Browse Topics
Infidelity
Finding Out
Cross-dressing, a lifelong eating disorder, the dazzling white image of life
October 2008
The Family Plot
The summer after my father attempted suicide, I found myself wandering through a graveyard near my house, up and down the rows of sunken headstones and faded pink cloth roses. I didn’t know a soul buried there, and I didn’t know what solace I expected to find.
October 2008
With Eyes Open
My ex-husband is dying. A year and a half ago he was on the telephone with someone, and suddenly words vanished from his brain. English became a language he’d once known but had forgotten. The memory of those things called “words” was still there, but they were lumpy, pale, and almost unrecognizable, like dust-sheeted furniture in a mansion’s unused rooms.
September 2007
The Mrs. Davises
One day my mother was at the hairdresser’s, sitting under the dryer with an array of tinfoil antennae in her hair and a magazine open in her lap, when she noticed that the woman under the next dryer was staring at her. The woman whispered tentatively, “Are you Mrs. Davis?”
March 2007
Over The Garden Fence
When I walk into my backyard, I hear my neighbor in her garden and smell the smoke from her cigarette. I stay close to my house, where I’m hidden from view by the overgrown laurel hedge. I was intending to weed my own garden, near the low wire fence where our dogs poke their noses at each other and over which my neighbor and I used to talk about flowers. But I don’t want to risk exposing myself.
December 2005
Self-Control
Spending the entire night together, being very brave, stitching yourself to reality
October 2005
Tilth
A friend at her father’s funeral had warned her, “When grief comes, ride it like a wave, like a childbirth contraction, even though it might feel like it’s pulling you down to the bottom. If you don’t, you’ll pay the price later. And don’t expect anyone to do it for you.”
June 2005
My Father’s Unholy Local Union
I knew my mother would find out before fall, when I’d leave home to find a real job. I’d watch her at the sink, her roan hair falling down, her round face red from the steaming dishwater, and I’d think about telling her, but it was impossible to open my mouth. I was sure something just under her pale skin would break if I revealed the truth: that my father was having an affair with a woman who looked like a man.
August 2004
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