I’ve had a lot of roommates. The first one in college was so different than me it was almost comical. Waking up several hours before her first class, Lisa would wash and blow dry her hair, apply makeup, and dress in something she had chosen the night before. I either went to bed with wet hair, which was still damp in the morning, wore no makeup unless I was on a dating warpath, and dressed in whatever emerged from my closet. Lisa had moved in with two dozen frozen steak dinners but after they ran out, I discovered she couldn’t cook, I mean she really couldn’t cook. Once I asked her to boil water for pasta and she put a box of noodles into cold water and turned on the heat. I returned from a late class to find a ball of starch floating in a pot of water. Lisa wanted to marry a Jewish dentist. I wanted to live in sin with a gorgeous man.

I was newly divorced, sober, unemployed, and grieving. New York City should have felt hard, cold, and dangerous, but somehow it took me in. Like my ancestors fleeing the famine in Ireland and the millions escaping the pogroms, the genocide, the impossibility of their lives, I found refuge and community. Yes, it was hard at first, one bad job after another, one terrible apartment, isolation and envy of others’ wealth and success, but gradually the life there became my life. Through my horribly paid publishing job, all those church basements where I listened to the stories of addicts like me, and the relationships I had no business pursuing, I found a way to live. One morning, walking across Central Park as the mist faded from Sheep Meadow, I encountered a gigantic obelisk, Cleopatra’s Needle, deserted except for an unhoused man who gestured to me to come closer.

Recently, I became interested in the idea of grief as an inheritance. There is an ongoing conversation about Black Americans carrying the DNA of former slaves. I am a white, second-generation Irish American, whose father was placed in an orphanage for a year as a child, whose grandfather, whom I never met, was described to me, or at least as I can remember through the mysterious prism of childhood, as dying in an alley. He was an alcoholic, his charm reported to be boundless but whose thirst killed him alone and penniless. My father was a brilliant, funny, loving man whose personality was transformed when he drank to excess into a violent, angry, and cruel man. He suffered deep guilt but did not stop drinking and that was our family’s shadow. 

I was beaten into literacy by an angry Irish teacher at a school located outside of Dublin called Glengara Park. I was six and had managed very well in an American kindergarten where we carried our chairs for credit. In fact, I had starred as Mother Nature in the Spring play and had learned all my lines by heart because I could not read.

This recent scandal at Interlochen involving faculty members and students, as well as the Epstein connection, has reminded me of my own experiences as a teenager. Because I grew up in a household that was suffused in literary sex, not actual sex, I was an idiot savant in terms of relationships between men and women. Having read Women In Love in the back of my parents’ Volvo while we were driving down to southern Spain, I became convinced that men and women were meant to destroy each other, but also they should have lots of sex. I was eleven, and my family discovered my reading choice when I asked from the back seat, “What’s a luminous loin?”  This question came from the scene when Gudrun watches Gerald climb out of the water: “The beauty of his dim and luminous loins as he climbed into the boat, his back rounded and soft-ah, this was too much for her, too final a vision. She knew it, and it was fatal.” There was that, and it was fatal, and in my eleven-year-old brain I thought I understood something, but I did not.

I am not a boss lady. During my life I have been in a position of authority as a mother, a line foreman, a teacher, and as a client.

“You are suffering, once again, from CMS,” my husband said in response to my shouting at the cat and then bursting into tears and announcing I hated my life.
“No, I’m not,” I said, “everything’s hopeless.”
“CMS,” he said, “completed manuscript syndrome. It’s the exact way you acted with your previous contracts.”

I am very, very conflicted about social media. The irony of writing this on a social media platform is not lost on me any more than that disgusting fuck saying he totally understands all sports and then admitting he has no idea what a red card is. I liked Facebook. I wrote stuff, funny or moving stuff, and people said they liked what I wrote. I never noticed who liked anything, and if no one liked it, I didn’t care. Occasionally I attended a party, and someone would tell me something they had no business knowing, and when I asked them how, they would say, Facebook. That was a little weird, but hey, it saved time because people didn’t need to be filled in on details about my cat or son or parents or constant whining about day-to-day stuff. My husband posting unflattering pictures of me with a cheese hat or coming out of the water in a bathing suit or making weird faces was annoying but nothing I couldn’t handle by looking at some old headshots and remembering I was once quite the looker.