Ilia Charms the Cafe

“Of course we’re making progress,” said Raf’s cousin Mayra, whom I had met just minutes before. “You wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t….”

I knew instinctively that “here” meant more than the restaurant at which we were eating: “here” was more about seeing Ilia, my mother-in-law, before we got to the restaurant.

Ilia is big on little gifts, regalitos, and since Mayra is a mother and possibly a grandmother (else why would Ilia be giving Mayra dolls?) there was a shopping bag full of little gifts. So we passed a pleasant ten minutes looking at all the gifts, and wondering—in Mayra’s case—how in the world she would get all this stuff back home to Texas.

We left Ilia to go to the restaurant, where the family secrets started to spill. There was the grandfather who... OK, that should probably stay a secret. And there was Mayra’s sister, who spent years and years being depressed, being hospitalized, being kept at home, all because she was Lesbian.

So yes, I am “here,” meaning also that last Thursday, the day that Ilia’s husband was admitted to a nursing home, I was chatting with Ilia in the café. Why? Because I got to imagining Ilia alone in her little apartment: how must she feel, knowing that her husband of 60-plus years was for the first time not coming home? Was she sitting alone in the living room? Praying? Crying? It seemed somebody should find out.

So I called and she immediately agreed to join me for coffee: that’s when the anxiety started. Why? Well, I proposed meeting her at her apartment; we could walk from there to the café. She, of course, refused and said she’d simply meet me at the café.

It’s only three blocks, but having had a broken back for the last three months, I can now tell you: relativity applies very much to space as well as time. And since all it takes is one crack, one bump in the sidewalk….

So I got to the café and immediately began to worry. Yes, San Juan is safe, generally, but an 85-year old woman is an easy target for a mugging. And what of the wind, which gusts so strongly on that street that my friend Harry, as a child, used to hang out there with his friends: the wind would blow lady’s skirts up…. Since Ilia is inversely proportionate in size to her years, she could easily have been blown into La Perla, outside of the city walls.

So I slunk off to her apartment, and lingered outside on the street, eyeing which car could provide maximal cover if she emerged. OK—that seemed silly, but was it? Of course not: she needs her independence, I need my reassurance. So if lurking outside the apartment, cowering for a moment or two, and then tailing my mother-in-law for two and a half blocks seems silly, well…

…you’ve never had an aged parent.

Which it now seems I don’t, since a Federal Judge, Juan Pérez Jiménez, has just ruled that Obergefell versus Hodges doesn’t apply in Puerto Rico. Why? Because we are a territory, and since we have the “limited” (his word, not mine) self government that could legalize same sex marriage.

OK—so today I am, again, not married. So if I’m hit by a truck and in intensive care, will I be able to see my (now) ex-husband? Or, since no legal convention holds me back, am I free to chat up and perhaps bed the really good-looking bearded guy who seems to be coming to the café an awful—or rather, a wonderful lot? Whee, I can go back to my promiscuous 20’s!

And how promiscuous was I then, and how promiscuous do I intend to be now? “Not very” and “not” to the two questions, and here it’s time to say that yes, some of the time it was fun, in those years. I had just come out—to everyone except my family and employer (you know, the little people in your life)—and you could hook up just by walking down the street, making eye contact, starting a mundane conversation, and throwing in the name of a gay bar. So yes, it was fun, except for the venereal diseases that were rampant, and the even more annoying problem of lice and scabies.

Was it as fun as watching Ilia work the café? Not really, since Ilia has advanced degrees from the very top-shelf of charm schools. She doesn’t enter the café, she makes an entrance—quite a different thing—since she has started the whole process by being introduced to Santana, addressing him formally as “usted,” and then, an hour or two later, as m’ijo. She then parks her walker in the corner, and gives a smile and a greeting to everyone she sees.

Nor does it stop there, since Ilia speaks just loudly enough so that others might hear, but not loudly enough to annoy. So it’s only a matter of minutes before the woman sitting on the sofa next to our table is engaged in conversation. And that’s wonderful, because the woman turns out to be a teacher, and Ilia herself wanted to be a teacher, and Ilia’s daughter is indeed not just a teacher, but a teacher de corazón, and that’s an excellent thing to be.

Well, Ilia and the teacher agree: things aren’t what they were when they were what they were, which they aren’t now. Which means that nuestros valores are all shot to hell—and no wonder that the insurance company was giving her such problems getting a hospital bed for her poor husband, because hadn’t the Feds cracked down on Medicare fraud? Imagine, even doctors….

Well, we go on about that, and then it’s time to discover that the woman is in the café not as a teacher, but as a mother, since her daughter is one of the people who draw murals. Instantly, it’s time to place the daughter, since Ilia has another daughter, not a teacher, but an artista de pura cepa, and that’s every bit as good as a maestra de corazón. Well, it turns out that a couple decades lie between the two artists, but is Ilia stopped? Absolutely not, since surely the daughter must remember Katherine, from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas? And indeed she does, and they both get a bit weepy thinking of Katherine, who took such good care of Ilia when she told the Grim Reaper to go “eff” himself, spent three months in ICU, and then three more months in the rest of the hospital. So Katherine was a godsend, and now she’s gone, having died of cancer.

Well, the idea had been to divert Ilia, and I had come prepared to chat, and was prepared to launch into my longest, and shaggiest of dog stories. In fact, I was about to tell her that the man she met at the opera last month was my shrink, and I was about to tell her that he’s surprising good, since he has absolutely only one, count it, one diploma on his wall….

…silence before the punch line….

But in that silence, Ilia burst in with a question about my brother, and didn’t he live in Montana? And so I choke the punch line (the one diploma is from Harvard University), and I tell Ilia, yes, he did. But now he lives in West Virginia, and then it’s Preston, who comes from the table two tables away but also from West Virginia. So we veer the conversation quite sharply onto a different ramp (since we were both about to trash the place, as if the inhabitants hadn’t done so already), and guess what? Ilia had a friend who was from West Virginia, and she was lovely, just lovely.

Here it must be said, I have never been with Ilia amongst strangers when she could not adduce a friend—of the highest loveliness—from any country which presented itself. In fact, speculation in the family runs high: how would Ilia fare in a tour of the United Nations? Would her roster of lovely friends extend even to Zimbabwe or Sumatra?

Very likely so, since Ilia is a loveable old fraud, which means that while she may not, in fact, ever even have met anyone from West Virginia, she still has friends there. As indeed she does: they just haven’t met. And now, of course, she does have a friend from West Virginia, since Preston is perfectly charming, and half-owns the bar with thousands of craft beers and rare whiskies. So Ilia and I agree: we’ll forsake coffee the next time and guzzle beer at Preston’s place.

So now we’ve met the school teacher and the school teacher’s daughter, and then Preston, and so who could be next? Easy, Stefan, who used to tutor Naïa, Lady’s daughter, but who has a masters in psychology. So now Ilia and Stefan are arm in arm, since Ilia has a masters in social work. But they both agree: the degree doesn’t matter, as long as someone listens….

At this point, Amir’s little baby appears, except that he has, in the space of only two years, gone from infancy to toddlerhood, which is excellent because no child can escape Ilia’s all-encompassing hand, and the encomium, “ay, que lindo!” So now it’s time to think about getting home, since at any moment Ilia may get a call from her children with the news: her husband is at the nursing home at last.

“It’s done me so much good,” she tells me. “Thanks for calling me!”

So we kiss, and then I go in and get her the shopper from SuperMax, because of course she has to know the specials. Then I ask her to please, please call me when she gets home, and she takes umbrage and says she won’t, and I tell her, “look, I ask my 22-year old son…”

So she kisses me again and takes off in perfectly good humor, having met more people in the coffee shop in one afternoon than I have in two years, though I am now—following her lead—saying hello to that amazingly hunky bearded guy that I was telling you about. You know, the guy I am now, this week, perfectly free to pursue, since Judge Juan Pedro Jiménez has decided I am not, after all, married. And speaking of which, might I ask the judge a question? If I’m not married, then what the hell was I doing, last Thursday, when I called Ilia? Because—excuse me, here—screw you, judge! I was doing it for Ilia, those hours spent in the café, but I was also doing it for someone else.

And that would be my mother-in-law.          

      

Ode to a Fallout Shelter

Before I was even five years old, my father had started to dig.

It wasn’t safe, you see, it was never safe. Yes, the house was only ten or fifteen years old, and certainly every precaution, every safety feature or code specification was undertaken or met. The foundation was sturdy, the studs in the walls were straight, the roof leaked only later, and never too conspicuously. No, no, there was no visible problem; no rational reason to believe that the house was not safe.

But it wasn’t—when the little tow-headed kids donned their pajamas in the cool evening, they might be doing it for the last time. They might, in a matter of seconds, be vaporized, their flesh and bones and eyes and teeth all becoming an infinitesimal smudge of a huge blast; a blast which would blink out the sun itself. And then, we would be sizzling atoms thrust miles up in the mushroom cloud. Next? The winds would take us, to poison anyone anywhere who had the misfortune to breath, to allow their skin access to the light or air. Yes, we would sear, we would rot the flesh, and claw at the lungs and endure for centuries—long past the measure of our days—as the toxic, radioactive fallout that no amount of scouring or removal could erase.

Yes, in any moment everything could change, or rather, everything could be revealed, since how could we turn so suddenly from something so sweet, so innocent—whiter than the white bread we ate—to something so evil, so toxic, so lethal? No, it was always in us, it must have always been in us, only taking the bomb to rip it out of us. Yes, the bomb—the bomb that we had dropped on Japan, and that now the Russians could drop on us.

And they’d do it, too—without a thought, without remorse. You only had to look at Lenin’s face: the black eyes, piercing without seeing. Eyes meant to bore, not to understand; eyes meant to send armies to their death, meant to see leagues of widows and children wailing in torture, meant to register all, and absorb nothing. No, Lenin would send his mother to the gulags, and never so much as twitch a hair on his mustache.

They were sly, the bastards—that librarian who sang in the church choir with your wife? A communist, with a gold-framed picture or Stalin himself on the inside of her closet door. Yes, he gazes in the darkness at her clothes, and the blouses that will cover her breasts, the skirt that will cover her loins. Yes, all night and all day her clothes will be drenched in communism; she will slip it on as naturally and easily as a dog rolling in a carcass in the woods. And then she will go, spreading her poison even to the woman sitting next to her on the bus.

Safe? Ha ha, no one was safe! They were everywhere, the bastards, and they were hidden, and no amount of searching would find them. No, they slunk among us, masquerading as bank presidents and doctors, even, but when the red army came down the elm-shaded University Avenue? When the Russians drove their tanks onto Library Mall, prepared to gut the men and violate the women? Ah, then we would see them—the people who had lunched at our table and cared for our children.

Dig, he had to dig. Because the house wasn’t safe—the blast would come, and then we would hear the sound coming across the radio waves. Yes, the high-pitched, unvarying sound, the sound made by nerves stretched just before they broke. Yes, we knew that sound, we had heard it before: but always, it had been followed (after several nerve-wracking seconds) with the words, “THIS IS A TEST. The broadcasters of your area, in voluntary cooperation with local, state, and federal authorities, are conducting this test of the Emergency Broadcast System. THIS IS ONLY A TEST.”

No, we knew—this was never just a test. Rather, it was a reminder, a portent, a sign that dig, we must dig. Nothing was safe, and so we dug, dug, dug—though we could never dig enough. No, there was no pit deep enough, because with every shovelful, the darkness and the deepness grew within us as well. And so he dug and dug, and put his eldest son to dig and dig, and put his wife to take the rocks and the earth and make a garden by the pit.

A garden, yes, that the neighbors would see, so that the neighbors would see the pit that was next to the house, and that was within us. For the fallout, it seems, had fallen even before the blast itself, and the rot and filth was growing within us—despite our white bread and tow-headed heads. No, we were as rotten as a pirate’s teeth, and just as black, as black as the soil which poisoned even the worms, the skeletal white bugs that lived under the rocks. And so they dug deeper, and deeper, and drenched themselves even more deeply as they went. They could not stop, and the dirt piled up higher and higher, and the neighbors began to notice and snigger.

Ah, the neighbors! For the alarm would sound, and it would not be a test. No, finally, finally the moment would come which we had dreaded and yet welcomed, since really, doesn’t the neck beg for the guillotine, once it has been decreed? Yes, bring it on, send that bomb and that blast and that heat and that mushroom cloud of all of the children and the houses and the trees and flowers and everyone and everything. Give us, please, give us the bomb. Because we can no longer dig, we can no longer pretend that we can out-dig the poison rotting through us. We laugh and smile and go to school and then to the library, where we check out books to inform and entertain us. To keep us from looking at what no amount of digging can conceal.

Yes, he dug, my father, and he dug, my brother. Together they dug, until Mother, peering over the abyss, could barely see the tops of their heads. They dug, and then the poured the concrete, into the tomb that had the two right angles necessary to keep the fallout out. (For fallout falls straight down, and cannot turn corners….) Yes, even Tut himself never had such a tomb, never had the shelter that we would have.

The neighbors? Would they storm the house, beat down the door, surge down into the basement, and seek to enter our redoubt? Yes and let them try, since for all the birthdays we celebrated, and all the cakes we baked, and all the Christmas cookies and cranberry bread that we had wrapped and exchanged—they were not us. Not us, and especially not us when the bomb was halfway across the Atlantic, and the alarm was sounding, and the friendly and official voice had grown graver and less polished.

Yes, he was no longer reading a script, he was at last telling the truth, and it was not just about the bomb, and about the fallout, and about the emergency precautions. No, finally, at long last, he would be announcing the truth. The father, who looks at his wife and wants to tell her, and cannot. Who sees his sons and thinks they are soft, in need of toughening, not strong enough to take the commies. Hell, who may become commies themselves!

The mother, who hates to cook and so does it badly—each burnt offering a tribute to her sacrificed life, her house that will never be clean enough or pretty enough. She moves the furniture around constantly in the living room, always trying to find a room that will comfort, that will please. Soon, she is banging the chairs against the walls, all but puncturing them; she grows maddened and frenzied, and sends the sofa spinning to all corners of the room. But still the room will not be right.

The children, whose white teeth and towheads are camouflage, or perhaps a shroud covering the pus-seeping corpse of the starved dead. The white bread had never reached the cells, so polluted and bloated with rot that nothing could be absorbed. The eldest would know success, but never happiness. The middle might know both, but only after a wrenching struggle.

The youngest? As much as anything, the father had dug the pit for the babe of the family, for it was all too clear. Yes, he had to dig and dig, but there was no pit deep enough to bury that secret, which was worse, far worse, than becoming a communist. Yes, it was a thing so black that it could cloud out even the nuclear blast, even the fallout itself would shudder, turn back, and refuse to face the horror.

Yes, the youngest had the blackest of secrets, the darkest of futures. He would be found dead, most likely, with his pants down around his ankles and his throat slit and the blood pooling, and most horrific, the semen drying on his chest. The police would come and talk to the family, and could they keep out the disgust they felt? He would not look them in the eye, could not look them in the eye, could not see the shame and pity and horror and disgust.

He had dug and dug, dug further than any man had dug, and had it been enough? For the more he dug, the darker the darkness grew, until it had consumed them all. And now, his youngest son had died in a park where everyone knew that only those people went. A park never spoken of, but sniggered. A park where no mother would take her child on even the sunniest day, since who knew, who knew….

He knew, he had always known. And he had dug, dug, and dug deeper, until it was clear that there was no digging deep enough, and that all of the digging only made it worse.

And so he dug, and tried to put the darkness back into it, and planted a garden on its side, and a patio on its roof. All so that we could go on, watering the flowers, sipping the lemonade, greeting the neighbors we would kill, when the time came. Yes, we would go on about our lives, never mentioning and never forgetting the pit and the shelter for all our darkest, worst selves.

The towheads had been peroxided—our hair was as dark as Stalin’s, Lenin’s. And our souls?

Darker still!             

  

  

Eternal Merriment

It had been, by the time I left the hospital, almost a month since I had fallen; I was, in theory, well on the way to recovery. Now, it was only a matter of going home, going to bed, and emerging two months later.

OK—that plan lasted about five days….

The first problem was that Christmas was upon us, and Taí, Raf’s sister as well as mine by adoption, was on her way. She is, and always has been, a blessing on the house, but what kind of house was she walking to? I decided: I would clean the bathroom and the back bedroom. I could do nothing more.

Taí is acutely sensitive to moods, and she told me, some days later: “you’re acutely depressed.”

Was I? I didn’t think so. I was acutely tired of what seemed about to be a chronic condition. Because the pain, while greatly reduced, was still there, still nagging—as insistent as a bad mother-in-law.

And now, every movement was an invitation to catastrophe. While I had been marooned in bed, nothing much could happen to me. But now, I was interpreting “bed rest” to mean, “try to avoid lifting the piano.” And so I was up, moving about, going to the store, and then seeking refuge back in bed. So any false move could be disaster; worse, I had to train myself to be a viejito, or old man.

Getting up from a chair meant first looking at my feet, looking at the floor that I planned to traverse, identifying objects that could trip me up, figuring out which tables, chairs, or walls I could grasp to steady myself, if need be. All that done, I could push myself up with both hands on the green resin chair arms, reach for the balcony door, steady myself, and then prepare to walk through the living room. Careful—the rug starts there. Caution, the cat is moving toward me. Watch out—am I faint? If so, hold on to….

Nor was that all. Since I was spending a good deal of time in bed, I tended to be dizzy when I got up. So each time I sat up in bed, I told myself, “postural hypotension.” A holdover from my nursing days, it simply meant that I had to take a few moments, make sure I wasn’t dizzy, and make sure I knew what I would grab if I were.

The danger was the unexpected: the cat that didn’t announce himself but was simply there, between my legs, as I was turning to put the yogurt back into the refrigerator. And speaking of the refrigerator, it had a special terror for me, since the cats had learned—unbelievably—to open the refrigerator door. Raf had responded to this by putting two large cat litter containers filled with water against the refrigerator door. When well, it was a nuisance to open the door, since the water containers would be pushed out to the middle of the kitchen. But now, I was distinctly edgy about opening the refrigerator door, especially since the sound tended to attract our four cats, who would then come into the kitchen. Was there food about? Something that might, perhaps, fall? So now there would be two water containers, four cats, assorted food-frenzy sounds, and my own two unsteady feet. Oh, and I would likely be holding a cup of scalding coffee.

Thus, there were dangers everywhere. And I might, somehow, learn to control myself, but could I control other people? Street corners became booby traps, since in Old San Juan, the sidewalks are narrow, just wide enough, in some cases, for one person. So if I turned the corner, and encountered someone charging along—as once I had charged—looking over his shoulder or down at his cell phone? It was his “oops;” it was my disaster.

Still, there were compensations: the order to rest in bed for two months was a nice excuse to avoid what I had learned to dread: the forced joyfulness of the holiday season. Nor is it just a season, in Puerto Rico, but rather something like a near-eternity. Christmas bombards you from even before Halloween, just as in the states; Puerto Rico, however, extends it almost into February. And thus, for three months it is three things: traffic, party, and pretending to be happy.

Which I wasn’t, of course—why should I be? I had broken my back and might face paralysis, and now, you want me to stand about clapping my hands and shuffling my feet and singing, Feliz Navidad? And speaking of which—did anyone on the island have a reason to be happy?

Because—no news here!—the island was not doing well. The news had been incessantly bad months, now, and people were beginning to complain: they were getting tired of hearing about the “financial crisis.”

“Crisis? What crisis? Do you see anybody in crisis here,” snapped Lady to a reporter from Forbes Magazine. He had thought to stop into the café on poetry night, and had expected to see glum, despondent people, heads hanging down, unable to greet or chat with one another. Instead, it was the usual crowd.

“Hah! He came to see a funeral, and discovered that there wasn’t even a corpse!”

We had been living, as we are still living, in the tense and unnerving weeks before the crisis really hit: true, we had defaulted on one loan repayment, but not much else had happened. No fiscal control board had been created, no jobs had been slashed, no government spending curtailed or contracts cancelled. It felt, in short, that life was going on just as usual, that the crisis was made up by the politicians. And who would have to solve it? The politicians, of course.

In short, Greece was way ahead of us, and would we see the runs on banks, even the closing on banks, or the limiting of withdrawals? Would the streets be thronged with protesting government workers, their jobs now gone at the demand of the European Union? Would the rapacious vulture funds, which had lent us money like loan sharks, force us to close even more schools, sell our parks, cut the government in half? Hah! Let them try!

And there was, it has to be said, a sense of injured pride: the world, which had paid so little attention to us, was finally now noticing us, and what was it seeing? We were all reading the national press, and getting tired of seeing the same photos: the picture of the balcony of the blue building in Old San Juan, with its Puerto Rican flag and the “For Sale” sign on it. Or there was the photo of the deserted urban mall in Rio Piedras: Calle de Diego now empty, with boarded up storefronts. But did anyone see our beautiful beaches, our lush forests, our vibrant culture? No—it was all the same negative rant about the 72 billion dollars that we owed….

And so we were tired of what hadn’t even begun, and were we going to let the politicians ruin our Christmas? Of course not, so the traffic got worse and worse, the people jammed into the old city, to walk the streets and to join—or just listen and watch—the bomba y plena.

The culmination, or for me the nadir, came in the middle of January, when the old city hosts the San Sebastian Festival. Or is it, rather, the beer companies that inflict the San Sebastian Festival? For all of the wonderful arts and crafts that you can see in the daytime, it is the raucous sounds of the salsa and the zuzuvuelas and the incessant shouting, singing, music blaring of the night that one remembers.

In fact, we had in previous years taken my brother’s advice from his experience of living in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. And that was? Head for the hills, and so we went on forced vacations to—usually—the Virgin Islands. There, we would stay at a hotel, scrounge for food at the supermarket, and—best of all—soak a year’s tension away in the Jacuzzi.

What would we do this year? Could I travel, I who had been ordered to rest for two months? Somehow, the thought of getting to the airport, standing in lines, shuffling through security, being cattled into an airplane seemed worse than enduring the festival. We would bunker down, we felt, and survive.

We very nearly did…. 

     

Release into Captivity

And so, after three days and two hospitals, I was free at last, and sat outside savoring the warmth of the evening. Blanca and Raf were on the way, but since I had been released at rush hour, the traffic was fierce. And so I had an hour or so to relish being alone, being warm, and listening to the night sounds coming from the bamboo grove next to the hospital.

Oddly, I had received great care, and no care at all. True, every imaging device yet available to man had scanned my back, which no human hand had touched. And yes, I was protected in the hospital, but I was also isolated. At home, in the worst of the days of pain, Gordito—our tuxedo cat—had insisted on coming into the back bedroom. Once there, he marked my face several times, settled laterally across my chest, and peered / purred into my face. Once I began to doze off, he then settled onto my right side: we fell asleep together.

And I had been given muscle relaxants and analgesics—that wonderful Percocet. But what was that, really, but a modern form of one of the oldest of drugs: opium? Certainly, it had been tweaked, but there was nothing really new there.

And now, I was being told to go home and rest for two months, and to avoid any strenuous activity: physicians all the way back to Hippocrates himself could have given me that advice.

So ostensibly there was nothing new in the treatment I had received; what was different, however, was the isolation that  I had experienced. A century ago, I would have been put to bed, the doctor would have come to my home, sat by the bed, looked grave and concerned. He would have felt my pulse, and listened to my chest. The neighbors would have brought soup, and arranged shifts by the bedside to relieve my family. The church prayer group would have included me on their roster. The butcher might not have pressed my wife as hard for the monthly payment.

I would have gotten to my feet gradually, and then been placed on the porch—weather permitting. I would have seen the neighborhood children playing, heard the crickets, smelled the sweet smell of freshly cut grass. But in modern times, I had been in a sterile, intensely cold environment. True, I was lucky to have a bed by the window: equally true, the window looked out onto a blank wall.

And so I sat outside as dusk fell, and remembered the story of an Amazon tribe who had received a visit from a team of physicians. All had been welcomed, with the exception of the psychiatrist. What was the problem?

“Well, he insisted on taking depressed people away from their families and into little rooms, where he wanted them to talk about their problems. And of course, he just made everything worse, since everybody knows that when the spirit has left a person, they need to be taken out into nature, distracted, and surrounded by their family. And then the spirit can return….”

I read once that all of the great physicians throughout history have had essentially equal success rates. So why should Galen and Hippocrates have succeeded as well as Raf’s cousin, with her MRI’s and CT scans and powerful arsenal of drugs?

We do a good job, I decided, on focusing on the disease. Disease we do well—we can isolate it, analyze it, visualize it, map it. But what of the patient, who is easily half of the equation? What does the disease mean to the patient, and how do the disease and the patient react to each other?

What did it mean to me, to have broken my back? Because it is one thing to write of a compression fracture of the L2 and L3 vertebrae; it’s another thing to have a broken back. Any patient can have fractures of the vertebrae, but a broken back implies a martyr, a saint, or perhaps a chronic whiner, intent on making his misery known to all.

‘I’ll try this out on the cats,’ I thought, and imagined the response.

“I worked my fingers to the bone! I slaved day and night—scrubbing the floors, washing your clothes, cooking and cleaning! All so that you could have the life I never had! Yes, I BROKE MY BACK FOR YOU, and is THIS how you repay me??!!”

Yes, since I am an inherently and incurably horrible parent, I have at least chosen to be responsible about it. Therefore, I have traded children for cats, which saves everybody a huge amount of money in psychotherapy bills. Because the cats, of course, are utterly unaffected by any such guilt-trippery, and they go back to sleeping in the sunshine.

But had I been bearing more weight than I could bear? Had my burdens really been so great? It depended, I thought, on whom you asked. Ostensibly, my life was easy: I woke up, wrote a bit about whatever interested me, taught some classes, and then settled back at night with wine and Netflix. How hard a life is that?

Well, there was the worry: the money certainly wasn’t flooding in. And then there was the house, which for six months had been undergoing a renovation / repairs. The work had dragged on, since only Zorba, Lady’s brother, was doing it. And Zorba periodically got called off to do his Army reserve; then he got sick. And then—for completely good reasons—he had taken a short-term job. So the work had stalled and stalled, and half of the apartment was in the living room. And since everything was in flux, what sense did it make to clean it?

True, at the beginning I was cleaning as Zorba was scraping / painting, and I had amused myself by wondering: who would complete his task first? But then I had fallen, and all I could do was lie in bed, and listen to Zorba move his scaffold from one section of the room to the next. And even that, at times, made my back ache.

But it was worse, since the termites had invaded virtually every stick of furniture that we had brought from colder and tougher climes. And so I looked from one pile of termite droppings below a treasured piece of furniture to the next. Only the grand piano and my cello seemed immune.

It was, in short, a frightening picture of decay and death. Even now, there is a side chair lying—well—on its side on the Oriental rug next to the piano. On the other side of the room, a side table lies collapsed: one of its legs completely chewed through by the termites.

We could have, of course, done what so many sanjauneros do: live in air conditioning, and close off both ourselves and our furniture to the elements. Because twice a year, minimally, the termites will spawn, or swarm, or do whatever it is that termites do. And then, the air will be filled with termites, each one ready to breed thousand of others.

It will look like a Wisconsin snowstorm—the kind that occurs when the weather is very well below zero, and thus the snow, when falling, is powdery and fine. And so we used to close the doors against the inevitable, and then Raf would spend much of the evening swatting termites, as they swarmed towards the light.

It was futile, of course, and it was agonizing, since both of us knew that the time would come when we would lose all our furniture, and then have to replace the northern walnut and mahogany with harder woods: teak and tropical cedar. This, for me, was of no matter: I had become philosophical, even Zen about it all. None of the furniture was particularly valuable: no museum would clamor for it, no serious collector would particularly want it. The musical instruments were important: we were merely guardians. Other people after my death would play my cello; it matters little that other people sat in my chairs.

But for Raf, collecting his furniture and creating his home had been the passion of his life. Whole evenings could be spent talking about which estate sale had provided which buffet or table. He had, in fact, immediately seen where each stick of furniture had gone in his mind in the first moment that he had seen our apartment. From that moment on, he had determined to get me to agree to buy it. Could we afford 4500 plus square feet of tenement—which is what is was? There were toilets in every corner of every room: the platform ceilings covered the ausubo beams and red bricks of the original ceiling. To buy the place was unthinkable, I felt—it would consume every nickel we had, and leave us exhausted in the gutter outside.

I had mentioned this whole period once to Zorba; we were taking a break, especially needed, since the work of painting the ceiling bricks white and the beams / crossbeams brown had put a near permanent crick in Zorba’s neck.

“My mother was a very wise lady,” I told Zorba. “Because I told her that I was dead set against buying the apartment, and Raf was just as ardent to buy it. So we were at complete loggerheads, and barely speaking….”

“So what did she say?”

“She said that if we didn’t buy the place, it would always lie between us, and might drive us apart. And if we did, and it worked out for us, then I should swallow my words and admit I was wrong. And of course, if it turned out that I was right, I should keep my trap shut….”

“Wow,” said Zorba.

“Yeah, she was like that. So we moved in, and for the first ten years or so, everything was manageable. The termites hadn’t invaded—or hadn’t completely devastated the landscape. And so the time had come when I had to eat my words, and I told Raf: you were right, I was wrong….”

“Ouch….”

“Not really. I’d much rather be wrong about something I wanted but didn’t think would happen. “

And so for many years our home had been more than homes were for most people. It had both sheltered us and defined us: it was the visible embodiment of who we were. And it was a sort of defense against past and future both. We had both grown up in the stalest of suburbia: we were now living in a vast, 18-feet ceilinged, 200-year old colonial space. It was hard to imagine that it wouldn’t have a ghost, which in fact it does.     

And so it was more than a metaphor, our home. It was, to a great degree, who we were. And now? It was falling apart, it was dirty, cobwebbed, and filled with decrepit furniture. It was atmospheric as hell, as it always had been.

The problem?

It used to be “House and Garden.” 

Now, it was Grey Gardens.