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Not the first snow of the season, but the first snow for which I’ve been present:
And not even major snow at that.
W smokes, so this morning I trailed him into the local Smokes 4 Less outlet on Route 9. The whole place smelled like my grandfather’s car. A musty, somewhat sweet odor. Not unpleasant.
The woman on line in front of us was settling her monthly bills. “$254 for the utilities. Then I need a money order for $162 for the Verizon. Then I want five packs of the Marlboros –“
She had a rather witless looking kid of about six or seven with her.
“Gramma, get the ones with the camels on them –“
“The ones with the camels on them!” she hooted.
“They’re cool,” he insisted.
“They grow up fast, don’t they?” said the woman behind the counter.
“They do. My little great-granddaughter wants a makeup kit for Christmas. A makeup kit! She’s three.”
The two women laughed.
It dawned on me eavesdropping on the two of them that Smokes 4 Less is sort of the hub for a whole shadow lifestyle here in upscale Hyde Park because, of course, the poor eking out a minimalist existence, the paycheck-to-paycheckers, the Walmart shoppers, are not just in Poughkeepsie. They’re everywhere. They live not in the tony chalet-style houses (whose mortgages are still underwater) closer to Route 9 or along the Hudson River, but in the drywall shacks – one step up from mobile homes – that cluster along Route 9 or Pine Woods Road. In the warmer months, they have frequent garage sales.
The woman buying the Marlboros was easily 20 years younger than me. I don’t know which I found more appalling – that she had a great-granddaughter or that she used so many definite articles. I am such a snob.
###
Turns out that Ed, who lives right across the road from me with his wife Pat, is also taking the Tax Aide class, so we’ve been car-pooling together. Ed bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Rik, who, in his youth, was one of my Platonic ideals for male beauty. We also have very similar conversational styles and senses of humor, which turns our car rides into epic discussions of the economy, politics, and human foibles.
“Listen,” Ed said. “If you ever hear me preface a remark with, ‘Why, when I was your age…’, you have my permission to shoot me.”
“What if I don’t have a legal permit to carry a gun?”
“I don’t care. I’d consider it an act of humanity. Mercy killing.”
If I were capable of being romantically attracted to anyone – which, at this juncture of my life, I strongly suspect I’m not – I’d be very attracted to Ed.
Which makes me curious about his relationship with his wife. There’s an Updike subtext to be teased out here, I’m sure. Onion-like layers.
He grew up in New York City; she grew up in a farming town in Ohio. They met in college. He was the love object; she was the smitten. He led her a merry dance for a decade or so before he finally married her.
Once they bought the Hyde Park house – 30 or so years ago – he got a job as a social worker with the New York State Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse. Commuted the 180 miles between here and Albany on a daily basis. Finally retired a year or so back.
“Is Pat thinking of retiring?” I asked. Pat’s a nurse practitioner.
“Oh, no. Pat’s not thinking of retiring,” he said. “And we don’t want Pat to retire. Because Pat is the type of person who needs projects, and if Pat retires, her project will become Ed. And we don’t want that to happen. I may have shortcomings, but they’re my shortcomings. And goddamit, I’m attached to them.”
Á deux, Ed and Pat came over two nights ago to attend an impromptu birthday celebration for Kimberly. Kimberly, Austin, and their three cats are the latest tenants of L’s tiny downstairs room. The running joke is that L is now operating a cathouse, and L chortles obligingly any time someone makes it. I have endless admiration for Kimberly who, at just-turned-21, is a real kickass and powerhouse. The other day when her truck broke down, I watched her singlehandedly back it up the Triple A tow truck’s 180 degree ramp.
“When Austin graduates from the Culinary Institute, we’re goin’ back to Tennessee,” Kimberly announced. “We love it there!”
“Eastern Tennessee is great!” I announced, although, of course, how could I possibly know? It’s not as though I’ve ever actually been there.
“Nashville!” said Pat. “Do you watch that show?”
“What show?” Kimberly asked.
“Oh, it’s a TV show. About country and western singers.”
“Don’t know it,” Kimberly said.
“Do you know Friday Night Lights?” I asked.
“Oh, sure.”
“Well, Nashville stars Coach’s wife.”
Pat laughed. “Yes, after she got tired of being Coach’s wife, she ditched him, moved to Nashville, and became a Country Western star.”
“Do you do that, too?” I asked. “I do that. I don’t think actors and actresses should have lives. Just parts. And there should be continuity between those parts!”
Pat and I both laughed. Nobody else did.
“But anyway,” I said. “It’s time for me to go to bed –“
“But it’s only quarter to nine!” said Kimberly.
“I go to bed very early because I get up very early,” I said.
Pat nodded. “I always see your light on around four.”
“Habit I developed when I was working full time and raising a family,” I said. “I wanted to continue having some sort of creative life where I could do my own work, think my own thoughts, so I got in the habit of getting up very, very early. It’s still the time I think the best. Between 4am and about 8am.”
Pat and Ed sat next to each other, but they didn’t interact. No finishing one another’s sentences. No lobbing shared anecdotes across the conversational net. No touching.
I wondered when the last time they’d had sex was.
###
So, the New Mexico trip. It was fun, but not entirely without incident.
When I got home, I found this post in Robin’s Twitter feed from the day we flew out: It's 6:48 A.M and my moms already yelling at the shuttle driver while muttering racist comments into her 5th cup of coffee.
I’d only actually had two cups of coffee – very weak, watery hotel coffee – and I was speaking forcefully to the shuttle driver because he’d driven right past our terminal, leaving us with something less than an hour and fifteen minutes to catch our flight. All my latent OCD tendencies tend to come out in airports anyway, so I was sitting there on the shuttle, under-caffeinated, imagining the plane taking off without us. Those little foil packs of stale pretzels? None of them would have our names.
I certainly was not muttering racist comments.
Robin continual demonization of me in these ways would be hurtful if I weren’t so completely resigned to it and cut off from emotionally from Robin. He can’t push my buttons anymore because there are no more buttons labeled “Robin” to push, frankly. I do what I can to be a responsible parent. Paid his rent for two months when all his loan money got stolen (because he was too fucking stupid to bank it – and, of course, he couldn’t be reprimanded for this stupidity because, you know, he was too traumatized from having his house burglarized.) Give money above and beyond my agreement with Ben. Am lavish with gifts.
I love the kid, and would cheerfully throw myself in front of a speeding bus to spare one hair in his hipster goatee from being damaged.
But I can’t say I particularly like him either. What’s to like? I mean, there’s plenty to like, but he never shows it to me. He never talks to me. Throughout the long hours of the plane ride, he sat glued to his iPhone, reading Tucker Max.
In what universe is Tucker Max wittier or more interesting than me?
Robin sees me as a scarecrow. I saw my own mother as a scarecrow, too, so probably this is karma catching up with me.
Karma. She can be a beyatch.
The racist mime bothers me though, because I don’t think I’m a racist.
I do talk about race. I ask questions about it.
Is that racism?
Back when I was a nurse, I got severely chastised one day because I asked questions about hair and skin care for African American patients. Yo, white people! African American hair and skin have phenotypic differences from European hair and skin, and if you’re charged with doing personal care for someone, it’s important to know what these differences are!
Right?
Well, no. Apparently wrong. I was severely criticized for asking those questions.
Similarly, I asked Max on the drive to Santa Fe, “Does Liza –“ the Future Mother of My Unborn Grandchildren – “identify with being African American?”
I asked because Liza, who is biracial, does not look black. I’m similarly curious about Max’s friend Nick Markowitz, whose mother is Korean, and who looks completely Asian despite his middle-European name. I’m always curious about people whose labels read one way when their reality may be something quite different. I think it’s a perfectly legitimate curiosity.
“What kind of a fucking dumbshit racist question is that to ask?” Robin sneered.
“Can it, Robin!” I said furiously. “Just can it. Try get over yourself. For once in your life.”
“She identifies very much,” Max said mildly. Ever the peacemaker. “Although, of course, she’s not African American. She’s Caribbean American. You’d like her Dad, I think. He came here from Bonaire when he was 19. Lived in one of the whitest communities in the United States for more than 30 years. Always his own man.”
In Santa Fe, Robin’s snit deepened. When Max and I over-rode his insistence that we eat right away so that we could walk around for a bit and stretch our legs after an hour and a half in the car, he exploded. Max was a condescending asshole. I was a racist jerk.
“Okay! Robin, Robin,” Max said. “Let’s talk about this. I’m willing to own that I might be behaving in condescending ways. You know. It’s the Big Brother/Younger Brother thing. I’ll own it. I’m sorry you feel that way, and I’ll work to change my behavior. But, you know, you do things that disrupt the dynamic, too –“
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Robin declared.
“Robin! We’ve got to talk about it –“
“No, we don’t! I don’t!”
At this, Max grew so frustrated that he wandered off into a silver shop by himself to hunt down earrings for the beauteous Liza.
Leaving me and the Bad Boy.
It was a rather gloomy day in Santa Fe. The storm which Accuweather had promised would hold off until we were gone appeared to be moving in over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
“Well!” I said. “Want to look at what the peddlers are selling in front of the Governor’s Palace?”
“No,” said Robin. “I wish I’d never come on your stupid trip.”
“You’re not having a good time?”
“The whole trip has been a complete bust. A complete waste of time.”
“What are you saying? We’ve had a lot of fun.”
“Maybe you have. And Max. Not me.”
“We’ve had fun,” I said weakly. “What about hiking in La Liendre yesterday?”
“That was okay.”
“And we went to the zoo.” I’d actually gotten stoned to go to the zoo with the boys. An exciting first. I’ve never been a heavy pot smoker, and I more-or-less swore off smoking pot when I was raising the boys. In the last five years or so, I’ve begun smoking occasionally again, though, and of course, I got stoned several times with Max summer before last when he and Liza visited NYC.
This trip was the first time I’d smoked with Robin.
That was practically the first thing he wanted to do when he got off the plane. He had a connection, and he wanted to score some weed.
He spent practically the entire trip stoned. Waking up in the morning and rolling a joint first thing.
Of course, Max spent practically the entire trip wasted, too. Why not? It was a fucking vacation.
It had been fun at the zoo. The three of us spent half an hour in front of the kangaroo enclosure, watching the joeys establish their social dominance hierarchy, laughing giddily. No doubt about it: Dope enhances one's ability to be entertained by kangaroos! You don't need to invest in that million-dollar study now, NIH!
“That was like three hours,” Robin sneered. “This trip has been awful. I wish I’d never come.”
And I wish you’d told me you didn’t want to come back in September before I spent so much time, effort, and money arranging the trip, I thought. But did not say.
“Okay, then. Well. I guess I’ll look at the Governor’s Palace on my own.”
I wandered off. I’ve always liked Santa Fe, but I had a hard time liking it today. The day was just so grey and off. The colors stood out like cinematography in a Luis Buenel film. Or something.
This was the end of the road with Robin so far as I was concerned.
Oh, I’d continue to send Ben Robin’s maintenance money. Give lavish holiday gifts. But hereafter, I wasn’t going to go out of my way to spend time in Robin’s physical presence. What was the point?
I didn’t feel bad or anything. Just as though I was drifting to another point on the compass, which had been exerting its magnetic attraction upon me for a considerable length of time.
Robin never went through that Fear of Strangers phase that babies are supposed to go through when they’re eight months or so. There was never a time in Robin’s childhood when he wouldn’t have cheerfully gone off with the nearest smiling stranger. I imagined his parallel life with all those smiling strangers – because Robin, as a small child, was absolutely adorable. On two separate occasions when I was wheeling him in his stroller near the Plaza Hotel – because I used to take him on a lot of my business trips when I was working for Time Inc – strangers darted out from FAO Schwartz with stuffed animals in their hands –
“Please. Here. Take this. I had to buy it for him! He is the most adorable child I have ever seen!”
Those two stuffed animals were still with us when I closed up the Monterey House. They were in good enough shape so that I felt okay about donating them to whatever abused children’s charity I ended up donating most of my household goods to.
Eventually, Robin, Max, and I reconnected. Went out to eat. Mexican food. There is no good Mexican food on the East coast for whatever reason. This is slightly bizarre because there are certainly a lot of Mexican nationals.
The mood turned cheerier.
“So I met up with this dude,” Robin told us. “He hit me up for a cigarette. Then he asked me if he could walk with me a ways because I was easy to talk to. And he was telling me about his life. Just out of rehab. No money, no job, but happy to be alive and in a good head space –“
Max laughed. “Careful, Robin! You could end up becoming a social worker. Like me!”
“It’s the family curse,” I said. “Being easy to talk to. When I was charging up my phone at the charge station in front of the air train to the airport, I encountered someone like that. He was having trouble charging his phone, so I tried to help him. Turned out, though, he had dropped his phone in a puddle so the thing wouldn’t work. Then he started telling me his entire life story – how he was getting chemo and radiation therapy. How he maybe only had three months to live but how that was a good thing because his wife was getting tired of taking care of him –“
“Wow, Mom!” Max laughed. “You got the whole two hour movie!”
"Yeah, really," I said. "Throw in the burning of the Atlanta and it could have been Gone With the Wind!"
“What did you do?” Robin asked. I think he may even have been genuinely curious.
“I nodded encouragingly. At that point, I wasn’t being called upon to do much. But when he asked whether he could borrow my phone to make a call, I said, No, politely excused myself and walked away.”
“Why?” asked Robin.
“I don’t like being hustled,” I explained.
“But I’ve seen you – “ Robin turned to Max. “Last time I was in New York City with Mom, she gave all this money to some random homeless person in the subway. It was like a lot of money! Twenty or forty bucks!”
“I’d forgotten all about that!” I said.
“I said, ‘Why are you doing that? He’ll just spend it on alcohol or drugs.’ And you said, ‘He needs to. He’s self-medicating!’”
“So, I did,” I said. “I remember that now.”
“So why would you give $40 bucks to some homeless person but not let that guy borrow your phone?”
I sighed. “That guy on the subway was just so palpably miserable. He was so down and out. You could just feel the hopelessness. I wanted to help him feel hope again. But that guy in the Air Train station was just trying to hustle me –“
“So?”
“I don’t like being hustled,” I repeated.
After lunch, we went to George R.R. Martin’s movie theater where I took this photograph:
And not even major snow at that.
W smokes, so this morning I trailed him into the local Smokes 4 Less outlet on Route 9. The whole place smelled like my grandfather’s car. A musty, somewhat sweet odor. Not unpleasant.
The woman on line in front of us was settling her monthly bills. “$254 for the utilities. Then I need a money order for $162 for the Verizon. Then I want five packs of the Marlboros –“
She had a rather witless looking kid of about six or seven with her.
“Gramma, get the ones with the camels on them –“
“The ones with the camels on them!” she hooted.
“They’re cool,” he insisted.
“They grow up fast, don’t they?” said the woman behind the counter.
“They do. My little great-granddaughter wants a makeup kit for Christmas. A makeup kit! She’s three.”
The two women laughed.
It dawned on me eavesdropping on the two of them that Smokes 4 Less is sort of the hub for a whole shadow lifestyle here in upscale Hyde Park because, of course, the poor eking out a minimalist existence, the paycheck-to-paycheckers, the Walmart shoppers, are not just in Poughkeepsie. They’re everywhere. They live not in the tony chalet-style houses (whose mortgages are still underwater) closer to Route 9 or along the Hudson River, but in the drywall shacks – one step up from mobile homes – that cluster along Route 9 or Pine Woods Road. In the warmer months, they have frequent garage sales.
The woman buying the Marlboros was easily 20 years younger than me. I don’t know which I found more appalling – that she had a great-granddaughter or that she used so many definite articles. I am such a snob.
###
Turns out that Ed, who lives right across the road from me with his wife Pat, is also taking the Tax Aide class, so we’ve been car-pooling together. Ed bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Rik, who, in his youth, was one of my Platonic ideals for male beauty. We also have very similar conversational styles and senses of humor, which turns our car rides into epic discussions of the economy, politics, and human foibles.
“Listen,” Ed said. “If you ever hear me preface a remark with, ‘Why, when I was your age…’, you have my permission to shoot me.”
“What if I don’t have a legal permit to carry a gun?”
“I don’t care. I’d consider it an act of humanity. Mercy killing.”
If I were capable of being romantically attracted to anyone – which, at this juncture of my life, I strongly suspect I’m not – I’d be very attracted to Ed.
Which makes me curious about his relationship with his wife. There’s an Updike subtext to be teased out here, I’m sure. Onion-like layers.
He grew up in New York City; she grew up in a farming town in Ohio. They met in college. He was the love object; she was the smitten. He led her a merry dance for a decade or so before he finally married her.
Once they bought the Hyde Park house – 30 or so years ago – he got a job as a social worker with the New York State Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse. Commuted the 180 miles between here and Albany on a daily basis. Finally retired a year or so back.
“Is Pat thinking of retiring?” I asked. Pat’s a nurse practitioner.
“Oh, no. Pat’s not thinking of retiring,” he said. “And we don’t want Pat to retire. Because Pat is the type of person who needs projects, and if Pat retires, her project will become Ed. And we don’t want that to happen. I may have shortcomings, but they’re my shortcomings. And goddamit, I’m attached to them.”
Á deux, Ed and Pat came over two nights ago to attend an impromptu birthday celebration for Kimberly. Kimberly, Austin, and their three cats are the latest tenants of L’s tiny downstairs room. The running joke is that L is now operating a cathouse, and L chortles obligingly any time someone makes it. I have endless admiration for Kimberly who, at just-turned-21, is a real kickass and powerhouse. The other day when her truck broke down, I watched her singlehandedly back it up the Triple A tow truck’s 180 degree ramp.
“When Austin graduates from the Culinary Institute, we’re goin’ back to Tennessee,” Kimberly announced. “We love it there!”
“Eastern Tennessee is great!” I announced, although, of course, how could I possibly know? It’s not as though I’ve ever actually been there.
“Nashville!” said Pat. “Do you watch that show?”
“What show?” Kimberly asked.
“Oh, it’s a TV show. About country and western singers.”
“Don’t know it,” Kimberly said.
“Do you know Friday Night Lights?” I asked.
“Oh, sure.”
“Well, Nashville stars Coach’s wife.”
Pat laughed. “Yes, after she got tired of being Coach’s wife, she ditched him, moved to Nashville, and became a Country Western star.”
“Do you do that, too?” I asked. “I do that. I don’t think actors and actresses should have lives. Just parts. And there should be continuity between those parts!”
Pat and I both laughed. Nobody else did.
“But anyway,” I said. “It’s time for me to go to bed –“
“But it’s only quarter to nine!” said Kimberly.
“I go to bed very early because I get up very early,” I said.
Pat nodded. “I always see your light on around four.”
“Habit I developed when I was working full time and raising a family,” I said. “I wanted to continue having some sort of creative life where I could do my own work, think my own thoughts, so I got in the habit of getting up very, very early. It’s still the time I think the best. Between 4am and about 8am.”
Pat and Ed sat next to each other, but they didn’t interact. No finishing one another’s sentences. No lobbing shared anecdotes across the conversational net. No touching.
I wondered when the last time they’d had sex was.
###
So, the New Mexico trip. It was fun, but not entirely without incident.
When I got home, I found this post in Robin’s Twitter feed from the day we flew out: It's 6:48 A.M and my moms already yelling at the shuttle driver while muttering racist comments into her 5th cup of coffee.
I’d only actually had two cups of coffee – very weak, watery hotel coffee – and I was speaking forcefully to the shuttle driver because he’d driven right past our terminal, leaving us with something less than an hour and fifteen minutes to catch our flight. All my latent OCD tendencies tend to come out in airports anyway, so I was sitting there on the shuttle, under-caffeinated, imagining the plane taking off without us. Those little foil packs of stale pretzels? None of them would have our names.
I certainly was not muttering racist comments.
Robin continual demonization of me in these ways would be hurtful if I weren’t so completely resigned to it and cut off from emotionally from Robin. He can’t push my buttons anymore because there are no more buttons labeled “Robin” to push, frankly. I do what I can to be a responsible parent. Paid his rent for two months when all his loan money got stolen (because he was too fucking stupid to bank it – and, of course, he couldn’t be reprimanded for this stupidity because, you know, he was too traumatized from having his house burglarized.) Give money above and beyond my agreement with Ben. Am lavish with gifts.
I love the kid, and would cheerfully throw myself in front of a speeding bus to spare one hair in his hipster goatee from being damaged.
But I can’t say I particularly like him either. What’s to like? I mean, there’s plenty to like, but he never shows it to me. He never talks to me. Throughout the long hours of the plane ride, he sat glued to his iPhone, reading Tucker Max.
In what universe is Tucker Max wittier or more interesting than me?
Robin sees me as a scarecrow. I saw my own mother as a scarecrow, too, so probably this is karma catching up with me.
Karma. She can be a beyatch.
The racist mime bothers me though, because I don’t think I’m a racist.
I do talk about race. I ask questions about it.
Is that racism?
Back when I was a nurse, I got severely chastised one day because I asked questions about hair and skin care for African American patients. Yo, white people! African American hair and skin have phenotypic differences from European hair and skin, and if you’re charged with doing personal care for someone, it’s important to know what these differences are!
Right?
Well, no. Apparently wrong. I was severely criticized for asking those questions.
Similarly, I asked Max on the drive to Santa Fe, “Does Liza –“ the Future Mother of My Unborn Grandchildren – “identify with being African American?”
I asked because Liza, who is biracial, does not look black. I’m similarly curious about Max’s friend Nick Markowitz, whose mother is Korean, and who looks completely Asian despite his middle-European name. I’m always curious about people whose labels read one way when their reality may be something quite different. I think it’s a perfectly legitimate curiosity.
“What kind of a fucking dumbshit racist question is that to ask?” Robin sneered.
“Can it, Robin!” I said furiously. “Just can it. Try get over yourself. For once in your life.”
“She identifies very much,” Max said mildly. Ever the peacemaker. “Although, of course, she’s not African American. She’s Caribbean American. You’d like her Dad, I think. He came here from Bonaire when he was 19. Lived in one of the whitest communities in the United States for more than 30 years. Always his own man.”
In Santa Fe, Robin’s snit deepened. When Max and I over-rode his insistence that we eat right away so that we could walk around for a bit and stretch our legs after an hour and a half in the car, he exploded. Max was a condescending asshole. I was a racist jerk.
“Okay! Robin, Robin,” Max said. “Let’s talk about this. I’m willing to own that I might be behaving in condescending ways. You know. It’s the Big Brother/Younger Brother thing. I’ll own it. I’m sorry you feel that way, and I’ll work to change my behavior. But, you know, you do things that disrupt the dynamic, too –“
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Robin declared.
“Robin! We’ve got to talk about it –“
“No, we don’t! I don’t!”
At this, Max grew so frustrated that he wandered off into a silver shop by himself to hunt down earrings for the beauteous Liza.
Leaving me and the Bad Boy.
It was a rather gloomy day in Santa Fe. The storm which Accuweather had promised would hold off until we were gone appeared to be moving in over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
“Well!” I said. “Want to look at what the peddlers are selling in front of the Governor’s Palace?”
“No,” said Robin. “I wish I’d never come on your stupid trip.”
“You’re not having a good time?”
“The whole trip has been a complete bust. A complete waste of time.”
“What are you saying? We’ve had a lot of fun.”
“Maybe you have. And Max. Not me.”
“We’ve had fun,” I said weakly. “What about hiking in La Liendre yesterday?”
“That was okay.”
“And we went to the zoo.” I’d actually gotten stoned to go to the zoo with the boys. An exciting first. I’ve never been a heavy pot smoker, and I more-or-less swore off smoking pot when I was raising the boys. In the last five years or so, I’ve begun smoking occasionally again, though, and of course, I got stoned several times with Max summer before last when he and Liza visited NYC.
This trip was the first time I’d smoked with Robin.
That was practically the first thing he wanted to do when he got off the plane. He had a connection, and he wanted to score some weed.
He spent practically the entire trip stoned. Waking up in the morning and rolling a joint first thing.
Of course, Max spent practically the entire trip wasted, too. Why not? It was a fucking vacation.
It had been fun at the zoo. The three of us spent half an hour in front of the kangaroo enclosure, watching the joeys establish their social dominance hierarchy, laughing giddily. No doubt about it: Dope enhances one's ability to be entertained by kangaroos! You don't need to invest in that million-dollar study now, NIH!
“That was like three hours,” Robin sneered. “This trip has been awful. I wish I’d never come.”
And I wish you’d told me you didn’t want to come back in September before I spent so much time, effort, and money arranging the trip, I thought. But did not say.
“Okay, then. Well. I guess I’ll look at the Governor’s Palace on my own.”
I wandered off. I’ve always liked Santa Fe, but I had a hard time liking it today. The day was just so grey and off. The colors stood out like cinematography in a Luis Buenel film. Or something.
This was the end of the road with Robin so far as I was concerned.
Oh, I’d continue to send Ben Robin’s maintenance money. Give lavish holiday gifts. But hereafter, I wasn’t going to go out of my way to spend time in Robin’s physical presence. What was the point?
I didn’t feel bad or anything. Just as though I was drifting to another point on the compass, which had been exerting its magnetic attraction upon me for a considerable length of time.
Robin never went through that Fear of Strangers phase that babies are supposed to go through when they’re eight months or so. There was never a time in Robin’s childhood when he wouldn’t have cheerfully gone off with the nearest smiling stranger. I imagined his parallel life with all those smiling strangers – because Robin, as a small child, was absolutely adorable. On two separate occasions when I was wheeling him in his stroller near the Plaza Hotel – because I used to take him on a lot of my business trips when I was working for Time Inc – strangers darted out from FAO Schwartz with stuffed animals in their hands –
“Please. Here. Take this. I had to buy it for him! He is the most adorable child I have ever seen!”
Those two stuffed animals were still with us when I closed up the Monterey House. They were in good enough shape so that I felt okay about donating them to whatever abused children’s charity I ended up donating most of my household goods to.
Eventually, Robin, Max, and I reconnected. Went out to eat. Mexican food. There is no good Mexican food on the East coast for whatever reason. This is slightly bizarre because there are certainly a lot of Mexican nationals.
The mood turned cheerier.
“So I met up with this dude,” Robin told us. “He hit me up for a cigarette. Then he asked me if he could walk with me a ways because I was easy to talk to. And he was telling me about his life. Just out of rehab. No money, no job, but happy to be alive and in a good head space –“
Max laughed. “Careful, Robin! You could end up becoming a social worker. Like me!”
“It’s the family curse,” I said. “Being easy to talk to. When I was charging up my phone at the charge station in front of the air train to the airport, I encountered someone like that. He was having trouble charging his phone, so I tried to help him. Turned out, though, he had dropped his phone in a puddle so the thing wouldn’t work. Then he started telling me his entire life story – how he was getting chemo and radiation therapy. How he maybe only had three months to live but how that was a good thing because his wife was getting tired of taking care of him –“
“Wow, Mom!” Max laughed. “You got the whole two hour movie!”
"Yeah, really," I said. "Throw in the burning of the Atlanta and it could have been Gone With the Wind!"
“What did you do?” Robin asked. I think he may even have been genuinely curious.
“I nodded encouragingly. At that point, I wasn’t being called upon to do much. But when he asked whether he could borrow my phone to make a call, I said, No, politely excused myself and walked away.”
“Why?” asked Robin.
“I don’t like being hustled,” I explained.
“But I’ve seen you – “ Robin turned to Max. “Last time I was in New York City with Mom, she gave all this money to some random homeless person in the subway. It was like a lot of money! Twenty or forty bucks!”
“I’d forgotten all about that!” I said.
“I said, ‘Why are you doing that? He’ll just spend it on alcohol or drugs.’ And you said, ‘He needs to. He’s self-medicating!’”
“So, I did,” I said. “I remember that now.”
“So why would you give $40 bucks to some homeless person but not let that guy borrow your phone?”
I sighed. “That guy on the subway was just so palpably miserable. He was so down and out. You could just feel the hopelessness. I wanted to help him feel hope again. But that guy in the Air Train station was just trying to hustle me –“
“So?”
“I don’t like being hustled,” I repeated.
After lunch, we went to George R.R. Martin’s movie theater where I took this photograph:
