PRISONER

PRISONER

Around this time I went back into therapy through the county—with Helen, a psychiatric social worker like my mother—seeing her once a week for free. She was a former nun who had left the convent after falling in love with a priest, though they didn't wind up...

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LICE-ERONI

This is a scene I imagined for a movie–a spinoff of an actual conversation I had one evening with Arlen and Harry:   Speaker 1: Anybody see The Hellstrom Chronicle on TV last night? Speaker 2: That’s the one about insects, isn’t it? Speaker 3: One of those Roach...

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ANOMALY

ANOMALY

One day in the middle of last week, it snowed. Only the noon before I had herded the kids out onto the deck in front of the school for pick-up and noted, as I sat luxuriating on the steps, how fine and warm the sun shone, as though servicing a summer day. It was the...

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HOMOPHOBIC

My evenings with Arlen and Harry were so convivial, partly because her kids were off at college—and I no longer was witness to the disparity in the way she treated them. She often used to say that she’d been her mother’s little princess and her father’s little match...

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COMPANIONABLE

Once Jeff and Karen, Arlen’s kids, had left home, I often visited her and Harry in her little cottage with the wild back yard, using the guest room with the wicker bed to spend the night. In A Patchwork Memoir I wrote:
Harry is lounging in an easy chair…

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KINSHIP

Meryl came from a bustling, affluent family, as I've said, the fourth of six kids. Her father and grandfather were prominent Bay Area architects; her mother had studied architecture too but given up a career to raise her children. I never knew whether Meryl wanted to...

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