Foreward
We are now twenty years from when I began to write the book in my mind. I have been muttering, mumbling, squirreling away lines and thoughts to impart to you for over a decade. The idea there is a version of myself in the future who exists outside of the writing of this book is too tantalizing a thought.
From the moment I began to think of this book, it was in the past. I have lived each moment as if I was remembering it, each meal and drive, each book and commute filled with moments being immediately soaked up and stored.
Future City
In the future people will arrive in New York like they did in the past, by boat. They will approach the Narrows but float above the Verrazano bridge instead of below it. They will not see most of Brooklyn or New Jersey, they will miss most of the Statue of Liberty. The first things they will see will be rusty, broken structures rising out of the sea. The Financial District. The Freedom Tower. The Empire State Building.
In the past people came to New York City to build a future. They imagined one for themselves here, they created it first in their minds. But in the future people will come to New York to find the past. Life here will be so unviable, only people who forage for stories will come. Like the urban explorers of Chernobyl, taking photos of a deteriorating classrooms, with math equations sitting unsolved on the chalkboard. The loss of New York City to the ocean will feel gradual at first like with Superstorm Sandy, and then fully - once those surges fill the streets forever the loss will feel complete.
Getting to Hunter Mountain was easy. The directions there were the first ones I knew. There were only two turns: take the Palisades Parkway to the Thruway, stay on until you pass the orchard, make a left at the McDonald's and another left at the old church. I remember looking up as I stretched across the back seats of the deep blue Mercedes,watching the world go by in the parallelogram of the window. The floating shapes, the sharp plumes of light and shadow, wafting smells of exhaust and urine. Leaning brick facades and whistling trucks. From back there, everything looked like it loomed over me, like it was falling. In the tunnel before leaving the city, the world became black. My parents faces glowed red from the brake lights in traffic, before the cliffs and the sunlight opened up to us on George Washington Bridge.
Hunter Mountain
Before I was born, Hunter was where my parents and their friends would go for the weekends. They worked crappy jobs and barely spoke English they made these escapes from the city in a brown Jaguar. A friend of theirs from Poland had opened up a hotel in the Catskills. It is where I was conceived. In very colorful ski pants and fabulous hair my mom precariously learned to ski when five months pregnant with me.
Unlike actual mountains, Hunter Mountain is really just a prickly bald hill. Like a knee protruding up in a blanket. The winter colors are brown, grey and white. It's slopes are often icy, and never full of powder. In the summer it is a ridiculous emerald green. It is here that everyone knew my dad, where he collected trophies, and slow motion high-fived the lift attendants. This always embarrassed me. He would drive from the city in two and half hours on many dark Saturday mornings to be the first in line when the lifts opened. I can hear the sound of his car going over the gravel, quickly parking, the rustling of Goretex as he quickly dressed, rushing to get on the mountain before anyone else got there.
I remember feeling very small and invisible to him there. In the parking lot, I refused to get out of the car until the mountain was officially open. I didn’t want to stand and wait in the freezing dark morning. But he always made me. Once I remember him turning around to me as I got out of the car and saying, “You know, you are not a nice person. I love you, but I don’t like you. There’s a difference.” When I see pictures of myself from this age, around eight or nine, not smiling, I imagine the coldness I must have tried to wrap around my face to protect myself from him.
Hunter Island
What is the difference between the ocean in your mind, and the actual ocean? Is it size, is it being able to enter it? When I try to hold the ocean in my mind, I know that I am in it. When I am standing on a beach, there is an ache I feel for the idea of the ocean and the overwhelming disappointment of being in front of the thing itself. How come I feel farther from it when it is at my ankles?
It is this act of holding a place in your mind that creates the path to Hunter Island. It’s hard to imagine parts of the earth reaching so confidently towards the sky as temporary, maps as just drawings of the idea of permanence. Do you look at a mountain and see a future island? Do you know that in our lifetimes the lines around land and ocean will become flexible, even reversible? Mountains became islands, memories dragged underwater. Climate change as an act of sublimation. Our world liquified. New rules apply: Water begets water.
There are many ways to feel like drowning. One of them is to drown in your own thoughts. To be self-absorbed. Absorption of the entire ocean into my body, waterlogged and heavy with my own past. Did noone tell you that to be truly full of love you become heavy, unable to move? That to be self-absorbed means to have drenched my body in my soul. There is a medication I take that brings enough air and levity back into my limbs so that I can make a sandwich, live a normal looking life, go to Yoga. But I know that without that drain, I am trapped in the weight of my own depths.
I thought I knew what it looks like when the sea surges into our city, on the back of a full moon and a high tide. After Sandy and Irene, I began walking around the city with this intense urge to tie my memories to the places they occurred. To write them down, place them in buoys and tie them to places. So I did. Each of the places in this map, I went to and tied a buoy to it with one thousand feet of rope.
I made buoys for the Queensborough Bridge, Union Square. Buoys for Williamsburg and even Far Rockaway. At one thousand feet above the sea-level there would be a few buildings still peaking out of old New York. The Empire State Building, the Freedom Tower. I tie up to the one of the spires, it’s almost rusted away though. Still, the Empire State building is the best for this, because it was initially imagined as a dock for dirigibles. Imagine tying a dinghy to the same spire King Kong spun around, the same building that drew millions of eyes in over a hundred years of lightning storms.
I can already imagine Hunter as an island. My dad chopping some wood or building something, or looking at the docks, fixing a thing. He'd get the top ski lift to work again even though the lower engines would be badly damaged by salt water. Salt water is the ultimate destroyer he said. We’d use the ski lifts to carry supplies from the dock to the lodge at the summit where we’d live. Most of it is storage. With a stolen tugboat and maybe one of those enormous barges, we’d fill a bunch of shipping containers from Costco with canned food, clothing, almonds and anything else we could fit.
Rowing
I was sitting in the dinghy and mouthing these words to myself: The sun was setting behind him, lighting up his chestnut curls into a halo. The weathered blue of his shirt began to seep with darkness under his arms, at the center of his chest.
I was looking at him and trying to remember each part, fearing this would be the last time out together. Memory is broken, because what I would really like to remember the last time before I knew he was sick. But then I lived in a world where our outings were infinite, a time before the actual pressures of time pressed down onto moments, making each one very heavy and precious, each one a diamond.
As I watched him row, and to sweat, I saw the beginnings of weakness and shame blossom in his face. The sun was setting behind him, lighting up his chestnut curls into a halo. The weathered blue of his shirt began to seep with darkness under his arms, at the center of his chest. He wouldn’t look at me or speak. Instead he concentrated on his fake-task and muttered to himself about what a bunch of bullshit cancer was. “Fuck this shit” he whispered as he looked over his shoulder, pretending to need to know which way we were going.
He knows the path between the shore and his boat by heart. First the fishing boat, then the green boat, then the half dozen shiny white sail boats he liked to call the “plastic fantastics”. His boat, shines in the last gold light of the day. As we approach, he pauses before we climb up. “Isn’t she something Patka?” It is a mahogany forest, which has been polished and sanded and kissed by rains and snow and held together with caulk.
Dunes
The first time I saw the boat, I was seven years old. On that first trip when
we sat on the dunes overlooking the harbor, the wind whipping at the sweat on our foreheads from the climb. We were panting and laughing and gulping water and wind between breaths. It was our first time seeing each other since he “left” and our first sailing trip on his new boat.
Sitting there on the dunes it felt like something important was supposed to happen between us. Remorse and confusion bloomed in my chest. I was always trying to formulate the perfect line, to seem adult. When I looked up at him squinting at the horizon, I saw trails of water in a web from the creases of his eyes, streaking down to his neck. Sniffing and using the back of his hands to wipe his face he took turns, smiling, wincing, making o’s with his mouth. He seemed to be struggling to speak, and he never did. He just cried. And cried. After awhile I said “I understand” and put my hand on his forearm which was very warm. I felt the strong muscles stretch and tighten under his skin. He wrapped me in his arms,the sudden wetness of his face and armpits so close to me made me go stiff, and he muffled some polish words into the top of my head, which I think he was kissing. Before I could make sense of the limbs and affection and words, we were laughing and rolling down the dunes and back to his dinghy. Once we reached the shore I wanted to ask him, what just happened, what do you want to say to me? Why did you go? But he handed my wide eyes the life vest, and the oar and pointed to the dinghy and just said, “It’s time to go.”
Home
One day FBI agents came to the house asking about my dad. I opened the door and the two men were there in big jackets, looking into the house behind me. They asked me when I had last seen my dad, where my mom was. I lied and said I was home alone, even though she was in the garden. I wished I was lying when I told them that I didn’t know where he was. What had he done wrong? What had I done wrong?
I knew he was around, but I didn’t tell them. Once, he rollerbladed all the way from New York City to my house. I wasn’t home, so he just came in for a glass of water and then took the train back into the city. I had missed him.
Planting Fields Arboretum
I was confused by the ritual of coming here. We would all dress up in and my mom would put colorful painful clips in my hair. Even my dad would brush his unruly hair, wear a denim shirt and a nice belt and brown leather shoes. We would come to this place and walk around and pose for pictures as if we were very happy. I loved the feeling of holding his hand and seeing other little girls and glowering at them. Look, I have a daddy too and here we are in our little paradise. We are going to climb under these bushes and he is going to chase me up this big tree. Even though my mom is mad that I tore my stockings he would let me explore the greenhouse rooms which are closed when nobody's looking.
There is a small pink house here that we have a picture in front of. I thought it was our special place, but each time I saw a picture of him here with a new girlfriend my heart broke a bit more. Why did he bring them here? I realized that Planting Fields was not really our place, that he was not really ever mine and that I had to share with him so, so many women. I was always hoping to find a place that would just be for us. The one I found was in the silences between our conversations, where we both timidly tried to think of what to say, of how to love each other and how to spend time together.
When I first saw impressionist paintings landscapes like Monet and Van Gogh I was sure the paintings were of Planting Fields. I couldn’t imagine that there was more than one place that beautiful in the world. It was with some disappointment that I realized, our paradise was really not so unique at all. There were rose gardens and little pink houses everywhere, and families posing in front of them, smiling.
What does the ocean do to parks? It must destroy them so quickly, trees and bushes that go from being landscaped to flooded. Can I imagine these great lawns full of sand? Can I see seaweed and barnacles in these trees?
Westbury
The winding brick path with the Japanese maple surrounded by a ring of rhododendron, I knew how to crawl through the web of branches to get to the center in a few lunges.
The den held couch forts, and my grandpa getting electrocuted, and being pulled into parties where all I could see were the dancing knees of my parents and their friends. Tulle, pantyhose, sweat, glass, diamonds, polkadots. The complete set of Rod Stewart C.D.’s , Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, Madonna.
In the kitchen Babcia fed me calf brains, my mom put a glass bowl full of hot shrimp on the marble counter and it exploded. Glass and shrimp flying everywhere.
Babcia’s room was next to mine, and my grandpa was downstairs near the den. They worked at a candy factory in Hicksville. They stood long hours and brought back chocolate and oreo covered pretzels for me. I remember the sound of the wrappers crinkling and the taste. Dziadek would tickle me so hard he left bruises and I loved it. My grandma left the nursing job she had held for over thirty years, while my grandpa finally left the darkroom where he had quietlyworked for just as long. My mom was being trained to move up from her secretary job to a gem buying job at the jewelry company where she worked. My dad was expanding his marble and granite business to a new warehouse in Greenpoint. I remember approaching him with fear, as he sat by the counter, tensing up as I touched him.
Their bedroom both beckoned to me and terrified me. The warmth of my mother and the cold of my father. Once, I found a little bag of white powder on their dresser and thought it was fairy dust. I tasted some on my fingertips and I didn’t like that it made my tongue numb. Another time, I walked into their bedroo and saw my dad in strange position over my mom like he was trying to run in place, or make a snow angel, or jump off a cliff into her. Her legs were up and they were both making sounds like laughing but with more silence in between the laughs. I closed the door confused, and tried to work out my nightmares without their help.
One time in that big gray bedroom he threw a chair at us, barely missing me and my mom. He was seething. He was like a wolf. We tried to hide. I found a corner behind the shiny dresser. Tried to pull myself under my moms sweatshirt.
He was the middle child; mischievous, adorable. When he was seven he spent a year in the hospital with heart problem. The doctors told him he would never be able to run again. They told him he wouldn't be able to be athletic or play sports. I think about this when I think about my dad at age fifty running the marathon on NYC. I think about him winning downhill ski competition, breaking 100 miles per hour on skis or walking a 5k when he was sick he could barely get out bed. His heart almost gave out when he was a kid. Because it didn’t - I am here and I exist. Because he made it, because he fought against his heart and with it. But now here I am and here he is and his heart has just stopped and after 58 years the red engine is full of saltwater and sinking and his lungs are full of blood and he will never laugh again.
I’m happy that parking lot is underwater now. It still exists in some way though, even underwater, and that bothers be. It would be easier if a place could truly disappear. But drowning is not the same as being gone.
Mandarinka on Bank St
Four months after he died I was invited to a storytelling salon with a friend who knew I wasn’t getting out much.
We arrive on the front steps, waiting to be let in, the snow is crunchy under our feet, it was that cold. The snow on the ground that night was from Winter Storm Janus. Janus was his name. I learned on the steps that the topic was “Lost at Sea” and I knew I would have to at least start to try to tie Greenpoint, the snow, the water, myself together.
Inside, the host passes me a bowl of clementines. “Take one if you want to tell a story, we’ll pick at random”. But how did she know clementines were my dad's favorite fruit? “Ok, but it’s going to be really sad and un-rehearsed…Just sayin….” I write the number 7 on a clementine and return it to the bowl.
Of course my number 7 clementine was held up in the candlelit living room by the nice- lady host. My story was not going to be about an awkward surfing accident or a funny thing that happened once, sorry previous storytellers.
(Thank god I wore a poncho I got in Mexico that night. It gave me some much needed witchy gravitas for this type of thing.) I began… “The spirit moved me to tell this story tonight because I have been lost at sea for quite some time. Tonight I will tell you why…” FIfty people listened in closely to my Greenpoint story and became part of it.
Elmhurst
Driving through this part of Queens, all you see are awnings. A sea of people from every part of the world with their own awnings to match. Koreans, Indians, Poles, Russians, Vietnamese, Pakistani, Salvadoran awnings that were purple yellow red and black, that were dusty old, new and big, tattered and faded. Somewhere in the awnings was a small building we would press a button and go to the top floor and see a dentist. Edyta. Smiles and touches, words for my father, words for my mother.
I didn’t know when the Ambulance brought him to the Mount Sinia Elmhurst emergency room that it would be one month before they closed it down to rebuild it into a state of an art one. On Google Streetview I frantically clicked around for the concrete wall I leaned against as I realized he would never leave this building alive, before the awnings and the cars swallowed me up again. I threw up the sushi I had eaten across the street on my shoes on that sidewalk, and now I can’t even find that sushi restaurant.
Sailing School
I learned to sail as I learned to speak Polish. No books, no classes. Like grammar, I don’t fully understand how everything works. I do know there is a small green tag at the center of each the sail and that if it is flapping and pointing down I need to tighten it, if it is flapping up I need to loosen the winch. I know if it is flailing around wildly that we probably need to change direction to find the wind. I know I need my dad’s help to figure that part out. My dad translates the sea for me. He looks at the water and tells me the tide and the direction of the wind and the current. I just squint into the blues, and smell the air. The language of the ocean speaks to us differently.
Learning on the boat was further complicated by sound. Sailing is deceptively loud. There are the lapping waves on each side, the wind whistling against every surface in front of you, the roar of the motor behind you, the seagulls above, and somewhere in the distance the hum of other boats, the twang of the radio. There’s the surprising way your own ear becomes a conch shell and air whistles within the valleys of your own head, hair suddenly an instrument for muffling air. Between the edges of this cacophony, the Polish words my dad was yelling at me tried to slide through, but somewhere between coming out of my dad’s mouth and reaching my own brain, became lost in the thirty feet of boat between us. Sometimes floating up in the air and getting swept away before they reached me, or blocked by a turning sail, or flock of gulls.
In this situation I can’t let go of the steer to hear what he is saying, and I also can’t guess. He can’t let go of the rope to come tell me, and so we are stuck yelling at each other, sounds flying everywhere and meaning going all over the place but not where it is supposed to and the boat is going the wrong the direction, and is about to get stuck in a sand bar. But before we get to that, let’s examine this chaotic moment. It is as futile as when I was yelling Polish sounds at children back in Queens. Here we are, suspended in the wind, trying to understand each other, my desperation growing against his anger, the screams rising and falling. Are we playing a game? Is this what it is always like between fathers and daughters?
Meaning was also lost when he was sitting right next to me, the sounds could get jumbled from across the boat width-wise too. Even when we were sitting close enough that I could reach forward and touch his knee, I would misunderstand a directive and turn the boat right instead of left. I would hear him say he wants a beer when he meant a banana. He would tell me to stop but I would speed up. “Just remember” he said “ you can always just let go of the sails and let everything go. All you have to do is stop holding the wind, and the boat will stop.” Just stop holding the wind, Patki.
Gold
My dad is driving and I am in the passenger seat. It is eight in the morning, I am almost sixteen years old and we are going to sail his huge wooden boat into the East River to watch the fireworks. The radio is not on but the engine is roaring. The air pours in through the many cracks of the canvas convertible top, the loose flaps slapping against the hot highway air. We pull into the marina and park in the usual spot near the trash can. The moment he turns off the ignition a sudden silence and stillness enters the car. The sweat sits, waits for a breeze.
Then his order, “Let’s go, Patulki”
He takes a few final chugs of the Lemon-Lime gatorade now warm from being crammed in between our seats. He exhales loudly, sticking out his tongue. Lion’s Breath my yoga teachers called it.
“My poison!” he jokes, hissing like a villain.
He brushes his golden-brown curly hair out of his eyes with this fingertips, as if he has long fake nails on, looking in the mirror and cocking his head a few inches to the left and a few inches to the right while pursing his lips. He knows I’m watching him so he pouts and gives himself a teasing air kiss. Cooing, he imitates a drag queen.
“C’mon!” He insists, now impatient as he slaps my thigh “MOVE”.
I’m dreading all the carrying we are about to do. All the yelling that’s about to happen. He is already shaking his head as he rubs the grime off his sunglasses, takes a deep heaving sigh, puts them on again and rolls out of the car all in one sweeping lunging movement. He slaps the the top of the car
“Faster, faster Patki, we are missing all the good wind and tide. Half the day is over already!”.
I know he is joking because the sun is not even up yet, but also not joking because the day is over for the men coming from the crab traps.
In his left hand is a car battery and dangling from his wrist is a red plastic container full of gasoline. It makes splashing sounds as it jostles and bumps onto the top of the battery and against his side. His right arm clutches the ledge of the small engine and jutting up alongside him is the spiral rotor. It nearly scrapes his cheek as it wavers in the air to the right. He watches it with corner of his eye and stiffens his neck to avoid it, as if keeping an eye on a cobra. He looks back at me with wide eyes and lips together in a silent whistle, “Close call” he whispers. His knees bent, he propels himself forward with small fast steps, as if trying to run very quietly across a balance beam.
As he always said about the hard things in life; the faster you do it, the quicker it ends. But I'm still just standing next to the car, with my small pile of things to carry sitting at my feet.
At the boat ramp, under his shirt the muscles pulling his shoulder blades together as he balances the bulky weight on both sides. He bends over the way they always tell you to, releasing the weight like a dancer, or maybe like a man who has spent a lifetime carrying heavy things and putting them down. He lets out a deep breathe that I can see all the way from the car as everything rolls off his fingers and onto the ground, his shoulder blades unfurling gently allowing his arms to release and roll forward, like a swan settling its wings. By now his sunglasses have slid down his nose and onto his chin, so as he rises up he pushes them all the way back like a headband. The hair that he himself describes as colored simply “Gold” starts to deepen to a chestnut brown at the roots where the sweat begins to creep.
He turns around quickly, shaking his hair out like a flustered starlet and shoots me a look of great disappointment. He immediately changes direction and disappears behind racks of dinghies, his shaking head appearing between the bellies of the boats, that facetious “tsssssss” he’s making only getting louder. His eyebrows raised high and his eyes are wide as he delivers the look. This is the look he employs when my laziness annoys him. Meanwhile, like magic, he flips the dinghy onto his back and loops the oars in the bend of his arms. Grimacing, he shouts back at me over his shoulder
“Just at least grab the seat, princess”.
Instead, I fumble with my one tote. In it are a magazine, cell phone, sunblock, notebooks, pens, paint, lip-gloss, a camera, a bag of crystals, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a clementine and a tampon.
In my other hand I also have a small bottle of orange juice, a large Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee (no milk, but very sweet) and a half eaten french cruller. I squeeze the three together awkwardly in a weird claw shape with my hand. There is a cooler slung across my shoulder with neatly chopped melons from my mom and ham sandwiches wrapped perfectly in aluminum with purple napkins neatly folded inside. I can’t quite wrap my fingers around all of the things and struggle with my floppy straw hat, which has fallen too low on my brow and blocked my view. I settle on scooping it all up in my arms and with the coffee dripping out the straw, I hobble over to the ramp. In the corner of my view between the mesh of the straw, I see two fisherman pretending not to laugh at me as they unload their clam cages and I scramble by with my chin jutting out and legs akimbo.
What they don’t know, is that this week I started a new antidepressant which specialized in making my brain numb and my eyes droop. Slightly better though than the last one which made me breathe too fast and seemed to erase all the sexual angst hormones that define being a teenager.
“Jesus Christ. We’ll never get out of here if you move like that Patki” my dad pleaded. I rolled my eyes “Whatever Dad it’s like a miracle I’m even freakin’ here…” But Fourth of July was always our holiday.
By this time he has already loaded the dinghy on the ramp and put everything inside it. He takes all my bags and throws them in and then points his gaze in the direction of the car.
“The seat. Please.”
Already tired, I shuffle over and grab the old piece of wood that was “the seat” and drag it back to him.
The year is 2001.
Secrets
My hands felt tingly and the beige shag carpet had become a cloud. My hair felt like an underwater mermaids and laughter filled my body, like bubbles of joy blowing up my throat. I closed my eyes and spun around and around. A child on a merry go round. My friends were trying to get me to stand. I felt their hands but couldn’t put my weight against them, I could only smile and laugh. I felt so heavy on the outside and so light on the inside. This feeling is home, I thought. I felt a light in my chest.
It was the first time in my life I blacked out. The next thing I remember I was in the shower, the lime green tiles spinning around me, my hands slipping down the walls as I tried to stand.
I didn’t wake up again until they took me to the hospital. There, with my arms tied to the metal sides of the bed, the nurse asked me if I had calmed down yet. My stomach had been pumped she told me I had punching everyone that came near me. My mom, whispering to the ceiling of the hospital room “ God, what did I do deserve this. Why are you punishing me Patunia? Why are you doing this to me?”.
I hadn’t seen my dad in months, so when he came in I tried to sit up but couldn’t. He just smiled at me, started laughing.
“It’s not fucking funny.This is your fault.” My mom said, before leaving the room.
My dad leaned in and I closed my eyes, thinking he was going to hit me. When I opened them he was already moving back towards the door. He had pinned a blinking Bacardi pin to my hospital gown. “Congratulations” he said with a thin smile, patting me on the head. “You’ve made your family very proud today”
Huntington
The counselor was well meaning. She was trying to help me structure the curiosity I had about my dad into something real. She was trying to help me understand why I used drugs the way I did, and decided I needed to work things out with him in order to move forward. She suggested I write down all the questions I had for him, all the things I wanted to know. The police, his mother, Poland, the tattoo on his hand, the time we were on the dunes, what he was afraid of. At fifteen my handwriting was bubbly, I still used hearts to dot my I’s. I wrote the questions in color coded pens. Red for urgent, purple for fun, green for family, blue for the many questions which felt too hard to ask. When he pulled up in front of the house, I could hear his engine making the predictable u-turn outside. Not suspecting the piece of paper in my hand, he suggests we get ice cream. Awkwardly, trying to act more grown up than I felt, I asked him if we can talk. He turned off the car and looks ahead blankly, disappointed. “Talk.”
I started to unfold the paper, feeling sick, mumbling…
“Oh cholera...Did your mom put you up to this?“ his neck straining as he looked at me.
“No…”My voice faltered “I have some questions for you. Like...Why did you leave us?...”
“Patka, that’s not how this works. You don’t just write a list and start asking. I don’t know you. You don’t know me. And there are some things you are not supposed to know. Would you like it if I showed up with a list at your house? Asking you about your boyfriends or girlfriends? Get out. And mind your own business.”
He takes the sheet from me, crumples it. He starts the car. I open the door, get out and close it but it hits the seat belt buckle. He glares at me and then lunges over to my side of the car and slams the door. It’s a red Volkswagen cabriolet convertible and I can hear his engine fade down the street behind me as I walk down to the creek. Defeated I am left with only one question. What is wrong with me?
Apartment 701
I did not think that it would be like a line in the sand: my past life with him falls here and the rest is after, but that’s exactly how it was. I had tried to imagine the day many times before, but as it was happening, as that line was being drawn, I realized that the line was inside me and the sand was actually cement and the date was being carved into this sidewalk of my brain that would never be clear and calm again. October first two thousand and thirteen, like waves on concrete, it all rushes back, and when it does it roars.
When I got there that day, he was already gone. He wasn't responding to my questions. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. He looked like someone trying to find his keys in a rush, but without moving their body at all.
When I spoke to him the night before, we were talking logistics, but kept going off track. His belabored breathe in the phone, shuffling sounds
“ I’m drowning in these goddamn papers Patki, I… I don’t know when and where. It’s October 1st? OK –– here’s one ...no no this is for October 4th. “ He was confused.
“It’s Ok Tata, I’ll figure it out, I’ll come get you tomorrow and we’ll get there when we get there.” He kept going back to the great weather.
“The sun was beautiful, but these damn hiccups won’t pass. We went to the beach and really it’s a shame to come back. “Yeah did you see the photos I sent? I was on the beach too! It was so beautiful, great sailing weather…”
Now all I can see is the plastic green bowl full of orange bile. How he hissed as he raised his eyes, groaned as he looked away. I watched him float out the window, joining the laughter of children and clouds shifting in the autumn sky. If souls are real this is when his left. When the paramedics came I started to slip away too. The empty eyes of the African masks followed me out of the apartment, and behind me the draft shook the plants as they waved goodbye to us, together there one last time.
The Red Engine
I understood what he didn’t want me to see when the Doctor said the words “His lungs are filling with fluid, he’s drowning.”
With that I felt the water take my legs from underneath me, rushing in to take all of New York City. It took all the rest of his birthdays, his curly golden hair which never turned grey, my forehead before it had these creases.
His heart, once so weak he almost died as a child. His heart, like the red engine of his boat, stopped after 58 years. The water surged in full of ice and oil except it was not ice and oil it was blood. The doctors said to me “his lungs are filling with blood. He will drown in it. We need to intubate but need your permission. Can we intubate?”
For a moment my mind leaves the emergency room. I am standing over the red engine with him. It’s a scene that has played out dozens of times before. It got sea water in it and some oil spilled and it needs to be cleaned out. Hand me a bucket, hurry. Szipko, szipko Hurry, hurry.
"Miss, we need to intubate him now. We have to stabilize him. He is drowning in the fluid. "
The engine is sputtering spouting. It is taking in salt water, there is nothing worse for an engine than salt water. There is nothing worse for lungs than a liter of blood.
He didn’t want his. He didn’t want the machines. I try to protest, but there are 10 maybe 12 people around him now. There is a blue curtain but it is not drawn. I am standing next to them and holding up something that is taking his pulse. It keeps falling off his chest. The numbers are all blinking and the monitors are all buzzing and there is a little heart icon in the bottom left corner of one screen it is green and black and it is blinking. This is not how you fix an engine, there has to be a bucket and a rope somewhere. There has to be something we can do.
Roosevelt Island
A small island in between two larger islands, he walked and slept with the tides here. I see him leaning against the lamp posts, pointing out the direction of the currents, throwing rocks at pigeons. I see myself in my twenties, trying to be a good sport as he taught me about running, cycling, cross country skiing, sailing. We built a friendship out of a broken family on this island, and I feel it when the cherry trees bloom and when the fog moves from one side of the island to the other.
Take the tram, where you soar in between towers and peer into the glass gray dining lives of the wealthy. See their children’s faces press against the windows looking out at us as we float through their dinner.
All the trains leading into and out of Roosevelt island are heavy with shadows of our commutes together. The city has stored in its sparkly sidewalks and reflective store windows the history of our passage. The trains hold him still. They held me when I fell apart each time I left his house as he got sicker and sicker. The time he asked me for a ride to the bodega to pick up a six pack of coronas after a four hour pot run to Ridgewood. He was unable to stay awake or keep himself from throwing up. The hiccups had begun. I take the elevator down to the platform and as I move down deeper into the earth I scream. I wait for the train sobbing like a wounded animal, gulping in air, looking at the city lights but seeing nothing.
Another time the train holds me. There is a long escalator on the island that takes you deep enough to go under the east river. I start to collapse and the tears came before I could I reach the bottom. I wish I had taken the elevator. This time he had asked me to come over because he was afraid he was going to die. He was afraid of being alone. He burped and was sweating and smelled terrible. I tried to give him food but he couldn't eat. Nothing sweet, nothing hard, nothing salty. The bread hurt his mouth so I tore off the crust for him. He fell asleep and I tried to work. Waking up, he was curled up in a small sweaty ball on the couch shivering. “Come here Patulka” he asked.
“I'm right here tatusiu.” I said, not looking up from my laptop.
“Come here, let me hold you.” he asked meekly.
“No, it's ok tatusiu. I'm working.”
I still didn’t look up at him, but I could hear him a bit surprised
“Hmmm ok” and he crossed his arms around himself and shivered and went back to sleep.
Missing
When I left New York before he got sick he cried as he hugged me goodbye, leaving a moist spot on my shoulder and awkwardly clutching my hair. I felt like the lanky Kid back on the dunes, wanting to tell him I understood, even though I really didn’t. Three years later, he picked me up from the same terminal, helped me carry the same bags back to the same car. “Funny how I don’t miss you at all when you are right here in the city, but when you are far away I want to talk to you and see you everyday” he mused, carving through the curves of the parkways back to his place.
I became acquainted with the 16th floor of Bellevue well, the in-patient oncology floor. These were people teetering on the edge of “the end” and “just a bump in the road”. The Cameroonian nurse on the 12th floor ICU, who let me touch the chemo drug and feel how it burned. “Now we are going to pump that inside him for 48 hours.” he said, cracking a smile and shaking his head . We laughed at the ridiculous prospect of giving a very sick man more poison. Both of our fingers burned, and I rubbed them together until the heat subsided. I helped him attach the bags to the IV stand and held my dad’s limp hand as the infusion began. Would his blood burn?He hissed as the liquid entered his veins. He hissed, pressed the morphine button, and went back to sleep. I stayed up late watching the clear liquid flow into his arms while the Cameroonian nurse slept. The nurse had a new baby at home and his wife never gave him a break. He had a hour and half home commute from Ozone Park and had not taken a day off all year. My fingers still burned, and when my dad hissed, I pressed the button for him.
Bellevue
I was frustrated to see him so uninterested in his own life. He had passed his life expectancy date, again. He cut the doctor off to ask for pain medications. For his nerve damaged feet, for his stomach twisted from constant wretching, and for the new terrible hiccups that have kept him up all week. “That’s palliative care honey, we don’t deal with that in oncology... We’ll set you up for an appointment when you are here next week”.
At the point, he kept low expectations of what the hospital could do for him so he was not upset by this. He just nodded in agreement. But I still wanted to help, or to feel helpful. I pushed the Doctor to explain the worst case scenario- “So, I mean I hate to ask but, like, how exactly should we expect him to die? Like, what does the ruptured spleen situation look like exactly? What will it be like for him?” The pleading eyes of my father and the Doctor to stop pushing blinked back at me.
On their way out of the office, Tata leaned hard over the receptionist's counter, playfully peeking into a purse left on the counter as the unsuspecting woman spoke to a patient on the phone. Smiling, but annoyed, she slapped his hand away.
“OOOH la laaaaaa what have we found heeere, are you smoking again my dear Alejandra? Very very disappointed in you… don’t end up on this side of the counter.” waving his hands theatrically towards the audience, until one by one the bald heads looked back down. She laughed and asked the person she was speaking on the phone to hold. “Are you coming back to us soon Tadeusz?” she asked, with perfect pronunciation of his name. He lost his playful face and with a serious tone, narrowed his eyes and lowered his voice “Yup, next week. My wonderful daughter will be here to help me so I won’t be able to bother you as much.” He grabbed my neck and jerked me around playfully.
“This is Patricia, she is an artiste.”
Hope
The hallways at the fancy cancer hospital were quiet and clean. The infusion room was small and had a box of tissues with flowers on it. There was a tray with small cups of grape juice. “This is like Club Med compared with Bellevue.” My dad joked in the waiting room.
The doctor looked through my dad's file shaking his head. How many rounds of chemo? How many years? He folded his hands and explained to us that this treatment would only give two or so more years of life, but that it’s worked 100% of the time. I ask him to repeat that. He turns around in his swivel chair and shows us the pill - it looks like one of those vitamin caplets with the gold liquid in it. He even let me hold the medicine in my hand, and as I held he told my dad, “ This will make you feel better in about two weeks.” Looking at the gold pill none of us can resist a smile. The wind batters the blinds against the window and my dad walks to them and opens them. “I wish I met you sooner Doctor, I live just across the river.”
We look at the apartment building on Roosevelt Island where he has been suffering, vomiting, not sleeping for years. Life experience had seasoned my dad, and he told me if it’s too good to be true it probably is.
The doctor handed us off to an intern, who handed my dad a large stack of papers on a clipboard, and his hand fell close the ground from the weight of them. The intern looked at him and then me, and my dad passed the clipboard to me.
“I can’t today Patka, can you do this for me?”.
I take a pen and open the book. He is coughing and starting to doze off.
“What is this?” I ask the intern.
“The Questions. For the study. Quality of Life stuff.”
My dad opens his eyes and winks at me, then closes them again when the Intern turns to look at him.
I read the first question out loud:
“On a level of 1 to 10, 1 being no pain and 10 being excruciating, how much pain are you in at this moment?”
I look at him for help but he is already asleep, his head nodding down.
There are some things you don’t need to know, I hear in my head. Mind your own business. I already know the answers. I know he has contemplated suicide, that the morphine doesn’t work. Neither does the weed. He’s been eating dozens of apricot seeds for the cyanide. “It’s nature’s chemo!” he joked.
I understand now what he wanted to spare me. After holding his hand during a spinal bone marrow biopsy. After hearing what it’s like for heavily infected lungs to try to flap air through them for days, after watching his lymph nodes swell to the point of suffocation, after seeing him vomit blood and fall asleep in all our favorite places from Astor Place to the Angelica. I have watched him faint and fall on the street and seen his head get stitched up and watch is face burn up in purple patches from the shingles. Mind your business Patti, but here I was at the hospital which was supposed to save his life, minding his business. I didn’t want to know that he had was in excruciating pain, that he couldn’t have sex, that he couldn’t go to the bathroom right, sleep right, that he couldn’t think or work. That he couldn’t do things he enjoyed. That life had lost his meaning. I didn’t want to know that he wanted to die. I wanted to see him as the fighter, the guy who never gave up. We sat together and I asked him one extremely personal and intimate question after another about erections, stool, urine, and things that a daughter never wants to ask her father. But these were the questions I had. They were not the questions I wanted.
Two weeks later, I was driving up the FDR on the strip that flies you out over the river before getting on the Major Deegan in the Bronx when I got the call. I could still see Roosevelt Island in the rear view mirror behind me. His voice cracked when he said the clinical trial was canceled. In looking through his bloodwork they found he had Hepatitis C and now didn’t qualify. There is a way that the bricks in New York can look so orange and vulgar against the blue sky, the granite water. The horizons of the city closed in on me as I drove north. There was no escaping this, but I kept driving, wiping tears into the cold horizon.
Memorial
I memorized the poem on a blue summer day. I was sailing across the Long Island Sound, following directions to not hit Connecticut or Long Island. We passed the dunes we sat on decades before on our right, to our left, Manhattan sat in a blue haze. I was no stranger to long silent trips with him. But this time, he was asleep for the entire eight hours of journey. As the day dragged on the poem was the only thing to keep me occupied. It was Father’s Day and it was my present to him, getting his newly restored boat from Port Jefferson to Oyster Bay. We never did gifts or restaurants. Instead, it was understood we would just give each other time. A bike ride around Williamsburg on my twenty second birthday. A drive through the small towns of southern Vermont on his fiftieth. The weeks leading up to this day we had spent hours sanding, varnishing, whittling and painting the boat. Layers removed, layers added back. Me with my respirators, gloves and goggles. Him ripping the dried resin off his arm with his hair still attached to it, showing off how invincible he was to the toxicity.
“Co patka? Am I going to get more cancer than I already have?”
Today, I was sailing him home in silence, with a poem in my mind and the sun in my eyes. By late afternoon that sun became unbearable. I made a tent on my head with a straw hat and some of his old t-shirts. I could still feel my eyes burning through the paint splattered sunglasses he had tossed me that morning, the searing white sparkles bouncing across the water conspiring with the drill of the engine to make the most unbearable migraine. I would close my eyes or look away for a few minutes at a time, making landmarks out of buoys and buildings to my right and left in order to stay on track. To call it sailing is an overstatement. I was driving this huge wood mass over the water, it’s peeling red diesel engine roared and clicked, the sails rolled up and sitting silent and dark in their canvas sleeves. I was on a tractor cutting down distance ahead of me. The entire journey I only needed to move the steer a few inches to the left and right.
So I held that poem in my mind, rolling the words out of my mouth quietly enough so he wouldn’t wake up.
‘Something there is more immortal even than the stars,” Whitman tells me. I repeat it, hoping that the words will act like a magic spell when they fall on the glittery water, the truth behind the lines revealing itself to me. Instead, my dad startles at the sound of my voice.
“ TSO?” He barks, without sitting up.
“Nic” I respond apologetically.
He glares at me and rolls over muttering angrily, falling back asleep. The morphine makes him lethargic. The steroids make him angry. I have learned to be an endless amount of patient with him as he lulls between various states of consciousness and disorientation.
I try whispering this time, trying to remember, to understand.
“Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter”
I’m whispering it into the very same waves and the same shores that Whitman lived on over a hundred years earlier. I imagine our boat, traversing the view of the daughter and father in the poem, time flattening, our destinies tied.
“Watching the east, the autumn sky”
I knew that I couldn’t tell him that when we got to marina, that it would be the last time. That the poem I was memorizing was to read at his memorial. That even though his flesh was still with me, I was already treating him as gone.
JFK
I am walking through airport security on eggshells. I am held together by wet duck tape. I have in my bag my dad’s ashes and earlier this morning I discovered that when I rattle the small urn against my ear there is something hard in there. A tooth? A chipped knee? I am trying to prepare something to say when the TSA agent asks me to open my bag, to show him the metal cannister, to tell him what is inside, to explain them that they cannot open it but I swear it’s not a bomb, please believe me. Will they put a wand inside the ash? Will they pull me out of line? I am muttering possible answers to theoretical questions when I am being scanned head to toe, being asked to step aside, and then I am walking away.
I am sitting at take off and I am shaking. I am leaving New York City for the last time and I know I will never call this place home again. As the plane also begins to shake and move from ground to sky, I look out the window. I see the roundabout at Jones Beach in the distance, I see Gateway Marina just below us as we turn. Of course. Of course we turn north, up to the north shore. We turn again just above the marina, I can see the spot where the boat was supposed to be. I can see the sailboats on the water. A stream of tears is making it’s way down my forearm, my forehead pressing against the cold window, fogging my view of the bay as it turns away from me.
I am remembering my dad picking me up from the airport, and musing about why he missed me so much when I was far away. The difference between loving someone who is still somewhere and loving someone who is gone is like pouring water into a bucket and pouring water into the ocean.
Birthday
I’m sitting on the toilet, with my laptop balanced on my knees. Tonight was my night off from my son so I went to a poetry reading. My heart is so full from watching other people say words they wrote. Sometimes you drown in yourself and sometimes in others and their beauty. I mumbled and bubbled over with the words I’d heard the whole way home. Unfortunately my boobs didn’t have a night off, and they started leaking back on the BART platform at 16th and Mission. I felt the cold breeze press into the wet spots on my sweatshirt as I power-walked home, and crossed my arms, ashamed, each time I passed someone on the street.
So here, I am on the toilet, my arms laced between the tubing of the breast pump, typing. Heart full and breasts full and I’m bottling that overflow for food, for art. My husband and dog are asleep in the bedroom. My son is in his crib in the living room.
Around my chest is a white elastic band with two holes cut in it for the nipples. The nurse made this for me when my son was born, telling me not to waste my money on a pumping bra. Before the bands held monitors to my stomach when I was still in labor. The pump flanges go into the holes and suck my nipples in and out. In and out. Freeing my hands to pump words in and out. In the time since I started writing the left boob has produced three ounces and the right boob has produced two.
In between the bottles, which are warm from the milk and resting on my thighs, is the still pink bump of my c-section scar peeking out from the top of my pubic hair. The linea negra that once ran from my solar plexus down to my mons pubis is nearly gone. When I suck in and look down at the little ponch under my belly button I can still see a light tan streak. It’s almost been a year and here I am with a body completely not my own.
I take in my thighs, my breasts, the folds of my gut scrunched in between them, framed by my hair, by tubes, my metal and plastic. I try not to make the association, but it’s too late. I think of my dad. I think back to the tubes that tried and failed to keep him alive, think back to his engine compartment flooding, to him drowning in himself. I see the folds of his flesh again, the flash of his eyes darting from person to person around him. That moment they landed on mine as they leaned him back to intubate him. The curtain should have drawn but it wasn’t. The area around his hospital bed became a dinghy taking on water. I want to yell at everyone get out. They were too heavy, making him sink. The doctors and nurses and me were getting tangled in the many tubes and pumps. The one pumping his stomach first was yellow, then green and then red. “That is not good” I heard someone say.
Today would have been his birthday. I am looking at the pink strip where my son came into the world, and wonder about my dad’s mom. Was it a long labor? Was she surprised by him in some way? He was her second son, born when she was twenty-one years old, exactly ten years younger than me now. Did she marvel at the color of his hair? Did warm tears slide down the sides of her face as he slept naked and new on her chest, blinking and breathing in the world for the first time? What nicknames did she give him as he grew and gurgled and grabbed her nose?
The day her second son died she had already been gone for twenty-one years. A lifetime. Both of them died just before reaching sixty years old. An ocean between them. And yet, connected. She held the memories of the first date that would be etched into his headstone, the one he would share with her in Poland. I would hold the memories of the last day of his life. He wouldn’t remember either the first or the last day of his life, and yet these dates are how our lives are defined. A line, the size of a typed character. Same at both sides. A beginning, a middle and an end.
The line on the heart monitor was flat. For years, the beeping of an open car door would bring me back to that machine with the line on it, to the beeping it made when the line was going flat. An insistent alarm, a machine crying.
I had two machines like this next to me the day my son was born. One for him, one for me. Something was wrong when the medical student doing the ultrasound asked me when I had last felt the baby move. She pushed the wand across my slippery stretched stomach, brow furrowed.“That is not good” The attending Doctor glared at her and moved her aside, taking the wand. Suddenly more bodies pressed against me, one person became six. My husband faded behind them. Then there was the beeping. I felt a sinking and a storm enter the hospital bed around me. I felt the dinghy, that I was rowing with each breath.
The Doctor looked at the screen behind my head, squinting and then smiled. “He’s breach.” she said. “He’s ok, there is his heart.” turning the monitor towards me and pointing to the flashing light. The line lit up with up with his life. “Today is going to be his birthday. Actually right now is going to be his birthday. We need to do a cesarean right away.
Life comes and goes in rooms like this a thousand times a day.
Lithographs
Oil and water do not mix, but when they do they make lithographs. The liquid ink spreads across a plate everywhere the oil isn’t, the ink soaks into paper. The print is a byproduct of elements which do not mix.
Turn blood into wine. Just drink enough, fast enough, get your blood alcohol level high enough. Does that count? The doctors are asking me if I had ever been hospitalized before. I thought about myself at age twelve with alcohol poisoning and the blinking bacardi pin appears again on my hospital gown as I look down at it but I know that it not what they mean.
Bleeding
When the therapist asks me about my father, I look down. I am spinning the strings that are coming out of the hole in my jeans between my fingers, then I am rubbing the bare skin at my knee. When I look up again, the man in his suit is suspended and distorted by a wall of tears. To blink them away is to make them fall onto my jeans.
As I start to speak, my eyes fill up and empty out several times. The man sighs a few times, pauses to write things down. Stops and sets down the legal pad. “That’s a lot to go through” he says at some point. And then just “wow”. The mucus is building behind my nose and my brow, the familiar cry headache is in it’s early stages. I continue.
I take him down the familiar path of explaining the “work” I did with my first counselor, the one from the Banana Splits program in first grade where I got to cry about how I missed by dad, and with the other kids from divorced parents, learned how it for sure wasn’t my fault. I learned how you can think a thing but still not know it to be true.
I explain the work I did with the counselors at rebab, who explained that using drugs and alcohol was just a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. I guess I did think it was my fault somehow despite early interventions, and I had to bring him in and tell him that I hated him in order to fix my drug problem. Yes I know, I was very young, I tell the therapist, just fourteen, yes I first started drinking as a very young child, and yes I’ve been clean ever since. And yes, that actually worked and the counselors were right.
I describe the friendship that formed after that, when as a recovering teenager my dad quit drinking too. Once I didn’t really need a dad anymore he showed up and became one just as I was going off to college.
And then we had a few good years before he got sick, and that’s why I’m back, looking for help again, because I began picking at my skin so hard it bled and people had to tap me on the shoulder on the train to tell me that a trail of blood was dripping down my shin, or elbow, or neck.
I needed to wade through another gate of tears to understand why I hated myself again even though it’s not my fault he is dying and I have to learn again that thinking something and knowing it to be true are not the same thing. Now doing the work is like swimming around in a circle.
It’s not my fault, he loves you, let go, move on, it’s not my fault. Would you like a tissue? I’m so sorry, that’s all the time we have for today.
Here and There
I see two frames at once. I am never in just one place at once. I am swimming laps in the pool in a California and also in my mind around his boat on a summer evening fifteen years ago. I am closing my eyes against the sun in the sierras, with tahoe unfolding before me. I am also closing my eyes and turning my face to the sun with his arm around me in the catskills as a twelve year old girl. I am my own haunted house, and the walls won’t stop talking. I no longer fight it, I just let my thoughts drift off there to the years where he appeared by my side. When I treated myself like I was the ghost haunting him.
Happy Holidays
He is gone and I am trying to mine whatever parts of him remain on my computer. There are the emails, the skype chats, the photos. I copied the photos off of his computer onto my hard drive, and so now his life is populating my own. The worst are the holidays we spent separate, which were most of them. Each of us smiling with different groups of people next to different turkeys and different trees.