PARADISE

       B. J. is listening to Bonnie Rait in the upstairs restaurant overlooking the Plaza de Mariachis in Guadalajara.  The plaza is encircled with the bronzed statues of important Mexican literary, scientific and diplomatic figures.  Not one woman is featured.  “I can’t make you love me,”  Bonnie plaintively sings.  And why would you want to love me, she thinks, as I am the wrong gender to be anyone important.  Once again, B.J. has forgotten the basic deal of the Western world, a little more hidden in the more developed countries, less so in Mexico.  You will or will not love me not based on literary or scientific talents but by how I look and how old I am.     When she was a young lesbian studying at SF State, there was a feeling, for a moment, that women could change the world.  There was the fantasy called radical feminism with true gender equity.  She finalized the change of her name from Barbara Jean to B.J.   Then, like all elusive dreams, it faded.  

Drinking iced tea, expensive by Mexican restaurant standards,  she thinks about which Chinese buffet she wants to eat at this evening.  Chinese buffet in Mexico is a relative cuisine which features big, unshelled shrimp with their eyes still in their heads along with big spears of vegetables steaming alone in their trays.  It also incongruously features french fries, tortilla chips and hot dogs. There may or may not be soy sauce.  There is definitely no tea.  Which is why she lingers over the iced version now, high above the plaza but stuck behind glass, unlike the night before when she  drank a solitary beer on a different plaza at a table with wooden shutters open to the easy night air.  Mexico extends the notion of leisure, of slow motion that can easily turn to torpor.  It is a retiree’s dilemma, painfully pointed at the hours in front of a person with the vague notion that now is the time they can do anything they truly want to do.  Gone is the squeezed zeal of hot blood but gone also is the angst that accompanied it.  Retirement is life now viewed with a long lens from a leisurely perch in Mexico.    From the safety of the restaurant, B.J. watches the afternoon sky darken as torrential rain comes in.  Soon the sky will open up to the rivers of water that flood the streets and create lake like puddles.  People scatter, the cobblestones take a beating and then it is dries up in the shortest of times almost as though it was never there.  

        Mexico is like hitting the restart button in so many ways.  People are not on cell phones, little monkeys typing on tiny pads, not doing the sweeping finger gesture over their smart phones that B.J.  has come to identify as the defining move of 21st century America.  Mexicans sit in the ubiquitous plazas everywhere after the day’s work, eating tacos, tamales, gorditas, tortas, elote, pozole, birria, plastic cups stuffed with tunas, cantaloupe, watermelon, strawberries doused with chile powder and lime, plastic bags of homemade potato chips doused with salsa, ice cream cones, humoungous pieces of chocolate cake and flan.  They seemingly are able to sit forever with their families and friends and talk.  At first, B.J. feverishly develops theories as to how and why this is so.  She imagines peeling back the layers of time and getting to the indigenous peoples of Mexico who lived in extended family groups and who needed each other to survive.  The politeness, the easy manner, the friendliness is of one big tribe.  

But then that is an outsider’s perspective.  Is she really seeing them all?   There is a nagging feeling, just starting a month ago in her studio apartment in Ajijic, along the shores of Lake Chapala and only one hour south of Guadalajara,  that society is as stratified here amongst the Mexicans as it is amongst the rich, white retirees who live in some strange symbiotic relationship with them.  “Behind the Walls,” is a photo book prominently on display in many of the cute galleries that line the main commerical street in Ajijic. Its lustrous photographs show a gorgeous panorama of wrought iron entrance ways to walled villas with their terraced poolsides overlooking the beautiful, placid and eeriely empty Lake Chapala.  Passing along always at street level, B.J. realizes she will never see most of the community she now lives in;  she could live in Ajijic for years and never see “behind the walls”.   Lately,  has been going off to the big city of Guadalajara. 

           “You are my homie from Oakland,”  Bob says.

He has let her occupy the more expensive room with its shuttered windows leading to a balcony over the kidney-shaped pool. 

  It’s a treat to stay at his hotel just a few blocks off of the main historic plaza.  At first, she had some trepidations as she walked the four or five blocks, the neighborhood quickly becoming more decrepit with graffati scrawls all over the walls.  Not even good graffiti, politically charged, but seemingly random marks of a weak identity. 

     B.J. comes to find later, from a bus window coming back into the southern end of Guadalarja, that this entire part of the city is covered with graffiti.  Every wall has been defaced with meandering spray paint.  People, in their clean business clothes,  walk stoically along streets that look like bombed out rubble.  Bob’s hotel is an oasis in this urban scrawl.  It explodes with vines and blooms.  Big fronded plants threaten their smaller counterparts.  Delicate blosooms remain undaunted.  There at the edge of chaos, his garden thrives, helped by the afternoon rains.  Put in an emotional context, the garden is new, surprising, unruly, perhaps dangerous yet with a master’s hand in the repetition of plants that flourish here.  It is just what she needs.  Bob quickly becomes Roberto and unfolds as as the gay chameleon who has truly crossed over to another culture.  He points the way in this direction, a sentinel with qualifications.  He has a Mexican boyfriend who B.J. quickly imagines to be about thirty to Roberto’s seventy two. Roberto speaks fluent Spanish with a terrible accent that belies the ability.  

Sitting in one of the back gardens when she returns to the hotel after the rains, she joins Roberto who smokes so many cigarettes that he can barely breathe.  He is a ministers’s son and looks the part of the lanky, somewhat disheveled and dissolute offspring. His eyes are red rimmed, he is pale to the sun with the remains of a handsome face and piercing blue eyes.  He is in the mood to talk and tells B.J. that he came to San Francisco during the Beat era when he was only eighteen.  He has some of that gay man’s guilt about being alive when so many died, hence, the disregard about smoking.  They  sit alongside a faux Aztec god which spews water from a fountain wall into a narrow, elongated pool filled with lily pads and carp.  Roberto gets some food for the carp who quickly come to the surface.  He drops a few flakes in and then abstractly, his mind wanders to another thought and the carp are left waiting. 

“I believe in profusion at the edge of chaos,” he says.  “Not only in the garden,” he says, “but in life.  People should push themselves more to the edge than they think they are capable of.”   

There is a push-pull desire in him to proselytize. 

    “Mexico is a monocultue,” he says,  “and that is good and bad.  The good is that it is a wonderful culture.  The bad is that there is nothing else here if you crave diversity.  My complaint is about the retirees.  They are going nowhere.  They are spinning their wheels, playing a waiting game with their money.”  

It is not what B.J. wants to hear.   An image of the white egret standing in the shallow water of Lake Chapala comes to her mind.  The egret has an elegant leg poised for a very long time before expanding its wings and flying off.  An  American retiree?     Roberto, with his young brown boyfriend.  Is it any different than all old men with eye candy wives clinging to their arms?  Is it any different than what colonialism brought?  Yes, she decides, it is.   There is no divide between Mexico and Roberto.  He has crossed over.  She resolves to study her Spanish even harder.   

“Guadalajara is the new San Francisco,” he says.  “There is a bathhouse just across the street, have you noticed it?”

She hadn’t.

“Gay men walk around town holding hands.”

“And lesbians?”  she asks.

“Oh, they are here,” he says.

They are always everywhere, B.J. notices, but never apparent.  It makes the world a maddening place.  And an isolating one.  And if she met them, she is not at all assured that they would say one word to her.   In Spanish or English.

“How long have you lived in the town of Chapala?”  he asks.

“I don’t live in Chapala,”  she says, “I live in Ajijic.”

Roberto is silent, wrestling with all his feelings about the rich retirees who have built their gated communities lakeside.  Chapala is the the next town over on the lake but it is a Mexican town.  There is a seeping invisibility to the Mexican lakeside towns as Ajijic has come to dominate the resources.  Residents, in search of what feels safe and familiar, have even redone their water systems so that they can drink it out of the tap like in the USA.  Even B.J. has noticed that when property is for sale, it is advertised as “just the next town over from Ajijic”, forgetting the Mexican town in between.  B.J. moved to Ajijic about a year ago and she loves it even if she is not a typical resident. She lives in a studio apartment in a large complex with her beloved dog Bojangles.  It is a much better apartment for a third of the price than the one in Oakland.  She has a small balcony that overlooks the pool.  She is studying Spanish and talking a film appreciation class at the spacious and accommodating Neil James Society for ex-pats in Ajijic.  

“It won my heart,”  she said simply and Roberto nods vigorously.  “I’ve been there for ten months.”

“There are very nice people in Ajijic,” he says in a slightly different tone of voice.  The one that strives to be inclusive.

“And it feels safe,”  she says.

He is still nodding.  

“You are right.  There has been an increase in break-ins in Chapala but not in Ajijic.”

Ajijic has all those gates,  roving security, cameras,  Mexican help wearing identifying uniforms.

“If I am too scared to live in Mexico...” she says.

“You shouldn’t be here...” Roberto adds but stops.  “It is okay to want to be safe.”

The issue of safety in Mexico wasn’t foremost in B.J.’s mind when she arrived.  After all, she is from Oakland.  But it seemed to be paramount to anyone who asked her about where she was going.  On her first few days, she noticed a gnawing sense of anxiety when she walked around Guadalajara and Lakeside.  As if the soft patter of the people, the bustle of them going about their business, the absolute stillness of the lake broken only by the sound of a mango dropping off a tree nearby, would be broken by the retort of a gun.  

“My theory is that if you live within the sound of the church bells, you are okay.”

B.J.’s apartment complex in Ajijic is close enough to the center of town to make that true.

“We can live here, but most of them can’t go to the States,”  Roberto muses.  “It is their biggest dream - to see Disneyland and snow.”

                                          

Jeffrey notes the fallen purple jacaranda blossom as he opens the front door into his walled courtyard.  The gardener will be here today.  He steps down from the huge wrought iron gate shaped as a facsimile of the winged serpent onto the cobblestone street.  He is annoyed with Simone, his wife, who likes to sing off key early in the morning.  It was that semester when she entertained the idea of becoming a professional singer that did it.  The house is certainly big enough to accomodate them both, yet Simone seems to want some confirmation of her choice to marry him instead, all those years ago.  As if it were a bad choice!  Their path has not been easy, he admits to himself, first Carmel, then Santa Fe in a house that didn’t particularly suit them.  And now here in Ajijic.  La Floresta to be more exact, a place that was once its own exclusive town, but has now been incorporated into Ajijic proper.  Luckily, there are the bylaws of La Floresta which gives residents the option of their own security force and the ability to secure water and sewer rights.  Simone has made herself busy on the La Floresta council while he has spent his time building their dream house from a vacant lot they snagged just before the prices went up!  

He shakes the water out of his ears.  He has just finished his requisite number of laps in his lap pool.  The pool is a little different then others, he notes with pride, instead of those bigger boxy designs that some people favor, he has chosen to have the Mexicans construct a long, thin pool running alongside the terraced side of the house.  It was an inspiration from the main pool at the Alhambra in Granada except at the very end of his pool, with a fantastic view of the Lake, there is a jacuzzi.  Take that, Alhambra!  He could have never built a house like this in Santa Fe.  The Mexicans’ gift is the gift of labor, he thinks for the millionth time.  His mind flits to the fraction this walled, dorado villa cost him.  Sure, it was in Mexico and most of the people he knew stateside thought they were insane to move here but they don’t live near as well.  You do what you do, he thinks and adjusts his IPOD.  He is on to the second step of his morning, the walk along the placid lake into town.  The Zeta gas truck rolls by with its characteristic jingle “Zeta, Zeta, Zeta Gas”.  It is not blaring like in Mexican towns but subdued on the volume for La Floresta.  The Mexicans in the truck stare straight ahead.   The spacious, cobblestone streets are difficult to walk on until he gets to the trail alongside the Lake.  The streets  were made for horses and there is still a horse trail that runs through La Floresta.  Mexicans spend all day by their gaggle of horses, occasionally renting them out to the few tourists that come by.   He passes them on the way to the lake but they take no notice of each other.  Language and culture separate them into their own islands.  Mexicans will take just so much, Jeffrey muses, and then pop!  they explode Pancho Villa style.  He unconsciously quickens his pace.  

Jeffrey is trim, tan and smooth but sensitive and  receptive.  Simone should be happy and yet, she’s not.  He is at the end of his rope with this really.  He has built her a house of their dreams, she lacks for nothing.   The only thing missing on the house is the moat, he smiles to himself.  There is the intercom and communication system in every room like the great houses in Victorian England where bells tinkled from every room to summon the help.  And they have their own Mexican legions of help.  There are the oceans of granite countertops, the raised burners and separate grilling feature on the stove, the stainless steel appliances, the deep set sinks, the second jacuzzi in the master bathroom with its Japanese inspired soaking tub.  They lack for none of the most current movies, piped in from a second to none satellite system.  And all of it is self sustaining!  That is the one aspect that Jeffrey was insistant on - the power of the sun keeps him and Simone happy all year long.  Back up generators, for sure.  A water purification system, a necessity.  He was just a bit disappointed with the contractor who pretended to know more than he actually did.  Building your dream from scratch is going to be tough.  He had to find another Mexican to pull out all the warped flooring in the back room.  But it worked out okay in the end and now, a year later, they lived better than they ever could in the States.  And that was the dream, right?   Except for those rich old biddies next door and their afternoon cocktail parties...

The Huichol gave the warning.   B.J. remembers him from the Wednesday market in Ajijic.  He was there with his family,  many other silent Huichols, beading their latest creations behind their display table.  B.J. bought a tiny, yellow-bellied, gecko key chain.  Its attention to beaded detail, a delight.  She had been touching it for inspiration ever since,  a talisman to the history of resistance and anti-colonialism of the Huichol.  They were the group that held out the longest against the Spanish and with the most ferocity.  B.J. admired the psychedelic vividness of their beadwork which brought out the story of peyote.  She remembers him as the one who told her about visionary awakenings. Her Spanish was really improving!  He was dressed in an immaculately clean, embroidered ensemble like a cute pajama set with three quarter length pants. Other Huichols have not fared as well - malnourished, filthy children and their parents still attempting to bead, at the threshold of many churches, plastic cups asking for a few pesos.  Today, her Huichol is wearing jeans and a tee shirt and the expression on his face is terrifying.  

     “Close the gates, close the gates,” he says in English. 

B.J.  had gotten back from Guadalajara the night before and had just taken Bojangles on a walk along the malecon.  It was an early morning tradition in Ajijic and she was beginning to nod to other dog owners on the palm-tree lined boardwalk that curved its gentle way around the lake.  She sat down on one of the benches and let her eyes trace the wide and empty expanse of the lake.  She fell in love with this cratered basin surrounded on all sides by green volcanic mountains the moment she saw it.  Ajijic, the town, was just a little strip off of the main road, between the lake and the contoured mountains.  There was so much here, her heart swelled.  After the walk, she turned into a side street to the Neil James Society to return a video.  The Huichol man followed her inside.

“Hold on!” Jeffrey appears from the other direction off of the trail along the lake. He is the last person admitted before the gate is slammed shut.

The Neil James Society was not a place he liked to go.  Simone had dragged him a few times to the Open Circle event.  It was the kind of touchy feely that had made him want to leave Santa Fe.  Plus, the few single, hungry woman under age seventy made him uncomfortable.

“What’s going on?”  B.J. asks but no one bothers to answer her.  It is an invisibility she recognizes.

One of the earplugs from Jeffrey’s IPOD ia dangling which indicated that he was listening to the Huichol.

“Zetas.  Zetas,”  the Huichol seems to lose the ability to say anything more in English.  “They come.”

“The Zeta GAS people?”  Jeffrey asks, unsure how that poses any threat.   Are the Zeta Gas employees suddenly dangerous?

“The Zetas are a gang,”  B.J. says.  “Zeta is the letter “Z” in Spanish.”

Jeffrey looks at her in a disdainful way.  Bojangles growls at him.

“Hold that mutt,” he says.

It is Blood Pressure Day at the center.  There is a gaggle of old ex-pats lined up by the clinic.  

“Oh this is just great for my blood pressure,” someone says.

“The Zetas are a rival drug cartel,”  says a woman, whose lipstick spreads well beyond the definition of her actual lips.

Is that to be attractive? Jeffrey wonders and then glances away.  He has more important things to think about.  He fumbles for his phone but realizes that he went phone-free for his morning walk.  

“Our lakeside peace shattered!”  a bent-over elderly woman screams.

“Now, now, dear,”  the director of the center says, “wouldn’t you be more comfortable over by the gazebo near the lily pond?”  

The Neil James Society has a lovely spread of gardens, terraces, a lending library of both books and films, a juice bar, a screening clinic, a stage.  It is grounded in the well-meaning humanism of philantrophy.  A printed schedule of the day’s activities is posted, a bit depressingly like a nursing home.  

“Was that a gun?”  a very old man asks.

“I didn’t hear anything,”  his wife says.

“That’s because you aren’t wearing your hearing aid,” he shouts.

“Calm down, folks, the police will be here soon,” the director says.

Everyone contemplated the concept of police in Mexico.  They rehashed the idea of the “mordita” (the little bite) that was required for any transaction with a police officer.  They reviewed how except for traffic cop, there was little police presence in Mexico.  They thought about the brutality and senseless of Mexican jails.

“Our police?” someone asks.

Each gated community spent directly on their own surveillance and protection.  B.J. was sure her apartment complex did not have their own police.  It is all privatized, the realization hits B.J. with a thump.  There is no property tax in Mexico, little taxes of any kind.  There is no infrastruture that is not privately bought and maintained.  It is a Republican’s dream, she realizes.  A gilded cage.  Social Darwinism.  B.J. wonders if the door to her complex is ajar, the Mexican office person having fled.  If the Zetas are setting up shop in her apartment. 

‘It IS another country’, Simone was always saying to Jeffrey apropos of nothing.  Somehow, that came to him now.  It IS another country.  The sentiment rushed in. He thought fondly of her, thin like a reed, tall, with naturally graying hair and wistful saucer eyes.  Mexico as peopled by Mexicans had faded for them.  He never could learn more than a few words of Spanish and Simone wasn’t much better.  Suddenly, he understood what she was saying now about her fears of living in a country as foreign as Mexico.   How it could be so close to the United States and yet so foreign was something he hadn’t fully realized.   Mexicans were so poor but seemed so unfailingly polite and seemed to welcome being maids and gardeners.   They seemed so docile.  Until they weren’t and then Pancho Villa or rival drug cartels.  And where was he?  Stuck with old people, a lesbian and her dog in the Neil James Society.

The Mexican man who ran the juice bar is on the phone with someone and he keeps nodding his head as if absorbing the news.  

“They found a minivan with headless bodies right outside of town?”  he asks.  

“My husband sells minivans!”  screams a woman.

Everyone looks at her.  

“Minivans, SUVs, light trucks.  We have a dealership in Houston!”

“Calm down,” the director says.

“They’ve abducted 12 people?”  the juice man asks, “right off the streets of Ajijic?”

“Foreigners?  They’re abducting ex-pats?”  someone screams.

A chill runs through the hot day.  What really was up with all those Day of the Dead skeletons?

“They are ruthless.  These crazy Zetas.  They are making a statement. Trying to intimidate,” the juice man tries to explain.

“Well, they are doing a damn good job of it,” another very old with a walker says.

Jeffrey searches for any American under eighty.  He notices a younger couple in leotards who are entwined in each other.  They keep moving sinuously like snakes and extending each other’s bodies.  They rest between these improbable poses, a mass of limbs akimbo.

“Do you have any information?”  he asks the lithe, blonde male part of this human conglomeration

“We are just the performers for the Open Circle tomorrow,” the man says, “we do dance yoga.”

“We are one spirit,”  the woman reminds him.  

“Well, you might be one dead spirit,”  Jeffrey says.  

“Negative energy never helps,”  the woman says as Jeffrey walks away.   

He thinks of his walled villa, his massive security gate, his security force, his fast internet connection, his phone.  Simone.

Two old men are debating the virtues of their security systems.  It is clear that everyone wants to be home.

“Do you think it is safe to leave?”  Jeffrey asks.

“You leave when we all leave,” B.J. speaks up.  “IF we leave...”

“Is that so?”  he answers.  

“We are in this together,” she says.

“Oh, are we?”

Bojangles growls.  

“Me, you and your mutt?” 

A lifetime of trying to wish away rich, white men vanishes in B.J.  A lifetime of trying to be an inclusive individual who even owns a tee shirt saying that he is the 99%, vanishes in Jeffrey.  The Huichol stands in between them. 

“Not now, not now,” he says.

“NOT NOW,”  the woman in big red eyeglasses that matches her big red shirt says.  

Jeffrey and B.J. stare at her.  Bojangles whimpers.

“Are you people going to argue when we have a situation on our hands?”

She is squinting through her glasses at her tiny, personal contact book and then holding the phone at a distance trying to punch in the numbers.  

“You know, phones have contact lists built right into them now,” Jeffrey says.

She glares at him like a schoolteacher who has just been told that two plus two no longer equals four.  

“Why doesn’t someone answer?”  she wails.  

“Don’t I know you from somewhere?”  B.J. asks.

The woman thrusts out a loose business card.  “Margery Hunter,” she says brusquely, “Rental Wizard.”

A minor celebrity in Ajijic, Margery Hunter had been finding people cheap places to live for at least two decades.  By her own estimate, she managed at least half the properties in Ajijic and owned at least fifty pairs of color-coordinated, owl-shaped glasses.  She liked to accessorize, she told people, but that was the soft side.  Don’t waste her time, don’t renege on a verbal contract and don’t think she was going to let you win at cards.

“Raul?  Raul?”  she is screaming into the phone.  “Damn it, we got cut off.  Is this whole town down for the count?”

“We might get killed,”  B.J. intones.  “The Zetas might storm the gates.”

“Nonsense,” Margery says, “we’ll be up and running in a few minutes.”

“They can leave?”  the juice man says into the phone.  “Even the old ones?”

“What did I tell you?”  Margery says.

He clicks off the phone and they all gather around him.  “They have found bodies - no heads - close to here.  But they think they have been in that van a few days.  It can be seen as a statement to a rival gang.”

“Oh dear, the smell,” someone says.

“And the abductions?”  a man in a walker asks.

“The police are here surrounding the town.  They are advising everyone to go home and lock up.”  The juice man opens the gate.  The Huichol slips out.

“I’m going back to the office,” Margery says.  

She is the first one out followed by Jeffrey who makes a beeline for the villa.  

“Come on, Bojangles,” B.J. says, “it is time to go home.”

Lock up they did.  Throughout the months of May and June, the town of Ajijic was virtually empty.  Little street traffic.  No tourists.  Events cancelled at the Neil James. Restaurants lost ninety percent of their business.  For sale signs popped up and villas were sold wholesale.  The people who stayed debated about how much worse crime was in the States.  They debated whether the change of government from the Calderon administration, which had confronted the gangs head on, back to the PRI, which had let the gangs operate as a shadow government, would stop the bloodshed.   They met and organized for proactive change.  Jeffrey installed better recessed and discrete security cameras.  Mangos dropped from trees.  The white egret stood with its leg poised high, wading and waiting, in the shallow ends of Lake Chapala.  B.J. called Margery to look at a few different rentals that might have better security systems.  Then suddenly one day,  she decided to go home to Oakland. 

 

 

    SADIE’S COAT

Paul is not worried; he has enough time in his life for all things to happen.  He lights a cigarette in celebration, after all it is New Year’s Eve.  

“Don’t you ever just take a day to do nothing?” he asks, a languid Southernness that was in his father’s background, seeping through.

I think of my hurried life and all I have missed. I want the spaces in between to see what comes up.  Yet, I am a novice at it and fear I will become frustrated and depressed.  Paul, with gangly limbs and blonde streaked hair, becoming a bit grizzled only to those who remember him through the decades or who see him before his morning ablutions or at that end of a long night, is a master at seeing the holes in the night.  Maybe it’s because of sensing where only gay men go, sharpened his instincts and ability to read below the radar.  

  New Year’s Eve, and the town will have a bonfire.  It’s a New England tradition that Paul seems particularly excited about.  He keeps talking about witches and superstitions, primordial flame, purging pyres and long, cold nights.  We peek into my mother’s front room, knowing we need to ask her to come with us.   She won’t go and there is no arguing with her even though the bonfire was only a block from the house, at the baseball field.  Once her mind was made there is no question although she was already bemoaning the event she hadn’t yet missed.  Her mind was fast forward and replay to an increasing extent as she aged with an alarming disregard for the present.  She sat on her faded, red velvet love seat in the front room of her house, the glassed-in porch, filled with all that was importantly hers.  Photographs of trips, plants, books by women discussing marital and family problems, a nude torso of a mannequin with a wide brimmed hat, her stone sculptures mounted on stands, an antique standing lamp with a light bulb dangerously close to the paper shade and the telephone.  Lifeline central.  

       “Go,” she commands.

       “Come with us, it’s New Year’s Eve and just down the block,” I say.

She is shaking her head slowly side to side, adjusting facial contours to speak of unspeakable grief that I don’t understand.  The spider fern bends towards her in sympathy but she doesn’t notice.  She is the queen in this little room, queen of a sorrow no one can quell, don’t even bother trying and thank you for closing the door on your way out.  My father, one of the main sources and recipient of this unspeakable grief, lingers somewhere behind me.  He has no room of his own, no mooring, and his vagueness and ability to cope has markedly dwindled.  Paul steps up and pokes his head into her room.  

“Not feeling well?” he asks in his chipper, diplomatic way.  Paul knows how to negotiate the stormy surfaces of life in a way that mends the waters.

My mother, with her privileged access to all her hurt and angry feelings, purses her lips and refuses to reveal.

“It will brighten you up,” he says, like she is a wash that just needs clorox.

She waves a sweeping hand, a gesture of why New Year’s Eve bonfires a block away come at an inopportune time.

“It’s just once a year,” Paul reminds her, “a good way to get to know the town.”

“Leave her,” I whisper.

Paul turns to me with that “you’ll feel guilty when she’s gone” look.

“She doesn’t want to go!”  I say it loud enough to  wake her up to her anger.

“Are you telling me not to go?”  she challenges.

I turn on my heels, grab Sadie’s coat and head out leaving Paul to deal with another go round.

Admittedly, it had been a long night, one that started long before the bonfire and should have ended earlier. And, of course, it started with my mother’s plans (as it always did).  What I  once scorned as a teenager as “kooky” became now as an adult, potentially interesting.  I had a grudging admiration for this small, wiry, oldster who still carried on, defying age and convention, who still drove all the way to the Bowery to pick up a stone for her sculpture class, who flew herself to San Miguel de Allende to check it out, who thought a good idea for New Year’s Eve might be a meditation.

Paul went along with it as did my father, who always basically did what he was told.  We bundled into the car and my mother drove us on the back roads, along the sea wall, to what was once a solid, brick, Christian church.  The mortar, laid between brick many years ago, spoke of simple elegance, of faith unswerving.  The trees were bare, it was cold and there were only tasteful Christmas lights dotting the way.   Still, it was the lowlands, close to the water and you could smell salt, knew the comfort of tides, marshes, beaches once you got out of the car.  The path to the church was marked by stones.  The warm interior was inviting through strained glass windows.  Once you entered, you knew that it had been transformed into some Eastern sect’s domain.  

        “It’ll wash away your sins,”  my mother says to me.

“There are no Eastern sins,” I say and she looks confused.

That’s the thing about my mother, something that has scared me since I was a child - she really doesn’t know what the hell she is doing.  

“That’s Christian,” I try to explain but she has already walked in front of me and I wonder about the sins she is referring to, immediately personalizing them.

Paul takes my hand and we walk into main sanctuary.  Paul, my ever faithful intermediary, the one who always comes down from Boston whenever I visit New York.   I wait for him to disembark from the train, for the long howl of railroad noises to start up again, by which time he’ll have lit a cigarette, bag over one shoulder.  In the dark, lit by globes of street lights, my father who insisted he accompany me in the car to the station, thought Paul was a woman walking towards us.  His willowy, slender, small form not anywhere masculine enough for my father’s eyes.

“We’re in for it tonight,” Paul, with his bleached blonde hair, skinnier than ever, says.  His tone is jovial, he appreciates my mother’s offbeat nature.

The entire altar has been redone.  Instead, it is a pulsating, backlit,  pink scrim.

“What sect is this?”  I ask my mother who has seated herself comfortably in the pews which are now covered in Indian fabric, plush cushions underneath.  She looks at me strangely.  There are different sects of this?

 It is all hot India inside, a striking contrast to the cold East Coast outside.  Hot flashes, sweltering colors - cardamon, curry, ginger, cloves, red pepper, tumeric, mango.  A woman in a sari plays atonal sequences on an electronic keyboard.

“Do you think you can handle this?”  my mother asks my father also seated in the pew but with Paul in between.  He is already tuning out, his eyes closed in what some might take as reverential but which I know to be sheer exhaustion of a lifetime catering to her whims.  He doesn’t even open his eyes to the question, just nods.

             I carefully lay Sadie Gottlieb’s black Persian lamb coat beside me. I had rescued it from the attic where it ineffectually resided beneath plastic sheathing from a dry cleaner’s.  It was discovered on my forays up there, twisted steps, the door barely opening, it holding all my mother’s various scarves, belts, pocketbooks.  Up there to find treasures or answers but the pickings were slim.  A baby book for a girl noting my brother’s progress written in my mother’s crabbed handwriting, an old record case for 45s from my high school years, a heart with ‘me and Steve’ on the inside.  The coat hung, boxy, curled lamb’s wool, a faint whiff of it like lamb stew, seemingly impervious to the decades.  I wore it downstairs and asked my father, seated in the one chair he seemed to permanently occupy, if my grandfather had made the coat for my grandmother.  My grandfather, Nathan Gottlieb, the proverbial Jewish tailor, a domineering man who landed with both feet running after passing through Ellis Island.  My father squinted at me with the coat on, memory flooding back and smiled.  ‘It fits you,’ he said.  

Sadie Bleiweiss Gottlieb.  I invoke the presence of my grandmother into the sanctuary.  Sadie, Sadie, foxy lady, Sadie, Sadie, sad lady.  She married my grandfather, an older man, possibly an arranged marriage.  She wrote bad poetry in a loopy handwriting, had a daughter who died in childhood from rheumatic fever, had my father who she poured out her miseries to, was thrilled to see me, her first grandchild, and died from breast cancer before I was two.  That’s all I know about her, all I ever will.

“How do you like the coat?”  I asked Paul when he first arrived.

Paul never answered any aesthetic question quickly.  It was all perusal, turning me around, looking at the seams, the overall picture, the touching of the wool.  “It fits,” he conceded, in his discriminating fashionista way, “and someday soon it might come back in style.”

I lay the coat out length-wise on the pews, its own animal presence taking up space.  There are not many people here on New Year’s Eve.    I lay it on the reconstructed pews where sins are not sins but maybe just poor choices, maybe like Sadie’s, maybe like my own.   The coat has begun its disintegration and with it my hopes of bringing it home to California.  The lining has started to shred longitudinally like someone had wielded knife to it.  Like puffs of smoke, the lining yielding to decades, the coat so substantial and then not.  I pat Sadie’s coat laid out lengthwise on the pew.  The meditation begins.  I could feel my mother beside me like a hen on her perch, feathers ruffled, sinking into herself.  There was no clear line to the beginning, the lights dimmed, the woman at the keyboard slowed down and stopped.  My eyes closed and I immediately fell into a sexual reverie about someone other than my partner.  Visiting my parents has always brought unbearable adolescent frustration to the surface.  I swirled and twirled and tumbled and generally didn’t bother with anything else meditative.  After all, it was New Year’s Eve.  At one point, I even let out a little yip and quickly glanced over at my mother, ashamed.  Were these the sins, all my lovers, real and imagined?   My eyes fluttered open to the vision of an older woman in a white robe seated on the dais.  Paul would be able to pinpoint the era of the chair she sat on.  He would swoon, “did you see the repro 15th century, French, white lacquered armchair?”  A subtle humming came over the loudspeakers like a swarm of impending insects.  The pink scrim pulsated. This was the meditative climax.  I closed my eyes again to fully enjoy it.

“Wasn’t that incredible feminine?”  Paul whispered in my ear as we descended to the lower level of the church for the little celebration and indoctrination.  

“And wasn’t that repro 15th century, French, white lacquered chair amazing?”  I ask.

The lower level was institutional and drab.  There was tea and little sweets laid out for us buffet-style. We sat at round tables on hard chairs.  A tall, very brown man began his speech in a lilting Anglo-Indian accent.  

“Your nature is good,” he confided, “everyday you have a way to get in touch with your true virtues, your positive energy.  Feel it through meditation, see how positive energy can change the quality of your life and your relationships.”

I can see my mother bristling. It’s one thing to sit in a comfortable space and close her eyes, another to be told what to do.  My father is slumped down in his seat.  The very brown man goes over and stands behind my father, placing his hands on his shoulders.  “Meditation will raise you up.  It will fill you with energy and self respect.”

        My father’s eyes pop open, he is not accustomed to being touched by another man.

The man passes out to each table the fun activity we will be doing.  It is called the VirtueScope, a piece of paper with all the months printed on a circle along with a pack of Virtue cards.  Each person picks this inner peace card and writes the virtue that we will be working on for each month of the coming year.  I look across the table at my mother, her face is hardening, her eyes squinting.  Paul is grinning; his life is an unsteady mix of restraint and hedonism.  I can see him honoring each virtue card for about five minutes on a good day.

I pick the first card.  I dutifully write it next to the month of January.

“Sweetness,”  I say.

I have always felt that I have a tremendous reservoir of sweetness just below the jaded surface of my life’s disappointments.

“Ha!”  my mother says.

I have a vision going back generations, lifting the mists of time -  a long line of bubbas, spoons waggling over a pot of chicken soup, wigs slipping over bald, orthodox heads, criticizing, haranguing, mortally disgruntled, vociferously disappointed.  My mother was born of such a woman and I try to remember this when I pick my next card for February,             “Compassion.”

“Why should I do these cards?”  my mother asks and the whole table turns to look blankly at her.  “If I want to be angry, I will.”

It has turned into church after all.  The virtues are too confining, too similar to Christianity.  I remember my long standing wish to not be part of this small Jewish family, small because my grandfather had disowned all his brothers and sisters.  I imagine established Christian or even Hindu families, tentacles reaching out like an extensive root system, spreading a wide, deep net of support and love.

“You do it if you feel it will make your life better,”  I say.

She considers this.  She is into making her life better which is why she goes to the meditations in the first place.  I can feel her struggling with foreign concepts, with something outside her own experience of defying authority, her own hurt and loneliness.

“Forgiveness,”  my March card.

“Can you forgive?”  she asks, leaving out the ‘me’.

“You can do these things a little bit,”  I say, remembering all the years of her screaming at me,  “they are just paths, you touch lightly, you work on it.”  

I’m up for “Honesty” for April.  Never a good policy according to my mother.  ‘Why must you always say what you are thinking?’ she would ask as if I was some village idiot with a loose tongue.  

“You know I’m always good for that,”  I say and she grimaces with a pained look.

Paul picks a card.  “Moderation”

“My, my, we really are getting what we need,”  I say.

My father picks.  “Appreciativeness”

My mother hisses.  He looks defeated. Her turn.  It’s “Honesty” again, someone must not have shuffled the deck well.   My mother considers her card.  I see a sly look cross her face.

“You know there is something about Sadie Bleiweiss Gottlieb that you don’t know,” she says.

My father bolts up in his chair.  I clutch the coat on my lap.

“Your grandfather had her institutionalized in an asylum,” she says.  “I thought you should know that about her.”

“Oh my god!”  I say.  

“That’s what they did in those days.  He was at his wit’s end.  She wouldn’t get out of bed, like some people we know,” and she glares at my father who lowers his eyes.  His fate is right there in front of him.

“What did they do to her?”  I ask.

“They tried everything.  Cold baths, hot baths, but it didn’t work.  So finally, they tried electro-shock treatments.”

“It was so barbaric then!”

“And it didn’t work,” she says.

My father’s eyes are misty.  “They gave her a partial.  She was never the same after that.”

“A partial?” I ask.

“A pre-frontal lobotomy,” my mother says impatiently like it has all been gone over a million times before.  I can see she is sorry she has brought this up.

“So I never really knew her at all,” I muse.

“Well, she died when you were so young so you wouldn’t have anyway,” she says.

I have a dim memory of Sadie, a bulky, indistinguishable form standing over me.  I remember looking up to find her eyes and seeing some teeth, a smile.

The very brown man instructs us in the final activity.  We write our wish for the new year. My father has written, “I will try new things.”

“I’ll remind you of that,” my mother says.

My wish splits a seam on the way out of the church, a large gaping hole as intricate renderings of black Persian lamb hang from my shoulder.  My wish was for a family who hadn’t disintegrated like the coat.

The bonfire is an artful assemblage of planks and discarded Christmas trees stacked up for maximum burn.  Paul joins me just as a man douses it with propellant and tosses in the match.  He watches it avidly.  “Now this is masculine,” he says.  The fire gives off sparks and Sadie’s coat warms up in the cold night air.