What I Whisper

2009-10-21T22:14:00.001-07:00

. And here is the rest of it.

BUST Music Review

2009-07-21T09:32:00.000-07:00

My review of BETTY's sixth album, Bright&Dark, will appear in the music review section of BUST's Oct/Nov 2009 issue.

BETTY

Bright & Dark

(BETTYRules Music)

Just try to listen to BETTY’s sixth album, Bright & Dark, without dancing. They’ve come a long way since their a cappella days in the eighties. Their songs are at once hard-hitting and melodic, fierce and heartfelt. Disco-inspired beats provide back up as they sing about a girl who belongs in a film noir or banging a Jesus look-alike. BETTY isn’t afraid to get in your face as you’re bopping around your apartment and realize you’re singing along to lyrics taunting the girlfriend of the man you just slept with. But these women aren’t all bawdy and brass knuckles. They raise millions with their performances and record sales for causes like women’s rights and finding a cure for breast cancer (check out Elizabeth standing proud in a bikini with only one boob on the cover). So turn this up and take a trip with BETTY over to the wild side. [Celeste Kaufman]

BUST book review

2009-07-18T22:11:00.000-07:00

My review of Loorie Moore's new novel, A Gate At The Stairs, will appear in BUST's Oct/Nov 2009 issue.

A GATE AT THE STAIRS
By Lorrie Moore
(Knopf)

A Gate at the Stairs starts out strong. Tassie is a college senior in the Midwest who, out of desperation, takes a job as a nanny for a couple who is adopting a biracial child. As Tassie accompanies the parents, Sarah and Edward, through the process of fabricating a family rather than creating one, we’re given shockingly honest insight to the intricacies of human relationships and the realities of the business of adoption. Her sharp observation and biting humor move the story along at a rapid clip. Surprisingly, Moore manages to accurately portray the voice of a college student, which is a rare feat for writers of any age. Her other characters, all quirky and charming, are wonderfully painted as well. But, about halfway though, Moore suffers from a flaw that clearly comes from a history of writing short stories: boredom. The story unravels and completely loses focus, falling into more of a series of pointless vignettes than a complete novel. And while her commentary about race, gender and politics was subtle and fascinating in the beginning, she starts to bombard the reader with it by the end. She succumbs to cheap twists and turns that fail to liven up a plot that had become dull chapters ago. Unfortunately, what started as a touching, fresh take on family, ultimately becomes a race to the finish line, praying that it’ll be over soon. [Celeste Kaufman]

BUST Test Kitchen

2009-07-18T22:04:00.000-07:00

One of the highlights of interning at BUST is everyone gets to write three beauty review blurbs for their Test Kitchen (and to have a picture of your floating head to go with it). Mine appeared in the Aug/Sept 2009 issue.

Kheils Mascara

Rather than turning my lashes into a stiff, clumpy mess, this mascara gave them more volume and length while still looking natural. The jojoba butter made me feel like I was conditioning my lashes, rather than destroying them.

Bromme’s Leave-in Conditioner

This leave-in conditioner made me smell like hippies, but other than that I didn’t see much of a difference from letting my hair dry without product. It might be more suited for different styles that don’t require as much upkeep as my mass of curls.

Cupcake floss

I’m not a fan of flossing (don’t tell my dentist!) or artificially sweetened things. So it was a surprise when I enjoyed using this odd little novelty item. Just make sure to cleanse your palette first, cupcake doesn’t go with everything…

BUST blog posts

2009-07-01T10:24:00.001-07:00

This summer, I interned at BUST Magazine, a bimonthly national feminist publication. One of my primary responsibilities was contributing to their blog, http://www.bust.com Below are links to my posts.

HBO Thinks Feminists are Sexy : HBO's new comedy about a middle-aged woman running a porn mag for ladies.

Feminism on So You Think You Can Dance? : Analyzing inherent sexism in dance and how one choreographer on the show is breaking those traditions.

Parental Notification Laws: What do they Mean For You? : Examining the parental notification laws for minors to obtain abortions

Iran Caving in to Public Pressure : Iran has released some detainees arrested during the election protests and has closed a notorious prison.

Your (Slightly Delayed) Morning Dose of Art Part Three : Oscar Diaz' ink calendar installation

And On the Sixth Day God Created the United States of America : How Texas' school system is trying to integrate God into their social studies curriculum

Kopali Organics : Mini profile and review

Save Coney Island! : What you can do to help save Coney Island

** He Is Neda, Too : The first response I got to the I Am Neda project, from a soldier stationed in Iraq. (For more on the I Am Neda project, go to I Am Neda )

Yoo Hoo! : About Gertrude Berg and the upcoming documentary about her life and career

** Destino is Destined for 2010 : About Dali's collaboration with Disney, Destino, and its possible release in 2010

Virtual Book Club : A review of the site, Book Glutton.

They Say It's Your Birthday : A guide to how to celebrate the 4th of July in NYC

Pride Comes to India : India overturns legislature that criminalizes homosexual sex

Sisters Are Doing it For Themselves : Women in Peacekeeping exhibit at the UN.

For Any Ladies Across the Pond : Banksy exhibit

** Run For Congo Women : A report on the war in the Congo, the effect it has on women and announcing the registration period to participate in the Run For Congo Women

** I Am Neda : A personal post about Neda's death and the Iranian protests

Ann Coulter Disrespects Tiller's Right to Life : A reaction to Coulter calling Tiller's murder a termination in the 203rd trimester on the Bill O'Reilly show

Va Va Vroom : A mini-profile on Danica Patrick

It's the New BFF : The Bicycle Film Festival

Japanese Company's Got You Covered : A company that lets you hire fake friends, family and colleagues for your wedding.

In Lighter News : A blog that reprints old clippings of vintage newspapers

**I Think I'm Done Reading the News For Awhile : A report on a man who arranged the rape of his wife via Craigslist, and a man who videotaped his rape of his girlfriend and posted it online.

I Tell You If There's Anything Worse Than a Staunch Woman...: The release of the Grey Gardens book.

Tim Burton at MoMa : Tim Burton's upcoming exhibit at MoMa

** Patil Keeps Her Word : A report on India's first female president and her actions to elevate women's status in her country, including her National Mission on Empowerment of Women.

Watch What You Eat : NYC's Food Film Festival

Obama Pours One Out For The Ladies : Obama's inclusion of women's rights as an issue of international concern in his speech in Cairo.

Helping Hands : A report on Afghan Hands, an organization where women gain economic independence through crafting.

When the Heat Rises, Get WET : A report on the INKubator Summer Series from WET, a company that produces theater created by women.

Make It Work, Marvel : A new comic book series, Models Inc. that stars Tim Gumm as a character.

Have You Heard? Girls Like Pink. : A trend report on creating girl-friendly, pink alternatives to popular board games.

The Heart of a Women : An exhibit of the history of Harlequin romance novel covers.

Connie DiForo

2009-07-01T08:04:00.000-07:00

This is a profile of a Boston fashion designer, Connie DiForo. She also has a makeup line, DiForo Cosmetics, that is inspired by the techniques used to create makeup in her native country of Botswana. Her story is an inspiration. Written October 2008.

Like many women, Connie DiForo learned to love fashion from watching her mother get ready in the morning. She was raised in Botswana by her single mother, who spent most of her days working in the city, leaving DiForo with her grandmother. "My mother dressed like she really loved her clothes,” DiForo tells me over coffee in the Prudential Center, readjusting the long linen shawl draped around her shoulders. “She did herself up every day; red lips, high heels. Especially when she was home for church,.” While she was away, DiForo helped her grandmother sew the clothes her mother wore that she loved so much, and began to learn how to operate the old manual machine.

When she moved to Boston to live with her cousin and attend college, her family wished her to not waste her time studying fashion and learn something practical. Yet while she worked her way up in the banking world, DiForo could not ignore her deeply ingrained love of fashion. She studied the clothes sold in the stores and what people wore on TV and in the streets. In her spare time she picked up sewing again and slowly began building it into a full-time career. Yet DiForo hesitates when addressed as a designer. "Am I a designer? I don't know, you tell me. I don't believe I'm a designer, I believe I am a business woman.”

Her head for business led her to her simultaneous endeavor of creating cosmetics. While attempting to establish herself in the United States, she quickly grew tired of the makeup available to her here. "As an African woman, I have very sensitive skin. The foundation would do terrible things to my face, but I just kept on using it,” she explains, smiling, “ we women will do anything to look good!" She found herself longing for how things were back in Botswana, where the old women in her village would break rocks in two and use one half to crush the other into powder of shades of red and cream. They blended it with goat oil to create a makeup for their face that actually improved the skin instead of distressing it. It was so light, women could sleep in it.

“That’s when I realized, this is what mineral makeup was, back at its roots!”DiForo wanted to expose women to this product in the States; to save their skin and prove that beauty doesn't always have to equal pain. However, due to import issues, she was unable to bring the original rock into the country. Instead she works with researchers in New York City to recreate the elements of the makeup of her country. She pulls a sample out of her large woven tote bag to demonstrate and indeed the resulting product line of DiForo Cosmetics is smooth, lightweight and gentle.
The back-and-forth between heading a fashion design company and a cosmetics company feels natural to DiForo. "It's about creating the image women strive for. They want to be feminine, respectable, admired.” They’re about growing up, and becoming the person each woman imagines when they first make a mess of her mother's lipstick or try on her shoes left in the hall after work.

DiForo, therefore, does not equate fashion design with costume design. Leave haute couture, neon fishnets and micro-minis to the rest of them, DiForo designs for the real woman; for the working mom, for the city girl who lives an ordinary life. These are the women who want professional yet feminine work-wear, who want eveningwear that's beautiful and classy and can be worn on many different occasions.
With only three pieces she demonstrates the versatility of her design. A fluttery, one-sleeved lavender chiffon dress invites itself out to lunch. A dramatic magenta silk evening dress with a rhinestone neckline threatens to take the attention away from the bride at a summer wedding. A chic black satin shift dress with a bow along the lace neckline just bought itself drinks on a night out on the town.

All of DiForo's pieces are custom-designed so these stunning dresses have the added allure of being one-of-a-kind. Right now she's relying on word-of-mouth to keep DiForo Designs afloat and it's proving to be a good tactic. She is slowly making a name for herself in the Boston fashion world, having shown at Boston Fashion Week, selling at house parties and having her cosmetics sold at Rebecca's Salon in Walden. But she's not stopping there. "I want to be big. I'm not Martin Luther King, but I have a dream!”

There are many things to admire DiForo for; her beautiful designs, her innovation, her warmth, her creativity, but what is truly impressive is her head for business. "Everything is always business, that's what it really comes down to," She says, tapping her notebook with a manicured finger, “you can be an incredible artist but if you can’t market yourself, you’re finished.” It's difficult to find someone who is able to tackle both the business and creative sides of the fashion industry, but DiForo is the complete package. She admits it's not easy, but that doesn't stop her. "Of course it's scary; you're shaking all the time. I hate cold-calling people and setting up appointments or pitching to them over the phone. It's terrifying.”

But DiForo is a firm believer in never giving up. She is strong and tenacious and she works hard to make her dreams come true. "Out of the lot of no's, I get a few yes's. Once you get past the first, the second, the third no, all of a sudden you get a yes. And then that's all you need, just one yes. That's when you know it's doable."

New Paltz, An Obituary

2009-04-29T23:20:00.000-07:00

I grew up in a town in New York called New Paltz. Anyone can tell you that growing up there is certainly a unique experience. Sadly, while there is still a lot of its charm left, the atmosphere of the town is slowly changing. While I had been dying to leave for the city for college, I have been nostalgic lately for the good old days of New Paltz. Written April 2009.

New Paltz, An Obituary

New Paltz is full of yellowing photos of my parents’ generation when they were in their twenties, with their long hair and ripped jeans and dusty floral dresses. When they grew up, they flocked to the town nestled in the Hudson Valley, halfway between New York City and Albany, because it had just the right amount of culture to avoid being a bumpkin village and just enough nature to not be Suburbia. Some of them cut off their hair and commuted to work and sat on boards, complaining about the system. Some of them kept it long and reek of patchouli and still get high in the sheds behind their houses. But they all raised kids who smiled at these photographs, who spent their childhood barefoot in the woods, their adolescence organizing middle school walk-outs to protest the Iraq War, and their teen years in a haze. It was an environment rich with nourishment, urging creativity and individuality.

Like many people looking back on their hometown as they knew it, I feel like the town I knew is a snapshot of a place that only once was, and never will be again. It was eighth grade when I first truly got to know it. It was an anticipated rite of passage when our parents let you wander downtown after middle school to hang out. After a year of only stopping briefly in town to get a snack before going to our friend’s house, we started to make Town the main event. We took our snacks to the wooden bench by the main downtown intersection and sat there for hours, chatting and watching the world go by.

From our post in the center of everything, we got to know the workings and main characters of New Paltz quite intimately. There was the eighty-year-old Beat poet, who we all knew as Diggit, who introduced us to the literary world of New Paltz. There was the artist and puppeteer, Carl, who had tusks pierced through his nose and would have been rather disarming if it weren’t for the constant presence of his baby strapped to his chest. There was the trashy fake blond who owned the barber shop, who had an attachment on her pink motorcycle for her Chihuahua to ride in.

That Spring, our days in town became more frequent. Spring was always the best time to be in town. People brought out their guitars and played on the streets. They started walking their dogs, boa constrictors and ferrets again. The ice cream places opened up and our feet finally got to be free from their shoes and feel the hot pavement. We could spend the whole day outside, ducking in and out of the little shops on Main Street, all with their traditional display of incense and glass pipes, no matter what they were selling.

After a few months of being one of these townies on an amateur level we wanted a change. We didn’t just want to observe New Paltz, we wanted to be a part of it. We had had our eye on a group of older kids who were constantly in town. They didn’t seem to live by any rules or have any parents, or any homes for that matter. They mostly only had one set of clothes and we started to identify them by their unique characteristics. Didgiridoo carried a homemade didgeridoo strapped to his back. Pants wore a hand-sewn pair of patchwork pants. Spoons was often found playing Spoons on The Stoop, and so on. Little by little we gathered courage, working our way up from saying “hi” as we passed them on the street to striking up conversation. Soon enough, we were part of Them.

Our parents like to blame our friendship with these kids for what happened next but, in their defense, it wasn’t them who introduced us to drugs. In a town like that, with parents’ histories like our’s, it was difficult to find someone who made it to their sixteenth birthday without having gotten high. I had casually made the decision to try it months earlier, age fourteen, in a friends’ basement on a winter night, and eventually everyone else followed suit. It was, simply, the thing to do.

Our bench became a mere meeting place before we left for the river to smoke or drink. We’d sit in circles, passing whatever was on hand around, sharing our new philosophies on life and laughing about what didn’t make sense and kissing each other. It didn’t feel wrong, or dangerous. It felt like the lives we imagined our parents living in the sixties. We had exchanged our T-shirts emblazoned with logos for secondhand full-length skirts, our exorbitant makeup and hair gel for chapped lips and halfhearted dreads. We wrote poetry together and made art. We wove needles dipped in ink in and out of our skin. (The moon-shaped scar on my foot still sometimes appears, in the right light.)

Our love of nature from our childhoods reawakened, and we lived to explore. One day we emerged from the woods behind our friend’s house that we thought we knew so well to discover a huge open field. On the opposite side was a line of trees through which we could see the river. “It looks like Africa,” one of us said, and thus it was named. It became a place where, as soon as we stepped into it, all normal rules and morals disappeared. We became bolder versions of ourselves. We went there to take too much. We’d collapse, the long blades of grass tickling our noses, and look up into the sky. On one particularly peaceful day, I looked around me and felt overwhelmed by everything Africa had come to symbolize, beauty and freedom and youth, and I stood up and I ran. And everyone wordlessly got up and followed after me, yelling for no reason, running until we reached the trees on the other side.

By the end of that summer, the whole town seemed to be in an upheaval. Our townies started slowly disappearing. Rumors abounded of arrests and organ failures; brains and livers finally snapping. New, suspicious figures came to take their place. They carried knives in their belt loops that they sometimes, “playfully,” held to our throats. They got people hooked on cocaine and heroin. Some of us started experimenting further, but many of us, like myself, stuck with what we knew. But, even when we would smoke through them, we had to pay for it – a concept that, in almost a year since we had started, had been unheard of. What used to be a communal gathering became all business, rushed and dark and dirty. While that didn’t stop me from returning to it, I tried to distance myself as much as I could from the Townie culture.

Instead I tried to spend my days in town the way I used to spend them back in middle school. I sat reading in Arielle’s, the independent bookstore, trying on clothes in Reanna’s Closet, the vintage shop, or picking out art supplies at Manny’s. I sat in the ratty armchairs of the organic coffee shop and listened to college students play the guitar. I would still walk the trail alongside the river and lie in Africa, but with a different purpose, just to relax and appreciate the beauty that New Paltz still had left. I only had two more years left in New Paltz, and this was exactly how I wanted to spend them.

It started with the wooden bench. We heard word it was being replaced with a stone bench in memoriam of the founder of Manny’s. On the day of demolition, we managed to get there just in time to salvage the plank we had scrawled our names on in Sharpie, claiming it as our own. The next day we sat on the new bench and it was hard and cold; it felt like we were sitting on a gravestone.

Then, it was Reanna’s. The owner had warned us it was closing by the end of the year because she was relocating to Florida. Despite our begging for her to reconsider, and our presentation of a handwritten contract drawn up at Jack’s that would sign the store over to a group of fifteen year-olds, Reanna’s windows were shuttered that Fall.

But what really broke New Paltz’s collective heart was when Arielle’s announced its closing. Half of the town’s population had grown up within those walls, moving from the picture book corner to the Young Adult shelves to the magazine racks and finally to the sprawling fiction section. It was a bold move to return from the malls of the neighboring city carrying a Barnes and Noble bag. But Arielle’s couldn’t fight the giants anymore and, after thirty years of business, it quietly disappeared.

During this time, New Paltz experienced a surge of immigration. New York City families that had just caught on to the Green Movement moved up in hoards, drawn to the charm that was slowly fading. They stopped us on the street and asked us where the mountains were and we’d jab our thumbs toward the lurking blue mounds of earth that were visible from virtually anywhere in the town. They’d squeal about how “cute” everything was and snap our pictures without asking. Huge Hummers and Range Rovers drove next to orange VW buses running on vegetable oil.

With them came the McMansions, which hungrily gobbled up the depleted farmlands and open fields. They shoved twenty of them at the top of my road, which used to house apple trees and rotating crops. Their construction made me actually miss the smell of rotting cabbage. It was when a developer started scoping out Africa that people started fighting back. The field belonged to a small organic farm and the threat caught the attention of the Nature Conservancy. Over the next few months we worked with them on fundraising and organizing a benefit concert where Pete Seger led us all in an emotional round of “This Land Is Your Land.” The effort ended up saving the open space but the farmer felt it was necessary to prove the land’s worth and actually started growing things again. When we went to celebrate the returning warm weather in Africa we discovered it was now a wheat field and our refuge was gone.

For the last two years we spent in New Paltz, our attitudes changed. We called it “growing up.” Our days spent in town were reduced to only going out to lunch or getting coffee. We went indoors. We stopped caring about much besides getting into college and getting out of New Paltz. It wasn’t a place we wanted to be anymore. It was different. It was boring.

When I find myself longing for my hometown, it’s the lure of driving up to those mountains and gazing down on the town below me. It’s really the only honest view of New Paltz anymore. I can still see some of its old ways peeking through, but mostly it is a series of rooftops and shrinking squares of farmland; a landscape that’ll no one will ever quite experience the same way as we did.

Welcome To Rosie's

2009-04-29T23:08:00.000-07:00

This semester, I had an internship with the arts program at Rosie's Place, a woman's shelter in Boston. Before I got to know the place and the people in it, I had a common perspective of the homeless, one of fear and ignorance. But Rosie's Place is a special, wonderful community, that completely broke down all barriers I had built up. The following is a feature article about why Rosie's Place is such an important part of our community. Written April 2009.

Welcome To Rosie's

Before I walked into Rosie’s Place, a woman’s shelter in Boston, I had an absolutely dreary idea of what homeless shelters are like. I imagined dank, grey cement halls, rows of cots, slop vaguely resembling food being doled out of vats onto the plates of a line of sad people. It didn’t matter that I came to Rosie’s Place to be a part of their arts program, which I knew gave daily workshops for every kind of craft you can imagine, I still didn’t envision any sort of life to be happening within their walls. I was nervous to come face-to-face with a population that, unfortunately, I had been raised to fear and ignore.

But as soon as I stepped through the door, my anxiety lifted. The lobby was bustling with women catching up with their friends and making appointments at the front desk for advocacy programs and field trips. The room was light and the walls were painted a cheery yellow, not an institutional white. I could see the expansive dining hall on the far side of the building, where the guests were served restaurant style at their tables. The smell of lunch cooking filled the building and it actually smelled – wouldn’t you know it? – appetizing.

Upstairs, a team of employees work one-on-one with Rosie’s Place guests to help find them housing, jobs, psychological services and an education. Two floors up is the small, but homey, residence, which provides temporary housing for sixteen women. But, I quickly realize, just because only sixteen people stay overnight here, most of these women consider Rosie’s Place their home. It’s not an institution, it’s a community, one that has been going strong now since 1974.

The founder of Rosie’s Place, Kip Tiernan, arrived in Boston in her early twenties, seeking independence from her grandmother who raised her after Tiernan lost both her parents at age eleven. She quickly became the center of the fight for economic and social justice, drawing on her roots in the Christian left movement. She lobbied and protested for affordable housing, health care, education and civil rights for all, rallying around the philosophy that the world can be changed if only everyone cared enough.

As she pursued a career in advertising, she continued to fight for the cause through advocacy and writing, publishing articles in the Globe, Phoenix and Boston After Dark. In 1967, she was asked to organize a press conference for the St.Philip’s House, and soon joined the team ministry. Her work required her to witness, first-hand, housing projects, mental institutions, jails and hospitals where she was deeply affected by the lack of government effort to address those in need. She was particularly struck by the amount of women who attempted to pass themselves off as men to get into men-only shelters, since at the time there wasn’t any place for homeless women. Feeling that the dependence on government aid and regulations was at the root of the problem, Tiernan organized a grassroots campaign to lend a helping hand to Boston’s homeless women.

On Easter Sunday 1974, Tiernan and four volunteers founded Rosie’s Place in the abandoned Rozen’s Supermarket on Columbus Avenue (which she leased for $1 a year) with a meager $250 donated from friends. She wanted to provide a warm and safe place for women to rest, drink some hot coffee and socialize. It was the first of its kind in the country. “Rosie’s Place” was thought to be a comforting name because it sounded like it could be a women’s coffee shop or a friend’s house. Volunteers distributed pink slips that read “if you need a meal, come here and we’ll help you” on the streets. Although there were more volunteers than guests present on opening day, word of mouth spread quickly and the numbers continued to grow.

In 1977, Rosie’s bought its first building, which housed nine women and served as a meeting place for meals. Yet Tiernan’s vision was quickly growing beyond the small walls of the five-story row house. Plans began to develop to relocate to the location of the St. Philip’s church, where Tiernan had originally volunteered. The new building was dedicated in 1986 and the first building was turned into a lodging house for thirteen women.

In the early nineties, Rosie’s started offering adult education classes, legal services and counseling. For the first time, Rosie’s was able to hire its volunteers. Tiernan has never been one of these paid employees. Relationships began to be formed with local organizations to bring help onsite. In 1996, the food pantry was established as well as the Women’s Craft Cooperative. In 1997, a Guest Advisory Panel was formed where guests were encouraged to give input about the wants and needs of the community. This remarkable step truly emphasized Rosie’s mission to reinstate dignity and self-respect in the women it served. Tiernan had never wanted her shelter to feel like an institution and now it was more like a club or organization.

By this time, volunteer numbers had reached the thousands. A movement for expansion began in 1998 and the building was renovated with a donated $3.2 million, reopening in 2000. The dining room now could seat 150 and more services were added like the clothing room, new showers and laundry facilities, an expanded food pantry and a space for Childworks, an afterschool program for the guests’ children. More education classes were offered and an art studio was created in the basement to extend the arts initiative. Rosie’s had officially grown from providing temporary relief from hunger to permanent relief from the strains of homelessness through advocacy, education and housing.

When a visitor realizes that the guests at Rosie’s Place represent only a miniscule percentage of Boston’s homelessness, the effect is more than humbling. The Annual City of Boston Homeless Census conducted in December 2008 showed that there is a total of 6,901 homeless people in the city and the numbers are only expected to get worse. Already the shelters are filled to capacity, forcing the government, which is legally obligated to provide housing for those in need, to put people up in motels. An article in the Boston Globe in October 2008 reported that 574 families were being housed in motels across the city, which was up from 467 families reported only a month prior. This is causing immense strain on the $87 million budget for emergency assistance for the homeless because while a night at a government-assisted shelter costs the city $89, a night at a motel costs an average of $99. At the time of the article there were 19,666 people on the Boston Housing Authority’s waitlist, which provides affordable housing through rental assistance programs.

But why is it necessary to have a women-only shelter? Women are the most at risk when homeless. Usually they also have children to provide for and therefore need more money to relieve them of homelessness. They also are more vulnerable to attacks on the streets. Many women become homeless because they’re running away from abusive relationships and have nowhere to turn to. Often, when women enter a mixed-sex shelter, they are exploited both financially and sexually by authority figures and other guests alike.

Rosie’s is a safe-haven. All it takes to become a part of the community is to identify yourself as a woman (transgender and gender-neutral guests, who run the risk of being assaulted in men’s shelters, are welcome) and to ring the doorbell. If any guests become abusive towards other women, volunteers or employees, they are banned from Rosie’s. What emerges is a tight-knit community. Lifelong friendships are created as the women meet new people, share their stories and help each other through their difficult times. The dining room and sitting areas aren’t far off from high-school as gossip spreads, information is traded, jokes are told and highly fueled debates rage on about anything from politics to style choices. Even though the majority of these women will leave after dinner is served and Rosie’s closes, many are quick to call this place home.

Just like the gathering Kip Tiernan originally imagined it to be, Rosie’s has developed a cast of regular characters. It doesn’t take me long to start knowing the regulars in the art studio personally, and that’s not uncommon for Rosie’s long-term volunteers. Guests and employees alike know each other’s stories and if someone doesn’t show up for a while, people start asking questions. The homeless woman on the street becomes humanized, a step most people wish to never see. By getting to know these women on a personal level, the stereotype of “the homeless woman” shatters. There is no better place to see this effect than in the art studio.

Down in the basement where the art studio is located, the stress of appointments with the advocates and life in a shelter is left upstairs. The only reminder of the business being conducted there is the constant ringing of the doorbell above, making it feel far more like an arts club in a private home than that of a shelter. Three worktables are shaped in a U in the middle of the room and boxes upon boxes of supplies line the walls, as well as a small library of art books and displays of finished works. It is arguably the most beloved aspect of Rosie’s. As I bring up the stack of freshly copied workshop calendars, I am swarmed by a group of women clamoring to get their copy first and begin planning out their month, discussing which classes look most interesting. Classes are held twice a day Monday through Thursday on knitting, jewelry-making, creative writing and everything in between. Alev Danis, the always chipper Arts Director, putters around the studio prepping for the next workshop.

“Having an arts program like this allows us to work with the woman as a whole. They’re not just this two-dimensional object. You can give them something to eat and a place to stay, and that’s wonderful, but giving them opportunities like these nourishes them completely,” Danis says of the arts initiative. It was because of her that the Woman’s Craft Cooperative was formed, since she thought that efforts to create employable skills in the women would be much more effective if applied to something they would enjoy, like crafting. After a four-year hiatus, Danis returned to Rosie’s Place as the director of the new arts initiative in 2006 and has been on ever since.

“Having the chance to create something gives the women an incredible amount of pride. They like the process of making something, of having that instant satisfaction. They can look at what they’ve made and say ‘that is mine.’ It really boosts their self-esteem.” The women who participate in the workshops come from all different backgrounds when it comes to the arts. Some have left behind a love of the arts because they no longer have the resources to create, such as Lisa*, who discusses her dreams of writing a children’s book about homelessness while she finally gets the chance to put her ideas to paper in a creative writing workshop. She’s a constant face in the art studio, and is considered quite the rock star by the other guests as she experiments with techniques and materials. During a self-portrait class, a few gather behind her to watch her work. “Isn’t it finished?” One woman asks, gazing at the layered collage of tissue paper and oil pastel. “When it starts breathing, then it’ll be finished,” Lisa says.

For many others, these classes are the first time they’re given an opportunity to be creative. They arrive in the studio, apprehensive about their abilities, but at the end of the session, when they have a finished work of art in their hands, their confidence soars. In the same self-portrait workshop, Deborah* came in warning me that she wasn’t going to be any good but she wanted to try it anyway. When she discovers that portraiture is more about expression than realism, she lets loose and is immersed in her project for the next two hours. By the end, she is asking me where she can get art supplies of her own.

The most popular workshops are ones where the women can embellish: jewelry-making, decorating ordinary objects, creating accessories. If there’s one thing all the women can agree on, it is a love of glitter. Any time the glitter glue is brought out is a time to celebrate. At a field trip to see Faith Ringgold’s story quilts, the guests zoned in on the one work of art in the accompanying quilt exhibit that involved glitter. “You know,” Martha* observes, “I was liking everything else alright but in the back of my head I was always thinking ‘man, these could use some glitter,’ and then I saw this one. Now that’s more like it!”

While the conversation sometimes veers into serious discussions about their lives outside of Rosie’s Place, the art studio is usually a place where the women can relax and socialize. Classic R&B is a favored choice of music to listen to and occasionally there is a break to sing and dance along to The Temptations and Michael Jackson. When Danis strolls around the room to see how everyone’s work is coming along the guests, who are always excited to see her, gently tease her about her British accent. Mostly, the conversations turns to dreams of what will happen next, where they’ll be going from here, because down here, they’re easy to imagine.

The arts program further emphasizes Rosie’s mission of unconditional love by working hard to offer workshops, field trips and performances representing all different cultures. Tie-ins to African-American and Hispanic heritages cater to the diverse population of Rosie’s guests. Guests learn about all different styles of art, from contemporary artist, Shepard Fairey, to the Renaissance to Frieda Kahlo. Danis hopes the varied calendar opens the minds of the women to different cultures and different ideas of what art is. They can point to similarities between an exhibit celebrating one culture to another and break down the barriers of seeing others as so completely different.

Danis attempts to balance doing art through the workshops and this seeing of art by organizing field trips. She estimates that about half of the women who join her on the trips have never been in a public art space before coming to Rosie’s. Joining them on a field trip is a refreshing experience, uninhibited from the usual snobbery of normal museum-goers. The women bring a fresh perspective on things, often asking the most intriguing questions and making unexpected connections. While most art audiences approach it with some level of jadedness, these women appreciate every piece. The two hour block of time allocated for trips is often barely enough. On one trip to the Museum of Fine Arts to see a photography exhibit, Maria* asked if she could stay behind at the museum when the group was set to leave at 11:30. After Danis was assured that Maria had her Charlie Card to get home safely, we left. The next day, Danis asked her how the rest of her stay was. She replied that she didn’t leave until closing time at 5:30.

When the trips and workshops return to Rosie’s at the end of the day it is just in time for dinner. Crowds of women are spilling out from the small sitting room into the lobby, milling about and perusing the crowded bulletin board announcing workshops and events. Many have spent their whole day there, meeting with advocates, socializing with friends, doing their laundry, picking out groceries. They will enjoy their meal and return to where they’re staying. Today they have gained essential goods, an education and advice, but most importantly they gained respect and dignity. And from there, anything is possible.

*names have been changed to protect the privacy of the guests

Quick Notes

2009-04-22T15:27:00.001-07:00

I have a few ideas for a collection of nonfiction essays.

The first is to explore the concept of family, particularly when you're left to sort of create one on your own. Up until recently, I really only considered my family to be my dad. My mom and stepmom's families faded out of my life shortly after their deaths and I wasn't really in touch with my dad's family until I moved to Boston where they all live. This lack of family is something that I used to resent very much and have always been searching for ways to fill that void. Yet, at the same time, this has led to creating extremely strong bonds with the family I do have, and with those I consider part of my surrogate family. The essays would talk about this sort of quest, as well as examine and broaden the definition of what family really is.

The other is to play around with the idea of Country Mouse, City Mouse. My childhood in my small town in upstate New York is something I hold dear to me, and I believe growing up where I did shaped me very much. Yet, I've always felt an attachment to New York City, since I grew up so close to it. There was this distinct moment I had in senior year of high school where I realized that I needed to be in a city, and it marked this turning point in my life. I ended up going to school in Boston, will be living in New York this summer and plan on moving there after graduation. Besides simply story-telling, I'd hope to explore the connection between childhood and the countryside versus maturity and the city.

I have a few pieces already that would work for each of these. I thought it would be a good idea to give myself some kind of direction in my writing, and when I looked at what I've written lately these two themes naturally stood out to me.

In other news, I'll be posting some new things up shortly. I have a handful that are all in the works, and once I feel they've been sufficiently revised enough, I'll put them up.

Excerpts

2009-02-28T15:02:00.000-08:00

Last year I attempted to write a novel. I only had a vague idea of the plot so I tried to just let it take me where it wanted to on its own. Halfway though the part of the story I actually had a plan for, I realized that I hated most of the plot and quit. I still really like the characters, though, so I'm including a few excerpts here. Written July-October 2008.

One
I was born on the road with my father. Not born, exactly, as in the moment when I was brought to life, but born as in the moment when I was suddenly aware of it. It was like waking up, opening my eyes and adjusting to the light and through that blur I see my dad reaching into the inner pocket of his overcoat and pulling out a silver flask. All of the moments before this one are static, with spastic bits of memory bursting through, flashes of color and smells and voices. At this moment I look down at my hands, it is the only thing I can think of to do.

My father tips the flask over the mug of coffee before him and a brown liquid flows out, its stench makes my nostrils curl. I swirl my chocolate milk around in my glass hoping he doesn't try to put any of it in my drink. The milk, of course, sloshes over the edge a bit and splatters onto the paper place mat in front of me, making the ink of the photo of their hamburger special run. A woman enters my peripheral vision and I assume it is my mother until I look up and see the shiny gold name tag pinned to her white apron. I remember now that my mother is gone.

"Here's your nice healthy breakfast!" The waitress announces as she sets my sundae down in front of me. She is giving me a megawatt smile but her eyes are sad. I wonder if she's looking for something too, like my dad says we are, and can't find it no matter how many 24 hour diners she stops in. And then I think maybe those eyes are an attack. She is looking at my father with his smelly liquid and at me with my ice cream breakfast and is thinking what an odd pair of people. I know it, my dad knows it, I don't need her eyes telling me twice. I decide not to speak to her and reach into my daisy bag and pull out the weathered country map my dad bought for me at the beginning. "Help me find where we are Daddy."

He leans over from his paper, squinting down at the map. "We're right around here, Chloe," he says, pressing his dirty forefinger down into New York. It makes a little crease right where I should draw my circle. I have decided to mark our journey by the diners we stop at for breakfast each morning. I am too afraid that if I were to choose to mark it by where we spend the night I would get too sleepy and forget to mark it down. My eyes trace the path of carefully drawn circles with a sense of satisfaction, of getting somewhere, even though I'm still unsure of where we're going.

As the ice cream of my first bite melts on my tongue I look down at my lap. I'm kicking my feet and I feel guilty because my shoes are pink and all that movement just brings more attention to them. My dad does not want me to be one of those girly girls with pink shoes. In fact I think he'd much rather me be a boy, but I just can't help but want pink shoes sometimes and since I've been good my dad bought them for me. He tries to act like I am a boy. He always wants me to go out and play in the dirt and throw a ball with him and sometimes he touches me a bit too hard. He likes to tell me things that boys want to hear but I just find gross. He tells me about this bug called the tarantula wasp who paralyzes tarantulas and lays its eggs in them. Then when the eggs hatch they eat the tarantula alive and that's their first meal that keeps them healthy. Sometimes, I feel like a tarantula.

My dad hears the scraping of my spoon against the bottom of the bowl and looks at me again. "You ready to go, Sport?" I nod licking the last bit of chocolate sauce off the spoon. I like the way the metal makes things taste. He whistles at our waitress and she comes over in her squeaky shoes, rips our check out of her pad and sets in on our table. "Y'all have a nice day," she says and I don't like it because she's saying it in a way like she thinks we won't but I know better. My dad drains the last of his coffee, tilting his head way back. I can see the lump in his throat bob up and down as he swallows and I wonder what it must feel like to have something caught in your throat all the time. I slide off my chair, gather my bag and push my bowl over so the melted ice cream spills out onto the table. I don't want to make the waitress's job easy and my dad doesn't mind because he knows it's right.

Even though we tried to park in the shade the sun has moved a little and when we climb into our truck everything is too hot to touch. I pull my stuffed bunny out from her hiding place where it must be even hotter and I feel bad but I couldn't risk her getting stolen. I hug her, looking for forgiveness, and she flops in my arms. My dad is struggling with the map and muttering things under his breath and I'm silently asking him to turn the car on so the fan will start blowing. He groans, "forget it, just forget it," and, after failing to fold the map correctly, crumples it up and throws it in the back. I know he'll regret this later and it will make him even more angry. I'm glad he doesn't touch my map, seeing the way he handles his. He starts the truck and it shakes a little before easing into a working tremble. I like the way the truck bounces a bit like that, how when it moves it creaks a little and you can really hear all the parts working. It makes me feel like I'm in the old days, like a real adventure. I picture those people from black and white photographs, dressed up in their fanciest clothes out for a ride in their cars and posing for the camera.

We pull out of the diner's parking lot and back onto the highway. Well, at least it's called a highway but it doesn't look like much of one to me. It's nothing at all like those ones they show from the helicopters on the news, rows and rows of cars packed together at a standstill honking and screaming as they try to make their way to work. It only has two lanes and it twists and turns through the hills and valleys like a snake. My dad pushes his favorite tape into the player. He's listened to it so much that the words on the label have faded where his thumb goes to hold it. The sound from the speakers is crackly but I think my dad likes it this way. He keeps time with his fingers on the steering wheel and sings along as I watch the world roll past my window.

In a little while we pull over at a gas station to fill up and so that my dad can use the pay phone. These stops always start with him complaining about how few pay phones there are nowadays and end with him slamming the phone down, making it jump back out of its cradle. He'll storm back to the car and we'll sit in silence for a bit while he strokes the stubble along his chin and thinks about what to do next. It always ends up being just to keep driving on. I always ask him who he's been on the phone with but he'll wave away the question like it's a fly buzzing in his face. I want to say it's a man because of how he talks while he's on the phone but, I hate to say it, he'll talk like that to anyone, man, woman or child. At these stops my dad always buys me a candy bar at the little convenience store where he goes to pay for the gas, even though it's usually pretty soon after my ice cream breakfasts. I keep these tucked next to me, fingering the plastic wrapper for comfort now and again.

Two
My dad rolled on until he sees an old mailbox painted in pinks and blues, the paint chipping off like a sunset. It seems that the number used to read 172 but the black lettering is so scratched off it's hard to tell exactly. I can imagine the owner trying to give directions in desperation to someone who lost their way, finally giving up on relying on the number alone and saying "oh, just look for the brightly painted mailbox." My dad makes some remark about it under his breath. I hate when he does this, hides what he's saying from me, it makes me all the more curious to what he could be saying that I shouldn't hear.

He turns into the driveway and begins the descent into the woods, the gravel creaking and groaning under the weight of the truck. Slowly the house comes into view. It reminds me of the pictures in my mother's real estate classifieds whose captions read "rustic charm." I had never quite understood what that meant until just now. It was made of wood that looked soggy and had a bright yellow door that looked like it was painted the same time as the mailbox. The front porch seemed to sag under the weight of the furniture on it that I had always thought of as strictly indoor furniture like armchairs and sofas, and it had a lot of those wind-chimes like the ones at the store. There were a lot of gardens, both flower and vegetable, that were set up in little plots around the yard. The property was surrounded by great thick trees casting everything in shadow. From one of their branches hung an old-timey wooden swing and I got my hopes up for a cousin to play with. There was also this strange structure that looked to me as if someone had piled their junk into a corner but there was something about it that looked a bit too purposeful and I wondered if it was supposed to be art.

I caught some movement in one of the windows and in a few seconds a man stepped out of the doorway. My dad said "speak of the Devil," even though neither of us had been talking. He was a skinny older man with bits of gray spotting his hair and squinting eyes behind oversized glasses. He wore a light purple tank top with a peace sign tie dyed onto it and cut-off shorts cut off very short, the frayed edges grazing mid-thigh. He was very tan and his skin looked a bit leathery, like he had spent his whole life out in the sun. his reaction to our arrival was hard to read. Eventually he raised his hand in a half-hearted wave as we came to a stop.

All three of us hesitated for a moment. Then my dad cleared his throat and pulled himself out of the car, walking with determination towards who I had by now assumed was my Uncle Jack. Looking at the two of them standing before one another it was very difficult to believe they were related at all, let alone brothers. My dad thrust his hand forward which my uncle took tentatively in a shake and said,
"hello, David."

"Please, Jack, call me Dave."

"Don't you think at this point in your life you should be a David?"

"Don't you think at this point in the millennium you should no longer be wearing tie-dye?"

The two stared at each other then released their grip. "Jack, I'd like you to meet my daughter, Chloe." My dad gestured down to his side but when he saw I wasn't standing there he whipped back towards the car and gave me a bewildered look. "Well come on, Chloe, get out of the car!" I noticed he wasn't calling me Sport of Kiddo or any other of the boy names he used.

I climbed out of the truck and shuffled toward them kicking pebbles into my shoes. "Chloe, this is your Uncle Jack. Technically you've met before but you was just a baby." Uncle Jack bent over a little to reach his hand toward mine. When he saw I certainly wouldn't be taking it he straightened up again and put his hands on his hips. "Well, well, Chloe, aren't you a lovely young lady?"
I don't know why I didn't want to talk to him. He scared me, a little. I didn't like that there was this full grown very real person in front of me who was supposed to be a part of my life, who had been existing all along, yet I didn't know the first thing about him. I couldn't help but feel like my dad was putting me on, like I was being led into a trap.
"Well, you both must be famished from your trip, why don't we go inside and have something to eat, hmm?" Uncle Jack motioned for us to follow him. I grabbed onto my dad's shirt, trying to warn him, but the cloth slipped from my fingers as he walked forward and I could do nothing but follow.

Three
After our pancakes my dad and I went back out to the truck to bring our things into the house. Uncle Jack showed me the room I would be staying in. It was the only room upstairs, which was really just a loft like in a treehouse, besides the sitting area which was open and could be seen from downstairs. The ceiling was slanted and was bare wood and I liked that. It felt like a grown up version of a fort made of a sheet draped over chairs in the living room. I remembered my uncle's comment about fort-making earlier and liked to think he bought the house for that very reason. I let my suitcase sit leaning against the dresser for now and brought my daisy bag back downstairs with me to go look around outside.

The backyard had some of the lushest grass I've ever felt between my toes. Plopped down right in the center of it was this giant stone bird bath that had a collection of songbirds gathered around it. Behind it were the woods, stretching out for what seemed like forever. I sat myself down in that grass and really looked hard into it. I saw two Daddy-Long-Legs crawling around on either side of me. I haven't been afraid of them ever since my dad told me they couldn't ever possibly hurt me. I'm not even afraid when they crawl onto me, like other bugs. I don't know why, I'm just not. I wondered if they were even aware of each other, these two spiders. What was only a foot or so of earth for me was an entire world to them of tangled green. It was like an entire state. And these two spiders were meant to be with each other and they're searching for each other and think that the other will never be found. Yet they're right there, so near.

I picked one of them up by the leg, its other legs wildly grasping at the air. It was such a simple little creature. Really it was only a little circle and a couple of lines, like a doodle, like something even I could create. Pressing my lips together I opened my daisy bag and went to drop him inside it when I heard a sharp intake of air behind me. "Chloe! What are you doing holding that bug? Don't you know not to touch those? They're dirty!" I twisted around to see Uncle Jack looking down at me with his hands on his hips. I pretended to just let the spider go, knowing full well it would drop into my bag and hoping Uncle Jack wouldn't see. He had changed from earlier and was looking a lot more dressed-up. "My friend is going to be here soon, the one I want to introduce you to? I was hoping you would come inside and change out of your traveling clothes." I wanted to tell him I didn't have different sets of clothing, traveling and standing still, but instead I got up quietly and followed him back into the house.

I climbed the stairs up to my room, liking the sound of my feet hitting them. I was excited to let my new spider go into my room. I had a little box I kept my crayons in and was going to just dump those out somewhere and let it be his home. I threw the bag onto the bed and dug into my suitcase for the box. When it was found I carelessly held it upside down so that the crayons fell onto the floor and put it next to my bag. I hopped onto the bed and opened the bag with fervor, peering down inside it to find my new pet. I had expected to see him crawling around right near the top but he wasn't there. With mounting anxiousness I threw the notebooks and books and things out of the bag and looked harder. And there he was, crushed into the bottom corner of my bag, still looking like a doodle just a little bit messier. With a sad sigh I replaced the items of the bag and went over to my suitcase to change.

I assumed Uncle Jack was hoping I would look a little cleaner, so I reached into the bottom to find the one dress that was brought with me. My mom had gotten it for me for my last birthday so it was my special dress and I wasn't allowed to play in it. But I figured this was the kind of occasion that called for a special dress so I carefully put it on and smoothed out the wrinkles as best I could in the mirror. Suddenly I had the urge to make myself look as pretty as can be. I brushed my hair out as much as it could go and very delicately placed my favorite butterfly hair clip in the best viewing spot on my head. I looked at my reflection for a long time. My dad, I don't think, will be happy to see me like this but something tells me that I would be doing my uncle proud.

Four
The next morning I woke up and my stomach hurt because, despite what Uncle Jack had teased me about, we didn't end up eating until real late. Still in my pajamas I slipped out the back door, daisy bag in tow, to go exploring in the woods. They didn't seem so scary anymore, instead they were inviting. I had stuffed the bedsheets into my bag hoping to find a good spot to construct a fort where no one would be able to find me. I tried to imagine my dad and Uncle Jack playing in these woods when they were little, back when they were brothers and being brothers meant something. Before Uncle Jack did whatever terrible thing he did to drive my dad away, twice. And now he was leaving me here alone with him and who knows what he would do to me.

The woods smelled damp and this made me sleepy. All of the birds that were singing to me seemed so far up in the trees that I felt smaller than usual. But I wasn't scared, no I was not. I had visions of never being able to find my way back to Uncle Jack's house, forced to live out here in my little fort made of sheets, picking berries for food. I would learn to steal things, wander until I found a house and take what I please. Soon my fort would be overflowing with my stolen treasures and I would become the feared bandit of the woods. People would rally up to attempt to capture me but I would always trick them and escape. People would want me.

My foot sank into the mud I had not seen coming that bordered a dirty stream trickling with great effort against the boulder plopped arbitrarily in the middle of it. One side of the rock was covered in slick green moss dotted with bird droppings. The light filtered through the leaves and made the water sparkle like a river of crystals. This was where my journey would end. I pulled my foot out of the mud with a satisfying sucking noise and tromped through the stream over to the boulder. I spread my fingers wide and pressed them into the sponge of moss, moisture seeping out and dripping down the back of my hand. It left a trail of brown on my skin. I moved around to the other side of the boulder and saw that it was slightly at an incline, the surface dry and untainted.

Fighting against the slick of mud now covering my pink shoes I scrambled up the face of the rock and sat myself at the top. The view disappointed me. I thought things would look so different from up here but only the pebbles in the riverbed looked smaller. The trees still towered over me, the birds still flew higher. I pulled the sheet out from my bag, let it unfold in my hands. With a shake of my wrists it unfurled before me, fluttering down through the air. I swung my arms back so that the sheet gently came to rest all around me. My eyelashes blinked against the scratchy fabric as I tried to see through it into the woods. Nothing. Finally, I was safe.

Letters to Teddy

2009-02-26T21:29:00.000-08:00

I have been losing and finding my stepbrother, Teddy, ever since he came into my life. This is the story of our relationship. Written February 2009.

Letters to Teddy
I was wasting time in the clearance section of my college bookstore when I felt my phone vibrating in my pocket. I didn’t recognize the number but answered it anyway.
“Hello?” No one spoke on the other end, but the silence was heavy. “Hello?”
“Celeste?” It was a small voice.
“Yes?”
“This is Teddy.

Eight years earlier, my dad and I were driving down to Nyack, New York to visit his girlfriend, Sue. For the past three years that he had been dating again after my mom died I had projected huge expectations of marriage and family on every first date he went on. After awhile, Dad stopped telling me about his dates. So the fact that not only had I met Sue, but was now meeting her three-year-old son, Teddy, meant something good was finally happening.

As we entered her home I was bombarded by a ball of energy that took me a few moments to recognize as a little boy. I was ten at the time and obsessed with the idea of “a normal family,” and now, in that living room, I was faced for the first time with the possibility of having one. That one day reflected what we could become; walking two by two along the Hudson River, Teddy throwing fits, parents huddled in adult conversation in the kitchen, me reading Teddy a bedtime story. Six months later, they moved in.

There was unequivocal happiness and there were tremendous arguments. As our two sides connected we cautiously formed each relationship, never quite sure of the boundaries but always trying to pretend we had been family from the beginning. By the time the wedding rolled around we all truly believed the vows that not only were my dad and Sue now united, but all four of us were, for better or for worse. Six months later, Sue went to the hospital.

A tumor had been found in her lung. Her smoking had been a problem from the start. We had had high hopes for quick recovery, but addiction is far stronger than willpower. The cancer worsened and it became only a matter of time. As his mother was reduced to a faraway symphony of rented machines’ beeping and hollow coughing, I felt it was my duty to step into Sue’s place and be there for Teddy. Our parents became more distant with each hospital visit but Teddy and I only became closer. I pulled him in my red wagon along the trail where the railroad tracks used to be. I created elaborate real-life versions of Blue’s Clue’s to play. I fixed him lunch and played superheroes. We played baseball in the backyard and chased the dog around. Every night, another bedtime story. We were brother and sister. Six months later, Sue died.

Teddy didn’t know yet. He had been staying with his dad, Bruce, the past few days, a man who had been absent from their lives until things started to get serious with my dad. He started to raise legal hell for custody. When Sue’s money should’ve been paying for hospital bills, it was paying for lawyers. I had never met a man I hated before. A few of Sue’s friends and her brother sat waiting at our house for Teddy and his dad to arrive to be given the news. He bounded through the door like always, all dimples and sparkling blue eyes and laughter. “Why does everyone look so sad?” He asked, circling the living room. His dad took his hand. “Hey, Teddy, can I talk to you in your room for a bit?”

The living room was silent. I stared at one speck on the carpet so hard it became my entire world. When I was told, my dad didn’t have to say anything before I was crying. I knew.Teddy didn’t have that luxury. I remembered that feeling of sabotage when I was in his situation only seven years earlier. Then, it came. It was the sound of complete, unadulterated pain. Everyone’s breath was released in sobs. A grown woman fell onto my shoulder, seeking comfort. We could do nothing but sit and listen to Teddy’s wails of “mommy, mommy, why did she have to die?”

Soon, Bruce emerged from the room, clutching at his face. “I can’t do it anymore, I can’t.” He doubled over in the armchair and cradled his head in his hands, shoulders shaking. Teddy’s uncle went in and a few minutes later, Teddy’s cries had quieted. I hadn’t moved. I was still staring at that speck. It wasn’t until I heard my name that the world came rushing back. “Celeste?” His uncle was standing over me. “Teddy wants you.”

I walked the hallway like a plank to his room. The lights were off and Teddy was only a small, quivering shadow tucked in the farthest corner of his bed. I sat on the very edge of the bed, not knowing what to say. His sniffles quickened and I knew he was trying to speak.

“My mommy died.”
“I know. I’m really sorry.”
“Did you cry too, when your mommy died?”
“Of course I did.”
“Did you cry when my mommy died?”
“Yes. I thought of her like my mommy too.”
“I think this makes us even more like brother and sister because both our mommies died.”

We sat, crying together. He looked down at the stuffed tiger he was hugging. “You know, I’m so angry I could slam this tiger into the wall!”
“Then, why don’t you?”
With a growl he hurled it across the room. I picked up a seal, said a silent apology to it, then sent it flying. We each took turns propelling the animals into the wall until there weren’t any more left on the bed. Somehow, we laughed.
“Celeste?”
“Yes?”
“I feel better now.”

For the next few months, Teddy and I managed to visit each other for a few hours every few weeks. But, soon, Bruce started acting up again. Even though the visits became less frequent, I thought everything would be fine. Six months later, I came home to a message on the machine.
“Hi, guys, this is Teddy. I was just calling to say that me and my dad are moving. To Connecticut. My dad – what?” We heard Bruce’s muffled voice in the driver’s seat. We heard Teddy’s confused submission. “Well. I’ll talk to you later! Bye!” We had nothing but a town name and Bruce’s cell phone number. After a few unanswered phone calls, a robot told us the number had been disconnected.

Months passed without a word. I created elaborate schemes of finding him again. I wanted my brother back. I couldn’t handle yet another person being taken away from me, especially when the only thing stopping me from being with them was my own willpower. Eventually we got a working number through his uncle. A few calls happened here and there. Then that number was disconnected too.

After a year, it took me a minute to remember how old Teddy was. His image faded from my memory and only his distinctive voice remained. I didn’t know where he was or what grade he was in. I didn’t know if he played sports or had friends or what his favorite subject was. I didn’t know if he was happy. I didn’t know what he remembered of his life with me, if he remembered me at all. The truth is, I gave up trying. I was too afraid that even if I did find the right number again he wouldn’t want to talk to me. He’d be too angry and think it was all my fault because who knew what lies Bruce was telling him. Or, worse yet, he’d pick up the phone and say, “Celeste, who?”

Missing Teddy eventually faded into the background. Every now and then I’d remember, and it would hurt, but then it would pass. It wasn’t until I was nineteen years old, six years after I had last seen him, that I made the effort again. I had just found out my aunt on my mom’s side had died, months after the fact, and became enraged. I needed to have what little family I had left in my life. I contacted Teddy’s cousin through Facebook and discovered that he had been living in Long Island with his dad’s girlfriend for the past few years. Bruce was out of the picture, driving taxis in New York, and it was hinted that I shouldn’t pry further than that. She assured me he was happy and gave me his address.

I wrote the most difficult letter I have ever written and waited. Just when I was giving up hope, I was wasting time in my college bookstore and my phone rang.

“Teddy?” My voice was already cracking.
“I got your letter. I’m sorry it took me so long to call. It kind of came as a shock, you know? And I had to think about it for awhile. But I wanted to call.”

That voice was still the same, only slightly changed with age. He was twelve, the same age I had been when we unknowingly said goodbye. We talked like peers; awkward colleagues of a by-gone time running into each other at the supermarket. How to catch up about the past six years? We talked about what we remembered.

“I remember when we were flying and I was scared and you held my hand and I wasn’t scared.” He said.
“I remember when the lights went out and we were the only ones who woke up and we told jokes so we wouldn’t be scared.” I said.

Then,
“Why did you even write me?”
“Because I missed you and I didn’t want you to not be in my life anymore.”
“Yeah, but, why now? Why not sooner?”
“I tried, Teddy, but there were factors far out of my control and it got too hard.”

Then,
“Were you angry with me? That I wrote you?”
“Yeah, I was a little angry. I felt a little bit of everything, really. I cried.”
“Oh, don’t you worry, I cried too.”

The woman, who he referred to as Mom and each time he said it I cried harder, hadn’t wanted him to contact me and he was calling while she was at work. He asked if any further contact could be kept to only when he called me first. I nodded. Not again.

“Celeste?”
“Yes?”
“I’m really glad we talked.”

We hung up, both knowing that it would likely be the last time we ever would.

The Life Behind the Clothes

2009-02-26T21:21:00.000-08:00

A love of vintage clothes has been ingrained in me from very early on, yet I've been disappointed again and again in being able to fit in vintage tailoring. Then, on a lazy summer day, I stumbled across a leather jacket I had been dreaming of for years.

The Life Behind the Clothes

I believe I was genetically predisposed to love anything vintage, antique, reminiscent in any way of the good old days. My aunt and uncle run the antique version of Ebay, my dad’s kitchen is decorated with vintage tin signs and trinkets salvaged from my great-grandparents’ candy store, and one of the few memories I have of my mom is when she would bring me along on her antiquing journeys throughout the northeast. Each store would feel like we were sneaking into a stranger’s attic; everything musty and disorganized and with a story to tell. I could pick out one thing each time to take home with me: a veiled hat, a bobble-head dog, fake fingernails.

It didn’t take me long to choose my favorite antique shops in my small, college town in upstate New York. I wasn’t connected to the few family members I had, so I didn’t have any other outlet for my craving for discovery of the past. When I wandered through these stores, almost always the only customer, I could pretend I was in my grandparents’ basement, finding relics of personal history. I was most drawn to the racks of vintage clothing.

While it’s relatively easy to feel removed from picking through old China sets and weathered Life magazines, there was always a sense of uneasiness when looking through the clothing. Each piece represented a person, a life. What did this mean to them? Each time I touched something I could only think of how there was once a body of a stranger living on the other side of the fabric. Who were they?

Unfortunately, the extent of my vintage shopping was mostly jewelry, shoes and bags. Although I craved an original fifties’ housedress, a sixties swing coat, a black shift dress that perhaps Audrey Hepburn herself considered buying, I never had the proportions or sculptural undergarments required to fit in vintage tailoring and likely never will. I considered the racks primarily a museum. I tested my knowledge, comparing my guesses of the period to what was scribbled on the handwritten tags. Sometimes I would find something so stunningly beautiful I would consider buying it solely as a piece of art but with reluctance I stepped away from the area empty-handed.

During the summer after my first year of college, I was perusing my favorite store just to pass the afternoon. It was a renovated barn and the mustiness added to the daydream feel. I climbed the steps to the loft where the clothes were kept. Mostly the collection resembled a “what were they thinking?” column in a tabloid, and I smiled to myself trying to imagine them in a modern setting. I paused to consider an adult-sized bright yellow plastic raincoat, wondering if I could ever be cheeky enough to pull it off. For fun I took it from its hanger and in doing so revealed a jacket its bulkiness had been hiding. I dropped the raincoat.

For years, I had been picturing the perfect leather jacket. It would be tough but feminine, not too biker-chick and not too eighties hair band. And there it was. I touched the sleeve and it was perfectly worn leather. No cracks, still soft, but not “buttery,” which I always considered too prissy. It was fitted, streamlined. The tag read “1960s, Berlin.” The lining had a large silk label sewn into it, written all in German. I could picture its owner so clearly: a no-nonsense chick who was part of the art scene and created things I probably wouldn’t understand. She discussed politics over black coffee. She probably yelled a lot and could get anything she wanted. Essentially, she was the girl I never could be but secretly always wished I could be like. I couldn’t help but think that wearing this jacket would make it just a little bit easier.

Nonetheless, there was no way it was going to fit. Nothing in a vintage store ever did. I tried to end my love affair before I got too hurt. But it kept pulling me back to it as I tried to distract myself with the meager display of shoes. What’s the harm in trying it on, right? I situated myself in front of the mirror, held my breath and slipped it on. I gasped. Not only did it fit, but it fit perfectly. It was one of those rare, magical dressing room moments where your reflection takes you aback because you can’t believe it’s you looking that good. I could feel the spirit I had associated with the jacket flowing through me and I immediately felt more confidant, stronger, able to take on whatever would be thrown at me.

There was no doubt about it, I was meant to own this jacket. There were forces out of my control at work here. Besides, it was a ridiculous steal at $50. I hurried out of the store clutching it to my chest, feeling like a thief.

A few weeks later I was trying to explain the experience I had to my dad. It was at this point he revealed, after nineteen years, that his entire side of the family was German. After all this time of expressing an interest in our family’s history he had managed to leave this out, allowing me to believe I was solely Russian. The afternoon in the antique store all made sense now. Stunned, I stared down at the jacket, rubbing my thumb over the label, wondering how different that girl in Berlin and I really were.

Malka

2009-02-26T20:35:00.000-08:00

Throughout my difficult relationship with religion, there was always a woman named Dorothy Ross guiding me through. She had been my first Hebrew school teacher and I continued to take her on as my mentor when it came to religion, writing and life. Written February 2009.

Malka
At the time I couldn’t understand why I was in Hebrew School. For the first ten years of my life the Jewish side of me had mattered only when it came to Hannukah and Passover. I never even thought about it for the rest of the year while my Christian mom shuttled me between services, Sunday School classes, Christian preschools, after-school programs and summer camps. After she died when I was seven, religion faded into the background with the exception of the obligatory celebration of both creeds’ major holidays. Suddenly, as I entered fifth grade, my dad decided to revive the Jewish faith in both of us.

I sat there in the cramped, musty classroom of the old synagogue, sizing up the teacher as the rest of the girls drew flowers on the chalkboard. She was a shrunken old lady with gigantic wire-frame glasses, smiling absentmindedly as she waited for the time to begin. Her name was Dorothy Ross and she was essentially the grandmother of the entire congregation. Her husband had died years earlier and her children were mysteriously absent from her life, so we all became her children. And, true to the Jewish Grandmother persona, she was also brutally honest and straightforward with whoever she was talking to. None of us had been prepared for this and in the first class, three of us had cried from being told to shut up or that we were wrong or disregarding our right to privacy. For me, it was when we were sharing our Hebrew names. Everyone had known theirs their whole life, but when it came to mine I faltered and said “I don’t know, I guess I’ll have to ask my dad.”

“Your dad?” Dorothy said. “Do you not have a mother?” I don’t know how she assumed this, but it stunned me. When people discovered this, the conversation had always taken place in whispers , with hesitation and concerned expressions, and now she was expecting me to discuss it like the weather. “No, she died,” I admitted, expecting my shame to now be over. “How?” I could sense everyone’s eyes on me. “Breast cancer.” She continued introducing the class and I decided that I hated her.
Each week my dad and I would argue over going to class. I would sit, arms folded, and tune out. But then, I started listening. Dorothy’s openness changed from putting us all in our place to talking to us like adults had never talked to us before. She threw rules of censorship and inappropriate subjects out the window and shared with us all the dirty details of Judaism, and of life in general. Dorothy had a lot to say about what it was like to be a woman in the world and instilled in us our first tastes of feminism. Every few weeks she asked for an update on who had gotten their periods and would retell us the story of how she thought she was dying when she first got her’s, and how her mother slapped her when she found out because that was the tradition. She told us about child prostitution and how truly Orthodox Jews were only supposed to have sex with a sheet that had a hole in it between them. She talked to us about how sexist Judaism was, how men and women were separated in the synagogue by a wall and how our Rabbi was an ignorant prick who had no idea what he was talking about.

When it came to our actual studies, Dorothy was the first person to teach religion as a series of stories, not rules. She was a writer, a published poet in Hebrew, and her perspective intrigued me in a way that I had never felt when it came to religion before. My favorite classes were when we learned how to read, write and speak in Hebrew because she taught it as a language, not a tool for prayer. She approached each letter as a piece of art, like they were little characters in the story of Hebrew. For the first religion was not confined to something I couldn’t see, touch or understand. It was another outlet for my passions of reading, writing and art.
I was even more open to it because my dad was remarrying a woman who was also Jewish. Our shared religion was something that made me feel as if our manufactured family was more connected, and belonged together. When Sue and her four-year-old son, Teddy, moved in and went to services together the first Friday of every month, I finally felt like I was part of a normal family. Even though Dorothy wasn’t my teacher anymore, she was still the only person I wanted to teach me. I took her on as my mentor for all aspects of my life, especially writing. I showed her my work and she would give me things to read in return, especially the works of women writers like ourselves. The exchange was accompanied with life lessons, stories of her past and a listening ear to whatever troubles I was going through. Whenever I spent time with her I became her daughter and she became my mother, roles both of us were endlessly seeking out.

Within a year of my dad and Sue’s wedding, Sue was diagnosed with lung cancer and died. My views on religion changed as drastically and abruptly as my life did. I couldn’t have faith in a god who allowed all of these things to happen to me and I fell into a passionate atheism. Sue had become more religious as her sickness progressed and hated seeing me turn away from God. In a letter I was given from her after her death, she pleaded with me not to turn away from religion, no matter what form of it I decided to follow. But I couldn’t believe in it, even then. The only religious symbol I still had faith in was Dorothy. She was consistency, normalcy. She did not let me be weak and encouraged me to work out whatever feelings I had with my writing.

I was thirteen and the time had come for preparations to be made in order for me to have a bat mitzvah, and since I no longer identified with the religion I didn’t think it was fair for me to be put through it. Yet again my dad and I were at odds with religion. At first it was the lure of promised material goods that persuaded me, but I soon also realized it was worth it because it mattered to the people who were most important to me. Not only was it important to my dad, who at this point I would do anything for, but for Dorothy also. Despite her unwavering faith, she was never allowed to have a bat mitzvah because girls weren’t permitted to have them until the late fifties. As the student she had put the most personal effort into, I could not let her down.

Maybe I still didn’t believe in what I was doing, but with each tutoring session with Dorothy I began to find more meaning in the coming-of-age ritual. On November 2, 2002 I stood up in front of the congregation and successfully completed my bat mitzvah. I did become a woman that day, and Dorothy had been there with me along every step of that journey.

The Train Tracks

2009-02-26T20:23:00.000-08:00

My dad loves trains. I have been going on old steam-engine train rides with him my whole life. Now, I can't help but love them too, if only for the memories attached.Written December 2008

The Train Tracks
The thing about fathers is, they all have their signature hobby that is ingrained in their character as much as the way they keep their facial hair, or how they choose to conduct disciplinary tactics. There was the father who spent every day when he was not out in his State Trooper cruiser touring the local golf courses. There was the father, who could tell you anything you needed to know about any kind of fish, especially of the Sturgeon family. There was the father who caught those fish, with whom I spent my one and only day of fishing. Then there was my father, who loved everything there ever was to love about trains.

Like a collection of old baseball trophies lovingly kept in pristine condition since the college years, my dad’s model train table sat as a beacon of awe and wonderment in his office downstairs. It was the symbol of Dad’s Space, a space kept very separated from the rest of the house, both physically and figuratively. Whenever I ventured down there to visit, it felt as if I were being invited into an exclusive club and the train table was the center of it all in my eyes and, despite being the one toy amongst filing cabinets and drafting tools, the thing I was most afraid to touch.

Some nights I would find my dad at his desk, his work papers pushed to the side, peering down through the magnifying light at a model building he was constructing to add to the table. I would stand by his side as he gingerly attached the little plastic roof to the little plastic hotel and wait patiently for my turn to affix the sticker labeling it as such, which would without fail, no matter how steady I kept my fingers, get stuck on at a slight angle.

On rare special occasions, my dad would even turn on the table, making the trains jolt into action and the lights of the town flicker on. I would get to arrange the people and the cars, as well as flick the switch on the intersections of the tracks to decide the path of travel the toy engine would take. I stood at attention for the often-required responsibility of carefully placing the train back on the tracks when it became derailed on a particularly sharp turn. I didn’t even mind so much that I wasn’t allowed to play with it on my own, because these were special times that I knew I alone shared with my dad.

I don’t think my dad could tell you exactly why he loves trains so much. I think it is a question most train enthusiasts would be stuck on. So it was doubly odd that I, through osmosis really, began to appreciate old steam engines as well. It was an interest that was, in a sense, forced upon me and eventually accepted, a feat which few parents can claim they have accomplished. It was an unspoken rule that if our family were to encounter an opportunity to visit a train museum or take a train ride on our travels, that we would stop. It was my dad’s treat for enduring children’s museums and amusement parks (a deal which was later replaced with fashion exhibits and certain designers’ stores).

The most commonly visited Train Mecca was Strasburg, Pennsylvania, a pit stop on our way home from Hershey Park or Philadelphia. It boasted the Railroad Museum, a train ride, and the Choo Choo Barn, which held a large collection of elaborate model trains. At the museum, we would wander through the huge hangers displaying old train cars, engines and cabooses. They were the trains that made history and we could scramble around the cars like jungle gyms. I, being a timid child, would always get shoved out of the way to play with the controls by the other kids, who always seemed angry that their parents had brought them there. But eventually I would make my way up there, with the gentle urging of my dad, and carefully test out the levers and buttons, somehow still smelling of grease and soot.

Then, once my dad had decided he’d seen enough or had reached his tolerance of my whining, we would make our way to the railroad where a sprawling, shiny black train awaited us. A conductor would collect our tickets and yell “all aboard!” (yes, really) and with a great resounding whistle that would bring a thrill to anyone with a heartbeat, the engine lurched forward to make its winding way through the forest. I would get the window seat, of course, and watch as the landscape rolled by.
My dad made the effort to make our train trips rewarding for me with a visit to the gift shop at the end. I’m sure I collected most of the Thomas the Train paraphernalia available at the time, as well as a handful of wooden train whistles and a kid’s conductor’s cap which, judging from old photographs, I voluntarily wore outside of our train excursions. But in all honesty, I genuinely enjoyed our time spent on trains together. I think I was genetically programmed to do so. Maybe it was just the time spent with my dad, but I found myself looking forward to our visits to all the working railroads we could find in the Northeast. I even picked out my favorite historic railroads; the Reading Railroad (because I like to read, of course) and the Chesapeake Railroad, for its cute sleeping kitten logo. An old fashioned tin sign of each hung on my bedroom wall for a long time.

There was something about the sound and the rumble of a train in motion that reminded me of being taken on car rides when I was very young just to get me to go to sleep. It was well suited for letting my mind wander. I had always had a fascination of times long gone, and when I was riding on those old trains I could allow myself to easily be transported back in time. As we’d roll on I’d make up stories in my head that took place on trains back when they were the main mode of transportation, back when ladies always wore dresses (and, more importantly, hats and gloves). I was always one of these ladies, well-to-do and on an important journey, sometimes to meet my husband, sometimes on my way to take care of important business matters.

If I had a notebook with me, I would write these stories down as we passed through the scenery, paying particularly close attention to what I was writing when we were crossing a bridge. If we had brought someone with us closer to my age, I would try to get them to participate in live versions of these games, often to no avail. One of the few home movies we’ve managed to save is of a train ride in Maine with my older cousin where I, clutching my beloved stuffed bunny that accompanied me everywhere for most of my early life, was doing just that.

It was truly the potential for stories that captured my imagination with trains. One of the most memorable rides was one where the conductor stopped the train in the middle of a valley. He had been narrating the trip, which I always preferred, and paused his historical speech to tell us a ghost story. I immediately perked up, being of the age where I first started my fascination with the supernatural. He told us to be careful, claiming that the valley we were chugging through was haunted with a ghost train and if we were to call to the train, sometimes it would call back. He shushed us all and blew the whistle, and from the far edges of the trees came a soft whistle back moments later. I was just young enough to believe that it was more than simply an echo, and watched out the window with a bit more trepidation for the rest of the ride. This prompted a series of drafts of a haunted train story, all of which uncannily resembled The Murder on the Orient Express.

The last steam engine train ride I took was when my dad and I were on vacation in Maui. It was the Sugar Cane Train, which snaked along the coastline on the same route the trains made everyday while in service to carry the harvested sugar cane to the mills. I was in my early teenage years and was under the impression that I was too cool for trains by now and I was really only tagging along in an indulgence to my father. Yet, sure enough, as soon as the whistle blew and I could feel the wheels churning beneath me, I breathed a sigh of relief. I happily settled in to stare out at the ocean, my mind already starting to form stories about a surfer girl making her way home from a long day at the sugar mills (what a surfer girl was doing working at the sugar mills, I couldn’t even begin to tell you).

Perhaps it’s just for nostalgia’s sake, or maybe I really did get bitten with the train bug that I share with so many old men, but I’ll always get a little flutter of excitement as I step onto a train, any train. Even the Metro-North Railroad, whose route I’ve almost memorized from so often journeying into New York City (sometimes to go to those fashion exhibits and designer stores). Even the T in Boston or the subway in New York gives me a similar sense of satisfaction. A ride on a train simultaneously holds the comfort of the past, and the thrill of the new. My fantasies of traveling in Europe always include transit on those much-lusted after trains that enthusiasts hold in high regard, spitting upon the likes of Amtrak. In these daydreams I may be celebrating my independence and adulthood, but when I’m on a train I will always first and foremost be that little girl riding next to her dad, holding her bunny and timing her toy whistle to match the real thing.

My Date With Doonan

2009-02-26T20:10:00.000-08:00

When Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barney's, visited Boston on his book tour for Eccentric Glamour I simply had to go. But what does one wear when they're meeting such a fashion icon? Written February 2008.

My Date With Doonan
I had been anxiously anticipating meeting Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barney's Department Stores and overall style guru, ever since I first heard about his pit stop in Boston a month ago. He was touring for his newly released book, Eccentric Glamour, and that title was exactly the reason I had been loving him and all his fabulousness for the past four years. I was dressed in my Girl-Takes-A-Trip-To-Barney's Best: my little black dress, sheer black tights and my oh-so-sexy red high heels with black lace. I thought I was looking pretty good, and the homeless men seemed to agree. As I teetered on the T ride over to Copley I imagined myself sitting in a crowd of Boston socialites and fashion industry wannabes captivated by the ever charming distinguished gentleman we had all been turning to for the latest advice in style. Simon would be up at the podium reading selections from his book and dishing about fashion in his wonderful British accent while we admired from afar, later scrambling to buy his book and wait in line for it to get signed. In the press I had been reading about the book I was relieved to hear his promising message: “say no to ho!” Be yourself, be eccentric, be glamorous. Exactly what I had been trying to achieve all along.

I finally made it to Barney's after winding my way through the breathtaking mall at Copley. I could see the signs exclaiming Simon's visit and as I paused to look around for someone to direct me to his book reading I was startled to see that he was standing a few feet from me. He was standing behind a table in a dark purple crushed velvet suit with a flowerly white and blue shirt and silver-framed glasses perched on top of his head talking to. I was shocked; when they said “come meet Simon Doonan!” they really did mean come meet him. I was not at all prepared to actually talk face to face with the man for more than the standard small talk at book signings I was used to.

Not to mention that my fabulous self had barely survived the journey. My poor ankles, which had grown accustomed to the flats of winter, were visibly shaking trying to support my weight in my now-cursed six inch heels. My hair, which had been chicly tousled before, was now just plain messy, and my skin was sweaty and blotchy from the unexpected heat and added exercise of walking in my damned shoes. Ladies reeking of Chanel and Hermes were pushing past me, as I was now awkwardly rooted in the busy doorway. The girl at the table was wearing a prim white collared shirt tucked into a high waisted navy blue pencil skirt and Balenciaga flats that I recognized from last month's Vogue. She was twirling her red hair talking to Simon about her PR plans she was pursuing once she graduated high school. Once she graduated high school. Cooler and younger than me, one of my most detested combinations.

I was sighing thinking that maybe I should just turn around and go home before I made a fool of myself. But then I caught sight of the book poster again. Eccentric Glamour. I scoffed remembering that I was planning on being the next poster girl for eccentric glamour and if there is one thing that is most important to remember for this is to have confidence in your look no matter what. And, judging from my straggled appearance compared to Simon's clean-cut one, he didn't even know from eccentric! I straightened myself up trying to think it's just Simon Doonan, creative director of Barney's and overall style guru. This wasn't Anna Wintour, this wasn't even Sarah Jessica Parker. I could do this.

An over-friendly salesman helped me purchase the book and as I fumbled with every step of the transaction, my voice already shaking and my words jumbling, all a foot away from the man himself, I began to think I should just toddle away now before I accidentally shattered the immaculate display of perfume bottles behind him or tripped and pulled his pants down with me. But since there was no one else waiting to see Simon he was now looking at me and my book expectantly with an intimidatingly bored expression and a Sharpie in hand. Get yourself together, will you? I stuck my hand out and smiled, “hi! I'm Celeste. It's so nice to meet you!” Finally a grin broke out on his face for the first time, I realized, since I had arrived. He shook my hand and said “well hello there, Celeste. I'm Simon Doonan. Would you like me to sign your book? I don't think I've ever signed a book to a Celeste before, what a pretty name!”

I slid the book across the table to him and as I watched him sign it in a gigantic, flowing script, it truly hit me that I now had the opportunity to shoot the shit with Simon Doonan. He handed the book back to me and I watched him study my outfit with scrutiny. I didn't have the time to fret about whether the particular squint in his eyes was positive or not, instead I asked, “what's it like writing for Elle? I've been wanting to write for them for years, I think they're my favorite magazine.” And so, for the next fifteen minutes, I had a bona fide conversation with Simon Doonan. We discussed writing for fashion, the magazine industry, internships. He was impressed by my list of favorite designers but said, with a wink, that the correct answer would have been designers that were sold in Barney's. I told him, that thanks to his appearance on America's Next Top Model, I knew all of the good places to drag my dad to when we visited London. We gabbed a little about his interview with Madonna which was published in the latest issue of Elle.

Near the end of the conversation he pointed to my neck and said, “by the way, I really like your necklace. What does it mean?” My hand instinctively shot up to the pendant, my fingers rubbing the smooth ceramic surface. “Oh, my boyfriend got it for me. It essentially loosely translates to Celeste.” His eyes lit up, “that's fantastic!” I nodded, smiling. Of course it was the necklace, which I wear everyday without thought, which is the least flashy but the most sentimental part of my outfit, that really grabs his attention. It's not the flattering black dress, the stylish tights, the sexy shoes, it is the part that is totally and completely uniquely me.

I clutch my book to my chest like a schoolgirl and say, “well, I guess I'm off then, Simon,” smiling inwardly at me addressing him like an old friend. “Bye now!” he says. I turn to walk away and Simon shouts after me, “oh! And the tattoo as well! Stars! Celeste! I love it! I love it!”

Foghorn Dreams

2009-02-26T20:02:00.000-08:00

This story follows the train of thought as a girl comes to terms with an assumed pregnancy. This is interspersed with flashbacks of the events in her life that have affected her view on her situation. Written February 2008

Foghorn Dreams
She turns the rock over in her hands, worn smooth by the waves dragging the stones back towards the ocean, urging them to join it again. They try to resist the temptation but they give in inch by inch until they are returned to the sea, coddled by the swirling water. With each step the rocks creak against each other, weary of travel. The sunbathing spiders scatter as they sense the shifting of the stones, reluctantly returning to the dark crevices they claim as home. She comes to this beach because it is the only place where she can be alone, alone with the stones and the spiders and the waves urging her to join them.

The perpetual fog obscures the horizon and that other world seems even farther away. She has only these stones, and this ocean, and that fog and after that, nothing. Time is marked only by the steady droning of the foghorn, a melancholy old man warning her not to crash. It makes her drift in and out of consciousness. The pine trees at the edges of the beach lean towards her in a comforting gesture, reminding her that, even if all else fails, the island will be there for her.

She sits and automatically begins to sort the stones by color. She has yet to find anywhere else in the world where there are purple stones, green stones, yellow stones; an unending array of color as if an artist has individually painted them all. A perfectly rounded black specimen catches her eye and she finds that it fits perfectly in her hand. It makes her feel maternal.

She clutches at her stomach. Her fingers let the rock tumble from her hand and she figures it's time to stop playing with stones like a child. A spider lazily crawls across her foot and perches on her toes where it can bask in the most sunlight.

“Mommy, why did Daddy get so mad when I jumped into his lap today?” She had asked after being roughly sent away from her father's office, where she had tried to leap up into his chair with him to better see the endless figures he was writing in his books. Her mother had invited her up into the wheelchair with her, which she climbed gingerly, to explain. “Well, honey, there are a few differences between a girl's body and a boy's body, and boy's laps are very sensitive and they can be hurt very easily there.” She had nodded but hadn't quite understood what she had just learned.
Her mother had always been a mystery to her. She was always attached to creepy machines as if she wasn't quite human enough. Sometimes she had hair, and sometimes she didn't. She would play piano only at night and every now and then she would leave for a few days and come back with different machines. But her mother was also the holder of such fascinating and important knowledge such as this, and for that she knew she was important.

She winces at the pinching she feels deep inside her. She can imagine it floating around peacefully, completely ambivalent. Perhaps she envies it, the closest thing to nonexistence. She begins to picture it as the spider on her toe, crawling frantically around the lining of her uterus. The image sends her shivering and she kills the spider with a rock. Immediately she regrets it and she scrambles to her feet, wanting to distance herself from the smashed corpse. The spiders that had come to the surface again in her stillness flee.

She approaches the water's edge tentatively. It is the first few tantalizing days of Spring in the North Atlantic and the water would be cold. She gazes out upon the ocean, squinting into the fog trying to imagine what would be just beyond it. The silhouette of an old fishing ship was approaching the weir off to the right. The foghorn was singing for him but she is sure of the captain's familiarity with the waters of the island. He had learned to steer that ship when he was young from his father, just as his father had done before that. It was what people did here; they got trapped in it. But if it wasn't for them the island wouldn't exist.

Her friendly waving is futile, but every now and then it's nice to encounter another human presence there. She wonders if he has children to pass the tradition on to. She can picture him clearly; a full gray beard but a lack of hair on his shining red head, denim overalls tucked into yellow Wellies, a rounded belly from eating too much of his catch. He lives in a modest cedar house which has long since turned gray from the salty air, and it overlooks the ocean where he spends his days. His wife rises from the armchair where she has been knitting to greet him each evening and asks him what he'd like to have for dinner that night. At this point their son would wander home after a day of adventures on the shore. He would be gently scolded for his missing sneakers and dirty feet but his misbehavior would be soon forgiven. The son would produce the treasures he had collected that day from his pockets to present to his mother, and she would pick out her favorites and place them in the vase on the windowsill where she collects such things.

She places her hand gently on her stomach. It sounded nice.

The thing she hated most was to see her last name carved into the granite. It made it all too easy to picture her next, respectfully placed next to her mother, who was buried next to her mother, who was buried next to hers. They had all buried each other earlier than they had ever expected. And their daughters had watched them cry there for the first time. A somber row of motherless mothers.

With trembling fingers she placed a pebble on each gravestone's rough top edge. Her heart ached at the relative lack of pebbles on her family's stones. She envied the surrounding plots that had so many tokens of visitation that they spilled off the top and collected in little piles by the base. She looked around and, finding that she was alone, she returned to the gravel driveway and scooped up a handful to distribute amongst her family.

They had never intended to be reduced to this so soon and yet without fail they succumbed to the illness within a few years of giving birth. It was a pattern she was surprised to discover had been so ignored. But she was smarter than them all, she had discovered the secret. She would never have children, and therefore she would never die.

After a few minutes of watching the silhouette fade in and out of the fog she begins to question if the ship was even there. She dares to slip her foot out of her sandal and tests the water. The island has the most dramatic tide in the entire world; in only a few minutes the ocean will be ten feet away from her and her feet won't even remember being wet. The drastic change is more realistic, it does not creep gradually into a new existence. She likes that about this beach.

She turns and walks up to where the ocean does not reach the rocks. They are larger and sharper there; the jagged edges poke through the soles of her feet. Even the spiders prefer the smoother stones. She tests her endurance and is pleased to discover she has maintained the agility of her youth. It reminds her of walking the balance beam as she steadily places each step. She picks her way around tangled litter and plant debris, emptied crab shells from seagull feasts.

She balances on a boulder that seems randomly thrown onto the beach from the cliffs farther down the island. As she surveys the landscape she feels herself obtaining the boulder's haughtiness and straightens her posture. She begins to think of what it would be like to bring her daughter here. It would be a daughter, of course, all of her life she has expected nothing else. She would stand at this same post in order to keep on eye on her daughter's every move. The girl would make pictures with the colored rocks as well, stack them tall and throw them into the ocean. She would chase the waves and run screaming as they chased her back. Her daughter would bring a branch out of the woods and smack at the spiders, swelling with all the power.
She is beginning to like the sound of that phrase. She takes a seat atop the boulder and looks to the ocean, scanning the horizon for the boat. “My daughter.”

It had been the first time she had experienced what it would be like to be a mother. The baby was not hers, would never be hers, but everyone insisted she hold it because she was a woman now. She was surprised that her arms naturally curved around it the right way, she knew to keep the head slightly higher than the feet. It was sleeping and didn't struggle to free itself from her. It didn't cry out for its true mother. In its sleep it felt safe in her arms.

She was fascinated by the smoothness of its skin and kept running her thumb back and forth along its arm. It moved its other hand to grab her thumb, its entire grasp barely making it around its width. Suddenly she was overwhelmed by the miracle this baby was. She stared wide-eyed down at it and her heart lurched. When its mother abruptly took it back she had looked up at her with shock and hurt. Her arms remained outstretched. They felt empty.

Yes, she can imagine it so clearly now. She pictures the lovely yellow room that would be the baby's. She would sit in an armchair like the fisherman's wife and knit while the baby sleeps, gazing over at her now and again to remind herself that it was she who brought that life into the world. She would bring back smaller stones from this beach so the baby can hold them in her hand and feel safe. She would wind up the music box her father had given her when she was a baby for her daughter to fall asleep too, and perhaps she would attempt to sing along.

She cradles her slightly rounded stomach and lets herself believe she can feel something growing beneath her hands. The tide has gone out now and has left behind what the waves had been concealing. Among the collection of logs and plastic bags there are the remains of an artful pile of rocks in the distance. The artist had created a base of red rocks and then had moved on to purple. Black stones were next and then green. She can not tell how high the original structure was but even the slumped left-overs reach an impressive height. She smiles as she imagines its construction. Now she is inclined to believe that that this was a father-daughter effort. A father would want to build something with his daughter, the daughter would want to make it pretty. They appear suddenly before her and they are her daughter and her father and it is a comforting scene.

He sat up after the amount of time he deemed necessary to lie by her side afterwards. She was wrapped in a sheet on her side staring at the wall, her mind already on the island where she would be returning to the next day. He had been leaning over for awhile. Admiring himself as always, she thought. The scratches she had left on his back made her want to pull him back down to her. She struggled to lift herself up to a sitting position and kissed the back of his shoulder, making him jump.

“Fuck,” he muttered, not turning to face her. Immediately she knew what had happened. Suddenly she was too aware of her nakedness. She jumped up off the bed and struggled to collect her scattered clothes. He remained in his catatonic state staring at her with fearful eyes that followed her every movement. She turned away from him as she put her bra back on. “What...what are you going to do?” He asked, his voice barely audible. She struggled to keep the sheet up as she whirled around to face him. “Jesus Christ, what the fuck do you think I'm going to do?”

The foghorn is beginning to slow its steady pace. She decides it is now time to leave her beach and return to her little summer cabin. She rises from her perch on the boulder and brushes the dirt off her jeans. She is surprised to discover that the back of her pants are wet. She looks down at the boulder curiously and then at her hands.

Her fingers are stained red.

Separation

2009-02-26T19:55:00.000-08:00

Awhile ago I embarked on a project of creating stories inspired by paintings of my favorite artists. It didn't last more than a few stories, of course, but this one was my favorite. It's inspired by this Edvard Munch painting, Separation.I was hoping to match the mood more than the story. Written November 2007

Separation
Lydia leaned on the wooden counter top, her coffee mug warm in her hands, staring out the window at her backyard. She had taken to the early mornings the past few days, the haze in the air soothing her, the quiet finally giving her time to breathe. She inhaled and exhaled deeply, the gust of breath forming a fog on the glass obscuring, briefly, the pink sky. Her diaphanous white nightgown danced about her legs as the breeze blew in through the screen door, the fresh air filling her lungs. She chased the cool air down with the hot coffee and shivered.

She sensed the shifting of the wood panels beneath her bare feet. They had not made a sound, but she had come to know the house's every movements, she did not have to look to see that Ed was awake. She turned, bracing herself against the counter. He rarely slept anymore. Instead he laid in bed for hours staring blankly into nothingness, ignoring all of Lydia's efforts to interact with him. He was standing in the far corner of the kitchen, his arm crossed across his body rubbing his other arm. He was staring through her and, while Lydia would have loved the reflection of her body in his eyes before, her stomach lurched at his gaze.

She could see it from there; the grotesque purple ring around his neck, the black spiderwebs from where the cord had cut into his skin. She wanted to look at him and think of him as he had been, but now all she could see was the silhouette of his body hanging from the rafters in their bedroom, his head hanging down in shame, his skin glistening with sweat. He had crumpled when he hit the floor after she had chopped the cord, mindlessly shouting useless words at him. She couldn't bring herself to touch him as she knelt down, continuing to scream at him in a panic. Thankfully his neck hadn't broken. Out of her own body she had somehow managed to find a phone, blindly dial and alerted the operator of the emergency. As the phone fell from her fingers he had turned to her, opened his eyes, saw her.

“Are you hungry? I can make you breakfast.” Lydia was silently pleading with him to reply. It had been so long since she had heard him speak unfettered by tubes and drugs and weariness. He looked down. Her pulse rising she began to take slow steps across the floor, her feet aware of every crack and curve and nail of the wood they landed on. She stopped before him, her eyes searching his. She watched the expansion of his chest with every breath, thankful for it. Her hand trembling she reached for his face and gently placed it against his cheek. The energy of contact shot through her. “Will you say something, please?”

Ed looked at her, wishing to see again the brilliance of her lips. But she, as with everything around her, was a faded watercolor. What was she even doing there, with him? If she had never been there, never seen him, he would have succeeded. He would not have to be standing here on this hard floor feeling every cursed breath course through him. He looked into her eyes, heavy with water, knowing she thought he loved her more for this. Her hand was pulsing with warmth, he could feel the blood rushing in and out of her veins.

It reminded him of his own hands. He looked down at them, stretching his fingers slightly. They could tie knots. They could tie knots in electrical cords, they could tie knots in silk scarves around Lydia's wrists. It was the first part of him that felt powerful in a long time. Slowly he lifted his hand, watching Lydia's eyes follow its path. He wanted to place his fingers on the bulbous ridge around his neck. He wanted to put his hand around her neck and make it the same color as his. Gently he placed it on Lydia's cheek. A tear cascaded down his finger.

Reanna's Closet

2009-02-26T19:41:00.000-08:00

When I was growing up in a small college town in upstate New York, many people and places that were part of the town became very important to me. My friends and I particularly took to a thrift store called Reanna's Closet and one of its employees, Barry, who introduced us to concepts we had never quite understood before. Written January 2009

Reanna's Closet
The thrift store was one room jutting out of an apartment house building, aptly named Reanna’s Closet as if it were truly a walk-in cut off from the rest of the house. It was what our parents called “funky,” the paint left to chip, the walls decorated with vintage Playboy covers and concert posters, the ambience accented by dusty disco-balls and movie memorabilia. Clothes and accessories were packed along every wall, except for one section which housed the incense and pipes display that all stores in our holdover hippie town possessed.

When we were in middle school, Reanna’s Closet went overlooked in lieu of name brands from the mall our parents drove us to every few months. Upon entering high school we became free spirits and wanted to wear clothing that our parents called “out-there.” That was when we started noticing the little store with the hand painted sign and eccentrically dressed mannequins in the window. That was when our allowances stopped being spent on snacks and started covering random pieces of secondhand clothing around which we built our new styles.

Our biweekly excursions to wander around town always included a trip to our new haunt. In accordance with the small-town-feel, the handful of employees tolerated our games of dress-up, and in no time even looked forward to our visits. There was only one man who worked there. His name was Barry and he was short and had a slight bend to his spine. Even though he wore large eighties glasses that turned his eyes beady and an oversized blue windbreaker that hung to his knees, we trusted him with style advice. For our first formal school dance, one of us wanted to buy a full length prom dress but hadn’t quite developed enough to fill it out yet. Barry showed us tricks on how to fake it and we made a friend for life.

Barry joined the cast of characters we would shout hellos to when we saw him shuffling along the streets, like the poet and the deli owner and other elders we thought deserved our respect. He was choosy about when he tolerated us, sometimes snapping at us to “buy something or get out.” He usually didn’t greet us when we arrived, but would sit behind the counter watching us sort through the racks until he couldn’t take it. He’d rush over to us saying “oh honey, no” before ripping a disastrous sequined tank top from one of our hands and pointing us in the direction of a well-worn corduroy blazer instead.

Even in a town as open-minded as ours, Barry would get looks. Other customers would raise eyebrows when he’d join us in the dressing room upon our reveals, seating himself on the velvet shoe-shaped chair to pass judgment on the outfits we had put together. Although we didn’t really know why, we had the feeling that it was okay for Barry, unlike other older men, to give us advice on how to flaunt our best assets.

It was a tired Saturday and our group had split up. The others were loitering along Main Street while I took a trip to Reanna’s by myself. I was wearing a hat with a brim the width of a pterodactyl’s wingspan and stomping around in vinyl platform heels a few sizes too big when I spotted the most hideous pair of pants crumpled in the dollar bin. At first I recoiled, but then my mind started whirring with inspiration. The pants began to rip apart and reconstruct themselves and suddenly the pattern, which would do terrible things to one’s legs, seemed absolutely perfect for a bag. Grabbing the heinous pants I stumbled over to the counter and threw them down like a bet in a high-stakes card game.

Barry was working that day. He slowly raised his eyes over the top of his tabloid and stared at the pants and then at me. “You have got to be kidding me.” I pulled a crumpled dollar bill out of my duct-tape wallet. “Don’t worry; I’m just using the fabric to make a bag.” His eyebrows rose as he tapped a few buttons on the register and the drawer shot open. “Interesting,” he said, drawing out the word, “you’ll have to come show me when it’s finished.”

That weekend we were all staying at our friends’ house, the one family in town where you could find a framed photograph of George and Laura Bush on the mantelpiece. It made us a little nervous to be there, but every time we came over her mom would make us the most delicious spreads of food so we learned to keep our mouths shut.
We were sitting around the dinner table trading hugely edited stories from our trips to town. Her parents sat at either end of the table with stern faces, knowing full well what details we thought we were cleverly keeping out. I decided that sharing my project of reconstructing the pants was safer territory but halfway though my explanation her dad leaned forward with fists on the table and interrupted.
“You know your little friend from the clothing store has AIDS, right?” We all knew what this was a euphemism for, he might as well have shouted “faggot” across the table, and our friend started crying because she hated when her parents showed their true colors. All of us were shifting in our seats grasping for a way to change the conversation but I was floored, my hand frozen in scooping up mashed potatoes.
“Wait, is Barry really sick?”

“Of course he is,” her mother snapped, “why would he joke about something like that?”
I knew the only way to know for sure was to ask the mother who was driving the few of us who all lived on the same road home. She didn’t work so instead she spent her days on the phone with her two best friends, one who worked in the middle school and knew all the gossip about the kids in our town, and one who served on many boards who knew all the gossip about the adults. She spent her evenings shuttling us around in her Volvo, which always smelled like pine air freshener even though there was no little cardboard tree in sight.

“Does Barry really have AIDs?” I asked, making eye contact with her in the rearview mirror. “Yes,” she said, “he’s been sick for a very long time.”
I was subdued into silence. We had learned about the disease in seventh grade health class. It had always been scientific terms we couldn’t make much meaning of. It had always been before our time in needle-sharers in the eighties and thousands of miles away in the villages of Africa. It had always been statistics and reports on the news. But it was never here in our lives, and our town, and our consciousness. Never would we imagine it to be a friend we bought a Christmas card for.

The next time I returned to Reanna’s Closet, finished bag in hand, I looked at Barry and I didn’t want to see it, so I didn’t see it. I laid the bag out on the counter with a proud smile and after a few moments to register what he was looking at, Barry brightened up. “Well, well, aren’t you little miss Louis Vuitton?” he chirped, tenderly picking it up to examine my work. “This isn’t bad, this is really quite clever.” He looked up at me and smiled a rare smile, “you know, if you’re starting to see the pieces as just fabric, then you need to shop the store completely differently,” and he dragged me around the room pulling items he thought I might be interested in.

We were piling on the loads of costume jewelry when the owner broke the news to us that she was moving to Florida and selling the property. It had been two years since we had first entered Reanna’s Closet, which, we joked, was really just Our Closet, and now by the end of the summer it would be just an empty space.

We tried to present her with handwritten contracts signing over the ownership to us, but it was met with only a smile and an offer to pick out a piece of the store to claim as a sort-of souvenir. A few weeks later I walked out with my last Reanna’s Closet purchase, a pair of black suede ankle boots, and the dusty disco ball I would always spin as I passed beneath it to get to the dressing room.

Two years later, with only a few months left of truly living in our town, we didn’t feel so connected with anything there. We had lived long enough to see our favorite places disappear. Our stores had gone out of business, our restaurants were under different management, our bench where we would people-watch was torn up and replaced. Even those people that we watched, who we befriended or made up stories for, had changed. Our town had become a holding place instead of a home where we, as adults, were just waiting in to get to the next stages of our lives.

I was sitting in the waiting room of the new medical center in our town for the physical I needed to send off to my college of choice. I used to go to my neighbor’s small family practice that was built on their front lawn, but I decided I was uncomfortable with the idea of a woman I’d known my whole life feeling me up. So I was now asking for a stranger to do it instead.

I kept looking for the toys that the people at my old doctor’s didn’t’ judge me for still playing with, but all I could find was Golf and Parenting magazine so I picked up the latter, wondering how many people would think I was pregnant because of it.
“Well, hello, Barry!” The woman behind the desk said brightly, and my concentration on a debate about homeschooling was broken. He was all the same; same eighties glasses, same blue windbreaker, same shuffle. But as he went to sit down across from me, this time I couldn’t help but see it. His eyes were vacant, his skin papery, his breath labored. The effort of moving the pen to fill out his forms appeared to exhaust him.

He looked up for a moment in thought and met my eyes. I could see them searching me, trying to place me, furious at the fact that he couldn’t figure me out. I held his gaze, urging him to remember, but soon it hurt too much to try. I went back to the magazine but could feel him still watching me.

A nurse burst into the room and called for me. At the sound of my name I saw something in him click and as I rose to follow her he cried, “Wait!” I looked down at him, seeing myself reflected twice in his glasses. I smiled.
After a moment he asked, “How did that bag ever turn out?”
“Great,” I said, my voice cracking, “you should’ve seen it.”