Broken Doll

When I was little my mother still believed that we'd move back to New Orleans and my sister and I would go to Cotillion and take turns being queen of her Mardi Gras krewe. She taught us to behave as if we still lived in that tiny sliver of New Orleans society. Our manners were frighteningly perfect. We knew which fork, knife, spoon and funny shaped doodad to use for every moment of a seven course meal we'd never had. We stood out in Ohio like little Lady Fauntleroys, causing mirth and derision with our straight posture and little white gloves. My dad's family cringed when we visited, having now to put napkins in laps and abandon barehanded eating. It wasn't enough for them that my mom towered above them, at 5'9" -- but she sewed her own knockoffs of designer dresses, first Christian Dior wasp waists, then Halston's Jackie look, and wore them to the farm on Sundays. She thought she was showing respect. They didn't take it the right way at all.

She scoured the Cincinnati area to find a ballet teacher who had the right resume. Ours had been the dance mistress for the Cincinnati Ballet and Miss D often sent pupils to local ballet groups for auditions. I was probably about 11, slender and not gawky enough that you couldn't hide it with makeup and a lot of rehearsal time. Miss D. liked the way I was shaping up, rounding my arms into a tidy oval in fifth position. My biggest flaw was a tendency to grimace in self absorption when performing a series of steps. That and a not so secret detestation of barre exercises. Mom got to the point where she was bribing us with a trip to McDonald's for dinner after class, something her French soul rebelled against I'm sure.

I don't know how my sister and I ended up in a performance of Coppelia with a university dance troupe, but it happened. Ms. D. told us very little, perhaps to keep from making us too nervous, but this wasn't our usual dance review and we all knew it. The role was fairly simple. During the night, the toymaker's shop comes to life, and we were godknowswhat-- little Scotch dolls in red tartan topped tutus and tams. Finally, instead of boring me, ballet was fun. It had a purpose. I learned the piece, I smiled involuntarily when we practiced it. I wanted to be that little Scotch doll finally free of its wooden limbs.

Miss D noticed, and gave me a tiny bit of solo work to do. I would be the doll whose mechanism sprang loose when daylight put the other dolls into a coma. I could pirouette across our segment of the stage and flop down like a rag at the end of the piece. I loved it. Not only could I have a solo, but I could make people laugh. It meant that Miss D. understood me and I would never let go of that feeling.

We rehearsed on the stage the day before, to make sure we all had our marks and timing right. I could see all the empty chairs rising in front of us like an impending wave. Tomorrow the seats would be full. We could put on makeup. We could share the stage with the beautiful Coppelia. Whom I would never be as big or as glamorous as. I didn't mind. I had the only solo of all the students.

It came off better than I thought. I kept waiting to be scared but I wasn't. I should have been shy-- wasn't I always shy? I hesitated to look at the imposing wall of chairs filled with judging faces, as the curtain came up, but they'd disappeared. The stage lights had canceled out the audience. I could pretend we were all alone up there. I can still remember my sister and our classmates watching each other to help keep time as we went through the routine, and then a little explosion of fireworks in my soul as the music drew up on my part and I broke away, keeping my eyes on the invisible audience as my body spun 360s past my collapsed cohort, then the dramatic flop, my legs flying up into the air, tutu over teakettle. And the shock of laughter and applause from the darkness. I lay there on my back and laughed till tears came. It worked. I no longer had to be perfect, as long as I could be funny.

The next year I grew too tall to be in a corps de ballet, and not long after that, my dad had his first heart attack, and mom couldn't afford to send us to ballet classes any more. My mother cried when she realized that now we'd never go back to New Orleans, and my sisters and I would never be presented to society.

The irony that I had learned to love ballet just in time to lose it did not escape me, but what could I do? I was changing diapers for the new baby sister while mom drove back and forth to the hospital to visit dad. It was time to grow up, whatever that meant. For all of us.

Dishonesty corrodes every relationship it touches.

This thought came into my head on the way to work today. I was thinking about a friend who had been dishonest with me once in a while, mostly by omission, but was the kind of person who, even when asked a direct question, would often tell you what you wanted to hear, rather than risk that you might not like the truth. I didn't realize this was going on at first, and then, when I would find out about a little lie, for example, I asked him if he smoked, and he said no; who cares, right? I would just ignore it, I guess. He was one of those people who always make you feel confident and strong: a booster when you're making a personal or career move, the kind of guy who would pay the bill at dinner just because it made him feel good to be generous.

Over time as we grew closer, more important things came to light: he'd cheated on his wife (but, he explained, he was really separated from her, even though they were living in the same house when the events occurred). He'd lied on his resume to get his first job. He'd lied to his fiancee about wanting to have children. There was always a good reason. He was a good friend, I thought, helpful and kind. Other friends liked him a lot, too. They of course, didn't know he was dishonest. He seemed very much the opposite, the kind of guy you would trust to be there for you when things went wrong.

I was so busy trying to believe my own excuses for this guy's behavior that when my pain medication started disappearing, I honestly believed it was someone else in our circle. I asked him directly at one point and he denied it.

"Of course I'd ask you first," he said. So I started hiding them around the house when friends came over, counting them religiously, worrying that I myself was taking them when I didn't need them and just not remembering. I even started keeping a tally on the pill bottle. Then one day I caught him with his hands in the drawer where I had hidden them. :"What are you doing?!" I asked him, nothing, he said and left the room. I counted the pills and sure enough, two were missing. I confronted him about it, and we had a bit of an argument. He admitted he was taking them "recreationally." Even though he knows I have herniated disks that cause me a great deal of pain, and knows that my doctor could cut me off if it looks like I'm taking too many.

He's since apologized, and says that was a "wake up call" for him. I don't know if I can get over that experience. It still makes me angry to think of it. At one point I was afraid it was my son, who was a teenager at the time, or one of his friends taking them. Thank God I never asked. Just imagine what that would have done to the trust relationship between my son and me.

Is it worse I wonder, that he let me distrust not just all my other friends, but my son, or is it worse that he made me question and distrust myself?

And all because this so called friend wanted to have a momentary rush of euphoria when no one was looking. I believe people can change for the better, but I'd be crazy to assume he really has.

I will not be death's handmaiden.

This week's New Yorker talks about hospice care, and reading the article threw me into vivid recollections of losing family members, not just Dad and Jesse, but my grandparents, and my in laws. Although sometimes I feel I've learned so much about coping with tragedy and death, I can't bring myself to seek out more by working in the field. It's hard enough to cope with what I've already faced, for now.

I accidentally 'went off' the Zoloft for a couple of days, and was starting to see Jesse everywhere, to miss my Dad, to cry at Inception, of all things (I know!). So I guess I'm not ready to go raw, pharmacologically speaking. I caught up yesterday, and now I'm a little more vigilant about the evening's ritual. I'm off the Prilosec, trading forbidden food for a smaller handful of medication. And I'm down to only taking melatonin to sleep, which is somewhat a tradeoff, too I guess. Elaborate story-like dreams that seem real because people's faces, and objects and places maintain their visual integrity, but then an escalator ends at a glass wall and I suddenly realize I'm late for a plane but I can't check out of the hotel because there's no front desk at the lobby, only a bar where I talk to my companion, a small child, who is my guide in this crazy world of my own invention.

being from the south, I've learned one must love people despite their beliefs and opinions.

Back to The Europe

We never do guided tours, but we did 2 in Dublin, because we only had a day to ourselves. We chose the historic tour, run by bubbly, wise-cracking Trinity history MAs, and the literary Pub Crawl, run by ironic, wise-cracking Irish actors. From the first we learned that every historical site in Dublin is ironic, except the Post Office (at least since they removed the statue of the Floozy in the Jacuzzi). From the second we learned that nearly every good Irish writer had a side business in enriching the local publicans. We also visited St Stephen's Green which we learned was a terrible place to attempt trench warfare for the first time.

The next day our friends drove us to Powerscourt where we learned that all the really big Irish homes are tainted with English pelf, then climbed Killiney hill, which was breathtaking in every possible way. The only downside is my friend's carriage house is down a narrow alleyway that the local soccer fans consider their personal toilet. And the floors had just been refinished so choose which reason your eyes will water.

The next morning we were in London, living with my friend, whose ethnicity is so specific I won't name it here for fear she'll find this and thrash me; and her extended family, who have made such an art form of family rows that you'd think you were still in Ireland except that 1/3 of the "conversations" are in their local language the name of which I still can't spell. Which I guess means exactly like Ireland, except with better cooking. Occasionally an English term will slip into the middle, like, "I'll chop your head off, sister," or "I'm not going to Nairobi to meet some man." So you can get the gist and laugh at the appropriate moments.

I made up my own walking tours of London and Paris, intended to wear us out completely and see so many historical and scientific sites that without photos we'd have no way to know where we'd been, and without photos of the relevant street signs and wall plaques we'd have no way to remember what's in the rest of the photos. Luckily, since I mapped the route out on my computer, I just have to match the angle of the sun with the point on the route and argue with my husband about what country it was. Couldn't be simpler.

My English friend was an excellent host, and I apologize to her constantly for our being American. Then I remember that we actually argued less than she and her mum did, and I feel a little better. She set up some terrific dinners, not the least of which was the Mango Room (perfect Caribbean in Camden Town), an Ethiopian family restaurant with a whole ritual built around roasting your coffee beans for you, and our final dinner with the extended family in Zanzi Bar, an actual Kenyan-style Indian restaurant. Her mum was in town to browbeat her for not being married, and to attend a cousin's wedding, more or less simultaneously. So this is why we went to Paris.

Paris. Noon. Jesus. I have photos of the sweltering sun that look like Nat Geo travel stills of the Sahara. My Paris migraine started in the Tuileries, which is essentially a big yellow roasting pan with a side of vegetation. Which means KA will be disappointed to know we barely did anything except sleep, but at least it was climatisée. We woke up in time to race to our dinner engagement an hour late (you MUST GO, Josephine Chez Dumonet in Montparnasse). Fortunately I know enough French to explain ourselves and get seated next to a lady suffering from heat stroke with her feet in a bucket of ice, and the kitchen, which I suppose could feasibly be cooler than the dining room, given the situation. No, nobody in Paris has AC except our hotel. Nor do they appear to own or comprehend the concept of box fans. Decently dressed middle class people were sleeping on the footbridge over the Seine, in the Champs de Mars, on balconies, anywhere to catch a breeze.

We walked from the restaurant to Les Invalides to the Champs de Mars/Tour Eiffel across the bridge to the Trocadero, where we discovered that there are NO FUCKING CABS IN PARIS. We walked up the Rue Kleber or Boulevard Kleiber or whatever, passing the same two American tourists sitting on the bench at every taxi stand along the way. At one point we even stopped and chatted with them, partly to determine their existence and maybe perform triage. I was certain when we got to the circus maximus that is the Arc du Triomphe that we could hail a cab there, but no. Apparently they can tell we want a ride, and are determined not to give it to us. Fortunately there's an M11 bus (I know, west side of Manhattan, but there it was), that runs down the Champs Elysée whose bus driver was about to faint from dehydration so he forgot to notice if we paid, which we didn't even know how to do if we'd wanted to. And it ran all the way to our hotel, so when I got out I took a commemorative picture of the sign pointing to the church across the street from us. Did I mention we could see the Louvre outside our window? And the roof of the church? Charmant!

The next day we went to the Louvre and took photos of Michelangelo's pornographic late works. Since my last visit, they've moved the Mona Lisa from the middle of a hallway across from the Raft of the Medusa (where I believe it had been since da Vinci hung it), to the far end of a large room that funnels her enchanted crowds against an outer bullwark suitable for blurry photos and lit like a pickup bar. I got much better shots of the Roman hermaphrodites. And the Venus di Milo, which I took from behind so it looks like she's hunching down embarrassedly in front of a dazzled crowd of Chinese tourists and their guide.

For lunch we got obscenely bourgie at La Coupole where we ordered the two tiered Royale, which is not a burger but an entire section of the bottom of the Mediterranean that will never recover. I believe the American students next to us were pretending not to be terrified, either of the sea life or our appetite for it, not sure which. The waiters were so thrilled that we knew of the existence of the Arenes de Lutece (thanks KA!), that they fell all over themselves to give us directions there, and insisted we walk or we'd miss the Jardin de Luxembourg, which they were right. It was hubby's favorite over the Tuileries, possibly because there was air.

So we had to run to catch a nonexistent cab in order to get to our hotel, pick up our bags and catch another nonexistent cab to the Gare du Nord and the chunnel train home. This is how we were forced to learn about the Paris Metro, which works fine, and may explain why no one is murdering all the cab drivers of Paris.

Our last full day in London involved small children who spoke French, Romanian and English. I wasn't allowed to take them home. Then we were force-marched (my friend has climbed Kilimanjaro twice, and most of the peaks of the Andes) across Kensington to see the World Music Festival. Which worked out ok because I want to climb Kilimanjaro, too and could use the practice, plus the bands were fantastic and I'm downloading all their mp3s. My favorite was a Moroccan band called Boujemaa Bouboul. Go ahead, listen.

After was the much touted dinner at Zanzi Bar. Mum sat at the head of the table and demanded the chef's head be brought to her for making such a disgusting korma. She told the waitress, he makes it this way for white people. Bring him out here and I'll give him my recipe. This just isn't right. And she meant unjust, not inexact. I said to my friend's cousin, so this is essentially a little pot of racism? And they all agreed, more or less. What, asked her mother, do you think makes it so sweet? Sugar? I say, realizing vaguely that I've stumbled into a rhetorical trap. And she nods her head as if I'm Dr. Watson. Luckily the Tusker was cold.

Anyway. We got home in one piece, I can't figure out what to get my friends as thank you gifts, and it's just as hot here as there except it's raining and I want to go back now.