Before the Fall

August rain always seems to begin at the rear window, then spreads in a soft crescendo across my apartment. Like a drawn curtain, it recedes, never quite erases the dark but leaves a kind of summer ghost symphony behind... like distant traffic music or trains that never come.

And then you’re left with the same sense of not quite being washed or blessed... the vague feeling you had at summer camp when you lay there in a damp cabin thinking of home, or after your Borough-of-Ealing marriage ceremony when you lay there wondering when your new husband was going to leave you. You could feel it.

I am distantly related to Arthur Miller, via a branch of the family we both preferred to forget.  I was actually originally destined to be christened Arthur, but the surprise of another daughter changed that. Still, I thought about him-- wrote a poem once about wanting him to pick me up from school and tell me I had potential. 1962 was my first summer at sleep-away camp. I was nine, and supremely homesick without admitting. When we got the August news Marilyn had suicided I told everyone she'd been my aunt and used the narrative as an excuse to let out six weeks of tears. 

My cousin called this week-- about to move his young family across the country back to the East Coast. He was feeling anxious and sad-- a kind of separation dread that seems familial. He, too, is related to Arthur. To distract him I recalled driving my son up to a college he didn't want to attend one August; he'd basically burned too many high-school bridges and this was a kind of fate. He was totally uncooperative and hardly spoke to me those days. I packed up the required dorm-room accessories and tried my hardest to arrange things when we got there, while he kept his sullen face and ornery attitude. I was on the verge of tears-- that terrible August dread in my heart mixed with parental angst.  He was untouchable.

My ex-boyfriend drove us the eight hours upstate. He had always been a personal 'option' if all else failed, but I couldn't have known then he was already married to someone else. Orientation required us to share a room in a cheap motel while my son spent his first adult night as a freshman. At 3 AM he knocked on the room door and sheepishly came in.  We turned on the cable and the three of us watched Jackass until dawn.  I'd never seen anything like it but I'll never forget the perverse laughter in that room filled with gloom, family tensions, my aching heart praying my tough son would not inherit my tendency to dark blues. It was a kind of cultural crossroad--bonding. I also developed a little rock-and-roll style crush on Bam Margera. He distracted me.

Years later my son told me he'd never been that desolate in his life. I all too well remembered my first semester away from home-- the August heaviness, the summer camp nights.  My best friend's Mom died that same Marilyn summer; it was the closest I'd come to imagining the loss of my own. Mrs. Gaines covered for me when I played wild games with my friend and her brothers, took me to the hospital once for stitches and made up a palatable tale for my own Mom. A stand-up parent. I grieved deeply-- for my friend, for myself, for whatever one processes as sorrow at nine years.  

I followed the terrible tragic narrative of Bam Margera. Even hs warm, wonderful mother could not save him from the pain he brought on himself like a dark fate.  The whole college trip is somehow linked with that crew--  the sheepish irrepressible silly giggling, the twisted disturbing behaviors and a kind of dark empathy. So many years later these guys are aged 'boys' still pranking and risking their bodies to entertain us. I have a weird soft spot for them even though I am officially critical of this kind of stuff. I hated the Three Stooges, slapstick-- even the Flinstones were annoying.

I lost my own mom one August, although she'd virtually left cognitive reality years before. Still, these dates pass with heaviness-- her anniversaries, and the failed marriage of mine, a distant epoch away, especially on rainy nights when the vague future relief of September is tainted with 9/11 memorials.

Arthur Miller died the day after my 52nd birthday.  I never mailed the packet of poems I'd addressed to him decades ago, nor did he ever pick me up from anywhere. I'll bet he never watched Jackass. I'm sure Marilyn couldn't bear another August in the wake of his evaporated passion and his desire for something else.  I wrote a poem for her in 1966 when the Sounds of Silence record was on continuous play in my teenage room. 'August die she must...'  was chilling. 

Jackass, despite various tragedies, lives. Bam tries hard to reinvent himself; his parents are saints. He's no longer even cute but somehow he got inserted in the mix of my late-summer iconography.  Funny how these things stick to us like an old shadow. My cousin is driving across the US with his dog and his California ghosts.  He'll be fine. And me-- I can sense the rain tonight like an old gravedigger huddled under a tree.  Die she must.  All of it.  

Wo-manicure

I have my mother's hands. Purely a physical rather than a metaphorical comment, the observation followed me throughout adult life. Deny as I might, as I grow older I wonder if even the increasingly prominent roadmap of veins is identical, like a fingerprint.  Watching my hands on the piano or laptop keys, they are so like hers it is alarming.  My face in the mirror-- the undeniable genetics of bone structure, expression...  I see her. The similarities are uncanny... and yet the buck stops there.

On Friday afternoons my mother had her beauty day.  She went to a salon called Ila or Isla-- many of her friends were there-- aunts, etc. They shared a hairdresser called Eleanor-- a bleached blonde with a kind of ducky upsweep who wore pancake make-up and orthopedic shoes.  Eleanor's cutting tools moved like Edward Scissorhands' and she managed several coiffes simultaneously.  Between chairs, tools were soaked in medical troughs of turquoise liquid that smelled like sulfur.  Everyone was bound up in rollers and curlers and metal pins, and sat under enormous heavy drying hoods like aliens while another set of women did manicures. 

As a small child I had to sit through this beauty day. I hated the stench of hairspray and the women chattering, and Eleanor didn't particularly like children. But there was a gift shop next door where a basket of tiny porcelain animals sat by the cash register. At five or ten cents, I could choose one for each hair-day; my little menagerie grew. One fateful afternoon I was placed in a booster seat in Eleanor's station and my long braids were transformed to imitate a shoulder-length cut with bangs my mother tore out of a Seventeen Magazine spread. I hated it, and unbelievable as it seems, I have returned to a salon only once in my life. 

Much to her horror, I have never had a manicure.  To this day I have the excuse of musicianship as the 'basis' for this, but it is also a choice.  My generation grew into puberty casting off bras, refusing makeup, embracing our natural bodies, only to find ourselves now in a world of extreme cosmetic sophistication and a ubiquitous standard of self-care we could never have predicted.  On every block it seems there are multiple nail boutiques and salons packed with women and a number of men being pampered.  I could never imagine having my feet handled by strangers--massaged, soaked, dressed, polished. It terrifies me, like a kind of public intimacy that is on display behind a storefront. I don't get it. 

The vintage scent of my mother's hands is palpable, nine years after her death. She'd clean our noses after our bath and the residue of polish and  cigarette-ghost was part of the nightly ritual. When I visualize my mother she's always on the telephone... one of those old black rotary things with the curly coiled wire. Her lovely hands with the red polish and a cigarette... as she talked and laughed with the receiver cradled under her chin so she could multi-task... sew or wash dishes or bake. She was chronically attached to another world-- a friend, maybe-- she was a girls' girl. I was so often an interruption and had to win her attention.

One traumatic night in particular comes to mind today... I'd been playing at a friend's house... one of my mother's preferred companions for me... a girl from a fancy private school-- an only-child with the name of a car who lived in an enormous house with a circular driveway.  The dining table where we lunched on Wedgewood dishes was enormous. Her Mom's hair was flipped and sprayed into a dark helmet; her father was an older man who smoked cigars.  We always played in her room.. she had pink toy horses and amazing things.  But she also taught me about sex.  She secretly read me texts about body parts and masturbation.  Dog-eared books were hidden under her mattress... where did she get these? I came home feeling guilty.

So this one night I went down to the kitchen and waited in the half-light while my mother-- her post-prandial work done, sat-- cigarette in manicured hand, on the telephone... gesturing to me to go upstairs... but I stayed... mesmerized... feeling confessional and confused.... I could not go to bed.  At last she finished speaking and gave me that look. I tried to tell her about the book. She literally did not reply.. she pointed the one perfectly painted nail toward the door and I went, feeling more sheepish and confused and guilty because not only had I committed some sort of sin, but I'd also violated my mother's privacy.

I learned not to confide things to my mother; years later I found I was a kind of self-judging pubescent prude. Not sure what she expected of me, I was eventually liberated from familial standards.  She loved to sing and was very shy but played the piano with a kind of finesse. And while she never came to a single gig or listened to anything I did, she made comments on my fashion choices or lack thereof... and continued to side-eye my bare hand.  In the end she had dementia, and all vanity and sentimentality evaporated. No one rescued my old artwork or my little beloved porcelain menagerie but I choose to think she secretly approved of our manual 'twinning'. 

Two of my boyfriends have told me they loved especially my hands. And they serve me-- they can draw a little, paint a little... they finger the bass and guitar the way I intend... I am grateful.  But my feet?  The rigors of ballet as a girl, the hazards of pointy rock and roll boots and vintage stagey footwear that didn't quite fit have taken a toll. I'm not proud. Several years ago I dated a jazz musician who obsessed over my feet.  I hide them-- I mean, the beach is one thing, but I'm not featuring them. Still... he claimed to love them.  He nagged and nagged outside of manicurists' shops for me to have them 'done'.  I refused.

One night he got me a little tipsy... we went to bed-- I passed out and woke up to find he'd painted my toe nails black.  I was horrified... angry.  He was overjoyed and couldn't stop celebrating my damn feet. Admittedly they looked edgy and cool in my platform sandals. But there was something Rosemary's Baby-like about having been foot-ravished while I slept. The polish eventually wore off, along with the relationship. 

Today I criticized my son.  We have open boundaries as far as emotional discussions but physical criticism is a little off-topic. Looking down at my ropy old hands, I immediately regretted my comment, and while  I think our bond is tough enough to weather this, the discomfort was familiar. I am not my chaste mother, although I have inherited her graceful fingers and a different brand of stubbornness.  For an instant I remembered the toe-painting-- and how it was really a kind of sexy tribute-- an unpredictable intimacy I failed to appreciate at the time. My mother may even have approved. And unpainted as they are, fretting and picking and tucked into a metal slide, I will somehow always have her hands.