Teri Mayers Best Friend

By Danny Rose

April 29, 2011

Incident on a Train

By DANIEL ASA ROSE

The guy behind me on the train was whispering into his phone, something about his soon-to-be-ex demanding the house on the river. Something about how he wakes up nauseated, almost as if he were undergoing chemo, which he would prefer because at least cancer would be an enemy he could commit to hating instead of being conflicted the way he was, still loving his pre-ex but needing to fight her as hard as he could. With my head against the window in the seat ahead, I was feeling vaguely nauseated myself, when I became conscious that a woman’s voice was calling out weakly from the front of the crowded compartment. “Help. Someone help me.”

Four or five tall men from various blue upholstered seats were already standing and moving sturdily toward her up the aisle. Soon I was among them, though not at all sturdy, and in my socks.

At the front of the train car, in the two seats that always face each other, a big man with a wild, vacant gaze was drooling, locked in a rigid forward position; in the opposite seats, a young mother was trying to protect her two little children from his blind lurch. The tall men were already restraining the man, though it was obvious he meant no harm but was operating from panic deep inside some sort of seizure.

The frightened mother was whimpering, “I thought he was just trying to be friendly, but then — ” as other men hustled her out of her seat and into the aisle with us. She and her children looked frozen with shock despite being encased in thick parkas.

“I’m a dad, give me the little one,” I said, and lifted her in my arms. The lightness of her being flooded me with warm memories.

Everyone in the full compartment was transfixed by the commotion. Our posse moved down the aisle to where two worried-looking people were gesturing that they had given up their seats. We got the mother and her children into the seats and sat them down.

The older girl stood against the window in her black snow boots while I slid the little one into her mother’s arms. I leaned over the mother and rubbed the back of her parka to try to make her tears go away.

Two or three nights earlier, I saw a video of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler on “American Idol” comforting a contestant’s disabled fiancée in her wheelchair, rubbing her head and neck as he murmured kind words in her ear, and that’s essentially what I found myself doing. Funny, because I always thought I hated Steven Tyler. That rubbery face seemed sexually infantile, as if he were halfway between a tantrum and an orgasm, but here I was taking guidance from his treatment of the woman. I was doing the same thing, rubbing and rubbing and speaking words of comfort to the children: “He didn’t mean any harm, he was having a medical problem, your mother is just a little stunned but everyone is safe.”

I kept it up until the mother came to herself enough to smile and to begin hugging her children extra well. I stood up; my back stiff. I turned and touched the tall men on their arms with admiration. “Thank you,” I told them, “you acted so fast!” Checking the front of the car, I could see that the drooling man was being attended to by two capable-looking conductors.

I made my way to my seat in my socks, keeping my gaze down because I felt the eyes of many people on me. When I got to my seat, the guy behind me was off his phone.

“Are they going to be all right?” he asked me.

“Yes, everyone’s fine,” I told him.

I hesitated, then said, “I want you to know that I couldn’t help overhearing a little of what you were saying on the phone before, not a lot but just enough to tell me that you and I are having an identical crisis.”

He stiffened, unsure whether to take offense or be embarrassed.

“I’m going through it, too,” I said, “and you were using some of the same words I use these daysto try to explain how horrible it is.”

His face softened. “Good to know I’m not alone,” he said.

“Hey,” I said, “I bet half the people on this train are going through times just as bad.”

That cheered us both a bit.

I like a few things about the piece, which, like a lot of these 'Lives' essays, has a specific and intended shape. Something happens to the narrator between the moment when he first listens to the "pre-ex ambivalence" conversation and he allies himself with the man behind him: he has a chance to go back into becoming the strong family-connected dad, reassuring the mother and children as if they four formed the family he is now losing, or seeing fall apart. The framing device and its relationship with the seemingly random event that happens in between is wonderful.

It seems to be this writer's style to yolk together disparate things, thus the title of his book at the bottom of the page. The Steven Tyler paragraph throws us at first, but it too, is shaped: it ends on the narrator becoming part of that family. And why is he watching American Idol? Are we to guess that he is not connecting with his own family at home, or that he is watching it with his (older, no longer carry-able) kids?

Woman recalls Mildly Disappointing Life

I have lived almost sixty five years. I have never been beaten, or physically abused, or not had enough to eat. Occasionally unpleasant things have happened to me, illness for example, but nothing I couldn't get through. I have been without answers, at times, when I ask myself "What should I do?", and I have free range anxiety about my children's happiness and unhappiness. I can honestly say that only a handful of decisions I've made or experiences I attempted were unsuccessful. And let me add that in that handful I include that nonsensical marriage, and if I knew one tenth, hell one hundredth of what I know now about human behavior, it would never have taken place. Nothing personal against myself, just a matter of facts I didn't know, abysmally low standards for normal...all things which I learned later than many people who, in all other parts of their lives, are average or above average. So my question to myself never changes: Despite not being born in Africa or China, two countries which are so very crowded and I would be so unhappy... despite having fairly good jobs and food and caring children for the most part, and just these few mild disappointments, like (2)failing to earn love from one particular man and (3) not having adequate retirement savings and (4) falling far short of my goal of expressing how funny people are and how life can be ephemerally breathtaking...Why do I feel just eternally lost? Outside the lines, alone in a life full of people whom I try hard to be good to?

Bumpy Road to Hell

If I remember the facts correctly, each was born in the same hospital in Glen Ridge New Jersey. Two years apart, he in 46 and she in March 1948.

After Reading West Norwalk Rocks and Rills

Every spot on the walking tour was a place where I felt joy, or sadness, where either I draped my arms around my horse’s neck and wept into her mane and wished time would move faster and I could be gone from there forever, or I stretched backward so I lay my head on her rump and pretended and I was a circus acrobat could I please god stay a child forever. The places that are now “scenic” ponds and “sites of interest” were then streams that trickled next to a gravel drive leading to the most elegant, lovely farmhouse on earth, with a brick-floored kitchen and a deacon’s bench in the mud room, kennels full of English setters and kitchen garden growing vegetables and herbs. The pool on the hillcrest where the house sat overlooked acres of fenced pastures. Now “beautiful homes” reside in these pastures, all landscaped and “Protected by ATF Security” signs festooning the front walks. Princes Pine Road didn’t open to Old Rock Way in my time. It dead ended at the boundary of a huge estate that visitors entered on Old Rock Way through two stone pillars and woods so thick that we couldn’t see the house where, every summer, a huge party was held with an orchestra and guests half in the bag moved all night to dance tunes outdoors and it went on so late that I fell asleep in my bed on Fillow Street listening to the endless melodies of the forties. There was a long flat stretch along Old Rock between the road and the stone wall containing the estate where the rich danced at night. We’d pull up our leather reins and crouch over the horses’ manes and race down the stretch, so fast, throwing up clods of spring grass or mountains of leaves in the fall. Every thing smelled so good, I remember as well today as I did those days when I was only 12 and odors normally went unnoticed unless they were bad. On the backs of our horses we smelled rain, and we smelled oncoming rain, and pine trees, and flowering shrubbery, and everything good that was still there in 1962—unlandscaped, assembled by nature before so many people wanted to buy what we didn’t know we had until it didn’t exist anymore. My parents’ friends lived on Princes Pine. Some of them like Sam and Anne Parsons were Village Creek types who couldn’t quite afford the water views, but compensated by building (all houses were identical) rectangular glass walled boxes with three bedrooms kitchen and living room completely surrounded by woods…no trees, pea-gravel driveways…and heated floors. No furnace or ductwork or embellishments of any kind. Mom claimed the Parsons bought oil paintings of new Englanders at a sale in Darien and falsely claimed they were “ancestors”. Impossible because Mr. and Mrs. Parsons were from Brooklyn and ended up killed on the East River Drive coming home one night plastered from a party in Manhatten. Terri lived there and once she kept her pony tied in the woods for days and the neighbors didn’t know. The woods of those houses backed to the Five Mile River and we’d stand in the water in the winter, hoping to catch a cold and stay home sick from school. Once Terry’s boyfriend Kenny Campbell hid in the woods outside her bedroom window and smoked cigarettes while he waited for her to undress for bed. She never pulled her shade. She saw him that night, smoking, and let him watch her. I babysat for another family on that road, there house was larger and a redwood deck overlooked a little falls of the Alewives river. In the summer evenings that deck was shady and cool and the father and I used to sit out there on patio chairs to wait while the mother got dressed to go out. He always offered me a martini. I was 15. On Weed Street were three places that aren’t even mentioned in “West Norwalk Rocks and Rills”. The Ferndale Monastery and the convent and Faith Baldwin’s house. The cemetery for the old monks backed up to the stables at the Jennings’ house and 75 acres, now Little Fox Lane mini-estates apparently. Hundreds of acres and a lake and endless fields and young seminarians who loved my mom and dad and invited them to hear the Gregorian chants on Christmas eve. Two of them Ned and I forget the other one, used to ride sometimes. They were only 21. I didn’t understand why they were there. I heard it’s all condominiums now. There was a path through the woods the nuns used to carry the clean laundry back and forth to the priests. My sister hinted at odd things that went on. I had no idea what. Faith Baldwin’s place was named “Fable Farm”. She was a hugely popular writer for women’s magazines like McCalls magazine and Family Circle in the 1950s. I rode by her stone walls and her mailbox that said “Fable Farm” a thousand times and never saw her once. Every morning, however, I heard ring-neck pheasants who prowled through the remains of the orchard across from our place.

Phil Booth

After Mom died we went into her desk, and we found a program for Dad’s retirement dinner, which neither of us had ever laid eyes on before this day. It described a stranger, a larger than life man with no kids whom we did not know.
He was at his most charming and generous when around new acquaintances, those he wanted to impress, and people in crisis–whenever he could make a grand gesture or come to the rescue. He was at his worst when it came to day-to-day relationships, especially with those he saw as subordinates–not just secretaries, retail clerks, women drivers, and girls over the age of five,, but also his wife (my mother) and his children.
I do not know now if he loved us kids, in his way, but I grew up knowing we weren’t important enough to impress. He treated my mother, myself, and my siblings as he would his least-capable employees (I wish I were kidding). Our jobs were to be his silent, unseen Children. And just as he rated his employees’ performance at work, so he did at home.
I grew up under a steady stream of belittling comments about my hair, my skin, my posture, the things I liked, my shyness and lack of social skills. He was the sort of father who took silent pleasure in defeating his own children. He loved to set us up to fail at something we didn’t know how to do, and then complain of our ignorance–somehow, we were just supposed to know how, and if we didn’t we were stupid.
If his comments hurt? That was our fault. We needed to “stop being so sensitive.”
And the generosity he so freely extended to other people rarely was extended to us., He used to give advice and encouragement to the children of his friends, or young co-workers, or the neighbors’ son, playing a supportive mentor role to them that he never played with us (because somehow we were stupid if we needed advice, but these other people’s kids weren’t). It always felt like other people got all the best of him, while we watched and hoped for a few stray crumbs.
What’s important here is that only after Mom died did he change. I believe he was just starting to get to like me a little. Then he died. Without hearing the dismissive or abrupt tone in his voice, or the mean edge in his voice when he warned of us something stupid we were about to do or had already done. He never acknowledged he hurt us. We didn’t fit his self-image, so we didn’t exist; we were not a part of him. We were invisible when it came to being a family.
There was no acknowledgement of how deeply unhappy each one of us was–and we obviously were–or that he and she both played a crucial role in making us so unhappy.
My father would have been perfectly charming toward anyone who wanted to interview him. A psychiatrist, for example. He’d come across as intelligent, perceptive, and thoughtful. And he would be mystified, unable to fathom, why his daughters were damaged
My father didn’t hit or molest me; he worked hard to have a nice home and buy cigarettes and gin; he wasn’t a falling down drunk; my father didn’t beat me ; there was no severe, obvious abuse. But rather than beating me down with a belt, he chose to slice at me, a litle at a time. Those countless small, stinging cuts added up.
You don’t know what’s good, you don’t know what you like, that music
stinks, turn out your light, get your hair out of your eyes sit up straight, gimme that you don’t know how to do it, no one wants to work, little kids little problems, big kids big problems, “problem child” , dumb broads, get outa the Way Grand-Maw……. Wherz my hammer goddam it,

These are the words I remember. It shouldn’t be that way.

My mother's friends

My mother had a friend, Mrs. Garment, who tried to be kind to me. Mr. and Mrs. Garment moved to Village Creek in 1956 but took a look at their neighbors and moved with Johnny and Suzie to Westport in the early sixties. Mr. Garment commuted and sold high end bath fixtures to the trade. By eavesdropping I learned they were second generation Brooklyn jews who "climbed out of the ghetto." whatever that meant. Furthermore, they gave their children names that would, in my mother's opinion, Americanize them. Mrs. Garment was enrolled in a masters in education and later ended up working in the New Canaan public schools. One time when I was around 16 she saw me at the Westport Country Playhouse and a week or so later she dropped by our house with some taupe eyeliner and a brush. I had worn black liquid eyeliner just like my friend Teri wore to the play and probably looked like a 12 year old hooker. But I didn't know how to accept a gift in a sincere manner, without sarcastic thoughts going through my head, how to accept help or advice, how to admit that I could improve my appearance without condemning the way I looked a week ago, etc etc. I knew even then she had no idea why I was such a sullen and unpleasant girl, because she adored my mother as did most people. She used to call the house and she'd say, "Hello Dear this is Mrs. Garment is MOTHER there?" And I would answer back, " 'Mother' isn't here." That's all, no "take a message?" or "she'll be back in an hour." I relished each chance to be rude. Being rude on the phone was a power trip for me. Even when my mother told me to stop or I would be forbidden use of the phone, I still did it. I got few calls anyway.
Later the Garment family would suffer with the American dream. Mr. Garment's brother was an attorney at Mudge Rose and went to work for the Nixon Administration. At the height of Watergate his wife put on her mink, went to Boston, checked into the Statler Hilton and killed herself. The custom embroidered name label in her coat identified her a week later. Mrs. Garment died of cancer in 1992. Mr. Garment moved to Longboat Key and is now 91.