The Cruelest Month
What is certain? Nearly nothing. Waiting is purgatory. That middle passage corridor I was told was the reason to christen me and give me a name I’ve never used. “Why did you baptize me Mary Ellen?” “Molly isn’t a saint’s name. You’d be a corridor baby.” The image of all these badly named babies, the misspelled and trendy, the nicknames and the silly, fills my brain. All those babies waiting to be allowed to enter a world deeply in need of their newness, their babyish ways, their ability to make adults feel helpless, uncertain, afraid.
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Teenage Wasteland
Hearing that Epstein and his charming, British girlfriend were frequent visitors to Interlochen, an art school about an hour from my current home in northern Michigan, was both disturbing and made perfect sense. Interlochen prides itself on being “special” and certainly the two predators targeted “special” girls, God forbid they groomed someone who lacked talent, although beauty was the thing that they found especially enticing. Of course, Interlochen no longer functions as it did in the years when Epstein was able to visit his private accommodations so kindly provided by the school’s gratitude for his large contributions. Now there is security and possibly teachers who are not like several of the teachers who once taught at my own “special” school; a private school in Princeton, New Jersey that I attended during my final three years of high school.
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The Fracturing of Female Friendships
The first time I realized I was breaking up with a female friend, an Irish friend I’d met during my year at Trinity in Dublin, a wild, talented, impossible woman with whom I had shared many drunken nights, the stage, family sadness and other things, came when I realized she had pursued and captured my ex-boyfriend for whom I pined, while he remained elusive. I had called from the States to talk to her, and her sister told me she was with him in his faraway country, a place I had longed to visit.
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