An Abbreviated Life Read online

  I RECALL THAT one time after school I had a classmate over. Danielle was, like me, one of the shortest girls in first grade. In the yearbook photos, we would be placed standing next to each other, always in the first row because of our height. Danielle lived in an apartment on Park Avenue South and her dog, a German shepherd, was named Frederick.

  The names of my childhood friends’ animals have stayed with me. I used to lie in bed at night and when the unfiltered shouting began, to block it out, instead of counting sheep, I would recite all the names that I could of my friends’ pets.

  Later I learned this ability to dissociate was altering my brain.

  DANIELLE AND I were eating carrot sticks in the living room when the chance to play Being Born arose. My mother called out from her bedroom, “Come and spend some time with me!” We took turns. First I would be born; then it was Danielle’s turn. Sometimes the birth would be loud and painful. Sometimes it would be effortless. We jumped up and down on the bed, waiting to go again. After several births in a row, my mother got bored or tired and made a phone call. The game ended.

  After that day, Danielle was never allowed to come over again. I can imagine now the conversation with her mother when she went home. “What did you do at Ariel’s house?”

  “We got into bed,” Danielle might have said. “With Ariel’s mother, who was naked. Then she pretended to push us out through her vagina.”

  I HAD FORGOTTEN all about Being Born. In all my years of therapy, I’d never mentioned it. One day I asked Emily casually, “Did I ever tell you about being born?”

  When I told her about the game, the look on her face frightened me. Being Born hadn’t seemed at all significant until that moment. The wobbly look of shock that indicated this was not a normal game mothers play with their children.

  “Do you realize that behavior was inappropriate?” Emily asked.

  I hadn’t. For me, it was a positive memory of a playful time. I received loving attention from my mother and this was the package it came in. It wasn’t a titillating experience for her; it was her way of showing she cared. As I explained (and by default, defended) my mother’s behavior, I had a fleeting understanding of invisible damage. And that there was no normal, only a calcified tolerance of abnormal.

  7

  Mario showed me a photo of his six-year-old twin daughters on his phone. They looked like little dolls: half Italian, half Chinese, with long brown hair and features that seemed impossibly flawless. I was asking him questions because I was curious. They were from a previous relationship. He was no longer with their mother.

  Later, when our relationship started, I didn’t consider what it would be like to be involved with a man who had children. But uncharacteristically, I didn’t question it. I didn’t analyze the pros and cons or think about how it would make me feel and where I would fit in. There was only a feeling that it wasn’t an obstacle. They were part of his life and they would be a part of mine, too.

  THE FIRST TIME I met them, I was uneasy. I couldn’t tell them apart and was afraid of getting them mixed up. I didn’t know how to talk to them. I wasn’t confident about how to relate.

  “Just be yourself,” Mario said.

  That’s what I was worried about.

  They weren’t impressed. They had spent time with a woman he had been seeing before me and the attention I was giving them was comparatively more reserved. After our first meeting I asked him what they said.

  “They don’t know you yet. Give it time.”

  THREE MONTHS LATER, when I tell the girls I am going for a visit with my father, who lives fifteen minutes away, they look unhappy that I am leaving. Mario, whom I now live with, straddles a branch above us seventeen feet off the ground, using giant shears to clip the leaves off the Kupu Kupu tree. The leaves have the shape of butterfly wings.

  “How long will you be gone for?” one of them asks.

  “Not very long,” I say. “I’ll be back soon.”

  They both make a face. Expressions of disappointment.

  “Maybe an hour at the most,” I say. But as soon as I say this, I know it is not a comfort. I am leaving them and specifics of time do not soothe. They do not know how long one hour is or what that means. Absence is unpredictable.

  I reassure them. “I’ll be back before dinner.”

  “I’LL BE BACK,” my mother says, “after dinner.” She is on her way out for the evening.

  I wait for her to return. The babysitter has been asked to sleep over. I know this means my mother might not come home.

  “You promise you’re sleeping here tonight?” I call out to her as she is getting on the elevator.

  “Yes,” my mother says. “I promise to be home after dinner.”

  In the morning I go to her bedroom to wake her up and she is not there. The bed is still made.

  THE GIRLS BOTH run across the garden after me as I get on my bicycle. I open the green gate and they follow me out onto the black pebble road. They stand there, both of them shielding their eyes from the sun, seeing me off.

  “I’m going to stay here and watch you ride away on your bicycle,” one of them says. “Because I love you.”

  I pedal away for a few seconds and then stop. I get off the bike, flick the kickstand with my foot, and stand with both arms extended forward. This is the signal for a hug. The girls come running over and wrap their arms around my torso, one on either side. I pull them in tight. We embrace for a few seconds and then I lean down so that they can kiss me on the face. I kiss them back, several times, before taking off again on my bike.

  MY MOTHER SAYS, “What kind of daughter doesn’t want to kiss her own mother? How did I get such an unaffectionate child?”

  I don’t respond. Her ire doesn’t change my mind. And I don’t feel criminal.

  When my mother kissed me, I wiped the kiss off my cheek. I used the back of my hand and wrinkled my nose. Her kisses were uncomfortable on my skin. She was wounded by this reaction. But it wasn’t meant to punish her. It was an instinctive revolt. She responded by grasping me in her arms, suffocating me with kiss after kiss after kiss after kiss.

  “Don’t!” I protested, trying to disentangle from her clutch, like a cat that thrashes around when it doesn’t want to be held. I knew, in a way that I couldn’t articulate, her kisses weren’t about me.

  8

  There is a black-and-white photograph of my mother and father, and I stare at it often. My mother is sitting in an upholstered armchair, on the edge of the cushion, poised to get up. My father sits on the arm of the chair, leaning forward, clasping her hand, believing in things he will later regret. In this picture my mother is in her early thirties, nearly fifteen years younger than I am now. I look at her face. It is a face I don’t recognize. Serene and alluring. I want to talk to her, be her friend. Share a secret. Can you hear me? I would have liked to have known you when you were happy.

  THE YEAR IS 1965, and the Star Ferry carries passengers between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island. Junks are moored in Aberdeen Harbour, rickshaws traverse the crowded streets, and sidewalks are filled with banana vendors. Flaccid chickens hang from butcher stands. There are no high-rises, no American department stores; laundry is pinned to clotheslines outside concrete apartment blocks; and it is, as my father liked to say, a colorful place to live.

  He has lived in Hong Kong since 1962. He is the US Treasury representative—in charge of the control of foreign assets. It is a big job during a sensitive time of US relations with China. The United States has placed an embargo on trade with China. Wigs from Hong Kong can’t use hair from the mainland. Chinese firecrackers, textiles, antiques, and cinnamon are not permitted to go to America. China provides Hong Kong with its water supply, a major issue for the Hilton Hotel, which is just being built. Are they allowed to use Chinese water? My father’s job is to draw lines. He is thirty-seven years old, handsome, gentle, and kind. He is well liked for his low-key, unflappable manner and admired for his honesty. He is tough but fair. After graduating f
rom Harvard Law School at the top of his class in 1952, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and served as a platoon leader. Years later when I am in college and old enough to understand the scope of this choice, I will ask why he did this and he’ll explain, “I was trained in law school how to think, and I wanted to be trained how not to think.” I will admire this decision and feel proud of his agile mind.

  AT THE SAME time, my mother has just won a prestigious award as a promising new American poet. Her father died from a heart attack the previous year and she is using some of her inheritance to travel throughout Southeast Asia with her friend, a Chinese painter. My mother’s first marriage to an Israeli violinist had been a mistake. She’d moved to Paris to live with him after Bennington College—a sudden decision that angered her father. In Paris, she’d become friends with Anaïs Nin. Soon she would realize her husband, the volatile genius, wanted her to be a muse. They divorced. When my mother returned to New York, she established herself as an artist in her own right. Her poetry was praised and Harper’s Bazaar listed her as one of the most beautiful and intelligent women in America. Other artists and writers became her friends—Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. Andy Warhol made a film of her reciting her poetry. These associations greatly impress my father, as much as his powerful position, intellect, and connections with foreign journalists and diplomats in turn impress her.

  They meet at a dinner party. The dinner is arranged to introduce my mother to a man who can’t make it. My father is invited at the last minute, as his replacement.

  THERE WAS NO one there to grab his arm and warn him, “Wait, don’t go! Your life will change forever if you go to this dinner. You have no preparation for what lies ahead. You will have no resources to draw from. You will think it is one thing, but it will be something else. Your instincts are wrong. And by the time you find this out, it will be too late.”

  MY FATHER IS instantly struck by my mother’s beauty and drawn to her vibrant manner. She is bewitching as she talks about literature, gesturing elegantly with her hands, conducting a symphony of ideas. She is glamorous, Jewish, and her wit and spirit are infectious. His dreams soar, filled with visions of their stimulating and exciting life together—practicing law and writing poetry. They find each other funny, and they are laughing. My mother’s eyes shut and crease at the edges. My father’s mouth opens and his teeth show. Just then my mother feels an unreasonable certainty. He will stand by her, fill up what’s missing, and be a good father.

  IT IS TWO days since the dinner and my mother has left Hong Kong and continued on her trip. My father is thinking about her and how she is different, creative, lively, and fun. There is a sense of concern, too; he doesn’t want to miss out on an opportunity. He is, he believes, ready for marriage.

  MY FATHER WAS raised in a conventional middle-class home in upstate New York with working-class Jewish immigrant parents who were happily married for fifty years. That’s all he knows about marriage and why he’s waited. He was the scholar of the family, skipping two grades and leaving for college at sixteen in 1945. He graduated at nineteen, knew he wanted to become a lawyer, and applied to Harvard Law and Yale. He was accepted at both but chose Harvard and deferred for a year to travel around France. He never lived in Utica after age sixteen, and he moved to Washington, DC, to work with the US Treasury Department in 1956. He felt at home when he arrived in Southeast Asia in the early sixties and remained in the Far East ever since.

  My father’s path and his choices were mysterious to his parents. For them, Utica was the promised land. Why would anyone want to leave? But his world expanded and there was no turning back. He is interested in poetry and literature and being in far-off, unfamiliar places. He reads my mother’s book of poetry, which has just been published by Grove Press, and falls in love with a poem. It is out of character for him to make a decision impulsively, but he does. He calls her.

  He asks, “Why don’t you come back to Hong Kong?” There is hopeful confidence in his voice.

  My mother cancels the rest of her trip, returns to Hong Kong, and stays with him at his apartment on the peak. A funicular carries the tram that ascends straight up the mountain, bringing her up up up to her savior on Mount Kellett Road. They live together for one month and six months later they are married. In three years, I will be born.

  9

  It is 2002 and I am thirty-four years old. I live alone in New York City. For most of my life, I’ve felt under siege. Navigating. Negotiating. Taking cover.

  But I can function, I can get by. I can work hard and create opportunities like this one: I have just been commissioned to write my first story for the Sunday Times Magazine. I have a meeting with the editor in chief, who is in town for a few days. We meet in the lobby at the Royalton Hotel on West 44th Street for a drink.

  I feel at this meeting a soaring sense of hope; things will work out. It is an unfamiliar sensation, and as soon as it occurs, it is modified, tamped down with something else. Something familiar, a lot like dread.

  The meeting goes well. It will lead to more work as a journalist. It will lead to living in London. It will lead to a decade of acceptable excuses that allow me to be separate from my mother. Strategies to hide. To hide is to exist.

  AS I AM getting ready to leave, another writer arrives. He is older, possibly in his sixties, and joining the editor for dinner. I am introduced. “Ariel, this is . . .” I’ve met him before. Thirty years earlier, he’d been in my living room, at 180 East 79th Street, a guest at one of my mother’s dinner parties. When I mention this, he asks who my mother is.

  With trepidation, I say her name. His eyes widen. There is a look on his face that I recognize—a slight recoiling, as though taking a mental step back. This accompanies the polite, sympathetic smile.

  I pretend not to notice and say good-bye. After I’ve left, he tells my editor, “My God. I always wondered how that little girl would survive. I thought her only choices were suicide or murder.”

  10

  Mario is a simple man. He owns one pair of shoes. There is a bamboo cabinet with three shelves and a small area to hang clothes in. He inherited it from the previous owner of the house. “Where is all your stuff?” I asked when I first saw how he lived. “All your things?”

  “That’s it,” he said.

  He does not know about brands or authors or movie stars. He does not care. He does not feel that he is missing out. He doesn’t read the newspapers.

  “Do you know who that is?” I ask. It could be anyone.

  “I probably did hear about that person, but it wasn’t interesting to me, so I forgot. But I never forgot how to make a bowknot.”

  He learned how to dive when he was four, left Italy when he was twenty-one, and never lived there again. He felt stuck in the concrete and had to be in open space, near the sea.

  His needs are not material. He is not a consumer and will avoid buying anything if he can. If something is old and ugly and worn-out, he doesn’t see it as old and ugly and worn-out. He doesn’t throw it away or replace it with something new. He will fix it with duct tape, fishing line, or rope. Supplies don’t come from Home Depot.

  When it comes to a computer, shirt, or kitchen utensil, he is not compelled to modernize. A flat-screen TV is “an unnecessary item.” Objects are not needed for a sense of comfort. Owning books or paintings, art or ceramic vases is not important. He is calm being by the sea and in the garden. He built a fishpond and points out the Southern Cross.

  IF SOMETHING IS needed, he’ll make it. It would not occur to him to purchase a new toaster oven, even though the one he has is rusted and the knob has broken off. “Why?” he says when I mention this. “It does the job.”

  He doesn’t buy things for himself, nor does he consider himself deprived. He has the same pair of sunglasses he’s worn for ten years. He remembers when he bought them. It was a treat. What he says more than anything else is “No need.”

  I want to buy sponges. “No need,” he says. There is an old piece of
foam that he cuts up. I want to buy coconut water at the store and keep it in the fridge. No need. He hacks open a coconut with a machete every morning and pours the water into a recycled glass bottle. Dijon mustard is “celebrity mustard.” Before I met him, he slept on the floor. A mattress is a privilege. Hot water is a luxury.

  When the power goes out and the lights disappear, Mario is not disturbed. This happens frequently. The lack of light does not bother him. The lack of air-conditioning is a relief. When the Wi-Fi doesn’t work, he is not in any way distressed.

  “Do you know how many people live without electricity?” he asks. “We’re lucky to have it at all.”

  HE HAS NO frame of reference for the world I came from. His childhood was peaceful; his parents were married for over forty years. He has never been to New York. Never been to America. When I met him, he asked, “What’s a bagel?”

  HE SHOWS ME a photo of a wooden shack. “This was my house in the Sudan,” he says. He was living on a deserted island working on a pearl farm. The nearest shop was an eight-hour drive away across the desert. The island had no name; it was a lump of sand, four hundred meters by three hundred. The photo shows a square box with a roof, and in front of it an aquamarine sea. He had a generator and a filter that turned salt water into drinking water. No neighbors; food was delivered once a week. He lived on this island for four months.