Tolite Hostias

When we set out as teenagers to find our so-called path, few of us consider what we will not be, how we will fail at our dreams.  Of course, many of us lack the opportunities of more fortunate friends... and of those, few have the courage to fight the down-winds and up-currents that seem to prevent any version of success as we imagine it.  Fewer still have the genuine nugget of talent that blossoms into valued accomplishment, and the vision and stamina to break new ground.

I could never stand my own writing.  The gap between what I could do and what my 'heroes' did was just too broad.  Be true to yourself, my mentors advised, and like so many, one winds up consciously or unconsciously mining one's own life for material.  This is both our truth, and our betrayal.  While a few ex-boyfriends and husbands might relish finding themselves written into a song, I am one of those people who cringes at old photographs.  Facebook has always been the bitter pill I wash down with joyful memories of actually making music.

While I doubt posterity will be deciphering the messages in my songs and poems, I keep at it.  A few of my friends are urging me to write memoirs; it seems I look back on things with a particular kind of telescopic/microscopic viewfinder that entertains them.  Whether or not my narratives would appeal to a general public is ambiguous; it's hard enough enough to find sufficient audience to support my poetry projects.  Few of us sell many cds, in my circle. I chose this path; like crime, it doesn't pay much.

My parents died several years ago, so I can no longer offend them. My friends-- well, I could flatter them, but I rarely flatter myself, and while I can show up badly dressed and confessional, it's hard to be truthful and not betray people in the process.  Eulogies are kind to me... grief is my companion of late, and the songs I sing in memoriam are uncontested.  

I grew up with a circle of girlfriends who were joined at the hip, at that age when intimacy is easy and secrets are passed like a shared lunchbox.  One especially-- I met her in middle school-- at age eleven? She was sweet and beautiful in my eyes, although my mother described her as 'chubby'.  She was terrible at sports, which was critical among the criteria for mean-girl popularity.  She was not a mean girl.  I defended her to that crowd... I held her hand and chose her. For me her talent-- her intelligence, and her artistic genius... well.. she had the natural ability of a da Vinci... she won the national Carnegie Mellon scholarship... I mean, her draughtsmanship was extraordinary.  She made me things-- she drew me, my dogs.  And we sang-- in choir, at school, in church-- on the way to school... she the alto, I the soprano... it was perfect.  

She and I loved the Kinks, The Who, the Beatles, the Stones.  She had this habit of buying multiple copies of whatever she loved.  Albums in duplicate... Hendrix, Cream... The Who, Traffic.. the 60's... we loved most everything.. we sang.  She introduced me to jazz... we listened to Beethoven, Miles, Ian and Sylvia, Tim Hardin, Simon and Garfunkel, Donovan, Dylan.  A new release was a major event; we lay around at night reading album-cover notes like sacred texts... memorizing lyrics. I played guitar... she drew, I drew, but nothing like what she produced.  It was like love... we slept in the same room most of the time... we roller-skated to school, we did our homework together... we crushed and suffered... she had an old red Valiant she called Red Devil... she picked me up and we had adventures... I was too young to drive. 

Anyway, all through college we wrote, we visited one another... she met all my boyfriends; she married young, some someone with a kind of title who cheated on her with a teenager... and I think it devastated her.  She was never quite the same... immersed herself in Buddhism, with work in a bakery, lived in a sort of ashram for a time. Nevertheless she faithfully attended gigs, exuded great love and support... had a strange new group of people but still came to my Thanksgiving, showed up at my rock and roll impromptu wedding with a home-baked cake, was thrilled when my son was born, etc. Never bitter, never competitive.. always sisterly and loving as my own sister was not.  

So she suffered some terrible griefs and losses, began to shift focus to pathological resentment of her father.  All our fathers post-war were fucked up.  The war, their disappointments and responsibilities... PTSD, their drinking and their quiet suffering wives. I left mine at sixteen and tried not to let his mistakes become mine... but we are never sure about these things.  We share our truths, their lies and deceits. 

Anyway, my beloved friend ended up in and out of various hospitals with serious medical issues, then ensuing emotional problems.. eating disorders and syndromes.. it was relentless.  She was on all kinds of meds... none seemed to help. Me-- I selfishly missed my beloved talented genius companion.  I wanted to shake her out of her emotional quicksand, to get her on the track of extraordinary greatness she deserved, and could not.  

There was an early Elvis Costello song in her name... we loved it. Her highschool boyfriend was a singer/songwriter and wrote one for her.  I had this dream that I would become famous and call her up on stage to sing 'Tolite Hostias' or 'When Life Begins to Fail Me' a-cappella in two-part impeccable harmony.  Her voice was pure and true. Like so many artists, she could see through music; she had a perfect ear. 

At a point in middle age we parted ways.  She refuses to speak to me although I have reached out to her many times.  The tough-love approach I used with my son did not work with her.  I am sure she found me harsh and uncompassionate... mean.   Looking back, all these years later, trying to swim against some time-current, I remember she had encephalitis as a girl-- was so ill; perhaps this altered her brain environment.  It was not all self-indulgence and metaphoric illness but a legitimate diagnosis.  

Some of my old friends will recognize her here.  I doubt she follows me; she unfriended me long ago and shuns me.  Parts of life are unforgiving.  I am surely betraying her here, although I have spared the devil in the details. In writing memoir, one discovers the devil is the details.  I insist here (a perfect word for a proverbial sibling), the loveliness of her remains like a visual afterimage behind closed eyes.

Organizing a life, rather than milestone to milestone, we often skip from betrayal to betrayal.  This is maybe the true value of autobiography; no one knows us like we know/reveal ourselves, at least the writers among us-- outside of a few of maybe our oldest companions-- the ones who propped themselves on the bed beside us at the windowsill, sketched us as we sketched them, harmonized, exchanged clothes, sang to us, read, memorized, cried, ached and longed with the innocent shared honesty of adolescence.  It was not my job to keep her on some path to acknowledgement; it was her choice to veer off. 

I miss her-- her large sedentary cat we called Brick, her red Valiant, her roller skates and her record collection-- our special created language only we spoke, her grace and beauty which like mine has wizened and aged into something unrecognizable.  She is still mentioned in my nightly prayers-- along, tonight, with the request that she forgive me for this and other betrayals. 

Sisters of No Mercy

I've bookmarked on my computer a piece from the New York Times which follows the four Brown sisters via forty years of an annual photographic portrait.  Maybe it's because they are all around my age that I find the slow transformation so riveting.  And here we have just a visual-- a snapshot-- an annual moment... but we infer things-- there are deep emotional changes-- darknesses and distances.  The body language of the girls shifts and alters.  One year they are tightly embracing...  another year they seem isolated.  The dynamic between sisters changes-- the hairstyles, the clothing... what they seem to represent.  We are given so little information and yet so much.  It's like a sad film without a soundtrack... and why is it sad?  It is sad to me.  It is life-- the effects of time which are the only way we can really understand it.  Passages.  One of the women is the photographer's wife.  She seems to be a little more mothery... one or two of the others seem to be going through a more traumatic metamorphosis-- maybe a gender or sexual identity thing.. who knows?  But I keep speculating... observing.

Maybe it is because I'm so estranged from my own sister that this fascinates me.  I mean-- I have so many close girlfriends who feel like my family-- a kind of girl-intimacy I've always enjoyed since I was small and shared bunks and cabins at camps and schools.  But the sister thing-- the genetic similarity, the familial DNA blood-bind... to have lost this is tragic in a way, although so often necessary.  I would say I am more the victim than the perpetrator of familial betrayals and they hurt, even though we do without and go on and have a rich life in spite.  My son, on the other hand-- I can't imagine anything coming between us.  My sister-- there was a sort of underlying competitive schadenfreude I became aware of only in middle age.  It seemed so contrary to the sort of thing I felt-- wanting to make things and give things to my sister.. loving her children, sharing their joys and sorrows... it was shocking and terrible. It was an awakening and a lesson.  I moved on.  I tried to learn to share my affections where they are at least respected if not reciprocated.

There is a small human drama I have been observing now for two or three years.  A girl I used to pass in Harlem, with her pimp, or her dealer...  pretty, white-- mid-20's-- out of place in the crowd she hung with on corners late-nights: people smoking weed, slapping one another, playing loud music-- a local party and social 'club' for some.. for others, opportunities to exchange things, make some deals, etc.  More recently I began to see her on her own, walking quickly like a dog with a scent-- underdressed in winter-- disheveled and nervous... or walking slowly and without linear sense because she is high and distracted.  The last few months I see her outside crack houses and project yards-- begging, pleading.  The hood boys have a way of ignoring these girls.  They are blocked.  But I have observed that each Friday her sister comes uptown, hunts her down-- hands her an envelope-- maybe cash, maybe some disability check she receives for her.  I watch the sister and her boyfriend.  She used to buy her a sandwich or some food-- sometimes they'd eat somewhere.. and then the sister took off, back downtown-- sometimes looking backward, with teary eyes... sometimes just looking down.   Lately there is only a cursory hug-- the using sister is emaciated and her face is marked with sores and infections.  Her arms and legs are covered with needle punctures gone bad, track marks and other scars.   I am obsessed with this story-- what I infer-- the enabling, the attempts at rehab, the kidnapping, the betrayals; I know well the path of addiction with and without intervention-- the rocky  stumble downroad and the pain of loved ones watching as though through a television screen-- unable to prevent, unable to touch.

My own sister and I were reasonably close; of course, you are thrown together-- share bedrooms and toys... but as the younger, I always assumed too much-- that I would have a protector, a team-mate, a
sympathizer.  I was fiercely loyal and covered for her, took some parental hits.  At a certain point, her life became unmanageable and she just walked out of her old self the way moulting snakes slither away from their skins.  I can scarcely remember her scent-- maybe her acne preparation she wore at night-- I even thought bad skin was cool, craved it back then-- although I hated the smell of the gunk she used.  Shalimar, by day.  Years later, in my 30's, I reached out one night--- my second marriage was deteriorating and I was hitting a wall.  You go back to childhood for clues... No, she said, I never think about that.  A slammed door.

I have always been a girls'-girl... I have tons of great women friends who are my family, who have my back... my acquired sisters-- even my beloved cousin, who shares my heart... we are honest and intimate.  My sister is not only lost to me forever, but she has re-invented a story in which she is the true heroine-- the good girl, the one who inherits the birthright,  like a twisted version of the Biblical tale where the hairy brother shaves his arms and pretends.   When I see this sister in Harlem-- taking the difficult trip uptown -- I know I would have done this... I do this, for my 'other' sisters, for the women in my life who need uplifting or assistance or even a nurse.  The word itself... the way it is used for nuns-- yes, it is a privilege, a title-- a sacred thing... not a mere juxtaposition of birth and DNA.

Looking at the Brown sisters-- their subtle movements and frozen gestures, their metamorphosis and transformation from girls into women-- from strong into vulnerable,  mature, complex beings.. like a painting which evolves... which deepens and completes.... I still feel a kind of sorrow and maybe envy.  This tableau of intimacy and womanhood, of genetic similarity and connection-- it fascinates and evades me.   I am missing this, despite all of my wonderful and fulfilling friendships-- old and young--- I am somehow a failed sister, an orphan of sorts, a disconnected twin.  It is loss, in life, that makes us realize what we have had; I have learned this, and maybe this is the lesson of my family.  I have tried-- once or twice-- at my father's funeral, for example, which was a 'show' run by my sister-- I have tried to sense the missing in her.  But it is not there.  I do not recognize the woman she is; I do not feel her or know her.  Not for a second was there the smallest opening, the millimeter of Achilles heel.

No one in my original birth family is quite like me.  They resent and despise my honesty and truthfulness.  They fear it, in a way.  I suppose this is a kind of power I do not fully appreciate.  I write, I confide, I disclose to my friends, I absorb their vulnerabilities and never betray.  Never.  The younger-- my son, even my niece, although I should not betray her-- they sense and love me.  But familial estrangement is in itself a kind of betrayal.   Among four sisters there is room for relationships to wax and wane.  But between two sisters-- it is like a marriage that either thrives or ends in divorce.  There was so much at stake, for her.  She had to be the winner, and I am glad, in a sense, to have conceded that.  If only that had made her feel complete.   My poor father went to his grave misunderstanding me (this was important to her), and I forgive him.  My success as a human has little to do with his version.  I was valuable to my sister as long as I gave and donated, have come to terms with the harsh reality of this.  In our fictional moving portraits over 40 years, there would have been so little touching, so little revealed-- just the aging, and in her eyes, the desperation and subtle anger-- the determination and the deception.  Here I am, I am what I told you I was.  As for me, my eyes would be watery, despite everything I know... I am breakable and here I am-- anyone's sister, trapped in a loveless photograph without a birthright, wearing last year's sweater.  I am what I have done, what I have left behind, the love I have had, the love I've been given, the failures, the betrayal:  I do not love being photographed but I no longer mind if you look at me.  I stand alone.