Memoir: ROMANCE by Aurelie Sheehan
I learned how to fall in love early, earlier than I learned how to hand wash pantyhose, shave my legs, tip the soup bowl away for that last sip. I’ve been a girl who cries love, a girl who misnames things. I’ve cast a hook toward a whippersnapper or roustabout, a golden glinting hook called Love, and thus been yanked out of the boat once or twice, yanked but steady in a swan dive, yanked but willing to try. There’s no way to say what comes first, what makes sense of the next thing. I doubt cause and effect: I see no control experiment. There are only facts, and so many ways to state them, see them, lie about them. A girl learns to love like a boy wants to become an astronaut. It gets her through science class, a slew of biology and chemistry experiments.
Our first house was in France. I knew the taste of the bread and water and the feel of the grasses, and the shape of the hills, and the feel of my mother’s cashmere sweater, and the smell of it, and the feel of her hair, and the soft cradle of her arms. I knew my father’s chest, I knew something true about his love for me, something essential. I knew about cigarettes and I knew about red wine and the whiff of it on breath and its magic wand quality, how it changed the atmosphere just slightly in the kitchen, almost like smell, or temperature: invisible but unavoidably there. I knew the steam of the iron and the simmering boeuf bourguignonne, and I must have known the cheap perfume of the neighboring woman who took care of me some days. I knew the unwieldiness of riding on the bicycle with my mother, and the hot dirty fur of the cows and the horses and the not so dirty fur and the sinew of our cat, and perhaps some dogs from the neighborhood, and I knew the softness of the rose petals that I grasped on our walks up and down the road, past the fenced gardens that lined our tiny village – an eyeful, but that’s really it on the highway between Verdun and Strasbourg. My parents knew these things too, and the other things they knew, I’d find out later.
Dad was not tall, not short, not thin, not fat. He was handsome in a European way, a black Irish way, like a movie star: petulant, brooding, intense, yet also a wit, his face filling with amusement, a serious look subverted. His eyes were dark, complexion on the ruddy side. Dad’s nose seemed like a prominent feature when I was a child – such cavernous nostrils, and he was always blowing it into a hankie, pushing it back and forth like a blob (my girl’s nose didn’t have so much breadth or mobility). He was a freelance writer, so I rarely saw him in a suit. He wore jeans, polo shirts, tennis sneakers. He usually had a kind of tousled, just-up-from-a-nap look. From my bed, I could see part of Dad’s office: the green couch where he piled papers, mainly. I heard him typing at night, fast (he’d won a typing contest). He had a pencil holder on his desk, a Camel tobacco tin from when he used to sell cigarettes in college. He wore a sweatshirt that said College Dropout and had a goofy-looking guy on it, which someone had given him when they found out that the person they originally bought it for had in fact dropped out of school – an early lesson in irony. When dressing up to go somewhere, Dad would slick his hair back, shave, wear a tie and a light pink shirt and a flecked-gray jacket. We’d be on our way to a wedding, say, and his aftershave smelled good when he swept me up, and we were late, always.
My mother was in a consciousness-raising group. She wore kohl on her eyes and white-and-blue-striped bell bottoms and sandals. She had exotic friends, and sometimes they smoked pot in our living room and played Bob Dylan or the 2001 soundtrack. There were things you did to become a feminist. You stopped wearing a bra or putting your hair in curlers. You raised one eyebrow and played the devil’s advocate. You wore a fist-shaped pendant with the sign for womanhood on it. You told your daughter she could be anything she wanted. You had arguments with your family and your husband’s family at holiday gatherings. Your husband, game for some bohemo/mind-expando stuff, but in fact just a Catholic boy from Connecticut, was disgusted in part, and it was hard for either of you to sort out the personal from the political. Hard to know when to back down. Everyone was learning to define male chauvinist. You listened to Dory Previn singing about dancing on a grave and thought this kind of meanness had a virtue, the ethics of catharsis. You got your own business cards with your old/new name, your maiden name, done up in purple ink.
My mother’s journal from this time reads like a frantic grocery list: Brought kids to school, cat to vet. Phone call with Helen about Mother’s will (hard). Grocery shopping. Painted the back gate. Dreamwork surrounding relationships with James, Daddy. Brought Aur to riding lesson. Mark has nosebleed. Dinner. Fight with James. Sinus headache. Twenty-five years later, Dad’s sister-in-law says: I never saw two people who loved their children more than your parents loved you and Mark.
Sometimes Mom or Dad would bring me and my brother to the Nature Center. Inside the building they had glass cases of rocks and birds and twigs and things, and by the parking lot stood a cast-iron statue of a bear and her two cubs, and past that were fields where I could pretend to be a lion in the grass, and there were also trails through the woods with skunk cabbage and other mysterious life forms. Once our collie Zorro ran headlong into a pond covered with algae. He had thought it was solid, and we laughed as he paddled out, wet and discomposed. It was that kind of time, jolly and revelatory, and we ate space food, too, just like the men on the moon: dry tasteless chocolate sticks washed down with Tang. When my mom’s first book came out, Mark and I were allowed to bang on pots, scream and jump on the furniture. The same giddiness took over the day my father quit his magazine job: he swung his briefcase, animated as a cartoon figure. He was often cutting up – like when he dressed in my mother’s nightgown and put on blush and lipstick. I thought this was hilarious. Mom didn’t. Or the puppet shows he created for me and my friends, a witch batting a clown over the head and knocking him off the striped red and green stage. These were the days before falling in love, just an imaginary me on an imaginary planet: walking in the woods as a princess or Indian, putting my dolls through their personality-parade paces. It was a literary period, no discrepancies to bridge except awkward growth spurts – constantly changing shoe sizes, teeth falling out and new ones coming in, then my back curving off course. My mother helped me unhinge and unbuckle the brace to do my exercises. I’d lie on the floor in my pink, metal-blackened T-shirt and roll, stretch, and make myself miserable in the name of the straight and narrow. I practiced the guitar too, another annoying half-hour-long event. It was when I was practicing the C chord that I heard my parents fighting in the kitchen: yelling and then the smashing of a plate. I remember the shadows of the commotion, but maybe I am just imagining that. Love locked in me like panic, like an island of treasure, a memory of what France was like.
I was twelve when we moved from Norwalk to Weston. We looked at a lot of places, one with three stories (I’d never seen that before) and two acres (this is how I learned about acres). We went to a big red house which was fancy and far away. And we went to 10 Hyde Ridge Road, a split-level ranch house with a barn and a peach tree and a pool and a paddock. The living room, dining room, stairs and hallway were carpeted in bright orange, and the kitchen linoleum was also orange. My room was carpeted in suave, light blue ’70s shag. Soon after we moved in, I got a space-age stereo, Billy Joel and Cher albums (soon to be replaced by Pink Floyd and Yes) and a horse named Malarkey. There was a pencil sharpener in the basement, halfway between Dad’s office and Mom’s. I imagined them meeting there under the bare bulb, sharpening their pencils and chatting. I didn’t play with dolls anymore.
Falling in Love is a book written for girls. It’s got gilt edges and a heavy, royal blue velvet cover with some lace around it. Each page is as wispy as a feather and if you open it the pages wisp wisp wisp in the wind. Falling in Love. It’s something that happens and then you can kiss the guy. It’s something that happens and then you can take your pants down. You are transformed, you get away from your house of chores, homework, the blank black wall of unknowing. It’s a river, it’s got energy, it goes somewhere and does something.
You know it’s real because they have it in movies and books and somehow even your mother knows about it and condones it. Valentines. Weddings. Sweethearts. Geez, love is all around you. It’s like this magic wonderful thing where two people, a guy and a girl, really like each other a lot and want to kiss and hold hands and so they do silly things to be together, you don’t know exactly what, but maybe she sits around and embroiders a handkerchief for him and maybe he serenades her from below her window. And everyone wears weird clothes, like the guy wears satin pantaloons and the girl has a bodice (whatever that is) and her breasts are kind of popping out and she breathes in little breaths – huh huh huh – and then she faints if he kisses her. It’s like, things are really hard for the two people and there are lots of forces out there in the world that keep them apart, but really they have a secret and beautiful bond no one else knows, and then finally, after a long hard journey and lots of extra trouble and when it seems most especially that it won’t work out, nothing will be right, he gives her a big engagement ring, or he returns to the country that’s way off the beaten path, or the desert island or wherever she is, the tree fort, and says something really really earnest, and then they fall into each other’s arms and stuff.
There was a shy part of me, and that shy part was what the man would know and love. He’d know it. I wouldn’t hide it. Or, if I did hide it, he’d know it anyway. He’d know everything about me and know all my feelings and what I really wanted and things, and everything would be okay, better, and I’d live happily ever after in a kind of suspended moment of fixed happiness.
It was easy to see why I’d fall in love with Mike Foster. To begin with, it was a first, first everything, and to make it more just everything, he was a junior and I was a freshman, I was thirteen. I had fallen in love with the sexiest guy in school, a blur of movement, a lank coke-spoon/flare-leg jean/cowboy-boot flirtation, cigarette behind his ear, blue eyes squinting, Mick Jagger lips curling into a let’s-fuck smile – like he knew everything I was thinking. He was a flirt with ropy arms, a shredded workshirt, and a blue Camaro with mag wheels and velveteen upholstery and Led Zeppelin on the eight-track. He wasn’t tough, exactly; he wasn’t a fighter. But he had attitude. He worked out and had two older brothers and came from some kind of useful, mysterious boy culture that I was always one step away from. He played the drums and he charmed the teachers and he wasn’t what you’d call bookish, exactly, but he was clever, able to find a nickname or an adage for a person or a day. He wore hairspray and had black-light posters and went to discos, and he must have been tired and lonely inside, is what I thought, always being so charming and handsome and tripping along the surface of the keg-party/Algebra-1 world like he had better places to go. Then he invited me to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert for my birthday and I had never been to a concert and it was our first date and it was just the year before that I’d been able to take off my back brace and enter the world of Love wholeheartedly. I’d traded my loose, thick clothes for lace-up jeans and delicate camisoles; I’d entered the realm of People With Bodies. Mine wasn’t much to write home about: flat-chested, lots of moles, curved back. But it could be dressed up, and it was so easy to be “sexy” – sexy was part of being In Love, but it was also separate. To be sexy, you just needed to buy, for one dollar, a tube top. In an hour, you could sew a red velvet heart on the back of your cut-offs. You could paint bleach on twists of your hair and pluck your eyebrows into thin arches and wear frosty pink lip gloss. You needed to muster up the courage to put your hand on his leg while driving from school to the beach, and then there were other more complicated things you had to do later but you weren’t sure of them yet.
My parents presumably loved each other then, but it wasn’t lovey-dovey love, of course. It was adult love, dreary – it wasn’t, anyway, some French movie. They were just regular people, medium height and medium build and just plain medium. They slept in the same bed, the way parents do, without inspiration. They weren’t truly exciting – like Mike Foster, say. They were the adults. Parents. The type of people who thought about bills and ways to make their children miserable. They didn’t listen to good music. They didn’t stay up late. They didn’t sleep late. They were overly concerned with the relatives, and also with their business friends and other people who were just sort of dull and medium height and medium build and old like they were.
And when they began fighting more, it was also just how parents were, what happens when people have nothing better to do. When my mother and I yelled at each other recklessly from either end of the split-level stairwell, this was how teenagers and their mothers behaved with each other – look at Jill, look at Jennifer. And when my father went into the other room and closed his door, this too, was just how things were.
Gordon Davis Hamilton told me he was the black sheep of his family, and he wore a seersucker suit, and his hair fluffed back in soft ripples from his forehead, and his lips were boyish and rouged. He lived in a little house by a river and I spent the night there, my first night ever spent with a man, and in the morning I heard rushing water and Stevie Wonder singing “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” and I had loved being in Gordon’s bed and loved when he kissed between my legs, and nothing in the world could have been so romantic. Then afterward I didn’t hear from him for weeks, my handsome fallen-prince/beach-bum/drunk, so my friend drove me back to his riverside shack. He wasn’t there, and it seemed he was moving out or something because all his clothes were heaped in the middle of the garage. On the edge of the pile, I left a bottle of Jovan musk cologne, a toothbrush (we’d had some joke about brushing teeth – I’d never seen a man, a lover, brush his teeth before), and a card of the sea and the sky with a poem, To Gordon. I saw him other times, he’d call now and then, drop in on my life and tell me I was beautiful. It never occurred to me he was using me just for sex.
Older men like Gordon were much more likely to bring me to a Suspended Moment of Fixed Happiness than were the pimply earnest types my own age who didn’t have their own cars and who couldn’t run roughshod over my insecurity, my unknowledge. Drinking also made it better, easier for us, because we were all very nervous and it took a lot to overcome that barrier, that zone where you aren’t kissing or touching at all to being In Love. And, since I didn’t see them very much, there were many moments between times to imagine love, with the petticoats and the engagement rings and stuff, because it seemed that this, this not-love part, was integral in some way to the in-love part, that the not-love and the in-love intermingled: one needed the other to exist. Not-love was the two weeks before he called back, and the sadness and the loneliness and the questioning and the longing. Not-love was the journal writing and the poem writing. Not-love was driving by his house and his not calling and not-love was filled by talk with your girlfriends, or doing dumb chores or fighting with your parents. But the not-love was infused with the in-love and you were stronger and better in every way, able to do things with a sense of their irrelevance, because the only thing that was important was him and being in love, which you were, and weren’t.
Conjecture tells me that the last year before my parents announced their plans to divorce would also have been when their incompatibilities ranged through our house with the greatest vigor. But I remember the escapes more than what I was leaving: closing the door to my room against Mom, her knocking with the same determination she used to rout out my father. I ran away, indignant because my mother used my own admission “against me” – she called the bar and told them I was only sixteen so not to let me in anymore. I wrote a letter to my parents explaining myself, negotiating a change in terms. We began such negotiations early: love as a set of parameters, the difference between coming home at 11:30 and midnight on a Thursday, the stalls mucked by noon Sunday. I blamed The Schedule of Love on Mom. But if she were more demanding than the norm on this point, my father went in the opposite direction: he pulled back as she took control. Sometimes I thrived on her involvement, but sometimes his approach felt safer.
They were fighting when they drove me to college. Maybe we were all fighting. Car rides were one of our favorite times for fights, then and the fast and loose dinner hour. My mother was shrill, her words filling the car, and Dad stared at the road like a kamikaze pilot, a time-bomb father. I had graduated from high school a half-year early because I hated school. My plan for that spring had been to work as an editorial assistant at Tennis magazine, learn oil painting, compare Plato and Aristotle’s views on love, teach myself to type, and investigate the field of law. My friend Mary also graduated early and we spent half our nights at the Black Duck Café; Meyers & O.J. and Marlboro Lights for me, white wine and Mores for her. I drove a Pinto and wore Calvin Klein jeans and high-heel, zip-up boots and generally felt pretty adult. I liked driving to my job in the morning: hungover and short of sleep, but showered, blown-dry and wearing lipstick. For lunch, I went to the deli for turkey with Muenster, lettuce and mayo on rye, and a 7-Up. Plato and Aristotle seemed to concur that I should sleep with Jimmy Evans, my friend Lynn’s boyfriend. Jimmy was a short twenty-some-year-old with black hair falling to his shoulders, dark brown eyes and a wispy mustache. He was sexy/weasely, depending on your perspective, and he hung out with a coke dealer who had cachet because of his drugs, immense weight and propensity to fight; the son of a cop who employed Jimmy in his tree and lawn work business; a near-midget with a big car (they said smoking had stunted his growth); and Sid and Cindy – slow-moving, pudgy people squeezed into designer jeans. These were the greasers, or townies. When Jimmy and I first started fooling around, I wrote about the innocence and purity of our liaison, this innocence and purity simultaneous to but reigning over moral, temperamental and lifestyle ambiguities. In the car with my parents, I was thinking about how tragic it was that I had to leave a love as true and passionate as mine and Jimmy’s for something as dumb as school. Before leaving me at the dorm, Mom and Dad brought me to a department store and bought me my first grown-up housewares: two green and white graph-design coffee mugs, a towel set, a sheet set, an electric tea kettle, a full-length mirror.
My parents wrote me letters that fall – Mom’s were typed on purple-calligraphy stationery and came once a week without fail (same as her father had done with her). Hers had two distinct moods: the first reflected the closeness we often felt, they were soft with affection, dreamy with pleasure in her latest discoveries – Judy Chicago, Frida Kahlo. The second batch was confrontational, question marks in multiples, too many to ever answer: why wasn’t I returning her calls? Why did I drink so much? Was I avoiding her? Dad’s letters were typed, too, typo-speckled on chance slips of paper. They were filled with stories, always funny, sometimes morose. Sometimes in shy, oblique ways, he’d tell me that he missed me, express the desire to see me, ever careful not to ask for too much. I had no idea what was happening between them, what they must have been feeling, but getting those letters in my little gray mailbox – more than anything they already seemed divorced from each other, at least divided – the tenor of each so unlike the other, as if they were pulling apart as parents, becoming more mother, more father.
In September, Jimmy came up to visit. He was different from the students on my hall. He wasn’t the sort to read, listen to the Ramones, mountain climb, go to the theater, go to college at all. He arrived in a big burgundy car, one of those four-door sedans that had seen better days, and he wore jeans and his jean shirt and his rawhide pendant and his workboots and his earring. We went to a nearby bar. I wore a long, blue-and-green dress with glass buttons I’d gotten at a vintage clothing store. I was taking poetry, political science, French. I’d sat in an apple orchard and written about crows and sunsets. I’d been nostalgic because every incoming student had gotten a sample bottle of the kind of shampoo Jimmy used, so every day I smelled him in the air. That strange fall weekend, I wanted Jimmy to feel at home. I wanted our feelings for each other to be strong enough to withstand everything: my being away, this chasm of culture. Did it work? He left after one night, and there was a sadness in the air.
And in their separate ways, both my parents missed me and had made it very clear that they wanted to spend a lot of time with me over Thanksgiving break, though when I snuck back to town two days early, it wasn’t to see them, but Jimmy. We needed to spend more time together, I thought, to communicate, to get back to basics. That first night was rich with unsaid, drunken emotion. We flung each other onto the pavement in a half-joking wrestle outside the bar. During the night, he peed in his sleep, which was kind of an ice-breaker for us: he felt sheepish in the morning, and I said everything would be all right. When I finally went home to my parents, there was a scene: Mom and I in tears, Dad fuming. Maybe it wasn’t their intent, but it turned out this was when they told me they were planning, now, a temporary separation. The rest of that vacation didn’t go much better. Jimmy broke his toe kicking the wall after I put toothpaste on a picture of Lynn, after he had gotten mad at me for being in a room alone with Bruce somebody. My parents and brother and I went to Thanksgiving dinner at Aunt Helen and Uncle Bob’s, and by the end Mom and Dad were “at each other’s throats.” I wrote this in my journal, but to be honest, I don’t remember it.
To fall in love, to be in love, is a magic charm you use against the circumstances. If you are in love, the darnedest things happen. If you are in love, all the evidence doesn’t count. Fighting, drunkenness, disappointment, mismatched desires: love can take care of it. Love is invisible and it just hums along, making things happen, even without you. I have fallen in love the way a novitiate loves God and makes a better world because it’s a world of faith. I have taken the shell of a book, the shell of sex, and extrapolated from there in a riff of imagination and need. I have jumped into my body like you jump into a cold lake. Nothing, free floating, falling, then the shock of immersion. I attached girl stories to the sex I had in Mike’s Camaro and in Jimmy’s bad-neighborhood house, girl stories I tried to make fit. Sex/Love. It didn’t surprise me when my parents said they were splitting up. My feet were on two tightropes and the ropes were dividing and I was stretching my legs, trying to make the thing work. The rift had already thrown me down onto a parking lot, drunk. The rift had carefully constructed letters to Jimmy, letters that didn’t ask for much, but asked for an insanely larger amount than possible. The rift. The divorce. The dream of France – place where they were happy, place where I was born. The medium-sized people who ate together at the kitchen table with me and Mark. The people who shared a pencil sharpener on the basement steps. The people who had matching VW Rabbits and who played golf and tennis and had parties on the patio and who danced out there one night to Marianne Faithful, I saw it from the dining room window, and the people who broke their bed once in the dead of night and the people who as Santa Claus bought me a pink bicycle with red, white and blue tassels and the people who couldn’t do an ounce of handiwork between them and the people who lived in my house: my parents. But the river of fighting had been there the whole time, the plain facts of a daily life separate from the dream of love. Two weeks after they gave me the news, I got blind drunk at a party and a strange man with long black hair, thick glasses and a trench coat followed me back to my dorm room and raped me. I didn’t tell my parents, of course. By Christmas, the fragile arrangement I had with Jimmy blew out entirely, I discovered I had VD, and Mom and Dad had broken whatever fragile trust they’d had between them, the faith that things could, one day, any day, work out.
My mother asks if I remember when we all went to an Italian restaurant and they got into a raging argument at the red-and-white-checked table, and they were drunk, and she walked home. No, I don’t remember. I remember Zorro running into the pond. I remember going to a concert. I remember having my first-ever piña colada with a man who had an aristocratic name. I remember writing love poems. I remember Jimmy crying and telling me he’d always wanted to be an architect, when we were drunk, when it was already over.
I am my mother’s voice, the sound of it, and the Morse code of hesitations, fits and starts. I am my father’s conviction about things that can hardly be spoken, and I am his reluctance to talk. My parents live in me, even in their divorce, as divorcees actually, my father at the bar, my mother in the garden, or vice versa. My parents war within me, puppets like the puppet theater my father performed for the girls at my seventh birthday party – the offhand intellectual writer guy, funny and remote and caustic; the fiercely maternal, willful woman, tears in her eyes, not satisfied with things as they are. Most of all, it’s become a tug of war about how to love, what love means after all. Mom says, love means involvement. My father more often lets me do the calling, the planning. Their styles are so different, they seem like antonyms. I am afraid at times I am my father to my mother, my mother to my father. Or could I look at it this way: I have inside me something of what each saw in the other? But no. I ask for more than he can give, and I pull away from my mother. I am a semicolon between opposites.
There is no end to a story about love and your parents and their divorce. There is no way to manipulate the figures of the drama so everyone is nicer to each other, more understanding. We loved each other like errant stars, hiphopping across the sky, unable to settle on a constellation, a symbol of lines. Styles of love – carpenter, diver, lawyer. Since their divorce, the cells in my body have regenerated twice. I’m one-seventh new just since Christmas.
When writing about the past, there’s a compulsion to mythologize, to label a festival of hilarity, stupidity, triumph and dullness as one thing, something to leave, to annul. I have been as surprised by unremembered love as unremembered nastiness. It’s as if there needs to be an excuse – for what? For taking speed, getting drunk, sleeping with a gas station attendant with a broken front tooth. For loneliness. It’s as if a break with the past needs to be complete to go on, that even as I say, love was there, I don’t mean it. The soul of my parents burns on in Delphic flame.
So it comes now to this, to us. At 32, an age when my parents were knee-deep in family life, halfway between intoxication and rupture, I met you. This is a dream I’ve had all my life. I’ve seen it destroyed and in fact destroyed it myself, as if I am a water creature and it is a desert habitat. I had a child’s belief in my parents, in their union, in their marriage. I’ve used the words “I love you” in circumstances that constituted attachments, yes, but love? Love? There is a water table of emotion underground; it metes out proportions of hope and actuality. Fear cuts through me, seething, charring. Can you believe me if I’ve said I love you before? Can I believe it? Our histories harp behind us, our histories are photo assistants pulling down screens of blue sky, sultry clouds, burgundy, green, pale nothing behind us, to better reveal who we are. Our histories look so different from a glance: I who have never married, you who have divorce, right now, running through your hair. You knew her and she knew you through the study and interaction of years, through battles and rapprochements, dreaming and planning and having some of the things you planned for. The years you two had puff you out here and there. She sometimes sits on the couch between us, a ghost of separation, of what was, what could have been. And so one would think this would be quite different than me – who, in recent years and in formative years, went from here to there in a circumscribed pace, loving in brief bursts of urgency and finding disappointment there. I didn’t know I’d find you. It’s not so far from what works to what doesn’t. All my life I’ve loved my parents, known, however much they fought, that they were an essential two, an essential one. (The clear signs of their happiness since the divorce don’t change that, either.) I have to say that with you, I am loving for the very first time. I only know my previous loves intellectually, rationally. My love for you encompasses the latitudes, these acknowledgments of our histories – it has to. This love has grief in it. This love is huge, and its attendant fears are correspondingly monstrous – it’s an all or nothing feeling, as if I’ve never hitched my horse to anyone’s cart before, ever. We’ve both felt the crush of failure. Newness and oldness dance in us. I am afraid and grateful, astonishingly grateful to have a chance to rewrite romance, remake love in this world.
Letter from my father, April 10, 1981: Your note came on this glorious spring-bursting day and though I was made miserable by its gloomy overtones I was very grateful to have it. As much as I can be sure of anything I am sure this change in my life is right, not just for me and for Mom but indirectly and eventually for you and Mark, and yet there are moments in my daily life when I am totally disoriented with the feeling of not knowing which foot to put forward first in the course of a simple walk across the room. Another thing I can say is you will like this place of mine and probably want to displace me. “This place is deadly,” said Mark the other day. Guess what, I love you very much, with all my heart and both my feet, and I’m saying so not to embarrass you but because just in case you might not have suspected it, because of my wayward manner in person, and terribly affected literary ways by post, and if anything I am more keenly aware of how much I love you, and also care for you in a perfectly ordinary way, now that I have established my beachhead in the new life of mine to be.
Aurelie Sheehan’s first novel, The Anxiety of Everyday Objects, is forthcoming from Penguin in early 2004. Her short story collection, Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant, has been reissued in paperback (Dalkey Archive Press, 2001). She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Jack Kerouac Literary Award, and a Camargo Fellowship.