Summers

There are lots of teenagers in my basement. Lilly's having a party. Her entire grade is over. There are only 5 girls in the grade--one of them is one vacation, and two elected not to show. But all the boys came. The pizza arrived, after some back and forth---one store told me they didn't deliver to my street--then the other store told me the same thing. Finally it got here. I was so annoyed.



Young people annoy the crap out of me. They don't seem cute or curious or on the verge or myself when young or whatever. They just seem like idiots. Even my own children seem like idiots. Everyone under 34 seems like an idiot.



Oh, God, now they've all come upstairs. I brought down pizza and all these white hands reached up and tore apart the boxes--it was sort of like day of the dead. The poor pizza didn't have a chance. I've never seen 5 large pizzas go so quickly. Like a cow being attacked by a school of piranhas.



Lilly dyed her hair red yesterday. We used henna. I used to have red hair when I was 21. It was beautiful. I don't have it now--I think women make a big mistake dyeing their hair red when they start getting older--it starts looking bad and brassy and dull. Of course, even your real hair starts looking bad and brassy and dull. We had to do it twice. The first time didn't take for some reason. Lilly sat in the kitchen on one of my old antique T chairs that I bought in West Virginia. We lived there when I was first married. Nick was just a baby, and Rob (my ex husband) got a job at a camp for rich Jewish kids in the mountains. The camp was owned by a man named Fred, who also owned one of the big circuses--either Barnum or Ringling--I forget which one. We lived in a 2 room shack for 3 months. We were the only goyim there. I mostly loved it. I walked around smelling the top of Nick's funny little head and thought of myself as the mommy tree. They gave me a job as the nature director, which meant basically that I fed the animals and sat up in the treehouse with two very unhappy overweight teenage girls who became my unofficial assistants and talked about the meaning of life, etc. I got a library card from the Handley Public library--starting my collection of library cards from weird towns around the nation. I did a lot of reading that summer--good stuff--Anna Karenina, The Count of Monte Cristo, Brothers Karamazov. And I wrote a short story about my grandfather which I thought was pretty good--it garnered a very nice rejection letter from Ploughshares I think--one with a nice handwritten codicil at the bottom offering encouragement and the generic "dear author" crossed out in ballpoint pen and my name handwritten instead. I still have it. It's my only brush with publication.



It was also at that time I fell completely out of love with my husband.

That's my 1/2 hour.