57. Who Do They Talk To?

 

I don’t know whether Mrs. Littington knows about the man whose body was found in the basement. The body with my name. Maybe the lady whose name I never knew told her. Then again, I suspect not. Why would they begin speaking now? But you never know what circumstances will prompt.

There’s no reason—I hope—for either of them to talk to me now. I’d had a close call on the way to the bathroom when the lady whose name I never knew followed me—or so I thought. For sure, she’d turn the glance she caught of me into a cross-examination. When you’re a kid on this block, it seems that adults are always doing that to you—even the ones who’d never talk to you, or let you talk to them, under any other conditions.

Even if they know, it won’t matter. Or so I hope. Who’s Mrs. Littington going to tell, anyway. Wherever she’s going, I’m sure there’s no one to whom any of this’ll matter. As for the other woman: With mother gone, who can she talk to? I don’t think she gets out—of this block—much; she never did. What she’s wearing now looks like one of those housedresses she always wore, only in black.

Shehasn’t angled her head toward Mrs. Littington the way she did with mother. I’d never see her actually turn her eyes, her nose, her mouth, in the direction of mother. But I could always tell when she was turning her attention toward mother, when she was about to speak as soon as I couldn’t hear.

I’m hoping she doesn’t, for the first time (at least to my knowledge), do the same with Mrs. Littington. They’d’ve had at least one common topic—mother—for gossip or whatever. And if they talked about her, I imagine they’d talk about me, whether or not they realized I was in the room with them, not in that cellar on that last cold afternoon before summer, when the police found the body to which they’d attach my name—my former name.

Hopefully, I won’t have another close encounter today. I never could’ve explained myself to anyone on this block when I was living here—at least, not in any way that they could hear. Then again, I never could’ve told them anything they’d wanted to know. Nothing’s changed.: I know, therefore I can’t say.

Could they’ve recognized me, even after all those years and all the changes? Of course, they say some things never change. Once, by chance, I met a friend of Vivian’s in a café, far away from this block or her town. “I recognize you from someplace. Your eyes…” Her name flashed into my mind, but of course I couldn’t say it. I pretended to ignore her, and she left.

56. Identification

At least I haven’t seen any cops. Maybe it wouldn’t matter if I did. Could they make a positive ID of me? They couldn’t with that body in the basement; how could they identify a living person? Especially if that person’s changed since the police started searching?

Not that they have any reason for stopping or questioning me. Not really. Then again, the cops, especially the ones around here, know how to extract confessions from mouths that never had to hold secrets. Vivian used to talk about the “highway blues,” when an officer could tail you, pull up alongside you and pull you over even though you hadn’t gone over the speed limit or in the wrong lane, and somehow you’d do something—you couldn’t deny it—and the officer would write a summons. Really, officer, I didn’t kill anyone. Especially not mother. Of course not. I hadn’t even been on the block at the time she died—or when the body in the basement gave up its last. Everybody—at least the woman whose name I never knew—knows that. I hadn’t been here in years. How many? Well, gee, officer, I’m not quite sure. So much has happened and well, you know how time flies.

But they’re not here now. Just me, Mrs. Litttington, the woman whose name I never knew—and mother’s body, in the casket.

54. Omerta

 

The official reports called Adam’s death a suicide. Given the circumstances under which he was found, it wouldn’t—couldn’t—‘ve been ruled any other way. The police department, the medical examiner and others involved in the case would therefore not be required to investigate any further. And there wasn’t any reason for them to do so: They found no more physical evidence and after questioning people on the block—including mother and Mrs. Littington—they probably didn’t know any more about Adam, or why he filled his apartment with cooking gas.

The people of this block could stop any questioning or discussion of any incident—such as Adam’s death—even faster than the officials of the city or state ever could. Mother or the nuns—and later, the teachers—always told me I asked too many questions. I hadn’t seen him for several months—an era, at that time in my life—before the police marked off that front stoop with their orange bands.

Mother, who’d had more troubles than I’d realized then, said it’s something she could’ve done, but she could only think of those she’d leave behind. I’m sure other women on this block felt the same way. Sister Elizabeth said that in times of trouble everyone has a patron saint—and God. But what if…She wouldn’t say any more about it and would upbraid my mother for her child’s “morbid curiosity.”

Snow covered the stoop; it cleared away. The stoop, then the house, were painted over, but nobody moved in. Everybody, it seemed, could tell when I was going to ask about Adam, about what happened that night before Christmas Eve, when the wind that carried the snow and whispered its hissing admonition to close one’s eyes and leave the darkness under blankets, under layers of snow.

The sun had already disappeared behind heavy veils of clouds; the full moon—it was so bright I could sit next to the window in my room and read by it—illuminated the last clear sky I could remember seeing for a long time afterward.

During the spring that followed, it seemed that the woman whose name I never knew was taking more care than usual to keep her bushes from growing up over her flowers, or the sidewalk. Sunny days were full of overpowering glare we were used to seeing only on those summer days when people stayed inside their houses or in shade.

Out in the sun on such a day, you could exhale and it would feel like wind from the surface of the sun rushing back at your face. And the clouds, and even the rain, seized the flaking, peeling bricks and stained and tarnished metal sheets of the houses and bound them in a thick gray haze that seemed still only because the people of this block hadn’t noticed—or had forgotten—when it came and went.

Sister Elizabeth lost patience she never had and slapped me across the face for “thinking about evil, selfish deeds” and not keeping my mind on the day’s lesson. What did I care about base six numeral systems—I think that’s what she was teaching—anyway? What did that have to do with Adam or mother or me or anyone else on the block? About as much as patron saints had to do with Adam, I thought. Would he’ve been alive had he known what a polynomial or a declension was? Would any of the stuff they were teaching’ve made my father—whom I didn’t know, or rather, didn’t want to know—care enough to stay with me and mother, or made him able to help us, or at least not to hurt us?

Catechism, mathematics, all those subjects whose names come from languages nobody on this block spoke or would care to speak—What good would those things do him, me, mother, anybody? But mother still insisted I go to school and learn. She responded to my protests that “you never needed that stuff” with the same glancing glare she gave whenever I mentioned Adam or asked about the ones—almost always teenaged boys and men—whom I saw one day and were gone another.

Through that year, the sun glared more blindingly and clouds grew heavier and more impenetrable like secrets. The haze between them draped windows and doors all over this block.

Nobody wanted to hear the stories Adam told me, and after his death mother and Sister Elizabeth and everyone else wanted me to forget them. The cops’d asked mother, Mrs. Littington, the woman whose name I never knew—everyone, it seemed, except me—what they knew about Adam. At first, I’d thought they skipped me only because of my age: They didn’t ask the few other kids on this block, either.

Then again, the cops were like the adults on this block and the teachers in one way: If you were a kid, they’d ask you questions only if they thought you’d done something wrong, or knew who did. That is to say, they’d ask if they thought you could give the answers they wanted to hear. Certainly, I couldn’t’ve told them any more than they already knew about the circumstances of that night Adam died. By the same token, I’m sure they weren’t ready to hear me recount the stories he told me, any more than they’d have any use for one inescapable fact: The adults of this block were speaking in the same furtive, clipped tones—and were scolding me and other children into silence in the same ways—as they did after any death or other tragedy or mishap the people of this block would deny or try to wash away.

51. From The Ground

 

Even if nobody here recognizes me, even if none of them recall me from the days when I lived on this block, I’ve got to get away as soon as mother’s in the cemetery. She’s not going to be buried in the plots at either end of this neighborhood; nobody—at least nobody from this block—‘s been buried in them for a long time.

They all ended up under a lawn about an hour and a half’s drive away from here. White slabs blister the ground; on a bright summer day you have to squint to read them. Each one’s the same: name, date of birth, date of death. The only differences are that some slabs have crosses carved into them between the names and dates, while others’ names and dates are separated by the Magden David. If you grew up on this block, everybody you knew was Jewish or Catholic. You realized there were “Protestants;” later, Presbyterians and Baptists and such: all those Christians separated and converged, never speaking to each other unless forced to do so. Like the Hasidic and the Orthodox and Reformed Jews: If you grew up on this block, those are the distinctions you make between people.

And if I’d ended up in that graveyard, as mother soon will, they’d consider me Catholic, like her. It wouldn’t matter, really, how or where I died: Whether the blood was in my crotch or on my hands, it would be the same. Nor would it matter that she didn’t make me kneel next to my bed and pray every night, or even that she said nothing even though she knew that I’d stopped attending church not long after she ran out of money to send me to Catholic school.

But what would they make of me now? The cemetery isn’t religious, at least to my knowledge. It’s not like one of those Orthodox cemeteries that won’t take you if you get tattooed or pierced, or one of those Catholic burial grounds that doesn’t allow anyone in who’s “died in sin.” I never understood how they defined that one—after all, people who’ve killed are allowed in.

Maybe that’s what spooks people about cemeteries. The bones and flesh, if they aren’t already dust, are on their way to becoming that. They can’t hurt anyone. Actually, that’s the reason I never felt uncomfortable when I was alone with the tombstones at night. Maybe the “voices” people claim to hear, or the specters or whatever they claim to see, escaped like bottled genies from the ones who’ve been killed by the ones whose names and dates are etched in marble or granite.

Every cemetery, as best as I can tell, covers, with a blanket of amnesia, at least one person who’s killed someone else. Of course some of the killers were themselves murdered, and a person who doesn’t kill isn’t necessarily more innocent or noble than one who does.

Under some grassy plot, under some rocky piece of ground, in a vault—somewhere—lie what remains, if anything, of Adam. Wherever it is, I know it’s not a Catholic or Jewish cemetery. For all I know, he might be in the same ground as Adolph Eichmann or Martin Bormann. Actually, I know he’s sharing the same ground with his killers: It doesn’t matter if he’s in Jerusalem or Cracow or the same state as this block. He must be; he ran from Bergen-Belsen and ended up—on this block.

I started here. Adam ended up here. Mother started and ended here. For a long time, I thought life was one of those board games you played as a kid with other kids. In some of those games, you end up some place different from where you started. In others, the idea is to get back to the start. And some players, due to an unlucky roll of the dice or draw of the cards, don’t get much past the start or always end up there.

I know what I must—or at least want—to do: get away, as soon as possible. But I had no more choice, really, about coming back today than I did about which body I had when I was born. Maybe a similar fate will determine whether I get away. I hope not.

I know I must get away—at least to continue my life and culminate my transformation. But there is no other reason why I’m obligated to move: As far as I know, there’s no law of nature or psychology that says so. Not that I know much about such things. I only know that I must, only for the vision of myself to which I’ve become acquainted, and of which I’ve learned, through some process I can’t name.

People look like they’ve been doing double-takes, but no one’s asked me. That confusion—which could aid my escape or get me killed—is also, at least in part, a matter of fate.

My name—take that back, the name I had when I lived on this block—is on a tombstone in one of the cemeteries. This is not a metaphor: I saw it on my way here. My former name, a date of birth, a date of death—whose? The former, that of the person who carried that name. The latter, the date someone calculated after the body was examined, was ID’d—by whom? August 4, 1967- June 18, 1992.

Someone—who avoided indictment for a daughter’s murder, according to some people, only through a spouse’s ability to pay—once said, “Two people know who killed her: the killer and somebody the killer confided to.” Funny, how she could’ve been talking about that person whose tombstone has my former name and my date of birth etched into it. Not only is there the confider and confidant; there is someone who knew that body was older than the person who had my old name would’ve been on the date of death. Or that he would’ve had no more reason to be on the block than I would’ve had—or so it seemed.

Stranger still, no one seem have any record or recollection of who ID’d that body, even though it wasn’t so many years ago, not really. In fact, no one’s ever said how the cops or the coroner or whoever connected—pieced together—the name and body. Was it the wallet, the driver’s license, what? They don’t know when he showed up here, on this block, or why. And I can’t say how he ended up in the particular cemetery in which he’s buried.

And here’s something else nobody talks about openly, I’m sure (and, I’m equally sure, kids get slapped when they ask about it): They found the body, bled and bloated, on the concrete floor eight feet below the house. Lying on his side, hands zip-tied behind his back, gray duct tape over his mouth. And a clotted gash where his penis had been. That detail spread, the way any other truth somebody doesn’t want the children to know spreads through the neighborhood: by word of mouth. Except, nobody knows where the first kid who knew the story heard it.

I’m sure that she knew everything I’m recalling now. But she never said so. In fact, knowing her, I don’t know who, if anybody, she told. The lady whose name I never knew, maybe. And perhaps someone else. But not the police, I’m sure. I’ll bet she denied knowing who might’ve killed him, or his reasons for doing it.

And mother was one of those people nobody questioned—at least not openly. Nor would she question me, or anyone else, about that body in the basement. She never asked whether I was here or anywhere else near this block at the time he was killed. She didn’t have to; she just knew. And she’d’ve never told, at least anybody who’d want to know.

Some people would say she’s responsible for letting the killer get away. Not that they’d necessarily want the killer to be punished,  at least not much. A few people might’ve missed him—a few, but not many. Others who knew him probably cared about him the way his killer did.

So now mother’s going to that field out in the country, with soldiers and sailors and their wives and children. Her father’s there. I don’t know whether he was in “The War”—the one Adam mentioned —or any other. Mother didn’t talk about such things. And she won’t have to, ever. Hopefully, after she’s buried, I won’t have to either.

50. More Stories

 

I suppose mother’d’ve wanted this. Or at least she wouldn’t’ve railed against it. But me, a part of me still wants to rescue her from it, to protect her against it.

She wasn’t one to protest things as they are, or at least as she knew them. If anybody knew what hypocrites, criminals and pure-and-simple liars the priests and nuns were—and are—it was she. That some of them could collect money and spend it on everybody and everything but the poor and broken—she knew—she told me herself before I left this block. It didn’t—at least, I didn’t think it did—surprise her, years after the fact, when I told her that a priest tipped my hand when I poured wine into his chalice during mass or that in the vestibule behind the altar he insisted that I—and he helped me—remove more than my surplice and cassock I, like the other altar boys, wore over my school uniform when I was on the altar. Well, I didn’t hear surprise in her voice anyway—I told her over the phone, months after I left. I’d stayed in so many places by then that I can’t remember now where I was when I made that call.

I’m sure she also knew that some took their vows of celibacy no more seriously than they took their vows of poverty. Madge, whom I’d gotten to know about the time I realized that I’d sleep with a man only for money or in self-defense, told me about the convent she left. “They’re all alike,” she said. As a noviate, she’d also taken the vow of silence, and the Mother Superior enforced it, she said, “for your own good.”

If mother hadn’t known about such things, surely she wouldn’t’ve been surprised to find out. After all, what woman doesn’t know that all bonds that hold any community—whether a family, convent, school, church or any other organization I know of—all consist of some unspoken, unwritten code of silence enforced by economics, blackmail and/or outright physical force? Just about every woman—I include mother; I include her mother and their friends, and now I will include myself—has, at some time in her life, acquiesced to those codes, out of habit or necessity, or because she was unaware of any other option.

The men—or the women who’ve joined forces with them—who coerce, blackmail, beat or starve their daughters, sisters, wives and mothers—either haven’t any idea of what they’re doing or see it as part of their entitlement, their very existence. Even the most consciously benevolent of them fall into their habits around women and girls, and with their students, employees, parishioners and other charges.

Mother had to’ve known this. Why else would she’ve raised me only with occasional help from her mother, with no men anywhere in sight? But then again, she made no attempt—perhaps she wasn’t capable of such a thing—to find a more worthy man, or to turn the man who impregnated her with me into my father. Nor did she stray very far from the church. True, she went only on special holidays or when she felt the need to light a candle and say a prayer for someone, for something she hoped for. And, as I’ve said before, she sent me to Catholic school for as long as she could afford it. The church wasn’t willing to help the “bastard child” of a single woman. But as long as he paid, or someone paid, I was allowed to stay in their school.

And for all that she complained about how meaningless such things are, she arranged for a wake and funeral as traditional as this one for her own mother. I don’t think she’d’ve wanted it any other way, hypocrites and all.

But once I left this block, she never talked to me about church, unless I mentioned the things I’ve been thinking about. She never used that stale argument I heard from others: “Well, church is like anything else. Some people are good and some people abuse it.” Others—someone else—said that. But not mother.

But even after I realized there are hypocrites everywhere—that one was in bed with me, lying with another—I still hated the church and its ceremonies. Even after I learned how employers use sex and other forms of extortion in much the same ways as priests and teachers do, I still despised them, it, all of them, all of it.

Mother may’ve thought this frivolous but I can’t stand to hear any living being say “thee,” “thy” or “thou,” even in prayer. In fact, I can’t stand the “th” sound: It sounds like the fanning of a flame that would otherwise die, and should, after it’s burned the house and killed all the innocents in it. I never could stand that kind of pompous artificiality that echoes voices that have authority only because they’re repeated. I mean, there’s just no reason—at least no reason that I can see—to say what doesn’t need to be said to make meanings out of things that aren’t there.

In one of the last classes I attended, the teacher was quizzing us on a book with this sentence in it: There be the woods of Lo’thlrien…Let us hasten. If those words had been spoken or written by someone in King Arthur’s court, I could understand. But the person who wrote them had been a professor of the teacher who assigned it. That teacher—I’m forgetting his name now—was probably mother’s age, so the professor who hastened him him to the woods was—what, mother’s age, maybe a few years older. But not ancient or—What did he call it?—medieval.

I wonder if that teacher advised the person who wanted use The Village People’s In The Navy as a recruitment song. Maybe he’s the one who told Reagan to use Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA for his Presidential campaign. While neither of those songs has much to do with me or mother, they—especially Bruce’s lament—are at least relatable to some people who have lived and died on, or fled or been pulled away from, this block.

And all the prayers, epitaphs, eulogies and such have no more to do with mother’s life than the opening line of Tale of Two Cities. Not the best of times, not the worst of times. Only this moment. No heaven, no hell; no appeals to get her into one or keep her out of the other mean anything now. Only now—this moment—does. It’s all she had; it’s all I have; it’s all either or all of us could ever have.

In this moment, in any moment, I breathe, I wake, I wash, I dress, I drink, I eat, I leave, I come back, I leave again, I breathe, I hurt, I cry, I sleep, I wake again, I sleep again, one more time, for the last time. Any virtue some priest some other mourner, could attribute to mother means about as much as anything they could attach to me or anyone else. She lives; she’s dead. She died; she’s here now, on this block, where she and I began.

At least neither Mrs. Littington nor the lady whose name I never knew are trying to make a hero of her now. I won’t, either. Nor, do I suspect, will anyone else here—except for the priest who pleads some cause that didn’t need to be made before God or any living being. No one has to justify her life, her death or the passage between them any more—and I’ve only just understood this—than I have any obligation to explain the transition I’ve been making: the one whose outcome mother won’t witness. But then again, she doesn’t have to. I am the life she bore into this world—onto this block—and I’m here now as she’s leaving. And so are the others. They can talk, if they choose, about drinking each other’s coffee or what their kids and hers have become or gone to. But it all matters now about as much as the priest’s appeals to that to which he’s pledged his belief and fealty, or about as much as any story I can tell about the boy who confined me inside my body back before it’d ever left this block.

After today, I will never be able to speak of that one as a boy, or myself as a man, again. Nor can I tell anyone about the woman I will become, and the laws of this state will recognize, if I survive the operation.

48, What They Knew

 

Some things are the same everywhere. Including here. People’re always afraid of what’s not there, or here. And then—guess what?—it happens.

They’re all afraid we’ll leave: the ones who’ve no reason, no wish, to stay—even the ones who have to leave if they want to continue living at all. Yet there’s always a sense of betrayal—nobody wants to know you—in fact, some may even want to kill you—once you’ve left.

So we go. Anyone with any sense—like mother—doesn’t try to bring us back. She may’ve hoped for my return at one time, just maybe, but I think she knew it’d happen. Did she know what I’d done? Somehow I think she must’ve. How could she not’ve? How could anyone, including (especially) that woman whose name I never knew, not know? Somehow I guess Mrs. Littington knew, too. Or at least I expect that if she’d found out, it wouldn’t surprise her. Now would Adam’ve been shocked, I think.

Actually, mother understood that what’d been done to me was enough reason to leave. So would the things I’d witnessed or learned about. Like Adam’s death. If there’s any sort of existence after this one, and whoever’s there can, or wants to, look at this planet again, how could he not understand? After all, I think he wanted to get off this block as much as he wanted anything else, save perhaps for getting away from Bergen-Belsen.

And mother: If the heaven she believed in actually exists, she’s going there. Not because she was any more virtuous than anyone else—well, maybe she was, because for all that she might’ve said to the woman whose name I never knew, I’m sure she kept as many secrets as anyone I’ve ever known. If I know anything about the man who fathered me, or anybody else, it wasn’t because she told me. It’s because she knew.

But really, how could she not’ve known about the murder? Me and the murderer. Other people’ve been killed on this block, but that killing was the one nobody could deny they knew about. Not even mother. And especially not me.

I know this much: that none of the information. save for the date of death, was correct on the crime report, or on the death certificate. Some of the information was more or less accurate, like the time of death. They came upon a figure based on the amount of time it takes someone to bleed to death, or by some such method of computation. But the rest of the information—the name, the date of birth—none of it has anything to do with the person it was supposed to identify.

44. Another Season

Perhaps that winter wasn’t any longer or colder than any of the others. Or it could be that people here needed to remember it that way. It’s amazing, the things people try to explain with it.

And it seems everyone has such a season. For my grandmother, it began the day her son—the brother (at least, I assume he was) mother never talked about, the uncle I never met—was born. I heard about him from my grandmother, and from other people. He died too young and far away, they said. He and a bunch of young men who died with him were memorialized, which is not to say remembered, with stones far away from this block.

What little that’s been recorded about his life didn’t include that winter, which had already begun by the time he was born and didn’t end—if it ever did—until some time long after the telegram, and what remained of him, came from Korea.

It didn’t end, either, when Adam bolted from that camp he would never name. (As best as I’ve been able to tell, it was Bergen-Belsen. What value does a name have, anyway, except that you can attach it to another name?) If there was a respite, it may’ve been been during the months he spent in a half-timber house far from any town the Allies or Nazis thought to be worth taking. Wind and snow swirled outside. It didn’t end when he got to this block.

In the logic of the TV programs I used to see and most movies and the novels they made us read in school, it somehow made perfect sense that Adam killed himself on the night before Christmas Eve. All the plot ingredients were there for preparation and consumption: impending holidays, a man alone who no longer believes (if he ever did) in God, or the gods—in other words, the hope for an end to suffering and defeat, and the promise that nothing would ever prolong his or any man or woman’s wait for it.

Of course, the logic of entertainment (however exalted its medium may be) has as much to do with life on this block as rises or falls in the exchange rate between the dollar and currencies or bars of gold no one on this block has ever seen. That logic has influenced life, or the liberty of anyone to pursue any pleasure to be derived from it, about as much as the life and death of an uncle I never met on some nameless hill in a country nobody on this block would’ve ever heard of otherwise. Why, his death couldn’t even end the winter my grandmother always talked about! It was hard; it was cold; it was coming and there was nothing anybody could do about it, she said.

In stories—like the ones I had to read for school—mourning ends when spring begins. If that were so, it’d make perfect sense that I was at mother’s funeral as winter draws near. So it’s also make sense Adam died on the night before Christmas Eve.

Somehow, though, it always seemed that whatever, whoever was lost with the early morning light was trapped, frozen in nebulous glaciers that didn’t retreat with the first rays of the equinox. Those skies, it seemed, simply moved further along like the rivers into which buds fell from trees.

43. The Colors of Other Storms

She never spoke of gathering clouds. Mother didn’t, either, but then she wasn’t one to speak about the weather.

I didn’t understand why until I saw it for myself. Of course, in her childhood home, Mrs. Littington sometimes wouldn’t see rain, or even clouds, for months at a time.

Every evening, the sun set wider and brighter behind trees that ringed the sea from her front yard, around a shoreline that arced like a boomerang back to the mountains she could see when she looked directly in front of her. For weeks, through August and September, and sometimes October, the sun—colored like the earth of the nearby hillsides—filled the waves with a power that burned foam away, leaving the most intense shade of azur—too much for the bluest of eyes, accustomed as they are to the flat colors, interrupted only by splashes of white, of the northern oceans.

She was right. I had to see that to understand why the part of the world where she grew up—even the gray city, Toulon, that she knew, where ships drifted away and disappeared beyond waves: ships heavy with their freight of secrets—is called the Cote d’Azur. The sea, the sky, at night or during the day, do not turn into shades of black or gray. Under the moon, nothing does.

And so even in Toulon, gray and gritty even before the Luftwaffe dropped bombs on it, the passage of days, of lives, happens through intensifying shades of blue and rose turning to orange, and back.

She remembered the day she left. It was close to evening. Blue hues deepened, as if the sea had engulfed the sun but couldn’t put it out. Instead, the sun refracted the depths of the sea through the stars and under bristles of cedar trees.

There was not darkness, no blankets of clouds: only more color, more intense and consuming hues, than even her eyes, which were accustomed to months of sun followed by months of rain, could take. Or take with her, she said.

Still, she never complained about this block, even though she wouldn’t’ve stayed any longer than she had to. Summer heat-- not light-- blinded people here: It led the eye to cracks in faded bricks. So did the clouds: layers of reflections of the shingles and windows of the houses here.

On this block, the clear blue sky—on those rare occasions when we really had one—suspends time, freezes motions—even those of the face—like a moments recollected from dreams. On the other hand, time, at least in every story I’ve heard or read, marches and gathers like the bodies of water that become storm clouds.

That’s how it is; that’s how it was—except in Adam’s stories. Or in Mrs. Littington’s, though she hardly ever told them. I don’t remember when I heard them: I don’t think she would’ve told my mother—or maybe she did, once or twice. But mother wasn’t interested in hearing about any other time or place but the one she was in. She’d’ve never understood what Mrs. Littington might’ve had to say about this place; she had no interest in Mrs. Littington’s Cote d’Azur or prewar Europe, for she’d never been, and never would be, any place but here.

And, through all those years we’ve spoken over the phone, mother never asked where I was: only that I had some place to say and something to eat. The sun from the Mediterranean, the wind down the Rhone—nothing like those things would’ve mattered to her.

40; Ce n'est pas important

For a time, I was surprised that some of the women who attended my mother’s funeral, did. As far as I knew, my mother never saw or heard from Mrs. Littington again once she moved. But that’s not the reason for my consternation at seeing her again. We all knew she’d live on the block only for a while, just as she had in every other place to which her husband’d taken her from Toulon. He plucked her, or so he wanted us to think, from the rubble the Nazis, Fascists and the ones who tried to “liberate” the old quais and cathedral from them, left behind. Ce n’est pas important, she’d say whenever anyone asked her about the war, her family or the town. Or any of the other places, people or experiences of her life.

Toulon, Oran, Aden, Asuncion, Tahiti, this block—those are just the places I remember her mentioning. And oh yes—Montreal. The one place name that aparked herface from the impassiveness that was too expressionless to be called serenity. Apres Paris, il y a Montreal. Montreal, she said, was from le temps perdu, like Paris, la belle cite, which she saw once when she was just a young girl. The sun rose in her chestnut-flecked eyes when she described la claire, l’elegance of the women promenading under belle epoque skies just starting to turn gray, the clouds enfolding from the east rather than the north or west.

Verite and elegance, she told my mother, are all that matter. My mother, who did not use the idioms and syntax of her immigrant grandmother, and knew no language save for what she learned on this block, understood. No one talked about liberte or egalite at Mrs. Littington’s sort-of-bohemian aunt’s house on the Rue de Rennes, near the old Montparnasse station; only verite et elegance.

Mrs. Littington’s aunt had never married, and every day “Madame St. Just,” the tallest woman she’d ever met, came to visit. Madame St. Just, Mrs. Littington said, also had the deepest, throatiest voice she’s ever heard on a woman, aussi des hommes. Her high cheekbones, her thin neck and arms, were fin but not raffine; her bones neither those of a paysane nor of une Parisienne vraie.

But Madame St. Just was full of l’elegance and la verite, Mrs. Littington said. Even in her strangest, crudest gestures—She belched louder and more gratingly than any woman or man in her country!—seemed as inevitable and beautiful as tiles from a mosaic of the gods that were retreating from the darkening post-belle epoque horizon creeping along the curves of the Seine.

Nothing impressed the girl who would become Mrs. Littington nerly as much as Madame St. Just’s mouth, which softened and curled whenever she said la vie or told stories she’d probably told hundreds of times before but filled young Francoise, the future Mrs. Littington, like wines discovered behind doors left unlocked, then uncorked, poured and palated between furtive glances.

Somehow she knew enough not to repeat anything she heard from Madame St. Just, not to her mother or her father, and certainly not to any man—or anyone else—in Toulon. As far as I know, no man on this block has ever heard such stories. All about je/te, she’d tell my mother, not je suis ici, vous etes la or worse, sous moi.\

I wish I could remember more of those stories now. But I could just as well try to recall a lecture on quantum mechanics (I have no idea of what it is) or a religious revival my mother brought me to, had she been the sort of woman to attend such things. Wait—I’m remembering now that Mrs. Littington said that her aunt and Madame St. Just didn’t talk about l’amour or make promises about anything, not even about meeting for lunch or coffee in the garden behind the cathedral.

Actually, I recall now that my mother and Mrs. Littington didn’t really talk that much—at least not when I was present. And mother was never reluctant to talk, especially with women she knew. For that matter, I don’t remember her spending as much time with Mrs. Littington as with some of the other women. And, as I’ve said before, once she left, mother never spoke about her again.

But there she was at my mother’s funeral, older but not the wan or matronly presence someone expects from someone her age. Her unwrinkled yet creaseless black pants and jacket fit her as perfectly; she stood like one of those buildings that, in spite of its cracks and peels, doesn’t age much, any more than if someone had painted it a different color.

She’d left the je/tu—as if she and one of her friends had simply been conjugations of the same verb—always unchanged, something she didn’t have to, but could, return to. When one’s stories become je suis ici, vous etes la narratives, returning—remebering—becomes both necessary and impossible.

I don’t think I could’ve understood this if I hadn’t left this block and lived among men, in their world of capricious, pointless deaths—which it to say, their lives. Mrs. Littington never saw Paris again, or any place else in France but Toulon. My mother never saw much of anything but this block, but she seemed to understand, even if Mrs. Littington could never exactly translate into my mother’s idioms.

I don’t know where she came from to see my mother—or at least those other women—one last time. Certainly I didn’t know whether her husband was still alive, whether they’d stayed together, or what became of their children. And of course mother could never know: She remembered only the ce n’est pas important which someone misinterpreted before it reached her ears. So she didn’t stay in touch; in time Mrs. Littington surely forgot much about my mother’s life. That is why she did a double-take, then looked away from me, in the funeral parlor. Sometimes people aren’t sure, after absences of decades, whether the person they’ve come to see had a son, daughter, cat , dog, all of the above or none of the above. Not that it was important—to me, anyway—whether she remembered me, or how. She won’t return to this block, and neither, I hope, will I. We couldn’t, even if someone allowed it.

39. Identity

It’s still strange sometimes to be free of obligations. The person to whom I was married has no idea of where I am or what I’m doing. The phone calls to friends and workplaces stopped a long time ago. I’ve not only liberated myself from marriage—It’s easier when you don’t have children or property, as I didn’t—but that somewhere, actually at various points along the way, I’ve shed most of the bonds I had with other people. It wasn’t a conscious choice, but I don’t regret it now.

Now I understand why people stop visiting the gravestones of family members and friends. It’s not just because survivors move away, at least geographically, from the dead. After a while, it’s not possible to mourn, or even to recall or forget. The person you knew no longer exists and can’t come back. In fact, they can’t be replaced: Someone or something merely substitutes for something. I guess we’re all substitutes for something or someone.

There was the girl my mother once was; there were the people she’d been before she met the one who fathered me; there is what she might’ve been if she hadn’t known him or given birth to me or anyone else. I’d heard stories that she’d had a boy or a girl: someone who’d been taken for her or whom she gave up. I found photographs once of a curly-haired (wo)man/child, wrapped in something that looked like a butcher’s apron with a picture of a tree—I don’t know what kind—painted on it. I guess that rules out the abortion story, which I’d never believed anyway.

She walked in. What were you doing in there? You left them on your dressser, I claimed. What were you doing, looking there? Couldn’t help it: the door opened that faded wood dresser top, I explained. Normally, she didn’t leave anything there, so of course those photos caught my attention. Whose pictures are those? I wondered aloud.

Mine.

Couldn’t’ve been: the face was too round, even for such a young child. Eye sockets too flat. And I didn’t think my grandmother—or just about any other mother—would’ve dressed her kid that way, not even if her husband or boyfriend or whomever chopped meat by day and silk-screened T-shirts by night.

What followed was the one moment of true hatred I ever felt toward her. It’s one thing to finesse one’s way around something a kid might not understand or be ready to hear—or something one simply isn’t ready to explain. But she never did that before, or after, so I knew she was lying. Why?, I still ask myself. Not many things could’ve changed what I felt for her, not even finding out she’d given a child away or killed it. I would never’ve told anyone else about something like that.

I didn’t tell when she thought she had a malignant tumor. Or when she said she’d sung or performed other jobs—That’s all they were, she said—or hinted at whom my father might’ve been. I also never told what I heard of her conversations with any of the women who would attend her funeral. She knew this, and some time in my teen years she stopped gesturing me away when I chanced upon one of her encounters.

I also never mentioned the things she said about a certain man whom I can only assume was my father. They met in school, in a dance hall, or on some long-since-closed ride in a seaside amusement park: The stories varied. Or maybe they just met one evening in some nameless stretch of sidewalk, or another evening somewhere else.

I’d seen him—I’m sure of it. Everything about my face, except for my knobby chin, I got from mother. Her hair was straight and fine, his splayed with an ever-so-short arc from the top of his head down to his ears. So I know I didn’t get my coiffure from the haircutter my mother used to take me to. His dark brown hair differed from hers only when he didn’t shave for a day or two and the nearly orange fields in his stubble reflected the rusty undertone of his hair.

When I was a child, my hair glowed nearly as russet as his flecks. As I grew older, they darkened like tree trunks after sunset. And when he lost the locks from the top of his head, the fringe around the crown just above his ears glowed brighter and curled at his ears.

Mother didn’t have to chase me, even though I always wanted at least a glimpse of him, the way most people choose to view tigers in a forest or sharks on the continental shelf: close enough to know what they are, but at enough of a distance for a head start.

38. Birth

 

Now that she’s gone, there’s one less date to remember: Mother’s Day. It’s the one and only holiday I cared about in any way. Whether or not you share other people’s beliefs, you’re forced to observe their holidays because stores close, people leave for vacations and other trips that may or may not have to do with the observance of their holy days (What does going to Miami have to do with Yom Kippur, anyway?) and they eat foods they wouldn’t touch at any other time of the year. Christmas, New Year’s Day and the days for saints and about declarations of independence, “discoveries,” “victories” in battle and other forms of homicide and rape—all of those celebrations mean nothing to me.

Mother never told me her birthday, possibly because she knew it’s the one date to which I’d pay attention. And somehow or another I managed to get through those years without knowing the date anyone else came into this world. I might know for a moment—Some kid in school would talk about a party or some such thing—but I’d forget almost immediately.

In fact, I know the date on which I squeezed between walls of her birth canal—I’ll say only that it was a murderously hot day, just as her first hours must have been, I’m sure—I know it only because some teacher—Mrs. Kilmer, the first lay teacher I ever had—said something about how other kids and I who were born during the summer weren’t going to have celebrations in school. Wouldn’t you like to tell the class what day it is?, she cooed, while looking away from me. I sat silently, my hands folded. Some kids giglgled; she hushed them and waited. Perhaps you need a moment to remember, she sighed. Ten other kids in that class of twenty-nine recited, on cue, the July and August dates on which they’d been born. Then she turned toward me. Maybe now you can tell us….

All that year, I hardly spoke at all. Mrs. Kilmer, it seemed, called on my only for questions about math, Latin and religion. I never knew the answers because I didn’t care about religion and I was simply hopeless in the other two subjects. Then she’d snap and point to someone else and I’d slink back into the dark silence behind my eyes.

Actually, I can remember one other time she called on me. What are you seeing now?, she demanded. A blackboard, you… Should I mention the other kids, I asked aloud: I didn’t want her to wonder aloud whether I wasn’t thinking about her question. Uh, blackboard, wall, American flag.”

What did you see before that?

I stared at her through the glaze over my eyes.

I mean, before you woke up… Some kids tried to conceal snickers. What did you see with your eyes closed?

Nothing.

You never see nothing.

Well, you know, just blackness.

What did you…Realizing it was pointless to ask, she dropped the question.

And—oh yeah—I remember her expressing that cloying, contemptuous form of pity that I later learned to call condescenscion. Don’t be afraid to tell me…Then she’d remember what she was getting herself into. She didn’t accept “nothing” for an answer and I wouldn’t give it. It seemed superfluous, like most things I’ve said and many of the people I’ve said them to.

And so with birthdays. I could never see any reason to demarcate it from any other date on the calendar. At some moment I can’t remember, I left or was pushed from a place to which I couldn’t return, no matter how much I imagined it, if I could’ve imagined. I am in this world and can do nothing about it. I have no control over whether or not I will inhabit any other reality. Why make a big deal over any of it?

Mother would have none of it, either. She never made a fuss about aging, which makes sense when you realize that during my late adolescence she didn’t look any different from my earliest recollections of her. They are, I suppose, what some embalmer thought he or she was seeing before my mother was set before me and those other women from this block.

How could any embalmer or funeral director see what Mrs. Littington, the lady whose name I never knew, or anyone else—including me—had seen, much less make any attempt to recreate it? Now I understand why people—usually women—take at least one look at the face in a casket, then pull themselves away. Trying to substitute some made-up image for the ones you hold in your mind: That’s what’s so intolerable, especially for the people closest to the deceased.

So what are you celebrating, then, when you celebrate someone’s birthday? Or your own, for that matter? Of course, when I was a child, I couldn’t articulate the reasons why I didn’t want to celebrate my birthday. I simply couldn’t understand why it was so important for anyone else. Someone gives you a cake moistened with food coloring; you have to thank people for giving you things you didn’t ask for.

So I’ve never done birthdays. Now, Mother’s Day, that’s another story. Why that date among all others? Well, I’ll say that I try to be as unsentimental as anyone can be in honoring or making some attempt to honor her. Honestly, I never quite knew how to do that, or how she'd feel if she knew that I'd wanted at least one day of the year that was about her, and only her. I had my own reason: I knew I couldn’t always, no matter how hard I tried, obey the few rules she had for me. I also knew that I couldn’t satisfy her unspoken wishes—after all, I did leave this block and I’ll never have children.

One of the few dictates I’ve heard from a religious person that I’ve made the effort to remember came from the priest who presided over the wedding of Mrs. Rolfe’s daughter. Remember, the commandment doesn’t say obey thy mother and father. It says to honor them.” I got the idea, although I never did figure out what sorts of actions honored one’s parents.

If nothing else, I came to realize that a parent, whether or not he or she is biological, is the first person you see in your earliest recollections. And the last you see when you close your eyes to this world. There’s nothing you can do about that; youcan only acknowledge it, or better yet, celebrate it. You never need anyone else, really. I guess that’s the reason why I’ve never worried about spending this moment, the next moment or my last, alone. It’s also the reason why waking up in a cemetery didn’t disturb me. The people in them (assuming, of course, they’re there) were as ephemerally a part of my life as anyone else was. And the dates on their tombstones simply mark the moments when they moved, like an empty railroad car from a yard toward the first station or the first point of collision, and when they exited, like that empty railroad car, from the last parts of their trip and returned to the colorless, soundless solitude.

So Mother’s Day, I decided, is the only day that should be differentiated from all the others. I try not to talk to anybody unless I absolutely have to, but on her day, I’d speak to her, and only to her. Actually, if I could’ve I would’ve probably spoken with nobody but mother until the day of her funeral. Maybe I’ve succeeded. The few people with whom I’ve spoken since her funeral were women.

Sometimes I get the feeling they talk only to members of their own gender, too. They may answer, or respond to, men’s questions—or at least those of their husbands, sons and nephews. Those neighbors and friends of my mother hear the stories of conquests, of wrongs done by bosses and family members, of injuries caused by accidents and fights. But when they say I’m not well, it’s that time or simply I want to lie down only they could understand each other in the way my mother did.

I’ve tried. It’s all I’ve ever known how to do.

34. Destinies of Choice

She doesn’t know I’m here now. I’ve never believed in ghosts, spirits or anything that’d wander whatever someone’d just left. I’m not saying there’s no existence after or before this one, and I’d never argue with someone who believes in reincarnation. But I’ve never experienced déjà vu as far as I know, and for that matter I’ve never had any wish to find out that I inhabited someone else’s body in Ancient Greece or some village just outside the farm where my great-grandfather was born. It would’ve been useless information to me—actually, very few facts and almost none of the ideas I’ve encountered could’ve changed the course of my actions.

Yes, my actions. I won’t try to explain them as the results of any other person’s actions or words, or any other force outside my own body. I killed. Yes, I killed. I could’ve claimed self-defense but I never have; I don’t expect to. None of it matters anyway: Nothing has changed the fact that someone is dead. Someone, perhaps the state, could’ve imprisoned, tortured or killed (Don’t you love that euphemism: Execute?) me, but it wouldn’t’ve brought him back or made his family—actually, his mother—whole again.

Anyone who’s ever taught—In fact, anybody who’s had as much time as I’ve had to see people from the other side of one-way mirrors—knows that the fear, the anticipation of punishment doesn’t cause someone to reconsider the action he or she is about to take; the actual punishment, once the act is done, is useless. It didn’t take long for me to realize that whatever ostracism, whatever abuse, I might run up against for killing him wouldn’t change the fact that he’s gone, that other people knew—or simply believed, which on this block is the same thing—that I’d aborted, cut down, short-timed, snuffed out, or whatever descriptive phrase they used to avoid saying “killed,” someone they might’ve treated even worse than they treated me.

So it’s not even a matter of how or who you kill, whether the victim was intended or not, a friend or an enemy, or a relation of any kind: I’ve paused longer for the deaths of people I’ve never met, or of whom I’d never heard except for their deaths, than for the one whose life I terminated. Even the death of Mother Teresa, whose work I always detested, left a hole in me no one else could and that couldn’t be filled with anybody or anything else. Some people can’t, won’t or don’t mourn their own fathers; others dissolve like rainclouds over the loss of a non-sentient being.

I’ll admit some guilt: I never stopped to grieve my father. The fact that he wasn’t there for me to grieve doesn’t explain or rationalize my lapse any more than necessity, whatever that may be, excuses my killing.

Of course he knew, if only for a moment, that when I had the power of life and death over him, I made the only choice, consciously or not, that could hold any meaning for him. Our lives did not intersect, as some would say: They never could have. Instead, he existed on one side of an opaque window. I began on the other side. Nothing in the life he lived has changed, or will be changed, by actions I or someone else have taken since his death.

So why, then, did I attend her funeral. She’d never know I was there; even if she did, she might not’ve recognized me. No, not even she—she’d only see what was, who was, in a moment called the present only because nobody’d yet decided what to call it, in a new suit of clothes—or at least something she’d never seen me wear before.

She, as much as anyone else could, or at least would, see someone who hadn’t killed—not even a “yet” attached to my story. I would not be the one who left, who ran. I’d still be that child who crept by the door and peeked through the window when she didn’t want me to know what she’d seen or heard outside. To her, I’d still be the one who wasn’t supposed to know the truth about Adam’s death—about Death—years after poking my nose through a curtain and lifting a slat of the Venetian blind. I still wasn’t supposed to know, or at least let on that I knew.

I’m sure she knew—Mother wasn’t stupid—but somehow I never wanted to tell. I never wanted to disillusion her. And what is disillusionment but the loss of one’s prerogative not to know that his or her life up to that point was an illusion, a dream. So what did I do but keep up one last illusion, even though she wasn’t there to notice.

Even though I knew it wouldn’t make any difference, I went to her wake and funeral out of respect for what I perceived to be her wishes. She’d’ve wanted me there, I told myself. And still tell myself. Me—or at least a memory of me—that’s who was in that room, along with my memory of her. Of course nobody goes to a funeral to remember: One only transports and transposes a memory of someone onto the corpse in the coffin. I couldn’t see her any more than she could see me. But nothing has ever seemed more imperative to me than to stand before that amalgam of wishes, dreams and fevers, frozen in an embalmer’s moment, encased in silk from the neck down.

I lied to her, disobeyed her, even stole from her, though I see now there are some things even I couldn’t’ve taken from her. Her half-hearted attempts to inculcate me with a faith she never questioned but never really believed did not take. Her more serious efforts to instill conventionally correct notions of sexuality and family in me proved even more fruitless.

I repeat, I’ve never been free from hypocrisy; probably never will be. I want to honor feelings my mother had now that she can no longer have them. For years, many years, whenever we could’ve gotten together, I made some excuse or found another obligation. Or I simply managed to be in some remote part of the world with no convenient way of getting back to this block to see her. Certainly we didn’t abandon any thought of each other: through all those years, we talked every week, usually on Sundays. She could sense, over the phone, that I’d changed, that I was changing. She’d never mention the differences she’d noticed in the pitch of my voice or the speed of my speech. She’d simply demand, almost plead, “Is everything OK?” How could she not know that I was trying to comfort her, or at least not worry her, with my evasions: “Yeah,” “Could complain, but won’t.”

Everyone learns not to tell a parent what he or she already knows, or at least believes. I learned that lesson after I’d been away a few years, when I told her I’d smoked back in the days on the block. I’d never again reveal what she never want to know. Not married, no kids—“You just haven’t met the right girl yet. Some day, maybe.” Right, mother. “You’ll find your calling, your purpose.” Of course, I’d never tell her I wanted any such thing, or believed anyone had one.

There was only one thing I ever wanted—myself, now, becoming. I killed only because I thought it’d bring me to the one I know now, who would never know him. And she would never know me in this moment any more than the women—There were only women—at her funeral knew me, or would know me.

31. The Providers

People’ve always accused me of not being thankful. Maybe they’re right. Some—sometimes the same people—have said that I’m grateful when other people aren’t.

So will I ever change? About those things, probably not. The hormones haven’t affected me so; I doubt that the surgery will. But at least I can say that I don’t feel guilty over the ones who accuse me of not being thankful and I’m not going to exalt the ones who realize that I’m grateful.

I still think of Thanksgiving: a time when people are supposed to give thanks….for what? For the food on the table? And whom do people thank? God, or whomever they worship. The Almighty Father: That was one of the names God had when I was growing up. Why should they thank a father for giving them something to eat? What kind of father wouldn’t?

The ones on this block, that’s what kind. Actually, they don’t deny physical nourishment. My father didn’t. Like him, they disappear; sometimes they die: In any event, one way or another, they’re not there for the women or children. Even the ones who don’t go out for a pack of cigarettes and never come back usually fail to provide sustenance—as opposed to belly-filling—for their children and wives.

And everyone grows up starving—the women cluck and the children peep until they realize that it’s useless; it won’t fill, much less fulfill, them.

In TV, in the movies, there are families where the father stays and the children are nourished, body and spirit, and the woman lives under his wing: under its shadow and protection. And they’re all thankful to him, whether they’re saying grace or whether he’s paying admission to enter the various realms of fantasy.

And the fathers who lead their charges, their wards, their concubines in prayer—To whom do they give thanks? To whoever signs their paychecks—or gives a loan or a gift—so they can buy food? They never thank themselves for working as hard as they do. Someone always says it’s the fathers who work hard. No doubt many do. But we never get to see the women running, lifting, bending, scrubbing, cooking or exerting themselves in everyday tasks. So tell me, who provides what for whom in those families?

But what they never say—because they didn’t know , because whoever puts the words in their mouths didn’t—is that they aren’t thankful to their mother, the one who brings them into this world, because they can’t be. They can only be grateful for that, and for the other events over which they have no control. For example, someone who can actually help them, and does, may appear in their lives. For that they should be grateful.

Yes, I’m relieved, in a way, that I’m about to bury my mother. But of course, I’ll be grateful that she existed, even when I didn’t care whether I would the next day.

30. Memories and Those Who Stayed

There’s very little—and very few people—I actually miss. Sometimes it seems that I had no choice, that if I tried to hold on to any part of my life—much less anyone else’s—I’d die, though not from the effort. I’ve always guessed that it’d be something like drowning: It’s not the work you put into getting in over your head that destroys you; it’s the stuff that you’re in that’s submerged you.

I haven’t tried to remember, or hold on to, mother. It seemed that no matter where I was, she was always on the other end of the line. Now, that’s not so benevolent, as I’ve seen, as I’ll probably see again and again. I don’t think I could not’ve spoken to her as I did, just about every week. Over time, I stopped visualizing the woman who stayed on this block because that was all she could do for me after I left.

This isn’t to say I didn’t need her or she didn’t need me. To the contrary: We were—still are—the only constant in each other’s lives. Or in her death. Will that change? After all, she won’t be there when I die, when my body ends up wherever it does. As far as I know, I don’t have a soul or anything that transcends my own bones. I never did tell that to mother: Even after all I’ve described, I still wasn’t about to break her heart—or that of any other living person—unnecessarily.

Soon she will be buried—just like everyone else who dies on this block, including Adam—and then what? I don’t know where she’ll end up in my mind, in my recollections, much less in the chaos of the cosmos.

I think about the what-next mainly because that’s what she would’ve wanted me to do. Will I think about her wishes, desires, ten, twenty years from now—if I’m around that long—if I survive the operation? Will it matter? As far as I know, I’m the only one who’s thought about Adam for a very, very long time. I must say, though, that I have no wish to bring him back. Even when I was young, just after he’d died—been murdered, really, just like every other man on this block who stayed—I felt this way.

Maybe mother thought of him, or more precisely, thought back to him. And what does it matter now? Maybe she’s taking some image of this place—of the light that didn’t fill rooms or spaces of any kind, that ended but never quite brightened or reflected colors, like the glass panes inside the front doors of some houses.

All those days in the shadows and in bound, muted illumination, passing one after another like all things never heard because they’ve repeated the same dull and pointlessly violent echoes you hear when you pass through some place you’re bound to return to because you don’t know that you are. Sounds, words used to muffle a scream, a shout of anger, murmur like rumbles buried deep in the ground and return to the surface when you stay on this block, wherever you are. And when the sun visits, shadows spread across windows and open eyes.

And so Vivian gave me one of the few, if not the first, of the experiences I would miss, that I miss now: an autumn afternoon, not much different from this one, maybe chillier or more brisk because we in those flat, open and, at this time of year, deserted areas around the beaches. There was no place where you couldn’t feel the late October sunlight, rippled and whipped across water, sand, rock and splintered wood, as it turned to wind. The young, oiled bodies were long gone. Vivian’s car, like the others, rattled along the sand-swirled road but never stopped or hesitated.

The people—especially the men—seemed as if they’d been there forever and would always be there, their days stretching ahead and sometimes around them, even they knew they would end, perhaps that winter or the one after it. They, like Vivian’s father, had been left there; the tide would not take them back out even if they’d flung themselves into it. They’d come ashore from everywhere in the times before mine, before Vivian’s: the wars, the wars from which they’d escaped; they came, the onetime surfers and musicians.

One man, who’d been fixing fishing rods and making shell and pebble bracelets for as long as Vivian’s father could recall, said he survived his first twenty-seven winters on codfish, potatoes and beer. In the summer, there were lobsters and farmers offered up corn and fruits; in the fall, the women baked pies. And she was the first to bake one—cherry, my favorite (I hate pumpkin!)—for me.

29. Their Stories

I’ve never been much of a storyteller. Sometimes I wonder whether it’s because I’ve never had any tales to tell or simply that I don’t have the gift of gab, or whatever it takes.

Seems that the ones who can weave tales are the people—usually men—who can find a moral , a lesson or some kind of point in something—usually in their childhood—that happened to them. They somehow get the idea that it’s going to matter to someone else, somewhere in the world.

Truth of the matter is that people are born, people suffer and people die and other people forget, or never notice. Women—most, anyway—bring the beings—or the lives, I’m not sure—into this world to begin all those endless, repetitive fantasies, all those experiences that tumble, like pebbles from cliffs, into chasms of forgetfulness that close in all around them.

Men look for rhyme or reason, as if the universe is some kind of orderly machine or a chant that marches in time. People, at least on this block do the same things again and again.

28. J'accuse

One thing I’ve noticed since I left this block: all of the sentences that began with “You aren’t…,” “You can’t…” or “You are not to..” have been replaced with ones that begin, “Why do you want to…”

I’m thinking of Vivian again. Maybe she wouldn’t recognize me now: it’s been how long? Last I heard, she wasn’t living far from here. Not that she ever did, or would do otherwise.

Near here. With or without a man. Or a woman, perhaps. Then I probably wouldn’t recognize her. No, she wouldn’t recognize her as she was when she drove me through her old seaside town, not so far from here. Or as she or I was on the morning when I first woke with her, when for the first time since early in my childhood I wasn’t thinking about a cup of coffee, a drink or breakfast. Or any other drug, for that matter.

Until that moment, my body’d never caught up to my mind, or at least the rages, fears and other waves that swirled behind my eyes and ears. The spirit had been ready, so to speak, but not the flesh. But on the morning, my body craved, for the first time I remember, the touch of another. My pores had opened, throbbing like buds after the first April rainstorm.

And her gaze: It stunned me, even blinded me temporarily. Twinges of needles, glancing without piercing—and I wanted more, because she could open me, if only for a moment, without rending.

For the first time, I felt—or at least relished the illusion—that someone’d taken from me exactly what I’d taken from her: whatever we could absorb through our mouths, through our skins. Of course we began and ended through our orifices; one of us, as it turned out, sweeter than the other, more bitter than the other. She, always a woman, on my tongue; I, becoming a woman—or so I thought—between her lips.

And through those hours, those days of chatting before that first night; the hours that followed; the days when I loved, when she loved: her supple touch. I, the supple touch, like the steady wind against her curtains: I turned to waves as cool as her linens against my skin.

No man could’ve loved me that way, I thought: no man could be loved so. That word I’d always swirled around, like sand around those mounds where boys believed they’d built castles, all dissipated in waves and wind. Boys rise, men fall; Vivian and I lay facing each other, her eyes opening to my gaze.

I knew I wasn’t going to die and go to heaven. I’d always known that. There was always another day, whether I wanted it or not. After what, it didn’t matter; there was always the day, the night, they year after. No way out of it, no way to fight—but on that day there was no need to fight, at least some things. Later she’d tell me it was the first gentle night she spent with a man. Was that the same as telling me I was the first gentle man she’d met? I know that’s something I’d’ve never been, not for her or anybody else.

On that night, I merely did what I’d done ever since a man—another one who disappeared from this block—pushed his pants down from his waist and pulled my face toward his crotch. There was no way out of the moment, which lasted an eternity; there was only the moment; there would never be any other. There was only him; there was only her; there would be this moment, consisting of women. And no way to leave it, even if I’d wanted to.

There was one major difference between that moment with Vivian and the others that preceded it: I’d had no urge to resist, to flee or even to protest. I could only accept her, in that particle of time, in the others that flew away from it: only me, only her, and no other force in the universe.

If she’d understood that I simply acted as I always had up to that moment, would she’ve declared that I was the first, the only, man for her even as I wrapped my body—at that moment clad in a black lace bra and panties—in her kimono and shuffled into the kitchen where I boiled water for coffee and the sun flooded the window? Well, if I was savoring an illusion, who’s to say that she wasn’t, too?

So, her question—her plea, her accusation—“How could you…” when I started taking hormones, when I talked about surgery, seems inevitable now, even—especially—had she seen me, or I her.

Something else I hadn’t realized then: the moment someone exclaims, “How could you!” it’s a sure sign you’ve survived, or at least progressed in some way, however small. The moment you’re not a subject—which is not necessarily the moment you cease to submit, if you ever do—someone somewhere feels betrayed. Actually, it takes only a moment of happiness, or at least equanimity, to make someone believe you’ve taken it from him or her. Look at all those parents who resent, overtly or covertly, their children’s success—which for most children, for most people, means nothing more than getting what they want. The son dreams of moving to a penthouse in the city; the father wants him to take over the family’s hardware store and father his grandchildren. And girls inspire jealousy in mothers who’ve stopped sleeping in the same beds with their husbands but have no desire to sleep with any other man. They’d sit shiva; they’ll schedule exorcisms (or psychotherapy, which is usually the same thing) for daughters who realize they’ll find love, in all its glory and cruelty, only inside the curtains of another woman.

Contrary to what some churches teach every day and others teach on Sundays, love is not forgiving, and it can only lead people to seek it by whatever means and for whatever ends.

27. Time

Now that I’m coming closer to my surgery, I realize that I am probably not going to become a better, wiser or more capable person, ever. I’ve also been released from the illusion that I hate men. These days, they just don’t figure much into my life. I could even say, perhaps, that I have no need for them. The funny thing is that they’ll have even less need for me, as a woman, than they did in my male existence.

Those guys—the ones who fucked me when they saw me in a dress—won’t come near me after my surgery, any more than they’d do it with any woman who’s not a wife, or perhaps a sister. Actually, most of them would lose interest in me soon even if I were to keep my male apparatus intact: I’m getting to be too old for their tastes.

Actually, I’ve felt too old for most people for a quite a while now. If I am, I don’t mind. Mrs. Littington seems not to’ve noticed me at all, and that woman whose name I never knew squinted in my direction as if I were somehow familiar, but she wasn’t quite know how. Or does she? Then maybe I’ve become another of her secrets like the ones she kept with my mother, or that mother had with her.

There’re some things that bind people more closely than the secrets they tell each other: the true secrets; that is to say, the intimate knowledge that they both know but never speak of. Now I know why mother never begged me to come back, not even in her last days. I think she always knew I wasn’t another boy, another man, from this block.

They’d had no need of me, nor I of them. And I think mother didn’t need to see me as I was, as I was becoming, as I am about to become. In any moment, there is only what I am and what she is and whatever anybody else may be. And the moment passes; I pass; I’m passing. So was she; so she is.

What would she’d’ve known about me had she seen me through the years that have just passed? What do people know about those whom they see regularly? Hobbies? Fact is, I’ve never had any. Or favorite TV shows, or favorites of much of anything else. None of that stuff matters, anyway. You can have in common with another person, usually a man (if you’re a man), the most banal compulsions—namely, the collecting of objects and the emotions and connotations attached to them, from one’s own or someone else’s past.

That’s the reason I don’t save things. Well, that and the fact that I haven’t stayed in one place long enough to store them. But the first bras, the first pumps, sandals and skirts I acquired have no sentimental value for me. In fact, I don’t even remember what color they were or what, if anything, I paid for them. I needed them, or something like them, and they were the best—which is to say all—I could get. Some things wore out; some stopped fitting and other things I just couldn’t stand anymore. The time for change inevitably comes, and it’s all you can do if you expect to stay alive.

So it is with becoming a woman. The male aspects of my body’ve outlived whatever usefulness they had: they never protected me, and I’m not going to use them to propogate. So I’m going to change, and I’ve been changing the chemistry of my body to prepare for my surgery.

And mother doesn’t need for me to be a man any more than I do.