Friends And Family

BEWARE OF GIFTS

My parents had sociopathic tendencies, as do we all. I lavished gifts upon them and the universe to ward off their evil spirits. I behave the same way with my friends. If I lavish you, you will not hurt me. If I stop giving gifts, I will see what evil lies behind the lavishment.

I often give gifts I cannot afford to people who are not even close to me because I cannot give a gift that I myself would not want. It would feel as if I am aggressively insulting them.

When a man gives me a gift, I am always embarrassed. It is never quite what I want. Yet he is kind to give of himself in this way. So there is the vulnerability of pleasure coupled with a slight disappointment. In other words, relationship.

Gifts, like everything else, tell everything about the person giving it. Sometimes one does not want to know that much about the giver, and so the gift hurts in some way. It is another form of fantasy being stripped away.

That’s why many men have trouble giving gifts to women. They don’t want to be so easily revealed.

Often people who crave kindness, like me, give expensive gifts. People who can never be loved enough give very few and miserly gifts.

FAMILIES

Families, weighed down by their disappointments in one another and the disappointments in themselves as shown to them by family members, walk slowly in groups.

Young men walk quickly, stride out, hungry.

My friend speaks frequently of what she will do when her husband dies. She is unconscious of her repetition. This playing with the image of her widowhood is her way of capturing freedom in her marriage. She uses these images like others use affairs, platonic or sexual.

I tell my friend last night that I would like to marry again, I who got married at forty-one the first time and had to practically be blackmailed into it. I tell her it is not good to be alone, it is good to share one’s troubles, cuddle up on a winter’s eve. I tell her this even though I love my aloneness far more passionately than she loves her married state. What are we really saying? That the idealization of union surpasses any reality.

My Ukrainian landlords come up to look at my swollen door. I cannot close it anymore. The mother and father who own the building come to look. The daughter follows. We talk about buildings. I have never felt more at home than I do here. The building is all family. Not my own, but just the architecture of their family heals me.

I stop in and see my Ukrainian landlords. The seventy-eight-year-old mother is sewing and fixing things for her forty-year-old daughter. That is how they both stay young.

I have no children and have many dinners with young women for whom I am the “wild” mother. And what is it they want from me? That I do not lie to them.

I show my visiting brother a picture of us as children. He looks at himself and says, “What an ugly child.” He means, “What a pain-filled child.”

Yet he is able to give to his own children. This, rather than killing in war, should be awarded for valor.

I talk nonsense for hours with my niece, a seven-year-old girl. I do it very seriously.

In marriage, the husband is always wrong when trying to do something new.

My brother and his family finally mobilize to see the city. They align their sensitivities, as if four people can. His youngest is happy to be in on any adventure. She can talk to her beanies.

Last night my Ukrainian landlords returned from the country. I helped them carry apples from their trees and bottled water up the stairs. This is the healing part of my day.

My mother’s boyfriend in London calls to report on her hip surgery. He answers my questions, “That’s right,” “No,”—a series of monosyllables. I shoot my questions out rapid fire, as if the speed will obfuscate my helplessness.

My lover has a daughter, but we three do not interact as a family. He does not include her in our activities. “She is busy,” he says. I suppose all three of us are so needy for the other, that we cannot share.

Some parents hold hands with their children in the city fearing someone will snatch them away. Another case of “in the eye of the beholder.”

A man tells me that during his entire thirty-one-year marriage, he thought he would leave. So few of us are willing to accept ordinary unhappiness.

“Understand—through the stillness,

Act—out of the stillness,

Conquer—in the stillness.

‘In order for the eye to perceive color, it must divest itself of all colors.’”

—Dag Hammerskjold