Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (22 page)

Back in New York, though, I felt increasingly unmoored by my college experience. Ironically, I failed to turn in a final paper in my pragmatism class and was now in danger of taking an incomplete. Furthermore, I had a misunderstanding with the Weiksners. Hanging out at their place one evening, I watched as their teenage boys took turns spinning each other in the basement dryer. It was a stupid game and I told them as much, but I didn’t stop them. When Marcia discovered the dryer was broken the next morning, she told the Weiksners who in turn got mad at me. “Why did you let them do it?” Sandra asked me. “You’re the adult. Weren’t you watching?” Only two years older than their oldest son, I didn’t feel adult and I didn’t realize that was supposed to be my role.

I wanted to be good, but I never seemed to understand how to be good or even what “good” meant. I noticed how my roommates attended to their figures, slowly turning before the full-length bathroom mirror and measuring the space between their thighs in a standing position, down to the millimeter. At dinner, they ate iceberg salads, mixed with carrots and canned beans. They cut out sugar and white flour to reach their ideal body weight. I can do this, I thought.

That spring, I researched the minimum number of calories and servings of food groups I needed to remain fit and organized my meals around these restrictions. My goal was to eat 1,500 calories a day: 400 for each of my three meals and 150 for each of my two snacks, at mid-morning and mid-afternoon. I drank eight glasses of water a day and avoided drinks other than coffee and tea because I didn’t want to waste calories. I memorized the calorie content of each basic food. Banana: 125. Apple: 90. Piece of bread: 125. Snack box of raisins: 50. Cup of plain nonfat yogurt: 90. On top of my careful diet, I started to budget myself to $15 a day, which I withdrew from the ATM each morning.

Organizing my life around these rules and figures calmed me. If at any point I began to feel anxious or uncertain, I could always find a scrap of paper and quickly tally up everything I’d eaten that day. If I was under goal, I was happy with myself and immediately relaxed. If I was over goal, I knew what steps to take—skip my afternoon snack or spend an extra twenty minutes at the NYU gym—and was also happy. The margins and back covers of my school notebooks became crowded with these scribbled lists.

In high school, I’d fantasized about a New York life that would revolve around SoHo openings and literary parties. I now spent most of my time at the Union Square A&P, a lonely old lady at eighteen. The top of my grocery cart stacked with my clipped coupons, I carefully examined the labels of soup cans and cartons of yogurt, comparing grams of fat, protein, and carbohydrates.

Then one Sunday afternoon while I was working at my proofreading job, one of my coworkers approached me in the bathroom.

“Hey Seventeen-something, are you feeling okay?”

“Yeah, fine,” I said. “Why?”

“You look pretty thin.”

“Thank you!”

“Are you . . . getting your period?” she asked.

“Yeah, why?”

“Just curious.”

I didn’t learn until much later that anorexic girls stop menstruating. I saw my close attention to diet and budget as a way of taking care of myself, of setting goals and realizing those goals. I knew I was depressed, the pathetic specter of the A&P, but I didn’t know why, so I kept these feelings to myself, which only made me feel more estranged. I longed for change. When Sandra Weiksner said she could arrange a summer job for me in the filing department of Cleary Gottlieb in Paris, I jumped at it.

16.

W
HENEVER I THINK
back to my first summer living in Paris, I remember a certain day on the Boulevard Filles du Calvaire in the 3rd arrondissement. It was a late Sunday afternoon in June. I was sitting next to the open window in my room at the dormitory where I was living, trying to write a letter to Dad. Whenever I felt stuck, unable to think of what to write next, I’d look out the window and watch the people passing on their way to the neighboring laundromat, large canvas bags balanced on their backs.

I once read a poem by Charles Baudelaire called “Windows,” which starts:

Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.

Behind this closed window on the Boulevard Filles du Calvaire was an eighteen-year-old girl living outside her home country for the first time, wearing a white t-shirt and cutoff jeans. Her bobbed hair curled in the humidity.

Fille
. I was a
fille.
A girl
.
I always liked the name of that boulevard: Filles du Calvaire. And I always liked the name of my temporary home there: Foyer Pour les Jeunes Travailleuses, Dormitory for Young Worker Girls. It had a nice communist ring to it. So very like the French in their socio-communist ways, I always thought.

Sandra Weiksner had not only arranged my job working at Cleary Gottlieb Paris, she set up my stay at the dormitory, mailing the headmistress copies of my passport and proof of my employment. To be eligible to live at the Foyer, you had to be between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, legally employed, and not from Paris. Though I’d have loved spending that summer with Dad in San Francisco, the opportunity to live and work in France on the cheap seemed too good to pass up.

Soon after my arrival, I noticed that the rooms were overwhelmingly populated by girls from former French colonies: the Antilles, Tunisia, Morocco, Vietnam, and Senegal. Each seemed to prefer socializing with girls from her own region, so I gravitated to the only European girls there, two French brunettes: a lean girl from Normandy with conservatively cut short hair and a thin, sharp nose, and a shorter, rounder girl from the Loire with long, kinky hair. We took breakfast together in the kitchen each morning before heading to our respective jobs.

There were no other Americans. I shared my room with a girl from French West Africa, but she spent most of her time down the hall with her friends, stirring fragrant peanut sauces on hot plates. I heard them explosively laughing as they spoke in thick African accents about their
mecs
, their guys. She never invited me to join and would only stop into our room to change before her dates.

Left to myself in the evenings after work, I walked from Boulevard Filles du Calvaire into the neighboring Marais district until sundown. Before heading out, I’d make myself a simple dinner. Other nights, when I wanted to treat myself, I’d buy a falafel on the Rue des Rosiers, which I’d slowly eat on the winding walk home, peering through the windows of small boutiques full of beautiful clothing I couldn’t afford. The waning light, a gold wash on the walls of the
vieux
quartier
, lingered until eight or nine o’clock, as I meandered through little streets with names like Rue des Mauvais-Garçons (Street of the Bad Boys), appropriate given the neighborhood’s recent transformation from a Jewish neighborhood into a fashionable gay enclave. As I neared the Boulevard Filles du Calvaire, the area restaurants would start to come alive—the warm evening air filling with murmured conversation and the music of glasses and tables being set for dinner. The streets were thick with these narrow restaurants, along with bars and nightclubs, what the French call
boîtes
, boxes.

I often felt as if I lived in a
boîte
, this little room on the third floor where I would sit by myself reading or writing letters to my father. It was a square space, with uneven slat-wood floors and room enough only for two wardrobes, two beds, and a desk. The bathroom was down the hall and shared with all of the other girls on the floor. Every night, I waited in line, holding a toothbrush and a cup in my hand. Returning to my room, I spied cockroaches creeping along the edges of the walls.

For three weeks that summer, my high school friend Camille, who was staying with her French father, was my companion and guide. She invited me to a traditional French lunch at her grandmother’s and introduced me to kir, a cocktail of white wine and sweet cassis. Drinking these with her on the terrace of a Latin Quarter bar, I felt sophisticated and French. But after she returned to her mother’s in California, I was on my own again.

Then one weekend, my roommate left for three days without mentioning anything to me. I looked for her out the window and listened for her laugh in the hallway. I checked with the front desk each night to see if they’d received any news of her. When she finally returned, I told her how worried I’d been but she only laughed. “I’m a grown woman,
une femme
,” she told me.

I knew then I was not a woman, just a
fille
.

EVERY SUNDAY
at four o’clock, I went to the
cabine téléphonique,
a hexagon of folding glass doors in front of the Foyer. I entered and closed the door, shutting out the sound of busy street traffic, and collect-called my grandparents in Kewanee, where it was ten in the morning. Talking to my grandparents in English, if only for five minutes, was like taking a breath of fresh air after being locked in a windowless room.

There was no problem with my French. Three years out of the bilingual school, I was surprised by how easily and completely it returned. With my pale skin and dark hair I could even pass for a local. One evening, riding home from work at rush hour, the car suddenly filled with a rowdy crowd of American tourists and a man standing beside me murmured in my ear, “It’s like we’re the only French left!” I smiled at him sheepishly, hoping not to reveal my true identity.

Dad couldn’t afford collect calls from France any more than he could afford to call me in New York, so when I finished talking to Munca and Grumpa, I returned to my room and sat down and wrote to him about my adventures.

June 14 1989

Dear Daddy,

You’re the best letter writer I know. Almost every week I get a letter. I must say, some of your first few made me cry. So much love was expressed in your words, genuine love. I’m bound closer to you than any one else in the world yet you’re so far away. It sounds as if you’ve been lonely lately. It must be hard having me away for so long. At least I can hear the details of your life by letter. Now you can hear mine:

. . . Five days a week, I spend 9 hours at a little law office called Cleary Gottlieb. Inside that little office I run around, drink liters of water, and talk about Jazz with the American in the photocopy room.

After work, at about 7:30, I eat dinner and take a walk into the Marais. Tonight I walked to the Place des Vosges, the oldest square in Paris, also in the Marais. It was very relaxing sitting on a park bench in the Jardin Louis XIII. I watched a young couple nuzzle and coo, a little girl chasing pigeons, and an old woman with a vivid, pensive face.

But on that one afternoon next to the window, a white sheet of paper, a letter unfinished, lay on top of my desk. I was now looking out the window trying to think of how to answer my father’s last letter:

22 June 89

Cher Alysia,

I got a horrid sunburn last weekend & now have had a horrid chest cough. Been tired a lot too (but have had trouble sleeping). My latest t-cell count is 71 (down from 360 three months ago.) It’s probably time I get on some AIDS treatment – if I can get on some program when I don’t have to pay (because things cost a fortune and I don’t have insurance) but the medical bureaucracy is such a maze and experts have so many contradicting opinions and I have been too tired and have no time. But I’ll see about it soon.

Been working hard on my job, on 2 books (proofing them, etc.) and my essay on homophobia came out and a lot of people liked it. You probably will be more interested in my writing sometime in the future after I’m gone than you are now.

Hearing about your days & your visit to the Place Des Vosges made me feel I was right there with you. You have a writer’s knack for noticing all the fresh, precise details. Rewriting this Atlanta novel is fun in that way – remembering what your mom was like – little details of what she did when she was agitated – and others we knew then too. Not much about you in it @ present (you were 1–2 then) I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that. But if I live awhile, there may be an Alysia book coming.

love,

Dad

Looking out the window, I felt myself tumbling. This loneliness in Paris, the loneliness of my room where the African girl never sleeps. There’s a greater loneliness out there, much worse than this loneliness. There’ll be a time when Dad won’t answer my letters. When I won’t be able to phone him collect or not collect. When he won’t complain and comfort and encourage me. This letter that speaks of T-cells speaks of this time.

“My latest t-cell count is 71 (down from 360 three months ago.)”

The white blood cells that fight off infection are called T-cells. As AIDS progresses it kills these cells, attacking the body’s ability to protect itself from any illness. I know this now, but at eighteen I only vaguely did. Sitting in my room, I looked at this part of Dad’s letter over and over again, like someone who couldn’t read. Then this unfathomable idea started to rise in my consciousness. Now a bone-hard realization, I felt it lift from the bottom of my belly, up under my spine—a large bubble of hard, cool air pushing up and through me, threatening to huff and puff until it blew my house down. Collapsed on the floor, I was suddenly sobbing and breathing so hard and so fast that I was no longer the verb’s subject but its object. (Not Alysia taking a breath but a breath taking Alysia.) I continued like this for a long time, rocking back and forth, trying to swallow my sobs, until I was too tired to cry anymore, and I just sat in my empty room, dazed and thirsty.

I stood up, returned to my spot by the window, and looked for the passersby and their big canvas bags of laundry. I needed these signs of the everyday to bring me back to the present.

So on this afternoon sitting by the window, I wrote him a letter finally admitting to and explaining my sadness, begging him to “be careful,” and signing it “your melancholy daughter.” Two weeks later his reply arrived:

26 July 89

Dear Alysia,

Don’t be melancholy (unless you enjoy it, hee, hee). I’ve been feeling very healthy lately. In fact, when I went to oral medicines this week, the nurse said my gums look better than they had in four months and was so excited she took two photos of them. I’m feeling more vigorous and energetic again too.

I don’t do drugs (not even smoke pot) and drink only occasionally (an occasional glass of wine if company comes to dinner). I’ve even been feeling sexy again. And got laid twice in 2 days (almost a miracle – the second time w/ a very nice person I met at the Anarchists Conference.) This did wonders for my mood.

I don’t “have” AIDS yet and am supposed to get on drugs that will fight the advance of the virus soon. Realistically I could stay fairly healthy for another five to ten years – or one or two. I just don’t know. It’s harder to fight off any illness as one gets older. I know people who have died of cancer or heart attacks younger than me. Death simply gives meaning to life (sets the boundaries of life), and one might as well complain about birth as death because birth is where the suffering begins.

So please don’t get so upset you hyperventilate my dear. No need for that. But I want to be honest with you about how things are & not “in denial” ignoring reality and pretending things are always perfect if they’re not.

My hope is that by doing this that we’ll love and appreciate each other more the next few years & not waste the time we have to communicate or share our growth, hopes and aspirations.

Wish you’d call collect so I could talk to you but I guess I can wait till you return to the US.

Much love,

Your loving Dad

By the time Dad had written me this letter, he’d already spent many days and months considering his end. He later told me that when he first learned he was HIV-positive, he panicked. Pacing through the apartment, he kept asking himself, “What about Alysia? What about Alysia?” He focused on his breath and, counting his exhalations, told himself, “It’s okay to feel scared.” Then he remembered Issan, the abbot at his Zendo. When Issan had tested positive for HIV, he said, “It’s not AIDS that’s fatal: if you have AIDS you’re alive.” Dad studied the graceful way Issan accepted his infection and decided to follow his path.

At one of Issan’s dharma talks he famously pronounced, “AIDS is the teacher.” The talk inspired members of the Hartford Street Zen Center to volunteer. Dad still sat with J. D. Kobezak every Friday at the Maitri Hospice, but now that he was HIV-positive he looked to that experience as a guide. In the epilogue to
View Askew
he wrote:

Because I’m antibody positive, I know I may be in J. D.’s position myself some day – still alive but fading with little control of body or mind. We all die differently just as we all live differently. I don’t know what it will be like for me but I’m no longer afraid.

My father may have been “no longer afraid,” but I was. He could write about staying healthy for “five to ten years” or for “one to two,” but I couldn’t think about numbers. The implications of Dad’s letter were too painful for me to keep in my head for any length of time. Sitting in my room in Paris, I folded his letter back inside its envelope and closed it in a drawer.