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My Life As Giselle

Giselle didn’t get up and leave when people started talking about the war. She stayed in the conversation, switched to waving her hands in front of other people’s faces instead of her own. When she listened in on the next table, she leaned over and said Pardonnez-moi before offering a pithy rejoinder to something she’d overheard. These talks were possible because people all around her were thinking, she was thinking, it was understood that everyone was thinking, that everyone should think.

Zen Mud

I’d planned to arrive in Japan with practically no social resources. I had some money, and my pack was heavy, but I hadn’t bothered to learn Japanese. I wanted to see what would happen. I arrived shaggy, hot, dizzy, and alone.

Wings Of Wax

It was a long bus ride from Mexico City to San Miguel, coming as it did on the heels of the overnight flight. You were glad when it ended and at the same time you would have preferred to keep on going.

Water

A new lifeguard, a poinsettia-plant-watering mystery woman, a big sister at the birth of her brother

Hard Bargain

Two head masks from West Africa, / helmets of rough wood, / hang on my study wall.

Fifty Guilders

I sat by myself on the train from Copenhagen. In the middle of the night, the door to my compartment opened. A young woman wearing a ponytail, a T-shirt, and a dark blue suit eyed me stretched out on the seat, my gray hair curled over my collar. Then she decided to come in. She heaved her baggage into the overhead rack, shut the door, and stretched out on the opposite seat.

The Cruise

“Here we are in Martinique,” the man said. He was standing at the window with his hands in his hip pockets, looking out at the green lawn and the deep woods beyond.

Home Free

He’s functional now, of course, a basically normal guy. That’s what gets me — I look at him and marvel at what a ground of pure craziness that normality is built on.

Trains

Luchita And The Radio Man

A Searing, True-Life Tale of Broadcasting, Love, and Deception

The two of us are on a fact-finding expedition to Philo, California. At first, Luchita hadn’t wanted to come; she knew I was researching a magazine article, and she’s still a little peeved at certain references I made to her in a profile of Lola Falana I wrote some months back. But she knows I like her company, and that this article is important.