Sarah Piazza

Another hot day in the city. School’s almost out for the year. We city kids have our recess in the street, which is barricaded for the purpose.

The boys are huddled together in what appears to be a show of solidarity but is really only studied boredom.

The girls are skipping rope and chanting:

Oh little playmate,
Come out and play with me–

“But not you, Jane!,” shrieks Sabrina. Jane, perplexed, moves off to sit on the curb. She inspects herself for stray hairs, stray threads, anything that might account for the seemingly capricious slight. She finds nothing. Her countenance is stony. She’s used to this.

–And bring your dollies three,
Climb up my apple tree.

Suzanne stops turning the rope and rolls her eyes. “Missy,” she says, wagging her finger. “You’re supposed to jump here, not there. You’re doing it all wrong. God. You are so dumb.”

Missy’s face turns even redder than is warranted by the awful humidity. “I know,” she murmurs, “I am a spaz.”

Suzanne nods in agreement. “You really are,” she says. And then an unexpected bounty. She puts a hand on Missy’s shoulder as solemnly and authoritatively as a pope administering a blessing, adds, “But it’s OK, at least you’ve admitted it. I’ll show you the right way to do it.”

Missy breathes a sigh of relief. She will not end up on the curb with Jane, not today.

Slide down my rain barrel,
Climb up my cellar door,
And we’ll be jolly friends
Forever more, more, more.

Sabrina throws down the rope, surprising Debby, who’s coming down from a jump. Debby cries out as her feet catch in the newly slack rope. Sabrina laughs, a tinkly laugh that manages to be both dainty and hard as the asphalt that daily tears up our shins. She places her hands on her hips in a brilliant send-up of Mrs. Bowman, our math teacher. “Debby,” she admonishes, “are you going to have to go sit with Jane today?”

But before Sabrina can dispense whatever punishment she has in mind, her attention is diverted by the gym teacher’s approach. She’s too clever to get in trouble with a teacher, especially for something as annoyingly minor as being mean, which, when you’re dealing with a bunch of losers, doesn’t even count — everyone knows it. She scampers off, her arm linked with Suzanne’s. Missy trails behind, careful to keep close enough so that all the boys and girls on the street understand that she is with Sabrina and Suzanne, at least in spirit.

Debby, still tangled in the rope, sits on the street. She looks more dazed than hurt. Her eyes track the receding forms of the alphas and their beta.

Jane is methodically chewing on her fingernails. One by one. Though what’s left for her to chew on none of us can discern. Next she’ll start in on her hair. Nothing new here.

Oh little playmate, I cannot play with you,
My dolly’s got the flu,
Boo hoo hoo hoo hoo!

Ain’t got no rain barrel,
Ain’t got no cellar door,
But we’ll be jolly friends,
Forever more, more, more.

The rest of us stand apart, grateful to have been spared on this oppressive afternoon. There’s a storm coming, though not soon enough to have closed the curtain on this painfully familiar scene. We are all wondering which one of us will be Jane tomorrow. We are all praying that Sabrina, not the dolly, gets the flu.

And we are all counting: one more recess down, one less to go.

written in early 2009

My son is frowning over his Valentines. This is the last year he’ll be addressing cards to his classmates. Next year, he’ll be in middle school, where the thought alone of Valentine’s Day evokes horror and disgust, even as its chocolate-covered fruits are devoured on the sly.

Not quite knowing what would suit given the socially fraught world of the fifth grader, I have bought two or three boxes of Valentine’s cards. My kid has started with the boys in his class (his teacher provided a list of names for reference, or should I say two lists — one of the boys’ names and one of the girls’ names), and for them he’s chosen the extreme sports Valentines. But now he’s on to the girls, and he looks puzzled. “I was going to go with different Valentines for the girls,” he says, “But why would I do that? Why wouldn’t the girls like the extreme sports Valentines just as much as the boys?” And he buries his head in his hands. This is a minefield.

In the end, he ditches the extreme sports Valentines altogether and starts over. Everyone in the class will get a paper airplane Valentine. I approve, and I am glad that he’s come to this place entirely on his own.

+++++++++++++++++++++

My boys are coming of age in a world where gender bias is arguably as weak as it’s ever been. This does not mean that it does not exist; of course it does. One glance inside the still highly segregated toy store will prove the point. The pink aisle! The blue aisle! Good grief!

At the same time, my older son was just vaccinated against a sexually transmitted disease not because he’s at risk of contracting it, but because a (hypothetical) girl with whom he may have sexual relations at some undetermined point in the (please, God, far) future is at risk of contracting it. This is an astonishing development. Would it have flown even twenty years ago for boys to be vaccinated against a disease they will never get, to be vaccinated simply to protect girls and women? I think not.

And when the doctor explained (gently, carefully, vaguely) the purpose of the shot his patient would be getting, my fourteen-year-old nodded. He didn’t comment, or object, or question.

Nor did he flinch when the needle breached his skin.

+++++++++++++++++++++

I am proud of this, most of all: that my boys are as close to genderblind as I’ve been able to get them. And yet these are troubling times, are they not? Suddenly, it seems, everything is close to toppling. Women’s reproductive rights are being threatened in ways that are downright frightening, and all in the name of a right-wing agenda that pretends to be about smaller government. Obfuscation, no more, no less.

We are moving backwards, and it is ugly, and terrifying.

Bemused, I sit back and watch the daily developments, and I wonder what on earth I’m supposed to tell these boys of mine, who’ve grown up believing in something that is too swiftly being undermined.

I am troubled. No, I am aghast. Orwell might have written a book about just this. Come to think of it, Orwell did write a book about just this.

We have arrived at the time when it is incumbent on us all to be Paul Revere, to gallop on a horse in the middle of the night, to sound the alarm.

For whom does the bell toll? It tolls for thee.

It was August of 2008, and I’d taken a great leap of faith. I’d traveled solo to San Francisco to spend the weekend with bloggers, not one of whom had I ever met in person. Those who knew me best wondered what the hell I was doing, and so did I, so did I, never more so than when I’d arrived at the hotel where the blogging conference was being held. I remember giving myself a running pep talk — You can do this, Sarah. You can do this. This is what grown-ups do, stay in hotels by themselves. You are a grown-up. The circumstances of my childhood had cemented a cautious, anxious tendency with which I’d had the misfortune to be born. Forty years old at the time, and I’d never once stayed alone in a hotel room.

I checked in and went up to my room to use the bathroom, and to hide. After fifteen minutes or so of dithering (to walk out of the room and go down to the conference, or not?), I left my room and took the elevator down to the lobby. I was walking up some steps to the second floor, where the conference’s meeting rooms were located, when a woman coming downstairs squinted at me, looked down at my name tag, and broke out into the loveliest, brightest smile. “Sarah!,” she cried. “It’s Susan!” And we hugged, not as two women meeting for the first time but as the oldest of friends. In that one small moment, all my fears about the conference lost traction and skidded away. I hadn’t put it together before then. I did know many of these women. They weren’t strangers at all. Yes, I knew them through their words alone, but that was enough. It was more than enough. These were my kindred spirits. I’d fallen in love with their words, and through those words, their souls. What we looked like, our physical selves, mere afterthoughts.

Susan died on Monday, at only thirty-nine years of age. It was cancer that took her, cancer, that thief of lives. I have grieved for her since then, but with a good deal of self-consciousness. Her husband, her two little boys, they have earned the right to grieve for her. Her best friend Marty is worthy of grieving Susan’s loss. By also grieving, am I somehow usurping Susan’s life?, I wondered, all week.

But I asked that question only until today, when I sat down and thought about how Susan would respond to my worry. “Don’t be silly,” she’d say, I think. “I’ve shared myself freely with you, and you with me. What are friends if not people who would share themselves with each other?” Yes, I think Susan might have said something just like that. She didn’t brook nonsense. Among so many fine qualities, Susan’s sensible nature spoke to me. Her wit, her wisdom, that megawatt smile. Her kindness. Her spirit. I loved her for all of that, and for something else, too.

She was the kind of present parent I’d always longed to be. Raised by one absent parent and one might-as-well-have-been-absent parent, I’d vowed since early childhood to do things differently from my own parents: to be with my children, to see them, to hear them, to know them, to love them unconditionally, no matter how hard that might prove. Susan got that. She felt the same way as I about parenting, I believe — that raising children is not trivial, that it is in fact an honor and a mission to bring humans up to be respectful, contributing members of society. To rear children who are above all generous, graceful, and kind.

Susan kept her boys out of sight in many ways, a significant task for a self-professed mommyblogger. She deeply respected their privacy. And yet I am as sure as one can be of the essential goodness of those two boys of hers, simply because there is no way it could be otherwise, not with Susan as their mother.

Some have written of looking up at the stars and finding Susan there, but however beautiful and fitting the image, that’s not how I will honor her memory. I will continue to parent my own boys, and when challenges arise, as they often do, I will ask myself what Susan might do if she were in my place, and I will listen for her answer, that sure and true moral compass of hers guiding me when my own instincts are lacking.

And for her I will love, not hate; laugh, not cry; leap, not stutter. I will take life by the reins and steer it briskly forward with sure, confident, capable hands.

For Susan I will live the kind of life that will leave me panting for breath, tired but happy and without regret. I think she’d like that. Don’t you?

dedicated to Susan Niebur, with all my love and admiration
title taken from lyrics written by Aimee Mann

Carrying a bulky package, I push my body against the door of the post office nearest the university. It is Saturday, early morning, but the room is already crowded. A Chinese family with a toddler and grandmother in tow is shipping three large boxes to China. The little boy can contain neither mischief nor glee, and he scampers under tables and runs circles around all the patrons waiting in line while his grandmother stands, arms folded, caught in that peculiar place between laughing and scolding. There are only two postal workers at the counter. I have a long wait ahead of me. I sigh, exasperated, and shift my box from one arm to the other. “Excuse me,” says a man behind me, and he taps my shoulder for emphasis. “Yes?,” I reply, and turn to him.

He is dressed in a blue jumpsuit, the type that mechanics wear. On his feet are yellow work boots. He looks, from head to boot, dusty, as if he’s been painting or sanding. Expectantly, he peers into my face. “I wonder if you’d know where I can get some Peachy Paterno ice cream?” “I do,” I answer. “But I expect that the Creamery is closed this morning. I doubt it’ll open until this afternoon. You just go onto campus. It’s on Pollack, I think.” He shakes his head. I have misunderstood. “I’m from Texas,” he explains, “where Rice University is? I’ve come a long way, slept in my truck on the side of the road. Shipping back my dirty clothes now,” and he gestures to a laundry basket on the floor in front of him. “So I don’t know where campus is, or how to get there, but I’ve come all this way to have some of that Joe Paterno ice cream.” “Oh!,” I say, as if this is the most natural thing in the world, that a person who lives several states away should drive for days in order to eat some Peachy Paterno. It’s good, mind you, but not that good.

I offer directions, and the fellow listens attentively. “Everyone is so nice in this town,” he muses. “And it’s much prettier here than where I’m from. I had to do something, you know? For Coach Paterno? So I decided to come and eat his ice cream.”

I nod. The postal clerk is beckoning me, so I settle my package onto one hip and walk forward. There is a tear in my eye, and I blink hard to shake it loose. I find people endlessly moving. A winter pilgrimage to eat ice cream, an adult earnest as a child, whose motivations, if bizarre, are perfectly, enviably unspoiled, the belief that the best or only way to honor a person’s life is to order some dessert.

It’s all so quirky and wonderful. Just remember to turn around when a stranger taps you on the shoulder.

Enjoy your ice cream, Don.

There is a photograph, taken in the spring of 1973, that shows me and my family on a cruise. We are standing on an upper deck against a railing. The ship’s photographer has come around to offer his services in exchange for money. We four — my mother, my grandmother, my brother, and I — look somewhat taken aback, having had little time to prepare for the idea of a portrait. My brother’s smile is simpering. He is eight years old and has better things to do than pose. My mother looks angry, although she always looks angry, which takes some of the edge off of the expression. My grandmother resembles the matriarch she is. She smiles as if nothing is wrong, which is how she sees the world, and especially our family: nothing is ever wrong. I look terrified. I have a smile on my face, but it might as well have been painted on long after the fact.

I hated that ship. On it I felt trapped. The expanse of blue from every angle was oppressive, not soothing. At night as I lay in bed I felt the ship riding the waves, and the movement was gentle enough, but it made me queasy, and I willed my stomach to behave. Most often it did not end up behaving. During the days my brother and I, left to ourselves while my mother and grandmother did I know not what, roamed the ship. We tried the pool, but within minutes of entry I found myself choking and coughing and spitting up water. I hadn’t known to expect that the pool would be filled with salt water.

Disappointed by the pool, and suitably horrified by the view of so many elderly people in black skirted bathing suits flopping like fish back and forth on slatted recliners, the better to soak up the sun, my brother and I took to wandering the decks. In staterooms, there were masses of people parked in front of slot machines. We ran into and out of the casino. The patrons’ eyes, glazed, stayed trained on the machines before them. I could have turned cartwheels along the hideously ornate carpet, and the gamblers, riveted by cherries and dollar signs, would not have blinked.

One morning, my brother, bored, had me remove some of the white letters pressed into the black foam board to form words listing the ship’s daily activities: Shuffleboard on the Lido Deck at 2pm! Calisthenics in the pool at 4pm! So I did. When my brother heard one of the ship’s staff approaching, he ran, leaving me holding a fistful of white letters, and a board of nonsense behind me. The purser bent down to my height and gently uncurled my fingers. “I’ll take those,” he said, smiling, as if I’d done nothing wrong. I nodded, and then I fled.

Later I’d read J.D. Salinger’s “Teddy” and weep with the realization that someone had invented a language to express how dislocated I’d felt on that ship. The trip marked the first time I’d noticed all the holes there were in my family, holes not unlike the missing letters on the ship’s daily board that had rendered it so frighteningly nonsensical. There was so much jumbled up in my family that I’d never before acknowledged. It was enough to make one queasy, or to make one choose, like Teddy in the Salinger story, to dive into a pool he knew contained no water.

Some people find solace on a cruise. That spring on the Atlantic I found despair. And just as when I’d first sprung up out of the ship’s pool, bewildered, the salt stinging my skin, it was the surprise of it that I choked on.

I was driving home from doing an errand. If I tell you what the errand was, you’ll laugh at me, or you’ll understand me, or, if you’re a certain kind of person, you’ll do both.

I had been looking for a Tupperware container to store the ornaments. Every year some of the ornaments break. Most of my ornaments are spun glass. Somehow I just fell into that. Someone bought me one, and someone else bought me another, and then there was a collection. Collections are meant to be fleshed out. And so. I am only accidentally a glass ornament person, but to you, I am a glass ornament person. That’s how personality coheres: chance coalescing.

Earlier that morning, I’d realized that grown-ups (one of whom I still do not count myself, all evidence to the contrary) own containers dedicated to the storage of Christmas items. Myself, I use shopping bags, black garbage bags, and scratched up plastic bins that long ago lost their lids. The basement is a haphazard place ’round these parts. Anyway. I was dismantling the Christmas tree when I thought, I could go get myself some of that specialized storage, yo.

So I drove to one store, and then another. At each the employees, gathered in a klatsch, it being early morning and I the only customer, laughed at me, oh yes they did. And then I laughed at myself. Because, of course, people who are wise about things like Christmas storage take down their trees well before January 7th. “All sold out of those weeks ago,” I heard. And I issued some kind of self-deprecating response, like, “Yeah, I’m a little late, I’ll have to wait until next year, doh.”

Nothing to show for my burst of organizational inspiration, I drove home, singing with Joni all the while. Because, so what? Another ornament will break sometime over the course of this year, and the world won’t be the worse for it. As I neared my neighborhood, the sun shone through the clouds, and there it was: the sky was suddenly striped. I’d never before seen such pronounced streaks of sunlight. It was a masterpiece waiting patiently to be painted, something you’d see in a book, the scene befitting an epiphany.

If I were ever going to have an epiphany, it would be right now, I recognized, and sat up straighter, expectantly, in my seat. Nothing happened. Mentally I shrugged. The landscape was breathtaking, and that was enough, for me. If I never have an epiphany, it will be enough, for me. Joni continued to sing out through the tinny car stereo. Even she didn’t have the answers. I wondered if she’d ever had an epiphany. I supposed not.

But, like me, she always did know how to ask questions, which somehow feels like enough, for both of us.