The Last House

I wrote this story at a temp job around 15 years ago. This is the best use of time at a temp job that I can think of.

Charming was the man, of course, I was just this guy who’d landed a pretty decent job at the palace, taking care of all the details, fulfilling his every whim, you can imagine, but for a while there, for a while, things were really happening. I have to say, the most exciting time of my life was that search, the search that took us all over the land, weeks it took, months, he was not going to give up, not ever.

Of course all he had to do was show up at these houses, just show up, and every woman in there, young and old alike, would swoon, literally swoon. The man had it going on, let me tell you. While I’d be there on my knees, trying to jam all manner of peasant feet into one tiny delicate slipper (made of glass! Glass! Do you know how hard it was keeping it in one piece just bouncing around on my horse?), Charming would be standing there, always so polite, graciously declining just about everything these women were offering him, even the poorest of them all, who you knew hadn’t even had a decent meal probably in weeks. The things they tried to give him! Blankets, ribbons, rusted silverware, even an old sickly goat at one place. This guy’s a prince, and still they all wanted him to take the very best object in the house, and I’m sure you can imagine that many times this would turn out to be one or more of the daughters of the house.

Man, there were some beauties to be seen on this journey, and, rich or poor, they’d always make some effort to be decked out in their best clothes, clean or not, once word had spread that the prince was searching the land for the perfect one he’d met at the ball, the one who hadn’t left her name (more work for me, of course). Anyway, some of the offers these girls made him—or worse, the girls’ mothers!—well, just don’t get me started! Now of course, I wouldn’t have minded taking his place in any of those activities—you know how they’ll sometimes have some poor unlucky bastard stand in for a prince if he has to fight or something?—but do you think he ever offered me the chance? Not even once. As for the women, do you think they even saw me with a prince in the room? No, I was just the one they’d glance at briefly as I knelt at their feet, before they’d turn their gaze right back to the man, who’d just be beaming at them royally.

Now let me tell you about their feet.

A lot of the poorer women never even wore shoes, of course, but just the same they had to be trying on that precious slipper like everyone else. The soles of their feet were always rough and dirty, but there was an incredible strength there too, in the veins that pulsed across the skin, in those terrible, magnificent calluses. Usually, lost in their own reveries, they wouldn’t even notice as my hands ran along the length of their arches, slowly, taking advantage of that moment, feeling all the work they’d ever done in their lives. On one occasion, a woman actually gasped and for a brief second I caught her eye. My hands began to shake. She looked as though she wanted to smack me, or possibly, make love to me, it was hard to tell. I had to look away. Soon it was over.

The rich women were different. Their feet, though not as strong by any means, were certainly clean and quite delicate; sometimes their toenails were painted, some even wore tiny rings on their toes. That was something to see. The initial look on their faces was always the same: hopeful, always hopeful, as though I could work some kind of magic, as though it were up to me to come up with the perfect fit. Then their attention would snap right back to your man, who was always, of course, all smiles. So I took a few chances with these women too. Sometimes my hand, resting on an ankle, would slide a little upwards, nearly approaching the full-length skirt that they had so boldly lifted up to me just seconds earlier. That feeling was electric, it was indescribable, and sometimes I was afraid that I might gasp aloud just like that young peasant woman had done, though I must say the brief looks I got from some of these women were not nearly so kind. And they too made me look away.

But, as in every case, soon would come the inevitable sobbing, the pleading, and Charming would have to apologize once again, profusely and ever so sadly, and we’d be out the door as fast as we could. Weeks of this really did him in.

There was one night where, thoroughly exhausted as well as disappointed, he turned to me and said in the saddest voice you ever heard, “I shall never find her! This has all been in vain! Let us return home now.” So of course I took pity on him, anyone would have. As much as I wouldn’t admit it at the time, the thrill of it all was completely addictive; I never wanted it to stop. And I told him there was just one house left in the area. Just one left. We ought to stop by there, I said, have a meal perhaps (it looked like there might be food there), maybe rest for the night, and in the morning return home. He nodded solemnly, in that way he has, not saying a word. I guess you know whose house this one was. I led him there myself. I led him, and so ended the search forever, and my one true adventure.

Every so often I find myself thinking about what might have happened had we not gone into that last house. Would we still be riding all over the lands searching out every home for every woman living within? Would one day one of them, perhaps in an unguarded moment, have turned away from our hero and glanced back at me, and there, in my face, noticed what would have been a perfect fit? And there would I have found the wife that has long been denied me?

Fortunately there is a lot at the palace that keeps me busy these days, and I don’t have much time to think about anything except the happy couple’s happiness. Who knows if their life is as blissful as they hoped? They seem pretty content, they have a lot of time to themselves to do whatever it is they do. This might be the secret, you know, but who except a royal family can afford such luxury? As for me, what I have are the memories of a time when anything seemed possible, when the future seemed wide open, and the tedium had all but lifted from my life for good.

So the last house. Do you want to know about the house? It was a simple cottage, clean and well-kept. The door had a knocker on it; in fact, it was the nicest thing about the place, intricately carved, old but still functional. We stood there and waited, me balancing the delicate weight in one hand, reaching up to the door with the other. The prince, he just simply stood, an almost beaten man, hands at his sides. I had to knock three times before someone came to the door.

Well, How Did I Get Here?

Today I received an award for this blog here, or really what I should call an appreciation, from my friend Hope, whose blog, Unmapped Country, is always worth reading.

And the award comes with some rules, which is to thank the person who gave you the award and link back to them in your post (see above), to share 7 things about yourself (an excuse for another list!), and to pass this award along to 15 recently discovered blogs and let them know about it.

So now, 7 things about me:

1. I am really good at ironing shirts, but I hate to do it.
2. I am 5’6 ½” but I pretend I’m 5’7”.
3. When I was a kid, I once rode on the shoulders of a clown while he was riding a unicycle. Clowns don't scare me.
4. This.
5. I have a literary crush on J.D. Salinger, which is almost too obvious to mention.
6. I wish I could draw well, but really I'm terrible at it.
7. One time (maybe 15 years ago) I bought a falafel at a cart somewhere around 23rd Street in Manhattan. What do you want on it? Everything? the guy asked me. Sure, I answered. Now I have no idea what “everything” was, exactly, but to this day, I have not stopped thinking about the most perfect falafel of my life.

As for fifteen blogs to recommend, well. I must always give props to the wonderful Li'l Blog of Lists, which includes my favorite list of all time, plus a list I once wrote myself and was generously allowed to post there. And if you're a fan of SZ, as you should be, you might also greatly appreciate Vegetarian Astoria, which will not cover the neighborhood schwarma scene, but will, I am told, feature falafels at some point. (Sooz, do not forget the loukoumades at Telly's Taverna, which they might still give you for free on weeknights!)

And then there's also the fabulous Catherine Newman, whose writing I have admired for years and years and who I once had the pleasure of meeting in Cape Cod, of all places, and who shares with me a great appreciation for this commercial, which, if you also were living in NYC in the late 1970s, needs no explanation.

But I think all the rest of the blogs I read are probably ones that you already know about or that someone is always sending you links from or something so I won't list them here. And I'll probably be back again soon writing about something that I'm reading or that I read a while ago or something that has nothing to do with reading at all. And I'll get in some Salinger too. I mean, it was his own character Buddy Glass who said: "I don't really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one."

Ten Songs I Wish Were Actually About Me

Sometimes when you are trying to get work done and your mind is all over the place, it helps to make lists like the following. As I learned years and years ago from my good friend SZ.

1. Stephanie Says - The Velvet Underground
Actually Lou Reed spent a lot of time listening to what women said and then writing songs about it. As for Stephanie, the people all call her Alaska. Damn, that girl is cold!

2. Perfect Skin - Lloyd Cole
Not only did she look like Greta Garbo at the age of ten, but she’s got cheekbones like geometry and eyes like sin.

3. The Element Within Her - Elvis Costello
If only for the line, “But back in the bedroom with her electric heater. He says, Are you cold? She says, No but you are…” Yeah, she’s pretty damn sharp. I wish I had said that.

4. Foxy Lady - Jimi Hendrix
Well, really it’s just this: Foxy lady, I’m coming to getcha!

5. Short Skirt/Long Jacket - Cake
I am certain my fingernails shine like justice, though my voice may not be like dark tinted glass. Yet.

6. Debra - Beck
Not only would he offer me a fresh pack of gum, but he’d pick me up late at night after work and say, Lady, step inside my Hyundai. Who would say no to that?

7. Janine - David Bowie
Aw man, remember when Bowie wrote gorgeous songs like this? I mean, like a Polish wanderer he travels ever onward to her land. Lovely. And were it not just for the jewels, he’d close her hand. Not sure about this, but it sounds good.

8. Tiny Dancer - Elton John
You must have seen her, dancing in the sand.

9. Greetings to the New Brunette - Billy Bragg
“I’m celebrating my love for you with a pint of beer and a new tattoo.” That pretty much says it all.

10. Hey Hey What Can I Do - Led Zeppelin
Do I really need to explain this one? Something about being in the bars with the men who play guitars. Well, actually you know what I'm talking about.

I Got By In Time

When I was about eight years old, I had this plan to give my Barbie doll a perm. I’m guessing that this was probably the only Barbie I had left with a reasonable amount of hair since all the others were unfortunately suffering from my poor attempts at haircuts. (This terrible skill at cutting hair would follow me into adulthood. Can you just trim my bangs, my younger daughter has asked. To which I must answer a horrified, No!) Looking for something that would help the perm set, I came upon my mother’s bottle of patchouli on a tiny shelf in the bathroom. There were many bottles on that shelf, but this one was unfamiliar to me. The strong smell of it was so shocking I couldn’t imagine it as anything but medicinal. I was sure it would do the trick.

Some hours later this would result in my mother yelling at me for using practically an entire bottle of her very expensive oil on a doll's hair. For what reason? she demanded. I thought my explanation made perfect sense, but apparently she did not. In fact, she just could not believe what I had done. I should point out that in all my life I had never known my mother to wear patchouli and the three-quarters-full bottle of it remained in the bathroom for years until one day it was just simply gone. My Barbie’s perm, unfortunately, never took.

But meanwhile. That faint smell of patchouli that never really went away worked its way into my sense memory, winding its way through the various food co-ops of my life, until one day many years later I found that I did, in fact, like it. Which is maybe the way anyone comes to like patchouli when they didn’t plan on liking it, you know, gradually and unexpectedly. I’m not saying that I would ever wear it or anything (I mean, really now), but I have been known to burn patchouli incense and thus both horrify and confuse my children. What is that smell? asks my older daughter, horrified and confused. Oh, don’t you like this? I answer, knowing that of course she doesn’t, but also knowing that as she heads down the winding path of food co-ops in her own life she will at least be familiar with it.

You think I’m going somewhere with this? Well, now, let’s just see. A couple weeks ago my friend Kate told me how she had just finished writing a novel. And I reacted the way I always do at the thought of something like that: utter astonishment. I could never write like that, I always tell people who think that I am actually planning to write a novel someday, though I’m not. I could not keep going on one story like that. And Kate surprised me by saying simply, Well, of course, you read a lot of short stories, don’t you? I think writers who like short stories the most write short stories. And there it was, the best explanation I’d ever heard. It’s true. I love short stories. I read books and books of them, even though everyone wants to talk about and read novels. I read novels, too, of course, but I think I might actually like short stories better. Is that possible?

What I like best actually are books of short stories in which the same characters show up in different stories, and I consider Alice Mattison and Edward P. Jones the masters of this. Right now I’m reading books of Amy Bloom’s short stories and I feel like I’m wolfing them down like a bag of potato chips that you don’t even remember opening and I end up having to go back and reread most of them. And the story “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” by Katherine Anne Porter, which I read twice in a row recently because I liked it so much. The thing about stories is that half the time with a really good one it feels like it’s over too soon. But isn’t that kind of the best thing about them? It’s like leaving the party when it’s still going strong, or, you know, like The Jam breaking up at the height of their success. The best kind of short story invites you into a world and then ends with a snap and you are left longing, but only in the very best of ways. This is why I always keep reading them and also why I keep trying to write them.

So now I need to tie this back to patchouli, right? Well, let’s just say that short stories have also worked their way into my sense memory throughout my life and now I can finally admit a kind of preference for them. And I will keep on reading and reading them. And, oh yeah, writing them too.

I Think My Spaceship Knows Which Way to Go

For a long time I’ve suspected that being an astronaut would just be a total hassle. All that equipment you have to wear all the time in such a small enclosed space. Plus the lack of gravity would really get to you, I thought. Really it must be exhausting. And it turns out I’m right, of course, but the thing that I guess I wasn’t considering is that astronauts don’t really care. I’m reading Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars, and the part that I’ve been thinking about for days, the part that probably explains everything about astronauts, is that back in 1962, people at NASA were considering a “one-way, one-man” expedition to the moon.

“It would be cheaper, faster, and perhaps the only way to beat the Russians,” insane Bell Aerosystems engineer John M. Cord is quoted as saying. So basically what this would entail would be sending a man to the moon and then eventually sending a spaceship to pick him up in a few years once they figured out how to do it. And, you know, no worries about supplies or anything! Why, they would send module after module to provide him with all the stuff he might need! On the moon. Hmm. I think it’s gonna be a long, long time.

But here’s the part that gets me, the part that I have been thinking about for days, the thing that really separates ordinary people from astronauts: someone, more than just one person really, would have volunteered for this mission. Basically there are people in this world that would be willing to be sent to the moon for an indefinite amount of time where they’d just be, you know, hanging around for a while. And really you’d just have to wait there until first, someone got around to coming up with an actual solution (Oh god, just put that return lunar module stuff on my desk. I’m just swamped with work! I’ll probably get to it when I get back from my vacation or something.) and then the months, if not years, of testing on earth, while you were maybe just playing a whole bunch of solitaire.

As for myself, I don’t even really like to carry a bag if I can help it. You know, I just throw my money and keys and things in my pocket and that’s that. And I get kind of queasy these days just watching my daughters ride a carousel. And, don’t get me wrong, I don’t always enjoy the company of people, but I think that basically when it comes down to it I tend to like the occasional conversation.

So I wonder if maybe that is the one real distinction between people on earth, not male or female, gay or straight, Dave Matthews fan or not. It may all come down to: would you be willing to be sent to the moon for an unknown number of years with a good chance that you’d be up there just kind of waiting for some “scientists” to come up with a way to get you back? And maybe trying not to panic too much or get a little too, you know, antsy? I mean, that's maybe all it comes down to really. Well, that and people who like relish and people who don't.

The Summer Day

This morning I took my younger daughter to her swim lessons at the lake we’ve been going to for I think seven summers now. She’s been doing these lessons for the past two weeks, but today was the first time I took her. Usually, in past summers, it was me taking my girls to these swim lessons, and so today I planned to approach it antisocially as I have been doing the past couple of years, which involved sitting way over to the side at these picnic tables and reading The New Yorker or whatever book I would be distractedly managing to work through the entire summer. But when I got there today I noticed that the picnic tables were not shaded as they usually were, but blazingly right in the sun. This is not the kind of day to be messing with sun. I took my magazine over to the shaded benches where all the other moms were talking about things their kids said and soccer tryouts and that sort of thing and I tried to read in my usual distracted way. I squinted way out at the dock where my daughter was practicing dives and I could just make her out.

Then I noticed someone sitting all alone at one of the picnic tables the way I used to do, not even minding the sun, and reading a book. I was immediately interested. Then I realized that I actually knew this woman, that we had talked over the years, mostly at picnic tables at this very lake, and I headed over there. As I approached I saw the name Mary Oliver on the book she was reading and I knew then that I was heading for something good.

The book was called A Poetry Handbook, and in it Mary Oliver kind of guides readers on how to write poetry, but in such a beautiful and graceful way, as she can’t help doing. And so this woman and I talked about Mary Oliver and poetry and Mary Oliver poems and writing in general (she too is a writer) and it was then that I began to realize that the knotted feeling in my stomach that I had brought to the lake with me was slowly unknotting. I have noticed something like this happening to me a couple times before in the past year, but the first time was last summer where at this huge retrospective Picasso exhibit at the Met, I literally felt something just lift up and out of my body. I mean, not to get all clichéd and everything, but it was a feeling of transcendence. When we got through the Picasso exhibit, I told my friend Alisa that I needed to go back to the beginning and go through it again, and so she went off to look at medieval paintings, and I lingered there, noticing, always noticing, the lightness that had come over me.

And so here at the lake, talking about the Mary Oliver book, it was happening again. I know that I’ve said this many times before, and even here, but there’s that line from Oliver’s famous poem “The Summer Day” that I can’t stop thinking about: “I don't know exactly what a prayer is/I do know how to pay attention…” Which, exactly.

After a while of talking, our kids came out of the lake, and I said to this woman, this almost friend of mine, Hey, do you want to get together sometime? My question kind of took us both by surprise, and she said, Sure, that would be great. Before I left, she told me to look for this other Mary Oliver poem that I didn’t know called “Wild Geese.” I think you’ll like it, she said.

Here’s how it ends:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Scary Stories

One day when I was about 13 or 14 I stayed home sick from school and somehow came across the book Rosemary’s Baby on the bookshelf in our hallway. Several hours later I was to be found frozen in bed having read the book in its entirety and too terrified to move. The important thing to know is that it is a book about devil worshipers, and you’d think by then I’d have learned my lesson regarding this topic, but clearly I did not. Even now I’m not sure I can think of a scarier book.

I don’t know if it’s the devil-worshiping topic itself that was so terrifying to me, though there was that (and strangely being raised by atheists somehow failed to make me doubt the devil’s existence). But the one part that really stuck with me, and it's a theme you'll see again and again in scary stories, was the fact that Rosemary goes to her doctor and explains the whole story to him and you think that finally someone will believe her, but the doctor simply leads her back to the devil worshipers who have convinced him that she is simply crazy and needs their care. It’s like that short story, “I Only Came to Use the Phone” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which ends up doing the same sort of thing. I mean, take look at the title. A woman’s car breaks down and she gets a ride on a bus that’s going to a mental hospital. She gets admitted as a patient and no one believes that she isn’t. She is ultimately forced to stay there forever. Now, that’s scary!

But just the other day I found myself rereading Paul Auster’s City of Glass, which I’d first read about 12 years ago. I totally remember the experience of reading it on the subway and looking around in horror and wondering if maybe I had to stop reading it because it was so disturbing and creepy. It wasn’t scary exactly and yet, had I been alone in bed reading I might have remained there frozen for some hours. Yet reading it the other day was a totally different experience. Really I just took total pleasure in its creepiness. I could say that it starts like all Paul Auster books, but since that was the first book he wrote I guess I could say, It starts like all the Paul Auster books that would come after it but at this point it was still quite unique, in which an ordinary guy who just had some tragic event occur in his life finds himself in an extraordinary circumstance. And eventually he is plunged into madness. So it isn’t exactly scary, in the true sense of the word, but there is much to disturb the reader. At least there’re no devil worshipers in that one.

But what has gotten me thinking about all this is that right now I’m reading (and by reading I mean at the exceedingly slow pace of like five pages every three days, which is how I read books in the summer) Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. You probably know Shirley Jackson from her famous story “The Lottery,” but it’s almost a shame if you do because everything else she wrote is just so damn funny and purely a joy to read. But is it scary? This is what I keep asking myself and, to be honest, complaining about to my entire family. This book is so much fun to read, but it’s not scary. The quote from the New York Times Book Review on the cover says, “Makes your blood chill and your scalp prickle.”

Well, no, it doesn’t, really. Sure there are parts with doors unexpectedly locking and mysterious writing found on the walls of the house. But really I find myself more pleasurably distracted with things that the character of Eleanor thinks, to calm herself: “I have red shoes, she thought—that goes with being Eleanor; I dislike lobster and sleep on my left side and crack my knuckles when I am nervous and save buttons.” And really there are some scary things going on in the house, like a room that is suddenly covered in blood or an area next to the nursery that is unspeakably cold or the fact that Hill House itself seems to be alive. But it hardly seems to matter. So this makes me wonder: am I no longer so easily scared? Or is it just that I can no longer be scared by stories? Or is it that the last ten pages of the Jackson book are so terrifying that when I (finally!) get to them I won't be able to speak for hours afterward?

Coming soon: answers to these questions.