the return of november

Lately I've been taking my cues from Eleanor Roosevelt, in trying to do one thing every day that scares me. Friday night, I sang in public. It was truly terrifying, yes, but that narrow escape from the hungry maw of failure made me so much the more alive. And just maybe it will change my life somehow.

Saturday I did something much, much harder. I moved the beds.

I did this alone for two reasons. One, I imagined it would be hard for Peter Pan (slash annoying because the bed is heavier than the Japanese national sumo team), and two, I expect I needed to process. It was something I had to do, and in the grand tradition of annoying home-centric tasks in our history together, it fell to me alone.

This breakup is a pillar of the platonic ideal. We have so smoothly downshifted into friendship, that at times it feels as if nothing has changed—certainly nothing has been lost in removing the romantic aspect, a fact which only serves to reaffirm the decision we made. We seem to have accomplished the impossible in branching into the hitherto unknown territory of congenial breakups.

I moved the beds because it was time to move the beds. We should have heat any day now, and I managed to hang the curtains (alone) with the hand drill I borrowed from my landlord. The new mattress pad arrived in the mail. There were no excuses left. I still need to buy a wardrobe and move my clothes from that closet, but that room is now his and this one is mine. The sooner we face it, the better.

I did not expect my own reaction. First, the mattress itself nearly killed me. There I was trying to guide it through tiny door frames, trying to prop it onto one side so I could slide it around the corner, but it kept going limp at my feet, limp like the entire Japanese national sumo team suddenly playing dead. It flopped out into lamps, knocked over space heaters, crashed into bookcases and broke a picture I really loved from Florence, glass shattering everywhere. In grappling with it I stubbed my toes, bruised my arm, cut fingers, tore sheets and broke nails. I found myself hurling all my frustrations at this stubbornly awkward and utterly maddening bed that we shared for nearly three years. Those coils and feathers in the slippery plastic mattress protector became Peter Pan—who wouldn't grow up, who wouldn't participate, who never really helped. Where there should have been teamwork, there was just me, making the one final gesture that will likely villianize me and leave him very sad.

So I started swearing, grunting and heaving and cursing like some woeful combination of a drunken sailor and a woman scorned. The mattress and the man blurred and suddenly I was furious. Then just as suddenly I was mourning. That thing in that moment was my albatross, it was the weight of all of this—the sadness yes, but also the frustration.

So the grunts and curses turned into the kind of ugly cry that makes you realize the violence inherent in the choices we make.

I did this. Perhaps I was selfish and cruel for doing so, but I have no other explanation to offer than I had to do it. I saved myself and if I damned him in the process, I will wear that around my neck. I have been riding this tide of adrenal release, the sweet high of starting each day feeling free, feeling the unknown starting to lap at my feet again, testing the waters of being alone. But this stupid chore drove it home. I chose this. I walked away. There are no take backs.

And all this happened in conjunction with another scary leap I've taken this week. Are you listening Eleanor? Because I am racking up the points here. Yet another risky venture where the stakes are high and there is no guarantee I won't end up embarrassed or hurt, though the deliciousness of it is so very distracting and the possibilities may be endless.

I think there is just so much going on in this heart and noggin of mine this week that I couldn't help but come home last night at nearly two am and do anything but cry.

That said, I slept the best I have in months. And this morning, I've got church bells and sun streaming through my windows. I'm leaving in an hour to go sing on stage again. And, even though there is not one goddamn leaf remaining on the tree outside my window, it's a good a day as any to start the rest of my life.

andare via

Are you playing? he asked.

He had pulled me aside at the milonga to do this, dragged his folding chair to meet mine, trapped me between his lanky knees.

Funny how the simplest phrases are the most easily misunderstood in translation. Or the most easily evaded.

Playing?

I think I know what he's talking about, but the question exhausts me. How am I supposed to know what I am doing? I met him at an Irish pub last night near Grand Central, for burgers and Cokes (he doesn't drink) and we sprang through the cold to listen to music on his computer (must be a generational thing) at his hotel.

Now, hotel rooms typically bring me joy, a comfort I can't quite understand. It was all I could do not to kick my boots off and flop down on one of the two double beds, enjoying the midtown office diorama through the plate glass window. But something told me to be uneasy, even with this bookish and slight specimen from Livorno who sent me roses on my birthday.

He kissed me. And it was nice, and to be expected. But then Italian men have this charmingly lax concept of time everywhere but in the bedroom. Late to everything, but the absolute first to try and peel off the turtleneck, reach for the jeans button, all the while whispering how much they want to fare l'amore con te. And I'm no prude, but this was all moving a little too fast.

Maybe it's the new nun-like digs—the twin-sized bed, the plaid flannel sheets, the room eight by ten. Maybe it's the vows I've almost taken not to own anything or love anybody ever again. Maybe it's the man, the men, I've not quite mourned.

Maybe it's me, wanting to carry my heart like the covenant and let it fester into mystical ether that melts the faces of the infidels. I just want to wait. It has been so long since I have been seduced, properly seduced, but I remember the attendant ceremony. As in: there ought to be one.

Roses, while lovely, words, while pretty, are no substitutes for knowing it is time for your clothes to slip to the floor, when your mind and your body are in easy lockstep, racing forward into the trains colliding overhead, and it is all you can do to keep up to the tune of so many trumpets. There's a great deal of wooing and winning to be done before this may be effortless.

Hai paura? he asked. Are you scared?

Yes, I am scared.

Also my heart is tired. Also, I say to myself, you are not yet worthy.

It is okay, we have time, he says, because they know what to say to get what they want. Va bene. We can just lay here, fully clothed, our thin, girlish frames, me conscious of my boots on the white duvet.

I fall asleep. Or he does. It is comfortable. He holds me in a practiced way (they must teach Italian schoolboys to do this), one arm squeezing, the other cupping the back of my hair like a child. It is the way a predator lulls you to safety only to suck your organs through your punctured skin. And it feels nice.

Everything feels nice—the eye contact, the furtive handholding racing through intersections, and this: being in someone's arms, even when I shut my eyes and imagine those arms to be the fleshier arms of others. Even when I shut my eyes and imagine dancing with someone else. My eyes flap open in the dark and I wonder, am I only here because I like to feel?

Either way, this is not fair to him. I am undecided here, and I have to go.

Devo andare, I say. I interrupt his snore.

Ma non... dormi qui con me. Dormi qui, piccola.

But I did leave. I read myself home on the F train, picked up a pint of sorbet to soothe my newly aching throat, went to my cell and to sleep.

And tonight he asks if I am playing with him. He wrestles the colloquial and I could hedge some more, but he deserves a straight answer.

I just need to be very careful. I always dive. This time I have to wade. You understand?

He pretends to, but then it's all . . . If I return next week, I come for you . . . and: I just need to know, when I see in your eyes, what I see there, are you lying?

My eyes never lie. But that is a stupid thing to say. And what do men see there that some find so captivating and the others fury-making. The innocence, the stores of love, the deer caught in headlights. The caution crusting over the abandon. Short answer: how should I know.

Can you come with me now?

I look at him sharply as if he has asked for me to kill someone, he sees my panic, understands, and leaves. It is the gentlemanly thing to do. Okay, we go this way, bit by bit. Write to me.

Yes, I say, and he is gone. I've got the whole milonga speculating about playboy flyboy and me. Are we or aren't we? Aren't, I'm embarrassed to admit. Or relieved.

I'm in a cluster of girls telling stories. Keep different men for different things, they say, diversify.

Then Gatsby is there at the edge of the dance floor, winking. And though I've sworn him off, it's been so long since we danced that I nod and make my way to take his hand.

He has a heart shaped sweat stain on his shirt.

displaced housewife seeks a kinder, simpler age

Last night I made meatloaf. Granted, this was meatloaf made of ground turkey and a host of other similarly modified healthy ingredients, but it was meatloaf nevertheless. And meatloaf is the provenance of housewives the world over, a Depression era staple, a Midwestern culinary rallying point (voted Good Housekeeping's seventh favorite food in 2007!); it is surely not the meal a twenty-something New Yorker makes for her boyfriend after boxing practice. Right?

I've always been a product of the wrong decade. If I had my druthers (see? I use words like "druthers"), I'd wear nothing but t-straps and pleated skirts, ride around with notebooks and loaves of bread stashed in my bicycle basket. I'd write letters. I'd keep a trousseau. I'd misbehave famously. This anachronistic fantasy of mine harvests the better parts of womanhood—subject to personal taste of course—and splices them together in defiance of their generational relevance. This works for me.

So I go to Whole Foods as if it were a market in the town square. I lovingly select vegetables I cannot afford, take them home, and mutilate them. I rattle about the kitchen listening to WCBSfm because they play songs I recognize from a time when I thought listening to Simon and Garfunkel made me "edgy." And I make things.

Sometimes I think I'd be perfectly happy like this: separating the whites from the darks, folding shirts, making beds, writing grocery lists, planning parties, planting flowers...provided there were some other element to my life to keep me engaged—no one wants to go out with their head in an oven. But I want to learn to properly fold the bottom sheet, how to mold marzipan, how to keep my plants alive. Perhaps it can be so simply explained as the need for control in my home, but what does that word even mean nowadays? Do we still hold by those needs or have we outgrown them?

It has occurred to me that these simple skills should not number among my goals and aspirations. Sure, everyone wants to write mystery novels in a cottage by the sea, labrador retreivers underfoot, whole bean coffee brewed at sunrise, but the pursuit of domestic happiness seems to have been rendered irrelevant to our postmodern lives. We are conditioned to want something else, something faster, especially us girls. Women in the wake of feminism are no longer presented with two equally valid choices: to stay at home or to go out into the workplace and seek our fortunes alongside the menfolk. We are now expected to do the latter and are judged only by our fellow seedbearers when we fail to also accomplish the former.

Many women have suffered and sacrificed for this to be the case. It is on their shoulders that we wear pants and vote and even burn our bras in protest. But sometimes I wonder if we haven't backed ourselves into an even trickier corner by disregarding some of the finer points of our natures. Listen, ladies, I have every respect for those of you who would rather eat mulch than bear children, wear a dress, or bake a pie. It should be your choice. I just wonder if that choice isn't being made for us?

I probably ask too much of the world. Because I want to wear pants. I want to curse and drink grown men under the table. I want to be a high-powered career woman just like everyone else. I just also want to wear lace every once in a while and be appreciated for the antiquated rituals I keep alive on special occasions. And someday, if I have babies and I want to stay home and actually watch them grow up, I want to do that too.

more than enough

Yesterday was one of those truly perfect New York days. HCB at the MoMa, lunch roseé, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson at the Public, stracciatella pizza, champagne and fondue at the Bourgeois Pig, then three humid hours of dancing in a bedazzled basement. With all those chandeliers, I half expected someone to start playing the voice over from the Haunted Mansion. "There are no windows . . . and no doors . . ."

Of course, I had to watch the G.I.Q. sulk in a corner all night in a tasteless shirt with some leggy blonde, but there are worse things to cope with—who wants his attention without the sweater vest anyway? Summer comes and Mr. Wet Wool and Book Smell is just another clammy man in khaki.

I danced and it was wonderful.

One by one, other tangueros paired off with other leggy blondes and left the station for beds in outer boroughs while I got passed back and forth between the Champion and the Tall Guy, who caught me with one strap dangling and actually reattached my shoe for a second tanda. We were all but chased out of the milonga by the cleaning crew.

Good nights are what we make of them and I ended this one staying out til nearly six making diner conversation with new friends. I rattled home in a minivan handicab in the luge lane on the verymost vertigo edge of the bridge, just as the weekend world was getting ready for work.

Off to dance some more.