Do not read into signs. Who knows, it’s too early probably. Ease into things, without that spiteful sheen that he can read, already, at a distance. I hate family, doesn’t he know? His, mine, whoevers. I have days, moments of easy comfort, but they belong to my specialty mostly: first impressions.

I know what to do then. It’s a careful mix, but I play it by ear, letting what’s barely visible sum itself up to the surface. You like animals, I can tell, I will drop a simple funny story, laughing at and displaying myself. I want you to understand early on that I am witty, but a good girl. I read people, and that’s what pays. But this continuity of effort, this showing up day after day, for the long talks, the baring of the souls: it is sick. His fucking normal childhood: the strawberry on the cake. Yesterday he wanted to play board games. Board games! I don’t know anything about board games. I told him resolutely I had had no childhood, but he didn’t get it. Who did he want me to play board games with, while my dad wasted away at cancer, and I gave facials and swept my grandmother’s floor for coins that I diligently exchanged for Barbie furniture I roamed downtown streets for? Or that was later, but I couldn’t have been more than nine, or eight. Board  games! The nerve! When everyone is fighting there are no partners for freaking board games, and if it weren’t for the carefully diced cheese and quince jelly that my grandmother concocted, complete with tiny colorfull sword toothpicks, what might have become of me, even lonelier?

This is normal, I told myself last night, peeing, go with the flow woman! But I made trouble early on, as I got there. He is often late and I just accept it, seeing no point in attempting reforms at a 32 year old. But he dared ask me why I had gotten there so much later than planned, and I seethed. He claims he was concerned and it wasn’t reproachful, but I was already on edge at the goddamm family invite: parents, uncles, the game on TV, and, thankfully, wine. His mom told me she had already drank a whole 2 glasses! Why my! I made the mental note to slow down ingestion, lest they see me as a drunk because I have some tolerance. It was interminable, old people topics, and he holding my hand steadily, and me looking past him into the screen, wishing for a soccer player, or anyone, not there now, more like the imaginary men I often frequented before he showed.

On the bus I missed O painfully, his subtle old man smell, all he’s been through: exile, deaths, children.  I had seen a picture he took decades ago in the paper, his name a brand other photographers say with some awe. And on the bus on the way to the whole parental inferno, in one dark stop by the elm, a man hopped on the bus with difficulty. His hair was peppered too, he was missing a limb from the knee down. He was dirty, missing teeth. The driver, an austere looking woman I detested intesely from that moment on, asked him once, twice, thrice why he didn’t have his bus pass, insisted he was getting her into trouble. He smiled looking down, he’s been through this drill. Have some mercy woman, can’t you see no one loves this man? You have no plight if you are stuck in this nonsense of bus passes, but he is rather alone at life, don’t you get it from the dirt on that raincoat, from the way he expertly places his knee over the leg, his filthy plastic bag firmly bound to his wrist?

When it gets like this I can’t stand it, because darkly I know- I just know- we are of a different breed, and the rest of folks, dealing happily with the mundane, getting together for family time, hinting at children and joint vacations… well, easy enough to read it in the tea leaves, to make it out in cloud sentences, to read it in the sprawled out palm of public transit: they can smell at darkness in our wake, while they go on about board games, and bus passes.

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I came upon it, powedered, immediately added it to the concotion, to the sunday evening storming and its coldness.  Spring my ass, the good nature of the warm days, so misleading, gone completely. It is cold, put back your long socks, your undershirt, cleaveage under your own risk. Of course there are those who don’t suffer any isolation, self-imposed or not, and have spaces friendly to cleaveage, to warm exchanges or misguided alcoholic intimacy.

Everything is fine, things are going fine, we had our first fight on the 24th, on our month anniversary. It’s ludicrous, only a month! He says he’s had the best saturday, in our outburst after the bar the air had gone neutral under all that gunpowder, and he picked me up the next morning, at 8:15am, and did dishes while I made coffee, and held my hand all day, randomly kissing my fingers.

He was jealous. I was hurt. I’m using again, if by using I mean getting so endeared to the idea of him, of a him to lift me beyond myself. In the meantime, I´ve had more hugs than the whole year, and it’s somehow freakish, scarier than the noncomittal hope I lived with before. I am terrified he will leave, now that it keeps  going well.

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He noticed, I wonder what he thought. If I put it into words it would go over cheesy, cliché, kitsch, you name it. His beard, the distant mark or laceration: he squeezed a pimple there, for sure. The idea of what he wants, beginning to wrap myself around it, this constant contact we have  had since that first random fateful party: he was the hetero friend, sweetheart, tall drink of water.

When I saw the bag he carried in for a night or two I wished for it not show on my face, the fainting. I glance at him as he walks somewhere, or as he works fully attentive: I want to smell him, sit on his lap, I take his hand to my thigh or my boob. But it’s not sexual, the gesture, and he knows it as well, though it can get there, it might always get there. Always, all of 3 weeks, but why be a cynic when nature opens in abundance? We walk each other to things, run errands and often I cannot hear when he talks (he talks rather inward, he says so himself) because he’s tall, and even the short beard must muffle it.

He has seen them, coarse black ink from the nineties;  maybe heard a sketch of the stories from me in passing, the approximate age range when I got them. I warned him I might scare him off, he doesn’t budge, he even says those unrepeatable things, the cheesy kind. I squirm and smile, while an hour before I wondered, again, when, if ever, he would call.

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It’s Carnaval week. Today and tomorrow off, might as well take the rest of the week, is what everyone thinks. A lone motorcycle rattles off down the street, vaguely a siren, streets and streets away, or the tired sigh of a bus starting, shifting gears and stopping again. Last week I started my new job, and returned to my other slightly more familiar one. We do workshops, as teachers, allegedly to reflect on practices. Whatever. On and on they force us to talk, in groups, in pairs, about community and action and service. About ladders, triangles and paradigms; they go on and on, and get us in groups to act out a machine for the others, which earns us the right to have lunch, apparently. Ours was a plane, and as a history teacher told me, I was the flight attendant, facing two rows of folks squatting, and leaning with the imaginary wind, and outstretching their arms to form wings. I pointed to the front and the sides, robotically, like I’ve seen them do.

For lunch: hamburgers. In the whole workshop there’s just one other vegetarian, and it’s my department head. I’m golden, this is bonding and beyond, and you never know when you might need it.

Upon leaving, about 2 blocks away, where the three streets circumvent, I see a small black puppy, rather emaciated, twitching. As I walk towards it, a thin homeless man, probably around my own age, but truly weathered, moves her with care onto the t-shirt he just took off, laid out circumspectly on the grass. We start talking about her, how she’s his little girl, and he knows he didn’t give her the shots when he was supposed to, and now this, although she’s his only family. He has had a family, he clarifies, but he’s been years and years in the street, and from the moment they brought her to him she belonged with him.

He says he takes her to the vet shop across the street from the university, the bus drivers pretend they don’t see her cuddled up in his sweater: she even knows not to make a peep, she’s smart like that, she shakes a lot less when he holds her.

I try to bring up tactfully the possibility that she might have to be put down. He tells me everyone wants to convince him of it, but he can’t, he’d rather walk into a car during the green light that harm a hair of hers. She is going to live, she’s going to have to live: one suffers like hell, that’s life, he tells both of us, his voice breaking. If I don’t do something, I’m going to cry too, so I stand and he stands with me. He needs to know it could have happened either way, even if he wasn’t stealing and getting high. He knows, he repeats, that she’s going to make it. He’s going to keep taking her to the vet, with the money people in the neighborhood give him.

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Of living organs: it grew that way, its lopsided limbs, it’s recurring patterns of amplification and shrinking, of casual comments and movies and longish nights, quick mornings. I usually leave right after the coffee, before either of us has to go for number 2. He digs from somewhere and presents slices, mugs freshly brewed. We review the day, briskly.

Maybe it’s the generational differences, but as soon as there is light we regain social identities, and speak only of the world, like two coleagues or fellow life-livers, staying at it. Maybe all those Scandinavian years cooled his character, his body has lived under a lot of sun and outlasted peers. Yet he has mentioned how his mother used to leave by their beds, to be found in the morning, china plates of shredded carrot, sprinkled slightly with sugar: the sweet water at the bottom of the plate. Then we are fellows, or I’m older, listening to the child in him.

And now we have to “have a talk”, again, renegotiate in no uncertain terms this odd friendship that has extended over the seasons, to which I’m so profoundly sweet to, albeit its unevenness. He’s going to China for a month, he’s probably additionally afraid of hurting me, with his neuroses and batchelor habits. I can’t tell how much he cares for me, he’s taciturn, at times secretly sad, wordly; I can’t help showing a levity I don’t feel when I’m away from him.

It all has the capricious beauty of what’s not necesary or fulfills a purpose: strangely enough at 31 I’m expected to be making long-term investments, or straight-up banking on something, someone. So this makes no sense, except, no less, because it has persisted, and I want to hear more, and we’ve really begun talking, wordlessly, in something akin to our own voices.

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Weeks go by and I cant’t get in the habit of a good routine, the type the glossy magazines proclaim and sure-footed high-heeled ladies all around me seem to engage in religiously. Little sticking power, I get demotivated easily. Is it because they go back to a home while I get back to a house (an apartment to be more exact)? Their lives are peopled differently, that’s why they huff with such determination, running the distance, tucking in their bellies. I settle for my little arsenal and jump when the phone rings, hoping it’s not my mother again.

But surely the rush, the feel-good adrenalin of physical involvement, wouldn’t hurt, and at the very least entail a folding out from myself, a moment away from self-consciousness and the list of failings and shortcomings I seem to go over every morning and well into afternoon, recounting and juxtaposing flaws in varied configurations.

Watch how they run on the treadmill, and sweat into their headbands, and look persistently ahead, savoring the sweat on their lips, repeatedly pushing the button: more speed, more uphill. The very same requirements the day to day makes of me, and to which I respond as I can, with slow steps, occasional boldness and retreat. Just a couple of days ago a fellow teacher commented, when I greeted him at a workshop, how easy it was to work with someone as cheerful. I guess I am a smiler, regardless, and as inescrutable as the sporty women who don’t miss a step.

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is one of her daily exercises, when she gets like this. Sometimes whole winters got spent away in this way, hermit-like, nourished by the tv background glow, hoarding the weed until it finished, or popping muscle relaxers from their silver lining. Not that bovinely living the days in her apartment was a lifetime occupation; but sometimes it struck her, and it go for 2 days or a week, but she was halfway unreachable then, she´d screen your calls and you just knew she was there with the curtains half-drawn. She wouldn’t answer the door if we had somehow gotten past the doorman up to her place. Not that we would, who wants to interact with people who don’t want to leave the house? She pretends she’s busy and what not, but you know, you just know, she’s secretly swollen with regrets.

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When we moved to Romania I was eleven. On the plane, reading Reader’s Digest, I first heard the Caucescu regime mentioned, although it didn’t ring any bells. My mother had married the ambassador-to-be there, after a whirlwind romance. She collected the bows of all the orchids he sent her in the kitchen pantry. My grandmother advised this was a good man, a good opportunity, was the underlying message. She was on the plane with us, on the way to Paris, our first layover. I already devoured Agatha Christie novels that I shared with her. I loved that world of scheeming socialites, of the wise ridicuouls folk like Poirot and Ms. Maple who saw through the beauty and tact and understood who the murderer was: who kept the most venom concealed under the wealth.

11, but I knew much was hidden from the naked eye, and kept reverting to seeking any information of the outcast, the diseased, the insane, the evil ones. Felt quite at ease, albeit scared, watching The Omen in my room, bible in hand, looking up those references. Or attempting to masturbate to the blurred cable porn in that Parisian hotel room while my grandmother snored. I fled from mirrors like the plague, and handed my mother religious literature I couldn’t possibly believe, just to see if it caught on. But that’s a different story, the point is, I was old and jaded and sought out instinctively everything that opposed this picture-perfect family that wasn’t.

When we moved in the house I was impressed: I had never lived in  a house, with a yard. I had only lived downtown, in appartments in a couple of noisy cities. My first memories where of the design of sidewalk tiles in Buenos Aires, and the first smells I recognized those assembled of bus and car fumes, the ambulance sirens like tropical urban birds, punctuating and retreating, echoing distantly.

I had to go to the American School, since there was nothing available in Spanish, and Italian is irrelevant and French and German too difficult to learn from scratch and master enough to finish the sixth grade. When the driver dropped me off in school, and kind and tall black man ushered me into my seat at Social Studies. No Spanish allowed, or more likely, no one to speak it with. My ESL class had a couple of kids from Pakistan, someone from Norway, and a pudgy girl who I never heard speak coming from Zimbabwe. I learned fast, I was good at change, I adapted. Being a quick reader, I started to get the hang of it. The classes were so small that I had lots of chances to practice, and I immitated the accent of my American teachers, one of whom shared my love for Guns and Roses. This inspired me, I figured then you didn’t have to be a total loser to teach kids.

I had no one to talk to yet. Both my mother and grandmother (the only one who religiously cooked for me, fat heavy meals dripping of butter and sugar, cheese and jam, dulce de leche, chocolate: cakes are still to me a form of love much like hugs) were conspirators, whispering behind my stepdad when he got drunk and his eyes reddened. I wanted nothing to do with them, already plotting my escape.

We travelled all of Europe, ate the best cheeses, bought cutlery in Spain and pijamas in France. Due to the dire situation of the Romanians, we had to order basic things like deodorant and toothpaste from a fat Dannish catalogue.  I took pictures with my first girl friend, frolicking in the snow I’d never touched before. I had a dog, he was poisoned by the neighbor during a winter vacation, and not being able to stand up for him when the white coats took him away to experiment cures (denying him a painless death) still makes me cry in insomnia-ridden nights. I was eleven, people didn’t pay heed to my ethics, and no one knew I cared more about the dog than the whole family put together. Something that has changed, a bit, in my adulthood and after four years of sometimes-cruel psychoanalysis. It hit me, one day, one afternoon while I drank coffee and attempted to extricate myself from some conundrum, that the cliché is true: we do the best we know to do at any given time.

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Watch: she is a truly dispassionate cook. You have to tell her things like “paprika isn’t spicy, you have to add pepper or these chiles for that”. She won’t even slice the onion, leaving that for the maid to do. And once the onion dish, loosely covered with cling film, stinks up the fridge, you have to inform her that’s another use of the baking soda, unopened in her pantry. She could care less, all she wants is the praise. My mother is a praise-devouring monster, her narcissism so pure and self-effacing, she would never understand the glazed look on people’s eyes when she makes every single anecdote link back to her, to the compliments people have told her. Imagine growing up next to that: there is never enough for you, and it makes you suspect any flaunt of pride on your own part.

At the table, she asks insistently, “Is it good? Is it tasty?”. After 4 yes I decide I detest her. After the story of how she probably saved my stepfather’s career by feeding this to the foreign minister, I laugh, and she thinks I am naturally basking in her glow, smirking because, wow, she is something.

I don’t know what strange hurts made her this way. Anything that happens to her is disconnected from her, unless it’s something good, then it is the fruit of careful work, due to her ascertaining her rightful place in the world. Apparently, as a teenager, a gypsy palm-reader told her her place was with men of importance in the world, like both husbands. She is a beautiful woman, my own looks largely derivative from hers. But where she rouges and paints, I let things be, falsely looking for the authentic.

It’s the first day of the year, and I can muster no compassion, and find no way to stand in her shoes. What does that say about me, an adult, who should know better than to be swayed like this, with this blind hating pounding at my throat. Instead I retreat to the novel I just started, stay in my pijamas all day as if to say: in this vacation, I am a prisoner, and I won’t bother.

Laughable and ridiculous, I am. The trick is to reconcile all the unconditional ways she’s loved me over the years, the ways she has supported my dreams she can’t understand, how she was withstood my long silences, the only words I have had to say the unnameable, the thing she can’t undertand.

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I believe it all happened in such  a way that made only this outcome possible. This is it: after you’ve moved around enough times, no place is good enough, no one gets all the double-entendres, and you end up sharing only a few ridiculous unreal places with all the people who waltzed through your life. Places as unsubstantial as the inbox, or facebook. This is what happens.

But not to all families. When we sat last Saturday at that fancy table of impeccable linen and easily elegant atmosphere, we had been invited by the Erganens. They are a middle aged couple with an easygoing fourteen year old son. Since I became a high school teacher last year, I feel strangely at easy with teenagers, recognizing none of that underlying fear other adults mention when I tell them about my job. And look, I’m five feet tall, a jealous, dark haired and sullen little thing, but I can put most creatures at ease and make them smile in under three minutes. And this kid, well, he’s had impeccable breeding, he doesn’t try to outdo himself in the company of other diplomats, he makes just the right amount of jokes.

On my left was the father. When he walked in to the award ceremony for my stepfather, I immediately thought: this man has a mistress. He has a joy for life rarely characteristic of happily married men. He had the bounce in his step of those who are saving and savoring something in their memory, keeping it apart from the general public, polishing it solo, for later perusal. Like when I would attend some family thing, before I considered it family, and expected to swallow some pills after, and felt their small bulge in my pocket, thinking “just breathe it out, don´t get chocked up, don´t be here now, just wait.”

Then, at the table, when they told us about their first date, and the reason why he affectionately calls her a witch, I chided myself for expecting the worst. Certainly, this thought will be unconfirmed forever: my mother and stepfather are leaving this country indefinitely, and I am out of my element, although it wasn’t difficult, in spite of my cheap cotton dress, to remember the taunt posture and to ask, calmly, for the right fish knife from the waiter, giving and not giving importance, detachedly, to the oversight.

They had been at the restaurant till it shut down, so engrossed in the conversation. They have lived across the globe, in Muslim countries, in NY. However, I never felt, not once, the sense of hidden loss I feel, at every step, spending time with my family. So could it be possible, then, to a wondering band of circus freaks, without a steady place to grow up, and still have a sense of belonging? Apparently. I, for one, cannot remember a single time when, surefooted, I knew myself an integral part of a group of people. Perhaps that’s why I haven´t yet missed a single class.

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