"Living with Linda", a white girl moves to Harlem with her lover.





Living With Linda
© 1996


"What do you think about living here, Diana?" Carol eyed me as she set the cheese, French bread and wine on the coffee table in front of the couch where Linda and I had reclined. "You would be the only white person on the block," she added. Carol, dressed in a bright African print dress with matching head wrap, settled into the chair across the room and studied the picture Linda and I made. We had fallen in love with the apartment the moment we stepped through the door but I could hear Carol's question before we rang the bell. Linda grinned and poured the wine.

She put a little extra in my glass.

"She's used to it," Linda said, and winked at me. She was right.

Linda and I do have our differences. Some of them cause complete strangers to pause and comment. One of the more humorous encounters of this kind occurred two years ago, while Linda and I were on vacation in Provincetown, Massachusetts. We lay on our blanket at Herring Cove beach, Linda deep in her murder mystery and me in my walkman-induced stupor. This beach is eternally long and, in a strange way, segregated. The section of the beach closest to the parking lot is a typical beach with snack bar and appropriately attired beach - goers. But the farther one walks away from the crowd, snack bar and parking lot, the more likely they are to bump into small groups of gay men (and a few women) completely naked and lying about in their brown leathery skin. Linda and I, in search of a private spot, had plopped our blanket down somewhere in the middle. A few minutes later, we heard muffled voices and the soft crunch of shoes in the sand.

An older man and woman, in traditional tourist wear, navigated through the sandy sea toward us, the man taking six or seven steps, stopping, raising his binoculars for a moment, then plodding on. Finally, when close enough to see our faces curiously fixed on them, they veered off toward the dunes. The woman, not realizing that voices travel quite far on the beach, turned to her partner and exclaimed, "We see a lot of Ba-laack women with white women these days, don't we?"

Linda and I were so tickled by this we made it our vacation "theme" and several times each day while in shops, restaurants or museums, took turns surprising each other by throwing our hands on our heads and gasping, "My God! There are so many Ba-Laaack women with white women these days!!"

This is how we have handled most of our differences over the years including how differently we have thought about living together. Linda assured me that she would consider living together after ten years of being happily coupled. I asked her once or twice a year, anyway. Her response was always gracious. She would carefully calculate, then gently inform me of how many years, months and days left for serious consideration, sometimes illustrating with a line graph.

After six years Linda asked me. I am not sure why she abandoned our ten year probation period though I suspect it may have something to do with the gray strands of wisdom lately inhabiting her dreads. I was, of course, just as gracious in my response. I ran unabashedly to the trash can, pulled out the week old Sunday Times and riffled through for the Real Estate section.

Though gay couples and singles live everywhere in New York City, the premium areas are the Village and Chelsea. But Linda and I soon discovered a great divide between apartment sizes and the amount of rent for them. This allowed us to make our decisions quickly for most apartments were both too small and too expensive. In one case the real estate agent, disappointed in the apartment herself, failed to bring application forms.

When Carol, a colleague of Linda's, suggested we look at the apartment on 153rd Street she occupied for ten years and was soon vacating for the brownstone next door, we were doubtful at first. We had not considered living in Harlem. But after Carol described the six room apartment with parquet floors, a bath and a half and a rent bill of under $800, we decided to take a look. Two hours after our visit, we made our decision.

On an early Saturday morning in September, a line of police barricades closely guarded by several husky teenagers stopped our moving van at the entrance to 153rd Street. Linda handled the negotiations and after several minutes was able to convince them she was a new neighbor moving onto the block and should be given special permission to enter. We had unwittingly planned our move on the day of the annual Block party. Linda promised the young men we would work quickly to get the van off the block. The barricade gates opened and the young men announced the entrance of their new neighbor, Linda, to the onlookers. No one suspected I was moving in, too, until a week had passed and they noticed me coming, going and taking out the trash.

Our block is 153rd Street between Amsterdam and St. Nicholas. It is the upper end of Sugar Hill, which extends from 135th Street to 155th Street. On each end of the block are twenty-family apartment buildings. Brownstones line the middle of the block on both sides. Many families are raising a third generation here. There have also been many changes on the block over the last ten years. Once completely made up of African Americans, there are now many Dominican families living here, mainly at each end of the block. This, according to my neighbors, has caused some cultural tensions. This tension boomed, in a manner of speaking, on the day of the block party.

Two DJ's had set up for the days event, one, at the center of the block, equipped with the latest R&B, Hip Hop and Classic soul, and the other on the Amsterdam end of the block, equipped with the most popular Merenge and Salsa. For ten hours they battled, with increasing volume, for musical hegemony, each enjoying momentary victory when, periodically, the equipment of the other overheated and failed.

Merenge plays at a moderate volume most of the time, in the only store on the block. Jose, a Dominican, has owned L&G grocery for three years. I had lived here for only a month when Jose began to bag a six-pack of Corona and a lime as soon as I walked into his store. In the warm months the neighborhood boys set up a card table outside Jose's store and play dominoes well into the night. On those evenings Jose puts a speaker on the Ice dispenser outside so the boys can listen to the Merenge.

We do our laundry at the Kleener King a few blocks down on St. Nicholas and eat breakfast at Ethyl’s Southern Quarters while our clothes dry. Mr. Ben and his wife run the place, doing most of the cooking, while other family members wait tables and do the dishes. On our first visit Mr. Ben sat at our table a moment and asked how we were. He mostly wanted to know who we were because he had never seen us before. When Linda told him we had just moved in he welcomed us to Sugar Hill and asked that we come back again. We have eaten breakfast at Ethyl’s' every Sunday since.

In February Linda turned thirty - six and we decided to throw a party, inviting friends, colleagues and some of our neighbors. We put invitations under their doors. Agnes our neighbor across the hall and Tina, who lives below us, let us know the same day that they would be attending. I was in the middle of cooking mountains of Barbecue chicken, rice, collard greens and lasagna when the door bell rang. An elderly woman whom I had never seen before stood there.

"Good afternoon," she said leaning toward me as if to help me hear, “I am Mrs. Johnson in apartment 43. Apartment 43 upstairs. I want you to know that I feel honored to be invited to your birthday party, Linda..."

"Ma'am, I'm not Linda," I tried to tell her. She continued as if she had not heard.

"And I am terribly sorry I can't make it," and speaking a little louder, "I don't stay up very late, anymore." She chuckled and added, "Dance a dance for me tonight and, please, give this to Linda." She slipped an envelope into my hand that held a folded twenty dollar bill.

A month has passed since then. It's a Sunday afternoon in March, the very beginning of Spring. The older boys have brought the table out in front of Jose's bodega again. From my window I can hear the slap of dominoes and an occasional curse in Spanish over the Merenge. The younger boys have just finished a noisy game of football on the street. Linda's folding the laundry while I write. Harlem is not for everyone, but I like living here. Most of all , I love living with Linda.

"February", an old lover returns once a year.


February

I don’t like Februarys. Anna comes in February. She comes back like a little girl lost in the supermarket and I always take her in. She used to stay for a night or two. Now she stays just a few hours. We make love on the pullout in my studio on 181st Street, then she leaves with that same lost look. I keep the sheets on the mattress until I can’t smell her there anymore. Then I cry until late march. This is the fifth February since she went away from me and it is her fifth return. Maybe the city has hardened me, or maybe age has made reason more heavy than desire. I wait with new resolve, for Anna’s call.

Years ago, She broke the news of her trip to Puerto Rico over the phone. A business trip, she said. The family business. So casually she spoke of being away for two months, I thought. I was silent. She worries when I am silent, so she came to me. She was like a little lost girl then, too. I wanted her to speak like a lover. I wanted reassurances. Instead, she played in my hair, twisting it around her long fingers. She rubbed her nose on my brow.

“Tu no me quiere,” I said, finally.

“Don’t say that.”

“You don’t,” I said, taking her hand from my hair, “You don’t love me anymore.”

“Rosie. It’s just for two months,” she said.

“Then take me with you,” I said. Anna looked scared.

“I can’t.”

“You see? I am right then.”

“Rosie. You don’t understand my father.”

“I understand. He controls you as if you were a child.”

“He’s my Father!”

“And who am I?”

“You are my Rosie,” She said. Her voice was soft and her hand was in my hair again. “The one I love. I’ll always come back for you.” I wanted to resist her hands and lips. I wanted to throw off her arms from me. But I wanted more to believe her. I wanted more to love her and send her away with my scent in her hair and mouth.

So Anna left for Puerto Rico and her father’s business. She left to see her mother and meet the man they had chosen to marry her. I roamed through that spring, summer and fall on the bike Anna had left behind. I rode her bike until the first snowfall that year and collected maple leaves in the park to press into the letters I wrote. She had said once that maple leaves have my scent in them.

Anna has been married for three Februarys now. She has a son two Februarys old. She brings a picture every year when she returns to me. She always comes back to me, as she had promised. She returns to me in February.

Today she called as I sat in the window, watching the snow turn to gray slush beneath the car tires along 181st Street. She was out in the snow somewhere. We used to sit on a bench in the park and let the snow cover us. This made us happy once.

“Rosie! I am here! Can you see me today? I have only a short time.”

I could picture her with snow in her dark curls. She was calling from a pay phone close by, I imagined. I could hear the wet tires passing. How easy it would be to open my door to her again and warm her hands on my belly.

“No puedo, Anna,” I whispered, hardly believing my own words. “No puedo mas.”

“Que?”

I did not speak. I was afraid she might hear the tremble.

“No quiere, mi amor?”

Still I was silent. I heard the rush of traffic by her and a distant siren. She is not wearing boots, I thought. She never did. I wondered if her hair was longer and if she had grown more freckles in the sun. I wondered if she still smelled like the honey soap her mother makes and if she had ever gotten her husband’s cologne out of her coat. The phone slid wet in my hand and tasted like salt. After a long while, Anna spoke in a strange voice.

“Rosita… tu no me quiere?”

I swallowed the stone in my throat.

“No te quiero, Anna,” I said, “No mas.” The siren in the background grew louder and the fire horn blew as it passed the intersection where she stood. Maybe she said something. I didn’t hear.

I put down the phone and returned to the window. The snow turned to rain and I watched it form little rivers in the street. Soon they would wash away winter and carry spring.

"Rivers", a short story about ending and refusing to.


Rivers
(c) 2000

“I can’t”, she said. And that was that! No explanation or apology, just those two little poisonous words. Have I told you this story, Hairo? Well, Today I’ll tell it differently. Today I’ll tell you a secret. Yes, coffee. Two. Black, no sugar and light and sweet. And two bagels. One dry, one with butter and jelly.

Just two words - I can’t - brought heat beneath my cheekbones and a chill in my limbs. I could not blink or shift my weight for comfort. I stood stiff and mute, paralyzed by some venom more of my own making than hers. For I had known her answer before I had asked. I knew and yet I had imposed the question, taken advantage of a moment of softness behind her dark eyes, thinking that my surprise in this moment - my ambush! - would reap her surrender.

A moment ago we had kissed. Before that we had made love. She was still there in bed and it was morning! You laugh but this is an important point. You see, she had not gone just before midnight, as was her routine. Oh, how I hated getting up from bed to dress and lock the door behind her. But this night, for some reason, was safer than most nights to leave her bed vacant in her family’s home. She had been sure they would not notice and I had made the most of it, I remember. Now it was morning and she sat up just enough to drink the coffee I had brought her. Light and sweet. She dunked the bagel I had toasted for her. Her ritual. She didn’t mind getting jelly in her coffee. All the sweeter, she said. She was beautiful that morning, more beautiful than ever, and she looked happy to be with me.

This won’t do, Hairo, it’s much too dark. Light and sweet I said. You should know that by now. And don’t you have any more strawberry packets? She likes strawberry, not that childish grape you’re always trying to pawn off on us. Por favor, Hairo! Learn some English!

So, if there was a moment when she might say something, anything but I can’t, it was that moment. I thought this because everything in that moment, her brown legs wrapped and twisted in my sheets, the smell of her hair and sex on my face, everything about that moment said she belongs to you. I stood, naked, literally, at the foot of the bed as I said it. Perhaps I looked a bit comical, suddenly serious and yet baring all, my heavy breasts and meaty hips, my grown-in bikini line, my hair entirely parted on the wrong side of my head. Or perhaps I sounded comical. It was a question and yet I had not asked it; a command, technically, yet I was not commanding her. I was begging. Yes, it was more like begging. I had said it as softly as I could. Like this, almost a whisper, though the urgency pushed and poked at my chest and temples like a hatchling. I knew the moment to say it, to ask it, was that moment, if ever.

“Marry me,” I said. Just like that. Oh, I knew it was foolish to ask. More foolish to beg. And not just because I already knew her answer. It was foolish of me to contemplate marrying her, of all women! There wasn’t a scrap of logic in it. I had a social worker friend at the time, trained in feminist psychoanalysis. She told me my proposal was outright pathological. I insisted that being in love, from the first damn moment, is goddamned pathological and decided to end our friendship by crashing the phone down on her analytical ear. Pathological, my ass! I say we should all be that insane at least once in our lives.

Still, we were wrong for each other, Taina and I. Completely mismatched, culturally, socially, politically, blah, blah, blah. I hate talking about our differences. She was religious. I wasn’t. She was devoted to her family. I didn’t speak to mine. She didn’t know her left from right in politics. I had been a communist, selling propaganda on trains, collecting signatures for obscure candidates and causes and getting videotaped by the FBI at leftist rallies.

No, I would rather talk about how well our bodies fit together or how nice her skin looked against mine. I would rather talk about how our lips fit each other’s so perfectly. You know, some people go their whole lives without finding someone whose lips fit theirs. Sometimes, with practice, you can get mismatched lips to work more compatibility. Usually people just get used to the kisses they get and forget that there is something better. I don’t think two people can feel as one if they cannot join perfectly at the mouth. It is like plunging deep into the sea or space and realizing that your air tube is not properly screwed on tight and watching your life supply escape in tiny bubbles.

So I stood there - and I am sure I looked and sounded comical – in a cloud of my own words, now loose in the air and hanging like carbon monoxide between her painted toes and my bikini stubble.

If she was anything like me - and she was not - she might have smiled. Maybe responded with some wit, a joke. If she was anything like me she might have pointed to my bikini hair and said, “I can’t marry you until I see the uppermost portion or your legs. You may be hiding something from me in there.” Or perhaps she would have deflected the question with a touch of farce, “Mary?! I’m not Mary!! Who’s Mary??” If she were anything like me she would have said yes, even if it were foolish and illogical and even pathological. But Taina was nothing like me.

For that moment, only that moment, I wanted her to be just like me. I wanted her to forget family loyalties and the Ten Commandments and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and Revelations and her commitment to having a baby only within the Holy Sacrament of Marriage. I wanted her to forget about what it would do to her family’s name and reputation in the community if it got around that she was in love with a woman. I wanted her to forget everything for a single moment and remember only me.

But Taina’s smarter than that, or just less impulsive. She didn’t smile or let on for a second that I looked or sounded comical. Her eyes grew a darker shade of brown. She looked into her coffee cup, which she now held in both hands because her bagel was finished. She studied the coffee and bagel crumbs on the bottom and I imagined a priest gazing solemnly into the Eucharistic challis just before raising it. I don’t know why I thought this at that particular moment but I remember imagining the ringing of the bells and the echo of the priest’s incantations throughout the church. This is my body. It shall be given up for you. Do this in memory of me… I had always wondered about the bells, those special bells the altar boys rang just at the moment the challis is raised. My mother had once explained that at that moment, the moment of the bells, the Eucharist became the body of Christ and the wine became His blood. In that suspended moment as I watched Taina stare into her cup, I wished I had those damn alter boy bells so I could change her coffee and bagel crumbs into me. Little bits of pink flesh and a few teaspoons from my river, the river she parted like a miracle to escape me.

When I think of it, even the tone of her I can’t sounded like a prayer or the very end of one. Her I can’t sounded like Amen. I suppose that is exactly what her words meant. Amen. Godspeed. Adios.

No, not you, Hairo. Haven’t you been listening? Is it time yet? The nine o’clock mass should be over about now, unless Father O’Neal said it. Then it’ll be another ten minutes. Hairo, warm up her coffee a bit.

I had never asked a woman to marry me before Taina and I haven’t asked one since. That was it for me. That one love everyone is supposed to have. That one person wandering around in the world looking for you. Taina was that for me. We didn’t discuss marriage anymore after that. But we clung to each other in the months that followed, desperate for our lips to join, desperate for the air that sustained us. For us the air in the streets and in the school where we taught was toxic. The air in restaurants and movie theaters. The air in church and in the homes of our families.

Thank you, Hairo. Just half a cup, please. Poquito. Too much gives me the jitters. Yes, that’s the first of them. Well, look, it’s Palm Sunday! Keep an eye out, will you Hairo? These eyes of mine have gone to the dogs. That’s right: we're looking for a beautiful woman. The most beautiful woman on the street with the biggest palm leaf.

Anyway, on her thirty-third birthday, Taina decided to pursue marriage and her own family. I had expected it. She couldn’t wait much longer and as it was, she probably had waited too long already. We made love for the last time that night, the night of her birthday, and cried off and on between sleep.

A few months later she met someone at the wedding of a friend. He was a decent man, as men go. Hard working, church going blah, blah, blah. I don’t like to talk about him much. They had three children together. Girls. I used to see them in the park, from time to time when they were teenagers. They were the image of her, sitting awkwardly on park benches with their boyfriends, resisting and wanting to sit on the boys’ laps. Trying to hold out for as long as they could. They were good girls. But even good girls let the boys dip into their rivers eventually. And the boys fumble there like idiots with their clumsy, over grown fingers. All they feel is wet, as if that is all there is to know about the river. They never learn to listen.

It whispers, Hairo. It is always whispering. It swells and sways and it whispers. You must listen with your fingertips, Hairo. You laugh! Let me see your fingers. Well, it is a good thing you have other means. These could only hurt. So rough! But listen Hairo, come closer, this is not for everyone. There is nothing sweeter in life, Hairo, than to feel the whispers of a woman’s river, to hear them through your fingertips. Do you see this pathetic middle finger of yours? Yes, the one you use for Fuck you and to pick your teeth and nose. This chewed off, filthy little stump is your only hope, Hairo, you poor bastard.

Was that all of them? Small crowd at the nine o‘clock today. It’s the weather. Taina hates gray days. Let it rain and thunder or let the sun shine, but don’t leave it gray. She would rather board the windows for a hurricane than endure the silence of a gray day. I’m sure Florida has been good for her. Sunshine and hurricanes. I still have the post card she sent in a few years back. "We love it here in our new home," she said. "Hope you are healthy and happy. Always, T." Always what? I wondered. I read those lines over and over for days, weeks, looking for some hidden message. Some hidden meaning. Always. What a corrupting word! But then, no more corrupting than sincerely or truly. Sincerely what? Truly what? Our own language forces us to lie. We all lie, Hairo.

Taina comes back sometimes, you know. To see her family. To visit her oldest girl. Mostly around the holidays. She brings her mother to Mass. The woman is terribly bent over now. Can’t lift her head to see in front of her. Milk? No, Hairo, I say she had too much of the stuff. But Taina would agree with you.

Yes, wrap it. It’s cold. I’ll bring it to the park. The swans are back already. Two bright spots on the Hudson. I don’t know what it is about that little park of ours that is so memorable to them. What brings them back to that same inlet year after year? It’s all mud at low tide and they can’t even swim. Poor things. They just wait patiently on the rocks until the tide comes in. Then they swim and swim until it goes to mud again.

Don’t be such an idiot, Hairo. It’s not my bagels the swans remember. It’s almost impossible to throw the bread past those greedy little ducks anyway. You have to ball it up and throw it like a stone. Poor swans will hardly get a bite of this.

It’s the river they remember, Hairo. The river! You’d remember too, if you could hear it.

Here I am at my favorite beach, Herring Cove, in Provincetown, Massachustts. On this particular day, we had not wandered down to the nude end, past the rolling dunes. Provincetown was my first full frontal gay experience. I thought I would begin there, because this blog will be another "first" in a series of 'exposures'.

I'm a teacher, and every June before summer vacation, I come up with an unreasonable list of things to do. One of those things this summer was to post some of my stories on the Net. My stories have been sitting in a box in our closet since my partner and I moved to Florida from New York City three years ago.Talk about irony! I'm out in just about every area of my life and my quasi-autobiographical stories are tucked away in a closet. So my stories are on my summer "to do" list. Here is the first of a series, approriately titled "Tasting the Ocean".

Tasting the Ocean

I’m on the ten-thirty Amtrak to Springfield and I’m thinking about my mother, my lover and that young woman in my writing class years ago whose name I can’t remember but whose face I’ll never forget. I’ll call her Bret. I wouldn’t recognize Bret in the street if I saw her again. Even now as I try to remember, I can only recall that frozen expression of embarrassment and repulsion when I told her where I grew up.

It’s Labor Day weekend and I have no business squeezing in a visit to Springfield before the New York public schools open on Tuesday. I should be home doing laundry, checking my wardrobe, packing books and supplies for my classroom. I should be grocery shopping so I can pack a lunch every day. But Mom was pretty insistent. She even paid for my train ticket. She is still disappointed that I am only staying until Sunday night. I lied and told her the school custodian was coming in especially for me on Monday to open my class so I could set up.

I was supposed to be on the train at seven this morning. That would have given Mom and I four more hours to spend together. But there was no way I was going to get up at five and leave Taina lying there in my bed. No way in hell.

Taina is my lover though almost no one knows that. She’s not gay, really. She’s just in love with me. Our colleagues, the other teachers at PS 150, have no idea that Taina and I secretly meet at my place a few afternoons a week to feed my cat, Smokie, eat my pasta, watch my TV and make love in my bed. I've been out since I was a teenager, but I've never been here.

I moved out with Jolene, my first lover, when I was eighteen. We lived in a dilapidated tenement across from the oil company in downtown Sringfield and split the cost of a 1968 Mustang. What I loved most about Jolene was the little space between her two front teeth and the way her legs and ass looked in corduroys. She always wore corduroys. After only five months, I put her bags out on our rickety porch and watched her drive off with my half of the car. A Leanese woman lived below me with her five children. Sometimes in the evenings, when I was hungry and penniless, I walked by her screen door, breathing in the smell of fresh flat bread and stewed meat.If she saw me, she invited me in and fed me. I didn't understand most of what she said - we communicated with nods and toothy smiles. Now as I think of it, I remember the curves of her hands and face more clearly than Jolene's.

I met Carol, a nursing student at Springfield Hospital. I was working my way through college as a messenger in the hospital, carrying blood, urine, feces and spit to the lab, sometimes an amputated leg or tumor from the O.R . Carol and I spent a long time just saying Hi as we passed in the halls. I practiced witty comments in the elevator when I was called to her floor. Carol introduced me to Provincetown, cocaine, and making love in the woods. I fell crazy for Carol. She was my only “forever girl”. The one. I didn’t notice she was sleeping with my best friend until I smelled Celeste’s perfume on our pillows. I told Carol I was leaving her but I stayed. The day before I was to move out, she had come into the bathroom while I was furiously scrubbing the tub. Everything was in boxes. I had gone into the bathroom to collect my shampoo and noticed the dirty ring. Carol watched me scrub for a minute.

"We don’t have to do this, you know,” she said. So, just like that, I stayed. But all I wanted to do was punish her. I couldn’t make love to her anymore and wouldn’t let her touch me. When she finally left, I took up running. I started feeling better when I could run five miles a day, but it would take almost twenty years to fall crazy again. Carol lives in the Berkshires now, with her partner and their three children.

Terri was loyal and sweet and had constellations of freckles across her cheeks. I made chicken soup for her on our first date because she had a sniffle on the phone. That Easter she got a speeding ticket for trying to deliver an Easter Basket to my door before I woke up. Terri was a self-taught auto mechanic. She drove a 78 Chevy Malibu and did all the engine work herself. She worked in an auto parts store and liked to show up at my door in her mechanics shirt and NAPA hat. I liked it, too. Terri’s idea of romancing me was lip singing to AC/DC. I liked that, too. She joined the Air Force to get out of her dead end job and to learn how to fix jet engines. While Terri was in boot camp, I met Dan and decided to try going straight one last time. Now Terri manages an auto parts store and lives with her lover just outside Springfield. They’ve been together for fifteen years.

Jeannine was a Mid-western, middle class, blue-eyed, blond from Illinois. She had played volleyball for Iowa State, fallen in love with her coach and come to Massachusetts. She stayed in Springfield even after the woman left her for someone new. She was managing a group home for the same agency that ran the detention center where I taught. We met at the copy machine in the central office. I was copying The Color Purple cover to cover for my students. She said she didn’t mind waiting. Jeannine had never slept with a man in her life and was proud of her 100% lesbian status. She had never bounced a check, either. I was as baffled by her clarity as she was by my confusion. She wanted to help me balance my life and my checkbook. I let her try for four years, then I became a communist and left her for politics, New York City and Lois.

Lois had come to Springfield representing a leftist presidential candidate and stood out in front of the Edwards Food Warehouse to collect signatures and spare change. She kept a coffee can on her card table with the newspapers and flyers she handed out. I knew she was a communist the first time we spoke but I kept coming back to her table even when I didn’t need anything at Edwards. When she went back to New York, I packed up and followed her like a puppy.

Lois had a seething sort of passion I couldn’t stay away from. We drank Stoli all night and talked politics. Sometime during the night, she would take my hand, made a fist with it and put it inside her. She had lots of girlfriends but I didn’t care. I didn’t mind waiting weeks to spend a night with her. Then Lois got cancer. She went back to Massachusetts for surgery and when she returned months later, she was through with politics and girlfriends. She wanted monogamy and a bourgeois life. I wanted neither. Lois works on Wall Street now and lives in the Village.

Linda was beautiful, brown, sweet and spoiled. She was the one I had finally settled down with. She was the one who could talk me through my four in the morning panic attacks and whip open the shades on afternoons when I sat in my own gloom. We were together long enough to be each other’s beneficiary. We were a mature, drama free couple, the couple other couples hang their hopes on. Our relationship, like the water that once seduced an unsinkable captain, was as smooth as a pond. But I longed to taste the salty, foamy swells of the ocean. Taina was my iceberg.

So, I’m in love. Again. It feels just as good as it did when I was twenty. But I’m forty. I’m softer and thicker in most places now. My breasts hang lower in the mirror and I’ve got these circles under my eyes that have nothing to do with a lack of sleep. My hair is thinner and turning gray. But Taina looks at me and says, “I love your eyes and I love your lips and I love your smile and I love this ass and these breasts.” Then she kisses me deep and long and I know she means it. I watch her watch me and I wonder what the hell she sees.

Taina is beautiful. Not cute. Not pretty. She’s a beauty. Men get a little crazy around her. Fall all over themselves waiting on her and letting her pass them in line or in traffic. The Spanish cab drivers always ask if she’s married. When she says no, they propose to her. Now she tells them she has a boyfriend. Sometimes I’m sitting right next to her in the back seat of the cab when she says this. She slides her hand over to mine and gives it a squeeze. I usually look out the window, study the East River or something. I don’t want her to see my face and see that I’m afraid, afraid she’s running out of excuses and we’re running out of time.

So I didn’t get up at five this morning to get on the seven o’clock train in order to spend a few more hours with my mother. I wanted to spend it with Taina. I wanted to wake up first like I always do and watch her sleep. I wanted to sneak into the bathroom and brush my teeth before that first kiss. Bring her coffee and see her sleepy smile. I wanted to slip my fingers into her dampness and slide around the sound of my “Good Morning.” Yes. I wanted to squeeze out every minute before she noticed the time and I had to watch as the realization that she should be somewhere else peeled her face away and left someone there I did not recognize, and no longer recognized me.

“Is that the time? It’s not fast? I’m late! I have to go. They’ll be looking for me. Why didn’t you tell me the time? You never tell me the time. You know I have to leave. Don’t you understand that? Where are my underpants? I can’t find them. No, I don’t want more coffee. Honey, please, I have to go. Is it hot in here? I’m getting a hot flash. I need air. I can’t find my shoes. Ay! I stepped on Smokie! Call me a cab. I have to go right now. I love you. Good-Bye.”

I stand barefoot and mute in the maelstrom, watching her scrub me off her new face and into my bathroom sink. I watch her apply lipstick and fix her long black hair in the mirror. She straightens her posture and gives one last look before leaving, one last check-over. Profile and front. I wonder if she’s checking for a trace, the smallest detectable trace of me hiding in a corner of her eyes or in the fuzziness of her earlobes, along the curve of her lips or under the mole on her chin. She leaves in a blur and I stand still beneath the cloud of her perfume until it settles on my skin.

The train glides through Greenwich, Connecticut, and I study the boats docked at the marina. I secretly make plans to retire on one of them. Alone on a boat, writing and drifting and smelling the ocean. I make a mental note to take sailing lessons next summer. When the train passes Danbury, I remember that job offer from the Danbury Schools. I had told the woman in the superintendent’s office that I wasn’t ready to relocate. She had asked, scolding me slightly for my indecision, that I call them when I was sure.

Mom was disappointed. She wants me closer to home. She thinks I should get the hell out of New York before some crazy terrorist drops a bomb on it. I had considered leaving right after Linda and I split. The city was getting to me. My teaching job was thankless and boring. My mother, sensing my weakness, began to hover and circle. She called all the time, usually after she had had a few glasses of wine, her voice noticeably an octave higher. Why not come up to Massachusetts again and look at property up here? Why not get a job in Connecticut? Teachers get paid so much more there. Wouldn’t it be nice to spend more time with your nieces and nephews? She had already volunteered me to my sister who was desperate for babysitters. It took a month or two before I came to my senses: I would stay in New York. Taina was there.

The truth is, I don’t like going back. I get nervous and cranky before leaving and always return a little depressed. My mother says I need to come to Springfield to relax, get away from the hustle and bustle of the city.

“You don’t have this in New York,” she says, inevitably, and points out the tree-lined view of her back yard from the patio where I spend most of my time during these visits. It’s a new patio. She and Dave, her new husband, had it built on to the back of the house. My mother likes to feed birds and her latest pleasure is waiting for the humming birds to feed from her little nectar feeder, hanging over the patio a few feet from where I sit.

The back yard looks almost the same as it did when I was growing up. There’s a little more grass now and a birdbath sits in the spot where I used to practice my soccer kicks. The shed still stands in the corner of the lot, away from the house. It used to be a chicken coop. My father built it one summer and then went out and bought a hundred little chicks to live in it. My sisters and I were beside ourselves with excitement. We studied the little chicks as they grew and learned the pecking order of the coop. We got attached to one scrawny chicken that lived a tormented life at the very bottom of that order. When my father killed it and had my mother cook it for dinner, we sat around the dinner table and cried. We didn’t eat a thing, not even our mashed potatoes. That winter all the chickens got sick and had to be destroyed. My father had not known how to build a proper coop. The chickens had died from their own filth.

My father decided chickens were too much work anyway and built rabbit cages along the side of the old coop. We sold bunnies to pet stores and the fattened adult rabbits to the Portuguese men who came for them on Saturday afternoons. The money we made didn’t cover the cost of rabbit pellets and hay so my father gave up on rabbits.

After a while, he bought a truck with a plow and kept it parked in the back yard, next to the old chicken coop and rabbit cages. The plow rested on a few cinder blocks. He got a permit for the dump and started cleaning out basements and cellars. Anything he thought he could sell, he brought home. We had a yard sale on our front lawn every weekend for six months. We took turns watching the lampshades, old dishes and furniture, putting our coins and dollar bills in an old Crisco can. In winter, my father attached the plow to the front of the truck and plowed store parking lots. I would ride shotgun to wipe the windshield and snap the ice off the wipers.

My mother walks five miles a day and I join her on my visits. She walks in the cemetery where my father is buried. It’s a nice cemetery, no tombstones, just stone and brass markers in the grass. She parks her car next to the little man-made pond and the grounds keepers wave as we pass. My mother walks fast, her arms swinging as our conversation moves from my sister’s second failed marriage to my thirty-six year old brother’s attachment to the local club scene. Somehow my mother tucks in the idea that everything might be better around here if I lived closer. On our last lap around the cemetery, I stop at my father’s grave. My sisters and I had requested that a fisherman in a boat be carved in the stone. Fishing had been the one thing my father had stuck to. Ocean fishing. I wipe the dirt out of the grooves.

The train is pulling out of the Windsor Locks station and I’ve got fifteen minutes before arrival. The Springfield train station is located on Lyman Street downtown. Lyman Street was the whore street years ago. They’ve moved the prostitutes out to the edge of the city now, part of the downtown revitalization project. I think of that train station and I think of Bret.

Bret was one of those artsy writers. She wore black all the time and tiny fashionable glasses. She looked good in a baret and had a small mouth, which always seemed to be puckered. Bret was smarter than she was talented and wrote shallow stories with flowery vocabulary. I was both attracted and intimidated. Bret had written a story for class about visiting her estranged father in Vermont. Her frumpy, no class, hillbilly father. Everything in the tone of her story shouted I am nothing like him! I am nothing like my father! She had traveled from New York City on the Amtrack and stopped in a town called Springfield. It was a dead town, she wrote. The women had teased hair and dead eyes. There were railroad tracks everywhere. It was a gray, ugly town with gray, ugly people. She couldn’t understand, she mused, how such a place could sustain life.

My critique was vague. I commented on the pace of the story and the sharp tone of the narrator. But after class, on our way out into the darkening Manhattan skyline, I asked as casually as I could, “Was that Springfield, Massachusetts, by the way?”

“Yes!” Bret chimed. She looked impressed that I was familiar with such an obscure place and tilted her head in a way that allowed the street lamp to backlight her face. “Have you been there?” she asked, emphasizing been like an evangelist underscores sin. She stepped closer and her perfume hovered like commiseration on my cheek. I thought of Soup and Burg, a quiet little coffee place two blocks up and imagined us in a little squeaky booth, Bret leaning toward me, smiling, charmed by some witty quote I had remembered or some lie about having read everything Borges had ever written -

“Yes,” I said, and curled my toes, “I grew up there.”

That’s when her faced changed. I stood on the sidewalk and watched it change, watched her eyes blink behind their tiny lenses. I wanted to stop her sputtering apology. I wanted to curse her feet for stepping away. I thought of telling her I agreed with everything she had said about the place. But it was too late. Her face had changed. I belonged as much to her father now as I belonged to my own.

We were traveling home in opposite directions, she on the train and me on the bus, and were both glad for a reason to part ways there. I haven’t seen Bret since and only think of her now when I travel back to Springfield.

So today I think of Bret and I try to remember what her face looked like before she knew. I close my eyes and try to recover that perfumed moment under the street light, but all I see is the moment after, when her face peeled away from me, peeled away like Taina's did this morning.