Momentum

by Deedee Agee
© Deedee Agee 2002 All Rights Reserved 

My mother was not good with forms. She was really bad about applications, renewal forms, warranties, paying bills, depositing checks, mailing things, filing tax returns, signing permission slips, balancing checkbooks — all the forms so essential to a smoothly running life. I felt good I could help out by telling people on the phone that my mother was out, making emergency bank deposits in midtown, running things up to the main post office to get the date stamped before midnight, and finding things she’d lost in the cardboard boxes and piles which surrounded her table. Every year we drove with an out-of-date inspection sticker until my mother finally got around to first taking it in, and then repairing whatever had caused the car to fail inspection. When my mother was late paying the garage bill, the guy would call all worried because the car wasn’t worth as much as one month’s rent in a basement on Perry Street, and she’d send me over there with a postdated check. My mother was never on time. For anything. Getting ready took her forever. To go for a weekend in the country she’d pack up food that would spoil if we didn’t take it with us, which led to cleaning out the refrigerator cluttered with weeks of leftovers. Clothes had to be washed and dried, overdue phone calls made, three cats had to be caught and secured in cardboard boxes taped with duct tape, and then there was the dog and her misplaced leash, the carton of unopened mail and another of her current freelance journalism job, and the stack of newspapers she read every day, critiquing headlines and talking about people in the news and the obituaries like they were the people in her day to day life. By the time my mother was ready it was the middle of the night, and my sister and brother had fallen asleep on the piles of blankets in the back of the car parked out front at the curb. She preferred to travel late at night when the cover of dark and the empty roads made it less likely we’d be stopped for the inspection sticker. And then there was the problem with her driver’s license since technically, she didn’t have one because she hadn’t gotten around to renewing it when it expired a few years back, but I mean, she’d passed the test. Once.

The car was a hand-me-down Ford station wagon from wealthy friends. The heater didn’t work, so in cold weather we huddled under quilts and drank hot liquids from thermoses. In hot weather we opened the windows and, for added ventilation, took up the flattened cardboard box that covered the rusted-through hole in the floor on the passenger side front. This let in some exhaust fumes, which is why we’d plugged it up with the cardboard in the first place, but with all the windows open it wasn’t a danger my mother said. Once the hole had rusted through to a certain size, it also served as a travel potty for me and my sister. We loved squatting over it watching the asphalt flash by just inches beneath us and our urine being whisked away by the wind into the big world outside. This was so much more fun, not to mention easier, than our previous method: balancing over the narrow neck of a mayonaisse jar. My mother didn’t like to stop. She traveled with ample drinks and food—cold cuts from the deli, bakery rye bread, jars of mayonnaise and mustard, donuts, fruit.

"Once we’re underway I don’t like to stop," she’d say. "I want to get there." Perhaps she believed momentum was our only hope. I remember feeling as a child that any stop threatened the re-emergence of the near terminal inertia which pervaded our household, and all too often got a stranglehold on me so that I’d spend the whole weekend reading comic books and spooning down pints of hand packed ice cream from Pete’s candy store across the street. Now I see it was actually the expired inspection sticker and drivers license, and probably insurance too that propelled us onwards.

My mother considered herself an excellent driver. I just wished she didn’t have to go so fast. I sat with my feet braced on the dashboard, magically believing that if my eyes traced the contour of the middle line, the car would stay on the road. I’d read road signs and tell her what was coming up, sharp curve left, deer crossing, bear right for New York City, 60 miles. She said she couldn’t see signs without her reading glasses.

My mother was a genius at getting lost. Once on a Sunday drive she took overgrown dirt roads until we were on a cowpath in the woods, the trees touching the car on both sides. "There has to be someplace to turn around," she kept saying, but there wasn’t, and finally she crested a hill which turned out to be a mudslide, and spun the wheels trying to back up until there was smoke and the smell of burning rubber. She killed the engine. "Now what?" she said, working a can opener around the top of a large can. A whole cooked chicken slid out, its pale beige skin coated with gelatin. A drumstick and thigh fell off in her hand, and she took a bite. "Now we’re really up shit creek without a paddle," she muttered. She seemed to be in a kind of trance, and if I’d let myself feel it, I would have been scared, so instead I walked across a meadow to a farmhouse, and the farmer came with his tractor and pulled us out backwards. "Can’t believe you folks took that old road," he chuckled. "Ain’t nobody been down it since I was a boy." He charged us $20 and my mother said it was highway robbery, but he had us over a barrel.

I was my mother’s travel handmaiden. She’d drive and I’d fish her cigarettes out of her bag, punch in the electric lighter, fit the Pall Mall into the black plastic holder, light up and hand it to her trying not to take my eyes off the road. I got pretty good at knowing what it was she wanted by the way she reached for something—a kleenex, cigarette, snack—liverwurst and white radish sandwiches on black bread, or pizza. That was the worst, the pizza. When she reached for a slice I’d take over steering while she tilted her head back to catch the drooping point in her mouth. At night I’d focus on the furthest away piece of road I could see. It was important to memorize the road as far ahead as possible. One time on a dead dark night she lunged for the lighter and hit the knob for the headlights, plunging us into blackness like I’d never known, and in that few seconds of nothingness, without thinking I pulled the knob back on, saw the shoulder looming, grabbed the wheel, jerked it to the left, and got us back on the road. I realized then that unconsciously I’d learned the function and location of every knob and lever in the car. Contrary to my recurrent nightmares in which the lives of my injured family members depended on me driving for help, only I was too small to reach the pedals and see out the windshield at the same time, when I did start actually driving it was so easy. I’d been driving in my mind for years. Like an olympic skier practicing the slope in his head at night, I had in my bones the timing and coordination of clutch, shift and brake, the right speed to go around curves.

We never did get stopped with anything worse than an warning except for one summer evening when we’d parked illegally by a lake and a motorcycle cop was writing out a ticket when we came back. I saw him glance at the peeling inspection sticker.

"You’re overdue with that, Ma’am," he gestured. "Long overdue." The setting sun glinted off his polished knee high leather boots.

"I know that, Officer. It’s simply incredulous, I mean incredible, it didn’t pass." Her German accent was especially pronounced. "I’ve been meaning to get to it. It’s just..."

"Ma’am, this ran out in January."

"Well, yes, but I’m a widower, you see..." WIDOW, I thought, torn between annoyance at her mistake and puzzlement at her manner with the cop.

"The long and short of it is it’s illegal," said the cop flipping to another page in his pad. "license and registration please, Ma’am."

My mother began rummaging through her bottomless handbag dumping handfulls of stuff out onto the seat, her bulging wallet, pads of notepaper from Time Inc., envelopes with shopping lists written on them, fat red editors pencils with broken points and ballpoint pens adorned with kleenex bits and hair, half empty cigarette packs, a baby bottle, a box of bandaids, wads of kleenex, old and new, rolls of lifesavers, several pairs of glasses. When the bag was empty she started in on the glove compartment emptying out maps and teething rings, a leash, a flashlight with no batteries. That’s when I heard my own voice say like I was in a school play, "Mommy, I think you left them in your other handbag."

She brightened. "I think you’re right honey -- on the bureau in the bedroom."

The cop looked skeptical. Just then my fingers reached over and gave my brother’s thigh a pinch so that he started crying, and I comforted him loudly, and my mother threw up her hands like I Love Lucy, "Officer, the children are hungry and cold, they need to get home..."

"Well, I’ll just follow you, Ma’am," he said then, and climbed back on his motorcycle. My mother headed home driving very slowly, the motorcycle headlight blazing through the back window.

"Now the shits are gonna really hit the fan," my mother said.

"Shit IS," I yelled. "Shit IS gonna hit the fan..." My sister started crying. "Are we going to jail?" she wailed. My mother drove slowly, cursing under her breath, my sister wanted to know do you really get only bread and water in jail, and I was trying to think of some other story when suddenly the motorcycle cyclops behind up veered off to the right and we basked in the soothing darkness.

"What the bejesus did he think, he was going to follow me into the bedroom?" my mother fumed. But then she bought us all whatever we wanted at the Dutch Treat instead of dinner, and I had a double hot fudge sundae with three cherries.

"Now we’re cooking with gas," she said, licking a frozen custard spire. I don’t know how I ever thought of saying that about the handbag, as though she was the kind of woman who changed handbags to match her outfit when in truth she was the kind of woman with one pair of shoes, three business suits and an assortment of silk blouses with the seams split under the arms, and one enormous handbag stuffed with junk and weighed down with pounds of loose change so that the straps eventually broke and she’d re-attach them with safety pins (an item she considered the greatest invention of all time) until a hole had ripped in the side of the bag. Then she’d retire it to the handbag graveyard on the floor of her bulging closet where the clothes were jammed in so tightly they didn’t hang, but held each other up between the closet walls. The bags remained there year upon year, creating fresh strata that became the fertile archeological project of my preteen years as I scrounged cigarette butts, tobacco encrusted lifesavers and spare change and in the process searched for clues about who she was really, my mother.

The day we took my brother to the airport to go to boarding school in Scotland was our last car trip together as a family. My mother’s tolerance for forms had been taxed to the limit getting my brother ready for boarding school and me ready for college at the same time what with school applications, financial aid, SAT tests, requests for letters of recommendation, passports, innoculations, traveler’s checks, etc. My brother was ten years old and on his third or fourth progressive school. They kept sending him home which was suppossed to be a punishment because you were missing out on a fun day of school, but he didn’t mind a bit, and besides that, he still didn’t know how to read. My mother thought he needed a man’s influence. She was almost set on a military academy when she heard about a Summerhill school in Scotland that came highly recommended as being good with problem boys. My brother was kind of a problem what with being in trouble in school all the time and being so accident prone. He’d broken his arm running into the street and being hit by a car, fallen off the fire escape, shot out my grandmother’s windshield with a BB gun, fallen out of a tree holding an ax and cut his leg, and shot a hole in the ceiling while cleaning a shotgun. At the last minute, my brother refused to go unless his new drum set went too. So we packed up the drums in the boxes they’d come in and forged on to Idlewild Airport.

The flight was delayed, and we sat around eating vending machine food, until it was time for my brother to board, and I could see my mother was almost in tears as he walked down the loading gate by himself in his sheep skin vest and matted shoulder length hair. We waited at the window to see his plane take off, but the takeoff was delayed too, so we left to deal with the drums.

We got lost finding the freight section of the airport in the dark, but finally we got the drums inside a huge hangar with fork lifts and scales, overhead cranes, winches on moveable tracks, and mountains of crated up stuff, kind of an Ellis Island in reverse. There was such an echo you could barely understand what people said, but it turned out the drums weren’t packed according to international shipping regulations, so we had to re-pack them in even bigger boxes, and then re-label everything, and my sister kept asking why they called it a hangar when there was nothing hanging in it, and my mother had to fill out long forms in triplicate and get them stamped at the other end of the building, and go somewhere else for insurance, and it seemed neverending the onslaught of forms and requests for increasingly obscure bits of information — social security numbers, dates of birth, weights in kilograms, mother’s maiden names, bills of sale for proof of value, canceled checks, bills of lading, and finally, when they asked for proof of identity and legal residence, my mother, in lieu of a driver’s license, started pulling things from her bag — paystubs, check registers, old con ed bills, a tax return, an expired Austrian passport, until she lost it, just completely lost it, like the time she had a tug of war over a sale table at Kline’s when she and another woman picked up two ends of the same sweater in the same moment, and they screamed at each other, stretched the sweater out so neither of them wanted it in the end — my mother, helpless in the grip of a sudden surge of primal rage, finally shrieked into the placid face of one of the military-uniform guys, "Get these damn drums off my hair! Can’t you just MAIL them for Christ sake!" The guy stood, blank faced like the guards at Buckingham Palace while she ranted on, and finally, after a few more rubber stamps in different corners of the hangar, they took the enormous boxes reinforced with tape along all the edges and put them on a conveyor belt that disappeared out into the night.

We burst out of the hangar into the evening drizzle, running to the car, my mother a ball of fury and exhaustion. "Goddamned piddling bureaucrats," she fumed.

"PETTY. PETTY bureaucrats," I said.

"I get the front," yelled my sister, leaping into the passenger seat. "What does "petty" mean?"

All I wanted was to lie down in the back and be oblivious, like when I was a little kid on a blanket on the floor of the back seat figuring it’d be safer in an accident because I wouldn’t get thrown through the windshield, and at least I wouldn’t see it coming, and maybe I’d be killed instantly and never know anything. I was lying on the back seat in that state you get in on a plane readied for takeoff — it’s too late to get off, fate will take its course independent of anything you do, all that’s left is the moment and the freedom to be in it fully, the enormous release of there being nothing left to do but simply be. I opened my eyes now and then to watch the lights pass over the ceiling, red, yellow, white, rocking in the cradle of the back seat as the car turned this way and that. It dawned on me dimmly that we seemed to be driving in circles.

"How in the hell do you get out of here?" my mother seethed through clenched teeth.

I sat up, wide awake. We were in a very dark area of the airport with no other cars. I realized we’d been lurching around for some time. The road was bumpy and gravely, the pavement broken up.

"They couldn’t put a sign?" My mother fumed, rummaging in her bag. "Light me a cigarette."

I leaned over the seat back to fish one out and told my sister to punch in the lighter.

"Huh?" she said emerging from the dream world she was in much of the time. I realized then I should have begun to train her to take over my position in the front seat, although I couldn’t imagine her being tuned in enough to keep us on the road.

"Under the radio," I said. "Just push it in."

"Wow," she said, finding the lighter, "I just realized that cigarette means a little cigar."

My mother turned onto a wide, well-paved road. "I’m fed up to the gills!" she yelled and jammed the gas pedal to the floor, the engine screaming as we accelerated. The road was dead straight and smooth, with no center line. There were lights on either side, at regular intervals, small blue lights. In that instant, dark realization bubbled up through the core of my mind and body, a rising phoenix of truth becoming one with a deep swelling rumble, blinding light bloomed out into the night, and I looked out the back window straight into the silver nose of an oncoming 747.

I screamed. "Get off! We’re on the runnnwwwaayy!"

Everything seemed to move in jerky slow motion like time release film strips of flower buds opening. My mother wrenched the wheel and glided the car between two blue lights, bumping off the smooth pavement onto grass, the jet roar penetrating our deepest centers, taking over on a cellular level as the plane magically lifted, floating over our heads and up into the night. I wondered absently if it was my brother’s plane.

I imagined the headline: Death of a Family. I watched the newsreel in my mind: morning sunlight streams through a high window, slow pan over a warehouse of crates and forklifts, zoom to a seperate group of boxes plastered with official stamps and seals, the drums sitting unclaimed forever, zoom in close up on triplicate form bearing the family name, like an epitaph on a tombstone.

Afterwards we sat there, our ears ringing, amidst the fresh smell of wet grass until the sound of the plane was no longer audible. I felt light, purged, serene. We found our way out of the airport right away then. It appeared like an exit in a fairy tale, close by and obvious. I couldn’t imagine how my mother had managed not to see it before.

My Name

by Deedee Agee
© Deedee Agee 2002 All Rights Reserved 

I’ve always had a problem with my name. In the beginning I lived without one while my parents tried out names a week at a time to see if they fit. My mother’s favorite was Leopoldina after the crown prince Leopold of Austria, where she was from. “Poldi” for short. All those years as the class fat girl, I knew “Poldi” would have been the icing on the cake, and I thanked my lucky stars my father had put his foot down. Another idea was Maria Teresa, after the Austrian empress, but thankfully my parents decided the royalty connection might in itself be a drawback for a child. They both liked the name Teresa though, and Julia as well, but there was the sticky question of the order. Teresa — without the “h” — was what they wanted to actually call me, but to them Teresa Julia didn’t sound as good as Julia Teresa, so Julia Teresa Agee it was, and I would simply go by my middle name. I don’t know why they spelled it without the “h”, but somehow I came to understand that there was something decidedly lower class about spelling Teresa with an “h”. 

Anyway, from the beginning, my grandmother called me Chickadee, and never gave it up. Trying to imitate her, I said “Deedee”, and it stuck. Other Deedee’s I’ve met are really Dierdre’s, Denise’s or Deborah’s, and people always ask if I’m one of those. It used to embarrass me to tell how I started out as Julia Teresa, and ended up Deedee. It felt like a Just So story — “How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin.” Maybe that association was what gave me the idea of making the whole thing into a little story in its own right, ending by saying, “So, in a way you could say I named myself,” and I liked that better.

Through grade school, I had two names: Deedee at home, and Teresa in school. This felt right, since I experienced myself as two different people: Deedee a sad, bored, overly sensitive, temper-tantrum-throwing child who caused problems for the adults;  Teresa a shy, cooperative, responsible good-girl who all the teachers loved. Since the at-home tantrum-thrower seemed more like my real self to me, Deedee felt like my real name, Teresa an alias for the fake good-girl I was in the outside world. I knew my mother thought Deedee was the real me too because she kept getting it wrong and referred to me as Deedee outside the family context so nobody knew what she was talking about. Still, I held on to Teresa, that ideal girl, made so concretely real by the metal dog tags, the same as the ones soldiers had, given to us in school in first grade with my official name, address, parents’ names and phone number stamped into the metal. I wore them always on a long chain around my neck — even to bed.  I knew that should I die in a war, the tags  would be matched to my name, safely stored in a fireproof file cabinet somewhere in Washington D.C., and I’d be identified.

In sixth grade, my father’s book A Death in the Family was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously.  Now my surname, Agee, became a bigger problem than the many mispronunciations I’d grown used to correcting — Eggy, Ahgee, Aghee. When people heard my name they’d say, Oh, are you related to the writer?, and when I said yes, they’d fall all over themselves about how wonderful my father was, and they couldn’t believe they were actually in the presence of his daughter, and how proud I must be, and what was it like having a famous father, and do I remember him, and what do I remember —  until I wished I had a different last name almost as much as I wished I had my father alive and in my life.  It was worse than being named after royalty. As if lineage had more to do with who I was than my own presence in time and space. As though my father was not the man I knew, Daddy.

The first year of high school, I told kids my name was Deedee.  Teachers, however, going by the official forms, called me Teresa (Julia had fallen by the wayside from disuse.) In my infatuation with all things French, and the movie “Gigi”, I changed the spelling of Deedee from “D_e_e_d_e_e” to “D_i_d_i”.  I mean, the overabundance of “e’s” in Deedee Agee was ridiculous. When I said my name, people thought I was saying the name of a corporation or a chemical —  IBM or DDT.  I considered putting the “h” back in Teresa and exchanging the final “a” for an “e” to become Therese, but even “D-i-d-i” made me feel too sophisticated and worldly-wise for the real me. 

At fifteen, away at boarding school, I was Deedee with “e’s” to teachers and students alike.  For the first time I had one name everywhere I went. Living away from home, I discovered a new unified sense of self.

That Christmas, to my horror, my mother and grandmother decided to take us all to Austria for an “old fashioned German Christmas.”  I pleaded to stay in New York, see old friends, go to holiday parties, and walk up and down MacDougal Street in the new winter coat with the sexy hood I’d bought in a thrift shop. In any case, I had to get a passport. The passport, based as it was on my birth certificate, said I was Julia Teresa, a small thing seemingly, but along with missing out on my real life back home, and my mother and grandmother apparently having been jolted into some sort of psychological fugue state by being in their native land — they were constantly forgetting what language they were speaking, blathering on in German, insulting hotel personnel while complaining to each other about the lousy service, thinking they were speaking English the whole time —  not to mention meeting relatives, my own flesh and blood, who claimed still that the holocaust was a lie — “American propaganda” they said — well, somehow the new solid identity I thought I’d forged at boarding school dissolved, as ephemeral as a disturbed reflection rippling across a pond.

Well somehow I got through high school (four different ones). On college application forms, I filled in the name Julia Teresa Agee.  It seemed fitting as I embarked on my adult life to be known by the name on my social security card. I felt the name bestowed a certain standing — a legitimization of sorts; like the dog tags. Teachers, referring to their forms, called me Julia, and I decided to try it out. Perhaps my official identity would be an aid to finding out who I was. But I discovered I had to rope off a piece of my mind like a fallow pasture for the sole purpose of realizing when I heard “Jool-ya”, it might be referring to me. Julia seemed so not me, so a part of a distant nineteenth century European world of privilege and repression, that I soon told everyone to just call me Deedee.  I dropped the Agee whenever possible.  I liked the idea of being a one named entity like Sappho or Twiggy or Cher.

Midway through college, drowning in my continuing identity crisis, I dropped out, moved in with Bill, my much older boyfriend, decided to have a baby, and got married, changing my name to Bollinger. We moved to my mother’s two hundred year old unheated farmhouse in upstate New York, and I got a driver’s license and checking account in the name Julia Bollinger.  It was a relief to be free of the burden of being the public “daughter of.”  And soon, I discovered an enticing new identity: I was now a secret Agee which strengthened my identity as a writer just as being “the daughter of” had been a threat.

Shortly after my first son was born, my mother, idly perusing his birth certificate one day, saw Julia Teresa in the box marked “mother’s name”, and said, Why, that’s wrong.  She said that my official name was “Theresa Julia”, with an “h” in the Teresa. 

I was shell shocked. 

What about all those stories? I said. About the order that sounded better and dropping the “h”?

She was adamant  —  Theresa Julia was my name. Desperate, I unearthed my own birth certificate and showed her, triumphant, right there in ink on parchment bearing the raised seal of the State of New York, the name Julia Teresa Agee without the “h”. She peered at the worn paper through her half glasses and a cloud of smoke. 

Huh, interesting, she said, off-handedly. Guess they made a mistake. 

For years after the end of that marriage, I went by the name Bollinger while Agee lay dormant, an underground secret.  But over the years, I ended up marrying five times, twice to the same person, once solely to get health insurance when I needed a minor operation I couldn’t afford.  I’ve gone by the last names Agee, Bollinger, Grossman, Morandi and Sprecher, along with the first names Julia, Teresa and Deedee.  The possibilities for varying combinations of these names still plague me. My driver’s license says Agee, my passport, Sprecher.  I have credit cards in two or three names: Julia Teresa Agee, Deedee Sprecher, Julia Agee Sprecher. When I use a credit card, I have to read it first to find out who I am. When I’d occasionally get royalty checks from my father’s work made out to Teresa J. Agee, I always had trouble cashing it. The up side was when people called about my defaulted student loan and asked for “Julia” as though they were a long-lost friend, they’d tipped their hand; I’d say, She’s not home, I’m just the cleaning lady, and I have no idea when she’ll be back. 

In the course of applying for adjunct teaching jobs and sending stories out for publication, I decided to use the name Agee again, grateful finally for whatever entre the name might provide.  I no longer feel either it dilutes my own identity, or that I’m taking unfair advantage.  By now there are many people — including my children’s English teachers — who’ve never heard of James Agee.  The name no longer elicits the same star-struck reaction, and I no longer mind so much when it occasionally does.  So I go by Deedee Agee, the name I’ve always most identified as me, or sometimes Deedee Agee Sprecher.  I’ve come to know that many people live with multiple identities, secret personas they shelter and nourish until the time and place are right, and that secrets have a life of their own, and like the ghosts of absent people, are a presence in our lives.

Teeth

by Deedee Agee
© Deedee Agee 2004 All Rights Reserved 

The summer I was seventeen, I cleaned Bill’s loft, did his laundry, shopped in the Village, and dragged my shopping cart up five flights after five and on weekends when the elevator didn’t run. I cooked small breaded fish I bought on Bleecker Street called “chicken of the sea”, made salads with avocado, raisins and chopped apples, brewed peppermint tea leaves by the handful, loose in a yellow teapot I got in Chinatown. Bill had the only Artist in Residence sign on Crosby Street. You had to apply to the city for the AIR permit, which made living in a loft legal. If there was a fire during non-working hours, the AIR sign would tell the fire department there could be someone inside. There were a limited number of permits, and to get one you had to prove you were a real artist. Bill’s hung like a mezzuzah on the doorframe.

Most nights, we walked up the dark empty street, past the lit windows of two other illegally occupied lofts, and on uptown past Union Square to the heavy glass doors of Max’s Kansas City. We’d wait at the bar for a table unless people we knew were already at one that still had room, and then we’d crowd in with them.  Bill started out with beer and moved on to shots of Jack Daniels. The back room was where Andy Warhol held court, sweeping in late with his large entourage. The front room was the territory of the minimalist and conceptual artists—Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Marc DeSuvero, Brice Marden, Larry Poons—who mostly thought Warhol was a flake, though they respected the Campbell’s soup cans and the 24-hour-long film of the Empire State building. Nancy Graves with her life-size camels was the only woman artist I remember. Most had recently been signed by one or another of the 57th street galleries and were just beginning to be known as a “school”.  They drank and talked art all night while the wives and girlfriends sat and smiled and listened, or pretended to, and I hoped my being ten years younger wouldn’t be noticed, or wouldn’t matter. Sometimes the group was large enough that a critical mass of mutual interest and admiration took over amongst the men, and then the women were freed up, and we’d congregate at one end of the table and swap cooking-for-a-crowd type recipes or tips on loft living: where to buy mosquito net cheap, how best to rig it up around a bed, the particulars of how each man had turned one of the two toilet stalls most lofts came with into a shower, how to stay warm at night and on weekends when the factories were closed and the heat was turned off, the virtues of wall mounted vs. floor model gas heaters, our various solutions to the shopping problem that went with living in an industrial neighborhood with no super markets, the latest on new thrift shops and temp jobs. Our bond was our unspoken understanding that we were called to be the women behind extraordinary men, that this was a hallowed responsibility, and that the men would be hopelessly lost without our practical support and love, our unflagging belief in them, in the future greatness of their work.  I felt welcomed into the generations-long fold of women sacrificing for the cause of genius, the glory of art, women who were strong of hand and heart, who scorned conventional views and the trappings of middle class life, who would learn to live under whatever circumstances presented themselves on the road to truth the men strode down, and do so with humor, humility and grace. And if some of us had our own artistic aspirations, those would of course be put off until the men had their work-booted feet solidly planted in the luminary circle, no longer dependent on the light we shed. I wonder now that we never thought to question what shoes of our own would be waiting, polished and tidy by the door step, for us to slip back into. 

I worked that summer in a dress shop on Bleecker Street, and dreaded going off to Bennington College in the fall. All I wanted was to have a baby, and marry Bill, though I knew this was a bourgeois notion and was willing to forgo it. 

One night we’d hung out at Max’s til closing, and when we burst through the doors out onto Park Avenue South, Bill was blind drunk. We headed west on 17th street because he wanted to find an all night drugstore for some reason and thought he remembered one somewhere in that direction. All I wanted was to head south and home. None of the women had been there that night. The men had talked about art as object vs. art as idea, form as meaning, the reactionary nature of representational art, the irrelevance of beauty. They’d talked about winches and acetylene torches, about the advantages of one gallery space over another, gossiped about agents, gallery owners, curators and critics. My face felt frozen sore from trying to look interested. 

Outside, Bill staggered to a garage doorway to take a leak. I knew he’d pass out the second we hit the mattress. I threw my head back, breathing in the cool night air, held out my arms dancing circles in the deserted street, trying to will into my body that sense of life I’d been missing lately. 

That’s when I notice there’s something crunchy underfoot, like someone has strewn handfuls of gravel on the asphalt.  I look down and see little white stones covering the street. I walk on, and the covering of stones becomes denser, and I bend down and scoop up a handful, carry them over to a streetlight. They are mostly small, irregularly shaped rocks, but there’s something peculiar about them. Suddenly it hits me. They’re not rocks at all; they’re teeth, they’re human teeth, thousands of them strewn about the street like chicken feed in a barnyard.  Bill has finished peeing and almost loses his footing sliding over the teeth.

I hold out my hand to show him. “Look, they’re teeth!”

He peers at my hand, picks one up, holds it to his eye.

“I think they’re human,” I say.

“Couldn’t be,” he says, and drops the tooth.

“You think they’re animal?”

“I just know they’re not teeth.”

“They’re teeth,” I say.  “Human teeth. Look. Some of them have fillings.”  I point to metallic spots on a molar I’m holding.

“They’re not teeth,” he says.

“Well what are they then?”

“Look…all I know? They’re not teeth.”

“How do you know they’re not?”

“Because, how could there be thousands of teeth rolling around on East Seventeenth Street?” he yells. “How would they get here?”

“I don’t know how they got here,” I insist.  “I just know what I see. Right here. In front of my eyes…” I’m warming to my subject, he belches and spits, “…and that’s teeth, thousands of them, human teeth that used to be in the heads of people, held firmly by bone and gums in human jaws, teeth that chewed and formed words and were brushed to shine, lying now on the black surface of this city street on which our own feet are walking, yours and mine, crunching over teeth as we go…”

“Bullshit,” Bill hiccups. 

I scream at him. “You wanna know how they could get here? Maybe a medical waste truck had an accident. Maybe, for all we know, some truck goes around the city at night picking up sacks of pulled teeth from dentists offices. Maybe there’s some secret concentration camp for communists they never got rid of after McCarthy, and this is a decade’s worth of inmates’ teeth.  Maybe they’re from regular prisons all over the State of New York, teeth that got pulled or knocked out in prison riots, and they save them up and collect them twice a century. Maybe this was that night, and the truck got held up cause it looked like an armored car, and when the robbers went for the loot all they found were bags of teeth, and they were so enraged they threw them all over the street. What do we know about how the world works to be so sure these teeth couldn’t be here?”

“Right,” Bill mumbles. “Maybe the tooth fairy had a mid-air collision.”

I want to kill him. I scoop up some teeth and put them in my pocket. I feel like I’m stealing something.

“Let’s get a cab,” says Bill.  “Fuck the drugstore.”

In the cab, at a stoplight he opens the door and pukes into the street. The cabby says please to get my friend out of his cab, no charge. We stumble the few blocks back to the loft, stagger up the stairs, fall into bed, sleep.

In the morning I search my pocket, but there’s a tiny hole in the seam, and not a single tooth to be found. I trudge up to 17th street. It’s a quiet Sunday, late-morning, deserted, nothing unusual. No teeth. I wonder if a sweeper has come by, but some paper and cigarette butts quash that theory. Maybe I got the wrong street. I go to 18th street, 16th street. Nothing.

I lean against a parked car, taking in the scene—the crescendo of a bus pulling away from the curb, at my feet, a tiny tree poking up through a seam in the sidewalk. I realize I’ll never be able to prove the teeth to anyone. Still, I go home happy. I walk the streets in my own shoes. I know what I saw, what I held in my hand. I will never again doubt the evidence of my own senses. I know there are mysteries in life that I will never solve, mysteries that may never be solved by a living soul, and still I believe in the living, breathing, wondrous mystery of a world without explanation or rationale.