasn’t looking forward to going back to work as soon as the streets were cleared of snow and the MTA was operating.

Stan and I became exclusive, dinners at quaint Cambridge restaurants, double dates with his best friend Howard Schwartz and his wife Jackie, art exhibits, and movies. One stands out—My Brilliant Career. Set in Australia, the film features a spunky young woman who plays tricks and dreams of becoming a writer. She questions the intentions of a wealthy landowner who proposes marriage.

“What did you think of the movie?” asked Stan preempting me.

“I can identify with the heroine’s feistiness, her passion to become a writer.” I stifled a sigh not wanting to seem a victim. “But right now I have bills to pay.”

He pressed me. “What do you think of her decision to reject her lover’s marriage proposal?”

“You first.”

Stan adjusted his glasses, which I had learned was his habit when he wanted to buy himself some time to think. “I guess every woman needs to choose her own path, but I think she could have had both. I don’t understand why she questioned his love.”

“Maybe she thought she didn’t deserve it.”

“I think she misinterpreted his intentions. I think he was in love.” As if ending the discussion, he leaned over and kissed me. Unlike the heroine, I felt in that moment that I deserved him—all of him.

Initially we had no intention of bringing our children together. It was much too soon for that happy “blended family.” Instead, we kept our romance under wraps.

 ~

 Stan made reservations at the Castle Hill Inn in Newport, Rhode Island for our first weekend away. What to wear? I chose a pink cashmere turtleneck, and pastel, paisley skirt with beige suede boots for the two-hour drive and packed two different outfits—one for dinner and the other for a walk on the beach.

“How do you know about this place?”

He was evasive. “I’ve been there.” I was curious to know if it was with another woman, or if he had taken off for a break after his divorce. I didn’t know much about his ex-wife, and I was glad. I would have had to share things about my ex, and the stories weren’t very flattering to me or to him.

Stan turned on the car radio; the classical music filled the comfortable silence between us.

The windows of our suite overlooked Narragansett Bay, and there was a claw foot tub, a nod to the inn’s beginnings in the late 1800s when grandees summered there. We didn’t bother unpacking and instead slid under the sheets. Stan was a masterful lover, one minute gentle and the next insistent. I discovered what his mustache was for. It sent shivers down my spine. Three hours later we showered, dressed, and went out to dinner at the White Horse Tavern in a red clapboard house. The main dining room was lit by candles in keeping with its seventeenth-century vintage. Stan ordered a dozen oysters. We were ravenous.

“What kind of wine do you like?’” he asked.

“I’m going to have the cod. What about a Pouilly Fuisse?”

“Let’s splurge. Why don’t we have a bottle of Pierre Jouet?”

“Are we celebrating something?”

The flame of the candles on the table lit up his face. “Every minute alone with you is reason enough to celebrate.” Bring it on.

I tipped an oyster and juice into my mouth. It was fresh and delicious.

The waiter came over to take our order. When he left, Stan asked, “Do you like to cook?”

“Chocolate souffle, Moroccan chicken, turkey with chestnut stuffing and sweet potato pudding, pot roast and latkes. Anything really, so long as I have a good recipe and can buy the ingredients.”

Stan ran his tongue across his mustache to catch the oyster juice. “I’m moving to a house in a few weeks. It’s right in our neighborhood. You’ll have to christen the kitchen, and I’ll do the dishes.”

I took a sip of champagne and nodded. Did he see a future for us? I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions. I didn’t stop to think if he was right for me. I was being led by my beating heart, and not my head.

The next morning, we walked along the beach. Stan had a tape recorder and played Bach as the waves pounded the rocks along the shore. He pulled out a camera. “You look stunning in that heavy blue sweater. Let me take a picture.”

“Only if you let me take one of you.”

I let the wind blow my hair, partially hiding my face and then we switched positions. Looking at Stan through the lens, I had trouble catching all of him. I had to keep walking backwards. “Careful you don’t trip and fall.”

 ~

 Our next outing was to his cabin in Quechee Lake, New Hampshire. He warned me that the amenities were basic. We decided to bring his sons who were six and eight.

“Why don’t you bring Josh? He’ll have fun with the boys.”

His confidence was catching, so I agreed. Since we were moving in the direction of becoming a couple I decided to give it a try. The evening before I made a lasagna casserole and Josh helped me with the crocodile cake—green food coloring mixed into the cream cheese icing, corn candy for teeth, M&M’s for the eyes and a tail that wound back on itself and into its mouth.

“What do you think, Josh?”

“It’s scary.”

“Maybe but it won’t bite you, I promise, and it’s going to taste delicious.” I swiped my finger through the icing bowl and offered it to Josh.

“Yummy.”

“I promised.”

“Tomorrow we are going with my friend Stan and his boys to their cabin in Quechee Lake.” I editorialized hoping that he’d be excited. Instead, he looked at me with his chocolate brown eyes, puddling with tears, and said, “No, I don’t want to go.” And then he had a full out cry. I held him in my arms.

“Would you like to sleep in my bed just for tonight.”

He managed a silent nod. I wondered if I was rushing headlong into one imaginary, big happy family.

Stan picked us up in his 1967 brown Pontiac. Half-hearted introductions. Apparently, his sons, Ricky and Noah, were in the middle of an argument and didn’t want to be interrupted by his father’s girlfriend and her son. We didn’t say much on the ride to the cabin, which was exactly as advertised—basic—it’s saving grace was the spectacular view of the partially frozen lake.

“Everyone up for a vigorous hike around the lake?”

I put on my boots and dug Josh’s out of his suitcase. Stan was already wearing his, as were the boys. This must have been a ritual. One shouted, “To the top.” The other groaned. “I’m tired. Let’s go half-way.”

“All right. Half-way it is. Probably make it easier on Josh,” said Stan. Then he added, “But Loren is an experienced hiker. She’d probably get to the top without breaking a sweat.” I gave him the side eye. Was he mixing me up with a former girlfriend, his ex-wife, or was he trying to sell me to his sons? Up to this point the only athletic sport we indulged in was in the bedroom.

The trees were covered with a dusting of snow, and the March wind stung. I tied a scarf around my face and turned the collar up on Josh’s snow suit. Stan took long strides dodging the snowballs his sons threw at him. Stan seemed impatient that Josh was holding us back. I kept asking him to slow down, but he just wanted to give his boys a vigorous outing, so Josh and I lagged behind. I consoled myself by thinking that Josh would be exhausted and not mind sleeping alone in a sleeping bag in the living room. There were only two bedrooms, and the boys claimed the second bedroom without inviting Josh to join them. It was apparent they didn’t want anything to do with a five-year-old.

When we got back to the cabin, I put dinner together and the boys were directed to set the table. They groaned. “Dad, fork on right, spoon on left?”

“What do you think?”

“Fooled you,” said the older boy, Rick. The three of them laughed. I didn’t get the joke. This must have been another one of their rituals.

Even Josh scarfed down the lasagna. I brought out the crocodile cake. It was a big hit, well worth the effort we had made. Stan declared it a masterpiece. I was thrilled.

“Why don’t you play a board game with the boys? I’ll do the dishes.”

“I don’t mind that arrangement at all.” Stan gently touched my neck and whispered, “And after they go to bed, we’ll play our own game…”

The boys chose Chutes and Ladders. I let them win. Josh found a corner and turned the pages of Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, telling himself the story. Rick said, “He’s got it all wrong.” I told him that Josh didn’t read yet. “Would you like to read it to him?”

“Forget it.”

Lights out. The only sound in the cabin was light breathing. Outside, the sounds of the ice cracking echoed through the woods. “Do you think this was a good idea?” I asked Stan. “Maybe we should have waited or done something together less ambitious than a weekend here.” If I had doubts, I should have voiced them sooner, but Stan sounded so enthusiastic that I went along with it.

“Sure. They needed to meet one another soon or later.” He then ran his finger from between my breasts and down my stomach to his intended destination. I gasped. He covered my mouth with his.

Breakfast was an assortment of cereals. The older boys got into an argument and started throwing corn flakes at one another. Stan laughed. I wasn’t amused. I thought he should discipline them, but as with many weekend fathers he didn’t put a stop to their game. The table was covered with cereal. I cleaned it up while Stan did the dishes.

We didn’t discuss the weekend, which I voted an epic fail, except for the crocodile cake. Instead, we resumed our routine of going out on dates on the weekends without the boys. Three years into our relationship, we closed all the blinds and danced naked to “Saturday Night Fever.” We spun around and ended up on the floor making love. It was the glue that held us together.

Our conversations were highbrow. He was obsessed with quantum physics, which was well beyond what I could understand, but I’d nod and ask appropriate questions as if I knew what he was talking about. “Quantum physics operates on the atomic and subatomic level.” Huh? I did better with his lectures to me about “corporate culture,” a concept he made popular with a colleague at Harvard University.

“Why did you go into this field?” I asked, struggling to understand how his mind worked.

“When I got my masters in anthropology, I could have done research on indigenous tribes or family relationships. But there’s no money in that. I decided that studying corporations was the way to go. It’s been very lucrative. I get $25,000 a speech. You’ll have to come with me one of these days.” I did, and afterwards we had sex in the back of the limousine on the client’s dime.

 ~

 I was Stan’s plus one at a dinner party in the suburbs given by his associate, Jim Bailey, president of Cambridge Associates. “You’ll enjoy it,” he said. “Good food, good wine, and good company.”

“Who’s going to be there?” He explained that the guest list included Howard Schwartz and Jackie; Warren Benis, a professor in the business school at USC, who was in town for a conference; and Werner Erhard, the founder of est Training, and his wife Hannukah. “I sit on their board. The company is going through growing pains and Werner asked me to help him reorganize.”

“est—I didn’t know you were involved with it.”

“Yes, you might want take one of their seminars.”

I got defensive, “Do I need fixing?” He assured me that was not what he meant. “The skills they teach are beneficial for everyone. Even me.”

“So I might gain more insight into the way you think.” Silence.

The dinner party was as advertised. Howard sat across from me. He kept staring at me. Was it my white angora sweater and pearl necklace or something else? I excused myself and went to the bathroom. Howard surprised me. “I need to speak with you.”

“Sounds serious.”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this. I am in love with you, totally and completely. I wish you had met me before you met Stan. He can be a hound dog. I don’t think he’s good for you.”

I was stunned. “Thanks, but I think I can take care of myself.”

Stan said he saw Howard following me. “What did he want? Did he hit on you?”

“No. He just wanted to catch up. See how you and I are doing.”

“You told him we are doing great, didn’t you?”

I nodded.

~

I was blind to Stan’s faults and ignored Howard’s warning. I was impressed with his accomplishments and addicted to the sex. I didn’t know where our relationship was going. I decided to explore job opportunities in Los Angeles so that Josh could be near his father—he wasn’t a good father but he was the only one Josh had, and I hoped that over time he would become more engaged with him as Josh got older. He was too busy building his career to give much thought to the son he had left behind. Ever the optimist, I interviewed a few firms and was made an offer to start work by June 1980.

I told Stan and gave him the chance to ask me to marry him, but he said, “I’m not going to tell you what to do. You have to make up your own mind.” It’s not what I wanted to hear. I wanted him to tell me that he couldn’t live without me, that I was the one. Instead, he accepted my decision once I accepted the best offer. He assured me that he’d visit me in Los Angeles. A year of bi-coastal trips later it was over. He had met another woman in Brookline with three children about the same ages as his two sons. Howard told me she was seven years older than he was, an interior designer, and an excellent cook. I forced a laugh, “He needs help in both departments.”

Howard added, “He’s really a mama’s boy. With three kids, she’s had plenty of practice.”

I was shocked that he gave up on me so easily. I wanted him to say he couldn’t live without me, that I was the one. That I shouldn’t move to Los Angeles. That we would make a life together.

Instead, he accepted my decision. His breakup gift was a book by Carl Sagan, which he inscribed: To one of the great ladies of the Cosmos, With love and affection, Stan, November 1980.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Holy Door

   “I was in prison and you came to visit me.”
   —Matthew 25:36

Stay on the sidewalk, the signs commanded, and we—my mother, my brother, and I—did, not that we were tempted in the very least to stray onto parched grass peppered with fire ant beds and sticky beggar lice and sand spurs. Towers loomed overhead like barbed-wire lighthouses, guards with rifles at the ready, a reminder of an unfathomable life at Tomoka Correctional Institution, a maximum-security facility in Daytona Beach. It was late August, not a tree or lick of shade to be seen; the sapping heat pulsed like a demon. We made our way in a straight line toward the recreation room, a dreary concrete block building, as if we, too, were prisoners.

Earlier in the stark security offices, we exchanged our car keys and iPhones for radios the size of the earliest of mobile phones. In the center of the bulky black boxes was an emergency button, and we were to affix these radios to our waists, but already mine wouldn’t clip properly; the clasp was broken. I clutched it like a walkie-talkie instead. Up ahead, at the sidewalk’s end, a heavy iron door opened, and the smiling face of a tall man in faded blues appeared, and then disappeared. A few feet up the sidewalk later, the door opened again, and before it closed, I saw that the man’s expression was that of a giddy boy at Christmas. It was such an unlikely emotion, so strange in this doomed landscape. I looked up at the armed towers, nervous. Was such joy even permitted here?

The chaplain accompanying us opened the iron door, and we stepped inside to a standing ovation, over a hundred prisoners applauding. We were at Tomoka to honor my late father, a decades-long volunteer who established a Toastmasters chapter there and ran it every Thursday. He’d passed away a month before. Next to me, the hulking, smiling gentlemen who orchestrated this surprise greeting, introduced himself as Jonathon. My father had represented him at a previous, unsuccessful parole hearing. Dad had spoken of him frequently, of how he deserved to be released, and how certain he was of his redemption despite his crime (he never revealed why Jonathon was serving a life sentence). I had never understood that idea, that someone who had committed such atrocious acts could be redeemed. Plus, wasn’t punishment the goal?

Bradley’s father with inmates at Tomoka Correctional Institution, photographed by Marc Krevo

As he spoke of Dad’s Thursday visits, Jonathon did not stop grinning. “Bob gave me his undivided attention. When other guys wanted to talk to him, I said, ‘Wait a minute, he’s here to see me!’”

He lifted a worn square of paper from his shirt pocket, the creases evident. It was a note my dad wrote after Jonathon’s first Toastmasters speech. Dad was a pharmacist, his early career in the family drug store in Monroeville, Alabama. He later became a pharmaceutical salesman in Jacksonville and was assigned to a territory that included the Tomoka facility. There was a need at the prison, he learned from staff and doctors. The “guys,” as my Dad always referred to them, wanted to be part of something, something more than what the prison offered. As Dad was an eloquent speaker, the kind of man you hoped made the toast at your wedding or the eulogy at your funeral, he was the perfect person to fill that void. He used Toastmasters to help the incarcerated men find their voices.

Jonathon didn’t unfold the note for us—the advice on that sliver of paper was his and his only—but knowing my dad, it was surely uplifting and encouraging, with a teeny bit of constructive criticism. And to Jonathon, it undoubtedly represented one thing: hope. 

~

That was ten years ago. This year, 2025, is a Catholic Jubilee Year. Pope Francis announced that five holy doors in Rome would be opened, two of which he would personally oversee. These ornate doors are bricked up from the inside, and the breaking of the mortar symbolizes, like the ancient Jewish tradition Jubilee originates from, the release of prisoners, forgiveness of debts, and the restoration of harmony in the world. Catholics believe that all who enter pass through the presence of God. The first door was opened at St. Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Eve. The day after Christmas, a second was opened at Rebibbia New Complex Prison. Outside of the church community, this led to some headshaking. A prison? But Pope Francis, known for his outreach to city slums and AIDS victims, as well as for washing the feet of many prisoners, said, “I too, could be here.”

~

After the Memorial service, there was cake and coffee, and we were encouraged to mingle. The service had done a number on me. I wasn’t ready for mingling. I sat off to the side and focused on controlling my tears. A metal folding chair dragged behind me, and then a voice, “You got to stop that.”

I turned around to face a linebacker-sized man wearing mirrored sunglasses. Clearly he spent his allotted free time in the facility’s weight room. He lifted his shades to reveal red, swollen eyes. “Look at what you got me doing.” That made me laugh, and we talked and talked. “I loved your dad,” he said.

I thought that a splash of cold water on my face would help. Someone pointed me in the direction of the restroom, and I walked along the kitchen corridor by the leftover cake and coffee. At a counter, a man sorted through a stack of sketches. I recognized the artist’s style—a heavy crosshatch shading, a light stippling. One of his drawings—the regal head of a tiger—hung on the wall of my dad’s office. The man beamed with pride as he went through the sketches one-by-one. Faces with wide eyes, stern profiles, exotic animals, self-portraits. He selected an unfinished drawing, and deep in thought, leaned against the counter, and began a light crosshatching to make it complete.

I found the washroom and made myself as presentable as possible. The intensity of the day was enormous. If I could have walked out right then, I would have done so. But there were two men I still wanted to meet. Plus, I had no choice. This is an exaggerated comparison, but like the prisoners, I could not simply walk out just because I was tired and emotionally drained. I looked at myself, puffy eyes, head pounding. The cold water did not make me look any better. As I stepped out into the rec room, I was immediately stopped by a young man in his late twenties. “You read my story,” he said.

Years ago, Dad had given me a short story written in pencil on wide-ruled paper. I’d made notes in the margins and signed off with “Keep Writing.” The story was set in St. Augustine, where I live, and he had also lived as a teenager. It was a beautiful love story of a young girl who worked in a sweet shop—pralines, brownies, fudge—on St. George Street, the main pedestrian thoroughfare. As we chatted, I got the idea he wasn’t writing much anymore, so I encouraged him, noting that writing is hard work, and then I stopped myself. He knew hard work. Everything was hard here. What was I even talking about? Fortunately, he changed the subject, kindly asked what I was working on, but as I began, the iron door swung open, and a guard entered blowing a whistle. The room went silent, and without a word, every prisoner found a place, back against the concrete block. Each man was counted, another whistle was blown, and everyone went back—slowly—to what he’d been doing.

I noticed that the writer had positioned himself in the count line beside another young man. His friend looked so familiar—square jaw, dark eyes, a handsome face, a stocky build. I’d noticed him when we’d first arrived, and as the pair, heads together, went back for another round of cake, I strained to see the name on his breast pocket. I did know him, or knew of him. He was also from St. Augustine, and his face had been all over the news in the past few years. He’d been convicted of strangling his wife, leaving her on the beach, waves crashing over her. I watched him, now friends with the young writer; they had their heads together like teenage boys, laughing and palling around. I wondered if they had known each other in St. Augustine, or if their hometown had simply brought them together on the inside. They were like children joking and licking cake icing from their fingers. All around me there were small groups of men talking with my mom and brother, all like old friends or relatives. Collectively, in this room, there was an unbelievable past of horrific crimes and violence, yet there was happiness. Genuine happiness.

I asked around and finally found the two men I wanted to meet, dear friends of Dad’s—James and Jimmy. He spoke of them a lot, but as always, he never mentioned their crimes. Jimmy’s wife had passed away years ago, his grief causing the rage and crimes that had brought him to this place. He had a grown daughter on the outside, and grandchildren. I also knew that he had been very ill recently, but that day he wore an infectious smile. Jimmy was originally from Alabama, and a loyal Crimson Tide fan. My dad was an Auburn fan, and that heated collegiate rivalry had become the origin of their friendship. Jimmy had a folder in his hand, the kind you used in grade school to keep math separate from history, English from science. It was bright green and had been so well taken care of it looked brand new. “This is contraband. Anything you got in your cell,” he whispered. “They can take it away.” He offered the folder to me, as if he were an FBI agent. “Your dad gave me this.”

In the sleeve of the green folder was an orange and blue paper plate with the Auburn University logo. The table erupted in laughter. The week after Auburn beat Alabama in the Iron Bowl, Dad was there for the Toastmasters meeting. After speech practice, dessert was served, and Dad brought Jimmy a slice of pie on that plate. Jimmy thought it was the funniest thing. It was a long-running gag between the two of them, each trying to outdo the other, but clearly Dad won that time. Somehow Jimmy had managed to save the forbidden paper plate in his cell with that folder, passing it off as a document for years. Jimmy would later go on to be released earlier during COVID because of a cancer diagnosis. I often think of him sitting by his daughter’s screened-in pool, drinking coffee in the morning, free to enjoy it where and when he chose.

Bradley’s father doing yoga with an inmate at Tomoka Correctional Institution, photographed by Marc Krevo

Though Dad also talked of James, it was more of his work on the inside, his yoga practice and meditation. I didn’t know much of his background or his family. He had severe blue eyes, a confident smile. As Jimmy and I talked SEC football, James had been mostly quiet. Now he looked around the room, and then back at me. “Is this what you thought it would be like?”

“No, it’s—” I said, struggling for the word. “Happier?”

He smiled and shrugged. “Well, in here, maybe. It’s not what it is out there.” He motioned toward the concrete block buildings that housed the dormitories. Some of the dorms could be violent and dangerous, he explained. The radio on my hip was uncomfortable and clumsy. Sometime during our conversation, I’d set it on the table. James motioned to it, and in a serious tone a reminder of where we truly were, said, “Better put that back on.”

“When you get home,” the chaplain told me as we were walking back down the sidewalk in a straight line, this time toward the security offices and the exit, “don’t search for these guys on the internet.” Of course, I would do exactly that. I fell down a rabbit hole at the state’s Department of Corrections site. I discovered their crimes—premeditated murder, armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon—and then I stopped. I did not need to know the details of their crimes. There was no making sense of their past, no resolving who they were with the sympathy and kindness they had shown my family, and most of all, their respect and love for my dad.

~

On December 26, 2024, when Pope Francis arrived at the holy door of Rebibbia Prison, he stood from his wheelchair, took halted steps, and knocked on the ornate bronze door. It slowly opened, a gesture of easing open the doors of our hearts, and he passed inside. Despite its lack of beauty, I am reminded of that iron door at Tomoka, and the men behind it so many years ago, how they deserve what the pope refers to as an “anchor of hope.” I saw, if only for a few hours at Tomoka, how hope worked its magic—the look on Jonathon’s face, unencumbered by despair and loss, the creased note in his pocket, the Auburn paper plate in Jimmy’s green folder—all of this the outcome of those who have taken the time to bring hope to them.

~

When Michael was released, Dad was there when he walked out the prison door. He drove him to Jacksonville to a family member’s home, first stopping at Walmart where they shopped and purchased new clothes and supplies for Michael to get him started on a new life. Over the years, they had a regular lunch date and talked frequently.

The aneurysm that took my father’s life was not instantaneous. His brain was gone, but his body held on for days. He was a runner, a swimmer; his lungs were strong. He was simply not ready to go, therefore there was time for those who wanted to say goodbye. Michael was one of the first people my mother phoned. While he promised to come to the hospice facility, days went by, and we had not heard from him. One evening, just after sunset, there was a knock at the door.  A black man, well over six-feet-tall with gold teeth and a worn leather Bible in his hands entered the room. He had an infectious smile. He came to the end of the bed, took my father’s feet in his hands. With the voice of a poet, he sang out, “My main man, my superman, my Hall of Fame.”

Three hours later, deep into the night, my dad slipped away quietly. I like to believe that Michael ushered him through that portal.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Still Standing

After over fifty years, Warren and I began corresponding—a term I use loosely, as Warren does not write. He does not speak. His IQ hovers below 20, and he does not know who I am. This is an excuse I saw my parents embrace most of their lives to alleviate the guilt of no contact, of giving up their parenthood, when it came to their fourth child and firstborn son.

Warren was about two years old when it became increasingly evident that something was wrong. He would spend hours sitting on the floor, with his head against the wall, rocking back and forth as if keeping time with the ticking of a metronome only he could hear. His hair had worn a little bald patch in the spot where it met the plaster. Words were not spoken; words were echoed, much like a parrot mimicking what it heard. No words came out of their own accord. No babbling two-year-old banter, the type we parents sometimes complain about. I’m sure there was no complaining by my parents. Only worry. Enough worry to make appointment after appointment with specialist after specialist. Diagnosis: Severe Mental Retardation. Age three.

~

“The Benches” was the place all the mothers of the building would meet with their toddlers and strollers to socialize and gossip. It was a long strip of a park adjacent to Henry Hudson Parkway with benches extending a city block. I remember playing there as a child with dozens of other kids from the building. I have very few memories of my childhood, but “The Benches” I always remember as a safe place. I have had recurring dreams in my adult life of various scenarios where someone is chasing me, trying to kill me, etc. I always knew that if I could just get back to “The Benches” and lay down on the concrete, I would always wake up in my bed. I would be safe.

Mom was embarrassed to have the other moms see her son, who was not quite the average child. So, instead of her usual routine with the older children, of going to The Benches with the other mothers, she would take Warren in the stroller and walk for hours, she told me, so her baby would not be seen, and apparently, she would not be embarrassed. It was the 1950s, but it is still hard for me to fathom.

The doctors, the specialists, and even the Catholic priests would all weigh in. It was decided that the best thing for all would be to place Warren in a home for the mentally ill. The decision was made that Warren, not yet four years old, would be sent to one of the best private institutions in the Greater New York area. I remember driving north, up the tree-lined Saw Mill River Parkway every Sunday afternoon to visit Warren. I was eight.

We would go to the Carvel ice cream stand down the road. Sad but true, this is the only concrete memory I have of my brother. Carvel on Sundays.

To be fair to my parents, it is what you did in the 1950s. Your pediatrician suggested it, and all the specialists recommended it. Many families faced these same choices. For some, it was a deep, dark family secret, not even knowing that their sibling or relative even existed. For others, there would be weekly visits. I know it was not easy for any of them.

My father was manic-depressive in the days before lithium. With three children of my own (all born within twenty-seven months of each other), I have often wondered, what would I have done? There are those who say that the parents were ashamed. Others say they just threw their children away and forgot about them. I do not pretend to know the answer. Unfortunately, what goes up must come down. The mania of my father, along with his record-breaking sales performance, came crashing down. When my father was in a manic stage, he could sell ice to the Eskimos. He was hospitalized, and the income dried up. The private institution had to give way to a state mental hospital, maybe the three most dreaded words in the English language.

Warren was transferred to Willowbrook State Hospital on Staten Island. It was actually called a school, and it was the largest institution for the developmentally disabled in the world at the time (and that was not a good thing).

~

 My brother spent about fifteen years of his life at Willowbrook, the place that Robert F. Kennedy called “a snake pit” in 1965. When Kennedy visited the site, he was horrified by what he saw and stated that “individuals in the overcrowded facility were living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo.”

A combination of budget cuts by Governor Nelson Rockefeller and more demand for placements coupled with indifference led to most of Willowbrook’s problems. Some quote a ratio of seventy patients to two or three caregivers. I wonder how those caregivers could keep clothes on the backs of children with mental disabilities as severe as most residents, who would disrobe as fast as staff could dress them. How could they keep the feces and urine cleaned up when there were seventy other children to look after?

I visited Willowbrook once. It may have been more than once, but the first visit is all I can remember. It was the Fall of 1970. I was twenty years old. I had been visiting my brother from the time I was eight years old. My two sisters, ages 4 and 9, and I, would pack into my parent’s car and drive the half hour or so up the tree-lined highway to Ferncliff Manor in Yonkers. It was a beautiful place with acres of grass. We would lay a blanket out and have a picnic with our brother. We would run around and play, especially my younger sister, as they were the closest, only about a year and a half apart in age. She missed her baby brother.

Willowbrook, on the other hand, was far from the pretty, peaceful picnic grounds of Ferncliff. The antithesis. When I first entered Willowbrook in 1970, I was with my father. My mother would not or could not return. My senses were bombarded. The scent was sharp. A mixture of bleach and feces. The air was still. The halls were dimly lit so as not to see the chaos or the peeling paint. The sounds I could not quite place: murmurs, distant cries, quiet humming, the shuffle of feet. There was a sense of stillness that felt anything but peaceful. I had not prepared myself for what I saw that day, but even then, I had the sense this place was failing the very people it was meant to be helping. A kind of numbness settled in—not because I didn’t feel it, but because I felt too much and didn’t know where to put it.

Dunham as a child with her mother and siblings, photographed by Burton H. Halper

It wasn’t chaos. It was something softer and harder to bear—indifference. Neglect masked by the very rhythms of daily life.

That day left a lasting mark. It didn’t just shape my view of institutions—it asked me who we become when we are unseen. Does Warren know he has a family? A majority of the residents there have no visitors at all. Unfortunately, I did not pursue those questions or those feelings I had that day, for many years. I buried them with all the rest.

It breaks my heart when I look at this photo taken when Warren was just a few weeks old because I see such hope. Children with such great prospects, immense potential. A future not yet marred by illness and tragedy. We were all unaware of what lay ahead.

It saddens me now because I know the outcome. I lived through it. The memories feel like a slow echo that never quite fades. There would be two more children to come, and the youngest would, in essence, never have the opportunity to know two of her siblings pictured here. In fact, she was not even told of their existence for years.

Lorraine, my older sister on the right would become affected by schizophrenia in her teenage years and commit suicide in 1967. Warren, the newborn in momma’s lap, would be institutionalized by the age of three, and dad, the photographer, unbeknownst to me at the time, would suffer from Manic Depression/Bi-Polar I for the rest of his life. I was sixteen years old when lithium became FDA approved for his type of mental illness. I didn’t fully recognize my family situation for many years. Like all small children, I perceived my life as typical. Of course, it was the only family life I had known. I used to think I had a perfectly normal childhood growing up in an upper-middle-class family in a particularly good neighborhood of the Northwest Bronx. Still, all is not always as it seems.

So, it has been fifty years since that day at Willowbrook. Fifty years of distance is not just a timeline; it’s a slow layering of choices, silences, rationalizations, and even regret. I had always blamed or perhaps rationalized my parents’ behavior for not visiting and for moving 2500 miles away. But what about myself? Was it guilt for not challenging the patterns my parents set? Was the guilt shaped by family dynamics and motional survival?

When you believe someone doesn’t recognize you, especially someone you’re biologically and emotionally tied to, it can feel like the connection was broken before it even had a chance to be made. “What’s the point? He wouldn’t understand. He wouldn’t know me.” But underneath that logic is a powerful current of loss—not just of a relationship, but of significance, visibility, and possibly identity.

Saying “He didn’t know who I was” may have been a way to protect us all from pain. There’s grief for what never existed: no history, shared memories or stories passed between siblings. And that grief is quiet. It just lives silently under decades of rationalization.

~

Since 1985, at the age of thirty, my brother has been living in a group home in upstate New York. The Consumer Advisory Board (CAB) monitors his wellbeing, which provides necessary and appropriate representation and advocacy services on an individual basis for all Willowbrook Class members as long as they live.

Warren has been well taken care of for the past thirty-eight years of his life. He has his own advocate who makes sure that all the stipulations of the Willowbrook Decree of 1975 are being followed when it comes to someone from the Willowbrook Class, as is my brother. But I often wonder, what about the trauma of the past? What does he comprehend of the horrors of growing up in an institution such as Willowbrook?

I am in contact with his advocate as well as his local case worker. They say he seems happy but does tend to withdraw and isolate himself. He doesn’t trust people very much. I suppose I can’t blame him. He is electively mute. Not to mention that Warren is missing the tops of at least six fingers, and, sometime in the past, his nose has been broken. Warren also has no teeth. I read an account of a Willowbrook parent stating that the Willowbrook dentist was notorious for pulling teeth. Her child had no teeth because she would bite herself until she bled. Whether this is connected to Warren’s missing fingers or missing teeth or is a result of abuse or self-mutilation remains a mystery.

 ~

 Warren loves classic rock—a man after my own heart. Music therapy is essential in the lives of the mentally disabled, probably because music is nonverbal. It transcends language. My brother is nonverbal, and I like to think that the music he listens to speaks to him in some way. I know that music calms anxieties and relaxes us when we are overstimulated. I’m told he can spend hours sitting in a rocking chair on the back porch of his group home in Plattsburgh listening to his CDs: He likes everything to be in its correct place, such as furniture being arranged in a particular way, or the house phone hung up in a certain direction. They say he can be quite helpful in clearing things away, such as mats after PT, arranging and clearing the living room after various activities. Sometimes, amusingly enough, his arranging can happen while the activities are still in progress!  This brings a smile to my face!

Warren has a personal savings account that cannot accumulate over $2,000. When the account gets up there, they go shopping to spend it down. His basic needs are taken care of, so he can shop for things he especially likes. His caregiver said Warren has the most expensive taste of any man she’s ever met. They will go to JCPenney, and he will go directly to the silk shirts or the most expensive items they sell. He is a very “interesting and complex” person, she says. It shows the respect that he garners as an individual, not simply someone or something to be taken care of. Not forgotten.

   ~

It had been fifty years since I saw my brother, The last time was that visit to Willowbrook in 1970. Not long after, I left New York for the west coast at about the same time my parents left New York. While my mother was alive, she would get annual reports on his health and progress and always shared them with me.

My youngest sister, Stacey, had never met Warren. He was institutionalized eight years before she was even born. She can’t quite remember when she was told that she had another brother. It was probably when she was about seven or eight years old.

When I brought up my plan, she was hesitant at first, but we finalized our trip and met in Montreal for a three-day visit before driving to Plattsburgh, New York, together in October 2023 to meet our brother. We had also arranged to meet both Warren’s care manager and his advocate from the New York State Office for People with Developmental Disabilities (OPWDD) for lunch in a nearby café.

I was heartened to learn of the care that the State of New York is giving to those with developmental disabilities and the extra care for the “Willowbrook Class.” Meeting these two women in that café was proof enough of the care and concern that my brother is getting. They spent two hours with my sister and me talking about Warren, listening to us recount our own family history, and answering any questions that they were able. They could not have been more caring and sincere. I am so grateful to have met them. Not only did they spend those two hours talking with us, but they also went with us to meet Warren. He was familiar with both, so they carved out even more of their busy days to come along.

We arrived at the house on Turner Road. It was out in the country among the trees. The feeling was peaceful and bucolic. His house manager greeted us and let us know that the other housemates had gone out so that we would have more privacy and less chaos.

There are four male house members. I believe at age sixty-eight, Warren is the oldest. Two of the men are more high functioning and a bit outspoken, while Warren is selectively mute and very low functioning. The fourth member falls somewhere in between, and it all works.

The house manager told us that Warren had just gone to his room to lie down. His advocate went and peeked her head in his room to say, “Warren, you have some company. Do you want to come out and say hello?” No response. His habit is to get into his bed with his legs crossed in a yoga position, then pull the blanket over his head and lie down. He looked like a not so little cocoon. I then said, “Hello Warren, I brought you a present,” and he immediately popped up from his bed and ran down the hall to the dining room table. He moves very quickly (and apparently even quicker when there is a present involved).

A bit later, we went out to his favorite spot on the porch where he sits in his lounge chair to rock and listen to music. We went through his box of vinyl albums sitting next to the record player. I was a bit surprised. I had to laugh and think, He’s a man after my own heart. There was Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, The Beatles (his favorite) and even AC/DC and Metallica!

So, Warren came out of his room to get his present. I brought him a Seattle Sweatshirt, as I know he loves sweatshirts. He went straight to the kitchen to get strawberry milk. The house manager poured his milk and then let him pour in the strawberry syrup and mix it up. They brought it to the table where he gulped it down as fast as he could and some of it spilled down the front of his shirt. All those years at Willowbrook ingrained in him that everyone would steal his food if they could, so eating or drinking as fast as he could was the only way to protect it. To this day, he must have someone watch him eat so the food doesn’t go down too fast and choke him. When a new member of the household is added, Warren will either bring his food to his room or else put his arm around the plate, protecting it from the would-be food thief. Once he is comfortable with the new house member, he will come back to the table for meals. It has been thirty-eight years since Warren left Willowbrook. Habits die hard. I only wish I knew what other horrible memories reside in his brain from spending his most formative years there.

He came to the dining room table and sat across from me.

We looked at each other. There was a connection of some sort. I asked if it was alright to take a picture. His advocate asked Warren if it would be ok, and he immediately jumped up from the table. I thought, oh no, he’s going to run back to his room, and turn back into a cocoon. To my surprise, however, he stood up, went to the middle of the room, and looked right at me, as if to say, “I’m ready for my picture now.” I thought I would quickly take advantage of the situation and handed my phone to Stacey and asked her to take a picture of both of us. I nonchalantly went over and stood next to Warren.

At one point Warren grabbed my arm and started pulling me towards the kitchen. I thought this was a real moment between us, but it turned out, he wanted more strawberry milk. When I realized, I just laughed and said, “Oh, he’s just using me.”

We had a total of twenty minutes or so until Warren decided to go back to his room, get in his bed, and pull the blanket back over his head. Stacey, for the most part, stayed in the background. But I know she was as moved as I was by the whole experience.

He reached out and touched my hand once. I really believe we did have a connection, my brother and I. I now have a new and wonderful memory that is gradually replacing the dark one that haunted me for fifty years.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Impermanence.

Her name escapes me now, but her face was unforgettable. The woman—I will call her Sarah—had half-inch fake eyelashes, sparkly pink lips, and her forehead, cheeks, and chin were plumped and plastered unnaturally smooth across the broad bones of her face. She had long inky black hair pulled up in a bright scrunchy, and her voice, simultaneously booming and breathless, could be heard in the furthest garden behind the meditation hall whilst Sarah was still inside the communal dining area.

She looked much younger than her age—fifty-five! she bellowed gleefully to everyone she spoke to within minutes of the introduction. Sarah beamed, and although the skin on her powdered face didn’t move much when she smiled, her eyes twinkled with childish delight. You couldn’t help but smile with her.

She was a refreshing eccentric, amongst the quiet crowd of introspective acolytes. We were a pretty mild mixed-bag of a retreat crowd: we were accountants, lawyers, or something in IT. There were a few yoga teachers and a handful younger, more overtly alternate-types, adorned in cheesecloth skirts and crop-top bodices and tattoos of Sanskrit symbols.

Most of us wore shy, thoughtful smiles that did not reveal our teeth, as we milled about the orientation hall. We were contemplating the days ahead, and what we’d just signed ourselves up for: ten days of no speaking, no reading, no writing, no eye contact, no exercise, and sitting Vipassana practice in the meditation hall for around ten hours a day, starting at 4:00 a.m.

If Sarah was nervous, she didn’t show it. She wore a fluorescent Hawaiian jumpsuit, very short, and she appeared to be fizzing with excitement. Within half an hour she’d bounced through the shy fidgety crowd and introduced herself to everyone, leaving laughter, furrowed eyebrows, and darting glances in her wake. Sarah, as everyone soon heard, was anartiste, an actress.  She’d played minor roles in a few minor movies, and received some minor awards—here, right here, see? And look—she swiped—here was another photo of her at the award ceremony, and here—look! look!– another one, in a different dress. She had a beautiful daughter who was twenty, who was an actress also—see? Sarah’s day job was proprietor and clinician of a Botox clinic. COME! She grasped the arm of her startled interlocutor. Oh, you really must come, come and stay in her home! She would cook for you! She would give you Botox treatment, no charge, not for such a friend as you. She beamed with the earnest warmth of a doting aunt and the appraising eye of a fond expert. She could also do something with your hair and make-up, too, she added warmly. Sarah did not seem particularly nonplussed by the fact that none of the other women, from the strait-laced accountants to the cheesecloth-bodiced seekers, appeared to be wearing, or exhibiting any interest in, makeup. Nor did she seem to notice the startled quality of the stuttered thanks and smiling murmurs of Oh, Uh, Maybe. She just bounced off to the next person and repeated her kind offers of hospitality and free Botox. She was a fountain of beneficent enthusiasm.

That first evening, when the retreat coordinators reviewed the schedule and reminded us all of the 4 a.m. start, Sarah gasped loudly and sat bolt upright. Her shock was not affected; it seems she genuinely hadn’t thought to check the program of this funny place, before signing up. This amazed me. It filled me with something like awe, given the hours I’d spent scowling cynically at my laptop, making absolutely certain this wasn’t some kind of weird, woowoo cult that would make me wear flowers in my hair or flop around on the floor to the beat of amateur bongo drums. I’d vetted the philosophy and reputation of the practice and the facility for weeks before deciding. Sarah, it seemed, had just rocked up. 

She was there at 3:55 the next morning, pacing silently in the cold and dark in front of the meditation hall. She was there, on her cushion, every single morning, by 4:00.  She was there even on mornings when a good deal of the surrounding cushions were empty; when sleep had won out against the bristling self-serious determination of many of her more somber retreat companions.

Sarah never spoke a word in the meditation hall. She belched. She belched noisily, pleasantly, and un-self-consciously. She was several cushion places and one row behind me, and I could hear her exhale contentedly after each burp. I bit my cheeks, trying not to laugh.

Like all of us, Sarah shuffled. We could all hear our companions’ shuffling, in the sitting hall; the quick shift of a painful knee, the discreet stretch of an ankle on fire, or the muffled re-fluffing of cushions. We all experimented with the cushions in those first few days, apparently reasoning that if we got the configuration just right, we’d be able to avoid the pain of sitting motionless for hours at a time. We took another, and yet another, cushion from the rack before each sitting. We built clever cushion ziggurats to perch on, certain we could avoid discomfort if only we kept experimenting. After a few days, most of us finally realised the futility of this; and that there was a path through the pain, to the other side of it, that was far more interesting than our squirmy, fruitless attempts to avoid it. But Sarah didn’t bother with cushion configurations for a straight-back sitting posture. By the end of the first morning, she chose a back-support chair, oblivious to the nonsensical imaginary stigma of weakness the rest of us had subconsciously assigned to that humiliating crutch, as we eyed it ruefully beside the cushion rack. 

The days passed. Soon, we shuffled less. Then, we barely noticed even the silence of the still, quiet crowd, as all of us individually sank deeper into the fascinating experience that is an intensive Vipassana retreat. 

~ 

On the tenth day, the final morning session came to a close, and several dozen pairs of eyes opened slowly and serenely inside the hall. I’m certain I wasn’t the only one who felt I’d just barely scratched the surface. I spoke to several people later who agreed that by the end of Day One, they were mortified by the torturous stretch of time ahead; and by the end of Day Nine, they desperately wanted to stay another week. It’s difficult to describe the tangible quality of the joy and tranquillity the teacher guides you into over those ten silent days, and difficult to explain what you learn about your own mind and body. It was utterly unlike anything I’d ever experienced, and as a sat there in the hall, my eyes slowly becoming accustomed to the light again, I felt semi-intoxicated. The breakfast bell sounded, peaceful faces smiled all around, arms stretched, and necks slowly craned. From the row behind came a loud, blunt, holler:

“SO! Uh . . . can we talk yet?” 

We were indeed permitted to talk in those last few hours, and the atmosphere that day was one of surreal communal elation. Strangers wandered over to a random table; the seated company warmly welcomed them; everyone inquired with warm interest as to who their companions were, what in their lives had brought them to this place, how they felt now that it was over, what they hoped to carry away from such an intense experience. Our faces glowed and our eyes shone, giddy and brimming with metta.

Sarah, too, was thrilled to be able to commune verbally again, although she didn’t seem much interesting in discussing the previous days. Within a few minutes, her conversation had returned to the appearance of the other female attendees, to enthusiastic invitations to come and stay at her house and get free Botox, to commentary on more photographs of her in evening dress at the award ceremony. She darted and flitted around, but now lingered—I noticed—a little more closely to those who seemed more kindly disposed to her. Some people were finding it difficult to hide an awkward desire to—kindly, smilingly—put some distance between themselves and Sarah.

Her conversation was mostly cheerful and bubbly, but some of it was genuinely disconcerting. She held her phone aloft for the benefit of the others at thetable—wanna see a picture of my BOYFRIEND? Haha! Just kidding. Oh my god, oh my god. She swiped, and a ridiculously tense-looking muscular young man appeared in a variety of selfie poses. Sarah dissolved into raucous giggles. My boyfriend! My boyfriend! 

Some people pressed their lips into a gentle smile, gave her a warm nod, then turned back to their conversation. Others made a cheerful rejoinder, patted her shoulder, then edged away. One or two of the younger ones simply stared at her, genuinely amazed. And it was a little surreal. Sarah was, it must be said, a fifty-five-year-old woman whose conversation skills in many ways had not developed beyond those of an adolescent. She squealed and clutched your arm, giggling over the kind of things very young girls giggled over. Her seeming indifference to the profoundly intense experience she’d just undergone was absolutely bizarre. Seated amongst a cluster of women talking intensely about their sittings in the hall, I heard Sarah blurt out unselfconsciously that she’d mainly come to lose weight. A stunned silence followed. Oh, sure! she beamed. Locked into a rigid retreat schedule where you weren’t allowed off the grounds, and only served two vegetarian meals a day—what better way to shed a few pounds? Sarah was perfectly serious. The group dissolved in kindly, stupefied laughter. Really? Oh yeah, she shrugged. Sarah had never missed a sitting; she’d practiced all those long, long hours, felt her spine and all her joints burn and ache with pain, listened to the madman ravings of her mind, and passed through to the other side of the gruelling experience, just like the rest of us. And all to lose a few pounds. I watched one young woman—dressed in a scarlet satin number reminiscent in design of Princess Jasmine’s outfit in Disney’s Aladdin, and covered in Buddha-themed tattoos—as her jaw dropped open.

Soon Sarah was enthusiastically soliciting numbers for a WhatsApp group: so that everyone could stay in touch! All friends together. Given that we were all, essentially, strangers and had only really spoken to each for the last hour or so, she was met with more surprise than enthusiasm. Some people froze, when she handed them her phone to enter their contact details. Others, after only an imperceptible pause, shared their contact, thanking her warmly for considering them. Some stuttered apologies: they didn’t have WhatsApp . . . no, nor email either, they were not really email people. I watched people tactfully duck and dart around the dining room to avoid her.

It was the group photo that Sarah insistently arranged, on the stairs in front of the meditation hall, that proved the final straw. Ok! she boomed to the tightly packed group. Now, everyone, smile for the camera! She handed her phone to the server, then bolted back to the front row and spread out peace sign fingers wide beneath a cheesy grin. Again, again, another photo! The young woman in the Princess Jasmine suit with the buddha tattoos groaned audibly. 

Ok, ok, one more! Sarah shouted up at us.

Now:

Everyone say:

ANI-CHE!

The Jasmine-suit woman hissed loud enough for the whole company to hear: this is embarrassing.

And I completely fell apart.

I never got a copy of that photo. The truth is—and I am not proud of this—that I was one of those that smiled and stammered something about not actually possessing any contact details, the automatic reaction of most introverts, when a stranger solicits phone numbers. So, I never made it into the WhatsApp group. But I’m pretty sure I know what the photo looks like. It looks like a group of people pressed tight into a stairwell, wearing facial expressions ranging from tranquil to perplexed to baffled and dread-filled. I’m pretty sure the Jasmine-suit woman is clenching her teeth. I recall a handful of kindly quiet older ladies whom I’m certain are wearing warm, loving smiles. One or two of them had even agreeably murmured the sansrkit word ‘Anicca!’ (pronounced ani-che), upon Sarah’s insistence that we all shout it, as if there were nothing odd about randomly substituting the Buddhist term for impermanence, for “CHEEEESE!”. And then there’s me, about row five, my cheeks pink and my mouth idiotically agape. I was shaking with laughter.

I couldn’t stop laughing. Sarah made such perfect fools of us all. We’d all just spent ten days in a state of deep concentration, practicing how to notice and transcend reactions of aversion. And the instant I came out of my bliss trance, here was Sarah, squealing about Botox and fad diets, thrusting grotesque amateur muscle-man photos in my face. The departure of bliss like water down a plug hole, and the resurgence of aversion was so strong I could feel it prickle up my whole body, albeit mingled with a kind of bovine, bleating denial of my own urge to run away from her.

The last day in particular had focussed on metta meditation practice, on cultivating loving-kindness and compassion for all beings. I had stumbled out of the hall feeling such abundant, overwhelming loving-kindness; for my silent companions, for that big yellow spider near the gate so beautiful it brought a tear to your eye, for the swaying bamboo overhead, for All Beings, Everywhere. And after two minutes of being cornered by Sarah, listening to her giggle and shriek about sexting with her make-believe boyfriends, I found that my cheeks were beginning to stiffen and twitch. Sarah simply refused to fit the noble, beautiful, tranquil mold into which I had mentally squished All Beings, Everywhere, in order to love them.

She revealed me—all of us—as so laughable in our earnestness, so adorable in our newfound contemplative gravity. Sarah was so kind, so generous, a woman whose frailties were no different than the rest of ours, and yet who was—in a way—so much more transparent about them. Sarah, it seemed reasonable to conclude, was one of those women who had never, her whole life, been given any respect or any regard, save in relation to how she looked. It was painful to picture her as a little girl, staring wide-eyed all around her, searching for a role model; someone to teach her how to be kind to herself, how to value herself, how to connect with others in a meaningful way. Beneath her raucous overtures was a real longing, the same longing as all of us felt, to connect; please, come to my house. Please, let me call you. I’ll give you things for free. I will feed you. 

There are a great many stories in various spiritual traditions about the importance of showing compassion and loving-kindness to all kinds of supposed undesirables: to beggars in the marketplace, to whom you should give your cloak; to adulterers and thieves, the outcast and condemned; to the poor, the incarcerated, the proud, the cruel, and the wicked, for they know not what they do. It seems to me this list of potential compassion targets is some pretty elementary stuff. In my experience, it’s far more difficult to feel loving-kindness for the average stranger loudly crunching an apple in confined public transport space than it is to give alms to the poor and embrace the pitiful and outcast. It’s easier to love the downtrodden than the noisy and flamboyant aspiring pop culture icon. Sarah was not an outcast of the world, she was everything the world had told her to be: an Instagram starlet, a woman so desperate to avoid aging she had devoted her career to artificially forestalling it, a noisy, bubbly, wealthy, body weight-obsessed, Pretty Girl, earnestly enacting a role that masked all the deeper and more vulnerable parts of herself.   

Ajahn Chah says: Anything which is troubling you, anything which is irritating you: that is your teacher. Sarah was my teacher. She made me see, for a fleeting instant when that ‘ani-che!’ photograph snapped, all of us within each other, all our states of being morphing and sliding in and out of one another. The vision wasn’t beatific, but it was rather beautiful, in a hilarious kind of way. A lovely human collage of fused-together impermanence. The stricken-faced girl with the spiritual tattoos and the Princess Jasmine outfit: that was me. I hid it better, but there I was, deep inside my innermost thoughts and feelings, cringing and groaning and deeply embarrassed to be posing for the cheesy ‘peace fingers’ retreat photo. The kindly older women who smiled for the camera so as not to hurt Sarah’s feelings, that was me too, in a way; deep, deep down, there was still a part of me able to choose kindness and compassion, despite the bleating protest of my pompous spiritual dignity. And Sarah, the odd one amongst us all, who showered generosity so profusely, whose desire for connection manifested so desperately, who wore her insecurities and misguided longings on her sleeve—that was me, too, although I wore my afflictions on a far less prominent place than my sleeve. That was all of us. People whose lives are all hunky-dory, A-Ok don’t bother signing up for an experience like that.

I’ve forgotten a lot of the recorded teachings from those ten days. I can’t remember much beyond the gist of the teacher’s evening talks. I did not march forth from the retreat and commence a stringent, unshakeable daily two-hour practice at home. I still find time on the cushion every day, sometimes for five minutes sometimes for thirty, sometimes in a state of deep tranquillity, sometimes as skittish and neurotic as a short-changed squirrel. But I’ve never forgotten Sarah, or whatever her name was (I’d know, if was in the WhatsApp group). I’ve never forgotten that mirror she held up to my face, captured in a photograph I’ll probably never see. I’ve never forgotten her inadvertent admonition to remember my own state of being, and the state of all things: all things sacred, and all things silly.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Care Bear for Sale

I’m about to be mugged over a fucking Care Bear. Togetherness Bear. Don’t ask how it came to be in my possession. Okay, fine, go ahead. I opened my front door one morning, and it was sitting there. I’m not lying. There was a box and I opened it and there he was.

I hear you say, “That’s a bit unusual, mate.”

Well, yeah, I guess it is. But unusual has this way of happening to me. Like the time I opened my door to find detectives standing there. I would have preferred the Care Bear, especially as the house was surrounded by armed police officers. 

Two words for you: past occupants. The detectives mumbled apologies and left, but this Care Bear has stayed.

The first time I was mugged it was over a pair of drumsticks. I thought the man running toward me in the flannelette shirt was going for a late-night jog—until he stopped and began throwing punches. The second time I was mugged, it was over a traffic cone. This will be the first time I’ve been mugged for a Care Bear.

Why am I so certain I will be mugged for the Bear?

It started two days ago, with someone who shares the name of a Bronte novel.  She came at me within seconds of creating the listing. 

“I really, really want this,” she said. “When can I get it?”

“How does tomorrow sound?”

And so, while I sit waiting, I browse her profile and notice something.

Care Bears. Everywhere.

Buying, selling, it doesn’t matter. She needs Care Bears like a junkie needs their next fix. 

“I’m really sick,” she tells me, and I think to myself, in the head?

“I can’t make it today,” she continues. “I’m pregnant.”

I say congratulations, and tell her it’s okay, and that in the meantime, other people are longing for this Care Bear, and she understands this, because at this moment she wants nothing else more than said Bear.

“Can you please hold it for me?” she asks, and for a second, I think she wants me to embrace the chap; to cuddle him, and let it know that a new owner will be with it soon. But then I snap out of this Care Bear daze of insanity.

“Yes, of course,” I reply. “Same time?”

“Yes!” she says. “I want him so much.”

So, here I am on this couch, rocking back and forth while reading a news headline:

MAN BEATEN BY THUGS POSING AS BUYERS FOR HIS IPHONE.

“This isn’t an iPhone,” I reassure myself.  But thoughts of rooms filled with Care Bears, like those on her profile, start to infiltrate logic, and I resign myself to fate.

MAN STABBED FOR CARE BEAR.

I can see the headline now. I ponder my final words. 

“Shhh!” I whisper to the empty house. I hear a car pull up outside. I run to the toilet window, because it’s inconspicuous, and no one will expect anyone to peer at them through there.

But shit. She has already escaped my vision, she’s already at the door. This is it.

I pick up the box, the same one that appeared on my doorstep on that sunny morning in November. My dog stares directly at me.

“Really?” she says. “You could be making something of your life.”

I shrug my shoulders. The Care Bear is life.

I turn the door handle and there she is. Dripping wet, curly red hair and barefoot, as if she has taken part in a triathlon to get here. I look around, expecting to see a bike and other competitors, before remembering that I’m about to be mugged.

She stares at the ground, unable to make eye contact, waving cash in the air.

“I’m here for the Care Bear,” she says, breathing heavily, eyes fixated on my feet.

“Here it is,” I say, presenting her with the Bear. 

This is when it will happen; the shanking. The box arrives in her hands and I reach for the money. The knife will pierce my skin any minute. I’ll fall to the ground, arms outstretched, clasping for the Care Bear that caused this, reaching for the remnants of my life.

But it never comes. The money lands in my hand.

“Merry Christmas,” I say, relief washing over me like the waves that clearly drenched her hair.

“You too!” she replies, skipping away with the Bear, back towards a car that still has the engine running, driver in place for a quick getaway.

She clearly forgot the knife. I look at my dog, and she wags her tail.

The Care Bear is responsible for my next two dinners. As I sit chewing my food, gratitude hits me. I’m grateful I wasn’t shanked over a Care Bear and grateful for the food on my plate.

I still think of him whenever I open my front door. Maybe one day there will be another box. Maybe not. But I will always remember the day he arrived on my doorstep and the day he left, via a barefoot girl with dripping wet hair, heavy breathing, who was maybe pregnant, and who may or may not have forgot to bring a knife to our Craigslist sale.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

The Skeletons Wash Their Hands Before Supper

When I was seven and you were five, you moved into my bedroom. They needed your room for the new baby. I don’t remember having any feelings about it—you spent all your time with me anyways. There was plenty of room for both of us.

We wanted bunk beds, but that option was never on the table. So, we slid your twin bed down the green carpet of the hallway and into the far corner of my bedroom. Now, it was our room.

Before you moved in, I made a twelve-foot-long clover chain and hung it from the ceiling beside my bed. We wove your Barrel-O-Monkeys into it and draped our new creation around the window frame like a strange, gaudy necklace. Your porcelain birthday dolls joined mine on the highest shelf, the first five of my brunettes now standing beside blonde twin sisters. Our closet was crammed with all the toys: my Easy Bake Oven and art supplies got cozy with your Lincoln Logs and doll clothes. Your Barney comforter clashed severely with the rainbow bedding I’d picked a couple of years earlier, but we didn’t mind conflating the two. Dad installed the folding bed rail you insisted on keeping for the safety of your dolls. Every night, you raised the rail to secure them in your bed while I rolled my eyes behind my chapter book.

The foot of my bed was in the doorway. On your first night, you told me that was good because I was stronger and could fight off robbers. Although I insisted that I wasn’t worried, I secretly checked the window locks behind my headboard every night.

Until the baby was born, we received excellent turn-down service from Mom and Dad. After my shower and your bath, we would read books in bed until one of them came to give us little glasses of water and turn off the lights. Then they would sit on the floor for a few minutes and offer prayers, stories, or songs.

We liked Dad’s nights the best because he told us “little boy stories” from his childhood. Our favorite was the one where he knocked out six baby teeth on a rock by jumping out of a backyard swing. We also loved the one where two of his permanent teeth got knocked out in a college basketball game. Mom really tried. But her “little girl stories” frankly weren’t very interesting—her childhood illnesses and hospital stays were no match for all of Dad’s missing teeth—so instead, we asked her to sing. Her repertoire was limited to “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music, various hymns, and the handful of 1970s pop songs she had performed to with her high school dance team. Her singing voice, high-pitched and whispery, became increasingly shrill as she began to doze off. To relieve her of her duties, we would pretend to fall asleep. After she left the room, you would give me an encore, mimicking Mom’s feathery voice with an eerie precision that caused us both to erupt into giggles.

At some point after you moved in, we begged for a pair of giant pillows at the Family Dollar, just so we could have one matching item on our beds. Constructed of hot pink velvet, the pillows were a little longer than our twin beds were wide. As needed, they could transform into lightsabers or prevent our baby brother from rolling too far across the room. On the days our parents fought, they were the doors to the secret hideout under our desk. We would spread out my sleeping bag on the floor, tuck our favorite Beanie Babies into our laps, and prop up the pillows in front of the desk so no one could see in or out. You always brought a doll or two, and my job was to procure entertainment. I’d read you stories, or we’d make friendship bracelets.

When the fighting got really bad, we ducked into our closet, which was split in half by a plywood divider wall. We had to squeeze into my side because your side was genuinely spooky. For starters, there was a small, flimsy door that led down into the crawl space. (I opened it once.) Next to the door was a defunct water faucet. It didn’t turn on and didn’t have any purpose as far as we knew. Weird stuff aside, your half of the closet was full of our shoes and mine had the toy shelves. While we waited for things to blow over, we’d slide the slatted doors shut and scarf down dry packets of Easy Bake Oven mix.

After the baby came and our parents were too tired to fight all the time, I convinced you that skeletons lived under that closet. I’m not sure if I actually wanted to scare you or if I just found the story entertaining. Every night when we turned out our light, the skeletons would wake up. They would use their bony fingers to raise the latch and climb through the panel. Then they would turn on the faucet so they could wash their hands before supper. They feasted on anything they could find as they lurked in the recesses of the closet: Barbie shoes, dried-up markers, Lite Brite pegs. To wash it all down, they took swigs out of the paint can left over from the previous year’s nursery remodel. You were petrified. If I really wanted to play it up, I’d tap my fingernails on the wall by my bed and tell you a bony hand was on the loose and headed in your direction.

For practical purposes, we did have our own sides of the room. My side had stacks of chapter books and yours had under-bed bins brimming with baby doll clothes. We didn’t have room for a dresser, but there was a desk between the beds that doubled as a nightstand. When your baby dolls inevitably tumbled from your bed and started crawling toward mine, I unrolled a line of white masking tape down the middle of the floor.

At night, the sides melted away. You always wanted to talk. Or sing the alphabet. Or play games, like Twenty Questions or “Invisible I Spy,” in which one of us described an item like an animal on our wallpaper or a dress in our closet while the other guessed what the item was. Sometimes, we both masturbated and raced to see who could “get to the good part” first. Do you remember the night when Dad walked in on us? He made us stop but didn’t explain what we were doing or why he didn’t want us to do it. After that, we just made sure to be quieter. It distracted us from the robbers and the skeletons. And the demons.

The demons existed exclusively in your reality. They were the shadowy creatures that lived under your bed and possessed the power to pull you down into hell by the ankles. You often woke up needing to pee but were too scared to get up. Since I didn’t believe in the demons, we eventually worked out that we could use my ankles as bait while you made your escape. I didn’t mind protecting you. But some nights, I just wanted to read chapter books by the light of my glow- in-the-dark watch, so I would shine my watch at the floor to deactivate the demons and light your path. Other nights, I would remind you about the skeletons under the closet and tell you they might find their way into your bed if you didn’t shut up.

Every Saturday, we stripped our beds and washed the sheets. Your bed had an extra knit blanket and a waterproof mattress protector—for nights when the demons won. These were items I had never noticed when you had your own room. But the moment you moved in, making our shared world feel fair became essential. I grabbed the purple-and-blue Afghan throw from the living room sofa and an extra fitted sheet from the bathroom linen closet and called it good. I never told you, but I would continue making my bed with two layers of fitted sheets every week until you outgrew the need for a mattress protector. It took two years.

~

When I was twenty-eight and you were twenty-six, you withdrew from my life. Your husband and baby needed you. You still don’t know how I feel about it because your new brand of religion shields you from people like me. You’re convinced there isn’t room for both of us.

According to the Apostle Paul, you and I can no longer share a table. For five years, my wife and I spent holidays, vacations, and late nights on the phone with you. So, when we came to town for Grandma’s funeral that November weekend, we were happy to make room in our plans for a last-minute coffee with you and your husband.

Minutes before our departing flight, your husband opened his Bible app and scrolled to 1 Corinthians. While you nodded and stared at your hands, he explained that “we may no longer have fellowship.” That while the two of you would still be able to accept our generosity, you could no longer extend invitations. You chimed in, half-whispering that you needed to roll out this white line to secure your own family’s salvation. That your theology severely clashed with my rainbow flag, and you didn’t want anyone accidentally conflating the two.

On the plane, your words hung heavily, choking me like a too-tight necklace.

Birthdays come and go. My wife and I buy your kids all the toys: Lincoln Logs, a sandbox, really good books. It’s not their fault that you’re like this. We live in the same town as you now, so we stop by your porch with your children’s birthday gifts. We’re not allowed inside the door.

You don’t need me to protect you from robbers anymore—your husband’s bedside gun collection is more than sufficient for that. But what happens on the nights when your demons show up? I have always worried for you. Every Saturday, I still strip my bed and wash the sheets. I am guessing you do too.

If only you didn’t have to believe in so many kinds of demons. Maybe someday the sides will melt away and you will want to talk. For now, we will continue forcing smiles from across the room at holiday parties while uncles and grandparents play Twenty Questions or I Spy with our kids. I am the skeleton in your closet. Only, my hands will never be clean enough to join you for supper.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Nostos

Birds circle:
rich entertainment
and in the middle of it
nature not quite dead.
The sun’s blade makes
one last stab
across my back.

I am leaving you,
October of my grieving—
your gray head
your orange skirt flouncing
round your ankles.
I drive east in low gear
along the unmuscled arm of Ohio
heading toward November.

And as the sun falls behind me
trees huddle to mask
disaster. Darkness, unwelcome
takes over the sky.
I thank the stars for making
a colander of night.

I look up and ahead
through heaven’s perforation.
The landscape shrivels past—
I am Orpheus in a dress
and Eurydice blind.
I drive under an overpass.
Lights strain, headlights on the bridge
gleam like the eye
in the head of an oracle.

Elegy as a Writing Instructor in State Prison

2022 Chapbook Prize Finalist

I want to know the god these men know,

pounded to life on the chapel piano.

I want to disguise myself in desert air

and follow the hymn between each keyhole.

There’s a rebirth I’m missing as I exit

the guard kiosk & accelerate. I want to know

yearnings on the yards too violent to walk,

the single ember in a cell of one

who still believes in the god I want to know.

Mardi Gras

“Mardi Gras… Isn’t that the most euphonious appellation?” I closed my eyes and pronounced each syllable slowly, showing off my English and French skill to my brother, Kevin.

My initiation into the amalgam of cultures of America.

“Mm,” from the other end of the line. That’s it? Just an “Mm”? But I’m not done yet…

I continued, “It’s an ancient holiday, preceded by Lundi Gras the Monday before. Fattened ox, boeuf gras, to indulge in before fasting. You know, a religious holiday. Celebrated in Rome and Venice in medieval Europe…”

Quiet.

His vague grin when he categorized my comments as rubbish flickered.

I was about to tell him that my apartment is a short distance from Elysian Fields, the site of Blanche DuBois’s tragic end in A Streetcar Named Desire, but then I remembered he had forbidden me to watch A Streetcar Named Desire at the Art Theater in Taipei.

I stopped talking and jotted down the arrival time of his flight from Los Angeles. After hanging up the phone, I drove down to Woolworths on Canal Street to get new sheets, pillows, and a blanket for the Murphy bed in my one-bedroom efficiency for his stay.

I couldn’t believe Kevin was taking off from work to visit me.

Growing up in Taiwan, I had been invisible to Kevin, the golden boy, the favorite son. I carried our lunch pails to and from school. He walked in strides ahead of me, his tall figure and handsome long face leading us into each school day. On the days we had sports, he had the first bowl of noodle soup. While I waited for the maid to fix a second one, he slurped next to my rumbling stomach. When he went off to college in America, we were uncommunicative till it was my turn for college at Tulane. Three weeks after my arrival in New Orleans, he announced he was coming to visit me.

I was elated. Eighteen long years waiting for his attention.

My studio apartment sat on top of a three-car garage at the back of a mansion on Magazine Street. My wealthy landlady, Adelaide, lived alone in the mansion with her maid.

Weeks before the holiday, pounding drumbeats and the winding Jazzy pitch of trumpets filled the air. Adelaide had party after party in her mansion. Universities closed on Mardi Gras as nobody bothered to attend class.

New Orleans’s antiquated cobblestone streets and wrought-iron-fenced balconies stuffed with crowds from all over the world. The hordes wandering up and down the lanes, some with open drinks, some already inebriated. The French Quarter jam packed; the early spring air stunk of urine, alcohol, and Cajun spices. Bodies covered in flashy costumes, faces behind mysterious masks. Heads adorned with jeweled crown pieces, turbans with feathers. Massive flamboyant floats, ensembles of dancers, color guards, and drum bands sashayed on main avenues. City crippled for days.

On the sidewalk of Canal Street, Kevin and I caught purple and gold strands of beads, chased after pink plastic cups with prints of Zulu King.

I should at least be grateful for Kevin buying us fancy dinners: Cajun Barbecue shrimps, crab etouffee, Andouille sausages with red beans and rice. On Mardi Gras day, Kevin slept till noon, went out by himself after lunch. I didn’t see him till the wee hours of the next morning, reeking of spirits and cigarette smoke. He was not in the state to receive ashes on Ash Wednesday, so I drove myself to church.

He had left my car with an empty gas tank. I wanted to say something to him, but he was asleep from his liquor induced stupor.

“A wild horse” my mother calls him, while I am “a gentle bunny rabbit.”

After I dropped him off at the airport, I didn’t hear from him. No thank you note. No inquiries about my school. Not even a Christmas card. A silent year. Until the next Mardi Gras. Yet I believed, or chose to believe, that Kevin wanted to see me at least once a year, and what better days than Mardi Gras to get us out of gloomy winters?

Years of life flew by in between many Mardi Gras. I graduated, worked, and married. My husband, Emilio, and I bought a large old house in the Garden District of New Orleans. In my starry-eyed view, a neighborhood close to the famed universities of Tulane and Loyola was a superb area to raise a family.

Big house, New Orleans, Mardi Gras. Kevin and his wife, Carrie, and his son, Joshua, came every Mardi Gras. Emilio and I became a popular couple. One year, Carrie invited her families to our house for the occasion. Suddenly, twenty some guests crammed our house, some we barely knew. They didn’t mind sleeping, or passing out, on the carpet, on the hallway, on the kitchen floor. At the end of the visit, they expressed gratitude exuberantly for a wonderful Mardi Gras holiday. Congratulated us on our good fortune living in a lovely historical home.

“Love you. Thank you for such a great time.”

“Oh, yes, love you. You are such a kind and gracious hostess. And you have a beautiful house.”

“Bye, love you, see you next Mardi Gras.” Joshua covered my face with smacking kisses.

They always said “love you” when they left. Love you, love you, love you, until the words sounded hollow.

For nearly fifteen years I had let myself believe that Mardi Gras was a sign of the real relationship between Kevin and me. A new milestone, a new tradition for our fledging families in America.

We enjoyed our new home. Our popularity fed our vanity.

Then we moved to the slow-paced, friendly, green foothills.

Greenville, South Carolina.

Our new house clutches the Enoree riverbank like a mollusk. The back yard slopes down to the winding waterway, tall trees overlooking the murmuring rock-strewn stream. I was planning to walk along the river path with Kevin’s family and share the view from my second-floor veranda with them. Kevin loves to eat. We could enjoy South Carolina Barbecue, Frogmore stew, corn bread, and collard greens.

The week before Mardi Gras, I stuffed the guest bathroom with toilet papers and towels, blew up air mattresses in the bonus room and packed the fridge, cleaned the house. Joshua adores chocolate milk, so I bought a large jug of Hershey’s chocolate syrup and a bag of marshmallows.

No phone call came to announce the arrival time.

Mardi Gras arrived, but Kevin never did.

Our neighbor, Brenda, invited us to watch a Mardi Gras parade in Greenville downtown Main Street.

On that Mardi Gras, the sky was cloudy and grim, a biting drizzle. Gray.

We stood on the sidewalk with an umbrella gifted by Greenville News. The parade was a relatively short entourage started with a big red fire truck, a high-flying American flag. Two white-haired gentlemen wearing Clemson baseball caps maneuvered two green and yellow John Deere tractors after the siren blaring fire truck. Behind the three vehicles, a band of children scrambled with American flags in their hands. It was a different parade from the ones in New Orleans and a different Mardi Gras celebration. Patriotic. Sober.

“No wonder Joshua didn’t come.” Zoe, my eleven-year-old, pouting. I was daunted by her brutal honesty.

Joshua. Rotund arms and legs, always with a good-natured smile.

I bite my lower lip, uncertain what to say.

“Let’s clear up the bonus room. Help me fold the air mattresses.” I held Zoe’s hand and lead her upstairs.

…better divert her attention… The move from New Orleans was tough on her.

“Uncle Kevin is bad.” Zoe said.

…Had I made it worse? Why clearing an unused bonus room now?...

“He is not bad. He is just inconsiderate. You don’t want to be like him.”

Yeah, Kevin could have called, saved me all the preparations. I was also wounded by missing a visit from his family. Worst, I had naively planned to take everyone to get ashes, hoping that we be reminded of our mortality and come to treasure what we have. But this inkling, like a premonition, was always at the back of my mind: Kevin and his family only wanted to be in the crescent city during carnivals. I was the convenience.

“That parade downtown was fun, wasn’t it?”

“Yea, it was ok. That boy gave me an American flag.”

“Oh, yeah, where is it?”

“Here, I’m going to put it in my room.”

I vacuumed the bonus room alone, sucked up all the dust. A family relationship is not like a business contract that you can terminate with a hasty signature. It’s not like Kevin had died, but it felt like it. Or I wished he had died. It would have been easier.

“Zoe, do you want some chocolate milk? The new chocolate syrup is in the pantry.”

“Yeah!!” Zoe skipped downstairs. Forgot about Joshua. Left me holding the old grudge.

“Let’s take a walk on the river path when you are done with your milk.”

We went out from the back porch. The earth was damp and the grass tender. Late afternoon sun peeked out, orange hue reflected on the soothing ripples around the glossy pebbles.

“I’m going to run. Do you want to run too? Mom?” Zoe had put on her tennis shoes.

“No, I can’t. I am just going to amble behind you, slowly.” I wiped her chocolate milk mustache, slightly relieved.

“We should go out for pizza; I don’t have energy left to prepare dinner.” I shouted to Zoe.

“That’s great, Mom.” As she ran, her voice became distant, wavering.

I meandered down the river path.

As I strolled, the illumination of the auburn sun, and the darkness of shade, alternated under the canopy of tree branches. I felt myself seeping gradually back into my own identity. Formed a new awareness. Finally, lost in the lulling whispers of the water, couldn’t even conjure up the image of Kevin, Carrie, or Joshua.