momtourage

Mom Fight

I got into a mom fight.

It happened Friday on the subway as I was riding back to Park Slope from the Upper West side, where I had been visiting with out-of-towners. All told, it had been a pretty rushed and slightly stressful day to begin with. My beat-up workhorse of a stroller was in "prison" at a friend's house (I couldn't get in touch with this friend, who was very far in her pregnancy and maybe in labor?) and so I spent the morning dragging Gus around by the arm to all the discount stores near my house, hoping to find a cheap ten-dollar stroller just to get me through the day. I was due on 85th Street in an hour. I thought I would easily find a stroller, but people seemed to laugh at me when I asked if they had one. "A play stroller?" one large woman told me who may have been Slavic. "Try Target." Gus kept asking me to pick him up, which I did until my arms burned. The morning slipped away. I was supposed to be at 85th street at 10:30, and it was 10:00. I was just wandering aimlessly at this point, and it was way too far to Target. I'd spent the preceding day with Owen perched in our granny cart to avoid having to buy another stroller. I couldn't do this again.

And so I ended up buying a brand new stroller for 130 bucks. Even as I was paying the smiling lady behind the counter, I felt like a complete idiot. I think we might have another baby, but maybe not? The new stroller was half as heavy as the old one, and I was really sick of this helpless hunting, and I was sweating. And once I got out onto the sidewalk it seemed really good, like I really was a good mom and I'd made a good choice. The stroller is very high-tech and swift. Gus kept making this comment, as if to reassure me that the money had not been wasted: "We are zooming right along, mommy," as we rushed to the B train.

The rest of the day was uneventful--merely a preamble to the mom fight. With our Idaho friends we raced to the Met to see an ancient chariot, which is part of the new Greek exhibit. The chariot was awesome, and my friend smilingly breastfed her baby next to a display of roman glass bowls and some humongous amphorae. (Cool chariot beats overpriced stroller...)

A few hours later Gus and I raced for the subway yet again. But now I had a few new items in hand to deal with, including a pesky bug net with a long wood handle.

Have I failed to mention the net? The net was a present for my friend's older kid, but she couldn't fit it into her suitcase. Now I was stuck with it. The handle poked out of my canvas "Park Slope Co-Op" shopping bag, the wooden handle sticking out the top.

So, the mom fight.

I should mention that I'm not very good at riding the subway when I'm with my son and I have to juggle a stroller and a bag and a bug net. I stumble a lot, and I get a little stressed out by the whole process, particularly the stairs. On the way uptown people had gladly offered assistance and it wasn't crowded, so Gus and I could spread out and enjoy the ride. But on the way back to Park Slope, when we got to midtown, people started piling on.

Gus sat beside me while the Park Slope bag (and net handle) rested atop my lap and the brand new folded-up stroller leaned against my knees. I felt like I was doing okay, but I was on the verge of losing my grip on all this stuff at the next big jolt. Then Gus decided he wanted to climb in my lap, and I momentarily switched the arrangement, placing the bag in Gus' seat and trying to shift Gus into my lap without knocking anyone with the bug net handle. That's when a thin, pinch-faced woman stood in front of me, and then "made eyes" at the seat where the bag was resting. As I said, the train car was crowded--but not every seat was taken. Some people were standing, though, and I should have realized that in order to maintain the spot beside me I should have put Gus back down again and put the bag back in my lap. It just seemed so clear that I was struggling with the whole thing--I didn't feel I needed to point out the obvious. Still, this woman held her ground and stared at the small space where my bag was now resting. So I took a breath and I said, "Oh, sorry, but my son is sitting there."

And she said, "Move your bag."

I was dumbfounded. I couldn't believe this. It's true that I'm not by any stretch a native of New York, but I do feel I have a pretty firm grasp of subway etiquette. It seemed to me that if a person has kids you just let them do their thing. This is how I'd seen countless people behave on the subway. Perhaps there's an understanding that the subway is not inherently a safe place for children--and so we hold onto them tightly. When we are not in the company of children we, the people who are in the company of children, get the right of way. It's like a traffic rule.

"Where would you like me to put it?" I said, speaking of the bag. This was a mistake. I should've just put Gus back in the seat. But the subway was lurching and Gus was squirming and the bug net handle was threatening to knock out my teeth.

She said, "Between your legs," and continued to move in on the space. I felt a very aggressive vibe at this point. I'm not an easily angered person, but this woman was pissing me off.

And so I told her, "No."

Luckily, the woman sitting to my left unceremoniously stood and in one motion I slid Gus to the left of me, into the seat she had made available. Then I put the bag in my lap.

When the thin woman sat down (in Gus's old seat) she gave me a small smile. "I was a mom too. It's not like I don't understand. I've been there."

My jaw dropped. She understood the position I was in? She was a mom? And so it was her mom-ness--the suggestion that she'd been in the same situation that I was in now--it was this that made it permissible for her to be a jerk? I am not looking for special treatment. But I do think we moms need to stick together. I know this has the potential of sounding facile. But it's true, isn't it?

Park Run

There are many things I miss about living in New Orleans. It's weird sometimes, thinking about how it was down there, because my life is so different now in almost every way that this is possible.

Two years ago in New Orleans I hired a babysitter to watch Gus for six hours every Monday (my husband was a full-time professor at a university). Gus was around four-months old, and I felt I might lose my mind if I didn't have some hours during the day to myself. My yoga instructor referred me to Gina, an older lady from Ecuador who had a degree in social work but couldn't speak English well enough to find employment other than as a maid or babysitter. I hired her two days a week for a total of ten hours. I became her English tutor slash sugar mamma. She was, admittedly, great with my baby, even though I sometimes resented how frequently I would find myself standing in the kitchen repeating phrases that she jotted down in one of those drugstore black-and-white journals so she could memorize them later. The deal was she would lightly clean house while watching Gus for fifteen dollars an hour. It seemed expensive at the time, but Gina had an advanced degree, and I made allowances. Before long, our bond was absolute.

Gina left New Orleans with her two beautiful teenaged girls just before the floodwaters hit (she had a car, even if it was falling apart). Gus was about fifteen months old at the time. Gina's house, in our absence, was so flooded-out that she had no choice but to move. She went to Florida. I miss her terribly.

Anyway, yesterday I was thinking about her again, wondering how she's doing in Florida, in part because of a big decision I've made. For this month only, I've hired a babysitter to pick up Gus after his few hours of preschool and keep him out of the house until 4:30. This means that once a week for four precious weeks I will have eight hours to myself--no interruptions and an empty apartment--to finish a novel I've been working on for about a year.

I have time. Oogles of it. And so, at 2:30, after writing all morning, I decided to go for a run.

In New Orleans, I used to take Gus running in one of those jogging strollers each morning. We were out of the house around 8--by 9 the heat would be unbearable. Our house was a mile from Audubon Park, and it was about two miles around the park. (If you're looking at the map, I started one block east of Jefferson Avenue, running on the small streets paralell to Magazine street.) My routine was to run there and back with Gus, stopping once to feed the fat, aggressive geese that hung out at the edge of a central pool in the park. We often stopped again at a gorgeous toddler pool made of stone, with several cake-like tiers and an enormous brass woman at the top stretching out her arms benevolently, a fountain that had been dedicated to the children of New Orleans in the 1800's. The antique pool had a shallow and a deep end, and Gus had a really cute baby boy speedo, and I would stand panting and sweating after my run under the oak trees, shuck my shoes and socks and dip my feet, marvelling at the fact that no one ever visited this fountain except for a big black lab and her owner that would swing by for a drink of water and ogle my baby. I usually rushed home with Gus at around 11, praying that neither of us would get heat stroke in the liquid heat, sometimes swinging by the Whole Foods for a huge bottle of water and some lunch food on the way home. The jogging stroller always fell into the deep cracks that were everywhere on the street and sidewalk--due to the extremely high water table of the city, there was no way to keep up with the potholes--but at least there were no hills.

Yesterday I wore the same sneakers and sports bra and black running pants that I had worn in New Orleans, those I had been foolish enough to evacuate the city with (not realizing it would be more than two years before I had the time or mental strength to run again). It's strange how these physical memories are linked together with unbreakable chain.

I remembered the last time I ran in Audubon Park. It was Saturday, the day before the hurricane hit, and I wanted to go for a run before the grueling car ride out of town. It seems frivolous now, of course, but I couldn't imagine what was going to happen on Sunday. After the run, Gus napped in the jogger while I stretched in the grass, gazing up at the branches of the oak trees, half-heartedly wondering if it would all be underwater soon.

As I ran home yesterday, tomato-red and exhausted from the trip around the park (Prospect Park is much, much bigger, by the way), I had a run-in with a nice-looking middle-aged man with gray hair and the kind, withdrawn smile of a model citzen in an old-masters painting.

He paused at the instersection and cocked his head, smiling at me.

"Have a nice run," he said. "Happy Spring!"

2 Weird Migraine Remedies

I've been having a lot of migraines lately. I've been getting these since I was thirteen, since that time in math class when I thought I was going blind, and the boy sitting in front of me began to slip me his dad's business card (he was an ophthalmologist), and then I saw "funny lights," and then I was running down the hall so that I could vomit in relative tranquility and privacy in the girl's bathroom, where I promptly turned out the lights. I was rushed to the hospital, because they assumed I had appendicitis, then realized I'd had a migraine. These nightmarish entities have persisted in my life ever since, like a bad habit I can't shake. Sure, they ebb and flow in frequency and intensity, but they're always there. Lately they've been bad. Frequent. Excruciating. Lurking. Some people call these "cluster" migraines. All I know is that they are very, very wretched. Each day I feel like I'm waiting for the blindness, then the aura--that spindle of light that jogs slowly across my vision and announces what will be a terrible, terrible day.

But then a good friend recommended this marvelous stuff called Feverfew. It's an herb, apparently taken from these pretty flowers.

I have no idea what it does, exactly, but weirdly enough it's working. My head feels all cool and breezy. I take thirty drops in a glass of water, and poof!

The second remedy I found was, oddly, my attendance at a Richard Foreman play. The new one, entitled Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead had an unusually restorative effect.

I have no idea why, but the combination of this revelatory play about the effects of modern life on the subconscious mind and the Feverfew tincture fixed me.

I'm not certain this will work for everyone. It worked for me.

Williamsburg Bank Building

My two-and-a-half-year-old son Gus needed to get his front tooth pulled. There was an abscess in the tooth I described in an earlier post; now we had to act quickly before the infection returned. The urgency was scary. Our dentist explained, in hushed tones, that if we wanted to try the extraction in his office, my husband and I would have to hold Gus down. "It won't be pretty," he said. "It might be upsetting to a child so young." Then he suggested we try an oral surgeon. "No pain," the dentist insisted brightly. A moment later, his expression clouded. "But I'll do it if you want. It's up to you."

I've had a lifelong fear of the dentist because of a childhood dentist who yelled at me if I flinched when he examined my mouth, and frequently refused to give me novicaine when he drilled a cavity. I couldn't imagine holding Gus down. Anaesthesia seemed scary, but in the end we decided to trust the surgeon. He sounded competent on the phone, even when he stated that he needed to see an x-ray with the sick tooth circled. "Just in case," he joked, softly laughing, as if aware that he had probably teased the wrong mom. I fretted all week about getting the x-ray, and when I received the copy I wondered how he would know which tooth to yank. They looked identical.

I didn't think about it when the nurse gave me the address to 1 Hanson Place. She said that Gus would occupy the last available appointment before their practice had to move "downstairs." I was worried about getting the tooth out; there was urgency coming from all directions. Finally, it dawned on me. Gus would have his tooth pulled in the Williamsburg Bank Building during the last week before the upper portions of the building would be turned into condos.

Early in the morning Gus and I caught the bus, riding down 5th Avenue to the Flatbush V, then crossing the vicious webbing of streets on foot to 1 Hanson Place. The building was under massive construction, although there was some attempt at normalcy. The lobby was clean and functional and elegant, and on floor sixteen--where you have to walk over to the second elevator bank that lifts you into the top tiers--there was a broad bank of windows. I felt like I was leaping out into the sky, with all of Brooklyn at my feet. Gus and I gasped in delight, stepping over piles of construction waste and old boards. There was ancient office furniture pushed out into dusty hallways. Some men delicately loaded a crate with what looked like a miniature crane--something for a dentist or eye doctor from the looks of it. We waited for ten minutes at least, and when it arrived the elevator was spookily creaking, its hatch open to expose the old, dusty shaft and darkness above.

The doctor's office was odd in a different way. Completely empty of patients, it was silent and untouched. With its nineteen-sixties modern furniture in spotless condition and nurses in bleached white scrubs, I felt I'd stepped into another era. The view was stunning from the sun-filled operating room; there were some guys bravely balanced on some scaffolding outside the windows. The equipment appeared to have been frozen in time: white, unblemished, ancient. The handsome older doctor explained he'd been on the 23rd floor for 25 years. They are moving him down to floor 16.

"We're losing the view," he sighed, "And they're raising our rent."

When the surgery was over, I cradled Gus as he groggily woke. We sat in a recovery room the size of a walk-in closet, kindly furnished with a pillow, a cushion to sit on, a box of tissues, and a little table with a vomit pan. The doctor left our door open so we could see out the windows that formed the exterior wall of a hallway. I'm new to New York. I've never seen this view. It seemed wrong, immoral even, that people like me, here to see a doctor with a child, weren't going to see it anymore. Down below, beyond the buildings, was a snake of wide blue water and some ships.

Bad Mom

My son, Gus, had a bad time in Montana. We were there for about four days looking for a house we might want to live in. We stayed with good friends from a writing program we attended and with whom we enjoy playing late-night rounds of Spades while drinking beer from cans and shouting heartfelt exclamations. Anyway, we weren't getting enough sleep, so the mornings were tough. Gus was waking up at 5 AM, never adjusting to the time change. Smith, my husband, often surpassed me in the drinking department, and so I was the one to rise, bleary-eyed and (I'll admit) grouchy.

Then, on the third day, Gus began to get emotional. The late nights and early mornings were taking a toll on all of us, but he was acting really weird. He wouldn't let me wipe his nose, for instance. He began to wake up all night, once every few hours. He didn't have a fever, though, and he didn't seem sick.

I began to worry that Gus hated Montana--or at least, that he hated the sort of people we were in Montana. This was odd, because over the summer we'd spent two blissful weeks there for a wedding, our toes plunged in rivers, the town crawling with old friends who would suddenly appear on a bicycle and wave. Gus was in heaven, in spite of the unbearably stifling un-airconditioned apartment we subletted from a poet. The apartment had a bathroom down the hall we shared with a guy who wore a dog collar and a mohawk and worked the nightshift in some depressing bar. Gus didn't mind. He loved the mountains, he said. He wanted to live there. Odd to take any of this too seriously from a two-and-a-half year old, but I do.

But when we returned to Brooklyn, his unhappiness persisted. Unable to find any symtoms that would define an illness, Smith and I came up with emotional reasons for Gus's moods. Personally, I was convinced that he was recalling our terrible move from New Orleans--that he was somehow permanently scarred by the possibility that we might yet again "relocate."

Then, on Thursday, he woke with an upper lip looking like three upper lips. He didn't want to leave the apartment. He wept in the stroller when I had to run an errand. I began to worry in earnest. What was wrong with him? What was going on? What had I done to him in Montana?

Gus chipped his tooth while we were living at my mom's house in Texas (during the period of time we call "the evacuation" after we had to leave New Orleans because of Katrina) when he fell head first against a glass tabletop. We didn't have access to a doctor; I placed the little tooth chip in my mom's china cabinet. In New York I took him to a wonderful dentist who told me it would be fine as long at the tooth didn't abscess. It was more than a year later, and nothing had happened.

All at once the light dawned. I peeked under his lip, way up near the gumline. There was the abscess, a pussy looking pocket above the tooth. No wonder he didn't want me to wipe his nose! Under his nose was the gargantuan lip, and under the lip a gross little pocket of pain that was swelling by the minute. After an emergency dental visit, we learned that he's going to lose the tooth.

I'm nervous about what's going to happen at the doctor's office, and I worry about the hole in his mouth. It's a front tooth. It will be a main feature of his appearance until his adult tooth comes in. I feel terrible that Gus was in pain and that he is still too young to explain in words what hurts. I feel horrible that I didn't notice the abscess sooner, even though I don't know how I could have known what it was.

Still, I have to confess the tiniest relief I feel that Gus's distress had nothing to do with my own bad behavior, or with the trauma of leaving New Orleans, or with any number of flaws I notice in myself as I struggle to be a good parent. In the past, I've scorned parents who project their own worries onto their kids. Now, I think I get it.

Happy Mardi Gras

My husband Smith found this article about New Orleans that I think is worth reading.

And if you do read the article: the movie theater the author mentions stands a few blocks from our first apartment in the city and from the house we later purchased (though in different directions). The Prytania movietheater was a big, drafty, one-show cinema whose presence on the streetcorner gave me hope, even while the place needed remodelling. The movie seats were so insistently damp that they seemed to be melting back into whatever organic material they'd been formed from. Its exterior was absolutely undramatic, a square brick building with a nineteen-fifties sign that read Prytania slanting across it; I took my mother there a few times when she visited, and she wasn't too impressed.

Video Alternatives was our video store before it shut down; the owner was some kind of a director and took a somewhat sweet and occasionally tiresome interest in the rather esoteric movies Smith used to like renting (and still does). The guy did have great taste in movies and a wonderful way of hiring young, gloomily handsome clerks to work in his store, drifting around like eye candy with their thrifstore clothing and hand-rolled cigarettes. The membership to Video Alternatives was lifelong, the records kept by hand in a spiral notebook.

I only mention these establishments because they are places--as the author points out--that could only have existed in New Orleans, where the rent was cheap and the people were so committed to being themselves, in raw form. Our friends--all of them--owned their own houses, and none of them were rich. Beautiful things, those houses: creaky wood floors, high ceilings, graceful mantlepieces, ungainly plants growing every which way and serious mold issues and termites, every day sinking further down into the skunky muck.

I don't want to get sentimental, but I will say that this author's approach to the city was very much in keeping with our own. The picture of Helen Hill's face is familiar, but I'm not at all sure that I ever met her. I will admit, though, that her pointless and horrible death struck me as a reason why I can't go back to New Orleans.

Floating Bookshelf

I just bought a pair of floating bookshelves. Basically, these are a couple of brackets that screw into a wall and make a stack of books appear to be stuck onto the wall—as if with velcro. A couple of days ago my husband and I installed the floating shelves on either side of the bed, several feet above our nightstands. The symmetry is nice; I like the idea of the books hovering over my head while I sleep, even while I fear they're going to fall and kill me.

For the blog, I thought I'd talk about the books I have on the shelf. I got the idea from The Believer back when I still had time to read magazines, before Gus was born. At the time, the magazine was still pretty new, and it presented a sweet longing towards writing and book consumption that nearly equalled my own earnestness on these subjects. I remember the informality of Nick Hornby’s reviews--"Stuff I've Been Reading"--with real fondness.

Here are the titles of the books on the floating shelf--those I'm interested in reading, have read, or am about to read (in the style of Hornby). The books lie horizontally, the way they might do on a desk or--as they do in our apartment--in piles on the floor. I think it best to arrange the list from top of shelf to bottom of shelf.

Some Hope, Edward St. Aubyn (tippy top)
The Baldwins, Serge Lamothe
Paris Stories, Mavis Gallant
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (top middle)
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
The Tartar Steppe, Dino Buzzati
Notable American Women, Ben Marcus
Hunts in Dreams, Tom Drury
The Echo Maker, Richard Powers (bottom; weirdly, The Believer website is currently featuring an interview with Richard Powers)

I was reading Some Hope (see list), a family drama about some fabulously wealthy and deranged English aristocrats, on the recommendation of Michael A. FitzGerald (see below), but it's so intense (and so fantastic) that I could only read the first two of the three novellas before I felt sort of brutalized and doomed. Has anyone else read this horrific masterpiece?

And then there's this amazing book--the only one that is physically resting on my nightstand. I'm staying up late to read it. It's about Budapest:

Radiant Days, by Michael A. FitzGerald

I feel that to properly end this post I should pray, or whatever, for the powers of the universe (namely Smith and Gus) to give me the time to read all these books. Right now, they feel just beyond my reach.

Birthdays and Pretty Toilets

When we first moved here, one of the things we were excited about were the world-class museums of New York. This is dorky, I realize, but Smith and I like dimly lit museum interiors, smelling of marble and damp and very old wood. But we have a toddler, and Gus is not someone, we've learned, that you can hang out with in a museum. You may push him through the echoey corriders in a stroller if he happens to be sleeping, or you may constantly shush him when he awakes, or you may grab back his chubby hands as they reach longingly for one priceless work of art after another--but the experience is not enviable.

Of course he savors the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History (but who doesn't?) and he can handle MOMA for about an hour if we stick to the rooms full of abstract paintings, with those alarming colors and dressy brushstrokes and wall-sized canvasses. And in some moods Gus is precocious about recalling the names of certain sculptures he finds fascinating--usually, a particular life-sized figure of a trudging man by the elevators. Still, in general it's best to leave him home with one of us, while the lucky one ventures forth to visit the museum solo.

Often, though, we feel dissatisfied with this. And so we have devised a relatively simple scheme to make a space for our artistic temperaments. One goes to the museum and rushes through in less than an hour (or less!) while the other one awaits, scowling and impatient, at a playground in Central Park.

Then switch.

It's not that bad in theory--who doesn't love the park! Jesus!--but it is an oddly excruciating experience. Once, at the Frick, the Goya show sold out during my hour, and I felt pitifully disappointed, knowing Smith would get to see the exhibition an hour later when there was space. I returned to the playground, mildly buzzing from the vision of my favorite painting at the Frick (John the Baptist, a strange desert scene, skulls), but ultimately feeling lost. I never did get to see the Goya's, and while I trust that I will surely have more experiences in front of great paintings, I doubt that the Goya's will appear again en masse in a room I could visit were it not for my toddler.

And so, on my birthday last week, Smith offered this: a trip to the Neue Galerie solo. I leaped out of bed and readied myself. I skipped to the subway and read a book while stifling giggles of pleasure, and delight. Oh, to be alone.

I couldn't believe how beautiful the Galerie was from the outside--all understated limestone--but throwing open the imposing iron gate I met a man in some sort of blue uniform who advised me the galleries were closed on Wednesdays.

"Oh," I said calmly, as my lips trembled with rage. "Okay."

It all worked out fine, however. I simply strode over to the Met. This being the other incredible, astonishing fact of life in New York--that one can just go elsewhere if one's hopes have been utterly dashed.

So I entered the museum, and checked my coat to maximize the feeling of lightness, of buoyancy, and I traipsed through my favorite Greco-Roman galleries, pausing to admire the amphoras and kraters.

Then, aware of the time--I had to get back to Brooklyn for an early dinner with Gus and Smith--I made a bee-line to the German exhibit, a showcase of paintings from 1920's Berlin. It was decay, and decadence of every type--extremely gorgeous yet horrific stuff--and I fell in love with some paintings.

Afterwards, I continued a project I started while I was living temporarily in Cambridge, Massuchesetts two summers ago (before the hurricane, before we moved here), and decided it might be interesting to take photos inside women's restrooms in museums, which are usually located in the basement. And so, at the risk of committing some grave act of exposure, I give you a pretty row of toilet stalls at the Met.

Making my way back to Park Slope, on the cold hushed streets, on the subway, I felt a kind of peaceful but not uncomplicated sense of accomplishment, wonder, mortality.

It was a good birthday, a really good birthday.

Fires

The day before yesterday I awoke to find that my apartment was full of smoke. Gus and I had been playing trains on the bed--blankets as treacherous terrain, pillows as mountains, or caves--when something sharp tugged at my nose, the all-too familiar smell of objects on fire. Still wearing pajamas, I went to investigate, following the smoky odor down the hall and into our living room.

I'll admit, it was sort of beautiful, the light streaming through the bay windows to illuminate the smoke so that it looked eerie and mystical. For a moment or two I felt a strange delight in this. Then I sniffed deeply and thought, shit. Rushing quickly back down the hall I paused at the door of Gus's room. His room is technically the dining room, separated from the living room by a set of pocket doors. When I opened the hall door I gasped. His room was so full of smoke it was difficult to discern the toys on his floor or the shapes of his furnishings. I didn't want to freak out, but this was fire, wasn't it?

Trotting back into the living room, I checked out the windows, wondering if something was going on outside and drifting in, but all I saw was a mom calmly walking her daughter to school and a couple of honking cars competing for a parking spot.

If you've read earlier posts, you know that I live on the very top floor of a fourth floor walk-up in an ancient but lovely brownstone. And when I remembered this, I understood that there could be a fire below us, in another apartment. We'd have to walk through it or down the fire escape. I ran back down the hall, found my husband who was taking a shower, and said, as calmly as I could manage, "I think our building might be on fire?"

Now, I should probably explain what happened to my family and me about two years ago, after hurricane Katrina and around the time we left New Orleans.

Our house was relatively undamaged. A couple of small trees fell on it, but nothing flooded. There was this towering, brittle pecan tree with its flabby, dying branches stretched over three houses, but luckily (?) this punctured the roof of our neighbor's house instead of ours. When we finally were allowed to return to our home back in October of '05, it looked like a giant had thrust a meat fork through their house, with the intention of roasting it. The owners were nowhere to be found. Anyway, we were among the people who could no longer imagine a happy life in New Orleans, after the hurricane, and so we did what we could to remove ourselves from the city as quickly and efficiently as possible.

But we couldn't get a moving truck. The Red Cross had a bunch of them, we were told, but I'm sure their scarcity must be blamed on the overwhelming number of people trying to move out of the city. My husband finally found a truck he could rent in Jackson, Mississippi, and he took a flight from New York to Mississippi, and picked up the U-haul truck. When he arrived, there was a line out the door of angry people, but they gave him a truck--much smaller and older than the one he'd reserved. Still, when he saw the faces of the other people, he felt lucky to have anything at all. Gus and I flew down once Smith had confirmed our house was in liveable condition. I probably don't need to point out what an emotional time it was. We spent roughly five days packing, sobbing, and staring at the city around us in glassy-eyed bewilderment.

Then Smith noticed that the U-haul was leaking gas. A mechanic came out to fix it, and when he was done he assured us we would be fine, then scurried off. And so Gus and I flew back to our apartment in Brooklyn, and Smith set out to drive the U-haul back up here, and thus to begin what we hoped would be a happy chapter in our lives and in our son's life. Put all the negativity behind us, we thought, and start again.

But unfortunately, we weren't done with Katrina, or she wasn't done with us, or however you might want to think about it. Smith called me from Tennessee from a cell phone he'd borrowed from one of the guys who waved him off the road.

The U-haul had caught on fire. My husband has escaped with nothing but his briefcase, which he had grabbed as he ran from the burning truck. He'd left his cell phone, along with everything else, behind.

"I'm watching it burn," Smith said, as we spoke on the phone. Our fire blocked Tennessee interstate traffic for miles. The local news channel wanted to interview Smith as he poked through the charred remains, but he refused.

I could go into all the gory details, listing what burned that was really important to me, my husband, or my son--but it would take too long, and I don't feel like thinking about it anymore. Assume there were paintings that we'd been carefully collecting, one by an artist who lost his oeuvre in the floodwaters; assume my son's crib turned into a a couple of charred slats; assume that anything we had that we cared about was in that truck. My husband and I are both writers, and in New Orleans we had bookshelves that covered nearly every wall of our house. Apparently--this is irony?--the books were "kindling." After everything burned to a crisp, or was destroyed by the firemen's hoses, the spines of the books--the volumes that burned but did not incinerate to become dust--were scattered all over the U-haul and all over the highway like some twisted art installation. Now, we are preparing to go to court with U-haul, who has refused to pay our claim.

Anyway, Smith hopped out of the shower and called the landlords, who didn't answer, then 911. We dressed somewhat frantically, while I eyed the fire escape out the window. Gus said, "Mommy, I'm a little afraid," and that's when I realized my hands were shaking. I just kept thinking, "This cannot happen again. No way. I can't do it again."

As it happened, a light fixture caught on fire just below Gus's room. This was why our apartment filled with smoke. It could've been serious; it wasn't serious. I've been assured by friends that we did the right thing calling the fire department, but I must admit that as I saw four fire trucks pull onto our street, I wondered if Smith and I had overreacted a bit, given the history of the thing. Gus and I waved at each fire truck as it drove away. I wanted to hug each fireman, individually.

But what's most unsettling is the lingering odor. After the U-haul fire, U-haul hired a driver to haul what was potentially salvageable up to New York City, and then Smith and I hired a troop of Albanian guys to carry the boxes into our apartment. By the time they were done, our apartment smelled like a campfire--literally--and we had to throw almost everything away anyway. It was crazy: charred boxes full of burned stuff were stacked inside new U-haul boxes, so we didn't know what was what until we opened each box. It was like a set of those Russian nesting dolls. But inside, instead of that cute, ever tinier doll, we found a charred toy or a dress covered with black soot. We still have a few garbage bags of nice clothes in a closet--waiting for what, exactly?--and occasionally I still stick my nose inside the plastic just to relive the smell. It doesn't fade. It doesn't go anywhere.

The day the lamp caught on fire, I vacuumed and scrubbed and washed Gus's room and the living room, because every time I smelled the campfire odor I felt like I was going to kill someone, or puke. It still smells in there. I wonder if I'm ever going to be totally free of that smell.

The next night, Smith had an appointment in a 12-story building in Chelsea. While he was there on the 6th floor the fire alarms went off, forcing everyone to leave the building. Smith stood on the street in the bitter cold. And while the firemen checked it all out, in the familiar by-the-book manner they conduct the business of saving lives, Smith called me on his cell phone.

"You're not going to believe this," he began...

Stairwell Encounter

Tonight, when I came upstairs to my fourth-floor apartment, I had a run-in with my downstairs neighbor Pluto. Because I avoid him so diligently (always ducking into my apartment if I hear him on his landing or making his way upstairs) I was unpleasantly shocked by the nearness of him, by how close our bodies actually came to touching in the narrow stairwell. I believe he was holding a laundry basket, because of the rectangular shape of the basket and the way he was carrying it, but I can't be sure. I looked steadily down as I climbed the flight, not looking up and smiling as I normally would have to greet my other neighbor who also lives in the building. Like a crazy person, I scurried past him as if he weren't there, inwardly hoping he would notice (with a guilty pang, perhaps) that I refused to acknowledge his presence.

But I could tell he wasn't looking at me, either. The sad truth is, Pluto wishes I did not exist. It's a horrible feeling, knowing this. I do, after all, have to conduct the business of my life on the floors that comprise his ceiling.

It all began last year, when my family and I moved here from New Orleans. We had good luck with the hurricane--in the sense that our home was for the most part undamaged--but bad luck with our moving truck. To make a long story short, when we arrived in Park Slope, we had few clothes, and no furniture. All the rugs were gone, too. But we did have an eighteen-month-old named Gus. While we were tiptoing around, trying to muffle our footsteps on the wood floors, Gus was making himself at home. He's not by any means a loud child--he's always been sort of bookish--but even so he has a tendency to drop things, and he runs.

About a week after we moved in, our downstairs neighbor came upstairs, at around ten in the morning, and asked me to keep my son quiet. I remember he said that my son's footsteps had become "unbearable." This pained me. It really did. I felt defensive for Gus, but I also hated this person who was intruding on my life in what was obviously a mean-spirited, scroogish manner. I offered to take Gus out in the mornings. I said I was sorry. I explained that our rugs had burned in a fire, that it might take a few weeks to replace all of them, but this made no impression on the downstairs neighbor. A man in his early forties, he had a music-industry job that kept him up late, and he needed to "sleep in." Essentially, I was being asked to keep my son from doing what it is children do: wake up early, play, and occasionally walk in a way that some people might construe as "heavy."

The situation peaked one night after the radiators clanked on at 5 AM. He struck his ceiling--our bedroom floor--with some sort of broomhandle device (or a boxing glove?) for five straight minutes. I timed it. He moved in a grid pattern, covering every inch of our floor. I wanted to call the police. My husband got dressed and listened for activity at our front door. Eventually, we went back to sleep. In the morning my husband wrote a letter to our landlords.

After this incident, Pluto denied having hit our floor then threatened to leave the building. He's been living here for years, apparently, but he said he would reside here no longer if my family and I dared to maintain our residency. He referred to us continually as "refugees"--as if we weren't legitimate residents paying rent in unbelievable quantities. Luckily, the landlords are good people and refused to kick us out.

We soon learned that Pluto had tried to kick out the very friendly, pot-smoking gay couple who used to live underneath him--before they moved to Israel. Then Pluto forced out the couple who used to live in our apartment. It seemed the landlords had discovered that there was a pattern to Pluto's behavior. For awhile, we felt relieved. My husband and I developed a tougher attitude, trying not to care about the little noises we might make in the course of an ordinary day. But, in fact, it is always terrible it to live over someone who despises you, who you are sure is insane, who would be happy if you died.

Then, in July, Pluto announced he was moving out. For awhile, we were happy. Then Pluto lost his job, and I learned through a friend of mine in real estate that his purchase of an expensive brownstone apartment fell through as a result of losing his job. He hasn't signed a lease in our building, we've been told--but he doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

Everytime I see him, I feel a chill up and down my spine, and I fear one day it's all going to come to blows. But for now, since we are apparently stuck with each other, his method has been to block us from his line of sight by the defiant turn of his head. It is juvenile, no doubt, but I've discovered that Pluto's method actually works pretty well, and I find myself following suit, as I did tonight in the stairwell.

Still, it's interesting how intimate our relationship is. Every time I get up in the middle of the night to use the toilet, for instance, I imagine him turning over and groaning, rolling his eyes, and then drifting back into some mediocre yet peaceful sleep.