A cat running. Collotype after Eadweard Muybridge, 1887. Credit: Wellcome Collection, via Wikimedia Commons.

This morning—that morning, rather—two men in my train carriage lift their heads—two men in their fifties in silky, understated ties—then there is a little snap, like a red light camera going off, and even before the next stop gets announced they’re leaning into each other laughing, How long has it been? Must be forty years give or take. What’s been happening? They run through their classmates: two cancers (one in chemo, one cannot hack chemo), a property development fraud, one guy (just on the other side of a protracted settlement) with too many ex-wives (stupid bastard, he and them deserve each other). A pause. Please don’t tell me it’s all there is. Fraud, cancer, bad marriages, being caught, extricating yourself, chance encounters on trains; can you remember the last time life felt long or kind, or like it was yours and mine?

My phone vibrates, one time only for texts. “Make sure you don’t have scissors, nail files, anything sharp.” It’s Vanda. Thank you, Vanda.

Shhh.

In front of me is time. Time is not a river. It is two strangers on a train whose briefcases touch as they hold each other. Two men who’ll never ride the same train again. Read More

Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781, oil on canvas, 40″ x 50″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

“I hate running.” My oldest daughter might quit soccer.

I start to defend running, though running, to me, is always as in a dream, legs stuck in quicksand, lungs stiff with panic, the bad guy closing in. Why defend things I do not like? I tell my girl the truth. “I hate running, too.”

*

When do the men come to you? They come to me at night. In the quiet, they find a way in, as if they’d been waiting in the foyer all day. Samantha will see you now. Which is to say, I let the men in, reckoning with the past. I don’t sleep well and, through the long night, the men line up like planes for landing, a flight pattern of losers: the crotch-grabber on the night train; the frotteur on the Roman bus; the masturbator on the C local; the man in Grand Central; the man at the photo assistant interview; the guy in the Chevrolet; my older cousin’s older boyfriend who slipped into my bed when I was fourteen; and the stranger jerking off beside me on a dark Santa Monica beach as I sang a slow, sad version of “Shattered,” wearing my nutty song as a protective shroud of mental instability or at least a muffle to drown out the grunts and fleshy kneadings of him getting off on my fear. Read More

By the time I went to school, I knew the world was changeable the way people were changeable, especially people like parents, with their moods and regrets and sore shoulders. Over the winter holidays, the world was lit by little yellow bulbs on garlands. There was the peacefulness of surprises that would come and that would not be terribly surprising: our stockings always held one orange, one apple, and a pack of chewing gum, along with something else like stickers or brand-new socks. In the car, the world grew purposeful; at the dollar theater, where our dad could take us to see The Princess Bride on a Tuesday afternoon for fifty cents apiece, the world grew relaxed.

Swimming pools turned the world glamorous. Every year my sister and I would look forward to the afternoon when Tulsa’s public pools would open. The pools hosted block parties with free sandwiches served in a long, perfect row, like the world’s biggest snake just lurking in the shadows, and even free cups of pop, which was prohibited at home.

In high school, I would make friends whose parents owned their own pools, but back in elementary school, the swimming pool was still a gift the world would only give for a precious few months out of the year, and only when our parents could make the time to take us. We occasionally also stayed in motels on our way to see our grandparents in Kansas or on our annual family vacation in Nebraska, though these places rarely had pools. But when they did, then the world shot clear up to the tip-top of the peak of glamour, and my sister and I became princesses from Lichtenstein or maybe Switzerland who’d been kidnapped by the Oklahoma criminals who called themselves our parents, and accordingly, on those rare nights, we would not speak to them at all.

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Image courtesy Jennifer Tseng, photographer unknown.

February 1982

It’s night. The curtains are closed, which gives the room a claustrophobic look. The men are all wearing brown or black, with white. Our mother is wearing blue, which both complements the oranges on the table and is the color that, as a child, I thought of as a white person’s color. When asked what their favorite color was, white kids almost always said “blue.” It’s our mother’s favorite color, too. Mine is red, the Chinese color of happiness. The men match the room, its fixtures and decor. Our mother and the oranges stand out as things that have come in from the outside; things that, like imports or immigrants, have come from elsewhere. Though the oranges agree with the orange chairs, one of the men’s shirt collars, the painting on the wall, our mother is the only blue thing.

This photograph, taken when I was thirteen, always provokes mixed feelings in me. I spent much of my childhood observing the ways in which our Chinese father didn’t belong in the mostly white, English-speaking town where we lived. Chinese parties (sponsored by the small Chinese association of which he was president) were both the one place where our father could speak his native language and a place where our mother was usually miserable. She was shy. She dreaded these parties. They meant stepping out of her comfort zone.

Our father stepped out of his comfort zone every day. He moved through the streets of our California town because he had to in order to survive. Relatively speaking, our mother had the luxury of choosing when (or whether) to step outside her comfort zone and into an all-Chinese situation. But our home—most people’s primary comfort zone—was a place where she felt distinctly uncomfortable. Under our father’s strict rule, she lived on tenterhooks. So it’s complicated. Read More

Émile Bernard, Mother and Child, 1898, oil on canvas, 15″ x 18″. Public domain.

“What did you have?”

“A boy.”

“Congratulations.”

If your first child is a girl I’m told people say: “How nice.” How nice. My child is of course wonderful but I am also—embarrassingly—slightly proud that he’s a boy. Childbirth is full of such pitfalls, where the wish to be congratulated overrules common sense. I don’t find the standard notion of the good wife very compelling. But the pressure to be “a good mother” according to the prevailing definitions is practically irresistible. I can keep my head when David Holbrook, in his most recent outburst against “art, thought and life in our time,” warns that it is a failure in mothering that produces intellectuals and other pornographers: it’s less easy to steer a clear course through all the varied strictures of the psychoanalysts themselves. Worse still, it’s by no means adequate to try to behave like a good mother, because that involves an act of will: goodness itself is supposed to emerge. Before Bowlby, you had only to keep your children clean and set a decent moral example. Now ordinary selfishness is thought somehow to be expelled in the moment of delivery, or sooner: it’s selfish, you’re told by the masked figures gathered expectantly around you, if you can’t manage without forceps. Better mothers don’t need them. Read More

On luck, love, and desire in Las Vegas.

Las Vegas in the nineties was a terrific place to be young. In few other places was this true. Steve Wynn and other developers had used their mountains of money to nearly, but not yet fully, transform the city from a seedy backwater into a sunny haven for the middle class. In the early nineties, downtown Las Vegas was still dirty and strange, not quite a mobster’s paradise but not for families, either. Fremont Street lay open to the sky above and to heavy traffic, which meant sidewalk hawkers and hookers and mean-looking hatted men smoking in doorways. A common sight: prostitutes on big cruiser bicycles, tall curving handlebars like Harleys, riding up and down the street while at each corner stood teenagers snapping thick cards against their palms and handing one to every passerby. Each card was printed with a photo of one of those very cyclists or some other beautiful woman, not cycling but posed in another kind of readiness, along with a phone number and an apothegm about companionship or temerity. Prostitution was not legal in Las Vegas and had not been for nearly fifty years, but no one seemed to care. Presumably, the hookers did, when a raid scattered them, or when they needed help, or when they were arrested or hurt or sometimes killed.

But I did not think about any of that when I was fourteen and fifteen, out on Fremont Street alone while my mother and my grandmother gambled. I thought about what it would be like to touch a woman the way the pretty women on the cards invited me to touch them. Whenever a teenager snapped a card and held it out to me, I took it. I assembled a collection of hookers until I had a stack as thick as a poker deck, and with this I made my own game, matching the cards to the women on the street, and imaginatively to other women in other parts of the city, the showgirls outside the Glitter Gulch, cocktail waitresses in dark hose, young wives in the elevators, and sometimes to the girls at my high school, brunette farm girls with big white teeth. The cards were, like the decks at the blackjack tables, representative of value and possibility. Some afternoons, while my mother napped and my grandmother played video poker at the Fitzgerald’s bar, I picked up the phone and traced the numbers. Sometimes I had money in my pocket from sneaking the slots, or because Grandma hit a royal the night before. I could pay, and that meant it did not matter that I was a girl, or only fourteen. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to touch women whose job it was to be touched. I wanted real affection. But the price of real affection was set so high, in my other, daily economy. Read More