slimvision

[slimvision]

Rainbow

The woman with the glass eye by the swing set said, "Thank God. You're the only other normal person here."

It's a pretty Hasidic playground, if that's what you mean, I thought. She and her escort were swigging out of plastic cups and seemed pretty relaxed. She was wearing pants and her own hair and nails, which definitely put her outside most adults at the playground. We pushed our kids in the swings and did the awkward dance of parenting together, people who don't have backyards. Or at least- we have to share.

So we shared.

"He, you know...her." said the man, and punched himself in the side of the face. I gathered he was speaking of the little girl's biological father.

"It's rough," I said, pushing my own daughter, nervous about the court date. The last one was a fiasco. My ex had sat there cool and calm in a suit. His lawyer is wrapped around his littler finger, not the first woman he's manipulated into thinking he's a victim. My lawyer was twenty minutes late, and I had never even met her.

"She's so pretty," said the woman with the glass eye, looking at my daughter, misty-eyed. Her daughter, leggy and bespectacled, watched us. "What's your favorite color?" I asked her.

"Rainbow," she said.

[slimvision]

We live in a rainbow of chaos.

Paul Cezanne

[slimvision]

Everywhere

"I don't really think of myself as a Mom," I said, sweeping the debris of my daughter's lunch from the floor.

My friend Queenie gave me the pursed, withering look she usually reserves for men. "Ok," she said. "Well...you are. A Mom. You're a good one."

I laughed. Seemed like just yesterday I was texting the group chat where we worked I was smoking crack with strangers in Coney Island in the snow if anyone wanted to join. No one had, including the two managers I had forgotten were on the group chat.

I don't do that anymore. I don't need to. Things are trippy enough around here at the house. Just the other day, I was brushing my teeth trying to collect my thoughts and a tiny person carrying a tiny pink guitar padded past the bathroom door, belly first, blowing raspberries. Who is this little person in my house? I asked my reflection in the mirror before spitting bloody toothpaste into the sink, charmed as hell.

She is fierce and she is cozy and if you ask her her name she doesn't say it, she yells it in triumph. My favorite picture taken of her is a sonogram and you can see a little smile, as if she knew she'd gotten away with something (she had.) She loves the glittering intro to the song Everywhere by Fleetwood Mac. Her eyes, unlike mine or her fathers, are blue as milk glass, and like mine, have that spark, that can lead you everywhere, including Coney Island.

Right now, she is with me everywhere, including the bathroom. "I have to be allowed to pee!" I said to her, while she wailed outside the bathroom door for me, even though we'd spent the entire morning joined at the hip. When I opened the door, no time even to wash hands, she wiped her snot nose. "Pee," she grinned. A new word. I clapped and clapped.

We have no money but we do live in New York. I take her to museums, graveyards and parks. I want to be with her everywhere.

[slimvision]

Fifth-century mosaic from the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna.

[slimvision]

At first, you can't believe him, he's so odd, and then you want to carry him around with you always in your pocket.

Humphrey Bogart on Truman Capote

[slimvision]

Mysteries

When I was very small, my mother told me that if I started praying a rosary and couldn't finish it, or messed it up, my guardian angel would fix it for me. I still believe this.

I haven't decided what I'm going to tell my daughter about it, but I will probably tell her the same. I pray a rosary at night, I try to every night, no matter how late I come home from the club, even if it's as she's getting up. The beads click and she stirs a little sometimes, in the soft dark with me, my breath in her hair.

My mother prayed rosaries in the dark when we were in England together, when I was pregnant and neither of us knew.

I wonder if it was her guardian angel, or mine, or my daughter's, that urged me to buy the prenatal vitamins in the British supermarket. I stood in line, feeling ridiculous, and almost put them back, but I bought them for no reason, and started taking them daily, sometimes washing them down with coffee, sometimes with red wine.

I bought a witch hat in a little store for Halloween, and my mother and I walked arm and arm over the cobblestones, under the full moon, listening to church bells.

It wasn't until November, when the little pill packet was almost done, that the double pink line appeared.

[slimvision]

I don't pray, really, because I don't want to bore God.

Orson Welles

[slimvision]

Killer Instincts

The worst is when it's all right there in front of you, obvious and black and white, so obvious that even your best friends have started calling you a dumb bitch.

Option one: 20-something, devoted, rich, polite, handsome. Tennis, Martha's Vineyard, treated his mother like gold.

Option two: forty-something, serial misogynist, unemployed, rude, rugged. Pool, Ocean City New Jersey, didn't often speak to his mother.

Of course the sparks flew with option two. Who wasn't even an option. Instincts stink.

[slimvision]

Instinct must be thwarted, just as one prunes the branches of a tree so that it will grow better.

Henri Matisse

[slimvision]

Holy Grails, White Whales

Weird the things you want when you're a little kid. I wanted dangly earrings more than anything, neon pencils with erasures that looked like they glowed, a clear phone with colored wires, Barbies, and to go to school so I could have friends. Mostly I just wanted to be at the party. And I wanted to write.

What does my daughter want? When I hold her tiny hand at night I know full well that she's parenting me in a lot of ways. She even boops me on the nose with her little pointer finger as if to say "gotcha. Silly." I change the pants and do the dishes sure but that's just physical maintenance stuff. In the realm of psychological and spiritual energy she is absolutely parenting me.

No one wants their kid to grow up with less than what they had. But if time is relative and money is just a video game, why not just have as many kids as possible? Because what's more fun with less people?

[slimvision]

People say I am stuck in childhood, but it's not that. I remember seeing a Matisse retrospective, and you could see he started out one way, and then he tried something different, and then he seemed to spend his whole life trying to get back to the first thing.

Tim Burton

[slimvision]

Christina's World

It would've been 2005 or 06, when we were living in Jamaica Queens, four of us in a two bedroom. Christina's World, the spooky, spacey prairie scene of the lone, broken woman in a flimsy pink dress, apparently trying to crawl toward what appears to be a haunted house, reminded me of home.

What is it about this image that is so hypnotic to me I don't know. Maybe it's that its truly a female protagonist. It reminds me of David Bowie's Major Tom; it reminds me of the Wizard of Oz; it's the whole Odyssey.

I got it framed in a manic fit. Sometimes when I have no money I spend wildly, the way people get tattooed when they break up with someone. Even with the 50% off sale it was $400. For a picture frame. The poster itself not worth the paper it had been printed on fifteen years ago.

It didn't make sense what I was doing and I knew that. The tall grumpy Gen Xer working at the art store had to roll out the poster with white gloved hands, which we both knew was absurd. "Ah, Christina's World," said someone snarkily, and the gen xer broke into an embarrassed smile. They were friends who hadn't seen each other in many years- they had shared big plans once upon a time. I could tell the guy wasn't from New York, and so had to say something nasty; we were all embarrassed. Christina's World. How corny, how played out. I felt defensive but said nothing. "I'm sorry about my friend," the Gen Xer said, after they'd made coffee plans and the guy shuffled off. I shrugged and smiled.

I didn't want to explain that even though my baby had been brought home to a buggy, ghost ridden apartment, whose windows had been boarded up, and now we had rats in the walls and electric that blinked on and off, she would at least see posters in proper frames. That this was something I could do for her.

I carried the poster home on my head with her strapped to my belly. It enshrined a woman reaching for a home.

In the weeks following, an apartment fell into my lap with round the clock sunlight, eight huge windows, a room for her, a room for me, each with a generous closet, and three closets in the hall besides. Honey colored hardwood floors, a hallway she could run down, four times the size of our old place. I put Christina across from my bed, and look into her world every morning. What now? I ask her. What next? What is the house now that we're home?

[slimvision]

I hope the time will never come when I shall feel satisfied. To reach the goal of one's ambitions must be tragic.

N. C. Wyeth

[slimvision]

La Bateau Ivre

I should've known by the way her skin was glowing, how she didn't finish her gin and tonic. She was the A student, the pianist who spoke French. I made Bs, Cs, tried guitar, attempted Spanish. The boys always liked her more. The men did, too.

That night at the Drunken Boat, the bar I took her to because it was small and French and the address was easy to remember, we went outside for cigarettes. I had a laughing fit and peed on the street. I was too drunk to care much. The rain made everything glisten regardless. I was careless, heedless, self-absorbed. But my body knew hers, the way you know someone with whom you've shared a childhood bed.

I dreamt she came to me in a white dress with a rabbit in her hands. When I woke up, it had been announced she'd had a baby.

[slimvision]

A thousand Dreams within me softly burn.

Arthur Rimbaud

[slimvision]

Turbulence

The day I went to meet him in the bar I wrote in my journal that I thought my life was going to change forever. I didn't think he was particularly good looking. I thought he was smart, a good writer. I wanted him to think I was a good writer. I wanted to talk about art. I couldn't see the fights ahead, the phones thrown, the tears on the dark streets, the flights missed, the neighbors leaving angry notes, the tangential lovers horrified. All I could do was hang on for dear life.

And then, finally, she was in my arms, wearing a tie dyed onsie, while my father, who had flown over a thousand miles to come yell at me, asked "Do you love him?" I didn't know how to answer that, because how can you love someone who doesn't exist? I loved who he pretended to be. I loved who I had let myself think he was. I loved how he could've made me feel, if he hadn't been using it as a weapon the whole time.

I don't cry any more. I am what comes from bullying a woman both technically and technologically for years.

I am Snowflake Slim.

[slimvision]

I gave him life. It is quite a lot to give. It is the opposite of nothing, and the opposite of nothing is not something. It is everything.

Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room