Eight and a half

There’s a scene near the end of Fellini’s film in which Guido, a famous director with serious creative block, is holding screen tests for the movie he just can’t seem to finish. He’s been trying to make a film of his memories and obsessions, but he keeps getting his life tangled up in the story. All he’s been able to do, so far, is build a massive rocket ship launch pad he plans to use in the ending somehow.

His wife is there at the screen test, sitting on the other side of the theater, watching a stream of actresses reenact the women in her husband’s life: the feral Saraghina, a prostitute dancing in the sand; Carla, his voluptuous and needy mistress; and finally Louisa herself, Guido’s wife.

Up on the stage, an actress is auditioning to play the betrayed wife. Her face taut, she pleads with her husband to change, though she knows he won’t. Out in the audience, the real Luisa watches as long as she can, then she gets up to leave and Guido follows her.

It’s over, she tells him in the theater lobby. She just can’t be with him anymore, she says. It’s not the other women; it’s his work, how he uses the people in his life, sucks them dry so he can fill up his films with them, all so other people — complete strangers — can watch the charade and admire him.

Guido doesn’t defend himself; he stands there in the lobby and lets her go.

When I watched it last week, that scene made me cringe. I can’t help but identify — with Guido. For as long as I can remember I’ve felt compelled to write about my life, to weave the intimate stories of the people I love into something bigger, something shared. And it’s not always fair.

Some things are meant to be private, no matter how great a story they might make.

I don’t know why Guido is so hellbent on turning his memories into a movie. To make himself feel important? He doesn’t seem to enjoy the praise that comes along with his success, always running away from crowds of admirers, ignoring questions from the press.

Is it to validate his existence, as if capturing on screen every squabble with his wife, every wicked fantasy, makes them worth something? Is it habit? The easiest way out of an indecipherable life?

Or is he just afraid to die without leaving anything behind, as if he’d never been here at all?

I know how powerful it is, that urge to make grand and luminous art from an achingly mundane life. But I don’t know why it tugs at me. Except that I, too, have visions of rocket ship launch pads, explosions of light and great rumblings in the earth when I finally come to the end.

Flying away

I used to be much braver.

This came to my attention last night as I was filling out an application for an apprenticeship with a small nearby farm. They asked me to write about an experience that has shaped my life — kind of a vague, typical question, I know — but it got me thinking about the person I was at 17, when I flew off to the Falkland Islands by myself.

I was part of this alternative curriculum in high school, a sort of crunchy, experiential interdisciplinary experiment we undertook in the basement of a New Jersey private school. While the rest of the school was taking AP classes and reading Catcher in the Rye, we were visiting cemeteries to make up stories about the dead. We spent our science hour sitting alone in the woods, listening for bird calls. When it was time to learn about American history, we hopped on our bikes and rode 10 days to Washington, D.C.

The culmination of this two-year program was to design our own summer research projects, before integrating back into the school’s conventional curriculum senior year. Since we were already paying big bucks to attend this elite school (well, some of us were — my mother worked there, thus granting us free admission) we were given a generous budget. We could go anywhere in the western hemisphere, study anything we wanted, as long as it lasted four to six weeks.

I still can’t believe anyone trusted us to do this. We were 16 and 17. We’d never done anything like this before.

Our teachers gave us an hour at the end of every day that year to make plans. All 22 of us sat around a big table together, sending out e-mails to strangers, making calls all over the world. We were going to Alaska, Oklahoma, Peru, Haiti.

I wanted to go as far away as I possibly could. Distance was paramount. I didn’t just want to travel, I wanted to see the underside of the world. So I picked the Falkland Islands, that smattering of wind-swept rocks in the South Atlantic the English once went to war for.

My plan was to study the rural education system, spend six weeks shadowing a handful of fearless women — mostly Australians and New Zealanders — on their excursions as traveling teachers. Together we’d fly from settlement to settlement, living with and tutoring one or two students for two weeks at a time.

I should mention that I used to love flying, and my epic trip to the Falklands was one of the best. My heart raced with every take-off and landing — up in New York and down in LA; up in LA and down in Santiago, Chile; up on a smaller plane tracing the Andes south to Tierra del Fuego; down and up again at least three times at each of the tiny airports along the way; then up again in Punta Arenas for the final stretch to the Falkland Islands. We came down that time through a kaleidoscope of rainbows, landing at the Mount Pleasant Royal Air Force Base.

There were only about 5 people on that last leg of the trip. The 737 was so empty we all shuffled up near the front where we could talk to one another. That’s where I met the Royal Air Force pilot who would fly me around the islands in a tiny two-seater plane for the next six weeks.

I remember two things he told me. First, the pilots flying for British Airways are the ones who couldn’t pass their RAF test. And second, when he got bored soaring over those barren islands, he played tricks on penguins. He’d come up toward them real fast and low, they’d look up to see him passing, and then, because their short necks just don’t turn far enough, they’d all tip over backwards in a black and white wave.

The two teachers I would shadow, Myra and Heather, met me at the airport. They were grey-haired and round-bellied, with heavy breasts and deep laugh lines. Myra was Australian, Heather was a Kiwi, and they welcomed me unequivocally. Looking back, I can’t believe I made it there. I had sent a few e-mails to the director of the school system, asking if I might be able to follow around some teachers for a research project, and he said yes without question. I was 17 years old and on my own, and I found nothing strange about that.

My luggage wasn’t so lucky. Stepping into the icy winter air on the tarmac at Mount Pleasant I was informed that my bags were still at the airport in LA. There was only one connection to the Falklands, the one I’d just taken, and it only flew once a week. So I spent that first week in Stanley, the island’s capital and the only town, wearing other people’s clothes.

Heather lent me the red down parka she’d worn on a recent trip to Antarctica, which hung down below my knees.

I was there in the dead of winter. I’d never seen such bleakness. It was beautiful, but barren, mostly rocks and expansive stretches of brown, wiry grass. Along the winding roads were barbed wire fences, marking off minefields left over from the Argentine war. No one remembers exactly where they were buried, so the fields are left untouched. The harbors were dotted with shipwrecks, like great old wooden skeletons haunting the shores.

I had never taught before or lived with strangers for such a long time. I was lonely and often bored, spending time each day just looking out at the landscape. I actually read and mildly enjoyed my summer reading, Tess of the D’urbervilles, and I wrote in a diary every day, crossing off a square in my calendar each morning.

I wasn’t eating much at the time; I’d been flirting with anorexia for the last few months, eating nothing but cereal most days. I’m still not sure why, except that it felt good for a while, and people always said such nice things about my body. I gave it up almost immediately when I got back from the Falklands, when my mother saw me, six weeks later, swimming in the jeans that had been tight the day I’d left.

It was mostly the embarrassment I felt when she said something, when my teachers and friends said something, that made me end it. But I was spooked too. My hypochondria, in the end, outweighed my anorexia.

Still, the whole time in the Falklands I was never afraid. I never doubted myself. I flew home over the Andes with my face stuck to the window, my heart soaring, looking down on glaciers so high I thought for sure they were clouds. I believed that I could do anything.

Now, 10 years later, I’m afraid to fly. The sound of jet engines makes my whole body shake. In my dreams, planes fall out of the sky regularly. Often I’m in them, hurtling toward the ground in a ball of fire. Sometimes I’m on the ground and the planes, their wings snapped off, their engines dangling important wires, are spinning and tumbling toward me. Even in sleep I can feel the rising pressure in my ears.

I know when it started, the first time I was afraid to fly: It was December 2001 and I was on my way home from Germany after my semester in Bremen. I’ve always dismissed the notion that it had anything to do with the events of September 11 — it’s mechanical and pilot error I’m afraid of, not terrorist attacks — but still, that’s when it happened.

It happened after I lost my virginity and after my first heartbreak. It got worse in the wake of my first experience with depression. The year I spent in Berlin, I remember standing at a pay phone behind the luggage carousel at the airport in Frankfurt, sobbing into the phone to my mother. I had just flown in from London where I’d been to my grandmother’s funeral. I knew my connecting flight to Berlin, boarding in 15 minutes, was going to crash.

“I can’t get on that plane, I can’t!” I whimpered into the phone.

So I didn’t. I bought a train ticket instead, forfeited the money I’d spent on airfare, got home hours later than I’d planned. On the train I felt relief, as if I’d saved my own life. When I arrived — to no news of a crash — I felt unspeakably ashamed.

I force myself to fly these days. And with enough wine and distraction I can usually get through it. But I would give anything to be as brave as I was at 17 — to call up the Falkland Islands from a basement in New Jersey, the thought someone might say “no” never once crossing my mind. Then boarding a plane and flying to the end of the earth, just to find out what’s there.

Knots

It’s easy to think I know everything about Daniel. But the other night when we drove up to Barre to borrow a canoe from his new boss, he surprised me again.

It was the knot-tying that did it.

Daniel ties knots with purpose and precision. Watching his hands work over the ropes is like listening in on a language I don’t understand. His fingers move with fluency, twisting and tugging to some old rhythm in his bones.

That night in Barre, he talked while he worked, and his voice was different, easy but resonant. He was explaining to his boss, who held a flashlight steady over Daniel’s hands, how he got to be so comfortable fastening boats to the roofs of cars: Daniel spent the better part of his growing up at a wilderness canoe-trip camp in Maine.

Every summer, from the time Daniel was six years old, he and his dad — and often his sisters and later his mom — would pick up and move to Grand Lake Stream, a tiny town with a sprawling lake, four hours north of their home in coastal Brunswick. His dad, John, was the camp’s director.

Daniel loved it there — the tight community, the wonderland of woods, the seasonal uprooting from home to home. He loved studying the intricate maps of the area lakes, building fortresses and launching pirate ships, and later, directing his first adventure movies on the roofs of cabins or inside the shadowy barn.

The canoe trips were a different story. As they pulled away from base camp, just a few cabins tucked away on an island in the middle of the lake, he wished he could stay behind. They would go out for weeks at a time, camping along the rugged shore. Daniel hated being wet all the time.

Early in the day the canoeing was usually fun, he says. But lunch would come and go and then it was just another bend in the river, nothing but trees and brambles lining the shores, every turn taking him farther from home.

He wasn’t cut out for those kinds of adventures, but what he learned over those summers stayed with him. He can read the currents in a river, cook breakfast for a crowd, swim across a lake guiding massive felled trees, construct a dock, tie sturdy knots.

John retired from the camp a few years ago to work full-time as a carpenter, but he still builds wood-canvas canoes by hand. His hands are like Daniel’s, effortlessly strong and patient.

Daniel stopped going to the camp around the same time he started college. He says he just felt it was time. He had gotten into Middlebury, the only school he’d applied to, and thought that meant he had to grow up and get serious. The only reason he’d applied to college at all — and picked Middlebury at that — was his best friend from camp went there.

He remembers a poster that hung on the wall of his high school guidance office, listing the top five worst reasons to choose a college. Number One: Because Your Best Friend Goes There.

Daniel thought that was kind of funny.

But then he got there and things fell apart. He gave up making movies and signed up for economics and Latin. He was trying to be someone else: the kind of person, he imagined, who would go to a fancy school like Middlebury. Not the kind like his father, fiercely intelligent but skeptical of conventional education, who understands the world through his tinkering with it.

Daniel was miserable at Middlebury. He dropped out twice, convinced he could get a better education in the working world, or at least at a school that taught tangible skills. But something kept drawing him back. I still don’t know what it was, and I’m not sure he does either. Maybe it was the shame he felt delivering a Domino’s pizza to one of his teachers from high school. Maybe it was ambition. Or maybe it was as simple as the need to finish what he started.

Whatever the reason, he went back and he finished — with honors and an award-winning thesis video, which also won him a new girlfriend, who stood back in awe the other night as he tightened the last knot at the bow of the canoe.

Daniel gave the gunnel one good shove from either side to make sure the boat was secure. It didn’t budge.

He sometimes says he left a part of himself on that island in Maine, and he still isn’t sure how to get it back. I can’t help but wonder if I saw it that night, watching him tie knots in a few old ropes: his hands so sure and proud.

Francois

Most people’s reaction, when I told them I was living with Francois Clemmons, was a kind of double-take. “Really?” They’d say, with an unbelieving smile, already starting to laugh. “You live with Francois Clemmons?”

I can understand their disbelief. To many people in the Middlebury community, Francois is an outrageous character — a singing, belly-laughing, shiny dashiki-wearing diva with a flair for sexual innuendo. The idea that he could have a home, or a personal life at all, is hard to fathom.

Francois came to the college as an artist-in-residence about 10 years ago. He made a name for himself first as an opera singer, performing with the Metropolitan Opera Studio starting in the late ’60s, then as Officer Clemmons on the children’s show Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. Later, he founded the Harlem Spiritual Ensemble, with whom he toured the world, performing the traditional American Negro Spirituals he had heard his mother sing when he was a child in Youngstown, Ohio.

He never could have imagined he would move to Vermont, he’s said, but something about it just seemed right. The community, homogenous in so many ways, welcomed him like royalty: Francois, the proud exception, the black man in a town about 95 percent white, the gay man living alone in an isolated village, the city boy at home in the rural north.

He had so many reasons to feel isolated, and yet he built himself a family with deeper roots than most.

He calls them his Cosmic Children. Daniel is one of them, and I guess now I am too. For years he has taken students under his wing. Many are international students, who stay with him during school breaks because they can’t go home. Others have worked on his public access television show. They’re invited over for dinner, then for holidays. He offers his guest-rooms for their visiting parents, or when they need a respite from the dorms.

But I was skeptical about the three of us living together this winter. Daniel had already been there six months when I moved in and they were proving to be perfect roommates. Daniel fixed things around the house, whistled to himself, listened to Francois’ stories. They watched the news together. Francois sat through early cuts of videos Daniel made for work, talked frankly about the challenges of pursuing a life as an artist.

I didn’t want to be the girlfriend who broke them up.

But Daniel wanted me to see the unlikely home he and Francois had created, he wanted me to be a part of it. So I agreed, even though I’ve always been uncomfortable in other people’s houses, even though I’d been living at my parents’ house for four months and was salivating over the thought of my own place.

I don’t know how it happened. I moved in three days after Christmas, and before I knew it I was spending long mornings chatting with Francois over coffee. He gets right to the good stuff; no small talk. He read my blog from start to finish, talked to me about infidelity, about his own heartbreak. I started going to the Unitarian church with him every Sunday. I’ve never felt so blindly accepted or so at home.

Even when he isn’t there, Francois’ house sings.

On his coffee table, turquoise and amber spills out of hand-painted jewelry boxes. Francois isn’t fully dressed without at least five pounds of these stones draped around his neck, more on his fingers and wrists, and on special occasions, one dangling from his ear.

On his bookshelves, histories of the negro spiritual, biographies of opera legends like Leontyne Price and Luciano Pavarotti, and a stockpile of self-help books: Keeping the Love You Find, Reiki Healing, Do What You Love The Money Will Follow.

On his walls, portraits of his heroes: Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama, Fred Rogers. Up the stairs, framed posters of his Harlem Spiritual Ensemble, each one in a different language: German, Czech, Japanese, Italian. On his fridge, a catalogue of gay pride magnets and a photo of him and his sister from some years ago, one of the only images of his biological family in the house.

On the leather couch patched up with duct tape, an embroidered pillow proclaiming The Queen Doesn’t Cook, which is a lie. Francois cooks often and well, though always with secrets. He won’t reveal the spices he uses, the hidden flavors he chooses.

In any given email Francois uses more exclamation points than letters of the alphabet. He has an arsenal of words he’s claimed as his own — butch, nuance, moisture — and expressions so charming Daniel and I started using them too: Miss Guuuurl! What are you doin with your big-head self? You and your narrow tail! This is SO fucking delicious.

Everyone he loves gets a nickname. Daniel is DanSterMan. I’m Miss Meegan La Pearl. He sings adoring ditties to his dog, Princess, a Tibetan terrier he loves like a child.

When we moved out a couple weeks ago, Francois told us to just leave, not to make a big deal about it. He doesn’t like goodbyes. So we did. We packed up our things and drove over the mountains to a new home, a lovely apartment perched above a waterfall. Even with the roar of falling water, it’s awfully quiet in there without him.

We came back to Middlebury a few days later for his annual Irish concert on St. Patrick’s Day. Led by three kilted bagpipers, Francois strode onto the stage in a kilt of his own, a massive bejeweled sporran and a neon green wig, topped with an oversized green hat complete with flashing green lights.

But it was when he addressed the audience that he really lit up the stage. I’d forgotten how charming he is when he’s performing. He introduced himself, twirled around once or twice to show off his skirt and explained how he came to be Middlebury’s unlikely face of the Irish holiday.

He had first sung “Danny Boy” as a young man, he said, and had instantly fallen in love with Irish music. He felt a kinship between the spirituals he’d grown up on and these Irish songs, cries for freedom both. But no one ever let him sing them professionally. There were too many talented Irish tenors around — why would they give the songs to a black singer?

But then he came to Middlebury, where all the Irish men were shy, he said. Oh no, I don’t sing. No, I could never perform, they would say. So the music department asked Francois, and he has done the concert ever since.

That night, he opened his mouth to sing “Danny Boy” and all his bright colors and busy accessories dropped away. All you could hear was his song, haunting and lonely.

He sang it all to Daniel, of course.

That is Francois’ great secret: He makes you think you’re getting a character; you end up with the real deal.

Summer in Vermont

Daniel and I were rooting through old hard drives last night and came across a series of stop-motion videos he made during the summer of 2007. They were dreamy, obsessive little explorations, flickering through hundreds of close-ups of tree bark, sunlit leaves, forks, faucets, typewriter keys and dusty old windowpanes. He snapped so many photos with my digital camera, he swore he would wear it out.

And then there was this one, which we made together over two days that summer. I love everything about it: the glare of summer, the old-movie flicker, Lake Champlain, a cameo by Francois Clemmons, general silliness, the abundance of snacks. I tend to gravitate toward the grey and bleak in my writing. Here is something that really is new: a bit of brightness.

Stonehenge and other mysteries

This bit from my thesis has been on my mind lately:

It was October 3rd again when I drove across Salisbury Plain with my father seven years ago. We had been to visit his mother in a nursing home in Frome. On the way back to London, I wanted to ask him about Stonehenge, whether it was built by the Druids or the Romans, and how anybody could have rolled the massive bluestones 245 miles from Pembrokeshire in Wales to Wiltshire in Southern England.

But instead I thought about the watch on my grandmother’s wrist, how it told the wrong time, off by hours. On her swollen finger was a ring, her wedding band. It had cost her one pound at Marks & Spencer, Dad said. He kept his eyes on the plains. Before the stones, it was all a forest, dense with hazels and pines.

In the nursing home, Nana had smiled at him and asked, “How’s school?” and he had to remind her he was an adult now, working in America. She had looked at me, then back at him, and said with a sideways grin, “Who’s your pretty new girlfriend?”

In the car through the plains, he turned up the radio so we didn’t have to talk.

***

And this, from a couple years later:

Dear Dad, write me a story. It doesn’t have to be yours. It doesn’t have to be true. Just write me a story. Tell me about growing up under the arrivals and departures at Heathrow Airport, how you lived so close the house shook on schedule, the laundry came off the clothesline smelling like jet fuel and the cracks in the windows grew deeper as the planes grew heavier.

Tell me about the first time you flew away.

Then tell me about your father, how he survived an attack by the Germans in the radio room of HMS Prince of Wales, how he was one of few men to make it out alive and how he came home to find his house in London torn apart by German air raids.

Tell me again about the blast that threw your mother down the staircase, the broken glass your grandmother wore like a necklace, the beet juice splattered on the walls like blood, your sister screaming. Tell me how your father tried to tell you what he had seen, how he took you to a movie about World War II so he wouldn’t have to find the words himself.

Write me a story about coming home again. It doesn’t have to be our home. You can change the names and places. You can make yourself into a beluga whale, swimming up the Delaware River, and I’ll believe you. You can make yourself the Berlin Wall. Write your story in graffiti, paint your words five feet tall in bright yellows and reds, sign you name in every corner. Make them jealous in Alexanderplatz of your colors and your freedom, then tear yourself down and start over again.

I’ll run to you from east and west. I’ll bring the cameras and crowds. I’ll write you into history.

Lean times

Daniel and I moved last weekend over the mountains to Montpelier, Vermont’s old mill town of a state capital. It’s only about 10 square miles around, so you can see the state house’s gleaming gold dome from nearly everywhere, looming over rows of once-brightly painted Victorian homes that look just a little bit tired.

I’ve been freelancing, figuring out how to live on sporadic assignments without a regular paycheck. It’s been exhilarating, and a little terrifying. On one particularly terrifying morning (must have been after a student loan payment was deducted from my account the same day my health insurance premium was due), I called my mother in tears. I just didn’t know how I was going to pay the bills.

She was a little harsh. She listened for a while, then told me to swallow my pride.

“Go get a job waitressing somewhere,” she suggested. “Or what about UPS? They pay really well and you’d look totally adorable in those little brown shorts.”

I do love cute uniforms. And delivering packages all day would certainly provide fodder for my writing. But I wasn’t quite ready to swallow my pride. I had just scored a freelance gig writing arts features for a state-wide paper I’d always admired. Why couldn’t that be enough?

I hung up the phone with my mother, still in tears, regretting leaving New York where at least I’d had a regular 9-to-5, even if it was eight numbing hours of filling out Excel spreadsheets.

But later that afternoon, my mother wrote to me, the kind of email that reads like an old-fashioned letter, with real paragraphs and a narrative arc. She told me about the lean times she and my dad had seen at about my age.

When they were first married, she wrote, Dad was making $250 a week at UPI. She didn’t have a job because she was trying like hell to get pregnant. It was the early 80s and the economy was terrible. She used to call her father and cry for help. But he was a prudent New Englander, believed in teaching his kids how to live by letting them fall.

“I look back on it, how directionless I was, married but with no kid, no job, following Steve around,” she wrote.

It was a year or so before she got pregnant with my brother and found a part-time job as a reporter at the Stamford Advocate. But even then, making ends meet was a challenge.

When his father died in 1982 — collapsed with a heart attack while tending his garden at the age of 66 — Dad couldn’t afford to fly to England for the funeral. Mum called her own father to ask for the money. He said no, on principle. So Mum and Dad opened their first credit card and bought the ticket that way. It took them a year to pay off the debt.

The following year, on the day I was born, dad announced he’d be moving down to Washington, D.C. for work, and we’d have to leave Connecticut. Six months into that new gig, as we were adjusting to a strange new town, UPI went belly up and Dad took a 25 percent pay cut. Mum found another newspaper job and left Alexander and me with a babysitter.

Again, my mother called her Dad, asked him if he’d loan her money for a house. Again, he said no.

“I thought we would never make it. But over time your Dad got raises, I found jobs. My father died and my mother gave me money for a house — a loan I mostly paid back. We got on the fast track and about 10 years ago, things started loosening up,” she wrote to me.

“I’m not more happy now than I was then,” she added. “In fact, I have wonderful memories of those tough years. They bind you.”

I know she’s right.

Daniel and I fantasize about building a beautiful house some day, something out in a field with plenty of room for a garden. We talk about when he’s a famous filmmaker and I’ve made a killing off my bestseller, how I’ll get regular massages and he’ll buy all the nicest camera equipment. How we’ll travel the world and eat at all the best restaurants.

I know we’ll be dreaming of these things forever, even long after we’ve got them. It’s the dreaming, not the stuff, we’re apt to remember.

Bonn

I wanted to delete the blog again after posting about the Black Hole. The truth is: I really don’t remember my parents from those years in Germany. But that’s not because of any deep, dark hole. It’s just because, like most adults are to the wild lives of children, Mum and Dad were kind of irrelevant. The adventures were mine and Alexander’s.

And those three years in Bonn had magic in them.

We arrived in the middle of the school year, the beginning of 1990. Alexander and I were enrolled in the British Embassy Prep School, where there was only a handful of American students. Alexander was eight and I was six, old enough to know I was foreign and to know that I loved it that way.

Our apartment building in Bad Godesberg, a suburb of Bonn, was next door to the embassy of Qatar, an imposing mansion set back from the road, circled by a high metal fence. It was an endless source of adventure. Alexander and I staged attacks, using our fiberglass bows and arrows to ambush the property through the slats of the fence. We knew we’d lose our arrows forever once they pierced the other side. But the thrill made it all worthwhile.

We lived almost entirely outdoors, Alexander and I, scrambling up hillsides and building forts within the exposed root systems we found on our way. Mum made us play with the Icelandic kid, Grimur, because no one else at school would. He was afraid of trees and wouldn’t go into the woods with us. He used to say things like, “Why do people wear clothes? Why do not they wear wood?”

The time we spent with our new friends was all that mattered.

Jenny and I were inseparable. She was British, with freckles and frizzy blond hair, and she always had the best ideas. We spent months holed up in a tent we erected in the living room, creating an intricate written language of our own. I still have the secret decoder somewhere, pages of symbols and broken messages.

Tanya had a Canadian father, a Japanese mother and a huge stuffed bear named Grovner. We were wild together. It was Tanya’s idea to put on a show when a boy from school came over to play. The two of us dressed up in bathrobes and danced around her attic with Grovner, before frantically ripping off our robes, shaking our naked bodies at Tom and running downstairs in fits of laughter.

Alexander and I played truth or dare with the Scottish boys Chris and Andrew, never tiring of making each other flush our feet down the toilet or run the perimeter of the house with no clothes on. And then there was Bloody Mary. Whoever picked this dare would have to go into the bathroom alone, turn the lights off, look straight into the mirror and say “Bloody Mary” three times, summoning the evil witch. No one ever made it to the third Mary. We all knew what would happen if you did: her face would show up in the mirror, bloody and deformed, and you’d drop dead right there on the bathroom floor.

Charlie and I created the Wierdoo Club, complete with a flag (half Union Jack, half Star-Spangled Banner with our chicken mascot emblazoned in the middle) our own currency and national dance. We’d run around his neighborhood, ringing people’s doorbells and scurrying away. Sometimes they got to the door too quickly and caught us as we bolted behind bushes, tried to round the corner. They would always threaten to call the police, and there was nothing more terrifying than getting yelled at in German.

I remember the food, too: heaping spoonfuls of rote grütze at the top of the hill in Bad Godesberg; pizza margherita along the Rhine where a flood line higher than anything I’d ever seen stained the stone walls; the crispy strips of seaweed Tanya’s mum always had on hand; pancakes and french toast at the American embassy club on occasional Sundays; the massive apfelberliner my parents adorned with candles and let me eat in my hospital bed when I was sick with pneumonia on my 8th birthday.

I spent a lot of time in German hospitals. For pneumonia and whooping cough, for smashing open my head when I couldn’t stop my bike from barreling down a dirt road, for the second degree burns I scalded into my thighs when I knocked a pot of boiling tea off the kitchen table, for slicing open my foot with a broken glass.

That’s why when my mother got rid of a ring Dad gave her because a friend said sapphires can bring bad luck, I thought she was doing it for me.

The black hole

I used to think that if I ever finished the Reunification story, I’d wake up the next morning with nothing left to write. That would have been it. My whole life poured into a single story. There’d be nothing to do but put down my pen, let out a huge sigh of relief and go get a job feeding old people or animals.

Then what? I could relax? Breathe easier? Die knowing I’d said something, I’d been someone?

Life after the story, I imagined, was a vast black hole. The same darkness that shows up when people ask, “Oh, you want to be a writer? What do you want to write about?” The same sharp cliff I lean over when there just isn’t anything to say. The buzzing that closes in through my ears when everyone else feels something and I come up empty.

I’ve spent the last week trying to write about the years we lived in Bonn. I’ve been digging through memories of my family from that time and a little bit later when we’d moved back to the States. I’ve been trying to piece together how I knew my parents’ marriage was coming apart, what I felt when my dad moved a continent away and when he returned three years later.

All I can find is a big, black hole.

A Valentine’s visit with Mormons

I just couldn’t think of a reason not to let them in.

It was late afternoon on Valentine’s Day. My lemon pound cake had at least 40 minutes left in the oven. Daniel was busy upstairs. And they looked so cold and adorable out there on my doorstep, their name tags fluttering in the wind.

It wasn’t actually my doorstep. I’ve been staying with a friend since I moved back to Vermont about a month ago. Lucky for these two baby-faced evangelists from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, my friend, a gay man who has on more than one occasion sent their brethren running wild from his stoop, was upstairs taking a nap.

But I have a thing for talking to strangers. That these strangers weren’t welcome around these parts made letting them in even more exciting. So I led them into the living room, wondering if they’d notice the illuminated mantelpiece piled high with homoerotic statuettes mounting one another in various acrobatic feats, and sat down to listen to their spiel.

You could tell they’d had few opportunities to practice — I was the first person in two weeks to accept their offer, they said. They were both nervous, the younger one breaking into spontaneous giggles when he forgot what he was going to say about the origins of Joseph Smith’s engraved metal plates.

“Not like dinner plates,” his slightly-more-experienced partner clarified. “Like tablets. You know, like Moses had.”

They were both from Utah, taking the requisite two years off from college to serve as missionaries in northern New England. The younger one, with the scruffy beginnings of a dark beard, had started his mission just a month ago and every time he chimed in with a question or explanation, he nodded his head as if to encourage himself.

“Do you have a big family?” He asked me, excitedly. “Because one of the things we really value is family.” When I told him I only have one brother, the topic fizzled almost immediately. But he just kept smiling, high on the success of executing the talking point.

His red-headed partner was much more sure of himself, almost eerily so. He was already well into the first year of his mission, but said he’d only recently begun to know in his heart that the Book of Mormon was the true word of God. When he began reciting a passage, his pale eyes seared with intensity. I couldn’t look away.

As a pair of missionaries, they weren’t terribly convincing, but as two young men on a curious journey together, they had me believing in something. I wanted to follow them for the rest of the night and write about their rejections and conversations. Do they talk about God as they tromp house to house? Or do they talk about movies and girls? Does anyone ever convert on the spot? What keeps them from giving up?

Joseph Smith had been frustrated, they said, with the sheer number of Christian churches in the mid-nineteenth century. He hated the way Christ’s teachings had been tweaked and specified and watered down into so many denominations. Exasperated, he turned to God to find out which to join.

And God, rife with irony, as usual, offered this suggestion: Go start another one, Joseph.

I asked them if they saw the contradiction there. They did, but didn’t seem to mind. I asked them why we should believe Joseph Smith above all other prophets who have spoken with God and started a church. Because, they told me, his church was the true church, the way Jesus wanted it.

The red-haired missionary flipped to the back of his well-worn copy of the Book of Mormon, to the passage, he explained, that proved it all to be true.

“And if they are not the words of Christ, judge ye,” he said, looking at me and not the text, because he had long ago committed these words to memory. “For Christ will show unto you, with power and great glory, that they are his words.”

Christ had shown him that these were his words, he said. He could feel it in his gut when he got home at night after each day searching for someone to listen. Who could argue with that?

Neither of them mentioned the doors I knew had been slammed in their faces or the insults I imagined were hurled at their backs. But they did remind me the world has been tuning out prophets for as long as it’s been creating them. Their job, it seemed, is to tune out the world as they quietly keep moving on.

Before they left I offered a piece of my lemon cake and they offered a second date; we all said no. They left me with a crisp copy of the Book of Mormon, their phone numbers scribbled on the back inside cover, in case I had a change of heart.