FINE TUNING

Aliki, the rich aristocratic Greek-turned-English woman whose friendship we were cultivating, gave Ariadne – Natvar’s charming little blonde daughter – a yellow tee shirt. It was too big, and I think that’s how I got it, a pale yellow tee shirt, brand new. Valuable. Anything brand new was valuable.

We were living in a furnished apartment off Sloane Square, an unstylish cheap apartment with a stylish, expensive address. Again, Natvar had managed this real estate feat – finding a cheap place at an address that assumed you were rich.

It was our second address in London. The first one was in Kensington, not a posh part of town. It was the spacious apartment they were living in when I arrived from Athens, a few days before Christmas, leaving a mound of unfinished business behind me, but convinced that everything would be easier and better in London. This move from Athens to London was what was needed. It had to be the right next step.

And in the Kensington apartment I did have my own room, a real room, and there was a kitchen you could sit down in. They didn’t meet me at the airport though, after all the lucsiousness on the phone, the honeyed persuasion urging me to come. They did not meet me and the walk from the subway station on the snowy sidewalk, carrying heavy suitcases, was not glamorous. I arrived feeling very ordinary, not the star I had been on the phone. And they took me in and we stood in the kitchen drinking tea, awkwardly trying to revive the enthusiasm of the phone calls and Natvar said sternly, “Don’t think you won’t have to work. London is expensive.” “Of course,” I assured him. “Of course.”

We moved to the Sloane Square place a few months later after the Kensington place was broken into, the front door smashed when Mark – the third member of our reduced family – came home one afternoon, and Natvar now in pitched battle with the landlord over who should pay, me writing long letters on his behalf about why we will not pay, making empty threats with complex sentences, the only weapon at our disposal besides Natvar’s rage.

The second place, the Sloane Square place, has two bedrooms: one for Mark and Natvar, and one for Ariadne. That’s okay of course. Marta can sleep on the couch, keep her clothes in this closet. Natvar opens the door of the empty closet and explains with a wave of his hand how I can fill the shelves here and hang my things there – he is smiling and happy, we have a new place, this Sloane Square address, and he tweaks my ear, calls me “Murtz” and I smile with the pleasure of his attention. The only response any of us gives to his happiness is to mirror it and make it last as long as possible.

At one end of the new apartment is the living room, at the other end the kitchen – both spacious – and connecting them is a straight corridor opening onto two bedrooms and two bathrooms, not so spacious. There is no natural light in the corridor. The best room is the kitchen because it’s big and the table is made of blonde wood and it feels light in there -- even hip and with it, a kitchen other up-to-date Londoners might have.

It is better here than when we lived together in Greece. I leave every morning now for my job and return in the evening. We only have to be together in the evenings and on weekends. And I am bringing in money.

I think that I am happy, that this is what I want, to be with Natvar, Mark and Ariadne, to make a good life with them.

My parents and two sisters don’t know where I am. When we lived in Greece, although my mother didn’t know exactly where I lived, she got the address of Natvar’s brother from Natvar’s ex-wife, and she sent me things, little parcels. A cotton skirt once. That I wore. Something new. Valuable.

Now my mother does not know I am even in England. We are more invisible than ever. This too is good.

My mother told us stories – me and my sisters – in the many times when my father was not present – about her growing up: the farm in Depression-era British Columbia, the one-room schoolhouse, the six brothers and sisters, the capable if unsentimental mother, the educated but angry father with his library of French, German and English leatherbound books. I grew up familiar with this landscape though I never actually saw it. It was not a happy place, this place of her stories, but I did not think of it as an evil place. Just a place I was glad I did not have to live in.

She didn’t tell these stories when my father was present. It was rare to be with both of them at the same time. There was always a tense silence between them, at the very best it dissolved into teasing, a little joke, a brief elbow-dig. But these moments of a shared joke were only moments and always had the feeling of a respite, like a held breath released for a second. When they were in the same room they didn’t talk to each other, not about pleasurable things. If they were in the living room together each might be reading. But even this was rare. They were usually in separate rooms, or separate places – my father in the city, my mother in the country.

I see a weekend. So my father is home. My mother in the kitchen, standing, making lunch. There is a saucepan or two on the electric stove, meat roasting in the oven. A green salad on the counter dressed with oil and lemon juice and a little sugar. Meals have three or four ingredients in our house. There are no sauces, no blends, nothing new. There are boiled vegetables, meat, potatoes, salad. Jello, ice cream or cookies for dessert. My mother prepares food without much mess or flourish. It’s a job she does.

Maybe my father enters the kitchen. Maybe it is Sunday morning and he has been up in the woods behind the house, raking brush, trying to get all the roughness out so that it will be a smooth park.

My father enters the kitchen cautiously. Perhaps he wants a glass of water. Maybe he is hungry, hoping lunch is almost ready or that he can sneak a quick snack.

“It smells very good in here!” he says with artificial cheer, testing the waters. How angry is she this time?

“Well, it’s not ready yet,” my mother replies without looking at him, angry, furious for a thousand reasons.

“Okay, okay, no rush,” my father says in a soothing voice, trying just to avoid her outburst. He too is angry, furious – why can’t she be nicer? He leaves the room.

I set the table in the dining room with its failed antique table that my father bought with so much fanfare a few years ago. The table is divided into two halves that are supposed to fit neatly and invisibly together, but the pegs are loose in the holes and there is always an unsightly opening between the two halves. We ignore it. We still treat it as a valuable table. My parents sit at opposite ends with us kids in the middle and nobody talks much except my father. He cannot bear the silence.

Strong Measures

My mother is an old woman who I think has just returned from a week in California visiting her two other daughters who decided about a year ago not to talk to me, which actually suits me quite well. I just wish they all didn’t want to talk to me.

I typed a note on the computer at work, just practicing the note I am thinking of sending her.

I bought a pretty card during lunchtime, the kind of card all her daughters buy her – two chickadees. You always get my mother an animal or a flower, something related to nature.

I looked at the racks of cards. All of them had pretentious sayings on them, sayings I’d been seeing for years on cards. I got scared that maybe this incense-drenched bookstore only sold cards with inspirational words on the front, but then I found an Oriental-looking one with just a frog – no words – but still a little more sophisticated than is my mother’s style. It might have to do. I pulled it off the rack, flipped it over to check the price. $3.95. Pretty steep. Kept looking. Two chickadees. Only $2.50. I’d found the card.

I was in the bookstore with my new friend Eleanor. She’s English. “Here, Eleanor,” I say, “for your new office.” I show her a hefty table-top statue of some kind of Hindu god, seated cross-legged with a naked woman facing him on his lap, legs wrapped around his waist. The statue is semi-hidden. It totally does not fit with the rest of this store with its thousands of books and CDs about how to become pure and its little gold earrings with Om signs, and its expensive stretch-cotton yoga clothes.

Eleanor gives a good guffaw. It’s one of the things I like about her. She’s good for a laugh.

Then she points to a drum up high on a shelf, says how much she wishes she could have it. She says it with real longing. I know she has a $25 gift certificate to this store in her pocket, something her husband gave her years ago that she hasn’t used.

I reach up high high high and coax the drum off the shelf. It’s stretched leather with a picture of a palm and a spiral painted onto it. The price tag is $200 more than Eleanor’s gift certificate, and as we are looking, heads bent, another drum crashes to the floor. “Eleanor did it,” I say to the store in general and Michael, alone on the other side of the lofty room, catches my eye and laughs. He’s an aloof person and this is rare contact.

I don’t tell Eleanor the card is for my mother and that I want to write a note that tells my mother to leave me alone – don’t call me, don’t make surprise visits.

For awhile. The note comes out gentler than I feel, on the computer screen. It might buy me two weeks. That would be something. Because right now I have no time at all because it was her birthday last week plus she’s just returned from a trip and because when we spoke on the phone last time she mentioned that my father and my aunt in Hungary were wondering about me, why I hadn’t been in touch. I am supposed to respond to this and call them.

I would never be friends with these people if I met them under other circumstances.

I google from my office phrases like “adult children” and “guilt” and “parents”, and of course I don’t find anything helpful – just conventional bits about how to manage guilt, by drawing boundaries, and deciding how much responsibility to take. “You can’t do it all,” they say. But I don’t want to do any of it. I realize I am just looking for someone to say – an anonymous stranger way out in cyberspace – “You don’t owe them anything. They used you for all you were worth.”

The card isn’t written yet. I didn’t get to it this afternoon. It got covered with a white flurry of emails printed out so I wouldn’t forget them, a scramble of tasks involving typing and phone numbers – I imagine I will do it as I sit with tea in the early morning.

I am working on divorcing my family. I think it’s possible. A process. But possible. This card like a medicine I must take, for myself.

NEW YORK

Suzanne and Bob sit across the table from me in the cramped coffee shop booth – anywhere else they’d give you a few more inches, but this is Manhattan and every inch is worth money. It’s a gray day and we have walked the two or three blocks north from their apartment, up Second Avenue, past the cable cars at 59^th Street. I have no idea what time it is. It is Sunday and I am not thinking about things like time.

“Did you see the cable car that got stuck up there a few years ago?” I ask, out of the blue, suddenly remembering that story. “Yes,” they say. They’d been out late rehearsing, had stopped for pizza, heard about the stuck cable car that had been hanging suspended all day, and went to look. “Were the people waving?” I ask. “Were they looking out the windows? Was there like a whole crowd down here?” Suzanne and Bob point to where the car had been. “No,” says Suzanne. “They were pretty grim, pretty serious actually. They were being taken one by one with a crane by then.”

I had been the first one up. I’d gone out, borrowing a black polar fleece jacket that was hanging by the front door and an umbrella that opened at the touch of the button, the umbrella so clearly more expensive and much better made than the ones I usually end up with that I vow to only buy expensive umbrellas from now on. There is something so satisfying and strong about this umbrella. It feels almost permanent.

Yes, it is raining and it is cold and I walk back to the Starbucks we passed last night at about midnight, Fred and I walking across town from the theater where we have both been so deeply moved, and I so deeply inspired. We walked slowly last night, no schedule to keep and after the circus of Times Square the city quieted and it felt like we were going back in time. Up Fifth Avenue a few blocks, then up a few more on Madison. Not many people on the sidewalks. Most of the stores darkened so that my eye did not stay at the usual eye level of shop windows and crowds, but looked higher at the outline of the buildings against the sky. “These are still the original buildings,” I commented to Fred, thinking how there is always so much talk of how different New York is, how it has changed, and I always feel out of step with common wisdom because for me New York never changes – just like a person you know well for years and years never changes – and for the first time there was actually some concrete evidence to back me up, the old-fashioned rectangular buildings lining the avenues, clearly the same ones that had to have been there when I was eighteen, I thought, and then I thought again, the same ones that must have been here when my father thought of this place as his city.

We come to Park Avenue and tonight it looks magnificent to me, this double boulevard. I pretend I am from another country and imagine seeing it for the first time. Park Avenue has never been much more to me than a rich person’s place, a street that takes twice as much time to cross as all the others, a place you just have to get through on your way to somewhere else. But tonight I am innocent and Park Avenue impresses me for the first time.

“I love this city so much,” I say to Fred. It is not a new feeling, but it is new to feel it this acutely, like a lover that I can be afraid of losing.

The Starbucks we noted last night is still here in the morning, more or less where I remembered it, a relief because now Fred will be pleased. I stand in line and order and walk back with my cardboard tray with two cups and one croissant. I will have the leftover raisin nut loaf I brought from Woodstock. I pass a woman in a party dress. She is middle-aged. The dress – I imagine her dressing up the night before. There must have been anticipation. She is alone now. It looks like it didn’t work out. Her face is worn with cigarettes and some kind of hard living. She is standing still, trying to make a phone call on a cell phone.

While Fred bathes and enjoys his coffee I sit in the living room at the glass coffee table. Suzanne and Bob got in late. I don’t know what time. I didn’t hear them come in. I have no idea how long it will take them to wake and come down. I start to read the bright green brand new paperback I have noticed on the table, a play.

I am so comfortable here. I keep noticing that. I keep thinking of thirty years ago when I’d be with Jeffrey and two or three of his friends and I would be on edge every moment, always feeling that every word I said was the wrong one. I keep thinking how if then was now I wouldn’t be able to drink this tea and read this book and curl up in the big leather chair and get the afghan to make myself warmer. Somehow all these things are easy now. How hard it used to be to be with other people, harder still to sleep in their houses.

RANCH

The buzz of several fat loud flies is in the room. Insects in the house. There have been ants too the last few days. A minute ago it was winter.

The fly buzz makes me think of my aunt’s ranch in British Columbia. I was only there 3 or 4 times in my life, all within the first 16 years of my life. It looms large.

Hot days that smelled of pine needles and grass as if rain never fell in this place. A place where cows wandered in the shade of woods and there were no buildings on the horizon, no buildings anywhere except a few ranch ones. That was the first time I went, a little girl, and the ranch was a huge place where one aunt panned for gold wearing a two-piece bathing suit. I’d never seen anyone do that before but here in this British Columbia world of my mother’s family you panned for gold when you took the kids swimming in the river. I see my aunt, a woman with dark hair and a face like my mother’s, crouched over the water, a metal screen in one hand. She is looking for gold in the water. She didn’t find any that day.

There were a lot of adults at the ranch, always people I didn’t know, men and women. My father didn’t come on that trip. I never saw my father there. He went once before I was born, and maybe once more when I was a baby, and he never went again. It was not his kind of place. It was a rough place. The ranch was anyway. It had no softness at all.

My aunt’s house, plopped in the middle, a few steps from the barn, from a corral, from a sludgy pond, was a gray kind of house, unpainted, no porch. You stepped right into a room that served as a living room – dumpy chairs, an old sofa or two, dim light, books and old newspapers scattered. This was not a place where people cleaned and tidied.

My aunt wore jeans and men’s shirts and her hair was short like a man’s. My mother said this aunt was beautiful when she was a girl, but “beautiful” didn’t seem to go with this person who was my mother’s sister. Her voice was full of cigarette smoke and coughing. She sat at the end of the long table in her house where everyone gathered to eat. She said she’d just gotten a book out of the library. “It’s called Below the Salt,” she said. “I got it because I thought it would be about the ocean. Turns out it’s about the Middle Ages, and if you weren’t rich enough you had to sit at a different table, below the salt. Rich people sat near the salt.” It made sense that my aunt had chosen a book, thinking it was about the ocean. My mother was like that too, always thinking about nature.

The adults hung out around the table a lot. They were noisy. I didn’t hear my mother’s voice amongst theirs. She kept quiet. They teased her. “Hey, Gin, get your nose out of that book!” They called her “Gin” since she was a kid. Most of her brothers and sisters had nicknames. They called her “Gin,” she said, because she had a laugh like a ginny hen. I didn’t know what that sounded like.

At night I slept with my sister in my grandmother’s little house which was also on the ranch, just beyond the barn and the corral. My grandmother’s house was not a scrappy house like my aunt’s. It had a blue front door that was split in two so you could close the bottom and keep the top open, and there were flowers outside, and my grandmother’s home-baked bread and the water that came out of her kitchen sink you had to pump it. It felt more peaceful and normal and less scary here. Not so many people. Just my grandmother in her housedress and apron and another aunt who lived with her. Just them. It was quieter here. At night though I knew my mother was over at the other house with her brothers and sisters. They didn’t all live there, but they gathered there easily. They came to the ranch from different parts of B.C. to be together. We were the only ones who don’t live in Canada.

My grandmother sat at her kitchen table and smoked cigarettes. The tobacco came in a tin. She plucked the brown shreds and rolled the cigarettes, her eyes looking out the window. She had glasses and light eyes and gray hair pinned up, a wide face and many wrinkles. When she laughed there was the sound of many cigarettes smoked long ago in her throat. You could hear them when she spoke too, her voice was deep. She didn’t want to be bothered with details. She baked bread and took care of things, was kind to me without being too gentle. Children were all right here. There were many children at the ranch. My grandmother was the kind of person to whom two or three children more or less didn’t make much difference.

I DO SOMETHING

I walk along the road. It’s countryside and about 3:30 in the afternoon, and spring is on its way and I am wearing a long wooley gray coat that I have gotten compliments on for years, a coat my mother saw in a consignment shop and bought for me back when I was living in the ashram. I’m also wearing a soft red scarf that Fred gave me for Christmas a few years ago. I always think of him when I put it on. I think it was sort of expensive when he gave it to me and I already had a couple of red scarves but he saw it, I guess, and liked it and gave it to me without thinking about whether or not I needed a red scarf, and for years I kept it carefully folded with my sweaters instead of just letting it hang on a hook in the messy coat closet, until this year when I started treating it like a scarf and it seems no worse for wear.

I have left the office late in the afternoon just to take a walk. I didn’t walk with Tamar this morning. Usually she and I go out after breakfast, but today I took it easy. She came to the front of the house at the time when we usually go and saw pretty quickly that weren’t going today. She accepts it, doesn’t whine or beg. I know that if I were to go get the leash out of the basket with the handle that holds all the cans of catfood, she would go delirious with barking, run to the front door, releasing all her excitement to go for a walk in the woods, but the leash isn’t reached for this morning so she ducks her head and goes back to the living room or back to catch a few more winks with Fred.

This morning when I went back to find the Harpers magazine that I thought would go nicely with my morning cup of tea, Tamar was sleeping on the floor on Fred’s side of the bed. Usually she’s on my side, and sometimes Fred hints that he wants a dog for whom he is the prime focus, but this morning Tamar was assuring him that she has his best interests at heart most of the time.

It is quiet on the wooded road where I walk and warm enough to be comfortable without a hat or gloves. It is a pleasure to be out of the office. I pass the small farm I have been passing all winter. I see a human being there for the first time. I think about waiting for her to come close enough to ask her the names of the two bassett hounds who live there, but think better of it. I’d have to wait too long. But I see there are chickens on the farm now. I hear a rooster, and I hear the donkey braying. I would like to know these animals better.

The last few days I have turned the radio off in my car and driven in quiet. Something I haven’t done for a long time. I don’t pray in words and I don’t meditate with the iron-clad discipline I learned in the ashram. But I do something. It’s almost like I try to notice and be with the layer that is not about getting to work on time or late, the layer that doesn’t worry about money or health, but a layer that has a trust in it, a calmness.

As I walked this afternoon, again seeking out, but in a gentle way, this calmness, I thought how years ago when I left the ashram I put an end to all words like “god” and anything I couldn’t see. I’d spent a long time believing fervently in things I couldn’t see and I’d had enough. Fuck that shit.

Something gentle is seeping back in. I am still careful. I have many friends who take a lot of things for granted: crazy healing schemes, pendulums, crystals, astrology and – worst of all – anyone who claims to be a teacher. I wish they’d be more cautious.

So I am still cautious. But I am also alert to what might really be true for me, or helpful to me as I navigate this strange segment of life with this almost fantasy world I work in to earn a check and health insurance, my two-sides-of-the-river life: writing and home on one side, crazy fantasy world on the other – a world that can’t just be dismissed, a world that is also some kind of place for me to expand.

I said to Fred the other day that my job – that I’ve had for five months now – is kind of like going to high school all over again, except I’m not the shy kid anymore who can’t speak because she’s so self-conscious.

I used to listen to people in high school Everything they said sounded stupid to me. Yet I deeply envied them that they could speak. It wasn’t fair. What they said was stupid, but I knew what I said was even worse – it was awkward. At least they seemed tat ease with their ignorance. That’s what it felt like.

I have a pink spiral notebook from 1985 or so. It’s the oldest writing I have. Not that old, but I don’t have any of my writing from before then. But somehow I still have this notebook. Now and then – every couple years – I look at it. I am in Greece in the book. I am less than thirty. I am in Natvar’s household. In the book I write about how stupid I am. I mimic Natvar’s words. It’s his voice in my head that I write down in the pink notebook. But I opened the door to his voice very willingly. It was a welcome guest. Sit down, I said to Natvar, make yourself at home.

HORSEBACK

Sometimes I think of the portable record player sitting open on top of the tall wooden radiator cover in the far corner of the large hall, 5 or 6 or 7 girls in school uniforms dancing beside it. It was the first place I danced to rock & roll.

When I first came to that hall I was 9 years old and I played Addams Family there, continuing a game that had been going on the year before in 3rd grade, at a different school in a different country. Now we had moved to England, but it was just another new school.

I knew the feeling of new school, knew the feeling of not knowing anyone yet, of having to pretend I knew more than I did, the feeling of keeping my shyness and uncertainty tucked away where it couldn’t be seen and instead doing my best to appear part of the same fabric as the others though I knew I stood out as new and different. Still, I knew no other way to be new than to resist and insist until I wasn’t new anymore, until the place felt like my place.

The hall was where the nuns let us loose after dinner and homework and before bed. There weren’t many rules in the hall. You could run. You could yell.

Sister Felicity sat in the semi-circle of window seat, plying her black rosary beads, watching over us, shaking the wooden-handled bell when playtime was over. Sometimes other girls sat beside her, the ones who weren’t running around.

In the evening hall crowd I didn’t notice the other girls much though I knew each one by sight and name. I played with complete focus with my small gang – Lucy Ann, Ann, Nicola and Madeleine. Very rarely did we let anyone else in.

After Addams Family we moved on to Jacks. From there to Stones, which was harder. Playing horses moved in and out of all of it – being the horses sometimes because Nicola was so good at being a horse that we all had to try. She made it look so much fun. Not on all fours, but bending over, knees bent, palms on the floor, skimming across the floor on hands and crepe-soled, buckled brown leather sandals – snorting, neighing, tossing our heads – and sometimes playing the rider, the owner of three horses – girls in the books we read often had three horses, and then you could name them, my favorite part. In one book I’d read the horses were called Symphony, Sonata and Serenade and I liked the prettiness and symmetry of those names and often named my make-believe horses with those three beautiful names.

Play horses were much more fun than real ones. It was my dirty secret I dared not share that I often dreaded our Friday afternoon riding sessions with Colonel Plowman who came to pick us up in a small square green car with wood strips cross-hatching the green and took us to his rough and ragged, windswept little farm where the ponies were strong and rugged and usually knew exactly what they wanted – they wanted the wide open spaces and as soon as they stepped into them – into the cold windy fields, away from the stable yard or the hedge-lined lanes, they ran and nothing could hold them back. I knew it was coming and the fear would be like a rock inside of me. And the anger of Colonel Plowman when you couldn’t control your horse and the scariness of being on the back of a creature who might do anything at any moment – and to be surrounded by girls who said horses were wonderful and wasn’t riding wonderful and why couldn’t we do it every day.

SPACE AND TIME

My sister is the first one to come to mind. Her unsmiling face looking at me, her long hair falling down either side of her face. Pale brown hair. I had the dark hair. She was the blondie when we were two little girls.

Once, I threw her brand new toy out of the attic window – a brightly painted wooden house my father had just brought for her from one of his exciting trips abroad – I was that furious. The house smashed to pieces on the ground and I got in trouble. She could make me speechless with rage – reduced to slamming doors -- back then.

I didn’t like her much much of the time, but she was usually the only person around. When I decided to make a store that sold rocks – each with a price tag – that my parents were invited to shop at – I let Chris play. I let her in on my games when there was no one else.

She often teased me in later years, saying that I would get so excited about a game, and we’d play it for one afternoon – and I’d promise that we’d play it again, and then I’d never feel like it. Like the time we took our bicycles and found a place amongst bushes by a stream that I declared would be our secret place, that we’d return – and for that one afternoon I’d been caught up enough to believe it, but when my little sister came around the next day, suggesting we go do it again, I didn’t want to. I’d lost interest. I wanted to stay on my bed reading Gone with the Wind.

I am in England when I tell these stories. We all are. I am lying in the small narrow room that was mine, a red room because the long red drapes dominated the small space. I have a horse stable on a table and two or three rubberized horses – a prized Christmas toy that I was surprised to get, I had wanted it so much.

There are board games to play with my sister, and card games. And in the afternoons we walk home from school together, she with her leather satchel that has straps so she can carry it on her back, both of us in the blue convent uniform. I am now a fellow student at her school, a comedown – she plays alone too – she plays cowboys by herself, pulling the gun, shooting, then falling to the ground – the shooter and the shot.

She tells me there were times when she thought about jumping out of her bedroom window and killing herself on the cement path below. I was sympathetic when she told me that though I never felt my sympathy was enough. I came up short. I did not have enough.

In the small English house where we lived our drama so close together – the four separate bedrooms on the second floor – each a different color depending on the drapes, each just a few steps from the other, my father’s next door to mine, a door leading from his room to mine, but a door that was always kept shut, never used. If I wanted to get to his room, I walked around the landing and went in through the other door, which made his room the farthest away. But he was not usually home. Only there on weekends. A gentleman with a country home. That’s how he liked to think of it. Returning from a sophisticated week in the city to his weekend retreat, or going away on trips.

His trips were a shower of glitter in the beginning. Trips of excitement – his and mine – the airport, the suitcases, the beautiful white shiny halls of the airport where you could run to meet him down wide empty spaces, your footsteps slapping the marble with sound, knowing his suitcase had present inside – toys, he always brought wonderful presents.

Now, in England, it is not exciting like then. He brings back ugly things that he likes from Ethiopia, Morocco – the black-and-white pen sketches done by a business associate in a bar, a heavy piece of blackened bronze once used to make coins.

And this time he asked me to help him pack so I had to be with him in his room as he lined everything up so orderly it was deadly dull – his shoes wrapped in newspaper. My father does everything so slowly and carefully it makes me restless, but I must stay there and be acquiescent, as if I am a pony like the ones he rides on Saturdays, and my restlessness is merely quaint, something that he must tame, and I must let him tame it. My unruliness must be ground down, polished like a stone.