Sending Pages Out to Dry - Episode 5 of 5

The gay couple who renovated Prichard House never found my sobbing story, but a cold-nosed developer with an eye to multi-use stumbled across it and took it home. Unable to decipher the handwriting, the dips into vague poetry, she gave the book to her teenage daughter who read, understood and wrote a paper on it at The Padeia School and then used it as the basis for an editing project in Accelerated English. She is now an editor at Simon & Schuster.
At the same time, a poetry major in Long Beach tripped over the corner of that collection, dug it all up and wrote a thesis that eventually secured him a job at The Atlantic Monthly.
Not all the Virginia-Highland books were found but one was discovered by a friend of a friend who’d met my old roommate at a meeting of The League of Women Voters. The friend took it upon herself to give the book the roommate who read it avidly, against her better judgment. Then she burned it, singeing off most of a really dreadful home permanent, which forced her to get a decent haircut, something that so changed her spirits and attitude that she met the man of her dreams, married him and was enrolled in law school before the year was out. All of this I know be I wrote it. For the first time, the voice inside that had led, then left me with a void to fill, became my own.

Sending Pages Out to Dry Part 4 of 5

The thought energized me again. One the way back to 3rd Street, I swung into the Midtown Post Office and mailed the oldest books to a high school friend in Long Beach, asking that they be dumped on the shore. Long Beach was the only part of New York in which I’d ever felt at home. I’d discovered during the course of this day that I’d had had a sympathy with the older books. Or the younger me. My arms hurt; my fingers were cramped from holding the handle of the plastic bag; my back ached. All I now wanted for those girlish purple scrawls was a decent burial.
The books still remaining were the most recent, those from Pershing Point. When they’d kicked everyone off the Point, I moved further down the street, figuring if I stayed on Peachtree, I could still live the Point life, which was one of meals eaten in cafes with friends met passing by. At the Point I had relaxed and considered myself home at last. When the eviction notice had come, it hurt so much my only balm was an open heart. I could relive the days spent there by setting them down.
I stood at the demolition site, in fascination with the way the building was coming down, brick by brick. It had been built to last. As had I. I tucked the last of my books between deconstructed walls. I had become what was written.
Across the street is the only ice-cream parlor in town that sells Bassett’s pistachio. I hurried over and ordered a double.

It was dark and very cold when I finally reached the high rise. Only the suburban books were left on the shelves and a midtown journal I’d fnished the week before New Year’s. I tossed the suburbs down the garbage chute and shredded the final book burning thepieces in the bathroom. At last I was playing with matches.
Later that night I dusted the void where the books had stood. The bravado hat had kep me going all day was gone; the voice leading me along my route quiet. I cleaned with a mix of Pledge and tears, past thinking of what I had done, knowing only that never had I felt so empty.
Winter passed and an aching, fickle spring took its places and for a long time I waited for the signs and clues that my abandoned books had been found. I no longer lay in bed reading but cleaned steadily, every week, as I had once been taught. One day I washed the walls and did the windows. Another day I turned out the closets and painted the bedroom radiator a bright red. For myself I took up running and by the first heat wave was up to three miles. I ran mostly alone but sometimes my steps would catch up or slow down and I would talk to strangers.
Finally, months after the event, there came another Saturday of note. Late in the afternoon while resting after stripping the floors, I drank iced tea and watched the sun glow red against my bookshelves. A friend had given me a new diary, brocade cover---very gaudy and satin. It made me laugh just to look at it. I picked up a pen. Only this time, instead of my writing to the book, the book wrote to me.

Sending Pages Out to Dry Part 3

First I took the subway south and then east four stops to Little Five Points where I walked half a mile to the house on Candler where I’d live with Hugh. He was the man in the gilt-edged book --- the one who, without knowing it, had taught me what it was like to be on the receiving end. It had taken me one summer to die of the heat and discover that painful as it is to love unrequited, to be loved unrequited is not much better. I lack the good manners necessary for such an advanced state.
A woman from the duplex next door was sweeping her porch.
“Hugh around?” I asked, leaning the shopping bags against an open Herbie Curbie.
“They moved,” she said, bringing her sweeping to the sidewalk.
“Oh?” Ho ho.
“Last fall, when Betsy was still pregnant.”
Ah.
“Well,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Great,” I thought. “Now I don’t have to feel guilty anymore.” I rummaged through my bas and extracted the blue book, dropped it into the trash bin and waved goodbye.
Back on Moreland Avenue I waited for the #48 to Ponce-Highland, near where I’d rented a roach-filled, though air-conditioned studio on St. Charles after leaving Hugh. I left those books on the front steps and forgot them.
Then I walked the half mile east to Virginia-Highland intersection around which I’d lived off and on since 1979. I left the appropriate books on the front steps or backdoors of each apartment-now-condo that I’d rented, mostly alone. Finally, I made it to the last building where I’d lived with a friend who avoids me. I left three nothing books beneath one of the tulip-shaped lawn chairs flanking the property’s very straight path.
A passing #45 bus slowed down when I waved and I rode it through Midtown to Peachtree Street, transferring at North Ave., to the new north line of the MARTA subway and within minutes was up near Lenox Square and standing in front of the house on Prichard Way where, five, no six years ago, I had my downfall. This was the journal I wrote to keep sane, and the memory of it was in my bones now, not in my head and certainly not in this book. Ferocity is never written.
The leather-bound journal I buried in the wood across the street from the big old house was filled with the confusion of a love neither requited nor unrequited but simply and innocently attempted and ultimately aborted. I heard it crying after me as I hurried away, but I was now much too light to turn back.
With half the books returned, I was both high on the action and fearful of the consequences. I had never left more than forgotten pan or pair of curtains behind, and so almost turned back even this late to gather the books, but I was too tired and glad of it. I had sent my pages out to dry. Irrevocable action.

It's Here!

Blossom time
to wash the car
buy a new box of tissues
refresh allergy meds
change flavor of cough drops from cherry to green tea

all the rain was for this
a new snow storm of petals
sent out like pages full of poems

Use these weeks for walking
before the heat creeps in and stops us cold

I will dash home now
and open all the windows

I Want to Live Here Episode 53

You’re probably wondering if I ever did finish cleaning Abigail’s apartment. I did. Without Judith seeing me (or maybe she avoided knowing), Susan opened the back door and together we packed away Abigail’s books, records, photo albums and clothes. She had little else. When we were finished, Susan handed me $50. “Judith says you’ll be leaving the complex.” I admitted as much and confided that Kevin was introducing me to a neighbor who rented rooms in a Victorian on Argonne Ave. I’d be leaving after the new year.
“I kind of made a fool of myself over Abigail’s accident,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” said Susan. "That detective came and talked to me about Abigail’s boyfriends and her life after Kevin. Not that I could tell him anything. I won’t forgive myself for that, you know. Sisters should know about each other. We do know each other’s weaknesses. If I hadn’t been so disappointed in her for leaving Kevin, though I understand it now, I would have known what she was up against.”
“Up against? What do you mean?”
“Don’t you think she was trying too hard to play that freedom game? We’ve all been playing it. I do. Before I got married, I acted like I could do whatever I wanted with my body because it was mine. I didn’t always realize that because it’s mine I should be careful what I do with it.”
“So how did getting married change that?” She blushed.
“Actually, it wasn’t marriage that matured me but getting pregnant. It’s a cliché, I know, but having to take care of the baby made me take care of myself. After that I couldn’t help but think back and compare how I tended to myself with a baby to the party years when I was empty.
“I don’t feel empty. Not physically, anyway.”
“I’m not saying this well. The baby was more of an excuse, or a reason to love myself better. Like training wheels. After I’d had nine months of really thinking about what I had and what I owed my own body, I kept on thinking it. You probably won’t need that but I did. And maybe Abigail did too, because in the end she died without having found a reason to take care of what she had…herself. She died thinking she was in love with a man who had used her and who didn’t want anything to do with her. John (Boker) told me every time he questioned Ken Eberhard he got a little closer to the truth of that relationship until he finally had enough to believe. Eberhard couldn’t wait to get out of Abigail’s living room and her life. He wanted her gone but he didn’t kill her. He didn’t do her any favors.”
“He might have saved her life.”
“Yes. If he’d cared even a little bit more about her than himself, he might have insisted she go to the emergency room.”
“Though if she’d cared about herself, she might have taken herself.”
“Except her car was in the shop.”
“Right.”
“So she called you.”
“Right.”
“And she stopped there. She could have called me and she didn’t. She could have called Ricky. She could have told the answering service what had happened, or gone next door to that couple.” “But she didn’t do any of those things.”
“She didn’t worry about herself enough. She was a trained flight attendant but she didn’t care about saving her own life.” “Are you sure we aren’t making excuses?”
“Maybe we are. Maybe we’ll continue to make excuses until we run out. I just come back to the one. She did almost nothing to save her own life and that behavior did not start when she banged her head on a glass table; it happened long before.”

Why Parades Make Me Cry

I look like a real tubby in my new uniform but I was actually wearing at least two layers of sweaters, including a very thick white knit affair belonging to my older sister. Also, because that particular Kennedy-era St. Patrick's Day was one of the wettest, coldest, sleetiest on record, my mom stuffed me into two pairs of tights and an extra pair of socks. It's amazing I could move at all.

But I will never forget leading (with best friend and nemesis, Eileen Celey) our school in the NY St. P Day Parade. Traditionally, the lead school is right behind the NYPD mounted police. I'm quite sure it was the rain, snow and sleet that kept us from slipping in the inevitable horse manure and for this I am grateful.

Sending Pages Out to Dry, part 2

Over the years, I had vowed then forgot to keep the volumes to similar sizes and shapes. Journals written in my teens were tall and narrow. I stacked these together and admired their uniform neatness. Poor years tended to be small. I’d gone through many of those $2.98 “Nothing” books and even one or two blank paperbacks. There were two heavy and expensive Record books covered in green canvas and leather bindings. These were the result of jobs where I’d had access to office supplies. A few of my diaries had been typed and put into loose-leaf binders. Funnily, I never re-read these.
If I couldn’t burn the books, and I didn’t see how I could without setting off the smoke detector, many I could toss them one by one down the garbage chute. I rearranged them again and sorted by geography.
These I wrote in Pershing Point, five books in two years, and I’d be there still if the demolition hadn’t started. Most of the Atlanta arty groups are still in a tizzy over the loss of that old hotel; the point was the only inexpensive block near the arts center.
The other pile represented Virginia-Highland, a saved neighborhood the look of which had grown too cute while the rents grew too high. I never could make any money.
The big green one I wrote in Prichard House up by Lenox Square. A small blue book from Little Five Points caught my eye next and I opened it. What a pretty handwriting I have, but very hard to read. This book was devoted to a love affair that had turned out to be important because I’d learned about being loved for a change. Reading it reminded me that I’d forgot what that felt like.
“The thing is,” I thought, throwing all the books back except the blue one and shoving a chair in front of the doors, “won’t I always need to be telling myself what I have learned?” I stretched out on the freshly vacuumed rug and turned slowly through the gilt-edged pages.
For the next week I talked to my best friend; my therapist; my sister; to all the people I never heed and whose advice I can for that reason hear. I told no one who is stronger than I. No men. Men are always telling me to go for it and I never want anyone telling me to do what I secretly want to do. The people I talked to convinced me not to throw my books away.
“You’d be throwing yourself away,” hey all said. “That’s your history,” said my college roommate in California. “It would be a waste.”
I yessed them all, agreeing up one side and down the other.

Which is probably why, on the following Saturday after doing a triple load of laundry on the worst day of the week, I walked up to the bookcase, took out all the journals and dumped them onto the rug. There was a voice telling me what to do. It was in me but I’d never heard it before. It was stronger than I and it told me to do what I’d made sure no one else ever would.
I took the Virginia-Highland books and the Little Five Points books and the two from Ponce de Leon and put them all into two plastic bags. I took the big green one from up near Lenox and slid it into my backpack with the five from Pershing Point tied up in a bundle.

to be continued