Summer

After last year's presidential elections I couldn't write anymore. I inexplicably gave up on recycling. I baked pies.

Unanchored. 

Here are pictures, from my phone, not my spiffy camera, I took last weekend. And some lines that might gel 

into a summer story. 

Or not...

 

 

 

 

 

 

The grass scent, a whiff of cyanide like biting apricot seeds, opens my rib cage. Birds achirping. The lake water ripples hypnotically.

I swam in the lake yesterday. Little blue back fish gathered around my feet. The algae tangled me. The fallen trees on the water edge reminded me of Louisiana swamp. I looked into the dark water underneath and feared alligators.

The dark sky at night with throws of wispy clouds and faraway stars, a few red airplane lights, and pulsating fireflies. The lack of depth/perspective makes all akin/equal.

The chestnut and pine trees are loaded with their green babies. Do they miss them when they fall down?

Laura Beth walks around the chalet with her parrot Hercule Poirot nested in her white hair. At times he pecks at her eyes.

I collected the eggs from the chicken coop. Two hens want badly to hatch. They pecked me when I scooped their hoard of eggs from underneath their warm feathers. I told Claire that often my chore was to check if they had more eggs coming up so we could keep count of them, make sure hens wouldn't eat them. Claire asked me how I proceeded. I explained I had to stick my finger up the hens'. She said gross. Oh, well. Mom didn’t want to have hens feeding on our eggs.

The stables. I mix up llamas with alpacas. One group is shorn comically. They have pantaloons of fur. The others are like mown lawns or freshly vacuumed carpets with lanes of imprints. They have large eyes and the top of their heads is like a hair pineapple. They look like the kids in my neighborhood.

Laura Beth took me to the flea market and garage sales. Locals are friendly with beautiful obliging smiles but I've seen Trump lawn signs. I'd die here. At the supermarket Candice was the only dark skin woman on the entire floor.

Later.

 

 

 

 

 

 

november colors

inside this rotting grapefruit are seeds that hope for a future, to become trees.
the beat of my heart, the workings of my mind, the air in my lungs, the tissue of my aching muscles feel like this rotten fruit.
i should listen to wise voices, some asking me to check where the rot attacked the fruit, make its autopsy, remember that i created the conditions for this disintegration, i placed the grapefruits in a plastic bag, and instead of storing them into the fridge, i forgot them in a corner in the hot kitchen.
i should listen to kind, scared voices, my eighty-years-old mother begging me to say nothing. ‘don't get involved, listen to me, daughter, the phone lines have ears. stop talking about him.’ ‘but how can i? this is not your totalitarian romania, mother. i came here to be safe.’ ‘you are safe,’ mother snaps. ‘you are millions of people. it's gonna be alright.’
people are in the street, protesting. he barricaded himself in his tower, built a wall of sacks of sand. i don't have strength to join them. i've been through enough civil unrest at the fall of communism. i can't i can't i can't live through four years of shame, disgrace, the president hurled on us the laughing stock of nations, war monger bigot.
i ask mother tips about baking a traditional romanian cake, cozonac. she applauds my interest. this is what we should be conversing about over skype, not elections.
so, woman go back to your kitchen, oven of life you are.
the rotten grapefruit goes to the compost pile. i still have two healthy glowing yellows. i zip them up separately and send them to the fridge hibernation. can't i do that too? wake me up in four years? no, i can't. rot would eat my entire pantry.
must stay vigilant.

The Olympics Seep In

In the NYC Park and Recreation swimming pool down the block. I swim faster, vigorously, since on my retina the Rio Olympics unfold. I don’t understand the rules of the swimming competitions, or even swimming styles. All I engage in is my frog stroke. It’s an approximation of breast stroke and butterfly, I was told by savvier swimmers at the gym swimming pool in winter. They insisted I should sink my head in the water, but I can’t do that at our neighborhood pool. Swimmers share wide lanes during the early morning lap swim hours. I rotate my head like a periscope. I have to watch out for the careless back-strokers to avoid frontal collision. I surely don’t want to start my day in a Titanic wreck.

During day there are no lap swim lanes, the pool turns into a zoo. Crab hermits congregate on the pool ramp and steps, blocking your access. The floor is dangerous to step on, since queen conch shells covered in barnacles don’t budge, busily working on their pink pearls. Your serene swimming is hindered by papa sea lions dipping their squealing pups in water, majestic whales snorting menacingly at you, their calves frolicking under their protective bellies, or by dazed catfish with their fingerlings pulling at their barbel-moustaches, or alarmed frogs, basking on pool edges, squawking loudly as they dive to rescue their overconfident tadpoles engaged in underwater breath-holding contests, or teenage sea horses clutched amorously, or islands of rapping seagulls, or the occasional mermaid, slaloming through clusters of ponderous pelicans, searching for their mermen, attacked by quarrelsome Medusas, or lazily hanging out with Rastafarian octopuses, anyway, not to belabor my point, playful bathers pop up in front of you from the water, splash, jump, ignoring your ‘efforting’.

So when a teenage girl follows me around and finally asks me smiling what kind of swimming is that, I apologetically say it’s my one of a kind frog style. When she asks me how I move my legs, arms, I realize she wants to learn to swim. I demonstrate. She eagerly imitates my arm moves. She moans she’ll never be able to swim. I encourage her, she will swim in no time, much better than me, if she registers for free swim classes. I want to get on with my ten-lap quota, that is ten pool lengths. In the morning I manage twenty pool widths. I’m a slow poke, but I came a long way.

I grew up in a dusty little town with no river or lake or clean swimming pool, the seaside was 400 kilometers away, and mom was terrified of water, fearful I’d drown or catch diseases. When I swam my first lap a few summers ago I thought I’d die, my heart was pounding out of my chest, my lungs were agonizing, my feet were shackled in cramps. All this in a sad four-feet-deep pool surrounded by eight lifeguards. So to me frogging twenty laps in half an hour is winning gold at the Olympics.

What those swimmers do in Rio is unbelievable. I’m in awe that they manage to jump into the water timely. I’d be still gasping for air on my trampoline, debating if I heard the start signal or not, while they’d be finishing the race, go on the podium, take their medals, travel back to their countries.

But according to my Yoga teacher I’m a gold medalist just for the mere fact that I show up on Thursdays at her Yoga class. As far as she is concerned, I could snooze on the matt in Child’s Pose, well, maybe that would be uncomfortable, but in Corpse Pose, and still win a medal for my ‘efforting’. Well, the municipality pays for this class, so some follow her advice, but were they to pay from their own pockets I bet they’d like to get more bang for their money than a nap on a matt. Anyway, the teacher’s point is that Yoga class is not a competition arena. No judges, no judgment.

If only I could reach that stage of enlightment, life would be so much easier, so much rosier. It’s a daily struggle not to pass judgment. I blame it on being raised during Ceauşescu’s socialism. My theory is that officially we were supposedly all in it together, so everybody goaded everybody, criticized one another. Everybody’s choices and actions affected everybody else. We all had to attain Epoca de Aur/The Golden Age of Communism as a group, not individually, slow pokes and Olympians alike.

We stand tall in Mountain Pose, eyes closed, listening to our teacher about the new women’s gymnastics world champion, a nineteen-year-old that smiles effortlessly and treats herself to pepperoni pizza even when she doesn’t win gold. She is the greatest gymnast of all times ever, the teacher enthuses, she can do poses that even male gymnasts have trouble with, she is so strong, so playful. The best.

I just can’t keep my eyes closed. I squeeze my eyelids, but I just can’t meditate. How could this American girl, the new world champion, be the best ever?! Nadia Comăneci is the best ever. Ever, ever, ever! Without Nadia there’s no modern gymnastics! Plus Nadia was born in Romania, and so was I, and you are now telling me Simone Biles is the greatest ever, ever? No, no, no! Nadia Comăneci is ever, ever, ever! I was a child when I watched wistful Nadia, a child herself, competing in Montreal, making the billboards go 00.00, because the machine had no 10.00 score for her perfection. I watched the world go berserk with wonder.

Then when she competed in Moscow the Russians cheated and stole the gold from her, because Russia’s might would trample us under its boot. I watched in tears her trainers withdrawing the team from the competition. That was the last sports competition I ever watched. It made me sick for decades. Only this summer visiting a dying friend I indulged her and watched together one evening’s broadcast to see if a Hungarian swimmer would make us proud. To my surprise I was so happy to see so many driven youth. Nowadays it’s cool to drift aimlessly, alas. Those swimmers, faces so young. It was endearing to hear their rehearsed speeches of gratitude. If you beat your competitor with just one millisecond you became the winner. Ridiculous. I’d give all finalists medals.

And then, at the gymnastics there was Nadia in the bleachers. And Marta Karolyi. And the American team wins. There’s only one lonely Romanian gymnast competing, not even a team. It was heartbreaking. What happened?! Romania was a powerhouse! We defined modern gymnastics! And now America wins it all?! What happened?!

Well, dear Ella, funny you should ask. Where do you live? In America. Where’s Nadia? In America. Where are the Karolyis? In America. Who wins? America. The safe harbor we all seek.

Simone Biles is a sweet girl, from foster care to gold medal, what an inspiring, from-rags-to-riches story, sure, but don’t tell me she is the greatest of them all. There’s an entire team of Romanians behind her. The Karolyis gave America fifteen world champions, nine Olympic champions, over seventy medals, and on and on the list goes. I don’t know if Nadia had privileges in Romania, if she had enough food to eat or was starving like the rest of us under communism, if she was freezing in her home, like the rest of us, or if she treated herself to pepperoni pizza, but I know that behind her was the sadness and joy, the humiliation and pride of the little country of Romania.

And now they have nothing. That is partly their politicians doing, alright. That is partly our doing, because we ran away for dear life, alright. But it is also part of beloved America’s doing, gulping in everything. Look at the many Easter European names that American champions have.

Sure, it is for the greater good, for humanity’s good.

But, please Yoga teacher, even if you were not born when Nadia was a world champion, you surely have heard of her…

New York City

August 12, 2016

Walk in the Woods

The moss and its alert peoplehood, shoulder to shoulder, delicate green antennas, shoulder to shoulder, a sea of tiny green soldiers.

Dried ferns, scorched in arthritic hands of witches.

Why a scared child?

A turquoise car abandoned, bushes of ferns growing through its gaping windows.

Tracks of two-toed moose. Wild turkeys scratched the forest floor for acorns.

A network of plugs drains the spring sap out of maple trees.

Leeches we are, preying on life.

Down we walk along a trail, down, down, until we reach the Beaver’s Pond.

I’m startled by the rummaged landscape.

Death beaver ate its way through the young wood. Bit through it savagely.

Serial killer.

Here a fallen oak tree, majestic once, all chewed up. There a white birch column, massacred, half-drowned in the indifferent mirror of the lake.

Around the lake ridge scores of trees, columns tumbled chaotically, dried branches, sun-bleached skeletons.

As we approach the lake, death realm, the Beaver King furiously slaps his tail against water, to scare us away from his nesting den, his little ones hidden.

As if I care to bother them, disturbed as I am by the death scenery.

This forest ruin of untimely fallen trees is my hometown, forgotten I thought, but still deep in my memory. The beaver eating its own forest.

Instead of shots of green and buds of spring, ants and monster crawlers nest in tree flesh, young tree untimely chewed into death.

A waterfall at the dam, cries, mourning for my young brother, mourning, wailing for the child with bright blue eyes. My memory replaces his drunken young man face with so lovely an infant, my innocent one. I mourn the walks in the woods we never took together, the talks we never had together. The hope I never gave him. My love withheld in grudges and irritation, his adolescent arrogance, foolish squandering of life.

Beaver, don’t chew my soul with the regret I never ministered to my brother. My words might have helped him stay away from death.

I walk closer to the waterfall, its howling pain resonating in my ears, trembling my heart to tears, cry water, cry, cry, cry, cry water tumult, cry out my powerlessness, my splitting pain, cracking open all pain for all those I lost to death, even for those who were unkind. Maybe life taught them regret, before I got to tell them it’s all forgiven, forgotten, don’t blame yourself for the pain you gave me, it’s all forgotten, forgiven, die in peace. It’s all forgiven. I understand now. Look at the buds of green on the spring branches, ready to explode in riots of lively green. I forgive as I hope to be forgiven too.

My brother knew we loved him. He knew all too well, he played us, wrapped us around his little finger. He knew we loved him. He just couldn’t bear life anymore. I can.

Walk, walk, cry now, cry now. Bye now, brother, bye now.

The woods, cracking twigs under my feet, the evergreens mirrored in the reverberating circles of water, remind me of my childhood, of my mother. He didn’t want to leave her womb, he clung to it, scared of the outside, scared of growth, scared of independence.

Why my mother is it so?

I find your comforting love in the burning embers of the camp fire. In its pulsating red glow, your heart, unstoppable glow of love and strength, my mother. Your warm hugs, in the flames and sparks spurred in the darkness you are with me, my mother.

The sizzling sap of the firewood. The smoke stinging my eyes, your sharp tongue.

My mother.

I find you in the crying of the lonely screechy owls. Under the shiny stars, that glitter in spite of weather fortune tellers who predicted snow and cold.

You are, dear mother, in the laughter of my son. In my womb.

In the tallness of the room, in the wooden ceiling and its cracked oak beams you are, as I fall asleep in this friendly home, my Easter sanctuary.

Even in the warm soapy water I wash the dishes in, the memory of childhood and you, my kitchen chores then, scrubbing dishes in the cold water, my umbilical cord still tying me to you as I rinse dishes now.

On the table your chicken and mashed potatoes; we were served tonight your Sundays.

Mother, teach me how not to mourn you while I mourn my brother. Teach me how to be you, my mother, so that I should never miss you, my mother, when your death will come. Teach me how when the door of mourning those taken from me by life or death, when that door cracks open, teach me not to break down, but to be a gracious host.

New Hampshire

2003

How Can I Walk On Weak Legs?!

Two years ago I started having severe pain in my middle back. As the months went by, it was getting worse. My personal doctor gave me pain medicine and muscle relaxers but that didn’t help. So I went to the emergency rooms to get X-rays. First I went to Muhlenberg. The doctor gave me a shot of something, which didn’t help, and sent me on my way.

A few weeks later the pain was so bad I was sleeping with pillows underneath me. I went to Somerset Hospital. They took X-rays. The doctor said I had pneumonia and that five weeks ago, my spine nerves got inflamed so he gave me Neurontin. That didn’t work either.

Three weeks later, I went back to Muhlenberg, only this time I didn’t have a car, so I was taking buses. It was twenty dollars one way in a taxi, so I’d take a bus one way and a taxi the other way, which living on social security it was a lot of money.

My legs had cellulites. I worked as a waitress five years at a diner. All these white water things came up on my legs, water spots. They got all swollen, I can’t walk on them. So, I got social security. $570.

I forgot to say that at Muhlenberg I had to give the doctor my history. At the time I was on a Methadone program. So you had to tell the doctors so they know what kind of medication you can’t take because you’ll have a bad reaction to it. So, I was honest. Right off the bat she looked at me like I was a drug addict and a bad seed, and I wasn’t. I had gotten on Methadone for prescription pills, Valium, I took for all my 30s. It had nothing to do with shooting drugs or heroine. But she thought I was still addicted to pills, and all she did was give me the same shot that didn’t work the last time, and also muscle relaxers. So I say, “Can’t you take some X-rays?” She took an X-ray and said it came out fine. I left. I walked home in agony, to say the least.

The last time I went to Somerset Hospital. The same doctor I saw earlier said the reason they couldn’t find out what the pain was, was that I still had a touch of pneumonia in the bottom of my right lung. He gave me an antibiotic, the Neurontin again, and a pain medication, and sent me home.

I then went to my personal doctor. She gave me pain medication and told me to go to the emergency room, get X-rays again. There was nothing she could do about it. So again, I went to Muhlenberg. It was the first time I didn’t get again that mean doctor, but her resident. He was really sympathetic. He was gonna give me X-rays, and he was gonna take a blood test finally. He was gonna do his job, actually. He went off to get me pain medication. As soon as he did that, the doctor I had seen formerly, stepped in.

I said to my nurse, who was a male, he was filthy dirty. I thought he was a patient! He had dirty white sneakers on, greasy hair. I didn’t know he was a nurse until he put gloves on and was taking my blood. I tell the nurse that I don’t want the medication she gave me last time, because it didn’t work.

He yelled at me, “You don’t come to us and tell us what to give you. You come to us, we tell you what we’re gonna do for you.” He was really snooty. So I called the doctor over and I told her to please see how much pain I was in. I couldn’t sit up straight in the bed. She goes, “See what?! I can’t see pain! How can I see pain?!” I didn’t mean it literally, I meant it in my face, you know. She was being a real jerk about it. I said, “Never mind, just let me go home.” As I was leaving, I saw the blood, the glass tubes, laying on the counter with no name on it, nothing. They weren’t even gonna send them to the lab. I went home.

About twelve days later, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I went back to my personal doctor. She gave me more medication, muscle relaxers, and I went home, spent the weekend in bed. I couldn’t get out of bed. I was in so much pain. My son had to walk me to the bathroom.

I had to go somewhere on Monday. I couldn’t stand up to get dressed. My son said, “Mom, you have to go. Try to get up.” So I stood up, my legs collapsed. I couldn’t feel anything, the pain was so severe. He called an ambulance and I went to Somerset Hospital. They stuck needles in my legs. I couldn’t feel anything. I was totally paralyzed from the waist down.

Thankfully a surgeon neurologist, Doctor Moore, did an MRI. The first time I’ve had it in all these months. He found an abscess, or a staph infection wrapped around my spine and my heart. He tells me, if this certain antibiotic wouldn’t take care of it in two weeks, they’d have to operate. So, I was admitted, with the pain, given a morphine drip. The pain didn’t let up and the abscess didn’t go away, so he had to operate. I had a good chance of dying. He called my family. In fact I didn’t know that I might die until all my family got there. I hadn’t seen them in a while. I was wondering why my mother was there, my son was there.

Before the surgery, this nurse, Terry, was taking care of me. I thought she was part of the hospital staff, actually she was a recruiter from a nursing home. After the operation, she said, “Where do you go from here? Are you going anywhere for therapy?” I said, “I know I can’t go home. I’d like to learn how to walk again, if I can.” She said she works for a nursing home and they had therapy.

A week after the operation she brought me there. It was a nursing home with old people. No therapy, at all. I was in such agony that they couldn’t even wash me or turn me. I, I, I could never forget that pain for weeks. Gradually over a month and a half, the pain subsided.

Six weeks later I was supposed to go back to Doctor Moore. Well, I didn’t know that. But they knew that and they never brought me. He thought I fell off the face of the earth. I found this out later on. He was wondering why I never came back to see him, after an operation like that.

They kept me in bed for ten months on my back. They had made me a back brace in the hospital to wear. When I got to the nursing home, they said I’d lost too much weight, the back brace wouldn’t fit, it would do me harm. So I didn’t even wear the back brace. I was supposed to wear it, get up, learn how to slide from the bed to the wheel chair. They had no occupational therapy to do that for me.

Much later they had one guy come in, only because I was on his route and he felt sorry for me. He’d come in twice a week and give me some therapy, moving my legs a little and show me some exercises I could do in bed. That’s it. My son would come, and after like six months, he said, “Mommy, try to move your toe.” I couldn’t. But two months later he said, “Try again,” and I moved my toe. It was the happiest moment in my life. I was able to move my toe. And I was still laying there.

A new social worker started working there, he was young. He came in my room and told me who he was. He said, “Karen, why are you here?” I explained to him. He said, “Why are you laying here in a nursing home? How come you’re not in sub-acute therapy?” I said, “I don’t know. I thought they were supposed to send me from here.” He asked me who my surgeon was, and I told him. He said, "I’m going to get in touch with him.” I said, “Terry said she tried, but they never called her back. She left message after message on his phone and she never got a call back for the last nine months.” He said, “Let me try.” He called and left a message and in an hour Doctor Moore called him back. In an hour! He told Steve, the social worker, he was so happy to hear from him because he had lost touch with me completely, like I fell off the face of the earth. And to bring me in as soon as possible. He couldn’t believe that he found me. He was such a jolly fellow. He was so nice, so sweet. He loved his job, you know.

I went three days later to his office, and he took X-rays. When he looked at the X-rays, he came in. I said, “Will I be able to walk again?” He said, “Well, with some acute therapy, I think you will.” He held my hand, we were laughing and crying. He’s such a good guy. I couldn’t believe it. He said, “You have to get into Kessler West, or Magee in Philadelphia. I’ll give them a call and a social worker will call too.”

He threw his part in it.

When I got back to the nursing home, I told Terry. She called Kessler West and told them that I was on narcotics at the nursing home. She came into my room and said, "Kessler West doesn’t take people that are taking narcotics. Don’t get your hopes up that you’re gonna go.” She tried to discourage me. I sat there for a while, and I said to myself I’m gonna call this lady at Kessler West myself, see if I can make a difference because the hell these people are giving me… you know, let me do some things on my own. So I called her and I told her who I was, and what Terry said about the narcotics.

“Oh, that’s not a problem. People come here with brain injuries. Believe me they have to take narcotics. That can’t be a problem, or we wouldn’t be able to take anyone.” She went on to say, “After talking to you, now I like you. [Laughs] You really sound like a different person than what Terry described. I want to get you here as fast as I can.”

A week later I was at Kessler West. Two days later I started therapy. It did wonders on me. I was barely curling a toe, my legs were swollen like big logs, hard from laying flat, and two weeks later I was moving my legs up and down. I was bendin’ them, and the swelling in my knees, my ankles, my feet had dropped. They did wonders. [Sighs] I felt so limber.

I then found out they only take people six weeks, on any insurance. They told me to try to find a place that would accept me, that had the therapy that they were doing. I looked all over, but everywhere they had long waiting list. So they said there’s a place, this one, they said they had same Kessler therapy here. I figured, if they do Kessler it must be good. So I came here and I was brought into this mental unit.

People were screaming and biting themselves, dribbling and crying... It was crazy.

The aides here are so mean, very abusive, especially to the older people who can’t talk. They’re pushing them around, hurting them, throw them around.

People walk around with wet soaking pants, through the diapers, crapping their pants for hours. The whole ward stinks with poop and pee.

Yeah, the aides don’t clean them. You ask them for something and they act as they don’t hear you. They give you a nasty look, they keep on walking away. I got hit by one of them. They put her on a different unit for four days, now she’s back. I think they gave her a warning, because now she’s nice to me.

The health care in this country is atrocious. Why can’t we have free health insurance, like Canada? It’s just terrible. And the nursing homes take people’s homes, everything, before they even touch their insurance. They leave them with nothing, their families with nothing.

I lay in the bed twelve hours a night, or ten. They make me go to bed at ten until ten in the morning. By the time I get out, I can’t even move my legs.

The nurse puts on my socks, pants. It’s terrible that you can’t do anything by yourself. Not going to the bathroom, to bed.

I waited three months before I got evaluated. I kept on telling them, “I’m regressing. My legs are starting to get numb again. What am I supposed to do?” They just kept putting off. So finally three months later they evaluate me by just how high I could pick up my feet. Of course they wouldn’t go up as high as they did at Kessler because, dude, it was three months later. They said, “Well, you’re never gonna improve anymore from here.” I said, “Yes, I will, if I had therapy. I improved at Kessler! I stopped improving here because I didn’t have therapy.”

Well, the head of the department was supposed to okay my papers but she was sick, she was out for three months. Then they got a new person, Melissa. After five months I talked to her and she finally gave me three weeks. But she also said, “You have to learn to accept to live your life as full as you can in a wheel chair. Don’t waste your time trying to walk.” Discourage me as much as she can.

When she got me the therapy room I had a good therapist, Abe. He got me exercising my legs. He stood me on the parallel bars. I was standing up by myself. He says, “No wonder you were so angry. If you had therapy all this time, you could be walking by now.” I said, “Yeah, I know.”

Two days later, Melissa came to see how I was and I said, “I was so excited by what Abe said. I told my nurse and a friend of mine.” She said that I shouldn’t have said anything because Able could get fired. He had no right to say that because it wasn’t true. He wasn’t supposed to get me on my feet. “That wasn’t what we agreed on.” “You got me in therapy so I could work on my legs.” She goes, “Okay, but no more.”

She gave me three weeks of occupational, so I got another guy when I went in the next day. For three weeks we threw a balloon at each other for my balance, sitting down, nothing to strengthen my legs, nothing.

I said, “When are we gonna work on my legs?” He said, “Melissa doesn’t want me to.” I said, “That’s what I came in here for!” He said if I progressed in a month, then we’d see. Keep on going. Three weeks later Melissa had me get on the parallel bars and try to take a few steps. I took three or four sliding steps, I wasn’t able to pick up my knees and legs. I was able to stand up, of course. But she said, “Okay, you’ve done well. Your therapy is finished.” I said, “Finished?! We didn’t even start on my legs yet!” She said, “I never told you we were gonna work on your legs.” I said, “Yes, you did. Me and Linda,” my social worker, “and you discussed it in her office.”

And that’s the therapy I got here. From Kessler West my doctors sent me here to get therapy. And eight months later, I still haven’t gotten it.

If I had family to fight for me, go up there and say, “She was sent here for therapy. Why isn’t she getting it? Why is she sitting in her room for three months?” But my son is in jail. My mother’s in a nursing home. My brothers are dead.

She said my legs were spastic. She said there is a new medication out, Baclofen. They showed doctors and nurses videos of. At first they inject it in your spine. Sometimes the patient can start walking. If that doesn’t work, there’s a disc that they insert in your spine and it drips a dosage of the medication every day for three, six months, and you’ll be walking.

But, I feel, before they do that, they should do therapy on my legs to strengthen them. How can I walk on weak legs?! I haven’t walked in two years, my legs are weak now. How can I walk on weak legs? If they don’t give me physical therapy before I start walking, then they’re gonna think I failed. Anyway in four to six weeks I’m going to go in for an evaluation to see if I qualify for this disc.

In the videos they showed there was a woman who had a stroke, she was paralyzed from the neck down. Two months later, after this medication, she was moving every part of her body, walking down the hall. 

My Pretty Place: Inside Geranium Blooms

Daniela and the Hypnotist. She sits on a couch and flowers her dress over her folded legs. 

Hypnotist: Look at it this way… [Overlap] Daniela: I want erotic dreams.
Daniela: [To the audience] My life coach, a certified hypnotist, offers The MythoSelf Workshop for Personal Transformational Change Work.
[To the Hypnotist] I dreamed that hair grows on my hands, like corn silk, like bird down, but a lot, a lot. I pull out fistfuls and it immediately grows back. As if I’m at an exhibition opening, people chatting with wine glasses in hand while I pull all that hair. Then I’m at my parents’ home, and it’s dark, the house is full of some animals also covered with feather down though they aren’t supposed to have feathers, they are like small puppies. My sister shrugs her shoulders, ‘This is how it happens.’ [Desperately] ‘Since when?’ ‘Since our parents travel.’ ‘When do they return?’ ‘Soon.’ ‘What will they say about these animals covered in down? Look at my hands. You’re a family doctor!’ She shrugs again. I can’t keep up with the corn silk down, pulling fistfuls! It still grows, still grows...
Hypnotist: Relax. Follow my pen with your eyes. Now close your eyes, you’re unable to open them. Go deeper and deeper into your subconscious. Count backwards from 10. Let your arms go limp. Breathe deeply. Feel tingling in your body.
Daniela: [To the audience] What if he starts masturbating?! I barely know this guy. [Closes her eyes] I dreamed that patches of grass and barnacles grow on my soles and I keep on pulling them out and they grow even faster. I run through the village, where I grew up, on a path down into the valley and a woman stops me, ‘I can heal you.’ She pulls the entire grass from my feet. I’m so ashamed I have grass on my soles. She rubs medicinal alcohol on them, snuggles me under a down comforter. She gets into the bed too, but I jump out repulsed. She mocks me, ‘Come now, don’t be afraid, I won’t touch you.’ I run away but that makes my feet stop healing.
Hypnotist: Hands, makers of things, not controlled by your will. Instead of pulling out the corn silk why not put fertilizer on it, be welcoming to it? What are feet? Locomotion, move away, move forward, immigration.
Daniela: Maybe my feet are trying to become roots, rooted. What if I let the roots grow? Get rooted? [Ironical] Come on…
Hypnotist: Instead of resisting, yield to it, even encourage it, find joy in your immigration. Focus on the future, dwell not on the past.
Daniela: Oh, I’m stuck in my perpetual dream in which I’m stuck back in Transylvania, wanting to escape to America with my son at a young age, and my mother puts obstacles in my way, either she's the one with the money, or she withholds our airplane tickets, or there is no one to drive us to the airport, but the dream always ends in the same way: gasping, we get into the airplane, and I wake up, my heart boom! boom! booming! If I get to live as long as my granny, I’ll have this dream for 40x365=14,600 times. Can you help me? It's dreary. I want erotic dreams, not nightmares.
Hypnotist: We’ll work on unblocking you.
Daniela: I’m blocked in so many ways. I’ve made lots of lovely cushions. I pile them up in the living room and can’t manage to sell them. I’ve blocked my hallway with the bag full of polyester fluffy pillow stuffing, which seems to grow, the more I take out of it, the more the fluff expands, so my home is barricaded. But from whom?
Hypnotist: I want your arms to become totally relaxed.
[He holds her hand. He drops it on her thigh.]
Hypnotist: One, two, three, four, go deeper and deeper into your relaxation. Your body becomes heavier and heavier.
Daniela: It’s so heavy, my muscles peel off the bones! [Giggles] They’ll drop to the floor in a mound!
Hypnotist: Go to the place where you feel best and you like yourself most. What will you call it? Let’s create a trigger so you can hypnotize yourself on the subway.
Daniela: The pretty place. I’m in a grass field in my hometown, by the woods edge. It’s sunny summer, light wind, wild flower fragrance. I slumber in the grass perfecting my suntan. I’m 17. My hair is huge, it flutters in the wind.
Hypnotist: You’re growing younger and younger, a child now, curious about things, curious about yourself.
Daniela: I’m 4 or 5 in my prim little girl cotton dress picking wild flowers in the grass field by the train canton. The grass is taller than I am.
Hypnotist: Become even younger, before you were even born.
Daniela: [Grumbles] Forget about it. My hands are so very heavy, my feet are so very very heavy, like cast iron, really heavy.
Hypnotist: Observe when the inhalation turns into exhalation. The place where being turns into not-being, where not-being turns into being.
Let your creations take off, like baby birds flee the nest, respect your creations. They were given to you, they pass thru you but have to go to others. Let them have their own life, go away, be they pillows or your son, who will soon go to college. Trust that they will father themselves, even if some only after you’re dead, just let them fly away like birds.
Daniela: I see pelicans that can’t find fish anymore, pray on another colony of birds, the parents are out fishing, while the pelicans steal the baby birds, the fledglings disappear in their enormous, sagging beaks, skinny baby legs convulse out of the pelicans' closed beaks. I see little baby flamingos, stuck in the mud and dying, or baby elephants trampled upon by stupid mommy elephants. [To the Hypnotist] Please, scramble me out of this monstrous pretty place! I need erotic dreams. My pretty places, my paradises, always get smeared, invaded by some ugly nutty monstrosity. When I was 17 I’d go every day into the woods. The fragrance, the quiet, the light and shadows, the thick bed of dry leaves and twigs and fir tree needles, the forest tall above me. One day a stupid pimply boy on my street followed me. He tried to rape me but I kicked his ass and I ran away.
I stopped going to my forest.
I don’t want any more dreams with my mom. I dreamed about my potted flowers. The Christmas cactus has grown a bushy branch but it is the color of cabbage and the leaves are small and many, but it’s as big as my geranium. Suddenly it grows limp. I search frightened to see why, when a nasty Limax snail slug comes out from a hole in the ground, darts like lightning and flees. Mother fucker Limax, you’ve destroyed my flower! I hope it will recover now, but it doesn’t. I pour water into the hole and a second disgusting slimy Limax purplish brown darts out running. [She takes again the hypnosis position.]
Hypnotist: [Drones] Your eyelids get relaxed and you can't open them.
Daniela: [She does open them] I know how I’ll call my hypnosis pretty place: I want to go into my geranium blooms, on the kitchen windowsill my red fresh geranium so red, red and profuse, that's where I want to go always, into my geranium blooms.
Hypnotist: Very well, then. Relax your face muscles and chest and arms. Become yourself, for the geranium is but a geranium, when the sugar and sap travels in the stem to make her bloom, she won't turn into a tulip, she won't turn into a lilac, no, the geranium blooms into a geranium. Like the acorn is an acorn and gives birth to an oak tree, and all it can turn into or do is be an acorn in all its acorness, and an oak in all its oakness...
Daniela: [Opens one eye.] God, give me a break! It's not quite working. Your droning is like an assembly-line guru voice. Maybe you could use your deeper tones instead of this mechanized, conveyor belt, I’m-hypnotizing-an-entire-factory droning? Should I go back to my acorness?
Hypnotist: [In a baritone voice] No. At the count of 3 you’ll feel a surge of rejuvenation and wake up filled with energy.
Daniela: A baritone in all its baritonness.
Hypnotist: 1, 2, 3! Wake up.
Daniela: This won't happen! My feet and hands are made of heavy clods and I can't move them, will you prod me? Will you poke me? Pretty please.
Hypnotist: No, at the count of 3 you will wake up by yourself. 1, 2, 3.
Daniela: Man, my feet are nailed to the floor! My hands are nailed to my thighs.
[His phone alarm rings. She moves awaken.]
Hypnotist: Each time you talk about what you don’t like, you lean your neck and head to my left. But when you talk about things you like you change your posture, look to my right and you straighten up, and brighten up. I want you to keep to my right.
Daniela: Well, then move to the right.
Hypnotist: It’s not about me moving to the right. It’s on you to stay to the right, in that desired life, in the things you love, the life you want. Just be, don’t construct scenarios, just be, knowing that you are very attractive.
Daniela: [To the audience] Hear, hear.
Hypnotist: In a few days, perhaps over the weekend, you’ll come to an understanding of what has just happened and you will regain your balance, allow yourself to become yourself.
Daniela: I want poise and balance.
Hypnotist: We’ll get you there, even if you’re on a New York subway. You can reset yourself, go to the pretty place and reboot yourself like a computer. I want you to make that good life for yourself. [Exits.]
Daniela: [To the audience] When I go home there are profuse pink blossoms in the trees by my building. Two years ago they planted one million trees, and today they’ve bloomed for the first time. I tell each of them I love you, so they know they are loved.
Over the weekend I had my first erotic dream in ages. Well, close enough. I never had such a dream before. I slept 13 hours and I woke up with a back-pain.
I was in a hotel elevator trying to catch up with my employer's group in a conference room. I was not eager. I felt ill equipped for the job, didn't know exactly my job description, I was like a gofer Friday girl, they were bossing me around and it was a boring job. Anyway, I caught up with them, they were taking places at the conference table, my boss was in a suit and the other team was Donald Sutherland and his entourage, he wore an elegant suit and a white shirt, unbuttoned. His hair was longish, white. I enjoyed looking at him. I don't know what were they negotiating, but then somehow the situation shifted, Donald Sutherland was holding me in his arms like in a slow dance and he was soft and caring and wistful and he said, “I can't keep up with your delicious, extraordinary wit, Ella,” and I smiled and I felt in my body something I never felt before, and I was startled and I said to myself perhaps this is what the hypnotist is talking about I am to feel when I am with a man. Weird.
Then things got hectic, the conference broke up, I was to go, fetch, arrange, while my heart was filled with Donald Sutherland, and how I must tell him, I must keep in touch with him, I must relocate! And as if I was in front of an entire theater audience in London performing a one-woman show and oh, was I fantastic. And I was wondering how would my life with Donald Sutherland be? Like slow dancing? And then things got even more hectic. I was trying to track him down to pass him a letter written in pencil on a school copy book page! In it was my number and email, and I was asking some of the hotel personnel where did he go. A woman said he had enough of conferencing and went for a walk. Anyway, I didn't manage to give him my note.
Then I woke up in my dream at my parents' home because a beige hand-phone was shouting my mother's distressed voice, how my father needed help because she was away drowned in snow, so much snow had fallen on the villages where she was, and my father's cable wires will melt because the phone or something hot fell on the wires and that was a major tragedy for my family, and I said, “Alright, alright.” I went into the other room and my father was under a feather duvet and he was crying that a young guy from his work place at the collective farm died and he was so young, and he was crying my father. My sister, or my son, young kids, were under the other duvet wanting to play with me. I said to my father harshly, “What can one do, tragedies happen, may the man rest in peace, we have to take care of his TV cable wires, that will be a major tragedy not to have TV service!” So I urged him to get out of bed and look for his wires because I was busy with my own quest for Donald Sutherland. As if I met him at his hotel room and he hold me again or I was just remembering how he hold me while slow dancing.
Then I went to my mom uphill on snowy village roads and I told her, “Mom, have you seen the movie last night on TV?” “No,” she says, she was busy with rescuing people in the village from the deluge. “Well, Mom, I was in the entire movie several times, and I had a smasher scene with Donald Sutherland, and Mom he is the most kind and poetic gentleman ever.” Mom says, “Oh, I know him. We were at the cinema and I sat behind him and I asked him if Constantin Niţu was dead or what had happened to him?” Niţu was a Romanian actor movie star who ran away under communism but his acting career didn't work out abroad. His talent useless abroad.
Anyway, I was saying, “Mom, you don't understand, I like Donald Sutherland.”
Mom was prattling away, so frustrated I woke up with a back-pain.
I don't know what's all this about. I have some pointers: I watched recently a DVD with Donald Sutherland having back-pain and no penis, like in that Hemingway book, and he had a massage therapist who eased his back-pain.
When I met in real life Donald Sutherland on a movie set in Budapest, we were in the makeup trailer. He made fun of my Russian whore make up, the film was about Chikatilo, a serial killer in the USSR, and he was a commissar and I was a Russian whore, a possible victim. The film was Citizen X for HBO shot in Hungary. And Donald Sutherland saw his joke didn't go down well with me, and he came back promptly to apologize, with an earnest face, that he meant no harm.
But that was 17 years ago! And I didn't feel anything in my body for Donald Sutherland back then!

[Blackout.]

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Dear Commander in Chief

Please forgive me if my language skills will fail me at times and cause merriment in you. It is not intended, but I come from a faraway land and I am a stranger to your customs and fancies. I write to you hoping you will find a way of solving my matter positively in a win-win situation and not cause further damage and puzzlement.
I am one of your humble subjects of inquestitation. Way back in early March my eyeglass was knocked from me, stomped upon, lenses broken, its brackets all twisted by my ex-paramour gone again berserk at the Armory Show Pavilion. I was myself demolished and defrayed nervously, emotionally and psychiatrically that I was put in a wheel chair to make my entrance at the ER hospital room. There two of your employees came and wrote my bad situation down and then life took me on the path to recovery out of my domestic violence residue and I waited to see about my eyeglass but nothing happened for quite a while, so I bought new.
Then a detective called! A Hamlet Aberdeen left a message saying to call the precinct! At last, help is on its way! At last, someone listens! I was very much impressed as I told him my gratitude he denied it completely. Before talking to this detective, I made many complaints at the precinct in my immigrant infested neighborhood but all I got was sniggerings and biggerings. They never did squat about my situation. I showered them with complaints but never ever one showed up ever never ever ever! Left me thinking I was still in the old country where justice is dead under a pile of musty dung.
When Detective Aberdeen Shining Armor came! I was impressed from the minute I stepped in your precinct! I told him I never met a detective. He smiled and said well, now I saw four. I do not have enough words to describe you and commend you since we have an ancestral saying and it is true here too in America it is true, that De la cap se-mpute peştele which roughly is: “The fish gets funky from the head!” I can’t wait to meet you! I am sure if your fine employees were so courteous and polite, what about you, the mind behind this fine team? I have never seen such fine speciments. All mussellar in tight T-shirts with their long American legs, like in the movies, on the table! Sergeants, like in the movies, were typing diligently at their carbon copies. That was amazing how it was and it was not like in the movies! In the movies, the detectives always jump in cars and drive away in a rush. At your precinct, when Detective Aberdeen gave me the Precinct Grand Tour pointed out one lonesome car key up on the billboard. It is a miracle that anything gets done! Dousens of detectives and one car!
Commander in Chief, you need a fundraiser! Make a calling for bikes and scooters, roller blades and skateboards! If the city’s millionaires won’t throw in money for enough cars, ask the poor population to pitch in! My rescuer should get to the rescue full speed! I called him to go and get my perpetrator from the other borough he was arrested for other maltratreatments he bestowed on me, but by the time, four hours later, that Detective Aberdeen arrived on his roller blades, he already bounded and fleed!
This will not do, I said to myself. This has to be brought to the public attention! These brave courteous men need help! Me, a humble immigrant, I can do only so much! In addition, my head was abuzz with ideas.
Commander in Chief, your staff changed my life. Especially Detective Aberdeen. He gave me back hope. He gave me backspine; he gave me pride in humanity. I wrote very exquisite erotic literature thanks to this man, Commander in Chief! I had such erotic daydreams that I said, America at last!
It was a grand feeling mutual.
Alas, Commander in Chief, all fine things end in shingles!
Detective Aberdeen succumbed under the large load of suitcases and bickering of his detective partner and I wonder who else?—Maybe you gave him the evil eye since he spent too many long days on my suitcase instead of catching heavier perpetrators and violators? But Detective Aberdeen, I vouch with my heart, is a man of vision and, may I say, television. Television! He saw the core problem in my suitcase and extricated it and hold it up as a flasklight of Statue of Liberty shining thru the darkness! Detective Aberdeen is my hero. He saw in my suitcase the malaise of the entire Nation. He identified it! He pinpointed: Here is a small woman of grand will who escaped dying of AIDS thru condom slippage and condom brokage and condom peelage off the HIV positive dripping faucet prick and she could have been infested, she could have been dying! but life protected her to bear witness! And here she is now bearing witness that there’s no finer man than Detective Aberdeen in all the precincts in the world!
Buy him a scooter!
I do not know what is appropriate and fraternal because I am all mixed up in America you have to be professional; you cannot fraternize and buddyrize when you go to the precincts. Therefore, I do not know, can I offer my tax returns to you to buy Detective Aberdeen a super-scooter and a voice mail while my suitcase is still open?
It is a distressful situation.
Voice mail is not in the precinct. The phones are from the James Bond Series. But we are not. It is hard to watch how fellow detectives scribble down my erotic messages for Detective Aberdeen. How they report courteously over the phone that Detective Aberdeen is taking a leek! Detective Aberdeen is coming only on Friday! Detective Aberdeen actually is on vacation scootering in Bahamas; comes back next Saturday. Detective Aberdeen has been seen a minute ago! But where is Detective Aberdeen? At times, it looks like he is hostage in his own precinct, all gagged up and tied with ropes, and cannot talk on the phone. A fine situation! A man who fought the terrorists is afraid of my anxious self, wanting to know about her suitcase!
Commander in Chief, here is a hundred check from my tax returns! Buy the voice mail! Let him screen his calls. Don’t let this situation fester! I can see him running away down the stairs in the basement when the phone rings: Here is the dear old lady calling again about her eyeglass! Alternatively, picking up the phone, pretending he can’t hear my squeaking voice asking about my suitcase! Dropping the receiver!
Buy the voicemail and then he effortlessly can think about other suitcases and delete my annoying messages efficiently without losing any brainpower.
We, as a Nation, will be much better served!
Otherwise, I fell in love with your precinct, as I said. I feel like I could move in. Needs badly a woman’s hand. Some curtains here and there, dusting, mopping, some flower bushes to play cops and robbers with the victims more efficiently. If I may suggest you need larger badges and shinier ones. In my old country, though the militia was vehiculing on donkeys, their uniform was more splendors: lots and lots of tassels and pompons, golden, red and emerald green! And they’d salute their superiors!
Please consider implementing this healthy attitude! They should all salute! Snap the heels and up goes the arm to the hat! What is this nonsense with public service? Order and discipline! You are the Commander in Chief!
And the hats are unimpressive here! Ostrich plumes would look smashing! Or peacock feathers! The Elton John style! It can be done very cheaply, I assure you!
But let me not get carried away!
Therefore, in these few words I mean to say how keep up the good work, Commander in Chief, father of such brave terrorist hunters and domestic violence victim protectors.
Please let me know if the check bounces so that I can pay in food stamps, and don’t let Detective Aberdeen hide-and-seek each time the phone rings.
The Nation needs him for a new detective series and bless my heart if I come sane out of this bedlam of a suitcase I will be the one to write it with your help and guidance, Commander in Chief, with your help and abbreviations.
May you be in good health and close retirement!

All our love with you and yours and Detective Aberdeen’s above all,

Ludmila Popovics,
Old Sexy Biddy Ex- Brighton Beach Sunbather [Now Bahamas Islands Cruiser—perhaps I bump into Detective Aberdeen and his scooter dressed as a palm or coconut tree!
Shush!]

P.S. We could have a rummage sale, Commander in Chief: with all the typerighters we can sell at a high price antiques. Please consider me to organizer it!
Let’s have a banner: Befriend Your Precinct! Community Gives Back to Precinct Rummage Sale!
Let me know!!!

10/25/2006

New York City

Welcome to Our Neighborhood!

FLORINA CERCEL, 35 years old, an impoverished, though overly-educated, freshly-immigrated Romanian, life still in disarray.
Late September, 2001. Evening, around 8:00 P.M.
Bloomfield, New Jersey, a staircase in front of FLORINA's apartment, second floor.
FLORINA has a purple beauty mask on her face and a bandana that makes her hair stick up. She wears an apron and slippers. She's embarrassed by the way she looks, is defensive, scared. A TIRED AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMAN and her four kids stand in front of her on the staircase. FLORINA’s son, MIRCEA, 11 year old, listens quietly to the outpouring of the AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMAN. After listening, FLORINA takes over and becomes unstoppable.

FLORINA
[Starts slowly.] Let me get this straight, please. I am a foreigner and have trouble with New Jersey accents. I'm also dead tired; I've just arrived half an hour ago, I had a hard day and I hoped for a quiet evening, reading beautiful plays, and have funny talks with my son. Instead you've interrupted my dishwashing and radio listening, and this mask itches to death.
Never mind.

[Casual, but speeding up.] So, you were saying that your son who suffers from asthma was almost killed by my son, and you've just come from the emergency room because he had a bump on the back of his neck and he could have been dead by now, killed by my son, an 11-year-old murderer and now you'll have to stay home all week and take care of him. Is that so? Please don't talk, you've talked enough, let me understand, because we won't get anywhere. Just nod. Yes? Yes.

[Lecturing.] Okay, now let me tell you this: I know my son and I have never seen him being unjust to anyone, or hurting anyone. If he hit your son, I am sure that your son hit him first. Yes, you are right, maybe your son could be dead by now but so could my son, both of them lying bleeding on the cement while Mr. San Giovanni, the principal, doesn't give a shit about it. Now, when I came home I saw my son had a scratch on his eyelid, but I thought it was a sty again, because he doesn't have health insurance, so when he had a sty I had to cure him myself, so I thought it's the sty again, but when I asked him, he said he got that scratch from a tree, okay? [To MIRCEA.] But now it comes out it was not a tree, and I don't want this to happen again, do you hear me? Go and switch off the stove. It smells of burnt milk.

[To the AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMAN, smiling.] You know what I think? It was your son, who lies to us both, it was your son, Madam. If my child said that your son took from him the blue plastic knife he found in the school yard, he took it though it was not his, and bullied my child, then my son did the right thing hitting him back! Look, Madam, don't interrupt me, okay!

[Slightly threatening. Faster, building up to a huff.] I am a single mother, so he has to look after himself, no bully will mess with him. My son is an orange belt, if you saw him on Harvest Day Festival demonstrating in front of the Recreational Civic Center and saw his photo in the papers, you'd know he is an athlete, he goes three times a week to Tae Kwon Do training, at the Universal Martial Arts, because he has to learn the art of kicking and punching and self-defense, until he gets a black belt. That's why I pay $75 a month, okay? Master Walter teaches him self-defense and no one will mess with my son, and with me for that matter.

[Relaxing, switching to a nicer tone.] Now, if you came here with kind thoughts, trying to find out the truth and try to make these immature boys understand that now we have to stick together because hard times will come for us people on Orange Street, when we won't have what to eat and whom to marry because men will go to war against terrorists, then I am with you, Madam. But if you came here to make me say I'm sorry that this happened to your son, and then use my words of sympathy to get money out of me, you are very wrong. Therefore, though I am sorry, I can't tell you I'm sorry, because this is not Romania, where kids are kids and people don't sue left and right out of the blue—[In disbelief, shares this small gossip.] I hear you here in Bloomfield have burglars who sue the burglarized victim that they over-waxed their floor and they slipped on it and broke a leg, and the burglar wins. Well, if that's the case with you, I am very sorry to say that I can't shake hands with you, and have no penny to give you. All I can give you is a book about friendship that I got from church. [To MIRCEA.] Go and bring it. From now on, Mircea you won't go outside and play with kids that afterwards come and lie about you, okay?

[To the AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMAN. Earnest.] I am sorry if I sound too harsh, but I am at a loss here. Perhaps you are a nice lady, single mother yourself, regrettably we meet under such circumstances that make me fear you are a sue monger. [Winning smile.] Whichever the case, my landlord is a cop and he said I should tell anyone to [Daintily. Must be a lady!] bugger off.
Good night. Go inside, Mircea.

[She shuts the door gently, as the group of kids and the other mother walk down the squeaking old wooden staircase.]

A Worm Has Wiggled Into People's Souls

[Early Spring, 2004. An apartment on Roosevelt Island, New York City. Thru the window the gray city skyline and glittering water. GRANDMA DIDINA prepares breakfast for IRINA, her daughter’s guest, then lovingly watches her eat.]

GRANDMA DIDINA:
Do you like your eggs scrambled? My son-in-law also likes them that way. Here is some salami. He always eats salami. If we don't have salami he doesn’t feel satisfied! Have some slices of provolone cheese. Here's bread. You have to eat properly. Young people don't eat properly. [Places the plate with eggs on the table. Sits down. Pause.] Look at the geraniums! It's a jungle! They blossomed early this year. Hey, you calico cat! Get back in the armchair! Let Irina eat!
I wanted to go to watch the Passion of Jesus. Imagine! Maia Morgenstein is in it! A Romanian girl! I wanted to go but none of my girls wanted to go. "Girls"! If you add up together their age, they are 200 years old! Is it really anti-Semitic?
America is hard, you have to adapt to its ruthless laws. It's all about money. The rhythms here are mad, hard to adapt to. Some don't. I look at my daughter and my son-in-law, they come home dead tired. Luckily I'm here, I cook and take care of the house. Supervise the kids. I don't like how kids behave here! My grandchildren are polite, but their friends just come and go straight into Sorin's room, without even saying hello! As if I don't exist. They are high school kids! They eat, leave the dishes all over the place and don't even say a thank you! I told them, “This is not a hotel! Wash the dishes after yourselves!”
See how society shapes them? [Pause.]
I've been sitting here, thinking about things. A worm has wiggled into people's souls. Nazism, communism, terrorism, they are all the same! They are all built on lies! Politicians fill their pockets with gold and don't give a hoot about poor people.
We Romanians are a kind, tolerant people. We carried them piggyback for decades. We were stupid, stupid, stupid… We believed in communism, enthusiastically, when it came. Young people went after school on their own volition and built up those mammoth buildings in the Red Star Square. We believed! But when I finally saw how crooked they turned… Why, they built this huge steel factory by the Black Sea, at Năvodari, you know? And we had no iron, no coal! How can you be so megalomaniac, build a factory like that? Even now it's empty! Our industrious comrades came and stole whatever they could, a window here, a door there, and it was with everybody's silent agreement! Come! Come and take whatever you can! In bright daylight! They stole everything. The state took everything from us, so we always stole. And lied. On the radio they said we made 100,000 tons of steel a month! What a lie. We barely made one ton!
When I realized they were lying, I told my brother, "Brother, this system won't last. It's too crooked." But my very own brother, a colonel in the army, said, "Don't you ever let anyone know that you told me this!" I looked at him—my very own brother! If I am your sister and I can't talk to you about my doubts, what is this? He never spoke to me again! If the party said everything was wonderful, he believed it! Well, later on he asked forgiveness, "My dear sister, you were so right. I was a fool."
He can't survive on his pension if we don't send him a hundred dollars every month. In ten years of inflation they increased the pension by 20,000 lei, but nowadays a tram ticket is 20,000! They ruined everything!
Hundreds of people would stand in line for hours and we wouldn't say a word to each other. We were afraid to talk, because informers could tell on us, twist our words and we’d end up in jail.
Before communism—I grew up under capitalism—I was twelve and I remember people were much friendlier then. We talked to our neighbors. My mother once sent me to borrow two eggs from our neighbor. Then she returned them, but the neighbor said she wouldn't take them, because they were smaller than her eggs. "Dear neighbor, this is all I've got! My hens make smaller eggs! I can give you four or six in return!" No, she didn't want more eggs, she wanted just two large ones. "Well, then, here you are!" And my mom smashed the two eggs, one after the other, on our neighbor's forehead! [Laughs.] Oh, dear! She was not a patient one, my mom. When my father came home, he was a quiet guy, Polish nobleman, he asked her, "Why have you done this, Pichi? Why couldn’t you just hand them to her?" She said nothing. Luckily the neighbor didn't sue my mom.
[Pause.] Don't bother with the dishes; just put them into the sink.
[Blackout.]