Little JP - for TW and MA

I am eleven, perhaps twelve years old but I look younger. On the back porch of the house on 1^st Street, balancing precariously on the edge of the railing above the 20 foot drop to the backyard of our 100 year-old brownstone, I hold a Siamese kitten in one hand, and the wand from a bottle of bubbles in the other.  Slightly out of focus, the photo looks older than it actually is.  It is the early 80’s, but my friend Shelley tells me it looks “quintessentially 70’s” due to the frizz in my hair and the earth tones in my clothing.  Straight hair had come back into style full force by then, and I’d given up battling my mane.  My mother and sister both had tame hair, and as an even younger child, I’d tried to brush my hair straight, which only exacerbated the problem. I am so focused on the task at hand that I do not acknowledge the camera, no doubt being held by my mother.  I’m wearing pink plastic eyeglasses, they are the second pair I owned – I was first fitted for glasses at age 10. 

  

The overalls were a staple of my wardrobe; I owned two pairs – one blue and one rusty orange, and wore them constantly. Newly transplanted to Brooklyn from an unincorporated town outside of Geneva, Switzerland, where our closest neighbors were dairy farmers, I was inexperienced with city life, or the idea that clothes might be an important indicator of personality. Tracy McTeague nicknamed me “Fannie Farmer” because of those overalls, and the name stuck.  My mother took me clothes shopping every fall before the school year began, and it would be several months before she bought me anything new to wear.

Everything about Brooklyn was foreign: the noise, the dirt, even the climate -- that first summer I developed heat rash on my neck and under my arms from the humidity, and when I started fourth grade that fall, was ostracized by my more culturally adept peers.  I had never gone to public school, and was overwhelmed by the mad crush of unruly kids, the endless lines that had to be stood in – to go to recess, to return from recess, to go to music class; the assigned tables in the lunchroom; and the perpetual wrath of the overworked, underpaid teachers who didn’t have the time or energy to take note of any new students. 

I hadn’t grown up watching American television, or any television for that matter, and didn’t understand the cultural references that my peers took for granted.  I was fascinated by cartoons and watched programs considered too young for me: Scooby Doo; Batman & Robin; Woody Woodpecker. The teacher led a discussion of the made-for-TV movie The Day After in class the day after it aired, and I was the only student who hadn’t watched it.  When the teacher asked why, I replied “I didn’t know it was on,” prompting riotous laughter. “How could you have not known it was on?” My classmates asked. 

My sister, six years my senior, went to a private high school and took the B67 bus to Pearl Street every day.  I went to P.S. 321 because it was across the street from our house, on the corner of 1^st Street and 7^th Avenue. My mother worked full time, and stayed at work late into the night on a regular basis; my father stayed behind in Switzerland, and our contact dropped to the occasional letters he typed on crinkly, light weight airmail stationary, and two visits per year.  

I became responsible for myself; I cooked Stouffer’s frozen and Bird’s Eye boil-in-bag meals, and became more connected to the cats in our house than to any human.  We bred our female Siamese cat with a male who belonged to one of my mother’s coworkers, and within weeks there was a litter of four tiny, blind, pink kittens – two males and two females.  They were my constant companions, following me up and down the three floors of our house, playing with my shoelaces, bits of string, and each other. We found homes for three of them, and kept one.  

This photo used to make me sad because it symbolizes everything that was lost when we moved back to Brooklyn: family life as it had once existed; the pastoral landscape of rural Switzerland and the sense of safety that it afforded; the easygoing attitudes of my teachers and classmates at the International School where my quirkiness was noted, but accepted.  Looking at it now I can appreciate it for the strengths it symbolizes: my self-reliance; my unruly, tomboyish ways; my lifelong bond with cats; and the inward-focused intensity that grew with being transplanted to a foreign place. I can’t say that I would do it all the same way if some magical being offered me the chance to do it over, but it made me who I am – my strengths and weaknesses, my dark sense of humor, my lifelong attachment to cats, my traveler’s spirit, and my constant inner dialogue.  It taught me to never feel alone, even when I am the sole human in the frame.

Me and Luke

If there’s one bar I’ve always wanted to drink in, it’s the Mos Eisley Cantina on Tatooine, from the first Star Wars.  As a child I was fascinated by the curious assortment of aliens who patronized the establishment: the creature that looks like a crocodile in a red beret sipping from something that resembles a Molotov cocktail; the bug-eyed instrumentalists; the mousy creature asking the bartender for another.  Obi Wan Kenobe saves Luke’s ass in that bar, establishing his role as protector and mentor. Although Mos Eisley is clearly dangerous, it also serves all kinds, and I get the feeling I might like it there.

On Easter Sunday of 2000, my sister and I split a list of phone numbers and sat in our respective homes, she in Boston and me in Chicago, faced with the task of calling relatives and family friends with unpleasant news. I couldn’t get anyone on the phone –most people were traveling, and cell phones were still a novelty. I left messages. I’d been at my boyfriend’s parents when I got the news myself. There had been indications that this might happen. I’d had a bad feeling the night before, while attending a concert at the Old Town School of Folk Music. I don’t remember who was playing, but a blanket of despair came over me during the performance and froze me in place. A thought had crept in on the fog outside and lodged itself in my brain: what would it take for her to attempt suicide?  She was miserable, disheveled, her body suffering from decades of alcohol abuse. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her wear anything besides sweatpants -- this from a woman who had a personal shopper at Rodier on trendy Newbury Street in Boston, and updated her wardrobe annually - at great expense. When my sister called the next day, I already knew what she was going to say.

I have a tremor in my right hand, it manifests when I try to raise something to my face: a glass of water; a utensil; a tube of lipstick. My husband noticed it before I did, and made me see a neurologist.  “Have you ever noticed,” the doctor asked, “that the shaking subsides after a glass or two of wine?”  “Um….no,” I replied.  “The alcohol helps to calm the nerves,” he explained.  I’m fairly certain that’s the only time alcohol will be prescribed to me. It turned out to be hereditary-- my mother’s hands shake but I always thought it was from drinking (although I’m sure that doesn’t help.) My grandfather’s hands shook, but I thought it was from age. 

It makes me self-conscious, and I do a lot with my left hand to hide it.  I mouse with the left on computers, I lift beverages with the left (what would people think if they saw me lift a pint to my face with a shaky hand?) It’s a constant reminder of where I come from, of the shaky woman who birthed me. It reminds me of the scene in The Empire Strikes Back when, in a fight for Luke’s soul, Darth Vader cuts off Luke’s hand with a light saber and says, between mechanical breaths: “Luke, I am your father.” Luke tries in vain to deny his parentage, but it’s no use; “Search your feelings,” Vader says, “you know this to be true.” In a later scene, Luke has been fitted with a prosthetic covered in a black glove. You can buy plastic action figures of Luke that have a pink left hand and a black right hand.  It is a symbol of Luke’s connection to the Dark Side, and to the fact that he cannot escape his lineage.  Like him, I have in my right hand a constant reminder of where I come from, of the dark forces in my heritage.

It wasn’t until her suicide attempt that I began going to ACOA – Adult Children of Alcoholics, in a post-war building on the north side that smells like cigarettes and plastic chairs. The first time I read the list of ACOA traits was like reading a high school detention report; revelatory, and disturbing. Listed before me were all the traits that I had believed were part of my personality, but as it turned out were just symptoms of growing up in a diseased household: We guess at what normal is; We judge ourselves harshly; and, the most damning one for me to read -- It is easier for us to give in to others than to stand up for ourselves. At night she’d come up the stairs in a drunken rage to yell at me, and I’d cower in a corner of my bedroom, silent, waiting for the moment she’d slam the door behind her so hard that objects flew from the walls. In the morning we’d both behave as if nothing had happened. 

Thinking about it makes me tired.

In my apartment, after leaving messages letting people know that mom was in the hospital and we didn’t know what was going to happen, I manically cleaned to distract myself. I took breaks when the phone rang and spoke to mom’s friends – some in tears, some curt and businesslike.  I hadn’t heard from any of them in years. None of them knew what to say to me. In fact, I haven’t heard from any of them since, except to decline invitations to my wedding the following year. 

“Well, at least it’s out in the open now,” Irene said after I’d told her this was the culmination of a lifetime of drinking and depression. Her words fell like fresh cat turds on my newly mopped kitchen floor. At least now? Was she kidding me? My mother had driven drunk to Irene’s country house in Vermont, and gotten pulled over after sideswiping an 18 wheeler and spent the night in jail.  I’d had to make a phone call to Irene that night too. At Irene’s home in Chevy Chase Maryland, at another Easter, my mother had tripped down the stairs to the bathroom and thrown up in Irene’s toilet. 

A few nights after speaking to Irene I had a dream that my boyfriend and I were looking for a new apartment and were considering renting a coach house from Irene.  The space was great, the rent was reasonable, but there was a problem – there was a woolly mammoth that charged the front door at random intervals.  I knew what it meant – there was an elephant in the room, and not just any elephant – a prehistoric one, because this issue was fucking ancient, and nobody wanted to deal with it, not even our prospective landlord.

I had just started a new job a couple months prior, and when I told my boss what had happened he asked if I wanted to fly to Boston.  I did.  Nobody knew how bad it was. If these were her final days, I wanted to be by her side, limited as she was in her parenting. I got a half-price ticket on United Airlines citing emergency circumstances (it still cost me over $600).  When I got to the hospital a curtain had been pulled around her bed, and a social worker was asking her questions.  I struggled with the ethics of listening in on a conversation that I wasn’t meant to hear, and in the end my curiosity won out – the questions were important, and as her daughter, I wanted answers.  

“What did you take?” The disembodied voice of the social worker asked.

“Half a bottle of Tylenol, and half a bottle of Advil.”

“Did you realize that this could kill you?”

“No.”

“Knowing now that it could kill you, do you think you would have done it anyway?”  

There was a pause of maybe fifteen seconds, and then: “Yes, I think I would have.” 

Having completed her interview, the social worker pulled back the curtain, and my mother saw me sitting in a chair by the door.

“My God,” she said, blinking behind her glasses.

“Hi mom,” I said.

She behaved as though this was something that had happened to her, rather than something she’d done to herself. The details were nauseating; she’d taken the pills just before meeting a friend who was in town with her 8 year-old daughter.  They went to dinner and mom began to act strangely. Her friend asked what was wrong, and she confessed to what she’d done. 

In the hospital, she’d been prescribed what looked like a fast food shake to combat the effects of the pills.  She aimed it toward me, the plastic straw pointing at my face and playfully said: “Would you like a sip?” “No, thanks,” I said, and she laughed, as if it were some kind of inside joke. 

She reveled in the attention of her visitors, regaling them with tales of what had happened: “I felt a strange feeling in my stomach…” she’d begin, as if this were an adventure gone wrong, as if there were a different reason for us to be here.

I slept like a rock that week in my sister’s apartment; sleep is my go-to habit when faced with stress.  I can sleep through anything – I once slept through an earthquake.

There were conversations: with doctors, psychiatrists, aunts, family friends.  The pills had damaged her liver, no one knew how much. It was possible that she’d have to be on medication for the rest of her life. “It upsets us because it makes us think about our own drinking,” one family friend said, “was this a real suicide attempt or just a cry for help?” asked another. Suddenly I was the expert, fielding questions I couldn’t possibly know the answers to, soothing the fears of people coming out of the woodwork.  “It must be so hard knowing she’s in the hospital,” they said, misunderstanding the most basic tenant of the child raised in an alcoholic home: the time I least worry about my mother is when she’s in the hospital.  “I’ll keep you posted,” I said. “Posted” was implicit for bad news – funereal news.  I’d brought a black dress with me just in case.

We cleaned her house – me, my sister, and my two aunts. There were piles of unread New York Times and New Yorkers clogging the place up and giving it the feel of a recycling center.  Her ageing cat that I’d grown up with, who was now missing an eye and required a special low-ash diet for his urinary tract health did his best to distract me. My aunt Jean talked about her own struggles with alcohol; she hadn’t touched the stuff in years.  My aunt Donna filled the empty spaces with conversation. She offered to cook for us, to give us wake-up calls in the morning, and I welcomed it.

At the end of the week we met with the doctor, there was no permanent damage – she wouldn’t have to take medication, and there were no complications to her already compromised liver.  The cosmic unfairness of it hit me hard – she had cheated death, or at the very least, cheated permanent damage.  Meanwhile, much younger people in my life would be culled too soon: Lisa, who died at 25 of a congenital heart defect, leaving behind a toddler; Brad, who died of cancer before his 30^th birthday; Dara, who died a few months ago at age 40.  Death, like violence, is random – you can minimize your chances, but you can’t eliminate them. 

ACOA was useful up to a point – about a year and a half into my tenure a couple showed up who weren’t actually Adult Children of Alcoholics, but insisted on attending meetings.  “My name is Judy,” one of them said, “and I’m an Adult Child of a Child Abuser…” Being a room full of ACOAs, none of us was able to stand up for ourselves and tell them that while their problems were real and terrible, the help they needed was not in this room. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so pathetic. One by one the core group of people I had come to depend on began dropping out. The last time I went, Judy was running the meeting. I haven’t been back since.

Luke Skywalker and I have more in common than I first realized; we were both born with one foot in Dark Side and the other in The Force.  We are both survivors – children without real parents, cobbling together our own families from the Wookiees, droids, and occasional Ewoks that we come across over the course of our lives. We are human children from another planet, and do not know Earth customs first hand.  Like Luke, I cannot control where I came from, but I can try to steer myself towards the future of my choosing. If I could, I’d buy him a drink at the Mos Eisley Cantina. We could talk about Leia’s attraction to bad boys like Han Solo, I could ask if Lando Calrissian likes to drink Colt 45, and what the real reason is behind Yoda’s syntax. He could ask me about life on Earth, what it’s like to use a toilet (I never once saw a bathroom in Star Wars,) and we could compare right hands. I think we’d have a good time.

Oh Hai!

I've been away from the blog for a while... here's a snapshot of what's happened in the past 3 months: I quit my job at the end of December, was accepted into a certificate program for creative writing at the University of Chicago, and have continued to write for Gapers Block and Chicago Theater Beat.  In February I got to read for 2nd Story, and my piece was podcasted (here's the link: 2nd Story go to the story titled "My Boyfriend").  I've continued to read at live literature/storytelling venues, and have a bunch of ideas on the back burner of what to do next, but haven't completed any of them yet.  And I'm looking for a job, again, but at least this time it's on my own terms.

Earlier tonight I read at Tuesday Funk, the text of what I read is below.  I hope to start posting again regularly, it's been quite a while.

Thanks for reading,

J.H.

Fear of Commitment

Although we had been together for five years, and I had no plans to date anyone else, when my boyfriend and I got engaged to be married, I totally freaked out.  I didn’t have the greatest model of marriage from my parents, and I was afraid that this spelled the end of fun, and the beginning of bitter, angry bullshit. We lived in an old apartment with a toilet that constantly needed to have the handle jiggled to make it stop running, and I was distracted by the sound of it when we sat down to have a serious discussion.  “I’m scared that getting married will mean the end of fun,” I said, and cavalier as hell, he said: “The fun never stops with me, baby.”   “The toilet’s running,” I said, and to prove to me how much fun he could be in the domestic realm, he stood up, walked towards the bathroom and said “come here you.” 

Unlike the toilet, I could actually run away.  As it happened, my friend Joanie introduced me to her friend Jeff at around this time, and he seemed really intriguing – he was a writer, he was young, he lived in London, which seemed very exotic, and we began an email correspondence, sending each other flirtatious, well crafted messages that seemed harmless until Joanie and I decided to fly to London to visit him.  As soon as I saw Jeff at baggage claim I realized that I wasn’t attracted to him, I was attracted to the persona I had constructed in my mind using minimal email conversations and a long ago memory of a boy I went to summer camp with who was really punk rock and whose name was Arrow – which is the coolest name ever.  Jeff looked like a sock monkey, we could barely hold a conversation in person, and I was stuck with him for the next several days. 

The three of us decided to make a side trip to Amsterdam; Jeff said he knew his way around, so we bought cheap tickets and made the trip over, and it quickly became apparent that Jeff didn’t really know his way around at all.  He’d been once, for a weekend, and just wanted to impress us with his knowledge of the continent. We booked a crappy hotel room that had three cots in it, and was down the hall from a communal toilet that was always warm with the body heat of whoever had just used it, and couldn’t handle more than three sheets of toilet paper at a time. There was a shower in the same room with the toilet, but Joanie and I reduced our hygienic rituals to rinsing our armpits in the sink in our room while Jeff waited for us outside.  Joanie and I slept on top of our cots, fully clothed, even covered our pillows with t-shirts because those cots looked like they were crawling with VD, or at the very least, scabies, but Jeff had no problem stripping down to his boxers and getting in the covers of the bed to prove that he wasn’t afraid of getting VD from his cot. He said: “This is the nicest hotel I’ve stayed at in Amsterdam,” which didn’t make me feel any better about the situation.

Joanie and I knew nothing about Amsterdam, except that it was rife with marijuana, so we went to a coffee shop – the kind where you can buy marijuana legally, where we were presented with a menu – it looked just like any menu, detailing all the different kinds of weed we could order.  We didn’t know the difference, we’re from Chicago. At the very bottom of the list was the cheapest item on the menu: a pre-rolled joint.  This was perfect because none of us were exactly experts in the art of rolling, so we ordered the thing, lit up, and began passing it around.  It wasn’t until my third toke that I remembered that weed in Amsterdam is much more powerful than the skunk weed I was somewhat familiar with in Chicago, and that I probably shouldn’t smoke it the same way - with deep intakes of breath, and holding it in as long as possible before exhaling.  By the time I remembered this it was too late - I was higher than I’d ever been in my life - we all were. It had taken us two minutes to get there, and now we had to figure out what to do with the rest of the evening.  

We decided to go for a walk, and Jeff led the way.  I experienced everything as if I were remembering something that had happened a long time ago, and not experiencing something in the moment, and it took me a long time to respond to stimulus.  I felt like I was half asleep on my couch, watching bad TV.  We walked past a street corner where someone had fallen, or been knocked down, and was bleeding and I thought: “I wonder if we should find a cop?” And a few minutes later, when I was able to process my next thought, it was this: I hadn’t seen any cops since we’d arrived in Amsterdam, and as far as I could tell, there was no reason to have any because pretty much everything was legal. I’m sure there are many cultural legacies of Holland in general, and of Amsterdam in particular, but our decisions had led us to explore what is essentially a theme park of vice: prostitution is legal, marijuana is legal, there are sex shows everywhere, it’s like Times Square in the 70’s, minus the weaponry and the Son of Sam.   

My motor skills had slowed considerably, and I found myself walking several feet behind Jeff and Joanie as Jeff led us through winding cobblestone streets, and through the red light district, where women stood behind glass panels at street level, tapping at the glass to get our attention – I guess it looked like we were some kind of threesome looking for a situation, and the sound of all those women tapping at the glass was overwhelming to my auditory sensibilities, it sounded like rain falling on a tin roof, it got louder and louder, and that’s when the paranoia kicked in.  In my mind Jeff and Joanie hated me, and were walking ahead of me because they were trying to get rid of me. I was never going to make it back home again; I was going to end up standing behind a wall tapping on the glass at passersby, never to see Chicago or my fiancé ever again.  I tried to psych myself out of that idea but it was a really persistent thought, and every time I managed to snap myself out of I became panicked with the ever-increasing distance between myself and my two cohorts, and the cycle began again. 

Finally we stopped at a felafel place where the three of us stared mutely at a short order cook who dumped frozen felafel into boiling oil; we stared at his every move like it was the most fascinating thing any of us had ever seen.  We were the only ones in the restaurant, and after feeling the weight of our zombie-like attention on him for several minutes, the short order cook looked at us and said: “you’re pretty quiet.” To which we said nothing.

I slowly began to come down from my high, and I was pretty sure that Joanie didn’t hate me, but I was still suspicious of Jeff.  I waited for Jeff to use the bathroom before I leaned over to Joanie, mustered up what was left of my cognitive powers and said: “Joanie, I thought you haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaated me.”  Several seconds passed before Joanie responded. “I don’t hate you,” she said, “I love you.” That was about all could express to each other, but it was enough.  I’m not sure how Jeff remembers that trip, or Joanie, or the felafel guy, but I remember it as the time I flew 4,000 miles away from home, and smoked the strongest pot in the world with a man who looked like a sock monkey before realizing that the man I wanted to be with was waiting for me in an apartment in Chicago with a runny toilet, and that if he would still have me, I should get married to him while I still had the chance.  

I did eventually make it home, and I did get married. I didn’t smoke pot again for six years.

Hanukkah, Thanksgiving, and the lazy Susan

My husband saw it before I did.  It was Thanksgiving, and we’d made the drive from our house on the northwest side of Chicago to the western suburb of LaGrange to spend the holiday with my in-laws.  “Mom, why is there a swastika on the kitchen table?” he asked.  I looked to where he was pointing, and saw a wooden lazy Susan that looked like it was handmade, was an antique, and was sectioned off into quadrants with spindles of wood coming from the center, each one finishing in a right angle that, while useful as a kitchen storage unit, gave it a rather unfortunate appearance.  

“What swastika?” my mother-in-law asked, incredulous. 

“This one right here!” my husband said, his voice rising.  She looked at him, unblinking. 

“The lazy Susan,” I finally said, “it looks like a swastika.”  She walked over to the table and leaned her diminutive frame over the object in question.  

“Oh,” she said, “well now that you point it out I see it, but I never would have otherwise.”  I stood a fair distance from the lazy Susan, eyeing it from the kitchen counter, as if getting too close to it might be dangerous. Seeing the look on my face she said, “Oh, she doesn’t like it, I can tell.”

“It’s,” I began, and lost whatever it was that I’d begun to say. “I mean, it’s funny because…” and I lost my words again, resorting to sticking my hands out at my sides, palms up. “I mean, I wouldn’t go promoting it...”

“Where did you get this thing?” my husband asked.

“At a garage sale.”  What I really wanted to know was whose clever idea was it to make a lazy Susan in the shape of a symbol of tyrannical power, and more importantly, what else was up for grabs at that garage sale?

I have a long and complicated history with Judaism, which goes a little something like this: my maiden name is Cohen, I wasn’t raised religiously, and by most traditions I wouldn’t be considered Jewish because my mother isn’t – she was raised Christian Scientist, and didn’t meet a Jewish person until she went to college on the east coast, and then married one.  She divorced one too, but it still counts.

For most of my life people have not only assumed that I am Jewish, but have regarded me through that lens to explain certain behaviors - an appreciation for good pickles and matzoh ball soup for instance, and a tendency to avoid overt Christianity and the south. Over the years I’ve had various reactions to this, ranging from guilt that I don’t know more about Judaism, to anger that people would have the gall to assume anything about me based on my name. I once hung up on a teenage boy who called to ask for my financial support of a Jewish organization because it bothered me that I’d ended up on a list of prospects simply because of my name, and I was irrevocably peeved when a former boss of mine asked, on Ash Wednesday, “so when is your holiday?” My high school chorus teacher was an African-American woman who taught us negro spirituals. Halfway through "I've been 'buked and I've been scorned" she looked up from her seat on the piano bench with a smirk on her face. She turned her attention back to playing the piano, and when she looked at me again was smiling broadly. Finally she stopped playing completely and burst out laughing. "I'm sorry," she said between breaths, "but you have never looked more Jewish to me than you do right now."

By the same token, it feels wrong to have my Jewishness denied. The first winter I spent in Chicago I was surprised that the office buildings downtown don't display menorahs side by side with Christmas trees the way they do in New York, and was shocked when a coworker asked me if Cohen was a Catholic name.

Years ago I felt the need to learn more about “my” religion, (although I never felt that way about Christian Science), and kept renewing the same book on Judaism from the Bezazian branch of the Chicago Public Library before finally returning it, unread. A Quaker friend of mine once gave me a menorah that had belonged to his deceased partner, and I asked a Jewish colleague to phonetically spell out the prayer that accompanies the lighting of the Hanukkah candles. For one holiday season I observed the candle lighting tradition, and now the menorah decorates the top of our television, less a religious item than a household decoration.

One less letter and my name would have been Chen - would people have expected me to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese and make Peking Duck on the weekends? The worst offense was when people told me that I looked Jewish - for those of you who’ve never met her; I look exactly like my Scotch-Irish shikse mother. How on earth can a person look Jewish anyway? I mean, I know what people were trying to get at - I wear glasses, I have curly hair that goes frizzy in the humidity, and I listen to NPR. Nonetheless, these indicators would amount to nothing if it weren’t for the name Cohen, and ever since I took my husband’s name nobody has assumed that there’s anything Semitic about me.

Now that I don’t carry the name Cohen, I feel a little nostalgic for it whenever I see it in print, and I enjoy being called Cohen by people who knew me before I was married. My husband's name is Palmer, which carries no such religious weight, although it should - the first Palmers made a pilgrimage to the holy land and returned with palm leaves as proof of their journey.

A couple years ago I accidentally learned that my father’s family had lost six of nine children in the holocaust.  I overheard my father tell this to someone else, which is pretty much how I’ve learned everything about my family, not much got passed on to my generation from either side.  Knowledge, while highly valued in my family – going to college was pretty much a given for me, and both sets of my grandparents had access to higher education, is treated like something one should already have, not something to be sought out or shared. 

Compounding the problem is the fact that my father is a high functioning autistic, and he doesn’t react well to confrontation.  When I overheard him casually answer “yes,” to the question: “did you family lose anyone in the shoah?” Anger rose up from my stomach, through my esophagus and into the back of my throat, anger that I’d gone my whole life without knowing this crucial information, and I compressed it into small, pinched statements like: “that’s the first I’ve ever heard of this, dad.” “Oh?” he asked. “Do you have a family tree somewhere with the names?” I asked. “Oh no,” he answered, with a wave of a hand, “I had one once, years ago, but I threw it away.” The person my father was talking to said:“that’s criminal,” and I was glad to have a witness. “Why did you throw it away?” I asked, gripping the stem of my wine glass as if the only thing keeping me from committing patricide was that my hands were full. “Well, that’s not so nice,” he said - the same reaction he gives when anything upsets the flow of his daily life; like when the trains are running late, or he gets overcharged at the supermarket.  “Not nice?” I wanted to say, “You know what's not nice is?  Not nice is letting your dead, persecuted relatives be forgotten.  Does the phrase ‘never forget’ mean anything to you? People purposely pass on this information to their children.  Good job, dad.” What I actually said was: “It doesn’t matter if it’s not nice, it’s important.”

That night I woke alone in the dark, my subconscious wouldn’t let me sleep, or maybe it was the spirits of my murdered relatives. 

Since then I’ve gotten some information from my dad’s side of the family, a photocopy of a handwritten family tree, with the words: “died, Hitler era”, next to those who didn’t survive.  I’ve had conversations with my second cousin Emilie, who grew up knowing some of our relatives who had numbers tattooed on their forearms.  

From our email exchanges and phone conversations, it seems like Emilie and I have a lot in common: we both love to travel, have interests in the arts, and don’t have children.  When I went to Senegal a couple years ago she connected me with a friend of hers who lives there, and we’ve brought up the idea of visiting Lithuania, where our ancestors are from.  

I’ve attended Friday night services once or twice, and while I kind of feel like a giant poser, when someone wishes me “Shabbat shalom,” it’s nice.  I’ve also become – not obsessed, but very interested in holocaust documentaries.  I generally watch them by myself when my husband is out, which sounds dark and depressing, but I just can’t imagine snuggling up with a bowl of popcorn to watch footage of Soviet prisoners being let do their deaths on the eastern front, and interviews with octogenarian survivors describing acts of vengeance and resistance with a ferocity that I have never heard in anyone’s voice.  I add the films to our Netflix instant cue, where my husband sees them, and reads the titles aloud before scrolling right past them: “Forgiving Dr. Mengele...”  “You don’t have to watch that,” I’ll say, “That’s a special movie, just for me.”

I’m amazed at the stories of individual acts of defiance; the group of prisoners who broke into an SS locker room, changed into guards uniforms, and stole a vehicle.  When they drove to the prison gate, and the guard manning it didn’t lift it, one of the prisoners shouted “what is this, how long do we have to wait?” The gate was lifted, and they drove right out of Auschwitz.  Then there was the band of prisoners who hoodwinked a bunch of SS guards into meeting them, alone, in a workshop under the premise of having a pair of boots for them to try on, and killed them one by one with an axe.  They were able to do so because they knew that since the guards were German they would keep their appointments, and would show up on time, which sounds almost like a joke.  

I was dumbfounded by the film Inheritance which follows Monica Hertwig as she tries to sift through what it means to be the daughter of Amon Goth, who was portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List.  It wasn’t until she saw that film that she was confronted with what her father had really done, and in a blind, ignorant rage sent an angry letter to Steven Spielberg accusing him of spreading lies.  I watched all four plus hours of The Sorrow and the Pity, whose subject is the French Vichy government collaboration with the Nazis, and all six episodes of a TV series called: Auschwitz: the Nazis and the “final solution,” hosted by Linda Ellerbee, to name a few.  

I’m not sure what I hope to gain from this inundation of documentary material, sometimes I wonder if, in all the footage I’ve watched, I’ve seen my relatives stepping off cattle cars for selection, or witnessed images of their emaciated bodies.  Sometimes I think I can guess with pretty close accuracy at what must have happened to them, but that’s not the same as knowing.

 

Absorbing all this visual information has done something to me, given more weight to my center of gravity, made me aware of how easily and loosely the word “Nazi” gets used to describe the most inane displays of stubbornness, and as a stand-in for curse words, and it’s made me even less tolerant of the phrase “everything happens for a reason.”

Driving home from Thanksgiving, my husband and I discussed the lazy Susan.  “I know she didn’t see it, but what if that had been my first Thanksgiving with your parents?” I asked.  “Well, at least it was a lazy Swastika.” I considered what it would be like to be blind to the unintentionally swastika shaped objects in the world.  

Tomorrow is the first night of Hanukkah, and maybe I’ll dig out the candles I bought for the menorah last year but never used, and maybe I won’t.  On Sunday, my husband and I will make the same drive out to LaGrange that we made at Thanksgiving, and despite the fact that none of us believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, we will celebrate his birth by sharing food and exchanging gifts.  I just hope the lazy Susan is gone by the time we get there.

Wednesday afternoon (for chjackson)

It’s Wednesday afternoon, and I’m busy pretending to look at office supplies online as a cover for the conversation I’m having with my husband via text message.  My Smartphone sits in my lap, and I sit in my cube, which isn’t even a real cube - it’s a computer monitor on a shelf underneath a row of cabinets with a divider along the right side to keep me from socializing too much with my coworkers.  I’ve threatened to bore a hole into the divider with power tools and fashion a window out of clear sheet protectors and double sided tape, or failing that, paste a photo of my face on the other side of the wall so that it looks like I’m hanging out with my coworkers even when I’m on my side of what sometimes feels like a rodeo bucking chute.  

On the left of my computer monitor is a color printer, which jerks to life when someone sends a job to it, and hiccups its way through the four colors of the printing rainbow: yellow, cyan, magenta, and black.  If I’m feeling gracious, I pick up the printed sheets from the output tray and hand them to whoever sent the job over, if not, it’s owner walks behind me and reaches into the narrow space between my body and the printer, their arm appearing in my peripheral vision like a sun spot.  I steal a glance at my phone to catch up on the latest communiqué from my husband. “My hand feels weird,” I write to him. “too much mousing or something different” he replies.  “I mouse with the left, and this is my right.  Must be all the handjobs I give you in my sleep,” I write back, and then quake with silent laughter at my own joke.  A couple minutes pass with no response.  “Is this thing on?” I type. “laughter, applause.” comes the answer, with a laughing, yellow-faced emoticon at the end.

I leave my desk to take advantage of the birthday cake in the break room, a sheet cake that makes an appearance on the last Wednesday of the month, with an 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper taped onto the cake box that reads “Happy Birthday September Staff!”, which is almost as personal as: “It Is Your Birthday.” I cut off a piece with the plastic spatula that’s been brought into service, and plop the heaping pile of sugar onto a snack sized Styrofoam plate.  The frosting is so sweet it makes me cough as if I’d accidentally walked through a dust cloud.

If you’d told me a year ago, or even six months ago, that this is how I would spend my time at work, I’d have been incredulous.  I’ve been looking for a job for almost two and a half years now.  I know, I have a job doing administrative work in a gym, but I mean a real job, one that I go to on purpose in the morning, and not just because I need the insurance and it makes me look like a better candidate if I have a current place of employment listed on my resume.  I’ve had some promising leads, some near brushes with success, but like Charlie Brown winding up to kick the football out from under Lucy’s fingertips, I land on my cartoon ass every single time.

One of the directors thanks me profusely for entering codes into the database, which is pretty much like thanking me for having descended from apes.  He tries to be gracious, but it comes off condescending.  “Hey thanks so much for getting all those codes in so quickly, you’re a rock star,” he says, breezing past me.  He uses the term “rock star” to fabricate a sense of camaraderie into our exchange, a sense of “we’re all in this together”, but what it sounds like is “thanks for using about as much brain power as Koko the gorilla.”

Meanwhile, I’ve been telling stories.  It gives me something to be proud of, something to be good at, something to hone.  I’ve told stories in front of audiences as small as twenty, and as large as seven hundred.  I’ve told funny stories, and really sad ones.  It keeps my brain alive.  To make myself feel better at work, I post fliers and postcards for the readings that I appear at, and when the ape-loving director sees one, he says “Well I just have to say, I am impressed.”  Impressed in the way that it’s impressive to watch Koko sign for a banana?  Impressed in the way that it’s impressive that Koko knows how to use a keyboard?  He is eight years younger than me and takes an aw shucks, you young ‘uns approach to our interactions, talking about the old days before he was married, when he used to be a performer himself, just like me.  

My colleague C is getting married soon, and someone asks where she’s going on her honeymoon.  “We’re going to Mexico, and we’re going to swim with dolphins,” she says.  I mishear the word “dolphins” for “Daschunds”, and I tell her so.  Together we fabricate a scenario where she swims with a pod of the tiny dogs, and has a very spiritual experience.  “You don’t have to fly to Mexico to do that,” I tell her, “just get a whole herd of them into Lake Michigan with you, people will come from miles around to be part of it, you could start your own small business.”  Taking on the persona of a Daschund swimming participant, I say “It was amazing, they’re so beautiful.  They’re so smart; they knew I was pregnant before I did!”  

C speaks in a secret code that’s not very hard to crack when she thinks she’s saying something dirty.  While relating the plotline of a Sex & The City episode, she tells me that the characters were “doozin’ it”, and refers to the female genitalia as “cucini”.  I look the word up to confirm a suspicion – it’s a conjugation of the Italian word “cucinare”, which means “to cook,” specifically: the present tense, second person singular.  I inform her of this, and add that if she ever goes to Italy, and the need to describe her genitals arises, she might have to use a different word.

Initially I wrote C off as too young and way too perky to be anything but a pain in my ageing, bitter ass, but as we spent time together in the confines of the workplace I grew to understand that beneath that Noxzema-fresh exterior and can-do spirit is a girl just as dark and funny as any I’ve met.  When I bought a new hairdryer she said “that’s better than using the ones in the locker room, there are ladies who dry their pubic hair with those.”  I registered surprise. “You’ve never noticed that?” she asked.  “I try to notice as little as possible in the locker room,” I explained, my mind reeling with countless images of sagging naked breasts and bent over asses, women of all ages and shapes in various states of undress.  I have noticed that sometimes they sit naked on the benches, and I haven’t sat on one since, but I’ve never noticed anybody blow-drying their pubes.  “Do you see them sometimes styling it?” I ask, “do people use product? Is anybody feathering their pubic hair into a Farrah Fawcett ‘do?”

I can’t see into the future; I have no idea how many of my Wednesday afternoons will be spent this way. When I do move on, I imagine that it will be a little bit like leaving prison.  I haven’t had to wear civilian clothes or deal with rush hour crowds for over two years now.  I go downtown so rarely that I get spooked by the wide streets and tall buildings, overwhelmed by the crowds of people surging past me.  The blue line sounds so loud to me now that I plug my eardrums like a tourist when it rolls into the station, and I am genuinely shocked when confronted with the dichotomy of shoppers on Michigan Avenue and the homeless people who wander the same street in the hopes of a handout. Sometimes I think that in the time since I lost my job I’ve become feral, other times I feel like I’ve become the person I was meant to be.

Addendum to 20 Milligrams

I saw this on a signpost on the corner of Chicago & Milwaukee avenues yesterday. 

20 Milligrams

I defaced my work ID card this week; I cut out a glossy photo of a brown egg from a Clinique ad that I found in a magazine in the break room, and pasted it onto my ID so that it covers my bemused 1.5” face but leaves my hair and shoulders as they were.  Glancing at it, you’d never notice the complete absence of features.  The day I posed for that picture I’d already submitted to a urine test and a background check (which as far as I know never came in, eventually they put me on payroll despite the fact that I could have a rap sheet as long as a gorilla’s arm).  By the time I submitted to the ID photo, I was pretty sure this job was going to be a joke, something I’d do for the next six to twelve weeks until one of the other jobs that I was interviewing for – real jobs, came through.  I thought it would be something I would omit from my resume.  It would be nice to have a buffer between me and unemployment, it would give me a better chance at getting a real job, and at the time that I accepted it there was talk of ending unemployment benefits for people who had reached the one year mark, which was getting precariously close.  I was tired of the effort of looking for a job, the constant self-promotion, the interviews, the rejections, the dusting myself off and starting again.  Psychologically, I didn’t want to cross the one year mark.  I’d done well with taking advantage of my free time and pursuing travel, volunteering, working odd jobs, and pursuing writing opportunities, and hadn’t spent a lot of time feeling down about my situation but I didn’t want to celebrate another unemployed birthday, another unemployed anniversary, another unemployed marker of any kind.

None of the other jobs I interviewed for were offered to me, and time passed.  I took advantage of the lax dress code and proximity of my workplace to my home, sometimes rolling out of bed and literally wearing what I’d slept in to work.  More time passed, and as it became clear that I would have to do something to mark the time (as if I were doing time, which in a way I am – clocking in and out, counting hours, minutes even), I decided to take advantage of what there was.  I signed up for a physical fitness course, and then a fitness challenge.  9 months later I had lost 20 pounds and dropped 2 dress sizes.  I’d made some friends too, and made strides in my writing, connecting with the storytelling circuit in Chicago and making regular appearances at different venues.  It wasn’t all bad, part of what allowed me to do all that writing was that my job wasn’t taking much out of me.

It had its costs; I wasn’t feeling good about myself.  6 months into the job, I called the EAP line (employee assistance program, a confidential service that gets promoted on the company website as a resource for when things are getting grim) and they literally put me on hold, which made me think of that old Rodney Dangerfield chestnut that he rolled out during his “I don’t get no respect” era.  When I finally spoke to someone, they asked me if it was an emergency.  It wasn’t.  They apologized for asking to call me back, but they were short staffed, or maybe the last seven people who called were all about to jump off the same bridge together, and it was taking up all their manpower to handle it.  I told them they could call me back, but I couldn’t take the call when they did.  I don’t have any privacy at work, and had snuck outside to place the call out to them.   Then one morning I woke up crying, and couldn’t stop.  The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on me – I’d managed to keep my spirits up the entire time I’d been out of work, and the reality of what kind of job I’d had to accept is what finally did me in.  I called the EAP line again, and the woman on the other end of the line had to tell me to calm down because she couldn’t understand what I was saying.  She connected me with a therapist in my neighborhood, and in short order I had a prescription for Prozac in my hands.

Here’s the thing about depression: it’s boring.  It’s something I’ve lived with for a long time, probably forever, and prescription medication is a wonderful, life-changing thing, and without it I’d probably live in a halfway house or worse by now, but talking about depression is just, well, depressing.  I was depressed for fourteen years before I was treated for it the first time, in my early 20s.  The fact that I went fourteen years without anyone noticing is remarkable, but not surprising, considering my family.  I had moments during those years, months even, when I was able to rise above it, but I lost a lot too, things I’ll never get back: time, opportunities, and relationships.   

The first time it was prescribed to me, Prozac was a wonder drug.  Everyone was on it, or talking about it, or knew people who were taking it.  I’d read enough to know that mine was far from the worst case; in high school I read The Bell Jar, and resonated with it deeply, and The Yellow Wallpaper.  In college I read Girl, Interrupted (I went to a reading by the author and got my book signed by her), and still later I watched the film An Angel at my Table, and was so awestruck that I read the book by the same name, all 434 pages of it, and then went on to read Faces in the Water, by the same author, Janet Frame.  

All these stories had a similar theme; they were about young women, generally raised in the middle-class, generally from educated families, who were crippled by depression and had to be treated for it, sometimes with dramatic remedies like shock-treatment.  I became the resident expert on depression in my family, which is funny in retrospect (sort of), because one by one all the women in my family were diagnosed with and treated for depression.  Suddenly I was a trailblazer; my female relatives came to me for advice on medication, to discuss side effects, and to soundboard.  

Prozac was expensive in those days, and I didn’t have any money.  I slowly weaned myself off it and began pursuing other methods – I started taking St. John’s Wort, I installed full-spectrum light bulbs in my apartment, I bought a SADD lamp for the long Chicago winters.  For the most part, it worked.  There was the occasional party that I’d flake out on at the last minute because I just couldn’t peel myself off the couch, the odd get-together that I’d mysteriously be absent from, or sleep through, but for the most part I was functional.  When things got serious with the man who became my husband I was up front about my history with depression, figuring if it was going to be a deal breaker it was better to find out early on.  Apart from a short stint in my early 30s when I was dealing with some crap with my dad, I was able to get along without medication until recently.  Here’s the thing about me and medication:  deep down, I feel like I shouldn’t be on it.  I feel like its fine for everyone else in the world to be medicated, but I should be strong enough to do without it.  It’s stupid, I know.  I don’t judge anyone else for taking happy pills, but I judge myself.  

Prozac is pretty much the same now as it was the first time I took it, only now it’s cheap as hell.  A 90 day supply of Fluoxetine, the generic for Prozac, costs me less than $8.  It used to cost me almost $3 per pill.  With prices like that, who the hell wouldn’t want a little help?  I was recently turned down for a job that I was pretty sure was going to be offered to me; a job that, unlike the countless others I’ve interviewed for in the 2+ years since I was laid off, I actually wanted.  It hurt, and I’m trying to figure out what to do next.  I have my pills, and I have my husband, and I have my writing, and I have my 20 pounds lighter, stronger body.  I know I’m blessed, but sometimes, as my friend Bridget once said: “it’s hard to wake up in the morning to it could be worse.”  So here’s to today, and here’s to tomorrow, here’s to hoping for better things, and here’s to the 20 milligrams of magic that keep the whole thing going.