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.

I sat on the school bus, midway to the back on the right hand side, and stared at the 3 students who were running a little late .

Rowayton Connecticut

If you imagined this place, it would not be more precisely replicated than the town that already exists. Garish flowers bloom everywhere; phlox, lilies, in brilliant shades of fushia, purple, snow white…colors that I don’t remember existing in my mother’s dusty begonia beds or in town shopkeepers planters. At each stop sign, at every traffic median or triangle over-the-top, “I Know-They just went Wild this year!” the fruits of garden club labor appear.
The Rowayton Market has set out cute bistro tables with umbrellas and a folding chalkboard with the day’s coffee and latte suggestions for customers lazing away their Connecticut weekend. Esso Gas station? Newsstand?? Bottle shop?? Forget it! Now, if you need a real estate agent, or an investment advisor, or a wine merchant, ok.…..Dogs are strictly leashed and tethered to the flimsy little tables, as if it were not possible that they, as dogs, could upend everything—table, lattes, the whole get-up-- Only the post office remains untouched. Untouched but tinier. Everything was as perfect as Speilburg himself could fashion it to be. No roaming dogs. No kids on black “English” bikes. Plenty, however, of adults in spandex, wired up to their vital signs and grooving to J-zee.
No longer is there a danger of your little kiddy being trapped while hiding out in the deteriorating and crumbling rubble of a three-story Victorian mansion, last lived in by an emaciated silent screen actress wearing 1940’s era bedroom slippers and two brilliant gashes of Max Factor Red lipstick. Twenty first century children won’t be mowed down by buzz-cut and pimpled teenage boys flying around the United Church curve and blasting through town going 80, or maybe holding out false hope to the town’s resident queer by groups of three or four stopping by his place in the early evening and joining him in a cocktail. No weird kids from the past will appear and terrorize the children of commuters, or wind up in the City Briefs in the “Hour” every Monday. All of these dangers are gone, the old houses, the jaded teenagers, the homo. Replaced by Martha’s Vineyard-issue homes, clear skinned, soccer playing 16 year olds ordering their own lattes, and family friendly gays. On Highland Avenue, a painted wooden sign preaches, “Neighborhood Kids Say “Slow Down!”
The streets of Rowayton and West Norwalk are so narrow that it isn’t possible to imagine the old days when we rode 2 or 3 abreast past stone walls in those summer pine needles or the times when I silently moved through the gray post-Thomas 5 pm air in thick falling snow. I’m certain there used to be grassy shoulders which we would gouge apart galloping our horses, or move onto if two cars going different directions happened to pass. As a matter of fact, when we became 16 and drove these suburban lanes, we poured it on, we flew. One time at the blind intersection of Fillow Street and Weed Avenue, Teri stalled her father’s new red Volkswagon in the snow and passed out, and though only 100 feet from my driveway, I threw up and fell asleep.
Two explanations, besides the obvious, explain the minute character of the streets. Maybe my town is dwarfed because I am in a vehicle at least 4 times bigger than the VWs and Saabs and Morris Minors of the 50s. Or it’s possible that, in a melodramatic cry to “Respect Our Privacy!” and boisterous anonymity, townsfolk have permitted shrubbery and trees to grow unchecked, and foliage that was newly-planted and strictly manicured in 1956 has gone feral, and engulfs the roads, driveways and property lines. Even the newest replacement houses on each block appear ancient, flaunting modest pea-gravel driveways, shutters and clapboard covered in humble blazingly colored annuals. “Us? Oh, We’ve lived here forever!!” Where there used to be 300 acres screening a stone house and barns, now there are 300 discretely positioned “homes”, which pretend to have been there for a century. Everything and nothing is new.
The Sherin’s place next door looked the same, smaller of course than the panoramic and holy stables, corral, and colonial house from my 12 year old memory, but stone walls, pasture, the brook-- they were all there. Missing only was Bonnie in the driveway where her date was already gunning his engine, shouting up to Susie or Debbie in a second floor window, “Twinnie, get me my blue cardigan, the one in the bottom drawer!” It was turning into the Jennings’ driveway that finally brought me tears, as you suddenly realize a fondly remembered old friend has been gone for decades.
The Jennings’ house, the first house I fell in love with- looked over the 100 Jennings acres from a flat knoll…the house and terrace and pool basked in light all day until the sun went down behind the stable and woods. I loved, I wanted to be the resident daughter of it! The brick-floored kitchen leading off the mud room, where we’d toss our riding boots and gloves and run up the front stairs to get in our suits and swim in the pool right outside the French doors. Mr. and Mrs. Jennings had 4 stair step sons Robbie Chris Jeff and Peter, so I recall her as often in a fog, and Mr. Jennings travelled as a VP for Bigelow Carpets, frequently to Paris for some reason. They always had a nameless cook or a maid, I don’t know which, and once Mr. Jennings brought 16 year old Teri a black bustier back from France. Even to me back then it seemed dirty, except I didn’t know the word.
I drive into the former driveway, now a paved street. My house looked over nothing now, the yards of the new-olds hidden by fast growing maples trees. In 1965 there were overgrown flowering trees and tall meadow grass on either side of the driveway near the mailbox. I hid there ,smoking, while I waited for my mother to leave the house for work on mornings I didn’t go to school. Susan Andrus and I waited there for Robbie’s mother’s station wagon to swing in and drop Robbie off before she drove on with the other three and the groceries to the house I loved. We would walk and laugh slowly up the quarter mile driveway.
Five houses now line each side, softened by the ubiquitous landscaping, where in 1960 there were acres of meadow grass, a clear brook running down the hill into a pond where I soaked Missy’s swollen ankle for hours one summer, and the remains of an ancient orchard. Mr. Jennings would sit on the slate patio near the pool with a martini in his huge fist and watch Robbie, the twins, Teri, and me playing spit-tag on horseback. White jump standards and rails had littered the treeless grass riding field, and the “homes” and lots made from this riding field were clearly grander. Designers had rearranged stone walls to respect the new settlers’ current boundary lines. In the parking area in front of the side entrance to my beloved house’s mud room, bordered by a fenced kitchen garden and a lane leading up to the barn and kennel, I see a huge contemporary style gray house, angled and vertical. The ancient rock wall marking the Ferndale cemetery behind this mess looked as though Mexicans had just come and pressure washed it. Robbie, Teri, Debby, Susie and me camped once in the woods behind Fox Run, tying the horses to trees holding hay bags for the night, like in the movies.
I drove down the driveway street and watched two 12 or 13 year olds jogging slowly uphill in the June heat. The remaining ferns and the moss and hemlock smelled like ancient forest. I wished for the girls to notice the scent of the old days. Piles of horse manure on the driveway. Ignored until they disappeared from rain or the dozens of cars cramming the parking area for a Bigelow Carpet cocktail party…The Learned girls painting the emptied pool with tropical flowers for their sister’s wedding. But the girls were on Ipods and it was hot.
Toward New Canaan on west Norwalk Road I approach the Merritt Parkway and slow down to locate the narrow entrance of the bridle path, but overgrown grass weeds hid any sign that a beckoning place of solitude once existed. I drive back but it’s not there.
Here are some other crazy things I saw on my trip:
The Ronald McDonald House ads featuring sick Mexican kids
The Men, Women, and Other restroom on the Connecticut Turnpike

Christ it's hot this afternoon. Only the 6th day of April but Jesus.

When I feel this way I'm reminded of elementary school, the high ceilings and air blowing in from outside which smelled so good. Like grass or rotting leaves or burning leaves or low tide. All good things.

I read through all the deliriously happy pages of the Rowayton website thinking, i was really a differnet kind of child. I saw things so much differently than the 1950s happy circles of friends.

One clear memory is the day Stacy Bissell returned from a trip to Europe or California or some place she went with her father and had to miss three months of school. Or maybe three weeks. Anyhow, we were in Mrs. Lies' 3rd grade housed in a temporary classroom in the gym.

All the girls were lined up on the left side of the temporary classroom door and all the boys on the right side , along the inside wall of the gym. Through the main gym doors come stacy and her father, Richard Bissell. EEEk shout all the girls eeeek! Its Stay-ceeeeee! All the girls ran over to her and threw their arms around her, eeek eeek Stacy!. But wait! There were Renee and I, staring and holding our hands behind our backs and gawking. I cannot speak for her, but I know sure as shit I was not going over there to act like a retard over someone who I didn't care was gone and didn't care had come back.

Book review: Carolyn See reviews 'Model Home,' by Eric Puchner
By Carolyn SeeFriday, March 12, 2010; C04
MODEL HOME
By Eric Puchner
Scribner. 360 pp. $26
We all operate under the spell of a convenient set of delusions: that women can be "made over" to look prettier than they actually are, for example; or that with enough diet and exercise we can live to 100. Our favorite delusion, the one on which this great country was built, is that with enough hard work, Americans can become anything -- and have anything -- that they want. A fair amount of good literature has been written about the failure of this American dream, but the failure part usually comes at the end of the story. Eric Puchner's first novel, "Model Home," puts that dismaying fate at the very beginning and proceeds from there.
Warren Ziller, who previously lived a pleasant enough life with his family on the shore of a lake in Wisconsin, becomes entranced by a bright idea that could make him a fortune: He develops a piece of land out in the Mojave Desert, about 100 miles from downtown Los Angeles. The place where he builds his handful of houses is a most unappetizing patch of sand and scrub, but he isn't a mad man. After World War II, hundreds of developers perceived their futures to be in desert land, and until a few years ago that land was a gold mine.
So Warren isn't a maniac to invest in desert property and build tacky affordable housing, just unlucky. No one has told him about the toxic waste dump someone else is locating just a few miles away. But Warren has already moved across the country and settled his family in a gated community south of L.A. overlooking the ocean. Herradura Estates (actually Palos Verdes Estates) features teenage girls trotting along bridle paths and peacocks wandering scenically across owners' front lawns. But it's too good to be true, and far too expensive. Warren begins to borrow from his children's college accounts. It's a nightmare, but he can't get up the nerve to tell his family what's happening.
His family: a sweet wife named Camille, who makes terrible educational films for a middle school audience; the eldest son, Dustin, impossibly handsome, a surfer who's been going out with beautiful Kira, who's planning to yield up her virginity to him on the first anniversary of their romance; Lyle, a cranky, impossibly pale high school girl who hates everyone and refuses to fit into Southern California culture; and Jonas, 11, nobody's favorite.
Part 1 of this novel tells the story of "before" -- before anyone except Warren knows anything about their financial crisis. Dustin, star of his own life drama, develops a sexual obsession with Kira's emotionally disturbed little sister, who worries her earlobes into hideous scabs, samples any amount of recreational drugs and eats glass as an attention-getting device. Lyle, who drips with shame for herself and everybody else, begins to have sex with a Mexican kid who opens and shuts the gate in their gated community. Jonas mopes along. Camille finally makes a film so bad that her family can't even joke about it. When their car gets repossessed, Warren pretends it's been stolen. Then their leased furniture gets taken away. Warren is increasingly entangled in his lies, but he can't seem to come clean about their situation.
Then, just before Part 2, all hell breaks lose. One of the minor screw-ups that accrue around the Zillers magnifies into tragedy. Until this point, the family has believed that they will get ahead because everybody else in America is getting ahead. All the way along, it's possible to see things that Warren ought to have done to avoid his fate. But then we readers should consider all the evenings we may have had too much to drink, or didn't have the courage to make the important phone call, or the plain fact that most of America is probably made up of people who aren't as bright as they should be, and that might include the person who's writing this review, or maybe even someone who's reading it. The American promise of success is often just what it says: a dream. "In truth there was not much time, a blip, and most of what you did was a mistake," a chastened Warren thinks toward the end of this narrative. "You were lucky to find a safe and proper home." And that, the author suggests, is what it really comes down to: decent meals, a roof over your head and, with luck, relatives or friends who will gather to help you when your life smashes to bits.
The Ziller family is utterly believable here. Little Jonas, the kid whom nobody loves, is the perfect example. It's left absolutely up in the air what's to become of him -- or his brother, or sister or parents. Sure, if you work hard and don't screw up, you could succeed, except for the fact that everyone screws up mightily sometime. It's actually a miracle that any one of us stays alive from breakfast to lunch. There's a terrible shame involved if you fail in America. But that shame is universal. It clings to us like an invisible, sticky veil. That's what this estimable book is about.

Its only another day but everything has stopped and silence ...no birds, planes, traffic...nothing can be heard except machines slogging away at heating, communicating, reproducing. We really don't need to be here. Back then, you had to speak, or move to another place and speak or perform an action then wait to recieve a response. Now, nothing. They sit in bed and type and the wrld is fine.

America

America, To Me

I lived in a place where life was always happening somewhere else. Anyway, I left-- not seeking old pals, or better times or peace of mind--- I was not looking to get anywhere.

I am fine with being nowhere. But I need to be trying for something better. I need to stay in motion.

Although I am now only an observer of what I’ve seen, I regularly assault myself with questions and harsh accusations that I can seldom respond to. A fog of old missteps shudders, and then emerges like Venus from the cold depths of old love. I can't see the answers through this mess.

Years ago I bumped into an old lover who still seemed fond of me. I offer him a sofa but he coolly blows me off. Later, I dreamed that he turns back around, accepts his old flame’s kindness, and finds himself reduced to tears by her pure and undiminished loyalty.

In real life he wakes up early and slides away. Nowadays, he appears far too estranged and exhausted to respond.

I no longer play Benedict Arnold to my younger self, denying my own identity or ducking the hard times which happened twenty-five or thirty-five or forty years ago. I find intimacy with the long-ago inhabitants of another place.

My lack of health complicates everything. Our --mine and America’s-- failing memory is unable to look the chaos that we have failed to keep under control in the eye.

In a sad land like America, fantasies beat out cruel facts. They organize my life in the manner of a good vacation—departing, enjoying, happily returning home-- while the truth is eternally unknowable and pulls me up short and back to square one every time.

I'm missing Sam this morning, and I'm trying to define exactly what meaning he gave my life.

My favorite thing at age 16 was to snarl "How phony", and leave it at that.

Sam showed me the truth is usually there underneath the horse shit So now at age 61 I still spot it easily...I'll demonstrate: Page one of today's NYT (but one could look any day of the week and find similar) thrills over a new show of photographs...."Some of these pictures will be on view at a new show at KMR Arts in Washington Depot, Conn., juxtaposed with an anatomically resonant series on sidewalk cracks that she produced in the ’70s. "

The sidewalk cracks may have merit, but Is this writer an idiot?

Bell Island

Creepy people lived there. People we did not know, or whose fathers were "away", people who didn't have the right number of digits on their hands or people who lived by another set of rules, like the Ripleys, Chip (off the old block or on the shoulder, either would apply) and Bobby? Billy? and unknown other brothers who terrorized the grade-schoolers and coated their black hair with grease and combed it in ducks ass Elvis styles . I wasn't old enough to know whether certain girls found them attractive, I would guess yes, very much so . They stood out in a classroom full of healthy skin and chestnut-haired girls and flat-top, buzz cut little boys. Their faces were pale, and even in fifth grade I feel that they smoked.

Entering Bell Island, visitors crossed an old WPA sytle bridge, where usually a mean-looking adult was drowning a pillowcase full of kittens, or teenage boys were dropping rotting fish on boaters on their way in or out of the cove that connected to Farm Creek. On the right, you'd see a creepy little house, a miniature cottage with a spooky wishing well and a sign singing "Sponsored by the Bell Island Garden Club" . It was red, and year-round it had blooms in its window boxes. Something made it ominous and the last place a little kid would want to break in and vandalize. Very Hansel and Gretel if anyone had asked me, of course no one did..... this was all going on in my mind.  The streets were so narrow, and cars were parked bumper to bumper along the sides, unlike in Rowaton proper where it was quite unacceptable to park anywhere but one's garage or personal driveway. Unless attending a large party....then the cars were everywhere and our local cop, Vinnie Velotti, patroled and directed  drunken guests  toward home if needed. 
Adding to the foreignness of Bell Island was the size and height of the houses.  They were generally tall, 3 story Victorians built right up to the sidewalks, and in my ignorance they screamed "Brooklyn" or "The Bronx" or "Newark", all crowded and evil and undesirable locations in my little mind.  How naive I was!  Only now do I know the island was exclusive and the homes were for the rich, the crowding and oldness had cachet and  to be packed into such close proximity with the neighbors meant the Ammerican Dream had been Achieved! 
Now I look on the iinternet on a hot North Carolina afternoon and I see that Bell Island's house are priced in the multi-millions, that tear downs have occurred and the new structures are fake Nantucket style mansions. I'm certain all the frightening things I noticed as a child are gone, the brown and tan Victorians if they still stand are painted unthreatening gray with dark green shutters.  Everything nice and normal.  No more little girls will lie in bed at night and wonder what it would be like to touch the white flesh of Chip Ripley, or even his younger brother Bobby......

Hot June Friday afternoons always bring memories of happy family picnics at Baily Beach. Mom would get home from teaching around 3:30, have a short gin and tonic with a twist or mabe a sprig of mint from the garden, then, if the tide was going to be high that evening, drag out the scotch kooler and shove it full of those blue plastic ice things that sat in the freezer year round and stunk to high heaven. She'd pack all the fixin's for martinis...shaker, gin and vermouth....dixie cups, and... oh yes, some meat and salad and french bread. When Dad rolled in at 5:30, he'd change to shorts and get the charcoal and newspaper and lighter fluid and away we'd go. There were always 3 or 4 other gin-drinking families doing the same thing at the Bailey Beach picnic area (NO Food or Drink on Beach under penalty of death) and pretty soon the party was going full blast. Booze, food, dimes for the kiddies to go to the concession and buy popsicles. The fire had to be started and then there were false starts and smoldering newspaper and black smoke. When it did start, at least one hour had to pass for it to become a white hot pile of coals, so that dad could burn the hell out of whatever protein he was cooking. It was usually steak...marinated flank steak as tough as an old leather belt and dripping with red wine marinade. Never a hot dog or even a less proletarian hamburger. Never a bottle of ketchup or A-1. Nothing. We didn't know what was good, and we were reminded of that on a daily basis. I'd beg to go home, beg for dimes and nickles, beg to be allowed to start a little campfire on the ground. Sometimes if the sun was far enough over the yardarm, I was allowed, and once in a blue moon there was a bag of hard, deformed marshmallows that I could impale and incinerate, and finally scrape out of my hair the next day. Each summer, nothing changed. The alcohol, the scotch koolers, the crusty old lifeguard Art Ladrigan, the high tide picnics. Until 1960. With 24 hours notice, all plans were changed, and I was put in the back of the barely-running 1950 Ford convertible with my dog and rabbits, and driven to New Hampshire where Mom and I hid out and snarled at each other for 2 and a half months. What was that about? To this day, no one's mentioned it. The month we returned, the "family" what was lefty of it..moved to West Norwalk.

I only have these 10 miutes, but do you know about the women in the Rowayton Art Guild? Well it used to be called that, they were so so artsy craftsy, -ish women who did things at fivish and sevenish.. they always had Phil Booth "Hang Their Shows". He was one of the only men in Rowayton who knew how to operate a hammer, or a generator, or do anything more useful than screw in a lightbulb...the majority of men were in our little hamlet were, their wives cried, "just useless"....He was the man they ran to in Rowayton Estates when their husband, say, may have kicked the lawnmower blade while the machine was running, to loosten the clodded grass, and were lying on the lush green lawn gushing blood from a severed artery. He painted garish 10 x 12 foot murals of naked women reposing in front of mirrors to decorate the annual Fireman's Ball at Roton Point, and Mom always burned them the next morning because her son's little friends wanted to hang them on their 11 year old bedroom walls , next to the Little League pennants.
But one activity that Dad refused was the annual cleaning of the cannon. On the traffic triangle in front of Winthrop House, at the intersection of Rowayton Avenue and , a Revolutionary War cannon said, muzzle eternally at half mast.. black and sooty and corroding in the salt air. The -ish women mounted the cannon every April, and gripping with their thighs positioned themselves astride for most of a morning while they scrubbed and rinsed. It never looked any cleaner, and Mom would always drive by and out of the corner of her mouth hiss that they'd be better off with a man at home than perched on a phallic symbol on Main Street. I had to get clarification from Becky of course. She knew everything.....

More About the Gulls

Quite a few of the older gulls aspired to be writers, artists, or in the theater. Or really just screwing men who were in any of the Arts would be fine... One was snickeringly admired as working "under" a famed director during the summer of 1959. Another was atonishingly told by an editor of the Saturday Review, after declaring sadly that she "wanted to write", "then....write". One rebel at heart went to Katie Gibbs to learn shorthand and get a secretarial job on Madison Avenue in order to meet "the one" without the bother of going to Wellesley.
The younger ones plotted organizing and attending mixers to meet boys from St. Lukes and King School. But the faculty and administration's less than frenzied mission was to prepare them...for what, no one really said. The curriculum consisted of French, Latin, Algebra, biology (using hairpins from Mrs. Lee's long, low graying braid dangling down her back as dissection instruments), geography, ancient, medieval, and european history..American history was not mentioned...and English literature...forget anything written after WW I or by an American. The lower school read the Song of Roland, Pilgrims Progress, and roman mythology, along with Booth Tarkington and Shakespeare's comedies. The older gulls acted out dramatic readings involving incestuous greek families and cried "Give Us Barrabas!" as they strolled to class. In other words nothing was taught that had any bearing on reality. Nothing was real, including the recent suffering inflicted by World War II, ending only 15 years before, or the deeds of Adolph Hitler and Joseph McCarthy, affecting so many of the faculty, or activities occurring in any part of America other than Broadway or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The gulls knew of no states located to the south or west of Manhattan.
I stayed two years. When mom and dad requested an increase in my scholarship assistance in the spring of eighth grade, the trustees offered them $200 . Seeing the handwriting on the wall and recognizing it as the same that had appeared before my sister's descent into the land of Hallbrooke "no post-secondary education", I was enrolled in Ponus Ridge Junior High School in August and I left behind the unhealthy complexions, sexual speculation, and all the other priveliges and advantages that a private school education offered. I couldn't wait!

Ok, I'll tell you more...

Thomas had a few problems. For one thing, some of the older girls were "precocious", undoubtably a result of years of single-sex education. They spent hundreds of hours speculating on the romances, sex lives, sexual orientation, and coupling potential of the faculty. They nicknamed teacher of french Miss Anita Darling "Ineeda Darling" and wrote one-minute round robin stories about she her roomate Pearl Searles having lesbian sex in their model T, which they chugged around Rowayton in and drove to the liquor store once a week. Each was almost 80 years old, so.....They created passionate love scenes between Mr. Emerson, the faux-bohemian, thirtyish, sloppily dressed drama teacher who always had a cigarette pinched between his index and middle fingers, , and Leslie Latham, divorced and horny english teacher and mother of Louie Latham, who hung around the wooded paths between buildings when he was on break from his third-rate boarding school in Maine. They created improbable yet innumerable triangles, usually two women battling over one man, since men were scarce. They nonchalantly changed out of their gym blouses in the back of algebra class, enjoying the sweat popping out on Mr. Cunha's forehead as he stood at the blackboard and did not make eye contact. They were encouraged to read the beat poets and cultiivate that unhealthy look, ("The gulls look So Natural!") and then everyone was surprised when they went to New York on the weekends and found lovers who were old enough to be their absent fathers.

Where wuz I?

Let's leave the chair and Winthrop House for a few moments and mosey on over to the Thomas School. Thomas School BRRE, that is...BEFORE Remington Rand Estate....back in the crumbling former mansion of Miss Mabel Thomas, founder and first headmistress of dear old "TS", letters its gray sweatshirts were emblazoned with until a few of the more worldly and cynical parents attended a Trustees meeting back in 1958 and had a word with Mrs. Opie.
Thomas at its peak was a very motley assortment of instructors (you really couldn't call them teachers since they were strictly uncredentialed), "gulls" from Southport and Greens Farms, westport, Darien as far south as Noroton, Shippan Point and sometimes including a couple of Jews from New Canaan who couldn't go anywhere else( but definitely no one from Greenwich) faculty dogs, famous spouses, veterans of HUAC investigations, and depending on the year, various schoolgirl tragedies.

My sister enrolled in 1957, repeating ninth grade when a deficiency in foreign languages, history, English, and general knowledge was discovered at the time of her graduation from Center junior high in Norwalk. Her 17 classmates were pale and unhealthy looking, partially due to the prohibition against wearing any type of makeup. And the school day lasted until 4:30, so the gulls enjoyed very little sunlight during the winter months.

I eagerly arrived in the fall of 1960, ready forall of it..the pale and unhealthy complexion, the instruction in french and latin, the distance from Rowayton girls and boys (who wanted to tan and didn't want to play sports), and the proximity to the intellectual world I imagined resided on Bluff Avenue. What fun I had. There were 26 girls, and our homeroom was the boathouse which extended into Wilson Cove and floated away shortly after I left. We were seated in alphabetical order...Booth, Brown, Carey, Carillo... (don't worry...a blonde of Spanish descent who wore only Black and Orange woolen scarves in honor of Daddy's alma mater.) We studied Algebra under Mammy Steelbags, our homeroom teacher who was named for her huge tits that she was constantly adjusting inside her over-the-shoulder-boulder-holders (bra). That was it...what I loved....there were words and nicknames for eveything...and everyone... Rencie for Florence Farwell, Winky for Suzie May's younger sister Winifred, Chicky for Catherine Matthieson. They all wanted to shed grandma's name and be a gull who was just a tiny bit common and have a language outsiders wouldn't know. I caught on fast...to the vocabulary, at least. I ate it up.

I arrived on the first day (walked) on my own..no mummy, no car, not streaming out of the Greens Farms bus with the lower school. Previously I had appeared at the entrance testing alone, with no pencil, no adult showing me which room to find and where to sit.
My sister had given me one warning...Do Not say "Hi" when introduced to Mrs. Opie. Of course, my nerves were shot and...
I blurted "hi" when she lifted her two fingers slightly toward me and nodded...She knew what I was still to find out...Although I was the highest scorer ever on the TSl entrance exam, I was a failure from the first day.