incidents and accidents

Change of Pace Tempo Quiz.

If you've read this site for a while, you'll know I talk about music a lot. Renaissance polyphony, Gregorian chant, French pop, American singer-songwriters, Christian bands, showtunes, Italian rock, even Céline Dion (who deserves a category all her own) ... have all had their 15 words of fame, or at least dorky scrutiny, on my blog. It's not to celebrate anything in particular, and it's not my blogibirthday, but I liked Greg's recent quiz/giveaway so well that I'm doing a shameless imitation and offering 10 CDs, the soundtrack of Incidents and Accidents over the 2-1/2 years I've been writing here.

And because I like competition, I'll give you a quiz. **Updated information : the former quiz stymied absolutely everybody and I am tired of giving private permission to cheat. So, here are a couple new and improved, where by "improved" I mean "EASY," questions.

1) Name the title and artist of the song from which "Incidents and Accidents" is taken. Oh, and because THAT'S such an easy, totally Googleable question, I also want the phrase that follows it lyrically. Yes, "googleable" is a word.

2) My choir in Lyon often sang this piece by a twentieth-century French composer : Cantique de ______________ by ___________________.

3) The patron saint of musicians, especially church musicians, is : ____________________________.

I'm already having fun making CDs, mostly because I have talked about so much music here that each CD contains a different sampling of songs and works. All will have a fairly Euro-centric flavor (I mean, if it was music you could get every day on the American radio, that would be a lot less fun). Email me your answers and your mailing address, which I promise not to sell to the people at the Christian Debt Clearinghouse. A very merry unbirthday to all of us. (Unless, of course, it happens to be your birthday, in which case - Joyeux anniversaire !)

Arrivederci ... magari.

P leaves on Wednesday, back to Italy and his family, girlfriend, studies - his life.

And I won't have told him so many things.

I won't have told him he has ressuscitated another me, a me ready to take more chances and roll her Rs. I won't have told him that his transcription of "L'Instabilità" has changed my perception of a song that has been part of my life for 5 years, since before I understood every last syllable of it. That he has given me the missing syllables. That I love him for that. And I won't have told him what the song stands for, in my life, the times and choices it represents.

I won't have told him that because of him I am willing to go out late at night, to a party full of people I don't know. Won't have told him that knowing he will be there a few hours later makes even the sprint for the last bus or the expensive taxi fare home worthwhile. Won't have told him about the most impossible fantasies, the ones where he stays in the States, or develops a fondness for French, or shows up at my door at midnight in the rain.

I won't have told him that I have only been "okay" with the idea of his leaving because I haven't let myself think about it at all. That I am only "okay" with the concept of leaving in general because I am usually the one leaving. That I know it makes not one whit of difference whether I am "okay" with anything. I don't have that role in his life.

I won't have told him, stupidly, that I love his jeans with the funny curvy cuffs. This omission makes the keys blur before my eyes. How have I overlooked doing such a small and essential kindness?

But the moment has passed by me now
To have put away my pride
And just come through for you somehow

So now I offer communication over distance. I am used to this. I know how it happens. I know the progression of the emails - the early heat and attachment, the blank period in the middle punctuated by periodic apologies and, eventually, resolved by resentment.

He says he will give me the groceries remaining in his refrigerator. He offers his duvet. I think of my brother and of the couch in my new apartment, which P helped me find. I accept, and think with some embarrassment of what I can offer in return. I will send things to Italy after him, if he has to leave things behind. I will drive him to the airport in my borrowed car. I will use the copious library resources here for him, send him photocopies or references as needed. It seems so practical, so little. I would do so much more. But he wouldn't ask for it. And I can't offer.

You’re the hidden cost and the thing that’s lost
In everything I do
Yeah and I’ll never stop looking for you
In the sunlight and the shadows
And the faces on the avenue

I don't know if I think of him as a second younger brother or as a big crush. I know I will ache to hug him at the airport before he disappears through the security gates. I know his returning to Italy is right and good : he has a Ph.D. to finish, and a Vanessa to reunite with. I know I will weep all the way back to this home that is not home. And hear his voice in my heart, in my consciousness, whenever I find myself faced with a difficult conjugation.

I will not have told him how much of my soul is tied into language. Somehow, anyway, I think he knows. He is the first person I met back in the States this year. He knows more of me than almost anyone. He reads this site (Ciao!). I can only post this entry because I know it will take him 3 or 4 months to get to it. And in that time any number of things could happen. Maybe, given 90 or 120 days, I won't be so afraid to say ...

That’s the way love is
That’s the way love is
That’s the way love is

Myself, inside-out.

The other night I was crawling the web looking for the name of some herbal supplements I bought back before I moved to France. I remember the night I ordered them : I was slightly drunk and giggly, and then I looked down and realized my entire midsection was folded over the waistband of my pyjama bottoms and I burst into tears. I found a site called nutrition general or general nutrition or good-health-r-us and before I knew it, thanks to the symbiosis of credit-card and hyperlink technologies, I had ordered not one but three bottles of miracle drug, one regular, two "light." The "light" ones were made with green tea and guarana ; the regular ones contained Ephedra and were subsequently banned. Three pills a day promised to make me effortlessly skinny.

I didn't use the pills right away. Life in France was both more active and more expensive than it had been in America, and I found myself losing weight naturally in the first year or so. Then I got used to it and started gaining weight again, and had more teary encounters of the waistband-meets-bellyfold variety that put my sensitive fat cells to shame, and because I am a product of my generation I turned to chemistry to make it all better, as painlessly and as fast as possible. I started taking diet pills. I was also running a few miles every day and subsisting on diet shakes my sister sold me at cost, and vegetables and cheese from the Banque Alimentaire (but that's another story). The pounds melted off my body. I dropped three sizes in the space of four months and felt stronger, and fitter, than any other time of my life. People noticed my changing shape and complimented me. I was on top of the world.

One day I heard myself utter the words : I have to go for a run today. If I don't run I can't eat. The guy I was speaking with turned and looked at me and said, "That is the most ridiculous piece of logic I have ever heard." And I thought, heard myself thinking : buddy, welcome to the tip of the iceberg.

Can't believe that I did it again
Wake me up from this nightmare
'Cause this monster is filling me up filling me out
This monster is wasting me away, taking my days

*

I have struggled with my weight for years. You can chalk it up to growing up with an underwear model for a sister, or having my father compare me to various bulbous fruits during my heaviest periods in college ; you can make general statements about Southern California as the land of silicone perfection ; you can look for deeper causes and diseases I must suffer from that give me this hang-up about my self-image. I have done all of the above and, though true in varying degrees, none of those answers actually touches the core of the problem. At the end of the day, they're all just symptomatic.

I look in the mirror and see pieces - thick waistline, bulging hips. Not the whole, there is no whole. Trying on clothes is trying indeed. I've realized recently that when I eat alone my eyes barely leave the plate, my fork moves in almost constant motion. In a restaurant or with company, I barely eat at all. If ever we go to a restaurant together, please do not notice what I eat or make a comment afterward like "Romy had a good breakfast," because I will turn on you with all the force of my Ph.D. vocabulary and an uncontrollable onslaught of tears. It won't matter that you were being funny, or factual, or that you paid. Neither of us will leave the breakfast table intact. And try as I might, I will not forget your words. I will wonder if you've seen through the thin veneer I put on, if you've glimpsed the fat girl inside.

I've struggled with my weight to the point that I can't write about my body. I can't describe the contours or trace its shape. I can't talk about the dips and rises, not even in a voice of self-mockery to say something serious I can take back later. I can't take my body back, so I don't take it anywhere, don't talk about it. As if I could be just eyes and hair and tattoos, just fingers to touch these keys and coax the words out. As if I could be just words.

Words are safe, and powerful. They weave helixes of sound to cover or erase the unsightly thighs, arms, abdomen. Words let me build a new imagined body in strings of code I can alter and revise without touching my actual limbs or taking photographs. This Looker-like practice lets me both create and conceal my actual self. The body I write mirrors the flame in my soul, the hard filament of steel at my center - it is flint and wire and song and spark, sharp-edged glass and jutting titanium planes, cauterized energy for the second it takes to shoot into warp-speed. My written body does not need to reflect the over-cushioned seat I sit on as I type it into existence. Thus is the kindness of language, the disappearing act it permits as I hide behind syllables. Thank you, words. The problem as always lies in the reality outside of language - I do not live within a keyboard. I always have to stand up again, and walk, and the body I have been ignoring or trying so desperately to erase comes with me.

*

1997
Spin around, my friend tells me when I step out of the fitting room in a dress. I stand still before the mirror, absently fingering the hem of one sleeve. Fabric falls in elegant creases down past my knees, one layer of charcoal gauze, one layer of mauve crèpe, an ethereal, Victorian effect. The dress has intricate detailing on the collar ; the buttons are covered in the same optical-illusion fabric mixture. I am mesmerized and one hand strays to the place between ribcage and hipbones, where a lump of flesh judders and heaves beneath the dress's formal waistline with its delicate back-tie. Spin around, she repeats. I shake my head and step back behind the white slatted door. If I turn around, she will see the expanse of my ass, made even wider by this style. It makes me look fat, I tell her through the paint. The dress pulls upward over my head in one sure movement, smoke from a chimney, and I hunt blindly for my black shirt and jeans, the clothes I can hide in. Oh honey, she sighs outside.

*

1984
I am 14 and my best friend invites me to participate in her summer challenge. We will telephone each other every day and compare our weight and measurements. When we begin I weigh 102 and my waist is 25 inches. She weighs 109 and her waist is 26 inches. I am 5'1", she is nearly 5'10". She looks our numbers up in the chart her mother got from a nutritionist. She tells me she is technically underweight but her waist is thick. I, on the other hand, am 9 pounds over weight for my age and size. Tears spring to my eyes. Nine pounds! I should weigh 93 at the maximum! She tells me we will each do 500 situps every night and stop eating lunch. We will call each other daily, for encouragement. I hijack the family scale from the back bathroom. Every morning I step onto it and watch the needle shiver then settle on a number. By mid-July the scale settles regularly on 98, but I know this isn't good enough. I add 100 situps to the daily routine, and start jumping rope as well. This is my first real religion.

You're only popular with anorexia
So I turn myself inside-out
In hope someone will see

*

1991
My mother and I sign up together for Jenny Craig and subsist on chalk-flavored yoghurt, fake Cheerios and tomato soup that tastes like the liquid you would drain from a can of stewed tomatoes. My mother loses ten pounds quickly and the rest of the summer is about maintenance. I actually gain weight and spend three months moody and miserable. In the nutrition-counseling sessions we attend as part of the program, we learn that Jenny's best advice is "Stop eating."

"Repeat after me : I am no longer hungry."

"Leave something on your plate."

I look down at the apple I have cut into slices, pull one section off to the side, to leave on my plate.

At night, after the family's noises have quieted, I tipoe into the kitchen and pull two Oreos from the cookie jar. I wrap the cookies in a paper towel, tiptoe back to my room and shove them into the back of my nightstand drawer. The drawer is full of stale cookies. Then I lie back in my twin bed, hands on either side of my abdomen, and do situps in silence until my muscles scream. I open the drawer and close it : my safety net, in case I can't make it through a day of dieting. I feel like a criminal.

The following fall I learn, two years into our friendship, that my best friend is anorexic. We talk about control : a hard-won, vicious dominatrix with changeable affection.

It started when I was about 10, she tells me. I just stopped. I drank a Doctor Pepper a day and that was enough.

But ... how? I ask. How do you stop feeling hungry? How do you tell your body it doesn't deserve to eat? How do you convince yourself you are no longer hungry?

I pictured every bit of food crawling with maggots, she says helpfully.

Oh.

Back in my own apartment I stare at the dinner I have prepared for my boyfriend and our other roommate. Spaghetti and meatballs, rich red sauce, my mother's recipe, and garlic bread and salad. I visualize maggots, their soft plump shapes working like fingers through the pores of the bread, humping over the whorls of lettuce leaves. It doesn't help. I am still hungry. My stomach is a gale-force wind, sweeping me along in its grip, and I can't deny the treacherous touch of this hunger like an ache. I sit at the table long after Andy and Jay have finished eating, slow heavy tears dripping down the sides of my face as I pick up forkful after forkful and mechanically chew and swallow.

You coming? Andy asks as they walk toward the door, headed to a party, or a poker game, or a drive along the dark back roads behind the Causeway.

I shake my head and stand, belly distended. I'll do the dishes, I tell him.

They go. I carry the plates to the sink, run the hottest water my skin can stand, and rinse stray beige noodles and red-flecked onion quarters down into the disposal. The water runs silver and dirty through our discarded food, and I am struck with a possibility.

I run to the bathroom, lean over the toilet, press two fingers against the back of my throat. I gag. Relax the pressure. Press again. Gag. I am not skilled at this. After a few repetitions it all happens hugely, the food rising in a lump, and then my throat closes for a second and it happens again and again, a series of aftershocks, until I kneel empty and exhausted, eyes stinging, cheeks burning, face pressed against the porcelaine. A vein pounds in my forehead. I stand up shakily and return to the kitchen. I pour a tall glass of water and brush my teeth. I've found the solution for every subsequent uncomfortable meal. It will serve me all the way through graduate school and marriage and four years of life in France. I don't even need control. I have the rememdy to control. I feel wobbly and pure : I have begun the world.

Still this nightmare's all mine, when I call him he answers
I can tell him when to come, when to stay
Sometimes I'm weaker than he is, is he just letting me win
He can tell me when to come, when to stay

*

2004
One Friday night in Lyon I walk down the quais to join some friends from church for our monthly prayer group and potluck supper. I sit next to Béatrix, who looks me up and down sternly and then leans over to whisper, Tu fonds, vue de l'oeil, you're melting before our eyes. It is the highest compliment she has ever paid me, and I beam.

The following Monday I walk into the office of the language institute where I teach and a slick ribbon of blood slides down the inside of my leg. In the center is a strange clot, about the width of a slim finger, as long as a pencil tip.

Oh my God! the secretary exclaims.

It's nothing, I assure her. I have extra pantyhose in my bag for just this eventuality. Since I started taking the pills and running, I have one period a week. Most of what leaks from my womb is rust-colored water with a vaguely viscous center ; heavy crimson discharge like this is anomalous. I step through the door behind her desk and into the staff bathroom, where I turn on the hot water and pull my skirt up, anchor it under my chin. I use the old pantyhose as a washcloth, clean off my leg, dry it with toilet paper, pull the new pantyhose on. I use more toilet paper as a makeshift maxi-pad and step out, smiling, to meet my first student of the day. She tells me, in her very careful English, that I look pale.

Thank you, I say, and we cross the corridor for her lesson.

*

2005
I learn the Ephedra ban is lifted, go online to search for the diet pill that changed my life one year ago. It crosses my mind to search for the other reasons my life might have changed in such dramatic ways both miraculous and concrete, but the thought is fleeting and quickly replaced with the image of a stark white bottle. I have lived too long with the treachery of my shape to seek solace or explanations anywhere but in annihilating it. But as I stare at the image on my computer screen something shifts in my mind, and I realize I am mouthing the name of this drug out loud, in a sort of disbelieving stupor. Did I take this? Did I buy this? Was it legal?

The bottle on the web page is slim and generically labelled, and the image from this herbal-supplements-R-us website has been photoshopped so it bends in at the center, like an hourglass, the perfect female body from the 1930s : a model of beauty my grandmother might have emulated. The drug is called Anorex. I find myself thinking of my best friend and her 25-year battle with this greedy demon. I find myself thinking of my aunt, who disappeared halfway at age 35, the age I am now. And thinking of Karen Carpenter, and Princess Diana, and the countless less famous names, casualties of this war within. I find myself thinking of a student in France, Estelle, who spent 6 months of every academic year in the hospital, fighting her parents who insisted on having her admitted when her weight fell to 37 kilos. And I realize suddenly that I am unwilling to buy a drug with this name. I certainly suffer from weight-obsession, dysmorphia, a self-image disorder, a hunger problem, call it whatever you want ... but I am no longer sick enough for this.

I close the website and go lie down in the dark on my borrowed, uncomfortable futon. The pasta I have eaten for dinner presses heavily against the inner limits of my stomach ; I taste the sauce at the bottom of my esophagus (red, acidic). It takes every ounce of strength in me to remember I measured it carefully and ate exactly the serving for one person : this was not a binge dinner. Still, I get up uncomfortably and wander into the bathroom, stare at the toilet, lower myself slowly to my knees. I raise a hand to my mouth, put it down again. My knees creak as I rise. I return to the bedroom and its horrible futon, stare at the ceiling and half-pray for some revolting dream of maggots. Let me ..., I plead, uncertain what to ask for. Let me not be guilty of these old, old habits. Some time later, time I cannot measure, I fall asleep.

Who are you that lies when you stare in my face
Telling me that I'm just a trace
Of the person I once was cause we're not the same
You're just a picture of me
You're gone as soon as I leave
You've lived my life for me
And you're no more than a piece of glass

*

Thanks to Tori Amos for lyrics from "Jackie's Strength," and Caedmon's Call for lyrics from "Piece of Glass."

And not a single one is looking at me ...

Yes, I'm fickle.
Also, I have a new toy.
There are more photos up at my flickr spot ... but not that many more. Yet.

Misspellings that make me happy.

(This will be an occasional series, à la Peg's "Basta!")

Midevil. Evil located somewhere between Reality television and the Sith lords.

Cloud on my Tongue.

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? ...
JEDER Engel ist schrecklich.

~Rilke, Duineser elegien

You won’t learn her name, any of them. I can only give you snapshots of her voice. She first comes when I am too young to say no to anything so damagingly lovely. She alights like a hummingbird or something from a book about fairies, sparkling dewy eyes and green center thrumming, she takes my hand and presses it to her breast and I feel her heart beating like a song from my own secret soul, like a poem. I am dazzled by her obsidian glow, shining in the strange morning light.

No one else will ever love you like this, she says, and reaches forward to press my eyes closed.

I don't need much to keep me warm
Don't stop now what you're doing
what you're doing
my ugly one

I learn from her that black can be bright and silver can contain infinite darkness. I learn to stop questioning paradox. I do not notice darkness settling around the place her fingers graze, do not realize a heart is not meant to feel chill and stony to the touch. I see only the harmony of architecture, the gleam and contours of the flawless maculate shape she tells me I can share.

She is a cathedral, her spires point to the only heaven I have ever seen. She is a concert hall, a drained and echoing swimming pool, eerie aquatic memories in tile. She is a wooden hallway worn to brilliance by perfectionists and penitents. She says hunger purifies a searching yearning soul. She says nothing is impossible as long as you deny yourself enough to prove you want it. I tell her I feel insufficient, and she tells me I am, the only way to be enough is to make myself less and less. Her poetry is long dark looks and bruises, pallor and silence and ethereal music in minor keys. If I step away from her she smolders a peculiar dark light. The romance of our first weeks tangles with her jealousy, my jealousy, my fear of disappointing her and everyone else. I neglect my friends, do not return phone calls, spend hours in the water because the bathroom acoustics let her voice echo and resound. In the morning she wakes me with her desire, and my heart gasps as she slides into me. She says, No one else will love you like I can.

You're already in there
I'll be wearing your tattoo
You're already in there ...

I close my eyes and her voice takes me, we dance through glittering alabaster rooms where our voices leap and soar and then descend. I spend the days light-headed from her presence, growing thin and smilingly elusive. My skin changes hue, I shiver in June. Soon I can’t remember what I sound like without her ; she is my Phantom of the Opera. I open myself so she can sing.

People who see me recognize her traces, but don’t know what to say. She is on me like a fragrance, you can’t separate scent from skin. And perfume seeps through the pores. Does it enter the bloodstream? My skin is hers, quartered and charted like a plotted blueprint. She takes as much as I dare to give her, then takes more. It is more than I can afford, more than I can spare, and I don’t care as long as she stays.

Bring them all here
hard to hide a
a hundred girls in your hair
It won't be fair
if I hate her
if I hate her
you can go now
you can go now

Sometimes, eventually, I try to leave her. The thought of the solitude breaks me. I throw her away but fish her from the trash. I give her to people for safekeeping but show up sobbing at 3 a.m. to reclaim her and take her home. Her forgiveness is merciful and exacting. She is my best friend and requires loyalty and devotion. I perform acts of apology, penance in garnet jewelry I thought I was done giving away. Only I can make you clean, she says in the night, and leads me beneath my skin to let the bitterness out. The stain hits the air and stretches long wiry ribbon-arms that dissolve into red wisps like smoke. I collect the smoke in Tupperware I do not label; it has too many names. She promises the smoke will leave me stainless, an irony I tuck into the gauze as I stitch myself together while she sleeps. I never know if she approves of this reparative practice. She does not participate.

Her touch on my hand makes me cold. She guides all my movements, I forget how to move without her choreography. I can’t stretch or clench a fist by myself.

When I finally succeed in separating she screams and hisses, wordless shrieks of rage. Or that might be me : need works in only one direction. The rest is nostalgia.

Leave me the way I was before
you're already in there
I'll be wearing your tattoo
I'm already in ...
circles and circles and circles again
it goes in circles and circles and circles again

I am ribbons, I am shreds of paper, I am the broken reflection in a puddle you tramp through in a hurry. I am the echo, I am the tiny voice whispering in the background. I am the leaf rustling into stone and fracturing, burned paper in the sunlight. I am her scar, her shadow, her forgotten possibility. I am the reflection in the shard of mirror that fell when she slammed the last door of the last continent, leaving. No one else has ever loved me like her, no one else will come that close. I am what she used to be, back in a time before the beginning : nothing.

It is a place to come back from.

(1984-2003)

I've been MEMED ...

... and as I have no energy for typing out original thought, I'll take advantage of the tag and respond. Thanks Zadok!

1. Total Number of Books I’ve Owned: I wouldn't know where to start counting. I have always been a bookish freak sort, and a collector to boot. I was a double major in English and French literature in college, and read about 50 books per ten-week quarter. I continued with French literary studies in graduate school and read about 50 books per fifteen-week semester. Then, in October of 1995, I discovered The Mystery Novel and a new passion for that genre of storytelling. When I moved back from France last August, I shipped 13 cartons of books via air freight, a whopping total of 180 kg (about 450 pounds) of reading material. Earlier, when I cleaned out the storage unit a couple years ago, I threw or gave away easily 500 books. So I would put the total somewhere around 2000, and probably higher.

2. Last Book I Bought: A Monk in the World, by Wayne Teasdale. I've read about 30 pages, and so far I'm afraid to say I wouldn't recommend it. I am far from being hooked, whether by his writing or his theology, both of which seem more careless than spiritual. You can't win them all, alas.

3. Last Book I read: Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett. Very fun read. Pratchett is always a treat, even (especially?) when I have to give myself permission to read something frivolous. Because at the same time I was meant to be reading Projet pour une révolution à New York by Alain Robbe-Grillet, La Princesse de Clèves by Mme de Lafayette, a collection of stories by Maupassant, La migration des coeurs by Maryse Condé, L'immoraliste by André Gide, Middlemarch by George Eliot, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, and Image-Music-Text by Roland Barthes, NONE of which has instructive footnotes about the nicknaming habits of modern-day vampire youth as Pratchett's does. Actually the Barthes was just for fun, and not nearly as fun as it should have been. (A fact for which I'm going to blame Barthes.)

4. 5 Books That Mean A lot to Me:

1. Duncton Wood by William Horwood. Horwood's The Stonor Eagles, which features human characters as well as allegorical animal ones, is much better literature, but I've had a special connection to Duncton Wood since a friend loaned her please-take-care-of-this-book special copy to me during a really rough patch my senior year of college. I own about 25 copies of the novel, which has been out of print since 1977 or so in its original bright-pink-paperback-cover edition. Every time I see one I buy it. Sometimes (not often, I admit, ok, once) I give them away.

2. A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr. I give this book as a gift when I can find it. The pace of the storytelling, the preference for things left lucidly unsaid because it is unnecessary to say them, the attention to detail ... and of course the whole luxurious idea of escaping to a tiny village in the north of England to restore art in a church. This novel made me want to change my career trajectory and turn to restoring medieval paintings.

3. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. Also The Book of Hours. Also Stories of God. Also The Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. Also The Book of Images. In fact, if I could find a bilingual Complete Works of Rainer Maria Rilke - including the poems he wrote in French, his correspondence and the prose Carnets de Malte Laurids Brigge - that would clearly be a better choice for my list here, as I already have 5 books just in the Rilke section. Rilke is the most important poet in my own history, the one I keep coming back to, as if his words were water. I always need to drink them in, and sometimes forget how grand and important a thing they represent.

4. The Holy Bible. If I were going to be stranded on a desert island I would want this with me, preferably a Latin-French or Latin-English version. I like to think that on a desert island, I would finally read all the books of the Old Testament instead of skipping around based on daily Mass readings as provided by l'Evangile au Quotidien.

5. Sainte Thérèse de l'Enfant Jésus, Histoire d'une âme. The first time I read it I admit I was mildly repulsed, more by the flowery style and simplicity than anything else. Then I found myself in a monastery for a week, and the nuns just happened to have a copy in English on the communal bookshelf in the guest house, in among the hard-backed Bibliothèque Verte and Bibliothèque Rose books for children. I did read a couple tales by the Comtesse de Ségur from the Bibliothèque Rose that week as well, mind you, and also a Romantic story of childhood vagabondage, conversion and tragedy set in Spain and involving an adventurous boy named José who falls in love with the beautiful bourgeoise girl and takes his first Communion right before he is run over by a stray horse-and-cart in Sevilla (Bibliothèque Verte. The content was too mature for the Bibliothèque Rose), but the Sainte Thérèse book grabbed and kept my attention. As I read through the flowery sentences and exclamation marks, I realized the simplicity had depth beyond anything mere literary style could offer. I found myself humbled by the "Little Flower" and the reading experience became a watershed one on my own path towards a better Christian life in the world. I haven't reread the Story of a Soul since then. I revisit certain phrases and precepts daily : it's a way of opening a window into the monastery in my heart, stepping in and kneeling in the dim and lucid stillness, and turning all my senses inward to my soul and then upwards to God. If I were going to a desert island I would take this book, not to read it daily, but to return to it a piece at a time and remember the little things that make small lives sacred.

5. What are you currently reading? Do you have any idea what you're asking with that question? OY. I am currently reading, in no particular order, Victor Hugo by Graham Robb; Les Chouans by Honoré de Balzac; Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Novel by Susanna Clarke; Kiffe-Kiffe demain by Faïza Guène; Les foules de Lourdes by J-K Huysmans; the Fioretti by Saint Anthony; and Rimbaud in Abyssinia by Alain Borer. I also try to read at least the Gospel du jour every day, if not the entire Mass proper. Some days are easier than others.

Ok, I'm going to share the meme-wealth and tag Different River because if ever there has been a book collector it is this son of Stephen, who even emailed me last August to recommend the best ways to shelve 180 kilos of books upon my arrival in the USA, and I'd like to see what he reads besides online news journals; Twyla because I know she can talk about books (!); Patricia whose Wish List puts mine to shame; k murphy j because I'd like to know what she reads; and my mother because she, after all, taught me to read in the first place and because so much of her teaching is about literacy and the ways books can open the entire galaxy up for a child. Have fun all!

Present imperfect.

Mercredi, 2004.
She walks in, smiles hesitantly and removes her scarf the way someone in a black-and-white film would unwind the curtain sash that later becomes a murder weapon - around and around one hand, slowly, her gestures deliberate, silent. She carries a leather briefcase battered into beloved condition and slides it carefully behind the door. She has the face of someone who has been chubby all her life but recently recovered from an illness that has drained the weight from beneath her skin. She carries herself the same way, a mixture of youthful confidence and weary intimidation. She sits down in the student chair and looks at me like a bird in the cold.

Bonjour, I say.

Um, bonjour, she says.

I bite back a smile and do not tell her that in French, "um" égale "euh." Instead I ask what I can do for her.

J'ai peur de mon prof, she says.

My mind goes through the acrobatics of what I will need to write down and what I will have to keep confidential and which useful campus numbers can help me deal with her situation. It amazes me how quickly my brain shifts into this gear. Then it dawns on me that "fear" does not mean the same thing for everyone.

Peur comment? I ask her. What do you mean? I keep my voice intentionally neutral. I lean slightly back in my teacher chair and smile at her as I reach for my pen.

He ... looks at me, she says. And I can't speak in class. She laughs, embarrassed, flustered, her round child's face going red around the edges of the bones. It's stupid. He doesn't do anything, or say anything. He just looks, and I lose my voice.

I have been imagining horrible scenarios. This is worse than all of them.

*

Septembre 1995.
Let's call him François. He sits in the corner, in a chair removed from the careful half-circle I orchestrate every morning at 10:02. He is socially immature as a sophomore, and the other students avoid or poke fun at him ; when he raises his hand in the middle of my explanations they roll their eyes. They know he will interrupt my explanation of the imparfait to ask how you say "harmonica" or why "plateau" isn't spelled with an "ô." His book is checked out from the reserve section of the library ; he can have it for exactly 90 minutes per day. He doesn't buy the textbook, which lasts the entire year but costs a whopping 95 $. He never goes to the language lab because he can't afford the workbook either, but he is too embarrassed to tell me this. By the end of the third week of class he has learned to associate the subject "je" with verb conjugations in the first-person singular, and this constitutes a hair-pulling step forward. At the end of our 53-minute hour every day for 4 months I watch him hunch thin shoulders back into the tattered straps of his backpack, pick up the laminate cardboard of his borrowed textbook, and head loping through the lecture-hall doorway and onto the pathway that leads to the library, to turn in the book he can't afford to buy and won't ask me to photocopy for him.

*

Mardi, 1999.
I face the group and explain the way the course will work. Each lesson consists mostly of grammar rules with specifically designed exercises, to help them learn how to read French in one semester. The students are mostly in graduate school and need this course to pass or get out of a language requirement for their programs. A quartet of them has come in together from the Divinity School, cross-registered because their theological studies have a distinct French or Francophone component. Todd, Trudy, Janet and Albert. Another group comes from the doctoral program in East Asian Studies ; they explain grammar rules to each other in Japanese. Tiffany, Matthew, and the Korean guy whose name I mispronounce as "Go" for the first two months of class because I heard him wrong at registration and he is too discreet to correct me. Then there is one undergraduate, whom nobody likes. He is blond and a bit stout and hides his studious loneliness behind a know-it-all attitude that graduate students under the pressure of exams and coursework can't tolerate. He knows all the answers, always. He challenges me. I will learn over the course of the semester that a significant skill in teaching this class lies in convincing people to think before translating. "Un sac sur son bras," in a newspaper passage about a biochemist performing liquid chromatography, will most likely not mean "a sack full of bras." But this is a way of thinking that does not come naturally at first, to students learning to translate.

*

Mercredi, 2004.
J'ai une présentation à faire la semaine dernière, she tells me.

La semaine prochaine? I ask her.

Ah oui, prochaine. Quelle est la différence?

I explain, one hand flapping at the air in front of my face for "next week," flapping backward over my shoulder for "last week."

She flushes slightly, as always when she makes a mistake, and tells me she isn't happy about her presentation. I have to talk about Fox News, she says.

What's wrong with Fox News? I ask her. She blinks. She explains how headlines are bought and sold and stories manufactured and manipulated to support a particular bias. How reporters are fired for trying to represent the news in an unbiased fashion. She speaks for close to ten minutes ; she has done her research. She ends by saying that Rupert Murdoch (Rou-PAIR Mur-DUCK) is "dans la pantalon du président."

He's in the President's pants? I ask.

Poche! she exclaims. Dans la poche du président.

She lowers her eyes for a moment, as if counting the flecks in the nubbly carpeting on the floor between us. Then looks up at me and laughs out loud, and I realize this is the first time I have seen her truly smile, with no fear creasing her eyelids.

When she gets up to leave at the end of the hour she steps quickly forward and impulsively kisses both my cheeks.

Bonne continuation, I tell her, smiling. I'm suddenly nostalgic and full-hearted, thinking of the expression and Docteur Martin who always wished it to me, on the other side of a language, the other side of an ocean.

A la semaine prochaine, she says as she turns to leave. Her sleeve catches in the shoulder strap of her briefcase, and rolls halfway up her arm, and I know I am not meant to see the bruises there because she turns her head toward me then away too fast and jerks the fabric down over the skin.

I have exactly one moment to decide if I can or should get involved, and how involved to get. The window will last one more second, the time it takes her to cover a blue-yellow spot on her arm. Once the sleeve is down the chance is gone. The bruise will take its veil after that, and disappear from the sight of the world, behind the cloister walls of clothing.

Oh là, I say, measuring my syllables. Ça a l'air douloureux. Tu n'as rien?

Je n'ai rien, she says, voice flat. Je suis tombée. Je n'ai rien du tout.

The sleeve is down. I inhale and hold her eyes, thinking of words. Before I can let my breath out she is gone.

*

Octobre 1995.
I have individual conferences with my students, who sign up for 30-minute slots using their Gallicized names : Julie, Michel, Lucie, Timothée, Eric, Sarah, all à la française with the accent on the last syllable, Tee-moh-TAY, Sa-RAH, the vowels opening to infinite sound. I have two Chrises and we call them, based on their respective heights, Christophe-trois-mètres (Very Tall Chris) and Christophe-taille-normale (Normal-Sized Chris). I ask them if they know any other languages, how long they have studied, if they have ever visited France. I ask what their interests are. They have just enough vocabulary by the end of the first month of class to tell me : j'ai étudié l'espagnol au lycée and j'aime la musique, or la photo, or le rugby. I tell them to pay attention to the U versus OU sounds, like in tu and vous. I use the example of "thank you." Merci, beau cul! has a vastly different meaning, I tell them, than merci beaucoup. The quicker ones get it and laugh in my office, pursing their lips to form and practice the "ou" sound under their breath. The rest nod nervously and I see them making a mental note to ask their roommates for a translation.

He shows up twenty minutes late for his half hour and can't seem to sit still once he arrives. He fidgets, his feet shuffle nervously back and forth on the water-stained beige carpeting of the fifth floor office, his fingers tap out the rhythm to a song only he knows against the edge of my desk. I ask him my series of questions and he shifts his head oddly as he answers, eyes darting from one corner of the ceiling to another. He tells me he grew up on an Indian reservation in Arizona. He tells me he took four years of Spanish but never really liked it. He tells me he dreams of going to Paris. That he wants to be a musician. He wants to play jazz violin in smoky clubs that smell of dry sugar at the bottom of an unwashed whiskey glass. I ask him the musical instrument question : Vous jouez du violon? He stares at me blankly and says : Non.

I nod slowly and realize I am chewing my pen cap. Je ne vous comprends pas, I tell him bluntly. I don't understand you.

Moi non plus, he says, and laughs. The sound is too loud, too harsh. He puts a pinky finger into one ear and digs for a couple seconds. I feel a sudden revulsion close to loathing. His truncated half hour comes mercifully to an end.

Bon, I tell him, standing up, a cue. À demain alors. And don't forget to study your conjugations.

Je ne oubliez pas, he says.

I am anxious for him to leave. I do not take the time to correct him.

*

Mardi, 1999.
I ask them each to bring in a passage from a previous reading exam from their respective departments. Janet brings a paragraph about Sainte Thérèse de l'Enfant-Jésus. Matthew chooses part of an article about the French presence in Indo-China. Todd has chosen a few paragraphs about the Gospel of Saint Luke. Go brings a couple pages he has photocopied from a novel : I'm in Comp Lit, he explains, slightly abashed, as if the fact of being Korean means he should be in East Asian Studies. We begin with Saint Luke.

Luc nous peint un Christ autant humain que divin, I read aloud. Avec sa brosse, il nous fait le portrait du Sauveur ancré dans son monde actuel, dans ses joies et ses turbulences ... Let's start with that.

Luke we comb ... that's not it, Matthew mumbles.

'Comb' is peigner, I tell him. 'Peint' is from which verb? Go?

'Paint,' Go says, flipping lithely through a Korean-English-French dictionary, and whispers something else I can't quite hear.

Luke we paint? Janet says. Why would we paint Luke? Like an icon? I don't get it.

Todd is frowning at his paper, which has been folded and unfolded several times and now has the appearance of a piece of shirt you might have slept in for a whole weekend.

We have recently done one lesson on object pronouns and their place in French syntax. Je vous dis bonjour, I remind them.

Luke paints us? Trudy offers. I nod. But ... how does he paint us? We aren't even there yet.

Luke paints us a Christ as human as he is divine, the unpopular undergraduate says, sounding bored. 'Nous' is indirect, not direct.

Tiffany says something in Japanese.

Todd finally speaks. Saint Luke ... was NOT a painter, he says, alarmed and definite.

*

Mercredi, 2004.
Her appointment is for 11h30. She doesn't come.

*

Septembre 1995.
His hand shoots up in the air just as I say "Ok, if there aren't any other questions ..." and I tune out the groans from his classmates.

How do you say 'Belgian Congo'? he asks.

On fait de la géographie aujourd'hui? I ask him, trying to keep my voice light and un-annoyed. I tell him to look it up and tell me tomorrow. Then I distribute the quizzes. His hand shoots up again. Oui? I stare him down.

J'aime vos bottes, he says. The other students giggle.

You like my boots. Thank you.

Et vos jambes, he adds, and I go red as the room goes silent.

Ça ne va pas, la tête? I shut him down sharply. His ears turn pink and he stares at his desktop.

When I collect the quizzes, at the end of the hour, every line of his paper is blank. In my grade-book, this makes the seventh quiz he has failed. Twenty percent of his grade is a zero.

*

April, 2000.
I have one photograph of her, sitting in a metal folding chair in the center of campus, in the shadows of t-shirts that swing and furl gently in a late-spring wind. Each shirt bears a message, like a scar in indelible ink : the clothesline with its cotton testimonials will hang between two sturdy trees for the next four days, as part of Take Back The Night week. Her hair is tied off in two perfectly symmetrical braids. I am taking a photography course and something in her pose arrests me, something about the way her shoulders bend in toward the center, as she sits there dwarfed by the ways the sun passes through other people's messages of pain. I stand far enough away that she won't hear the click of the shutter. She wets a fingertip and leans forward to anchor the book in her lap so she can turn the page. She tilts her head back for a moment as the sun comes out from behind its cover of typical spring-grey clouds. Tournesol, I find myself thinking as she angles her neck to get as much light as possible on her face. Then she straightens up and stretches her spine, leaning to the right and to the left, and the moment has passed like a shadow. I put my camera away and walk up to her.

Ah! Bonjour! she says, a bright smile breaking underneath eyes circled with fatigue.

Coucou, I say, and gesture at the two uneven parallel lines of twine stretching between the trees. C'est bien, ce que tu fais ici.

C'est très important, she agrees.

I recognize the book in her lap : Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, assigned for the survey course I am assistant-teaching this semester. In our discussion next week, we will talk about the place of visuality in Duras's novel, about how the characters look at each other and cannot see what they see, about how they are blinded by the expectations of subjectivity and desire - their gazes overlap but do not communicate.

Ça va? I ask her, slightly distracted ; I have just remembered I left some papers in my locker upstairs and will need to climb the four flights of stairs again before going home. Tu restes ici toute la semaine?

Oui, tous les jours, she answers, her eyes faraway. She will be here all week, in the gentle violet shadow of these shirts.

Courageuse, I tell her.

She looks at, beyond, through me, does a little motion that could be a shrug or a yawn or a shudder, and rises from her chair, unfolding dancer's legs and flexing her ankles as she moves.

This one's mine, she says suddenly, in English, and pulls me by the hand to look at a t-shirt. The thin, pale cotton is covered with traced black handprints, filled in messily, like a smudged charcoal sketch of hands, and a single word : Again.

*

Décembre 1995.
We have a little class party before the holidays and I ask them each about their plans. I have brought cookies and music, a French compilation mix - Tous les Tubes Quatre-Vingt-Quinze ! - and one by one they examine the titles and try to understand the choruses of popular songs on the other side of the ocean. We listen to Pow Wow and François Feldman and Céline Dion's French hit from the previous summer, "Pour que tu m'aimes encore." I explain that MC Solaar is a rappeur ; they get a kick out of that. I have them stand together on one side of the classroom and take a group photo. Michel and Eric are bookends, standing tall and smirking on either side of the group, Christophe-trois-mètres sits at a desk in the center, Julie, Sarah, Timothée, Lucie, Heidi, Christophe-taille-normale and Dinh the Vietnamese biophysicist with no equivalent French name range themselves around the desk. François stands in the very back and gazes off to the left. I try more than once to get him to face forward (OK, on en fait une de sérieuse ! OK, venez, tout le monde vers moi !) but he insists his way is better. Finally I give up and snap the picture. In January, when I have calculated their grades after the final, I make each of them a card. Cher ____, I write, Merci pour un bon semestre de cours français. Continuez bien ! I glue copies of the group photo onto each card.

Before the break I throw a party at my apartment. Some teaching colleagues and fellow graduate students come, and a few students, including François. We listen to jazz and play Trivial Poursuite and chat for a couple hours, and then I drive them all home through the dark Cambridge streets with their twinkling blue and white lights. François hops out of my Jeep on the corner of Mass Ave and Dunster Street, even though he lives down by the river. Feliz Navidad ! he shouts as he stomps off through the snow.

*

Samedi, juin, 2000.
I throw a goodbye-to-me party before moving to France. My brother-in-law comes with his new girlfriend. My Italian teacher Serena comes in a special dress. Kids from the literature survey class come, Todd comes with a friend from the Div School, Janet comes because I made her promise she would help me glitter. A couple teaching colleagues show up with bottles of wine and a cake. Chris and I take turns going into the kitchen to mix margaritas. During the evening we make a game out of Romy's possessions she can't fit in the suitcases - who wants an old jacket? red platform shoes? the multicolored hat with synthetic dredlocks sewn to the underside of its rim? On second thought I can't part with the hat, and it passes from person to person as the party turns into a tipsy poetry reading. People filter out gradually ; the screen door squeaks and clicks over and over. Before leaving, Todd comes to press my hand and whisper "merci" - he has received a "High Pass" on his departmental reading exam, which let him finish his Master's degree in theological studies, and now he is headed to a doctoral program in California. After the translation class ended, he asked me to tutor him privately in reading French, and we have been working together since February.

"I wish you great things," I tell him as he leaves.

"Life is great things," he responds, "and great people." He leans down and kisses my cheeks, wishes me luck in Lyon, and is gone.

*

Janvier 1996.
François makes a special appointment to meet with me. After all the grades are in, and the numbers added up, he has an F. He wants to talk about it. Suddenly I am besieged with phone calls - from the director of language programs, the woman in charge of French classes in my department, his Resident Advisor. His RA says, "You should have contacted me. How did you not notice he didn't have a textbook? He is from an indigent family. There are funds for this kind of situation. You should have called me. You should have sent me an email."

"Every day he showed up with a book," I tell her. "And how do you suggest I should have brought up the subject of his family's finances? 'Gee, François, your French sucks - are your parents poor'?"

"You should have contacted me," she insists.

"On the contrary," I tell her, angrier than I've been in a long while, "you are his RA ; you live in the same building with him. I see him for fifty-three minutes four times a week. If you knew he was having problems, you should have contacted me."

My department upholds my grade, in the end, and François is asked to leave the university on academic probation. Before he goes home to Arizona, he sits in the student chair in the office I share with 5 other French teachers, hunched into his everpresent khaki-colored parka, looking vaguely miserable, and cold. I watch him and wait. Suddenly he sits up straight and looks at me directly.

"Thank you," he says. "I think you're doing the right thing, failing me. I can't do languages, obviously. And all my other grades are bad too." I stutter as I try to find words to respond to this bizarre bit of self-scrutiny, the most coherent sentence he has yet uttered in my presence.

Finally I raise one shoulder. "I don't know what to say," I tell him simply. "I scheduled conferences for you and you didn't come. I gave you extra time to do the big essays and you never turned them in. I wish you'd made more of an effort when you realized you were having trouble." He nods.

"Moi aussi," he says, in the god-awful accent that has been the bane of an entire class for 16 weeks, "but I was afraid of you."

"Of me?!" He gives a forlorn little half-smile. I want to comfort him, give him a hug, but cross my arms over my chest instead. For months afterward he sends me emails whose tone alternates between angry, plaintive, and grateful. I do not reply. It is my first semester teaching, and my first F, and I feel I am the one who has failed.

*

Jeudi, 2005.
She walks in and sits down. Her V-neck is unbuttoned down to a place where you can see the first dip of the hollow of her cleavage. Her three-quarter-length sleeves are pushed up, cuffs folded back over her elbows. I keep looking at her neck by accident, wondering if I'm really seeing that much of her skin.

Je suis désolée, she says immediately. For that time I didn't come. I should have called to cancel.

Il n'y a pas de quoi.

I didn't mean to waste your time.

Her skin has a radiance I haven't noticed the previous times I've worked with her.

It's really all right, I tell her. Now. Comment ça va avec ton prof?

Mon prof? Oh oui, oui. En fait, she repeats, then stops. She stands and looks around the room, making sure we're alone, I realize, before she switches briefly into English.

"I don't think my prof was the problem," she says.

"Ah."

"I broke up with my boyfriend," she says.

"I'm sorry. That's hard."

"No, no, don't be sorry! He ... well, we kept fighting. Anyway, it's going to be so much better now."

I hope it will be, I tell her.

And she asks me questions about the uses of the past tense, and I answer every single one.

Take it.

M sees me in the room where our department party is being held. I am chatting with the cute French guy who I am sure is gay, balancing a plastic plate with some rice and vaguely Mexican food on it, or what would be Mexican food if I had arrived 10 minutes earlier before the Spanish girls descended on the platters and left only sauce. In one hand I hold my plate, thick lavender napkin folded underneath it, and a knife ; in the other, my bookbag, my purse, my jacket, my mobile phone, and the handle of a plastic fork. A plastic tumbler of hot wine (alcohol content 14%) is cradled precariously between the lip of the plate and the hollow just below my cleavage. M lifts her plastic glass of margarita in a mock-toast and yells, across the crowded, shadowy room, "Hey Piggy, put down your stuff before you stuff your face!" I stare at her for a second before I turn away, pretending to laugh. "Mais qu'est-ce qu'elle a, celle-là?" the cute French guy asks. What's her problem? "Elle a raison," I tell him. She's right. I should put my things down. I excuse myself and walk, face flaming now my back is turned, to a corner that looks remote enough to hide my purse, bookbag, jacket and dignity.

*

When I was nine-going-on-ten I had a best friend, named Ann, who lived down the street. Ann was the kind of girl you could hang out with, as a sometimes-frilly sometimes-tomboy nine-year-old girl, because she lived the same dichotomy. She was the kind of girl I - already geeky and studious, and very hard on myself for not being enough so - kind of wanted to be. She had long legs with muscled calves that went brown in the southern California summer sun. She had blonde hair. She played softball and volleyball and her mom had a "plAYSOccer" sticker on the bumper of her dark-gold Mustang. She didn't think about her biweekly piano lesson beyond the half-hour it lasted and the five or ten minutes she was required to practice every other day. "I don't give a care about piano," she would say, tossing her hair over one shoulder. (What's it like not to care about piano? I frequently wondered. And : How big is a care you don't give? How do you keep it for yourself?) On Saturdays we rode our bikes up to the Taco Bell at the Rossmoor shopping center, specifically prepared with one dollar and twenty-nine cents, precise to the penny, which bought us a bean burrito and small Mountain Dew each. That was our Saturday lunch and Saturday ritual. Other days, or Saturdays when we couldn't go, Ann rode her ten-speed up and down our shady street ; you could hear the gears click as she shifted through them, learning to go faster and faster. When we played Dukes of Hazzard on our bikes, Ann was always the General Lee. I chased her fruitlessly, frustrated, down the street, pedalling as hard as I could on my blue one-speed kick-back-to-brake banana-seat bike ... playing a chunky Roscoe P. Coltrane to her faster, sleeker Beau and Luke.

In the bewildering ecosystem of children, everybody is mean to someone. Children are mean to the people they can be mean to, people they aren't afraid of. Ann was mean to me. Her older sister (Lisa, 16) was mean to Ann, probably much in the way I was mean to my younger sister (yeah, the hot one with the radio show and freakishly high-arched feet). Somebody was mean to Lisa, and someone else was mean to that somebody. My sister was mean to someone else. At nine, though, I didn't understand this feeding order. I thought Ann was mean because of something wrong with me. She always said it that way : her meanness, my fault.

"I'm not playing anymore. You smell."

or

"Give me the prettiest Barbie or I'll tell everyone you still wet the bed.
-But I don't still wet the bed.
-Who are they gonna believe?"

or

"My mom doesn't want me to go to your house. She says I can't play with people whose parents don't go to church because you're all going to be damned."

The last word would bounce around the bottom of my consciousness, echoing dully (damned - damned - damned) as I stood alone on the street corner, staring at the sidewalk or kicking my bike tire, fighting the temptation to suck my thumb.

Ann learned something early on, a trick I never did master in years of school or gym class or Campfire Girls : the way to find a person's weak spot and press it, repeatedly, needle into it with her words the way you do with a bruise when you're not sure if it still carries pain behind the blue. She knew I was shy. I got tongue-tied in the transition from elementary to middle school, and it took me a while to volunteer to answer questions. Ann and I had our Core class together, and the first day I raised my hand during Reading comprehension, Ann leaned over and hissed, "Put your hand down. You have underarm hair and body odor." Which effectively meant I didn't answer anything until about May of my sixth-grade year (actually, until about 1998, but I can't claim that's entirely Ann's fault).

I have a picture of Ann and me, standing in my family's 1979 kitchen, ready to go to our first school dance. She is wearing dark red Chemin-de-Fer pants and a stripey top. I'm wearing rust bellbottoms and a silvery-rust velour shirt my grandmother made. I loved that shirt, loved the way it felt next to my skin, the way it caught the light and changed its color. Ann and I raise half-joking hands up to our lips, in an inexplicably universal gesture of nervousness, pretending to bite our nails. Or pretending to pretend. I am looking up sideways at Ann, my eyebrows slanted upwards to the center ; she is looking straight into the camera. This is a pose I will replay in various photos throughout my life - wanting that final second's-glance of approval before the shutter clicks.

I don't remember any details of that dance. I don't remember if anyone danced with anyone, or if it was a typical sixth-grade deal, girls on one side, boys on the other, each side rowdy in isolation but suddenly shy if an emissary from the other side appeared. The only thing I do remember was that, once we were out of the hearing of any parents, Ann told me the bellbottoms made my legs look short, and the beloved shirt made me look fat, and I'm pretty sure that's the last time I wore those clothes.

*

One Friday I went home after sixth period with Ann, trailing her on my bike, and we played dollhouse in her bedroom and then started coloring pictures, leaning our elbows into the nubbly beige carpeting of her floor, and Ann took away the yellow pen. Why? Because I was using up all the ink, or holding it so the tip got smashed, or something. She yanked it from my hand and the felt tip left a long yellow line like a tobacco scar up my palm and the side of one index finger. I stood up. I felt a rush go through me as I said, "Keep your dumb pen, I'm going home." It was the most daring statement I had ever made. Ann panicked and said I couldn't go home, and then she started to cry, and I felt confused by her reaction but smug and liberated at the same time, and I said I was leaving anyway. I'd never felt so strong. She could see how she liked being left behind, being made to feel stupid and lonely and mysteriously at fault. She gave my arm an Indian burn, holding onto me, but I was determined and withdrew fiercely. She stood and tried to block the door to her bedroom but I ducked under her arm, and then she ran to block the front door to her house, so I spun around and ran to the sliding glass door to the patio and the backyard with its rarely-used gate to the street. I was free! I marched down the street, laughing deliciously, feeling righteous and redeemed.

My dad greeted me at our own back gate, and took me into the back yard, and we played set after set of ping-pong. He asked why I hadn't wanted to stay at Ann's, and the story spilled from my lips. I watched his hands line up a perfect serve that made the little ball spin through the air between us and just nick the edge of the table on my side : Ace. I fumbled with my paddle as I showed him the line of yellow pen. A litany of insults came to the forefront of my mind : the time Ann had called me smelly, in front of the mean boy down the street who then adopted that as my nickname. The time she broke a dollhouse doll and told her mother I'd done it. The time she and another girl from our class ditched me during lunch. The tone of her voice as she asked why I'd written my book report in pen and talked about a sequel. The way she laughed at me in Bible study class when I couldn't recite all the books of the Old Testament in order. The times she said my piano teacher was stupid, or that I was lame for worrying about making so many mistakes. The way she made fun of my bike, my clothes, my mannerisms. I felt a sob well up in my throat as I told my dad these things, a sob of pride. Small, late, hard-won pride at having, finally, stood up for myself.

My dad nodded quietly and tossed me the ping-pong ball. "Your serve," he said. I eyed the table and its little net, the white-taped lines and green chalky wooden rectangles and planned how I would send the ball into dad's farthest left-hand corner, and raised my paddle for my own ace, and then Dad said, "The thing is, sweetheart, I think you hurt her feelings. Ann's mom called."

"I'm NOT apologizing," I said right away, but suddenly the blood squeezed coldly through my heart. Sound slowed down.

"Well, you think about it," he said, distractedly looking into our house through one of the windows. "Sounds like you got pretty mad. You always have to remember to control your temper."

*

And my priest says
'You ain't saving no souls'
My father says
'You ain't makin' any money'
My doctor says
'You just took it to the limit'
And here I stand with this sword in my hand

*

My dad scoops up the ping-pong ball and says, "Well, we can talk about this all later. Let's go see what your mom has made for dinner," and I can't talk around the lump in my throat, just nod and put my paddle in the paddle-rack my father made last summer and follow him inside through the living-room door, and as we step inside a weird cheer goes up, too many voices, and my mother's behind them. I step into the dining room and see friends from school and realize they are shouting "Surprise!" because it was my birthday a few days ago and my parents have been planning this for weeks. There are Emily and Allison and the other Alison with 1 "L", the one who likes horses and is adopted and whose aunt is my mother's best teacher-friend. There are Catherine, and Anna Chen and Anne Caraisco, and Lisa from Campfire Girls, and Joelle from math class, and Ann from down the street. It's a surprise party. I have never had one of those. I want to cry and hug my parents and also, kind of, go to bed and wake up yesterday and do all of this over again without the fight with Ann. Ann hangs back, hardly speaking, and her eyes are red. When they sing "Happy Birthday" she barely moves her lips. After dinner and cake we move into the family room and there are games and presents and rough-housing, cartwheels and piano-playing and we dress the cat in long white doll dresses and a bonnet and push him in the doll's baby-buggy, and Ann forgets she's mad at me, or sad or whatever she is, and my dad takes pictures, and then the girls unroll their sleeping bags and we giggle until the house is quiet and one by one we fall asleep. In the morning there are pancakes and cars with bright-eyed parents who take their grumpy sugar-tantrum daughters home, some of them all the way to Seal Beach. Ann gets on her ten-speed and pedals down the street. She doesn't want to stay and play. I am officially ten years old : the date has been consecrated by crisis and catharsis and a spanking machine that stings for twenty minutes afterward.

Ann and I remained best friends until eighth grade, when I joined the bookish geeks of our school and she started riding bikes with Misty instead. We had French classes together all through high school. I saw her in AP US History and gym, at dances, in a poetry-writing class our junior year. The day before graduation she offered to drive me home. We stopped at Taco Bell and each got a bean burrito and a small Mountain Dew, our favorite menu from years before. She told me about her sister's high-school drug habit. "It made everything a nightmare," she said, voice flat but weirdly compassionate. "She got pregnant. My mother drove her to Planned Parenthood in Anaheim for the abortion. Then she moved away."

"How is she now?" I asked, feeling humbled.

Ann shrugged. "We don't talk much."

*

I chat with the cute French guy for a while, then exchange dissertation horror stories with my landlady and another French grad student, then move on to the funky Brazilian professor and a small group of people dancing vaguely as they lean on the chairs of their table. The work-study students bring out dessert and coffee and people move toward the food tables again. I take a piece of ice-cream cake and a new fork, the previous one having disappeared in the odd way forks have when you're at a department function, and look up to see M walking toward me with a deliberate grin on her face, holding a beer bottle by its long glass neck. Stop eating! she says. Your legs will double by tomorrow. I'm surprised they haven't doubled already. I look at her coolly as she tips the bottle up and drinks. Her eyes laugh : it is like a burn I have to swallow, and I feel it all the way down. A grad student walks up and drapes an arm over my shoulder, dislodging the already tenuous hold of a bra-strap, and we all laugh at my rebellious undergarments. There is no way I can finish my cake on the heels of her remark and so I put the whole plate down, feigning absent-mindedness and animation as I start telling some story about France and the time another rebellious bra-strap made its appearance during a lunch with my priests. That one was yellow, I finish, and I didn't notice it until it was dangling next to my elbow. The grad student laughs in a wheezing uproar for which I am grateful for the very first time, and starts a line of questioning I would just as soon have avoided if not for the handy distraction it provides. Tu manges avec des prêtres? Pourquoi? What do priests eat, anyway? Aren't they kind of like the Griffin - extinct? Ha, ha, ha. I decide to leave before he continues inventing a whole mythical bestiary to describe French religious communities. I've had enough of this party anyway, I'm cold and fed up and exhausted, I want my hot water bottle and my cat. I don't need to prove I can laugh at myself. I give the grad student a kiss on each cheek before going to find my coat and bags, off in the corner behind the alcohol table. I leave the party hungry.

*

You can say that one more time
What you don't like
Let me hear it one more time ...

Three Days in Kentucky (Fifteen short stories, 5)

(The last day of these stories without words - today's are all from the conference I attended last month. I wanted to show you some things I've seen but that words can't touch : things I pass every day that make me smile, or that I've passed once, things that have marked me. If you've kept count you'll have noticed there were more than fifteen of them. Eh. I never was good at math. Bon weekend.)

*

Lexington Bluegrass Airport.
(You can't see it in this shot, but the day I took this picture it was snowing.)

*

University of Kentucky, Lexington campus.

*

Historic Landmark.

*

She's Got the Whole Window In Her Hands.

*

Ecclesia Sancti Pauli Apostoli.

Chiamami.

Here I am on The Mirror Project.

Three Campus Details (Fifteen short stories, 4)

Just before I go in the door every morning ...

*

Please Use Center Steps (Widener Library, February 2005).

*

Gate with snow.

Sects & the City (Fifteen short stories, 3)

Appleton Chapel.
(Morning Prayers, 8:45 a.m., a Tuesday in Winter, 2005)

*

Chapel Ice.
(St Clement's Eucharistic Shrine, Boston, January 2005)

*

Evêque nommé de Pétrée.
(Vieux Lyon, Quai de Bondi, novembre 2004)

*

An unspeakably precious Easter present.
(March 2005.)

*

God is in the midst of the city.
(Winthrop Street, Cambridge MA, April 2005)

Three lessons in fetishism. (Fifteen Short Stories, 2)

The other shoe. (Cambridge Street, Allston, October 2004)

*

I Can't Believe They're Not Carrie Bradshaw's. (On rack at A.J. Wright, Brighton, March 2005)

*

Spring shoes.

Cartographone (Fifteen short stories, 1)

(I will probably be too busy this coming week, as I have been over the past week, to write anything worth anything. Instead, I want to give you a few stories of a different kind, the kind my telephone tells. This started as a much briefer series, just a single post, until I realized all my "stories" could be related in specific categories. Also, hey, theme week ! And you know I love me a theme week. So the title is no longer appropriate, but I've got so used to hearing it as "Fifteen" that nothing else sounds right.)

****************************************************************

O'Hare Airport - Walkway to Terminal B (April 2005).

*

SPQR. (April 2005)

*

Paris, Eglise St Germain l'Auxerrois + lune. (January 2005)

*

Frankfurt-am-Main airport tunnel. (November 2004)

*

Vieux Lyon, seen from the Presqu'île. (January 2005)

Epistolaria or, a few letters because I'm too busy to write a real post.

1. Dear Full Professor Paid More Per Month Than 10 Years of My Salaries Added Together,

You're overworked. I get that. I'm overworked. The pity party? Not working on me. And guess what. University education? Wouldn't exist without that oh-so-annoying population, THE STUDENTS. Please bloody be available for them every so often. You know, I think once a month would be a good start. Also? ANSWER YOUR DAMN EMAIL WHEN I SEND YOU A MESSAGE. Sending you messages is part of my job. Please don't make me think black hateful thoughts.

That said,

*

2. Dear Freshman Who Came To the Conference I Organized And Demanded To Speak To Me RIGHT THEN About Majoring in a Romance Language,

Use the Internets - I'm sure one of them will provide you with my office hours. Do not come up to me during the question-and-answer part of one of my students' presentations, interrupt me as I am about to ask her a question, then look at me blankly as though this behavior is normal and I should drop everything and say, "Wait. The world revolves around YOU? My bad." Not today, sweetheart. And furthermore, bite me.

*

3. Dear PEOPLE OF THE WORLD WHO USE PUBLIC TOILETS,

WHAT IS IT WITH YOU. FLUSH. F-L-U-S-H. EFF-ELL-YOU-ESS-AITCH. GOOD GOD, THE HUMANITY. I HAVE NEVER SEEN SO MUCH HUMANITY LEFT BEHIND IN PUBLIC TOILETS EVER IN MY LIFE, NOT EVEN IN GREECE WHERE THE RESTAURANTS HAVE SIGNS ASKING YOU TO AVOID FLUSHING IF YOUR ... CONTRIBUTION IS TOO LARGE. IT'S VERY SIMPLE. INVOLVES A LITTLE METAL HANDLE OFF TO THE LEFT ONCE YOU'VE STOOD UP. YOU CAN EVEN TRIGGER IT WITH YOUR FOOT, I DON'T CARE, JUST SEND THAT BIT OF YOUR OWN PERSONAL HUMANITY DOWN THE DRAIN.

*

4. Dear CAPS LOCK,

Thanks for being there right when I needed you.

*

5. Dear GOD,

45 degrees in May, with rain every other day and wet miserable winds? Is that your final answer? Call a friend. Call ME. I will totally be that friend who tells you the hard truth about the annoying shit you do that pisses people off, like February weather in MAY.

Deal?

*

6. Dear lovely French professor who invited me to the Brahms concert this evening,

Iou ahre zeuh besteuh.

(P.S. You totally don't sound like that.)

*

7. Dear conductor who forgot his little elastic wrist-band and sent his baton spinning into the audience during the Fourth movement, the really energetic one,

Thanks. I needed that.

*

8. Dear Amazon.com,

The whole Wish List thing? Most. Excellent. Good.

*

9. Dear students,

You rock.

(All except that annoying-ass interrupting freshman [AAIF]. Heh. You SOOOO have a new nickname, kid.)

*

10. Dear Google,

The irony hits me. 8 days of a post about the hospital, and my ads stayed on "Ricordi del Santo Padre" (including a small resin bust) and how to buy Popely souvenirs from ebay.it. Twelve hours of epistolarity, and now I have four banner ads on toilets. Glad you're so alert.

(On the other hand, thanks for the check.)

Cheers,
Romy

Bon weekend.