The Things We Remember, for Tamar Kitzmiller (1954-2017)

Do you remember the time, Tamar, that we hiked that wild mountain in Vermont, so intent on our gossiping that we missed the trail junction and continued for a full mile down the wrong trail? We recognized our mistake far too late into the game, and quickly became panicked at the realization that we had to pick up your tween daughter at a local ice-skating rink. She would be disappointed and annoyed. Rather than fess up to our own idiocy, we concocted a fake story about encountering a mother bear and her cubs on the trail. They had menaced and delayed us! And the cubs were dreadfully cute. There were three of them. One had a stubby tail. One had a lisp, etc.

Your daughter ate up that story, She quizzed us about the adorable cubs. We lied like bandits to her, and to the kindly dad who had given her a ride home from the rink. The truth came out quickly, of course. Do you remember how I snortled, "We sure fooled that old Griff fellow!" without realizing that we had failed to properly hang up the phone and he could still hear us? (His name was something like Mr. Griffin.) Did we ever get the business from J and H, who were both disgusted and amused! ("You rotten, rotten liars.")

I could be altering some details of the story because memory doesn't always serve, but I suppose it doesn't matter. You're not here to correct me anymore, Tamar, so it's my story now. But it's still ours. It was a long time ago. Forgive me.

You surely remember our trip to the "Bloody Brook," in dead of night. It was in your hometown of Norwich, VT. We thought it would be a grand old idea to venture out en masse and skinny dip, drinks in hand. When we arrived at the Blood Brook, we found that the relative lack of rain had limited the brook to a shallow trickle. We went in anyway, dipping our nethers in a few sad inches of water. We laughed and laughed, and we scrabbled over the wet stones to find our shoes. We looked up to the full moon. We padded home in the dark, shoes in hand, drunk with love of our lives.

On another occasion, J and S polyglued eggs to an old railroad tie and we shot them clean away with BB guns. And we lit a bonfire by soaking a roll of TP in fluid and firing it down a zipline from an upstairs bathroom into a big garbage can of combustible materials. Does this sound impossibly dangerous? Oh, yes. But you have to understand: We were all guaranteed to live forever.

On so many Halloweens before I had children of my own, we painted our faces and carved pumpkins and roasted the seeds in olive oil and salt and ate them until our stomachs were sick. I spilled a mason jar of seeds into your front lawn and picked them out of the grass blades and ate them anyway. I was dressed as Ballet Pumpkin, or the Octo-Moose, or a Flying Purple People Eater—my costumes have always been a bit unique, and you lent your support with your clever sewing and additions. You always styled yourself as a one-of-a-kind witch—with such enormous creativity! I recall the Halloween when you had a smoking urn of dry ice on the lawn, and you sat in grand splendor with makeup so thick and green that no one could recognize you.

(Years earlier, I also recall arriving at your home for a visit and going to use the toilet, after a very long drive. I opened the lid to a smoking cauldron of doom. I thought the toilet was about to explode! Dry ice. Thanks for the panic attack, guys.)

You had a red door on that house, and a yellow lantern. You had cross-country skis on the wall of your garage. I once dug a flowerbed for new tulips in your backyard. When we had boys (all three of them), we sat in your backyard and made "Pine Noodle Soup" and played catch with a rubber chicken. I always felt at home there. We sat under a tree that oozed with sap and looked out on the half-pipe that J built for your son W and we talked until the sky grew light. We never ran out of things to talk about. Nor would we now, if I had the chance.

Just give me one clear night. One afternoon, in hazy sunshine. Give me your cats Blossom and Addie, who once crawled into my guest room and kneaded my chest for comfort in the night, or your small black cat, Misty, who darted in terror from our amateur movie-making, in which we made her an unwitting victim of a fiend that rose from the leach field. But most of all, give me you, Tammy. I miss your sweet, chuckling, authentic laugh. I wish everyone reading this who didn't know Tammy could hear  your  laughter. It was the best laugh ever possible. Real as anything you can touch with your hands. Yours was a laugh that suggested there was a deep river of goodwill flowing beneath us all, and you were privy to the source. You loved your life.

My god, but every moment matters. Because you're gone now, Tamar, and you were my sister in heart, and I never ever thought you would be gone. I sort of thought we would have another moment, another time, to recollect each and every one of these stories. I know you were a bit older than me, and all, but I never thought of you as such. You were young in every way. I could come to you and say: "Let's make fancy hats and costumes and parade down the road and toss water balloons at everyone just to delight their souls and knock them off their rockers," and you would never ask "Why?" You would only ask, "When? And do you have the water balloons handy?" Or better yet, "Let me fill them! Where's the nearest water tap?"

I remember my very first trip to Norwich, VT. Our dear friend S introduced us. I met you and J, and we sat by the fire, and he tossed popcorn at your knees, for no reason I could discern. There was a bright painting of hummingbirds above the mantel. The next day I slept in, and you all teased me relentlessly, saying I was "due the sleep to which I was accustomed and would sleep until the time to which I was accustomed." We went to a local apple festival and bought and ate crisp apples, and you gave me a lunchbag stuffed with goodies and trail mix that I took home and ate, bit by bit, until it was depleted. You called me "Princess Pomme" and later "Princess Pumpkin." I took your teasing for love. I pretty much knew that I loved your family then and there. I loved you. I love you. You one day said I was the little sister you never had. I couldn't be more grateful for that role.

Over time, over years, as your children grew, their artwork came to fill the walls of your home. The green-snouted thing with the purple eyes. A massive sunflower. Lopsided little clay cups on the windowsill. And as your children grew further, we played games. Your daughter drew a rabid raccoon during a game of Pictionary, and it stayed magnetized to the refrigerator for years, its eyes two magnificent little spirals. A quote appeared one year, attached to a cartoon, perhaps: "God does not play dice with the universe." J put that there. He's wonderfully clever, often challenging us to logic puzzles and math games. He loved you for more than 40 years. And we love him. He is as much a part of us as you are. And so are your children. We aren't related by blood, but we are all family, forever.

Do you remember, Tamar? I know you do. Every story, every inside joke, every prank, every night by the fireside singing our hearts out with the boys strumming the guitars, every conversation, every walk in the woods. We lost you sometimes in the "Triangle" and then we found you, and then we lost you again. You and I roamed about at night in our pajamas, and we lay down on the clean earth to look up at the stars. Who will remember your laughter? Who is going to remember "Mahlon Bither" and "Team Goat" and "Braised child under 10" and all of it, all of it, except you and those of us who remain?

Tamar, everything you ever did and said is part of that deep river flowing fast toward we know not where, and we're all standing in it together, and we are stronger and better and braver for having known you. We will all work hard to make this place better than we found it, for certain.

I love you, Tamar.

For Tamar Kitzmiller, 1954-2017.  

The Manny Diaries, Chapter Fifteen: The Pushing of the Swing

“in the cupboard sits my bottle


like a dwarf waiting to scratch out my prayers.


I drink and cough like some idiot at a symphony,


sunlight and maddened birds are everywhere,


the phone rings gamboling its sound


against the odds of the crooked sea;


I drink deeply and evenly now,

I drink to paradise


and death


and the lie of love.”

—Charles Bukowski, “Soirée”

No more cliffhangers. No more chapters to be delivered. This is the final chapter. It’s the end of fifteen parts, both sad and fierce, and the end of a eulogy that began with the very first chapter, although I didn’t know it then.

The Manny died on Tuesday, July 7, 2015. We don’t know the hour. His relentless talking, both the internal dialogue and the external monologues, had already presumably gone quiet. He had left Mexico to renew his visa, which he did periodically. After crossing the border from Guatemala into Mexico by bus, he suffered a seizure, collapsed, and fell into a coma. A good Samaritan pulled his passport out and called the American embassy in Mexico City.

This is he.

Oh, you would so mad if you knew I shared any photos of you, but this one shows you at your happy, smiling best so i'm going to pretend you never said anything. You look happy. Besideswhich, you can't git after me me cos you are dead! (Oops, sorry, trying on a bit of your style of humor.) The text caption for this one read; "Look, Miss Jennifer, I got a haircut!"

My husband had spoken to Manny on the previous Friday afternoon and he was right as rain. Sober as a judge. They were catching up after not having spoken for a month, and they talked for an hour and a half. The conversation was so innocuous that my husband can’t clearly remember any specific details. There was no “Lupita the beautiful Mexican girl, who stole my Chipmunk puppet but whose skin was so soft, so very soft.” There was no talk of missing pants or missing chunks of tongue or angry landlords or roaming oxen or stopping up the toilets or avocados falling like manna from the trees. (When he was sober he might have, I dare say, been a bit more ordinary. But one might say that he was reasonably happy. A decent trade-off.)

On Sunday, my husband received a call from the embassy. Some years back, he had helped Manny obtain a passport, and his name was (eerily!) still on record with the state department as a result. They told him that Manny was in a coma and that the doctor had stated that, “the prognosis is not good.”

Two days later my husband placed a call to the embassy and received word that Manny was gone, his ever-present nattering and wild speculations silenced and darkened forever. He was dead of “unknown causes.” Unknown except for the dubious devil of drink, which may have finally killed him in the end. Perhaps he had tried to stop again. Perhaps he had tried to begin again. We don’t know, except that he had quite suddenly ceased to exist. It was what we had expected, all along. I knew I’d never see him again, and I won’t.

He had often said things like: “But what if I die, Miss Jennifer? What if I were to die?” He was truly afraid of dying. He knew in his heart it was a constant possibility. Some people are hyperbolic, prone to doom-filled mental wanderings, and hypochondria (myself included). He was all that and more. He knew he was going to die. It was just a matter of time.

You think you’ll have a chance to prepare, to say your goodbyes. You’re hoping for movie lighting. But then you step off a bus and fall down in a parking lot, or a dusty field, and no one notices but for a kind stranger. You’re there and then you’re not. You’re nowhere. You’re torso-deep into a bush with your pants missing and still have the grace to guffaw about it.

Manny, in the year that you lived with us, you crafted us near 100 meals, probably more. But you’ll cook no more. Where is your sunburnt smile under that ridiculous hat, and where are your 14 chickens that you bought for a song? I think you named three of them the Big One, the Middle One, and the Little One, after our boys.

His name was Mark. I’ll stop calling him Manny, but I’ll leave his last name off the records. His last name—the name we knew him under for many years—was real. He often went by another name, Frank, by which many of his friends knew him. But it wasn’t real. Many other things he told us weren’t real.

He was 54 years old, and not 63 as he often told us when he was drunk. (This had caused confusion, as my husband knew his true age by his passport. However, he [that is, Manny] had told us that Mark was also an assumed name. His real name, he said, along with the person had been when he was born, was long buried and forgotten. He had intentionally aged himself by 9 years.) He never served in Vietnam. He never killed anyone in combat. He was not adopted. His parents were not shot by Stalin’s goons as he cowered under the bed. He had a daughter, adopted, from a short-lived marriage. He adopted her in 1999. She’s sixteen now.

He had four siblings, all of whom (but for one) had washed their hands of him years ago. “We haven’t seen him in 26 years. Let him be buried in Mexico’s version of Potter’s Field,” said his sisters. One brother still cared, and we found that brother through the embassy. He hadn’t glimpsed Mark since 1990, when Mark had come by his shop to borrow $5,000. The brother wonders if that lousy $5,000 that he didn’t even care about kept Mark away for so long. Mark could have repaid the loan, too—he had the money many times over in the next two decades, when he was doing well financially. His brother would have gladly forgiven the loan just to spend more time with him.

Almost everything he told us, especially when he was drunk, was a lie. And his lies went even further. He had told friends that we owed him because he had paid for my husband’s law school education, and that, despite that, we were constantly “shaking him down for money.” No, simply not true, my husband’s mother paid for it. And we never shook him down for money. In fact, he owed us money. But we didn’t care.

I’m picturing rattling the poor man’s pockets as I “shake him down” and finding only some Dove dark chocolates and shards of broken pretzels and maybe a linty quarter.

Oh Mark, I’d like to swat you in the face with a sheeny-eyed red snapper now, but I can’t. Nor can I ask you what you meant to achieve with your wild fictions and your weeping over the dead you left behind in Vietnam. I now know that you had Muscular Dystrophy as a child, and they had to cut the muscles on the backs of your legs to help the condition (why I do not know; looking it up instantly hosed my computer, as if Mark is gleefully fiddling with the controls from the beyond to prevent fact-checking of his falsehoods).

We learned that your mother doted on you and you were always the favorite. “My sweet Mark. My poor Mark,” she used to say. You outgrew the condition, apparently. You got an apartment and your mother would deliver groceries to you once a week, out of love. But when your mother died in 2013, you didn’t attend her funeral, nor did you attend your father’s funeral in 1996.

And the “wetwork” you supposedly did. Did you ever actually hurt a single living thing? You had so much anger burning you up inside. You had so much pain. And so much love, too.

Why did you adopt a daughter and never speak of her? Despite that, why did you love our boys so much? I have videos of you pushing our children on a tree swing, and laughing. You had a great, big belly laugh. A real laugh that made fake cocktail-party titters seem shameful. You had a deep chuckle.

They amused him greatly, our boys. He let them climb over him and batter him like he was made of granite, despite his aches and pains. He was never dark then, during the pushing of the swing, although the darkness was in him.

I didn’t fully realize the fact of Mark’s death until I saw, a few nights ago, a photograph of the urn that carried his ashes. It had been delivered from Mexico to his brother in Detroit. It seemed awfully small to house such a big man. How can someone so massive be just…gone.  It was a wooden box, rectangular in shape. It made me feel scared for him, until I remembered: He’s not in there. That’s just all the ashes that are left from the pains and sorrows and hungers and loves of that big, ungainly body that never quite fit him.

Mark, you were a real physical presence. You used to startle on my stairs. You toasted tortillas on our stove and chopped endless “guavacados” on the cutting board. In our closet we have your old coat on a hangar, a “Dickies” brand coat. Your old winter hat is wadded-up in the pocket. You used to point at the logo and snigger, “Look, it says Dickies. Hee hee hee. Dickies!” That was your trademark sense of humor. A little juvenile, a little dirty, but we laughed all the same.

He was a mountain of a man—all crags and thorns and gullies and crevasses, a big bumbling sorrow of a man who loved his dog, Gus, so much that he carried the bulldog’s urn of ashes across the country. He cried his heart out over that dead dog, to us over the phone over many weeks. He wept like a baby.

Where is his wok, and his perfect citrus press? I covet that citrus press. All his meager possessions, left behind in Mexico with the landlord who grew to love him, too, even over a short period of time. Rodolfo wept on the phone while discussing the details of Mark’s final months.

Can I think that Mark inspired one of my sons (the “Middle One”) with a passion for cooking that has never wavered over the months? I’d like to think so, yes.

His art collection in the storage unit had already been sold for pennies on the dollar by the time we learned of his death. We have a couple of broken, antique lamps in the garage, and a collection of photographs he never bothered to return to the art galleries that had loaned them out to him. We have a handful of photos that contain him, the man, the Manny. We don’t have much.

I thought to write, “I wish I could have told him that I never hated him.” No, I loved him. But I think I did manage to tell him that. He read this blog once in an indignant fury (after my husband informed him of its existence) and told us to “fix it!” He wanted it all deleted. He wanted every piece of information about him that existed to be expunged from public record. My husband wrote back, “Suck it up!” We would never delete it, especially now. It’s a record of who he was, both sad and joyous. He didn’t leave much else.

You played a joke on the world, Mark, and maybe you’re still sniggering about it, and we’ll never know why. Lies and deceit and family estrangement and pain and heartbreak and drinking and more lies and even more drinking, but you did something right, because we sit here in the cricket song and the dark night thinking of you, and we are filled with sorrow. You fed us, you pushed our boys as high as the moon, you sent us stupid photographs day after day via text message with inane and obvious captions: Bunny. Groundhog. Fish in River. Goose. Sailboat. Bunny eating weeds.

You and your big fat smile, Mark. That stupid mustache. Those awful baggy t-shirts and your rangy arms. The way you flinched when someone dug their hand into the grated cheese instead of properly using a spoon. The day you wandered up behind me, silent, because I was playing Cat Stevens’ “Wild World” on the piano, and you said, “I always liked that song. I sang that song once.” The day you fixed the broken switch on an old lamp I had, and smiled proudly like a little child who has learned to tie his shoes, and I was grateful.

All of it.

  

The Manny Diaries, Part Four: Grey Gardens and Bellevue

People have been stopping me on the street and asking, "Why didn't the Manny make that plane flight?! Tell me now, or I'll have to wring your neck. Whaddaya been doing, writing more children's novels or something? Cease it now and write the MANNY DIARIES."

So the Manny had gone into the city, and his flight was the next day. On that day there was a snowstorm. But that's not why he didn't make his flight. In fact, we texted him during the snowstorm:

"Make it out OK?"

"A-OK! 70 degrees and sunny," was the reply.

But the very next day I got an ominous message from Manny's friend, to whom I had never spoken directly. She told me that Manny was in the hospital and asked that I call her immediately. Wild speculations flew through my mind. He had arrived in CA and had mixed it up with the criminal dentist, who had placed a hit on him that had misfired at the last moment. He was now on the run with a bullet hole through his midriff and the evil dentist's disembodied teeth implanted in his shoulder! All bets were off.

I called her back.

"Well," she said. "Manny was supposed to catch this plane tonight, right?"

"No, last night. He already caught a plane last night. He's in California, right?" I said.

"Uh, no. I think he might be in Bellevue?" she said.

As it turned out, Manny had gotten the date of his flight wrong by one day. That left him with 24 hours in which he thought it was, perhaps, a really grand idea to go out and buy a few bottles of Tito's vodka. He had apparently gargled with Vodka, washed down his eggs with Vodka, had a Vodka-induced nap, and proceeded to sample additional Vodka snorklings until his friend arrived home from work. He'd knocked over the shelf in her bathroom and was lying about in a stupor, mumbling about the evil dentist who was going to extract his molars without permission.

"You gotta plane flight to catch!" she said, helping him out the door. He retrieved his roll-aboard and promptly fell all the way down the stairs of her apartment building, his luggage clattering after him. A horrified neighbor popped out and said: "Call an ambulance!"

"He has no health insurance!" said Manny's friend. Manny was lying comatose at the base of the stairs, his exploded luggage of T-shirts and briefs around his ankles. Faced with little alternative, she called the ambulance. The EMTs arrived and tried to get Manny into the vehicle. He awoke quickly and resisted fiercely.

"You fat sons-o-bitches! You sons of pig-whistling cockmonkeys!" he shouted, as they tried to take his vitals.

Finally the EMTs subdued our Manny and strapped him down into a bed in the ambulance, where he continued wailing and thrashing and burbling about the criminal dentist who was out to pull every good tooth in his head.

They asked Manny's friend what his name was, but she didn't really know anymore. So she gave some random name that was an amalgamation of his "real name" and his "fake name." It probably sounded like "Maneerdaniel Smith."

So no wonder when, later, she called every hospital in the city and they didn't have him. They'd never heard of him. We did some searching and could not find him.

"He detoxed while at my apartment," said the friend. "He stayed in his room for a week and sweated and swore. I wanted to help but...it was like Grey Gardens. There were like 1,000 empty bottles of Tito's under his bed."

Just don't invite ANY tenants into your home, OK?

"Made in Austin," said I. "Titos, that is, you know. Good stuff!"

"He's out to kill me," said the sweating friend, who Manny had told me wore a leopard-skin bathrobe that didn't tie properly and revealed a naked tummy. "I seriously think he will take revenge on me because I knew he didn't have health insurance. But I was just trying to help."

"He's as gentle as a kitten," I said.

"Tell that to the bouncers at every bar on 10th avenue!" she retorted.

I said that I would investigate and, if I had any clues, I would report back.

I went to bed. I woke up the next morning, and went to open the living room curtains. The morning sunlight illuminated a rolling suitcase, seated by the door.

"Aw, honey?" said I. "Whose suitcase is in our living room?"

Husband came down and rubbed his eyes and looked at it.

"Why, that's Manny's," he said.

"He's in the house," I said.

Great Raids in Carpet Removal

We are officially in our new house, and it feels worlds away from the old one. No longer can I call myself New Ro's own blogger, so I will have to content myself with a new title (to be determined at a future date).

The house we moved into, in Mamaroneck, had acres of the thickest, dustiest, driest shag carpet available to man or beast around the late 60s. The color in the living and dining room was a putrid and virulent green—a color I actually favor when it comes to little cocktail dresses, but not on the floor. In the family room/den, the carpet was rust-colored; coupled with the dark wood paneling and small then-in-vogue windows, the room seemed to suck up all available light and deliver a Stygian black gloom suitable only for decadent key parties. It also features a dry bar and a dropped acoustic tile ceiling. Yeah, baby!

We happen to have about seven of some of the best relatives and friends on the whole darned planet, because they arrived this weekend and tore that carpet up. Every last stitch of it, every tack board, every staple in the floor. From about 8 a.m. until cocktail hour arrived on Saturday, our friends sweated and pried, toted pounds of dusty carpet padding, and rendered the carpet fit for trash removal. One large chunk from the dining room was so hefty that we called it The Beast; it took five people to hoist it out to the garage. The stairs alone took two hours of prying due to all the tacks and nails.

While all this was going on we also managed to fix a broken section of fence, repair a broken toddler bed, sweep the area behind the garage for sharp glass, and tamp down the dumpster in the driveway (one demented soul jumped up and down on the carpets shrieking like an ape—not very wise considering the crevasses between the broken old cabinetry shifting beneath, but rather amusing all the same). Other crew members entertained the children by singing songs, molding Play-Doh into a lifelike plate of spaghetti and meatballs, and dragging around blocks of concrete attached to ropes. And everyone actually got fed.

By five p.m. all that carpet was gone, revealing pristine hardwood floors beneath. One team member swabbed the floors with Murphy's Oil Soap and we retired for cocktails and take-out food. As we sat on our new front porch, nary a shopping cart nor a speeding car came into view. And this was good.

What kinds of friends do this sort of thing? Some might say: The insane kind. I say: The rarest and best.