De Ce Monde Secret de l’ Amelie Americaine

That familiar pain is pressing down on the middle of my chest. I opened my yahoo account to empty it of spam. I use this account whenever I have to put in an email address on a web page. It’s an oldie. I kept it out of sentimentality because the name referenced my first real job in New York. My first stab at independence and self reliance. Almost 100 spam messages and newsletters had filled it.

I started deleting, by selecting all messages on a page, and hitting delete. I got to the third page, when I saw it, a personal email message from someone I had been out of contact with for a few years, a business acquaintance, and a good listener. The email was short. “I was asked to forward this message to you. They’re looking for you. She’s passed away.”

For nearly ten years I’ve lived on my own terms…pass or fail…falling up…making mistakes, but doing so without the glare, insinuations, and back-handed half truths. For this precious time, the threads of shame have slowly unraveled themselves as I have been able make my own identity and forge my life, without this other piece overshadowing any accomplishments. I had fought the fight, even though it played on my self hatred and shame, and found small ways to love myself again. I lost many times, but ultimately, here in New York, I found a way to be…almost free.

There was a family story told to me by my grandparents. They had a very smart border collie who use to follow my aunt as she ate her apple and would grab secret bites from it, whenever she lowered her hand. My aunt would continue to walk around oblivious that someone else was eating her apple. Her head was in the clouds, “dans la lune”. The moral of the story was not how smart their dog was, but how many brain cells they thought my aunt, their daughter, lacked.  The person who died was not my aunt, but was someone who used stories like these as social leverage.  I was not proud of this story, but it has to be told, because it reflects a part of my history, a door I’ve been trying to shut ever since.

Unfortunately, when I think of small towns, I think of unfair judgements, and I think of her. I think that when certain people decide that you are “one thing”, they close their minds and their ears and they cease to love you unconditionally, that you can twist and turn in your own self hatred, or you break away and find it for yourself. It has been hard to separate myself, from the identity that was put upon me. I never thought I’d feel released from that self doubt.

But when I heard about her death, my own reaction surprised me. I wasn’t relieved. I felt pain and shock. The pressing anxiety in the middle of my chest is ever present. I was nearly sleepless last night. My dreams were fleeting pictures, not totally immersed REM visions, with depth and emotional, truthful subconscious meaning. I don’t know what lies ahead or how many questions will still remain unanswered. She was someone’s mother, even if she wasn’t perfect. Neither or us were.

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I bought my first carnation today. This was a big step. It was not that I hated carnations, but I avoided them like you avoid the restaurant where your ex-boyfriend took you on your first date. The experience tickled all of your pleasurable senses, but the thought of looking at the table where you shared your first kiss, knowing how the story ended, is too much to bear. And being the vibrant, forward-thinking, keep the momentum going toward the blessed future, personality type, you’re trying to avoid anything that might trigger a moment of regret or depression.

So you avoid these triggers, like you avoid Dan Fogelberg on Lite FM and those nifty holiday songs remade by an aging pop star. These commodities of modern life are suppose to sooth away the winter blues, but instead make you go into endless emotional loops like a song that won’t get out of your head.

This is why I kept pink carnations at bay. I read somewhere that smell is the one sense that goes right to the memory centers of the brain without being processed first. This means that you experience the memory and the associated emotions before any astute reasoning, or calm affirmations can even enter your consciousness. There is no emotional protection, if a memory has been associated with a particular smell.

The problem is, I love pink carnations. I love their ultra floral smell, their tight pink ruffles, and the way, when you touch them, they spring back to life. They are resilient, even when they are drying out, they don’t easily brown or loose their bloom. One of the few concrete memories I have of my birth mother was a moment when she reached out of her catatonic state and attempted to embrace a bit of life. She wanted flowers.

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I was slightly late for work on that day. This was my habit. It was a bad one, but my boss at the time, was a new mother. She rarely chastised me for what she couldn’t do either. The Path train into the city came every couple of minutes during rush hour. I knew I could get out of bed and be at my desk within the hour.

I came out of my connecting New York City Subway train and looked up into that crystal blue sky. A digital clock on the side of one of the skyscrapers read 9:05 a.m. My office was in midtown and few short blocks from Central Park, facing west. There was no view of the chaos taking place downtown. The streets were not extremely busy, no one was looking up at the sky and nothing said “you were just in incredible danger.” I was blissfully ignorant to the events taking place downtown.

On that day there were two path trains that connected to my stop: one to 33rd street, the other to the bowels of the World Trade Center. The World Trade Center train, came twice as much as the 33rd street train and if I was late, I would jump on it, and connect to my subway there. On September 11th, 2001, I decided to be just a little bit more late and wait for the 33rd street train.

I took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor expecting to play catch up with all the other assistant buyers who had already finished their weekly sales reports. Instead I walked in and everyone was hundled around one computer in the cubicle next to mine watching video stream from CNN. Obviously we never started work that day.

At first I called my grandmother in California, as an afterthought. I didn’t want her to think that my office was close to the towers. I had woken her up with my call. “Nana, don’t worry, I’m okay, they’re locking up the building, and I’m not downtown.” I called her again after the towers fell but the call was cut off, communcation and phone lines were beginning to falter.

Security locked up the building for our safety, no one was getting in or out. We were also listening to 1010 WINNS, the local am information station on the radio. Another plane had hit the Pentagon, and there were false reports about a bomb at the Supreme Court building.

At one p.m. all New Jersey residents were evacuated to a bus that was going to drive into Westchester to another bridge that crossed between New York and New Jersey. We all walked single file out the front door. This was the first time that I had to experience the confusion and chaos firsthand. The air was a little less clear and a distinct smell could be detected that would last for days. A sea of humanity was traveling on foot heading uptown trying to leave the city. Traffic was slowed to a crawl. All lanes had been diverted uptown as well. Hours before we had we had fought to make our daily migration into the city. Now we were just trying to find a way to get back home.

Those who lived in the city were also trying to decide where to go. One buyer decided to walk to St. Vincent’s hospital and donate blood. Another had reconnected with her husband and they were going to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge back home.

I sat in the bus next to my boss, clinging to her for comfort. She called her husband and made arrangements for us to be picked up on the other side of the bridge. The bus pulled out from it’s parking space and slowly meandered on to Third Avenue. As it turned left, I looked south toward downtown and saw the great cloud of grey smoke blackening out the sun and traveling toward Brooklyn.

I walked into the door of my Jersey City apartment, nine hours later, shaken but whole, and grateful that a random series of event had protected me. I was too shocked to breakdown or cry, instead, a knawing ache lodged itself into my chest and throat. What was going to happen now?

The attack on the World Trade Center has brought out the absolute best and worse in people. We all suited up and returned to work that Thursday. We listened to 1010 WINS and kept our bags packed incase we had to leave again quickly. Despite over 90, yes 90 bomb threats, and multiple closures at all three airports, we stayed our desk and continued on with our work. The opportunity that some would take advantage of this uncertainty, did not change our resolve to go about our lives. It seemed like the only thing we could do.

I was at a social meeting a few days later, my spirit had started to dampen as polarization began to take hold. I couldn’t respond when a woman said that she stood on her roof and watched the planes hit the towers. She wasn’t horrified like the rest of us. Instead she said that she understood why the terrorist had done it.

I looked around at the half empty room, wondering which one of my acquaintances wouldn’t be returning. Were they alive? Or did they just leave town? I couldn’t understand how this woman who had also sat with them as a friend could be so callous and full of hate. There would be a time for debate and discussion about US Foreign Policy, but this wasn’t it. I wish I would of had the strength to speak up and tell her to shut up, or at least to leave the room. Instead I sat quietly, waiting for someone else to have that courage. It didn’t happen. All of us were too shell shocked and numb.

This has been my world since that day. Although I’ve moved to Brooklyn, changed careers and had many more interesting experiences, there will always be a part of me who thinks back to that moment at 9:05 a.m. and wishes that sense of wonder and innocence about my life in New York would return.

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Her phone call came around 5 p.m.

I was sitting in the auditorium at Radio City Music Hall during a rehearsal for yet another two hour television special when my Treo lit up. I looked at my caller i.d. and didn’t recognize the number.

I answered the phone, “Hello.”

“Is this S___ R___?” Her voice was excited.

“This is her” I replied, “Who is this?”

“Do you remember someone by the name of Kimber?”

“From high school?” My voice stuttered in disbelief. It had been fourteen years since I graduated high school and left my father’s house for college. I never turned back. Here on the phone was the best friend I had lost touch with, who still lived in the same town.

“Your grandmother gave me your number.” She continued. “I was going through all of the letters we wrote each other. You wrote her number on the back of one of the envelopes”

“I always spent the summers at her house. I can’t believe it.” I was floored. Unlike most members of my family, my grandmother always kept tabs on me, and knew where I was currently living.

I was suddenly fifteen again and talking to the one person who knew all of my secrets. We quickly started where our friendship had left off as if not a day had gone by.

“I found a clipping from a magazine in your letter as well” She continued “It said the inevitable future is closer than you think.”

I chuckled and said,”What do you think I meant by that?”
“I think we were both just focused on our glorious futures and getting out of our miserable lives.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Kimber and I had created many imaginary stories and worlds we could live in that soothed the continuous wounds of adolescence.

“When I talked to your grandmother she told me that you lived in New York. She told me about all the celebrities you are working with. I had to find out what this was all about.”

“Oh…you know how grandmothers are. They tend to make their kid’s accomplishments seem much grander than they actually are.” I quickly retorted. It was the truth. Although I worked in the media industry, I’m one of those faceless technicians that made the production chain purr for those in front of the camera.

“You kept my letters.” I was overwhelmed.

“I kept everything we ever wrote each other.” Her voice cracked. “I was rereading them and I just remembered how much you meant to me. I don’t know why I stopped writing. I had just figured that you needed space to start your own life.” She said with regret.

She spoke the truth. I had left it all with the intension of cutting the past and everyone associated with it loose. I felt profound compassion for us both. We had been young, bitchy and insecure. We wanted nothing more than to connect with one another, yet we were unable to reach out and say the things that would have prevented our misunderstanding.

We talked throughout my dinner break and then we talked again the next day and the next. It is as if I see myself in her and her in me. More to come. This is just one of several new beginnings.

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During my second year at college I roomed with a Japanese major who sold Mary Kay cosmetics. I came back to our dorm room one afternoon to find her giving free facials and makeovers to three Japanese exchange students. They brought her gifts wrapped in silk, as was custom, and she demonstrated her latest product. They were trying to make new friends and she was trying to supplement her allowance.

I was determined to not fall prey to her machinations. She had already lured two of my friends into buying fifty dollars of makeup, and six weeks later, she still had not delivered. They were livid. Although she did study ever night until the wee hours, I also think she was hiding out in our dorm room to avoid them.

We loved poking fun at Jill…criticising her every move and snubbing her when we went out to eat. The peril of living in an all girl’s dorm is that it becomes a very caddy and cliquish place. Jill studied more than any of us, and on some level she was desperate to be our friend. She had tracked me down the previous year and all but begged me to be her roommate so that she wouldn’t be stuck with another unbearable stranger. My best friend at the time was already roomming with her sister, so I finally agreed.

Then one day in the fall semester of our sophomore year, I was stuck in our dorm room. Jill sat quietly at her desk, her head face down in a book. It was close to mid-terms and everyone was squirrelled away in their hiding places trying to catch up before their tests.

I couldn’t focus as usual. Jill stopped asking me why night after night I would leave my bed and end up asleep on the couch in the commons room with the television on. I’d return to our room before everyone awoke, no one the wiser. I looked tired and it wasn’t for the usual reasons.

“I don’t know how you do it.” I finally said, breaking the silence.

“Do what?” She asked.

“Study like you do and have no bags under your eyes.” I replied.

“My mother taught me how to take care of my skin.” She said. Her words hit a tender place. I imagined a middle aged woman in West Virginia with bleach blonde hair and Jill’s features, gayly teaching her how to properly wash her face.

She added,”And when that isn’t enough, I know how to put on makeup to hide it.”

Her words caused a small knot in my throat. Applying makeup properly was one of those corny rites of passage between mother and daughter that I missed out on. And I felt it all too acutely.

“I can show you.” She said cautiously. This wasn’t a sales pitch.

“Okay.” I gave in.

Over the next hour Jill showed me how to apply makeup, to bring out my eyes, cover the spots and bags, and yes, how to properly wash my face. I looked in the mirror. I didn’t recognize the old me. Instead I looked like another well put together co-ed from a proper family. What I saw brought tears to my eyes.

Jill asked, “Didn’t your mother teach you how to do this?” I shook my head no.

“I didn’t grow up with my mother.” I confided. This was true. My mother had left when I was eight years old. Since then no adult female in my life had ever been interested in showing me how to present myself as a woman. I had to figure these things out for myself with trial and lots of error. I dyed my haired, curled it to extremes, applied thick eye liner, ripped up my t-shirts, applied false nails, all in an attempt to find some definition of femininity that was my own. It was all guess work. I had no role model to work from.

“Why? Where is your mother?” She asked with genuine confusion. While I was very grateful for what she had given me, I was getting annoyed with her again.

I changed the subject. “Let’s go have dinner. I want to show off my face.”

That night at the pizza parlor, instead of averting my gaze, I looked directly into the eyes of the guy behind the counter. Jill noticed and smiled. Although I was a long way from feeling completely normal, it was a small start in the right direction.

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I looked for the last time through the window of my apartment in Los Angeles. I had finished repainting the walls back to their original hospital white. Only two months earlier I painted my bedroom magenta. I blew glitter from my hand on to the wet paint so that the walls would sparkle. Like every other noble effort of mine, the intensity overwhelmed me. I had to shut my eyes every time I walked into the room.

It was 80 degrees in December, hot and stagnant. The seasons were not going to change, my family would not change, my life would not change, unless I changed.

In my dreams I couldn’t breathe. My dead grandmother came inside my head while I slept and push down on my chest so that I couldn’t move. She forced to me to listen to the same song over and over again that said “You have to go and leave me.” I had to scratch her to move. I had to betray what I was conditioned to believe was right, so that I might have a chance at a real life.

I had always done what I was told, so I didn’t know how to move forward at first on my own. I was spinning in the same routine, with no where to go, adrift in my own rut. Despite the quests I made for physical and spiritual perfection, everything I did turned out wrong and ineffective.

I’d spend hours meditating, hoping that enlightenment would float down on me at last and that all would be healed. I opened my eyes and looked at the copper budda statue that I used to hold my burning incense. It was laughing at me. It said, “Little girl, this changes nothing.”

My grandmother kept a miniature budda on her desk, that she bought on a trip to Asia. She taught me to make a wish and rub the budda’s tummy. If the budda granted wishes for a good daughter, then my life would have already been a panacea. No such luck.

On this day I prepared myself for another journey. If I was going to fail at life then I might as well fail at something that meant something real to me. I was moving to New York. I had loaded my car, my cats, and whatever could fit into two suitcases. The rest was given away.

I had bought some small gifts at the health food store: scented candles, soap, flashes cards with positive slogans written on them like, “Be the change you want to see in the world” and “carpe diem.”

I didn’t know what else to do. There was no appropriate gift or card suited to this moment. My birth mom didn’t know it, but I was about to say goodbye.

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